Istanbul Households: Marriage, Family and Fertility, 1880-1940 (Cambridge Studies in Population, Economy and Society in Past Time)

Istanbul households is a social history of marriage, the family and population in Istanbul during the turbulent period of transition from the Ottoman Empire to the Turkish Republic in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Istanbul was the first Muslim city to experience a systematic decline in fertility and major changes in family life, and, as such, set the tone for many social and cultural changes in Turkey and the Muslim world. Istanbul was the major focal point for the forces of westernization of Turkish society, processes which not only transformed political and economic institutions in that country, but also had a profound and lasting impact on domestic life. This is the first systematic historical study of the family and population in Turkey or the Middle East, combining the methods and approaches of social anthropology, historical demography and social history.

Istanbul households

Cambridge Studies in Population, Economy and Society in Past Time 15 Series Editors PETER LASLETT, ROGER SCHOFIELD

and

E. A. WRIGLEY

ESRC Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure

and

DANIEL SCOTT SMITH

University of Illinois at Chicago

Recent work in social, economic and demographic history has revealed much that was previously obscure about societal stability and change in the past. It has also suggested that crossing the conventional boundaries between these branches of history can be very rewarding. This series will exemplify the value of interdisciplinary work of this kind, and will include books on topics such as family, kinship and neighbourhood; welfare provision and social control; work and leisure; migration; urban growth; and legal structures and procedures, as well as more familiar matters. It will demonstrate that, for example, anthropology and economics have become as close intellectual neighbours to history as have political philosophy or biography.

For a full list of titles in the series, please see end of book.

Istanbul households Marriage, family and fertility 1880-1940

ALAN DUBEN and CEM BEHAR Bogazic;i University

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CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS Cambridge New York Port Chester Melbourne Sydney

Published by the Press Syndicate of the University of Cambridge The Pitt Building, Trumpington Street, Cambridge CB2 1RP 40 West 2oth Street, New York, NY 10011, USA 10 Stamford Road, Oakleigh, Melbourne 3166, Australia ©Cambridge University Press 1991 First published 1991 Printed in Great Britain by the Bath Press, Avon

British Library cataloguing in publication data Duben, Alan Istanbul households: marriage, family and fertility t88o194o. -(Cambridge studies in population, economy and society in past time; 15). 1. Turkey. Istanbul. Social life, history I. Title II. Behar, Cern 956·3

Library of Congress cataloguing in publication data Duben, Alan, 1943lstanbul households: marriage, family, and fertility, 188o-1940 I Alan Duben and Cern Behar. p. em.- (Cambridge studies in population, economy, and society in past time: 15) Includes bibliographical references. ISBN o 521 38375 7 1. Family - Turkey - History - 19th century. 2. Family - Turkey History - 2oth century. 3· Marriage - Turkey - History - 19th century. 4. Marriage- Turkey- History- 2oth century. I. Behar, Cern, 1946-. II. Title. Ill. Series. HQ663.4.D83 1991 3o6.8'09561- dc20 90-33133 CIP ISBN o 521 38375 7 hardback

For my wife, lpek Aksiigiir Duben A.D.

For my wife,

Bii~ra

Ersanlz Behar C. B.

and for our parents

Contents

List of plates List of figures Note on calendars, weights and currency Note on Turkish pronunciation and spelling Acknowledgements 1

ISSUES, SCOPE AND SOURCES

Istanbul in context Family, fertility and society Family history Periodization The sources and their limitations Quantitative data Written sources Interviews 2

3

page xi xiii XIV

xvi xvu 1 2

8 11

13 15 15 20

22

CITY, MAHALLE, INCOMES AND SUBSISTENCE: SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC FRAMEWORK

23

City Mahalle Standards of living Wages and cost of living, 188o-1918 War shock

23

HOUSEHOLDS AND FAMILIES: STRUCTURE AND FLUX

Households and families Household types and the domestic cycle The Istanbul household formation system lX

29 35

36 41 48 48

62

69

Contents

X

4

LOVE AND MARRIAGE: MEANINGS AND TRANSACTIONS

Love The purposes of marriage Marriage transactions 5

MARRIAGE AGE AND POLYGYNY: MYTHS AND REALITIES

Age at marriage Remarriage Spousal age and status Actual and ideal ages at marriage The ideal age at marriage The discrepancy The social and economic bases of late marriage Polygyny 6

Fertility patterns, 188o-1940 Family planning Birth control, deliberate and fortuitous Abortion Breastfeeding Other methods Appendix: procedure for estimating total fertility rate in 1885 and 1907

159 t61 176 181 181 185 186 189

WESTERNIZATION AND NEW FAMILY DIRECTIONS: CULTURAL RECONSTRUCTION

8

122 122 129 131 133 134 139 142 148

FERTILITY AND BIRTH CONTROL: ISTANBUL'S PARTICULARITIES

7

87 87 103 107

Family deconstruction Family reconstruction Europeanization Wives and husbands Parents and children

194 194 201 202 214 226

CONCLUSION: CIVILIZATIONAL SHIFT

239

Glossary of Ottoman-Turkish terms

249

Sources and bibliography

252

Index

268

List of Plates

(Those plates which are not attributed belong to Alan Duben)

2.1 Looking across the Golden Horn, Istanbul, c. 1900 (collection of Engin ~izgen) pagez8 2.2 A street in an Istanbul Muslim mahalle of the 187os (collection of Engin ~izgen) 33 2.3 Houses of the Istanbul wage-labouring class, 11}06 (collection of Engin ~izgen) 34 51 3-1 An Istanbul family of modest means, 1919 3-2 A military family in the early Republican years, 1920s (Haydar Aksiigiir) 52 An early Republican family, 192os 3·3 53 54 3·4 An Istanbul family of average means, 1922 (Rana Ersanh) 4-1 Wedding photograph, 1926 97 4-2 Wedding photograph, 1933 (Haydar Aksiigiir) 98 7-1 An Ottoman Istanbul Muslim family at home, 1908 (collection of Engin ~izgen) 204 7-2 The cover of the third edition of Nusret Fuad's/zdivac;: ~erait-i S1hhiye ve lc;timaiyesi (The Hygienic and Social Conditions of Marriage) (1919-20) 205 7-3 'Home furnishings' as portrayed in a children's reader, 208 1909 7-4 'At the table' as portrayed in a children's reader, 1909 209 217 7-5 Children, pre-First World War period 218 7-6 Pupils and teachers at a girls' middle school, Istanbul, 1926 7-7 Women's biology laboratory at Istanbul University, 1933 (Afife Aksiigiir) 219 7-8 Husband and wife, early 1920s 224 xi

xii

List of Plates

7·9 A dervish grandfather with his modern-looking granddaughters, 1897 (collection of Engin C,::izgen) 7.10 A father and his children, turn of the century (collection of Engin C,::izgen) 7-11 Children from a well-to-do family, 1911 (collection of Engin C,::izgen) 7.12 Father and daughter, 1924

227 228

229

237

List of Figures

page 26

2.1 Map of Istanbul, c. 1900 3-1

Headship by household type, Istanbul, 1907 3.2 Male headship rates, Istanbul, 1907 (male household heads aged 15 + as a proportion of all males 15 +) 3·3 Female headship rates, Istanbul, 1885 and 1907 (female household heads aged 15 + as a proportion of all females

63

15+) 3·4 Males by age, marital status and headship position, Istanbul, 1907 5.1 Female proportions single (adjusted) in two censuses,

66

Istanbul 5.2 Mean age at marriage in Istanbul, 1905-40 5·3 Proportions single in various groups of female marriage

cohorts, Istanbul

134

6.1 Mean age at birth of last child, Istanbul (completed

marriages)

t68

6.2 Mean age at birth of last child, Istanbul (completed

marriages) 6.3 m within various marriage cohorts, Istanbul 6.4 Percentage of completed family size attained after N years of marriage, Istanbul 6.5 Parity progression rates, Istanbul (completed families only) 6.6 1885 Istanbul age pyramid 6. 7 1907 Istanbul age pyramid

XIll

Note on calendars, weights and currency

CALENDARS

Along with the lunar hegirian calendar, nineteenth-century Ottomans also began to use another hegirian but solar calendar called rum£ (Roman) or ma/f(fmancial). After 1840 both calendars were used jointly in legal and fmancial transactions. From the 187os on, newspapers and other periodicals also used both calendars. Religious authorities and the sharia courts, however, continued to use the classical (lunar) hegirian dates. Towards the end of the nineteenth century the rumt calendar became more popular and, especially after 1908, it superseded the lunar hegirian one in many areas. During the First World War the Gregorian calendar also began to be used. After 1 January 1926 it became the official calendar of the Turkish Republic. We have, when possible, tried to give both the hegirian and the Gregorian dates in the text and in our references. The hegirian dates given, however, sometimes refer to the lunar and sometimes to the solar hegirian calendars. Census registrations were largely done using the rnmt calendar and those are the ones we have used in the text. For printed materials we have made use both of lunar and solar hegirian calendars. In most cases we list the hegirian dates fi.rst followed by the Gregorian ones. Conversions were done with the help of the tables found in F. R. Unat, HicnA Tarihleri Miladt Tarihlere

250

35-7

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18.6

11.0

420

41.7

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11.0

77

11.0

2

1.2

3·0

93

9-2

1

0.6

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19-7

2

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253

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74

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0 17-4 13-4 8.9

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16.2 11.6 2.9 s.8

100.0 14.0 14-0

0 171 133 115

0 17.1 13.2 11.4

27-7 10.2 4.8 8.4

100.0 9·0 6.0 11.0

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1007

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122

94 62 6e: Women's Experience of Home and Family 1850-1040 (Oxford, 1086), 150. "" 'Kadmlara malumat: tefrik-i vezaif' (Information for women: various duties), Saball, 1822 (6 Rebiyiilevvel1)12/7 September 1894), 3-4.

Westernization and new family directions

221

should be capable of producing ideas and have the ability to make judgements."4

During the growing nationalism of the Young Turk and First World War period the child-rearing role of women was, in the hands of Gokalp and others, linked to the needs of the Turkish nation and combined with the idea that women could be, or rather should be, companions of men. 'Women are not just responsible for raising children', Gokalp writes to his daughter Seniha. 'They also have a duty to educate the nation, to set men on the right path.' 70 Motherhood came to be seen as a patriotic duty. Celal Nuri, a well-known supporter of women's rights, perhaps one of the best known during the Young Turk period, emphasized the same roles: 'At this time we do not really need female politicians or technicians ... What we primarily need are mothers, wives, governesses, that is, women to bring up future generations. 171 At a time when larger numbers of women were entering the labour force to replace men at the fronts, there was also much more discussion of the importance of women in the work-force, a theme picked up and developed by the Kemalists in the twenties and thirties, when there was an increase of women's employment in factories, in whitecollar occupations and in the professions. 72 Perhaps, as Shorter argues, low urban fertility favoured the employment of women outside the home. 73 However, there must have been other factors, because in 1927 26 per cent of all factory production workers were women, whereas by 1975 it was only 18 per cent. 74 Atatiirk himself called for women to, 'take their place in the general economic division of labour', in a speech delivered in 1923. 75 And this call was repeated, multiplied and taken very seriously, particularly by elite urban men and women in the late twenties and thirties. Yet there was a contradiction in this Kemalist feminism, because, as Mustafa Kemal himself said in the same 1923 speech, 'a woman's highest duty is motherhood'.76 The Republican Civil Code of 1926, a revolutionary document from an Islamic point of view, gives the legal sanction of the modernists to the traditional gender division of labour. The Code assigns " Alifet Celal, 'Terbiye-i nisvaniye' (Female socialization), Demet, 2 (24 Eyliil 1324/7 October •908), 27-8. '" Limni ve Malta, y.2. 71 KadrnlanmlZ (Our Women) (Istanbul, 1331/1913), 119ff. 72 Shorter, 'Population of Turkey', 431. " Ibid. " Ibid., 433-4. " E. Z. Karal, Atatiirk'ten Dii~iinceler (Some Thoughts of Atatiirk) (Ankara, 1956), 55· " Ibid., 56.

Istanbul households

222

the headship and the provision of family income to the husband and the following role to the wife: 'The wife ... is the assistant and advisor of the husband. She is responsible for the housework. 'Ti Abdullah Cevdet, the well-known author of a book of etiquette targeted at elite westernized Republican families and published one year after the promulgation of the Civil Code, echoes the law and what were very likely the sentiments of most people. 'The primary duties of a woman are to look after her home' / 8 and properly socialize her children, he says. The prime justification for women's education and entry into the work-force put forth by the major feminist magazine of the pre-Republican years, Kadmlar Diinyasr, was in terms of their role as mothers and child-rearers. 79 Sirin Tekeli observes that the Kemalist women who took all of these contradictory messages seriously led a kind of schizophrenic existence. They believed in the egalitarian and female professional rhetoric of the day, held professional jobs, yet continued to do all the traditional domestic tasks, their husbands being sanctified as the head of the household under Turkish law. 80 The advances of women in the public world and the enthusiastic discussions of the equality of the sexes in the context of the modernizing Turkish nation - a kind of 'state feminism' in Tekeli's words - were not paralleled by significant changes in the ordinary domestic world of men and women, where traditional gender responsibilities and sexual morality persisted. 81 Such a traditional sexual division of labour was by no means unique to Turkey. It was also found in England, the homeland of the feminist movement, during that period, though without the same degree of restrictive gender-based morality and codes of comportment that accompanied it in Turkey. 82 Such gender relations were, indeed, the cornerstone of the modern western nuclear family as it emerged in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. 83 With very few exceptions, a similar sexual division of labour still exists today in homes in Istanbul and in other major Turkish cities. A recent sociological 77

H. V. Velidedeoglu, Turk Medeni Kanunu (The Turkish Civil Code) (Ankara, 1970), 81.

78 I~m, 'Abdullah Cevdet', 17. "' 'Cah~mak hakkimizd1r' (We have the right to work), Kadmlar Diilzyasz, 19 (22 Nisan 1329!5 May 1913), 1. .. "" 'The meaning and the limits of feminist ideology in Turkey' in F. Ozbay, ed., The Study of Women in Turkey (Istanbul, 19&>), t8o. •• I~m, 'Abdullah Cevdet', 2o; Durakba~a, 'Cumhurivet donemi', 151-3. " Jane Lewis, 'Introduction: reconstructing women~s experience of home and family' in J. Lewis, ed., lAbour and Love: Women's Experie11ce of Home and Family (Oxford,

1gB6),

1.

" Eli Zaretsky, Capitalism, the Family, and Personal U(e (New York, 1973).

Westernization and new family directions

223

study of contemporary Turkish women indicates that, 'employment does not bring women more power in their marital relations', and that, 'certain areas of marital interaction and resources are still tabu and under male control regardless of social class, such as women's physical mobility, their employment decisions, autonomy in birth control or family planning, and sexuality'. 84 While it is very difficult to know about the intimacies of conjugal relationships with any precision, it appears that although inegalitarianism in the family division of tasks was very slow to change, if it did so at all, the move towards a companionate relationship between husband and wife went beyond the modernist rhetoric of the time. By the 1920s and 1930s the haremlik-selamlzk (female-male) divis~ons of space in the homes of the better-off had already become a thing of the past, thrusting husbands and wives upon each other on a more regular and routine basis. The Istanbul poor had never had such separations anyway, though the 'inescapable' physical intimacy of their relationships did not appear to bring egalitarianism or a companionate relationship with it. We also know, for example, from our interviews, that by the 1920s and 1930s it was quite common for husbands and wives from middle-class and even lower middle-class families to socialize as couples. Semih Bey, the child of a middle-class bureaucratic family, tells us that his parents played music together, played cards with each other and with their friends, 'and always went out together as a couple . . . They loved to socialize'. This trend presumably had begun during, perhaps even before the war, since some of our informants tell us about such visiting practices at earlier dates. One of these, whose father was an imam, says that his parents and other religious personnel at a naval post in the lower-class neighbourhood of Kas1mpa1?a in the middle of the city, visited each other with their wives during the evenings in those years. For most of the lower strata of the city, however, it is very likely that men and women did not socialize together. The parents of Kaz1m Bey, from a lowerclass family, did not socialize as a couple. His father would regularly visit the neighbourhood cafe in the evenings; his mother might visit neighbours but 'the men did not usually go visiting'. A number of important demographic changes during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries moved parallel to and provided an underpinning for the ideational developments that eventually led toward greater companionship between husbands and wives. Perhaps "' Niliifer Kuya~. 'Female labor power relations in the urban Turkish family' in