Sara Rahnama, The Future is Feminist: Women and Social Change in Interwar Algeria (Cornell University Press, 2023).
Jadaliyya (J): What made you write this book?
Sara Rahnama (SR): Within the fields of French history and French colonial history, there has been so much scholarship on colonial Algeria, yet both fields have been largely silent on Algerian women, particularly before the War of Independence (1954-1962). When Algerian women appear, they are often silent background actors, passive recipients of aid or efforts by French feminists. To me, this silence in the scholarship invariably reproduces colonial assumptions that Muslim women are marginal or invisible actors, absent from public life and meaningful contributions to history. Algerian women’s involvement in the War of Independence, popularized by The Battle of Algiers, is when they finally enter the history books, but I wanted to understand their lives and contributions in the first half of the twentieth century.
Also, until recently, much of the scholarship on colonial Algeria has come from a French history lens and relied on French-language sources and archives in France exclusively. In graduate school I began seriously learning Arabic to be able to bring in a new set of sources, which unsurprisingly revealed many connections to similar discussions about women happening across the Middle East. The Arabic-language press also allowed me to see more clearly how ideas about Islam were informing this new feminism and concern for women’s status that was emergent in the interwar years. In recent years, more scholars have connected the dynamics they analyze in colonial Algeria to the broader Middle East and I am glad to see more scholarship on colonial Algeria in spaces like the Middle East Studies Association conferences because it signals to me that more scholars are thinking through these regional connections.
J: What particular topics, issues, and literatures does the book address?
SR: The book examines both the discursive role women played within national conversations, but also how real women participated and left their mark on public life in new ways. These discussions about women and Algeria’s advancement took place in the press, in café discussions, in plays on theater stages, in schools and clubs, and in religious sermons.
More specifically, it opens with a look at how Algerian cities were transformed in the interwar years by the large-scale entry of Algerian women into the labor force as domestic workers in European settler homes. Within the press, elite men struggled to grapple with the way these women (many of them recent migrants from nearby rural areas) were remaking urban space, and also with these women’s earning power, particularly compared that of men within the colonial economy. The book then moves to the discourses in the press over women’s education, arguing that Algerians envisioned women’s education as a first step that could empower Algerian society to modernize in the way of other Middle Eastern nations, where they saw women’s advancement as having produced general social uplift. References to the Middle East and new readings of Islamic knowledge were crucial here, as well as in the next chapter, which looks at women’s veiling and men’s hats. The book then explores French feminists and argues we can better understand them through the triangulated frame of France, Algeria, and the Middle East, given how anxious many were about Turkish and Egyptian women’s advances. The book closes with a chapter that moves to the counter discourse articulated by women in the late 1940s in response to nationalism, namely where they critiqued the French colonial state for its failures and Algerian men for their assimilation and misogyny.
J: Why did you pick this book title?
SR: Some of the Algerian commentators I examine in the book insisted that women’s uplift was not a European export, but rather something integral to Muslim societies. To support their claims, they cited new readings of the Qur’an and Islamic knowledge, as well as recent developments in Egypt, Turkey, and other Middle Eastern spaces. French colonial ideology insisted that Algerians were ineligible for citizenship and participation in modern life because Muslims were supposedly so misogynistic, so as Algerians wrote about feminism they were challenging the ideological basis of their exclusion under colonialism. I found these rhetorical moves so relevant today when stories about how Muslims are so misogynistic continue to permeate our public discourse and be used to legitimize violence and exclusion. I wanted a title that immediately pulls readers into those tensions.
J: How does this book connect to and/or depart from your previous work?
SR: I have tried to write in public-facing forums about the ways the histories I study can inform our understanding of our present moment. In recent months, Israeli commentators cited stories of alleged mass rape perpetuated by Hamas in the October 7 attacks to legitimize the outsized retaliatory violence in Gaza. Although there was no evidence of mass rape, such claims circulated quickly on social media. In an article in Middle East Eye published in January, I argue the quick diffusion of these unsubstantiated claims build on longer-standing colonial tropes about Muslim men and their unique capacity for monstrous violence. Both this work and my new book, The Future is Feminist, reflect on how entrenched colonial stereotypes about Islam and gender have been throughout history, and also offer new perspectives that can nuance our understandings of these stereotypes. The book examines how feminism offered a language through which Algerians not only wrote back against such stereotypes, but also reordered the world on their own terms. They frequently cited, for example, that Turkish women gained the right to vote in 1930, well before French women in 1945.
J: Who do you hope will read this book, and what sort of impact would you like it to have?
SR: Given the ways ideas that Muslims are inherently and especially misogynistic continue to circulate in public discourse, my hope is that the book offers an important perspective for a wide audience on feminism and Islam. Algerians articulated feminist discourses inspired by new readings of Islamic knowledge and news from the Middle East, which wrote back against French colonial assumptions about Muslims. When I have had the opportunity to share this research on different campuses in book talks and guest lectures, students have been really responsive to it because they see it as directly connected to the world we continue to live in and how Islam and gender continue to be discussed.
For scholars thinking about and teaching colonial North Africa, I hope the book will be helpful for the ways it foregrounds a settler-colonial context and working-class women, which sets it apart from other gender histories of the Middle East. In interwar Algeria, there was not the same class of educated, elite women to lead a women’s movement like there was in Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, and Palestine. My book instead centers working-class Algerian women, many of whom worked as domestic servants in European homes. Some women who worked as domestic workers also campaigned in the streets for political causes or acted on theater stages. More on this in the excerpt below!
J: What other projects are you working on now?
SR: My new project is a social history of the Middle East in the 1960s and 1970s from the perspective of teenage girls. I am currently collecting oral histories from Arab women born between the 1940s and 1960s and always looking for more, so if anyone reading this knows of anyone interested, please reach out to me!
Excerpt from the book (from pp. 56-59)
Domestic workers were a noteworthy group, both because of their scale and because most of them lived and worked in Algeria’s urban centers, where previously women were less visible and mobile. Employment in domestic service drastically transformed women’s “constellations of mobility,” to borrow Tim Cresswell’s term, in ways that changed the optics of Algerian urban space. Both Muslims and settlers wrote about the “processions of veiled women” who left the casbah every morning to work in European neighborhoods. It was not only in the streets that one more often saw Muslim women. One Muslim man complained that “now women are everywhere: factories, stores, and administration.”
Domestic workers were exceptionally mobile Muslim women. They not only left their homes but moved from Muslim neighborhoods into European neighborhoods. In his study of how color lines operated in multiple colonial spaces, Carl Nightingale argues that the maintenance of colonial power required “keeping color lines semiporous . . . by authorizing very specific forms of urban boundary-crossing,” including domestic workers. He asserts that certain social actors like domestic workers could cross color lines without disrupting the fundamental power relations between colonizer and colonized. He continues, “Gendered interests matter too: white people, typically men, always have tacit permission to cross color lines in search of sex.” In interwar Algeria too, while domestic workers’ mobility did not disrupt power dynamics between European settlers and Muslims, it reflected an important reversal of earlier patterns of gendered movement.
As domestic workers crossed into European neighborhoods and inti- mate spaces in the interwar years, they broke older patterns of gendered movement where the only figures authorized to cross color lines were European men in search of sex. From the start of the French colonial experiment in Algeria in 1830, the casbah was where European men would come to purchase sex from Muslim women. For many settlers, the entire casbah was coded as a space of licentious possibility. As one settler wrote in 1939, “For the Algerois [the settler population of Algiers], the popular expression ‘going to the Casbah’ means to debase oneself [through the purchase of sex].” Domestic workers’ regular daily movement across these neighborhood bounds then broke long- standing patterns of who was authorized to move where in Algeria’s cities. Many of them were permanent migrants. An administrator noted that women who left rural areas to work as domestic workers in Algiers and Berrouaghia (a town 100 km south of Algiers) rarely returned to their families.
While their work enabled mobility between their homes and their places of work, some domestic workers also took on greater public roles. The public lives of two domestic workers in particular, the afore- mentioned Rahma Ben Drahou and her contemporary Melika Douifi, although not representative, offer more details about what was newly possible in the interwar years for some domestic workers. Rahma Ben Drahou was the daughter of the local sheikh and teacher at a Qur’anic school in a village just outside of Nemours. Since she was seven years old, Ben Drahou had worked as a domestic worker for multiple families in Nemours, and her income helped support her entire family. This suggests that even though the pay for domestic work was often meager, it could still bring some material stability to families. Oran républicain published a letter from a Muslim woman (“B.”) who wrote to the publication to share Ben Drahou’s story. She reported that Ben Drahou “enjoyed great popularity” in the town of Nemours for her activism and suggested that Ben Drahou could serve as a model of Muslim women’s emancipation. While her story may have been exceptional, her activism and popularity demonstrate that despite their absences in the archival record, domestic workers were not marginal or invisible actors in interwar public life.
Melika Douifi was a domestic worker who also acted on stage as part of the Alif-Ba theater troupe. She had moved from Blida to work as a domestic worker in Algiers. Of the six actors in the troupe, some worked for the French colonial regime as interpreters or in the Tribune de Commerce courts, and others were unemployed. Among them, Douifi was the only woman. The troupe performed classic French theater pieces in Arabic. A colonial surveillance report noted that in April 1941, Douifi would be on stage performing in one of the city’s largest venues. In celebration of the Mawlid holiday, which celebrates the Prophet Muhammad’s birthday, the troupe would perform Chateaubriand’s The Last of the Abencerrajes either at the Algiers Opera House or the Majestic Theater.
Douifi’s presence on stage as a woman was exceptional. Muslim women performed as singers or dancers in private gatherings such as weddings, but in many of Algeria’s bigger Muslim theater troupes, the parts of women were played either by Egyptian actresses or by men. Marie Soussan, a Jewish singer and actress who was the most important female performer of the interwar years, was a notable exception. Scholars had long thought Soussan was the only non-European woman of her time to appear on stage, but they have now identified at least three Muslim women who also appeared on stage in the 1930s. Still, although she only appears briefly in a surveillance report about Muslim theater, the life of Melika Douifi, recent migrant, domestic worker, and theater performer, modeled newly possible transformations. Although she was a new arrival in Algiers, her unlikely presence as a domestic worker on stage in Algiers’s biggest venues illustrates how women like her left their mark on the city despite their gender and class position.
Both Ben Drahou and Douifi were not only highly mobile women— moving from city to city—but also particularly comfortable in public. Ben Drahou engaged in public activism, while Douifi was willing to act on stage—the only woman in an otherwise all-male acting troupe and one of the few Muslim Algerian women on stage at all in the interwar years. While all domestic workers likely did not share Ben Drahou’s and Douifi’s independence and confidence, they remained objects of inquiry for a broad range of commentators preoccupied with Muslim women’s bodies. Commentators were concerned with not just how such women moved (out of their homes, into European neighborhoods and homes) but also how they dressed (unveiled, wearing makeup). Onto these bodies, each group asserted their own vision of Muslim society’s evolution or descent.