Worn and haggard, with a
skeleton-like child pulling at her breast, the women tries to make the
investigator understand. The grandmother helps to interpret. "She never
sleeps," explains the old woman, "how can she with so many children?"
She works up to the last moment before her baby comes, and returns to
work as soon as they are four weeks old.
Another apartment in the same house; another of those night-working
mothers, who had just stopped because she is pregnant. The boss had
kindly given her permission to stay on, but she found the reaching on
the heavy spinning machines too hard. Three children, ranging in age
from five to twelve years, are all sickly and forlorn and must be cared
for. There is a tubercular husband, who is unable to work steadily, and
is able to bring in only $12 a week. Two of the babies had died, one
because the mother had returned to work too soon after its birth and had
lost her milk. She had fed him tea and bread, "so he died."
The most heartrending feature of it all--in these homes of the mothers
who work at night--is the expression in the faces of the children;
children of chance, dressed in rags, undernourished, underclothed, all
predisposed to the ravages of chronic and epidemic disease.
The reports on infant mortality published under the direction of the
Children's Bureau substantiate for the United States of America the
findings of the Galton Laboratory for Great Britain, showing that an
abnormally high rate of fertility is usually associated with poverty,
filth, disease, feeblemindedness and a high infant mortality rate.
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