This paper investigates urban life during the First World War in Ottoman Beirut. As in much of Europe, World War I in the Ottoman Empire was characterized by ‘total war’, whereby the classic distinction between the front and the home front became irrelevant as the effects of war pervaded everyday life and transformed society. This paper adopts the concept of total war to consider the experiences of Beiruti women alongside those of men, viewing their roles as intertwined and interdependent as a result of the all-encompassing nature of the war rather than as distinct and irreconcilable due to an artificial division between the front and the homefront. Women’s participation in the First World War, and the war’s impact on gender relations have been key areas of investigation by European historians for some time. World War I has become a popular area of inquiry in Middle Eastern history during the past decade, with historians of the Arab world and the Ottoman Empire publishing work on the wartime experience in various parts of the empire, and engaging actively with scholarship on the First World War in Europe and around the world. Drawing upon Ottoman Turkish and Arabic archival documents, this paper demonstrates the ways in which urban women from all walks of life were active participants in Beirut’s wartime society, and investigates how the war provided opportunities for women to become more directly engaged in the workforce and political life. For many women, particularly from the lower classes, this meant becoming the head of household and primary breadwinner for the first time. Others, especially from the middle and upper classes, left the confines of home to serve as nurses and volunteers, or to take an active role in intellectual life through the publication of opinion pieces and fiction. These new roles necessitated negotiation with a variety of male actors, from individual family members to a more broadly male-dominated public sphere. The emergence of women into the public spaces of Ottoman cities was facilitated by the circumstances of war, and persisted in the aftermath of the conflict, shaping official approaches to gender and social practice in post-Ottoman national states.