APPENDIX B

aInformation is not available as to the number of persons in or number of rooms occupied by two of the 55 households.

In spite of the lack of space, light, and air, and the poor sanitary conveniences, six of the families in apartments,as shown in the following table, paid rentals of $20 or over per month, four paid from $16 to $20, 20 paid from $12 to $16, 17 paid from $8.00 to $12, and only three paid less than $8.00. One family lived in furnished rooms for which they paid $3.50 a week; one family owned the house they lived in; for three we had no records of the amount of rent paid. The distribution of rentals according to number is shown by the following table:

aThis item was not secured for three of the 55 families; one family owned the house in which they lived, and one lived in furnished rooms, paying $3.50 a week.

Life insurance is almost universal in our district except for families in the most abject poverty. Often every member is insured, the rate varying from 5 cents a week for children to 25 cents or more for adults. One family spent $52 a year for insurance out of a possiblemaximum income of $806 for seven persons. Another family of seven spent $2.40 a week out of an income which probably did not average more than $20 a week at the most. The benefit seldom does more than cover the cost of the funeral, and often barely that. The baby may have been insured for $30 and the undertaker’s bill is likely to be $40 or $50. One wife received $141 at her husband’s death, and the funeral expenses were $155, leaving a debt of $14, the cost of an illness, and a family of children to support. Such a funeral, of course, indicates lack of judgment on the part of the family, but it must be remembered that from time out of mind and in all ranks of society, a fine funeral has meant respect for the dead; and burial in the Potter’s Field is still a sign of the lowest economic stage to which a man can fall.

Twenty-five of the 55 families, or nearly half, had been in the past, or were at the time of our investigation, affected by excessive drinking on the part of one or both parents. Of this we were sure, either from records of philanthropic agencies or from our own knowledge. Some of the remaining 30 families had no cases of alcoholism, but concerning others we were unable to get any definite information. To summarize: In 25 families either the father or mother, or both, were subject to excessive drinking; in 13 of these the fathers drank to excess; in four the mothers drank; in eight of the 25 families both the father and the mother drank. “Excessive drinking” does not necessarily mean habitual drunkenness. Such cases are not frequent. On the other hand, it never means merely taking either an occasional or a regular drink, unless this is done to excess. It means at the least drinking of the sort whichmakes the mother unable to keep her home together without interference from the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children or makes it impossible for the father to “hold down” a job. In all 25 of these cases, the families had relief records.

To sum up, we have divided our families on a basis of prosperity and poverty as Miss Breckinridge and Miss Abbott have done in their book on The Delinquent Child and the Home.93

Class I represents the very poor, the “submerged tenth,”—the broken family, ill fed, ill clad, ill supported, aided by charity month after month and year after year, sick, wretched, truly poverty stricken. To this class we have judged that 20 of our 55 families, containing 25 of our 65 girls, belonged.

Class II are the poor, those with whom it is a constant struggle to make ends meet, who seldom have comfort but who seldom are on the verge of starvation. In this class we have placed 23 of our families, containing 28 of our girls.

Class III represents the fairly comfortable, those whose chief wage-earner has steady work or in which the children are contributing a fair share of the income; where food is sufficient and overcrowding is not very great. In this class were 11 of our families, with 11 of our girls.

Class IV is the very comfortable group, those who can afford a little more than the minimum of education and of care for their children, and who are never likely to know pressing want. In this class there was one family,containing one of our girls. This child’s grandfather was an early district settler, an Irish builder and contractor. When he died he left to the mother three or four tenement houses, in one of which the family were living, while the rents from the others rendered them, according to local standards, positively affluent.

Thus, to separate poverty from prosperity, roughly though it must be, only 12 of the 55 families could be called comfortable. The remaining 43 families were poor, some of them wretchedly poor. This condition, whatever may have been its cause, was the dominating factor in the lives of all but 12 of our 65 girls.

Toobtain facts regarding school attendance in the West Side district studied, a special tabulation for four public schools was made in the Bureau of Social Research from schedules obtained for the Committee on School Inquiry of the Board of Estimate and Apportionment of New York City. Public Schools Nos. 17, 32, 51, and 127 were the schools included in the study. The records covered a period of five months, from February 1, 1911, to June 30, 1911, or practically 100 school days. In the following table is shown the relation between the absences of boys and the absences of girls in the four schools mentioned, and the relation between absences in these schools and absences in the entire city.

It will be noted that attendance is poorer for the girls than for the boys. The difference in the average number of days of absence is about 2.6 days, or approximately 2.6 per cent of the term in question.

Attendance is better in the city as a whole than in the four schools in the district. But 63.5 per cent of the children in the schools in the district were absent less than eleven days, as compared with 67.3 per cent of those in the city as a whole. The proportion of children in each of the successive groups representing longer periods of absence is smaller for the city as a whole than for the four schools. A comparison of thecolumn for boys with that for girls shows that the low attendance in the schools studied is due to the relatively low attendance among the girls. While the percentages relating to the boys correspond almost exactly to those relating to all the children of the city, the percentages for the girls indicate a materially lower proportion of attendance.

aTabulated from schedules obtained for the Committee on School Inquiry of the Board of Estimate andApportionment of New York City.

bFrom a report to the Committee on School Inquiry of the Board of Estimate and Apportionment of New York City, on Promotions and Non-promotions, and Part Time, by Frank P. Bachman, Ph.D., p. 64.

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