Separation of the sexes in the workrooms wherever possible, special rooms for meals and dressing, and provision for education in housewifery, are measures which are all the more urgent, if we grant the impossibility of altogether excluding women from factory work. This further protection is above all necessary for girls. 4. _Prohibition of the employment of women during the period immediately succeeding child-birth._ Whilst prohibition of factory work for wives and mothers is of the first importance for the protection of family life, exemption from work during the period immediately succeeding child-birth of all women engaged in factory and quasi-factory employments, is a measure that is necessary for the health of the mother and the nurture of the newly-born. The exclusion of pregnant women from certain occupations is another important question; the Confederate Factory Act leaves this in the power of the _Bundesrath_. Prohibition of the employment of nursing mothers in factories is a measure that has long received recognition in some countries, and lately it has become general. The resolutions of the Berlin Conference demand that the protection should cover a period of 4 weeks; Switzerland already grants protection for 8 weeks, a period which is recommended in Germany by the Auer Motion; the _von Berlepsch_ Bill proposes 4 weeks (instead of 3 weeks as hitherto appointed by the Imp. Ind. Code); the Reichstag Commission proposed 6 weeks, and this will probably be the period adopted. If it were necessary to enforce exemption from work after childbirth for _all_ women engaged in industrial wage-labour, even this would scarcely be found to be attended with insuperable difficulties. The Auer Motion on this point receives no notice in the _von Berlepsch_ Bill. It would be preferable in itself for such exemption to become general even for factory women, without special protective intervention from the State. But under the existing moral and social conditions legal prohibition of employment can hardly be dispensed with. The measure may be carried out by the help of the official birth-list, or of a special factory list of nursing mothers. The industrial inspector will not be able to do without the help of the workers themselves. The economic difficulties of the question are partly met in Germany by the existing agency of Insurance against sickness for all factory workers, which grants assistance during the period of lying-in, as during sickness. The means of help provided by the family and the club have to supply the additional assistance necessary for the nursing period. The granting of state assistance to women during the lying-in period, without which exemption from work would be a questionable benefit, is vigorously opposed by some on grounds of morality as likely to promote the increase of illegitimate births, and by others from the point of view of the population question.