Between the 1910s and the 1930s, women-oriented magazines and periodicals in Greater Syria exploded in popularity. Women who founded, edited, contributed to, and read these magazines, primarily of the urban middle class, were attempting to both construct the ultimate ideal of “modern women” and also understand how their overarching society—beginning to be envisioned as a nation—would function through the lens of a collectively-defined women’s role. Modernity for these women often centered explicitly on capitalism, attempting to give “work” occurring both within and outside the home new meaning. This debate distinctively shaped the class conceptions, aesthetics, and anxieties in Greater Syria embedded within a discrete generational moment. Taking account of various publications’ perspectives and relevant secondary literature, this paper will deconstruct these debates with an eye to explaining how they were uniquely generative. I argue that the debates in women’s magazines were productive of new lines of thought which were not linearly replicative of existing “Western,” “Eastern,” or local schemas, but rather often pulled selectively from all three in order to craft their own visions of what it meant to be a modern woman in Bilad al-Sham. The 1910s-1930s was a time in which women had to deal with changing social and material realities created by crisis. The most influential factors during this in Greater Syria included socio-cultural concerns with domesticity that defined sexual difference in separating men’s and women’s roles, “scientific” benchmarks to evaluate a good housewife and mother, the acquisition of wealth to accommodate luxury expenses, migration flows in, out and around the region, the famine of 1915-1918, and new city-oriented terrains due to urbanization, influencing the regional demography. These experiences and more conditioned women’s relatively new positionalities in determining both what was possible and also what was desirable for the modern woman. In addition, given that this study focuses on the period of the 1910s-30s, which saw the imposition of the French Mandate in the Greater Syria, the debates couched within the pages of these magazines were informed by a mixture of local elements as well as transnationally-derived vocabularies (from within and outside the Arab world), sensibilities, and concerns. By studying women’s periodicals at the time, this paper focuses on how women debated these crises as a collective pursuing a nation-building project—albeit a collective which contained many interpersonal distinctions—and investigates how different women drew on a variety of discursive traditions to make contending and generative claims.