This paper analyzes the struggle for women’s suffrage between political independence in 1943 and the first parliamentary elections in which women participated in 1953. In doing so, it takes into account the views expressed and strategies pursued by different women’s organizations. Of particular interest will be the 1950 formation of the Executive Committee of Women’s Organizations in Lebanon. The Executive Committee served as the key node around which Lebanese women sought to secure their suffrage rights, including issuing statements, organizing demonstrations, and building alliances with politicians, political parties, and select constituencies. A key concern of the analysis presented are the changes and continuities between the 1943-1953 mobilizations for women’s suffrage and women’s activism in the colonial period. It therefore accounts for the contexts and contingencies that revived mobilizations for women’s suffrage in 1943 (after being dormant for more than a decade) and that secured it in 1953 (in the first year of Camille Chamoun’s presidency). Rather than an inevitable consequence of independence, women’s suffrage emerged as the product of women’s agency and strategic decision-making within a complex set of contexts and contingencies involving post-colonial state building, intra-elite rivalries, and shifting norms of development, governance, and citizenship. In doing so, this paper makes use of a wide array of sources including the little-known archive of the Executive Committee, the debates about women’s suffrage in the local press, the assessments of foreign embassies, and the memoirs of Lebanese women and men that reflect on the struggle. The conclusions drawn from these sources make possible both the construction of a details narrative about how women in Lebanon secured their right to vote as well as how that struggle intersected with other dynamics of political, economic, social, and cultural life in early post-independence Lebanon.