Modernization and Gender Regimes

Modernity assigns women roles for reproduction and protection of society. In non-western societies where modernization is compounded with nationalism, politics of modernity constitutes a gender regime. Thus, women are meant to achieve a modern look and behave as guardians of national solidarity. This book is a close look at Turkish modernization and its share in gender regime through analysis of subjective and private meanings as related to modern, coming out of the life histories of the wives of the top Turkish political leaders. It was argued in the book that Kemalism envisaged a nation- state vis-ŕ-vis an ideal of new family which involved some degree of tension between ascribed roles and lived-through experiences related to gender. As their life histories has presented, the wives of the political leaders experienced modernization both as political and personal. Thus their experiences of modernization as the outcome of the dialectical relationship between the gender role performance and the gender identity construction are assumed to reveal potential tensions and adaptive strategies related to gender in Turkish modernization.