What Is Happening in the Lebanese House?

Storms are blowing from every quarter around this Lebanese house, and within it — at times light and gentle, at times roaring and wailing. And the only women's magazine in this country has sentenced itself — with no compelling reason — to confining its mission to social, cultural, and educational questions and to the demand for women's political rights. But does it harm this "Woman" to broadcast to "women" something about the storms that are shaking the Lebanese house? It is my conviction that the woman who is preparing herself to enter, tomorrow or the day after, or in three or seven years, the ranks of the legislators' circles of her homeland is driven to acquaint herself with what is happening in this homeland by way of this magazine, whose issues are kept in the library of the home.

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This year began with convulsions — not born of the hour, but born of months and years full of infirmities and diseases — and these convulsions found expression in a series of strikes, each following hard on the heels of the other.

The strike against the companies: the inhabitants of Beirut resorted to it the day they refused to pay their installments to the electricity company, and they are still on strike. The company plays the coquette, collecting profits that the consumers consider out of all proportion to the "goods" it offers them, while the administration running the company stiffens and does not budge from its position by a hair. The cabinet of Mr. Yafi went and the cabinet of Mr. Solh came, and the strike is still where it was...

And the teachers of the private schools went on strike: was it not the late Fouad Suleiman, whom this magazine mourns, who said:

"Better for the teacher to eat his own blood than to eat his loaf as a favor"?

This is exactly the condition of the teachers of most of the private schools. They live either "on favor" or by licking their blood off that file... A law was issued which, in their eyes, did not lift their grievances, so they resorted to striking.

Are the men and women teachers of the private schools Lebanese?.. Do they perform a principal task in the building of this nation? There is no one who says no. Then why are they not made equal to the rest of the workers? And why is it that a mother raises a single child and he surrounds her in her old age with care and attention and every kind of provision — and if he shrinks from this duty, "the law" compels him to perform it, deducting a portion of what he earns and handing it over to his mother — or to his father — while these men and women teachers, these spiritual fathers and mothers of hundreds and of thousands of children, are abandoned in the days of sickness and old age to every kind of pain and despair, and to a thousand and one heartaches??

And the lawyers strike: ... a general, all-embracing strike that struck with paralysis every transaction that must pass through the Palace of Justice. Several hundred men, holders of the "licence," the hope of this nation on the day when every hope is cut off, because they represent that class which knows the recompense for every deed!!! All of these — and most of them toilers and workers who wrest their loaf and their families' loaf with the utmost hardship — went on a splendid, mighty strike in protest against keeping the judiciary bound to the wheels of past centuries, while the state has leaped a great stretch toward a progressivism that surges forward every day and every hour.

This issue has no room to take up the question of the lawyers' strike from all its sides, so my appointment with the lady readers is in the next issue. In any case, a word is due to those men who have gone out ahead to "lead the battle of true evolution," who "drove the first nail into the coffin of stagnation." And the woman's word is this:

You may not succeed today in gaining all that you demand, and you may be defeated — a temporary defeat — before the rigidity of these mountains that have stood since the ages of darkness. But remember that victory in the end belongs to liberty and to its people. And how sweet is the word spoken by a free martyr overcome against his will:

If one of the free dies, liberty does not die!!.

Issue Four — Year Eight — April 1952