Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 83.djvu/384

380 mother sees her infant once in six or ten hours only. Drugs are given to children only two weeks old to keep them quiet while the mother is away from home. Interference with lactation is injurious to the mother and fatal to the baby. The survivors of this heroic treatment grow up never having had sufficient nourishment. When it comes their turn to go to work, they do so not equipped with full vigor to meet the increasing stress of such work, but in a weakened condition, and are susceptible to all the ills before mentioned. Lifelong malnutrition added to pelvic deformities acquired by work is a serious drawback to the motherhood of working women.

Because children are a handicap, in calling for time and attention that is needed for other work, they are unwelcome or impossible to certain groups of women workers. A woman reporter or school teacher can not afford to have the demands of a child interfere with the requirements of her work, so in some branches of industry it can not be stated whether the women engaged in it are physically incapacitated for bearing children, or whether they have none because they do not wish them. All the social and economic factors which are causing a world-wide decline ia the birth-rate operate in the various groups of working women and complicate any general conclusions that might be drawn as to the injury done by the work itself.

A hundred and fifty years ago the man who ventured to predict that no women would be allowed to work in mines, bar rooms, buffing or polishing metals or as public messengers would have been laughed at in scorn, but we to-day look upon such occupations for women with horror. May not our children's children think of a time when women worked in factories as a barbarous age? Lawmakers may some day forbid such labor on the grounds of the injury to the future race. "We may not have to wait for such laws, however. Working conditions are usually the worst in the smaller concerns. The country is tending toward large-scale production, therefore conditions are slowly improving. But with large-scale production machines are larger, work heavier, speed and number of machines greater, so much so that men must be employed to do the work formerly done by women. The task a woman performs is largely of a mechanical nature, hence with large-scale production unreliable labor is replaced by a reliable automatic machine. The development of the loom from hand power to power driven, and from female to male attendance, and to final automatic action is an illustration in point. The more efficient machine may drive the less efficient woman out of the shop. In stores, offices and schools they must be more adequately protected by law, for it is evident that working, sooner or later, is reflected in fecundity.