Round about a Pound a Week

by Mrs. Pember Reeves

CHAPTER XVI
THE STATE AS GUARDIAN

From a leading article in The Times, October 7, 1913:

“They (women) are resolved, we may take it, that laws and customs which do not recognise that their children are the children of the nation are behind the times and must be altered. Because they are the children of the nation, the nation owes them all the care that a mother owes to her own child. Because they are the future nation, the nation can only neglect them to its own hurt and undoing. That is a law of life which is proved up to the hilt by the bitter and humiliating experience of a large proportion of the disease and mortality and crime in our homes and hospitals and asylums and prisons. But it is a law of life which also carries with it this further truth—that the nation’s children are the nation’s opportunity.”

What is needed is the true fulfilment of human parenthood which is a natural unforced and unforceable relation of the spirit as well as of the flesh. Money, and the efficient, skilled service it procures, can be provided from any source. But that close, personal affection and watchfulness essential to children which no other guardianship can replace can only be given by parents. Yet even parents can be thwarted and embittered by crushing toil and slavish drudgery until their natural affection is destroyed. The nation needs the active and free co-operation of fathers and mothers in the upbringing of its children, and it must enable them to do their share of the work.

At the present moment the nation, as super-guardian of its children, acts, in the case of the children of the poor, in a manner so baffling, so harassing, so contradictory, that the only feelings it induces in the minds of parents whose lives are passed in incessant toil and incessant want are exasperation, fear, and resentment.

Some painful cases show the way in which the State, as guardian of its children, uses its great power merely to punish the parent and not to protect the child. Where either father or mother is convicted and sentenced for cruelty, the child is often left helpless in the hands of a still more brutalised parent when he or she comes out of gaol. Cases exist in which a father, sentenced to hard labour for criminal assault on his own child, can again be given custody of that child on his return to work at the completion of his sentence. Punishment of the parent may be a terrible necessity; but the main object of reasoned public action should be permanently to protect and deliver the child.

A wife may be granted in public court separation from her husband for cruelty or desertion, with an order that he should pay her a weekly allowance for the support of the children of the marriage. By spending on summonses money she can ill afford, she may find it possible to get her husband sent to prison for non-payment of the allowance. But the court contents itself with punishing the father, and takes no steps to ensure the welfare of the children by enforcing payment.

A mother, the bread-winner for three young children, earned 12s. a week for work which took her from home in the early morning and again in the evening. During two daily absences, which cost her 2s. weekly in fares, she was obliged to leave her baby lying in its perambulator. The illness of an elder child brought an education officer to investigate his absence from school. The officer discovered the boy in bed with rheumatic fever, and the baby unattended. Meeting the hurrying mother as she came back from her morning’s work, he indignantly informed her that it was against the law to leave a baby as hers had been left. She must in future pay a neighbour to care for it in her daily absences, or the police would interfere. She pleaded with him; in her ignorance of the ideals and methods of our English law, she explained her circumstances. He was, of course, sorry about it, but the upshot of their conversation was that by the direct action of Public Authority the mother was forced to pay a neighbour to care for the baby, and the 10s. a week on which four persons were living was further diminished. Such a woman may be potentially a good parent had she any means by which she could make her good parenthood effective. But her experience of State guardianship of her children may be that Public Authority, without troubling as to whether or not fulfilment be in her power, forces further duties and responsibilities on to her shoulders in respect of those children—through the threatened medium of the police, with all the horrors of prison in the background.