Divorce and Female Entrepreneurship: Between Source of Motivation and Societal Constraints

Abstract

This article investigates the relationship between divorce and female entrepreneurship in Algeria, focusing on divorced women operating in the handicraft sector in the wilaya of Tizi-Ouzou. While divorce is typically framed as a private or legal event, this study conceptualizes it as a structural rupture with profound social, economic, symbolic, and identity consequences. Drawing on qualitative interviews conducted in 2025 with ten divorced women entrepreneurs, the research examines how divorce functions simultaneously as a catalyst for economic initiative and as a mechanism reinforcing structural inequalities. Anchored in a socio-constructivist feminist framework and informed by Bourdieu’s theory of symbolic violence, intersectionality theory, feminist economics, and embeddedness theory, the article analyzes how gendered habitus, social stigma, limited social capital, and institutional norms shape entrepreneurial trajectories. Findings demonstrate that female entrepreneurship in this context is primarily necessity-driven, emerging as a survival strategy following economic vulnerability and weak institutional support in addition to the pressure of society. However, entrepreneurial practices remain embedded within systems of male domination, moral surveillance, and restricted mobility. The study argues that divorced women’s entrepreneurship constitutes a paradoxical space: a site of resilience and partial emancipation that simultaneously reproduces gender hierarchies. By integrating marital status into entrepreneurship studies, the article contributes to sociological debates on gendered economic agency in post-divorce contexts.