Feminism; Women; Women -- Social and moral questions; Women -- Social conditions
Feminism repudiates, from time to time, the charge against it of
belittling Motherhood. Yet how can it profess to credit the maternal
function with due values or significance when it denies the obligations
and responsibilities thereof, asks no economic concessions for it? And
when, in place of demanding privileges indispensable to its exercise and
complete fulfilment, it makes no distinction, in respect of work and the
worker, between childless and unmarried women and mothers and expectant
mothers? And this despite the fact that, for a period of eighteen months
at very least, the mother's best vital resources belong by rights,
biological and moral, to each babe she produces--nine for the pre-natal
building of its body and brain, and nine for lactation.
Her moral obligation to nurse, and the criminality of her omission when
able to do so, have been emphasised as follows by Sir J.
Crichton-Browne:
"Dr. Robertson, Medical Officer of Health for Birmingham has shown
that while the infant-mortality of breast-fed infants is 7·8 _per
1000 births_, that of infants receiving no breast-milk is 232 _per_
1000. And Sir Arthur Newsholme, Medical Adviser to the Local
Government Board, has shown that the probability of death from
epidemic diarrhoea is 54 _times greater among infants fed on cow's
milk_ than among those fed on breast-milk, and 150 _times greater_
amongst infants fed on condensed milk.
"But it is not merely in a high infant death-rate that the evil
effects of the want of breast-milk stand confessed. Where it does
not kill it often maims, and is responsible for malnutrition,
rickets, tuberculosis, and a multiplicity of ailments. Every doctor
is familiar with the alabaster babies, flabby, limp, languid, and
painfully pallid, who have never tasted their natural nutriment."
Dr. Truby King records the interesting fact that the finest calf-skin,
known as Paris Calf, is obtained from calves reared by their mothers, in
order to provide the finest veal for Paris. So supple and smooth-haired
and superior is the skin of these mother-suckled creatures that dealers
are able to distinguish it at once from the skin of calves that have
been artificially fed.
About this, Mr. Horace G. Regnart kindly supplies me with the following
significant data:
"If we feed a calf, 'on the bucket,' the calf's coat loses its shine and
becomes dull. We say it is 'dead.' A couple of days is sufficient to
deaden the coat. And it takes three weeks or a month 'on a cow' to get
the gloss back. _A quart of milk direct from the cow is as good as a
gallon of milk out of a bucket._
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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