CHAPTER I

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THE UNADJUSTED GIRL

CRIMINAL SCIENCE MONOGRAPH No. 4

_Supplement to the Journal of_

THE AMERICAN INSTITUTE OF CRIMINAL LAW AND CRIMINOLOGY

THE UNADJUSTED GIRL

WITH CASES AND STANDPOINT FOR BEHAVIOR ANALYSIS

BY

WILLIAM I. THOMAS

FOREWORD BY

MRS. W. F. DUMMER

[Illustration]

BOSTON

LITTLE, BROWN, AND COMPANY

1923

_Copyright, 1923_,

BY LITTLE, BROWN, AND COMPANY.

_All rights reserved_

Published June, 1923

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

------------------------------------------------------------------------

EDITORIAL ANNOUNCEMENT

The rapid development of criminological research in this country since

the organization of the American Institute of Criminal Law and

Criminology, has made a place in America for this series of Criminal

Science Monographs. Their publication is authorized by the American

Institute of Criminal Law and Criminology. They appear as supplements to

the Journal of the Institute. We believe the present number will satisfy

a real need in America.

ROBERT H. GAULT, }

Chairman, Editor of the }

Journal of Criminal Law }

and Criminology. }

FREDERIC B. CROSSLEY, } Committee on Publications

Northwestern University. } of the

ROBERT W. MILLAR, } American Institute

Northwestern University. } of Criminal

JOHN H. WIGMORE, } Law and Criminology.

Northwestern University. }

JOEL D. HUNTER, }

Superintendent Chicago }

United Charities. }

FOREWORD

Modern psychology is throwing so much light upon human behavior that

concerning delinquency one cannot do better than follow the teaching of

Spinoza, “Neither condemn nor ridicule but try to understand.” Such an

attitude led to the establishment of the first mental clinic in

connection with a court, where Doctor William Healy revealed astonishing

facts regarding causes and cures of delinquency; such an attitude led to

this sociological study of delinquency.

Having learned from Doctor Healy the relation between mental conflict

and misconduct and the possibility of cure by the freeing of blocked

emotion, social workers were somewhat prepared for one of the unusual

situations brought about by the war,—namely, the wholesale arrests of

girls and women on suspicion of venereal disease, with effort on the

part of the government not only to cure the physical disease but to

rehabilitate the individual. The gathering of data by the Girls’

Protective Bureau of the United States Interdepartmental Social Hygiene

Board gave a basis for study which years of private practice or

philanthropy could not assemble. One felt about these young prostitutes

that mere suppression by force would not reach the root of the

matter,—that causes and conditions must be studied. With this in mind

certain lines of research were undertaken, primarily to gather and

interpret data which would lead to less unjust treatment than is at

present accorded so-called delinquent women, by changing public opinion

and especially altering procedure in our courts, jails and hospitals. It

was hoped that such data might also tend toward a better understanding

of human relations and indicate marriage standards based upon biology

and psychology rather than on economics.

A profound statement of Mr. Thomas’s is, “Statistics in themselves are

nothing more than the symptoms of unknown causal processes. A social

institution can be understood and modified only if we do not limit

ourselves to the study of its formal organization but analyze the way in

which it appears in the personal experience of various members of the

group and follow the influence it has on their lives.” It was just the

sudden knowledge of the effect of our custom, law and court procedure as

they influenced the lives of individual girls which brought critical

questioning of such justice as had been meted out to them. It seemed as

if society had been systematically wrecking women.

The government program acted as a searchlight flashed upon the farce of

our dual system of morality. In the case of a child suffering assault or

rape she might be detained in an old type of reform school till her

majority gave her freedom—a poor preparation for later life—while the

man, were he convicted, rarely had a long sentence. Of two parents of a

child conceived out of wedlock, for the girl abortion is classed as

crime; motherhood brings shame and condemnation; while the part of the

man passes as a biological necessity. Whereas in some hospitals fifty

per cent of the women arrested on suspicion of disease were found to be

not infected, it was suggested in one city that prophylactic stations be

established in men’s clubs and even in boys’ schools,—the futility of

fine and jail for the woman, freedom for the man.

This war measure brought hundreds of girls to our courts for whom in

some States there was no proper provision. This emergency developed

rapid establishment of correctional schools of most approved type,

showing marked success in the rehabilitation of girls, even with some

seeming psychopathic cases. Little girls unfortunate enough to have a

sex experience called to the attention of the court, who in the past

would have been confined behind bars, are now placed in the country,

given good food and opportunity for free happy activity. Formerly for

the unmarried mothers the psychological values of pregnancy were

ignored, and in the effort to save the reputation by concealing

motherhood the mind and character were often weakened.

If fear in soldiers could produce pathological symptoms both mental and

physical, curable by psychiatry, might not some of this apparent

feeble-mindedness be a hysteria resulting from shock? Most case

histories showed early sex experience treated, especially when pregnancy

resulted, with utmost scorn, contempt and condemnation. Surely the world

offers to these little unmarried mothers as menacing a front as was

faced by the soldiers in France. For girls passing through Juvenile Hall

in Los Angeles, right environment is provided where they receive

friendly care and encouragement. As a psychologist said of the soldiers,

“Morale is pumped into them.” The fact that they have shown during

pregnancy an advance in intelligence quotient amounting in some cases to

ten points demands a reconsideration of opinion till further data give

scientific basis for judgment.

In the introduction to Kammerer’s study of “The Unmarried Mother”,

Doctor Healy questions whether such a constructive act as bringing a

child into the world should ever be classed as a crime. Life, legal or

illegal, must be respected.

One grows to love the incorrigible girl. She has many fine qualities. A

protective officer was escorting to a State institution a girl thought

too bad for a House of the Good Shepherd. A train wreck occurred and she

thought, “Here is where my girl escapes me.” On the contrary, the

“incorrigible” turned to and helped as many as possible of those

injured. The biologist tells us it is just this superabundant vitality

that is necessary for the evolution of higher types.

In the autumn of 1919 at the International Conference of Women

Physicians held in New York under the auspices of the National Y. W. C.

A. for discussion of the physical, mental and social health of women,

many valuable contributions were made to our problem. The relation

between sex shock and nervous disease was plainly given by the

psychoanalysts, and their theory of retarded emotion and fixation of

infantile affection explained varied phases of behavior. Most

encouraging of all was Freud’s hypothesis of sublimation.

Those who, in Freud’s teaching of the danger of sex repression to mental

health, find merely sanction for license miss the point of his wonderful

message. This theory that life force, libido, creative energy, follows

the Law of Conservation true of Physical force—that as motion may become

heat, light or electricity, so this inner power may be transmuted from

procreative effort to creative work of hand and brain—would seem to

explain much of the modern success in the rehabilitation of the young

prostitute. This transmutation of sex force into art and religion had

been noted in the past by Jacob Boehme and James Hinton. Myers hinted it

in a line of poetry, “Forge and transform my passion into power”, but it

remained for Freud to bring it to common understanding. James Hinton,

the English surgeon, said just after our Civil War, “Prostitution will

pass as has slavery when it becomes too great a burden for humanity to

carry.” That time has come and prostitution must pass. Prostitution and

promiscuity will be eliminated not by force but through sublimation.

Further analysis of this hypothesis of sublimation shows that life

energy or libido may be manifested physically, psychically, socially,

spiritually:

Physically in motion, eating, drinking and in sex acts;

Psychically in art, science, literature, anything which uses one’s wits;

Socially in service to others;

Spiritually in meditating upon Infinite Power or seeking one’s relation

to The Whole.

Though these divisions give somewhat roughly general group types,

humanity shows infinite variety of expression, and individuals may

change from time to time according to influence and environment. Each

may be developed through her special abilities. One notes with interest

that associated with physical sex expression there is frequently great

cleverness in cookery and crochet. Each must be stabilized on her own

level.

An interesting report comes from El Retiro, the experimental school for

correctional education established by the city and county of Los Angeles

during the war. Of two hundred girls passing through this institution

during the first three years, only two have drifted to the underworld,

these being drug addicts when they came from the court. One hundred and

ninety-eight are functioning socially in the community. These girls were

all under twenty-one years. On arriving at El Retiro each girl is

studied by a group consisting of the referee of the court, the

psychologist, the superintendent, the teacher and the head of student

government. So soon as her interests and special abilities are

discovered, a project is chosen which will prepare her for constructive

living in the community. The girls are stimulated to mental expression

of energy, not set to hours of dull routine, scrubbing floors or paring

potatoes. Not punishment but responsibility develops power and leads to

higher expression and achievement. Science is teaching us that man is an

epitome of the past,—that in each human being is retained the impress of

prehuman behavior. As one analyst puts it, “Each day is an adjustment

between the higher nerve centers and the spinal column.” We must study

this conservation of life force that we may strengthen those

manifestations which show ascending effort and decrease the tendency to

revert to action patterns of earlier forms.

A dictum of the percipient mind of the biologist-sociologist, Lester

Ward, should startle us into fresh appraisal of life’s values. Shortly

before his death he said, “The day will come when society shall be as

much shocked at the crime of perpetuating the least taint of hereditary

disease, insanity or other serious defect, as it is now at the

comparatively harmless crime of incest.”

As an equation is solved more simply by algebra than arithmetic, so any

subject carried up into the next higher universe of discourse becomes

clarified, falls into proper perspective, and is more easily understood.

This thought in conjunction with the statement of Lester Ward shows the

need of extending our discussion to include women both in and out of

wedlock, and instead of differentiating the good from the bad by legal

definition, the ethics of human mating must be based upon those laws of

nature which secure the finest human values, the essential aim being an

ever better next generation.

The fundamental function of woman being motherhood, this with its

secondary manifestations explains much of her behavior. The devotion of

the young girl to the cadet who enslaves her reveals the same instinct

which holds a wife faithful through difficulties and degradation,—the

instinct from which have developed the virtues of loyalty, endurance and

self-sacrifice. The period of pregnancy should be (if the imagination be

not filled with old wives’ tales) one of health, exhilaration,

development of psychic values and social consciousness. Any woman

experiencing this wonderful functioning should be aided to as complete

psycho-biological fulfillment as her personality and the social

situation permit. Should the higher love and association of the father

of her child be lacking, so much the greater is her need of genuine help

and encouragement. Given this, she may be strengthened and stabilized

whether the man desert or become disaffected before or after a legal

ceremony.

Though mating and its resulting responsibilities have evolved our

highest virtues, marriage is now under attack. Not only are divorce and

illegitimacy evidenced as showing its failure, but intellectual women

are demanding freedom and self-expression which they find doubtful in

marriage. In Paris one woman who believed the relation of the unmarried

mother to her child more ethical under French law than that of the

married mother, lived out of wedlock for years of monogamous mating, her

daughter bearing her name. She and the father of her child were leaders

in La Ligue pour le Droit des Femmes, of which Victor Hugo was an early

president. Fundamentally this attack is encouraging, indicating effort

to bring law up to newer ideals of ethical mating. Man’s marriage law

was based upon economics, upon the idea of possession and inheritance of

possessions. In Scandinavia, where woman has for some time been voting,

there is a tendency to make the law conform to biology. In Norway all

births are registered. The father as well as the mother must be held

responsible and there are no illegitimate children. Under their law for

children born out of wedlock which went into effect in 1915, in only

nine out of the first five thousand cases was paternity contested. Here

law is conforming to biologic fact. Before science can offer a new

marriage law the psychology of mating must be further studied. Women are

classifying as prostitution a marriage in which psychical values are

ignored. They seek chastity in marriage according to the definition

given in Doctor S. Herbert’s Fundamentals in Sexual Ethics,

“Chastity—true chastity—has reference not so much to actions as to

feelings and motives. It is the quality of the emotion in relation to

sexual acts that constitutes a state of purity or impurity.”

Mr. Thomas’s study quite disproves the former theory of psychologists

and criminologists that the prostitute is a type and can live no other

way. Girls may come through a measure of prostitution, marry and make

successes of their lives. In China a girl will sometimes earn through

prostitution the money which makes marriage possible. In that country,

where the seclusion of wives necessitates the entertainment of men

guests at public places, the so-called prostitute may be called to act

as hostess at dinner, to provide music or dancing at regular stipulated

prices, according to the class to which she belongs, this not

necessarily including the barter of the body. Even dominoes are played

at so much a game. It would seem strange to our Y. W. C. A. hostesses at

the army camps that their hospitality to the soldiers would in China

have been classed as activities of the prostitute.

One of the surprises of the war work was the definite number of married

women carrying on not commercial prostitution, but clandestine

relationships. They were not vicious but immature. Their husbands being

away, they seemed unable to get on without the aid of a friendly man.

The need was not money but affectionate companionship. In some cases

women were glad to escape from conditions of marital cruelty, yet they

were so simple-minded as to accept instead most casual relationships.

Few people are able to live without some affectional alliance. An

unmarried woman may establish a permanent friendship with another woman;

one of less stable personality may pass from one “crush” to another,

leaving havoc in her wake as does the promiscuous male, yet for this she

may not be haled into court. If affection be lacking it takes a strong

purpose in life to steady either a man or woman.

To claim that a girl need not be ruined or may recover from sex conflict

expressed or repressed is not advocating promiscuity. Far from it. Nor

in this effort of women to free themselves from the blunders hidden

under the sanction of marriage should young people be encouraged to

believe that to repeat those same blunders freely is the ideal of

mating. Much nervous disease and delinquency are traceable to early

emotional shock. Each case requires special study of personality. The

results of any conflict are dependent upon previous environment,

training, characteristics, interests, ideals. Freud says that if two

little girls, one the daughter of intellectual parents, the other the

child of the janitor, should have some sex experience, the former might

later suffer neurosis while the latter would probably be unharmed. Cases

of disease and of delinquency show the persistence of the association of

idea, the strange continuance of symptoms fixed as conditioned reflexes

which hamper a human being for years. Recent study of pre-delinquent

groups has revealed children “with normal or even superior native

endowment who are prevented from showing their ability by factors acting

upon their feelings.” These illustrate the dangers of affectional

wound,—the sensitivity of personality to emotional shock. A conflict may

make or break an individual.

Just what is it which differentiates between two lives of similar

asocial behavior or suffering affectional wounds, one becoming

disorganized, the other attaining higher levels of mental and social

integration? Certain psychoanalytic biographies show struggles of

eminent men and women who passed through periods of mental strain or

moral failure, yet rose superior to and even strengthened by their

wrestling with life. Our revered Abraham Lincoln not only kept bride and

guests waiting on the first date set for his wedding, but disappeared

from family and friends for three days. Imagine the frenzy of the modern

press over such an event.

Psychiatrists are interpreting to nervous patients symptoms of strain

and sorrow, assisting them to assimilate such emotional experience and

to regain poise. It is possible to minimize sexual blunder as

unfortunate but not irreparable. One recovers from disease, from

disappointment. One lie told may bring from the parent an explanation of

the importance of truth and be a milestone on the upward path. Such

lesson, however, should never be based on condemnation but must be

linked with idealism. A wise physician said, “Nature tends toward

meliorism.” This accounts for the success of girls who pull themselves

up without aid.

That nature has brought us up from the amœba to man should give us

confidence in Life Force. Life is not so simple as to have one

“definition of the situation” solve the whole problem. This will take

further trial and error. The scientific mind observes, differentiates,

finds contrasts and resemblances. Bits of inorganic elements may be

identical, but in the study of living organisms the higher the type the

greater the possibility of variation, till in man no two are identical

in finger print, still less so in emotional reaction. Even when a new

period of socialization shall have simplified life, each individual must

still be considered separately, each personality approached with utmost

reverence, accepted for values and possibilities which when developed

displace asocial behavior. The problems of sexual disharmony, retarded

emotion, affectional distress, which send people of wealth to the

sanitarium or divorce court, lead the poor to delinquency. The future

court of domestic relations may become a clinic for all.

On the whole this period of individualization is more fortunate for

women than otherwise. Their struggle for independence is winning higher

standards of affectional association in friendships with both sexes,

higher psychic and social levels of group coöperation. Though one

deplores the necessity of divorce one watches its increase with the

feeling that consecutive marriages are an advance upon simultaneous

promiscuity. From marriage based upon possession there is evolving a

fine comradeship in which psychic fertilization becomes ever more

significant as is seen in the collaboration of man and woman in art,

science, literature and social service. While marriage within the law

may attain the highest level of human mating known today, and social

sanction is necessary for right environment for children, it is not law

which achieves this result but the ever evolving adjustments of fine

personality shown by men and women in whom emotion and intellect and

will have matured harmoniously and in whose lives sublimation begun in

childhood has given stability.

Sex has always baffled humanity. Alternately it has been considered

sacred and sinful, attached to temple worship or cast beyond the pale.

In this day of scientific synthesis we are solving some at least of the

fundamentals of this Welträtsel.

This present research of William I. Thomas with his trenchant

sociological analysis is a distinct contribution not only to the study

of delinquency but to educational and industrial problems. As his

conclusions point toward the practice of the most advanced experimental

schools and also conform to the theories of certain leading

psychiatrists, this triple concurrence of opinion indicates approach to

scientific truth. Mr. Thomas’s interpretation of today’s unrest as a

“period of individualization following and preceding periods of

socialization” emphasizes our present opportunity to reorganize the

administration of justice. Let such reorganization be based upon that

emergent truth which Dean Pound has called “the most important change of

the century,—the transference of the sense of value from property to

humanity.”

ETHEL S. DUMMER

CONTENTS

CHAPTER PAGE

EDITORIAL ANNOUNCEMENT iii

FOREWORD. By Mrs. W. F. Dummer v

I THE WISHES 1

II THE REGULATION OF THE WISHES 41

III THE INDIVIDUALIZATION OF BEHAVIOR 70

IV THE DEMORALIZATION OF GIRLS 98

V SOCIAL AGENCIES 151

VI THE MEASUREMENT OF SOCIAL INFLUENCE 222

INDEX 259

THE UNADJUSTED GIRL

CHAPTER I

THE WISHES

It is impossible to understand completely any human being or any single

act of his behavior, just as it is impossible to understand completely

why a particular wild rose bloomed under a particular hedge at a

particular moment. A complete understanding in either case would imply

an understanding of all cosmic processes, of their interrelations and

sequences. But it is not harder to comprehend the behavior of the

“unadjusted” or “delinquent” person, say the vagabond or the prostitute,

than that of the normally adjusted person, say the business man or the

housewife.

In either case we realize that certain influences have been at work

throughout life and that these are partly inborn, representing the

original nature of man, the so-called instincts, and partly the claims,

appeals, rewards, and punishments of society,—the influences of his

social environment. But if we attempt to determine why the call of the

wild prevails in the one case and the call of home, regular work, and

“duty” in the other, we do not have different problems but aspects of

the same general problem. It is only as we understand behavior as a

whole that we can appreciate the failure of certain individuals to

conform to the usual standards. And similarly, the unrest and

maladjustment of the girl can be treated only as specifications of the

general unrest and maladjustment.

In this connection students of psychology and education have been

particularly interested in determining what the inborn tendencies really

are. There was however no scientifically controlled work on the point

until Watson undertook his experiments on newborn babies. At the time

his work was interrupted he had found only three “instincts” present in

the child at birth:

We are inclined now to believe that the fundamental emotional

reactions can be grouped under three general divisions: those

connected with fear; those connected with rage; those connected with

what, for lack of a better term, we may call joy or love.

These at least deserve the name of major emotions. Whether or not

other types of emotional reactions are present we cannot yet

determine.... The principal situations which call out fear responses

are as follows: (1) To suddenly remove from the infant all means of

support, as when one drops it from the hand to be caught by an

assistant.... (2) By loud sounds. (3) Occasionally when an infant is

just falling asleep the sudden pulling of the blanket upon which it

is lying will produce the fear response. (4) Finally, again, when

the child has just fallen asleep or is just ready to awake a sudden

push or a slight shake is an adequate stimulus. The responses are a

sudden catching of the breath, clutching randomly with the hands

(the grasping reflex invariably appearing when the child is

dropped), blinking of the eyelids, puckering of the lips, then

crying; in older children, flight and hiding.

Observations seem to show that the hampering of the infant’s

movements is the factor which apart from all training brings out the

movements characterized as rage. If the face or head is held, crying

results, quickly followed by screaming. The body stiffens and fairly

well coördinated slashing or striking movements of the hands and

arms result; the feet and legs are drawn up and down; the breath is

held until the child’s face is flushed. In older children the

slashing movements of the arms and legs are better coördinated and

appear as kicking, slapping, biting, pushing, etc. These reactions

continue until the irritating situation is removed, and sometimes do

not cease then. Almost any child from birth can be thrown into a

rage if its arms are held tightly to its sides.... Even the

best-natured child shows rage if its nose is held for a few

seconds....

The original stimuli for bringing out the earliest manifestations of

joy or love seem to be as follows: gentle stroking and soft tickling

of the infant’s body, patting, gentle rocking, turning upon the

stomach across the attendant’s knee, etc. The response varies: if

the infant is crying, crying ceases and a smile may appear; finally

a laugh, and extension of the arms. In older children and in adults

this emotion, due both to instinctive and habit factors, has an

extremely wide range of expression.[1]

We understand of course that these expressions of emotion mean a

preparation for action which will be useful in preserving life (anger),

avoiding death (fear), and in reproducing the species (love), but even

if our knowledge of the nervous system of man were complete we could not

read out of it all the concrete varieties of human experience. The

variety of expressions of behavior is as great as the variety of

situations arising in the external world, while the nervous system

represents only a general mechanism for action. We can however approach

the problem of behavior through the study of the forces which impel to

action, namely, the wishes, and we shall see that these correspond in

general with the nervous mechanism.

The human wishes have a great variety of concrete forms but are capable

of the following general classification:

1. The desire for new experience.

2. The desire for security.

3. The desire for response.

4. The desire for recognition.

1. THE DESIRE FOR NEW EXPERIENCE. Men crave excitement, and all

experiences are exciting which have in them some resemblance to the

pursuit, flight, capture, escape, death which characterized the earlier

life of mankind. Behavior is an adaptation to environment, and the

nervous system itself is a developmental adaptation. It represents,

among other things, a hunting pattern of interest. “Adventure” is what

the young boy wants, and stories of adventure. Hunting trips are

enticing; they are the survival of natural life. All sports are of the

hunting pattern; there is a contest of skill, daring, and cunning. It is

impossible not to admire the nerve of a daring burglar or highwayman. A

fight, even a dog fight, will draw a crowd. In gambling or dice throwing

you have the thrill of success or the chagrin of defeat. The organism

craves stimulation and seeks expansion and shock even through alcohol

and drugs. “Sensations” occupy a large part of the space in newspapers.

Courtship has in it an element of “pursuit.” Novels, theaters, motion

pictures, etc., are partly an adaptation to this desire, and their

popularity is a sign of its elemental force.

1. When 11 years old Walter McDermott was brought to court in

company with three other boys, accused of breaking a padlock on a

grocery store and attempting to enter the store at four o’clock

A.M., March 3, 1909, and also of breaking a padlock on the door of a

meat-market and stealing thirty-six cents from the cash till. Put on

probation. August 19, 1910, brought to court for entering with two

other boys a store and stealing a pocket-book containing $3.00. He

admitted to the officers he and his company were going to pick

pockets down town. He is the leader of the gang....

Sent to St. Charles. Ran away March 17, 1913. By breaking a window

got into a drug store, with two other boys, and stole a quantity of

cigars and $1.61. Having taken the money, he gave one boy ten cents

and another five cents. He gave away the cigars—eight or nine

boxes—to “a lot of men and some boys.” Spent the money “on candy and

stuff.” Committed to John Worthy School ... October 27. His conduct

has improved greatly; released on probation....

December 23, 1913, accused of having broken, with an adult boy (19),

into a clothing store and filled a suit case they found in the store

with clothing and jewelry. Caught in shop. The officer said, “He

would like to imitate Webb. He would like to kill some boy.”

According to his own confession, “It was six o’clock at night. I was

going to confession. I met a boy and he said, ‘Come out with me.’

About nine o’clock we came to a clothing store, and we walked to the

back, and seen a little hole. We pulled a couple of the laths off

and as soon as we got in we got caught.” But the officer said that

previous to this they had burglarized a butcher’s store and took

from there a butcher’s steel, and bored a hole in the wall with it.

Committed to John Worthy School. Released June 26th, 1914....

July 19, shot in a back alley twice at a little boy and once hit

him. Broke with two other boys at night into Salvation Army office,

broke everything he could and “used the office as a toilet room.”

Next day broke into a saloon, broke the piano, took cigars. Before

this, July 14th, broke a side window of a saloon, stole $4.00 and a

revolver. At the hearing Walter said about shooting the boy: “That

boy was passing and I asked him for a match, and I heard this boy

holler. I took a revolver off (his companion) and fixed a shot and

hit the boy.” His mother testified that he had spent only three

nights at home since the time of his release from John Worthy

School. He was arrested after the first offense, but escaped from

the detention home. Committed to John Worthy School....

Released after March 26. Committed a burglary in a grocery store,

April 7th. Shot a man with a revolver in the left arm April 4th.

Held up, with three other boys, a man on April 11, and robbed him of

$12.00. Caught later, while the other boys caught at once. Held to

the grand jury, found “not guilty” and released June 16, 1915.[2]

Vagabondage secures a maximum of new experience by the avoidance of the

routine of organized society and the irksomeness at labor to which I

will refer presently. In the constitutional vagabond the desire for new

experience predominates over the other wishes and is rather

contemplative and sensory, while in the criminal it is motor. But the

discouraged criminal is sometimes a vagabond.

2. I have known men on the road who were tramping purely and simply

because they loved to tramp. They had no appetite for liquor or

tobacco, so far as I could find, also were quite out of touch with

criminals and their habits; but somehow or other they could not

conquer that passion for roving. In a way this type of vagabond is

the most pitiful that I have ever known; and yet is the truest type

of the genuine voluntary vagrant.... The _Wanderlust_ vagrant ... is

free from the majority of passions common among vagrants and yet he

is the most earnest vagrant of all. To reform him it is necessary to

kill his personality, to take away his ambition—and this is a task

almost superhuman. Even when he is reformed he is a most cast-down

person.[3]

3. In view of the experience at home and abroad it is now proposed

in France to place vagrants in solitary confinement. These vagrants

are free-footed and irregular, devoted to the highway and an

open-air life, and they are far less afraid of fatigue and hardship

than of a steady and regular job. Advantage must be taken of their

weak point by imposing solitary confinement; they must be subjected

to what they most dread.[4]

4. Dear Brother Joe: I have decided to trop you a feiw lines and

hope you are well and you family also. I have heart of your troubles

but could not helpet. I have left Chi. and went tru Ky. Ind. N. Y.

Pa. N. Jerrsey and bak. Mich. Ohio. Ill. Wisconsin Minnesota Iway.

Mo. Kansas. Nebr. Colo. and I have not done any work since I left. I

am hapy on the road and it is very fine, I feel like I never will

work again onless I have seen all U. S. I am on my way to Californ

but I take my time. I ant in horry, you have been traveling, but you

have not seen anything yet and you have no experience about Ho Bo

life a tall. gee it is fine to be on the Road. It is 10 weeks since

I have no home but a Box Car. If you go on the Road again look for

my Monogram in the Cars. I will not work very much this Sumer only

to bull tru the Coast. It is blenty of work around here, but I dond

feel like working yet. I wisht you vas not mareyt and could be with

me. I bet you would engoeyet. I hav enofh to eet and a diferent

place to sleep every night and feel healty.[5]

5. Girl states that she has been a tramp since she was 15 years old,

going from one place to another, usually on freight trains, part of

the time dressed as a boy.... She has a child, two years old, which

she had illegitimately. The Court had compelled the father of it to

marry her. This statement was verified at this office on its

communication with the Probate Judge at Moundsville, W. Va.

She says that both her parents died when she was a little girl, that

she lived with her grandmother, who worked out for her living,

leaving her to run the streets. She says that from earliest

childhood she has had the wanderlust. She spoke of being as far west

as Denver, and mentioned several army camps she had visited, always

riding freight trains. Says that she never works except long enough

to get what she can’t beg. She says that she has no love for her

child and that her grandmother takes care of it with money supplied

by her husband. Her husband secured a divorce from her about three

months after their marriage. The reason she asked to stay at the

Detention Home over night was because she was going past the house

in the alley and saw through the open door several young girls and

thought it would be a nice place to stay all night.

Case was reported to office immediately after her admittance to the

Detention Home. The next morning immediately after breakfast, while

the Matron’s back was turned, the girl escaped. The case was

immediately reported to the Military and local police. The girl was

picked up near camp, having had intercourse with several soldiers.

Her appearance was the least attractive of any girl handled by this

office. The little bundle of clothes she carried, tied in a bandanna

handkerchief, was the dirtiest ever seen, and was burned at the

Detention Home. At police headquarters she gave her age as 20 years

but later told that she was but 17, which was verified from

Moundsville. She was given $10.00 and thirty days and costs in the

county jail, and while being taken from the jail to the clinic, by a

policeman and Miss Ball, she, with another girl, escaped. Every

effort was made to catch her, but she was as fleet as a deer.[6]

There is also in the hunting pattern of interest an intellectual

element. Watson does not note curiosity among the instincts because it

does not manifest itself at birth, but it appears later as the watchful

and exploratory attitude which determines the character of

action,—whether, for example, it shall be attack or flight. The

invention of the bow and arrow, the construction of a trap, the

preparation of poison, indicated a scientific curiosity in early man.

Activities of this kind were interesting because they implied life or

death. The man who constructed the poisoned arrow visualized the scene

in which it was to be used, saw the hunt in anticipation. The

preparation for the chase was psychologically part of the chase. The

modern scientific man uses the same mental mechanism but with a

different application. He spends long months in his laboratory on an

invention in anticipation of his final “achievement.” The so-called

“instinct for workmanship” and the “creative impulse” are “sublimations”

of the hunting psychosis. The making of a trap was a “problem”, and any

problem is interesting, whether the construction of a wireless or the

solving of a puzzle. Modern occupations or “pursuits” are interesting or

irksome to the degree that they have or have not a problematical

element:

The convict makes bricks, digs the earth, builds, and all his

occupations have a meaning and an end. Sometimes, even the prisoner

takes an interest in what he is doing. He then wishes to work more

skillfully, more advantageously. But let him be constrained to pour

water from one vessel into another, or to transport a quantity of

earth from one place to another in order to perform the contrary

operation immediately afterwards, then I am persuaded that at the

end of a few days the prisoner would strangle himself or commit a

thousand crimes, punishable with death, rather than live in such an

abject condition and endure such torments.[7]

The following description of a scientific adventure of a creative man,

which I transcribe from an earlier paper, illustrates perfectly the

psychological identity of a scientific quest with the pursuit of game:

6. Pasteur’s first scientific success was in the study of

crystallization, and in this connection he became particularly

interested in racemic acid. But this substance, produced first by

Kestner in 1820 as an accident in the manufacture of tartaric acid,

had in 1852 ceased to appear, in spite of all efforts to obtain it.

Pasteur and his friend Mitscherlich suspected that the failure to

get it was due to the fact that the present manufacturers of

tartaric acid were using a different tartar. The problem became then

to inspect all the factories producing tartaric acid and finally to

visit the sources from which the tartars came. This was the quest,

and the impatience which Pasteur showed to begin it reminds us of a

hound tugging at the leash. He asked Biot and Dumas to obtain for

him a commission from the Ministry, or the Académie, but exasperated

by the delay he was on the point of writing directly to the

President of the Republic. “It is,” he said, “a question that France

should make it a point of honor to solve through one of her

children.” Biot counselled patience and pointed out that it was not

necessary to “set the government in motion for this.” But Pasteur

would not wait. “I shall go to the end of the world,” he said. “I

_must_ discover the source of racemic acid,” and started

independently. I will excuse you from following this quest in

detail, but in a sort of diary prepared for Mme. Pasteur he showed

the greatest eagerness to have her share the joy of it. He went to

Germany, to Vienna, to Prague, studied Hungarian tartars. “Finally,”

he said, “I shall go to Trieste, where I shall find tartars of

various countries, notably those of the Levant, and those of the

neighborhood of Trieste itself.... If I had money enough I would go

to Italy; ... I shall give ten years to it if necessary.” And after

eight months he sent the following telegram: “I transform tartaric

acid into racemic acid. Please inform MM. Dumas and Senarmont.” He

had made his kill.[8]

The craftsman, the artist, the scientist, the professional man, and to

some extent the business man make new experience the basis of organized

activity, of work, and produce thereby social values. The division of

labor which removes the problematical from the various operations of the

work makes the task totally unstimulating. The repudiation of work leads

to the vagabondage just illustrated and to the antisocial attitudes

described below:

7. We have in New York at present, and have had for some years past,

an immense army of young men, boys between fifteen and twenty-six,

who are absolutely determined that under no conditions will they do

any honest work. They sponge on women, swindle, pick pockets, commit

burglary, act as highwaymen, and, if cornered, kill, in order to get

money dishonestly. How do they dispose of the vast sums they have

already stolen? Gambling and women. They are inveterate gamblers.[9]

And similarly, among women we have the thief, the prostitute, the

blackmailer, the vamp, and the “charity girl.”

2. THE DESIRE FOR SECURITY. The desire for security is opposed to the

desire for new experience. The desire for new experience is, as we have

seen, emotionally related to anger, which tends to invite death, and

expresses itself in courage, advance, attack, pursuit. The desire for

new experience implies, therefore, motion, change, danger, instability,

social irresponsibility. The individual dominated by it shows a tendency

to disregard prevailing standards and group interests. He may be a

social failure on account of his instability, or a social success if he

converts his experiences into social values,—puts them into the form of

a poem, makes of them a contribution to science. The desire for

security, on the other hand, is based on fear, which tends to avoid

death and expresses itself in timidity, avoidance, and flight. The

individual dominated by it is cautious, conservative, and apprehensive,

tending also to regular habits, systematic work, and the accumulation of

property.

The social types known as “bohemian” and “philistine” are determined

respectively by the domination of the desire for new experience and the

desire for security. The miser represents a case where the means of

security has become an end in itself.

8. Mamie Reilly’s mother viewed with increasing 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.”[10]

Document 9 shows the desire for security in a person who is

temperamentally inclined to new experience, but whose hardships call out

the desire for security. The whole life, in fact, of this man shows a

wavering between the two wishes. The desire for a “secure existence”

which he expresses here finally prevails and he approaches the

philistine type:

9. I had been ten weeks on the journey without finding any work, and

I had no idea how long I should still be obliged to tramp about the

world, and where was the end toward which I was going.... I should

have been very glad of my visit to Stach had it not been for the

thought of my wandering. If I had been going immediately to work

from Mokrsko I should certainly have fallen in love with some girl,

but the thought that I must tramp again about the world destroyed my

wish for anything. Moreover I wanted to leave as soon as possible,

for I could not look with dry eyes on how he wallowed in everything

and had whatever he wanted. Everybody respected and appreciated him;

everywhere doors were open for him, and he prized lightly everything

he had, for he had never experienced any evil or misery. For if I

had only one half of what he owned, how grateful I should be to God

for his goodness. And tears flowed from my eyes when I compared his

lot with mine. Fortune, how unjust you are! You drive one man about

the world and you have no pity on him though he is whipped with wind

and snow and cold stops his breath. People treat him worse than a

dog and drive him away from their doors, without asking: “Have you

eaten? have you a place to sleep?” And when he asks for anything

they are ready to beat him, like that peasant who struck me with the

whip. And what for? Perhaps this mayor would have acted likewise if

he had met me somewhere on my journey, and today he sets tables for

this same tramp.

What a difference between us! Why, we have the same parents, the

same name! And perhaps he is better considered because he is better

instructed than I? In my opinion, not even for that. Or perhaps

because he is nobler and handsomer? No, not for that. He merits

consideration only because he has a secure existence, because he has

bread. Let him wander into an unknown country; would he be better

considered than I? No, a thousand times No. So if I want to merit

consideration and respect, I ought first to win this [secure]

existence. And how shall I win it and where? Shall I find it in

tramping about the world? No, I must work, put money together and

establish my own bakery. Then I can say boldly that I have [a secure

existence] and even a better one than a teacher.[11]

In case 10 the desire for security is very strong but is overwhelmed by

the desire for new (sexual) experience of the type which I shall term

presently the “desire for response.”

10. I am a young woman of twenty-five, married seven years. I have a

good husband and two dear children; also a fine home. I was quite

happy until an unexpected misfortune entered my life, destroying my

happiness.

I consider it important to state that as a child I conducted myself

decently; people regarded me as a blessing and my parents were very

proud of me. As a young girl I strove to marry some good young man

and live contentedly. I had no higher ambition. My dream was

realized but unfortunately this did not last long.

Three years ago, my husband’s cousin, a young man, came to us. He

obtained employment in our town and lived with us. He stayed with us

four months altogether. During the first three months he was not in

my thoughts at all ... but during the last month my heart began to

beat for him. It was a novel sensation for me and I did not know the

meaning of this attraction; I said to myself: I love my husband and

my children, why then this strange fascination for my husband’s

cousin? He surely must have done something to me to arouse this

feeling in me, I thought. Fortunately, the young man soon lost his

position and left for some distant place. I felt very happy at his

departure, though I longed for him very much.

Two years passed thus, during which I resumed my former contented

life with my husband until one day my husband informed me that his

cousin had returned and planned to live in our town. I had a

presentiment of dark clouds that would soon gather over my head, so

I requested my husband to find other quarters than our own for his

relative, on the pretext that I was not well enough to care for

another person in the family. But as my husband reproached me and

charged me with lack of interest in his relatives, I had to yield

and give my permission for the man to stay with us.

I had decided to be indifferent and act as a stranger toward the

boarder that was thrust upon me, so as to avoid trouble. I did not

wish to ignite the feeling in my heart toward him by too close

contact. I almost never spoke to him, and never came near him. God

only knows how much these efforts cost me, but with all my energy I

fought against the diabolic feeling in my heart. Unfortunately, my

husband misinterpreted my behavior as a lack of hospitality. His

resentment compelled me to assume a more friendly attitude toward

his relative, as I wished to avoid quarrelling. What followed may

easily be inferred. From amiability I passed to love until he

occupied my whole mind and everybody else was non-existent for me.

Of course no one was aware of my predicament.

One day I decided to put an end to my sufferings by confessing all

to my boarder and requesting him to go away or at least leave our

house and avert a scandal. Unfortunately, my hope of a peaceful life

was not fulfilled, following my confession to the cousin. He

remained in our home and became more friendly than ever towards me.

I began to love him so intensely that I hardly noticed his growing

intimacy with me and as a result I gave birth to a baby whose father

is my husband’s cousin....

I am unable to describe to you one hundredth part of the misery this

has caused me. I always considered an unfaithful wife the worst

creature on earth and now ... I am myself a degraded woman.... The

mere thought of it drives me insane. My husband, of course, knows

nothing about the incident. When the child was born he wanted to

name it after one of his recently deceased relatives but ... I felt

as if this would desecrate the grave of his late relative. After

oceans of tears, I finally induced him to name the child after one

of my own relatives.

But my troubles did not end here. Every day in the week is a day of

utter anguish for me and every day I feel the tortures of hell.... I

can not stand my husband’s tenderness toward the child that is mine

but not his. When he gives the baby a kiss it burns me like a hot

coal dropped in my bosom. Every time he calls it his baby I hear

some one shouting into my ear the familiar epithet thrown at low

creatures like me ... and every time he takes the child in his arms

I am tempted to tell him the terrible truth.... And so I continue to

suffer. When my husband is not at home I spend my time studying the

face of my child, and when I think it appears to resemble its father

at such a moment I become terrified at the possibility of the baby’s

growing up into a real likeness to its father. What would my husband

say and do when he noticed the similarity between my baby and his

cousin? It is this thought that is killing me.... [If I should tell

my husband I am sure he would drive me away.] I do not care for

myself so much as for the child who would be branded with the name

given all such children and this would remain a stain upon him for

the rest of his life.... It is this fear that prevents me from

revealing to my husband my crime against him. But how much longer

shall I be able to bear the pain and wretchedness?[12]

3. THE DESIRE FOR RESPONSE. Up to this point I have described the types

of mental impressionability connected with the pursuit of food and the

avoidance of death, which are closely connected with the emotions of

anger and fear. The desire for response, on the other hand, is primarily

related to the instinct of love, and shows itself in the tendency to

seek and to give signs of appreciation in connection with other

individuals.

There is first of all the devotion of the mother to the child and the

response of the child, indicated in the passage from Watson above, and

in the following passage from Thorndike.

All women possess originally, from early childhood to death, some

interest in human babies, and a responsiveness to the instinctive

looks, calls, gestures and cries of infancy and childhood, being

satisfied by childish gurglings, smiles and affectionate gestures,

and moved to instinctive comforting acts by childish signs of pain,

grief and misery. Brutal habits may destroy, or competing habits

overgrow, or the lack of exercise weaken, these tendencies, but they

are none the less as original as any fact in human nature.[13]

This relation is of course useful and necessary since the child is

helpless throughout a period of years and would not live unless the

mother were impelled to give it her devotion. This attitude is present

in the father of the child also but is weaker, less demonstrative, and

called out more gradually.

In addition, the desire for response between the two sexes in connection

with mating is very powerful. An ardent courtship is full of assurances

and appeals for reassurance. Marriage and a home involve response but

with more settled habits, more routine work, less of new experience.

Jealousy is an expression of fear that the response is directed

elsewhere. The flirt is one who seeks new experience through the

provocation of response from many quarters.

In some natures this wish, both to receive and to give response, is out

of proportion to the other wishes, “over-determined”, so to speak, and

interferes with a normal organization of life. And the fixation may be

either on a child or a member of either sex. The general situation is

the same in the two cases following.

11. I am the unhappy mother of a dear little son, eight years old.

You ask the cause of my unhappiness? I ought to be happy with such a

dear treasure? But the answer is, I love my child too much. My love

to my son is so great, so immeasurably deep, that I myself am

worthless. My own person has not a trace of worth for me. I am as it

were dead to all and everything. My thoughts by day and by night are

turned toward my child. I see nothing in the world except my beloved

child. Nothing exists for me except him. Every one of my thoughts,

every desire and wish that awakens in me, turns around the child of

my heart. I am nothing. I do not live, I do not exist. I forget

myself as I forget all and everything in the world. I go around the

whole day without eating and feel no hunger. I forget that I must

eat. I go around often a whole day in my nightclothes because I

forget that I have to dress. With soul and body, with mind and

spirit I am wrapt up in my child. I have no thought for myself at

all.

If clothes come to my mind, I am thinking of a new suit for my boy.

I am nothing. And if I think of shoes, I imagine a pair of little

shoes on the feet of my dear little boy. I myself am the same as

dead. If I go to the country in the summer, I come home on account

of my child. I myself do not exist. Every enjoyment in life, every

happiness to which I give a thought is connected in my mind with my

little boy. I myself am as if I were never at all in the world. The

child is everything—my soul and my spirit, my breath and my life. He

is the air I breathe. I am nothing. I don’t consider myself, I don’t

think of myself, just as if I had never been in the world.

And so it is when my child is not well, when he has perhaps

scratched his finger.... Oh, how I suffer then. No pen in the world

can describe the terrible despair I feel. I live then as it were in

a cloud, I cannot at all understand how my soul then remains in my

body. My pain is then indescribable, greater than any can

understand.... When my child is well again and his round, rosy

cheeks bloom like the flowers in May and he is joyous and full of

life and leaps and dances, then I myself look as if I had just

recovered from a fever sickness.

Tell me, I beg you, dear editor, what can such a mama do that her

dear child shall not become a lonely orphan. For I feel that I

cannot continue long as it is. My strength is not holding out and a

time must come when no strength to live will remain in me.[14]

12. I beg you to advise me, dear editor, how to stop loving. It is

perhaps a ridiculous question but for me it is a very sad one. It is

almost a question of life and death. It is so: I love a person who

is not in a position to return my love. It is certain that we can

never be united.... My love is hopeless but I cannot give it up. I

run after the person I love, I follow his steps, knowing that it

will do me no good. I have simply attached myself to an innocent

person and distress him. My conscience tells me that it is not

right. I suffer needlessly and I make suffering for another, but I

simply have no inclination to stop.

I cannot live without my lover. When I don’t see him at the expected

moment I am wild, and I am ready to commit the greatest crime in

order to accomplish my purpose. He runs away from me and I chase

after him. When he goes away to another city I feel sure that I

cannot live another twenty-four hours without him. I feel like

throwing myself from a roof. I feel that I am capable of doing any

evil deed on account of my love.

Do not think, dear editor, that I pride myself for having such a

feeling. No, I do not compliment myself at all. I am provoked with

myself, I am ashamed of myself and I hate myself. How can a person

be such a rag? I argue with myself, how can I permit my mind to have

no control over my heart? But my arguments with myself do me no good

at all. It is work thrown away. I can love no one except him, the

only one who has captured my heart and soul. I cannot even entertain

the thought of ceasing to love him. It is simply impossible.

By what name would you call such a person as I am, dear editor?

Perhaps I have gone out of my senses. So give me a word of advice as

to how I may become sane again. I neglect everything in the world.

Nothing remains in my thoughts except him. Without him everything is

dark.

He is also unhappy on account of me. I don’t let him breathe freely.

He might have been happy with another, but I give him no chance. I

disturb his life. I will add that this condition has gone on now for

several years and there is no prospect of its ending.

Dear editor, give me an advice before I commit a deed after which

marriage is impossible. I wait for your wise advice. Perhaps you

will be my savior.[15]

The varieties of love in women are greater than in men, for we are to

include here not only physical passion but parental feeling—that fund of

emotion which is fixed on the child. The capacity of response to the

child, mother love, is notorious and is painfully evident in document

11, p. 18, where the mother has no thought left for anything but the

child. The mother is one who does not refuse. She does not refuse the

breast to the lusty child even when she is herself ailing. And while

this feeling is developed as a quality of motherhood it is present

before motherhood and is capable of being transferred to any object

calling for sympathy,—a doll, a man, or a cause. The women of the Malay

Peninsula suckle little wild pigs when these are found motherless.

I have seen (through the kindness of Hutchins Hapgood) the life history

of a woman who has had sexual relations with numbers of men. At the same

time she has always fed men. She has kept a restaurant, partly I think

to feed men. When one of her friends committed suicide she dreamed of

him for months and always dreamed that she was feeding him. While she

was sexually passionate her concern was mainly to satisfy the sexual

hunger of others, as she satisfied their food-hunger. When two of her

lovers were jealous, unhappy, and desperate, she ran from one to the

other like a mother visiting two sick children in different hospitals.

More than once she attempted suicide. When she tried to explain herself

to me she said that without some human relationship she felt unbearably

lonely, and that she was drawn to lonely men without regard to their

social condition. Many of her friends were criminals and she would speak

to any bum on a park bench. She was never a prostitute. One of her

friends said, “Martha is a woman to whom everything has happened that

should logically break a woman’s character and spirit. She ought to be a

demoralized victim of society. She has done nearly everything that is

supposed to ruin and destroy a person, especially a woman, but she is

not a bit destroyed. She knows the so-called lowest things in life, but

she wants the best and feels it. She feels what is beautiful and fine

and loves it. She does things that sometimes mean sordidness in others

but not in her. She gets drunk, but is not drunken. She is loose

sexually in her acts, but her spirit is as simple as the flowers.”

A touching expression of response from a man, a devotion to a parent as

deep as mother love, is found in a letter of the psychologist William

James, written to his father from England when the death of the latter

was anticipated.

13. My blessed old Father: I scribble this line (which may reach

you, though I should come too late) just to tell you how full of the

tenderest memories and feelings about you my heart has for the last

few days been filled. In that mysterious gulf of the past, into

which the present will soon fall and go back and back, yours is

still for me the central figure. All my intellectual life I derive

from you; and though we have often seemed at odds in the expression

thereof, I’m sure there’s a harmony somewhere and that our strivings

will combine. What my debt to you is goes beyond all my power of

estimating—so early, so penetrating and so constant has been the

influence.

You need be in no anxiety about your literary remains. I will see

them well taken care of, and that your words shall not suffer from

being concealed. At Paris I heard that Milsand, whose name you may

remember is in the _Revue des Deux Mondes_ and elsewhere, was an

admirer of the _Secret of Swedenborg_, and Hodgson told me your last

book had deeply impressed him. So will it be....

As for us, we shall live on, each in his way—feeling somewhat

unprotected, old as we are, for the absence of the parental bosoms

as a refuge, but holding fast together in that common sacred memory.

We will stand by each other and by Alice, try to transmit the torch

in our offspring as you did in us, and when the time comes for being

gathered in, I pray we may, if not all, some at least, be as ripe as

you.

As for myself, I know what trouble I’ve given you at various times

through my peculiarities; and as my own boys grow up I shall learn

more and more of the kind of trial you had to overcome in

superintending the development of a creature different from

yourself, for whom you felt responsible. I say this merely to show

how my sympathy with you is likely to grow much livelier, rather

than to fade—and not for the sake of regrets.

As for the other side, and Mother, and our all possibly meeting, I

can’t say anything. More than ever at this moment do I feel that if

that were true all would be solved and justified. And it comes

strangely over me in bidding you good-by how a life is but a day and

expresses mainly but a single note. It is so much like the act of

bidding an ordinary good-night.

Good-night, my sacred old Father! If I don’t see you again—farewell!

A blessed farewell. Your William.[16]

Usually this feeling is not so profound, as shown in these examples, and

may be just sufficient to use as a tool and a play interest. But even

then the life may be so schematized that it plays the main rôle.

Document No. 14 is a single item taken from an autobiography of over

three hundred closely written pages in which practically the only type

of wish expressed is the desire for response from men, but this wish is

never very strong.

14. At Wichita I went to school till I was about sixteen. Between

ten and sixteen I had lots of little sweethearts. I have never been

able to be happy without an atmosphere of love or at least

flirtation. To such a degree is this true that I fear this story

will be little else than the record of my loves and flirtations,

happy and unhappy. I liked to kiss little boys from the start, but

never cared to kiss the girls. I have had many women pals all

through my life, but I never cared to kiss them, as many girls do. I

suppose I am what my friend the newspaper man calls a man’s woman.

Certainly I am miserable unless there is a man around, and I

generally want several. Until recently I have always been in love

with two at the same time. But somehow since I met Harry it is

different. My love for the other sex was always of an innocent kind.

I loved men as the birds love sunshine. It is not a passion, but a

necessity, like the air. I am light-hearted and buoyant by nature,

and never thought of doing wrong. And yet the ugly side of this

passion has always been forced upon me.[17]

In many girls the awakening of love and its fixation on an object is

slow or incomplete. The girl in the following example is cold as a stone

toward everything but herself. Her affection is turned inward. She is

the type called narcissistic, in love with herself, like the mythical

Narcissus. Probably the appearance of a child will extrovert her feeling

to some extent.

15. I have a sister of sixteen, very beautiful and proud of herself.

She is of the type who care only for themselves. She would drown her

parents, brothers and sisters in a spoon of water if she could only

gain something by it, and without suffering the slightest remorse.

Besides, she is very obstinate and must have her own way regardless

of anything.... But my father and mother and the rest of the family

wished her to possess the ordinary school education, so that her

ignorance might not be an impediment in her future life, so we put

our efforts together and sent her to business school, and thank God

she managed somehow to finish the course.

Well, she is now working for the past six months. She has a very

good position with a large firm and earns $20 a week. Out of this,

mother does not get even a cent, though she sleeps and boards at

home. Moreover, she borrows money from mother whenever she can but

she never repays it. As if this were not enough trouble, she acts

very improperly toward the whole family. She possesses absolutely no

sense of shame nor sense of pity and behaves like a wild person in

the house; she scolds and shouts and is especially cruel to our

younger sisters and brothers.[18]

And in certain characters, almost invariably men, the desire for

response is barely sufficient to keep them in contact with or on the

fringe of humanity.

16. Many a man leads in London a most solitary, unsociable life, who

yet would find it hard to live far away from the thronged city. Such

men are like Mr. Galton’s oxen, unsociable but gregarious; and they

illustrate the fact that sociability, although it has the gregarious

instinct at its foundation, is a more complex, more highly

developed, tendency. As an element of this more complex tendency to

sociability, the instinct largely determines the form of the

recreations of even the cultured classes, and is the root of no

small part of the pleasure we find in attendance at the theatre, at

concerts, lectures, and all such entertainments.[19]

Frequently in marriage the wife provides the main fund of response and

the husband is assimilated to the child. In No. 17 the wife has had a

love adventure, is living with another man, but is planning to visit her

husband clandestinely and look after him a bit.

17. My Own Dear Dean: So you would like to know if I am happy. Well,

dear, that is one thing that will never be in my life again. It has

gone from me forever. I don’t want you to think that Clarence is not

good to me, for he could not be better—I have a nice home that he

has bought, and chickens and a lovely garden, and if Marjorie was

his very own he could not be better to her. But he is terribly

jealous, and it makes it very hard for me, for, God knows, I never

give him cause. Oh, Dean, dear, wait until you see how I have

changed. If I could only live my life over it would be so

different....

Now, dear, please don’t feel that you have no interest in life, for

you have our dear little girl, and just as soon as she is big enough

to be a comfort to you—well, she is yours.

Dean, if you only knew how badly I want to see you. Now,

listen—Clarence leaves here August 31 for Vancouver and will be

there until September 6.... So, if you could send me my fare one

way, why, then he could not refuse to let me go.... Let me know what

you are planning, for I want to see you and cook you some good old

meals again.... Yours only, Patsy.[20]

In No. 18 a conventional woman permits herself to have a single new

experience in the field of response, as compensation for a married

relation which lacks everything but security, and then returns to her

security.

18. American woman, forty-five years old, married. Husband is a

prosperous real estate broker, a member of many clubs, a church

warden, director of several corporations, a typical business man of

the type termed “successful”, a good citizen “without one redeeming

vice.”

She is a beautiful woman, albeit tired and faded. Her hair is

prematurely white, her youthful face with deep-set brown eyes has a

wistful contradictory appearance. Has many sides to her nature, can

play ball with her boys as well as she can preside at a meeting. Is

a good companion, has many friends, and leads a busy life as head of

a prosperous household. Has five children, four boys and one girl.

One would not guess that she is an unsatisfied woman; her friends

all think her life ideal and, in a sense, she does not deny it. This

in substance is her view of married life though not literally word

for word:

“I suppose there can never be a school for marriage—how could there

be?—yet how sad it is that every one must begin at the same place to

work out the same problem. I had a good father and mother. They did

not understand me but that was probably more my fault than theirs; I

never confided in my mother overmuch. My father considered my mental

progress at all times and I owe him much for the manner in which he

made me think for myself, strengthened my views, and guided my

education. When I left finishing school I played in society for two

years and many of the men I met interested me, though none compelled

me. I had never been given any clear conception of what marriage

should be in the ideal sense. I knew vaguely that the man I married

must be in my own class, good and honorable, and rich enough to

maintain a dignified household. I had more of a vision of love at

sixteen than at twenty-six, the year I married, though I was sure I

loved my husband and I do—that is he is as much a part of my life as

my religion or my household conventions. He is wholly a product of

civilization and I discovered too late there is an element of the

savage in most women. They wish to be captured, possessed—not in the

sense the suffragists talk about; it is really a sense of

self-abasement, for it is the adoration of an ideal. They wish to

love a man in the open—a fighter, a victor—rather than the men we

know who have their hearts in money making and play at being men.

Perhaps it cannot be remedied, it is only a bit of wildness that

will never be tamed in women but it makes for unhappiness just the

same.

“My sex life had never been dominant. I had a commonplace

adolescence with physical longings and sensations which were not

explained to me and which did me no harm. My relation with my

husband was perfectly orthodox, and vaguely I longed for something

different. My husband was shocked at any demonstration on my part.

If I was impulsive and threw myself in his arms he straightened his

tie before he kissed me. Once at our cottage in the mountains I

suggested that we spend the night in the woods. I saw a possibility

of our getting nearer each other physically and spiritually if we

could get out in the wilderness away from the restraints and

niceties of our luxurious household. That was the first time I ever

felt like a traitor. He told me quite sternly to go to bed, I was

not a wild Indian and could not act like one. I went to the nursery

for the night and snuggled close to my little boy and was glad he

was young and slender and hoped he would never grow fat and

complacent. I had noticed for the first time that my husband was

growing stout, like any other church-warden.

“Since that time I have never been wholly happy. It was not the

foolish incident, it was the fundamental principle, and underlying

our civilization. Our babies came rather closely together and I was

glad that the mother element in me needed to be uppermost. My

husband was perfectly content with life, I satisfied him at dinner

parties, I could dress well and talk well, managed the household

money to advantage and was at hand—tame, quite tame, when he wished

to kiss me. I do not mean to sound sarcastic and bitter. It is not

what my husband is which troubles me, but what he is not; I think I

speak for many women. I am more mated to the vision of what my

children’s father might have been than to the good kind man whom I

teach them to love and respect.

“Perhaps you have guessed I am coming to a confession: I met the man

in England two summers ago, but he is an American and is in this

country now, a friend of ours whom we both see quite often.

Something in both of us flared the very night we met. He and

Lawrence (my husband) get along famously; they both believe in many

of the same ideals and discuss kindred subjects, but my brain and

his supplement each other in a way which is hard to explain. I did

not mean to love him. It is an upper strata of myself; I love

Lawrence; I mean I belong to him, am part of his very being and he

of mine, but I am myself when I am with this other man and I refuse

to think what a different self it might have been had I known him

before. The very morning after I faced the awful fact that I was

thinking of a man other than my husband, Lawrence put a bouquet at

my plate at the breakfast table. It was a red geranium, a tiny pink

rose, and some leaves of striped grass. Poor Lawrence.

“Our adventure in love came rapidly. He understood me perfectly and

I knew that he cared. We have never told Lawrence for we do not

intend to do anything more that is wrong. He has spent several

evenings at the house when Lawrence was away. There was no deception

about this—it just happened and we have talked and kissed and faced

life in the open. We decided quite calmly, and without passion, that

we would have each other entirely just once. I wanted the complete

vision of what my love could mean. If it is wrong I cannot think so;

at any rate I would not give up the memory of that time. It was only

once and it was a year ago. We both knew there could be no continued

sex relation. When I have an opportunity I kiss him and he me.

Lawrence never kisses my lips, so they belong to him. He has helped

me to be more patient, and understanding of my life as it has been

and must be. I have my children and must live out the life for their

sakes and for Lawrence who loves me, tamed and domesticated.

“If life could be—what it would mean to give him a child, but life

in its entirety cannot be—for me. Probably that is the creed of many

women.”[21]

It is unnecessary to particularize as to the place of response in art.

The love and sex themes are based on response, and they outweigh the

other themes altogether. Religion appeals to fear, fear of death and

extinction, and promises everlasting security, or threatens everlasting

pain, but in the New Testament the element of response, connected with

the concrete personalities of Jesus and Mary, predominates. Any hymn

book will contain many versified love letters addressed to Jesus. There

are on record, also many alleged conversations of nuns with Jesus which

are indistinguishable in form from those of human courtship.

19. Angela da Foligno says that Christ told her he loved her better

than any woman in the vale of Spoleto. The words of this passage are

fatuous almost beyond belief: “Then He began to say to me the words

that follow, to provoke me to love Him: ‘O my sweet daughter! O my

daughter, my temple! O my daughter, my delight! Love me, because

thou art much loved by me.’ And often did He say to me: ‘O my

daughter, My sweet Spouse!’ And he added in an underbreath, ‘I love

thee more than any other woman in the valley of Spoleto.’” To amuse

and to delight Gertrude of Eisleben, He sang duets with her “in a

tender and harmonious voice.” The same saint writes of their

“incredible intimacy”; and here, as in later passages of Angela da

Foligno, the reader is revolted by their sensuality.... In the diary

of Marie de l’Incarnation there is such an entry as “_entretien

familier avec J.-C._”; and during such interviews she makes use of a

sort of pious baby talk, like a saintly Tillie Slowboy.[22]

In general the desire for response is the most social of the wishes. It

contains both a sexual and a gregarious element. It makes selfish

claims, but on the other hand it is the main source of altruism. The

devotion to child and family and devotion to causes, principles, and

ideals may be the same attitude in different fields of application. It

is true that devotion and self-sacrifice may originate from any of the

other wishes also—desire for new experience, recognition, or security—or

may be connected with all of them at once. Pasteur’s devotion to science

seems to be mainly the desire for new experience,—scientific curiosity;

the campaigns of a Napoleon represent recognition (ambition) and the

self-sacrifice of such characters as Maria Spiridonova, Florence

Nightingale, Jane Addams is a sublimation of response. The women who

demanded Juvenile Courts were stirred by the same feeling as the mother

in document No. 11, whereas the usual legal procedure is based on the

wish to have security for life and property.

4. THE DESIRE FOR RECOGNITION. This wish is expressed in the general

struggle of men for position in their social group, in devices for

securing a recognized, enviable, and advantageous social status. Among

girls’ dress is now perhaps the favorite means of securing distinction

and showing class. A Bohemian immigrant girl expressed her philosophy in

a word: “After all, life is mostly what you wear.” Veblen’s volume,

“Theory of the Leisure Class”, points out that the status of men is

established partly through the show of wealth made by their wives.

Distinction is sought also in connection with skillful and hazardous

activities, as in sports, war, and exploration. Playwriters and

sculptors consciously strive for public favor and “fame.” In the

“achievement” of Pasteur (case 6) and of similar scientific work there

is not only the pleasure of the “pursuit” itself, but the pleasure of

public recognition. Boasting, bullying, cruelty, tyranny, “the will to

power” have in them a sadistic element allied to the emotion of anger

and are efforts to compel a recognition of the personality. The frailty

of women, their illness, and even feigned illness, is often used as a

power-device, as well as a device to provoke response. On the other

hand, humility, self-sacrifice, saintliness, and martyrdom may lead to

distinction. The showy motives connected with the appeal for recognition

we define as “vanity”; the creative activities we call “ambition.”

The importance of recognition and status for the individual and for

society is very great. The individual not only wants them but he needs

them for the development of his personality. The lack of them and the

fear of never obtaining them are probably the main source of those

psychopathic disturbances which the Freudians treat as sexual in origin.

On the other hand society alone is able to confer status on the

individual and in seeking to obtain it he makes himself responsible to

society and is forced to regulate the expression of his wishes. His

dependence on public opinion is perhaps the strongest factor impelling

him to conform to the highest demands which society makes upon him.

20. The chief difference between the down-and-out man and the

down-and-out girl is this. The d.-a.-o. man sleeps on a park bench

and looks like a bum. The d.-a.-o. girl sleeps in an unpaid-for

furnished room and looks very respectable. The man spends what

little change he has—if he has any—for food and sleeps on a bench.

The girl spends what little change she has—if she has any—for a room

and goes without food.

Not because she has more pride than the man has. She hasn’t. But

because cops haul in girls who would sleep on benches, and

well-meaning organizations “rescue” girls who look down and out. A

pretty face and worn-out soles are a signal for those who would save

girls from the perilous path, whereas an anæmic face in a stylish

coat and a pair of polished French heels can go far unmolested....

You will argue that any woman with an empty stomach and a fur coat

ought to sell the coat for a shabby one and spend the money for

food. That is because you have never been a lady bum. A fur coat

gets her places that a full stomach never would. It is her entrée

into hotel washrooms when she is dirty from job hunting. It gets her

into department-store rest rooms when she is sore of foot. And in

the last stages it gets her help from a certain class of people who

would be glad to help her if she had suddenly lost her purse, but

who never would if she had never had a purse.

And then, most important of all, it helps her to hang on to her last

scraps of self-respect.[23]

21. Alice ... wants to be somebody, to do great things, to be

superior. In her good moods, she is overwhelmed with dreams of

accomplishment. She pines to use good English, to be a real lady.

There is pathos in her inquiry as to what you say when a boy

introduces you to his mother and how to behave in a stylish hotel

dining room. Such questions have an importance that is almost

greater than the problem of how to keep straight sexually. Winning

of social approval is an ever-present, burning desire, but she has

no patterns, no habits, no control over the daily details of the

process whereby this is gained. When one tries to place her in a

good environment with girls of a better class, she reacts with a

deepened sense of inferiority, expressed in more open, boastful

wildness. She invents adventures with men to dazzle these virtuous,

superior maidens. The craving for pleasures and something to make

her forget increases.[24]

22. One of the most tragic lives we have ever known—now ended, and

perhaps happily, with the death of the girl at twenty years of

age—was that ensuing from unusually mixed parentage. An intelligent,

English-speaking Chinaman married an American woman of no mean

ability. One of their children was a girl, who developed splendidly

both physically and mentally. She was an exceptionally bright girl,

who at fourteen had already commenced a delinquent career which only

ended with her death.... The fact that she was different, so

obviously different, from other girls attending the public and

private schools to which she went, and that there were many little

whisperings about her, served greatly to accentuate her inner

distress. Her capabilities and ambitions were great, but how was she

to satisfy them? As a matter of fact, neither the mother nor I could

ever find out that any great social discomforts came to this girl;

the struggle was all within. She behaved most extravagantly as a

direct reaction to her own feelings, of the depth of which she had

rarely given any intimation at home. With us she essayed to remember

and to reveal all that had gone on in her mind for years back: How

could her mother have married this man? Was she really this woman’s

child? To what could she attain with this sort of stigma upon her?

Did she not properly belong to a free-living stratum of society?

This girl wandered and wavered. She tried religion, and she tried

running away from home and living with other people; she assumed a

Japanese alias and tried to make a new circle of acquaintances for

herself.[25]

In many cases, both in boys and girls, particularly at the period of

adolescence, the energy takes the form of daydreaming, that is, planning

activity, and also of “pathological lying”, or pretended activity. The

wishes are thus realized in an artistic schematization in which the

dreamer is the chief actor. The following, from the diary of a

sixteen-year-old girl is in form a consistent expression of the desire

for recognition, but very probably the form disguises a sexual longing,

and the daydream is thus an example of the sublimation of the desire for

response, as frequently in poetry and literature.

23. I am between heaven and earth. I float, as it were, on a

dream-cloud which carries me up at times into a glorious atmosphere,

and again nearer the mucky earth, but always on, always on. I see

not man, I see not the children of man, the big ME lies in my head,

in my hand, in my heart. I place myself upon the throne of Kings,

and tramp the dusty road, care-free. I sing to myself and call me

pretty names; I place myself upon the stage, and all mankind I call

upon for applause, and applause roars to me as the thunder from the

heavens. I reason that mine is not inevitable stage-madness which

comes to all females of my pitiful age; mine is a predestined

prophecy, mine is a holy design, my outcoming is a thing to be made

way for.

I bathe myself in perfumed waters, and my body becomes white and

slender. I clothe myself in loosened gowns, silks as soft as

thistledown, and I am transported to scenes of glory. The even

stretch of green, bedecked with flowers to match the color of my

pale gold gown, is mine to dance and skip upon. A lightness and a

grace comes into my limbs. What joy is mine! I leap and spring and

dart in rhythm with nature, and music leaps from my steps and

movements and before my eyes are men. Men and women and children

with heads bent forward, with eyes aglow with wonder, and with

praise and love for this essence of grace and beauty which is I.

What more, what more! I hang upon this idol of a dream, but it is

gone. The height of happiness is reached; alas, even in dreams there

is an end to happiness, the bubble bursts, and the dust and noise of

earth come back to me. I shut my eyes and ears to these and seek

consolation among the poor. In dreams I go often among them. With my

heaping purse of gold, I give them clothes and beds to sleep upon, I

give them food to nourish them and me, to nourish and refresh my

fame. But do I give my gold away, and does my purse cave inwards?

Ah, no! Come to my aid, my imagination, for thou art very real to me

today. An endless store of gold is mine in banks of state. My name

is headed on the lists of all, my money does increase even as I hand

it to these poor. The poor bless me, they kneel and kiss my hands. I

bid them rise, and the hypocrisy of my godless soul bids them pray

and in this find restoration.

I grow weary as I walk, and truth is even harder yet to bear than

ever before. I am sad, I have nothing, I am no one. But I speak

soothingly to myself, bidding me treat my hungry self to food, and I

promise that the night shall be long and the dreams and journeys

many.[26]

On the contrary, 24 is in form a desire for response, but the details

show that the girl feels keenly the lack of recognition. The response is

desired not for itself alone but as a sign and assurance of comparative

worth.

24. I am in despair, and I want to pour out my bitter heart. When I

have once talked out my heart I feel better afterwards.

Dear editor, why can I not find a boy to love me? I never make a hit

with young people. I never have any success with them. I associate

with young people, I like them, they like me, but nobody ever runs

after me. No boy is crazy about me. All my girl friends are popular

with young men. Every single one has a boy or more who is in love

with her and follows her steps. I alone have no luck. Do not think,

dear editor, that I am burning to marry; it is not yet time for

that. But the thought that I am left out makes me very wretched. It

distresses me and it hurts me to my soul’s marrow to know that no

one desires me, that people are indifferent toward me. Oh how happy

I should be if somebody would love me, if somebody would come to see

me. It must be such a sweet pleasure to feel that some one is

interested in you, that some one comes to see you, comes to you

especially, on account of yourself. Oh, why can I not have this

happiness!

When I go to a party and when I come back I feel so low and so

fallen. Young men crowded around my companions like flies around

honey. I alone was an exception. I have not a jealous nature, but no

other girl in my place would feel otherwise. Can you show me a way

to win a boy’s heart? What sort of quality must a girl possess in

order to attract a young man?

It is true I am no beauty. But what do all the girls do? They fix

themselves up. You can buy powder and paint in the drug stores. My

companions are not more beautiful than I. I am not sleepy. When I am

in the company of young people I am joyous, I make myself

attractive, I try my best to attract attention to myself. But that

is all thrown to the dogs.

Dear editor, if you only knew with how much care I make my clothes.

I go through the great stores to select out the most beautiful

materials. I annoy the dressmaker to death until she suits me

exactly. If it happens that a hook somewhere on the dress is not in

the right place, or a buttonhole has a single stitch more or less

than it should have, I have the greatest distress, and sharpest

heartache.

When I go somewhere to a dance I am full of hopes, my heart is

beating with excitement. Before leaving the house I take a last look

in the mirror. When I return home I have the blues, I feel cold. My

teeth grind together. So much exertion, so much strength lost, all

for nothing. A boy has talked to me, another boy has given me a

smile, still another boy has made me a little compliment, but I feel

that I am not near and dear to any one. I feel that my face has not

been stamped on the heart of any one.[27]

From the foregoing description it will be seen that wishes of the same

general class—those which tend to arise from the same emotional

background—may be totally different in moral quality. The moral good or

evil of a wish depends on the social meaning or value of the activity

which results from it. Thus the vagabond, the adventurer, the

spendthrift, the bohemian are dominated by the desire for new

experience, but so are the inventor and the scientist; adventures with

women and the tendency to domesticity are both expressions of the desire

for response; vain ostentation and creative artistic work both are

designed to provoke recognition; avarice and business enterprise are

actuated by the desire for security.

Moreover, when a concrete wish of any general class arises it may be

accompanied and qualified by any or all of the other classes of wishes.

Thus when Pasteur undertook the quest described above we do not know

what wish was uppermost. Certainly the love of the work was very strong,

the ardor of pursuit, the new experience; the anticipation of the

recognition of the public, the scientific fame involved in the

achievement was surely present; he invited response from his wife and

colleagues, and he possibly had the wish also to put his future

professional and material life on a secure basis. The immigrant who

comes to America may wish to see the new world (new experience), make a

fortune (security), have a higher standing on his return (recognition),

and induce a certain person to marry him (response).

The general pattern of behavior which a given individual tends to follow

is the basis of our judgment of his character. Our appreciation

(positive or negative) of the character of the individual is based on

his display of certain wishes as against others and on his modes of

seeking their realization. Whether given wishes tend to predominate in

this or that person is dependent primarily on what is called

temperament, and apparently this is a chemical matter, dependent on the

secretions of the glandular systems. Individuals are certainly

temperamentally predisposed toward certain classes of the wishes. But we

know also, and I shall illustrate presently, that the expression of the

wishes is profoundly influenced by the approval of the man’s immediate

circle and of the general public. The conversions of wild young men to

stable ways, from new experience to security, through marriage,

religion, and business responsibility, are examples of this. We may

therefore define character as an expression of the organization of the

wishes resulting from temperament and experience, understanding by

“organization” the general pattern which the wishes as a whole tend to

assume among themselves.

The significant point about the wishes as related to the study of

behavior is that they are the motor element, the starting point of

activity. Any influences which may be brought to bear must be exercised

on the wishes.

We may assume also that an individual life cannot be called normal in

which all the four types of wishes are not satisfied in some measure and

in some form.