The Impact of American Protestant Missions in Lebanon on the Construction of Female Identity,c. 1860-1950

Posing challenging questions in an attempt to answer what impact the American Protestant missionary encounter had on middle-class Syrian women, this article focuses on the experience of Syrian women with the American Presbyterian Mission in Lebanon. It discusses missionary educational institutions as the most important site of the encounter between missionaries and women in the Middle East. It further speculates as to what young Arab women took from their mission educations' ideas of gender, modernization and deculturization in order to shape their own destinies and to create their own sense of identity.