THE WRECKED FOUNDATIONS OF DOMESTICITY
"Sense with keenest edge unused
Yet unsteel'd by scathing fire:
Lovely feet as yet unbruised
On the ways of dark desire!"
These words written by a poet to his young son express the longing
which has at times seized all of us, to guard youth from the mass of
difficulties which may be traced to the obscure manifestation of that
fundamental susceptibility of which we are all slow to speak and
concerning which we evade public responsibility, although it brings
its scores of victims into the police courts every morning.
At the very outset we must bear in mind that the senses of youth are
singularly acute, and ready to respond to every vivid appeal. We know
that nature herself has sharpened the senses for her own purposes, and
is deliberately establishing a connection between them and the newly
awakened susceptibility of sex; for it is only through the outward
senses that the selection of an individual mate is made and the
instinct utilized for nature's purposes. It would seem, however, that
nature was determined that the force and constancy of the instinct
must make up for its lack of precision, and that she was totally
unconcerned that this instinct ruthlessly seized the youth at the
moment when he was least prepared to cope with it; not only because
his powers of self-control and discrimination are unequal to the task,
but because his senses are helplessly wide open to the world. These
early manifestations of the sex susceptibility are for the most part
vague and formless, and are absolutely without definition to the youth
himself. Sometimes months and years elapse before the individual mate
is selected and determined upon, and during the time when the
differentiation is not complete--and it often is not--there is of
necessity a great deal of groping and waste.
This period of groping is complicated by the fact that the youth's
power for appreciating is far ahead of his ability for expression.
"The inner traffic fairly obstructs the outer current," and it is
nothing short of cruelty to over-stimulate his senses as does the
modern city. This period is difficult everywhere, but it seems at
times as if a great city almost deliberately increased its perils. The
newly awakened senses are appealed to by all that is gaudy and
sensual, by the flippant street music, the highly colored theater
posters, the trashy love stories, the feathered hats, the cheap
heroics of the revolvers displayed in the pawn-shop windows. This
fundamental susceptibility is thus evoked without a corresponding stir
of the higher imagination, and the result is as dangerous as possible.
We are told upon good authority that "If the imagination is retarded,
while the senses remain awake, we have a state of esthetic
insensibility,"--in other words, the senses become sodden and cannot
be lifted from the ground. It is this state of "esthetic
insensibility" into which we allow the youth to fall which is so
distressing and so unjustifiable. Sex impulse then becomes merely a
dumb and powerful instinct without in the least awakening the
imagination or the heart, nor does it overflow into neighboring fields
of consciousness. Every city contains hundreds of degenerates who have
been over-mastered and borne down by it; they fill the casual lodging
houses and the infirmaries. In many instances it has pushed men of
ability and promise to the bottom of the social scale. Warner, in his
_American Charities_, designates it as one of the steady forces making
for failure and poverty, and contends that "the inherent uncleanness
of their minds prevents many men from rising above the rank of day
laborers and finally incapacitates them even for that position." He
also suggests that the modern man has a stronger imagination than the
man of a few hundred years ago and that sensuality destroys him the
more rapidly.
It is difficult to state how much evil and distress might be averted
if the imagination were utilized in its higher capacities through the
historic paths. An English moralist has lately asserted that "much of
the evil of the time may be traced to outraged imagination. It is the
strongest quality of the brain and it is starved. Children, from
their earliest years, are hedged in with facts; they are not trained
to use their minds on the unseen."
In failing to diffuse and utilize this fundamental instinct of sex
through the imagination, we not only inadvertently foster vice and
enervation, but we throw away one of the most precious implements for
ministering to life's highest needs. There is no doubt that this ill
adjusted function consumes quite unnecessarily vast stores of vital
energy, even when we contemplate it in its immature manifestations
which are infinitely more wholesome than the dumb swamping process.
Every high school boy and girl knows the difference between the
concentration and the diffusion of this impulse, although they would
be hopelessly bewildered by the use of the terms. They will declare
one of their companions to be "in love" if his fancy is occupied by
the image of a single person about whom all the newly found values
gather, and without whom his solitude is an eternal melancholy. But if
the stimulus does not appear as a definite image, and the values
evoked are dispensed over the world, the young person suddenly seems
to have discovered a beauty and significance in many things--he
responds to poetry, he becomes a lover of nature, he is filled with
religious devotion or with philanthropic zeal. Experience, with young
people, easily illustrates the possibility and value of diffusion.
It is neither a short nor an easy undertaking to substitute the love
of beauty for mere desire, to place the mind above the senses; but is
not this the sum of the immemorial obligation which rests upon the
adults of each generation if they would nurture and restrain the
youth, and has not the whole history of civilization been but one long
effort to substitute psychic impulsion for the driving force of blind
appetite?
Society has recognized the "imitative play" impulse of children and
provides them with tiny bricks with which to "build a house," and
dolls upon which they may lavish their tenderness. We exalt the love
of the mother and the stability of the home, but in regard to those
difficult years between childhood and maturity we beg the question and
unless we repress, we do nothing. We are so timid and inconsistent
that although we declare the home to be the foundation of society, we
do nothing to direct the force upon which the continuity of the home
depends. And yet to one who has lived for years in a crowded quarter
where men, women and children constantly jostle each other and press
upon every inch of space in shop, tenement and street, nothing is more
impressive than the strength, the continuity, the varied and powerful
manifestations, of family affection. It goes without saying that every
tenement house contains women who for years spend their hurried days
in preparing food and clothing and pass their sleepless nights in
tending and nursing their exigent children, with never one thought for
their own comfort or pleasure or development save as these may be
connected with the future of their families. We all know as a matter
of course that every shop is crowded with workingmen who year after
year spend all of their wages upon the nurture and education of their
children, reserving for themselves but the shabbiest clothing and a
crowded place at the family table.
"Bad weather for you to be out in," you remark on a February evening,
as you meet rheumatic Mr. S. hobbling home through the freezing sleet
without an overcoat. "Yes, it is bad," he assents: "but I've walked to
work all this last year. We've sent the oldest boy back to high
school, you know," and he moves on with no thought that he is doing
other than fulfilling the ordinary lot of the ordinary man.
These are the familiar and the constant manifestations of family
affection which are so intimate a part of life that we scarcely
observe them.
In addition to these we find peculiar manifestations of family
devotion exemplifying that touching affection which rises to unusual
sacrifice because it is close to pity and feebleness. "My cousin and
his family had to go back to Italy. He got to Ellis Island with his
wife and five children, but they wouldn't let in the feeble-minded
boy, so of course they all went back with him. My cousin was fearful
disappointed."
Or, "These are the five children of my brother. He and his wife, my
father and mother, were all done for in the bad time at Kishinef. It's
up to me all right to take care of the kids, and I'd no more go back
on them than I would on my own." Or, again: "Yes, I have seven
children of my own. My husband died when Tim was born. The other three
children belong to my sister, who died the year after my husband. I
get on pretty well. I scrub in a factory every night from six to
twelve, and I go out washing four days a week. So far the children
have all gone through the eighth grade before they quit school," she
concludes, beaming with pride and joy.
That wonderful devotion to the child seems at times, in the midst of
our stupid social and industrial arrangements, all that keeps society
human, the touch of nature which unites it, as it was that same
devotion which first lifted it out of the swamp of bestiality. The
devotion to the child is "the inevitable conclusion of the two
premises of the practical syllogism, the devotion of man to woman."
It is, of course, this tremendous force which makes possible the
family, that bond which holds society together and blends the
experience of generations into a continuous story. The family has been
called "the fountain of morality," "the source of law," "the necessary
prelude to the state" itself; but while it is continuous historically,
this dual bond must be made anew a myriad times in each generation,
and the forces upon which its formation depend must be powerful and
unerring. It would be too great a risk to leave it to a force whose
manifestations are intermittent and uncertain. The desired result is
too grave and fundamental.
One Sunday evening an excited young man came to see me, saying that he
must have advice; some one must tell him at once what to do, as his
wife was in the state's prison serving a sentence for a crime which he
himself had committed. He had seen her the day before, and though she
had been there only a month he was convinced that she was developing
consumption. She was "only seventeen, and couldn't stand the hard
work and the 'low down' women" whom she had for companions. My remark
that a girl of seventeen was too young to be in the state penitentiary
brought out the whole wretched story.
He had been unsteady for many years and the despair of his thoroughly
respectable family who had sent him West the year before. In Arkansas
he had fallen in love with a girl of sixteen and married her. His
mother was far from pleased, but had finally sent him money to bring
his bride to Chicago, in the hope that he might settle there. _En
route_ they stopped at a small town for the naïve reason that he
wanted to have an aching tooth pulled. But the tooth gave him an
excellent opportunity to have a drink, and before he reached the
office of the country practitioner he was intoxicated. As they passed
through the vestibule he stole an overcoat hanging there, although the
little wife piteously begged him to let it alone. Out of sheer bravado
he carried it across his arm as they walked down the street, and was,
of course, immediately arrested "with the goods upon him." In sheer
terror of being separated from her husband, the wife insisted that
she had been an accomplice, and together they were put into the county
jail awaiting the action of the Grand Jury. At the end of the sixth
week, on one of the rare occasions when they were permitted to talk to
each other through the grating which separated the men's visiting
quarters from the women's, the young wife told her husband that she
made up her mind to swear that she had stolen the overcoat. What could
she do if he were sent to prison and she were left free? She was
afraid to go to his people and could not possibly go back to hers. In
spite of his protest, that very night she sent for the state's
attorney and made a full confession, giving her age as eighteen in the
hope of making her testimony more valuable. From that time on they
stuck to the lie through the indictment, the trial and her conviction.
Apparently it had seemed to him only a well-arranged plot until he had
visited the penitentiary the day before, and had really seen her
piteous plight. Remorse had seized him at last, and he was ready to
make every restitution. She, however, had no notion of giving up--on
the contrary, as she realized more clearly what prison life meant, she
was daily more determined to spare him the experience. Her letters,
written in the unformed hand of a child--for her husband had himself
taught her to read and write--were filled with a riot of
self-abnegation, the martyr's joy as he feels the iron enter the
flesh. Thus had an illiterate, neglected girl through sheer devotion
to a worthless sort of young fellow inclined to drink, entered into
that noble company of martyrs.
When girls "go wrong" what happens? How has this tremendous force,
valuable and necessary for the foundation of the family, become
misdirected? When its manifestations follow the legitimate channels of
wedded life we call them praiseworthy; but there are other
manifestations quite outside the legal and moral channels which yet
compel our admiration.
A young woman of my acquaintance was married to a professional
criminal named Joe. Three months after the wedding he was arrested
and "sent up" for two years. Molly had always been accustomed to many
lovers, but she remained faithful to her absent husband for a year. At
the end of that time she obtained a divorce which the state law makes
easy for the wife of a convict, and married a man who was "rich and
respectable"--in fact, he owned the small manufacturing establishment
in which her mother did the scrubbing. He moved his bride to another
part of town six miles away, provided her with a "steam-heated flat,"
furniture upholstered in "cut velvet," and many other luxuries of
which Molly heretofore had only dreamed. One day as she was wheeling a
handsome baby carriage up and down the prosperous street, her brother,
who was "Joe's pal," came to tell her that Joe was "out," had come to
the old tenement and was "mighty sore" because "she had gone back on
him." Without a moment's hesitation Molly turned the baby carriage in
the direction of her old home and never stopped wheeling it until she
had compassed the entire six miles. She and Joe rented the old room
and went to housekeeping. The rich and respectable husband made every
effort to persuade her to come back, and then another series of
efforts to recover his child, before he set her free through a court
proceeding. Joe, however, steadfastly refused to marry her, still
"sore" because she had not "stood by." As he worked only
intermittently, and was too closely supervised by the police to do
much at his old occupation, Molly was obliged to support the humble
ménage by scrubbing in a neighboring lodging house and by washing "the
odd shirts" of the lodgers. For five years, during which time two
children were born, when she was constantly subjected to the taunts of
her neighbors, and when all the charitable agencies refused to give
help to such an irregular household, Molly happily went on her course
with no shade of regret or sorrow. "I'm all right as long as Joe keeps
out of the jug," was her slogan of happiness, low in tone, perhaps,
but genuine and "game." Her surroundings were as sordid as possible,
consisting of a constantly changing series of cheap "furnished rooms"
in which the battered baby carriage was the sole witness of better
days. But Molly's heart was full of courage and happiness, and she was
never desolate until her criminal lover was "sent up" again, this time
on a really serious charge.
These irregular manifestations form a link between that world in which
each one struggles to "live respectable," and that nether world in
which are also found cases of devotion and of enduring affection
arising out of the midst of the folly and the shame. The girl there
who through all tribulation supports her recreant "lover," or the girl
who overcomes, her drink and opium habits, who renounces luxuries and
goes back to uninteresting daily toil for the sake of the good opinion
of a man who wishes her to "appear decent," although he never means to
marry her, these are also impressive.
One of our earliest experiences at Hull-House had to do with a lover
of this type and the charming young girl who had become fatally
attached to him. I can see her now running for protection up the broad
steps of the columned piazza then surrounding Hull-House. Her slender
figure was trembling with fright, her tear-covered face swollen and
bloodstained from the blows he had dealt her. "He is apt to abuse me
when he is drunk," was the only explanation, and that given by way of
apology, which could be extracted from her. When we discovered that
there had been no marriage ceremony, that there were no living
children, that she had twice narrowly escaped losing her life, it
seemed a simple matter to insist that the relation should be broken
off. She apathetically remained at Hull-House for a few weeks, but
when her strength had somewhat returned, when her lover began to
recover from his prolonged debauch of whiskey and opium, she insisted
upon going home every day to prepare his meals and to see that the
little tenement was clean and comfortable because "Pierre is always so
sick and weak after one of those long ones." This of course meant that
she was drifting back to him, and when she was at last restrained by
that moral compulsion, by that overwhelming of another's will which is
always so ruthlessly exerted by those who are conscious that virtue is
struggling with vice, her mind gave way and she became utterly
distraught.
A poor little Ophelia, I met her one night wandering in the hall half
dressed in the tawdry pink gown "that Pierre liked best of all" and
groping on the blank wall to find the door which might permit her to
escape to her lover. In a few days it was obvious that hospital
restraint was necessary, but when she finally recovered we were
obliged to admit that there is no civic authority which can control
the acts of a girl of eighteen. From the hospital she followed her
heart directly back to Pierre, who had in the meantime moved out of
the Hull-House neighborhood. We knew later that he had degraded the
poor child still further by obliging her to earn money for his drugs
by that last method resorted to by a degenerate man to whom a woman's
devotion still clings.
It is inevitable that a force which is enduring enough to withstand
the discouragements, the suffering and privation of daily living,
strenuous enough to overcome and rectify the impulses which make for
greed and self-indulgence, should be able, even under untoward
conditions, to lift up and transfigure those who are really within
its grasp and set them in marked contrast to those who are merely
playing a game with it or using it for gain. But what has happened to
these wretched girls? Why has this beneficent current cast them upon
the shores of death and destruction when it should have carried them
into the safe port of domesticity? Through whose fault has this basic
emotion served merely to trick and deride them?
Older nations have taken a well defined line of action in regard to
it.
Among the Hull-House neighbors are many of the Latin races who employ
a careful chaperonage over their marriageable daughters and provide
husbands for them at an early age. "My father will get a husband for
me this winter," announces Angelina, whose father has brought her to a
party at Hull-House, and she adds with a toss of her head, "I saw two
already, but my father says they haven't saved enough money to marry
me." She feels quite as content in her father's wisdom and ability to
provide her with a husband as she does in his capacity to escort her
home safely from the party. He does not permit her to cross the
threshold after nightfall unaccompanied by himself, and unless the
dowry and the husband are provided before she is eighteen he will
consider himself derelict in his duty towards her. "Francesca can't
even come to the Sodality meeting this winter. She lives only across
from the church but her mother won't let her come because her father
is out West working on a railroad," is a comment one often hears. The
system works well only when it is carried logically through to the end
of an early marriage with a properly-provided husband.
Even with the Latin races, when the system is tried in America it
often breaks down, and when the Anglo-Saxons anywhere imitate this
régime it is usually utterly futile. They follow the first part of the
program as far as repression is concerned, but they find it impossible
to follow the second because all sorts of inherited notions deter
them. The repressed girl, if she is not one of the languishing type,
takes matters into her own hands, and finds her pleasures in illicit
ways, without her parents' knowledge. "I had no idea my daughter was
going to public dances. She always told me she was spending the night
with her cousin on the South Side. I hadn't a suspicion of the truth,"
many a broken-hearted mother explains. An officer who has had a long
experience in the Juvenile Court of Chicago, and has listened to
hundreds of cases involving wayward girls, gives it as his deliberate
impression that a large majority of cases are from families where the
discipline had been rigid, where they had taken but half of the
convention of the Old World and left the other half.
Unless we mean to go back to these Old World customs which are already
hopelessly broken, there would seem to be but one path open to us in
America. That path implies freedom for the young people made safe only
through their own self-control. This, in turn, must be based upon
knowledge and habits of clean companionship. In point of fact no
course between the two is safe in a modern city, and in the most
crowded quarters the young people themselves are working out a
protective code which reminds one of the instinctive protection that
the free-ranging child in the country learns in regard to poisonous
plants and "marshy places," or of the cautions and abilities that the
mountain child develops in regard to ice and precipices. This
statement, of course, does not hold good concerning a large number of
children in every crowded city quarter who may be classed as
degenerates, the children of careless or dissolute mothers who fall
into all sorts of degenerate habits and associations before childhood
is passed, who cannot be said to have "gone wrong" at any one moment
because they have never been in the right path even of innocent
childhood; but the statement is sound concerning thousands of girls
who go to and from work every day with crowds of young men who meet
them again and again in the occasional evening pleasures of the more
decent dance halls or on a Sunday afternoon in the parks.
The mothers who are of most use to these normal city working girls are
the mothers who develop a sense of companionship with the changing
experiences of their daughters, who are willing to modify ill-fitting
social conventions into rules of conduct which are of actual service
to their children in their daily lives of factory work and of city
amusements. Those mothers, through their sympathy and adaptability,
substitute keen present interests and activity for solemn warnings and
restraint, self-expression for repression. Their vigorous family life
allies itself by a dozen bonds to the educational, the industrial and
the recreational organizations of the modern city, and makes for
intelligent understanding, industrial efficiency and sane social
pleasures.
By all means let us preserve the safety of the home, but let us also
make safe the street in which the majority of our young people find
their recreation and form their permanent relationships. Let us not
forget that the great processes of social life develop themselves
through influences of which each participant is unconscious as he
struggles alone and unaided in the strength of a current which seizes
him and bears him along with myriads of others, a current which may so
easily wreck the very foundations of domesticity.