tuated by
overwork, with no labour-saving devices; lack of suitable food; too
few, if any, hours of recreation, and hence very little out-door
exercise. Badly ventilated homes deprive the mother of necessary
supplies of oxygen, and insufficient sleep is often the last straw
which breaks down the patient burden bearer. A true and haunting
picture is given in a recently published book called _The Woman in the
Little House_ (which first appeared in a series of articles in the
journal "Time and Tide"), describing the anxiety of a working woman at
night to keep her baby quiet that the husband may sleep.

Now it is quite true that a small family instead of a large one will
diminish the work and anxieties of such a mother, but it will not give
her the remedies which she needs, nor will it diminish the excessive
sexual demands made upon her.

Everyone who knows these women intimately realises what an exhausting
feature is this habit of excess due to lack of knowledge or
self-restraint on the part of the husband.

I believe if facilities were provided whereby the woman could do her
laundry with modern appliances outside her own home, if family meals
were arranged in service rooms equivalent to the arrangements in
service flats, and if there were creche rooms where children might be
left for an hour or two in safety while necessary work was done--we
should find a greatly increased standard of comfort even in existing
homes, and a great improvement in dietary for the whole family. Such
relief, added to teaching both to husband and wife as to the times of
conception, would revolutionise the life of women more than any
teaching of artificial birth control, and would lift it up to a higher
level instead of degrading it to the grossly physical.

We come to very different considerations in group 4, p. 18, where
choice rather than necessity impels the parents to limitation of the
family. The teaching now being advocated by certain books and
pamphlets advises deliberate delay in child-bearing for a period after
marriage, and the spacing of certain periods between the births of
such children as are allowed to come into the world, with limitation
of the number in each family.

Teaching on these lines, if followed, would involve an artificial mode
of sex life always--natural spontaneous union would find no place.
Already young wives are seeking advice for some relief from methods of
preparation which they say have destroyed in them al