On Granting the Educated Lebanese Woman Her Political Right

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Everyone is talking about rights. Woman wants her rights, and so does man, and every human being wants his rights. Talk of rights in these days is abundant, and so it usually is after wars. The last war was marked, more than all the wars before it, by talk of freedoms and rights. Every people demands its rights, every class demands its rights, and every country demands its rights... After all this we cannot but ask whether these people truly understand what they want, and know these rights they are demanding!

It has lately happened that woman rose up to demand her rights. Now if what she demands is truly a right of hers, then her obtaining it is a duty, and there is no justification whatever for withholding it from her — except that determining what is a right is a difficult matter, on which most people differ. What woman calls a right, man may not concede to her; and what man enjoys under the cover of right, woman may not acknowledge, considering it despotism and unjust selfishness.

Let us take what happened lately in Lebanon as an example. If the right to vote is one of the rights of democratic man, then there is no longer any reason to grant it to one particular class of people and withhold it from the other classes. Until recently, man was the only person who enjoyed the right of giving his opinion directly — and indirectly — on his country's political affairs and their administration and organization, regardless of whether he was fit for such a grave task or unfit. The injustice of this state of affairs becomes clear to us only when we observe that woman — as a member of society — bears the responsibility of submitting to the prevailing system of government, yields to the general laws as man dictates them, and suffers the penalties of breaking them or deviating from them. Among the paradoxes of these conditions is that man should enjoy these wide powers, which affect his life and the lives of his children and the life of woman as well, merely because he is a man and nothing more!.. And then, if woman does obtain such powers, she does not obtain them on the same basis — the basis of sex —

but on the basis of culture!..

We realize perfectly well that we do not live in a socialist state, under a socialist or semi-socialist system that secures for all people the means of learning, culture, and education and compels them by obligation to take them up. And so people's rights, duties, and powers have been distributed, not on abstract human foundations, but on unjust and partial class foundations... Were things otherwise than they are, we should find all the children and youngsters in the schools and institutes of good education, obtaining their culture according to their intelligence and capacity, with no distinction in that between rich and poor, male and female...

Such facilities — and they are among the causes of a state's survival in the modern age — had they been available to all the children of the people, would have made that cultural division which the government lately adopted — for women — acceptable... acceptable with reluctance, no doubt.

Culture among us is a preserve of one class of people to the exclusion of the other. The reasons are many... The wealthy classes find going to school an easy matter, and the exorbitant costs of study a simple, ordinary affair...

As for the middle class — in the era when we had a respectable middle class — everyone who belongs to it knows that sacrificing the necessities of life, in most cases, is among the essentials for acquiring knowledge and attaining culture... And as for the poor, or those of small income, learning is to them one of the luxuries of life that never crosses their minds or passes through their fertile, unruly imaginations. These, as no one can fail to see, are the majority of the people, and the element that has the first right to express what the country needs in the way of freedom, justice, and security — this is my opinion at least... And the woman who belongs to this class is fitter than her man to carry that thirsting need to those who hold influence, and more capable than he of expressing plainly and clearly the want she has known and the social, economic, and health humiliations she has lived through. For the cultured woman does not represent — in many cases — the woman of this country: the workman's wife, the peasant's wife, the wife of those who toil in pursuit of

[Boxed pull quote:]
The political, social, and cultural struggle must be subject to the interest of the people as a whole, not to the benefit of a particular sex or of a cultural, sectarian, economic, or political class.
We must guarantee the fundamental rights of every individual; and the fundamental rights are human, democratic rights — general, comprehensive, complete.

livelihood and living. Her language has more often than not been foreign and strange, and so too her inclinations, her hopes, her thoughts, her feelings, and her impulses. The want she feels in her ranks and in her life — whether emotional or economic or social — does not correspond to the milieu of the mass from which she came, nor does it agree with the want the poor woman feels... The mentality of the first differs from the mentality of the second, and her mental and emotional makeup differs from that of the other.

That is one side; on the other side, we observe that corruption among people is more widespread among men than among women, especially in a country morally conservative — in the way we know it among us — like ours. If we permit man — every man — to express his opinion by means of the vote at least, regardless of his morals, his culture, and his conduct, then we are opening the field wide to a great number of people who are unfit for it; and then at the very same time we withhold such powers from the ignorant woman, though for all her ignorance she is fitter than the man, sounder in intention, truer in voice... and more honorable... I heard someone comment on this new system by saying: "Is it reasonable that we should allow a low fellow who roams the alleys the whole day long, without work and without purpose, to vote because he is a man and nothing more, and then deny it to a woman who keeps to her house, washes for people, and stays up nights rearing her children and preparing them?... And that because she is uneducated?!.."

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The truth is that we are all mistaken... The question, as I understand it, is not a question of man and woman, nor a question of educated and illiterate; it is a question of the individual and the community... What I mean by that is that it is necessary that we find another measure by which to measure rights and powers, other than the measure of custom, sect, sex, and class. This measure must be a measure stripped of all these incidental considerations, and must spring from the individual's relation to the community, thereby guaranteeing rights and duties together. This, as I see it, is the essence of social life and the secret of its soundness. If woman obtains the right to vote — and the other rights — simply because she is an individual, she becomes equal in that with the other individuals, women and men, and she will thereby have reached with them the rank of the citizen who enjoys all that the other citizen enjoys and bears all that he bears... This means that equality is general for all people, and this is the aim toward which every movement, whatever its kind, must be directed. And if the aim of the state is not such equality, then there is no justification whatever for the state's existence.

We must believe that man's right, insofar as he is a human being, and his duty as well, form an indivisible unity. The human element in the individual is more important than the secondary attributes — of sex, class, sect, and culture alike. And woman must not struggle for the things she believes to be women's merely because they are women's and nothing more; she is, like man, a citizen and a human being before all else, and she must build her social and political struggle on this real truth... Everything besides that, of the matters she considers purely women's, are matters private to her, which must not enter the sphere of the general community or the arena of politics. And when woman struggles on the basis of the individual and his relation to the state and the community, she will meet man on one human ground that makes her struggle and his more useful, more profitable, and further-reaching.

Woman wants to be emancipated, but she forgets that man among us is still an abject slave, fettered socially and intellectually at the very least. And were

he to struggle for his rights, and she to struggle for hers, the interests would never agree nor the benefit become general, and society would remain weak and feeble, subject to a worn-out dualism that profits neither him nor her.

We are in an age that demands much striving to wrest the rights of the individual from the reactionary character of systems and laws that never arose from the need of the society in which we live, nor from its interest. And the bodies that arise on the foundations of those reactionary systems and laws are feudal bodies that do not consent to granting freedom to all people and without distinction.

The sum of the matter is that the political, social, and cultural struggle must be subject to the interest of the people as a whole, not to the benefit of a particular sex or of a cultural, sectarian, economic, or political class. If we unify the aims of the struggle in this fashion, its benefits become general, and we bring down a great number of the limited confessional, political, and economic blocs from which there is no general benefit and which are never fit for progress, advancement, and development... We must guarantee the fundamental rights of every individual; and the fundamental rights are human, democratic rights, comprehensive and complete. And their acquisition must be a general, comprehensive, complete acquisition... Every struggle on a partial, limited basis is a failed, limping struggle, deserving neither the care nor the efforts we expend upon it at the present time — men and women alike.