Militant Women of a Fragile Nation

Description

In Militant Women of a Fragile Nation, Malek Abisaab takes a gendered approach to labor conflicts, anticolonial struggles, and citizenship in modern Lebanon. The author traces the conditions and experiences of women workers at the French Tobacco Monopoly. Challenging the prevailing assumptions about culturally inscribed roles for Middle Eastern women, the book highlights traditions of public activism and militancy among rural women that are in turn adapted to the spaces of the factory. Women employed distinct strategies involving kinship, sectarian, gender, and class ties to enhance their work conditions and social benefits. Drawing on extensive ethnographic data, the author convincingly argues that the condition of women can only be explained by exploring the shifting relationship between culture, societal arrangements, and economic settings. Abisaab’s richly detailed work illuminates the impact of class and gender in the transformation of modern Lebanon. Contents Maps and Illustrations Tables Acknowledgments Introduction Abbreviations 1. From Loom to Puff: Women and Waged Labor in Colonial Lebanon 2. Domesticity and Waged Labor: Gendered and Class Polemics in Colonial and Postcolonial Times 3. At the Legal Frontiers: “Unruly” Workingwomen Between Colonial Authority and the National State, 1940–1946 4. Rural Displacement and Migration among the Régie Workers, 1950–1980 5. Women Negotiate Family and Work: 1950–1997 6. “Qati‘ al-Arzaq min Qati‘ al-A‘naq”: Gendered Boundaries and Class, Tobacco Women’s Struggle, 1960–1965 Conclusion Notes Selected Bibliography Index