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

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  • Kocabicak, Ece

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.

Suggested Citation

  • Kocabicak, Ece, 2018. "What excludes women from landownership in Turkey? Implications for feminist strategies," LSE Research Online Documents on Economics 88707, London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library.
  • Handle: RePEc:ehl:lserod:88707
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    File URL: http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/88707/
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    Cited by:

    1. Selin Çağatay, 2018. "Women’s Coalitions beyond the Laicism–Islamism Divide in Turkey: Towards an Inclusive Struggle for Gender Equality?," Social Inclusion, Cogitatio Press, vol. 6(4), pages 48-58.
    2. Kiros Tsegay & Hongzhong Fan & AM Priyangani Adikari & Hailay Shifare, 2021. "Does gender matter for household livelihood diversification in Ethiopia rural areas?," International Journal of Research in Business and Social Science (2147-4478), Center for the Strategic Studies in Business and Finance, vol. 10(6), pages 221-232, September.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    The Turkish civil code 1926; Landownership; Property; Ottoman empire; Feminism; Islam;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • Q15 - Agricultural and Natural Resource Economics; Environmental and Ecological Economics - - Agriculture - - - Land Ownership and Tenure; Land Reform; Land Use; Irrigation; Agriculture and Environment

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