Sophie Bessis (Arabic: صوفي بسيس , 1947) is a Tunisian-born French historian, journalist, researcher, and feminist author.

She has written numerous works in French, Spanish, and English on development in the Maghreb and the Arab world, as well as the situation of women denouncing the identity imprisonment to which they are subjected.

In 2007, she published "Los árabes, las mujeres y la libertad" ("Arabs, women and freedom") which reviewed the inheritance of the Egyptian reformers of the early twentieth century, or the Bourguiba, that enacted in 1956 a law that freed the Tunisians and analyzes the changes of Arab societies and the disappointments of a badly undertaken modernization connected with the development of the Islamists and the return to an identity based solely on the religious norm.

[clarification needed] Bessis denounces the identity imprisonment to which women are subjected to in their country and in the Arab world.

[citation needed] In 2017, she published Les Valeureuses ou Cinq Tunisiennes dans l’Histoire,[9] in which she vindicates the story of key women in Tunisia, namely Elissa, the founding Phoenician princess of Carthage (also known as Dido/Didon); the singer and Jewish actress Habiba Msika, who in the 1920s stood out for her transgressive look; Aïcha Sayida Manoubia, the "free saint" of the thirteenth century recognized by the Sufi tradition; Aziza Othmana, legendary Tunisian-Ottoman princess of the seventeenth century; and the feminist Habiba Menchari, whose conference in January 1929 against the use of the veil shocked Habib Bourguiba.