Abdu'l-Bahá's Tablet on the Equality of Women

In Selections from the Writings of 'Abdu'l-Bahá a number of Tablets address themselves directly to the question of the equality of women and men. Among the most quoted is the Tablet in which the Master sets the principle in the form of a single governing image: the two wings of a bird, neither of which can be allowed to remain weaker than the other if the bird is to fly.

The world of humanity has two wings — one is woman, the other man. Not until both wings are equally developed can the bird fly.

The image had become, by the time of its publication in Selections, one of the best-known sentences of the Master's teaching across both East and West. He had used the image in many addresses on His American and European journeys. He had written it in many Tablets to individual believers asking how the principle was to be applied in their own families and communities. The Tablet preserved in Selections gives the fullest single statement.

The Tablet enlarges the image into its practical implications. The same education must be available to girls and to boys. The same access to the professions must be open to women and to men. The same participation in the public life of the community — in business, in politics, in the deliberations of the consultative bodies of the Faith and of the larger society — must be extended to women on equal terms with men. None of this is, in the Tablet, a matter of modern fashion or of borrowed Western liberalism. It is a matter of the spiritual constitution of the human family as revealed in the Bahá'í Dispensation.

The Tablet acknowledges the difficulty. The customs of many societies, both East and West, have for many centuries kept women in conditions of dependence and subordination. The education of girls has been neglected. The participation of women in public life has been restricted. The change required by the Bahá'í teaching is therefore not a small adjustment but a substantial reformation. The Tablet asks the believers to undertake the work patiently, beginning in their own families and proceeding outward into the larger community.

The closing portion of the Tablet enlarges the principle one further step. The full equality of women, when it is at last achieved, will not only correct an old injustice. It will release into the human family the full creative force that half of its members have for centuries been prevented from contributing. The peace and prosperity of the future world, the Master writes, will depend in considerable measure on the practical application of this teaching.

Source: 'Abdu'l-Bahá, Selections from the Writings of 'Abdu'l-Bahá (Bahá'í World Centre, 1978), Tablet on the equality of women. Public domain text from Project Gutenberg eBook #19287.

'Abdu'l-Bahá. (1978). *Selections from the Writings of 'Abdu'l-Bahá*. https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/19287/pg19287-images.html