In 1953, Emily Fares-Ibrahim, a Lebanese intellectual, writer, and feminist, became the first woman to run in parliamentary elections in Lebanon and the Arab region. Campaigning in front of a crowd in the town of Zahle, she was splashed with ink by a bystander protesting her participation in elections. Fares-Ibrahim persisted, continuing her speech and facing the crowd with ink on her face. Few histories cover Fares-Ibrahim’s life, and those that do tend to concentrate on her activism in post-independence Lebanon. They have thus overlooked her earlier foundational work during the French Mandate period. In fact, Fares-Ibrahim had been one of the most prominent activists in the colonial era. She had long demanded women’s political rights, most significantly the right to vote and to run for office. This paper offers a unique and novel focus on Fares-Ibrahim. First, it examines her activism in the critical years of 1940-46, a period that coincides with the transition to independence. Second, it locates her within leftist circles—an often overlooked aspect because of her sidelining by the Communist Party in 1948. Third, it situates her within the genealogy of feminist activism from the late Ottoman period into the post-independence period. Using personal family papers as well as her journal articles and speeches, I argue that Fares Ibrahim pushed back against subordinating women’s equality to class struggle within existing leftist discourses. At a time when elite women’s activism retreated behind nationalist movements in Syria and Lebanon, Fares-Ibrahim equated suffrage with progress and democratic principles. She argued that independence and democracy in Lebanon and the world could not be fulfilled without the achievement of women’s political rights. While the history of the left and the history of the women’s movement have often been written separately, by focusing on Fares-Ibrahim, I bridge this historiographical gap for the benefit of highlighting the issues that connected these histories.