to a girl I knew two years ago, named Suad Fuad Basil, eighteen years of age, that she was stricken with the disease of “varices” and obtained a medical report from Dr. Salim al-Hayek declaring the presence of this disease in the said girl; yet the employer refused to allow the said girl to leave her work and to pay her the legal compensation, contenting himself with offering the girl a “change” in the kind of her work for one month, “for rest” — and no sooner had the month passed than he put her back at her former work.

This is what more than ten thou-sand women workers are exposed to, the greatest number of them employed in the weaving mills, where they make up 80 percent, with 10 percent in the match factories and 10 percent in other branches of industry.

There are also the women employed in the government departments and the offices of the companies: most of these employ-ees receive wages lower than the man's wages for the same work.

From this we see, then, that the treatment of women's questions in our country is carried on in a most superficial fashion, because we are so far from taking our stand on reality, and run on instead in talk of theoretical abstractions — so that at times the situation becomes a farce that invites mockery, as is now the case to

a great degree: while woman is entering the public fields of work and actually sharing with man in every field, we see the official circles, and most of the intellectual circles, still debating the question of the rightness or wrongness of letting her share in these fields. That is the logical side; on the practical side, this state of things does great harm to the woman's cause, for it turns efforts away from her real problems, some of which I have pointed out in this hurried word.

And if at the opening of my word I expressed my delight at the ini-tiative shown by the editorial com-mittee of “The Woman's Voice” in studying women's affairs in a real-istic, scientific way, it is because I

have never ceased to feel, deeply and insistently, a deficiency into which women's circles fall in this respect — and not least the magazine “The Woman's Voice,” the one magazine that speaks in woman's name in this country, and one that has covered a long stretch on the course of progress in other respects. But it is my con-viction that it can never become a necessary and useful element in the women's field unless it grasps the importance of the matters I have pointed to in passing where women's causes are concerned, and sets itself to study them in a serious and realistic way. And that is what we hope for it, out of care for the interest of woman.

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