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 exam-ple, 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 ten-dencies are all but confined within the activity of the women's asso-ciations and institutions, regard-less 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 allow-ing 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 propos-als 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 con-gress, 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.