Care crisis and grandmothers

Intergenerational encounters between women in Turkey are often analyzed in terms of which type of care will be provided for whom, and for how long. Examining women’s lives in terms of the type of care they provide allows us to trace how women are valued differently as daughters, daughters-in-law, wives, mothers, and mothers-in-law at different stages of their lives. Turkey is historically characterized by a strong patriarchal culture, where women’s gendered subjectivities are expected to be determined by male-dominant values. According to Kandiyoti, women internalize the patriarchal values of the system, which promises that they will have control and authority over subservient daughters-in-law, but only when they are older.Footnote ⁴ In other words, women can finally empower themselves in their old age, but only at the expense of younger women. This intergenerational patriarchal bargain is still very relevant to an understanding of female kin relations in contemporary Turkey. At the same time, a strong sense of filial obligation in Turkey informs the behavior of adult daughters toward their mothers.Footnote ⁵ In short, younger women—whether daughters or daughters-in-law—are expected to show care and respect to the older generation of women in Turkey. However, as will be detailed below, this system has become increasingly difficult to sustain since the beginning of the 1980s: factors such as rural-to-urban migration, the dissolution of patrilocal living forms, the neoliberalization of the economy, and women’s increased participation in the labor force have led to a gradual deterioration of the expectations embedded in the classic patriarchal system in Turkey, as elsewhere.Footnote ⁶

Furthermore, since the 1970s, increased participation by women in the labor force, the gradual dissolution of gender roles, and the resulting decline of informal care provided by mothers, daughters, and wives have resulted in what scholars call a “care crisis.”Footnote ⁷ With the retrenchment of institutionalized care provision as a response to neoliberal restructuring during the same time period, familial relations as a form of social protection and a support mechanism have become increasingly central for the provision of care.Footnote ⁸

This increased reliance on various forms of home and family care can be observed not only in Turkey, but in other countries as well, both those with a high and those with a middle income.Footnote ⁹ It is within this global context that grandmother childcare, as an intergenerational and interfemale mechanism of care transfer, has emerged as a formal and informal solution to the care crisis in diverse settings. In other words, as more women have come to participate in the labor force in both the global north and the global south, the demand for grandmother caregiving has also increased.Footnote ¹⁰ At the same time, female migration to the global north has given rise to a care deficit in the global south: women’s labor force participation in wealthy countries relies on care labor performed by women from the developing world, who leave their children behind with their grandmothers. Even in countries with relatively advanced formal childcare services, the relationship between grandparents and grandchildren has intensified with increased life expectancies and lower fertility rates.Footnote ¹¹

Reliance on social solidarity values and familial networks as primary care providers has always been strong in Turkey.Footnote ¹² It has been further documented that the neoliberal social welfare policies put in place in Turkey over the last two decades take for granted the dominant role of women as wives and mothers,Footnote ¹³ and the government has institutionalized dependent caregiving roles through contemporary social policy measures.Footnote ¹⁴ In the absence of public childcare facilities, and as a result of husbands’ reluctance to share childcare responsibility, the extent to which women can distance themselves from motherly obligations of care in Turkey depends primarily on the social relations and material resources surrounding them.Footnote ¹⁵ Even middle- and upper-class women fail to mount a challenge to the traditional division of labor at home in Turkey.Footnote ¹⁶ As a result, women who participate in the labor force either hire domestic workers for housecleaning and daily chores,Footnote ¹⁷ or else ask for help from their neighbors and/or relatives, and especially from their own mothers.Footnote ¹⁸ In short, in the absence of childcare facilities provided by the state, and as long as the patriarchal division of labor at home has remained intact, women’s ability to participate in the labor force has become dependent on other women, such as paid domestic workers or female kin. It is within this sociocultural context that grandmother childcare has increased in Turkey, from 3 percent in 2006 to 6 percent in 2016.Footnote ¹⁹ Although this percentage is not especially high, it still highlights the trend of grandmother childcare becoming more common, particularly in families where the mother holds a regular job.

Grandmother childcare existed as a kind of informal arrangement between women until January 2017, when the state intervened. The Minister of Family and Social Policy announced a pilot project to financially support grandmothers (notably, not grandfathers) in exchange for their contribution to daily childcare, as a means of fighting extremely low rates of female employment. The full title of the project is the Grandmother Project to Support Female Employment (Kadın İstihdamının Desteklenmesi İçin Büyükanne Projesi), and its description reads: “The support given to grandmothers who take care of grandchildren under three years old aims to prevent women’s withdrawal from the labor market and to maintain cultural transmission by providing children with the opportunity to be raised by their grandmothers.”Footnote ²⁰ This government policy is likely to increase even further the already rising percentage of grandmothers providing daily and intensive care for their grandchildren. But how do these grandmothers experience and negotiate this increase at the everyday level? Who are these women? How do they make sense of their “new” caregiver roles as elderly women? How do they negotiate the contradictions between their experiences and the dominant gender expectations in society?

In order to answer these questions, I conducted life story interviewsFootnote ²¹ with 25 grandmothers who functioned as the primary caregiver for their grandchildren for more than a year. 15 were maternal grandmothers, while 10 were paternal grandmothers. I recruited the research participants from among grandmothers dropping off or picking up their grandchildren from one particular kindergarten, located in a middle-class neighborhood of İzmir most of whose residents migrated there from the city’s hinterland. The kindergarten selected is a small and modest neighborhood one located among high-rise buildings. Many of its students live nearby and walk to the kindergarten together with their family. I secured access to the grandmothers via the kindergarten’s owners.

All of the interviewed grandmothers were providing daily care for their grandchildren before the latter were old enough to attend kindergarten. Even after the grandchildren began kindergarten, the majority of the grandmothers continued to provide them with regular care, taking care of the child before and after school, during emergencies, and whenever the parents were busy. None of the interviewed grandmothers lived in the same house as their daughters or daughters-in-law, though they did live in close proximity. Using the snowball sampling method to recruit new participants ensured that all of the participants were from lower and middle-income families, with none of the grandmothers being economically dependent on their adult children’s family. They were all house owners and had sufficient income for living.

Throughout the course of the study, meeting with the grandmothers who were willing to speak to me proved relatively easy. As a young woman close to the age of the interviewees’ daughters and daughters-in-law, I was able to build relationships of trust and empathy relatively quickly. The interviewee grandmothers introduced me to other grandmothers whom they knew from the kindergarten or from the neighborhood. While I visited some of the participants in their homes, others preferred to meet at cafés for interviews; we sometimes used an empty room in the kindergarten for the interviews as well. I began the interviews with open-ended questions that invited them to tell their life stories. I also, however, occasionally intervened in order to ask directed questions about their childcare practices and about their relations with their husbands, daughters, daughters-in-law, sons, and sons-in-law. As housewives, in their youth these women had provided all sorts of care work for their families as a mother, a wife, and a daughter-in-law. Because I was mainly interested in understanding how they see themselves vis-à-vis their caregiving roles at different stages of their lives, I also asked questions about their experiences with their own mothers and mothers-in-law. However, my research and analysis do not include the experiences of daughters, daughters-in-law, or the mothers of the grandmothers interviewed. Inspired by the work of certain feminist ethnographers,Footnote ²² I aimed to develop analytical frames that would be congruent with the grandmothers’ lived experiences.

Being a mother-in-law then and now: Familial sacrifice and patriarchal bargain

İzmir is Turkey’s third largest city, with a population of 4.2 million people. Most residents of the neighborhood where I conducted research, including the research participants, had moved here from İzmir’s rural hinterland, having been born in rural towns and cities surrounding İzmir during the 1950s and 1960s. Moreover, they all had traditional families as defined by a gendered division of labor in their natal and conjugal families. All of the participants had married at a very early age and had their first child when they were under 20 years old. These families had moved to İzmir in the last two decades because of marriage, the husband’s occupation, or childcare needs. Almost all of the participants had received very little formal education, with most of them having completed only middle school, through the age of 14. Only three of the research participants were high school graduates, while none of them had undertaken tertiary education. All except two, who were retired from jobs in the public sector, were housewives and had never worked in a formal job. Growing up in rural patriarchal families, the lives of the interviewed grandmothers had many common features both before and after marriage. For these women, not getting married was not an option. They raised their children and undertook all housework duties on their own. Most of them lived far away from their natal families, having moved to cities or towns close to their husband’s family, with some of them even living in the same house as their husband’s family. Even in cases where they lived close to their natal families, their mothers were too busy with their own domestic duties and thus not available to help them, as they are do with their own adult children now.

One of the central themes in their life stories is the lack of support they received from their mothers or mothers-in-law as they raised their children. Sevim is a 50-year-old maternal grandmother. She moved to İzmir after she got married in 1986. She was the daily caregiver for her granddaughter for three years before the girl was sent to kindergarten at age four. For the last two years, Sevim has been dropping off and picking up her granddaughter from the kindergarten and taking care of her till her parents arrive. She is the only woman among the research participants whose mother helped her with childcare for a year when she decided to take up a paid job. When she started to talk about this experience, she immediately recalled how her mother would “leave dirty baby diapers in front of the door” for her to pick up and wash when she returned home from work. Her mother would not invite Sevim to dinner when she came to pick up her daughter after work. She tells these stories to emphasized how limited her mother’s support of her was, especially when compared with what she does for her daughter now. She adds, “we are helping the younger generation a lot.” Far from receiving help from their mothers, the interviewed grandmothers in fact remembered how they had always helped their mothers with housework from early childhood on. Havva is a 53-year-old paternal grandmother. She moved to İzmir with her natal family when she was a child. Raised in a very conservative family, she was forced to marry a man from the same town, which they left behind immediately after high school, when Havva gave birth to two sons. After she said that her youth had been spent doing housework and helping her mother, I asked about how she had felt at this time, and Havva replied:

Like Havva, Ziynet (56 years old) was also the regular caregiver for her grandson for three years before he was sent to kindergarten. Although her natal family was not especially religious or conservative, she nevertheless did not continue her education after high school, marrying her husband when she was 18. Domestic work and serving men are the key elements in her narrative as well. She says that she was alone throughout most of her marriage because her husband was the owner of a coffeehouse and used to work until late. She was living in the same apartment as her mother-in-law and had to wash, by hand, all the family members’ clothes, prepare food, and then wait for her husband to come home for dinner, after which he would leave for the coffeehouse. Instead of receiving care, she was providing care for all the members of her husband’s family. Her story suggests that, once she had transitioned from girlhood into marriage, it was the family of her husband, specifically her mother-in-law, who had the right to benefit from her domestic labor. Mürüvvet (60 years old) is another woman who lives with her mother-in-law, in her case for 22 years. She describes her mother-in-law as a very dominant figure who never takes any responsibility for childcare or domestic work. Her relation to cooking is restricted to checking the salt. She does not feed, clean, or put her grandchildren to bed; she just “loves” them. Mürüvvet, throughout her narrative, compares her grandparenthood to that of her mother-in-law: “She [i.e., her mother-in-law] was self-indulgent […] Now I think that my maternal grandparenthood (annaneliğim) and my mother-in-law’s paternal grandparenthood (babaneliğim) are as different as chalk and cheese.”

Even in cases where they did not share the same house, the mother-in-law emerges as a dominant and frequently unpleasant figure in these women’s narratives. Hatice (53 years old), who got married when she was 17 years old, is the mother of three children and currently her granddaughter’s caregiver. From a critical distance, she describes her relation with her mother-in-law in the early years of her marriage, when they were living in the village:

In the village, families are more authoritarian. Mothers-in-law did not use to be as tolerant then as they are now. Mine would imbue even the father-in-law with certain ideas about me—I mean, not explicitly or with words, but tactfully. He had an attitude against me. Your husband would always become unhappy, too, saying, “My mom isn’t happy.” Getting along with your husband is one thing, with his family another. You’re very little then, and don’t know how to handle them. Always some attitude from your husband here, your mother-in-law there. If one doesn’t get a divorce in the first three years, one would never get a divorce, ever.

Although she lived away from her mother-in-law at the time of her second birth, her mother-in-law and father-in-law had visited them at home in order to name the baby after she had given birth to her first child. This encounter becomes another example of the traditional division of gender, and it remains as a sad memory for her:

Hatice’s mother-in-law apparently thought that she had the right to expect care and service from her daughter-in-law and that it was appropriate to ask her to cook despite the fact that she had just given birth. There was perhaps a naïve expectation on the part of Hatice, as a young woman, that her mother-in-law might show her affection and care by cooking dinner because she had just given birth.

Such naïve expectations abound in the women’s narratives. Nihal (70 years old) had to quit work after marrying a bad-tempered farmer, and she had to share a garden with her mother-in-law during the early years of her marriage. When asked about her relationship with her mother-in-law, she said: “My mother-in-law acted like a real mother-in-law. She would say negative things about me to my husband and send him over to me […] She would never take care of my child, not even for half an hour, if we were to go, say, to a wedding. That’s how I raised my child.” Her mother-in-law acted in accordance with gendered normative expectations by acting “like a real mother-in-law.” Just like Hatice’s mother-in-law, she also wanted to benefit to the fullest from the promises of the patriarchal system: her daughter-in-law was there to serve her. As such examples show, these women did not receive emotional or practical support from either their mothers or their mothers-in-law when they were young. Moreover, most had conflictual relationships with their mothers-in-law, who did not treat them well or criticized them for the way they did housework or took care of their children. Neither they nor the older generation of women questioned the hierarchical and conflictual relationship between older and younger women at the time, which indicates the presence of strong classical patriarchal relations.

All of the grandmothers I interviewed paid the heavy price of the patriarchal system without fully enjoying the benefits traditionally provided to older women, mainly because they were in the caregiving position vis-à-vis the younger generation of women. Kandiyoti, in her discussion of the potential implications of the breakdown of classic patriarchy in Turkey, drew attention to women who “have paid the heavy price of an earlier patriarchal bargain, but are not able to cash in on its promised benefits.”Footnote ²³ There is a rich literature showing how older women deal with the erosion of the benefits promised to them by classic patriarchal arrangements in diverse settings. For example, threatened by the dissolution of patrilocal forms of living and seeing that their survival depends on male migrant remittances, older village women in China encourage young married women to consent to domesticity as a way to guarantee the flow of remittances from male members of the family.Footnote ²⁴ Mothers-in-law “work more and say less” because they are economically dependent on the younger generation. In other cases, older and younger generations of women might develop diverse forms of interdependency by changing their expectations of care. For example, older women in Ireland of middle and higher socioeconomic status tell their adult children that they do not want to take care of their grandchildren. A new reciprocal relationship is thus maintained between younger and older generations of women through mutual withholding of expectations and demands for care.Footnote ²⁵

Even though the grandmothers I interviewed suppress their own customary expectations and demands for care, they nevertheless continue to provide childcare and housework for younger women, even without any traditional expectations to compel them. They have neither an explicit intention of empowering the younger generation nor the necessity for survival that would force them to provide care. Through these narratives, grandmothers reflect on their past and compare their experiences with that of the older and younger generation of women in such a way as to highlight the sacrifices they make. However, a closer look into the women’s narratives reveal that these sacrifices are complex acts requiring the women to constantly negotiate diverse societal and individual expectations. For example, when I asked grandmothers how they feel about the fact that they worked hard in their youth and continue to do so for the families of their adult children, their response was often a mix of regret and gratitude regarding what they had experienced and where they were now. In recalling the sacrifices they made and the sufferings they went through when they were newly married and afterwards, they noted that they had begun to reflect on how they should not have worked so hard in order to make others happy, nor should they have cared so much about what their mothers-in-law said about them. They regret that they took these familial roles far too seriously, at the expense of enjoying life. Their stories thus suggest that the sacrifices they made for the sake of the older generation were not inevitable, as they could have acted differently. However, it was also precisely these sacrifices that taught them to be patient and to deal with their own problems, as opposed to the younger generation, whom they see as dependent on others.

Despite their sense of resentment regarding past sacrifices, many of the interviewees stated that they were not going to let the same things happen to their own daughters and daughters-in-law. It seems, then, that they want to make it possible for their daughters and daughters-in-law to be able to distance themselves from domestic and childcare responsibilities in order to hold full-time jobs. In other words, these women have called into question the patriarchal expectations for the younger generation of women in contemporary Turkey via an extension of their own motherhood practices.

Taking care of two generations: Extending motherhood

All of the grandmothers whom I interviewed fundamentally reorganized their lives in accordance with the daily rhythms of their grandchildren and adult children. They moved to neighborhoods and apartments close to their adult children in order to connect with each other both physically and emotionally. Every day for the past five years, Sevim (50 old) has woken up at 6 am to take care of her granddaughter until 7 pm. When asked how she maintains this work schedule, she said, “I do everything for my grandchildren and children.” She not only feeds her granddaughter breakfast and lunch every weekday in her own home, but also prepares dinner for her adult daughter and her son-in-law so that they can eat before eventually returning to their own home with the child. Though her daughter never actually asks her to prepare food for them, Sevim said, “You have to put food on the table in the evening.” It is something that she cannot not do. Most grandmothers confirmed that they prepare food for their adult children and their partners so that they can eat when they return from work. However, the extra work they undertake is by no means limited to cooking. Every morning at 8 am, for instance, Ziynet goes to her son’s apartment, where she spends the whole day, and on a typical day with her grandson she cooks, cleans the house, vacuums the carpets, and does the dusting while the grandson takes his afternoon nap.

In short, all of the grandmothers I interviewed, whether paternal or maternal, do a great deal of housework for their adult children in addition to childcare.Footnote ²⁶ A new division of labor thus emerged within these extended families, with grandmothers undertaking a series of household tasks for their adult children in addition to assuming the role of caregiver for the grandchildren.

But how do these women feel about extending their motherhood practices to their grandchildren and adult children? When I asked if they do not get tired and bored by all the work they do for their adult children, Alime (65 years old) said:

In a similar vein, Ziynet said:

Both Ziynet and Alime challenge public norms concerning what they should expect of their daughters-in-law (i.e., that they should serve their mother-in-law). They would rather do things for them so that the younger couple can spend time together. Women in female kinship networks grow up learning publicly expressed norms about how the relationship between mothers-in-law and daughters-in-law or mothers and daughters should be.Footnote ²⁷ When grandmothers offer voluntary care labor for their adult children, they are always in conversation with social perceptions about what they should be doing as mothers and mothers-in-law. The normative ideas associated with the classic patriarchal system still provide the dominant paradigm for interpreting the relationship between mother-in-law and daughter-in-law in these women’s narratives, with the former considered to have a right to ask for service and care from the latter.

Havva is a grandmother who has looked after her granddaughter for three years and who does not expect her daughter-in-law to fulfill any patriarchal expectations of care, despite the fact that her husband and his family never in fact wanted her to become the primary caregiver for her granddaughter. Havva’s mother-in-law criticizes her, saying, “You have a husband, you have a family, what is it to you that you’re taking care of her [i.e., her granddaughter]?” By saying this, she implies that her primary responsibility should be toward her husband and his family, not to her daughter-in-law. Her husband also criticized Havva by saying, “You couldn’t be like my mother, you couldn’t do what she did. You didn’t say, ‘I cannot take care of her.’” As the traditional beneficiaries of the age and gender hierarchies of the classic patriarchal system, both her mother-in-law and her husband thus criticize Havva for not adhering to the system’s normative expectations of care. Havva’s desire to provide care becomes a very implicit form of resistance against these figures. When I asked if she ever had any arguments with her daughter-in-law about childcare, she said:

There is an affectionate solidarity that underlines these women’s narratives toward their daughters and their daughters-in-law. Having suffered when they were young from the classic patriarchal system controlled by husbands and mothers-in-law, they do not want to have this type of relationship with their own daughters or daughters-in-law. These grandmothers do not expect to be surrounded by subservient daughters-in-law. By willingly taking up caregiving roles and helping their daughters-in-law and daughters with domestic work, they are refusing to perpetuate patriarchal expectations. Having long since become accustomed to the role of caregiver, these women then expand this role to the families of their adult children. In other words, they continue to perform their own subservient daughter-in-law and subservient mother roles by providing an unconditional sacrificial labor of love and care for their adult children and grandchildren. The women do not complain of all the time and labor that they invest in the families of their adult children. Instead, when talking about all the housework that they do for their daughters and daughters-in-law, for example, they say things like: “I cook dinner anyways, I’d just add two more plates on the table”; “I just cannot sit idle, I like to do work”; “Instead of sitting around, I vacuum the carpets or do some ironing while watching TV. There’s nothing to it.” In this way, they downgrade and trivialize the work they do for their adult children by describing housework as simply part of their daily routine. The trivialization of the work undertaken by these women might be a way of deflecting any criticism on the part of those around them who adhere to traditional patriarchal norms. At the same time, however, it also has to do with the way that they see the care work in general. While the societal disparagement of domestic and care work is definitely reflected in the women’s narratives, there were also moments when the interviewed grandmothers indicated that their seemingly habitual and routine daily work was also on some level a deliberate, intentional choice, and that their contribution to childcare and housework could be suspended at any moment.

Grandmothers’ subjectivities and everyday negotiations

The interviewed grandmothers realize that their care and support is taken for granted and seen by their adult children as a natural extension of their motherhood. For example, when elaborating on how they ended up becoming their grandchildren’s regular caregivers, many of the women said that their adult children had sensed that they were willing to take up such a role and had jumped at the opportunity. Rahsan (65 years old) said that, “They in fact knew that I was willing to provide childcare, and they dropped the child off without even asking a thing.” Her daughter asked her if she could take care of her granddaughter because she had some errands to run, and that is how she ended up becoming the granddaughter’s regular caregiver. Ziynet tells how her son and daughter-in-law found an apartment near hers and then said, “Mom, we live close by, you would take care of him, right?” In many cases, the adult children do not explicitly ask their mothers or mothers-in-law if they want to provide daily care for the grandchildren for an indefinite period of time. This may be because those grandmothers who are not willing to take up this kind of responsibility are usually very vocal about it from the very beginning of the pregnancy. If grandmothers voice no such reluctance, though, and if they in fact show some interest in caregiving, then it seems to be regarded as a golden opportunity for an aspiring middle-class family to have a trustworthy yet free caregiver for the children. Although grandmother childcare is thus usually taken for granted, there are nonetheless a series of negotiations lying behind the provision of this care, because most grandmothers have more than one grandchild. Which grandchild or grandchildren they take care of depends on multiple factors, such as whether the other grandmother is offering childcare, where the adult children live, and so on. Grandmothers are usually very explicit about the reasoning behind their choice of grandchild, a choice that often reflects their desire to treat all their children equally. They send their adult children direct or indirect messages regarding which grandchild they are willing to take care of.

If the parents work full time, the grandmothers continue to provide occasional care for the grandchildren even after the latter have started at school. Gül (61 years old) sends her granddaughter to school every morning after preparing her breakfast, and then runs to her mother’s house, where she cooks for her parents. She also helps her mother shower, washes her clothes, and cleans the house until 4 pm, after which she picks her granddaughter up from school at 5:15 pm. When I commented that she had a full schedule, she responded that, “This is sacrifice. But I don’t find it difficult. […] My neighbors hang out, but I can’t go anywhere because I’m waiting for my grandson—yet I do not envy them. I am much happier when I see my grandson.” When I asked Nihal about how her life had changed after assuming the responsibility of caregiving, she stated:

Occasionally, however, the grandmothers would remind their adult children that their labor should not be taken for granted. Despite their love for their grandchildren, they make it clear that their dutiful sacrifice for their adult children is very fragile, and can be suspended at any time. After an argument over a trivial matter regarding childcare, Hatice’s daughter grew angry and yelled at her mother, “I’ll find a nanny.” Hatice, knowing how essential her support for the family of her adult children was, responded: “Go ahead. It’s a very difficult thing to take care of children after a certain age. Why would God give us children when we’re younger?” Hatice said that her daughter and son-in-law were frightened when faced with the possibility that Hatice might stop taking care of their child. She also said, “I wouldn’t let them down, but I would still have been relieved if they had come up with a nanny.” This reveals Hatice’s resentment at serving as a regular caregiver for grandchildren at an advanced age. It is usually very difficult, though, to get these women to talk about the hardships of what they are doing.

When asked if they get tired or if they have any age-related illnesses, a recurring theme that emerges is that all is forgiven for the love of the grandchildren, who are the “sweet, joyous fruit of the family tree” and “sweeter than honey.” As Tomris put it, “One word from your grandchild takes away all your exhaustion. What I get as a response to my labor is love. And I do it with love.” Yet, at the same time, many women talked about how difficult it can get for them to run after a two-year-old in a house all day long and how relieved they feel when the grandchild leaves with his/her family in the evening. They acknowledged that childcare is usually very tiring at their age, both physically and mentally, but often only in passing or with reference to hypothetical situations.

The women’s resentment about the sacrifices they are making for their adult children emerges most clearly in their relationship to their natal families, especially if their parents are in need of care. As members of the “sandwich generation,”Footnote ²⁸ they complain about how they cannot spend much time with their natal families due to their new childcare responsibilities. For example, Havva—who says she can take care of her grandchild “until she dies”—was angry with her son’s mother-in-law for refusing to provide childcare for her grandchild. Havva’s ailing parents expect her to help them, but she cannot visit them as much as she would like, even though they live in the same building. In defining her relationship to her natal parents, Mürüvvet (60 years old) said that it is her natural right to be with her parents and provide care when they need it, yet she argued that she was being deprived of this right due to taking care of her grandchildren. She said, “This is the worst [aspect of the situation]. I would have liked to help them […] A daughter would like to be with her mother and father. They took away my most natural right.” The women, especially those with ill parents, were vocal about the sacrifices they were making for their grandchildren. This is an indicator that these older women still feel a deep sense of filial obligation, particularly when this obligation is compromised by new childcare responsibilities.

As these examples show, the narratives of these caregiving grandmothers are fraught with ambivalent feelings of sacrifice and being overwhelmed with childcare and housework. These ambivalent emotions are always mediated through the women’s desire to take up multiple gendered subject positions: loving grandmother, sacrificial mother, filial daughter. They love taking care of their grandchildren, yet they feel tired. They are happy to help their adult children’s families with housework, but they also feel regret that they do not have the time to help their ailing parents. Feminist scholars have long shown how processes of domination and resistance can intermingle in women’s actions, and how certain acts of resistance can provide relief within the patriarchal system rather than directly and completely challenging it.Footnote ²⁹ Actors’ subjectivities are “bound but choosing, constrained but transforming, both strategically manipulating and unconscious of the frames within which they move.”Footnote ³⁰ In order to develop an embodied understanding of the gendered subjectivities of grandmothers, I have focused in particular on their laboring practices and bodily experiences vis-à-vis signifying practices and cultural norms.Footnote ³¹ The way that grandmothers take up caregiving roles and come to terms with gendered cultural expectations draws on the concrete, everyday, and bodily dimensions of their life experiences as daughter, wife, and daughter-in-law. Some retrospectively criticize the older generation for “acting” in ways that meet all normative gendered expectations. Some remind their adult daughters that there is nothing natural about assuming responsibility for a child at an advanced age. Some worry that they cannot help their own ailing mothers as much as they would like. And some also lament how tired they get and how their social lives have been ruined. All of these findings indicate that these grandmothers’ love for their grandchildren is not unconditional: it is daily, routinized, physical labor that they choose to undertake with an awareness that the sacrifices they thus make are for the sake not only of their grandchildren, but of their daughters and daughters-in-law as well.

Conclusion: Neoliberal conservatism through the lens of care work

Intergenerational relations among women are informed by “conventional understandings of who gets what through what sort of work,”Footnote ³² and these conventions are always subject to bargaining and negotiation due to the fact that one’s position within the family and one’s access to social, cultural, and economic capital change throughout one’s lifetime. Grandmothers who grew up within the constraints of the classic patriarchal system continue to act as subservient daughters and provide unpaid domestic and childcare work for their adult children’s family. It was within the context of the dismantling of the social relations sustaining the patriarchal bargain that I conducted interviews with maternal and paternal grandmothers who define themselves primarily through their roles within the family. While maintaining traditional gender roles for themselves, they also help their daughters and daughters-in-law challenge the patriarchal script. On the one hand, in this way the younger generation are able to go back to their full-time jobs and distance themselves from obligatory care work after giving birth, but on the other hand they are dependent on their mothers and mothers-in-law.

My analysis of grandmother childcare among middle-class families reveals the critical moments at which locally entrenched patriarchal and generational expectations are challenged in and through intrafemale micropolitical interaction at the household level throughout the course of women’s lives in urban Turkey. Paternal grandmothers, who are expected to reproduce normative gender roles, do not want to be surrounded by subservient daughters-in-law, yet they continue to act as subservient caregivers themselves. Despite societal pressures from their neighbors and family members, the interviewed grandmothers actively refuse to reproduce normative expectations. They extend their motherhood roles to their grandchildren, and rather than expect their daughters to reproduce filial obligations toward them, these maternal grandmothers want them to have the freedom to work and enjoy their lives.

The government of Turkey has recently developed a one-year pilot project to pay such caregiving grandmothers one-third of the minimum wage. This project was introduced a few months after my research was completed, and as such I was unable to interview the grandmothers about what they thought of the project and whether or not they would be willing to enroll in it. My research nevertheless demonstrates that such policies unfold against the backdrop of complex intergenerational negotiations among women. By monetizing grandmothers’ unpaid care work, the government aims to introduce a cost-efficient and non-institutional solution to the very low rate of female employment. However, there is a fundamental contradiction between the stated purpose of the project (i.e., increasing female employment) and how it is implemented. By inherently excluding fathers and grandfathers from taking responsibility for childcare, the project reproduces the traditional division of childcare labor, which is thereby presented as the sole responsibility of women, with the government project proposing to “solve” the problem by simply designating another group of women as the new caregivers. While this might be seen as a way of valuing women’s naturalized unpaid care work in the home, it also reproduces conservative gender roles and gender inequality through social policy. A pilot project implemented in only ten of Turkey’s provinces in 2017, the project was not further extended in 2018. It might thus be interpreted as being one of several controversial official policies implemented in relation to female employment. Although, in official documents, the aim of increasing the female employment rate is always openly declared, almost no initiative has been undertaken in regards to reducing the care burden, and thus care work is left largely to women’s unpaid work as mothers or grandmothers.

Care can serve as a powerful analytical framework for discussing the life stories of such grandmothers as these. It is in the light of their own past sacrificial care work for the whole family that these women do “support” the younger generation of women. These women alter the traditional direction of care transfer from younger women to older women by continuing to sacrifice themselves. Grandmother care work is thus potentially empowering for younger women who might thereby feel less burdened by patriarchal and filial expectations. However, the decision by such older women to support the younger generation can also potentially become institutionalized into a conservative social policy tool by the neoliberal conservative government. This rather unexpected feedback mechanismFootnote ³³ between social policy instruments, gendered expectations, and affective familial interactions around unpaid care deserves further scholarly attention.