Elite, urban Lebanese women’s efforts to enshrine political, economic, and educational rights for women in the constitution were largely unsuccessful. Disappointed by the structure of the Lebanese Constitution, some activists worked to prove that women were foundationally important to the Lebanese nation. In order to do this, Beiruti-based activists like Najla Saab, Eveline Bustros, and Ibtihaj Qaddura constructed a narrative through their writings in the popular and women’s press that rural women were the holders of a “true” Lebanese identity. This imagined, archetypal Lebanese woman raised future generations and was connected to the land through agricultural production. Based more in fiction than fact, this image served two objectives. First, this image allowed its elite progenitors to challenge the exclusion of women from the foundational documents of the Lebanese state. Second, positioning the imagined, rural woman as the holder of Lebanese tradition, allowed urban women to claim gendered expertise locally and internationally. In 1953 the Associated Countrywomen of the World (ACWW) accepted the Village Welfare Society as its Lebanese affiliate. Through its affiliation with the ACWW, one of the largest international women’s organizations dedicated to improving the status of rural women, the Village Welfare society could position its members as experts on the status of rural women, even though none of the organization’s leaders permanently lived in a rural area. In an effort to carve out a zone of influence for themselves in the newly independent nation, members of the Village Welfare Society and other women’s organizations utilized post-war development discourse to their advantage. Crucially, the members of the Village Welfare Society did not think that they needed to be the targets of development efforts. Instead, elite, urban women involved in women’s organizations turned women who lived in Lebanon’s villages into populations in need of development and modernization. The efforts of development-oriented feminists reveals the competing impulses in the Lebanese women’s rights activist community in the early post-independence period: elite women wanted power for themselves and to help poorer, rural women, but in order to achieve the former, they needed to denigrate the latter. Using memoirs, archival materials, and newspaper articles, this paper reveals that the invented an image of rural Lebanese women as holders of tradition and as the mothers of the nation was ultimately used to otherize them in ways that benefitted the elite, urban women who constructed the image in the first place.