What excludes women from landownership in Turkey? Implications for feminist strategies

Ece Kocabicak

LSE Research Online Documents on Economics from London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library

Abstract: This article investigates the reasons for women's exclusion from landownership in Turkey. Landownership is a crucial element in enabling greater gender equality in developing countries. I argue that the Turkish civil code (1926–2001) discriminated against women in inheriting small-scale agrarian land, and the lack of alignment between separate feminist agendas weakened their capacity to challenge the gender-discriminatory legal framework. Historical analysis of the Ottoman and the Republican periods identifies the diverse implications for women's property rights of transition from the Islamic-premodern to the modern legal framework. The selected period reveals that rural and urban women were divided by changing forms of patriarchal domination, gendered landownership and paid employment. This division of women, alongside attacks and manipulation by the state, prevented the first-wave feminist movement from acting collectively. Consequently, the civil code granted education, employment, and inheritance rights to urban women but discriminated against rural women inheriting small-scale land under cultivation.

Keywords: The Turkish civil code 1926; Landownership; Property; Ottoman empire; Feminism; Islam (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: Q15 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018-07-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ara, nep-cwa and nep-hme
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Published in Women's Studies International Forum, 1, July, 2018, 69, pp. 115-125. ISSN: 0277-5395

Downloads: (external link)
http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/88707/ Open access version. (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ehl:lserod:88707

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in LSE Research Online Documents on Economics from London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library LSE Library Portugal Street London, WC2A 2HD, U.K.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by LSERO Manager ().