Page:Women Wanted.djvu/370

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WOMEN WANTED

dozen others? Well, the world is no longer going to ask it of you, the maker of men!

THE CHILD'S CHANCE DEPENDS ON FAMILY INCOME

Tradition may still rise to protest: But the home! You wouldn't abolish the home! I think you would if you had seen it, Mrs. Smith's home. Child mortality in her street is at the rate of 200 per 1,000. I know a home in the other end of London that is as lovely as a poet's dream. Child mortality in this district is 40 per 1,000. There is a great house facing a park. There are three children in it. They have a day nursery and a night nursery and a school room all to themselves. They are cared for by a head nurse, and an assistant nurse, a governess, and a mother who now and then comes to caress them and see that they are happy. There are, you see, four women—to say nothing of the household staff of eight servants indirectly contributing to the same service—to care for three children in the West End.

In the East End Mrs. Smith has only one pair of hands to do for seven, and she is no superwoman. They live in two rooms that the fiercest all the time scrubbing could not keep clean. The discoloured walls are damp with mildew. You can see the vermin in the cracks. There isn't any pantry. There isn't any sink. There isn't so much as a cook stove, only an open grate. There isn't any poetry in a home on less than a pound a week!

Down the street is the way out to the new home that Mrs. Smith's wage envelope will help to build.