Eva Badr Malik, Eva Badr Malik: from the Lebanese Women’s Union to Spouse of a Diplomat (1914-1958)

Abstract

The Levant History research has to take into consideration women stories, as they contribute to read History through another angle. Eva Badr Malik was the diplomat Charles Habib Malik’s wife. She was part of the few women to have access to Higher Education in the 1930s (AJC and AUB) and to start a career in teaching in Beirut. Before her marriage with Malik, Eva Badr’s journey is a mirror of feminist ideas of her time, beyond domestic life: studies (MA in 1941), cultural and intellectual network (relations with Said Akl, Constantin Zurayk and Albert Hourani), working and advocacy for women’s rights within the Lebanese women union. She indeed contributed to raise women’s voice and to call for the Lebanese independence in 1943. When she married Charles Malik, Eva Badr abandoned her life in Lebanon, to be spouse of a diplomat in the U.S. If her lifestyle has changed, she remained a great figure of Lebanon’s History in the 1940s-1950s.

A journal article about her path will give a more complete reading of the History of Lebanon before and after independence. It will be part of the poststructuralist feminist studies that contribute to get women out of oblivion. We have the opportunity to use many resources from Malik’s private archives, AUB and LAU libraries special collections and to diversify our methodology by using tools of oral history (interview with her son, Habib Malik).

This research will help us to create a prosopography of Lebanese women from the 1930s-1950s.