ABSTRACT
The Turkish concept of, especially among villagers, was practical. If the young were left unmarried, it was likely that their sexual desires would find an outlsexual desireet outside of marriage. Polygamy seems to have been fairly rare among the Turks of the Ottoman Empire. According to Islamic rules, a divorced woman was supposed to wait 100 days before remarrying, but this rule was routinely broken. Remarriage often came soon after divorce. The normal family in most of the modern world is a nuclear family, comprising father, mother and children. Anthropologists did not make detailed studies of relations between the sexes in the Ottoman Empire. However, studies were made of Turks in more modern times, but before the egalitarian philosophy of the Turkish Republic and the effects of technological change took hold. In Middle Eastern cultures, the separation of male and female duties was found in an extreme form.
