"The future is ours..."

How does the girl in our country live today?

On what foundations do we build and nourish her personality?

What are her views on life...? On learning? On marriage? On dress? On religion? Etc...

This is what I wished to learn by studying the daily life of a group of our girls. There is no doubt that the answers to these questions differ according to the milieu to which each one belongs. A Beirut girl, for example, lives a life different from that of a girl who lives in a village in north Lebanon. Yet pausing over a few of these examples helps us to understand aspects of the mentality of the new generation and to judge the future of Lebanon twenty years hence.

"The Woman's Voice" will begin presenting this new series, which will show readers a clear picture of how our girls live today, without thereby taking sides with one opinion or condemning another.

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Samia Salim Saab is one of those girls born with a golden spoon in

her mouth. She lives in a home well supplied with parental care and comfortable circumstances. She and her four siblings — Nabila, Raja, Omar, and Khalid — have been given ample scope for education and for the strengthening of each one's personality, in a milieu founded on mutual understanding. Her mother, Mrs. Najla, described this to me, saying: "I try to be to my children a mother and a friend at once, and I take care that each of us in the house respects the freedom and the opinions of the others."

Samia enjoys a strong, cheerful personality, and always seems busy in her comings and goings between home and school. After passing the first part of the baccalaureate class at the Protestant College in Beirut, she preferred to enroll this year at the American College for Girls, where a girl is relatively freed from the nightmare of theoretical studies and is offered various applied subjects suited to her general inclination. So she entered the Freshman class, and then joined the arts-and-crafts club, where in her free hours, under the supervision of a skilled teacher, she

trains in engraving, carving, and drawing. She said to me, as she showed me samples of handiwork she had made with her own hands: "I confess I am not the ideal of a girl in my studies; my grades are about average. I do not like living among scientific books, nor do I want to be a 'Madame Curie' in the

Samia performs a rhythmic dance at home...