The Woman's Word: At the Crossroads

The Woman's Word

Here is your magazine, Madam: it has folded away its eleventh year, and, as you observe, it is more confident of itself than ever, pressing forward to fulfill its mission and its existence.

The magazine grows, and its growth is accompanied by a development that cannot be avoided. Readers develop too, and their inclinations with them. What, then, is the nature of this development, and how shall we meet it?

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The truth is that a group of those by whose opinions we wished to be enlightened took the magazine to task — sincerely — for its attachment to the classical stamp and its disdain of following the journalistic paths that would strengthen its popularity and its circulation alike.

So we set about probing, deliberately, this "popularity" enjoyed by certain of our sister magazines, which have invaded the markets in suspect fashion... And how quickly it became clear to us how they are loaded with the cheap and the vulgar. They practically rest upon nudity and folly — things we are ashamed even to hint at! And it became plain to us that the source of this popularity is nothing other than the stirring of the instincts, above all in the rising generation, which responds easily to such things and rarely meets with sound guidance toward the reading that builds its character as it should and makes of it a better human being.

In the depths of our perplexity we have turned to you, Madam, to take counsel from your suggestions, for "The Woman's Voice" is your magazine. For your sake it came into being, and for the sake of your "voice" it lives...

And we ask ourselves: has the aim of this magazine, from the beginning, been material and commercial? Had it been so, the Lebanese Women's League would have opened, instead of the magazine, a shop for "nouveautés" to pour abundant profit into its hands!!

Must the magazine, in order to win the reading public, satisfy the desire that calls for strengthening the light sections at the expense of the intellectual and literary ones? And consequently, must "The Woman's Voice" descend to meet its readers, or remain on the heights and struggle hard to raise its readers to the fitting level?

Shall "The Woman's Voice" choose the easy way down, and spare itself the hardship of climbing and of standing firm in the face of the sweeping currents that threaten our moral and material being with collapse?

This is the problem before us. We place it in the hands of all our readers, that they may judge impartially — against us or for us.