In some rural areas of Tunisia, especially in the northwestern highlands of Béja Governorate (100 kilometers from Tunis), women are the main providers for their families.
As a social costum in rural areas, men tradtionally provide for their women out of religious duties as well as for legal and social regulations. Customs require that men are the breadwinners while women run the household and occasionally work for extra income.
In Béja, everything is different.
Male couch potatoes
In some rural areas of Tunisia, especially in the northwestern highlands of Béja Governorate (100 kilometers from Tunis), women are the main providers for their families.
As a social costum in rural areas, men tradtionally provide for their women out of religious duties as well as for legal and social regulations. Customs require that men are the breadwinners while women run the household and occasionally work for extra income.
In Béja, everything is different.
Male couch potatoes
Women in rural Béja, in areas such as Skhounah, Makhchbiah, Mgraoh, Qusa, Shaar Mountain and others, are required to provide for their families, including their husbands. Nevertheless, women maintain their housekeeping roles like cooking, cleaning and raising children, whereas husbands spend their time playing cards and drinking tea in small gatherings in shops in winter or under trees in summer.
Hana, a 26-year-old woman who has been married for two years and has one child, says she quit school when she was only 14. Her mother trained her to be a housewife when she was little and she learned and mastered all kinds of agricultural jobs, such as olive harvesting, pasturing, weed removal from garlic and sunflower farms, etc.
Hana’s situation is not unusual in her village. Very few girls continue their education whereas the rest, like their precedents and relatives, join the seasonal farm work and participate with their mothers in providing for their families. Hana’s wage differs according to seasons but it does not exceed 15 Dinars, nearly USD$10 per day.
Hana says she starts her day at 5 a.m., considering that her employer transfers her and her colleagues from their residence to his farm at 6:30 in a truck. She returns home at 5 p.m. to begin her second round of work at home.
The young wife confirms that her husband spends his day moving between villages either to perform some light work for a low wage that he saves for his private expenses, or chattering with his peers at the neighborhood shop.
However, she does not perceive this as unusual since she was raised with these customs although she believes that it is time to change this mentality “since the high cost of living necessitates the man’s participation in supporting his family.”
Restless life
Although she is only 40, Fatima has a face full of wrinkles. She began working at an early age when she used to help her mother smooth clay and make traditional pottery while her peers in the city were enjoying their childhood.
Fatima stresses that she has not enjoyed a single day of rest. She and her mother and sister were providing for an eight-member family after she insisted that her other sisters should continue their education. “My father,” explains Fatima, “used to only bring the clay that my mother used from the mountain or sell the products at the weekly market every Tuesday.”
Fatima says she is not an exception; she is one of hundreds of women meant for “wretchedness” whether in the countryside or in the city. She adds that her friends who moved to the city work as maids.
The painful fact, she says, is that rural women are exploited at all levels since their wage is not commensurate with the required jobs. Furthermore, few employers commit to social security laws, which makes women work their entire lives with no guarantees that allow them to enjoy retirement compensation or a medical insurance system.
Fatima’s mother, Aysha, says she witnessed three generations during which she observed the evolution of rural social life. When she was young, most women helped men carry out peasant work and spent their remaining time performing household duties. But during the 1970s and with the beginning of the collaboration experience of Tunisia (a socialist experience adopted after the independence that did not last long), the social hierarchy in rural areas “turned upside down.”
During the 1970s, men abandoned agriculture and moved to the industrial and coastal cities in search of higher wages. Consequently, women found themselves compelled to preserve the land and were gradually transformed, over a forty-year period, from partners to performers. In contrast, the man’s role has diminished and women have become experienced in all fields and become their breadwinners.
Victims of development policy
Social psychologist Professor Snim Ben Abdullah interprets this “phenomenon” as an outcome of the incorrect development policy, which has emptied rural areas from their content and marginalized the agricultural sector, compelling males to abandon rural areas, either to work at the industrial and coastal cities or retire from work due to low agricultural incomes deemed demeaning and undignified to men. Consequently, women, according to Abdullah, found themselves compelled to perform men’s jobs. Thus, women have become free in terms of finance and subsesequent decision-making even though the rural costums obligate them to be obedient to men in the smallest details of their lives.
Abdullah also attributes this phenomenon to the encouragement of the developmental associations, which grant women small loans for they are “more serious at work and more committed to paying installments and thus are put ahead of men in economic participation.”
