essional equipment which is too
valuable to discard; often the demands of the home, especially where
there are no children, do not call forth the best energies of the
woman, and she needs the larger life of outside work. Hence many married
women must continue to work away from the home. In any of these cases,
the problem is difficult. Bearing and rearing a child should retire a
mother from fixed outside occupation for at least a year. Arguments born
out of conflict cannot change this primitive fact.[41] Women should not
do shop or factory work during the last months of pregnancy, and babies
should be nursed from seven to nine months. A baby should be nursed for
twenty minutes, every two or three hours of its waking time; and since
it does not always waken regularly, the nursing mother is debarred from
most continuous work, even if it does not interfere with her
effectiveness as a milk producer.

[41] Dr. ETHEL VAUGHAN-SAWYER, speaking before the Fabian Women's Group,
in 1910, said: "Fortunately, after the first two or three months, most
children will thrive equally well when artificially fed, so long as the
milk is good and reliable, and is properly prepared." All of our facts
go to disprove this statement.

The question of maternal care for children after they are weaned is more
difficult to settle, but notwithstanding certain statistics gathered in
Birmingham,[42] in February, 1910, which showed that the infant
mortality among working mothers was one hundred and ninety per thousand,
while, among those not industrially employed, it was two hundred and
seventy per thousand, it seems sure that infant mortality is extremely
high in foundling asylums and in factory homes. In Fall River, where out
of every one hundred women, forty-five are at work outside the home,
three hundred and five babies, out of every one thousand born, die
before they are a year old; while even in New York City, but one hundred
and eighty-nine out of a thousand die. The natural location of Fall
River should make it a very healthy city. One remembers, too, the
classic statement that deaths among little children fell off steadily in
Paris during the siege of 1870. Little children seem better off even in
time of war, with the mothers at home, than in time of peace with their
mothers in the factory.

[42] Pamphlet entitled _Report on Industrial Employment of Married Women
and Infant Mortality_, signed by Dr. JOHN ROBERTSON, the Medical Officer
of Hea