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The French Army and Muslim Women During the Algerian War (1954–62)
Abstract
This paper examines the itinerant women-only medical and social teams, created by the French army during the Algerian decolonisation war, which sought to instrumentalise and win over women through access to medical and social services. It is argued that the teams were instrumental in two significant events during the Algerian war: the public unveiling of Muslim women in May 1958 and the September 1958 referendum, in which Muslim women voted for the first time. This paper argues, however, that the teams' achievements were short lived and superficial and that the teams themselves faced severe limitations.
... Due to the role played by women in the context of the Algerian war, there have been numerous scholarships regarding the role of Algerian women both in the Front de Libération Nationale (National Liberation Front; FLN), and during the Battle of Algiers, as guerrilla warriors, acknowledging the importance of the role played by women. Even though less visible, an equally important role was played by rural women in helping by providing food, shelter, and medical care to the FLN's Armée de Libération Nationale (National Liberation Army; ALN) (Mortimer, 2018) (Seferdjeli, 2005). ...
... 39 Violence was not limited to women detainees identified as activists. More than one scholar of the Algerian war has concluded that, 'rape and sexual violence against Muslim women perpetrated by the French military reached appalling levels during the... war.' 40 In Kenya, British security forces often targeted women related to male Mau Mau fighters. Molly Wairimu and her baby son were awakened early one morning by soldiers breaking down the door. ...
This essay explores the contributions of women to decolonization struggles from the perspective both of women involved in anti-colonial movements and women who were part of the colonial authority structure. It argues that without a gendered analysis, our understanding of decolonisation remains partial, minimising women’s roles and replicating masculinist political structures.
Central to the goal of ‘hearts and minds’ counterinsurgency is the need for knowledge, understanding and influence in relation to local populations. Building on feminist scholarship on counterinsurgency, the article focuses on the ‘female engagement’ work undertaken by four programmes developed by the US military between 2003 and 2014. The article offers three key arguments. First, it maintains that the gendered subjectivities of Iraqi and Afghan women and US female counterinsurgents are constructed as strategic assets and as vulnerable subjects. Second, these programmes reveal the extent to which gendered counterinsurgency is constituted and regulated by emotional and embodied norms and rules for both female soldiers and civilians. Third, it suggests that the discursive construction of ‘winning hearts and minds’ works to render less visible the violence of gendered counterinsurgency practices. Although gendered counterinsurgency mobilizes a relational ontology predicated on the emotional labour required for developing knowledge of the Iraqi and Afghan ‘other’, female engagement activities cannot escape the logic of instrumental reasoning within which they are located. Ultimately, recognizing the policy of female engagement as central to forms of knowledge production reveals the extent to which the violences of war rely on a complex set of gendered and affective relations.
This conceptual paper critically analyses how the British Army exercises control over the production of knowledge about women’s war labour in ‘front line combat’ and how women exert agency to resist this. 2018 saw all British military roles opened to women, yet it is a myth to say that women are only now able to serve in ‘front line combat’. The paper reveals a complex negotiated gender order or ‘bargain’ between the British Army and servicewomen seeing the latter controlled through their co-option, embodied by compliant military femininities, whilst permitting them some agency to resist. Driven by military need, sustaining this ordering has repeatedly seen women exposed to unnecessary risk. This critical feminist history contributes to conceptual development through deconstructing gendered knowledge systems, arguing that foregrounding women’s voices is central to furthering the cultural turn in war studies.
British counterinsurgency thinking today remains strongly influenced by the Malaya Emergency (1948–1960) but little-known is the extensive women’s outreach program, pioneered by Lady Templer, involving the Women’s Institute and British Red Cross. Through discourse analysis of archival records, this article identifies four discourses characterizing British women’s participation, used, at the time, to make acceptable their presence whilst distancing them from the counterinsurgency campaign. By exploring how women’s presence has been negotiated and marginalized, I will reveal the blurred boundaries of counterinsurgency, questioning how the role of the counterinsurgent is constructed and sustained over time and for what purpose.
On 23 June 2019, seven Muslim women staged a protest at a swimming pool in Grenoble, France in defiance of rules prohibiting burkinis in swimming pools. French law 2010–1192 criminalizes the bodies of visibly Muslim women by prohibiting full-face coverings in French public space. This creates precarious bodies through law and facilitates an institutional Islamophobia, which I argue circulates in French society through a logic of hygiene. This logic of hygiene refers not merely to cleanliness but to the racial purity of the French republic. Law performs a dual cleansing role: it cleanses public space(s) of the presence of colonial markers and acts to displace colonial memory in France. This article traces the emergence of pro-ban feminist arguments supporting the criminalization of Islamic dress in France to a historical foundation of humiliation and cleanliness in post-WWII shavings of the hair of dissident French women. The article draws parallels with the forced uncovering of the hair of Muslim women in historical colonialism and in contemporary France to conceptualize hair as the patriarchal symbol of the French republic. Muslim women are made precarious through law's complicity with the hygiene and sterilization agendas of French coloniality and post-war capitalist modernization. The conclusion is that Muslim women are the site of the racial and gender differentiation necessary for the maintenance of the French republic.
This chapter explores the different stages of the war, from the National Liberation Front (FLN)’s first attacks on 1 November 1954 to Algerian independence in July 1962. The conflict was fought across three interconnected arenas. Firstly, this was a military confrontation, which took place both in Algeria and in mainland France. The chapter examines the FLN’s use of revolutionary warfare—urban and rural guerrilla units, embedded in local populations—and the French army’s response—including large-scale military operations, population displacement, psychological action and torture. Secondly, this was a war between two competing claims: ‘Algeria is France’ versus ‘Algeria is the FLN’. The chapter analyses French strategies to ‘win hearts and minds’ by extending political rights and investing in housing, education and healthcare. The FLN, meanwhile, built a state-within-a-state and aimed to influence French and international public opinion. Thirdly, then, the war was fought on the world stage and shaped by a shifting global context. The chapter locates Algeria within broader processes of decolonisation, discusses the role of the United Nations and explores how the FLN leveraged Cold War rivalries. Throughout, it examines the perspectives of different actors, underlining that this was not a straightforward confrontation between ‘the French’ and ‘the Algerians’.
This chapter provides an introduction to the relationship between gender and counterinsurgency. It demonstrates how gender dynamics are important to study as a means to fully understand the theory, doctrine and practice of counterinsurgency. It begins by explaining the core tenets of this form of warfare and its underlying colonial logics. Following this, it focuses in particular on recent ‘population-centric’ approaches to counterinsurgency in Iraq and Afghanistan, and discusses its various manifestations of military masculinities, emphasising ‘cultural sensitivity’ and the recent invention of Female Engagement Teams.
English-language historians have argued that the category of gender is particularly useful and relevant for understanding the violence of war,1 with rape now clearly identified as a ‘gendered war crime’.2 Very few French historians of the modern period, however, have examined past conflicts from a gender-based perspective. Still, times are changing and analyses of rape and sexual violence, and, more generally, a gender-based approach to wars are becoming less and less unusual in French historical studies.3
The article examines thirty years in the history of women, gender and sexualities in colonial Maghreb (1830-1962). The author emphasizes the essential contribution of gender and subaltern & colonial studies, while also offering a critical review of the advances, as well as the silences and resistances within the field. Five themes structure the analysis of the historiographic production between 1980 and the present - colonization, settlement and European women relationships between European women and indigenous women recontexualised orientalism sexualities in a colonial context women, men and war in colonial situations.
Virginia Woolf famously wrote 'as a woman I have no country', suggesting that women had little stake in defending countries where they are considered second-class citizens, and should instead be forces for peace. Yet women have been perpetrators as well as victims of violence in nationalist conflicts. This unique book generates insights into the role of gender in nationalist violence by examining feature films from a range of conflict zones. In The Battle of Algiers, female bombers destroy civilians while men dress in women's clothes to prevent the French army from capturing and torturing them. Prisoner of the Mountains shows a Chechen girl falling in love with her Russian captive as his mother tries to rescue him. Providing historical and political context to these and other films, Evangelista identifies the key role that economic decline plays in threatening masculine identity and provoking the misogynist violence that often accompanies nationalist wars.
Recent developments in the population engagement strategies associated with Operation Enduring Freedom and the International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan have led to the emergence of the Female Engagement Teams. These teams seek to provide
insight and intelligence while engendering American and ISAF efforts in the region, by utilizing female service members to actively engage and interact with the population. This thesis endeavors to answer the question of how the Female Engagement Teams
evolved around combat exclusion and whether, given the nature of the conflict in Afghanistan, they can serve to facilitate the missions of counterinsurgency and population engagement? This paper will serve as the beginning of the academic analysis of this concept and policy for potential use in future determinations by civilian and military leadership. Understanding of both the tribal networks wielded by women and their capacities to influence their world while still recognizing the given constraints and realities of gender seclusion are a necessity to truly exploit the human and cultural terrain in Afghanistan. The FETs despite the restrictions of combat exclusion seem the preeminent means by which to tap into this fountain of possibility.
In the middle of the Algerian War of Independence, the French military and government launched an elaborate campaign to ‘liberate’ Algerian Muslim women. The timing of its inception indicated one of the strongest motivations behind this elaborate series of policies. Indeed, French propagandists and officials, prompted by the appearance on the international stage of ‘modern’-looking female Algerian nationalist agents, scrambled to uphold the myth that Algerian Muslim gender relations in the territory were ‘backwards’ and only they could rectify this shortcoming in Algerian society. They consequently embarked upon the emancipation campaign mainly in pursuit of convincing outsiders of France's purported ability and duty to make Algeria ‘modern'. For this reason, the production of photographic evidence capable of visually demonstrating that Muslim women were becoming French and liberated under French guidance was one of the campaign's central aims. In order to obtain such evidence, military agents exploited and falsified representations of Muslim women, a process this article examines. The present work additionally elucidates many of the hypocrisies inherent in the French army's exploitation of Muslim women and their bodies through their elaborate propagandist efforts; through their actions on the ground in Algeria, French soldiers and military leaders, including individuals directly implicated in the ‘emancipation’ campaign, were actually confining, abusing, and torturing Muslim women rather than freeing them.
The article examines thirty years in the history of women, gender and sexualities in colonial Maghreb (1830-1962). The author emphasizes the essential contribution of gender and subaltern & colonial studies, while also offering a critical review of the advances, as well as the silences and resistances within the field. Five themes structure the analysis of the historiographic production between 1980 and the present - colonization, settlement and European women ; relationships between European women and indigenous women ; recontexualised orientalism ; sexualities in a colonial context ; women, men and war in colonial situations.
What French soldiers arriving in Algeria from 1954 to 1962 know almost nothing about this country. What they know about Algerian women is still less. Exotical images are often the only representation they have. The war will teach them something else: the complexity of relations with women encounters the image of a female ennemy.
The systematic practice of rape during the war in ex-Yugoslavia from 1991 - 1995 put this specific violence in the spotlight whereas it is too often considered as a universal collateral damage of wars. In the historical field, it has shaken up the view on war violence and brought about a certain reconsideration of this history. Historiography is making slow progress on this subject because of the difficulty of getting to the sources. During the Algerian war, French soldiers' rape of Algerian women is beginning to be studied. While they are partially the reflection of women's active commitment in this conflict, they are nevertheless especially the reflection of the balance of power that characterized this war : relations within the Algerian society as well as between the fighters on the opposing sides. The study of the gestures, the way they were carried out, the actors, their eventual punishment and the consequences provides a more precise look on the logics what were at work in this war.
This article analyses the different measures the French authorities took to ‘encourage’ Muslim women's emancipation during the Algerian war. The study also looks at the political careers of three Muslim women promoted by the French authorities, one of whom was appointed the first Muslim female Secretary of State in General de Gaulle's government of 1958–62. The involvement of women in the war, as well as the events of May 1958 and the policy of integration promoted by the French during the war, prompted the French to initiate a series of measures – as part of their war strategy – aimed specifically at women in order to win them over. This article argues, however, that the measures had little effect.