ENDOWMENT OF MOTHERHOOD

Evening Post, Volume CIV, Issue 7, 8 July 1922, Page 16

ENDOWMENT OF MOTHERHOOD

FAR-REACHING SUGGESTIONS

' A conference held, at Leamington recently under the auspices of the Labour organisations, made some far-reaching suggestions which are dealt with by The Post's London correspondent as follows : Briefly stated, the scheme recommends universal free education from the nursery school to the university^ with mainten-. ance allowance; universal free services with regard to health; the provision for all women of maternity, medical, and nursing care, with adequate maintenance six weeks before and six weeks after childbirth. The proposals also include the provision of pure milk at cost price, complete school medical service, and ono free meal a day at school, and the resolution declared all these to be preliminary to a far greater development of national' endowment. The scheme will come before the annual conference of the Labour Party in Edinburgh in June, with a view to its embodiment in the programme of the party at the next General Election.

The writer then points out what is being already done by Government and by ■private societies, and quotes from the ■Daily Telegraph, which says : —

"We wonder, how the average British mother would receive the suggestion that her children should be absorbed into a vast national charity school, with mniform complete. The proposal gives us, if. we may say so without offence, the . measure of the Labour women's understanding of the ideas and preferences of ordinary women. We would also mention apologetically the fact that this programme would involve an enormous exipenditure out of those 'properly graded' taxes which are casually referred to in the committee'^ report. It seems to be accepted by a majority, though not by all, of those who describe themselves as Labour that there is no objection in principle, and that the average working iman and his wife would have no objection in practice, to their children being fed, clothed, doctored, and 'maintained' out of taxes paid by other people. We do not feel so sure, and we note that one lady at this conference spoke of 'endowments and all that sort of rot' as destructive of the independent spirit of the people. Her advice, which seems to us extremely sound, was that the Labour party should work for 'better wages, on which the working man could keep his family without having recourse to endowments and doles.' There is also another side to the question, namely, that there is not enotugh wealth in the .country to provide for 'social service' on this ' LENINISTIO SCHEMES. Less considerate comment is made by Miss Helena Nornianton, to-The Evening New. "As a short cut to national bankruptcy," she says, "one can conceive nothing quicker or more certain. I must own I am getting very sympathetic with the Irishman who pointedly asked -what posterity had. done for us that we should be told so insistently •what we ought to do for posterity. What the endowment of maternity -really means is that we are all invited to help the country to go completely bankrupt for the sake of-giving the present generation of children more education, food, and other things mostly material so that when they are grown up there will •be no industrial system left for_ their to grow up into. Everything will have crashed, as in Russia. "It may even be that in twenty years' time Britain 'will be advertising for foods to feed her famine-stricken, if.we let chaos come. No good that we can do children can possibly compare with the harm we can do them if we let our system, cumulative of capital and therefore of the possibility of existence itself, go down before these Leninistic schemes. ■Of the degradation which would befall womenfolk once maternity were endowed I can hardly bear to think. It is a dead certainty, that inspection by the State would dog each mother's every movement between the conception 'of a child and the termination of its university career. No married woman would leave her home in safety—certainly not to dare to earn any money outside it. Back to the home it would be with a vengeance! The country would become one vast stud farm. Home, by choice, is Heaven. By Order-in-Council—Hell."