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The Industrial Employment of Married Women and Infant,
Mortality.—The Home Secretary had under consideration the report of
the Physical Deterioration Committee in regard to the further regulation
of the industrial employment of women before and after childbirth,
together with the resolutions adopted by the Conference on Infantile
Mortality, held in Caxton Hall in 1906, that women should not be
employed in a workshop or factory within three months after giving
birth to a child, and that women advanced in pregnancy should not be
employed. He found that the question of imposing further restrictions
presents difficulties both from a social and administrative point of view,
but, before forming a decision, he considered it necessary to have fuller
information than was then available, and with that view he held a
Conference of Medical Officers of Health in 1907 at which it was
decided that a systematic and simultaneous inquiry on uniform lines
should be made in a number of industrial centres throughout the
kingdom, the inquiry in each case to be limited to homogeneous
districts and to families of the same class and circumstances. It was to
relate to children born in the year 1908, and, as it is to cover the whole
of the first year of life, it could not be completed until the end of 1909.
The two main objects of the inquiry, so far as the Home Office is
concerned, are:—
(1) To determine the effect of the employment of women before
and after childbirth on the health of mother and child, and particularly
by means of a comparison between women who have been
at work in a factory or workshop and women who have been otherwise
employed or engaged only in domestic duties, whether
employment in a factory or workshop has any special prejudicialeffect;
and,
(2) so far as the Medical Officer of Health may be able to
collect material bearing on the question, to gauge the social and
economic effects which further restrictions on the employment of
women in factories and workshops before and after confinement
would entail, and in particular whether such restrictions would or
would not have indirect effects prejudicial to infant life, either
(a) by adding to the economic burden of child bearing and so