Was women's work bad for babies? A view from the 1911 census of England and Wales

Abstract

Comments penned in the late-Victorian and Edwardian eras leave few doubts that many contemporaries believed that women's work (in the sense of paid employment), particularly that of married women, was bad for babies. Mothers who were employed in industry received particular condemnation, accused by their critics of abandoning their children with the most inadequate of childcare arrangements. As H. Jones, a doctor, put it in 1894:

The children of women engaged in industrial occupations suffer from the effects of maternal neglect. They are handicapped from the moment of their birth in the struggle for existence, and have to contend not only against the inevitable perils of infancy but also against perils due to their neglect by their mothers, and the ignorance of those to whose care they are entrusted.

Such views did not go unchallenged, however, even at the turn of the century. Some of Jones's critics, for instance, noting his particular antipathy to women undertaking industrial occupations, argued that it was the generally insanitary condition of the towns where women found industrial employment which underlay the poor survival of their infants, rather than their mothers' employment per se.