Professional veiled women: the everyday life strategies of professional Islamic women in 1990s Bursa

Abstract

The major aim of this thesis is to examine the multiple bases on which professional, married, veiled Islamic women organize their everyday lives, and understand how do they legitimize their everyday activities with using different discourses. The professional veiled women reproduce and reformulate their gender roles and relations with regards to material necessities of everyday life and also with regards to the necessities of Islamic discourse. The professionally working veiled women legitimize or reconcile their everyday life experiences on the one hand with respect to their Islamic values, and on the other hand with their working woman status. The relationship between the social structure, Islamic discourse and individual agency is constructed by using different strategies, to cope with the necessities of everyday life. These strategies show differences according to the material well being of the Islamic women. The social class is an important factor for the transformation of Islamic discourse into a living social practice.