Tunisia's Modern Woman: Nation-Building and State Feminism in the Global 1960s 9781108845045, 9781108961264

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Tunisia’s Modern Woman

Claims over women’s liberation vocalized by Tunisia’s first president, Habib Bourguiba began with legal reforms related to family law in 1956. In this book, Amy Aisen Kallander uses this political appropriation of women’s rights to look at the importance of women to post-colonial state-building projects in Tunisia and how this relates to other statefeminist projects across the Middle East and during the Cold War. Here we see how the notion of modern womanhood was central to a range of issues from economic development (via family planning) to intellectual life and the growth of Tunisian academia. Looking at political discourse, the women’s press, fashion, and ideas about love, the book traces how this concept was reformulated by women through transnational feminist organizing, and in the press, in ways that proposed alternatives to the dominant constructions of state feminism. amy aisen kallander is Associate Professor of Middle East History and affiliated faculty with the Women’s and Gender Studies Department at Syracuse University. She is the author of Women, Gender, and the Palace Households in Ottoman Tunisia (2013), and a contributor to The Making of the Tunisian Revolution (2013) and A Companion to Global Gender History (2020).

The Global Middle East General Editors Arshin Adib-Moghaddam, SOAS, University of London Ali Mirsepassi, New York University Editorial Advisory Board Faisal Devji, University of Oxford John Hobson, University of Sheffield Firoozeh Kashani-Sabet, University of Pennsylvania Madawi Al-Rasheed, London School of Economics and Political Science David Ryan, University College Cork, Ireland

The Global Middle East series seeks to broaden and deconstruct the geographical boundaries of the “Middle East” as a concept to include North Africa, Central and South Asia, and diaspora communities in Western Europe and North America. The series features fresh scholarship that employs theoretically rigorous and innovative methodological frameworks resonating across relevant disciplines in the humanities and the social sciences. In particular, the general editors welcome approaches that focus on mobility, the erosion of nation-state structures, travelling ideas and theories, transcendental technopolitics, the decentralization of grand narratives, and the dislocation of ideologies inspired by popular movements. The series will also consider translations of works by authors in these regions whose ideas are salient to global scholarly trends but have yet to be introduced to the Anglophone academy. Other books in the series: 1. Transnationalism in Iranian Political Thought: The Life and Times of Ahmad Fardid, Ali Mirsepassi 2. Psycho-nationalism: Global Thought, Iranian Imaginations, Arshin AdibMoghaddam 3. Iranian Cosmopolitanism: A Cinematic History, Golbarg Rekabtalaei 4. Money, Markets and Monarchies: The Gulf Cooperation Council and the Political Economy of the Contemporary Middle East, Adam Hanieh 5. Iran’s Troubled Modernity: Debating Ahmad Fardid’s Legacy, Ali Mirsepassi 6. Foreign Policy as Nation Making: Turkey and Egypt in the Cold War, Reem Abou-El-Fadl 7. Revolution and its Discontents: Political Thought and Reform in Iran, Eskandar Sadeghi-Boroujerdi

8. Creating the Modern Iranian Woman: Popular Culture between Two Revolutions, Liora Hendelman-Baavur 9. Iran’s Quiet Revolution: The Downfall of the Pahlavi State, Ali Mirsepassi 10. Reversing the Colonial Gaze: Persian Travelers Abroad, Hamid Dabashi 11. Israel’s Jewish Identity Crisis: State and Politics in the Middle East, Yaacov Yadgar 12. Temporary Marriage in Iran: Gender and Body Politics in Modern Persian Film and Literature, Claudia Yaghoobi 13. Cosmopolitan Radicalism: The Visual Politics of Beirut’s Global Sixties, Zeina Maasri 14. Anticolonial Afterlives in Egypt: The Politics of Hegemony, Sara Salem 15. What is Iran? Domestic Politics and International Relations, Arshin AdibMoghaddam 16. Art and the Arab Spring: Aesthetics of Revolution and Resistance in Tunisia and Beyond, Siobhan Shilton

Tunisia’s Modern Woman Nation-Building and State Feminism in the Global 1960s

amy aisen kallander

University Printing House, Cambridge CB2 8BS, United Kingdom One Liberty Plaza, 20th Floor, New York, NY 10006, USA 477 Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, VIC 3207, Australia 314–321, 3rd Floor, Plot 3, Splendor Forum, Jasola District Centre, New Delhi – 110025, India 79 Anson Road, #06–04/06, Singapore 079906 Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge. It furthers the University’s mission by disseminating knowledge in the pursuit of education, learning, and research at the highest international levels of excellence. www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781108845045 DOI: 10.1017/9781108961264 © Amy Aisen Kallander 2021 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2021 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Kallander, Amy Aisen, 1978- author. Title: Tunisia’s modern woman : nation-building and state feminism in the global 1960s / Amy Aisen Kallander. Other titles: Global Middle East (Cambridge, England) Description: Cambridge, United Kingdom ; New York, NY : Cambridge University Press, 2021. | Series: The global Middle East | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2021002821 (print) | LCCN 2021002822 (ebook) | ISBN 9781108845045 (hardback) | ISBN 9781108959490 (paperback) | ISBN 9781108961264 (epub) Subjects: LCSH: Feminism–Tunisia. | Women’s rights–Tunisia. | Women–Tunisia–Social conditions–20th century. | Women–Tunisia–Economic conditions–20th century. Classification: LCC HQ1792 .K349 2021 (print) | LCC HQ1792 (ebook) | DDC 305.4209611–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021002821 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021002822 ISBN 978-1-108-84504-5 Hardback Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Contents

List of Figures

page viii

Acknowledgments

ix

Note on the Text

xiii

Introduction

1

1

Between State Feminism and Global Sisterhood

38

2

Family Planning as Development: Urban Women, Rural Families, and Reproductive Justice

80

Postcolonial Tunisian Academics: Between International Aid, National Imperatives, and Local Knowledge

120

4

Fashion, Consumption, and Modern Gender Roles

157

5

Love and Sex: The Limits of Modern Womanhood and Heterosexual Masculinity

197

Conclusion: Love, Politics, and Bread

239

3

Bibliography

254

Index

280

vii

Figures

1.1 The modern woman as citizen, from the title page of Women of Tunisia 1.2 The women’s press, cover of Al-Mar’a, March 1966 1.3 Cover of the May–June 1962 issue of The Shield: For Employees around the World, a publication of USAID, including “Tunisian Women See Capital.” 2.1 “With family planning, a better life,” poster from the National Office of Family Planning 4.1 Sugar as an essential part of the diet, served by a happy homemaker: Al-Nisr/L’Aigle sugar advertisement in Faiza 4.2 The feminine seduction of Al-Khadra filtered cigarettes, advertisement in Faiza 4.3 The mini recast with Tunisian styles, Faiza cover, August 1967

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page 42 55

70 105

170 172 177

Acknowledgments

This book seeks to answer questions about the origins of Tunisia’s state feminist reputation that have been germinating since the summer and fall of 2001. Thanks to the encouragement and critical perspectives of Nabiha Jerad, I spent many hours in the libraries of the IRMC and later CEMAT reading the works of feminists of the 1980s and 1990s who explored similar themes: Souad Bakalti, Souhayr Belhassen, Sophie Bessis, Souad Chater, and Ilhem Marzouki. Their writings placed women at the center of the story, revealed the superficial feminism of Tunisian legislation, and questioned the ability of the law to transform women’s lives. Another parallel body of scholarship, including that of Abdessalam Ben Hamida and Clement Henry Moore, probed the liberal façade of the postcolonial Tunisian state and its populist claims. Nabiha strongly supported these lines of analysis, introducing me to the Tunisian academy and notably to Abdessalam Ben Hamida and Ilhem Marzouki. Ben Hamida kindly secured permission for me to attend some of his classes, whereas Marzouki invited me into her home and shared her research with me. They graciously answered the questions of a novice and generously offered knowledge, experience, and insights. Sadly, both Ilhem and Nabiha have since passed, marking a major intellectual loss. Nabiha was a mentor and friend for many years. Colleagues and friends were kind enough to read portions of the book and offered gentle critique, thoughtful insights, and tremendous moral support. If I have not been able to respond to all of their sagacity, much gratitude to Matthew Connelly, Nouri Gana, Frances Hasso, Mehammed Mack, Asma Moalla, Dana Olwan, Judith Surkis, Melanie Tanielian, and Natalya Vince. I have been fortunate to be part of a community of scholars interested in Tunisia and am indebted to those who have shared their research with me, including research in progress. I have learned a great deal from Abdallah Al-Arian, Max Ajl, Edna Bonhomme, Recebba Gruskin, Idriss Jebari, Robert Lang, ix

x

Acknowledgments

Kathryn Medien, M’hamed Oualdi, Chris Rominger, and Julian Weideman. Silvia Marsans-Sakly is a source of inspiration and a companion in thoughtful and multifaceted inquiries, always ready to share her research and deep understandings of contemporary Tunisia, revolt, and historical matters. This project is indebted to the patience of Arabic teachers such as Hatem Bazian and Mohammed Alhawary, while Sonia Shiri has always been a source of inspiration and support. Conferences and exchanges with audiences at Al-Akhawayn, Brown, CEMA, Cornell, CUNY, the Doha Institute, Duke, and UCLA, as well as at MESA and NWSA, raised new perspectives and offered the chance to refine many arguments. Thanks to Beth Baron, Francesco Cavatorta, Ziad Fahmy, Doris Grey, Imed Labidi, Bobby Parks, Malika Rahal, Sophie Richter-Devroe, Chris Rominger, Tamar Shirinian, Natalya Vince, and Secil Yilmaz. For conversations about population, women’s magazines, and all things Tunisia, I have learned from the rich knowledge and experiences of Kmar Bendana, Terry Burke, Julia Clancy-Smith, Sarah Fishman, Abdelhamid Henia, James Miller, and Alexandra Minna Stern. I also want to thank Etty Terem and Jennifer Johnson for providing opportunities to explore facets of this work in divergent directions. Judy Jarrow was an early partisan of this project, sharing her personal magazine collection. Carol Hamilton and the librarians in ILL at SU provided essential support tracking down magazines, journal articles, and conference proceedings, and their diligent work has been tremendously appreciated as have the online collections of RTSS thanks to AMEEL at Yale. In Tunisia, the staff at the UNFT main office shared space with me, as did staff at RTT, who handed over their desks and provided tours of facilities and broadcast rooms. Bassirou Barry at the BDIC (La Contemporaine) facilitated research in their collections by offering important insights and creating a welcoming environment. I am delighted that Houda Ajili readily shared her beautiful and vibrant artwork for the cover. As always, my research in Tunisia would not be possible without the amazing friends who have taken care of me over the years, opening their doors and their hearts; Zohra El Kheriji and the Elouafi family never hesitate to answer questions large and small and make Tunis feel like a second home. Ioana Barry and family in France made an extended research trip with two kids possible and pleasurable. Thanks in particular to Bass, Amaru, Femi, and Kenta for sharing their

Acknowledgments

xi

home with us, and to Alain and Anita Langer, Delphine Georgelet, and Simon Langer for making it all such a pleasure. This project has benefited from an NEH Summer Stipend and a Pellicone award from the history department at Syracuse University. Funding from the Central New York Humanities Corridor contributed to a congenial scholarly community and enriching conversations with Ziad Fahmy, Kent Schull, and Nazanin Shahrokni. Research and travel were made possible by Appleby-Mosher funds from the Maxwell School, and were logistically easier thanks to the competent, efficient, and always friendly support of Faye Morse. Likewise, much of the writing and organizing of materials was facilitated by the constant technology support from Mike Cavallaro and Daryl Olin. At Cambridge, Maria Marsh has been an enthusiastic editor and I am thankful for her support. Daniel Brown, Atifa Jiwa, Stephanie Taylor and Niranjana Harikrishnan have been kind, efficient, and consistent, while Stephanie Sakson has been an insightful copyeditor, greatly improving the final product. Much appreciation to two anonymous reveiwers who offered important feedback. That all of these people have continued to provide support during a pandemic that upsets daily routines has been wholeheartedly appreciated. An earlier version of parts of Chapter 4 appeared in “Miniskirts and ‘Beatniks’: Gender Roles, National Development, and Morals in 1960s Tunisia,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 50, no. 2 (2018): 291–313, reprinted with permission. Even when writing is a solitary endeavor, I am deeply thankful for Dana Olwan and Carol Fadda, who make Syracuse feel like a home. Their love and friendship are a blessing. Alongside an academic interest in the genre of advice, I have been on the receiving end of much good advice from friends and colleagues who have offered wisdom about the process of writing, shared teaching strategies, and talked about family, community, and activism. Thanks in particular to Lamis Abdelaaty, Niki Akhavan, Omar Cheta, Michele Demers, Michael Ebner, Heather Ferguson, Osamah Khalil, Sami Kitmitto, Radha Kumar, Laura-Anne Minkoff-Zern, Kenny Rose, Perry Singleton, Martin Shanguhyia, and James Gordon Williams. Robin Mitchell is a model of scholarly devotion and brilliance. Her humility toward her interlocutors is an inspiration. A litany of aunts, uncles, and cousins have proven to me the importance of extended family networks of support, hosting and meeting me during conferences as well as

xii

Acknowledgments

providing necessary breaks from them. Thanks to Jeanne Dzienciol, Claudia and Norman Levin, Susie and Jose Picart, Steve Rosenbaum and Aileen Alfandary, Nancy and Steve Sturtecky, Pitiya LeHuu, and all the Taitelbaums. Special thanks are due to my parents, Jeff and Judy Aisen, for their unwavering support and enthusiastic framing of my international travel as an opportunity to spend time with their grandkids. George Kallander has been a constant source of humor, calm, and grounded perspectives, which makes the balancing of parenting and productivity all the better. Mona and Sabrina bring creativity into my life and are a constant reminder of the importance of stylistic hybridity.

Note on the Text

Transliteration systems not only change over time but depend on linguistic conventions in two languages. For research focusing on Tunisia, many sources follow a French orthography. I have adopted a modified approach with a simplified version of the IJMES transliteration system for texts. For proper names of well-known figures, I have included both the French-inspired transliteration and one based on the IJMES system. For place names, I generally utilize IJMES standards as they fall closer to the names by which these places are known to Tunisians (Halq al-Wad and not La Goulette). Unless otherwise noted, translations from Arabic and French are my own.

xiii

|

Introduction

Saadia was young woman from a small town whose widowed mother worked as a laundress. Completing her primary school certificate shortly after Tunisian independence in 1956, she was hired in an office in the capital. Scared as she left home and boarded a train for the first time, she was determined to support her younger brothers and improve her family’s situation. Saadia begins to shed her provincialism by removing her safsari (pl. safasir) (a long piece of fabric worn over women’s bodies that covered their hair and could be pulled across the face) on the instruction of her new boss to “lose the veil.” She sends money home and spends her first paycheck shopping with her colleague, Leila. But Saadia struggles to fit in with her cosmopolitan peers and resist the pernicious temptations of the big city. She attends a party hosted by Leila’s male friend Samir but is reluctant to dance and steps on Samir’s foot when she tries; she recoils from an offered drink, but then accepts a glass of wine and drinks too much. When Samir drives her home, his car veers off a cliff, sending them both to the hospital. Saadia recovers, suffers memory loss, roams the streets, is briefly arrested, and ends up in sex work. Samir then reappears, asking for her hand in marriage, reassuring Saadia that she is worthy of his love. “The past no longer matters, for you and me, only the future should count. I am ready to confront the whole world for you. We will triumph,” he promises. As an officer in the National Guard, Samir requests permission to marry from his superiors but they deny him. In an act of sacrifice and “payment for her weaknesses,” Saadia commits suicide.1 The story “Saadia,” serialized in the Tunisian women’s press in 1963 and 1964, offers a snapshot of the era and a particular configuration of women and gender roles. It evokes contemporary themes with which readers would have been familiar and that run throughout this book: rural poverty and internal migration, education as a path of 1

Omar Khlifi, “Saadia: Roman photos” and “Saadia: Roman photos inédit,” Faiza, February 1963–January 1964.

1

2

Introduction

social mobility, and the ideal of companionate marriage based on love. These themes are entangled with global symbols of a consumer modernity such as clothing and cars. Centered on the eponymous female protagonist, it is a story about modern womanhood and one young woman’s perilous quest to navigate its demands. Melodramatic turns of plot illustrate the high stakes of poor choices for young women; though Samir’s car burst into flames as it drove off a cliff, he walks away unscathed, whereas the accident begins Saadia’s descent into homelessness, incarceration, and vice. Her departure from “proper” womanhood is sexualized and her loss of virginity makes Saadia as ineligible for marriage as her personal shame makes her unworthy of the nation, represented by Samir’s uniform. As a cautionary reformist tale, sex work symbolizes decadence while serving as a foil for Saadia’s potential liberation through education, white-collar employment, and a marriage based on love.2 This book argues that narratives and experiences of modern womanhood in Tunisia, like the story of “Saadia,” can read in multiple ways; Samir is not only Saadia’s potential savior, but the cause of her downfall. His unfulfilled promise of marriage and a modern future reveals the limits of masculine guidance and thus the limits of the nationalist commitment to women’s rights when chaperoned by men. As a critique of state feminism that places Tunisia within established feminist scholarship on women and the state in the modern Middle East, this book exposes the myth of Tunisian exceptionalism and its faulty reliance on the separation between gender and politics, between women and men. Illustrating women’s contributions to postcolonial state-building and the imagery of modern womanhood, the point is not to castigate state support of women’s rights as wholly negative. Instead, I argue that it is essential to consider domestic, regional, and international politics informing state feminist policies; the cultural spheres in which these were articulated; and the limits of liberatory claims along class, regional, and other axes.

State Feminism, Nation-Building, and the Struggle against Underdevelopment Marriage and the legal regulations surrounding it contributed to reshaping family life and modern womanhood in Tunisia as elsewhere 2

Haytham Bahoora, “The Figure of the Prostitute, Tajdid, and Masculinity in Anticolonial Literature of Iraq,” Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies 11, no. 1 (2015).

State Feminism, Nation-Building, and Underdevelopment

3

across the globe. Modern states from Argentina and Japan to India or Russia, according to Kristin Celello and Hanan Kholoussy, have “played a significant role in the production and promotion of certain kinds of marriage and families” whether as an instrument of governance, a key to social stability, or an aspect of nation-building.3 In much of the Middle East, the politicization of family life and of women’s status were overburdened with Orientalist legacies in which imagery of polygyny and harems sexualized conjugal life, presenting gender segregation as a sign of women’s inferiority and seclusion.4 Reformist intellectuals since the nineteenth century advocating for nuclear families and companionate marriage as a social good engaged with the same stereotypes that justified colonial occupation, reinforcing associations between family life, gender roles, motherhood and modernizing discourses.5 By the turn of the twentieth century, nationalists increasingly projected “the monogamous couple, their children, and the reformed modernized domicile [as] templates for discussing political transformation.”6 Family law, which was articulated as a distinct juridical domain, was based “upon the public-private divide so foundational to the secular political order, and upon a modern conception of the family as a nuclear unit responsible for the reproduction of the society and the nation.”7 It was “a critical issue” for postcolonial states turning marriage into a relation based on “companionship and the care of children” that reflected the nation’s sovereignty and economic

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Kristin Celello and Hanan Kholoussy, Domestic Tensions, National Anxieties: Global Perspectives on Marriage, Crisis, and Nation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 2. Rana Kabbani, Europe’s Myths of Orient (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986). Elizabeth Thompson, Colonial Citizens: Republican Rights, Paternal Privilege and Gender in French Syria and Lebanon (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 39–57; Kenneth M. Cuno, Modernizing Marriage: Family, Ideology, and Law in Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century Egypt (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2015); and Omnia El Shakry “Schooled Mothers and Structured Play: Child Rearing in Turn-of-the-Century Egypt.” In Remaking Women: Feminism and Modernity in the Middle East, edited by Lila Abu-Lughod (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998). Lisa Pollard, Nurturing the Nation: the Family Politics of Modernizing, Colonizing, and Liberating Egypt, 1805–1923 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 5. Saba Mahmood, Religious Difference in the Secular Age: A Minority Report (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016), 26.

4

Introduction

development.8 The legislation of marriage and divorce coincided with regimes of women’s rights in Egypt, Iraq, and elsewhere, while broader concerns about family life and morality, or what Frances Hasso terms a family crisis discourse, prompted state interventions that made women “further dependent on undemocratic states by the expansion of state power and influence over sexual and family life.”9 Tunisian articulations of a modern womanhood grounded in the nuclear family constituted a political project and economic strategy of nation-building that bolstered the class and regional base of the ruling party and secured its diplomatic alliances. Proprietary claims over women’s liberation were vocalized by Tunisia’s first president, Habib Bourguiba (al-Habib Bourguiba) (1956–87), who played an outsized role in the postcolonial state. They began in 1956 with legal reforms related to family life known as the personal status code (Majalla alAhwal al-Shakhsiyya, or Majalla). Comparable to the ways colonial regimes had promulgated a process of codification of Islamic law to make it amenable to modern state power, Tunisia’s new family law encouraged a new vision of the family by delaying marriage (establishing a minimum age of marriage for girls at fifteen) and encouraging monogamy (polygamy was penalized but not initially outlawed).10 In addition, divorce became a civil procedure, and matters of custody and inheritance became the purview of a centralized legal system. The law departed from majority interpretations of Islamic law in important ways (the provisions regarding divorce) but built on Islamic reformist precedents in others (the role of consent in marriage) and maintained an image of gender complementarity over that of parity in others (inheritance). These contradictions allowed the state to justify the Majalla in terms of Islamic jurisprudence invoking the legacies of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century reformists such as Muhammad Al-Senoussi and Al-Tahir al-Haddad, who had called for women’s education and the reform of marriage, while subordinating religious

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Sara Pursley, Familiar Futures Time, Selfhood, and Sovereignty in Iraq (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2019), 187–88. Frances Susan Hasso, Consuming Desires: Family Crisis and the State in the Middle East (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2011), 13. Souad Chater, “Les mutations de la condition de la femme tunisienne (1956–1994),” Cahiers de la Mediterranee 49 (1994): 38.

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scholars within a judicial system that answered to the president.11 This appropriation of religion in the name of women’s rights contributed to state centralization while allowing the state to define Tunisian morals and values.12 State discourse informed hegemonic understandings of gender roles; a plethora of official, semi-official, and nonofficial voices participated in this project, including those of women. “The battle for building a modern nation,” declared Bourguiba, was a “struggle against underdevelopment.”13 In these terms, industrial expansion and the mechanization of agriculture became a national cause prolonging facets of the anticolonial struggle “into a second phase, that of national construction,” described by Frantz Fanon in a trenchant critique of single-party regimes.14 There was significant overlap between Tunisia’s ruling party and the state, with access to employment, free healthcare, or subsidized housing often dependent on party membership, while the language of “struggle” demanded sacrifice and unity to silence dissent. Despite the renaming of the NeoDustur or New Constitutional Party as the Dustur Socialist Party (Hizb al-Ishtiraki al-Dusturi), the Tunisian economy included elements of socialism and liberalism, in part due to US financial aid that by the mid-1950s followed a Cold War strategy prioritizing the expansion of capitalism and required access to local markets. While some in the administration, especially those with a background in labor such as 11

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Bourguiba departed from their readings of scripture and Islamic history. Julian Weideman, “Tahar Haddad after Bourguiba and Bin Ali: A Reformist between Secularists and Islamists,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 48, no. 1 (2016). It sought to fracture extended family structures by reorganizing them around the conjugal family. Ilhem Marzouki, “La modernite: Pour ou contre les femmes?,” in La place des femmes: Les enjeux de l’identité et de l’égalité au regard des sciences sociales, ed. Ephesia (Paris: La Decouverte, 1995). The autonomy of religious scholars at the Zaytuna mosque-university was curtailed by their incorporation into the national education system. Malika Zeghal, “Public Institutions of Religious Education in Egypt and Tunisia: Contrasting the Postcolonial Reforms of Al-Azhar and the Zaytuna,” in Trajectories of Education in the Arab World: Legacies and Challenges (New York: Routledge, 2010), 111–24. As Bourguiba continued, this quest was “as serious as when we undertook our action to unite the Tunisian nation against colonization in order to reconquer our sovereignty.” Habib Bourguiba, Our Road to Socialism; (Address Given before the Nation’s Cadres at] Sfax, 19th April, 1964) (Tunis: Secretariat of State for Cultural Affairs and Orientation, 1964), 4, 12. Frantz Fanon, Les damnés de la terre (Paris: Editions Gallimard, (1961) 1991), 127.

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Introduction

Ahmed bin Salih, were partisans of collectivizing the means of production and distribution, Bourguiba rejected class struggle and viewed “the hazards of Marxism” as inimical to national unity.15 Large landowners were an important constituent of the ruling party who prevented land redistribution, with the proponents of agricultural reform persecuted when the program was abandoned in 1969. Despite these limits, the “struggle against underdevelopment” remained a powerful construct informing political initiatives, economic planning, and social transformations that accompanied state-building efforts intersecting with state feminism and the reform of family life in important ways. Colonial legacies of deindustrialization and the underfunding of education represented significant hurdles to Tunisia’s economic prospects in 1956. French rule had restricted Tunisia’s manufacturing to building materials, food processing, and chemical production such as phosphate derivatives.16 Settler confiscation and colonial land policies contributed to the concentration of landholding, leaving 83 percent of farmers with only about one-third of the land, forcing much of the rural population into wage labor, unemployment, or migration to the cities.17 The first major economic plan, the ten-year plan of 1958, inaugurated a period of state-led development based on agricultural collectivization, the mechanization of crop production, increasing national control over mineral resources, and light industry. It outlined an expansion of education including technical training, specialized institutes and the founding of the nation’s first university, and the standardization and centralization of primary education shifting the language of instruction to Arabic (though French continued to dominate the classroom at the secondary level). Young women and men joined the expanding bureaucracy to fill professional gaps left by the departure of much of the European settler community. Tunisian women were recruited into the state apparatus through the National Union of Tunisian Women (Union Nationale de la Femme Tunisienne [UNFT]; al-Ittihad al-Watani al-Mara’a al-Tunisiyya), established in 1956. The volunteer-based organization brought together 15

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“We have everything to gain by keeping our ranks closed so that we form one single family, united in good fortune or misfortune,” he noted at the end of a lengthy section on the problems of Marxist dogmatism. Bourguiba, Our Road to Socialism, 26–31; Habib Bourguiba, “Destourian Socialism,” East African Journal 3, no. 5 (1966). Charles Issawi, An Economic History of the Middle East and North Africa (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), 156–60. Mouldi Lahmar, Du mouton à l’olivier (Tunis: Cérès éd, 1994), 149.

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women who had been involved in the anticolonial struggle under the aegis of the state with Bourguiba appointing its presidents.18 Though women had also been active with the Tunisian communist party, it was forced to disband, making the UNFT the only legally recognized women’s organization for much of the 1960s and 1970s.19 As common among women’s movements of the era, the UNFT consisted of primarily urban, middle-class, and educated women. This positionality meant they were more likely to benefit from new legal codes and public opportunities, becoming the face of state sovereignty and a modernized gender ideology. Yet the UNFT was more than a symbol of the regime. In the years after independence, the women’s union contributed to the work of numerous state ministries reaching women from less privileged strata: they provided vocational education, ran artisanal workshops, trained rural social workers, and sponsored literacy classes, children’s clubs, after-school programs, and a women’s dormitory at the university. State feminism was more than a series of laws, however patriarchal and unevenly applied. It was a project of social transformation, political engagement, and cultural renewal in which women, including the UNFT, participated. Its leaders were incorporated into party structures by holding offices, appearing at official events, and becoming important diplomatic interlocutors and representatives of the state. Their focus on social and economic domains expanded women’s education and employment, encouraging social change. They were not as focused on the legal advocacy of women’s rights, which I argue was strategic considering their location within a single-party state that restricted the political engagement of both women and men. At times conflicting with the singular nature of Bourguiba’s nationalist ideology and political strategy, the largely bourgeois elite did not position themselves as dissenters. Instead, they were committed nationalists 18

19

Bourguiba ignored the results of its first internal election and the consensus behind the leadership of Aicha Bellagha and Asma Rebai as president and secretary general, imposing his preferred candidate. See her description of this event as foreshadowing Bourguiba’s tight grip on the ruling party in Radhia Haddad, Parole de femme (Carthage: Editions Elyssa, 1995), 103–19. See also the interview with Radiyya al-Haddad in CREDIF, ed., Mémoire de femmes: Tunisiennes dans la vie politique, 1920–1960/Nisaʼ wa-dhakirah: Tunisiyat f¯ı al-hayah al-ʻammah, 1920–1960 (Tunis: Média Com, 1992), 84–85. A small number of women remained active with the communist-affiliated Union des Femmes de Tunisie (Union of Tunisian Women, or UFT) until it was outlawed in 1963. See the interview with Nabiha ben Miled, who had been president of the UFT since 1952, in CREDIF, ed., Memoire de femmes/Nisaʼ wa-dhakirah, 33–42.

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Introduction

who, in striving to actualize the goals of postcolonial feminism, proposed alternate routes to their realization.

Economic Inequalities Opportunities available to women in postcolonial Tunisia were largely structured by regional disparities and educational hurdles similar to those faced by Tunisian men, with a few important divergences. First, employment in the public sector and industrial workforce was located predominantly in the nation’s capital (approximately 60 percent of manufacturing jobs were in Tunis, which was home to the largest port in the country, averaging three million tons of traffic by 1960, including 500,000 tons of imports, namely, manufactured and consumer goods). State-run industrial production focused on light industries such as dairy (Société Tunisienne des Industries Laitières [STIL]), cotton textiles (Société Générale des Industries Cotonnières de Tunisie [SOGICOT], operating under the National Textile Office), beet sugar (Société Tunisienne du Sucre), and salt (COTUSAL). Private entrepreneurs with government encouragement produced car batteries, shoes, and furniture. Women’s employment and disposable income contributed to sustaining nascent state industries thanks to family ideologies where purchasing fish or milk was part of children’s healthy diet and a facet of modern motherhood.20 Second, in the rural interior, agricultural collectivization employed local men, but was carried out by stateappointed managers from the capital who tended to disregard the insights and concerns of local farmers. Production was further weakened by repeated droughts and poor harvests from 1964 to 1968.21 Third, Tunisia’s political independence was negotiated at the sacrifice of economic autonomy, as Bourguiba preserved trade and customs agreements with France. Agriculture remained export-oriented 20

21

“Qu’est-ce que la Société Tunisienne du Sucre,” Faiza, December 1961, 60 ; “Cotusal,” Faiza, October 1962, 14. For one of the earliest and most trenchant critiques of collectivization, its structural flaws and political limits, see Abdelkader Zghal, Modernisation de l’agriculture et populations semi-nomades (The Hague: Mouton, 1967). Similar arguments have been reiterated in much subsequent scholarship, for example, Mira Fromer Zussman, Development and Disenchantment in Rural Tunisia: The Bourguiba Years (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1992); Joel Beinin, Workers and Thieves: Labor Movements and Popular Uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2015), 20–23.

State Feminism, Nation-Building, and Underdevelopment

9

and increasingly dependent on global markets, a position reinforced by a diplomatic alliance with and economic assistance from the United States. Finally, while colonial-era education had been abysmal all around, it was particularly so for girls, emphasizing handicraft production and artisanal skills. Even these opportunities were limited and at independence literacy rates among women stood at 4 percent.22 Economic planning centered predominantly on the male workforce and male employment, following a male head-of-household model. Decrees passed between 1950 and 1956 regulated women’s employment, including maternity leave and equal pay. However, additional provisions defined certain types of employment as “detrimental to the health or morals, or beyond the strength of women.” Women and girls were prohibited from working in certain sectors (mines and quarries) and were paid lower salaries in others where a minimum “of not less than 85 percent of men’s wages is permitted.”23 In villages near the nation’s Mediterranean coastline, women also found work in the expanding tourist sector, especially in services such as laundry and housekeeping.24 Women were hired as low-paid factory workers, including in the textile sector, but despite the participation of some in labor unions, they were underrepresented and distanced from positions of authority. From its early years, the national labor union agreed with the state’s prioritization of full male employment. This protected its class base but translated to a “policy of ignoring and even opposing the employment of female workers.”25 Thus, even with women in the artisanal sector, domestic service, and factories, the overwhelming majority of working women were agricultural laborers (over 90 percent by some estimates). 22

23

24

25

Julia A. Clancy-Smith, “Envisioning Knowledge: Educating the Muslim Woman in Colonial North Africa, c. 1850–1918,” in Iran and Beyond: Essays in Middle Eastern History in Honor of Nikki R. Keddie, ed. Rudi Matthee and Beth Baron, 99–120 (Costa Mesa, CA: Mazda Publishers, 2000). Kitabat al-Dawlah lil-Akhbar wa-al-Irshad Tunisia, Women of Tunisia (Tunis: Secretariat of State for Information and Tourism, 1961), 29–30. Waleed Hazbun, Beaches, Ruins, Resorts: The Politics of Tourism in the Arab World (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 10–14. Eqbal Ahmad, “Politics and Labor in Tunisia” (PhD dissertation, Princeton University, 1967), 219; Hafidha Chékir and Khédija Arfaoui, “Tunisia: Women’s Economic Citizenship and Trade Union Participation,” in Making Globalization Work for Women: The Role of Social Rights and Trade Union Leadership, ed. Valentine M. Moghadam, Suzanne Franzway, and Mary Margaret Fonow (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2011).

10

Introduction

However small, women’s professionalization was essential to economic planning and state-building. As soon as they finished law school in the late 1960s, women were appointed judges, positions of symbolic significance even when they were few in number.26 By the mid-1960s, there were thousands of women teachers to meet the goal of universal elementary education. The first ten-year plan required women nurses and administrators, so the number of salaried women doubled every two to three years from independence through the 1960s.27 Women’s professionalism depended on and contributed to increasing numbers of girls in school at all levels; while there were 385 young girls at the university in 1956, this increased nearly three-fold by 1966, as had the number of girls enrolled at the secondary level.28 These gains are significant but the national literacy rate for women stood at 17.6 percent in 1966, a success that was concentrated in urban centers with illiteracy rates almost twice as high in the rural interior.29 Overall, women constituted less than 5 percent of all government employees and worked primarily as secretaries and typists, and only about 1 percent of women in the workforce were professionals.30 The minority of educated urban women in whitecollar careers represented the potential of social mobility and the dawn of a new era, solidifying the urban middle-class base of the ruling party while providing an alibi to the marginalization of workers and peasants.

The Political Landscape of State Feminism Women leaders from the UNFT, professional women, and political wives played a visible role in state affairs with a position in proximity to the state that sanctioned and limited their political activities in ways 26

27

28

29 30

Sana Ben Achour, “La féminisation de la magistrature en Tunisie entre émancipation féminine et autoritarisme politique.” L’Année du Maghreb 3 (2007): 55–74. Arlie Hochschild, “Women at Work in Modernizing Tunisia: Attitudes of Urban Adolescent Schoolgirls,” Berkeley Journal of Sociology 11 (1966): 32. There were 21,849 in secondary schools and 1,195 young women at the university during the academic year 1965–66 according to “Les filles dans l’enseignement depuis l’indépendence,” Faiza, April–May 1966, 67. CREDIF, Tunisian Women and Men in Figures, 28. In 1966 there were over 7,600 professional women including 3,600 teachers and over 100 civil servants; Kitabat al-Dawlah lil ‘Alam Tunisia, Tunisia Moves Ahead (Tunis: Ceres Productions, 1976), 228. There were 827 women in government in 1958, then 2,515 in 1960 and 4,459 in 1963. Hochschild, “Women at Work in Modernizing Tunisia.”

State Feminism, Nation-Building, and Underdevelopment

11

similar to the experiences of the labor movement. The support of women and labor were crucial to state centralization and their ideological conformity necessary for its geostrategic orientation and location within a capitalist world economy. The labor confederation, the General Union of Tunisian Workers (Al-Ittihad al-‘Am al-Tunisi lil-Shughul, Union Générale des Travailleurs Tunisiens [UGTT]) had been widely appreciated for its anticolonial militancy. A member of the communistsupported World Federation of Trade Unions until 1950, the UGTT switched to the US-led and CIA-funded Confederation of Trade Unions following Bourguiba’s efforts to solicit US support against French colonial rule.31 Officially independent from political parties, about 80 percent of its members were involved in the nationalist movement, making up half of Dustur party membership by the 1950s. Concerned about UGTT influence, Bourguiba exploited divisions within the union about its political autonomy by appointing four of its members to ministerial positions, undermining its neutrality and contributing to its willingness to compromise instead of advocating on behalf of workers.32 Bourguiba’s leadership was not unanimously accepted within the nationalist movement, which contained multiple tendencies as a result of its formerly clandestine nature and the imprisonment and exile of many of its leadership. Combatants based in the south and center who were loosely aligned with the party’s general secretary Salih bin Yusuf took up arms from 1952 to 1954 and again in 1955–56, combining rural revolt with anti-colonialism that called attention to rural problems and demanded agrarian solutions. Bourguiba exploited their militancy as a threat to French interests and potential communism, securing his own role in political negotiations on a platform of sustained economic cooperation.33 Bin Yusuf, who attended the formative 31

32

33

Abdesselem Ben Hamida, “Le rôle de syndicalisme Tunisien dans le mouvement de libération nationale (1946–1956),” Cahiers de Tunisie 39, nos. 117–18 (1981). Debates over whether the UGTT should refuse to join the National Assembly as advocated by Ahmed Tlili are detailed in Ahmad, “Politics and Labor in Tunisia,” 149–90. Ben Hamida emphasizes that the acceptance of ministerial positions was a serious compromise that transformed the union into an organ of the state. Abdesselem Ben Hamida, “Pouvoir syndical et édification d’un état nation en Tunisie,” Cahiers de la Méditérannée 41 (1990). France could either chose “an independence presided over and guided by France” or one achieved through blood and hatred that would “push Tunisia towards other blocs . . . less favorable to France.” Habib Bourguiba, “Le

12

Introduction

conference of the Non-Aligned Movement at Bandung, spoke of North African solidarity, called for land redistribution, and criticized colonial capitalism.34 His rhetoric of socialist planning, political pluralism, and an autonomous civil society appealed to communities in the mountains, near the border with Algeria; to tribes and rural migrants in the capital; to an urban commercial class; and to farmers, artisans, and landowners in Jerba. His explicit embrace of pan-Arab solidarity and denunciation of French brutality in Algeria earned bin Yusuf positive coverage in the Arabic press and the support of Moroccan and Algerian nationalists. Bourguiba manipulated such connections, either confusing pan-Islam with conservativism and “traditionalism” or portraying his rival as a communist in order to invoke Cold War fears of a red menace.35 The tarnishing of the left and official consternation over pan-Arabism continued even after assassinating bin Yusuf in 1961. The uncovering of a disorganized and ideologically heterogenous plot against the regime in December 1962 provided a political opportunity to castigate leftist opposition and peasant revolt and to outlaw the small Tunisian Communist Party and its women’s group. Bourguiba’s authority was couched in familial framing of the state over which he stood as father. Implications of obedience were explicitly rejected by students at the university, which became became a site of political contestation over the course of the 1960s and into the 1970s. For many students, participation in the national student union, the General Union of Tunisian Students (Al-Ittihad al-‘Am li-Taliba Tunis, Union Générale des Etudiants Tunisiens [UGET]) formed a pathway into ruling party networks and civil service employment. Yet for a distinct minority, the heavy hand of the ruling party over student organizing was an exercise in political control. Chafing at these limits, and the lack of deliberation, student activists challenged their subordination by proposals for economic and political change on a

34

35

problème franco-tunisien est un problème de souverainité,” Les Temps Modernes 77 (1952): 1570. Max Ajl, “Farmers, Fellaga, and Frenchmen: National Liberation and PostColonial Development in Tunisia” (PhD dissertation, Cornell University, 2019), 125–48. Ahmad, “Politics and Labor in Tunisia,” 150–53 ; Ilhem Marzouki, “Le jeu de bascule de l’identité,” in La Tunisie de Ben Ali: La société contre le régime, ed. Olfa Lamloum and Bernard Ravenel (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2002), 75–101.

State Feminism, Nation-Building, and Underdevelopment

13

platform of socialism and anti-imperialism.36 Tunisian sociologist Aziz Krichen describes the fracture between Bourguiba and a younger generation of men (his metaphorical sons) as a crisis of paternity. Bourguiba’s authoritarianism, for Krichen, resulted from an inability to acknowledge his biological father, a refusal to recognize his intellectual predecessors within the nationalist movement, and his disavowal of student activism.37 In fact, it was this “patriarchal impulse” of presenting himself as a pivotal figure within nationalist narratives that Nouri with shaping the generation of men who came of age after independence as they remained attached to “the protective shelter of traditional patriarchy, in which male supremacy is the grantor of psychosocial stability.”38 A discursive framing of women’s rights as Bourguiba’s gift to women was part of this patriarchal legacy. Whether inspired by real or imagined feminist conviction is less pertinent than the ways in which the narrative of presidential benevolence encouraged women’s submissive loyalty as payment for a state-owed debt. The alliance with women was a mechanism of discipline and control intended to bolster presidential authority against opposition from regional labor unions, students, and eventually from within the ruling party. Tunisia shared this utilitarian approach to women’s public engagement and the reform of marriage with Egypt or Iraq, though it lacked their rapprochement with the Communist bloc and did not emphasize women’s contribution to industrialization. Single-party regimes in states such as Algeria similarly privatized religion, though Tunisia had few pan-Arab or revolutionary credentials. Tunisian state feminism differed from other state-building projects in the Middle East in its combination of liberal pretensions, nominative socialism, and authoritarian control, but its patriarchal approach to women’s rights did not constitute an exception. The narrative of Tunisian exceptionalism was crafted by the postcolonial state to sustain domestic and international political 36

37 38

Roger Le Tourneau, “Cronique politique: (l’année 1966),” in Annuaire de l’Afrique du Nord, ed. Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (Paris: Editions du CNRS, 1967); Mohamed Dhifallah, “Bourguiba et les étudiants: stratégie en mutation (1956–1971),” in Habib Bourguiba, la trace et l’héritage, ed. Michel Camau and Vincent Geisser (Paris: Karthala, 2004). Aziz Krichen, Le syndrome Bourguiba (Tunis: Cérès Productions, 1993). Nouri Gana, “Bourguiba’s Sons: Melancholy Manhood in Modern Tunisian Cinema,” Journal of North African Studies 15, no. 1 (2010): 109–10.

14

Introduction

legitimacy. Despite the very real limits to the early platform of women’s rights, it was a project in which women invested, echoing official formulations for their own advance while manipulating and transcending their parameters.

Women’s Rights and Gender Equality Traces of the idea that Tunisia’s early postcolonial legislation formed an exception are found in scholarship describing the personal status code as “the most extensive” in the Middle East or standing “at the forefront of the Arab world.”39 The singular focus on family law as determining women’s rights often marginalizes broader social and political contexts, while the claim to exceptionalism obscures commonalities with Egypt, Turkey, Algeria, or Morocco. Legal frameworks of emancipation extended state power over the home through the regulation of marriage and divorce, while granting the state the patriarchal privilege of protecting those rights. Mervat Hatem long ago insisted that advantages for a few women came at the expense of all women’s subordination to public forms of patriarchy that merely replaced intimate familial forms of male control.40 Tunisia’s personal status code incorporated patriarchal structures, positioning the husband as head of the household and its finances (Article 23). While women in Tunisia benefited from education and professional opportunities, as Deniz Kandiyoti argues in the case of Turkey, these “acted not so much as a means of mobility as a means of class consolidation.”41 Despite the real advantages for urban and middle-class women, state feminism “produced new sorts of gendered and classed 39

40

41

Mounira M. Charrad, “Tunisia at the Forefront of the Arab World: Two Waves of Gender Legislation,” in Women in the Middle East and North Africa: Agents of Change, ed. Fatma Sadiqi and Moha Ennaji (New York: Routledge, 2011); Valentine M. Moghadam, “Toward Economic Citzenship: The Middle East and North Africa,” in Making Globalization Work for Women: The Role of Social Rights and Trade Union Leadership, ed. Valentine M. Moghadam, Suzanne Franzway, and Mary Margaret Fonow (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2011), 33. Mervat F. Hatem, “Economic and Political Liberalization in Egypt and the Demise of State Feminism,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 24, no. 2 (1992). Deniz Kandiyoti, “Emancipated but Unliberated? Reflections on the Turkish Case,” Feminist Studies 13, no. 2 (1987).

Women’s Rights and Gender Equality

15

hierarchies” among women.42 Nadia Marzouki insists that despite legislative differences, Tunisia shares with Algeria and Morocco a state monopoly on women’s issues and authoritarian governance responsible for structural and systemic problems such as unemployment or poverty.43 Scholars have been critical of the UNFT when questioning Tunisia’s record of women’s rights. As political scientist Laurie Brand pointedly notes, “the union almost never initiated proposals for concrete changes. Its primary task was to implement state policy.”44 Tunisian feminists also criticized the women’s union for its lack of influence within economic and social planning, its monopoly on women’s associative life, and its inability to overcome structural limitations and “enact a true platform of women’s liberation.” Stressing the limits of its bourgeois origins and the tepid egalitarianism of the 1950s, the UNFT is reduced to an agent of regime propaganda and a “link in the chain of command transmitting the regime’s wishes to a feminine audience.”45 These analyses locate advocacy within an opposition and reinforce associations between women’s rights and legislation. Women working within state-led organizations appreciated this collaboration as means to access the inner echelons of power. Though operating as a state agency imposed political restraints upon women’s organizing, anthropologist Kristen Ghodsee questions the central assumptions of feminist scholarship that women’s groups must be autonomous to be effective. This builds on Saba Mahmood’s argument against reducing feminist agency to political autonomy or liberal definitions of freedom as the subversion of norms.46 Drawing from her research on socialist regimes in Bulgaria and Zambia, Ghodsee argues 42

43

44

45

46

Laura Bier, Revolutionary Womanhood: Feminisms, Modernity, and the State in Nasser’s Egypt (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2011), 2. Nadia Marzouki, “Images of Manipulation: Subversion of Women’s Rights in the Maghreb,” in Muslim Women in War and Crisis: Representation and Reality, ed. Faegheh Shirazi (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2010). Laurie Brand, Women, the State and Political Liberalization: Middle Eastern and North African Experiences (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 105. Ilhem Marzouki, Le mouvement des femmes en Tunisie au XXème siècle (Tunis: Cérès Productions, 1993), 157, 84, 200 ; Sophie Bessis, “Bourguiba féministe: Les limites du féminisme d’état bourguibien,” in Habib Bourguiba, la trace et l’héritage. Saba Mahmood, Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), 9–22.

16

Introduction

that women’s position within the state was essential to enacting structural and economic changes that would benefit more than a minority of women. Women activists defined self-actualization as inclusive of improved material conditions for their families, communities, or states, and advanced these agendas as they intersected with state goals, strategically adopting hegemonic discourses for their own purposes.47 The accomplishments of women’s unions officially sanctioned by socialist regimes in Iraq (the General Federation of Iraqi Women) and Yemen (the General Union of Yemeni Women) indicate how women’s rights are tied to broader social and political considerations. At first glance, the 1959 personal status legislation in Iraq appears similar to Tunisia, though it incorporated demands made by Iraqi feminists regarding inheritance, divorce, and marriage.48 Over the 1960s and 1970s, the regime was increasingly brutal, repressing political opponents and Kurdish communities and abandoning any pretense of addressing social inequities. Yet the lives of many women improved from advances in literacy; higher rates of employment, including in professional spheres such as medicine, law, and engineering; better access to healthcare; and free university tuition.49 The People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen also espoused socialist development to mitigate against considerable poverty and the dire ramifications of colonial underdevelopment. The women’s union had a close relationship with the state, with women represented at the highest levels of government. They gained rights related to marriage and custody within egalitarian interpretations of Islamic law, participated in the labor force in increasing numbers, and experienced more literacy and education than in earlier decades. As Maxine Molyneux argues, many obstacles to reform were material, and compared with countries of similar economic means, transformations led by the women’s union during the 1970s were substantial.50 In contrast to the largely urban 47

48

49

50

Kristen Rogheh Ghodsee, Second World, Second Sex: Socialist Women’s Activism and Global Solidarity during the Cold War (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018), 23–26, 46–47. Noga Efrati, Women in Iraq: Past Meets Present (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015), 137–62. Nadje Sadig Al-Ali, Iraqi Women: Untold Stories from 1948 to the Present (London: Zed Books, 2007), 90–108, 16–46. Maxine Molyneux, “Women and Revolution in the People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen,” Feminist Review (1979); Fred Halliday, “Yemen’s Unfinished Revolution: Socialism in the South,” MERIP Reports, no. 81 (1979).

Tunisian Women in Global Contexts

17

and middle-class women who benefited from state policies in Egypt or Tunisia, education, healthcare, and workforce participation in Iraq and Yemen went further in alleviating poverty and improving women’s lives. While there were disadvantages as well, the examples of Iraqi and Yemeni women’s groups indicate the importance of intersectional analyses of gender, class, and global hierarchies that acknowledge the location of state feminism as an aspect of authoritarian nation-building at particular moments within global configurations of power.

Tunisian Women in Global Contexts Tunisian nation-building and state feminist projects occurred during an era of national liberation and civil rights movements, postwar economic recovery, Afro-Asian solidarity, and Cold War rivalries. The independence of Tunisia and Morocco in 1956, Egypt’s anti-imperialist success at Suez that summer, the overthrow of the British-backed Hashemite monarchy in Iraq in 1958, and Algeria’s triumph over France in 1962 contributed to euphoric optimism in the Middle East, furthered by the decolonization of much of Asia and Africa. The association between national liberation and the dawn of a new era was captured by the Tunisian-based pan-African newsmagazine Jeune Afrique (Young Africa). Its titular embrace of “youth” was not meant to infantilize Africans or erase “the longevity of their culture or their civilization.” Instead “youth” was “a style and a way of life, the capacity to embrace life and facilitate taking the rightful place in the contemporary world. Youth is turned towards a future that only they will build. That’s why Africa, our Africa, is a ‘young Africa.’”51 Youth were also up in arms, and as they dissented from the regime, Tunisian students invoked solidarity with Palestine and the people of Vietnam. Similar ideas of transnational connections inspired student uprisings throughout the 1960s in the United States, Western Europe, the Soviet Union, and China, with the end of empire in Algeria and the war in Vietnam resonating heavily among students in France and the United States. If they did not achieve the radical transformations of state and society, historian Jeremi Suri argues, their revolts informed national policies and international diplomacy.52 51 52

“Jeunesse de l’Afrique,” Jeune Afrique, August 13, 1967, 3. Jeremi Suri, Power and Protest: Global Revolution and the Rise of Detente (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003).

18

Introduction

Women participated in student organizing and anticolonial movements, contributing to and symbolizing revolutionary changes that encompassed gender. Algerian women combatants emphasized their role in the armed struggle, becoming symbols of resistance across the Third World. Elected to the nation’s first parliament, women featured prominently in the diplomacy of independent Algeria as representatives of the nation’s “youthful courageousness . . . pan-Arabism and socialism.”53 Armed Vietnamese women inspired “the political imaginations of American activists who connected domestic aspirations for social justice with global critiques of imperialism,” with the Vietnamese Women’s Union involved in female internationalism as they furthered their struggles.54 The superpower rivalry over newly independent nations recruited women by juxtaposing US and Soviet constructions of womanhood and gender roles as representative of the economic and ideological differences between the two.55 The American media projected images of the domestic bliss of white middle-class housewives that substantiated the official position locating women’s rights within existing economic structures or equated feminism with the extension of men’s rights to women. This disregarded the work of African American and Mexican American feminists who prioritized civil rights as opposed to individual autonomy. For the Soviets, who boasted of women’s productivity, paid work was compatible with motherhood.56 In this respect, women’s lives became sites of nationalist projects and global alliances where gender roles and family structures represented the postcolonial state’s standing within a bipolar international order. Political orientation was complemented by economics, and Tunisia’s struggle against underdevelopment domesticated the development ideology espoused by international financial institutions dominated by the West. In the words of James Ferguson, development imposed the structures of a capitalist, industrial economy, giving the 53

54

55 56

Natalya Vince, Our Fighting Sisters: Nation, Memory and Gender in Algeria, 1954–2012 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2016), 75, 83–88, 157–58. Judy Tzu-Chun Wu, Radicals on the Road: Internationalism, Orientalism, and Feminism during the Vietnam Era (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2013), 9, 194–200. Ghodsee, Second World, Second Sex, 45–47. Leila J. Rupp, “From Rosie the Riveter to the Global Assembly Line: American Women on the World Stage,” OAH Magazine of History 18, no. 4 (2004).

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19

amelioration of poverty an implied moral directionality of progress.57 The Tunisian state embraced these logics, joining the World Bank in 1957 via the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development, which promoted investments in tourism from 1959 by building beach resorts and full-service enclaves.58 Development aid from the World Health Organization (WHO) or rural dispensaries funded by Sweden, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Canada brought European and North American personnel to the Tunisian interior, including doctors from Czechoslovakia and Bulgaria who often staffed these clinics. Donor agencies not only reinforced state centralization, but development discourse and the structure of their programs contributed to reshaping family, gender roles, and modern womanhood especially in the realm of family planning. By the mid-twentieth century, population control “became a global campaign that encompassed most of humanity, aimed to convince or coerce people to plan smaller families.”59 These translated social ideals of family life and companionate marriage, often motivated by international security concerns that blamed high fertility for poverty, migration, and political instability. Tunisia was the first Arab and Muslim state to commit to family planning, hoping to play a pioneering role in the region while incorporating efforts to reduce population growth into its women-friendly reputation. In part thanks to foreign donor–funded contraception, the state encouraged couples to limit their families to a maximum of four children. Controlling fertility was cast as a social responsibility, whereas large families represented ignorance. Such judgments mirrored the condescension of US health professionals who normalized white middle-class practices limiting childbearing to marriage and financial considerations while castigating black families for overreproduction and the dissolution of the family. Efforts to control the fertility of America’s welfare recipients and “poor and minority women” in 57

58

59

James Ferguson, The Anti-Politics Machine: “Development,” Depoliticization, and Bureaucratic Power in Lesotho (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009), 9–21. This failed to improve local infrastructures or create sustainable sources of income. Robert A. Poirier and Stephen Wright, “The Political Economy of Tourism in Tunisia,” The Journal of Modern African Studies 31, no. 1 (1993). Matthew James Connelly, Fatal Misconception: The Struggle to Control World Population (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2008), 5.

20

Introduction

general, as Johana Schoen argues, carried “strong gender assumptions, modern notions of race and eugenic improvement, public attitudes toward the poor and toward women’s sexuality” that linked welfare to family planning. In addition to shaping family planning in North Carolina, Schoen found that presumptions about race, gender, and sexuality informed the US financing of family planning abroad.60 Tunisian state feminism was engaged with domestic and foreign contexts, and the implications for foreign policy, economic development, and cultural matters could not be separated. Bourguiba spoke openly of “the affinity of North Africans for the liberal democracy of the West . . . and their need to enjoy the economic cooperation of the great nations of the free world.” Positioning Tunisia at the crossroads of Europe and Africa, his state “has chosen unequivocally to follow the free world of the West” because “Tunisia’s natural sympathies are with the democratic and liberal nations.”61 This geostrategic alignment was driven by financial concerns as well as a desire to bolster the standing of his small nation in contrast to the revolutionaries of Algeria and the pan-Arab nationalists of Egypt. Strategic references to anticommunist tropes conveniently undermined his leftist detractors, including students who continued to study in Paris, Brussels, and London, as well as Cairo and Damascus. Returning with new skills, ideas, and tastes, some among the largely male student community also returned with foreign spouses, eliciting new interations of debates about gender and citizenship. Thus, as much as the ruling party strove to shape values through legislative, educational, and cultural means, as Frances Hasso astutely observes, “the transnational flows of people, ideas, and products influence native sexual and marital practices, family life, and gender ideologies.”62 The story of “Saadia“ that I described at the beginning of the chapter illustrates how Tunisian notions of modern womanhood existed within transnational contexts. The presentation of the story reflected developments in media technology and cultural convergence; it utilized black and white photographs to stage scenes from the 60

61

62

Johanna Schoen, Choice and Coercion: Birth Control, Sterilization, and Abortion in Public Health and Welfare (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005), 5–13. Habib Bourguiba, “Nationalism: Antidote to Communism,” Foreign Affairs 35, no. 4 (1957). Hasso, Consuming Desires, 99.

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narrative, superimposing dialogue and narration to mimic silent films. Described as a roman photos, or photo-novel, a genre utilized in the contemporary French press, the author Omar Khlifi (‘Umar Khlifi) was part of the first generation of Tunisian cinematographers.63 Visual media was politicized as Bourguiba passionately described the development of television broadcasts as “a mission as important as that of national defense. Television is the means par excellence to enter into every household, to influence behaviors, to weigh upon the will and guarantee the mobilization of everyone in the essential process of the development of our country.”64 Investments in film began with brief video reports in 1957, state-sponsored scholarships to study film in France, and the establishment of a state agency responsible for production and distribution in 1961. Yet the one or two Tunisian features each year could scarcely compete with Egyptian, American, and European films (the latter often dubbed in French or with French subtitles) that appealed to Tunisian audiences.65 Tunisia’s first feature-length film, Khlifi’s Al-Fajr (The Dawn/L’Aube), which celebrated the heroism of the anticolonial struggle, appeared on screens only in 1967. A self-described nationalist who filmed Bourguiba’s 1962 wedding, Al-Fajr projected nationalist narratives from schoolbooks onto the silver screen.66 In the words of Tunisian historian Kmar Bendana, it contributed to “the project of constructing a nationalist epic in line with a state-sponsored cultural production” that insisted on unanimity.67 63

64

65

66

67

The photo-roman appeared in the French magazine Nos Deux. Sarah Fishman, From Vichy to the Sexual Revolution: Gender and Family Life in Postwar France (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), xviii. Mohamed Mzali, Un premier ministre de Bourguiba témoigne (Paris: Jean Picollec, 2004), 255. Tahar Cheriaa, “Le cinéma en tunisie,” Africa: Rivista trimestrale di studi e documentazione dell’Istituto italiano per l’Africa e l’Oriente 28, no. 3 (1973). Until the opening of the first lab in Gammart in 1969, production, editing, and sound for Tunisian films were all done in France. Khlifi rejects the idea that his films were propagandistic. Hédi Khelil, Le parcours et la trace: Témoignages et documents sur le cinéma tunisien (Salammbô, Tunisie: MediaCom, 2002), 26–34. Kmar Kchir Bendana, “Ideologies of the Nation in Tunisian Cinema,” Journal of North African Studies 8, no. 1 (2003): 36–37. Tunisian producers embraced this nationalist narrative working alongside the state; see Tahar Cheria’s preface to Omar Khlifi, Histoire du cinéma en Tunisie (Tunis: Société Tunisienne de Diffusion, 1970).

22

Introduction

Khlifi produced one of the first films to focus on women with a bleak portrait of rural society in his 1972 Surakh (Hurlements/Screams). Its plot centers on two sisters, the first named Saadia, who is “raped, then disowned and eventually killed by her family, while the other, her sister, is married against her will.”68 Earlier Tunisian amateur films had depicted the devastating consequences of familial expectations on women, though according to film scholar Viola Shafik Surakh borrows from Egyptian models of commercial cinema, with “social criticism . . . wrapped in a rather melodramatic plot.”69 With its female protagonist and conspicuous engagement with social questions about virginity and marriage, the photo-novel “Saadia” anticipates Khlifi’s later work and its focus on the symbolism of women’s lives as social and cultural commentary. The effectiveness of such critique depends on its legibility, and fashion infuses Saadia’s journey with globally coherent signs. Samir, for one, appears in a dark suit and tie. Saadia’s progressive transformation of geographic and social mobility is represented through the discarding of her white safsari to acclimate to the urban space of the capital and the modern heterosocial milieu of the office. Embarrassed that her dress is too long and old-fashioned (démodé), clothing becomes a threshold in her transformation toward modern womanhood. While Saadia’s “traditional veil“ (son voile traditionnel) is legible to Tunisian audiences as a regional or temporal marker, shopping for skirts and blouses illustrates the urbane homogeneity of ready-to-wear fashions and more widely accepted marks of 1960s capitalist consumerism qua “modern” femininity. With her new dress, shoes, and haircut she blends seamlessly into the urban cityscape. Saadia’s story is a cautionary tale about the fragility of Tunisian womanhood amid threats to culture, identity, and the future of the national family. In Khlifi’s narrative, Saadia is introduced to new forms of youthful sociability at Samir’s “surprise party.” Though not a “surprise,” the English verbiage appears in its French form in the text similar to its use in the contemporary French press, referring to a party

68

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Roy Armes, Postcolonial Images: Studies in North African Film (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005), 32. Earlier films about women’s status include Albert Samama-Chikly’s 1924 Ain alghazal. Khlifi, Histoire du cinéma en Tunisie, 68–74. On Khlifi’s use of Egyptian models, see Viola Shafik, Arab Cinema: History and Cultural Identity (Cairo: Oxford University Press, 1998), 92–93.

Tunisian Women in Global Contexts

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with music and dancing.70 While Egyptian celebrities continued to enjoy fame in Tunis, with Um Kalthoum performing there in 1968, Saadia’s ignorance of the proper dance steps indicates that they were listening to the American and British rock and roll then popular in Tunis, and perhaps dancing the twist. Musical fads produced in Europe or the United States were an important facet of 1960s youthful contestation. Movements for civil rights and social justice also drew inspiration from anticolonial nationalist movements in Africa and the Middle East, with African American jazz musicians turning to Islam and the music of Sufi brotherhoods or traveling to Egypt and Morocco for inspiration and exchange, with some learning Arabic or playing the oud.71 Musical tastes became fodder for political rivalries whether in conservative concerns about the amorality of rock or in American efforts to deploy racially integrated jazz ensembles to present a harmonious vision of the United States to audiences in Eastern Europe, Asia, and Africa. Many of these movements were closely associated with youth, as the postwar baby boom and expanding education delayed the age of marriage and prolonged the transitional period between childhood dependence and adult responsibility in many cities around the world. Movements of political contestation were articulated through cultural innovation in clothing, music, film, and art.72 Though her age is not specified, Saadia is neither a child living with her parents nor an adult, a life stage marked by marriage and the establishment of a household. Instead, her perilous journey occurs during an intermediate stage. For Saadia’s generation, who came of age under a sovereign state, their youthful dynamism emblematized independence and a promising future. The Tunisian state vacillated between admiration of youth and disdain for student activism, either courting them into ruling party networks or dismissing their protests as resulting from foreign meddling. Student fluency in worldwide cultural 70 71

72

Fishman, From Vichy to the Sexual Revolution, 138. Hisham Aidi, Rebel Music: Race, Empire, and the New Muslim Youth Culture (New York: Vintage, 2014), 88–98. The cross-cultural and syncretic nature of musical exchanges including the 1960s is described in Robin D. G. Kelley, Africa Speaks, America Answers: Modern Jazz in Revolutionary Times (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012). Timothy Scott Brown and Andrew Lison, “The Global Sixties in Sound and Vision: Media, Counterculture, Revolt,” in The Global Sixties in Sound and Vision: Media, Counterculture, Revolt, ed. Timothy Scott Brown and Andrew Lison (New York: Palgrave, 2014).

24

Introduction

and ideological currents became synonymous with an antiestablishment threat. As Omnia El Shakry explains, the tension surrounding adolescence as containing both “peril and promise” was formative within the field of psychology, informing public opinion and political concern. Whether young people were associated with the success of a national struggle or considered a threat to the social order shaped state education policy, which Sara Pursley describes in Iraq as driven by the desire to channel youthful energies in patriotic directions.73 While the problematization of youth focused unself-consciously on men as subjects of agentive disruption, discourses around proper womanhood reveal comparable concerns about the instability of young women whose misguided choices threatened the national order of the heterosexual family.

“Our Revolution”: Rewriting Modern Womanhood August 13, the anniversary of the promulgation of the personal status code, became an official holiday celebrating the Tunisian woman. Commemorating the moment when “she was granted her legitimate rights,” it was an occasion when the iconic Tunisian woman should recall her painful past. According to the women’s magazine Al-Mar’a (Woman), as “women prepare for a better tomorrow” they were reminded of their “tremendous responsibilities” and their duties toward society and family.74 In these terms, the Arabic-language publication of the UNFT acknowledged the leadership of “our venerable president” by embracing national messages and reinforcing their relevance to women. Al-Mar’a was a small-format, predominantly blackand-white monthly that debuted in 1960. It covered matters of policy, summarized recent activities of the women’s union, and encouraged women’s participation in the nation through a vision of responsible citizenship alongside a brief fashion section, recipes, advice on managing a household, and cultural pieces such as film reviews.75 The 73

74 75

Omnia El Shakry, “Youth as Peril and Promise: The Emergence of Adolescent Psychology in Postwar Egypt,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 43, no. 4 (2011); Sara Pursley, “The Stage of Adolescence: Anticolonial Time, Youth Insurgency, and the Marriage Crisis in Hashimite Iraq,” History of the Present 3, no. 2 (2013). “Thawaritna: ‘aid al-mar’a,” Al-Mar’a, September 1966, 5. Hedia, “La Femme,” Afrique Action, November 7–13, 1961, 17, described the new women’s periodical as the “mouthpiece for the UNFT.” Tunisian feminist Ilhem Marzouki describes its vision as one grounded in Arab and Islamic

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women’s union’s second magazine, Femme (Woman), appeared about three times a year starting in 1964. It similarly focused on news and current events of relevance to women and, to a lesser extent, national history, fashion, and child-rearing. Both publications promoted a vision of women’s activism as in sync with “the leadership of the Party and the [economic development] Plan,” echoing phrasing about the “daily struggle towards the liberation of woman and her social and economic promotion.”76 Under the direction of UNFT leaders, Al-Mar’a and Femme contributed to women’s awareness of contemporary issues. The UNFT platform encouraging a middle-class vision of the family and national prosperity aligned with national interests and supported the status quo. Their intentions were not radical or oppositional. Instead, in their activities and writings the union and its publications contributed to shaping women’s roles within nationalist projects. Under the heading “Thawaritna” (Our Revolution), editorials in AlMar’a claimed possession of state feminist projects and the revolutionary magnitude of women’s social and political inclusion. The title evoked a stark contrast between the ideal of modern womanhood and a stereotypical past defined by women’s subordination and exclusion. Yet this nomenclature promised a shift in power by incorporating women into the revolutionary project of building the independent nation-state in ways that illustrate how the women’s press can prompt a rethinking about the relation between women and the state. Faiza (a woman’s name) (1958–67) was alternately a monthly and a bimonthly, covering the national art scene and a range of contemporary questions such as adoption, housing, education reform, and the cost of living to educate women about current events, culture, and politics. Though not funded by the state, Faiza upheld a nationalist platform and was closely affiliated with the ruling party.77 It was run

76 77

identity; see “The Importance of Preserving Our Arab Character” (Arabic), April 1965; “A Woman’s Opinion on the Crisis of Boredom” (Arabic), June 1962; and the editorial “We Will Preserve Our Independence” (Arabic), March 1962. It briefly ceased publication between 1966 and 1968. Marzouki, Le mouvement des femmes en Tunisie, 177–79, 203. Femme, April–June 1965. According to Dorra Bouzid, who insisted that it was not an official publication but funded through advertisements, the magazine folded in late 1967 when the state abolished advertising and a promised state subsidy failed to materialize; Femmes Journalistes, directed by Kamel Ben Ouanes (2013).

26

Introduction

predominantly by professional women; its founder, Safia Farhat, was the first woman faculty member at Tunisia’s Institute of Fine Arts, and the second editor-in-chief, Dorra Bouzid (Dura Buzid), was one of the nation’s first women journalists. From the first issue and its inclusion of a short story by Algerian writer Assia Djebar, Faiza staked a claim as a cultural magazine. The works of Tunisian writers Souad Gellouz, Najiya Thamir, and ‘Ali al-Du’aji appeared in the issues that followed, as did an essay by Mahmud al-Mas‘adi; profiles of Tunisian actors and singers such as Walaya, Habiba Msika, and Saliha; panegyrics on playwright ‘Ali ben Ayed; reviews of productions staged by the theater company of Tunis; and poetry submitted by readers. Celebrating national accomplishments, it situated the horizons of modern Tunisian womanhood within broader regional and Third World conversation about gender and culture. As a corpus of texts engaging with ideals of modern womanhood, the reports, letters, and editorials in women’s magazines are one of the central sources of this book. In the 1960s, the three magazines devoted to women, written largely by women, represented a more consistent engagement of women in the media than prior to independence. They reached an increasingly larger audience; despite inconsistent access to printing facilities, Faiza and Al-Mar’a still maintained eight to ten issues per year. Faiza’s typical circulation was roughly 12,000 (perhaps reaching a peak of 15,000), with 10,000 and 5,000, respectively, for Al-Mar’a and Femme, though such figures are only an estimate of readership as some subscriptions may have been obligatory, and other copies shared.78 Even as illiteracy declined across the nation, it remained higher in rural areas and among women, meaning that readership was concentrated among educated urbanites and that Faiza’s glossy format and colorful fashion spreads appeared distant from the realities of many Tunisians.79 Yet even when promoting fashions inaccessible to much of the population, M. Angela Jansen 78

79

The figure of 15,000 was mentioned in Faiza, in comparison to the Arabic daily newspaper al-ʿAmal, which had a maximum print of 20,000. Habib Boulares, “La presse en Tunisie: Un tableau aussi sombre que la réalité,” Faiza, March 1962, 8. Other circulation figures for Faiza date to 1967 and 1970 for the UNFT periodicals, The Europa Year Book 1967: Africa, the Americas, Asia, Australasia (London: Europa Publications Limited, 1967), https://archive.org/details/in.ernet. dli.2015.146900/page/n1. At least one contemporary argued that Faiza promoted a bourgeois lifestyle. Zghal, “Le bilan de Faiza,” Afrique Action, January 9, 1961, 14.

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insists that “magazines played an important role in the conceptualization” of a nationally specific modernity.80 The women’s press was a platform for an increasingly visible and vocal minority who bridged the gap between official rhetoric and practice opening conversations that reshaped women’s understandings of modernity, development, postcolonial womanhood and nationhood. Over the 1950s and 1960s literary journals fostered lively debates about the relation between culture, nationalism, and political movements across the Middle East. For instance, Maha Nassar argues that the circulation and consumption of written texts allowed Palestinians to forge “cultural and intellectual connections” across impermeable political borders, “creating new political vocabularies and solidarities” within an Arab and international struggle for decolonization.81 The Arab modernist project of socially committed literature and literary criticism depended on education and often a class position similar to that of the women’s press. In the words of Abdellatif Laabi, founder of the Moroccan-based Souffles-Anfas (Breaths, 1966–72), cultural conversations sought to “disrupt the obstacle of dependency and the multiple forms of exploitation under way.” Contributors to Souffles included intellectuals from Algeria, France, Haiti, Lebanon, Senegal, and Sudan and the works of Tunisian writers Du’aji and Mas‘adi.82 The Tunisian journal Al-Fikr (Contemplation, 1955–86) fostered similar scrutiny over the relationship of culture and identity within the context of nation-building. According to Hoda El Shakry, Tunisian writers strove to transcend the binary opposing “cultural authenticity” to “colonial mimicry” through dialogue with Arab intellectuals and engagement with the ideas of Pan-Arabism, Maghrebi unity, Marxism, and Third Worldism.83 Contributions of women writers such as the 80

81

82

83

M. Angela Jansen, “Beldi Sells: The Commodification of Moroccan Fashion,” in Modern Fashion Traditions: Negotiating Tradition and Modernity through Fashion, ed. M. Angela Jansen and Jennifer Craik (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016), 147. Maha Nassar, Brothers Apart: Palestinian Citizens of Israel and the Arab World (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2017), 3. From his “Realities and Dilemmas of National Culture II,” translated by Safoi Babana-Hampton in Olivia C. Harrison, and Teresa Villa-Ignacio, SoufflesAnfas: A Critical Anthology From the Moroccan Journal of Culture and Politics (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2016), 95–103. Hoda El Shakry, “Printed Matter(s): Critical Histories and Perspectives on Tunisian Cultural Journals,” Alif: Journal of Comparative Poetics, no. 37 (2017): 140–41.

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Introduction

Tunisian poet Zubayda Bashir were infrequent, however, as the literary journals of the 1950s and 1960s were dominated by men with little concern for women’s issues. Olivia Harrison and Teresa Villa-Ignacio describe this blind spot in Souffles-Anfas as a populist masculinist militancy typical of the radical left.84 Through its attention to women’s cultural production in Tunisia and across North Africa and the Middle East, Faiza brought gender into debates about cultural modernization, national identity, and transnational alliances.85 Language featured repeatedly within literary and cultural debates across Al-Fikr, Souffles-Anfas, and Faiza. Souffles began as a French publication, what Laabi later referred to as “linguistic disorientation,” though it also encouraged bilingualism, viewing Arabic as a national language that mitigated against cultural imperialism. Calls for the Arabization of literature were meant to encourage writing for an Arab (as opposed to international or European) audience beyond the bilingual elite.86 However, in her work on narrative ethics in North Africa, El Shakry insists on reading Arabic and French texts in tandem to disrupt notions of Arabic as a sign of “origins,” uncovering literary continuities regardless of language.87 That two of Tunisia’s three women’s magazines were published in French reflects the gendered linguistic legacies of colonial-era education. Professional women in the 1950s and 1960s were educated in French colonial schools and completed their university studies abroad. They had few options for an education in Arabic since late nineteenth-century educational reform and bilingual curricula were not coed. In response to a reader who wondered how a journal named after a Tunisian woman and directed by a Tunisian woman could publish in French, the editors admitted that discrepancies in colonial education meant they were more literate

84 85

86

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Harrison and Villa-Ignacio, Souffles-Anfas, 6–9. They covered some of the same writers such as Du’aji, Frantz Fanon, and Kateb Yacine. Mas‘adi, who was interviewed in Faiza (January–February 1967), was Bouzid’s stepfather and the two were close. An announcement for Souffles appeared in one of Faiza’s final issues, November 1967. This was a critique of colonial-era French-language novels from North Africa that were largely intended for a French audience. Abdelkebir Khatibi also questioned the utility of writing in French considering the high rates of illiteracy in Morocco. Harrison and Villa-Ignacio, Souffles-Anfas, 13–21. Hoda El Shakry, The Literary Qur’an: Narrative Ethics in the Maghreb (New York: Fordham University Press, 2020), 3–5.

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in French: “we have to be realistic.”88 Even after dropping its initial bilingual format, Faiza’s audience remained Tunisian, though it circulated beyond Tunisia and reached readers in Algeria, Morocco, and, to a lesser extent, Libya. The main part of this book consists of five chapters. Chapter 1 locates the Tunisian women’s press within wider conversations about postcolonial culture and revolutionary change through its approach to women’s rights and feminism. It insists on the political nature of these topics as they relate to Tunisia’s nation-building and international standing. This includes an overview of hegemonic constructions of state feminism and gender roles, tracing official discourse in the women’s press. Bourguiba looms large in the shaping of Tunisia’s liberal feminist vision. With a penchant for public oration, he embarked on nation-wide tours, addressed regional party meetings, and spoke at congresses of state-sanctified associations. These speeches were broadcast on the radio and television and detailed in the press. They communicated policy, offered civics lessons, and commemorated heroic moments of national history and the anticolonial struggle, often reiterating Bourguiba’s sacrifices. Presidential speeches not only provide details on official understandings of modern womanhood; they were considered sources of nationalist thinking and political action by his contemporaries and were printed, translated, and distributed internationally.89 In the heightened political contexts of Afro-Asian solidarity and Cold War rivalries, women’s allegiances were matters of global political importance. Tunisian women were simultaneously recruited to bolster their nation’s alliance with the United States and improve its reputation among Arab and Middle Eastern nations. They hosted state receptions and diplomatic events that contributed to the visibility of women’s rights in the self-presentation of the regime. Though a minor player in global rivalries, the Tunisian case insists on the importance of gender analysis to international politics in the era of decolonization. 88

89

Specifically, there were few women journalists and few, if any, trained in Arabic. Najet Lasram, “Notre langue est l’arabe,” Faiza, November 1961, 8. Mohsin Toumi, “Discours politiques maghrebins,” Les Temps Modernes (1977): 149–71. Individual speeches were reproduced in booklets and collected into annual volumes. English and French translations were published by the Secretary of State for Information and Tourism, a government office with its own press.

30

Introduction

The women’s press participated in national, regional, and global conversations, was represented in conferences across the globe, and reported on women in myriad locations. Bourguiba’s brand of liberal feminism shared much with that advocated by international feminist organizations aligned with the United States. That this feminism addressed patriarchy while ignoring the vicissitudes of capitalism and imperialism was denounced within the United States by feminists of color and abroad by socialist feminists and Third World radicals.90 Though forced to contend with the hegemonic articulations of liberal state feminism, Tunisian women’s participation in international solidarity networks represented a wide array of feminist positionalities that transcended the parameters of state control and official ideology. State modernization efforts, from building industrial capacity, tourist resorts, and schools to planting commercial crops, required money. Despite economic agreements, the French withheld resources to punish Tunisia’s support for the Algerian war of Independence (1954–62). Bourguiba turned his eyes across the Atlantic, securing American military assistance, food aid, and grants. Chapter 2 examines one facet of Tunisia’s relation with international programs of economic development as pertaining to modern womanhood: family planning. Tunisian legislation regarding marriage and divorce encouraged the restructuring of kin loyalties along a nuclear model as a symbol of the modern nation. By placing such measures in continuity with global concerns to control population, Bourguiba aligned domestic interests with international imperatives, hoping to distinguish himself from other Arab or Muslim heads of state to sustain his aspirations of regional leadership. Beginning after World War II, population control became an arm of international relations that was at once “a vehicle for modernization, the introduction of liberal democracy, and, if properly pursued, world peace.” This rosy picture belies a darker reality, as Alexandra Minna Stern uncovers, where eugenicists joined forces with leading organizations such as the Population Council and Planned Parenthood, blending ideas of white racial superiority into family planning policies.91 The world-wide 90

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A notable feminist critique of such liberal framings as part of a Third World alliance is Combahee River Collective, “A Black Feminist Statement,” in The Second Wave: A Reader in Feminist Theory, ed. Linda Nicholson (New York: Routledge, 1997). Alexandra Stern, Eugenic Nation: Faults and Frontiers of Better Breeding in Modern America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 153.

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consensus stigmatizing high fertility thus sought to limit demographic growth in communities perceived as poor, rural, or racially inferior using language about women’s health to gloss over coercive policies. Attempts to control world population involved “the world’s richest foundations, one of the largest non-governmental organizations, the biggest foreign aid programs, the World Bank and a purpose-built UN agency” and, according to Matthew Connelly, formed an essential facet of international relations.92 Beginning with grants from the Ford Foundation in 1963, donor agencies perpetuated Tunisia’s women-friendly image while touting the family planning program as a model for African, Arab, and Muslim countries. Reducing family size became part of official portrayals of Tunisian womanhood in the early 1960s, with fewer children deemed essential to achieving its middle-class depiction of modern domesticity. The UNFT and women’s press contributed to understandings of modern womanhood and maternal health dependent on family planning where happiness was an essential component of child-rearing. Contraception, legalized in 1960, was a central facet of donor programming from sources such as the Ford Foundation. Working alongside foreign personnel, Tunisian doctors and administrators wrestled with the implications of racial logics and their applicability to local realities, whether medical, logistical, or otherwise, often targeting rural women. While coercive tactics to urge long-term contraception and sterilization were premised on these women’s ignorance and irrationality, women’s access to contraception raised questions about dominant sex and gender roles. Were women responsible for contraception as an extension of their role in childrearing, or were decisions about family size men’s prerogative? The implementation of family planning resulted from a multilayered process of negotiation that took place between men and women in the field. Rural communities refused to isolate childbearing from the social and economic contexts that informed their decisions about family life. Their insistence on the intersection of class and regional identities in their understanding of gender roles and family life rejected state feminist imagery that located modern womanhood outside family and community. Whether they were female healthcare providers who regulated and disrupted the flow of contraceptives or were their clients who embraced, rejected, and ignored calls for 92

Connelly, Fatal Misconception, 15, 195–236.

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Introduction

sterilization, women challenged the limits of state control over their bodies. Demographic concerns in Tunisia traced a rural-urban divide because the nation’s interior was perceived by elites as a source of internal migration, unemployment, poverty, and potential insecurity. Chapter 3 digs deeper into the interplay between development logics and Tunisian nation-building by examining scholarship on rural populations, the rural family, and rural women. Knowledge about the rural interior, farming, fertility, and family structures was essential to agricultural reform, population control, public works programs, and economic planning more broadly. While the relation between the modern state and peasants was ambiguous – as Partha Chatterjee explains, vacillating between disdain for their backwardness and celebration of their authenticity – this legacy was particularly weighty in colonial contexts where peasants “became the repositories of all of those cultural presuppositions that allegedly made those societies incapable of modern self-government.”93 In postcolonial Tunisia, national identity was configured as urban and cosmopolitan. Belief in peasant ignorance remained pervasive among the elite, which justified the paternal authoritarianism of single-party rule and still necessitated approaching this population as an object of control. Between independence and the early 1970s, the need for local data facilitated a partnership between the state and scholars eager to shape national policy. Their research in rural spaces allowed them to demonstrate expertise. It was also a space of advocacy, consciousness raising, and a feminism concerned with women’s lives and local knowledge. In fields such as demography and sociology, Tunisian academics engaged with theories of population and development, worked with international organizations, attended conferences on multiple continents, and published in scholarly journals, both Tunisian and foreign. In their approach to contemporary debates, their scholarship illustrates concentric processes of localization. First, academics urging attention to Tunisian specificity used a nationalist lens to contest development’s supposed universalism. Second, working at the village level granted agency to rural communities often building on a commitment to Marxism or socialism in ways that questioned Tunis-centered decision 93

Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Post-colonial Histories (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), 158–59.

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making and the normalization of bourgeois family values. Third, Tunisian women academics approached rural women as sources of knowledge relevant to nation-building projects, challenging stereotypes about rural ignorance and the exclusion of women from development plans, Marxist scholarship, and leftist activism. Through their work in rural areas and advocacy to state agencies, the UNFT also contributed to bringing rural women into economic planning. Academic and policy writing operated within the political limits imposed by the single-party state and its Western alliances, avoiding explicit contestation. These collaborations between urban and rural women resulted in feminist analyses that challenged the male bias of development discourse, opening possibilities of cross-class solidarity that redefined what it meant to be Tunisian. One method of distinguishing rural from urban women regardless of place of birth or residence was clothing. In fact, projects surrounding the formulation of modern womanhood and family life were highly visual. Visual codes such as dress took on enhanced significance as the public sphere became increasingly heterosocial thanks to women’s broader participation in the salaried workforce. The women’s press promoted a regime of stylistic progress from head coverings and loose colorful dresses to makeup and heels. While access to material goods was an increasingly important attribute of the competent wife or caring mother, other commodities could threaten family stability and proscribed gender roles. Chapter 4 traces the fault lines between Tunisia’s openness to global commodity flows and concerns about authenticity in the moralization of fashions such as the miniskirt. An iconic 1960s item, the mini provoked controversy around the globe from Greece to France to Tanzania. In the United States, miniskirts catalyzed “political anxieties over gender and sexual mores, racial and class tensions, increased feminist activism, and the state of American youth.”94 Polemics surrounding the hyperpoliticization of women’s dress in the Middle East have focused predominantly on the veil to represent anything from women’s subjugation to cultural authenticity, piety, or consumer modernity. While not outlawed, Tunisian women were discouraged from covering their hair when they or their husbands were 94

Betty Luther Hillman, Dressing for the Culture Wars: Style and the Politics of Self-Presentation in the 1960s and 1970s (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2015), xxi.

34

Introduction

employed by the government. Unveiling shifted scrutiny over women’s dress onto other articles of clothing, maintaining the political and cultural pertinence of women’s appearance. Not only did short-skirted young women and long-haired young men transgress bourgeois visual aesthetics, but as the university became a space of leftist dissent, such youthful fashions violated expectations of filial obedience to presidential authority. Clothing, as Firoozeh Kashani-Sabet remarks, “became a barometer of politics . . . State intervention in fashion signaled an attempt to impose uniformity and control upon the individual. A citizen’s outfit expressed either social conformity or political dissent.”95 Adopting an apolitical guise, discussions about fashion in Tunisia’s women’s magazines situated textiles within a future of national industrialization with innovative understandings of style, identity, and authenticity. Magazines shaped ideologies of modern womanhood in surprising and unanticipated ways. While journalists played a starring role in these conversations, readers introduced important topics such as love into the script. Chapter 5 examines the emotional components of modern womanhood in discussions about marriage and the nuclear family. Across the globe, shifting marital practices and the idealization of romance encouraged new familial social norms. In the United States, a vision of marriage in the 1950s, at least among middle-class women, of “a mutual emotional and sexual partnership” had not mitigated “the tyranny of sex-gender norms, particularly the double standard expected of women and deep-seated paranoia about homosexuality and sexual deviance.”96 The 1950s and 1960s inaugurated “major changes in thinking about gender, family, and sex” in France, with the women’s press depicting the couple as a site of emotional fulfillment and love. Yet conservative attitudes about marriage as composed of a male breadwinner and a female housewife were not profoundly questioned until the protests of 1968.97 In postcolonial contexts in particular, novel understandings of love diverged from earlier romantic 95

96 97

Firoozeh Kashani-Sabet, Conceiving Citizens: Women and the Politics of Motherhood in Iran (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 147. Stern, Eugenic Nation, 155. Kristin Ross, Fast Cars, Clean Bodies: Decolonization and the Reordering of French Culture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995), 127–38. In France, “heterosexual marriage remained the ultimate stated goal for most people.” Fishman, From Vichy to the Sexual Revolution, xxxiii–xxxv.

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traditions in their associations with youth and progress, as Daniel Jordan Smith notes: “when people talk about marrying for love . . . they mean a kind of love that is associated with being modern.”98 Companionate marriage had long featured within reform projects, with marriages of choice incorporated into state building, juridical reform, and modernization projects across the Middle East, and further articulated in poetry, prose, and film. In fact, as Amy Motlagh shows, the modern state’s celebration of marriage in legal terrains occurred in tandem with the cultural project of reimagining the beloved.99 The women’s press contributed to the process of translating marital ideals into practice. Journalists, by offering advice and responding to letters, and their audience formed an emotional community within which to deliberate the gendered norms of modern behaviors such as courtship. However, by withholding approval of their romantic choices, the promise of love became a tool to discipline youthful femininity into mature adult womanhood. Despite the global nature of marriages of choice, romantic love also worked to fortify newly constructed national borders by racializing these identities. Alongside the celebration of choice as a testament to individual and national modernity, debates about love reveal the destabilizing effects of transnational intimacies as they challenged the territorialized nation-state and its reproductive order. Within the confines of the women’s press and its relative anonymity, young women transformed the question of romance into an attack on double standards surrounding premarital sex that urged a reconsideration of hegemonic forms of masculinity. I have used an array of archives to tell these stories and hope to have conveyed them with humility, though many silences remain. For instance, the UNFT generously opened their library to me, though it is not clear that the volunteer-based organization maintained and curated records in the years after independence. The Tunisian radio did not. The Rockefeller Archives in New York and the Sophia Smith Collection in Northampton, Massachusetts, contain materials relevant 98

99

Daniel Jordan Smith, “Managing Men, Marriage, and Modern Love: Women’s Perspectives on Intimacy and Male Infidelity in Southeastern Nigeria,” in Love in Africa, ed. Jennifer Cole and Lynn M. Thomas (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 160–61. Amy Motlagh, Burying the Beloved: Marriage, Realism, and Reform in Modern Iran (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2012), 3.

36

Introduction

to Tunisian family planning and women’s activism and benefit from greater resources. Yet they are narrated through American perspectives. These are complemented by a student opposition paper, a prominent academic journal, the women’s pages of major state-run dailies, and the weekly Jeune Afrique. A politically focused news magazine founded in Tunisia in 1960, whose director Béchir Ben Yahmed (alBashir bin Yahmad) then served as secretary of state for information in Bourguiba’s cabinet, it moved to Paris by 1965 concomitant with his demission from the government.100 Contributors included Tunisian journalists such as Dorra Bouzid, Tunisian academics and students in Paris such as Moncer Rouissi and Mounira Chelli, and intellectuals from across the region, from Moroccan feminist Fatima Mernissi to Algerian writer Assia Djebar, Egyptian writer Georges Henein, and the West African journalist Justin Vieyra. In the early 1960s, the editors described their readers as primarily Tunisians (30 percent) and other Africans (40 percent), with the rest in France and elsewhere across the world, including Tunisian and African diasporas.101 Prominent Tunisian men and a few women have written about the early postcolonial state, publishing memoirs and interviews. This includes politicians such as Ahmed bin Salih, Muhammad Mzali, Radhia Haddad, and Wassila Bourguiba; cultural figures such as Omar Khlifi and Jelila Hafsia; and political opponents such as Gilbert Naccache and Ahmed Othmani. While memory is not stagnant and their writings engaged with the political struggles of the 1980s and thereafter, they offer insightful interpretations of the early postcolonial era. Overall, these sources reflect an urban and educated bias in their composition and intended audiences. While some texts were more attentive to rural particularities, regional divergences, and class inequalities, few capture the voices and perspectives of working-class, poor, or rural Tunisian women. State feminism was the product of a patriarchal regime that expected the subordination of both men and women as defined by political and 100

101

It began as Afrique Action, before changing to Jeune Afrique early in 1962 when Bourguiba contested their use of the word “Action,” as the prerogative of the Dustur. It then expanded its focus to include African and Third World politics. On Ben Yahmed’s ministry, see Clement Henry Moore, Tunisia since Independence: The Dynamic of One-Party Government (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969), 78. “Nouvelles suggestions,” Afrique Action, May 22, 1961, 3.

“Our Revolution”: Rewriting Modern Womanhood

37

economic necessity. While the state brought many middle-class educated men and women into its orbit, its control over them was not complete. By promoting women professionals as diplomatic representatives, the state also granted them the power to craft and shape the delivery of its messages. However restricted by the authoritarian climate, these women were not just the face of Tunisian modernity but actors within that global story. An understanding of women’s activism, women’s scholarship, and discourses about women and gender is central to understanding Tunisian state-building and modernization. The nuclear family, companionate marriage, and contraception also figured into Tunisia’s international orientation, revealing the centrality of gender to Cold War alliances, development aid, and transnational exchanges. Though Tunisian women did not uniformly speak the language of liberal feminism, sexual liberation, or Third World radicalism, they articulated understandings of feminism and feminist practices that incorporated and diverged from the boundaries of the nationalist imperative, illustrating the relevance of gender to national politics, international alliances, economic development, intellectual life, culture, and social change.

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1

Between State Feminism and Global Sisterhood

“Electrician, conductor, or pig farmer (porchère), women have conquered every profession,” announced the Tunisian women’s magazine Faiza. “From now on, we will devote a space to the marvelous diversity of careers that women have conquered in major modern nations. May this rubric help our young girls expand their outlook (voir plus loin). To no longer be content with a degree in English or pharmacy like everyone else.”1 Over subsequent issues, the accomplishments of an agronomist, archeologist, and geologist from the Soviet Union and women artists and acrobats in Shanghai and Peking were presented as role models for a new generation of Tunisian schoolgirls.2 By drawing examples from contemporary global locations the magazine imagined a feminist future distinct from Tunisian realities by introducing such possibilities to local audiences. To be sure, the women’s press celebrated professional women at home, from teachers to social workers to those breaking new ground; firsts in higher education, the first high school principal, and women in broadcasting.3 These women were consciously upheld to represent the face of the nation to “our sisters and our friends around the world.”4 They kept tabs on the political and diplomatic activities of the UNFT leadership and the First Lady as they hosted international guests, attended conferences around the world, and traveled in the presidential entourage, normalizing women’s 1 2

3

4

“Les carrières et elles,” Faiza, April 1963, 8. “Les carrières et elles,” Faiza, December 1963, 12. Al-Mar’a included a profile of the French physicist Marie Curie, May 1964. “Femmes de la RTT: Alia Babbou ce ‘phénomène dévorant,’” Faiza, June 1960, 32; Safia Farhat and Josette Ben Brahem, “Deux jeunes filles tunisiennes peu ordinaires,” Faiza, September 1961, 32–33, 54; “Le premier lycée de jeunes filles,” Faiza, November 1962, 34–39; “Une grande militante: Mme Cherifa Messadi,” Femme, August 13, 1964, 19; Al-Mar’a, March 1966; “Mathématiques: le premier docteur est une jeune fille,” Faiza, February–March 1966, 54; “Femmes a l’heure de la télévision,” Femme, February–April 1966, 36–39. Femme, August 13, 1964.

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Between State Feminism and Global Sisterhood

39

participation in the civic life of the nation. Even as the state enabled women’s public roles presenting successful women as representative of national modernity and its regime of progressive gender politics, it could not control these interactions or their meaning. The women’s press shaped popular narratives about women’s place in society by situating Tunisian feminism in relation to the experiences of women elsewhere. In fact, women in Tunisia had participated in anticolonial women’s networks for decades following calls from Egyptian feminist Saiza Nabarawi to unite Asian and “Eastern” women, and Lebanese feminist Nour Hamada’s First Eastern Women’s Congress in Damascus in 1930. Habiba Menshari, a Tunisian nationalist active with the socialist party, attended the Second Eastern Women’s Congress in Tehran in 1932.5 The pan-Arab Feminist conference in Cairo in 1944 and the 1949 Conference of the Women of Asia – including countries in Southwest Asia and North Africa – continued this tradition of placing anticolonial nationalism in conversation with a vision of women’s rights.6 Explicitly anti-imperial agendas that foregrounded leftist, mass-based feminisms allowed for collaborations with women in China and India building on women’s legal rights, revolutionary feminist nationalism, reproductive rights, and organizing peasants and the working class.7 Over the following decades, Asian and African women continued to connect on platforms distinct from that presented by Western feminists at events such as the Asian-African Conference of Women in Colombo, Sri Lanka, in 1958, and the Afro-Asian Women’s Conference in Cairo in 1961. Participating in such conferences, Tunisian activists were exposed to a range of feminisms that transcended and sometimes challenged the state feminist canon.8 5

6

7

8

Souad Bakalti, La femme tunisienne au temps de la colonisation, 1881–1956 (Paris: Editions l’Harmattan, 1996), 36, 72. Charlotte Weber, “Between Nationalism and Feminism: The Eastern Women’s Congresses of 1930 and 1932,” Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies 4, no. 1 (2008). Egyptian and Turkish women activists were featured in the earlier Tunisian women’s magazine Leila. Nadia Nadja Mamelouk, “Anxiety in the Border Zone: Transgressing Boundaries in Leïla: Revue illustrée de la femme (Tunis, 1936–1940) and in Leïla: Hebdomadaire Tunisien Indépendant (Tunis, 1940–1941)” (PhD dissertation, University of Virginia, 2008). Elisabeth Armstrong, “Before Bandung: The Anti-Imperialist Women’s Movement in Asia and the Women’s International Democratic Federation,” Signs 41, no. 2 (2016). With women status garnering international legitimacy for their respective regimes, Iranian and Turkish women sought to utilize international conferences and the hosting of feminist events to pressure their respective government.

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Women’s alliances constitute an underrecognized component of American and Soviet rivalries for political influence, access to raw materials, and ideological hegemony that made the Third World central to international affairs.9 Women’s organizations and women activists contributed to maintaining the Cold War status quo and resisting such forms of Western dominance through their participation in anticolonial uprisings and transregional alliances that “inaugurated vital discursive and political pathways that informed the emerging pan-Asian and AfroAsian movement for anti-imperialist regional cooperation symbolized by Bandung.”10 As Judy Tzu-Chun Wu notes, they also invite caution regarding the transformative potential of such alliances. Interactions between US-based women activists and Vietnamese feminists were complicated by the former’s idealized and romanticized perceptions of the decolonizing Third World. Depicting Vietnamese women as mentors of revolutionary activism reversed the racial hierarchies inherent to Orientalism without dismantling them. Still, Wu’s work draws attention to the political stakes of transnational solidarity and its use as a diplomatic tool by Third World and radical movements.11 This chapter delineates how the liberal contours of Tunisian state feminism contributed to domestic and global politics. It begins with official representations of women’s liberation as grounded in the legal rights guaranteed by the state, to illustrate the linkage between state policies of feminism, centralization, and authoritarianism. By regulating marriage and divorce, the state became involved in family life in complex and often precarious ways. Careful not to destabilize the family, the modern woman became an element of its transformation into a conjugal household that rejected the extended family model as a repressive vestige of the past. The

9

10 11

Camron Michael Amin, “Globalizing Iranian Feminism, 1910–1950,” Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies 4, no. 1 (2008); Kathryn Libal, “Staging Turkish Women’s Emancipation: Istanbul, 1935,” Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies 4, no. 1 (2008). Odd Arne Westad. The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). Armstrong, “Before Bandung,” 308. The Vietnam National Liberation Front invited representatives of the New Left, antiwar movement, and Black Panthers on “revolutionary pilgrimages,” knowing that their reports in the leftist press contributed to greater understanding and sympathy for their cause. For some activists, their travels served as inspiration and the reformulations of their political agendas back in the United States. Wu, Radicals on the Road, 5–9, 217–18, 34, 58–59.

The Liberal Ethos of State Feminism

41

women’s press and the UNFT echoed the outlines of a liberal rights–based feminism as they often shared the socioeconomic privileges and largely francophone cultural orientation of the national elite. But they departed from hegemonic iterations of feminism in subtle ways. Traveling across Africa, Asia, Europe and the Middle East, visiting the United States, attending feminist conferences, and engaging with Western women’s groups as well as those from the socialist bloc, the experiences of Tunisian women were not contained within the nation’s borders. In their reports, presentations of women’s lives, and coverage of contemporary events, periodicals depicted multiple models of modern womanhood as relevant to the young Tunisian nation, carefully transcending the parameters of liberal emancipation. Evoking forms of international solidarity encountered in their travels, references to women’s collaboration and visions of Third World sisterhood hinted at such alternate feminisms.

The Liberal Ethos of State Feminism State rhetoric about women under Bourguiba iterated a set of interconnected themes. First, it centered on Bourguiba as an individual responsible for women’s emancipation. Second, it equated womanhood with a specific vision of the family where rights – in terms of marriage, divorce, custody, or inheritance – were attached to their roles as wives, mothers, and daughters (with such purportedly personal matters subject to state regulation). Family was “the basic unit of the Nation”; emancipation was immersed in a social project of civic responsibility where the best way for a woman to exercise her rights was to “make herself useful to the nation.”12 For literary scholar Lamia Ben Youssef, the emphasis on “Tunisian women’s roles as wives, mothers, and guardians of Islamic tradition” resembled nationalist rhetoric prior to independence.13 However, the third component of postcolonial discourse relied on linear constructions of national time where women embodied independence and progressive modernity. Colonial occupation allowed “traditions” to subjugate women, whereas the independent state liberated them. Bourguiba blamed “so-called religion and bad traditions” for women’s 12

13

Bourguiba, “Décoloniser la femme” (Nouakchott, November 15, 1965), in Discours, ed. Secrétariat d’Etat à l’information, 128–36 (Tunis: Publications du Secrétariat d’Etat à l’information, 1975) vol. 15, 19. Lamia Ben Youssef Zayzafoon, The Production of the Muslim Woman: Negotiating Text, History and Ideology (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2005), 95.

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seclusion and polygamy to distinguish such practices from true faith.14 Yet the focus on family life as the location of “old tradition” echoed Orientalist clichés and colonial-era denigrations of Muslim, Arab, or Middle Eastern women.15 In practice, women’s extensive involvement in diplomacy, as representatives of the UNFT or as spouses of political figures, was facilitated and encouraged by the regime. As UNFT president Radhia Haddad described the continuous ceremonies, dinners, and tours of UNFT projects, the UNFT was the “vitrine of the political regime” for foreign audiences.16 Women’s suffrage was also a symbol of their participation in the nation as seen in photographs of women at the ballot box illustrating official publications about “women in Tunisia” (see Figure 1.1). In these respects, postcolonial womanhood combined women’s roles as wives and mothers with women’s public presence as citizens of the nation.

Figure 1.1 The modern woman as citizen, from the title page of Women of Tunisia, Secretariat of State for Information and Tourism, 1961.

14

15

16

Habib Bourguiba, Mobilisation générale pour le travail: Allocution hebdomadaire du président Habib Bourguiba: 26 février 1960 ([Tunis]: Secrétariat d’Etat à l’information, 1960), 4–5. There is an extensive literature on Orientalism and the representation of women, beginning with Malek Alloula, Le harem colonial (images d’un sous-érotisme) (Paris: Editions Slotkine, 1981); Kabbani, Europe’s Myths of Orient; Reina Lewis, Gendering Orientalism: Race, Femininity and Representation (London: Routledge, 1996). Haddad, Parole de femme, 139, 77, 80.

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Though women contributed to nationalist mobilization under the colonial regime, the Dustur had distanced itself from reformist calls for women’s liberation, viewing the latter as an assimilationist threat to Tunisian identity.17 Bourguiba’s elevation of women’s rights to a crucial aspect of anticolonial nationalism was retrospective and discursive: “I placed women’s rehabilitation at the top of national priorities at a moment where French troops still occupied the country.”18 These singular claims required frequent reiteration, with Bourguiba reminding his audience at UNFT congresses how “once independence was gained, even before the evacuation of our territory by French forces, one of our first efforts was in the interests of women.”19 As he described on another occasion: At the dawn of independence, as soon as Tunisia’s destiny was in my hands, and four short months after the formation of my government, I promulgated the law that liberates women making them equal to men. This is the law of August 13, 1956, reforming personal status. Since last summer [1964] August 13th has become the day where we celebrate women’s emancipation.20

Even when women’s participation in anticolonial protests was acknowledged, Bourguiba crafted a legacy of personal commitment to women’s rights, explaining, “In taking the initiative of emancipation, I assumed a heavy responsibility.”21 He positioned himself as the ultimate arbiter of legal affairs pertaining to women, informing members of the judiciary that he would personally intervene when a woman’s rights were not respected, and “If necessary, she could write to me directly.”22 Nationalist texts placed women in a position of grateful appreciation but not agency: “the women of Tunisia regard Habib Bourguiba not only as the creator of Tunisia, but as the man who gave them back their dignity.”23 The personal status code not only was “the instrument of emancipation of Tunisian women” and the cornerstone of women’s rights 17 18

19

20 21 22 23

Bakalti, La femme tunisienne au temps de la colonisation, 62–67. Bourguiba, “La femme, élément de progrès dans la société” (Monastir, August 13, 1965), 158 in Discours, 156–73. Habib Bourguiba, The State Carries On (Le Kef: Secretariat of State for Cultural Affairs and Information, 1962), 3. Bourguiba, “Décoloniser la femme,” 18. Bourguiba, “La justice et l’évolution de la société,” 11. Bourguiba, “Edifier une société saine et équilibrée,” 20. Women of Tunisia, 16

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legislation, but according to Bourguiba, cemented his personal role, secured women’s position within the family, and created a temporal marker of national progress dating to 1956.24 State intervention in familial matters was rare in “ancient societies” but was the foundation of “modern law.” As Bourguiba explicated, the Majalla was a component of this legal evolution because “jurists estimated that relations between individuals have collective relevance and that it is the obligation of the state to intervene in these relations.”25 Instruments of governmentality such as record-keeping and the registration of marriages as well as divorce were presented as protecting the rights of the national collective. In Bourguiba’s estimation, these laws also protected the family as “the fundamental unit of society.”26 Hence, establishing a minimum age at marriage (of fifteen for girls and eighteen for boys) was intended to prevent child marriage, encourage companionate relationships, and solidify the foundations of the nuclear family. A woman’s legal rights did not grant her permission to “reject a father’s or a husband’s authority.”27 The family remained a microcosm of and metaphor for the nation, as all citizens were “members of one family.”28

Divorce as a Gendered Process Connecting marital reform to family harmony and national stability politicized divorce as a public affair. Again according to Bourguiba, state supervision of divorce as a civil procedure was intended to restrict the husband’s ability to divorce at whim, thus preserving the family from dissolution and sparing society from its dangerous repercussions.29 Both husbands and wives could end marriages, granting women a new visibility in the process (though scholars have intuited that even while unilateral divorce was the husband’s prerogative within Islamic courts, their wives were nonetheless involved in 24 25

26 27 28 29

Bourguiba, “Birth Control,” 3. Habib Bourguiba, “Deux fondements du statut personnel: Dignité et cohésion nationale (Tunis, le 10 août 1956),” in Discours, ed. Secrétariat d’Etat à l’information, 128–36. Bourguiba, “Deux fondements,” Discours, 131. Bourguiba, The State Carries On, 13. Bourguiba, “La femme, élément de progrès,” 170–71. Bourguiba, “Deux fondements.”

The Liberal Ethos of State Feminism

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initiating divorce).30 While permissible, divorce was condoned in moralistic terms, as Bourguiba warned: “If we have authorized divorce, we consider it the lesser of two evils when conjugal life has become impossible. Didn’t the Prophet say that ‘of all that is licit, nothing in the eyes of God is more reprehensible than divorce’?”31 This reference to the sunna, to Islamic traditions, serves to justify legality of divorce while appearing paradoxically dissuasive about its use. The responsibility for maintaining moral standards fell upon women, as Bourguiba elaborated: “Sometimes a wife reproaches her husband with being given to joking with other women or being a bit of a charmer.. . . Rather than indulging in recriminations she would do better to remember that she has a husband, and also children to bring up.”32 He urged their patient acceptance of men’s philandering and adultery as “little sacrifices.” It followed that a wife who initiated divorce was faulted with “excessive independence” from her husband, which risked ruining the country through “licentiousness and moral vacuity.”33 By sexualizing women’s access to divorce as a national calamity, Bourguiba exposed the gendered nature of concerns about divorce as a critique of women’s agentive role in ways that reverberated beyond presidential speeches: “‘I want this chair, or I’m divorcing you . . . I want this dress . . . I want the same ring as my sister . . .’ I want, I want, and continued menacing. This is my life,” complained an artist who bemoaned his wife’s insatiable materialism and singular focus on money. “I have decided to divorce,” he confessed. But one thing breaks my heart: must our child be sacrificed to the thoughtless frivolity of his mother? I beg you, tell women that these are not true values. A loving husband, beautiful children are worth more than jewels and are a more reliable measure of happiness than piles of new belongings.34

30

31 32

33 34

Judith Tucker, In the House of the Law: Gender and Islamic Law in Ottoman Syria and Palestine (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 78–112. Though Tucker does not focus on the cities of Tunisia, her conclusions about women’s awareness of their legal rights and recourse to the judicial system are consistent with findings on Tunis by David Stephan Powers, The Development of Islamic Law and Society in the Maghrib: Qadis, Muftis and Family Law (Farnham: Ashgate Variorum, 2011). Bourguiba, “Edifier une société saine et équilibrée,” 15. Habib Bourguiba, Women and Social Evolution (Tunis: Secretary of State for Cultural Affairs, 1966). Bourguiba, “La femme, élément de progress,” 162–63. “Le courrier des lectrices,” Faiza, April 1960, 6.

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In these evocative terms, a male reader of Faiza drew connections between the gendering of divorce (attributed to his wife’s apparent greed) and the potential social and familial consequences. The editors printed it in full, urging readers to pay attention. While the letter coincided with another discursive thread critiquing women’s materialism, its resonance with official constructions of modern womanhood is striking. Whether concerns about divorce were spurned by increasing divorce rates is difficult to ascertain due to a lack of data prior to 1956. According to the National Institute for Statistics, the number of divorces increased over the 1960s, but less than 23 percent were initiated by the wife.35 To what extent these numbers are linked to demographic patterns or previously unregistered divorcees seeking documentation matters less than the consensus that wives were responsible for sustaining marriages regardless of their husbands’ behavior and that their liberation posed a threat to the family. Divorce and remarriage had been common in the first half of the twentieth century and was presumably socially acceptable, as Frances Hasso writes in the case of Egypt and the Emirates. Its stigmatization followed the postcolonial state’s construction of divorce as inimical to the modern family and akin to “male polygamy, and marital seriality as threatening to the well-being of the nation-state.”36 In Tunisia, concerns about the impact of women’s emancipation on family life occurred in a context of juridical constraints on men’s patriarchal authority as husbands and fathers, bringing marital matters under the purview of a centralized state and its judicial apparatus. Along with restrictions on male polygamy, judges (as representatives of the state) held the authority to grant divorce and approve the marriages of minors. Tunisian apprehension about divorce rates are reminiscent of the family crises that Hasso details in Egypt and the Emirates, or what Hanan Kholoussy describes as a marriage crisis in 35

36

There were 826 divorces in 1957 and 3,719 in 1969. Of the latter, 1,538 were initiated by the husband, 837 were requested by the wife, and 1,147 were described as mutual. Yet over the same decade marriage remained almost universal; only 3 percent of men and 1.5 percent of women in the 50–54 age group had never been married. Tunisia Moves Ahead, 216 and 226. Other data indicates regional variation with higher rates of divorce in the capital, and a decrease in Sousse between 1962 and 1966. Rockefeller Archives, Ford Foundation, Tunisia Field office VII, 17, 63-207A. Hasso, Consuming Desires, 6.

Nationalist Women and the Women’s Press

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Egypt, driven less by statistical changes and more as “a metaphor to critique larger socioeconomic and political turmoil.”37 While women’s rights in marriage and divorce were portrayed as an element of Tunisia’s secularism and the privatization of faith, women’s responsibilities toward the family took precedence over individualism or autonomy, locating their contributions to the new nation within specific spheres that accommodated the state’s patriarchal and authoritarian structures. The “liberal” attributes of Tunisia’s state feminism need qualification. It was liberal in the sense that official discourses on women’s liberation extended some of men’s rights to women, particularly in marital matters (and was concomitant with its liberal economic orientation despite nominal references to socialism). However, the regime encoded hierarchies as indicated by the patriarchal nature of family law and the family ideology expressed in concerns that through divorce women posed a threat to the family and society. Despite its claims of political inclusion, as Uday Mehta argues, liberalism coexisted with hierarchies, colonial domination, and exclusion attribuatable to the “thicker set of social credentials that constitute the real bases of political inclusion,” whether defined by race, civilization, or otherwise.38 In Tunisia, maturity and adulthood were associated with marriage, so that women who were not yet married or who had ended their marriages (via divorce) were not recognized as benefiting from the rights conferred by the state. Presidential discourse and the women’s press contributed to the articulation of nationalist ideals delineating such cultural and social parameters of women’s inclusion.

Nationalist Women and the Women’s Press Official depictions of state feminism as the personal project of the president explain his frequent appearance on the covers of Faiza and Al-Mar’a, the detailing of his appearances at UNFT events, and frequenting quoting of his speeches in the women’s press.39 Faiza’s 37

38

39

Hanan Kholoussy, For Better, for Worse: The Marriage Crisis That Made Modern Egypt (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010), 2. Uday S. Mehta, “Liberal Strategies of Exclusion,” in Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World, ed. Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 61. See, for instance, “Khitab al-mujahid al-akbar fi ‘aid al-mara’a,” Al-Mar’a September 1966, 6–13; and the column “Qal al-ra’is,” Al-Mar’a, January 1964, September 1966, and August 1967.

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inaugural issue included Arabic and French dedications to President Bourguiba, “the liberator of Tunisian women, the man who opened to her the door of progress, who renewed her dignity and her responsibility within the nation.” Presidential activities were regularly featured, and national holidays commemorated. The central place of the UNFT in regime narratives about women’s emancipation and women’s responsibilities toward the nation was embraced by Al-Mar’a and Femme. In the words of Femme, its mission was to mirror “the action of the Tunisian woman in the life of the nation, and to help her become conscientious of the role that she must fulfill in a society in the midst of transformation, and for a better future.”40 Readers too referenced the contours of official discourse quoting presidential speeches and equated the state’s commitment to women as “the modern and revolutionary project that is the Personal Status Code.”41 In addition to technical difficulties and prohibitive costs, the women’s press published in a context of censorship where sanctions and official pressure led to the closing of newspapers. With little independent journalism by the mid-1960s, even “the nonparty papers learned to echo the political line of the government’s Information Department.”42 This state monitoring of information was integral to ensuring the lack of meaningful political participation available to the average citizen.43 Thus the explicit nationalism within the women’s press should be treated as a prerequisite to publishing and not necessarily a comprehensive reflection of their editorial visions since despite their nationalist credentials, the space from which to question official feminist imperatives was limited. Women active in civil society organizations or public life were close with Bourguiba, his wife Wassila Bourguiba, the Dustur party, and inner circles of political authority. The women’s cultural group, the ‘Aziza Uthmana Club, founded in 1957, was led by the wife of

40 41

42 43

Femme, August 13, 1964. Mahmoud Ben Hassine suggested that the Code be discussed in each issue; see his letter in Faiza, August–September 1967, 82–83. Moore, Tunisia since Independence, 78. Larbi Chouikha, “Autoritarisme étatique et débrouillardise individuelle: Arts de faire, paraboles, Internet, comme formes de résistance, voire de contestation,” in La Tunisie de Ben Ali: La société contre le régime, ed. Olfa Lamloum and Bernard Ravenel (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2002).

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Abdelaziz Lasram (later minister of economic affairs) and Habiba Zaouche, whose husband Ahmad Zaouche was the first governor of Tunis after independence. Prominent charitable projects targeting women or matters deemed of concern to women, such as the orphanage Al-Radhe’a/Le Nourrison (The Nursling) and the Vestiaire Nationale (The Nation’s Closet), which provided clothing sewn by women to the needy, were run by the president’s wife and niece, respectively. Both were also supported by the UNFT. Neila bin ‘Ammar, presidential sister-in-law and a prominent UNFT figure, was part of the growing number of women elected to municipal councils in the first decade after independence (there were ten in 1957 and forty-four by 1966). These connections facilitated women’s activism and public service while cultivating dependence that restrained them within state-sanctioned parameters. The women’s press was also tied to the palace. Jelila Daghfous, a longtime UNFT activist and its general secretary from 1962 to 1966, was responsible for Femme, whereas Al-Mar’a was directed by UNFT president Radhia Haddad. Haddad was not only from the prominent Bin ‘Ammar family and a cousin of the First Lady, but her husband and father in law were nationalists, and her brother served as director of the Dustur party and minister of defense. Faiza’s founder, the artist Safia Farhat, was married to the artist Abdallah Farhat, a member of the Dustur political bureau in the 1950s who served as director of the presidential cabinet immediately following independence. Dorra Bouzid, who joined the editorial committee in 1960, becoming editor-in-chief in 1963 and director in 1965, was a journalist and militant nationalist, whose activism dated to her student days in Paris in the 1950s where she studied pharmacy and penned a women’s column in the nationalist L’Action. Her stepfather and “spiritual father,” the writer Mahmud al-Mas‘adi, with whom she was quite close, was minister of education from 1958 to 1968, and later minister of cultural affairs.44 Other members of the editorial staff were Josette

44

She used the pseudonym Leila in L’Action, and later also Dorra ben Ayed, Ferial, and Cactus. Julia Clancy-Smith, “From Household to Schoolroom: Women, Transnational Networks and Education in North Africa and Beyond,” in French Mediterraneans: Transnational and Imperial Histories, ed. Patricia M. E. Lorcin and Todd Shepard (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2016). See also her extensive interview in Ben Ouanes, “Femmes Journalistes.”

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ben Brahem, a French woman who wrote for Jeune Afrique and for Le Monde under the pseudonym Josette Alia whose husband Raouf Ben Brahem was close with Bourguiba, and Samia bin ‘Ammar, the co-director of Faiza, who was the wife of another prominent member of the Dustur party, Mundher bin ‘Ammar, who held ministerial portfolios in public health, and later youth, sports, and social affairs and who was also the First Lady’s younger brother.45 For all its personal connections to the regime, shared class, and educational backgrounds, the women’s press was more than a mouthpiece for state feminism as it drew conversations about modern womanhood in new directions. For instancre, UNFT president Haddad, who became the first woman in parliament in 1959, and was the only woman with an official position within the Dustur party, was frequently featured in the women’s press. Along with coverage of legislation and congressional debates relevant to women, Haddad’s visibility normalized women’s political participation. With only an imperfect potential for advocacy that stemmed from women’s proximity to the state and restrictions on the press, women’s magazines presented subtle deviations from important components of the state feminist narrative, stretching the boundaries of accepted gender roles.

Women’s Place in the New Nation References to Bourguiba’s personal initiative in liberating women were plentiful in the women’s press. As Karima Medjoub described for readers of Femme: “Since our nation became independent, Bourguiba has never failed to support and encourage the cause of women’s emancipation. A true revolutionary, he was the first Arab and African head of state to have always advocated that ‘without first women’s evolution, no progress is possible.’”46 The canonization of Bourguiba’s biography within nationalist history offered occasions for similar commentary.

45

46

Ben Brahem was denied the ability to continue in her role as a professional journalist after criticizing state violence against student protests in late 1966; see Jeune Afrique, January 8 and 29, 1967. Karima Medjoub, “En dix ans d’indépendance, la femme tunisienne a accompli une révolution authentique,” Femme, February–April 1966, 12–13.

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On June 1, celebrating Bourguiba’s 1955 return to Tunisia from exile and imprisonment on the eve of independence, Faiza declared that June 1st consecrates not only the definitive victory of the Tunisian people over its conquerors, but also the triumph of woman after her long resignation and her most valiant struggle. The Tunisian woman, fully conscious of the victories won by the people thanks to the leadership of the president, the providential man that Tunisia awaited for centuries, expresses her filial gratitude.47

By inserting women’s “valiant struggle” within the story of national liberation, women’s agency quietly accompanies her “filial gratitude” to the national leader. By reminding readers of presidential advocacy for women, these comments reinforced their proximity to the paternal state and held it accountable. Women’s claim to national history appears in a small UNFT book commemorating a decade of independence and women’s rights, Union Nationale des Femmes de Tunisie, dix ans: 1956–1966.48 Including photographs of the president and lengthy excerpts from his speeches, this twin birthing of the nation and women’s organization justified the existence of the UNFT. Yet alongside references to Bourguiba’s struggle is a narrative of women’s engagement, resuscitating legendary figures of the pre-national past, the seventh-century Amazigh warrior Kahena, and the medieval saint and philanthropist ‘Aziza ‘Uthmana, both of whom represented women’s public engagement. Their lives chronologically preceded the reformist politicians of the nineteenth century and the largely male conversations about feminism cited in nationalist histories, pointing toward women’s actions as shaping such narratives. The text describes women’s involvement at every step of the anticolonial struggle and effectively decenters Bourguiba’s role. Even the description of UNFT structures and foundational statutes depicting the organization as independent may stem less from a denial of their subordination to the state and more as a resistance to it. Internalizing the hegemonic norms of the national project as a bourgeois modernity,

47

48

Dina, “Premier juin,” Faiza, June 1960, 9. Appreciation of Bourguiba is similarly the focus of Radhia al-Haddad’s women’s day piece “‘Aid al-mar’a,’” Al-Mar’a, June 1964, 18, 62. The forty-five-page text includes no author or publication information; Institut des Belles Lettres Arabes.

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the organization articulated its own vision of women’s place within the nationalist canon stemming from collective agency. The agentive positioning of women within the national future also appears in surprising ways. When the president visited the town of Touza (just south of Monastir), women welcomed him by donating their jewelry to the national treasury. Their sacrifice was lauded and featured on the cover of Femme as a major event. In the accompanying article, one participant proclaimed, “This is nothing compared to the sacrifices of those who have given their life [for the nation]. Bourguiba has given us our rights, our responsibility is to help him in his quest to build,” and “we no longer need gold, our dignity has been restored by the personal status code.”49 These statements could be performative, but they nevertheless indicate the influence of official discourse about Bourguiba’s role in women’s liberation as they shaped women’s engagement with the state. However, Femme shifted the emphasis back to the women, whose “bracelets, pins, pearl necklaces, gold pieces” were an important source of women’s wealth and access to capital that became an “investment” in the nation’s “fight against underdevelopment.” This framing underscored women’s financial contributions and participation in national initiatives. Even when women’s agency coincides with national interest, reinforcing hegemonic narratives, it cannot be entirely ignored. Similar logics of reiterating and contradicting state discourse are evident in Faiza. A report on divorce in its second issue chided women readers in the closing lines: “let’s merit the freedoms we have acquired, don’t take advantage of them,” capturing the spirit of national polemics and perpetuating the politicization of matrimonial affairs as a topic of public interest.50 To shed light on rumors about increasing divorce

49

50

Anissa, “Femmes de Touza ou les prémices d’une maturité,” October–December 1965, 21. Women in nearby Mahdia and Machrouha as well as Bou Arkoub near Cap Bon followed suit. Anissa, “A la pointe de progrès ‘nos rurales’ continuent à investir. Après, Touza, MACHROUHA donne le ton,” Femme February–April 1966, 5. According to Marzouki, the UNFT press emphasized women’s centrality to the family as wife and mother, and “divorce was equated with a real failure, an aberration in social and emotional life to be avoided,” citing articles in Al-Mar’a on family happiness, maternal responsibility, and spousal advice in 1961–64, and a critique of divorce in December 1970. Marzouki, Le mouvement des femmes en Tunisie, 179–81.

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rates and better understand its causes, an unnamed judge was interviewed who specialized in matters of marriage and divorce. To exemplify the problem, the judge described the case of Mrs. S., who had filed for divorce after eleven years of marriage and three years of attempted reconciliation. The judge was incredulous that Mrs. S. failed to specify her rationale and worried about the ramifications on the couple’s four children. To this Faiza wondered if perhaps “the true reason is her marriage at a very young age – fourteen or fifteen years old – which is currently prohibited,” and an age at which she may not have consented to the marriage in the first place.51 Pressing the judge to opine on women’s requests for divorce more generally, the article cited additional factors such as male unemployment and alcoholism. By ending the article with an emphasis on rights and responsibilities, Faiza did not challenge the gendered understanding of divorce. Yet highlighting Mrs. S.’s young age and presenting divorce as a social problem that intersected with socioeconomic factors or public health transgressed official framings of divorce in important ways.

Working Women and Working-Class Women The modern Tunisian woman was expected to work. “The wealth of this underdeveloped country of Tunisia is not so much a matter of present resources, which are insufficient,” Bourguiba proclaimed in his explanation of the nation’s socialist path. “Our wealth lies especially in the resources that our men and women must create with an enthusiastic sustained and organized effort under the guidance, encouragement and supervision of the State.”52 Women were photographed in official publications as a telephone operator, hair stylist, secretary, and artist to illustrate that “women have the choice of many different careers,” and according to another text women were “actresses . . . dressmakers . . . typists . . . laboratory assistants . . . and even soldiers or members of parliament.”53 Yet descriptions of labor were often

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52 “Et le divorce?,” Faiza, 1959, 17. Bourguiba, Our Road to Socialism, 11. Kitabat al-Dawlah lil-Akhbar wa-al-Irshad Tunisia, Tunisia Works (Tunis: Secretariat of State for Information, 1960), 70–71; Tunisia, Women of Tunisia, 18–20.

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masculine, whether in militaristic terms as “the ultimate battle” or references to “the ordinary worker” who toiled the land.54 The imperative to work, to build the nation, was repeated in presidential speeches warning against complacency, but how women’s labor balanced with their domestic responsibilities were subjects on which the president did not dwell. In stark divergence from official narratives, the women’s press devoted considerable space to women’s employment. “Our young girls want to work. They are right, because for a woman there is no true independence without the security of an occupation,” explained Faiza in 1959. “Instead of offering laconic encouragement, we thought that the best way to help these young girls – and their parents – would be to provide a comprehensive documentation of the professions that are open to them, and where they can aspire to fulfill a useful social role.”55 Women’s labor was concentrated in agriculture, and to a lesser extent in childcare, domestic service, and textile production, and while fields such as sales, law, or medicine were seen as appropriate for women, young girls had few models beyond the classroom for women’s formal employment.56 Faiza’s attention to prominent contemporary personalities, including women in arts and politics such as the South African star Miriam Makeba, Algerian Amazigh writer Marguerite Taos Amrouche, the Moroccan representative to the UN Halima Warzazi, and Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, challenged this status quo. They urged young girls to contribute to society or “be useful,” by explaining how to “become” nurse assistants, teaching assistants, rural healthcare workers, and telex operators.57 While many career paths respected gendered understandings of women’s role in the family and society, women’s careerism was modern in its association with industrial machinery, technology, and communications.

54

55 56

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“Le travail, voilà le combat suprême,” in Bourguiba, Mobilisation générale pour le travail, 12–13. “L’orientation professionnelle des jeunes filles,” Faiza, 1959, 73. Hochschild, “Women at Work in Modernizing Tunisia.” About half of women professionals (who constituted roughly 1 per cent of working women) were teachers, and very few women civil servants held high-ranking administrative positions. Tunisia, Tunisia Moves Ahead, 228. “Femme au travail,” Faiza, December 1959, 14; “Jeunes filles au travail,” Faiza, January 1961, 16; “Najet et le Telex,” Faiza, April 1966, 36–37.

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Figure 1.2 The women’s press, cover of Al-Mar’a, March 1966.

The UNFT approach featured women active in the organization and interviews with women in arts and culture, while arguing for the significance of women’s labor in industry and agriculture within ideals of national progress and modern womanhood. This included cover

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photographs of a smiling young woman picking oranges described as “a true social revolution” that made labor joyful, and a young woman at a loom in its second and third issues. A cover illustration of Al-Mar’a depicted two women and two men joining their hands in the air as a portrait of Bourguiba imposed over the sun hovers in the upper left corner. Whereas one woman carries stalks of wheat, her hair covering, long clothing, ankle bracelets, and bare feet identify her as a peasant, the other woman’s high-heeled shoes, short bobbed haircut, kneelength skirt, and handbag signal her position as an urbanite and perhaps an office worker (see Figure 1.2). In the editorial of its third issue headlined “In the Era of the Plan,” Femme proposed an intersection between the goals of the national four-year plan and the participation of the UNFT. Artisanal and professional training for women, Femme argued, supported “the modernization of economic sectors” and allowed women to participate in the civil life of the nation alongside men in the “economic and social battle.”58 This platform countered the exclusion of the UNFT from the drafting of such plans or economic decisions more broadly.59 Another editorial that was focused on women’s “advancement and dignity through work” combined references to Bourguiba and the importance of women’s “feminine” career paths, while hinting that any path open to men must also be open to women. It was essential to “combat anachronistic traditions,” so that women continued to contribute to the nation’s evolution and a regime of progress.60 Similar language about the nation’s “new battle” was sprinkled across features on “women in industry,” projecting how “women in industry will be the reflection of this new battle.”61 Textile factories and smaller clothing workshops were seamlessly integrated alongside women weaving in their homes in reports about women across the nation presenting industrial labor in continuity with women’s domestic role.62 This framing reinforced yet diverged from

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60 61 62

Femme, April–June 1965, 5. The lack of women in positions of authority within the labor sector was acerbically noted following an international labor conference hosted in Tunis: “the participation of 412 members and numerous observers from all corners of the world. Not one woman.” Faiza, April 1960, 12. Femme, February–April 1966, 7. Sonia Maarouf, “Femme dans l’industrie,” Femme, April–June 1965, 25–27. Souhaiba Rached, “La kairouanaise,” Femme, April–June 1965, 10–11; Sonia Maarouf, “La femme du centre tunisien a concretisé son émancipation,” Femme,

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the gender roles of nationalist mantras about the “struggle against underdevelopment.” Questions about hiring women in a spinning factory in the face of male unemployment hinted at concerns about women’s labor, financial autonomy, and their impact on men and masculinity. For Faiza, women’s earning power was a way for women to “contribute to household finances,” as illustrated by a sketch of a couple flexing their biceps to hold up a block labeled “household.” The wife in a dress and the husband in a suit depicted the complementarity of their distinct gender identities as a partnership of shared economic burdens.63 When an older man revealed his fear about his wife’s recent employment (even though it was prompted by his illness), Al-Mar’a reassured him that working outside the home was part of the modern woman’s commitment to her family.64 The women’s press strove to assuage male fears over the security of their employment and financial roles as head of household by couching women’s labor within presidential discourse, party directives, and familial framings. In the end, the presentation of work as liberating still rested on the middle-class experiences of the educated women writing for the press. This divergence was noted in an interview with Mbarka bent Abdallah, a young female employee at a state dairy processing facility, who described work as a necessity. With an unemployed mother, no father, and only a fifth-grade education, she had few options: “If I had money, I would have continued my studies. I would have been a nurse. Sometimes I tell myself, ‘if only I could be a secretary.’”65 As Tunisian feminist Ilhem Marzouki explains, the economic projects initiated by the UNFT (and the working women featured in its publications) exacerbated economic and regional divides. Coordinated with the “needs of the state,” providing military uniforms and souvenirs for the tourist market, this focus on textiles and handicrafts perpetuated rural underdevelopment and marginalization in the market economy where women “far from being able to achieve economic independence, were subjected to a double subservience: exploitation on the level of

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February–April 1966, 23–24; A. Razgallah, “La révolution continue . . . Tunisie an X,” Femme, February–April 1966, 16–18. Dorra ben Ayed, “Le code et le mariage,” Faiza, October 1961, 34–35. “Li-kol mushkila . . . hal,” Al-Mar’a, October 1966. “Mahbouba et M’barka à l’usine,” Faiza, April 1–May 15, 1966, 34–35.

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their salaries, and economic dependency.”66 In her work on Turkey, Deniz Kandiyoti similarly found no direct causal link between women’s labor, their status within the family, and their ability to transform patriarchal norms in urban, rural, or nomadic communities.67 The status of the UNFT as an official body representing women’s interests granted legitimacy to women’s legal rights as a matter of policy considered at the highest levels of the state. But the authoritarian political climate limited the oppositional possibilities of the women’s press. When Bouzid spoke out against sex discrimination, it was to criticize the ambassador of Yugoslavia.68 With the powerful labor union caught between advocating on behalf of its constituencies through collaboration with the ruling party or forming an opposition, it is little surprise that feminists operated within similar constraints, choosing to work within party lines.69 In the implementation of rights that the state had already granted, the women’s press expanded the hegemonic reach of official narratives, but from within this position, the contours of women’s role in the new nation could be continually explicated, elaborated, and debated.

Cultural Mobilization and Transnational Alliances From theater to cinema to dance to amateur poetry, the Tunisian women’s press devoted much space to local and contemporary cultural production. Poetry was an important political tool of the era, with Palestinians organizing poetry festivals in the 1950s to rally “a sense of collective spirit” that situated Palestinian liberation within “the overlapping Palestinian, Arab, and Third World anticolonial discourses and struggles.”70 Culture was part of intellectual calls for radical change, of demonstrations of transnational solidarity; it was mobilized by newly independent states to showcase national identity, 66 67

68 69

70

Marzouki, Le Mouvement des femmes en Tunisie, 188–89. Deniz Kandiyoti, “Sex Roles and Social Change: A Comparative Appraisal of Turkey’s Women,” Signs 3, no. 1 (1977). Cactus “Et des femmes: Chronique d’OEK,” Faiza, January–February 1967, 73. Ahmad, “Politics and labor in Tunisia,”; Abdesselem Ben Hamida, Le syndicalisme Tunisien de la deuxième guerre mondiale à l’autonomie interne (Tunis: Publications de l’Université de Tunis, 1989); Ben Hamida, “Pouvoir syndical et édification d’un état nation en Tunisie.” Nassar, Brothers Apart, 79–87.

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and manipulated by the superpowers as a facet of Cold War competition. In 1996, the Tunisia state began hosting the most important film festival on the African continent of the era, the Carthage Film Festival (Journées Cinématographiques de Carthage).71 Sponsored by the Ministry of Culture and organized by the director of its cinema department Tahar Cheriaa, film was a decidedly modern genre through which to demarcate Tunisia’s position in the region. Its competition included only films produced by Arab and African directors, promoting an anti-imperial agenda and socially engaged cinema.72 From the First World Festival of Negro Arts in Senegal in 1966 and Algeria’s hosting of the first Pan-African Cultural Festival in 1969, regional festivities celebrated African heritage and political independence, inspiring calls to incorporate culture into state-building projects of Third World nations. As the Moroccan novelist Mohammed Berra argued in a 1968 essay in Souffles, “The problem at hand is to see literature, and the arts in general, become one of the tools that will form the society that we aspire to become.”73 Following Bandung, Arab nations such as Egypt and Algeria held a prominent place in visions of Afro-Asian solidarity, including within the African diaspora in the United States. Between coverage of the Algerian revolution in newspapers such as the Nation of Islam’s Muhammad Speaks (the most widely circulated African American paper of the 1960s), President Ahmad Ben Bella’s meetings with Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X, and Black Panther Party teach-ins on Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, Algeria became a powerful symbol of the parallels between anticolonial struggles and the civil rights movement. These connections were fostered by the National Liberation Front’s (FLN) brief support of the Black Panthers and African liberation movements, particularly in Portuguese colonies, and epitomized by the Pan-African Cultural

71

72

73

Cheriaa, “Le cinema en tunisie,” 433; Armes, Postcolonial Images, 20–21. See Faiza’s coverage of the festival in November 1966. The first Tunisian films presented a collective national identity focusing on the struggle for independence. Morgan Courriou. “Les Journées Cinématographiques de Carthage et la “Guerre de libération cinématographique” (1966–1975).” Africultures 101–102 (2015): 294–317; Florence Martin, “Cinema and State in Tunisia,” in Film in the Middle East and North Africa: Creative Dissidence, ed. Josef Gugler (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2011). “Generation Drive,” in Harrison and Villa-Ignacio, Souffles-Anfas, 140.

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Festival.74 Despite tensions between Afrocentrism and broader visions of blackness and African identity in which Arabs were included, such international events articulated an intellectual and cultural platform for anticolonial struggles, national revolutions, and economic development based on the revolutionary potential of African culture.75 International conferences, global travel, and rhetorics of transnational solidarity were politicized components of the shifting constellations of Cold War rivalries and alliances, with vast resources invested in personal encounters and cultural programming. In 1955, President Eisenhower received congressional approval to use emergency funds for a State Department program that sent African American and racially integrated jazz ensembles on global tours. Concerned that reports detailing the prevalence of segregation and frequent instances of racist violence would limit potential alliances with newly independent nations, their itineraries adhered closely to areas of CIA interest, with frequent stops across the Middle East.76 Scholars have concluded that the jazz tours failed as a form of American propaganda, but even as the revolutionary credentials of Algeria and Egypt waned by the early 1970s, cultural connections were transformational on the individual level.77 74

75

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Negotiating with the United States for investments in the energy sector, the FLN quieted its radical internationalism by 1970 to focus more on industrialization and national development, whereas the defeat in Palestine, Nasser’s death, and Sadat’s open-door economic policy marked a similar move in Egypt. Radical alliances were limited by economic and political constraints faced by the Algerian FLN and a mutual lack of understanding. Justin Jackson, “Kissinger’s Kidnapper: Eqbal Ahmad, the U.S. New Left, and the Transnational Romance of Revolutionary War,” Journal for the Study of Radicalism 4, no. 1 (2010); Samir Meghelli, “From Harlem to Algiers: Transnational Solidarities between the African American Freedom Movement and Algeria, 1962–1978,” in Black Routes to Islam, ed. Manning Marable and Hisham Aidi (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). Samuel D. Anderson, “‘Negritude Is Dead’: Performing the African Revolution at the First Pan-African Cultural Festival (Algiers, 1969),” in The First World Festival of Negro Arts, Dakar 1966: Contexts and Legacies, ed. David Murphy (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2016); Andrew Apter, “Beyond Negritude: Black Cultural Citizenship and the Arab Question in FESTAC ’77,” in The First World Festival of Negro Arts, Dakar 1966. The personal motivations of the musicians were more complex. Penny M. Von Eschen, Satchmo Blows up the World: Jazz Ambassadors Play the Cold War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006). This was probably true for African American musicians such as Randy Weston and Ahmed AbdulMalik engaged with stylistic fusion and experimentation in part to counter Orientalist stereotypes of the Middle East and Arab world,

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As a small nation explicitly aligned with the West – as Bourguiba described it, “We do not need . . . Khrushchev or Tito” – Tunisia is often left out of transnational narratives.78 Yet access to domestic markets, natural resources, and votes within the UN awarded importance to otherwise minor players in global politics. As Ghodsee demonstrates, cultural promotion to appeal to hearts and minds extended to women who were courted by international alliances and subjected to superpower propaganda featuring distinct models of women’s emancipation.79 The politicization of gender within international affairs was explicit at the 1975 UN International Women’s Year conference in Mexico where government delegations focused on conversations regarding women’s legal, social, economic, and political roles, but began much earlier, and in the case of Tunisia, targeted nations already located within the Western bloc. Attention toward Tunisian women’s approach to Cold War alliances and global references in their vision of modern womanhood underscores the significance of women’s organizing and the broader import of gender to international politics.

Cold War Feminisms While connections among and between women in the global south were fostered early in the early twentieth century, they coalesced under a few umbrella organizations in the Cold War era. On the one hand was the liberal feminist International Alliance for Women (IAW) led by American and Western European women. Broadening to include women from across the globe, it was less effective in regions such as the Middle East, thanks to its espousal of American foreign policy and firm belief in Western superiority in definitions of women’s liberation based on suffrage and legal rights.80 On the other hand,

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which were often reduced to belly-dancing clichés. Weston collaborated with gnawa musicians in Morocco, and AbdulMalik studied under a Sudanese oud master. Kelley, Africa Speaks, America Answers. Bourguiba, Our Road to Socialism, 31. Ghodsee, Second World, Second Sex, 130, 46. Though they diverged from popular stereotypes of the Middle East and Islam in their publications and interactions with women during travels to Egypt and Syria, they ignored political problems caused by American-led war and American-backed coups. Charlotte Weber, “Unveiling Scheherazade: Feminist Orientalism in the International Alliance of Women, 1911–1950,” Feminist studies 27, no. 1 (2001).

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anti-imperialist collaborations brought together women from across Asia and Africa under the aegis of the Non-Aligned Movement. Finally, the Soviet-affiliated Women’s International Democratic Federation (WIDF), built on socialist feminism to frame women’s issues around the intersections of gender and class. The small Tunisian women’s group affiliated with the national branch of the Communist party had worked alongside the WIDF prior to independence, celebrating Labor Day on May 1 and International Women’s Day on March 8 and drawing parallels between Tunisia’s anticolonial struggle and those of women across the globe.81 While the Tunisian government declared itself squarely within the US-led bloc, defining state feminism along largely liberal models, Tunisian women participated in Afro-Asian, European, and WIDF circles and attended conferences in a dizzying array of locations, exposing them to multiple iterations of women’s rights and definitions of identity or belonging. They attended major events affiliated with the Non-Aligned Movement such as the 1958 Asian-African Conference of Women in Colombo, Sri Lanka, and the Afro-Asian women’s conference Cairo in 1961. From 1960, the UNFT was affiliated with the North American– and Western European–based International Council of Women (attending meetings in Istanbul in 1960 and London in 1967, with Haddad serving on its executive committee). Tunisian delegates participated in WIDF events, from the World Gathering of Women for Disarmament in Vienna in 1962 to the WIDF’s World Congress of Women in Helsinki in 1969, and undertook a study voyage to Yugoslavia in October 1962. Tunisian women traveled across the African continent, attending a conference of West African Women in Conakry, Guinea, in July 1961, the Pan-African Women’s Congress in Algiers in 1968, and one on women and development in Addis Ababa in 1969. The UNFT was also grounded in the Middle East, participating in the work of the Union of Arab Women in 81

The UFT had nominated a delegation including Nabiha ben Miled and Tewhida ben Sheikh to attend the Cairo Conference for Peace in 1952, but were prevented from traveling by the French colonial authorities. Marzouki, Le mouvement des femmes en Tunisie, 108–29. They also voiced their support for and solidarity with women in Korea, China, India and Egypt; see, for instance, “8 mars 1951 journée de lutte des femmes de Tunisie et du monde entier,” L’Avenir de la Tunisie, February 23–March 9, 1951, no. 321. For more on the UFT prior to independence, see the interview with Nabiha ben Miled in CREDIF, ed., Memoire de femmes/Nisaʼ wa-dhakirah, 33–42.

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Jerusalem and Beirut, and meeting with delegations of Iraqi women.82 Travels to Tanganyika, Mauritania, China, Moscow, London, and Montreal were recorded, tallied, and presented in annual reports and announced at anniversaries showcasing the breadth and scope of the UNFT’s activities and Tunisia’s acknowledged place within international feminist circles through “fruitful exchanges and amicable relations” with women across the globe.83 International women’s conferences provided a broader platform for solidarity and nonEurocentric imaginaries where global sisterhood created a space for debate, for the consideration of intersectionality, as opposed to insisting on “a rigid universal theory for understanding women’s oppression” to replace liberal feminism.84 Guests such as England’s Queen Mother, the First Lady of Turkey, the wives of the American vice president, and the Romanian minister of foreign affairs were feted by prominent female figures such as Haddad, Saida Sassi, and Neila bin ‘Ammar. They were taken on tours of the UNFT’s charitable projects, visited its main office, or welcomed for teas and dinners, just as UNFT representatives accompanied Bourguiba on state visits to China and his tour of the Middle East.85 Comparable to the wives of foreign service officers described by Cynthia Enloe as essential to their husbands’ careers, Tunisian women’s contributions to diplomacy fostered the conditions of trust 82

83

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Al-Mar’a covered the General Union of Arab Women (April 1964), the Arab Women’s Congress in Jerusalem and Jordan (May 1964), and a voyage to Turkey in early 1967. See, for instance, Union National des Femmes de Tunisie, dix ans: 1956–1966, 30; Al-Ittihad Al-Watani Lil-Mar’a Al-Tunisiya, Manara Bin Ahdin, vol. 1: 1956–86; Haddad, Parole de femme, 181; Dorra ben Ayed, “Rendez-vous à Conakry,” Afrique Action, August 7, 1961, 18–19; “L’UNFT à 8 ans,” Femme, August 1964, 4–9; “L’année 1968 en bref . . .,” Femme, February 1969, 8–9. Some of the same women attended multiple conferences regardless of their Cold War positionality; for instance, Aisha Bellagha, a founding member of the UNFT, participated in women’s conferences in Guinee and Yugoslavia in 1961, while traveling to France and Tanzania in 1962. Tewhida ben Sheikh, who had been involved with the UFT prior to independence, represented Tunisia at an international conference on family planning held in Pakistan in 1962, and UNFT President Haddad spent time in the United States, represented Tunisia at an exposition in Montreal, and accompanied Bourguiba on a delegation to China. Wu, Radicals on the Road, 5–9, 218. Union National des Femmes de Tunisie, dix ans: 1956–1966; “Visite de Mme Sunay à l’UNFT,” Femme, November 1966, 10–13; “L’année 1968 en bref,” 8–9.

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and confidence required within international affairs.86 Fluent in international contexts, they represented the success of state feminism and the modernity of the nation.87 Tunisian women embodied the gendered legitimacy of the state to global audiences, but more than a charade of state feminism, they also contributed to international postcolonial feminist organizing and found inspiration in these exchanges. The women’s press reflected an internationalism built through travels across Africa, Asia, and the Middle East that contributed to the decentering of Western feminism and its universalist claims. As Haddad curtly noted during one visit to the United States, Tunisian women were there to find not “things to copy, but ideas to work with.”88 She later elaborated that despite America’s long-established independence and decades of women’s enfranchisement in the West, American women were not role models in every sphere. “Take the US congress, or that of England, how many women are representatives?” Even if women exercised indirect influence, she added, “Why don’t they have the same positions of responsibility as men do?”89 Her rejection of American leadership and its implicit superiority to Tunisian, Muslim, or other Middle Eastern women resonates with the strategies of Turkish feminists who intentionally crafted a selfimage to contrast persistent stereotypes of Middle Eastern backwardness.90 Despite the shared class background of women activists in diplomatic circles, Tunisian women critically engaged with Western feminist models, instead of merely translating or adopting them.

86

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88

89 90

Cynthia Enloe, Bananas, Beaches and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Politics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 93–123. Reports on Tunisia translated from the international press indicate the awareness of the nation’s global standing and feminist reputation. Ali Mansour, “La femme tunisienne, du voile au bikini (un article du New York Herald Tribune du 14 juillet 1965),” Faiza, December 1965, 6–7. A column entitled “La femme tunisienne à travers la presse étrangère” was regularly included in Femme; see February–April and September–October issues in 1966. William McPherson, “She Proves Women Are Citizens in Tunisia,” Washington Post, May 11, 1962. “L’action de l’Union National des Femmes Tunisienne,” Confluent, 689. Turkish women activists in 1940–70 were not passively supporting state mandates but shaping them to their own ends. Umut Azak and Henk de Smaele, “National and Transnational Dynamics of Women’s Activism in Turkey in the 1950s and 1960s: The Story of the ICW Branch in Ankara,” Journal of Women’s History 28, no. 3 (2016).

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Culture and Identity The ability to articulate a Tunisian feminism that differed from Western models was directly related to the cultural content of the women’s press, with its eclectic attention toward everything from Ma’luf music to ballet to Arab cinema. Recipe sections included French cuisine, stuffed grape leaves, Algerian couscous, Turkish dining, and Tunisian classics such as brik, tajine, and dishes of the nation’s Jewish community.91 Theoretical engagement included major texts on the anticolonial struggle such Fanon’s L’an V de la Révolution Algérienne and the works of French feminist Simone de Beauvoir.92 Faiza was committed to celebrating art and culture across North Africa and women’s contributions therein as seen in reports on “Maghrebi literature,” the Algerian national theater troupe, a Moroccan sculptor, Moroccan poets, and Moroccan actor Fatma Rezguigi.93 A running poetry section, “Jeunesse maghrebine” (Maghrebi Youth), printed work submitted by young readers from across North Africa, namely, amateur poets in their teens and early twenties. Cultural conversations across the Middle East were represented through the writings of the Ottoman-Turkish poet Nazim Hikmet, Palestinian novelist Samira Azzam, and a translation of the provocative Ayyam ma‘ahu (Days with Him) by Syrian feminist Colette Khuri. Prefacing an excerpt of Leila Ba’albaki debut novel Ana Ahya (I Live!), as a story of a young woman “who exposes her soul, her state of revolt,” Faiza emphasized the relevance to Tunisian women readers: “this young woman is Muslim and Arab. Her problems are our problems.”94 91

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Femme often included a weekly menu “Cuisine: Femme a choisi pour vous” or “Cuisine: Recettes de par le monde,” including dishes from England, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary. Faiza’s cooking column “Cuisine/Fi al-matam” began bilingually with a focus on simple Tunisian meals. Faiza, December 1959. Having lived in Tunisia where he wrote Les damnes de la terre, Fanon was memorialized in December 1961. De Beauvoir’s works feature in February 1961 and January–February 1967 The record of Al-Mar’a was also mixed, with features on Saudi women (March 1964) and the Syrian poet Nizar Qabbani (May 1964) as well as reviews of films starring Dean Martin (January 1964) and Brigit Bardot (March 1966). Radhia Hanachi, “‘Je vis!’ Ou l’échec de la femme prix de sa liberté,” Faiza, October 1961, 13 and 16. Women writers such as Ba’albaki and Khuri were among the first to assert a distinctly female voice in the realm of fiction, and their works were widely discussed across the Arab world. Roger Allen, “The Arabic Short Story and the Status of Women,” in Love and Sexuality in Modern Arabic

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Positioning themselves within multiple intellectual traditions, Faiza discussed the works of the preeminent French scholar Jacques Berque, giving ample coverage to the writings of the Tunisian historian Paul Sebag. Placing Tunisian or Algerian writers alongside their French counterparts acknowledged French scholarship but resisted its predominance. Both French historian Charles-Andre Julien and Algerian writer Leila Hacene responded to Germaine Tillon’s work. Under the heading “The Oriental Woman, Is She Subjugated?” the magazine questioned French scholarly interest in its former colonies and its conclusions about Middle Eastern or Muslim women.95 Interviews with European and North American scholars conducting research in Tunisia became a platform to deliberate their work and disseminate the results among Tunisians. A conversation about girls education hosted by Farhat, Bouzid, and ben Brahem included Tunisian professionals Samira Benghazi and Daghfous; Clémence Sugier, a French professor teaching in Tunisia; and Ruth Ruelle, a Dutch anthropologist pursuing a thesis on women’s “evolution” in Tunis. While Ruelle was interested in European influences over behaviors and gender roles, Benghazi criticized Western models of femininity that pushed young women “to abandon tradition for westernization.” “Western women’s acquisition of liberty is understood by young girls as the liberalization of male-female relations . . . she truly wants to accept this aspect of Western civilization that seems to her a real advance, but she is worried about those aspects that appear to her as licentious, immoral, and too much freedom (liberté trop grande).”96 Through such conversations, the insights of foreign researchers were brought into conversation with Tunisian priorities, reversing the scrutinizing gaze of the ethnographer upon a passive subject and questioning the applicability of Western definitions of women’s liberation.

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Literature, ed. Roger Allen, Hilary Kilpatrick, and Ed De Moor (London: Saqi, 1995), 86–90. Faiza, August and May 1961. Jeune Afrique covered the publication of Germaine Tillon’s Le harem et ses cousins throughout July and August 1966, including discussion of American sociologist Arlie Hochschild’s work on Tunisian women in January and March 1967. See also Sebag’s review of Berque in Faiza, October 1959, and his contributions on questions of public health and literacy in 1960. “La jeune fille tunisienne au bord de l’évolution” and Ruth Ruelle, “Ma jeune tunisienne vit dans deux mondes,” Faiza, March 1961, 44–45, 50–54.

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Faiza’s inclusion of art and literature communicated sophistication, national progress, and a sense of solidarity with women’s struggles across the Middle East and to a lesser extent the global south. El Shakry poignantly argues in her analysis of literary magazines of the early postcolonial era that writing was central to the formation of identity, whether national, regional, or otherwise. In Souffles/Anfas, culture and poetry were a forum for discussions of progressive politics. The inspiration of Moroccan intellectual Abdellatif Laabi, Souffles was grounded in Morocco and Algeria, in conversation with anti-colonial intellectuals more broadly.97 Faiza fostered a similar sense of shared culture through its coverage of and support for writers across Tunisia, Algeria, and Morocco, recognizing the social and political value of their work. Readers praised what the journal represented for a young nation, showing “that Tunisia has achieved in ten years, in literary and cultural domains, what other nations have not accomplished in a century or even more.”98 However, considering Bourguiba’s rejection of pan-Arabism and Western geo-strategic alliances, cultural publications such as al-Fikr adopted a cautious approach as El Shakry notes, it was “operating within certain state structures of power that it simultaneously seeks to undermine.”99 These conclusions are instructive for understanding how the women’s press positioned European culture and knowledge as particularistic but not universal, as informative but not authoritative, with a pan-Arab perspective implicit in celebrations of Arab and North African success. As a result of its alliance with the regime, Tunisian women approached the United States with similar circumspection, navigating the boundaries between proximity and friendship while dismissing American pretenses of feminist leadership.

Tunisian Women and US Friendships The politicization of Cold War–era models of womanhood is captured in relations between Tunisian women and women in the United States, though considering the resources invested by the latter in soft power diplomacy, these did not exist on an even playing field. When Tunisian 97

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Between 1966 and its final issue in 1972 there was only one poem by a woman, and one essay on works by North African women (by French contributor Jeanne-Paule Febre). Harrison and Villa-Ignacio, Souffles-Anfas. Ayed Benghazi, “Votre rôle culturel,” Faiza, August–September 1967, 83. El Shakry, “Printed Matter(s),” 161.

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women traveled to the United States on official sojourns under the aegis of the State Department, they were welcomed by a CIA-funded women’s organization. These women were mobilized to discreetly build Cold War alliances, though unlike the jazz ambassadors they appear to have followed segregated lines and did not include African Americans. Participants in a student delegation in 1959 requested “to attend a negro church service,” hinting at their awareness of the racially circumscribed nature of their engagement with the United States.100 A group of upper-class New York women hoping to promote their vision of the American democratic way of life by building friendships among women formed the Committee of Correspondence. They organized conferences, published a newsletter, and engaged in epistolary diplomacy.101 Relations with Tunisia appear to begin with Neila Bin ‘Ammar, a longtime nationalist close to Bourguiba and the younger sister of Tunisia’s First Lady. (The Committee otherwise relied on diplomatic or consular channels for introductions to well-placed, educated women.) Bin ‘Ammar met Committee member Mrs. D’Estournelles and founder Rose Parsons in Colombo, after which she was recruited to a workshop for “Moslem women.” “Women leaders” from Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, Morocco, Sudan, Syria, Tunisia, and Turkey were brought together for a two-week program to learn about “The Role of Women in the Community and Home.” The program purported to exchange “ideas and experiences among a group of women leaders working towards citizen responsibility in a free society,” through lectures by American organizers on the home (education, nutrition, health, legal rights of women), community (women’s role in, and volunteering), and 100

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Smith College, Committee of Correspondence Collection (hereafter CoC), Box 22, Folder 50. Helen Laville, “The Committee of Correspondence: CIA Funding of Women’s Groups 1952–1967,” Intelligence and National Security 12, no. 1 (1997). CIA financing was first revealed in 1967, leading to the folding of the group by 1969. Neil Sheehan, “Foundations Linked to C.I.A. Are Found to Subsidize 4 Other Youth Organizations: Funds Identified as Go-Betweens,” New York Times, February 16, 1967, 26. Committee members were instructed not to mention politics in their letters to women in the Middle East. Events such as the July 1958 coup against the British-backed monarchy in Iraq were referred to obliquely with expressions of concern for “our friends from Iraq”; see Alison Raymond’s letter from July 17, 1958, CoC Box 22, Folder 53, and Box 5, Folder 11. Armstrong describes the Committee as “explicitly anticommunist”; Armstrong, “Before Bandung,” 317.

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women in public life (suffrage and public office).102 The Committee covered airfare and accommodations in New York, a visit to Washington, DC, and at least one excursion outside the city (usually a meal with a Committee member in her home). Following the visit, members of the Committee sent invitees form letters asking for feedback, personal updates to include in their newsletter, and names and addresses of friends to whom they could write, and encouraged them to share their positive experiences with women in their home nations. Almost every Tunisian woman traveling to the United States was received by the Committee, even if only for a hasty reception as was the case during Saida Sassi’s 1961 stop.103 When the International Cooperation Administration’s Education Office brought an all-female group of Tunisian university students for a three-month teachertraining program at Ohio State University, in 1959, they were hosted by the Committee in New York before returning to Tunisia. When the US Agency for International Development (USAID) invited ten Tunisian women from the UNFT for a series of workshops on community development in the summer of 1962, their itinerary included a stop in Manhattan, with the Committee of Correspondence chaperoning field trips to a settlement house, a department store, and a Broadway performance of My Fair Lady.104 Though CIA financing may have been concealed from some members of the Committee and their guests, their extensive diplomatic networking and outreach to the wives of ambassadors and UN representatives, and other collaboration with the State Department, made clear their political alignment, as did the celebration of such friendships by USAID (see Figure 1.3). Despite Tunisia’s official location in the US orbit, the efforts of the Committee of Correspondence to cultivate relationships with Tunisian women indicates concerns about the political import of

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“Report on the Moslem East Workshop, 1958,” CoC Collection, Box 12, Folder 9. Sassi was participating in “Foreign Leaders Program of the Bureau of Education and Cultural Affairs” run by the US Department of State, from January to March 16, 1961. CoC Collection, Box 23, Folder 2. Between 1951 and 1961 when it was replaced by AID, the ICA was part of the State Department responsible for foreign cooperation and nonmilitary security. CoC Collection, Box 22, Folder 50; “Program for Tunisian Women, Community Development Project,” CoC Collection, Box 22, Folder 51.

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women’s multiple allegiances; it is little coincidence that Bin ‘Ammar was brought into Committee circles after meeting one of its members at the Asian-African Conference of Women.105

Figure 1.3 Cover of the May–June 1962 issue of The Shield: For Employees around the World, a publication of USAID, including “Tunisian Women See Capital.” 105

Bin ‘Ammar, similar to Haddad and Sassi traveled widely in her official capacity. Women appear to have been selected for their proximity to Bourguiba, their position within the UNFT, and perhaps professional qualifications, irregardless of ideological orientation.

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These voyages were noted in the women’s press and UNFT materials, contributing to amicable relations with their American hosts but not the adherence to the US model for the “free world.”106 Bin ‘Ammar retained the lengthiest correspondence with the Committee and appeared to be one of their primary contacts in Tunisia, and her comments following the 1958 workshop give pause to the notion of friendship as a political platform. On the one hand, Bin ‘Ammar appreciated the moral support represented by the Americans she encountered (and perhaps the other seminar participants): “It is with this sort of contact that women all around the word can be informed of what is happening in one another’s country and strengthen the solidarity among them.”107 Yet on the other hand, she couched this acknowledgment in an implicit questioning of the United States as a global leader noting with some surprise: “I found out that a highly developed country has no fewer problems to face than a poor and less developed one.” In other words, if poverty and inequality persisted despite the wealth of the United States, to what extent could it claim to offer solutions to Tunisian or “Muslim” women? Appreciating the kindness of her hosts, she saw this as an exception to American ignorance: “I know from many reliable sources that the average American people are not well-informed about foreign countries, and that our area especially is not well understood,” adding, “my dearest hope is that your circle of ‘happy few’ will widen.”108 Embedded in her polite synopsis and generous praise is an awareness that American women did not hold the answers but struggled with social and economic inequities of their own. Bin ‘Ammar’s statement pushed back against the pretense of superiority within the workshop

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For instance, Faiza reprinted an article from the New York Herald Tribune on the 1962 delegation – “Journalisme à la mode américaine,” Faiza, November 1962, 8 – but devoting more space to Bouzid’s subsequent voyage to Morocco. Femme included reports on a colloquium in Lome on women in Africa in all three of its issues in 1965, and Al-Mar’a listed UNFT events and travels and the presence of foreign delegations at UNFT events (June 1966). Haddad’s trip to the United States is summarized within a list of events in 1962 in Al-ittihad alwatani li-lmara’a al-tunisiyya: Manara bin ‘ahdin, 127. CoC Collection, Box 22, Folder 53. Neila ben Ammar, “The Workshop as I Saw It,” 1958, CoC Collection, Box 12, Folder 10.

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format whereby Western, white, American liberal feminists offered solutions and insights for situations about which they knew relatively little.109 The hierarchical relationship enacted by the Committee in its detailed planning and financing of expenses was negotiated if not rejected by Tunisian women. For starters, the prominence of the UNFT among women visiting the United States was not merely the result of the UNFT’s reputation as “the semi-official women’s federation responsible for much of the social welfare work in Tunisia,” but also because the UNFT, and Haddad in particular, inserted itself into the decision-making process.110 When the Committee’s invitation to UNFT Secretary General Fethia Mzali was declined because she was unable to get leave from her teaching obligations, the UNFT selected Dourdana Masmoudi as her replacement. An activist with the women’s union since her student days in Paris, Masmoudi was a younger member then employed at the national museum of antiquities in Bardo and was Mzali’s younger sister. Though the Committee had already reached out to the US Information Agency and the Foreign Office for suggestions inviting an alternate candidate, they were forced to concede to Haddad’s wishes.111 Haddad also deployed her American friendships toward political goals. In the immediate aftermath of the French bombing of Binzart in July 1961, Haddad telegrammed the Committee requesting messages of support and their condemnation of French brutality, to which they replied with a cable expressing their “deepest sympathies.” Finally, she inverted the hierarchies between first and third-world feminists by inviting the former to participate in, and observe, UNFT congresses, placing Tunisian women as a model to be followed.112

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See also Sassi’s advice on tailoring their news bulletins to better serve their audience. CoC Collection, Box 23, Folder 2. In the assessment of the Committee, likely based on information they received from USIS. “Program for Tunisian Women, Community Development Project,” CoC Collection, Box 22, Folder 51. CoC Collection, Box 23, Folders 1 and 5. Dr. Laura Bornholdt, dean of Women at Wellesley, represented the Committee at the 1960 Congress. CoC Collection, Box 23, Folder 5. The Committee struggled to find an envoy with similar international status thereafter. See Haddad’s letter of invitation to Allison Raymond, June 1962, and a response to Haddad’s 1966 invitation; CoC Collection, Box 22, Folder 57.

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Radical Sisterhood The UNFT appreciated the symbolism of hosting international conferences with prominent diplomats as guests. The ambassador of Vietnam and Lalla ‘Aisha, daughter of the Moroccan King Muhammad V, attended their national congress in August 1960, and guests from Algeria, Morocco, Senegal, Ivory Coast, Lebanon, Turkey, France, the United States, the USSR, and Yugoslavia were present at its fourth congress in 1966, as was a WIDF representative.113 Haddad alluded to the political relevance of these events, describing a workshop organized for social workers from Algeria as an act of “solidarity” in favor of Algerian independence.114 The UNFT supported the Tangiers congress with a resolution toward similar goals in 1957, serving as the inspiration for the League of Maghrebi Women and reiterating a commitment to the Arab Maghreb at its 1966 congress.115 Frequent contacts with women in Algeria and Morocco performed a vision of unity, even though efforts toward political unity between the three never materialized.116 Conferences created opportunities to promote national accomplishments while building regional and transnational ties. By placing Tunisian women’s successes at the center, they reversed global hierarchies that denied women from a postcolonial nation positions of leadership. Tunisian women’s engagement with radical ideologies and transnational feminist solidarity was particularly evident in their advocacy on behalf of Algerian independence. The Afro-Asian women’s conference in Sri Lanka, hosted by women’s groups from Ceylon, Burma, Indonesia, and Pakistan, fostered conversations about social development as it intersected with nationalist and state feminist demands for independence.117 The Tunisian delegation, including Bin ‘Ammar and Sassi, brought international attention to the Algerian struggle (contra 113

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Lalla ‘Aisha was an important symbol of women’s emancipation for the Moroccan monarchy who spoke publicly in favor of women’s education. Jonathan Wyrtzen, Making Morocco: Colonial Intervention and the Politics of Identity (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2018), 239–240. Leila, “Cette semaine à Tunis,” Afrique Action, June 12, 1961, 19. See, for instance, Faiza, February 1960; Khodja Sfaxia, “Youth and Development,” Femme, January–March 1965, 32. Marzouki, Le mouvement des femmes en Tunisie, 194–95; “Motions adoptées au IVème Congres,” Femme, September–October 1966. 117 Haddad, Parole de femme, 181. Armstrong, “Before Bandung,” 316.

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the French strategy of insisting that it remain a domestic matter) as relevant to anticolonial feminism by requesting a moment of silence in solidarity with women in Algeria.118 At the WIDF Congress in Vienna also in 1958, the UNFT delegate Mrs. Bou Attour explained at the plenary session: First of all, we feel linked to the Algerian people, because it is fighting our greatest enemy, colonialism. We suffered it for 72 years and we still suffer from the consequences. Besides, the war in Algeria is a threat to our independence, it is waged along our borders and quite often on our territory. We Tunisian women cannot remain indifferent to that situation; this is why, for two and a half years now, the activity of women in Tunisia has been determined by the question of solidarity towards the Algerian women.119

Continuing imperialism in Tunisia (in the form of a US airbase) and the French extension of the war on Algeria through the bombing of Sakiet Sidi Yusuf in 1958 were also discussed at the Afro-Asian women’s conference in Cairo, in January 1961, which included a Tunisian delegation.120 The women’s press raised awareness by disseminating information about the Algerian cause. From Faiza’s debut in late 1958, it provided regular coverage of the war between Algerian nationalists led by the FLN and the French colonial government. Covers featuring Algerian women and children depicted the brutality of war through a maternalfeminist lens. A running feature on Algeria throughout 1962 and 1963 highlighted the human costs of war in pieces on orphaned children and women refugees (many of whom sought shelter in Tunisia), but refused the dehumanization of Algerians with writings by Assia Djebar and Mohammed Dib. Reports on the struggle were followed by celebrations of independence in 1962 (which Bouzid attended) and women voting, coverage that insisted on Algerian agency and self-determination.121

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Natalya Vince, “Looking for ‘the Women Question’ in Algeria and Tunisia: Ideas, Political Language and Female Actors before and after Independence,” in Arabic Thought against the Authoritarian Age: Towards an Intellectual History of the Present, ed. Jens Hanssen and Max Weiss (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2017). Countries Collection, Sophia Smith Archives, Smith College, Box 44, Folder 25. Afro-Asian Women’s Conference, “The First Afro-Asian Women’s Conference, Cairo, 12–14 January 1961: Reports, Messages, Speeches, Resolutions” (Cairo, 1961). Femme tended to focus on political events such as the arrival of Algerian ministers or delegates at a meeting of municipal councilors and in the Ministry of Sports.

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Participation in the Afro-Asian movement fostered additional solidarities. The Women’s Conference in Cairo in 1961 resonated deeply with the Tunisian women who attended, Safia Zouiten and Fatima Ben Slimane. Speeches and events centered the experiences of colonized and formerly colonized women, and the conference “stressed solidarity based on a common experience of subjugation created and perpetuated by Western imperialism.”122 Zouiten, who had been active with the Tunisian Communist party and their women’s group prior to independence, contrasted her experiences in Cairo to Vienna. Though both feminist meetings were ostensibly global in scope, she found that the discussion about disarmament in Vienna had focused primarily on Europe, to the detriment of armed conflicts elsewhere in the world. This imbalance had infuriated feminists across Asia, living with the militarization of conflicts in Burma, Korea, and Vietnam perpetrated by Britain, France, and the United States, which were marginalized by the focus on Europe and Japan.123 At the Cairo conference, Tunisian women felt empowered to provide an example for women from other Arab countries who asked them about the application of personal status laws. On their return, Zouiten summarized: “this is our place, their preoccupations are also our preoccupations.” They were also inspired noting that “women at home have extensive political and social rights, but these remain theoretical as long as the cultural competency of women is not higher.”124 As anti-imperialist activism shifted to the Vietnamese struggle against the United States and Palestinian resistance to Israeli occupation, the UNFT declared its solidarity with the people of Vietnam (while passing a carefully worded resolution that avoided explicit condemnation of Bourguiba’s alignment with the United States).125 Compared with extensive coverage of the Algerian war, expressions of feminist solidarity with the women of Vietnam and Palestine, with occasional reference to political events, a short story, or editorial in 122 123 124

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Bier, Revolutionary Womanhood, 161–63. Armstrong, “Before Bandung,” 306. “Cette semaine à Tunis: arrivées,” Jeune Afrique, February 13, 1961, 16. On Zouiten, see also Bakalti, La femme tunisienne au temps de la colonisation, 84. “Les travaux du Congrès,” Femme, September–October 1966, 10–11. Haddad viewed this as a sign of support for Vietnam and insisted that the UNFT was free to adopt its own positions and not subordinate to Dustur party dictates. Dhakariyat al-nissa/Memoire des femmes, 86.

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Faiza, were tepid at best. One of the most explicit critiques of American imperialism came in a call for African resistance, by Bouzid, writing under the pseudonym Donia. She demanded an end to the practice of testing the atomic bomb in Africa, proclaiming that “we are not your guinea pigs.”126 Her statement, which coincided with the brief visit of Barbara Eisenhower, daughter-in-law of US President Dwight Eisenhower, was a tacit critique of Tunisia’s alliance with and subordination to the United States. Considering Bourguiba’s unequivocal public support of the US war in Vietnam, and a response to the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip following the 1967 war widely considered more sympathetic to Israel, advocacy on behalf of Palestine and Vietnam posed a considerable political risk.127 Sara Salem views the period between 1950 and the 1970s as a particularly opportune moment for transnational feminist solidarity that embraced difference and acknowledged power, combining feminist insights with class analysis in an anti-imperial militancy allowing collaboration between Egyptian and African American feminists.128 Yet in both Turkey and Iran, women activists were limited by authoritarian regimes that viewed class analysis as a threat to national unity, insisted on homogeneity, denied racial or ethnic difference, and discouraged collaboration with international women’s organizations.129 While they were all secular, single-party states promoting women’s rights, as was Tunisia, radical transnational feminist alliances were 126 127

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Donia, “Nous ne sommes pas de cobayes,” Faiza, February 1960. Bourguiba informed US Ambassador Francis Russell that even if the two nations did not always agree on details, he disapproved of Communism and would always side with the United States on “major issues” (les cas durs) such as Vietnam. Bourguiba “was the only leader of a small underdeveloped state that spoke out publicly in support of what we were doing in Vietnam.” Francis H. Russell, oral history interview, November 1972, JFK Presidential Library, JFKOH-FHR-01. Bourguiba publicly rejected the notion of a Palestinian armed liberation struggle, urging instead for negotiation based on the UN Partition Plan of 1947, including most famously at a visit to a Palestinian refugee camp near Jericho in 1965. His calls for normalization with Israel after the June 1967 war and after Palestinian concessions earned the approval of the United States and contributed to protests at the Tunisian Embassy in Cairo. C. A. Micaud, “Tunisia’s Foreign Policy: Independence and Development,” Africa Today 15, no. 6 (1968). Sara Salem, “On Transnational Feminist Solidarity: The Case of Angela Davis in Egypt,” Signs 43, no. 2 (2018). Amin, “Globalizing Iranian Feminism”; Libal, “Staging Turkish Women’s Emancipation.”

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possible in Egypt because Nasser strove to make Cairo a hub of Arab, African, and Afro-Asian activism, embracing socialist modernization for most of the 1950s and 1960s.130 Bourguiba situated himself squarely within the Western bloc, remained economically dependent on France, banned the Communist women’s organizations, and was hostile to Nasser’s pan-Arabism.131 Faiza covered the Non-Aligned Movement during state visits as part of its current events focus, locating Chinese cinema, a Czech woman of letters, or a Bulgarian folktale in the arts section. Conversations about women’s sexuality drawing from Lebanese novelist Leila Ba’albaki allowed Faiza to indicate new directions for Tunisian women not explicitly condoned by the state. Alluding to the breadth and complexity of international possibilities, this tactic avoided direct conflict with the regime, offering an example of cultural connections centered on women’s creativity.

Conclusion In 1970, Haddad began a UNFT campaign to improve the personal status code.132 In June of the same year an elite circle of political figures including the Minister of the Interior Ahmed Mestiri, the Minister of Defense Hassib Bin ‘Ammar, and Abdallah Farhat were tasked with proposing constitutional amendments. Though their pluralistic leanings were rejected by Bourguiba, Mestiri reopened the conversation at the October 1971 Dustur party congress. Haddad, then a deputy in the National Assembly and the only woman on the Dustur’s Central 130

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Reem Abou-El-Fadl, “Building Egypt's Afro-Asian Hub: Infrastructures of Solidarity and the 1957 Cairo Conference," Journal of World History 30, nos. 1–2 (2019): 157–92. Though Nasser had advocated on behalf of Tunisian independence, his support for Tunisian (and Moroccan) nationalists waned given his preference for armed struggle over diplomacy. David Stenner, Globalizing Morocco: Transnational Activism and the Postcolonial State (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2019), 59, 67–77. Nasser too persecuted leftist and Communist women critical of the regime such as Duriyya Shafiq and Inji Aflatun. As Ben Miled later recalled, “The Dustur did not want a feminist organization close to the Communist party.” She declined to join the UNFT in 1960, despite their invitation, finding it too bureaucratic. CREDIF, ed., Memoire de femmes/Nisaʼ wa-dhakirah, 38–39. On the relation between the UFT and UNFT, see Marzouki, Le mouvement des femmes en Tunisie, 130–41. Brand describes the proposed reforms as moderate. Brand, Women, the State and Political Liberalization, 206.

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Committee, was close with Mestiri and Bin ‘Ammar (her younger brother) and supported their program of internal reform, signing a letter to that effect in 1972. Bourguiba viewed the critiques as a challenge to his authority; Mestiri was disciplined and Haddad publicly criticized. Earlier in the year, leftist protests at the university had resumed, leading to a months-long student strike. Bourguiba called a February rally of all national groups to symbolize their continued support for his leadership, blaming political dissent on foreign interference, pan-Arab socialist parties, the Ba’ath, and a euphemistic “wind from the east.” Haddad sympathized with the students (one of her sons was among those arrested) and did not attend the nationalist rally, nor did the UNFT send a representative. Reports to this effect in the daily Al-Sabah began her political descent, including her resignation as UNFT president. Haddad was then excluded from the party and pursued on charges of corruption. The state confiscated her passport, revoked her legal immunity as a member of parliament, and fueled a defamation campaign in the press to accompany her prosecution and sentencing. Despite her ties to the president, her foundational role in the UNFT, and diplomatic and political status as an emblem of the nation’s feminist reputation, Haddad’s political downfall serves as a poignant reminder of the nature of Tunisian authoritarianism.133 As Ghodsee argues in the case of socialist Bulgaria, the accomplishments of women aligned with the state should not be discounted merely as a result of that alliance or of their foregrounding socialism over feminism.134 Algerian women who had fought in the war of independence became diplomats participating in international affairs, challenging the male-dominated public sphere, even when they did not articulate a platform of women’s rights. As Natalya Vince argues in reference to Jamila Bouhired and Jamila Boupacha, their anti-imperial

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Sadri Khiari, “Bourguiba et les bourgeois: La crise de 1970–1971,” in Habib Bourguiba, la trace et l’héritage, 357–70. These events were widely discussed; for contemporary coverage, see Taoufik Monastiri, “Chronique sociale et culturelle Tunisie 1972,” Annuaire de l’Afrique du Nord 11 (1973); Béatrice de Saenger, “Chronique politique Tunisie (1971),” Annuaire de l’Afrique du Nord 10 (1972); Béatrice de Saenger, “Chronique politique Tunisie (1972),” Annuaire de l’Afrique du Nord 11 (1973). Haddad’s memoir is framed in defense of her reputation beginning with Mestiri’s preface and her coverage of “Les années de plomb.” Haddad, Parole de femme. Ghodsee, Second World, Second Sex, 53–75.

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solidarity was a political act.135 The Tunisian militant Gladys Adda, who had been active with the Communist-affiliated women’s group prior to independence, later voiced a comparable position: “women’s struggle was part of the men’s struggle . . . the day that men would be free of their oppression, colonial as well as capitalist, women would be [free] automatically.”136 Tunisian women were not armed militants and adhered closely to the terms of national political discourse. Yet their political visibility and transnational presence often challenged the boundaries of these discourses. In the press, Faiza’s cultural activism enacted implicit feminist solidarities not bound by nation-state borders or foreign policy. Women’s nationalism, their centering of family welfare or communal advance as spaces within which women prosper, is a form of feminist advocacy. Working within the confines of Tunisian state feminism, women found subtle ways to alter its meaning. By rewriting national history as a story of women’s participation, they challenged the official origins story that presented women’s rights as the sole creation of Bourguiba. Resisting the terms of American friendship and hosting and attending international events, Tunisian women decentered the hegemony of the nation’s Western alliance and bourgeois feminist models. Quietly recognizing the shared experiences of Arab women and postcolonial societies, they provided alternate imaginings of the feminist modern. 135 136

Vince, Our Fighting Sisters, 158–64. CREDIF, ed., Memoire de femmes/Nisaʼ wa-dhakirah, 71.

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Family Planning as Development Urban Women, Rural Families, and Reproductive Justice

In a 1966 interview with the official party daily, L’Action, UNFT president Radhia Haddad commented on a recent presidential speech about women and the national family planning program. She explained that “the evolution of the Tunisian woman should be achieved by women’s participation in national life, in the edification of a new Tunisia . . . Our evolution as women must be grounded in morals with a healthy and solid basis.” When the national assembly voted to authorize contraception in December 1960, Haddad – the only female deputy – had been an ardent supporter. The UNFT had reiterated official arguments promoting contraception as a modern and rational approach to family. While it was argued that smaller families were beneficial to the increase of national wealth, Haddad later cited falling birth rates as a problem caused by wealthy parents with one or two children. “It is not normal that the masses alone provide the future generations and carry the sole burden of this serious responsibility . . . whereas others, those who have the means, divest themselves of this responsibility.”1 From the 1950s into the 1970s, family planning brought together discourses of modern womanhood and economic development. The contradiction between Haddad’s promotion of contraception and concerns about reproducing the nation reveal the ways that gender and class shaped both discourses. Shortly after independence, Tunisian officials began voicing concern with the nation’s increasing population as an economic problem.2 The 1

2

“L’évolution de la femme ne saurait être le fruit de l’improvisation et de l’immoralité.” L’Action, Rockefeller Archive Center, Ford Foundation, Tunisia Field Office, Box 17, hereafter abbreviated as RAC, FF. On Haddad’s support for contraception, see “La limitation des naissances; Tribune,” Afrique Action, January 9, 1961, 15. Inaugurating a pilot site in the agricultural collectivization program in the Mejerda valley in 1959, Bourguiba noted that population growth was neutralizing economic advance. Alain Marcoux, “The Ford Foundation/

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legalization of contraception shortly thereafter overturned the pronatalist remnants of French colonial-era prohibition. In official pronouncements, newspaper articles, and seminars, population was increasingly presented as a drain on the limited resources of the young nation and an impediment to meeting the goals of central planning.3 This rhetoric distinguished Tunisia from its larger neighbors such as Algeria, aligned the Tunisian president with the powerful population movement backed by the United States, and opened access to its funding.4 Tunisia received one of the first grants from the Ford Foundation when it devoted over $20 million to “family limitation” as a solution to global poverty and facet of overseas development.5 By the time of initial meetings with the Secretary of State for Planning (the equivalent of a Minister) in the summer of 1962, a pilot family planning center had been established through UNICEF and the WHO in the outskirts of the capital. A Tunisian delegation traveled to the United States, Japan, India, and Pakistan in 1963, to observe medical and clinical practices related to birth control and to visit a manufacturer of contraceptives.6 An initial $200,000 for the establishment of twelve family planning centers and a two-year experimental program administered by the Population Council in 1964 was followed by a

3

4

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Population Council North Africa Population Program in Retrospect: 1963–1975,” RAC, FF, Catalogued Reports, Box 201, Folder 004509. For instance, see the coverage of a colloquium on family planning; A. Razgallah, “Limitation des naissances ou accélération du développement économique?,” L’Action, January 26, 1964, 4. A “Memorandum on Population Problems and Controls in Tunisia” from 1962 notes that “Over the last two years there have appeared in the daily press several series of editorials and articles discussing the problems arising from rapid rates of population increase for Tunisian economy and for individual families.” RAC, Population Council Collection (hereafter abbreviated as PCC); Acc. 2, Series 2, Box 175, Folder 1683. In the 1960s, the United States provided millions of dollars in economic assistance toward agriculture, education, and tourism, as well as military assistance and support for Tunisia’s police and internal security. According to Ambassador Russell, “At one time . . . we were giving more to Tunisia than to any other African country. During the rest of the time we were giving more per capita than to any other country,” though the aid was programmed and not used at the discretion of the Tunisian government. “Francis H. Russell: Oral History Interview.” A subsection on North Africa located the region under the Middle East. Ford Foundation Annual Report, 1963. “Tunisian Mission on Family Planning,” RAC, PCC Acc. 2, Series 2, Box 184, Folder 1761; March 1963 letter, RAC, PCC, Acc. 1, Series 2, Grant Files, Box 54, Folder 829.

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second grant to expand the program across the country, with more generous funding from USAID beginning in 1968. Through population planning Tunisia gained visibility in international arenas as an important interlocutor in Africa and the Middle East. For North American and European advocates striving to present the population movement as universal and not merely Western, Bourguiba’s signature to the “Declaration on Population: World Leaders Statement” presented at the UN on World Human Rights Day in 1967 provided visible evidence of this argument.7 The steady trickle of foreign experts and consultants became a deluge of funding by the early 1970s with projects supported by USAID, the World Bank, a German affiliate of the International Planned Parenthood Federation, and Canadian and Swedish governmental development agencies, with localized medical missions tied to family planning supported by Belgium, China, and the Netherlands, as well as the WHO and UN agencies such as UNICEF and the Fund for Population Activities (UNFPA). Tunisian politicians, activists, and doctors – both men and women – threw their weight behind the modernizing imperative of smaller families and planned births, often mirroring the official emphasis on development as they tailored the contours to their specific agendas. While demographic growth slowed, the promised material advantages did not benefit all Tunisians equitably. Through a focus on family planning, this chapter examines how images of modern womanhood informed economic development. Population rhetoric targeted the rural interior, perpetuating the ruralurban divide, and facilitated state control over women’s bodies and family life in ways comparable to the expansion of state authority that James Ferguson attributes to development projects more generally.8 The population program was the product of interaction between foreign donors, Tunisian bureaucrats, and healthcare workers that further illustrates Tunisia’s imbrication in global political and economic networks and the significance of women and gender in these domains. Tunisian contributions to the population movement intersected with domestic and international agendas, revealing their biases. 7

8

It originally included twelve heads of state and was presented to UN Secretary General U Thant in Dec 1966, with Bourguiba among an additional eighteen signatures added the following year; see Studies in Family Planning. Ferguson, The Anti-politics Machine, 20–21.

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In both domestic and global iterations, the premises of population control deprived women of agency, relegating rural or uneducated women to a cultural past antagonistic to and separate from the modern state. While aspects of this discursive divide were perpetuated by the women’s press, it also offers a lens on how population policies drew attention toward women’s bodies with sexual and moral implications for the understanding of liberation. Family planning was accepted, accommodated, and rejected in its relation to family life, mothering, and gender roles, by their intended recipients whose decisions were driven by myriad political, economic, and emotional considerations.

The Global Population Movement and the Middle East According to Arturo Escobar, humanitarian concerns about local, national, or global poverty stem from a new understanding of poverty dating to the mid-twentieth century. This shift was driven by fears about political unrest in recently decolonized nations and the global south, and their ramifications on wealthier nations. Whereas colonial control provided a secure supply of raw materials, national independence made such access more tenuous, with implications for capitalist economic expansion. Under the rubric of development, investment, loans and assistance from the World Bank and its largest funder, the United States, created new relations of dependence. Unfortunately, they failed to generate greater resources or improve the standard of living but furthered underdevelopment, exploitation, oppression, and, as Escobar puts it, contributed to the production of the “Third World” as a homogenous bloc.9 The focus of development aid on technocratic solutions while ignoring political problems and supporting “benevolent autocrats” stems from colonialist and imperialist origins, argues William Easterly.10 Tunisia domesticated this technocratic approach in its “struggle against underdevelopment,” focusing on a lack of affordable housing, unemployment, insufficient road networks, landlessness, and the penury of teachers, medical personnel, and other education professionals as problems to be solved through 9

10

Arturo Escobar, Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995), 3–4, 21–34. William Easterly, The Tyranny of Experts: Economists, Dictators, and the Forgotten Rights of the Poor (New York: Basic Books, 2015), 43–46.

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economic planning without attention to broader social and political matters. In the 1950s, improvements to global public health and rising birth rates contributed to projections of a causal relationship between increasing population size, what the Population Council’s Mel Thorne described as Tunisia’s “galloping demography,” and increasing poverty.11 Population was a “problem,” demographers and policy makers presumed, because it strained national resources, contributing to poverty, migration, ethnic strife, and instability. The rational solution was small families.12 This increasing consensus that population was a problem brought family planning to the agenda of the UN General Assembly in 1961. Earlier in the twentieth century, interest in population as an object to control or improve had perpetuated eugenic ideas about “degeneration” and racial decline. Far from discredited by their genocidal implementation in Nazi Germany, they were rehabilitated into questions of postwar public health. In her work on the United States, Alexandra Minna Stern insists that these racial ideologies became more ingrained in the 1940s and 1950s through “‘culture of poverty’ and family pathology models of race and social difference” that informed ideas about reproduction.13 Birth control was expanded from an issue of women’s rights into a theater for American and transnational intervention in newly independent countries.14 While the concept of overpopulation blamed poverty on sexuality and fertility, “population demography stressed class, racial, and geographical differences with respect to reproduction” in what Laura Briggs describes as “reproductive racism.” Perpetuating racial inequalities in the United States, and American colonial control over Puerto Rico, as Briggs demonstrates, the racial, class, and gendered 11

12 14

Thorne, “What’s Needed in Tunisia to Deal with Galloping Demography,” confidential report, RAC, FF, Tunisia Field Office, Box 17. 13 Connelly, Fatal Misconception, 15. Stern, Eugenic Nation, 189. Secretary of State Dean Rusk threatened to withhold aid (such as food) if recipient countries did not embrace population control. This message was communicated to Ford Foundation staff in Tunisia by Ambassador Russell; see Harkavy’s January 1967 log notes, RAC, FF, Catalogued Reports, Box 136, Folder 003076. In its earliest American iterations, birth control was described as voluntary motherhood but remained an elitist concern well into the early twentieth century. On how the population movement fits into these longer trajectories, see Linda Gordon, Woman’s Body, Woman’s Right: Birth Control in America (New York: Penguin, 1990).

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premises implicit in constructions of the ideal family structured international funding and coercive population policies.15 Private donors such as the Rockefellers recruited Middle Eastern and Muslim countries into the birth control movement, albeit unevenly, beginning with Pakistan. The largest recipient of US foreign aid after India, Pakistan expressed interest in family planning from at least 1957. The ensuing program depended on the American alliance with President Ayub Khan, contributing to its termination when he was overthrown in 1969.16 Both Turkey and Iran sought advice from the Population Council, adopting national programs in 1964 and 1967, respectively.17 The Iranian program tapped into reformist interests in hygiene, social reform, and scientific motherhood that pre-dated the Pahlavi monarchy. By the 1960s, family planning was enfolded in regime efforts to address social problems through public health plans to build hospitals, invest in preventative medicine, and train nurses, midwives, and a health literacy corps.18 Iran’s program remained underfunded and largely urban. The Shah’s persecution of political opponents and abominable record of human rights abuses tainted the appeal of his initiatives, leading to the temporary suspension of family planning after the Iranian Revolution.19 In Morocco, King Hassan II had signed the UN Declaration on Population and Ford began an experimental program in 1966, but contraception reached only a small percentage of urban women, and publicity for the program was

15

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18

19

Laura Briggs, Reproducing Empire: Race, Sex, Science, and U.S. Imperialism in Puerto Rico (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 82–83. Feroz Ahmed, “Pakistan Forum: Building Dependendency in Pakistan,” MERIP Reports, no. 29 (1974). N. R. E. Fendall, “A Comparison of Family Planning Programs in Iran and Turkey,” HSMHA Health Reports 86, no. 11 (1971). This fit with the regime’s “maternalist” focus on women’s health and education. Kashani-Sabet, Conceiving Citizens, 95–119. Under the Islamic Republic, the goals went beyond population reduction, including fertility support, greater access to education, and the provision of contraception to low-income and rural communities. Homa Hoodfar and Samad Assadpour, “The Politics of Population Policy in the Islamic Republic of Iran,” Studies in Family Planning 31, no. 1 (2000); Homa Hoodfar, “Family Law and Family Planning Policy in Pre- and Post-Revolutionary Iran,” in Family in the Middle East: Ideational Change in Egypt, Iran, and Tunisia, ed. Kathryn M. Yount and Hoda Rashad (London: Routledge, 2008).

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uneven.20 Egypt’s strong national program built on decades of women’s activism and a social welfare movement funding health clinics. In fact, Egyptian social scientists had deliberated questions of population since the interwar era, with recommendations for state planning, even if family planning did not take off until 1966.21 This program condescended toward poor women, but was nonetheless situated within social development goals; Nasser touted birth control as an aspect of women’s duties toward the nation and the creation of a new citizen.22 Despite the greater stability of Egyptian family planning, Nasser’s anti-imperialism and embrace of socialist modernization did not endear him to the United States. Tunisia became a model of population control among development specialists in the West, who appreciated its utility in limiting the spread of Communism, as captured in the following description: an African, an Arab, and a Mediterranean state, [Tunisia] has established an effective and basically democratic government with a moderate foreign policy orientation . . . Tunisia’s importance arises from its strategic geographic position in North Africa close to Europe’s southern flank, its effective and energetic government, its generally favorable disposition towards the West, and its respected, moderate voice in the world community.23

As an “Arab state,” Tunisia’s “moderate foreign policy orientation” and “moderate voice” were defined by “its generally favorable disposition towards the West” in contrast to the anti-imperialism of socialist regimes and pan-Arab states such as Algeria and Egypt. According to Francis H. Russell, the US ambassador to Tunisia from 1962 to 1969, “Bourguiba was the type of national leader the United States would like to see many more of.” His alliance benefited the Western bloc, making it important to NATO “and the free world that Tunisia 20

21

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Robert Lapham, “Family Planning in Tunisia and Morocco: A Summary and Evaluation of the Recent Record,” Studies in Family Planning 2, no. 5 (1971). Though an interventionist project, it was Egyptian-led. Omnia El Shakry, The Great Social Laboratory: Subjects of Knowledge in Colonial and Postcolonial Egypt (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007), 145–64. Bier, Revolutionary Womanhood, 121–53. On the work of social scientists and reformers in the field of population and health clinics in the 1940s, see Beth Baron, “The Origins of Family Planning: Aziza Hussein, American Experts, and the Egyptian State,” Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies 4, no. 3 (2008). “Agency for International Development Proposed Program for Fiscal Year 1963,” JFK Library.

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prosper.”24 Fostering connections between Tunisia, Turkey, Iran, and Pakistan through the exchange of delegations, the Ford Foundation contributed to framing a specific Muslim or Middle Eastern approach to family planning. As the most “advanced” North African country, Tunisia was considered important in the Arab world “as another Moslem nation choosing to engage in a serious level of action.”25 Tunisia’s relevance “as the first national family planning program in an Arab country” was enhanced by a geographic position that made it “the first in Africa.” As one Ford official recalled, they “hoped that the Tunisian experience would provide a practical example for other countries.”26 French colonial rule across the African continent had imposed its pronatalist policies, often replicating metropolitan legislation criminalizing abortion and banning the sale of contraceptives. France’s republican, socialist, and conservative regimes shared in the idealization of motherhood with state incentivizes for large families. Fears about a “depopulation crisis” that would threaten domestic authority as well as international stature overshadowed discussions about birth control.27 With its aging population and low birth rate, France had the most restrictive anticontraception legislation in Europe.28 Even after independence, generations of elites from the former colonies who completed their higher education in France in the fields of medicine and public health were not likely to be exposed to family planning. Tunisia thus held “immense value” for training, educating, and promoting birth control across a continent where French was the second language for over ninety million people.29 24 25

26

27

28

29

Francis H. Russell: Oral History Interview. John A. Ross, “Recent Events in Population Control,” Studies in Family Planning 1, no. 9 (1966). Marcoux, “The Ford Foundation/Population Council North Africa Population Program.” Jean Elisabeth Pedersen, “Regulating Abortion and Birth Control: Gender, Medicine, and Republican Politics in France, 1870–1920,” French Historical Studies 19, no. 3 (1996). In the early 1960s, withdrawal was the most common form of birth control. Richard David Sonn, “‘Your body is yours’: Anarchism, Birth Control, and Eugenics in Interwar France,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 14, no. 4 (2006). Walter G. Povey, “Family Planning in Tunisia,” June 30, 1968, RAC, PCC, RG2, Box 175, Folder 1684. This framing was commonplace, such as the assessment that “In comparison to what has been achieved in other parts of Africa, the Family Planning Program in Tunisia has made very good progress.”

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The geostrategic potential of Tunisia was also evoked by Tunisians addressing foreign donors. Isam Nazer was a Tunisian doctor who served as the Middle East and North Africa regional director for the International Planned Parenthood Federation in the early 1970s. A key figure navigating between the Tunisian medical establishment, the UN, WHO, and Population Council, he reminded them that “Tunisia is a country looked to all over the Islamic world.” Writing the press release about a regional conference in Morocco on Islam and family planning, and translating the proceedings, he solicited the participation of Tunisian religious figures supporting abortion and sterilization. He reassured the donor community that there were no legal challenges to family planning in Tunisia and that it was supported on multiple levels of government, yet he cautioned forebodingly, “If [family planning] does not work here, it will be frustrating elsewhere.”30 Beyond imagining an outsized role for his small nation (with a population under four million in 1956), Bourguiba’s personal motivations are hard to pin down. The foreign assistance available in the field of population contributed to expanding healthcare and reducing infant and child mortality, as family planning services were housed within maternal and infant health clinics called PMI (Protection maternelle et infantile) devoted to the health of women and children. The first twelve family planning centers were urban, semi-urban, and predominantly in the north and along the coasts including Tunis (where there were two), Ariana, Binzart, Beja, Nabeul, El Jem, Monastir Sfax, and Sousse (Bab el Gharbi). Only Maktar and Tozeur were in the interior. Even this limited funding channeled to rural areas had the potential to improve the standard of living, limit rural exodus, and weaken political support for Communism, which Bourguiba believed was driven by poverty.31 Having interviewed Bourguiba in 1961, the American scholar Clement Henry Moore conveyed the former’s shock on witnessing the destitution in parts of the rural interior. Expecting

30

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Raymond Vande Wiele, “Report of a Visit to Tunisia,” RAC, PCC, Box 175, Folder 1683. “Population Programmes Meeting,” January 1972, RAC, FF, Series VII, Box 18. A discussion of the UN report on global population growth placed Tunisia as a rare instance of farsightedness among developing nations. Ben Amor, “Planning familial dans le monde et en Tunisie,” Progrès Social, October–December 1963, 16–17. Amor Daly to Parker Maudlin, November 1963, RAC, PCC, Acc. 2, Series 2, Box 178, Folder 1707.

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foreign investments that did not materialize, development assistance partially filled the lacuna.32 Combined with legislation raising the age of marriage and restricting polygamy, which were favorable to limiting population growth, contraception bolstered his reputation as the liberator of women and was incorporated into nationalist discourses about modern womanhood. Contraceptive responsibility fell disproportionately on women, making it a particularly gendered iteration of development. Referencing global precedents or regional contexts, population provided a point of convergence between the Tunisian government, foreign donors, and international agencies whose shared vision rested on the transformation of local communities. Elevating family size to a subject of national significance, like marriage or divorce, brought intimate matters under the purview of the state’s economic plans. The abstract language of modernity, progress, and development merged in a vision of the modern nuclear family divorced from regional disparities and political concerns. Feminist scholars argue that in the United States, regardless of the rationale, demographic questions were gendered, racialized, and intertwined with social and political struggles.33 The US government offered some women access to contraception, sterilization, and abortions, and denied it to others, while collaborating with a conservative medical establishment that viewed birth control as immoral.34 Racism, sexism, and elitism that informed US policies prior to and after the legalization of abortion merged with Orientalist and colonial stereotypes about women’s sexuality and fertility when population policies were exported to Tunisia.

Tunisia’s Population Logics From its inception, the goals of Tunisian family planning were reducing the birth rate, preventing pregnancies, and promoting small, 32 33

34

Moore, Tunisia since Independence, 194–95. Briggs, Reproducing Empire; Stern, Eugenic Nation. Racial understandings of the American nation and the institution of slavery had implications for reproduction and efforts to control the fertility of enslaved women, informing reproductive politics for centuries. Loretta Ross and Rickie Solinger, Reproductive Justice: An Introduction (Oakland: University of California Press, 2017), 18–29. Schoen, Choice and Coercion, 3–6.

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nuclear families. These policy choices were evident in a 1960 law restricting family allowance to four children, and the 1961 legalization of contraception. The positioning of family planning within state-led economic development highlighted the importance of planning as a facet of modernization: using contraception was a rational decision made possible by scientific innovations, whereas unplanned families connoted underdevelopment, antimodernity, tradition, and even natural disaster.35 In the 1960 government publication Tunisia Works, the chapter on employment and housing opens with the announcement that “population pressure sets urgent deadlines.” Continuing in a declaratory voice, noting population size and the rate of increase whereby “The problem they pose today is of a serious nature; the magnitude of the threat they constitute for the future is only too apparent,” the passive tense presents demographic increase as inevitably harmful and its reduction as a foregone conclusion. Abstract fears of “a serious nature” are given concrete shape in photographs of orphans and abandoned children, promising that populatin policy would eliminate “little scamps” who were previously “swarming” the streets of the capital and destined for a life of juvenile delinquency.36 Government logic drew a direct line from population to poverty to social instability. That family planning was a national imperative relied on the widely accepted, though faulty, economic rationale for limiting population growth. It is worth quoting Bourguiba at length, who posited education and agricultural production as dependent on controlling demography:

35

36

See, for instance, “Le planning familial vise l’équilibre entre l’accroissement démographique et le revenu national,” L’Action, January 2, 1964, 1, 6; Razgallah, “Limitation des naissances ou accélération du développement économique?” On the framing of birth control as an “antidote to underdevelopment” and its economic rationale, see “Moins d’hommes,” Jeune Afrique, February 6, 1966, 24; “Malthus et le tiers monde,” Jeune Afrique, June 27, 1965, 32–34. Tunisia, Tunisia Works, 42, 50–51. Regarding those housed in state orphanages and referred to as “Bourguiba’s children,” another text noted, “Abandoned babies, small children, adolescents left to their own devices, vagabonds and delinquents are no longer allowed to remain wretched outcasts,” signaling the interchangeability of these social categories. Tunisia and Secretariat of State for Information and Tourism, Bourguiba Children’s Villages (Tunis: The Secretariat, 1961), 5.

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In twenty years’ time we shall number six million, perhaps more. Think of the new wealth we shall have to create in order to feed all these mouths. Think of the number of classes that will be needed in order to provide education for all children of school age. This is the underlying reason for planning, which many people still do not understand. However, every Tunisian must come to realize how necessary and urgent it is. We cannot help but feel some apprehension at the human tide rising implacably at a speed much greater than the rate of increase of subsistence.. . . What is the use of increasing our agricultural production and our mineral wealth, what is the use of raising our national income in order to bring about a fair distribution of wealth, if the population is to go on rising in a frenzied, uncontrolled manner? We should have achieved nothing, for we run the risk of dropping, in spite of all our efforts, to a general level lower than our point of departure.37

That population growth was “frenzied,” akin to the “rising tides” of a hurricane or other natural disaster, amplified its threat. The failure to control population would erase any gains in national income, weaken the means of subsistence, and undermine the work of state planning. From the start, the Dustur party backed the goal of reducing population with publicity on the radio, and by instructing local party cells to include the topic at meetings. Brochures were printed and distributed explaining contraceptive methods, with classes in rural areas.38 Leading officials such as Ministers of Health Mundher bin ‘Ammar (1962–964) and Fathi Zouhir (1964–66) collaborated with Ford representatives, as did Dr. Amor Daly, the Ministry of Health’s assistant director of medical affairs, who served as program director from 1964 to 1969. Dr. Tewhida Ben Sheikh was another prominent advocate, and as Tunisia’s first female gynecologist, her leadership as director of family planning and maternal and child health after 1970 was a major asset to the Ford Foundation. Reiterating the major parameters of global population discourse and the national program, Prime Minister Hedi Nouira

37

38

Bourguiba, The State Carries On. This speech, delivered at the opening of the third Congress of the UNFT in December 1962, was summarized by Safia Farhat. “Le congrès de la maturité,” Faiza, January 31, 1963, 24–27. These were repeatedly iterated as major strengths of the Tunisian campaign; see Population Council, “Tunisia: The Role of the Political Party,” Studies in Family Planning 1, no. 13 (1966); Warren G. Povey and George F. Brown, “Tunisia’s Experience in Family Planning,” Demography 5, no. 2 (1968); Jacques Vallin, “Limitation des naissances en Tunisie: Efforts et résultats,” Population 26, no. 1 (1971).

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(Al-Hadi Nawira) opened an international seminar on population in the Middle East and North Africa by warning about the “threat of demographic growth” in the region where “public opinion needs to be better informed about the problems posed by a galloping demography in developing nations.” Legislation in support of population control placed Tunisia within the “legion of advanced nations.”39 National media coverage included mention of Tunisia’s unique role and aspirations of leadership among African, Arab, or Muslim nations, for instance, citing John D. Rockefeller’s projection that Tunisia’s would be “a model experience that could serve as an example for many other nations.”40 References to global precedents configured demographic questions within prevalent understandings of development and progressive modernity. When the first contraceptive products hit the shelves of Tunisian pharmacies, Jeune Afrique described approval in the national assembly as allowing its deputies “to catch up (rejoindre) to their English, Swiss, German, Chinese, Pakistani and Indian colleagues.”41 A Tunisian student interviewed about the legalization of contraception referenced its successful use in Japan and India.42 The global nature of population programs was evident in women’s magazines, where articles about national initiatives were placed adjacent to a tally on birth control across the world. Beginning with Anglo-Saxon nations, Scandinavia, and Communist nations, it singled out France to note that “Only Catholic and Muslim nations remain behind.” The subheading associated Tunisia with those falling “behind,” suggesting Tunisia instead lead Muslim nations forward.43 Family planning was presented as a rational matter of economics as indicated by examples from the United States, Europe, 39

40

41

42

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United Nations Centre for Economic Social Information, International Planned Parenthood Federation, and Diwan al-Qawmi lil-Tanzim al-`Aili wa-al-`Umran al-Bashari, Les problèmes de population et les mass média en Afrique du Nord et au Moyen Orient (Tunis, 1973), 1–2. Quoting from a press conference during his visit to Tunisia, “Excellentes perspectives pour le planning familial en Tunisie,” La Presse, February 11, 1966. Marcel Herz, “Naissances; le produit que vous savez,” Afrique Action, June 12, 1961, 13. Abdelkader Zghal, “Que pensez-vous de la ‘limitation’?,” Afrique Action, January 1, 1961. “Le b.c. à travers le monde,” Faiza, 1961, 14. See also the subsection on “Muslim nations” in Mahmoud Seklani, “Les expériences de planning familial dans les pays en voie de développement,” Progrès Social (August 1964): 86–96.

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and Asian countries such as China, India, and Pakistan. Pointing out that only “African nations remain indifferent” reinforced the inevitability of population control and Tunisia’s pioneering potential.44 Bourguiba touted Tunisia’s importance for Arab and Muslim nations backed by a careful selection of religious references.45 In a lengthy speech on the holiday of Mawlid, Bourguiba first boasted that as an aspect of foreign relations, family planning would allow Tunisia to blaze a trail for “Arab and Islamic nations.” He then drew on extensive reformist arguments on the synchronicity between Islam and science to indigenize population control as a rational approach to family life. Muslims had fallen “behind” in the march of nations toward progress and must wage a struggle (jihad) against underdevelopment in order to “reestablish the dignity of Muslims and guarantee the inviolability of their territories.” Tunisia, he proposed, could “save Arab people from decadence.” Family planning was the key to economic growth and prosperity for nations “incapable of providing the basic assurance of subsistence to their populations as they suffer from an excessive demographic growth.” Finally, with references to the Qur’an, hadith, and the opinion of muftis (jurists learned in Islamic law), Bourguiba outlined the licit nature of abortion and female sterilization for Muslims. Combined with the insights of modern medicine, family planning became key to economic and social development and the future glory of Arab and Muslim nations.46

Gendered Responsibilities of Family Planning Building on gendered norms of child rearing in Tunisia and the United States, contraception was couched in the Tunisian family planning program as a woman’s responsibility. For the Tunisian government, this avoided the appearance of telling men when and how to have children, further impinging on their patriarchal authority within the family. For American donors, the promotion of sex-specific contraception such as the intrauterine device (IUD) followed established

44 45 46

“Planning familial,” Femme, August 13, 1964, 26–27. He did not distinguish between Arab and Muslim, using the two interchangeably. “Bourguiba: Les pays arabes et islamiques doivent recourir à la science pour se développer et assurer leur invulnérabilité,” La Presse, April 15, 1973, in RAC, FF, Box 18, Folder VII.

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practices in the United States. Widespread use of condoms was hampered by limited supply and distribution problems, with the Ford grant and USAID funding greater provision of IUDs.47 Together, they built gendered understandings of family and parenting into program structures. For instance, early outreach was invested disproportionately on women, with Ford Foundation surveys assessing women’s awareness of contraception and motivations to limit procreation, but not asking similar questions of men.48 Efforts to encourage sterilization focused disproportionately on women. One intensive initiative by the Ministry of Health in the town of Jenduba provided women with transportation to hospitals, a gift of five dinars, and fifty kilograms of semolina for undergoing a tubal ligation.49 Though men expressed interest in vasectomies, it is not clear that medical training and facilities made this option widely available.50 While there was acknowledgment of the limits of excluding men “from the family planning activities,” resulting in a 50 percent reduction in “one’s potential clientele,” efforts to include men, by making condoms available in all public health facilities in 1968, were often intermittent and experimental.51 Institutional structures cemented the gendering of contraception. Mohamed Ennaceur, a Tunisian doctor in the Ministry of Planning who had initiated contact with Ford, introduced family planning in the Maternal and Child Health centers, as the Tunisian government advocated a “clinic-centered” approach. Following an exploratory visit, the 47

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In one instance, 5,000 condoms were requested for Gafsa and Sfax but only 800 were received. Untitled note, January 1970, RAC, PCC, Box 175, Folder 1683. The plan to distribute condoms was fixed at twenty per month, with instructions about washing indicating limited supplies. Secrétariat d’état à la santé publique, “Circulaire n676,” RAC, PCC, Acc. 2, Series 2, Box 180, Folder 1720. See also notes requesting thousands of loops with no mention of condoms, and Maudlin’s supply order for 1,800 Lippes loops, 1,800 cycles of oral contraception, 600 gross of condoms, and 1,200 bottles of aerosol foam. RAC, PCC, Series 2, Box 54, Folder 829. The details of the survey – though not the decision to focus on women – were frequently discussed by Jean Morsa, a Belgian demographer hired by the Population Council, and Parker Maudlin, in the Population Council files. Marcoux, “Report from Tunisia,” October 1973. RAC, FF, Series VII, Box 18, Folder VII. A study showed that “22% of men said they would accept vasectomy,” surrounding a publicity campaign in Mateur. Richard Roberts to Montague, March 3, 1972, RAC, FF, Series VII, Box 18, Folder VI. Rex Fendall to Elizabeth Mueller, January 5, 1968, RAC, PCC, Series 2, Box 180, Folder 1720.

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Population Council‘s Parker Maudlin described the PMI centers to Ford officials as “excellent places in which to begin to develop a family planning service” due to their contact with women and large patient load. This placement of services meant that medical consultations and free contraceptives – whether jellies, foam, condoms, or oral contraceptives – were primarily available to women. Maudlin suggested inviting husbands for a weekly discussion, though there is no subsequent mention of this facet of the proposal, nor does it appear to have been implemented.52 Expanded into the Institute for Family Planning and Maternal and Child Health (Institut National de Planning Familial et la Protection Maternelle et Infantile [INP/PMI]) in 1971, under a Dr. Bahri, also within the Ministry of Health, until the 1973 creation of the National Office of Family Planning and Population (Office National de Planning Familial et Population [ONPFP]), family planning and children’s welfare were institutionally circumscribed as components of maternal health.53 The imbalance of global and financial power granted foreigners an outsized role in formulating programs. From the arrival of the first foreign population specialist in 1964, quite a few foreign appointees in Tunis were competent in French, but it is not clear if any spoke Arabic and they had little understanding of the nation’s history or contemporary politics. With backgrounds in public health, philanthropy, or academia, these spheres were not entirely separate from US policy circles in which clichés about the Middle East were prevalent.54 Robert E. Hall, a New York–based obstetrician, traveled to Tunisia on a medical mission that he described to fellow Columbia alumni and students. Demographic truisms merged with Orientalist tropes in his 52

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Parker Maudlin, “A Report on Family Planning in Tunisia,” August 1962, RAC, FF, Catalogued Reports, Box 218, Folder 004905. The establishment of the ONPFP signaled increased financial support and greater autonomy. M. H. Riza, “Office National du Planning Familial: Des nouvelles dimensions,” La Presse, press clipping, RAC, FF, Series VII, Box 18, Folder VII. In 1984 the name changed to Office National de la Famille et de la Population (ONFP, National Office of Family and Population). Melani McAlister, Epic Encounters: Culture, Media, and U.S. Interests in the Middle East since 1945, 2nd ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 43–83. On how the development of academic interest in the Middle East depended on and perpetuated security concerns and government ties, see Osamah F. Khalil, America’s Dream Palace: Middle East Expertise and the Rise of the National Security State (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016), chapter 3.

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description of the “half-desert country” as burdened by a “traditionally astronomical rate of births,” making it nearly impossible to “attain economic equilibrium.” While pleasantly surprised that his expectations of a diseased population with “exotic casbahs” were disproven by colonial-era vineyards and shops that were “about as mysterious as Manhattan’s lower east side,” he marveled most at its secularism. “Bourguiba has insidiously westernized his followers,” Hall noted, because women were “urged to unveil” and daily prayers were “no longer said in public.”55 The gendered dynamics of American workplace culture and its condescension of women were matched by the predominantly male staff of Ford and the Population Council, with women relegated to support roles.56 Islam was essentialized in their descriptions of Tunisian women, who were presumed to be highly fertile and ignorant of contraception.57 State efforts to promote contraception carefully navigated around its implications of interferences in intimate family affairs. Public officials such as the Secretary of State for Public Health Fathi Zouhir specified that the national family planning “campaign was not devoted to the systematic limitation of births, but to the healthy and rational organization of the family.” Repeating the claim that an increasingly youthful population was an economic burden, Zouhir also faulted women and the large portion “of women who are fertile, or especially fertile, between the ages of twenty and forty . . . This led us to the very serious realization for Tunisia that one Tunisian works to support four people. One woman out of three gives birth each year, and 52% of the population is taken care of either by their family or by the state.” For

55

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Despite Hall’s indication that Tunisia did not conform to Orientalist stereotype, the article is illustrated by drawings of faceless turbaned crowds in an exotic marketplace, a faceless group of veiled women waiting for milk at a dispensary adorned with mashrabiya that resembles a mosque, and a man on a camel in front of a mosque. Robert E. Hall, “Contraception in the Casbah,” Columbia Medical Review (summer 1964), RAC, PCC, Box 184, Folder 1761. Ghislaine Julemont worked for Jean Morsa on a survey of attitudes and perceptions and its coding in the summer of 1964. Elizabeth (Betty) Mueller was hired as field personnel, working for Walter Povey and Jacques Vallin from October 1967 until November 1969 when she transferred to the Population Council, remaining in Tunisia another two years. See, for instance, the description of Tunisian women as largely illiterate, uninformed, and prone to exaggeration and the spread of rumors. Vande Wiele, “Report of a Visit to Tunisia.”

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Zouhir, the productive Tunisian was a man, and women served only a reproductive role, and a burdensome one. As he explained further in the interview, “we hope to explain to the Tunisian population, in priority to women and their husbands, their interest in organizing their family on a consistent, rational, and valid basis by limiting births.”58 Thus, followed to its conclusion, the rational organization of the family meant fewer children. Feminizing family planning allowed for its indigenization as a policy in continuity with condemning polygamy and educating mothers about vaccinations. Opting for smaller families constituted “an act of social improvement by the free choice that it gives to a woman to decide the circumstances within which to fulfill her destiny of motherhood.”59 “Family planning concerns women first and foremost,” thanks to their contributions to their families since once women were “convinced and initiated,” they would persuade their husbands.60 In a guest editorial in Al-Mar’a, Muhammad Al-Sayah, director of the Dustur, repeated that “economic and social progress” could not be achieved if the nation were to “bear the weight of demographic increase.” Women were now citizens who worked alongside men and bore a “foundational role” in the construction of a socialist society, and therefore in preventing population growth and ensuring the economic well-being of the nation.61 Whereas addressing men uncomfortably imposed on men’s patriarchal authority within the family, positioning women as agents of contraceptive responsibility circumvented such malaise reinforcing ideals of modern womanhood and its arguments about the benefits of state feminism for the modern family. 58

59

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See the interview with Yves Moati, “Nous ne sommes pas pour la limitation systématique des naissances,” La Presse, June 15, 1966, 2. That planning families meant small families was reflected in popular understanding of the campaigns. Abdelkader Zghal, “Que pensez-vous de la ‘limitation’?,” Afrique Action, January 16, 1961, 13–14. “En deux ans la campagne du Planning familial intéressera 120,000 tunisiennes,” La Presse, July 12, 1967, 2. See also coverage on women’s pages of the press, “Pour vous Madame” pages of L’Action, January 17 and 24, 1964. “En marge des travaux du séminaire organisé par l’Institut du Planning Familial,” L’Action, November 27, 1971, RAC, FF, Tunisia Field Office, Series VII, Box 18. Muhammad Al-Sayah, “Thawaritna: Dawar al-mara’a fi tashiyyid alishtirakiyya,” Al-Mar’a, December 1964. See also the reprinted presidential speech celebrating women and addressing birth control, such as “Khitab alMujahid al-Akbar fi ‘Aid al-Mar’a,” Al-Mar’a, September 1966, 6–13.

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In the summer of 1969, American Peace Corps volunteer Bob Walker spent about two weeks in the cafés of Maktar, a town in the Tunisian interior, talking to men about family planning. Equipped with the Arabic version of a 1960s pamphlet on contraception, he had trouble sustaining conversations due to the noise. He was also frustrated by the relatively middle-class basis of café clientele, wanting to reach the more destitute who he felt would benefit from his services (but they did not frequent cafés and may not have easily understood his classical-inflected Arabic).62 In its anomaly, this incident highlights the gendered nature of conversations about birth control and the structure of funding, outreach, and education as it was iterated in Tunisia. The feminization of population concerns was a product of the collaboration between Ford and Population Council staff and Tunisian health officials. As a women’s issue, contraception contributed to specifically national initiatives related to women’s liberation within the family, locating the family as an object of state intervention, economic planning, and overseas development.

Contraception and Modern Womanhood The UNFT and the women’s press embraced the connections between the promotion of women and their ability “to control the demographic bulge” as an aspect of women’s role in the nation’s economic life: “to balance economic development and population growth and guarantee each Tunisian a decent standard of living.”63 Especially in the early years, the topic figured prominently in UNFT meeting agendas and annual congresses, as the group “took a particular interest” in promoting family planning as “a further step in the emancipation of women.”64 The first two UNFT presidents, Haddad (1958–72) and Fethia Mzali (1973–86), were staunch advocates; Haddad collaborated with American agencies, heading a fifteen-member UNFT 62

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Meeting in Maktar with Peace Corps Volunteer Bob Walker for midpoint evaluation of experimental summer project Family Planning Education of Tunisian men in Maktar cafes, FF, Tunisia Field Office, Box 17. Another pilot experiment involving men was initiated in Jenduba in 1973. From the National board meeting in July 1965; see the editorial in Femme, April–June 1965, 5. Povey, “Family Planning in Tunisia,” and Memorandum on Population Problems and Controls in Tunisia, 1962, Box 175, Folder 1683.

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delegation for a six-week development study program funded by USAID in May 1962. Mzali was a teacher and visible public figure, traveling internationally with the UNFT and accompanying Bourguiba during a tour of the Middle East in 1965. Her husband, Muhammad Mzali, was an influential Dustur politician who joined its political bureau in 1964, heading ministries of education (1956–58), youth and sports (1959–64), defense (1968–69), and health (1973–76), and eventually serving as prime minister (1980–86).65 She led the Tunisian delegation to the UN Conference on Women in Mexico in 1975, and her appointment as Minister for the Family and Women’s Affairs in 1983 made her the nation’s first woman minister. Haddad and Mzali led the Tunisian Association of Family Planning and Well-Being when it was founded in 1968, the national affiliate of the International Planned Parenthood Federation.66 The UNFT trained social workers attached to the maternal health centers to provide birth control counseling and served as liaison to the international family planning community attending conferences abroad. From its inaugural issue, Femme emphasized the economic necessity of family planning, considering the limited “human and material resources of the nation” and the desire for a decent standard of living. Referring to population growth as a “human wave that’s increasing at a speed that far outpaces that of subsistence,” the magazine reiterated official metaphors presenting population increase as a natural disaster with detrimental consequences.67 Arguments in favor of birth control were peppered with statistics on government spending in health and education, providing a scientific veneer to the debate that underscored associations between contraception and modern rational behavior.68 65

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It would be difficult to exaggerate the importance of Mzali within Tunisia’s political life under Bourguiba. He also served as the director of Tunisian Radio and Television, returned to the Ministry of Education throughout the 1970s, and was long considered as Bourguiba’s handpicked successor. Haddad and Mzali were considered solid advocates by American staff in Tunis; see Marcoux, “The Ford Foundation/Population Council North Africa Population Program.” “Planning Familial,” Femme, August 1964, 26–27. All of these topics featured in a lecture series organized at the Aziza Othmana cultural club. “Vous entendrez au Club Aziza Othmana,” Faiza, October 1959, 13; “Le b.c. a travers le monde,” 14. Birth control was also described as a characteristic of “the Tunisian women of ’66,” with information on contraceptive methods relevant to the modern educated woman; see “L’opération planning sera un succès, si . . .,” Faiza, January 1966, 23, and “Le

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Interviews with medical professionals and public health officials and excerpts from presidential speeches further situated the topic within official agendas and state planning.69 The legalization of abortion in July 1965 was described as part of the “general policy of controlling births towards reasonable demographic growth,” concomitant with the regime’s efforts “in favor of promoting women and improving society.”70 Another tactic held contraceptive use and small families as coeval with motherhood. At a lecture for women, Fethia Mzali described birth control as grounded in women’s “maternal sentiments” to educate their children and better care for their families.71 Presenting contraception as a practice already familiar to women masked the Western origins and colonial hierarchies of the population movement. Following the legalization of contraception, Faiza’s cover featured a smiling toddler with the caption, “Tunisian women can now have happy children.” Framing the debate in the national assembly as addressing the “voluntary control of procreation by modern, scientific methods,” the law was described as particularly beneficial to women “who could rest between pregnancies.” The law “put an end to the nightmare of yearly births” so that the “era of happy motherhood could begin.”72 A later advertisement focused on the benefits of contraception to married women, declaring, “Madame, you are fortunate to be Tunisian, to live in Tunisia. Take advantage of this! A simple phone call will instruct you . . . guaranteeing you the support: – of your home, of your health, and of your happiness! Seize this opportunity offered to you by: The National Office of Family Planning and Population.”73 Birth control became less a matter of choice than a means to implement a nationwide consensus on the benefits of the

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contrôle des naissance: Une femme médecin répond à nos questions,” Faiza January 1961, 15 and 54. Donia, “Bourguiba avocat de la femme,” and “Bourguiba, et la condition féminine,” Faiza, November–Decemeber 1966, 8–9, 10–11, 76. They also drew from government family planning materials as in “Docteur planning répond,” Faiza, October 1967, 22. Femme, October–December 1965, 3. “Birth Control,” Faiza, February 1960, 26. Dorra ben Ayed, “L’assemblée a-t-elle résolu une question brulante: Le Contrôle des naissances,” Faiza, March 1961, 6, as well as Farhat’s coverage of the UNFT congress quoting Borguiba’s speech and reiterating the importance of controlling births for the benefit of children: “Le congrès de la maturité.” Promodes, September 1974, 8.

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small, nuclear family. Whether evoking economic development or the modern family, birth control was incorporated into the national initiatives of economic planning and ideals of modern womanhood. Couching contraception within more established state programs steered conversations away from politically sensitive matters and the sexual implications of its association with women’s bodies.74 By asking, “Is birth-control an antidote to underdevelopment? Is it morally reprehensible? Whose morals?” the weekly news magazine Jeune Afrique highlighted the link between contraception, women’s sexuality, and gender roles. The issue featured the views of two middle-aged male deputies, Othmane ben Aleya, a single lawyer, and Lamine Chabbi (al-Amin al-Shabbi), a father of six. Ben Aleya deferred to the economic rationale for contraception given the costs of state welfare programs, education, and healthcare. He dismissed claims that contraception would loosen morals. Chabbi, in contrast, was against permitting the sale of contraceptives because he feared that women would abuse the “antichildren” pills, even as he praised women’s noble sacrifice for the cause of motherhood.75 Readers worried, “Does the use of contraception risk leading to the abandoning of morals by our youth? I firmly believe it does.”76 At least some voiced support for birth control to protect women’s health and minimize population growth, describing it as “a lesser evil” than babies abandoned in the garbage.77 The UNFT urged women to exercise “self-control during this dangerous transition from a passive state to a free, active life,” hoping to assuage fears that women’s “sudden emancipation would lead to moral license and debauchery.”78 The president explicitly censured women who displayed “excessive independence towards their husbands,” warning that could potentially “drive the country . . . 74

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These associations are noted in scholarship on the United States where doctors found it immoral to prescribe oral contraceptives to unmarried women. Beth Bailey, “Prescribing the Pill: Politics, Culture, and the Sexual Revolution in America’s Heartland,” Journal of Social History 30, no. 4 (1997). “La limitation des naissances; Tribune,” Afrique Action, January 9, 1961, 15. Madame Belaya, “Prenons garde,” Afrique Action, January 16, 1961, 3. Ahmed Bouadja, “Pour la limitation,” Afrique Action, January 16, 1961, 3; A. Djaziri, “Le moindre mal,” Afrique Action, February 20, 1961, 2. Tunisia, Tunisia Works, 72; Tunisia, Women of Tunisia, 26. The role of the union in preserving women’s morals was echoed by Femme, “Conseil national ou conseil de la réforme en rapport avec les conjonctures nouvelles?,” October– December 1965, 26–28.

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towards licentiousness and the dissolution of morals.”79 Despite their divergent views on birth control, the gendering of contraception as a woman’s responsibility destabilized the fragile balance between granting rights and imposing control over women, between individual autonomy and familial prerogatives.

Geographies of Tradition Writing in Progrès Social (Social Progress), a publication of the Secretary of State for Public Health and Social Affairs, Dr. Ben Brahem identified Tunisian population interventions into large families as specific to the disenfranchised rural interior. “Statistics all demonstrate the higher birth rate among poor classes, and the higher birth rate in rural communities.” Large families and their poverty, according to the doctor, caused malnutrition, spread infectious diseases, and contributed to higher rates of child and infant mortality; “the children are always handicapped,” if not abandoned. The solution Ben Brahem proposed was not only to educate the population and improve the standard of living but to “limit the number of births” (contrôler les naissances).80 Focused on correlation as opposed to causation, Ben Brahem’s dubious conclusions made explicit the geographic specificity of the national family planning campaigns as a project of rural transformation. The Tunisian approach to population that accepted reproductive behavior as an aspect of modernization squared with preexisting state intervention in rural spaces such as agricultural reform (beginning in 1958). The emphasis on small families and stigmatization of poverty as a cultural problem resonated with family planning publicity in the United States that presented smaller families as “a great thing for poor folks.”81 Such condescension stemmed partially from the shared

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Bourguiba, “La femme, élément de progrès dans la société,” 156, 162–63. Degeneration and a poorly understood emancipation were invoked in the June 14, 1966, speech “La justice et l’évolution de la société,” printed in Discours, vol. 16, 13. The self-identified pediatrician “pleading on behalf of family planning” did not include his first name, but was likely Josette Ben Brahem’s husband Raouf. R. Ben Brahem, “Famille nombreuse et santé de l’enfant,” Progres Social 18 (1964). Schoen, Choice and Coercion, 1–20.

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educational background and class privileges of medical professionals and policy makers in the United States and Tunisia. In addition, Tunisian rhetoric about the ignorance of the masses, which incorporated domestic priorities such as the sedentarization of nomads, deepened rural-urban and class divides. In terms of family planning, the presumption that poor (meaning illiterate) women were unable to properly use contraception allowed men to make such decisions on their behalf. Discussing contraceptive methods in Beja, Dr. Amor Daly concluded that “in developing countries, the most effective contraceptive method is the one which requires as little action as possible on the part of the patient.”82 The Tunisian family planning program promoted the IUD, including through coercive measures, and, after 1973, female sterilization, over other forms of contraception. This decision was informed by presumptions of rural women’s incompetence and the financial priorities of donors.83 Family planning personnel expressed frequent concern about “discontinuation rates,” or women who had accepted condoms, jellies, foams, or oral contraceptives but did not frequently return for additional supplies (although the matter was difficult to assess considering the limitations of record-keeping). A long-term hormonal suppressant that could be removed only by a medical professional, the IUD was a relatively new technology, with the first plastic model introduced in 1958 and still undergoing tests as the Tunisian program got off the ground. The Population Council contributed significantly to its widespread use, hosting conferences in 1962 and 1964 that touted the efficacy and simplicity of the IUD, despite uneven and unreliable 82

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Amor Daly, “Experience in Family Planning in the Republic of Tunisia,” International Conference on Family Planning Programs, Geneva, 1965, RAC, FF, Series VII, Box 18. Intense sterilization campaigns focused on rural areas considered to be “urgent social cases.” Alain Marcoux and Mongi Bchir, “Tunisia,” Studies in Family Planning Studies in Family Planning 6, no. 8 (1975). As early as 1967 women requesting abortions at the ‘Aziza ‘Uthmana hospital were urged to accept an IUD or tubal ligation immediately following the procedure. This was an experimental program initiated by Ben Sheikh; see Tewhida Ben Cheikh, “Étude comparative de deux moyens d’insertion des appareils intra-uterin (rapport preliminaire)” (paper presented at the Colloque de Démographie Maghrébine, Tunis, 1969). The ONFP was similarly skeptical about rural women’s competency with contraceptives. Francine M. Coeytaux, Taoufik Kilani, and Margaret McEvoy, “The Role of Information, Education, and Communication in Family Planning Service Delivery in Tunisia,” Studies in Family Planning 18, no. 4 (1987): 229.

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research findings. In fact, critics noted a failure rate of up to 40 percent due to expulsions and removals from women experiencing severe pain, bleeding, or pelvic inflammatory disease.84 Such debates were brushed aside by Population Council officials who viewed Tunisia as a potential site for IUD research, emphasizing its virtues as a budgetary solution.85 Goals of the first program were set in terms of IUD insertions.86 The state depiction of modern womanhood mapped progress onto women’s bodies using clichéd images of rural traditions as a yardstick against which to measure the progress of women’s rights; as Bourguiba lamented, despite women’s liberation “in our villages and in our countryside, the pace of evolution is still slow.”87 He pinpointed villages near Monastir and the island of Jerba as spaces where erroneous traditions persisted, and “a certain nomadism still wreaks havoc.”88 Family size was evidence of dated customs and irrational practices. In a speech titled “Birth Control as a Factor of Development,” Bourguiba described how he “reprimanded some bedouin or other whom I saw dragging a dozen or so children after her,” for not using contraception. In Kef, in the northeast, he “advised women who have already given birth to six or seven children to have themselves sterilized.”89 By homogenizing the interior, rural, nomadic, and Amazigh (or “Berber”) women, they became interchangeable objects of public scorn in need of rescue by the enlightened state and medical intervention.90 Subtle references to achieving a “population balance between regions” implied the disparate regional and class dynamics of the program. State imagery of family planning clinics depicted the gap 84 85

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Connelly, Fatal Misconception, 202–3, 96. Outlining the program for Tunisia, Maudlin was less interested in “relatively expensive” oral pills, and though IUDs were still experimental, Tunisia could be a site for research. Maudlin, “A Report on Family Planning in Tunisia.” See also George Brown’s letter to Richard Anderson, April 17, 1965, RAC, PCC, RG 2, Series 2, Box 178, Folder 1709 “En deux ans la campagne du planning familial intéressera 120,000 tunisiennes.” Bourguiba, “La femme et l’évolution de la société.” Bourguiba, “La femme, élément de progrès dans la société,” 170–71. Habib Bourguiba, Birth Control as a Factor of Development (Tunis: Secretariat of State for Cultural Affairs and Information, 1966), 10–11. See also Moati’s article in La Presse regarding whether educational campaigns will differ in rural and urban areas. This stigmatization of rural women and their higher birth rates as “backward” continued for decades. Kimberly L. Mills, “Reproducing the Nation: the Politics of Family Planning in Tunisia” (PhD dissertation, University of Chicago, 2005).

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between the women receiving services (rural, bedouin) and those providing it (urban, educated) through captions and distinctive clothing. Urban women healthcare workers appear in trim, fitted, suits, whereas their clients wear colorful loosely draped malaya (sing. maliya, an article of clothing that extended past the knees and was often cinched with a belt) or safasir. They are frequently surrounded by children and occasionally seated on the ground.91 The logo of the ONPFP was a black-and-white silhouette of a couple, identifiably urban in his suit and her skirt, with two children. One promotional poster produced by the Office depicts rural women as targets of their campaign. Standing in a field, dressed in headscarves, the ONPFP promises that with family planning they can “better their lives (tahla al-hayat)” (see Figure 2.1).

Figure 2.1 “With family planning, a better life,” poster from the National Office of Family Planning, undated, photograph by the author.

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Tunisia, Tunisia Moves Ahead, 220–21. Photographs in Faiza distinguish clinical staff from clients by their dress and posture.

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Professional women and activists shared similar presumptions. The state expected the UNFT to employ their social advantages to serve the “less favored social strata.”92 Though Haddad felt they strove to unite women despite class differences, she recognized that “the intellectual class is very far removed from these ignorant women” with whom the UNFT worked.93 This bias is evident in her suggestion that rural women should request IUD as the form of contraception most amenable to rural conditions.94 Short stories written by women included the number of children as a measure of modernity, alongside spousal relationships and parenting. Fatima Salim’s “Thaman bahiz jiddan” (A Very Heavy Price) condemns the materialism of a bus driver and his five children, who neglect their education and health to build a bigger house. Yet this also reinforced associations of working-class irrationality, by depicting a family of seven with financial difficulties making poor decisions.95 In the women’s press, a column advocating the medical and social necessity of abortion and sterilization appeared alongside a picture of a peasant woman. Seated on the ground with a child on her lap, and three more children at her side, her vacant look and the children’s bare feet signal poverty and distress. The caption, “An image that we will no longer see,” reinforces that she (or they) are the target of interventions, and eventual erasure thanks to the state’s progressive modernization.96 While birth control purported to allow women greater control over reproductive choices, any agentive role was restricted to the urban and educated. The class dimensions of Tunisia’s population program, as described by Haddad at the beginning of this chapter, were also a matter of rural 92

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Comments by Muhammad al-Sayah, as party director at a UNFT meeting. “Conseil national ou Conseil de la réforme en rapport avec les conjonctures nouvelles?”, Femme, October–December 1965, 26–28. “L’action de l’Union National des Femmes Tunisiennes,” 685. Concerned about the “repercussions (of a large family) on the standard of living and unemployment,” she also worried about the negative impact of reducing subsidies on large families. Haddad, Parole de femme, 172–73; CREDIF, ed., Memoire de femmes/Nisaʼ wa-dhakirah, 93–94. Salim was involved in the UNFT and wrote for Al-Mar’a in the early 1960s. Judith Foster Jarrow, “The Feminine Literary Voices in Tunisia (1955–1975) and the Growth of Emancipation” (PhD dissertation, University of Utah, 1999), 222–23, 29–30. D.B.A., “Une loi insuffisante: Il faut envisage les cas sociaux,” Faiza, January 1961, 14. See also the depiction of bedouin “tradition” as an obstacle to progress in J.B.B., “L’expérience tunisienne,” Jeune Afrique, June 27, 1965, 33.

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difference. After years of insisting on smaller families, Bourguiba temporarily pivoted in 1966, worried that declining births would weaken the nation. Even though “married couples are particularly prolific in certain governorates such as Le Kef and Khroumiria,” there were also a “large number of hardened bachelors or childless couples . . . who do not want to have children, on the threadbare pretext that their professional activities do not give them the time.” While the contrast between the “prolific” nature of families in the governorates of the rural northwest and those without children due to “professional activities” already implied the urban and middle-class location of the latter, Bourguiba addressed his party cadres to make this clear. He urged them to marry because, “Unfortunately, large families often have a very modest social background and suffer from ignorance and poverty. On the other hand, those who remain bachelors are generally men of a certain intellectual level, with sizeable incomes.”97 In a eugenic reinterpretation of population control, national rejuvenation became the responsibility of urban, educated, and professional couples, whereas rural communities were excluded from producing future civil servants. Zouhir as well specified that “we are not against births, but we are for balanced births, we are not for the systematic limitation but we are for the organization of births according to the means of the family,” in other words, poor families need not reproduce.98 If this line of argument initially appeared to contradict the commitment to reducing population, it aimed to achieve more “balance” between its constitutive parts. Well-off, educated, and healthy men who remained bachelors threatened the stability of modernization as a middle-class urban project as reflected in the imagery of modern womanhood.99 Intertwining economic and moral concerns to emphasize small families, contraception became a solution to poverty and a path to development. The proposition that large families were a drain on limited economic resources and a cause of social instability transformed childbearing from a family matter into one of national concern. While 97 98 99

Bourguiba, Birth Control, 10–11. Moati, “Nous ne sommes pas pour la limitation systématique des naissances.” Similar class dynamics were referred to as “race suicide” in the United States. Sources close to the president stressed this interpretation of Bourguiba’s new line of argument, suggesting to Ford Foundation personnel that Bourguiba had not abandoned the program though he wanted “well-to-do couples” to have children; see Oscar Harkavy’s “Log Notes on Tunisia 1/67.”

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drawing from the dominant themes of the international population control movement, it brought together domestic initiatives such as the struggle against underdevelopment and Bourguiba’s purported liberation of women. Depicting family status laws as part of government “policy of limiting population growth” made large families not only irrational, but also unpatriotic.100 The authoritarian political climate precluded direct critique or explicit opposition to contraceptive use and the nuclear family model whether this meant the responsibility of marriage and establishing a family for civil servants or limiting the number of children in rural communities. Population discourse encouraged open disdain for rural migrants in and around the capital and justified the lack of investment in much of the interior by depoliticizing poverty, blaming it instead on culture or lifestyle: women (and rural families more generally) became responsible for their own destitution.

Family, Community, and Reproducing Inequality The problem with equating rational decision-making with the use of contraception, and understanding those capabilities as dependent on education, wealth, or privilege, is that these assumptions are usually not true. First, Tunisian women (and men) from a variety of regional and socioeconomic backgrounds desired contraception. A reporter in the village of Sulayman observed that “young couples welcomed the anti-conception legislation, especially in the shantytowns,” and middle-aged men and women also voiced their support for smaller families.101 Visiting villages and rural maternal health centers across the nation, Ford and Population Council staff also noted “much demand for the pill.”102 Women, especially those in their early thirties who already had children, also sought long-term contraception.103 Second, as scholarship on population and development has illustrated, population growth does not cause poverty. Kamran Asdar Ali argues in the case of Egypt that the economic misfortunes of the working class were caused by the state’s erosion of financial safety nets perpetuated 100 101

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Daly, “Experience in Family Planning in Tunisia.” Arlette Leautaud-Guillonet, “Contrôle des naissances: à Soliman on est ‘pour,’” Faiza, February 1961, 10. Fendall’s diary, 1967, RAC, PCC, Acc. 2, Series 2, Box 175, Folder 1683. “Rapport résumé sur l’étude des caractéristiques démographiques des acceptrices de DIU de 1964 à 1969,” 1970, RAC, FF, Series VII, Box 18.

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by economic liberalization from the 1970s onward.104 Third, the purported causal relationship between poverty and family size presenting decisions about childbearing as reducible to economic calculations is an oversimplification. Scholarship on reproductive justice centers the right to raise children with dignity at the intersection of gender, sexuality, economics, political power, and a host of other factors in considerations of family life. Reproductive justice builds on the movement founded by women of color in the United States in the 1990s. The deeply historical approach to questions of reproduction – the enduring trauma of enslavement, imperialism, systemic racism, incarceration, and forced sterilization – is relevant to an analysis of the relationships between structural inequality, colonial dispossession, and underdevelopment and family planning in Tunisia. This recognizes that state policies contributed to differentiated access to contraception often along racial and socioeconomic lines that limited contraceptive choice.105 The liberal constructions of modern womanhood by the Tunisian state contributed to the valuing of choice as an expression of rationality. However, most liberal narratives of family planning, as Ali argues in Egypt, preclude the right not to have children, restricting women’s choice to the type of contraception, and not when or whether to use it.106 The structures and discourses of population control in Tunisia were informed by the erroneous belief that nomadic, bedouin, rural, or otherwise “traditional” Tunisian women were not rational actors and that their fertility was harmful to the nation and its economic growth and was inimical to modern womanhood. Yet the actions of rural women were grounded in social and economic understandings of the family, and while the archival traces of their voices are few and far between, they provide insight on the structural limits of family planning as a model of postcolonial development. The story of family planning in Tunisia actually begins long before the legalization of contraception or the arrival of Ford Foundation personnel. It is about healthcare and the efforts of the newly independent state to improve on public services that were nonexistent if not 104

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Kamran Asdar Ali, Planning the Family in Egypt: New Bodies, New Selves (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2002), 1–14. Ross and Solinger, Reproductive Justice. Contraceptive availability in Egypt also depended on the decisions made by international providers. Ali, Planning the Family in Egypt, 35, 156–57.

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underdeveloped. Earlier in the twentieth century, the French colonial state had provisioned medical care along racial and religious divides to disadvantage the Arab Muslim community. This contributed to poor health outcomes that justified and reinforced colonial claims of native inferiority.107 In 1953, there were four hospitals in Tunis and a smattering of military hospitals in other urban centers. Roughly 80 percent of Tunisians lived beyond the capital and its suburbs, and much of the countryside was serviced by forty-one dispensaries, some of which were staffed by only a single nurse.108 Early measures undertaken by the postcolonial state to compensate for such lacunae included investing in measures to limit infant mortality and to improve access to clean water. Massive vaccination campaigns against polio and tuberculosis were waged in part through the creation of the maternal and child health centers. Women with young children visited these centers where powdered milk was distributed free of charge via a UNICEF program. The Tunisian decision to locate family planning in the PMI centers brought them additional funds, situating demographic questions within broader state projects in healthcare. The medicalization of childbirth and contraception was hindered by a deficit of medical personnel. Economic barriers to completing medical school included the requirement to study abroad until the University of Tunis graduated its first class in 1971. There were roughly 500 doctors practicing in Tunisia in the mid-1960s, only half of whom were Tunisians, with the remainder foreigners on cooperation programs. Fewer than fifty specialized in gynecology (only eighteen of whom were Tunisian). A decade later, there were still less than ninety gynecologists practicing in the public sector, almost half of whom were concentrated in the capital. In 1970, there were only 150 licensed midwives, meaning a ratio of 1:35,000 (compared with 1:11,200 for Chile or 1:4,200 in Egypt). Until well into the 1960s, the majority of women were cared for during labor and delivery by

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Richard C. Parks, Medical Imperialism in French North Africa: Regenerating the Jewish Community of Colonial Tunis (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2017). Despite their awareness of the poor state of public health, this was never a priority for the colonial state. Benoît Gaumer, L’organisation sanitaire en Tunisie sous le Protectorat français (1881–1956): Un bilan ambigu et contrasté (Québec: Les Presses de l’Université Laval, 2006), 195–98.

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midwives.109 The steady improvements to the nation’s medical infrastructure were concentrated in the capital and along the coasts. Twentynine of the nation’s maternal and infant health clinics did not have a full-time midwife (and the majority of centers that did were located in the capital).110 Though the proportion of doctors in the center east, or Sahel region, roughly corresponded to its share of the national population, the starkest disparity occurred in the center west (Qairouan, Sidi Bouzid, Kasserine), which contained roughly 14 percent of the population and less than 6 percent of the nation’s gynecologists.111 Regional disparities were exacerbated by the population program. None of the twelve PMI centers included in the experimental program was located in a rural area; medicalized procedures such as sterilization and abortions were available only at the three major hospitals in the capital; and it was not until 1967 that urban centers outside the capital had access to oral contraceptives. By the mid-1960s, each governorate had one mobile team servicing disparate clinics for as little as an hour or two per week in a schedule that did not account for the number of patients at each center. There were no emergency services available in case of complications or side effects. Traveling 6,000–9,000 kilometers per month, the movement of mobile teams was hampered by insufficient road networks that could be inaccessible due to flooding, causing delays or cancellations. In the region surrounding Jenduba in the northwest, the average patient traveled for nearly an hour to receive services.112 Each team included a doctor, a midwife, a nurse’s assistant, and a secretary. Yet the doctors were frequently from Eastern Europe, 109

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According to Zouhir, in 1965 only 40,000 of the approximately 185,000 annual births were in a maternity ward. Herve Bleuchot, “Chronique sociale culturelle Tunisie, 1965,” Annuaire de l’Afrique du Nord (1966). In the provinces of Gafsa, Gabes, and Mednine, home births were by far the norm. Povey, “Report from Tunisia,” March 1967, RAC, FF, Series VII, Box 17. Projet de développement des activités de planning familial, 1972–1976, RAC, FF, Series VII, Box 19. Bechir Dahmani, “Le personnel de la santé: Évolution et problème de répartition,” in Centre d’Études Démographiques et Sociales and Association Maghrébine pour l’Étude de la population, L’intégration de la variable population dans la planification du développement: Actes du VII Colloque de démographie maghrébine (Nouakchott, Mauritania, 1988). Elizabeth S. Maguire, Ann A. Way, and Mohamed Ayad, “The Delivery and Use of Contraceptive Services in Rural Tunisia,” International Family Planning Perspectives 8, no. 3 (1982): 97. A mobile clinic custom-built in New York and shipped to Tunisia in the fall of 1966 intended to improve rural access to clinical services was not put into regular service until August 1970 when it was

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spoke minimal French and no Arabic, and while midwives tended to be Tunisian women, medical, racial, and gender hierarchies ensured their subordinate position.113 The limited medical infrastructure meant that rural and poor women had infrequent access to family planning services. According to some reports, rural patients were treated disrespectfully by medical personnel, who viewed them “as an unwelcome intruder.” Social hierarchies contributed to abusive practices, such as inserting an IUD without the patient’s permission or withholding free supplies of powdered milk from women unless they accepted an IUD.114 Supplies that were distributed free of charge by family planning services were difficult to obtain or prohibitively priced when purchased over the counter, for example, 126 millimes per box of spermicide when many laborers earned 200 millimes per day; even into the 1990s some rural areas lacked pharmacies.115 In the focus on contraceptive distribution, supplies, and targets, American donors often isolated the question of family size from broader considerations, whether health-related or otherwise. As a singleissue solution to poverty, population control made presumptions about healthcare and failed to accommodate local realities or overcome the hurdles faced by newly independent nations.116

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circulated about seventy kilometers from Tunis; see “Semi-Annual Report,” August 1970, RAC, PCC, RG2, Box 203, Folder 1947. See, for instance, Elizabeth Mueller’s January 5, 1970, letter, RAC, PCC, Acc. 2, Box 180, Folder 1722. Tunisian medical personnel often preferred to work in the three major hospitals in the capital. Mobile teams later included Peace Corps Volunteers, generally English-language teachers on summer vacation, with little medical training or public health experience. Povey, “Family Planning in Tunisia.” Staff believed that midwives forced women to accept contraception to improve their statistics and that “medical personnel also tell patients lies.” Berelson, “Notes on a Trip to Tunisia,” and Povey, “Tunisia Revisited,” October 1968, RAC, FF, Tunisia Field Office, Series VII, Box 17. Not all contraception included clear instructions. “Le Syn-à-gén a déçu,” Faiza, June 1961, 17; Susan H. Cochrane and David K. Guilkey, “The Effects of Fertility Intentions and Access to Services on Contraceptive Use in Tunisia,” Economic Development and Cultural Change 43, no. 4 (1995). They also note hurdles for accessing rural communities that lasted into the 1980s. Population Council personnel did recognize medical lacunae, for instance, that women’s demand for contraception outpaced the capacity of physicians; see George F. Brown, “Report on a Visit to Tunisia,” RAC, PCC, RG2, Series 2, Box 178, Folder 1709; Povey’s December 1967 report, RAC, FF, Tunisia Field Office, Series VII, Box 17; and Melvyn Thorne, “Semi-Annual Report from Tunisia,” February 1969, RAC, PCC, RG2, Box 203, Folder 1946.

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Tunisian experts were acutely aware of how structural conditions constrained family planning initiatives. In both public and private, Daly articulated the need for population to be better integrated into health services, treating birth control as “only one of the many public health problems they have to face.”117 Divergent views on program priorities were a recurring source of tension between Tunisian and American staff. Focused on record-keeping, data, and statistical measures of success, George Povey, the medical director and general advisor from the Population Council from 1966 to 1968, suggested busing women to health centers to achieve “better results.” He preferred abandoning the mobile teams or moving them to more populated areas, whereas Daly advocated for maintaining the geographic breadth of services.118 Driss Guiga, minister of health from December 1969 to March 1973, prioritized infrastructural improvements and the expansion of medical services more broadly, urging donors to fund “medical and paramedical personnel in the field” over education, research, or bureaucrats based in the capital.119 As stressed in a proposal by the Ministry of Public Health, family planning depended on existing medical and public health activities and required that the latter were already well developed.120

Women at the Clinic and How Families Plan Surmounting obstacles, women visited health centers and clinics in search of contraception and saved their few resources to pay for private care. Demand often outpaced supplies. Over the years, women were able to quote substantial information gleaned from the radio, family planning centers, and hospitals on a variety of contraceptive methods.121 At a weekly family planning clinic at Habib Thameur 117

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Daly, “Le programme de planning familial en Tunisie,” RTSS (1969): 307–20. For American donors and population advocates, this informed their critique of Daly; see Vande Wiele, “Report of a Visit to Tunisia.” Povey, “Report from Tunisia,” March 1967, and “Tunisia Revisited.” Discussion with Minister of Health Guiga at the CARE-Medico Cocktail Party on March 6, 1972, RAC, FF, Box 18, Folder VI; Spoelberch to Joel Montague, October 27, 1972, Box 20. Projet de développement des activités de planning familial, 1972–1976, RAC, FF, Series VII, Box 19. According to a study in Nabeul, Gabes, and Tunis. Mounira Chelli, “Enquête nationale sur la planification familiale,” ONPFP Bulletin, no. 14 (1975).

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hospital, women seized the opportunity of the medical consultation to discuss their general state of health. Though most were satisfied with the long-term contraception provided by the IUD, their experiences with contraception could not be disassociated from other aspects of their lives. One woman described a constant state of exhaustion, which the doctor attributed to her continued nursing of a fourteen-month-old infant. When the midwife gave her advice on weaning the infant, she replied, “my husband is unemployed. I have seven kids. How do you want me to feed him [the baby]? At least with nursing, the problem is solved.”122 This woman’s awareness of how her infant’s health could be understood only in relation to her husband’s employment to her and her husband’s ability to provide food for and healthcare of their other children was not shared by medical personnel. When surveyed, women expressed verbal support for contraceptives and often cited four as the ideal number of children (the number promoted in official discourses), indicating widespread awareness of state policy among rural Tunisians. Rural women were hesitant about the IUD due to the lack of female gynecologists (nurses and midwives were not permitted to remove IUD coils). They were concerned about the intermittent scheduling of medical staff at rural PMI centers, which could not guarantee the presence of doctors in case of emergency.123 Persistent side effects and frustration over the coercive measures used to promote the IUD reduced its appeal, whereas interest in, and preference for, oral contraceptives increased. These requests were dismissed by doctors as resistance, with both local and foreign personnel “concerned with the sudden enthusiasm for pills” hoping to limit distribution until after further educational programs were initiated.124 Families situated questions of childbearing within multiple economic and political considerations. Based in the Khroumir region of Tunisia’s 122 123

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“Celles du lundi,” Faiza, January 1966, 26–27. Described sympathetically as “a situation that would frighten even an educated woman.” Vande Wiele, “Report of a Visit to Tunisia,” and an unsigned note from 1970 in RAC, PCC, RG2, Series 2, Box 175, Folder 1683. Bassam Khalil Abed, “The Social Organization of Production and Reproduction in Rural Tunisia” (PhD dissertration, Pennsylvania State University, 1979), 143. Povey, “Report from Tunisia,” December 1967; and on the demand for pills, see Fendall’s diary, 1967. Povey elsewhere noted that pills were constantly requested but “were rarely dispensed due to the conviction of doctors and midwives that Tunisian women were incapable of using them successfully.” “Tunisia’s Experience in Family Planning,” 623.

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northwest, the Dutch anthropologist Douwe Geert Jongmans noted that for many locals, displeasure with the national emphasis on small family size was understood as a facet of broader state-building policies. The population program reinforced patterns of urban-centered decision making that disregarded rural perspectives and failed to account for local particularities, in this case the reliance on the land for sustenance. Though some local men had been employed in colonial service industries on a nearby French base and at the resorts of ‘Ain Drahem, these jobs disappeared with the departure of the French military and settlers and were not replaced by other opportunities. The increasing dependence on agriculture and pastoralism was compounded by the 1958 promulgation of laws banning hillside agriculture. Intended to prevent erosion, the new legislation contributed to a loss of 50 percent of the arable land in this community. An additional ban on goats – whose hooves were believed to harm the soil – forced families to sell their herds within months, flooding the market and leading to a significant decline in prices. Partial unemployment relief did little to diversify or improve the situation, increasing frustration with an elitist central government that failed to understand local perspectives. After the loss of their land and herds, encouraging smaller families was widely considered as further encroachment on their livelihood.125 In evaluating the importance of children and family relationships, emotional and economic reasons cannot be disentangled. For instance, among nomadic and urban communities in the region of Gafsa in the Tunisian south, more children were considered beneficial to companionate marriage. They sustained the relatively modern practice of marriages based on choice, strengthening exogamous marriages that otherwise lacked a kinship connection.126 Family was an important source of social identity and children a form of insurance.127 Family 125

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When asked directly about contraception, a majority spoke favorably, but few used it. D. G. Jongmans, “Why Did Family Planning Fail? An Anthropological Case Study in the Khroumirie Region (North Africa),” 1972, RAC, FF, Series VII, Box 19. In a low-income neighborhood of Jenduba, another researcher described family planning as the “ultimate humiliation” imposed by the state. Ridha Boukraa, “Notes sur ‘culture et pauvreté’: Le cas d’une cité populaire à Jendouba,” Revue Tunisienne de Science Sociales, no. 27 (1971). Abed, “The Social Organization of Production and Reproduction,” 17–20. Carmel Camilleri, “Modernity and the Family in Tunisia,” Journal of Marriage and Family 29, no. 3 (1967); John I. Clarke, “Population Policies and Dynamics in Tunisia,” The Journal of Developing Areas 4, no. 1 (1969).

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members advanced each other money, financing celebrations and pilgrimages, creating a security net that was especially significant among working classes and the rural poor.128 Children were valued in large families in rural Sidi Bouzid for their contributions to agricultural production, weaving, and guarding the herds. They also reduced the labor of aging parents. In urban areas as well, women and girls were employed in factories, contributing to the family’s income. As men were migrating to urban areas for work in factories and the tourism industry, daughters were increasingly important.129 The flexibility of gender roles and shifting approaches to marriage within rural and working-class families is indicative of the dynamism of the family as an institution, the problems of monocausal explanations about family size, and a narrow vision of modern womanhood. For families and communities that had been adversely affected by colonial dispossession and state agricultural policy, nationalist imperatives were experienced through “the interdependence of social, economic, political and cultural” spheres.130 Vocalizing a rejection of contraception or the ideal of four children was risky, and instead when Bourguiba reprimanded a woman “dragging a dozen or so children after her, she would reply that it was ‘the will of God.’”131 Similar anecdotal references to God or God’s will were read by policy makers as a form of fatalism, an expression of traditional religiosity, or the lack of individual autonomy.132 However, in an authoritarian political climate that precluded open dissent, this recurring comment can also be read as a rejection of the model of “choice.” Where structural inequalities meant limited options, references to the will of God rejected the emphasis on the individual over family or community. Women deferred to stereotypes of feminine submission or rural ignorance by citing their husband’s disinterest in contraception and declined to answer questions about family size and the spacing of 128

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Tunisian men and women made decisions about family size in relation to economic and political problems. K. L. Brown, “The Campaign to Encourage Family Planning in Tunisia and Some Responses at the Village Level,” Middle Eastern Studies 17, no. 1 (1981). Sophie Ferchiou, Les femmes dans l’agriculture tunisienne (Aix-en-Provence: Édisud, 1985), 25–41. Lahmar, Du mouton à l’olivier, 149. Bourguiba, Birth Control as a Factor of Development, 9. American clinicians similarly complained about the fatalistic attitudes of their clients. Schoen, Choice and Coercion, 55.

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pregnancies.133 Women’s silence was a form of subtle resistance similar to the deference to cultural stereotypes of the patriarchal family that rejected the focus on birth control as women’s responsibility and depoliticized their noncompliance with official dictates.134 Tunisian proponents of family planning envisioned a program that went beyond “the narrow sense of birth control” and toward “a broader and more comprehensive concept: the Well-Being of the family with all that this implies from nutrition, health, housing, education, and employment.”135 Rural women and peasant communities marginalized within the political and economic structures of state-building and targeted by population programs quietly advocated for such alternative conceptualizations of progress that included family and community welfare.

Conclusion In the years after independence, the Tunisian state shifted from expecting that the birth rate would slow with the expansion of education and improvements to the standard of living to reducing demographic growth as an end in itself in the first ten-year plan. Explicit demographic goals were subsequently included in the 1973–76 threeyear plan. On the surface, this indicates changing understandings of population from a public health approach grounded in broader social and economic considerations to the type of single-issue solution to poverty espoused by development agencies and population advocates. Yet such reformulations are also indicative of tensions within the Tunisian bureaucracy and the obstacles to making their voices heard among increasing numbers of foreign donors established across the national landscape. Tunisian professionals such as Nazer, Bahri, and 133

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In a survey of women in Kef, 70 percent declined to answer a question about the ideal number and timing of pregnancies, which Seklani attributed to their “ignorance” of contraception. M. Seklani, “La famille tunisienne au seuil de la contraception,” Revue Tunisienne de Science Sociales, no. 11 (1967): 68. Abed, “The Social Organization of Production and Reproduction,” 141–44. Visiting Nabeul, Fendall confided to his diary that women “sometimes use the husband as an excuse for not accepting contraceptive methods.” M. H. Riza, “Office National du Planning Familial: Des nouvelles dimensions,” La Presse, press clipping, RAC, FF, Series VII, Box 18, Folder VII. Fendall earlier noted that “Tunisia has accepted family planning not so much as a means of limiting the overall population, but as a means of improving maternal and child health,” June 1968, RAC, PCC, Series 2, Box 180, Folder 1720.

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A. Mezlini advocated for broad investments in healthcare replicable without foreign aid. Instead, they received technocratic solutions that concentrated on urban areas and exacerbated the patchy nature of public health services in the rural interior. The promise of an improved standard of living was belied not only by the faulty logic of the equation between family size and poverty, but by the lack of investment beyond contraception into rural communities. American donors such as the Ford Foundation and USAID found in Bourguiba an important ally. By repeatedly promoting Bourguiba’s “moderate” political stance or his amenability to Western financial and geo-strategic interests, population circles helped secure Tunisia’s economic dependence and Bourguiba’s claims to protect women’s rights. In their reliance on the head of state and the party machinery to promote contraception, they also contributed to expanding state control over family life and women’s bodies, bolstered his international reputation with a self-serving emphasis on certain characteristics (legislative changes) over others (his domination over state and society), and encouraged the silencing of critique, in fear of jeopardizing the future of the program in Tunisia.136 Family planning served different purposes among its coalition of supporters, from the president to medical personnel to women activists and the UNFT. Official discourse emphasized women’s biological role in childbearing, depicting women as both a coherent group and one bifurcated by notions of progress represented by fertility and family arrangements that stigmatized rural or peasant women. The nationalist telos of population control further politicized the small nuclear family as a manifestation of progress and women’s responsibility to the nation. While the UNFT and women’s press often reiterated the new ideal of the nuclear family, they also encouraged women’s increasing participation in national affairs and development initiatives as facets of modern womanhood. The larger picture of agricultural reform, sedentarization, disproportionate investment in coastal regions, and higher rates of rural unemployment were all factors contributing to decisions about family size. Deferring to stereotypes of the submissive woman or of religious fatalism offered women a way to minimize their personal role and frame reproductive choices in a way that did not directly 136

Melvin Thorne to Clifford Pease, September 11, 1970, RAC, PCC, Series 2, Box 182, Folder 1832.

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challenge state policies. If anything, such stories urge us to consider the agency of the many anonymous women who accepted, rejected, or ignored contraception at different phases in their lives as rational means to exercise control over their bodies and their families. These struggles over the family planning program, between foreign donors and the Tunisian state, between local officials and healthcare workers in the field, between doctors and their patients, are indicative of how contraception merged with or was subordinated to other interests – US Cold War policy, the urban basis of state modernization – and underscore women’s centrality to these domains. Conversely, women were routinely excluded from decision-making capacities; as noted at the Women’s International Forum on Population and Development, population planning was “both male chauvinistic and Western chauvinistic.”137 The extent to which knowledge about family life and its connections to rural development, poverty, and social instability was produced by Tunisians in the elaboration of social scientific research and the development of national expertise is the subject of the following chapter. 137

This was attended by Jalila Daghfous from the ONPFP. Adrienne Germain, “Results of the Women’s International Forum on Population and Development (1974),” RAC, FF, Series VII, Box 19.

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Postcolonial Tunisian Academics Between International Aid, National Imperatives, and Local Knowledge

Early each morning, groups of women walked to the capital where they cooked, cleaned, washed laundry, and raised the children of others. With origins in central and western Tunisia they built neighborhoods on the outskirts of the capital: Borj ‘Ali Rais, Garjouma, Jbel al-Ahmar, Melassine, Saida Manoubia, and Sidi Fathallah. Since the 1940s, landless or underemployed families migrated to the capital in search of better lives. Men scraped by as day laborers or opened tiny shops, while women and their daughters worked as maids or foraged for cloth and scrap metal in nearby dumps. Though women journalists and the women’s press reported on domestic workers, drawing attention to the gendered dynamics of internal migration, socioeconomic inequalities, underdevelopment, and their impact on family life, planners often conceptualized the urban periphery in masculine terms.1 The rural woman who haunted population discourse for their ignorance of contraception and excessive fertility were notably absent from other realms of economic and social planning. In contrast to the push for male employment, the maid called attention to the gendering of the labor market, exploitation, class difference, and the exclusion of women from these development initiatives.2 Government management of rural space and hopes of disciplining rural inhabitants dated to the final decades of the colonial era. Even 1

2

A number of reports in the press focused on these neighborhoods and their inhabitants. Josette Ben Brahem, “Les faubourgs clandestins,” Faiza, February 1961, 22–25; Josette Ben Brahem, “Mabrouka, 5 dinars par mois,” Jeune Afrique, February 6, 1961, 14–15; “Li-kol mushkila . . . Hal,” Al-Mar’a, April 1966, 2; Asma, “La ceinture de Tunis,” Faiza, August–September 1967, 38–41, 90–92. These topics were also covered by Jelila Hafsia in La Presse. Neila Jrad, La ligne d’espérance (Saint-Denis, France: Édilivre, 2016). Djamila K. “A propos des bonnes . . .,” Afrique Action, February 13, 1961, 4; Mustapha Nagbou, “Les bonnes,” Afrique Action, February 20, 1961, 2–3; “L’emploi féminin en Tunisie,” Femme, January–March 1965, 20–21. They numbered anywhere from 25,000 to 30,000 by some estimates.

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with cities along the coasts, the livelihood of much Tunisia’s population was tied to the land and sea via herding, fishing, or farming.3 Colonial land policies of dispossession and economic dislocation caused by further incorporation into capitalist networks had reduced many farmers to small plots, share-cropping, wage labor, or urban migration, and rural poverty became widespread. It was not until the 1940s and 1950s that the plight of rural communities drew the attention of the colonial state, fearful of unrest that might destabilize the colonial order as Muriam Haleh Davis argues, “exposing the fine intimate connection between military strategy and humanitarian intervention.”4 Poverty was blamed on rural populations for supposedly damaging their lands through backward farming and herding practices, or what Diana Davis calls the French “colonial declensionist environmental narrative,” where farming conformed to presumptions of civilizational decline.5 Policies such as the forced settlement of pastoral herders did little to address dispossession or the underlying structural causes of rural precarity. The anticolonial movement mobilized peasant resentment against the French without a unanimous solution to their economic marginalization. For one, rural communities were underrepresented in nationalist organizations such as labor unions, which drew heavily from cities and mining regions and had less to say about agricultural reforms.6 For another, Bourguiba’s emphasis on political autonomy preserved colonial economic interests and the privileges of the national elite. A small number of rural families aligned with colonial interests benefited from colonial-era economic restructuring by increasing their landholdings or 3

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5

6

Farming varied by region and the aridity of the soil. As of 1960, about 40 percent of the total land was considered “arable,” another one-third was “of low productivity and nomadic grazing land.” Orchards and forests occupied another 10 percent each. Tunisia, Tunisia Works, 79–81. Muriam Haleh Davis, “Restaging Mise En Valeur: ‘Postwar Imperialism’ and the Plan de Constantine,” Review of Middle East Studies 44, no. 2 (2010): 176–86. Diana K. Davis, Resurrecting the Granary of Rome: Environmental History and French Colonial Expansion in North Africa (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2009), xii. The nationalist movement demonstrated little of the nostalgia for the peasantry that was evidenced by Palestinian nationalists. Bourguiba’s supporters within the Dustur were largely urban and educated in French universities and Tunisia’s French and Franco-Arab high schools. Ahmad, “Politics and Labor in Tunisia,” 146; Clement H. Moore and Arlie R. Hochschild, “Student Unions in North African Politics,” Daedalus 97, no. 1 (1968): 24.

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through involvement in commerce. However, the Dustur leader Salih bin Yusuf was cognizant of how export-oriented agriculture had damaged the viability of local farming, whereas the privileging of French imports limited manufacturing capabilities. He integrated class and national arguments in a vision of political independence and economic restructuring.7 The armed uprising in the center and south in 1955–56 implied the necessity of agrarian reform, of severing ties with France, and of pan-Arab and pan-Maghrebi solidarities. Bourguiba’s manipulation of Western apprehensions about peasant uprisings was accompanied by the rejection of alternative visions of modernization, socialist or otherwise which bolstered his position in the eyes of his French interlocutors and later American donors.8 Postindependence development initiatives targeted the rural areas involved in the uprising.9 Rural men who fought for independence expected the postcolonial state to improve their standard of living.10 Over the next decade, state interest in rural populations sought to anchor rural people to the land, offering financial incentives of employment or welfare to earn their political quiescence. These projects often made presumptions about rural ignorance or tradition that permeated discourses of modern womanhood. Across the mid-twentieth century, “the peasant” was a subject of international scrutiny, driven by concerns about the political ramifications of poverty. American, French, and British scholars turned to the Middle East to study village life and the peasantry in ways that perpetuated the essentializing of Islam seen in Orientalist scholarship. French planners framed racial difference in sociological terms as a question of “aptitudes and behaviors” in a form of cultural racism.11 As Timothy Mitchell details, the peasant was “a category of human being” and “a field of expertise, the subject of his own scholarly

7

8

9 10 11

On the political-economic differences between the two nationalist leaders, see Marzouki, “Le jeu de bascule de l’identité.” Habib Bourguiba, “Nationalism: Antidote to Communism,” Foreign Affairs 35, no. 4 (1957): 646–53. Max Ajl, “Farmers, Fellaga, and Frenchmen 211–15. Lahmar, Du mouton à l’olivier, 147–56. Muriam Haleh Davis, “‘The Transformation of Man’ in French Algeria: Economic Planning and the Postwar Social Sciences, 1958–62,” Journal of Contemporary History 52, no. 1 (2017): 73–94, 93.

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journals and the object of a distinct body of theory and description.”12 This research contributed to state domination over the countryside through land reform and settling of nomads in ways that restructured rural space, amounting to what Omnia El Shakry describes in the case of Egypt as social engineering.13 State programs were informed by ideas of development, Cold War political narratives, and transnational intellectual circuits. The genesis of postcolonial projects of rural reform differed from colonial precedents as their elaboration coincided with the building of Tunisia’s national university. A new generation of academics in disciplines such as sociology and demography positioned their research on the rural interior to inform state planning. Their engagement with data and discourses about rural space and “the peasant” as a figure of study reveal much about their academic training, the regional and international politicization of poverty, and the gendering of development. Concerns about rural society focused on men as the typical migrant or potential political opponent. Women’s bodies, especially those of rural women, were central to limiting demographic growth, but often removed from development initiatives by their relegation to a domestic space of procreation. This chapter situates knowledge about rural spaces within international, national, and regional contexts as an aspect of Tunisian state building and postcolonial development. To emphasize the nexus of state, university, and foreign donors in the 1950s and 1960s, I begin with an overview of these partnerships as they shaped the intellectual climate of the era. For the first generation of post-independence Tunisian intellectuals, access to rural communities allowed them to demonstrate the relevance of new academic disciplines and to claim ownership over knowledge production. By grounding local perspectives, they pushed back against the urban and middle-class premises of American and French development models. Women activists with the UNFT and in academia urged state planners to be more inclusive of women and revealed the gendered impact of economic planning and the limits of its singular vision of modern womanhood. Their attention to women’s lives further challenged the Eurocentrism of their disciplines while laying the foundations of scholarly inquiry about women and gender as it began to coalesce as a field over the course 12

13

Timothy Mitchell, Rule of Experts: Egypt, Techno-Politics, Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 123. El Shakry, The Great Social Laboratory, 113–42.

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of the 1960s and 1970s (in the Middle East and the United States).14 By centering women’s experiences with economic development, Tunisian women academics utilized feminist methodologies to urge a reconsideration of development’s patriarchal premises while subverting the homogenizing image of modern womanhood.

Planned Solutions to Rural Poverty As early as 1954, the nascent Tunisian state began creating temporary jobs as a form of welfare. This transitioned to public works projects in 1958 under the ministry of planning, paying 200 millimes per day plus weekly supplies of semolina.15 By managing rural poverty without addressing its causes, providing only partial employment to the men who worked as little as two out of every six weeks, it left many perpetually underemployed and impoverished.16 In addition, the programs incorporated gendered understandings of labor and productivity, operating with a head-of-household definition of unemployment that did not include mothers, students, or the disabled.17 A second postcolonial strategy to stem internal migration was agricultural reform. Beginning on a trial basis and expanding with the first ten-year plan, small plots were combined to facilitate the mechanization of agriculture (with any surplus employment reoriented toward light industry). Promotional materials promised to turn barren landscapes full of “rubble, swamps and mud-shacks” into “fields of rice . . . white houses, fields of artichokes, thousands of fruit trees.”18 The extension of monocrop production and export-oriented arboriculture, 14

15 16

17

18

These processes were relatively coeval. The first women’s studies centers in Beirut and Cairo were founded in the 1970s around the same time as the National Women’s Studies Association in the United States. The study of women in the Middle East was marginal in the US academy until at least the 1980s. Margot Badran, “The Institutionalization of Middle East Women’s Studies in the United States,” Middle East Studies Association Bulletin 22, no. 1 (1988). From 1958, this grain was provided by the United States as food aid. In addition to low salaries, the projects were unproductive, with employment following clientelist patterns protecting the financial spoliation of the new elite regime. Krichen, Le syndrome Bourguiba, 81, 115. Kitabat al-Dawlah lil-Akhbar wa-al-Irshad Tunisia, Les chantiers de travail ([Tunis]: Secrétariat d’état aux affaires culturelles et à l’information, 1962). This piece on the Mejerda valley was listed as a “publi-reportage” or infomercial. “Chaque année 5,000 nouveaux hectares,” Afrique Action, March 6, 1961, 14–15.

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trends dating to in the 1930s, was premised on the expectation that greater yields would generate greater revenues. It did not address social relations, nor did Tunisian socialism target the privileges of the landed elite as was the case in Egypt or Iraq in the 1950s. Large landowners continued to constitute an important component of the Dustur party, particularly in the fertile coastal regions and the Sahel.19 Instead, the plan was facilitated by the complete nationalization of French settler lands in 1964. Collectivization focused heavily on male employment, placing them in a socially subordinate position to landowners as cooperants or employees. Photographs of its early implementation in the Mejerda Valley portrayed men’s agricultural productivity as a facet of national betterment, while women represented domestic quietude by hanging laundry.20 Agricultural collectivization sought to maintain the political loyalty of rural communities, anchor them to the land, and contribute to social reform through a specifically gendered vision of modern family life (though its eventual demise was blamed on peasant intransigence and traditionalism). These plans were also subject to much academic debate. A third initiative linking rural development with policy concerns and academic specialization around visions of the modern family was housing, specifically low-cost housing for rural migrants who had settled in the outskirts of the capital.21 Faced with few options, many showed resourcefulness and ingenuity, renting vacant lots and building their own homes with mud, stone, or clay, adding concrete when they could afford it. They tread pathways between their homes in the absence of paved roads and drew water from nearby wells. In official discourse and popular imagination, neighborhoods on the urban periphery were stigmatized as spaces of overcrowding, filth, 19

20 21

Fadila Amrani, “Réforme agraire et système politique: Le cas de la Tunisie, 1960–1969” (thesis, Institut d’études politiques, 1979). That socialist land reform sought to limit the political influence of the landholding class is widely discussed in the literature on Egypt, Iraq, and Syria. On the continued cleavages in Tunisian rural society after agricultural collectivization, see Stephen J. King, Liberalization against Democracy: The Local Politics of Economic Reform in Tunisia (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003); Zussman, Development and Disenchantment in Rural Tunisia. “Chaque année 5,000 nouveaux hectares.” Though this was described as a “dysfunctional” approach not only because the homes were not maintained but because different housing did not “magically resolve the problems posed by underdevelopment.” Boukraa, “Notes sur ‘Culture et pauvreté,’” 185.

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poverty, and social instability where “delinquency and prostitution” were endemic.22 The homes, known as “gourbis,” had sparse furnishings and multipurpose rooms that indicated life at or below subsistence. The neighborhoods, known as “gourbivilles,” took on metonymic status in ideologies of poverty. Building just over 3,500 housing units under the first phase of planning from 1959 to 1961, the ambitious goal of 130,000 new units outlined in the ten-year plan was scaled back to the more realistic 5,600 units between 1965 and 1968. Public housing was designed for the nuclear family and did not accommodate diverse household composition.23 Whereas domestic architecture offered aeration through open courtyards and maintained heat in the winter with smaller rooms, mass-built modern housing often lacked ventilation and insulation. Insufficient in number to replace makeshift housing and often too expensive, the state alternated between punitive and coercive measures to evict rural migrants. If they lacked stable employment in the capital, heads of household were urged to leave Tunis for their regions of birth with the offer of partial employment and transportation. Few were interested.24 In 1965, the government turned to the drastic tactic of demolition in Sidi ‘Ali Rais. When the inhabitants refused to leave, the National Guard was deployed, responding to their protests with live ammunition and killing at least five, detaining hundreds, and expelling others toward their natal villages.25 These tensions continued throughout the 1960s as 22 23

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25

“Les animatrices sociales,” Faiza, November 1967, 34–35. Housing provided on agricultural cooperatives frustrated participants as it was not capacious enough to include elderly parents, Abdelkader Zghal, “Système de parenté et système coopératif dans les campagnes Tunisiennes,” Revue Tunisienne de Science Sociales 4, no. 11 (1967): 105. Multiple reports detailed the presence of extended family, including one in Sidi Frej near Beja that described a three-room unit housing a family of seven, with two adult brothers, their mother, their wives, and two children. “Si M’naour, Khmissa, Souad et Si Amor de Beja,” Faiza, November 1967, 34. Zghal also noted the insufficient furnishings in cooperative housing, with stools too small for most adults. Zghal, Modernisation de l’agriculture, 51, 110–11. Roger Herman Harrell, “Governmental Capacity in Developing Nations: A Survey of Urbanization in Tunisia” (master’s thesis, University of Southern California, 1967), 57, 61–62. Roger Le Tourneau, “Chronique politique 1965,” Annuaire de l’Afrique du Nord (1966); Jean-Pierre Darmon, “La Tunisie en danger,” Esprit 377, no. 377 (1969). Two such neighborhoods in Borgel and Ariana were destroyed in 1957 and 1958, with inhabitants provided tents. Harrell, “A Survey of Urbanization in Tunisia,” 62.

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housing policy could not meet demand, and were exacerbated in the following decade due to budgetary reductions and a liberal reliance on banks meant only those with the best credit had access to housing.26

State Planning and the Tunisian University Al-‘Arbi al-Shabbi, the first postindependence minister of education, situated education within a vision of development that built on Arab and Islamic heritage, open to the West but specific to Tunisia.27 The founding directors of the first sociology program met personally with al-Shabbi’s successor, Mahmoud al-Mas‘adi, in 1958, to convince him of the relevance of their discipline to state planning.28 Homegrown scholarship focused within the parameters of the nation-state dramatically increased with the opening of the University of Tunis in the fall of 1961 and the foundation of the Center for Economic and Social Research (Centre des Etudes et de Recherches Economiques et Sociales [CERES]) the same year. Female students were a distinct minority of the roughly 1,000 university students registered in Tunisia in 1961, but their presence on campus and in institutional contexts grew steadily.29 With sections in economics, geography, and sociology, CERES trained and hired PhDs and housed

26

27 28

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Morched Chebbi, “Une nouvelle forme d’urbanisation dans le grand Tunis: L’habitat spontané pre-urbain,” in Tunisie: Quelles technologies? Quel développement?, ed. GREDET, 207–26 (Tunis, 1983). El Shakry, “Printed Matter(s),” 157. Sociology was then still based at Tunisia’s Institut des Hautes Etudes. Khalil Zamiti, “Aux origins de la sociologie en Tunisie,” in Abdelkader Zghal: L’homme des questions, ed. Mohamed Kerrou (Tunis: Ceres Editions, 2017). Gmar says there were 3,725 university students with 1,800 in Tunisia and 1,600 in France, including 186 female students: “Etudiants: Un pour mille,” Afrique Action, June 19, 1961. However, Ben Brahem tallied closer to 1,000 in Tunis and 1,250 in France: “En marge; Jeunes, tout simplement . . .,” Afrique Action, September 2–8, 1961. Another source places the number of female students between 600 and 700 from 1961 to 1964 and over 1,000 by the 1965–66 academic year: “Les filles dans l’enseignement depuis l’indépendence,” Faiza, April–May 1966. The number of faculty ranged from 100 to 200 between 1961 and 1964, almost half of whom were French citizens, though by the early 1970s Tunisian faculty were the majority. Monastiri, “Chronique sociale et culturelle Tunisie 1972”; Michel Treutenaere, “La coopération culturelle, scientifique et technique entra la Tunisie et la France: Évolution et perspectives,” Annuaire de l’Afrique du Nord 20 (1982).

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“almost all the research in the social sciences undertaken by Tunisians” in its early years.30 For Tunisians scholars, CERES represented an ideal of collaboration between researchers and the government since it was founded “to train a corps of university scholars who, while not directly committed to activism, would be motivated by the problems posed by planning” while circumventing its “technical incoherencies.”31 Its research agenda was informed by the state, which appointed its director, though their priorities were not always identical.32 Its staff was small, predominantly Tunisian, heavily francophone, and mostly men, with a few women. Academics had similar social origins to civil servants and planners. They were predominantly nationalist in their commitment to study local realities, but held divergent ideological views and varied in loyalty to the ruling party. For instance, the center’s first director, Mustapha Filali, began a career of state service as the first minister of agriculture in 1956. In his introduction to the inaugural issue of the center’s journal, the Revue Tunisienne de Sciences Sociales (Majalla altunisiyya lil-‘alum al-ijtima’iyya, Tunisian Social Science Review [RTSS]), Filali described the social sciences as a privileged domain of research and an essential pillar of national development and urged the government to appreciate research and not reduce scholars to teachers and technicians. Hailing from Qairouan, Filali was also a proponent of land reform and socializing agriculture, positions that earned him the ire of large landowners within the Dustur and that contributed to his reappointment to another cabinet post in 1957.33 Other early participants and members of the RTSS editorial committee included leading scholars such as Habib Attia (a politically engaged geographer at times

30

31

32

33

Abdelkader Zghal and Hachmi Karoui, “State of National Scholarship: Decolonization and Social Science Research: The Case of Tunisia,” Middle East Studies Association Bulletin 7, no. 3 (1973). Mustapha Filali, “Préface,” Revue Tunisienne de Science Sociales, no. 1 (1964); Zghal and Karoui, “Decolonization and Social Science Research.” Writing decades later, Zamiti described the directorship as a political appointment granted only to Dustur loyalists. Zamiti, “Aux origins de la sociologie en Tunisie.” Ben Salem recalled that the research agenda was imposed “or commanded at times, by different administrations.” Sylvie Mazzella and Lilia Ben Salem, “Lilia Ben Salem, ‘Propos sur la sociologie en Tunisie,’” Genèses, no. 75 (2009). 130. Moore, Tunisia since Independence, 95–96.

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active in Communist circles), Abdelwahab Bouhdiba (a sociologist and political philosopher), Salah Garmadi (a leftist poet, translator, and professor of Arabic at least occasionally at odds with the regime), Mahmoud Seklani (then a research affiliate of the French CNRS), and the economist Yves Younes, from Tunis’s law school.34 CERES was also part of Tunisia’s global interface, with researchers participating in collaborative and interdisciplinary conversations at the international, national, and local levels. The founding of this preeminent national institution included a $100,000 subsidy from the Ford Foundation in the United States. As one of its early initiatives in Tunisia, Ford viewed CERES as providing a regional foothold from which “to assess opportunities for Foundation assistance” in neighboring Algeria and Morocco.35 Tunisian scholars became important interlocutors for development personnel, who treated Tunisia as both a test case and a springboard for further regional intervention but lacked local experience and the relevant data for understanding the national context. This was particularly true with sociological research on the rural interior and in disciplines such as demography, which offered a platform for Tunisian scholars to participate in international conversations about population. Often earning higher degrees in France, many of Tunisia’s recent graduates were familiar with Western intellectual traditions, whether they were trained by French academics or through French-language instruction that predominated in many disciplines until the mid-1970s. The government’s geo-strategic orientation toward the West and an economic dependence that deepened its integration into the capitalist world economy meant that Tunisian intellectuals were in conversation with discourses of development. In an article on engaged sociology, Bouhdiba entreated his peers “to demand and to assume their responsibility to participate in the important struggle that our nation is waging.” Selectively echoing parameters of official initiatives, he asserted that sociologists should carve out a place in a changing world, where knowledge of the self “is an asset in the struggle against under-development.”36 For Arturo Escobar, efforts to bring material 34

35 36

RTSS was published two to four times each year, with research articles by CERES members and the RTSS editorial board, summaries of conferences, and book reviews predominantly though not exclusively in French. Ford Foundation Annual Report, 1962. Abdelwahab Bouhdiba, “Pour une sociologie militante,” Etudes de sociologie tunisienne 1 (1968).

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prosperity to the postcolonial world constituted a set of practices particular to the period following the 1950s, as well as a “regime of representation” about the world similar Orientalism and Africanism.37 If development is then understood as a historically specific way of thinking about poverty and backwardness, it is one shaped by the first generation of postcolonial intellectuals who, as Bouhdiba indicates, spoke directly to, and often in the language of, these representations. Influenced by Marxism and socialist humanism, Tunisian institutions of higher education had fostered anticolonial dissent.38 Frantz Fanon taught there for a year on social psychopathology in the 1950s as he was working on L’an V de la révolution algérienne, and Michel Foucault lectured in the philosophy department from 1966 to 1968. European instructors committed to ethnographic methods traveled around Tunisia with their students, encouraging attention to local dynamics and involving them in their research.39 Tunisian research on questions of agriculture and economic development were informed by an awareness of Soviet industrialization, socialist modernization in China and Vietnam, and collaboration with European academics and scholars across North Africa and the Middle East. The proximity between Tunisian academics and the state required a delicate balancing between academic freedom, professional integrity, international imperatives, and maintaining amicable relations with the state/party apparatus and foreign donors. Tunisia’s single-party regime did not tolerate open dissent regarding domestic initiatives such as agrarian reform or the foreign policy of anti-Communism and alignment with the United States. Scholars who explicitly contested the government, such as Gilbert Naccache, were penalized. A student activist and Communist turned engineer at the Ministry of Agriculture, Naccache wrote for the Paris-based Tunisian Marxist newsletter Perspectives, deriding collectivization as the extension of state control over agriculture to the benefit of private profit. He argued that regional inequality would prevent agricultural development and that state plans would deepen its integration into the capitalist world

37 38 39

Escobar, Encountering Development, 6. Mazzella and Salem, “Propos sur la sociologie,” 128–32. Students contributed to the work of Jean Duvignaud on Shebika. Khalil Zamitti, one of the first class of sociologists, recalled the camaraderie of these early cohorts. Zamiti, “Aux origins de la sociologie en Tunisie.”

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market; his concerns were ignored, his activism denounced, and Naccache was imprisoned for over a decade.40 Members of a leftist opposition articulated a forceful critique of class privilege and structural inequalities that resulted in their imprisonment for charges including plotting against the security of the state. This stifled intellectual production around class analysis and silenced state employees. Planners “operat[ed] within state hegemony” and even when proposing alternatives to state policies “affirmed the parameters of the regnant value system.” As Idriss Jebari demonstrates, in the authoritarian political climate that solidified in the 1970s, the best option for critical scholars was not dissent but subversion.41 Bouhdiba had insinuated in his call for engaged scholarship that planners heed the research and recommendations of their academic colleagues, and avoid operating as mere machines.42 As he later noted, despite initial euphoria surrounding the mission of CERES, academics chafed at the implication that they justify plans that had already been drafted.43 The expansion of the university and public sector in the 1950s and 1960s offered greater opportunities for collaboration between academics and state planners than in later eras, but academic commitment to national projects did not erase tensions between researchers and civil servants, while authoritarian practices limited the modes in which they were expressed.44 40

41

42 43

44

Gilbert Naccache, Qu’as-tu fait de ta jeunesse: Itinéraire d’un opposant au régime de Bourguiba, 1954–1979: Suivi de récits de prison (Paris: Cerf; La Marsa: Mots passants, 2009). See, for instance, “Les problèmes agraires en tunisie,” Perspectives, December 1963, 11–22, and February 1964, 7–21. The persecution of students and faculty that began in the 1960s continued into the 1970s and 1980s; see Max Ajl, “Auto-Centered Development and Indigenous Technics: Slaheddine el-Amami and Tunisian Delinking,” The Journal of Peasant Studies (2018): 19–20; Idriss Jebari, “Rethinking the Maghreb and the Post-colonial Intellectual in Khatibi’s Les temps modernes Issue in 1977,” The Journal of North African Studies 23, nos. 1–2 (2018). Bouhdiba, “Pour une sociologie militante.” In a 1995 interview Bouhdiba recalled that this “divorce” happened relatively quickly, with academics expecting more academic freedom. Kmar Bendana, “La Revue Tunisienne des Sciences Sociales entretien avec Abdelwahab Bouhdiba,” blog post, Histoire et culture dans la Tunisie contemporaine, Kmar Bendana (2019, https://hctc.hypothese.org). The Ministry of the Plan briefly opened an internal institute for sociological research to replace CERES, fusing the two before CERES returned to its initial organization in 1972. Zghal and Karoui, “Decolonization and Social Science Research,” 16.

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Rural Modernities and the Political Roots of Poverty As an early member of CERES and head of its sociology section after 1969, Abdelkader Zghal was a regular contributor to RTSS publishing assessments of agricultural reform that called for greater autonomy and democracy at the local level. By studying contemporary topics, Zghal “explicitly defined his work in sociology as means to participate in public policy” and to improve its implementation.45 In the words of Tunisian political scientist Mohamed Kerrou, Zghal wrote from within an “engaged milieu of the communist party, of Neo-Dusturian nationalism, and labor militancy of the UGTT.”46 His work on agricultural reform illustrates the commitment of postcolonial scholars to nationalist imperatives, their awareness of and contributions to development ideology, and their attention toward rural communities in the formation of expertise. Born in Sfax in 1930, in a closely knit extended family that respected education and appreciated culture, Zghal studied philosophy and Arabic literature before his nationalist involvement caused trouble with the colonial authorities, forcing him to exile in France until 1954.47 At the University of Tunis, his interest in sociology was sparked by the French sociologist Jean Duvignaud (who taught in Tunisia in the 1960s while conducting research in Shebika), and he completed a doctorate on rural North Africa at the University of Paris in 1964. He was a founding member of the Organization for the Promotion of Social Sciences in the Middle East, serving on its executive committee; collaborated with academics in the United States, such as political scientist I. William Zartman and the anthropologist Nicholas Hopkins, both at New York University in the 1970s; and received grants from the Social Science Research Council and the Ford Foundation.48 Over a long and productive career, Zghal established 45

46

47

48

Malika Zeghal, “Abdelkader Zghal, sociologue de la modernité et de la réactivation de la tradition,” in Kerrou, ed., Abdelkader Zghal, 28. Mohamed Kerrou, “Le sociologue et le politique: L’art et la méthode du débat publique,” in Kerrou, ed., Abdelkader Zghal, 11. Hamed Zghal, “Abd al-Qadir min tifulato ile tur al-shabab,” in Kerrou, ed., Abdelkader Zghal. MESA Bulletin 6, no. 1 [February 1972]: 51–55; MESA Bulletin 7, no. 1 [February 1973]: 86–88; MESA Bulletin 7, no. 3 [1975]: 9–10. The Organization for the Promotion of Social Sciences in the Middle East was founded in Alexandria, Egypt, in July 1974 and in 1977 changed its name to the

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himself as a pioneer in the field of sociology who was admired and respected within Tunisia and beyond. Zghal positioned agricultural reform in relation to contemporary debates on modernization (as evidenced in the title of his monograph, Modernisation de l’agriculture et populations semi-nomades [Agricultural Modernization and Semi-Nomadic Populations]). Referring to a process of human transformation and the guarantee of basic material comforts, Zghal’s vision of modernization did not depend on nationalism’s progressive telos, measured by distance from a backward rural society. He was skeptical of, if not downright hostile to, the urban prejudice regarding central Tunisia as home to “the most traditionalist and the most ‘archaic’ of peasant populations.” Contra the characterization of nomadic lifestyle as stagnant, he found many in these communities were interested in technology, owned radios, and were committed to education.49 Responding to the Tunisian geographer Salah-Eddine Tlatli’s claim that the nomad held an enduring emotional “disdain” for the “settled bourgeoisie,” Zghal problematized such essentializing about the “mental structures” of the bedouin, finding flaw in Tlatli’s assessment that urban-rural hostility could be explained away as a “millenarian antagonism” that existed “in Tunisia and in all Mediterranean countries.”50 Zghal’s rejection of culturalist arguments implies a disagreement with the rationales justifying the end of collectivization, namely, rural hostility to mechanization and reform. Conducting extensive fieldwork near Qairouan, in Tunisia’s center, Zghal observed and analyzed the experience of collectivization in four different micro-settings as it was implemented by the state in the early to mid-1960s. Zghal alluded to the structural flaws of a reform

49

50

Association for Social Science in the Arab Countries, Turkey and Iran. MESA Bulletin 10, no. 1 (January 1976): 102–3. Radio ownership ranged from 40 percent in Shebika to 56 percent in Sbitha, 70 percent in Jeloula, and 90 percent in Bou Merra. Rates were higher among landowners than among their employees, and radios were purchased despite the latter’s limited disposable income. Zghal, Modernisation de l’agriculture, 159–61. Salah-eddine Tlatli, Tunisie nouvelle: Problèmes et perspectives (Tunis: Sefan, 1957), 117, quoted in Zghal, Modernisation de l’agriculture, 15, 33. Tlatli does espouse such stereotypes in an almost Braudelian imagining of habitat-aspersonality. Tunisie nouvelle was caustic about the failures of colonial development and insisted on economic sovereignty as a facet of national independence, including control over natural resources.

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program that ensured the privileges of large landowners by noting the nepotism guiding land allocation and the exclusion of small farmers from decision-making processes. In fact, local participants had suggested alternate models to increase productivity, such as more democratic communal organization, though their insights were ignored.51 Rural reform needed to address political and social concerns, by considering farming as a lifestyle with implications for “dietary practices, traditional housing, and family relations.” Administrative programs to settle pastoralists were experienced as a direct challenge to nomadic patterns of living and considered as an effort to “spread its [the state’s] own conceptions of family life.”52 While focused on agricultural reform, Zghal’s vision of respect for the peasantry and acknowledgment of their dignity revealed the entanglement of political, social, and economic questions for rural communities targeted by state projects. Social scientists of this generation rejected the idea that poverty was cultural and instead politicized development programs by problematizing socioeconomic hierarchies that were embedded into their structures. Attia found that landless and unemployed peasants in the dategrowing region around Nefta supported agricultural development. Any “resistance . . . does not stem from a supposedly backwards mentality but . . . from contradictory social forces” such as the privileges of absentee landowners, who had greater access to water and additional sources of income.53 Paul Sebag, a Tunisian historian, urban geographer, sociologist, and Communist who was Jewish, was also critical of the state role in perpetuating inequality. Sebag published detailed studies of the largely informal migrant communities of Borgel and Saida Manoubia. Depicting a space marked not by “tradition” but state neglect, it was the lack of electricity, water, public schools, and baths that contributed to poor health, unemployment, and economic 51

52 53

Abdelkader Zghal, “Modernisation de l’agriculture et population seminomade,” Revue Tunisienne de Science Sociales 2, no. 2 (1965). Zghal argued that the barrier to collectivization was the alliance between the administrative elite and the rural bourgeoisie whose loyalty to shared socioeconomic origins alienated poor farmers from development processes. Abdelkader Zghal, “L’élite administrative et la paysannerie,” Revue Tunisienne de Sciences Sociales, no. 16 (1969). Zghal, Modernisation de l’agriculture, 103, 32. Many of the absentee landowners were state employees and merchants. Habib Attia, “Modernization agricole et structures sociales. Exemples des Oasis du Djerid,” Revue Tunisienne de Science Sociales 2, no. 2 (1965).

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precarity. Nor could poverty be blamed on fertility, as data showed an average of three children per family (with a median of 2.89). Larger families were compound households that included up to three generations, cousins, or in-laws, in efforts to combine scarce financial resources. For Sebag, both malnutrition and underemployment could be addressed by state involvement.54 Sebag’s work on Borgel appeared in the context of state plans to address the precarity in these informal peri-urban neighborhoods. A 1957 plan to rehouse a portion of its inhabitants involved deporting the majority to the villages from which they had ostensibly arrived. Residents of the area responded with enthusiasm to plans for a local school and mosque and improved sanitation that would eliminate dust storms, swarms of flies, and the stench of open sewers. However, they were apprehensive about any potential displacement to villages where they had struggled to make ends meet. Based on these concerns, Sebag suggested government intervention to augment the economic base of Tunisia’s rural hinterland, such as public works projects, regulating land claims, providing technical and financial aid to peasants for making wells, adopting more profitable crops, improvements to tools, expanding flocks, the allocation of additional state lands to landless peasants, and the expansion of social and cultural services that would decrease the gap between cities and the countryside. In his assessment, only a comprehensive approach would resolve the problem of urban poverty instead of merely displacing it.55

Rural Women and Labor These studies on the rural interior and the peri-urban neighborhoods of Tunis rejected the vision of development as scientific expertise and drew attention to its imbrication in existing regional and socioeconomic disparities and the political nature of decision-making processes. Though often implicit, they also reveal the gendered parameters of 54

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He collaborated with Tunisian nutritionist Mrs. H. Taieb, Dr. Mustapha ben Salem from the Secretary of State for Social Affairs, and Dr. Jean Claudian from the FAO, who were already undertaking a nutritional and medical pilot study in Saida Manoubia. Paul Sebag et al., Un faubourg de Tunis: Saida Manoubia. Enquête nutritionnelle et médicale (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1960), 82. Paul Sebag, “Le bidonville de Borgel,” Cahiers de Tunisie 6 (1958): 306–7.

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development and its vision of the modern family. For instance, census data on neighborhoods such as Borgel organized the population per head of household. Each was classified by employment status (unemployed, day laborers, or gainfully employed) with only two of the more than four hundred surveyed for Sebag’s study officially headed by women. Proposed solutions then focused on male employment, ignoring the fact that “families rarely live on the labor of only the household head,” which was supplemented by “women, sons, daughters, brothers, who contribute to shared expenses.”56 In fact, most households were families of up to three generations, and at 1,058 men to 1,002 women, there were nearly equal numbers of men and women. In a subset of interviews, about 20 percent mentioned adult women’s formal employment such as washing clothes or working in a mill. Both women and men worked in the informal sector. As Sebag noted, a nearby municipal dump was an important source of income, with daily crowds of “men, women, and children armed with sickles and hoes” who undertook a “thorough exploration aiming to recoup everything with a price: papers, rags, bones, tin cans,” all of which were sold to local merchants or intermediaries.57 Though largely invisible in official data, economic planning, and debates about poverty, women’s labor was essential to many households. The UNFT drew attention to the invisibility of rural women’s labor, demonstrating its relevance to development projects and economic planning. Despite the concentration of its leadership in the capital, and the largely urban and middle-class basis of its volunteers, the UNFT claim to represent women depended on a nationwide reach and establishing a rural presence. Branches in every governorate and multiple subcommittees fostered interaction, if not collaboration, with women in many locales, and conferences and congresses often included regional delegates.58 This did not preclude hierarchies. A number of UNFT initiatives that were focused on rural communities, such as 56 57

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Sebag, “Le Bidonville de Borgel,” 286–87. Women supplied their households with water from Borgel’s two fountains. He adds in a footnote that “women’s economic activity is entirely outside the parameters of census agents.” Sebag, “Le Bidonville de Borgel,” 282. There was one regional delegate from the head of each governorate elected by the national congress, institutionalizing top-down structures and guaranteeing the urban location of regional delegates. However, each section required a minimum of only five adherents, allowing for representation in less populated areas, as per Articles 5 and 11.

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projects training animatrices sociales (female youth social workers who numbered over two hundred by the mid-1960s), framed urban women as bringing modernity to the countryside. Teaching women basic health and hygiene and participating in vaccination campaigns in rural communities, the animatrices were generally recruited from urban areas to contribute to rural transformation. A 1968 conference on rural women and economic and social development brought together delegates from Beja and Jenduba in the northwest and Kasserine, Mednine, Gafsa, and Gabes in the center and south with educators and social workers from the UNFT’s higher echelons. The audience included prominent political figures such as the Secretary of State for Youth, Sports, and Social Affairs Mundher bin ‘Ammar (Bourguiba’s brother-in-law) and Ahmad bin Salih, Secretary of State for planning and the national economy. Their ministries were directly involved with rural women, as the former coordinated and sponsored rural training centers, so that invitations to make opening and closing remarks not only extended official sanction to the proceedings but made evident the policy intent of the conference, as did Bourguiba’s participation.59 Presenters included Halima Attia, a UNFT activist from its early days and occasional contributor to Femme, who had recently attended a women’s conference in Conakry, Guinea, and served on the UNFT’s women and work committee. Responsible for matters of professional employment, her comments iterated the symbiotic role between rural women and the agrarian economy. Attia’s vision of UNFT rural advocacy included “consultation with interested women themselves” to formulate a coordinated approach to the economic and social promotion of rural women. At once reifying rural difference in terms that resonated with Bourguiba’s reductive depictions of a homogenous rural life hindered by cultural particularities, Attia advocated for the inclusion of rural women.60 Souad Chateur, director of the UNFT Centres de la Jeune Fille Rurale (Centers for Young Rural Girls) under the Secretary of State for Youth, Sports, and Social Affairs, focused in 59

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Participants included representatives from the ministries of agriculture, cultural affairs, and the Dustur party, though only Bin ‘Ammar and Bin Salah made official comments. Halima Attia, “La femme rurale dans le cadre des reformes de structures,” in La Participation de la femme rurale au développement économique et social (Tunis: Institut Ali Bach Hamba, 1968).

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detail on educational institutions for illiterate rural teens. This ministerial location, as opposed to that of education, may have precluded a more extensive focus on professionalization. Still, with a curriculum ranging from basic literacy and math to ironing, civics, and moral education, the Centers offered elementary skills to prepare these girls for “a more active feminine rural life, more efficient, and happier.”61 Building from within prevalent ideas about gender specificity, the program operated within gendered structures of rural life to improve women’s economic, social, and emotional lives. Another participant, Aicha Ben Younes, spoke about the training program for young rural women that she directed. With a curriculum of vegetable gardening, raising animals, accounting, nutrition, and math, graduates would master “rational means to running the household and participate efficiently in managing the budget and agricultural labors.” Building on the existing household division of labor, their education positioned these girls as “the ideal vectors of progress,” contributing to the “evolution and promotion of the family” in rural areas.62 As head of the UNFT’s youth commission, Jalila Ben Mustapha addressed the absence of national initiatives directed toward young girls. Ben Mustapha, who had been involved with the UNFT for much of the 1960s, had traveled on behalf of the women’s union to Baghdad. She noted that while the Dustur party cultivated a youth branch, its programs were primarily offered to young men. There was only one civil service training program recruiting rural girls, at Medjez al-Bab, and it was initiated by the UNFT. She called for the expansion of agricultural education and training and defined women’s agricultural work as a “vocation,” noting that the recently opened schools in Maknassy and Sidi Bouzid were insufficient to

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She was also involved in family planning. Souad Chateur, “Centres de la Jeune Fille Rurale,” in La participation de la femme rurale. Aicha Ben Younes, “L’enseignement, l’orientation de la jeune fille et les ecoles professionnelles en milieu rural,” in Institut Ali Bach Hamba, ed., La participation de la femme rurale. Fatima Slim’s “Nida’ al-Mustaqbal” (“The Call of the Future”) imagines how rural women contribute to the modernization of village life. The young protagonist Rim, brought to Tunis as a domestic servant, uses her time in the capital to pursue an education. Returning to her village with a degree in agriculture, she shares her scientific approach to the land and knowledge of hygiene to the benefit of her community. Jarrow, “The Feminine Literary Voices in Tunisia,” 223–27.

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encourage women’s extensive participation in economic and agricultural development. Echoing Bourguiba’s call to reform “mental structures” to uplift the rural destitute, she lauded the transformative nature of the personal status code granting women a place in society. Yet Ben Mustapha subverted presidential dictates by stressing the limits of women’s “new condition” as an urban privilege.63 While speaking on behalf of rural women, the UNFT called for the inclusion of women in development initiatives, transcending official visions of rural areas that removed women from the public sphere and relegated them to a private realm of domesticity. By urging expanded educational opportunities for women, they articulated a feminist appreciation for women’s labor as a facet of development that brought rural women into discourses of modern womanhood. It was not until the 1970s, particularly following the beginning of the United Nations Decade for the Advancement of Women (1975–85), that women were taken seriously as an important constituency within development circles.64 Initially, this meant adding women to projects, without questioning the structural premises of development itself.65 As the UNFT’s 1968 conference indicates, Tunisian women advocated a remodeling of economic development, incorporating women’s participation much earlier. Hoping to position their organization within policy conversations as did CERES, they engaged with dominant paradigms about modernization as a shared vision of improved material conditions to frame their recommendations for reform while rejecting patriarchal premises that trivilalized women’s labor and depicted modern womanhood as a uniquely urban phenomenon. Avoiding explicit critique of economic planning, they strove to revise it by drawing attention to women’s ability to improve rural livelihoods.

National and Local Knowledge for the Global Population Movement Academic interest in rural communities contributed nuanced insights to questions of population that diverged from prevalent understandings 63

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Jalila Ben Mustapha, “L’U.N.F.T. et la femme,” in Institut Ali Bach, ed., La participation de la femme rurale au développement économique et social. Escobar, Encountering Development, 13. Gita Sen and Caren Grown, Development, Crises, and Alternative Visions: Third World Women’s Perspectives (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1987), 16.

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of family life and gender roles. The field of demography, a relatively new discipline represented at CERES, provided tools for Tunisian academics to directly contribute to population policy. Mahmoud Seklani was an important interlocutor between Tunisia and international audiences, working with the Ford Foundation when it first offered grants to Tunisia for family planning. Born in Tunis in 1929, he studied math and statistics at the University of Paris, before completing his doctorate in economics in France. By 1960, he had received grants from the Population Council, the major center for demographic research related to population control, and was a research assistant in France’s national institute for demography (INED). His publications range from the quantitative concern with birth rate and fertility to applied questions related to family budgets and contraceptive practices in Tunisia as well as Algeria, Egypt, and Morocco. Perhaps the first demographer to focus exclusively on the former French colony, and the first Tunisian contributor, Seklani frequently authored articles in the French edition of Population, the flagship journal of INED. With an appointment at CERES, Seklani was responsible for about one-third of its teaching hours in statistical methodology and demography and contributed regularly to RTSS in the 1960s.66 Demographers were particularly significant to the Ford Foundation and Population Council because data collection and analysis were critical to demonstrating the success of their programs. Recall that women complained about their IUDs and requested their removal; contraceptive distribution ran into logistical hurdles; the president vacillated in his commitment to smaller families; and there was an unpredictable rate of turnover in ministerial positions with which these programs interacted. In the initial phase, the program failed to reach its target goal of IUD insertions and could boast only a mitigated record of success in reducing fertility and promoting contraception. Local academics favorable toward birth control were precious intellectual allies in the struggle to maintain donor interest and programmatic continuity.67 66

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Prior to 1967, he divided his time between Tunis and Paris where he had an appointment at INED; see Maudlin’s diary notes, July 1965, RAC, PCC, Acc. 1, Series 2, Box 54, Folder 830. Concerns that Bourguiba might abandon family planning were particularly evident between 1966 and 1969, though attributed to the president’s misreading of statistics; see, for instance, Povey’s “Report from Tunisia” of July 1967, RAC, FF, Tunisia Field Office, Series VII, Box 17, and Thorne’s “Semi-Annual Report

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Seklani was one of the main local intermediaries for the revolving cast of foreign experts temporarily stationed in Tunisia, whose research rendered the nation legible to outside observers. In publications such as Population, he translated international concerns about population growth, in the Third World in particular, to these broader audiences. Take, for instance, Seklani’s identification of a specific type of “fertility in Arab nations,” which he equated with “socio-cultural, or purely religious” factors informing “the attitude of the Muslim couple.” Religion (Islam) became a substitute for race or nation (Arab). In a series of simplistic descriptions, Seklani compared the sexual mores of Islam and Christianity: the patriarchal pronatalism of “Muslim civilization” to “Catholic mentality.” He presumes the audience’s familiarity with Christianity to position himself as a native informant standing at the intersection of national and international networks.68 In the end, with references to the tenth-century scholar AlGhazali, a sixteenth-century text encouraging contraceptive practices, and a handful of religious opinions by Egyptian jurists since the 1930s arguing for the licit of nature of contraception, Seklani presents population control as compatible with Muslim (and Arab) societies.69 Seklani’s work was informed by the predominant theories about population embraced by his American and French colleagues in which fertility caused poverty and drained national resources. This economic determinism was combined with a Malthusian understanding of rural exodus as “fatally linked to population growth.”70 Espousing dominant arguments about the causal relationship between expanding public

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from Tunisia,” February 1969, RAC, PCC, Acc. 2, Series 2, Box 203, Folder 1946. Mahmoud Seklani, “La fertilité dans les pays arabes: données numériques, attitudes et comportements,” Population 15, no. 3 (1960). Seklani, “La fertilité dans les pays arabes,” 838–39, 51–52. He similarly countered any Islamic ethical taboos surrounding family planning by comparative research in predominantly Muslim populations such as Pakistan, Egypt, and Turkey. Mahmoud Seklani, “Expériences de planning familial dans les pays en voie de développement,” Progres Social (1964). Under his directorship CERES convened a round table about migrations in Tunisia including researchers in geography, sociology, and urbanization, publishing a special issue of RTSS “Migrations internes en Tunisie.” Mahmoud Seklani, “Présentation et vue d’ensemble,” Revue Tunisienne de Science Sociales, no. 23 (1970). In his estimate, rural migration tended to be greater within each governorate than between them, and driven largely by the industrial base of urban areas such as Sfax and Gafsa, though he condescended toward rural migrants for their failure to “socially integrate.” Mahmoud

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health (increasing life expectancy and lowering infant mortality) and population growth facilitated his participation in global conversations about “preventing births and the relation between population problems and under-development.”71 Even his association of habitat with character – that rural communities maintained “a certain differentiation of a psychological and sociological nature” – resonated with contemporary French development thought where the language of psychology and sociology recast racial hierarchies through academic concepts.72 In a technocratic vision of population control as an inevitable aspect of postcolonial development stemming mainly from an “awareness” of the problem, Seklani tended to depoliticize government commitment to reducing births. Yet Seklani was also aware of global hierarchies that positioned Third World nations as external to and possibly a threat to the “evolution desired by the Western world.” First, addressing his colleagues at the Second World Congress of Population in Belgrade in 1965, he remarked how Western concerns about the Third World turned the latter into a recipient of economic assistance, noting that such aid was “much less effective than its intentions indicate.”73 Second, he revealed the Eurocentric bias in the structures and practices of demography and the consequent impediments this created for intellectuals from outside the West to contribute to the field. Namely, colonial authorities had not systematically collected data such as birth records and death certificates essential to calculating mortality, longevity, and demographic change, and newly independent states had limited capacities. Seklani proposed innovative statistical methods to overcome such lacuna in comparable data, rethinking the field and facilitating the participation of specialists from less wealthy or less data-rich nations.74

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Seklani, “La mobilité interieure dans le sud tunisien,” Revue Tunisienne de Science Sociales, no. 23 (1970). Mahmoud Seklani, “Problèmes démographiques et développement,” Revue Tunisienne de Science Sociales, no. 7 (1966). Mahmoud Seklani, “Villes et campagnes en Tunisie. Evaluations et prévisions,” Population 15, no. 3 (1960); Davis, “‘The Transformation of Man’ in French Algeria,” 73–74, 93. Seklani, “Problèmes démographiques.” For instance, utilizing available census data to gauge birth rates by building on the correlation between fertility and infant mortality. Mahmoud Seklani, “Méthode d’estimation du taux de natalités dans les pays à statistiques d’etat civil incomplète,” Revue Tunisienne de Science Sociales, no. 1 (1964).

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Alongside his commitment to reducing population growth, Seklani’s research and interactions with foreign consultants demonstrate consistent efforts toward the amelioration of programs conceptualized abroad, questioning their purported universalism. He projected that Tunisia’s birth rate would decline as income increased, making fertility an attribute of broader social and economic transformations. This directly contradicted the primacy of contraception as a stand-alone solution to poverty and questioned the causal relationship between family size and wealth.75 Seklani later advocated a more aggressive role for the state by ensuring low-cost contraceptives with at most minor side-effects, shifting decision making about program specifics from donor agencies to their local counterparts.76 In an extensive sociodemographic study in Tunis with Moncer Roussi and Mongi Bchir, Seklani concluded that changes in the rate of fertility were barely perceptible by the end of the 1960s.77 Whereas placing services in the most densely populated communities achieved greater numbers of clinical visits, the approach perpetuated rural disenfranchisement. In fact, Seklani argued that the urban bias of acceptors during the first years of the program (1964–66) was an indication of the scarcity of village-level services, which he hoped would be overturned by improving conditions in rural areas.78 Finally, without completely discounting the importance of women’s motivation to use contraception, he credited the shift toward smaller families to later age at marriage and women’s emancipation (increased public activities and advanced education) as the determining factors in reducing birth rates in Tunisia and elsewhere in the Middle East.79 Thus, while perhaps sharing 75

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His UN report was consulted by Ford and Population Council personnel in assessing Tunisia’s potential for programming. Maudlin, “A Report on Family Planning in Tunisia.” He later reported the lack of enthusiasm within the medical community for contraception and the limits posed by poor recordkeeping. John F. Kanter’s diary, RAC, PCC, Acc. 1, Series 2, Box 59, Folder 982. Seklani, “La famille tunisienne.” Mahmoud Seklani, Mongi Bchir, and Moncer Rouissi, La fécondité des ménages à Tunis: Résultats de trois enquêtes socio-démographiques (Tunis: Centre d’Études et de Recherches Économiques et Sociales, 1969). Seklani, “La famille tunisienne,” 60–62. Though he also acknowledged regional differences. Mahmoud Seklani, Les problèmes de population et les mass media en Afrique du Nord et au Moyen Orient: Rapport final, textes des communications et conférences, seminar organized by the UN, IPPF, Tunisia’s Family Planning office, and published by the Secretariat of State for Information, Tunis, September 24–29, 1973.

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presumptions about rural ignorance and committed to the importance of contraception, his understanding of and approach to population as a form of development did not conform to the Ford Foundation and Population Council script.80 Tunisian scholarship on the family exposed the erroneous presumptions about rural families that informed family planning. Rouissi, a sociologist and demographer at CERES who was from the south and rather more sympathetic to rural perspectives, worked on household fertility. In one study, he found that while many families did not share the program’s urgency for “the spacing of births immediately following marriage,” this stemmed not from hostility to contraception but from a preference for “utilizing contraception once a certain family size has been achieved.” The reticence of respondents about discussing how they utilized family planning was at least in part attributable to men’s discomfort or modesty in discussing their intimate life.81 In another sociodemographic collaboration, Bchir, Rouissi, Zghal, and Abdelhamid Bouraoui argued that recent legislation regarding marriage and divorce and the universalization of girls’ education – “improvements to women’s condition, to her status and her role in society” – “will lead to a notable decrease in her fertility rates” because such new roles would counter the “traditional overvaluing of women’s procreative role.” Finding variation according to education, regional location, and class, and noting that access to contraceptives was not evenly spread across all geographic regions, they concluded that fertility depended on variables such as “information, sanitary infrastructure, and the balance of power in decision-making at the level of the couple.” Results were presented as applicable to family planning projects all over the Third World.82 80

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This difference of opinion may explain their questioning of his leadership and suggestion to replace Seklani with a foreigner. Walter Povey to Parker Maudlin, July 13, 1968, RAC, PCC, Acc. 2, Series 2, Box 178, Folder 1703. This is despite their recognition of his work as the best available information. “Report of Meeting (UN),” September 1971, RAC, FF, Tunisia Field Office, Series VII, Box 18. In the small group of respondents who did not adhere to the idea of limiting births, the average number of children was only 2.6. Though the study concentrated in Tunis, many participants were recent arrivals, and Rouissi argued that the insights were applicable more broadly. Seklani et al., La fécondité des ménages à Tunis, 55. Mongi Bchir et al., “L’influence sur le taux de fécondité du statut et du rôle de la femme dans la société tunisienne,” Revue Tunisienne de Sciences Sociales 10,

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As women entered the academy, albeit in small numbers, they also engaged in social science research that granted the family an agentive role in development. Mounira Chelli (occasionally spelled Chelly), who had written for Jeune Afrique on women’s issues during the 1960s while teaching philosophy in France, was a sociologist at the ONPFP in the 1970s. Her career included forays into psychoanalysis in the 1970s, studies of women and the family at CERES in the 1980s, and participation in international conferences into the 1990s.83 She was part of the Association of African Women for Research and Development founded in 1977 to prioritize connections between women, the hiring of women scholars, and research topics of interest to women that aligned with national goals.84 Her early work called attention to global hierarchies through which Euro-American practices masqueraded as universal. While facilitating comparison between nations and across the globe, these methods were poorly adapted to account for local particularities. To illustrate this problem, she referred to a study by Jean Morsa, a Belgian-based doctor and researcher hired by the Population Council to ascertain contraceptive knowledge, attitudes, and practices (known as a KAP survey) in Tunisia in 1964. Morsa found that rural women expressed displeasure with early marriage and frequent pregnancies. Not only did these contribute to higher fertility, but Chelli concurred that “it is extremely rare these days to hear a woman state that she wants more than four children.” Yet many of these women were not using contraception, and Morsa’s data collection failed to explain or even examine the gap between women’s

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nos. 32–35 (1973): 103–6, 59. Roussi applied similar arguments to questions of population in Arab nations. Moncer Rouissi, “Population et politiques de population dans le monde arabe,” in Actes du duexième colloque démographique Maghrebine, ed. République Algérienne Démocratique et Populaire (Algerie: Secretariat d’Etat au Plan, 1975). Mounira Chelli, “La relation conjugale: Une variable déterminante dans l’explication de la modernité,” in L’avenir de la famille au Moyen Orient et en Afrique du Nord, ed. CERES (Tunis: Cahiers du CERES, 1990); Mounira Chelly, “Nuclearisation émotionelle de la famille et émergence de l’individualité,” paper presented at the Symposium international sur la mutation du système de valeurs dans les sociétés européennes et maghrebines (1991). “The Association of African Women for Research and Development (AAWORD),” Africa Development/Afrique et Développement 6, no. 2 (1981); Abantu for Development, “Southern Women’s Networks: Their Own Priorities,” Focus on Gender 2, no. 3 (1994).

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stated desires and actions.85 Chelli drew attention to local experiences, the agency of rural women, and their understanding of contraception, methodological practices made feasible by her own localized knowledge of the terrain and her position as a female scholar. Chelli revealed further gaps in the American program in ways that challenged its medical presumptions and overturned the stereotype of rural women’s ignorance. In an article on home births, Chelli positioned the local midwife (qabila, pl. qawabil) as a knowledgeable specialist essential to public health. Officially invisible and frequently derided in the medicalization of birthing, they numbered about 1,000 nationwide, and were responsible for up to 70 percent of deliveries, with home births more prevalent in the center and south where health infrastructure was lacking. Trained by their mothers or by elder women in the community, the qabila was integrated into her community regardless of origins and a venerated maternal figure, serving important functions within the local family economy by providing care and services in relation to births, marriages, and deaths. Chelli’s portrait of the qabila is that of a competent and skilled woman coexisting with other medical practitioners who, when faced with difficult births, transferred women to local hospitals. Proving their integration with multiple medical systems upended the telos of modern medicine and stereotypes that equated lack of formal schooling with ignorance. In essence, Chelli advocated a further integration of qawabil within public health infrastructure and family planning initiatives, building on their position as a community resource in matters of hygiene, maternal health, and contraception, and their deep relations with and knowledge of rural areas.86 Demographers as well as sociologists worked alongside state planners and the development community, hoping to rationalize these processes and tailor them to local realities. While their transnational training validated their position as native informants providing crucial data, they often had little leverage against state-determined priorities and foreign-imposed structures. Fluent in Western intellectual practices, Tunisian scholars managed to articulate alternate visions of family planning within the narrow parameters of academic freedom. 85 86

Chelli, “Enquête nationale sur la planification familiale.” Mounira Chelly, “Notre qabla traditionnelle doit elle forcément disparaître?,” ONPFP Bulletin, nos. 12–13 (1975).

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Addressing matters of methodology, Seklani and Chelli rejected the derivative position of Tunisia and other Third World countries tasked with mimicking an externally scripted vision of modernity. Chelli’s attention to the intersection between development and gender roles not only implied an understanding of Tunisia’s rural hinterland, but fed a parallel interest in the family as a subject of study, presenting arguments about family life concomitant with and contributing to the inauguration of a modern era.

“Transformations of the Family” “Every matter that concerns the family plays an elementary role, either as a way of encouraging development or as a barrier to economic development.”87 In these terms, the historian Ahmed Abdesselam, president of the University of Tunis, framed the rationale for a 1966 conference on “transformations of the family in North Africa” (mutations de la famille au Maghreb).88 Presided over by French scholar Jacques Berque, the CERES sociology seminar was heavily Tunisian with Bouhdiba, Sebag, Seklani, and Zghal, as well as Lilia Ben Salem, Noureddine Belgaid-Hassine, the Moroccan scholar Mesdali Bennani, and Carmel Camilleri, a Tunis-born sociologist of Maltese origin, participating. Together they examined and deliberated the impact of political, social, and economic processes on the institution of the family. Whether the family served as the basis of national particularities or as a barometer of modernization, their quantitative research and micro-studies illustrated the localized impact of developmental processes in conversation with French, European, and American theories. Attention to the family as a unit of inquiry contributed to arguments reconsidering the dominant discourse about rural space, while prompting exploration of women’s lives and gender roles that challenged the patriarchal presumptions of Tunisian state projects and the international organizations that funded them.

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A. Abdesselam, “Introduction,” Revue Tunisienne de Sciences Sociales 4 (1967). Even data substantiating an image of the ideal family was poorly understood. Seklani et al., La fécondité des ménages à Tunis. This continued to be an important topic of study, forming part of the historical assessment of fertility and family organization in Moncer Rouissi, Population et société au Maghreb (Tunis: Cérès Productions, 1977).

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The traditional family, in Bouhdiba’s scathing critique, consisted of authoritarian structures that he considered prevalent across Arab and Muslim societies where elders wielded power and treated women as subordinates. He celebrated a mid-twentieth-century cultural shift that led to its gradual replacement with the nuclear family, but worried about the erosion of the family as a social institution and the pernicious influence of the mass media. “All of this means that our children have never had more need for the moral comfort of the family and never has it been so dramatically absent. Hence their flight toward gangs and delinquency.” Echoing contemporaneous scholarship on youth, Bouhdiba considered social stability as rooted in the family where mothers bore the responsibility for nurturing children, providing guidance, and anchoring the “moral comfort of the family.” However, modern women were expected to volunteer or to establish a career, creating additional responsibilities where “familial obligations” could only be met by the presence of female elders such as a grandmother or aunt: “The Tunisian woman wants to liberate herself from the home but never has her presence there been so essential.” Implicit in his argument, the extended family could not become obsolete, as these networks of support made it possible for women-as-mothers to meet the increased demands of modern womanhood.89 Other contributors probed the validity of the consensus that traditional families were primarily rural, defined by their large size, the frequency of early marriage, endogamous marriages, and women’s subordination. Seklani, for instance, found that large families were “widespread” throughout Tunisia’s urban and rural areas regardless of socioeconomic status. In fact, the trend toward smaller families that he observed indicated only “minor divergences” between different social groups.90 For his part, Zghal posed a theoretical intervention in favor of the compatibility of tradition and progress in the “Arab” understanding of family among participants in agricultural cooperatives. Sedentarization of bedouins over the preceding generations had increased the importance of extended family and kinship relations, perhaps contributing to the tendency for girls at a young age to marry older men (what Zghal considered “one of the most revealing 89

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Abdelwahab Bouhdiba, “Point de vue sur la famille tunisienne actuelle,” Revue Tunisienne de Science Sociales 11 (1967). Seklani, “La famille tunisienne.”

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expressions of the socially inferior status of the Bedouin woman”). Yet the increasing prevalence of exogamous marriage as form of social integration proved the flexibility of family structures.91 While the presentation focused on policy recommendations for the democratization of the rural economy, Zghal’s ethnographic attention to family was elaborated in his book. Using data collected from ‘Ain Jellula and ‘Ain Bou Merra, Zghal demonstrated that household and family size tended to increase with an improved standard of living, disaggregating multiple pregnancies from poverty. Women’s dress was also determined by class, with the safsari a sign of status worn by the wives of landowners. Few rural women were fully veiled. Changes to women’s status occurred within locally accepted practices and not against them.92 Regarding contraception, he found that it was husbands “in greater numbers than their spouses [who] desired more children,” though the possibility that children were a financial burden “did not appear to be experienced as such by the majority of the peasants.”93 In these terms, Zghal disentangled population, poverty, and rural location, rejecting the mapping of regional difference onto modern/ traditional binaries.

Family-Centered Development Women academics such as Lilia ben Salem and Sophie Ferchiou extended scholarly insights on family life into consideration of economic and political matters relevant to discourses of modern womanhood. Ben Salem was part of the inaugural cohort of Tunisian sociology students in the 1958–59 academic year, and the first female student finishing the French licence degree in 1961. She participated in UNFT events and contributed at least occasionally to Femme.94 She was appointed to CERES in 1963 and wrote her thesis in Paris in 1968. From her earliest work, Ben Salem reimagined the family as a space of change as opposed to a bastion of tradition by emphasizing its dynamism. Education offered one such path toward social and geographic 91 92 93 94

Zghal, “Système de parenté et système cooperatif.” Zghal, Modernisation de l’agriculture, 110–11, 32–45. Zghal, Modernisation de l’agriculture, 104, 16–21. She was listed as a contributor in early issues; see also Lilia Ben Salem, “Le choix d’une carrière,” Femme, August 1964, 24–25; “Problèmes de la jeune fille tunisienne,” Femme, April–June 1965, 32–34.

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mobility with universities and technical institutes in urban centers, and graduation leading to employment in the state bureaucracy. Ben Salem found that when investing in the education of even one family member, rural families from the “middle-class and less favored sectors of the population” often encouraged children who were university students to adopt a professional lifestyle and new social practices in relation to dress, housing, food, and even marriage. These families were open to marital arrangements between students, regardless of regional or socioeconomic backgrounds, transcending the communal and familial parameters of earlier marital patterns. As higher education was a privilege not necessarily accessible to all children in a given family, even modest social mobility created socioeconomic differences between generations and among siblings. The implication was that had it previously been valid; the notion of “the family” as a homogenous and static entity was no longer meaningful.95 Trained in sociology and philosophy, becoming an anthropologist and filmmaker, Sophie Ferchiou brought feminist methodologies to questions of family and development. As a student at the Sorbonne in the 1960s when she was at least briefly involved with the UNFT, a member of the preeminent French research institution the CNRS and with a position at CERES, Ferchiou was also engaged in transnational academic practices.96 Over a lengthy career she published in the second issue of the Paris-based Questions Féministes under the direction of Simone de Beauvoir and participated in conferences run by the American Institute for Maghreb Studies.97 In an era when anthropology was not taught at Tunisia’s university and was denigrated for its proximity to colonial rule, Ferchiou promoted ancillary disciplines such as ethnography and folklore to valorize agriculture and artisanal

95

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97

Lilia Ben Salem, “Le phenomène de mobilité sociale et ses incidences sur la famille,” Revue Tunisienne de Sciences Sociales 4, no. 11 (1967). She traveled to the United States on a grant from USAID in July and August 1962 where she was listed as a student and chair of the Paris branch of the national women’s association. “Data of Tunisian Women,” SSC, CC, Series V, Box 22, Folder 51. Sophie Ferchiou, “L’aide internationale au service du patriarcat: L’exemple tunisien,” Nouvelles Questions Féministes, no. 5 (1983). As a member of CERES she participated in the AIMS Annual Conference on “Women, State and Development in North Africa,” in 1991. “Recent Conferences,” Middle East Studies Association Bulletin 26, no. 1 (1992): 125–39.

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production as rural contributions to national culture.98 She became a visible figure in these realms, serving as director of the Centre des Art et Traditions Populaire, a national institution promoting national heritage and supervising ethnographic research.99 Women’s contributions to animal husbandry, harvesting, or textile manufacturing were crucial to family income and national production. Signaling the statistical failure to account for such labor and the devalorization of the work of most Tunisian women, Ferchiou proved the limits of equating work with salaried employment and the inaccessibility of the nationalist depiction of modern womanhood.100 Ferchiou thus acknowledged that rural women’s imaginaries were not defined by the liberatory models of state feminism and the experiences of urban, educated women. This is best illustrated in her early study in the southern Jerid region on sexual differentiation and diet. Nutritional practices were an important subgenre for scholars such as Claude-Lévi Strauss and other anthropologists writing about France, China, South Africa, and Sudan, though the topic was overlooked in Tunisia. Although previous (male) scholars had less access to women (even when using local men as informants), their inattention to gendered consumption practices cannot be entirely attributed to segregation. Sharing meals with women, Ferchiou approached rural women’s lives as worthy of scholarly inquiry, carving out a space for herself in a male-dominated field, while urging attention to women not as research subjects but as bearers of knowledge. Ferchiou carefully describes the boundaries of proper etiquette in the Jerid where it was considered impolite for women to eat in front of men. This was a normative cultural practice and not a religious prohibition or taboo. Providing thick ethnographic detail on how basic staples such as dates and grains are prepared for and consumed 98

99

100

An argument she made explicitly in Sophie Ferchiou. “Problèmes et perspectives de la recherche ethnologique en Tunisie,” Cahiers des Arts et Traditions Populaires 5 (1976). Programs in anthropology date to 1999. Imed Melliti, “Une anthropologie ‘indigène’ est-elle possible? Réflexions sur le statut de l’anthropologie en Tunisie,” Arabica 53, no. 2 (2006). Virginie Rey, Mediating Museums: Exhibiting Material Culture in Tunisia (1881–2016) (Leiden: Brill, 2019), 61, 99–100. Sophie Ferchiou, “Place de la production domestique féminine dans l’économie familiale du Sud tunisien,” Revue Tiers-Monde 19, no. 76 (1978); Sophie Ferchiou, “Travail des femmes et production familiale en Tunisie,” Questions Féministes, no. 2 (1978).

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differently by men and women, Ferchiou offers a Freudian-inspired psychoanalysis of the sexual connotations and hierarchies opposing the greater quality, quantity, and palette of men’s diet to the more economical (in terms of both cost and time) aspects of women’s dishes. Whereas these culinary hierarchies would appear to confirm presumptions about women’s inferiority in Arab, Muslim, or rural societies, Ferchiou rejects such conclusions. In songs, women celebrated their diet for its herbal properties and a base of carbohydrates, which provided an ideal feminine figure and was believed to increase their fertility. This was intentionally different from men’s food and correlated with gender roles for “making women beautiful and fertile, and thus more attractive in the eyes of their husbands.”101 These women’s appreciation of gender differences was not a false consciousness, but an assertion of power and self-value. Ferchiou recognized male superiority in rural family life, but, “contrary to what one might believe,” this domination is limited to specific realms. Women in the Jerid, she writes, “hold a decisive power” thanks to their ability to heal, their spiritual beliefs, and their medicinal knowledge. Drawing from women’s conversation, folklore, and oral traditions, Ferchiou underscored the culturally specific construction of gendered agency and women’s sexuality, noting that women in the Jerid did not have a “complex” about their sexual role, but used their sexuality to attract men, provide pleasure, and influence their husbands. Her powerful and provocative conclusion is worth quoting in full: The example of differentiated diets, called ‘abbud, places us within Muslim women’s social milieu and the sexual symbolism attached to food reveals how the Tunisian woman approaches sexuality and sentimentality. She appears to us as she is, liberated from all constraints, because there is no awkwardness between women, they talk about love without blushing, they can expose parts of their bodies.. . . The excessive authority of men becomes in some ways neutralized by the decisively erotic power granted to women: authority and eroticism, these are the weights that balance the traditional couple in Tunisia; these are the foundational principals of complementarity that forms the basis of the sexual dichotomy in Islamic societies.102

101

102

Sophie Ferchiou, “Différenciation sexuelle de l’alimentation au Djerîd (sud tunisien),” Homme (1968): 82–83. Ferchiou, “Différenciation sexuelle de l’alimentation,” 84–86.

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Ferchiou thus rejects Orientalist and liberal feminist interpretations of women’s inferiority in traditional, Islamic societies, while illustrating women’s power over men in specific realms as a positive facet of gender complementarity. Women’s liberation is not measured in relation to men’s status, as women in the Jerid did not aspire to emulate men, in their diet or otherwise. Ferchiou’s research illustrates respect for women’s knowledge and social authority. Her appreciation for women’s orality and ethnographic commitment to exploring power within segregated spaces presages Lila Abu-Lughod’s path-breaking Veiled Sentiments of 1986 on the Awlad Ali bedouin in Egypt. AbuLughod explores emotional norms and gender relations through an intimate discussion of women’s poetry as a medium of communication and expression, in ways similar to Ferchiou’s attention to women’s voices and understandings of food.103 At an international congress of francophone sociologists, Ben Salem described her frustration with dated methodologies of little relevance to the postcolonial world. The major transformations in Third World societies in recent years, she argued, could not be analyzed with nineteenth-century European theories drawing from completely different historical, economic, and ideological contexts. Similar to advocates of cultural decolonization, Ben Salem pushed for intellectual practices based on “acquiring an intimate knowledge of the terrain.”104 Tunisian scholars from Abdesselam to Zghal centered national sites of knowledge and to varying degrees used ethnographic fieldwork to engage with peasant perspectives. Male researchers were circumscribed by gender norms that made them heavily dependent on male informants, including women only as survey respondents. This perpetuated the power disparity between urban and rural Tunisia, extending class and educational differences between scholars and their research sites onto a gendered hierarchy of subjectivity. Ferchiou’s attention to women was enabled by gender segregation but defied gendered understandings of domestic space as a private realm of family control and

103

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Lila Abu-Lughod, Veiled Sentiments: Honor and Poetry in a Bedouin Society (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986). Participants included fellow Tunisian Khalil Zamitti and the Moroccan sociologist and literary critic Abdelkabir Khatibi. Lilia Ben Salem, “Quelques refléxions sur le devenir de la sociologie (en marge du Colloque de Sociologie de Neuchâtel),” Revue Tunisienne de Science Sociales 5, no. 14 (1968).

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feminine subordination. Writing from the position of urbanity and education, with the cultural baggage that this entailed, Ferchiou pushed beyond facile narratives of gender segregation as oppression, challenging dominant perceptions of rural backwardness and women’s subordination that informed state planning and its vision of modern womanhood.

Conclusion In postcolonial Tunisia, configuring rural spaces as sites of tradition created a barometer against which to measure progress and modernization. This narrative not only justified the failure of agricultural collectivization, but shaped familial narratives about the nation’s past as defined by the patriarchal extended family, and against which discourses of modern womanhood and the nuclear family were articulated. These beliefs rationalized state efforts to intervene in rural communities, altering family structures and subordinating them to the state. Once a political threat, development sought to turn the rural proletariat into agents of economic progress in ways that both presumed and reinforced gendered presumptions of agency. Men were tasked with social transformation and economic uplift, while women were circumscribed within a domestic space of procreation or otherwise ignored. In a context where the university was expected to produce data for state planners, and where the state depended on foreign development aid, intellectual production was constrainted by the single-party state’s authoritarian grasp on the political landscape and criminalization of dissent. The first generation of postcolonial Tunisian scholars was hired by state agencies, contributed to central planning, and held positions within national research institutions. While broadly supportive of development goals of improving the rural standard of living, their scholarship identified class divisions and structural flaws of Tunis-based decision making and international programs that failed to account for local specificity. Though scholars subscribed to visions of change that originated in urban and elite spaces, many identified the structural nature of regional inequality and rural poverty, refusing the apolitical premises of technocratic decisions. Further reformulation of development logics was articulated at UNFT conferences and in women’s scholarship. The UNFT drew attention to the sidelining of women within national projects.

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Presentations detailed women’s centrality to household production, diverging from liberal, state feminist interpretations of modern womanhood as defined only by family law. They broadened the equation between labor and salaried employment, offering educational opportunities and technical training for girls that built on gender roles while touting women’s potential centrality to state building. As a national organization, these recommendations were couched within the parameters of official policy while subtly stretching them in new directions. Along with scholars such as Ben Salem, Chelli, and Ferchiou, their understandings of women’s economic role and contributions to public health presaged the movement toward gender in development. Chelli and Ferchiou went further in their digression from urban, liberal imperatives by approaching rural women as sources of knowledge and bearers of valuable insights on birth control, sexuality, and gender roles. With European training and international connections common to scholars of the era, they parochialized the purported universalism of these models. Women academics did not explicitly position themselves as a feminist opposition, but their work revealed the limits of a gender-blind approach to development. Implicit in the scholarship of engaged intellectuals was a process of localization that resisted the hegemony of global capitalist development and liberal feminism. First, in their attention to national particularities, scholars such as Seklani and Chelli insisted on quantitative methods informed by local parameters and not determined in Washington, DC, or Paris.105 Second, by respecting rural communities and their knowledge of agriculture or birthing, Zghal and Chelli demanded a reconsideration of Tunis-led programs in favor of real partnerships across regions. Third, by detailing women’s economic contributions to peasant families, Ben Mustapha, Chateur, and especially Ferchiou deployed gender analysis to lay bare the patriarchal presumptions of international development agencies and their national iterations, including discourses of modern womanhood and the

105

Zghal sought to revise classical Marxist theories about class that failed to account for the particularities of the Third World, and France’s former colonies in North Africa. Tunisia represented a situation where dependence on industrial societies and capital was located beyond national borders, and even the middle class consisted of two distinct components. “Classes moyennes et développement au Maghreb,” in Les classes moyennes au Maghreb, 1–39.

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nuclear family. As Ferchiou later wrote, in their devalorization of women’s labor and mechanization of men’s tasks, “the dominant western ideology and Arabo-Muslim ideology (both masculine) collaborate to maintain the unequal relations between sexes and aggravate the condition of women in rural areas.”106 106

Ferchiou, “L’aide internationale au service du patriarcat,” 48.

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4

Fashion, Consumption, and Modern Gender Roles

Before independence, women in the northern town of Binzart were “living shadows, completely covered in a thick wool veil, their faces obscured by a large ‘takrita’ [a headscarf tied under the chin].” As the UNFT regional representative explained to readers of Femme, by the mid-1960s “many had abandoned the veil [le voile],” preferring “dress that is decent or of a certain elegance to which all women are naturally inclined.” She further reassured readers that women in Ras Jebel or Raf Raf held an important place in the family and were not humiliated; even if the veil harkened to a “sad era of decadence,” it was worn only when women wanted to hide their poverty (une cache-misère).1 In “Women across Tunisia,” Femme described regional styles and uncovered the multiple meanings of women’s dress. The haik of transparent blue or black fabric worn in Qairouan, similar to “the Arab woman in the Middle East” in Baghdad or Damascus, symbolized the city’s renown as a bastion of Arab-Islamic civilization. In the Sahel, the veil turned women into “white pigeons” who were rarely permitted to leave their homes.2 These articles demonstrate how ideals of modern womanhood shaped cultural conversations imposing new values on clothing and placing the takrita beyond the parameters of “decent” dress. They encouraged consumerism as a feminine activity, projecting women’s desire for “elegant” clothing as a “natural inclination.” Building on linear understandings of national modernity, where the takrita or safsari were markers of rural poverty, regional identity, and the humiliation of colonial subjugation, depended on the elaboration and standardization of new dress codes. Adding cultural values to these fabrics turned articles of clothing into fashion.3 1 2

3

Souheiba Rached, “Femme de Bizerte,” Femme, October–December 1965, 4. Souheiba Rached, “La Kairouanaise,” Femme, April–June 1965; Fetah Ouali, “Femme du Sahel,” Femme, August 1964, 20–21. Yuniya Kawamura, Fashion-ology: An Introduction to Fashion Studies (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018).

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An oft-recited story holds that Bourguiba criticized women’s unveiling in the 1930s as acquiescence to French colonial policy and a betrayal of national identity. After independence, he derided the safsari as a relic of a traditional past. Though not legally prohibited, Bourguiba discouraged women from wearing it and personally removed the safsari from women’s heads during public events, placing it around their shoulders. Images of such encounters were broadcast on state television and became a reference point in the presidential vision of women’s emancipation.4 As another instance of Bourguiba’s desire to control the nascent women’s movement and harness women’s rights to his personal political program, his earlier praise and later scorn of the safsari also point toward the culturally specific meanings of dress as a sign of identity or national belonging. Yet as the women’s press contributed to shaping the meaning of dress within discourses of modern womanhood, it also revealed the inability of such representations to capture the complexity of women’s behavior. In central Tunisia, sedentarization contributed to the “evolution” of women: from a “bedouin” without a veil [voile] to living from the land, by changing her lifestyle this woman has ascended up the social hierarchy, and a curious thing, from an unveiled [devoilée] bedouin we now see her appear as a veiled [voilée] woman, while in the cities and large village the veil is reactionary, here as in certain regions of the south, wearing the veil is synonymous with advancement.5

This apparent paradox unintentionally gestures toward local variations in the socioeconomic values of dress and its cultural symbolism: what covered up poverty in one context indicated status in another. As argued in recent scholarship on modest dress, women’s clothing can be traditional, modern, political, driven by personal piety or economic necessity, and refuses neat classification.6 4

5

6

During a Ramadan visit to the suq, “women were among the most enthusiastic with some awaiting to de-veiled by him,” “Faiza Magazine,” Faiza, March 1961, 10–11. An accompanying photograph of Bourguiba and one such woman reads “‘Aid: One Less Veil.” See also the report from France’s Institut National de l’Audiovisuel (INA) archive from a 1967 documentary “Femmes Tunisiennes,” available on YouTube: www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rx6N4CzE3_s. Sonia Maarouf, “La femme du centre tunisien a concretisé son émancipation,” Femme, February–April 1966, 23–24. Examples of this scholarship include Lara Deeb, An Enchanted Modern: Gender and Public Piety in Shi’i Lebanon (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006); Homa Hoodfar, Between Marriage and the Market: Intimate Politics and

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The meaning of the veil has been long debated among feminists, nationalists, intellectuals, and reformers of various ideological tendencies. From Orientalist associations with women’s subjugation to a nationalist emblem of cultural resistance to unveiling as part of the modernizing and secular agendas of nation-states to modern veiling in relation to the piety movement, the veil has remained a visible marker of identity and a prominent, if malleable, political symbol.7 However, fashion, as a culturally specific set of ideas and values about dress and its meanings, goes beyond the veil. Take, for instance, the warnings against adopting European styles of dresses and skirts from Bourguiba’s speech on Women’s Day in 1966: We must also fight against the danger of slavish imitation of certain foreign customs.. . . It would be ridiculous to try to ape the handful of corrupt individuals to be found in European countries. Likewise, it is inadmissible that we in Tunisia should adopt all the fashions that arise in Europe . . . on the pretext of following the fashion, we must not allow the female body to disclose all its secrets. Our dressmakers are responsible for this shamelessness in dress. They get their customers to wear mini-skirts so that they will be in the latest fashion. Let us be sensible. In [the] future, our dressmakers will make dresses hiding at least the knees. Mini-skirts are a provocation. They are very trying on men’s nerves and on women’s modesty.8

Encouraging, chastising, covering, or undressing women, Bourguiba’s moralization of dress codes suggested that even unveiled, public scrutiny over the meanings of women’s bodies and their relation to public space continued unabated. In secular and ostensibly feminist states across the Middle East where veils were perceived as anathema to modern womanhood, the state prerogative to liberate women included defining appropriate

7

8

Survival in Cairo (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997); Mahmood, Politics of Piety; Feyda Sayan-Cengiz, Beyond Headscarf Culture in Turkey’s Retail Sector (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016); Joan Wallach Scott, The Politics of the Veil (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007). Early contributions to this line of scholarship include Leila Ahmed, Women and Gender in Islam (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992); Fatima Mernissi, Beyond the Veil: Male-Female Dynamics in Modern Muslim Society (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985). On clothing as a facet of religious nationalism, see Madawi Al-Rasheed, A Most Masculine State: Gender, Politics and Religion in Saudi Arabia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). Bourguiba, Birth Control, 23–24.

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clothing and makeup.9 Under the Pahlavi monarchy, Camron Amin notes, “Women’s bodies needed to be unveiled so that the regime could display and celebrate the progress of women . . . progress it initiated, progress it co-opted, and . . . progress it controlled.”10 As a specifically feminine article of clothing, attention to veiling obscures broader consternation over women’s dress and the importance of men’s corporeality to the notion of propriety. After denouncing the miniskirt, Bourguiba turned derisively to stylistic eccentricities among young men, particularly the “barefoot, long-haired imitators of the Beatles, [who were] dirty and badly dressed.”11 With such hairstyles blurring gender boundaries, notions of propriety and Tunisia’s modern identity were gendered in their intimate entanglement with youthful bodies of both sexes. As Minoo Moallem argues, clothing became part of nationalist discursive practices to “commemorate specific bodies – through gendered and heterosexist practices, gestures, and postures – serving not only to facilitate modern disciplinary control of the body but also to create gendered citizenship.”12 Clothing was as much about how gender and class informed social norms such as decency or modesty as it was an attempt to navigate the boundaries of shifting gender roles in modern society. I begin this chapter with the miniskirt, an icon of sixties culture, and a lightning rod of debates about propriety, social norms, and gender, so that Tunisian stories can be located within this global matrix. Ready-to-wear clothing was presented as progressive if not universal in official Tunisian visions of modern womanhood. The boundaries of these dress codes were perhaps clearest in their transgression. Falling anywhere from slightly above the knee to part way up the thigh, the 9 10

11

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Bier, Revolutionary Womanhood, 91–98. Camron Michael Amin, The Making of the Modern Iranian Woman: Gender, State Policy, and Popular Culture, 1865–1946 (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2002), 80. References to depraved young men identified by long hair, bare feet, (al-jamaʿat al-mursala li-shaʿuriha al-mutabahiyya bi-l-qadhara wa-l-hafaʾ), and sparse clothing (yabraz ahadihom ʿariya) utilize similar language in the Arabic, English, and French versions of the speech, though the Beatles reference appeared only in English and French; see Bourguiba, Birth Control; and “Bourguiba à la t.v.: Mon vœu est que la femme tunisienne demeure l’exemple de la pudeur, de la dignité et de la vertu,” La Presse, August 14, 1966. Minoo Moallem, Between Warrior Brother and Veiled Sister: Islamic Fundamentalism and the Politics of Patriarchy in Iran (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 59.

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miniskirt was an erotic commodity that revealed extended portions of the female body. As such, it was a catalyst for fears about women’s autonomy, shifting gender roles, and generational divides. Then, by turning to advertisements, I suggest that while adhering to the visual regime of progress as illustrated by women’s clothing and presenting knowledge about hygiene or nutrition as concomitant with modern motherhood, the consumerism of middle-class women pushed against the boundaries of their domestic location. The women’s press contributed to shaping modern sartorial codes featuring closely tailored suits, neat uniforms, and knee-length skirts, as part of women’s presence in public spaces, from the schoolyard to the office. Faiza’s editors accepted the miniskirt but rejected the association between dress and morality, proposing fashion as a site of cultural pluralism and national pride, and clothing production as a facet of state-building. Finally, I turn to the political nature of men’s dress while exploring topics often not considered through the lens of gender, in this case, student activism of the 1960s and early 1970s. Global fashions raised concerns about morality and respectability in relation to men, masculinity, and a patriarchal order destabilized by youthful rebellions. Though efforts to politicize dress were contested and incomplete, as a recognizable facet of 1960s youth culture, fashion forced a reconsideration of national identity and the relations between men, women, and the state.

Global 1960s Culture Cuts, colors, and cloths were visual markers of religious and regional identities in the early modern and modern Middle East, with regulations surrounding consumption and display a malleable facet of political power. Elite efforts to limit the supply of luxury goods and control appearances increased as socially mobile individuals dressed in ways that blurred sartorial boundaries.13 In the nineteenth century, in particular, efforts to homogenize male dress to represent imperial unity and a shared loyalty to the state belied the plurality of stylistic choice 13

Toufoul Abou-Hodeib, “Taste and Class in Late Ottoman Beirut,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 43, no. 3 (2011); Charlotte Jirousek, “The Transition to Mass Fashion System Dress in the Later Ottoman Empire,” in Consumption Studies and the History of the Ottoman Empire, 1550–1922: An Introduction, ed. Donald Quataert (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000).

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and the hybridity of fashion.14 Early modern states in France, England, and Austria implemented similar sartorial legislation to establish and enforce corporate identitites and social hierarchies, moving away from royal monopolies during this era. For Leora Auslander, the development of a modern French “bourgeois stylistic regime” essential to the construction of social power depended on gender-specific roles of men as producers and women as consumers.15 Advertisements in the Ottoman press, particularly the inexpensive illustrated press, sought to shape tastes by promoting specific goods to women consumers as an aspect of modern femininity.16 Elsewhere across the globe, black hair straightening or forcing Native Americans to cut their hair illustrates how appearances, including hairstyles, “encode specific social values or identities” in US history.17 The varied meanings of hair or skirt lengths are part of the social and relational aspects of consumption, or what Arjun Appadurai describes as the circulation of objects within different regimes of value.18 The mid-twentieth century witnessed major political change and the restructuring of global politics on international and national levels. On multiple continents, mass-produced commodities such as jeans became a symbol of social transformations and shifting gender roles, with new dances perceived as foreign and immodest such as the jerk or the twist contributing to consternation over moral decline, and in the case of Algeria, fueling debates in the national assembly about the definition of national authenticity.19 In Argentina, the popularity of blue jeans 14

15

16

17

18

19

Donald Quataert, “Clothing Laws, State, and Society in the Ottoman Empire, 1720–1829,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 29, no. 3 (1997). Not only could men no longer create beautiful products, but the notion of dandyism further discredited working-class masculinity, displaced by bourgeois consumption where women defined family status. Leora Auslander, Taste and Power: Furnishing Modern France (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996). Elizabeth B. Frierson, “Cheap and Easy: The Creation of Consumer Culture in Late Ottoman Society,” in Quataert, ed., Consumption Studies. Gael Graham, “Flaunting the Freak Flag: Karr v. Schmidt and the Great Hair Debate in American High Schools, 1965–1975,” The Journal of American History 91, no. 2 (2004): 525. Arjun Appadurai, “Introduction: Commodities and the Politics of Value,” in The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective, ed. Arjun Appadurai (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986). The Algerian press worried about the impact of global youth culture especially in the cities of Algiers and Oran. El Moujahid, December 1963; Alger républicain, February 1964; Vince, Our Fighting Sisters, 141–42.

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raised concerns about masculinity, desire, and the eroticization of public life, which served as a platform for the airing of elite grievances about social mobility and ideological conflicts.20 The socialist regime in Tanzania outlawed miniskirts, wigs, and skin-lightening products as antithetical to modern national culture, though the underlying concerns were about rural-to-urban migration and generational differences.21 In the United States, boys who grew their hair past their ears were expelled from schools for violating dress codes, with American school officials arguing that long-haired boys blurred gender lines and created disorder. Public schools became “battlegrounds for hotly contested political and cultural issues” about middle-class norms of respectability and constitutionally protected freedoms, which led to a series of high-level court cases.22 In Greece and Turkey as well, long hair and blue jeans set off alarms about degeneration and premarital sex.23 Bourguiba’s critique of the mini as shameless, provocative, and an affront to morality linked gender, youth, sexuality, and clothing in ways common to these cultural wars of the 1960s. Short skirts popularized by the French designer André Courrèges were a prominent target of social and political anxieties. Jeune Afrique reported miniskirt bans in Greece and Senegal, playfully pointing out that if Brazzaville was the sole African capital allowing the mini by 1968, it was authorized for only women under age six.24 American newspapers decried the miniskirt as a threat to girls’ modesty, traditional norms of womanhood, white middle-class respectability, American values, and American identity.25 American newspapers also seized upon 20

21

22 23

24

25

Valeria Manzano, “The Blue Jean Generation: Youth, Gender, and Sexuality in Buenos Aires, 1958–1975,” Journal of Social History 42, no. 3 (2009): 658. Andrew Ivaska, “‘Anti-Mini Militants Meet Modern Misses’: Urban Style, Gender, and the Politics of ‘National Culture’ in 1960s Dar es Salaam,” in Fashioning Africa: Power and the Politics of Dress, ed. Jean Allman (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004). Graham, “Flaunting the Freak Flag,” 525–27. Kenan Behzat Sharpe, “Mediterranean Sixties: Cultural Politics in Turkey, Greece, and Beyond,” in The Routledge Handbook of the Global Sixties: Between Protest and Nation-Building, ed. Jian Chen et al. (New York: Routledge, 2018). “Cachez le genou!,” Jeune Afrique, May 5, 1965, 39; André Bercoff, “13 mai,” Jeune Afrique, May 28, 1967, 12; “Port de la minijupe,” Jeune Afrique, July 8, 1968, 52. Luther Hillman, Dressing for the Culture Wars, 4–28.

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Bourguiba’s anti-mini proclamations, perpetuating a sense of the skirt’s countercultural aura and challenge to the status quo as a global phenomenon.26 The common thread in America, Africa, or the Middle East was that stylistic novelty catalyzed public anxieties about national identity, foreign influence, and social disorder, often represented in relation to gender norms and ideas about sexuality. By exposing the social specificity that defined normative dress, fashions of the 1960s contributed to “long-term processes of cultural change involving mores, aesthetics, consumption, and a politicization of the myriad faces of the everyday” demanded by political protests of the era.27

Toward a National Dress Code? The parameters of proper attire in postcolonial Tunisia were sketched in a piecemeal fashion in presidential speeches, official publications, and by national organizations such as the UNFT. Schoolchildren wore an apron or coat over their clothing, with different cuts and colors for boys and girls, for primary and secondary levels, creating a modicum of uniformity while serving as visual identification of a scholasticism that justified their public presence. In the narrative of women’s transformation from “slave” to “citizen,” schoolgirls wearing bright white uniforms and sitting in evenly spaced rows stood for the nation’s future, whereas the past was represented by women wearing long, colorful malaya, their heads covered and their feet bare. Building on Orientalist and colonial critiques, these texts accepted that women’s “inferior position in Moslem society” was “a sign of the backwardness of those countries” often emblematized by the veil.28 In line with Bourguiba’s practice of removing the safsari from women he encountered, the UNFT encouraged women to unveil at its gatherings and supported a ban on veiling among young women, especially 26

27 28

“Tunisian President Prohibits Miniskirts and Closes a Club,” New York Times, August 14, 1966, 12; “Tunisian Chief Bans the Jerk, Mini-Skirts,” The Chicago Daily Defender, August 15, 1966, 2; Branislav Petrovic, “Short Skirts and Beatle Haircuts Are Disappearing from Tunisia,” Washington Post, October 2, 1966, A2. Brown and Lison, “The Global Sixties in Sound and Vision,” 1–2. Suggesting a link between women’s status and Islamic law, the texts also urge cultural readings where women’s lives were “far more due to the traditions and customs which had grown up around Moslem thought and life.” Women of Tunisia, 5–8.

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those holding public office.29 Haddad took it upon herself to voice disproval of specific regional customs such as black veils in Binzart.30 Veils continued to provide a reference point in the temporal locations of women’s progressive liberation dating to the Majalla. State publications credited “the new laws, the lifting of the veil, and the emancipation of women” as transforming women’s lives. References to unveiling were metaphorical and literal references, as now “the streets are enlivened by pretty little faces.”31 It was not only the conspicuousness of women’s public presence that symbolized their recently acquired freedom, but the visibility of their hair and faces. In practice, Tunisian women’s sartorial choices could not be neatly separated into modern/urban versus traditional/rural. Photographs in official publications and UNFT brochures document women in safasir in urban spaces engaging in modern activities such as voting and attending a political rally.32 The discourse on veiling struggled to accommodate these myriad meanings, weaving colonial domination, women’s submission, and questions of development into the fabric of modest dress: “Once the living standard has risen . . . there will no longer be any economic reason for the veil (sefseri), which will die a natural death and with it the seclusion of women will come to an end.”33 Other texts attempted to present covered dress as an apolitical symbol of folklore: “The tourist will, of course, still be able to discover white-clad, ghost-like figures lingering in the passages of the medina or in the provincial ouezras. In any case, when the veil is completely cast off, it will always be possible to don it again for the purposes of folkdancing.”34 Colorful, loose-fitting, and richly embroidered rural attire was contrasted to the neat, trim lines of lab coats and tailored blazers, 29 30

31

32

33 34

Marzouki, Le mouvement des femmes en Tunisie, 197. As the title celebrates, a few dozen women immediately removed these veils, but it is not clear whether this was more than a charade of compliance. “29 femmes ont dechiré leur voile noir,” La Presse, August 24, 1966, 1. Tunisia, Women of Tunisia, 27. Or in another text, “The Tunisian woman is the first flower of liberty, which has blossomed forth beneath the gentle breezes of national independence and revolution.” Tunisia, Tunisia Works, 70. “Women lining the streets on 20th March 1957 to cheer President Bourguiba, who gave them their freedom.” Tunisia, Women of Tunisia, 34–36. Tunisia, Women of Tunisia, 12 and 18. Tunisia Works, 70–71. Women of Tunisia also connected veiling to the foreign gaze, noting, “The difficult heritage of the Moslem woman has for centuries aroused the interest of foreign visitors,” though it is not clear if the sexual connotations were intended (5).

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encouraging women to adopt the latter, while promoting public understanding of women’s dress as an index of national progress and collective modernity. New norms of dress were upheld by civil servants, with photographs of party congresses and state organizations showing rows of men in dark-colored suits. A National Clothing Council (al-Majlis alQawmi li-l-Kisa’) marketed and distributed low-cost packages of locally manufactured “modern, European-style clothing.” This initiative sought to further standardize dress beyond the urban middle class by “encourag[ing] the acquisition of decent clothing” among the working class and peasants.35 Clothing packages were announced on posters, in advertisements, and distributed by local Dustur cells. The UNFT participated in promoting new sartorial norms; members of the board of directors, and delegates at its congresses, appear in photographs in trim blazers, short-sleeved blouses, sleeveless dresses, and Aline skirts.36 Bourguiba explicitly praised their attire, saying that it had become “much more modern” since independence, as expected, considering the progressive nature of the UNFT mission.37 However, presidential critique of “shameless” European fashions made clear that while some modern styles were universal, others had no place in Tunisia. Haddad justified these limits as “intended to preserve morals.”38 In her memoirs, she associated women’s liberation with specific styles that “contain[ed] women’s thirst for freedom within reasonable limits.” Reiterating official outrage, she continued, “I was no less shocked by how certain women blindly followed certain western clothing styles. The miniskirt for instance caused many negative reactions and the rejection of women’s emancipation. Like other women, I like fashion and its caprices, but I never hesitated when it was a question of choosing between decency and fashion.”39 The veil

35

36 37 38

The costs remained prohibitive for many. “L’habillement: Une affaire de dignité nationale,” La Presse, August 9, 1967, 2; al-Raʾid al-Rasmi li-l-Jumhuriyya alTunisiyya, July 14, 1967, 1332, www.legislation.tn/sites/default/files/journalofficiel/1967/1967A/Ja03067.pdf. “Convinced that traditional clothing is not made for modern work conditions, the Tunisian authorities also believe it is not dignified,” a piece in Faiza reported. “La vie quotidienne: L’habillement,” Faiza, May–June 1967, 32–35. UNFT à dix ans, 15, 18, 31. Similar photos appeared in the women’s press. Habib Bourguiba, Women and Social Evolution, 7. 39 “29 femmes ont dechiré leur voile noir.” Haddad, Parole de femme, 175.

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was a physical barrier that Haddad found to be an obstacle to women’s public activities. Yet clothing was symbolic of inner morals, and the miniskirt marked the threshold between proper women’s emancipation and “indecency.” This intertwining of clothing and morality was prompted by the increasingly heterosocial nature of postcolonial society. In Egypt, women in the workforce were expected to perform a “veiling of conduct” toward similar ends.40 While the state aimed to homogenize dress and center its role as the arbiter of modern identity, it also added a moral component to clothing by linking fashion to character, perpetuating scrutiny over women’s appearance. Whether punitive, as in the reported ban on women wearing short skirts and as in rumors of long-haired young men dragged to nearby barbers, or not, it is unclear to what extent state efforts bore fruit.41 Instead, attempts to shame women for their fashion choices announced the limits of women’s recently acquired rights. In her work on clothing in Tunisia, Meriem Mahmoud Chida found that attaching value to imported clothes could have unintended consequences. One man recounted to her that on the day of ‘Aid, instead of purchasing new clothes for the holiday, “there was a man wearing American pajamas with Bonne Nuit [good night] written on them that he thought was a suit.”42 Whether confusing or mocking the association between Western clothing and modern dress, the anecdote reveals the myriad ways sartorial codes were embodied and understood. By relocating certain styles, practices, and behaviors to the national past, and delegitimizing aspects of consumer culture as foreign, the official rhetoric about dress sought to impose order on the increasingly heterosocial urban public sphere. Presidential statements and official publications indicate domestic attention to the international context, an awareness of the European gaze, and shared perceptions about middle-class aesthetics of respectability. Yet state feminist discourses struggled to define Tunisian cultural specificity

40 41

42

Bier, Revolutionary Womanhood, 90–92. Both men and women caught in violation were subject to fines, though it is not clear how widely these were imposed. “Cheveux longs, jupes courtes,” La Presse, August 18, 1966, 3. Meriem Mahmoud Chida, “Tunisian Dress 1881–1987 and New Nation Building” (PhD dissertation, University of Minnesota, 2006), 89.

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within the homogeneity of modern urbanity, to control the cultural meaning of clothing and what it implied about modern womanhood.

Selling Womanhood: Domesticity, Comfort, and Personal Pleasure Advertisements catering to women as agents of a middle-class consumerist domesticity depicted modern womanhood according to specific haircuts and styles of dress generally similar to the readyto-wear outfits of the day. Drawings of women boarding a Tunis Air flight or drinking mineral water combined the desire of material goods with normalizing women’s travel and gendering household cleansers, appliances, and food products, the purchase of which supported women’s commitment to a clean and comfortable home.43 Though magazines and newspapers circulated across nation-state borders, advertisers participated in efforts to “define the boundaries of national community.” In the first half of the twentieth century, ads in the Egyptian press promoted inexpensive commodities such as cotton socks as means to support domestic production and a rejection of British imports in accord with the anticolonial sentiments of the era. Their drawings of strong men and sexualized women aligned mass consumption with gender roles that projected understandings of the Egyptian nation and “the behaviors deemed suitable in it.”44 In French women’s magazines of the 1950s and 1960s, the frequent appearance of cars and refrigerators symbolized the modern housewife and new patterns of consumption.45 Modern comforts were contrasted to the difficulty of the past while maintaining women’s domestic responsibilities and commitment toward their families. In the absence of veils and the presence of short haircuts and cheerful faces, advertisements replicated and elaborated the basic parameters

43

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These practices were reinforced by the women’s press with regular features on home decoration, recipes, and practical solutions to housekeeping dilemmas. Nancy Y. Reynolds, “National Socks and the ‘Nylon Woman’: Materiality, Gender, and Nationalism in Textile Marketing in Semicolonial Egypt, 1930–56,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 43, no. 1 (2011): 51. Fishman, From Vichy to the Sexual Revolution, 38; Ross, Fast Cars, Clean Bodies, 3–6.

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of official sartorial codes surrounding the temporal progress of postcolonial womanhood. Advertisements for luxury goods, lingerie, domestic appliances, and household commodities were a main source of revenue for Faiza. Food processing, textiles, and other nationalized industries appealed to the domestic market and women’s purchasing power. Beet sugar was one such national industry, with Al-Nasr/L’Aigle (Eagle) brand sugar cubes described as “an essential nutrient (ghadhaa’ daruri)” (see Figure 4.1). Perhaps entertaining guests, a beaming woman drops a sugar cube into a cup. Wearing what appears to be a fitted dress with a collar, jeweled earrings, and a single bracelet, she is marked as modern by her class, fair complexion, and confidence. In another ad, a simple black-andwhite drawing foregrounding a large can of tomatoes was complemented by a smartly dressed woman with a clean apron. She smiles invitingly as she carries a platter of “healthy” and “delicious” spaghetti cooked with Byrsa tomato paste. According to the Arabic and French text, the Izdihar processing facility is “ultra-modern” thanks to cleanliness and mechanization that combined to ensure the highestquality products. By serving food from Izdihar cooperative, “the most modern in Tunisia,” the modernity of the factory is transposed onto the home consumer. Hygiene and nutrition featured prominently in the gendering of commodities. A household cleaner used by a blue-eyed smiling woman in a striped short-sleeve dress and white apron was “the detergent of the modern woman.” Ads for salt appealed to housewives (ménagères), announcing its abilities to improve appetite and facilitate digestion. A mother holding a plate of fish for her happy son presented maternal success in terms of a healthy diet.46 The domestic setting implicit in food advertisements is represented by women’s aprons.47 As caring mothers or attentive wives capable of providing a healthy balanced diet, these modern sensibilities are expressed through consumer acumen and embodied through fitted dresses, stylish bobs, and simple accessories.

46 47

Izdihar, COTUSAL, and the National Office of Fish were state-run. The apron was also a symbol of the sexualization of domestic workers in the bourgeois home. T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting, Black Venus: Sexualized Savages, Primal Fears, and Primitive Narratives in French (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999), 64–65.

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Figure 4.1 Sugar as an essential part of the diet, served by a happy homemaker: Al-Nisr/L’Aigle sugar advertisement in Faiza.

The most explicit pairing of dress and a modern lifestyle was in a series of ads for Butagaz, the Tunisian enterprise marketing butane fuel in refillable metal containers for domestic appliances such as gas heaters and stoves.48 Urban apartments and modern housing that were poorly insulated and less adapted to the environment required heating, while hot-water heaters were a necessary addition to the household bathroom to replace public baths. One full-page ad depicts these modernizations of the family alongside continuity in women’s domestic roles. An elderly woman is shown soaking a cloth in petroleum to light the coals on a terracotta brazier. “Yesterday, was like today, where the first task each morning for the mistress of the house is to prepare the family breakfast.” Yet today Butagaz extolled how “everything has changed, and in fifteen minutes the entire family is served.” Butagaz promised that the use of a stove simplified women’s

48

Civil servants frequently owned refrigerators and televisions, as indicated by a survey of teachers, suggesting the affordability of smaller appliances. Bchir et al., “L’influence sur le taux de fécondité.”

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tasks with the touch of a button, perhaps facilitating her labor beyond the household. Another ad contrasted between “yesterday” as an age where trying to stay warm put one at risk of suffocation, and “today” as an era of comfort and hygiene. Temporal progress is reflected in the contrast between the first woman, wrapped in a blanket and with her hair covered, and her modern counterpart welcoming the Butagaz delivery to her kitchen in a short skirt and blouse. In another image, a child sits on the floor next to a space heater reading quietly. Thus, not only did “an entire series of appliances exist to simplify the task of the housewife,” but their presence implied education, security, and domestic bliss.49 Scholarship on consumerism illustrates how ads for cosmetics in China and the United States contributed to local expressions of feminine modernity. They were instructional and aspirational, transferring the promise of erotic pleasures into commodities.50 Mona Russell argues that by emphasizing vanity, self-indulgence, or “self-creation through commodity consumption,” advertisers minimized the threat of modern women to Egyptian men.51 Yet in their efforts to mobilize women’s desires, Tunisian advertisements exposed the tensions between women’s consumer agency and their fixity within the home. A large ad for Al Khadra’ cigarettes centers a manicured hand holding a box of the filtered cigarettes, described as light and flavorful. A seductive woman wearing pearl earrings and a draping blouse smokes casually in the background (see Figure 4.2). While her clothing affirms her modern location, there is no apron, children, or other clues to indicate the domestic setting. In fact, her relaxed posture alludes to leisure practices and her conspicuous consumption hints at a seductive femininity of self-indulgence. At once an objectification of women under the male gaze, Al Khadra’ also gestured away from 49 50

51

Faiza December 1959, November and December 1961, and March 1962. Tani E. Barlow, “Buying-In: Advertising and the Sexy Modern Girl Icon in Shanghai in the 1920s and 1930s,” in The Modern Girl around the World: Consumption, Modernity, Globalization, ed. Alys Eve Weinbaum et al. (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008); Kathy Peiss, “Making up, Making Over: Cosmetics, Consumer Culture and Women’s Identity,” in The Sex of Things: Gender and Consumption in Historical Perspective, ed. Victoria De Grazia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996). Mona Russell, “Marketing the Modern Egyptian Girl: Whitewashing Soap and Clothes from the Late Nineteenth Century to 1936,” Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies 6, no. 3 (2010): 48.

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familial-centered norms of state feminism with the possibility that the modern woman could purchase her own cigarettes and enjoy a moment of contemplative solitude.52

Figure 4.2 The feminine seduction of Al Khadra’ filtered cigarettes, advertisement in Faiza.

Miniskirts and Modern Fashion in the Women’s Press As with other aspects of the discourse on modern womanhood, women adjusted the meaning of dress and its cultural significance. Women’s radio programs played a proscriptive role in establishing new sartorial expectations, announcing: “Today it will be cloudy, wear a wool skirt, a turtle-neck sweater, you can also add a little scarf, and a black handbag” or “Spring is here, dress in bright colors such as green.”53 With photographs and illustrations, fashion pages were a site of voyeurism, entertainment, and fashion pedagogy. Al-Mar’a and Femme both included fashion sections with advice on hair care and what to 52

53

The feminine hand holding the package of cigarettes does not belong to the woman in the background, hinting at female intimacy and queer potentials. Hafsia bitterly complains that such broadcasts were inappropriate, as the vast majority of women listeners could not afford such a varied wardrobe. Jélila Hafsia, Instants de vie chronique familière, vol. 3: 1967–1973 (Tunis: PicturaImpress, 2009), 136.

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wear throughout the day, on vacation, or at the beach. In its spring 1966 fashion feature, Femme advised women to “shorten your wardrobe” following “le style Courrège,” with a word of caution for those whom it did not flatter.54 Al-Mar’a’s fashion pages featured trim cuts, solid colors, high-heeled shoes, and short skirts.55 Faiza’s covers of a young, carefree woman standing along the coast in a bikini and straw hat, or at the university wearing jeans and a casual sweater, presented poise and confidence within an appealing vision of modern womanhood centered in public spaces. Mounira, a student contributor identified only by first name, explained to Faiza’s readers how external appearance corresponded to inner qualities. She complimented modern liberated young women for showing “discretion and taste” in their makeup and dress, typically “A-line skirts with a sweater and flats.” She contrasted them to a second “type” of student, usually from an illiterate family from the interior, identifiable by her “empty stare . . . a smile void of charm . . . [and] a particular hairstyle. They generally dress in a manner that lacks taste. They wear colors that do not match. Even their purses are the wrong size for them. As for shoes, they never wear heels.” According to Mounira, young women who failed to meet the standards of good taste “do not know how to take advantage of their freedom,” but adhered to “dated traditions and ancestral customs.”56 Higher education was not sufficient to make a young woman modern, according to Mounira’s assessment; she needed the disposable income permitting her to display an awareness of fashion trends in the urban public space of the university. The public shaming of the mini emboldened conservative voices who lumped together women’s status with the critique of a host of social phenomena from miniskirts and dancing to alcohol consumption and crime.57 Femme shifted gears, distancing itself from short styles and “certain habits that have nothing to do with true emancipation.” 54 55

56

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“Mode,” Femme, February–April 1966, 30–33. Yet editors saw foreign styles a form of cultural alienation and false liberation. Marzouki, Le mouvement des femmes en Tunisie, 177–79. Mounira, “Les 2 types d’étudiantes tunisiennes,” Faiza, April–May 1966, 64–65. Moral concerns about alcohol, dancing, and even foreign films were suggested in Moncef Gmar, “Qui a bu, ne boira plus,” Afrique Action, November 21, 1961, 14–15; Mohammed Abid, “Il y a plus utile,” Jeune Afrique, February 27, 1962, 3; Taoufik Baklouty, “Moins de femmes nues,” Jeune Afrique, June 25, 1962, 2; Zoubeida Amira, “Al-ta’biyya al-akhlaqiyya,” Al-Mar’a, February 1964, 7, 46.

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Explicating the boundaries of tasteful fashion, one editorial stated: “What for some might appear to be one of the most beautiful forms of modernism as it exists in certain countries in a very limited way, is really little more than a new manner to degrade women. Can one seriously believe that the mini-skirt and outrageous makeup are truly essential for women to be considered free and emancipated?”58 A subsequent letter from a male reader reinforced the immorality of such choices, admonishing “my dear ladies” to recognize that liberation was more than “abandoning the veil and scouring stores in search of what people are wearing abroad” or “walking around scantily dressed.” He encouraged education, hard work, and household responsibilities, equating this vision of modern womanhood with “proper” dress: “Make sure to dress correctly and properly.”59 A letter in Faiza from three men expressed similar alarm about the vacuity of a “certain European lifestyle.” Was the nation witnessing “the first signs of decadence in miniskirts and boys with long hair,” and were these fashions a step toward premarital sex? This was inappropriate for Tunisian women, and they exhorted their compatriots: “We must remain Tunisians!”60 Another reader, Nadiya Kilani, pursued the matter of morality by pleading, “You must guide us, Faiza. On the one hand, there are critiques of the miniskirt, and on the other, you feature them in your fashion pages and continuously promote this style.. . . Faiza, you yourself must fight against this crazy trend.”61 While such critiques highlighted the superficiality of fashion and its role in the objectification of women, the radical potential of this line of thought was muted by the projections of national morality onto women’s bodies. Alongside this public awareness of the taboo surrounding the miniskirt, shorter hemlines continued to appear in Faiza’s fashion spreads and covers throughout 1966 and 1967. Models repeatedly showed their knees and parts of their thighs as the mini craze spiraled into an array of minis including the minidress and the mini-jubba. Su‘ad, a trendy nineteen-year-old, told one reporter about her preference for 58 59

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Leila Rihani, “Editorial,” Femme, September–October 1966, 7. Amor Jormani, “Courrier,” Femme, November–December 1966 to January 1967, 4–5. Moncef, Ahmed, and Mahrez, “Trop de catalyse = Explosion,” Faiza, November–December 1966, 66. Nadia Kilani, “Mini-Jupe, RTT et Juifs,” Faiza, November 1967, 85–86.

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bright colors over depressing tones to reflect her lively personality. She appreciated the miniskirt as flattering and youthful. “If I dress ‘short’ it’s not only because that’s in style, it’s also to keep my youthful freshness. Because wearing short skirts gives you the impression of being a kid.”62 Responding to the letter from Kilani, the editors justified their mini coverage: The miniskirt! Let’s talk about it. We are neither for, nor against it. The mini is perfectly acceptable for the very young (that’s what we demonstrated in issue number 60) on whom it is not at all provocative. But of course, it is not recommended for mothers and especially not for those who are overweight. Regardless, this fashion already exists on the streets of Tunis. Why should we bury our heads in the sand and act as if nothing is happening? Even if you cover your eyes and ears, the mini has invaded Tunis. In which case, why not talk about it? That would be a breach of objectivity. That does not mean that we are encouraging it since once again, we only recommend it for the very young.63

In part focusing on “the very young” with more explicit prohibition for mothers and heavier women (similar to Femme’s discreet suggestion that the mini should be avoided by those whom it did not flatter), Faiza couched the matter within the domain of advice. Grounded in a position of offering women guidance, the editors located fashion as feminine territory. They could therefore shift the parameters of taste away from morals and onto considerations of age and body size. Describing the skirt as “not at all provocative,” they subtly contradicted the patriarchal connotations of associating the garment with sexual availability, urging acceptance in describing the arrival of the miniskirt as a fait accompli.

Fashion Politics and National Identity Faiza not only was willing to engage conversations on a topic deemed taboo but situated women’s dress within a strategic politicization of fashion. Instead of the narrow boundaries of the state’s disdain for 62

63

“Faut-il acheter tunisien?,” Faiza, May–June 1967, 57. This reflects the conclusion that the “young girl” as a particular lifecycle stage often drew on specific commodities. Tani E. Barlow et al., “The Modern Girl around the World: A Research Agenda and Preliminary Findings,” Gender & History 17, no. 2 (2005): 245–46. NDLR, Faiza, November 1967, 86.

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European styles as immoral, the magazine crafted an alternate ideological reading grounded in production, labor, and the national economy. As early as 1959, the magazine breathlessly championed developments in local manufacturing, as indicated by the following presentation of a clothing enterprise: “Will we soon see all Tunisian women dressed in knits? Mohair sweaters, knit outfits, all the jersey [fabrics] that are so fashionable this year are as of now made by the UNFT’s new workshop. With new cuts and colors, Tunisian knits can compete with any import, but . . . they will be less expensive, we hope!”64 Here affordable fashions are an asset of national production that illustrated Tunisia’s global competitiveness. Photographs of models in Italian-style knits visiting the first Tunisian jersey cloth workshop appeared in an early issue; a center-page spread extolling beachwear “entirely made in Tunisia” was included in another; and in yet another issue a National Office of Textiles gala was the subject of an eight-page feature on evening gowns and wedding dresses “made entirely in Tunisia with Tunisian fabrics.”65 Modeling the latest styles from the runways of Paris and Milan, adjacent captions directed readers toward local retailers offering locally made replicas. The excitement about Tunisian couture accentuated the importance of clothing to the homogenizing depictions of modern womanhood. They were modern by virtue of the sophisticated technology of the textile sector, and national in their manufacturing source. Many women were skilled at embroidery and dress-making, particularly rural women who participated in aspects of production from shearing to weaving. Fashion coverage wove local production with women’s employment as a way to reconcile national traditions with industrial modernity and new understandings of womanhood. Industrialization “would first and foremost result in sustainable employment for many poor women, giving them the means for selfimprovement.” Women’s traditional aptitude in weaving could be marshaled toward national development, settling “this sort of ‘quarrel between the Ancients and the Moderns’ that one finds so frequently in local public opinion.”66 Regional textile patterns were repurposed as decorative accents to craft a specifically Tunisian fashion style. 64 65

66

“Verrons-nous bientôt,” Faiza, December 1959, 7. “Une nouvelle mode est née,” Faiza, December 1960, 42–45; “Voyage à la Goulette,” Faiza, June 1962, 42–49; “Il n’est de robe que de Tunis,” Faiza, November 1962, 40–47. Z. Henablia, “Une industrie va renaître,” Faiza, December 1959, 40.

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A veil or scarf (le foulard) was an accessory, an artisanal trinket to tie back hair while relaxing on the sand.67 Covers featured young Tunisian models in outfits that celebrated artisanal expertise with modern silhouettes, such as a black sleeveless fuchsia-trimmed burnus, a Tunisian-inspired jubba from Florence, and a tailored suit trimmed with Tunisian embroidery (see Figure 4.3). Articles offered instructions on how to turn a “bedouin blouse” into a beach cover-up.68 While they reluctantly acknowledged the imperfections of Tunisian manufacturing, Faiza implored readers to commit to local production and “help us to build a better nation.”

Figure 4.3 The mini recast within Tunisian styles. Faiza cover, August 1967.

67 68

“Et voilà les foulards,” Faiza, August 1965, 26–27. The black burnus belonged to Wassila Bourguiba; see, respectively, the February–March 1966, November–December 1966, and March–April 1967 issues; and “Les robes pratiques: Une idée choc, la robe ‘kif,’” Faiza, July– August 1962, 62. At least one fashion spread in Al-Mar’a promoted a similar reinvention of national dress by cutting traditional clothing into new patterns. “Al-miliya fi shakilha al-jadid,” Al-Mar’a, April 1966. Interestingly, an inverse stylistic borrowing is featured in Vogue’s July 1966 fashion section “The Beautiful People in Caftans,” adorned with photographs of high society women such as the wife of the Baron d’Erlanger in a black burnus embroidered in magenta sitting outside their villa in Sidi Bou Said. Vogue 148, no. 1 (July 1, 1966): 66–73.

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While fashions have long crossed political borders, any examination of fashion and production needs to account for “the global power relations embodied in clothing systems.” As Sandra Niessen argues, “understanding globalized fashion requires dissection of the global relations built into Western dress and the implications of the global economy for clothing traditions everywhere.”69 Tunisian textiles lacked the infrastructure and market available to European centers of design, and was further undercut by low-cost imported clothing available as secondhand imports, a profitable market also organized by a state agency.70 By the 1960s and 1970s, Turkey was also a manufacturing center for European and North American companies due to low-cost production. In order to be competitive, Turkish companies turned to local culture for inspiration and distinctive designs.71 Faiza’s presentation of fashion as an iteration of national pride and display of economic solidarity placed conscientious consumerism over questions of quality or trendiness. It was not the visibility of women’s bodies that marked the nation’s modernity per se, but the beauty and appeal of Tunisian artistry. The attempt to bring industrial labor into discourses about fashion and modern womanhood fractured along socioeconomic lines. Touring a UNFT knitting center in Marsa, a UGTT-backed clothing cooperative, and a SOGICOT spinning factory in Qsar Hellal, synopses of production, organization, and the economic viability of these enterprises was similar in Femme and Faiza.72 Articles included photographs of finished products such as colorful knit sweaters and a successful challenge to recreate a Chanel-inspired velour blazer with silk lining. With comments on décor, the “patience and dexterity” of women workers, and how a factory contributed to the postcolonial transformation in the life of the town, industry was presented as both

69

70 71

72

Sandra Niessen, “Afterword: Fashion’s Fallacy,” in Modern Fashion Traditions, 211, 216. Chida, “Tunisian Dress,” 89. The hybrid styles combined Turkish clothing or decoration with European fashion aesthetics. Sakir Ozudogru, “Ottoman Costume in the Context of Modern Turkish Fashion Design,” in Jansen and Craik, eds., Modern Fashion Traditions, 121–23, 28–29. Sonia Maarouf, “Le centre de tricotage de la Marsa: De l’apprentissage à l’unité,” Femme, February–April 1966, 10–11; “Stage de haute couture,” Femme, March–April 1967, 14–15.

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feminine and modern. In addition, Faiza’s reporters stopped to talk with women on the factory floor about their jobs, their lives, and how they used their income. Rafia Boubaker, a twenty-two-year-old newlywed who met her husband at work, seems to represent proper fashion sensibilities. She is described as “carefully made-up” and wearing “a gold chain hidden by the pink blouse of working women.” Yet her interest in fashion is unclear. She chews gum, has two gold teeth, and shares a cigarette with the reporter explaining how she divided her salary between helping her mother, the repayment of debts, and saving with her husband to buy an apartment.73 If working women could make Chanel, as the article title indicated, it was not clear that they cared to wear it.74 The miniskirt did not disappear from vitrines or from public consciousness, and neither had veils. In a range of colors, fabrics, and styles, rural and urban women covered their hair. For instance, female employees at the Qsar Hellal factory wore a pink apron and navy-blue kerchief. That such a uniform was concomitant with salaried employment in the mixed-gender workplace of the factory remained unaddressed, and there was little elaboration on the fact that the SOGICOT factory produced malaya. Despite the limits in promoting made-inTunisia styles and inability to overcome the middle-class premises of fashion, Faiza sought to broaden and pluralize understandings of dress within constructions of modern womanhood. This rejected presidential rhetoric associating women’s emancipation, debauchery, and miniskirts, by avoiding parochial fears about the foreign origin of certain styles and turning purchasing power into an act of patriotism. Attention to design and the textile industry illustrated women’s productive capacities while suggesting that homemade replicas subverted 73

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Her supervisor, Fatma El Marrakchi, also dissents from the ideals of middleclass womanhood, reporting that she was too tired to attend evening literacy classes and rarely went to the movies, instead preferring sleeping and going to the hammam. Ferial, “Ouvrières de Tunisie, elles peuvent faire du ‘Chanel,’” Faiza, June 1960, 17–19. Mahbouba bent Hamadi, a seventeen-year-old working at the national dairy processing facility, made clear that she lacked the time and money for leisure activities, going out primarily to run errands. “Mahbouba et M’barka a l’usine,” Faiza, April 1–May 15, 1966, 34–35. See also Douja, “Tricot-tricot,” Faiza, December 1960, 16–17. One interviewee, Jelila, mentioned clothes but was primarily helping her family and saving for her trousseau. Zohra El Amri, “De la khellala au tergal,” Faiza, July 1967, 32–35.

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the dominance of the capitalist market. Yet debates over gender politics, family life, and women’s presence in city spaces reinforced the association of women with national modernity and the continued fixation on women’s bodies and clothing.

Respectability and Men’s Dress: For “Men to Remain Men” Notions of proper dress were gender-specific, but they certainly included men. For starters, that the exhibitionism of miniskirts would “make their husbands a laughing-stock,” in Bourguiba’s phrasing, underscored how women’s dress had repercussions on men and masculinity. As Marilyn Booth observed, the “woman question” was a conversation full of implications for men.75 In fact, Tunisia’s family law and debates about women’s role in postcolonial society required the reassertion of patriarchy; as Bourguiba explained at the outset, the Majalla did not permit women to “reject a father’s or a husband’s authority.” That women’s rights transformed gender roles and blurred their boundaries was similarly evident in Bourguiba’s insistence that he expected “women to remain women and men to remain men.”76 Ideas about masculinity and manhood that were projected onto cultural understandings of dress were the product of social and political concerns about reasserting gender roles and patriarchal control. The creation of a hierarchy of men’s dress along progressive parameters that distinguished rural from urban shaped relations between men by contributing to and sustaining hierarchies of age, class, and region.77 Masculinity was not a given characteristic of all men, but an expression of power established through class- and regionally specific behavioral norms constructing adulthood to exclude students and youth. Transnational activism and political contestation in the 1960s and early 1970s enhanced conservative fears about foreign influences, particularly among youth. Men’s dress and manners were “politically 75

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Marilyn Booth, “Woman in Islam: Men and the ‘Women’s Press’ in Turn-of-the20th-Century Egypt,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 33 (2001): 171–201. Bourguiba, The State Carries On, 13. Sinha understands masculinity as relations between men, whether in terms of cultural, material, or ideological representations. See Mrinalini Sinha, “Giving Masculinity a History: Some Contributions from the Historiography of Colonial India,” Gender and History 11, no. 3 (1999).

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charged sites of cultural contestation,” as Wilson Jacob insightfully illustrated in Egypt, where masculinity and sovereignty cannot be completely intelligible without reference to the international.78 Men’s dress, as defined by packages from the National Clothing Council, consisted of a suit, a coat, two checkered dress shirts, two knits, two sweaters, two pairs of underwear, and three pairs of socks, with an optional coat at a slightly higher cost.79 In addition, men employed by the state were expected to shave daily, and the president instructed them to completely button their shirts to cover all chest hair.80 Being presentable included attention to hygiene, and men were told that traditional clothing was not “appropriate for the modern workplace” and that turbans were “a nest of germs.”81 In the words of Abdelhamid Jeguim, the commissioner in charge of the clothing campaign, “men’s dress is not merely an individual question, it concerns the entire nation.”82 This located men’s clothing within the symbolic realm of “national evolution.” Notions of appropriate dress incorporated concerns about men’s behavior. Giving a speech to state employees and “young cadres,” Bourguiba urged morality, righteousness, and resisting material temptations. The state was a major employer, increasing the number of salaried administrative positions over the first four years of independence from 12,000 to 80,000, with 18.8 percent of urban employees working for the government. Recounting anecdotes of postal employees stealing stamps, a manager on a public works project selling meal 78

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Wilson Chacko Jacob, Working out Egypt: Effendi Masculinity and Subject Formation in Colonial Modernity, 1870–1940 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 186–225. “500,000 trousseaux sont délà prêt à la vente,” La Presse, September 16, 1967, 7. Clothes would be given as an annual bonus to employees in need. Quoting a presidential speech, “Une société évoluée se doit de mettre en ordre son langage comme ses us et coutumes.” La Presse, October 12, 1966, 1, 7. The women’s press had less to say on the topic besides Faiza suggesting that men “do” wear button-down shirts and “don’t” let their hair grow long. Simone Puck, “Ce que nous n’aimons pas chez vous, Monsieur,” Faiza, August–September 1962, 66–67. The fashion section in Femme often included children’s dress (mode pour enfants) but did not mention men. Anne Guerin, “Mais ou seront les melias d’antan?,” Faiza, May–June 1967, 32–33. “L’habillement: Une affaire de dignité nationale,” La Presse, August 9, 1967, 2. Bin Salih, as minister of economic planning, suggested punitive measures against those who appeared in public without proper dress. “500,000 trousseaux sont déja prêts à la vente,” 7.

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tickets, and a school principal who profited from free meals, Bourguiba construed their acts as a threat to the state, identifying the men by name in a spectacle of public shaming. Framing their employment as an opportunity granted by the patriarchal state, they had violated its trust, meriting “penalization,” “punishment,” and “repression.” Under the heading of “conscience,” he moralized on men’s behavior as essential to national order, though the term lacked the sexual connotations it held when applied to women.83 The behavior of students was also scrutinized in relation to standards of manhood and middle-class respectability represented in dress. As future ministers or civil servants, students were idealized as the “hope of the nation.”84 Yet their dependence on scholarships positioned them as children benefiting from the benevolence of the patriarchal state. Bourguiba projected a fatherly role, offering students advice on correct behavior (studying and a consideration of one’s duty to the nation) versus incorrect behavior (material concerns, youthful entertainment, and discussing politics).85 Similar concerns permeated public opinion, with hints that students’ clothes signaled leisure and privilege. “It would be very useful to orient our youth in ways beneficial to the nation,” wrote one man to Jeune Afrique, complaining that instead of building schools or roads, they spent their vacations reading the newspaper in cafés or chasing girls and were concerned with snobbish matters such as clothing.86 “No one can ignore the attention the Tunisian government dotes on students,” wrote another. Even though this “elite” played an important role “in the construction of a future Tunisia,” he wondered whether they were “worth the lofty attention from which they benefit.” “Do they serve as a model to other citizens?” He thought not.87 83

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Habib Bourguiba, Conscience as the Basis of Society (Tunis: Secretatiat of State for Cultural Affairs and Orientation, 1964). From a July 27, 1956, speech quoted in Dhifallah, “Bourguiba et les étudiants,” 316. “Le président Bourguiba: Loyauté et sincérité doivent guider toutes les démarches de votre pensée,” La Presse, August 16, 1966, 4; Habib Bourguiba, Address to Students on the Importance of Concentrating on Their Studies: Address Given before Tunisian Students at the Public Hall, Monastir, on 19th August 1962 (Tunis: Secrétariat d’Etat aux Affaires Culturelles et à l’Information, 1962). Bechir Labbouz, “La trahison des clercs,” Jeune Afrique, January 24, 1962, 3. B. “Vaniteux et égoïstes,” Jeune Afrique, January 24, 1965, 4–5. Similar criticisms were leveled at female students who engaged in seemingly frivolous pastimes and thus failed to demonstrate their devotion to the nation. T.T., “On

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References to the irresponsibility of students resonated with reporting on youth that associated music, leisure, and clothing with immaturity, delinquency, and social destabilization. For instance, colloquial references to “yé-yé” culture, as in the “yeah, yeah, yeah” of the Beatles’ “She Loves You” refrain, presented popular music as European, foreign, at best a sign of frivolity, and at worst undermining the integrity of the nation.88 English terms such as “beatnik” were used in articles about aimless and lackluster adolescents whose genderbending clothing hinted at other impropriety: “boys or girls? We cannot tell them apart with their hair so long and they all wear pants.”89 A reporter meeting “a beatnik, a pure, authentic beatnik” joked that he needed to bring along a friend with long hair and faded jeans. The twenty-year-old Brit, Chriss, who wandered the streets of Tunis with his guitar, appreciated Tunisian girls, James Brown, and the Beatles. Taken as representative of a youthful generation dissatisfied with the way adults run the world, Chriss declared, “I want to live without responsibilities.” Other reports described beatniks as petty thieves stealing for the thrill and as drug users purchasing over-thecounter medication with alcohol to get high.90 Similar linking of morality to criminalization through the focus on “yéyé youth” in Mali merged supposed cultural transgression with political subversion.91 The ensuing portrait in the Tunisian press of the youthful look of long hair and lack of gender distinction and musical tastes in English rock bands, with an attitude of lazy disengagement or criminality, suggested visible signs of irresponsibility or lawlessness.

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rit trop fort puis on vient jouer aux neurastheniques,” Faiza, December 1961, 12. Rolling Stones albums were also popular. F.B., “Disques: Les ‘yé-yé’ sont les plus demandés à Tunis,” La Presse, August 21, 1966, 3. “‘Beatniks’ à Prague,” La Presse, July 3, 1966, 8. See, for instance, “Plus d’euphorie à bon marché pour les beatniks du Côte d’Azur,” La Presse, August 6, 1966, 6; Jean-Pierre Tuil, “Chriss: ‘Je veux vivre sans responsabilités’ – Un beatnik au physique de Rimbaud,” La Presse, August 14, 1966, 2; M.L.T., “Trois ‘yé-yé’ volent pour le goût du risque,” La Presse, February 15, 1966, 2. Male fashions such as long hair and tight pants were framed as incompatible with the socialist rhetoric of unity and uniformity by hinting at individual consumerism. Youth-led vice squads shaved the heads of boys transgressing these codes, and also enacted violence against girls in miniskirts. Ophelie Rillon, “Rebellious Bodies: Urban Youth Fashion in the Sixties and Seventies in Mali,” in Chen et al., eds., The Routledge Handbook of the Global Sixties.

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The fixation with global youth culture crystallized around a local event, the brief opening of an upscale nightclub called the Bey’s Palladium. Nicknamed Zéro de Conduite, a cheeky reference to its poor reputation, it was credited with popularizing the mid-1960s dance craze, the jerk.92 Frequented by the elite, including the son of the president, al-Habib Bourguiba Jr., and Madeleine Malraux, wife of the French minister of culture, rumors about the lewd behavior of clubbers provoked Bourguiba to denounce “barefoot, long-haired imitators of the Beatles,” who would make a poor impression on tourists.93 Tunisian identity was defined under the gaze of foreigners in line with a sartorially demarcated middle-class respectability. Whether in the office or at the club, men’s loyalty to the patriarchal order was substantiated and thwarted by their dress. Chastising young bachelors for their fashion choices and subsidizing clothing packages, the state alternated between punitive measures and rewards to increase sartorial uniformity across regional and class difference.

The Meaning of Jeans Even with newspapers expressing disdain for pampered students and defending national culture from untoward foreign influences, there was little consensus on the symbolism of shaggy hair and men’s clothing styles.94 Though Faiza generally presented fashion as a feminine concern, its series on daily life invited men into conversations about dress.95 One segment contrasted the styles of two young middleclass bachelors, ‘Azuz and ‘Aziz, with different personalities and tastes. ‘Azuz, a thirty-year-old civil servant, always wore a tie, shaved, and was so attentive to cleanliness that he bleached his underwear. He 92 93

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“Zéro de conduite,” Jeune Afrique, August 7, 1966, 39. Ambassadors from Turkey and Lebanon as well as other prominent political figures, including Beji Caid El-Sebsi, Chadli Kilibi, and Fouad Mebaza, were among the 2,000-plus guests reportedly in attendance on its opening night. “Pour la fin de l’année scolaire le Gotha tunisien déchaine un zéro de conduite” and “Carthage: Une nuit de jerk qui s’est terminée par du stambeli,” La Presse, July 2 and 17, 1966, 3; Bourguiba, Birth Control; “Bourguiba à la t.v.” Even self-identified nationalists who favored closing the Bey’s Palladium did not necessarily mention its dress code. M. Z., “L’affaire du ‘Bey’s,’” Jeune Afrique, September 18, 1966, 2. An earlier piece on men and fashion, “La mode et eux,” represented men’s opinions on how women should (and should not) dress. Faiza, February 1960, 30–43.

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criticized his roommate for his “pants that were never ironed and Beatles-style hair.” But the twenty-four-year-old artist ‘Aziz, in black corduroys, a turtleneck, and blazer, boasted that his jeans were a recent acquisition from Paris. For ‘Aziz, dress was also practical, and his style was more appropriate for his line of work. Asked to comment on whether peasants should be urged “to abandon the turban and the melia, to be more sanitary, to dress like Europeans,” neither was particularly inspired. ‘Azuz found the turban useful protection from dirt, and for ‘Aziz these signs of a Tunisian “personality” were worthy of keeping. Rejecting the overemphasis on appearances: “You have to change people’s mentality, not their clothes.”96 Alternating between propriety, respectability, and practicality, these divergent views were left unreconciled. In another segment, a jebba-clad merchant in Tunis’s main marketplace expressed similarly complex and contradictory views on clothing. Though he owned a jacket and pants that he wore on occasion, Si Bashir had bought his clothes from the same neighboring shop for decades. Asked why he mainly dressed “Tunisian,” the fifty-sevenyear-old replied, “My goodness, I’ve never thought about it.” Regardless of whether it was a habit or was appropriate for his age, he offered that young people should “dress the way they want to.” His children all dressed in European styles, as was expected these days. The conversation continued: What did Si Bashir think of tight-fitting, brightly colored pants that certain youth wore to be trendy? “It’s important to be modern, without forgetting modesty, I would never let my sons dress like women or like clowns. “The youth of Tunis are now like tourists, there are even some who wear their hair long!” Si Bashir’s indignation is reaching its peak . . . or almost. Because he is yet to weigh in on women’s fashions. I had to persistently question him on that because at first – being a gentleman – he hid behind a modest “that doesn’t concern me.” But soon his anger exploded. “It’s shameful. It is important to remember that we are Muslims. I am thankful to President Bourguiba for putting an end to all of that.”

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Faiza steered the interview toward questions of women’s dress, the purchasing power of women, and Tunisian products, before turning to men’s fashion. “Faut-il acheter tunisien?,” Faiza, May–June 1967, 27–29.

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The merchant’s eventual ire for certain fashions was not automatic, as indicated by his initial deference to youthful choice and acceptance of European stylistic models. Instead, the journalist’s prodding and provocation constitutes a process of shaping his initial position of noninterference into one of moral indignation. The lengthy quote illustrates the politicization of clothing as a facet of national identity and a symbol of a proper social order of distinct gender roles. However, Si Bashir returned to the matter of individual preferences when asked about the modernization of bedouin dress: “It’s a fine idea,” he opined, “to encourage people towards cleanliness. As far as clothing is considered, I do not agree. Personally, I am not interested in changing the way I dress, and I don’t plan to later in life. Bedouin men and women are nicely dressed. I like the melia. We are free, right? Let everyone dress how they want.”97

Here an older man, depicted as conservative or traditional in his clothing choices, refuses the middle-class basis of respectability and rejects the association between traditional Tunisian clothing (whether his own or that of bedouin) and backwardness. These conversations shed insight on the fraught process of assigning cultural values to clothing, and men’s clothing in particular. Whereas ‘Aziz dismissed the standardization of men’s appearance as superficial, Si Bashir identified diversity and autonomy in dress as a mark of the self-determined postcolonial citizen in a thoughtful commentary on the relationship between modernity and choice.

Patriarchy and Gendered Rebellion Regime efforts to create visual unity through men’s dress occurred during a period of political contestation that lasted from the early 1960s into the early 1970s in the first prolonged opposition to Dustur hegemony.98 Bourguiba turned policy debates and calls for democratization into a personal attack, prompting not only punitive responses, but a reassertion of his patriarchal authority by depicting 97 98

“Faut-il acheter tunisien?,” 25–26. On the significance of the protests as a sustained opposition and their transnational reach, see Burleigh Hendrickson, “March 1968: Practicing Transnational Activism from Tunis to Paris,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 44, no. 4 (2012).

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protesters as disobedient, ungrateful, and driven by foreign designs. Calls to reform the university and Bourguiba’s harsh and punitive response resemble patterns of youthful resistance and state repression in West Germany, the United States, France, the Soviet Union, and China in 1968, many of which reference these transnational connections.99 Yet as much as global events such as the American war in Vietnam and the Israeli occupation of Palestine resonated with and connected protestors around the globe, Abdullah Al-Arian insists on the local nature of the critique of government violence, failures of economic development, and demands for freedoms in worker’s strikes and student protests in Egypt in 1967 and 1968.100 The decade after the opening of the University of Tunis witnessed curricular expansion and increasing enrollments.101 The Tunisian university was a recruiting ground for the party, primarily through the student union, the UGET, which included branches in Tunis and abroad. Prominent UGET figures were incorporated into government office following independence, solidifying the reputation of UGET leadership as “political careerists.”102 Resistance to the use of national organizations as satellites of the ruling party articulated by leftists led to their exclusion from positions of authority and the defection of a progressive block during the 1962–63 academic year.103 Dustur loyalists rejecting calls for internal reform at the 1964 UGET congress exacerbated ideological differences with progressive and leftist students who were inspired by Third World radicalism, were exposed to Nasser’s Arab socialism and Ba’athism, and who mingled with student activists from Morocco and Algeria.104 Tunisians studying in Paris 99 100

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Suri, Power and Protest, 167. Abdullah Al-Arian, “The Revival of Protest in Egypt on the Eve of Sadat,” in Chen et al., eds., The Routledge Handbook of the Global Sixties. According to the Ministry of Education, the number of students in institutes of higher education increased from 2,309 during the academic year 1961–62 to nearly 12,000 just over a decade later, not including approximately 3,000 Tunisians studying abroad. Monastiri, “Chronique sociale et culturelle Tunisie 1972,” 525. Moore and Hochschild, “Student Unions in North African Politics.” Perspectives 1 (December 1963); Dhifallah, “Bourguiba et les étudiants,” 318–19. It was at this time that the Tunisian Communist party was dissolved. “Où en sont les étudiants maghrébins?,” Jeune Afrique, January 17, 1965, 23; “Elections à l’UGET de Paris,” Jeune Afrique, December 5, 1965, 35. The Ba’thist and Pan-Arab influences were particularly strong among the approximately 150 Tunisian students in Damascus. Michel Béchir Ayari,

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formed GEAST, the Groupe d’Étude et d’Action Socialiste Tunisien (Tunisian Socialist Action and Study Group), known by the title of their publication, Perspectives, or simply as the Group. The selfidentified revolutionary intellectuals sought to form alliances with workers, accepting their role as an educated vanguard promoting policy reform within the realms of economic development and international affairs.105 While rejecting the limited nature of Tunisian socialism and dependence on the United States, their vision of development and commitment to the nation, as indicated by the journal’s subheading “for a better Tunisia (pour une Tunisie meilleure),” aligned with that of the state.106 Between 1964 and 1966, many of the early members of Perspectives completed their studies and returned to Tunisia where some began positions in the government (notably Gilbert Naccache, an agricultural engineer). Noureddine ben Khader (Nur al-Din bin Khader), one of the leaders of Perspectives, later explained that while many shared Bourguiba’s vision of national modernity, it was their critique of imperialism that made them “his illegitimate children.”107 This hints at the hierarchical relations between students and the regime, identified in their denunciation of the socioeconomic hierarchies replicated within the university as they chafed against its ideological homogeneity, and students’ infantilizing material dependence on the regime. Calling out “the regime’s paternalist attitude toward them and the shameless way it manipulated the UGET,” they drew attention to the paternalism of Tunisian political structures and associational life dominated by men.108 Tunisian

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“Tolérance et transgressivité: Le jeu à somme nulle des gauchistes et des islamistes tunisiens,” L’Année du Maghreb 5 (2009): 187, 93–94. For instance, they denounced how agrarian reform enriched the national bourgeoisie, exacerbated regional inequalities by investing in fertile and wealthier regions, and amounted to little more than the “prostitution” of the concept of socialism. “Editorial,” Perspectives Tunisiennes, December 1963, 1–2. On their class status and efforts to ally with the working class after 1970, see “Deux années de travail au sein de la classe ouvrière tunisienne,” Perspectives Tunisiennes, July 1972. Demographic growth was also described as a problem that contributed to poverty. “Les problèmes agraires en Tunisie: Les problèmes economiques et humains de l’agriculture tunisienne” and “Kasserine,” Perspectives Tunisiennes, February 1964, 7–21, 42–43. Michel Camau and Vincent Geisser, “Noureddine Ben Khader: Entretien,” in Habib héritage, 542. Adel S., “La lutte des étudiants,” Perspectives, November 1968, 10–13.

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sociologist Aziz Krichen, who had been imprisoned for his involvement with Perspectives, theorized that patriarchal relations with students were the manifestation of Bourguiba’s role as procreator and protector of society more broadly. Political opposition, especially as articulated by the younger generation, “was never considered as an objective matter of politics, that should be dealt with as such [on a political level] with consideration and with an open mind; in contrast, he [Bourguiba] considered it as an unacceptable act of disobedience, the manifestation of a spoiled and criminal lack of gratitude that needed to be eliminated and destroyed.”109 University students and the Tunisian government expected that they would contribute to the nation and staff its bureaucracy, as their studies would prepare them “to assume their responsibilities as citizens and civil servants.”110 Bourguiba’s response to protests during the 1966–67 school year clarified that this meant sustaining its bourgeois order and respecting its hierarchies. When the arrest of two students following a disagreement with a police officer on a bus fueled anger at multiple colleges and solidarity strikes at high schools in December 1966, the state responded punitively making over two hundred arrests.111 According to the government, a few troublemakers exploited the incident, and the disciplinary response was marked by Bourguiba’s “bitterness,” considering the role he assigned to “youth in general and students in particular,” who should sacrifice for the nation instead of acting “spoiled [and] pampered.” “This is all true,” continued Jeune Afrique. “Tunisian students have grants and many financial benefits. They are for the most part privileged which is normal as they represent the Tunisia of tomorrow. But in Bourguiba’s estimation this implies and maintains their participation in the system. Students, for him are leaders with all that this implies in terms of obedience, efficiency, and discipline.”112 A second facet of the regime narrative pointed toward foreign interference, for instance, linking the December protests to student activism in Paris and Brussels. Demonstrations targeting the American cultural center and the US and British embassies followed the Arab loss in the Six-Day War and Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip 109 110

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Krichen, Le syndrome Bourguiba, 26, 81, 115, 20. Quoting from a speech to the UGET administrative council. “Le president Bourguiba: loyauté et sincerité doivent guider toutes les démarches de votre pensée,” La Presse, August 16, 1966, 4. See the special issue Perspectives Tunisiennes, January 1967. “Pourquoi ce drame?,” Jeune Afrique, January 1, 1967, 19.

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in June 1967. For leftists of GEAST this was an anti-imperialist critique of the regime’s political alliances in accord with their advocacy of AfroAsian solidarity and pan-Arabism, but the government narrative depicted rioters as motivated by an anti-Israeli stance, fanning the flames of tension between religious communities.113 The state swiftly arrested, expelled, or imprisoned protestors, subjecting many to torture. Farcical political trials and heavy sentences contributed to additional protests into January and March 1968, including the arrest and detention of faculty such as Habib Attia at CERES.114 Michel Foucault, teaching in Tunis at the time, hoped to testify on behalf of Ahmed Othmani (Ahmad ‘Uthmani) and, after returning to Paris in October 1968, contributed to funding his defense.115 Alongside these international reverberations, the regime pointed toward Cairo and Damascus, presenting the philosophy student Mohamed Ben Jennet (Bin Jannat) as the ringleader, highlighting his “extremist positions and sympathies for the Muslim Brothers.”116 At the trial, passages from Marx, Lenin, and Mao were read to further illustrate their obedience to foreign designs, with its supposed atheism “showing to the Muslim Tunisian people that these young men (jeunes) are not their sons.”117 Regime efforts to diffuse campus protests by diverting their energies 113

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GEAST solidarity with Palestine was based on antagonism for US imperialism, of which Israel and Tunisia were both agents. “La question palestinienne dans ses rapports avec le développement de la lutte révolutionnaire en Tunisie,” Perspectives, February 1968, BDIC, Fonds Othmani. In the ensuing riots where Jewish businesses were targeted, members of Perspectives point toward the regime as encouraging or condoning violence. Naccache, a Tunisian Jew, explains that their critique was a condemnation of Israeli aggression that the Dustur sought to frame as “flare up of racist violence.” Naccache, Qu’as-tu fait de ta jeunesse, 84–85. Torture was conducted by a branch of security services under the Minister of the Interior in police stations and a farm, in the late 1960s and into the 1970s; see, for instance, Ahmed Ben Othman, “Répression en Tunisie,” Les Temps Modernes, no. 393 (1979). Sentences included forced conscription, expulsion, and to ten- and twenty-year incarceration. Gerard Fellous, “Michel Foucault,” La Presse de Tunisie, April 12, 1967, 3, reprinted in Dits et ecrits, vol. 1: 608–12, quoted from Marnia Lazreg, Foucault’s Orient: The Conundrum of Cultural Difference, from Tunisia to Japan (New York: Berghahn Books, 2017), 162–63. On their trials and the international response, see Darmon, “La Tunisie en danger.” “Tunis: Les troublions chatiés,” Jeune Afrique, August 20, 1967, 20–21. “A la lumière du procès du GEAST,” Perspectives Tunisiennes, June 1969; “Procès à Tunis (Esprit, octobre 1968),” Perspectives Tunisiennes, November 1968, 7–8.

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toward pious pursuits with the Association de Sauveguarde du Coran (Association for the Defense of the Qur’an) in 1970, were evidenced in the description of its goal as “protecting national identity and defending youth from nefarious cultural influences resulting from contact with different ideological currents across the world.”118 Whether gesturing toward Paris, Beijing, or Cairo, students’ disregard for filial loyalty was portrayed as a foreign menace and threat to national security. Arrests early in 1970 led to another cycle of protests, arrests, and trials from 1970 to 1972, with calls for democratization at the university, an extraordinary meeting of the UGET, and new elections to its executive body. A state-led media campaign to control the public narrative surrounding protests sought to further discredit the student movement.119 The national assembly voted in March 1972 to close universities until the following September (though they were reopened in April).120 Prime Minister Nouira hyperbolically claimed the nation was under attack and questioned the loyalty of students, in a February 1972 rally of national organizations at a major sports arena near the capital to display national unity.121 Building on the popular perception of students as immature and youth culture as degenerate, their criticism attributed this to misguided foreign ideologies, to the disobedience of ungrateful youth, and not as a form of resistance to the one-party state.122 This vision was articulated during trials, with one of their lawyers noting “the tone employed during the questioning of the defendants was meant to be paternal, it followed that the latter appeared as spoiled and irresponsible children.”123 Although students

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It was located under Ministry of National Education. L’Action, January 19, 1971, quoted in Ayari, “Tolérance et transgressivité,” 194. Hafsia complained frequently of the premeditated nature of this propaganda campaign in which students had no voice. Hafsia, Instants de vie chronique familière, 82. Ayari, “Tolérance et transgressivité”; Monastiri, “Chronique sociale et culturelle Tunisie 1972.” Though representatives of national organizations echoed such sentiments demonstrating support for the party line, the UNFT and Radhia Haddad were not present. “Pourquoi ce drame?,” 19; Dorra Bouzid, “Etudiants en colère, pourquoi?,” Faiza, November–December 1966, 6–7. Jeanne Rouil Furet, “Rapport sur le procès de Tunis du 5 mars 1973,” BDIC, Fonds Othmani, sol 39.

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and youth were often also men, the government understood the opposition in gendered terms as a contest over masculinity and patriarchy.

Women and the Student Movement Much of the standard narrative of student activism focuses on men and obscures women’s involvement or what GEAST described as “the significant participation of female students in the demonstrations of January and March 1968.”124 Ben Khader praised the convivial nature of relations between the “Tunisian girls” and boys in the Group, whether at cafés or demonstrations, as marked by mutual respect.125 Contemporary observers concur, with Foucault praising the “girls and boys who took formidable risks by writing a tract, passing it around or calling for a strike” in 1967, and Jelila Hafsia recorded in her diary that she sheltered female students with bruises and black eyes who had been beaten in front of the university in March 1968.126 Though the upper grades at one girls’ school went on strike in the mobilizations of early 1970 demanding democratic reforms and a national union representing high school students, the overall proportion of female participants is not clear.127 A Marxist-Leninist publication, questions of women’s rights do not figure prominently in Perspectives, though gender segregation in university housing was included as representative of the “paternalistic attitude of the regime” that contributed to “sexual oppression.” While arguing that “the separation in dormitories and even in cafeterias” was another instance of how they were treated as adolescents, their claim that the “problems of male–female relations are no more resolved than they were in the past” resonates with the state feminist critique of women’s seclusion and largely syncs with the emphasis on women’s public presence as a symbol of modernity.128 Another text appeared to 124

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“A la lumière du procès du GEAST: Les acquis et les perspectives de la lutte révolutionnaire en Tunisie,” Perspectives Tunisiennes, June 1969. He mentions only Faouzia Rekik, the wife of Mohamed Charfi. Camau and Geisser, “Noureddine Ben Khader: Entretien.” From an interview with D. Trombadori cited in Lazreg, Foucault’s Orient, 169. Hafsia, Instants de vie chronique familière, 55–57. Lycée de jeunes fille de rue du pasha (The School on Pasha Street), “Mouvement de fevrier 1972 en Tunisie: Un nouveau bond dans le combat de la jeunesse intellectuelle,” Perspectives Tunisiennes, July 1972. Adel S., “La lutte des étudiants.”

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praise the regime, with a list of accomplishments since independence including “the secularism of the state and the relatively extensive liberation [libération assez poussée] of women that the personal status code has given her from a juridical perspective.”129 This emphasis on women’s rights rooted in state legislation suggests that the group shared much with the regime’s depiction of modern womanhood. Narratives about women’s involvement were constructed in relation to state feminism, or what Naccache later termed GEAST’s “advanced ideology, particularly regarding relations between the sexes.”130 The state released women defendants in 1967–68 based on what Perspectives described as fear that their convictions would lead to further protests. A similar approach was indicated by the pardoning of three young women, Souad Yaakoub, Mariam Magroune, and Faouzia Abbes, shortly after their 1974 sentencing. Received by the president in his palace, “they expressed their joy and gratitude for his paternal generosity,” offering to take care “in the future to be worthy of the esteem and confidence that he placed in them.”131 In contrast, the activists claimed parity between men and women as “the trial against our group is the first political trial where women figure among the accused, demonstrating that women’s liberation and her participation in revolutionary struggles are realities for us.”132 The voices of women activists are less evident in the sources and do not indicate their numbers or roles within the Group. However, they do indicate efforts to counter the hegemonic narratives of state feminism. Simone Lellouche, a defendant in 1968 from a Tunisian Jewish family, was involved with Perspectives from the early years when she was studying in Paris. A high school science teacher at the time of the 1967 protests, she was exiled to France for her participation and charged in absentia. Allowed to return to Tunis after the 1970 amnesty, marrying Othmani, she was rearrested on the same charges in January 1972, with her sentencing and a second expulsion contributing to the wave of strikes that February. She remained active in 129

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“Les caractéristiques de la période actuelle de développement de la Tunisie et les instruments de la révolution arabe,” BDIC, Fonds Othmani, sol 5. Naccache, Qu’as-tu fait de ta jeunesse, 139. Male defendants were also encouraged by the regime to ask for pardons. “President Bourguiba amnistie trois étudiantes,” ProModes, July 1974, 4. From what I can tell, only men were sentenced with prison terms and military service in the 1968 trials. “A la lumière du procès du GEAST.”

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multiple solidarity organizations in Paris, disseminating information about events in Tunis to the diaspora and international supporters. At a press conference in Brussels, she spoke of repression, arguing that the persecution of Tunisian women revealed that the image of Bourguiba as liberator of women was based on myth.133 ‘Aisha ben ‘Abed was also a victim of continued state repression in 1972. Ben ‘Abed, an archeologist and the only woman facing trial in 1972, was held in solitary confinement in the women’s prison in Tunis. In addition to the charges of disseminating false information and membership in an illegal organization, Ben ‘Abed was tried and sentenced for her relationship with Ben Khader, as the two lived together as a couple (and subsequently married). Ben Khader was charged with adultery since his divorce with his first wife Leila had not been finalized. During the trial, the judge questioned her reputation and presented her as “a debauchée – as she engaged in forbidden sexual relations.” Ben ‘Abed apparently responded that “her personal life was no one else’s business.”134 The regime considered rebellion as an affair between men and a challenge to masculinity, incorporating women within patriarchal narratives that treated them with greater caution and belevolence. While GEAST presented women’s participation alongside men as an aspect of their revolutionary character, their assessments of women’s rights remained largely bound by hegemonic narratives of modern womanhood, utilizing women’s status as a mark of progress. In their words and actions, women protestors such as Simone Lellouche and ‘Aisha ben ‘Abed resisted the limits of these narratives. The state trivialized student engagement with economic development and foreign policy as apolitical by blurring the distinctions between youth, college students, and superficial aspects of transnational culture. Transgression was defined through references to European and American popular culture and foreign words in an amalgam of youthful pastimes (dancing, surprise parties) and countercultural trends (the Beatles, the twist, the jerk), though the political ideologies they embraced were not necessarily of the same provenance. Intertwined with postcolonial leisure practices and coed socializing, the 133

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Y. Van de Vloet, “Mouvement unifié belge des étudiants francophone,” Bruxelles, March 4, 1973, BDIC, Fonds Othmani, sol 39. Handwritten note, “Procès de GEAST du 5/3/73,” BDIC, Fonds Othmani, sol 39.

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moral concerns indicate the strict delineation of gendered boundaries within the increasingly heterosocial public sphere and very limited political arena.

Conclusion The debate over dress encompassed authoritarian politics and cultural insularity in defining the patriarchal state’s relations with women and men. Restrictions on women’s hemlines and makeup contained women’s rights within official parameters of modern womanhood, whereas the respectability of the suit stood for the middle-class norms of civil servants and the presumed filial obedience of students. Even though cultural meanings of men’s dress remained fluid, ideas of respectability permeated public opinion, denigrating students as spoiled or privileged. Throughout these conversations, the foreign provenance of political ideologies, from Marxism to Mao, and cultural trends such as British music, French skirts, or Egyptian movies, signaled a threat to the nation, national security, and national identity. Viewing independence as a new beginning, the government celebrated the younger generation as an embodiment of the nation’s promising future. Nationalist commitment in this new society, however, required public performance of obedience to the single-party state in particularly gendered forms. Women’s smiling faces, tailored skirts, and trim sweaters suggested the vibrancy of a new generation of students and secretaries liberated by the postcolonial state’s legislation. As opportunities in education and employment opened the potential of women’s financial independence, the availability of birth control decoupled sex from child-bearing and threatened men’s control over women’s bodies and reproduction. Advertisements encouraged women’s purchasing power as reinforcing their devotion to the husband and family by maintaining a clean home and preparing nutritious meals but also hinted at the potential for women’s leisure activities and sensual pleasures that transcended the space of the household. In these charged contexts of shifting gender norms, women’s stylistic improvisations threatened the state-envisioned patriarchal order even as it was encouraged by a consumerist developmental logic and the needs of national industry. The miniskirt was a device for nationalist women to promote a hybrid style in tune with local heritage and selective

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elements of global fashions, avoiding the question of morals and turning consumerism into an act of economic patriotism. Replacing turbans with suits gave the impression of a modern nation that subsumed regional differences and erased class struggles under a middle-class veneer of adult masculine responsibility. Clothing also served to regulate relations between men under the patriarchal benevolence of the single-party state. While supporting the state’s modernizing vision, political opponents rejected Bourguiba’s condescension, Dustur “propaganda,” and his singular place within nationalist myths, “since independence has glorified Bourguiba and repeated without ceasing that he is the only architect of the victory over the protectorate regime.” Overturning his self-proclaimed status as the “ultimate warrior,” men and women within the student movement countered “only the people are the ultimate warriors [le people seule est le combatant suprême].”135 135

“Mouvement de février 1972 en Tunisie: Un nouveau bond dans le combat de la jeunesse intellectuelle,” July 1972, BDIC, Fonds Othmani, sol 5.

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5

Love and Sex The Limits of Modern Womanhood and Heterosexual Masculinity

Youssef El Masry’s Le drame sexuel de la femme en orient arabe (later published in English translation as Daughters of sin: The sexual tragedy of Arab women) raised questions applicable to Tunisian women, wrote Selma Slaoui in response to a review of the book.1 Pointing toward the Egyptian journalist’s efforts to expose male privilege in marriage and divorce, she found that: all of the problems addressed are real and touch women and young Tunisian girls quite closely. I’ve thought long and hard about this statement that is unfortunately true “99% of Arab girls do not marry the man of their choice.” That is so true! Even in Tunisia, this problem is very common. How many times have we seen educated and modern girls resign themselves to marry a man chosen by their parents! And if they object, they are accused of insolence and ingratitude, and required to marry by force.2

Drawing parallels between El Masry’s prognosis on the marital conundrums of “Arab girls” and Tunisian girls, Slaoui positioned their modernity and education as antithetical to marrying men “chosen by their parents,” signaling “resignation,” obedience, and the use of “force.” Her letter frames romantic practices as a feminist issue and appeals to Faiza and Bourguiba to provide solutions, ending: “Dear Faiza, we are depending on you, and our President to help us resolve this crisis.” Slaoui’s letter and the coverage of El Masry’s book in the women’s press were part of the global process reshaping the material

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The reviewer, a French ethnologist and teacher living in Tunisia who served on Faiza’s editorial committee in 1961 and 1962, was unimpressed by El Masry’s book, describing it as anecdotal, trendy, underestimating the changes in Tunisia, and “a violent indictment of the Arab man and not an objective study.” Clémence Sugier, “Les livres: Le drame sexuel de la femme arabe,” Faiza, October 1962, 24–25. Selma Slaoui, “Un drame sexuel? Certaines tentent de se suicider . . .,” Faiza, January 1963, 6.

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and affective value of marriage and the broadening of conversations about love, marriage, and sex as topics of social debate. The increasing prevalence of “romantic courtship and companionate marriage,” as anthropologists Jennifer Hirsch and Holly Wardlow discovered, was part of economic, demographic, and cultural changes linked to urbanization, increased life expectancy, and the spread of mass media in the twentieth century. A Eurocentric narrative opposing love to arranged marriage was widespread, not because of its veracity, but as a common register for young people to “assert a modern identity” distinct from that of previous generations. As a facet of globalization, this construction of love “has become a strategy for affective mobility, and a very individually oriented technique for framing oneself as a modern subject” relevant to the study of social relations, gender and sexuality.3 Alongside the shared idealization of romance as a modern phenomenon, and common patterns of structural change, Hirsch and Wardlow underscore that “emotion, courtship, intimacy, companionship, sexuality and fidelity interrelate differently in different places.”4 Scholars of Africa Jennifer Cole and Lynn M. Thomas argue that analytical approaches to love can engage with the “problem of universality and difference.” Love is distinct from material facets of globalization, they argue, because attention to romantic feelings can debunk colonial stereotypes and social scientific and historical scholarship that reduce intimacy to sex.5 Focusing on the Middle East, anthropologists insist on the relevance of love to the study of familial expectations, social relations, technology and social media, gender roles, class, and moral constructs, including responsibility or piety.6 3

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Mark Padilla et al., “Introduction: Cultural Reflections on an Intimate Intersection,” in Love and Globalization: Transformations of Intimacy in the Contemporary World, ed. Mark Padilla et al. (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2012), xviii. Jennifer S. Hirsch and Holly Wardlow, eds., Modern Loves: The Anthropology of Romantic Courtship and Companionate Marriage (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006), 5–6, 14. Jennifer Cole and Lynn M. Thomas, eds., Love in Africa (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 3–4. Elisabetta Costa and Laura Menin, “Digital Intimacies: Exploring Digital Media and Intimate Lives in the Middle East and North Africa,” Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication 9 (2016); Laura Menin, “The Impasse of Modernity: Personal Agency, Divine Destiny, and the Unpredictability of Intimate Relationships in Morocco,” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 21, no. 4 (2015).

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Pushing back against the idealization of love marriage, scholars distinguish modern love from earlier romantic ideologies by its imbrication in the expansion of global capitalism. Political economic structures shape dating as an activity requiring leisure and disposable income, while romantic codes such as gifts, as Aymon Kreil argues in the case of Egypt, were class-specific. Ideas about status contributed to new iterations of the concept of spousal compatibility, which has a long genealogy in Arab and Muslim societies, as it applied to companionate relationships.7 These observations build on Eva Illouz’s insistence that even if the primarily financial rituals of marriage became secondary over the course of the twentieth century, economic considerations disappeared from neither discourses of love nor marital practices. In North America, Illouz argues, vocabularies of rational calculation, costs and benefits, or “political economies of love” permeated conversations about relationships where the presumably moral qualities of a partner were infused with cultural values shaped by class and education.8 Sandra Nasser El-Dine’s work in Jordan demonstrates how acts of care, including material provisions, generate love.9 Writing about marriage in Lebanon, Sabiha Allouche succinctly theorizes these ideas, arguing that “intimacy [is] compatible with materiality.” As she elaborates, the entanglement of financial and familial considerations creates an “affective regimen where closeness, both in physical and in conceptual terms, and material security constantly inform each other.”10 This chapter adds a historical perspective to anthropological and literary explorations of emotion in the modern globalization of love as a romantic ideal alongside the history of companionate marriage. Postcolonial conversations about romantic love and marriage were built on literary and filmic constructions of love, including the romantic verse of Tunisian poets, and movements to reform marriage across 7

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Aymon Kreil, “The Price of Love: Valentine’s Day in Egypt and Its Enemies,” Arab Studies Journal 24, no. 2 (2016). Eva Illouz, Consuming the Romantic Utopia: Love and the Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 266. Sandra Nasser El-Dine, “Love, Materiality, and Masculinity in Jordan: ‘Doing’ Romance with Limited Resources,” Men and Masculinities 21, no. 3 (2018). Sabiha Allouche, “Love, Lebanese Style: Toward an Either/And Analytic Framework of Kinship,” Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies 15, no. 2 (2019): 258.

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the Middle East. In Tunisia, the primacy of individual choice in marriage gained renewed significance with national independence and state feminism so that marriage was idealized as a space of selfdetermination parallel to that of the nation. Magazines provided a forum in which to explore romantic practices and shape the emotional registers in which they were expressed. Readers represented a largely middle-class community, though a younger and broader audience than in earlier political and cultural debates. Examining the relation between affective attachment and material concerns, the boundary between heterosocial friendships and dating, and how and when young people should exercise marital choice, I detail how the processes of establishing the parameters of emotional norms were profoundly gendered as they coincided with the political project of shaping unmarried girls into respectable middle-class women.11 Efforts to discipline youthful romance contributed to shaping gender roles and reasserting nation-state borders, and further entrenched the middle-class premises of modern womanhood. Yet they also reveal a generational fracture as readers contested social conventions and demanded a reconsideration of male privilege.

Modern Love Attention to women’s intimate lives was a novel facet of mid-twentieth century understandings of love that was not exclusive to the Middle East. According to French historian Judith Coffin, Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, published in 1949, became a cultural phenomenon, earning the feminist philosopher global notoriety, because she addressed “topics that were not only taboo but illdefined,” allowing a reconsideration of the “pain, confusion, and ignorance in the sexual lives of many” or, for others, providing a way to speak about their sexual desires. De Beauvoir appeared on Canadian radio and in the Colombian press, and received hundreds of letters from readers in France, Mexico City, New York, Rio, and

11

Lara Deeb suggests that drawing boundaries about whom to marry was important to the creation and maintenance of community, with religious definitions of belonging operating in ways similar to race. Lara Deeb, “Beyond Sectarianism: Intermarriage and Social Difference in Lebanon,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 52, no. 2 (2020): 215–28.

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Tunis, seeking her advice on personal matters.12 The questions she raised were part of the transformation of family life to which magazines contributed, according to cultural theoriest Kirsten Ross, through romanticizing the heterosexual couple as the source of love and emotional fulfillment. More popular than television and more easily shared than newspapers, thanks to a glossy format, magazines were a crucial facet of mid-twentieth-century French culture.13 They contributed to opening matters of intimacy to public scrutiny with columns such as “Courrier de Cœur” (Love Letters) in the French women’s magazine Elle, widely circulated across Europe and the French empire. Its author, Marcelle Ségal, detailed her experiences in a how-to guide published in 1952. As a novel profession, Ségal insisted that a love columnist must be an experienced woman who knew her public well.14 “Dear Dolly” in the Anglophone-African Drum magazine furthered this process by dealing candidly with sex and courtship and helping to “revolutionize the nature of journalism in Africa” in the later 1960s and 1970s.15 De Beauvoir’s works were covered in Faiza, and magazines such as Elle and Drum were likely familiar to Tunisian journalists and perhaps readers as well; Tunisia was the largest per capita consumer of the French “feminine press” in Africa, and Jeune Afrique specifically referred to “Dear Dolly” in its columns.16

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13 14

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Judith G. Coffin, “Sex, Love, and Letters: Writing Simone de Beauvoir, 1949–1963,” The American Historical Review 115, no. 4 (2010): 1064–65. Tunisian writer and cultural critic Jalila Hafsia recounted how she had written to de Beauvoir after reading La deuxième sex, and received a response. Jrad, La ligne d’espérance, 155–56. Ross, Fast Cars, Clean Bodies, 133–45. Ségal at the time estimated that there were only ten such writers in France. She received letters from across the French empire, Belgium, Switzerland, Canada, Lebanon, and Egypt. Marcelle Ségal, Mon métier: Le courrier du cœur (Paris: P. Horay, 1952), 14, 25, 57. The magazine sold as many as 300,000 copies in English-speaking Africa. Kenda Mutongi, “‘Dear Dolly’s’ Advice: Representations of Youth, Courtship, and Sexualities in Africa, 1960–1980,” in Cole and Thomas, eds., Love in Africa, 84. Excerpts from de Beauvoir’s autobiographical La force de l’âge appeared in Faiza, February 1961, 47, and her novel Les belles images was reviewed shortly after its publication. Faiza, January–February 1967, 3. More than twice the number of issues of the women’s press were purchased in Tunisia than in Algeria or Morocco, with rates considerably higher than Senegal as well. “Presse féminine,” Jeune Afrique, September 5, 1965, 28; “Chère Dolly . . .,” Jeune Afrique, September 19, 1965, 38.

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The cultural shift toward acknowledging intimate affairs as an aspect of social transformation concomitant with modern womanhood resulted from the demands of readers despite the hesitation of journalists. Saida Maherzi, host of an educative women’s radio program, “wished that our listeners would present real problems as opposed to their romantic troubles (peines de cœur),” which she did not consider “real problems,” and Faiza’s editors initially balked at offering advice on “delicate matters,” wondering, “[A]n advice column on love, is that really useful?”17 Approaching Faiza as an “elder sister,” readers urged the magazine to consider women’s “soul” in addition to matters of intellectual and social advance.18 When Faiza began its “Courrier de cœur” section, with nomenclature and designs that nodded toward the transnational nature of the genre, it was unique within the Tunisian women’s press. The popular feature continued throughout the remaining duration of the publication, with an editorial policy of including all letters received, the bulk of which were written by young readers and newlyweds. The snippets of letters appearing in print were edited, and it is possible that they were fabricated, yet the appeal of the love column required addressing relevant matters, and regardless of veracity, the column indicated how romantic topics could be broached.19 These epistolary exchanges form what Coffin describes as an “archive of interior lives,” providing rare insights on the experience and expression of love in postcolonial Tunisia.20

The Emotional Community of Readers The offering of editorial advice was a common feature of the Tunisian women’s press. The French and Arabic publications of the UNFT 17

18

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“Emission féminine: Hesset el Mar’a,” Faiza, February 1960, 48–49; “Courrier des lectrices,” Faiza, 1959, 4. A similar condescension toward romance novels can be seen in Bouzid’s describing them as “poisons of sentimentality” best thrown into the sea to make space for “good fiction.” Cactus, “Carnets de la vie quotidienne,” Faiza, November 1967, 6–7. “Courrier des lectrices,” Faiza, 1959, 4; Hassine Ellily, “Puis-je délaisse ma fiancée?,” Faiza, January 1963, 5. In response to a reader who complained that certain letters reflected poorly on Tunisia, the editors stated that aside from personal attacks (which they had not received), “we publish all of the mail we receive,” editing for grammar and length. Tahar Benzid, “Choisir ses bavardages,” Faiza, April 1962, 2. Coffin, “Sex, Love, and Letters,” 1065.

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responded to letters about women’s struggles to balance work and family alongside queries about parenting, adoption, and health in “Correspondance” and “Li-l kol mushkila . . . hal” (A Solution for Every Problem).21 This format adhered to the proscriptive and pedagogical nature of these publications. Historian Ada Shissler describes the advice column penned by Turkish journalist Sabiha Sertel as a form of social engineering for her efforts to influence social norms and encourage change around questions of women’s rights and gender roles.22 The Tunisian women’s press similarly responded to reader’s concerns by promoting women’s education and volunteer work, with Faiza extending such ideals into relationship advice. Parallel to the ways that postcolonial legislation intervened in matters of “personal status,” making questions of marriage and divorce subject to state scrutiny, the advice column furthered public speculation into family affairs, blurring the boundaries between private concerns and matters of national importance. The confessions narrated through epistolary exchanges perform a version of individual subjectivity often associated with modern genres of writing.23 Magazines were purchased by men and women, young and old, but women’s publications such as Faiza cultivated a feminine audience defined by sex and gender and were marketed as a “revue féminine” (feminine magazine), addressing its audience in the feminine plural as opposed to the masculine plural as gender-neutral; letters to the editor were titled “Faiza bavarde avec ses lectrices” (Faiza chats with its readers), and editors requested feedback from “nos amies lectrices” (our friendly readers), not lecteurs or amis.24 By turning to Faiza for advice, young readers drew its staff into social networks previously configured around family and neighborhood, building a particularly postcolonial feminine community that was homosocial in its composition, and pronouncedly heterosexual in outlook. 21

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Femme printed a selection of letters elaborating the editors’ pedagogical goals and replied individually to questions of a personal nature. “Courrier,” Femme, February–April 1966, 3. Sertel’s political positions otherwise earned her questioning and reproach by the authorities. Ada Holland Shissler, “‘If You Ask Me’: Sabiha Sertel’s Advice Column, Gender Equity, and Social Engineering in the Early Turkish Republic,” Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies 3, no. 2 (2007). Jennifer S. Hirsch and Holly Wardlow, “Introduction,” in Hirsch and Wardlow, eds., Modern Loves. See, for instance, the editorial in Faiza, January 1964, 4–5; “Tribune,” Faiza, November 1962, 3.

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Readers of and writers to the love letters column constituted what Barbara Rosenwein identifies as emotional community. Emotions are not purely physiological or neural, but “elicited, felt, and expressed” in relation to “cultural norms as well as individual proclivities.” Emotional norms reveal important aspects of social life as they interact with political ideologies, values, and beliefs. Instead of adhering to nation-state borders, Rosenwein sees shared experiences and references as particular to multiple places and spaces where people create value and assess harm, defining “the modes of emotional expression that they expect, encourage, tolerate, and deplore.”25 Suffering from a broken heart or jealous of a husband’s wandering eye, letters printed in Faiza proposed, questioned, and tested the parameters of appropriate feelings in ways that offer insights on social practices and cultural understandings of romance, shaping modern womanhood among the literate and urban audience of the magazine. While writing about love or celebrating romance was not novel, magazines contributed to translating abstract emotional ideals into the lives of readers. Through their shared reading practices, letter writers contributed to shaping the ambiguous moral universe of emotions such as love by defining when, how, and toward whom it could be expressed.

Cultural Precedents and Innovation While the format was new, romantic yearnings were informed by multiple intellectual, cultural, and political legacies, including a rich Arab literary tradition.26 Love was a central theme in Arabic literature, poetry, and theater where it was evoked to express mourning or loss or to symbolize higher spirituality. For instance, in what Walter Andrews and Mehmet Kalpakli identify as a specifically early modern aesthetic register, the celebration of the beloved in Ottoman elite poetry combined intellectualism and creativity in sensual and erotic adorations of

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Barbara H. Rosenwein, “Worrying about Emotions in History,” The American Historical Review 107, no. 3 (2002): 837, 842; Barbara H. Rosenwein, Generations of Feeling: A History of Emotions, 600–1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016). Hilary Kilpatrick, “Introduction: On Love and Sexuality in Modern Arabic Literature,” in Love and Sexuality in Modern Arabic Literature, ed. Roger Allen, Hilary Kilpatrick, and Ed De Moor (London: Saqi, 1995).

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male, female, and androgynous beauty.27 References to love and its social codes was part of bawdy humor and satirical commentary on gender roles and social hierarchies.28 While rich in insights on sexual norms and ideals of masculinity, early modern love poetry said little about marriage and operated outside the contours of family life. Even women poets such as Mihri Hatun, who diverged from the male poetic voice, operated within a context dominated by male perspectives on love and emotion.29 By the late nineteenth century, romantic literary sensibilities were increasingly politicized within intellectual deliberations over women’s status and promoted the “modernization” of marriage as aspects of national independence. For instance, Romantic aesthetics drew attention to individual subjectivity, where “this reflection on man was bound, in the first place to be pursued in the domain of love.”30 Literary journals, such as the Cairo-based Apollo, celebrated new romantic poetry by contributors such as the Tunisian poet Abu alQassim al-Shabbi. Combining sensual affection, spirituality, and youthful idealism, Al-Shabbi’s platonic adoration of women as a “temple of love” rejected the conventions of classical and neoclassical Arabic poetry, which he criticized for reducing woman to an object of pleasure.31 Short stories provided another avenue for critique of contemporary social problems starting in the 1930s, though it was not until after independence that Tunisian women writers such as Hind Azuz, Fatma Slim, and Layla bin Mami were published. Their works placed love marriages in relation to new gender roles, featuring 27

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Walter G. Andrews and Mehmet Kalpakli, The Age of Beloveds: Love and the Beloved in Early-Modern Ottoman and European Culture and Society (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005). Irvin Cemil Schick, “Representation of Gender and Sexuality in Ottoman and Turkish Erotic Literature,” The Turkish Studies Association Journal 28, nos. 1–2 (2004): 125–48; Dror Ze’evi, Producing Desire: Changing Sexual Discourse in the Ottoman Middle East, 1500–1900 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006). Didem Havlioglu, “On the Margins and between the Lines: Ottoman Women Poets from the Fifteenth to the Twentieth Centuries,” Turkish Historical Review 1 (2010). Boutros Hallaq, “Love and the Birth of Modern Arabic Literature,” in Allen et al., eds., Love and Sexuality in Modern Arabic Literature, 17. Robin Ostle, “The Romantic Imagination and the Female Ideal,” in Allen et al., eds., Love and Sexuality in Modern Arabic Literature; R. Marston Speight, “A Modern Tunisian Poet: Abu al-Qasim al-Shabbi (1909–1934),” International Journal of Middle East Studies 4, no. 2 (1973).

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educated, working women who navigated companionate relationships with their modern husbands.32 Romantic experiences including the pain and injustice of thwarted love also informed storytelling. Tunisian literary scholar Monia Hejaiej explains that talented storytellers drew inspiration from their own lives, producing stories of great loves, separations, passions, and yearnings, which refuse gendered norms and “explore subversive possibilities.”33 Film provided a novel platform for the dissemination of love narratives to wider audiences. From the 1920s to the 1960s, Cairo was the heart of Arab cinema, with hundreds of commercially successful productions, especially comedies and melodramas. These films were broadly distributed beyond Egypt; in Tunisia, they constituted almost the entirety of films that were not American or European. Romantic plots that were focused on stars such as Leyla Murad, Muhammad ‘Abd al-Wahhab, and Abdelhalim Hafiz presumed the desirability of companionate marriage and the heteronormativity of social interactions in the public sphere, even when, as Mejdulene Shomali notes, they included the queer possibilities of female friendships.34 Tunisians were involved in cinema as script writers, producers, directors, and actors in movies set in Tunisia since the 1920s. Short films and features, often Tunisian-European co-productions, included themes related to love and marriages, from the general desirability of marriages of choice (Hlima) to arranged marriages that contradict the desires of a young woman or man, or the love of a young couple (Ain al-Ghazal, Yasmina, Tergui, Fou de Qairouan), resulting in the suicide (Ain al-Ghazal) or attempted suicide (Yasmina, Fou de Qairouan) of one of the lovers, or the death of one or both lovers

32

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Jarrow, “The Feminine Literary Voices in Tunisia,” 180–88; Mamelouk, “Anxiety in the Border Zone,” 280. Collected in the 1980s, the stories reflect the personal experiences of women who came of age in the 1950s. Monia Hejaiej, Behind Closed Doors: Women’s Oral Narratives in Tunis (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1996), 20–22, 44–49. Walter Armbrust, “The Golden Age before the Golden Age: Commercial Egyptian Cinema before the 1960s,” in Mass Mediations: New Approaches to Popular Culture in the Middle East and Beyond, ed. Walter Armbrust (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000); Mejdulene B. Shomali, “Dancing Queens: Queer Desire in Golden Era Egyptian Cinema,” Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies 15, no. 2 (2019).

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(Ain al-Ghazal, Fou de Qairouan).35 In the 1960s, Nasser encouraged films as an aspect of Egypt’s regional leadership where the ideal couple was hard-working and united by love to epitomize socialist modernity.36 These films, and stars such as Hafiz, drew large audiences, to the consternation of Tunisian critics who worried that as a vehicle for a young girl to express “her thirst for love” they fostered adolescent crushes.37 A young Tunisian male student commented, in terms of male-female relations, “We’re educated by movies, by foreign papers.”38 Films, regardless of their origins, as Laura Fair theorizes about postcolonial Zanzibar, created a platform for young people to talk about love and romance.39

Romantic Reform The reconfiguration of heterosexual romance placed marriage alongside projects of women’s education, scientific motherhood, social transformation, and national renewal elaborated by Arab and Persian nationalists across the Middle East. They derided polygamy, early marriage, and marriages arranged without the consent of the betrothed as antagonistic to individual and national self-determination.40 In his 1930 treatise on women, the renowned Tunisian scholar al-Tahir alHaddad identified marital choice and unions based on love and mutual affection as attributes to strengthening family and society (which he grounded in an analysis of the Qur’an and the writings of prominent Tunisian ‘ulama’).41 Individual choice and companionate marriage as 35 37

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36 Khlifi, Histoire du cinéma en Tunisie. Kreil, “The Price of Love.” Ferid Ghazi, “La jeune fille, le cinéma et la chanson,” Faiza, March 1961, 38–41. For Cheriaa, then director of film within the Ministry of Culture, these films were often toxic, due to their “mediocrity and childishness.” Cheriaa, “Le cinema en tunisie,” 432. Dorra Bouzid, “Le jeune homme et l’amour: Débat,” Faiza, May–June 1967, 60. Laura Fair, “Making Love in the Indian Ocean: Hindi Films, Zanzibari Audiences, and the Construction of Romance in the 1950s and 1960s,” in Cole and Thomas, eds., Love in Africa. Afsaneh Najmabadi, Women with Mustaches and Men without Beards: Gender and Sexual Anxieties of Iranian Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 156–60; Kashani-Sabet, Conceiving Citizens, 51–72. Bakalti, La femme tunisienne au temps de la colonisation, 52–53; Zayzafoon, The Production of the Muslim Woman, 103; Judith E. Tucker, Women, Family, and Gender in Islamic law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 66–67.

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poetic and literary themes contributed to shaping bourgeois subjectivities articulated in legal discourses; the literary imagination, as Amy Motlagh notes in the case of Iran, was closely linked to the juridical aspects of state building.42 In fact, Ken Cuno argues that a modern family ideology based on the social importance of the family and motherhood with the conjugal family as its main unit was part of a process of legal reform and codification that created the notion of family law or personal status as a distinct component of Islamic law.43 Polemics against polygny and forced marriage did not necessarily reflect marital practices, which varied. For one, arranged marriages regularly involved the consultation of the future spouses, and couples from closely knit rural communities were likely to have been acquainted prior to engagement. Research on Turkey suggests that while polygamy existed, it held little relevance beyond the ruling elite and landowning classes.44 In Tunisia, by the turn of the twentieth century, there were instances where young men selected their own spouses, and young women exercised their right to refuse spouses proposed by their fathers in both rural and urban contexts.45 Choice was incorporated into marital selection in the 1920s, with Tunisian historian Souad Bakalti documenting a custom whereby young men selected their brides from an annual display of available women on “Al Makhtar Street” (the Street of Choice).46 The work of anthropologist Fida Adely cautions against the binary opposition between arranged marriages and those premised on romantic love and choice, finding that family input was a welcome and accepted part of choice.47

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43 Motlagh, Burying the Beloved, 33. Cuno, Modernizing Marriage. Alan Duben, “Turkish Families and Households in Historical Perspective,” Journal of Family History 10, no. 1 (1985); Alan Duben and Cem Behar, Istanbul Households: Marriage, Family and Fertility 1880–1940 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). Leïla Blili Temime, Histoire de familles: Mariages, repudiations et vie quotidienne à Tunis, 1875–1930 (Tunis: Editions Script, 1999), 61. Bakalti, La femme tunisienne au temps de la colonisation, 218. Based on research among educated young men and women in Amman, these conclusions resonate with scholarship on marital arrangements in earlier periods. Fida Adely, “A Different Kind of Love: Compatibility (Insijam) and Marriage in Jordan,” Arab Studies Journal 24, no. 2 (2016).

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As a facet of women’s status, reformist arguments about marriage were informed by European imperialism even when denouncing the scientific racism that justified domination based on cultural, religious, and civilizational hierarchies. Yet they contributed to universalizing European and Christian constructions of romance that separated a heroic, selfless love from lust.48 Colonial ideology endowed such European constructions with moral superiority, while depicting colonies from the Caribbean to the Indian Ocean as places where “lust [w]as omnipresent and love [w]as absent.”49 For the Middle East in particular, the association of the “Orient” with lustful sexuality and hence “decadence” endowed expressions of desire with taboo, as they signaled debasement and moral inferiority.50 Erotic depictions of colonized women and sexualized metaphors of colonial rule informed what Anne McClintock describes as modernity’s “conquest of the sexual and labor power of colonized women.”51 Reformists across the Middle East adopted colonial clichés when it suited their purposes, rejecting the applicability of sexual stereotypes but not necessarily their terms. Their advocacy of monogamy and companionate marriage rescripted the social value of polygamy from a sign of status, wealth, and power to one of backwardness.52

Economies of Love Modern idealizations of romance configured love as diametrically opposed to material considerations. In Tunisia’s postcolonial context, 48

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Though it remained influential into the modern era, this vision was rooted in Christian theology and struggles between the clergy and the aristocracy. William M. Reddy, The Making of Romantic Love: Longing and Sexuality in Europe, South Asia, and Japan, 900–1200 CE (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012). Lynn M. Thomas and Jennifer Cole, “Thinking through Love in Africa,” in Cole and Thomas, eds., Love in Africa; Inderpal Grewal, Home and Harem: Nation, Gender, Empire, and the Cultures of Travel (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996); Jennifer L. Morgan, “‘Some could suckle over their shoulder’: Male Travelers, Female Bodies, and the Gendering of Racial Ideology, 1500–1770,” The William and Mary Quarterly 54, no. 1 (1997). Joseph A. Massad, Desiring Arabs (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007). Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Context (New York: Routledge, 1995), 3. Kenneth M. Cuno, “Ambiguous Modernization: The Transition to Monogamy in the Khedival House of Egypt,” in Family History in the Middle East: Household, Property and Gender, ed. Beshara Doumani (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2003).

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women’s consumerism or increasing access to salaried employment destabilized gender roles and expectations of men’s financial responsibilities within the family. Expressed as a critique of women’s material expectations as harmful to men, the repertoire of presidential discourse offers an example of these concerns. Speaking to the UNFT and female representatives of the national youth organization on Women’s Day in 1965, Bourguiba announced his displeasure for wedding plans that included discussions about “the bedroom, the dining room, and I don’t know what other furniture, without counting jewelry, perfumes and the interminable list of items demanded.” While furniture and décor were otherwise a distinguishing feature of the modern home (and their absence a sign of backwardness and rural poverty), in this narrative they led to “catastrophe.” Bourguiba went on: “I have received heartbreaking letters on this topic. One fiancé was literally ruined. He ended up breaking the engagement.” This detail clarifies the positioning of the bride and her family as the culprits, in a threatening feminization of consumption perpetuated by “certain mothers who suffer from a complex.”53 Though marriage required considerable resources in order to establish a nuclear household, women’s financial considerations were stigmatized as “ruinous” to men.54 Similar concerns about women’s materialism as detrimental to companionate marriage appeared in the pages of Faiza. Amor Jarmouni, identified as a postal employee, bemoaned the futile expenses of wedding preparations as emblematized by tea sets that were never used, urging a definition of marriage as “choosing a life-long companion, a woman who comforts you and makes you forget about other women.”55 Ali Mansour, a frequent contributor, drew on the nationalist message of linear progress to complain that “material 53

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Bourguiba, “La femme, élément de progrès dans la société,” 166–68. “Material goods,” he noted on another occasion, “are not intended to be consumed, that is to say, to disappear in useless festivities or expensive celebrations (circumcision festivities, lavish weddings, etc.).” Our Road to Socialism, 13. In the few instances where similar considerations were warranted in Al-Mar’a, its editorial approach focused on women’s consent as opposed to more idealistic formulations of freedom of choice and romantic love. For instance, the editors told one sixteen-year-old girl who was considering breaking off an engagement that she could accept him or reject him, but in the case of the latter must return any gifts and keep in mind that love itself is not sufficient to ensure happiness in the life of a couple but that mutual understanding was. “Li-l kol mushkila . . . hal,” Al-Mara’a, September 1966, 2. Amour Jarmouni, “Equation a plusieurs inconnues,” Faiza, February 1962, 4.

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considerations are not in accord with our era, with our evolution and our struggle against under-development.”56 Two young sisters from Qairouan wrote with nostalgia about the simplicity of weddings in Gafsa and Tozeur. Though their assessment that expensive weddings were not widespread is worth noting, they encouraged young women to avoid peer pressure toward material excess and to rein in the demands of their parents.57 In an October 1967 editorial, Dorra Bouzid explicated the nationalist and feminist critique of overpriced weddings. Her collaborator, Sophie, detailed a series of “extravagances” at a recent wedding: a hairstyle requiring 350 bobby pins, a dress so heavy with gold and pearls that it bruised the bride, outrageously priced bridal jewelry, and an equally lavish room rented for the occasion. These practices bespoke of an earlier era at odds with national modernity: In the past, for women at mercy of a repudiation, jewelry constituted the only guarantee of an unpredictable future. But now they are in their majority and occupy professions.. . . In the past, Sophie continues, it made sense. I asked my grandmother. Even she was disgusted! And god knows how many traditional weddings full of pearls and satin she attended.. . . Even my grandmother she recognized that all of this is outdated now, with women’s work and ‘ishtirakia’ [socialism]. In the past, at the very least, such excesses could be allowed. In the first place, it was the only entertainment for women who were cloistered all day long by their husbands and their parents. They had no other leisure; so they spent their time preparing for their weddings and getting themselves all dolled up.

Explaining the significance of jewelry as an investment, this passage relies on a vision of modern progress as a homogenizing force that cannot accommodate different financial practices and presumes that women’s careers ensure their economic stability. Instead, material display is “disgusting,” and jewelry becomes connected to the “cloistering” of women, subservience to husbands and parents, and the practice of repudiation, which they projected on a shameful past. Another problem highlighted by Sophie and Bouzid was the hypocrisy of “the young girls of today,” who have “accepted and desired the principle of evolution” while they “continue to subscribe to all the 56 57

Ali Mansour, “Un mariage sans amour, c’est la discorde,” Faiza, June 1961, 7. Miss N. and Miss S., “Le trousseau ne fait pas le bonheur,” Faiza, October 1961, 29.

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benefits of an ancient lifestyle without qualms.” Bouzid continued, “Hasn’t the personal status code given the Tunisian woman pride in a reconquered dignity and her true independence? Should we have the right to ask whether she really deserves this???” By contrasting the professional women (such as Faiza’s staff ) who question the purpose of such weddings against the students and secretaries who supposedly hosted them, Bouzid’s critique of young women who came of age after independence deploys the idealization of marriage (implicitly romantic) as separate from material concerns to imply that they had not earned their access to legal rights (the personal status code) and “the pleasures of modern life.”58 The argument against displays of wealth and unattainable material demands was misleading. As noted by the two young women in Qairouan, elaborate celebrations may have been common among the social circles of Faiza’s middle-class staff but were far from the national norm. Bouzid herself pointed out that more than half of Tunisians earned less than fifty dinars per year and were not renting five-hundred-dinar reception rooms. In fact, a French anthropologist in Tunisia in the 1950s expressing similar concerns about the costs of weddings found out he was misinformed. One of his interlocutors in Monastir explained that the apparent luxury was largely for show: not only were many of the bride’s adornments borrowed, but after the celebration the fancy clothes and much of the trousseau were sold and the money invested in olive trees.59 While marriage remained an occasion for the intergenerational transfer of wealth, polemics surrounding women’s materialism reveal concerns about shifting gender roles prompted by the economic implications of modern womanhood. Sociologist Eva Illouz associates modern love, in the North American context, with capitalism where spousal selection, consumerism, and politics are premised on choice constructing modern selves, who “are defined by their claim to exercise choice.”60 In hegemonic iterations of Tunisian modernity not all choices were elevated to the plane of modern selfhood; for starters, political choice was largely nonexistent. As for economic choice, Tunisian socialism circumscribed consumerism to collective needs. Wedding celebrations were a target of 58

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Dorra Bouzid, “L’aberrante saison des mariages ruineux,” Faiza, October 1967, 10–11. Henri de Montety, Femmes de Tunisie (Paris: Mouton, 1958), 63. Illouz, Consuming the Romantic Utopia, 19.

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feminist critique when they resembled those of generations prior through the interdependence of emotion with economics. Here costly preparations for a future home signaled an immaturity incompatible with companionate marriage as the basis of the conjugal family and the building-block of the modern nation. Rather than a reflection of contemporary practices, feminist arguments perpetuated the ideal of men’s financial responsibility over women and isolated the conjugal unit from extended familial structures and networks. The expectations of frugality and austerity were facilitated by the privileged position of Faiza’s editors.

Love and Independence National independence, raising the minimum age to marry, and increasing access to education combined with cultural representations of romantic love to inform shifting social expectations and transform marital practices. In the years following independence, women were marrying slightly later than before, with the mean age at first marriage around twenty for women (and twenty-six for men).61 In the southern town of Gafsa, families increasingly valued the education of their daughters, encouraging them to complete secondary school before marriage. Shifting social norms meant that early marriages were considered “as a sign of lower status, social inferiority, or archaic attitudes.”62 Photographs of the bride and groom were a common memento by the 1960s, which Tunisian anthropologist Lilia Labidi reads as a public record of their emotion. Focused on the marital couple, photographs contributed to distinguishing them from the extended family.63 Elsewhere in the Middle East, women’s education was linked to later age at marriage, and young Algerians, particularly in urban areas, spoke enthusiastically about spousal choice.64 Young 61

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The mean age at first marriage increased from 26.3 to 27.1 for men and 19.5 to 21.6 for women, though these figures obscure regional variation. CREDIF, Tunisian Women and Men in Figures (Tunis: Ministry of Women and Family Affairs, 2002). Abed, “The Social Organization of Production and Reproduction,” 124. This differed from Zghal’s observations the previous decade that “Women marry very young. Neither men nor women have the option of choosing their spouse.” Zghal, Modernisation de l’agriculture, 111. Lilia Labidi, “Photographs as a Source for Social History and the History of Emotions,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 39, no. 1 (2007). Though they hoped to influence their parent’s selection, many felt excluded from the process. Fadéla M’Rabet, La femme algérienne: Suivi de les algériennes

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Iraqi women considered the university a space to explore love, and among educated urbanites the idea of love marriages was increasingly acceptable in the 1950s and 1960s.65 In Egypt as well, within educated, upper-class, urban circles love was increasingly invoked in relation to marriage.66 The dominant discourse of modern womanhood in Tunisia depicted arranged marriages and individual choice as mutually exclusive. One symbolized gender segregation and women’s submission, the other heterosocial practices and the modern family. In the same speech where he condemned elaborate wedding expenses, Bourguiba insisted that brides be granted the liberty to choose. Parents who interfered in spousal selection abused their parental authority.67 Arranged marriages, for Bourguiba, were like those contracted to repay a debt: reprehensible “anachronistic traditions and fundamentalist mentalities . . . of another era.”68 Creating temporal distance between past traditions and present liberties avoided messy realities while again celebrating state involvement as liberatory (whereas the legal parameters surrounding marriages drew on the Islamic notion of consent).69 What distinguished state feminist emphasis on spousal selection from Islamic precedents was the focus on the bride and the attention to love over compatibility. The April 1962 cover of Faiza was a black and white photograph of a bride and groom. They hold hands, gazing into the distance; the groom is clean-shaven with a fez, his black tie standing out against a white button-down shirt, his white jebba visible where his hand meets hers. The bride’s Monastiri-styled kemija is heavy with lace, finely

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(Paris: F. Maspero, 1969), 35–38. There were love marriages among militants during the war of independence; they were not the norm, nor do they capture the complexities of gender relations among combatants. Vince, Our Fighting Sisters, 89–95. Al-Ali, Iraqi Women, 101–6, 43–45. Abu-Lughod, Veiled Sentiments. The importance of a woman’s right to choose her partner and enjoy a marriage based on love was invoked in feminist arguments about divorce legislation. Bier, Revolutionary Womanhood, 112–20. Bourguiba “La femme élément de progrès dans la société,” 165–66. The speech was subsequently quoted in “Bourguiba et le marriage,” Faiza, August 1965, 8–9. In the Maliki school predominant in Tunisia, only the father has the authority to grant consent on behalf of a daughter who is still a minor. Jurists from all four major schools of Sunni Islam took seriously women’s right to consent to marriage. Tucker, Women, Family, and Gender in Islamic Law, 42–43.

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embroidered with gold, and she holds a small bouquet of fresh flowers at the center of her chest. Faiza’s covers had previously displayed brides dressed in regional styles or white gauze veils announcing reports about marriage and bridal fashions. But this bride and groom, aged fifty and fifty-nine respectively, both recently divorced, were unique and, according to the caption, exemplary: They have loved each other for nineteen years.. . . They are finally happy after many trials. But for them, no obstacle is unsurmountable: they are made from the same steel, of those who retreat from nothing, not even death. She is Wassila Bin ‘Ammar, Tunisian citizen, who became on April 12, 1962, the first Tunisian woman, president of the republic (la première Tunisienne, Présidente de la République). She is pretty, she is classy, she is a nationalist militant: Wassila Bourguiba is worthy of her husband and her country.70

The daughter of a bourgeois family (on her mother’s side, the Dellajis) of landowners and professionals, her father M’hamed Bin ‘Ammar was long involved in nationalist politics, and her younger siblings Mundher and Neila both occupied prominent political positions and were close with the president. Wassila Bourguiba became a powerful figure and role model for the women’s press (she was featured on the cover of the first issue of Femme in August 1964). The couple had first met in the 1920s, and Bourguiba frequently and publicly spoke of his “love at first sight.”71 The wedding, officiated by the mayor of a Tunis suburb, Taieb Mehri, included a richly symbolic dowry of one dinar and formed part of the love story and its fairy-tale happy ending that inscribed marriages of choice within the nationalist canon of modern womanhood from the 1960s.72

Whom to Marry and When: Faiza’s Advice As with other aspects of national conversations on modern womanhood, the women’s press contributed to the moralization of marital 70 71

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Faiza, April 1962, 5. Wassila Bourguiba and Jacqueline Gaspar, Entretiens avec Wassila Bourguiba: à Carthage, de novembre 1972 à mars 1973 (Tunis: Déméter, 2012), 5–15, 55–56. “Qui êtes-vous Wassila Bourguiba?,” Faiza, April 1962. Her influence over the president gained visibility as his health declined and was particularly resented by those who lost power or disagreed with her politics. They were separated by early 1986, and Bourguiba divorced her that summer.

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practices to represent the feminism of modernity against the patriarchy of traditions. Readers’ personal narratives synced easily with cliched depictions of generational discord and invasive families as antagonistic to modern youthful yearnings. Consider the following replies to a teenager and another young man whose parents interfered in their choice of a beloved: “Your problem is everyone’s problem. Regardless of everything, we are still afflicted by the inconsiderate abuses of parental authority.” “Hang in there, you’re the one who is right. In the Tunisia of 1965, nobody can force a young girl to marry a young man who does not want to.”73

In both instances, the editors offered sympathetic consolation, solidarity, and support, encouraging the exercise of self-determination as an actualization of “the Tunisia of 1965.” The specific details are brushed aside in order to emphasize the shared experiences of the national collective now identified through the possibility that young men choose marriages of love. Tales of thwarted love were projected onto “towns of the interior,” as a distinct physical and temporal region consistent with depictions of rural backwardness as it contrasted with the capital and coastal cities.74 Yet love coverage, whether reports on marriage, letters, or otherwise, reveals that turning varied marital practices into distinct typologies was a complex process. Representing the ideal of companionate marriage and the postindependence regime of women’s rights, love was prevalent in conversations with and about younger generations; love was “the tender and noble ideal of all youth,” and youthful romance embodied renewal and change.75 Though youth was a gender-neutral category, Faiza surveyed generational differences among women and the gendered experiences of youth by devoting a full issue to “the young Tunisian girl.” Including a composite portrait of this young Tunisian girl, they described her as “liberated from ancestral burdens” and concerned about her future. Signaling a decisive break from the past, the 73

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M.D., “Je suis sain de corps et malade de cœur,” Faiza, June 1965, 44; S.S., “Epouser sa sœur,” Faiza, August–September 1965, 5. This included the discovery of a secret love between a young couple that resulted in the girl’s hasty marriage to a much older man, or that of “a boy [who] loves a girl, but their parents do not get along” and he sadly accepts another. “Dans une ville de l’intérieur,” Faiza, June 1961, 35. R.B. “Le mariage ne fait pas jeune,” Faiza, October 1961, 28.

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trajectory of youthful girlhood paralleled the linear development of the postcolonial nation. Young women of the 1960s were defined as a generation by their education, employment, attention to popular culture, and the fact that for them “love is no longer a taboo subject,” adding that “88% chose the man that they love.”76 Based on a limited sample, this statistic nonetheless suggested an evidentiary basis upon which to compare romantic love to other quantifiable measures of modernity such as school enrollments or workforce participation.77 Vignettes on the marriages of three women, Zohra, Huda, and Sarra, attempted to illustrate this linear path of marital progress. For instance, their stories were evidence that there were no longer “little fifteen-year-old girls marrying a sixty-year-old man” or “a young girl who does not meet her husband until their wedding day,” marking significant age differences between spouses and couples who did not date as characteristic of a bygone past. Yet Zohra, who married in the 1940s at age fourteen, had not met her husband prior to their wedding. She did not lament her situation and appeared content with their nuclear household, concluding, “I live alone with my husband and my children and I would be happy even if we only had bread and water.” Zohra’s evocation of happiness illustrated the affective possibilities of arranged marriages and their compatibility with the conjugal family. Huda, who was married shortly before independence, described how she had initially rejected the idea of marrying a man almost twenty years her senior. Yet given time to know him during a prolonged engagement, she proclaimed, “I loved him despite his age.” Here, arranged marriage was inclusive of romance, though it followed, as opposed to preceded, their betrothal. Similarly, Sarra, a twenty-twoyear-old student whose mother had persuaded her to marry a man fifteen years her senior, was optimistic about their upcoming introduction.78 In all three stories, the women articulate a vision of marriage that included arranged marriages and nuclear households, age differences and love, where emotional fulfillment was indicative of, but not reducible to, the contemporary configuration of romantic love. 76 77

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“A la découverte de la jeune fille tunisienne,” Faiza, April–May 1966, 20–27. Researchers also noted that in the capital young people talked about the importance of selecting their own spouses. Camilleri, “Modernity and the Family in Tunisia.” Safia Farhat, “Le mariage en 1961: Une enquête de Faiza,” Faiza, June 1961, 34–35.

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In her commentary on Zohra’s, Huda’s, and Sarra’s relationships, Safia Farhat showed disappointment that marriage was still “not a matter between the fiancés, but their families.” Farhat lamented that young Tunisian women such as Sarra “view marriage with a state of mind that does not drastically differ from that of years past.” She struggled to conclude that “there is an evolution” because even if “young girls still do not dare reject a fiancé proposed by their families, . . . they know that they can, because they know that they are in their legal majority at age twenty.”79 This return to Tunisian legislation as the backbone of progress deferred to state feminist narratives, which again did not significantly differ from the recognition of women’s right to consent to marriage upon her majority in the Maliki school of Islamic law. The divergence between Farhat’s prioritization of choice and dating over the three women’s expressions of emotional satisfaction hints at the fracturing of modernist discourses into polyvalent realities. Responding to letters, Faiza placed happiness alongside love. Consider the following exchange: X: I am a twenty-year-old teacher and madly in love (it’s reciprocal) with a young man who is twenty-four. He asked for my hand two years ago, my father refused on the pretense that he is not as educated as I am, even though we could live well with our two salaries. Nothing can make me forget my love. I am suffering. Faiza: Two years of reflection is enough. You are sufficiently qualified to know where to find your happiness. It is up to you to decide.80

Parental obstruction is overruled by the young teacher’s right to choose after two years of sober reflection, and thus find her happiness. In her exploration of happiness, feminist scholar Sara Ahmed describes happiness, or the future possibility of happiness, as a technology of citizenship. Belief in this promise binds individuals to a national ideal of what has already been established as good (in the case of Tunisia, marriages of choice). At the same time, Ahmed cautions, positive emotions contribute to exclusion.81 Faiza evoked happiness and love

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Farhat, “Le mariage en 1961.” “Il y a deux ans,” Faiza, April–May 1966, 6. Sara Ahmed, The Promise of Happiness (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 133.

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as a promise awarded to some young people (those who demonstrated proper modernity) and withheld it from others. In the advice column, love talk was integrated with other postcolonial projects as a disciplinary mechanism that disproportionately sought to control women’s behavior. Young girls and women needed to earn the right to choose. Take one writer who complained that her parents did not allow her to go out, thwarting her efforts “to marry a boy whom I love because that is possible now.” This framing evokes the generation gap and the ideal of romantic courtship, but the curt reply was: “Potential spouses are not on sale at the market, my child. Be careful, the Don Juans of the streets prefer bachelorhood. Remind yourself that marriage is a serious matter.”82 In the following exchange, the editors similarly dismiss a correspondent who complained that she was not attracted to a young man chosen by her father for his wealth. Faiza’s response was caustic: What are you doing at home? There are rural social assistants in the UNFT who are overwhelmed with work. Go sign up with one of those sections. And stop paying attention to physical aspects of young men. You will find one without even looking and who will not be overly concerned with your appearance.83

Whereas the writer placed attraction above financial considerations, iterating the separation between love as a lofty emotional ideal and materialism as a traditional practice, Faiza depicted the writer as immature, refusing her access to the privilege of self-determination. Faiza frequently urged readers to pursue an education and contribute to society prior to marriage. S.K. had terminated her studies in order to work, subsequently meeting a young man who promised to ask for her hand in marriage. After almost a year of dating, he broke things off, citing his parents’ disapproval. The writer evoked the trope of the meddling family as thwarting romantic goals, wondering why an educated and financially secure man would acquiesce to his parents and “break up with someone he has loved.” S.K was told: “Go back to school or find a job. You will meet other men who are more sincere or more courageous. Only work will help you overcome your 82 83

“Le courrier des lectrices,” Faiza, February 1960, 6. The anonymous writer describes herself as a “young girl at home” (jeune fille à la maison), though additional details about her age or education are not included. “Courrier,” Faiza, February 1961, 5.

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problems.”84 When eighteen-year-old Leila wrote about a man six years her senior with whom she had been involved for some years, but of whom her parents disapproved, Faiza’s pedantic response was categorical: “One word of advice for all of you young girls under twenty-five: worry first about your studies and your career.”85 For avid readers of Faiza’s love column, the editorial emphasis on education as a prerequisite to romantic love and companionate marriage was crystal-clear. Seeking insight on how to navigate her romantic struggles, one teenager pleaded: “I hope Faiza that you will not tell me: ‘Focus on your studies,’ because I work hard despite my suffering and I passed [my exams] this year.”86 Since girls could marry at age fifteen after independence, and seventeen in 1964, many who wrote to Faiza could have married. But their questions were not legal and instead explored social norms, cultural codes, and gendered expectations. Their familiarity with the state feminist discourse of marital progress is evidenced in their evocation of youthful romance, the desirability of choice, and the backwardness of parental interference. Faiza’s editors and journalists referred to similar parameters and emotional ideals, particularly in their response to young men. In addressing young women, they located companionate marriage within a reformist project of modern womanhood dependent on education, employment, or community service that preceded the ability to choose. Describing encounters at school and at work, these letters indicate the role of romance in shaping heterosocial relations in these public spaces, by detailing marital choice as men’s prerogative and something women needed to earn.

The Meaning of Friendship Sex-segregated and family-based socializing were complemented by greater interactions between young women and young men after independence due to the expansion of secondary and higher education and increasing numbers of women in the urban workforce. Conversations about love not only offered advice on dating but introduced friendship to shape emotional etiquette and behavioral norms governing 84 85

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S.K., “Il rompt pour ses parents,” Faiza, August 1965, 5. Leila, “Mes parents ne veulent pas de l’homme que j’aime,” Faiza, May 1963, 48. “Une fille doit-elle avouer son amour?,” Faiza, August 1965, 5.

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these nonromantic and nonfamilial interactions, as in one letter lauding “friendship between girls and boys” as “a sign of emancipation and progress.” Enacting friendship, the letter continued, was gender-specific: young men were advised to be fraternal as opposed to motivated by desire or preoccupied with sex, whereas young women were instructed to act feminine without flirting or engaging in seductive behavior.87 Another male reader cautioned his fellow students to repress their sentimentality, and presumably delay marriage, until after their studies were completed, seeking instead “dance partners and true camaraderie.”88 A young woman urged her peers to treat young men the same as their female classmates, instead of worrying about marriage, and utilize their spare time for studying and participating in sporting clubs.89 Consternation over heterosocial friendship reveal its imbrication in broader gender roles and social codes overshadowed with sexual tensions prevalent in conversations about love. This “heteronormalization of sexual mores and heterosocialization of public life,” Afsanah Najmabadi insightfully argues, was integral to the “modernist project” of companionate marriage.90 In fact, a comparable disavowal of homosexual desires was integral to modernizing projects in Europe, explains Kadji Amin, with all-male institutions such as schools and the army rife with sexual tensions and male pederastic impulses, as they “solicit and implant affective attachments to masculine hierarchies.”91 The advice column and discourses on friendship managed heterosexual tensions by channeling them into friendship as a specifically modern form of public heterosociability. Friendship, according to Faiza’s editors, was the solution to many a romantic problem. In the following letter, two young, working women who invoke “the evolution of the Tunisian women” described meeting young men. They despaired that a five-year courtship and professions of love had not led to proposals and wondered what to do: “We love them, but these men have not made up their minds. We no longer have confidence in men.” 87 88 89

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Ali Mansour, “L’amitié masculo-feminine,” Faiza, March 1961, 13. R.B., “Le mariage ne fait pas jeune.” Zaineb, “Pour être compris: Ne donnez pas prise à l’incompréhension,” Faiza, June 1961, 5–6. Najmabadi, Women with Mustaches and Men without Beards, 156. Kadji Amin, Disturbing Attachments: Genet, Modern Pederasty, and Queer History (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017), 56.

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Faiza: “Provide more details so that we can respond. What is your field, why do you no longer trust men? But we also have a criticism to make of you: You prey upon men as if they are no more than a marriage. You must learn to practice camaraderie.”92

In this response friendship takes precedence over marital choice, becoming another hurdle on the path toward achieving modern womanhood. By seeking to contain romantic courtship, the idealization of friendship reveals concern for bolstering the heterosocial nature of public spaces while voiding them of sexual tensions. Alongside modernist claims about the virtues of coed schooling to inculcate heterosocial practices from a young age, camaraderie would prevent young women from expecting commitment and instead protect choice as the masculine prerogative within a relationship. Readers recognized the disproportionate way young women were rebuked for purportedly underestimating the value of friendship and overemphasizing marriage. The problem, according to B., a philosophy student, was young men’s hypocrisy. When she chatted openly with male students about books or classes, they boasted that she was “their latest conquest,” twisting friendship into the sexualized acquisition or commodification of women.93 Nabiha Driss, a university student, pointed out that damaging rumors spread about young women who met fellow students outside the classroom regardless of their intentions. Friendship between peers, noted Fawzia Hamza, president of a student club affiliated with the women’s union, was limited by young men’s behavior: But the girl who meets you for coffee, your best friend will see her and tell you “she’s not serious.” If after a while, or around the same time, you see her with others, at a café, or even only walking out of class or at the bus stop, would you still marry her? No. He prefers some country bumpkin, who is almost illiterate.94

In other words, they retorted that male students’ intentions to befriend female students or find dance partners were not entirely pure. B., Driss, and Hamza identified the double standards informing heterosocial

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J.H. and Ch. Z., “Ces messieurs ne se décident pas,” Faiza, March 1961, 4. Ms B., “Pas d’amitié en Tunisie,” Faiza, May 1961, 6. “Judo marriage . . . et qu’en dira-t-on,” Faiza, February 1960, 16–19.

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relations whereby young women embodying the appropriate distinction between heterosocial practices and heterosexuality were considered too independent, or too modern, to marry. The experiences of these university students suggest the gendered parameters of youth sociability where young women were expected to foster proper heterosocial friendships, but their behavior was constantly scrutinized by male peers who reduced them to objects of sexual conquest or sexualized friendship as a good quality in a classmate, but not befitting of a wife. Public acts of friendship between youth of opposite sexes would ideally substantiate modern heterosocial norms. Young women should be friendly, but not flirty, available but not eager. While there is much to appreciate in urging young women to prioritize education and self-development over dating, Faiza’s vision of friendship bespoke an editorial paradox that revealed the patriarchal limits of hegemonic iterations of liberal state feminism in postcolonial Tunisia. While the ideal of choice and companionate marriage as juxtaposed against arranged marriages implied women’s agency, her actions and desires were contained by a courtship in which her passivity was encouraged under the guise of camaraderie. Social norms governing public sphere interactions were more flexible for young men, and the agentive associations of youthful self-determination were primarily masculine. However, through the women’s press, young women directly challenged the double standards of friendship and its efforts to contain and deny the sexual tensions within heterosocial spaces.

Sexual Boundaries of the Nation The gendered fracturing of romantic love and choice into an agentive masculinity and passive femininity was inherently sexual. It was also intertwined with implicitly racialized and predominantly Muslim understandings of Tunisian identity. These two axes are evident in the postcolonial rehashing of debates on “mixed marriage,” referring to interracial or interreligious marriages or both. The political and cultural anxieties surrounding the topic since the early twentieth century made marriage a “contested site of national identity formation.” As Hanan Kholoussy elaborates in the case of colonial Egypt, polemics in the press “often portrayed mixed marriage as endangering the

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marital futures of Egyptian women.”95 In Tunisia as well, anticolonial nationalists considered marriage between Tunisian men and French women as a betrayal of their movement; women activists such as Bashira Bin Mrad dramatized portrayals of these unions to raise funds for the nationalist cause and increase awareness of the problem.96 Often referring to marriages between Tunisians and Europeans, postcolonial political events facilitated the reappearance of mixed marriage as a topic of scrutiny. First, animosity toward France was maintained, if not heightened, throughout the Algerian war of independence and exacerbated by French attacks on Tunisian soil at Sidi Sakiet Yusuf in 1958 and Binzart in 1961. Second, the president ended a nearly thirtyyear marriage with Moufida Bourguiba (née Mathilde Lorrain) in the summer of 1961.97 A French woman he had met while studying in Paris, the former First Lady had been a partisan of the nationalist cause and converted to Islam after independence; their divorce appeared to mirror the diplomatic rift between the former colony and imperial metropole.98 With a French woman no longer occupying the presidential palace (though she remained in Tunisia until her death), Bourguiba’s divorce alleviated the political taboo of conversations about the racial and national implications of marriage. Tunisian women continued to be scrutinized in postcolonial debates about mixed marriage. Whereas prior to independence such debates coincided with reformist calls to improve women’s status, in the postcolonial context Tunisian women were more likely to be blamed for 95

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Hanan Kholoussy, “Stolen Husbands, Foreign Wives: Mixed Marriage, Identity Formation, and Gender in Colonial Egypt, 1909–1923,” Hawwa 1, no. 2 (2003): 206, 209. CREDIF, ed., Memoire de femmes/Nisaʼ wa-dhakirah, 77; Bakalti, La femme tunisienne au temps de la colonisation, 246–49. According to Wassila, this divorce had long been in the works and Bourguiba merely hoped to take advantage of the political situation. Bourguiba and Gaspar, Entretiens avec Wassila Bourguiba, 77. An American journalist viewed Binzart as leading not only to a diplomatic crisis but to an increase in religiosity, evidenced by fasting during the month of Ramadan and “a spate of letters published by the Tunisian women’s magazine Faiza denouncing ‘mixed’ marriage . . . The letters took on the aspect of a holy war . . . [and] coincided with President Bourguiba’s divorce from his Frenchborn wife last year.” Thomas Brady, “Tunisia, Disillusioned by West, Is Reverting to Religious Ways,” New York Times, February 18, 1962, 20. The piece or its general thesis must have circulated in Tunisia, though it was rejected by Faiza. “Le vénérable New York Times et le mariage mixte,” Faiza, February 1962, 18.

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pushing Tunisian men away and, in a new twist, subjects of scrutiny for their affections for foreign men. For decades, Tunisian men were part of a larger community of North African labor migrants filling blue-collar positions in France, some of whom lived with European women (whether married or not), though they generally lived in segregated worker housing.99 The 1960s debates about mixed marriage focused less on migrant laborers and more narrowly on the student population. The national student union, the UGET, which represented Tunisian students studying abroad, publicly opposed marriages with foreigners, according to its secretary general Mongi Kooli.100 The number of such marriages, as tallied by the UNFT, remained small: of the hundreds of Tunisian students in France, thirty-six returned home with foreign wives in 1959, another fifty-four in 1961, and seventy-five more the following year. Hoping to dissuade students and “young people from committing this error” in the future, the women’s union adopted a motion against mixed marriages at their congress in 1962. These marriages were seen as a threat to national security and a problem for the future of the nation and its families.101 As Radhia Haddad explained in La Presse, a recently independent nation involved in the struggle against underdevelopment required the commitment of all “men of a certain class” whose skills were essential for the nation to attain economic self-sufficiency. To further impress the patriotic spirit threatened by mixed marriages, Haddad pointed out that nine of the men accused in the attempt on

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North Africans comprised only about 2 percent of the foreign workforce at the end of World War II, of whom Algerians constituted the overwhelming majority. Alec G. Hargreaves, Immigration, “Race” and Ethnicity in Contemporary France (London: Routledge, 1995), 11. The political and demographic implications of “mixed couples” was a source of concern for the French government as well. Amelia Lyons, The Civilizing Mission in the Metropole: Algerian Families and the French Welfare State during Decolonization (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2013), 24–46. According to Tahar Ben Jelloun, physical segregation created an emotional vacuum for male migrants, contributing to psychological trauma. La plus haute des solitudes: misère affective et sexuelle d’émigrés Nord-Africains (Paris: Seuil, 1977). On the UGET, see the statement by Secretary General Mongi Kooli in “Judo marriage . . . et qu’en dira-t-on,” Faiza, February 1960, 16–19. Saida Al-Diw Al-Qaied, Al-Ittihad al-watani lil-mara’a al-tunisiya, manara bin ahdin, vol. 1: 1956–1986 (Tunis), 177.

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Bourguiba’s life were married to foreigners.102 “Mixed marriage” became another site of postcolonial debates about marriage and modern gender roles addressed by politicians, scholars, writers, and the press.103 The Tunisian writer Albert Memmi, who rose to prominence with his exploration of the colonial condition, also addressed FrancoTunisian romance. First published in 1955, his novel Agar begins with the return of a Tunisian Jew and his French Christian wife to Tunisia after the protagonist completes his studies in Europe. His reacclimation is marred by an inability to navigate social pressure (from the Jewish qua national community), eventually leading to the dissolution of his marriage.104 The European Christian bride was a recurring figure within postcolonial fiction, often depicting the fraught nature of interracial or interfaith marriages.105 In film as well, tales of love gone awry or failed romance between an Arab Muslim man and a European Christian woman reflected “a profoundly racialized notion of desire and domesticity that defined the parameters of ideal Egyptian womanhood, manhood, and intimacy.”106 Memmi’s work illustrates the imagined incompatibility of marriages that crossed geographic and religious lines as ones of national difference. With romance beginning at the university, the novel resonates with postcolonial attention to 102

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104 105

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“Déclaration de Mme R. Haddad au journal La Presse qui enquêtait sur les mariages mixtes, La Presse, 9 January 1963, 3,” in Annuaire de l’Afrique du Nord (Paris: Editions du CNRS, 1965), 899–901. Haddad otherwise referred to the alarming increase in marriages with foreigners and their serious consequences in her oral history. CREDIF, ed., Memoire de femmes/Nisaʼ wadhakirah, 77–78. Sociologists publishing in RTSS examined mixed marriage in relation to social mobility of educated Tunisian men (Ben Salem) and a barometer of the liberalism of parents who voiced their hypothetical acceptance (Fenniche). Ben Salem, “Le phénomène de mobilité sociale,” 45–46; Naima Fenniche, “Attitudes des jeunes parents tunisois de 20 à 30 ans devant le mariage mixte,” Revue Tunisienne de Sciences Sociales 2, no. 3 (1965). Albert Memmi, Agar ([Paris]: Gallimard, [1955] 1984). In his cataloguing of French literature from North Africa, Jean Déjeux describes the image of the foreign spouse as a set of repetitive caricatures. Jean Déjeux, Image de l’étrangère: Unions mixtes franco-maghrébines (Paris: La Boîte à Documents, 1989). Such cliches regarding European women were also common in Arabic literature. Susanne Enderwitz, “The Foreign Woman in the Francophone North African Novel,” in Allen et al., eds., Love and Sexuality in Modern Arabic Literature. Ifdal Elsaket, “Sound and Desire: Race, Gender, and Insult in Egypt’s First Talkie,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 51, no. 2 (2019): 227.

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students. Considering their visibility in political activism and expectations of their national commitment, student liaisons lent matrimonial affairs greater weight and touched on nationalist sensibilities. Faiza’s editors advocated in favor of mixed marriages as an extension of the right to choose couched within a vaguely defined universal humanism. What became an extensive conversation across multiple issues began with an article by Josette ben Brahem in June 1961. A French national married to a Tunisian doctor she had met at the university, and a frequent contributor to the francophone press, she framed the topic largely within feminist prognostication about women’s betterment. The article recounted the story of a friend named Kamel, a Tunisian studying in Paris, who ended his engagement with his Tunisian fiancée and was now dating a French woman. While Ben Brahem framed “mixed marriage” as the result of a gender gap between Tunisian men and women, recalling earlier reformist polemics, she also blamed his fiancée and her family for pushing young men to marry abroad, as they expected him to provide appliances for the couple’s new home. “Many future doctors or lawyers” were repulsed by the demands of bourgeois Tunis families, she argued. Yet the morality of Kamel’s story was more ambiguous as he also decided not to marry his French girlfriend, declaring, “I feel deeply tied to my country, my society.”107 For the next six months, a plethora of letters sent to Faiza evinced the volatility of cross-border romances and their national significance. As the editors summarized in their struggle to offer a framework through which to interpret the range of perspectives, “In the name of love, reason, family or religion, the polemic between those ‘for’ (a distinct minority) and those against. Of note: a clear position ‘against the French woman’ more than against foreign women in general.”108 Letters referred to the colonizing attitude of French women, the potential religious implications on future children, and the loss of Tunisian intellect and capital when these marriages led to emigration. Others were more ambivalent, stereotyping both partners for having 107

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The article also contained social critique of the extended family for its “racist reactions” to marital disagreements of mixed couples, because even when foreign wives tried to “adapt” to Tunisia they faced myriad obstacles. Josette Ben Brahem, “Un mariage mixte de plus,” Faiza, June 1961, 22–24, 56. “Lectrices et lecteurs aux prises avec le mariage mixte,” Faiza, October 1961, 25–27.

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“complexes” about their identity (for Tunisian men) or class (their frequently working-class French wives). Still others explained such liaisons by the presumably greater sexual availability of European women, while others saw it as a platform for feminist advocacy for the improvement of young Tunisian women.109 By the fall, Faiza’s editors attempted to end the controversy. On the one hand, noting the highly public nature of “students and Tunisian officials [who] continued to contract marriages with foreigners,” the editors relocated marriage within the private sphere of personal choice. On the other hand, they recognized the advantages of the debate as a feminist strategy to urge for further investment in public education and changes to family life.110 By January 1962, as “letters continue[d] to pour in,” they implored readers to put the debate to rest. Whether supportive or critical, citing feminist, religious, or nationalist rationales, these letters contain a shared presumption about the definition of mixed marriage as the union between a Tunisian man and a European woman.

Tunisian Women and Potential Spouses: Pierre or ‘Ali? The nationalist rationale against mixed marriages that surfaced in many letters echoed earlier precedents, yet postcolonial debates expanded the polemic to include consternation over the marital choices of Tunisian women. Letters scorned young women interested in French boyfriends, referred to as “Pierre,” for following a superficial fad or as evidence of an “epidemic.” Dating foreign men was a failure of women’s emancipation and a misunderstanding of what it meant to be “modern.”111 One letter asked whether religion allowed a Tunisian Muslim young woman to marry a foreigner, implying that “foreign” was synonymous with non-Muslim, testing the boundaries between social norms, religious mores, and legal parameters. Faiza replied that 109

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Hamida S., “Surplus pour exportation,” Faiza, October 1961, 27; Abdelkader, “Méfiance ou snobisme,” Faiza, December 1961, 2; A. Salem, “Une correction à nos jeunes filles,” Faiza, February 1962, 2. One young man later threatened that if he lost his Tunisian fiancée to another man he would leave Tunisia permanently, taking his engineering degree and earning power so that “a foreign woman will benefit from my wealth and a life of happiness.” “Un seau d’eau froide en hiver,” Faiza, February 1962, 2. “Ce mariage mixte qui suscite tant de passion; le point de vue de Faiza,” Faiza, November 1961, 30–32. Kmar Aouni, “Je n’arrive pas à m’expliquer cette épidémie,” Faiza, November 1961; Badia M’rad, “Pierre ou Ali?,” Faiza, December 1961, 2.

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legislative provisions regarding marriage “were mute on this point” and did not explicitly prohibit Tunisian women from “this type of marriage.” Since Islam prevented Muslim women from marrying outside the faith, they suggested, “She can marry a foreigner as long as he is Muslim.” The response further cautioned that a Muslim woman who married a non-Muslim “is rejected by her family and by society as if she has committed a crime of high treason.” Any young woman should be aware of the risks, should she follow her husband to his country, slowly forgetting her own, “if not renouncing her family, her milieu, her culture and her traditions.”112 There were in fact legal parameters cautioning against Tunisian women’s marriages to foreign and non-Muslim men. For one, Tunisia declined to ratify the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1962, which included women’s right to marry outside their faith.113 As subsequently codified in the Tunisian Nationality Law of 1963, Tunisian men could pass their nationality to a foreign spouse, whereas women’s ability to pass their nationality to a foreign spouse and their children was more limited.114 That editors settled for describing current practices with a cautionary word about social consequences as opposed to challenging social norms in favor of women’s choice pointed toward the gendered boundaries of Faiza’s approval of mixed marriage. Once again, not all readers agreed with the idea that French boyfriends were off-limits. Two other young women, Fawzia and Fatma, pointed to the double standard that male students “date young foreign women, without admitting that Tunisian women should be able to do the same.”115 Another writer identified as Fatma recalled the importance of marital choice in relation to women’s rights: 112 113

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“Une musulmane peut-elle épouser un étranger?,” Faiza, June 1961, 23. The point was directly addressed in 1973 when marriages between Muslim women and non-Muslim men could not be registered. Unless the husband converted to Islam, such marriages were thereafter considered annulled in the eyes of Tunisian authorities. Bessis, “Bourguiba féministe,” 110; Zayzafoon, The Production of the Muslim Woman, 121–22. For a Tunisian woman married to a foreigner, her children had to be born in Tunisia to qualify for citizenship (Article 6). While a Tunisian man automatically passed his nationality to a foreign spouse on marriage (Articles 13 and 14), a Tunisian woman was required to reside in Tunisia in order for her foreign spouse to apply for naturalization (Article 21), www.e-justice.tn/ fileadmin/fichiers_site_francais/codes_juridiques/Code_de_la_nationalite_ tunisienne.pdf. Fawzia and Fatma, “Journal des jeunes,” Faiza, 1959, 82–83. Similar questions were also raised in subsequent letters. Nesria Daoud, Faiza, November 1961, 6.

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If Khadija loves Pierre, why should she marry Ali? If she gets along perfectly and completely with Pierre, why shouldn’t she marry him?. . . This is not just about modernism. It is simply a normal fact of life and should or must arrive sooner or later. The Tunisian woman . . . is no longer a doll, an object or “a subservient woman.” The patriarchal regime has ceased to exist in our society today which needs all of its members.116

Fatma brought feminist ideals of modernism and rights into an argument that extended gender parity into personal domains. Setting aside national, religious, or racial implications, these letters pushed at the boundaries of companionate marriage and the primacy of individual choice, testing the limits of male prerogative. Regardless of the rates of marriage between Tunisians and Europeans, debates over mixed marriage offered a legible framing for other social matters. In their support or critique of mixed marriage, letters, articles, studies, and surveys in the Tunisian women’s press indicated a consensus that transnational romances were a matter of national importance and subject to public scrutiny. This reinforced the expectation of filial obedience that (male) students owed to their nation, whose patriarchal authority could limit the exercise of choice. Yet more often than not, young men were absolved of any potential betrayal in a denial of personal responsibility that deflected blame onto Tunisian women, their families, and society at large. As icons of national modernity, the potential emigration or conversion of Tunisian women held weighty symbolic consequences. While such patriarchal discrepancies were challenged by young women, they hinted at fears about men’s inability to control women’s sexuality.

The Young Tunisian Woman, the Young Tunisian Man, and Love Early in 1966, two of Faiza’s reporters sat down with nine unmarried young girls in a park in Tunis. Six were students in high school or at the university, two worked in sales, and one was a secretary. Participants were identified only by initials, and the journalists were unnamed in the transcript of the conversation: “Gathered with the utmost secrecy, and strictly limited to girls despite their protests. But we wanted it to be 116

Fatma, “L’autre mariage mixte: Pas de poupée de maison,” Faiza, February 1962, 2.

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more realistic, more sincere.. . . Here it is, with hearts bared, a debate about a subject so ancient, so much discussed: love.”117 Under the heading, “La jeune fille tunisienne et l’amour” (The Young Tunisian Girl and Love), they pondered whether love could be the basis of marriage, the relation between dating and marriage, the qualities of a husband such as education or material means, and love as a source of family strife. Beginning with open-ended theoretical questions such as “What do you think about love?” and relationship expectations (“What do you expect from a boy that you love?”), it was a strictly heterosexual topic. The report sparked curiosity, comments, and concerns about gender roles, courtship, and premarital sex, reappearing under similar “love” headlines in seven issues over the course of the next eighteen months. The dramatization of romance, whether in terms of the catastrophic consequences of mixed marriage in Egyptian cinema or candid conversations about love, underscored the appeal of such topics, representing what film scholar Ifdal Elsaket identifies as an astute commercial strategy, particularly appealing for a publication such as Faiza in need of revenue.118 This first foray into youthful romances followed standard themes projecting an ideal future through love, but the young women often disagreed with the progressive linear narratives established around marriage. For instance, when Faiza wondered if they would choose to pursue love against the wishes of their family, they rejected this juxtaposition. For E., this melodramatic schema was unimaginable: “[M]y parents would allow me to marry anyone. They told me, ‘He has to come to you and ask for your hand in marriage, not to ask us.’” R. agreed: “I love my parents and would not leave them for a man. After all, if I am here today, and have an education, it is thanks to 117

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Though their ages are not listed, their marital status is implied by the repeated use of the term “jeune fille” to describe them. Even if young girls in the countryside “live and think in silence,” the editors argued that they were still represented by this group “of girls who arrive from everywhere, live in the capital,” and represent a new era, “the first decade of independence.” “La jeune fille tunisienne et l’amour,” Faiza, April–May 1966, 50–58, 96. Elsaket, “Sound and Desire,” 227. Faiza’s editors were candid about the challenges of publishing, the inevitable delays, and the struggles of their publication. The April–May 1966 issue was its fifty-fourth, though as they explained in the subsequent issue dated November–December 1966, they were again facing difficulties, and readers committed to the future of Faiza should encourage their friends to subscribe. “Chers lecteurs,” Faiza, November– December 1966.

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them. For that reason, I couldn’t tell them: ‘I love this guy and I’m leaving you.’ I know that the moment my parents know that I love someone, they would let me marry him.” Refusing the binary terms implied in the question, M. argued that for young Tunisian women who “ignore society, their families and so on if they fell in love” and those who “forget their love because they are conscious of society and their families,” the future was bleak. Far from the forlorn missives bemoaning parental interference and control, these young women offered sober reflections toward balancing personal choice with familial and social norms. While most love reporting had been chaste, the young women steered the conversation toward the entanglement of love, intimacy, and sex captured by the euphemistic notion of a “flirt” (un flirt). Often used as a noun such as when J. complained that guys scorned women for “a simple flirt,” the French term borrowed from English was somewhat amorphous.119 Pondering whether a young woman should date or “save herself” for marriage, whether to flirt meant dating (in J.’s opinion) or kissing (according to M.), they agreed that a young woman who had “an adventure” (as R. described it) had her life ruined. M. pointed out that young women took love seriously: “[Y]oung girls know that if they are not married, they cannot express their love for a boy.” This exposed a sensitive paradox: young women could express love only within marriage, but boyfriends dumped them if they mentioned marriage. Even if love meant more than desire or passion, a clear taboo against young women’s sexual experiences prevailed; Tunisian men in Europe acted very “liberated” toward their girlfriends, they claimed, but then returned to Tunisia to marry, insisting on the bride’s virginity. J. and E. concurred: “If she’s not a virgin, it’s over,” whether the young man had gone out with thousands of young women or only two or three.120 By highlighting such discrepancies, these young women revealed and denounced the sexual double standards of dating, premarital intimacy, and virginity.

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In France, the term had multiple meanings, from its use as a noun to refer to the person with whom one flirted. As a verb it could be similar to contemporary English terms such as “necking” or “petting,” with sexual undertones, and was a topic of deliberation in the French press as well. Fishman, From Vichy to the Sexual Revolution, 95. “La jeune fille tunisienne et l’amour.”

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The premise that young men had greater latitude in their romantic affairs and more sexual experience catalyzed multiple readers, whose suggestions remained within the framework of women’s concerns. According to Moncef ben Redjeb (who had previously written to rant about irresponsible youth who partied or wore miniskirts and high heels), young women should exercise caution in any relationship, never appearing too eager, because young men would distort love to take advantage of them. “Young ladies,” he recommended, “you must understand once and for all that our behavior and evolution depends on you,” again absolving men of responsibility.121 Another, echoing the spirit of benevolent patriarchy, offered young women a list of ten principles to follow in becoming the “ideal wife,” including to smile frequently, to speak with caution and without losing one’s temper, to admit immediately to any fault, to avoid seeking advice from friends, and to allow a man time to relax before approaching him with any problem.122 At least one reader considered the implications for men, whom he condemned for predatory behavior. Undressing women with their eyes while donning a false smile was unmanly, he wrote; shouldn’t men “support and protect these precious roses? Let’s not become starving wolves who only try to ‘get the girls.’”123 Bouzid then convened a conversation on “the young man and love,” featuring twelve men aged twenty to thirty: seven were students, one worked in sales, another was a technician, and three were civil servants. Two of them were married.124 Their dialogue on love, sex, and dating, while similar to that on “the young Tunisian girl and love,” revealed the importance of love practices in the configuration of Tunisian manhood and heterosexuality. Commenting on premarital sex, Khalid, a twenty-six-year-old married civil servant, defined Tunisian identity by gendered sexual mores whereby what was acceptable for European women was not acceptable for Tunisian women. “I will only marry her if she is a virgin,” he boasted, “and I will only love 121

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Moncef Ben Rejeb, “Rien ne sert de courir,” Faiza, January–February 1967, 69; see also his letter in “Faiza bavarde,” Faiza, November–December 1966, 78. Abdallah Mzabi, “Dix conseils pour être l’épouse idéale,” Faiza, January– February 1967, 68. Mohamed Nefzi, “Loups affamés et roses précieuses,” Faiza, January–February 1967, 68. Dorra Bouzid, “Le jeune homme et l’amour,” Faiza, May–June 1967, 56–62, 90–92.

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her if she is a virgin. It’s a very selfish position.” Munsif, a twenty-oneyear-old student, generally concurred on this separation between love and premarital sex: “Every time I get to know a girl, I love her, and every time that I sleep with her, I don’t love her anymore.” As Hadi noted with condescending chivalry, in Europe a flirt “means to sleep together, but in Tunisia, flirting is like a bee sipping nectar from one flower after another without killing the flower.” Rafik, a twenty-oneyear-old student, affirmed the double standards inherent in the codes of courtship epitomized in this analogy about the bee and the flower: “Muslim boys, in a general way, we have a hard time considering marrying a girl who we’ve seen flirt. I’m not sure that any of us here would agree to marry a girl who he had seen five or six times on the arm of another boy, boyfriend or otherwise.” However, outlining specific behaviors for Tunisian or Muslim young women presented a paradox, noted Nour al-Din: “[B]oys can flirt but not girls? Then who are we going to flirt with? Other boys?”125 While this joke provoked laughter, it evoked the importance of dating or being a “flirt,” in the creation of heterosocial norms central to the construction of male heterosexuality. Literary scholar Nouri Gana identifies the tensions between men’s avowed belief in women’s rights and their deference to social norms that reinforced male privilege as a defining trait of the generation that came of age after independence. Ideas of “sociocultural specificity” hinted at by the men’s distinctions between Tunisia and Europe exemplify how normative constructions of masculinity resonated with the “patriarchal manhood” of “Bourguiba’s brand of Tunisian nationhood.”126 Ahmad, a married thirty-year-old, vacillated between ideals of companionate marriage and deference to male privilege when he chided the others, “Tunisians live the ‘myth’ of the man as a protector who has to be in charge of everything.. . . The misfortune of our generation, it’s that we’re living with a European mentality in a Tunisian environment.” Deflecting blame, Ahmad and other participants attributed the problem to the older generation, to parents and mothers in particular, to taboos, and to those “whose evolution has not paralleled ours.” By refusing to recognize their own complicity in 125 126

Bouzid, “Le jeune homme et l’amour.” These were later challenged by filmic depictions of male homosexuality and rape. Gana, “Bourguiba’s Sons,” 109–11, 22.

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perpetuating patriarchal social norms and family structures, they not only reinforced sexual double standards, but sheltered men’s intimate lives from public debate. If men could admit scrutiny over women’s behavior as a matter of national concern, they deferred to male control over the family to reject similar attention to their own behavior. Faiza’s readers seized on the contradictions between the pretense of men’s enlightenment and their deference to patriarchal control, responding with wit and biting condemnation.127 Discussing the matter with twenty of her friends, ‘Aida bin Khalil denounced men for their deception and egotism. What was the meaning of love “if he claims to love” when chasing after women only to drop them and brag to their friends? “The Tunisian boy [le garçon tunisien], whether he is at the university, in high school, in the administration, or in a factory, is always selfish.” He upheld gender hierarchies that not only were counterproductive, “whether in the office or at home,” but clashed with the ideal of companionate marriage because “in the life of a couple, there is neither master nor slave.” For Bin Khalil and her friends, men’s misunderstanding of companionate marriage as premised on a relationship of equality was not merely a matter of romance but an example of faulty gendered heriarchies in society more broadly.128 Less talk, more action, wrote Naziha Moulay, who found the young men insincere, as did Muhmmad Zamzari, adding that they were prone to exaggerations and egoism.129 Another letter signed by “a psychology student in Tunis” dissected the claims of the young men one by one. She urged Rafiq to educate himself about women’s sexual pleasure, argued that women’s submissiveness was a learned behavior contra Hadi’s claim that it was part of women’s nature, and insisted that men’s authoritarian tendencies were not “proof of love, but quite the opposite, a sign of disrespect” toward women. Her critique of Khalid’s embrace of sexual double standards was trenchant, political,

127

128

129

“Le jeune homme, la jeune fille et l’amour: Réponses au débat paru dans le n. 57,” Faiza, November 1967, 50–55. Aida ben Khalil, “Mieux que la virginité, la réputation,” Faiza, November 1967, 50. Zamzari applauded Faiza’s efforts to address the problems of “Maghrebi youth.” Muhammad Zamzari, “Messieurs de la franchise, s.v.p.!,” and Naziha Moulay, “Un ramassis de singes,” Faiza, November 1967, 52–55.

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and worth quoting at length as it draws connections between gender roles and ideals of the modern nation: Khalid demands that a woman be a virgin. I would like to ask him why he allows himself to have numerous adventures without conceding that women can have them as well? Isn’t that unjust?. . . When our country was colonized, it was up to the French to define our freedoms. Now that we are independent, is it your turn, the men, to act toward women as colonizers? Have you forgotten the name the French gave to their colonial rule [in Tunisia]: the Protectorate . . .? And you want to protect us!!. . . Fortunately, women today are increasingly cognizant of their rights, exercise them, and no longer let themselves be easily led and exploited by men. You want to “control everything,” live your myth of the colonizer? But as women, we will prevent that! We will never again allow you the right to a dictatorship. We will only accept communal decision making and not those imposed upon us. All things considered; I think our spirit is turned more toward democracy than toward dictatorships! I want to let you know that the myth of the “protective man who controls everything” is not universal, as you seem to be convinced, but only applicable to underdeveloped countries. Let’s figure out how to end our underdevelopment, come on!130

The letter, running nearly four columns, exonerated mothers as products of earlier social norms and advocated consciousness-raising among women and calls for education. The writer reframed debates about manhood within nationalist idioms of progress and anticolonial liberation by comparing male privilege to dictatorship, fascism, and colonial rule so that respect toward women was an inherent feature of modern love, national progress, and independence. Patriarchy threatened the ideal of companionate marriage as well as women’s ability to contribute to national betterment, stalling the political transformation and economic future of the postcolonial nation. Centering love as a youthful experience, the letters and features in Faiza revealed the broader social implications of romance as it related to sex, patriarchy, and masculinity. Young women rallied against contradictory expectations about male-female interactions that placed greater burdens on their shoulders, insisting that modern womanhood required a reconsideration of manhood. Love could not be romanticized as an embodiment of modern subjectivity when emotional expression was limited to the male braggadocio of conquest and female 130

“Démystification,” Faiza, November 1967, 51–52.

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passivity. They articulated a feminist platform that embraced women’s liberation as a central feature to social and political transformation as implied by the modernization of love. This feminism did not call for legislative reforms from the state, nor did it argue that women should adopt the same traits as men or equate sexual experiences with sexual liberation. Instead, they questioned men’s behaviors and the patriarchal structures that excused them. Experiences of love, they argued, were embedded within gendered social norms, the transformation of which was essential not just to women but to the future of the nation.

Conclusion Questions of love, premarital sex, and mixed marriage drew more emotional pontification and passionate responses from readers of the women’s press than coverage of social issues such as the cost of living. Responding to an appeal by a younger generation of readers, Faiza’s column addressed more than the romantic woes stemming from shifting courtship practices, changing familial expectations, new ideals of marriage, and heterosocial etiquette in the workplace and university. The column reinforced the desirability of companionate marriage, happiness, and the prominence of the nuclear family as aspects of national progress, contributing to the cultural registers in which people narrated love. Unlike Sertel in Turkey, who pushed back against liberal state feminism through her advice column, Faiza’s editors encouraged a model of youthful femininity that prioritized education, formal employment, and civic responsibility, adhering to the contours of official state feminism.131 With marital choice representing the independence of the young nation and the self-determination of the individual, such benefits of modern citizenship were withheld from young women, who had not demonstrated their preparation for adult womanhood in these terms. In evoking love to condone or condemn the social practices and familial norms of their peers, writings in the women’s press delineated a set of boundaries shaping the standards of heterosocial behaviors. The shifting composition of previously homosocial spaces urged young men to perform masculinity through heterosexual seduction, flirting, 131

Sertel’s political positions otherwise earned her questioning and reproach by the authorities. Shissler, “Sabiha Sertel’s Advice Column.”

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or dating. That young women were expected to befriend them in denial of such sexual undertones disavowed the place of women’s sexuality or virginity within constructions of modern womanhood. Proper comportment was defined in opposition to the nation’s past (arranged marriages); in relation to modern, heterosocial, urban spaces (the university, the workplace); and as distinct from Europe (the chastity of Tunisian women). Women’s sexuality not only established national boundaries that were threatened by mixed marriage and reasserted in nationality codes limiting women’s ability to pass citizenship to their children but created a set of national particularities within the global discourse of modern love. Chafing against these symbolic burdens and their social implications, young Tunisian women took to the protected space of a magazine to argue for deeper transformations, challenging the continued privileges of masculinity and the liberal construction of women’s liberation that had largely left gender roles intact.

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Conclusion Love, Politics, and Bread

Love! Politics! Culture! And bread, you would ask us, why don’t you ever mention it? Even if man (and woman) doesn’t live on bread alone?. . . What is in the grocery basket of a woman in Tunis? What is missing in the basket of the bedouin woman? What is the price of meat, of milk or tea, and why are they hard to find? What is a commercial entity of a consumer’s cooperative?. . . For all of these major questions that make up our daily lives, Faiza will search for answers from this issue onward. After these essential basic concerns, she will address others in future issues (such as the question of rent), before attacking the problem of lipstick, fabric and all other relevant considerations of daily life. Your suggestions are welcome as is any participation from our readers in this quest that hopes to be useful to them. And if you disagree, say so!1

With these words Faiza’s editors introduced a series of investigative pieces on issues of national economic planning, arguing for their relevance alongside topics typically considered relevant to women such as “the problem of lipstick.” Extensive deliberations about love raised questions about patriarchy and male privilege, whereas attention to theater, art, and literature insisted on women’s participation in cultural production. Engaging with state feminist models of modern womanhood, both were inherently political as they ignored the boundaries of official discourses and expanded its horizons. By differentiating between the “grocery basket of a woman in Tunis” and “what is missing in the basket of the bedouin woman,” the passage identified regional and class disparities in a manner that included “the bedouin woman” in conversations about national modernity. Faiza printed letters from readers who lived beyond the Tunis metropolitan area, in the larger coastal towns of Sousse and Sfax, and those of the interior such as Kef, Qairouan, or Gafsa. The UNFT boasted of nearly 34,000 adherents in over 273 branches by 1965. 1

“La vie quotidienne,” Faiza, January–February 1967, 25. Ellipses in original.

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Yet much of the press and UNFT organizing was dominated by educated, middle-class voices on women’s issues, reducing rural and working-class women to silence or symbolism.2 Organizations such as the UGTT and UGET were also predominantly concentrated in the capital and struggled to transcend their elite and middle-class origins, particularly in the realm of decision making.3 Proximity to the state conferred advantages and disadvantages. Structural barriers to massbased mobilization were a feature of postcolonial society attributable in part to the authoritarian single-party state (though not uncommon in multiparty democracies of the era, either). Despite the efforts to bring modernizing agendas to working-class and rural women via literacy, healthcare, and vocational programs, the UNFT was marred by the predominant hierarchies of the time whereby the inclusion of Tunisians from different walks of life was to be done within the existing structures of such urban-based institutions without their reconceptualization. The official celebration of Bourguiba’s singular role in granting women’s rights through the Majalla rendered further mobilization around questions of legal reform risky, as a personal attack on the president. Authoritarianism restricted women’s ability to directly disagree with state feminist platforms, whether through the UNFT or otherwise. The dismissal and persecution of the UNFT’s first president, Radhia Haddad, and her removal from parliament and the women’s union, succinctly illustrates how censorship, repression, and the lack of political pluralism overshadowed postcolonial society, political activism, and intellectual debate, including matters of women’s rights. While recognizing these limits, women’s organizing, writing, and activism were integral to the elaboration of modern womanhood as an aspect of state-building, asserting women’s relevance to economic, social, and cultural affairs.

Women’s Organizing: Continuities and Ruptures Historians of the 1960s caution that student mobilization, transnational alliances, and cultural experimentation provoked a 2 3

UNFT à 10 ans, 38. While some union leaders used their political positions as a platform from which to advocate for workers’ rights, overall, the incorporation of UGTT members into the higher echelons of political power “created a gulf between union leaders and workers.” Ahmad, “Politics and Labor in Tunisia,” 220.

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conservative political backlash by heightening fears about gender roles, social stability, and national identity, which lasted into the 1970s. These shifts were economic as well as political, with consequences to education and intellectual life. As Egypt scaled back its commitment to social and economic change, embracing liberalism in 1973 and partnering with the United State, and Algeria’s FLN negotiated with US oil companies tempering its radical internationalism, Tunisia ended collectivization in 1969 turning more explicitly towards economic liberalism, as evidenced in the persecution of bin Salih and Nouria's appointment as prime minister. Protests calling for democratization, structural change, and a break from the dictates of US foreign policy continued into the 1970s, as did arrests, imprisonment, and harsh sentences against student activists. Dismissing their grievances as the complaints of spoiled youth, the state continued to label them “enemies of the people” who threatened national unity.4 Configuring the university as a national and nationalist institution where dissent was attributed to foreign interference not only increased the risk of activists charged with undermining state security but perpetuated a climate of mutual distrust in which constructive criticism was unlikely. The Fourth Plan articulated in 1973 called for a deceleration of investment in education. Job training would be calibrated to economic needs, reducing budgetary expenses and contributing to the neoliberalization of higher education.5 Whereas teaching had previously been a path of upward social mobility, the ensuing contraction of higher education and stagnation in civil sector employment decreased the value of an education, making it a privilege that not all could afford.6 Tensions between institutions such as CERES and the government, 4

5

6

These were recurring themes and phrases in presidential speeches of the 1970s. Mohsin Toumi, “Discours politiques maghrebins,” Les Temps Modernes (1977): 158–59. While many nations cut back state resources for education, most narratives of education in Tunisia paint it as a success story, overlooking how the university perpetuated social inequalities. Corinna Mullin, “Neoliberalism, Higher Education and National Security: (Re)Producing and Contesting Hierarchies of Sovereignty and Citizenship in Post-uprising Tunisia,” paper presetned at the conference of the Middle East Studies Association, Boston, 2016. Arguing that the Tunisian state firmly embraced the dominance of the middle class after 1969, Zghal indicates structural similarities across the Maghreb, with Algeria in particular. Abdelkader Zghal, “Classes moyennes et développement au Maghreb,” in Les classes moyennes au Maghreb, ed. Abdelkader Zghal et al. (Paris: Editions du Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, 1980).

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hinted at in the 1960s, became only more pronounced over the following decades, with intellectuals in the 1970s facing “a difficult choice: to remain in the creative and unimpeded margins or to join the center, shaped by political considerations and the constraints of pragmatism.”7 Tunisian academics defined the first postcolonial intellectual generation as one shaped by this authoritarian climate where research “functioned to legitimize the project of modernization and development.”8 Political repression and the need for dissimulation contributed to new forms of activism in the 1970s in which women participated.9 Women challenged the single-party monopoly on power by their involvement in associations, drawing attention to the intersection of political and social questions through concerns about gender and women’s lives. Haddad participated in efforts to formulate a democratic socialist scission from the ruling party that coalesced in the late 1970s around other former regime loyalists, notably Ahmed Mestiri and Haddad’s brother, Hassib bin ‘Ammar. Both Simone Lellouche and her husband Ahmad Othmani were founding members of the Tunisian League of Human Rights (Ligue Tunisienne des Droits de l’Homme) in 1976, in support of political prisoners and committed to penal reform. In preparation for the Third World Conference on Women at Nairobi in 1985, the League established a commission on women’s rights.10 By 1983, even the UGTT established a women’s section.11 Women also spoke through religion and morality to address social inequalities challenging the state’s superficial secularism that 7 8

9

10

11

Jebari, “Rethinking the Maghreb,” 67. For a summary of the proceedings of a conference that defined this generation as those active from 1956 to 1980, see Ilhem Marzouki, “Où sont les generations intellectuelles tunisiennes?” (unpublished work, 2001). Participants in the 1968 student movement “played an instrumental role” in human rights organizing in the 1970s and the foundation of the Amnesty International section in Tunisia in 1981. Hendrickson, “March 1968,” 757. The Commission focused not only on defending women’s legal rights but on women in the workplace advocating for the financial rights of working-class women; see BDIC, Fonds Othmani, sol 26, Ligue Tunisienne des Droits de l’Homme. This was at least in part inspired by feminist academics involved with the UGTT, who began exploring the idea in 1981. Azza Ghanmi, Le mouvement féministe tunisien: Témoignage sur l’autonomie et la pluralité du mouvement des femmes (1979–1989) ([Tunis]: Chama, 1993), 57–62. See also Neila Zoughlami, “Quel féminisme dans les groupes-femmes des années 80 en Tunisie?,” Annuaire de l’Afrique du Nord (1991).

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associated modernity with Western dress. The state sought to include pious women at formal events to deflect such critiques, inviting Hend Shelbi to give a public lecture during Ramadan, though Shelbi, a highschool philosophy teacher, voiced her disagreement with Bourguiba’s policies provocatively denying regime efforts to utilize her veiled body in representations of Tunisian womanhood. Women were involved in social and political projects centered on Islam, which included what coalesced into the Islamic Tendency Movement and later the Nahdha (or Renaissance) political party. Its base consisted of approximately 20 percent women, a rate higher than that of women in other sociopolitical organizations, with at least one woman, Hafifa Makhlouf, elected to a position of leadership by the end of the 1970s.12 While Faiza ceased publishing by early 1968, the UNFT press continued, supplemented by Femina and Promodes starting in 1974 and the bilingual periodical Nisa’ in the 1980s. By the late 1970s, female students from sociology, in particular, began a weekly gathering at the Tunis cultural club, to discuss women’s lives in a women-only space. Cultural clubs were led by the vice president of the UNFT, Fethia Mzali, from 1964 to 1967 when they were placed under a National Cultural Committee led by Jelila Hafsia, a friend of the president and First Lady. The Tunis study club on women was a response to the lack of attention to women within leftist circles and a rejection of the hierarchical structures of the UNFT and of the dependence of women’s groups on political parties. The club also initiated Maghrebi feminist meetings.13 Political autonomy was important to activists as 12

13

Vincent Geisser and Chokri Hamrouni, “Bourguiba dans la mémoire islamiste tunisienne,” in Habib Bourguiba, la trace et l’héritage, ed. Michel Camau and Vincent Geisser (Paris: Editions Karthala, 2004). Despite its origins in the statesanctioned Association for the Defense of the Qur’an, the Islamic Tendency Movement’s request for official recognition was rejected in 1981. Ayari, “Tolérance et transgressivité,” 194–95. Its socioeconomic origins were also among the educated. Christopher Alexander, “Opportunities, Organizations, and Ideas: Islamists and Workers in Tunisia and Algeria,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 32, no. 4 (2000). Ilhem Marzouki, “The Feminist Movement in Tunisia,” in The Feminist Movement in the Arab World: Interventions and Studies from Four Countries; Egypt, Palestine, Sudan, Tunisia (Cairo: Dar el-Mostaqbal al-Arabi, 1996), 96–98. Cultural clubs were named after historical figures, with the Tunis branch selecting Al-Tahir Al-Haddad in recognition of his advocacy for women’s education. Azza Ghanmi, Neila Jrad, and Neila Zoughlami were all early participants, while Hafsia supported and participated in the group. Ghanmi, Le mouvement féministe tunisien.

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constituting a turning point in the women’s movement. There remained similarities with earlier women activists in terms of their class location and education, the political constraints to advocacy, and their efforts to reach a wider audience through the periodical Nisa’. Publishing seven issues between 1985 and 1987, Nisa’ referred to transnationalism or socialist contexts, urging collaborations with women in Algeria and Morocco in ways that transcended the parameters of the nation-state model of liberal feminism.14 In 1989, the group split into activist and research branches open only to scholars: the Tunisian Association of Democratic Women (Association Tunisienne des Femmes Democrats [ATFD]) and the AFTURD (Association des Femmes Tunisiennes pour la Recherche et Développement), legalized in 1989.15 According to Labidi, the women’s movements of the 1980s turned to women’s experiences to challenge their invisibility in national history.16 Indirectly subverting these legacies through their focus on nationalist women, and attention toward women’s participation in the development of national culture, women’s magazines had contributed to such projects since independence. “Why include a rubric on the economy in a women’s journal?” the editors of Nisa’ rhetorically asked, before answering, “[F]or many years there has been a struggle to recognize women’s significance to economic considerations.” By foregrounding the economy as a women’s issue, they hoped to render more visible the monetary value of domestic labor, food preservation, weaving, and embroidery, while problematizing the gendering of labor in the textile sector.17 This feminist goal of including women when “thinking [about] development” as opposed to bringing women into the “struggle against 14

15

16

17

It also continued to center the Personal Status Code within its vision of women’s rights. “Editorial: Le combat de l’heure,” Nisa, August 1985. For Zoughlami, the 1980s activism remained focused on a vision of progress that was largely European. Zoughlami, “Quel féminisme.” Though Marzouki locates the origins of ATFD to protests against the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982. Marzouki, “The Feminist Movement in Tunisia,” 103; Badra Bchir, L’enjeu du feminisme indépendant en Tunisie: Modèles et pratiques, vol. 21 (Tunis: Cahiers du CERES Série Sociologique, 1993). Lilia Labidi, “The Nature of Transnational Alliances in Women’s Associations in the Maghreb: The Case of AFTURD and ATFD in Tunisia,” Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies 3, no. 1 (2007). “Face caché de l’économie,” Nisa’, 1985, 21.

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underdevelopment” points toward topics and themes addressed in the women’s press and by women activists in the 1960s. Faiza’s attention to the cost of bread and women’s diets, UNFT efforts to expand vocational training for rural girls, or academic attention to women’s labor in scholarship of the 1960s engaged with social and economic problems often couched within the struggle against underdevelopment. In both, women’s centrality to political modernity becomes a method for reconsidering that modernity and the gendered nature of development.

Women, Gender, and Development UN International Women’s Year in 1975 marked an important moment in the international visibility of women’s rights, which attracted greater state resources. Over the 1980s and 1990s Tunisian women were recruited into development programs, often adopting the liberal construction of femininity and hoping to foster “entrepreneurial attitudes” among lower-class rural women and improve their sense of “empowerment.” Not only did women report little material benefit from working long hours as tailors, domestic employees, or in petty trades, but similar to women participating in family planning in the 1960s, their visions of material security included an appreciation of family as a source of motivation, encouragement, and commitment.18 Women’s economic options remained limited by structural factors, from the lack of formal education or training to general unemployment and the insufficient transportation infrastructure.19 While speaking of empowerment, this new generation of development interventions, including those of nongovernmental organizations, perpetuated the inequalities of structural adjustment and placed a greater burden on already marginalized communities.20 Despite the language of “choice” and “individual rights,” Kamran Asdar Ali points toward the limits of “provider-dependent” contexts that “took decision making away from 18

19

20

Essma Ben Hamida, Jamila Binous, and Yara Abd’ul Hamid, The Thousand and One Paths to Empowerment: Coping Strategies of Poor Urban Women in Tunisia (Tunis: ENDA Inter-arabe, 1997). Sénim Ben Abdallah and Markaz al-Buhuth wa-al-Dirasat wa-al-Tawthiq wa-alIlam hawla al-Marah, Recherche-action sur les dynamiques entrepreneuriales des femmes dans le secteur agricole en Tunisie (Tunis: CREDIF, 2003), 107, 10–11. Julia Elyachar, Markets of Dispossession: NGOs, Economic Development, and the State in Cairo (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), 29, 137.

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Egyptian women.”21 The consistent grounding in a liberal feminist equation between work and liberation that separated women from family and community and proposed technocratic solutions failed to address socioeconomic inequalities and their political origins. Agricultural development, argued Sophie Ferchiou, often increased women’s labor while decreasing its value.22 In the villages around Sidi Bouzid, a region whose poverty had attracted domestic and international investment since the 1970s, Ferchiou demonstrated that these projects had pushed girls out of school at rates higher than that of boys and higher than the national average due to the monetization of their labor. While women were excluded from technical training, the commercialization of agriculture had rendered their labor (and that of children) more valuable. Claims to “respect their [local] norms and traditions” and “not alter the family organization of peasants” had monetized patriarchal structures to the detriment of women.23 Ferchiou further detailed structural causes for educational disparities, including the insufficient number of classrooms, the distance of schools, the lack of female teachers (fewer than one in ten), and limited economic means among families to support the education of all of their children (local unemployment was also higher than the national average).24 In identifying regional disparities, Ferchiou refused to isolate gender from broader social and political considerations, arguing that development exacerbated national problems in ways particularly harmful to women. The economic and political marginalization of Sidi Bouzid and other towns in the rural interior continued. Popular uprisings in 1977 and 21

22 23

24

Kamran Asdar Ali, “Faulty Deployments: Persuading Women and Constructing Choice in Egypt,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 44, no. 2 (2002): 375. They also continued to perpetuate stereotypes about rural women. Frances Dennis and IPPF International Office, Planned Parenthood and Women’s Development: Lessons from the Field (London: Programme Development Department, IPPF International Office, 1983). Ferchiou, “L’aide internationale au service du patriarcat.” The Swedish International Development Agency and the UN Food and Agricultural Organization had partnered with the Tunisia government on projects in Sidi Bouzid since 1974. Ferchiou, Les femmes dans l’agriculture tunisienne, 25. There were 166 elementary schools in the governorate but only seven at the secondary level. In her survey, 91 percent of women expressed a desire that their daughters receive educated to allow them salaried employment. Ferchiou, Les femmes dans l’agriculture tunisienne, 52–55, 68.

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1978 and in the winter of 1983–84 began in these rural areas before spreading to larger towns and cities, calling out the uneven nature of regional development, rural unemployment, economic hardship, and the cost of living epitomized in references to bread.25 Another important social movement in the mining region of Gafsa spread across the southern governorate, bringing local unions and students together around matters of unemployment, political corruption, and nepotism at the mines. In these protests, women spoke out on a platform that combined family and community concerns with questions of gender, development, and labor. For example, a tent sit-in including those known as the “eleven widows” – whose husbands had died in the mines – mobilized to demand employment for their children.26 The neglect of rural communities and the agricultural sector in Sidi Bouzid again was the genesis of a nationwide movement beginning in 2010 that demanded regime change and the dismantling of the single-party state.27 Informal networks of family and kin were as important to mobilization as social media and labor organizations.28 Calls for government accountability and for the economic inclusion of the rural interior for equal access to employment and education underscore how the problems faced by the state at independence persisted more than five decades later. They point toward the failure or uneven nature of national development and the promises made by the postcolonial state to men, women, and their families. Debates over legislation regarding women remain polarizing in their perceived relation to questions of identity and authenticity, often detracting from considerations of necessary political and economic reform. 25

26

27

28

David Seddon, “Winter of Discontent: Economic Crisis in Tunisia and Morocco,” MERIP Reports, no. 127 (1984). In Moulares, amid increasing regime violence, young people marched in protests accompanied by their mothers. Larbi Chouikha and Vincent Geisser, “Retour sur la révolte du bassin minier. Les cinq leçons politiques d’un conflit social inédit,” L’Année du Maghreb 6 (2010); Larbi Chouikha and Eric Gobe, “La Tunisie entre la ‘révolte du bassin minier de Gafsa’ et l’échéance électorale de 2009,” L’Année du Maghreb 5 (2009). Mathilde Fautras, “Mohamed Bouazizi, l’ouvrier agricole: Relire la ‘révolution’ depuis les campagnes tunisiennes,” Jadaliyya (2014), www.jadaliyya.com/pages/ index/18630/mohamed-bouazizi-louvrier-agricole_-relire-la-%C2%AB-r% C3%A9. Mehdi Mabrouk, “A Revolution for Dignity and Freedom: Preliminary Observations on the Social and Cultural Background to the Tunisian Revolution,” Journal of North African Studies 16, no. 4 (2011): 631.

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State Feminist Alibis The imbrication of women’s lives with national politics of representation remains a conflicting legacy of postcolonial state building. Attempting to circumvent Bourguiba’s personalization of women’s liberation but not dismantle the narrative of state feminism, women’s rights remained a source of legitimacy for Tunisia’s second president, Zine al-‘Abidin Ben ‘Ali, following his 1987 coup.29 Another generation of government publications maintained the framing of women’s rights as a facet of benevolent patriarchy: “On November 7, 1987, the very day he acceded to the highest executive office, President Ben Ali officially affirmed his commitment to the principle of equality between the sexes and to promoting the condition of women and the family. Ever since, his Excellency’s primary concern has been to consolidate the legal gains of women.”30 These narratives continued to prioritize a vision of women’s rights centered in marriage, divorce, and custody that the state granted to women, protecting them by its attachment to the 1956 personal status code.31 Women proved relevant to securing domestic approval and reassuring foreign allies about the secular nature economic liberalism and foreign dependency of the Ben ‘Ali regime, emphasizing its supposedly progressive nature despite increased policing and the repression of political opponents.32 Global political divides continued to be exploited by the Tunisian state even after the waning of the Cold War. With Islamic activism and piety movements considered a threat to the Western liberal order and the authoritarian regimes they supported during the wars in Algeria in the 1990s and the American-led War on Terror after 2001, Ben ‘Ali took advantage of the stereotype that Islam posed a particular threat to 29

30

31

32

The idea that women served as an “alibi” for the regime was articulated by contemporary observers. Olfa Lamloum and Luiza Toscane, “Les femmes, alibi du pouvoir tunisien,” Le Monde Diplomatique, June 1998. Tunisia, Wizarat Shuun al-Marah wa-al-Usrah and Markaz al-Buhuth wa-alDirasat wa-al-Tawthiq wa-al-Ilam hawla al-Marah, Tunisian Women’s Legal Gains in the New Era (Tunis: CREDIF, 2004). See the collection of quotes to this effect and those insisting on the role of the state to “guarantee women’s effective participation in the struggle that our people is waging for progress,” collected by the Tunisian Agency for External Communications. ATCE 1991a, March 19, 1988, and March 31, 1989. See, for instance, Larbi Sadiki, “Bin Ali’s Tunisia: Democracy by Nondemocratic Means,” British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies 29, no. 1 (2002).

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women and women’s rights.33 With a record of violent repression of political opponents who voiced their critique through Islam, during his tenure as Minister of the Interior and Prime Minister in 1986 and 1987, Ben ‘Ali contributed to the vilification of religiosity. Avoiding calls from the Nahdha party and from within the Dustur and its offshoots for multiparty pluralism, Ben Ali instead legalized women’s organizations such as the ATFD and AFTURD and in 1991 established the Center for Research, Study, Documentation, and Information about Women (Centre de Recherches, d’Etudes, de Documentation et d’Information sur la Femme, CREDIF) to promote research on women.34 Legal status facilitated organizing and public activities for women’s groups, but necessitated maintaining positive relations with the regime. As Ilhem Marzouki elaborates, the instrumentalization of women’s rights and the subordination of women activists to the singleparty state left women powerless and trapped “between public declarations and favorable legislative measures and the effective absence from decision-making.”35 The UNFT was not a radical organization, and it did not dismantle entrenched socioeconomic and regional inequalities. Yet this record must be placed alongside the similar failures of later development projects and civil society organizations. The UNFT’s advocacy on behalf of rural girls and women raised questions about the intersections of class, gender, and the uneven nature of state investment. Many of its projects sought to address this disparity, whether institutes to train girls as agricultural technicians or branches of the state-run People’s Schools offering adult literacy courses and basic education for working-class women.36 Its welfare activities, from opening shelters to clothing distribution to health, nutrition, and vaccination

33

34

35

36

On the role of secular fears of Islam and their manipulation by the Algerian state, see Hugh Roberts, “Algeria’s Ruinous Impasse and the Honourable Way Out,” International Affairs 71, no. 2 (1995). The ATFD was invited to join the National Pact, and the AFTURD was given space within the Ministry of Social Affairs with some of its representatives serving on ministerial councils. Labidi, “The Nature of Transnational Alliances,” 15–16. Ilhem Marzouki, Femmes d’ordre ou désordre de femmes? (Tunis: Noir sur Blanc, 1999), 2, 11–12, 34. Fatma Ben Sedrine, “Aspects de l’alphabétisation et de la condition des femmes en milieu rural,” in La participation de la femme rurale.

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campaigns, benefited women, as did its textile factories and artisanal enterprises (many of which were located in towns such as Gafsa and Tala). It ran the first daycare centers in Tunisia; opened cultural centers to supplement public education with music, theater, field trips, and sports; and built girls-only dormitories, providing essential housing to students from remote locations who otherwise may have had to forgo higher education.37 Remaining loyal to the concept of liberal nationalism and its paternalistic structures, these projects were political in the sense that they gestured toward particularly gendered lacunae in state services. As Ghodsee points out, women’s organizing within the state conferred recognition to their struggles, acknowledged women’s place within national projects, and granted select women positions of authority. Such accomplishments should not be underestimated solely because they did not emanate from civil society.38 The women’s press encouraged models of modern womanhood that often resembled hegemonic articulations of state feminism, yet writers and readers found ways to broaden its parameters, whether by celebrating the economic contributions of women in agriculture or championing models of cultural collaboration and hybridity in which women were pioneers. While they spoke the hegemonic language of national imperatives, a requirement for participation in public discourse under the single-party state, this did not preclude critique.

Decolonizing Modern Womanhood In examining state feminism and postcolonial womanhood, this book has explored the meaning of modern womanhood among those committed to its fruition, primarily the women who benefited from the state’s version of enfranchisement. But this book has also been about its failures. The idealization of certain representations of femininity relied on the ideological and structural marginalization of rural spaces, the deprecation of local cultural expressions, and often the exclusion of working-class and poor women. This cohered with the postcolonial state’s participation in the Western bloc, with its liberal vision of equality grounded in the experiences of middle-class white women. Continuity with colonial patterns of trade that privileged the 37 38

Marzouki, Le mouvement des femmes en Tunisie, 188–92. Ghodsee, Second World, Second Sex.

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extraction of raw materials and a dependent relationship with France and later Europe guaranteed that meaningful economic change remained difficult. The UNFT recruited women from across the nation, and the women’s press strove for broad circulation, but the heart of women’s activism, scholarship, and cultural expression was centered in the capital, among more privileged women. Their embrace of liberal feminism meant that efforts to ground women’s liberation within the nuclear family neither reenvisioned family life in a manner that challenged patriarchy nor accepted the possibility that family was a space of empowerment. In the family planning program and campaigns to limit family size, the liberal vision of women’s emancipation clashed with that of rural interlocutors, whose vision of rights or development incorporated gender, family, and community with political and economic struggles. Constructions of women, womanhood, and the modern family in Tunisia were influenced by regional and transnational conversations, by Arabic women’s novels, international women’s conferences, and the accomplishments of women across the globe. Within intellectual and cultural circles, among development experts and purveyors of foreign aid, at international feminist events, and in fashion periodicals, women deliberated, debated, and reimagined their contributions to the nation. Women were not merely pawns in the soft diplomacy of the Cold War era, or the target of development aid, or passive beneficiaries of state largesse. They were actors in the construction of political alliances and nation-building projects – from the promotion of the local textile industry to the revitalization of the artisanal sector – and proponents of cultural transformation. State discourses about women’s rights and the position of those discourses within the national canon were important in formulating official narratives about liberation. Despite their hegemonic nature, and a broad liberal consensus among the urban educated sectors of the population associating women’s liberation with modernity, employment, and a bourgeois lifestyle, feminists and activists found ways to diverge and dissent from the entrenchment of such middle-class norms. Since the political transformations inaugurated by the December 2010–January 2011 protests, the centrality of women to Tunisian identity frames secular government as the only guarantor of women’s emancipation in opposition to the recognition of Islam (in any capacity). Whether targeting miniskirts or headscarves, the social

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value of clothing has not been uncontested. The polarization of questions of gender and identity has created a roadblock to institutional reform, turning public debates away from questions about restructuring and reorienting the national economy, or addressing regional disparities that the current neoliberal imperatives perpetuate. In focusing on appearance and questions of identity, media coverage turns away from the structural inequalities and political questions embedded in instances of violence against women, neglecting intersectional approaches that could situate women’s rights alongside those of men. Once again, male domination has been “an instrument of and an effect of state authoritarianism,” regardless of its secular of religious justifications.39 In the 1960s, activists and intellectuals called for the decolonization of culture by connecting art with political independence, economic questions, and labor struggles. Literary magazines articulated this vision through translation, bilingualism, and radical poetry, and these cultural narratives resonated within the pages of the women’s press. Without the explicit militancy of publications such as Souffles-Anfas, the women’s press combined cultural developments and readers’ poetry with coverage of contemporary economic and social matters, performing an iteration of this decolonization in which women were active participants. Parallel intellectual concerns with restructuring the university and the disciplinary hierarchies dominated by Europeans and Americans and their methodologies were articulated by student protests, at academic conferences, and in journal articles. Including women’s voices, whether as a facet of rural perspectives, national knowledge, or otherwise, challenged the class and regional biases implicit in the patriarchal academy. Taken together, these countered the singularity of state feminist and global discourses on the modern woman, by demonstrating the plurality of women’s experiences. While discourses about women’s liberation and modern womanhood are central to understanding the construction of the postcolonial state, women’s lives are equally important, as they shaped these ideals into practice. The move to reduce women’s status and gender roles to a question of identity (whether representing the modernity of the nation or morals that can be read through clothing) was subtly rejected even during the height of state feminist euphoria. It was rejected by the 39

Marzouki, “Images of Manipulation.”

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women’s press, which insisting on placing dress within economic circuits of production and industrial development; by reports framing the cost of living as a women’s issue; by the work of the UNFT in rural areas; by the writings of feminist academics; by women who chose to have children or not to have children; and by young women who insisted that modern gender roles implied new visions of masculinity. While none of these projects transformed state structures or altered the regional and international balance of power, they remain an integral facet of postcolonial nation-building that underscores the importance of women and gender to domestic and international politics, economic development, the academy, and social and cultural life.

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Index

agricultural reform, 8, 241 collectivization, 6, 124 critique, 133–34 Algeria, 12, 20, 29–30, 59, 73, 129, 140, 187, 224, 244, 248 marriage, 213 women, 15, 17–18, 73, 78 writers, 26–27, 36, 54, 67, 74 Al-Mar’a, 24 family planning, 97 fashion, 172 Attia, Habib, 128, 134, 190 Attia, Halima, 137 Bashir, Zubayda, 28 Ben ‘Abed, ‘Aisha, 194 Ben Brahem, Josette, 50, 66, 227 Ben Khader, Noureddine, 188, 192, 194 Ben Salem, Lilia, 149, 153 Ben Sheikh, Tewhida, 62–63, 91, 103 Bin ‘Ammar, Hassib, 77, 242 Bin ‘Ammar, M’hamed, 215 Bin ‘Ammar, Mundher, 50, 91, 137 Bin ‘Ammar, Neila, 49, 63, 68–73 Bin ‘Ammar, Samia, 50 Bin ‘Ammar, Wassila. See Bourguiba, Wassila Bin Salih, Ahmad, 5, 137 persecution, 241 Bin Yusuf, Salih, 11–12, 122 Bouhdiba, Abdelwahab, 129, 148 Bourguiba, Habib, 4 alliance with USA, 11, 76, 86, 118 Cold War politics, 20, 61, 122 demographic concerns, 90, 93, 107 divorce of Moufida, 224 divorce of Wassila, 215 manipulation of Islam, 4, 12, 45, 93, 190

280

marriage to Wassila, 215 patriarchy, 12, 181, 188, 234 personal role in women’s rights, 43, 50 speeches, 29, 47, 51, 54 wedding expenses, 210 women’s dress, 166 Bourguiba, Wassila, 38, 48, 215 Bouzid, Dorra, 26, 36, 49, 58, 66, 74, 76, 191, 211 CERES, 127–29, 140, 149 Chateur, Souad, 137 Chelli, Mounira, 36, 145–47, 155 clothing, 2, 33 modern dress, 164, 166, 173 modern dress for men, 181 morals, 167 politicization in 1960s, 162 sartorial legislation, 162 working-class women, 179 Cold War cultural politics of, 58 gender politics, 18, 30, 39, 61–64, 67 Committee of Correspondence (US), 68–72 culture and decolonization, 27, 252 women’s press, 65–67, 157, 180–81, 183–86 Daghfous, Jelila, 49, 66 Daly, Amor, 91, 103, 113 development, 18, 82 critique, 83, 142 women and, 139 divorce, 4, 44–47, 52–53 Dustur, 5, 11, 138 class base, 121, 125 family planning, 91

Index opposition to, 77, 186, 249 women, 50 economic planning, 9, 117, 154 housing, 125 industrialization, 8 public works, 124 women, 56 education, 6, 10, 28, 138 female students, 10, 127 University of Tunis, 127, 154, 187 Egypt, 20, 36, 59, 77, 140, 168, 187, 245 marriage, 47, 214, 223 masculinity, 180 state feminism in, 14 Faiza, 25–26 Algeria coverage, 74 audience, 203 emotional community, 204 family planning, 100 fashion, 34, 174, 184 gender roles, 57 identity, 67 mixed marriage, 228 Tunisian fashion, 175 family and modern womanhood, 41 modernity of, 147–50 family law, 4, 14 family planning, 30, 80–119, 138, 251 abortion, 93, 100, 111 coercion, 103, 112 contraception, 31, 81, 98–102 demography, 140 Egypt, 86, 108, 245 family size, 107, 116, 135, 143, 149 intrauterine device (IUD), 104, 106, 114 Iran, 85 Islam, 88, 141 men, 98, 144 midwives, 146 public health, 110, 113 Tunisia as model, 19, 87, 93 US, 19 women’s status, 144 Fanon, Frantz, 5, 59, 130 Farhat, Safia, 26, 49, 218

281 fashion, 22, 26, 176 global, 178 Femme, 25, 149 family planning, 99 fashion, 172 Ferchiou, Sophie, 150–55 film Carthage Film Festival, 59 Egypt, 22, 206 Tunisia, 21–22, 206 Ford Foundation, 81, 94, 129, 140 France colonialism, 6 economic relations with Tunisia, 8 military aggression in Tunisia, 224 pronatalism, 87 women’s magazines, 168, 201 GEAST (Perspectives), 187–92 women’s participation and gender, 192–95 Ghodsee, Kristen, 15, 61, 78, 250 Haddad, Radhia, 49–50, 63, 72, 80, 98, 166, 240 mixed marriage, 225 prosecution, 78 Haddad, Tahir al-, 4, 207 Hafsia, Jelila, 192, 243 Hasso, Frances, 4, 20, 46 Iran clothing, 160 marriage, 207 women, 76 Iraq marriage, 213 women, 17 Islam, 122, 127, 152, 229 Islamic Tendency Movement/Nahdha, 243 Jeune Afrique, 17, 36 Khlifi, Omar, 21, 36 Krichen, Aziz, 13, 189 Lellouche, Simone, 193, 242 love, 34 advice column, 201–2, 215, 221

282 love (cont.) gender roles, 230 global cinema, 207 literary and poetic treatments, 204 romantic love as global phenomenon, 199 Majalla. See family law; personal status code marriage, 3 age, 4, 213 companionate, 2, 35, 197 early, 53 mixed marriage, 223 reform, 207 virginity, 232 wedding expenses, 209 Marzouki, Ilhem, 57, 249 Mas‘adi, Mahmud al-, 26–27, 49, 127 Maternal and Infant Health Clinics (PMI), 95, 110–11, 114 men dress, 160, 181–86 employment, 9, 125 fears about women’s employment, 57 Mestiri, Ahmed, 77, 242 miniskirt, 33, 159, 167, 172–75 global concerns, 163 Morocco, 12, 23, 29, 36, 54, 65, 67–68, 73, 88, 129, 140, 147, 187, 244 women, 15, 73 Mzali, Fethia, 72, 98–100, 243 Naccache, Gilbert, 188, 193 National Clothing Council, 166, 181 Nazer, Isam, 88 Othmani, Ahmad, 242 Palestine, 17, 75, 189 pan-Africanism, 59 pan-Arabism, 12, 27, 39, 86, 122, 190 personal status code, 14, 44, 248 gender roles, 180 Islamic precedents, 4, 16, 214 Perspectives. See GEAST

Index population control, 19, 30, 32, 83, 107, 109, 112, 141–42 race, 84 Population Council, 30, 81, 84–85, 95, 103, 113, 140 press advertisements, 168–72 censorship, 48 women’s press, circulation, 26 Rouissi, Moncer, 144 rural men nationalism, 121 “the peasant,” 122 rural women, 22 contraception, 114 gender roles, 116, 151 Saadia, 1, 20–23 safsari, 1, 105, 149, 165 removal, 22, 158, 164 Sassi, Saida, 63, 69, 73 Sebag, Paul, 66, 134 Seklani, Mahmoud, 129, 140–44, 148 Souffles, 27–28, 59, 67 students, 182–84 female and protests, 192 Stern, Alexandra, 30, 84 Turkey global fashion, 178 marriage, 208 state feminism in, 14 women, 58, 76 UGET, 12, 187–89, 191, 240 mixed marriage, 225 UGTT, 11, 178, 240, 242 underdevelopment/struggle against, 5, 18, 51, 56, 83, 93, 108, 129 UNFT, 6–8, 25, 57, 101, 106, 149–50, 239, 245, 249 Afro-Asian women, 74 class base, 41, 106 conference on rural women and development, 137–39, 154 diplomacy, 42, 62–64 family planning, 80, 98, 118 industry, 176, 178 mixed marriage, 225

Index

283

modern dress, 166 press, 48 relations with Arab Maghreb, 73 relations with the US, 69 rural initiatives, 136 and rural women, 33 veils, 164 Vietnam, 75 women’s history, 51 USAID, 69, 82, 94, 99

women’s employment, 9–10, 38, 53–58, 151 women’s organizations, international, 39

veil(s), 22, 33, 157–60, 166, See also safsari folk culture, 165 Vietnam, 17 women, 18, 40

Zghal, Abdelkader, 132–34, 144, 148 Zouhir, Fathi, 91, 107 Zouiten, Safia, 75

Yemen, women, 16 youth, 17, 23, 138, 216, 223 culture, 23, 191 fashion, 175 Maghrebi, 65