Militant Women of a Fragile Nation (review)

Malek Abisaab's monograph on the history of working women in Lebanon's tobacco industry is an essential contribution to the historiography of Lebanon, in particular to its labor, gender, colonial, and postcolonial facets. Perhaps more importantly, Militant Women of a Fragile Nation is one of the very few extant social histories in any language that incorporates Lebanon's "other" interwar period—between World War II and the 1975 civil war—which has been otherwise relegated to the domains of political history and political science. Abisaab's refreshing narrative takes us beyond—and behind—the political hagiographies and analyses of the viability of the Lebanese state structure by highlighting the ways in which working class women were at the forefront of labor struggles and were instrumental in bringing about new labor laws, conceptions of citizenship, and gender relations.

Lebanon's tobacco industry expanded largely as a result of the decline of the previously lucrative silk industry and the establishment in 1935 of the French tobacco monopoly, the Régie Co-Intéressee Libanaise des Tabacs et Tombacs. The "Régie," as it was better known, was a cornerstone of what Abisaab identifies as Lebanon's liberal economy and deeply affected a majority of the inhabitants. Whether they resided in the south, Mount Lebanon, or the north, by the late 1930s "every peasant family planted tobacco instead of garden vegetables" (xvi). This company remains one of Lebanon's major economic enterprises and Abisaab's interest is mainly in its female employees, who consistently comprised over 40 percent of the workforce and were the most proactively "radical" in their resistance to corporate policies and their demands for change (xix). He examines the ways in which these women adapted to and altered their working and living conditions by assigning "multiple cultural meanings" to intersecting identities of class, sect, and gender (xxi). By extension, Abisaab is arguing for a more theoretically nuanced and historically textured understanding of the role of culture within Lebanon's sectarian system. Further, his study examines the material bases of patriarchy and the inextricability of patriarchy and neoliberalism by drawing on Peter Gran's "ethnic-tribal" (i.e. sectarian) theoretical framework.

The outer limits of Abisaab's somewhat chrono-thematic study encompass the nineteenth century to the late 1990s, but the crux of Militant Women is the era following independence in 1943 through the 1970s. Chapter 1 lays out the historical groundwork leading up to the replacement of silk by tobacco as the main cash crop, and the establishment of the Régie during the French mandate. Abisaab argues that it is during this later period, when capitalist enterprises and the liberal economy were truly coming into their own, that the structure of gender relations transformed and women confronted family, state, and modes of capital in increasingly complex ways. The remaining five chapters illustrate the various historical moments in which female Régie employees resisted attempts by the company and the state to displace, disenfranchise, or otherwise disadvantage them.

Chapter 2 thus situates women's public opposition to the founding of the Régie in 1935 within the larger anti-colonial struggle already well underway. Both working- and upper-class women found common ground: the former out of fear of displacement and unemployment resulting from industrial mechanization and the latter as part of their negotiation of bourgeois feminist-nationalist identity.

Régie employees quickly perceived the state as an extension of the French mandatory power. Chapter 3 lays the foundations for women's increasingly radical activism, specifically a major 1946 labor strike, which revolved around their experiences of the Régie's discriminatory labor practices. Abisaab attends to the important roles played by the Communist party and the unions in encouraging the strikes. However, working women felt shut out of these organizations and instead took their cues to mobilize from one another and their immediate working environments. Their activism directly resulted in the passage of labor laws for all workers that, while imperfect, were nevertheless...