Prohibition of the employment of nursing mothers in factories is a measure that has long received recognition in some countries, and lately it has become general.
The resolutions of the Berlin Conference demand that the protection should cover a period of 4 weeks; Switzerland already grants protection for 8 weeks, a period which is recommended in Germany by the Auer Motion; the von Berlepsch Bill proposes 4 weeks (instead of 3 weeks as hitherto appointed by the Imp. Ind. Code); the Reichstag Commission proposed 6 weeks, and this will probably be the period adopted.
If it were necessary to enforce exemption from work after childbirth for all women engaged in industrial wage-labour, even this would scarcely be found to be attended with insuperable difficulties.
The Auer Motion on this point receives no notice in the von Berlepsch Bill.
It would be preferable in itself for such exemption to become general even for factory women, without special protective intervention from the State. But under the existing moral and social conditions legal prohibition of employment can hardly be dispensed with.
The measure may be carried out by the help of the official birth-list, or of a special factory list of nursing mothers. The industrial inspector will not be able to do without the help of the workers themselves.
The economic difficulties of the question are partly met in Germany by the existing agency of Insurance against sickness for all factory workers, which grants assistance during the period of lying-in, as during sickness. The means of help provided by the family and the club have to supply the additional assistance necessary for the nursing period.
The granting of state assistance to women during the lying-in period, without which exemption from work would be a questionable benefit, is vigorously opposed by some on grounds of morality as likely to promote the increase of illegitimate births, and by others from the point of view of the population question.
The question was brought before the German Reichstag, on the representation of Saxony, in 1886. Petitions from twenty-one district sick clubs in the chief district of Zwickau demanded the withdrawal of the legal three weeks assistance of unmarried women after childbirth, on the ground that this was calculated to promote an increase in the number of illegitimate births. The petitions were accompanied by statistics of each club showing that the funds were actually called in to assist more unmarried than married women. No information however was given as to the proportion between married and unmarried women members of the club, an omission which rendered the statistics worthless. Moreover the conditions existing in Zwickau are hardly typical of German industry as a whole.