Daughters Of Tunis

Women, Family, And Networks In A Muslim City

Paula Holmes-Eber

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9780429980749
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Daughters of Tunis is an innovative ethnography that carefully weaves the words and intimate, personal stories of four Tunisian women and their families with a statistical analysis of women's survival strategies in a rapidly urbanizing, industrializing Muslim nation. Delineating three distinct network strategies, Holmes-Eber demonstrates the "public" role of neighborhoods as informal social security systems, and the impact of women's education, class, and migration on women's resources and networks. An engaging, warm, and oftentimes humorous portrait of Muslim women's responses to development, Daughters of Tunis is an exciting new approach to ethnography: merging the historically disparate methods of both qualitative and quantitative analysis.

1
Introduction

Lush-dark-haired and brown-eyed, twenty-seven-year-old Hannan,¹ her pregnant belly gently nudging the stomach of her neatly tailored dress and jacket, leans forward to pour the steaming minted green tea into my glass. A university graduate, Hannan has just returned from another long day at the British Embassy in Tunis, where she works as a multilingual translator. She and her husband, a successful banker, live alone in a newly constructed apartment building on the outskirts of the capital of Tunisia, spending weekends and evenings entertaining their friends from the university or driving in their car to visit Hannan's extended family, who live eighty kilometers away. I have stopped by to visit, to ask Hannan for some help with my survey, and to catch up on the latest news about Hannan's family and work.

"Aq'ad, aq'ad" (Sit, sit). Voluble, dancing-eyed, forty-three-year-old Nura pats a spot for me in between the many brown-skinned, shouting children of her eight neighbors, all sprawled in colorful patterned skirts and brightly decorated head scarves on woven wool blankets on the beach. A housewife with less than six years of schooling, Nura spends most of her days in the courtyard of a once-elegant Arab house in the old city or medina of Tunis, cooking, washing, chatting, arguing, and sharing her joys and sorrows with her children, her mother-in-law, brother-in-law, and the other eight neighbors who rent rooms around the now-dilapidated courtyard. It is another gasping-hot July day, and so, their baskets overflowing with kaskrout (Tunisian sandwiches), sodas, peanuts, and bonbons, Nura and her neighbors have settled down on the warm yellow sands of the Le Marsa beach to laugh, exchange stories, wipe off children's noses, and dry wet, sandy feet on a long-anticipated day's outing together.

Tired and wan, almost disappearing into her thin, pale, cotton dress, Miriam scrubs the last of the white-and-green-tiled countertops in the modern kitchen of Madame Al Mohad's beautiful orange-tree-gardened villa. A twenty-eight-year-old maid from Hamma in the south of Tunisia, Miriam lives in a shack with electricity but no running water near the dusty railroad tracks of a billowing smoke-stacked industrial section of Tunis. She shares the squatter home with her sickly husband Sami, who works sporadically in construction, and Sami's teenage sister, who takes care of their nine-month-old baby, while Miriam cleans Madame's house to support them. Wiping off her hands on her apron, Miriam smiles shyly as she pulls out a stool to sit for a moment and chat with me among the piles of purple satins and black velvets in Madame Al Mohad's sewing room.

"Bchir, don't get dirty," Sherifa's louza (sister-in-law) Kareema shouts as tousle-haired, four-year-old Bchir trundles off munching on a sticky handful of sugared almonds. "Kareema is like a sister to me," tall, slender, twenty-six-year-old Sherifa smiles, offering me a brown paper wrapped cone of nuts. "We love each other. We are always together," Kareema adds. Six years ago, Sherifa dropped out of high school to marry the man she loved, Kareema's adopted brother. Although he was a well-to-do landed farmer from an old Tunis family, Sherifa's family had hoped she would marry her paternal cousin. Her father's relatives did not forgive her and refuse to visit her now. Yet Sherifa still spends her life in a world of kin. Sharing cooking, shopping, child care, and errands, she goes everywhere with her four sisters-in-law, who live in houses built next door to one another. Sherifa and Kareema spend their days and nights together, drinking tea, eating nuts, and shouting after each other's children.

Working women and stay-at-home mothers, university graduates and illiterate wives, migrants to the city and women from old-established Tunis families, well-to-do or barely making ends meet, these women are all part of the new generation of Muslim women in Tunisia. Born into a rapidly developing nation, facing not only radical economic and social change but also astonishing legal reforms for Muslim women, Hannan, Nura, Miriam, and Sherifa are daughters of a new Tunis. These women live in a world radically different from that of their mothers: a world that only a few decades ago was primarily rural and agricultural and now is predominantly industrial and urbanized; a world in which Muslim women may hold jobs in factories or the government, go to school, vote, choose their own husbands, walk the streets without veils, initiate divorce, and live in their own households, separate and sometimes far away from their in-laws.

At the vanguard of legal and social reform for Muslim women, Tunisia is the obvious choice for a study of the impact of development and social change on women and their families—not only within the Middle East and Muslim world—but in all developing nations where men and women are willingly or unwillingly being thrust rapidly into the global economy; where women's rights and roles are being relegislated, often uneasily clashing with existing cultural beliefs and norms; and where extended families are scrambling to adjust to the impact of migration and urbanization on traditional household structures.

How is this new generation of women coping with such rapid and unprecedented changes? What is the impact of education, employment, migration, and changing marriage rights on women's personal and economic options or their roles and relations with their families? Has development had similar effects on women of different classes or regions of origin? And how have women reconciled Muslim and Arab beliefs regarding gender roles and marriage with the current realities of men and women working and studying together? In this book I seek to answer some of these questions by offering an intimate look at the daily lives and survival strategies of more than sixty Muslim women and their households whom I interviewed, observed, and surveyed in Tunis from 1986 to 1987 and again in 1993.²

Women, Family, and Social Change in Tunisia

Tunisia's independence from the French in 1956 marked the beginning of a rapid shift from a primarily rural and agriculturally based economy to the current highly urbanized (more than half of the population of the country now lives in the capital city of Tunis) and industrial society that is entering the new millennium. Led by the late president Bourguiba (who ruled from 1956 to 1987), an aggressively pro-Western and pro-development program was initiated, instituting numerous reforms designed to make the nation competitive in the world market economy.

One of the first and most significant pieces of legislation enacted by the Bourguiban government was the Personal Status Code. This code continues to be one of the most radical and liberal sets of laws on women and the family in the Arab and Muslim world today, granting women numerous rights and protections paralleled by few Middle Eastern countries (with the exception perhaps of Turkey). The Personal Status Code granted women citizenship and the right to vote, forbade the veil, abolished polygyny, improved women's rights in divorce, and challenged the practice of arranged marriages. Women's education and employment were also encouraged; free schooling at all levels through the university was offered to both women and men. And further laws were decreed encouraging women's employment through protection of their rights in the workplace.

Women's rights continued to be expanded by Bourguiba's successor, Ben Ali. Women were granted more privileges in divorce and custody cases, and labor laws were revised to remove earlier restrictions on women's salary and to prevent job discrimination.

Alarmed by these revolutionary new laws, in the years after Tunisia's independence researchers began linking the changing social status of women and new family status laws to disruptions in the "traditional" patriarchal extended Tunisian family. Studies documented the gradual disappearance of the extended Arab household, increasing divorce and tensions in the marital dyad, erosion of patriarchal authority and consequent parent-child conflict, the rupture of relations with absent/migrant parents, and a decrease in arranged marriages. Other studies across the Maghreb found similar crises in parent-child relations due to emigration, as well as an increase in sexual freedom prior to marriage and greater choice in mate selection.

In addition to legislation concerning women's rights, the Bourguiban government began a number of progressive economic programs designed to promote industry and Tunisian economic self-sufficiency. After an initial failed move toward socialism, which divided up the large, protected habous lands of wealthy families and the French colons, the Bourguiban regime moved toward a protectionist model of a free market industrial economy, maintaining strict controls on prices, importation, and investment. Policies promoting heavy investment in industry and tourism finally paid off by the end of the 1980s. The spectacular sandy beaches and coasts of Tunisia (particularly from Nabeul to Mahdia and on the island of Jerba) soon became lined with row after row of large, white washed Tunisian-style two-to five-star hotels designed to attract vacationing Europeans, many of whom brought their own radically different customs of topless sunbathing and "loose" sexual behavior. And Tunisia began manufacturing everything from clothing to plastic tubs to pottery to batteries, much of it for the nation's own consumption. Thirty years after independence only 13 percent of Tunisia's gross national product (GNP) came from agriculture, whereas 45 percent derived from industry and 42 percent from services—predominantly tourism (Samuelson 1990). Considering that Tunisia is one of the few Arab nations with only a few natural resources (primarily phosphates), this accomplishment is no small feat.

Yet the fairy-tale story has had its downside: several years of rampant inflation in the 1980s; food riots due to price controls on bread and other essentials; increasing international debts; and, reflecting the dissatisfaction of some with the overly liberal laws regarding women and the bizarre contrasts of nudist European sunbathers with Muslim notions of modesty, a series of Islamist group protests, arrests, and bombings.

Coastline north of Tunis.

In November 1987 the prime minister, Ben Ali, quietly and quickly overthrew the ailing and senile President Bourguiba. Under Ben Ali's leadership Tunisia then instituted an aggressive structural adjustment program with the guidance of the International Monetary Fund (IMF).³ In recent years, the country has become a model of success for the IMF, citing reduced inflation, a lowered deficit, and a consistent gross domestic product (GDP) growth of 4.2 percent per year (Tunisia Digest 1992, 1993). Tunisia's continued high unemployment rate, which varied between 15 and lő percent in the mid-1990s—a reflection of the economy's difficulty in keeping pace with the growing workforce—has, however, drawn criticism as well as praise (North Africa Journal 1998 and ABC News 1999).

Although some have benefited from these new economic and social changes, the gains have not been distributed evenly. As the growing educated middle class of government employees and permanent factory management has received secure positions with reliable and good salaries, the uneducated and unskilled have been left behind to fend for themselves. Manual laborers face serious underemployment, with unpredictable and sporadic work and income. Self-employment is widespread, with both men and women running formal and informal businesses. Tiny "hole-in-the wall" stores selling baguettes, tobacco, and toothpaste proliferate alongside businesses offering moped repair, used plumbing and auto parts, traditional pottery, and handmade shoes. Women, although not always visible on the streets, run hairdressing salons from their homes, sew clothes on commission for their relatives, and make handmade knitted goods for sale in the souks (traditional markets).

Although the Tunisian government does require that large firms provide health insurance, disability, and old-age pensions, these social security programs tend to apply to a small privileged minority of stably employed persons in government and large industries—the social class that, in general, is least in need of assistance. Also, like many other Muslim countries, Tunisia has no comprehensive social assistance or welfare programs for the poor or disabled, assuming that the religious practice of zakat or almsgiving is adequate.

As a result, women—who typically leave the workforce after marriage and/or often work in the informal sector as maids, in handicrafts production, or in agriculture—generally fall through the gaps in these programs, as does the large male population of the irregularly and self employed. For these men and women, death, illness, disability, the failure of one's small business, and unemployment are feared financial catastrophes that can, in a few minutes, leave an entire household destitute.

Households, Development, and Women's Survival Networks

Despite the immense opportunity to analyze the rapid effects of pro-Western development on women in a Muslim country disappointingly, only limited information is available in English on women in Tunisia. Most of the available research in English has focused primarily on the ideology of change—for example, studies documenting Tunisian legal reforms, or men's and women's attitudes and political responses toward these reforms.⁴

Although publications in French and Arabic on women and the family in Tunisia have been more extensive, like the available English-language literature, this research tends to examine ideological issues such as legislation affecting women, women's movements, and cultural ideologies regarding women or to focus on statistical trends such as women's employment, health, and education,⁵ rather than analyzing the actual impact of these changes on the day-to-day lives and experiences of women in Tunisia. Only a handful of studies⁶ examine in any detail the specific negotiations, strategies, and choices employed by Tunisian women and their families in adapting to social and economic change.

This neglect of research at the micro level of the household and the individual in large part reflects a general bias in the development literature toward a "top-down" analysis of development and social change— an approach that assumes that governments rather than individuals effect change. As Hatem (1999) observes, although there have been a variety of narratives over the past century discussing modernization, gender, and the family in the Middle East, almost all discourses have viewed the state as the primary agent of development and social change. These narratives place the state and modernization in conflict with what is viewed as the traditional/Muslim family, which is blamed for women's oppressed position and lack of integration into the formal economy.

In contrast to this "top-down" approach, a burgeoning ethnographic literature on women in the Middle East and in other developing areas— particularly Latin America and the Caribbean—suggests that men, women, and households are not simply passive recipients of change but rather active agents, who define and reshape the outcome of change according to their own needs and perceptions. White (1994), Early (1993a, 1993b), Hoodfar (1997, 1990), Lobban (1998b), and Singerman (1994) have described Middle Eastern women's many enterprising solutions ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Series Editor Preface
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Notes on Language Use and Transliteration of Tunisian Arabic
• 1 INTRODUCTION
• 2 MEN'S AND WOMEN'S SPACES IN TUNIS
• 3 TEA AND VISITS: WEAVING THE WEB OF EXCHANGE
• 4 MARRIAGE AND FAMILY: MIRIAM'S KIN EXCLUSIVE NETWORK
• 5 SHERIFA'S STREET: MIGRATION, RESIDENCE PATTERNS, AND KIN NETWORKS
• 6 INTIMATE ECONOMIES: NURA'S NEIGHBOR NETWORK
• 7 WOMEN'S RELIGIOUS CELEBRATIONS: STATUS, CLASS, AND HANNAN'S FRIENDSHIP PATTERN
• 8 CONCLUSIONS
• Appendix 1: The Survey
• Appendix 2: Tables
• Glossary
• Glossary of Tunisian Kinship Terms
• Suggestions for Further Rending
• Bibliography
• Index