1955 -
Moroccan women's rights advocate; founder of L'Union de L'Action Feminine (FUA).
Latifa Jababdi was born in Tiznit of Berber heritage. She received a degree in sociology and feminist studies from Mohammed V University in Rabat, and in 2003 was preparing a doctorate in sociology at the Université du Québec à Montréal, Canada, on the integration of women in development.
At the age of fourteen Jababdi joined the Party of Liberation and Socialism (PLS) and took part in the student movement in the 1960s that campaigned for greater democracy in Morocco. This group was associated with the New Left, and Jababdi herself became a member of the PLS, the Communist Party of Progress. She was condemned in 1977 for threatening state security and spent two-and-a-half years in prison with other well-known Moroccan feminists such as Fatna el-Bouih because of her participation in the illegal Marxist-Leninist group "March 23."
In 1984 Jababdi ran for office, but no women were elected. Disappointed, she went on to serve as editor of the 8 Mars newspaper, named after International Women's Day (8 March, or Thamaniya Mars) and written by and for Moroccan women interested in feminist issues. She later founded L'Union de L'Action Feminine (FUA) in 1987. The FUA has seventeen offices throughout Morocco and one in Paris. It offers literacy classes and workshops, seminars, festivals, and publications such as 8 Mars.
In 1993 Jababdi launched a campaign to change the mudawana, the female-status code of Moroccan family law that reduces all women to legal minors. She collected one million signatures for a petition given to King Hassan II requesting the abolition of marital tutorship and polygamy, recognition of women's full maturity at age twenty-one, gender equality in marriage, and judicial divorce. The king convened a committee of women to examine these issues further. Revisions to the mudawana concluded that women could no longer be repudiated by their husbands without their knowledge. No sweeping changes to the mudawana have been made, but Moroccans hope that Muhammad VI will soon do so.
Bibliography
Fernea, Elizabeth Warnock. In Search of Islamic Feminism: OneWoman's Global Journey. New York: Doubleday, 1998.
Morocco Trade and Development Services. "Union de L'Action Féminine." Available from http://www.mtds.com/uaf.
Slymovics, Susan. "This Time I Choose When to Leave: An Interview with Fatna El-Bouih." Morocco in Transition, Middle East Report 218 (Spring 2001).
The Tamaniya Mars Collective. "Journal for an Emerging Women's Movement (Morocco)." In Alternative Media: Linking Global and Local, edited by Peter Lewis. Reports and Papers on Mass Communication 107 (1993): 61 - 72.
— MARIA F. CURTIS
