Introduction

Studies investigating the gendered effects of religion tend to conclude that women's workforce participation increases as societies become more secular (Hertel, 1988; Guetto et al, 2015). However, any proposition that connects secularity with women's empowerment remains incomplete as long as the link between secularity-led paid work and women's welfare is not clearly defined. Empowerment relates not only to employment, but also to the resulting changes in domestic work and time use patterns (Charusheela, 2003). This chapter provides evidence from Turkey, a Muslim-majority country, on how religious unorthodoxy is related to number of children and generations living in a household, both of which strongly link to women's time burden, and consequently, to their welfare.

The evidence provided in this chapter complements the findings of my recent contribution (Kızılca, 2016) in which I develop an empirical strategy which considers consumption of religiously forbidden (haram) or disliked (makruh) goods in Turkey as a signal of a household's unorthodox stance. There I show that consumption of products that contradict orthodox Sunni taboos exhibits a strong positive effect on women's labour force participation, and to some extent, educational participation. Unorthodoxy stimulates women's participation not only directly, but also through mediating factors, including lower numbers of children, and number of generations living in the same household. However, that study does not provide a detailed analysis of household structures and ‘sinful’ consumption. The current chapter establishes that missing link between religious unorthodoxy with women's agency, by showing that haram and makruh consumption associates with a significant decrease in both the number of children, and the probability of being a ‘large’ household. A number of previous works, mainly by feminist scholars, touch on the issue of gendered connotations of liquor consumption and regulations in Turkey. This study contributes to the existing literature by providing novel statistical evidence on the link between ‘sinful’ consumption and household structures that exert an important influence on women's time use patterns.