The Harem and the Cousins

Germaine Tillion shows us that the oppression of women is rampant in both Christian and Muslim countries and that none has been able to completely push back this legacy of prehistory and paganism. The worst part is that this enslavement benefits no one: the alienation of women alienates men and dramatically impoverishes the regions where it weighs the most. It took a famous ethnologist to go back to the origins of humanity, to draw on its scientific work, to question its memory for us to be propelled, incidentally, to the forefront of a feminism that until then had been too entangled in the inventory of its differences to analyze the common evil that strikes both the oppressor, his victim and the civilization that carries them.