The Threat of Middle Eastern Women

Like the Muslim press in Algeria, La Française reported heavily on Middle Eastern women, particularly from Turkey and Egypt. While these developments inspired hope for Muslims, for French feminists they fueled anxiety about their tenuous global standing. From 1933 to 1934 La Française offered continuous reporting on women’s rights in Mustafa Kemal Atatürk’s Turkish Republic.⁵ In this period La Française covered developments in Turkey as much as if not more than other European nations. French feminists were impressed that not only could Turkish women vote, they could hold important leadership positions, including being elected to local and national legislative bodies. Within this context, the Middle Eastern woman became a powerful foil against which both French and Muslim women in Algeria were measured. To many, including Bugéja, the successes of Middle Eastern Muslim women proved that the Muslim women of North Africa were also capable of advancement. Yet the Middle Eastern woman’s successes, particularly in the realm of suffrage, illustrated how she was capable of surpassing French women and thereby disrupting French women’s claims to civilizational superiority over the Muslim women in Algeria.

The achievements of feminism in spaces like Turkey and Egypt became a metric by which to measure French feminism. Elsa Mornay wrote in the French feminist publication Minerva that Turkish and Egyptian women enjoyed so many rights that they essentially lived like Western women.⁶ The vice president of the UFSF, Germaine Malaterre-Sellier, wrote an article titled “The Liberation of Muslim Women,” which was reprinted in the Muslim newspaper La Voix des Humbles. Malaterre-Sellier ranked the world’s countries based on women’s rights. She wrote that French women “feel ashamed” when they “compare France to England, Germany, Hungary, [and] the Scandinavian countries.”⁷ In Turkey, “women have achieved equality in every domain.” Malaterre-Sellier described France alongside Arab spaces where women were agitating for more rights, including “Egypt, Palestine, and Syria.” She wrote that feminism was spreading rapidly in the “Islamic world,” and if French women were “not on guard, it is not impossible that Egyptian women would have political rights before them.”

Turkey also loomed large in interwar French feminist thought because Istanbul was the site of the Twelfth Meeting of the Congress of the International Alliance for the Suffrage and the Civil and Political Activities of Women. Contributors, who called the congress simply “the Congress of Istanbul,” wrote about this conference from November 1934 to June 1935. This conference was a key moment of engagement between French and Middle Eastern feminists. While Arab feminists wanted many of the same rights as their American and European counterparts, they directed their calls to the family more than the state.⁸ It was on the basis of these shared goals that feminists engaged with one another at such conferences. By the late 1930s onward, international cooperation between European and Middle Eastern feminists fizzled out because of European feminists’ failure to support the Palestinian cause.⁹

For these feminists, women’s advancement in Turkey and Egypt rendered further visible French women’s limited political standing in France. The failure of the French state to accord them suffrage, feminists argued, limited French women’s capacity to serve as leaders. A commenter noted that while Malaterre-Sellier held an important position of authority within the United Nations as the “Technical Counsel to the French Delegation,” within France she could not even be a conseiller général, or local administrator. This discrepancy, they argued, weakened France’s global standing. Malaterre-Sellier’s leadership within metropolitan, colonial, and international circles demonstrated what women could offer as intermediaries between the French regime and Muslims, and how they could bring glory to France, the article suggested. The article celebrated Malaterre-Sellier as “a distinguished ambassador of France and of feminism.” It quoted Malaterre-Sellier on her ability to forge connections with Muslim elites across North Africa. She had said, “I love traveling in Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia, and interacting with French feminists and the Muslim elite, who like us, are preoccupied by moral and social problems.”¹⁰La Française also offered extensive coverage of Malaterre-Sellier’s travels in Morocco.¹¹ The author noted a lot of anticipation surrounding her visit, and her supporters “were not disappointed.” In each of the cities she visited, Malaterre-Sellier met with the French colonial authorities, European settlers, and Muslims—reflecting her status as someone uniquely suited to navigate multiple publics. Not only did she meet with these groups, according to La Francaise, but she enjoyed a warm reception because of her “good reputation.”

Even as they were threatened by the successes of Middle Eastern women, French women still sought to position themselves as intermediaries between Muslim women in Algeria and Middle Eastern women. La Française reprinted Abou-Ezzohra’s wedding speech about the Islamic feminist movement sweeping the Middle East (analyzed in this book’s introduction). Brunschvicg introduced it as “one of the most beautiful homages to the Muslim feminist movement” and noted that the UFSF hoped “an evolved indigenous woman” would accompany their delegation to the upcoming Congress of Istanbul.¹² They envisioned the conference as being an opportunity for a Muslim woman from Algeria to meet “Muslim women from Oriental countries.” This collaboration, Brunschvicg wrote, would surely inspire this woman to “lead the movement of the emancipation of the French Muslim woman.” Brunschvicg’s commentary suggests that some of these French feminists, like Brunschvicg herself, imagined themselves not as the leaders of the movement for Muslim women’s rights but as facilitators.

At the conference Malaterre-Sellier gave a speech on how the Orient and Occident each had a lot to learn from one another.¹³ This language of mutual admiration was a distinct departure from the condescending language she had used toward Muslim women at the 1932 Constantine congress.¹⁴ Together, she wrote, Muslim and European women could create “a better humanity, more just and more fraternal.”¹⁵ Interestingly, with the exception of Iran, all of the speeches La Française published were from representatives from multiple English colonies or spheres of influence, including India, Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), Jamaica, and Egypt.¹⁶ After the conference, Malaterre-Sellier wrote that she was proud of the relationships she and other women from the UFSF forged with Tunisian feminists. She described these connections as a potential model for Algeria.

Failures of Social Services

Feminists understood the tenuousness of their ability to claim global superiority as French women in the face of Turkish and Egyptian women’s achievements. This anxiety was a crucial context that established the stakes for their claims that they were the only ones who could ameliorate the French colonial state’s failures in the realm of social services. Feminist publications like La Française and Femmes de Demain amplified local women’s efforts to show that French women were capable, resourceful, and able to reach those the French colonial regime could not, especially Muslim women. Feminist publications in both France and Algeria focused on the failure of the French colonial regime to address the material needs of its Muslim subjects in the domains of schooling and medical care. Jane Bagnault insisted it was shameful that a century into French rule, only 3.7 percent of Muslim children were enrolled in schools.¹⁷ This figure is less forgiving than the official ones, which in 1934 put this figure at 8.7 percent, or 78,000 out of 900,000.¹⁸ French women distinguished between the state’s failures, on one hand, and, on the other, the tireless work of French women (doctors, educators, intermediaries) to remedy the state’s inadequacies.

Feminists praised the efforts of schoolteachers in the few existing French schools for Muslim girls, which inculcated students with French cultural values.¹⁹ One such school was on rue Marengo (now rue Ben Cheneb) on the edge of the casbah of Algiers. Every year, Femmes de Demain reported on the school’s celebrations for the Muslim holiday Eid El-Kebir and heaped praise on the school’s director, Madame Wienlocher. This yearly event was covered by “Vonnick,” a regular columnist of Femmes de Demain. A blonde woman whose photograph was included in the publication’s first issue, she was introduced only with the claim that she was “particularly familiar with the life of the Muslims of Algeria” and would offer “documented studies” as well as reporting on settler high society.²⁰

Vonnick was particularly touched by the students’ performances.²¹ She described how little Muslim girls, dressed in costumes, sang French songs and performed French plays. To their attendees, these performances conveyed how these Muslim girls were absorbing French history, culture, and traditions. The school and the efforts of its director indicated how France could, on one hand, respect Muslim culture through its celebration of this important Muslim holiday and, on the other, remake the holiday as a forum to show off the extent to which these girls could perform Frenchness. Vonnick wrote, “Femmes de Demain sees with pleasure our female educators organize an indigenous celebration according to French tastes.”²² This reporting again conveyed the message that French women could create hybridity, ease friction, and impart Frenchness without resentment.

To remedy the state’s failure to provide adequate numbers of schools, many settler women created their own schools and crafts workshops for girls, including the L’Aiguille Musulmane (The Muslim Needle) school in Philippeville (Skikda), workshops by the White Sisters, and a vocational school created by Aurélie Picard Tidjani, wife of the leader of the Tidjani zawiya in Ain-Mahdi.²³ She was celebrated by the Muslim publication L’Echo Indigène with a front-page feature. Her achievements, the publication suggested, illustrated what beauty could come from Europeans and Muslims becoming closer to one another.

French women not only sought to fill the gaps in the state’s educational facilities for women; they also sometimes clashed with authorities, complicating the scholarly claim that feminists operated solely as agents of empire. Jeanne Bottini-Honot, a feminist and member of the UFSF, was initially an instructor in a French colonial school that taught Muslim girls how to weave. Over time she became increasingly critical of the limited education the school offered local Muslim girls. She claimed the girls learned very little.²⁴ The few skills they did learn would not serve them after graduating, since many struggled to afford the raw materials needed to weave at home. She wrote that local Muslims were beginning to see French colonial artisanal schools as “dupery.” She insisted that these girls instead needed an education that was “practical, not artistic.” Taking matters into her own hands, she began teaching the girls basic domestic tasks. This move was met with such profound disapproval by local authorities that she was fired.

Bottini-Honot then founded her own school in Sétif, called the Muslim Housewife, where she taught Muslim girls to sew, knit, iron, bathe themselves and children, and create their own clothing.²⁵ In 1935 Bottini-Honot held a conference called “Raising Up the Indigenous Woman through Work” in order to publicize the school and raise monetary support. Local French colonial officials, both Europeans and Muslims, as well as Muslim elites attended. The Muslim reformist newspaper La Défense reported on the conference and Bottini-Honot’s efforts with approval. Her school, they wrote, served the unmet needs of impoverished girls who would otherwise “wander in the streets” without purpose.

Bottini-Honot’s conference featured several of her students dressed in clothing and white aprons they made themselves. Like the Eid celebrations at the school on rue Marengo in Algiers, the students’ bodies showed off how they had been transformed from potentially aimless little girls to tidy, well-groomed, neatly dressed model young women. In her speech to attendees, she outlined how she envisioned her position with respect to the state. She described how “the actions of French women” were ameliorating the “lamentable” situation of Muslim women. These French women’s important contributions, she asserted, should be supported by the state, and yet the state should not rely on French women alone to fulfill the state’s responsibilities to Muslim women.

In 1939 Bottini-Honot wrote to Joseph Brenier, the head of the French League for Education, an organization established in the mid-nineteenth century to promote secular education throughout France and its colonies.²⁶ Bottini-Honot complained to him that far from being grateful for her work on behalf of Muslim women, local officials had tried to sabotage her efforts. These tensions between Bottini-Honot and local authorities suggest that French feminists’ projects such as the Muslim Housewife should not be oversimplified as entirely “an instrument in service of [French colonial] politics,” as some historians Sakina Messaadi have argued of French feminist efforts.²⁷ Even as Bottini-Honot saw her work as carrying out the ideals of the colonial project, her willingness to break with the colonial regime’s policy on schooling and local colonial officials reveals the extent to which feminists asserted their right to be the authors of what the colonial project should entail.

La Française described Bottini-Honot as the one “who leads our efforts in Sétif”—thereby connecting her school to the overall feminist project of the UFSF. The publication framed Bottini-Honot’s efforts in terms of how she was received by the Muslim population. Bottini-Honot wrote that it was important that local people felt the French were working hard for their benefit.²⁸ She reported on the gratitude of her students’ mothers to both the audience of her conference and to fellow feminists. La Française published a letter written from a Muslim woman in the town of Chellala, near Sétif. The letter thanked Bottini-Honot for teaching her daughter Zineb how to “manage a household,” an important skill that would serve her the rest of her life.²⁹ These mothers’ approval was evidence, the newspaper suggested, of Bottini-Honot’s fruitful proximity to Muslims.

Bottini-Honot’s efforts equally illustrated settler women’s maternal feminism and how they envisioned its wide impact. For Bottini-Honot, the Muslim woman was the most vital recipient of European attention and activism. She wrote that the “material and moral elevation of the Muslim household” and the “elevation of the indigenous people” would all happen “through the woman.” In her letter Zineb’s mother expressed gratitude for not only the domestic training Bottini-Honot imparted to Zineb but also the relationship they developed. She wrote that Bottini-Honot was “like [a] mother” to Zineb. Alongside this classic maternal feminism, though, La Française also wrote that the letter proved there were “enlightened” Muslims who could collaborate with French feminists on the shared “task of feminine liberation.”

Rosalia Bentami’s 1936 novel The Hell of the Casbah caused an uproar among European settlers for its frank depiction of the impoverished lives of Muslims in the casbah and its critique of the colonial state’s failures.³⁰ Rosalia Bentami was a Jewish artist and the wife of Doctor Belkacem Bentami, one of the leaders of the Young Algerians, a group of Muslims who demanded a reform of the Indigénat and more political representation. Early in the novel, Rosalia Bentami described the enormous crowd of Muslim children, parents, and even grandparents that gathered around the school building on the first day of school each year. ³¹ Bentami described an “electric wave” of disappointment that rippled through the crowd as most realized their children would not be admitted because there were so many students and so few classes open to them. This was an indictment of the failure of the French state to meet the needs of its Muslim subjects.

Bentami’s novel was a space to illustrate not only the state’s failures but also their impact. She described that for impoverished young Muslims, “there is no family, no assistance, no refuge, no school, but only the streets, mother of vice, theft, and crime.”³² Muslim boys would often try to find informal employment, at the train station helping with baggage, for example, but often there were so few opportunities, she claimed, that they resorted to theft and drug use. Bentami disentangled the imagery commonly associated with Muslims, delinquency, from Muslim culture and instead connected it to poverty.

While of course some feminists parroted colonial rhetoric that emphasized the veil as a marker of Muslim women’s backwardness and social exclusion, others insisted that education had a greater impact. Lucienne Jean-Darrouy was not only the editor-in-chief of Femmes de Demain but also the author of a regular column for women in L’Écho d’Alger and a music critic there as well. In Femmes de Demain Jean-Darrouy wrote that people should be more troubled by Muslim women’s ignorance than their veils.³³ More urgent than unveiling, she argued, was all Muslim girls attending schools with the same frequency as Muslim boys. Amateur ethnographer Marie Bugéja similarly reminded her readers that the real veil “that needs to disappear is the veil of ignorance that keeps the spirit in a stagnation that we should not find after over a century of occupation.”³⁴ She wrote in La Française that Muslim women could not be blamed for their own ignorance and their failure to assimilate when “the schools have not been given to” them.³⁵

Medical care was another domain within which, like education, urgent intervention was necessary, and French women claimed they were working to remedy the state’s failures. There were some state-run medical services, for example, programs that offered free care to mothers and infants. In 1934 the mayor of Montgolfier (Rahuia) reported that one such program helped 139 families, most of them Muslim, in its first four months of operation.³⁶ But feminists pointed out how these barely skimmed the surface of Muslims’ medical needs.³⁷ In her novel Bentami wrote, “In the casbah, human beings die in the street, when they don’t have all the pieces [of documentation] necessary to be hospitalized [among Europeans].” Throughout the novel Bentami refers to Muslims as “Arabs” or the “indigenous,” but her use of “human beings” here signals her attempt to humanize this population for potentially indifferent settler readers.

Feminist publications instead celebrated French women for meeting the needs of Muslims, thereby more effectively carrying out the state’s interests than the state itself, indicative of how they deserved suffrage. One commenter wrote that these female doctors were able to “penetrate the private lives of indigenous, where in principle the white person is excluded.”³⁸ These doctors’ unique access to Muslim women allowed them to forge intimate connections. Their clinics addressed such a profound need that Muslim women “came in crowds.” Access to this many Muslim women thus meant these female doctors “can make the indigenous love France” and were thus “indispensable to the success of the civilizing project.”³⁹ These arguments were not limited to print culture. In Paris in June 1936, Maryse Demour held a conference called “French Women in the Colonies” where she lauded how Muslim women could more easily trust French women because of their shared “maternal” bond.⁴⁰ Like settler feminists, Demour argued the success of colonialism depended on these women. Without them, she contended, “all territorial conquest would remain vain and unproductive.”

For some feminists, these failures on the part of the state to meet the basic needs of Muslim women in schooling and medical care mirrored the state’s failure to grant French women suffrage. Together, these failures threatened France’s ability to claim global superiority, they argued. This perspective was also informed by a growing anxiety about the new rights of Middle Eastern women. Malaterre-Sellier was unafraid to critique the regime and reminded other French feminists that they were not obligated to “justify our country.”⁴¹ She wrote that “the European nations” that maintained control over most of the “Arab world [via colony,] mandate, or protectorate” were not sufficiently invested in “the liberation of Muslim women.”

Malaterre-Sellier drew attention to the hypocrisy of the language of the civilizing mission on one hand and the realities of French indifference toward Muslim women on the other. She wrote, “Our Europe, which pretends to carry to other continents the flame of a superior civilization, shouldn’t it understand … that the mark of a real civilization is to give women, like men, a means of developing their personality in all of the domains and in all activities?” She simultaneously critiqued the French colonial regime for its failures vis-à-vis Muslim women, as well as metropolitan France for denying French women political rights. These failures challenged the degree to which Europe successfully “carried to other continents the flame of a superior civilization.” While her critique mentioned “Europe,” she was arguing that the failed situation of women’s rights in Algeria thus threatened France’s global reputation.⁴²

A settler schoolteacher named Jane Bagnault similarly described the intertwined destinies of French women and the Muslim women of Algeria. In the feminist publication Femmes de Demain she wrote, “It is so my Muslim sister no longer gives birth in the slum … that it is necessary that French women vote… . It is so little indigenous children no longer die in their cribs, lacking hygiene and elementary care, that it is necessary that the French woman votes… . It is so one day we can see big schools where French and Muslim children play and learn together” that it is necessary that French women vote.⁴³ Bagnault echoed older French feminists, like Hubertine Auclert, who wrote in 1900 that “if French women had the right to vote, their African sisters would have long been delivered of the outrageous practice of polygamy, and the intolerable promiscuity they live under with their cospouses.”⁴⁴

Some feminist critiques were targeted toward men in lieu of the state. Femmes de Demain’s editor-in-chief, Lucienne Jean-Darrouy, wrote in the publication’s first issue that while men had “led Society toward progress,” they could not accomplish everything alone. She contended that it was women who would be better suited to “the work of peace” and “the work of brotherhood.”⁴⁵ True success and progress would require affording women a seat at the table politically through suffrage. Cécile Brunschvicg, secretary-general of the UFSF, dismissed the state’s claims that they did not build more schools for Muslim girls because of budgetary concerns or out of a respect for Muslim culture.⁴⁶ To her, it was rather that the French state “lacked the courage and the energy” to offer Muslim women the means (an education) of gaining some power over Muslim men. She wrote that the French state feared worsening their already tenuous relationship with Muslim men and thereby enabled Muslim men’s patriarchal treatment of Muslim women.

French Amateur Ethnographers

Feminists capitalized on the colonial context of endless fascination with Muslim women, who appeared to many Europeans as unknowable because of the veil, Muslim men’s protective jealousy, and their supposed sequestration. Within this context, certain French women claimed their life circumstances gave them unique access to Muslim women, which they used to write amateur ethnographies. Their work capitalized on the public thirst for insider information about Muslims as well as allowed them to position themselves as uniquely authoritative on the subject of Muslim private lives. Like teachers and doctors, these women’s warm reception by Muslim society was part of the currency they flaunted. Exchanges between these amateur ethnographers and Muslims, however, suggest the tenuousness of this currency.

Ethnographies functioned as political weapons within colonial Algeria.⁴⁷ French colonial rule relied on the maintenance of narratives of inherent, unending difference between Muslims and Europeans. Many of these ethnographies centered Algerian women as important sites for the civilizing mission.⁴⁸ In his introduction to Amélie-Marie Goichon’s La View féminine au Mzab (1927), historian William Marçais wrote, “It is the French women who must run to save us from our misery [from ignorance about Muslim women] and undertake the necessary inquiries in this unexplored domain… . The solidarity among members of the same sex, which is stronger than the antinomy between civilizations, will loosen the tongues and make veils fall.”⁴⁹ Here the female ethnographer is imagined as an instrument of colonialism. She alone can “make veils fall.”

As ethnographies became increasingly popular, the genre remained only semiprofessional. Europeans in Algeria with varying credentials, including not only academics but also military generals, offered ethnographic accounts of Muslim women. As European women contributed to this craze for an ethnographic look at Muslim women, they built on generations of existing travel literature, including the harem literature, written by European women who similarly asserted their authority by being able to access such spaces.⁵⁰ The long-standing popularity of such harem literature ensured that there was already a large audience with a voracious appetite for this sort of content.

The prolific work of Marie Bugéja exemplified the public’s thirst for this insider look into Muslim women’s lives.⁵¹ Marie Bugéja was married to Manuel Bugéja, a retired colonial administrator and also an amateur ethnographer.⁵² Marie Bugéja published editorials and newspaper and journal articles, as well as presented at different conferences.⁵³ While Bugéja’s critiques of the failures of the French colonial state were more subtly worded than those of some of her feminist counterparts, she too focused on many of the same themes: the state’s failure to adequately provide resources, her unique position as an interlocutor between the state and Muslim women, and her warm reception by Muslim elites. The Muslim press, including La Voix Indigène, L’Écho Indigène, and La Défense, advertised Bugéja’s books, lauded her activism, and offered her space for commentaries.⁵⁴ Bugéja took pride in noting to Europeans that “the indigenous know well” how knowledgeable she was about Islam.⁵⁵ To Muslims she emphasized the wide range of influence she had with Europeans. She recounted that a bookseller had reported to her that many tourists purchased her books and then traveled to the regions of Algeria she described. This proved the real-life material impact of her work. That impact, she wrote, was to make these travelers “admire our beautiful Algeria.” She presented herself as responsible for generating interest in, understanding about, and respect for Algeria.

Ethnographies also took the form of memoirs. In 1929 Bottini-Honot published a memoir, titled Among the Unknown, about growing up in proximity to Muslims in the town of Souk-Ahras. She adopted the observational style of Bugéja and other amateur ethnographers. She distinguished between educated Muslim elites, whom she described as virtually indistinguishable from Europeans, and the Muslim “masses [that have] stayed primitive,” whom “she took pleasure in observing at length.”⁵⁶ She wrote that it was only once Europeans understood this “primitive mass” thanks to guides such as herself that they could begin “to study the ways to elevate” Muslims. In other words, any attempts to assimilate Muslims or ameliorate their possibilities depended on women like Bottini-Honot. Like other forms of ethnography, the project Bottini-Honot undertook involved control and authority through observation and knowledge.

As Bottini-Honot described typical Muslim homes in Souk-Ahras, she wrote that indigenous families, which often included extended family as well, often shared a single room, where they all slept “in disorder.”⁵⁷ Bottini-Honot made explicit for her readers that parents had no privacy for sex. She wrote, “One must not be surprised to hear children recount what they have seen or heard at night.” She continued on to describe that it would not be unusual for students to arrive at school and explain that they were absent because their mother had given birth. She then wrote, “The indigenous, like all primitive peoples, live very close to nature.” Bottini-Honot’s description of Muslim familial cohabitation moved between the pseudo-ethnographic assessment of “primitive peoples” and the voyeuristic gaze toward the Muslim couple, having sex within sight and earshot of their children.⁵⁸ Such descriptions of Muslim homes and family lives corresponded neatly to existing Orientalist tropes within travel literature published about North Africa and the Middle East.

French Feminists and Muslim Elites

French feminists also claimed they were uniquely positioned to foster interpersonal relationships with members of the Muslim elite, which made them ideal intermediaries between settler and Muslim societies. For these feminists, Muslim elites were educated, Francophone, and literate, and thus naturally the ideal segment of the Muslim population with which to connect because they were already assimilated to French culture. Feminists saw these elites as their natural allies in the struggle for increased rights for Muslim women, and they critiqued the state’s failure to engage these men. Cécile Brunschvicg wrote that the French colonial regime was so impotent with respect to reforms for the Muslim woman that it failed even to “have the sympathy of the indigenous masculine elite.”⁵⁹

Again, French feminists positioned themselves as the sole actors who were compelled because of their “duty as feminists and as French women” to work alongside their Muslim men allies toward the amelioration of the Muslim woman’s status.⁶⁰ Bottini-Honot wrote that feminist “groups like the UFSF of North Africa have proved the special character that feminism can take here.”⁶¹ They explained why they were more suited than their male European counterparts to successfully enact change. These explanations weaponized French women’s feminine traits of compassion and generosity in the struggle for the hearts and minds of Muslims. French feminists positioned themselves as the group most able to “ameliorate relations with the Muslim population, where settler men and the state had already failed.”⁶² It was French women who lobbied the colonial state to build more schools for Muslim women. It was French women who united to form charity associations to help Muslim women. It was French women who could succeed where French administrators and men broadly had failed in uniting the two civilizations, Arab and French.

Feminists were quick to note that they were being called on by Muslim men to aid in the cause of Muslim women’s advancement. In 1929 members of the Algerian branches of the UFSF attended a conference in Algeria organized by M. Meziam Oussedik called “Feminism, Its History, Its Results.”⁶³ Oussedik lamented women’s inferior status in both France and Algeria. A feminist in attendance, Alice La Mazière, reported that Oussedik argued that French women had proven their intelligence and thus deserved full political rights. He closed his talk by noting that he hoped “all these efforts will lead to the rapid amelioration of the lamentable situation of Kabyle women.” French women marshaled such Muslim evocations of their leadership and calls for help as evidence that they had earned full citizenship rights.

La Française argued that another conference, the 1932 Congress of Mediterranean Women in Constantine, proved their capacity to serve as interlocutors between Muslim men and Europeans. For both Malaterre-Sellier and Bottini-Honot, Muslim attendance signaled that the two parties shared common goals and gave the French feminists “hope” that they had allies in their efforts on behalf of Muslim women.⁶⁴ Malaterre-Sellier was pleased that Muslim men brought their daughters to the conference, a move she interpreted as their openness to a more liberated next generation of Muslim women.⁶⁵ French women connected easily with Muslim elites, whom they saw as already “liberated by us intellectually and morally.”⁶⁶ An author in La Française wrote that it was French feminists who “have heard the elite call for help” from the French colonial regime on behalf of Muslim women.⁶⁷ Bottini-Honot reported that the Muslim men who attended the conference “demanded that we intercede on their behalf with the administration to build more schools for indigenous girls.”⁶⁸ This demonstrated that not only were French feminists uniquely qualified to address the needs of Muslim women, but they were also being called on by the Muslim population to do this work. Here again Muslim public opinion was invoked to prove the necessity of French women’s intervention.

This discussion of Muslim men’s pleas to French feminists to get involved also became another opportunity for feminists to critique the disparity between the rhetoric of colonialism and its impotence. A correspondent of La Française in Constantine wrote, “It is a shame that a Muslim is obligated to underscore the state of servitude of the women of his country to a government that pretends to have come to Africa to civilize the still barbarous population.”⁶⁹ To this correspondent, the fact that it was Muslim men who were lamenting Muslim women’s status signaled the hypocrisy of the French colonial state’s failure to intervene. Interestingly, multiple open letters to conference attendees appeared in the Muslim press, including the one from Muslim woman Seghir Hacène analyzed in chapter 3 of this book. Such calls insisted that French women needed to do more for Muslim women and that Muslim women would not evolve based on a “more or less sincere discourse or under the effect of a magic wand.”⁷⁰ Like Bugéja’s exchange with al-Gharbi, such moments reflect contention between French feminists and the Muslims they claimed to speak for, and publications like La Française never reprinted or responded to these critiques.

Unlike the average Europeans who trafficked in stereotypes, these women claimed their proximity to Muslims as women enabled them to see the real Muslim life. A shift in focus from poor Muslims to elite Muslims, for example, could undo some European prejudices. Bottini-Honot wrote that “this elite [who attended the 1932 Constantine conference] is victim of the ancestral customs of their parents” and of “religious fanaticism.”⁷¹ Elite Muslims were thus being held back by their less enlightened brethren. In a searing editorial titled “Them and Us” in Femmes de Demain, Metropolitan journalist Paule Husset challenged the contempt with which most settler women treated Muslim women. She wrote that French women were unable to see Muslim women as their counterparts.⁷² Instead, they saw every Muslim woman as like “their own cleaning lady.” This was partially an issue of class. Husset asserted that while settler women treat every Muslim woman like the “Fatma who does the housework,” they should not forget the Muslim middle and upper classes. She reminded her readers that they were educated Muslim women who probably had to struggle to earn their degrees from French colonial institutions. She described the various evolved Muslim women she knew personally. She described being in someone’s home and meeting other young Muslim girls who normally were veiled, but among women they dressed in French clothes. One elite Muslim girl drove herself around Algiers in her own car and was training to be a midwife.

The ignorance of the French population—both in the metropole and in Algeria—about Muslims and Islam was another problem French feminists claimed they were uniquely positioned to solve. Sometimes this involved reprinting articles from Muslim publications. La Française occasionally amplified the voices of Muslim elites who called attention to the plight of Muslim women. They republished articles such as an editorial by Mohammed Tatouti in the settler paper La Dépêche Algérienne, the wedding speech of Abou-Ezzohra from the Muslim paper La Voix Indigène, and a report from Tahar Ameur to the conseil général of Algeria.⁷³

Their introductions to these reprinted articles suggest that French feminists envisioned these articles as a key part of a larger project to educate their audience about Islam’s emancipatory possibilities. Malaterre-Sellier wrote that at the 1932 congress in Constantine, French feminists learned from the Muslim attendees that “there is a growing movement to interpret the Qur’an in favor of women’s moral, social, and political education.”⁷⁴ Another commentator, M. R., wrote that the article being reprinted proved the misogyny Muslim women faced was rooted in custom, not Islam itself. In fact, she insisted, misogyny was “contrary to the spirit of Islam.”⁷⁵ In the preface to an article written by a woman, C. Senieh, who was married to a Turkish diplomat, the newspaper’s correspondent wrote that the article disproved the settler stereotype that the Qur’an mandated women’s sequestration. She wrote that the article instead “proves that the true spirit of the Prophet was betrayed by texts written many centuries after his death and that he himself never wanted women’s enslavement.”⁷⁶

In the later interwar years, Lucienne Jean-Darrouy, editor-in-chief of Femmes de Demain, published extensively to challenge popular depictions of Muslims in response to the ongoing debates about the Blum-Violette Law, which proposed extending citizenship to more Muslim men in Algeria. Settlers against the law cited Muslim misogyny as one of the reasons Muslim men could not be French citizens. They claimed French men would be endorsing Muslim men’s cruel treatment of Muslim women if they granted them citizenship rights. One author asked how “Muslim men could be admitted into the French family where there was a situation so odious and so barbarous.”⁷⁷ Jean-Darrouy conceded that the Muslim woman faced a particular set of challenges because of her religion, culture, and male counterparts, but she insisted that suffering at the hands of Muslim men was greatly exaggerated. In a series of articles that she published in February and March 1937, Jean-Darrouy challenged French settlers for pretending to care about Muslim women. She wrote that while feminists had long worked to alert the broader public about Muslim women’s suffering, people “indifferent yesterday” were now pretending to care because of their opposition to the Blum-Violette Law.⁷⁸ Interestingly, she mentioned the reforms of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk in Turkey as evidence that Muslim societies could embrace feminist reforms, echoing the arguments that appeared in the Muslim press. She closed her article that the feminists behind Femmes de Demain would continue to work on “liberating Muslims from abusive customs while at the same time the Muslim man from an inferior political situation.”

At the same time, Jean-Darrouy did not mince words when she addressed Muslim men. In April 1937 she penned an editorial titled simply: “Muslim Men, Your Wives Are Also Human Beings.”⁷⁹ In it she challenged Muslim men’s continual demands for the French state to build schools for Muslim girls while doing little to improve circumstances for the women in their lives. Again, her interconnectedness to Muslim elites was important. She cited three conversations she had with a Muslim teacher, a Muslim cleric, and a politician who all raised the question of more schools for girls. When she pressed them for more details about the women in their lives, one admitted his wife was illiterate and he had not tried to teach her to read. Another admitted that while he sent his daughter to school, he would soon insist she would veil herself because of her age. While Jean-Darrouy elsewhere herself advocated for more schools, in this editorial she turned her attention back to Muslim men. How sincere were their demands for more schools, she asked, if they were not willing to grant more freedoms to the women in their own lives?

Feminists and the Fight against Settler Prejudice

Metropolitan and settler French women wrote that settler prejudice toward Muslims made them indifferent to the plight of the Muslim woman. C. Fel was a teacher in Paris and also the assistant secretary of the teacher’s union of the Paris area. In April 1931 she had recently returned to Paris from a 6,000 km road trip around Algeria with her husband. She reported to the metropolitan audience of La Française that settlers were “too full of superiority” to care about improving life for the impoverished Muslim masses.⁸⁰ She wrote that they opposed Muslim “emancipation” in part because it would make Muslims their equals. Likewise, Bagnault explained that Europeans had a limited image of Muslims, based on stereotypes, which they did not bother trying to complicate or nuance.⁸¹

Bottini-Honot and Bagnault, both schoolteachers, tied the question of prejudice to early childhood years. Bagnault wrote, “European mothers systematically distance their children from the indigenous.” As a schoolteacher she described the regularity with which she observed parents transmit their disdain for Muslims to their children. This in turn led “European children to think they come before Muslim children.”⁸² Bottini-Honot wrote that part of the difficulty in side-by-side Muslim and European education was that Europeans saw Muslims as “undesirables” because their of their questionable “health” and “propriety.”⁸³ Bottini-Honot linked the question of how settler children learned prejudice to their proximity to Muslims in housing. In her memoir, Among the Unknown, she described growing up in Souk-Ahras, 100 km south of Bône (Annaba) and 170 km east of Constantine. She emphasized how different the town was from other Algerian cities. Unlike Constantine, Algiers, Ksar Boukhari, and Tiaret, she noted, where Arabs were limited to a particular neighborhood, the Arabs of Souk-Ahras lived among Europeans, “sometimes in the same house.” While in larger Algerian cities European “children are very often afraid of Arabs,” in Souk-Ahras they played together and shared a “warm sympathy” for one another.⁸⁴

Instead of trying to undo their gender difference with their male counterparts, French feminists underscored that it was their femininity that enabled them to connect to the Muslim population better than men could. In Femmes de Demain’s opening issue, its editor-in-chief, Jean-Darrouy, wrote that she hoped the journal would bring together French and Muslim women and remind them of their connectedness through their “female bodies and of course female hearts.”⁸⁵ Husset wrote that French women needed to approach Muslim women not with exoticization or condescension but with “friendship,” because of the “insoluble links between all of the women of the world.”⁸⁶

The Franco-Muslim Feminine Union also took on this work of cooperation and collaboration. They held conferences and workshops and took on aid projects with Muslim collaboration. On March 3, 1937, they held a conference at the Muslim reformist Cercle du Progrès in Algiers.⁸⁷Femmes de Demain reported on the union’s activities regularly, including this conference. The union was so important, the publication asserted, because it represented a new step forward in women’s engagement with one another. European and Muslim women came together “no longer in one of these gestures of charity that have always humiliated [Muslim women] in rescuing them, but in a simple, fraternal gesture.” This statement praised the women of the union while implicitly critiquing the charity efforts of so many other settler organizations as condescending.

Reporting on the union stressed its commitment to collaboration with Muslim women over the condescension so common among settlers. Another article asserted that the union was started by French women who wanted to connect other settler women to Muslim women so that they could see Muslim women as more than simply creatures who inspire “pity or revulsion.” Unlike other women’s organizations, the union did not seek to “dominate” Muslim women but instead come together on the basis of “profound sympathy and feminine fraternity,” as Paule Husset wrote in an article that praised the union for the creation of their dispensary in Algiers, which offered Muslim women consultations from female doctors.⁸⁸ Like other reporting on French dispensaries, this article too reminded the readers of how Muslim women were typically distrustful of settlers. Yet these female doctors had managed to overcome that distrust and offer help to almost two hundred people in the three months since its opening. Husset wrote that she was thrilled to see “women task themselves with this public service and organize it so benevolently.” Again French women had effectively taken up a responsibility of the regime (a “public service”).

Bagnault suggested that while men emphasized race or religion, “for [settler] women, the Muslim problem is a human problem.”⁸⁹ Bottini-Honot also compared settler women’s attitudes to that of their husbands. While men were cynical about transforming Muslim lives, settler women remained patient and compassionate, she wrote.⁹⁰ While men blamed culture and religion for Muslim delinquency, women understood that the root cause was poverty. While men disparaged Muslims as “thieves,” it was their wives who insisted that their hunger forced them to steal. Even though some husbands treated their wives as if “they are naïve,” settler women continued in their “difficult and thankless” work because of their “spirit of justice.” To Bottini-Honot, then, settler women proved their essential role in transforming Muslim lives through their tireless commitment to humanizing Muslims, but also working on their behalf even in the face of disapproval from their husbands. Gender difference here was not an impediment to citizenship but an asset to women’s capacity for leadership.

Of course, feminists too reaffirmed stereotypes, including, for example, of Muslims as unwaveringly superstitious. Marie Bugéja, for example, urged the French colonial state to build schools for Muslim girls, which would “deliver them from superstitions.”⁹¹La Française once published an interview about the Muslim woman between one of its correspondents, Yvonne de Bruillard, and a thirteen-year-old Algerian boy, Ali, living in France.⁹² To explain he was returning to Algeria, de Bruillard wrote that he was returning to “Africa, [where] his little Arab soul will again dominate him with its beliefs and superstitions.” For de Bruillard, Ali’s belief in superstitiousness was racialized, an inescapable part of Ali’s “Arab soul,” which could be combated in France but would inevitably reign in “Africa.” For Bugéja, however, belief in superstition, like ignorance, could be cured with a French education.

Others, however, used comparisons with France to challenge the idea of Muslim particularity. A reviewer in La Française responded to Lucienne Favre’s book Oriental, which described the material and “moral” impoverishment of a Muslim domestic worker.⁹³ Favre’s Muslim protagonist was intensely superstitious. Yet the review’s author, Henriette Sauret, offered details of the unscientific superstitions to which the French domestic worker in Paris also adhered. Sauret’s comparison thus underscored the relationship between poverty and superstition, irrespective of culture or religion. Bugéja similarly compared gendered forms of dress, comparing the hijab to the corset.⁹⁴ She wrote that such a comparison demonstrated that civilization and barbarism could be found among both Muslims and Europeans, and it was only through education that groups could transition to civilization.

Some sought to connect French and Algerian women’s suffering, both as victims of patriarchy. Fel wrote that like Muslims, who were “slaves of tradition and ancestral beliefs,” French women were “slaves of the code français.”⁹⁵ Brunschvicg wrote that Muslim women were oppressed because of the misogyny French women also faced, particularly masculine “egoism” and “jealousy.”⁹⁶ Similarly, in her articles about the Violette Project, Jean-Darrouy compared the restrictions imposed on Muslim women to those also suffered by French women. She wrote that while deputies claimed to be indignant about polygamy among Muslims (which she noted hardly existed anymore), they were indifferent to French men engaging in adultery with mistresses.⁹⁷ French officials complained that Muslim women were supposedly sequestered in their homes, but, she asked, would a French woman not be approached by police if she tried to flee her home without her husband’s permission? These comparisons signaled the shared experience of patriarchy, as well as the hypocrisy of the deputies in question.

French women saw themselves as the force that would not only challenge prejudice but eradicate it in the future. Bagnault urged her readership that “it is time to stop ourselves and let go of all the reasons we separate ourselves from our Muslim brothers.”⁹⁸ Paule Husset wrote, “Between the Muslim woman and us, we have sowed too much contempt, indifference, and mistrust. Rest assured, European or indigenous readers, that the Women of tomorrow will … [eliminate] these odious prejudices.”⁹⁹ The capitalization of “Women of tomorrow,” which referred to women broadly united by feminism, suggested that the power Husset envisioned lay within modern European women to dismantle prejudice.

“Women of Tomorrow”: A Conclusion

This chapter has argued that like Muslims in Algeria, interwar feminists’ activism was shaped both by the internationalism of the interwar moment and the particularities of the settler-colonial context. French feminists positioned themselves as educators and interlocutors who had earned the trust of Muslim women despite the failures of the state to provide adequate education and medical care. They argued that they were the sole actors who could cross the cultural and social chasm created by settler colonialism and its de facto segregation of Algerian space. Intellectually too, these women asserted that their unique access to Muslim women empowered them to educate the broader settler public about their inaccurate prejudices toward Muslims. Like earlier generations of imperial feminists, they sought to reproduce maternal dynamics between themselves and the Muslim women they supposedly wanted to save.

Yet unlike earlier generations of imperial feminists, they were increasingly willing to break with the state and openly critique its failures to educate Muslim women, to offer a better material reality to Muslims broadly, and to offer full citizenship to French women. In their accounts of French women’s leadership, feminist publications like La Française and Femmes de Demain cited support from the Muslim public as a crucial marker of these women’s success. They depended on the evocations of this support from Muslims as a currency they could marshal to their public as evidence of their capacity for leadership, which proved they deserved full political rights. They also broke from earlier generations of imperial feminists in their internationalism. They felt their sense of global superiority was threatened by the contrast between Turkish and Egyptian women, whose place in their own societies and globally seemed to be on the rise, and French women, who still could not secure suffrage. Like the Muslim press commentators, they too were locked in a multidirectional relationship to Europe, settler colonialism in Algeria, and the women’s advancement projects of the Middle East.

By the 1950s the French army also turned its focus to Muslim women. As the movement for Algerian independence grew, the French colonial regime was desperate to tighten its reins on the Muslim population. Muslim women, they concluded, were the key to changing Muslim hostility toward the French regime. If women could be convinced of the merits of assimilation, they could influence their husbands and transform their families. Army officers in the Psychological Warfare Bureau targeted Muslim women through posters, newspaper articles, and public unveiling ceremonies, where Muslim women were pressured into tossing their haiks into a burning fire to symbolize their emancipation from Islam’s misogyny. In the interwar years French feminists were ahead of this later turn by state elements toward Muslim women. The final chapter now returns to Muslim society as an extended conclusion on how these multifaceted debates about Muslim women shifted in the postwar years.