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
Women and the Global Workforce | 7 |
PART III | 18 |
Bridge Between Europe and Asia | 29 |
The house of the world | 43 |
The Patriarch | 62 |
The Social Web | 81 |
The Structure of Production | 99 |
Yenikent | 125 |
Kinship and Production | 138 |
Local modernisms in the global factory | 144 |
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Common terms and phrases
activities Ankara apartment atelier Aynur behavior biological reproduction Bosphorus bride capital child construction cultural daughter debt discourse economic example exchange expected exploitation export family labor family members father female friends Füsün gecekondu gecekondu areas gelin gender gender identity global market household husband husband's family identity ideology income indebtedness individual intermediaries Islamic Islamist Istanbul Kadıköy kinship knitting leather lived male maquiladoras marriage married materials means merchants middle-class migrants modern moral mother mother-in-law natal family neighbors obligation organization Osman parents particular patriarchal patriarchal family percent piecework profit reciprocal relations relations of production relationship relatives religious rent reproduction role Sea of Marmara şımarık small-scale production social social contract social web solidarity son's sons squatter districts subcontracting sweaters traditional Turkey Turkish Ümraniye unmarried urban village wife woman women women's labor workers working-class neighborhoods workshop Yenikent Zeytinburnu