As time went on, Mrs. Smith’s headaches became more severe. Carrying water and coal upstairs greatly aggravated the heart trouble she had had since Jimmie’s birth. Suddenly dizzy one day, she nearly fell from a chair on which she was standing to wash the windows. The next morning her feet were so swollen she could with difficulty get on her shoes. Her neighbour on the lower landing remarked, “Of course, you’ll have to be worse before you’re better.” And she herself knew no other way.
But the ante-natal clinic did. The doctor wrote kidney trouble on her attendance card. That, of course, was the technical diagnosis. He might have said it another way had he written “overwork” and “overbearing.” It was a long time since Mrs. Smith had been strong. She had nursed two of the children with measles right up to the day that the seventh had arrived. Three months later, with the eighth expected, she was going out charring. Her husband was out of work. The 30 shillings maternity benefit that would be coming to her from the national insurance department on the birth of her baby, would have to be supplemented somehow in order to meet all the additional expenses of the occasion. Well, the eighth baby was a miscarriage instead. Then there was the ninth, and then there was Jimmie, in quick succession. And with the five others and trying to keep up with all that she was learning at the school for mothers should be done for children, why it was more than one pair of hands was equal to. She had now reached the verge of collapse.
The clinic doctor was telling her gravely that she must have medical attendance at once. The business of a centre is to supply supervision, but for medical treatment the patient is referred to her own physician. Mrs. Smith didn’t have one. Half the babies of the kingdom are brought into the world by midwives. Mrs. Smith could not afford a doctor. Well, Parliament could. The bill, presented by the physician in whose care she was now placed, was paid half by the national government and half by the health department of this borough. It is an arrangement which is considered a good investment by the national treasury. Without this aid Mrs. Smith would have died in convulsions and a new baby might never have been born. Careful feeding and careful doctoring obviated both disasters and carried the case to a triumphant conclusion. The baby is here. On his first birthday anniversary he tipped the scales at 20 pounds.
Mrs. Smith counts it a confinement de luxe that brought him. For the first occasion in her maternal history she did not have to get out of bed to do the washing. For two weeks she just “laid up” while a Home Help took the helm in her household. The Home Help is an adaptable person in a clean blouse and a clean apron, who comes in each morning, and cooks and scrubs, and washes, and gets the children off to school. Her wages of 13s. a week were paid half by the centre and half by Mrs. Smith through her weekly 6d. contribution to the Home Help Society. But there was a greater event than even the Home Help. A “bed to yourself to have a baby in,” is the dream of luxury to which the working class woman with her new war-time allowance looks forward. Mrs. Smith, carefully saving out a shilling here from the “coal and lights,” and another shilling there, perhaps, from “clothes and boots,” painfully accumulating the little fund, had achieved the bed of her ambition. And neighbours from the length of the square and around the next turning came in to look at her as she lay in state, as it were, the new improved baby by her side.
There are improved babies like Mrs. Smith’s arriving every day in England. They are not all among the working class. They are reported with increasing frequency, as at Nottingham and Huddersfield, among the artisan class. Even comparatively well-to-do mothers in the best of homes have not in the past been always accustomed to the skilled medical supervision during pregnancy which is now afforded without cost. It is Parliament’s plan to have the new maternity service as available for the entire population as is public education for school children. The city of Bradford exhibits the ideal of a complete municipal system now in successful operation: an infants’ department occupying a new three-story building, with a consultation to which 600 mothers come weekly; a maternity department with the ante-natal clinic; a maternity hospital, announced as “the first of its kind” in the world; a staff of municipal midwives for service in the homes; a cooking depot, from which meals in heat-proof vessels distributed by motor vans are dispensed to 500 expectant mothers daily; and a staff of 20 women health visitors to connect the homes of Bradford with all of this municipal maternity service.
Still England’s comprehensive scheme of assistance to mothers grows. Down the street, Mrs. Smith noticed one day another new institution that has been started. It is a municipal crèche, for which the Government pays 75 per cent. of the cost of operation. The sign in the window says that it is a nursery for the care and maintenance of the children of munition workers. Three meals are provided, and the charge is 6d. a day. Just around the corner, the Labour Exchange has out a sign, “8,000 women wanted at once for shell-filling factories. Age 16 to 40. No previous experience necessary. Fill the factories and help to win the war.”
And Mrs. Smith is thinking. The school for mothers has taught her to. Do you know that the number of children who survive the first year in good health is 71 per cent. in homes where the wage income is over 20s. a week and it drops to 51 per cent. in homes where the wage income is less than 20s. a week? The sociologists have also some very interesting figures that were compiled at Bradford. In 1911 the infant mortality rate there in houses that rented for six pounds and less was 163 in 1,000; house rent six to eight pounds, infant mortality, 128; house rent eight to twelve pounds, infant mortality, 123; house rent over twelve pounds, infant mortality, 88. And here in London infant mortality is over 200 per 1,000 in one-room tenements, as compared with 100 in tenements of four rooms and upwards. Now, Mrs. Smith, I don’t suppose, has ever seen those figures. But she doesn’t need to. She understands why the small white hearse goes so continuously up and down some streets. She knows perfectly well that there will be more light and air for her children in three or four rooms than in two. Also that the rent will cost her 9s. 6d. a week, where now she pays 4s. 6d. But in a factory there are women earning 25 and 30s. a week, and even up to two pounds a week. Mrs. Smith is thinking.
THE MADONNA IN INDUSTRY
Meanwhile over in France Azalie de Rigeaux, at half-past ten this morning, will step aside from the lathe where she turns fuses, to retire for say half-an-hour for another service. Azalie de Rigeaux is a munitions worker in trousers in a Usine le Guerre in a banlieu of Paris. See her now as she takes her baby in her arms and seats herself in a low chair by a small crib. A wedding-ringed hand opens her working blouse from the throat downward, the black lines of the cloth fold away from her bosom, revealing in lovely contrast the white, satiny texture of her skin. And she, too, even as you, a mother anywhere in the world, smiles happily into her baby’s eyes as she holds him to her breast. It is a mother and child picture the like of which you will not find in any gallery of Europe. Azalie de Rigeaux, crooning softly here to her child, is a new figure in life, so new that she has not yet reached the canvas of even the modern masters in art. See just above the curve of her arm where rests the bay’s head, the armlet that she wears on her left sleeve. Embroidered on it is that sign of her national enlistment, a bursting bomb. It is important because it is the clue to the new picture. All over the world war has called the woman to the factory. And what shall she do with the baby? Well, the baby is so valuable that the state is not going to let it cry.
It is France that makes the security for maternity gilt-edged. By the gifts they are bringing here, one would say that this is the country that to-day takes precedence of all others in its appreciation of the rising value of a baby. As every one has heard, there has not in a long time, in generations indeed, been a surplus of babies in France. As a matter of fact, they have always been scarce. And they are so dear that the passion for the child is the distinctive national trait. This building in which Azalie de Rigeaux nurses her child to-day was erected at a cost of 75,000 francs. It stands in the factory yard, adjacent to the shop in which women make shells. In this sunny high-ceilinged room, with plenty of sunlight and air, rows and rows of dimpled babies sleep in the blue cribs with the dainty white cover-lids. Four times a day the mothers from the shop across the way, as Azalie de Rigeaux has now, come to nurse them. Outside the long French windows there is a large French “jardin,” where the older children, in blue and pink check aprons, play. The nursery dining-room has a low table with little low chairs, where they come to their meals. Nourishing broths and other foods are prepared in a shining, perfectly equipped kitchen. There is a white bathroom with porcelain basins and baths of varying sizes; on the long shelf across the room are the separate baskets that hold the individual brushes. Each child, on arrival in the morning, is given a bath and a complete change of clothes. Once a week they are weighed. The doctor and the staff of trained nurses are alert to detect the least deviation from normal. Scientific supervision like this costs the firm 1 franc 35 centimes per day per child. To Azalie de Rigeaux and the other mothers in their employ, it is free.