Women's Events in a Month... October

Syria

In Damascus, woman is ordering her ranks to fight the coming electoral battle. The Women's Union held a general meeting at which speeches were delivered, and it resulted in the formation of a publicity committee, which has begun its work by organizing the affairs of publicity... The wife of His Excellency President Shishakli visited the headquarters of the Women's Union and spoke to its members, urging that some of them be nominated to enter the parliamentary assembly. Some believe that a goodly number of ladies will put themselves forward, while others hold that opinion will settle upon nominating two ladies only — one for Damascus, the first capital, and the second for Aleppo, the second capital.

Egypt

A delegation of the women's Red Crescent flew to Greece, and so Athens saw two ladies arrive at its own expense, after the earthquake disasters that befell the Greek islands — arriving in Athens to make the necessary arrangements and to pave the way for the visit of the Red Crescent mission that will carry relief to the victims of the earthquakes. After discharging this humane duty, the delegation flies on to Geneva to attend the International Red Cross conference convening there in these days; then one of its members will set out for Lausanne, in Switzerland, to visit the sanatoria for diseases of the chest there, and to see what these sanatoria provide against tuberculosis, which the delegation considers among the most important diseases to be fought in Egypt. Then she continues her journey to Copenhagen, where she will visit the children's institutions and the nurseries there, in order to borrow certain of their systems and apply them in the Egyptian institutions... As for the second Red Crescent delegation, it has gone off to the Sudan, carrying relief to the victims of the floods there.

Iraq

For months now the Women's Union in Iraq has been making ready for a week in September which it calls Woman's Week. The Union's purpose in it is to carry on, throughout the week, campaigns aimed at giving woman her political right. Thus the Union invited sixty of Iraq's thinkers to take part in Woman's Week, and then began a poll of ten thousand persons there on each one's opinion of woman's political right — is she to be given it or not?...

India

And from India, a woman has been able to lift woman's head high in East and West: the circles of the United Nations, great powers and small alike, agreed upon electing Mrs. Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit president of the General Assembly of the United Nations for its current session — the first woman to reach this weighty post. The papers say that the election of Mrs. Lakshmi Pandit, which was conducted by secret ballot, was not a matter of courtesy or any favoritism, but rested upon the personality of this rare woman, who has fairly wrested the respect and esteem of all nations, great and small — ever since she was India's ambassador in Washington, overcoming many of the difficulties that stood in the way of Indian-American relations... ever since she represented her country powerfully in most of the sessions the United Nations has held... ever since her voice rang out dozens of times in the hall of the United Nations, bold and measured... She is fifty-three years old today; in her girlhood they used to call her “Swarup,” that is, “the beautiful one” in the Indian tongue, and when she married she changed her name in keeping with tradition. To this day she is still beautiful, her beauty adorned by dignity and stateliness... highly cultured... of blazing intelligence, widely informed... strong of memory... strong in argument in her speeches and her talks... an adroit conversationalist of the first order... an ardent patriot... When the leaders of the movement in her country were arrested in 1932, she stepped to the front of the ranks and took over the leadership. In India she held the post of minister, which no woman had held before her... She was imprisoned for her country's sake four times, and when the war broke out she resigned from the ministry and was imprisoned a fifth time... Her country sent her out as its ambassador in Moscow and in Washington. And so everyone affirmed that she was the one person fit for the presidency of the General Assembly in the current session. She was elected and mounted the chair, and the first thing she said was that her attainment of this post is a pride not for India alone but for the women of the whole world; then she called for the treatment of poverty and want in the world...

Indonesia

And from here moist breezes have blown upon us: there passed through Lebanon an Indonesian woman journalist, the wife of the journalist Muhammad Diya. Her husband publishes the newspaper “Freedom,” and then together they publish an illustrated weekly magazine and a monthly women's magazine — though she is the mother of three children... And Mrs. Diya

graduated from the universities of America after four years of study, during which she specialized in sociology. She tells us that dozens of Indonesian girls are studying today in the universities of America as she studied. Then she spoke to us of the women's renaissance in her country, saying that it is the only country in Asia where the two sexes mingle on the school benches from the primary grades onward; as for the Muslim woman, she has, as Mrs. Diya says, won complete equality with man before the law. She has cast off the veil and appears in the national dress... Those are breaths of air from a country made up of five thousand islands strewn like pearls in the Pacific Ocean, inhabited by eighty million people...

And from Uruguay

There arrived in Lebanon a poetess of Lebanese origin, Layla Naffaa; and perhaps what gladdens the heart is to see this poetess held in esteem by the people of the country in which she grew up: the Uruguayan minister plenipotentiary in Lebanon gave a reception in her honor, attended by a number of notables and dignitaries, by Lebanon's minister in Brazil and his wife, by the consul of Venezuela and his wife, and by others — not to mention the journalists, who welcomed the poetess and published pictures of the reception...

England

An Englishwoman astonishing in her daring managed to cross the Pacific Ocean alone in a sailboat, wrestling the roaring waves in it for fifteen whole months, until at last she reached Miami. This woman, whose courage and strength of will the papers have acclaimed, is a young miss named Ann Davison.

And in France

Another young lady, Monique Laroche, thirty years of age, managed to win the title of world champion in parachute jumping: after taking the world championship in the women's parachuting competitions, she went on to beat all the men who entered the contest...

Beauty Queens

The choosing of beauty queens has become a prevailing fashion. While in nearly every one of Lebanon's summer resorts the election of a beauty queen took place — to say nothing of queens of elegance and the like...

And while a contest was held in Istanbul to elect the beauty queen of Europe for 1953 — the fairest beauties of France, Italy, Switzerland, Sweden, Denmark, Monte Carlo, and Holland took part in the contest, and Italy won — we see the United Nations finding time enough to elect a beauty queen of its own: last year, from among forty-seven beautiful girls, it elected a Lebanese young lady who took the title of Beauty Queen of the United Nations, Miss Renée Melhem, who arrived in Lebanon lately...