Workshops of Empire Rural Women’s Artisanry in Interwar Colonial Algeria

Abstract

The French colonial state created an increasing number of artisanal training workshops for rural Algerian women during the interwar period. In earlier eras, some similar workshops had been managed and run by individual settler women or religious groups, but a new model of state control over these workshops emerged in the 1920s and 1930s. Throughout the French colonial project in Algeria, the state had resisted working to improve Algerian women’s status, claiming that to do so risked provoking the ire of Algerian men. This article examines the brief interwar moment in which the colonial state targeted Algerian women. It draws on an underexamined archival source base from both Algeria and France to explore how administrators used workshops to transform rural Algerian women into waged workers and inculcate them with French culture. Women’s workshops were thus at the intersection of multiple state projects, including racial capitalism.