Incongruent Modernities: A Comparative Study of Higher Educated Women from Urban Turkey and Norway

Abstract

In this article, main findings of a comparative study on the social positions, attitudes and identities of younger Turkish and Norwegian women with higher education will be presented. The findings are based on interpretations of twenty in-depth interviews. Turkish and Norwegian interviewees differ considerably in terms of their social identities: they use dissimilar reference groups while evaluating their societal positions. The two groups also conceive gender and its social reflections in diverse terms. Such differences are analysed in light of differing class structures and modernization histories of the two countries. At the same time, Turkish and Norwegian interviewees share similar worries related to the expected difficulties of combining marriage, motherhood and employment. These accounts give support to arguments about an inherent incongruity in the design of modernity. The Norwegian welfare state and the Turkish family, with their enabling and constraining properties, are the key institutions in the lives of the informants of this study.