This section considers the record of women’s political, economic, and social engagement in postcolonial Tunisia and its legacies beyond the 1960s. Despite continued restrictions on associational life, political repression, and a harrowing intellectual climate, women were involved in reformist projects into the 1970s and 1980s, and under the regime of Zine Al-Abidin Ben Ali as women’s rights were again instrumentalized as a cover for authoritarianism. Whether in political parties, human rights organizations, student groups, religious movements, or women’s journals, activists insisted on the relevance of gender to visions of social, economic, and political change. Sophie Ferchiou’s work on women in agriculture illustrates the limits of liberal models of women and development implemented in Tunisia in the 1970s and 1980s, and the structural causes of rural protests, such as those of 2010. Working within the establishment, nationalist women raised questions about the intersections of class, gender, and the urban-rural divide, even if their visions of emancipation fell short of challenging patriarchy. However, in their activism and publications they demonstrated a plurality of women’s experiences that could not be captured in the singularity of state discourse on the modern woman.

This chapter focuses on the political meanings of state feminism. It begins with an overview of the state’s vision of gender roles and the modern family as concretized in postcolonial legislation. Women’s rights were an aspect of state-building, political centralization, and foreign policy. The national women’s union and the women’s press (the magazines Al-Mar’a, Femme, and Faiza) engaged with and transformed the hegemonic discourses of modern womanhood. The women’s press contributed to wider conversations about postcolonial culture through its attention to women across the Middle East and around the world. Middle-class women, often urban and educated, embodied modern womanhood as they participated in national politics and diplomacy. 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. 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.

The introduction frames state feminism within the context of authoritarian state-building in Tunisia as elsewhere in the Middle East as offering opportunities and limitations. Marriage reform and marital metaphors were mobilized by modernizing states across the globe, shaping the public-private divide emblematic of secularism and modern conceptions of the nuclear family. Tunisian family law was part of these processes of juridical reform and modernization that expanded state power over both men and women, appropriating men’s patriarchal control over their families. In postcolonial Tunisia, they were undertaken by a single-party state asserting its authority over the religious establishment, the labor movement, and women’s organizing. Continued ties with France and American financial aid shaped Tunisia’s Cold War alliance, perpetuated its position of dependence, and shaped its economic structures in liberal directions despite a period of ostensible socialism. Women’s rights were important to Tunisia’s international image and secured the middle-class, urban base of the ruling party. Yet by bringing women in proximity to the state through its patronage over women’s affairs, they became public personas involved in politics, diplomacy, and cultural life, shaping the image of modern womanhood along the way.