and carrying it and water on her back in the old country.  Also says the carrying of water and cases of beer in this country is a great strain on her.”  But the illuminating point in this case is that the father was furious because all the babies died.  To show his disrespect for the wife who could only give birth to babies that died, he wore a red necktie to the funeral of the last.  Yet this woman, the government agent reports, would follow and profit by any instruction that might be given her.

It is true that the cases reported from Johnstown, Pennsylvania, do not represent completely “Americanized” families.  This lack does not prevent them, however, by their unceasing fertility from producing the Americans of to-morrow.  Of the more immediate conditions surrounding child-birth, we are presented with this evidence, given by one woman concerning the birth of her last child: 

On five o’clock on Wednesday evening she went to her sister’s house to return a washboard, after finishing a day’s washing.  The baby was born while she was there.  Her sister was too young to aid her in any way.  She was not accustomed to a midwife, she confessed.  She cut the cord herself, washed the new-born baby at her sister’s house, walked home, cooked supper for her boarders, and went to bed by eight o’clock.  The next day she got up and ironed.  This tired her out, she said, so she stayed in bed for two whole days.  She milked cows the day after the birth of the baby and sold the milk as well.  Later in the week, when she became tired, she hired someone to do that portion of her work.  This woman, we are further informed, kept cows, chickens, and lodgers, and earned additional money by doing laundry and charwork.  At times her husband deserted her.  His earnings amounted to $1.70 a day, while a fifteen-year-old son earned $1.10 in a coal mine.

One searches in vain for some picture of sacred motherhood, as depicted in popular plays and motion pictures, something more normal and encouraging.  Then one comes to the bitter realization that these, in very truth, are the “normal” cases, not the exceptions.  The exceptions are apt to indicate, instead, the close relationship of this irresponsible and chance parenthood to the great social problems of feeble-mindedness, crime and syphilis.

Nor is this type of motherhood confined to newly arrived immigrant mothers, as a government report from Akron, Ohio, sufficiently indicates.  In this city, the government agents discovered that more than five hundred mothers were ignorant of the accepted principles of infant feeding, or, if familiar with them, did not practise them.  “This ignorance or indifference was not confined to foreign-born mothers....  A native mother reported that she gave her two-weeks-old baby ice cream, and that before his sixth month, he was sitting at the table `eating everything."’ This was in a town in which there were comparatively few cases of extreme poverty.