Laure Tabet Enters the Electoral Battle

On Saturday, April 13 last, the president of the League of Women's Organizations called a press conference at her home which brought together, besides the journalists, a select group of ladies, and at which she officially announced her final resolve to enter the coming electoral battle.

Among the things Mrs. Laure Tabet said: The second step, now that the Lebanese woman has been granted her political rights, is for her to come forward and exercise these rights in full — and here I am, opening the road before the daughters of my sex. We women are a new element, but we are distinguished from men in that our interest is a national and public one, and nothing more. My first duty will be to defend the causes of woman, childhood, and the family — those civic causes which we feel at every crossroads of our daily life and whose importance we sense.

She then appealed to the journalists to stand by her and support her cause, and appealed to the ladies to spread the call in their circles for the necessity of giving the question of the election the weight it requires — and it is not to be trifled with — so that the results may come according to what the higher public interest demands... After Mrs. Tabet had answered the journalists' questions, Miss Ibtihaj Kaddoura, president of the General Arab Women's Union, rose and endorsed Mrs. Tabet's candidacy for the deputyship, welcoming it and affirming that her entry into the parliamentary forum would be a pillar of support not for woman alone but for the whole homeland...

Then Dr. Jamal Karam Harfush improvised an eloquent word, in which she said: Laure Tabet's announcement today of her resolve to enter the electoral battle has written a new page in the history of Lebanon — the page of woman's plunge into the service of public causes... We stand behind Laure Tabet not as a woman, but as a human being and as a loyal, upright, striving citizen — a citizen with a citizen's rights and a citizen's duties.

And if Laure Tabet had no guarantor of her success in the election other than her moral guarantee, that alone would suffice!...

Amid a storm of applause Mrs. Tabet thanked Miss Ibtihaj Kaddoura and Dr. Jamal Karam Harfush, wishing that they would walk at her side along the road she has decided to travel...

This press conference, called by the president of the League of Women's Organizations in Lebanon, proves — if it proves anything — that woman is able to carry her work out of the narrow sphere into the wide public one, and to order her projects and undertakings with a discipline second to none.

We congratulate Mrs. Tabet and her colleagues, and we wish her success and good fortune.