Our Women in the Face of the Ordeal

The Woman's Word

A friend in Denmark wrote to me and to a number of the women of Lebanon, asking us: what efforts, pray, have we made to put out the sedition and stem the blood... and urging us to do the possible and the impossible to turn evil away from Lebanon and to bring in security and peace.

It is as though this friend, in her decisive letter from foreign lands, roused me from a kind of heedlessness and set me face to face with the problem. I came to the conclusion that woman — practically speaking — has remained, throughout Lebanon's revolt, on the safe shore; I mean that she had, in the first place, no opinion and no hand in kindling the fire. She made attempts, as others did, to curb the revolt's unruliness, but they yielded no result, for the current was strong and sweeping, and she could not confront it or stand in its way... And so she fell back upon her own private world, serving her homeland through her own means in the purely humanitarian fields.

Then there arises a question about the Lebanese woman: did she, do you suppose, set out to whet and direct her energy — all her energy — toward stopping the sedition? Did she plead with her husband? Her brother? Her father? Her son? Did she cling to his garment and implore him — with her weakness, with her tears, with her kisses — to throw down the devil's weapon and desist from the infernal adventure: with his life, with his brother's life, with his neighbor's life? Perhaps she did that and more, and found no listening ear; then the swift developments stunned her, and she returned to her conscience, seeking from it what she should do in this black crisis. And at the prompting of her human conscience she enrolled in the ranks of the women volunteers for first aid and rescue, or withdrew into her house, hugging her children with the anxiety of the fearful, and praying with them with the fervor of the devout: may God preserve Lebanon and turn harm away from it!!

The desolate days and nights followed one another while woman, with the believer's hope, wiped away the tears of her fearful heart and gathered up the fragments of her shattered courage, walking in the path of a sacred duty imposed by her sound patriotism: she is the nurse keeping vigil in the service of the victims; she is the consoler carrying clothing, food, and medicines to those in need of them; she is the one looking ahead to the fruitful ways of reviving an economy on the verge of collapse... and she is, above all that, the volunteer giving her blood to save the wounded from death. In the registers of the Red Cross stands the conclusive proof that the number of women volunteers equaled the number of men.

It has become clear to whoever reflects on our cruel circumstances that woman did not plunge into the heart of the battle, and consequently failed to strangle the revolt in its cradle; but she did not collapse upon herself in irresponsible despair. Rather she went on with earnest diligence, serving in her broad humanitarian fields, behind the scenes, far from eyes and ears: rescuing and relieving, healing and consoling... Then before long she stands mute and broken before the marks of ruin and destruction here and there, and wonders at the intent of man — her husband, her father and her brother: how did his heart permit him, how did his hand permit him, how did his patriotism permit him, to bargain over Lebanon: covering it with wounds, afflicting it with lost lives, and driving it toward bankruptcy?

So, friend in Denmark who asked us what woman has done in our grievous circumstances: our Lebanese sister has not shown herself selfish and indifferent, or paralyzed of will and feeble of patriotism. She is today shaken in her composure and sorrowful of heart, but she is working actively, within the frame of her possibilities, to bring our beloved Lebanon out of an ordeal the like of which it has never known in all its life, and to restore tranquility and peace to its secure regions.

Editor-in-Chief