MATERNITY
LETTERS FROM WORKING-WOMEN
INTRODUCTION
The whole point of this book lies in the letters which it contains; and it might therefore have seemed advisable to leave the reader untroubled by an introduction to gather that point from the letters themselves. The material is, however, in form and in subject of so unusual a kind that it has been thought necessary to explain something of its origin and its authors, and even to touch upon some of the problems which the letters so vividly show to exist. The letters are written by married women of the working-class, all of whom are or have been officials of the Women’s Co-operative Guild. The Guild is a self-governing organisation within the Co-operative Movement, and deals with subjects which affect the Co-operative Movement and the position of married women in the home and the state. It might justly claim to speak with greater authority than any other body for the voteless and voiceless millions of married working-women of England, for it has a membership of nearly 32,000, distributed in 611 branches over the whole country.
The Guild has for several years given special attention to the subject of “The National Care of Maternity.” Before the Insurance Bill was introduced, the Guild asked for the inclusion of Maternity benefit, and when the Amending Bill was before the House in 1913, an agitation by the Guild secured the benefit as the mother’s own property. Later on it placed a scheme for the national care of Maternity before the Local Government Board, which issued a Circular on July 30, 1914, largely embodying the various suggestions of the Guild. In the course of this work it was considered advisable to obtain information from the members themselves of the conditions under which they had brought children into the world. These letters are the result. The barest indication of the information wanted was given, and the only questions used were those on p. [191], as it was thought that it would be more valuable to allow the women to tell their own story in their own way.
We claim for these letters that for the first time are presented in them the real problems of Maternity seen through the women’s own account of their lives. If the writers are uneducated in the ordinary sense of school and university, a long schooling in life and suffering has given them a peculiar simplicity and dignity of language in place of the more usual literary style. The letters are left exactly as written by the women, the only alterations made being in the spelling, in the addition of punctuation, and in the omission of a few medical details. All names and places have also been omitted in order to prevent identification.
The women are the wives of men who earn their daily bread by manual labour. The husband’s trades cover over one hundred different occupations, and their rates of wages vary from 11s. to £5. The letters show how often the nominal wages are reduced by periods of short time and unemployment, such periods constantly coinciding with childbirth. It should also be remembered that a wife does not usually receive the whole of the weekly wage for her family expenditure.
The earnings and conditions of life of these men are certainly above rather than below the level of their class. It is true on the whole to say that the Co-operative Movement is largely composed of the better-paid manual workers, and there is no doubt that the woman who is secretary of a Guild branch lives in better conditions than the average working woman. If the conditions of their lives are as described in these letters, the suffering and waste of life, the overwork and poverty, must be tenfold and twentyfold where wages are less and employment more precarious. That the women themselves are well aware of this is shown by the occurrence in the letters of such sentences as “I was more fortunately placed than most women,” or “I have not had to go through so much pain and suffering as many poor mothers have to go through.”
These letters then give for the first time in their own words the working woman’s view of her life in relation to maternity. Now, what is the general impression that the reader gets of the life at such times of these more fortunate working-class mothers? It is on the whole an impression of perpetual overwork, illness, and suffering. The stories and records of 400 lives have been received, taken at random out of the million similar lives lived in our cities. In this book 160 letters have been published, and the unpublished letters describe similar experiences. The evidence of such witnesses cannot be impugned; it is that to bear children under such conditions is to bear an intolerable burden of suffering. The cry of a woman in travail has become a commonplace of literature, and the notion that pain and motherhood are inevitably connected has become so fixed that the world is shocked if a woman does not consider the pain as much a privilege as the motherhood. And this attitude of the world towards the pain of travail has been extended to all the sufferings attending motherhood. These letters show that this is the view of women themselves, for which doctors have been largely responsible. It is hardly too much to say that the ordinary professional attitude might have been summed up in the saying, “You’ll be worse before you’re better.” It would be foolish to cry aloud against the inevitable minimum of maternal suffering. And it is to be noted that there is no foolish note of self-pity in these letters. The brave words, combined with a stoic resignation to fate, the invincible optimism shown in such letters as Nos. [33] and [47], are characteristic of the spirit of them all. But if it be folly to kick against Nature’s pricks, what is more foolish is the facile fatalism with which we resign ourselves and other people to unnecessary and useless suffering. And a very short consideration of the suffering disclosed in these letters will show that it is both unnecessary and useless.
The roots of the evil lie in the conditions of life which our industrial system forces upon the wage-earners. It is useful to consider the different conditions under which the middle-class and the working-class woman becomes a mother. The middle-class wife from the first moment is within reach of medical advice which can alleviate distressing illness and confinements and often prevent future ill-health or death. During the months of pregnancy she is not called upon to work; she is well fed; she is able to take the necessary rest and exercise. At the time of the birth she will have the constant attendance of doctor and nurse, and she will remain in bed until she is well enough to get up. For a woman of the middle class to be deprived of any one of these things would be considered an outrage. Now, a working-class woman is habitually deprived of them all. She is lucky if her husband hands her over regularly each week 25s. with which to provide a house, food, and clothing, for the whole family. It has to be remembered that the ordinary family wage leaves nothing over for the additional outlay upon maternity. This ought to amount to £5 if the expenses are properly met. Too poor to obtain medical advice during the months of pregnancy, she “learns by experience and ignorance,” comforting herself with the belief that however ill she be it is only “natural.” Meanwhile she has to scrape and save to put by money for the inevitable expenses that lie before her. She often goes out to char or sits at her sewing machine, to scrape together a few shillings. She puts by in money-boxes; she lays in little stores of tea, soap, oatmeal and other dry goods. At a time when she ought to be well fed she stints herself in order to save; for in a working-class home if there is saving to be done, it is not the husband and children, but the mother who makes her meal off the scraps which remain over, or “plays with meat-less bones.” One woman writes: “I can assure you I have told my husband many times that I had had my dinner before he came in, so as there should be plenty to go round for the children and himself, but he found me out somehow, so that was stopped.” Another woman says: “Many a time I have had bread and dripping for my dinner before my husband came home, and said I had my dinner, as I would not wait.”
If the mother is not working long hours in a factory, she is working even longer hours in her own home.