Hannah Sabbagh Shakir

Hannah Sabbagh Shakir (1895-1990) was a Lebanese-American businesswoman who co-founded the Lebanese-Syrian Ladies' Aid Society of Boston with 13 other Syrian women, including; Adele Ashook, Adelle Shayab, Rose Handy, Sady Besharra and others. The first President was Sadie Abdelnour. The Society's fundraising events made it a center of social life for Boston's Arabic-speaking community for many years. Shakir was also an entrepreneur who went from working in a factory to owning a successful clothing factory. She is remembered on the Boston Women's Heritage Trail.

Early life

She was born in 1895 in Ain el Rwmmaneh, a small village in the mountains of Lebanon, then in the Ottoman Empire to George Sabbagh and Marion Ashook. In 1907, she migrated with her family to the United States. At the age of fourteen she began working in the textile mills of Fall River, Massachusetts. She said in an interview later, "We made gingham. I learned to operate the looms, six big looms, just like a man. I did it very well." As a young woman she worked as a stitcher in a Boston textile factory. (At the time, Arabic-speaking immigrants were usually referred to as Syrians, since most of them came from the Ottoman Province of Syria, which included what is now Lebanon, most of Jordan, Palestine/Israel, and Syria.) They held their first meetings in rooms provided by St. George's Church. By May 1920 they were able to rent their own flat.

The records of the Society from 1917-2005 are on file at the Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University. Other records are included in the Evelyn Shakir Collection at the Arab American National Museum Archives.

Business

In the 1920s, Hannah and her brother Naseeb started a small apron factory in East Boston, where they were living at the time. After some initial success, they made the mistake of moving to downtown Boston, where the high rent drove them out of business. For the next twenty years she worked for other people.

Shakir's daughter, Evelyn Shakir, was a pioneer in the field of Arab American literature. Evelyn Shakir included her mother's history with those of other Arab-American women in her scholarly work, Bint Arab: Arab and Arab American women in the United States.