How I Understand the Question of My Political Rights

If we may survey the questions occupying Lebanese public opinion, and women's circles in particular, the question of woman's political rights stands out at the head of them. It is the question of this very day, occupying the highest place in the thinking of the Lebanese woman — for woman has learned on good authority that this great disparity between her and man is the party chiefly responsible for the crushing failure that pervades the various departments of our life: national and social in general, and familial in the narrow sense..

I shall not speak to you, ladies and gentlemen, of the manifestations of man's bankruptcy in government, nor of the calamities to which he has dragged the country. Nor shall I claim that woman is broader in understanding or farther-seeing in wisdom, for that inquiry is not my province. Nor shall I recite in your ears the glorious silent works to which woman's consoling, tender hand has reached out with love and sacrifice, for that is a topic your ears have wearied of until the hearing of it has become a trite and tiresome thing...... Likewise I shall avoid entering into the debate over whether woman, upon obtaining her political rights, will desert her family nest and take up residence in Parliament, or crowd man out of the state posts that remain to this day his exclusive preserve...

These are matters that have become self-evident and familiar, so much has been written of them and so much have they been debated.

Yet as one woman of this country, and with my woman's turn of mind, I should like to pause here a moment, to assure man, and to set his mind at rest for the last time, that nothing of the sort will ever happen. So long as woman keeps woman's instinct, she will prefer no atmosphere in the world to the atmosphere of her own little house, and nothing will distract her from tending her cell and preserving the sanctity of her first mission...

As for those whose fancies whisper otherwise to them, so that they build castles and towers out of illusions — these wander blindly in their error; they do not understand woman's nature and do not wish to understand it. They meet every word contrary to their theory with a measure of mockery, a questioning look, and always the same single question: "How strange woman is! What has she to do with political rights? By nature she is unpolitical, and can well spare herself the trouble of them; better she content herself with her domestic comfort. What does she want with all that headache!!"

This is talk we hear at every turn — in the salons, in the cafés, in the open street. For it speaks the mind of most of our men; indeed, many of those who champion woman outwardly show their true colors, "when it comes to the pinch," on this very opinion. The painful truth that must be faced is that this opinion prevails throughout our various circles, and few indeed are the enlightened, sincere company who acknowledge that woman must be given her political right and her equality with man in all rights.

I bear no grudge against this man who fights my idea and obstructs its progress with all the power and influence at his command, nor do I blame him for this crookedness in his thinking.. For this crookedness is the fruit of ten centuries during which man exercised absolute power: he laid down the laws and statutes, favoring himself and cheating woman of her right. He removed her from government and narrowed her outlets to light and knowledge.... He set her in his own scales, and behold, her weight equaled but half his own: his testimony whole, hers deficient and rejected...

And man addressed woman from his ivory tower, and she bowed her disheveled head to him with the abjection of the weak; and humiliation marched in the processions of her days and nights across time, dragging her downward and keeping her from every great work.

Man exercised his legal supremacy throughout these centuries; woman was denied her natural rights, and her work was confined to managing her house and bearing children. The natural result of this division of labor was the practical, unintellectual direction which woman's life took: she found herself facing a society, and facing a man, who asked of her nothing but to secure offspring and to secure amusement and pleasure. She complied with their demand contentedly, and set about concentrating her attention on beautifying her body, interrogating her mirror with every art of that sensual allure which raises her in man's eye — a bodily raising and nothing more. Hence her gradual decline, and her pursuit of cheap material values in place of high spiritual ideals...

Woman, then, is likewise not to blame for the state to which she has come; the blame, all the blame, lies upon the social and traditional order which has wronged her from the beginning and stinted her natural rights in life, and whose product is this present condition from which we suffer now and from which we know no deliverance.

Some years ago, ladies and gentlemen, I counted myself among the opponents where woman's political rights were concerned — because by nature I am a "woman" before all else.. And I supposed, like many of my sex, that to pursue the woman's cause was a departure from femininity and from woman's original nature.. But on my recent return to the American University to complete my higher studies, I experienced for myself a certain aspect of the mentality of the university students, as regards their view of their fellow women students, which led me to change my opinion...

Thanks to these circumstances, which opened before my eyes new horizons of thought I had not heeded, it became plain to me at close range that these students — a choice elite of the rising Arab generation — do not regard their women colleagues with that lofty regard equal to their regard for one another. Rarely did I find between the two sexes a purely scholarly comradeship in the true sense.

I felt likewise that the girl student was usually the readier to realize this scholarly relation and to give it earnestness and steadiness, whereas the young man was most often the first to descend — reminding the young woman, with a glance of his eye or a passing remark of his,

that she is a female — so that she falls back upon herself, bewildered and alarmed; and when she does not find in herself the power to raise the young man to a spiritual and scholarly level worthy of university life, she takes one of two roads: either she exaggerates her elegance and the display of the marks of femininity in her body, and descends with him to whatever he wishes, in compliance with his desire and in gratification of his strong, dominating manhood; or her pride is wounded, she thinks ill of her colleague and of the worth of his feeling, and this works a reaction in her conduct: she withdraws into herself, stifles her feelings, and shuns her fellow students, preferring total

separation from the other sex. And both roads, brothers and sisters, are a great evil, for they set the two parties apart, obstruct the paths of understanding, and create for each sex its own independent world in whose skies it soars, searching within it for the other sex in vain.

This is the picture that unveiled itself to my eyes during my two full years at the University. I came out of it, as I said, with a somewhat different view; for it was proved to me that the mentality of these educated young men is not much distinguished from the mentality of the old generation — this only as regards their view of woman, for in other respects they have developed rapidly, as we know —...

From here I began to think seriously, and to search for the root of the disease and its cause; and it became clear to me, upon reflection, that the question is deeper than I had imagined at the outset.. I used to call for sound home training and sound school training, believing that such sound training would suffice to erase the distinction from the minds of our children of both sexes. But I was deluded, and I ascertained that the effect of training in this respect is slight — because this disease is deep-rooted; its foundation is the corrupt order in which we have walked for distant centuries and consented, under compulsion, to practice. Yes, this social and political — and even religious — order is corrupt and barren, and things will not be set right as they should be until this order is blown up from its foundations, to be replaced by a just order whose substance is absolute equality.

Here, gentlemen, the question of woman's political rights comes forward. It is the first step, and a step most necessary, for walking the highroad of the desired reform, for securing family balance first, and thereby the comprehensive national balance.

There are early signs indicating that the question of woman's rights is today passing through its final stage, and will shortly be realized — with the Chamber's approval, at its coming session, of the bill drawn up by the Administration and Justice Committee for the amendment of the electoral law, under which woman will be given her full political rights.

This is a truly beautiful thing, and a great victory for woman — but it is only the preface. Even if the wish comes true, and we exercise our political rights from tomorrow, this will not much alter man's view of us; for our men of today were reared and raised in the crookedness in which they now stand, and there has been fixed in their minds a picture of woman very difficult to change — because the internal and external factors that helped fix that deficient, disfigured picture are too strong to be removed today by discussions and proofs, however logical and convincing those proofs may be.

Let us then wash our hands of this generation — I mean of those among you who oppose us in our cause — and look to the sons of the new generation, who will grow up in the shade of true freedom...

Yes, the period of transition will extend into another generation — the day our children grow up between two parents equal in rights, and the son learns that he has no privilege over his sister, but that she has the same rights as he... And here precisely begins the constructive stage, which prepares the sound generation we want for our country.

I said that political rights are the first step; and woman's struggle does not end once the first step is achieved, but proceeds in an organized course toward the attainment of other rights, which may be, in woman's eyes, more important than the political rights themselves — I mean her civil rights, which entitle her to live honored, with head held high; and I mean also those rights of which statutes and religions have stripped her, and which remain so to this hour, with no legislative power to restore them to her.

For this reason, the question of woman's political rights, which occupies women's circles in Lebanon today, is a question of great importance, deeper than man imagines. It is not an arbitrary movement whose aim is to bring a few ladies to the seats of government; it is a question of the utmost delicacy, aiming at its heart to prepare a sound, balanced, strong generation that will shoulder the burdens of this stricken nation and ward off from it its many calamities and misfortunes. For it has been proved to our leaders of thought that among the chief causes that pull us backward, that keep us from catching up with the rising nations, and that drag us from failure to failure and from farce to farce — among the chief causes of all this is woman's anxious, weak position, and her inability to stand firm-footed in surroundings that have robbed her of many of her natural rights and then stood with folded arms, showing no desire to repair what they had spoiled.

Gentlemen: the woman who builds for the coming generations must be strong, that she may bring up a strong generation confident in itself; and this cannot be unless woman exercises her full right, and unless she is certain that sex has no value in fixing and defining these rights, but that all value belongs to competence and diligence alone.

The time has come for us to grasp this question rightly, in the light of this analysis, if we want to live an elevated, independent life, and if we want a flourishing future for our nation. As for the continuance of the state we are now in, its result is grievous — and we want it neither for ourselves nor for our nation.

Peace be with you.