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COPYRIGHT 2002 Association for Middle East Women's Studies
The new Turkish Civil Code, which scraps the supremacy of men in marriage and thus establishes the full equality of men and women in the family, was approved by the Turkish Parliament on November 22, 2001 and came into effect on January 1, 2002. One of the most important changes included in the new code, which consists of 1030 articles, is the removal of the clause that defines the man as the head of the family. The new code also raises the legal age for marriage (which was previously 17 for men and 15 for women) to 18 both for women and men and sets the equal division of the property acquired during marriage as a default property regime, assigning an economic value to women's hitherto invisible labor for the well-being of the family household. The concept of `illegitimate children', which was used for children born out of wedlock, has been abolished; the custody of children born outside marriage belongs to their mothers. Children born outside marriage will be given the same inheritance rights as others and single parents will be allowed to adopt children. In addition, in October 2001, Article 41 of the Constitution was amended, redefining the family as an entity that is "based on equality between spouses." The new article states that: "The family is the foundation of Turkish society and is based on equality between spouses."
The reform of the Turkish Civil Code: a 50-year story
The efforts towards the reform of the Turkish Civil Code started in the 1950s. The old Turkish Civil Code of 1926 was translated and adapted from the Swiss Civil Code of the time and included several articles reducing women to a subordinate position in the family. For example, the husband was defined as the head of the marriage union, thus granting him the final say over the choice of domicile and children. In the legal domain, the first effort to reform the Turkish Civil Code of 1926 to the advantage of women took place in 1951. Since 1951 there have been numerous commissions formed by the Ministry of Justice and several proposals prepared by them aimed at a comprehensive reform of the Civil Code; but until 2001 none had succeeded. Several factors have played an important role in the delay of the final realization of this reform. Here, we concentrate on a few of the main ones.
In the 1960s and 1970s, political movements with right and left wing ideologies dominated political debates and activities in Turkey, as a reaction to the extremely dominant state control, which had continued since the foundation of the Turkish Republic in 1923. In this environment, women's issues were subsequently subsumed into Marxist discourses. The military coup of 1980, which was touted as the only way to put an end to the `anarchic atmosphere' of the 1970s, suppressed all kinds of opposition by force, applied a systematic depoliticization of the masses, and implemented neo-liberalist economic policies as formulated by the...
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