4 - Fashion, Consumption, and Modern Gender Roles

Summary

Modern womanhood was also a cultural project with implications for gender roles and masculinity. This chapter turns to dress as a visual code in the increasingly heterosocial public sphere. The women’s press promoted a model of stylistic progress from head-coverings and loose colorful dresses to makeup and heels, images reiterated in advertisements. Yet fashion catalyzed fears about women’s independence and sexualization as seen in the miniskirt. An iconic 1960s item, the mini provoked controversy around the globe from Greece to France to Tanzania. Attention to the hyper-politicization of women’s dress in the Middle East often focuses on the veil, yet beyond veils or unveiling, scrutiny over women’s dress perpetuated the political and cultural relevance of women’s appearance. The 1960s were also a quintessential decade of student protests, and the politicization of clothing included concerns about men’s appearance as an aspect of men’s behavior. While youthful fashions violated expectations of filial obedience to presidential authority, there was little consensus about the meanings of men’s dress. 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.

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

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

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 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 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 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 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 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 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 folk-dancing.”³⁴ Colorful, loose-fitting, and richly embroidered rural attire was contrasted to the neat, trim lines of lab coats and tailored blazers, 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 al-Qawmi 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 A-line 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 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 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 ready-to-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 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-and-white 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 highest-quality products. By serving food from Izdihar cooperative, “the most modern in Tunisia,” the modernity of the factory is transposed onto the home consumer.

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

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.

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 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 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 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.” 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 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 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 self-improvement.” 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. 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.

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 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-in-Tunisia 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 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 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 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

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 gender-bending 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-the-counter 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.

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 middle-class 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 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-seven-year-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.”

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 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 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 self-identified 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 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 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 Afro-Asian 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 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 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 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 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 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 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