great national duty, and forget her responsibilities amid the succession of joint efforts, if we seek glory and desire the rising?

Any human force, if its training is not attended to, loses its essence and its efficacy. Hence the neglect of woman and her exclusion from the national arena in the past caused her to lose her special merits, and there followed a general incapacity and a feebleness in shouldering burdens, until the nation's strength dwindled away from all glory and greatness.

Jamal al-Din al-Afghani said: Movement with error is better than stagnation with rightness. The import of this saying is great, for in movement lies the secret of life, and in stagnation the abasement of paralysis and death. Whatever errors life may hold, it is the constitution of survival and the glory of existence.

No being could live a dignified life with half of itself stagnant and paralyzed. No — it would then beg for abject help, and submit to a servitude far removed from all sound self-dependence. Woman, in the revolt of peoples and their renaissance, is inspirer and worker; and in their shame and heedlessness she is cause and impeller. And here is the Turkish woman today: after gaining equality with man in rights and duties, she has confirmed the renaissance of the Turks and guarded with man the pillars of their independence.

And who does not know that the Lady Aisha, wife of the greatest Prophet, created by her revolt sects and parties, turned the helm of Islamic history, and transferred the caliphate from Medina to Syria?

And who denies what woman, in the person of Joan of Arc, did to overturn the political situation in France at that time? Her voice rose in fervor when men's strength gave way, and she spurred them on to rescue, attack, and struggle.

And who has not heard of the last tsarina of the Russians, Alexandra, whose weakness was among the causes that battered the throne of the tsars down to the abyss, and forever?

And in these our days, who has not seen the massed, reverent crowds in Argentina before the leader Eva Perón, laid out upon the bed of death, her great works

having meted out to her triumph, immortality, and sanctification, and strewn about her the flowers of glory of an entire nation that walked by her guidance and her struggle?

And here is woman among us today — as in all parts of the world — risen and changed from what she was yesterday. This there is no way to ignore. Her duty in the public fields has become other than what it was inside the old houses filled with deception. Woman has only to believe in her own weight and appreciate her great influence, and to come forward into the fields of struggle with competence and courage, sacrificing her private pleasures for the general good; for

she is the mother of the homeland, just as she has been accustomed to labor as the mother of its sons within the family.

In the keeping of those responsible is the life of the homeland, and upon the necks of all individuals are its glory, its renaissance, and its dignity. And in the decree amending the election law which the government has issued with respect to woman there is that which shows its concern to perform the sacred duty — the duty of social justice, and of equality for all the individuals of the people, men and women, in all rights and duties — so as to guarantee the rising: a rising after which there shall be no decline, no exclusion, and no shame thereafter.