Sawt al-Mara — page 4

The woman of letters Miss Falak Tarazi has left us for France, where she will stay for some time, acquainting herself with the features of life in Europe. She has kept her promise to The Woman's Voice and sent us the first of her letters. There is no doubt that our readers will find in this letter, and in the letters that follow it, a new color of freshness, pleasure, and profit in great measure.

To speak of Paris is to speak of life itself in all the variety of its faces and branches, its forms and its meanings. Like life, it seldom ends at any definite point, and seldom begins at a definite point either. Its beginning may be at the beginning; it may be at the middle point; just as its end may come at any point — save one, whose name is "the end." For there is no such thing as "the end" in a city whose bounds have embraced the entire universe, and whose quarters have gathered up its loftiest meanings and its basest. Whoever claims that Paris is the city of frivolity errs utterly! Perhaps the expression has misled such people, so that they confuse gaiety with frivolity — and what a difference between the two! For Paris is as far as can be from frivolity; it is, rather, the city of earnestness — earnestness in its widest and most spacious meanings. Even gaiety, in this city, takes an earnest form, because Paris stands in the utmost need of it.

And need, for a human being, is ever earnestness through and through. A glance, however fleeting, at the faces one meets, whether in the Métro or on the bus or anywhere else, tells one that the life of these people is summed up at this moment in a few words: unremitting, continuous toil for the sake of life; ceaseless struggle to obtain bread merely to hold on to safety; struggle to fight off hunger, helplessness, and death. Such is the life of the toilers and strugglers of Paris, earnest in their toil and their struggle — those who eat their bread by the sweat of their brow; and God knows they are many.

The thing that truly arrests attention in Paris is the role of woman at this perilous stage of

its history — Paris's, that is — and her direct, practical entry into the various fields of life as a working member of society, toiling and struggling for her daily bread

exactly as the man does. This great multitude of women whom you come upon, whether as you go down the stairways of the Métro — one of the wonders of Paris — or as you climb them, or as you round the "endless" turns and bends that connect you with the line that carries you to your destination — these women catch your eye by their earnestness, their haste, their simple dress — which is as far as can be from the appearances of elegance and finery — and by those burdens they carry, now in their hands, now on their backs. You may happen to see a girl whose weight does not reach fifty kilos loaded with burdens that may weigh more than twenty. And yet despite all this, and despite the burdens of every kind that the French woman bears — especially she who belongs to the popular classes — her nature has managed, under the rule of necessity, to grow familiar with this kind of life and to school herself to it; for the harsh and mighty trials she passed through during this war have taught her to overcome every weakness that might take hold of her by reason of the hardships she meets; for to give way to weakness and dependence might bring down calamities upon her, of which hunger would be the beginning, and degradation and the fatal