Syrian Women’s Anticolonial Nationalist Organizing

In July 1919 a group of Syrian women from Damascus met with Charles Crane, who was part of the American led Inter-Allied Commission on Mandates in Turkey. In a follow-up petition, the activists stated they would not “accept for Syria any government save an independent Arab government.” Syrian women’s activism on behalf of an independent Arab state began in concert with the formal male-led Syrian nationalist movement in the 1910s, but struggled for acceptance into the wider movement at the time and their contributions are largely forgotten in the existing literature. Drawing on newly discovered archival sources, this paper recovers Syrian women’s anti-colonial activism during through three moments of heightened post-war anti-colonial activism in Syria: the 1919 General Syrian Congress, the Battle of Maysaloun (1920), and the Great Syrian Revolt (1925-1927). In each of these nationalist struggles, Syrian women, led by Alice Kandaleft Cosma and Nazek al-Abed Beyhum, worked to advance the nationalist cause through petitions, protests, smuggling news and information, and even battlefield nursing. The Ottomans and the French exiled Beyhum for her nationalist organizing, but her contributions to the nationalist struggle were largely overlooked by her co-nationalists. Foregrounding gender relations in these anti-colonial struggles reveals that the transition between the Ottoman Empire and the French Mandate did not rupture social relationships. Furthermore, analyzing the continuities in gender relations across imperial and political structures, challenges the existing narrative that World War I fundamentally transformed the region. While the political structure of Syria changed, the arrival of the French Mandate did not drastically alter women’s position in society, even though women’s rights activists advocated for such a change. Ultimately, women’s sidelined role in fighting for national independence gave rise to a women’s movement that targeted both male co-nationalists and the mandate government in an effort to secure rights.