Contenu du sommaire : Femmes africaines et mobilisations collectives (années 1940-1970)

Macoucou in Beijing. The International Arena : A Political Resource for African Women in the 1940s and 1950sUntil now, the struggles against colonial domination in the 1940s and 1950s have primarily been analysed as a face-to-face confrontation between the metropoles and their colonies. This paper proposes a change in scale and analytical angle, by focusing on how African women combined the imperatives of national liberation and internationalism, and used the international arena to structure their local struggles, as well as to circumvent male domination and cope with repression by the French. More precisely, the aim is to trace the history of contacts and exchanges between women from French West Africa (women from Côte d'Ivoire, Senegal and Mali, among other countries) and the Women's International Democratic Federation (WIDF), founded in Paris in 1945. The WIDF is still not very well known, but it was the largest international women's organisation in the 1950s in terms of the number of members. Based on colonial archives, the WIDF's monthly newsletter and published testimonials, we investigate the influence that the WIDF may have had on African women and especially the use that they made of their ties with the federation in order to organise women's militant sections that were autonomous but dependent on the men of the Rassemblement démocratique africain (RDA), the African Democratic Assembly, which was the main opposition party to the colonial authorities at the time. This paper deciphers the presence of these women in the WIDF's international congresses, their modes of action, and the references and values that they adhered to. It applies a threefold perspective of the history of women and gender, transnational history and connected history.

‘I Would Have Liked to Be a Bomb to Explode.' Algerian Women Communist Militants, between Assigned Gender Roles and Subversion of Gender Roles (1944-1962)Following on recent research about the history of gender in colonial Algeria, this article focuses on the experiences of Algerian women communist militants, from the creation of the Union des Femmes d'Algérie in 1944 until Algerian independence in 1962. The Algerian Communist Party and its ‘mass' women's organisations are an excellent field of study to understand how women militants adapted to or subverted the gender roles produced by various social actors. Yet studying these groups also enables us to investigate the interaction between activism and the specific gender and racial social relations in Colonial Algerian society. Communism was the political movement that grouped together the largest number of women in Algeria in the decade after the Second World War, and it was the main space for political and sentimental interactions between men and women outside the legal and racial barriers of colonial society. This created a different series of issues within the ranks of Algerian communists than the issues faced by communists in Europe.

The Chatouilleuses Movement : Gender and Violence in Political Action in Mayotte (1966-1976)A symbol of the fight for Mayotte to maintain its ties to France, tickle torture was a form of collective action invented by women from Mayotte in 1966 after one of the members of the territorial authorities showed them a lack of respect. Inversing the typical relationship of domination, tickle torture is an example of an act of violence perpetrated by women against men. This form of violence could also target women who were opposed to the political views of the ‘chatouilleuses' (ticklers), who were protesting against the transfer of the capital to Moroni on the island of Grande Comore and who were defending the conversion of Mayotte into a French département. As a euphemism, the term ‘tickling' contributed to covering up the violence perpetrated by these women and by the men that were their allies. It was also representative of the actions by women militants of the MPM (Mahoré People's Movement), which became a repressive protest movement.

Women's Mobilisations in French Cameroon in the 1940s-1950s : The Gender Order and Colonial Order FracturedDuring the decade after the Second World War, French Cameroon – like all the territories in the French colonial empire – experienced a social and political effervescence. This was reflected in mobilisations by Cameroonian women and rising nationalist claims, faced with the insufficiency of the political and social reforms. This paper examines how, by becoming involved in a political landscape dominated by men, Cameroonian women attempted to make their voices heard by organising to defend their own interests. The analysis of the foundations of women's mobilisations in Cameroon casts light on the duality governing women's presence on the political scene in a colonial context. To a certain degree, their approach expanded on the dominant social imaginary, highlighting domestic values in order to justify women intervening on the political stage. However, women's mobilisations also aimed to defend a specific agenda for women, as well as the emergence of a new social imaginary governed by equality between the sexes.

When Local Women Activists ‘Act Tough'. Gender and Political Violence at the Turn of Independence in French SudanAlthough the decolonisation of Francophone West Africa is regarded as a ‘peaceful' process, compared with the national liberation wars, it generated many conflicts with the colonial administration, as well as between the various partisan organisations created in the colonies just after the Second World War. Based on the example of French Sudan (present-day Mali), this article analyses the street action of women from working class backgrounds (farmers, ‘housewives', shopkeepers and traditional midwives or ‘matrones') and their participation in the political violence of the decade. Investigated from a gender perspective, these women's participation in violent urban conflicts went against gender stereotypes. Thus, an analysis of how women used the streets enables us to consider in a different light the dichotomies between public/private spaces ; political/domestic activities, as these prove to be not very useful for understanding the ways that women became engaged and their progression to collective action. Completely opposite to the maternal and peaceful femininity promoted by the organisations of educated women and by nationalist leaders, the working class women discussed in this article took on roles that were regarded as manly because they were violent and provocative. But should these women's participation in street violence be interpreted as a transgression, or even a muddling of gender roles ? How could the relationship with violence and the representations attached to women's violence vary according to social class ? The political division of activist work was also derived from gender, age and class categories. By giving working class women the tasks of mobilising, recruiting, propagandising and controlling crucial parts of their districts, the political organisations propelled them to the forefront of confrontation. A gendered interpretation of the phenomena of violence in collective action, interconnected with an analysis of the embedding of partisan confrontation in these women's daily lives, enables us to reconstruct the complexity of the decolonisation process in French Sudan.

The Faces of Emancipation : The Action of Messalist Women during the Algerian Revolution
The Algerian revolution illustrates a particular type of revolution, the woman-in-the-family model, which excluded or marginalised women from the process of defining and building independence, liberation and freedom. This categorisation corresponded quite closely to the dominant ideology of Messali Hadj's partisans, whose activities and newspapers promoted a differentialist feminism, anchored in the Arabo-Islamic tradition and with a charitable dimension. In response to the outbreak of armed combat and colonialist propaganda that emphasised women's emancipation, the context became favourable to a redefinition of the role assigned to Muslim Algerian women. This phenomenon, which we will investigate in terms of the conditions for its emergence and its scope, was stronger among Algerian emigrants in France, and found its institutional framework in the short-lived Messalist union, the Union des syndicats de travailleurs algériens (USTA). These union members were just as preoccupied by women's emancipation as by national independence or workers' demands, and they enabled the Messalist movement to show faces that were acceptable for its French interlocutors and to distinguish itself from its rival, the National Liberation Front (FLN).

Gender Making and National Meaning in Young Christian Organisations in Cameroon (1940s-1950s)While scholarship on Africa at the end of empire has tended to focus on the evolution of notions of citizenship and demands for national political inclusion in the years following the end of the Second World War, the vibrancy and widespread influence of the Christian churches in France's African territories, particularly in Cameroon, demonstrates that Africans also expressed solidarities with communities both above and below the nation-state. The history of political anti-colonialism and syndicalism in Africa has heretofore neglected the contributions of religion to national meaning making in the last decades of colonial rule, and its secular focus has failed to perceive how religion mediated the costs and benefits of political modernity and national sovereignty, critically underpinning much cultural life that gave shape to various kinds of mass politics at the end of empire. This article demonstrates how African women in the Catholic and Protestant Churches in Cameroon presented an image of social and cultural continuity in the midst of political and economic disruption and articulated an alternative platform of human rights and national liberation from that of the anti-colonial political parties. In doing so, devout African women in laity and in consecrated orders inserted themselves into the revolutionary aspect of nationalism by promoting a conservative vision of pious, educated society that would ensure social and moral progress, not only political liberty.

Over the course of a century : recollections and historical reflections (1916s-2016s)This interview details and connects four lives, from 1916 to 2016. A professional career : from being a daughter of two workers to being a university professor. A woman's life : free, beyond all conventions, actively supporting women's cause. Multiple commitments : in the French Resistance, without weapons, in the French Communist Party, without discipline, in the Union of French Women (UFF) then in the CGT, with energy. The works of a major historian, either in writing or in film : about workers, work and trade-unionism, about women, about Jaurès and thus politics, about wars, and the French Resistance. This interview is followed by a filmography and an audiography.