Lebanese Women at the Crossroads is an incisive intervention into a series of questions that Nelia Hyndman-Rizk calls the “women’s rights puzzle” in Lebanon (114): Why is women’s political representation so low in Lebanon? Why is women’s participation in the labor force relatively thin, even though they are highly educated in aggregate? Why can Lebanese women not pass Lebanese citizenship on to their children? In facing these questions, Hyndman-Rizk asks whether introducing a secular nationality and civic marriage law would solve the many legal, political, social, and economic contradictions that women face in Lebanon. Although it would not be a panacea, it would nevertheless guarantee that “citizenship status will be absolute, irrespective of sect or gender, rather than relational based upon sect and gender” (114).The first part of the book, “Formations” (introd.–chap. 3), is a broad overview (based on original research and a wide range of secondary sources) of the ways that Lebanese people, specifically Lebanese women, have been constructed under differing legal regimes between the nineteenth and the twenty-first centuries. It examines “the formation of Lebanon as a congressional democracy and explores the plural system of personal status law in Lebanon, wherein women experience differential and relational rights under both religious and civil law” (113). The introduction situates the ongoing challenges women face in Lebanon within the arc of the Arab uprisings between late 2010 and 2013. Some accounts assert that the newer uprisings that began again in the late 2010s, including those in Iraq, Sudan, Algeria, Palestine, and Lebanon (particularly its October 2019 uprising), are volutions of the still-ongoing uprisings, which contain similar discontents, motivations, and strategies. Likewise, Hyndman-Rizk asserts that the women’s movement in Lebanon is currently in a fourth phase that “is an extension of previous waves of activism in the MENA region” (4–5). She acknowledges that women’s issues in Lebanon are rooted in the very legal and political construction of the state, and so women’s rights and gender equality activists must continue to mobilize against that ongoing legally bound inequality to achieve justice. However, the book contends that this phase is unique in that it emphasizes an intersectional approach and uses different tools to accomplish its goals (mainly through a mixed online-offline strategy, elaborated on further in part 2). Chapters 2 and 3 traces how the emergence of the Ottoman-era Mount Lebanon mutasarrifate (a semiautonomous administrative district) after 1860 gave Maronites a unique position that was further reinforced by the French mandate and then the 1943 National Pact. Maronites’ position was once again consolidated under the 1989 Taʾif Agreement, which ended the Lebanese Civil War and gave them more parliamentary representation than their suspected demography currently warrants, although no census has been taken since 1932. This arrangement overall undergirded the impetus to tie rights to sect and to the reproduction of that sect and, ergo, to women as first an appendage of the reproduction of that patrilineal sect rather than full national citizens in their own right. As such, women are perpetually caught between “sect and nation,” as they have an incomplete nationality by both religious and civil codes. They are responsible for the reproduction of a body politic defined primarily by patriarchal lineage predicated on religion without themselves being accorded full national citizenship, since they cannot pass citizenship rights down to their children and since they have sexual, reproductive, and marriage rights explicitly allotted through eighteen personal status laws. Instead, women have been made “‘wards’ of their husbands upon marriage, with guardianship passing from their father to their husband, while civil rights are relational and follow a patrilineal logic” (113). Part 1 concludes that power-sharing agreements have always been present and fraught in Lebanon and that women have been caught in the crosshairs of realpolitik negotiations as the state emerged as a confessional democracy.Part 2 of the book, “Activism” (chap. 4–conclusion), introduces the ethnographic intervention of the book by examining women’s strategies of online-offline activism. Using a combination of “face to face interviews, two online surveys, and historical and ethnographic research conducted over a seven-year period” (xviii), Hyndman-Rizk asked women about how they conceive of themselves, the idea of a women’s movement in Lebanon, their experiences of activism, and the challenges women face more broadly. Sampling from a range of ages, religions, education levels, languages, and other factors, Hyndman-Rizk draws a picture of “a young, mobile, interconnected, polyglot group of activists, who are highly educated, and utilize smartphone and computer-based Internet to access social media apps to communicate and network with each other, to access news, and engage in online activism” (69). This section concludes that women’s successes in mobilizing campaigns for passing the 2014 domestic violence law (chap. 4), demonstrating against the 2015 #YouStink garbage crisis (chap. 5), demanding a women’s quota in parliament (chap. 5), pushing for women’s nationality rights (chap. 5), and agitating for civil marriage (chap. 6) are all rooted in the dynamic and interactive interplay between using both online and offline forms of activism—in spite of Lebanon’s frequent political deadlocks in the twenty-first century. The people sampled through this research agreed that online agitation (largely through social media, as 84 percent of the survey’s respondents indicated) must be paired with on-the-ground mobilization (according to 97 percent of respondents) to actually reinforce the dispersive women’s movement’s various causes and demonstrations (72). Perhaps most interesting are a 2013 online survey’s results that show that the people sampled overwhelmingly support the introduction of a unified civil status code and a civil marriage option (both received 98 percent in support) (100–101). But, as the conclusion notes, transforming religious and secular codes will not alone be sufficient to achieve equality, as patriarchy also permeates the logics of civil and criminal laws and therefore must be transformed (114).In all, Lebanese Women at the Crossroads provides a vast overview of women’s historical and contemporary status and leaves room for future research to delve qualitatively and quantitatively more deeply into many of the questions the book raises. For instance, further analysis could expand our understanding of categories that complicate the cisgender and heteronormative framework of the book. Genderqueer, trans, and nonheterosexual people complicate the dynamics of women’s movements everywhere, frequently eliciting the enmity of biological determinists who are also often present within women’s movements. How do their presence and demands shape the context of Lebanon’s newest phase of the women’s movement? Moreover, although the research provided a good deal of information about the sect, age range, access, education, and other characteristics (67–71), the book focuses on urban women’s activism—for instance, Nasawiya, a feminist collective that Hyndman-Rizk frequently interviewed, is based in Beirut. Although Hyndman-Rizk notes that the Lebanese population is overwhelmingly urban, she leaves open the question of what may be distinct about rural women’s activism, methods, demands, and dynamics.The book provides a cogent call to action and a wide sampling of the history and present of women’s rights in Lebanon, rather than making a deep theoretical intervention. Therefore it would prove useful for an undergraduate class focusing on women’s and gender studies in the Middle East, as well as for policy-oriented audiences.