Studying the lives of individuals allows historians to explore where the personal meets the political. Researching the lives of four pioneering women, ‘Afifa Karam (1883-1924), Eveline Bustros (1878-1971), Eva Malik (1914-1988), and Angela Jurdak Khoury (1915-2011), provides a unique window into changing gender discourses and gender anxieties within Greater Syria and the wider diaspora from the turn of the twentieth century to the late 1960s. This panel fuses the descriptive approach of biography with gender theory to reveal how analyzing women’s lives sheds light on wider cultural, economic, political, and social trends in Greater Syria and, indeed, the larger global processes, such as the Arabic nahda or the global feminist movement, that shaped the Middle East during these women’s lifetimes. In particular, we are interested in exploring how these women made sense of major events in their lives and how they embraced, negotiated, or challenged their roles in the family, in society, and in national and transnational affairs.
In addition to exploring the mechanics of constructing gendered historical biographies of women, our panel queries how to best approach existing biographies as sources. Historians have relied on biographical sketches of historical subjects found in newspapers and biographical dictionaries since the cultural turn in the 1970s. However, these biographical sketches are often vague, recycled, and inaccurate. How should scholars engage these materials when writing biographies? Furthermore, existing historical biographies primarily address the life stories of men, ignoring the contributions of women. Such a bias toward the life stories of male subjects perpetuates the erasure of women’s experiences.
The first paper discusses ‘Afifa Karam and her role as a feminist novelist and journalist in the North American mahjar, or diaspora. The second paper details Eveline Bustros’ political activism, and especially campaigns for women’s political rights, in the mandate period. The third paper considers the life of Eva Malik, who was the wife of the first Lebanese ambassador to the US, Charles Malik. The final paper examines Angela Jurdak Khoury, Lebanon’s first female diplomat. We do not claim this group as representative of all Levantine women in this period; however, certain patterns and characteristics emerge from the biographies we present. Each woman is contextualized in her own history and society. Together, the four papers address the specific ways in which reading, writing, and narrating biography can creatively and productively challenge existing literary, historical, socio-political, and institutional histories.
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Dr. Nova Robinson
Eveline Bustros (1878-1971) is one of the well-known Lebanese raidat, women’s rights pioneers. However, her life story is generally presented in fragments that highlight her family’s background, her oeuvre, and her political activism. Such biographical sketches note she was the daughter of a very wealthy, Orthodox, Francophone family in Beirut. That World War I sent her and her husband, Gabriel Bustros, the scion of another well-known Beiruti family, into voluntary exile first in Egypt, then in Paris. That while in Paris she started to write and was exposed to the pan-Arab cause. Existing biographies then address in skeletal detail her written work before addressing her work with the women’s rights movement in Lebanon and the wider Arab world. Bustros is best known for her work La Main d’Allah (1926). Profiles also note that she organized a literary salon that brought politically active Beirutis to discuss the future of Lebanon. Furthermore, brief biographies sometimes address the fact that she founded the Literary Society of Beirut and the Lebanese Pen Club.
Her work with women’s rights activism garners greater attention in the existing sketches of her life and work. The fact that she led the Lebanese delegation to the Conference for the Defense of Palestine in Cairo in 1938 is always highlighted. Biographies also note her role in the women’s movement locally and regionally: she became president of the Lebanese-Arab Women’s Federation in 1942. Then, she became president of the General Federation of Arab Women in 1948. During World War II, her role in anti-French demonstrations and the fact that she organized many women’s marches is also presented. Biographical sketches written after her death address that she received the Lebanese Order of Merit a few months before she died.
But, behind these accomplishments, who was Eveline Bustros? This paper tries to fill in the holes in the existing biographies using newly recovered archival material and oral histories with her descendants to present a more complete biography of Bustros and what she thought about the political and social transformations that shaped Lebanon during her lifetime. The paper also queries the limits of writing her biography. Nonetheless, a more complete biography of her life and activism sheds light on the issues that motivated women’s rights activists in the first half of the twentieth century in the Arab world and how they viewed their movement in relation to the international women’s rights movement.
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Dr. Catherine Batruni
Eva Malik served as the secretary of the Lebanese Women’s Union, and was one of the co-founders of Sawt al-Mar’a (Voice of the Woman), a women’s periodical published in Lebanon throughout the 1940s and 1950s. She was well educated, and had obtained a Master of Arts degree from the American University of Beirut. Yet she is usually remembered for being married to Charles Malik, the first Lebanese ambassador to the United States. This paper examines her life, education, work, and most importantly, her ideas on women’s roles in society and the family, as well as her conceptions of Lebanese women’s liberation.
I argue that Malik was eager for Lebanese women to become “liberated”, but had reservations about how liberated a Lebanese woman should become in comparison to American and other Western women. Malik advocated a form of emancipation for Lebanese women that would not result in distraction or negligence of essential feminine duties, namely the home and the family. She often implied that Western women had achieved the highest level of emancipation, but that it was preferable for Lebanese women to remain within the boundaries of emancipation that were culturally appropriate, lest they destroy their nation. However, if Malik addressed a Western audience, she would not speak ill of the West despite her misgivings about Western women’s excessive freedoms. In an interview with an American newspaper in 1946, she stated that Lebanese women have “had to overcome the general Eastern idea about women,” which was why they had not yet attained suffrage despite much noteworthy progress in other areas.
Malik implied that the “Eastern” perception of women maintained that they were only exclusively capable of wifehood and motherhood, while Malik and other active women viewed themselves as competent wives and mothers who also deserved the right to vote, work, and receive an education. She was receptive to the practices of Western education, technological prowess, and economic development, and wanted Lebanon to catch up to the West in these respects. Malik was adamantly against Western “freedoms” that were morally questionable, such as straying away from family life, renouncing the home, spending too much time in bars and nightclubs, and sexual intercourse outside of marriage. I conclude by raising the question: Why was Eva Malik, in spite of all her achievements, best known for being the wife of a diplomat?
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Ms. Angela Kahil
Angela Jurdak Khoury (1915-2011) is a woman of many firsts: she was the first Lebanese female diplomat as well as the first Arab female diplomat. But Khoury is important for more than just charting a new path for Lebanese women; she had a foundational role in the Lebanese diplomatic mission to the United States and to the United Nations. A detailed analysis of Khoury’s life story demonstrates her contributions to shaping the Lebanese state’s foreign policy, particularly in the formative years of the republic. Such a project is necessary because women are largely absent from standard texts on Lebanese history. A more detailed investigation into Khoury’s life story reveals the crucial role she played in the cultivation and the consolidation of the relations between Lebanon and the United States. Furthermore, her pivotal role in developing the United Nation’s Commission on the Status of Women in 1946, through which she advocated for women’s rights on the international level, becomes clearer.
After receiving her Masters in Sociology from AUB in 1938, Khoury became its first female faculty member that same year. During World War II, she worked as the Assistant Director of the Allied Powers Radio Poll for Lebanon, Syria, and Palestine to register the number of people who listened to broadcasts by the Axis nations. Soon afterwards, Khoury became the first secretary of the consulate of Lebanon in Washington, D.C., a position she held from 1945 to 1966. She was the only female member of the Lebanese delegation to the United Nations Organization in 1945, alongside Charles Malek and Sobhi Mahmassani.
The Lebanese government awarded her the Order of the Cedars in 1959 in honor of her service to the country. After resigning from the Lebanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs following twenty-one years of service, she pursued her Ph.D. in International Relations from American University in Washington, D.C. This paper fills some gaps in the existing narrative on Khoury and Lebanese women by utilizing her personal archives and conducting oral histories with her children and nephews to create a more complete biography of a woman who broke new ground for Lebanese women to be employed in the diplomatic corps and shaped the trajectory of Lebanon’s national affairs.
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Dr. Elizabeth Saylor
The Lebanese immigrant writer, journalist, and translator ‘Afifa Karam (1883-1924) was a key contributor to the Arabic cultural renaissance, or the nahda. An early voice calling attention to the situation of Arab women, Karam was a staunch advocate for women’s rights to education, to work, to travel, for self-expression, and to decide on their life partners. Karam chose fiction as her preferred means of promoting women’s empowerment and liberation, and she published groundbreaking Arabic novels in New York City between 1906-1910, at a time when few such novels had been written. Karam’s romance novels took on such subjects as honor killings, interreligious marriages, and veiling practices. Nevertheless, despite her landmark accomplishments and the accolades she was accorded during her lifetime, there is a little extant documentation about Karam’s life. Personal papers were not preserved; family members who might have been able to provide oral histories have died; primary and secondary source materials are negligible.
As happened with many of her women contemporaries, Karam’s life and work was kept “alive” in survey-style texts or biographical dictionaries. By and large, Karam’s legacy was summarized in and circumscribed by short, recycled, often inaccurate biographical sketches. Long-form biographies, it would seem, were reserved for her male contemporaries. Understanding of great women’s lives has been greatly limited by fragmentation, lack of attention, in the end, by the gendered dynamics and processes of historiography.
Karam’s life is well worth investigating and analyzing to deepen understanding of the Lebanese and Arab diaspora (mahjar) of the early 20th century, and its impact on the nahda. But because of the lacunae in material, and the biases in what is available, a traditional straightforward approach to biography cannot provide the insights we are looking for. This provokes a variety of methodological questions. How ought scholars approach the writing of biographies of marginalized groups? What creative methodological strategies could, or should, be used, when primary source materials are scarce and existing biographical accounts are shaded by gender (or other) biases, and therefore, require critical interpretation? What is the validity of employing speculative methods, such as of reconstructing the biography of an individual through analyses of their published works? These methods can not only reconstruct a life, but have revolutionary potential to rewrite dominant historical, social and political narratives.
