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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, con-sidering 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 social-

ist 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 foun-dations, 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 insti-tutes of good education, obtaining their culture accord-ing to their intelligence and capacity, with no distinc-tion 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 divi-sion which the government lately adopted — for women — acceptable... acceptable with reluctance, no doubt.

Culture among us is a pre-serve 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