Woman's Week Is the Week of National Dignity

No wonder that, after successive waves of the light of thought had flooded the peoples of the East, those peoples awoke thereupon and became alert to their usurped rights, and rose to demand them, calling for national dignity, resisting every colonialism that fetters their independence. And no wonder, after this, that we have seen woman in the East generally rise and demand her own independence and her full rights.

For the awakening of peoples is nothing but the result of a dawn that gleamed on woman's horizon, from which the light spread and hope shone forth.

And it would be more fitting for us — we citizens — not to call this week Woman's Week, but the week of all-embracing national dignity. For the renaissance of woman in demanding her rights is proof of the completion of the general national feeling and of its saturation with the national pride that befits rising peoples as they demand life.

There is no dignity for a nation except through the liberation of all its members from psychological complexes that make those who bear them feel lowly and inferior to the members of other peoples.

Nor is the consciousness of its members complete until the feeling settles within them, at the height of fitness, for attaining individual and national pride; and until the national resolve grows strong to secure individual independence and national independence, and to defend and protect it with lifeblood and souls. And when souls join in covenant upon a work, they endow it from their life with the strength for victory and success.

The independence of homelands is not gathered in unless its foundations rest upon impregnable bases of the covenant of souls, their union and their mutual understanding. And this is not accomplished unless all — males and females — are equal in rights and duties.

The denial of rights is an injustice that harms the whole and afflicts it with disintegration and deprivation; nay, it is a fetter upon its powers, stripping them of their possibilities and exposing them to the danger of decline or the danger of extinction.

And whoever neglects his right and accepts his fetter exposes himself to regression and humiliation and the loss of the meanings of humanity within him. It does not befit an honorable person, nor a proud people, to hold back from taking their right, nor to leave it in the hands of the enslavers.

This week, then, is proof of the completed consciousness that has opened upon the feeling that equality among all individuals, men and women, in all rights and duties is a necessity; and proof of the understanding of responsibilities and of rising to shoulder their burdens, whatever their kind, whatever their toils and their dangers.

And if woman has risen today to carry all her responsibilities, she is performing a duty incumbent upon every living, advanced being in this existence.

There is no doubt that in woman's attainment of her full rights lies an all-embracing good for the nation; and there is no need to repeat the documents and cite the proofs that establish this, for they have become known to all, and none ignore them but those for whom illusion conjures up a danger that has no existence, should woman attain her political rights.

Every renaissance in the histories of peoples is stamped with a character that distinguishes it, and the renaissance of the East today is distinguished by the rising of its peoples for liberation and release, and by the revolt of its individuals to wrest all national rights from the colonizers.

And here we are, hearing the answering echoes across the horizons of the East of the breaking of fetters and shackles! — the melody welcome to every proud, patriotic, honorable, lofty soul.

And the renaissance of woman is nothing but the inevitable result of this noble feeling that independence of self and independence of homeland are a necessity. It is a repetition and a confirmation of the voices of the fathers rising from the depths of souls, demanding the plundered right.

And when movements of thought issue in true renaissances, then petrified reaction cannot stand firm in the ways of its opposition. Renaissances are not resisted with worn-out ideas and with confused, flimsy illusions.

There is no fear for the right once it comes into the open, for reaction has ever been shattered before its impregnability — above all when the spirit clings to it, and hearts believe, and the awakened, rising feeling accompanies it with a new vitality that destroys every injustice hindering its firm leap toward renewal, development, and liberation.

And to give woman her political rights, and to make her a partner in work in all the national fields, is a decisive step in the history of the East toward complete liberation from the confusion of the past and the darkness of its ignorance, and a renaissance to bring forth the human self in its true and lofty meanings.

The educated woman will not consent, after today, to be a repeated copy of her ignorant grandmother crouched in the corners of chambers filled with silly illusions that darken the horizon of her thinking and bind her to purely material demands that abase the soul and extinguish the spiritual refreshment which is the beauty of life.

And I appeal to the sensible men who fear that momentous step in woman's history to be persuaded that reason and balance are among the qualities of the educated woman who works for the good; and that chastity and self-keeping grow in the virtuous woman outside the chambers darkened with illusions, and that they very often weaken inside their curtains drawn of ignorance and superstitions.

Woman's capacities grow strong and flourish with knowledge and experience, and it is a grievous loss to the nation not to profit from the powers of the sensible, virtuous woman.

For women stamp with the stamp of their morals every generation of the succeeding generations. And the bondage of the East in the past was nothing but a trace of the bondage of woman, and of her ignorance of her right and her duty.

Is it not women who answer the first yearning born in the child's consciousness for knowledge and the growth of the self? Does not each of us remember, going back to his earliest recollections, those impressions stamped in the depths of his spirit, which the mother created or shared in creating?

No one who seeks the truth but will admit that woman creates the people that rises, inspires the civilization that comes into being, and breathes life into the thought that gives light and the mind that teaches and leads.

She cannot be stripped of the authority and power that God has bestowed upon her; all we can do is to open to her the doors of the world, that she may use those powers, by the means of science and knowledge, for the good of the nation — thus preserving those lofty gifts with which God has singled her out from being squandered in the shadows of trifles and the evils of falsehoods, and protecting them from going to waste with the fragrance of the incense that rises in the hands of the charlatans.

The Lebanese woman today believes in the rightness of her demand and its justice, and seeks through it nothing but the reform that is required and reasonable development.

She believes that the broken wing has healed, and that it is fit to join the first wing in bearing the Lebanese national being aloft in the splendor of pride and sovereignty.

And whoever rises to share with her in the noble struggle to attain what she seeks of equality and justice in the various systems shares in winning the national battle for strength and dignity.

For the women of the whole world work beside the men to buttress their homelands and to defend their dignity.

The torch of hope, O citizens, is in the hand of the virtuous woman; it is supplied with oils from a blessed tree — so let us draw away its curtains, that it may flood the homelands with light.