View report page

37
age, who had scrubbed the floor and table and was washing the
children's clothes and napkins in a small enamelled bowl.
The Mothers.—One of the most potent factors in maintaining
the infantile mortality of Finsbury at its high level is the employment
of the mothers. In the mean streets of the borough, a large
number of mothers work cither in their homes as outworkers or
in workshops. They resume their employment soon after the
confinement, but defer the weaning as long as possible. Some
work even during the lying-in, on the third or fourth day after they
have just been confined, making wreaths or artificial flowers as
they lie in bed. They work chiefly because they are unable to live
on their husband's money, because their husbands keep them
short, or because their husbands are out of work. A few—very
few state that they work in order to get a little extra pocketmoney.
Many of them work right up to the day on which they
are confined. They work before the confinement in order to pay
for the lying-in equipment for themselves and for the clothes for
the children about to be born. The difficulties which occur during
the confinement are very distressing, especially when the family
occupies only one, or at most two, rooms.
In such straits the father may go to sleep in a neighbour's
tenement, while the children may be taken in by relatives or
friends. Often the father may be found sleeping on the common
stairs with his head between his hands. These are comparatively
easy ways out of trying situations. The deplorable circumstances
arise when the family occupies one room and the husband is ill in
bed, or when the children cannot be accommodated elsewhere.
Thus, in one case the family occupied one room and the father
was ill in bed with rheumatic fever. When the mother was confined
the father was carefully lifted out of bed and laid on a couch
near the side of the bed while the mother was being delivered of
her child. It would be a wise provision of the owners of large
blocks of tenements if, in such buildings, they were to furnish and
equip a special lying-in room for the use of their mothers—a room,
cleanly kept and replete with modern conveniences for confinements,
which poor mothers cannot afford.