"Under an American Roof": The Beginnings of the American Junior College for Women in Beirut

[...] changes in both the American and worldwide mission movements were reflected in the story of the founding of the college. Unlike in Egypt, where the state sponsored a girls' secondary school in 1874, there were no government-sponsored secondary schools for girls in the Arab provinces of the Ottoman Empire; secondary education could only be obtained from private, religious, or missionary schools, prominent among them the flagship school of the Syria Mission, the American School for Girls (ASG), which was originally established in the mid-nineteenth century as the Beirut Female Seminary.9 During the last half-century of Ottoman rule, parents of children from the middle and upper strata in Greater Syria (as was the case in Europe, particularly France), increasingly came to equate education with progress, science, reform, and hope.