Syro-Lebanese Women’s Transnational and International Collaborations at the League of Nations

Abstract

Most people associate the League of Nations with failure. Founded after World War I, the organization failed to forestall another global war, which was among its animating objectives. However, the League did lay the groundwork for the international system in force today. The League of Nations’ integration of women’s rights into the framework of international governance is among its most important legacies. In the 1920s “women’s rights” encompassed a woman’s right to own property, to an education, to a safe work environment, and to a nationality. Throughout the 1920s the League’s leaders resisted calls from international women’s organizations to internationalize women’s rights, stating that women’s issues were national concerns rather than international ones. After the Hague Conference on the Codification of International Law in 1930 revealed that sometimes a woman’s marriage to a nonnational rendered her nationless, some officials in the Secretariat agreed that certain aspects of the “woman question” were international in nature (DuBois 2009).The League’s role in inserting women’s rights into the realm of international governance is largely forgotten, which is hardly surprising, because the League did not become the subject of substantive historical inquiry until the early 2000s.1 Also forgotten are the transnational campaigns and international connections that elite Syro-Lebanese women forged in an attempt to be heard in the discussions about women’s rights happening at the Palais des Nations. As citizens of the French Mandate for Syria, Syro-Lebanese women’s rights activists had no decision-making power at home or at the League. In addition, international women’s rights organizations viewed Syro-Lebanese women through an Orientalist lens and considered them second-class women’s rights activists (Weber 2008). Despite these obstacles, Syro-Lebanese women’s activists sought change in the international organizations affecting their lives, namely, the League of Nations and international women’s organizations. Thus their campaigns were simultaneously transnational, working with women’s organizations in other nations in the name of justice, and international, targeting supranational organizations and governing bodies.2To rectify being blocked from decision-making positions, internationally oriented activists from Syria and Lebanon developed a multipart activist program. First, they formed a network of like-minded women in the Eastern Mediterranean and in other parts of Asia. Efforts to create “Eastern,” “Oriental,” or “Asian” women’s networks went both ways. For example, Indian women approached Arab women to join the All-Asian Women’s Conference and Arab women invited Indian women to join the Eastern Women’s Conferences (Mukherjee 2016; Nijhawan 2017). In calling for and attending conferences, participants actively negotiated what it meant to be “Eastern” women, a capacious identity category defined in contradistinction to “Western,” which often had anticolonial overtones.3Next, activists used the newly established regional network of Arab women to secure representation in international women’s organizations, such as the International Women’s Suffrage Alliance (IWSA), the International Council on Women (ICW), and the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF). While the organizations’ leadership prioritized US and western European feminist issues, such as suffrage and nationality, many individual activists within the organizations were sympathetic to the campaigns led by Syro-Lebanese women. On the international level, Syro-Lebanese activists sought to end colonialism and establish an international women’s rights system that acknowledged the multiplicity of women’s rights systems in the interwar world, including the civil and common law traditions in force in the United States and Europe and their colonies and the many other tribal and religious legal traditions that granted women rights and protections.Finally, once representation was secured, activists organized transnationally with their allies to get their concerns on the radar of the leaders of international women’s organizations, who could use their clout to raise Syro-Lebanese women’s issues at the League of Nations and in other international governing bodies. Despite many barriers to their participation, Syro-Lebanese activists tenaciously carved out a circuitous activist pathway that increased their chances for representation in conversations about the status of women happening in Geneva. Syro-Lebanese activists saw their status as linked to that of women in other world regions and worked to improve the status of all women, but especially those in the colonized world. Indeed, they thought colonialism was one of the greatest impediments to improving the status of women.However, despite their transnational campaigns, Syrian and Lebanese women’s rights activists were not represented in early conversations about what constituted international women’s rights and which rights should be included in the category of “women’s rights.” Their absence from these early debates is part of a larger story of elite US and western European women positioning themselves as empowered to speak for the world’s women.4 Crucially, not all US and western European feminists shared the worldview that activists in the colonized, or recently decolonized, world were lesser feminists (Marino 2019).A campaign launched by Nour Hamada, a Druze women’s rights activist from Mount Lebanon, illustrates what Syro-Lebanese women’s transnational activism targeting the emergent gendered international system looked like in practice. Hamada and her activist colleagues generally came from elite families with economic and political power, which facilitated their engagement with the international women’s rights organizations and the League (DuBois and Emrani 2008). In 1938 Hamada lobbied the League for more equitable representation on its Committee of Experts on the Legal Status of Women. The Committee of Experts was created in 1937, when the League was hemorrhaging members as war in Europe loomed on the horizon. Tasked with conducting a global survey of the status of women, the committee was the result of eighteen years of activism from the same international women’s rights organizations that offered token representation to women from the colonized world but did little to end colonialism. The League consented to the activists’ demands to take the study of the status of women seriously only when the organization desperately needed the support of women to keep itself afloat.Seizing the opportunity presented to them, a variety of activists used the survey to prove that women’s rights were an issue that merited international attention and support. Hamada and several other activists from Syria and Lebanon went a step farther and tried to get the League to recognize a range of women’s rights systems, including what they called “Eastern” women’s rights. These systems sought the same citizenship and suffrage rights claimed by US and European women, but they advocated that women should be granted those rights through a collectivist, rather than individualist, framework. After a rather undemocratic nominating process, the ranks of the committee were announced: four women and three men. All of the representatives were from Europe with the exception of Dorothy Kenyon, a US lawyer. Women from other world regions took issue with the committee’s composition, Hamada among them.To advance her campaign for including representatives from the “East” on the committee and to get it to recognize “Eastern” women’s rights more broadly, Hamada cultivated an activist coalition. She reached out to fellow activists in Beirut and Damascus and asked them to write to the League to support the creation of a seat for women of the “East” on the committee (the letters also suggested that Hamada might be a good candidate for the position, should it be created). Additionally, Hamada connected with allies from international women’s organizations. Hamada’s global mobility aided her efforts to organize transnationally and shaped her feminism, which reflected a unique combination of international and Greater Syrian influences.5 The leadership of IWSA, ICW, and WILPF were happy to pay lip service to supporting the women’s movement in the colonized world, but rarely took risks to support their “sisters’” overlapping struggles to secure national independence and women’s rights. Some members of these organizations, however, were willing to push against the status quo and support the activism of women from the colonized world.Hamada had worked with the US feminist Alice Paul and the Swiss feminist Emilie Graizier during a previous campaign to get the League to recognize a woman’s right to nationality. Hamada had met Paul while in the United States and knew Graizier because they were both active in feminist circles in Geneva. Hamada pressed Paul and Graizier for help and both assented. In response to her request, Graizier wrote a letter supporting Hamada’s efforts and Paul appealed to the secretariat to create a seat for a representative of the East.6 Hamada did not receive any support from the leaders of the larger international women’s organizations. The IWSA and other international women’s organizations pressured the committee to include the “Status of Women of Primitive Peoples” in its global survey of the status of women, but they did so on behalf of—not with—women from the colonized world.7 Focusing on Syro-Lebanese women’s activism in the domestic realm alone ignores the creativity of a group of activists who were far removed from power but nonetheless worked through the channels available to them, however indirect, to make sure that their voices were heard. Indeed, studying Syro-Lebanese women’s rights advocates through a transnational lens reveals the full extent of their vision for women’s rights, which was not bound by national borders.Why does this micro-transnational campaign that advocated for a reconceptualization of the structure and scope of the League’s Committee of Experts matter today? Most important, it shows how women’s rights activists with few resources but a grand vision for a more equitable future used all the tools at their disposal to pressure the world’s first governing body to include them. It was an audacious call that directly challenged the hierarchies of the colonial world. The campaign also reveals the circulation of several visions for internationalizing women’s rights in the early twentieth century. It demonstrates that the system that was eventually internationalized was (and is) not the only viable model for protecting women’s status at the international level. Countering a move to codify women’s rights within a Western (civil and common law) rights framework, Syro-Lebanese women’s activists offered the alternative international vision of “Eastern” women’s rights.Finally, the campaign proves the maxim that representation matters. Without representation from the “East,” a core demand of Hamada’s transnational campaign, the Committee of Experts faced little opposition when it formalized civil and common law as the bedrock of the international women’s rights system. Hamada’s efforts to secure representation at the League of Nations encourages a reexamination of the exclusionary roots of the contemporary international women’s rights system. The lack of representation from the “East” on the committee continues to affect who has access to conversations about women’s rights on the international level—both in international organizations and in international governing bodies—and who is left in the margins, trying to build a bridge between alternative women’s rights systems and the Western definition of women’s rights that was absorbed into the League and its successor, the United Nations. Thus studying transnational feminist campaigns led by Middle Eastern and North African activists gives us a clearer picture not only of the dynamism of women’s movements within and beyond national contexts but also of the history of the international women’s rights system more broadly.