The Colonial 'Emancipation' of Algerian Women: The Marriage Law of 1959 and the Failure of Legislation on Women's Rights in the Post-Independence Era

Abstract

The failure of the newly independent Algerian state, after a long war of decolonization in which women played a major role, to introduce progressive reform to women’s legal, and thus social, status is widely recognized. The article explores a neglected aspect of this problematic by showing that binary perceptions of a radical colonial/post-colonial hiatus can be misleading. Through a focus on the reform of marriage and family law, it is shown that both colonial and post-Independence states proved weak and ineffective in the face of the entrenched power of patriarchal family structures and ideology. Algerian post-independence nationalist and feminist discourse tended to be structured in relation to the manichaean opposition between the 130 year regime of colonial violence and repression and the post-colonial liberated order that, it was imagined, would sweep away all the structures of the ancien regime. This included the forms of domination that had affected women, from alienation of land rights and dislocation of family structures to endemic poverty and prostitution. However, French colonialism in its terminal phase was highly ambiguous and Janus-faced since it was simultaneously extremely violent and repressive towards Algerian women (destruction of villages, torture, rape…) and reformist, enunciating a significant body of liberal “emancipation” measures, 1 particularly in regard

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