This impulse on the employed woman’s part is by no means always and entirely the result of poverty, and would not, therefore, be removed by raising her wages.  Long before marriage, when little more than a child, she has usually gone out to work, and work has become a second nature.  She has mastered her work, she enjoys a certain position and what to her are high wages; she is among her friends and companions; the noise and bustle and excitement of the work-room or the factory have become an agreeable stimulant which she can no longer do without.  On the other hand, her home means nothing to her; she only returns there to sleep, leaving it next morning at day-break or earlier; she is ignorant even of the simplest domestic arts; she moves about in her own home like a strange and awkward child.  The mere act of marriage cannot change this state of things; however willing she may be at marriage to become a domesticated wife, she is destitute alike of the inclination or the skill for domesticity.  Even in spite of herself she is driven back to the work-shop, to the one place where she feels really at home.

In Germany women are not allowed to work for four weeks after confinement, nor during the following two weeks except by medical certificate.  The obligatory insurance against disease which covers women at confinement assures them an indemnity at this time equivalent to a large part of their wages.  Married and unmarried mothers benefit alike.  The Austrian law is founded on the same model.  This measure has led to a very great decrease in infantile mortality, and, therefore, a great increase in health among those who survive.  It is, however, regarded as very inadequate, and there is a movement in Germany for extending the time, for applying the system to a larger number of women, and for making it still more definitely compulsory.

In Switzerland it has been illegal since 1877 for any woman to be received into a factory after confinement, unless she has rested in all for eight weeks, six weeks at least of this period being after confinement.  Since 1898 Swiss working women have been protected by law from exercising hard work during pregnancy, and from various other influences likely to be injurious.  But this law is evaded in practice, because it provides no compensatory indemnity for the woman.  An attempt, in 1899, to amend the law by providing for such indemnity was rejected by the people.

In Belgium and Holland there are laws against women working immediately after confinement, but no indemnity is provided, so that employers and employed combine to evade the law.  In France there is no such law, although its necessity has often been emphatically asserted (see, e.g., Salvat, La Depopulation de la France, These de Lyon, 1903).

In England it is illegal to employ a woman “knowingly” in a work-shop within four weeks of the birth of her child, but no provision