As regards the care of her body in pregnancy and childbirth, and the feeding of her children, the middle-class mother is in a position to carry out what modern science has to teach. She cannot have a large family, it is true, and the cry goes up on all sides that it is very hard for the middle-classes to pay for the proper education of their children.[10] The best stocks are being penalized and extinguished, so we are told. This is part of a much bigger problem, and a problem that involves the class-war. All ambitious mothers, from miners’ wives to the aristocracy, would like to breed the fine types who receive a thorough education and then enter one of the intellectual professions. Obviously this cannot be. And, given equal ability in two children of different classes of life, there is no just reason for driving the worker’s child, who has less good food and conditions and is therefore less fitted to stand the strain, through the worry of the scholarship system, whilst the other child’s path is made smooth to a ruling position. Man for man, woman for woman, the workers would be the equals of the middle-class in strength and ability, given the same nourishment, comfort and training. In actual fact, the middle-class is perpetually being replenished in one generation, or two at most, from below. Middle-class fathers and mothers have no right to claim the privilege of a large family unless their children, if they are strong but not clever, are prepared to work the railways or dig coal in the mines. Professional people, scientists, artists, research workers, pure mathematicians, as well as skilled engineers, are, indeed, the salt of the earth, and the community that fails to produce them and give them scope is doomed in this modern world. But they are supported by manual labor, and it cannot be denied that their number cannot be indefinitely extended except by an increase of productivity and wealth. A more equal system of society will diminish drudgery and make it possible for all to have a fine development of intelligence and understanding, whatever the work on which they are employed.
[10] An instance of the incredible snobbery surrounding this question is given by the decision of the conference of Headmasters of Secondary Schools, January, 1925, against free secondary education. While the middle-class parent groans against the cost of his children’s education, he also refuses to take the obvious remedy of making education free, for fear the working class should get some of it. Class difficulties would not exist if health and education were adequately dealt with.
Feminism in the mother has led us far from maternity. That is what it is bound to do. The working mother to-day looks straight from her kitchen, if she is lucky enough to have one, on to one of the most complex situations in history. And the intelligent ones are not blind to the situation. That is why I suggested that, though middle-class feminism has conquered the professions, the feminism of working mothers might bring a new and powerful contribution to our work.
The life of the working woman who intends maternity is becoming well-nigh impossible, and she knows it. When she has found a husband the community denies them a decent house. Possibly they find one room or two at an exorbitant rent, with no water and a grate unsuited for cooking. There are no restaurants at which the pair can afford to feed. Therefore they exist on partially or casually-cooked food, innutritious bread, and food from tins. Things may not be so bad if the wife can go on with work at a mill and get food that is fairly good at the canteen, her wages helping the meals taken at home.
The coming of a baby too often means a search for another lodging. The Bishops and the Generals like babies, but landladies don’t. Another room is found, perhaps. The mother works till the last moment, has a difficult confinement and inadequate attention, and gets up too soon. It is not easier for her than for a delicately-nurtured woman, and it is not less painful. Probably it is worse, because the working mother has from birth been underfed and has weaknesses and deformities—a contracted pelvis, perhaps—that a woman well-fed and cared for escapes. Then it goes on, baby after baby up to ten and eleven,[11] always in one room and no more money coming in. The mother works whenever she can to help keep the family. Frequently she is cursed or beaten by her husband for her fertility. Should the husband die, she must work continually and harder or send her children to the workhouse. In the opinion of the Bishops, she deserves the “stigma of the Poor Law,” and, in the opinion of all right-thinking people, anything done for her by individuals or the State is in the nature of a charity.
[11] A woman of 45 years of age gave birth recently at Queen Charlotte’s Hospital, Paddington, to her 23rd child. Ten children is not uncommon.
If I but had the eloquence of Hecuba mourning her slaughtered sons! The crime of war is bad enough: this butchery of hope and promise and human lives is one so black that the heart and mind of every woman who has borne a child should revolt against it until it is tolerated no more. It is easy to escape into an aristocratic theory of society. It has been done before, and ends in the guillotine. These working mothers are the people who must be lied to and terrified by bogies for fear that they use their votes to help themselves. And it is they who, when they sit in conference, demand of the State the right to stem the tide of children, to endow mothers, to pension widows, to teach and tend maternity and ensure rest for pregnant and nursing women; to see that houses and schools are built, and to control and purify the food-supply. Here is the most serious problem for the mothers, and one which the middle-class politician does not touch, because for the middle-class pure and fresh food is almost always obtainable. It is for the working mother to tackle those tins. She cannot now destroy industrialism, which dragged her work and her after it to the mill; but she can claim her right to control it in the name of life and the destiny of her children. Control of the population is essential to solving the food-problem and improving national health. Women in small houses know it. They know, moreover, that contraceptives are better than infanticide and war. The survival of the fittest is a false doctrine in child-bearing as in fighting. Every child which starts with a reasonably good constitution can, by the right care up to one year and food up to five, grow up to be strong and well. And, if the weak and unhealthy are discouraged from breeding and healthy mothers given proper care, great improvements are possible. Poor food and over-crowding are the ladder down which we go to mental deficiency and ultimate complete feebleness of mind.[12] If we cared for life, the best food would by law go to the pregnant and nursing mothers instead of, as at present, to clubs for fat old gentlemen and the frequenters of palatial hotels. It is probable that at present we do not produce enough milk, or produce and import enough butter and eggs to distribute adequately to all.[13] But, by stabilizing or decreasing our population, and by co-operation, intensive culture and control of marketing abroad and of marketing and purity at home, we could see to it that everybody had enough and that what they had was really good.
[12] Professor MacBride, dealing recently with the “Inheritance of Defect” (Daily Telegraph, January 8, 1925) said: “The question of questions was whether the failure of the lowest strata of society was due to their surroundings or to their inborn characters. Such questions must be ultimately decided by experiment; and proper experimental work could only be done with animals; we were not entitled to make corpora vilia of our fellow human beings. For this reason he would direct attention to the common goldfish, whose weird monstrosities were all originally due to the starvation of the eggs with respect to light and air in the earliest stages of development. The result of this starvation was to weaken the developmental power and to produce a disharmonious arrest of growth of various organs. Similar arrests of growth occurred in human beings, and were the causes of mental and bodily defects. Their original cause, however, must be sought in the starvation and poisoning of the blood of the mother, but, once started, they were hereditary.”
[13] Working people live on tinned milk, margarine, and substitute eggs—all deficient in necessary vitamins.
To feed an industrial population in a small island is a peculiar and special problem and one demanding expert care and advice. Food must come long distances and must “keep.” Hence the preservatives and tins and the need to be watchful beyond measure against poisoning and the loss of what is vital to our well-being. With research, the problem would be easy; but we must make it clear that it is important. Science would easily enable us to produce more from the soil, and, as regards the food of mothers, since the assimilation of extra minerals, salts, etc., in their natural state is not always satisfactory or easy during pregnancy, we might find ways of growing food, through treatment of the soil, to provide for the special needs of their condition.