Each of the fourteen districts into which the country is divided for Poor Law purposes is placed under the care of a General Inspector (male), whilst the half dozen Women Inspectors are available for duty in these districts, but only at the invitation of the General Inspector.  If an Inspector omits to arrange for these visits it is possible for his district to remain unvisited by a Woman Inspector for an indefinite period.  When it is remembered that there are still 194 Unions without a woman on the Board of Guardians, the present arrangement, by which the Women Inspectors can only inspect Poor Law Institutions on sufferance, is seen to be indefensible and the need for reform in this direction urgent.

There is one Assistant Woman Inspector, who is a highly qualified medical woman, in the Public Health Department of the Board.  She has been in office only a few months, but it has been remarked in more than one quarter that the enhanced value of the recent report of the Board’s Medical Officer on Infant Mortality is due to her co-operation.

The jurisdiction of the Local Government Board in London is confined to England and Wales—­Scotland and Ireland having their own Boards in Edinburgh and Dublin respectively.

The Local Government Board for Scotland appointed a Woman Inspector for the first time about three years ago, at a salary of L200 a year.  She is a fully qualified medical woman.  Her duties include both Poor Law Work (e.g. the inspection of children in poor-houses or boarded out, enquiries into complaints of inadequate relief to widows) and Public Health Work (e.g. enquiries into any special incidence of disease).

The Local Government Board for Ireland employs two Women Inspectors, one at a salary of L200-10-L300 and the other at a salary of L200, to inspect boarded-out children.

There are no prescribed qualifications for these posts; but they have always been, and still are, held by highly qualified women—­distinguished graduates and experienced in social work; one is a doctor of medicine.

Sir Henry Robinson, Vice-President of the Local Government Board for Ireland, said in his evidence before the Royal Commission on the Civil Service that he would like to have one or two women doctors to go round the work-houses and to visit the female wards, but the salaries offered by the Treasury to women doctors seemed to him too low to attract well qualified women.

The Home Office

It was about twenty years ago that the Home Office began to realise that the ever-increasing number of women and girl workers in factories and workshops made it imperative that women as well as men inspectors should be appointed if the Factory Acts intended for the protection of workers were to be effectually enforced.  There was no doubt even from the first about the usefulness of these Women Inspectors, but in ten years’ time the number appointed for the whole of the United Kingdom had only increased to eight.  At the beginning of the present year, 1913, they numbered eighteen, and only within the last few months has this number been increased to twenty.