Militant Women of a Fragile Nation (review)

Written in a clear, engaging style, Malek Abisaab, Assistant Professor in History at McGill University, has given us a fascinating, meticulously researched history of workingwomen — their working conditions and militancy — in Lebanon's tobacco industry. Over several decades, these women workers became known for their radicalism and protests against both management and the Lebanese state. Yet these women's voices and struggles have often been written out of trade union records and accounts which focus on socialist activism or 'organized labour.' Rejecting a culturalist lens which has unfortunately characterized so much writing on the Middle East, Abisaab weaves a finely-crafted history of working women's lives and struggles which have hitherto been invisible. Central to Abisaab's argument in the book is his positing of a "multifaceted, ever-changing, intention-driven, and processual view of culture" instead of "a unilineal, stage-driven view of culture as the organizing machine of history." (178)

Through its investigation of the lives and struggles of the women tobacco workers, the book explores the complex connections among class, gender, and the nation-state in Lebanon. It also presents us with an account of a workers' radicalism which arises at least partly from a relationship between anti-colonial struggle and peasant culture. To do so, the author draws upon extensive archival research, oral history, interviews, and surveys of workers. Focussing on the lives of women who worked for the Régie Co-Intéressée Libanaise des Tabacs et Tombacs — the French-Lebanese tobacco monopoly established in 1935 (now state run), this is an important study on the industrialization of Mount Lebanon and the economic and social transformation of the Lebanese state. The book traces the emergence of industrial work culture and the extent of its influence on workingwomen's status and outlook in Lebanon.

Initially mobilized to work to meet a demand in the 19th-century Lebanese silk industry, Abisaab argues that in that industry, women workers continued to reside in the patriarchal household and within its extended kinship network. Nonetheless silk work provided women a chance to adapt to industrial life and work patterns, and challenge social norms which viewed factory work as shameful. As the silk industry became less lucrative and went into a decline, women found work in the tobacco industry which often meant working and sometimes living away from home, and in larger industrial settings. Abisaab shows that workingwomen have long resisted their exploitation in the tobacco industry, but that their labour activism in the early 20th century built on agrarian experiences and traditions of peasant protest. As Lebanon moved from the French colonial era to independence and nationhood based on tribal-ethnic hegemony, this resistance confronted first colonial rule, and later viewed "state nationalism as an extension of, not a break with, oppressive colonial practices and traditions." (35) The book discusses women workers' participation in anti-colonial struggle against the French, and a diversity of strategies employed by the women including claims made of their employer and the state, the pursuit of legal avenues, and the resort to more militant forms of action in direct challenge to state authority. Abisaab maps a gradual radicalization of these women tobacco workers which had a complex and tense relationship with male-dominated unions and left political parties, neither of which, he argues, determined the women's growing militancy. In one plant he contends that shared experiences of the hardships of rural poverty, displacement, and migration, as well as familial and kinship ties among workers, were significant factors in the women's radicalization, while in the Beirut plant he argues that this politicization was impacted by a growing Beiruti trade union and urban political culture, with politicization of arts, music, and other forms of popular culture having their impacts on workers' education.

Abisaab vividly charts and brings to life women's strategies in negotiating family and work, and captures the complexities and contradictions whereby women's wage labour, desperately required for the survival of many rural families, and their work further away...