To His Excellency the Speaker of the Chamber of Deputies and Their Excellencies the honorable Deputies.
The Lebanese Arab Women's Federation has a long-standing position which it wishes to renew, and its demand is a sound one which it hopes to see fulfilled. Behold, the nations, great and small—from Italy to France to Belgium and even Japan—have lately made man and woman equal, and have seen fit to do justice to half the nation, so that its forces may be equal in raising it up and strengthening it; so they passed the electoral law, and woman was given this right, to be an elector and elected.
As we follow the work of your esteemed Chamber, our attention was caught by the amendment of
its present constitution before the year 1946, and we saw that the winds will favor our ship, which we hope will sail on with God's blessings in this session and prosper in its course, and that women will receive at your generous hands this right which they desire, so that they may contend together with their men against the storms of life and join hands with them in building and reform. Did not the head of your delegation—Lebanon's delegation to San Francisco—sign the Charter of the United Nations, in which it is laid down that man and woman shall be equal in political and civil rights?
Therefore, as we set this lofty aim before women, we cannot but rejoice and be glad, for we are certain that it will impel every intelligent girl whose natural gifts qualify her to continue her study and her progress, so that she may be worthy to assume this lofty position, in which she will serve her sister, her children, and her country with sincerity and zeal, and help her menfolk to establish order and arrangement in the works and in the matters that lie within her competence.
Therefore the ladies of the Women's Federation as a whole—numbering no fewer than thirty women's associations—hope that this cry of theirs will have its desired effect; and in your esteemed Chamber every thinking, educated man acknowledges in his heart of hearts the powers woman possesses, which, if turned to the good of the country, would add to its prosperity and its advancement.
We hope that our voice will find an echo, and that the seed we cast into your hands will find water to nourish it, so that it may grow and bear fruit; and yours, gentlemen, will be the first merit, in aiding woman, your sister, and history will immortalize your memory. Please accept our respects.
President of the Lebanese Arab Women's Federation
Parliament. But the name of Eleanor Rathbone will remain forever linked with this law in the register of British laws—she, the champion of all causes, the small among them and the great.
It was she who in 1918 called a small group of workers in the social field to a meeting at which they demanded that woman must be made equal with man in wages and work, and said that this could not be achieved unless society considered itself partly responsible for the rearing of children. And it was she who, as one of the independent Members of Parliament, the deputies for the union of the English universities, fought for the cause without interruption or weariness, because she believed sincerely in its rightness. Eleanor Rathbone died at the beginning of this year, and her adversaries and opponents in the realization of this scheme were at ease, thanking Divine Providence for having granted her life until she saw the work that absorbed her lifetime fulfilled at the last.
A Doctoral Thesis by an Egyptian Physician
News from Geneva reports that the Egyptian physician Dr. Naguib Riad has succeeded in carrying out precise scientific experiments by which he has proved that it is possible to know the sex of a child before its birth — whether it will be a boy or a girl.
One curious detail worth mentioning is that the Egyptian physician based his experiments on an ancient Egyptian idea recorded in one of the papyri, dating from the year 1250 before Christ. He went on applying this idea in the light of modern scientific methods, conducting his experiments in a hospital in Geneva, until he had prepared his thesis on the method by which the sex of a child can be known before its birth — the thesis by which he obtained the degree of doctor from the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Geneva. It has been described as "a doctoral thesis of great value in the world of medicine."
The thesis was prefaced by Dr. King, director of the maternity hospital in Geneva, with an introduction on the medical-scientific side, while Professor Jacques Pirenne wrote on the Egyptian historical side of the thesis, making clear that Egypt was not only the cradle of the nations' civilization, but the cradle of their sciences as well — such as medicine, for example.
— The man who says what he does not mean, and means what he does not understand, is a human being who does not know he is an animal, and an animal that imagines itself a human being! "Goethe"