A Worn-Out Tune

Talk has multiplied of late about woman and her place in society, her natural characteristics, her appointed tasks, and the circle marked out for her activity — or rather the circle beyond whose bounds she cannot step without falling into errors and failures, or losing her gentle femininity, so dear to the soul, or neglecting her family duties, those duties for whose sake she was created. For she is before all else a wife and a mother — and so on to the end of the familiar tune.

What is truly strange in the matter is the insistence of some on continuing to make people listen to this worn-out tune. I might even say — and this is the comic side of the matter — the insistence of these same people on ignoring the evolution of mentalities that has taken place in the world in this field, an evolution that has led in the end to a social reality on the basis of which — taken duly into account — the laws and constitutions that guarantee rights and duties are framed. This reality is the emergence of the feminine element in the field of general human activity.

I shall not attempt to argue with those who still expatiate on this subject upon the foundations on which people built their opinions three or four hundred years ago, by reciting examples and naming the places where this new social reality has come to the fore; for argument on this matter has become, in my view, like argument over proving that the earth revolves around the sun, now that this scientific fact has entered the ranks of established truths — especially since it is to be presumed of those whom thinkers, or workers in the social field, address that they are not illiterates, but rather informed, if only in a general way, of the fundamental developments taking place in the course of human society.

What may properly be treated by thinkers and writers with regard to this problem is the question of creating the practical means to reconcile woman's domestic tasks with her social tasks, in her capacity as a new, active element in the apparatus of the nation; these are the foundations in whose light such questions are treated in all the lands of the world.

That some thinkers, or workers in the social field, should persist in this course in Lebanon — the country that still prides itself on its free intellectual openness and its respect for the judgments of a mind liberated from every kind of fetter — is very strange indeed, and evidence of an ignorant obstinacy or an arbitrary contempt for the judgments of reason; it is a gesture unworthy of Lebanon as an evolved, open-eyed country.

The question of treating woman's affairs in the Lebanese country must be posed in the following form, now that reality throughout the world has proved that woman's natural capacity — or incapacity — to perform all the tasks a man performs is no longer in any way a matter of debate.

I said that the question of treating woman's affairs must be posed in the following form:

First — To work, by way of amending the constitution in a manner consonant with woman's new social position, for the wresting of official recognition that woman is a citizen possessing the same rights as man and bound by the same duties.

Second — To strive to create the practical means that will enable woman to exercise her national rights and perform her duties: such as establishing networks extending from child welfare institutions, day nurseries, and dispensaries to the remotest corner of the Lebanese country; and spreading free compulsory education, so that no citizen, man or woman, shall exercise rights or perform duties without enjoying the right to education. Thus will vanish the pretext by which some seek to exclude woman from the public arenas — the pretext that woman is, on the whole, an ignorant creature; though this pretext could, alas, be applied to a great many men in our country, and it is among the gravest of the blemishes with which it is no longer seemly that Lebanon's brow be stained.

Such, in general terms, are the sound foundations in whose light must be treated the question of woman's emergence and her struggle to enter the fields of public activity. These are the affairs with which social thinkers and writers must concern themselves, now that the matter of woman's capacities has become a thing conceded, just as it has become scientifically conceded that the earth revolves around the sun, despite what this theory encountered by way of objections which, in that day, it was reasonable to make matters of dispute and give-and-take. But once science had finally settled the correctness of this theory, it was no longer natural in any way, nor logical in any way, to return to debating it, or to inquire into natural phenomena connected with the earth's position with respect to the sun as though that theory did not exist.

Such is the case of those who still treat the question of woman on the basis of debating whether or not she is worthy of performing the full tasks of a citizen, or of arguing back and forth in order to fix woman's place in society, now that the emergence of the feminine element in the public field has become a social reality about which debate has ended, as debate ended over the correctness of the scientific theory to which I referred above.