Syrian-Lebanese Women Tell Their Story

Abstract

An old Arab proverb says that a daughter is born, the very threshold of the house weeps forty days. I read that in a book and asked my mother about it. She confessed that, yes, there was such a proverb, but it was only a proverb, only a saying, and parents certainly didn't mourn forty days over the birth of a daughter. It was more like a week. I was sorry I had asked. Nevertheless, for many years I continued to read about and ask about Arab women, especially those who emigrated from Syria and Lebanon at about the turn of the century.1 After interviewing my mother who came from Mt. Lebanon to America in 1907, I went on to relatives, friends, and friends of friends, mostly in the Boston area, but a few in St. Paul, Minnesota. When I tried to confirm their testimony by consulting written histories, I soon discovered how little had been published on Arab-Americans and how much less on Arab-American women. But even that scattered documentation seemed, in important matters, to support the varied recollections of the women I had interviewed. In addition, it reinforced my own judgment that women born into the traditional, patriarchal cultures of the Near East had experienced radical social and economic change in coming to America and that, as a group, they had adjusted to that change with remarkable success. The story of these women and their daughters, as the two generations told it to me, is the subject of this paper. Of the twenty or more women I interviewed at length, ranging in age from fifty-five to ninety, eight were born in America; most of the others had been brought here as children. Thus, they are almost all, then, the daughters of the generation who made the decision to emigrate. That pioneering generation, now almost extinct, cannot speak for itself, but through the recollections of the daughters we learn something of the mothers and of the life they left behind in the mountain villages of Syria and Lebanon. One woman, who was twelve when her family emigrated in 1910, remembered life in her tiny village and the house she was born in.