Feminism and the Tunisian Revolution · CHAPTER 7 ·
Tunisia under Bourguiba
Chapter 7 of Protest and Change: Second-Wave Feminism and Tunisia, 1945–2015: “Bourguiba’s Tunisia”
Tunisia became independent from France on 20 March 1956 under Habib Bourguiba, and on 13 August 1956 his government decreed the Personal Status Code, which banned polygamy, ended divorce by a husband’s declaration and required a bride’s consent. Women first voted in 1957, but rights came without the freedom to organise.
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The map above is the world of Tunisia, August 1956 — Family law: the Personal Status Code abolishes polygamy.
Every state on the map that year: The world in 1960 · Europe in 1960.
Part of IB History: Second-wave feminism and Tunisia →
SHORT EXPLANATION
Tunisia entered independence on 20 March 1956 with a political settlement unlike that of its neighbors. France had controlled the government since establishing a protectorate in 1881, although the bey remained ruler in name. Habib Bourguiba’s nationalist Neo-Destour party now led the country; in 1957 he abolished the monarchy and became president.
Within five months of independence the government decreed the Personal Status Code (CSP). Polygamy was banned, a husband could no longer divorce by declaration alone, and either spouse could seek a judicial divorce. Marriage required the bride’s consent and a minimum age. Tunisia is blue on the map, alone in North Africa, because polygamy remained legal next door. Many of these rights arrived through the state before feminist protest had won them.
The same government tightly controlled political life. Bourguiba ruled through one party, banned communists in 1963, became president for life in 1975 and allowed only the party-controlled National Union of Tunisian Women. Development favored the coast, especially the Sahel around his hometown of Monastir. The two arrows trace migration from the interior toward Tunis and Sfax.
The interior also became a source of resistance. Villagers opposed farm collectivization at Ouardanine in 1969. At the end of 1983, a doubling of bread prices sparked riots in the southern oases; within five days they reached Tunis, along the red arrow. Bourguiba cancelled the increase. Both the family law and the route by which revolt spread would matter in 2010–11.
The full story
On 13 August 1956, before Tunisia had a constitution, Bourguiba’s government decreed the Personal Status Code. It took effect on 1 January 1957. Why could a new government make such extensive changes to family law when its neighbors did not? Sociologist Mounira Charrad looks to the alliances through which those governments held power.
Neo-Destour drew strength from urban professionals and townsmen of the Sahel, the coastal plain around Sousse and Monastir. Its rival nationalist faction had the backing of rural notables and conservative clergy, but Bourguiba’s side defeated it. The victors consequently depended less on tribal kin groups whose authority rested in part on family rules keeping marriages and property within the lineage. Bourguiba could present reform as a modern interpretation of Islamic law, drawing on Tahar Haddad, whose 1930 book on women in the Sharia had been condemned by the religious establishment. Tunisia is blue on the map; Algeria, then a French colony at war, and Libya remain parchment because their family law allowed polygamy. Charrad’s comparison makes the structure of political power, rather than religion alone, central to that difference.
The Code began a wider program. Women voted in municipal elections for the first time in May 1957 and in national elections from 1959. The state built girls’ schools and opened a national family-planning program in the 1960s. It legalized abortion for mothers of five children in 1965, then on request during the first three months of pregnancy in 1973, two years before France.
The government could make these changes without giving women an independent means to defend them. The National Union of Tunisian Women, founded in 1956, was an arm of the ruling party. Independent feminist associations, including the Tunisian Association of Democratic Women, were licensed only in 1989. A state that could extend rights could also freeze or trade them away; the organizations able to challenge it were restricted.
Economic policy exposed another consequence of concentrated power. Planning minister Ahmed Ben Salah forced farmers into state cooperatives in the 1960s. When the scheme reached the Sahel’s olive groves, villagers resisted at Ouardanine in January 1969 and police opened fire. Bourguiba abandoned collectivization and jailed Ben Salah. His successor as economic policymaker, Prime Minister Hédi Nouira, opened the economy in the 1970s to tourism and export factories. These clustered on the coast, while families from Kasserine, Sidi Bouzid and Siliana moved toward Tunis and Sfax.
Opposition did not disappear. On ‘Black Thursday’, 26 January 1978, the army crushed a general strike called by the UGTT trade-union federation. The official count was 46 dead; independent estimates reached about 200. The bread riots of 1983–84 killed about 90 to 150 people. Long before 2010, protests could begin in the interior and spread toward the coast.
FULL EXPLANATION
State feminism: a gift, a strategy or a conquest?
The Personal Status Code transformed Tunisian law, but historians differ over how to explain it. Charrad compares the alliances on which states depended. Morocco’s monarchy needed tribal kin groups and retained conservative family law; Tunisia’s victorious party had broken their power and could legislate differently. This explains an opportunity for reform, rather than treating the Code as the gift of one man. Critics of ‘state feminism’—women’s rights designed and controlled by government—also ask what Bourguiba gained. The Code weakened the religious establishment, won Western approval and helped present one-party rule as progressive. Other scholars point to earlier Tunisian women’s activism, including Bchira Ben Mrad’s Muslim Women’s Union, founded in 1936, and to the groundwork of reformist thinkers. Nor did a change in law immediately mean the same change in every home: polygamy was already rare, while custom continued to govern many rural marriages and divorces for years. The rights were real, even though an authoritarian state advanced them for its own reasons. That combination helps explain both their durability and fears in 2012 that a new government might reverse them.
The coast and the interior
The dashed outline on the map encloses a prosperous littoral from Bizerte through Tunis and the Sahel to Sfax. Outside it are highland towns, mining basins and desert oases. Tunisians often describe the contrast as two countries. Its roots precede independence: French settlers took the best northern farmland, while the coast already possessed the ports. Independent governments widened the division. Their ruling elite came disproportionately from the Sahel, and public investment, tourism and the export factories of the 1970s followed coastal roads and ports. Hard figures from before the 1980s are scarce. Later official data show the scale the division reached: in 2010 the national statistics institute measured poverty at 32 per cent in the Centre-West, including Kasserine and Sidi Bouzid, against 8 per cent in the coastal Centre-East and 9 per cent in Greater Tunis. Béatrice Hibou and Kenneth Perkins both describe regional inequality as a structural feature of the post-colonial state. Almost every major revolt in this atlas begins outside the outlined coast.
The bread riots as a rehearsal
At the end of 1983 the government announced that bread and semolina would cost roughly twice as much. It was under pressure from the International Monetary Fund to cut food subsidies. The resulting riots, from 29 December 1983 to 6 January 1984, showed how quickly a protest in the neglected south could become a national crisis. Contemporary reports compiled by the Middle East Research and Information Project follow the route of the red arrow: the Nefzaoua oases around Douz and Kebili, Kasserine on 1 January, Gafsa, Gabès and Sfax on 2 January, and Tunis and Le Kef on 3 January. A nationwide state of emergency was declared that day. An official inquiry counted 89 dead, the Tunisian Human Rights League 110, and other independent counts 150 or more. On 6 January Bourguiba cancelled the increases on television; crowds celebrated in the streets. In both this crisis and 2010–11, protest moved from the marginal south and interior to the capital in under a week, and the regime blamed its ministers. But in 1984 Bourguiba could restore the old price and the army held. In 2011 the regime itself was the grievance. The earlier revolt showed the interior’s power to start a crisis, and the concession by which the ruler survived it.
Key places on the map
On this day
Why it happened
A nationalist party that owed little to tradition. Neo-Destour (‘New Constitution’) was founded in 1934 at Ksar Hellal in the Sahel, Tunisia’s coastal heartland. Its French-educated lawyers and teachers sought a modern nation-state and had little attachment to religious tradition. Bourguiba’s victory in 1955–56 over Salah Ben Youssef changed the political balance: Ben Youssef’s pan-Arab nationalism, the hope of uniting all Arabic-speaking peoples, attracted conservative clergy and rural notables. Bourguiba was therefore less dependent on opponents of family-law reform. Ben Youssef’s assassination in Frankfurt in 1961 shows how ruthlessly the victors guarded their position.
A reformist tradition within Islam. The Code had intellectual roots within Islam. For decades Tunisian reformers had argued that law could be reinterpreted for modern life through ijtihad, the independent reasoning of a qualified scholar. Tahar Haddad’s 1930 book advocated women’s education and an end to polygamy. By drawing on that tradition, Bourguiba presented the Code as faithful to Islam, making outright religious opposition harder. Haddad had died poor and isolated in 1935; the Code turned a condemned dissident into a national prophet.
Women as citizens of a new nation. Bourguiba regarded the patriarchal extended family as an obstacle to national unity and economic development. Educated women workers and smaller families, he believed, would help modernize Tunisia. The Code therefore belonged alongside schooling, family planning and secular courts. Rapid population growth gave family planning an economic purpose too. Women gained rights through a program designed to serve the state’s ambitions, a relationship that shaped the reform’s limits.
A state without counterweights. The ruling party controlled the Constituent Assembly and press and, from 1963, all legal political life. It could decree reforms without negotiating with parliament, clergy or the public. The UGTT had an independent mass base, but its leaders were purged when they defied the party, as in 1978. Concentrated power made rapid reform possible while restricting women’s groups and unions that might challenge policy; the interior had little voice when development passed it by.
THE TURNING POINT
The Personal Status Code, 13 August 1956. The Code decreed on 13 August 1956 made divorce a matter for courts and abolished polygamy and repudiation. Tunisian women gained legal rights for which women in most of the Arab world would wait decades; 13 August became National Women’s Day. For sixty years the Code also expressed a political bargain: an authoritarian state granted rights while demanding political silence. Ben Ali and the Islamist-led government of 2012 each had to define a position on it. A reform from above had become a boundary defended from below.
What it changed
The most liberal family law in the Arab world. Bourguiba and Ben Ali extended the Code. In 1993, for example, mothers gained new rights over their children. The Code became part of Tunisian national identity: when a 2012 draft constitution described women as ‘complementary’ to men, thousands marched to defend its rights. Ben Ali had presented himself as its guardian, helping him win Western support while repressing Islamists.
Rights without the freedom to organise. A party-controlled women’s organization gave women little independent means to use or extend their legal rights. Independent feminist associations appeared in the late 1980s, but spent two decades under police surveillance. Many women who led protests in 2011 and 2012 came from them. Their history shows the importance of freedom to organize in defense of state-granted rights; women’s groups emerged as organized actors only after 2011.
A country divided between coast and interior. The coast gained development while the interior had fewer jobs, schools and hospitals. Young people left for the coast or abroad. By 2010 poverty in the Centre-West was four times the coastal Centre-East rate. Resentment surfaced in the 1984 bread riots and the 2008 mining-basin revolt, then exploded in Sidi Bouzid in December 2010. The development model helped create the grievance that brought down Bourguiba’s successor.
A succession crisis waiting to happen. By the mid-1980s Bourguiba was in his eighties and erratic, dismissing prime ministers and divorcing his influential wife in 1986. In 1987 he demanded death sentences for tried activists of the new Islamic Tendency Movement. Prime Minister Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali used the crisis to have him declared medically unfit in November 1987. The bloodless coup was initially widely welcomed. A president for life had been removed by a medical judgment in constitutional form.
DISCUSSION QUESTION — Was the Personal Status Code a victory for Tunisian women, or a tool of Bourguiba’s state?
The Code gave Tunisian women substantial legal gains: it abolished polygamy and repudiation, made divorce a judicial right for both spouses and laid a foundation for votes, schooling, contraception and legal abortion. Women in much of the region waited decades for comparable rights, and many Tunisians came to regard the Code as their own. But Bourguiba also used it to weaken religious authorities. It was decreed without public debate, while the ban on independent women’s organizations left women to defend or extend rights through the party. Urban, educated women benefited faster than rural women in the interior. Charrad’s argument helps us understand why these facts belong together: a state that did not need kin groups could grant rights for its own purposes. The gain was real and also an instrument of power. After 2011 women gained freedom to organize in its defense.
An interesting fact
Bourguiba met his first wife, the Frenchwoman Mathilde Lorrain, while studying law in Paris in the 1920s; she later took the Arabic name Moufida. His second wife, Wassila Ben Ammar, whom he married in 1962, became one of the most powerful figures at his court for more than two decades. When he ended that marriage in 1986, he had to go to court. The Code he had decreed thirty years earlier made a judge’s ruling the only legal way for a Tunisian man to divorce his wife.
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