[From “Women’s Work and Handicraft Production”]
In Algiers after Madame Luce was forced to transform her school [for native girls] into a workshop [by the French colonial regime], she taught young Algerian girls how to embroider with creative motifs, some simple, others sculpted like lace, and how to achieve stitchery whose evenness makes it look as if it were machine made. . . . Winter tourists come and purchase Algerian women’s handicrafts; English and American exhibitions like to show them to their visitors. Some pieces of embroidery were bought for the Chicago Exposition [then being organized for the next year, 1893]. However, the French in Algeria, and even some Algerians themselves, appear to be unaware of the existence of this artistic embroidery whose inspiration is Arab. Clearly the French colonial administration does little to promote feminine handicrafts. For example, when in 1878, Madame Ben-Aben, the grand-daughter of Madame Luce and her administrative successor at the women’s craft school asked permission to exhibit her pupils’ best pieces, colonial authorities promised her a place in the Algerian section of the Paris Exposition. However, when she arrived in Paris with the very finest handicraft pieces produced by two young Algerian Muslim girls, she not accorded any exhibition space. . . . We would not have to denounce the colonial administration in French Algeria—which is responsible for ruining native women’s crafts because of its policies—if women, who are better able to appreciate beautiful needle work than men, had been allowed to serve as adjuncts to the male-dominated organizing committee for the Paris Exposition.
[From “Women and Algeria”]
Instead of encouraging education for Arab girls in Algeria, the French administration has closed the schools that existed prior to the [1830] conquest, allowed conservative Muslim men to shut down those schools for girls that were established after the conquest, and thus the capital of Algeria has not had a single [academic] school for native girls for thirty-five years. When the rector of the Academy of Algiers, Monsieur Jeanmarie, opened a class where young Arab girls could receive education, these girls proved so prodigiously intelligent that the French became alarmed. The French said that these young girls when they graduate from school would no longer want to stay at home in seclusion.