I am no opponent of political rights for woman. Every step toward equality — which for woman is still a distant dream — is undoubtedly in her interest, and in the interest of the country. But when I see how the man among us misuses his political rights, disfiguring them with bribery, with ignorance, and with blind obedience to the chiefs, I am appalled at what I see of the degeneration of the democratic system at the hands of our men; I picture these same defects doubled by the votes of women, and imagine the additional confusion that this change would bring; and then I wish that woman would postpone the demand for her political rights until the population, men and women, reaches a higher level of political maturity and a fuller measure of civic culture, so that we content ourselves for the time being with the man's vote and confine ourselves to one of the two evils. As for giving political rights to educated women only, that would be counted an injustice against woman, for in that case political rights would have to be withdrawn from the hand of the illiterate man, who represents no small number of our men. Accordingly, before pressing the demand for our political rights, we ought to prepare the ground for them logically, by insisting on the demand that illiteracy be wiped out among women and men alike, and that civic and political culture be spread among the population in all their classes and kinds.
There are still in the world — according to the latest report given out by the United Nations — fourteen states that deny woman her political rights. Of the fourteen, six are Arab states, that is, about half the total. And among the seven Arab states, Syria stands alone in giving woman a truncated right in elections.
Woman has been politically emancipated in the Far East, in all of Europe except Switzerland, and in all the American states except those of Central America. As for our women, they are not merely deprived of political rights; in all the other civil rights and in the laws of personal status they are still subject to the statutes of the Middle Ages.
Our civil law does not regard woman as a person capable of independence, but makes her a dependent upon man in all the stages of her life and denies her every right to equality. In the courts, a woman's testimony is refused unless two women agree upon a single testimony — and the wrong in that, and the belittling of woman's personality, are plain enough. Worse still is the law of inheritance, which gives woman half her brother's right in the inheritance of the parents; and this explicit preference often leads on to her being deprived of the whole inheritance. I say this on the evidence of the inquiry carried out by one of the women's committees during the women's conference of UNESCO last year. One hundred and fifty women from educated families of middling circumstances were questioned on the subject, and it was found that only 43% of those women had been given their lawful rights in inheritance, that is, half the rights of the brother, while the rest obtained nothing, or received only some of their rights. Nor are the rights of the wife any better off, for she inherits an eighth of what her husband leaves if she has a child, and otherwise a quarter of the inheritance. What this law means is that it places the widow in a position in which she is unable to live independently unless her husband was possessed of vast wealth. She must depend for her livelihood on her children or some of her kin, and must trust to their affection and their good intentions — though these two virtues are scarce among the children of men.
Someone may say: man is the breadwinner of the family, and the law makes him responsible for the maintenance of women if they do not work or possess no wealth. But at what price does man perform this duty? What a debt of obligation he lays upon the woman
who, as he sees it, lives at his expense! And how many are the men who do it with good grace, without grumbling or tyranny?
There is another matter that calls for attention. It is that the number of women working outside their homes, especially among the girls, increases day by day. To verify this we have only to visit the factories, the shops, the institutes of education, the offices, the hospitals, the farms, and the other places of work. There are statistics compiled by a group of members of a women's association last year: they found that the number of working girls of the middle class is not less than fifty percent, while the women of the working class, one and all, labor like the man in the factories, the farms, and the establishments. Indeed, in some workshops they saw that the number of women was double the number of men.
Secondly — the woman who does not work outside the house ordinarily works in the house. She is the governess and the nurse, the seamstress, the cook, the laundress, and the manager of the household. The number of true parasites is in fact very small, no greater than the number of millionaires. And I cannot imagine a man who consents to support his mother or his wife or his sister without requiring her to do the work of the house, whereby she stands to him in the place of a servant. In such a case she has earned her food and her clothing, with nothing owing in return. His supporting her involves no loss whatever, and there is no pretext or argument to justify depriving her of the right of equality in inheritance.
Thirdly — man's preferment over woman in the matter of inheritance, or his seizure of the whole fortune to the exclusion of the women, often has an evil effect upon his character. This deification makes him dependent and idle, or selfish and arrogant, inclined to tyrannize over