One of the puzzles that faced French colonization in Tunisia was the inaccessibility of Tunisian women to the French man’s gaze. In order to break this barrier between colonizer and colonized, periodicals offered a forum for both sides to express their viewpoints and display their opposing agendas. From the French point of view, Tunisian women were in need of feminism to liberate them. The example of the French doctor Charles Lemanski’s article “La psychologie de la femme Arabe: la pudeur” (1899) demonstrates the negative portrayal of “the Arab woman” or “the Muslim woman” who stands in binary opposition to the superior French/Christian woman. Lemanski refers to Tunisian women as “les éternelles invisibles” (The eternally invisible). The women’s literary periodical Leïla (1936-1941) proves that this “invisibility” is a colonial shaming mechanism and a myth at its best. Applying Leila Ahmad’s notion of “colonial feminism,” this article argues that Tunisians made use of the periodical Leïla to respond to the process of shaming that the French undertook in order to inflict guilt upon men and women for their traditionalism carried out through women’s bodies and the fact that gender constructs did not conform to those of the dominant imperialist culture. Using Mary Louise Pratt’s notions of “Imperial eyes” I argue that Tunisians employed the veil to counter the shaming orientalist discourse of the French, which made use of colonial feminism to further serve their imperialist project. The resistance and resentment of Tunisians to the shaming of women through colonial feminism comes forward when Tahar Haddad, considered the pillar of Tunisian modern feminism after independence, is attacked for his book Imra’atuna fī al-sharī‘a wa al-mujtama‘ (Our women in Sharia and Society) which appeared in 1930, after the 1929 debates regarding the veil. This work was contentious to the point that Haddad was dismissed from the Zeïtuna religious establishment. I contend that the nationalist state-sponsored Bourguibian feminist model put forth after independence, mirrors the internalization of colonial shaming as it covertly linked the veil to lower-class rural women. As a modernist/feminist state-sponsored discourse was promoted through Faïza (1959-1967) for example, the internalization of the shaming practices are covertly present as the veil becomes synonymous with backwardness. A close examination of the women’s periodical gives evidence of how Tunisian feminist modernity rooted itself in colonial feminism. Tunisian “modern” women resembled their French “sisters” as portrayed in texts and images.