Excerpt from The New Public Health
The Problem. Until such time as poverty is abolished, or the State takes charge of children, the majority of the women of the race must continue to rear the majority of the children of the race inadequately, in homes too small, without facilities, doing for them somehow, individually and alone, that which three women could hardly do well, working together.
This is not wholly a slum problem nor is it a problem of the rich. Numerically the race is chiefly middle class, neither rich nor extremely poor, judged by ordinary standards. This is the problem of the family with an income below $3,000, i.e., it is the problem of the race proper, and it is the old problem of the pre-mosaic Hebrew - how to make bricks without straw - alas, often without knowing how to make bricks at all.
The problem as a whole involves food, clothing, proper physical development, morals. education, amusement, discipline, and citizenship. But the public hygienist has as yet but indirect concern with these. The public hygienist the board of health man as yet concerns himself chiefly and by general expectation and consent, with the grosser, more imminent, more spectacular, more immediately tragic problems of disease and death, and chiefly with only one group of these, the infectious diseases. However much in ordinary life over-crowding, lack of facilities and overburdening of mothers may render unavailing even the tears and ageing, the back-ache, heart-ache, crooked fingers and wrinkled faces of mothers striving for their young, ten times over is the effect of these seen when disease enters the family, adding its burdens, its sorrows, its disabilities and its deaths. Once more, remember this is not in the slums alone, nor, numerically, chiefly there. It is found in city and country, village and town, everywhere, the overburdening of mothers, in ordinary life, added to ten times over when disease springs up. How Big A Problem Is It? Call the population of the United States 80,000,000.
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