"Unruly" Factory Women in Lebanon: Contesting French Colonialism and the National State, 1940-1946

Historical studies of Middle Eastern Arab women have largely ignored experiences of women's labor and working-class activism in theorizing about gender and nation. This article examines working women's militancy in the context of French colonialism and the national state in Lebanon from 1940 to 1946. The dominant narratives on labor and national struggles, whether in daily newspapers, in schoolbooks, or in academic studies, have offered little space for women, revealing the gender imbalance in the writing, or rather the unwriting, of their activism. By reinscribing gender into this history, the narrative of "nation construction" becomes less cohesive, challenged and undermined by class and gendered formations. Working women tied anticolonial struggle to labor demands, casting their roles not in terms of domesticity or pre-industrial images of motherhood, but rather in terms of waged work. Meanwhile, gender-specific realities, rather than membership in a union or the Communist party, shaped women's consciousness and collective organization in improving their conditions and experiences at the workplace.