The Modern Woman Between Her Supporters and Her Opponents

The modern woman is passing through a most perilous phase, for she stands at the beginning of a transitional period in which she is trying to move out of a stage of bondage and stagnation into a stage of freedom and activity. She walks a road beset with difficulties, because the ideal that the charter of the rights of man has set before her — liberty, and equality with man in rights — is still a dream toward which she moves, and by no means an accomplished fact.

What has woman actually achieved of her liberties so far? She has been enabled to enter the schools and acquire learning, and so she has been freed from ignorance and illiteracy, in lesser or greater measure. A minority of women have aspired to the higher degrees and have practiced some of the liberal professions. Circumstances have helped woman — or, more often, compelled her — to achieve her economic freedom by means of paid work and the occupation by which she earns her living. And in most countries of the civilized world she has succeeded in winning her political freedom, becoming both elector and eligible for election.

By economic emancipation and political emancipation woman lays the cornerstone, the necessary foundation, of her other liberties — social, intellectual, and civil. But this does not mean that her attainment of her remaining liberties has become assured; for political and economic freedom, without intellectual and social freedom, may become for woman an instrument of enslavement rather than of liberation. The voter who takes her orders from her husband or one of her relatives is practicing political bondage instead of freedom. And the woman who earns her living by her work and places herself at the disposal of a family that exploits her, or of a parasitic husband who reaps the fruit of her toil, has accepted a new kind of bondage, no less oppressive than her former bondages.

We may imagine that the greatest success the modern woman has won lies in the field of work, or in her taking up posts and professions. But if we examined this subject closely and subjected it to inquiry and statistics, we would find that woman's work is still far from doing her justice or tempting her to continue the struggle. The working woman, like the working man — indeed, more than he — is exposed to injustice, and has better right than he to complain. In most cases she does not equal man in wages, though she equals him in competence and in quantity of work. If we counted the teachers wronged in their wages, we would find that all those who receive thirty Lebanese liras a month (for a period of nine months only!) are women teachers, not men. Employers do not dare to exploit man in this shameful fashion, yet they have no scruple about exploiting women. They keep the sewing-woman at work a full day for a wage of no more than a single lira a day. The embroideress and the woman who does fine needlework earn no more than the amount we have mentioned. The woman who studies law can practice that profession only in rare cases. And the nurse meets with neither the social esteem nor the material reward that would encourage her to go on practicing this profession, or encourage others to take it up.

For woman to be freed in actual fact, first her moral emancipation must be completed. Second, public opinion concerning her must be freed from its old view of woman and from the influence of the dark past which humiliated her and weakened her personality.

For the enemies of woman are many, and the first of them is woman herself: the woman who uses her freedom for cheapness, painted adornment, display, and the exhibition of her bodily charms.

And she who makes her bodily charms a means of success in her work.

And she who makes it her concern in life to hunt down the man of wealth, and takes marriage as a means of escaping work and responsibility.

And she who, despite her economic emancipation, clings to the tradition of submission and abjection before man and of humoring his whims.

Among the enemies of woman is the ignorant woman who pretends to learning, who undertakes certain tasks without merit or preparation, thinking that her femininity will pardon her shortcomings and entitle her to presumption and conceit.

Among the enemies of woman's freedom is the woman weak in self-confidence, the lazy one who prefers sliding down the slopes to pressing on into the hills and heights, who proclaims woman's weakness and her inherited incapacity — after the fashion of Madame Marthe Borély, who wrote books arguing that woman is devoid of creative intelligence. Yet her writings contain fallacies and errors enough to make her own words evidence against her.

The enemies of woman's freedom are also the poets and men of letters of the romantic tendency, who are still under the influence of the Middle Ages and the eras of chivalry, which held woman to be an ethereal being, an idol to be pampered: a lady immured in her castle, bent over her weaving, seeing the world only through a narrow window beneath which lovers and the lovesick sigh.

Those who cling to the various old, mistaken legends about femininity: now she is an instrument of evil and temptation, like Eve and Cleopatra and Semiramis; now the inspirer of poetry and the muse of heroes, like Beatrice and Abla and Roxane; now a sorceress who reads the future and announces calamities before they befall, like the priestesses found among the ancient Romans and among the Arabs and the Indians; and now an obscure riddle, like the Sphinx or the mermaid, toying with men's souls and captivating their minds — they try to fathom her secret, and turn back from it baffled.

The woman of popular legend lives on today in the souls of many of the educated and the lettered. Her descendant is the doll-woman who presides over gatherings and salons, adorns the clubs of pleasure and amusement, distributes diplomatic smiles upon those around her, and puts the fluency of her tongue and the grace of her movements at the service of every kind of propaganda.

The woman of legend is a goddess or a genie, an angel or a devil — that is, in either case she is not counted a normal human being, and cannot equal man in rights. And in either case she is wronged, for she does not hold the reins of her own affairs: if she is a worshipped idol, man can smash her whenever he wishes; and likewise, if she is a sorceress or a devil, he rids himself of her evil with charms, or meets her with malice and enmity. But if he treated woman as he treats himself, the veils would be lifted from her, and he would see that she is an ordinary person, differing from him neither in mystery nor in strangeness.

Of the same kind as these obsessed men is a class of despots who wish to confine woman's work within the circle of the home and believe that her function is limited to procreation and motherhood. It is they who, after the fashion of the philosophers of force and the advocates of war — Napoleon, Nietzsche, and Hitler — wish to sacrifice woman for the sake of the species and to restrict her work to the multiplication of offspring and the bearing of the warriors and soldiers by whose means the state achieves mastery over its neighbors and sweeps across the world. And in order to make this function attractive to woman, they have resorted to magnifying motherhood, deifying the mother, and holding her love the greatest of loves and her sacrifice the noblest of sacrifices and the worthiest of sanctification. Among their sayings: "Woman cannot be a hero, but she gives birth to heroes, and therein lie her pride, her greatness, and her immortality." Here we ask: why can woman not be a hero? Is it not because they have stood between her and heroism?

The fettering of woman in the manner we have described, and the regarding of her as a deficient creature who must be supported and protected, is nothing but a vestige of the slavery that played its part in history. And this age of ours is witnessing society's emergence from the phase in which slavery was held to be a social necessity: the bondage of the individual to the tribe, of the vanquished to the victor, of woman to man, of minors to adults, of the worker to his master, and of the black to the white.

In the last century, and at the opening of this one, woman concentrated her efforts on winning the right to learning and to work, and the political right, and she often sacrificed her biological functions in this cause. Today, however, she seeks to exercise all her rights together: she wants to found a family and play the mother's part, and at the same time she wants to hold posts and do work. For she wants to live a full life, complete in all its parts.

And here is what a girl of seventeen, who has lately completed her secondary studies, says on this subject:

"We college graduates differ in our inclinations and in our ways of living, and our ambitions and dreams likewise diverge. Among us are those who would delight in teaching mathematics or literature, and those who will take up acting, or hostessing on airplanes. There are those among us whose ambition goes no further than managing a home and raising children, and others who dream of exploring the South Pole or the wilds of Africa. But all of us want travel and movement, knowledge and discovery, adventure and love and work and play. And all of us want for our daughters in the future, and for our younger companions, a life of wider scope, and an independent upbringing that respects the girl's rights, gives her a greater measure of freedom, and is pervaded by an atmosphere of understanding, frankness, and confidence."