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 women into the
factories to work, night in and night out, to support their procession
of uncared for and undernourished babies. It is the married women with
young children who work on the inferno-like shifts. They are driven to
it by the low wages of their husbands. They choose night work in order
to be with their children in the daytime. They are afraid of the neglect
and ill-treatment the children might receive at the hands of paid
caretakers. Thus they condemn themselves to eighteen or twenty hours of
daily toil. Surely no mother with three, four, five or six children can
secure much rest by day.

"Take almost any house"--we read in the report of conditions in New