“Our Great Disappointment”: Arab Women’s Campaigns for Representation on the League of Nation’s Committee on the Legal Status of Women

Pan-Arab women’s committees and organizations lobbied the League of Nations on behalf of their perceived right to participate in the League of Nations’ Committee of Experts on the Legal Status of Women. The committee was approved by the Assembly of the League of Nations and was convened in 1938; the creation of the committee marked the culmination of decades of lobbying from women’s groups to have a bureau for their affairs. Arab women wanted to be included on the committee and did not see their nationalities, their position under the mandate system, their ethnicity, nor their religion as impediments to participation in discussions about the status of women. As women, they thought they deserved a seat at the negotiating table.

The campaign nominated Nour Hamada to the League’s committee. The letters cited Hamada’s presidency over the Congresses of Oriental Women in Damascus (1930) and Teheran (1933) and two Arab women’s conferences in Beirut and Baghdad as proof that she was the ideal candidate to represent all Arab women. The women that nominated Hamada were aware that their campaign might not succeed in its aims, which it did not. They also supported nominating a “friend of women’s rights in the East" who would speak to the status of women outside the West.

In analyzing the content and outcomes of the Arab women’s campaign for representation on the first international governmental body dedicated to the rights of women, this paper explores how women’s rights protections were politicized by the League of Nations. The League of Nations’ established a lasting precedent of which women could participate in discussions of women’s rights; women in the Arab Middle East were excluded from the discussions, as were other minority women.