Elizabeth Thompson’s Colonial Citizens: Republican Rights, Paternal Privilege, and Gender in French Syria and Lebanon examines the construction of ‘modern’ citizenship in Syria and Lebanon during the French Mandate, drawing attention to the critical role that gender played in this process. Thompson argues that although these states (and their post-colonial successors) were technically republics comprised of citizens with de jure equality, underlying power structures meant that “some citizens were able to engage the state more directly than others.”

Examining the history of the colonial and post-colonial state in Syria and Lebanon, Thompson argues that women of all political affiliations, religious groups, and social classes found their rights and access to the state’s resources mediated through their fathers, husbands, and sons. While men automatically received the right to vote, women were expected to earn suffrage through their service as ‘national’ mothers producing patriotic sons. Medical services targeted women in their capacity as mothers and as prostitutes, suggesting that the state’s concern was with the potential impact of women’s sickness on men, rather than with women’s health in its own right. ‘Citizenship’ in its fullest sense was constructed as male.

Thompson is interested in the ideological transformation of public space. Using police reports, public records, and the press, she demonstrates how violence against women was used to justify their exclusion from the street at precisely the moment it became an arena for mass politics. When women did participate in demonstrations, they were depicted as acting at the behest of male guardians or under their protection.

Women’s participation in the press also underwent a similar transformation in the 1930s, as independent women’s periodicals were replaced by ‘women’s pages’ in mainstream newspapers. Thompson notes a dramatic change in the tone and content of women’s writing as a result of this shift, arguing that while the women’s press had addressed women on their own terms and published articles on topics of general social and political interest, the women’s pages addressed women primarily in terms of their relationship to men and published articles that were “emotional rather than professional, personal rather than civic-minded”. In both real and virtual space, women were being denied the authority and opportunity to articulate their political demands on the grounds that their interactions with the state should be mediated through men. The tendency of male elites to use women’s rights as a bargaining chip created a vicious cycle in which women’s exclusion from public (i.e., political) space served to reinforce the hierarchical notions of citizenship that had marginalized them in the first place. Thompson’s examination of the spatial transformations entailed by gendered definitions of citizenship effectively demonstrates how citizen identities were negotiated in practical terms.

Although Syria and Lebanon underwent tremendous political and social changes over time, culminating in their formal independence, Thompson argues that the hierarchy of citizenship established during the Mandate period remained essentially unchanged, due to bargaining and compromise among independence-era elites who wished to strengthen the state and their position within it.

This was an incredibly dense and complicated book. I would recommend it to all who are interested in the history of Mandate Syria & Lebanon or the construction of gender and nationality, but it is a tough read. The author is probably to be commended for managing to make a book that is so packed with information readable at all. I enjoyed it, despite the challenge. ( )