The Birmingham age-herald., 1909-10-10

the hardest kind of job-taking your place in the machinery of your employ CTS economy. has its compensations when the homecoming means the greeting of q sympathetic husband. But you come home only to the emptiness of missing him-he is dead. Perhaps it is worse yet and he has simply left you to do for yourself and the children because he has found someone younger and less worn in the struggle with life and the little ones. Your prospect is a restless night on the floor or the fire escape, with the children tumbling about and a boarder to make life more miserable, more crowded, more unhappy. What is the end? What sort of children will the little ones be without their mothers care, however unwise CT untaught?
 This is the real story of a widowed mother She has thousands of companions in similar plights. The stories are diff ferent only in detail. The principle is always the same; the terrible struggle to maintain a home for the little ones and to keep them near their natural protec- tor Rousseau in his Emile values the zeal of a parent above the talent of a paid instructor. These mothers are as a rule of the unskilled type. They are just mothers and their children are as a rule typical of the faults and virtues of nor nal children enjoying home privileges wherever they may be.
 These mothers are no more desirous of sending their children among strangers to be counted as units among hundreds of other children in the asylums, than are mothers of the better class. They are Just as sure that they alone under stand the individualties of their children as are other mothers; and in the long run they would make as great a success in training the children. In certain cases of full orphanage, the principle has been recognized that the home gives something that the institution lacks, and placing out has been resorted to and is vigorous | ly carried on with the most gratifying | results.
 The theory under which a widowed | mother is obliged to leave her home daily l or to take such an amount of work into ' 1t as will use ninety per cent. of her time, i does not allow for the normal develop
 ment of the child. It Is forcing the chil-
 dren who are necessarily without the ! proper amount of parental supervision, | into correctional institutions and orphan | ages, where the public expense is far ! greater than private support at home In the month of July in the Juvenile 1 Court, there were twenty-two Jewish boys whose mothers were widows Many
  tion between the hours of one and three in the morning waiting for daylight to start paper-selling. All were the children of working mothers. Four girls who came to the attention of the court in the same month were committed because the mothers, widows were working and could not look after the girls. One of them was complained of for staying away from home at night and another had become i'll Of vph he mother worked late at night in factory to keep the roof over their heads. Finding a large percentage of mothers undergoing sucn struggles and this new 1 field of work lying neglected, or nearly so, the Widowed Mothers Fund has been organized to study and develop a new method of dealing with such cases. Care ful survey of the field before them shows many complications. The families where
 illness has seized several members of the household, others where there is a grand mother to support too, a sick son in a sanitorium, or even an insane husband who thus is out of the bread winning class, all offer peculiar problems.
 The Widowed Mothers Fund proposes to establish a standard of living in ac- cordance with which per capita provision can be made until the children are of such ages as 10 pc contrlputors. At pres ent the fund is attempting to work with the United Hebrew Charities of New York in much the same manner as the committee on tuberculosis works with the Charity Organization Society.
 A joint committee of both societies re- views all cases of widowed or deserted mothers coming to the attention of either society. In June and July of this year, there have been three hundred and fifty applicants whose families average four children apiece. The Widowed Mothers { Fund contributes regular sums to the charities for use in this work but, finding the greatest number of those needing it's ministrations were residents of the East Side, the fund established it's office at 155 Clinton street.