"Mary, Mother Mary"

Mary, Mother Mary

Mary Minora is 14 years old. She has a baby three or four months old. For the past ten months she has been earning sixty cents a day--working from eight in the morning until nine at night--as a finisher on trousers. Her mother, a woman in her thirties, earns seventy cents a day. The husbands of Mary and her mother have been of the unemployed of New York City. Mary had to work hard during her pregnancy to help support husband and father and little brother. These facts were brought out at the recent investigation by the federal Commission on Industrial Relations. The evidence in full will be printed in the bulky report of this benign commission, along with several more volumes of similar edifying testimony. Mary and her mother will go on finishing trousers. Mary will have more children. The Government Commission will go on investigating--oh, so many highly interesting labor situations! And the Government will try to suppress as obscene all of us who teach birth-control. That, you see, might interrupt this process of creating generation after generation of cheap labor for the manufacturers of shoddy trousers--generations of women chained to Misery by enforced maternity.