Gender politics scholars argue that women's political participation temporarily increases during political transitions, but conservatives and nationalists marginalize women over time and their participation declines. In Tunisia, women participated in the 2010-2011 Arab Spring and sustained their political participation through activism for at least a decade after. Social movement scholars either focus on coalitions in stable and mature democracies or under authoritarianism. Less is known about coalition dynamics during political transitions. Drawing on interviews with secular feminists, state officials and international actors and textual data, I show how secular women with little to no experience with activism created two small secular feminist organizations (Femmes et Leadership and LET) that remained active throughout the transition. They did so by (1) drawing on state feminist ideals and (2) joining feminist coalitions that prevented backsliding on women's rights. This article is one of the first and only to focus on novice organizations that emerged during the transition in Tunisia. It has implications for social movement studies and gender politics beyond Tunisia and the Arab world.

This article analyzes the efforts of ordinary women to frame the Hijab (Veil) ban under the former autocratic regime of Ben Ali, also known as Circular 108, as a women's rights violation through mobilizing Tunisia's process of transitional justice. Women's headscarves –known as hijabs– were not only portrayed as traditional and sectarian symbols by secular state elites throughout Tunisia’s postcolonial history, but they were also outright banned in all state institutions, including schools and universities. The first restrictions on the veil were introduced in 1981 under Tunisia’s first president Bourguiba, but Ben Ali extended this policy under other circulars in 1991-1992, introducing a complete national ban on wearing the veil in all state-run educational institutions. The government further widened the official state ban on the veil in 2003, forbidding female civil servants working in the public health sector from wearing any form of the Hijab. Circular 108, and its various applications, adversely affected the lives of thousands of ordinary Tunisian women in critical ways. Women who wore the Hijab were expelled in their thousands from government universities and schools, harassed by the police on the streets, frequently summoned to the police stations, and excluded from many areas of the labor market, as mentioned above. The topic of the Hijab ban remained virtually off the limits of public discussion until the 2011 Jasmine revolution. Based on qualitative fieldwork including forty in-depth interviews with ordinary women, ethnographic observation of the work of the Truth and Dignity Commission (TDC), and content analysis of the Tunisian media, this article contributes to scholarship on feminist politics in post-revolutionary Tunisia in three ways. First, it documents the complex terrain of women's repertoires of resistance against Circular 108, demonstrating how their lived experiences trouble the official narrative of Tunisia's edifice of state-sponsored feminism by highlighting how it oppressed thousands of Tunisian women. Second, it reveals how the Hijab ban, and its contemporary afterlives constituted a dynamic field of feminist contention that shifted over time and in response to changes in women's web of social relations and networks of support. Finally, the findings directly challenge the religious versus secular conceptual binary that dominated earlier scholarship on women's rights in post-revolutionary Tunisia, confirming the urgent need for more nuanced, intersectional analyses of the field of contemporary feminist politics, as emphasized by recent scholarship.

WOMEN’S ASSOCIATIONS IN TUNISIA TODAY In the early years after independence, women’s associations were few and tightly controlled. There was only the General Union of Tunisian Women (UNFT) officially created by the President. In 1989, Ben Ali allowed two autonomous women’s Organizations, AFTURD and ATFD to receive legal recognition, but severely restricted their activities. After the Arab Spring, the number of women’s organizations exploded to as many as 300, specializing in different activities. They approach taboo topics like sexual harassment at home, in the street, or at the workplace. Despite the gains achieved before and after the Arab Spring, Tunisian women have not realized the equality they had been striving for. The appointment of a woman, Najla Bouden as Prime Minister (11 October 2021-1 August 2023), a first in the history of the country, did not add anything to women’s rights. Women made no gains following that nomination. Indeed, there has been a drastic decline in the number of women parliamentarians, representing about 16% in the newly elected Parliament, against 26% and 31% in 2014 and 2018. Women’s associations today continue to work on women’s issues, however. The theme of violence against women (VAW) has been a particular focus. Before the Arab Spring, men and women could be arrested for wearing a hijab, but after the Arab Spring, women and men could be arrested for being in the company of foreigners. All of these women’s organizations have been asking for recognition of their human rights as a principle, to equality, to freedom of choice, to protection against violence in public places, at home, and in the workplace. More recently, at least since 2023, human rights activists and politicians have been arrested or threatened with being arrested. LGBT people can also be arrested but, even though homosexuality remains illegal, the number of LGBT organizations has increased: DAMJ (2002), MAWJOUDIN (2014), CHOUF that registered abroad in 2012 and became Tunisian in 2015. Meanwhile, AFTURD and ATFD have continued to work, enlarging their activities by joining other organizations like recently the Associative National Coalition of Struggle Against Violence Against Women (CNAV), Every Woman Treaty, and EuroMed Rights.

With reforms spanning over more than a half-century, Tunisia has been a leading country in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) in regard to family law and women’s rights. Today, it continues to stand at the forefront of the modern Muslim Middle East in this respect. In accounting for the expansion of women’s rights that became the hallmark of Tunisia, previous research emphasized state feminism, or top-down interventions by the state to reform Islamic family law. These interventions did indeed shape the trajectory of women’s rights in the country from the mid 1950s to today. It will not suffice, however, to suggest that the position of Tunisia in the Arab world in regard to women’s rights today results from a history of state actions alone. Since the Arab Spring, Tunisia has witnessed the explosion of women’s agency in the form of associations that have actively pursued greater gender equity. Yet, even though several of these associations engaged in gender advocacy following the Arab Spring, they did not do so equally. I argue that one particular group was critical in spearheading the call for greater gender equity after the collapse of authoritarianism. That group was the network of secular feminists known as the Association Tunisienne des Femmes Democrates (Association of Tunisian Women Democrats), known internationally by its French acronym, ATFD. The group played a key role in the inclusion of gender equity in the 2014 Constitution, a major step in promoting women’s rights in the country. A salient point in the recent history of Tunisia is that this group, which came together first as an informal network of like-minded feminists, survived authoritarianism. It became a leading voice for women’s rights after the collapse of authoritarian brought at the same time an opening of the political space and a growing Islamist presence. Using a path analysis framework, this paper suggests that the seeds of feminist advocacy developed alongside state feminism from the 1980s onward. Even though it was not there in the 1950s when the initial top-down reforms were initiated, associational feminism grew starting in the 1980s to become part of the post Arab Spring discourse after 2011. This analysis leads us to rethink top down and bottom-up approaches to women’s rights.