Defining and living out the interior: the ‘modern’ apartment and the ‘urban’ housewife in Turkey during the 1950s and 1960s

Abstract

This study investigates the interaction of women's gendered identities and performances in the modern middle strata with the new apartment, while complicating the boundary between the legitimizing discourses of modern architecture and ideas around femininity, during the 1950s and 1960s in Turkey. It conceptualizes domestic premises as the inhabitant's space, where gender roles are formed and performed. Drawing on research concerning the postwar construction of women's identities and diverse ideas of feminine space in a global context, I examine how the apartment was a place for women, who were conceptualized as Western and happy housewives amid Cold War geopolitics. The study ponders ways in which women negotiated/subverted conflicting expectations of the modern housewife. The apartment mediated powerful discourses on structures of patriarchy and identities, while simultaneously allowing women to define and live out the modern domicile as active agents. It embodied the intermediate space between the concepts of modern and traditional, Western and non-Western, urban and rural, and masculine and feminine.

‘Protecting the national body’: regulating the practice and the place of prostitution in early republican Turkey

“…5 Indeed, regarding the status of women, sexuality, and statist Downloaded by [Stony Brook University] at 06:11 20 December 2014 definitions of womanhood, Kemalist Turkey exhibited varying and profound sociocultural contrasts with Victorian Britain. 7 Finally, our research contributes to prior articles that have addressed how space, place, and womanhood were defined byand oftentimes for -women and girls in republican Turkey (i.e., Secor 2002;Mills 2007;Gürel 2009;Komsuoglu and O ¨r s 2009;Aks it 2011;Gö karıksel 2012). Moreover, there are numerous works that engage with more contemporary manifestations of prostitution as a matter of human rights in terms of both the domestic population (Anti-Slavery International 1993;S ims ek et al 2003) and migrant sex workers (Hann and Hann 1992;Beller-Hann 1995;Gülc ür and İlkkaracan 2002;Bloch 2003;Erder and Kaska 2003).…”

Gendered dispossession and women’s changing poverty by slum/squatter redevelopment projects: A case study from Turkey

“…In the case of the KUTP, relocated women interviewees note that they now have a "modern" and "clean" house and an increased sense of privacy due to changing social relations. This also resonated with the Turkish modernization discourse that associates apartments with modernity and higher status for women (Gürel, 2009), contrary to the negative image of squatter dwellings depicted as backward and rural in popular discourse (Erman, 2001;Karpat, 1976). However, they also report that they miss the neighborly relations as they feel a greater social distance in the new housing areas.…”

Visual Representation of the Modern Domestic Space in Iranian Printed Media (1925-1979)

“…Such a woman represented a healthy and attractive citizen of a progressive nation that cared of herself. (Gürel, 2009) According to Amin, "nowhere was the conflation of modernization and Westernization more apparent than in the conflation of health and beauty for Iranian women" (Amin, 2004). Therefore, aesthetic imagery and hygiene were the common features of a modern domestic space and modern woman that were publicized in the press of Pahlavi period.…”