Social Workers and Algerian Housewives in Decolonized France: The Paradox of Assimilation

In the decade after the Algerian War, approximately 850,000 Algerians resided in France in 1974, a third of them women and children. To anxious French officials, the familial dynamic of this migration indicated the permanence of this population in France. Previous scholarship has focused primarily upon the male laborer’s unilateral exclusion from the workplace.  This paper examines the fraught relationship between French social workers and immigrant housewives in the 1960s to overturn the common insistence that the state abandoned universalist doctrine to reject the Muslim Algerians living in France.

            This paper makes several claims by examining the work of social worker Nelly Forget, the foremost expert in decolonized France on the “Muslim” population, this paper makes several interrelated claims. By examining the gendered dimensions of immigration through female social workers, we see the full breadth of pedagogy tailored to Algerian immigrants during these years. Social workers like Forget argued that the most complete assimilation of Algerian families to French lifestyle occurred first within the home. I stress Forget’s innovations to that curriculum, which tended to emphasize consumer practices linked to homemaking as paramount to Algerian women’s adaptation to France. Forget recognized a paradox to assimilatory pedagogy, particularly in the consumer-oriented demands placed upon immigrant women, and sought to overturn a practice common among the educated middle-class social workers who spoke for rather than to their ex-colonial clientele. I conclude by linking these important conversations on the unsteady ground of a nation just decolonized with France’s inability to come to terms with its colonial past.