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Eva Malik: How Much Liberation for Lebanese Women?
Abstract
Eva Malik served as the secretary of the Lebanese Women’s Union, and was one of the co-founders of Sawt al-Mar’a (Voice of the Woman), a women’s periodical published in Lebanon throughout the 1940s and 1950s. She was well educated, and had obtained a Master of Arts degree from the American University of Beirut. Yet she is usually remembered for being married to Charles Malik, the first Lebanese ambassador to the United States. This paper examines her life, education, work, and most importantly, her ideas on women’s roles in society and the family, as well as her conceptions of Lebanese women’s liberation. I argue that Malik was eager for Lebanese women to become “liberated”, but had reservations about how liberated a Lebanese woman should become in comparison to American and other Western women. Malik advocated a form of emancipation for Lebanese women that would not result in distraction or negligence of essential feminine duties, namely the home and the family. She often implied that Western women had achieved the highest level of emancipation, but that it was preferable for Lebanese women to remain within the boundaries of emancipation that were culturally appropriate, lest they destroy their nation. However, if Malik addressed a Western audience, she would not speak ill of the West despite her misgivings about Western women’s excessive freedoms. In an interview with an American newspaper in 1946, she stated that Lebanese women have “had to overcome the general Eastern idea about women,” which was why they had not yet attained suffrage despite much noteworthy progress in other areas. Malik implied that the “Eastern” perception of women maintained that they were only exclusively capable of wifehood and motherhood, while Malik and other active women viewed themselves as competent wives and mothers who also deserved the right to vote, work, and receive an education. She was receptive to the practices of Western education, technological prowess, and economic development, and wanted Lebanon to catch up to the West in these respects. Malik was adamantly against Western “freedoms” that were morally questionable, such as straying away from family life, renouncing the home, spending too much time in bars and nightclubs, and sexual intercourse outside of marriage. I conclude by raising the question: Why was Eva Malik, in spite of all her achievements, best known for being the wife of a diplomat?
Discipline
History
Geographic Area
Lebanon
Sub Area
19th-21st Centuries