title: Did factory girls make bad mothers? Women's labor market experience, motherhood, and children's mortality risks in the past.
abstract: Prior research has suggested that the quality of maternal care given to infants and small children plays an important role in the strong clustering of children's deaths. In this article, we investigate the quality of maternal care provided by those women who most nineteenth-century social commentators declared would never make good housewives or mothers: the young girls and women working in textile mills. We carried out this examination using an analysis of children's mortality risks in two textile cities in The Netherlands between roughly 1900 and 1930. Our analysis suggests that these children's clustered mortality risks cannot have resulted from either their mothers' labor market experience or biological or genetic factors.
authors.affiliation: Department of History, Radboud University Nijmegen, Nijmegen, The Netherlands. a.janssens@let.ru.nl
authors.forename: Angélique
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Janssens
authors.forename: Ben
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Pelzer
mesh_terms: D000367:Age Factors; D046688:Child Mortality / Q000266:history* / Q000639:trends; D002675:Child, Preschool; D016000:Cluster Analysis; D005192:Family Health / Q000266:history; D005260:Female; D049673:History, 20th Century; D006801:Humans; D007223:Infant; D007226:Infant Mortality / Q000266:history* / Q000639:trends; D007231:Infant, Newborn; D008297:Male; D009034:Mother-Child Relations; D009035:Mothers / Q000266:history* / Q000706:statistics & numerical data; D009426:Netherlands / Q000453:epidemiology; D009790:Occupations / Q000266:history* / Q000706:statistics & numerical data; D012737:Sex Factors; D012959:Socioeconomic Factors; D012962:Sociology, Medical; D013783:Textile Industry / Q000266:history* / Q000706:statistics & numerical data