9

Looking for “the Woman Question” in Algeria and Tunisia: Ideas, Political Language, and Female Actors before and after Independence

Natalya Vince^*

University of Portsmouth

In both activist and academic writing, Algeria and Tunisia are often described as having contrasting post-colonial outcomes for women. This contrast is usually based on a comparison of the status of women in family law. In Tunisia, on August 13, 1956, just a few months after independence, President Habib Bourguiba (1903–2000) introduced a Personal Status Code (Code du Statut Personnel/Majallat al-ahwal al-shakhsiyya, or CSP). By abolishing polygamy, replacing repudiation with judicial divorce, and ending the practice of matrimonial tutors for women, the Tunisian CSP appeared to break with key tenets of Islamic law and jurisprudence (shariʿa). In Algeria, debates about how family law might be remodeled continued for more than two decades after independence in 1962. During this period, no new legislation was passed, and family law was a mixture of individual judges’ interpretation of shariʿa and, until all colonial legislation was repealed in 1975, the French-formulated 1959 marriage law that brought Muslim women under civil rather than religious jurisdiction. Then, in 1984, despite significant opposition from many members of the National Assembly and women’s associations, a Family Code was passed in Algeria that made a matrimonial tutor obligatory for women, legally obliged wives to obey their husbands, fixed in law men’s right to polygamy and repudiation, and restricted women’s grounds for divorce. The 1984 Code was subject to limited modifications by a presidential decree in 2005, which emphasized the consensual nature of marriage, placed some restrictions on polygamy, and strengthened women’s rights over their children and access to financial support after divorce.¹

At the intersection of state, family, and religion, the status of women in family law is emblematic of what is often termed “the woman question.” Using “the woman question” – that is, debates about women’s rights, roles, and appearance – as way of reimagining state, society, and collective cultural identity has preoccupied intellectuals and politicians in North Africa and the Middle East from the nineteenth century to the present day.² The seemingly contrasting Tunisian and Algerian approaches to “the woman question” have often been explained as a result of their respective intellectual histories. Bourguiba is frequently presented as in the direct lineage of Tahar Haddad (1899–1935), whose 1930 publication Imraʾatuna fi al-shariʿa wa-l-mujtamaʿ (Our Woman in the Shariʿa and Society) criticized forced marriage, veiling, seclusion, polygamy, and repudiation.³ The book led to Haddad being expelled from the Zaytuna mosque and university in Tunis. Haddad himself is positioned as following in the wake of earlier reformist politicians and intellectuals in Tunisia, such as Khayr al-Din Pasha (1820–90), who in the service of Ahmad Bey of Tunis argued that although shariʿa was of divine origin it was not a fixed code and could be modified by governments,⁴ and Beylical government official Ahmad Ibn Abi Diyaf (1804–74), whose Risala fi al-marʾa (Epistle on Women), written 1856 in response to questions from the French consul about the place of women in Tunisian society, was one of the first texts to engage with “the woman question.”⁵

Imraʾatuna fi al-shariʿa wa-l-mujtamaʿ received a hostile reception from Algeria’s ʿulama, the intellectuals long considered, not least in Algerian official history, as having played a central role awakening nationalist consciousness by defining what it meant to be Algerian⁶ – their famous triptych was “Islam is our religion, Algeria is our homeland, Arabic is our language.” Like Haddad, ʿAbd al-Hamid Ben Badis (1889–1940), the founder of the Association des Oulémas Musulmans Algériens (Association of Algerian Muslim ʿUlama, AOMA), had studied at the Zaytuna. Like Haddad’s colleagues in the Zaytuna administration, he considered Imraʾatuna heretical. Ben Badis accused Haddad of promoting “Frenchifying” and “de-Islamization.”⁷ For Marnia Lazreg, by focusing in his writings on the sacrifices of devout women in the early history of Islam, Ben Badis

did not share in or directly respond to the feminist ferment, meetings and debates that marked the 1920s and 1930s in Egypt, Turkey and France … Algeria had no feminist male writer as Iraq did with Jamal Sidqi, Egypt with Qasim Amin [1863–1908] or Tunisia with [Tahar] Haddad. It was as if the promotion of women’s rights was tantamount to a denial of men’s rights.⁸

Instead, the newspaper Al-Shihab, founded by Ben Badis in 1925, reproduced articles written by the modernist salafi Rashid Rida (1865–1935), whom Ben Badis had met in Egypt, and which had first been published in the Cairo-based Al-Manar. These articles defended polygamy, women’s limited access to divorce, and unequal inheritance and rejected unveiling – although Rida was a supporter of women’s education, and believed women had a role to play in public life.⁹ Indeed, in a more recent analysis of articles published in al-Shihab on “the woman question,” Lawrence McMahon underscores that their authors’ preoccupation with the role of the family as the building block of society and the nation, and the need for educated women to transmit (Islamic) values was, in terms of its logic, not so far removed from Qasim Amin’s argument that liberated women would liberate the Egyptian nation (although the resulting prescriptions of Amin and the ʿulama differ).¹⁰

Haddad and Ben Badis are both highly charged intellectual figures in the Tunisian and Algerian political imaginaries, held up as intellectual fathers of the nation. Yet the nation-states that emerged in 1956 in Tunisia and in 1962 in Algeria were in many ways far removed from the thought of these two men who were part of an interwar transnational community of ideas, and who both died two decades before the independence of their country of birth. Indeed, at the time of their writings, the model of the nation-state was far from being the most obvious or only solution to colonial oppression.¹¹ It was after independence that Haddad and Ben Badis came to symbolize, or rather were reimagined to symbolize, the distinctiveness of national identity.

The platform of the AOMA was not one of Algerian independence – their central aim was to “purify” Algerian Islamic practices, not just from Western influence but also from Sufism. The AOMA only formally lent their support to the National Liberation Front (Front de Libération Nationale, FLN) in 1956 – the FLN’s November 1, 1954, declaration announcing the beginning of an armed struggle took them by surprise. As James McDougall argues, it was after 1962 that former members of the AOMA came into their own, when their mastery of the language of cultural authenticity, the national past, and a homogenizing, unitary vision of the “Arab Muslim Algerian identity” provided a ready-made set of references and idioms for the newly independent state to adopt.¹² Nor was this a straightforward relationship between the ʿulama and Algeria’s new political leaders, who sought to place religion in the service of the state and not vice versa – as Algeria’s first president, Ahmed Ben Bella (1916–2012), threatened in March 1963: “We will block the road to false doctrines and we will break the back of false preachers of Islam and Arabism.”¹³

In the case of Haddad, as Julian Weideman has underscored, the extent to which Haddad “inspired” post-independence leaders has been exaggerated. For Weideman, Haddad does not fit into Albert Hourani’s category of reformists who “open[ed] the door to” or “made thinkable” the secularism of Bourguiba or Bin ‘Ali: “His writings on the Zaytuna and [its relationship to] women in fact took place within [emphasis in original] the religious establishment, which he sought not to subvert or destroy, but to renew and revitalize.”¹⁴ It was after his death that Haddad was appropriated by Bourguiba, his successor Zin al-ʿAbidin bin ʿAli (b. 1936) and post-independence nationalist intellectuals as a symbol of “state feminism”: “the link between him and the two presidents was a rhetorical construction rather than a genuine affiliation.”¹⁵ Bourguiba, who joined the constitutionalist and nationalist Destour party in 1927, and founded the splinter Neo-Destour in 1934, did not defend Haddad when he was being attacked, and Haddad’s name was not mentioned in either of Bourguiba’s speeches introducing the CSP in 1956.¹⁶ Indeed, in a 1937 article, Tahar Sfar (1903–42), a founding member of Neo-Destour and close friend of Bourguiba, referred to the work of Rida (whose influence on Ben Badis is often presented as evidence of AOMA conservatism) to argue that “customs and tradition” were masking the inherently liberal nature of Muslim law which was often much more progressive than current European legislation.¹⁷

Having recognized that the link which 1950s and 1960s nationalist leaders had with 1930s intellectuals was selective, strategic, and indeed at times ad hoc, how else might we explain why “the woman question” came to take – or appeared to take – such different forms in rhetoric and practice in Algeria and Tunisia? Focusing on the eve and the immediate aftermath of independence, and moving away from an intellectual history per se, this chapter considers “the woman question” as an idea which acquires meaning and visibility through a series of mechanisms: first, the selection, public articulation, and strategic deployment of certain languages and idioms by political actors and movements; second, as women were increasingly called upon to embody an “ideal woman” as defined by nationalist and other political principles; and third, through the responses of women to this role as well as the extent to which they engaged with the language of “the woman question,” and why they did or did not.¹⁸ This chapter seeks to strike a balance between structure and agency. While recognizing that legislation concerning and discourses about women result from legacies of colonial rule, the rootedness of kin-based groupings, and the strength of state institutions, it also highlights the agency of individual actors – including those necessarily not at the center of power – to shape the language and direction of public debate.¹⁹

Colonialism, Nationalism, Muslim Personal Status, and Women

Formally speaking, neither Algeria nor Tunisia was a colony in the French empire. Algeria, first invaded by the French in 1830, had the unique position of being considered, from 1848 onwards, one of three départements of France. Oran, Algiers, and Constantine had the same administrative status as provinces on metropolitan French soil. Tunisia became a French protectorate with the signing of the 1881 Treaty of Bardo and the 1883 Marsa Convention, when the Bey of Tunis ceded defense and foreign policy decision-making to France, while nominally maintaining sovereignty over domestic affairs. Unlike in Algeria, because the Tunisian state nominally existed, a Tunisian nationality existed – autochthones were subjects of the Bey and in family matters were governed by shariʿa courts under the authority of the Bey. In Algeria, the national marker “Algerian” (Algérien) was appropriated by the growing European settler population in the late nineteenth century.²⁰ The July 14, 1865, senatus consulate declared that indigenous Muslims in Algeria were French, thus subject to military service and permitted to join the civil service, but that they would not have access to the benefits of full French citizenship unless they renounced their Muslim personal status, an act few were willing to contemplate.²¹ Thus what the French government considered to be the defining features of Muslim family law – in particular, the way it regulated relations between men and women in terms of inheritance, marriage, and divorce – was precisely what made Muslim men “inassimilable” into the French nation, unfit for the benefits of Republican citizenship.²² The difference of “the Algerian Muslim woman” (compared to “the French woman”), both in appearance and in her treatment by “the Muslim man,” was reinforced by the extensive production of accounts of their dress, morals, social status, and cultural practices by French military personnel, social scientists, writers and artists, and political actors.²³

In Algeria, then, family law – and notably representations of the place of women within this – was bound up with nationality and citizenship in a particularly acute way. In Tunisia, being Tunisian placed a person under the regime of the Muslim personal status. In Algeria, Muslim personal status produced a sense of (collective) selfhood (often referred to as personnalité/shakhsiyya), which might be termed “Algerianness” but which the colonial order denied the label “Algerian.” The right to personal status was thus a key marker of belonging for all anti-colonial political parties in interwar Algeria, even those one might consider more secular. At the first Algerian Muslim Congress on June 7, 1936, which brought together parties and associations that were either anti-colonial or highly critical of colonial abuses, in order to make a series of demands for greater political rights, the AOMA, the Fédération des élus (composed of pro-assimilation Muslim notables), and even the Algerian Communist Party (Parti Communiste Algérien, PCA) all underlined the importance of Muslim Personal Status.²⁴

In Tunisia, by contrast, there was more political space for autochthonous men and women to question how the roles, rights, and appearance of women might look beyond the Muslim personal status, and debates were far more numerous. In 1929, Habiba Menchari took to the public stage, unveiled, to give a talk on “The Muslim Woman of Tomorrow: For or Against the Veil,” in which she argued against the practice.²⁵ In the same year, Tunis Socialiste published a series of articles by Mohamed Nôomane and Joachim Durel against veiling.²⁶ In response, Bourguiba wrote an impassioned – and often cited, including by Bourguiba himself – defense of the veil, critiquing “our worthy apostles of clothing feminism.” He declared that evolution in cultural practices could only take place when “Tunisian selfhood [personnalité]” was protected.²⁷ Bourguiba’s stand against the veil in 1929 came as a surprise for his Socialist friends who had put him in the camp of the new, modernist members of Destour. For Sophie Bessis, the way in which Bourguiba justified his 1929 position was through “incontestable modernist convictions, solid pragmatism and an unapologetic instrumentalization of the female condition in the service … of nationalism.”²⁸

Religion and nationality became increasingly linked by Tunisian nationalists in the 1930s: one of the biggest nationalist campaigns of the 1930s, which led to the emergence of Neo-Destour in 1934, was to prevent the burial of Muslims who had chosen to be naturalized as French in Muslim cemeteries.²⁹ What was at stake was not just the nature of colonial rule in Tunisia which, compared to Algeria, left more political space to develop a range of references beyond the Muslim personal status. In Tunisia, by the 1930s, Neo-Destour was placing religion in the strategic service of nationalist rhetoric and action in a much more systematic way than in Algeria. The AOMA led a broad social and cultural project that was not limited to – or even primarily concerned with – anti-colonial activism. They existed alongside reformist critics of colonial rule (the Fédération des élus and the PCA) as well as explicitly nationalist movements – Messali Hadj’s (1898–1974) Étoile Nord Africaine (North African Star, ENA), which was initially established with the support of the French Communist Party, and its successor the Parti du Peuple Algérien (Party of the Algerian People, PPA). In 1954, all of these parties and movements would feed into, but would also be usurped by, a new generation of nationalist leaders with the creation of the FLN.

In Tunisia, there was also recognition fairly early on that women could be useful to the nationalist movement, not just as symbols of the nation but also as agents in contesting the colonial order. When the new Resident General, Eirik Labonne, arrived in Tunis in November 1938, he was met by a delegation of Tunisian women – including Zakia and Jamila Fourati, Saïda Bouzgarrou (Bourguiba’s niece, 1921–2007), and Chadlia Nôomane. Zakia Fourati gave an improvised speech in their name of her Tunisian sisters, in which she made explicit reference to the Neo-Destour’s April 9, 1938, demonstrations for political reform, which ended with a number of demonstrators being killed by the police. She expressed the wish that Labonne rapidly turn his attention to the issues they raised. All four women then declared together “Long live S. A. Ahmed Pacha Bey! Long live Eirik Labonne! Long live Habib Bourguiba! Down with privilege!”³⁰ In 1936, the Muslim Union of Tunisian Women (Union Musulmane des Femmes de Tunisie, UMFT) was founded by Bchira Ben Mrad (1913–93), with the approval of the Zaytuna, including her father Mohamed Salah Ben Mrad (1881–1979), who had written a stinging critique of Haddad’s work in 1931, entitled al-Hidad ʿala Imraʾat al-Haddad (Mourning Haddad’s Woman). The emphasis on the UMFT was on civil duty, education, and moral instruction, but it also lent its support to neo-Destour, for example, campaigning for the release of political prisoners. The UMFT thus confined itself to a “traditional” interpretation of women’s roles (education, charity) but also transgressed certain norms and boundaries by taking on these roles in a highly visible public space.

With World War II leading to a certain hiatus in anti-colonial activity, it was not until in 1947 that the Union des Femmes Musulmanes d’Algérie (Union of Muslim Women of Algeria, UFMA) was established under the auspices of the Mouvement pour le Triomphe des Libertés Démocratiques (Movement for the Triumph of Democratic Liberties, MTLD), created in 1946 by Messali Hadj as the continuation of the outlawed PPA. Run by Mamia Chentouf (1922–2012), the UFMA was a very small movement compared to the UMFT. Three years earlier, in 1944, the Tunisian and Algerian Communist Parties, which were composed of Europeans and Tunisians/Algerians, had both formed women’s branches: the Union des femmes d’Algérie (Union of Women of Algeria, UFA) and the Union des Femmes de Tunisie (Union of Women of Tunisia, UFT). Neither had a nationalist line, at least at first; rather, they sought to reduce political and socio-economic inequalities engendered by colonial rule. In Algeria, members campaigned for the right to vote (accorded to French women in 1944) to be extended to Muslim women and organized housewives’ committees to try and attenuate soaring food prices. One former member of the UFA, who would go on to join the nationalist struggle, Lucette Larribère (later Lucette Hadj Ali, 1920–2014), described demonstrating outside schools demanding that Muslim children be given equal access.³¹ Access to education was also a campaign for the UFT. In 1952, a former member of the UFMT, Nabiha Ben Miled (née Ben Abdullah, 1919–2009), became UFT president. She had joined the UFT in response to what she saw as the UFMT’s subservience to Neo-Destour.³²

Between World War II and independence in both Tunisia and Algeria, no systematic linkage was made between the colonial order and gender hierarchies by nationalist movements. Indeed, focus on fighting the colonial system seemed to automatically exclude combatting the structural oppression of women. To paraphrase Bourguiba in 1929, certain questions could not be answered until national selfhood was protected – that is, after independence. In Algeria, anti-colonial language was somewhat different: for those more closely aligned with the religious reformists, women were the repositories of authentic identity, although some “evolution” (i.e., education) was necessary to make them better guardians of religion and culture. For Marxist, or Marxist-inspired, anti-colonialists and nationalists, destroying colonialism, like destroying capitalism, would automatically resolve “the women question.” Fatma Zohra Sai, who published one of the few works on women in the Algerian nationalist movement before 1954, opens her study by citing Mohamed Harbi (b. 1933), a leading member of the wartime FLN and historian of Algerian nationalism: “the struggle was located first and foremost on the national level. It sought to eliminate the most visible form of oppression. Independence was thought and imagined as the opposite of exploitation,” that is, the end of exploitation for everyone.³³

“The Woman Question” as National Particularism, Nation-Building Tool, and Political Weapon

Riding high on his immense political legitimacy in the immediate aftermath of the international campaigning, popular strikes, and acts of armed resistance which led to Tunisian independence in 1956, Bourguiba swiftly moved to put into law the new CSP and exhort women to unveil. The covering, which in 1929 he had claimed protected “Tunisian selfhood,” was now condemned by Bourguiba as a “miserable rag.” Unveiling was to be part of the “modernization” of Tunisia, “following the example of the Western woman and even the Egyptian woman.”³⁴ Given the highly charged symbolism of “the Tunisian woman” there was no better choice to embody (both literally and metaphorically) the newly independent state’s break with the past and vision of the future.

At the same time, and in a self-conscious effort to sustain two different interpretations of the CSP, the language of transformation was abundantly mirrored by the language of return. The CSP was presented as a “true” understanding of Islam which had been masked by colonial manipulation and misguided local interpretations.³⁵ In 1966, Ahmed Mestiri (b. 1925), Ambassador to Algeria, former Minister for Justice, and a key author of the CSP, gave an interview to the Algerian newspaper Révolution africaine in which he insisted that, unlike Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, who drew upon the Swiss civil code in reformulating Turkish family law, Tunisian lawmakers had been inspired by principles from the shariʿa, based on a new conception of ijtihad (legal reasoning).³⁶ Every modification to family law in the CSP was supported with a citation from the Qurʾan – as Bourguiba argued in one radio address: “Islam has liberated the mind and recommended to man to reflect on religious laws in order to adapt them to human evolution.”³⁷

The author of a series of articles on the post-independence Moroccan and Tunisian family codes published in 1962 in the left-leaning Algerian weekly Révolution africaine described the banning of polygamy in the Tunisian CSP as “shocking, even provoking.”³⁸ In the opinion of the writer, this was an obvious break with shariʿa: “Let us hope,” the article concluded:

that the Algerian Family Code, currently under examination, is a synthesis of its two predecessors [Moroccan and Tunisian], avoiding the errors and the imprecisions of each and pointing the way to the remaking of the three codes into a single code within the framework of the unified Maghrib that we all wish for.³⁹

This series of articles underlines that the CSP was seen, and meant to be seen, as a “shock” but also that its creation, and the reaction to it, was framed by broader political conflicts and rivalries. Although officially endorsed by senior religious figures, the CSP was intended to undercut the political influence of religious leaders at the Zaytuna. The Zaytuna was historically a center of contestation, and in the 1950s it had been sympathetic to Bourguiba’s political rival Salih bin Yusuf (1907–61), who accused Bourguiba of selling out to French imperialism and abandoning the cause of Maghribi unity and pan-Arabism. From exile in Cairo, Bin Yusuf denounced the CSP.⁴⁰ In the context of the FLN’s political sympathy for Bin Yusuf at the time of Tunisian independence, the reference to revising the code (based on an Algerian model that was only theoretical at this point) after the political unity of the Maghrib (which did not exist either) was a calculated political dig, in which the CSP was the pretext to allude to a much broader set of issues.

In the immediate aftermath of independence, Tunisian women were presented in the Tunisian press as not only keeping up with developments elsewhere, but also as being pioneers in the region and the world. Two days after independence on March 20, 1956, L’Action described women of the neo-Destour party participating in a youth festival, marching side by side with men, wearing identical military uniforms and caps:

Too bad for the sayings … you know … “The Moroccan is a lion. The Algerian is a man. The Tunisian … a woman!” In the March 21 demonstration the women themselves were men! If we dare say so. The young Destourian women marched with their [male] companions, like them wearing a virile and severe uniform, with the same peaked cap pointed towards the West.⁴¹

Although such a description appears at first to appropriate gendered national stereotypes that emasculate the Tunisian man, it is women’s performance of masculinity which is depicted as a sign of their strength and power. Traditional gender roles were not challenged, however. Bourguiba’s “emancipation” was a paternalistic one; he depicted himself, and was depicted in the closely controlled press of the single-party state, as a kindly father guiding women to enlightenment.

Indeed, the CSP was often presented as a “gift” to Tunisian women. In an article by Léïla, the pseudonym of Dorra Bouzid (b. 1933), one of the leading female journalists of the period, entitled “Does the code go against religion?” the author gathers various points of views from her entourage. Female students, she declared, insist that “this is not a Kemalization,” scoffing at the radical secularism of Turkish state feminism, and that “Islam can evolve” even though men might be surprised and disorientated. Most women, she argued, were happy, without being overwhelmingly enthusiastic, about the code. Whereas some considered themselves too old to benefit, others worried about their daughters benefitting too much. For one of Léïla’s interviewees:

The emancipation of the Tunisian woman is not the result of her struggle. The Tunisian woman stood by, impassive and resigned, and watched the emancipation of her Egyptian sister … We didn’t do anything to have it, alas! We are used to letting men decide for us, to let things be decided for us.⁴²

In a January 1957 speech, Bourguiba admonished his female audience: “Women cannot keep hiding behind the expression: ‘Si Habib said so’.”⁴³ In Evelyne Rey’s 1967 documentary Bahia … ou ces femmes de Tunisie, one scene shows Bourguiba with a group of rural women greeting him rapturously, kissing him on the cheek and passing him their small children to embrace. Bourguiba then proceeds to a purportedly impromptu unveiling of women in the crowd. The first woman begins to tie her headscarf back on, but Bourguiba persuades her against it, stroking her cheek when she finally complies. The voice-over declares: “For them, he is not just the father of the State, he is the father, full stop, and even the husband, in this family unit somewhat dismantled by a veritable revolution.”⁴⁴

The political language employed by Algerian nationalists took a decidedly different tack vis-à-vis “the woman question.” 1956, the year of Tunisian independence, marked a rapid escalation of the war that had broken out in Algeria in late 1954. In March 1956, the French National Assembly granted the army “special powers,” effectively giving it a free hand in order to quell the growing revolt in Algeria. The number of French troops deployed to the country multiplied rapidly. But the conflict was not only a military struggle; it was also a war to win “hearts and minds,” both in Algeria and on the international stage. Debates surrounding the proper definition and practice of roles, rights and representation of women constituted a key battleground: “women” emerged as both a symbol of French civilizing efforts and the way to win over “the Muslim family.”

The ratification of the CSP in Tunisia thrust the French government into an awkward position. The maintenance of Muslim personal status law in Algeria had long been justified as “respect for tradition,” and yet here was a neighboring state with a very similar cultural identity suggesting a different path. The government in Paris and the military–civilian regime in Algiers thus set about establishing a new marriage law for Algeria, one that was closely modeled on the Tunisian CSP. The 1959 Marriage Ordinance stipulated the need for the free consent of both spouses, the option of judicial divorce instead of repudiation (talaq) and, in cases of divorce, the woman’s right to custody of her children and entitlement to a maintenance allowance (nafaqa).⁴⁵ Alongside this legislation, renewed effort was put into increasing “French Muslim” girls’ access to education, rural healthcare campaigns, sewing circles, and unveiling. The language was that of “emancipation” and “modernization.” In the 1950s colonial context this meant turning Algerian women into quasi-French housewives who would raise their children with the benefits of literacy, French dress, French hobbies and modern childcare methods. This, in turn, was expected to be the guarantee of their political loyalty.⁴⁶

Much was made of women’s physical appearance as markers of their ideological belonging. Unveiling ceremonies often involved women who did not wear the veil putting it on only in order to publicly “unveil.”⁴⁷ When some of the first women arrested in an FLN maquis (rural guerrilla) unit, Safia Baazi, Fadéla Mesli (b. 1936), and Meriem Belmihoub (b. 1935), turned out to be three (unveiled) nursing students, the French magazine Jours de France published a photograph of them in their military trellis and bearing arms with the headline “These Smiling Nurses are Killers.” Outrage over the fact that their political sympathies did not seem to correspond to their French education and appearance was palpable.⁴⁸ The Tunisian newspaper L’Action roundly mocked the incredulous reaction in much of the French press, including the satirical newspaper Le Canard Enchaîné, which – unable to believe that they might be Algerian – had reported that the three women were Egyptian.⁴⁹

The FLN leadership rapidly responded to counter such colonial feminism with a message that women could only be liberated by throwing off the shackles of colonial oppression. The intellectual most central to the public articulation of this argument was the Martinique-born psychiatrist and FLN activist Frantz Fanon (1925–61). In “Algeria Unveiled” (1959), Fanon describes the colonizers’ sustained attempts to unveil the Algerian women as part as a strategy of “Converting the woman, winning her over to the foreign values, wrenching her free from her status” in order to “[achieve] a real power over the man and [attain] a practical, effective means of destructuring Algerian culture.”⁵⁰ The obvious form of defense to such a plan was to shield women from the colonizer’s gaze. However, in the context of revolutionary warfare, he argued, women were called upon to enter public space en masse to fight the colonial oppressor. Here, the veil would acquire a new, revolutionary dynamic. Veiled women, assumed to be ignorant of politics, transported tracts and messages and made sure the coast was clear. The veil was no longer a weapon of symbolic resistance only. Strategically unveiled women moved “like a fish in the Western waters” in order to carry “revolvers, grenades, hundreds of false identity cards or bombs.”⁵¹ These female members of the urban guerrilla network, who included the “three Djamilas” (Bouhired [b. 1935], Bouazza [1938–2015], Boupacha [b. 1938]) became internationally famous – or notorious, depending on one’s political perspective – during the War of Independence after their arrest, trial, and imprisonment.

The FLN drew great political capital from promoting an image of women bearing arms in the anti-colonial struggle on the world stage, alongside publicizing accounts of colonial atrocities committed against women and children. These images of and discourses about women belied French claims of a “civilizing mission,” undermined French insistence that the FLN was a minority movement of religious fanatics, and reinforced the position of the FLN as the legitimate representative of the people. Djamila Bouhired, who was brutally tortured after her arrest by the French army, became an international icon, the subject of solidarity writing and activism around the world and a film by Egyptian director Youssef Chahine.⁵² The torture and rape of Djamila Boupacha provoked international outrage in liberal circles, prompting a book by French feminist Simone de Beauvoir and Franco-Tunisian lawyer Gisèle Halimi as well as a portrait by Pablo Picasso.⁵³

Educated urban women played an active role in producing anti-colonial propaganda, by giving interviews and writing articles and pamphlets with titles such as “Colonial Alienation and the Resistance of the Algerian Family”⁵⁴ and “The Death of my Brothers.”⁵⁵ This material reproduced familiar nationalist tropes about colonial interference in the family, and the humiliation of Algerian men forced to witness the abuse of “their” women. However, these stereotypes were often reproduced in a very knowing way – to “have an impact on a certain section of the [metropolitan French] population,” in the words of one author and member of the Algiers bomb network, Zohra Drif (b.1934).⁵⁶ Women also actively promoted the image of the new, fighting woman. In January 1961, the FLN sent three delegates to the Afro-Asian Women’s Conference in Cairo. Ex-UFMA leader Mamia Chentouf, Djamila Rahal, and Leila Benouniche brought with them a message from Ferhat Abbas (1899–1985), a former member of the interwar Fédération des élus and now president of the FLN’s Provisional Government of the Algerian Republic (Gouvernement provisoire de la République algérienne, GPRA).

In Algeria, the woman’s contribution in the armed struggle [i]s not limited to a secondary part. She is taking part in this struggle arms in hand, just like her fighting brothers. However, in Algeria – like in other Afro-Asian countries, the role of women could not possibly be limited to this first stage of the liberation struggle. In these countries, women are the symbol of the new generation and it is therefore towards the process of shaping the new societies that their efforts should be guided. It is in this line [sic] that the woman could really free herself and be considered as an essential element of progress.⁵⁷

In February 1958, the National Union of Tunisian Women (Union Nationale de la Femme Tunisienne, UNFT, created in 1956) had attended the Afro-Asian women’s conference in Colombo, leading a minute’s silence in support of the Algerian people, in protest against the destruction of schools and healthcare facilities and the ever increasing numbers of Algerian refugees forced to flee to Tunisia’s borders.⁵⁸ That same month, the bombing of the village of Sakiet Sidi Youssef, on the Algerian border by French warplanes had led to Bourguiba taking a much more openly supportive stance in favor of the FLN.⁵⁹

The Tunisian press regularly ran images of Algerian women, both as fighters and as victims, as well as interviews with Algerian women who were engaged in the struggle.⁶⁰ On December 17, 1956, the women’s page in Action, “Action féminine,” declared, “Algerian women have brought something new in the history of North Africa: they are fighting within the maquis, caring for the injured, fulfilling dangerous missions, carrying out liaison activities and surveillance, spying, and above all, participating in combat. Well done Algerian women!”⁶¹ The torture of Djamila Bouhired in the hands of the French army was extensively reported. Léïla penned an article with the deeply sarcastic headline, “An Algerian Among the ‘Civilized’.”⁶² The women’s pages of L’Action discussed Algerian women’s “promotion by arms”: “[Algerian] women have conquered their place and their responsibilities, and therefore the respect of their male compatriots.”⁶³

Based on his study of the internal documents of the FLN, Gilbert Meynier argues that traditional gender roles were reinforced in Algeria rather than challenged during the war: women were not given leadership positions, marriage was tightly controlled by the military hierarchy, there were instances of young female recruits being subjected to virginity tests, women accused of adultery risked the death penalty, and, at the end of 1957, the decision was taken to remove women from the maquis and send them to the Tunisian and Moroccan frontiers. Meynier concludes, “the ALN [the National Liberation Army, or armed branch of the FLN] thus replaced the father in the management of the gentler sex.”⁶⁴ Attempts by some Algerian female students in the FLN’s metropolitan French wing (Fédération de France, Federation of France, FF-FLN) between 1961 and summer 1962 to create a women’s section that would place women’s rights at the heart of the program for the soon-to-be independent state petered out when the FF-FLN was sidelined during the internal power struggle of spring and summer 1962.⁶⁵ Nevertheless, the egalitarian, fraternal language of brothers and sisters in arms remained important, as we shall see in the next section, as it shaped the way in which many educated urban women who participated in the independence struggle would consider “the woman question” after independence.

In 1962, nationalist leaders in Tunisia and Algeria imagined the future in different ways. Tunisia, it was claimed, was speeding along the route of a Western-style “modernity.” In Algeria, 1962 was presented as “year zero” of a revolution during which a new path would be forged. At the same time, nationalist leaders in both countries claimed to have kept at least one foot firmly rooted in the “authentic past.” In March 1962, just as representatives of the FLN were signing the peace accords at Evian that would pave the way for independence, Tunisia’s Jeune Afrique published a photo of women running, walking and standing, with a caption declaring that Algerians lagged behind with respect to the women question, Egyptians were advancing too slowly, and Tunisians were racing ahead.⁶⁶ If Tunisians were presented as women of the future, Algerians represented women of the revolution. For Fadéla M’Rabet (b. 1936), a member of the wartime FF-FLN and post-war radio journalist, Marxist and feminist activist, “Algeria was going to be the model for the world! At the radio there was a revolutionary spirit.”⁶⁷

This revolution, however, was one that “protected” women: focusing on economic reconstruction and social and cultural development left no time for sexual liberation. In a speech in May 1963 in which President Ben Bella sought to persuade reluctant men to allow their women to enter the workplace, he declared:

Let the woman problem be posed once and for all. Liberate your women so they can take up their responsibilities; by leaving women prisoners, it is half of our people, half of our country which is paralyzed. Don’t think that the veil will protect them. The Revolution will protect them.⁶⁸

Indeed, the idea that the wider processes of revolution (simultaneously understood as the struggle to end colonial rule as well as to build a post-independence socialist society) already had resolved “the woman question” – or would imminently accomplish that goal – was a central theme in the speeches of Algeria’s leaders during the first years of independence. This contrasts with the case of Tunisia, where “the woman question” was incessantly employed as both theme and subject, and indeed used to settle political scores with the Zaytuna. In Algeria, the leitmotif of resolution through revolution was intertwined with a classic reformist argument; namely, that a return to religious sources of authority would reveal those teachings to hold out a fundamentally liberal position on the status of women. This was a similar line of argument to the one that was used to justify the CSP in Tunisia, even if many contemporaries remained unconvinced that the CSP was an example of the correct exercise of ijtihad. In Algeria, the tension between conservative and progressive interpretations of the proper status of women had reached an impasse, and it was only in the new political climate of the late 1970s, alongside the global rise of political Islamism, that proponents of a conservative family code would be powerful enough to push their legislation through. In the meantime, President Houari Boumediene (1932–78), speaking at the 1966 congress of the Union Nationale des Femmes Algériennes (National Union of Algerian Women, UNFA), a year after the coup in which he overthrew Ben Bella, neatly encapsulated the standard government line:

The Algerian woman has, in effect, imposed herself in our society thanks to her efficient action, her sacrifices and the many martyrs which she has given to the cause of a free, modern and socialist Algeria … All the same, it is absolutely necessary that this evolution takes place in a natural way and within the framework of the Muslim religion, since our society is at the same time Arab, Muslim and socialist and it has foundations and traditions which we must respect.⁶⁹

Boumediene urged women not to concern themselves with what he considered to be superficial problems. Polygamy, he argued, was effectively forbidden by the Qur’an because scripture stated that a man could not take more than one wife unless he was able to treat them all equally. The veil, he insisted, was not worthy of the attention that it had garnered in other Muslim societies; instead, women needed to go beyond this trivial issue and challenge outdated customs that were a deviation from Islam. In doing so, Boumediene contended, they would participate in the construction of a new Algerian society.

Embodying “Our Women” and “the Woman Question”: Mass Organizations at Home, Diplomacy Abroad, and Women’s Journalism

In the immediate aftermath of independence, both the Tunisian and Algerian single-party states created women’s mass organizations with the express aim of representing Tunisian and Algerian women. One consequence of these activities was the presentation of a particular image of Tunisia and Algeria abroad. In the Tunisian case, the Union Nationale de la Femme Tunisienne (National Union of the Tunisian Woman, UNFT) was the only organization allowed to exist (independence marked the end of the Communist UFT). The UNFT’s first president, Aïcha Bellagha, selected by members of the organizations’ constituent assembly, was sidelined, upon the insistence of Bourguiba himself, in favor of Radhia Haddad (née Ben Ammar, 1922–2003), who would go on to head the UNFT from 1958 to 1972.⁷⁰ The closeness of the UNFT to the president both resulted from, and was reinforced by, family ties. Senior figures in the UNFT, many of whom had begun their political careers in the UFMT, included Wassila Ben Ammar ([1912–99], Bourguiba’s wife from 1962 onwards), Neila Ben Ammar (Wassila’s sister), and Bourguiba’s niece Saïda Sassi (née Bouzgarrou). UNFT leaders often accompanied the president, giving “pep talks” to women at public meetings and “lobbying” Bourguiba, a practice described by a U.S. Embassy report at the time as a “mise-en-scène.”⁷¹ In February 1961, Saïda Sassi, who in 1958 alone had visited West Germany, Turkey, Morocco, Lebanon, and Syria, was a guest at President John F. Kennedy’s inauguration. The UNFT was a darling of the Americans during this period, because – unlike Algeria – Tunisia was seen as an all-too-rare potential Arab ally, a country opposed to Nasser and conciliatory towards Israel. Building links with women who were so close to Bourguiba was seen as an important way to strengthen ties between the two countries. In May 1962, fifteen UNFT members visited Washington to look at social and community development projects on a trip that was deemed by the American administration to have “intrinsic political importance.”⁷²

Beyond the social elite of Tunis, the UNFT played little role in representing or mobilizing women.⁷³ The subservience of the organization to Bourguiba and his family networks discouraged some educated urban women with political experience from joining. One U.S. Embassy report in July 1962 depicted the political dominance of the Ben Ammar family as generating “increasing apathy,” meaning that, “many competent women are fearful and refuse to anything to do with the UNFT.”⁷⁴ The purpose of the UNFT, however, was not to give a voice to women, but to be the image of Bourguiba’s Tunisia on the world stage and in this, it was undoubtedly successful. In 1978 the United Nations awarded the UNFT its Prize in the Field of Human Rights, in recognition of its outstanding contribution to the promotion and protection of human rights, no minor achievement for the women’s wing of an authoritarian, repressive single-party state.

In Algeria, there was little chance that the UNFA would be the recipient of such an award. Like the UNFT, the UNFA membership was primarily composed of an Algiers-based educated elite. In fitting with Algeria’s self-image as the “Mecca” of Revolution and Third Worldism, UNFA foreign delegations visited Eastern Europe, Russia, Cuba, China, and Vietnam, in addition to countries all over Africa and the Middle East. Unlike the UNFT, the UNFA had little visibility and was accorded little political importance. Created in late 1962, its leadership was constantly changing, with numerous “first” congresses taking place. Press reports presented a litany of different women taking brief stints as head of the organization, including former members of the UFMA such as Mamia Chentouf, wartime icon Djamila Bouhired, and National Assembly deputy and war veteran Samia Salah Bey, among many others. The UNFA was publicly derided, even by senior figures within the single-party state. In Fall 1964, Mohand Said Mazouzi, member of the FLN Central Committee, described the UNFA as “inefficient and inoperative.”⁷⁵

In the first years of independence, the Algerian state preferred to send its famous female war veterans abroad, rather than more conventional UNFA delegations, as they were riding high on an international status as icons of liberation “by the people, for the people” (to quote an official FLN slogan). In November 1962, Djamila Bouhired and Zohra Drif toured various Arab countries – visiting Egypt, Kuwait, Syria, Morocco, and Tunisia – with the aim of collecting funds for the Algerian war orphans’ organisation Al-Jil al-Jadid (The New Generation). The Algerian press proudly declared: “No other woman in the Kuwait Emirate has ever received the official reception that Djamila Bouhired was given.”⁷⁶ On a two-week visit to China in March 1963, Bouhired had tea with Chairman Mao.⁷⁷ In March 1963, Djamila Boupacha was part of the first Algerian delegation to the United Kingdom. As for Boupacha, her role was described in the press as to study other women’s organizations while the male delegates visited factories.⁷⁸ She clearly understood that the reason why she was asked to participate was that “they needed a woman,” she accepted to take on this role “as a woman.”⁷⁹ Drif and Bouhired, however, seemed less willing to stay within the lines of their gendered public roles. On March 1, 1963, they called a press conference in their formal capacity presidents of Al-Jil al-Jadid, complaining that neither the Arab states nor the Algerian government had followed through with their promised donations.⁸⁰ After the first few years of independence, Bouhired withdrew from public life, apparently in order to avoid political manipulation. Zohra Drif, on the other hand, remained a figure in Algerian public life, and indeed played the equivalent role of “first lady” to Wassila when Habib Bourguiba and Houari Boumediene exchanged state visits in April and May 1972. In part, this was because her husband, Rabah Bitat, was one of independent Algeria’s most senior political figures. But the Tunisian press also highlighted Drif’s wartime credentials.⁸¹ In the Algerian context, then, the equivalent of Wassila’s Western-style “first lady” was a “mujahida” (female combatant of the anti-colonial struggle). This exemplified two very different political idioms, one of “Western modernity” and the other of “revolutionary change.”

In both Algeria and Tunisia, some women rejected joining the UNFA and the UNFT, respectively, because these organizations were deemed subservient to the single party state. This was the case, for example, of Nabiha Ben Miled, who refused to join the UNFT when the UFT was dissolved in 1963. Former UFT member Lucette Hadj Ali neither joined the UNFA nor did she seek to rebuild the UFT (although, arguably, she would not have been able to do so anyway, as the PCA was dissolved in late 1962). In her words: “We needed to rebuild on other foundations.”⁸² In the Algerian case, resistance to the UNFA by women who were part of an educated urban elite with political experience was not necessarily or only because the organization was part of the apparatus of an authoritarian system. It was also because “the women question” was not considered a legitimate frame of reference for such political debate. There was deep resistance to being categorized “as women.” Saliha Djeffal (b. 1943), who enjoyed a rapid ascension from local to national politics within the Jeunesse (Youth) FLN, and who became a senior figure in the FLN party structure, states that she did not join the UNFA: “Because I believe in one struggle without a split between men and women, I never wanted to join a women’s organization.”⁸³ The refusal of educated urban Algerian women who had participated in the war to be categorized “as women” started becoming apparent even before independence. In early 1962 Josette Ben Brahem (Josette Alia), a French journalist based in North Africa who worked for the Tunisian press and radio, interviewed an Algerian woman who had participated in the independence struggle and was living in exile in Tunisia. Her interviewee told her:

Today they are covering us in praise. They say: they were extraordinary, Algerian women! Marvelous! They bore arms, they planted bombs. But we want to continue the struggle. It’s important not to leave oneself to suffocate under flowers. When they come to tell us: tomorrow, you will take care of social matters, we will reply, no. We will be everywhere, alongside men, like before. There will not be a sector reserved for women, or organizations reserved for women, because this will be a step backwards. There are thousands of women, in prisons, whose consciousness has been raised. No-one will suffocate them.⁸⁴

The attitudes of these educated, politically engaged Algerian women towards the “women question” stand in noticeable contrast to those their Tunisian counterparts. “L’Action féminine” was a regular section in L’Action, edited by Léïla from 1955 onwards. Topics included education, gender mixing, and veiling as well as advice on housekeeping and child rearing. Bouzid’s work was considered important, taking up two full pages in every issue. On July 9, 1956, the first anniversary of her column, Léïla was given free rein on the front page. She was forthright and uncompromising, often inciting angry responses from letter writers, to whom she gave short shift. For example, in May 1956, an animated exchange was published between her and Tahar Bedoui, who wrote in a letter to the editor:

At Neo-Destour, young lady, we are taught to be modest and especially efficient … The Tunisian woman is anonymous; she is not obsessed by holding court at all cost. She wears unflattering trousers, the unaesthetic cap and she learns to march to the beat. Tomorrow she will be a teacher or a social worker. That is the true greatness of the Tunisian woman.⁸⁵

A letter published in defense of Léïla insisted that if Tahar wanted women to march to his beat he had better learn to become a good “househusband” so that women could be freed from the tasks of raising children and peeling potatoes. Moreover, if he wanted women to give up their “frivolity,” he needed to give up his card games in cafés.⁸⁶ In January 1956, Hicheri Mohamed Larbi from Tunis wrote to Léïla that “the good Muslim does not have the right to show off his young wife to everyone [especially] with a low-cut top and a V-neck jumper.”⁸⁷ Other letters suggested the economic benefits of veiling – not everyone has a wardrobe to wear outside.⁸⁸ Léïla’s response was that: “It is precisely because [women] are free to develop their sense of self [personnalité] and assume the responsibilities that they are emancipated.”⁸⁹ It is worth noting that Léïla’s conception of “personnalité” was not calqued on that of Bourguiba: for the president, a certain version of the emancipated Tunisian woman embodied national selfhood, but for Léïla, individual emancipation enabled personal choice. In Algerian official discourse, questions about clothing were considered trivial, or indeed, false problems.

The epistolary exchanges in “L’Action feminine” in 1956 did not find their echo in the FLN’s wartime organ, El Moudjahid (published in French and Arabic), in which representations of women fell into one of two categories: either victims of colonial barbarity or heroic embodiments of the new, armed Algerian woman. Instead, there is some parallel, in form, if not content, between the debates in “L’Action feminine” and the pages of the Arabic-language AOMA journal al-Basaʾir. In addition to articles supporting the FLN, in 1956 al-Basaʾir published letters from young educated women (likely educated in the schools of the AOMA) expressing their frustration – and at times desperation – at being forced to end their studies to marry. They were supported by articles from Zuhur Wunisi (Zhor Ounissi, b. 1937), who called on the readership to protect and defend women, as a true understanding of religious texts dictated they should.⁹⁰ It was thus a woman issued from the AOMA who argued that “the woman question” was neither resolved, as the dominant nationalist line claimed, nor in the process of being resolved. Having become an FLN activist during the war, Wunisi had a long political career after independence. In the 1960s she had been an outspoken critic of mixed marriages, which she considered an insult to the independence struggle and a threat to national character. As Minister for Social Affairs in the early 1980s, she was a staunch opponent of the Family Code.⁹¹

In the immediate aftermath of independence, however, the majority of educated urban women who had taken up arms sought to distance themselves from the language and tropes of “the woman question.” Often left leaning and not associated with the AOMA, they would have been against forced marriage, like Wunisi, although perhaps more open-minded about mixed marriage than she was, but also far less likely to engage in a gender-based analysis. Highlighting the specificities of the female experience risked undermining the struggle that had been waged to not be seen “just” as women but also as fighters on an equal footing. Talking about the war, Fadéla Mesli, a former nurse in the maquis who served as a deputy in the Constituent Assembly (1962–63) and the National Assembly (1977–82), and campaigned against the Family Code, states: “We led two revolutions, one against colonialism, the other against taboos, and I would say that the latter was even more difficult.” Nevertheless, having participated in both battles, in her post-independence political career Mesli did not want to be seen exclusively “as a woman.” In one debate, she recalls telling her fellow representatives: “‘I come here to debate all the problems, whatever they are. As I am here with you, you must not consider me a woman. I am a citizen of this country and all its problems are of interest to me. I don’t see you as men’ – imagining saying that to men! – ‘For me you are Algerians, full stop. There is no sex’.”⁹²

In August 1963 the daily newspaper Le Peuple ran a series of articles on the theme “Is there an Algerian woman problem?” with contributions from veterans Zohra Drif and Meriem Belmihoub, who were also deputies in the Constituent Assembly. “We cannot talk about the emancipation of women by talking about the veil and traditions, but by giving her work,” Belmihoub declared, while for Drif, “the liberation of both men and women is a question of access to education.” Drif called the “woman problem” a “myth,” while Belmihoub described it as “a false problem.”⁹³ This does not mean that women who were in the Constituent Assembly between 1962 and 1964 were not (also) interested in law; they were. Indeed, the few female deputies in the National Assembly (10 out of 196) were instrumental in passing the 1963 Khemisti law that raised the marriage age for women to sixteen and for men to eighteen. Female deputies also (unsuccessfully) argued against the 1963 Nationality Code, which defined citizenship along ethno-religious and patriarchal lines; nationality could only be inherited from fathers and grandfathers who had been subject to Muslim personal status jurisdiction. Apart from very rare occasions, however – on International Women’s Day, March 8, 1965, for example – female war veterans and other women did not seek to organize as women.⁹⁴

Le Peuple tentatively sought to generate some kind of debate about “the women question” through its “Chroniques féminines” (Women’s Pages). Articles discussing “the emancipation of the Algerian woman” were published alongside recipes, fashion, and baby hygiene advice. There were no articles attributed to female journalists in these pages, even though a number of journalists at the time were women. Mimi Maziz (b. 1938), a former member of the FF-FLN, says she refused to “take care of the recipes” as was requested of her when she joined Le Peuple.⁹⁵ Another female journalist who refused to be pigeonholed on the woman’s page was Zhor Zerari (1937–2013), a former member of the Algiers bomb network, who instead specialized in investigative journalism on industrial and agricultural issues.⁹⁶

In the immediate aftermath of independence, educated Algerian women thus rejected the terms of the debate of “the woman question,” insisting on social class and education level as more important factors than gender, refusing to be seen “as women” (promoting gender-neutral citizenship instead), and arguing that they had “snatched away” their rights rather than had them bestowed on them. Unlike Bourguiba’s “gift” to Tunisian women, no one handed anything to Algerian women, neither in official discourse nor in the words of women themselves. As Habiba Chami, who worked as a nurse in the maquis during the War of Independence, and who was involved in the UNFA in the post-independence period, put it: “If [women] don’t seize their rights like they seized independence alongside men, it’s not men who are going to give rights to them!”⁹⁷

In 1967 a scandal erupted when Fadéla M’Rabet published two critiques of the status and treatment of Algerian women in post-independence society, La Femme algérienne (The Algerian Woman) and Les Algériennes (Algerian Women) in 1964. The impetus for M’Rabet’s books had come from her work as a radio show host, and the extensive accounts she had accumulated of sexual harassment in the street and young women being forced to marry driven to suicide. In 1971, M’Rabet and her husband, French journalist Maurice Tarik Maschino, were forced into exile. She received very little support from other women who had participated in the independence struggle. In her view, this was partly to do with the fact that her contemporaries were overly attached to “Arabo-Islamic values,” having told her that her critiques were “too soon.” Imagining a solution to the problems she described that went beyond a “return to religious sources” was politically unimaginable. However, in M’Rabet’s view, her analyses were also rejected because “My generation felt humiliated when I said that we were oppressed women.”⁹⁸

Conclusion: Afterlives of “the Woman Question”

During the first decades of independence in both Algeria and Tunisia, authoritarian political systems left little space for autonomous women’s movements to emerge. Bourguiba’s “state feminism” set the terms of the debate in Tunisia, a benign patriarch bestowing emancipation upon women. It was thereby difficult for Tunisian feminists who were also critics of authoritarian rule to articulate “the woman question” on their own terms. Attempts to go beyond the Bourguibian framework laid them open to accusations of destabilizing the advances of the CSP. In Algeria, the dominant nationalist narrative sacralizes the self-abnegation of women who collectively participated in the independence struggle, and lays upon their shoulders the guardianship of “authentic” selfhood. This also works to shut down debate. Official discourse equates the struggle to throw off colonial rule with the struggle for equality for women, thus insisting that the “woman question” had been resolved with independence. Those women who questioned this truism, or the attachment to Muslim personal status law, risked being accused of inadequate patriotism and cultural authenticity. Party–state discourse, according to Monique Gadant, has been used to “muzzle, since independence, all women’s demands.”⁹⁹

Such is the conventional analysis. What this chapter has sought to do, by contrast, is take a different approach, examining “the woman question” not only as a collection of references, discussions, and conflicts that take different forms in Algeria and in Tunisia, but also as a language that acquires different degrees of political legitimacy, in terms of the acceptable conditions of discourse, and perceived efficacy, in terms of how political power may be acquired within the limitations of a single party state. The hypervisibility of “the Tunisian woman” upon independence and the invisibility of “the Algerian woman” shortly after independence tells as much, if not more, about elite women’s willingness to engage with the language and idioms of “the woman question” as it does about their actual engagement in political, economic, social, and cultural life. Part of the explanation for why women who were once so visible during the Algerian War of Independence “disappeared” after 1962 was their refusal to organize as women. At least until the 1970s, this was not seen as a legitimate framework for analysis or form of mobilization for women who had broken taboos to fight alongside men. In Tunisia, there was not the same level of resistance to organizing “as women” as there was in Algeria.

From the late 1970s the first autonomous women’s movements began to emerge in both Algeria and Tunisia. As a conservative family code loomed in Algeria, educated urban war veterans now chose to organize as women, making political demands as women alongside new generations who explicitly employed a feminist language.¹⁰⁰ In Tunisia, Bourguiba’s growing reliance on references to the Arab-Islamic heritage as a rhetorical mask for his authoritarianism and difficulty maintaining a political monopoly left space for Tunisian women who did not recognize themselves in his state feminism to re-appropriate Haddad. After all, the “Tahar Haddad” cultural club was the starting point for the emergence of the independent feminist movement in the late 1970s.¹⁰¹ Moreover, Haddad’s work came to be adopted to serve a wide variety of political arguments and purposes by Islamists and secularists alike.¹⁰² In Algeria, feminists also sought to reclaim the legacy of the AOMA from both state nationalist-religious hagiography as well as Salafist appropriation during the 1980s. In a 2008 interview, Mamia Chentouf states that she was able to study and have the political career she did because of her father, whom she describes an early follower of Ben Badis, “and the reformism of the ʿulama who advocated for girls’ education.”¹⁰³ At the same time, Chentouf also cites as a model Halima Benabed, one of the first Algerian women to successfully pursue university studies, describing how her mother would pray every night for her daughter to do the same. Chentouf does not mention that in the late 1940s Benabed was arguing that emancipation for the Muslim woman would only come though becoming more like European women, or how in 1960 Benabed attracted the hostility of the FLN, who accused her of being a colonial collaborator, when she became director of a Franco-Muslim lycée for girls in Algiers.¹⁰⁴ Such intellectual affinities endure because they are so flexible; they can be made to mean different things to different groups at different times or they can be adapted to co-exist with seemingly contradictory ideas and examples.

Challenged from multiple directions by parties and associations of a wide variety of political and religious tendencies, the autocratic Tunisian state and the authoritarian Algerian state sought to maintain control of the state-sponsored historical narrative of “the woman question,” in a matter that would serve their political ends both at home and abroad. Under Bin ʿAli in the 1990s, interest was revived in the role of women in the anti-colonial struggle, and the legacy of the CSP was held up as a bulwark against the Islamists.¹⁰⁵ As late as 2009, the U.S. Embassy in Tunis was describing Tunisia as both a “model” of women’s rights and an out-of-touch police state, as if women were not just as oppressed as men under such a repressive regime.¹⁰⁶ A regular theme of Abdelaziz Bouteflika’s (b. 1937) international women’s day speeches since his presidential election in 1999 has been the timelessness of Algerian women’s resistance: against colonial conquest and insidious interference in family life under colonial rule, by taking up arms during the independence struggle and stoically defending the integrity of the nation against terrorist violence in the 1990s.¹⁰⁷

Even if the language of “gifts bestowed” to Tunisian women and rights “seized” by Algerian women have somewhat constrained women activists, they have also provided a powerful political grammar through which to articulate demands for rights. The struggles of the “mujahidat” are a constant concern in feminist writing in Algeria since the 1980s, with these women often (re)cast as feminists or proto-feminists.¹⁰⁸ When it was suggested in Tunisia that the 2014 constitution refer to the “complementarity” between women and men rather than their “equality,” “bottom up” street demonstrations selectively mobilized the “top down” legacy of Bourguiba.¹⁰⁹ What all the examples in this chapter reveal is that at the heart of any analysis of ideas about “the woman question” there must also be an examination of how multiple genealogies of ideas are constructed and reconstructed by historical and contemporary actors at specific political, economic, and social conjunctures.

^*An early version of this chapter was published as “‘È la Rivoluzione che le proteggerà’: movimenti delle donne e “questione femminile’ in Algeria e Tunisia’” [“The revolution will protect them”: women’s movements and the “women question” in Algeria and Tunisia], trans. Andrea Brazzoduro and Liliana Ellena, Zapruder: Storie in Movimento 33 (2014): 41–56.

¹Mahieddin (2007).

²Key works on the intersections of nationalism, state-building, gender, and women include: Joseph (2000); Jayawardena (1986); Kandiyoti (1991); Abu-Lughod (1998b); Moghadam, 1993); Badran (1995); Baron (2005). Work on North Africa is not as well represented as work on the Middle East.

³Haddad (2007).

⁴Khayr al-Din Pasha is featured in the chapter on “The First Generation” in Hourani 1983 [1962]).

⁵One the main collections of the Centre for Research, Studies, Documentation and Information on Women (CREDIF), which opened in 1990 and is under the supervision of the Ministry of Women, Family and Childhood, is the Tahar Haddad library. In 2014, the then director of the CREDIF, Rachida Tlili Sellaouti, gave an interview in which she traced out a genealogy stretching from Mohamed Bayram and Ahmad Ibn Abi Diyaf to Haddad to Bourguiba, declaring that “the demand for modernity” has always been at the heart of Tunisian reformers’ preoccupations. Mouna Mtibaa, “Interview: “La modernité de la femme tunisenne a emerge des profondeurs-même de cette société”, La Revue du CREDIF (November 2014): 5–8, www.credif.org.tn/images/livres/2-Revue%20du%20CREDIF%2048%20FR.pdf.

⁶This is the view developed in Merad (1967). Ben Badis is institutionally present in Algeria in a similar way to Haddad in Tunisia – for example, lending his name to the University of Mostaghanem and the University Hospital of Constantine.

⁷Bakalti (1996: 57–59). On Qasim Amin and his legacy in contemporary debates about women and Islam in Egypt, see the chapter in this volume by Ellen McLarney.

⁸Lazreg (1994: 85).

⁹Lazreg (1994: 86).

¹⁰McMahon (2012). Both Amin and Rida were disciples of the grand mufti of Egypt, Muhammad ʿAbduh (1849–1905).

¹¹Cooper (2014).

¹²McDougall (2006: 230–33).

¹³El Moudjahid (23 March 1963).

¹⁴Weidemann (2016: 49, 58).

¹⁵Ibid. 49.

¹⁶Ibid. 50, 55.

¹⁷Tahar Sfar, “Le Droit Muslman et le Mouvement Féministe Moderne,” Léïla (March 1937). Reproduced in Boujmil (2007).

¹⁸The very limited educational opportunities open to women in the colonial period (in both countries, female illiteracy stood at around 95 percent) meant that those women who were called upon to embody “the Algerian woman” and “the Tunisian woman” from the 1930s to the 1960s were a small elite, most of whom were educated in the French language (and thus read and wrote in French), although some were bilingual (notably those close to Zaytuna and AOMA circles, who wrote and published in French and Arabic both at the time and subsequently). This chapter focuses mainly on French-language sources.

¹⁹My argument thus differs from Charrad (2001), who argues that the more centralized the state and the more developed its bureaucracy, the easier it is to undermine the authority of kin-based groupings and impose a family code that breaks with religious-based practices. For Hatem (1999), Charrad neglects discussion of possible sources of change or conflict beyond the state’s aim to keep social peace.

²⁰Examples of the abundant literature on citizenship in colonial Tunisia and Algeria include Lewis (2013); Lorcin (2006).

²¹Weil (2004: 355).

²²Clancy-Smith (2006). Muslim courts in Algeria, unlike those in Tunisia, gradually came under French control and French interpretations of Muslim law. See Christelow (2014).

²³This is a classic example of what Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (1993: 93) describes, in her discussion of the self-image of nineteenth century British colonists in India, as “white men … saving brown women from brown men.”

²⁴Lalami (2008).

²⁵Bakalti, La femme tunisienne, 36

²⁶Zayzafoon (2005: 101).

²⁷L’Etendard tunisien, 11 January 1929. These debates were reproduced in full after independence by newspaper L’Action on 22 October 1956 as the “Bourguiba-Nôomane debate.”

²⁸Bessis (2004: 103).

²⁹Lewis (2009).

³⁰Mahmoud Zarrouk, “La Femme Tunisenne à l’Action,” Léïla (December 1938).

³¹Interview with Lucette Hadj Ali (18 December 2005).

³²See the account of Nabiha Ben Miled in Kazdaghli (1993).

³³Harbi (1975: 66–67), cited in Sai (1984: 1).

³⁴L’Action (6 January 1958).

³⁵Ben Achour (2007).

³⁶Response of Ahmed Mestiri (then Tunisian ambassador to Algeria) to Révolution africaine (29 January 1966). Cited in Ben Achour (2007).

³⁷Radio speech by Bourguiba reproduced in La Presse de Tunisie (4 August 1956).

³⁸Series of articles signed “BSA” comparing the Moroccan and Tunisian family codes, Révolution africaine (29 January–4 February 1962).

³⁹Révolution africaine (11–19 February 1962). Although there are constant references in the 1960s and 1970 of the development of a new Algerian code, no details of these discussions were ever made public.

⁴⁰Weideman (2016: 55).

⁴¹L’Action (26 March 1956).

⁴²L’Action (3 September 1956).

⁴³L’Action (7 January 1957).

⁴⁴Bahia … ou ces femmes de Tunisie (Evelyne Rey, 1967).

⁴⁵Macmaster (2007: 95).

⁴⁶See Macmaster (2009); Sambron (2007); Seferdjeli (2004).

⁴⁷See Macmaster (2009), esp. chapter 3, “Unveiling: The ‘revolutionary journées’.”

⁴⁸Jours de France (11 August 1956).

⁴⁹L’Action (6 August 1956).

⁵⁰Fanon (1965: 39).

⁵¹Fanon (1965: 58).

⁵²Gamila al-Gazaʾiriyya (Djamila the Algerian) (Youssef Chahine, 1958).

⁵³Halimi and de Beauvoir (1962). A picture of Picasso painting this portrait, and a summary of the book, was published in La Presse de Tunisie on 22 March 1962.

⁵⁴Saadia-et-Lakhdar (1961).

⁵⁵Drif (1961).

⁵⁶Interview with Zohra Drif (11 June 2005).

⁵⁷Algerian National Archives: Fonds du GPRA/MAE/78: The First Afro-Asian Women’s Conference, Cairo 14–23 Jan 1961: Reports, speeches, resolutions [pamphlet].

⁵⁸“UNFT: premiers pas vers l’étranger,” L’Action (24 March 1958). According to this article, all the women’s unions present were supportive of the minute’s silence, apart from the Union of Turkish Women, who criticised the UNFT for “politicizing” the conference.

⁵⁹Officially supportive of the cause of independence, and a rear base for the political and armed wings of the FLN as well as the location of hundreds of thousands of Algerian refugees, Tunisia’s relationship with the FLN was rendered more complicated by Bourguiba’s desire to remain on good diplomatic terms with France.

⁶⁰For example, on the “Action féminine” pages in L’Action: “Pour l’Algérie” (11 June 1956), “La femme algérienne et la révolution,” which interviews an unnamed former leader of the UFMA (14 July 1956), reports on the arrest of the first three students in the maquis (6 August 1956); in the pages of Jeune Afrique (6–12 February 1962) – which L’Action was transformed into – an article on Djamila Boupacha.

⁶¹L’Action (17 December 1956).

⁶²L’Action (24 June 1957). See also 22 July 1957; 18 November 1957; 31 March 1958; 21 April 1958; 30 June 1958.

⁶³L’Action (22 July 1957).

⁶⁴Meynier (2002: 223–31). See, too, Seferdjeli (2012).

⁶⁵Macmaster (2012).

⁶⁶Jeune Afrique (12–19 March 1962).

⁶⁷Interview with Fadéla M’Rabet (1 November 2005).

⁶⁸Ben Bella (1964).

⁶⁹“Discours du Président Houari Boumediene à l’iauguration du congrès de l’UNFA,” UNFA Bulletin intérieur 4 (1966).

⁷⁰Radhia Haddad was herself sidelined in 1972. Haddad (1995).

⁷¹NARA RG 84: Classified General Records 1959–1961. 500–570.1. Box 16. UD: 3282. Embassy dispatch no. 591 from G. Lewis Jones, American Ambassador in Tunis to the Dept. of State, Washington.

⁷²NARA RG 59: Bureau of African Affairs, Country Files, Tunisia 1956–1963, Box 7 A1-3109. Memorandum from AFN John F Root to AF Mr. Tasca, Welcoming Session for Tunisian Women’s Group.

⁷³Waltz (1990: 21).

⁷⁴NARA RG 59: Central Decimal Files 872.46/8-1360. Field Message from John P. Nevins, Public Affairs Officer USIS Tunis to USIA Washington.

⁷⁵Le Peuple (6 November 1964).

⁷⁶Al Chaab (27 November 1962).

⁷⁷Révolution africaine (30 March, 6, 13, 20, 27 April, and 4 May 1963).

⁷⁸Alger Républicain (9 March 1963).

⁷⁹Interview with Djamila Boupacha (11 June 2005).

⁸⁰Al Chaab (2 March 1963). A few weeks later, the Al-Jil al-Jadid children’s homes – which housed 2,000 orphans in fifteen centers – were placed under the control of the Ministry of Mujahidin. Alger Republicain (19 March 1963).

⁸¹La Presse de Tunisie (21 May 1972).

⁸²Interview with Lucette Hadj Ali (18 December 2005).

⁸³Interview with Saliha Djeffal (21 June 2005).

⁸⁴Jeune Afrique (26 March–2 April 1962).

⁸⁵L’Action (14 May 1956).

⁸⁶L’Action (21 May 1956).

⁸⁷L’Action (23 January 1956).

⁸⁸L’Action (6 February 1956).

⁸⁹L’Action (23 January 1956).

⁹⁰Courrèye (2016: 367–71).

⁹¹Courrèye (2016: 375).

⁹²Interview with Fadéla Mesli (20 December 2005).

⁹³Le Peuple (4–5 and 22 August 1963).

⁹⁴Lévy (1997).

⁹⁵Interview with Mimi Maziz, “Spécial: 10 années de parution,” El Djazaïria (1980).

⁹⁶Interview with Zhor Zerari (21 December 2005).

⁹⁷Interview with Habiba Chami (1 June 2005).

⁹⁸Interview with Fadéla M’Rabet (1 November 2005).

⁹⁹Gadant (1995: 32).

¹⁰⁰Lalami (2012).

¹⁰¹Dwyer (1997: 479–65).

¹⁰²Weideman (2016: 49).

¹⁰³“Mamia Chentouf, Moudjahida, membre fondatrice de l’UNFA ‘Je me sens toujours aussi engagée,’” El Watan (15 May 2008).

¹⁰⁴Messaoudi (2011: 154).

¹⁰⁵Labidi (2006).

¹⁰⁶Secret section 01 of 05 Tunis 000492, “Troubled Tunisia: what should we do?” 17 July 2009, www.guardian.co.uk/world/us-embassy-cables-documents/217138.

¹⁰⁷El Moudjahid (8 March 2007).

¹⁰⁸Mortimer (2012); Salhi (2010); Seferdjeli (2012).

¹⁰⁹Charrad and Zarrugh (2014).