What part do changing gender roles play in the evolution of the company form in the Middle East? Literature on the nineteenth-century corporation in the Global South provides two primary narratives. The first is characterized best by Ritu Birla’s study of the Marwaris. It suggests that companies in the Global South follow the rules of kinship and “custom” as distinct from British or Western capitalism. The second, exemplified in Timur Kuran’s work, treats the family company as the product of the hinderances of Islamic law to permit limited liability – an ideal form for capital accumulation. What both narratives share is their preservation of the same fundamental mythology: that the private domestic realm and the public limited liability company are not interrelated. In this paper I will trace the evolution of the Levantine companies between the late 19th and early 20th centuries. I will argue that not only was the company form tied up in the political economic shifts during this period, but it was also entwined with changing gender norms. Specifically, diminishing practices of extended family inhabitation, love-based marriages verses arranged unions, and growing social and sexual freedoms for women were inextricable from the rise in incorporated companies in the region and the forms that these incorporated companies took. Indeed, the limited liability company is founded on the mythology that the company is an object separate from its individual members. Yet, changing gender norms influenced not just the kin-based unincorporated entity but it impacted the limited liability one was well. By examining the record books, private letters, court cases, and official company documents of several companies in Beirut, this paper will specifically make two interventions in the current literature on the company form. First, that the increased autonomy of women in the social realm that Elizabeth Thompson carefully outlines for post-World War I Lebanon curtailed certain women’s autonomy in the business realm. Second, these changes were not merely causes or effects of the changing company forms in Lebanon and globally, but inextricable from evolving institutions of capitalism, and yet widely treated as external to them.