Tunisia has been one of the Islamic countries that has developed stronger legislation favorable to the emancipation of women. The fundamental architect of this policy was a key figure in the history of Tunisia in the twentieth century: Habib Burgiba. Nevertheless, the emancipatory discourse was already present in the work of earlier reformist thinkers such as Tahar Haddad.
This research aims precisely to examine what were the roots, the fundamental axes and the main achievements of this policy of emancipation. In the same way, we also try to analyze how this emancipatory discourse of women coexisted with the traditional cultural representation of women in the Arab world.
Based on an exhaustive research work in archives and libraries in Tunisia, I studied the policy of female emancipation undertaken by Habib Burguiba in the period immediately after the independence of Tunisia, when he was still Prime Minister (1956-1957), and continued later during his long term as President of the Republic (1957-1987) from the historiographical perspective of gender discourse and cultural representation.
The thesis that I support, as indicated by the subtitle, consists in the survival of the traditional cultural representation of the Arab-Islamic woman that underlies the paradox, modern and emancipating gender discourse with which Burguiba justified the Tunisian citizens as a whole. the emancipation policy of the Tunisian-Muslim woman that he was developing through legal or legal means.
