The Woman's Word

In Women's Week it pleases me to address a sincere word to our friends, the lords, the men.

My word is not a plea in defense of woman's rights, for that plea has already been taken up by all the women who wrote and spoke and broadcast, from the members of the committee for the defense of these rights and from the supporters of the cause of this forgotten half of the nation.

The plea was taken up by His Excellency the Prime Minister, Mr. al-Yafi, who crowned it the day he transmitted to the Administration and Justice Committee a golden historic document that placed him in the vanguard of the heads of government of the Arab East — a precious document that consecrated the chairman and members of that committee as friends of justice and of right.

As for the legal points that justify — in law — the restoration of these usurped rights, Messrs. Subhi Mahmasani and Salah Labaki examined and expounded them with a scrutiny and an exposition that closed the door of ijtihad in the face of the opponents of these rights!

I blame none of the hard-liners, though every one of them claims we owe him a favor and says his stand is proof of a heartfelt love for woman! And of a desire to preserve her dignity and her comfort, since she was created only for the throne of the home, since the mire of politics would soil her purity, since her preoccupation with public questions would divert her from her sacred function, and since... and since... to the end of the tune.

I blame no one, because man is the enemy of what he does not know, and because the point of departure in this whole question is false and mistaken!

I ask the crowns of our heads, the men, whether they have ever tired their brains and made an exact census of the number of women and girls who have left the alleged thrones of the home and gone rushing after the securing of bread and roof and clothing and light! I ask of them one small mental excursion, that they may perhaps be convinced that woman works, as they do — and has for a long time! — outside the home. If we reckon the inhabitants of the capital alone at three hundred thousand, and reckon that every five persons occupy one house, we have in Beirut sixty thousand houses; and if we count one maidservant for every three houses, the number of women working outside the home, in other people's houses, leaps to twenty thousand. And there are battalions of schoolmistresses and nurses and workers in the factories and the dressmaking shops, and women clerks in the offices! Are they not human beings?

I ask the gentlemen, the men, why they strike from the registers of the women they pity all these thousands upon thousands of women, and why the pitch of their zeal rises only when they are told that two or three women will be elected members of the Chamber or of the municipal councils, and that women will go once every four years to the ballot box to drop into it the name of a man or the name of a woman.

They say that illiteracy is a calamity, that the illiterate man who votes is two calamities, and that we shall multiply the number of calamities by tens the day the right to vote is given to illiterate women. With much humility I ask the pillars of democracy in this country — and all of them, praise God, are pillars — I ask them: what is the fault of the illiterate man in the remote farmsteads, if the men of government, the men of religion, and the foreign educational missions did not kindle the lights of learning in the farmsteads as they kindled them in the fortunate cities? And then, why should this poor illiterate be denied every pleasure of the mind, and denied on top of it the pleasure of electing the man who governs in his name in the Chamber? And finally, who told us that the educated man is more "human" and more "patriotic" than the illiterate?

Gentlemen, you err when you suppose that the Lebanese woman wants to depose you and sit in your place. She aspires to nothing but to help you fold up the stages of the road, and fold them fast, so as to carry Lebanon, at the speed of airplanes, to the ranks of the advanced, democratic nations that are clean in truth and in fact. And she has brought proof after proof of her fitness: she opened schools and created curricula long before the State came into being! She founded relief centers eighty years ago or more; as for matters of health, she awoke to them decades before the birth of the Republic, opening hospitals and fighting diseases of the chest for fifty years now. And it is only right for me to say that the better Republic was born in the innermost chambers of her heart before it was born in the brain of any man!

The Lebanese woman in fact lifts a great burden from the shoulders of the ministries of education, health, relief, and social affairs! What say, then, has she in these departments, all of which lie within her province, she being the first educator, the first nurse, the first benefactress? You say: keep to these humanitarian works alone, for they suffice to create the desired progress, asking

Lords: we want to bind these working forces together and bring them into harmony with the rest of the forces of the State. We want to demand reform under the dome of the Chamber, and we aspire to have a say in the management of our common house, Lebanon! A quarter of a century has passed over us while we demand from afar, demand with gentleness and softness, and still no answer has been vouchsafed from you; and I do not see how the effect of binding forces together and massing them for the attainment of the goal can escape your celebrated intelligence.

And I beg your pardon and your patience if one day I stepped outside the circle of patience and cried: Let the women into the municipalities, that they may clean the face of this capital whose filth has set men and jinn alike to groaning!

I would not have reproached you with this bitter reproach did I not esteem your gifts and know the measure of your qualifications.

And here I am, correcting my old saying, and I say: the Lebanese woman wants to be a servant of her homeland Lebanon, and to place her hand in the hands of its great men, that together they may clean the face of this capital whose filth has set men and jinn alike to groaning.

God is my witness that I speak out of jealous concern for you. Do you not see that it would be a good thing to restore to woman her right, and so bring yourselves into harmony with the countries of the world and with the recommendations of the organizations of the United Nations?

Would it please you if tomorrow a Westerner stood up in the United Nations and said slyly to Dr. Charles Malik: O philosopher who draws inspiration from the philosophers of this world and the next for the liberation of the inhabitants of the North Pole and the South Pole, will you not liberate woman in your own country, Lebanon?

And from this Lebanese radio station I repeat what I have said to you in the pages of The Woman's Voice:

Wanted: a dozen or so free men, to resolve:

That they will be the first to apply the Charter of Human Rights in the Arab East.

And that they will restore to their wives, their sisters, and their daughters the sacred trust enjoyed by their chauffeurs, their bootblacks, and the carriers of their bags.

And that they will no longer permit this sacred mother to be denied a right that has been exercised once and twice and three times over by the criminals and thieves and pickpockets and forgers and smugglers who crowd the prisons of mountain and city.

Wanted: a dozen or so free men. Who will answer her call, O men of free Lebanon?