the house, wash, iron, mend, sew and prepare the midday meal.  She tries to snatch a little sleep in the afternoon, but explains:  “When you got big family, all time work.  Night-time in mill drag so long, so long; day-time in home go so quick.”  By five, this mother must get the family’s supper ready, and dress for the night’s work, which begins at seven.  The investigator further reports:  “The next day was a holiday, and for a diversion, Mrs. N. thought she would go up to the cemetery:  `I got some children up there,’ she explained, `and same time I get some air.  No, I don’t go nowheres, just to the mill and then home."’

Here again, as in all reports on women in industry, we find the prevalence of pregnant women working on night-shifts, often to the very day of their delivery.  “Oh, yes, plenty women, big bellies, work in the night time,” one of the toiling mothers volunteered.  “Shame they go, but what can do?” The abuse was general.  Many mothers confessed that owing to poverty they themselves worked up to the last week or even day before the birth of their children.  Births were even reported in one of the mills during the night shift.  A foreman told of permitting a night-working woman to leave at 6.30 one morning, and of the birth of her baby at 7.30.  Several women told of leaving the day-shift because of pregnancy and of securing places on the nightshift where their condition was less conspicuous, and the bosses more tolerant.  One mother defended her right to stay at work, says the report, claiming that as long as she could do her work, it was nobody’s business.  In a doorway sat a sickly and bloodless woman in an advanced stage of pregnancy.  Her first baby had died of general debility.  She had worked at night in the mill until the very day of its birth.  This time the boss had told her she could stay if she wished, but reminded her of what had happened last time.  So she had stopped work, as the baby was expected any day.

Again and again we read the same story, which varied only in detail:  the mother in the three black rooms; the sagging porch overflowing with pale and sickly children; the over-worked mother of seven, still nursing her youngest, who is two or three months old.  Worn and haggard, with a skeleton-like child pulling at her breast, the women tries to make the investigator understand.  The grandmother helps to interpret.  “She never sleeps,” explains the old woman, “how can she with so many children?” She works up to the last moment before her baby comes, and returns to work as soon as they are four weeks old.

Another apartment in the same house; another of those night-working mothers, who had just stopped because she is pregnant.  The boss had kindly given her permission to stay on, but she found the reaching on the heavy spinning machines too hard.  Three children, ranging in age from five to twelve years, are all sickly and forlorn and must be cared for.  There is a tubercular husband, who is unable to work steadily, and is able to bring in only $12 a week.  Two of the babies had died, one because the mother had returned to work too soon after its birth and had lost her milk.  She had fed him tea and bread, “so he died.”