ABSTRACT
In December 1946 a prominent Lebanese feminist named Imilie Faris Ibrahim published an article entitled “New Horizons for Lebanese Women.” With the end of World War II, and with the end of more than a quarter century of French colonial occupation earlier in the year, Ibrahim heralded a new era for women. She foresaw women’s liberation in “the pervasive spirit of progress in the world and the new opportunities afforded women in the new international order,” particularly in the international law of the new United Nations, which called for legal equality among men and women, and in the advent of new household appliances, which would free women from housework so that they might engage more fully in economic and political life. Ibrahim urged women not to abandon the new roles they had adopted in the struggle for liberation from France, but rather to expand their political and economic roles in the service of national progress: “Women’s concern is to share with men in the building of a new society.”1
