Women Drinkers.

New Zealand Graphic, Volume XXXI, Issue XI, 12 September 1903, Page 783

Women Drinkers.

INFANTS AFFECTED BEFORE BIRTH. DOCTORS’ WARNINGS. The drunkenness of women is one of the chief causes of the degeneracy of the race. This proposition was discussed, and practically established as a fact, at a meeting of the Society for- the Study of Inebriety, held in the rooms of the Medical Society of London. Furthermore, it was stated, the evil of drunkenness is not confined to the women of the working classes. It is common among the we.i-to-do, although in their case the danger to young children is minimised by healthy surroundings and the guardianship of trained nurses. Miss Frances Zanetti, a health inspector of Manchester, read a paper on "dnebrity in women, and its influence on child-li f e.” She summarised the proved facts on the degeneration of the race— ■ the decreasing birth-rate, tire abnormally high infantile death-rate, and the difficulty of finding young men of suitable physique for the police forces, the Army, and the railway service.

Many factors were responsible—town life, with its overcrowding, its machinery, and its nervous haste—but the most important factor of all was the neglect of children during the first years of their lives.

“As a rule the woman drinks as a relief from worry and trouble, and finds in alcohol at once a stimulant and a narcotic.

‘Women in every rank of life are very liable to drift into habits of nipping, with disastrous results. Of the inebriety of women of the better classes I do not propose to speak, for, though it is well known that such women frequently become chronic drunkards, it is difficult to obtain statistics as to sickness and insanity, and still more difficult to obtain figures as to death.

“A pauper’s death may be certified as due to alcoholism, but in the case of a member of a respectable family, few medical men would be willing to attach such a stigma to her memory.” Miss Zanetti spoke of the common practice of women taking stimulants while nursing, and showed how bad a result that might have in the child. In times of depression, infantile mortality shows a decrease, doubtless owing to the

fact that the mothers cannot obtain drink. Poor Jews, although they violate many of the laws of hygiene, have a lower death-rate among infants than have Christians, for the simple reason that Jewesses do not drink.

For remedies Miss Zanetti could only suggest a general improvement in the social conditions of the working classes —better houses, cheap trains to the sub m-bs, better education, more enlightenment. Dr. Claye Shaw made some striking statements: Drunken parents produce children with all sorts of deformities, mental and physical; the children of drunken women fill Broadmoor; 56 per cent, of the offspring of inebriate women die at birth or under the age of two years, while in the ease of sober women the percentage is only 26. Children of inebriate parents were sodden with drink before they were born and showed the classic signs of degeneracy in after-life, even if they them selves were abstainers. Neurotic, hasty, impulsive, without self-control, they had to suffer through life for sins committed by their mothers. The doctor mentioned a case which had come unde- his notice—-a family of six—the four eldest sane and normal, the two youngest quite degenerate. On inquiry he found tha* the mother took to drink after the birth of her fourth c’Jld. “Do not imagine that the evil is confined to the poor. Women of fashion, women of frivolity, women who need a stimulant for' their jaded nerves—these women also take to drink, and you find these unfortunate neurotic condi tiohs in their families.’' Dr. Sullivan, speaking with experience as a prison doctor, said that, great as was the evil of alcohol in provoking crimes of violence, that evil was slight compared with the production of moral imbeciles as the result of the drunkenness of the parents.

Another aspect o r the question was mentioned by Dr. Wynn Westcott, the coroner. In Loudon alone 600 babies are killed every year by mothers lying on ton of them while in an inebriate condition. In Germany cuch deaths are almost unknown. German mothers do not get drunk; English mothers do.