| normally women’s work, and finally to things no man would or could do. There would be no hard and fast lines in such a list, except perhaps at each end, where one finds activities strictly confined to one sex or the other. To give this list in full would be tiresome, but I will give an outline of it. Few tasks are performed only by men. Anything requiring a knowledge of reading or writing or of the world belongs in theory and practice to the male sphere. Men are solely responsible for all village political affairs and dealings with government. They have a monopoly of religious leadership and learning and they conduct all visits to town for buying and selling and all buying and selling in the village of such major items as grain or animals. At the general election, although women were allowed to vote, and all did so, they simply recorded the votes which their husbands had instructed them to. With the exception of weaving and carpet-making, all remunerative skills are in male hands, and men with no special skill repair their own tools, build houses and look after the roofs. Women may provide unskilled help in these tasks, especially in building, and one sees them bringing stone to the men actually building the wall, or bringing water to make mud plaster. In agriculture, men normally do the ploughing and sowing, reap the wheat and rye which has a long enough stalk to be cut with a scythe and do all the fetching of the crop into the threshing floor which involves the use of the “kagni”, the ox cart with two solid wheels which is the commonest means to transport in Anatolia. Nearly all these agricultural tasks are readily done by women if they have no man to do them for them. I have seen women working with a scythe and seen them ploughing, but I have never seen a woman managing a loaded kagni, and those women who handled their household harvest without a man’s help were forced to get their crop brought in by kinsmen. Men take care of horses and water buffalo, and generally of oxen, though it is quite common to see a girl attending to these. All herdsmen are men, and if an animal is sick men take charge. Sheep and goats are looked after by either sex but all milking of cows, sheep and goats is done by women. Other farming jobs may be done by either sex. Work in the vineyards and on the fruit trees seems to be mainly masculine, work on the vegetable plots mainly feminine. Hoeing and weeding are especially female tasks. At the harvest, threshing, winnowing, and carrying the grain and straw to its storeplace are done jointly by the whole household, but reaping crops which are too short for the scythe and have to be cut with a sickle is women’s work in Sakaltutan, though not in all the villages. They use a different word for the two processes, speaking of reaping rye “bicmek”, and plucking the barley |
| “yolmak”. Washing and sifting the grain is also women’s work. Everything to do with the care of the house is women’s work. At the most, men sweep out their own odalar on occasion and, if they are fortunate enough to have wood, see to cutting and fetching it for the stoves by which the odalar are heated. Women cook and prepare all food, including the gathering of both wild and cultivated vegetables, and the drying and storing of vegetables and milk products for the winter. They do all sewing, spin the coarse wool and make it into saddle bags, sacks and tapestry prayer mats, sometimes for sale but more often for the trousseau for one of the young girls of the household. They prepare the cakes of dung and straw which form the main fuel supply. They fetch all the water needed in the house. The only occasion on which men cook are the feasts provided for religious reasons for the whole village. Cooking on such occasions is not, in Sakaltutan, considered to be within the compass of women, though, in the course of a discussion, it was pointed out that women do this work in one of the nearby villages. But only a few men have the skill to cook on the grand scale for these occasions and since the occasions are rare one or two such cooks per village is enough. The care of children, especially babies, is entirely a feminine duty. The women feed and clothe them and small children are almost always with or near their mothers or near kinswomen. Fathers by no means ignore or neglect their young children. I have seen a father minding the baby while the mother is busy on some task which prevents her from watching it. As the cooking is done in ovens let into the floor, there is a permanent danger of the baby falling in and getting burnt, and not uncommon event, so that it can never safely be left alone in the ev. This applies mainly to households which are short of women power. Small boys who can scarcely walk are sometimes brought into oda and made a fuss of by their kinsmen. Inside the home the father fondles his young children and in company will show them off with pride. But all the actual chores and the hour by hour watching over them is the business of women. Details of this division of labour vary from village to village and area to area. The richer the household and the more civilised, that is the more townlike it sets up to be, the less heavy outside work the women do. Several times in discussions, men of other villages have expressed their contempt for villages where the women have to do heavy outside work. Their own women, they claim, are more secluded and more refined. I do not think that this attitude has anything whatsoever to do with concern for the well-being of the women; |
| it is simply a question of class prestige, based on imitating the old order of middle class town conditions. Nevertheless, behind the list of tasks allotted to each sex, there lies a conception of the function of each sex which is perhaps deeper and wider spread. Certainly in the villages round Sakaltutan women are entirely and solely responsible for birth and the care of babies, and for the care of the home and preparation of food. At childbirth no man may be present. Suggestions that it would be a good idea to see a doctor in difficult cases or cases of infertility, or to cope with illnesses in small children, were met with anything from polite scepticism to outright statements that “males do not know about our children”. These attitudes were expressed even more definitely towards the young government trained Health Officer, a village lad who had received five years’ secondary education as a training for the task, and seemed to have little idea of what he was supposed to do and little effect on the villages. Women are creatures of the home. Not only do they look after it and do all the cooking, they never leave it for very long. They never go away to work or even to shop. During the day they stay in or near the ev, while the men either sit out of doors or go to an oda. By contrast, men are responsible for the protection of the home and for providing the main sources of wealth, staple food stuffs or, if need be, case; and alone are considered capable of business with government or of large scale transactions. The concern of women is thus within the home, the concern of men with contacts between the home and the outside world. Some of these male activities women can and do encroach upon. Women can and do plough and reap if they have no man to do it for them or if, as is becoming more common, their men are away working for cash in the towns. A woman may even go to town on business and do her own buying and selling. The area of male prerogative is thus considerably lessened and the balance of mutual dependence is not symmetrical. In fact, we have the paradox that in this male dominated society, a man cannot get along at all without an adult woman in the house, and upon the death of his wife, unless he has some other able-bodied woman in the house, is compelled to find a new wife with expedition. A widow, on the other hand, if she so wishes, manages to bring up children on her own. In fact, however, a widow is dependent for success in so doing on the help and protection of male kinsmen, if she is not to be reduced to great poverty and misery. |
| 2. | Social Segregation |
| The Turkish harem has been a popular western legend for centuries, and the social segregation of men and women in Turkey has been remarked by many observers. (1) It has never been so strictly observed in the villages, according to the observers, mainly for economic reasons, that is to say, because the women have to work out of doors and could not be kept quite so secluded as the middle and upper class women about whom the most detailed records exist. The reforms of the Republican Government, aimed to break down this traditional segregation, have profoundly altered the position of women in the large cities, but their effect in the villages and even the small towns is much less direct. The social segregation of women in Sakaltutan at present conforms to the Turkish tradition. Although the physical barriers of the old order in the towns do not and never have existed in the villages, a woman can have no free social relations with men who are no close kinsmen, and even her relations with her own menfolk are limited in scope. On no occasion does a family hold any celebration in which all members take part together. But perhaps social segregation is a misleading term. The men and women are to be seen about the village, often in conversation, and if a man, for some reason, calls at an ev, the women may sit down with their own menfolk to listen to and even join in the conversation with the visitor. I have seen a woman sitting unabashed with four or five men neighbours round the tandir in her home. Nevertheless, it is a repeatedly stated rule of conduct that a woman must not address or be addressed by a stranger. The younger women observe the rule strictly and the superficial impression, that the sexes mingle fairly freely, which one might form from a casual view of the village, would be incorrect. Most often if women are seen in conversation with men they will be their kinsmen, or at least close neighbours. The old women, past child- bearing age, have a great deal of freedom, but although they may speak to the men, they do not sit in groups with them, nor join publicly in masculine discussions. Although all the women were burning with curiosity to see the inside of my house when I first settled in the village, I had no female visitors for the first six weeks and then only one very old and wrinkled widow. A girl or a young married woman can only form personal relationships with men among the members of her own natal household or those of her husband’s household. Even these relationships are not likely to be full or intimate. From girlhood up, a woman is with women only. She learns little or nothing of the world outside her village and those to which her kinswomen and neighbours have married, a range at most of about twenty miles. Her interests are completely centred on the village, on births, deaths and marriages, on |
| festivals, on the petty events from day to day. Even the language of the women differs; their village dialect is more marked and more difficult to understand than that of the men, and they often failed to understand Istanbul Turkish words which are comprehensible to the men. Hence the possible topics of conversation and the common interests between a woman and the small circle of her male intimates are few. The segregation from general male society creates a barrier between a woman and those men who are allowed to her. Men do not tell their wives about the town, about their work there, about political and business affairs, on the assumption that they would not understand and have no interest. This reasoning is quite explicit; more than once Bilal and Ali Osman spoke to me of their womenfolk as “hayvan gibi” - “like animals”. On the day of the general election I had occasion to visit an ev full of women. I asked if they had voted. This question produced puzzlement for a moment - the word for to vote also means to choose - then one of them said “Oh, the paper business. Yes we have done that. What was it for?” Such ignorance was not universal. One woman in our village, a girl from the nahiye centre, Tomarza, who was literate, had some idea about the political parties. She even claimed to have voted opposition to her husband’s instructions, but not out of political conviction but simply as a joke against her husband. In general, however, men and women have little interest in common. If, within the household, men and women have but little common ground, inter-sex relations between kin across household boundaries are practically confined to interest in welfare. I have made the point, with illustrations, (2) that a man’s interest in his sisters is not in personal contact with her but simply in her welfare. He does not want to see her to talk to her, he wants to know if she is well and to have news of the major events of her life such as the birth and career of her children. I have had constant reason to refer to the division of houses into ev and oda. This division symbolises the social segregation of the sexes. If women with whom he is not familiar enter an ev, any man, even if he is a member of the household, will withdraw. In bitter weather I have seen men standing about in the open under a sheltered wall rather than go to their own ev. The ev is the preserve of women. Equally the oda belongs to the men. In the odalar which were used for family purposes, such as Haci Mehmet’s (T 1), women might be found, (3) but in the larger odalar women were seldom present, and younger women, if they had cause to enter an oda, would draw their headcloth over their face. The rule was not rigid. Haci Ahmet’s mother and wife always seemed to be in his oda but they were regarded as too old to matter much. One night in the DS-DG oda the wife of a senior member was lying sick in the corner of the oda all through the evening, but again no one took any notice, |