ABSTRACT
There is still a relative scarcity of culturally situated studies of the interrelationship between paid work and the allocation of family work in households where women are gainfully employed. This is particularly true of how women strategize to negotiate the contradictions of being full-time workers inside and outside the home. Critical mediators of how this negotiation takes place include relationship dynamics, cultural constructions of gender, access to kin and other support systems, household composition, and situational imperatives, including work schedules. These factors inform women’s expectations about, and the negotiation of, family work. Analyses of the complex lives of urban women from specific Middle Eastern contexts are particularly needed to problematize the notion of “working women” and Orientalist accounts of “cultural difference.” Thus, in this article, I address the negotiation of family work in the households of blue-collar women in urban Turkey from a perspective that highlights the structural, cultural, and symbolic barriers to equality.
