Strategic uses of women’s movements and the ‘woman question’ in post-independence Tunisia and Algeria

Natalya Vince

University of Portsmouth, UK

Since the regimes of Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali, Hosni Mubarak and Muammar Qaddafi fell one after the other in 2011, much media attention has focused on what the status and rights of women will be in the Tunisia, Egypt and Libya of free(r) elections and greater freedom of speech. In discussions of Tunisia, debates about what was ‘good’ and ‘not so bad’ about the old regime often centre around the roles and status of women. A 2009 cable from the US embassy in Tunis – made public in December 2010 as part of the Wikileaks documents – described Tunisia as both a ‘model’ on women’s rights and an out-of-touch police state. The cable added: ‘Tunisians intensely dislike, even hate, First Lady Leila Trabelsi and her family. In private, regime opponents mock her; even those close to the government express dismay at her reported behavio[u]r.’1 As is so often the case for dictators’ wives, the material excess and nepotism of Leila Trabelsi embodied for many the political illegitimacy of a corrupt and closed system of power.

At the same time, many commentators have held up Habib Bourguiba’s 1956 Personal Status Code (Code du statut personnel, CSP), maintained by Ben Ali – which abolished polygamy, replaced repudiation with judicial divorce and ended the practice of matrimonial tutors for women – as one of the achievements of 55 years of authoritarian rule. These commentators have questioned whether parties sanctioned by democratic vote – i.e. the moderate Islamist Ennahda – will defend the historic rights which the CSP accords to women in family law. Algeria experienced its anti-regime uprising in the late 1980s, complete with popular mocking of Chadli Benjedid, who was depicted as a puppet, manipulated – and emasculated – by his wife Halima Bourokba and her entourage.2 The party which capitalised the most on the introduction of multipartyism in Algeria in 1989 was the Islamic Salvation Front (Front islamique du salut, FIS), winning the first round of legislative elections in December 1991. In response, the Algerian army

1The author wishes to thank the organisers and participants of the Library of Congress and National History Center’s 2009 Decolonization seminar, where some of the research and ideas in this article began to be developed. Secret section 01 of 05 Tunis 000492, ‘Troubled Tunisia: what should we do?’, 17 July 2009: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/us-embassy-cables-documents/217138 2 N. Khadda and M. Gadant, ‘Mots et gestes de la révolte,’ Peuples Méditerranéens, 52-3 (1990), 19-24.

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cancelled the second round of elections and Algeria became embroiled in a decade of civil violence. As in Turkey and, since the ousting of President Mohamed Morsi on 3 July 2013, in Egypt, the Algerian army and its political apparatus was quick to emphasise to the outside world its progressive vision of women compared to that of its opponents. In his 2007 International Women’s Day speech, President Abdelaziz Bouteflika compared women who died during the civil violence of the 1990s to the female veterans – mujahidat – of the War of Independence (1954-62):

La femme algérienne a, au fil du temps, relevé bien des défis. De Lalla Fatma N’Soumer [nineteenth-century heroine of anti-colonial resistance] à Hassiba Boulmerka [middle distance runner who won gold for Algeria in the 1992 Olympics in Barcelona, and who was threatened by Islamists for her ‘unMuslim’ sporting attire], en passant par les vaillantes mujahidat et les femmes martyrs de la tragédie nationale [i.e. the 1990s], l’Algérienne a forcé le respect par son courage, sa résistance et son héroïsme.’3

Since the late nineteenth century, in North Africa, the Middle East and indeed around the world, the image, roles and rights of women have been used to denounce political and social decadence, reinforce one’s own legitimacy and re-imagine the nation.4 Debates about women are rarely ‘just’ about women. Instead, the ‘woman question’ is often used as a location for arguments about the broader political, economic, social and cultural direction of nation-states. In dictatorial or authoritarian regimes, ‘culture’ can provide a space for coded political debate that cannot take place openly.

These are outward facing debates as much as internal discussions. Gendered representations are often motivated by a state’s desire to position itself in relation to international ‘others’ – i.e. neighbouring states, dominant global players and international organisations. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s description of the self-image of nineteenth-century British colonial powers in India – ‘white men […] saving brown women from brown men’5 – continues to resonate in the almost obsessional interest of many Western governments, institutions and media outlets in oppressed ‘native’ women. Both ‘brown men’ – and women – have resisted such stereotypes and instrumentalised them to further their own political ends. Ennahda is neither the first, nor will it be the last, political party, movement or state accused of having a double discourse on women, one aimed at its local base, the other for American and European consumption. As the pre-2011 Tunisian case shows, being seen to conform to a

3 El Moudjahid (8 Mar. 2007)4 S. Joseph (ed.) Gender and Citizenship in the Middle East (New York: Syracuse University Press, 2000), p. 6.5 G. C. Spivak, ‘Can the subaltern speak?’, in L. Chrisman and P. Williams (eds), Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory: A Reader, (New York, London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1993), p. 93.

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tick sheet of measures of ‘women’s emancipation’ can also be a useful smokescreen to distract attention away from the fact that neither men nor women are free in a dictatorship.

Comparing Tunisia and Algeria is useful way to begin to think about the strategic uses of such discourses because they are generally depicted as having contrasting post-colonial outcomes for women. In the most schematising depictions, Tunisian ‘emancipation’ of women after independence in 1956 is often pitched against post-1962 Algerian ‘betrayal’ of women who had fought alongside men against French colonial rule. This view of Algerian women betrayed particularly emerged from the 1980s onwards, when – 22 years after independence – Algeria finally legislated on family law. Between 1962 and 1984, family law in Algeria had been a confused mixture of the French civil code (and more precisely the 1959 marriage law, closely modelled on the Tunisian CSP, which brought Muslim women under civil rather than religious jurisdiction in colonial Algeria), Muslim law and individual judges’ interpretations. Then in 1984, as conservative religious views held increasing national and transnational sway, the National Assembly adopted a family code which institutionalised gender inequality, legally obliging women to obey their husbands, fixing in law repudiation and polygamy for men and reducing the grounds upon which women could divorce. The Code was subject to limited modifications in 2005.

At the same time, comparing female literacy and fertility rates – generally considered key markers in evaluating the status and rights of women in societies at macro level – we see that Algeria and Tunisia today are fairly similar. In their influential 2007 publication Le Rendez-vous des civilisations, demographer Youssef Courbage and historian and anthropologist Emmanuel Todd record female literacy as 86 per cent in Algeria and 92 per cent in Tunisia, and the fertility rate as 2.57 per cent in Algeria and 2.02 per cent in Tunisia: 6 a dramatic shift from the early years of independence which were characterised by soaring birth rates and single-figure female literacy rates. Moreover, it is a truism that women do not automatically benefit from rights just because they exist in law. A study in the early 1980s of attitudes towards Tunisian women revealed that 51 per cent of women surveyed were unaware of the existence of the CSP.7

In a context where the impact on the ground of lofty official pronouncements about women is often limited, it becomes even more important to examine the strategic uses which discourses about women serve, beyond the stated aims of ‘emancipation’, ‘rediscovering an authentic past’, ‘entering into modernity’, etc. Using the example of the immediate post-independence years in Tunisia and Algeria, this article seeks to explore how ‘the woman question’ was

6 Y. Courbage and E. Todd, Le rendez-vous des civilisations (Paris: Seuil, 2007), p. 164.7 M. Zamiti-Horchani, ‘Les Tunisiennes, leurs droits et l’idée qu’on s’en fait’, Peuples Méditerranéens, 22-23 (1983), 181-192; p. 191.

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articulated in public space and how an (elite) group of women engaged with this discourse and the women’s mass movements established to promote it. It seeks to underline the importance of locating debates about the roles and rights of women within both a wider domestic context of political legitimisation and a broader international context of Cold War diplomacy, in which women were both deployed as representatives of newly independent states, and courted by the leaders of the capitalist and communist blocs.

When ‘women’ is used an ideological concept to define, debate or represent the nation, women’s heterogeneous lives, aspirations and frames of reference are often obscured. This article cannot claim to recover these voices. However, by reflecting on how a small minority of educated women, with socio-economic or historical capital, chose to position themselves in relation to the ‘woman question’ and women’s movements, this article questions the commonly held idea that Algerian women disappeared from public space whilst Tunisian women become ever more visible.

The ‘women question’ and redefining the self

Describing the first youth festival, celebrated two days after Tunisian independence on 20 March 1956, daily newspaper L’Action emphasised the virility of the women of the neo-Destour party which had campaigned for independence. Women were depicted as wearing identical military uniforms and caps, marching alongside men:

Et tant pis pour les dictons… Vous savez… « Le Marocain est un lion. L’Algérien est un homme. Le Tunisien… une femme ! » Au défilé du 21 mars au soir les femmes elles-mêmes étaient des hommes ! Si nous osons l’écrire. Puisque les jeunes destouriennes défilaient avec les compagnons, comme eux vêtues de l’uniforme viril et sévère, coiffées de la même casquette à visière tournée vers l’Occident.8

Such essentialising national stereotypes about macho Algerian men and emasculating Tunisian women remain common currency in both countries today and it is striking that the reproduction this apparently popular saying dates from March 1956 – that is to say, before the mythical date of 13 August 1956, when Bourguiba introduced the new CSP. For Tunisian weekly Jeune Afrique, the CSP was simply further proof that Tunisia was in the avant-garde. In March 1962, at the very moment that the representatives of the Algerian National Liberation Front (Front de libération nationale, FLN) – otherwise steadfastly supported in the columns of Jeune Afrique – were signing the peace accords which would pave the way for independence, the newspaper argued that on the women question,

8 L’Action (26 Mar. 1956)

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Algerians were behind, Egyptians were not going very fast and Tunisians were running forward.9

Yet newly independent Algeria also saw itself as at the avant-garde, a Third World leader with a political, social and cultural project more radical than that of its Tunisian neighbour, which sought to maintain good relations with the West. Fadéla M’Rabet was a radio presenter in post-independence Algeria until her feminist critiques of the post-independence state prompted her exile in 1971. Speaking in 2005, she described the euphoria of Algeria in 1962: ‘Algeria was going to be the model for the world! At the radio there was a revolutionary spirit.’10 During the War of Independence, the FLN had actively used women’s participation in the anti-colonial struggle to combat the French government’s depiction of the nationalist struggle as a minority movement led by religious fanatics. Writing in the middle of the war, Martiniquais writer and FLN supporter Frantz Fanon argued:

C’est que la société algérienne se révèle n’être pas la société sans femme que l’on avait si bien décrite. Côte à côte avec nous, nos soeurs bousculent un peu plus le dispositif ennemi et liquident définitivement les vieilles mystifications.11

How then, do we arrive at the contemporary vision that post-colonial Tunisia was relatively ‘good’ for women, and post-colonial Algeria relatively ‘bad’? In a comparative study of family codes in the Maghreb, Mounira Charrad insists on the importance of a state’s ability to bypass or impose itself upon existing kin structures. In Tunisia, she argues, bureaucratic centralisation predated, and then was reinforced by, French colonialism, whereas in Algeria, kin groupings were fragmented but not dissolved, explaining the hiatus between independence and the 1984 Family Code, during which time competing ideological tendencies counter-balanced each other.12 Charrad’s theory has proved influential, but her emphasis on the determining role of kin structures is not without its critics: Mervat Hatem argues that such a theory neglects any discussion of possible sources of change or conflict beyond the state aim to keep social peace.13

In explaining the apparently contrasting post-independence outcomes for women and family law in Tunisia and Algeria, we might also look to the different

9 Jeune Afrique (12-19 Mar. 1962)10 Interview with Fadéla M’Rabet (1 Nov. 2005)11 F. Fanon, L’An V de la Révolution algérienne (Paris: La Découverte, 2001 [1959]), p. 55. 12 M. Charrad, States and Women’s Rights: The Making of Post-Colonial Tunisia, Algeria and Morocco (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001). 13 M. Hatem, ‘Modernisation, the State and the Family in Middle East Women’s Studies’ in M. Meriwether and J. Tucker, A Social History of Women and Gender in the Modern Middle East (Colorado: Westview Press, 1999), pp. 63-87.

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intellectual history of each country, beyond the euphoric – not to say propagandistic – statements of the Tunisian and Algerian press. In Tunisia, unlike in Algeria, there was an established history of male advocates of women’s rights and a reformist movement pre-dating colonial rule. As early as 1930, Tahar Haddad published Notre femme dans la charia et la société, criticising forced marriage, veiling, seclusion, polygamy and repudiation. His arguments received a hostile reception from more conservative Tunisians, but they began a debate. The reaction of one of the leading figures of Algerian cultural nationalism in the 1930s, ‘ulama’ Abdelhamid Ben Badis (who, like Haddad has studied at the famous Al-Zaytuna mosque and university in Tunis) was, however, unequivocal: he accused Haddad of ‘francisation’ and ‘de-islamisation’.14

The development of these different intellectual histories was intimately linked to the different nature of colonial rule in each country. Algeria, invaded in 1830, had the unique position in the French empire of being considered not a colony, but, from 1848 onwards, three departments of France. In contrast, Tunisia was colonised in 1881 and was a protectorate, leaving some degree of autonomy to autochthonous rulers. The 14 July 1865 senatus consulate declared that the indigenous Muslim in Algeria was French, and thus subject to military service and able to join the civil service, but that he would continue to be ruled by the Muslim personal status unless he renounced this, in which case he would become a full French citizen. In short, what the French government considered to be the distinctive features of Muslim family law – and in particular the way it regulated relations between men and women in terms of inheritance (male children inherit two parts to female descendants’ one part), marriage (polygamy) and divorce (repudiation) – was what made Muslim men ‘inassimilable’ into the French nation. In practice, this was a convenient way for a minority to politically dominate a numerical majority, in what was meant to be an integral part of French territory. In the post-independence period, the political importance of ‘being Muslim’, and ‘rediscovering’ an ‘authentic’ Algerian collective identity (personnalité in French; shakhsiyya in Arabic) in many ways might be traced back to 1865: in a colony where one’s political rights, economic security and cultural identity were constantly challenged, it was the distinctive marker of what made you ‘not French’.

Crucial to explaining why Tunisia got the CSP in 1956 and Algeria a legislative void in family law until 1984 is where the ‘women question’ was located at that moment within a broader landscape of competing political forces. In the immediate aftermath of independence, Bourguiba was used his immense historical and moral legitimacy to enact reforms which were controversial and potentially unpopular. But his motivations were not only because he saw the reformulation of the status of women and the family as central to his vision of

14 S. Bakalti, La Femme tunisienne au temps de la colonization 1881-1956 (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1996), pp. 57-59.

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independent Tunisia. Although officially endorsed by senior religious figures, the CSP was also intended to undercut the political influence of religious leaders at the Zaytuna, historically an influential centre of contestation to the regime in place and sympathetic to Bourguiba’s old ally and new political rival Salah Ben Youssef. In contrast, Algeria’s first president, Ahmed Ben Bella, struggled to assert an alternative to the vision of Algerian Arabo-Islamic identity promoted by the ‘ulama’. Houari Boumediene, who overthrew Ben Bella in a coup on 19 June 1965, is often seen as even more closely tied to the vision of cultural identity promoted by the ‘ulama’.

Yet this search for authenticity was not just an Algerian pursuit. As Tunisian writer Hélé Béji, the daughter of Bourguiba minister Mondher Ben Ammar, wrote in 1982: ‘Nous revendiquons notre identité comme une jeunesse contre l’injure du temps.’15 Béji’s phrase reminds us that despite the structural differences in Algerian and Tunisian colonial and intellectual history, and despite their competing claims to represent an unrivalled avant-garde, there was much in common in the strategies which post-independence leaders used to justify their visions of new society, even though some of the end results envisaged could be quite different. Equally some of the proclaimed end goals could be same, whilst the means to achieve them diverged.

For example, the left-leaning Algerian weekly Révolution africaine described the banning of polygamy in the Tunisian CSP as ‘choquant, voir provoquant’.16 Yet this was not because the author was against ending the practice. After all – as it had been argued in Tunisia – the Qur’an states that a man can only take more than one wife if he can treat them all equally, which is impossible in practice. But, argues Révolution africaine, ‘n’aurait-on pas pu obtenir le même résultat par une présentation moins lapidaire ou, mieux encore, par un moyen détourné’, for example by making it a condition that the bride be asked if she would accept a second wife by the registrar before she took her vows: ‘Sa réponse, à moins de contraints morales, se devine aisément. Ainsi on aurait obtenu une interdiction de fait de la polygamie sans qu’il y ait même une apparence formelle de contradiction avec les préceptes charaïques.’17

In both countries, innovation in the roles and rights of women was presented as a return to ante- and anti-colonial roots. Each of the changes to family law in the CSP was justified with a quotation from the Qur’an as well as references to the Tunisian nineteenth-century tradition of engaging with religious reform: ‘L’Islam a libéré l’esprit et recommandé à l’homme de réfléchir sur les lois religieuses afin de les adapter à l’évolution humaine,’ argued

15 H. Béji, Désenchantement national: essai sur la décolonisation (Paris: Maspero, 1982), p. 104. 16 Révolution africaine (29 Jan.-4 Feb. 1962)17 Révolution africaine (29 Jan.-4 Feb. 1962)

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Bourguiba in a radio speech.18 Whilst arguing against ‘dépersonnalisation’ (i.e. losing one’s collective identity), ‘imitation’ (of ‘foreign’ models) and insisting on the importance of ‘notre personnalité arabo-islamique’, Boumediene also described outdated customs as a deviation from Islam which need to be got rid of. 19

Linked to this idea of a return to ‘true’ roots was the argument that strategies of cultural resistance employed during colonial rule were no longer necessary. The veil, which Bourguiba had vigorously defended in 1929,20 was frequently referred to by the president after 1956 as a ‘misérable chiffon’, and women were encouraged to unveil as part of the ‘modernisation’ of Tunisia: ‘à l’exemple de la femme occidentale et même de l’Egyptienne’.21 Algerian official discourse did not use the Western woman as a model, nor were women explicitly told to unveil, but, it was argued, as socialist construction progressed, the veil would fall into disuse. It is worth pointing out that references to the veil in the late 1950s and 1960s were references to the Algerian hayk or Tunisian safsari. Given that this is loose cloth which has to be held around the body with one hand, from a practical point of view, this would make it difficult to accomplish workplace tasks. This is not to say that arguments against veiling in the 1960s were purely practical, but they were not only ideological, and particularly in the Algerian case they tended to be presented in the terms of ‘the veil gets in the way of work’, both literally and psychologically. Speaking in 1963, Ben Bella demanded:

Que le problème de la femme soit posé une fois pour toutes. Libérez vos femmes pour qu’elles prennent leurs responsabilités; en laissant les femmes prisonnières, c’est la moitié de notre peuple, de notre pays qui est paralysé. Ne croyez pas que le voile les protège. C’est la Révolution qui les protegèra.22

In a 1972 speech, Boumediene declared:

‘Il est temps pour la femme algérienne de reprendre sérieusement et activement son role positif dans l’édification de notre pays, hier exposé aux multiples tentatives infernales visant à sa deformation, son alienation et à sa dépersonnalisation.’23

Both of these speeches, aimed at encouraging men to let ‘their’ women come out to work in order to participate in economic construction, insisted that there was

18 La Presse de Tunisie (4 Aug. 1956)19 Discours du Président Houari Boumediene l’inauguration du congrès de l’UNFA, UNFA, Bulletin intérieur, 4 (1966)20 L’Etendard tunisien (11 Jan. 1929)21 L’Action (6 Jan. 1958)22 Les Discours du Président Ben Bella année 1963 au premier trimestre 1964 (Annaba, Direction de la documentation et des Publications: 1964), pp. 72-74. 23 ‘Salut du frère Boumediene aux femmes algériennes’, Reproduced in Al Djaziairia (1972)

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no longer the need to hide women from the colonial gaze. Equally, men were reassured that the moral purity of ‘their’ women was safe in the hands of the revolutionary state and society. To a certain extent, this was a convenient accommodation between a conservative vision of morality (seeking to separate the sexes) and a revolutionary moral code (which left no space for any activity outside of national construction). This was somewhat different from Bourguiba’s demand that women reveal themselves as ‘modern’, but the aim was broadly the same: bring women into the public sphere to build the state and reimagine a new society which appeared both forward-looking and firmly rooted in an ‘authentic past’.

Presents bestowed, rights snatched away: women’s use of political language

Ultimately, Bourguiba’s ‘emancipation’ was a paternalistic one. He depicted himself as a kindly father guiding women to enlightenment. ‘L’émancipation de la femme tunisienne n’est pas un résultat de sa lutte. La femme tunisienne a assisté, impassible et résignée, à l’émancipation de sa sœur égyptienne. […] Nous avons rien fait pour l’avoir, hélas!’ declared one female writer in L’Action in September 1956.24 Indeed, the CSP was often presented as a ‘cadeau’ to Tunisian women. In a speech made in January 1957, Bourguiba patronisingly informed his audience: ‘La femme ne pourra pas toujours se retrancher à tout moment derrière « Si l’Habib a dit ».’25

This is a political language which is very different to that in Algeria. In the official discourse on women and gender in Algeria, just as the Algerian people had ‘arraché’ (seized) their rights from intransigent French colonial rulers, so women had the responsibility to seize their status and rights, it was implied, from recalcitrant men. This was not just a top-down discourse to remove state responsibility. Instead, the language of rights seized impregnates the way in which a number of women – notably those of the wartime generation – talk about women’s rights today. As Habiba Chami, who was a nurse in the rural guerilla during the War of Independence and a senior figure in the National Union of Algerian Women (Union nationale des femmes algériennes, UNFA) in the post-independence period, put it in a 2005 interview: ‘Si [les femmes] n’arrachent pas leurs droits, comme elles ont arraché l’Indépendance à côté de l’homme, c’est pas les hommes qui vont les donner.’26

Moreover, in the Algerian context, there was often significant resistance amongst women armed with the educational and historical capital which enabled them to participate in public debate to accept that ‘the woman question’

24 L’Action (3 Sept. 1956)25 L’Action (7 Jan. 1957)26 Interview with Habiba Chami (1 June 2005)

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was a legitimate frame of reference of discussion. In August 1963, daily newspaper Le Peuple ran a series of articles on the theme ‘Y a-t-il un problème de la femme algérienne?’ The two main contributors were Zohra Drif and Meriem Belmihoub. Both women were amongst the most well known veterans of the War of Independence, Drif was arrested alongside Yacef Saadi during the 1957 ‘Battle of Algiers’, Belmihoub was one of the first women arrested in the rural guerrilla. In 1963, both were deputies in the Constituent National Assembly. For Belmihoub: ‘Il ne faut pas parler de l’émancipation de la femme en parlant du voile, des traditions, mais en lui donnant du travail.’ For Drif: ‘la libération de l’homme et la femme est cette question de scolarisation.’ Drif called the ‘woman problem’ a ‘un mythe’ and for Belmihoub it was ‘un faux problème’. 27

Le Peuple nevertheless tentatively sought to generate some kind of debate about ‘the women question’ through its ‘Chroniques féminines’ page. Articles discussing ‘the emancipation of the Algerian woman’ were published alongside recipes, fashion and baby hygiene advice. There were no articles credited to female journalists on these pages, although a small number of journalists at the time were women. Mimi Maziz, a former member of the FLN in mainland France, point blank refused to ‘s’occup[er] des recettes de cuisine’ as requested when she joined Le Peuple.28 Another female journalist who refused to be reduced to the woman’s page Zhor Zerari, a former member of the Algiers bomb network, who specialised in investigative journalism on industrial and agricultural issues, and in particular assessing the impact of Algeria’s ‘socialist path’ on these sectors. Speaking in 2005, Zhor Zerari said she never really felt implicated in a gender specific struggle: ‘Il faut se battre pour la citoyenneté. Une fois que la femme est citoyenne, beaucoup des problèmes disparaissent.’29

These journalists’ attitudes towards the ‘women question’ are in notable contrast to the place of the women question, and female journalists, in the Tunisian press. L’Action féminine was a regular section in L’Action, edited by Dorra Bouzid (under pseudonym of Léïla) from 1955 onwards. Education, mixing, veiling as well as advice on housekeeping and child rearing were amongst the topics. Bouzid’s work was considered important. It took up two pages in the journal and on 9 July 1956, ‘Léïla’ was given front page coverage to mark the first anniversary of her rubrique.

Léïla was forthright and uncompromising, often inciting angry responses from letter writers. For example, in May 1956 she and her readers became involved in an animated exchange with letter writer Tahar Bedoui. He wrote:

27 Le Peuple (4-5 and 22 Aug. 1963)28 Interview with Mimi Maziz, ‘Spécial: 10 années de parution’, El Djazaïria (1980)29 Interview with Zhor Zerari (21 Dec. 2005)

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Chez nous au Néo-Destour Mademoiselle on apprend à être modeste et surtout efficace. […] La femme tunisienne est anonyme; elle n’a pas la manie de présider, présider à tout prix. Elle porte le pantalon disgracieux, la casquette inesthétique et apprendre à marcher au pas. Demain elle sera l’éducatrice ou l’assistante sociale. C’est là la vraie grandeur de la femme tunisienne.30

A letter published in defense of Léïla insisted that if Tahar wanted women to march to the beat he better quickly learn to become a good househusband to free women up from the tasks of raising children and peeling potatoes. Moreover, it was argued, he wanted women to give up frivolity he needed to give up his card games in cafes.31

In Algeria, women of a similar level of education to that of Dorra Bouzid, and who, like her, had professional careers, were much more likely to adhere to Tahar Bedoui’s austere vision of asexual revolutionary seriousness. Fadéla Mesli, a former nurse in the rural guerilla, National Assembly deputy 1962-3 and 1977-82 and activist in local politics tells an anecdote in which male participants at a local party meeting asked her to leave out of ‘respect’ when they were discussing a ‘question des moeurs’. She says that she retorted: ‘Comme je suis avec vous, il faut pas me considérer comme une femme. Je suis citoyen [sic.] de ce pays, et tous ses problèmes me concernent. Je vous vois pas comme des hommes.’ Mesli says – to her pleasant surprise – the men present respected the fact that she stood her ground and concludes: ‘C’est pas des lois qui peuvent faire imposer la femme, la femme doit s’imposer sur le terrain. Il faut des lois, mais on peut s’imposer par le travail, le sérieux, le comportement.’32 Insisting being gender-neutral citizens, rather than women, was also a way for this minority of Algerian women in the public sphere to avoid being saturated by their gender, as official discourse was wont to do.

The refusal of these Algerian women to be categorised ‘as women’ is evoked in an article by Josette Ben Brahem (Josette Alia), a French journalist based in North Africa who worked for the Tunisian press and radio in the 1950s and 1960s. She interviewed an Algerian women who had participated in the independence struggle and was living in exile in Tunisia just before independence was declared. Ben Brahem describes her interviewee as stating:

«  Aujourd’hui on nous couvre de louages. On dit de nous : elles ont été extraordinaires, les Algériennes ! Merveilleuses ! Elles ont porté les armes, déposé les bombes. Mais nous, nous voulons continuer cette lutte. Ne pas se laisser étouffer sous les fleurs, c’est important. Et quand on vient nous dire : demain vous aurez à vous occuper du domaine social,

30 L’Action (14 May 1956)31 L’Action (21 May 1956)32 Interview with Fadéla Mesli (20 Dec. 2005)

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nous devrons répondre non. Nous serons partout à côté des hommes, comme avant. Il n’y aura pas un domaine réservé aux femmes, ni des organisations réservées aux femmes, parce que ce serait un retour en arrière. Elles sont des milliers de femmes, dans les prisons, qui ont pris conscience d’elles-mêmes. Personne ne les étouffera. »33

Many historians would argue that many Algerian women were ‘suffocated’ after independence, but what is of particular interest here is the way in which the interviewee rejects ‘women’s organisations’: they are not seen as a means of action, but rather as a backwards step to gender separation after having fought alongside men.

Women on the move and women’s movements

In the early years of independence in both countries, women were an integral part of foreign delegations. The foreign visits which these women carried out were part of a series of signposts and references sent out to the rest of the world, positioning new nation-states within (or across) the ideological divisions of Cold War politics. Sometimes women were part of mixed delegations. In March 1963, Djamila Boupacha, a former member of the Algiers bomb network, whose torture in the hands of the French army created an international scandal, was part of the first Algerian delegation to the United Kingdom. After divorcing his first (French) wife, Bourguiba’s second wife Wassila Ben Ammar frequently accompanied him. Algeria – unlike many other North African and Arab states in this period – resisted the model of the ‘first lady’. Ben Bella was unmarried during his presidency. Boumediene married his wife Anissa in discrete ceremony in 1973, and when Bourguiba paid a state visit to Tunisia in 1972, it was the wives of other senior politicians, and notably war veteran Zohra Drif (also wife of senior figure Rabah Bitat), who were called upon to entertain Wassila.

On other occasions, women were sent on their own to conduct diplomatic visits. In February 1961, Bourguiba’s niece Saida Sassi, who in 1958 alone visited West Germany, Turkey, Morocco, Lebanon and Syria, was a guest at the inauguration of President Kennedy. In November 1962, Djamila Bouhired – another former member of the bomb network whose condamnation to death had provoked worldwide consernation, making her a heroine of the Arab world and Third World and the subject of a film by Egyptian director Youssef Chahine – went on an tour of the Middle East with the aim of collecting funds for the Algerian war orphans’ organisation Al-Jil al-Jadid (The New Generation). Egypt, Kuwait, Syria, Morocco and Tunisia were all part of her whistle-stop tour. A two-week visit to China in March 1963 saw Bouhired taking tea with Mao.

On yet other occasions, women travelled abroad as part of delegations of the National Union of Algerian Women (UNFA) or UNFT (Union nationale des

33 Jeune Afrique (26 Mar. - 2 Apr. 1962)

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femmes tunisiennes, UNFT). UNFA foreign delegations took its leaders to Eastern Europe, Russia, Cuba, China, Vietnam, as well as other African states and the Middle East. The UNFT was particularly courted by the Americans: Tunisia (unlike Algeria) was seen during this period as an all-too-rare potential Arab ally, opposed to Nasser and conciliatory towards Israel. Building links with women so closely related – as we will see, both literally and organisationally – to Bourguiba was one more way of strengthening ties. In May 1962, the visit of 15 UNFT members to Washington was described as of ‘intrinsic political importance’ by the Americans.34

It is worth pointing out that in the early years of independence the UNFA was deployed less for foreign delegations than the UNFT, the Algerian state preferring its celebrated female war veterans. However, after these first few years, the UNFA’s foreign role became more like that of the UNFT as ‘famous wartime women’ became less likely to be deployed. In part at least, this seems to have been the result of some of these women’s resistance to being used as a symbol of political legitimacy, reproducing a pre-formatted message. On the one hand, when I asked Boupacha how she came to participate in the official delegation to the UK, she replied ‘ils avait besoin d’une femme’,35 indicating that she was called upon to fulfil a gendered role and she felt that she had a responsibility to serve. On the other hand, Drif and Bouhired appeared keener to give substance to their symbolic roles. On 1 March 1963, they called a press conference as presidents of Al-Jil al-Jadid, during which they complained that neither the Arab states nor the Algerian government had lived up to their donation promises.36 A few weeks later, the Al-Jil al-Jadid children’s homes – which housed 2,000 orphans in fifteen centres – were placed under the control of the Ministry of Mujahidin.37 It is not clear if this decision was a coincidence of timing, a means to better fund these centres in response to criticisms, or a way to remove influence from two ‘ambassadors’ going beyond their role and complaining to outsiders. After the first few years of independence, Bouhired withdrew from public life, seemingly a move to avoid political manipulation of her image.

Back at home, women’s mass organisations were meant to represent women’s interests and make women more effective members of society by promoting literacy and education, family planning and women’s work. The UNFA was the newest, the least organised, the least influential and the least autonomous branch of the FLN’s mass organisation apparatus. Its leadership was

34 Memorandum from AFN John F Root to AF Mr Tasca, Welcoming Session for Tunisian Women’s Group. NARA RG 59 Bureau of African Affairs, Country Files, Tunisia 1956-1963, Box 7 A1-3109.35 Interview with Djamila Boupacha (11 June 2005)36 Al Chaab (2 Mar. 1963)37 Alger Republicain (19 Mar. 1963)

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constantly changing, with numerous ‘first congresses’ taking place. Press reports continually present different women at the head of the organisation, including former members of the Union of Muslim Women of Algeria (Union des femmes musulmanes d’Algérie, UFMA, founded in 1947) Fatima Benosmane, Mamia Chentouf and Nefissa Lalliam, as well as Djamila Bouhired, National Assembly deputy and war veteran Samia Salah Bey, Farida Khadir, Nadra Saïm, Mme Ghani and Fatima Zohra Arabdiou, amongst others. The UNFA was publicly derided even by senior figures within the single party state. In autumn 1964, Mohand Said Mazouzi, member of the FLN Central Committee, described the UNFA as ‘inéfficace and inopérante’,38 and in his 1966 International Women’s Day speech Boumediene declared that: ‘l’UNFA n’a joué aucun rôle depuis l’indépendance et ne peut avoir d’efficacité dans la libération de la femme si son action ne s’étend pas à la campagne.’39

In contrast, the UNFT, created in January 1956, had significant political backing, as well as a solid lineage back to the Muslim Union of Tunisian Women (Union musulmane des femmes de Tunisie, UMFT) founded in 1936. The closeness of the UNFT to the president was both the result of, and was reinforced by, family ties. Senior figures in the UNFT included Neila Ben Ammar, Wassila Bourguiba’s sister; Samia Ben Ammar, Bourguiba’s sister-in-law and wife of the Secretrary of State for Public Health and Social Affairs Mondher Ben Ammar; Bourguiba’s niece Saida Sassi and Rahia Haddad, longstanding president of the UNFT – also a Ben Ammar. UNFT leaders often accompanied the president, giving ‘pep talks’ to women at public meetings and ‘lobbying’ Bourguiba – a practice described by a US embassy report as a ‘mise-en-scène’.40

In 1978 the United Nations awarded the UNFA its Prize in the Field of Human Rights, in recognition of its outstanding contribution to the promotion and protection of human rights. Yet in academic analyses, the UNFT is often described as failing to effectively mobilise women outside of the social elite of Tunis.41 Moreover, one US 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’.42

38 Le Peuple (6 Nov. 1964); Alger ce soir (20 Feb. 1965)39 Révolution africaine (12 Mar. 1966)40 Embassy dispatch no. 591 from G. Lewis Jones, American Ambassador in Tunis to the Dept. of State, Washington. NARA RG 84: Classified General Records 1959-1961. 500-570.1. Box 16. UD: 328241 S. E. Waltz, ‘Another View of Feminine Networks: Tunisian Women and the Development of Political Efficacity’, International Journal of Middle East Studies, 22: 1 (1990), 21-36; p. 21.42 Field Message from John P. Nevins, Public Affairs Officer USIS Tunis to USIA Washington. NARA RG 59 Central Decimal Files 872.46/8-1360.

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In this perspective, the UNFT suffered from many of the same weaknesses as the UNFA. It was largely an elite organisation based in the capital, rejected by women who sought to keep the single-party system at arm’s length. Yet unlike the UNFA, derided even by the single-party state which it was meant to promote, the UNFT was close to power and it was seen as an organisation worth fighting for control of – notably there was on-going, bitter rivalry between Radhia Haddad and Samia Ben Ammar. Many of the urban, educated women who joined the UNFA, on the other hand, left as quickly as they joined.

Crucially, in the Tunisian context, there was not the same resistance to organising ‘as women’ as there was in Algeria. Saliha Djeffal, who enjoyed a rapid ascension from local to national politics within the Jeunesse (Youth) FLN and who today is a senior figure in the FLN, states that she did not join the UNFA: ‘Parce que je croyais en un seul combat sans clivage entre homme et femme, je n’ai jamais voulu adhérer à une organisation féminine.’43 Between 1974 and 1978, war veteran Louisette Ighilahriz says she visited 18 different countries on behalf of the UNFA, ostensibly with the task of looking at socio-economic models which might work in Algeria. Her biggest regret about joining the UNFA seems to have been less its lack of ambition, inefficiency and clientelism, although these were factors, than the UNFA’s very essence as a single-sex organisation: ‘je ne peux pas accepter un militantisme sexe unique […] je ne sais pas comment je me suis retrouvée là-dedans.’44 The fact that many of the women who had professional or political careers after independence were also war veterans is not a coincidence: at least part of the explanation for why women so visible during the War of Independence in Algeria ‘disappear’ post-1962 is because of their refusal to organise ‘as women’. At least until the debates around the Family Code in 1984, this was not seen as a legitimate frame of analysis or form of mobilisation for women who had fought to fight alongside men.

This article has sought to explore the theme of ‘movements’ from two perspectives: that of women’s organisations as mass movements created by single-party states, and ‘the woman question’ as a series of shifting ideas about the status, roles and rights of women, which circulated within nation-states, across national borders and moved across time from the colonial into the post-colonial era. Thinking about how debates about ‘the woman question’ in Algeria and Tunisia were located within a broader set of questions about decolonisation and nation and state-building in Algeria and Tunisia underlines the argument made by Lila Abu Lughod in her volume on Egypt and Iran: post-colonial projects with women as their object should not be seen as part of a trajectory moving from patriarchy to liberation (or vice versa) but instead placed ‘squarely within

43 Interview with Saliha Djeffal (21 June 2005)44 Interview with Louisette Ighilahriz (8 June 2005)

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the messy situations of state building, anti-colonial nationalism, changing social orders, and the emergence of new classes.’45

Thinking about the language of ‘gifts’ bestowed or rights ‘snatched away’ and whether campaigning as women on the ‘woman question’ was seen as an empowering pathway to political influence or a reductive dead-end by women called upon to act or organise ‘as women’ allows us to go beyond the classic dichotomy of Algerian ‘betrayal’ and Tunisian ‘fulfilment’ of women’s rights. The historical case study here suggests that the visibility or invisibility of ‘women’ is not always a useful marker of women’s roles and status in the public sphere. Rather it is a reflection of if the ‘women question’ and women’s movements are seen as a valid frame of reference and an effective form of organisation by groups and individuals with access to political power and/or a public presence.

44,446 signes, tout compris, notes + espaces

45 L. Abu Lugoud (ed) Remaking Women: Feminism and Modernity in the Middle East (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), p. viii.

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