Page:Women Wanted.djvu/364

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WOMEN WANTED

lids. Four times a day the mothers from the shop across the way, as Azalie de Rigeaux has now, come to nurse them. Outside the long French windows there is a large French "jardin," where the older children, in blue and pink check aprons, play. The nursery dining room has a low table with little low chairs, where they come to their meals. Nourishing broths and other foods are prepared in a shining, perfectly equipped kitchen. There is a white bathroom with porcelain basins and baths of varying sizes; on the long shelf across the room are the separate baskets that hold the individual brushes. Each child, on arrival in the morning, is given a bath and a complete change of clothes. Once a week they are weighed. The doctor and the staff of trained nurses are alert to detect the least deviation from normal. Scientific supervision like this costs the firm 1 franc 35 centimes per day per child. To Azalie de Rigeaux and the other mothers in their employ, it is free.

It is this crèche at Ivry-sur-Seine which is the model recommended by the minstry of munitions to the factories of France. The last feature to make this, a national institution, absolutely complete, has been added. It was the Union Française pour le Suffrage des Femmes that one day held a conference with the ministry of munitions. "Gentlemen," they said, "a mother who must go home from a factory to stand over a wash tub, gets so tired that the baby's source of nourishment is imperilled. And when a baby languishes, a future soldier may be lost."—A