This paper, based on original research in the archives of the Arab-American National Museum in Dearborn (MI), the archives of the League of Nations in Geneva and the archives of the French state, takes as its point of departure famine relief parcels sent to Syria-Lebanon by the Union of Syrian Ladies in Alexandria, Egypt during World War One. The paper argues that the wartime humanitarian activities of Syro-Lebanese women’s groups in the diaspora proved constitutive of a durable mode of gendered philanthropic politics, connecting the global Syro-Lebanese diaspora and the emerging Mandate states of Syria and Lebanon during the 1920s. The paper thus provides a counterpoint and a global framework to the panel’s other contributors, who focus more closely on the movement of women within the Eastern Mediterranean. It also draws on and contributes to the current debates on the history of humanitarian intervention and human rights discourse, as reinvigorated recently by Samuel Moyn, Lynn Hunt and Didier Fassin (Fassin 2012; Moyn 2010; Hunt 2007). Within the historiography of the French Mandate, the paper recasts Elizabeth Thompson’s decade-old argument - about a ‘maternalist’ Mandate regime in Syria-Lebanon during the 1920s – to take account of new scholarship on the Syro-Lebanese diaspora by Akram Khater, Andrew Arsan and others (Thompson 2000; Arsan 2011; Khater 2001). The paper thus tests the concept of a ‘maternalist’ Mandate diaspora in comparative perspective. By examining the activities of Syro-Lebanese women’s philanthropic associations in diaspora communities both inside the Eastern Mediterranean and in North America, and by contrasting these associations’ humanitarian philanthropy during World War One with a subsequent iteration of such practices during the Great Syrian Revolt of 1925-6, the paper identifies the geographic and diachronic shifts in Syro-Lebanese diaspora women’s humanitarian philanthropy – both targeted at women in particular and not. Thus, the paper contributes to this panel by emphasizing not only the movement of women within the borders of the ‘mandate Mediterranean’ but ‘women’s movements’ – especially philanthropic and humanitarian associations – that existed well beyond the region while remaining focused on it. In closing, the paper assesses the League of Nations’ Permanent Mandates Commission, and the inter-relationship between diaspora Syro-Lebanese women’s movements and the gendered humanitarian norms established and diffused by the League regarding the migration and labor of women in Mandate contexts.