by Celine Sarraf
Women’s salons and book clubs are often remembered as elegant relics of a bourgeois past: private, literary, and apparently detached from politics. In Damascus, however, they played a modern and consequential role. In the early twentieth century, as empire collapsed and colonial rule took hold, women’s literary clubs and salons became spaces of civic participation and debate. They were not ornaments to public life, but part of how public life was made.
With that, women’s public and civil participation in Damascus can be understood through this world of literary clubs and salons, especially the space associated with Mary Ajami and the Shami Women’s Club. Rather than focusing on formal political institutions, women created public presence through cultural pathways: by founding magazines, organizing gatherings, and building networks of discussion. In a context where women’s access to formal politics remained limited, these spaces mattered precisely because they gave women a collective voice. They helped cultivate a broader feminist public in Syria.
The wider historical setting of the era is essential to understand how significant these spaces were: the late Ottoman period and the years around the First World War were a time of intellectual change and political instability in Syria. Reformist ideas circulated alongside a growing Arabic literary culture, and women’s education and writing began to appear more visibly. Still, the circumstances were fragile; the war disrupted everyday normalcy, Ottoman rule collapsed in 1918, and a brief postwar moment of political opening was quickly overtaken by the French Mandate in 1920. Under colonial rule, formal political participation remained limited, which made cultural spaces even more valuable.
It is within this context that Mary Ajami emerged as a pioneering figure in women’s literary and civic culture. She founded her magazine, Al-Arous, in 1910, as the first Arab publication explicitly devoted to women’s discourse. Al-Arous, despite meaning ‘The Bride’, served to defy patriarchal notions and mobilise women as Ajami writes in the magazine’s sixth volume; ‘Some say women are born to serve their husbands, others say women are born to serve their fathers, I say her rights exist for herself.’ The magazine was paused during WWI, but restarted with momentum in 1918, with Ajami simultaneously helping found women’s clubs in Damascus, turning literary culture into an established trend of women’s civic action.
These public projects are precisely what makes Ajami’s contribution especially important: it was never only about letters or private improvement. Her intellectual salon, The Shami Women’s Club (named after the Arabic word for Damascus), held public meetings where members could present views on literature and politics. Ajami’s establishment of the club in 1920, alongside fellow activist Naziq al-Abid, defied the notion that Arab feminism rose as a reflection of European influence and tendencies. The gatherings had a unique nature and identity, proving that progress can be made and seen without dependency on being included in parliamentary office or formal political structures.
The Shami Women’s Club and Ajami’s literary circle can thus be placed within the first wave of Syrian feminism. Across major Syrian cities at the time, the gradual popularisation of Arab nationalism encouraged conditions for feminist ambitions and drove women to participate in public demonstrations. A new feminist infrastructure was hence built on these ideological and societal shifts, concretely seen in a rise of women entering the labour force and increased literacy rates. In this sense, cultural participation became a main form of feminism. This context helps challenge the notion that women’s salons were somehow apolitical and the overlap between culture and politics was in reality immense.
The significance of this history extends beyond a single generation as Mary Ajami lived to see the end of French rule in 1946 and Syrian independence. That same year, her poem “The Peasant’s Hope” won first prize on BBC radio, reminding us that her voice remained culturally relevant even as Syria entered a new political era. Early independent Syria was a time of redefinition, and Ajami’s career bridges the worlds of Ottoman collapse, mandate politics, and national independence. Her legacy shows that women’s civic participation in Damascus cannot be understood only through legal milestones; it must also be traced through association and cultural leadership.
Her story unsettles narrow ideas about what counts as political participation. Her magazine, her work, and the broader Damascene salon culture she helped shape show that women were building civic life before they were fully recognized in formal politics. The literary salon offered an entrance to the public sphere, and women entered and reshaped it, proving that these spaces belong at the center of the history of Syrian feminism.
