and proofs of success...

But since woman did not nominate herself, and voted and gave her voice — did she bargain with her candidate? In America, for example, women number millions, yet only a few of them occupy seats; the overwhelming majority organize their rights with astonishing precision, then back their candidate and raise him to the seat after agreement and understanding. Thus they attain their aims through him, and he carries out what he pledged to them. Did the Lebanese woman — the aware class of her — do the like?... Did she elect the candidate faithful to the country's interest and stipulate that he be at the same time faithful also to her own particular interest?...

The Swiss woman — who has never entered parliament at all — was once asked why she does not demand her right to a deputy's seat... She answered: I possess all my social rights; man has done me justice and held my rights sacred; why then should I not leave the deputyship to him and busy myself with other things?... The Lebanese woman, however — indeed the Arab woman generally — used to complain of man's injustice and the injustice of the laws he had enacted. She saw her social right utterly trampled: she inherits from her father only half of what her brother inherits, and from her husband only a quarter if she has no children, and an eighth if she has, while the rest of the fortune goes to the relatives. She may be a physician, or a professor at a university with her distinguished standing and her independent income, and yet she cannot travel from one country to another unless her husband signs her passport — and other iniquities besides.

Hence her insistence on winning her political right: first, that her dignity might be safeguarded; and second — and this is the more important — that she might demand under the dome of parliament her trampled

social rights, so that the laws be reformed and the injustice lifted from her. Did she seize the opportunity that offered itself, and stipulate to the candidate she was to raise to the deputy's seat that he stand in her stead and reform the laws that trample her right?... I think she did not. Her organization was not a woman's organization — that is, one built on the basis of woman's interest — and not one banner was to be seen bearing the words: 'Elect the champion of woman, who will do for her thus and so.' If my surmise is correct, woman has missed a great opportunity to realize her aspirations, and it now falls to her to wait several more years, during which she will organize her affairs further, so as to wage the battle on the basis of her own interest... In any case, woman may have her mistakes — but they are the mistakes that usually accompany the first step.

On the whole: if we picture the great leap woman has leaped — if we picture the grandmother who was ordered and who obeyed, tucking herself away in the house like a piece of its furniture, in inertness I will not say as

ornament and beauty, vanishing indoors whenever a strange man entered, preparing the coffee and sending it out to the guests... if we set against her the woman of July 1953, standing on the roof of a motorcar, making speeches and chanting and crying, 'We are your men, O So-and-so!' — a cry with a jest in it that seems laughable on the surface, but that holds in its depths the rush of a bomb bursting after long suppression, its owner wishing to say: we are like the men in strength and might. If we set this granddaughter — shoulder to shoulder with her candidate, her hand in his — against that grandmother who understood nothing of the world and who hid indoors whenever the shadow of a strange man appeared, murmuring 'A man is coming!' — then we are assured that woman is advancing with rapid strides, and that on the near morrow she will not be content with a deputy's seat but will aspire to a throne, like her grandmothers among the Arab women — Zenobia and Bilqis, or Cleopatra and Nitocris and others. And history always repeats itself.

Lolo Cologne

A surprise from Lolo Cologne for its customers

The agents of Lolo Cologne offer a bottle of cologne to everyone who returns 4 empty bottles with their caps to the shops where Lolo Cologne is sold, or to the agents

International Advertising Office

Maronite Waqf Building

Star Square — P.O. Box 2782

Prices: 1/2 liter, 650 Lebanese piasters; 1/4 liter, 350 Lebanese piasters; 1/8 liter, 100 Lebanese piasters