The result is that appalling
ignorance of everything connected with cookery, with cleanliness,
with the management of children, which make the average wife and
mother in the lower working class in this country one of the most
helpless and thriftless of beings, and which therefore impels the
workman, whose comfort depends on her, not only to spend his free
time in the public-house, but also tends to make him look to
alcohol as a necessary condiment with his tasteless and
indigestible diet. Both directly and indirectly, therefore, the
employments that withdraw women from domestic pursuits are likely
to increase alcoholism, and, it may be added, to increase its
greatest potency for evil, namely its influence on the health of
the stock."
Elsewhere I have endeavoured to deal with the general physiology of
alcohol and its relations to race-culture. Here our special concern has
been woman, and not woman as mother, but rather woman as individual. We
have had specially to refer, however, to expectant and nursing
motherhood because each of these offers special temptations and
opportunities for the beginning of the alcoholic habit or strengthening
its hold in a deadly fashion, and it is certainly necessary for us to
know that the supposed advantages to the child, which constitute a new
argument for alcohol at these times, are not advantages but injuries
which may be grave and often fatal.
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