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85 4 Confronting Sectarian “Veto Points” Women’s Advocacy Politics in Postwar Lebanon It is often said that women find participation in civil society easier to negotiate than . . . at the level of the state. . . . [Yet], in the context of the contemporary Middle East (as elsewhere), both state and civil society are complex terrains—fractured, conflictual, threatening spaces that are as much a source of oppression as they are spaces of opportunity for struggle and negotiation.1 Lebanon provides an interesting and paradoxical example of gendered citizenship. On the one hand, it is one of the more advanced societies in the Middle East region with respect to women’s literacy rates, women’s health indicators such as life expectancy at birth, and the percentage of women in higher education. On the other hand, statistics with respect to women’s participation in the formal private and public sector workforce combined with the broader array of legal and institutional restrictions on their freedom that surrounds them—particularly in the case of married women—points to the existence of powerful systems of gendered discrimination in the country. This has created a situation where reforms promoting the equal status of women in Lebanon have lagged behind those in other Middle East states. Indeed, a recent report by a leading feminist nongovernmental organization (NGO) in Lebanon with region-wide experience remarked that while legal and institutional change remains within the realm of possibility in most Middle East countries, in Lebanon, “it is difficult to imagine even minor changes . . . being made in the near future.”2 This chapter, through an examination of gender equality advocacy in the postwar period, seeks to understand the source of this institutional resistance to reform. Its particular focus is on the ways in which actors within civil society, broadly defined to include those associations affiliated 86 Reproducing Sectarianism with families and sects, have contributed to the perpetuation of systems of gender inequality in the country and prevented the emergence of a women’s policy domain within the state built upon the principles of gender equality. The chapter begins by examining the historical entrenchment of systems of gender inequality in the country—those that find their roots in the critical period of state formation during the mandate era. It was during this period that the potential of the state to act as an autonomous actor with respect to gender issues was effectively eliminated, transforming it instead into a defender of the power of the patriarchally oriented religious clerical class in the country. The second section of this chapter examines postwar efforts by an array of civil associations and networks to challenge the deeply embedded power—constitutional, institutional, and political—of these state–clerical alliances with the aim of constructing a more equality-oriented women’s policy domain. The third section examines the mechanisms that contributed to the overall failure of these efforts, focusing in particular on the dynamics of various feedback mechanisms that served to reinforce preexisting systems of gender inequality and prevent the emergence of a more autonomous, institutionalized, and equalityoriented women’s policy domain. One of the main contributions of this chapter is to highlight the ways in which Lebanon’s women’s associational sector itself—hegemonically intertwined as many of its component parts are with the country’s political and clerical elites—has acted as one of these feedback mechanisms reinforcing the patriarchal status quo. The Structuring of Gender Advocacy Politics in Lebanon: The Historical Roots of a Women’s Policy Domain Modern Lebanon has had a long history of women debating their status and demanding their greater inclusion in the country’s public sphere. Thompson has documented the rise of a politicized women’s movement during the mandate period in Lebanon, which, from its modest beginnings in the 1920s, “steadily widened” the scope of its activism beyond the traditional areas of charity and education to include such concerns as health, labor, and the right to vote. Though women’s activism was elitist and lacking in popular roots, Thompson nonetheless argued that, by the 1930s, it had managed to carve out for itself “a significant presence in the civic order.”3 The crowning achievement of this early activism came in 1953, with women gaining full voting rights. Buoyed by the success of their cross-sectarian campaign, a group of Muslim and Christian women’s associations subsequently came together to form a unified coalition called the Lebanese Women’s Council (LWC), an institution that has more or [3.22.51.241...

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