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Among the factors which are supposed to enter into the causation of
infantile mortality, the industrial employment of married women ranks high in
some quarters. Formerly, married female labour was almost universally held
to be an etiological factor of preponderating importance, and the general
tendency of legislation has been towards placing checks on the industrial
employment of married women. It is very difficult to eradicate a fallacy which
has originated in high quarters, and when a high authority asserted that the
absence of the mother from the home, constitutes one of the greatest dangers
to infant life, those unacquainted with the social, economic and sanitary circumstances
of the industrial classes accepted the dictum in its entirety. The
application of more precise methods of investigation has cast grave doubts on
this view, and has called for a re-statement of the whole case.
The Registrar-General in his report for 1905, discusses the question of
Infantile Mortality, and the employment of married women. He took two
groups of 15 towns, each containing respectively the lowest and the highest
proportions of occupied married women, and compared their birth-rate and
infantile mortality in two quinquennia. The birth-rate is, as might have been
anticipated, lower in the towns having a high proportion of the married women
industrially employed. The relationship between industrial employment of
married women and infantile mortality is, however, not very visible.
In the first group of towns having only 4 to 8 per cent. of its married
women engaged in industrial occupations, the infantile mortality in 1901—5,
varied from 101 in Burton-on-Trent to 202 in Aberdare, the average in the 15
towns being 161.
In the second group of towns having from 20 to 39 per cent. of its married
women engaged in industrial occupations, the infantile mortality varied from
140 in Rochdale to 206 in Longton, the average for the 15 towns being 168.
More recently, inquiries have been conducted at the suggestion of the
Home Office, and the publication of these results will be awaited with great
interest.
Special reports on the subject have been made by workers in this field
of labour, and one of the most interesting is that of Dr. Robertson, of Birmingham.
In Birmingham the area selected for inquiry comprised two wards, both
of which have a high death-rate, a high infantile mortality, and a large proportion
of married women industrially employed. The mortality among the infants
whose mothers were industrially employed either before or after childbirth,
was at the rate of 190 per 1,000 births, while among those whose mothers were
not industrially employed, it was 207 per 1,000 births. The general conclusions