One of Our Social Afflictions

We all know that the servant girl has a great effect on providing the housewife's comfort and happiness, and we all complain today of the problem of servants, from both the moral and the material standpoints. Whereas the servant girl's guardian used to ask about the condition of the employer and the morals of the members of his family before asking about the wage she would receive — out of care for his daughter's morals — today you find him neither asking nor caring about anything but the sum he will put in his pocket. And the tempting wage comes, for the most part, only from the foreign houses; and these care nothing for the affairs of their servant or her conduct, whatever it may be — indeed they find it a natural matter, beyond reproach. Then comes a circumstance in which this servant is compelled to leave her master's house; and service in a native house does not please her, because the wage may be less, the work more, and the freedom limited; and she recoils from returning to her village, because she finds that she has gone back to the fetters of customs and traditions and village labor after having been freed of them, and the comforts that descended upon her have spoiled her — so she throws herself into the street, where the livelihood is easy and cheap, and where there is temptation, the corruption of morals, and the loss of decency and honor.

Therefore — in mercy to the village girl and in care for her morals and manners, on the one hand; and to ease the work of domestic service in Lebanese houses, to provide for the housewife's comfort, and to secure a portion of her family's happiness, on the other — I hold it a duty that a committee be formed from the Union, the Cooperation Club, the employment bureau, and the Committee for the Uplift of Village Women, to solve this problem by making contact with the foreign circles concerned, in order to fix wages and to hold the servant to account for her moral conduct. Thus we may manage to preserve, in some measure, the Lebanese village character, and the pride and gallantry with which it is natively endowed.

It is enough that our young men have deserted their Lebanon in pursuit of a livelihood; let us then guard our girls from moral decline and social chaos.