This chapter focuses on the political meanings of state feminism. It begins with an overview of the state’s vision of gender roles and the modern family as concretized in postcolonial legislation. Women’s rights were an aspect of state-building, political centralization, and foreign policy. The national women’s union and the women’s press (the magazines Al-Mar’a, Femme, and Faiza) engaged with and transformed the hegemonic discourses of modern womanhood. The women’s press contributed to wider conversations about postcolonial culture through its attention to women across the Middle East and around the world. Middle-class women, often urban and educated, embodied modern womanhood as they participated in national politics and diplomacy. In the heightened political contexts of Afro-Asian solidarity and Cold War rivalries, women’s allegiances were matters of global political importance. Tunisian women were simultaneously recruited to bolster their nation’s alliance with the United States and improve its reputation among Arab and Middle Eastern nations. Though forced to contend with the hegemonic articulations of liberal state feminism, Tunisian women’s participation in international solidarity networks represented a wide array of feminist positionalities that transcended the parameters of state control and official ideology.

Aware that studies of gender relations include both the world of women and that of men, this chapter examines them primarily from women’s perspective, as they command a numerical majority of the Japanese population while forming a sociological minority subject to various forms of gender discrimination. In international comparison, the World Economic Forum reports that the gender gap in Japan is exceptionally vast, ranking one hundred twenty-first out of one hundred fifty-three countries, well behind the Philippines, China, and South Korea, and in last place among major advanced economies. To understand Japanese society, women’s situations and voices must be given priority and studied in depth with a critical eye.