Although there is an extensive corpus of Turkish proverbs, riddles, adages, and other poetic forms collected and published since the end of eighteenth century, a thorough analysis that focuses on women and gender is lacking. The research of those who published work on the images of women in proverbs does not show a scholarly quality and expresses strong national sentiments (Birkalan 2002). In modern Turkish, the word for proverb is atasözü, which refers to words of male sages, or the ancestors; in Ottoman Turkish it is darb-ı mesel (pl. dürub-ı emsal (Boratav 1965).

Proverbs not only re…