Algerian women and political choice [Ressource électronique] : a time of transition

The article focuses on the condition of Algerian women. Currently, Algerian women are facing a major crisis. In a complex and changing political environment, the status of women is at stake, threatened by conservative forces associated with Islam, which are likely to win in Algeria's forthcoming multi-party elections. In 1989, after the coming of the multiparty system and freedom of association, the feminist movement in Algeria became legal. Its objective was to fight for women's rights, and their opportunity for employment, and against the obstacles to women's education, and to improve the status of women within the family, especially given the huge inequality brought about by the family code adopted in 1984. The transition to democracy in Algeria has suffered, and continues to suffer, from ambiguities in the nationalist approach to the demands of modernity along Western lines, and the place of Islam and universal law in the move towards this modernity. The question of political choice for Algerian women today is inseparable from the question of democracy and the problems of achieving it; it is also bound up with the question of equality between men and women, which is less an issue of the public sphere than of the private domain.