Moors, Jureidini, Özbay, Sabban 167older print media have also at times dealt with non-kin domestic labor. In
the late nineteenth-century Ottoman Empire, for instance, women writ-
ers expressed their criticisms of slavery as an institution.^43 This was not
so much because they considered slavery itself as inhumane, but rather
because they considered slavery as immoral for the very reason that it
enabled the practice of concubinage. Writers were not necessarily much
concerned with the experiences of slaves; rather they used slavery alle-
gorically to address political issues, such as when the abolishment of slav-
ery was read as freedom from state despotism. Neither were the informa-
tion media much concerned about young girls working in households.
As Ozbay discovered in her research on the relations between adopted
daughters and the members of the families that had taken them in,
newspapers did not address this issue. Their plight was most poignantly
addressed by Republican novelists who strongly criticized the practice of
using evlatlıks as cheap domestic labor.^44
ore recently, especially in countries with a very small national M
population such as the United Arab Emirates, the employment of
migrant domestic workers has been hotly debated.^45 While Emirati fami-
lies consider the employment of domestic workers a necessity, in pub-
lic discourse the employment of foreign women as domestic workers is
deemed highly problematic. Warnings of “national disaster scenarios”
abound in which children are seen as insufficiently socialized citizens of
the nation-state in terms of language and religion, and Emirati women
are blamed for neglecting their offspring.^46 Such debates also find their
way into the press. Sabban points to some differences between Arabic
language and English language newspapers in their reporting on this
issue.^47 Comparing the English language Gulf News and the Arabic lan-
guage al-Khalij, she concluded that al-Khalij had twice as many negative
articles on migrant domestic workers, with more than one quarter of the
articles criticizing the national dependence on migrant domestic work-
ers. Gulf News, in contrast, more often defined migrant domestic work-
ers as victims, and it was the only paper that also included a few suc-
cess stories. This divide is not one of nationals versus non-nationals (all
businesses are owned by nationals) but one of audiences, with the ability
to read Arabic or English the critical distinction. Also relevant here is
that Gulf News has become a leading newspaper in the Gulf, read by the