ABSTRACT
When Algeria's independence from France was declared on July 3, 1962, 132 years after the establishment of a colonial system of domination, it seemed as if it caught Algerian leaders by surprise. The ideological nature of the various policy declarations they made from 1954 to 1962 was revealed to the Algerian public in all its starkness, as a power struggle between factions of the National Liberation Front (FLN) ensued while the French were withdrawing. Among Algerian leaders, the Charter of Algiers is but a trivial remnant of a short-lived political era. Yet, in its essentials, the charter provides evidence of continuity in perceptions of women at the political level, in the sense that no government after 1965 was able to transcend the problematic of sex/gender/state structure it so clearly revealed. Gender-blind in its theory, the Algerian economy is gender-real in its consequences. Among these, demographic growth and long-lasting housing and water crises.
