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becoming more and more the sufferers. Take, for instance, the position 

 as to Munition Creches. 



The Munitions Department is encouraging with advice, exhortation, 

 and finally with financial aid, the establishment of creches for the 

 munition worker's children. Well and good, we say ; it is better that 

 the mother should place her babies in a well-ordered creche rather 

 than leave them for the day with this neighbour or that a haphazard 

 method at the best. Yes, but ' by the day ! ' What we are not 

 realising is that creches are being established not only for the care 

 of the children by day, but for the care of them by night.* In certain 

 areas, mothers working on night shifts can board their little ones out 

 by the night or by the week. Thus a new condition of affairs is growing 

 up, and women working in National Filling Factories who have young 

 babies are actually being advised to wean them, because the work 

 does not agree with the production of mothers' milk. Add to this 

 that the mother is having the terrific strain of working at night and 

 minding a home and probably a cross, milk-fed baby by day ! 

 What chance will the next baby have after this experience ? The fact 

 is that the demand for workers should be better regulated, and that 

 no nursing mother should be employed, not only not on night shift, 

 but not on work which makes suckling unhealthy for the child. 



I have said nothing of the risk of planting creches in or near explosive 

 works. I have said nothing of the health of infants and tiny children 

 taken to and fro in the crowded trains or trams to the creches at 

 unearthly hours at nightfall or at dawn. But I want to point out to 

 you that this whole method means a very forcible breaking up of the 

 family life of the community, and that it is a curious commentary on 

 the old abuse of the Socialists who were supposed to favour such a 

 process and to desire the barrack system for child-rearing ! So far 

 as I know the Labour movement, through the War Emergency: Workers' 

 National Committee, has made the only protest against this pitiful 

 destruction of the baby's home. 



But home life is being broken in another direction also. To get 

 the necessary mobility of labour, workers have been moved from one 

 district to another until in every large munition centre there are 

 thousands of women, often no more than young girls, living in hostels, 

 or lodgings, or huts. The effect of heavy work and long hours under 

 these conditions must be far greater than when they live at home, 

 for there is in the ordinary home a different kind of care and comfort 

 from that of lodgings or the most approved type of hostel. There is 

 also a certain restraint which parents and brothers and sisters, friends 

 and familiar surroundings exercise, which is lost when labour comes 

 to be so mobile as it is now ! The system has also encouraged schemes 

 of almost military discipline, and in many cases all sorts of interference 

 in the lives of the workers by their employers, welfare workers, and 

 official and unofficial philanthropists. Thus the influence of the dis- 



* I do not know whether these creches are subsidized by the Munitions Department 



