Lessons from the Life of the American Woman

We have heard many sayings about woman — some of them graceful and moving, picturing the flow of the noble sentiments that have tried to express woman; some disparaging, belittling woman and demeaning her dignity, besides being far from free of emotion. Among these descriptions: "Woman is man's better half." "Woman is a mother who rocks the cradle with her right hand and the world with her left." "Look for the woman." "Woman is wholly an evil, and the worst of her is that she cannot be dispensed with." "A virtuous woman — who can find her?" "Women are devils created for us; I take refuge in God from the evil of devils." "Paradise lies at the feet of mothers."

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These are very small samples from the flood of sayings and writings about woman set down or uttered by sages, poets, and men of thought generally. Some of them touch the truth about woman at its edges, but none of them penetrates to its core — as if this truth, for all its simplicity and self-evidence, had strayed from the eyes and minds of thinkers, or as if the stronger sex had deliberately ignored it, leading itself astray and misleading woman along with it in a deep sea of descriptions and judgments that tried to fix the place of this creature in society and, naturally, failed. It is time, then, for us to display this simple truth in letters of fire, and to take it as a goal toward whose application we strive continually. This elementary, simple truth is that "woman is a human being, and hers is the full right of a human being!"

On the basis of this self-evident rule it becomes clear to us that the equality of woman with man is a settled matter; in the light of this principle woman's sacred function, with which God Almighty has singled her out as wife and as mother, takes its true shape, and by gaining her rights and her freedom woman can fulfill this function in its most perfect form; and by virtue of this truth, which obliges woman to be conscious of her humanity, she becomes able to appraise her responsibilities in life correctly, and she strives to be an effective member of her society, no longer forever a paralyzed half of it.

In our present age the peoples have come to look at woman with a more serious eye. Here are the international councils affirming her rights as a human being. She has begun to come forward in all fields of work, giving proof of many capacities and of worthiness in bearing responsibilities. The Western woman has outstripped us by long stretches in this arena and has obtained in some countries her rights almost whole and undiminished, save in partial respects. Perhaps the most brilliant example of the equality of woman with man is in the United States of America.

I have chosen the American woman as the subject of my description — and not, say, the Russian or the French or the British woman — only because I know her at close range and know next to nothing worth mentioning about the others.

The American woman is distinguished by a general equality between herself and man in all sides of political, economic, social, and cultural life. These rights did not come to her cheaply; she struggled and sacrificed to obtain them for many years, from which she emerged victorious; then she entered the stage of organizing her affairs generally, until today she possesses a strong, organized, many-branched women's movement concerned with all the activities of life.

Woman in the United States carries great weight. If we look at her in the political field we find her a force, not merely behind the curtain but in the front line of the electoral battles — we find her nominating and nominated, working in this field in complete freedom, her freedom respected like man's freedom. She draws up her political plans and goes down into the arena to fight, and she does so generally in cooperation with the man who shares her same political leanings; she delivers rousing speeches setting out the programs of reform for the country which she will carry out if she is elected, or which her candidate will carry out, appealing to her fellow citizens to elect him. Last year I followed in the American press the activity of the lady candidates for the American Congress and for the Senate, and I read with close attention the speeches of Mrs. Margaret Smith of the state of Maine in the north, of the Republican Party; she had been a member of Congress and stood for membership of the upper house, the Senate, and succeeded, and today she is the only woman "Sheikh" in the American Senate.

Woman in the United States of America has organized institutions concerned with political affairs, of which I mention two: the "Daughters of the American Revolution," a conservative organization inclining today to the support of MacArthur; and the "League of Women Voters," who demand that the equality between man and woman be made complete, especially in partial rights. Mention must also be made here of woman in the army. She makes up the numerous corps trained to perform the auxiliary tasks such as clerical matters, nursing, and national administration, thus enabling

man to devote himself entirely to scientific production and purely military training. She wears a military or naval uniform proper to her rank in the army service.

We see, then, that the American woman's concern with the political side does not consist of electoral flurries alone but of organized institutions conscious of all the political currents, following the course of events and feeling their weight in the general balance.

And has political fever swept the American woman away, so that she has given herself wholly to voting and elections and confined her care to this side and no other, or do we find her awake to other problems in her life?

We may say that woman's concern with the other sides of life exceeds by degrees her concern with politics. In the economic sphere we find her an effective member of society: she fills most of the public positions, so that a stranger in America is apt to think at first glance that woman has monopolized all the jobs, and to wonder why man does not demand his rights! If you enter the stores or certain offices, schools, hospitals, and restaurants, or speak on the telephone, you find yourself dealing in the first instance with a lady, and you are pleased by her friendliness, her courtesy, her neat appearance, her competence, and her seriousness at work. And if you searched deeply into woman's economic condition in America you would find her occupying great positions in the state and drawing high salaries for them; you would find her in all the liberal professions; and you would discover that she owns businesses, industries, and very large fortunes — it is said that most of the American people's financial savings are in woman's hands. Then we find woman attentive to the study of her economic conditions and problems: after continual insistence with the government she has organized a department of her own in the ministry of labor, or the labor section of the government departments — the Labor Department. Through the specialized women officials of this department she studies the conditions of the women workers of the country, gathers statistics, submits proposals, and drafts just laws, then strives to have them applied through Congress.

As for the social side, it is the widest field of women's work. In it woman works with complete freedom of movement, impelled by the democratic American spirit which enjoins upon the individual humanitarian service and self-sacrifice for the sake of the whole. Among the most important social institutions in America is the Red Cross society — in it men cooperate with women.

Woman takes an effective part in all the national projects, and to her belongs the greatest credit for gathering millions of dollars every year for all manner of humanitarian projects.

Among the most important women's institutions also is the Cooperation Club, and this is an international institution, its branches being spread through the various parts of the world. Among the women's institutions in America are the associations beyond counting or numbering, some of them tied directly to the church and some lay associations, all of them serving various social ends. And there is the great institution that embraces most of the associations, the "American National Council of Women," which is a member of the International Council of Women. This international council embraces a great number of women's councils in most of the countries of the world. Nor does the women's movement end with the associations; there are the congresses that meet continually, in which woman studies all manner of social problems and takes resolutions concerning them, striving always to carry them out with all seriousness and energy. And there are the famous women's clubs.

After this description of woman's ceaseless movement in America one asks: where are the home, the family, and the child? And where does woman stand with regard to all of these — is not the home her first field of work? There is no doubt that to woman belongs the greatest credit in the forming of the American home. The family in America is still one of the basic cornerstones on which the structure of the nation rests, despite the dangers threatening it. The family is an institution which the American in fact tends with special care. It has beautiful traditions — religious, cooperative, and educational — which every founder of a family follows spontaneously. American life is practical in its essence, and the American home is among the simplest homes I have known, together with order and organization in the internal management and the provision of all the means of comfort, all of which help to save time and to secure the happiness of every member of the family. The child is brought up soundly; his parents accustom him from childhood to individual independence and self-reliance, and he absorbs the principles of democratic life in the home, at school, and in society, growing up a free citizen who knows his rights and does not squander them, with full consciousness of his duties and responsibilities and respect for the rights of others.

This is the American home in its reality; and today two disquieting dangers assail it. The first is the problem of divorce, and the second the disintegration among the members of the family, each member taking up an independent private life which he lives most of the time outside the home and cut off from his family. The pressure of these two dangers grows severe in the great cities such as New York and Hollywood and others. But be it known that woman has begun to face these two problems, and has begun to ask to what extent she is responsible for their emergence, and to what extent, also, modern American life, clamorous and complicated as it is, has its effect in the breaking apart of the family.

The real question, in my view, which every woman must face is how she looks at her responsibilities, and what among them she considers fundamental

and what secondary. This question has today taken an acute form for the American woman, because her domestic duties very often clash violently with her concern with social work outside the home. Hence arises the problem of the correct reconciliation of these two cares. Despite this clash I think she has managed, more than others, to reconcile in some measure the work inside the home and outside it, and that owing to three basic secrets in her life. First: the practical administrative organization inside the home, where every hour has its own program. Second: the complete cooperation among the members of the family in the service of the home — even in the washing of the dishes! And third: her personal energy, which enables her to attend to the home and to press on after public service or the pursuit of a livelihood outside. But this remains, in my view, the problem of problems in the social life of the American woman today.

As for the cultural side, the American woman enjoys complete equality in education. All the doors of learning and specialization are open before her, whether in the government institutes or in the private schools and universities.

And from the graduates of the higher institutes of learning is formed the "American Association of University Women."

And in every field of learning and specialization we see examples of women who have distinguished themselves by their mental capacity — we find woman a professor, a physician, a judge, a lawyer, a worker in communications, a writer, and a journalist. Perhaps the two doors of novel-writing and journalism are those the American woman enters most, and for this we constantly hear the names of the famous women novelists such as Willa Cather and Margaret Mitchell, or of journalists such as Anne O'Hare McCormick or Dorothy Thompson or Marguerite Higgins, who lately won a great annual prize for her precise reports in the Korean War. These writers have world fame.

From these fleeting pictures we clearly conclude that the American woman, despite abundant difficulties that have confronted her and confront her still in the clamorous present age, has nevertheless realized a full portion of the perfection of her humanity and of her equality with man in dignity and rights, and has taken part in civilization's constant creative act, endowing her own world and the wider world with living works.

And if we hold against the American woman a certain mechanicalness in her way of living and a certain excess in the imitation of man, with the harm this brings in some degree to her perfection as a woman, her great virtue for all that is that she is a resounding voice in her society, a fundamental pillar in the life of her country, and an effective agent in deciding the destiny of her nation.

And we — how does the woman among us look at herself, what is her ambition, what are her hopes, and how much of them all has she realized? A question that will confront you, dear

graduates, every day after you leave the soft, secure life of study for the clamor of public life and its problems. What, then, are your plans concerning yourselves?...

In my view three basic rules must be observed in our women's renaissance:

1 — We need in the first place to organize our ranks in a conscious women's movement proceeding under a wise and capable leadership that knows what we want, so that we may pursue it by the sound and effective ways. And we have every qualification for that.

At the core of this organization we must set sectarianism aside and work as Lebanese women citizens united by single national aims. And we must overcome the individual selfishness that submits to no order or leadership — from which we have long suffered, and which has been until now a destructive factor in our realizing an effective women's entity.

Second — the life of woman abroad must not dazzle us, so that we fall into the trap of blind imitation. We have often been accused, and perhaps rightly, of being copiers, not originators. This does not prevent there being many things we must learn from woman abroad; but it is for us to originate, and to trace our plans according to our own particular needs. With this principle go two basic rules: the preservation of values and traditions of ours that are very solid and beautiful; and the avoidance of shutting ourselves in upon ourselves, so that we are cut off from the outside world and have no effective share in it.

As for some of the beautiful traditions we must preserve, they are: modesty, sobriety, care for the family and for kin — together with the organization that must be introduced into family life — fidelity between the man and the woman bound by the sacred contract of marriage, devotion to the home, the tie of children to their parents and the respect of the young for their elders, and the winning femininity for which the Eastern woman has been known.

And by not shutting in upon ourselves I mean our acceptance of honest criticism, our openness to the useful new, and our following world events with attention and without interruption, especially those that touch us. I mean also our effective participation in the international women's congresses and projects, outside which I so often find us because we are not organized at home...

3 — And the third rule that must be attended to at the start of our women's renaissance is the control of emotion, for this emotion, as it shows itself in many sides of our life, is what most obstructs our march forward. We must control the unruly emotions in our dealings with one another and in our contact with man.

In our social life we must encourage the mingling of man and woman in a natural way, and train children in polite social conduct. And we must accustom man, before all else, to look at woman with a detached look, free of emotional and sexual involvements, so that she may cooperate with him in the affairs of life and play her part as a citizen in earnest.

Our man has grown used to a complete separation in his life between his emotion and his work; if we helped him to polish emotion together with reason through a free, open, useful mingling of the sexes, he would see a touch of beauty and harmony in his life completing his happiness, and woman would find that her effectiveness in the building of the nation had increased, and she would have begun from a sound foundation toward realizing her place in society.

So by organization resting on obedience and on close accord, by the avoidance of blind imitation, and by the polishing of reason together with emotion, the woman among us will have taken a serious step toward gaining her full rights as a human being.