Does the Western Woman Surpass Her Eastern Sister? Who Is to Blame!

My attention was caught by an interview published in one of the Lebanese magazines with three university young men returned from the West after several years spent there in study and the pursuit of learning. The questions put to them concerned the Western girl—whether this girl pleased them, and what the difference is between her and the Eastern girl. I then read a reply to the three university men written by an Arab girl—a university girl herself—who was offended by her colleagues' answers, since they disparaged the life of the Eastern girl and expressed their admiration for Western women. This moved me to examine this delicate subject and to speak of the differences between the Western woman and her Eastern sister.

The three university men agreed that the Eastern girl is a superficial creature, lacking confidence in herself, limited in ambition, her aspirations bounded by marriage. She is—in their view—dependent and averse to responsibility, since she considers herself a negative part of society; she is also repressed in her feelings, remote from politics and from aims of her own. Quite the opposite of the Western girl, who is deep in her thinking, entirely confident of herself, and ambitious to the furthest limits of ambition. She takes up the challenge of responsibilities and shares with man the bearing of life's burden, for she sees herself as a positive part of society. She gives material things only a secondary place, and she marries only when she loves, because she believes in the gifts of youth; on gifts she centers her love, helping her chosen young man to bring out his talents and give them shape.

As for the girl's reply, it was to accuse the three young men of flabbiness, confusion, and lack of personality, and of encouraging the licentiousness prevalent in the West, which the conservative traditions of the East forbid and refuse.

Each of the two parties held some portion of the truth and another of error. And I regret most deeply—I, an Eastern girl—that I must stand beside the three young men to set forth many of the truths to which they pointed. It has been my fortune to observe the Western woman at close range, in all her stages: I lived with her as a student, worked beside her as a working woman, and kept her company as a wife; and in all her stages she was an example bearing out the opinions of the three university men.

I admired her taste, her elegance joined with simplicity, and her extraordinary energy, which drives her to prove her existence and her right as a primary element in the advancement of her nation.

And I admired her relations with her surroundings: she is a gentle creature, a graceful talker; in her voice are balance and confidence; she overflows with a captivating friendliness and womanliness. Her view of life is a view of optimism and hope. She is cheerful; she does not fear failure, no setback dampens her spirit, and she feels the keenest pleasure in overcoming difficulties. Above all this she is sociable and adaptable, with her own influence in her circle and her surroundings, letting no occasion pass without seizing it to help shed life, gaiety, and hope upon its atmosphere.

Then there is her artistic personality: strong, frank, bold, creative; she believes in her own philosophy, but she is not fanatical about it.

And I admired her as sweetheart and as wife: she is simple and faithful to her feeling, as though she lived for her feeling and for her man... She understands the man, shares his life with him, and helps him to develop his ambition and his confidence. To him she is friend, and companion, and sweetheart, and wife, and rearer of his children.

And I knew her as a student: she was energetic and ambitious, hungry for knowledge; poverty does not keep her from pursuing her studies, and she combines work and study when forced to it. She works in the political field and joins the parties, of all their different kinds. In her political life, as in all the other sides of her life, she is a foundation stone of the great building.

And I saw her as a working woman, combining her work at home and in the factory... She prepares food that joins simplicity to savor, and cares for her children and her husband alongside doing her duty toward her work and her superiors. She pays few visits; her friends see her only on occasions.

And I saw her in the museums of art, the theaters, and the concert halls: she is a woman of taste who loves the arts and distinguishes the worthless in them from the precious; she has an eye, an ear, and a sense marked by precision and true awareness. Indeed I saw the one who does not hesitate to make herself a model for an artist, who paints a picture from her or carves a statue.

And I saw even the vagabond girl—that lonely one who runs after life while life runs away from her, with no shelter and no place to sleep, keeping company with men and living a cheap life—yet even she searches for a meeting of mind and spirit between herself and her chosen man.

In all her stages and conditions I saw her a woman energetic, bold, free in her thinking, relying on herself, loving life with its hardships and its stumbles, and knowing how to guard against the stumbles and surmount the hardships.

As for the Eastern woman, the accusations the returning university men direct at her are not all mistaken—unfortunately. If we enter her world we find in her much superficiality and dependence: in her society, in her home, and with her husband. Her great and final goal is marriage and children, and once she reaches that goal, the family swallows her up.

The Eastern student girl has rarely stepped outside the bounds of her lessons, and few are the educated women who respond in any positive way to their society and the intellectual currents passing through it, or who take part in dealing with the political and social systems. And even those few—no sooner had they broken loose a little than conceit rode them; their natures grew tangled, and they drifted away from the modesty and simplicity that make one loved.

As for the ignorant woman, she is the very model of dependence and primitive backwardness: her husband and her kin direct her, and she works mechanically without feeling that her opinion has any effect on what she does.

When it comes to marriage, money, and the suitor's ability to provide the life of ease—these are the standards our girl takes as her constitution in choosing the man who is to steer the helm of her days.

But... are the faults and the backwardness confined to the Eastern woman? Is she the only one responsible for her remaining at the rear of the caravan of progress?

No. It is the corruption of the educational and social foundations under whose shadow she lives that has led her to this withdrawal, and burdened her with repression and deprivation.

Our home education is in its very basis negative and reactionary; it does not prepare the girl to face reality, nor does it arm her with what to meet the coming life. It binds her with a blind, deaf dependence, and works to destroy every progressive element in her from her childhood.

The superficiality of the Eastern woman goes back to her training, from her earliest years, in trivial thinking, and to her distance from any understanding of positive moral values and of personal competence and qualification.

Her dependence and her lack of confidence in herself come of a deep-rooted fear of responsibility, for she was not raised in love of that responsibility and never grew familiar with it.

How, then, do they expect her to develop, to step out, to accompany young men and befriend them, without a project of marriage or a sentiment standing behind the friendship and the companionship, when the Eastern young man himself does not believe in such friendship? And how is she to choose the young man with whom she can find an atmosphere of spiritual and intellectual understanding, when her mother has prepared her from her earliest dawn to wait for the rich man... How is she to choose her man, when she has no room to choose a man without exposing herself to the danger of the man's own disbelief in innocent friendship? How do they expect her to take part in politics or in intellectual affairs, when her surroundings deny her this ambition?

The Eastern young man—regrettably, most regrettably—has not yet reached the maturity and flexibility of the Western young man; he still looks at the girl as he would look at a tool without will, without personality, without feeling; and while he casts that look at his fiancée, for example, he does not disdain to see another cast the very same look at his own sister.

Would it not have been more fitting for the respected university men to criticize the environment, the customs, and the ignorance in which those who form the rising Eastern generations are floundering?

As for the university girl who replied to the university men, she confined her reply to the sexual side and accused the young men of calling for hateful licentiousness. It would have been more fitting for her—an aware university woman—to know that there is more than this narrow personal view: there are systems and conditions, customs and traditions, that stand between the Eastern woman and her becoming a model woman, preparing the morrow and the generation of the morrow.