But the woman who looks forward to motherhood as a possibility for
herself, or the woman who is expecting to become a mother, should not,
through an unlimited amount of voluntary work or of work forced upon her
contrary to her will, sacrifice the capacities for life and work of an
unborn generation, in such a way that she will bring into the world
weak, invalid, or physically incapable children, who will later on be
neglected.
It does not occur to the dogmatic advocates of women's rights that their
talk about the individual freedom of the woman to control her career,
their contention that no limitation need restrict woman's power of
deciding her own vocation, because they are married or are mothers,
mean the most crying injury, not only to children, but to women
themselves. For the demand of equality, where nature has made
inequality, brings about the injury of the weaker factor. Equality is
not justice. Often it is just the opposite, the most absolute injustice.
The strongest reasoning will not convince those advocates of women's
rights who discuss woman's labour from the old-fashioned level of
individualism, unaffected by the social feeling of solidarity, which is
the solution offered by our age. But fortunately protective legislation
does not depend on the women who advocate the rights of women. The
workingmen's movement, aided by women and men of all classes who are
active in it, will carry through this legislation. The movement for the
normal working day is steadily gaining ground.
Experience has shown that, because of the greater intensity of the work
done, just as much can be accomplished in a shorter as in a longer time.
The first concern has been the work of children and of younger adults.
The effect of factory life on the health of women themselves, as well as
on their children, has excited general attention. In England first,
then in other European countries, it has become recognised as necessary
that a normal period of work should be laid down for women as well. The
programme was and continues to be threefold:--a maximum working time for
women's work; limitation, or, better still, the cessation of night work
on the part of women; the prevention, too, of the work of women in mines
and in certain other industries dangerous to health; finally the
protection of women who are about to become mothers. In most European
countries there is now a maximum working time fixed at eight to eleven
hours. Night work, work in mines, and extra work, is either forbidden or
considerably limited, and a rest period of three to eight weeks is
established for women at childbirth.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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