Was the Personal Status Code a victory for Tunisian women?

The short answer

• 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.

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.