THE RISING VALUE OF A BABY
You unto whom a child is born to-day, unto you is this written. I bring
you glad tidings. Blessed are you among the nations of the earth. Wise
men all over the world are hurrying to bring you gifts. Only lift
your eyes from the baby at your breast and in your mirror I am sure
you shall see the shining aureole about your head. Exalted are you,
O, woman among all people. Know that you have become a Most Important
Person. Governments are getting ready to give your job a priority it
never had before. For you, why you are the maker of men!
The particular commodity that you furnish has been alarmingly
diminished of late. It is clear what has happened with the present
world shortage of sugar: we pay 11c and 16c a pound where once we paid
four. The world shortage in coal has increased its cost in certain
localities almost to that of a precious metal, so that in Paris within
the year it has sold for $80 a ton. It is just as the political
economists have always told us, that the law of supply and demand fixes
prices. That which becomes scarce is already made dear.
Thus is explained quite simply over the world to-day the rising value
of a baby. Civilisation is running short in the supply of men. We
don’t know exactly how short. There are the Red Cross returns that
say in the first six months alone of the war there were 2,146,000
men killed in battle and 1,150,000 more seriously wounded. Figures,
however, of cold statistics, as always, may be challenged. There is a
living figure that may not be. See the woman in black all over Europe
and to-morrow we shall meet her in Broadway. There are so many of her
in every belligerent land over there that her crêpe veil flutters
across her country’s flag like the smoke that dims the landscape in
a factory town. It is the mourning emblem of her grief unmistakably
symbolising the dark catastrophe of civilisation that has signalled
Parliaments to assemble in important session. Population is being
killed off at such an appalling rate at the front that the means for
replacing it behind the lines must be speeded up without delay. To-day
registrar generals in every land in white-faced panic are scanning the
figures of the birth rates that continue to show steadily diminishing
returns. And in every house of government in the world, above all the
debates on aeroplanes and submarines and shipping and shells, there is
the rising alarm of another demand. Fill the cradles! In the defence of
the state men bear arms. It is women who must bear the armies.
Whole battalions of babies have been called for. If we in America have
had no requisitions as yet, it is because we have not yet begun to
count our casualty costs. L’Alliance Nationale pour L’Accroissement
de la Population Française is calling on the French mothers for at
least four children apiece during the next decade. Britain’s Birth
Rate Commission wants a million new babies from Scotland alone. The
Gesellschaft fur Bevolkerungs Politik, which is the society for
increase of population organised at a great meeting in the Prussian
Diet House, has entered its order with the German women for a million
more babies annually for the next ten years. And that is the “birth
politics” of men.
Then to the proposals of savants and scientists, sociologists and
statesmen, military men and clergymen and kings, there has been
entered a demurrer. Governments may propose, Increase and multiply.
She-who-shall-dispose overlays their falling birth rate figures with
the rising death rate statistics. And there is tragedy in her eyes:
“What,” she asks, “have you done with my children? The babies that I
have given you, you have wasted them so!”
Is it not true? Even now along with the war’s destruction of life on
the most colossal scale known to history, children throughout the
world are dying at a rate that equals the military losses. In England
a hundred thousand babies under one year of age and a hundred thousand
more that do not succeed in getting born are lost annually. In America
our infant mortality is 300,000 a year. In Germany it is half a million
babies who die annually. The economics of the situation to a woman
is not obscure. Conservation of the children we already have, is the
advice of the real specialist in repopulation. One other suggestion
she contributes. She has made it practically unanimously in all lands.
In the Prussian Diet House it was one speaking with authority as the
mother of eight who interpolated: “Meine Herren, if you would induce
women to bring more children into the world you must make life easier
for mothers.” “Messieurs, Messieurs,” called the Union Française pour
le Suffrage des Femmes to the Société pour la Vie with its curious
proposal of money grants in reward to fathers of large families, “to
get children, you must cultivate mothers!” “Gentlemen,” declared the
Duchess of Marlborough at a great public meeting on race renewal held
in the Guild Hall, London, “care of the nation’s motherhood is the war
measure that will safeguard the future of the state.”
These amendments in birth politics offered on behalf of the Most
Important Person have been practically adopted the world over.
Chancellors of the Exchequer are everywhere busy writing off
expenditures from the taxes running into millions, in support of
nation-wide campaigns for the conservation of the child. Maternity from
now on in every land takes the status of a protected industry. Britain
is ready to devote two and one-half million dollars a year to schools
for mothers. France has voted a “wards of the nation” bill, to provide
for the care of 700,000 war orphans, at a cost to the state which
it is estimated will mean an outlay of two hundred million dollars.
Public provisions for motherhood and infancy are proceeding apace
with provisions for the armies. If you are going to have a baby in
Nottingham, England, a public health visitor comes round to see that
you are perfectly comfortable and quite all right. And the municipality
that is thus anxiously watching over your welfare solicitously inquires
through a printed blank on which the reply is to be recorded, “Have
you two nightgowns?” In Berlin large signs at the subway and elevated
stations direct you to institutions where rates are moderate, or even
the Kaiser himself will be glad to pay the bill. Similar facilities are
offered by the government of France in the “Guide des Services Gratuits
Protegeant la Maternite,” with which the walls of Paris are placarded.
Even the war baby, whose cry for attention not all the ecclesiastical
councils and the military tribunals commanding “Hush” has been able to
still, at last is too valuable to be lost. And every Parliament has
arranged to extend the nation’s protection on practically equal terms
to all children, not excluding those we have called “illegitimate,”
because somebody before them has broken a law.
FINANCING MATERNITY
You see, yesterday only a mother counted her jewels. To-day states
count them too. Even Jimmie Smith in, we will say, England, who before
the war might have been regarded as among the least of these little
ones, has become the object of his country’s concern. Jimmie came
screaming into this troublous world in a borough of London’s East End,
where there were already so many people that you didn’t seem to miss
Jimmie’s father and some of the others who had gone to the war. Jimmie
belongs to one of those 300,000 London families who are obliged to live
in one and two room tenements. Five or six, perhaps it was five, little
previous brothers and sisters waited on the stair landing outside the
door until the midwife in attendance ushered them in to welcome the new
arrival. Now Jimmie is the stuff from which soldiers are made, either
soldiers of war or soldiers of industry. And however you look at the
future, his country’s going to need Jimmie. He is entered in the great
new ledger which has been opened by his government. The Notification of
Births Act, completed by Parliament in 1915, definitely put the British
baby on a business basis. Every child must now, within thirty-six hours
of its advent, be listed by the local health authorities. Jimmie was.
And he was thereby automatically linked up with the great national
child saving campaign. Since then, so much as a fly in his milk is a
matter of solicitude to the borough council. If he sneezes, it’s heard
in Westminster. And it’s at least worried about there. Though all the
King’s councillors and all the King’s men don’t yet quite know what
they’re to do with the many problems of infancy and complications of
pregnancy with which they are confronted, now that these are matters
for state attention.
A first and most natural conclusion that they reached, as equally has
been the case in other lands, was that the illness of babies was due
to the ignorance of mothers. Well, some of it is. And that has proven
a very good place to begin. For every one else, from a plumber to a
professor, there has always been training. Only a mother was supposed
to find out how by herself. Now she no longer has to. The registration
of Jimmie’s birth itself brought the Health Visitor, detailed from the
public health department of the borough, for her first municipal call
on his mother. She found Mrs. Smith up and trying to make gruel for
herself. After serious expostulation, the maternity patient was induced
to return to bed, where she belonged. Gruel, the white-faced woman who
sank back on the pillow insisted, was easy. Why, probably she should
not have minded it at all. Only that day before yesterday she had
gotten up to do a bit of wash and had fainted at the tub. She hadn’t
seemed to be just right since. Neither had the baby.
The visitor leaned across the bed and removed a “pacifier” from the
baby’s mouth. “But he has to have it,” said the mother, “he cries so
much. All my children had it.” Looking round at them, the visitor saw
that it was true. Each exhibited some form of the facial malformation
that substantiated the statement. And one was deaf from the adenoid
growth. And one was not quite bright. This was, of course, no time for
a medical lecture beyond Mrs. Smith’s comprehension. But the effort was
made to impress her with the simple statement of fact that a pacifier
really was harmful for a child. There were inquiries about the baby’s
feeding. No, of course, it was not being done scientifically. Well,
the mother was told, if he were fed at regular intervals he would be
in better condition not to cry all the time. And of course she herself
must not get tired. It was Mrs. Smith’s first introduction to the
practice of mothercraft as an art. At the school for mothers recently
opened in the next square, where the Health Visitor had her enrolled
within a month, her regular instruction began.
The schools for mothers are now being established as rapidly as
possible throughout the country. It is not an absolutely new
enterprise. The first one in England, from which all the others are
being copied, had been started in London by an American woman who had
married an Englishman, Mrs. Alys Russell, a graduate of Bryn Mawr.
Women recognised at once the value of the plan. It was only a question
of popularising and paying for it. This the war has accomplished.
Government will now defray 50 per cent. of the cost of a school under
the operation of either voluntary agencies or borough authorities.
Already 800 schools have been opened. Some of the most successful
are at Birmingham, Sheffield and Glasgow, under municipal direction.
Parliament, you see, by financing it has established the school for
mothers as a national institution.
The “infant consultation” is the feature about which its activities
centre. Jimmie was taken regularly for the doctor’s inspection and
advice and there is on file there at the school a comprehensive record
in which is entered every fact of his family history and environment
and his own physical condition, with the phenomena of its changes
from week to week. The weekly weighing indicated very accurately
his progress. And the week that his weary mother’s milk failed, the
scales reported it. The modified milk was carefully prescribed but
the next week’s weighing indicated that Mrs. Smith wasn’t getting the
ingredients together right. The Health Visitor was assigned to go
home with her and show her just how. Like that, Jimmie was constantly
supervised. When the doctor at the consultation, tapping the little
distended abdomen with skilled fingers, announced, “This baby is
troubled with colic,” Mrs. Smith said he had been having it a good
deal lately. Well, a little questioning corrected the difficulty. The
trouble was pickles, and he never had them after that. Also he never
had the summer complaint, which the former Smith babies always had in
September.
You see, there is no proper cupboard at Jimmie’s house. There is
only the recess beside the chimney, and flies come straight from
the manure heap at the back of the house to the milk pitcher on the
shelf. Mrs. Smith didn’t know that flies mattered. She knows now, and
at the school she has learned that you protect the baby from summer
complaint by covering the pitcher with a muslin cloth. She also has
learned how to make the most ingenious cradle that ever was contrived.
It’s constructed from a banana box, but it perfectly well serves the
purpose for which it was designed. That Jimmie should sleep alone, is
one of the primary directions at the school. Of course, it is clear
that this is hygienically advisable, and there is another reason: these
crowded London areas are so crowded that even the one bed the family
usually possesses is also overcrowded. With some five other children
occupying it with their mother, there was danger that Jimmie would
some night be smothered. “Overlaying,” as it is called, is the reason
assigned in the death certificate for the loss of a good many London
babies.
BETTER BABIES ARE PRODUCED
Jimmie in his banana cradle slept better than any of the other babies
had. He had a little more air. Also he was cleaner than the others,
because his mother had learned that dirt and disease germs are
dangerous. But it is not easy, you should know, to keep children clean
where every pint of water you wash them in must be carried up stairs
from the tap on the first floor and down stairs again to the drain. A
frequent bath all around in the one stewpan that perforce must serve
for the purpose is out of the question. But there was a real wash basin
now among the new household furnishings that Mrs. Smith was gradually
acquiring. There are so many things that one goes without when one’s
husband is an ordinary labourer at the limit line of 18s. a week. But
when he becomes a soldier and you get your regular separation allowance
from the government, you begin to rise in the social scale. Mrs.
Smith, like so many others of the English working class women, now
during the war was “getting on her feet.” And some of the improvement
in family life was certainly registering in that chart card at the
school consultation that recorded Jimmie’s progress.
When his father, home from Flanders on furlough, held him on his knee,
it was a better baby than he had ever held there before. For one thing
it was a heavier baby: children in this district used to average
thirteen pounds at one year of age. And now those whose attendance
at the consultations is regular average sixteen and seventy-five
hundredths pounds. Also Jimmie was a healthier baby. He hadn’t rickets,
like the first baby, who had suffered from malnutrition. What could you
do when there was a pint of milk a day for the family and the baby had
“what was left”? He hadn’t tuberculous joints, like the second baby. He
hadn’t died of summer complaint, like the third and the fifth babies.
And he hadn’t had convulsions, like the seventh baby, who had been born
blind and who fortunately had died too. Yes, when one counts them up,
there have been a good many, and if some hadn’t died, where would Mrs.
Smith have put them all? The six that there are, seem quite to fill two
rooms and the one bed.
Still in the course of time there was going to be another baby.
Governments crying, “Fill the cradles,” seem not to see those that are
already spilling over. But the development of birth politics has at
last arrived at an important epoch—important to all the women in the
world—in the recognition of the economic valuation of maternity. It
has dashed acquiescent compliance in a world old point of view most
tersely expressed in that religious dictum of Luther: “If a woman die
from bearing, let her. She is only here to do it.” Mrs. Smith will
not die from bearing to-day if her government can help it—nor any
other mother in any other land. Instead, all science and sociology are
summoned to see her through. The rising value of a baby demonstrates
clearly that you cannot afford to lose a maker of men. The British
Government and the German Government and the French Government,
speeding up population, are now taking every precaution for the
protection of maternity. The mortality record for women dying in child
birth in England has been about 6,000 a year. In Germany it has been
10,000. There was also in addition to this death rate a damage rate.
The national health insurance plan inaugurated by several countries
before the war was beginning to reveal it: the claims for pregnancy
disabilities, the actuaries reported, were threatening to swamp the
insurance societies. New significance was added to these phenomena when
there began to be the real war necessity for conserving population.
The Registrar General, laying the case before Parliament in England,
found it suddenly strengthened by a book presented by the Women’s
Co-operative Guild. The volume constitutes one of the most amazing
documents that ever found a place in any state archives. It is entitled
“Maternity,” and is a symposium constituting the cry of woman in
travail. A compilation of 160 letters written by members of this
working women’s organisation recounting the personal experiences of
each in childbirth, it reflects conditions under which motherhood is
accomplished among the 32,000 members of the Guild. “Maternity,” with
its simple, direct annals of agony is a classic in literature, a human
document recommended for all nations to study. The gentlemen in the
House of Commons, who had turned its tragic pages, looked into each
other’s faces with a new understanding: there was more than maternal
ignorance the matter with infant mortality! And a new population
measure was determined on.
“These letters” impressively announced the Right Honourable Herbert
Samuel, “give an intimate picture of the difficulties, the miseries,
the agonies that afflict many millions of our people as a consequence
of normal functions of their lives. An unwise reticence has hitherto
prevented the public mind from realising that maternity presents a
whole series of urgent social problems. It is necessary to take action
to solve the problems here revealed. The conclusion is clear that it
is the duty of the community so far as it can to relieve motherhood of
its burdens.” So you will now find the maternity centre being erected
next door to the school for mothers. The Government in 1916, announcing
that it would assume also 50 per cent. of this expense, sent a circular
letter to all local authorities throughout the kingdom, urgently
recommending the new institution “in spite of the war need for economy
at the present time in all other directions.”
[Illustration:
HER GRACE THE DUCHESS OF MARLBOROUGH
Formerly Consuelo Vanderbilt of New York, who is leading the movement
in England for the conservation of the nation’s childhood.
]
STARTING THE BABY RIGHT
Mrs. Smith was automatically registered from the school for mothers
to the books of the maternity centre when the Health Visitor learned
that it was time. The medical authorities report that 40 per cent. of
the total deaths of infants occur within a month after birth and are
due very largely to conditions determined by the state of the mother’s
health. A specific trouble is maternal exhaustion. Mrs. Smith, under
weekly observation at the ante-natal clinic, was discovered to be
hungry. She didn’t know it herself, because she had so long been that
way. It gets to be a sort of habit with the working class woman, who
must feed her husband first, because he is the bread winner. He has the
meat and the children have the soup, and she is very likely to have the
bread and tea. The clinic doctor, looking Mrs. Smith over, wrote out
a prescription. It wasn’t put up in a bottle. It was put on a plate.
Mrs. Smith was to attend the mothers’ dinner, served every day at the
centre. The mother, being the medium of nourishment for the child, the
good food that she would get here would do more than any dosing that
might be done afterward to ensure the right kind of constitution for
the coming little British citizen. In the “pre-natal class,” under the
instruction of a sewing teacher and with municipal patterns furnished
by the city of London, she made better baby clothes than she had ever
had before. The materials, bought at wholesale, are furnished at cost
price, the entire layette at 10s. to be paid for by a deposit of 6d. a
week.
As time went on, Mrs. Smith’s headaches became more severe. Carrying
water and coal upstairs greatly aggravated the heart trouble she had
had since Jimmie’s birth. Suddenly dizzy one day, she nearly fell from
a chair on which she was standing to wash the windows. The next morning
her feet were so swollen she could with difficulty get on her shoes.
Her neighbour on the lower landing remarked, “Of course, you’ll have to
be worse before you’re better.” And she herself knew no other way.
But the ante-natal clinic did. The doctor wrote kidney trouble on her
attendance card. That, of course, was the technical diagnosis. He might
have said it another way had he written “overwork” and “overbearing.”
It was a long time since Mrs. Smith had been strong. She had nursed two
of the children with measles right up to the day that the seventh had
arrived. Three months later, with the eighth expected, she was going
out charring. Her husband was out of work. The 30 shillings maternity
benefit that would be coming to her from the national insurance
department on the birth of her baby, would have to be supplemented
somehow in order to meet all the additional expenses of the occasion.
Well, the eighth baby was a miscarriage instead. Then there was the
ninth, and then there was Jimmie, in quick succession. And with the
five others and trying to keep up with all that she was learning at
the school for mothers should be done for children, why it was more
than one pair of hands was equal to. She had now reached the verge of
collapse.
The clinic doctor was telling her gravely that she must have medical
attendance at once. The business of a centre is to supply supervision,
but for medical treatment the patient is referred to her own physician.
Mrs. Smith didn’t have one. Half the babies of the kingdom are brought
into the world by midwives. Mrs. Smith could not afford a doctor. Well,
Parliament could. The bill, presented by the physician in whose care
she was now placed, was paid half by the national government and half
by the health department of this borough. It is an arrangement which is
considered a good investment by the national treasury. Without this aid
Mrs. Smith would have died in convulsions and a new baby might never
have been born. Careful feeding and careful doctoring obviated both
disasters and carried the case to a triumphant conclusion. The baby
is here. On his first birthday anniversary he tipped the scales at 20
pounds.
Mrs. Smith counts it a confinement _de luxe_ that brought him. For the
first occasion in her maternal history she did not have to get out of
bed to do the washing. For two weeks she just “laid up” while a Home
Help took the helm in her household. The Home Help is an adaptable
person in a clean blouse and a clean apron, who comes in each morning,
and cooks and scrubs, and washes, and gets the children off to school.
Her wages of 13s. a week were paid half by the centre and half by Mrs.
Smith through her weekly 6d. contribution to the Home Help Society. But
there was a greater event than even the Home Help. A “bed to yourself
to have a baby in,” is the dream of luxury to which the working class
woman with her new war-time allowance looks forward. Mrs. Smith,
carefully saving out a shilling here from the “coal and lights,” and
another shilling there, perhaps, from “clothes and boots,” painfully
accumulating the little fund, had achieved the bed of her ambition.
And neighbours from the length of the square and around the next
turning came in to look at her as she lay in state, as it were, the new
improved baby by her side.
There are improved babies like Mrs. Smith’s arriving every day in
England. They are not all among the working class. They are reported
with increasing frequency, as at Nottingham and Huddersfield, among
the artisan class. Even comparatively well-to-do mothers in the best
of homes have not in the past been always accustomed to the skilled
medical supervision during pregnancy which is now afforded without
cost. It is Parliament’s plan to have the new maternity service as
available for the entire population as is public education for school
children. The city of Bradford exhibits the ideal of a complete
municipal system now in successful operation: an infants’ department
occupying a new three-story building, with a consultation to which
600 mothers come weekly; a maternity department with the ante-natal
clinic; a maternity hospital, announced as “the first of its kind” in
the world; a staff of municipal midwives for service in the homes; a
cooking depot, from which meals in heat-proof vessels distributed by
motor vans are dispensed to 500 expectant mothers daily; and a staff of
20 women health visitors to connect the homes of Bradford with all of
this municipal maternity service.
Still England’s comprehensive scheme of assistance to mothers grows.
Down the street, Mrs. Smith noticed one day another new institution
that has been started. It is a municipal _crèche_, for which the
Government pays 75 per cent. of the cost of operation. The sign in the
window says that it is a nursery for the care and maintenance of the
children of munition workers. Three meals are provided, and the charge
is 6d. a day. Just around the corner, the Labour Exchange has out a
sign, “8,000 women wanted at once for shell-filling factories. Age 16
to 40. No previous experience necessary. Fill the factories and help to
win the war.”
And Mrs. Smith is thinking. The school for mothers has taught her
to. Do you know that the number of children who survive the first
year in good health is 71 per cent. in homes where the wage income is
over 20s. a week and it drops to 51 per cent. in homes where the wage
income is less than 20s. a week? The sociologists have also some very
interesting figures that were compiled at Bradford. In 1911 the infant
mortality rate there in houses that rented for six pounds and less was
163 in 1,000; house rent six to eight pounds, infant mortality, 128;
house rent eight to twelve pounds, infant mortality, 123; house rent
over twelve pounds, infant mortality, 88. And here in London infant
mortality is over 200 per 1,000 in one-room tenements, as compared with
100 in tenements of four rooms and upwards. Now, Mrs. Smith, I don’t
suppose, has ever seen those figures. But she doesn’t need to. She
understands why the small white hearse goes so continuously up and down
some streets. She knows perfectly well that there will be more light
and air for her children in three or four rooms than in two. Also that
the rent will cost her 9s. 6d. a week, where now she pays 4s. 6d. But
in a factory there are women earning 25 and 30s. a week, and even up to
two pounds a week. Mrs. Smith is thinking.
THE MADONNA IN INDUSTRY
Meanwhile over in France Azalie de Rigeaux, at half-past ten this
morning, will step aside from the lathe where she turns fuses, to
retire for say half-an-hour for another service. Azalie de Rigeaux is
a munitions worker in trousers in a Usine le Guerre in a _banlieu_ of
Paris. See her now as she takes her baby in her arms and seats herself
in a low chair by a small crib. A wedding-ringed hand opens her working
blouse from the throat downward, the black lines of the cloth fold
away from her bosom, revealing in lovely contrast the white, satiny
texture of her skin. And she, too, even as you, a mother anywhere in
the world, smiles happily into her baby’s eyes as she holds him to
her breast. It is a mother and child picture the like of which you
will not find in any gallery of Europe. Azalie de Rigeaux, crooning
softly here to her child, is a new figure in life, so new that she has
not yet reached the canvas of even the modern masters in art. See just
above the curve of her arm where rests the bay’s head, the armlet that
she wears on her left sleeve. Embroidered on it is that sign of her
national enlistment, a bursting bomb. It is important because it is the
clue to the new picture. All over the world war has called the woman to
the factory. And what shall she do with the baby? Well, the baby is so
valuable that the state is not going to let it cry.
It is France that makes the security for maternity gilt-edged. By the
gifts they are bringing here, one would say that this is the country
that to-day takes precedence of all others in its appreciation of the
rising value of a baby. As every one has heard, there has not in a long
time, in generations indeed, been a surplus of babies in France. As
a matter of fact, they have always been scarce. And they are so dear
that the passion for the child is the distinctive national trait. This
building in which Azalie de Rigeaux nurses her child to-day was erected
at a cost of 75,000 francs. It stands in the factory yard, adjacent
to the shop in which women make shells. In this sunny high-ceilinged
room, with plenty of sunlight and air, rows and rows of dimpled babies
sleep in the blue cribs with the dainty white cover-lids. Four times
a day the mothers from the shop across the way, as Azalie de Rigeaux
has now, come to nurse them. Outside the long French windows there is a
large French “jardin,” where the older children, in blue and pink check
aprons, play. The nursery dining-room has a low table with little low
chairs, where they come to their meals. Nourishing broths and other
foods are prepared in a shining, perfectly equipped kitchen. There is
a white bathroom with porcelain basins and baths of varying sizes; on
the long shelf across the room are the separate baskets that hold the
individual brushes. Each child, on arrival in the morning, is given a
bath and a complete change of clothes. Once a week they are weighed.
The doctor and the staff of trained nurses are alert to detect the
least deviation from normal. Scientific supervision like this costs the
firm 1 franc 35 centimes per day per child. To Azalie de Rigeaux and
the other mothers in their employ, it is free.
It is this _crèche_ at Ivry-sur-Seine which is the model recommended by
the ministry of munitions to the factories of France. The last feature
to make this, a national institution, absolutely complete, has been
added. It was the Union Française pour le Suffrage des Femmes that one
day held a conference with the ministry of munitions. “Gentlemen,” they
said, “a mother who must go home from a factory to stand over a wash
tub, gets so tired that the baby’s source of nourishment is imperilled.
And when a baby languishes, a future soldier may be lost.”—A state
department was at instant attention—“Gentlemen,” it was pointed out,
“there is one thing more that you must do.” Well, they have done it. In
this model babies’ building at Ivry-sur-Seine there is a steam laundry
in which two women are kept constantly employed, so that there shall be
no night laundry work for the child whom the mother takes home. There
are washed eight hundred diapers a day. You see there is nothing that
the Government will not do for a child in France. Nothing is too much
trouble.
Even her employers will be equally as pleased as the state if Azalie
de Rigeaux shall decide to give another citizen to France. They have
told me so. “Why, it is patriotism,” the factory owner explained to me,
as we stood there among the whirring belts and the revolving wheels
of a thousand machines in this Usine de Guerre. “Don’t you see,” he
patiently elucidated, “I’m sure if she will only have the baby every
one else should do what they can.”
This is what they do for Azalie de Rigeaux. She comes directly
under the protection of L’Office Central d’Assistance Maternelle et
Infantile, which, as you will read on all the walls of Paris, is
organised “to secure to all pregnant women adequate and suitable
nourishment, proper housing accommodations, relief from overwork and
skilled medical advice, all of the social, legal and medical protection
to which she is entitled in a civilised society.” A visitor will arrive
from the nearest Mairie to inform the prospective mother of all the
aids that are available for her. All of the municipally subsidised
institutions have had their accommodations increased since the war.
There are the Municipal Maternity Hospitals, where care is free, or
there is the Mutualité Maternelle, the self-supporting maternity club
through which one may make arrangements for accouchement. There are
free meals for mothers at the Cantines Maternelles, which are spread
over Paris. Are there other children in the family, so that their
care is a burden to the mother? She must not tire herself with the
housework. They will be taken to the country at municipal expense
and she shall go to a Refuge to rest in preparation for the coming
confinement. There are free layettes to be had at every Mairie. A
limousine will even take the lady to a hospital if necessary. The
military automobiles of the army are subject to requisition for this
purpose by L’Office Central d’Assistance Maternelle et Infantile of
Paris.
There is also definite financial assistance. The Government will pay
to Azalie de Rigeaux ten francs and fifty centimes a week for four
weeks before and four weeks after the confinement, with an additional
three francs fifty centimes a week if she nurses the child. To this her
employer tells me he will add his bonus for the baby, 105 francs if
she has been in his employ for one year, 135 francs after three years,
and after six years it will be 165 francs. All indications point to
market quotations on the French baby rising even higher. Prof. Pinard,
the celebrated _accoucher_ of Paris, who has assisted into the world
so many babies that he should know their value as much as any man may,
is saying they are really worth more. Through the Academy of Medicine
in France he is recommending to the Senate a measure providing for a
payment to a mother, from the time that gestation begins until the
child is one year old, of five francs a day.
IT MEANS THE LIBERATION OF THE MOTHER
But most significant to the woman movement of all lands is the welcome
that the Usine de Guerre is extending to Azalie de Rigeaux. Of all the
making over they have been doing for us in industry, this is perhaps
the most revolutionary in its effects on the whole social structure.
For when industry takes the baby, it means the passing of the wage
envelope to a whole class of the population whose arms were hitherto
literally too burdened to reach for it. Here at Ivry-sur-Seine they do
not shake their heads and say, “Oh, you might have a baby. We prefer to
employ a man who won’t.” On the contrary preference in employment is
given to a woman who has a child. The only person who takes precedence
of her is the woman with two children or, of course, with three. From
the day that she signifies she is going to have another, she becomes an
object of special solicitude. She will be shielded from any injurious
strain. Because it may not be well for her to stand at the lathe, she
will be transferred to the gauging department, where she may remain
continuously seated. And, while the gauging department’s regular rate
of pay is but 50 centimes an hour, her own job’s rate of pay, 60, 70,
80 centimes an hour, whatever it may be, will be continued.
“But isn’t it an interruption to your business to have employés
who every now and then have to stop to have a baby?” I asked the
French manufacturer. “Ah, no, Madame,” he replied, “surely it is no
disturbance at all. It is nothing even if a woman should wish to be
absent for two or three months. Is she not serving her country? We
simply arrange a large enough staff of employés so that always there
are some to fill the gaps. Maternity is something that may be estimated
by percentage. We count on it that Camille here will probably have a
baby in July. Etienne, next to her, may have one in September. Well, by
the time a substitute employé is finished with taking Camille’s place,
she will be required in Etienne’s place, then, perhaps, in Azalie’s
place. It is very easy, I say, to arrange.”
And it is because the rising value of a baby makes it worth while.
It is in France, where maternity has always been important, that all
of the institutions for the welfare of the child now being rushed
to completion in other lands have been originally invented. We in
America, in some of our large cities, have started the “clinic” and
the “consultation” and the _crèche_. Italy is inaugurating them.
Russia sent to Paris for specific information about them before the
war. Germany’s “Kaiserin Auguste Victoria Haus” in Berlin, a veritable
“laboratory of the child,” from which the child culture system
adapted from France has been developed for the Empire, is a monument
to the national thoroughness, which, making military preparation for
the conquest of the world, made maternity preparation on almost as
comprehensive a scale.
Industry to-day beckoning the woman, you see, Parliament is bound to
provide for the child. Mrs. Smith in England—or in America or anywhere
else—you need not hesitate.
Azalie de Rigeaux’s baby is, what is it one shall say, as good as gold
all day long. Do you know that he is so well regulated that there is
no deviation from his perfection save on Mondays when he gets back to
the _crèche_ fretful and perhaps a little inclined to be colicky after
a week end at home? At that munitions _crèche_ down your street the
babies shall have a bath every day and no one will have to carry the
water toilsomely upstairs by the pint. Think of the dainty cribs to
sleep in and the beautiful green garden to play in! There are three
meals a day that never fail. You can easier pay for those meals than
cook them. How many skilled vocations are you trying to follow in your
home! The graduate of a school for mothers, you are doing, the best
you can, more than the winner of a Cambridge tripos would attempt to
undertake! Cooking and sewing and nursing, laundry work and scrubbing
and child culture, that is the gamut of the achievements you are trying
to accomplish. Oh, Mrs. Smith, one trade in the factory is easier. What
artisan can be good at his job if he must also putter with half a
dozen others? Well, the world is no longer going to ask it of you, the
maker of men!
THE CHILD’S CHANCE DEPENDS ON FAMILY INCOME
Tradition may still rise to protest: But the home! You wouldn’t abolish
the home! I think you would if you had seen it, Mrs. Smith’s home.
Child mortality in her street is at the rate of 200 per 1,000. I know
a home in the other end of London that is as lovely as a poet’s dream.
Child mortality in this district is 40 per 1,000. There is a great
house facing a park. There are three children in it. They have a day
nursery and a night nursery and a school room all to themselves. They
are cared for by a head nurse, and an assistant nurse, a governess, and
a mother who now and then comes to caress them and see that they are
happy. There are, you see, four women—to say nothing of the household
staff of eight servants indirectly contributing to the same service—to
care for three children in the West End.
In the East End Mrs. Smith has only one pair of hands to do for seven,
and she is no super-woman. They live in two rooms that the fiercest
all the time scrubbing could not keep clean. The discoloured walls are
damp with mildew. You can see the vermin in the cracks. There isn’t any
pantry. There isn’t any sink. There isn’t so much as a cook stove, only
an open grate. _There isn’t any poetry in a home on less than a pound a
week!_
Down the street is the way out to the new home that Mrs. Smith’s wage
envelope will help to build. There will be at least 4 rooms and the
children away during the day under expert care. The little children of
the rich in the West End nursery have no more scientific supervision
than the municipal _crèche_ will afford Mrs. Smith for hers. I know
she will not longer personally wash their faces and wipe their noses.
Even when she tries to, as you may have noticed in any land, she
cannot possibly do those tasks as often as they should be done. The
mere physical needs of children, any one else can attend to. But only
a mother can love them. Hadn’t we better conserve her more for that
special function? The rising value of a baby begins to demand it.
And don’t worry about the effect of factory employment on her
health. Two government commissions of experts, one in France and one
in England, tell us it’s all right after all. Both report that a
properly arranged factory is as good a place as any for a woman. Some
significant figures presented to England’s Birth Rate Commission show
that the proportion of miscarriages is among factory workers 9.2 per
cent. as compared with 16 per cent. among women doing housework in
the home. Hard work and heavy work, you see, are just as harmful in
Mrs. Smith’s kitchen as they might be anywhere else—and not nearly so
well paid! Really, in spite of its historic setting there is no sacred
significance attaching to the figure of a woman bending over a washtub
or on her knees scrubbing a floor. Let us venerate instead Azalie de
Rigeaux nursing her child in a Usine de Guerre! After the schools for
mothers and the maternity clinics have done what they may to reduce
infant mortality, the mothers in industry may do some more. Take your
babies in your arms, Mrs. Smith, and flee from that stalking spectre of
poverty that has already snatched four of them to the grave. The door
of the municipal _crèche_ stands ajar!
Like this, the world is making ready for reconstruction. Let there be
every first aid for the maker of men. We await one more measure: Mrs.
Smith must never again have ten babies when she lives in two rooms—nor
Frau Schmidt in Berlin. This unlimited increase that crowds children
from the cradle to the coffin, in the haste to make room for more, has
been the fatal force that has impelled nations teeming with too many
people to make war for territorial expansion. We shall not blot out
from civilisation the Prussian military ideal until we have likewise
effaced the Prussian maternity ideal of reckless reproduction. That
the cradles of the world may never again spill over, the nations must
rise from the peace table with a new population policy. In the “birth
politics” of the future there must be birth control. When children are
scarce, are they dear. See France! The rising value of a baby may yet
lift the curse of Eve!
Then shall we be ready to repopulate right. After the battles are won
and man’s work of conquest is done, woman’s war work will only have
begun. I have stood in the cathedral at Rheims and in the stricken
silence looked with sickening dismay on the destruction of the
beautiful temple of worship builded with such exquisite art and such
infinite labour. But I assure you not all the cathedrals of Europe
piled in a single colossal ruin, broken sculptured saint on saint, can
stir the beholder with the poignant pain of one war hospital! There
in the whitewashed wards with the smell of blood and ether, where the
maimed lie stiff and still and the dying moan and the mad rave in wild
delirium, stand there and your soul shall shrivel in horror at the
destruction of men! It is the agony of it all, and the suffering and
the sorrow and the grief of it all—and then something more. You creep
with the feeling that every one of these men once was builded with
such exquisite art and such infinite labour and such toilsome pain and
anguish by God and a woman! It is a stupendous task of creation to be
done over again when the armies shall have finished their work. Bone of
her bone and flesh of her flesh, God and woman must rebuild the race.
You unto whom a child can be born to-day, to you Parliaments make their
prayer!
Not a captain of industry who assembles the engines of war, not a
general who directs the armies, may do for his country what you can
do who stand beside its cradles. The cry that rings out over Empires
bleeding in the throes of death is the oldest cry in the world. Women
wanted for maternity!