Careful investigation showed this report to be absolutely correct
except for the fact that the birth was normal and not “premature.”
]
Not long ago, in one of the largest cigar factories in New York, a woman
left her bench with a cry of agony and sank down in a corner of the
factory, where, in the presence of scores of workers of both sexes,
whose gay laughter and chatter her shrieks had stilled, she became a
mother. The poor woman afterwards confessed that she had feared that it
might happen so, but said she “wanted to get in another day so as to
have a full week’s pay and money for the doctor.” Within two weeks she
was back again at her trade, but in another shop, her baby being left in
the care of an old woman of seventy who supports herself by caring for
little children at a charge of five cents per day. In another factory a
woman returned to work on the seventh day after her confinement, but was
sent back by the foreman. This woman, a Bohemian, explained that she did
not feel well enough to work but feared that she might lose her place if
she remained longer away. The dread prospect of unemployment and hunger
had forced her from her bed to face the awful perils attendant upon
premature exertion and exposure. Had she been a “savage heathen” in the
kraal of some Kaffir tribe in Africa she would have been shielded,
protected, and spared this peril, but she was in a civilized country, in
the richest city of the world, and therefore unprotected!
In many factories, probably a majority, women in whom the signs of
approaching motherhood are conspicuous are discharged. “It don’t take
two people to run this loom,” or “Two can’t work at one job,” are
typically brutal examples of the language employed by bosses of a
certain type upon such occasions. The fear of being discharged causes
many a poor woman to adopt the most pitiful means to hide her condition
from the boss. “It wouldn’t be so bad if we were only laid off for a few
weeks, but it’s getting fired and the trouble of finding a new job that
hurts,” they say. But the consequences are too serious alike to mother
and child, to justify legislative neglect or the dependence upon the
wisdom or humanity of employers or foremen. In many cases, doubtless,
sympathy for the women themselves and the knowledge that discharge, or
even suspension for a few weeks, would mean increased poverty and
hardship, induces foremen to allow them to remain at work as long as
they can stand. But in many other instances the condition of business
and the needs of the employer at the moment determine the question. If
the mill or factory is busy and in need of hands, the pregnant woman is
rarely discharged; if there is difficulty in obtaining workers in
certain unpopular departments, like the winding-room of a textile mill,
for instance, such a woman will frequently be given the option of
ceasing work or going into the less popular department, generally at
less wages.
The evil is apparent, but the remedy is not so obvious. That no woman
should be permitted to work during a period of six or eight weeks
immediately before and after childbirth may be agreed, but then the
necessity arises for some adequate means of securing her proper
maintenance during her necessary and enforced idleness. To forbid her
employment without making provision for her needs would possibly be an
even greater evil than now cries for remedy. The question really
resolves itself into this: Is civilized man equal to the task which the
savage everywhere fulfils? Private philanthropy has occasionally
grappled with this problem and the results have been highly significant
of what might be accomplished if what has been done as a matter of
charity in a few cases could be done generally as a matter of justice
and right. Of these private experiments perhaps the most famous of all
are those of the celebrated Alsatian manufacturer, M. Jean Dolphus, and
the Messrs. Fox Brothers, of Wellington, Somerset, England.
M. Dolphus found that in his factory at Mülhausen, where a large number
of married women were employed, the mothers lost over 40 per cent of
their babies in the first year, though the average at that age for the
whole district was only 18 per cent. He noticed, moreover, that the
mortality was greatest in the first three months of life, and that set
him thinking of a remedy. He decided therefore to require all mothers to
remain away from their work for a period of six weeks after childbirth,
during which time he undertook to pay them their wages in full. The
results were astonishing, the decrease in infantile mortality in the
first year being from more than 40 to less than 18 per cent.[35] Other
employers followed with similarly beneficent results, among these being
the firm of Fox Brothers, who employed considerably over one thousand
persons, more than half of whom were women. They paid wages for three
weeks only, but provided excellent _crèches_ with competent matrons in
charge for the care of the infants whose mothers were at work. There,
also, the infantile death-rate was very materially reduced, though,
owing to the fact that no statistics showing the rate among children
whose mothers were employed by the firm prior to the introduction of the
plan exist, it cannot be statistically represented. Mr. Charles H. Fox,
head of the firm, is authority for the statement that the reduction was
extensive.[36] The importance of these experiments, especially in
conjunction with the experiences of Paris in the great siege and
Lancashire in the cotton famine, cannot easily be overestimated. They
clearly show that not only hunger, but that other aspect of poverty
hardly less important, the neglect of infants through industrial
conditions which force the mothers to neglect them, are responsible for
an alarming sacrifice of life year by year, and that it is possible to
reduce materially the rate of infant mortality by improving the economic
circumstances of the parents.
X
No study of this problem can be regarded as satisfactory which ignores
the question of poverty and its relation to the number of still-births,
yet we can only touch briefly upon it. No brutal Malthusian cynicism,
but a calm view of such facts as those cited, leaves the impression
that, however it might be under other and more humane social conditions,
still-birth means very often a child’s escape from a life of suffering
and misery. It is surely better that a babe should be strangled in the
process of delivery from its mother’s womb, never to utter a cry, than
that it should live to cry of hunger which its mother cannot appease, or
from the torture of food unsuited to its little stomach! When a mother
suffers all the pain and anxiety caused by the struggling life within
her, and in her travail goes down to the brink of the grave, only to be
mocked at last by a lifeless thing, she suffers the supreme anguish of
her kind. Last year there were more than 6000 such tragedies in the city
of New York alone, and the number in the whole country was probably not
less than 80,000.
Some of the best authorities upon the subject of vital statistics insist
that still-births should be included in the death-rates, and in many
foreign cities, notably Berlin,[37] they are so included. If such a
method were adopted in this country, it is easy to see how important the
effects would be upon the tables of mortality. Whatever opinions they
may hold upon the moot question of regarding still-births as deaths in
all enumerations, all authorities appear to agree that the circumstances
of the mothers influence the numbers of the still-born as surely as they
do the actual infantile death-rates. Six physicians of large obstetrical
experience were asked to estimate what percentage of the still-born
should be ascribed to the influence of poverty, and the average of their
replies was 60 per cent.
[Illustration:
BABIES WHOSE MOTHERS WORK CARED FOR IN A _CRÈCHE_
]
That may be an overestimate, or it may be, and probably is, an
underestimate. If we assume it to be fairly correct, it means that in
one city something like 3700 mothers needlessly endured the supreme
agony, and as many lives were sacrificed to poverty. It means that to
the 80,000 babies annually devoured by the wolf of poverty must be added
another 45,000 killed by the same cruel foe in the passage of the race
from the womb of dependence to a separate existence. Whatever the number
may be, it is certain that many are still-born because of the fatigue
and overexertion of the mothers in the critical periods of pregnancy and
that many more are suffocated in the passage from the womb because of
the employment of untrained and unskilled midwives—especially, as often
is the case, when the “midwife” is only a kindly neighbor called in
because of the poverty of the family to which the child comes. And it
may be added, incidentally, that still-birth is not by any means the
only danger from this source, nor the most lamentable. Many accidents of
a non-fatal character occur at birth which seriously affect the whole of
life. Carelessness, inexperience, and ignorance may cause the
suffocation of the child, or by pressure upon some delicate nerve centre
irreparable injury may be caused to it, such as paralysis for life or
hopeless imbecility.[38]