Woman the Man

The war whose fire the world is still writhing under has brought forth several social phenomena that will turn modern society upside down. Foremost among these is the question of woman: must she take up men's work, can she do it, and what does society gain from such work?

Whoever follows the work women have done in this war is astonished at its quantity and its magnitude... From nursing in the dispensaries, to doctoring in the camps and on the fighting fronts; from manual labor in the war factories night and day, to sharing in the building of ships, submarines, tanks, and the other ravenous beasts of war!!...

And finally, from sheer exhausting toil — woman reaping the grain in the fields and gathering it heap upon heap for the general provisioning, to secure life for the army of fighters and for the civilian population — to enlistment in the ranks of soldiery and military training, where woman can do exactly what man does: at the searchlight posts, behind the fighting lines, in the shipyards, in the factories, at sea, and at the steering columns of motorcars!!

Often have I stood perplexed, dazzled, gazing at the picture of a girl of slender figure and sweet smile, wearing a white woolen jacket over a man's rough "trousers," holding in her right hand an axe keen-edged, cutting as her glance, and leaning upon it in a posture all ease and allure, resting from the toil of hewing and felling — felling trees in the British forests!!

She is Britain's girl, working at wood-cutting in the forests of Scotland!! (See the picture, reproduced from Al-Rafidain magazine, September issue, 1945.)

And your mouth falls open despite yourself when you look upon a girl with nobility in her eyes and majesty in her bearing, wearing a handsome military dress and an officer's cap upon a head adorned with cropped, well-ordered hair, kneeling on her knee before a lorry, working at its wheels with two soft hands sheathed in thick gloves of white leather!!... She is... Her Royal Highness Princess Elizabeth, daughter of the King of the English, George VI, King of Great Britain and Emperor of India. And the Princess, having passed through the training course at the women recruits' center, puts on working dress and changes the wheels of a motorcar with her own soft hands!!

The examples on this subject are not to be exhausted. There are dozens of examples in which woman has appeared in this war in the guise of man, proving that she can serve her country and her family by the very means man uses, and that she who rocks the cradle with her left hand can wield in her right the axe, the rifle, and the cannon, and work upon the human adversary killing, destruction, and disfigurement exactly as man does!... Thy pardon, O God, and Thy forgiveness!!

The good reader will not expect from me a scientific, psychological study of woman's psyche and a comparison of it with man's, in order to judge whether she can do his work and perform what he performs in the hard, harassing fields of labor. No — nothing of that is the purpose of this article of mine. The learned have opinions upon opinions that only add difficulty to the subject's difficulty. But I wish to whisper in the ear of our ladies a whisper that may wound the pride of some of them and may satisfy the logic of those who possess logic. So I say:

The present war has opened before the world wide horizons for thought and for work. And the world arose — woman being its sensitive member — in a mad revolt, one of the revolts of the suffering soul, thinking and working; and its thinking came out confused, and its work crippled, without harmony among its various parts and without cohesion...

Our Arab world had its share of this thinking and its portion of this work. It rose up to demand and to struggle, and took to holding congresses, founding associations, and encouraging parties and national political organizations; and in all of this our women had a hand that shall be remembered to their pride and admiration, inscribed in graven letters upon the brow of time. If I forget, I shall never forget Lebanon's rising last Tishrin for the sake of its liberty and its dignity, and that glorious, memorable day when our women came out from their seclusion in serried ranks, marching in a magnificent demonstration with a rank of our loyal men surrounding them. I shall not forget that we went out that day to the gates of the University, professors and students, having cast off the cares of our homes and our hearts; and one of the University's great professors turned and said, a tear in his eye: "Now Lebanon has won the battle — and by the grace of its women!!"

All this is beautiful and splendid, but it does not prevent us from looking at the facts with the eye of reality, and from warning our women's community against exploiting it to evade a duty that none but woman can perform...

Madam: your share in this human partnership in which you are man's associate is a winning, weighty share. Why, then, do you try to appear before man in the guise of an aggressor and a transgressor? Man has begun to fear you and to see in you the stubborn competitor, contending with him for his rights and his work — you who were created to help him, to console him, and to be his happiness. And you have come to see in man a stubborn, unjust adversary, a despotic tyrant who disposes of all his affairs as he pleases, without consulting you — he who exists only to solve his problems by the light of the counsels you offer him and the guidance and solutions you inspire in him!

The truth is that you are both in error, for you are both stricken in your confused thinking and your crippled work. And the fault falls not so much upon you two as individuals as upon this crooked social order which harnesses you to work within it as hired competitors fulfilling a commercial end — one that carries you far from the beauty of humanity and the nobility of its aim. This cheap commercial end to which I point is the trap set for us by the men of monopoly and colonialism — those men who have monopolized human thought and enslaved man, now in the name of bread, now in the name of bread and liberty, and who have taken to cajoling men and hurling them into a furnace of successive wars. And here they are today, hurling woman into the field of their conquests to gratify their bloodthirsty appetites and their empty vauntings — forgetting that the hand that binds up wounds does not know how to fire the cannon; that the heart which has embraced humanity with its love, its tenderness, and its compassion cannot in minutes turn into a hard, deaf rock; and that the woman who was created to give life its worth with the nobility and feeling of her heart, the mercy and pity of her eye, and the candor, frankness, strength, and right of her brow, cannot turn into a speckled serpent crawling with the earth's reptiles and its ravening beasts, spitting her venom now in the name of right, now in the name of justice and equality...

And after all this: we in this country are a handful of the sons of mankind, a corner among the corners of the world, with our glorious right to a sound and noble life. Living on the margin of life would never content us, nor is drifting in the current of the crowd any aim of ours. Why, then, this uprising of our women, and why do our men rage, when each of us has a work of his own and hers — God be witness, a great and noble work!!

We do not wish to dictate our will to anyone. We do not ask woman to keep to her house and remain in her kitchen, content with performing her household tasks. Nor are we prepared to accept anyone's orders, or to hear our women speechifying here and there about man's oppression of woman and his tyranny over her. Both man and woman, by our reckoning, are wronged in this country — wronged by an ignorance blind to the facts of life and by a blind zeal to keep pace with the rest of mankind!...

We ask woman to work and work, for work is the sign of life, of strength, and of vigor. And we want her to work in every place and at every time — in the home, in the hospital, in the school, in the associations and the clubs — provided we understand that God, for a wisdom we do not know, has set apart for man a kind of exhausting, harassing work, and has set apart for her another kind of work no less important and vital than man's, though less exhausting and harassing.

And finally: the highest thing we strive for — we who claim liberation from the crushing nightmare of the past — is to see woman among us feel the duty of helping man. But we warn her against looking at him with the eye of envy and rivalry, seeking to do what he does and to take his place in many kinds of work, as is the case today. For — and this whisper is especially for the ears of our ladies — we in this country have no need of women who bear men and do men's work: we are in direst need of women who inspire men!!...