| Senel
"…when I was a kid – the way girls got married would be through matchmaking or through families knowing each other. They would come and kind of ask your parents permission to have their son to marry you. So [my mother’s] concern was all the time, you need to know the skills to be a good housewife. The main expectation from a woman in Turkey, and it’s still the same, is to be a good mother." |
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"My father’s concern and message was that you need to go to school. He was, like, you need to study hard, you need to get good grades in school and you need to go to college. If you have an education, rather than people choosing you, you’ll get to choose others. So, I was receiving double messages… I ended up going with my father’s messages. That made more sense. I did not want to be chosen by someone else. I wanted to have more options."
Senel was born in Maras, Turkey in the early 1970s. She came to the United States in the early 1990s to study English and was accepted into a Masters program in Boston. Discrimination and unrest against Kurds in Turkey led Senel and her husband to apply for asylum in the United States. She completed a doctorate program in psychology and currently teaches at a local university. She and her husband have two young daughters.
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