Gendered Expressions of Labor: The Case of Sümerbank Defterdar Textile Factory (Feshane)

Industrial workplace and wage labor have lost their appeal for labor historians. One of the reasons claimed for the stagnation in the field of Republican labor history is the insufficiency of archival sources. Nevertheless, the use of alternative evidence beyond standard archival records has been on the agenda in recent years.¹ I hope to contribute to the labor historiography of the Turkish Republic from a different perspective, by employing a great deal of visual evidence alongside more common textual documentation. My main objective is to introduce nuances about labor conditions that are not always traceable through textual evidence. I also emphasize the possibility of writing a more gender-inclusive history of labor in the Republican context by examining the issues of safety, health, hierarchy, and worker's rights in the case of the Sümerbank Defterdar Textile Factory (also known as Feshane), where women had a high rate of employment compared to other industrial establishments.

Feshane, established in 1833 in Eyüp, was one of the factories that was taken over by the new state following the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. In 1937, it was handed over to Sümerbank, a state enterprise, which was assigned to administer industrialization and to oversee problems in the labor force. It remains a challenge to decipher in which departments women were employed in Feshane using official government documents. The Sümerbank inspection reports (Sümerbank Murakabe Raporları) include statistics and comments on the work conditions and the body of laborers, but they are either ambiguous or gender blind. However, using overlooked sources provides insights about where female workers were present and what types of tasks they performed. For example, the photographs in the Taha Toros Archive offer an invaluable opportunity to visualize everyday life on the scale of the individual building. In general, the photographs reveal details of the various stages of production and departments in which women were employed, the physical aspects of the spaces, and the hierarchy of work on the shop floor.² They do not display women individually but instead show them in larger spaces: both performing their tasks and in relation to one another and their male coworkers.

Spatial Organization and Technology

According to reports prepared in the early 1940s by the Sümerbank inspectors, the complex was marked by deficiencies in hygiene, spatial organization, and technology. The Defterdar Textile Factory was found to be unhygienic.³ It also "lacked order and discipline."⁴ Referring to all the industrial facilities within Sümerbank, the reports stated that improving the lighting systems could prevent work-related accidents, especially during the night shifts and in the narrow and compact workshop floors with insufficient daylight.⁵ An additional concern of the examiners was the lack of proper heating, ventilation, and air conditioning systems. It should be noted that spatial organization and technology not only affected female workers but also their fellow male laborers.

Although the reports did not specifically indicate the conditions of each department in the factory, it can be argued that the photographs are in line with the inspectors' observations. Based on the visual evidence, women were primarily employed in wet processing in the spinning department. After the dirty raw wool was separated according to type and quality, it was washed,

Figure 1.

Wool fleece washing unit (yapağı yıkama dairesi ve süzgeçler). Image courtesy of Taha Toros Archive, Marmara University, 001562384008.

dyed, dried, and sent to the clean raw wool storage.⁶ As seen in a photograph of the wool fleece washing department, women operated the fleece opener and washed the dirty wool (Fig. 1). Here, apart from a few suspended lamps from the ceiling, light was provided only through the openings on the roof.

The next stage of wet processing was dyeing. Although from photographs the dyehouse (Fig. 2) seems more spacious than the wool fleece washing department, one can notice the lack of interior organization. In the forefront, one unit of processed material, part...