Transnational Women’s Organizing in Colonial Tunisia (1929 – 1963)

Abstract

This thesis traces the tenure of two international women’s organizations with branches in Tunisia during the colonial period: the Tunisian Section of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF), founded in 1929 and active until World War II, and the Union des Femmes de Tunisie (UFT), the Tunisian chapter of the Women’s International Democratic Federation (WIDF), founded in 1943 and formally closed in 1963, following Tunisian independence in 1956. It situates both groups within a constellation of local and international relationships, via-à-vis the Tunisian nationalist movement, the French metropole, and the international networks that being part of a larger organization opened to them. Examining these chapters within the landscape of Tunisian and European politics as well as the global women’s movement allows for a richer understanding of how local chapters of the WILPF and the WIDF interpreted broader organizational ideas of peace and freedom. In particular, it asks how two international women’s organization with explicitly anti-imperialist aims functioned in a colonial setting. Both the Tunisian WILPF and UFT were founded by leftist French women and each struggled to expand their membership and build relationships with the Tunisian Muslim population. Both faced a rapidly changing geopolitical context, confronting the rise of fascism and the hardening of Cold War borders respectively. And each strategically used the affordances of the WILPF and the WIDF both to localize global campaigns for disarmament and democracy, and to internationalize Tunisia’s struggle for independence. Taking these women’s organizations seriously as political actors provides an important perspective on the opportunities and limits of transnational women’s organizing and contributes to an emerging literature foregrounding Global South women’s contributions to the twentieth century global women’s movement.