The Woman's Word

What excites astonishment and fury alike are these violent, arbitrary campaigns which a group of our writers and journalists wage against woman from time to time. Some of them go to extremes in blameworthy praise — these we do not condescend to answer, nor do we spare them a glance — while others waver between reality and exaggeration, treating their subject from a single angle, unjust in their judgment and their rigidity, and coming out with a truncated study that reflects only one face of the many-faced truth...

And what insult could be greater than accusing the educated Lebanese woman of being given over all day long to her mirror, elaborating the dressing of her hair and the painting of her face with every sort of powder, while her house is chaos beyond all chaos... In her drawing room one trips over pots and dishes; her children's room is left to the servants; and her kitchen — entering it is forbidden her... and so on through all those farces, laughable and lamentable at once, which contradict reality and from which sound taste recoils?!

O you slanderers who fancy yourselves the leaders of thought and society: these tales of yours have grown threadbare and worn from sheer old age! The Lebanese and Arab woman — above all the educated woman upon whom you have fallen — is innocent of these hideous charges you have pinned upon her. And I challenge anyone who claims that the cultured woman — whatever the kind of her culture — deviates and strays after empty appearances, forgets her principal duties, and deserts her home...

I do not mean that this class of women has no existence whatever; I insist rather that it is a tiny minority within an all-embracing majority. And that class of women remains far smaller than the men who stray and deviate from their principal responsibilities — and you may well be among them!

Why, then, do you shut your eyes to reality and pursue woman, deliberately or without deliberation, dragging her backward, lest in these latter days her morale should have gained some strength!!

I call upon our writers and journalists to rise above these slanders and futile trivialities, to leave woman to her own affairs and turn their attention to themselves. And let them rest assured that woman, thank God, is well — and her house and her children are very well indeed!...