Arab women were distinguished through ancient and modern times by their active participation in various spheres of life. They played the role of the Queen, the political, the warrior, the poet and the artist, as well as her role as a mother. However, she had limited opportunities to lead and contribute to the political process. She had many obstacles to her participation in politics through racist institutions and laws that limited women's choices to run for office. However, in spite of this, women's names have emerged throughout history as the best example of women being able to exercise their duties and represent their countries internally and externally. However, many of these women neglected history and did not mention their names very much. Among these women is the first Arab actress at the United Nations, Alice Kandalft, whose country was Syria.
Alice was born in 1895 in Damascus to a family of her ancient families. She was the first Arab woman to represent her country as an ambassador to the United Nations in the 1940s.
I studied in Kandalft in Damascus and then joined the Syrian Protestant College (the American University of Beirut currently). In 1919, it received a study mission from the King Katherine Commission.
Kandalft participated in the first founding meeting of the Ba'ath Arab Socialist Party, along with Michel Aflaq, Salah Bitar and others in 1939. She also participated in the founding of the intellectual forum in 1946 alongside Al Khaimi.
United Nations documents acknowledge that she is one of those women who do not forget their presence. In her years at the United Nations she has been a living example of who believes in a cause and defends it to the point of adhering to it. How can it be a case of a homeland that is intended to be bad? Her spirit and thought strong defense.
The United Nations documented Alice's meetings with many international delegations there. On January 5, 1945, she attended the second UN session on the situation of women around the world and presented her speech on the situation of women in the Arab world and in Syria in particular. Of French colonialism, and at the International Meeting of Women's Economic Rights at the fortieth United Nations meeting on women's rights to property.
Alice was a prominent presence in the corridors of the United Nations. This is confirmed by her images in which she met with a number of representatives of the influential countries at the time to defend the Syrian cause and to attract these countries to support the idea of independence that was successful with the beginning of the next world.
The Lebanese Ambassador Mei Rihani mentioned in her book from Beirut to Washington (Part III) that she met with her at a luncheon hosted by UNESCO and attended by the Iraqi poet Ahmed Al-Safi Al-Najafi and the well-known Palestinian Professor Isaac Husseini and others. To an intellectual class that was very rare in the Arab world at that time, especially since she graduated from Columbia University in New York, where she returned to Syria at the United Nations.
Alice, in her political history, did not forget her literary interests. She founded a political literary salon in the city of Damascus in the old Amiya Hotel in 1942, the first of its kind in the country. The country's politicians and teachers, Salah al-Din al-Bitar, Omar Abu Risha, Michel Aflaq, Fakhri al-Baroudi, Muhammad Suleiman al-Ahmad, and many others. From this forum began several political movements formed influential parties in the subsequent political life of Syria, including "Baath."
With the disappearance of political life in the country of loneliness with Egypt, Kandalft moved to Lebanon to live in it and in its hotel that likes the old hotel Amia.
Mrs. Kandalft died in the mid-1960s in Beirut and was buried there.