Half a Man: The Status of the Negro in New York — John Shaqi
Half a Man: The Status of the Negro in New YorkOvington, Mary White
History
Half a Man: The Status of the Negro in New York
Ovington, Mary White
African Americans -- New York (State) -- New York
The colored mother who has no husband
often takes a position in domestic service and boards her baby, paying
usually by the month, and finding the opportunity to visit her infant
perhaps once a week. Sometimes she secures a "baby tender" who can give
kindly, intelligent care; but under the best conditions her child will
be bottle fed and in tenement surroundings inimical to health, while
sometimes the woman to whom she intrusts her infant will be ignorant of
the simplest matters of hygiene.
I remember an old colored woman, she must be dead by this time, who kept
a baby farm. Her health was poor, and when I saw her, she had taken to
her bed and lay in a dark room with two infants at her side. They were
indescribably puny, with sunken cheeks and skinny arms and hands,
weighing what a normal child should weigh at birth, and yet six and
seven months old. The woman talked to me enthusiastically of salvation
and gave filthy bottles to her charges. She was exceptionally
incompetent, but there are others doing her work, too old or too
ignorant properly to attend to the babies under their care.
Mothers who go out to day's-work are also unable to nurse their babies
or to prepare all their food. The infant is placed in the care of some
neighbor or of a growing daughter, who may be the impatient "little
mother" of a number of charges. When the hot summer comes, such a baby
is likely to fall the victim of epidemic diarrhoea, caused by pollution
of the milk. Newman has a striking chart of infant death rates in Paris
in which he pictures a rate mounting in one week as high as 256 in the
thousand among the artificially fed infants, while for the same week,
among the breast fed babies, the mortality is 32. The Negro mother,
seeking self-support by keeping clean another's house or caring for
another's children, finds her own offspring swiftly taken from her by a
disease that only her nourishing care could forestall.[7]
Remedial measures have for some time been taken in New York to check
infant mortality, and they have met with some success. The distribution
of pasteurized milk by Mr. Nathan Straus, the establishment of milk
stations during the summer months in New York and Brooklyn where mothers
at slight cost may secure proper infant food, and where much educative
work is done by the visiting nurse, the multiplication of day nurseries,
all these have helped to decrease the death rate. The Negroes have been
benefited by these remedial agencies, but their percentage of 290 is
still a matter for grave attention.
Two out of seven of New York's Negro babies die in the first year, but
the other five grow up, some with puny arms and ricketty legs, others
again too hardy for bad food or bad air to harm.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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