Description
Title"Sisters of men"
Date Created2015
Other Date2015-05 (degree)
Extent1 online resource (xiii, 521 p. : ill.)
DescriptionThis transnational history of Syrian women’s activism argues that Syrian women’s identities were shaped by activism at home and abroad at the League of Nations. In the early twentieth century, women in Ottoman Syria—later divided by the French into Syria and Lebanon—forged regional as well as diasporic and activist connections to lobby for rights as Arabs and as women. Drawing from research in over twenty archives in Lebanon, Egypt, Switzerland, France, Italy, the Netherlands, and the United States, this project provides new historical evidence about how a pan-Arab women’s identity developed and how it was used in relation to domestic and international audiences. In the 1910s, Syrian women focused on providing basic social services to women and the poor. In the 1920s, when the League of Nations imposed the French Mandate for Syria and the British Mandates for Palestine and Iraq, a regional women’s network desirous of Arab independence was born. Women’s rights, which initially meant the right to citizenship, became an international issue during the League of Nations era, 1920-1945. Syrian women seized upon this transformation and channeled the regional Arab women’s network toward the League in the name of Arab independence and women’s rights in the 1930s. Arab women’s activism directed toward the League of Nations decentered the West as the only model for women’s rights. A gendered history of Syrian women’s pan-Arab activism problematizes the existing narrative that the UN Decade for Women, 1975-1985, was the moment when women’s rights first galvanized transnational activism in the global south. The existing history of the international women’s movement erases alternative definitions of women’s rights that circulated in the early twentieth century. In demonstrating the early global engagement of Syrian women on behalf of women’s rights and Arab independence, this history changes the narrative of the origins of transnational women’s activism and internationalizes the study of Arab women’s history. The project uses the lives and activism of Alice Kandaleft Cosma, Julia Tu’mi Dimashqiyya, ‘Afifa Karam, Anbara Salam Khalidi, Nour Hamada, and Ibtihaj Qaddura to challenge the pervasive stereotypes about Arab women’s passivity, which still have currency today.
NotePh.D.
NoteIncludes bibliographical references
Noteby Nova Robinson
Genretheses, ETD doctoral
Languageeng
CollectionGraduate School - New Brunswick Electronic Theses and Dissertations
Organization NameRutgers, The State University of New Jersey
RightsThe author owns the copyright to this work.
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