Crying boys were everywhere in the Syrian and Lebanese communities of the Americas of the 1920s. Following the loss of the homeland to French occupation, the trope of masculine tears appeared in the global Arabic press in a variety of contexts: expressing frustrated Arab nationalisms, invoking the responsibilities of proper maternal conduct, or threatening the breakdown of Syrian families in light of new patterns of female labor outside the home, particularly in the textile industry. Using a series of comics, mahjari popular stories, and interwar newspaper editorials, this paper demonstrates the emergence of a diasporic nationalist culture concerned with the emasculation of Syrian men through the trope of tears. The paper argues that the familial nationalism which promoted masculine strength and refinement in spaces like reading rooms and men's cafes also fostered a specific vision of Syrian women workers. Female textile workers were a particular sort of emasculating threat. Women's wages underpinned the mahjar's commercial economy, but female factory workers also formed the vanguard of a new Arab feminism which was deeply critical of nationalism and its paternalist trappings. Mahjari feminists, meanwhile, attacked the Syrian clubs and cafés as spaces of immoral and indolent behavior, directly challenging both the politics and masculinity of their patrons. In the afterlife of Syria's occupation, in sum, the mahjar's gender politics inverted, opening new critical roads for feminists but raising the specter of the boys they caused to weep.