Turkish laws start working for women

ANKARA, Turkey -- Under Turkish law, the man is head of the family and the woman must seek her husband's permission in order to work. But that could be history soon.

Vying for membership of the European Union, Turkey is finally revising its 75-year-old civil code to advance women's rights. Parliament is scheduled to start debating a new draft code Wednesday, and the changes are expected to be voted on later this month.

To join the 15-member EU, a country has to be a democracy and have a free-market economy. It has to reform its legislation using an EU manual of tens of thousands of pages.

Some of the provisions of Turkey's old code -- like the one requiring wives to seek their husbands' permission to work -- are rarely invoked. But women's groups say the code was influential in shaping attitudes in the judiciary and among the public, especially in poorer rural areas.

If the changes are passed, they would take effect Jan. 1, 2002, after endorsement by President Ahmet Necdet Sezer.

Although women's groups say the new code can be improved further, they also welcome it for the advances it makes on the old code, which is virtually unchanged since it was adopted in 1926.

Turkey adopted its old code from Swiss family law, replacing the old Ottoman system which, for example, allowed a man to have more than one wife or to repudiate a wife who was no longer in favor.

The draft new code scraps the phrase "the head of the marriage union is the man," giving women the right to have a say in decisions concerning the children or the family home. She no longer needs a husband's consent to go out to work. But a person could ask his or her spouse not to take up a job that would disrupt "calm in the marriage union."

The code also ensures that women are better off in the event of a divorce, guaranteeing that all assets accumulated during the union are shared equally. Currently, a divorced woman is only entitled to assets legally registered under her name.