This paper examines the codification of personal status laws—which pertain to marriage, divorce, inheritance, and custody— in Lebanon between 1948 and 1962. In accordance with the 1936 law passed during the French mandate guaranteeing each religious sect the right to determine its own code, a number of personal status laws were submitted to parliament beginning in the late 1940s; alongside this process of codification grew significant activism by various groups including women’s and lawyers’ associations demanding a range of reforms from a universal civil code to universal laws such as on inheritance and divorce that would guarantee gender equal rights for all Lebanese. Recent scholarship on personal status law in Lebanon, and elsewhere in the Arab world, has focused on the role of the secular state in co-opting religious law and sectarian politics to regulate family law to understand why reform efforts such as those started in Lebanon in the 1950s have stalled or failed. Is gender inequality in personal status perpetuated by the secular state through regulating these laws and either manipulating them according to a specific understanding of Islamic law, or by handing power to the specific set of religious or sectarian leaders that did so? Or, can the root of inequality be blamed on the ongoing control of sectarian communities over these laws due to the incomplete secularization of the state? What is the role of religious law, the elite religious establishments, and the secular state in producing gender unequal personal status regimes? This paper considers these questions, and attempts to nuance this debate in the case of Lebanon by drawing on a range of sources including Lebanese government records, legal documents, newspapers, and periodicals to explore the role of and relationships between the state, sects, and social movements in shaping the codification process.