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MATERNITY
LETTERS FROM WORKING-WOMEN
ROUND ABOUT A POUND A WEEK. By Mrs. Pember Reeves. 2s. 6d. net.
“The best piece of social study published in England for many years.”—Manchester Guardian.
“If you would know why men become anarchists, why agitators foam at the mouth, and demagogues break out into seditious language—here is a little book that will tell you as soberly, as quietly, and as convincingly as any book that has yet come from the press.”—Mr. Harold Begbie in the Daily Chronicle.
THE FEEDING OF SCHOOL CHILDREN. By M. E. Bulkley, of the London School of Economics. Crown 8vo. 3s. 6d. net.
“The first comprehensive description of one of the most momentous social experiments of modern times.”—Economic Review.
“An admirable statement of the history and present position of the problem.”—New Statesman.
LONDON: G. BELL AND SONS, LTD.,
York House, Portugal Street, Kingsway, W.C.
New York: THE MACMILLAN CO.
Bombay: A. H. WHEELER AND CO.
AN ANNUAL CONGRESS OF THE WOMEN’S CO-OPERATIVE GUILD.
MATERNITY
LETTERS
FROM WORKING-WOMEN
COLLECTED BY
THE WOMEN’S CO-OPERATIVE GUILD
WITH A PREFACE BY
THE RIGHT HON. HERBERT SAMUEL, M.P.
HIS MAJESTY’S POSTMASTER-GENERAL
LATE PRESIDENT OF THE LOCAL GOVERNMENT BOARD
LONDON
G. BELL AND SONS, LTD.
1915
PREFACE
BY THE RIGHT HON. HERBERT SAMUEL, M.P.
These letters give an intimate picture of the difficulties, the troubles, often the miseries, sometimes the agonies, that afflict many millions of our people, as a consequence of normal functions of their lives. An unwise reticence has prevented the public mind from realising that maternity, among the poorer classes, presents a whole series of urgent social problems. These letters give the facts. It is the first time, I believe, that the facts have been stated, not by medical men or social students, but by the sufferers themselves, in their own words. The Women’s Co-operative Guild, unresting in their efforts for the improvement of the conditions of working women, have rendered a most useful service in eliciting these letters and in making them public.
It is necessary to take action to solve the problems that here stand revealed, first for the elementary reason that a nation ought not to tolerate widespread suffering among its members, if there are measures by which that suffering can be obviated without indirectly causing worse. “Woman,” says Kant, “is an end in herself, and not merely a means to an end.” Apart from all question of social advantage, her claim for help for her own sake, when she needs help to meet the difficulties special to herself, is as valid as any other claim—as the claim of the sick man, for his own sake, to be cured, as the claim of the child, for his own sake, to be protected and to be taught.
Action is necessary also because, for the lack of it, the nation is weakened. Numbers are of importance. In the competition and conflict of civilisations it is the mass of the nations that tells. Again and again in history a lofty and brilliant civilisation embodied in a small State has been borne under by the weight of a larger State of a lower type. The ideas for which Britain stands can only prevail so long as they are backed by a sufficient mass of numbers. It is not enough to make our civilisation good. It must also be made strong; and for strength, numbers are not indeed enough without other elements, but they are none the less essential. Under existing conditions we waste, before birth and in infancy, a large part of our possible population.
How quickly some social evils will yield to treatment is seen in the fact that in ten years the campaign against infant mortality has reduced the death-rate among infants under one year of age by nearly a third. But it is still very excessive. It is not race or climate or the irreducible minimum of physical defect which accounts for a large part at least of the present infant death-rate. In the same towns, among people of the same stock, twice, sometimes three times, as many infants, in proportion to the number born, will die in the wards where the poorer classes live as die in the wards where the well-to-do live. The excess is mainly due to ignorance, to malnutrition, to all the noxious influences that go with poverty. Not nature, but social conditions, are to blame for the evil. Therefore it is remediable.
The time is past when a shallow application of the doctrine of evolution led people to acquiesce in a high infant death-rate. It was thought that it meant merely the killing off of the weak, leading to the survival of the fittest, and that the process, cruel in its method, was beneficent in its end. There are few now who do not see that the high death-rate is due, in large measure, to a bad environment; and that by keeping a bad environment you produce unfitness. You partly remedy the evil, it is true, by destroying a large number of lives which have been made unfit to survive; but you leave, as a clog on the community, numbers of others not killed but weakened. The conditions that kill also maim.
The theory, too, is passing away that the country is over-full and that the danger to be feared is not a lack of population but its excess. Because many districts are overcrowded, it does not follow that these islands as a whole are over-populated. So long as food supplies can be relied upon from oversea, it is difficult to set limits to the numbers that, under sound social conditions, this country can maintain.
The conclusion is clear that it is the duty of the community, so far as it can, to relieve motherhood of its burdens, to spread the knowledge of mothercraft that is so often lacking, to make medical aid available when it is needed, to watch over the health of the infant. And since this is the duty of the community, it is also the duty of the State. The infant cannot, indeed, be saved by the State. It can only be saved by the mother. But the mother can be helped and can be taught by the State.
The local health authorities have large powers, and some already are eager to use them. As President of the Local Government Board I was able to submit to them a comprehensive scheme of assistance to mothers in pregnancy, in confinement, and in the care of the infants, and to offer, to such as chose to adopt it, a Treasury grant of one-half of the modest expenditure involved. The need at the moment is to create among the local councillors and their electors a body of opinion which will secure the adoption of this scheme and its administration on effective lines. Because I believe it will conduce to that end, I commend this book the more readily.