Joan of Arc Is No Fit Example for Women

Miss Nadir Sabbour is one of the young women active in the social field in the sister country, Egypt; she is the general secretary of the Ladies' Committee of the Egyptian Red Crescent. She answered the request of "The Woman's Voice" to take part in editing this issue, out of a desire to raise the standing of the Arab woman so that she may march in the world's women's procession. And we wished her to give her own opinion on woman's duty and on her true mission in life.
"The Editors"

Duty differs as people differ: the duty of the rich man is not the duty of the poor man; the duty of the eminent is not the duty of the obscure; the duty of the craftsman is not the duty of the soldier; and the duty of woman is not the duty of man. Yet the value of duty in itself is one, and for that reason whoever performs his duty deserves the finest praise, and it will not lower his standing that the duty he performed was small measured against the various duties that others undertake.

The noblest picture of the performance of duty is that the individual perform it willingly and by choice, not spurred by some personal aim he seeks to accomplish in duty's name; for the plague of society is the weakness of its members' character in performing duties for their own sake, in their proper forms.

As for my opinion on woman's duty: I do not grant, and never will grant, that woman and man are equal in capacity for work, and my soul recoils from picturing her on the field of battle brandishing a sword, even were that in defense of her homeland; my nature refuses to see her a killer, save in defense of her honor. Joan of Arc, in my view, is no fit example for women; rather she is, to me, a mark of shame for men. Yet my heart is not without admiration for the woman who performs some kind of courage that does not clash with the mission her soul has formed for itself in existence, for I believe she was created to be a messenger of peace and concord...

Without a sword, with strokes of a pen, Harriet Beecher Stowe raised a tremendous clamor in her country, and her famous book Uncle Tom's Cabin was among the blows that finished off slavery once and for all.

Without a sword, a woman in England carried out a campaign that put an end to the atrocities decreed by English law until the early nineteenth century; for the cruelty of the laws in that era is something the mind can now hardly stomach. Would anyone in our time consent to hanging a woman for stealing a piece of cloth worth twenty-five piasters? No. Yet this used to happen in England until the year 1815. The woman who fought the injustice of the law is Elizabeth Fry. The echo of her humane work extended to other lands, and France, Denmark, Germany, Russia, and Switzerland followed England's lead.

Without a sword, another English lady was able to fight the injustice of the men of war toward the men of war: she is Florence Nightingale. This noble lady tells us that when she reached the age of twenty-five she wanted to ask her parents' permission to join the Salisbury hospital to nurse the sick, and their astonishment was great. And no wonder: the people of that time (1845) believed that a girl who thought of anything other than marriage was a renegade from her sex, a rebel against womanhood.

When she reached thirty-three, her parents allowed her to take up nursing, having despaired of uprooting her inclination to comfort the sick. But she stayed no more than a year in the charity hospital to which she was appointed, for news came that the British army in the Crimean War was marching, in its entirety, to its doom: the condition of the wounded was neglected, and the distance between the battlefield and the hospital took eight days, so that a quarter of them died on the way, and whoever arrived alive found in the hospital neither bandages nor the necessary supplies. Florence offered her services to the government, took with her 38 of her colleagues, and applied herself to cleaning the hospital and arranging the means of surgery for the wounded; she even fed and clothed them from her own money, and she kept working twenty hours a day until the death rate fell from 42% to 2%. When she returned to her homeland after the end of the Crimean War, she resolved to continue her work so that the tragedies of Scutari should never return; for she saw that the system of army doctors had to be reformed, and that if she slackened, her efforts would be wasted. So she set about rousing the War Ministry, and compelled the authorities to appoint a committee to write a report on the army's condition from the standpoint of health; the report was built upon what she supplied to them, and reform became a binding necessity from which there was no escape.

Reform, reform, without weapons. That... is woman's mission in my view. As for Joan of Arc and Charlotte Corday, they do not represent woman, however much admiration we may owe them for the courage, patriotism, and self-denial they displayed.

It is my opinion that woman was not created for war and is not suited to it, and she must not think of engaging in it, for it is among the traces of mankind's barbarism and savagery; nor do we wish to enter it save as defenders of the homeland or advocates of a lofty aim — not as conquerors nor as colonizers enslaving our brothers in humanity. And in my opinion it behooves woman, at the present time at least, not to be the one steering the helm of politics, for politics is a matter of deceit, treachery, lying, and hypocrisy, and woman's character is too noble to sink to that depth.

The homeland wants of women that they be good mothers and wives, and virtuous educators or teachers of children and girls; that they be doctors for ladies and nurses, in peace and in war, for all the hospitals; guides for raising the level of the ignorant and the peasant women; revivers of the national and the women's industries; benefactresses for the rescue of the straying and the fallen; charitable workers in deeds of piety and good; and radiant sources of letters, art, and learning. It is regrettable and shameful that education in the East — the wellspring of the West's renaissance and progress — should be so degraded, and that the number of educated women in every Eastern state cannot be compared with their number in the West, though education is the most necessary requirement of the women of advanced nations; for the woman who rocks the cradle with her right hand gives birth — if she prepares him well and directs him well — to one who rocks the world and sets it in motion.

So to my sisters, the women of the Arab East in particular and the women of the world in general, I appeal that they exert their effort for the progress of their homeland; that they work in the sphere prepared for them with patience and sacrifice, expending effort, money, and self for the happiness of their people; and that they not begrudge the homeland a small effort followed by great benefit — for there is no life for a homeland without the sacrifice of its children. If the people of a country are not prepared to die in defense of their homeland, it becomes a lifeless corpse among the nations of the world, lived upon as parasites live upon carrion.

"Cairo"