TODAY ‘ABDU’L-BAHÁ IS the guest of the Minerva Club, a women’s club in New York, where he is speaking on sex equality at their annual luncheon at the Waldorf Astoria. Wherever he has gone in America during the last seven months, he says, everything is always “hurry, hurry, hurry.”.

“‘He made a great hit with the assembled Minervas,’” the New York Tribune reports, “because he called them ‘a radiant faced assemblage,’ and told them that women were fully the equal of men where they weren’t men’s superiors.”

“The only real difference between men and women,’ he said, ‘is that men’s faces are covered with disagreeable growths of hair, while women’s faces are clean and decent.’”

“‘And even that is true now only in Oriental countries, for I perceive that here in America gentlemen are doing away with that difference by shaving.’ Here the white haired sage let his blue eyes twinkle a little, just to show that a seer could crack a joke,” the reporter wrote.

The coming week will be ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s last full week in America. We will continue to look ahead to the future, the end of the Great War, ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s program for global collective security, how the Progressive Era ends in a disappointing “return to normalcy” after the war, and we follow the places ‘Abdu’l-Bahá visited in New York as they grow and change through the twentieth century.