Conflicts and conundrums in a women's cooperative in western Turkey

תקציר

In a Turkish village, Western expatriate intellectuals founded a carpet cooperative to promote natural dyeing and women's artistic heritage as weavers. In this cooperative, encounters between feminist ideals of female emancipation clashed with conservative Sunni Muslim villagers' understandings of gender roles. I discuss how the villagers selectively adopted the goals of the project and reinterpreted ideals of female emancipation according to their own needs and understandings of gender. Employment in the women's cooperative became a source of empowerment for married women, but unmarried daughters remained unpaid weavers in their natal households. By considering the different actors in this cooperative-male and female, unmarried and married-I consider the construction and limits of personhood, agency and empowerment, collective struggles for economic survival, and local interpretations of development.