Introduction
If you come here to see and talk to these people, you’ll find out that their hearts are rusty, filled with pain and rage.1
When protests broke out in the mine basin in Gafsa in January 2008 over state corruption – an event perceived as the portent for Tunisia's 2010–11 revolution that eventually toppled President Ben Ali (Allal and Bennafla 2011; Zemni 2013) – women marched on the city hall of Gafsa to set up a successful sit-in calling for their arrested sons, brothers and fathers to be released (Gobe 2010). According to one witness (interview with author, 5 June 2015), women kept the demonstrations in Gafsa alive ‘after their husbands and children were arrested. They were the avant-garde of this movement.’ When the immolation of Mohammed Bouazizi in Sidi Bouzid stirred mass protests all over Tunisia two years later, women again stood side by side with men demanding ‘Work, Freedom and National Dignity’. Behind the scenes, mothers, sisters and daughters played a crucial role in supporting the uprising, through the provision of (medical) care and support. Although some orientalist media in the West showed surprise at the presence of women protesters in early 2011, there has been a strong tradition of women's participation in Tunisia's social struggle ever since the country gained its independence in 1956.
This has not changed since the 2010–11 uprising. In January 2016, for example, female workers at a construction site in Jebiniana in the south of Tunisia were numerous during a sit-in, asking for a pay rise in order to be able to meet their families' needs. As one protester present explained: ‘Of course women are the majority, they are the first victims of this misery’ (Ben Naser 2016b). In the coastal city of Mahdia in March 2016, female protest again gained the media's attention when women textile workers went on strike after their employer refused to pay their wages. After weeks on strike, they decided to take control of the factory and to organise the textile production themselves (Mzalouat and Sehiri 2016). A couple of months later, in Ben Arous, a governorate south of the capital, 800 workers protested against the closure of their factory. Najwa, one of the majority of female employees working at the factory, explained: ‘A foreigner comes to Tunisia, exploits Tunisian workers, does not pay taxes for ten years and then decides to leave, as if nothing happened. Today it's our factory; tomorrow it’ll be other factories’ (Rebhi 2016). These are just a handful of recent stories where women took centre stage to fight against the loss of jobs and economic injustice.
Women's prominence in the social struggle is no coincidence. In general, the era of economic globalisation has entailed a feminisation of labour and labour conditions (temporary, flexible, underpaid work) and a feminisation of poverty, with 70% of the world's poor being women (Hawkesworth 2006, 23). In Tunisia, women workers often face discrimination and precarious working conditions, more so than their male counterparts. In addition to women's vulnerability at work, the numbers of formal unemployment among Tunisian women are also high. Although it is well known that unemployment is peaking amongst Tunisia's educated youth today, people are less aware that highly educated women, who often perform better at school than male students, are twice as likely as male graduates to be unemployed (Larguèche 2013). Yet, despite high levels of female unemployment, an unemployed youth in Tunisia is still associated with a male figure, based on the image of Bouazizi (Kréfa 2016). The gendered specificities of both (un)paid work and unemployment justify this article's focus on the hardships and the socio-economic demands of Tunisian women before and after the uprising.
The majority of Tunisian women workers, understood as unskilled labourers dependent on physical labour for a wage, are active in the agricultural sector (whether in crafts or through manual labour in the fields) and in manufacturing (especially in the textile sector, in which 85% of the labour force are women). Their demands are in line with the calls during the Tunisian 2010–11 revolution for karama (dignity) and social justice. This article investigates whether women workers’ demands for justice have been heard and included in formal politics since the start of Tunisia's so-called democratisation process. Starting from the premise that socio-economic inequality tends to reinforce political exclusion (Young 2000; Fraser 2013), genuine inclusive democracy requires that people's material needs are addressed. If not, as in many of today's ‘democracies’, political exclusions reinforced by socio-economic exclusions ‘enable the powerful to use formally democratic processes to perpetuate injustice or preserve privilege’ (Young 2000, 17). Material justice is therefore a condition for both democracy and gender justice.
Starting by acknowledging women workers’ informal mobilisation, as the examples in the beginning of this introduction have shown, the purpose of this article is to trace whether and how their struggle is addressed by the formal politics for gender justice of Tunisia's principal women's movement, the Tunisian Association of Democratic Women (ATFD) – the key player to influence and structurally improve women's conditions during democratic transitions (Viterna and Fallon 2008) – in relation to the gender politics of the trade union and the Tunisian state. By using critical theorist Nancy Fraser's theory of justice (1997, 2013) as a hermeneutic tool, the article adopts a three-dimensional understanding of gender justice. To realise gender justice, Fraser argues that economic redistribution, cultural recognition and political representation – three dimensions which are largely imbricated – are required. While a feminist struggle for redistribution aims at rectifying gender injustices in the realm of the economy by challenging the gendered division of labour (e.g. women's reproductive labour, domestic work, emotional labour), the struggle for recognition battles against gender injustices in the cultural and symbolic realm (e.g. sexual differences, sexual harassment, domestic violence, objectification, and stereotypes in the media). The struggle for political representation, finally, is about who is included and excluded from distribution and recognition and thus centres on issues of membership and procedure. Representation thus requires democracy.
Based on interviews in the region of Grand Tunis (which includes the governorates of Tunis, Manouba, Ariana and Ben Arous) with state officials, union leaders, women's rights activists and (rural) women workers during several field trips to Tunisia between 2012 and 2016, this study presents a historical overview of the politics for redistribution, recognition and representation of Tunisia's autonomous women's movement and, to a lesser extent, of the principal trade union and the state against the background of the country's political economy. First, the emergence of leftist women's activism in trade union circles is discussed during the dwindling of the developmental state under Bourguiba. Next, the article looks at how an independent women's association was formed during Ben Ali's neoliberal reign and what changes this entailed for the approach of Tunisia's feminists. Finally, the last part seeks to answer whether explicit workers’ demands during and after the 2010–11 uprising have influenced Tunisia's so-called democratic politics. The article argues that while more attention has been paid to the hardships of (rural) women labourers since the uprising, the disconnected struggles for recognition and redistribution, by the feminist movement and the trade union respectively, fail to represent women workers’ own aspirations in Tunisia's nascent democracy.
The emergence of a leftist, rebellious women's movement in Tunisia (1960s to 1980s)
Anti-colonial struggle and the developmental state under Bourguiba (1960s)
The emergence of the country's first women's unions and associations took place in the context of Tunisia's struggle for independence. French colonialism, which accelerated the introduction of capitalism, altered gender relations and women's relationship to work. The capitalist logic made women's work increasingly invisible, with domestic and educational work judged as non-productive labour (Mahfoudh 1990; Federici 2004). With the French colonial project affecting all facets of their lives, women started to formally organise against the colonial power, for example in the conservative Muslim Union of Tunisia's Women (founded in 1936) or the communist Union of Tunisia's Women (founded in 1944) (Marzouki 1993, 12). Eventually, with the active participation of women, Tunisia's national liberation movement gained independence in 1956 with Habib Bourguiba becoming the first president of the new and independent nation.
Bourguiba, like other post-colonial leaders in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), pursued a socialist planned economy of import substitution industrialisation (ISI) in the 1960s. This was paralleled by reforms to protect the internal market and ensure employment, consumption, education and a certain extent of social security. These policies figured as a kind of social contract between Bourguiba and the people, with social services offered in return for political obedience (Bogaert 2013). One important pillar of Bourguiba's developmental state was the state's encouragement of women to join the labour market, which was necessary to meet the new needs of the independent nation-state. Bourguiba made sure, however, that this stimulation of female participation in the workforce would not jeopardise the harmony of the family and women's traditional role in the home (Marzouki 1993). Nonetheless, women generally benefited from the policies of Bourguiba's minister of planning in the 1960s, Ahmed Ben Salah, who launched a national plan for public sector industrialisation and agricultural cooperatives. Women became especially active in administration and services due to public sector investments (Taamallah 1990, 147).
While the pre-independence period was characterised by a flourishing of women's unions, Bourguiba outlawed their activities in the name of ‘national unity’ after independence. Instead, a system based on a mass party (Bourguiba's Socialist Destourian Party, PSD) was founded in 1964, with several corporatist structures representing different categories of the population (e.g. students, women, farmers, workers and businessmen). Former women's groups were replaced by the National Union of Tunisian Women (UNFT) in 1958, which was closely linked to the party in power. As in other post-independent states in Africa (Tripp 2004; Zeilig and Dwyer 2012), the state's co-optation of the UNFT served national interests rather than feminist ones. The Union was tasked everywhere in the country with ‘balancing the efficient participation of women in social and economic life, and promoting a healthy and harmonious family life’ (Marzouki 1993, 160). With regional and local structures, the UNFT also reached out to rural milieus where it coordinated several training centres for young rural girls (CREDIF 1996). Up until the 2010–11 uprising, however, the UNFT's close ties to state power prevented the Union from criticising the state's (gender) politics.
Market liberalisation (1970s) and the birth of the autonomous feminist movement
When Bourguiba decided, following the failure of collectivism in 1969 and the global economic crisis in the early 1970s, to modify his state socialism into a semi-liberal economic policy based on the combination of import substitution (ISI) and export-oriented industrialisation (EOI), the national government began to develop policies to decentralise rather than centralise farming, industry and distribution (Zussman 1992, 8). The laws of April 1972 and 1974, which encouraged foreign investments in Tunisia, led to a major boom in women's work in especially the textile and garment sector, with the number of women working in the formal sector tripling between 1966 and 1975 (Taamallah 1990, 147; Lamari and Schürings 1999, 63). From 1975 onwards, women also took up agricultural jobs as men deserted agriculture because of its precarious, seasonal and low-paying nature. The rural exodus by men – also a consequence of the unequal development of Tunisia's coastal and interior regions – resulted in a degradation of women's position in agriculture, with many women becoming unpaid ‘family helpers’ in service of the male heads of family (Zouari-Bouattour 1996; Lamari and Schürings 1999). However, both the state and the UNFT failed to address rural women's needs (Labidi 2012), while the Tunisian General Labour Union (UGTT) only concerned itself with formal workers in the textile sector, but not with rural women who performed informal labour in the fields. Thus, although women entered the public space and the labour market, they were marginalised by both an economic system driven by profit and a traditional society driven by patriarchal values (Ferchiou 1996).
Despite the economic growth between 1969 and 1979, discontent gradually increased among the population because of ‘the rising political repression, increasing regional differences and the integration of Tunisia in the global economy’ (Mahfoudh and Mahfoudh 2014, 22). Social inequality increased, with large parts of the population becoming increasingly marginalised. This discontent culminated in a series of social protests principally led by women, students and workers: student demonstrations (1972), the first strikes by women workers in the textile and garment sectors (1975), large unionist strikes (1978) and bread riots (1984). As one female unionist recalled:
During the 70s, women were very present in the Tunisian Left. They were imprisoned after protest against the dictatorship and the presidency-for-life of Bourguiba. They gave up their lives in prison for the aspirations of the Tunisian people, freedom, democracy … These were unionist women, present during the crises of the 70s, the 80s. (Interview with author, 6 June 2015)
It is as part of this broader (unionist) protest movement in the late 1970s that an independent women's group emerged, for the first time questioning the male–female relations and the patriarchal gender roles in Tunisian society. Exclusively composed of women, the Cultural Tahar Haddad Club for the Condition of Women was founded in 1978. Most members were affiliated with either the trade or student unions, yet many were disappointed by these unions’ lack of internal democracy and marginal roles for women (Marzouki 1993; Mahfoudh and Mahfoudh 2014). Indeed, up until today, the Tunisian Left and the trade union (UGTT) have failed to include women in their ranks and leadership positions, despite Tunisian women's active role in each of the country's historical struggles. The first public demonstration of the Tahar Haddad Club was organised on 8 March 1980, on International Women's Day, and focused on women's right to work and gendered labour conditions for women in the workplace. The Club believed there existed a double, interrelated domination in society: the domination of capitalism and patriarchy (Ghanmi 1993, 27).
In 1982, in an attempt to correct the gender-blindness of the UGTT, the Tahar Haddad Club successfully lobbied for the creation of a women's committee in the trade union (Ghanmi 1993).2 Based in a cultural centre, the members of the Club understood that they were distanced from the traditional Left's target groups (workers, housewives and illiterate people) who would not frequent such cultural places (Marzouki 1993). Therefore, while the Tahar Haddad Club discussed its projects in cultural and international circles, the UGTT Women's Committee started to reach out to members of the female working class. Although the majority of the Club's and Committee's members stemmed from the Tunisian Left, heavy internal and external debate emerged during the early 1980s about which direction Tunisia's first autonomous feminist movement should take. Internally, most of its members realised that, besides a broader struggle against capitalism, another struggle was imperative to tackle their own conditions as (house)wives, mothers and sexual objects. How these struggles should be viewed in relation to each other caused internal division; yet most adopted a Marxist point of view (Ghanmi 1993).
Besides internal discussion, both the UGTT Women's Committee and the Tahar Haddad Club also faced harsh criticism from the traditional (male) Left. While the UGTT Women's Committee was accused of dividing the working class – based on the idea that the end of men's exploitation by men would automatically entail the end of men's domination over women – the Tahar Haddad Club was seen as nothing but a bourgeois, intellectual group of women that would not structurally change anything for women. This criticism led to the UGTT's decision in 1983 to make the new Women's Committee of the UGTT a committee for mere ‘reflection and study’ without any decision-making powers. This stopped the UGTT Women's Committee from bringing together women workers, from mobilising around specific women's demands and from organising solidarity activities, awareness campaigns and protests (Marzouki 1993, 265). This hampered the autonomous women's movement in organising the masses, as a result of which the Committee focused increasingly on ‘cultural’ issues.
To sum up, when the autonomous feminist movement emerged within the circles of the UGTT in the late 1970s, its struggle centred principally on questions of redistribution, by paying attention to those gender injustices in the economy that were neglected by an androcentric trade union and mainstream Left (e.g. the sexual division of labour). Cultural issues of recognition were secondary within the movement in those early years. Bourguiba's authoritarian rule, however, hindered the actual political representation of the autonomous women's movement in decision-making, with only Bourguiba's women's union, the UNFT, authorised to operate.
The women's movement under the yoke of neoliberalism and state feminism (1990s and 2000s)
A short democratic opening
Army General Ben Ali, who replaced Bourguiba as president in November 1987 after a non-violent coup d’état, promised a new way forward for Tunisia by announcing a more democratic way of ruling. When this news was announced, women feared that they would lose the rights that they had acquired under Bourguiba in 1956. The rise in Islamist and conservative sentiments during the 1980s – one consequence of Bourguiba's harsh repression of the Left in the late 1970s – scared the members of the new autonomous women's movement. This conservative atmosphere in Tunisian society explains why a profound internal debate emerged in the late 1980s about the importance of secularism (laïcité) for the feminist struggle – to this day a key debate in the women's movement.
Eventually, the announced democratic opening under Ben Ali only lasted until the first ‘democratic’ (in reality rigged) elections in 1989. In order to undermine its popularity, there was an unprecedentedly harsh crackdown on the Islamist movement. Simultaneously, Ben Ali declared his support for the women's rights enshrined in the 1956 Personal Status Code; in fact, he pledged allegiance to a top-down state feminism similar to that which Bourguiba had pursued. Moreover, two women's associations which both stemmed from the circles of the Tahar Haddad Club were legalised in 1989: these were the Tunisian Association of Democratic Women (ATFD) and its more research-focused sister organisation, the Association of Tunisian Women for Research and Development (AFTURD). This was the first time since independence that an independent women's movement had obtained a limited form of political representation. Although the Women's Committee within the UGTT was also reinstated by 1988, few of its former members were interested in joining the committee again, owing to the trade union's androcentric politics:
The situation of the Women's Committee wasn't making any progress. … We can probably find in this situation one of the reasons why … very few of those who had initially set it up decided to return. And even those who did soon left it, being more interested in setting up the Association of Democratic Women. (Ghanmi 1993, 61–62)
Structural Adjustment Programmes and the impact of economic imperialism on Tunisian women
At the beginning of the 1990s, governments in the North African region pushed forward export-led industrial growth strategies based on economic liberalisation to balance budgets and increase productivity and competitiveness (Moghadam 1998). These new strategies, based on a Structural Adjustment Programme that was launched in 1986–87, were forced upon the Tunisian government by international financial institutions such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank in return for further financial support and loans. Tunisia's Structural Adjustment Programme led to a neoliberal restructuring of the country by deregulating the market, lifting the restrictions on trade and reforming the tax system (World Bank 1988). Furthermore, actors such as the US and the EU used debt, aid and the promise of increased market access as mechanisms to further consolidate the region's neoliberal trajectory (Hanieh 2013). The textile sector and the agricultural sector in North Africa were two of the principal sectors where Western powers intervened. It is no coincidence that these two sectors are the two most female-labour-intensive sectors. Indeed, women turned out to be especially useful for the ‘extortion of surplus value and therefore for the extension of capitalism’ (Mahfoudh 1990, 160).
While some consider the increased integration of women in the labour market – a side effect of Tunisia's course for economic liberalisation – a potential feminist achievement, it is important to point out that the neoliberal restructuring of the economy has had adverse effects on women's productive and reproductive roles (Moghadam 1998, 6). In terms of their productive labour, women have been principally employed in export sectors like the textile industry and agribusinesses in low-paying jobs with poor working conditions (Hanieh 2013). Since the production in these sectors is labour-intensive, low-cost labour is important in order to increase profits. The large wage gap between men and women in the region explains why hiring women is more beneficial from an economic perspective (Moghadam 1995; Hanieh 2013). Hence, in Tunisia, exporting companies saw women as a highly flexible and available workforce – because they are principally mothers and housewives – to be used according to the wishes of the market, with temporary, low-waged and low-skilled jobs as a result (Lamari and Schürings 1999).
This was perhaps most apparent in the agricultural sector, a sector that saw gradual privatisation and parcellisation of the land under Ben Ali (Zussman 1992; King 2003). While big agribusinesses started to lease the best lands from the state, small and medium-sized farmers found it increasingly difficult to compete with these players (Lamari and Schürings 1999, 83). This reinforced the migration trend of men to the cities, with women left behind either to work the family land or to be exploited by large agribusinesses and farmers for seasonal and low-paid work. While the state hardly existed in the eyes of women in rural areas (Labidi 2012), the autonomous feminist and labour movement equally failed to respond to these women's needs owing to authoritarian restrictions on their work and the informal nature of women's agricultural work respectively. As a result, the development logic, based on a capitalist system which built upon the already patriarchal system in place, led to the increased feminisation of rural poverty (Mahfoudh 1990; CREDIF 1996).
Women's reproductive labour in the MENA region was equally negatively impacted by the neoliberal economic project. Cuts in social spending, especially in health care and education, have entailed an extra burden for women's already undervalued domestic labour and childcare (Hawkesworth 2006). At the same time, the declining wages of men and the increase of prices for services – because of privatisation or cuts in subsidies, for example – have forced Tunisian women into precarious paid employment, as they are seen as the ones responsible for household budgeting and maintenance (Moghadam 1998). Up until today, Tunisian women face a double exploitation: the neoliberal system, with its preference for flexible, low-paid jobs and social budget cuts, reinforces unequal and patriarchal gender roles that burden women with all unpaid care work.
The feminist struggle for social and economic rights
In contrast to the early 1980s, when the feminist project was linked to a systemic restructuring of the economy, the principal women's movement – by now legalised as an autonomous association, ATFD – refocused its struggle during the 1990s and 2000s on two fronts: against state feminism and against Islamism and rising conservatism (Mahfoudh and Mahfoudh 2014, 26). State feminism posed a challenge to the movement, as the authoritarian state under Ben Ali played an ambiguous role by at the same time adopting an emancipatory, ‘feminist’ discourse and a conservative, ‘pro-Islam’ strategy (Ben Achour 2001). Moreover, the state made independent activism and genuine political representation impossible, as one prominent ATFD member recalled:
We were perceived as a political association: we were constantly repressed, our activities were almost held under surveillance, sometimes even prohibited. They often invented ridiculous excuses. For example, when we wanted to use a public space belonging to the state, they would systematically refuse it. Even when we wanted to rent a room in a hotel, they would suddenly tell us that there had been a flood, or electricity breakdowns, this or that, clearly because they didn't want to tell us that they didn't want us there. (Interview with author, 28 October 2014)
How can the autonomous women's movement's shift in the 1990s towards ‘recognition’ rather than ‘redistribution’ be explained? First of all, as already pointed out, the presence of an authoritarian state in parallel with a deeply seated fear of Islamists pushed feminists more and more towards cultural debates about secularism at the expense of a focus on women's economic exploitation. Limited in their possibilities for mobilisation all over the country because of the strict monitoring of civil society activism by the authoritarian state, feminists often stayed within their own circle of middle-class and highly educated women in the capital. In addition, the strong secularist stance of the ATFD was not attuned to the conservative and religious sentiments of many Tunisian women workers and Tunisians more generally. The attachment to religion and conservatism, especially apparent in lower (middle) classes, has been a difficult stumbling block for the Tunisian Left, which is still perceived as an anti-religious Marxist or socialist force (Gherib 2014).
A second explanation for the feminists’ agenda shift can be found in the increasing neoliberal climate itself. A climate that prioritises individual empowerment and responsibility, entrenched in a discourse of liberal democracy and human rights, had a huge impact on the feminist agenda.3 The 1990s saw a boom in international development non-governmental organisations (NGOs) (CREDIF 1996), with whom the grassroots Tunisian movement increasingly interacted. Dependent on their funding for its projects, the Tunisian feminist movement saw itself forced to adopt the best practices and neoliberal priorities (e.g. microfinance) proposed by international (Western) donors – priorities the movement itself did not always agree with. As one of the founding members of ATFD specified:
This domination … the IMF and the World Bank of course have their own priorities. In the beginning there was the structural plan, followed by other kinds of pressure that they put on the countries. … It's about the way in which international organisations inject money via international NGOs in order to subsidise civil society. … These NGOs follow their own politics, their own political choices. (Interview with author, 6 June 2015)
Women are a majority in the textile and garment sector. But, despite their representing 7 in 10 of the textile workers, there is only one single woman in the National Federation of the UGTT for this sector. … Women are traditionally underestimated by the UGTT, which explains this under-representation in the governing structures of this organisation. (ATFD 2008, 63)
The struggle for redistribution, however, never fully disappeared from the feminist agenda. With work conditions and contracts deteriorating during the 2000s, the number of strikes increased and demands for dignified work and a fair salary intensified. These social protests took place sometimes in cooperation with and sometimes outside the (local and regional) structures of the UGTT (Yousfi 2015). In 2004, by way of example, the female employees of the textile factory of Hotrifat in Moknine started a strike and occupied the factory after the Dutch owner's decision to close the factory down, leaving 275 women without work and income. The ATFD, together with other civil society organisations, sent a delegation to show solidarity with the workers (ATFD 2008, 72–73). When in January 2008 protests broke out in the mine basin in Gafsa, with women playing a key role, both the local branches of UGTT and ATFD supported the protest movement. Yet, although the ATFD has been involved in some struggles for social and economic rights, its outlook as a middle-class, elitist and secular association has not helped to attract women workers to its ranks.
In sum, the 1990s and 2000s witnessed a shift in feminist politics from a focus on economic redistribution to a struggle for cultural recognition. Genuine democratic representation of (working-class) women was prevented by the top-down ‘feminist’ project of an authoritarian president.
What dignity for women workers? The case of rural labourers (2011–today)
We should revolt … We should make a revolution. We would burn and demolish. Let them take us to jail, we have nothing to lose.4
The Tunisian uprising has changed the struggle for gender justice in at least two ways. First of all, the uprising and subsequent wave of democratisation have enabled, at least to a certain extent, the political representation of women of all backgrounds in formal politics or in civil society activism thanks to the freedom of association. While working-class women are still largely absent from the formal political scene because of material, educational and patriarchal constraints, the post-Ben Ali era has been the first period in Tunisia's independent history where women do not face authoritarian barriers to participating in public life. Second, with a popular revolution led by workers and the unemployed, the 2010–11 uprising and the subsequent wave of strikes, sit-ins and demonstrations have challenged the women's movement and other political actors to take issues of class seriously (Hanieh 2013). This part of the article focuses on how key actors – the Tunisian state, the ATFD and UGTT – have dealt with workers’ demands for social justice through an intersecting class and gendered lens. Taking the case of rural women labourers as a starting point, this section investigates whether the Tunisian ‘revolution’ has put the struggle for redistribution again prominently on the political agenda.
Rural women workers
Agricultural labourers – principally women today – have perhaps been the category of the labour class most affected by the double burden of patriarchy and neoliberalism. Yet, their hardships were largely ignored by the authoritarian regime, as these women's lives and physical traits did not align with the characteristics – well educated, professional, modern, non-veiled – of the hegemonic ‘Femme Tunisienne’, whose imaginary was promoted and cherished by the regime as a pillar of Tunisian identity (Debuysere 2016a). Today, interviews with rural women labourers in Tbourba, a rural city in Manouba (Grand Tunis),5 illustrate the multifaceted difficulties these women still face after their popular uprising ‘for dignity’, in the phrase increasingly used for revolutions, resistance movements and uprisings in the region. While these Tbourban women's living conditions cannot be taken as representative for all rural women in Tunisia, they are a good indication of the hardships that some of the most marginalised among the marginalised face in post-uprising Tunisia. Generally speaking, female labourers in Tbourba agree that their living conditions have got worse since the 2010–11 revolution, with prices and the cost of living continuing to rise. The socio-economic crisis prompted by neoliberal politics, which had triggered the popular uprising in the first place, worsened after 2011 owing to turbulent years of political instability and security perils that followed the uprising.
Rural women in Tbourba (and elsewhere) are seldom fellahat, i.e. farmers who own land, as they generally do not inherit land as a consequence of the unequal Islamic inheritance rules enshrined in Tunisia's family code. Instead, they are ‘amilat (workers) who work the land of either family members (unpaid labour) or other landowners who lease the land from the state (paid labour). The privatisation and leasing of rural land during Tunisia's neoliberal restructuring, often to large agricultural companies or rich farmers, have worsened rural women's conditions, according to this worker:
Why do we work for the private sector and then they don't pay us, or they give us only 12 or 15 dinar? Why does the state leave land abandoned that we cannot use? Let the state exploit the land and let us work on it and get salaries. So that when we get sick, the state takes care of us. Why is it like this, it's all private, all these lessees and merchants. Farming isn't the same any more, it's all people leasing land from the state. (Interview with author, 20 October 2016)
We have to bring water and food ourselves. We have no insurance, no rights. The transport is bad and the salaries low. We’re doing all the work while the men are sitting in the cafés smoking shisha. (Worker in second-hand clothes industry in Tbourba, interview with author, 19 October 2016)
Men don’t work, it’s women who do everything. It's the man who spends the money that she earns. Even in this degrading economic situation, it's the women who work even though they are badly paid, and they have problems with transport … (Islamist women's rights activist talking about rural women, interview with author, 27 June 2015)
The Tunisian state
Rural women long for a dignified life with stable jobs, social rights (especially health care) and political representation. Up until today, however, there is no specific state strategy to enhance the conditions of rural women, nor a development politics in favour of these women (Ministère de la Femme 2016, 6). One worker described the absence of the Tunisian state since the uprising in the following way:
Help from the state? The state is on its knees; it has to take care of itself first before it's able to take care of us. We no longer expect anything from the state. (Interview with author, 20 October 2016)
Today, we no longer talk about women's integration in the labour force, but about economic empowerment. The entry point for this is to support and promote the entrepreneurial spirit of women: entrepreneurship and economic initiative by women. … If we support these [educated] women to make their own projects, they will themselves become the employers of other women. (Interview with author, 4 June 2015)
While not the primary focus of the Ministry's strategy, uneducated rural women are also encouraged to establish small businesses in artisanal products for example. Although entrepreneurship is presented as a success story and the ultimate solution for unemployment by the Tunisian government, the microcredit loans that are used to help poor, unemployed women fund their own projects are not without their critics. With the number of microcredit providers growing in Tunisia since the uprising, the fear of over-indebtedness for these women – who already bear most of the responsibilities within the family – is also growing among sceptics (Ben Naser 2016a).
Besides ill-suited strategies, more than anything, the Tunisian state is perceived as absent and lacking in leadership. Since the uprising, the state has lost its influence and strength, and is no longer able to have an impact in discussions about workers’ rights between employees and employers. The head of the Textile Federation of the UGTT explained the situation as follows:
Before [the uprising], the state had a role in the process and intervened when there was a blockage. But today, the state is just a spectator. … The state was active through fear, the state kept an eye on businessmen. Bosses were for example scared of governors who represented the president of the Republic. … Before, there was the prestige of the state [haibat al-dawla]. Today it's the opposite. (Interview with author, 31 October 2016)
With the country currently undergoing a severe economic crisis, Tunisia relies on foreign loans, the conditions of which aim at decreasing the state's role in the economy in order to boost foreign direct investment, trade and private-sector employment opportunities for youth. A new investment code, a new law on the independence of Tunisia's central bank and austerity measures aimed at cutting social benefits are some of the current strategies that international creditors like the IMF are pushing for to tackle Tunisia's economic crisis. These, however, are the same recipes that led to the uprising in the first place; with no alternative to corruption and no solutions for those who suffer most from the crisis, these strategies ‘only risk aggravating social inequalities and tensions’ (Aliriza 2016).
The Democratic Women (ATFD)
Tunisia's principal women's association is divided over the impact of neoliberal recipes and solutions for today's economic crisis. The ATFD still claims to be pluralist in the sense that it accommodates feminist ideologies of all kinds – with only the Islamist ideology being a bridge too far (Debuysere 2016b). As one member of the ATFD's Executive Bureau argues:
Listen, the ATFD is really diverse, you can find communists, liberals, some who support a political party or those who belong to the wider leftist family.6 We are allowed to have different views and positions. (Interview with author, 14 March 2016)
The left wing of the ATFD has criticised the cuts in social services, the economic imperialism on the part of international financial institutions and the neoliberal course of economics that disproportionately harm women. It questions the current approach by the Tunisian state and its creditors in terms of women's empowerment – which is a depoliticised empowerment that focuses on individual accountability and emancipation. Microcredit, a practice on the rise since the uprising (Ben Naser 2016a), is not an approach supported by the association. ATFD (2008, 77) had a brief experience of microcredit in the 1996 but decided that the practice cannot be reconciled with feminism:
Our feminist approach has led us not to accept an approach that nurtures the illusion that women can acquire autonomy through assistance, especially since the funding is generally derisory. Moreover, the projects financed by it confine the beneficiaries to traditional professions and do not help them to escape their marginalisation.
Whereas ATFD rarely dealt with rural women before the uprising, their situation has become more central in the association's recent activities. For one thing, the fall of the authoritarian regime has enabled the ATFD to travel the country and also reach out to the interior regions, with new ATFD sections set up in Bizerte, Sousse, Kairouan and Sfax. Moreover, ATFD launched its ‘Asma Fanni’ Study Centre (observatoire) in Ben Arous, which focuses on the rights of the most marginalised women and which worked on a study about rural women.
These good intentions aside, however, ATFD still faces limitations on its outreach to vulnerable rural women. First of all, being dependent on foreign donors, it sees its agenda set and determined by these actors. The Study Centre for marginalised women, for example, suffers from a lack of funding to tackle social and economic problems:
Is the Study Centre still operational? Yes and no. There is a problem of financing. We didn't get further funding, even if social and economic rights are being abused and need a lot of further study … Unfortunately all funding goes to political rights. (ATFD member of Executive Bureau, interview with author, 26 October 2016)
International actors, especially when they are donors, set up or seek to implement projects that aim at supporting the build-up of civil society and assure a democratic transition. However, their intervention does not always support the goals of feminist associations who sometimes find themselves diverted from their mission.
Sometimes there are associations that say that Tunisian women should have the right to marry someone from another religion. Is this really a pressing issue in Tunisia? How many women are actually suffering from this problem? No, if I compare this with the conditions rural women are living in, does it really have the same weight or value? No, not at all. (Interview with author, 12 June 2014)
The trade union (UGTT)
If Tunisia's oldest feminist association has been unable to mobilise female agricultural workers, the trade union has not yet reached out to them either. First of all, the UGTT does not represent workers who work informally, a status shared by many agricultural labourers (and women more generally). Consequently, rural women workers (interview with author, 20 October 2016) feel abandoned and represented by no one: ‘The union won't listen to us, they won't even agree to talk to us.’ Second, since there is a separate Union for Agriculture and Fishery (UTAP) – a union characterised by much corruption and dominated by rich farmers and landowners (Ayeb 2013) – the UGTT does not always feel competent to work on the case of rural women workers. The UTAP, however, barely includes women, as it principally focuses on those who own land, generally men.
The UGTT does represent women workers in other sectors, like the textile and garment sector; yet, the Union is characterised by much machismo and very little representation of women in the Union's decision-making levels. By way of example, the Board of the General Textile Federation of the UGTT is currently presided over by a man and only three of its nine members are women, despite the sector's large majority of women workers (85%). In 2016, after strong feminist pressure within and outside the UGTT, the general executive Board of the UGTT elected a female member for the first time since 1952.
While the demands for democratisation and social justice of the Tunisian uprising raised expectations of better representation of women workers in Tunisia, these women are still largely excluded from redistribution and recognition. Apart from a malfunctioning state due to the economic and security crisis, it is the disconnect between the trade union's struggle for (androcentric) redistribution and the ATFD's feminist struggle for recognition which adds to the post-uprising failure to represent and include women workers’ demands in Tunisia's new-found democracy. Without a collective struggle for redistribution and recognition, preferably jointly undertaken by an inclusive feminist and labour movement, it is unlikely that (rural) women workers’ hardships (e.g. sexist violence at home and at work, long, underpaid working days without social security and poor transport …) will be tackled and included in the political arena.7
Conclusion
With the conflict between supposed ‘modernist’ and Islamist actors dominating the Tunisian political scene – a conflict in which the women's question has been a key theme of contention – women's revolutionary demands (for work, social justice and dignity) have remained secondary to feminist research on the Tunisian uprising. This article, in contrast, attempts to take seriously class-based fault lines between Tunisian women, by attempting to understand the historical trajectory and the trade union roots of Tunisia's principal feminist movement, the ATFD. By linking Nancy Fraser's theory for gender justice – which includes a struggle for redistribution, recognition and representation – to the formal gender politics of the state, the feminist movement and the trade union over recent decades, the article illustrates why a non-intersecting and non-inclusive unionist and feminist struggle hampers the political representation of working-class women in Tunisia's nascent democracy. With working-class and peasant mobilisation still a bulwark against anti-revolutionary forces in today's Tunisia, especially in the hinterlands of the country, consideration of these actors’ demands is key if Tunisia's revolution is to succeed in the long term. Newly emerging and long-standing feminist voices in Tunisia will have to overcome a singular focus on gender as an isolated structure of oppression, if this revolution is going to be a successful and a feminist one.
In order to bring about (gender) justice in Tunisia's emerging democracy, a mere national struggle will, however, not suffice. Indeed, this article has shown how a global political economy has been a crucial factor in affecting and influencing women workers’ lived realities. Today's ongoing neoliberal project – an intrinsically patriarchal project that underpins much of the funding and the loans provided by international actors – is a major limitation to the improvement of the livelihoods of female workers. Therefore, in today's globalising world, Fraser's third political dimension of justice – representation – has to also encompass inclusion and entitlement to make justice claims for recognition and redistribution at the global level. Indeed, without global membership and a just procedure, it is hard to realise redistribution and recognition at the nation-state level. Therefore, the difficult task ahead for Tunisia's feminist movement is not just to fight gender injustices in the cultural and economic realm but to launch an intertwined struggle for redistribution, recognition and representation at the local, national and global levels.