TWO GENERATIONS OF MUSLIM WOMEN IN FRANCE : CREATIVE PARENTING, IDENTITY AND RECOGNITION

International audienceIn France today there are approximately one million families who come from North Africa. Many of these are large families. Their children are born in France and they are French citizens. Their language is French, and they are raised in French schools. They feel French. But given the colonial past of France, the metropolitan French continue to consider them somehow as 'the other'. This post-colonial attitude has very damaging consequences, encouraging discrimination by some teachers, by employers, by landlords and by the police. 1 Their parents and especially their mothers are fully aware of what their children will have to face. Mothers in particular are concerned to prepare their children to encounter the risks of discriminatory situations. I myself have been reconstructing in-depth case studies of Muslim immigrant families in France for many years. For the last twenty years I have focused in particular on how these working class families originating from the Maghreb – the mountainous rural interior of Algeria and Morocco – educate their children to face the difficulties linked to economic instability: unemployment, chronic shortage of money, and discrimination