Feminism and the Tunisian Revolution · EPILOGUE ·
How protest movements create change
Chapter 12 of Protest and Change: Second-Wave Feminism and Tunisia, 1945–2015: “Two Movements Compared”
Second-wave feminism and the Tunisian revolution both grew from a gap between what a society promised and what it delivered, and both were organised through existing networks, from state commissions to trade unions. Feminism worked for four decades through law and culture, while Tunisia’s revolution changed the state far faster.
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The map above is the world of Tunisia, November 2015 — The emergency reimposed.
Part of IB History: Second-wave feminism and Tunisia →
BRIEF EXPLANATION — THE ESSENTIAL ARGUMENT
The governing question of this atlas asked why protest movements emerge, how they create change and whom the change leaves out, and the two case studies give answers that are strikingly similar in structure and different in pace. Both movements emerged from a gap between what a society promised and what it delivered. American and European women had won the vote but not equal pay, equal citizenship or control of their fertility; young Tunisians had been promised education, jobs and dignity and received unemployment, corruption and police contempt. In both cases the grievance became a movement when it was named, by Friedan’s book or by Bouazizi’s act, and when existing networks, from state commissions and civil-rights veterans to trade unions and lawyers, gave it an organisation.
The movements created change in different ways and on different clocks. Feminism worked for four decades through laws, courts, consciousness-raising and an international treaty, and much of its change was cumulative and quiet; the Tunisian revolution toppled a dictator in twenty-eight days and wrote a constitution in three years. Both met counter-movements, STOP ERA in America and jihadist violence and the old elite in Tunisia. Both also left people out: Black, Chicana, poor and lesbian women in the first case, and in the second the interior towns where the revolt began, still poorer in 2015 than the coast. The final map shows November 2015, with Tunisia hatched under a renewed state of emergency. After 2021, as a later development, an elected president suspended parliament and ruled by decree, a reminder that change won by protest can be reversed.
The full story
Both movements emerged when a rising generation experienced a promise that reality denied, and when that experience was turned into a shared argument. Educated women in the 1950s and 1960s had been raised to expect careers and equal citizenship and found pay scales, jury rules and job advertisements that treated them as dependants. Educated young Tunisians in the 2000s had been promised that schooling would bring work and found that jobs went to the connected. In each case a moment of naming converted private frustration into public claims: The Feminine Mystique told women their unhappiness had social causes, and Bouazizi’s act told Tunisians that humiliation by officials was a national condition. In each case existing networks did the organising, from Kennedy’s state commissions and veterans of the civil-rights movement to the UGTT’s regional unions and the lawyers’ bar. Protest movements rarely invent their organisations; they repurpose the ones that already exist.
The two movements created change through different mechanisms, which explains their different speeds and their different kinds of durability. Feminism worked mainly through law and culture: the Equal Pay Act, Title VII, Roe v. Wade and CEDAW, together with a slow change in what women and men expected of each other. Its gains therefore accumulated over decades and were hard to reverse in full, although the ERA failed and abortion rights later proved vulnerable. The Tunisian revolution worked through the sudden collapse of a regime and the negotiation of a new one, so its gains were rapid and spectacular but rested on fragile institutions and on an economy that did not improve. Both provoked counter-movements: Schlafly’s homemakers in the United States, and in Tunisia both the old regime’s elite, which returned by election in 2014, and the jihadists who attacked the transition. Change that comes quickly can be undone quickly, while change that comes slowly is harder to see and harder to undo.
Both movements left out some of the people whose grievances had given them their force, and both were then pushed by those people to widen their aims. Second-wave feminism spoke first for white, middle-class women, and Black, Chicana, poor and lesbian women built their own organisations and theories, from the Combahee River Collective to the welfare-rights movement, which reshaped feminism long after 1985. The Tunisian revolution began in Sidi Bouzid, Kasserine and the mining basin, the places the map has revisited, yet by 2015 those regions still had the highest unemployment and poverty, and their young people protested again in 2016 and after. Women in Tunisia, by contrast, used the new freedoms to defend and extend their rights. After 2021 President Kaïs Saïed suspended parliament, ruled by decree and introduced a new constitution in 2022, a later development that shows how quickly a democracy built by protest can be dismantled. Movements win changes that their founders did not foresee and lose control of them soon after.
DEEP EXPLANATION — EVIDENCE & INTERPRETATION
Comparing the cases: how historians explain movements
Historians and sociologists of protest often use three questions to compare movements, and they work well for these two cases. The first concerns political opportunities: openings created by the state or by elites, such as Kennedy’s Commission and the accident of Title VII in the United States, or the army’s neutrality and the UGTT leadership’s change of position in Tunisia in January 2011. The second concerns mobilising structures, the organisations and networks that recruit people and coordinate action, such as NOW, consciousness-raising groups and the welfare-rights movement, or union branches, the lawyers’ bar and online networks of bloggers. The third concerns framing, the way a movement explains its grievance, such as “the personal is political” or “dignity”. Sidney Tarrow and Charles Tilly, who developed this approach, emphasise that opportunities explain when movements succeed, structures explain how they grow and frames explain whom they attract. The comparison shows the limits of each: feminism had the strongest organisations and the slowest victories, while Tunisia had sudden opportunity and weak organisations afterwards. A comparison of the two cases should therefore weigh all three questions together, because each explains a different stage of the same story.
A later development: Tunisia after 2021
This atlas ends in 2015, but no account of the Tunisian revolution can ignore what happened next, and historians are still debating how to interpret it. Kaïs Saïed, a law professor elected president in 2019 with strong support from young voters, invoked emergency powers on 25 July 2021 to suspend parliament and dismiss the government, citing economic crisis, corruption and the failures of the parties. He then ruled by decree, dissolved the elected judicial council and the parliament, and in July 2022 introduced a new constitution, approved in a referendum with a turnout of about 30 per cent, which concentrated power in the presidency. Opposition leaders from Ennahda and secular parties, journalists and lawyers were later prosecuted and imprisoned. Some scholars see the decade after 2011 as a genuine democracy that failed to deliver economically and lost public support; others argue that the transition’s bargains protected elites and never addressed the interior’s demands. Both readings connect back to the governing question: a movement that changes political institutions without changing the lives of those who began it leaves those institutions exposed. Events after 2015 are outside the scope of this atlas, and their meaning is still contested.
Key places on the map
Why it happened
A promise that reality broke. Both movements grew from frustrated expectations, the gap between what people had been promised and what they received. Women who had gained education and the vote and Tunisians who had gained schooling and growth measured their lives against those promises, and the gap fuelled anger. People revolt when they have been led to expect more than they receive, which is why in both cases the most likely protesters were those whose expectations had risen fastest.
A moment of naming. Each movement had a catalyst that gave its grievance a name and a face: The Feminine Mystique and Bouazizi’s self-immolation. Neither caused the movement, but each converted a scattered, private experience into a shared public story. Catalysts matter because they solve the problem of coordination, telling many people at once that others feel the same. Both catalysts were later mythologised, which is why historians examine them so carefully.
Networks before the movement. Feminism grew from state commissions, unions, civil-rights groups and universities; the Tunisian revolution grew from union branches, lawyers, teachers and online activists, many of them veterans of the Gafsa campaign. In both cases organisations that existed for other purposes were repurposed for protest, which is why both movements could act quickly once the moment came. Without those networks the catalysts would have produced only a day’s headlines.
Openings from above. Both movements exploited divisions or hesitations among elites: Kennedy’s Commission and a civil-rights bill amended by an opponent in the United States, an army that would not defend Ben Ali and a union leadership that changed sides in Tunisia. Protest succeeds most often when insiders open a door that outsiders can push through. Without such openings protest is usually contained or crushed, as the Gafsa revolt was in 2008.
THE TURNING POINT
The Nobel Peace Prize, 9 October 2015. The prize to the National Dialogue Quartet is a fitting hinge for a comparison, because it rewarded what both movements show to be the hardest part of protest: turning mobilisation into lasting institutions through negotiation. Second-wave feminism did this through NOW, the courts and CEDAW; Tunisia did it through four organisations that brought enemies to a table. Yet the prize was awarded while the country was under a state of emergency and while the interior still waited for the revolution’s economic promises, a reminder that institutions built by compromise depend on delivering results to the people who started the protest.
What it changed
Change through law. Both movements secured their most durable gains by writing them into law: equal pay and anti-discrimination statutes, court rulings and CEDAW in the first case, the 2014 constitution and its equality and parity articles in the second. Laws outlast the mobilisation that produced them, although both cases also show that laws can be reinterpreted, ignored or overturned.
Counter-movements as part of the story. STOP ERA, the anti-abortion movement and, in Tunisia, the old regime’s elite and jihadist groups all reacted against the changes protest had won. The anti-ERA campaign helped elect Ronald Reagan, and Tunisia’s old elite returned to power through the ballot box in 2014. A full history of any movement includes its opponents, because their mobilisation determines which gains survive and which are lost.
The excluded keep organising. Women of colour and poor women in the United States, and the unemployed young people of Tunisia’s interior, continued to organise after the mainstream movements had won their main victories. Black women founded reproductive-justice groups in the 1990s, and unemployed graduates staged sit-ins in Kasserine and Gafsa after 2011. Their demands, for control over their own bodies and for regional development, define the unfinished agenda that both case studies leave behind.
Unfinished business. Both stories end without a final verdict: the ERA’s ratification remains legally disputed, the United States never joined CEDAW, and Tunisia’s democracy was dismantled from July 2021, when President Kaïs Saïed suspended parliament and later replaced the constitution. That is why historians judge protest movements over decades, and by the questions they force societies to keep asking about equality, dignity and who belongs.
DISCUSSION QUESTION — Compare and contrast how second-wave feminism and the Tunisian revolution created change.
The similarities between the two movements are substantial, and they lie mainly in how each began. Both turned a grievance rooted in frustrated expectations into a public claim through a moment of naming, and both relied on existing networks of activists, unions and professionals. Both also used law as the main vehicle of lasting change, provoked counter-movements and left out some of those whose grievances had driven them. The differences lie in mechanism and pace. Feminism changed laws and attitudes incrementally over four decades in stable democracies, using courts, legislatures, the media and the UN, so its gains were gradual and hard to reverse wholesale. The Tunisian revolution brought down a dictatorship in four weeks and built a democracy through negotiation in three years, so its gains were sudden and dependent on new institutions and on an economy that faltered. Historians would add that feminism’s targets were laws and cultural norms inside a political system it accepted, while Tunisia’s target was the system itself. The most persuasive conclusion is that both created real but partial change, and that the speed of change and its durability were inversely related. The transferable insight is that the way a movement creates change shapes how long that change lasts.
An interesting fact
Two years after this atlas ends, Tunisia’s women’s movement won two changes that would have been unthinkable under Ben Ali. In July 2017 parliament passed a comprehensive law against violence against women, which also abolished a provision that had allowed a man who had sex with a minor to escape prosecution by marrying her. In September 2017 the government withdrew a 1973 administrative circular that had barred Tunisian Muslim women from marrying non-Muslim men. Both reforms came after years of campaigning by independent women’s associations that before 2011 could campaign only under police surveillance.
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