The Century of the Child

by Ellen Key

An English doctor has shown from exact investigations conducted during a number of years, that the enormous mortality among young children in factory districts arises chiefly because the child is deprived of a mother's care a few weeks after birth. A child needs its mother's milk at least six months, and the mother's milk cannot be substituted by artificial means, least of all when the substitutes are used with carelessness. In certain textile factory districts, in Nottingham, for example, where lace is produced, and where people have complained of the law limiting women's work, out of each thousand children, two hundred die annually. Mortality in factory districts is four to five times greater than in country districts; and yet the death of children is, relatively speaking, a lesser evil. More unfortunate still is it that those who survive always suffer partial weakness from the lack of a mother's care at a tender age.

In Silesia, where children and quite young girls are employed in the glass industry, the work has so distorted their bodily structure that when they bear children, their sufferings are intense. Such unique material do they offer for the study of obstetrics, that doctors make pilgrimages to Silesia to learn from their cases.

Before women have reached maturity, when they can, according to the advocates of women's rights, protect themselves, they are ruined physically. If it is said that the facts mentioned above belong to the question of the protection of children, not to that of the protection of women, the answer lies close at hand. The physical and moral interest of children and of women are so mutually related, that they cannot be separated. Crippled women have children who are stunted at the time of their birth. The burden of toil they take up with weakened power of resistance and they transmit this weakness to their offspring. Cause and effect are so intimately associated here, that they cannot be accurately apportioned between the work of women and the work of children.

Even the advocates of women's rights must, allow that the limit of their claims to right is to be found where the right of another begins. They cannot suppose that the individual right of the woman to control her life should go so far that a woman could take a piece of a neighbour's property to lay out a garden, or use for an industrial scheme a part of the water power belonging to some one else.

Can they not see that woman's individual freedom is limited by the rights of another, by the rights of the potential child? The potential child has its own proper rights, its own vital power. This property, the woman has not the right to encroach upon in advance.

A woman, who from one motive or another, great or small, permanently keeps outside of the marriage relation, has complete right to ruin herself by work, provided she does not, as a result of so doing, become a burden to others through incapacity.

But the woman who looks forward to motherhood as a possibility for herself, or the woman who is expecting to become a mother, should not, through an unlimited amount of voluntary work or of work forced upon her contrary to her will, sacrifice the capacities for life and work of an unborn generation, in such a way that she will bring into the world weak, invalid, or physically incapable children, who will later on be neglected.

It does not occur to the dogmatic advocates of women's rights that their talk about the individual freedom of the woman to control her career, their contention that no limitation need restrict woman's power of deciding her own vocation, because they are married or are mothers, mean the most crying injury, not only to children, but to women themselves. For the demand of equality, where nature has made inequality, brings about the injury of the weaker factor. Equality is not justice. Often it is just the opposite, the most absolute injustice.

The strongest reasoning will not convince those advocates of women's rights who discuss woman's labour from the old-fashioned level of individualism, unaffected by the social feeling of solidarity, which is the solution offered by our age. But fortunately protective legislation does not depend on the women who advocate the rights of women. The workingmen's movement, aided by women and men of all classes who are active in it, will carry through this legislation. The movement for the normal working day is steadily gaining ground.

Experience has shown that, because of the greater intensity of the work done, just as much can be accomplished in a shorter as in a longer time. The first concern has been the work of children and of younger adults. The effect of factory life on the health of women themselves, as well as on their children, has excited general attention. In England first, then in other European countries, it has become recognised as necessary that a normal period of work should be laid down for women as well. The programme was and continues to be threefold:—a maximum working time for women's work; limitation, or, better still, the cessation of night work on the part of women; the prevention, too, of the work of women in mines and in certain other industries dangerous to health; finally the protection of women who are about to become mothers. In most European countries there is now a maximum working time fixed at eight to eleven hours. Night work, work in mines, and extra work, is either forbidden or considerably limited, and a rest period of three to eight weeks is established for women at childbirth.