Why Is the Family Allowance the Man's Right and Not the Woman's??

An open letter from Edvick Jureidini Shayboub to Mrs. Laure Tabet,
president of the League of Women's Organizations, and to every woman in Lebanon

Here it is — my case — one of the strangest cases of its kind, which I felt it my duty to lay open to view, so that the woman in Lebanon may see what injustice our laws do to her rights — in the hope that a cry from her may awaken the legislators to their duty of amending such laws to suit this age.

For two and a half years I have worked as an employee in the Ministry of Information: supervisor of the women's program and announcer of the morning period. I was confirmed on the permanent state roster under last year's staff appointments. And when the employees began drawing their family allowances due for the year 1953, I met with an anomalous situation that singled me out, alone among all the employees, on the ground that I am a woman, and that the family allowance is the right of the man, the family's provider. I was instructed to submit a petition to the Ministry of Finance stating that I am the mother of two children who have no provider but me, and requesting on that basis their family allowance, like the other confirmed employees.

After months of applications and follow-up, the answer to my petition came back: refused, on the ground of "its illegality." For I, in proof of my claim, had not attached to the request my husband's death certificate! — and this despite the signature of the responsible director and his attestation to the truth of what the petition contained!

My dignity rose up, as though an insult had touched me, in the face of this anomalous treatment; I refused to produce my husband's death certificate, and I instructed the clerk to send up my answer to that effect.

Here I ask:

Why does the man draw, with no questions asked, a family allowance for his wife and children, while all this stern inquisition is carried out against the woman? Why may not every woman employed by the government receive an allowance for her children, as is the case with the man? This mother, who fills a government post equal to the man's, has the natural right — as a citizen who performs her full duty and pays her taxes to the state — to be given her family allowance in all circumstances, except in the case where the husband is also a government employee; in that case the family allowance is withheld from the woman, so that it will not be paid out twice. Apart from that case, the woman has the right to draw the full allowance even if she has a husband.

Laws like these, marked by bias and favoritism, which we run up against in our public life from time to time, are no longer fit to stand; they must be revoked and revised anew in keeping with the spirit of the age, and with the dignity and self-respect that belong to woman — especially the educated woman.

Discrimination like this no longer befits a country in which the cause of woman has passed out of the narrow bounds of reaction into the broad field of equality. And it is strange that a problem such as this, which the woman sees as repugnant and unjust, should appear in the eyes of some men fair and familiar.

We are demanding no more than our right, and our demand is just and equitable: just as every man has the absolute right to his family allowance, exactly so must the woman have hers — except in the one case I have already explained.