There will be at least 4 rooms and the children away during the day under expert care. The little children of the rich in the West End nursery have no more scientific supervision than the municipal crèche will afford Mrs. Smith for hers. I know she will not longer personally wash their faces and wipe their noses. Even when she tries to, as you may have noticed in any land, she cannot possibly do those tasks as often as they should be done. The mere physical needs of children, any one else can attend to. But only a mother can love them. Hadn't we better conserve her more for that special function? The rising value of a baby begins to demand it.
And don't worry about the effect of factory employment on her health. Two government commissions of experts, one in France and one in England, tell us it's all right after all. Both report that a properly arranged factory is as good a place as any for a woman. Some significant figures presented to England's Birth Rate Commission show that the proportion of miscarriages is among factory workers 9.2 per cent. as compared with 16 per cent. among women doing housework in the home. Hard work and heavy work, you see, are just as harmful in Mrs. Smith's kitchen as they might be anywhere else—and not nearly so well paid! Really, in spite of its historic setting there is no sacred significance attaching to the figure of a woman bending over a washtub or on her knees scrubbing a floor. Let us venerate instead Azalie de Rigeaux nursing her child
