"She Cooks, He Reads," by Ilham Kallab Bisat

In the mean time, Ilham taught at numerous high schools and universities. She was part of the faculty at the Beirut University College teaching about art history and women artists. She is currently on the Faculty of the Lebanese University, Faculty of Arts and teaches some courses as well in the Jesuit University. Her community work has always been an important part of her life. She was on the board and is still an active member of the Family Planning Association. She is an active member of the National Committees for the Affairs of Women (that was founded in preparation and to follow-up on the recommendations of the UN Beijing conference on women) and for Development (which was founded after the UN Copenhagen conference on Development). She has represented Lebanon on a number of conferences and workshops and is a member of the Arab Regional Women's Committee. Working within the realm of civil society is an essential responsibility that each should play within their own capacity, according to Ilham.

She has managed to express her views and ideas eloquently and effectively in many conference presentations, papers, publications, and media appearances. Kallab-Bisat participated in preparing Reading School Texts for elementary classes, and in preparing books to encourage children to engage and understand art. She published a book called "She Cooks, He Reads: Woman's Image in School Textbooks in Lebanon" in 1983. The book presents an excellent study of the role that women play in our textbooks and thus the kinds of stereotypes that we consciously and unconsciously transmit to our children about what women can/would and cannot/wouldn't do. Kallab-Bisat believes that the school textbook is a very powerful and dangerous instrument since kids read it and look at its pictures for a whole year. This book thus provides him/her with images of mothers, girls, grandmothers, women as members of family, working mothers, wives, male and female animals. It informs him/her about their capacities, their duties and responsibilities as expected by society and the range of their 'ideal' roles.

Her findings in this book are very telling. We tend to see women as primarily mothers and as caregivers in all other situations, thus still carrying on with their motherly role. In the absence of mothers, we see little girls or grandmothers taking over and performing the same tedious nurturing role. We also tend to see the 'supermom idea' where women manage to clean the whole house, cook, feed their children, wash clothes and do all household chores with no complaints and still manage to help their children with all their homework, answering their children's questions correctly and patiently as they knit quietly in the living room. Kallab-Bisat states "This feminine model found in school textbooks, affects the mind of the child and contributes to delaying women's progress. This small child cannot when he grows up easily overcome by himself these strong images that have taken up his mind " (216).

Ilham Kallab-Bisat is currently working on some type of memoir in the hopes that she could transmit part of her experience to younger generations. She is a strong believer in communication and in the essentiality of achieving women's equality in our societies. Her final words in the above mentioned book stand witness to the ideas she has held dear to her heart which stress the importance of socialization in achieving a more just society that is capable of treating women as the real counterpart to men in building a better society. Ilham Kallab-Bisat says: "nourishing at this early stage the inquisitive and critical mind of our children regarding the image of man and woman in these books, will lead our children to understand our humanity with all of its complications and variety, hoping that with the progress of society and social and economic needs we are able to create a new school textbook with a more positive, realistic, and well rounded image of woman, that would eventually lead to the development of a balanced, humanistic society that does not categorize people according to sex, religion, or nationality " (216).