Women's Wild Oats: Essays on the Re-fixing of Moral StandardsHartley, C. Gasquoine (Catherine Gasquoine)
History
Women's Wild Oats: Essays on the Re-fixing of Moral Standards
Hartley, C. Gasquoine (Catherine Gasquoine)
Women -- Great Britain; Women -- Social and moral questions
It is, of course, easy to write of these evils, the difficult thing is
to find a remedy. Many attempts are being made; much discussion is
taking place about the future position of women in industry; training is
being given to adolescent girls; even schools for wives have been
formed. The newly established Ministry of Health has wide schemes for
maternity and child welfare. Never was so much expended to right things
that are wrong. Yet, I cannot think the remedies offered are likely to
be satisfactory.
Let me here pause for a moment to compare my view of the true remedy for
the present unsatisfactoriness of women's lives, and the consequent
wastage of baby lives, with those remedies now so commonly put forward
by the reformers. I assert that women are trying in vain to transfer
their affection from babies to machines, and to take care of their
babies, if they have them, in the few hours left over after days
seriously devoted to business. I will test the results in a way fairer
to my opponents than to myself, comparing the effects of their method
at its best with my system in circumstances little favorable to human
life.
Bradford is a wealthy town: spending some L40,000 annually on the care
of infants in a total population of 300,000. Its institutions and
arrangements for this purpose are famous; its infant department, its
graded municipal milk, its free-feeding for expectant mothers--all are
as nearly perfect as is possible; and the men who have developed and
direct its municipal system of protection for infants are well known for
their ability and enthusiasm. The birth-rate is as low as Malthusians
could desire. But all its care is but an attempt to lessen evils brought
about by a wrong system; for the mothers of Bradford are not in their
homes, but in woolen factories.
County Roscommon is a poor district in Ireland, with a primitive and
superstitious population of agriculturists; the birth-rate is very high,
and there is practically no public provision for the safeguarding of
infant life. But its backward ignorant mothers tend and feed their
babies after the manner of the earliest ages.
_The infant death-rate is 135 in Bradford, and 35 in Roscommon._
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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