Chapter V: Employment of Mothers; Young Workers; Charitable Institutions

“Every wise woman buildeth her house.”

“Give your women economic freedom, assure them access to the sources
of culture and you can safely leave eugenic experimentation to them”
(“Interpretations and Forecasts,” by Victor Branford, 1914).

Hitherto this survey of women’s life in the factory and workshop has simply accepted the fact of productive labour by women and its clear social and economic necessity. While admitting the existence of differences and handicaps, physiological and social, that in part distinguish them from male industrial workers, we have only, in one instance, touched on the influence of marriage and maternity on their employment. The sinister secondary effects of lead poisoning on maternal functions inevitably raised question of factors that, in a civilised community, must place certain limits or conditions on complete liberty of women’s employment in factory production as hitherto carried on. This, already long recognised in the United Kingdom in regulations excluding women and young persons from some of the most dangerous lead processes, has been followed or extended in other industrial countries since the Washington Convention.

No one will deny, said the Report of the Women’s Employment Committee, 1919, that “woman should be guarded from strain, from accident and racial poison, to a greater degree than man is guarded,” and that report fairly indicated standards and tests of suitability in occupations for women.

In this present chapter we pass from the general human considerations controlling industrial conditions over to special groups of persons, where the “human machine” to be safeguarded can least of all be regarded simply as an economic, producing unit. Here the interest of the community as well as of the individual requires consideration from a new angle of vision.

Children, the earliest objects of humanitarian aims in the factory system, came first under a Factory Act in 1802 in certain textile factories; adult women first in 1844. Not until 1891 (after the Berlin Conference in 1890) was any provision whatever made in this country for obviating the necessity of employment of a woman too early after childbirth—in a factory system such as that we have been considering in previous chapters. And then it came only in the form of a prohibition of employment: “An occupier of a factory or workshop shall not knowingly allow a woman to be employed therein within four weeks after she has given birth to a child.”[155] Effects, not causes, seem alone to have been held in view; what was to become of the woman, without other resources, seeking employment at such a time, was left to be sufficiently disclosed by the Women Factory Inspectors, who from 1896 onwards tried to give effect to the prohibition by warnings and prosecutions of the occupier so far as he could be shown to be legally responsible for infringements.

Inmates of charitable and reformatory institutions, engaged in production or manual labour of the nature covered by the Factory Acts and not already under Government inspection (as in workhouses, prisons, certified homes, etc.), first seem to have come, somewhat accidentally, under serious consideration in connection with these Acts through proposals to include laundries within their scope. For laundry work was by far the most general industrial occupation in charitable and reformatory institutions—where the work was done not for the institution itself but for outside clients, although not carried on by way of trade, and where the inmates were not working under a contract of service or apprenticeship. Occupiers of ordinary commercial laundries were willing to be included within the Act only if these institutions were also included. The opposition of the institutions was, however, sufficient to secure their exclusion from the Act of 1895, which in some degree covered commercial laundries; they remained outside until partially brought in by the Act of 1907, after we had for some years inspected convent laundries on a voluntary basis. Opposition of the managers melted away steadily, as the advantages of friendly advisory inspections were experienced.

For all but the last of these three classes of specially protected workers, the legal or the administrative position has substantially changed at the close of the period 1893 to 1921. And most of all has it changed in the care of child-bearing women employed in industry, who were before 1911 completely dependent on the Woman Factory Inspector for disclosure of evidence on their position. The change in the administrative point of view is most quickly realised when one recalls the fact that responsibility for applying the prohibition of employment in factories and workshops of women after childbirth has in 1921 been transferred from the Home Office to the Ministry of Health by Order of His Majesty in Council. It is thus formally recognised as a “matter affecting and incidental to the health of the people.”

The cases of employment within four weeks of childbirth were frequent in our experience. As it was generally extreme poverty or desertion or illness of the husband that drove mothers back to work, and the prohibition was well known (being included in the official abstract of the Acts affixed in the workplace), they would in some way conceal the date of birth from the occupier or manager, or sometimes change the place of employment. Thus in comparatively few instances could any legal action be taken at all; even where it could, the painful dilemma of the suffering woman became evident.

The first case taken into court under Section 17 of 1891 was in the year 1897, by Miss Squire. It was a clear case for testing the effect of the section, and it revealed much. The mother, working in a textile mill, had been sent for by the foreman, who was short of workers, on the ninth day after her confinement, although he had been informed of the reason of her absence on the day she left. Although she made some attempt to screen her employers when called as a witness, she was dismissed from their employment, after they had been convicted and fined. She obtained employment from one of the magistrates soon after he had heard the case, and this relieved her immediate need. The effect of this dismissal on the minds of the other workers remained.[156]

In 1898 old and new difficulties attending the application of this section again made action difficult or impossible. A laundry visited on a complaint of infringement of the section yielded only the information that the woman was at home, the regulation well known, and “as soon as it was permissible she would return to work.” The Inspector, wishing to make sure of all the facts, “went straightway to see the woman in her home, and found her in the act of doing heavy washing for the laundry in question.” The occupier was only legally responsible for knowingly employing the woman in his laundry within four weeks of childbirth, accordingly he had “sent the work to be done in the home. The laundry was clean and the surroundings ... in point of fatigue-saving appliances incomparably superior” to those in which the woman was found. “Her husband was a labourer, she had four living children, and the entire family inhabited two rooms; the woman was washing over a tub raised on two stools in one of the rooms, a small paved and drained yard lay at the back; it was a rainy day, and she had pulled the tub into the room to be under cover from the wet; she dragged it into the yard to empty when needful.”[157] More often the difficulty of taking action turned on the impossibility of proving knowledge of facts on the part of the occupier, a knowledge which in such a matter it was only natural he should avoid. In any case it was shortly discovered that a young mother of sixteen or seventeen was not covered by the section, being not a “woman,” as defined in the Act (_i.e._, a person of eighteen years and over), but a “young person.” These enquiries soon drew my attention to the high rate of infant mortality in districts where women were largely employed in heavy labouring work, such as brick-making in the Stourbridge area, and the galvanised bucket industry in the Lye district, and some enquiries were made to learn how far such work affected infant life.

In 1902 a conviction, with penalty, was again secured in one of the instances of re-employment of a woman within four weeks of childbirth. In another case of re-employment—this time within a fortnight of childbirth—in a wholesale clothing factory, although a deplorable state of affairs was disclosed, action was impossible owing to the entire lack of evidence of responsibility for supervision anywhere in the place. The Inspector took occasion to press home the need of superintendence by a competent woman, which in this case was promised by the employer. She found that young single women going to the workhouse for a confinement were usually discharged at the end of a fortnight if their state of health made it possible, with the result that their re-employment within three weeks was practically unavoidable.

The whole position was, as Miss Squire put it in 1897, that “Section 17 of 1891, although of so great importance to the community no less than the individual, must remain for the most part a dead letter owing to the difficulty of proving the employer’s knowledge of all the circumstances, as well as for other obvious reasons.”[158]

A welcome opportunity for wider dissemination of knowledge and understanding of the whole problem of employment of mothers arose through the appointment of the inter-Departmental Committee on Physical Deterioration in September, 1903. An invitation was extended to me to give oral evidence on the effects of factory and workshop employment on the health of women and girls, which I did at some length. Fuller information was sought by the Committee on the effect of industrial employment of mothers both on themselves and their infants. By the help of my colleagues, I set intensive study of the matter on foot in three separate and distinctive industrial centres for women’s employment: in Dundee (jute trade), in Lancashire, in Preston, Burnley, and Blackburn (cotton trade), in the Staffordshire Potteries, in Hanley and Longton (earthenware and china trade). Two of these towns, Dundee and Preston, were particularly characterised by an absence of employment for men of the same class as the women so largely employed. In all the centres of study infantile mortality was high, although not higher than rates to be found elsewhere—_e.g._, in mining centres where mothers are not industrially employed. Widely varying conditions in local sanitation and housing obtained in these towns. Wide variation also was present in nature of the industrial work done by the women, speed and pressure of work, length of daily hours, presence of dust or lead in the processes, and other circumstances.

The main effect of this enquiry, with the following up of many cases of re-employment of mothers after childbirth, was to establish more clearly than ever before that such re-employment was not, as had hitherto been often alleged, largely caused by the women’s preference for factory over domestic life, but by the pressure of poverty, or actual want, on the mothers. Much help was given by officers of the local health authorities in making the enquiry.

In 1904 I presented to the Committee a memorandum on “Employment of Mothers in Factories and Workshops,” containing full details, and what the Committee described as a “wealth of information” from the three Inspectors, Miss Paterson, Miss Squire, and Miss Martindale, who had carried out my scheme of enquiry. The Committee gave full publicity to the results in the memorandum, including it as an appendix in their report, besides favourably commenting on its conclusions. They further definitely recommended fuller investigation, on the lines suggested, into infant mortality rates; locally, for particular areas in industrial towns, and into general infant mortality rates for selected industries throughout the country, and the specifying of the occupation of all mothers (married or unmarried) in the Registrar-General’s records. They also recommended a strengthening of the prohibition of employment within four weeks, either by throwing onus of proof on the employer or by requiring a medical certificate from the mother.

The Committee attached great importance to observations of the Inspectors in the memorandum on the stress and strain involved, through many existing conditions in factory life, “in the employment of women from girlhood, all through married life, and through child-bearing”; they specially noted the fact that when decreasing physical capacity brought the prospective mother “at least some relief at the hands of the manager of the mill and she is sent away,” it is often only “to take up the equally unsuitable occupation of charwoman or scrubber.” No general notion had then arisen, or at least it had not been publicly expressed, that national responsibility for release of child-bearing women from wage-paid employment should be recognised by the provision of some form of maintenance at the time of their greatest need. The Committee, on this financial point, only included in their recommendations a suggestion that “charitable efforts in manufacturing towns might be directed towards endowing and maintaining insurance organisations to which employees, assisted by voluntary subscriptions, could contribute while in work, and from which they might receive assistance during a confinement and afterwards.” I had pointed, in my memorandum, to the experience at Mulhouse in Alsace that organisation of a maternity fund by manufacturers, to which both employer and employed contributed, had resulted in a reduction of infant mortality by half. I had also suggested that “whether by local trade effort, or larger national effort, provident insurance of the kind might be expected in time to eliminate the cases where infant lives are lost ... and needless suffering caused to hard-working, valuable mothers by total absence of skilled attendance.” I had also laid stress on the need for fundamental reorganisation of antiquated charities, in harmony “with increased scientific knowledge,” and with the “changed economic conditions of women’s lives.”

On this side the earliest help that came was, of course, through the National Health Insurance Act of 1911. In 1904, and onwards down to 1913, Women Factory Inspectors continued to gather and to present information on this subject, which never seemed to them less poignant in the details, though it took seven years to issue in any provision for the sufferers. A summary of all that we learned, as Miss H. F. Cohen said when she prepared such a summary from my Annual Reports for the Women’s Employment Committee in 1919, “gives only a faint idea of the state of things—it is only the cumulative effect of instance after instance which enables one to realise the impotence of the law.”

In 1904, in twenty-one cases of employment within four weeks of childbirth investigated in Scotland by two Women Inspectors, only three were found suitable for proceedings, and a conviction was recorded in only one. “The others were dismissed, one without trial, on the ground that a Limited Liability Company could not be charged with the offence; the other on the ground that the woman was not “knowingly” employed, although it was proved that the reason for leaving the mill was known to the foreman, who re-engaged her without enquiry. In the majority of cases the woman did not return to the same factory as that in which she worked before confinement.” In a very bad case of re-employment at one and the same works the woman, working under a contractor, was employed in very laborious work, the setting and drawing of kilns. The manager of the works ordered the contractor to send her home, as she was obviously not in a fit condition to do the work. Ten days after the child’s birth she was re-engaged by the manager who had ordered her to be sent home, and employed at the same place in loading wheelbarrows at the canal bank and other work. “Sixteen days after its birth the child died.... The occupier, who goes daily to the works, endeavoured to shift the legal responsibility on to the manager, the latter on to the contractor. Until the Woman Inspector put the matter before them in what was evidently a new light, it had not occurred to anyone that it was worth consideration, or that even a legal, let alone a moral responsibility, rested on anyone.”[159] In Lancashire, in the same year, one out of many cases of too early re-employment was taken into court. The fact that the mother was back at her loom fourteen days after the birth of the child was proved; it was also proved that the manager and tackler, as well as her fellow-workers, knew the reason for the weaver’s absence, but the case was dismissed (after long and earnest deliberation by the magistrate), because the manager had not had the simple enquiry made as to the age of the child, and therefore did not “knowingly” allow her to be employed. In this case the reason for the return was poverty, the husband being out of work, and the woman had been alone and untended at the birth of her child. The futility of the unamended law for the protection of industrial mothers against pressure of either poverty or negligence was more than established.

“Some of the most pathetic incidents came to one’s knowledge,” says
Miss Paterson, in some notes written at my request for this book, “in
the administration of the section which requires absence of mothers
from work for the short period of four weeks after the birth of a
child, for the poverty or the fear of permanent loss of employment
which drives her to cut short her time for recovery generally means
that she is indeed in straits. Customs vary in different parts of the
country, and it is Scotland that is in my mind chiefly when the figure
comes before me of the work-worn woman who appeared to have a choice
to make whether she would go out to work or stay at home and work, but
who had in reality no alternative but to earn, at once, what she
could. ‘If he could bring in a pound a week constant,’ said the wife
of an unskilled labourer to me, ‘I would never think of going out,’
and I believe this represents the feeling of the Scottish married
women, though they would not all put their minimum at so modest a
figure.”

In the returns of persons employed in factories and workshops for 1907 the first attempt was made to obtain official figures to show the extent of employment of married women in industry. The information could only be obtained by voluntary returns, which were in many cases not forthcoming. On the figures so obtained it appeared that in textile factories 24·1 per cent. were married, 71·8 per cent. unmarried, and 4·1 per cent. widowed; in non-textile factories 16·3 per cent. were married, 79·3 per cent. unmarried, and 4·4 per cent. widowed. A high proportion of power-driven laundries made the return, and in these 28 per cent. of the women were married.

The worst cases of too early employment of mothers did not, however, necessarily appear in the industries that were most characteristically women’s, but rather in poor or underpaid industries and in towns or districts where women were largely employed without a sufficient balance of men’s staple industries to enable the husband and father to be the main breadwinner of the family. Any high degree of unemployment for the latter, of course, immediately affected the security of the mother’s support at the time of child-bearing. Many of the worst examples of too early employment after childbirth came primarily from that cause.

“I know,” wrote Miss Paterson in 1907, “of no more tragic figure than
that of the toil-worn woman striving ... to do the work of two persons
with, as her background, the unemployed or insufficiently employed
man ... desolate and oppressed are the words which seem then to
describe her the best.”[160]

Some of the very worst examples came to our knowledge in the five years preceding the modest relief that came for maternity through the National Health Insurance Act of 1911. In that year, at the Congress of the Royal Sanitary Institute at Belfast, Miss Martindale gave an address on Hygiene and Industrial Employment, in which she stated that in that city she had “come across women returning to work of a hard manual nature, entailing hours of standing, within ten days, and even four days of their confinement.” She was convinced that “no woman would return to work within the month if it were not poverty which compelled her to do so. As one poor tired woman remarked, ‘Could I remain away from work for more than a fortnight with five children under six years of age starving at home?’” The emigration of men in Ireland often threw the burden of breadwinning on to the women.

To those who wish to understand, even partially, the extent of suffering and injury endured by poor working mothers before any national attempt was made to help them at the time of childbirth, I can only say that the subject must be further studied in the section of my Annual Reports from 1907 to 1911 dealing with employment of women before and after childbirth.[161] The monotonous recital, year after year, of facts revealed by complaints investigated can alone give any idea of the matter. One characteristic example must close the recital here. The occupier of the factory had not “knowingly” re-employed the mother within the four weeks’ limit; the woman’s husband, a carter, had been out of work seven weeks before the confinement, and the Guardians gave relief in money and kind for fourteen days after the birth. The third week they refused an application for continuance of the relief, and the woman returned to her employment—her husband being still workless. The Inspector asked the health visitor to interest herself in the matter and secure assistance if possible for the woman. Section 61 of the Act of 1901 only took effect generally by bringing to our knowledge facts that might otherwise be overlooked, and prevented inconsiderate employers from directly requiring women to return to work too soon after the birth of a child.[162] Ultimately, when due care has been secured for the poorest child-bearing woman, the tale of their past suffering and neglect will seem a terrible and incredible thing.

Let us now turn to the young worker in industry. Strong though the appeal of this subject was to the Women Inspectors—taking much of their time and thought—in a sense it lies outside the limits of this book, and it is far too great for adequate notice in a fraction of a chapter. A few illustrations of ways in which we came in touch with industrial employment of children must suffice. “Children in the factory” is a thought that irresistibly carries memory back to tragic past wrongdoing, in cruel overstrain and misuse of children’s forces that no one of our race or nationality can cheerfully recall to mind. Yet we are bidden by the foremost historian of the factory system, Mr. Whately Cooke-Taylor, never to suffer the story to be forgotten lest its pitiful warnings against the blinding power of false doctrine should also die out.[163]

The earliest legal remedies for the worst evils of child labour under the factory system were threshed out in the first half of the nineteenth century by English men themselves, long before it was imaginable that women might enter the Civil Service and help as Factory Inspectors to apply these remedies. It was, indeed, through the sufferings of little children that the whole humanitarian movement for reform of factory life by law and administrative action began, and that it found its chance to grow against many and powerful adversaries, as may be seen in the life of Anthony Ashley Cooper, Lord Shaftesbury.

The sacrifice of the young workers made the first opening through the outer framework or crust of society, built up as it had been in the nineteenth century on a basis of “machinery and steam.”[164] The children had been drawn, as the children were drawn by the Pied Piper,

“A wondrous portal opened wide
As if a cavern were suddenly hollowed;
And the Piper advanced and the children followed.”

They had been drawn into the factories as helpless dependents of the machine for the purely economic reasons that were then generally deemed valid and all-sufficient. In turn, they furnished the most unanswerable argument against the doctrine of _laissez faire_, and thus involuntarily helped to bring about its discredit.

The main provisions in the Factory Acts for protection of the young worker had been framed, and the very worst evils repressed, when Women Inspectors entered the service in the last decade of the “economic” century. Yet much remained to be done, as has already been seen in certain examples of hardness and barbarity, particularly in Chapter II. The very institution of the “half-time system,” which first came as an enlightened practical remedy for excessively long daily hours, and as the original provision for compulsory elementary education, had in our early official days begun to be more than suspected as an evil in itself among reformers. It lingered until the close of the War, for its prestige had been great; it had grown into the very structure of textile industries; and it had secured at least that whatever schooling a factory child had was given to it in the daytime. Many pages scattered through Annual Reports of the Chief Inspector record the injurious effects on health (as observed by Women Inspectors) following on the attendance of young workers at night school permitted by some education authorities in cases of family poverty, as a condition of allowing the young worker of thirteen and fourteen to work full time during the day.

This latter point came out so markedly because of the close attention that was given by myself and my staff to applying the provisions for securing a reasonable degree of physical fitness in young workers in factories. We did all in our power to bring home to parents as well as employers that examination by the certifying surgeon of the child for half-time or young person for full time employment, as to their physical fitness for “working daily for the time allowed by law in the factory,” was a serious, not a merely formal, matter. We freely used our powers as Inspectors to suspend a child or young person for re-examination, wherever it appeared to us that she was unfit by “disease or bodily infirmity” for the daily work during the legal hours. Out of this came the evidence that led to strengthening of the law by giving to the certifying surgeon power to examine any process, and to qualify the certificate by conditions as to the work on which a child or young person is to be employed. The younger the child the greater our concern for all this, and from the first we worked in close contact with the teachers in the schools attended by half-timers, whose age or delicacy called for our enquiry. Incredibly small and baby-like were some of the eleven-year-old children still lawfully employed in factories up to the year 1899. A few ten-year-old children were still lawfully employed in 1893 when the first Women Inspectors began their work.[165] In some notes sent me by Miss Paterson at the close of 1921, written for this book, she says:

“Amongst the changes in the law during my official service few were so
completely satisfactory as those which have contributed to the passing
of the half-timers. Each advance of a year in the age for entering on
employment was accompanied by gloomy forebodings of the result to
industry of preventing a child from acquiring facility while its
fingers were still supple—as if a non-wage-earning child sat with
hands folded in inaction—and (by some people) of the effects on
character of too much leisure in youth. A well-known sheriff added to
his reluctant convictions of several firms for illegal employment of
children an exhortation to me to consider carefully what I was doing
before bringing more such cases to this court. In his opinion I was
doing much to fill the place with young criminals who would have me to
thank to some extent for their ruin.”

Some remarkably enlightening information came out of enquiries made by Miss Paterson in order to find an answer to the question, “What becomes of young workers rejected by the certifying surgeon in a factory as physically unfit for the work?” It was carried on, as much of our work was, in co-operation with the certifying surgeon. In 1900 79 cases of rejection were followed up to the child’s home, 56 having been rejected as under age, 11 for weakness or disease of the eyes, 6 for skin disease, 1 for deficient intelligence, and 5 for personation of another older child. It became clear that the children did not go back to school, that they tended to go either into casual employment outside the factory system, or into a workshop where the certificates were not required and where a register need not be kept, that the work they went to was as hard as, or harder than, that for which they were rejected, and that the children lived under pressure of circumstances impossible for them to combat—sometimes selfishness, oftener the extreme poverty of parents, sometimes carelessness or indifference of employers. This information was embodied in evidence I gave to the Departmental Committee on Employment of School Children in 1901,[166] and thus fortunately became promptly utilised. The interest of the general community in the matter became evident, and not only from the standpoint of future efficiency of the child; for example, it was ascertained in one case that a child rejected for a contagious skin disease went into a process not under the Factory Act—namely, the picking and cleaning of fruit for making preserves. The close enquiry into the reasons for rejection brought out again very clearly what I had pressed forward several years earlier, the unsatisfactoriness of the conditions of publicity, noise, etc., under which the certifying surgeons had to make their examination of the young worker in the factory and the handicap they felt in trying to make it sufficiently thorough.[167] The uselessness of a perfunctory examination became the clearer as one saw more of the wide range of possible occupations in a large factory. It was recommended on the results of this enquiry that better arrangements should be made for the examination, that the surgeon should have power to qualify his certificate, and that enquiry should be systematically made as to what became of a rejected young worker. Miss Squire had two years earlier laid bare, in vivid words, the narrow basis on which a surgeon then had power to reject.

“The certificates must by law be granted if the child or young person
is of the proper age, and is not ‘incapacitated by disease or bodily
infirmity for working daily for the time allowed by law in the factory
named.’ The number of girls and boys so incapacitated is small; is the
number of those physically unfit for the employment to which they are
set also small? Certainly appearances in the factories are often
against such a conclusion. Many a factory is a town in itself; the
processes of manufacture carried on within its walls are as different
in character and conditions as they can be; a boy or girl is certified
as physically fit for them all. Yet it is conceivable that a child or
young person may be physically fit for one department or process and
physically unfit for another; quite fit, for example, in a silk mill
for winding, quite unfit for the intense heat of the gassing room;
quite fit in steel pen works for sorting or stamping, quite unfit for
the strained position and dust-laden atmosphere of the grinding shop;
quite fit in fancy box factories for pasting on the paper, quite unfit
for waiting on the glue room by carrying up and down heavy pails; or
physically strong for rough work, but with eyes unfit for strained
attention on work requiring close application. Could not certifying
surgeons have power to exclude from a certificate a specified
department or process, or to name in the certificate one department or
process only, and for this purpose have power of entry to factories in
order to see the work in relation to the child? In a district known to
me where both these powers are, with the co-operation of occupiers,
exercised, no one regards a certificate of fitness as an empty form; a
dead system has been galvanised into life.

“I have often thought whether the doctor who saw the little, delicate,
narrow-chested girl in the office, and was ‘satisfied that she was not
incapacitated by disease or bodily infirmity for working’ for the
legal time, were to see her as I see her in the stress and strain of
work toiling up flights of stairs with a load I cannot lift, streaming
with perspiration in steam and heat, bent double straining over minute
work, he would have been able to certify her as physically fit for
such employment had such a certificate been requisite. Having regard
to eyesight alone, what misery entailed by impaired vision might not
be spared by the exercise of a judicious control over the kind of
employment permitted to boys and girls with defective eyes.”

Frequently, when it was necessary for an Inspector to suspend a child or young person from work until re-examined by the certifying surgeon, or to prosecute an employer for neglect to obtain a certificate for the young worker, it was found that the occupation itself had increased some constitutional delicacy or weakness.[168] In such cases the young worker had to be sent for medical treatment. Many prosecutions were taken for entire failure to obtain the certificate, but so frequent was the neglect that most of them were taken into court only after warning, and on account of unhygienic conditions to which the young workers were exposed. Heavy weight carrying and other kinds of injury have been dealt with as regards workers generally in the chapter on dangerous trades. Here I must record the strong impression early made on the Women Inspectors by the liability of children to suffer overstrain of many kinds in the factory, simply because of the general lack of sufficient superintendence by someone whose duty it was to protect them, and because of their own eagerness and readiness for effort. It was, as Miss Paterson said, “almost incredible the extent to which details connected with employment are allowed to be nobody’s business.”

“The use of heavy irons, carrying or dragging of heavy loads,
continuous strain of one kind or another, is just as often as not the
result of that want of thought on the part of responsible persons
which occasions, in all circumstances of life, so much misery, and
which it is so hard to overcome.... It was my duty early in the year
to take proceedings against a firm in whose factory I found a little
girl engaged in work for which she appeared to me to be physically
unfit. I served a notice on the firm requiring them to discontinue her
employment unless the certifying surgeon, on a re-examination, found
that she was fit for it. On a revisit I found her still there, neither
dismissed nor re-examined. It would have been easy for the firm to
have replaced her ten times over from the immediate vicinity of the
factory, so that there was no reason for the disregard of the
instructions except carelessness and indifference.”[169]

As time went on, and especially after the certifying surgeons had the power given by the Factory Act of 1901 to attach conditions to certificates of fitness for individual girls and boys, interest grew among employers and managers in setting the young workers on to more suitable work under more favourable circumstances. They realised the possibilities for good in the examination as they had not done under the past more formal methods. In cases where young persons were employed in very dusty processes—bronzing in printing factories, shaking up and cleaning feathers in quilt and cushion works—those who complained of ill effects were found to be “mouth-breathers” on account of nasal obstruction, and by arrangement with the occupiers these were removed to non-dusty processes.[170] In potteries where a good many prosecutions had to be taken for neglect to obtain certificates of fitness—so necessary for the heavy work to be done there by young workers—good effects were particularly seen in new potteries. At one, notices were distributed by the occupier at intervals to all the sub-employers in the different departments[171] reminding them of their duty immediately to report the engagement of workers under eighteen; in another a clerk was set in official charge of the general register and health register with the duty of regularly ascertaining whether the prescribed examination had been carefully carried out. Enquiries were systematically made into reasons for and results of rejection, and an extensive report on such activities may be read in the Annual Report for 1905. Official visits to medical officers of health as well as conferences with certifying surgeons in the special question of rejections for uncleanliness led to development of co-operation between the different authorities. By 1913 co-operation with education authorities and the juvenile labour exchange was added. Great advance in the care of children was then brought about by co-operation between the school medical officer and the certifying surgeon. When a child, known to have a physical defect or weakness, goes from school to the factory, the certifying surgeon is notified, and he subjects the child to a searching examination.

Careful investigation in earlier years of the certificates of school attendance of half-timers showed the attendance to be good. The possibility of securing a labour certificate at thirteen years of age for full-time employment had a good deal to do with this in places where the certificate was granted on a high standard of attendance. This meant, said Miss Paterson:

“Hard work at school in the years before the child is twelve years of
age ... and between school work and factory work the Lancashire full-
timer is often pitifully small, thin, and nervous. In a Scotch cotton
mill I noticed a little girl, twelve years old, exempted from day
school on condition of attending a night school, and working full time
in the mill on the ground that her work was not employment within the
Act. She had been examined by the certifying surgeon and passed for
‘messages only, not to work in the mill,’ and carrying messages
upstairs and downstairs from one department to another was her work
from 6 a.m. till 6 p.m. Her home was not far from the mill, but the
night school which she attended from 7 p.m. to 9 p.m. was a mile from
her home, and altogether her day’s work was one that few people double
her age would willingly undertake.”[172]

And yet, in spite of much serious, heedless overstrain of children and of deplorable illegal employment in Great Britain in our time, Ireland, and particularly Belfast, exceeded all other parts of the United Kingdom in what must be described as exploitation of child labour. Economic and political conditions there, accompanied by backwardness in education, no doubt retarded a general improvement in public appreciation of the vital interest of the community in conservation of the strength and care of the natural development of the child. And it was the additional misfortune of the Irish child that the conditions of the chief industry— flax—in its many dusty and humid processes, inevitably contained much that was undesirable for the physical well-being of the young growing worker.

“Public opinion,” said Miss Martindale in 1908, “on this subject of
child labour in Ireland lags far behind that in Great Britain.[173] I
have never so vividly realised this as when I prosecuted a firm on
behalf of five little girls who had been employed full time in fairly
strenuous work. Three of them were twelve years of age, and had been
employed full time since they were nine or ten years of age. It is
impossible to describe the antagonism aroused in the whole district by
this prosecution ... and the case was dismissed on a small technical
point.... Several cases of illegal employment ... could not have
occurred except for public opinion in that district.... In a flax
scutching mill one morning I found a little girl aged twelve years
‘stricking’ flax with a rapidity and dexterity which showed
considerable practice. My enquiries met with the most bare-faced
untruths.... I was told that the child was at the mill for no other
purpose than bringing tea to the workers. On visiting the school ... I
was told that this little girl and her sister, aged ten and a half
years, worked alternate weeks at the scutching mill, and were employed
there from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. on every week day, including Saturday. I
could not hear of any steps having been taken by the teacher or
managers to stop this obviously illegal employment. In another factory
I found a little girl of thirteen years working full time with a
certificate which showed clearly she was only in Standard IV., and of
the illegality of the employment the teacher must have been
aware.”[174]

It was evident from the Report of the Belfast Health Commission, published in 1908, that very adverse circumstances affected the health of adolescent workers in Belfast, though housing conditions and unhygienic conditions of schoolrooms may have been answerable as much as working conditions. Although the infant under five years of age had a better chance of life in Belfast than in Manchester, not so the young persons aged fifteen to twenty years; in that age-group the mortality was found to be double that for the same age-group in Manchester.

“It needs,” said Miss Martindale, “little power of imagination to
realise the pain and wretchedness which must have preceded these
deaths, and as the death-rate is a sign of the standard of health, it
is not difficult to picture the number of children who are living on,
but who are robbed of that health which brings vigour, buoyancy, and
light-heartedness. Mrs. Dickie, the Local Government Board Inspector
of boarded-out children, who has had many years’ experience of work
amongst Irish children, has, I think, put her finger on one factor in
the cause of the high death-rate when she says of half-timers:
‘Commencing as they do just at the time when all their physical powers
are needed for the merging of childhood into adolescence, the strain
of the long day in the hot, noisy mill or factory leaves them without
the reserve of strength necessary to support growth of mind and
body.’”[175]

In a wonderful degree the publication of the reports I received from Miss Martindale on such considerations, and on many details and aspects of the employment of children in Ireland, arrested attention there, and aroused true sympathy for the cause of child protection. Not only were the reports, and her very words, widely quoted in the daily Press, but regularly there were leading articles to drive her points home when the Report of the Chief Inspector of Factories annually appeared. In June, 1909, the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church passed the following resolution:

“That the assembly feeling deeply the obligation for the safeguarding
of child-life, especially in manufacturing districts, recommends
ministers of this Church to study official documents bearing upon the
question of child labour, and to endeavour to arouse public opinion in
favour of enforcing the law with a view to the protection both of the
children and of the law-abiding employer.”

In the counties of Antrim and Down, out of 50,686 persons employed in textile factories at that time, not less than 13,691 were under eighteen years of age, and of these 4,144 were half-timers. Thus the question was not a small one for these districts, having regard to the heavy and debilitating atmosphere of dust or humidity, in which so much of the work was done. Miss Martindale felt that a spinner was right when she said, pointing to a group of half-timers, “Ah! indeed, they are hard enough wrought.” It was not surprising that the Belfast half-timer was undersized and delicate. A little girl aged twelve (one of many of the same size) she had weighed in a factory in 1906. Her weight was 58 pounds, instead of the 76 pounds that might have been expected for her age.[176]

The total number of young lives in factories and workshops under some degree of protection by the Factory Acts in the United Kingdom in the first decade of the twentieth century was approximately 1,099,841 persons under eighteen years of age, and of these 459,698 were under sixteen years of age; of the latter, 37,129 were half-timers, the majority, 19,211, being girls. The lowest age-limit of admission had been established and duly observed without difficulty over the greater part of the kingdom, but in Ireland we had many attempts at evasion to contend with—generally from the side of the parents; both Miss Martindale and her successor, Miss Slocock, frequently had to follow up falsified certificates, and prosecution of a father was repeatedly necessary.[177]

A great deal of valuable work was done in Lancashire and Yorkshire textile districts by Miss Squire and her staff, and by Miss Vines in Scottish textile districts, not only in giving effect to the actual requirements of the law, but in watching over details of employment that seriously strained the young worker, such as bobbin carrying up and down stairs, weft carrying by the tenter in the weaving shed (“the tenter has always a tired look”). Conditions affecting them in Dundee jute, hemp, and flax factories were in many ways quite as bad as conditions in Belfast factories.

It is impossible to give here more than this bare idea of the scope of our activities in the matter of child labour, and I can merely refer to the fresh care that had to be devoted to the question during the pressure of wartime. At that time the eagerness of children to help again led to much illegal employment before the legal age of admission, or to full time when only half-time was permissible, to employment in school holidays, and at all kinds of illegal hours in many miscellaneous industries. Many prosecutions had to be taken in London, Birmingham, and the North of England, and in Scotland. Increasing support was given by magistrates and sheriffs in repressing this evil. In 1917, in one case taken by Miss Vines, where very young girls had been employed for excessive hours, and a defence was set up that the pressure of work had led the management to overlook the youth of the workers, the sheriff severely observed that “no one could be so busy that he could not see a girl of thirteen was not eighteen.” In Birmingham, Miss Martindale in the same year prosecuted nineteen firms and five parents for illegal employment of children, and in Coventry she prosecuted a firm for employing a child of ten years in a bakehouse. In an outstanding case in the North-Western Division a fruit preserving company was prosecuted by Miss Tracey for employing little girls of eight to ten years, mostly in the intervals between school, in preparing fruit for bottling, two of them being in poor health and absent from school. There was found to be great and special need during the later years of the War for watchfulness by the Inspectors against serious overloading of young workers or their employment near dangerous machinery.[178]

We have already seen above that certain religious and charitable institutions first came within the purview of the Factory Acts in 1907 as regards industrial work of their inmates, and the question of their inclusion or exclusion had long been a subject of controversy—in fact, ever since the Act of 1895 had partly regulated commercial laundries. It is somewhat surprising, in view of the long discussions and the fear frequently expressed by ordinary laundries of unfair competition from the side of institutional laundries, when one learns that the total number of working inmates of institutions under Section 5 of the Act of 1907 never exceeded round about 9,550, of whom 9,417 were engaged in laundry work for persons outside the institution, 4,068 of these inmates being engaged in laundry work aided by power-driven machinery. In commercial laundries fully regulated by the Act of 1907, the last returns to the Factory Department—published in 1911—showed that 103,635 women and girls were employed, besides 11,466 men and boys, and that 75,774 of the women and girls worked in power-driven or “factory” laundries. When it is further remembered that even the largest institutional laundries are relatively small compared with very many large commercial laundries, it is evident that the question of their competition with these laundries barely arises, and that the administrative question of chief importance in the institutional laundries always has been, What was the form of regulation most likely in the special circumstances to aid in securing the well-being of the inmates? The latter are mostly brought into the institution for charitable aid or reform, or special training or special protection against their own weakness, and generally they lack the self-protecting habits of normal industrial workers. The Factory Acts were in no way devised for controlling, nor competent to regulate, either the domestic conditions in the lives of these inmates or their training or education. The aim of inclusion under the Factory Act was simply to secure that, when they were actually engaged on industrial work (for purposes outside the institution itself, even if not by ordinary way of trade), they might be assured of conditions of work, health, and safety, not less favourable in their circumstances than those enforceable for a worker employed in a factory or workshop.

It was about the year 1899 that we began, as a branch Inspectorate, to come in touch with certain convent or religious institution industries; first, through the complaints of the ordinary trader that they were in an unfairly favoured position, and, secondly, through the research of Miss Deane and Miss Squire in Ireland, into convent industries really carried on by way of ordinary trade. Here the workers were definitely employed under a contract of employment in lace making, knitting by hand or machine, embroidery, shirt making, laundry work, and weaving of flannel, tweeds, and linen. Some of these were inspected for the first time in 1900 by Miss Squire. She and the instructions she gave under the Act were well received by the Superiors. The successful example and high standard set by the Rev. Mother Superior of Foxford Convent, county Mayo, where a woollen factory with dye works had long been carried on (with profit to the peasants of the district as well as the convent), inclined other convents, attempting to carry on small manufactures, to welcome the visit of a Woman Inspector. These were not places for reformatory or protective occupation of girls and women—not so-called penitentiaries—but real productive establishments. In no such place previously uninspected did Miss Squire find any objection to her official visits; a hope was, however, expressed that the Inspector might always be a woman; she came to the conclusion that occasional friendly inspections were all that was necessary to secure that the spirit and intentions of the Acts would be complied with. When I had the pleasure of visiting them myself later on, beginning with the interesting Foxford Factory, where the nuns managed the business and supervised the work in the worksheds, I found the same spirit, and in that particular factory an attractive combination of successful management with picturesque charm.

The discussions in Press and Parliament in 1900 and 1901 on the problem of regulating the other type of religious institution workplaces, of a reformatory or charitable character—largely for derelict women and girls—when the Act of 1901 was passing into law, led me to enquire into comparative methods of regulating such places in the chief industrial countries of Europe. My enquiries of the officials of sister Factory Departments in France, Belgium, and Germany led to my receiving warm invitations from the Inspectorates of these countries to visit them and see their method of administration. The invitations were accepted, and this was altogether a happy experience; details may be read in the Annual Reports for 1901 and 1902.[179]

It was not only the friendly, helpful reception that was gratifying, it was the discovery that in these countries, and most completely in France and Germany, the general hygienic and safety provisions of their industrial laws applied to the religious, charitable, and reformatory workplaces equally with ordinary industrial establishments, and were enforced by the same administrative methods. In France the Inspector had “not to enquire whether a charitable institution works for gain or the technical instruction of its workers; it sufficed that there is manual labour for the law to apply.” Regulation was the more necessary in that there were no less than 1,472 religious or charitable establishments employing 48,432 workers, of whom the majority were under eighteen years of age. The long time, over twenty years, during which regulation of the hygiene and safety of these institutional workplaces, including laundries, had been carried on under the ordinary safeguards of the law, gave me a helpful object lesson in France. Commercial laundries had, moreover, been regulated as other factories and workshops had been, and for the same length of time. Thus I saw in them a higher standard of cleanliness, ventilation, and fencing of dangerous machines than had yet been obtained under our more recent regulation of laundries in England. In Germany, where I was received in the Grand Duchy of Baden as a colleague, and accorded the privilege of attending a staff conference of the Inspectorate, under the late Dr. Wörishoffer, their learned chief, I was interested to find how strict was their protection of young workers against risks of severe accident or dangerous machinery, and how much less they were employed in factory work than with us.

After this experience followed our regular voluntary inspection for several years of a considerable proportion of charitable and religious institution workshops and factories (chiefly laundries), which had submitted themselves to such inspection at the invitation of the Home Office. In Ireland, where the institutional laundries were larger and more numerous than in England, I made some personal visits in 1905 to representative institutional laundries and other workplaces possessing varied characteristics and aims, and began a study of similar English institutions. A few were found to be entirely willing to receive and act on advice from Inspectors in the carrying out of standards laid down for commercial workplaces as to hours, sanitation, safety; others were willing to comply in part. Objections to compliance were sometimes on the score of expense in providing safeguards to machinery, screens, and ironing stoves and so on; sometimes on the ground that great care in supervision obviated need for other safeguards; sometimes that precise limits in hours or fixed mealtimes, or affixing notices and abstracts of the law interfered with discipline; the last-named, and the possibility of an Inspector speaking to a worker, were the measures of protection for the working inmates that were most frequently opposed. Explanations tended, on the whole, to smooth away obstacles, yet in an undue proportion of the institutions nothing was changed under “voluntary” inspection, and in these cases, finally, the only course was to refuse to continue the inspection. Full reports on the results of inspection on such lines, by Miss Deane and Miss Martindale in Ireland, and by Miss Paterson and Miss Tracey and other Inspectors in England and Scotland, appeared in Annual Reports for 1905, 1906, and 1907. Remoteness from ordinary life in the atmosphere of these workplaces, too strong a tendency to place production for profit before thorough training of the workers, and too close a dependence on laundry work alone instead of experimenting with varied occupations—in preparation for life outside the institution—were among the defects most frequently commented on by the Inspectorate. Lack of understanding of elements of personal hygiene for the worker as well as of hygiene of the workplace was widely found, and, even after the law and compulsory inspection applied, striking illustrations of resultant ill-health among the inmates were repeatedly reported. At the same time illustrations of good and understanding care (always found in some places) grew in number and greatly developed in enlightened ideas as time went on. Some of the extraordinary risks found in certain places—_e.g._, an unfenced power wringer fed by a feeble- minded girl; an uncovered hydro with friction cones and driving belt totally uncovered fed by a girl of sixteen with long, loose hair; newcomers set to feed an unguarded calender, for the greater part apparently without accident—tended to suggest that leisurely methods and care in supervision did to some extent lessen risks. In an orphanage laundry with an uncleanly wash-house and very long hours of work, little girls were found with sore eyes, and some cases were also seen among inmates who were domestic workers. The Sister said they had had a great many cases lately, and that it seemed “almost as if the children infected each other”![180] Poor feeding of inmates often came to the knowledge of the Inspectors through uninvited communications from the managers or Sisters, and records of accounts in printed reports of the institutions showed a very low average expenditure per head on this item—_e.g._, 2s. 1Od. per inmate weekly in one Scottish institution—many inmates being young, undeveloped girls, and here the hours were 8 a.m. to 7 p.m., with one and a half hours’ intervals for meals; in another the report stated that the average cost of dieting superintendents and inmates was 3s. 11d. per week, and average cost of clothing inmates £1 10s. per year. After application of the Act of 1907 to these institutional workplaces we occasionally learned of serious outbreaks of ill-health among working inmates, and invariably we called in the services of the local medical officer of health, or the certifying surgeon, or both—improvements following. In one case escape of sewer gas into the house; in another defective management of working conditions, with dreary routine and absence of play or outdoor exercise for growing girls; in yet another pressure for output, with long hours of work, was found to be the immediate cause of cases of illness occurring. In very many institutions, however, the inmates are of poor constitution to begin with, and not equal to standard industrial hours until after some care for the building up of their health. At first we had many places to inspect where inmates were more or less feeble-minded, but gradually these have passed under care of the Board of Control for the Mentally Deficient.

In 1907 the last of the “voluntary” inspections were specially welcomed by managers, who increasingly applied for advice and information. In 1908 compulsory inspection was generally cordially welcomed and Inspectors were often pressed to return. Conferences on aims and method of conducting the institutions increased among associations of managers. Educational and character-forming occupations were in a few places added to laundry work or substituted for it, and attempts were here and there made to try and suit the special needs of individuals. For example, a woman who made nothing of laundry work or needlework took whole- heartedly to the printing of programmes and notices. One began to see hope of the passing of the listless, lifeless condition of many inmate workers, and of the coming of something of the vital, “alive,” and frequently graceful movements of the “factory girl.” It is not impossible even with laundry work as the chief occupation of the institutional workers to find happy activity among them—when the Sister Superior or manageress is sufficiently young in spirit to develop “hobbies” in recreation, and to encourage in the girls a sense of responsibility. I know of one institution where the Sister Superior aims at self-government in the best spirit of a “public school.” And here, when charming baskets made by the laundry girls were brought out for my inspection, they asked eagerly that I might also “see Sister’s work.” Still, it must not be supposed that there was not very much to be done to secure compliance with the letter and spirit of the Act of 1907 during the seven years following its coming into force.

Although desire of exceptional treatment in the matter of hours declined, still, on the whole, the total extent of hours spent at work is more nearly drawn out to the full permissible limits than is recently customary in commercial workplaces. Safety of the machinery and sanitation of the workplace were gradually secured, but it was a slow and tedious process to develop any enlightenment as to the value of shortened spells and hours. In a few cases there was obstinate resistance to instructions in the requirements of the Act, and reform was not secured until the Home Office had exercised the power of withdrawing all privileges allowed under the Act. The last reported case of that kind was one in 1914. Yet “in the great majority of homes under