Feminist Mediations of the Exotic: French Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia, 1921–39

Abstract

In a 1935 issue of the feminist newspaper La Française, Huguette Champy complained that 'the French woman living in the colonies sometimes has what one calls "bad press"; she is too readily criticised for her taste for pleasures, and for her easy-looking life'. 1 The multiple meanings associated with 'pleasure' -including its sensual as well as its bon vivant dimensions -were intentional, for overseas territories had a powerful hold upon the French imagination. Popular culture and the press played upon established preconceptions when they sensationalised colonised women from all over the empire, but the full extent of colonialism's seductive embrace is exposed by the manner in which French women who inhabited overseas spaces were folded into the exotic mould alongside their colonised sisters. 2 Thus, whereas metropolitans presumed that life away from mainland France was a decadent and indolent one, French women who settled there insisted that their life was an exhausting but vital service to the nation. 3 During the interwar years, exotic was a multidimensional term. 4 It denoted adventure, travel and danger but also contained distinctly sexual and sensual dimensions. Through all its variations, however, exoticism was often linked with both colonised and colonising women. When applied to the southern shores of the Mediterranean, it was associated with two strongholds of European fantasies: the harem and the veil. 5 These tropes, and hence presumptions regarding Arab and Berber women, crept not only into colonial novels but also to the forefront of French feminists' concerns with respect to the role they could play overseas. 6 The imaginary and real-life experience of colonialism collided for French women who lived in, or travelled to, predominantly Muslim territories under French control in North Africa, including the French départements in Algeria and the protectorates of Morocco and Tunisia. In turn, journalists and novelists among them helped to mediate the North African colonial setting through the printed word for female metropolitan audiences. This article investigates how French women who were associated with the Union Française pour le Suffrage des Femmes (French Union for Women's Suffrage, UFSF), or its newspaper, La Française, came to terms with their North African counterparts in three different media: newspaper articles, novels and correspondence. The degree to which these means of communication were public, the ends for which they were intended and the extent to which the women using them were primarily based

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