Women, Gender, and Colonialism in Nineteenth-Century Tunisia

This paper takes family as a site for social history and a space in which to examine the shifting construction of gender roles in Ottoman Tunisia. It combines an analysis of women as historical actors on the provincial scale, within the context of intellectual and social change in the Ottoman Middle East as seen through the family, and later through their interaction with colonial officials. This begins with an exploration of women's contributions to economic and political power, focusing on the gendered understandings and representations of Ottoman authority in the province of Tunis in the 18th and 19th centuries as espoused by the ruling family. Concentrating on the ruling family and the palace households, I illustrate the malleable constructions of gender relations and the impact of social and intellectual change in the 19th century. Specifically, I consider the gendered implications of modernity in transformations of political authority, and the role of the ruling family within government. Finally, internal changes are posited in dialogue with the understanding of women and the family in colonial ideologies and in colonial practices as Tunisia was incorporated in to the French empire in the last two decades of the nineteenth century. My discussion of the ruling family allows for an integration of scholarship on Tunisia within a broader regional and comparative framework. Thus, I focus upon the shared experiences of Ottoman identity in their belonging to a common culture of ruling families, and through the family the impact of the common Ottoman experience of colonialism. This approach gestures towards debates within the empire over defining a specifically local or Ottoman (as non-European) modernity, and through the model of the family, allows for comparison to other colonial encounters with Europeans, namely from India.