Zanàn1382/2003) to voice women’s urgent con-
cerns and demands. All these speak, eloquently, to
the presence of women as a highly potent political
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Khomeini, New York 1983.Haideh MoghissiNorth AfricaBeyond the Mediterranean tradition of patri-
archy, whose mechanisms have been uncovered by
Germaine Tillon (1996), does it make sense to
examine the trajectories of women’s struggles in the
Maghrib’s three main countries (Tunisia, Algeria,
and Morocco) as part of a single movement? In
Tunisia, Bourguiba instituted a system of state-
backed feminism, whose preservation nowadays is,
for some, one of the last valid reasons to support
the regime of Bourguiba’s successor against the
threat of “Islamist regression.” In Algeria, in the
period that followed independence from France,
the collusion of the Front de libération nationale
(FLN) and conservative religious forces to send
women back into the home, paved the way for a
true “civil war within the civil war” dating back to
the early 1990s, in which gender relations are at
stake, and that is at least equal in violence to the
war between the military and Islamists. Finally, in
Morocco, subtle adjustments to the Màlikìtradi-
tion, supported by the monarchy, have barely
weakened masculine domination, but have given640 political-social movements: protest movements
some degree of liberty to elite urban women on the
economic, political, and intellectual fronts. In the
meantime, ordinary women continue to share with
ordinary men the unfavorable fate cast upon the
underprivileged by the Sharifian kingdom. These
significant differences notwithstanding, the three
countries present several common traits forming
a system of constraints that determine the way
women will organize their struggle in relation to the
global societal evolutions of each country, and are
indicative of obstacles or even regressions recorded
in those societies.
In Tunisia, Algeria, and Morocco, resistance to
colonization turned the family structure and the
preservation of women’s honor into the last bas-
tion of a distinctive identity as well as symbols of
maintained integrity. As a result, a contradiction
emerged between the role of women in the resist-
ance – which was important, particularly in Algeria
and Morocco – and women’s ability to articulate
autonomous demands. An additional possible con-
sequence was the continued subjugation of women.
In contexts where the aim for reform constituted
the modality of both the interactions and the con-
frontation with the colonial power and its “civiliz-
ing mission,” the first “feminists” in the Maghrib
were men: Tahar Haddad and Bourguiba in Tuni-
sia; Ben Badis and Ferhat Abbas in Algeria; and
Sultan Mohamed Ben Youssef and Allal al-Fassi in
Morocco. They preached the renovation of the fem-
inine condition by the resurrection of the models of
pious ancestors. But as soon as women took it upon
themselves to articulate their own demands, they
faced the recurring accusation of Westernization,
notably on the issues of the veil, polygamy, and
†alàq(repudiation).
Once independence was obtained, the one-party
systems in place in Algeria and Tunisia, and the
monarchy in the case of Morocco, did not deem it
necessary to address the question of the place of
women in society as a specific issue: as long as the
state promised improvements in the condition of
women – and delivered them in the sectors of edu-
cation, health, and employment – women were
strongly discouraged from raising the question of
their status, in spite of the fact that the constitutions
of all three countries stated that they should enjoy
the same rights and responsibilities as men. A long
period of latency followed, during which women’s
demands could only be expressed – cautiously –
through organizations created by and under the
control of the state or the single party – the Union
nationale des femmes tunisiennes, created by Bour-
guiba in 1958; the Union nationale des femmes
algériennes, created in 1963 under the supervision