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WOMEN IMMIGRANTS*
Turkish women in Germany
From the 1960s to today
Women Immigrants* is a new series by The Immigrant Times. It explores the challenges faced by women who, alone or with their families, leave their home countries behind to seek freedom, safety, or economic gain in other parts of the world. We start with Turkish women who first arrived in Germany in the 1960s
Turkish women in Germany at a family gathering in 1975 and, several decades later, in conversation with former German Chancellor Angela Merkel. (Photos: Sueddeutsche Zeitung; Reuters)
April 2026: For decades following the signing of the German–Turkish labour agreement in 1961, hundreds of thousands of Turkish women migrated to West Germany as wives and mothers, dependants, as designated by the state. They arrived in a country unprepared for their presence, lacking integration measures and the right to employment.
Predominantly confined to their residences, raising children in a language they did not speak and navigating a bureaucratic system that showed indifference, they became the unseen backbone of a community that Germany had anticipated to be temporary. This article, the first in a series of ‘Women Immigrants’, examines their experiences across three generations: from the isolation during the Gastarbeiter era, through the challenges faced by their daughters living double lives, to the professional and civic accomplishments of the Millennial and Z generations.
Men only
Between 1961 and 1973, West Germany recruited around 650,000 workers from Turkey under a bilateral labour agreement. The country needed labour for its factories, mines, and assembly lines. It did not want families and made this clear. Workers were expected to arrive, work for two years, and then return home. The German term for them, Gastarbeiter, meaning ‘guest worker,’ reflected the assumption that guests go home.
But they did not go home. The Swiss playwright Max Frisch put it succinctly: “We asked for workers, but human beings came.” (Wir riefen Arbeitskräfte, und es kamen Menschen.)
When West Germany halted recruitment in 1973 and started offering financial incentives for Turks to leave, many refused. They had established lives in their host country. From 1974 onwards, a new right, family reunification, allowed them to bring their wives and children to join them. Between 1974 and 1988, the Turkish population in Germany almost doubled. The country that had planned for temporary workers found itself hosting a permanent community for which it had made no provisions.
The arrival of women
Among those who arrived were tens of thousands of women who had never asked to emigrate. Some had married men already in Germany and followed them west. Others came as part of family units once reunification became possible. They arrived in cities they did not know, speaking no German, with no right to work, no integration programme, and no expectation from the German state that they would need one.
They moved into apartments in Kreuzberg, Berlin; Duisburg-Marxloh; and numerous towns and cities in the Rhine-Ruhr area. The flats were mostly small, and the neighbourhoods unfamiliar. Their husbands left for the factories before dawn, while the wives stayed at home.
The isolation these women faced stemmed from a bureaucratic oversight. The German government designed its guest worker programme around male labourers; as a result, when women arrived as dependants, the state lacked an appropriate classification for them. After November 1974, wives joining their husbands were denied eligibility for work permits, thus preventing them from working legally. Furthermore, they encountered restrictions in gaining free access to German institutions, hospitals, schools, and offices due to language barriers. Their activities were limited to the domestic sphere.
A 1980 newspaper report described their circumstances with notable honesty: Turkish women in Germany were portrayed as “either completely confined to their households, where they experience total isolation and unconditional dependence on their spouses, or they are employed in factories.”
The report noted that primarily, these women suffered from alienation from their children and spouses, and an increasing number exhibited signs of psychosomatic illnesses. A social worker associated with the Workers’ Welfare Association in Duisburg, responsible for organising literacy courses at the time, remarked that the women had a strong desire to change their situation. She also indicated that their husbands presented a significant obstacle to such change.
In 1977, the West German government commissioned a study. Researchers interviewed 100 women, 25 from each of Greece, Italy, Yugoslavia, and Turkey, with the aim of understanding the lives of individuals referred to by officials as ‘non-working wives of guest workers’. The findings revealed that over half wanted to work but faced obstacles preventing them from doing so.
The study failed to explore aspects of daily life experienced by these women, including their responsibilities in providing for their families, managing financial matters, and raising children in a country where the educational system, bureaucratic processes, and cultural environment were predominantly German, rendering their environment unfamiliar.
These women were not passive participants; in many households, they acted as the primary organisers, securing the family’s survival in a foreign land. However, their labour was mainly domestic and thus remained unrecognised both by the German state and in the historical record.
Second-generation girls growing up
There exists a profound hardship faced by women who migrate as adults and do not attain full proficiency in the language of their host country. They age within a society that they are unable to fully navigate. Their children, educated in German, diverge linguistically from them. A mother who cannot read a school letter, attend a parents’ evening, or communicate effectively with a landlord or doctor’s instructions is not merely isolated; she is increasingly displaced within her own family.
Research on families of Turkish origin in Germany has documented this pattern across generations. First-generation parents were less involved in their children’s education, not due to a lack of concern, but because language barriers and cultural differences made the institutions inaccessible. Teachers perceived these parents as disengaged. They regarded the education system as not sufficiently inclusive. Both observations were likely accurate.
For many first-generation women, the dream of returning kept them going through loneliness. Germany was only temporary. Turkey was their home. The flat in Kreuzberg was a stop, not a final destination. This belief, shared by their husbands and sometimes supported by both the German and Turkish governments, made it sensible not to learn German or engage with German society. Why bother learning a country’s language if you plan to leave it?
The return never happened. As a result, these women aged in Germany within neighbourhoods that had become sufficiently Turkish to be self-sufficient, where commerce, social interactions, and worship could be carried out without German. While not exactly ghettos, these communities had become inward-looking due to years of social exclusion. The resulting isolation had hardened into a distinct, functioning world.
Turkish women of the Millennium generation
German schools now include third- and even fourth-generation descendants of workers who arrived in the 1960s. A significant change has occurred from the first to the fourth generations. This shift was mainly driven by the second generation, with the daughters in that group playing a disproportionate role in this transition.
The daughters of Gastarbeiter women faced a tough situation. They were raised and educated in Germany, fluent in German, and immersed in a culture their mothers could not fully access. However, they also grew up within Turkish households, subject to Turkish expectations and scrutinised by Turkish communities, where reputation, especially that of their families, held great importance and was often demonstrated through their conduct.
A recurring theme in accounts from this generation highlights the contradiction clearly: parents who encouraged their daughters to study, succeed at school, and integrate, then, once those daughters had achieved this, became anxious that they had become too German. Girls motivated to attend school were not allowed to go to the discotheque. Young women who excelled academically were directed towards Turkish marriages. The German world was to be used for qualifications and income, but not fully embraced.
Many persevered despite the challenges. The second generation of Turkish-German women entered the workforce, pursued higher education, and became lawyers, doctors, teachers, social workers, and civil servants. They reached these milestones without the safety nets that their German counterparts usually relied on: parents who could manage university applications, contacts within professional networks, and an understanding of unwritten societal rules. Instead, they gained this knowledge independently, often serving as interpreters and intermediaries for their mothers, thereby bridging the cultural gap between the Turkish household and German society beyond.
This double burden, consisting of integration responsibilities and family duties, was carried more heavily by daughters than by sons, a pattern consistently documented in scholarly research. Sons enjoyed greater autonomy and more freedom to move between different spheres. Conversely, daughters faced stricter oversight, with the expectation that they uphold the community’s honour even as they were sent to acquire the qualifications necessary for it.
Today, around three million people of Turkish origin live in Germany. Most of them hold German citizenship. Many have never visited Turkey or have only travelled there as tourists, viewing the country as foreign. The community, often dismissed in Turkey as the “Almancı” or German Turks, holds a complex and nuanced position: insufficiently integrated into German society, yet too connected to be seen as outsiders in Turkey.
For women of the third and fourth generations, their grandmothers’ isolation is now history, something they are aware of rather than personally experienced. However, its legacy is not entirely gone. Turkish-German women remain underrepresented in higher education compared to their German peers, although the gap has narrowed. They are more likely than their brothers to have stayed in Germany, built careers there, and raised children locally. Essentially, they are the ones who continued the migration that their grandmothers initiated.
Some also start sharing stories of those grandmothers. Turkish-German female filmmakers, a minority within a minority in what was once almost an all-male cinema, have produced documentaries focused on the domestic spaces of the Gastarbeiter era: the kitchen, the factory, the cramped flat with the radio dial tuned to Turkish stations. These films challenge what one scholar called the ‘historical invisibility’ of migrant women, illuminating voices that have been overlooked by the official record.
The grandmothers
The first-generation women, those who arrived in the 1960s and 70s, who raised children in a language they could not speak, who navigated German bureaucracy through their children’s translation, who never went to the discotheque, never fully learned German, and never quite returned home, are now in their seventies, eighties, and nineties.
Some have returned to Turkey to grow old with their families. Others stay in Germany, in the same neighbourhoods, within communities that have transformed around them while they have not. They are, in a way, the last generation for whom the word ‘guest’ in Gastarbeiter still held significance: women who arrived expecting to leave and ended up, almost by chance, making Germany their home.
Turkish women of influence in German society
Seyran Ateş (born 1963)
Lawyer, activist, and mosque founder
Seyran Ateş arrived in Berlin as a young girl, one of many Turkish girls who grew up navigating two cultures. She excelled at school and studied law at the Free University of Berlin, an achievement that the first generation of her community could only dream of for their daughters. In 1984, while working as a student adviser at a women’s counselling centre in Berlin, she was shot in the neck by a Turkish nationalist. The client she was advising was killed. During her long recovery, Ateş decided to dedicate herself even more fully to the rights of women with Turkish backgrounds in Germany.
She qualified as a solicitor, specialising in family and criminal law, and spent decades representing women seeking to escape forced marriages and domestic violence within the Turkish community. Her public advocacy made her a target: she temporarily closed her practice in 2006 after a further violent attack and has lived under police protection for much of her adult life. In 2017, she founded the Ibn Ruschd-Goethe Mosque in Berlin, Germany’s first liberal place of worship for Muslims, where men and women pray together, and women may lead prayer as an imam. The Egyptian religious authorities issued a fatwa against her. The mosque remains open.
Ateş is not an easy figure to like. She has faced criticism from all sides: conservative Turkish communities for her liberal views, and mainstream German commentators for what some see as an overly confrontational style. But her life’s work is tied to the community she comes from and the women her own mother’s generation could not protect.
Dilek Gürsoy (born 1976)
Heart surgeon
Dilek Gürsoy was born in Neuss (North Rhine-Westphalia) to parents who migrated from the Black Sea province of Ordu as Gastarbeiter in 1969, the same year, via the same route, as tens of thousands of other Turkish families. Her father died when she was ten. Her mother, who had never attended school and spoke little German, worked factory shifts to support her children and, importantly, to pay the admission fee for her daughter’s medical examinations. “She is the hero of my story,” Gürsoy has said. “I am the daughter of an illiterate woman who did not speak German, yet managed to raise us with her resolve.”
Gürsoy studied medicine at Heinrich Heine University in Düsseldorf and specialised in cardiac surgery, one of the most challenging and male-dominated fields in medicine. In 2012, she became the first female surgeon in Europe to implant an artificial heart. She was named German Doctor of the Year in 2019 and appeared on the cover of Forbes Germany in 2022. She continues to research the next generation of artificial heart technology.
Hatice Akyün (born 1969)
Journalist and writer
Hatice Akyün was born in a small village near Kütahya in Anatolia and moved to Duisburg as a young child, where her father, originally a farmer, took work as a miner. She learned German through Grimm’s Fairy Tales and describes herself as having a ‘German heart and a Turkish soul’, a phrase that, in simpler terms, captures the condition described in earlier sections of the article.
She built a career in mainstream German journalism, writing for Der Spiegel, the Berliner Tagesspiegel, and the feminist magazine Emma, among others. Her 2005 autobiographical novel, Einmal Hans mit scharfer Soße (published in English as One Hans with Chilli Sauce), became an immediate bestseller and was later adapted into a film, notable as one of the first German productions to feature a Turkish-German woman as its heroine rather than her victim. She has since written several more books and has been a prominent voice in Germany’s integration debates, consistently arguing that integration failures are as much a failure of German institutions as of immigrant communities.
Sources and methodology
The research for this article was carried out in April 2026. We consulted academic research, contemporary documentation, and press sources. Readers seeking more detail on specific sources are encouraged to contact the Editor.
*Women Immigrants, a series by The Immigrant Times
‘Women Immigrants’ is a new series by The Immigrant Times. We explore the challenges faced by women who, alone or with their families, leave their home countries behind to seek freedom, safety, or economic gain in other parts of the world. During their journeys and at their destinations, women migrants, more than men, often encounter discrimination and abuse. Additionally, social and cultural integration proves to be more difficult for women immigrants than for men. Mothers also carry the primary responsibility for preparing their children for a future in an initially unfamiliar environment.
The series also features individual women immigrants whose achievements have significantly contributed to the society in which they live and to their chosen profession.
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