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

baby she 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.[70] Forty-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 much

of 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 as well

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 a part 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.[74] This 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,[75] the 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 the factories 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; but for 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

counteract the 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 girl was 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.[77] They 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 from

families 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 attached herself 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

uncertainties of 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.

CHAPTER III

WHERE THE SCHOOL LAW FAILED

At five 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 children

of 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. There were 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.[78] Two 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 sister employed 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 is regarded as the normal age for

graduation,[79] and 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 “giving trouble” 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 was soon 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 whose only 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 grade[80] and pass an educational 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

a chewin’ 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.

CHAPTER IV

WAGE-EARNING AND NEW RELATIONS AT HOME

Our West Side girl sets out some morning, short-skirted, hair in

braids, absurdly childish, to find her minute place in the great

industrial world. Probably she strolls through the streets, looking for

“Girl Wanted” signs. She will try at one of the big factories nearby.

Or, if she is fortunate, some friend who is already working there

speaks for her. The more enterprising buy the _World_ and consult its

long columns of advertisements.

The West Side factories take in the majority of the work seekers.

A few with especial pretensions to “refinement,” or whose families

sincerely dread the physical strain and supposedly lower social and

moral standards of the factory, go into department stores or become

errand girls to milliners or dressmakers. But most of the girls prefer

the higher wages of the factory. Lizzie Wade, herself a laundry worker,

was perfectly clear in her sixteen-year-old mind as to the advantages

of factory work over department store work. “In the first place,” she

pointed out, “the factory girl gets better pay, and if she hasn’t any

home, she can always get a family to live with. The girl that works in

a store lives in the cheapest boarding houses, and gets soaked for her

board just the same.”

Few sixteen-year-old workers are as wise as Lizzie. Many of them,

no doubt, are vaguely influenced by reasons just as practical in

preferring the factory to the store, though they are less able to

express them. But if they are asked to justify their preferences, they

are likely to return very childish answers. “Tootsie” O’Brien had

achieved her working papers at fourteen and a half and was looking

for a place. It was significant that Tootsie, who had qualified as

a wage-earner, had not yet outgrown her baby name at home. She was

willing to take any kind of work, she said, but liked housework best.

She wanted to “live out” because her brother was always fighting with

her. However, she soon changed her mind, as her sister, who had been a

servant before her marriage, told her that she wouldn’t be allowed out

when at service. She finally went to work in a factory.

Girls of this type do the most unskilled work in the entire scale of

factory occupations. They are not equal to the high grade, skilled work

of the garment trades and textile industries. An inquiry concerning

the occupations of 26 girls showed the following results: One was a

trimmer in a necktie factory; three were folding or slip-sheeting

in bookbinderies; one was rolling wall paper; one was working in a

tin can factory, operating a machine which fixed the bails in lard

cans; nine were packers or wrappers in factories producing biscuits,

candy, cigarettes, or drugs; three were markers and shakers in steam

laundries; eight were errand girls and messengers for milliners or

dressmakers.

These occupations are patently without educational value. The factory

processes are the sort of lightweight machine work usually assigned

to young girls after the last drop of individual responsibility has

been squeezed out. Their chief characteristic is a degree of monotony

in which no discipline for the young worker is possible because their

effect is stupefaction. The work soon palls on the girl’s restless

spirit. Martie Sheridan, after five months of this grinding monotony,

secretly cut the belt of her machine just to get a day off. Another

girl probably, long before the end of five months, would have thrown up

her job and tried another, if not several others.

Finding a new place is always something of an adventure, and in the

process of shifting she enjoys a few days of freedom. Pauline Stark,

throughout her four years of wage-earning, had been a “rover.” She had

had no trouble in finding new places and had tried so many that she

had lost count of the number. “I see a sign up an’ I go an’ try. Then

sometimes I meet some one I know. I stop an’ get to talking an’ mebbe I

won’t look any more that day. But it don’t take long. Sometimes I throw

up a job the first day. I can tell. I take a look around an’ see that

it ain’t for me. Then I work out the day an’ don’t go back.”

It is difficult for the girls to give an accurate account as to where

they have worked and the changes they have made. They are hazy as

to places and quite unreliable as to the length of stay. With great

effort we pieced together the industrial histories of girls who had

been employed for some time. Although most of them had been at work

less than a year, they had tried a great number of occupations. The 30

wage-earners in our club mustered among them 120 different jobs, an

average of four apiece. Two girls of sixteen had held 12 positions

each; one girl of sixteen, 10 positions; and one fifteen-year-old had

had nine. One-third of the 30 had had five or more positions. These

instances give some idea of the way in which the girl of fourteen and

fifteen flits from job to job. It is no wonder that she is inaccurate

concerning the details of her industrial experience when each

connection is so brief and episodic. A further reason for her haziness

is that her point of contact with the great factory and its processes

is so slight. Nellie Sherin, aged fourteen, worked in one of the

largest and best of the West Side factories. Her childish description

of her work is the best indication of her incompetence. “I have to run

a machine that pastes the labels. If you don’t get the boxes in right

the knife breaks and a man comes and hollers at you.”

The girl of this class accepts in a matter-of-fact way conditions of

work that impress the outsider as very hard. Sometimes she tells of

having cried with weariness when she started. But complaints of the

long day, the meager reward, and the monotony are few. She has not

thought out the general aspects of the factory. Comparisons between

individual places are constant, as also are personal grievances,

usually against a “cranky forelady.” She rebels against the tediousness

of her job. “You can hear talkin’ all over our room when the forelady

goes out. Then we’ll hear her comin’ in an’ it stops short. Soon’s she

goes, we all start again.” As often as not she throws up her job for

a personal grievance--a quarrel with another worker, a grudge against

a “boss.” Fanny Mullens left the Excelsior Laundry because her friend

quarreled with the foreman and Fanny’s loyalty would not permit her to

remain. The human factor is the strongest with these young workers.

The girl starts in a store at $3.00 or $3.50 a week; in a factory, at

$4.00 or $5.00. The 26 wage-earning girls concerning whom information

was obtained were receiving sums which varied from $3.00 to $7.50.

Of this group, three were earning $3.00 or $3.50; eight were earning

$4.00, and eight were earning $5.00. Thus 19 out of 26 were earning

$5.00 or less. The remaining seven girls were receiving $6.00 or over;

three received $6.00; two, $6.50; and two, $7.50.

One of the girls earning $6.00 had been working five years; another

earning the same amount had been working but a few months. Of the

two girls earning $7.50, one had been working four years in the same

position and the other five months. As far as our little group of girls

was concerned, there was no connection between age or experience and

wages. Practically all the girls were doing such unskilled work that

additional years and additional experience were idle commodities. There

was, on the other hand, some divergence between what the different

factories of the district were accustomed to pay for the same grade of

labor.

Along with her first humble job and her first meager wage, there comes

to the young girl her first taste of power. Her first pay envelope is

the outward and visible sign of many changes. Her position at home

is altered. She has more prestige, the first beginning of authority.

Her family may be actually dependent for comfort on what she brings

in. This gives to her desires and wishes a new importance. However

autocratic her parents’ rule may have been, they must now turn to her

for assistance. There must follow a certain loosening of the reins.

Every now and again there is a girl who in these early, headstrong

years will press her advantage to the full.

To these girls has come the age of self-assertion. The experience is

common to adolescence of becoming intensely aware of oneself. With the

new intensity of self-consciousness comes the desire to assume control.

At this age the girl resents being “bossed.” It is the time when many

families feel the increased friction between brothers and sisters.

Interference and guidance need to be gentle. Because the girl is young

she is apt to be extreme and her assertion will often be crass and

ill-balanced. These are traits of the adolescent girl of all classes,

but this phase among our girls is accentuated sharply by a very

definite set of circumstances.

Tradition still upholds her parents’ authority. What they ask from

her is their right. They are backed by the practical code of morals

which, in any community, counts more than many sermons. Public opinion

demands the continued subservience of both boy and girl. The precarious

state of family wellbeing has instituted a rigid system of household

economics; this is needed for mere preservation. It is zealously

guarded by the mother, ever the most wary of anything which threatens

the group. According to custom she is the spender. All wages come

to her untouched; the broken envelope violates the social standard.

Husband, sons, and daughters alike are supposed to come under this

rule. There should be no exception until the children reach the age of

eighteen or nineteen. The mother doles out spending money according to

the needs and the earnings of each.

There is no pity felt by her world for the girl who must turn over

her meager pay. This is a duty taken for granted. It is the least

return for the years during which her parents have made sacrifice and

effort for her. The feeling has reason for holding good while economic

conditions remain as they are. Each item in the family income is far

too important for the girl to escape her toll. She is born to a contest

in which she, too, must take part. Only a lucky accident can free her

from this inheritance,--accident or rebellion. The pay envelope passes

through her hands, and this means the possibility of some independence.

At least the choice is hers to give grudgingly or freely. With the

responsibilities which come to her so much earlier than to those more

sheltered, comes also this earlier power.

Every degree of willingness or resentment in assuming her share of the

burden is met with in the various girls. Little wisps and snatches of

talk are straws that point to the set of the wind. “Oh, sure, there’s

a lot o’ girls that ‘knock down.’ You take this week in our place,--we

all made good overtime. I know I got two forty-nine. Well, I guess

there wasn’t a single girl but me that didn’t change her envelope, on

our floor. Whatever you make is written outside in pencil, you know.

That’s easy to fix--you have only to rub it out, put on whatever

it usually is, and pocket the change. They think I’m a fool. But I

wouldn’t lie to my mother. She has to work an’ she ain’t had things

none too easy. Some girls are like that. They’re only too proud to make

so much t’ take home.”

A common trick is to pretend to the mother that wages are smaller than

they actually are. Katie at seventeen was getting $7.50 a week; in six

months she had risen from $5.00. This was unusually good for her set

of girls. But her mother believed that she earned only $6.00.

On the other hand, there is the “worrisome” type of girl who surrenders

all. Her unselfishness is as extreme as the wilfulness of others.

She accepts her hard surroundings, as the others rebel against them,

without counting the cost, and sacrifices unsparingly her youthful

right to gaiety and pleasure. Mamie Reilly’s mother watched with

anxious regret the effect of premature care and responsibility on

her daughter. Mamie had been working five years since, as a child of

thirteen, she first insisted on getting a job. “She’s a good girl,

Mame is, but y’ never seen anything like her. Every pay night reg’lar

she’ll come in an’ sit down at that table. ‘Now, Ma,’ she’ll say like

that, ‘what _are_ you goin’ to do? How ever are y’ goin’ t’ make out

in th’ rent?’ ‘Land sakes,’ I’ll say, ‘one w’d think this whole house

was right there on your shoulders. I’ll get along somehow.’ But y’

can’t make her see into that. ‘Now, what’ll we do, how’ll you manage,

Ma?’ she’ll keep askin’. She’s too worrisome--that’s what I tell her.

An’ she don’t care to go out. Mebbe she’ll take a walk, but like’s not

she’ll say, ‘What’s th’ use?’ Night after night she jest comes home,

eats ’er supper, sits down, mebbe reads a bit, an’ then goes t’ bed.”

Through everything Mamie had done more than her share. At eighteen she

was tall and awkward, quiet and shy. Almost alone among these girls,

she had never learned to dance. She had none of the frills--bangs,

powder, and gewgaws--the cheap frivolities which were the joy of the

rest. But she had a dignity and reliability which the other girls

respected. In the whirl of excitement beckoning to the girl in New

York, she had led a staid, colorless life. She had never “gone out”

anywhere because she had never had any clothes. The price she had

given had been the very sap of her youth. Her mother said, “She is too

quiet-like an’ gettin’ humdrum at her age. It ain’t right as I know.”

There is less revolt against these early exactions among the girls than

among the boys. In the midst of working hours groups of young fellows

may be seen any day of the week idling on the street corners. They are

significant of something badly awry in the social machinery here. But

the girl who refuses to work is less usual by far. Often the loafer’s

sister is going each day to her job, turning her money in to the common

fund, while he is a parasite who drains the meager supply. Although

she probably protests, it is amazing to find how often she tolerates

a scheme so unfair. One reason, perhaps, is that a stay-at-home life

is too dull to tempt her into idleness there, and to spend time on the

streets speedily brands her as “tough.” But the chief reason is that

she is ruled by the popular conception of duty. Inheritance and custom

force her to a conformity which is not required of her brother. Her

protest is fainter than his.

But within the home circle she makes her revolt felt. Rarely is a girl

“worrisome,” like Mamie Reilly; few girls surrender so much. The trail

of her way, a way glittering with “good times and fun,” carries her

often to the other extreme. She follows the lure of her desires with an

imperious insistence which does not scruple to shirk the irksome claims

of her home. The result is an atmosphere surcharged with wrangling

and spite. The girl who as a little child may have been devoted to

her father, now switches away impatiently under his scolding. He, for

his part, complains bitterly that she thinks only of dancing and new

clothes.

One German father whom we knew, at home with his broken ankle bound

in a cast, used his crutch on his fourteen-year-old daughter. “Don’t

tell me about talkin’ to girls--I know how to take care o’ them.” He

brandished his weapon with ire. The home was the scene of quarrels and

threats. Amelia was given the worst of reputations by her parents. She

“had been a disgrace to them.” She stayed out till two in the morning,

hung around halls with boys, and had been brought home by a policeman.

They had tried keeping her in and putting her under the surveillance

of her nine-year-old brother, but no amount of punishment would change

her fundamentally. Rancor and hatred had bitten into her soul. She

was a strong, tall girl, loud, unkempt, and disorderly. She was more

frank than most girls, partly from recklessness. But the bitterness

with which she spoke of her parents, the coldness with which she said,

“They can have my money if that’s what they want,” was that of hardened

maturity.

The parents often get a settled distrust of a girl with which they do

not hesitate to confront her. Distrust is too often justified, for

there are few girls who scruple about telling a lie. But constant

accusation and doubt serve only to deepen suspicion and drive the

girl on to more crafty concealment. The crassness of the punishment

administered is especially bad for her years. To this can be traced

so much of the “wildness” of the children here. But familiar as she

is with brutality of one kind or another, a special resentment comes

to the girl at this age. Violence outrages her self-respect and the

ideals which are struggling for a foothold in her imagination.

The greatest strain in such households is that between mother and

daughter. The girl is starting her course, undisciplined and eager. The

woman has lived through checkered and hazardous years. She has suffered

the bearing of many children; she has watched the death of some. What

she has attained has been hardly won. Through it all, constant labor

has drained her physical strength. She is spent, dragged, and worn, in

pitiful need of the younger, more vigorous life at her side. As she

turns to it there creeps into her attitude the note of appeal which the

girl is too young to appreciate. If she deals a rebuff with the half

conscious brutality of youth, her mother may draw back into a shell

of hardness. Out of the scant wisdom of her years the child has been

forced to a decision pregnant with results for her future; for often

upon her response to the older woman’s first appeal trembles her entire

relationship with her mother and her home.

There is no getting away from the girl’s economic value to her family.

It seems ugly and crass that a child’s contribution to the common purse

should have any bearing on the affection or guidance she will receive.

Yet it has, and her manner of contributing has even more. Out of the

conditions of this engulfing, material struggle, rise the spiritual

forces at work in each narrow tenement home. Whatever breeds there of

loyalty or bitter estrangement works out its certain effect. And the

spirit of the household is of no greater import to any member than to

the young, venturesome girl.

Here is a household where the girl’s wages have been the mainstay for

the whole winter. Louisa’s father, a German, has always been frugal

and hardworking and was even penurious in better days. He is now

seventy-four. His eyes were weakened in the days of his strength by

the strain of his trade as a tailor. Later he came to porter’s work,

but now he is too feeble for this. The mother, like so many women in

the neighborhood, earns the rent as a janitress. Louisa’s brother, a

young man of twenty-one, is a glass cutter by trade. His work might be

steady and his wages good, but the common blight of the West Side has

struck him; he chooses to loaf with the gang and take things easy. The

old father, inveighing against him, has wished to turn him out. But

his mother, although she too takes her turn at upbraiding, shields him

against the others and clings to a desperate belief in his transparent

excuses.

In this crisis, they have looked to the $5.00 which Louisa brings home

every week from the candy factory. She is a wilful little person,

frail, underdeveloped, weak of build in character as in physique. The

reins have been put into her hands. She has used her new-found power

to add to her long day at the factory several nights every week at

dance halls where she stays until 1 or 2 o’clock. The reproaches of her

parents have no effect. “You say that you like me,” she wails, “but you

make me miserable here. I’ll go out if I want to, and I’ll not tell

where I am going. Anyhow I don’t come home drunk like Bill and make a

fuss in the hall. And I work while he hangs around doing nothing.”

Leading the Grand March at the racket of the “Harlem Four,” Louisa has

forgotten her outburst, and the dull, sad, cramped existence at home.

She is thin, pale, sharp-featured, yet with a certain daintiness. Her

attire is “flossy” tonight. She cannot boast a ball dress, to be sure.

But her scant suit of brown serge with its sateen collar is trim and

new. It was bought at an Eighth Avenue store on the instalment plan.

Four out of the twelve dollars have been paid down. A great encircling

hat of cheap black straw reaches to the middle of her back and bends

under the weight of an enormous “willow.” It sets off her hair, which

has been bleached with peroxide. A long bang hangs to her eyes. Her

moment of elation comes as she receives the favor for the ladies who

lead, a huge bunch of variegated flowers--roses, carnations, and

daffodils. But the costume in which she steps out so triumphantly has

cost many bitter moments at home. She has gotten it by force, with the

threat of throwing up her job.

The breach is widening between her and the parents to whom she clung

as a child. There comes the time when she gets a steady “gentleman

friend.” She is out now almost nightly. At last the mother appears

with her tale, tearful and anxious. “I don’t know whatever I’m goin’

to do with that girl. I’ve just beat her, I have--I guess I ruined

three dollars’ worth o’ clothes. But I lost my temper. She stands up

and answers me back. An’ she’s comin’ in at 2 o’clock, me not knowin’

where she has been. Folks will talk, you know, an’ it ain’t right fer

a girl.” So Louisa is losing her only safeguards. Foolish, childish,

easily flattered, she is drifting into a maelstrom of gaiety and

pleasure from which only chance will bring her out unscathed.

The great issue between the home and the girl is the question as to

whether her affections will center there. Only an emotional hold will

take effect on this girl. Her mind is undeveloped. She is not going

to reason far. Habit has not yet fastened her in a rut of eternal work

and decency. Possibilities that menace health and strength and, in the

long run, happiness, hedge her round. If she becomes estranged from

those who are naturally near to her, she is set adrift. She is bound

to express in some way the chaotic emotional forces within her. She is

dangerous then to herself and others, in surroundings like these of the

far West Side.

CHAPTER V

THE WILL TO PLAY

A girl from fourteen to eighteen is about as unstable and kaleidoscopic

as any quantity in nature. She is changing, almost from day to day. It

may be that poverty in her home has deprived her of her full share of

youth’s vigor and supreme physical wellbeing. Even so, she keeps its

impatient desire for action and experience. She feels its disdain of

restraint and hindrance; its zest for swallowing life in hot, hasty

gulps. The desire to play is strong in her. Lack-luster resignation

and pessimism are rare among the young even where poverty weighs most

heavily. The girl’s buoyant spirit breaks loose at the instant of

release from factory walls or from the momentary depression of family

want. It bubbles forth in girls’ laughter and girls’ play, and in

girls’ capricious, whimsical, egoistic moods.

The West Side girl is an independent young person. She has seen a good

deal of the world. She has the early sophistication bred of a crowded,

close-pressed life. As yet, she has not been battered to the wall in

the stress. She has not the pitiful appreciation of the middle-aged

woman for slight and passing kindliness. She is self-assertive,

arrogant, “able to take care of herself.” She comes, asking nothing, at

ease and alert, but ready to give a trial to anything thrown in her

way. If it does not suit, she will not be slow to reject it. So she

stands, looking bright and curious eyed, straight into the face of her

world. She can be defiant at a hint of challenge. And yet one finds

that she is suddenly and sharply sensitive. Ridicule and harshness

touch her to the quick. Her new-born self-consciousness is easily

wounded. A trifling hurt may become a lifelong grievance.

This is a signal of a restlessness beneath the surface which she does

not herself understand. It is propelling her onward in an unconscious

search. In all her pleasure-loving, drifting adventures she is hunting

steadily for the deeper and stronger forces of life. Into her nature

are surging for the first time the insistent needs and desires of her

womanhood. But this she does not know. She is the daughter of the

people, the child of the masses. Athletics, sports, diversions, the

higher education, will not be hers to divert this deep craving. She

is not close enough to her church for religion to control it. It will

stay with her, sweeping her inevitably out of the simplicity of little

girlhood into the thousand temptations of her environment, if not,

perhaps, into one of the commonest of neighborhood tragedies.

Just now her search is translated very lightly and gaily into the

demand for “a good time” and a keen interest in the other sex.

She prosecutes it with the imperious heedlessness of her age. Her

haphazard and inconsistent training has given her little of the art of

self-control. The city bristles with the chances she longs for--“to

have fun and see the fellows.” What is to come of this depends on

the unformed character of the individual girl, the oversight of her

family,--sometimes effective and sometimes not,--and, most of all, on

chance.

The control of a little money is far more essential to these girls in

their search for enjoyment than to girls in another class. There are

many doors which a very small coin will open to her. After she goes

to work she usually has a little spending money of her own. As a rule

she is given, besides lunch money and carfare, a quarter or 50 cents a

week. This may go for candy, carfare to dances and parks, or entrance

fees to dance halls and moving picture shows. Sometimes she spends

the money given her for carfare on other and more pleasurable things,

and walks to work, “wearing out shoe leather, which ain’t right,” as

her mother complains. A carfare saved by walking to work is a carfare

earned for a trip to a dance hall “away out in the Bronx.” Usually a

single fare is enough for the whole trip. The “fellow” who “sees you

home” will pay for the return. Thus the little West Sider makes her 25

cents carry her as far along the primrose path as possible.

She has no keener longing than her longing for pretty and becoming

clothes. Usually she helps in selection, though now and then the mother

buys her clothing from the girl’s own earnings as autocratically as she

buys the rest of the home necessities. Sometimes the girl is allowed

to keep a dollar or two out of her pay every week with which she buys

her own clothes. Often there comes a period of distress which swallows

up her whole wages week after week. She sees her earnings go for rent,

for fuel, and for food. Hers is not the time of life to be content

with shelter, warmth, and nourishment. She would rather starve for

these things than miss her worshipped pleasures. Mamie Craven, working

steadily in the laundry, turning in her money every Saturday night,

once broke out one night in a bitter wail, “Oh, Miss Wright, you don’t

know _how_ I want a chinchilla coat.”

There are bound to be many lacks in her wardrobe. Usually the greatest

one is that of protective clothing. She has no overshoes and no

umbrella. When it rains she comes drenched to her club, but will not

think of foregoing the evening’s pleasure on that account. She goes

to work in the same unprotected fashion. Winter clothes are thin

and inadequate. Many a girl’s vitality is sapped for months in the

year through sheer exposure to cold. These deficiencies are endured

uncomplainingly. It is much harder if finery or the coveted Easter suit

must be foregone. The poorer girl will buy her suit on the instalment

plan--$4.00 down and $2.00 each following week. She pays $15 for a suit

of the value of $10. She is often guilty, like girls of every class, of

some wild bit of extravagance. But in her case extravagance may become

heartlessness. A girl whose income was the only regular support of her

family spent $5.00--a week’s wages--on a willow plume. “We starved fer

that hat,” her mother said, “just plain starved fer it, so we did.”

Social relations between girls of their age and class are very unlike

those of boys. A single friend or a little clique takes the place of

the gang. They will follow a leader for a moment but not consistently;

they are jealous of leadership and slow to acknowledge it. There is

almost no natural loyalty to a group. Probably the girl by the time

she reaches fourteen has already some special companion. This may be

a playmate from her school days, or, very likely, a “pick up” on the

street or at work, who soon has the title of “me lady friend.” The

relationship may extend over years. It is very constant and means that

the two share most of their pleasures together. There are distinct

requirements; one must “call up” and “wait in” and not “go round” too

much with anyone else. But the girl is rare who has a strong feeling of

obligation toward appointments or promises. Therefore the friendship

is sure to be checkered by quarrels and reunions. There are besides

a thousand and one reasons for dispute. The quarrel is taken very

seriously, but the chances are that the breach will heal before long.

However, this is not always so; no prediction formed on girl nature

is sure. The relationship assumes at times some of the formality and

ceremony of the gang. In one case, a definite proposal to be “friends”

was made by a girl who had quarreled with her former lady friend. The

second girl declined, not from any dislike, but because she was already

“going with somebody else.” When a girl begins to have a “gentleman

friend” even the slight ceremony of calling up and waiting in for the

girl friend is omitted.

The cliques consist of three or four girls, seldom of more. They are

likely to exist among the younger girls who have played together as

children. They are seldom formed later on, but incline to resolve

themselves into the standard couples.

The girls’ homes are not very advantageous places for entertainment and

fun. They are too cramped and often too forlorn. Yet everyone here is

used to these conditions, and they are not the only difficulties which

stand in the way of visits and hospitality. Visits from gentlemen

friends are frowned upon and not desired. The parents, especially of

the younger girls, look askance on the boys who come to see them.

“My father was always too strict with us girls,” said an older sister,

married and established in her own home. “It was always work and keep

quiet at home the minute we came in from the factory. He believed that

girls must be kept down. He’d have beaten us good if we’d brought a

fellow home. So I used to meet my friend at a corner a few blocks off,

just the same as my sister Maggie has been doing. It’s only a wonder I

didn’t get into trouble the same as she has done and get put away like

her. I’m not the one to turn against her now. When she comes out of the

Home, she and her baby can come and live with me.”

The sequel of Maggie’s story only served to prove the unwisdom of the

parental policy which had tried to “keep her down.” One day Maggie

returned to her sister’s home with her six-months-old baby. A week

later her sister announced with the utmost gratification and relief

that Maggie was married. “If she’d only told us at the start, there’d

never been any need for all this trouble. Hannick is a decent fellow

and has steady work. He was looking for Maggie all the time she was

in the hospital and he was afraid to ask her folks what had become of

her. As soon as she came back here, he sent word to me and asked if he

could see her. That was the first time I knew who her fellow was. When

he came around I told them they ought to go straight off to the priest,

and they did.”

The street corner has become, with its free and easy etiquette, a

substitute for the home. It is very popular in spite of nagging from

the “cop.” Still, the policeman is not a very censorious chaperon. Even

the older girl whose parents have opened their door to her company

has often learned to prefer its lack of supervision. As a place of

rendezvous it is greatly preferred to a parlor of one’s own where

one must be “real lady-like.” “You see,” one of the girls explained,

“my friend comes to my home; then if he wants me to go somewhere to

a dance, my mother’ll likely hear and won’t let me. My brother knows

all the places and he’ll tell my mother there’s likely to be shooting

there. He makes it bad for me that way.”

The boys’ preference for the street corner is quite as strong as the

girls’. Their habit is to send a small boy as intermediary to the

girl’s door to tell her who is waiting in the hall below. An incident

at “471” gave the smaller boys a chance to express their sentiment.

Their gang, known in the neighborhood as “tough young nuts,” were

giving a return party to their girl friends. It was to be a “swell”

affair, and had involved much consultation and collecting of money

beforehand. The instructions had been, “Buy three times as much ice

cream as the girls had at their party. Get a cake as big as the cover

of this table (a centerpiece 22 inches round). Get three pounds of good

candy. Get all the milk and cocoa you want for them girls, but none

of that for us. We want soda and ginger ale and celery tonic.” These

concoctions, not as harmless as their names suggest, had been purchased

by the boys. Everything was elaborately ready and the party had begun.

All the guests had arrived except the special friends of two of the

boys. A club leader’s naïve suggestion was that Peter and “Gimp” should

call for the girls at their homes. Gimp leaned forward, astonished,

as if uncertain of what he had heard. “Homes,” he gasped, in a tone

surcharged with dismay. “Gee,” the other boy added, “that sure w’d be

some place to go, a’right.”

Still, the home is by no means to be discounted entirely as a place

for recreation. There is too much Irish jollity and good-fellowship in

our neighborhood to make it altogether a tame and stupid place. The

“house party,” as any home gathering is known, is not unusual. Music,

dancing, and drinking are the chief features of the entertainment on

such occasions. A Thanksgiving party at the McKeevers’, for instance,

to which the family invited one of the club leaders, showed that the

happy good-fellowship which Goldsmith mourned as forever departed from

the “Deserted Village” has crossed the ocean with the Irish immigrants

and is still preserved to some extent in their newer stronghold on the

Middle West Side.

The homelike spirit of the gathering was noticeable. Mrs. McKeever,

gray-haired, fifty-two years of age, presided over the festivities. She

sat in the only rocking chair, holding in her arms the small son of a

neighbor, aged three, extremely dirty and ragged, and as a companion a

fox terrier, the pet of the McCormick family. Then came Mrs. O’Hara,

the neighbor from the next tenement, large and fat and slovenly, but

perfectly good-natured and kindly. She was nursing a small child who

was boarded with her by some organization. The child was sleepy and

tired and whenever he dozed off was wakened by the music and dancing.

In the corner of the sofa next to Mrs. O’Hara was a small, undeveloped

specimen of humanity in a faded flannellette dress and very much

broken shoes whose appearance classed her as degenerate. She was also a

neighbor and had come in to take part in the Thanksgiving festivities.

On the same sofa with her at the other end sat a well made-up Negro

minstrel, with feet crossed and a large guitar in his arms, who played

and sang as well as many a man in a minstrel show on the stage. Next

to him, on a kitchen chair, sat a chap of probably thirty-five years.

A crutch stood beside his chair, and upon a closer look one could see

that one of his legs had been amputated. He was very dreamily playing

an accordion, and had had just enough drink to make him very solemn and

uninterested in people and things in general. Mrs. McKeever several

times deposited the small child and the fox terrier in the middle of

the floor and went over to remonstrate with him for not being willing

to take part in the ceremonies. He, however, could not be persuaded

and sat perfectly still, only occasionally extracting a glass of beer

from under his chair and offering it to the others. Over in the corner

next to the man with the accordion was a short, stout boy, probably of

seventeen years, in his shirt sleeves, whose chief desire was to dance,

but who found it difficult to procure partners.

These were the guests on one side of the room. In front of the large

pier glass at the end the chair was occupied by an immense Teddy bear,

who occasionally was forced into taking part in the dances and general

merrymaking. The next seat was occupied by Delia McKeever. Delia was a

remarkably good-looking girl, and on most occasions was neat and tidy,

but this evening she was conspicuous because of her untidiness. She

had had enough beer to make her unusually mirthful and to make her

dance much better than usual. Next to Delia sat Annie, also in most

untidy condition. Lizzie, the youngest daughter, was sent for to come

in from the street. She was dressed in boy’s clothes and had been out

masquerading. Holding the center of the floor was a rather handsome

chap who played the mandolin well and had a bellowing baritone voice.

The McKeever family were very solicitous that their guests should have

a good time, and went around whispering to the musicians, telling them

to play or sing whatever the visitors suggested. Everyone sang “The

Suwanee River,” and the players of the mandolin and accordion sang

several of the latest popular songs. Delia and Annie did a fancy dance

known as the “Novelty.” Delia also danced with the chap in the corner,

who was ever busy trying to procure a partner. He was so much shorter

than Delia that she could conveniently rest her forehead on his head,

which she did during the entire dance, making him act very much as a

prop to her wilful, antic steps.

* * * * *

There are two places in which the unoccupied of all ages and types may

be seen--the streets and the moving picture shows. Eighth Avenue, the

residence street of our aristocracy, is the promenade of the district.

No one has better expressed the essential spirit of these promenades

than Mr. Wells has done in The New Machiavelli.[81]

“Unkindly critics, blind to the inner meanings of things, call them,

I believe, Monkey’s Parades--the shop apprentices, the young work

girls, the boy clerks, and so forth, stirred by mysterious intimations,

spend their first-earned money upon collars and ties, chiffon hats,

smart lace collars, walking-sticks, sunshades, or cigarettes, and

come valiantly into the vague transfiguring mingling of gas light

and evening, to walk up and down, to eye meaningly, even to accost

and make friends. It is a queer instinctive revolt from the narrow,

limited, friendless homes in which so many find themselves, a going

out toward something, romance, if you will, beauty, that has suddenly

become a need--a need that hitherto has lain dormant and unsuspected.

They promenade. Vulgar!--it is as vulgar as the spirit that calls the

moth abroad in the evening and lights the body of the glow-worm in the

night.”

Here also are the flashing, gaudy, poster-lined entrances of Hickman’s

and of the Galaxy. These supply the girls with a “craze,” the same

that sends those with a more liberal allowance to the matinees. Their

pictures spread out adventure and melodrama which are soul-satisfying.

The vaudeville is even more popular and not so clean.

Sooner or later almost every girl drifts into some club or settlement.

She is a wandering spirit, difficult to hold, still more difficult to

tie down to any definite program. She wants activity but soon tires of

any one form of it. She cannot concentrate, especially on any finely

co-ordinated work requiring time and patience. Dancing and music

make the strongest appeal to her. A boisterous club room will quiet

suddenly to the sound of “Oh! Mr. Dream Man, let me dream some more.”

The dark-eyed girl at the piano drawls in shrill nasal mimicry of the

vaudeville “artist,” copying her air and mannerisms.

Cheap and shoddy--but the scene typifies that groping for the ideal

which is universal. Look along the line of faces, stilled and

attentive. Something is there neither cheap nor small. Here the

face of a youngster is caught an instant from its impish drollery.

The hardening lines are soft as with a child’s wonder at something

beautiful and new. Next to her an older girl is leaning forward.

Her features are haggard and drawn, a ghastly white. But she sits

with opened lips and a look in her eyes as if she heard beyond the

singing something half articulate and far-away. The song has brought

a quickening of the imagination, a stirring of childish, unformed

aspirations, half gropings for a world finer than the one she knows.

In these girls the longing for the unreal is overlaid by much that is

commonplace and sordid. To come upon this sudden, vivid glimpse of it

takes away one’s breath. At the same instant some of the faces are

prophetic of its final dying out. The girls’ instinctive idealism,

a wild thing here, unnurtured, is as elusive and fleeting as it is

beautiful. It is foredoomed to fade swiftly in the midst of unfriendly

reality.

Only a fleeting glimpse of the ideal, and soon the club room is again

a clamorous, gay, turbulent place. There is much energy that must be

let off; nothing but dancing will satisfy the demand. This means that

the doors must be opened to “the fellows” too. They, meantime, have

been besieging the club from the outside. If the older girl is to be

held, some concession must be made to her chief desire. Once it is

made, many difficulties arise. The interest between the girls and boys

here is almost wholly one of sex. They are farther apart than in other

circles. As children, there has been very little playing in common.

The boys’ interests are more energetic; group athletics have seldom

been opened to the girls of the elementary schools. Both boys and girls

have a narrow range of knowledge and impersonal interests. Conversation

is a mere exchange of personalities, gossip, and bickering, and there

is little even of that. The girls line up on one side of the room;

the boys group together on the other side. Games are sidetracked as

foolish. There is only dancing to bring them together, and so the club

dances. This is doubtless the reason why the dance hall holds the

first place in the girl’s estimation of a good time. In these places

she learns the “tough” dances in their worst forms and with all their

suggestive details. If she attends these dubious resorts freely, she is

marked socially by it.

Most of the girls under sixteen and the most strictly guarded of the

older girls go to dances only occasionally. Then they attend some

“racket” given by their special friends, their fathers’ association,

or their church. They may go with their families or be taken by a boy

friend with their parents’ knowledge and consent. Perhaps a younger

sister is allowed to go along, much below the age when the first

daughter started, because “she’s company for May.” This occasional

ball, with its more or less formal invitation, its sanction by the

parents, and its semi-chaperonage, is considered a very different thing

from the promiscuous attendance of dance halls.

Many of the older girls, as we have seen, go much as they choose, in

a free and easy fashion. They are not restricted, or if they are they

“sneak” away. Two girls go together as a rule. They must have a little

money--carfare and a quarter for entrance. But that is all that is

needed; no chaperon and no escort. Bonds are off; freedom is absolute;

the range of possibilities is almost limitless. From Fourteenth Street

to 162nd Street, East Side and West, from Coney to Jersey, these

eager feet in the path of pleasure find their way. They are not even

dependent on the initiative of an escort for their good time. The girls

decide on their dance hall, and once on the floor, a “pick-up” is

easy to acquire. If they dance together, two men are sure to “break”

provided the girls are good looking and dance well. Etiquette demands

that they remain through the dance with this random partner. To desert

him on the floor is an insult which he may avenge with violence. To

sneak between the halves is somewhat risky and is considered mean. It

is better, as one of our girls pointed out, to tell him frankly that

“you can’t seem to keep step and you’d rather not dance it out.”

The dance hall, with its air of license, its dark corners and

balconies, its tough dancing, and its heavy drinking, is becoming

familiar to every reader of the newspapers. To the girls who attend

them they are not all of one kind by any means. The best places are

perhaps too “classy” for the West Side girl, and she has not the

proper clothes. The character of the dances at any hall depends, our

informants said, entirely upon the club that manages the affair. “If

they don’t want nothing but society dancing, why the cop’ll keep the

floor clear for them. But if some of these tough fellows are running

the racket off they go to the cop and say, ‘We don’t want any dancing

stopped here. See?’ and he leaves them alone.”[82] Home-going is not

thought of until 1 or 2, often 3 or 4 a. m. The ball is often followed

by a trip to a restaurant and home is finally reached at 6 a. m.

A party of this kind is not the single carnival of the year. Once a

week, if not twice or thrice, the girl who goes to the dance hall

goes through its round of excesses. The most startling fact in this

connection is that it is the little girls who are doing the dancing

in the public places of amusement in New York. The young girl usually

settles down to keeping steady company some time before her early

marriage, and goes less to the dance halls. Sixteen-year-old Josie,

spending three out of every seven nights of the week at public dances,

said, “When I’m eighteen or nineteen I won’t care about it any more.

I’ll have a ‘friend’ then and won’t want to go anywheres.”

There is another group of girls who do not go to the dance halls. They

have not even the small amount of money that would take them there, nor

the one suit of good clothes that would make them presentable among

the others. Lacking the tawdry finery and the superficial good manners

of the other set, they are shabby and dirty and are known throughout

the block as tough. Between them and the upper set, those who hover

on the edge of toughness and fight for the poor distinction of just

escaping it, there is a chasm of dislike, suspicion, and jealousy.

The tough girls have the two universal amusement places--the street

and the nickel “dump” (moving picture show). Besides these, they can

make meeting places of the alleys, the docks, and vacant rooms in the

tenements. These neglected, unlit cracks and crannies serve as traps

for childhood of both sexes. Here children are snared in the darkness

long before they are old enough to know the meaning of temptation. This

is the most sinister phase of the recreation problem.

Marriage is for all these girls the final and greatest adventure

of adolescence. They do not look past the adventure at the

responsibilities which lie beyond. The question of children is waved

aside as scarcely worth a hearing. Here, where the management of a

household is so hazardous and stern an affair, it is most lightly

assumed. The girl steps carelessly and boldly ahead. Sixteen is a bit

early, but eighteen or nineteen is a good age and further delay is

considered needless.

Sometimes the girl goes to church with her companion and is married

in the presence of her family and friends. But very often she and her

boy-husband indulge in a mild elopement. This is not necessarily done

to evade the objection of parents. It is partly in obedience to the

romantic instinct of youth and partly because the girl and her family

cannot afford the parade of a real wedding. After one of these secret

marriages, it is not uncommon for the girl to go on living at home and

working, while her husband does the same. In a short time the fact

of their marriage becomes known; the young pair become the center of

neighborhood interest; and then, as a decidedly secondary matter, the

question of their “taking up rooms” is considered. Probably the new

wife goes on working in order to buy furniture for her home.

“What do you think!” exclaimed Mrs. Attinger to a visitor from the

club who dropped in on a Saturday morning. “Our Lizzie’s married.

She’s been married two months and they never told me till last week.”

Mrs. Attinger seemed not at all displeased with the event, viewing it

as a successful joke on herself and Lizzie’s friends. She went on to

relate how her daughter had given up her job at the cigarette factory

and had gone over to live in New Jersey with her husband, who was a

day laborer. It also appeared, from her mother’s story, that the young

couple had not started out under the most favorable auspices. Lizzie

had visited Mrs. Attinger the day before with the news that her husband

expected to be laid off soon and she was looking for work, as she

needed money to furnish her house. Mrs. Attinger related these details

without seeming to be particularly disturbed by them.

It was, after all, the familiar story of beginning wives and husbands

on the West Side. It indicated that Lizzie had quickly found marriage

to be an extremely sobering event. Henceforth she would have new

problems to face, problems in which the adolescent hunger for good

times would cease to be the dominant element. The will to play was to

give place to the incessant struggle for existence which makes up the

career of the wife of a casual laborer.

CHAPTER VI

THE BREAKDOWN OF FAMILY PROTECTION

Our West Side girls were members of a supposedly protected part of

the community. Each of them belonged to a family group; if they were

not living with their own parents, near relatives had taken them in.

Their homes were in a section which possesses a neighborhood life and

neighborhood opinions. The population is far more stable than that of

the East Side; recent comers are rare. Some of our girls told of how

their mothers had gone to school together. One had started in the same

school through which her mother had passed. Many families had shifted

around within a range of 10 blocks for a generation. The parents of

most of them had been here from ten to thirty or forty years. It is,

then, not in the absence but in the breakdown of neighborhood and

family protection that we must seek the reasons for social, moral, and

physical deterioration in these girls.

The character of the community goes far to counter-balance any

advantage the girl may gain from living in an environment familiar to

herself and to her parents. If she grows up in one of these blocks,

she is, from babyhood, in the midst of lawlessness and rumors of

lawlessness. They are afloat in the air she breathes, as certain to be

inhaled as are the heavy odors from the gas plants and slaughter pens.

Two girls came excitedly into their club with news of an assault

which had just taken place down the block. They had loitered to join

the curious crowd and to have a look at the victim. They related the

details of the event and commented upon them as upon a familiar story.

There was a ripple of excitement, but no surprise. One girl exclaimed,

“Things like that are happening on our block all the time.”

The block where this girl lived bears the distinction of having

sheltered, some forty years ago, the original “Hell’s Kitchen”

gang.[83] A junk-covered lot is pointed out as the site of the

tumble-down shack where the gang met. The shack has disappeared, while

in the rear, facing the street to the north, a mission is now in full

swing. Still, tradition upholds the desperate character of the locality

and gives it a bad reputation. The police declare, however, that it

is no worse than many other parts of the neighborhood. Fifteen of our

club girls came from this block. All the toughs who gather there are,

of course, identified with the “Gopher Gang.” The Gophers were said to

have assaulted the housekeeper in 562. She had reported to the police

their use of her vacant rooms, and in revenge they had “beaten her

up.” It was to this same house, which bears a bad reputation, that a

physician had been recently called, late in the evening, to attend a

baby. The child was in convulsions, the effect of the whiskey with

which she had been “doped.” After a search through the house, he found

only one family sober enough to be trusted with the child.

Authentic stories of violence came to us from time to time. Many

other tales were the product of gossip largely mingled with falsehood.

But the brutality of the neighborhood speaks for itself; it is

everywhere, in the streets, in the talk, in the minds of old and young.

Recklessness and daring are apt to be painted with heightened colors,

exaggerated beyond the fact. The child does not discriminate between

garbled truth and falsity. In any case, these stories take effect

on her. They are poured into her mind and muddy the stream of her

imagination. She believes a large amount of what comes to her ears,

some of which she sees and knows to be true. The girls who lived in

this block, though they were coming and going by night and day, had

yet a lively apprehension of its dangers. “When I go home after ten,”

said Mamie Stertle, “I always get the cop on the corner to see me to my

door.” Mamie had lived uptown for a few months. Up there, far to the

north, she had acquired a friend of a superior type, a chauffeur, who

worked steadily and always had money in his pocket. When she came back

to live on the West Side, she took it for granted that he could not

come to her home, lest he be assaulted and robbed.

The young girl shares in all the gossip of her elders. She takes in

greedily the idle talk of the kitchen, the stoop, and the street. In

this prurient school she becomes familiar, even as a child, with the

lowest forms of vice and immorality. Living on the same block with 15

of our girls were two young women who were the “talk of the parish.”

“They begun in the dance halls back o’ the saloons,” said Mrs. Ryan,

“and look what they are now!” Not one of our 15 girls but was familiar

with the talk and with all the details of the two irregular lives about

which it centered.

A restaurant was opened on the corner. It was soon noised about that

the woman proprietor was identical with a notorious criminal who had

served a sentence of twenty years for infanticide. Before long the

girls were repeating with gusto horrible stories of her crimes. Sadie

Toohey, standing on the corner with a group of schoolmates, informed

them concerning the restaurant keeper, “She was a midwife and used to

burn babies.” Then, with a toss of her blonde head with its little-girl

bows, she added, “She burned one of mine.” The sally was greeted with

shouts of appreciation and Sadie’s reputation as a wit rose among her

comrades.

A mother, even one of the wisest, finds it no easy task to defend her

young against these influences. Life is far too congested in such

quarters for the girl to escape any of its aspects. When a family of

from six to eight members lives in three or four rooms it is impossible

to segregate the young from their elders. Only well-to-do parents can

afford to provide a separate life tempered to the needs of young and

growing personalities. The poor man’s house has no nursery for its

young, no annex like the boarding school, which enlarges the dimensions

of the rich man’s house and provides a special environment friendly

to youth and its needs. The daughter of fourteen in the tenements

must share the experience of the mother of fifty, who, even with the

best intentions, cannot shield her girl from her own fifty-year-old

materialistic morals. What is true of the individual family is also

true of mass life on the block. There is no segregation of youth. The

result is precocious hardness or youthful rebellion.

If the practice of pooling the moral standards of old and young is

not considered ideal training for children in families whose moral

standards meet the usual requirements, it is even less desirable

in families which are either degraded or undeveloped. There are

here on the West Side many families who have the naïve morality of

primitive social groups. The result is that many of the girls are

simply reared in a different morality from that of the community at

large. Illegitimate births are common. Marriage--even a common law

marriage--is accepted as removing any stigma that might attach to an

irregular relationship. “Oh, it is all right,” said the parents of one

girl-mother, “because she’s been goin’ with Bill now for years. They’ll

marry as soon as they can.”

One of our club girls drifted into a temporary union and then drifted

out again in the most matter-of-fact way. After a period of absence

from the club, she was reported upon inquiry to be married. “She done

well for herself,” rumor ran. One day she turned up at the club and

brought her boy-husband, apparently a decent, steady sort of chap. Soon

we learned that they had not really been married but had started the

report in a spirit of fun. However, they now decided to go through the

ceremony in earnest and together they went to the priest. Here they

met an unexpected obstacle, for their visit had been forestalled by

Mattie’s mother, who did not approve of Cleary for a son-in-law and

had charged the priest not to marry them. The girl returned home, but

continued to meet Cleary on the street and to go around with him. Then

gradually she began to shake off the connection, breaking promises to

the boy and failing to keep appointments with him. He came to the club

one evening expecting to find her there according to her promise. But

Mattie did not come to the club that night, and Cleary, after waiting a

while in vain, departed saying darkly, “That’s the third time this week

she’s give me the hang-up.” There was evidence that Mattie’s mother was

more concerned about the loss of her daughter’s earnings than about

making her an “honest” girl.

The toleration of moral irregularities is mingled with much harshness

of censure. “D’ ye know Jennie Meehan that lives in th’ house next to

ours?” Kitty Stevens asks the cooking class. “Well, she’s just had

a baby. Father McGratty went there today an’ he married her an’ the

feller. Her sister was just th’ same way, only she went and had her

baby in Jersey. Me mother says if she had that kind of girl she’d

burn her, she w’d. Burnin’ w’d be good enough for the likes o’ her.”

But in spite of this severity of comment, the occurrence is accepted

philosophically by the elders of the neighborhood, and soon forgotten.

Some families fall below all moral codes, even the simple ethics of the

far West Side. The fault which may be forgiven in the girl is not so

pardonable in her parents. Open and excessive infidelity on the part of

the father and drink or infidelity on the part of the mother may make

the family outcasts from among the merely poor. The daughter shares the

degradation of the others and can scarcely escape the consequences.

Even where the habits of her elders are not the subject of gossip,

she herself cannot escape the knowledge and the influence. There was

fifteen-year-old Addie Mercer, bright, vivacious, with sparkling dark

eyes, who was getting a “bad name.” The unsavory example came from

her father. He, as Addie and her mother and all the children knew,

maintained a second household with a colored woman in charge. The

effects of this constant example, as well as of other demoralizing

influences, were already evident in Addie, and the final result

threatened to be total moral collapse.

Often the mere physical conditions of life seem enough to account for

the moral tragedies. The hallways of these tenements are perennially

dark by day, although they are lit by flickering gas jets in the

evening. The legal requirements for illumination of dark halls and

stairs are too often evaded throughout the tenements. There was

one house in our neighborhood where no lights burned in any of the

halls day or night, for months. It is not uncommon to find a hall so

pitch-dark that one must feel one’s way down the stairs.

A white flower was sent to the sick mother of one of our girls. When a

visitor called, it was literally the only thing that could be seen in

the woman’s room. All other details--walls, bed clothing, the features

of the sick woman--were lost in blackness until the eyes of the visitor

became sufficiently accustomed to the darkness to distinguish between

them. Men boarders shared from time to time the three rooms of this

home. In this flat and others like it a daughter had lived her fourteen

years. Then, still a child, she became a mother.

Childhood in the tenements cannot escape the smirch of its brutal and

ugly surroundings. The open toilet where little children play has given

occasion to the bitterest of tragedies. The corner saloon, without

which no block is complete, is always, it must be remembered, a part of

some tenement house. It impinges on the homes of 12 or 15 families.

The halls reek with the odor of bad whiskey. Snatches of saloon talk

and saloon laughter leak through the walls, even by day. Out of homes

like this come girls and boys to go to schools from whose neighborhood

all liquor selling is legally banished to a distance of at least 200

yards! Truly, our legal protection of childhood is in some respects a

farce.

Allowing for great deficiencies, we have still much natural vigor and

strength among the young in the district. This is not yet a spot such

as some that exist in the London slums, pervaded with the taint of

innate mental and physical degeneration. The parents of our girls were

mainly Irish immigrants or first generation Irish-Americans. They came

of vigorous peasant stock, and from a country which is, by comparison

with the rest of Europe, almost free from venereal disease. We found

that most of our club girls had a fair physical inheritance. Of a

group of 20 who were given physical examinations, 18 were shown to

have well-developed muscles and organs. Notwithstanding many signs of

weariness and disease, they were not lacking in stamina. All the more

for this reason should the girl in her adolescent years live under a

régime which will conserve her natural energy. The chance for health

and strength should not be thrown away. These are the years of nervous

instability in which especially she needs rest, change, exercise, and

the healthful freedom of outdoor play and occupation. Her chances for

all these things are very limited. Bodies intended to be vigorous

are hard used from the start, and during adolescence they are often

strained and harried far beyond their recuperative power.

Almost every night some girl came dragging in with heavy eyes and

cheeks dead white under the powder. There were complaints galore of

weariness and headache. One great reason was the immoderate pace at

which the lives of such girls are hurried on. Long hours of work

are thrust upon them. Long hours of play are seized with petulant

insistence. To wrap packages from 7 a. m. until 5:30 p. m. within the

walls of a factory; then several times a week to dance until 2 or 3

a. m. in the stifling closeness, the noise and excitement of a public

hall, is a not unusual program. The immature body is bound to fail.

With the girl who keeps up her train of pleasures, only a rebellious

season now and then, when she loafs and sleeps long mornings, saves her

from exhaustion.

Another cause of discomfort and pain, often with serious results, is

the prevalence of minor defects of body. They have gone without care

for months and years. Practically no girl has had teeth, eyes, and

throat kept in good condition. The group of 20 girls were examined for

defect in scalp, nose, ears, throat, teeth, eyes, heart, and lungs. Not

one examined was without defect. Of the 20, 15 had enlarged tonsils and

five had adenoids; 12 had defective teeth; four defective vision; two

were cross-eyed; three had spinal curvature; one had trachoma; and one

conjunctivitis.

Two sisters brought trachoma to the house from an institution where

they had been reared. Sarah had been cured by a delicate and skilful

operation. Martha had been discharged without any treatment. She was

one of the toughest girls in the club and least concerned about herself

or her appearance. When she came to us she was “bumming,” without a

job. In her torn and filthy clothing, with reddened eyes half closed

with the disease, she looked the most forlorn and neglected of the

underworld. For weeks we worked to induce her mother to give her

care. “Thank God, there’s nothing much the matter with her eyes,” was

the mother’s final answer after she had been warned that blindness

was a certain consequence. And from her sister, Sarah’s eyes were

re-infected. A case recorded in the group of 20 was also contracted

from her.

These examinations were little guide to the most serious physical

defects among the girls. Those most in need of care were most difficult

and wayward about examination. The mention of a doctor dismayed

them. Some who promised to go never reached his office. But a weekly

clinic was continued through the winter. Gradually the girls gained

confidence and a number of serious troubles came to light. Three cases

of tuberculosis--two incipient--were found. The third, which was taking

a headlong course, was checked and ultimately cured by sending the girl

daily to a hospital boat. Two girls were finally examined and treated

for venereal disease. It was noticeable that girls whose histories and

habits left little doubt of sexual abuse were under par in general

health. Undoubtedly this operated both as cause and as result.

Carrie Fuller drifted into the club irregularly for months. Her voice,

her frown, her dragging slouch across the room all told of the absence

of any stamina. She never consented to any suggestion of a doctor or

of care. It is inevitable that such a condition should make continuous

work impossible. She was in a cigarette factory till she “chucked

her job.” When we saw her after several weeks of absence, we learned

without surprise that she had left home to live with a married sister

and “lead a sporting life.” She laughed a bit recklessly and shambled

out, leaving only the wonder that she cared to come at all. Without

bodily vitality, how shall any of these children live through the long

working days of their youth? And, still more, how shall they resist the

continual pressure of the viciousness around them? Yet many a girl is

scattering to the wind the strength of her youth.

A group composed of 19 of our girls, ranging in age from thirteen to

seventeen, were examined in a psychological clinic. Four girls stood

above the normal in mental ability, 10 were normal, and two were barely

normal. One was below normal, as the result of immoral habits, and two

were feeble-minded.

In the full story, broken schooling, low moral standards, the brutal

life of the streets, low housing, and physical inferiority all play

their part in the coarsened moral outlook of the girls. There is a

group demoralized even in childhood by the abuse of their sexual

functions. There are some who fall into immorality during the first

years of adolescence. For the most part, however, the girls finally

slip into the established ways of marriage and family building. From

such groups the children of the next generation will be born in the

largest proportion. To society, as well as themselves, it matters

a great deal whether they have been crippled in mind and body by a

wretched and brutal environment.

Such a girl was May Carney, who announced one day to our consternation

that she was going to be married. May was only sixteen and a victim of

gonorrhea. She had been, however, perfectly “straight” for a couple

of years. At the age of sixteen she looked upon herself as a reformed

character. “I used to be pretty tough with the boys,” she said. “That’s

a pretty bad thing for any girl to say of herself, but I’m over it

now.” The physician had said that it would require three years to cure

her thoroughly of her disease and had recommended a slight operation

immediately. In view of these facts, we could only feel great concern

at the news of her immediate marriage. One of the club leaders sought

out her mother to remonstrate against the marriage and also to propose

that May should go to the hospital for two weeks.

Mrs. Carney was found at home one evening about 8 o’clock, and

adjourned with her visitor to the hall outside for a confidential talk.

The public passage, lighted by a flaring gas jet, was surrounded by

four closed doors shutting off as many different flats and the crowded

domestic life within. In the evening, when Mrs. Carney’s family was at

home, it was the only spot where she could have a private word with a

caller. Her final summing up of her daughter’s situation was this: “You

see, if May was to go away to the hospital for two weeks, they’d all

say she went away to have a baby. You see them two doors,” pointing to

the forward end of the hall. “The girls in there--both of them--have

just been away havin’ babies. They didn’t have nobody to take care of

them, so they had to bring their babies home. Now, if May was to be

gone two weeks, ye couldn’t make nobody believe she wasn’t doin’ just

the same as them two.”

In view of this difficulty it was suggested that the operation might

be performed at home. This seemed feasible, and the more serious

question of May’s marriage was then broached. “Yes, May will be married

in September,” said Mrs. Carney. “I know, she’s not seventeen yet,

but it’s this way, y’ see. She’s sickly, she won’t never be no good

to me,--the two or three dollars she brings home won’t hardly keep

her,--and she’s always wantin’ money to spend on herself. What I say

is, she’d better get married now. Daley is a good fellow and he’s

workin’ steady. She mightn’t have so good a chance again.”

It would not be fair to blame Mrs. Carney very harshly for the

materialism of this speech and her total lack of consideration for the

“steady fellow” whom May was about to marry, and for their possible

children. Mrs. Carney’s moral outlook was the result of the hard school

in which she had been educated. As for her willingness to saddle a

hardworking young man with her sickly daughter, this was, after all,

only her duty as a “good mother.” It would have been hard to make

Mrs. Carney see anything wrong in her attitude toward her daughter’s

marriage. One has to admit that what we expected of her as a matter of

course was from her point of view heroic conduct.

In view of the circumstances surrounding these young lives, it is

useless to talk of the “fall” of these girls. Many of them have

never lived on a sufficiently high moral level to “fall.” With them

immorality is of a piece with the uncleanliness, physical and mental,

in which they have been reared. There was, however, one important

distinction which we learned to make between the forms of immorality.

There was the girl who “solicited” and the girl who did not. One may

have courage to grapple with mere immorality, but the girl who has been

swept into the currents of commercialized vice is at once allied with

secret and powerful forces which enable this trade to hold its own.

Once during the year we were compelled to stand by helplessly and see a

girl of sixteen slip over the brink of prostitution.

Carrie Drake, who drifted into the club one evening with Winnie Hyland,

was a tall, white-faced girl, rather gawky and poorly dressed. She wore

a shabby suit, a very dirty white waist of cheap embroidery, and a

rackety hat which showed the effects of having been repeatedly rained

upon. Carrie’s devotion to this hat was all the more noticeable because

the other girls seldom wore any. We soon discovered the reason; an

attack of typhoid fever had left her almost bald. Beneath the hat she

wore a reddish-brown wig which was so thin that it scarcely covered her

new growth of stubby hair of altogether a different shade of brown.

She said she had made the wig of “some puffs,” and that it had been

very good until some girl had tried to improve it by cutting it. She

possessed a low voice and a courteous manner which she had kept as

salvage from the wreck of her mother’s training.

Winnie Hyland, who brought her to us, was an irresistible little

crippled girl whose faith in the powers of a social worker was the

result of having been gently cared for all her life by representatives

of one social agency or another. The tubercular hip-bone which she

had developed in early childhood had saved her from the worst of the

harshness and want which prevailed in her own home. Discovering her

friend in search of a job she brought her over to the club to one of

the “teachers.”

Carrie was not a hopeful candidate for work. She was only fifteen,

still gaunt from the ravages of typhoid, grotesque in appearance.

Her mother had died when she was eleven, and she had been promptly

taken from school, which she hated, to do the housework. To appease

the truant officer, she was sent to another school for a month. Then

quietly she dropped out altogether. An attempt at work in a factory at

this age was unsuccessful. “My aunt told the forelady how I was poor

and hadn’t any mother. So she took pity on me and let me try.” But she

was soon discharged and was kept at home to take care of her younger

brother and sister, until all three were sent to an institution.

Two months later the father died,--as Carrie declared and certainly

believed, “of a broken heart.”

After leaving the institution at fourteen, she had lived with her aunts

by spells, quarreling and breaking away from time to time. For a while

she had stayed with the mother of a friend who found her sitting on

the steps in the rain. She tried places at service, but she was not a

trained houseworker and did not stay long at any place. Finally she

had got a job in a steam laundry, but while working there she sickened

with typhoid and was sent to the hospital. When she came to us she was

living with an aunt in a furnished room house, a forlorn, three-story

shack on one of the river blocks. The halls reeked with odors from the

corner saloon. The aunt, her husband, and two children were occupying a

single room when they took the girl in. There was only one bed. “I told

Carrie she could squeeze in,” she explained. “I couldn’t ask her to

sleep on the floor.”

It was slow business finding work for Carrie. She had to have better

clothes. She had to be examined by a physician, for there were

signs of a venereal disease which would have made her dangerous to

fellow-workers in a factory. These things had been arranged for and

consented to. But before they could be put into effect and work could

be found, Carrie had taken the plunge. She disappeared without leaving

a trace, but soon after one of the girls reported seeing her on Eighth

Avenue, “in a real wig and a swell new suit.” Immorality was not new

to Carrie, but she had found a way to make it pay. She was “on the

streets.” There followed an unsuccessful search, inquiries at police

headquarters, of prison officials, of probation officers. We enlisted

the aid of a strong society, but the agent, though he promised to help,

gave us very little encouragement, saying that such a search was pretty

hopeless, as there were hundreds of girls in similar circumstances at

large in New York.

Carrie slipped out of sight all the more easily because she had no

one “who rightly belonged to her.” When a girl disappears from a home

presided over by a determined mother, the search which follows is

likely to be a desperate one. Mrs. Mullarkey’s search for her Fannie

was a mixture of folly, shrewdness, and heroism. Fannie, according

to her mother, was “the best girl you ever saw” till she came to

live on the “Gopher block.” There she “got in” with an older girl at

the factory and began to be tough. She threw up her job, as did her

friend, and the two spent their time in secret ways. At first the

mother knew nothing of Fannie’s being out of work because the girl

left home regularly mornings and came home promptly to her dinner. But

at last the fraud was discovered; there was a scene, with “hollerin’

and smashin’,” and upon the heels of it Fannie disappeared. Mrs.

Mullarkey’s fears pointed to a certain house on Eleventh Avenue where a

woman lived who had the reputation of harboring girls. Not daring to go

there alone, she enlisted the aid of Father Langan, “a rough hollerin’

sort of a man that the children was all afraid of.” But the woman would

not open even to the Father’s authoritative knock. Eventually they

returned with an officer who broke down the door. But Fannie was not

there after all.

Mrs. Mullarkey’s two aids, the officer and the priest, could give her

no further counsel. But she herself knew of another resource in the

person of a young man, about twenty-two years old, a gangster and

political scullion, whom she had known from early boyhood. To him she

made her appeal for old acquaintance’ sake. “For God’s sake, Petey,”

she said, “you are the only one that can get Fannie. Find out where she

is.” Moved by the appeal and nothing loath to show his power, Petey

promised that he would find the girl; only he stipulated that Mrs.

Mullarkey must “leave Fannie be” when once she had her. Mrs. Mullarkey

agreed and Petey went forth on his quest. In a couple of hours he

returned with the culprit and commanded her to tell her mother where

she had been. At first she refused; but Petey, once enlisted on the

mother’s side, was a stern and unyielding ally. He brought out a knife

and threatened her, so that the poor girl was terrified and stammered

forth a confession of how she and her friend had been staying together

in a furnished room. Mrs. Mullarkey was so outraged by what she heard

that she altogether forgot her promise to Petey. After he had gone she

summoned an officer and had the girl taken to court. Fannie was locked

up in a cell for twenty-four hours “to cool off.” When she came up

before the judge the following day she was “as brazen as could be, not

a tear in her eye.” At last, however, she said she wanted to go home,

and the judge placed her on probation.

We knew a sorry scrap of a child, five years old, who was already

getting her instruction. She was a thin, sharp-featured little

creature, uncommunicative, but very watchful out of her clear, bright

blue eyes. Her clothing, hands, and face were always unclean. She

gave an uncomfortable sense of possessing a great deal of unnatural

knowledge for her age. Her home was a kitchen with two windows, and two

tiny dark bedrooms, as hopelessly unkempt and dirty as herself. It was

the abode of six people and nine cats. Her father was the last of three

husbands, all of doubtful legal status. Her mother, who drank heavily

on occasion, was unreliable. “Patsy” was the frequent companion of her

sister of fifteen. This girl, who had an unusual, vivid, and forceful

personality, was alternately sought out by the fellows of the block

and censured with their disapproval. She ruled Patsy as an autocrat,

petting and punishing her, allowing her to “tag around” and constantly

using her as a go-between. There will be no question of a “fall” for

Patsy. As she was being taught, so in time she will naturally develop.

With girls from such homes, childhood is the crucial time. It is not

temptation, circumstance, or delusion that gets them into “trouble.”

It is the faulty moral and mental training which simply expresses

itself later in the almost inevitable, natural fashion. A smattering

of conventional morality given by the church or by school is of little

practical force against the tenor of their lives. “Reform” for such

girls does not mean a return to abandoned ideals and desires. This is

hard to achieve, but what is required here is still more difficult.

It is the graft of new habits and a new outlook. It is the patient

training away from the easy ways into the strict new law. Even fourteen

or fifteen may be too late an age at which to begin this.

But actual immorality is not the only fruit of the dingy, sordid

happenings which compose so large a part of the life of this community.

There are girls who grow up in the midst of vicious surroundings with

an inward security against harm. They are as trustworthy as the most

carefully trained and guarded child--and hardier. For with them there

is truth in the familiar boast, “I’m able to take care of myself.”

But they pay a price for this fortitude. They are not taught, cleanly

and rightly, straight from the shoulder. The taint and grime around

them reach to their thoughts and feeling, and they suffer in their

conceptions of life and of human experience.

We hear a great deal of the precocious development of New York

children. It is most noticeable in girls from homes like these. In

spite of the essential helplessness of their age, they acquire a

surface hardihood which marks them out from normal children. They

have grown up to have a settled distrust of life. They have a lurking

bitterness which may be unavoidable in the adult but which ought never

to play a part in childhood.

Yet, granting all the untoward conditions and influences which she

must face, the problem of our West Side girl is by no means a hopeless

one. Watch her as she swings through the streets, lovely through

all her tawdriness, fine through all her vulgarity, gentle through

all her “toughness.” Seeing her thus we cannot but see also her

hopeful possibilities, in spite of the sordidness and evil which have

encompassed her.

To strengthen the best elements of the home--this is the surest and

most fundamental way to help this girl. The dangers for her family

are the most deeply rooted menace to her. And here they are manifold.

We may safeguard her recreation; we may improve her schooling; we

may regulate her working conditions. But we must remember that she

is seldom to be regarded entirely as an individual; she is one of a

family group, a unit of a community. Unless she drifts to the streets

she will probably remain so. And whatever can lighten and beautify the

grimy life of the district, or relieve the intense pressure on family

comfort, will give her a better chance.

CHAPTER VII

THE ITALIAN GIRL

BY JOSEPHINE ROCHE

From out the big candy factories of the Middle West Side throngs of

workers, one Saturday night, came hurrying into the December darkness.

Eagerly they turned their steps toward their tenement homes. Many of

them were Italian girls, and very young.

Across the street from Kohlberger’s candy factory a child waited,

peering anxiously at every group of girls that left the building.

“Lucy!” she called out suddenly. Three girls stopped and the child ran

up to them crying, “Oh, Lucy, your sister Mary’s got twins!” Lucy’s

shriek of delight was echoed rapturously by her companions; they caught

hold of the child and besieged her with questions. Several friends

stopped to hear the glad tidings. Then the little group set out up

Ninth Avenue for Lucy Colletti’s home to see Mary and the new arrivals.

The noise of the elevated trains drowned their voices and the crowds

held them back, but they talked happily on. After the first excitement

of the news had abated a little, they turned to other matters. “Perhaps

your friend will be at your house, Lucy,” said one of the girls.

Lucy’s happy look faded.

“No, he won’t.”

“But he’s there at the door every night, and he goes up the stairs with

you.”

“My father’s got no use for him, so I told him .... Well, what’s the

use, we ain’t allowed to do anything,” she ended sullenly.

“Why don’t you do like Jennie does, and not let them know?” asked the

other.

“They’d know. They don’t ever let me out at night, not even to go to

the club. It’s just sit around the house all evening. If you’ve got

a husband, he’ll take you out somewhere. Mary got married when she

was fifteen and after that she went out all the time. I wisht I was

married!”

As they turned from Ninth Avenue west into one of the Forties a girl

and a young man approached them. “There’s Angelina!” exclaimed Jennie,

calling to the girl. Angelina greeted them warmly. She was thin and

looked delicate, as though she had just recovered from a severe

illness. In answer to the girls’ eager questions she said that she was

better; that she and Nick were to be married at Christmas and go to

live in the Bronx; that she’d get well fast then. She asked in turn

about the girls at the factory and said that she missed them.

Angelina was sixteen. Two years before, she had gone into the candy

factory. She started at $3.50 a week and after a year got $4.00,

packing chocolates in the basement. It was cold there and damp, and

in spite of her heavy sweater and two pairs of stockings she had

contracted a severe cold which lingered on her lungs. She failed

steadily until one day after a bad fit of “coughing blood” she fainted

and had to be taken home. She could not go back, although her mother

missed the $4.00 sadly, as her father too was out of work. But when

she was able to be up and care for the baby and do her mother’s work

as janitress, the latter managed to get cleaning jobs and things were

easier. This last week her father had got employment. He was washing

dishes in a saloon for $9.00 a week. Now it would be possible for

Angelina to marry. Her friends shared in her happiness with quick

responsiveness, and continued to talk of her marriage to Nick until the

nearness of Lucy’s house brought them back to the first interesting

topic of the evening.

“My, I’m glad I don’t have to work tonight!” Lucy exclaimed.

“Yes, but we must work tomorrow!” exclaimed Jennie. “I just hate going

on Sunday. Gee! I don’t want no candy for a Christmas present!”

Through cold, ill-smelling hallways, the girls trooped up the four

flights of narrow stairs to Lucy’s home. The gas flame which flickered

feebly on each landing revealed the dirty, crumbling walls. It was the

social hour of the tenements. Fathers were returning from the day’s

toil and the children were welcoming them. Mothers were cooking the

evening meal, whose various odors mingled in the passage-way with those

of bad plumbing, the common toilets, escaping gas, wet plaster, and

garbage. Half-dressed babies crept out to the open doors or rolled on

the bare, grimy hall floors, peering with curious eyes through the

banisters at the new arrivals. The little knots of neighbors gathered

about the doorways hailed Lucy with words of rejoicing. A continuous

sound of voices arose, sometimes low and laughing, again, high and

excited, but tinged with the varying cadences and the finely shaded

meanings with which the Italian language abounds. Accustomed to a life

of the greatest intimacy with relatives and neighbors, the Italians

will sacrifice any comfort to preserve this condition.

In the Collettis’ flat a stream of smiling friends passed in and out

congratulating Mary and touching with warm brown fingers the babies’

cheeks. Each drank two tiny glasses of crème de menthe to the health of

mother and children. Four generations lived in that flat--a family of

eleven. Mrs. Colletti was seated near her daughter’s bed, nursing her

own year-old baby. Mrs. Colletti’s mother, who had been a midwife in

Italy, tended her daughter and the newborn babies after the manner in

which she had cared years ago for the peasant women of Calabria. The

Collettis were prosperous; their fruit stand did a good business. All

the family helped. Mrs. Colletti spent every morning at the stand, and

the children were there after school and at night. They were able to

afford a five-room flat and some pretentious furniture. The front room

was particularly splendid with its brilliant green-flowered rug, stiff

Nottingham curtains, and equally stiff “parlor set.” Mary’s wedding

presents, bright painted vases, imitation cut glass, enormous feather

roses, and pink celluloid album, were arranged around the room. Staring

likenesses in heavy oil paint of the bride and groom were the crowning

glory of the parlor.

Lucy dropped her pay envelope into her mother’s lap. Then she and her

friends surrounded the sixteen-year-old mother and told her of the

day’s happenings, of meeting Angelina, and how she was soon to be

married. Mary was as eager as the others over the idea of a wedding

and a dance. Indeed she would be able to go! And she would wear her

blue dress, the one she bought when she “stood up” with Flora at her

wedding.

Lucy’s friends promised as they said goodnight, to explain to the

“boss” why she could not come on Sunday morning for extra work. They

ran downstairs out into the street, and as they passed the steam

laundry on the block, from which came the dull thump of subsiding

machinery, a girl came through the iron gateway. She was a short,

stocky peasant type, but her shoulders were stooped, her flesh flabby,

and she looked far from strong. She shivered as she came out of the

hot, steaming workroom into the chill December air. The girls greeted

her.

“You wasn’t at the club last night, Rose, so we came up to see you,”

said Jennie.

“No, I never get home till most 9 o’clock on Fridays and on Mondays.

It’s awful busy at the laundry these days,” Rose explained. “I wisht I

was back at the factory packing peanut brittle. It’s no joke standin’

foldin’ all day long. My side hurts something fierce; it wakes me up at

night.” The group walked along arm in arm toward the tenement in which

Rose Morelli lived.

“Have you heard from Tony?” Jennie asked as they entered the Morelli

flat.