This panel brings together a diverse range of historians to explore the changing nature of women’s status and activism in Lebanon during the late colonial and early independence period (1936–1955). In doing so, the presenters collectively address three important lacunas in scholarship on both women and gender as well as Lebanon. First, despite the thriving nature of the field of women’s and gender history in the modern Middle East, our understanding of the historical dynamics of women and gender in Lebanon remains limited to a specific set of periods and sectors—most notably reflected in the important works of Elizabeth Thompson and Malek Abisaab. Several presentations on this panel build on this critical scholarship yet broaden the archival source base, questions asked, and methodologies deployed. Second, much historical scholarship on Lebanon emphasizes the late Ottoman and French Mandate periods. This panel shifts the focus to the early post-independence period, highlighting the centrality of questions related to women and gender while at the same time taking seriously the issue of continuity and change with the late colonial period. Finally, the last decade of historical research has seen an increasing interest by historians in the post-World War II period. As such, this panel provides an important basis of comparison for thinking about Lebanon in comparative perspective. What emerges is a complex set of complimentary narratives about women and gender in the period between late colonialism and early post-independence. They significantly expand our understanding of women’s lives, political activism, and state building and economic development more broadly.
Each paper is premised on a specific element of the richly diverse array of women’s lives and activism during the late colonial and early independence period. While some papers focus on specific individuals or organizations, other zoom out to discuss the broader structural dynamics of the women’s movement or gendered citizenship. Equally important, each paper explores intersections between women’s activism and elements of political mobilization, economic development, or intellectual production that have hitherto been assumed to be male-only spaces. These include the leftist milieu surrounding the Communist Party, other networks championing and shaping rural development, or daily practices of citizenship that political elites sought to consolidate independence around. Each paper does so through analyzing a unique set of primary sources, which in turn expands the terrain of research agendas, theoretical contributions, and empirical knowledge of Lebanon.
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Dr. Nadya J. Sbaiti
One of the primary foci of the field of Middle East women and gender studies has been examining the institution and politics of marriage as a way to access women’s lives, gender dynamics, and the connection to state- and nation-making. However, this focus has occurred at the cost of overlooking “all the single ladies”, for reasons that are often methodologically driven. While unmarried women are certainly not uncommon in Middle East history, there has been remarkably little attention paid to this group of women as a category, and the degree to which their ‘singlehood’ was both a choice and a factor (a catalyst or a hindrance) in their mobilization and activism. 'Single' women have been involved in political and society at every level as labor union organizers, writers, schoolteachers and principals, magazine editors, healthcare workers, and founders of social welfare organizations, among other things. Using written sources as well as oral interviews, this presentation will highlight a number of single women’s life stories between 1930 and 1960 as a way to begin to expand theories of women’s activism and the deliberate choices Lebanese women made to remain unmarried and childless, as part of that work. In so doing, this paper asks: what historical sources can we mine for access to unmarried/single women’s lives and contributions? How do we read those sources? What terminology should we use and what are the implications of doing so? This work builds on an essential albeit scant literature to argue that making visible the activities of ‘unmarried’ / single women in Lebanon in the late mandate and early independence periods is critical to making deeper sense of the choices that women made in terms of defining their political and social involvement, the language they used to describe their work, and the impact it made on Lebanese society during this crucial historical transition from colonialism to independence.
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Dr. Sana Tannoury Karam
In 1953, Emily Fares-Ibrahim, a Lebanese intellectual, writer, and feminist, became the
first woman to run in parliamentary elections in Lebanon and the Arab region. Campaigning in front of a crowd in the town of Zahle, she was splashed with ink by a bystander protesting her participation in elections. Fares-Ibrahim persisted, continuing her speech and facing the crowd with ink on her face.
Few histories cover Fares-Ibrahim’s life, and those that do tend to concentrate on her activism in post-independence Lebanon. They have thus overlooked her earlier foundational work during the French Mandate period. In fact, Fares-Ibrahim had been one of the most prominent activists in the colonial era. She had long demanded women’s political rights, most significantly the right to vote and to run for office.
This paper offers a unique and novel focus on Fares-Ibrahim. First, it examines her activism in the critical years of 1940-46, a period that coincides with the transition to independence. Second, it locates her within leftist circles—an often overlooked aspect because of her sidelining by the Communist Party in 1948. Third, it situates her within the genealogy of feminist activism from the late Ottoman period into the post-independence period.
Using personal family papers as well as her journal articles and speeches, I argue that Fares Ibrahim pushed back against subordinating women’s equality to class struggle within existing leftist discourses. At a time when elite women’s activism retreated behind nationalist movements in Syria and Lebanon, Fares-Ibrahim equated suffrage with progress and democratic principles. She argued that independence and democracy in Lebanon and the world could not be fulfilled without the achievement of women’s political rights. While the history of the left and the history of the women’s movement have often been written separately, by focusing on Fares-Ibrahim, I bridge this historiographical gap for the benefit of highlighting the issues that connected these histories.
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Dr. Ziad M. Abu-Rish
This paper analyzes the struggle for women’s suffrage between political independence in 1943 and the first parliamentary elections in which women participated in 1953. In doing so, it takes into account the views expressed and strategies pursued by different women’s organizations. Of particular interest will be the 1950 formation of the Executive Committee of Women’s Organizations in Lebanon. The Executive Committee served as the key node around which Lebanese women sought to secure their suffrage rights, including issuing statements, organizing demonstrations, and building alliances with politicians, political parties, and select constituencies. A key concern of the analysis presented are the changes and continuities between the 1943-1953 mobilizations for women’s suffrage and women’s activism in the colonial period. It therefore accounts for the contexts and contingencies that revived mobilizations for women’s suffrage in 1943 (after being dormant for more than a decade) and that secured it in 1953 (in the first year of Camille Chamoun’s presidency). Rather than an inevitable consequence of independence, women’s suffrage emerged as the product of women’s agency and strategic decision-making within a complex set of contexts and contingencies involving post-colonial state building, intra-elite rivalries, and shifting norms of development, governance, and citizenship. In doing so, this paper makes use of a wide array of sources including the little-known archive of the Executive Committee, the debates about women’s suffrage in the local press, the assessments of foreign embassies, and the memoirs of Lebanese women and men that reflect on the struggle. The conclusions drawn from these sources make possible both the construction of a details narrative about how women in Lebanon secured their right to vote as well as how that struggle intersected with other dynamics of political, economic, social, and cultural life in early post-independence Lebanon.
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Dr. Nova Robinson
In 1950 Eveline Bustros and Anissa Najjar founded the Village Welfare Society (VWS) in order to educate rural women and girls and to offer training in local handicrafts. The VWS was the first Lebanese women’s organization to take women’s social welfare work beyond the confines of Lebanon’s cities and focus explicitly and exclusively on rural women. Using the never-before-used papers of the Village Welfare Society, this paper explores the politics behind focusing on rural women. The VWS’s emphasis on developing rural women connected to national and international conversations about the status of women in the post-WWII world. In order to participate in conversations about women in development on the international level, the VWS joined Associated Country Women of the World, an international organization with consultative status at the United Nations. On the domestic level, Lebanese women were fighting to secure political rights from the state, but felt that their rural “sisters” were holding them back in these campaigns. Therefore, Bustros and Najjar, veterans of mandate era women’s organizations, started the VWS to help rural women “develop.”
The VWS’s development metrics were influenced by the emergent international women’s rights standard, which used the legal and political status of women in Europe and the United States as the gold standard. Despite the colonially-rooted biases imbedded in development-oriented reforms, the UN’s emphasis on development made it possible for Lebanese women to claim new forms of gendered expertise on the national level, which enhanced their larger campaigns for political rights. The VWS used the discourse of development in its activities with rural women while simultaneously trying to prove to the Lebanese state that urban women were developed enough to secure full political rights. Studying the VWS reveals the complicated, and sometimes contradictory, political and social landscape women’s organizations had to navigate in the period after independence. Nonetheless, the VWS used their gendered expertise and the discourse of development to shape politics and women’s rights in post-independence Lebanon.
