It is this crèche at Ivry-sur-Seine which is the model recommended by the ministry of munitions to the factories of France. The last feature to make this, a national institution, absolutely complete, has been added. It was the Union Française pour le Suffrage des Femmes that one day held a conference with the ministry of munitions. “Gentlemen,” they said, “a mother who must go home from a factory to stand over a wash tub, gets so tired that the baby’s source of nourishment is imperilled. And when a baby languishes, a future soldier may be lost.”—A state department was at instant attention—“Gentlemen,” it was pointed out, “there is one thing more that you must do.” Well, they have done it. In this model babies’ building at Ivry-sur-Seine there is a steam laundry in which two women are kept constantly employed, so that there shall be no night laundry work for the child whom the mother takes home. There are washed eight hundred diapers a day. You see there is nothing that the Government will not do for a child in France. Nothing is too much trouble.
Even her employers will be equally as pleased as the state if Azalie de Rigeaux shall decide to give another citizen to France. They have told me so. “Why, it is patriotism,” the factory owner explained to me, as we stood there among the whirring belts and the revolving wheels of a thousand machines in this Usine de Guerre. “Don’t you see,” he patiently elucidated, “I’m sure if she will only have the baby every one else should do what they can.”
This is what they do for Azalie de Rigeaux. She comes directly under the protection of L’Office Central d’Assistance Maternelle et Infantile, which, as you will read on all the walls of Paris, is organised “to secure to all pregnant women adequate and suitable nourishment, proper housing accommodations, relief from overwork and skilled medical advice, all of the social, legal and medical protection to which she is entitled in a civilised society.” A visitor will arrive from the nearest Mairie to inform the prospective mother of all the aids that are available for her. All of the municipally subsidised institutions have had their accommodations increased since the war. There are the Municipal Maternity Hospitals, where care is free, or there is the Mutualité Maternelle, the self-supporting maternity club through which one may make arrangements for accouchement. There are free meals for mothers at the Cantines Maternelles, which are spread over Paris. Are there other children in the family, so that their care is a burden to the mother? She must not tire herself with the housework. They will be taken to the country at municipal expense and she shall go to a Refuge to rest in preparation for the coming confinement. There are free layettes to be had at every Mairie. A limousine will even take the lady to a hospital if necessary. The military automobiles of the army are subject to requisition for this purpose by L’Office Central d’Assistance Maternelle et Infantile of Paris.
There is also definite financial assistance. The Government will pay to Azalie de Rigeaux ten francs and fifty centimes a week for four weeks before and four weeks after the confinement, with an additional three francs fifty centimes a week if she nurses the child. To this her employer tells me he will add his bonus for the baby, 105 francs if she has been in his employ for one year, 135 francs after three years, and after six years it will be 165 francs. All indications point to market quotations on the French baby rising even higher. Prof. Pinard, the celebrated accoucher of Paris, who has assisted into the world so many babies that he should know their value as much as any man may, is saying they are really worth more. Through the Academy of Medicine in France he is recommending to the Senate a measure providing for a payment to a mother, from the time that gestation begins until the child is one year old, of five francs a day.
IT MEANS THE LIBERATION OF THE MOTHER
But most significant to the woman movement of all lands is the welcome that the Usine de Guerre is extending to Azalie de Rigeaux. Of all the making over they have been doing for us in industry, this is perhaps the most revolutionary in its effects on the whole social structure. For when industry takes the baby, it means the passing of the wage envelope to a whole class of the population whose arms were hitherto literally too burdened to reach for it. Here at Ivry-sur-Seine they do not shake their heads and say, “Oh, you might have a baby. We prefer to employ a man who won’t.” On the contrary preference in employment is given to a woman who has a child. The only person who takes precedence of her is the woman with two children or, of course, with three. From the day that she signifies she is going to have another, she becomes an object of special solicitude. She will be shielded from any injurious strain. Because it may not be well for her to stand at the lathe, she will be transferred to the gauging department, where she may remain continuously seated. And, while the gauging department’s regular rate of pay is but 50 centimes an hour, her own job’s rate of pay, 60, 70, 80 centimes an hour, whatever it may be, will be continued.
“But isn’t it an interruption to your business to have employés who every now and then have to stop to have a baby?” I asked the French manufacturer. “Ah, no, Madame,” he replied, “surely it is no disturbance at all. It is nothing even if a woman should wish to be absent for two or three months. Is she not serving her country? We simply arrange a large enough staff of employés so that always there are some to fill the gaps. Maternity is something that may be estimated by percentage. We count on it that Camille here will probably have a baby in July. Etienne, next to her, may have one in September. Well, by the time a substitute employé is finished with taking Camille’s place, she will be required in Etienne’s place, then, perhaps, in Azalie’s place. It is very easy, I say, to arrange.”
And it is because the rising value of a baby makes it worth while. It is in France, where maternity has always been important, that all of the institutions for the welfare of the child now being rushed to completion in other lands have been originally invented. We in America, in some of our large cities, have started the “clinic” and the “consultation” and the crèche. Italy is inaugurating them. Russia sent to Paris for specific information about them before the war. Germany’s “Kaiserin Auguste Victoria Haus” in Berlin, a veritable “laboratory of the child,” from which the child culture system adapted from France has been developed for the Empire, is a monument to the national thoroughness, which, making military preparation for the conquest of the world, made maternity preparation on almost as comprehensive a scale.
Industry to-day beckoning the woman, you see, Parliament is bound to provide for the child. Mrs. Smith in England—or in America or anywhere else—you need not hesitate.
Azalie de Rigeaux’s baby is, what is it one shall say, as good as gold all day long. Do you know that he is so well regulated that there is no deviation from his perfection save on Mondays when he gets back to the crèche fretful and perhaps a little inclined to be colicky after a week end at home? At that munitions crèche down your street the babies shall have a bath every day and no one will have to carry the water toilsomely upstairs by the pint. Think of the dainty cribs to sleep in and the beautiful green garden to play in! There are three meals a day that never fail. You can easier pay for those meals than cook them. How many skilled vocations are you trying to follow in your home! The graduate of a school for mothers, you are doing, the best you can, more than the winner of a Cambridge tripos would attempt to undertake! Cooking and sewing and nursing, laundry work and scrubbing and child culture, that is the gamut of the achievements you are trying to accomplish. Oh, Mrs. Smith, one trade in the factory is easier. What artisan can be good at his job if he must also putter with half a dozen others? Well, the world is no longer going to ask it of you, the maker of men!