Mrs. Asiya Wahbi, leader of the women's renaissance in Iraq, presides over the Iraqi Women's Union and the Child Protection Society, and works diligently in the service of constructive projects. Here she speaks of the women's renaissance in Iraq.
The dawn of the women's renaissance in Iraq broke with the establishment of national rule a quarter of a century ago, when the first club, under the name of the Women's Renaissance, was set up in 1924; it performed a service approaching that performed by the Red Crescent societies. A short while later the Iraqi Red Crescent Society was founded, and at first both sexes together belonged to it; the work of the Crescent was confined to extending health and social assistance to the members of the nation. During this period the Iraqi woman had come to feel the harm resulting from the spread
of intoxicants and the plagues of alcohol among the people, and so she founded a society, under the name of the Society for Combating Intoxicants, in 1937. This society gathered many excellent women, who found in rising up to fight the plagues of alcohol a social and humane duty. And when the Iraqi woman found that she was surrounded by other social ills that had to be fought, she changed this society's name and its purpose, replacing it with the Society for 'Combating Social Ills,' and took upon herself to fight in earnest these ills entrenched among her fellow countrymen. Nor would she turn a blind eye to the condition of the Iraqi child, to guiding motherhood in the right direction, and to combating the illiteracy and misery widespread among the people; and in this campaign there joined the societies of the Red Crescent, of Combating Social
Ills, the Houses of the Nation, the Women's League, the Arab Home Society, and Child Protection — and her work in these societies has been a source of pride, which the hand of the Iraqi people has recorded with praise and thanks.
With a view to uniting the endeavors of the Iraqi woman in raising the edifice of a social and cultural renaissance, and to make possible a coming-together between her and the Arab woman and the Western woman, a club was set up under the name of the Iraqi Women's Union in 1945, gathering within its walls the memberships of all the women's societies. From this club voices were raised directing woman to the exercise of all her social and political rights; it made contact with the international associations, made its voice heard, and took part in numerous congresses, in which its representation was successful in the highest degree.
I shall devote the following word to the women's branch of the Child Protection Society:
The women's branch has the Queen Alia charitable dispensary, whose aims are to reduce infant mortality by every technical and scientific means,
'Nero,' the tyrannical Roman emperor, ordered his mother put to death... When the hour of execution came, the headsman drew near her, sword in hand; and she, flinging her arms wide, said to him, urging him to strike:
— Come, strike the belly that carried that monster!