As in all human problems, ignorance plays an important rôle in this
great problem of childhood’s suffering and misery. The tragedy of the
infant’s position is its helplessness; not only must it suffer on
account of the misfortunes of its parents, but it must suffer from their
vices and from their ignorance as well. Nurses, sick visitors,
dispensary doctors, and those in charge of babies’ hospitals tell
pitiful stories of almost incredible ignorance of which babies are the
victims. A child was given cabbage by its mother when it was three weeks
old; another, seven weeks old, was fed for several days in succession on
sausage and bread with pickles! Both died of gastritis, victims of
ignorance. In another New York tenement home a baby less than nine weeks
old was fed on sardines with vinegar and bread by its mother. Even more
pathetic is the case of the baby, barely six weeks old, found by a
district nurse in Boston in the family clothes-basket which formed its
cradle, sucking a long strip of salt, greasy bacon and with a bottle
containing beer by its side. Though rescued from immediate death, this
child will probably never recover wholly from the severe intestinal
disorder induced by the ignorance of its mother. Yet, after all, it is
doubtful whether the beer and bacon were worse for it than many of the
patent “infant foods” of the cheaper kinds commonly given in good faith
to the children of the poor. If medical opinion goes for anything, many
of these “foods” are little better than slow poisons.[22] Tennyson’s
awful charge is still true, that:—
“The spirit of murder works in the very means of life.”
Nor is the work of this spirit of murder confined to the concoction of
“patent foods” which are in reality patent poisons. The adulteration of
milk with formaldehyde and other base adulterants is responsible for a
great deal of infant mortality, and its ravages are chiefly confined to
the poor. It is little short of alarming that in New York City, out of
3970 samples of milk taken from dealers for analysis during 1902, no
less than 2095, or 52.77 per cent, should have been found to be
adulterated.[23] Mr. Nathan Straus, the philanthropist whose Pasteurized
milk depots have saved many thousands of baby lives during the past
twelve years, has not hesitated to call this adulteration by its proper
name, child-murder. He says:—
“If I should hire Madison Square Garden and announce that at eight
o’clock on a certain evening I would publicly strangle a child, what
excitement there would be!
“If I walked out into the ring to carry out my threat, a thousand men
would stop me and kill me—and everybody would applaud them for doing so.
“But every day children are actually murdered by neglect or by poisonous
milk. The murders are as real as the murder would be if I should choke a
child to death before the eyes of a crowd.
“It is hard to interest the people in what they don’t see.”[24]
Ignorance is indeed a grave and important phase of the problem, and the
most difficult of all to deal with. Education is the remedy, of course,
but how shall we accomplish it? It is not easy to educate after the
natural days of education are passed. Mrs. Havelock Ellis has advocated
“a noviciate for marriage,” a period of probation and of preparation and
equipment for marriage and maternity.[25] But such a proposal is too far
removed from the sphere of practicality to have more than an academic
interest at present. Simply worded letters to mothers upon the care and
feeding of their infants, supplemented by personal visits from
well-trained women visitors, would help, as similar methods have helped,
in the campaign against tuberculosis. Many foreign municipalities have
adopted this plan, notably Huddersfield, England, and several American
cities have followed their example with marked success. There should be
no great difficulty about its adoption generally. One great obstacle to
be overcome is the resentment of the mothers whom it is most necessary
to reach, as many of those engaged in philanthropic work know all too
well. One poor woman, whose little child was ailing, became very irate
when a lady visitor ventured to offer her some advice concerning the
child’s clothing and food, and soundly berated her would-be adviser.
“You talk to me about how to look after my baby!” she cried. “Why, I
guess I know more about it than you do. I’ve buried nine already!” It is
not the naïve humor of the poor woman’s wrath that is most significant,
but the grim, tragic pathos back of it. Those four words, “I’ve buried
nine already!” tell more eloquently than could a hundred learned essays
or polished orations the vastness of civilization’s failure. For,
surely, we may not regard it as anything but failure so long as women
who have borne eleven children into the world, as had this one, can say,
“I’ve buried nine already!”
But circular letters and lady visitors will not solve the problem of
maternal ignorance; such methods can only skim the surface of the evil.
This ignorance on the part of mothers, of which the babies are victims,
is deeply rooted in the soil of those economic conditions which
constitute poverty in the broadest sense of the term, though there may
be no destitution or absolute want. It is not poverty in the narrow
sense of a lack of the material necessities of life, but rather a
condition in which these are obtainable only by the concentrated effort
of all members of the family able to contribute anything and to the
exclusion of all else in life. Young girls who go to work in shops and
factories as soon as they are old enough to obtain employment frequently
continue working up to within a few days of marriage, and not
infrequently return to work for some time after marriage. Especially is
this true of girls employed in mills and factories; their male
acquaintances are for the most part fellow-workers, and marriages
between them are numerous. Where many women are employed men’s wages
are, as a consequence, almost invariably low, with the result that after
marriage it is as necessary that the woman should work as it was before.
When the years which under more favored conditions would have been spent
at home in preparation for the duties of wifehood and motherhood are
spent behind the counter, at the bench, or amid the whirl of machinery
in the factory, it is scarcely to be wondered at that the knowledge of
domestic economy is scant among them, and that so many utterly fail as
wives and mothers. Deprived of the opportunities of helping their
mothers with the housework and cooking and the care of the younger
children, marriage finds them ill-equipped; too often they are slaves to
the frying-pan, or to the stores where cooked food may be bought in
small quantities. Bad cooking, extravagance, and mismanagement are
incidental to our modern industrial conditions.