Migration experiences of Turkish women: notes from a researcher's diary.

This article presents six case studies of the experiences of Turkish women whose husbands were labor migrants. The article opens with an overview of labor emigration from Turkey to developed countries in Europe starting in the early 1960s and continues with a review of the literature that considers migrant women as an analytical category. The literature review then addresses the prevalent emphasis on the impact of labor migration on the emancipation of women and notes that these studies overgeneralize application of the analytical category "tradition," overlook the important effect of patriarchy on women's wages and work, and forward radically different conceptualizations of "emancipation." The research that yielded the case studies presented in this article was undertaken to determine if external migration had changed gender roles and indicates that migration experiences are influenced by whether the migrant workers are part of an extended or nuclear family. The case studies illustrate that the migration experiences of women are too multifaceted for a single categorization. Two of the women left their children with in-laws and followed their husbands to seek employment. One stayed at home under the supervision of a male relative, and two depended upon female relatives whose husbands had also migrated for mutual support. Another woman and her children accompanied her husband to Europe where the woman kept house and cared for the children. It is concluded that many different factors affect a woman's migration experience and that labor migration may change gender roles more for women who stay behind as heads of the household than for women who accompany their husbands as housewives. All of the women benefitted materially, but women who left their children behind regretted the loss of a close relationship with them.