In this paper we present a threefold argument, chronological, geographical, and socio-cultural, in order to demonstrate that interest in the woman question and the lively and charged debate it stimulated began in Greater Syria in the early nahda (awakening) period (between 1858 and 1900) and persisted throughout, drawing into its orbit leading intellectuals as well as members of the general public and permeating even into the peripheral areas of Greater Syria. We propose to re-envision this early period and the debate concerning women by examining the public reflection of this debate in the early nahda press, mainly the privately published Beiruti journals and newspapers. First, we argue that it was during these years that early thinkers and their readers turned their attention to gender issues and re-casted gender relationships, as part of their overall scheme of social and political regeneration. Second, we emphasize that it was in Greater Syria that these issues first came to the fore. Greater Syria, and in particular Beirut, was a hub of growing intellectual ferment of bookstores and printing presses, literary salons and scientific societies, journalists and newspapers. Only later was the debate relocated to Egypt. Third, this study of the dialogue on women, developing between the writers and readers of the newspapers, points out its major themes and sources of influence; it therefore emphasizes the modes and directions of the diffusion of ideas, the “community of discourse” the authors, readers, commentators, and critics, who over time discuss, revise, and expand on ideas. By moving beyond the accepted chronological, geographical, and socio-cultural boundaries of this debate, re-envisioning them, and illustrating that the nahda involved a major re-conceptualization of social relations, in which gender and women’s issues lay at its core, we provide a new framework for rethinking the dynamics of the debate on women.