Woman Between Femininity and Humanity

The principal problems in education here are still in the worst state of neglect, and the teachers of the private schools send out appeal after appeal without finding attentive ears. It is to these principal problems that we must direct attention, before concerning ourselves with differentiating the girls' curriculum from the boys'.

If we grant that vocational guidance must take account of the child's inclination — as Dr. Kamal al-Hajj says in his reply to my article — we must admit that the child's inclination is subject in the first degree to the influence of the environment in which he lives, and that environment has a stronger influence in directing him than heredity. Do we not find, for this very reason, that the inhabitants of certain environments are marked by laziness while others are marked by energy? And that artistic inclinations usually grow and flourish in an environment of art and die and vanish elsewhere? Do we not observe that people's demand for certain trades and professions grows and increases in proportion to the need for them, and diminishes or disappears when they find no market in their society?

This truth applies to the education of girls in our country and in others.

In toiling environments the girl is raised to drudgery and directed toward exhausting work, unmarried and married alike; she works in the house and outside it, in the field and in the factory, and performs her double task without complaint, because she was raised on patience and submission. In other environments the girl is encouraged toward slackness and dependence; she is urged to strive to snare the rich husband who will spare her the hardship of work inside the house and out, and she may devote herself entirely to this mission and confine her activity to it. While in environments other than these we find parents doing the opposite: they smooth for the girl the path of self-reliance through the study of a profession that suits her, and they make work dear to her before marriage and after it, because they consider this principle the surest guarantee of her future.

If we turn to the West, in a desire to broaden our view, we find that the Americans adopt this very last principle in raising their daughters. Some have claimed that there is no American girl who does not dream of marriage and does not pursue a husband, since the idea of the convent and the taking of vows finds among them none of the favor or attention it finds in some circles of the old world. Yet the Americans see the necessity of directing the girl toward a profession, toward work, because it protects her from the evil of living off others, and because they believe that the woman who is not directed toward independent work cannot be a housewife fit to shoulder her responsibilities.

No people is so interested as the Americans in what they call the modern social sciences and the branches that spring from them — health sciences, family relations, household arts, and so on. Their concern with these subjects has gone so far that they have made room for them in the universities, encouraged their teaching to men, and granted their students university degrees — unlike the Europeans, who confine attention to them to the secondary schools, where they are taught in the girls' schools as a supplementary subject.

But specialization in household management is counted by the Americans as only one of the professions that prepare a woman for work and for earning a livelihood. The specialist in household management finds all sorts of opportunities to make use of her specialty, from teaching this art in the schools to employment in industrial establishments, where she guides customers to the best fabrics and foods, to furnishing and decorating houses, or bringing up children, or drawing up menus in hospitals and hotels.

The education of the modern girl in a developing environment must be subject to one principal rule: her education as a human being — that is, preparing her to be a human being before being a wife, to depend on herself for her living before depending on a man. And it is self-evident that preparing woman for marriage and motherhood entails preparing man for marriage and fatherhood. It is not right that the man should remain in his utter ignorance of his role in the family opposite a wife who is aware and informed on the subject. And just as preparing the man in this fashion does not prevent him from practicing all sorts of professions and occupations, so domestic education may not prevent the girl — every girl — from preparing herself for work and from arming herself with a profession that fits her to share in concentrated constructive work. Nor may we instill in the girl's soul the notion that her marriage and her care of the children can fill her life, when the facts contradict this claim.

The baccalaureate curriculum can only be one and the same for boys and girls, because the certificate that prepares students of both sexes for entrance to the university can only be one.

As for those who wish to study household management, they can study it in the secondary schools, which offer supplementary lessons in it; and they can specialize in this science so as to teach it later on. In Lebanon there is an institute for specialization in household management which grants a certificate in the subject, and in the Lebanese curriculum there is a place for supplementary household-management lessons in the secondary schools.

This being so, I do not know why this subject is raised with such insistence, what the purpose of raising it is, and what revolution they wish to work in women's education.

It seems to me that all this is a kind of storm in a teacup, and that there is no problem in the matter. If there are educational questions worth examining, they are rather the problem of reforming education in its many aspects and its complicated faces: reforming the teacher's position and supervising the course of instruction in the private and public schools.

It is this broad-scale reform that we must demand of those responsible, and for its sake the pens of researchers must be harnessed for a long time to come, until deep study yields the required results.