Our Fighting Sisters: Nation, Memory, and Gender in Algeria, 1854–2012 by Natalya Vince (review)

Natalya Vince's award-winning study of Algerian women war veterans is an important reflection on gender and memory in the history of modern Algeria. Recognizing the centrality of the Algeria War of Independence (1954–62) on modern state building, national identity formation, and historical study, Vince seeks both to situate the experiences of the war years as continuities, not ruptures, and to go beyond violent conflict in the narration of postcolonial Algeria. Toward these ends Vince offers an analysis of "vernacular memory" to explicate the terrain between individual and collective memory (9). Vince juxtaposes nationalist celebrations and commemorations of women freedom fighters, who are neither completely forgotten nor fully remembered, within the "glorified national history" sanctifying the anticolonial struggle with women's variegated trajectories to counter the presumption that women's rights have gone precipitously downhill since 1962 (3).

At the heart of Vince's study are interviews with twenty-seven women active during the War of Independence. These are supplemented by National Liberation Front (FLN) documents, memoirs, newspaper accounts, and occasional references to cinema and fiction in a careful consideration of their relation to the state and nationalist ideals. Vince balances the experiences of the largely Francophone, urban, professional women with a handful of Tamazight-speaking rural women, allowing her to articulate how socioeconomics and education have helped shape these women's experiences and memories. The former includes European women who fought with the FLN and later took Algerian citizenship. Acknowledging the absence of a predominantly Arabophone majority, Vince urges readers to question the notion of one single representative image of an "authentic" Algerian identity. Despite the diversity of these women's postwar trajectories, and what appear on the surface to be conflicting interpretations, they use similar language and reference points in "a malleable set of codes through which political debate can be conducted without undermining the social importance of the War of Independence as the foundation of Algerian society" (9).

The contributions of women to the nationalist struggle, whether they served as nurses among guerrilla units, participated in Algiers's bomb network, worked in orphanages and hospitals in Morocco and Tunisia, or fed and sheltered combatants in the rural hinterlands, were the starting point of the oral histories they shared with Vince. Their involvement was spurred by family networks and education, and many remembered a desire to "fight for freedom, equality and socio-economic redistribution" as opposed to specifically feminist platforms (77). Just as the FLN touted women's activism to cultivate broader domestic and international support for the nationalist cause, strategically deploying the "woman question" (and Vince teases out the gap between FLN policy directives and practices), the women Vince spoke with referenced, appropriated, and challenged official stereotypes for their own purposes.

Vince offers compelling evidence for framing the war years in terms of continuities as opposed to either a revolutionary transformation or failed promises. As her case studies illustrate, urban women, many of them high school and university students prior to the war, were much better situated to benefit from professional opportunities (in nursing, journalism, and government administration) and to claim war pensions than their illiterate, rural counterparts. In addition, her urban interviewees were more likely to have been individually acknowledged and rewarded through commemorative acts such as official portraits and state honors, whereas rural women were recognized only as an anonymous collective group. Highlighting rural-urban and educational divides among women combatants contributes to explaining how their memories of 1962 are informed by "anxieties about their own political legitimacy and relationship to power" (106).

Vince's strength and originality lie in her analysis of postwar state building and development, women's relationship to the FLN, and a gendered analysis of debates seeking to "regulate the public and private spheres in a way that would enable the newly independent nation to (re)define the boundaries of the imagined community" (143). Tracing shifting government discourses about women's rights and public...