Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Woman and Space in Turkey

The question of whether men or women have stronger personalities is occasionally debated. Trying to come up with a meaningful answer to a question such as this is an exercise in futility. A. Maurois, a truly smart man, offers the following insightful response: “Even a woman of little intelligence can wrap a man round her finger, yet managing a crazy man requires an exceptionally clever woman.”

The family unit is still an important pillar of society in the USA. Ties among relatives are strong and closeness is maintained without interruption. Birthdays are not forgotten. Families get together around Christmas. Our old Turkish “bayram” (Eid) traditions, however, have almost entirely disappeared in our day and age. In the past, all family members, including children, would always visit their elders during bayram. These “bayram” visits used to be taken so seriously that if the three- or four-day “bayrams” were not long enough for all planned visits, the following few days would also be devoted to visiting those that were not visited during bayram. Teachers and business relations, regardless of their social rank, were definitely visited.

In some marriages, the marriage certificate is a doorway to a new life together, be it a result of falling in love or as an arranged marriage. After 60 years of marriage, I can now dare say without fear or reservation that “falling in love” is not a prerequisite for a good marriage. However, this was not the way I thought 60 years ago… Closeness, including falling in love, may lead to two things eventually: The first is separation or falling out, and the second is marriage. There is a Mongolian proverb that suggests that long marriages need not be boring in a witty way: “Even if couples sleep on the same pillow, they can have different dreams.”

Although marriage is a tiny unit that involves only two people, it constitutes “a union.” It is up to the talents of husband and wife to raise this union to the level of a real theatrical play that will include only them as the actors. The endless duties or tasks of many long years of service can only be undertaken willingly, with pleasure, not by being forced to perform them. “The root cause of unhappy marriages is the disappearance of friendship, not the disappearance of love.” – Nietzsche

The smartest opinions about men are likely to come from women. Jeanne Moreau, one of the most intelligent French actresses of my youth, describes men in the following way: “Many men who don’t refrain from talking about women’s intellect are ignorant people who could not learn how to love. Successful practitioners don’t talk much, they go ahead and do things.” Another muse uses different words to express a similar opinion: “Men’s fantasies are not at all adequate to grasp the reality of women… ” (Anna Magnani) Coco Chanel, a French woman with a poisonous tongue, makes a becoming remark: “We women have to be beautiful in order for men to love us… but for us to be able to love them, we need to be fools.”

The fact that women appear to pay more attention to their looks than to learning or becoming wiser leads to some misinterpretations. The rather mistaken assumption is that a man’s appreciation of a woman’s physical appearance is more important than his assessment of her intellect. This perspective is not entirely unfounded. A cognitive evaluation requires patience and care, whereas the eye makes its assessment the moment it beholds an object. On the other hand, ladies’ evaluations of men are not based on instant judgments based on quick glances. As a result, women’s evaluations are informed by deeper reasons than those of men.

The world-famous writer Mark Twain was an interesting person and more importantly a truly great family man. He was an extraordinarily good husband, who had great respect for his wife. As one of the most famous masters of satire, he never feared or got tired of attacking and ridiculing various social ills he observed in humanity as well as in society. Yet, when speaking of family affairs, he unwittingly disclosed how much he feared his wife: “Many women could have definitely become better wives had they only given up on their wish to make their husbands better family men.”

Generally, men tend to avoid speaking frankly about women (or about what really goes through their minds). The number of men who are frank is probably one in a thousand… If I am told I am exaggerating, I would then say, a “few” in a thousand. Perhaps an exception to the general rule is Malraux who asked “How can a woman be described? In order to give an accurate description, one needs to know her really well. If one starts studying women starting today, no conclusion can be reached before doomsday.”

It is customary to conclude an article by wrapping up and offering a brief recap of all thoughts expressed thus far. Yet it is not possible to conclude a piece with a summary when the subject in question is women. There is no way of expressing thoughts about women in just a few pages, a few hours, or even in just a few books.

Ultimately, these lines are all that I have to offer for now.

Aydın Boysan

The evolution of space and the new meanings it assumed over time have led us to think that it would prove to be an exciting adventure to take up “space from a feminine perspective.” While women and space relationships are predominantly explored in feminist literature of the West, in the Turkish context the idea has developed into taking a wider, multidisciplinary approach.

The starting point of this book is the existence of a series of complex and multifaceted relations in our comprehension of social structures, social relations, and spaces. In other words, while social structures and relations affect how we give meaning to spaces, our comprehension of spaces affects how we give meaning to what is social. We wanted to look into how women stroll through spaces, what roles and functions they undertake, how they give meaning to their engagement with spaces, and how, with their existence, they become one with spaces. We started this journey by looking for the clues as to how women, as they played their parts, reinterpreted those scripts written by sovereign powers, how they became stars, how they transformed limitations into the limitless, and how they created rich lives out of deprivation. We aimed to take up what kind of an intermediary role “space” serves, while women stretched their limits – without objection, screaming, or revolting; how, in various forms, they have positioned themselves in spaces and redefined their being, and how spaces in this journey served as an interface between society’s perception of women versus their self-perception and their lives.

In the year 2007; we, myself, Dr. Ayşen Akpınar, and Handan Dedehayır as joint editors made a call to prominent individuals from different fields in Turkey, who we believed could evaluate the various dimensions of the relationship between women and space within the context of Turkish culture. Almost all of our writers’ first reaction was that the subject is very interesting and exciting. They also added that in all the work they had carried out until then, they had never evaluated the subject from that perspective – they said such a topic would be totally new for them. This made the project even more exciting. As a result, the book you have in your hands evolved as a product of a rich variety, with extraordinary contributions from a group of writers composed of an anthropologist, an archeologist, a linguist and literary expert, a lawyer, an economist, a public administrator, an architect, a painter, an art historian, a historian, a cinematographer, a political scientist, and a sociologist. During their very busy schedules, each one of the writers with their wide expertise devoted his/her limited and very valuable time to reevaluating the relationship between women and space. They provided a widened horizon and added rich variety and depth to the book. We would like to extend our gratitude to each one of them. The Turkish version of the book was published in 2009 in Turkey and welcomed with a wide interest. Ten years later, I was compelled to have the book translated into English and present it to a wider audience of readers, who would be interested in getting familiar with the interaction between women and space within the context of the Turkish culture. I hereby extend my sincere gratitude to Mrs. Nigar Alemdar for her time and effort in translating a work of this magnitude.

When we had started receiving the articles, we noted that they came together under three parts: The first part talks about women who left their mark on the space they found themselves in, out of nothing. The second part studies women confined by various spaces assigned to them. Thus, the titles of the first two parts of the book emerge: “Women Who Make Out of Nothing” and “Women Confined by Spaces.” Chapters outside these two topics display a rich variety, reflecting the relationship of women and space. Then there are the spatial traces of migrant women workers’ status in Germany, women in Turkish cinema, in miniatures, in the works of foreign travelers, in the Turkish Civil Code, at the hairdressers, in the former Ottoman lands, at events, cultural spaces, and at the literacy courses in urban shanty towns. We compiled these chapters under the third part “Reflections on the State of Women.”