Money Makes Us Relatives: Women's Labor in Urban TurkeyWithin the rural immigrant community of Istanbul, Turkey, poor women may spend up to fifty hours a week producing goods for export, yet deny that they actually "work." This ethnographic study seeks to explain why women and men alike devalue women's work and to show how the social and gender ideologies that prompt this denial create a pool of cheap labor for the world market. Jenny White bases her study on two years of field research into the internal organization of women's piece-work and family-workshop production. She demonstrates that among these small-scale producers, labor for money becomes a kind of kinship relation, in which reciprocal obligation and debt-exchange occur. Women's work for pay becomes an extension of women's work for the family, in both of which labor is endlessly demanded and yet poorly compensated. |
Contents
Introduction | 1 |
Bridge between Europe and Asia | 27 |
The House of the World | 35 |
Copyright | |
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activities Ankara behavior Bosphorus capital capitalist chapter collective reciprocity daughter debt distributor duction economic euphemized example exchange expected exploitation export family atelier family labor family members father friends gecekondu gelin gender gift girls give Hatice household husband identity ideology income indebtedness individual intermediary Istanbul Kadıköy Kandiyoti kinship knitting Kuşadası labor power leather live machine male marriage married Marxist materials means of production ment merchants moral mother mother-in-law Murad natal family neighborhood neighbors nomic obligation organization Osman says outfits paid patriarchal payment pencil leads percent piecework atelier production in Istanbul profit relations of domination relations of production relationship relatives reproduction role sell Şengül small-scale commodity production small-scale production social social web society solidarity squatter districts surplus value sweaters takes tion Turkey Turkish Ümraniye urban violence wage wife woman women women's labor workers working-class workshop yarn Yenikent Zeytinburnu