The event of the month in the world of the Arab woman was that the Lebanese government granted woman her political right, so that she may now elect and be elected to all the councils of the nation. The woman of Lebanon has every right to be glad and to take pride in being the first Arab woman to win this right, while her Syrian sister won only the right to elect. The Lebanese woman deserves congratulation, having won what she won after long struggle and unceasing demands; and we, for our part, have the right to ask of her that she organize her ranks from this day forward and enter the electoral battle as a bloc whose aim is reform, with an organized program before it. The Lebanese woman feels that the right she has won is incomplete, for the law stipulates that a woman who does not hold an elementary certificate may neither elect nor be elected; and she asks why the law demanded no certificate of the man, but gave the illiterate man the right to vote. In any case, woman can act on the principle that says: take what you are given and demand the rest — may God grant her success.
As for London, the papers of the month spoke of the two most powerful women members of the British Labour Party, Alice Bacon and Barbara Castle: the first stands behind Mr. Attlee, leader of the party, and the second behind Mr. Bevan, leader of the party's left wing. From the latest news it appears that the new American Congress will include eleven women representatives and one woman senator.
The women's associations and hundreds of prominent ladies signed a petition which they presented to the Iraqi government, demanding their political right.
The city of Stockton, in California, held a great celebration for Mrs. Tillie Lewis, inviting nine hundred people to luncheon; and when the guest of honor entered, the crowd rose and greeted her standing. She answered, along with her word of thanks: I have only just begun, and up the sleeve of my gown are many projects that I shall carry out. Who, then, is Tillie Lewis? None other than the biggest woman farmer in all the United States, and one of the great owners of its can factories, supplying the markets every year with two million cans of fruits and vegetables, and
with seventy-seven uncanned varieties
of them that invade every market in America — a quiet, slender woman of forty-seven, of whom they say that she had the greatest hand in changing the face of California. Where the great Joaquin Valley there once held small orchards that counted for nothing beside the farmlands of America, today it furnishes sixteen percent of its agricultural production... She grew up destitute, but within her breast was the spirit of the struggling pioneers. Her father was a seller of phonograph records, her husband a grocer. And America in 1930 was no longer the land of ready opportunity. It was a can of Italian pomodoro that changed Tillie's life. Why was this excellent variety imported from Italy? Because it was better than anything America produced. Why did America not grow it? The soil and the climate were not suited to it. And Tillie ran from farm to farm and plunged into the work; she quarreled with her husband and they separated when she was twenty, after five years
of marriage. She studied and strove and then worked, and when the money was found she traveled to Italy, and her feet reached the north; there she found soil and climate like California's, so she journeyed back and said: here is the promised land, here is my
Woman
country, and here I shall begin. She carried the pomodoro seeds she had brought from Italy — the choice variety whose juice invades America — and offered it to the farmers, and they laughed: what does this slim city girl, with her high-heeled shoes, understand of farming? Then they agreed to try; the crop grew, and she hastened to range across America, sleeping and eating in automobiles and trains and walking miles to persuade the wholesale buyers to purchase her canned goods. The word 'no' was of no avail with this woman, and some of them took the gamble and signed contracts with her. She went on to persuade the Pacific can company to fit out a factory for making cans, since she would buy millions of cans from it — and the company did so. In 1935 a man stood holding an umbrella over her head against the rain as she struck the first pickax into the earth to build a factory of her own. In 1947 she bought the Pacific company's factory, at the age of thirty-three; then she added a third factory, and a fourth, and so on. The mayor of the city saw her, having supposed he would see a farm woman of rough appearance, and found himself instead before a lady beautifully dressed, her hair in curled locks — and they married. She was, and still is, the most merciful and gentlest of chiefs with her workers. And on the day the men were conscripted in the Second War, she herself