This paper explores the exchange of knowledge about women’s rights between Syria and the United States as Syria exited the French Mandate (1920-1946). On the eve of complete Syrian independence, several Syrian women toured the Eastern United States speaking about the status of women in the Arab world. Some were sent by the Syrian government, others traveled on grants from the US-based Institute for International Education (IIE). From Meredith College in North Carolina to Southern Illinois University and many colleges, churches, and civic centers in between, these representatives of the “new Arab women,” most of whom had been educated in the United States, delivered speeches to American audiences. The speeches were designed to counter the limited view Americans had of women in the Arab world and to provide a primer on the rights awarded to women by religious law and national governments. To this end, the speeches focused primarily on women’s access to education, employment opportunities, and marital rights afforded by Islam. These orchestrated tours in the United States demonstrate that women’s rights became a medium through which independent Syria was able to demonstrate its progressive politics and manifest its readiness to be incorporated into the UN system. While it seems the women were invited to speak on women’s rights or status, the speakers often also addressed larger political questions, such as national independence and the “Palestine issue.” Women from Syria were ready to step up to the lectern and challenge the stereotypes that circulated about their limited rights as women and as Arabs. In doing so, they claimed a position for women in independent Syria and Lebanon. Alice Kandaleft Cosma was one of the women on tour. A cornerstone of Cosma’s speeches was her emphasis on the fact that “[i]t is the duty of both the Arabians and the Americans to know each other better.” Upon returning from her tour in the United States, Cosma spoke at universities in Syria about her tour, including the Teachers College in Damascus, where she was a professor. The American speaking tours offer a window into the confidence some Arab women had in the ability of independent Arab states to provide women with the rights they had been denied by the legal system in force under the mandate system. Furthermore, the speeches illustrate that the rights claimed by the “new Syrian woman” fused international women’s rights protections, indigenous traditions, and Islamic law.

This paper explores tropes and practices of prostitution in Hispanophone memoir and fiction, recreating northern Morocco’s urban landscapes from the 1920’s through the 40’s, when Tangier became emblematic of the decadent Mediterranean port city in the global colonial imaginary. Most of the city’s subaltern foreign nationals were Spanish; Spanish women participated in prostitutional networks across northern Morocco and into the French Algerian province of Oran. Spaniards were also present as transient cosmopolitan consumers of sexual tourism. I focus on a novel, a memoir, and travel accounts published as magazine articles whose authors’ differential positionalities as Tangerines or metropolitan travelers offer contrasting narratives of sexualities on sale during Tangier’s years as an International Zone (1923-1940, again 1946-1959) initially jointly administered by the British, French and Spanish, later joined by Italians, Belgians, Portuguese, Dutch, Americans and Russians. Born into the Spanish working classes of the city and holding odd jobs throughout his life there and later in Madrid, Ángel Vázquez (Tangier 1929-Madrid 1980) remains an elusive figure, alternatively effaced and celebrated. His novel, La Vida Perra de Juanita Narboni (1976) is periodically cited as one of the greatest achievements of twentieth century Spanish literature by Spanish critics. Vázquez describes Tangier as a whore in his private correspondence, narrating his definitive move from Tangier to Madrid in the wake of Tangier’s passing from International jurisdiction to independent Morocco. Juanita, his novel’s narrator and central character, blandishes whoredom constantly in the interminable monologue that constitutes the narrative, casting accusations of whoredom to distance herself from disreputable modern practices making young women’s sexuality visible in public space. Whereas Vazquez’s novel, an intimate, affect-laden tribute to the author’s lost world, mobilizes what he calls the language-memory of his mother and her working-class Christian and Jewish women friends to represent early twentieth century Tangier, Hispanophone narratives anchored in the modernist spectator positionalities of Spanish colonialism evoke memories and practices of prostitution otherwise. The Barcelona-based illustrated weekly Algo (1929-1930’s) directed by M. Jiménez Moya printed travel narratives. Authored by metropolitan journalists intent on Orientalizing North Africa, they casually portray the ubiquity of commercial sex, associating it with the persistence of slave traffics inviting and legitimating European intervention. El Barrio de las Bocas Pintadas, published in Barcelona in 1954 by Arabist Luis Antonio de Vega (Bilbao 1900- Madrid 1977) romanticizes the modern landscape of commercial sex available to the traveler, introduced by French administrations to Morocco and Algeria.

Between 1920-1939, a lively debate about women’s roles in politics, society, and the family captivated men and women writing in Arabic in Cairo and Beirut. Writers raised important questions about whether women should vote, unveil, and/or work outside the home. While some, who would later be recognized as "feminist" by historians, opposed the veil and advocated expanding legal, political, and labor rights for women while honoring their domestic roles, others embraced more exclusively maternalist political imaginaries, arguing that raising children in the home was women's most important socio-political work. Both of these positions--the feminist and the maternalist-- mainly reflected the lived experiences of elite and bourgeois women, for whom work "outside the home" was a political choice rather than an everyday necessity. For most women in Lebanon and Egypt, however, work "outside the home" was hardly a new phenomenon made possible by feminist advances. Women working as maids, shopkeepers, farm laborers, silk factory workers, piece-work producers, sex workers, and in many other professions could "chose" neither the ethical, political labor of full-time motherhood nor the bourgeois careers prescribed by their elite contemporaries. Beth Baron, Margot Badran, and others have demonstrated how bourgeois writers overlooked working-class women and developed elitist political imaginaries. Others, like Malek Abisaab, have told the story of women's activism "from below," emphasizing how women engaged in formal waged labor shaped political change. This paper argues that the figure of the working-class woman was by no means absent from elite press debates; in fact, this figure played an important political role by helping to consolidate both bourgeois feminist and maternalist politics. I trace the debate about women's work in three women's journals from the interwar period, Julia Dimashqiyya's al-Mar'a al-Jadida (Beirut), Labiba Hashem's Fatat al-Sharq (Cairo), and Rosa Antun and Niqula Haddad's al-Sayyidat wa-l-Rijal (Cairo), to explore how domestic and other forms of labor were represented, moralized, and politicized. Which forms of women’s labor were to be commodified, and which were to be performed in the home without formal remuneration? The paper focuses on representations of maids, servants, and wet-nurses -- i.e., forms of working-class women's labor that elite women writers could not easily ignore -- to show how a shared aversion to the figure of the working-class woman came to unite bourgeois women across feminist and maternalist positions, while inadvertently underlining how important working women were to bourgeois forms of family life and feminist activism.

The role and place of Middle eastern elite women during the Mandate, especially the role they played in raising national consciousness and in educating their fellow women, is well known. Most of studies on Feminism and women’s movements have focused on this bourgeois milieu and its social work. This perspective is often justified - and obviously legitimately – by the absence of women in institutional archives and “official documentation” in the region. The work of the “Open Jerusalem” ERC program over the past three years allows us today, at least for the city of Jerusalem, to be able to cross documentations and consider the possibility of accessing other stories, especially on the “invisibles”, among them the working woman. This paper aims to frame the presence, role, and life of women in the holy city during the British Mandate. It is based on original documentation from a selection of archives of the city, combining missionary documentation (mainly the Rosary Sisters’ papers and the Custodian Archives), the Municipal Minutes, Consular archives (mainly French, Italian and British) and some newspapers. Its main focus is the workplaces and the public, social and political presence of women in the daily life of the city. The attention to women’s their role in education, business and commercial activities, and mediation and services, show at the same time the social economic value of women in the global urban economy and the importance of social stratifications. Gender, class and confessions played a specific role in the definition of a feminine working group that helped to define a national struggle for independence and emancipation in the 1936 Revolt. Palestinian women, confronted by the British Mandate and the growing Zionist movements, faced to the transformation of their position due to the progress of the Arab feminist national movement, and negotiated their own practices and presence in the public life. The examination of women’s daily activities and practices may introduce us to the complexity and the ambiguity of their social position, not confined to private and close spaced (even though pushed in that direction by a growing conservative movement, especially among men of religion ), but directly confronted to the public struggle for hegemony and power in streets, markets and fabrics, schools, mosques and churches.