companions in the service of Lebanese woman
and Lebanese society. How great was my admiration for her intelligence and the breadth of her knowledge of social affairs! And no wonder, for Miss Bayoud possesses rare gifts, polished by experience, whether gained through attending international congresses or through the activity she has carried on in the social field.
She too spoke to me at length about the congress, and I have preferred to convey from her talk what concerns the most important impressions the congress left upon her. Here they are, as she recounted them to me:
First: The world has become more of a single whole than it was before. Hence the thinking that prevails in the Western world is worldwide, all-embracing thinking. As for us, our thinking is still, regrettably, shrunk in upon itself. We care for nothing but ourselves, as if we lived cut off from the rest of mankind. If we only realized that whatever befalls any spot of the earth affects us here, whether directly or indirectly, we would not take this stand in our thinking.
Second: I was moved by what I saw of the pains Western woman has borne and still bears for the sake of building a better world. As for us, we have not suffered, and do not suffer, enough in this cause.
Third: The overwhelming majority of the world's women today have attained equality with man in political rights — even in Japan, after the last war. France and Italy, too, have lately granted woman these rights. In Lebanon and the Arab world, however, matters are still as they were, as if the last war had
not been enough to convince us, as it convinced others, that woman's participation is most necessary in all the affairs of life and society. We must therefore concern ourselves seriously with giving woman in Lebanon and the other Arab lands the right to vote and to share in the administration of the country's affairs. For a country, as the famous saying has it, rises no higher than the level of its women.
Fourth: My attention was caught by Western woman's concern with moral building rather than material building. She therefore directs her care to children, in her belief that they alone are the foundation on which the future rests. We here do not attend properly to this important point.
Fifth: I marveled exceedingly at the freedom people enjoy in the West, whether freedom of thought or freedom of speech and action. How I wished that we here might enjoy this freedom! Delegates joined the congress from all parts of the world, professing different opinions and creeds, and each one of them would voice her opinion in complete freedom; the discussion would proceed with no partisanship except to reason and logic. I recall that when the Palestine question was raised at one of the meetings, the desire to understand its point of view was keen, even among the Jewish women. The American women expressed to us their sharing in our feeling of the injustice done to the Arabs in Palestine, and they wished that all the women of the world might be enabled to acquaint themselves thoroughly with the Arab point of view on the subject.