It should be remembered that the Consumers' League, which publishes
these reports on women in industry, is not advocating Birth Control
education, but is aiming "to awaken responsibility for conditions under
which goods are produced, and through investigation, education and
legislation, to mobilize public opinion in behalf of enlightened
standards for workers and honest products for all." Nevertheless, in
Miss Agnes de Lima's report of conditions in Passaic, New Jersey, we
find the same tale of penalized, prostrate motherhood, bearing the
crushing burden of economic injustice and cruelty; the same blind but
overpowering instincts of love and hunger driving young women into the
factories to work, night in and night out, to support their procession
of uncared for and undernourished babies. It is the married women with
young children who work on the inferno-like shifts. They are driven to
it by the low wages of their husbands. They choose night work in order
to be with their children in the daytime. They are afraid of the neglect
and ill-treatment the children might receive at the hands of paid
caretakers. Thus they condemn themselves to eighteen or twenty hours of
daily toil. Surely no mother with three, four, five or six children can
secure much rest by day.
"Take almost any house"--we read in the report of conditions in New
Jersey--"knock at almost any door and you will find a weary, tousled
woman, half-dressed, doing her housework, or trying to snatch an hour or
two of sleep after her long night of work in the mill. ... The facts
are there for any one to see; the hopeless and exhausted woman, her
cluttered three or four rooms, the swarm of sickly and neglected
children."
These women claimed that night work was unavoidable, as their husbands
received so little pay. This in spite of all our vaunted "high wages."
Only three women were found who went into the drudgery of night work
without being obliged to do so. Two had no children, and their husbands'
earnings were sufficient for their needs. One of these was saving for
a trip to Europe, and chose the night shift because she found it less
strenuous than the day. Only four of the hundred women reported upon
were unmarried, and ninety-two of the married women had children. Of the
four childless married women, one had lost two children, and another
was recovering from a recent miscarriage. There were five widows. The
average number of children was three in a family. Thirty-nine of the
mothers had four or more. Three of them had six children, and six of
them had seven children apiece. These women ranged between the ages of
twenty-five and forty, and more than half the children were less than
seven years of age. Most of them had babies of one, two and three years
of age.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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