| nor was the conversation in any way inhibited by her presence. After Bilal had built and opened his small oda in the summer, his wife was often in it, even in male company; on one occasion as Bilal and I were going to sit in it we found her in the doorway, and the oda full of women neighbours. Bilal was not pleased, but admitting defeat, led me away to a neighbour’s oda, (PK 1). In the fine weather the same segregation is maintained out of doors, the women having places where they gather in groups quite separate from those of the men. Occasionally outside the school one would see old women sitting near the men, and outside Selahaddin’s oda women might really form a small group and exchange remarks with the men, but only when there were no strangers present, and only the womenfolk of the men in the group. The rarity and the precarious manner of these contacts served to emphasise the usual segregation. Up to about seven years, small children of both sexes remain with the women. The boys then begin to follow their fathers to work in the fields and to frequent odalar. By about ten or eleven they are barred from attending women’s dancing, but their presence does not seem seriously to embarrass women until they are about fourteen. For girls there is no transition, they remain with their mothers in female society, the prohibitions becoming stricter at adolescence and not relaxing until they are past childbearing. Although young children often play together, small boys are sometimes seen pugnaciously refusing to admit girls into their play groups. There was a group of about four or five boys under eight years old in the Lower Quarter who consistently refused to admit their sisters to their company. On the other hand, we have seen girls in early adolescence, even after the beginning of menstruation, playing in a group with boys of about the same age. An adolescent girl has a certain amount of freedom to wander about the village, but Bilal’s wife strongly disapproved when Bilal allowed his fifteen year old daughter to work alone out in the fields at the harvest. Secret contacts between adolescents of opposite sexes do occur. Both Bilal and Ali Osman had, in fact, chosen their wives in this way, and there was, during our stay, a case of a girl being married off quickly and unceremoniously out of reach of such a temptation. But a girl’s chances of a good marriage depend as much as anything on her “honour” and any hint of such contact is damaging. Since they are bound to be secret, it is impossible to say to what extent such contacts go on, but the villagers say emphatically that it happens rarely, and then only in other villages. The segregation is more sharply marked on ceremonial occasions. At |
| weddings the male and female ceremonies and dancing are entirely separate and to some extent different in kind. The women, whose duty it is, dressed in all their finery, to fetch the bride home to the groom’s house, follow the men well to the rear of the procession, and are completely concealed in large drapes and veils. For some reason, while in their ceremonial dress, they are specially anxious not so much as to be seen at all by any man. At the betrothal of a couple from different villages, the women alone pay a visit and stay for a period of days, with dancing and singing, in the girl’s village. The men have to go with them to take them and bring them home again but they do not stay more than one night. When a girl returns to her home village at the end of her first year of marriage it is the women alone who celebrate the event. At women’s dances, no male may be present. Equally, at funerals, men and women keep strictly apart, each part of the bereaved household with the kin and neighbours of their own sex. Men prepare a man for burial, women a woman. Interment of the corpse, which is entirely enveloped in shrouds and a rug, is entirely a male duty and no woman approached the grave. Whatever the occasion, and whatever the group involved, there is never any ceremonial emphasis on the duty on a whole group, but only separate ceremonials for the women and for the men, each by themselves. |
| 3. | Prestige |
| Village society is dominated by men. At the household level, the male head carries firm authority and his wife is dependent on his decision and permission for anything important. Often a woman suffering from a chronic disease told us she could not go to the doctor because her husband refused permission. When Bilal’s baby son, in Bilal’s absence, ran a high fever, his wife and her daughter were both unwilling to remain alone in the ev and, refusing our advice, allowed the child to run around, fever and all; only Bilal had the authority to insist on one of them staying at home with the child. A wife is economically dependent on her husband, even for a few piastres to throw at the betrothed girl when she is dancing in the betrothal ceremony. Both men and women assume the superiority of men in intelligence and knowledge. The government inspector insisted that girls attend the village school, and accordingly five girls attended, for the first time ever, during the winter I was there. Men and women both complained of the uselessness of teaching girls to read and when they appeared to be making little progress everyone said that this was only to be expected from girls. As I have said, several times, in discussing women or questioning men about their home life, I was told that the women are “hayvan gibi” - like the animals. As I hope will be clear from my discussion of the household, men do not altogether act on |
| the proposition, but that they should affirm it so often and, on occasion, in front of women and girls, is significant of the relative prestige of the sexes. The difference of prestige is reflected in the interest which each sex takes in the affairs of the other. Men have no interest in the details of women’s rites, in their clothes, in any of the things regarded as belonging to the feminine sphere. This attitude was often aroused by my enquiries about feminine activities. Passing a house one evening from which sounds of revelry came forth, I asked what was happening. “It is only women”, I was told, and I had great difficulty in extracting information as to the cause and nature of the celebration. Equally, for a man to show any interest in a womanly skill would be shameful and is in fact unheard of. Hence the asymmetry to which I have already called attention between a man’s helplessness if he has no woman in the household, and the readiness of widows to cope with the business of running the household and bringing up children. On the other hand, male affairs are a source of interest to women, and male skills rather a source of prestige than of shame. There is nothing disgraceful about a woman ploughing or reaping, rather her prestige is the higher. In so far as they can understand them, women are interested in their husband’s occupations and skills, and know the names of the towns to which men go even if they have little idea of what a town is. It is shyness and fear that keep women from joining in male groups and male activities, not indifference. From birth on, in every way, in occupation, in ability, in authority, men count for more in village society than women. |
| 4. | Conclusion |
| At first sight a functionalist approach to this matter based on the usual mechanistic analogy seems plausible. The three characteristics of the relations between the sexes which I have distinguished, division of labour, social segregation and comparative prestige, do seem to react on each other so as to strengthen each other and to preserve the pattern. The difference of function, by giving the two sexes different spheres of activity, reduces the common ground of interest which is the stuff of personal intimacy, and at the same time, by keeping the women from learning the skills which carry higher prestige, and from earning money in their own right, helps to preserve their dependent status. The social segregation, in its turn, strengthens the division of labour and gives the men the opportunity in their purely male social life to express and confirm to themselves their superiority. The higher prestige of men makes social association with women shameful and puts peculiarly feminine occupations beneath male dignity. |
| In such an account, two different points which are often, I think, confused in a functionalist approach are here confused. First, it can be reasonably claimed that a certain way of behaving must have inevitable consequences on other activities. If men and women are segregated for work and for social life, clearly they will have less to talk about and the relations between husbands and wives, however affectionate, will be weakened by the absence of common interests. Clearly, if all men are assumed to be superior to women, men will not feel much respect for their wives, nor will the wives expect it. such correlations seem plausible, indeed obvious. Even if there are behind such theories assumptions about human motivation, these assumptions are such as to command universal assent. Apart from the practical connection between sets of activities, the beliefs held by the society about the general subject of relations between the sexes form, from the village point of view, a rough logical system. The implications in this system need not be logically water-tight. The village sees the inferiority of women as logically consistent with the men having little to do with them, and with their performing a different set of tasks which are regarded as of less value than those done by men. Although such a system of beliefs is bound to contain errors which a logician could point out, so long as it is superficially plausible, with no glaring contradictions, it is likely to be enduring and to influence behaviour. But that their beliefs constitute some sort of logical inter-relation of the beliefs corresponds to any real functional interactions in the society. The relation in any given context between beliefs and behaviour must be a subject for careful practical research. Whether or not this digression is a fair criticism of some functionalist theories, the functionalist view does not here provide a full and satisfactory explanation. If we assume an absolute correlation between the three characteristics which I have distinguished, then we would expect to find precise repetitions of the patter in other societies. Other factors clearly play a part - in other words, the situation is very much more complex than the simple-minded functionalist view which I put forward allows for. Perhaps the largest single explicit factor in maintaining the present relationship of the sexes in the villages is religious belief. The villagers say, quite rightly, that according to their relation, women should be completely secluded, and to look on the face of a woman is a sin. Lately, they will continue, since the government campaign for the emancipation of women, even the village women have become freer, and this is against their religion. But though Islam is obviously of fundamental importance in this connection, it does not offer a complete or detailed explanation. In other Islamic societies, |
| even in other Sunni villages of Anatolia of different tribal origins, the women are treated differently. Circassians, for example, are said both by outside observers, and by the Turkish villagers themselves, to allow their unmarried girls much greater social freedom, even allowing them to dance with young men, though they are also reputed to keep them much closer after marriage than the Turkish villages do. Similar differences of custom in detail were reported to exist between the Turkish villages and the so-called Avsar villages which lay beyond Tomarza. Sex morality is strict. Repeated questions, both public and private, failed to discover a single current case of adultery. The invariable answer was “we would kill them if they did - or at least drive them from the village”. The only incident of which I even heard concerned Mehmet (BA 2) - he had divorced his second wife on grounds of unfaithfulness reported by his neighbour during his absence on military service. The villagers themselves explicitly connect the high standard with the absence of opportunity, and state their objections to less rigorous systems of sexual segregation in terms of an anticipated decline in sex morality. This correlation seems perfectly correct. The villagers do not think of the village was a changing society and children accept their father’s point of view more or less without question. Although most of the young men have been to the cities and seen the modern generation of Turkish girls in Western dress about the streets, and been to American films, they state not only to me but to each other that their own customs are better. The only time I heard the opposite view put forward it was greeted with a storm of protest. It is perhaps a sign of weakening that the matter should be discussed at all, and that such comparative knowledge of other societies should be allowed as relevant to what they do themselves. They admit themselves that their own women are freer that a generation ago. Such innovations as co-educational schooling for girls may also in time produce further changes in their present relationship. But the present system of division of labour, social segregation, and comparative prestige of the sexes, interlocked closely with the whole system of social life in the village, and backed by religious beliefs, seems unlikely to change easily or rapidly. |
| VIII | THE HOUSEHOLD |
| 1. | Husband and Wife |
| The household is defined economically, being composed of those who eat food cooked in common, that is, a consumption unit. But although the household cannot be discussed without reference to economics, it is not the economics but |