In most cases women now recognize the milk station not as a private but as a public responsibility. They first demonstrated the wisdom and practicability of the enterprise as direct health activity, then urged the municipalities to incorporate the plans into their regular health department program. Cities have accepted the lesson readily, although there are still places like our national capital, where the death rate among infants is disgracefully high and where no provision is made by the commissioners, during even the hot summer months, to care for babies in this way.
The superiority of breast feeding is so well-known that the provision of wet-nurses is recognized as a social advantage. The examination, registration, pay and care of wet-nurses are matters of increasing interest to women health workers and the Women’s Municipal League of Boston is attempting to deal seriously with this social mother.
No more interesting story of women’s help on the problem of general milk supply is to be found than comes from the Oranges, although it is fairly typical of the way women have viewed their responsibility elsewhere. In the spring of 1913, the Civic Committee of the Woman’s Club of Orange, New Jersey, offered, for the summer, the services of its secretary to the Orange Board of Health in order that a more thorough study of the milk supply might be made than was possible with the limited official staff alone. “Through the courtesy of the Board, Miss Hall was made a temporary special milk inspector in June, 1913, and has enjoyed the use of the department’s laboratory in assisting in the test of over 600 samples on which conclusions are based as to the quality of the milk furnished in the Oranges.” Those conclusions are published in a report by the aforesaid club in order to give the consumer a better knowledge of the production and supply of milk “in the hope of arousing citizen interest in a union of effort among the four municipalities, toward a more efficient control.”
The joint effort of the Woman’s Club and of the Department of Health led to their common support of certain proposals dealing with the milk situation in the four Oranges. In this case, after a careful and detailed study of all the elements that enter into the provision of milk for these communities, the women determined upon a citizen support of the health officers that, among other proposals, they might obtain better appropriations for the work of inspection. Their publications and general agitation have been marked by exact information.
From New York on the eastern seaboard to Portland on the western come countless reports of the activities of organized groups of women in behalf of pure milk. The “Portland Pure Milk War” was graphically described by Stella Walker Durham in a recent number of Good Housekeeping. The struggle to secure the kind of milk they wanted meant a year’s fight for the women who knew and proved that they knew the true conditions of their city’s milk supply.
Dr. Harriet Belcher, formerly bacteriologist in the Rockefeller Institute in New York, in her campaign for clean milk, made a close study of dealers, delivery, refrigeration, balanced rations for cows, care of cows, process of milking, soils in relation to cost of production, and many other phases of the problem. She did field work as well as laboratory work, and is justly entitled to the name of expert.
While the advisability of mothers learning to care properly for milk and other food in their own homes instead of relying solely upon public care, is evident and is urged even at the milk stations in their educational capacities, such right care in the home necessitates the ability to secure ice easily and cheaply.
Ice
A tragic story of the scarcity and cost of ice in summer has come from more than one large city and the machinations of ice trusts have been among the most scandalous of business revelations. Here and there in the United States sporadic attempts have been made to establish municipal ice plants. Women have been prominent in the agitation for cheaper and more plentiful ice. An instance of this agitation is afforded by the following clipping from the New York Times, May, 1914:
More than one hundred mothers attended a meeting yesterday afternoon in the offices of the East Side Protective Association, No. 1 Avenue B, and discussed plans for the establishment on the east side of a municipal ice plant whereby ice could be distributed to mothers during the coming summer for their infants. At the conclusion of the meeting a letter was forwarded to Mayor Mitchel, signed by Harry A. Schlacht, Superintendent of the Association, asking the Mayor to do all in his power to aid the project, pointing out that through it lives of hundreds of infants would be saved.