Policy Shifts: State, Islam, and Gender in Tunisia, 1930s-1990s

This paper offers a macropolitical framework to analyze shifts in the gender policy of the Tunisian state. Throughout the twentieth century, the status of women in Tunisia has been caught up in political wars fought largely over other issues such as colonialism, nationalism, modernity, and Islamic cultural authenticity. Only in the 1990s did women's agency emerge on the political scene, as women's rights advocates seized an opening created by conflicts in national politics. The paper suggests that neither essentialist concepts such as Islam and patriarchal state, nor models centering on pressures from below, can adequately explain shifts in state policy on women's rights in Tunisia. The paper argues instead that gender policy has been the outcome of contests over state power and that the contests sometimes have provided opportunities for women's agency. Four political configurations are compared: nationalism under colonial rule in the 1930s, the formation of the national state in the 1950s, the consolidation of the state in the 1970s, and the state challenged by feminism and Islamic fundamentalism in the 1990s.