Islam and Tunisian Women Activism

Thanks to the generous grant from the Abbasi Program in Islamic Studies, I was able to travel to Paris to conduct field research for my Senior Honors Thesis to investigate the transnational ideological trajectories of Tunisian feminists. Using the case of Tunisian female activists with experience in France, I argued in my thesis that the transnational position of Tunisian feminists in France since 1970 both enriched feminist debates in Tunisia and inscribed migrant women’s issues as central within in the French feminist movement. On an ideological level, these women adopted intellectual trajectories with divergent emphases (secular, situational and religious). On an organizational level, they went beyond the duality of Tunisia and France, drawing on North African, Middle Eastern, and international networks. They thus learned from and contributed to transnational feminist circles of different strands and ideologies.

This thesis challenges conventional understandings of the relationship between France and its colonies. Indeed, many believe that French ideals of female emancipation influenced the emergence of feminist movements in former French colonies. Women returning to their home countries after immigrating or studying in France would thus serve to spread novel feminist ideas in former colonies. However, this understanding both downplays these migrant women’s contributions and situates the sources of feminist knowledge in France. My focus on a previously-unstudied population—immigrant Tunisian feminists—contributes new empirical research, which in turn gives rise to a new conceptual framework: feminist knowledge did not radiate from the colonizer to the colonies, but rather was bidirectional, with migrant women contributing to and challenging feminist knowledge in France.

The summer field research was primarily based on oral history interviews I conducted, interviewees’ publications, and primary documents I gathered from the Association of Tunisians in France (ATF) archives. In Paris, I visited the French National Archives, the National Museum of the History of Immigration library, the Arab World Institute library, and the UNESCO archives. I also explored the Center of Feminist Archives and the archives of Générique, an association founded in 1987 that collected documents related to the history of immigration until its closure a few years ago. I additionally conducted 20 in-depth interviews with self-proclaimed Tunisian feminists. After gathering a preliminary list of potential interviewees, I adjusted my list during field work through chain-referral sampling—a nonprobability sampling technique. My research participants thus referred me to other interviewees from their acquaintances. Beyond my interviews, I identified 25 additional Tunisian feminists in France and am in contact with many of them. I hope to interview them in future work expanding on the findings of my honors thesis.