Woman in Parliament

... A just defense of the cause of woman's political rights,
set down by a singular man of letters, whom we are proud to count among our champions!

If the Lebanese woman were granted the full rights of the citizen — that is, what are called political rights — so that it became hers to elect and to be elected, what would happen?

Some of us imagine, thinking on an arithmetical basis, that we would open one eye and close the other, and behold — Parliament half men and half women, and perhaps the number of women greater still, in keeping with their greater proportion in the ranks of the electors. And then they give their imagination free rein, and see Parliament transformed into a great salon, with dressing-rooms in its corridors, and see the debates taking strange forms that range between flirtation and love-verse, and between weeping and "the beating of forelocks"...

So much for inside Parliament. As for outside it, it appears to them that woman, once permitted to plunge into the arena of politics, will sink into it up to her ears and be diverted from every other concern of life — from care of the home and all that it embraces of tending the husband, raising the children, and managing the kitchen; from social works and charitable projects. Indeed, they perhaps imagine that she will renounce her femininity and her elegance and be transformed into a political wrestler with no care but elections and parties and treaties and all that politics holds of favors and blows.

This arithmetical thinking, even if it holds true of things, does not hold true of people. It is not enough that half the electors be women for half the deputies to come out women; nor is it enough to give woman her political rights to make of her a stubborn politician.

Several factors going back to nature, to history, and to society — human factors, in short — enter into the calculation and spoil the calculation...

*

Before everything, voting in a democracy is a right, not a duty. If woman is granted this right, it is hers, as it is men's, to exercise it or not to exercise it. And if I may make an estimate, according to what I know of the women of my country, I do not reckon that more than twenty percent of women electors will take upon themselves the trouble of casting a ballot. Then, too, the electoral battle takes place every four years, and at the furthest estimate does not last more than two months. Even if we supposed that a woman plunged into this battle up to the crown of her head, as they say — and this is a supposition true only of a very small handful of women — it would require of her no more than two weeks in the year, and there would remain to her fifty weeks in which to attend to all her other cares and concerns.

That is on the side of voting. As for election — that is, standing for the deputyship and winning the deputyship — the matter is far simpler. I believe that several electoral battles will pass before we see any of our sisters as deputies in our chamber. For however much we jumble the heavens with the cellars, we cannot deny that we live in the East, where long generations of women have lived in the shadow, where men have grown accustomed to look upon women from above, and where women themselves accept this look and consider it something natural. Do you not see how they rejoice at the birth of a boy, while their faces cloud over at a girl — as though they conceded that their sex is of a lower degree? Those are traditions handed down across long ages, and they have created a mentality that cannot be uprooted by a law thus at a single stroke. And woman knows that granting her, in the constitution, the right to reach the deputyship does not mean her reaching it in fact.

The constitution, for example, permits the smallest peasant and the smallest workman to become a deputy — indeed, President of the Republic; but usage and custom stand until now in the way of his arrival. And so long as democracy has not taken root in souls, and the influences of inherited standing and amassed wealth have not passed away, the small peasant and the small workman cannot become deputies. So too woman cannot become a deputy in Lebanon before several years have passed, in which she is freed — and frees herself — from the mentality of the past and all it was filled with of the degrading of women and the slighting of them. And in the most advanced countries of the West, which has deep-rooted traditions in the respecting of woman, you find women holding only a very limited number of seats in parliament.

*

I hear you say: your predictions of what will happen should woman be granted political rights show that nothing worth mentioning will happen; what call is there, then, for raising heaven and earth over the rights of woman?

I answer: and yet I am among the staunchest partisans of granting woman these political rights, which she will use only in measure. I am a partisan of that, just as I am a partisan of her education — of setting freedom loose for her to learn as much as she pleases — with trust and certainty that this will change nothing of the nature of her femininity, of the nature of her motherhood; and with the firm conviction that setting this freedom loose does not mean that women will all become doctors and engineers and lawyers. What matters is that society not be deprived of a genius in medicine or engineering or law merely because she is a woman. And what matters more is that woman not feel for a single moment that society considers her less than man, and that it bars in her face roads that are open to him. And what matters more is that my daughter and your daughter, as she opens her eyes to the light, feel that she is a complete human being, who has, like every human being, rights, and upon whom lie duties — so that the inferiority complex does not ride her, and she grow up a cowardly citizen and become a wife and a mother of little confidence in herself, raising a generation of little confidence in itself.

Granting her political rights, after the granting of her civil rights, has its importance in my view from this side first: the doing away of the inferiority complex in the Lebanese woman. She may not care greatly about voting, but it cuts into her soul to know that she is deprived of it — that she attains the highest ranks of culture, and shoulders the burdens of the greatest associations, and takes part in the widest national campaigns, yet cannot elect the one who represents her in Parliament and thereby in the government, while this right is vested in the most trivial of citizens, ignorant or obscure, merely because he was born with a mustache.

There are secondary benefits from woman's exercise of the right of voting and election, such as the introduction of new blood into the electing body; for there are bound to be among women enthusiasts for their new right, who will try to prove their fitness for it by supporting the best of the candidates, just as a large company of them proved their fitness for higher learning, and their superiority at times over the men students, when it was given them to enter the universities. And their nearness to the ballot boxes may lead to the spreading of new manners around those boxes. Add to this that woman has a sense, or an intuition, surpassing man's sense and his intuition in knowing the fitter among the nation's deputies. She says to you at times: I cannot bear so-and-so among your friends or among those you deal with. You ask her the reason, and she does not answer, or she says that she listens to the language of the heart. Then you verify after a while that she was in the right.

But these secondary benefits are nothing beside the essential benefit, which is the raising of the morale of the Lebanese woman, and making her feel that she is a full member in society and in the homeland. The past has wronged her greatly, and has thereby wronged society, and it is for us to correct its errors: by granting her this constitutional right we assure woman that we honor her and respect her and consider her our equal in everything; by that we give proof of our good will toward her, and we leave to evolution in usage and custom its field of work — we leave to man, and to woman herself, the opportunity of liberation from a hateful past, in a favorable atmosphere consecrated by the written text.