One of the primary foci of the field of Middle East women and gender studies has been examining the institution and politics of marriage as a way to access women’s lives, gender dynamics, and the connection to state- and nation-making. However, this focus has occurred at the cost of overlooking “all the single ladies”, for reasons that are often methodologically driven. While unmarried women are certainly not uncommon in Middle East history, there has been remarkably little attention paid to this group of women as a category, and the degree to which their ‘singlehood’ was both a choice and a factor (a catalyst or a hindrance) in their mobilization and activism. 'Single' women have been involved in political and society at every level as labor union organizers, writers, schoolteachers and principals, magazine editors, healthcare workers, and founders of social welfare organizations, among other things. Using written sources as well as oral interviews, this presentation will highlight a number of single women’s life stories between 1930 and 1960 as a way to begin to expand theories of women’s activism and the deliberate choices Lebanese women made to remain unmarried and childless, as part of that work. In so doing, this paper asks: what historical sources can we mine for access to unmarried/single women’s lives and contributions? How do we read those sources? What terminology should we use and what are the implications of doing so? This work builds on an essential albeit scant literature to argue that making visible the activities of ‘unmarried’ / single women in Lebanon in the late mandate and early independence periods is critical to making deeper sense of the choices that women made in terms of defining their political and social involvement, the language they used to describe their work, and the impact it made on Lebanese society during this crucial historical transition from colonialism to independence.