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!!...
By "we" I mean the community of emigrants whom good fortune destined to live through the present world crisis far from everything called hardship, hunger, torment, and annihilation.
We live in comfort, compared with the millions of human beings floundering amid troubles and woes; we stand as spectators — no shock rocks our being, no war levy is imposed upon us. The human slaughter has ended, and in its place has settled a shadow of transparent peace. I say this because today's peace is nothing but an illusory truce with no rest in it, so long as greed lies deep in the breasts of the leaders who dominate the weak, drawing off their blood to make it a mount for their thrones. But let us call it peace and be done. Will you tell me, children of my country, what effect the peace has had on our souls, and what provision we laid up during the war and at the coming of peace?...
In this land we are guests, no more, no less, and we shall remain strangers, intruders in the eyes of its people, until no trace remains of the first emigrant caravan. We came to gather money, and gather it we did; what, then, keeps us from returning, now that the war is over and no barrier stands as an obstacle in the way of travel and passage?
We proclaim patriotism
and strive to aid the homeland with money — and no one who saw the work of the Syrian-Lebanese committee during the country's late ordeal will deny it, nor the Palestinian community's efforts to succor its country and ward off the Zionist danger from its lands.
All this inspires pride and admiration; but it is not enough, for love of the homeland does not stop at singing its love from afar; it demands the exertion of effort and the venturing of everything that leads to raising it up in its new awakening — the call to liberate the homeland avails nothing if we do not join word to deed.
Our country needs working hands and rising forces — it wants us ourselves, with our money, our strength, and our efforts. Money is no substitute for the experience we have acquired through the years of our emigration, and our sentiment cannot replace for it our children, who alone are its future wealth, its sole hope, and the strong force to lift it from its stumble and make it a free nation, honored on every side.
I do not address the emigrant in Chile alone; I call to all emigrants in the American lands generally — I want my voice to reach them [...] which is the voice of woman, whom you hold above all things; and I