THE NEW MATER DOLOROSA

Otago Witness, Issue 3102, 27 August 1913, Page 77

THE NEW MATER DOLOROSA

By Jessie Mack ay. (Continued.) The ill-married mother of the English lower classes, having lost hope of receiving a living wage from her husbandemployer, or of the law enforcing his contract upon him, has two or three courses open to her, beside the obvious and frequent one of dying. She becomes another unit of the vast army of sweated women. Her scanty wages keep the family from utter starvation, on what dietary scale may be judged from the comparatively liberal estimate taken in Mrs Pember Reeves’s famous pound-a-week budget. In this, representing the higherwage of a man, the family daily allowance for food per head varies from l|d to sd. The return to work is the be it that can befall the uuhaujiy wife. It means, however, working all day abroad and all night at home. It also means incurring the wrath of pundits, parliamentarians, and ladies of leisure, who piously reiterate that “a woman’s place is at home.” What a start, eugenic, educational, and moral, the children born and reared 1 under such conditions may be guessed. If less strong or capable, the hapless slum mother usually sinks into a parasite. Granted that, by no stinting of herself, can she rear her children on what her husband allows her, necessity will teach her the whine and shifts of the modern beggar. If she may not'beg openly, she can easily work on the credulous pity of the district visitor, the church worker, and the officials of the various guilds, schools, and institutes of veiled charity that abound. England does not grudge the poor their dole; it always comes cheaper than justice. Quick is the descent to Avernus. The morale of mother and children is sapped ; the lethargy of pauperism seizes on the whole , family like leprosy.

She may, of course,, take to drink or theft, and yet this is curiously infrequent, notwithstanding the vast numbers and the bitter temptations of these unfriended, exploited mothers, accursed of their nation for their very motherhood's sake, while they are mocked by the foolish, fulsome sentimentality poured out on an ideal that casts too much money to turn into living reality.

We have been considering comparatively mild cases, however.

"Think thou deserves! hanging with a straw rope, and thou wilt count it a luxury to die in hemp.” says Carlyle. The slum woman who is merely starved or deserted can stoop to pity her who is owned by the husband —Degree—who kicks her to death, or near it, in addition. True. Hngland is a Christian country, and has remedial laws on her Statute Book even for her women. In 1878. and again in 1895. Acts were passed for the relief of such wives and mothers as these. Let us look into these man-made statutes of protection, and try to realise why the obstinate creatures do not, once in a hundred times, take advantage of these wise and merciful enactments. If she can prove “aggravated” assault (no easy matter, as we have seen) she is in no better case. If he is sent to gaol she has the privilege of keeping the family till he comes nut. and the dread as to what he will do to her when he comes out. If she would apply for permanent, protection, the case becomes unimaginably involved. It has been said that a suit for judicial seiiaration is like an obstacle race. Divorce, of course, is financially out of her read) ; that is the luxurv of the well-to-do, and unaccommodating clerics are known to grudge it even to estimable peers, much more to street hawkers and such. Tn her quest for judicial separation, then, she is first asked 2s for a summons—obviously as prohibitive to the starving mother as £IOO to a woman slightly higher in the social scale. If she can go up at once, while blood and bruises are yet dreadful to behold, she may obtain a “free” summons; but whether she can convince a magistrate she has been sufficiently ill-treated is another matter. She may he sent home without remedy, having doubly incensed her tyrant for nothing. If she obtains her summons and passes the magistrate, she has to leave her husband's dwelling and leave her children, unless she can hire another dwelling for them and herself, which, unless she is a comparatively wdl-pa-id worker, she cannot possibly dm Her poor little bits of furniture have also to be left to the Legreehusband. so she would have to furnish as well as hire. Even if friends helped her to a lodging she still goes in terror of the

man’s vengeance every time she goes abroad. If fear and fate are so far conquered, she then finds out ■what every woman knows in the underworld; that the judgment for maintenance is so much waste paper. The man may pay for a month yr two —not more, —and it is not the business or desire of a paternal Government to compel him. If the wife does worry the police, in the strength of her feminine inconsiaeration for official comfort, she has still to prove that he is able to pay —an almost impossible task, —and has the family to keep while he is in prison. And if she surmounts all these difficulties and proves the most flagrant infidelity, the moat inconceivable neglect and cruelty, ahe is, as we have said, still barred from honest divorce, and honourable union with a good man. For this reason, many women live faithfully in unlawful bonds, as little banned by the sor-row-taught moralist of the slums as George Eliot was in another sphere, but like case. This is the case of the helot mother if she strives with destiny. If she is too broken-spirited to leave her tyrant, hers is an abyss of misery imagination refuses to follow or words to express. And all this is not specially the law made by the rich for the poor, but the law of man, made for woman. The Labour party in England has a fair modicum of direct representation, and forms a body in Parliament. Moreover, it is the only party which, as party, has shown more than a shimmer of chivalry in its dealings with women. And yet the other day it was the Labour party that frustrated the feeble attempt made to remedy the most notorious of the many clauses in the Lloyd George Insurance Act, tis it bears cruelly on the poorest women, especially married women. It seems impossible for England to-day to do any justice to her exploited men that is not paid for in the flesh and blood of her worse-exploited women. The Insurance Act, a milestone of progress as affecting men workers and a section of the better-paid women, is a car of Juggernaut to the wretched washerwoman and low-class factory operative, who arc mulcted now of the free sick benefit they got before, and stand liable to continual discharge and re-engagement to avoid the employer’s new liability. Even the highgrade typists, nurses, and permanent domestic assistants are penalised under the Act, while the poorer mothers are alternately mocked and exploited under its E revisions. The Amending Act brought in y Mr Lloyd George the other week has redressed most of the men’s grievances while leaving the voteless women's practically untouched. The most flagrant of those, wo have said, was that of the maternity benefit, which is paid to the husband, and often after such delay as to force the supposed recipient to rise and work earlier than before. This benefit, it has been wittily said, should be called the “Publican’s benefit clause,” as, when it does not go to pay the overdue rent, in the case of the good husband, it goes to increase the bad husband’s prestige at the nearest bar. The Labour party indignantly declared this statement a' slur upon the working men of the country, and the obnoxious provision was restored. She was not a coolie or kanaka, this Mater Dolorosa, only the labour man’s own lawful serf.

It is not irrelevant to glance at another phase of this sick benefit here. The authorities have been astounded at the inordinate amount of sickness among those women (mainly the married women) who really derive advantage from the Act. Cruel charges of malingering have been brought against these sufferers by wellfed M.P.’s and aldermen, and it has even been proposed to cut down the alluring dole which nearly approximates to their miserable wages. Men and women who know the real conditions declare indignantly that the women had reached the last stage of debility and exhaustion before the Act came into force, and the onlv alternative is the death they would have met earlier without this slender chance of rest and nourishment.

It may seem like bathos to rehearse some of the meaner, more foolish pinpricks and restrictions with which law-givers, professedly in (he name of chivalry, have harassed this vast niultiude of exploited and deeply-wronged women workers. Yet. can it be bathos to speak of anything' however small, if it makes the difference of life and death to those dumb, driven creatures, always on the borderline of starvation? It would seem as if the supreme sin of woman leaving “(he home” to work i.s the sin of leaving it for monev worth her while. Any work commanding an approximate living v age i.s jealously watched by tiie powers that be. Two years or so back Air Winston Churchill was in a position to bar women front the light and well-paid work of decora tinesupper tables at public gatherings. He could not permit such danger to health as evening occupation (since it did not happen to be *tb° salubrious one of washing, or the elevating one of selling whisky at a bar). Mr Churchill obeyed his chivalrous impulse ; some foreign men enjoyed the monopoly of the table-decoraf bin-, and the abyss found room for another band of English women. As president of the Board of Trade. Mr John Burns has enjoyed some unique opportunities of shutting married women out of opportunities of earning a few shillings for themselves and their starving children, and his pious zeal for “the homo” i.s reported never to have missed one. And things that arc forgiven to Mr Churchill and Mr Asquith, whoso mothers never knew what physical privation meant, are not forgiven to Mr John Bums and Mr Lloyd George. (To bo concluded.)