Feminism and the Tunisian Revolution · EPILOGUE ·
How protest movements create change
Chapter 12 of Protest and Change: Second-Wave Feminism and Tunisia, 1945–2015: “Two Movements Compared”
Second-wave feminism and the Tunisian revolution both grew from a gap between what a society promised and what it delivered, and both were organised through existing networks, from state commissions to trade unions. Feminism worked for four decades through law and culture, while Tunisia’s revolution changed the state far faster.
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The map above is the world of Tunisia, November 2015 — The emergency reimposed.
Every state on the map that year: The world in 2020 · Europe in 2020.
Part of IB History: Second-wave feminism and Tunisia →
SHORT EXPLANATION
A vote, a diploma or a promise of dignity can raise expectations without making people equal or secure. American and European women had the vote, yet lacked equal pay, equal citizenship and control over their fertility. Young Tunisians were promised education, work and dignity, but faced unemployment, corruption and police contempt. Friedan’s book and Bouazizi’s act helped turn experiences like these into public grievances. Existing networks gave people ways to act: state commissions and civil-rights veterans in one case, trade unions and lawyers in the other.
The resulting movements changed their societies at very different speeds. Over four decades feminists used courts, laws, consciousness-raising and an international treaty; much of their progress accumulated quietly. Tunisia’s protesters toppled a dictator in twenty-eight days and produced a constitution in three years. Both faced opposition, from STOP ERA in America to the old elite and jihadist violence in Tunisia. Their victories also left demands unmet: Black, Chicana, poor and lesbian women pressed claims of their own, while Tunisia’s interior towns, where the revolt began, remained poorer than the coast in 2015. The final map shows Tunisia hatched under a renewed emergency in November 2015. After 2021 an elected president suspended parliament and ruled by decree, showing that protest’s achievements can be reversed.
The full story
The two movements began with expectations that ordinary experience frustrated. Educated women in the 1950s and 1960s had been raised to expect careers and equal citizenship. Yet pay scales, jury rules and job advertisements treated them as dependants. In Tunisia in the 2000s, education had been presented as a route to work, but educated young people found that jobs went to the well connected. In each society, people could see a distance between what they had been promised and the opportunities available to them.
A shared grievance still needs a public language and a means of organization. The Feminine Mystique presented women’s unhappiness as a problem with social causes; Bouazizi’s act made humiliation by officials visible as a national condition. Neither created an organization by itself. Feminists could draw on Kennedy’s state commissions and civil-rights veterans; Tunisians had the UGTT’s regional unions and the lawyers’ bar. Networks formed for other purposes gave people a way to turn recognition into collective action.
The movements pursued change through different institutions. Feminists used law and cultural argument over decades. The Equal Pay Act, Title VII, Roe v. Wade and CEDAW accompanied slower changes in what women and men expected of one another. These gains accumulated across many settings, making them difficult to reverse in full. They were not secure everywhere: the ERA failed, and abortion rights later proved vulnerable.
Tunisia’s revolution moved much faster. The regime collapsed, and its opponents negotiated a new political order. That achievement depended on young institutions and an economy that did not improve. Both cases brought opponents into action. Schlafly’s homemakers mobilized in the United States; in Tunisia the old regime’s elite returned by election in 2014, while jihadists attacked the transition. The pace and means of change affected what opponents could contest and how much of a victory could survive.
A movement’s public victories do not settle every grievance that helped bring it into being. Second-wave feminism initially spoke for white, middle-class women. Black, Chicana, poor and lesbian women developed organizations and theories of their own, including the Combahee River Collective and the welfare-rights movement, and reshaped feminism long after 1985. In Tunisia the map has repeatedly returned to Sidi Bouzid, Kasserine and the mining basin, where the revolution began. By 2015 these regions still had the highest poverty and unemployment, and young people protested again in 2016 and afterward. Tunisian women, meanwhile, used their new freedoms to defend and extend their rights.
The political settlement itself later came under attack. After 2021 President Kaïs Saïed suspended parliament and ruled by decree; in 2022 he introduced a new constitution. The democracy built after the protests could be dismantled quickly. Movements can bring about changes their founders did not foresee, while losing control over the institutions they helped create.
FULL EXPLANATION
Comparing the cases: how historians explain movements
A comparison needs to explain both how people organize and when their actions can change policy. Historians and sociologists use three related questions. Political opportunities are openings created by the state or elites: Kennedy’s Commission and the accident of Title VII in the United States, for example, or the army’s neutrality and the UGTT leadership’s change of position in Tunisia in January 2011. Mobilizing structures are the organizations and networks that recruit participants and coordinate them. NOW, consciousness-raising groups and the welfare-rights movement served this role for feminists; union branches, the lawyers’ bar and bloggers’ online networks did so in Tunisia. Framing concerns the way a movement presents its grievance. “the personal is political” and “dignity” gave people ways to connect individual experiences with public demands. Sidney Tarrow and Charles Tilly, who developed this approach, emphasize opportunities to explain when movements succeed, structures to explain how they grow, and frames to explain whom they attract. No one question is enough. Feminism had stronger organizations and slower victories; Tunisia had a sudden opportunity and weak organizations afterward. Together the three illuminate different stages of each story.
A later development: Tunisia after 2021
The atlas ends in 2015, but the later course of Tunisia’s revolution remains central to interpreting it. Kaïs Saïed, a law professor elected president in 2019 with strong support from young voters, cited economic crisis, corruption and the parties’ failures when he invoked emergency powers on 25 July 2021. He suspended parliament and dismissed the government, then ruled by decree and dissolved parliament and the elected judicial council. A new constitution he introduced in July 2022 concentrated power in the presidency; it was approved in a referendum with about 30 per cent turnout. Opposition leaders from Ennahda and secular parties, journalists and lawyers were later prosecuted and imprisoned. Scholars disagree about the preceding decade. Some see a genuine democracy that lost support because it failed economically. Others argue that the transition’s bargains protected elites and never addressed the interior’s demands. Both accounts relate political vulnerability to the lives of people who began the revolt. These events lie beyond the atlas’s 2015 endpoint, and their meaning remains contested.
Key places on the map
Why it happened
A promise that reality broke. Education and the vote had expanded women’s expectations; schooling and economic growth had raised Tunisians’ hopes. In both cases people could compare those promises with their actual opportunities, and the gap fueled anger. Those whose expectations had risen fastest were the most likely protesters: being led to expect more can make a shortfall a cause of revolt.
A moment of naming. Neither The Feminine Mystique nor Bouazizi’s self-immolation caused a movement alone. Each gave scattered experiences a public story and a recognizable name and face. People could see that others shared their grievance, helping them coordinate. Both catalysts were later mythologized, which makes close historical examination necessary.
Networks before the movement. When opportunities arose, protesters did not have to build every network from nothing. Feminists drew on state commissions, unions, civil-rights groups and universities. Tunisian union branches, lawyers, teachers and online activists, many veterans of the Gafsa campaign, could also be redirected toward protest. Without those existing connections, the catalysts would have produced only a day’s headlines.
Openings from above. Divisions and hesitation among insiders gave outsiders room to act. Kennedy’s Commission and a civil-rights bill amended by an opponent provided American openings; Tunisia’s army would not defend Ben Ali, and the union leadership changed sides. Protest most often succeeds when such openings appear. Without them it is usually contained or crushed, as the Gafsa revolt was in 2008.
THE TURNING POINT
The Nobel Peace Prize, 9 October 2015. The Nobel Peace Prize honored the National Dialogue Quartet on 9 October 2015 for bringing adversaries to the table. Its achievement invites comparison with feminism’s work through NOW, courts and CEDAW: in both stories mobilization had to become institutions if gains were to last. Yet Tunisia was under emergency rule when the prize was awarded, and its interior still awaited the revolution’s economic promises. Compromise-built institutions depended on delivering results to those who began the protest.
What it changed
Change through law. Legal change can carry a victory beyond the moment of protest. Equal-pay and anti-discrimination statutes, court rulings and CEDAW recorded feminist gains; Tunisia’s 2014 constitution included equality and parity articles. Yet neither case makes law permanent by itself: provisions can be ignored, reinterpreted or overturned.
Counter-movements as part of the story. Those who resisted change organized too. STOP ERA and the anti-abortion movement opposed feminist gains, while Tunisia’s old elite and jihadist groups reacted against its transition. The anti-ERA campaign helped elect Ronald Reagan; the Tunisian elite returned through elections in 2014. Their actions help explain which gains endured and which were lost.
The excluded keep organising. The claims left outside mainstream victories continued to organize people. Black women founded reproductive-justice groups in the 1990s, and poor women and women of color continued organizing in the United States. After 2011 unemployed graduates held sit-ins in Kasserine and Gafsa. Control over their own bodies and regional development remained unfinished demands.
Unfinished business. A movement’s history continues after its apparent victory. The ERA’s ratification remains legally disputed and the United States never joined CEDAW. From July 2021 Tunisia’s democracy was dismantled as President Kaïs Saïed suspended parliament and later replaced the constitution. Over decades, the cases keep raising questions of equality, dignity and who belongs.
DISCUSSION QUESTION — Compare and contrast how second-wave feminism and the Tunisian revolution created change.
Both movements made public claims out of frustrated expectations. Naming a shared grievance helped people recognize one another, while existing networks of activists, unions and professionals gave them a means to act. Both sought durable change in law, faced counter-movements and left some of the people whose grievances gave them force with unmet demands. Their targets and methods differed. Second-wave feminists sought changes to laws and cultural norms within political systems they accepted. Over four decades in stable democracies, they used legislatures, courts, media and the UN. Their gains accumulated in many places and were hard to reverse wholesale. Tunisian protesters challenged the system itself: a dictatorship fell in four weeks, and negotiation built a democracy in three years. Its rapid gains depended on new institutions and an economy that faltered. Both movements achieved real but partial change. In these cases, feminist gains accumulated slowly and proved harder to reverse wholesale, while Tunisia’s rapid institutional transformation proved fragile. How a movement creates change helps shape its durability.
An interesting fact
Independent Tunisian women’s associations had campaigned for years under police surveillance before 2011. Two years after the atlas ends, their movement won two changes that would have been unthinkable under Ben Ali. In July 2017 parliament passed a comprehensive law against violence against women, abolishing a provision that allowed a man who had sex with a minor to escape prosecution by marrying her. That September the government withdrew a 1973 administrative circular barring Tunisian Muslim women from marrying non-Muslim men.
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