RUSSELL SAGEFOUNDATION—THENEGLECTED GIRLBYRUTH S. TRUEWEST SIDE STUDIESNEW YORKSURVEY ASSOCIATES, INC.MCMXIV
RUSSELL SAGEFOUNDATION—THENEGLECTED GIRLBYRUTH S. TRUEWEST SIDE STUDIESNEW YORKSURVEY ASSOCIATES, INC.MCMXIV
Copyright, 1914, byThe Russell Sage FoundationTHE TROW PRESSNEW YORK
Thematerial for the following studies was collected by four persons. The final chapter, which deals with the Italian girl of the West Side, was prepared by one of the group working independently. This course was necessary, as the Italian girl’s life is inseparable from that of her family and the only approach to her is by way of her own home. One could not know the Italian girl of the West Side without knowing also her father, her mother, and her numerous brothers and sisters, if not, indeed, a great many of her relatives. The other three workers, including the writer, joined in the management of a small house which was used as a recreation center and club house. They also collaborated in keeping a daily journal, to which reference is made in the following pages.
It was our wish especially to gain some knowledge of the type of girl who is seen so frequently at the street corners and who refuses to be attracted to agencies which frankly declare a desire to improve her. The club, therefore, adopted an open-door policy and the leaders tried to refrain from obvious attempts to influence or control the girls who came. The aim was to encourage sincerity among them, and to prevent their “playing up” to superimposed standards “for what there was in it.” Not that we thought that thesegirls were especially inclined to practice fraud; but we knew from experience that work with too obvious a purpose “to do good” often encourages hypocrisy.
One of our reasons for opening the Tenth Avenue club for girls was that we had found it impossible to be on an intimate footing with them in their homes. The atmosphere of family life was far too often one of mutual reproach and recrimination, and the visitor was likely to find herself in the embarrassing position of a court of appeals. Picture an evening spent in the company of the two Katie Murphys, mother and daughter, thus: Mrs. Murphy, sitting with folded arms in the rocking-chair, rehearses the story of Katie’s sins. Katie leans against the back of the sofa with dropped eyelids and a face as expressionless as putty. All the efforts of the involuntary court of appeals to induce the girl to say a word in her own behalf are met by stony silence. Meanwhile, the mother runs on, zealously driving nails in her own coffin as far as the girl’s affection and confidence are concerned. Harassed by the problem of feeding, clothing, and housing six children on $8.00 a week, Mrs. Murphy has little strength or imagination left for the subtler problem of how to handle an adolescent daughter.
It was such experiences that taught us the necessity of providing some neutral ground on which to meet Katie Murphy, if we were to secure her confidence. This neutral ground took the form of club rooms where we established ourselves with the definite intention of giving Katie the just due of her youth,—a good time.
We continued, however, to visit the families of girls in the course of the investigation, collecting therebymaterial for the observations on home life contained in the following chapters. The girls themselves welcomed our visits even though they must have realized in a vague way that we were keeping “tab” on conditions in the homes from which our club members came. One day May Sipp,63a new girl, came to one of the club leaders and said, “Miss ——, will you come to my house tomorrow?” The leader thought that perhaps a party was being planned and asked for further details. “Why, no one has been to my house yet and I’d like to have you come,” the girl explained. It was evident that she felt a little put out because her home had not as yet been visited.
It was the middle of December when we first opened for the girls in the neighborhood the house which we had taken for the purpose. The place received no more colorful name than the number on the door, “471,” by which it was designated during the whole time we occupied it. “471” was a red brick structure consisting of three stories and a basement. It was rather a friendly looking house with a “stoop” and the remnants of front and back yards; that is, there was a small area in front guarded by a low iron fence with a gate, and a square box in the rear which became a “playground” in summer. A supervisor from Christ Presbyterian Church was placed in charge of the latter, and the children crowded into the little box in such numbers that we soon had complaints from the neighbors against the shrill chorus rising from the back yard.
The front yard was of no particular use except that the iron gate served to stimulate the imagination of thesmall boys who haunted our premises. It was a continual bone of contention. It was always being carried away by bands of enemies and heroically restored by bands of friends—who were sometimes one and the same—until at last we decided to remove it entirely from the sidewalk, where it was of no earthly use as a gate, and store it in an inner closet.
We occupied two floors of the house, the ground floor and the basement. In the basement was a large, well lighted kitchen and a living room. On the first floor were two large connecting rooms which were furnished with folding chairs and a piano. Though our equipment was meager, we had a cook stove and a piano. These two pieces of furniture we came to regard as the necessary minimum of equipment for a girls’ club under all circumstances.
The occupations of the clubs—cooking, sewing, basket-weaving, brass work—were carried on as pastime rather than as work. It was necessary to vary the program repeatedly, for the shifting attention of the girls refused to consider any occupation as pleasurable for long at a time. The one thing of which they never seemed to tire was dancing, and in spite of the ugly forms which this recreation took, it had always the beauty of spontaneity. Their fondness for popular songs was almost as spontaneous. “The Garden of Love,” “The Hypnotizing Man,” “When Broadway was a Pasture,” “The Girl that Married Dad,” and others of the same lurid and sentimental strain were sung over and over to an unvarying appreciation.
Our relations with our co-tenants at “471” threw much additional light on conditions of life on the West Side. Above us on the second floor lived the McCluskyfamily. Ellen McClusky was fourteen, and since her mother’s death two years before had been housekeeper for her father and three brothers. Lately one of the brothers had sickened of tuberculosis, thus adding to Ellen’s housekeeping duties those of a sick nurse. Her school attendance had suffered. The truant officer was paying visits to the house and the health officer was also knocking at the door. Thus the clouds had already begun to gather on the McClusky horizon even before our entrance on the scene. Ellen’s joy at the news that a club for girls had moved in on the ground floor of the house was unbounded. She was allowed at first to come down to us every evening.
But Mr. McClusky soon turned against us. He was a choleric individual, and was, moreover, constantly agitated over the condition of his son, who was dying by inches. It is not surprising that he turned violently against the social coercion which demanded that Ellen should go to school and his son be put away in a hospital. He mishandled the truant officer and forbade Ellen to have anything to do with the “teachers,” whom he regarded as being in league with the forces that harassed him.
Ellen would hang over the banisters in the evenings watching the hall below. But her father had forbidden her even to speak to us. In March the invalid brother died, and the club rooms were closed for a week during which the house was given over to the solemn splendors of a funeral. After the undertaker had retired, the health officer took possession and the rooms were submitted to a thorough fumigation.
We opened our club once more, but Ellen was still forbidden to come to us. She continued living in theisolation of the second floor, peeping over the banisters in the evening. It was finally a great relief to our overstrained sympathies when an officer of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, upon evidence furnished by Ellen’s aunt, arrived and removed her from her home. This ended the vicissitudes of the McClusky family so far as we had any share in them.
On the top floor lived Mr. Distel, a German mechanic about fifty years old. He was an odd little bitten-off man, unkempt and kindly, who had lived alone in his three little rooms many years. He liked to hear the boys and girls downstairs, he said, and occasionally he made clumsy efforts to join in, but he had been too long a hermit. He could not. Needless to say, Mr. Distel was our most sympathetic neighbor, and the presence of the little man finishing off an industrious and worthy life in his lonely top floor rooms made us but the more determined in our task of supplying wholesome good times to our friends.
The source from which most of our difficulties proceeded was the spirit of disorder abroad in the neighborhood. This was indeed a lawless spirit and, in its extreme form, a sinister and menacing influence. The “Gopher gang”64figured largely in the neighborhood gossip, and whatever may have been the actual extent of Gopher operations in our vicinity, the current stories about them, however inaccurate as to facts, were in themselves a sufficiently evil influence in the lives of the boys and girls of the district.
Our most direct contact with local disorderly influences was through the gangs of small boys whohaunted our premises, demanding to be admitted. As we were not prepared to open the house to them, our apparent inhospitality drew upon us a series of attacks. Not that all the attacks were acts of deliberate revenge; they were sometimes merely outbursts of habitual rowdyism. Nevertheless, they were a serious element in our situation. We found that we could not run a club for girls on Tenth Avenue without getting the small boys’ consent. Time had to be spent in conciliating them. At first our method was to station an out-post on the sidewalk. To one of the “teachers,” who proved an adept in gang psychology, this difficult task was usually delegated. An entry in her diary under the date of December 20—a date on which the usual Tenth Avenue spirit was enhanced by the approach of the Christmas holidays—reads as follows: “As it was not my night on duty I had no intention of spending the evening at the Tenth Avenue house. I stopped in to speak to Miss Barclay and see how things were going, but the disorder on the outside was so bad that I was forced to spend most of the evening on the sidewalk outside with the boys.”
An adventure which befell us on the second evening after our “opening” might have had very serious results. One of the club leaders was engaged in the front basement room with a group of the older girls. Early in the evening a gang of small boys gathered at the window outside to upbraid their sisters for not letting them come into the club. But they withdrew at a word from the “teacher,” who might have suspected such unusual docility, but did not. An hour later when the girls were engaged in their club occupations, there came crashing through the window a weapon seven feetin length, which proved to be a gun with a bayonet attachment. It struck the chair in which the teacher was sitting with such force as to chip the oaken back. As the gun was slowly drawn into the room there was much wringing of hands and a general desire to get a “cop.” The gang had promptly made off, of course, leaving the sidewalk deserted.
It became apparent that the small boy could do serious damage unless conciliated. Treating with him in the darkness of the sidewalk proved not to be successful. It was evident that we must bring him inside and examine him in the light. One evening just after the front shutters had been pried open by depredators who had then promptly run away, one of the club leaders went out to the sidewalk, closing the door behind her. Nobody was in sight. But she had only to continue long enough in a motionless attitude to coax these young animals from their holes. Presently a head came out from behind a stoop, and another from an area opposite. Soon several boys were edging along the pavement toward the solitary figure in the dark, and in a few minutes the whole gang had closed in a circle around the trapper. She led them up the stoop, into the brightly lighted sitting room, and called for a clear statement of grievances. It was all ready. “Say, ain’t no boys gona be let in never?”
The end of this council and of others which followed was that we gave Saturday night to the boys. Gradually, by this concession and others, we were able to conciliate the gangs. The worst of our troubles were over when they had been somewhat enlisted on our side, but there were occasions when the alliance proved embarrassing. For instance, one of the “teachers”leaving the club late in the evening encountered a group of the older boys who gallantly offered to escort her to the car. As they neared the corner she remarked hastily that she must catch a car which had just stopped there. Before she could get her breath, four of the boys rushed ahead, jumped on the front platform, and began putting on the brakes so that the motorman could not start his car. The astonished club leader found herself seized by the other three youths and hoisted upon the rear platform with a parting shove which sent her hurtling into the car. The hooting and confusion were intense, and the passengers stood up in alarm. The boys, however, stood genially waving their caps as the car started. When the conductor came to collect the fare, he said suspiciously to the new passenger, “Did you know them boys?” The young woman was compelled to say that they were friends of hers, to which he replied, “Gee, but you got tough nuts for your friends!”
Stories of the disorder in the neighborhood came into the house in many ways. For instance, it was vividly reproduced in the conversation of the “gentleman friends” of the girls, who were often our guests. This was full of wild Gopher gossip and stories of arrests. There was one evening in particular when Doran thrilled us all with a long story of how he had gone home early one night and was sitting reading his paper, feeling rather queer—the trouble was in the air—when a terrific noise broke out in the hall. A whole gang of fellows had come into the house through the door on the roof and gone plunging down the stairs pursued by a trail of officers.
At this point in the story, Cleaver suggested thatDoran must have kept the door shut pretty tight, to which he agreed. Cleaver then accused him of being afraid, and recalled an instance when, as he claimed, Doran had shut the door against him when the “cops” were after him. Doran hotly denied this. The two ruffled spirits had to be smoothed and then the talk ran on, all about arrests and flights and pursuits. The whole conversation indicated how precariously near the edge of trouble these young men felt themselves to be all the time. It showed also the kind of lawlessness and rowdyism on which they built their youthful ideals, which lead in turn to further acts of lawlessness and rowdyism.
Echoes of the Gophers occurred in the talk of the girls. At one of the first club meetings, a tall, attractive girl arose and proposed as a name for the club, the “Gopherettes.” As a motto, she suggested, “Hit one, hit all.” This was Fanny Mayhew, who turned out on nearer acquaintance to be a wonderfully cheerful girl with a happy disposition and very popular with her family and school teachers. Though perfectly able to hold her own, she proved not so belligerent as the episode had suggested. She told a club leader that she had once belonged to a club of girls called the “Gopherettes.” They had paid dues and even rented a basement room for a short time. Later the club had moved to the dock, and she had not been allowed by her mother to go to its meetings.
It was unavoidable that the girls’ conduct should reflect the character of their environment. However, only once was there an outbreak against a club leader. Among the friends of the house who kindly volunteered from time to time to help with an evening’s entertainmentwas a young woman from another city who had, thanks to her own efforts and the interest of a wealthy friend, raised herself from the ranks of the girls who composed our clubs. On the occasion of this young woman’s visit with us, there arose from the room where she was engaged with a group of girls the sounds of a violent quarrel. One of the regular leaders hastened to the room, arriving just in time to prevent blows. Julia O’Brien had lifted her arm to strike the young woman who had come up from the ranks and who was, moreover, for the moment the center of a hostile, excited group.
The leader of the riot, led downstairs to the kitchen, became instantly repentant, and the story of the quarrel came out. One of the girls had stepped on Julia’s foot and she had exclaimed, “Oh, hell!” It was an unfortunate slip. Julia knew that swearing was not allowed in the club rooms and she was making strenuous efforts, as the leaders knew, to break a lifelong habit. But the young woman from the ranks did not know this and she had rebuked the guilty Julia in a tone of such cold and stinging contempt that it had not only provoked her victim to the point of striking blows but had drawn upon the tactless leader the wrath of every girl present.
A subsequent talk with this young woman revealed the attitude of offensive superiority which the girls had so hotly resented—an unfortunate by-product of her rapid rise into responsibility. A thoroughly self-respecting and deserving person, she had the peculiarly hard and unsympathetic attitude toward those who had failed to surmount their disabilities so often held by persons who have themselves struggled up from the ranks.
“Fights” among the girls were not infrequent. One unusually peaceful and happy evening, for instance, ended in open warfare because Barbara Egan, apparently with no evil intent, had asked Louisa Storm why her fingers were so crooked. No less painful was the quarrel between Mamie Taggart and Anna Strumpf, which was recorded in the following entry in the diary: “Tonight it was raining heavily but about eight or ten girls of the Wednesday night club turned up. Anna Strumpf sent word that she is not coming any more as she is afraid that Mamie Taggart will do her up outside.”
Not all the “fights” were duels; some of them were petty wars of faction with faction. There was one particularly unfortunate evening when fatal “remarks were passed” and the deadly insult “tough” was used. The waves of bitterness were long in subsiding. The next evening a group of the girls, headed by Maggie Tracy and Clara Denley, appeared at the club wearing large stiff hair bows, some red and some black, which stuck out defiantly on either side. They announced that they had been called tough, so what could one expect? The club leaders began to muster their diplomacy and act as peacemakers, but the air was still belligerent when the opposite faction came in.
Expecting a repetition of the clash between the two sets, we were greatly surprised to see Sadie Fleming, the leader of the newcomers, go up to Maggie Tracy and put her hand affectionately on her enemy’s shoulder, apparently forgetting that a state of war existed between them. Sadie and her companions had collected on their way to the club the most thrilling gossip of the entire year. Father Langan, according to thestory, on his way to give holy communion to a woman who was sick, had been attacked by a gang of Gophers. He had thrown open his coat to show the vestment of the priest, but they had robbed him of some money he was carrying and had left him stretched on the sidewalk!
This story was a nine-days’ wonder on the West Side, where, as a usual thing, deeds of violence are promptly forgotten. Father Langan flatly contradicted the report, but this had no effect upon the currency of so picturesque a story. Very likely there were other quarrels besides Sadie’s and Maggie’s which were forgotten and effaced in the mutual thrill over this piece of modernized Irish folklore. Mrs. O’Callahan was graphic, bringing together details heard from various other sources as well.
“The father was just afther going t’ give a dyin’ woman th’ Holy Communion. He was stheppin’ down the street when these fellows set in upon him. ‘B’ys,’ he sez, throwin’ back his coat and takin’ an’ showin’ thim th’ Sacrament which he had in his pocket, ‘d’ye see what I’m carryin’ here? For yer own good,’ he sez, ‘Oi warn ye,’ he sez, ‘not t’ lay hand on a priest,’ he sez, ‘an’ him goin’ t’ a sick old woman,’ he sez. An’ with that they hit him an’ took what money he had—twenty-six dollars he was carryin’, so they say. Oi can’t understand why the fire from above didn’t sthrike thim down dead. In Ireland, a priest there has only t’ stamp with his foot and they’d ha’ been sthruck down where they stood. But America is a bad place, it ain’t like th’ owld counthrey.”
When the youthful gang spirit of Tenth Avenue had been conquered it seemed as though the last difficultyhad been surmounted. At the end of ten months we thought we had taken the measure of all the unpropitious influences that threatened our enterprise. But not so. We were yet to capitulate to the last and most powerful enemy of all—industry. First came a “dispossess” notice, and before we could get our breath from the surprise the house-wrecking crew were upon us. It was a simple matter to raze “471” and the adjoining buildings. In a few days they had all disappeared, along with the tiny back yard, where the children had played on hot summer days. On the site was erected a lofty factory building. Tomorrow the machines will be chugging away in the new shops, tended perhaps by some of the same girls who yesterday came knocking at the door of “471” asking for room to play. A neighboring school received the remnants of our clubs. With new conditions, a new environment, and new groups of girls, an entirely new start had to be made.
The observations given in this study of girl life on the West Side do not pretend to be extensive. No attempt was made to gather in numbers. We had 65 girls in our clubs whose home conditions were very well known.65But the study was written with much additional information in mind. Other girls came to the house and we were in touch in one way or another with a great many families of the neighborhood besides those of club members. The chief purpose, however, was to know intimately and sympathetically a small group of girls who were typical in many ways of the girls in any poor and neglected city population. As onewriter puts it: “The alternative lies, not between knowing a few people and knowing all to an equal degree, but between scratching the surface of the whole field and digging a portion of it spade deep in order to gain some idea of the under-soil throughout.”66
How far did our groups represent the girl life of the West Side? It was a comparatively small number whom we knew, and the majority of them came from the “under-soil.” The well cared for did not come to us. Our girls were for the most part the daughters of the poorest poor. As a group they differed essentially from the types of girls usually found in settlement clubs and classes. Some of them were not of the best local repute. They were known as “tough,” and had been practically outlawed by certain settlements and recreation centers for the sake of the more promising element.
The settlement workers in the district repeatedly assured us that it was hard to hold the girls who came from our particular area and impossible to work with them in numbers. This testimony as to the unsocial character of these girls was sadly borne out by our experience in trying to organize them into clubs. There were many who corresponded to the description given by Dr. Katherine Bement Davis,67superintendent of Bedford Reformatory: “Our girls as a class are anti-social. It is very hard for them to see their conduct in its relation to the lives of those around them. They are individualistic in the extreme. They have never thought of the necessity for governmentand law, and can see no reason for obedience to anything but their own impulse.”68
But after making all due allowances for the limited number of girls studied and the “tough” reputations of some of them, the fact remains that these 65 girls and their friends were representative of many others who are subjected to the same environment. They had been brought up from babyhood in these blocks. Born in the crowded, dark tenement house they had had for a nursery the crowded sidewalk, and for a playground, the street. They had gone to the nearest school and from there to work in the nearest factory. They had seen the West Side, breathed the West Side, fed on the West Side for fourteen years or more, and had built up their adolescent ideals of the same forlorn material. That they had succumbed to unwholesome influences does not prove them to have been peculiarly weak or susceptible. Nor does it prove that their parents had been culpably delinquent in their duties. Conditions of living in the crowded city have tended to loosen the family bond, and the powerful force of neighborhood influence cannot be adequately combated by parental authority alone. The community must assume the responsibility for the environment of its least protected members.
A campaign for the control of conditions in the public dance halls has been begun. We are told that our young working girls must be given decent dance halls and not publicly and deliberately consigned to the degraded centers which attract them under that name.The West Side girls need much more, however, than protected dance halls. Some of the girls of this district are too poor to go to public dances. But the same dangers which threaten the dance-hall girl stalk unrestrained through the neglected streets and tenements of the West Side, and the girl of fourteen may fall a victim even under her own roof tree.
Demoralizing neighborhood conditions, such as congestion, filth, street temptations, and neighborhood gangs, all of which are practically synonymous with West Side life, influence the girls for evil only to a less degree than they influence the boys. One needs only to talk with any good mother of the district and hear how steadily she is engaged in fending her children against the life of the street to learn how constant and how potent are its influences. Testimony is borne to their power by the iterated complaint of West Side mothers,—of those who do not work away from home as well as of those who do,—that “Mamie is beginning to get out from under me,” or, “Katie was the best girl you ever saw until we came to live on this block.”
The problem of waywardness among West Side girls cannot be solved by long distance methods. Their environment must be made safe and their pleasures recognized and made decent. Some of the things which enlightened criminologists recommend for women in reformatories, after they have completely succumbed to the sort of conditions which abound on the West Side, are regular school attendance with manual training and flexible courses of study; regular hours for sleep, for food, for work, and for play; plenty of nourishing food; fresh air and outdoor life; the social discipline of communitylife. These are the things which are given to the girls in the reformatory at Bedford as a cure. The same things would help to prevent; they would preserve the West Side girl to society as a daughter and as a mother, as a worker and as a citizen.
“
You’vegot t’ keep your eye on a girl. Now it’s different with a boy. He can take care of himself. But you never can tell, if you don’t keep a watch, when a girl’s goin’ to come back an’ bring disgrace on you.”
Such, in a nutshell, is the attitude of our community toward the adolescent girl. The chances are that she will “never give you worry an’ trouble like a boy.” But if she does, she will give vastly more. The sting of her shame is felt to be keener than any the boy can inflict. And with very few girls in our neighborhood is “trouble” of this sort beyond the range of the possible. Therefore the sense of family responsibility is far more alert in her behalf than on her brother’s account. With few exceptions, the girl is assured of interest and counsel in her home. This counsel is not always wise. Worse still, it is not always tempered with the affection she needs. Here all family life struggles against handicaps. But through all the sorry failures, the ignorance, and the thwarted ambitions, much love and much concern for the girl are to be found in the homes of her people. Almost as a babyshe has duties at home. The boy, as a rule, assumes them with his first pay envelope. Or, if he is earlier drafted into service, his chores are outside, probably the gathering of coal or wood while his sister stays at home to mind the babies. He has more freedom. She grows up in a more intimate relation to the family, far more under the eye of her mother. Therefore, family influence, nine times out of ten, is the great factor in her development. To understand her, home conditions must be known.
The most common of family skeletons among this West Side group is one which can scarcely be locked in its closet. It stalks forth, apparent to the casual glance. It is the grim elemental question of primitive needs. The daily struggle for food, shelter, and clothing is a stark reality to which only the youngest babies in the family can be oblivious. The daughter of fourteen knows it to the last sordid detail. In the group of families we knew, poverty was almost universal. Of our 65 girls only eight came from households which had known continuous comfort during these children’s lives. All the others had at some time faced staggering misfortune. Forty of the total 55 families, or 73 per cent, had had records with relief societies, some stretching far back into the past.70Forty-three families, from which came 53 of the girls, must be classed with the very poor.71
Those of us born into better fortune seldom feel the meaning of this primitive struggle. We have no common denominator with it. We cannot estimate the heroism of “the poor.” We have heard and read muchof hunger and exposure. These things play a large part in juvenile literature, whether sensational or classic. There is no little daughter of a comfortable home but is told the sad legend of the match girl who froze in the snow under the lighted windows from which floated sounds of merriment and music. The same little daughter, grown older, goes to school and learns that “man’s three primal necessities are food, shelter, and clothing.” But neither the faraway and sentimental pathos of the match girl’s fate nor the cold scholastic statement of the text book is sufficient to teach one the real meaning of poverty. Only those who follow its trail, step by step, seeing the gradual and tragic disintegration of human worth under its influence, the suffering and waste left in its path, can realize its full power and significance.
To these girls who come forth to their recreation in a skirt worn thin and a gaping, ill-made waist, poverty is neither distant nor sentimentally touching. Possibly no child does starve in these streets. But there are many children who do not need to learn out of books about hunger. At any moment, one may open a door and find it, in all its gaunt, staring reality. We once found a tiny crippled baby who had sat for days in a fireless, barren room, stiffened with cold. She was as helpless and defenseless a little creature as could well be met. But this was the treatment that an indifferent community tolerated for her. And she was only one.
To our girls these were harsh facts of everyday knowledge. Familiarity with poverty makes it seem both more and less terrible. It does not kill, perhaps, but it stunts. It does not come as an overwhelming catastrophe; but steadily it saps the vigor of the young aswell as of the old. With the more fortunate of families such as these, extreme poverty is only episodic. A fairly decent standard is kept until something goes amiss. But one break in the machinery of their working capacity means hardship. No reserve fund has been possible, or the small amount saved is hopelessly inadequate to meet illness or protracted unemployment. It melts away in a few weeks or months. The family is very soon over the borderline of self-support. With the less fortunate, poverty takes the form of a slow, chronic contest against everlasting odds. This demands every atom of physical and nervous strength, every fraction of intelligence and effort. And the exaction is made from those whose only training has been hard, devastating experience.
In this neighborhood, families are large and wages are small. The size of the family is a definite element in its standard of comfort. Poverty begins not merely at a certain wage but also with a certain number of children.72“We’ve got eight,” said Mrs. Meehan, “and by rights we’d only have two if we was to bring ’em up proper. But,” she added, “it’s the littlest one that I love the best.”
Sometimes where the father is living and at work, he earns enough to keep in cleanliness and health, and with at least the necessary medical care, a family of three or four. But with six to support, an income sufficient for four means the lack of essentials for all, loss of health, and sometimes loss of life. Often the mother is compelled to supplement his earnings by her own. Twenty-nine out of the 46 living mothers were contributing apart or the whole of the family income. In 24 of the 55 families the father was dead or incapacitated, and there was no stepfather to take his place as breadwinner.73
The mortality among children on the West Side is shockingly high. A family which had not lost at least one child was indeed rare. Fairly accurate records of the births and deaths of children in 31 out of the 55 families show that the number of births averaged nearly eight, and the deaths about three.74This average death rate for so small a group is not surprising when one considers the birth rate. The more children that are born into such poverty, the greater the likelihood that many of them will die. On our list were families who had two living children and six dead, five living and five dead, five living and six dead, six living and nine dead, seven living and seven dead, one living and six dead. Though practically all these families carried insurance,75the amount for which a baby’s life is insured would not as a rule be sufficient to pay the expense of burial.
The attitude of our community toward birth or death is disheartening in its helplessness. Either event is accepted as the will of God. The idea of voluntarily limiting the size of the family is almost unknown. Mrs. Reilly, bent, deformed, old at fifty, with five children living and eight dead, would ramble on with her dull and listless story of the sickness and suffering those deaths and births had meant, and the constant crushing poverty they had caused; and would finish with,“It’s the poor as can’t take care of them, to whom they’re sent.”
The housing of these families was of a grade commensurate with the degree of their poverty. Dark, unventilated rooms were found in the apartments of 30 families, and about half of the group of 55 had less space than was required for health or comfort. As is generally true with families of their class, the amount of rent paid for poor and inadequate accommodations was relatively high.76
In spite of the mountains of difficulty in the way of these mothers, their success in bringing up their children is sometimes great beyond our realization. There was, for instance, one household on a certain block on Eleventh Avenue where the father brought in $12 in return for a full week of unskilled labor. There were four children under working age. Twelve dollars, six persons, city prices—this was the mother’s problem, by no means so discouraging as that of some of her neighbors, but still a difficult one. The answer is not to be written on paper. It is on children’s faces, in the events and outcome of human lives. However successful the present answer, each day sets the old quandary forth anew. Never solved, it stretches on into the years ahead.
With this family, part of the answer was their presence on Eleventh Avenue. It was in the clangor of the freight trains that passed on the street surface by their door and blackened their windows with smoke. It was in the stench of the slaughter house which the breeze brought into their rooms. It was in the soot of thefactories and the dangers to child life around the docks. There were outward evidences of family life in the block where they dwelt—dilapidated tenements, with a sordid little grocery store in the middle of the block. A garish little saloon stood on the corner. The houses did not present the solid red brick front of the usual tenement street, with its delusive appearance of respectability. The buildings were irregular; some were low and shack-like. Their windows faced Jersey and the nightly glory of the sunset, but even this could not redeem the sordidness and squalor of the neighborhood.
From these surroundings came two trim little figures. They were school girls, still with all the ways and traits of little girls. Their hair was drawn smoothly into straight black braids. Their eyes were round and wide awake. The neatness of their dress spoke of continual care. They were alert and well-mannered, brimming with interest and comment. In short, they were bright, normal, ordinary children. What this meant as an achievement can only be measured by the obstacles which this one mother had overcome.
She had had the help neither of good fortune nor of training. She had fashioned her product with her own pitiful, clumsy tools. A large-boned, uncouth Irish woman, she still bore the stamp of the soil. Her education had been that of life, a life of hard knocks and rough going. Plain, coarse, with the burr in her speech, bent and weakened physically, she did not present an attractive appearance. But it was her boast that she “never got anything from no society—never knew much about them places—never had to, thank God.” Relatives had helped when the hardest pinches came; butfor the most part the family had plodded on alone. But even such parents cannot master poverty. In turn they must pay toll to its resistless strength. For the smallest girl of five was a wan, great-eyed baby whose puckered lips were drawn with pain and on whom the shadow of death already lay. The terms of life cannot be utterly remade.
In one of the sordid tenements wedged into a narrow space as yet unclaimed by business this mother had found a shelter for her brood. Four rooms “through” with a cupboard were rented to her for $9.00 a month and her services as janitress, which were reckoned as worth $3.00. Thus, while her flat would otherwise have cost $12 a month and have absorbed exactly one week of her husband’s wages, she saved $3.00 out of the rent to spend on food for her family of six. This was the important fact which had kept them on Eleventh Avenue from year to year, though the mother always hoped that each winter would be her last in the house.
But not all families have the fortitude, the endurance, the power of ceaseless, undiminished effort which this particular group possessed. Even with those who accept the challenge and make the continual effort to keep their heads above water, strength and courage sometimes break. The loss of two days’ work for a daughter whose full week’s wage amounts to only $4.00 or $5.00 may mean a family tragedy. What elsewhere are incidents, are hazards here.
We have fallen into the habit of looking to the mother as the mainstay of the family. She is held to a rigorous standard which neither husband nor children are required to measure up to. We expect her to counteractthe difficulties and evil influences of her environment by possessing all the known virtues of character. As a matter of fact, the worry and strain of insecurity become too great for many a woman. She grows apathetic, careless, and stolid, or she becomes querulous and neurotic. Perhaps she takes to drink. Drinking is rife on the West Side; it is the easy and familiar escape from worry and discouragement. For the woman who drinks there is scant sympathy or toleration. The decent, hardworking mother has no patience with her. If the victim is putting up any fight at all it is a desperate and a solitary one, for she can expect no help from others. With every lapse, every slipping back from the precarious foothold gained so painfully, she is met by scorn and reproach from her judges with whom the long weeks of effort do not count when once she has failed. To rise many times from the utmost depths of despair and bitterness is not given to human nature, and she ends as an outcast.
I am thinking of one black, terrible half hour with a woman of my acquaintance. A thunder storm darkened all the outer world and almost no light entered the kitchen where we sat. It was one of the two small rear-house rooms that she rented for $8.50 a month. This day it was stifling and unswept, cluttered with little piles of her rubbish. She was going to move; she had been dispossessed. She had lost her job, a position held for three months after a winter when she had hunted work for weeks. For seven years she had kept up a home for her girl and boy, one year during the illness of her husband who drank and beat her, and six years after his death. She had looked forward to the time when Sadie should get her working papers; but the girlwas incompetent and irresponsible and failed to keep any job for long.
This year had brought the mother her first out-of-work experience. In the course of it she had slipped far behind. But with every seven dollars’ pay during the past three months she had climbed slowly back. The rent was even. The insurance agent lacked a single dollar. Every night on coming home she had figured slowly and clumsily with the aid of her boy “Petie.” She had “built castles, which no one had ought to do.” Castles! Dreams of a new suit for herself and Sadie, of whole shoes for Petie which should not be begged from his school; dreams in the future of an “all-through” apartment, even with rugs, and curtains of cheap lace. But again thrown out of work, hope was gone.
She was a woman slow and clumsy of movement, who went through her plodding days quietly and dumbly, with a certain trembling hesitance. But her rusty black clothes were always neat. The housekeeper said, “You c’d tell she was respectable.” It was a cherished respectability. She suffered bitter pangs when she saw it fall away. Today her tongue was loosened by drink. She talked quickly, with an unaccustomed rise and fall of speech, and with fluency of gesture. She clung to Petie, possessed with the idea that some one was trying to take him away. “They shall not take me boy. The girl is wild; she has me heart broke. I’ve worked and I’ve tried an’ it’s all come to this. But I won’t be parted fr’m me boy.” And again and again, the voice rising to a cry, “I’ve been turned down—turned down I am. I’m not a young woman now an’ you know I can’t stand it—turned down hard I’ve been.”
Without doubt some women of the dependent classes are strongly braced in their morals by the rigorous standard to which we hold them. The consciousness that nothing but the best of conduct will be excused in them must serve as a constant stimulus to heroic living. But on the other hand, there are doubtless many who have drifted to the bottom as the result of a first lapse which might have been excused and survived under a less rigorous standard. There are too many who share the decent working woman’s point of view. “When a woman takes to the can, she ain’t got no good left.”
Many of our girls came from homes where the parents were heavy and constant drinkers.77They were familiar with the appearance of drunkenness. It does not revolt such girls when it breaks out in a place of amusement. They do not resent it in their boy companions but view it on the whole with unconcern. But they come to be wary of its manifestations in others and even unconsciously expert in inebriate psychology. There was one family where the alcoholic father was always turned over to the fourteen-year-old daughter during his “sprees” to be managed. When he was in this condition she was “the only one who could do anything with him.” Surely an ominous ability for a fourteen-year-old daughter!
In a neighborhood like the Middle West Side, poverty is seldom found isolated from its menacing concomitants—ignorance, immorality, drinking, filth, and degradation. Whether as cause or result, these appear as close companions of want. Some of our girls came fromfamilies which hovered constantly on the verge of disruption. The arrogant, decisive power of the law always hung over them like the sword of Damocles, threatening dismemberment.
Here was Annie Brink, who came to her club with Hyde and Jekyll moods. Sometimes she was gentle and tractable. Sometimes she looked out sullenly from a cloud of morbid depression and gloom impossible to pierce. She had grown up in a world of sudden disasters. Almost from babyhood she had been a household drudge. There were seven children in the family and Annie, the eldest daughter, was early pressed into service as general houseworker and nurse for the younger ones. To take proper care of seven young children is too big a job for one woman, and Annie’s mother was certainly much too gay and irresponsible by disposition to attempt it. “There was seven of us kids,” said Annie, “so I had to help. I wasn’t let out on the street much when I was little. One house where we were had a back yard and we’d play there. But then we moved. When we went on to Tenth Avenue there was a fire escape. We’d take pillows out there and sit. It was just grand. Then I always could play on the organ. It was mamma’s since she married, but she don’t use it any more. It’s the same as mine now. It stays locked, because if all seven of us used it there wouldn’t be any organ soon.”
At nine, Annie was a shy and backward child. Then she lost the sight of one eye by infecting it from an abscessed finger. The new physical defect kept her out of school and the housekeeping was transferred more and more to her young shoulders. She had never had a friend of her own age until at thirteen she attachedherself to a girl of a vigorous personality. Agnes was rough and quick to strike, like a boy, strong and generous. She protected her new friend and took her out to see the world. They went to a school recreation center several blocks north and Agnes saw that Annie was not molested on their way. “We wasn’t afraid of anything with Agnes.” Then abruptly the strong protector was removed by a yet stronger power. Agnes was “put away.” Annie reported, “They won’t let her out till she is twenty-one. They’re awful strict. It makes us all feel bad.”
Such things are accepted happenings in Annie’s world. They are the acts of a power quite beyond its influence. Annie took the loss of her champion with philosophy and stayed at home once more. She did not dare go to the recreation center alone. Then came another thunderbolt. Her mother, who had entered upon the familiar way of middle-aged West Side women who lack the stamina that the grim struggle demands, was brought into court, charged with drunkenness, and sentenced to the workhouse. The smaller brothers and sisters were also taken away. Since then life had been one succession of strange women brought in as housekeepers. There were interludes between trials of the various incompetents when the full care fell on the young girl. She was in school only a few hours a day, because her single eye had been weakened. She had grown up on the edge of a volcano. At fourteen she was, by her school record, “peevish and extremely stubborn and difficult to handle.”
Such precarious conditions of living are especially unfavorable for the adolescent daughter. The instability of her age is accentuated by the uncertaintiesof her life. Foresight and steadiness of purpose are not easily taught when the essentials of existence depend upon chance. The girl sees around her all sorts of makeshifts and haphazard expedients. One of our girls tried to avert a family disaster. Dispossession threatened at the end of the week. Mrs. Derks was in despair, and helplessly she resigned the situation to Emma. With their last $3.00 the girl bought a lamp and some hundreds of printed tickets. The lamp was put in a saloon window. The tickets were to be sold in a raffle which was to pay the rent. They did not sell and the rent went unpaid. “I told her it wouldn’t do no good,” a neighbor said. “She should a’ got a watch.”
But as poverty is the enemy of adolescence, adolescence is the adversary of poverty. The vivifying forces of youth are a protection against the depleting effects of want and insecurity. The girl does not take to drink as her mother does. Weeks of want are quickly forgotten in a following period of comfort. When kindliness and cheer once more prevail in her home, consciousness of the lack of ease and loveliness is shaken from her. With the buoyancy of youth she rebounds at the slightest release. But all too often her respite is brief, and when periods of want follow too closely upon each other, her powers of recovery must fail.
Atfive or six years of age, the girl starts to school; between fourteen and sixteen, she leaves school for good and goes to work. The eight or nine years which lie between make up the full period of her formal education. She must acquire during these years of compulsory school attendance all the “learning” which the law of the state fixes as a minimum for its workers.
She has a wide choice of schools. Between Thirty-eighth and Forty-third Streets are the buildings of four different systems. The public schools, the parochial schools, the Children’s Aid Society school, and the American Female Guardian Society school are all waiting with open arms to receive her. Often she is simply sent to the nearest school building. To cross the crowded avenues is more or less hazardous for a six-year-old. Or, she is taken by an older child to the school attended by her protector. In this case, it is “Mary’s school” that is chosen, and the various systems mentioned have nothing to do with the decision. Sometimes, however, one of them is chosen by the parents because of its particular specialty. The church school teaches “prayers,” the “soup” school, as the Children’s Aid Society is called in the neighborhood, gives a free lunch and shoes and warm red petticoats. The childrenof the poorest poor are likely to go there. The public schools are in general considered best for “learning.”
After the original choice has been made, neither parents nor child feel bound to stick to it. A great deal of shifting about takes place, only a small part of which is necessary. Some of the local schools carry their pupils only through the primary classes and must then transfer their small graduates to another building and another street to enter the grammar grades. For many reasons, this single change may be wise, but very often it is only the beginning of a succession of transfers. The break is an occasion to try out two or three new places before settling down. In the meantime, the little wanderer goes through a period of unsettled plans, and incidentally loses considerable time from her lessons.
A free choice of schools and a free use of the transfer are the chief concessions made by the compulsory school law to parental authority. As a matter of fact, it is not always parental authority which transfers little Mamie from school to school, but the child’s own flitting, aimless spirit. In the middle of a term, for almost any cause, she is likely to drop out of her class and claim the right to transfer. A quarrel with a schoolmate, a friend in another school, a dispute with the teacher,—these are the sort of trivial reasons which result in sudden transfers.
Our girls had made the most of their transfer privileges. One of them had attended nine different schools on the West Side; another had attended eight; two had attended seven; one had attended six; two had attended five; and four had attended four; 16 had attended three; 21 had attended two; and only eight had continued throughout in the same school. Therewere five girls who had come from institutions, and four whose school careers were unknown.
These interruptions mean a serious waste from the girl’s meager allowance of time for schooling. She passes at each shift to a new set of teachers who know nothing of her record and tendencies. Frequently she is put back a grade. She resents this, grows discouraged, and perhaps loses interest. Besides, so much ease in changing weakens the school’s authority. It is, however, a safeguard against the rigidity of a single autocratic system. It gives some room for experiment with a difficult child, until the régime and the teacher with whom she will fit may be found. A restriction of the transfer would certainly be a blow to the truant officer’s method of dealing with girls. At present it constitutes his one suggestion, his only “golden cure.”
The girl’s schooling begins to suffer as soon as there is any especial need for assistance at home.78Two or three days are dropped repeatedly. Wage-earning sisters cannot stop at home to nurse an invalid or care for younger children while the mother works. When a new baby comes, it is the oldest school girl who carries the extra burden of work. Even the most devoted mothers make these encroachments on the time which belongs to the school. They are driven to it by necessity. “What can I do? There ain’t nobody else and I’ve got to keep Mamie t’ help.”
When Mrs. Kersey went to the hospital, it was “Baby,” the eleven-year-old daughter, who was kept out of school to do the work, and not her older sisteremployed in a factory. “You ought t’ ’a’ seen how Baby run our house,”—her wage-earning sister was giving the account. “Gee, but she was that strict,believe me. I couldn’t have a cent o’ my money. No shows them days fer mine. She cried if me father didn’t give ’er his pay an’ she made him, too. She’d give him his quarter fer shavin’ money, but not a cent more. An’ she bought everythin’ an’ run things herself. Me mother was away sick fer nine months. Baby, she’s an awful good girl.”
Emma Larkey, having at last struggled up to Class 5B, had just dropped out of school for good. She was normal in body and mind. She should have been in the graduating class. Why wasn’t she? In the first place, she had changed schools eight times since her start, wandering indifferently from public to parochial school and then back again. In the second place, there were five younger children and she was constantly being kept at home. The mother patched grain sacks in order to pay rent for a well lighted apartment of five rooms. “There are nine of us, and if I don’t work, we’d have to crowd up an’ sleep in those black stuffy bedrooms. I can’t bear for the children to do that.” Decent living quarters and fresh air for the whole family seemed more important than Emma’s schooling. Something must give way under such pressure and so it was Emma who went down. She had braced her young shoulders to tasks more difficult than school lessons and had lost all desire to finish the grammar grades by the time the second girl was old enough to relieve her at home.
The result of so much absence was seen in the great retardation among our girls. Thirteen to fifteen isregarded as the normal age for graduation,79and by this standard only 10 of our 65 girls were in the normal grade. All the rest were “laggards.” There were, for instance, 35 girls who were fourteen years old, the normal age for graduation. Some of them had gone to work, while others were still in school. The grades they had left or were still attending are shown in the following distribution: Two had reached the 3B grade; four, 4A; three, 4B; one, 5A; four, 5B; four, 6A; four, 6B; five, 7A; three, 7B; and four, 8A. One girl had been in an institution. The girls are thus seen to have been distributed almost impartially from the third to the eighth grade. There was for them practically no relation between age and grade.
An occasional girl is defiantly truant. Her refusal to fit into the school system marks a deeper vein of rebellion than in the case of the boy, who more commonly slips the leading strings. Or else it marks an undeveloped body and spirit in dealing with which the usual forcible methods of combating truancy are often ineffectual.
Annie Gibson was a slim, undersized girl of fifteen. Her light, almost colorless hair hung down around small, undeveloped features, strikingly vacant and weak. Her teeth, very small and deeply set, might have been the milk teeth of a well-developed baby. Surrounded by a cover of reticence and a surface of embarrassment, her real thoughts were impossible to discover. She would agree to anything but would seldom volunteer an opinion of her own.
In school she was a passive pupil, never “givingtrouble” but learning little, and her attendance record was very low. In time she furnished-one of the most stubborn cases of truancy in the school and the truant officer was sent after her. He found her at home alone, the girl’s mother being away at her regular work as chambermaid in a hotel. As the officer laid his hand on her arm to take her back to school, the child’s passivity suddenly broke and she flung herself on the floor, screaming. The man retreated in consternation, fearful that he might be accused of having physically mishandled the child, while Annie was left to recover from her hysterical outbreak as well as she could. This is only one instance of the futility of applying our present method of dealing with truancy to these exceptional cases. This child was primarily in need of careful mental and physical examination and probably of special training which could only be defined after such an examination had been made.
When the difficulty rests with the girl there is no course between threats and a sentence of great severity. The parent may be fined, but then the punishment does not fall on the child. If she is sent away it must be to a reformatory, not to a school. Let us see how these methods would work applied to Christina Cull, another of our girls who was a stubborn truant. At fourteen, she had reached Class 4A. She had not “made her days”; that is, attended school for 130 days during the year prior to her fourteenth birthday. Nor had she gone far enough in her classes to get her working papers. But Christina refused to pass the doorway of a school. She had gone far beyond the influence of the ordinary school.
Five years before, one of the Catholic fathers had found her loitering in the rear of his church. It wassoon after Christmas and he stopped to ask about her holiday. She answered shortly that she had had neither presents nor a good time. His interest in the pathetic, sullen child took him later to her home. The family was squalidly poor. They lived in three dark basement rooms, without comfort or decency. The father, after four years of desertion, had returned home in the final stage of tuberculosis to be cared for until his death.
Christina had grown into a forbidding girl. Her face was so lined and so hard that she looked years older than she was. The childlike effect of her flowing hair and long bangs contrasted oddly with the age and hardness of her features. She might almost have been a middle-aged woman masquerading as a little girl. The truant officer went after her time and again, only to listen to the mother’s repeated complaint. Christina was “out from under” her; she went where she listed. Threats were long since outworn and useless. She had heard them from babyhood. “Aw—they talk but they won’t do nothin’.” Occasionally she would grow frightened and penitent for the moment. But re-enter the ordinary school and sit in the classes with the younger children, she would not.
No course was left but to take the culprit before the superintendent and enter a formal complaint against her. There would then be two plans of action which might be followed: Christina’s mother—her father had died in the meantime—might be fined in the magistrate’s court or Christina might be committed to a reformatory. To fine the mother of a family already on the verge of dependency was manifestly futile. On the other hand, a reformatory sentence for a girl whoseonly offense was that she refused to go to school seemed much too severe. In the face of this dilemma no action at all was taken. Christina, without working papers, without work, was left to employ her illegal holidays in her own way. Her only chance for positive discipline was that she might soon become a serious offender for whom a reformatory sentence might not be too severe. For girls like Christina the only remedy seems to be that they shall grow worse before they can grow better. Such a roundabout and wasteful course might be obviated if we had a truant school for girls, as we already have for boys, especially planned for their needs.
It is a common occurrence for a girl to escape from school at thirteen or fourteen without open defiance of the labor law. Of our 65 girls, at least nine had left school illegally. Their escape was accomplished by petty frauds of various kinds. One girl gave the school a false address; another altered the date on her birth certificate. Two had been absent for illness and had never returned. Others simply “dropped out” and their defection was not followed up by the school, which with its limited number of attendance officers is bound to neglect many such cases. These are some of the usual loopholes by which the girl evades the school law.
The young refugee does not always find it easy to get her working papers at once. The required record of 130 days’ attendance during the previous year is a serious stumbling block, although it allows for 70 absences out of a possible 200 attendances. In the public schools she has to reach a 5B grade80and pass aneducational test before the school papers which she must present at the board of health are signed. There the mental test is simpler—a mere proof of ability to read and write. She is tested on two or three primer sentences, such as, “Is my mother in this room?” She is then weighed and measured; and occasionally a child much under average is rejected. Failing in any of the requirements, the girl must wait until she is sixteen, when she may legally go to work without papers. In the meantime she helps at home, or “lives out,” or finds an employer who is willing to connive at her lack of working papers.
These are the girls who evade the law. Those who are obedient to its requirements are scarcely less eager to escape. Almost without exception, the girls of our district step eagerly forth from the school at the earliest possible moment. Not a girl of our clubs had stayed in school longer than the law required or long enough to “graduate” from the eighth grade. To continue in school after you can get your working papers is a sign of over-education and is not popular.
In thus leaving school as soon as the law allows, family need very often plays a part. Sometimes the younger girl has begun to lend a hand during vacations. The Donovans tell how “Sissy” got a job at eleven. It was the summer when both parents were ill and out of work. They still chuckle with appreciation of Sissy’s enterprise. “You’d ought to ha’ seen her. She let down her skirts and done up her hair. She was just a bit o’ a thing—not twelve then. She come out one mornin’ an’ said, ‘Ma, I’m goin’ to go to work’s well as Mame.’ We laughed at ’er but she set out. So that day she come back an’ sure enough she’d got a job in achewin’ gum fact’ry, wrappin’ packages. There was a graphophone an’ at lunch time all the girls danced. Oh, she had a grand time, be-lieve me. There was a lot o’ little girls whose mothers were poor. When the inspector come, they’d hide Sissy under the table. We most died laughin’ when she brought her first week’s pay—85 cents! Now, what d’ye think about that? She come in here an’ give it t’ me as proud ’s if it had been dollars instead.”
It is not surprising that after a vacation adventure like this Sissy began to lose interest in school. Working in a factory is not all fun, but it brings a measure of independence which the young personality craves beyond all else. It is not always stern need alone which sends the girl out to work at such an early age. Parents may call on her in times of special stress and insist on her returning to school as soon as the pressure is removed. But public opinion among the girls themselves is strong and decided on this point. “I don’t mind studyin’, but all my friends are goin’ t’ work, an’ I don’t want t’ stay. My mother an’ brothers all holler at me, but I’m kickin’ to leave. Graduate? Gee, stay two years? Not for me—it’s too slow.”
The girl’s restlessness demands at this age something very new and vivid. This the school has so far failed to supply. She thinks she may find it in work. And by the time she has discovered that work too grows tedious and monotonous, her greater independence has enabled her to make free use of her evenings for the changes and new experiences she craves.