Women in Lebanon frequently come to power in mourning clothes, stepping into a seat vacated by a father or spouse who has been assassinated. Such is the case of newly-elected deputy Nayla Tueni, 26, whose father Gibran Tueni, MP and editor of Lebanon's An Nahar newspaper, was assassinated in 2005. Mrs. Geagea found herself thrust into politics when her husband Samir Geagea, a Christian leader and head of the Lebanese Forces party, was imprisoned for 11 years during the Syrian occupation of Lebanon.

“Lebanon has passed through extremely difficult times,” Mme Geagea tells The Media Line at her home in east Beirut, sitting among portraits of herself and her husband set against billowing Lebanese flags or romantic mountain landscapes. “And all during those times, Lebanese women have proved to be on the front lines as activists.”

It was Mrs. Geagea who spearheaded the campaign for her husband's release, keeping his incarceration on the political agenda and in the public consciousness. But it is not so much her activism that got her a seat in parliament as her husband's name.
 
“I think this parliament is as conservative, as patriarchal, as removed from the citizens and women's rights as its predecessors,” says Abou-Habib. “We need more women in parliament but then you have to ask, would the four women who are there now have had the same possibilities had they different family names?”

All four of the women MPs in the newly-elected parliament come from long-standing political dynasties. And therein lies the glass ceiling above the heads of young Lebanese women with political aspirations.

Unlike on the political level, engagement in politics by women on the grass roots and university levels is relatively high in Lebanon. Some of the political parties' youth branches boast female membership levels of up to 40%.

“In Lebanon, everything is politicized, even in school,” says Yara Boutros, a 19-year-old student of business at Université Saint Joseph in Beirut. “So I started to talk and think about politics in school, and that's when I started to get involved.”

Boutros is an example of how younger Lebanese women are getting involved in politics and quickly climbing up the lower echelons of political parties. Boutros is a member of the Christian Kataeb Party youth branch and she sits on their university committee, a board of 10 people each representing one of Lebanon's universities. Every Thursday, the committee meets in a basement room at the Kateab headquarters in east Beirut to strategize and talk politics. Boutros is one of two female members on the committee, a level of representation that is already a vast improvement on the meager parliamentary ratio.

“I think it is at this level and at the level of local activism that we can find the most encouraging signs for women in Lebanon,” says Abou-Habib.

Still, for young women like Yara Boutros, getting involved in politics means learning to play by its sectarian rules and that means community, religion and culture comes first, before all other concerns.

“I'd love to have the same rights as men but for me it's not my goal,” Boutros says. “My identity is first Lebanese and then Christian. I don't see myself as being a woman in political terms. Now I am fighting for a country that is still at war and that hasn't really emerged from the war so before being a woman or a man, we must focus on survival as a community.”

Sectarianism is the biggest foe of women's political advancement in Lebanon and last month's elections, largely recognized as Lebanon's most tightly fought ever, were a further example.

“When the going gets tough, you're going to get rid of the most disposable and what is disposable in the patriarchal system are women,” says Abou-Habib.

MP Strida Geagea says that increasing female parliamentary representation cannot happen naturally in the Lebanese political context and that forceful measures are now required to push through change. Lebanon's new government is expected to pass reforms to current electoral law during its four-year mandate and Mrs. Geagea says she will push to include a quota for women MPs in parliament as part of those reforms. She declined to specify what percentage of parliament would be appropriate. Iraq, Morocco and Jordan each have women’s quotas of 25%, 9.2% and 5.5% respectively.

“Though this is not the best way to promote women's rights because it’s a kind of segregation towards them, we have to do it this way for perhaps two parliamentary terms so that people can get used to seeing women in government,” says Mrs. Geagea. “Then we can progress to a more natural political process.”

With Lebanon's notoriously slow consensus politics, it could take many years to realize Geagea's vision. It has been over a month since Lebanon's elections took place and a cabinet has still not been formed. It is not impossible that the country will slide back again into the political gridlock and sectarian anxieties that have held its women back for decades.