Talk of the Month: On the Margin of Lebanon's Signing of the Charter of Women's Political Rights

On the margin of Lebanon's signing of the charter of women's political rights

How is woman preparing for the general congress of the Arab Women's Union, which it has been decided to hold at the beginning of next June in Beirut? Is woman conscious of her grave responsibilities, and does she appreciate their importance, so that she will stand in a single, close-ranked line to support her cause and prove her worthiness of absolute equality with man?

Dr. Charles Malik, Lebanon's delegate to the United Nations, signed the charter concerning women's political rights at the meeting held at United Nations headquarters on the twenty-fourth of last month. The said charter gives woman the right to vote in all elections on an equal footing with man, to occupy public offices, and to exercise any practical activity on the same conditions as man, without discrimination.

This is the summary of the news that the dispatches brought us in the last week of February. If the news carries any significance, it is that Lebanon has recognized for its women, at home and abroad, the full rights of the citizen, preceding therein every other Arab country by granting these rights without particular conditions, such as those that impose upon the Syrian woman, as voter and as candidate, a certain degree of education, for example. I paused a little at this news and went on to ask myself a question to which I would like to hear an answer from the Lebanese woman herself: has this step — the step of granting the Lebanese woman the right of election in both its halves, and the step of acknowledging this in an international charter — been able to stir in the Lebanese woman reflection upon the gravity of the responsibility which the logic of things makes it incumbent upon her to bear?

The results of the last electoral battle in Lebanon, which took place last July and in which the Lebanese woman took part for the first time in the country's history, allow my question no reassuring answer. We all still remember that certain women's voices were long raised, demanding that the way be opened to woman and insisting on the necessity of granting her rights — and we do not except from this stand the women's associations and institutions — yet when matters came to the test, these personalities drew back from nominating themselves, just as the organizations did not think of arranging a definite program under which one of the women would be nominated to enter the Chamber; nor did any gesture come from these organizations to back the two women personalities who held their ground in the field to the end, despite their feeling from the outset that their scales would lose against the electing public's traditional faith in the strength of the man.

Does this mean, then, that all the Lebanese woman and Lebanon's women's organizations were burning for was to complete these formalities and then say: what have I to do with politics — it has a lord to protect it?

I have heard and read various justifying comments on this slackness in preparing for the battle and entering it. Some speak of the necessity of deliberation before storming the Chamber for the first time; some of the necessity of preparing public opinion to accept this step; and some, and some...

It does not serve us here to weigh each justification's share of argument and logic, just as expatiating in comment upon an event now counted as old is a matter without point. But it serves us greatly to alert the women's organizations — now that Charles Malik's signing of the charter of women's rights at the United Nations has stirred up the circumstances of the last elections — to work seriously and sincerely at closing ranks and at drawing up programs to be studied with deliberation and care, and to prepare public opinion to believe in these programs, so as to secure the votes of the electors, men and women, should they push their women candidates into the fray... And I do not imagine that any woman who respects her own existence would wish these rights to remain formalities acknowledged on paper and not demonstrated by the facts.

There is a second piece of news that came to us from the folds of this month: the general congress to which the Arab Women's Union intends to summon its various branches, to assemble in Beirut on the fourth of next June.

These periodic congresses to which the Women's Union calls are held once every year or two in one of the capitals of the Arab countries. The invitation has been officially addressed to the various branches, and these have set about selecting their representatives and studying the proposals they intend to submit for entry in the congress's agenda, and preparing statements on the subjects they are supposed to have studied since the dispersal of the general meeting held by the Women's Union in Baghdad two years ago — of which it was said at the time, in describing its purpose, that it was held in order to prepare for a great coming congress in which the affairs of the family would be examined, and its advancement in health, economy, and society, each branch of the Union studying separately the various problems, giving priority to the subjects of greatest importance in its local environment; and that there should be studied at the congress, besides this, the fight against illiteracy, compulsory education, the creation of vocational schools for girls, the reform of prisons and of reformatories for juveniles, and so on to the end of the list.

The agenda of the coming Union congress, then, is heavy with subjects that go to the very core of the vitality of our existence. And this agenda — in my belief — includes undertakings that I consider too great to be realized at the hands of associations or groups; rather, if we wish them to be carried out properly, they are the work of governments — compulsory education, for example, or the fight against illiteracy, or prison reform, and so on.

We acknowledge that the Arab woman has had an undeniable hand in the various social fields, and we do not exaggerate if we say that most social reform tendencies are all but confined within the activity of the women's associations and institutions, regardless of the breadth of the projects or the narrowness of their scope.

We acknowledge, too, that if the Union adopted the call for such reforms and spread it among public opinion, it could influence the governments in charge of affairs in the Arab countries. But I should like to draw attention to a truth which I do not know whether it has occurred to the minds of those in charge of the Women's Union and its branches in the Arab countries: that these branches will represent countries whose constitutions differ in their position on the question of women's rights.

Many things have happened since the Baghdad meeting was held two years ago. The Lebanese woman has obtained the right of election unconditionally, and the Syrian woman has obtained it with conditions; and here is the committee engaged in drafting the constitution in Egypt intending to grant the Egyptian woman this right piecemeal, or in installments, beginning by allowing the educated women to vote only... not to stand as candidates. And the Women's Union congress about to be held is not confined to the representatives of these three countries alone: there is Iraq, and there is Jordan, and the women of these two countries enjoy no electoral right whatever, nor does anything appear on the horizon to indicate that they will have it soon. Why, then, should the Lebanese or the Syrian Union, for example, not study these proposals as programs capable of being carried out should the Lebanese Union or the Syrian Union nominate one of its members to parliament upon these principles? Or why should the Egyptian Women's Union not study them on the basis of backing one of the men candidates for them — and it grieves us not to be able to say it — so that he might plead for them in the Egyptian parliament as soon as Egypt resumes her parliamentary life under the new constitution!

These are questions we hope will circulate in the heads of those women concerned with this congress, and will be raised when it convenes... and that they will find such a share of seriousness as will guarantee that they do not die.