Infant Mortality and Working-Class Child Care, 1850-1899. By Melanie Reynolds

Abstract

This book sets out to prove that nineteenth-century working class women were not always bad mothers. For the volume, Reynolds scoured an enormous volume of contemporary reports, newspaper and journal articles, and other sources in search of “evidence of positive child care models” (14). Using the material, she paints an idyllic picture of textile factories lined with moses baskets of contented infants, whose caring mothers were able to leave the looms to breastfeed, and where the only danger were the unsanitary toilet facilities. Infants whose mothers could or would not take them to work were looked after by diligent child-minders, who “were actively co-opted' by Poor Law authorities “in order to arrest excesses of maternal neglect and abandonment” (159). Some infants ended up in the workhouse, where they were looked after by pauper nurses trained in child-care by their previous work in domestic service. Many of the practices described in this volume have not been newly discovered: other historians have noted women giving birth at the loom, children as young as five years old acting as child-minders at the factory rather than going to school, and the fact that women went out to work in order to stave off poverty. The difference is mainly one of emphasis: Reynolds depicts all this (including a woman serving her dinner “using the shears she used to cut the rags with” [96])—as evidence of positive childcare practices which had an overall effect of reducing infant mortality rather than as obstacles which made it hard for working women to do as well for their children as they might have liked had they not been forced by circumstance to take paid work.