Woman Around the World

Talks like "Woman Around the World," or "The Summary of a Book" and their like, are talks devised by the broadcasting stations to offer the listener culture in a few lines, or an essence easily digested and delicious. The talk "Woman Around the World," for instance, spares you the reading of six or seven magazines and newspapers. It is long news items condensed and ordered into sentences; items of which a single one is sometimes gathered from two different magazines and cast in a new mold; meanings read between the lines; articles from which is chosen not only what concerns woman in the matter of her rights of every kind, but everything that spurs on her ambition. For in the world there are women of trade who have reached the summit, women farmers who have trodden hardships underfoot, and pioneer women who march in the vanguard. There are women in other regions rising up, and women who invent and who write. A talk that spares you effort, and carries you on the magic carpet to pass over cities and villages and enter palaces through their windows.

That is my opinion of this kind of talk, whoever presents it; but what matters is your own opinion. Why do you switch off the announcer on hearing any talk that does not please you, instead of taking pen and paper, setting down your observations, and sending them in..? It is the give-and-take between speaker and listener that raises the talk to a higher level, and listeners the world over consider it their right to offer their observations. Do likewise, then—and I personally welcome everything you send.. And now come with me around the world.

The newspapers have bestowed the title of Woman of the Year on the young Queen of England. Every hour of her day is crowded, from the minutes in which she hears the morning news until she returns, at five in the evening, from visiting an asylum or an institute, or from launching a battleship into the sea.

In her is a maturity and a depth of thought that her advisers had not supposed in her. Any guest from the colonies, or minister whom she entertains, must understand that Elizabeth likes a simple, short luncheon that takes no more than an hour. Every minister or ambassador asks her leave before departing the country—even Churchill did so before his last visit to the United States. Churchill meets her daily in an audience attended by no living creature, as he used to do with her father; but she has put this audience back an hour because of her hour with her two children. She plays with her two children twice a day, for they come to her at half past nine in the morning—Charles, four years old, forever curious, and Anne, two years old, wide-eyed, who stumbles when she bows—to go out at ten o'clock; and she gathers them to her again when she returns to the palace at five in the evening and plays with them for a whole hour. She gives a slight start when she sees her picture in the papers, for the pictures do not please her. A queen happy in her husband and her little ones—and this happiness has added a new softness to her manners and a new beauty to her countenance.

And in Lebanon the women's organizations are busy preparing certificates for educated women, to make easy their taking part in the coming elections. The first to adopt this project was the Lebanese Women's League, which appointed women's committees for all the quarters of the capital and outside it, to undertake the easing of the task of registration, lest time run out before it is accomplished. The League of Lebanese Women and the Makassed likewise announce their readiness for this.

Lebanon was visited by Mrs. Lakshmi Pandit Nehru, the woman whom the world has placed in the front rank among its most important personalities, because she is one of the ablest stateswomen in the world; the women's organizations in Lebanon feted her, and she visited Damascus and Egypt as well.. Her most striking trait is modesty, and she has declared that she holds no school diploma. She is today a member of the United Nations organization. Her fame is not derived from the fame of her brother Nehru, for she was appointed the first woman Minister of Health in India while her brother was in detention. They bear one name, but each of them, as she says herself, has his own way. Ardent in her patriotism, she was imprisoned several times: she would enter prison as her husband came out, and come out as he went in, and sometimes they were imprisoned together.

This is what the world health organizations say: they presented their statistics this month, and it appeared that the greatest number of suicides is in East and West Berlin, followed by Australia, then Denmark, then Switzerland, then Japan; also that the statistics of the United States for the year 1949 stood at the Australian rate. As for the proportion of suicide between the sexes, it is in every country from two to five men for every one woman.

Your house in the future: the scientists are working with all their might for your sake. Ultraviolet rays will flood the inside of your rooms and disinfect them completely; screens will be set in the windows to keep the particles of dust suspended in the air from coming in with the air, and if you wish to remove the dust from the furniture and carpets you will set these screens in motion, and they will send out strong currents of air that carry it off.. In your house there will be a calculating machine that recites to you lists of the kinds of food containing all the nutritive elements, with mention of the quantities needed for children and grown-ups.. Your front door will have no bell; but the moment someone stands before it, the image of the person standing at the door will appear on a television screen inside and a bell will ring; if you wish to open the door, you press a button and it opens.. Over your garden will be set domes of plastic that shield you and your guests from the cold, let you enjoy the sun, and keep the flowers and vegetables growing within them. This is some of what the scientists are preparing for you.

Unity: Egypt is working to join its great societies—such as the Mabarrat Muhammad Ali, the New Woman, the Ambulance Society, and the Red Crescent—into a single society to be called the Red Crescent, which corresponds to the Red Cross in other countries. Rules of work in peace and in war will be laid down and made general, so that it may perform its mission in full when the need arises.

And then—can you believe that only a hundred years ago, that is, in the year 1852, and in the heart of London, a man sold his wife Margaret Huntley for a glass of beer and a hot pie? And that Thompson, one of England's peasants, sold his wife for twenty shillings, crying as he sold her: I married her to be my solace, and she turned into a curse upon me. Nor was Thompson the only man to sell his wife, as the papers say; it was a familiar sight for a man to go out dragging his wife behind him, a long rope wound about her neck, to put her up at public auction for sale. Cases of wives being pawned, or given out on loan and on hire, occurred among the upper class as well. In Belgrade, for instance, women were sold by the scale—and the more a woman weighed, the higher her price, of course. Glory be to Him who restored those men to their senses and changed that state for a better one.