The Bitter Cry of the Children

Nothing could be further from the truth than the comfortable delusion under which so many excellent people live, that so long as the work is done at home the children will not be neglected nor suffer. While it is doubtless true that home employment of the mother is somewhat less disadvantageous to the child than if she were employed away from home,—though more injurious from the point of view of the mother herself,—the fact is that such employment is in every way prejudicial to the child. Even if the joint income of both parents raises the family above want, the conditions under which that income is earned must involve serious neglect of the child. The mother is taken away from her household duties and the care of her children; her time is given an economic value which makes it too precious to be spent upon anything but the most important thing of all,—provision for their material needs. She has no time for cooking and little for eating; the children must shift for themselves.

Thus the employment of the mother is responsible for numerous evils of underfeeding, improper feeding, and neglect. She works from early morn till night, pausing only twice or thrice a day to snatch a hasty meal of bread and coffee with the children. Her pay varies with the kind of work she does, from one-and-a-half to ten cents an hour. Ordinarily she will work from twelve to fourteen hours daily, but sometimes, when the work has to be finished and delivered by a fixed time, she may work sixteen, eighteen, or even twenty hours at a stretch. And then there are the “waiting days” when work is slack, and hunger, or the fear of hunger, weighs heavily upon her and crushes her down. Hard is her lot, for when she works there is food, but little time for eating and none for cooking or the care of her children; when there is no work there is time enough, but little food.

In Brooklyn, in a rear tenement in the heart of that huge labyrinth of bricks and mortar near the Great Bridge, such a mother lives and struggles against poverty and the Great White Plague. She is an American, born of American parents, and her husband is also native-born but of Scotch parentage. He is a laborer and when at work earns $1.75 per day, but partly owing to frequently recurring sickness and partly also to the difficulty of obtaining employment, it is doubtful whether his wages average $6 a week the year through. Of six children born only two are living, their ages being seven years and two-and-a-half years respectively. Both are rickety and weak and stunted in appearance. As she sat upon her bed sewing, only pausing to cough when the plague seemed to choke her, she told her story: “It’s awful,” she said, “but I must work else we shall get nothing to eat and be turned into the street besides. I have no time for anything but work. I must work, work, work, and work. Often we go to our beds as we left them when I haven’t time or strength to shake them up, and Joe, my husband, is too tired or sick to do it. Cooking? Oh, I cook nothing, for I haven’t time; I must work. I send the little girl out to the store across the way and she gets what she can,—crackers, cake, cheese, anything she can get—and I’m thankful if I can only make some fresh tea.” Neither of this woman’s two little children has ever known the experience of being decently fed, and their weak, rickety bodies tell the results. From a bare account of their diet it might be inferred that the mother must be ignorant or neglectful, but she is, on the contrary, a most intelligent woman and devoted to her children. Under better conditions she would perhaps have been a model housewife and mother, but it is not within the possibilities of her toil-worn, hunger-wasted body to be these and at the same time a wage-earner. So, without attempting to minimize the part which ignorance plays, it is well to emphasize the fact, so often lost sight of and forgotten, that what appears to be ignorance or neglect is very frequently only poverty in one of its many disguises.

VIII

As a contributory cause of excessive mortality and sickness among young children, the employment of mothers away from their homes is even more important. There is no longer any serious dispute upon that point, though twenty-five years ago it was the subject of a good deal of vigorous controversy on both sides of the Atlantic.^[28] Professor Jevons thoroughly established his claim that the employment of mothers and the ensuing neglect of their infants is a serious cause of infantile mortality and disease. So important did he consider the question to be that he strenuously advocated the enactment of legislation forbidding the employment of mothers until their youngest children were at least three years old.^[29] When one who is familiar with the facts considers all that the employment of mothers involves, it is difficult to imagine how its evil effects upon the children could ever have been questioned. In too many cases the toil continues through the most critical periods of pregnancy; the infants are weaned early in order that the mother may return to her employment, and placed in charge of some other person—often a mere child, inexperienced and ignorant. These “little mothers” have been much praised and idealized until we have become prone to forget that their very existence is a great social menace and crime. It is true that many of them show a wonderful amount of courage and precocity in dealing with the babies intrusted to their care. But in praising these qualities we must not forget that they are still children, necessarily unfitted for the responsibilities thus placed upon them. Moreover, they themselves are the victims of a great social crime when their childhood is taken away and the cares of life which belong to grown men and women are thrust upon them.

In a personal letter to the writer, Mr. Roscoe Doble, Clerk to the Health Board of Lawrence, Massachusetts, says: “Relative to the high infantile mortality, I can only say that ignorance in the preparation of food, illy ventilated tenements, and, in many cases, unavoidable neglect occasioned by the mothers being obliged to work away from the homes, often leaving their babies in the care of other children, seem to be the prime factors in the high mortality among children.” Similar testimony has been given by physicians and nurses wherever I have made inquiries, indicating a general consensus of opinion among experts upon the subject. A striking instance of the ignorance of these little girls to whom infants are intrusted was observed in Hamilton Fish Park when one of them gave a baby, apparently not more than four or five months old, soda water, banana, ice cream, and chewed cracker—all inside of twenty minutes.

In several factory towns I made careful investigations of the home conditions of a number of families where the mothers were employed away from their homes, noting particularly the rates of infantile mortality among them. The following typical schedule relates to five cases noted in the course of a single day in one of the small towns of New York:—

It will be observed that out of a total of 32 children born only 10 were alive at the time of the inquiry, and that of the number dead no less than 18 were under one year of age, the cause of death in most cases being associated with neglect and defective diet. Of the ten children surviving, six were decidedly weak, and the mothers said that they were “generally sick” and that somehow it seemed as if they “took” every sort of disease, a well-known condition of the undernourished child.

In the same town the case of a poor Hungarian mother was brought to my attention by one perfectly familiar with all the details, a witness of unassailable veracity. This poor Hungarian child-wife and mother was barely fifteen when her baby was born, but she had been working fully three years in the mill. When the child was born the father disappeared. “He was afraid he could never pay the cost,” the wife said in his defence. On the ninth day after her confinement she returned to her work, leaving the baby in charge of a girl nine years old.

Upon the day the baby was two weeks old, word came to the mother while at work that it had been taken suddenly ill and imploring her to return to it at once. Terrified, she sought the foreman of her department and begged to be allowed to go home. “Ma chil seek! Ma chil die!” she cried. But the foreman needed her and scowled; they were “rushed” in the winding-room. And so he refused to grant her the permission she sought—refused with foul objurgations. Heartbroken, she went to another, superior, foreman and in broken English begged to be allowed to go to her sick babe. “Ma chil seek! Ma chil die!” she cried incessantly. This foreman also refused at first to let her go. Perhaps it was because he thought of his own daughter that he relented at last and gave her permission to go home—permission to give a mother’s care to the child born of her travail! Eye-witnesses say that she sank down upon her knees and, with hysterical gratitude, kissed the foreman’s rough, dirty hands. “You good man! You good man!” she shrieked, then fled from the mill with frenzied haste.

But when she reached her little tenement home in “Hunk’s town” the baby was already dead, and there was only a lifeless form for her to clasp in her arms. The life of an infant child is too frail a thing, and too uncertain, to permit us to say that a mother’s care would have sufficed to save that babe. But the doctor said neglect was the cause of death, and the poor mother has moaned daily these many months, “If I no work, ma chil die not. I work an’ kill ma chil!”

Thirty-five years ago Paris was besieged by Germany’s vast army. For months the war raged with terrible cost to invader and invaded; industry was paralyzed and factories were closed down, with the result that there was the most frightful poverty due to unemployment. But, because the mothers were forced to stay at home, and were thus enabled to give their children their personal care and attention instead of trusting them to the “little mothers,” the mortality of infants decreased by 40 per cent. No other explanation of that striking fact, so far as I am aware, has ever been attempted.^[30] Very similar was the effect upon the infantile death-rate during the great cotton famine in Lancashire as a result of the prolonged unemployment of so many hundreds of mothers. Notwithstanding the immense increase in poverty, the fact that the mothers could personally care for their infants more than compensated for it and lowered the rate of mortality in a most striking manner.^[31] These examples of a profound social fact are sufficient for our present purpose, though, were it necessary, they might be indefinitely multiplied.

IX

Perhaps the employment of mothers too close to the time of childbirth, both before and after, is almost as important as the subsequent neglect and intrusting of children to the tender mercies of ignorant and irresponsible caretakers. Élie Reclus tells us that among savages it is the universal custom to exempt their women from toil during stated periods prior to and following childbirth,^[32] and in most countries legislation has been enacted forbidding the employment of women within a certain given period from the birth of a child. In Switzerland the employment of mothers is prohibited for two months before confinement and the same period afterwards.^[33] At present the English law forbids the employment of a mother within four weeks after she has given birth to a child, and the trend of public opinion seems to be in favor of the extension of the period of exemption to the standard set by the Swiss law.^[34] So far as I am aware there exists no legislation of this kind in the United States, in which respect we stand alone among the great nations, and behind the savage of all lands and ages.

Wherever women are employed in large numbers, as, for example, in the textile industries and in cigar-making, the need for such legislation has presented itself, and it is impossible, unfortunately, to think that the absence of it in this country indicates a like absence of need for it. Cases in which women endure the agony of parturition amid the roar and whirl of machinery, and the bed of childbirth is the factory floor, are by no means uncommon. From a large mill, less than twenty miles from New York City, four such cases were reported to me in less than three months. Careful personal investigation in each case revealed the fact that the unfortunate women had begged in vain that they might be allowed to go home. One such case occurred on the morning of June 27 of this year, and was reported to me that same evening by letter. The writer of the letter is well known to me and his testimony unimpeachable.

A poor Slav woman, little more than a child in years, begged for permission to go home because she felt ill and unable to stand. Notwithstanding that her condition was perfectly evident, her appeal was denied with most brutal oaths. Cowering with fear she shrank away back to her loom with tears of shame and physical agony. Soon afterward her shrieks were heard above the din of the mill and there, in the presence of scores of workers of both sexes,—many of whom were girls of fourteen years of age,—her child was born. Perhaps it is fortunate that the child did not live to be a constant reminder to the poor woman of that hour of unspeakable shame and suffering! The young daughter of my correspondent was one of the witnesses of this shameful, inhuman thing. Subsequently I secured ample corroboration of the story from the local Slav priest who knew the poor woman and visited her soon after the occurrence. When I showed the letter of my informant to a local physician, he acknowledged that he had heard of other similar cases occurring and begged me to see one of the principal owners of the mill and secure the discharge of the foreman whose name was given. As if that could do any good! What good would be accomplished by securing the discharge of the man, and possibly bringing him and his family to poverty? That it would salve the conscience of the mill owner is probable. That it would be a well-deserved rebuke of the foreman’s inhumanity is likewise true. But it would not contribute in any way to the solution of the problem of which the case in question was but one of many examples.

Not long ago, in one of the largest cigar factories in New York, a woman left her bench with a cry of agony and sank down in a corner of the factory, where, in the presence of scores of workers of both sexes, whose gay laughter and chatter her shrieks had stilled, she became a mother. The poor woman afterwards confessed that she had feared that it might happen so, but said she “wanted to get in another day so as to have a full week’s pay and money for the doctor.” Within two weeks she was back again at her trade, but in another shop, her baby being left in the care of an old woman of seventy who supports herself by caring for little children at a charge of five cents per day. In another factory a woman returned to work on the seventh day after her confinement, but was sent back by the foreman. This woman, a Bohemian, explained that she did not feel well enough to work but feared that she might lose her place if she remained longer away. The dread prospect of unemployment and hunger had forced her from her bed to face the awful perils attendant upon premature exertion and exposure. Had she been a “savage heathen” in the kraal of some Kaffir tribe in Africa she would have been shielded, protected, and spared this peril, but she was in a civilized country, in the richest city of the world, and therefore unprotected!

In many factories, probably a majority, women in whom the signs of approaching motherhood are conspicuous are discharged. “It don’t take two people to run this loom,” or “Two can’t work at one job,” are typically brutal examples of the language employed by bosses of a certain type upon such occasions. The fear of being discharged causes many a poor woman to adopt the most pitiful means to hide her condition from the boss. “It wouldn’t be so bad if we were only laid off for a few weeks, but it’s getting fired and the trouble of finding a new job that hurts,” they say. But the consequences are too serious alike to mother and child, to justify legislative neglect or the dependence upon the wisdom or humanity of employers or foremen. In many cases, doubtless, sympathy for the women themselves and the knowledge that discharge, or even suspension for a few weeks, would mean increased poverty and hardship, induces foremen to allow them to remain at work as long as they can stand. But in many other instances the condition of business and the needs of the employer at the moment determine the question. If the mill or factory is busy and in need of hands, the pregnant woman is rarely discharged; if there is difficulty in obtaining workers in certain unpopular departments, like the winding-room of a textile mill, for instance, such a woman will frequently be given the option of ceasing work or going into the less popular department, generally at less wages.

The evil is apparent, but the remedy is not so obvious. That no woman should be permitted to work during a period of six or eight weeks immediately before and after childbirth may be agreed, but then the necessity arises for some adequate means of securing her proper maintenance during her necessary and enforced idleness. To forbid her employment without making provision for her needs would possibly be an even greater evil than now cries for remedy. The question really resolves itself into this: Is civilized man equal to the task which the savage everywhere fulfils? Private philanthropy has occasionally grappled with this problem and the results have been highly significant of what might be accomplished if what has been done as a matter of charity in a few cases could be done generally as a matter of justice and right. Of these private experiments perhaps the most famous of all are those of the celebrated Alsatian manufacturer, M. Jean Dolphus, and the Messrs. Fox Brothers, of Wellington, Somerset, England.

M. Dolphus found that in his factory at Mülhausen, where a large number of married women were employed, the mothers lost over 40 per cent of their babies in the first year, though the average at that age for the whole district was only 18 per cent. He noticed, moreover, that the mortality was greatest in the first three months of life, and that set him thinking of a remedy. He decided therefore to require all mothers to remain away from their work for a period of six weeks after childbirth, during which time he undertook to pay them their wages in full. The results were astonishing, the decrease in infantile mortality in the first year being from more than 40 to less than 18 per cent.^[35] Other employers followed with similarly beneficent results, among these being the firm of Fox Brothers, who employed considerably over one thousand persons, more than half of whom were women. They paid wages for three weeks only, but provided excellent crèches with competent matrons in charge for the care of the infants whose mothers were at work. There, also, the infantile death-rate was very materially reduced, though, owing to the fact that no statistics showing the rate among children whose mothers were employed by the firm prior to the introduction of the plan exist, it cannot be statistically represented. Mr. Charles H. Fox, head of the firm, is authority for the statement that the reduction was extensive.^[36] The importance of these experiments, especially in conjunction with the experiences of Paris in the great siege and Lancashire in the cotton famine, cannot easily be overestimated. They clearly show that not only hunger, but that other aspect of poverty hardly less important, the neglect of infants through industrial conditions which force the mothers to neglect them, are responsible for an alarming sacrifice of life year by year, and that it is possible to reduce materially the rate of infant mortality by improving the economic circumstances of the parents.

X

No study of this problem can be regarded as satisfactory which ignores the question of poverty and its relation to the number of still-births, yet we can only touch briefly upon it. No brutal Malthusian cynicism, but a calm view of such facts as those cited, leaves the impression that, however it might be under other and more humane social conditions, still-birth means very often a child’s escape from a life of suffering and misery. It is surely better that a babe should be strangled in the process of delivery from its mother’s womb, never to utter a cry, than that it should live to cry of hunger which its mother cannot appease, or from the torture of food unsuited to its little stomach! When a mother suffers all the pain and anxiety caused by the struggling life within her, and in her travail goes down to the brink of the grave, only to be mocked at last by a lifeless thing, she suffers the supreme anguish of her kind. Last year there were more than 6000 such tragedies in the city of New York alone, and the number in the whole country was probably not less than 80,000.

Some of the best authorities upon the subject of vital statistics insist that still-births should be included in the death-rates, and in many foreign cities, notably Berlin,^[37] they are so included. If such a method were adopted in this country, it is easy to see how important the effects would be upon the tables of mortality. Whatever opinions they may hold upon the moot question of regarding still-births as deaths in all enumerations, all authorities appear to agree that the circumstances of the mothers influence the numbers of the still-born as surely as they do the actual infantile death-rates. Six physicians of large obstetrical experience were asked to estimate what percentage of the still-born should be ascribed to the influence of poverty, and the average of their replies was 60 per cent.

That may be an overestimate, or it may be, and probably is, an underestimate. If we assume it to be fairly correct, it means that in one city something like 3700 mothers needlessly endured the supreme agony, and as many lives were sacrificed to poverty. It means that to the 80,000 babies annually devoured by the wolf of poverty must be added another 45,000 killed by the same cruel foe in the passage of the race from the womb of dependence to a separate existence. Whatever the number may be, it is certain that many are still-born because of the fatigue and overexertion of the mothers in the critical periods of pregnancy and that many more are suffocated in the passage from the womb because of the employment of untrained and unskilled midwives—especially, as often is the case, when the “midwife” is only a kindly neighbor called in because of the poverty of the family to which the child comes. And it may be added, incidentally, that still-birth is not by any means the only danger from this source, nor the most lamentable. Many accidents of a non-fatal character occur at birth which seriously affect the whole of life. Carelessness, inexperience, and ignorance may cause the suffocation of the child, or by pressure upon some delicate nerve centre irreparable injury may be caused to it, such as paralysis for life or hopeless imbecility.^[38]

XI

It is a strange fact of social psychology that people in the mass, whether nations or smaller communities, or crowds, have much less feeling and conscience than the same people have as individuals. People whose souls would cry out against such conditions as we have described coming under their notice in a specific case, en masse are unmoved. As individuals we fully recognize that charity can never take the place of justice, but collectively, as citizens, we are prone to solace ourselves with the thought that charity, organized and unorganized, somehow meets the problem, and we blind ourselves to the contrary evidences which everywhere confront us. But it is only too true that charity—“that damnably cold thing called charity”—fails utterly to meet the problem of poverty in general and childhood’s poverty in particular. Nothing could be more pathetic than the method employed by so many charitable persons and societies of attempting to solve the latter problem by finding employment for the mother, as if that were not the worst phase of all from any sane view of the child’s interest. Charity degrades and demoralizes, and there is little or no compensating effective help. In the vast majority of cases it fails to reach the suffering in time to save them from becoming chronic dependents. More and more the heart and brain of the world are coming to a recognition of the fact that charity, however well organized, cannot solve the problems which the gigantic and blind forces inhering in the laws of social development have called into being.

While the causes of poverty remain active in the forces which govern their lives, it is impossible to reclaim the victims. Were nothing but charity possible, consideration of this and other phases of our growing social misery might well plunge us into the deepest and blackest pessimism. But surely we may see in those experiments in the work of social reconstruction, which wise and enlightened municipalities have undertaken, a widening sense of social responsibility and the rays of the hope-light for which men have waited through the years. Such social efforts as the municipal milk depots of Europe and this country, based upon the Gouttes de Lait of France;^[39] the provision of free, well-regulated crèches^[40] and the extension of free medical service at the public cost, have been attended with important beneficial results and point the way to further efforts in the same direction. Experience points clearly to the need of some provision to enable the mother to remain with her infant child instead of leaving it to the care of others while she joins the great machine, and becomes part of it, in the interests of that world-supremacy in commerce and industry which is our boast and dream, and for which we are paying too terrible a price.

It is, of course, true that even these measures will not banish poverty from the world. They can only palliate the evils, not eradicate them. Eradication can only be accomplished by greater, foundational changes which will make it possible for every child to flourish as befits the inheritors of the ages of strife and suffering which the world is slowly coming to regard as so many experiences and lessons in the art of life. Between the present wrong and that ideal there must come golden years of opportunity for enlightened social statesmanship consecrated to the rescue of the nation’s children from the curse and thrall of cruel and relentless poverty, which otherwise must be bequeathed again to the generations yet unborn to damn their lives. In the child’s cry of to-day wisdom will hear the nation of to-morrow pleading that it may be saved from the blight and decay of a poverty which our vast resources and treasuries of wealth declare to be as needless as it is shameful and wrong.