Lebanese women made their first attempts at acquiring voting rights during the early 1920s, a time when Lebanese men enjoyed universal and unconditional suffrage, and were finally awarded voting rights in 1953. While some women fought relentlessly for this cause, others did not desire the right to vote. A significant number of Lebanese women felt that politics was a male domain and that women should focus on their homes and families instead. This is perhaps the reason why only 10% of female voters cast their ballots in the 1953 elections. There were even special polling places for women, emblematic of their citizenship status in a separate sphere from men. Only a very small number of women went on to hold public office. This paper explores the tensions and fissures in the Lebanese women’s movement during the post-independence era regarding voting rights, and the resulting dearth of female representation in politics after women finally obtained the franchise. Why wasn’t suffrage a common goal amongst Lebanese women, and why did the granting of female suffrage fail to translate into women’s political participation in the new state? I posit that the reasons for these phenomena are twofold. Firstly, the resilience of the patriarchy at the political, social, economic, and private level kept women outside of the official state-building process. Secondly, many women were ambivalent towards political participation and through their calls for the right to vote, they were actually playing to a script that proclaimed that political rights would lead to social and economic rights. Though they did not turn out in large numbers at the polls, this did not render Lebanese women passive citizens—they perceived their roles in the domestic sphere as a more relevant practice of citizenship. Lebanese women’s claims to citizenship were based on proper care of their households, scientific mothering, and raising upstanding citizens—this was equivalent to national service. Therefore, women actively contributed to the state-building process on their own terms from inside their homes. Sources include polling data, literature on postcolonial women’s movements, and Lebanese women’s own writings from the press and alumnae bulletins of universities.