Dreamers of a New Day (19 page)

But there were other women, especially in the labour movement, who insisted that reproduction was a social as well as an individual matter. They accordingly adopted a very different approach in the 1920s, demanding state resources both for the provision of birth control information and for the welfare of mothers and children. This division was carried over into debates about policies that would benefit mothers in rearing children. How to balance the needs of individuals with the interests of society was an unavoidable conundrum. ‘Now we can begin’, declared the optimistic Crystal Eastman in 1920, after the vote was won.
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Quite how was to prove less clear as the decade wore on.

5

Motherhood

When Dora Russell examined the maternal death rate in the early 1920s, the statistics were startling: ‘We found that the
average
death rate of mothers was then four to five per thousand births. By contrast the death rate of miners from fatal accidents was 1.1 per thousand miners actually engaged in mining. Leah L’Estrange Malone and I then coined the slogan: “It is four times as dangerous to bear a child as to work in a mine . . .”.’
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Concern about infant and maternal mortality had been gaining momentum from the late nineteenth century, and by the early 1900s proposals for reform were circulating internationally. From 1904 the pioneering German League for the Protection of Motherhood and Sexual Reform presented integrated policies for child-bearing and child-rearing, while supporting birth control and abortion. After the 1917 Russian revolution, Alexandra Kollontai declared mothering a ‘social function’ and introduced eight weeks’ maternity leave, nursing breaks at work, free pre- and post-natal care and cash allowances. When the International Congress of Working Women held a Maternity Convention in Washington DC in 1918, among its proposals were full maintenance payments and free medical care for six weeks, before and after childbirth. Along with birth control, motherhood had become a terrain of struggle.
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These large-scale, ambitious policies had grown out of an accretion of small interventions. In Britain the dangers associated with infancy and maternity had led charitable organizations to send ‘health visitors’ out to mothers in their homes during the mid-nineteenth century; by the 1890s this philanthropic activity was being taken on by local authorities. But it quickly became evident that while advice might be useful, poverty and the hard work women were doing, before and after giving birth, were contributing to mortality. As a result, ad hoc maternity and child welfare centres
were set up; these not only gave advice but provided a range of practical services such as meals for pregnant women, mothers and young children.
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An early initiative was taken by the socialist and feminist Charlotte Despard. After she was widowed, she settled in Nine Elms, South London, where her charitable attempts to educate her working-class neighbours on baby care and diet evolved into a mother and baby clinic which she set up in her own home, employing a nurse to assess the babies.
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The understanding she gained contributed to the creation of clinics elsewhere.

By the early 1900s maternity and child welfare centres were being started by local health officers, by councils and by women’s voluntary efforts. Funding came from the government, local councils and in some cases from the co-operative movement. Under pressure from women in St Pancras, London, the Medical Officer for Health opened a school for mothers along with a clinic employing health visitors. In 1908 the feminist and labour activist in the Women’s Co-operative Guild, Sarah Reddish, a Poor Law guardian in Bolton, persuaded the local co-operative movement to follow the St Pancras example. She and other members of the Guild were aware of international experiments in maternity provision; they went to Ghent, in Belgium, to investigate ‘the pioneering “Consultations for Mothers”’, before establishing Bolton’s School for Mothers, with tea and biscuits ‘to show friendliness and good feelings’.
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Within the year the co-operative movement found itself supporting five clinics which the local council was eventually persuaded to take over. In another Lancashire textile community, Stalybridge, Anne Summers, the charitable wife of a wealthy iron founder, formed a school to teach motherhood which turned into a Maternity and Child Welfare Centre.
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The infant mortality rate in the northern mill towns was exceptionally high, and every practical initiative on behalf of mothers served to reveal the problems of mothers and infants.

A pattern emerges of voluntary action being gradually augmented by local authorities.
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This was by no means an automatic process. Behind the scenes, Labour women activists energetically applied political pressure. Aware that 102 babies out of 1,000 were dying in the town during their first year and that a combination of poverty and illegal abortions put working-class women’s lives at risk, the secretary of the Women’s Labour League in Nelson, Lancashire, Harriette Beanland, wrote to the Labour Party in 1913 urging that ‘Baby Clinics’ be adopted as policy, complementing the Party’s advocacy of school clinics and medical inspections in schools for older children.
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Despite the need for such provision, working-class women often felt a deep-rooted suspicion that medical experts would despise their own knowledge of mothering based on experience. Consequently, in 1913, when the Women’s Labour League set up a mother and baby clinic in a working-class area of London, they were determined to show that information need not be given in a patronizing way. They argued for a clinic on the same grounds as the birth controllers, invoking the nineteenth-century radical working-class argument of the right to knowledge.
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The suffragette and socialist Sylvia Pankhurst was hostile towards state involvement and believed in self-help projects. In 1915 her East London Federation of the Suffragettes collected money from wealthy supporters and bought a pub, ‘The Gunmakers’ Arms’, which they renamed ‘The Mothers’ Arms’, using the former bar as a reception centre and providing medicines, milk and nutritious food, including fresh eggs from the country. Domestic science lessons were offered and a nurse employed to weigh the babies and assess their progress. The Pankhurst venture pioneered combined provision: a nursery run on first Tolstoyan and then Montessori lines was housed in the same building. Self-help, however, proved problematic. Pankhurst’s suspicions of the state forced her to depend on wealthy feminists in running these projects, which also absorbed a considerable amount of energy. The ELFS found itself tussling with the babies’ inability to digest milk and with an embarrassing case in which a nurse was accused of stealing from the centre.
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Problems such as these inclined reformers to seek state support for the maternity welfare centres, which spread rapidly in the early twentieth century; however, the existence of self-help projects like The Mothers’ Arms undoubtedly helped to demonstrate the demand for provision.

Once established, a maternity clinic could become the basis for a network of services. Women devised schemes which became part of social policy provision, such as health visiting and ‘home helps’, who provided free domestic service for mothers after they gave birth as well as helping the elderly and ill.
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Piecemeal local responses were inevitably uneven and women campaigners, linked through the Women’s Local Government Society, began to press for systemization of provision both nationally and locally. Elected as Manchester’s first woman councillor in 1908, Margaret Ashton persuaded the Council to establish a Maternity and Child Welfare Committee, which she chaired.
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Maternity welfare centres continued to act as catalysts for further change and, during the 1920s, were at the eye of the storm over birth
control advice. However, the welfare clinics were not in themselves a solution to all the dangers of maternity. Gaps in medical knowledge combined with broader economic and social factors contributed to the maternal death rate. Local councils found it cheaper to set up a clinic than to deal with the more costly problems of the inadequate sanitary systems in industrial towns.
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Nevertheless the whole range of voluntary measures, and their institutionalization, reinforced the argument of there being a social responsibility for reproduction, in relation both to maternity care and maintaining the future generation.

In the early twentieth century the Liberals were bidding for the male working-class vote through social reforms, and working-class women’s organizations sought to ensure that women’s interests were not overlooked. When the Liberals proposed legislation in 1910 on national insurance, the Women’s Co-operative Guild began a campaign for non-wage-earning married women’s maternity, sickness and invalidity to be incorporated. However, the bill which was drawn up did not include full sick pay for women, and it made maternity benefit the property of the man. While the Labour Party’s Women’s Labour League was prepared to accept this, the Women’s Co-operative Guild protested, mobilizing 700 women on local councils and Poor Law boards, along with members of nursing and midwives’ associations, health visitors and sanitary inspectors, to sign a statement insisting that maternity benefits should belong to women themselves. Eventually Lord Robert Cecil, a Conservative sympathetic to women’s issues, amended the Bill to enable the husband to receive the benefit on the authorization of the wife.
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World War One was the turning-point in agitation for state support for maternity. Panic about racial ‘degeneracy’ contributed to a public mood which enabled labour organizations to push for reforms. Breaking the silence around pregnancy and childbirth, the Women’s Co-operative Guild published
Maternity: Letters from Working Women
(1915), edited by the indefatigable Margaret Llewellyn Davies. Far from idealizing motherhood, the writers documented how they dreaded the arrival of another baby. They recorded miscarriages, infant deaths and the lack of time to rest. Their moving testimonies intensified concern about maternity.
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Suddenly in wartime, mothers having babies and the survival of infants became a matter for ‘the nation’. In 1915, municipalities were given power to set up maternity committees. Three years later the Maternity and Infant Welfare Act empowered local authorities to finance services such as maternity hospitals, hospital provision for children under
five, home helps and nurseries for children under five without fathers. From 1919 grants were also available for voluntary groups doing similar work. As a result, in post-war Britain a patchwork of state and voluntary services would be co-ordinated by the Maternity and Child Welfare Committees.

Even though the wartime state’s welfare provision had developed in a top-down way, a strong democratic current ran through the labour movement, and this was braced by a gendered class feeling. The Women’s Co-operative Guild and the Women’s Labour League reckoned that neither men, middle-class women, nor the state could be relied upon to safeguard their interests, and pressed for working-class women’s representation on the Maternity and Child Welfare Committees. Consequently the demand for state resources merged with the resolve to influence the services provided. The long, hard struggles for maternity provision bred both profound fortitude and a sense of democratic entitlement which enabled labour women’s organizations to carry on defending services right through the 1930s depression.
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In 1890s America, the cause of maternal welfare was taken up by large and powerful charitable organizations. The Charity Organization Society in the US, as in Britain, emphasized individual effort, admonishing mothers to adopt habits of order, cleanliness and thrift. A coalition of club women, suffrage and social-purity activists created the National Council of Women, and municipal councils of women were formed. The Mothers’ Congress of the Christian League for the Promotion of Social Purity and the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union combined charity with a religious message, while the National Congress of Mothers dispensed advice on maternity, child welfare and the rearing of children through Parent-Teacher Leagues and women’s clubs. The National Congress of Mothers sought to strengthen women’s position in the home, while at the same time providing practical services such as kindergartens. From the 1910s they prioritized child health, setting up centres for babies, and began to seek state funding.
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Black American women reformers also intervened in efforts to improve motherhood. The National Association of Colored Women (NACW), formed in 1895, sought to reshape prevailing ideas of motherhood by making black women moral guardians of race uplift. In 1900, the Chicago Afro-American Mothers’ Council told mothers to: ‘Instruct their girls in all matters pertaining to their future welfare; not to let them roam the streets by day or by night, but they must keep close to
their daughter and make constant companions of them, and wield such a refining influence over them for good that there will be no danger of them ever wandering from the path of rectitude.’
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This extra sense of the need for motherly supervision arose in response to both the actual dangers of sexual violation facing young black women, and to racist stereotypes.

The formation of the social settlements enabled women to investigate and spread awareness of the needs of poor women and children. In 1909 Alice Hamilton conducted a Hull House survey of 1,600 working-class families, immigrant and native-born, which showed that infant mortality was higher in larger families. Progressive social reformers began, as they did in Britain, to press for training for midwives, education on breastfeeding and ‘milk stations’ to ensure pure milk in poor immigrant areas. They invoked ethical arguments to justify reforms for mothers and children and made an economic case by pointing to the long-term social costs of failing to intervene.
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