Militants, Misfits, or Miscreants? Education for Modern Womanhood in Mandate Lebanon

This paper explores the multiple ways in which female education constituted an important vehicle for creating “modern women” in Lebanon during the French mandate (1920-1946). During this period, the educational landscape was exceptionally diverse, including (but not limited to) public schools, American and British missionary schools, Islamic madrasas, Lebanese secular institutions, and French Catholic and Protestant schools.  This paper focuses on three different types of girls’ schools - Islamic, secular nationalist, and French Protestant – in order to investigate the construction of multiple, often competing, meanings of modern womanhood during this time.  The paper reveals how fluid perceptions of both culture and national identity – alternately defined as Arab, French, western, Islamic, Christian, or Lebanese – were harnessed not only by teachers and society at large, but by students themselves, in order to define what this modernity was. This paper shows that resulting divergent manifestations of emerging modern womanhood, as girl scout-cum-militant, cultural misfit, or social reprobate, reflected myriad anxieties over what national culture was, with finer implications for the debate over defining female citizenship. Perhaps more importantly, contrary to scholarship that continues to portray Islamic, secular, and French-cum-francophone narratives as incompatible and cacophonous, this paper shows that examining constructions of the modern in these different schools reveals that these narratives not only sustained and reinforced one another, but in fact overlapped.