It would be an injustice and a wrong for anyone to speak of the surging women's renaissance in Lebanon without paying tribute to the grave political role played by the Lebanese woman in wresting independence from the tyrannous foreigner — above all the foremost fighter in the struggle, Her Ladyship the wife of His Excellency the President, around whom, and in whose house, our ladies from every walk of life rallied. They held conferences, drew up memoranda, made the rounds of the representatives of the Arab and Allied states, and sped off telegrams and protests, until the voice of the Lebanese woman rose ringing through the countries of the world, demanding the right that had been plundered and the glory that had been lost...
I could forget everything I saw or heard of on the day of the ordeal — even Bchamoun! But never, so long as I live, shall I forget the sight of our sheltered ladies and our fresh young girls, who forgot sectarian differences and buried them forever, who left their secluded chambers and came down to the field of struggle, marching in the vanguard, in the lines of fire, in a single serried rank, with firm steps, heads held high, their hearts full of faith, defying the colonizer's tanks, his barricades, his bayonets, and his rifles leveled at their breasts, greeting the bullets with smiles, finding death and martyrdom sweet for the sake of Lebanon!
And it was one of God's blessings upon Lebanon that from the ordeal of the ten days there sprang the Lebanese Women's League, that distinguished elite of our married ladies and our young unmarried women who, having shared in wresting independence until it became an accomplished fact, resolved to devote themselves to buttressing it with fruitful, constructive, guiding work. Their efforts in this brief span have yielded two noble projects of guidance: the first, a modern kindergarten of the finest type; the second, a refined women's magazine which is in truth, and without exaggeration, the most splendid publication of its kind in the Arab world, uniting elegance and taste, pleasure, novelty, and profit.
The League's choice of these two projects and no others testifies to the far-sightedness and sound judgment of our excellent ladies. They saw that
comprehensive reform must reach young and old alike, and at one and the same time. Reform among the young comes by guiding them, from the foundation and from their tenderest years, in the right direction — hence the kindergarten. Reform among adults comes only by organized general guidance, and there is no doubt that a magazine is the best and most successful means of reaching grown Lebanese women — hence the magazine The Woman's Voice.
Yet it has seemed to me, as I watched with joy and delight the birth of these two noble projects, that the League's commendable efforts were directed toward the 'few' rather than the many, toward the cultivated and well-to-do elite rather than the deprived and untaught classes. The kindergarten can hold only a limited number of children of means, and the magazine reaches only the hands of educated women — and these, alas, do not in their sum make up the great mass of the fair sex in Lebanon.
I have therefore thought fit to turn, in this evening's talk, toward the forgotten multitudes, those thousands upon thousands of citizens, men and women, of whom Lebanon is composed and upon whose arms every renaissance in Lebanon must rest — confining myself to the stage of childhood, that suffering, tormented childhood which will find no true champion to raise it from its fall but the awakened woman, and will find none better than the Lebanese Women's League, headed by Her Ladyship the First Lady of Lebanon, to be the merciful consoler who bends tenderly over these opening buds and rescues them from the claws of ignorance, disease, and poverty.
Perhaps the most striking spectacle of misery and wretchedness that one sees in the quarters of the capital is these children — our very hearts walking upon the earth — who crawl through the filthy streets playing with refuse, barefoot and half naked, not one of them past his third or fourth year. A pallor plain on the face that bespeaks malnutrition; a visible filth that bespeaks neglect and straitened means; and a staggering multitude that shows how effectively the poor contribute to the quickening of the birth rate — without its betterment. All of it together composes a crying picture of the social injustice that reigns in Lebanon as it reigns in the rest of the Arab lands.
These are sights people see every day without their arresting their attention or their care, for they have grown used to them from seeing them so often; perhaps I too have grown used to them. But what pains me in these scenes of tormented childhood is the sight of the little one crying bitterly in the street, in a way that would draw forth pity, with no one to attend to him. His mother, busy with the housework, or serving the neighbors, or ill, has sent him out to weep in the road; and there, amid the refuse, in an atmosphere of weeping and wailing, the poor thing passes the golden, happy age of childhood of which writers and poets sing, and whose return they long for.
I swear, I have never seen these scenes of vagrant, weeping childhood without there rising in my imagination the scenes of laughing childhood I once saw in the Luxembourg Gardens in Paris: children like roses, the blood all but leaping from their radiant faces, racing one another with gladness brimming on their lips, playing the innocent games of