Was the Personal Status Code a victory for Tunisian women?

The short answer

• A nationalist party that owed little to tradition. Tunisia’s family law was reformed quickly because the party that won independence had little attachment to religious tradition. The Neo-Destour (“New Constitution”) party, founded in 1934 at Ksar Hellal in the Sahel, Tunisia’s coastal heartland, was led by French-educated lawyers and teachers who wanted a modern nation-state. In 1955–56 Bourguiba defeated his rival Salah Ben Youssef, whose pan-Arab nationalism, the hope of uniting all Arabic-speaking peoples, attracted conservative clergy and rural notables. Victory left Bourguiba free of the groups most opposed to changing family law, which explains why reform came so fast. Ben Youssef himself was assassinated in Frankfurt in 1961, a reminder of how ruthlessly the victors guarded their position.
• A reformist tradition within Islam. Tunisian reformers had argued for decades that Islamic law could be reinterpreted for modern life, a practice known as ijtihad, the independent reasoning of a qualified scholar. Tahar Haddad’s 1930 book called for women’s education and an end to polygamy. The Code drew on this tradition and was presented as faithful to Islam, which made it harder for religious opponents to reject it outright. Haddad had died poor and isolated in 1935, and the Code turned a condemned dissident into a national prophet.
• Women as citizens of a new nation. Bourguiba saw the patriarchal extended family as an obstacle to national unity and economic development. Educated women workers and smaller families would, in his view, make Tunisia modern, so the Code was part of a wider programme of schooling, family planning and secular courts. Rapid population growth also made family planning an economic priority for the new state. Women’s rights were a means to the state’s ends as well as an end in themselves, which shaped their limits.
• A state without counterweights. Because the party controlled the Constituent Assembly, the press and, from 1963, all legal political life, the government could decree reforms without negotiating with parliament, clergy or the public. The UGTT, the one mass organisation with an independent base, was purged whenever its leaders defied the party, as in 1978. The same concentration of power that made rapid reform possible also prevented independent organisations, including women’s groups and unions, from acting freely, which left the interior with no voice when development passed it by.

What it changed

The most liberal family law in the Arab world. The Code was extended under Bourguiba and Ben Ali, for example in 1993, when mothers gained new rights over their children. It became part of Tunisian national identity, so that when a draft constitution of 2012 described women as “complementary” to men, thousands marched to defend the rights the Code had created. Ben Ali presented himself as the Code’s guardian, which helped him win Western support while he repressed Islamists.

Rights without the freedom to organise. Because the only legal women’s organisation belonged to the ruling party, Tunisian women had rights on paper and little independent means to use or extend them. Independent feminist associations appeared only in the late 1980s and spent two decades under police surveillance, though many of the women who led protests in 2011 and 2012 came from them. Rights granted by a state can be defended only by citizens free to organise, which is why women’s groups emerged as organised actors only after 2011.

A country divided between coast and interior. Regional inequality became a lasting feature of the state Bourguiba built. Young people from the interior migrated to the coast or abroad, and those who stayed faced fewer jobs, schools and hospitals. In 2010 poverty in the Centre-West was four times that of the coastal Centre-East. Their resentment, voiced in the bread riots of 1984 and the mining-basin revolt of 2008, exploded in Sidi Bouzid in December 2010, so the development model that favoured the coast built the grievance that would bring 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. Islamist activists of the new Islamic Tendency Movement were tried in 1987, and Bourguiba demanded death sentences. His prime minister, Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali, used the crisis to have him declared medically unfit in November 1987, a bloodless coup that was at first widely welcomed. A president for life could be removed only by declaring him unfit, so the succession came through a medical coup dressed in constitutional form.