Colonial Citizens: Republican Rights, Paternal Privilege, and Gender in French Syria and Lebanon »

Elizabeth Thompson is an associate professor of history at the University of Virginia.

Thompson shows how post-WWI Syrians and Lebanese mobilized to claim the terms of citizenship enjoyed in the European metropole. Colonial Citizens highlights gender as a central battlefield upon which the relative rights and obligations of states and citizens were established.

Philip S. Khoury

Elizabeth Thompson has produced the most original and exciting study on the relationship of gender to politics and culture in the Middle East in the first half of the twentieth century. Historians of Syria and Lebanon and of the French Empire will find much new to feast upon. Others interested in the ways citizenship and democracy are understood in today´s Arab world will be grateful to Thompson for revealing their early manifestations in the Levant. I highly recommend this book.

I. WAR AND THE ADVENT OF FRENCH RULE: A CRISIS OF PATERNITY
1. World War I: Famine, Memory, and a Shattered Social Order
2. Soldiers and Patriarchs: Pillars of Colonial Paternalism
3. Bureaucrats: Mother France's Civilizing Mission
II. PATERNAL REPUBLICANISM AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF SUBALTERN CITIZENS
4. State Social Policy: Constructing a Hierarchy of Citizens
5. Revolt: The Rise of Subaltern Movements
III. GENDER AND THE LEGAL BOUNDARIES OF THE COLONIAL CIVIC ORDER
6. Political Rights: Women's Suffrage as a Revolutionary Threat
7. The Veil and the Dual Legal System
8. Civil Rights: Patriotic Motherhood and Religious Law Reform
9. Social Rights: Emergence of a Colonial Welfare State
IV. GENDERING THE PUBLIC: SPATIAL BOUNDARIES OF THE COLONIAL CIVIC ORDER
10. Remapping the Urban Landscape
11. Street Violence: Regendering an Old Urban Space
12. Cinemas: Gendering a New Urban Space
13. The Press: Gendering the Virtual Public
V. WORLD WAR II AND THE TRANSFORMATION OF THE COLONIAL CIVIC ORDER
14. Climax of the Colonial Welfare State
15. Claiming Paternity of Independent Republics
16. The Making of Postcolonial Citizens