In 1907 Schools for Mothers were introduced into England, at first under the auspices of Dr. Sykes, Medical Officer of Health for St. Pancras, London. Such Schools are now spreading everywhere. In the end they will probably be considered necessary centres for any national system of puericulture. Every girl at the end of her school life should be expected to pass through a certain course of training at a School for Mothers. It would be the technical school for the working-class mother, while such a course would be invaluable for any girl, whatever her social class, even if she is never called to be a mother herself or to have the care of children.
The great movement of social reform during the nineteenth century, we thus see, has moved in four stages, each of which has reinforced rather than replaced that which went before:
- (1) the effort to cleanse the gross filth of cities and to remedy obvious disorder by systematic attention to scavenging, drainage, the supply of water and of artificial light, as well as by improved policing;
- (2) the great system of factory legislation for regulating the conditions of work, and to some extent restraining the work of women and of children;
- (3) the introduction of national systems of education, and the gradual extension of the idea of education to cover far more than mere instruction; and
- (4), most fundamental of all and last to appear, the effort to guard the child before the school age, even at birth, even before birth, by bestowing due care on the future mother.
It may be pointed out that this movement of practical social reform has been accompanied, stimulated, and guided by a corresponding