“House” to “Goddess of the House”: Gender, Class, and Silk in 19th-century Mount Lebanon

Abstract

“Are you going to behave like a factory girl?!” With this phrase, an 1880s peasant in Mount Lebanon not only admonished a daughter, but also encapsulated the social and economic transformations which were altering the notions of family and society, and the gender roles underlying both. Typically enough, these transformations came about between 1843 and 1914 as a result of the interaction between the local peasant economy and European capitalism. Modernization and dependency narratives of such an encounter follow the line of “tradition” versus “modernity,” with Europe ultimately dictating an inevitable outcome to its absolute benefit. Yet closer examination reveals the story in Mount Lebanon to be far more complicated. In particular, gender replaces this artificial bipolarity with a triangular struggle among peasant men, peasant women, and European capitalists. Furthermore, rather than being historical victims, women and men in Mount Lebanon—with intersecting and diverging interests—worked to contour the outcome of their encounter with Europe and to take control over their individual and collective lives. While the equation of power was most definitely in favor of European merchants and capitalists, the struggles of these peasants were not for naught. Rather, as I will argue in this paper, their travails made the outcome multifaceted and less predictable than European capitalists would have liked it to be.