Maternity: Letters from Working-Women

by Unknown

I am sure there is great need for thought and care being given to the mother previous to childbirth and afterwards, and I do feel that a scheme as is suggested is a good one, and that the public health authority should deal with all maternity cases. It would mean untold happiness to the coming generations. It will be grand to get a maternity benefit such as you suggest, and it is most necessary. We have some women in the Guild who feel we should be more independent than take such sums as maternity benefit. They do not realise that we pay rates and taxes just as property owners do, though indirectly.

How some of our poorest women exist year after year, bearing all, I cannot understand. For, if having two children, as I did, in eighteen months wrecked my health, which it did for a long time—and only through having one of the best of husbands was I helped to pull through—I wonder what so many other less fortunate women suffer. It is just slavery and drudgery.

Wages 28s.; two children.

102. Need for Nourishment after Confinement.

For what I can see of others, I came off fairly well; but, in the first instance, my first child was a girl. I was very well during pregnancy, but being such a strong child the doctor told me to give it the bottle; but, on the other hand, the nurse persuaded me to keep it to the breast. The result was as soon as I got about, by keeping the child to the breast, I had two gathered breasts. I had the two breasts in slings till they broke. The next two being boys—two years between—I was right well during pregnancy. But as soon as a mother is able to get up and have to work, that is the time her health fails her, for she finds she has to feed the rest of her little family, and goes without her own food, and then, through lack of nourishment, often mothers have to go to their bed again.

In the first place, when we were married my husband was a fireman. We ran along smoothly, and up to the time my first and second child was born his standing wage was 30s. a week and overtime. The time went on, and in two years the second was born. Now, just before it came it was my husband’s turn to go to pass for engine driver. The result was he failed to pass the eyesight test. It was a great shock to us both, more so to my husband. It was then the dots they had to count at a distance. They then reduced him to 21s. a week to work in the shed, so we thought it was cruel to run the risk of more family on such a wage. To keep my home up and keep the children respectable I had to take in two young men lodgers, which we have done till I started the children to business. Of course, I take it you don’t want to know the ups and downs of life between these times. I must say I have had the best of husbands, or else I should not have been alive now.

If there could be such a thing as a Maternity Club started it would be a benefit to all married women, because the majority of us have to screw and save for confinement, where we ought to be able to have good food and more nourishing food while we are carrying the child, but often have to go with less.

Wages 21s. to 30s.; three children, one miscarriage.

103. Her “Lot.”

Your letter to hand reminding me of my promise to let you have a few details of my neighbour’s life. At first she hesitated about telling anything, as she said it was all past and done with, and at times felt ashamed at having had thirteen children, especially to a man like her husband (who is a drunkard). She looks back on her past life at the age of forty-eight with different feelings to what she had at thirty. Then she thought it was her “lot,” as she terms it, to have so many children, and so many sickly ones, but now she feels she has been to blame for many things—for instance, for the number of children she has had; for the dulness and lack of energy in two of them; for the feeble-mindedness in a third; deafness and sore eyes in a fourth. She blames the conditions under which she bore those children during pregnancy. She was married at nineteen, and a mother before she was twenty, with no knowledge whatever of the duties of motherhood. Her first five children came in rapid succession. While she was pregnant of her sixth child her husband fell out of work, and was out of work six months. During this time they had 10s. a week to live on (from the husband’s trade union). She went out washing and cleaning-up to the last week of her confinement. While cleaning windows at one of the houses she slipped and fell, hurting her side. Three days later the child was born, apparently all right, but as time went on the mother noticed there was something wrong, but nobody seemed to know what. This child did not cut its teeth till two years old, nor walk without help till it was seven, and now, at the age of eighteen, you can hardly make out a word he says. He is not exactly an imbecile, but he is feeble-minded, and all this could have been avoided could the mother have had proper nourishment during pregnancy, and less work. The mother had to work hard all day, and got little rest at night, as the fifth child was weakly and ailing, and the neighbour who looked after the child during the day used to put gin in its milk to stop its crying, which it did till the effects of the gin had passed off. The poor mother, not knowing that gin was given to the child, would often, after a hard day’s work, spend most of the night pacing the bedroom floor, trying to soothe the fretful child, and often had to go downstairs because the crying disturbed her husband. It was not until her sixth child came, the feeble-minded one, that the neighbour admitted giving it gin. Consequently the lad has grown up dull, never made any headway at school. He is a labourer, and twenty years of age, and will never be anything else but a labourer, because, as his mother says, he has no “head-piece,” and cannot do a simple sum in arithmetic to save his life. The mother firmly believes her children would have been as bright as anybody’s could she have had proper nourishment during pregnancy, and herself cared for them after they were born. Her girl of sixteen is deaf in one ear, and has weak eyes, the after-effects of measles when a child. The mother nursed this child a fortnight, then was obliged to leave her with a neighbour while she went out to work. The neighbour neglected the child in letting her run out too soon, etc., and as there were no school clinics when her children went to school, some of them are suffering to-day from diseases which might have been cured, could they have had attention at the proper time. Now that they are grown up they seem fairly healthy, though undersized, but when one considers their childhood, the want of sufficient food, lack of fresh air (the younger ones always slept four in bed, two at the top and two at the bottom), one wonders they are as healthy as they appear to be. They seem to be fairly good workers, but not one good scholar among them. And to add to the above discomforts, they had a drunken, brutal father. He was never a real father, a surly, gloomy man, never a kind word for his children, and not one of them remembers a caress from him. I can quite understand the woman being ashamed of bearing thirteen children to a man like him, and having to rear them in surroundings and conditions which she has reared hers. It takes it out of the mother mentally and physically.