BETTER BABIES ARE PRODUCED
Jimmie in his banana cradle slept better than any of the other babies had. He had a little more air. Also he was cleaner than the others, because his mother had learned that dirt and disease germs are dangerous. But it is not easy, you should know, to keep children clean where every pint of water you wash them in must be carried up stairs from the tap on the first floor and down stairs again to the drain. A frequent bath all around in the one stewpan that perforce must serve for the purpose is out of the question. But there was a real wash basin now among the new household furnishings that Mrs. Smith was gradually acquiring. There are so many things that one goes without when one’s husband is an ordinary labourer at the limit line of 18s. a week. But when he becomes a soldier and you get your regular separation allowance from the government, you begin to rise in the social scale. Mrs. Smith, like so many others of the English working class women, now during the war was “getting on her feet.” And some of the improvement in family life was certainly registering in that chart card at the school consultation that recorded Jimmie’s progress.
When his father, home from Flanders on furlough, held him on his knee, it was a better baby than he had ever held there before. For one thing it was a heavier baby: children in this district used to average thirteen pounds at one year of age. And now those whose attendance at the consultations is regular average sixteen and seventy-five hundredths pounds. Also Jimmie was a healthier baby. He hadn’t rickets, like the first baby, who had suffered from malnutrition. What could you do when there was a pint of milk a day for the family and the baby had “what was left”? He hadn’t tuberculous joints, like the second baby. He hadn’t died of summer complaint, like the third and the fifth babies. And he hadn’t had convulsions, like the seventh baby, who had been born blind and who fortunately had died too. Yes, when one counts them up, there have been a good many, and if some hadn’t died, where would Mrs. Smith have put them all? The six that there are, seem quite to fill two rooms and the one bed.
Still in the course of time there was going to be another baby. Governments crying, “Fill the cradles,” seem not to see those that are already spilling over. But the development of birth politics has at last arrived at an important epoch—important to all the women in the world—in the recognition of the economic valuation of maternity. It has dashed acquiescent compliance in a world old point of view most tersely expressed in that religious dictum of Luther: “If a woman die from bearing, let her. She is only here to do it.” Mrs. Smith will not die from bearing to-day if her government can help it—nor any other mother in any other land. Instead, all science and sociology are summoned to see her through. The rising value of a baby demonstrates clearly that you cannot afford to lose a maker of men. The British Government and the German Government and the French Government, speeding up population, are now taking every precaution for the protection of maternity. The mortality record for women dying in child birth in England has been about 6,000 a year. In Germany it has been 10,000. There was also in addition to this death rate a damage rate. The national health insurance plan inaugurated by several countries before the war was beginning to reveal it: the claims for pregnancy disabilities, the actuaries reported, were threatening to swamp the insurance societies. New significance was added to these phenomena when there began to be the real war necessity for conserving population.
The Registrar General, laying the case before Parliament in England, found it suddenly strengthened by a book presented by the Women’s Co-operative Guild. The volume constitutes one of the most amazing documents that ever found a place in any state archives. It is entitled “Maternity,” and is a symposium constituting the cry of woman in travail. A compilation of 160 letters written by members of this working women’s organisation recounting the personal experiences of each in childbirth, it reflects conditions under which motherhood is accomplished among the 32,000 members of the Guild. “Maternity,” with its simple, direct annals of agony is a classic in literature, a human document recommended for all nations to study. The gentlemen in the House of Commons, who had turned its tragic pages, looked into each other’s faces with a new understanding: there was more than maternal ignorance the matter with infant mortality! And a new population measure was determined on.
“These letters” impressively announced the Right Honourable Herbert Samuel, “give an intimate picture of the difficulties, the miseries, the agonies that afflict many millions of our people as a consequence of normal functions of their lives. An unwise reticence has hitherto prevented the public mind from realising that maternity presents a whole series of urgent social problems. It is necessary to take action to solve the problems here revealed. The conclusion is clear that it is the duty of the community so far as it can to relieve motherhood of its burdens.” So you will now find the maternity centre being erected next door to the school for mothers. The Government in 1916, announcing that it would assume also 50 per cent. of this expense, sent a circular letter to all local authorities throughout the kingdom, urgently recommending the new institution “in spite of the war need for economy at the present time in all other directions.”
HER GRACE THE DUCHESS OF MARLBOROUGH
Formerly Consuelo Vanderbilt of New York, who is leading the movement in England for the conservation of the nation’s childhood.
STARTING THE BABY RIGHT
Mrs. Smith was automatically registered from the school for mothers to the books of the maternity centre when the Health Visitor learned that it was time. The medical authorities report that 40 per cent. of the total deaths of infants occur within a month after birth and are due very largely to conditions determined by the state of the mother’s health. A specific trouble is maternal exhaustion. Mrs. Smith, under weekly observation at the ante-natal clinic, was discovered to be hungry. She didn’t know it herself, because she had so long been that way. It gets to be a sort of habit with the working class woman, who must feed her husband first, because he is the bread winner. He has the meat and the children have the soup, and she is very likely to have the bread and tea. The clinic doctor, looking Mrs. Smith over, wrote out a prescription. It wasn’t put up in a bottle. It was put on a plate. Mrs. Smith was to attend the mothers’ dinner, served every day at the centre. The mother, being the medium of nourishment for the child, the good food that she would get here would do more than any dosing that might be done afterward to ensure the right kind of constitution for the coming little British citizen. In the “pre-natal class,” under the instruction of a sewing teacher and with municipal patterns furnished by the city of London, she made better baby clothes than she had ever had before. The materials, bought at wholesale, are furnished at cost price, the entire layette at 10s. to be paid for by a deposit of 6d. a week.