An inquiry is being organized by the Women's Industrial Council into the conditions of women's occupations which are favourable or unfavourable to motherhood. It is intended that the results shall be accessible to parents, teachers, care committees, and young intending workers.
Miss Clementina Black, who is in charge of the inquiry, will be assisted by three women investigators, who will visit special districts. No rigid list of questions has been drafted and none may be adopted, since different industries may require different methods. The inquiry is expected to occupy about six months.
"We have already secured a large amount of official support," Miss Taylor, the secretary of the Women's Industrial Council, said yesterday, "and public health authorities are prepared to help us with the facts at their disposal. Women doctors, who keep very careful records of their women patients, have also promised their help. We are not touching trades where there is lead-poisoning, the facts of which are already widely known, nor are we concerning ourselves with the results of venereal diseases. Our object is to approach impartially industrial occupations, both the old and some of the new, to find whether the muscular action or the strains and stresses involved in certain processes, want of light, overtime, speeding up, &c., have an effect on expectant mothers and on the future child-bearing of ordinary women workers. We are, for instance, investigating the cotton industry, the conditions of shop work, of women working in laundries, and in the engineering trades.
"We are not trying to make a case for or against any particular trade, and it is quite possible that the results may prove that the stretching motions involved in such domestic tasks as the washing of heavy sheets and blankets are more harmful than the stretching motions of the shop assistant or the vibrations which certain engineering employees meet in their work.
"The investigation, as it will be very thorough, will be costly, and we hope to obtain contributions towards it from women who realize the importance of impartial inquiry."
.lcThis 1916 enquiry recognised that work outside the home may have been less hard on expectant mothers than the heavy duties of housework.
