SINGLE MOTHERS DOING FAMILY: RE-FORMING TRADITIONAL FAMILY IN TURKEY

Abstract

In this study, my main purpose is to grasp how women whose marriage is ended up either by divorce or the loss of the husband experience the life after marital dissolution as a widow and a divorced woman in economic, social network and social support, cultural stigma and single parenting issues in Turkey. I claim that widowed and divorced women are trapped in between family, market and state; and that gender based, family oriented patriarchal society and social policies do not allow these women to live their life the way they want and to stand on their own feet, and make them lean on their families or men. In this study, my argument is that divorced and widow women are doing family in order to cope with the difficulties of being single mothers. In order to understand the change in women’s experiences with patriarchy, semi-structured interviews were conducted with nineteen divorced mothers and seventeen widow mothers living in Ankara. This study shows us while the divorced mothers were trying to construct a new family; they reconstruct the traditional family approach by letting grandfathers to be authority figure in the family. The findings of this study point out that divorced and widow women families are defined by the family ideal. Single mothers try to perform the family by adopting traditional family norms in their family after marital dissolution because of the pressure of patriarchal system in the society. The cases of divorced and widow women show us that family ambivalence and authority problems occur because single mothers do not fit the traditional family model in Turkey.