The most serious of the problems in connection with the older boy and
girl is that of the relations between the sexes. In the old country
the situation was much more easily defined. The conventions were
fixed, and had changed very little since the mother was young. In
Italy, for example, daughters never went out with young men, not even
after they were engaged. The same is said to be true in most of the
other countries from which our immigrants have come. In Croatia,
Serbia, and Bohemia it is unheard of for a young woman to go out alone
with a young man.
Moreover, coming as so many of these people do from small villages or
rural communities, they have been used to a single-group life which is
impossible in a city. As one Italian woman has expressed it, work and
recreation went hand in hand in the old country. During the day there
was the work of both men and women in the fields in congenial groups,
and in the evenings songs and dancing in the village streets. The
whole family worked and played together with other family groups.
It is not intended to assert that there were no problems with young
people in the old country, for undoubtedly there, as everywhere, some
of the young would be wayward and indifferent to the conventions. The
point is that there the mother knew what standards she was to maintain
and had, moreover, the backing of a homogeneous group to help her. In
this country not only is she herself a stranger, uncertain of herself,
not sure whether to try to maintain the standards of her home or those
that seem to prevail here, but the community of which she is a part is
far from being a homogeneous group and has apparently conflicting
standards. The immigrant mother, then, has to decide in the first
place what standards she will try to maintain.
The old standards can scarcely be maintained in a modern community
where the girls go to work in factories, working side by side with
men, going and coming home in the company of men. It is manifestly
impossible for the mother to watch her daughter at work. In the old
country this was possible as long as she stayed on the farm. And when
at school and at work she is constantly thrown with men, it is
impossible to regulate her social hours by the old standards and to
see that they are all spent under her mother's eye. Moreover, any
attempt to do so is likely to provoke resentment, as a girl naturally
thinks that if she can take care of herself at work she is equally
well able to do so at play.
Furthermore, the character of the recreation has undergone almost as
great a change as the character of the work. With the change from the
country to the city, it has already been suggested that the old group
life with its simple pleasures, which the whole family shared, has
become impossible. If the mother then tries to see that her daughter
has social life in which she herself may share, she either cuts her
off from most of the normal pleasures of young people of her age, or
the mother finds herself in places where she is not wanted, and where
no provision has been made for her entertainment.
Most immigrant parents, except those from southern Italy, recognize
the impossibility of maintaining the old rules of chaperonage and
guardianship of the girls. One of the Slovak women with whom we
conferred said that in all her circle of acquaintance there was only
one mother who was attempting to bring her daughter up by the old
standards and was not allowing her to go places in the evening where
the mother might not accompany her. All the others were allowing their
daughters more freedom than they thought desirable, but they did not
know what else to do.
The Italian parents, on the other hand, try to guard their girls
almost as closely as they did in Italy. It is not especially to be
wondered at, for what the immigrant father or mother sees is usually
the worst in American city life. If the daughter could not be trusted
alone or unchaperoned in a village in which they knew most of the
people and all the places of amusement, is she any more safe in a city
in which, as one foreign-born mother says, "You don't know what is
around the corner from you"?
Moreover, realizing only the danger to the girl, and not being able in
his ignorance to explain to her or to protect her in any other way,
the father often resorts to beating the girl to enforce the obedience
which generations have taught him is due to him. The head of the
Complaint Department of the Cook County Juvenile Court in Chicago said
that while cases of immorality were very rare among Italian girls, the
attention of the court was called to a great many who rebelled at this
attempt at seclusion and ran away from home, often contracting hasty
and ill-advised marriages.
While most parents of other nationalities see that the old standards
cannot be maintained, there is a great deal of confusion as to what
standards are to be considered right. This is illustrated by the
following incident. A very intelligent Jugo-Slav woman, in discussing
the problem, said that she did not know what she would do in her own
family, as she hated to think of her girls adopting American
standards. The matter had been brought to her attention recently by
the conduct of two girls with a young Serbian officer who was visiting
in this country. As he walked up one of the boulevards two girls, who
were utter strangers to him, had flourished small feather dusters in
his face by way of salutation. This woman was very much surprised to
hear that the investigator disapproved of this; she had supposed it
was just our "American freedom."
As long as the mother does not understand this tradition of freedom
between the sexes nor realize its limits, it is natural that she
should accept her daughter's dictum that everything she wants to do is
"American" and that it is hopeless for the mother to try to
understand. In many of the families visited in this study it was
evident that the mother had completely given up trying to understand
either the conditions under which her children work or how they get
their recreation. One mother, for example, said that she knew where
her daughter worked when it was a well-known place, but otherwise not.
Another said that her children told her where they worked, but she
never remembered the names, for she knew that they would mean nothing
to her.
Several said they did not try to advise their children about their
work, because they knew they didn't understand. One Russian mother was
very much worried about the future of her two boys, aged seventeen and
thirteen. The older was working as a cash boy, earning twelve dollars
a week, and the younger was working outside of school hours, sewing
caps. The mother said that their father had learned one trade and
followed that, but that her children changed work every two or three
months. She seldom asked why they changed, because she did not
understand conditions in Chicago.
Most of the women confessed to being equally at sea with regard to
their children's amusements. Some of them accepted with resignation
the fact that they could not understand, saying, as one woman did,
that she thought they had too much freedom, but that young people
lived very differently here. Some of the mothers, on the other hand,
while thinking that young people in general had too much freedom,
thought that they did not need worry about their own children,
because they had been able to make companions of their daughters. A
few even were found who approved of the freedom allowed to young
people, but thought children should be taught "more morality."
It is scarcely possible to say too much of the failure of the American
community to assist the immigrant family at this point. It has neither
tried to make the fathers and mothers understand modern American ways,
nor has it exercised any community supervision so that the girl is in
reality safe at work and at play. Furthermore, some of the agencies
from whom the most help might have been expected have deliberately
passed over the mother to educate the child, hastening the process by
which the child becomes Americanized in advance of his parents.
The Church has had its share, as may be seen from the statement of one
priest who holds a responsible position in the Church in Chicago. He
believes that the parents are usually too advanced in years to
assimilate or utilize whatever instruction is given them. In his
opinion the ignorance of the parent is responsible for many bad
tendencies in the children, but the difficulty can be corrected more
surely and satisfactorily by dealing directly with the children.
The attitude of the public schools is illustrated by an interview with
the principal of a public school in an immigrant neighborhood. He
says that his contact has been only with the children. The
foreign-born parents of the first generation are, in his opinion, "so
incorrigibly stupid" that any attempts to educate them are a waste of
time. The only possible way, he thinks, of reaching the parents is
through the children.