In Liverpool Workhouse fourteen days after labour the lying-in women are thus discharged. Fourteen, eighteen, twenty-one days, are the average of a woman’s stay in the lying-in division in London workhouses.
A soldiers’ wives’ hospital takes in no unmarried women to lie-in.
Civil lying-in institutions almost invariably have to make exceptions and take in unmarried women.
In workhouses they are not the exception, they are the rule. Married women are the exception.
It is to be observed that married women will rarely come in an hour before, or stay an hour after it is necessary, in any lying-in institution.
Ten to twelve days is ‘the average period of hospital treatment’ in Colchester, Woolwich, and other soldiers’ wives’ lying-in hospitals. ‘Women of this station of life cannot, as a rule, be prevailed upon to submit to longer detention,’ it is added.
The average number of days in King’s College Hospital lying-in ward was sixteen. None were permitted to leave under fourteen days. Twenty-one days were allowed, in ordinary cases. It is feared this might be too long; but so very many weakly, half-starved women sought admission, that to send some away sooner was ‘to ensure a breakdown,’ it is stated.
In a civil lying-in institution it would not be by any means desirable absolutely to exclude single young women primiparæ; it would be grievous to some of these poor things to be sent among the (often hardened) wretched women of the workhouse. The whole question of these poor young women—unmarried mothers of a first child—is full of difficulty. It would never do, morally, to make special provision for them. And for this very reason we seem bound to receive such, conditionally, into well regulated lying-in institutions, and afford some kindly care to prevent, at the very least, their sinking lower. But it would not be right to leave any admissions for single women in the hands of any young assistant, or morally inexperienced person.
The principle appears to be that, if pregnant women are to be received some time before and kept some time after delivery, the excess of time should not be passed in the lying-in wards, but in separate accommodation.