The Woman's Voice

"... It is this homeland's good fortune that you did not join your voice to man's voice in the past ages of our life! Providence has kept you in reserve for this grim day, that you might be the last attempt to save this people — great in the greatness of its past and its glories, and weak in the weakness of its present and its disgraces!..."

In a country where, over man's voice, have piled up
the veils of private interests,
and base wishes,
and low aims,
and ambitions with clipped wings —
let me hear your voice, O woman!
Your voice,
whose clearness no waves of artificial swamps have muddied, nor the tremors stirred by the crocodiles as they pounce upon their prey!
Your voice,
which the clamor of hired demonstrators has not confounded,
nor the vexing rattle of those who trade in shots of gunpowder!
Your voice,
which was never put up for sale in the slave-dealers' markets,
never debased in the forgers' exchanges,
and never grew faint before the tyranny of the oppressing colonizers!
Your voice is still a captive in your heart.
And is there any heart purer than yours among the hearts of a nation such as this?!
Your heart —
man tried to exploit it and enslave it, and his attempt stretched over long centuries; and when man went bankrupt in his attempts, he turned back upon his own self:
doubling its falsehood and its calumny,
cultivating its weakness and its meanness,
and defiling its sound parts,
until, in our day, it made its accursed historic leap!
Your voice, O woman citizen,
is the voice of man's innate freedom,
which the centuries have preserved in their pure hiding places, that it might save this people from its social defilements, rarely matched in the world!
Your voice is the voice of truth, veiled in noble feeling, perfumed with pure wishes, winged with lofty ambitions;
man's respect for his own humanity has preserved it, and love and the sense of duty shall release it from its holy of holies!
It is this homeland's good fortune that you did not join your voice to man's voice in the past ages of our life!
Providence has kept you in reserve for this grim day, that you might be the last attempt to save this people — great in the greatness of its past and its glories, and weak in the weakness of its present and its disgraces!
Blessed be Providence, which has kept you in our reserve lines!
Blessed be genius, of which only parts have destroyed themselves, for it does not wish to die out in this great people!

*

When I searched, O woman citizen, for the hiding places of strength and immortality and honor and dignity, I found them nowhere but in your heart!
The heart is what moves humanity toward its highest ideals;
it is the strongest impulse to immortal sacrifices and glorious deeds!
Does man boast to you of the wealth his mind produces?
And was the mind ever anything but the heart's obedient instrument,
carrying out its supreme decrees and submitting to its adventurous, creative passions!
But for the heart's heroic adventures, would the mind have been anything more than an inventor shrunken within his secrets, adding figures to figures, and measures to measures, and elements to elements, until he formed from them natural facts that increase this human creature's information, and increase his heart in nothing but reticence and constriction?

*

Man's heart has died in our people, O woman citizen!
So you have been summoned to mount the throne of sovereignty!
And the nation awaits your bold daring, that you may take over the responsibilities of this sovereignty!
Your heart, O woman citizen, is the pulse of life in a people that has lain in its death throes for generations and centuries!

What virtue among the virtues has not burst forth from this great human heart!

Nay, what heroism has the heart not ventured upon, generous and bold?!

Nay, what great sacrifice has the heart not given gladly, even while floundering in its own blood and its death agony?!

You have awakened, O woman citizen, and risen to demand your full right in life, after man monopolized this right for thousands of years until he made of it a treading-ground for the feet of usurpers and coveters, and a bargaining commodity in the hands of the oppressors, the colonizers! Your right to life — man made of it a means to enslave you and to enslave himself!

Rise, then, and wrest from him your right and his, for he is not worthy of the rights of man!

Your hour has struck, O woman citizen! Your hour is the hour of rescue and liberation! Your hour is the decisive awakening:

to be followed by eternal death,

or succeeded by everlasting life!

Your hour is the final explosion of the geniuses of this nation:

either the frame of our nation is cast among the ruins of extinct nations,

and it enters the history of the immortal dead,

or renewed life leaps up from among these moving bodies and resumes its march toward glory and survival!

They are trying to keep you outside the arena of life, because the luminous, rich virtues of your heart will expose the vices of their black, contemptible hearts! Know, then, that you are the one answerable before life, and before history, and before existence as it surges toward loftiness and perfection!

Your role is no longer a secondary one that can be dispensed with for a time —

it is the role that decides our destiny!

If you fall back before the assault of the reactionaries leagued against you, the loss will not be your loss alone, but the loss of the whole nation!

They commission women of your own sex to write, so as to turn your awareness and your renaissance back toward your traditional tasks, that your isolation within a narrow circle may continue, and that they may drag you down into the abyss toward which they themselves are sliding!

They call your right in life "politics," and your boldness in entering the field of reform a swerving from the path for which you were created!

They magnify your household duties in order to magnify the dangers of the venture of demanding your right in life!

Who told these fools that woman was created to be a captive in her house:

carrying her unborn child in her womb,

rocking her infant's cradle by night,

and cooking his food by day?!

Who taught them that woman exists to be a means of fulfilling man's ambitions in his pride and his despotism, his surrender and his servility?!

If these and their like are woman's duties, then man's corresponding duties are:

to toil the whole day long to support his children and his wife, and to come home in the evening and take his share in managing the affairs of his household!

But if life is a matter of impulses and gifts and aptitudes, which take hold of a human being and claim his energy, the powers of his mind, and the inclinations of his heart, then these impulses and gifts and aptitudes may appear in man and in woman alike.

A man may be created to become a cook and a nursery-tender, just as a woman may be created to become a reforming thinker and a fighter for the liberation of her country!

Woman's exercise of her social-political rights is not "politics"; and politics is not, as people among us understand it, a wallowing in base personal ambitions and appetites, nor is it a diversion from our family duties and our household tasks! It is, before all else:

a living social conscience that feels its responsibility toward itself and toward its society!

And is it permissible for any human being — whether a father working to support his children,

or a mother watching over the management of her house,

or a cook excelling in varieties of dishes,

or a philosopher immersed in the various philosophical schools,

or a maidservant working in her master's house —

is it permissible for any civilized human creature to be reared to the freezing of his social conscience, so that he neglects his rights and his duties?

The rights that woman is demanding are the completion of the cycle of social life in the field of rights and duties; and whoever resists woman in this bold renaissance of hers is like one who tears himself down with his own hands. For just as woman is the complementary part of man, so is she the complementary part of the national-political society; she is the necessary force that cannot be dispensed with if the cycle of social-political life is to be driven through its full motion — the motion that strives to free society from the diseases of its mind and its heart, and that guarantees its survival, its progress, and its continuance!

O woman citizen!

I have searched the corners of my country, corner by corner, and sounded the depths of my nation as it drifts toward extinction, and I found nothing pure and unsullied but the soil of my country, storing up bounties and blessings in its heart;

and I found nothing but your heart, bent over the virtues stored in its depths:

Woe to us, and to our generations to come, if our soil turns into volcanoes hurling lava, and if your heart turns to stone with fear and waiting!

On the first of May, 1950