In localities where large numbers of women are engaged in industrial work, comparisons are frequently made of the death rates among their babies with those of the babies of mothers not so engaged. In Johnstown, however, industrial occupations are not open to women, and but 3.1 per cent. of the mothers visited went outside their homes to earn money. All mothers who gained money by keeping lodgers or in any other way are, for convenience, designated “wage-earning” mothers, even though their earnings were not in the form of a definite wage at stated periods.
Although not industrially engaged, nearly one-fifth of the mothers did resort to some means of supplementing the earnings of their husbands. Usually they kept lodgers. This was done by the foreign mothers principally, exactly one-third of whom had lodgers, as compared with less than 1 per cent. of the native women. Usually work done outside the home consisted either of char work or of assisting husbands in their stores. Generally these stores were in the same building with the home.
When a mother of a young baby does not give her full time to her duties within the home but resorts to means of earning money, it generally indicates poverty. This is true to a greater degree in Johnstown than in places which have many inducements for women to work. In Johnstown, with its excess of males, especially in the foreign population, the woman’s services are particularly needed to make the home.
In the group where the husband earns $10 a week or less—that is, under $521 a year—many of the women are wage earners. In each group showing better earnings for the husband the number and percentage of wage-earning wives decline. Such a tabulation as the following almost automatically fixes the minimum wage on which a man, wife, and a child or two can live with any degree of comfort in Johnstown at about $780 a year. When the husband’s wage is less than $780 a year, it is shown that the wives, in considerable number, must be wage earners. As shown in the next table, in nearly half of the families where the husband earns $10 a week or less (less than $521 a year), the wife resorted to some means of earning money; when he earned as much as $900 a year, only 8.9 per cent. of the wives worked, and in the small group where the man earns as much as $1,200 a year, only 1 in 50.
| Table 32.—Number and Per Cent of Husbands with Wage-Earning Wives, by Nativity of Wife and Annual Earnings of Husband. | |||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| ANNUAL EARNINGS OF HUSBAND. | TOTAL HUSBANDS. | HUSBANDS HAVING NATIVE WIVES. | HUSBANDS HAVING FOREIGN WIVES. | ||||||
| Number. | Husbands with wage-earning wives. | Number. | Husbands with wage-earning wives. | Number. | Husbands with wage-earning wives. | ||||
| Number. | Per cent. | Number. | Per cent. | Number. | Per cent. | ||||
| Total | 1,491 | 278 | 18.6 | 816 | 26 | 3.2 | 675 | 252 | 37.3 |
| Under $521 | 233 | 111 | 47.6 | 36 | 9 | 25.0 | 197 | 102 | 51.8 |
| $521 to $624 | 174 | 57 | 32.8 | 50 | 3 | 6.0 | 124 | 54 | 43.5 |
| $625 to $779 | 229 | 51 | 22.3 | 86 | 4 | 4.7 | 143 | 47 | 32.9 |
| $780 to $899 | 166 | 25 | 15.1 | 108 | 6 | 5.6 | 58 | 19 | 32.8 |
| $900 to $1,199 | 146 | 13 | 8.9 | 98 | 1 | 1.0 | 48 | 12 | 25.0 |
| $1,200 and over | 50 | 1 | 2.0 | 39 | 11 | 1 | 9.1 | ||
| “Ample”[[34]] | 493 | 20 | 4.1 | 399 | 3 | .8 | 94 | 17 | 18.1 |
It is impossible to judge from statistics alone whether or not the work done by an individual woman, either her own housework or work for money, is so excessive as to affect her during pregnancy or while nursing to the extent of reacting on the health of the baby; but the fact is that the infant mortality rate is higher among the babies of wage-earning mothers than among others, being 188 as compared with a rate of 117.6 among the babies of nonwage-earning mothers. Wage-earning mothers and low-wage fathers are in practically the same groups, and it is difficult to secure an exact measurement of the comparative weight of the two factors in the production of a high infant mortality rate.
| Table 33.—Distribution of Live Births and of Deaths During First Year, and Infant Mortality Rate for Babies of Wage-earning and Nonwage-earning Mothers, According to Annual Earnings of Father. | ||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| ANNUAL EARNINGS OF FATHER. | MOTHER A WAGE EARNER. | MOTHER NOT A WAGE EARNER. | INFANT MORTALITY RATE. | |||
| Live births. | Number of deaths in first year. | Live births. | Number of deaths in first year. | Mother a wage earner. | Mother not a wage earner. | |
| Total | 266 | 50 | 1,165 | 137 | 188.0 | 117.6 |
| Under $521 | 105 | 26 | 114 | 30 | 247.6 | 263.2 |
| $521 to $624 | 53 | 8 | 112 | 18 | 150.9 | 160.7 |
| $625 to $779 | 48 | 6 | 176 | 18 | 127.1 | 102.3 |
| $780 or over, or “ample”[[35]] | 60 | 10 | 763 | 71 | 166.7 | 93.1 |