Note 213 — CRIMINALITY. (continued 2)

We come now to education among the proletariat. Here we meet first, insufficiency of the pecuniary means which education requires; second, bad housing conditions, which oblige the children to pass a great part of the day in the street; third, the total absence of pedagogical ideas; fourth, the absence during the greater part of the day of the father of the family, and in many cases even of the mother. The number of married women who work away from home is continually increasing. In 1882 there were in Germany, for example, 507,784 married working-women, and by 1895 this figure had risen to 807,172—an increase of 299,388 (59%) in 13 years. In 1882 17.3% of the working-women were married; in 1895 21.5%.213 There are no official figures but Braun214 calculates that in Germany there are 500,000 children under 14 years of age, whose mothers are working-women. In Austria 44.6% of the working-women are married, and in France 20.6%.215 We have seen above (pp. 409 ff.) that juvenile criminality is increasing. This is explained in part by the increase in the labor of married women, from which it results that an increasing number of children are brought up without the proper care.