Why Property Matters? New Varieties of Domestic Patriarchy in Turkey

Abstract

This article extends theories on varieties of gender regimes by arguing for the significance of property. Drawing on the case study of Turkey, it proposes that gendered property ownership diversifies patriarchal relations of labor. This historical-sociology-based case study method is used to differentiate two forms of domestic patriarchy: premodern and modern. In premodern domestic patriarchy, women’s exclusion from agricultural landownership, in conjunction with the dominance of small landownership, sustains the patriarchal exploitation of labor in agriculture. In modern domestic patriarchy, women’s exclusion from paid employment, along with dispossession and increasing wage dependency, maintains the patriarchal exploitation of labor within the home.

Introduction

Differentiating varieties of gender regime is necessary to analyze women’s diverse experiences and for an effective strategy to achieve greater gender equality. The identification of different forms of domestic gender regime is particularly important in the global South, where gender-based exclusionary strategies have a greater impact upon state-formation, capitalist development, civil society, and culture and religion in comparison to the global North. Existing theories on varieties of gender regime, however, tend to neglect the significance of property ownership for changing forms and degrees of domestic gender regime. It is this neglect that the current article intends to address. Critically engaging with the pioneering studies of the gender regime literature (Brown 1981; Hartmann 1981, 1979a, 1979b; Walby 2011, 2009, 1990), I propose a theoretical framework based on gendered property and labor relations. Using a historical-sociology-based case study method, I examine the ways in which women’s exclusion from ownership of a means of production (land) and subsistence (wage or other forms of income) gives rise to two forms of domestic patriarchy: premodern and modern. Women’s exclusion from agricultural landownership, in conjunction with a pattern of small landownership, leads to patriarchal exploitation of labor in rural households and, as such, creates premodern domestic patriarchy. Under the conditions of dispossession and increasing wage dependency, women’s exclusion from paid employment sustains patriarchal exploitation within urban households, thereby establishing modern domestic patriarchy.

While invaluable in providing a detailed account of changing forms and degrees of gender inequality, existing theories of gender regime have two shortcomings which hinder analysis of the connections between property ownership, labor exploitation, and varieties of domestic gender regime. First, insufficient attention is paid to the significance of family during the shift from a domestic to a public gender regime, which obscures the role of gender-based dispossession in sustaining the patriarchal exploitation of labor within the family. Second, existing theories tend to neglect the collective agency of men in establishing and reproducing the system of gender-based exploitation from which they benefit. This oversight gives rise to the perception of the state (neoliberal, social-democratic, conservative, or authoritarian) as an entity autonomous from the individual and collective interests of men, and as such, obscures the state-mediated powers of gendered dispossession.

In different ways, the above problems are also addressed by the contributors to the Special Section in https://academic.oup.com/sp/issue/27/3 of Social Politics. For example, Alonso and Lombardo (2020) find that the domain of economy, which includes free wage labor and domestic labor, has a hegemonic role in shaping other domains in Spain. Their focus, though, is not on explaining why this may be the case or in accounting for its significance in shaping the gender regime. Shire and Nemoto (2020) find that the family is the central institution of social policy in Germany and Japan, while Moghadam (2020) highlights the significance of family as an institutional domain by examining the cases of Algeria, Tunisia, and Morocco. These scholars interpret their findings as a deviation and propose new forms of public gender regime to account for them. I pursue a different path in this article by reconsidering the theoretical positioning of patriarchal labor exploitation within the family.

Developing an alternative theoretical framework, I argue that the family remains the locus of patriarchal exploitation of labor despite the shift from domestic to public patriarchy, thereby emphasizing the connections between gendered dispossession and patriarchal exploitation. Drawing on research on the gender gaps in asset ownership (Deere, Alvarado, and Twyman 2012), I examine the extent to which the gendered patterns of ownership of a means of production (e.g. land) or subsistence (e.g. wage or other forms of income) have a particular importance in maintaining the patriarchal exploitation of labor within the family. Women’s exclusion from owning these properties diversifies forms of domestic patriarchy, whereas their segregated access is significant for varieties of public patriarchy. The proposed framework, furthermore, theorizes the acting capacity of men as a group by developing the concept of the patriarchal collective subject. I propose that men, in their position as head of households and urban and rural small-producers, shape the politically constituted property relations in a way which sustains gendered dispossession and patriarchal exploitation of labor within the family. I also examine the ways in which the patriarchal collective subject preserves the domestic patriarchal character of the state.

In a context where agriculture in Turkey is highly commercialized and integrated into the local and global food chains, my concept of premodern does not imply the existence of any kind of feudal relations. Drawing on critiques of the neo-Smithian approach (Brenner, 1976; Wood 2002 ), I identify dispossession of laborers and wage dependency, rather than commercialization, as the key features of capitalist modernity. My analysis focuses on a particular case in which patriarchal property and labor relations in agriculture constitute barriers to dispossession of male peasants, thereby preventing large-scale capitalist farms and wage labor in agricultural production (Kocabicak 2021). As a result, agriculture is integrated into capitalist transformation through commercialization, but not production. Under such conditions, men as household heads and small-producers exchange the agrarian surplus produced by women’s unpaid labor, thereby forcing women to produce for the market. This process, in turn, leads to qualitative as well as quantitative differences between the premodern and modern characteristics of household production. Building on this distinction, I develop the concepts of premodern and modern domestic patriarchy.

Turkey is selected on the basis of being a middle-income country with a dominance of small landownership and persistent gender gaps in paid employment. The selected context, therefore, allows in-depth analysis of the significance of women’s exclusion from landownership and paid employment for varieties of gender regime. Furthermore, the Turkish case challenges the assumption that market forces “crumble” the material bases of patriarchy in rural households (Kandiyoti 1990, 282). In my analysis, I use a historical-sociology-based case study (i) to differentiate the causes of premodern domestic patriarchy from those of modern domestic patriarchy, (ii) to assess how far male small-producers exclude women from ownership of agricultural land and paid employment, and (iii) to examine the state’s role in sustaining gendered dispossession. The evidence I use includes work which has drawn on archival materials such as the Imperial code, sharia court records, land inheritance laws and regulations, and petitions and complaints. The period considered is from the sixteenth century Ottoman Empire until the Republican period (1923–2015).

I further investigate how far the emergence of neoliberal public patriarchy challenges the predominance of premodern and modern domestic patriarchies. In order to do so, (i) I differentiate districts where neoliberal public patriarchy is stronger by comparing gender gaps in education and paid employment across all twenty-six districts of Turkey, (ii) I analyze the conditions of childcare provision, and (iii) I assess the patriarchal character of social policy, civil society, and the criminalization of violence against women. I focus on the time period from the 2000s onwards when the neoliberal form of public patriarchy has had a substantial foundation. In my assessment, I compile data from the publicly available databases of the Turkish statistics office, policy laws and regulations, and the bans and prohibitions announced by the government and governors.

The next section critically assesses existing theories on varieties of gender regime and is followed by discussion of my theoretical framework. The section “Varieties of patriarchy in Turkey” includes my data analysis. Finally, I conclude by summarizing the key contributions of this research.

Theories on Varieties of Gender Regime

In analyzing changes in the forms and degrees of gender inequality, theories on varieties of gender regimes develop different approaches. For example, Brown (1981) argues that during the transition to capitalism, men’s control over women’s reproductive labor is replaced with the bourgeois class control of female paid labor, thereby suggesting capitalism initiates a move from patriarchal toward capitalist domination, leading to a shift from private to public patriarchy. According to Brown, women’s double burden of paid and unpaid labor has increased in capitalist transformation, but public patriarchy offers benefits and job possibilities which support women in escaping the bondage of their husbands and increase women’s collective strength as wageworkers (Brown 1981).

Walby (1990, 2009, 2011) provides one of the most comprehensive theories of gender regimes. In her analysis, the entire regimes of inequalities operate in four institutional domains of economy, polity, violence, and civil society. She argues that the dominance of gender-based exclusionary strategies within those domains is associated with a domestic gender regime, and gender-based segregationist strategies with the neoliberal or social-democratic forms of public gender regime. For example, when the domestic gender regime dominates the economy, women are excluded from free wage labor and the household production becomes the primary place whereby women’s labor is organized. Nevertheless, in the economy of the public gender regime, “[t]here has been a reduction in household production as a result of the purchase of substitute goods and services from the national and global marketplace” which thus leads to a transition away from household production to market production (Walby 2009, 111).

However, Hartmann rejects the argument that capitalism has eroded patriarchal domination and the claim that there has been a transition away from household production. According to Hartmann, capitalism has shifted the direct personal system of patriarchal control toward the indirect, impersonal system of patriarchal control, which is mediated by society-wide institutions, especially the labor market (Hartmann 1979a). With the development of capitalism, she argues, men “are more likely to exercise control in public domains” (Hartmann 1983, 36), but the family is still the “primary arena where men exercise their patriarchal power over women's labor” (Hartmann 1981b, 190).

Theories on varieties of patriarchy are powerful and influential and this article is intended to be a companion to them. Nevertheless, their shared theoretical framework has two main limitations that I wish to go beyond. First, scholars have neglected the significance of the patriarchal exploitation of labor. Brown posits a one-sidedly deterministic relationship whereby capitalism shapes patriarchy and, in doing so, assumes that capitalist relations of labor are superior to patriarchal labor relations in shaping social transformation. Walby avoids this assumption, identifying instead a mutually shaping relationship between the entire regimes of inequalities, including gender and class regimes. However, her concept of inequality regimes obscures the distinctions between the relations of (gender- or class-based) exploitation and of (race-ethnicity, sexuality and disability based) oppression. Subsequently she highlights that “there is no single privileged domain” (Walby 2009, 260). This approach prevents analysis of the significance of patriarchal exploitation of labor within the family for both state-formation and the shift from domestic to public patriarchy, thereby obscuring the role of gendered dispossession in patriarchal relations of labor. Although Hartmann puts particular emphasis on the role of patriarchal labor relations within the family, she avoids the concept of exploitation. This neglect results in an ambiguous definition of patriarchal control which has two meanings in her analysis: men’s control over women and men’s control over women’s labor power. The former has shifted toward society-wide institutions but despite this shift the latter has remained within the family.

Second, those scholars do not investigate the collective acting capacity of men, as a socially constructed dominant group of society. For example, Brown assumes that the capitalist collective subject is the only dynamic shaping social transformation. Despite her initial account of patriarchy as “a system of social structures, and practices whereby men dominate, oppress and exploit women” (Walby 1989, 214), Walby does not theorize the interdependence and solidarity among individual members of the dominant groups of society in shaping inequality regimes. Furthermore, Walby’s theory of institutional domains provides a suitable context for analyzing how gender inequality occurs in the market and household production (economy), the states, nations, organized religions, empires, hegemons and the global political institutions (polity), social movements, sexuality and knowledge-institutions (civil society), and violence. But, at the same time, her theory obscures the causality leading to the neglect of the ways in which the solidarity and collective acting capacity of men sustain gender inequality. This, in turn, prevents a detailed account of the patriarchal character of the state and the state-mediated powers of gendered dispossession.

The neglect of the gendered relations of labor within the family and the collective acting capacity of men, therefore, obscures the significance of gender-based exclusion in property ownership for patriarchal relations of labor within the family and varieties of domestic gender regime. Below I propose an alternative framework to address this limitation.

Establishing an Alternative Framework

Patriarchal Exploitation of Labor

Perceiving exploitation of labor as purely a social relationship (Roamer 2014), I suggest that this is central in shaping the forms and degrees of gender- (or class-) based inequalities. Subsequently, I argue that patriarchal (or capitalist) exploitation of labor refers to a causal element sustaining systems of exploitation, and thus cannot be reduced to the domain of economy, or separated from political struggle and the collective acting capacity of (gender- or class-based) dominant groups of society. Therefore, a theoretical and analytical shift from the aspects of exploitation toward exploitation of labor is required to destabilize the system of gender-based exploitation. The gender gaps in time spent on housework (including care work), furthermore, crosscut various forms and degrees of gender regimes. Thus, I suggest that patriarchal exploitation of labor within the home persists during the shift from domestic to the neoliberal or social-democratic forms of public patriarchy. While the market and/or the state-led substitution might decrease the total time spent on housework, it does not abolish the gender-based division of labor and patriarchal exploitation within household production. Rather, under the neoliberal or social-democratic forms of public patriarchy, women’s double burden of paid and unpaid labor is regulated by the state.

Contrary to the argument that puts emphasis on the capitalist character of the (neoliberal or social-democratic) state, I highlight that it is the patriarchal character of the state that shapes the terms and conditions of women’s double burden. While the domestic patriarchal state confines women’s labor to household production by sustaining gender-based exclusionary strategies, the public patriarchal state relies on gender-based segregation and subordination, particularly in the labor market, and utilizes various degrees of commodification and decommodification (of goods and services produced by women within the home) to guarantee the sustainability of women’s double burden. The predominance of commodification refers to the neoliberal form of public patriarchy, whereas decommodification points to the social-democratic form of public patriarchy. Drawing on this framework, I suggest that a shift from women’s unpaid labor within household production toward women’s double burden of paid and unpaid labor is a prerequisite for the accomplishment of the transition from domestic to the neoliberal or social-democratic forms of public patriarchy.

Patriarchal Collective Subject

A theory of the patriarchal collective subject is necessary to understand the persistence of the gender-based system of exploitation. In patriarchal exploitation, the dominating section of society is constructed based on gender. This means that appropriators force certain tasks on producers by sustaining uneven gender relations within society. The enforcement of these tasks through the category of gender is accompanied by the reinforcement of inequalities, violence, discrimination, segregation, and also certain cultural and religious values, meanings, affect, and other psychological patterns. Contrary to the notion of a harmony of interest (i.e. the assumption that not only women, but also men lose in a patriarchal society), Connell emphasizes the significance of the “battle of the sexes” for the configuration of masculinity as a collective practice amongst men (Connell 2005, 82). Engaging with her argument, I argue that gender conflict is one of the main drivers of social change. Gender-based socially constructed groups pursue different interests, i.e. the ability of the dominating group to achieve its goals inhibits the ability of members of the subordinated group to achieve their goals. Subsequently, the system of gender-based exploitation occurs as a set of social relations between men, which have a material base, and which, though hierarchical, establish or create interdependence and solidarity among men that enable them to dominate women (Hartmann 1979b). Therefore, I identify a continuum between an individual and the collective subject. At the individual level, appropriators benefit from the patriarchal exploitation and, at the same time, are aware of the significance of their solidarity and collectively act for their individual benefits. Men, as a gender-based socially constructed group, therefore, constitute a patriarchal collective subject.

Nonetheless, I acknowledge that some groups of men have the potential to threaten the collective strength of the patriarchal subject. In such conditions, solidarity and punishment are two sides of the same coin: as well as solidarity between individual members of the dominant group, punishment of betrayers is necessary to sustain systems of exploitation. In her theory of subordinated masculinities, Connell (2005) does not pay enough attention to the significance of patriarchal exploitation within household production. Therefore, I develop the concept of betrayers in theorizing the role of men who handle the tasks allocated to women within household production, for example, including gay men, stay-at-home fathers, single men, and male wageworkers and peasants lacking means to sustain the gendered division of labor within their households. As those betrayers threaten the patriarchal collective subject, under the system of gender-based exploitation, they are punished in different ways.

Feminist theories highlight the role of male household heads (Delphy 2016; Folbre 1994) and wageworkers (Cockburn 1991, 1985; Walby 1989) in sustaining patriarchal relations of labor within the home and at work. This article starts to detail how far men, in their position as rural and urban small-producers, also constitute a patriarchal collective subject by excluding women from the ownership of a means of production (e.g. land) and subsistence (e.g. wage or other forms of income), thereby sustaining patriarchal exploitation of labor within rural and urban households.

Property and New Varieties of Domestic Patriarchy

In examining the extent to which women’s exclusion from property ownership diversifies the premodern and modern forms of domestic patriarchy, I differentiate two forms of gender-based exclusionary strategies:

1. Gender-based exclusion in ownership of agricultural land: The demands of landownership by dominant sections of society establish a division of labor and appropriation of agrarian surplus. From a gender perspective, gendered landownership gives rise to a gender-based division of labor within agriculture and patriarchal exploitation of women’s labor. Women’s exclusion from landownership is therefore an important form of gender-based exclusion sustaining patriarchal exploitation of labor in rural households.

2. Gender-based exclusion in paid employment: I suggest that under the conditions of dispossession and increasing wage dependency, women’s exclusion from paid employment or other forms of income-generating activities becomes a particular form of gender-based exclusionary strategy that shapes varieties of domestic patriarchy.

By distinguishing the above arrangements of gender-based exclusionary strategies, I conceptualize two forms of domestic patriarchy: in premodern domestic patriarchy, men sustain their exploitation of women’s labor in rural households by excluding women from landownership; in modern domestic patriarchy, men maintain their exploitation of women’s labor within urban households by excluding women from paid employment.

Varieties of Patriarchy in Turkey

This section differentiates two forms of domestic patriarchy and investigates the respective roles of male rural and urban small-producers in excluding women from landownership and paid employment. It also analyzes the limited emergence of public patriarchy.

Premodern Domestic Patriarchy

Both the Ottoman and the Republican legal frameworks treated agricultural land differently to other forms of property. The Sultan symbolized the owner of the entire land in the Empire—except the private and awqaf lands—called the miri land. The miri land was distributed to tax-farmers who had a lifetime contract without hereditary rights. Peasants, however, had hereditary rights on the land; upon the death of a peasant, the miri land automatically passed to the son(s). Other than a son, anyone who wished to cultivate the land, called outsiders, had to pay an entrance fee, called tapu-tax (Imber 2010). During the Ottoman period, the main struggle between male and female peasants was whether daughters, sisters, and mothers constituted outsiders and were eligible to pay tapu-tax.

Daughters were accepted as outsiders for the first time in 1568, followed by mothers and sisters in the early seventeenth century (Imber 2010,, 2012 ). Having attained the status of outsiders, female peasants tried to delay payment of tapu-tax since immediate access to financial resources was rare. Analysis of the local sharia courts’ archives demonstrates that in many cases courts postponed the deadline of the tapu-tax payment in favor of women and, as such, supported female peasants (Gerber 1980; Imber 2010). Male peasants, however, did not accept female peasants’ increased control over the miri land. They organized various petitions and written complaints to the Ottoman state which led the state to impose time restrictions for tapu-tax payment (Imber 2010). Court cases demonstrate that the local sharia courts played a significant role in the struggle for landownership; male peasants often utilized these courts to claim ownership of land under female peasants’ control (Jennings 1975).

The Nizamiye court system (1860s–1923) also limited women’s access to legal powers of property relations in several ways (Agmon 2006; Rubin 2012). (i) Since Ottoman women were not allowed to be professional attorneys, replacing self-representation with professional attorneys increased women’s dependency on male attorneys. (ii) The Hanefi School’s appointment of kadıs as protectors of women against men’s abuses was undermined and autonomy restricted by the imposition of increased obligations to local and central authorities. (iii) The legal costs associated with Nizamiye courts required significant financial resources. (iv) Increased legal terminology and replacing witnesses’ verbal statements with documented evidence required professional support which increased the legal costs and, given women’s limited financial assets, undermined their access to justice. The Nizamiye court system thus gradually limited female peasants’ access to legal powers and thereby supported male peasants’ control over women’s land, although it was not until the introduction of the 1926 civil code that female peasants almost entirely lost their control over landownership.

The Turkish civil code (1926–2002) passed land under a certain scale directly to the son. Article 598 meant a woman could inherit her father’s land only if none of her brothers wanted it and if she or her husband were eligible to cultivate the land, manage the agrarian holding and demanded to do so. Otherwise, female descendants could not inherit the land. The 1926 civil code remained in place until 2002 when a new civil code (2002–current) removed the previous discriminatory article but introduced an ambiguous criterion of eligibility. This ambiguity was addressed in 2014 when the Ministry of Agriculture announced a new points-based eligibility formula for transfer of small-scale land to descendants. The formula represents the least gender-unequal law that female peasants have witnessed for centuries.

Legal discrimination against women in land inheritance certainly allowed the state to protect land from dispersing through the generations, thereby maintaining agricultural productivity under conditions of increased commercialization. However, this justification does not explain why the state in Turkey waited for almost ninety years before introducing a gender-equitable formula for selecting an heir (as many other states did in the first place). Given such discrimination, it may be argued that the domestic patriarchal character of the state persisted into the Republican period.

Assessing the character of the Turkish state needs to take into account the conditions under which the peasantry was capable of negotiating to protect small landownership against the market-led powers of dispossession. Research shows that peasant revolts, protests, and petitions during the Ottoman Empire and early Republican period (Aytekin 2013; Faroqhi 1992; Orhan 2012), as well as electoral pressure through the ballot box in the early Republican (Karaömerlioğlu 2008; Pamuk 1991) and also the Justice and Development Party period (2002–current) (Gürel et al. 2019) comprise the key mechanisms for peasants to bargain with the state. During the Republican period, the parliamentary system has increasingly become a significant means of negotiation between the state and peasants: the opposition parties had considerable support in rural areas, which led to party closures (in 1925 and 1930). Furthermore, in 1950, the peasants’ “vote of protest” ended the single-party regime in Turkey (Pamuk 1991, 138). Peasants were therefore successful in negotiating with the state and securing small-production. As a result, the 1926 civil code legalized peasants’ claims over the (miri) land and allowed “official” occupation of Greek and Armenian peasants’ land. Land redistribution continued with the Land and Settlement Laws (1930 and 1934) and the Law of Giving Land to the Farmers (1945). The state also drove agrarian commercialization in ways that protected small-medium-scale farms from market-led dispossession of land. The pressure from the peasantry did not allow the state to allocate a greater proportion of surplus through rural taxation (Pamuk 1991). State-led incentives further supported the peasantry in allocating a relatively significant proportion of surplus.

Considering that male domination is not inherent to the state form, I argue that male small-producers in rural areas were able to negotiate with the state. As well as providing economic incentives to peasants, the state utilized gendered-based exclusionary strategies to gain male peasants’ support for the overall regime. This, in turn, maintained the dominance of small-landownership and legal discrimination against women in land inheritance. As a result, the domestic patriarchal character of the Turkish state has been retained. Consequently, the extent of small landownership in Turkey has remained largely unchanged; since the 1950s only 6 percent of agricultural holdings have comprised large-scale farms (20 hectares or larger) and 83 percent of agricultural holdings have been smaller than 10 hectares (in 2001) (TURKSTAT 2011). Gendered dispossession in these conditions has had significant consequences. Qualitative research shows that women’s exclusion from landownership leads to a strong gender-based division of labor in agriculture, thereby sustaining the patriarchal exploitation of labor (GDSW, 2000; Karkıner 2009; Morvaridi 1993; Onaran-İncirlioğlu 1999). Men tend to handle commercial and bureaucratic tasks, whereas women are responsible for the heaviest and most labor-intensive and repetitive tasks. Male peasants further use control over the agrarian surplus to their advantage by, for example, spending more time and money on leisure, eating more and having more nutritious food than women, and having greater consumption of luxuries (Kandiyoti 1990). Rural women’s dispossession sustains the patriarchal exploitation of labor in rural households and thereby establishes premodern domestic patriarchy.

Modern Domestic Patriarchy

Here I investigate the extent to which male small-producers in urban areas sustained their influence over the patriarchal character of the state, and in so doing, limited women’s access to income-generating activities (including paid employment). Historical research shows that Ottoman guilds were key institutions in allowing male small-producers to utilize their collective acting capacity. These associations set prices and salaries, regulated production quality, organized the buying and flow of raw materials and goods, decided on production quotas, and supervised selling, and were therefore significant in shaping the socio-economic life of the Empire (Chalcraft 2015; Gerber 1976; Quataert 1993, Quataert 1994; Yi 2004). Guilds further established strong control over Ottoman urban labor; indeed, some argue that no workers existed outside of these structures (Quataert 2001). Analysis of the Ottoman archives demonstrates that male small-producers limited women’s access to income-generating activities by excluding women from guilds, organizing petitions and complaints against female artisans and laborers, utilizing courts, and sustaining the myth that goods made by women were of inferior quality (Gerber 1980, 1976; Kala 1997; Shatzmiller 1988; Zarinebaf 2001).

Ottoman archival materials, further, show that the imperial orders supported guilds in sustaining those gender-based exclusionary strategies. The state repeatedly banned women from establishing their own guilds, opening shops, and selling products of their labor (Kala 1997; Zarinebaf 2001). In addition, legal discrimination against women in inheritance was a significant barrier to women’s access to small-production. Although inheritance from their fathers (hisse) supported women in pursuing occupations, female small-producers were not allowed to pass their occupation to descendants (Gerber 1980). Moreover, in the seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries, merchants started to deliver raw materials to female producers to decrease production costs which allowed women to work in the home. In response, male producers and their guilds wrote many petitions and complaints to secure state intervention to limit women’s access to income (Kala 1997; Zarinebaf 2001).

Why did the state adopt male small-producers’ discriminatory approach toward women? Male small-producers in urban areas appeared to wield influence over the state by utilizing their collective bargaining capacity under the guild system. Guilds held considerable power with respect to regulating socioeconomic life, as well as being the main resource of urban taxation. Furthermore, they played an important role in times of war by paying army-tax and providing goods and services to the Ottoman army (Gerber 1976; Quataert 1993, 1994, 2001; Shatzmiller 1988; Yi 2004). Historical research demonstrates the significance of petitions, complaints, uprisings, and the justice system in maintaining the bargaining power of the guildsmen (Yi 2004). In doing so, they enjoyed not only a monopoly guaranteed by customary rights, but also managed to sustain the domestic patriarchal character of the state. In comparison to colonial regions (e.g. North Africa), Turkey’s guild system was therefore protected against the market-led powers of dispossession for a longer period of time (Chalcraft 2015; Clancy-Smith 2018; Quataert 1993, 1994) which meant that gender-based exclusion in income-generating activities was sustained.

The male-dominated urban labor market was not challenged until the late nineteenth century when women’s access to income-generating activities increased. Women of elite households began to manage their property and invest in trading and manufacturing, particularly textiles, by providing capital and entering partnerships with men (Gerber 1980; Zarinebaf 2001). The 1927 industrial survey suggests around a quarter of manufacturers were non-Muslim women, and around a quarter of industrial workers were women and girls (Makal 2010). However, the domestic patriarchal character of the state was reconstructed during the early decades of the Republican period (1923–1940s). As Quataert (2001) suggests, guilds remained important and sustained their influence on workplace culture, including labor unions and syndicates. In addition, as argued elsewhere, the first wave of the feminist movement in Turkey failed to challenge the resurgence of the domestic patriarchal state (Kocabicak 2018). As the domestic patriarchal character of the state was preserved without facing a significant challenge, the succeeding decades saw various forms of gender-based exclusionary strategies in paid employment. These strategies included: (i) gender-based discriminatory laws and regulations, including the prohibitions of women’s employment in certain jobs and patriarchal rights granted to husbands to confine their wives’ employment, (ii) lack of preventative measures targeting sexual harassment at work, (iii) the patriarchal character of the Turkish welfare regime, which assumes men are the single-breadwinners and women are the homemakers and, consequently, (iv) the lack of public provisioning of childcare, (v) gender-based discrimination in hiring practices, and (vi) women’s exclusion from the trade union leadership. As a result, women’s exclusion from income-generating activities and paid employment has become one of the main features of social transformation in Turkey.

In light of the evidence examined thus far, I suggest that men, in their position as rural and urban small-producers, constitute a patriarchal collective subject and, at the same time, the patriarchal collective subject is mediated by the state. Through such mediation, gender-based exclusion in property ownership is represented as unintentional, traditional, or an aspect of culture or religion. Contrary to this appearance, I have shown that men, in their position as rural and urban small-producers, were relatively successful in negotiating with the state, and in so doing, secured small production as well as excluded women from landownership and income-generating activities. Male small-producers shaped the patriarchal character of the state by revolts, protests, petitions, complaints as well as electoral pressure through the ballot box. The domestic patriarchal character of the state sustained gender-based exclusionary strategies in property ownership which, in turn, preserved the dominance of the premodern and modern forms of domestic patriarchy. Next I assess the extent to which the neoliberal form of public patriarchy weakens this bond between male small-producers and the state as well as challenging the gender-based exclusionary strategies and the state’s domestic patriarchal character.

Emergence of Neoliberal Public Patriarchy

By comparing employment rates in the non-agricultural sectors across all twenty-six districts, I identified five districts where a shift toward female paid employment has been initiated (İstanbul-TR10, Ankara-TR51, İzmir-TR31, Bursa, Eskişehir, Bilecik-TR41, Tekirdağ, Edirne, Kırklareli-TR21). Women’s access to education and paid employment is also higher in these districts and working mothers have a certain level of access to commodified and decommodified forms of childcare (Kocabicak 2021). As well as changes in the domain of the economy, recent changes in the polity signal the emergence of the neoliberal form of public patriarchy. Since the mid-2000s, the state has taken steps to address the sustainability of women’s double burden of paid and unpaid labor largely through gender-based segregation in the labor market and commodification of care work. The Turkish state has: (i) modified social policy to increase women’s self-employment, (ii) initiated conditional-cash transfers to increase working mothers’ access to childcare, and (iii) removed gender-discriminatory laws and regulations. In the domain of civil society, the increasing presence of women in social movements is associated with the struggle against compulsory heterosexuality. Turkey is also signatory to international agreements, including CEDAW and the Istanbul Convention (at the time of writing), and has thereby started to criminalize domestic violence.

Nevertheless, in those five districts referred to above household production remains the primary place for women’s labor, and large gender gaps in paid employment persist (women’s labor force participation rate is around 32–39 percent, whereas that of men is 72–78 percent in 2017). This means that while neoliberal public patriarchy is emerging it is doing so alongside modern domestic patriarchy. Furthermore, its spread appears limited to only five districts which account for 39 percent of the total population aged 15–64 years (2017). The majority of districts are marked by large gender gaps thereby sustaining the dominance of gender-based exclusionary strategies. Moreover, notwithstanding the emergence of neoliberal public patriarchy in the polity domain, the Turkish state continues to play an important role in confining women’s labor to household production. The state has: (i) provided incentives to increase number of children per family, (ii) put restrictions on abortion, (iii) arranged payments to encourage women to become full-time care workers within the home, and (iv) introduced restrictions on maintenance to prevent women from getting divorced. Although Muslim women’s struggle is significant, organized religion is still predominantly shaped by gender-based exclusionary strategies and, as such, has a considerable impact on the ruling regime of the Justice and Development Party. The feminist and LGBT movements are further under heavy surveillance and their main demonstrations are banned. Country-level data therefore indicates the dominance of gender-based exclusionary strategies. In comparison to other developing countries (Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Malaysia, and South Africa), Turkey has larger gender gaps in paid employment in the nonagricultural sectors, tertiary education, access to basic financial assets, and political representation (Kocabicak 2021).

To summarize, the evidence examined thus far indicates that the emergence of the neoliberal form of public patriarchy is limited and its scale insufficient to challenge the dominance of premodern and modern domestic patriarchies. Rather than arguing that the transition from domestic to public patriarchy is almost complete (Moghadam 2020), I suggest that this transition may have been initiated but it is still far from being accomplished.

Conclusion

This article contributes to existing theories on varieties of gender regime by (i) analyzing the significance of women’s exclusion from property ownership for different forms of domestic patriarchy, (ii) investigating the importance of patriarchal exploitation of labor within the family, (iii) theorizing the role of the patriarchal collective subject in maintaining the system of gender-based exploitation, and (iv) highlighting the significance of the state in sustaining patriarchal relations of labor. I find that male peasants have utilized legal discrimination against women in land inheritance and, in so doing, have sustained patriarchal exploitation of labor in rural households. At the same time, male small-producers, not only male household heads, have played a considerable role in excluding women from income-generating activities (including paid employment) which, in turn, maintained patriarchal exploitation of labor within urban households. I therefore identify the premodern and modern forms of domestic patriarchy by distinguishing two main arrangements of gender-based exclusionary strategies. Women’s exclusion from agricultural landownership, in conjunction with the dominance of small landownership, leads to patriarchal exploitation of labor in rural households and, as such, constructs premodern domestic patriarchy. Under the conditions of dispossession and increasing wage dependency, women’s exclusion from paid employment and income-generating activities sustains patriarchal exploitation of labor within urban households, thereby establishing modern domestic patriarchy.

It has been thirty years since the focus of feminist analysis shifted from “how the subordination of women is produced, maintained, and changed” towards “how gender is involved in processes and structures” (Acker 1989, 238). The change in focus has obscured the significance of the patriarchal collective subject and subordinated the gender-based system of exploitation to the class-based system or has perceived gender inequality as an accidental process with no beneficiaries. It is crucial to investigate how the patriarchal collective subject is historically constructed, deconstructed, and reconstructed. This contribution has started to detail the way in which the patriarchal collective subject has been so constituted within the historical context of Turkey.

Feminist theories highlight the role of male household heads and wageworkers in sustaining patriarchal relations of labor within the home and at work. In this study, I demonstrate that men, in their position as rural and urban small-producers, also constitute a patriarchal collective subject and, at the same time, the patriarchal collective subject is mediated by the state. State-mediated powers of gendered dispossession limit women’s access to a means of production (agricultural land) and subsistence (wage and other forms of income). Under such conditions, the state becomes a vehicle for making the patriarchal collective subject both invisible and coincidental. My analysis highlights the enduring bond between the domestic patriarchal character of the Turkish state and the patriarchal collective subject. Male small-producers have been relatively successful in negotiating with the state and have thereby not only protected urban and rural small production from market-led powers of dispossession but also excluded women from landownership and income-generating activities. These processes have, in turn, established premodern domestic patriarchy and reproduced modern domestic patriarchy. The emergence of the neoliberal form of public patriarchy, however, fail to challenge the dominance of premodern and modern domestic patriarchies.

Patriarchal transformation in Turkey, therefore, consists of the uneven and combined development of premodern and modern domestic patriarchies and of the neoliberal form of public patriarchy. Women in non-agrarian cities experience particular forms of patriarchal domination specific to modern domestic and neoliberal public patriarchies, whereas women in other cities live under the conditions of modern and premodern domestic patriarchies. Gender-based exclusionary strategies persist in both modern and premodern forms of domestic patriarchy and thus prevent transition to public patriarchy.

Note

Ece Kocabıçak is currently working as a Lecturer in the Department of Sociology at the Open University. Her teaching and research engage with the contemporary debates in comparative sociology, feminist political economy, and international development. Her research expertise is on varieties of gender regimes; trajectories of capitalist development; state-formation; the relationship between gender, class, race-ethnicity, and sexuality based inequalities; and the significance of political collective subjects for social change. She is currently working on her research monograph, titled The Political Economy of Patriarchy in the Global South (Routledge, forthcoming).

Acknowledgments

I especially thank Sylvia Walby, Karen Shire, Valentine Moghadam, Mieke Verloo, Heidi Gottfried, and other participants of Gender Regimes Workshop (at City, University of London) for their support and constructive criticisms. I thank the anonymous reviewers for their careful reading of my article and their many insightful comments and suggestions. I also thank Gülnur Acar-Savran, Kate McNicholas-Smith, and Jo Armstrong for their feedback on the early drafts of this article.

Author notes

Present address: Department of Sociology, The Open University, Milton Keynes MK7 6AA, UK