Miss Sabah Rushdi is an educated young Iraqi woman who teaches language in the government schools and devotes the rest of her time to public social service. Readers of The Woman's Voice have already become acquainted with her work in past issues.

In this article she speaks of the Iraqi girl's renaissance in the field of education, both academic and vocational, and of the wide strides she has taken in that arena, joining study and analysis with wishes and hopes.

The long dark period through which the Iraqi girl passed, and the crushing circumstances whose harshness and severity she suffered on account of custom, habits, and traditions, produced a far-reaching setback in every aspect of her life. It made her a captive of ignorance, her freedom fettered, understanding nothing of life but submission to man's will and resignation to him. She came to live a mechanical life, looking out at what surrounded her through black spectacles, owing to the interaction of the foundations of a sickly upbringing with the influences of the backward environment under whose sway she lived for a long stretch of time — all of which left a deep mark upon her spirit. She grew up with little confidence in herself, naive in her thinking, dependent on man for everything she needed. Her stamp was bashfulness and dread of the other sex — the opposite of what woman enjoys in advanced societies, owing to the difference of environment and circumstances through which the two beings have passed.

Those clouds soon began to lift

from the horizon of the Iraqi girl's life once she ventured, some years ago, upon learning and the pursuit of knowledge, though within a limited compass that did not go beyond secondary school-ing. The merit of this change that came over the Iraqi girl and altered the course of her life cannot be denied — a change we may call "the stage of transition" from her old pattern of life to another manner differing from it entirely, which affected her inner personal and mental makeup amid this tremendous cultural din, pulled this way and that by various intellectual currents and tendencies, and growing noisier the deeper one plunges into it. In this stage she was seized by intellectual confusion as a result of the collision of her desires with what her environment wanted of her, and hesitation clung to her: whether to content herself with this meager measure of knowl-edge, or to throw herself into this deep sea tossed by the various waves of learning. Yet she did not lack the daring to storm the field of higher study, to complete the elements of her culture side by side with the other sex, thereby surmounting the difficulties and obstacles that stood in her way.

Thus she smashed the doors that had been bolted in her face, free-ing herself from the yoke of the pitch darkness in which she had lived for a long age, to enjoy the light of learning and culture. And she achieved success with dis-tinction through the qualifications and competence she displayed, despite the harassments and vexations that confronted her at the outset.

Mixed education has driven away

dread and removed bashfulness from the girl, for it enabled her to gain insight into the psychology of man, of which she had known nothing except by guess and conjecture; and higher study disclosed to her new horizons of which she had been ignorant in the recent past.

This education has proven, in practice, her worthiness of equality with man: she is with him in the field of learning, exchanging ideas, debating opin-ions, and matching him argument for argument, just as she stands before him face to face in the other walks of life. This heralds a blessed cultural renaissance, manifest in the girl's venturing to educate herself to a high standard — a clear proof of the Iraqi girl's pressing desire for study and attainment and her awareness of her natural right in life, and of her worthiness to occupy the place befitting her in society and to bear the responsibility of per-forming her national and social mission in the fullest manner and on an equal footing with man.

Thus has the idea of mixed education developed with the developments of the times; indeed, thus has the modern Iraqi girl come forth from those somber darknesses into the light of a kindled mind, to taste the sweetness of existence and the bliss of freedom in the ample shade of modern learning.

The Iraqi girl of today is other than she was yesterday, for she has covered very great distances in the various scientific, literary, and social branches. And when we know that the numerical proportion of girl students in the higher institutes is nearly a