Teaching Happiness: Women's Education and Transnational Currents in Modern Morocco

Abstract:This article presents a transnational account of women's education in modern Morocco. While previous accounts of this history have relied on the colonial archive, this study also considers an assembled collection of Arabic sources reflecting Moroccan perspectives. These sources show that Moroccans advocated for specific changes to women's education, drawing on reforms taking place in Egypt and the Levant. Analyzing nationalist discourse about gender and education reveals a key distinction between colonial and nationalist approaches to women's education: a new understanding of happiness that was central to nationalist discourse and absent from colonial policy. This account centers Moroccans as historical actors and highlights the circulation of ideas and people across North Africa and within the Arabic-speaking world. In doing so, it emphasizes the need to look beyond the circuits that connected metropole and colony. This opens the possibility for a new periodization of modern gender norms in Morocco and offers a basis for a feminist critique of women's education in modern Morocco, transcending both colonial and national historiographical frameworks.