The Woman's Word – The Problem of University Women in Lebanon!

If woman's primary education in Lebanon goes back some seventy years, her university education goes back half that number of years; and from its yield we have gained a good nucleus for a university women's institution whose members could, if they wished, burst forth with a tremendous energy for good works.

We said, on the morrow of the university women's ranks turning, in recent years, toward banding together and asserting their existence: "a blessed phenomenon" — but the phenomenon, regrettably, carried no blessing, for the caravan began its work divided. And when has strength ever lain in fragmentation and splitting?

This little Lebanon cannot bear two institutions of university women. One suffices, and more — especially as we women are approaching parliamentary elections that require of us a united word and a marshaling of forces in the service of national causes, and the causes of woman in particular.

University women are presumed to be the chosen elite among their countrywomen. And this elite is presumed to act by the inspiration of its mind, not by the inspiration of its emotions — hence its distinction from all others, hence the stricter account it must render and the greater hope placed in it.

The university women of Lebanon are an army whose numbers are not to be slighted; what it lacks is organization and sound leadership. To attain that, we must deny ourselves, seek the higher, far-reaching interest before our narrow personal interest, and set to work in a spirit of disinterestedness, sobriety, sacrifice, and sincerity.

In the recent past the ranks of Lebanese women knew a situation like ours today. It ended, thanks to cooperation and thanks to good intentions, in the birth of "the League of Women's Organizations" — the organization that gathers more than a hundred associations and institutions. Why, then, should history not repeat itself, and the university woman prove that — alongside her learning — she has attained such awareness, such maturity, and such breadth of spirit that she deserves to be regarded with the utmost respect, and to be pointed to as one points to a lighthouse whose light reaches out to the horizons and puts an end to the black darkness?