In 1950 Eveline Bustros and Anissa Najjar founded the Village Welfare Society (VWS) in order to educate rural women and girls and to offer training in local handicrafts. The VWS was the first Lebanese women’s organization to take women’s social welfare work beyond the confines of Lebanon’s cities and focus explicitly and exclusively on rural women. Using the never-before-used papers of the Village Welfare Society, this paper explores the politics behind focusing on rural women. The VWS’s emphasis on developing rural women connected to national and international conversations about the status of women in the post-WWII world. In order to participate in conversations about women in development on the international level, the VWS joined Associated Country Women of the World, an international organization with consultative status at the United Nations. On the domestic level, Lebanese women were fighting to secure political rights from the state, but felt that their rural “sisters” were holding them back in these campaigns. Therefore, Bustros and Najjar, veterans of mandate era women’s organizations, started the VWS to help rural women “develop.” The VWS’s development metrics were influenced by the emergent international women’s rights standard, which used the legal and political status of women in Europe and the United States as the gold standard. Despite the colonially-rooted biases imbedded in development-oriented reforms, the UN’s emphasis on development made it possible for Lebanese women to claim new forms of gendered expertise on the national level, which enhanced their larger campaigns for political rights. The VWS used the discourse of development in its activities with rural women while simultaneously trying to prove to the Lebanese state that urban women were developed enough to secure full political rights. Studying the VWS reveals the complicated, and sometimes contradictory, political and social landscape women’s organizations had to navigate in the period after independence. Nonetheless, the VWS used their gendered expertise and the discourse of development to shape politics and women’s rights in post-independence Lebanon.