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August 13, 1956, is a date that Tunisian students learn about early on. In the sixth-year primary school history textbook, Tunisia is building its new state: the monarchy is abolished, education expands, and the Central Bank is established. Among these transformations is the promulgation of the Code of Personal Status (CPS).
At this stage, women’s rights are not invisible. They are, in fact, considered important enough to feature in the birth of modern Tunisia.
“First women, then the law, then liberation”
At the secondary school level, the national narrative becomes even more explicit. In the third-year secondary history textbook for science and technology students, the chapter entitled “Tunisia from 1956 to 1987” covers the first decades following independence. Under the heading “Modernization of Society” appears the subheading “Women’s Emancipation,” followed by “Women’s Emancipation through the Promulgation of the CPS.” The wording tells a chronological story in itself: first women, then the law, then liberation.
Another part is entitled “Tunisian Women’s Enjoyment of Their Political Rights after Independence: The Right to Vote.” The choice of verb is significant. The Arabic word tamattouʿa means “to enjoy” or “to benefit from.” It contains no active demanding, no struggling for, no wresting away of rights.
Further on, the narrative shifts: “The Tunisian woman gradually enters different sectors of employment.” This time, she is portrayed as active, but only after the law, after political rights, and after the state has granted equality in education and employment. In this chronology, women’s actions begin once their rights have been secured.
Najia (a pseudonym), who has taught history in Tunisia’s public secondary schools for 34 years, also points to the limitations of this narrative. Asked about the attention given to the struggles and demands that preceded the promulgation of the CPS, she replies, “The curriculum tells us nothing about any of that. All we learn is simply that the CPS was promulgated.” The CPS is thus presented as an established achievement, without tracing the historical process that made it possible.
“Selection is never entirely neutral”
Rahma Talmoudi goes beyond simply reading the textbooks. A trained teacher and researcher, she has studied the mechanisms through which Africa and Africans are represented and rendered invisible in Tunisian school textbooks. Her approach offers a way to examine not only what textbooks make visible, but also the roles they assign to historical figures.
“Once we have established the numbers, we need to take the analysis further: where women are placed and what they do, but also how sentences are constructed, the choice of words and verbs, the use of the active or passive voice, and the grammatical subject. All of this contributes to shaping the history passed on to students,” she explains.
This approach leads Talmoudi to the following question: “Who actually makes history?”
When it comes to the national movement, historical actors have names, organizations, and a clearly defined series of actions. Bourguiba leads and is arrested. The Neo-Destour resists. Activists and trade unionists appear. There are accounts of mobilization, arrests, negotiations, and fighting. Textbooks, then, know how to tell the story of a struggle. When the subject is national sovereignty, they construct a narrative of hard-won victory. But when the subject is women’s rights, they tell a story of reform.
According to Talmoudi, this difference does not necessarily mean that women are deliberately rendered invisible. The process of selection itself must be questioned: why are certain historical figures included while others are left out? Invisibility can be deliberate, unconscious, inherited, or reproduced. “But selection,” she reminds us, “is never entirely neutral.”
The researcher encourages us to look at what comes before the law. In a historical narrative, legislation can be presented either as a starting point or as the culmination of a much longer history: “Is this a story of rights granted, or rights won? Were women given their rights? Or did they fight for them? Who struggled to secure those rights?”
The process of selection itself must be questioned: why are certain historical figures included while others are left out? “Selection,” Talmoudi reminds us, “is never entirely neutral.”
During the Bourguiba era (1956–1987), schools played a role in constructing a national memory. Textbooks do not simply state that “Bourguiba gave women their rights.” Rather, they situate women’s emancipation within the modernizing project of the post-independence state. The underlying logic of the narrative thus resembles that of a gift: the state introduces reforms, and women reap the benefits.
Long before Bourguiba: Arwa of Kairouan
Yet more than a millennium before the CPS, in eighth-century Kairouan, a woman named Arwa married the man who would become the second Abbasid caliph, on the condition that he take no other wife or concubine. The historian Hassan Hosni Abdelwahab linked this clause to an older marriage custom in Kairouan, known as sadaq al qayrawani.
This practice was not equivalent to the general prohibition of polygamy introduced under Article 18 of the CPS. Nevertheless, it shows that women had already used the law to negotiate the terms of their marriages long before the reforms of 1956.
1924: Manoubia Ouertani takes the floor
There is no need to go as far back as the eighth century to find Tunisian women speaking out about their own rights.
On January 15, 1924, Manoubia Ouertani, then around 15 years old, took the floor at a debate on feminism organized by the arts and cultural association L’Essor in Tunis. She publicly called for women’s liberation, removed her veil, and addressed the restriction of polygamy, equality, and the need to revisit dominant legal interpretations.
It was only six years later that Tahar Haddad’s landmark book, Our Women in Sharia and Society, was published. The school textbook leaves Manoubia Ouertani out of the narrative, choosing instead to foreground a male figure.
From speaking out to organizing
In 1936, Bchira Ben Mrad founded the Muslim Women’s Union of Tunisia. Women were no longer simply making demands; they were organizing.
And their activism did not stop there. In 1947, activist Radhia Haddad became president of the Friends of the Scouts association and joined the Muslim Women’s Union of Tunisia. In 1952, she helped provide material and moral support to the families of nationalist political prisoners. She went on to lead the National Union of Tunisian Women in 1958 and became a member of Parliament in 1959. Under her leadership, the organization carried out literacy, healthcare, and family planning initiatives. Her trajectory, culminating in her conflict with the Bourguiba regime in the early 1970s, demonstrates that women were political actors both before and after independence. Yet neither Bchira Ben Mrad’s name nor her struggle appears in the textbooks.
“You can talk extensively about women without ever allowing them to speak.”
Tunisian women: Between visibility and agency
“You can talk extensively about women without ever allowing them to speak,” observes Rahma Talmoudi. Invisibility does not necessarily mean that women are never mentioned. Textbooks can devote considerable attention to “women”: teaching students about women’s rights, equality, their place within the family, their access to employment, and the gains they have made, while saying far less about women as the authors of this history. This is precisely the distinction between visibility and agency.*
Women are not absent from the national narrative. They occupy a symbolic place in the story of Tunisian modernity. But visibility alone is not enough to acknowledge their historical role.
Najia, the history teacher, reaches a similar conclusion based on the teaching materials she uses. She refers, in particular, to the first-year secondary school textbook, in which she says she found only one photograph of women, depicting a women’s demonstration during the national movement, probably in 1953. “They are not discussed. They are just there. It’s only a photograph,” she laments.
Najia also raises the issue of how much time is allocated to history in school timetables. She regrets that third-year secondary students have only one hour of history per week. With science subjects carrying greater weight in students’ overall grades, many prioritize rote memorization.
According to her, students are often encouraged to memorize lessons rather than discuss them. “Information is no longer the problem. Dates are no longer the problem. That’s not what matters most. Now you can search on the internet and find the information. […] But classroom discussions are what develop critical thinking about history. And we don’t have that. We don’t have the time.”
Compounding this lack of time, according to the teacher, is the difficulty of completing the curriculum. She explains that some chapters dealing with social transformations, particularly women’s status and their entry into the workforce, may not be covered at all during the school year. She attributes this situation to changes to the school calendar introduced after 2011.
It would therefore be too simplistic to conclude that women have been erased from Tunisian school textbooks. They are present, but even textbook analysis has its limitations. As Rahma Talmoudi points out, “The textbook is not the whole school experience. It cannot tell us what a teacher may have added orally, what discussions took place in the classroom, or what a student ultimately retained. But it does constitute a written record, an archive of what the institution chooses to transmit, prioritize, and turn into historical figures.”
An asymmetry nevertheless persists in school textbooks: the national movement is narrated as a struggle for sovereignty, while women’s rights are primarily associated with a reform and a date.
