Exploring the collapse of the Ottoman Empire in the Eastern Mediterranean through the lens of gender alters the existing conceptualizations of the region’s history. The common periodizations of national histories in the cases of Lebanon, Palestine, Syria, and Turkey present a drastic rupture with the Ottoman past after World War I. For example, many national histories of Lebanon focus on three distinct periods—Ottoman (1516-1920), French Mandate (1920-1946), independence (1946-present)—that are largely disconnected. However, foregrounding a gendered analysis blurs the boundaries between these periods. Our panel argues that focusing on gender relations reveals more continuities with the Ottoman past than previously recognized. For example, in Turkey male breadwinners had come to expect certain social support from the Ottoman state and demanded it from Atatürk’s secular nationalist government. The political elites in Ottoman Lebanon maintained their power by negotiating a dual legal system with the French Mandate government. This power sharing arrangement preserved rather than disrupted the Ottoman gender order. Anti-colonial nationalist feminism in Syria after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire reveals that despite the change in governmental structure, activists still ignored women as potential nationalist collaborators, which gave rise to new forms of women’s organizing. British colonial social welfare policy in Palestine was contradictory, simultaneously drawing upon pre-existing gender systems and asserting twentieth century notions of women’s roles in progressive societies. All of these cases reveal connections with the Ottoman past, rather than ruptures. Drawing from case studies from Lebanon, Palestine, Syria, and Turkey, this panel seeks to address several questions about gender relations in the post-Ottoman Eastern Mediterranean. First, what gender norms from the Ottoman Empire were adopted by Ottoman successor states? Second, why did these gendered practices survive the transition from one governing structure to another? Third, who benefitted from the preservation of gendered social and legal systems from the Ottoman era? Recent scholarship on World War I expanded our understanding of how the conflict refigured the political borders of the Middle East leading to sectarian conflict and the creation of new minority identities, but has ignored the impact of these borders on gender relations. Ultimately, the gender politics that accompanied the partition of the post-World War I Middle East are an overlooked dimension in the making of the region’s contemporary societies. Studying gender in periods of transition has the power to upend conventional periodizations and decenter “ruptures” in the construction of national histories.