Cracking Walls: The Slow Progress of Women’s Agency,A Case Study on Turkish and Iranian Women

The concept of agency has been tied to the upper middle classes in most studies. In contrast, the concept of submission and obedience is more commonly used for the lower middle classes. By exploring the lives of the lower-middle-class traditional-religious Muslim Women in the Middle East, with an emphasis on women in Ankara and Tehran, this article seeks to show the opposite aspects of current theories. Using a qualitative method, thematic analysis, and cognitive and semi-structured interviews with 50 women in Tehran and Ankara, this study was able to show there is insufficient knowledge about the meanings of women’s agency for women living in conservative non-western regions, especially the Middle East. The result also showed that the progress of agency for religious-traditional women in their everyday life may be quiet, hiden and slow. However, these women have been able to demonstrate their agency with low education and low economy. Not only often did these women think and act according to social, cultural, traditional, and religious expectations as an obedient, passive, and submissive personality, but also they sought ways for a redistribution of their facilities and opportunities to gain internal independence while they were conscious of what was going on in their current situation