Abstract:

Since the beginning of the XX. century, various cultural studies that take woman as their subject, or deal with women as a problematic have gained impetus. In these studies, societal status of women, and their disadvantages with respect to religious, economic, sociological or political terms have been evaluated in different contexts. Among these studies, those that evaluate men and women in terms of ‘cultural gender’ as a cultural construct, aside from their biological differences, are quite remarkable. Moving from the concept of cultural gender, ‘cultural gender roles’ that are interpreted as cultural meanings of being a man and a woman, lay the foundation for many multi-disciplinary studies. All cultural products about mankind, verbal, written, physical, or spiritual, that are within the scope of folklore and literature, are no doubt closely related to many disciplines within social sciences. From this point, it can be thought that the works that bring folklore and sociological theories together, will give different perspectives to researchers of both disciplines. In every region where Turks live, texts of folklore songs, since they reflect the common threads of Turkish folklore and address a very large area in terms of the subject, are important information sources for multi-disciplinary studies. In this study, transformation of ‘woman’ in terms of societal gender role has been studied in the context of Rumeli folk songs. Within the examined Rumeli folk song texts, it has been found that women have experienced gender role transformations of ‘young girl/lover’, ‘bride/spouse’ and ‘mother/mother-in-law’ respectively. Within the ordinary cycle of life, it is clear that certain requirements, expectations and ideals have been attached to these transformations. At this point, we think that ‘folk songs’, reflecting the tastes, values, acceptances, and emotional diversity of the people for centuries, are important sources of data that display the projections of social woman identity regarding the alleged transformations

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