Patrilocality and the Bronze Age Paradox

Mustafa Kemal describes a scene he encountered during one of his travels as follows;

"I see women in some places who, by throwing a cloth, a headscarf, or something similar over their heads, cover their faces and eyes, and when men pass by, they either turn their backs or sit on the ground and huddle up. What is the meaning and significance of this attitude? Gentlemen, does the mother or daughter of a civilized nation adopt this strange form, this savage situation?"

So, what is the fundamental source of this behavior deemed appropriate for women? The subject should not be immediately pulled into the realm of headscarves and analyzed through piety or the power of faith. This situation has nothing to do with religious expectations.

When does a person want to hide from another person, when do they want to become invisible?

When does one renounce all their human appearance on earth by hiding behind a dark veil? When does a woman choose to become invisible, ashamed of all the distinctive features that belong to her own being?

A living creature in nature only exhibits this form of behavior when it is extremely afraid; this behavior of women is the product of the fears that have affected their souls as a result of thousands of years of violence and oppression.

The reason for this fear in women dates back to before monotheistic religions, to the period when humans transitioned to a settled life. The fact that the position of women is the same in all patriarchal religions is the result of thousands of years of patriarchal practices being reflected in religious texts.

So, was it always like this? Findings suggest that it most likely was not.

Because climatic events were not regular after the Ice Age, it was not yet possible to transition to a settled life through farming. Since people fed themselves on plant roots, tree fruits, and hunting, everyone's goal was to find enough food to get through the day; therefore, it is estimated that there was no intention for one gender to dominate the other.

So what happened that the woman's position within the community was overthrown? Despite having the physical advantage of being able to give birth, the woman, who could not even claim rights over the children she bore and was deprived of almost all the rights and privileges granted to men, what happened that she was condemned to live her whole life in fear in the narcissistic garden of the man who declared all other beings his slaves?

The findings of positive disciplines interested in these subjects enlighten us in the following direction;

Approximately 12,000 years ago, with the end of the Ice Age, a regularity began in climatic events in the world entering the Holocene period. That is, a product grown in a region could also be grown in the same region the following year. This change in nature and climate meant for humans the ability to settle in a region.

Transitioning to a settled life in this period, which we define as the Neolithic era, created the idea of property, which in turn gave rise to the need to defend that property.

The fact that a property was in a position to be defended meant that this property was valuable enough to be worth stealing by someone from the outside. Which meant attacks and conflicts. The world had now entered a period where everyone had to violently defend what they possessed.

This was the first nuance that formed between men and women; the man, who was stronger and more durable due to his muscle structure and could move faster, was in a much more advantageous position than the woman against attacks.

For the tribe to be stronger, many more male children were needed. This situation pushed the woman into the position of being one of the properties that the man had to defend. Because attacking tribes wanted to possess not only the harvested products and goods but also the women, and to increase their population by making these women give birth.

With this new order, women had completely ceased to be free individuals, transformed into pieces of property that could not make decisions about their own lives and had to be protected during attacks.

In her new position, the woman was pushed out of active hunting and, thinking there was a possibility of being kidnapped if she moved away, was deprived of all possibilities of movement. Just like the version reflected in our day, such as the well-known 80 km rule, or the fact that it is not considered permissible for a woman to go out without a man by her side.

Men had assigned women the duties of giving birth to children, farming, cleaning the houses they lived in, cooking, and feeding and protecting the babies who were the future of the tribe. For a woman tasked with such heavy burdens to be free, strong, and headstrong did not suit any man then, just as it does not now. To ensure this, they used the only power they had: fear, violence, oppression, and rape!

There were, of course, other factors that weakened women within the patriarchal culture.

For example, the shortening of the duration of breastfeeding for babies fed with the milk of domestic animals. While the breastfeeding period protected the woman from pregnancy, the shortening of this period caused women to experience pregnancies at shorter intervals. This meant that a woman would get pregnant every year, not every 3-4 years.

The woman, whose power to defend herself diminished because she was constantly pregnant, whose health deteriorated, and who could die while giving birth, had her wings clipped against the male-dominated culture.

In the Bronze Age, the tables of men and women were also separated.

For this reason, the constantly pregnant woman could not be fed enough either. Because examinations on fossils show that from the Bronze Age onwards, men were fed a protein-heavy diet, while women were most likely fed with leftovers from the men's table or grain. In addition, the damage caused by the births women had on their spinal bones can be clearly observed.

Another situation that worsened the woman's position was the Patrilocality system.

In the practice of patrilocality, the woman was sent to the house of the man she was married to and forced to live there. The woman, alienated from her roots and left alone, had all ties with the family she was born and raised in severed, and was separated especially from her mother and sisters who would support her.

In the patrilocality system, the woman had now been taken far beyond the human level and transformed into a piece of property that was transferred.

Looking at today's Anatolia from the Bronze Age, it is terrifying to see that there are still practices that have not changed for women.

In Anatolia, girls married between the ages of 13 and 18 are still given as brides to their husbands' family homes. They are held responsible for cleaning the house, cooking, and serving their father-in-law, husband, mother-in-law, and their husband's siblings. While they are allowed at most a few days to come to their mother's side even if they give birth, the young girl's desire to visit her own family is perceived as rebellion.

In Anatolia, there is a term called 'doing bride-work' (gelinlik yapmak), which is still practiced in some places; the bride does not let her voice be heard by the men in the house throughout her life, she cannot answer even if asked a question, she does not sit at the same table, and even if she does, she covers her face, eats her bites from under her veil, sits hunched over in a crushed and embarrassed manner, and does not lift her head from the ground. Even if she grows old and has grandchildren, she continues this behavior. Moreover, she prides herself on having hidden her voice and 'done bride-work' for forty years.

It is hair-raising to know that this behavior of the woman, who has been left helpless, frightened, and, let alone being free, has been made to give up even feeling like a human being in the face of male authority, is not from the Bronze Age, but from today's Anatolia...

This was exactly the scene Mustafa Kemal heard as he went deeper into the country. The cry for help of a woman who was so afraid that she would collapse to the ground just because she saw a man, and who hid herself by wrapping herself in layers of veils. In our country, where the women who are the legacy of Mustafa Kemal cannot be protected, it is still possible to encounter in women in Anatolia in the year 2023 the ten-thousand-year-old behaviors caused by severe oppression.

Therefore, Mustafa Kemal, who had studied the enlightenment ideas in Western countries very well and knew the enlightenment writers and the roadmap they followed, began to implement the idea of enlightenment not from those who were already enlightened, but from the towns, villages, women, and children of Anatolia who were living in pitch darkness.

He closed the sects, dervish lodges, and lodges that whispered to women's ears 'You are not human', and fought tooth and nail against the amulet-makers, sorcerers, and superstitious mentalities that opposed school education.

Mustafa Kemal could analyze the state and situation the people were in very well and knew that for the enlightenment of the people, the obstacles to enlightenment had to be removed first. Only after these obstacles were eliminated could the language of enlightenment be taught to the people through a schooling revolution. Because we cannot expect a people to speak a language they do not understand.

Although we assume that countries always move forward in the long run on the path of civilization, we know that setbacks are also possible in the short term. So much so that the woman whom Mustafa Kemal took from the Bronze Age with a tremendous leap and carried to the level of modern states is now being wasted in the hands of primitive mentalities left over from the Bronze Age.

We live in a country where there are child brides, girls sent to madrasas by having their right to education taken away, and young girls murdered because they are not virgins. We must face the reality that we live in a country where grown men marry young girls, where they mask their pedophilic mentalities with religious veils, and where polygamous marriages are discussed without shame.

And therefore we must know that we do not even have the luxury of starting our country's age of enlightenment from the Middle Ages. The abyss between our country's intellectuals and the people goes down to the Bronze Age.

The idea of just enlightening each other is of course more comfortable, but being an intellectual in a country where the people live in the dark ages eventually makes one stateless. I don't know what it feels like to be crazy among the sane, but staying sane among the crazy is a very heavy burden to carry.