Women's activism and advocacy for greater rights in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have been widely debated in Middle Eastern and North African history. Scholars including Beth Baron and Elizabeth Anderson argue that state-building and movements for women's rights developed alongside each other, inevitably linking the two issues within the political cultures of countries in the region. Libya was an exception to this pattern of state-building. While Tripoli had the first academic primary school for girls in North Africa, Italian colonial rule destroyed the Ottoman education system. Even jobs traditionally held by women in conservative countries, such as nursing and teaching, were mainly off-limits to Libyan women at independence. Less than one percent of Libyan women were literate at independence, and the first women did not receive high school diplomas until the 1950s. Women achieved the right to vote in 1963, but their economic and political participation in Libyan society remained limited until the 1970s. This paper considers the generation of women educated during the late Italian colonial period and directly after independence. Instead of being educated in Libya, they were educated in the major cities of Egypt, Syria, or Lebanon before returning to Libya. These women became the first female writers, broadcasters, educators, and activists in post-independence Libya while advocating for greater literacy. They also founded the first organizations that supported women's rights, including the Women's Renaissance Society and Women's Society. I argue that women's experiences in the Mashriq were central to narratives around women's rights in Libya during the 1950s and 1960s. In conclusion, by closely examining the influence of education obtained outside of the Maghrib, this project sheds new light on the rarely acknowledged role that international, as opposed to national or regional, education played on state-building, development, and women's rights in Libya.