ANTE-NATAL HYGIENE : DISCUSSION 415 



to women, and not allow themselves to be carried away by 

 the false plea that it was a slur on the husband when the 

 woman was paid the money which was justly hers. 



Miss HELEN G. KLAASSEN (Camberwell School for 

 Mothers) said she was going to look at the question from 

 the point of view of the Foresters. She rather sympathized 

 with them, because she thought the whole matter had been 

 put upon the basis of the bad men they, as workers, came 

 across. She had a considerable amount of sympathy with 

 the Foresters, and she would like to put the whole matter 

 on quite a different basis, and that was the basis of custom. 

 She would say that it had been the custom in the first place 

 for the women to put by a certain amount of the weekly 

 money until the time came for spending it, so that in the 

 past it was likely that the men had little knowledge of the 

 expense of confinements. She thought that, apart from any 

 question of insult to the husband, it was a perfectly right 

 basis to pay the money to the woman. By paying it to the 

 man they were really introducing something quite new and 

 contrary to custom. The fact that in the past the woman 

 had always put it by and had spent it made the woman the 

 proper person to administer it now. Looking at it from 

 the point of view of the men, they must not think that there 

 were only bad men and no bad women in the world. She 

 knew at least one case where a woman might have taken her 

 marriage certificate and received the benefit, and she would 

 have been receiving it for the benefit of another man's child. 

 She thought in the rules which were being made in these 

 new regulations such matters as that should be guarded 

 against. The man belonged to a society and was known by 

 the society, but the woman who applied for the benefit which 

 her husband had paid for was not known to the society 

 previously, and that did introduce a real difficulty in adminis- 

 tration which must be guarded against in some way. Again 

 there was the case of the drunkard. All social workers 

 knew of men who gave their wives an allowance for house- 

 keeping and perhaps paid the rent themselves, and who did 

 not allow their wives to have the handling of a penny more 

 than they could actually help. They knew cases where this 

 was done very wrongly, but they also knew of cases where 

 it was done very rightly, and where the woman would spoil 

 the whole house if she had the spending of the money. 

 She believed it was the view of all legislators that to legislate 

 for the abnormal was always a bad thing in general legis- 

 lation they should never be guided in their rulings by very 

 abnormal cases. 



Mr. A. D. D. BANKS (Ashford Urban District Council) 



