L'Emancipazione della donna in Tunisia dal Protettorato francese a Bourguiba

Abstract

During the 20th Century, the woman question was a fundamental issue in Tunisian society: five months after the end of France Protectorate, in 1956, the promulgation of the Code of Personal Status (CSP) introduced important innovations in legal terms: by using of ijtihad, the CPS declared the abolition of polygamy, the replacement of repudiation in favour of the institution of divorce. In the same year, the National Union of Tunisian Women (UNFT) was born supported by the Neo-Destour party. Although the CSP and Bourguiba’s reforms benefited from intellectual and cultural trends in Islamic reformism, especially the action of important personalities such as Khayr al-Din, who founded Sadiqi College (1875), where the modern Tunisian elités were educated on the Occidental model and Tahar Haddad, first thinker who argued for women’s rights into his book Our Women in the shari‘a and Society (1930).The absence of female education was the main problem for woman’s emancipation and for the advancement of society. Tunisian feminism started taking shape in the 1930s. Before that, two Tunisian women had taken off their hijab at a public conference following the example of Egyptian woman Huda Shaʻrawi, leader of the first feminist movement in the Arab world. In Tunisia women’s activism developed before the independence through the efforts of different women organizations. All these factors contributed considerably to the maturation of Tunisian society, female consciousness and gender policy