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2 The origins of the emancipation campaign, November 1954 to May 1958 The military coup of 13 May 19581 was marked by demonstrations of ‘fraternisation’ when Muslim women unveiled en masse on the Algiers Forum. This has been widely seen as a quasi-revolutionary moment that dramatically initiated the emancipation campaign. However, as will be seen in chapter 3, the illusion of a revolutionary break in May 1958 was successfully created by the propagandists of the psychological warfare bureau. Emancipation, far from springing forth perfectly formed as a triumphant
In May 1958, and four years into the Algerian War of Independence, a revolt again appropriated the revolutionary and republican symbolism of the French Revolution by seizing power through a Committee of Public Safety. This book explores why a repressive colonial system that had for over a century maintained the material and intellectual backwardness of Algerian women now turned to an extensive programme of 'emancipation'. After a brief background sketch of the situation of Algerian women during the post-war decade, it discusses the various factors contributed to the emergence of the first significant women's organisations in the main urban centres. It was only after the outbreak of the rebellion in 1954 and the arrival of many hundreds of wives of army officers that the model of female interventionism became dramatically activated. The French military intervention in Algeria during 1954-1962 derived its force from the Orientalist current in European colonialism and also seemed to foreshadow the revival of global Islamophobia after 1979 and the eventual moves to 'liberate' Muslim societies by US-led neo-imperialism in Afghanistan and Iraq. For the women of Bordj Okhriss, as throughout Algeria, the French army represented a dangerous and powerful force associated with mass destruction, brutality and rape. The central contradiction facing the mobile socio-medical teams teams was how to gain the trust of Algerian women and to bring them social progress and emancipation when they themselves were part of an army that had destroyed their villages and driven them into refugee camps.
attempt to form Muslim women in a particular mould. During the last two decades there has been much research on the process of ‘domesticating the empire’, the methods by which British, Dutch, Portuguese and French imperial regimes attempted to intervene in, regulate or remake indigenous family life in its own image.1 This chapter aims, in part, to investigate the overt and implicit meanings of the model of family life, companionate marriage and gender roles that underpinned the emancipation campaign. The paternalistic origins of domesticity are complex and varied from
directive Action sur les milieux féminins en Algérie of March 1960, noted, ‘The evolution of the female milieu is a long-term project since it involves a transformation of deeply rooted customs. It will be the fruit of the work of several generations’.3 However, the time-scale of the emancipation campaign was at most a mere six years (1957–62), during the final two years of which the French were merely treading water and preparing for withdrawal.4 The one exception to this pattern of minimal or superficial impacts of French ideology concerns the numerically very small
equal terms’. 22 Meanwhile, O’Connell applied his lawyer’s brain to keeping the Catholic Committee and its successors on the right side of the draconian laws governing public assembly and political organisation. O’Connell’s irreverence and willingness to indulge in personalities and ‘Billingsgate’ invective were much in evidence during the elections at the heart of the later phase of the Catholic Emancipation campaign, beginning at Waterford in 1826. There, O’Connell roundly abused the ‘bloody Beresfords’, the Ascendancy family from whose pocket the constituency was
successively a union secretary, a founder of unions, the editor of a series of short-lived newspapers, a bookseller and a printer. He was also active in support of parliamentary reform, repeal of the union between Ireland and Britain, working-class education and temperance and served two prison terms for his various activities. A devout Catholic, he actively championed Catholic rights, including the emancipation campaign, though working-class interests clearly took precedence. His effort to set up the Manchester and Salford Catholic Association in May 1824, linking Irish
him a suitable representative of the people of Wexford owing to his stance after 1829.52 Esmonde’s loyalty, however, was not unconditional. In 1844, when officers of the crown struck the names of Irish Catholics off a special jury selected to act on state trials, Esmonde joined with a number of laymen in protesting to the crown. On this occasion, he revealed that in 1829 he had hoped that the emancipation campaign would see the end of Catholic agitation, though even then he had accepted that further efforts might be necessary if Catholics were not afforded religious
mightily to the British self-estimation as a just empire, one supposedly capable of showing the way to others. Thus, although the emancipation campaign seemed to contain anti-imperial elements from time to time, they were only traces, soon converted to a new sense of national justification. As Clare Midgley has demonstrated, women played an important role in the anti-slavery campaign, and after this women
‘severest ecclesiastical censures’ against ‘subordinate Pastors’ speaking out against the government, the 1813 address also established the Scots bishops’ particular aversion to the activities of Daniel O’Connell and those Irish priests in Scotland who actively supported him.81 Tensions flared again in 1823 when the Glasgow Catholic Association was founded to support O’Connell’s emancipation campaign. Vehemently opposed to Irish political radicalism and concerned about the threat this might pose to the support they had been receiving from influential Protestants, Andrew
tyranny which is not based on the Koran’.94 The ALN inside Algeria was quick to recognise the very real propaganda dangers presented to its own position among both the rural and urban inhabitants by the French emancipation campaign that could offer not only rhetoric, but very real material rewards such as medicines, food supplies and clothing to a desperately poor population. FLN anxieties were revealed in detail in an internal directive, Propagande et contre-propagande à mener vis-à-vis de la femme musulmane, which was found by the French army on the body of an