The Women of the Arabs

The Women of the Arabs is a book by Henry Harris Jessup, the American Presbyterian missionary who lived from 1832 to 1910 and who spent more than fifty years working in Beirut and the surrounding Ottoman territories as a missionary, educator, and Arabist for the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions and later for the Presbyterian Board of Foreign Missions.

Jessup arrived in Beirut in 1856 and spent the rest of his working life in what is now Lebanon and Syria, with extensive travel throughout the broader Arab world. He learned classical and colloquial Arabic to a high standard, became one of the most knowledgeable Western observers of the Arab world of his period, and produced substantial writing on Arab society, religion, and culture aimed at the substantial American Protestant audience interested in missionary work in the region.

The Women of the Arabs presents Jessup’s observations on the lives of women in the Arab societies he had been working in across decades. The subject was one of substantial interest to the American Protestant missionary audience that supported his work, partly because the missionary movement was developing substantial educational and medical programs aimed specifically at Arab women and partly because the broader American Protestant culture had a particular interest in what it understood as the position of women in the various non Western societies that missions were engaging with.

Jessup writes from the perspective of a sympathetic but committed Christian missionary observer. He presents detailed observations of family life, religious practice, education, and the various social institutions that shaped Arab women’s lives in the late nineteenth century Levant. The treatment is more sympathetic and better informed than much of the broader Western literature on the position of women in the Arab and Muslim worlds during the period, since Jessup had genuine personal knowledge from decades of residence and substantial relationships with Arab families across various religious and social communities. The treatment is also inevitably shaped by his missionary commitments and by the assumptions of late nineteenth century American Protestant culture.

The book is mostly of interest now to historians of American Protestant missions, of Western writing on the Arab world during the period, and of nineteenth century Levantine social history. It pairs naturally with Jessup’s other writings.