The Woman's Word: ...Woman and Spring

The Woman's Word

With the first of spring, life is breathed into the earth, and its face is clothed in greenness and color; signs of youth and vigor spread through the air, and people rise to their work with a new energy that knows no weariness... For spring is the loveliest of nature's gifts to her daughter the earth; from its spray an abundant good falls upon us, calling us to take heart after despair, and to resume, with openness and hope, those worldly duties we had neglected.

The observer of the course of world events notices that their activity in springtime is usually double what it was in the season of winter and bitter cold, when minds are at their great diversion behind warmth and food and delicious evening talk... whereas we see in the very nature of the spring season a flagrant rejection of these comforts and primitive indulgences, and an impatience with the idle and sluggish among men...

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And woman, in spring, finds her long-standing struggle for her great cause taking on faces and forms that vary between gentleness and violence: the Iraqi woman's means is to stir up publicity among public opinion and government bodies by way of broadcasts, newspapers, and rallies; while the Egyptian woman seizes the opportunity of the convening of the Constituent Assembly for the Egyptian constitution and goes on hunger strike, in the "Gandhian" manner, until final victory or death... And she holds out, in fact, seven days and more, and nothing turns her from her passive resolve but a gracious letter from General Naguib carrying support and a whiff of promises...

As for the Syrian woman, her first tranquility is today tinged with doubt and fear. What will become of her after the return to the parliament of 1949, which granted woman only a portion of her right? Will woman keep silent in the face of this broad step backward, or will she order her ranks with deliberation and firmness, to settle upon the surest means of guaranteeing her full political right?

Woman in Lebanon appears more fortunate than her sisters, for she preceded them to the attainment of her rights in full, and has tasted the pleasure of exercising these rights... Yet the reality is otherwise, for in woman's throat new cries resound, for causes of further import than political rights themselves — which are but the means of attaining civil rights, so tightly bound to the daily life we live.

The first cry is the demand for equality of inheritance between the sexes; a select women's committee is working in pursuit of this demand, and the voices of our reactionary foes will not keep it from reaching its goal... The second cry takes up the demand for family compensation for mothers employed on the state payroll — that right which remains reserved for man alone, and which no women enjoy but widows... The committee will continue its stubborn march along these thorny paths beset with difficulties until it obtains its demands, all of them, demand after demand; nor will it fear to touch what people fear out of awe and sanctity, so long as it firmly believes that its demands are just, without deviation and without favoritism.

Woman today, in every Arab country, whatever the stage she has reached, stands in the utmost need of whetting her moral and spiritual powers, and of seizing the openings of opportunity without that cold dallying which man brandishes in her face as proof of her faintheartedness and the feebleness of her capacities.

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Spring laughs its optimistic laugh, spreading over the earth colored joy and fragrance... spurring man to concentrate his powers, to widen the horizon of his hopes, and to hasten to the positive work that leads to a result... For only when the iron is at the height of its heat can striking it shape it into the desired form!