ABSTRACT
This chapter offers us the opportunity of reflecting on the nature of literacy in colonial and postcolonial settings. It provides additional information about the history of female Tunisians' access to literacy and schooling, seeking to explicate the social meanings of these events. The chapter offers some of the most basic facts about the history of education in Tunisia, especially for females. Then the chapter offers four short vignettes about women's and girls' access to literacy-three involving women and one involving a man. The author goal is to complement the account offered of census data, languages of literacy in Tunisia, and the history of education for women in Tunisia with human stories because, in the end, the meanings of literacy are tied to individuals' embodied experience of it.
