Woman's work in municipalities. Mary Ritter Beard
ice. An instance of this agitation is afforded by the following clipping from the New York Times, May, 1914:
More than one hundred mothers attended a meeting yesterday afternoon in the offices of the East Side Protective Association, No. 1 Avenue B, and discussed plans for the establishment on the east side of a municipal ice plant whereby ice could be distributed to mothers during the coming summer for their infants. At the conclusion of the meeting a letter was forwarded to Mayor Mitchel, signed by Harry A. Schlacht, Superintendent of the Association, asking the Mayor to do all in his power to aid the project, pointing out that through it lives of hundreds of infants would be saved.
A report on Municipal and Government Ice Plants in the United States and Other Countries was prepared last winter by Mrs. Jeanie W. Wentworth, who has been assisting Mr. McAneny, president of the New York City Board of Aldermen, to study the question of ice.
Child Welfare
The reduction of infant mortality is only one phase of child welfare. However imperative it is to save little babies, unless they are watched over and safeguarded physically during the after years of growth and nutrition, the earlier work is wasted. It is this conception of the unity of health work that has resulted in the formation by women of child welfare associations and of such committees within women’s associations all over the country.
The General Federation of Women’s Clubs voted several years ago to work for the following five universal needs of the American child:
1. For better equipped, better ventilated and cleaner school buildings.
2. For more numerous, larger and better supervised playgrounds.
3. For medical school inspection and school nurses.
4. For physical education and instruction in personal hygiene.
5. For instruction in normal schools in wise methods of presenting the essentials of personal and sex hygiene.
Every medical inspection of the poor children in the public schools of large cities reveals a state of anæmia from undernourishment. A hungry child cannot learn rapidly, if at all. Teachers are the ones to see the connection between hunger and mentality, and the first school lunch in Cleveland was therefore started by teachers in a neighborhood where many of the mothers of the children were forced to go out of the home each day to earn all or part of the family income. Everywhere women have been largely instrumental in initiating and defending the school lunch.
Promoters of the school lunch often have as competitors the candy vender, the ice cream man and sellers of adulterated and low dietary wares of various kinds who stand even at the school gates to wean the children away from less exciting but more nutritious food. School lunches cannot be compulsory, or are not compulsory, and the child must be led to realize that good nutrition is fundamental and desirable. Then he can be led on to an interest in pure food laws and their enforcement, and kindred civic matters.
The school lunch is therefore of high social utility and an invaluable adjunct to the work of the school medical inspector or nurse. Yet it has its critics.
Mr. Joseph Lee of Boston is one of the more outspoken of these, claiming that school lunches will disrupt the family.
Mrs. George B. Twitchell of Cincinnati gave a spirited defense of the school lunch in a letter to The Survey:
I want to ask Mr. Lee how it is possible to disrupt a family when our social conditions are such that the mother has to go out to help make a living. Isn’t that family already disrupted? We are all working to bring about social conditions when it will be possible to have a home for all the people, when father will be able to earn enough to make it possible for mother to remain at home; but until such time the children must be given some good, substantial food, not candy, pickles and such trash as they can buy at the candy store. …
The teachers of Cleveland proved that their pupils could not work on a diet of candy and pickles. The school lunch has proved so helpful that ten have been established in Boston, all but one in the poor districts. The one in the Mt. Auburn school was started by the Mothers’ Club because they wished to give their children better food than they could get at the candy store at recess time. The mothers report that since they have opened the lunch room and the children get good food at recess time they have better appetites and eat more than they did before.
Many times children do not eat because they are too hungry and tired after the walk home and really have lost their appetites on account of that. Children often eat a very light breakfast and need a lunch at recess. They are like little chicks, they thrive best if fed every three hours. We believe there should be a lunch room in every school which should supply the children with good food, rather than depend on commercialism, as in that case we know the only interest is to make money.
Undaunted by those who fear that the school lunch may pauperize the poor, some of its defenders would go further. Miss Mabel Parker, of New York, proposes to unite with the school lunch a “pre-natal restaurant” in certain districts where poor women in a pregnant condition can get for five cents a nourishing lunch which they could not get for a great deal more money at home. With the school plant already equipped for meeting the extra work, these same women, instead of living on bread and bologna, could be provided with a nourishing midday meal and child welfare be promoted from the very start. Her belief is that this extended work would be self-supporting. Miss Parker says: “We have learned from our work in the Board of Health milk stations that education is not enough. The people of the tenement districts simply cannot afford good food, even if they have learned how desirable it is. That is why the city is willing to sell them milk at cost and why mothers must be provided with good food.”
Not only must mothers be taught better care of their infants but the “little mothers” and “little fathers” upon whose young shoulders devolves the burden of taking mother’s place, while she goes out to earn or help earn the family living, must receive the education which will enable them to preserve the lives intrusted to their care until such time as the real mothers and fathers can be placed in an economic situation whereby they themselves are able to assume that burden which is rightfully theirs alone. Dr. S. Josephine Baker appreciates the value of this work and through the organization of groups of young guardians of children, this information is being imparted.
Mrs. Clarence Burns of New York has been among the women who have sought to make the burdens of the “little mothers” lighter and her “Little Mothers’ Aid Society” is one of the well-known institutions of that city. Recently the little fathers have begun to feel that their position of responsibility was ignored too much in the greater efforts made to smooth the way of girls who have parental tasks, and their protest has served to call attention again to the extent to which the oldest child whether boy or girl is the real person charged with the task of prolonging infant life and keeping or making baby brothers and sisters well and strong.
Children Born Out of Wedlock
In leaving the matter of women’s interest in the reduction of infant mortality and the proper preparation of women for motherhood, mention should be made of the growing recognition of the right of the child to be well born. Realizing the responsibility of the father, as well as the mother, for the physical and mental vigor of children, women in many states are discussing in their associations the proposition for requiring health certificates for those who seek the marriage license. In some states such laws have been already passed. The right of the woman (as well as of the man) to know that her children are to have a proper physical heritage is now included in the new Declaration of Independence.
Mothers there are with no legal husbands and for these and their children the problem is difficult indeed. Mrs. Weston of Los Angeles states that the care of such children and their mothers presents a large and serious