Tunisia: “A woman is no complement, she is everything”

Tunisia, once hailed as one of the region’s women’s rights trailblazers, is now a country in which many women are beginning to fear for the future of their daughters. 

An estimated 6000 women marched through Tunis on Monday to protest against the possibility of changes to the Tunisian constitution that, they fear, would relegate the status of women in the country.

While the Ennahda party, which formed a coalition government in October 2011, has rejected the idea that the constitution would be harmful to the attainment and protection of gender equality; women are rejecting the government’s draft proposal that the constitution includes a stipulation that women are to be “complementary to men” and are demanding that the 1956 law that had granted women and men equality remains in place.

Carrying a placard reading “A woman is no complement, she is everything”, one of the men who turned out to support women in their protest, Sami Layouni, declared “We are here to support women and to say there are men who stand for women’s rights… We are proud of Tunisian women … and we will not let Islamists turn our spring into a winter”.