The Home Is Woman's Palace

The Arab woman has devoted herself to the study of the various sciences and arts, and she has found support from the champions of her renaissance, an ally in modern civilization, and a favoring wind in her natural aptitude. She has made a sweep through learning whose means were never available to her forebears; suffice it, in this connection, to point to the number of women lawyers, who increase year after year, and to the women writers who labor persistently at treating public affairs.

Yes, we are in dire need of the educated woman. We are in dire need of women teachers and nurses, of women lawyers and doctors; we are in dire need of women working in every field of life. But with all this we know that neither the teacher nor the nurse, nor even the lawyer or the doctor, can succeed in her work if the home is tumbledown in its pillars, feeble in its foundations and its structure.

Let us turn our eyes toward the home, then—the home that is everything in this life, the home that is to every human being as the soul is to the body: if its affairs fall into disorder, the body's affairs fall into disorder too, its powers weaken, its activity fades away, and it becomes incapable of continuing the struggle to preserve its being and secure its needs.

The care of the home is an arduous matter, of that there is no doubt; but "whoever knows what is sought makes light of what is expended." Whoever knows that on her depends the raising of children—healthy, strong children who want for no food, miss no mother's tenderness, into whom no claws of disease sink, and with whose forming characters no servants tamper—whoever knows that makes light of what she expends.

Whoever knows that on her depends the family's material security, and that every extravagance in food or dress is bound to affect not one person alone but a company of people who are by law a family bound one to another—whoever knows that makes light of what she expends.

And then what? Is all of life expenditure and sacrifice? Is there no joy in it? Is there no room in it for bringing out the individual's personality? Is there no scope in it for free work? Yes—the field in life is wide before every person, and it is wide likewise before woman. Women's literature will flower only within the corners of a home over which the wings of concord flutter; and art—fine art—will not flower amid the din of evening parties and their like: this art, and the fine arts akin to it, will flower only in a quiet corner of the home.

Let us turn our eyes toward the home, then, for by turning our eyes toward it we work to awaken our artistic gifts—gifts fit to prove to others that we are a nation possessed of a power of invention that cannot be matched and an artistic range that cannot be reached. To the home, then—for it is the cradle of living literature and splendid art, the home in which the child gropes his way toward the artistic gifts and grows up with eyes accustomed to seeing beauty and harmony made manifest in everything that surrounds him.

To the home—woman's stately palace, which she builds with her own hands and adorns with her fingertips, and rejoices to behold now that it appears a part of her very self, bespeaking her personality and her genius.