Cultures of Care in Women’s Organizations in Mid-Century Lebanon

Through a close analysis of the early history of the Village Welfare Society (VWS) in Lebanon, this paper explores what happens when nation states leave a care vacuum. In 1950 Eveline Bustros and Anissa Najjar founded the VWS in order to extend social and care services to rural women. At the time of the organization’s founding, Lebanon was a newly independent nation and was not providing social and care services to rural populations. The VWS aimed to fill the care vacuum left by government inaction and explicitly focused on providing services to women and children. The VWS was the first Lebanese women’s organization to take women’s social welfare work beyond the confines of Lebanon’s cities and focus explicitly and exclusively on rural women. Using the never-before-used archive of the Village Welfare Society, this paper explores the politics of NGOs providing care and of urban women deciding the care needs of rural populations.

The VWS’s emphasis on providing care to rural women was not entirely altruistic. At the time of the organization’s founding, elite Lebanese women were fighting to secure political rights from the state, but felt that their rural “sisters” were holding them back in these campaigns. Therefore, Bustros and Najjar, veterans of mandate era women’s organizations, started the VWS to help rural women “develop” socially and economically. Improving the delivery of childcare, in particular, was seen as essential in advancing the status of women and improving the national economy. The efforts of the VWS were lauded by the Lebanese state, which was slow to develop state-run care centers, and received a mixed response the communities the VWS sought to serve. Studying the VWS reveals the complicated political and social landscape women’s organizations had to navigate as they worked to provide care services to rural, socio-economically disadvantaged women and children.