CAPITALISM AND FAMILY

With a capitalistic society, each social process is considered as a whole – where production of relations takes place in public as well as private space where the reproduction process is determined. The society’s dominant relations appear during the production and the reproduction process. The “private space” as the place of the reproduction process is institutionally called “family”. The capitalist process of production is identified as salary in return for labor of the free workers in factories and could continue its existence with the process of reproduction that can be defined as the physical and psychological regeneration of all individuals in the society (daily regeneration of labor power) and the regeneration of human being via new births (regeneration of labor power generation). While the institutional superstructure of the capitalist process of production is the nation state, the institutional superstructure of the process of reproduction is the “nuclear family”.

The marriage of a heterosexual woman and man (a secular, or in other words, a civil marriage in modern societies) is the prerequisite of the foundation of a nuclear family. The process of reproduction, indispensable for the uninterrupted continuation of the process of production, has legal relevancy just as the production process. In other words, just as the labor law identifies how many hours, at which minimum wage, and for how many years and with which type of rest period a worker should work, family law identifies different topics too. “Family” – which became “the nuclear family” within capitalist relations - has been subject to a series of changes and qualitative transformations as was the case for the worker-employer or even statedemocracy relationships. The working class, exposed to heavy exploitation since the 1700s, succeeded in obtaining many rights such as the reduction of working hours, union rights, voting rights, pensions, and other social aids. Those achievements, many of which were obtained after uphill bloody struggles, enabled the working class to transform life in public. The decisiveness of the transformations within the public sphere has triggered a transformation within the private space – in other words, the nuclear family. For example, women started to take part in the paid labor force and thereby the fact that men were breadwinners was not a norm anymore, and it became a legal status over time. But these transformations did not take place in parallel with what took place in public. The transformation between men and women within a family was shaped in concordance with the battle between them. This battle was going on at home but at the same time was led against capitalist class and the state. Women were entitled to education, to wages, to property rights, to inheritance rights, and to higher education rights over centuries. These rights were obtained at the beginning of the modern era by women in different periods in different countries. The right to vote that enabled women to express themselves at the “state level” – so to say – was only gained in the 20th century.

The right to vote for women in America was established by the 19th amendment, passed by Congress on June 4, 1919, and ratified on August 18, 1920. It guarantees all American women the right to vote. This milestone was finally achieved after a very long and difficult struggle and decades of agitation and protest. This amendment, considered by many Americans a radical change of the Constitution, was a result of almost one century of woman suffrage supporters’ lectures, marches, writing, lobbying and civil disobedience. (The US National Archives and Record Administration. n.d.) Turkish Women acquired this right when Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the founder of the Turkish Republic initiated reforms involved in modernization of the country; Turkey adopted a new civil code regulating civil and political rights of women that became equal to that of men, except in suffrage. After a short struggle women achieved voting rights in local elections by Act Nº 1580 on 3 April 1930. Four years later, this right was implemented and starting from 5 December 1934, women in Turkey gained full universal suffrage, earlier than most other countries.

The acquisition of voting rights allowed women into citizenship and a position of legal respect. Facilitation of women to vote changed the value position and meaning of women socially. The long, slow process of attaining voting rights changed the very fabric of societies positively. To qualify for voting is one of the crucial points for women’s visibility in the public space which is interlinked to enjoy civil, political, economic, social and cultural rights.