The Case for Birth Control: A Supplementary Brief and Statement of FactsSanger, Margaret
Science
The Case for Birth Control: A Supplementary Brief and Statement of Facts
Sanger, Margaret
Birth control; Eugenics
In localities where large numbers of women are engaged in industrial
work, comparisons are frequently made of the death rates among their
babies with those of the babies of mothers not so engaged. In Johnstown,
however, industrial occupations are not open to women, and but 3.1 per
cent. of the mothers visited went outside their homes to earn money. All
mothers who gained money by keeping lodgers or in any other way are, for
convenience, designated “wage-earning” mothers, even though their
earnings were not in the form of a definite wage at stated periods.
Although not industrially engaged, nearly one-fifth of the mothers did
resort to some means of supplementing the earnings of their husbands.
Usually they kept lodgers. This was done by the foreign mothers
principally, exactly one-third of whom had lodgers, as compared with
less than 1 per cent. of the native women. Usually work done outside the
home consisted either of char work or of assisting husbands in their
stores. Generally these stores were in the same building with the home.
When a mother of a young baby does not give her full time to her duties
within the home but resorts to means of earning money, it generally
indicates poverty. This is true to a greater degree in Johnstown than in
places which have many inducements for women to work. In Johnstown, with
its excess of males, especially in the foreign population, the woman’s
services are particularly needed to make the home.
In the group where the husband earns $10 a week or less—that is, under
$521 a year—many of the women are wage earners. In each group showing
better earnings for the husband the number and percentage of
wage-earning wives decline. Such a tabulation as the following almost
automatically fixes the minimum wage on which a man, wife, and a child
or two can live with any degree of comfort in Johnstown at about $780 a
year. When the husband’s wage is less than $780 a year, it is shown that
the wives, in considerable number, must be wage earners. As shown in the
next table, in nearly half of the families where the husband earns $10 a
week or less (less than $521 a year), the wife resorted to some means of
earning money; when he earned as much as $900 a year, only 8.9 per cent.
of the wives worked, and in the small group where the man earns as much
as $1,200 a year, only 1 in 50.
TABLE 32.—NUMBER AND PER CENT OF HUSBANDS WITH WAGE-EARNING WIVES, BY
NATIVITY OF WIFE AND ANNUAL EARNINGS OF HUSBAND.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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