ren. In the afternoon, there were again dishes
and cooking, and caring for three babies aged five, three years, and
six months. At five, supper was ready for the family. The mother ate by
herself and was off to work at 5:45."

Another of the night-working mothers was a frail looking Frenchwoman of
twenty-seven years, with a husband and five children ranging from eight
years to fourteen months. Three other children had died. When visited,
she was doing a huge washing. She was forced into night work to meet the
expenses of the family. She estimated that she succeeded in getting
five hours' sleep during the day. "I take my baby to bed with me, but he
cries, and my little four-year-old boy cries, too, and comes in to make
me get up, so you can't call that a very good sleep."

The problem among unmarried women or those without family is not the
same, this investigator points out. "They sleep longer by day than they
normally would by night." We are also informed that pregnant women work
at night in the mills, sometimes up to the very hour of delivery. "It's
queer," exclaimed a woman supervisor of one of the Rhode Island mills,
"but some women, both on the day and the night shift, will stick to
their work right up to the last minute, and will use every means to
deceive you about their condition. I go around and talk to them, but
make little impression. We have had several narrow escapes.... A Polish
mother with five children had worked in a mill by day or by night, ever
since her marriage, stopping only to have her babies. One little girl
had died several years ago, and the youngest child, says Mrs. Kelley,
did not look promising. It had none of the charm of babyhood; its
body and clothing were filthy; and its lower lip and chin covered with
repulsive black sores."

It should be remembered that the Consumers' League, which publishes
these reports on women in industry, is not advocating Birth Control
education, but is aiming "to awaken responsibility for conditions under
which goods are produced, and through investigation, education and
legislation, to mobilize public opinion in behalf of enlightened
standards for workers and honest products for all." Nevertheless, in
Miss Agnes de Lima's report of conditions in Passaic, New Jersey, we
find the same tale of penalized, prostrate motherhood, bearing the
crushing burden of economic injustice and cruelty; the same blind but
overpowering instincts of love and hunger driving young