On my first trip from our home in Miami, Florida, to Tunisia in 2006, my Tunisian husband Maher and I and our one-year-old baby Faris stayed with his parents in their apartment in Ezzahra, a suburb of Tunis. My in-laws lived with two of Maherâs unmarried older brothers, and his then-unmarried younger sister, Kalthoum. As we pulled up at their apartment building, my sister-in-law stood in the courtyard performing ululation that was audible through the closed car windows.1 As I exited the car, I remember my father-in-law taking Faris from me. The following days were a blur of visiting relatives coming to the apartment. They doted on baby Faris and had a good look at the American wife.
After being in the apartment for a day and a half, as I watched the sun setting from the rooftop terrace, it dawned on me that I had not left the apartment to go anywhere for a full two days. While Maher left the apartment with his brothers and father just a few hours after our arrival and seemed only to come home for meals and to sleep, his sisters and mother only left the house to do quick errands in neighborhood shops. Being in the apartment with my mother-in-law and Kalthoum as they endlessly cooked fabulous meals, cleaned, and served visitors and family, gave me a very particular first impression about Tunisian gender relations. What I learned did not jibe with the academic and government descriptions of Tunisian womenâs liberation.
Both my sisters-in-law had remained unemployed for most of their twenties, despite their college degrees and tenacious job searches. Both spent many years after graduating college living in their parentsâ home, earning little or no money and having little autonomy. The fact that they remained unmarried throughout most of their twenties meant that they remained âgirls,â in a cultural sense. They spent their days assisting their mother, hosting visitors, and serving their male kin.
My eldest sister-in-law Awatef eventually married and moved into a middle-class neighborhood twelve blocks away from her parentsâ apartment. For married women homemakers like her, whose college degrees were supposed to have opened the door to careers, life is marked by frequent frustrations. âWhy did I get this college degree? So I can be stuck at home, a housewife?â Awatef repeated these sentiments to me frequently in her perfect British English. She especially liked to speak to me frankly in English because her husband did not speak English. She acknowledged her economic privilege as a woman married to a man with a job at a multinational company, but she lamented that she did not have a chance to leave her beautiful walled villa for up to four days at a time. She was not forbidden from going out by her husband, but she was expected to do the housework and childcare for their two small children. Her husband came home from work long enough to eat her delicious meals and to inspect her housework before heading out to socialize with his men friends in the cafĂ©s. Her husband reprimanded her if she failed to clean things properly or make the meals that he desired. When she had to ask him for money, she told me that she felt humiliated.
On this first trip to Tunisia, I listened to many of my female in-laws describe feeling âfed upâ from staying inside their homes for days on end. Being a pragmatic American, I tried suggesting a solution: could they have their husbands take the kids one evening a week, so they could socialize with their friends? I was met with laughter. Having to stay home one night a week to care for the kids would put their husbands âin a bad mood,â I was told. Later when conducting interviews with women factory workers, similar descriptions of husbands, fathers, and brothers who were put, âin a bad mood,â when they had to do childcare and then gave their wives, daughters, and sisters, âa hard timeâ as a result, were common. In Tunisia, 53 percent of women have reported that they suffered gender-based violence, as compared with the global average of 35 percent (UNwomen 2017). There was very little description of what it meant for husbands to give wives âa hard time,â a vagueness that would continue to characterize many descriptions of abuse.
That first visit to Tunisia made me skeptical of my husband Maherâs descriptions of Tunisia as a place where women were liberated and where law and policy actually favored women over men. I could not find this liberation, much less any favoritism, in the words or experiences of my female relatives. I wondered more and more about the women outside my circle of in-laws. Their experiences of being chronically unemployed, bored, and over-burdened with household labor prompted me to wonder what life was like for women who had found employment. Were the hours such women spent in the waged labor force important in terms of their family lives? Women in the waged economy seemed to be everywhere and always in a hurry, on public transportation, walking to and from work, and packed into cheap taxi-vans. How did they manage all the housework, the cooking, and the serving? Who took care of their children while they were at work? Did men pick up the slack in terms of housework and childcare when women were not at home all day? I had a feeling that there were probably conflicts between gendered household labor expectations and waged labor, and I wanted to learn more.
In her ethnography of Tunisian women in the capital city of Tunis, Paula Holmes-Eber (2003) discusses the Orientalist myth of the secluded and imprisoned Arab woman. She counters this myth, concluding that Tunisian women use the home as a lively public visiting space. Holmes-Eber does not discuss the politics of housework much, other than descriptions of affluent womenâs ability to hire lower-class women to do housework. Perhaps this is because Holmes-Eber did not live with a Tunisian family. Holmes-Eber lived in a Tunisian neighborhood with her non-Tunisian husband. She entered womenâs homes as a visitor and friend. Tunisian hospitality is such that when visitors arrive, most housework is paused and a jovial mood is fomented. Rarely was Holmes-Eber privy to womenâs work experiences in the home outside of these hospitality performances.
When I am in Tunisia, I always live in a Tunisian home. I experience the âbackstageâ of housework and preparations for visitors (Goffman 1959). I was often involved in what Goffman describes as the âmystificationâ that occurs secretly before guests arrive, the fervent tidying up and heated debates concerning what foods to prepare. I soon learned why Tunisian women close their kitchen doors when guests are in the living room; it is about much more than containing the strong cooking smells. While Holmes-Eber tended to be the visitor sitting in the living room, I was often in the kitchen, a participant in the idealization of our family (Goffman 1959). The concealment of information that could be damaging to the performers is a driving force in what Holmes-Eber knows to be fabulous Tunisian hospitality. Boredom, fatigue, and rage is backstage behavior.
When I am in Tunisia, I witness and participate in the unpaid household labor that women are expected to perform. My mother-in-law is always up in the morning before everyone else making breakfast, including homemade bread, and couscous dotted with pomegranate seeds that she peels herself. I am part of the constant cycle of washing clothes by hand and hanging them on the lines on the rooftop terrace. I witness the careful budgeting for groceries purchased at an outdoor market that is cheaper than a grocery store. I learned that the etiquette guidelines for serving tea are status-bound by making a mistake. When I made tea for a room full of my husbandâs fatherâs relatives, and proudly carried out a tray of teacups with only a few pine nuts floating in some cups, my husband whispered to me in English that this would humiliate the guests and sent me, blushing, back in the kitchen to fix the tea. These preoccupations with housework, hostess work, and household budgeting became my own, and from them emerged many questions that helped shape this ethnography.
Exceptional Tunisia
Before the popular uprisings commonly known as the Arab Spring, Tunisia was the exemplar of an African country where neo-liberalization was deemed successful (Murphy 2013). It was also the exemplar of a secularized Muslim Middle East and North Africa (MENA) country, especially in the eyes of Western governments, international lending institutions, and multinational corporations. Tunisia continues to be the exemplar amongst Muslim Arab countries for womenâs rights (Charrad 2001; Holmes-Eber 2003; Marks 2013; Perkins 2004). The high status of women in Tunisian institutions is often attributed to the Tunisian Personal Status Codes (PSCs) that were passed just as Tunisia gained independence from France, in 1956. The PSCs continue to be referenced as evidence of the already-liberated st...