Abstract
Parallel to the fact that productive women started to be heard in the face of both individual and gender-related problems, social studies on women have also started to intensify. It is possible to see the reflections of this in cultural studies -especially- dealing with gender and the theme of women in different disciplines from folklore to sociology, from psychology to musicology. In the field of music, which is the auditory dimension of culture, it is seen that the studies related to women have started to increase. In addition to popular music, folk songs, which are the verbal and auditory reflection of the culture, draw attention in this context. Folk songs, a cultural heritage that carries the social life and the perspective of events from the past to the present, are important data sources that enable us to obtain information about the essence of society based on the themes and motifs in their words. In this study, based on these valuable resources, an answer is sought in the sample of Erzurum folk songs to the question of how the perspective of women is from the past to the present. In this context, using the content analysis method, 308 folk songs of Erzurum region were examined in detail, and 167 folk songs containing a woman theme in their lyrics were determined. Of these folk songs, 153 of which are “rhythmic melody” and 14 of which are “free-rhythmic melody”; It has been distributed according to the features of maqam, method and dialect. The folk songs were examined in terms of symbols related to women, forms of address, roles deemed appropriate for women, and in the light of all the data, the position of the woman in the social structure of the region and her perspective on women were interpreted in the form of tables and graphs.