Taking a gendered perspective and using oral history, this paper considers Algeria’s year of independence, 1962, as both event and metaphor (Amin, 1995). In the first part, it seeks to sketch out a revolutionary moment, bringing nuance to the popular and academic vision of women going ‘back into the kitchen’ in 1962 after the ‘parenthesis’ of their wartime activism, whilst at the same time exploring how continuities between the colonial and post-colonial periods – and notably men and women’s levels of education and socio-economic status – determined to what extent independence would offer individual women new opportunities. In women’s testimonies, 1962 is neither a cut off point nor a year 0, but a whole new world in which many things stay the same. The second part of the paper engages with the highly politicised historiography of Algeria. It explores the symbolic significance which 1962 has acquired in discourses of independent Algeria, as the watershed moment when either independence was consolidated (the ‘dominant’ discourse, in the sense it is promoted by the state) or the revolution stolen (the ‘non-dominant discourse’). It seeks to unpick how women’s narratives of where they were and what they were doing in 1962 are entwined with and filtered through anxieties about their own political legitimacy and relationship to power in Algeria then and now. The paper principally draws on twenty-eight oral history interviews with women who participated in the War of Independence (1954-62) in a wide variety of roles – from urban bomber to villagers in rural support networks – and who were in Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia, France or indeed Switzerland at the moment of, and in the months following, the Evian accords of March 1962 and independence in July of the same year. These interviews are contextualised by a survey of the contemporary press as well as published testimony and secondary sources. By engaging with the multiple meanings of 1962, the paper seeks to contribute to broader debates about colonial/ post-colonial periodisation, the interactions between discourses and lived experience (i.e. how discourses circulate and become part of the recounting of lived experience), and how to construct one’s sources for a period in which archives can be difficult to access and political debate has in many ways filled the gap left by a lack of historical research. Reference: Amin, S. (1995) Event, metaphor, memory: Chauri Chaura 1922-1992. Berkeley: University of California Press.