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

CHAPTER 1 · 1945–1963 · 1963

The Problem That Has No Name

Winning the vote had changed less than its campaigners hoped, because the law still treated a woman first as a wife and mother and only second as an individual citizen. The clearest test was the jury. In 1957 Gwendolyn Hoyt of Tampa, Florida, struck her husband with a baseball bat during a quarrel, and he died. An all-male jury convicted her of murder, because Florida placed women on jury lists only if they registered to serve, and few ever did. In Hoyt v. Florida (1961) the Supreme Court upheld the rule, reasoning that woman was “still regarded as the center of home and family life.” On the map Alabama, Mississippi and South Carolina are charcoal because they excluded women altogether; the grey-tan states exempted women for their sex alone, so that their juries stayed overwhelmingly male. A duty that only volunteers performed turned out to be a right that most women never exercised.

Post-war America told women to find fulfilment at home, yet the economy was quietly pulling them out of it, and this contradiction made discontent possible. Federal mortgage guarantees and the GI Bill, which paid for veterans’ homes and college places, helped build suburbs such as Levittown on Long Island, where 17,447 houses went up between 1947 and 1951, and the suburban homemaker became the national ideal. Meanwhile the share of married women in paid work kept rising, to about a third by 1960, although most worked in low-paid “women’s jobs” and full-time women earned around 60 cents for every dollar men earned. In 1960 the Food and Drug Administration approved the contraceptive pill, which had been tested on women in Puerto Rico in 1956, as the arrow from Puerto Rico to the mainland shows, and within five years millions of American women used it. Women’s lives were changing faster than the ideals and laws that described them.

The second wave of feminism, the movement for equality beyond the vote, began when writers and officials gave this gap a language and a set of numbers. Beauvoir’s philosophy, which the arrow from Paris to New York traces, reached American readers in an English translation in 1953 and taught that inequality was made by society and could therefore be unmade. Friedan, who surveyed her classmates at Smith College, an elite women’s college in Massachusetts, at their fifteenth reunion in 1957, turned their answers into a bestseller that sold more than a million copies within a few years of its publication on 19 February 1963. At the same time the President’s Commission on the Status of Women, a panel Kennedy appointed in 1961 to investigate women’s position, published its report American Women in October 1963. It recorded unequal pay, unequal jury laws and the lack of childcare. The Equal Pay Act of 10 June 1963 was the first federal law against sex discrimination at work. Naming the problem mattered as much as any statute, because a movement needs a shared grievance before it can make a shared demand.

WHY IT HAPPENED

The vote without equality. The first wave had concentrated its energy on the ballot, on the assumption that political power would bring legal equality with it. It did not, because older laws and customs survived the Nineteenth Amendment of 1920, which gave women the vote. Married women in some states still needed a court’s or a husband’s permission to run a business or manage their own property, jury rules kept women out of the jury box, and pay scales openly set lower rates for women. The gap between formal citizenship and daily treatment was the raw material of the second wave.

A contradiction inside the suburban ideal. Post-war culture celebrated the full-time homemaker at the very moment when the economy needed women’s labour, because the service sector, offices and shops were expanding. By 1960 about a third of married women held paid jobs, usually in low-paid, sex-segregated work, while magazines, advertising and television still presented domesticity as women’s natural destiny. Women experienced both pressures at once, and the strain between them made the inequalities of work and law feel personal.

Education without outlets. More women than ever were attending college, yet graduates were widely expected to marry, leave work and devote themselves to their families. Friedan’s Smith College classmates had studied economics, literature and science and were now running households in the suburbs. Educated women had both the skills and the expectations to notice discrimination, and the social confidence to write, organise and lobby against it, which is why the movement’s first leaders came disproportionately from this group.

Ideas that crossed the Atlantic. Simone de Beauvoir’s argument that women were made “the Other”, defined only in relation to men, gave the coming movement a theory of why inequality persisted after the vote. Her book was condemned by the Vatican, read in an abridged English translation from 1953, and absorbed by a generation of American and British readers. It allowed feminists to treat inequality as a social construction, something produced by institutions and upbringing, and therefore as something that politics could change.

WHAT IT CHANGED

A language for consciousness-raising. Friedan’s idea that individual unhappiness had social causes became the starting point of the small “consciousness-raising” groups of the late 1960s, in which women compared their experiences and concluded that personal problems had political roots. The phrase “the problem that has no name” passed into the language and made it possible to discuss housework, marriage and ambition as public questions.

A network ready to act. The Commission’s state offshoots brought together hundreds of experienced women in law, unions, universities and government. In June 1966 they met in Washington and found that they could not even pass a resolution urging enforcement of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the new law against sex discrimination at work. A group of them founded the National Organization for Women on the spot. The infrastructure of a movement existed before the movement had an organisation of its own.

Equal pay in law, unequal pay in fact. The Equal Pay Act outlawed paying a woman less than a man for the same job, but it did nothing about jobs that were segregated by sex, and in 1963 most were. Women’s earnings stayed at about 60 per cent of men’s for the next fifteen years. The gap between the law and the paypacket made Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which banned sex discrimination in hiring and promotion, the next battleground, and pushed activists toward strikes and lawsuits.

A movement defined by one group of women. Because the first texts of the second wave spoke for educated, married, middle-class women, the movement’s early agenda reflected their concerns: careers, professional schools and escape from the home. Women who had always worked, and women whose main problems were racism, poverty or forced sterilisation, found that the movement did not describe them. That gap would become the movement’s deepest internal argument, because a feminism built on one group’s grievances could not speak for women whose problems were different.

DISCUSSION QUESTION

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

The case for symptom is strong. Married women were already entering paid work in large numbers, the Pill was already on sale, Kennedy’s Commission was already collecting evidence of discrimination, and the Equal Pay Act passed four months after the book appeared, so the structural pressures that produced the movement predate it. Historians such as Meyerowitz and Horowitz also show that Friedan described only one group of women and was drawing on a decade of earlier writing about women and work. Yet the case for cause is real, because movements need more than grievances: they need a shared interpretation that tells people their problem is common and political. The flood of letters to Friedan suggests that the book supplied this to readers who would never have joined a commission. The most persuasive answer is that the book was a catalyst, a trigger acting on conditions already present. The transferable lesson is that structural change makes protest possible, but it usually takes an act of naming, by a writer, a martyr or an event, to turn possibility into mobilisation.

AN INTERESTING FACT

The man who translated The Second Sex into English in 1953, Howard Parshley, was a professor of zoology at Smith College, the same college whose graduates Betty Friedan surveyed in 1957. Parshley was hired by the publisher Knopf, whose editors reportedly expected a scientific study of sex, and he cut somewhere between a tenth and a sixth of the text and rendered several of Beauvoir’s philosophical terms in ways scholars later criticised. English readers had to wait until 2009 for a complete translation, by Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevallier, so the book that launched a generation of feminism in English was read for more than fifty years in an abridged form.

CHAPTER 2 · 1963–1970 · 1970

Organising for Equality

The law opened the door before anyone was ready to walk through it, and the reason lies in how the word “sex” entered Title VII, the employment section of the new civil-rights law. On 8 February 1964 Howard Smith, a Virginia congressman who opposed the bill, proposed adding “sex” to the forbidden grounds for discrimination. His motives are still debated, because he opposed civil rights yet had long supported the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), a proposed constitutional guarantee of equal rights regardless of sex. Martha Griffiths and other congresswomen seized the amendment and it passed. In its first year about a third of the complaints to the EEOC, the agency created to enforce the law, concerned sex discrimination, yet a senior official called the sex provision a “fluke” and sex-segregated job advertisements continued. A right without enforcement is only a promise, and the lesson pushed women to organise.

Two kinds of organisation grew out of the law’s failure, and the first was the National Organization for Women (NOW), a national lobby born of insiders’ frustration. On 30 June 1966 women at a national conference of the state commissions on the status of women, government advisory bodies much like a modern task force, were barred even from urging the EEOC to act, so they founded NOW on the spot. Its method was litigation and lobbying. Lorena Weeks, a Georgia telephone clerk denied a better-paid job by a state rule barring women from lifting more than 30 pounds, showed how it worked: in 1969 a federal appeals court ruled that Title VII overrode such “protective” laws. The second kind grew from younger women in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), a student civil-rights group registering Black voters in the South, who wrote in 1964–65 that they typed and cooked while men decided. The two arrows trace that experience north from Mississippi to New York and Chicago, where they formed women’s liberation groups without leaders, because SNCC had taught them that even a movement for freedom could reproduce inequality.

Two other groups looked beyond the courtroom: radical feminists, who saw male power built into family, sexuality and culture, believed publicity could change minds faster than lawsuits, and British women workers believed a strike could change pay. The Miss America protest of 7 September 1968 shows both the power and the cost of the first belief. A few hundred women picketed the pageant at Atlantic City, threw bras and girdles into a “Freedom Trash Can” and crowned a sheep, arguing that the contest judged women like livestock. Nothing was burned, yet the press invented the “bra-burner”, an image that made the movement famous and easy to mock. The 187 women who sewed car-seat covers at Ford’s Dagenham plant showed the power of the second. Their three-week strike against a regrading that classed their skilled work as less skilled stopped car production and helped persuade the Employment Secretary, Barbara Castle, to steer the Equal Pay Act through Parliament in May 1970. The courtroom, the street and the picket line were complementary routes to change, because each reached people the others could not.

WHY IT HAPPENED

A civil-rights law with a sex clause. Title VII gave women a legal weapon that existed almost by accident, and a weapon creates a constituency of people who want it used. Once discrimination by sex was illegal on paper, every job advertisement marked “male” and every lower pay scale became evidence of an unenforced law. The distance between the statute and its enforcement gave women a precise, winnable demand, which is the kind of demand that builds organisations.

Experienced women with nowhere to take their anger. The state commissions of the early 1960s had trained hundreds of women in law, research and lobbying. At their third national conference in June 1966 they learned that the commissions could pass no resolutions and had no power to press the EEOC. Frustrated insiders who know how institutions work are among the most effective founders of protest organisations, and NOW was founded by exactly such people on the last day of that conference.

The civil-rights and anti-war movements as schools. Young women who had registered voters in Mississippi or organised against the Vietnam War learned to run meetings, write leaflets and confront authority. They also experienced sexism inside these movements: in 1964 and 1965 SNCC women wrote papers describing how they were kept from leadership. They took both the skills and the anger into women’s liberation, which explains its language of oppression, liberation and solidarity. The same pattern appeared in Britain and France, where women’s liberation grew out of the student and anti-war protests of 1968.

Women workers who could stop production. At Dagenham 187 machinists sewed the seat covers without which no car could leave the factory, so a strike by a small group halted one of Britain’s largest plants. This gave them leverage that middle-class lobbyists lacked, and their success showed working women across Britain that equal pay could be won by industrial action. Bargaining power, more than numbers, decides whether a protest can force concessions. The machinists also had the backing of their union, the National Union of Vehicle Builders, which turned a grading dispute in one factory into a national argument about women’s pay.

WHAT IT CHANGED

The EEOC is forced to act. Pressure from NOW and from thousands of complaints pushed the EEOC to rule in 1968 that sex-segregated job advertisements broke the law, and in 1969 courts began striking down “protective” laws that barred women from better-paid work. The legal ground of the workplace shifted within five years, although the pay gap barely moved. In 1973 the Supreme Court upheld a ban on sex-segregated newspaper advertisements in the Pittsburgh Press case, which began with a complaint by a local NOW chapter.

A movement split by method and goal. Liberal feminists wanted equality inside existing institutions; radicals wanted to transform marriage, sexuality and culture; labour feminists wanted pay, childcare and protection. These differences produced creative energy and bitter quarrels, including NOW’s internal fights over abortion and over lesbian members, whom Friedan called a “lavender menace” in 1969. The quarrels were also a sign of growth, because a movement that argues about whom it represents has become large enough to represent many different women.

Equal pay becomes law in Britain. The Equal Pay Act of 29 May 1970 gave employers five years to remove separate rates for women, and it came into force in December 1975 alongside the Sex Discrimination Act. On the map Britain is grey-tan because in 1970 the law had passed but did not yet apply. Women at Dagenham struck again in 1984, because their work was still not graded as skilled.

DISCUSSION QUESTION

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

The law came first and gave women something they could not have won alone, a federal ban on sex discrimination at work, and it arrived through the politics of race, a congressman’s motives and the lobbying of a few veteran feminists, before any mass movement existed. Yet the evidence of the EEOC’s first years shows that a law without an organised constituency can sit almost unused: the agency treated the sex clause as a fluke until NOW, the complaints of thousands of working women and cases such as Weeks forced it to act. The movement also did things the law could not, such as changing what women expected of their own lives. The fairest judgement is that the law and the movement were mutually dependent: Title VII gave feminists a target and a tool, and feminists gave Title VII its meaning. The transferable insight is that legal change and protest usually work in a cycle, with each new right becoming the starting point for the next campaign, which is why movements so often grow stronger after their first victories.

AN INTERESTING FACT

The equal-pay principle the Dagenham women fought for had been written into the founding treaty of the European Economic Community in 1957, whose Article 119 required member states to ensure equal pay for equal work. France had insisted on it, partly because its own law already demanded equal pay and its industries feared being undercut by cheaper female labour elsewhere. The clause sat largely unenforced until a Belgian air hostess, Gabrielle Defrenne, sued the airline Sabena, which had forced her to retire at 40 while male stewards flew on. In 1976 the European Court of Justice ruled that Article 119 gave individuals rights they could enforce in national courts.

CHAPTER 3 · 1968–1975 · 1972

The Personal Is Political

Consciousness-raising, in which small groups of women compared their lives much as a support group does, turned complaint into analysis because it treated each woman’s experience as evidence. In 1968 Kathie Sarachild of New York Radical Women described the method: members answered one question at a time, about their mothers, jobs or first sexual experiences, and looked for the pattern. Carol Hanisch defended the practice in a 1969 paper that her editors titled “The Personal Is Political”, arguing that these groups were political action because they traced women’s unhappiness to the power men held in marriage, work and law. By the early 1970s tens of thousands of women had joined such groups. In February 1970 between 500 and 600 women met at Ruskin College, Oxford, for Britain’s first national women’s liberation conference and demanded equal pay, equal education, 24-hour nurseries and free contraception and abortion on demand. A method invented in small rooms became the grammar of a mass movement.

Abortion became the movement’s defining cause because illegal abortion was common, dangerous and hidden. Historians estimate that hundreds of thousands of illegal abortions took place in the United States each year before 1970. Infections from unsafe procedures, known as septic abortion, were a leading cause of maternal death, especially for poor women and women of colour who could not pay a sympathetic doctor. In March 1969 the radical feminist group Redstockings held a public speak-out in New York, after a state hearing on reform had invited fourteen men and a nun as its expert witnesses. In Chicago a clandestine service known as “Jane” performed an estimated 11,000 abortions between 1969 and 1973. In April 1970 New York’s legislature legalised abortion on request by a single changed vote, and because it set no residency rule, women came from across the country: in 1972 alone just over 100,000 travelled there from other states. The blue states show where the law had changed, and the arrows show who could afford to reach them.

The same logic of public confession crossed the Atlantic, where it met a different legal map. Britain’s Abortion Act of 1967 allowed abortion with two doctors’ agreement on broad health grounds, so British clinics drew women from France and from Ireland, where it remained banned. On 5 April 1971 the weekly Le Nouvel Observateur printed the Manifesto of the 343, in which Simone de Beauvoir and 342 other women declared that they had broken the law and dared the state to prosecute them. In 1972 the lawyer Gisèle Halimi turned the Bobigny trial of a teenager, Marie-Claire Chevalier, into an indictment of the law itself, and the girl was acquitted. On 22 January 1973 the Supreme Court, whose rulings bind every state, decided in Roe v. Wade by 7 votes to 2 that the constitutional right to privacy, which shields certain personal decisions from government, covered abortion in early pregnancy. In January 1975 France’s Veil law, named after the health minister Simone Veil, legalised it in the first ten weeks. Making the private public had changed the law on two continents within six years.

WHY IT HAPPENED

A method that turned experience into evidence. Consciousness-raising groups gave women a way to see that their individual problems, from housework to sexual coercion, followed common patterns. Once a pattern is visible it can be blamed on institutions and law, which turns a private sorrow into a political grievance. The method was cheap, needed no leaders and could be copied anywhere, which is why it spread faster than any organisation could recruit. Its findings also gave women the confidence that they spoke for many others, which is the precondition of any public protest.

An injustice that fell hardest on the poor. Illegal abortion was available to women who could pay a sympathetic doctor or travel abroad, and dangerous for those who could not. Wealthier women could travel abroad or persuade a hospital committee to approve a “therapeutic” abortion, options that were closed to most poor women. Hospital wards for septic abortion filled with poor women, and maternal deaths fell disproportionately on Black and Puerto Rican women. The visible inequality of the old system made repeal an argument about fairness, which broadened its appeal far beyond the women’s movement.

Doctors, lawyers and clergy changed sides. Reform gained respectable allies when professionals changed sides: from the early 1960s the American Law Institute, an influential body of lawyers, proposed allowing abortion on limited medical grounds, and many doctors who saw the results of illegal procedures supported reform. In 1967 a network of Protestant and Jewish clergy in New York began referring women to safe providers. When professional elites shift, protest movements gain allies who can draft laws and testify with authority. Their support also made reform respectable to legislators who would never have listened to radical feminists.

Public confession as a weapon. Speak-outs, manifestos and courtroom protests broke the secrecy on which the old laws depended. When famous women such as Beauvoir and Catherine Deneuve announced that they had broken the law, prosecutors faced a choice between enforcing it against the respectable and admitting that it was unenforceable. The same tactic ran through gay liberation’s contemporary call to “come out” and reappeared decades later in the online testimonies of #MeToo. Making a crime public and collective can make a law collapse, because laws depend on being obeyed quietly.

WHAT IT CHANGED

A national right and a national opposition. After 1973 abortion was legal in early pregnancy everywhere in the United States, and the movement to reverse it became a national political force. Catholic organisations and, from the late 1970s, evangelical Protestants made opposition to abortion central to a new conservative politics, which joined the campaign against the Equal Rights Amendment. Abortion became one of the most divisive issues in American politics and remained so for half a century.

Rights without access. The Hyde Amendment of 1976 stopped Medicaid, the public health insurance for people on low incomes, from paying for most abortions, so the right remained but poor women increasingly could not afford to use it. Feminists of colour argued that a movement centred on “choice” had ignored the material conditions and the abuses, such as forced sterilisation, that shaped their reproductive lives. The gap arose because the Court defined the right as freedom from state interference, which protected a woman’s choice without paying for it.

Europe follows a similar path. Western Europe followed the same path of confession, trial and reform. France’s Veil law of January 1975, carried through parliament by the health minister Simone Veil against fierce hostility in her own majority, legalised abortion in the first ten weeks, and Italy followed in 1978 after a long campaign of civil disobedience. Ireland and Northern Ireland held out for decades, which shows that public confession could change the 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?

Critics at the time, including some socialist feminists and many men on the left, argued that talking about personal experience was self-absorbed and that real politics meant organising workers or opposing the war in Vietnam. The evidence of this chapter suggests otherwise. The groups produced a shared analysis that moved directly into action: the Redstockings speak-out grew out of consciousness-raising, and the same logic of making private experience public drove the Manifesto of the 343 and the Bobigny trial, both of which helped change national laws. The method also reached women who would never have joined a party or a union. Its limits were real, because groups were often homogeneous, mostly white and middle-class, so the patterns they found reflected the experiences of their members and missed those of others. The fairest judgement is that consciousness-raising was a genuinely political method whose findings were only as broad as the women in the room. The transferable lesson is that the way a movement gathers its evidence decides whose problems it will see.

AN INTERESTING FACT

The Manifesto of the 343 is remembered in France by an insult. A week after it appeared, the satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo ran a cover headline asking “Who got the 343 sluts from the abortion manifesto pregnant?”, with a cartoon of the defence 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, while others rejected it. The signatories included the novelists Marguerite Duras and Françoise Sagan, the actresses Catherine Deneuve and Jeanne Moreau, the filmmaker Agnès Varda and the lawyer Gisèle Halimi, who defended the Bobigny accused the following year, so the insult was aimed at some of the most admired women in France.

CHAPTER 4 · 1970–1981 · 1977

Who Was Left Out?

The mainstream spoke of a universal sisterhood, but its priorities followed the experiences of the women who led it. Frances Beal, a veteran of the student civil-rights group SNCC, argued in her 1969 essay “Double Jeopardy” that Black women faced racism and sexism together, and that treating housework as women’s prison ignored Black women who had always cleaned other people’s houses for wages. When her Third World Women’s Alliance, named for the formerly colonised peoples, marched in August 1970 with placards defending the Black activist Angela Davis, an organiser told them her case had nothing to do with women’s liberation. In May 1971 more than 600 Chicanas, Mexican-American women, met in Houston at La Conferencia de Mujeres por la Raza (“the Conference of Women for the People”), where the meeting 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. In each case the women most affected found that “universal” sisterhood had an unspoken membership list, which is why they began to organise apart.

Poor women’s feminism was organised around welfare, the government payments for mothers raising children alone, and it inverted the mainstream’s demands. The National Welfare Rights Organization (NWRO), mostly Black mothers on welfare, claimed some 25,000 members by 1969 under its chair Johnnie Tillmon, whose arrow on the map runs from a Los Angeles housing project to Washington. They demanded an adequate guaranteed income, like today’s proposals for a universal basic income, and an end to “midnight raids”, in which caseworkers searched homes for evidence of a man. For women told by Friedan to escape the home, freedom meant a job; for welfare mothers told to take any job, freedom meant the right to raise their own children with dignity. In 1972 Tillmon wrote that “welfare is a women’s issue”, yet the mainstream gave the cause little support, and the NWRO went bankrupt in 1975, which shows that the feminism of the poorest women was the easiest to ignore.

Reproductive rights showed the deepest divide, because “choice” meant something different to women who faced coercion in the opposite direction. In June 1973 a federally funded clinic in Montgomery sterilised the Relf sisters, Mary Alice and Minnie Lee, neither yet fifteen, with operations that permanently prevent pregnancy, after their mother, who could not read, marked an X on a consent form. In Los Angeles, Mexican-American mothers were sterilised in labour after signing English forms, and although they lost their lawsuit, Madrigal v. Quilligan, in 1978, 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, named after a South Carolina river and linked to it by an arrow, argued that racism, sexism, class exploitation and homophobia had to be fought together, and it listed sterilisation abuse beside abortion rights among its causes. Reproductive freedom, these critics argued, meant the right to bear children as well as the right not to, the demand later activists called reproductive justice.

WHY IT HAPPENED

A movement built in the image of its founders. The first texts and organisations of the second wave were created by educated white women, and they naturally began from their own experience of suburban isolation, professional exclusion and unwanted pregnancy. Women whose main problems were racism, poverty or coerced sterilisation found those concerns missing from the agenda. Friedan’s book, for example, said almost nothing about the millions of women who already worked for wages. No movement can see experiences that its members do not share unless someone forces them on to it.

The pull of other loyalties. Black and Chicana women were often active in civil-rights, Black Power and Chicano movements, whose leaders, male and female, frequently argued that feminism was a white middle-class luxury that would divide their communities. This pressure discouraged women of colour from joining white-led organisations and also made organising as feminists within their own movements difficult, which is why they so often created separate groups. Many also feared that criticising Black or Chicano men in public would hand ammunition to racists who already portrayed their communities as disordered.

The same issue meant different things. Mainstream feminists saw abortion as the central reproductive right because unwanted pregnancy was their main risk. Poor women of colour also faced pressure in the opposite direction, from doctors and welfare officials who wanted them to have fewer children. Similarly, paid work meant liberation for the suburban housewife and hardship for the domestic worker. A movement that takes one group’s experience as universal will misread the needs of every other group.

Exclusion inside the organisations. Lesbians were pushed to the margins of NOW in 1969 and 1970, and women of colour reported being treated as tokens or ignored at meetings and marches. These experiences convinced many that reform from within was impossible and that only autonomous organisations, led by the women most affected, could represent them. Exclusion pushed people out, but it also pushed them to build. Even NOW’s first Black president, Aileen Hernandez, elected in 1970, later left the organisation, criticising its failure to take up the concerns of minority women.

WHAT IT CHANGED

From reproductive rights to reproductive justice. Campaigns by groups such as the Committee to End Sterilization Abuse won federal rules in 1978 requiring a 30-day waiting period, consent in the patient’s language and a ban on sterilising people under 21. In 1994 Black women activists coined the term “reproductive justice” to describe the right to have children, not to have them, and to raise them safely, a direct descendant of the arguments of the 1970s.

Houston, 1977: inclusion in the official agenda. At the federally funded National Women’s Conference in Houston in November 1977, delegates adopted a “minority women” plank drafted by Black, Latina, Asian American and Native American women, which Coretta Scott King was among those to champion. It was the most diverse gathering in the movement’s history, and also the moment conservative women organised the counter-rally that defined the backlash of the next chapter.

A literature that changed feminist theory. Writers including Audre Lorde, bell hooks, and Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa, whose anthology This Bridge Called My Back appeared in 1981, made the critique of white feminism central to feminist thought. Kimberlé Crenshaw’s concept of “intersectionality” (1989) gave it a name that spread worldwide, which shows that ideas formed at the margins can eventually reshape the centre. Their essays are now among the most widely taught texts of the whole movement.

Fragile institutions. The organisations of this chapter were small and poorly funded: the NWRO went bankrupt in 1975, the NBFO dissolved by the late 1970s and Combahee ended in 1980. Their ideas spread through books and later movements, while their practical demands, such as an adequate income for mothers, were largely defeated, culminating in the welfare cuts of the 1990s. Ideas can outlive the defeat of the organisations that produced them, which is one reason the history of a movement should be judged over decades.

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 evidence supports both readings, and the answer depends on what “the movement” is taken to mean. If it means the national organisations and the legal campaigns that dominated the press, then these women were largely left out: NOW and the mainstream gave welfare rights little support, ignored coerced sterilisation until activists forced the issue, and treated lesbians and women of colour as embarrassments or tokens. Yet the record of the Third World Women’s Alliance, the Chicana conference of 1971, the NWRO and the Combahee River Collective shows women who did not wait to be included; they built organisations, wrote theory and won concrete changes such as the 1978 sterilisation rules. Historians such as Thompson and Roth therefore argue that second-wave feminism was always plural, and that the image of a single movement is itself a product of who wrote its history. The most persuasive judgement is that these women were excluded from power in the movement while being central to its ideas. The transferable insight is that the question “who was left out?” should always be followed by “what did they do about it?”, because exclusion is a starting point for agency as well as a loss.

AN INTERESTING FACT

The Combahee River Collective took its name from a military operation. On the night of 1–2 June 1863, during the American Civil War, Harriet Tubman, who had escaped slavery and was working as a scout for the Union army, 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, a group of Black feminists in Boston chose the name to signal that their politics came from a long tradition of Black women’s collective action.

CHAPTER 5 · 1972–1982 · 1982

The ERA and the Backlash

The ERA began with enormous momentum because almost everyone in power claimed to support it. Alice Paul of the National Woman’s Party had first drafted an amendment in 1923, both major parties had endorsed it in their platforms for decades, and by 1972 President Nixon, a growing number of trade unions and the new women’s organisations all backed it. The Senate passed it by 84 votes to 8. On the map the first snapshot shows 22 states ratifying within nine months, many with little debate: Hawaii on the same day, then New Hampshire, Delaware, Iowa, Idaho, Kansas, Nebraska and Texas within about a week. By March 1973 the total reached 30, and only eight more were needed. The speed of the early votes concealed a weakness, because legislators who ratify without debate have not been persuaded and can be unpersuaded.

The backlash, a counter-movement that mobilises against the gains of another, was organised above all by women, which made it far more effective than opposition from men alone. In February 1972 Phyllis Schlafly, a Republican activist from Alton, Illinois, published “What’s Wrong with ‘Equal Rights’ for Women?”, and that autumn she founded STOP ERA, whose initials she said stood for “Stop Taking Our Privileges”. Her volunteers, many recruited through churches, brought home-baked bread to state legislators and testified that the ERA would draft daughters into combat and abolish a husband’s duty to support his wife. The three arrows show her campaign reaching into the states that never ratified. Nebraska rescinded, or withdrew, its ratification in March 1973, followed by Tennessee, Idaho, Kentucky and South Dakota. After 1973 only five states ratified, the last being Indiana in January 1977, which left the total at 35, three short, and showed how quickly a counter-movement could freeze a cause that had seemed unstoppable.

The endgame showed how much depended on a few hundred state legislators. In 1978 Congress extended the deadline to 30 June 1982 after some 100,000 supporters marched in Washington, and NOW organised a boycott of conventions in unratified states. Illinois became the decisive battleground, partly because Schlafly lived there and partly because its constitution required a three-fifths majority for amendments, so even a House majority of 102 to 71 for the ERA in 1980 counted as a defeat. In June 1982 seven women fasted for 37 days in the Illinois capitol and others chained themselves outside the Senate chamber, but on 30 June the deadline passed and the fifteen charcoal states had never ratified. Courts had meanwhile begun to treat sex discrimination as suspect under the Fourteenth Amendment, the Constitution’s guarantee of equal protection of the laws, which allowed opponents to argue that the ERA was unnecessary. The amendment failed, but much of the equality it promised arrived by quieter routes.

WHY IT HAPPENED

A supermajority rule. Because 38 of 50 states had to ratify, opponents needed to hold only 13 states, and in each of them they needed to persuade only one chamber of the legislature. A movement that wins the national argument can still lose if its opponents are concentrated in enough places. The rule favoured the South and the Mormon West, where conservative churches were strongest and where the ERA was most easily presented as an attack on local values.

A counter-movement of women. STOP ERA was effective because it was led by women who spoke as homemakers defending the respect and security they believed the law gave them. Legislators could not easily dismiss it as men defending privilege. Schlafly also offered her followers a positive identity, the full-time wife and mother, at a moment when many felt that feminism looked down on them, so the backlash drew its strength from the same politics of identity that had built the women’s movement.

Abortion and the culture war. Abortion turned the ERA into a battle over the family: after Roe v. Wade in 1973, opponents argued that the ERA would also protect abortion and, later, gay rights, which drew Catholic, evangelical and Mormon churches into the campaign. By the late 1970s many of STOP ERA’s most active volunteers had been recruited through their congregations. The ERA ceased to be a narrow legal question and became a symbol in a wider conflict over the family. Each victory of one movement can hand its opponents a new reason to organise.

The decision lay with legislators. Ratification was decided by a few thousand state legislators, most of them men, many in part-time assemblies where personal lobbying mattered enormously. Polls showed majority support for the ERA nationally, but legislators heard most from the most intensely committed citizens, and in the late 1970s the most intense were the ERA’s opponents. In Illinois, Florida and North Carolina the decisive votes were lost by only a handful of legislators. Intensity often beats breadth in politics.

WHAT IT CHANGED

Equality by other routes. Much of what the ERA promised arrived through courts and statutes: the Supreme Court’s rulings in Reed v. Reed (1971) and Craig v. Boren (1976) subjected sex discrimination to stricter review, meaning that courts demanded a strong justification for any law that treated men and women differently. Congress also passed the Equal Credit Opportunity Act (1974) and the Pregnancy Discrimination Act (1978). The defeat of the symbol did not reverse the legal change already under way.

The rise of the New Right. The STOP ERA network became one of the foundations of a new conservative coalition of churches and grassroots activists. In 1980 the Republican Party dropped the support for the ERA it had held since 1940, and Ronald Reagan won the presidency. A “gender gap”, with women voting less Republican than men, appeared in that same election and has persisted since.

An amendment that never quite died. The ERA has been reintroduced in almost every Congress since 1982. Nevada, Illinois and Virginia ratified it between 2017 and 2020, taking the total to 38, but because the deadline had passed and five states had rescinded, its legal status remains disputed. The fight shows how a defeated cause can remain a symbol long after its practical purpose has been met elsewhere.

DISCUSSION QUESTION

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

Schlafly’s role was real and measurable: ratifications slowed sharply after STOP ERA formed, and her movement supplied the arguments, volunteers and pressure that turned wavering legislators in Illinois, Florida, North Carolina and elsewhere. Yet the rules for amendment were what made her campaign decisive. A national poll majority was not enough when 13 states could block the change, when Illinois required a three-fifths vote, and when a deadline gave opponents a date by which they simply had to hold their ground. Some supporters also contributed to the defeat by overstating what the amendment would do, which gave Schlafly her best material, as Mansbridge argues. The most persuasive answer is that Schlafly turned a structural possibility into an actual defeat: without the supermajority rule her campaign could only have delayed the ERA, and without her campaign the rule would probably not have mattered. The transferable lesson is that the outcome of protest depends on the interaction between agency and institutions, because the same movement can win under one set of rules and lose under another.

AN INTERESTING FACT

Phyllis Schlafly, the woman who did most to defeat an amendment designed to open careers to women, built a remarkable career of her own. She had run unsuccessfully for Congress in Illinois more than once, first in 1952, and her 1964 book A Choice Not an Echo sold about three million copies in support of Barry Goldwater’s presidential campaign. In the middle of the ERA struggle, in her fifties, she earned a law degree from Washington University in St. Louis, graduating in 1978. Her opponents pointed out the irony; her supporters saw a woman who had achieved everything she wanted without needing the amendment, which was precisely her argument.

CHAPTER 6 · 1975–1985 · 1985

A Global Movement

The UN became feminism’s global stage because it combined a forum, a staff and the authority to set standards. Its Commission on the Status of Women, a committee of government delegates, had monitored women’s rights since 1946. The proposal for an International Women’s Year came in 1972 from the Women’s International Democratic Federation, aligned with the Soviet bloc, which shows how Cold War competition to appear progressive helped put women on the agenda. The first World Conference on Women met in Mexico City in June and July 1975, with delegations from 133 governments. A parallel forum, the Tribune, gathered non-governmental organisations (NGOs), citizens’ groups much like today’s charities. There Domitila Barrios de Chungara, the wife of a Bolivian tin miner, challenged middle-class feminists from the North. Her community’s enemy, she argued, was poverty and the mine owners, and men and women had to fight it together. The quarrel announced the central tension of the Decade, between a feminism of legal equality and a feminism of survival.

CEDAW, the UN Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women, turned the movement’s demands into international law. A treaty binds every state that ratifies it, much as a trade agreement binds its members, so CEDAW gave women a standard for judging their own governments. The UN General Assembly adopted it on 18 December 1979 by 130 votes to none, and it took effect in September 1981. Its Article 5 obliges states to change social and cultural patterns based on ideas of women’s inferiority, an unusually ambitious clause. At the Copenhagen conference of July 1980 dozens of states signed it, the United States among them. Many ratified with reservations, formal statements excluding particular articles; Tunisia, ratifying in September 1985, reserved those on family law and nationality. On the map the United States remains grey-tan, because a signature without ratification does not bind a state to the treaty’s terms.

By Nairobi feminism had become a set of movements with different priorities, connected by shared forums and the language of rights. The final conference met in July 1985 with 157 governments, and most of the 12,000 to 15,000 people at its NGO Forum came from Africa, Asia and Latin America, the poorer, mostly formerly colonised countries known as the Global South. Its Forward-Looking Strategies were adopted by consensus, after the conferences of 1975 and 1980 had split over Zionism, the movement for a Jewish state, and over apartheid, South Africa’s system of racial segregation. Activists from the Global South, such as the network Development Alternatives with Women for a New Era (DAWN), argued that debt, rural poverty and structural adjustment, the spending cuts that international lenders demanded in return for loans, were feminist issues. Europe’s new forms of action also reached beyond legal equality: in October 1975 nine in ten Icelandic women stopped work for a day, and from 1981 women camped at the Greenham Common air base in England against American nuclear missiles. A movement that began by naming one group’s problem ended the Decade by learning that women’s problems differed with their place in the world.

WHY IT HAPPENED

The UN as an amplifier. An international institution can magnify a movement by making governments answer questions they would otherwise avoid, and the UN had the tools to do so: a Commission on the Status of Women from 1946 and the authority to declare years, convene conferences and draft treaties. Once International Women’s Year was approved, governments had to send delegations and write reports on women’s status, and these obligations turned ministries and statisticians into collectors of evidence about inequality. The same machinery lent weight to activists who had little leverage over their own governments.

Decolonisation changed the room. Decolonisation changed who sat in the room: by 1975 the UN had 144 members, most of them from Africa, Asia and Latin America, many independent for less than twenty years, and African states alone held about a third of the seats. Their delegates brought priorities shaped by colonialism and poverty, and they could outvote the Western states. The Decade therefore had to address development and peace alongside legal equality, which broadened feminism and also produced its sharpest quarrels.

A Western movement looking outward. After a decade of domestic campaigns, American and European feminists were eager to build international solidarity, and their organisations had money, publications and experience to export. Their confidence brought energy to the conferences and also provoked resentment when they assumed that their own agenda, such as abortion rights or workplace equality, was everyone’s. Many delegates from the Global South saw the men of their own communities as allies in struggles against poverty and imperialism, a view that Western radical feminists found hard to accept.

Cold War competition. The Soviet Union and its allies presented themselves as pioneers of women’s equality, pointing to women’s high employment rates and state childcare, and the Women’s International Democratic Federation proposed International Women’s Year. The United States and its allies could not afford to appear less committed. Here superpower rivalry, an unlikely ally of women’s rights, raised the political price of ignoring them.

WHAT IT CHANGED

A standard for movements everywhere. The CEDAW Committee of independent experts, which first met in October 1982 and reviewed its first national reports the next year, gave campaigners an international audience. Activists in dozens of countries used the treaty to challenge discriminatory laws on nationality, inheritance and family. In Tunisia, which ratified with reservations in 1985, women’s organisations campaigned for decades to lift them, and after the 2011 revolution the government withdrew its specific reservations while keeping a general declaration, which shows that a treaty works slowly and only when someone at home uses it.

Feminism of the Global South. Networks such as DAWN and the women who filled the Nairobi Forum made development, debt and poverty central to international feminism. The next world conference, in Beijing in 1995, adopted a Platform for Action that reflected this broader agenda, declaring that “women’s rights are human rights”. It also placed violence against women at the centre of the agenda, an issue largely missing from CEDAW’s original text.

The United States stays outside. The Senate never ratified CEDAW, despite hearings in later decades, which left the United States among a handful of UN members outside the treaty. Senators opposed to ratification argued that it would intrude on family law and national sovereignty. The movement’s most famous homeland had changed its own laws through courts and statutes, while declining international oversight of them, a gap that critics abroad have cited ever since.

DISCUSSION QUESTION

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

The Decade certainly revealed how divided women were, along lines of class, region and politics. At Mexico City the Bolivian miner’s wife Domitila Barrios de Chungara’s challenge to Western feminists exposed a gulf between a feminism of legal equality and a feminism of survival. The conferences of 1975 and 1980 also split over Zionism, the movement for a Jewish state, over apartheid and over the world economy. Yet the same Decade produced CEDAW, adopted by the UN General Assembly without a single vote against, and built networks of women who had never met before, such as the 12,000 to 15,000 people at the Nairobi Forum. The divisions were themselves a sign of unity of a kind, because women who disagreed were for the first time arguing inside shared institutions. Olcott’s work suggests that the quarrels were the Decade’s real achievement, since they forced Western feminists to recognise that their agenda was one among many. The most persuasive judgement is that the Decade replaced the illusion of a single global sisterhood with a working coalition of different movements. The transferable lesson is that international protest succeeds, when it does, by giving people with different priorities a common framework in which to bargain.

AN INTERESTING FACT

The first United Nations world conference on women was chaired by a man. When the delegates met in Mexico City in June 1975, the host government’s nominee, Mexico’s attorney general Pedro Ojeda Paullada, was elected president of the conference, a choice that delegates and journalists at the time noted with irony. The conference’s emblem, a stylised dove combined with the symbol for woman and an equals sign, was designed by the American graphic artist Valerie Pettis and became the symbol of the whole Decade for Women. The chair went to the host country by custom, a convention that made the irony possible.

CHAPTER 7 · 1956–1987 · 1956

Bourguiba’s Tunisia

The Personal Status Code was possible because Bourguiba’s state depended less on traditional authorities than any of its neighbours. It was decreed on 13 August 1956 and took effect on 1 January 1957, before Tunisia even had a constitution. The sociologist Mounira Charrad explains why Tunisia went further than Morocco or Algeria. The Neo-Destour was a party of urban professionals and townsmen of the Sahel, the coastal plain around Sousse and Monastir, and it had defeated a rival nationalist faction backed by rural notables and conservative clergy. It therefore did not need the support of tribal kin groups, whose power rested on family law that kept property and marriages within the lineage. Bourguiba presented the Code as a modern reading of Islamic law, drawing on reformers such as Tahar Haddad, whose 1930 book on women in the Sharia had been condemned by the religious establishment. On the map Tunisia is blue while Algeria, then a French colony at war, and Libya remain parchment, because their family law still allowed polygamy, a contrast that came from the structure of each state more than from its religion.

The Code was the first of a series of reforms that made Tunisian women citizens of a modernising state. Women voted for the first time in the municipal elections of May 1957 and in national elections from 1959. The state built girls’ schools, opened a national family-planning programme in the 1960s, legalised abortion for mothers of five children in 1965 and on request in the first three months of pregnancy in 1973, two years before France. Yet women had no independent way to defend or extend these rights. The National Union of Tunisian Women, founded in 1956, was an arm of the ruling party, and independent feminist groups, such as the Tunisian Association of Democratic Women, were licensed only in 1989. Rights handed down by a state can be extended by that state, but they can also be frozen or traded away by it, since nobody outside the state has the power to defend them.

The same state that reformed the family built an economy centred on the coast, and the interior paid for it. In the 1960s the planning minister Ahmed Ben Salah forced farmers into state cooperatives; when the scheme reached the olive groves of the Sahel, villagers at Ouardanine resisted in January 1969 and police opened fire, and Bourguiba abandoned the policy and jailed its architect. In the 1970s Prime Minister Hédi Nouira opened the economy to tourism and export factories, which clustered along the coast, while families from Kasserine, Sidi Bouzid and Siliana migrated towards Tunis and Sfax. The tensions erupted twice. On “Black Thursday”, 26 January 1978, the army crushed a general strike called by the UGTT trade-union federation, killing 46 people by the official count, while independent estimates ran as high as about 200. In the bread riots of 1983–84 between about 90 and 150 people died. Tunisia’s pattern of revolt, interior first and coast last, was established long before 2010.

WHY IT HAPPENED

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.

DISCUSSION QUESTION

Was the Personal Status Code a victory for Tunisian women, or a tool of Bourguiba’s state?

The case for victory is strong. The Code abolished polygamy and repudiation, made divorce a judicial right for both spouses and set the foundation for votes, schooling, contraception and legal abortion, giving Tunisian women rights that most women in the region would wait decades to win. Its durability shows that many Tunisian women came to treat it as their own. Yet the evidence also shows a tool of the state. It was decreed without public debate, used to weaken the religious establishment, and accompanied by a ban on independent women’s organisations, so women could not defend or extend their rights except through the party. Its benefits also reached urban, educated women faster than rural women of the interior. Charrad’s structural argument suggests that the question is partly false, since a state that needed no support from kin groups could afford to give women rights for its own reasons. The most persuasive judgement is that the Code was both, a real gain delivered as an instrument of power. The transferable insight is that rights granted from above are only secure once people below are free to defend them, which is exactly what Tunisian women became after 2011.

AN INTERESTING FACT

Bourguiba’s own marriages follow the arc of his reforms. His first wife was a Frenchwoman, Mathilde Lorrain, whom he met while studying law in Paris in the 1920s and who later took the Arabic name Moufida. In 1962 he married Wassila Ben Ammar, who became one of the most powerful figures at his court for over two decades. When the ageing president ended that marriage in 1986, he did so through a court, because the Personal Status Code he had decreed thirty years earlier had made a judge’s ruling the only legal way for any Tunisian man to divorce his wife.

CHAPTER 8 · 1987–2010 · 2008

Ben Ali: Stability and Silence

Ben Ali’s regime began with the promise of freedom and became one of the most thoroughly policed states in the Arab world. The “medical coup” of 7 November 1987 used Article 57 of the constitution, which transferred power if the president was incapacitated, and seven doctors signed the certificate. Ben Ali released political prisoners and in 1988 signed a National Pact with the opposition, the UGTT and even Islamist leaders. The UGTT, the General Tunisian Labour Union, was the national trade-union federation, large enough to call a general strike, much like a national union congress elsewhere. In the elections of April 1989, candidates backed by Ennahda, standing as independents because the party was not allowed to register, won around 14 per cent of the vote by the official count, and possibly more. That result convinced the regime that free competition was too dangerous. From 1990 thousands of Islamists were arrested, tortured and tried, and Ennahda’s leader Rached Ghannouchi went into exile in London. Newspapers, opposition parties and human-rights groups survived only as long as they were harmless. A regime that offers pluralism and then withdraws it teaches its citizens that only silence is safe.

The regime’s bargain with Tunisians was prosperity and order in exchange for political obedience, and for many years it worked. The economy grew by about five per cent a year, tourism and export factories expanded along the coast, and girls’ education and women’s legal rights advanced, which allowed Ben Ali to present himself to Europe and the United States as a bulwark against Islamism. Yet the education system produced graduates faster than the economy produced skilled jobs, and those jobs were concentrated in the coastal regions around Tunis, Sousse and Sfax, outlined on the map. In 2010 poverty stood at about 32 per cent in the Centre-West around Kasserine and Sidi Bouzid, against about 8 per cent in the coastal Centre-East. Meanwhile the Ben Ali and Trabelsi families took over banks, telecoms and import licences; a US embassy cable of 2008, published by WikiLeaks in December 2010, described them as a “quasi-mafia”. Growth bought consent only where it arrived.

The mining-basin revolt of 2008 showed every ingredient of 2010–11 except one. On 5 January 2008 the Gafsa Phosphate Company, the region’s main employer, published the results of a competition for 380 jobs, and unemployed young people in Redeyef judged them rigged in favour of insiders. Sit-ins, marches and hunger strikes spread to Moularès, M’dhilla and Métlaoui, led by local union activists such as the schoolteacher Adnane Hajji, while the UGTT’s national leadership, close to the regime, held back. Security forces sealed off the region, and on 6 June police shot Hafnaoui Maghzaoui dead in Redeyef. In December 38 people were sentenced to up to ten years in prison. Videos filmed on phones circulated online, but national media were silent and the protest never left the basin. Gafsa had grievance, leadership, martyrs and images; what it lacked was a way to spread, and the next revolt would find one.

WHY IT HAPPENED

A coup that promised freedom. Ben Ali removed a senile president constitutionally and without bloodshed, released prisoners and promised democracy, so many Tunisians, including opponents of Bourguiba, welcomed him in 1987. The promise bought him time to take control of the party, the police and the media. When he withdrew it after 1989, the opposition was divided and exhausted, which explains why resistance was so weak for two decades. His first months brought an amnesty, the abolition of the state security court and a new law on political parties.

The Islamist threat as justification. Ennahda’s strong showing in 1989, and the civil war that began in neighbouring Algeria in 1992 after Islamists won an election there, allowed Ben Ali to present repression as protection. Many secular Tunisians, including some feminists and leftists, accepted the trade, because they feared an Islamist government more than a police state. Western governments accepted it for the same reason. The trade-off allowed the regime to present every critic, secular or religious, as a threat to stability.

Education outrunning jobs. Tunisia expanded universities rapidly, and by 2010 graduates made up a growing share of the unemployed, about 23 per cent of them without work. Young people who had done what the state asked, studying hard, found no jobs without connections or bribes. Frustrated expectations are a classic cause of protest, because people revolt less against poverty than against blocked hopes. Graduate unemployment was highest in the interior, where private firms were fewest.

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 became visible to ordinary Tunisians and offended the coastal business class that had supported the regime. Corruption at the top turned a regime that claimed to deliver order into one that seemed simply to steal, weakening its support among its own elites. The US diplomatic cables published by WikiLeaks in December 2010 gave Tunisians written proof of what they had long whispered.

WHAT IT CHANGED

A template for revolt. Gafsa established a repertoire that reappeared two years later: sit-ins outside local government buildings, hunger strikes, marches led by unemployed graduates, union backing at the local level, and videos filmed on phones. The protesters of Sidi Bouzid and Kasserine knew what had happened in the basin, and some of the same activists took part. What 2008 lacked, a way to spread, is the subject of the next chapter.

A divided union federation. The gap between the UGTT’s regime-friendly national leaders and its militant local and regional branches widened after 2008. In January 2011 the regional unions pushed the national leadership into authorising strikes, and the UGTT became the organisation that turned scattered protests into a national movement, and later the broker of the democratic transition. Its double character, part ally of the regime and part popular movement, made it the ideal intermediary between the street and the state.

Exit by sea. For many young people in the south and interior, the alternative to revolt was emigration, often illegal: the harga, literally “burning” the border, by boat to Lampedusa or Sicily. When 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 real and systematic: thousands of Islamists and leftists were imprisoned and tortured, the press and internet were censored, and the Gafsa revolt was crushed with bullets and long prison terms. Yet repression alone cannot explain twenty-three years of stability in a country without a large army. Hibou shows how economic dependence, through credit, subsidies, licences and party networks, gave many Tunisians a stake in the regime, and growth, rising education and women’s rights won the approval of the coastal middle class and of Western governments. The geography of protest suggests that consent was conditional and uneven: it was strongest where the economy delivered and weakest in the interior, where the regime relied more on the police. The best answer is that consent maintained the regime on the coast while repression maintained it in the interior, and that the balance shifted when growth stalled and corruption became visible. The transferable insight is that authoritarian regimes rarely rule by fear or by bribery alone, so they become vulnerable when the material side of their bargain fails in the places where fear was already doing most of the work.

AN INTERESTING FACT

Tunisians gave their internet censor a nickname: “Ammar 404”, after the “Error 404, page not found” message that appeared when a blocked website was requested, as if an official called Ammar had personally switched it off. Under Ben Ali sites such as YouTube and Dailymotion were blocked for long periods, and police were reported to hack the email and Facebook accounts of dissidents. In November 2005 the same government hosted the second phase of the United Nations World Summit on the Information Society in Tunis, an international meeting about the free flow of information, while human-rights activists who tried to hold a parallel meeting in the city were harassed and beaten.

CHAPTER 9 · DECEMBER 2010 – JANUARY 2011 · 2011

Twenty-Eight Days

The revolt began where the regime’s bargain, the unwritten deal by which Tunisians accepted political silence in return for jobs and order, had failed most visibly, and it spread through networks that already existed. In Sidi Bouzid, in the poor Centre-West, the street vendor Mohamed Bouazizi set himself on fire on 17 December 2010 after officials confiscated his scales and refused to hear his complaint. That day his relatives and local unionists marched on the offices of the governorate, one of Tunisia’s 24 provinces; a cousin filmed the protest, and the footage reached Al Jazeera, which Tunisians watched by satellite. On 24 December the National Guard, a paramilitary police force, shot dead Mohamed Ammari, aged 18, in Menzel Bouzaiane, where a memorial marks the place. He was the first of the uprising’s martyrs, the name Tunisians give to those killed by the security forces. By 31 December protests had reached the eleven governorates coloured red in the second snapshot. Revolutions rarely start from nothing; they borrow the organisations that already exist.

Repression multiplied the protest, because each death created a new grievance and a new funeral. President Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali, who had ruled since 1987, mixed gestures with threats: on 10 January he called the protesters terrorists while promising 300,000 jobs. Bouazizi died on 4 January, and about 5,000 people attended his funeral. From 8 to 10 January police fired on crowds and funeral processions in Kasserine, Thala and Regueb, killing at least 25 people by Amnesty International’s count; the government admitted 21, and unions said more than 50. On 11 January the UGTT, Tunisia’s national trade-union federation, pushed by its regional branches, authorised regional general strikes, in which all the workers of a region stopped work together. The International Crisis Group, an independent research body, calls this decision the true turning point. The next day between 30,000 and 50,000 people marched in Sfax and strikes closed Kairouan and Tozeur, while Tunis’s poorest suburbs rose and the army was deployed in the capital. On the map the red now crosses the dashed outline of the coast, which means the revolt had reached the regime’s own heartland.

Ben Ali fell when the institutions that had protected him stopped doing so. On 13 January he promised freedoms and an end to live fire. On 14 January the UGTT held a two-hour general strike in Tunis, around 10,000 people gathered before the Interior Ministry, and that evening the president flew to Jeddah in Saudi Arabia, as the arrow leaving the map shows. The army had stood aside, guarding buildings and refusing to coordinate repression with the presidential guard, although the famous story that its chief refused an order to fire is doubtful: General Rachid Ammar later testified that no such order was given. The official commission of inquiry later counted 338 dead and 2,147 injured, including 86 prisoners who died after Ben Ali left. On the map four governorates, Béja, Siliana, Le Kef and Tataouine, stay tan because no protest before 14 January has been documented there. A regime falls when its own elites decide it is no longer worth defending.

WHY IT HAPPENED

Blocked hopes in the interior. The revolt began in the interior because hope had been blocked there longest: Sidi Bouzid, Kasserine and Gafsa had unemployment far above the national rate of 13 per cent and poverty about four times that of the coast. Young people had been educated for jobs that did not exist and were humiliated by police and officials when they tried to make a living informally. The interior had already revolted in 1984 and 2008, so the grievance was old; what changed was the speed and scale of its expression.

Dignity as the demand. Bouazizi’s act was a protest against humiliation as much as poverty, and Tunisians call the uprising the “Revolution of Freedom and Dignity”; many dislike the foreign label “Jasmine Revolution”. Demands for dignity unite people across classes in a way that economic demands often do not, because everyone has experienced the contempt of a corrupt official. That breadth helped the protest jump from the poor interior to the coastal middle class.

Networks ready to mobilise. Trade-union branches, the lawyers’ bar, teachers’ unions and human-rights activists had survived Ben Ali’s rule in weakened form and had gained experience defending the Gafsa prisoners. In December 2010 they organised marches, documented killings and called strikes. Spontaneous anger becomes a movement when organisations with national reach give it structure, and in 2008, when the UGTT’s national leadership held back, that was missing.

New media against an old blackout. Phone cameras, Facebook and Al Jazeera allowed Tunisians to see what state television hid, and the publication of US diplomatic cables by WikiLeaks in December 2010 confirmed what many suspected about the ruling family’s corruption. Footage filmed in Thala in the afternoon could be watched in Sfax the same evening. Information that crosses a regime’s barriers faster than police can block it removes one of a dictatorship’s main tools, the isolation of each protest from every other.

WHAT IT CHANGED

A dictator falls in four weeks. Ben Ali’s flight on 14 January ended 23 years of his rule and 55 years of one-party government. The interim authorities, led at first by figures of the old regime, faced continuing protests that would force a far more radical break than they intended. The first were the Caravan of Liberation, a march of young people from the interior to the capital, and the sit-ins in the Kasbah square outside the prime minister’s offices. The most lasting change was that Tunisians no longer feared to speak in public.

The Arab uprisings. Tunisia’s example inspired protests across the Arab world within weeks: in Egypt from 25 January, where Hosni Mubarak fell on 11 February, in Libya from 17 February, and in Yemen, Bahrain and Syria. The slogan “the people want the fall of the regime” travelled with them. Only Tunisia’s revolution produced a democratic transition, and it lasted a decade before President Kaïs Saïed suspended parliament in 2021. The speed of Tunisia’s success encouraged protesters elsewhere to believe that regimes could fall quickly, an expectation that cost many lives in Libya and Syria.

A revolution without leaders. The uprising had no single party, leader or programme, which made it hard to suppress and hard to steer afterwards. The vacuum was filled by the old regime’s officials, by the UGTT, by returning exiles such as Rached Ghannouchi and by new parties, so the question of who would inherit the revolution became the central conflict of the next three years.

The dead and the wounded. Families of the dead and the wounded became a lasting pressure group, demanding recognition, compensation and trials of police officers. Their campaigns kept the memory of Kasserine and Thala alive, and the official list of martyrs, published only in 2021, showed how slowly the new state delivered justice, a grievance that resurfaced in every later crisis.

DISCUSSION QUESTION

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

The grievances were the same in both cases: unemployment, corruption, regional neglect and police abuse. The difference lay in the mechanisms of spread and in the response of the regime’s pillars. In 2008 the revolt stayed in one isolated basin, the national union leadership held back, and images reached few people, so the police could cordon the region and jail its leaders. In 2010 protests broke out in many governorates within two weeks, faster than the police could contain them; videos on Facebook and Al Jazeera broke the blackout; the regional unions pushed the UGTT into authorising strikes; and the killings in Kasserine created national outrage. Finally the army, which had no stake in Ben Ali’s survival, stood aside. Historians weigh these factors differently, with some stressing new media and others the unions, but the comparison suggests that no single factor was sufficient. The transferable lesson is that revolutions usually need both a spreading mechanism and a defection among the regime’s defenders, and that a failed protest can supply the experienced organisers that a later success depends on.

AN INTERESTING FACT

The most famous lines of the revolution came from a poem written in 1933 by Abu al-Qasim al-Shabbi, a young Tunisian poet who died of heart disease the following year, aged 25. His poem “The Will to Live” begins with a couplet promising that if a people one day wills to live, fate must answer and the chains must break. The couplet had been part of Tunisia’s national anthem since 1987, so it was sung at every official ceremony of Ben Ali’s regime. In January 2011 crowds chanted it in the streets of Tunis, so a verse the regime had made official became the anthem of its overthrow, and demonstrators in Cairo and other Arab cities soon took it up as well.

CHAPTER 10 · 2011–2014 · 2014

Building a Democracy

The street kept forcing the transition further than the old elites intended. The first interim government, led by Ben Ali’s prime minister Mohamed Ghannouchi, kept ministers from the ruling party, the RCD. On 22 January 2011 young people from Menzel Bouzaiane and other interior towns set out for the capital, as the arrow shows, and camped in the Kasbah square outside the prime minister’s offices until 28 January, which forced a reshuffle. A second, larger sit-in, with more than 100,000 people in Tunis on 25 February, forced Ghannouchi to resign. On 3 March the interim president promised elections for a constituent assembly, an elected body whose only task was to write a new constitution. Under this pressure a court dissolved the RCD on 9 March, and an appointed commission wrote the electoral law, including a decree of May 2011 requiring every list to alternate women and men. The capacity to keep mobilising was the revolution’s main asset.

The election of October 2011 produced a democratic government and a deeply polarised country. Ennahda, the Islamist party that seeks to shape law by Islamic values through elections, won 89 of 217 seats with about 37 per cent of the vote. It governed in a “troika”, a coalition with two secular parties. Sidi Bouzid, where the revolution began, voted mainly for a populist list led by a London-based businessman and rioted when some of its seats were annulled, a sign that the interior felt the new politics passing it by. Secular Tunisians feared that Ennahda would roll back women’s rights, and 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. Polarisation turned deadly in 2013, when jihadists, militants who use violence to impose their version of Islamic rule, shot the secular leaders Chokri Belaïd on 6 February and Mohamed Brahmi on 25 July with the same gun. Because the opposition blamed Ennahda for tolerating extremists, the killings became a crisis of the whole transition.

The crisis of 2013 was resolved by organisations outside the parties, which is why Tunisia’s path diverged from Egypt’s. After Brahmi’s death, opposition deputies walked out and tens of thousands camped outside the Assembly at the Bardo, while Egypt’s military coup of 3 July showed both sides the cost of a contest of force. The National Dialogue, negotiations convened by a Quartet of civil-society organisations, independent of the state and the parties (the UGTT union federation, the employers’ union, the Human Rights League and the Order of Lawyers), produced a roadmap. Ennahda agreed to hand over to a government of non-party experts in January 2014, and the Assembly completed the constitution. Adopted on 26 January 2014 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, and Article 46 committed the state to parity in elected assemblies. In October 2014 Ennahda lost the election to the secular Nidaa Tounes and accepted the result. A democracy is established when the losers accept losing.

WHY IT HAPPENED

Pressure from the streets did not stop. Unlike many revolutions, Tunisia’s did not end when the dictator left. The Kasbah sit-ins were led by young people from the same interior towns that had begun the revolt, and with trade unionists and students they kept occupying squares until the old ruling party’s ministers resigned and a constituent assembly was promised. Continued mobilisation prevented the old elite from managing a cosmetic change, which is what happened in several other Arab countries in 2011.

A union with national reach. The UGTT had survived Bourguiba and Ben Ali as the only mass organisation not wholly controlled by the regime, with branches in every governorate and members in every profession. Its leadership, compromised under Ben Ali, had rebuilt its credibility by siding with the protesters in January 2011. It therefore had the legitimacy and the organisation to call strikes, threaten the government and sit at the negotiating table, which made it the natural convener of the National Dialogue.

An Islamist party that chose compromise. Ennahda had been persecuted for twenty years and knew that it could be crushed again. Its leaders accepted the Personal Status Code, dropped demands to cite Islamic law as a source of legislation, and in 2014 handed power to technocrats and accepted electoral defeat. Their choices were shaped by conviction, by divisions inside the party and by fear of Egypt’s example, but without them no compromise would have been possible.

Fear of the Egyptian outcome. Egypt’s collapse taught both Tunisian camps what confrontation would cost: the army’s overthrow of the elected president Mohamed Morsi on 3 July 2013, followed by the killing of hundreds of his supporters in August, was watched closely in Tunis. Secular opponents of Ennahda saw how a military solution could destroy democracy, and Ennahda saw what could happen to an Islamist party that refused to bend. A neighbour’s disaster can be a powerful teacher.

WHAT IT CHANGED

A democratic constitution. The 2014 constitution created a parliamentary system with a directly elected president, guaranteed civil liberties, equality between women and men and parity in elected assemblies, and promised to favour the poorer regions. Free legislative and presidential elections in late 2014 made Tunisia the only Arab country rated “free” by Freedom House for most of the following decade. Its chief weakness was that the constitutional court it required was never created, which later allowed a president to interpret the constitution alone.

The old elite returns by election. The first parliamentary election under the new constitution returned figures of the old regime to power. Nidaa Tounes (“Call of Tunisia”), a secular party founded in 2012 by the 85-year-old Béji Caïd Essebsi, a minister under Bourguiba, won the election of October 2014 with 86 seats against Ennahda’s 69, and Essebsi became president in December. Many revolutionaries saw this as proof that the revolution had changed the rules of politics while leaving many of the same people in charge.

A region that went the other way. Tunisia’s success was surrounded by failure: Egypt returned to military rule in 2013, Libya fragmented into rival governments and militias by 2014, and Syria descended into civil war. The collapse of Libya in particular brought weapons, training camps and jihadist recruitment to Tunisia’s border, while foreign governments and donors invested heavily in Tunisia as proof that democracy was possible in the region.

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

DISCUSSION QUESTION

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

Civil society, the unions, associations and professional bodies that sit between citizens and the state, made a decisive contribution 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, the employers, the Human Rights League and the lawyers turned a confrontation that resembled Egypt’s into a negotiation, which the Nobel Committee later recognised. Yet the parties made the choices that the Quartet could only encourage: Ennahda agreed to hand over power and to drop contested clauses, secular leaders such as Essebsi agreed to share the state with Islamists, and the Assembly’s deputies wrote and passed the constitution. Historians such as Stepan stress long negotiations between party leaders, while others emphasise the union’s unique weight. The fairest judgement is that civil society created the conditions and deadlines for compromise and the parties supplied the compromises, so neither could have succeeded alone. The transferable insight is that democratic transitions usually depend on organisations that sit between the state and the parties, because they can apply pressure without seeking power for themselves.

AN INTERESTING FACT

Tunisians living abroad elected eighteen of the 217 members of the 2011 Constituent Assembly, from six overseas constituencies, with ten seats for the large community in France and others for Italy, Germany, the Americas and the rest of Europe, and the Arab world. Tunisian polling stations opened in cities from Paris to Montreal days before the vote at home. Emigrants who had left to escape unemployment or repression therefore helped to write the constitution of the country they had left, and some of the 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

Jihadism grew after 2011 because the revolution removed the police state faster than it built a new state. Three words need separating: Islamists, such as Ennahda, the party that led the 2011 government, seek to shape law through elections; Salafists want a return to the practice of the earliest Muslims; and jihadists, a small minority, use violence to impose their version of Islamic rule. A general amnesty in early 2011 freed hundreds of imprisoned Islamists, including veterans of foreign jihads. Ansar al-Sharia, founded by a veteran jihadist known as Abu Iyadh who had been freed in the amnesty, ran charities and preached in mosques whose imams had fled, recruiting unemployed young men in poor suburbs and interior towns. On 14 September 2012 its supporters stormed the US embassy compound during protests against a film insulting the Prophet, and four people were killed. Ennahda’s government designated it a terrorist organisation only in August 2013. A transition that is busy writing rules can leave gaps that armed groups fill.

Libya turned a domestic problem into a regional one, which the two arrows trace from Tunisia to the camps and onward to Syria. After Gaddafi’s fall in 2011, Libya’s weapons depots were looted and its border was barely policed, and by 2014 rival governments and militias divided the country, which is why it is red on the map. The Islamic State set up camps near Sabratha, less than 100 kilometres from the border, where Tunisian recruits trained. The UN estimated in July 2015 that about 5,500 Tunisians were fighting with jihadist groups, most of them in Syria, although estimates range from about 3,000, the government’s figure, to 6,000. Analysts disagree on why so many came from the only Arab Spring country to become a democracy, citing the frustrations of educated young men and the sudden freedom of recruiters after 2011. The open border meant that Tunisia’s security now depended on a neighbour with no functioning state.

The attacks of 2015 were designed to destroy the economy on which the transition depended, and the government’s response showed how fragile the new order was. After the Bardo Museum attack of 18 March and the killing of 38 people at Port El Kantaoui on 26 June, the state of emergency returned on 4 July, with powers to ban strikes and gatherings and to place people under house arrest. Tourism receipts fell by about 35 per cent in 2015 and about 70 hotels closed. A counter-terrorism law of July 2015 extended the death penalty to terrorist crimes and allowed detention without a lawyer for fifteen days, and work began on a barrier along the Libyan border. In October the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to the National Dialogue Quartet, the four civil-society organisations led by the UGTT union federation that had brokered the compromise of 2013, a reminder that the transition’s greatest strength lay in negotiation. After a bombing killed twelve presidential guards on 24 November the emergency, lifted on 2 October, returned, so a democracy that had ended the revolution-era emergency in 2014 was again governing under a decree written for Bourguiba in 1978.

WHY IT HAPPENED

Freedom for preachers and recruiters. The revolution ended the surveillance of mosques and released political prisoners, including jihadist veterans, and the new government was reluctant to repress religious activists after Ennahda’s own members had suffered for decades. Salafist groups gained a freedom to preach, organise and recruit that they had never had, which they used among young men with few prospects. Some preachers banned under Ben Ali returned to their pulpits, and Salafist groups took over other mosques by force.

A security state in transition. The police, who had been the backbone of Ben Ali’s rule, were distrusted by the public and partly purged, while the army was small and inexperienced in counter-insurgency. Intelligence networks built to watch dissidents were poorly suited to tracking armed groups. A state that dismantles its repressive apparatus without building effective democratic policing in its place leaves a security gap. Officers who feared prosecution for their conduct under Ben Ali were often reluctant to take risks.

Libya’s collapse next door. The fall of Gaddafi in 2011 and Libya’s slide into civil war by 2014 created an ungoverned space within a day’s drive of Tunisian towns. Weapons were plentiful, the Islamic State held territory around Sirte and ran camps near Sabratha, and smuggling routes across the border, long tolerated because border towns depended on them, carried fighters as easily as fuel. A Tunisian recruit could reach the Libyan camps in a few hours and return almost as easily.

Grievances the revolution had not met. Unemployment, especially among young graduates and in the interior, was higher in 2015 than in 2010, and the economic gains promised by the revolution had not arrived. Jihadist recruiters offered young men without work a sense of purpose, belonging and pay. The same blocked hopes that drove the protests of 2010 could drive a minority toward violence. Many recruits came from the same towns and suburbs that had protested in 2010–11.

WHAT IT CHANGED

Emergency rule returns. The state of emergency declared on 4 July 2015, lifted on 2 October and reimposed on 24 November, was renewed continuously for years afterwards. It gave the executive powers over gatherings, strikes and movement that later leaders could use against political opponents as well as against armed groups, so a measure adopted to protect democracy became one of the tools that would later undermine it.

An economy without visitors. Tourism receipts fell by about 35 per cent in 2015, growth almost stopped and unemployment stayed around 15 per cent. Coastal resorts emptied, and the interior, which had seen few of the revolution’s economic benefits, saw even fewer. Some resort towns lost most of their visitors for two years. Economic disappointment became the most common reason Tunisians later gave for losing faith in democratic politics.

A prize for compromise. The award of the 2015 Nobel Peace Prize to the National Dialogue Quartet, announced on 9 October between the two declarations of emergency, recognised Tunisia’s achievement while it was under attack. The prize brought international attention and aid, and it confirmed the idea of Tunisia as the Arab Spring’s one success story, an image that both helped and burdened the governments that followed.

DISCUSSION QUESTION

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

The attacks were a direct threat: they killed soldiers, police, politicians and tourists, aimed to destroy the economy the transition depended on, and sought to provoke a conflict between secular and religious Tunisians. Their economic effect was severe, with tourism receipts falling by about a third in 2015. Yet the government’s response carried its own danger. The state of emergency, renewed for years, and the 2015 counter-terrorism law restored powers over gatherings, movement and detention that resembled the old regime’s, and human-rights groups documented abuses under them. In the short term the response helped democracy survive, since elections continued and the Nobel Prize rewarded the 2013 compromise. In the long term the emergency normalised exceptional powers that a later president would use to dismantle the democratic institutions themselves after 2021. The most persuasive judgement is that terrorism weakened democracy by damaging the economy and the public’s trust, while the response weakened it by eroding the habits of liberty, and that the second threat proved more lasting. The transferable lesson is that how a democracy defends itself can matter as much as the attack it faces.

AN INTERESTING FACT

The National Dialogue Quartet that won the 2015 Nobel Peace Prize was led by four people from very different worlds: 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, elected in 2011, was the first woman to lead Tunisia’s employers’ federation, so the prize honoured, among others, a woman heading the business lobby sitting beside the leader of the trade unions. It was the first Nobel Prize ever awarded to Tunisians.

EPILOGUE · 1945–2015 · 2015

Two Movements Compared

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.

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.

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.