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 pass-ing 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 founda-tions 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 posi-tive 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 accom-pany 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 friend-ship? How do they expect her to take part in politics or in intellec-tual affairs, when her surround-ings deny her this ambition?

The Eastern young man—regret-tably, 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 fit-ting 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.