What this is
Sawt al-Mara was issued in Beirut by the Union of Lebanese Women. It launched as a weekly in March 1945, became a monthly, and ran until the summer of 1958. Its writers discussed women’s suffrage, education, marriage, work, regional and global politics, fashion and the new republic; it carried poetry, fiction, recipes, society news and more.
For most of its run, Sawt was published by Dar al-Kitab, which was co-owned by my grandfather, Fuad Badr. That is how I first learned of the magazine. In its pages I found other family members, including my great-aunts Lily Badre, who sat on its supervising committee and wrote the occasional article, and Eva Malik, a more regular contributor.
The American University of Beirut Libraries was the source of the magazine scans. From those scans this project produced four things:
- Cleaned per-issue PDFs. The bound volumes were split into their issues, now public on the Internet Archive.
- A transcription. Every page was read by a vision model into text regions: articles, headings, bylines, captions and advertisements.
- An Arabic web edition. Each page was rebuilt as a web page that follows the printed layout, with the art and advertisements cut from the scan and the text set in type. This allows the text to be searched, copied and read on any screen.
- An English web edition. Every article was translated, and the English was set back into the magazine’s own page designs.
Almost all of this was done by language models working under review. Many mistakes surely remain, and corrections are welcome: andrewbadr@gmail.com.
