The nineteenth and twentieth centuries marked an era of profound change in Turkish society. During the transition from the Ottoman Empire to the Turkish Republic (mid-1800s–1920s), Istanbul experienced the first systematic decline in fertility and reorganization of family life, where gradually the Western ideal of the nuclear family displaced more traditional extended patriarchal family forms (Duben and Behar 1991). The twentieth century witnessed the spread of the nuclear family form to rural areas as well, though i…