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
• “The Woman's Voice” thanks the institutes of higher learning and the cultural institutions that have kindly invited it to attend their annual ceremonies.
It takes this occasion to repeat what it has announced before: that it begs to be excused for its inability to answer all invitations and to report on them at length, and that at the same time it welcomes all the news, photographs, and comments that reach it from the various fields of social activity in the country.