Table Of ContentPalgrave Studies
in Gender and Education
Gender Justice,
Education and Equality
Creating Capabilities for Girls’
and Women’s Development
Firdevs Melis Cin
Palgrave Studies in Gender and Education
Series Editor
Yvette Taylor
School of Education
University of Strathclyde
Glasgow , United Kingdom
This Series aims to provide a comprehensive space for an increasingly diverse
and complex area of interdisciplinary social science research: g ender and
education. Because the fi eld of women and gender studies is developing
rapidly and becoming ‘internationalised’ – as are traditional social science
disciplines such as sociology, educational studies, social geography, and so
on – there is a greater need for this dynamic, global Series that plots emerg-
ing defi nition and debates and monitors critical complexities of gender
and education. This Series has an explicitly feminist approach and orienta-
tion and attends to key theoretical and methodological debates, ensuring
a continued conversation and relevance within the well-established, inter-
disciplinary fi eld of gender and education. The Series combines renewed
and revitalised feminist research methods and theories with emergent and
salient public policy issues. These include pre-compulsory and post-com-
pulsory education; ‘early years’ and ‘lifelong’ education; educational (dis)
engagements of pupils, students and staff; trajectories and intersectional
inequalities including race, class, sexuality, age and disability; policy and
practice across educational landscapes; diversity and difference, including
institutional (schools, colleges, universities), locational and embodied (in
‘teacher’–‘learner’ positions); varied global activism in and beyond the
classroom and the ‘public university’; educational technologies and transi-
tions and the (ir)relevance of (in)formal educational settings; and emergent
educational mainstreams and margins. In using a critical approach to gen-
der and education, the Series recognises the importance of probing beyond
the boundaries of specifi c territorial-legislative domains inorder to develop
a more international, intersectional focus. In addressing varied concep-
tual and methodological questions, the Series combines anintersectional
focus on competing – and sometimes colliding – strands of educational
provisioning and equality and ‘diversity’, and provides insightful refl ec-
tions on the continuing critical shift of gender and feminism within (and
beyond) the academy.
More information about this series at
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Firdevs Melis Cin
Gender Justice,
Education and
Equality
Creating Capabilities for Girls’ and Women’s
Development
Firdevs Melis Cin
Department of Psychology
Istanbul Ticaret Universitesi
Istanbul, Turkey
Palgrave Studies in Gender and Education
ISBN 978-3-319-39103-8 ISBN 978-3-319-39104-5 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-39104-5
Library of Congress Control Number: 2016959269
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A
CKNOWLEDGEMENTS
There are so many people who have inspired and supported me during
this research. It has been an enjoyable and enriching journey for me. It is
impossible to thank all the people I have come across during this period.
To start with, I would like to express my gratitude, fi rst and foremost, to
my parents, Belgin Cin and Mesut Cin, and to my brother, Mehmet Melih
Cin, for their constant encouragement and support.
I am gratefully indebted to Professor Melanie Walker and Professor
Monica McLean for their guidance and for being a source of inspiration
throughout this project. No words could express my appreciation of them. I
would also like to express my gratitude to University of Nottingham, School
of Education, for offering funds and scholarship to undertake this project.
I would like to thank my aunt, Yelda Baba, and my uncle, Professor
Dr. Fevzi Baba, for their support and encouragement during my studies.
As for my friends, I cannot pay back the emotional and intellectual
support I got from Julia Long, Ecem Karlıdağ, Aurora Lopez-Fogues,
Görkem Altınörs, Francesca Silvestri, Earl Kehoe, Tham Ngyuen and
Rahime Süleymanoğlu-Kürüm. I am also hugely grateful to Dimitrios
Anagnostakis for the encouragement, invaluable support and intellectual
debates. He has given his time to read over various versions of this book
and provide feedback.
My special thanks go to my colleagues Prof. Dr. Gökhan Malkoç,
Dr. Ela Arı, Dr. Aydın Karaçanta and Gizem Cesur for their encourage-
ment and support during the writing of this book. Thanks for listening to
me going on about this research and this book.
My thanks to all my participants who have enthusiastically joined in this
study and opened their lives and hearts to me.
v
C
ONTENTS
1 Introduction: Conceptualising Gender Justice 1
2 Understanding(s) of Education, Gender
Justice and Human Development 1 9
3 Understanding Context: Political History,
Gender Politics and Education Provision in Turkey 47
4 The Women and Their Micro-Contexts 7 5
5 Exploring Gender Inequalities in Personal Spaces
and Private Sphere 8 9
6 Education and Changing Lives 1 21
7 Working for Social and Gender Justice 1 39
8 Conclusion: A Capabilities-Based
Human Development Approach to Gender
Justice and Education in Turkey 169
vii
viii CONTENTS
Appendix A: Interviews Undertaken with Women Teachers 183
Appendix B: Profi le of Women 185
Bibliography 189
Index 209
L T
IST OF ABLES
Table 3.1 Percentage of school enrolment and graduates
for primary schools, 1929–1930 to 1949–1950 62
Table 3.2 Number of teachers between 1924 and 1950 at all
levels of education (primary school, secondary school
and high school) 63
Table 3.3 Percentage of the rural population aged 15 and
over working in agriculture (1935 Census) 63
Table 3.4 Percentage of Turkish population by literacy and sex,
12 years and over, 1980 64
Table 3.5 Net schooling ratio by educational year and
level of education 66
Table 3.6 Number of teachers between 1980 and 2010 at
all levels of education 67
Table 8.1 Women’s valued capabilities across generations 170
Table A.1 Interview schedule 183
Table B.1 Profi le of women 186
ix
CHAPTER 1
Introduction: Conceptualising Gender
Justice
This book elaborates on the capabilities approach, developed by Amartya
Sen (1 999 ) and Martha Nussbaum (2 000 ), engaging with the study of
education, gender and development by looking into women’s lives and
giving them the opportunity to speak for themselves. In so doing, it takes
Turkey as a case where women are located at the crossroads between
embracing modernity and living under traditional and cultural norms
(Göle 1 997 ). The book explores women’s positioning, survival, resistance,
freedoms, well-being and agency through the clash of multifaceted, socio-
logical phenomena, such as: religion/secularism, modernism/tradition,
ethnicity, multilingualism and the paradoxes of culture and generations,
both in the public sphere and in their private lives. It analyses the everyday
expression and narratives of women who have variously defi ned them-
selves as nationalist, feminist, modern, activist, submissive and traditional.
Through the collective voices of three different generations of women
teachers, I voice women’s experiences of being a woman and becoming a
teacher in socio-culturally diverse Turkey. Turkey, as a developing context,
provides an interesting site to explore how the issues of gender, education
and development interweave with its diverse socio-cultural setting—mid-
way between the values and systems of the West and the East.
Located at the intersection of gender and education, the book also looks
into how education can be transformative in women’s private and public
lives, and distribute justice. At the same time, it examines how gender
inequalities can be reproduced through education and aims to explore
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017 1
F.M. Cin, Gender Justice, Education and Equality, Palgrave Studies
in Gender and Education, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-39104-5_1
