Woman in the Fields of Work

It pleases me today, as one of the Arab women readers, that a distinguished lady like Mrs. Alice Nakkash, who recently took the chair of the editorial committee of “The Woman's Voice,” should have turned her attention to the fundamental practical sides of woman's life among us, asking for writing in the pages of this women's magazine on the position of woman in the fields of work, with all possible precision and clarity, so that it may become feasible to treat her problems in the light of the facts as they are: for how much we lose when we take up the study of women's affairs in general abstractions that rest on nothing in reality and naturally lead to no tangible result.

While we go on stirring up debates over the possibility or impossibility of woman's taking part in the public fields of work, and multiply citations from this or that learned or intellectual book to prove this or that point of view — while we are busy with this theoretical dialogue, we find that woman now has problems that have sprung from a new reality, a reality that has entered among the data of which the woman question is composed; and this reality is nothing other than woman's actual entry into the public fields of work. To go on inquiring, then, whether woman is fit to enter the various fields of work is a gesture that betrays ignorance of reality, or a pretense of ignorance; and in any case it brings woman no practical benefit, for it turns us away from the points of error in the conditions that surround her new life. The examples of this deviation are many; among them is the disregard of the question of equal wages for woman and man for every work equal in kind and in quantity.

We all know that there is a labor law which provides, among other things, that the minimum daily wage of workers shall be 360 Lebanese piasters. But what we do not know — because we have not sought to know it — is that the working woman receives only 200 Lebanese piasters for a single day, that is, 160 piasters less than the man; and that there are girls who work for a daily wage ranging between one hundred and twenty-five and one hundred and fifty Lebanese piasters for a day's work. Only those women workers who have worked in one and the same establishment for five or six years receive a daily wage of two hundred and fifty Lebanese piasters.

So much for the level of wages and their inequality with the man's wages for the same work.

As for the hours of work, the girl often works more than eight hours a day, beginning her work at six in the morning and finishing at four, and sometimes at six, in the evening. The night hours are paid the same as the hours of day work, without any increase.

There is also the question of health conditions in the places of work. These conditions are wholly lacking, for there is no supervision by the Ministry of Health nor any other supervision — above all since the authority to carry out this supervision, to submit reports, and to draw up official reports of violations was taken away from the Union for the Protection of Childhood, an organization that had been recognized as an institution of public benefit under Decree No. 310 L.A. The men and women workers of the cotton mills are often stricken with diseases of the chest for want of masks to protect them from the deadly cotton dust, and for want of the ventilation required to lessen the effect of that deadly dust; this in addition to the absence of sanitary conveniences, of places for taking meals, of the provision of uncontaminated drinking water, and so forth.

Girls are often afflicted with swelling of the veins of the legs — “varices” — from the long hours of standing; and the girl stricken with such a disease cannot leave her work,

because the employers refuse to pay the compensation provided for in the labor law. It happened to a girl I knew two years ago, named Suad Fuad Basil, eighteen years of age, that she was stricken with the disease of “varices” and obtained a medical report from Dr. Salim al-Hayek declaring the presence of this disease in the said girl; yet the employer refused to allow the said girl to leave her work and to pay her the legal compensation, contenting himself with offering the girl a “change” in the kind of her work for one month, “for rest” — and no sooner had the month passed than he put her back at her former work.

This is what more than ten thousand women workers are exposed to, the greatest number of them employed in the weaving mills, where they make up 80 percent, with 10 percent in the match factories and 10 percent in other branches of industry.

There are also the women employed in the government departments and the offices of the companies: most of these employees receive wages lower than the man's wages for the same work.

From this we see, then, that the treatment of women's questions in our country is carried on in a most superficial fashion, because we are so far from taking our stand on reality, and run on instead in talk of theoretical abstractions — so that at times the situation becomes a farce that invites mockery, as is now the case to a great degree: while woman is entering the public fields of work and actually sharing with man in every field, we see the official circles, and most of the intellectual circles, still debating the question of the rightness or wrongness of letting her share in these fields. That is the logical side; on the practical side, this state of things does great harm to the woman's cause, for it turns efforts away from her real problems, some of which I have pointed out in this hurried word.

And if at the opening of my word I expressed my delight at the initiative shown by the editorial committee of “The Woman's Voice” in studying women's affairs in a realistic, scientific way, it is because I have never ceased to feel, deeply and insistently, a deficiency into which women's circles fall in this respect — and not least the magazine “The Woman's Voice,” the one magazine that speaks in woman's name in this country, and one that has covered a long stretch on the course of progress in other respects. But it is my conviction that it can never become a necessary and useful element in the women's field unless it grasps the importance of the matters I have pointed to in passing where women's causes are concerned, and sets itself to study them in a serious and realistic way. And that is what we hope for it, out of care for the interest of woman.