Women's Personalities: Dr. Najla Abu Izzeddin

In women's circles there are great personalities at work in every field — in literature, in social affairs, in politics, in learning — doing great works that men are unable to perform. "The Woman's Voice" will present these personalities to women's society in extended interviews, and it pleases us that the first of these personalities should be Dr. Najla Abu Izzeddin.
"The Editors"

Q — Since you have spent most of your time in study, would you kindly tell us something about the universities where you studied in the United States?

— In the United States I studied at Vassar College and at the University of Chicago. The former is the oldest women's college in the world. And I recall — apropos of all the talk nowadays about women's rights and equality between her and man — that Vassar was the first institution in the world to secure for woman equality with man in the field of higher learning; that was at the beginning of the seventies of the last century. After graduating from Vassar I went to the University of Chicago, where I specialized in Arab history.

Q — I have heard that when you were working in the Iraqi Ministry of Education, you were the first lady appointed to teach male students at the Higher Teachers' College. Did any timidity come over you when you first undertook this work, and how did you feel then?

— The students at the Higher Teachers' College in Baghdad were of the utmost courtesy and refinement, and from the very first lesson I felt no difference between teaching young men and teaching young women.

Q — A short while ago you returned from the United States, where you carried out a national mission, and it would please me to know something of this mission?

— I was at the Arab Office in Washington, and my task was to deliver lectures in university circles and before women's organizations. This mission required me to travel continually to most of the United States and to every part of Canada. The first purpose of these journeys and lectures was to make clear the cause of the Arabs in Palestine, and the second, to acquaint cultivated circles in the New World with the civilization of the Arabs in the past and their efforts and activity at the present time. I met among my listeners a sincere desire to know the facts about the Arab countries and their people. The Arab cause stands in the greatest need of being made known and spread in the Western countries — provided that the deeds of the Arabs support their words, and provided that this publicity begin, and gather strength, in the Arab countries themselves, spreading through every circle in every Arab land, so that faith in it may prevail and fill hearts and souls.

Q — Women's circles in every Arab country welcomed the statement of the head of the Syrian government about granting the educated Syrian woman the right to vote. What is your opinion of this step, and do you believe it came before its time?

— The statement of the head of the Syrian government on granting the educated woman the right to vote is bound to be a spur to the other Arab governments, and it is without doubt of a nature to encourage woman to seek learning and to take part in public life.

Q — I have learned that you worked last year on preparing a book in English about the Arabs. How far have you come in writing it?

— What led me to think of writing a book in English about the Arabs is the scarcity of truthful information about them in the West and the difficulty of reaching it, together with the desire I sensed for obtaining this knowledge. But in view of what the Palestine question has come to, I have thought it more fitting to postpone the publication of such a book until conditions in the Arab countries become settled.