Money Makes Us Relatives: Women's Labor in Urban TurkeyIn the rural immigrant community of Istanbul, poor women spend up to fifty hours a week producing goods for export, yet deny that they actually 'work'. Money Makes Us Relatives asks why Turkish society devalues women's work, concealing its existence while creating a vast pool of cheap labor for the world market. Drawing on two years of ethnographic fieldwork among family producers and pieceworkers, and using fascinating case studies throughout, Jenny B. White shows how women's paid work is viewed in terms of kinship relations of reciprocity and obligation - an extension of domestic work for the family, which is culturally valued but poorly compensated. Whilst offering the benefits of social identity and long-term security, women's work also reflects global capitalism's ability to capture local cultural norms, and to use these to lower production costs and create exploitative conditions. This fully revised second edition includes a new introduction and conclusion, updated references, comparative material on women's labor elsewhere in the world, and brand new material on Islam, globalization, gender and Turkish family life. It is an important contribution to debates about women's participation in late global capitalism. |
Contents
1 INTRODUCTION | 1 |
2 WOMEN AND THE GLOBAL WORKFORCE | 7 |
THE SETTING | 14 |
THE IDEOLOGY OF LABOR | 37 |
THE STRUCTURE OF PRODUCTION | 87 |
NOTES | 137 |
| 146 | |
| 150 | |
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Common terms and phrases
activities Ankara apartment atelier Aynur behavior biological reproduction Bosphorus capital capitalist crochet cultural daughter debt discourse distributor economic euphemized example exchange expected exploitation export family labor family members father female friends gecekondu gelin gender girls global market Hatice household husband identity ideology income indebtedness individual intermediaries Islamic Islamist Istanbul Kadiköy Kandiyoti kinship knitting leather leather diamonds lived male maquiladoras marriage married materials means merchants migrants modern moral mother mother-in-law natal family neighbors obligation organization Osman paid participation particular patriarchal payment percent piecework profit reciprocal relations of domination relations of production relationship relatives reproduction role Sea of Marmara small-scale production social social contract social web society solidarity son’s squatter areas squatter districts strategies subcontracting sweaters traditional Turkey Turkish Ümraniye urban wage wife woman women women’s labor workers working-class neighborhoods workshop yarn Yenikent young Zeytinburnu