Social Values and the Female Labor Force Participation in Turkey: A Historical Evaluation from Ottoman Empire to the Present

“A nation’s women are the measure of its modernity.”Working life refers to the process by which employees using mental or physical labor are used to produce goods and services. When the development of this process is analyzed with regard to Turkey, it can be seen that the economic structure and relations of production that were taken over from the Ottoman Empire were a key determinant for the working life during the Turkish Republic. The key determinant of the economic structure was agriculture in the early Republican era. Apart from the manufacturing workers in a few cities where the industry was relatively advanced, 90% of the workers were employed in the agricultural sector. The adventure of the working life of Republican era is actually a story of immigration from the countryside to the city in a sense. Having started with the 1950s and accelerated after the 1980s, migration to cities from agricultural regions has deeply affected not only Turkey’s political and social structure but also its labor markets.