religion and the adoption of the Sunnìrite, with its
own interpretation and legislation of reality; and,
later, the French colonial experience with its linguis-
tic, organizational, and institutional characteristics.
Although these strong connections illustrate a
shared imaginary and role attribution according to
gender and age, there are still limitations that com-
plicate the description of these three nation-states
as a unified culture. First, there exist within each
nation-state extremely varied communities: urban,
semi-urban, rural, and other (tribal nomads, for
example, though to a lesser extent in Tunisia).
These each have their own internal hierarchies and
predispositions/resistance to accepting change to
their social structures. Second, the political model
each country adopted after its independence from
France differs from the others in many ways. In
1956 Morocco laid claim to an institutional mo-
narchy, while Tunisia adopted a liberal economic
regime headed by the then-maverick Bourguiba.
Then in 1961 Algeria adopted a socialist regime
based on a single party model (Front de libération
nationale).
The post-independence political management of
existing social and economic structures in these
three countries consequently wrought different
changes. The remainder of this entry focuses on
two elements as start points for a discussion of
these changes: first, it examines the common imag-
inary structures in premodern North Africa; sec-
ond, it looks at the formal, official structures of the
post-independence era.
In premodern North Africa, women rarely stood
as individuals or possessed an independent status;
rather, they were always defined relationally. As we
know through historical treatises and early colonial
ethnographies, women were invested with sym-
bolic values that made them, more often than not,
objects of the culture rather than its subjects. In any
given social setting, the social standing of a woman
was defined by four determining elements: the
larger net of kinship with whom and by which she
is identified (namely, her consanguineous kin, those
of simulated kinship, and those built through mar-
riage); property or possession of goods (even if the
woman does not lay actual claim to the property
proper because she is married outside her kin group);
her fertility and especially her capacity for bearing
sons; and finally, for lack of a proper expression,
the “cultural capital” stemming from her own gen-
eral behavior and her group’s ascribed status of
social importance, honor, and/or religiosity.
“Cultural capital” means the political role or
leadership position from which a woman may orig-
inate that gives her a distinguished social status, as750 social hierarchies: modern
in the example of sharìf families, descendants of the
Prophet who have strongly influenced the history of
North Africa. Women lived with and evolved
within vertical links of dependence, whether of
their kin group, their in-laws, or both. The modes
of relationships were largely predetermined by
these external elements and only rarely were there
women who could effectively, though positively,
separate themselves from these traditional struc-
tures. A woman’s status could only be defined by
and via her kinship relations, and not through her
being an individual in her own right, as exemplified
by women prostitutes who had forsaken (or were
forced to break from) the dominant social structures
in a negative way – as morality would define it.
An important number of elements played rather
positively in the emergence of what is identified
today as modern social hierarchy, a term that
implies social mobility: a relatively more progres-
sive understanding of social regulations; the con-
sideration of merit as a criterion of social mobility;
and, generally, a stratification that differs both in
scale and function from the older one. These ele-
ments may be separated into two clusters: one set
that is conjectural but has a profound bearing on
the structural level, and a set that is more internal
and inevitable. The latter stems from a cultural
logic and patterns of accommodation to external
pressures necessary for the survival of any group
under a centralized political power.
Concerning the conjectural cluster of effects,
three factors should be stressed: the birth and
spread of nationalist ideology, which recognized, in
some sense, a woman’s “subject-hood”; high popu-
lation growth due to medical progress that led to
mass migration and, to varying degrees, a break
with traditional ways; and the development (slow
especially in the case of Tunisia and Morocco) of an
industrial infrastructure that gave rise to important
population movements and social reorganization
that both indirectly and, at times, directly chal-
lenged traditional statuses and roles. An important
result of these changes was the emergence of social
classes (and especially the middle class).
Throughout the formative years following politi-
cal independence, these social classes would be-
come a dominant principle in understanding North
African social organizations and political institu-
tions. The remaining internal processes, such as
education, access to salaried labor, and “a possibility
of corporeal freedom,” have also played extremely
decisive roles in engendering new social roles and
statuses for North African women.
Historical processes distributed political and
economic power unevenly throughout the North