This dissertation examines the creation, codification, and reforms efforts of Lebanon’s personal status legal system between 1920 and 1975. It tells the story of how the sectarian structure of Lebanon’s personal status laws was formulated under the French mandate, partially codified and continually reshaped through a series of parliamentary decrees throughout the 1940s and 1950s, and at the same time, contested by various groups in civil society. During this period of codification, a women’s movement organized to reform personal status laws with the goal of achieving state protection for gender equality across all sects. Despite the efforts of the women’s movement, by the 1960s, the Lebanese state and religious leadership of the personal status communities had solidified a personal status law system that would prove nearly impossible to reform. The inability to reform personal status laws or introduce gender equality in the laws for all religious sects in Lebanon was not simply a product of the sectarian system (or, a product of the failure to secularize), but a reflection of the state structures and the continued exclusion of women from the political process beginning in the mandate era, and continuing through the period of codification during the 1950s and on. By studying of the creation of these laws, alongside a history of the Lebanese women’s movement that sought both to secure women’s rights within the laws and to participate in the state institutions that created them, this project explores how personal status law came to be a central battleground for issues of gender equality, religious rights, sectarian politics, and secularism in Lebanon, and more generally in the Middle East.