Due to French investment in silk factories on Mount Lebanon in the mid-late nineteenth century, the tremors of the capitalist world-system arrived in Lebanon earlier than almost anywhere else in the Arab world. As Akram Khater tracks in Inventing Home, by the time France formally colonized Lebanon and Syria under the League of Nations’ aegis, a distinctive but porous middle-class had arisen in the cities of Beirut and Damascus. Moreover, the rise of the industrial-capitalist model on the mountain instigated a process of generating sexual difference in laboring. Women became the primary pool of factory workers while men’s identities became increasingly tied to working the land. While the characteristics of this distinctively gendered division of labor transformed in the runup to French colonialism, the maturing of this middle class nevertheless maintained separate gendered expectations between what women and men were “supposed to do” in order to liberate the newly-conceived nation as France installed its colonial project, even within the diaspora. These conditions yielded an intensely generative arena for women’s magazines and periodicals, all of which dealt with the question of modernizing and what it demanded of/for women specifically. To examine how women were beginning to define and participate in modernity with an eye to liberating the nation, this paper looks at the role of visual advertisements embedded in women’s periodicals in interwar Lebanon-Syria and its diaspora, linking the realms of aesthetics, consumption, gender, modernity, and work. It argues that if “modernizing” via participating in a capitalist system represented a form of liberation to Lebanese and Syrian women in the interwar period, then purchasing power, making desirable choices, and defining the “ideal” woman as a consumer represented a yardstick measuring one’s proximity to liberation in both the homeland and the diaspora. The kinds of commodities advertised in magazines circulated in the Arab world and Arab communities in the United States suggested what kinds of objects could signal one’s moves towards liberation—advertisements for cars, women’s fashion, and tobacco products were three of the most evocative. In subtle ways, all three represented gendered conceptions of modernity, particularly incipient shifts in the new arrangements of the family, understandings of (racialized) beauty, and the role of the family as a cosmopolitan and consumption unit. These advertisements were creating an aesthetic-cultural hegemony that proved essential in equating liberation to modernity to consumption to new models of the family and the role of women.