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 facto-ries, 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 adver-sary 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 strug-gle, and took to holding congresses, founding associ-ations, 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