This dissertation examines the importance of schools to the national project, the increasing popularity and significance of girls’ education in the interwar period to that project, and the ways in which girls and women defined and acted out their citizenship as students, teachers, administrators, and alumnae, in the context of colonial occupation and nation-building in the post-Ottoman Middle East. It uses colonial, state, institutional, and school archives, press accounts, memoirs, and interviews with alumnae related to six girls’ schools with secondary programs that operated before, during, and after the French Mandate in Lebanon: the three girls’ schools of the American Mission, the Maqasid’s Kulliyat al-banat, the Greek Orthodox Zahrat al-ihsan, and the secular nationalist Ahliah.
In its engagement with these sources, and with scholarship of the Mandate period in the Middle East and Lebanon, sociological conceptions and definitions of citizenship, postcolonial theory, and theoretical frameworks concerning gender, nationalism, and space, this dissertation argues that girls’ education and educational institutions served a discursive and material function in defining girls’ and women’s citizenship in interwar and early independence Lebanon. The vision of women’s citizenship articulated discursively in curricula and the press and materially in girls’ schools was a type of social citizenship, one that allowed girls and women to reconcile their multiple loyalties and drew on their experiences during the Mandate.
School curricula called for girls’ education for the creation of modern wives and mothers for the nation’s men and boys, linking educated womanhood and the modern home with national uplift. The Beirut-based women’s press simultaneously bolstered and challenged such a conception through discussions of educated women’s role in political life and the home. Materially, schools served as sites through which colonial, national, and local claims were made. They also provided a space in which students, teachers, and administrators articulated their own visions—of the school, the nation, and their citizenship. When looking at Mandate Lebanon from the perspective of girls and women, one encounters a nonsectarian vision for Lebanon that looks to what Lebanon can be rather than what it is or was.
