Troubling Mothers: Immigrant Women from Africa in France

This outrageous statement uttered by a French elected official (the Mayor of Paris at the time) did not, like the recent comments of Senator Trent Lott in the United States, lead to his resignation from public office. Quite the contrary, in spite of the polemic the statement generated, Jacques Chirac not only retained his position but also went on to pursue his political career¹ and to become the President of the French Republic in 1995. Jacques Chirac's successful run for office in the aftermath of his infamous "noise and smell" comment is telling in itself and warrants further analysis. Among other things, it highlights the deep contradictions (and hypocrisy) embedded within French politics and evokes what some commentators describe as the lingering blemish of French republican racism.² In this paper, however, I want to focus on something else. Rather than analyzing Jacques Chirac's fate in French politics, I want to focus on a key, if evanescent character in the "noise and smell" story. Indeed, I want to zoom in on a background but extremely potent figure: namely the African Mother in the French-immigration-problem narrative evoked by Jacques Chirac in 1991.

Let me begin by pointing out that, at first glance, Jacques Chirac's story opposes two male characters. The African immigrant and the French citizen who are locked in a close but conflicted relationship that gradually, and dramatically pushes the French guy to the verge of madness. These two male characters, however, are cast in a very different light. The French citizen who only appears at the end of the story when he "loses his mind" is cast as a French worker (travailleur Français). So the French citizen evoked here is clearly established as a French national (he is French/c'est un Français) but he is also clearly portrayed as a productive member of French society (he is a worker/c'est un travailleur). The African immigrant, however, is never clearly named as such but rather is evoked through a series of linguistic and imaginary linkages.

The scene opens with the two words "the father." The generic kinship category used to introduce the African immigrant in the story serves at least two purposes. First, it locates him in the realm of family and settlement immigration. In contradistinction to the single male migrant worker (le travailleur immigré) emblematic of the 1960s and 1970s, the immigrant presented in the "noise and smell" story is someone who is not in France alone but who has brought wife and children along. Not a temporary "guest" any longer, he is here to stay. Second, the "father" who opens the story is opposed to the "worker" who closes it. By contrasting a kinship category to an economic one, Jacques Chirac's scenario introduces a variation on the theme of immigration-as-economic-threat.

The economic threat invoked here is not so much that the African immigrant will compete with the French worker in the labor market even though that threat has not fully disappeared in the French collective imaginary. Far right political parties and their leaders still bank, and score political points, on the spurious connections they make between rising French unemployment figures and unbridled immigration. Rather, it is the fact that the immigrant father is collecting welfare benefits "without working." So, Jacques Chirac's script, in fact, opposes the French worker to the non-French immigrant welfare recipient who drains the resources of the French state without contributing anything: "it goes without saying!"

Moreover, the unproductive-welfare-recipient-father lives "in cramped quarters with three or four wives and some twenty kids." The binary pair set up here is that of the large unproductive African polygamous family versus the French productive monogamous nuclear family. So, while the African wife and mother is an apparition in the "noise and smell" script, she is, of course, fundamental to the perverse logic of the narrative. It is because she/they are here in France that the face of immigration has fundamentally changed and has become so problematic! It is indeed these African mothers who give birth to 5-7 children (compared to the 1.8 figure for French women)³ who enable the immigrant father to collect so much Aid to Family Allocations (allocations familliales) and other welfare benefits. It is because she/they do not come alone but in twos and threes that France now has a "polygamy problem" on its hands. It is also because she/they are not acquainted with the refinements of French culture and cooking that unsavory "smells" emerge from her/their kitchens. Finally, it is because she/they cannot control their children that raucous sounds disturb French peace and public order. Would it be too far fetched here to suggest, as I have elsewhere, that on a symbolic level it is precisely because she/they are here that the French social order (civilization?) is perceived to be under threat and that madness emerges as the grim but inescapable denouement of Jacques Chirac's narrative?⁴

In the first two sections of this paper, I look at the various ways in which immigrant women have indeed been located in the French imaginary, social, and legal landscapes as family members. By analyzing French scholarly production, media constructions, social services, and legal texts, I underscore the complex ways in which discourses on African Motherhood constitute in part the material realities of African mothers in France. In the last section of the paper, I point out how African women (and immigrant women more broadly defined) themselves, especially in the sans-papiers movement⁵ , critique, resist, and transform the discursive and material processes analyzed earlier in the paper. Throughout, I suggest the various ways in which the image of the "African Mother" re-articulates old colonial understandings of African people and Africa to racialize⁶ certain immigrant communities and the question of immigration in France.

Locking immigrant women into familial roles

The "noise and smell" story is one among many that insidiously uses the figure of the African Mother to ultimately present certain immigrants as unable and/or unwilling to embrace French culture. It must be noted, however, that this notion is counterbalanced by a parallel focus on immigrant women and daughters of immigrants as privileged agents of integration.⁷ This has been the case, for instance, of the media coverage of the beurettes (daughters of North African immigrants). The beurettes appeared in the media in the mid-1980s in stories suggesting that they, unlike their brothers, were doing well in school and were embarking on trajectories of success and integration.⁸ The idea that immigrant women are vectors of integration (because of their privileged location within the family as mothers and/or daughters) circulates widely in France and stands as the flip side of the imagined immigrant woman evoked by Jacques Chirac. In both cases, women (and gender) are conjured up to render problematic the presence of certain immigrants within the French national space. Whether bearers or breakers of tradition, women are called forth precisely to raise the specter of a "Tradition" that stands in the way of the successful integration of African and Muslim immigrants and their children.

The French imaginary construction of immigrants and immigrant communities is replete with contradictory images of women. This hyper-visibility of immigrant women (especially those from the African continent) in political discourse and media representations interestingly is accompanied by a real paucity of (scholarly) knowledge about them. Indeed, in spite of such symbolic and media foregrounding, studies of immigration have only begun to pay serious attention to the presence of women within a variety of immigrant communities and the political reactions such a presence has generated.

Sabah Chaib, in a report commissioned by a French labor union, provides an excellent review of the French scholarship on gender and immigration.⁹ Among other things, Chaib highlights the many ways in which immigrant women are indeed discursively locked into the private sphere occupying, by and large, domestic and familial roles.

In one of the studies reviewed by Chaib on the representation of immigrant women on francophone TV channels, the author, Nouria Ouali, notes that subjects treating immigrant women directly figure only in a minority of the programs. Images of women in the backdrop, however, are omnipresent. Indeed, veiled women, wives, mothers, and daughters abound in these programs. Ouali's study also highlights the fact that these women are rarely given a voice and almost never portrayed as active members of the labor force. Moreover, both documentary and fictional accounts seem to privilege stories about young women being victims of and/or revolting against their families.¹⁰

Daughters of immigrants made their entry into the French political and media scenes in 1989 during an incident that created a national polemic and has been widely referred to as the "headscarf case" (l'affaire du foulard). The incident that launched the national debate involved three young women of North African descent who were expelled from a public high school because they refused to remove their Islamic scarf inside the school. The headscarf incident and the controversy surrounding it mainly focused on the inability of certain immigrants to "melt" into French society and the waning integrative power of French republican institutions. These young women and others like them (constructed as either willing or manipulated agents) came to symbolize the notion that some immigrants were unable and/or unwilling to embrace French republican and secular principles. It also establishes Islam as one of the main roadblocks to the successful integration of post-colonial immigrants in France.

The hyper-focus in the media on issues such as the hijeb (Islamic scarf), forced marriages, female genital cutting, and honor killings tend to construct these young women as prisoners of religion and the private/familial sphere. Through these representations, they emerge as super victims of "tradition" or as rebels in rupture with their families and that tradition. I am not suggesting here that these painful realities are not present in the lives of immigrant women and should not alarm us. What I am pointing out, along with Ouali and Chaib, is that the French media tend to focus on certain women and certain realities and not others and, therefore, offer dangerous and reductive constructions of immigrant women. First and foremost, they conflate immigrant women and African women and therefore, fail to convey the incredible heterogeneity of backgrounds and lived experiences of immigrant women in France. Where are alternative images of immigrant women involved in regular but complex and layered lives? Where are the single working mothers? Where are the political organizers? Where are the divorcees and the women who migrated alone to France? Where are the teachers, students, and civil servants displaced by global economic forces?

Reductive constructions of immigrant women are not totally absent from scholarly research reports. This is particularly problematic since they ultimately inform media and popular understandings about the women under scrutiny. For instance, Chaib notes that the crucial question of immigrant women's participation in the labor force has been under-analyzed in the vast majority of the studies she reviewed. "What are the reasons why the professional activity of immigrant women has not emerged as a `phenomenological reality'?" she ponders. Chaib attributes this particular blind spot to the fact that many of these studies cast their analysis within a familial (women as family members) or a cultural (women as agents of cultural reproduction or transformation) approach. Chaib also points out that the over-representation of women from the Maghreb in these studies contributes to the general lack of attention to work-related issues. Maghrebian women do tend to have one of the lowest rates of labor force participation among immigrant women.

These patterns of knowledge production contribute to the formation and circulation of highly problematic "common sense ideas" about immigrant women (this has almost become a code word for African women in France) and certain immigrant communities. One of the most pernicious is that these women are only marginally involved in the work force. While this might be true for some immigrant women, the fact of the matter is that immigrant women regardless of their country of origin and regardless of their familial status are entering the French labor force in greater and greater numbers.¹¹ In 1995, for instance, the labor force participation of immigrant women (age 30-59) from the European Union was 66.2%; it was 40% for Algerian women, 37.8% for Moroccan women, 44.8% for Tunisian women, and 67.4% for African women (outside of the Maghreb).

What is particularly interesting about these numbers is that the labor force participation of women from Africa (outside of the Maghreb) is higher than that of their European counterparts (with the exception of women from Portugal whose labor force participation rate is 74.5%) and only slightly inferior to that of the total female labor force participation in France.¹² Because we lack disaggregated numbers by nationality and we lack information about educational levels, language fluency, and geographical location in country of origin, it is difficult to interpret these data. However, what is clear is that they debunk the racist/sexist notion that African women are simply consumers of a French welfare state and do not contribute to the national economy.

Scholarly and media constructions cannot but help shape the kinds of social services and programs delivered to immigrant women. Another study reviewed by Chaib, for instance, describes how in the PACA (Provence-Alpes-Côte-d'Azur) region social programs focusing on economic insertion are few in numbers (around 10% of all the programs listed – a total of 186), but rather target immigrant women as immigrants in need of social integration ¹³ (57%), and as mothers (15%). The author ironically points out the sexist move that reduces women to their role as mothers: "[we] can hardly imagine associations offering [immigrant] men activities centered on their role as fathers."¹⁴

What I am arguing here is that (African) immigrant women, are being constructed in ways that emphasize and reinforce their domestic roles in the family and locate them primarily in the sphere of the private and the "traditional." In a particularly perverse logic, immigrant women emerge as symbols of "tradition" and backwardness, and at the same time are locked in material realities that reproduce and maintain the very processes that the French imaginary has constructed as radically foreign (Other). Old colonial/patriarchal beliefs about African women are re-articulated here to racialize certain immigrant communities and to politicize the very question of immigration in France. Legal discourse is another arena where we can see this perverse logic at play. It is to legal texts and legal practices that I now turn.

Changes in French laws: From derivative rights to legal autonomy

Since the formal closure of work immigration in 1974, France has implemented a dual strategy of immigration control and integration. Patrick Weil, the political scientist, argues that since the 1970s French governments – regardless of their political sensibilities – have tried to (1) Curb legal immigration, and penalize illegal immigration in order to stop it; and (2) Establish and protect the rights of immigrants, and ensure the real integration of legal immigrants already present on the national territory.

It is clear, however, that this dual movement of closure and integration has affected immigrants, depending on their national origin and their racial/ethnic background, differently. Indeed, it has been noted that the development of increasingly restrictive immigration policies has primarily affected non-European nationals. More specifically, certain observers have argued that the primary targets of this new politics of immigration control have been Maghrebians and sub-Saharan Africans. Charles Pasqua, the French minister who introduced some of the most restrictive of these legal changes in 1993, tellingly stated in a public speech: "The most difficult for the French cauldron, is [...] the integration of these populations that come to us from Africa and notably from North Africa."¹⁵

For the purpose of this paper, it is important to look at the gendered effects of French immigration laws and their restrictive turn since the mid seventies. While the law itself is now gender neutral (it refers to spouses rather wives or husbands), institutions, cultural norms, and social interactions are not.¹⁶ It has been amply demonstrated, for instance, that the so-called end of legal work immigration in 1974 hastened and deepened an already existing momentum toward the feminization of immigration in France. After 1974, family reunification became one of the few ways to enter the country legally. Therefore, many men (especially from Africa) who had practiced a form of rotational immigration (immigrants from Mali here are a perfect example) decided not to return and eventually sent for their wives and children.

Migratory profiles changed dramatically in the 1970s and the 1980s. Indeed, in the second half of the 1970s we begin to see men migrating to France after having married a legal immigrant or a young French woman of immigrant descent. While these changes might be read as interesting reversals of existing gender patterns, it has been noted that these new migratory profiles might anchor (and strengthen) otherwise on-the-wane matrimonial practices. Young women, as a result, find themselves in difficult situations that sometimes result in profound unhappiness and domestic violence.¹⁷

Legal scholars, grassroots immigrant women's organizations, and international agencies have pointed out the specific legal vulnerability of immigrant women in France. Many of their rights have been defined as derivative rights. Through the procedure of family reunification (because the vast majority of joining spouses are in fact women), immigrant women are legally linked to the status of a male member of the family. In other words, it is "the legal status of a [male] spouse (or of the father) which will determine the legal status given to the woman." The legal standing of the immigrant woman then will often depend on the nationality and immigration status of the spouse/father.¹⁸ When familial and marital relationships are severed – for a variety of reasons – it can put immigrant women in a legal bind vis-à-vis the French state and in the worst case scenarios usher them into the realm of illegality.

The 1993 immigration law increased this legal vulnerability. It made legal family reunification harder to achieve and it stipulated that in the case of divorce or estrangement within a year after the issuance of legal residency papers, these could be taken away from or not renewed for the foreign spouse.¹⁹ When there is a rupture in legal status, women can be deported to their countries of origin. Mothers of French children are protected from such deportations under French law, but find themselves undocumented and therefore unable to work legally or to claim and receive social and health benefits.

The contradictory circumstances created by French nationality and immigration legislation often put immigrant women and the children who depend on them in difficult situations and work against their long-term integration within French society – a stated goal of French governments for the past twenty years.

In France polygamy has been a marginal phenomenon. While it is obviously difficult to quantify with accuracy the number of families that are polygamous, various estimates suggest that it affects only a few thousand and no more than 20.000 families residing in France. However, polygamy has received enormous attention because it presents specific challenges to French legislation and because anti-immigrant campaigns and their leaders have exploited it for obvious political reasons. Numbers of polygamous families tend to be inflated. French legal scholar, Edwige Rude-Antoine, and a few others,²⁰ have generated a small body of scholarship that dispels such dangerous myths.

Foreigners who reside in France are allowed to follow, as far as their personal status is concerned, the legislation of their home country as long as it does not interfere with "public order." This legal compromise sometimes creates legal conflicts and oppressive situations that affect women in particular. Polygamous marriages are legal in France as long as they are contracted in the home country. The Pasqua laws of 1993, however, prohibited the entry of polygamous families into France through the process of family reunification. It also prohibited the renewal of residency permits of foreigners in polygamous situations. Recently, the French authorities have asked established polygamous families to stop cohabiting in order to maintain their legal status in France. This, according to the French press, has put many women in extremely vulnerable positions.

Sans-Papières Speak Out!

In the spring of 1996 three hundred undocumented (but often non-deportable) immigrants launched a large national resistance movement that has redrawn the boundaries of grassroots immigrant politics in France. By directly confronting the legal impasse that the French law has created for all of them (parents of French children, spouses of legal immigrant workers, refugees denied asylum; students who have lost their financial aid), the movement of undocumented immigrants (Le mouvement des sans-papiers) is forcing France to look at the contradictions embedded within the laws of the republic. Women are present in the movement. In fact they were everywhere in the media coverage of the various events (demonstrations, sit-ins, hunger strikes, and occupations of public space) that happened during the spring and the summer of 1996. In spite of this high visibility, I was not able to determine the number of women involved and their particular stake in the movement. Indeed, when I clipped the written press, I found out that the sans-papiers, as they call themselves, are mostly from Mali but also from Senegal, Cameroon, Guinea, Mauritania, and the Maghreb. I also discovered that among them were some 100 children and around 12 polygamous families – but nowhere was a mention made of the women themselves. When a leader was interviewed in the paper or on TV, it was likely to be a male figure. While it was clear that women were very active in the movement (one of the spokespersons of the movement was a woman), there was an obvious erasure of them and their specific issues by the French media.

Despite the numerical importance of women in the Saint-Bernard collective – more than 30% of the adults are women – the dominant representation of the movement is one that does not seriously take women into account. In fact, one only needs to look at the French daily newspaper Le Monde between August 14 and August 30, 1996 to witness the literal erasure of women (and children) from the struggle ( sans papiers, fig. 1, Le Monde, August 14, 1996). This was the two-week period when the conflict was at a stalemate, and received continuous coverage from the French press. At that moment, ten sans-papiers had been engaged in a hunger strike for more than forty days and were physically at risk. Negotiations between the government and the sans-papiers had been interrupted, and the French government had been planning the evacuation of the church but was reluctant to implement such a forced removal in the context of an (inter) national movement of solidarity mounting in support for the Saint-Bernard 300.

By looking at the Le Monde's illustration of the crisis, we can see – among other things – that the movement is conceptualized and presented as a story whose main protagonists are men – especially French men. In the cartoons published by the newspaper, the conflict is represented as une affaire d'hommes (blancs) white men's business. The stories themselves, however, present a more nuanced take on the struggle and the sans-papiers, in fact, have become so central to the culture that they are also used to illustrate other stories for the paper. In the August 14, 1996 issue of the paper, the front-page story is one about the decline of vacation-time road accidents in France. Next to it, one can also read a story about the sans-papiers, and the help they are increasingly receiving from the left and humanitarian organizations. The cartoon, which represents a French policeman driving a whole African family back to the border, is cleverly used to illustrate both stories. One of the black back seat passengers says: "The French, they are driving better and better!" The white policeman, as the driver, is at the center of the image. In the back seat, one adult male is surrounded by a slew of children and one woman – his wife and the mother of all the children one can easily infer from the drawing. This representation of an African woman in relation to the sans-papiers' struggle is both exceptional and typical. It is exceptional in the sense that usually women are not even present in these cartoons and typical in the sense that she is the quintessential African woman who gets conjured up when the African presence in France is in need of a representational trope. Needless to say, she is silent in the cartoon and interestingly half-hidden by the car's window frame. This visual narrative however, belies the more complicated story that is unfolding in the Saint-Bernard church. Indeed, the reader needs only turn to page 6 of the paper to discover the story of Marianne Camara. The 27-year-old Malian mother of two is angry and determined. She has just joined the four other women involved in the hunger strike in protest of the forced (on August 12) hospitalization of the strikers:

Ms. Camara then, unlike the woman in the cartoon is speaking and acting. However, this will be the last mention in the paper of the women's involvement in the struggle. I would like to end this section by quoting at length from an interview I conducted in the spring of 2002 with a young Muslim woman from the Comoro Islands. Louisa, like Ms. Camara, is a young immigrant woman struggling to define for herself the contours and the meanings of her presence in France. Her account provides a resistive contrast to the other narratives analyzed in this paper.

I met Louisa in Marseilles. She was 25 at the time of the interview. She had arrived in 1993 when she was 17 to be with her older sister and study in France. She entered the country with a 3-month visa hoping that she would obtain a change of status by having her sister become her guardian. Her applications took over a year to be processed and when she finally obtained an answer it was negative: by then she was too old (18) to be under the guardianship of her sister. Instead of going back to aging parents, a dislocated economy, and a bankrupt education system, Louisa decided to stay and joined the ranks of the thousands of undocumented immigrants who now live in France in the most precarious conditions. She enrolled in a French private school in 1995, learned French and obtained excellent results. However, she was unable to take the national end of high school exam (le baccalauréat) because she did not have appropriate short-stay and residency papers. In 1997 she applied for a change of status but her application was rejected. She became involved in the sans-papiers movement in 1998. Between her first application and the time she actually obtained a change of status in 2001, she appealed 4 times and was rejected four times.

Louisa talks eloquently of the fact that her mother had insisted on her daughter's independence. Denied of real opportunities, the older woman wanted another set of life experiences for her young daughter:

Louisa thinks that she has learned a lot from her mother and wants to fight for both of them. Women, she thinks, should stand on their own and fight to show their full worth to the world. Louisa's critique of the French authorities and how they handle undocumented immigrant women's application for a change of status is quite telling for the purpose of this paper. Louisa tells me for instance that Marseilles immigration officials recommended that she get married in order to obtain a change of status:

Louisa's testimony parallels the analysis offered earlier in this essay. It underscores the fact that immigrant women in France are literally being tied to the family through a variety of social practices. Later on in the interview, she explains how single women are always suspect characters in the eyes of the French administration: "How can a single woman live in France for ten years without papers?" Because women are always thought of as depending on a man, it becomes impossible to imagine them independently migrating, getting an education, obtaining paid work, and supporting themselves in spite of the fact that thousands of them do just that. According to Louisa, the French administration treats (and therefore constructs, I would add) immigrant women as perpetual minors. She sees this basic fight for immigrant women's legal autonomy at the core of the sans-papiers movement.

Conclusion

Requests for legal autonomy have been at the center of immigrant women's organizing efforts in France. Since the 1981 law, which allowed immigrants to form their own associations, there has been a flourishing of immigrant women's organizations. In a 1984 article in Hommes et Libertés – the publication of the leading French human rights organization (Ligue des droits de l'homme) – the authors clearly indicate that legal autonomy was at the forefront of immigrant women's organizing in the early 80s:

Such desire for autonomy, the authors argue, has also generated a series of grassroots local projects where immigrant women themselves have created cultural fairs, solidarity networks, professional and educational training schemes, radio programs, and publications.

At the European level, non-governmental organizations have lobbied to put this issue on the agenda. They have asked the European Community "to ensure migrant women an independent legal status and to recognize – on personal grounds – their right to obtain a work and residency permit, which should reduce their vulnerability in case of divorce, domestic violence, sexual abuse, and rape."²⁴ As a result of these pressures, the European parliament has begun to turn its attention to the particular situation of immigrant women.

The presence of the woman (mother/daughter) figure within popular discussions of immigration in France is of crucial importance. Indeed, whether constructed as agent or victim, whether understood as promoting or resisting "integration," the immigrant woman emerges as a key element in the racialization of immigration and citizenship in France. In Le Sol et le Sang: Théories de l'invasion au XXe siècle, French demographer Hervé Le Bras analyzes the emergence of an ideology of (immigrant) invasion in France in the 20 ^th century. Le Bras points out that the immigrant, in France, presents a Janus face: "that of the worker and that of the dweller. One hides the other: we only see the worker during periods of economic growth and only see the dweller during economic crises."²⁵ However, Le Bras fails to notice that the face of the immigrant-dweller is more often than not the face of a woman. The wearing of Islamic scarves in French schools, polygamy, forced marriages, and female genital cutting are important threads within anti-immigrant discourses that present Africans as undesirable immigrants who are unwilling/ unable to assimilate within French culture. Within each of these threads, it is women who, while often robbed of any real agency, are conjured up to capture the cultural distance between the French and their post-colonial others. Against the backdrop of international economic transformations, the construction of Europe, and increased national anxieties, "the immigrant Mother" (imagined as poor and illiterate but skilled at draining the resources of the state) and her children have indeed emerged as threats to the nation. It is against this imaginary backdrop that French understandings of national inclusion as political and cultural process lose ground, and make room for the re-articulation of racist distinctions between "blood" French citizens (Français de souche) and "paper" French citizens. The re-articulation of existing forms of racism, xenophobia and nationalism in France with deeply rooted patriarchal understandings of citizenship, has created a context where some immigrant women and their daughters find themselves particularly vulnerable to processes of exclusion. In the proud country of the rights of man (les droits de l'homme), some women (and men) are being excluded from the most basic of human rights.

While immigrant organizations and the sans-papiers movement continue to challenge French immigration laws and to create bridges for autonomous action and development for immigrant women, French legislation still pronounces (and French media still construct) women as dependent on their husbands. This paper begins to address the problems generated by such legal and discursive contradictions.

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	want to thank the Center for Women's Studies and the Taft Memorial Fund at the University of Cincinnati for their research support. Jacques Chirac's political career is long-standing and of the highest order. His tenure in the French government spans three decades and can be briefly summarized as follows: Agriculture and Rural Development Minister, 1973-74; Interior Minister, 1974; Prime Minister, 1974-76, 1986-88; Mayor of Paris, 1977-95; President, 1995-Now.


	Racialization here is used the way Omi and Winant define it "to signify the extension of racial meaning to a previously unclassified relationship, social practice or group." In Michael Omi and Howard Winant, Racial Formation in the United States From the 1960s to the 1980s. New York, London: Routledge, 1986. p. 64.


	See Sabah Chaib, Facteurs d'insertion et d'exclusion des femmes immigrantes dans le marché du travail en France: Quel état des connaissances? Document de travail élaboré pour la Confédération Française Des Travailleurs, Janvier 2001.


	See Catherine Raissiguier, "Scattered Markets, Localized Workers: Gender, Work, and Immigration." In Black Women, Globalization and Economic Justice: Studies from Africa and the African Diaspora, edited by Filomena Steady. Rochester, Vermont: Schenkman Books, 2002.


	The Labor force participation for all women in France in 1992 for the age 25-49 is 78.3%. Sources: INSEE, Les Immigrés en France. Paris: INSEE, 1997. p.73. For the year 1994, labor force participation rates for all women in France are the following: 77.0% (age 30-34), 77.0% (35-39), 79.0% (40-44), 76.9% (45-49), 68.3% (50-54), and 46.3% (55-59). Sources: INSEE, Les Femmes. Paris: INSEE, 1995. p.117. These figures, of course, do not account for the involvement of many immigrant women in underground economies, which cannot be measured by national statistics.


	Chantal Deckmyn, Les "actions femmes" dans la politique de la ville en region Provence-Alpes-Côte-d'Azur. Rapport pour a Délégation Régionale des Droits de Femmes PACA. Mars 1999. Cited in Chaib, Op Cit.


	Michèle Tribalat, De L'immigration à l'assimilation. Enquête sur les populations étrangères en France. Paris, La Découverte/Ined, 1999. Cited in Chaib, Op. Cit., and personal interview with Claudie Lesselier from the RAJFIRE.


	For recent discussions of polygamy in France see, Edwige Rude-Antoine, "Des épouses soumises à des régimes particuliers." In Migrants Formation. 105. Juin 1996; "Le Statut personnel: Liberté ou sujétion?" In Plein Droit. 24. Avril-Juin 1994; "Le Statut personnel en France." In ADRI Point Sur. Juillet1994; "La Polygamie face au droit positif Français." In Migration Societé. 35. Septembre-Octobre 1994; and "La polygamie et le droit Français." In Regards sur l'Actualité. Décembre 1991. See also Brigitte Thomas, "La gestion quotidienne des problèmes générés par des questions de statut personnel." In Les droits personnels des femmes étrangères en France: Le cas des femmes algériennes, marocaines, tunisiennes et turques et leurs conséquences juridiques et sociales. Paris: Actes de la rencontre du 25 juin 1992, coordonnée par Saïda Rahal-Sidhoum; Françoise Gaspard,. "Statut personnel et intégration sociale, culturelle et nationale." In Hommes et Libertés. 84. Juin-Juillet-Aout 1995; and. Saïda Rahal-Sidhoum, "Du statut des femmes." In Quantara. 14. Janvier/Février/Mars 1995.


	Catherine Quiminal, "Mobilisation associative et dynamiques d'intégraton des femmes d'Afrique sub-Saharienne en France." In Migrations Etudes. Octobre/Novembre/Décembre. 1995. p. 26.

Jenda: A Journal of Culture and African Women Studies (2003)

ISSN: 1530-5686

TROUBLING MOTHERS: IMMIGRANT WOMEN FROM AFRICA IN FRANCE

Locking immigrant women into familial roles

Changes in French laws: From derivative rights to legal autonomy

Sans-Papières Speak Out!

Conclusion

References


	Pierre Tévanian, Le Racisme Républicain: Réflexions sur le modèle français de discrimination. Paris: L'Esprit Frappeur, 2001.


	French fertility rate in 1999 was 1.77 children per woman. Source http://www.info-france-usa/atoz/social.asp


	See Catherine Raissiguier, "The Sexual and Racial Politics of Civil Unions in France." In Radical History Review. Issue 83. Spring 2002.


	Movement of undocumented immigrant in France that has been organizing since the mid 1990s.


	See Catherine Raissiguier, Becoming Women/Becoming Workers: Identity Formation in a French High School, Albany: SUNY Press, 1994.


	Nouria Ouali, "Les televisions francophones et l'image des femmes immigrées," in Annuaire de l'Afrique du Nord, XXXIV, 1995. Cited in Chaib, Op Cit.


	Social integration is defined here as including literacy, social insertion, conviviality, personal autonomy, knitting, and sewing activities.


	Intervention by Charles Pasqua at the Colloquium of Friends of Passages/Unesco October 14, 1993. Quoted in Sami Naïr, Contre les lois Pasqua. Paris: Arléa, 1997. p. 95.


	Claudie Lesselier, "Pour une critique féministe des lois sur l'entrée et le séjour des personnes étrangères en France" in Brochure du RAJFIRE. 2. Mars 2000.


	Saïda Rahal-Sidhoum, "Du statut des femmes." In Quantara. 14. Janvier/Février/Mars 1995, 12.


	E. de Oliviera A Silva and Martine El Mahalawi-Nouet, "L'Aspiration à l'autonomie des femmes immigrées." In Hommes et Libertés. 33. 1984/3. p. 40.


	Quoted in Maddy Vetter, Situation juridique et sociale des femmes âgées étrangères (en region P.A.C.A.). Bureau Régional de Ressources Juridiques Internationales. 1997. p. 12.


	Hervé Le Bras, Le Sol et le sang: Théories de l'invasion au XXe siècle. Paris: Editions de l'aube, 1994. p. 77.