Protest and Change: Second-Wave Feminism and Tunisia, 1945–2015 — the study guide

CHAPTER 1 · 1945–1963 · 1963

The Problem That Has No Name

In 1957 Gwendolyn Hoyt struck her husband with a baseball bat during a quarrel in Tampa, Florida. He died, and an all-male jury convicted her of murder. Florida placed women on jury lists only if they registered to serve. Few did so, and the Supreme Court upheld the arrangement in Hoyt v. Florida (1961). Woman, the Court reasoned, was “still regarded as the center of home and family life.”

The map lets us see the reach of that idea. Alabama, Mississippi and South Carolina, colored charcoal, excluded women from juries altogether. The grey-tan states exempted women because of their sex, so that juries remained overwhelmingly male. Jury service was a duty of citizenship, but a system that required women to volunteer left most of them without a practical opportunity to exercise it. The law recognized women as voters while continuing to place their family role ahead of their civic role.

Meanwhile, the setting of family life was changing. Federal mortgage guarantees and the GI Bill, which paid for veterans’ homes and college places, helped families move to suburbs. Levittown on Long Island acquired 17,447 houses between 1947 and 1951. The suburban homemaker became a national ideal, although the economy was drawing married women into paid employment.

By 1960 about a third of married women worked for pay, mostly in low-paid “women’s jobs”; full-time women earned around 60 cents for every dollar men earned. In that year the Food and Drug Administration approved the contraceptive pill. It had been tested on women in Puerto Rico in 1956, a connection shown by the arrow to the mainland. Within five years millions of American women used it. Paid work and contraception altered women’s choices, while familiar ideals and unequal laws continued to govern their lives.

The emerging movement needed ways to explain those tensions. The arrow from Paris to New York follows Beauvoir’s ideas: her book reached American readers in English in 1953, suggesting that inequality made by society could be changed by society. Friedan approached the question through women she knew. In 1957 she surveyed her classmates at their fifteenth reunion at Smith College, an elite women’s college in Massachusetts. Published on 19 February 1963, her book sold more than a million copies within a few years.

Officials were gathering evidence too. Kennedy appointed the President’s Commission on the Status of Women in 1961; its report, American Women, appeared in October 1963 and recorded unequal pay, unequal jury laws and a lack of childcare. The Equal Pay Act, passed on 10 June 1963, was the first federal law against sex discrimination at work. The report and the law addressed identifiable inequalities. Friedan’s account helped readers connect their own disappointments to a wider condition, giving them a reason to consider acting together.

WHY IT HAPPENED

The vote without equality. The Nineteenth Amendment secured women’s vote in 1920, but the expectation that political power would bring legal equality was left unfulfilled. Older rules survived: in some states married women needed a court’s or a husband’s permission to run a business or manage property, jury rules excluded women, and pay scales openly assigned them lower rates. These everyday restrictions supplied grievances for a movement that would look beyond the ballot.

A contradiction inside the suburban ideal. Offices, shops and services were expanding and needed women’s labor. By 1960 about a third of married women had paid jobs, usually low-paid work segregated by sex. Yet magazines, advertising and television celebrated the full-time homemaker and presented domesticity as women’s natural destiny. Women who encountered both expectations could see the distance between the ideal and the conditions in which they worked.

Education without outlets. College offered more women an education, but graduates were widely expected to marry, leave work and devote themselves to family. Friedan’s Smith classmates had studied economics, literature and science; many were now running suburban households. Their education shaped their expectations and gave them skills and social confidence to recognize discrimination, write, organize and lobby. The movement’s first leaders came disproportionately from this group.

Ideas that crossed the Atlantic. Why might inequality survive the vote? Beauvoir’s account of women as “the Other”, defined in relation to men, suggested an answer in institutions and upbringing. The Vatican condemned her book, but an abridged English translation reached American and British readers from 1953. Her argument gave feminists a way to understand inequality as socially constructed and therefore open to political change.

WHAT IT CHANGED

A language for consciousness-raising. Women in the small “consciousness-raising” groups of the late 1960s compared experiences and found political roots in personal problems. Friedan’s account had helped make that connection available: “the problem that has no name” entered the language, and housework, marriage and ambition became subjects for public discussion.

A network ready to act. State commissions had brought together hundreds of experienced women from law, unions, universities and government. At their Washington meeting in June 1966, they could not pass a resolution urging enforcement of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the new law against sex discrimination at work. Some participants founded the National Organization for Women on the spot. The connections made through the commissions now supported an independent organization.

Equal pay in law, unequal pay in fact. The Equal Pay Act addressed unequal pay for the same job, while leaving the division of jobs by sex untouched. Most jobs in 1963 were segregated in that way, and women’s earnings stayed at about 60 percent of men’s for the next fifteen years. Activists pursued strikes and lawsuits and pressed for enforcement of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which banned sex discrimination in hiring and promotion.

A movement defined by one group of women. The early texts centered educated, married, middle-class women, and their concerns with careers, professional schools and escape from home shaped the agenda. Women who had always worked, or who faced racism, poverty or forced sterilization, could find their own problems missing. Their differing experiences would become a deep argument within the movement over whom its demands should serve.

DISCUSSION QUESTION

Was The Feminine Mystique a cause of second-wave feminism, or a symptom of changes that were already under way?

The book appeared amid changes already in progress. Married women were entering paid work in large numbers, the Pill was on sale, Kennedy’s Commission was gathering evidence, and the Equal Pay Act passed four months after publication. Meyerowitz and Horowitz show, too, that Friedan described one group and drew on a decade of earlier writing about women and work. In these respects her book was a symptom of conditions that preceded it. But conditions alone do not explain how people come to act together. The flood of letters suggests that Friedan gave readers who might never join a commission a way to recognize their troubles as common and political. The book was a catalyst: it acted on pressures already present. Structural change can make protest possible; naming a grievance, whether by a writer, a martyr or an event, often helps turn that possibility into mobilization.

AN INTERESTING FACT

Howard Parshley, who translated The Second Sex into English in 1953, was a zoology professor at Smith College, where Friedan surveyed graduates in 1957. Knopf hired him, reportedly expecting a scientific study of sex. He cut between a tenth and a sixth of the text, and scholars later criticized his rendering of several philosophical terms. English readers encountered the book that launched a generation of feminism in this abridged form for more than fifty years. Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevallier produced a complete translation in 2009.

CHAPTER 2 · 1963–1970 · 1970

Organising for Equality

Title VII’s prohibition of sex discrimination began with a contested political maneuver. On 8 February 1964 Howard Smith, a Virginia congressman opposed to the civil-rights bill, proposed adding “sex” to its forbidden grounds of employment discrimination. Smith had long supported the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), a proposed constitutional guarantee of equal rights regardless of sex, and historians still debate his motives. Martha Griffiths and other congresswomen seized the opportunity, and the amendment passed.

Women soon tried to use the new law. About a third of the complaints the EEOC received in its first year concerned sex discrimination. Yet a senior official called the provision a “fluke”, and newspapers continued to carry sex-segregated job advertisements. The statute gave women grounds to complain; enforcement would determine what those grounds were worth.

At a national conference of state commissions on the status of women on 30 June 1966, attendees found they could not even urge the EEOC to act. These commissions were government advisory bodies, rather like task forces today. The women founded NOW as a national lobby, able to press claims through litigation and lobbying. Lorena Weeks, a Georgia telephone clerk, offered one such claim: a state rule barring women from lifting more than 30 pounds had denied her a better-paid job. In 1969 a federal appeals court held that Title VII overrode such “protective” laws.

Another route emerged from the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), a student civil-rights group registering Black voters in the South. In 1964–65 younger women wrote that they typed and cooked while men made decisions. They had learned how to organize for freedom and had also encountered inequality within that struggle. The arrows follow their experience north from Mississippi to New York and Chicago, where women formed liberation groups without leaders.

Radical feminists wanted to expose male power in family, sexuality and culture, and some believed publicity could change minds faster than lawsuits. At Atlantic City on 7 September 1968, a few hundred women picketed the Miss America pageant, put bras and girdles in a “Freedom Trash Can” and crowned a sheep. They were arguing that the contest judged women like livestock. Nothing was burned, but the press invented the “bra-burner”: an image that brought the protest attention while making it easy to mock.

At Ford’s Dagenham plant in Britain, 187 women who sewed car-seat covers could exert pressure at the point of production. A regrading had placed their skilled work in a less-skilled category; their three-week strike stopped car production. It helped persuade Employment Secretary Barbara Castle to steer the Equal Pay Act through Parliament in May 1970. The lawsuit, the public protest and the strike worked in different settings, each giving women a means to challenge an inequality the others could not reach in the same way.

WHY IT HAPPENED

A civil-rights law with a sex clause. Once Title VII prohibited sex discrimination, a job advertisement marked “male” or a lower pay scale could be presented as evidence that the law was not being enforced. The sex clause had entered the law almost accidentally, yet it supplied women with a specific legal tool and a demand around which to organize.

Experienced women with nowhere to take their anger. The state commissions had given hundreds of women experience in law, research and lobbying. At their third national conference in June 1966, they discovered the limits of those bodies: the commissions could pass no resolutions and had no power to press the EEOC. On the last day, women who knew how institutions worked founded NOW so they could act outside them.

The civil-rights and anti-war movements as schools. Registering voters in Mississippi and organizing against the Vietnam War taught young women to run meetings, write leaflets and confront authority. The same movements exposed them to sexism. SNCC women’s papers in 1964 and 1965 described exclusion from leadership. Women’s liberation drew on their skills, anger and language of oppression, liberation and solidarity. In Britain and France it likewise grew from student and anti-war protests in 1968.

Women workers who could stop production. The 187 Dagenham machinists made seat covers needed before cars could leave the factory. A strike by this small group could therefore stop one of Britain’s largest plants, giving the women bargaining power of a kind middle-class lobbyists lacked. Their success showed working women across Britain the possibilities of industrial action. Their union, the National Union of Vehicle Builders, backed them and helped turn a grading dispute into a national argument about women’s pay.

WHAT IT CHANGED

The EEOC is forced to act. NOW’s pressure and thousands of complaints helped push the EEOC to rule in 1968 that sex-segregated job advertisements were illegal. From 1969 courts began striking down “protective” laws that had excluded women from better-paid work. Legal rules shifted within five years, though the pay gap barely moved. A local NOW chapter’s complaint led to the Pittsburgh Press case, in which the Supreme Court upheld a ban on sex-segregated newspaper advertisements in 1973.

A movement split by method and goal. The movement’s branches disagreed about what equality required. Liberals sought access to institutions, radicals wanted to transform marriage, sexuality and culture, and labor feminists pressed for pay, childcare and protection. These differences produced both energy and bitter disputes. NOW fought internally over abortion and lesbian members, whom Friedan called a “lavender menace” in 1969. The argument over representation reflected a movement encompassing many different women.

Equal pay becomes law in Britain. Britain’s Equal Pay Act passed on 29 May 1970 but gave employers five years to remove separate rates for women. It came into force in December 1975 alongside the Sex Discrimination Act. That delay explains Britain’s grey-tan color on the 1970 map. The Dagenham women struck again in 1984 because their work still lacked a skilled grading.

DISCUSSION QUESTION

Which did more to create change for American women in the 1960s: the law, or the movement that formed to enforce it?

Title VII came first. The politics of race, a congressman’s motives and lobbying by veteran feminists produced a federal ban on sex discrimination at work before a mass movement existed. It gave women a tool they could invoke. But the EEOC’s early treatment of the sex clause as a fluke shows why the tool needed users and advocates. NOW, thousands of complaints from working women and cases such as Weeks pressed for enforcement. The movement also changed expectations about women’s lives in ways a statute could not. Law and movement thus depended on each other: Title VII supplied a target and a means of action, while women’s efforts gave its promise practical meaning. A new right can become the starting point for another campaign.

AN INTERESTING FACT

Long before the Dagenham strike, the European Economic Community’s founding treaty of 1957 had included an equal-pay principle. Article 119 required member states to ensure equal pay for equal work. France had insisted on the clause partly because French law already required equal pay and its industries feared cheaper female labor elsewhere would undercut them. The provision remained largely unenforced until Belgian air hostess Gabrielle Defrenne sued Sabena, which had forced her to retire at 40 while male stewards continued flying. In 1976 the European Court of Justice ruled that Article 119 gave individuals rights enforceable in national courts.

CHAPTER 3 · 1968–1975 · 1972

The Personal Is Political

In 1968 Kathie Sarachild of New York Radical Women described a way for women to investigate their own lives. A small group would take one question at a time—about mothers, jobs or first sexual experiences—and compare the answers. One woman's account might sound like a private complaint. Several accounts together could reveal a pattern that none had been able to see alone.

Carol Hanisch defended this discussion as political action in a 1969 paper her editors titled “The Personal Is Political”. Women's unhappiness, she argued, was connected to power men held in marriage, work and law. By the early 1970s tens of thousands of women had joined groups. Their concerns also appeared in collective demands: in February 1970, between 500 and 600 women gathered at Ruskin College, Oxford, for Britain's first national women's liberation conference. They called for equal pay and education, 24-hour nurseries, and free contraception and abortion on demand.

The abortion laws gave the argument a particularly urgent application. Historians estimate that hundreds of thousands of illegal abortions took place each year in the United States before 1970. Unsafe procedures could cause infection, or septic abortion, a leading cause of maternal death. Women who could pay a sympathetic doctor had an advantage; poor women and women of color were especially exposed to danger when they could not.

In New York, a state hearing on reform invited fourteen men and a nun as expert witnesses. The women who had undergone abortions could speak for themselves, and in March 1969 the radical feminist group Redstockings gave them a public forum at a speak-out. In Chicago, women also organized care: the clandestine service known as “Jane” performed an estimated 11,000 abortions between 1969 and 1973.

New York's legislature legalized abortion on request in April 1970, after one legislator changed his vote. The law had no residency requirement, so its effect reached beyond the state. Just over 100,000 women traveled there from other states in 1972 alone. The blue states show where laws had changed; the arrows show a journey available to those who could afford it. A legal change in one place made the inequality between places more visible.

Britain offered another destination. Its Abortion Act of 1967 allowed abortion on broad health grounds with two doctors' agreement, and clinics drew women from France and Ireland, where abortion remained banned. French women challenged their own law publicly. On 5 April 1971 Le Nouvel Observateur printed the Manifesto of the 343, in which Simone de Beauvoir and 342 other women declared that they had broken it and dared the state to prosecute them. In 1972 lawyer Gisèle Halimi used the Bobigny trial of a teenager, Marie-Claire Chevalier, to indict the law itself; Chevalier was acquitted.

On 22 January 1973 the US Supreme Court decided Roe v. Wade by 7 votes to 2. The Court held that the constitutional right to privacy, which shields certain personal decisions from government, covered abortion in early pregnancy. Its ruling bound every state. France followed in January 1975 with the Veil law, named for health minister Simone Veil, legalizing abortion in the first ten weeks. Within six years, women had carried experiences once hidden from public discussion into campaigns that helped change law on two continents.

WHY IT HAPPENED

A method that turned experience into evidence. Consciousness-raising gave women a way to compare housework, sexual coercion and other experiences that each might have taken as a personal problem. Repeated patterns invited a further question: what institutions and laws sustained them? The answer could turn private sorrow into a political grievance. Groups were inexpensive, needed no leaders and could be copied anywhere, allowing the method to spread faster than an organization could recruit. Discovering common experiences also gave women confidence to speak for others, a precondition for public protest.

An injustice that fell hardest on the poor. Money affected both the choices available under the old law and the dangers women faced. A wealthier woman might travel abroad, pay a sympathetic doctor or persuade a hospital committee to approve a “therapeutic” abortion. Most poor women lacked those options. Wards treating septic abortion filled with poor women, and Black and Puerto Rican women bore a disproportionate share of maternal deaths. The inequality made repeal a question of fairness as well as abortion, drawing support beyond the women's movement.

Doctors, lawyers and clergy changed sides. Some professionals who had encountered the consequences of criminal abortion became allies of reform. From the early 1960s the American Law Institute, an influential body of lawyers, proposed permitting abortion on limited medical grounds; many doctors supported reform after seeing the results of illegal procedures. In 1967 Protestant and Jewish clergy in New York began referring women to safe providers. These allies could draft legislation and testify with professional authority, giving reform a hearing among legislators unlikely to listen to radical feminists.

Public confession as a weapon. Speak-outs, manifestos and courtroom protests made concealed acts visible and collective. When respected figures including Beauvoir and Catherine Deneuve admitted breaking the law, prosecutors faced the prospect of enforcing it against them or acknowledging its unenforceability. Gay liberation's contemporary call to “come out” used a related tactic; decades later, #MeToo testimonies appeared online. Public disclosure could weaken a law whose operation depended on people keeping quiet.

WHAT IT CHANGED

A national right and a national opposition. The national right recognized in 1973 was accompanied by a national campaign to reverse it. Catholic organizations and, from the late 1970s, evangelical Protestants made abortion opposition central to a new conservative politics, alongside resistance to the Equal Rights Amendment. The issue remained among the most divisive in American politics for half a century.

Rights without access. The Court protected a woman's decision from state interference; it did not require the state to finance care. The Hyde Amendment of 1976 stopped Medicaid, public health insurance for people on low incomes, from paying for most abortions. Poor women retained the right but increasingly could not afford to use it. Feminists of color argued that a movement centered on “choice” had neglected the material conditions and abuses, including forced sterilization, that shaped their reproductive lives.

Europe follows a similar path. France's health minister Simone Veil carried the January 1975 law through parliament despite fierce hostility in her own majority; it legalized abortion in the first ten weeks. Italy followed in 1978 after a long campaign of civil disobedience. Confession, trial and reform thus shaped change in Western Europe, although Ireland and Northern Ireland held out for decades. Public confession could change law only where religious authority no longer dominated politics.

DISCUSSION QUESTION

Was consciousness-raising a political method, or a form of therapy that distracted women from politics?

Some socialist feminists and many men on the left regarded talk about personal experience as self-absorbed. For them, real politics meant organizing workers or opposing the Vietnam War. Yet the groups did more than offer consolation. They developed an account of shared power that could guide action: the Redstockings speak-out grew from consciousness-raising, and the move from private experience to public claim also drove the Manifesto of the 343 and the Bobigny trial, both of which helped change national laws. The method reached women who might never have joined a party or union. Its evidence had limits, however. Groups were often homogeneous, mostly white and middle-class, and could miss experiences absent from the room. Consciousness-raising was a political method; what it revealed depended on whose lives were included.

AN INTERESTING FACT

The Manifesto of the 343 acquired an enduring name from an insult. A week after it appeared, the satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo asked on its cover: “Who got the 343 sluts from the abortion manifesto pregnant?” A cartoon showed defense minister Michel Debré, a champion of a higher birth rate, replying “It was for France!” The phrase “the 343 sluts” (les 343 salopes) stuck. Some signatories later wore it as a badge of defiance; others rejected it. The women targeted included admired French figures: novelists Marguerite Duras and Françoise Sagan, actresses Catherine Deneuve and Jeanne Moreau, filmmaker Agnès Varda and lawyer Gisèle Halimi, who defended the Bobigny accused the following year.

CHAPTER 4 · 1970–1981 · 1977

Who Was Left Out?

Frances Beal asked feminists to look at the lives behind their general claims about women. A veteran of the student civil-rights group SNCC, she argued in her 1969 essay “Double Jeopardy” that Black women faced racism and sexism together. Housework might be described as a prison for women confined to their own homes. That description left out Black women who had long cleaned other people's houses for wages.

Beal's Third World Women's Alliance, named for formerly colonized peoples, marched in August 1970 with placards defending the Black activist Angela Davis. One organizer told them that Davis's case had nothing to do with women's liberation. Other women faced pressure from within their communities. At La Conferencia de Mujeres por la Raza (“the Conference of Women for the People”) in Houston in May 1971, more than 600 Chicanas, or Mexican-American women, met and divided over whether feminism weakened the Mexican-American civil-rights movement. In May 1970 lesbians calling themselves the “Lavender Menace” seized a feminist congress to protest being kept out of sight. Each dispute exposed a limit to the promised sisterhood and helped explain why women organized apart.

The National Welfare Rights Organization (NWRO) began from the circumstances of poor mothers. Welfare meant government payments for mothers raising children alone; the organization, mostly Black mothers on welfare, claimed some 25,000 members by 1969 under its chair Johnnie Tillmon. Her arrow on the map traces a journey from a Los Angeles housing project to Washington. The NWRO demanded an adequate guaranteed income, comparable to today's proposals for universal basic income, and an end to “midnight raids,” when caseworkers searched homes for evidence of a man.

The meaning of work depended on the woman's circumstances. Betty Friedan urged women confined to the home to seek freedom in jobs. Welfare mothers who were told to take any job also wanted the freedom to raise their own children with dignity. Tillmon wrote in 1972 that “welfare is a women’s issue”. The mainstream gave the cause little support, and the NWRO went bankrupt in 1975. Its members had organized around women's lives, but had few resources with which to sustain their claim.

Reproductive freedom also meant more than access to abortion. In June 1973 a federally funded clinic in Montgomery sterilized Mary Alice and Minnie Lee Relf, neither yet fifteen, after their mother, who could not read, marked an X on a consent form. The operations permanently prevented pregnancy. In Los Angeles, Mexican-American mothers were sterilized during labor after signing English forms. They lost their 1978 lawsuit, Madrigal v. Quilligan, but their testimony helped win federal rules that year requiring consent in the patient's language and a 30-day wait.

In April 1977 the Boston-based Combahee River Collective brought such concerns together. Named for a South Carolina river linked to Boston by an arrow on the map, the collective argued that racism, sexism, class exploitation and homophobia had to be fought together. It listed sterilization abuse alongside abortion rights. The right to bear children and the right not to bear them belonged in the same account of freedom, an argument later activists called reproductive justice.

WHY IT HAPPENED

A movement built in the image of its founders. The second wave's early texts and organizations grew from the experience of educated white women: suburban isolation, exclusion from professions and unwanted pregnancy. Other experiences received less attention. Friedan's book, for example, said almost nothing about the millions of women already working for wages; women facing racism, poverty or coerced sterilization also found their concerns missing. A movement must hear such experiences before it can make them part of its agenda.

The pull of other loyalties. Many Black and Chicana women participated in civil-rights, Black Power and Chicano movements. Leaders of both sexes in those movements often called feminism a white middle-class luxury that would divide their communities. Women could face pressure both when joining white-led groups and when organizing as feminists within their own movements. Many also feared that criticizing Black or Chicano men publicly would give ammunition to racists who already depicted their communities as disordered. Separate groups gave them another place to pursue their concerns.

The same issue meant different things. The same demand could mean different things in different lives. Mainstream feminists made abortion central to reproductive rights because unwanted pregnancy was the principal risk their leaders faced. Poor women of color also faced doctors and welfare officials who wanted them to have fewer children. Paid work might promise a suburban housewife freedom while bringing hardship to a domestic worker. Treating one experience as universal could conceal the needs of another group.

Exclusion inside the organisations. The problem appeared inside organizations as well as in their agendas. Lesbians were pushed to NOW's margins in 1969 and 1970, while women of color reported being ignored or treated as tokens at meetings and marches. Many concluded that reform from within was impossible and built autonomous organizations led by those most affected. Aileen Hernandez, elected NOW's first Black president in 1970, later left, criticizing its failure to address minority women's concerns.

WHAT IT CHANGED

From reproductive rights to reproductive justice. The Committee to End Sterilization Abuse and other groups pressed for safeguards against coercion. Federal rules in 1978 required a 30-day waiting period and consent in the patient's language, and banned sterilizing people under 21. In 1994 Black women activists coined “reproductive justice” for an account descended from the 1970s arguments: the rights to have children, not to have them, and to raise them safely.

Houston, 1977: inclusion in the official agenda. The federally funded National Women's Conference in Houston in November 1977 adopted a “minority women” plank drafted by Black, Latina, Asian American and Native American women. Coretta Scott King was among its champions. The gathering was the most diverse in the movement's history; conservative women also organized a counter-rally, defining the backlash taken up in the next chapter.

A literature that changed feminist theory. The criticism developed by women at the margins entered feminist thought through writing. Audre Lorde, bell hooks, Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa helped make the critique of white feminism central to it; Moraga and Anzaldúa's anthology This Bridge Called My Back appeared in 1981. In 1989 Kimberlé Crenshaw gave the concept the name “intersectionality,” which spread worldwide. The writers' essays became among the movement's most widely taught texts.

Fragile institutions. The organizations themselves had brief lives. The NWRO went bankrupt in 1975, the NBFO dissolved by the late 1970s and Combahee ended in 1980. They were small and poorly funded, and practical demands such as adequate income for mothers were largely defeated, culminating in welfare cuts in the 1990s. Their ideas nonetheless continued through books and later movements, giving them an influence that outlasted their institutions.

DISCUSSION QUESTION

Were Black, Chicana and working-class women “left out” of second-wave feminism, or did they build a different feminism of their own?

The answer changes with what we mean by the movement. In the national organizations and legal campaigns that dominated the press, these women were largely excluded from power. NOW and the mainstream offered welfare rights little support, ignored coerced sterilization until activists forced the issue, and treated lesbians and women of color as embarrassments or tokens. But the Third World Women's Alliance, the 1971 Chicana conference, the NWRO and Combahee show women building organizations and developing theory themselves. They also won changes, including the 1978 sterilization rules. Historians such as Thompson and Roth therefore describe second-wave feminism as plural: the picture of one movement reflects choices made by those who wrote its history. These women could be excluded from mainstream power and still be central to feminism's ideas.

AN INTERESTING FACT

The name Combahee River Collective recalled an American Civil War operation. On the night of 1–2 June 1863 Harriet Tubman, who had escaped slavery and was working as a Union army scout, guided Union steamboats up the Combahee River in South Carolina. The raid destroyed plantations and freed more than 700 enslaved people, who ran to the boats as the steam whistles sounded. Tubman is widely credited as the first woman to lead an armed military operation in American history. More than a century later, the Boston collective chose the name to place its politics in a long tradition of Black women's collective action.

CHAPTER 5 · 1972–1982 · 1982

The ERA and the Backlash

The ERA had been waiting a long time for the reception it received in 1972. Alice Paul of the National Woman’s Party first drafted an amendment in 1923, and both major parties had endorsed it in their platforms for decades. President Nixon, a growing number of trade unions and new women’s organizations now supported it. The Senate approved it by 84 votes to 8.

The states seemed to be following Congress. Hawaii ratified on the day Congress passed the amendment; New Hampshire, Delaware, Iowa, Idaho, Kansas, Nebraska and Texas followed within about a week. The map’s first snapshot shows 22 ratifications in nine months, many with little debate. By March 1973 there were 30, and only eight more were needed. But a quick vote left room for a change of mind: legislators who had scarcely discussed the amendment could face a much harder decision once its possible consequences became contentious.

Phyllis Schlafly helped make them contentious. In February 1972 the Republican activist from Alton, Illinois, published “What’s Wrong with ‘Equal Rights’ for Women?” In the autumn she founded STOP ERA, which she said meant “Stop Taking Our Privileges”. This was a backlash: a counter-movement organized against another movement’s gains. Its women could speak as people who believed they had something to lose, giving their testimony a force that opposition from men alone would have lacked.

Many volunteers came through churches. They brought home-baked bread to legislators and warned that daughters would be drafted into combat and husbands would no longer have a duty to support their wives. The three arrows trace the campaign into states that never ratified. Nebraska withdrew, or rescinded, its ratification in March 1973; Tennessee, Idaho, Kentucky and South Dakota followed. After 1973 only five states ratified. Indiana’s vote in January 1977 brought the total to 35, three short.

Supporters still had places where a few votes could matter. Some 100,000 marched in Washington in 1978, after which Congress extended the deadline to 30 June 1982; NOW also organized a boycott of conventions in unratified states. Illinois was especially important: Schlafly lived there, and its constitution required a three-fifths majority for amendments. In 1980 the ERA won 102 votes to 71 in the Illinois House and still lost. A majority in that chamber could not supply the votes the rule required.

The final protests made the stakes visible. In June 1982 seven women fasted for 37 days in the Illinois capitol, and others chained themselves outside the Senate chamber. On 30 June the deadline passed with fifteen states unratified, shown in charcoal. Courts had meanwhile begun treating sex discrimination as suspect under the Fourteenth Amendment’s guarantee of equal protection. Opponents used those decisions to argue that the ERA was unnecessary; the amendment failed while much of the equality it sought was already advancing through other legal routes.

WHY IT HAPPENED

A supermajority rule. The requirement of 38 ratifications gave opponents a smaller task: hold 13 states, by persuading one chamber in each. Support spread widely across the country could therefore lose to opposition concentrated in particular legislatures. The South and the Mormon West provided favorable ground for that opposition: conservative churches were strong there, and the amendment could be presented as a threat to local values.

A counter-movement of women. Women speaking for STOP ERA presented themselves as homemakers protecting the respect and security they believed the law afforded them. Their presence made it harder to dismiss the campaign as men defending privilege. Schlafly gave followers a positive identity as wives and mothers when many felt feminism looked down on them. Like the women’s movement it opposed, the backlash could mobilize people around a shared identity.

Abortion and the culture war. The argument over the ERA widened after Roe v. Wade in 1973. Opponents said the amendment would protect abortion and, later, gay rights, making it a question about the family as well as legal equality. Catholic, evangelical and Mormon churches joined the campaign, and by the late 1970s congregations had supplied many of STOP ERA’s most active volunteers. A victory for one movement could give another reason to organize.

The decision lay with legislators. National polls showed majority support, but ratification depended on a few thousand state legislators, mostly men. Many served in part-time assemblies where personal lobbying mattered enormously. They heard especially from intensely committed citizens, and by the late 1970s opponents were the most intense. In Illinois, Florida and North Carolina, only a handful of legislators separated the sides in decisive votes.

WHAT IT CHANGED

Equality by other routes. Legal change continued without the amendment. In Reed v. Reed (1971) and Craig v. Boren (1976), the Supreme Court applied stricter review to sex discrimination, asking for a strong justification for laws treating men and women differently. Congress passed the Equal Credit Opportunity Act (1974) and the Pregnancy Discrimination Act (1978). These courts and statutes supplied much of what the ERA had promised.

The rise of the New Right. The women organized through STOP ERA helped build a conservative coalition with churches and other grassroots activists. Its political setting changed in 1980: the Republican Party abandoned its ERA endorsement, held since 1940, and Ronald Reagan won the presidency. A “gender gap” also appeared in that election, with women voting less Republican than men; it has persisted since.

An amendment that never quite died. The ERA returned in almost every Congress after 1982. Ratifications by Nevada, Illinois and Virginia between 2017 and 2020 brought the total to 38, but the expired deadline and five rescissions left its legal status disputed. The amendment remained a symbol even as much of its practical purpose had been met through other laws.

DISCUSSION QUESTION

Did the ERA fail because of Phyllis Schlafly, or because of the rules for amending the Constitution?

Schlafly made the opposition effective. STOP ERA provided arguments, volunteers and pressure on wavering legislators in Illinois, Florida, North Carolina and elsewhere, while ratifications slowed sharply after it formed. Mansbridge also assigns a part to supporters who overstated the amendment’s effects and supplied opponents with useful arguments. The rules determined how that pressure could win. A national poll majority could not overcome opposition in 13 states; Illinois required three-fifths of its legislature; and the deadline gave opponents a date until which they needed to hold their ground. Without the supermajority rule Schlafly’s campaign could only have delayed the ERA, while without her campaign the rule would probably not have mattered. She turned an institutional possibility into an actual defeat.

AN INTERESTING FACT

Schlafly’s own career gave both sides an argument. She had run unsuccessfully for Congress in Illinois more than once, beginning in 1952. Her 1964 book A Choice Not an Echo, supporting Barry Goldwater’s presidential campaign, sold about three million copies. Amid the ERA struggle she earned a law degree from Washington University in St. Louis, graduating in 1978 in her fifties. Opponents saw irony in her success while she fought an amendment designed to open careers to women; supporters saw proof of her argument that women could achieve their aims without it.

CHAPTER 6 · 1975–1985 · 1985

A Global Movement

Women’s movements had a reason to look to the United Nations: it could bring governments together, collect information and set standards against which they could be judged. Its Commission on the Status of Women, a committee of government delegates, had monitored women’s rights since 1946. In 1972 the Soviet-bloc-aligned Women’s International Democratic Federation proposed an International Women’s Year. Rivalry between Cold War powers helped put the proposal on the agenda, as each had reason to appear progressive.

The first World Conference on Women met in Mexico City in June and July 1975, with 133 governments represented. Alongside it, citizens’ groups called non-governmental organizations—much like today’s charities—met at the Tribune. The two gatherings brought women into a shared discussion, but they did not bring a single account of what women needed.

At the Tribune, Domitila Barrios de Chungara, the wife of a Bolivian tin miner, challenged middle-class feminists from the North. In her community, she argued, poverty and mine owners were the enemies, and women and men had to fight together. Her intervention exposed a problem for an international movement: a demand for legal equality addressed one set of urgent concerns, while women whose families struggled to survive could place other demands first.

The UN also offered a way to turn demands into obligations. The General Assembly adopted CEDAW on 18 December 1979 by 130 votes to none, and it took effect in September 1981. Like a trade agreement, a treaty binds states that ratify it. CEDAW supplied a standard against which women could judge those governments; its Article 5 went beyond formal law, requiring states to change social and cultural patterns based on ideas of women’s inferiority.

Signing and ratifying were different steps. Dozens of states signed at Copenhagen in July 1980, including the United States, but the US Senate never ratified, leaving it grey-tan on the map. Other governments ratified with reservations, formal statements excluding particular articles. Tunisia, for example, ratified in September 1985 while reserving provisions on family law and nationality. The same treaty could therefore provide a common standard while states accepted different limits on their commitments.

At the final conference in Nairobi in July 1985, 157 governments were represented. Most of the 12,000 to 15,000 people at the NGO Forum came from Africa, Asia and Latin America—the poorer, mostly formerly colonized countries known as the Global South. The conference adopted its Forward-Looking Strategies by consensus, after the meetings in 1975 and 1980 had split over Zionism, the movement for a Jewish state, and apartheid, South Africa’s system of racial segregation.

The shared language of rights connected movements whose priorities remained different. Development Alternatives with Women for a New Era (DAWN), a Southern network, argued that debt, rural poverty and structural adjustment belonged in feminism. Structural adjustment meant the spending cuts international lenders demanded in return for loans; decisions about those cuts affected the conditions in which women and their families lived. European activists also acted beyond legal equality: nine in ten Icelandic women stopped work for a day in October 1975, and from 1981 women camped at England’s Greenham Common air base against American nuclear missiles. By the end of the Decade, the international movement had acquired both common institutions and a wider account of women’s concerns.

WHY IT HAPPENED

The UN as an amplifier. The UN had machinery that a movement could use: the Commission on the Status of Women, established in 1946, and authority to declare years, call conferences and draft treaties. International Women’s Year brought delegations and reports on women’s status. Ministries and statisticians gathered evidence of inequality, and activists with little influence at home could appeal to an institution that had made their questions international business.

Decolonisation changed the room. Decolonization changed the balance inside the UN. By 1975 it had 144 members, most from Africa, Asia and Latin America; many had been independent for less than twenty years, and African states held about a third of the seats. Their delegates brought experiences of poverty and colonialism and could outvote Western states. Development and peace consequently joined legal equality on the agenda, widening the discussion and sharpening its disputes.

A Western movement looking outward. After a decade of campaigns at home, American and European feminists sought international solidarity. Their organizations brought money, publications and experience, but resentment followed when they treated abortion rights or workplace equality as everyone’s priorities. Many Southern delegates regarded men in their communities as allies against poverty and imperialism. Western radical feminists found that position difficult to accept.

Cold War competition. The Soviet Union and its allies pointed to high female employment and state childcare as evidence of their leadership on equality. The Women’s International Democratic Federation proposed International Women’s Year, while the United States and its allies had reason to avoid appearing less committed. Cold War rivalry raised the political cost of ignoring women’s rights.

WHAT IT CHANGED

A standard for movements everywhere. The CEDAW Committee of independent experts first met in October 1982 and reviewed its first national reports in 1983. Campaigners gained an international audience and, in dozens of countries, used the treaty to challenge nationality, inheritance and family laws. Tunisian organizations campaigned for decades against the reservations with which their country ratified in 1985. After the 2011 revolution the government withdrew its specific reservations while retaining a general declaration. The treaty gave those campaigners a standard to use over a long struggle.

Feminism of the Global South. Women at the Nairobi Forum and networks such as DAWN made debt, development and poverty central to international feminism. That broader agenda appeared at the next world conference in Beijing in 1995. Its Platform for Action declared that “women’s rights are human rights” and placed violence against women at the center, although that issue was largely missing from CEDAW’s original text.

The United States stays outside. Despite hearings in later decades, the US Senate never ratified CEDAW, leaving the country among a handful of UN members outside it. Opposing senators cited national sovereignty and possible intrusion into family law. The United States changed its own laws through courts and statutes while declining the treaty’s international oversight, a gap critics abroad have continued to cite.

DISCUSSION QUESTION

Did the UN Decade for Women unite women across the world, or reveal how divided they were?

The Decade brought disagreements into view. In Mexico City, Domitila Barrios de Chungara, a Bolivian miner’s wife, challenged Western feminists with a struggle for survival that did not fit neatly into an agenda of legal equality. The 1975 and 1980 conferences divided over Zionism, the movement for a Jewish state, apartheid and the world economy. Class, region and politics affected what women asked the movement to do. Yet the participants also built common ground on which to argue. The General Assembly adopted CEDAW without a vote against it, and the Nairobi Forum brought together 12,000 to 15,000 people, many of whom had never met. Olcott’s work suggests that the quarrels themselves were an achievement: Western feminists had to recognize their priorities as one agenda among several. The resulting coalition did not require a single experience of womanhood. Shared institutions let movements with different priorities negotiate and act together.

AN INTERESTING FACT

The first UN world conference on women had a male president. At Mexico City in June 1975 delegates elected the host government’s nominee, Mexico’s attorney general Pedro Ojeda Paullada. Delegates and journalists noticed the irony; custom gave the chair to the host country. The conference also acquired an enduring emblem. American graphic artist Valerie Pettis combined a stylized dove, the symbol for woman and an equals sign; her design became the symbol of the whole Decade for Women.

CHAPTER 7 · 1956–1987 · 1956

Bourguiba’s Tunisia

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.

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.

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.

CHAPTER 8 · 1987–2010 · 2008

Ben Ali: Stability and Silence

Ben Ali’s arrival offered reasons for hope. Under Article 57 of the constitution, power could pass to a successor if the president was incapacitated; seven doctors signed the certificate used in the ‘medical coup’ of 7 November 1987. Ben Ali released political prisoners. In 1988 he signed a National Pact with opposition figures, Islamist leaders and the UGTT, the General Tunisian Labour Union. The UGTT was a national trade-union federation, like a national union congress elsewhere, large enough to call a general strike.

The elections of April 1989 exposed the difficulty of his promise. Ennahda was not allowed to register, so its candidates stood as independents. They won around 14 per cent by the official count, and possibly more. The regime took their strength as a danger in open competition. From 1990 thousands of Islamists were arrested, tortured and tried; Ennahda leader Rached Ghannouchi went into exile in London. Newspapers, opposition parties and human-rights groups could continue only while they remained harmless. The promised competition had given way to a system in which silence was safer.

The regime offered a different bargain: prosperity and order in return for political obedience. For many years there was something to show for it. The economy grew by about five per cent a year, tourism and export factories expanded on the coast, and girls’ education and women’s legal rights advanced. Ben Ali presented himself to Europe and the United States as a bulwark against Islamism.

The benefits were uneven. Education produced graduates faster than the economy created skilled jobs, which were concentrated around Tunis, Sousse and Sfax in the coastal regions outlined on the map. In 2010 poverty was about 32 per cent in the Centre-West around Kasserine and Sidi Bouzid, compared with about 8 per cent in the coastal Centre-East. At the same time the Ben Ali and Trabelsi families took over banks, telecoms and import licences. A 2008 US embassy cable, published by WikiLeaks in December 2010, described them as a “quasi-mafia”. Growth could win consent most readily where people shared in it.

In the Gafsa mining basin, a contest for jobs brought these grievances together. On 5 January 2008 the Gafsa Phosphate Company, the region’s main employer, published results for 380 positions. Unemployed young people in Redeyef judged the results rigged for insiders. Sit-ins, marches and hunger strikes spread to Moularès, M’dhilla and Métlaoui. Local union activists, including schoolteacher Adnane Hajji, led the movement, while the UGTT’s national leadership remained close to the regime and held back.

Security forces sealed off the basin. Police shot Hafnaoui Maghzaoui dead in Redeyef on 6 June, and in December 38 people were sentenced to as much as ten years in prison. Phone videos circulated online, but national media stayed silent and the protest did not leave the basin. Gafsa had grievances, leadership, martyrs and images. The next revolt would also find a way to carry them beyond their place of origin.

WHY IT HAPPENED

A coup that promised freedom. Many Tunisians, including Bourguiba’s opponents, welcomed Ben Ali in 1987. He had removed a senile president constitutionally and without bloodshed, released prisoners and promised democracy. An amnesty, abolition of the state security court and a new political-parties law followed in his first months. The welcome gave him time to take control of the party, police and media. When he withdrew his promise after 1989, the opposition was divided and exhausted, helping explain two decades of weak resistance.

The Islamist threat as justification. Ennahda’s 1989 showing helped Ben Ali present repression as protection. The civil war that began in neighboring Algeria in 1992, after Islamists won an election there, strengthened that appeal. Many secular Tunisians, including some feminists and leftists, feared an Islamist government more than a police state; Western governments accepted the same trade. The regime could use the claim of defending stability against critics both religious and secular.

Education outrunning jobs. Universities expanded rapidly, but skilled jobs did not keep pace. By 2010 about 23 per cent of graduates were unemployed, and graduates made up a growing share of the jobless. Young people had studied as the state encouraged them to do, only to find jobs requiring connections or bribes. Graduate unemployment was highest in the interior, where private firms were fewest. The gap between education and opportunity made blocked hopes a source of anger: protest can grow from frustrated expectations as well as poverty.

A family that owned the economy. From the 1990s the president’s relatives and his wife’s family seized stakes in banks, airlines, car imports, telecoms and property. Their greed was visible to ordinary Tunisians and offended even the coastal business class that had supported the regime. A government claiming to provide order came to look like one that simply stole, weakening support within its own elite. US diplomatic cables published by WikiLeaks in December 2010 gave written evidence of what Tunisians had long whispered.

WHAT IT CHANGED

A template for revolt. The actions used at Gafsa appeared again two years later: sit-ins outside local government buildings, hunger strikes, marches led by unemployed graduates, local union support and phone videos. Protesters in Sidi Bouzid and Kasserine knew the basin’s story, and some of the same activists joined them. The next chapter follows the movement beyond the local limits that had contained Gafsa.

A divided union federation. Gafsa widened the distance between the UGTT’s regime-friendly national leaders and its militant local and regional branches. In January 2011 regional unions pushed the national leadership to authorize strikes. The federation helped turn scattered protests into a national movement and later brokered the democratic transition. Its connections to both the regime and a popular movement made it an intermediary between street and state.

Exit by sea. For some young people in the south and interior, departure was an alternative to revolt. The often illegal boat journey to Lampedusa or Sicily was called the harga, literally ‘burning’ the border. After the police state collapsed in 2011, about 20,000 Tunisians crossed to Lampedusa in three months, showing how many had been waiting to leave. For many young men the boat was a private answer to a public failure.

DISCUSSION QUESTION

Was Ben Ali’s regime maintained more by repression or by consent?

Repression was systematic: thousands of Islamists and leftists were imprisoned and tortured, the press and internet were censored, and police crushed Gafsa with bullets and long prison sentences. Yet fear alone is a poor explanation for 23 years of stability in a country without a large army. Hibou shows how credit, subsidies, licences and party networks made people dependent on the state and gave many a stake in it. Growth, education and women’s rights also won approval among the coastal middle class and Western governments. Protest suggests that consent was conditional and uneven: strongest where the economy delivered, weakest in the interior, where police mattered more. Consent did more to maintain the regime on the coast, repression in the interior. When growth stalled and corruption became visible, the material bargain weakened where fear had already carried much of the burden.

AN INTERESTING FACT

Tunisians nicknamed their internet censor “Ammar 404” after the “Error 404, page not found” message shown when a blocked website was requested, as if an official named Ammar had switched it off himself. YouTube and Dailymotion were blocked for long periods under Ben Ali, and police were reported to hack dissidents’ email and Facebook accounts. In November 2005 the government hosted the second phase of the United Nations World Summit on the Information Society in Tunis, a meeting about the free flow of information. Human-rights activists attempting a parallel meeting in the city were harassed and beaten.

CHAPTER 9 · DECEMBER 2010 – JANUARY 2011 · 2011

Twenty-Eight Days

The revolt began in the Centre-West, where the regime’s unwritten bargain had failed conspicuously. Tunisians were expected to accept political silence in return for jobs and order. For a street vendor in Sidi Bouzid, even the attempt to earn a living could end in a confrontation with officials. On 17 December 2010 Mohamed Bouazizi set himself on fire after his scales were confiscated and his complaint went unheard.

His relatives and local unionists marched that day on the governorate offices; a governorate is one of Tunisia’s 24 provinces. A cousin filmed the march, and the footage reached Al Jazeera, which Tunisians watched by satellite. On 24 December the National Guard, a paramilitary police force, shot dead 18-year-old Mohamed Ammari at Menzel Bouzaiane, where a memorial now marks the place. He was the first of the uprising’s martyrs, the name Tunisians give those killed by the security forces. By 31 December protests had reached the eleven governorates colored red in the second snapshot. Local anger had traveled through connections already available to its organizers and witnesses.

The deaths brought more people into the streets. Bouazizi died on 4 January; about 5,000 attended his funeral. From 8 to 10 January police fired on crowds and funeral processions in Kasserine, Thala and Regueb. Amnesty International counted at least 25 killed, the government admitted 21, and unions said more than 50. Each funeral gathered people around a loss for which they held the authorities responsible. Repression was creating occasions for further protest.

Ben Ali, president since 1987, answered with threats and promises. On 10 January he called the protesters terrorists and promised 300,000 jobs. The following day regional branches of the UGTT, Tunisia’s national trade-union federation, pushed its leadership to authorize regional general strikes: workers across a region would stop work together. The International Crisis Group, an independent research body, calls the decision the true turning point. On 12 January 30,000 to 50,000 marched in Sfax, strikes closed Kairouan and Tozeur, Tunis’s poorest suburbs rose, and the army was deployed in the capital. On the map red crosses the dashed coastal outline. The revolt had reached the regime’s own heartland and acquired an organized means of disrupting it.

Ben Ali promised freedoms and an end to live fire on 13 January. The next day the UGTT held a two-hour general strike in Tunis, and around 10,000 people gathered outside the Interior Ministry. That evening he flew to Jeddah in Saudi Arabia, along the arrow leaving the map. His defenders had ceased to act together: the army guarded buildings and declined to coordinate repression with the presidential guard. General Rachid Ammar later testified that he had received no order to fire, casting doubt on the famous story that he refused one.

The official commission of inquiry later counted 338 dead and 2,147 injured, including 86 prisoners who died after Ben Ali left. Four governorates—Béja, Siliana, Le Kef and Tataouine—remain tan because no protest before 14 January has been documented there. The government had lost the capacity to hold its ground before demonstrations were documented in every governorate.

WHY IT HAPPENED

Blocked hopes in the interior. In Sidi Bouzid, Kasserine and Gafsa unemployment stood far above the national rate of 13 per cent, while poverty was about four times that of the coast. Education had raised hopes of jobs that did not exist. Those seeking informal work could encounter humiliation from police and officials instead. The interior had revolted in 1984 and 2008; in 2010 familiar grievances spread with a different speed and reach.

Dignity as the demand. Poverty alone does not capture the meaning many Tunisians found in Bouazizi’s act. It spoke to humiliation by officials, an experience that crossed class lines and helped draw the coastal middle class into protest. Many Tunisians call the uprising the “Revolution of Freedom and Dignity” and dislike the foreign label “Jasmine Revolution”.

Networks ready to mobilise. Under Ben Ali, union branches, the lawyers’ bar, teachers’ unions and human-rights activists survived in weakened form. Defending the Gafsa prisoners gave them experience they could use again. In December 2010 they organized marches, documented killings and called strikes. Their connections gave local protesters a means of acting across the country; in 2008 the UGTT’s national leadership had held back.

New media against an old blackout. A state television blackout could leave each town unaware of protests elsewhere. Phone cameras, Facebook and Al Jazeera made that isolation harder to maintain: footage from Thala in the afternoon could be watched in Sfax that evening. WikiLeaks’ publication of US diplomatic cables in December 2010 also confirmed what many suspected about corruption in the ruling family.

WHAT IT CHANGED

A dictator falls in four weeks. On 14 January Ben Ali’s departure ended his 23 years in power and 55 years of one-party government. Old-regime figures initially led the interim authorities, but protesters demanded a deeper break. Young people came from the interior in the Caravan of Liberation, and sit-ins took place in Kasbah square outside the prime minister’s offices. A lasting change was that Tunisians no longer feared to speak in public.

The Arab uprisings. Tunisia’s rapid success encouraged people elsewhere to believe their rulers could fall quickly. Protest began in Egypt on 25 January, and Hosni Mubarak fell on 11 February; demonstrations began in Libya from 17 February and also spread to Yemen, Bahrain and Syria. The slogan “the people want the fall of the regime” traveled with them. That expectation of quick change cost many lives in Libya and Syria. Tunisia alone produced a democratic transition, lasting a decade before President Kaïs Saïed suspended parliament in 2021.

A revolution without leaders. No single leader, party or program directed the uprising. The authorities therefore had no single leadership to suppress, but the revolution also lacked an agreed direction after Ben Ali fled. Old-regime officials, the UGTT, returning exiles such as Rached Ghannouchi and new parties entered the resulting political space. Who would inherit the revolution became the central conflict of the next three years.

The dead and the wounded. Families of the dead and wounded pressed for recognition, compensation and trials of police officers. Their campaigns kept Kasserine and Thala in public memory. The official list of martyrs appeared only in 2021, and the slow delivery of justice remained a grievance through later crises.

DISCUSSION QUESTION

Why did the protests that failed in the Gafsa mining basin in 2008 succeed in bringing down Ben Ali in 2010–11?

Both uprisings grew from unemployment, corruption, regional neglect and police abuse. In 2008 the Gafsa revolt stayed within an isolated mining basin. Few images reached the rest of Tunisia, the national union leadership held back, and police could cordon off the area and jail its leaders. In 2010–11 the same grievances reached many governorates within two weeks. Videos on Facebook and Al Jazeera crossed the blackout; regional unions pushed the UGTT to authorize strikes; and the killings in Kasserine produced national outrage. The army, with little stake in Ben Ali’s survival, finally stood aside. Historians differ over the weight of media and unions, but neither spread nor defection alone explains the outcome. The earlier failure also supplied experienced organizers for the later movement.

AN INTERESTING FACT

A poem written in 1933 supplied some of the revolution’s most famous lines. Abu al-Qasim al-Shabbi, its young Tunisian author, died of heart disease the following year, aged 25. The opening couplet of “The Will to Live” promises that if a people one day wills to live, fate must answer and the chains must break. The couplet had entered Tunisia’s national anthem in 1987 and was sung at Ben Ali’s official ceremonies. In January 2011 crowds chanted it against his regime in Tunis; demonstrators in Cairo and other Arab cities soon took it up. Words the government had made official became an anthem of its overthrow.

CHAPTER 10 · 2011–2014 · 2014

Building a Democracy

Ben Ali’s prime minister, Mohamed Ghannouchi, led the first interim government after the president fled. Ministers of the old ruling party, the RCD, remained in office. For people who had risked their lives against that government, a change at the top left too much of the old order in place.

On 22 January 2011 young people from Menzel Bouzaiane and other interior towns set out for Tunis, along the arrow on the map. They camped in Kasbah square outside the prime minister’s offices until 28 January and forced a reshuffle. A second, larger sit-in brought more than 100,000 people into Tunis on 25 February. Ghannouchi resigned, and on 3 March the interim president promised elections to a constituent assembly, an elected body whose only task was to write a new constitution. A court dissolved the RCD on 9 March. An appointed commission then wrote the electoral law; its May 2011 decree required every list to alternate women and men. The protesters had secured a say in how the new rules would be made.

The October election brought a new conflict into the open. Ennahda, an Islamist party seeking to shape law by Islamic values through elections, won 89 of 217 seats with about 37 per cent of the vote. It formed a “troika” with two secular parties. In Sidi Bouzid, where the revolution began, voters mostly chose a populist list led by a London-based businessman. The town rioted when some of its seats were annulled. The interior had reason to fear that the politics it had helped create was passing it by.

Others feared what the new majority might do to women’s rights. In August 2012 a draft article describing women as “complementary” to men brought 7,000 to 9,000 protesters into the streets; the clause was dropped. Then violence made the dispute more acute. Jihadists, militants who use violence to impose their version of Islamic rule, shot secular leaders Chokri Belaïd on 6 February 2013 and Mohamed Brahmi on 25 July, using the same gun. Opposition groups blamed Ennahda for tolerating extremists. The murders became a crisis of trust in the transition itself.

After Brahmi’s death opposition deputies walked out and tens of thousands camped outside the Assembly at the Bardo. Egypt’s military coup on 3 July had shown where a contest of force could lead. Tunisia’s parties needed a way back to negotiation. Four organizations independent of the state and parties—the UGTT union federation, the employers’ union, the Human Rights League and the Order of Lawyers—formed a Quartet and convened the National Dialogue. Its roadmap gave the rivals a way to move together.

Ennahda agreed to hand power to non-party experts in January 2014 while the Assembly completed its work. On 26 January the constitution passed by 200 votes to 12. It kept the 1959 formula that Tunisia’s religion is Islam and guaranteed freedom of conscience. Article 21 declared men and women equal in rights and duties; Article 46 committed the state to parity in elected assemblies. In October Ennahda lost to the secular Nidaa Tounes and accepted the result. The constitution had given political opponents rules under which they could compete, and the losing party allowed the result to stand.

WHY IT HAPPENED

Pressure from the streets did not stop. The departure of the dictator did not end the protests. Young people from the interior towns that began the revolt joined trade unionists and students in occupying squares during the Kasbah sit-ins. They stayed until old ruling-party ministers resigned and a constituent assembly was promised. Their pressure prevented the old elite from managing a merely cosmetic change, as happened in several other Arab countries in 2011.

A union with national reach. The UGTT survived Bourguiba and Ben Ali as the only mass organization not wholly controlled by the regime. It had branches in every governorate and members in every profession. Its leadership had been compromised under Ben Ali, but siding with protesters in January 2011 rebuilt credibility. The union could call strikes and threaten the government, yet it could also negotiate. Those resources made it a natural convener of the National Dialogue.

An Islamist party that chose compromise. Ennahda’s leaders had experienced twenty years of persecution and knew the party could be crushed again. They accepted the Personal Status Code and dropped demands to cite Islamic law as a source of legislation. In 2014 they handed power to technocrats and accepted electoral defeat. Conviction, internal divisions and fear after Egypt’s example shaped these choices; the settlement depended on them.

Fear of the Egyptian outcome. Egypt’s army overthrew elected president Mohamed Morsi on 3 July 2013, and hundreds of his supporters were killed in August. Both Tunisian camps watched. Secular opponents of Ennahda could see that a military solution might destroy democracy, while Ennahda could see what might happen to an Islamist party unwilling to bend.

WHAT IT CHANGED

A democratic constitution. The 2014 constitution created a parliamentary system with a directly elected president. It guaranteed civil liberties, equality between women and men and parity in elected assemblies, and promised to favor poorer regions. Free legislative and presidential elections followed late that year. For most of the following decade Freedom House rated Tunisia the only “free” Arab country. The required constitutional court was never created, however, later leaving a president able to interpret the constitution alone.

The old elite returns by election. A new election could return familiar people to power. Nidaa Tounes (“Call of Tunisia”), the secular party founded in 2012 by 85-year-old Béji Caïd Essebsi, a former minister under Bourguiba, won 86 seats in October 2014 to Ennahda’s 69. Essebsi became president in December. Many revolutionaries concluded that political rules had changed while many of the same people remained in charge.

A region that went the other way. Tunisia’s neighbors followed different paths. Egypt returned to military rule in 2013, Libya had fragmented into rival governments and militias by 2014, and Syria descended into civil war. Libya’s collapse brought weapons, training camps and jihadist recruitment to Tunisia’s border. Foreign governments and donors invested heavily in Tunisia as evidence that democracy was possible in the region.

Women’s rights defended from below. Women’s campaigns against the “complementarity” clause and for parity showed them organizing freely on a mass scale for the first time. Women held about a third of the seats in the parliament elected in 2014. Their associations continued to win laws, including a comprehensive law against violence against women in 2017. Rights first granted from above could be defended and extended from below.

DISCUSSION QUESTION

How far was Tunisia’s democratic transition the achievement of civil society rather than of political parties?

Civil society consists of unions, associations and professional bodies between citizens and the state. Its contribution was decisive at two moments. In early 2011 young protesters and trade unionists forced the old ruling party out of government and won a constituent assembly. In 2013 the Quartet of the UGTT, employers, Human Rights League and lawyers turned a confrontation resembling Egypt’s into negotiation. The Nobel Committee later recognized that work. The mediators could set deadlines and bring rivals together, but they could not make the parties’ decisions for them. Ennahda agreed to hand over power and drop contested clauses; secular leaders such as Essebsi agreed to share the state with Islamists; Assembly deputies wrote and passed the constitution. Stepan stresses long negotiations between party leaders, while other historians emphasize the union’s distinctive weight. Civil society created conditions for compromise, and the parties made the compromises. Neither could have succeeded alone. Organizations between state and parties can apply pressure without seeking power themselves, a capacity on which democratic transitions usually depend.

AN INTERESTING FACT

The 2011 Constituent Assembly included eighteen members elected by Tunisians abroad, from six overseas constituencies. Ten seats represented the large community in France; others covered Italy, Germany, the Americas and the rest of Europe, and the Arab world. Polling stations opened from Paris to Montreal days before the vote at home. People who had left because of unemployment or repression could therefore help choose the writers of Tunisia’s constitution. Some deputies they elected had themselves spent decades in exile, sentenced in absentia by the regime that had just fallen.

CHAPTER 11 · 2012–2015 · 2015

Terrorism and Fragility

The fall of Ben Ali’s police state gave Tunisians freedoms that had long been denied. It also changed the conditions in which religious movements could organize. These movements did not all seek the same thing. Ennahda, the Islamist party that led the 2011 government, sought to shape law through elections; Salafists called for a return to the practices of the earliest Muslims; jihadists, a small minority, sought to impose their version of Islamic rule through violence.

An amnesty in early 2011 released hundreds of imprisoned Islamists, including veterans of foreign jihads. Among them was Abu Iyadh, who founded Ansar al-Sharia. The group provided charity, preached in mosques whose imams had fled, and recruited unemployed young men in poor suburbs and interior towns. During protests against a film insulting the Prophet, its supporters stormed the US embassy compound on 14 September 2012; four people were killed. Ennahda’s government designated the group a terrorist organization in August 2013. The leaders of the transition were building new rules at a time when militant organizers had already found room to act.

The danger extended across the border. After Gaddafi fell in 2011, Libyan weapons depots were looted and the border was barely policed. By 2014 rival governments and militias divided Libya, shown in red on the map. The Islamic State trained Tunisian recruits at camps near Sabratha, less than 100 kilometres from the border. The two arrows follow routes from Tunisia to the camps and onward to Syria. An open border tied Tunisian security to events in a neighbor without a functioning state.

In July 2015 the UN estimated that about 5,500 Tunisians were fighting with jihadist groups, most in Syria. Other estimates ranged from the government’s roughly 3,000 to 6,000. Analysts disagree about the reasons for such a large contingent from the only Arab Spring country to become a democracy. They point both to the frustration of educated young men and to the freedom recruiters gained after 2011.

The attacks on the Bardo Museum on 18 March 2015 and at Port El Kantaoui on 26 June, where 38 people were killed, struck tourism and the economy on which the transition depended. Tourism receipts fell by about 35 per cent that year, and about 70 hotels closed. On 4 July the government declared an emergency, allowing it to ban strikes and gatherings and place people under house arrest. A July counter-terrorism law extended the death penalty to terrorist crimes and permitted detention without a lawyer for fifteen days. Work also began on a Libyan border barrier.

Negotiation had helped Tunisia through its political crisis: in October the Nobel Peace Prize went to the National Dialogue Quartet, the four civil-society organizations led by the UGTT union federation that brokered the 2013 compromise. Yet the danger of further violence kept emergency powers in use. The emergency was lifted on 2 October and reinstated after a bomb killed twelve presidential guards on 24 November. Tunisia had ended the revolution-era emergency in 2014; its democracy was again using a decree written for Bourguiba in 1978.

WHY IT HAPPENED

Freedom for preachers and recruiters. Ennahda’s members had themselves suffered decades of repression, and the new government hesitated to repress religious activists. With mosque surveillance ended and political prisoners, including jihadist veterans, released, Salafists could preach and organize among young men with few prospects. Some preachers banned under Ben Ali returned to their pulpits; Salafist groups seized other mosques by force.

A security state in transition. Tunisia’s security institutions had been built for a different political order. The police, a backbone of Ben Ali’s rule, were distrusted and partly purged; the small army had little counter-insurgency experience. Intelligence networks that watched dissidents were ill suited to tracking armed groups. Officers who feared prosecution for conduct under Ben Ali were often reluctant to take risks. Effective democratic policing had yet to fill the gap left by the removal of repressive practices.

Libya’s collapse next door. A recruit could reach camps near Sabratha in hours and return almost as easily. That possibility grew from Libya’s collapse after Gaddafi fell in 2011 and its slide into civil war by 2014. Ungoverned space lay within a day’s drive of Tunisian towns, weapons were plentiful, and the Islamic State held territory around Sirte. Smuggling routes, long tolerated because border towns depended on them, carried fighters as well as fuel.

Grievances the revolution had not met. The revolution had raised economic hopes that remained unmet. Unemployment in 2015 was higher than in 2010, especially among young graduates and in the interior. Recruiters could offer unemployed young men pay, belonging and purpose. Many came from towns and suburbs that had protested in 2010–11: grievances shared by protesters could also help draw a minority toward violence.

WHAT IT CHANGED

Emergency rule returns. The emergency declared on 4 July 2015 was lifted on 2 October, reimposed on 24 November and renewed continuously for years. Powers over movement, strikes and gatherings were available against political opponents as well as armed groups. Adopted to protect democracy, they later became tools for undermining it.

An economy without visitors. When visitors stayed away, coastal resorts emptied; some towns lost most visitors for two years. Tourism receipts fell about 35 per cent in 2015, growth nearly stopped and unemployment remained around 15 per cent. The interior, already short of the revolution’s economic benefits, received even fewer. Economic disappointment later became the most common reason Tunisians gave for losing faith in democratic politics.

A prize for compromise. On 9 October 2015, between the two emergency declarations, the Nobel Peace Prize recognized the National Dialogue Quartet’s compromise. The award brought attention and aid while Tunisia was under attack. It also reinforced the country’s image as the Arab Spring’s one success story, an image that helped and burdened subsequent governments.

DISCUSSION QUESTION

Did the terrorist attacks of 2012–2015 threaten Tunisia’s democracy more than the government’s response to them?

The attacks killed soldiers, police, politicians and tourists, sought to provoke conflict between secular and religious Tunisians, and damaged the economy supporting the transition. Tourism receipts fell about a third in 2015. The government had reason to defend the public, and in the short term its response helped democracy survive: elections continued and the Nobel Prize recognized the 2013 compromise. But the emergency and the 2015 counter-terrorism law also restored powers over gatherings, movement and detention resembling those of the old regime. Human-rights groups documented abuses. Renewed for years, emergency rule normalized exceptional powers that a later president would use to dismantle democratic institutions after 2021. Terrorism weakened the economy and public trust; the response eroded habits of liberty, and that danger proved more lasting. How a democracy defends itself can matter as much as the attack it faces.

AN INTERESTING FACT

The National Dialogue Quartet brought leaders of very different institutions together: Houcine Abassi of the UGTT trade-union federation, Wided Bouchamaoui of the employers’ union UTICA, Abdessattar Ben Moussa of the Tunisian Human Rights League and Mohamed Fadhel Mahfoudh of the Order of Lawyers. Bouchamaoui had become the first woman to lead Tunisia’s employers’ federation when elected in 2011. Thus a business leader sat alongside the trade-union leader in the group awarded the 2015 Nobel Peace Prize, the first Nobel Prize ever awarded to Tunisians.

EPILOGUE · 1945–2015 · 2015

Two Movements Compared

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.

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.

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.