There is an agreement amongst scholars that the earlier, Mesopotamian era of women were afforded greater personal liberties prior to the rise of the Akkid Empire in the areas of northern Syria.

[8] In 1919, Naziq al-Abid founded Noor al-Fayha (Light of Damascus), the city's first women's organization, alongside an affiliated publication of the same name.

[11] The year 2011 marked the beginning of the Syrian Civil War, which saw many civilians fall victim to attacks targeting hospitals, schools, and infrastructure.

Extremist rebel groups, such as Jabhat al-Nusra and ISIS, have enforced strict policies restricting the freedoms of women in territories they control.

[12] The Syrian feminist movement essentially began towards the end of the 1800s, during the time period in which modern Lebanon and Syria were occupied by the Ottoman Empire.

[21] Although there were efforts to secularize the legal system of most Arab states in the 1920s, family law is still heavily influenced by religion and has an impact on the private domain in cases such as marriage, divorce, and child custody.

[26] Between 1970 and the late 1990s, the number of girls in the education system dramatically increased due to the Ba'ath Parties initiative to combat illiteracy.

[28] According to the Human Rights Watch, reports show at least 650 cases of educational facilities being attacked or exploited for military purposes.

During the Arab spring, for example, women protested for change and in spite of arrests continued to take action, despite being socially oppressed by their male counterparts.

[35] Adopted after the Security Council issued a presidential statement on International Women's Day in March, it was acknowledged that there was a strong relationship between gender equality and peace building enterprises.

[36] Women have not overtly engaged with direct governmental contact and influence, but instead interact more with the informal negotiation process through non-governmental organisations and intergovernmental institutions.

[44] After the institution of the Ba'ath party in the 1963, universal socio-political policies were adopted which saw significant improvements in the country's development indices like health and education, but also in public sanitation, water, energy and infrastructure.

[11] However, women's involvement in the workforce is low; according to World Bank, in the Syrian Arab Republic, the labor force participation rate among females is 14.1%, and among males its 63.6% as of 2023.

The United Nations Population Fund stated in 2022 that 7.3 million women and girls need life-saving sexual and reproductive health care due to hostile circumstances, drought, economic collapse, and displacement.

[51] Following the outbreak of acute conflict in Syria, cases of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) in women in the Syrian community, both within the country and in refugee populations, have resulted in correspondence to violence and health insecurity that they faced.

[55][56] In 2015, the United Nations gathered evidence of systematic sexual assault of women and girls by combatants in Syria, and this was escalated by the Islamic State (ISIL) and other terrorist organizations.

[56][57] Sexual abuse has been recognized as the dominant form of violence experienced by women and girls in Syria since the outbreak of the conflict.

[65] The most common motivation of the honour killings was due to the number of girls and women getting sexually abused, following the increased rate of war molestation during the civil unrest.

[67] Usually the victims of these honor killings include women who engage in adultery, premarital sex (or relationships), seek a divorce or refuse a forced marriage.

Physical damage can be related to child bearing specially for women under 18 years old and the possibility for not being able to give birth later in life, and in extreme cases it can lead to death.

Kurdish female fighters in the Women's Protection Units (YPJ) played a key role during the Siege of Kobani and in rescuing Yazidis trapped on Mount Sinjar, and their achievements have attracted international attention as a rare example of strong female achievement in a region in which women are heavily repressed.

[82] For the first time in Syrian history, civil marriage is being allowed and promoted, a significant move towards a secular open society and intermarriage between people of different religious backgrounds.

[83] The legal efforts to reduce cases of underage marriage, polygamy and honor killings are underpinned by comprehensive public awareness campaigns.

These are community centers run by women, providing services to survivors of domestic violence, sexual assault and other forms of harm.

[88] The PYD's political agenda of "trying to break the honor-based religious and tribal rules that confine women" is controversial in conservative quarters of society.

The myth is that villagers would prepare for weddings by making mud bricks for the roofs of new households, and the process by which this was achieved was through dozens of people tramping on the soil and thick mid, accompanied by sung poetry, a mijwiz reed instrument and tabl drum.

Through musical and visual elements of the Dabka, protesters appealed to the cultural identity of the people with anti-war ballads from contemporary artists.

[90] This considered, the path women took to achieve a voice in the realm of artistic production and distribution was undeniably a symbol of female power.

Syrian female artists in Syria's northwestern Idlib province have been creating murals on the blank walls within their communities, using them as a way to communicate messages or images since before the outbreak of the civil war in 2011.

[91] The global language of art, as female artist Al-Hamedh told Syria Direct, became "a weapon and a tool [she] used to express [her] emotion.