West Side Studies: Boyhood and Lawlessness; The Neglected Girl

by Unknown

INTRODUCTORY

The material for the following studies was collected by four persons. The final chapter, which deals with the Italian girl of the West Side, was prepared by one of the group working independently. This course was necessary, as the Italian girl’s life is inseparable from that of her family and the only approach to her is by way of her own home. One could not know the Italian girl of the West Side without knowing also her father, her mother, and her numerous brothers and sisters, if not, indeed, a great many of her relatives. The other three workers, including the writer, joined in the management of a small house which was used as a recreation center and club house. They also collaborated in keeping a daily journal, to which reference is made in the following pages.

It was our wish especially to gain some knowledge of the type of girl who is seen so frequently at the street corners and who refuses to be attracted to agencies which frankly declare a desire to improve her. The club, therefore, adopted an open-door policy and the leaders tried to refrain from obvious attempts to influence or control the girls who came. The aim was to encourage sincerity among them, and to prevent their “playing up” to superimposed standards “for what there was in it.” Not that we thought that these girls were especially inclined to practice fraud; but we knew from experience that work with too obvious a purpose “to do good” often encourages hypocrisy.

One of our reasons for opening the Tenth Avenue club for girls was that we had found it impossible to be on an intimate footing with them in their homes. The atmosphere of family life was far too often one of mutual reproach and recrimination, and the visitor was likely to find herself in the embarrassing position of a court of appeals. Picture an evening spent in the company of the two Katie Murphys, mother and daughter, thus: Mrs. Murphy, sitting with folded arms in the rocking-chair, rehearses the story of Katie’s sins. Katie leans against the back of the sofa with dropped eyelids and a face as expressionless as putty. All the efforts of the involuntary court of appeals to induce the girl to say a word in her own behalf are met by stony silence. Meanwhile, the mother runs on, zealously driving nails in her own coffin as far as the girl’s affection and confidence are concerned. Harassed by the problem of feeding, clothing, and housing six children on $8.00 a week, Mrs. Murphy has little strength or imagination left for the subtler problem of how to handle an adolescent daughter.

It was such experiences that taught us the necessity of providing some neutral ground on which to meet Katie Murphy, if we were to secure her confidence. This neutral ground took the form of club rooms where we established ourselves with the definite intention of giving Katie the just due of her youth,—a good time.

We continued, however, to visit the families of girls in the course of the investigation, collecting thereby material for the observations on home life contained in the following chapters. The girls themselves welcomed our visits even though they must have realized in a vague way that we were keeping “tab” on conditions in the homes from which our club members came. One day May Sipp,[63] a new girl, came to one of the club leaders and said, “Miss ——, will you come to my house tomorrow?” The leader thought that perhaps a party was being planned and asked for further details. “Why, no one has been to my house yet and I’d like to have you come,” the girl explained. It was evident that she felt a little put out because her home had not as yet been visited.

It was the middle of December when we first opened for the girls in the neighborhood the house which we had taken for the purpose. The place received no more colorful name than the number on the door, “471,” by which it was designated during the whole time we occupied it. “471” was a red brick structure consisting of three stories and a basement. It was rather a friendly looking house with a “stoop” and the remnants of front and back yards; that is, there was a small area in front guarded by a low iron fence with a gate, and a square box in the rear which became a “playground” in summer. A supervisor from Christ Presbyterian Church was placed in charge of the latter, and the children crowded into the little box in such numbers that we soon had complaints from the neighbors against the shrill chorus rising from the back yard.

The front yard was of no particular use except that the iron gate served to stimulate the imagination of the small boys who haunted our premises. It was a continual bone of contention. It was always being carried away by bands of enemies and heroically restored by bands of friends—who were sometimes one and the same—until at last we decided to remove it entirely from the sidewalk, where it was of no earthly use as a gate, and store it in an inner closet.

We occupied two floors of the house, the ground floor and the basement. In the basement was a large, well lighted kitchen and a living room. On the first floor were two large connecting rooms which were furnished with folding chairs and a piano. Though our equipment was meager, we had a cook stove and a piano. These two pieces of furniture we came to regard as the necessary minimum of equipment for a girls’ club under all circumstances.

The occupations of the clubs—cooking, sewing, basket-weaving, brass work—were carried on as pastime rather than as work. It was necessary to vary the program repeatedly, for the shifting attention of the girls refused to consider any occupation as pleasurable for long at a time. The one thing of which they never seemed to tire was dancing, and in spite of the ugly forms which this recreation took, it had always the beauty of spontaneity. Their fondness for popular songs was almost as spontaneous. “The Garden of Love,” “The Hypnotizing Man,” “When Broadway was a Pasture,” “The Girl that Married Dad,” and others of the same lurid and sentimental strain were sung over and over to an unvarying appreciation.

Our relations with our co-tenants at “471” threw much additional light on conditions of life on the West Side. Above us on the second floor lived the McClusky family. Ellen McClusky was fourteen, and since her mother’s death two years before had been housekeeper for her father and three brothers. Lately one of the brothers had sickened of tuberculosis, thus adding to Ellen’s housekeeping duties those of a sick nurse. Her school attendance had suffered. The truant officer was paying visits to the house and the health officer was also knocking at the door. Thus the clouds had already begun to gather on the McClusky horizon even before our entrance on the scene. Ellen’s joy at the news that a club for girls had moved in on the ground floor of the house was unbounded. She was allowed at first to come down to us every evening.

But Mr. McClusky soon turned against us. He was a choleric individual, and was, moreover, constantly agitated over the condition of his son, who was dying by inches. It is not surprising that he turned violently against the social coercion which demanded that Ellen should go to school and his son be put away in a hospital. He mishandled the truant officer and forbade Ellen to have anything to do with the “teachers,” whom he regarded as being in league with the forces that harassed him.

Ellen would hang over the banisters in the evenings watching the hall below. But her father had forbidden her even to speak to us. In March the invalid brother died, and the club rooms were closed for a week during which the house was given over to the solemn splendors of a funeral. After the undertaker had retired, the health officer took possession and the rooms were submitted to a thorough fumigation.

We opened our club once more, but Ellen was still forbidden to come to us. She continued living in the isolation of the second floor, peeping over the banisters in the evening. It was finally a great relief to our overstrained sympathies when an officer of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, upon evidence furnished by Ellen’s aunt, arrived and removed her from her home. This ended the vicissitudes of the McClusky family so far as we had any share in them.

On the top floor lived Mr. Distel, a German mechanic about fifty years old. He was an odd little bitten-off man, unkempt and kindly, who had lived alone in his three little rooms many years. He liked to hear the boys and girls downstairs, he said, and occasionally he made clumsy efforts to join in, but he had been too long a hermit. He could not. Needless to say, Mr. Distel was our most sympathetic neighbor, and the presence of the little man finishing off an industrious and worthy life in his lonely top floor rooms made us but the more determined in our task of supplying wholesome good times to our friends.

The source from which most of our difficulties proceeded was the spirit of disorder abroad in the neighborhood. This was indeed a lawless spirit and, in its extreme form, a sinister and menacing influence. The “Gopher gang”[64] figured largely in the neighborhood gossip, and whatever may have been the actual extent of Gopher operations in our vicinity, the current stories about them, however inaccurate as to facts, were in themselves a sufficiently evil influence in the lives of the boys and girls of the district.

Our most direct contact with local disorderly influences was through the gangs of small boys who haunted our premises, demanding to be admitted. As we were not prepared to open the house to them, our apparent inhospitality drew upon us a series of attacks. Not that all the attacks were acts of deliberate revenge; they were sometimes merely outbursts of habitual rowdyism. Nevertheless, they were a serious element in our situation. We found that we could not run a club for girls on Tenth Avenue without getting the small boys’ consent. Time had to be spent in conciliating them. At first our method was to station an out-post on the sidewalk. To one of the “teachers,” who proved an adept in gang psychology, this difficult task was usually delegated. An entry in her diary under the date of December 20—a date on which the usual Tenth Avenue spirit was enhanced by the approach of the Christmas holidays—reads as follows: “As it was not my night on duty I had no intention of spending the evening at the Tenth Avenue house. I stopped in to speak to Miss Barclay and see how things were going, but the disorder on the outside was so bad that I was forced to spend most of the evening on the sidewalk outside with the boys.”

An adventure which befell us on the second evening after our “opening” might have had very serious results. One of the club leaders was engaged in the front basement room with a group of the older girls. Early in the evening a gang of small boys gathered at the window outside to upbraid their sisters for not letting them come into the club. But they withdrew at a word from the “teacher,” who might have suspected such unusual docility, but did not. An hour later when the girls were engaged in their club occupations, there came crashing through the window a weapon seven feet in length, which proved to be a gun with a bayonet attachment. It struck the chair in which the teacher was sitting with such force as to chip the oaken back. As the gun was slowly drawn into the room there was much wringing of hands and a general desire to get a “cop.” The gang had promptly made off, of course, leaving the sidewalk deserted.

It became apparent that the small boy could do serious damage unless conciliated. Treating with him in the darkness of the sidewalk proved not to be successful. It was evident that we must bring him inside and examine him in the light. One evening just after the front shutters had been pried open by depredators who had then promptly run away, one of the club leaders went out to the sidewalk, closing the door behind her. Nobody was in sight. But she had only to continue long enough in a motionless attitude to coax these young animals from their holes. Presently a head came out from behind a stoop, and another from an area opposite. Soon several boys were edging along the pavement toward the solitary figure in the dark, and in a few minutes the whole gang had closed in a circle around the trapper. She led them up the stoop, into the brightly lighted sitting room, and called for a clear statement of grievances. It was all ready. “Say, ain’t no boys gona be let in never?”

The end of this council and of others which followed was that we gave Saturday night to the boys. Gradually, by this concession and others, we were able to conciliate the gangs. The worst of our troubles were over when they had been somewhat enlisted on our side, but there were occasions when the alliance proved embarrassing. For instance, one of the “teachers” leaving the club late in the evening encountered a group of the older boys who gallantly offered to escort her to the car. As they neared the corner she remarked hastily that she must catch a car which had just stopped there. Before she could get her breath, four of the boys rushed ahead, jumped on the front platform, and began putting on the brakes so that the motorman could not start his car. The astonished club leader found herself seized by the other three youths and hoisted upon the rear platform with a parting shove which sent her hurtling into the car. The hooting and confusion were intense, and the passengers stood up in alarm. The boys, however, stood genially waving their caps as the car started. When the conductor came to collect the fare, he said suspiciously to the new passenger, “Did you know them boys?” The young woman was compelled to say that they were friends of hers, to which he replied, “Gee, but you got tough nuts for your friends!”

Stories of the disorder in the neighborhood came into the house in many ways. For instance, it was vividly reproduced in the conversation of the “gentleman friends” of the girls, who were often our guests. This was full of wild Gopher gossip and stories of arrests. There was one evening in particular when Doran thrilled us all with a long story of how he had gone home early one night and was sitting reading his paper, feeling rather queer—the trouble was in the air—when a terrific noise broke out in the hall. A whole gang of fellows had come into the house through the door on the roof and gone plunging down the stairs pursued by a trail of officers.

At this point in the story, Cleaver suggested that Doran must have kept the door shut pretty tight, to which he agreed. Cleaver then accused him of being afraid, and recalled an instance when, as he claimed, Doran had shut the door against him when the “cops” were after him. Doran hotly denied this. The two ruffled spirits had to be smoothed and then the talk ran on, all about arrests and flights and pursuits. The whole conversation indicated how precariously near the edge of trouble these young men felt themselves to be all the time. It showed also the kind of lawlessness and rowdyism on which they built their youthful ideals, which lead in turn to further acts of lawlessness and rowdyism.

Echoes of the Gophers occurred in the talk of the girls. At one of the first club meetings, a tall, attractive girl arose and proposed as a name for the club, the “Gopherettes.” As a motto, she suggested, “Hit one, hit all.” This was Fanny Mayhew, who turned out on nearer acquaintance to be a wonderfully cheerful girl with a happy disposition and very popular with her family and school teachers. Though perfectly able to hold her own, she proved not so belligerent as the episode had suggested. She told a club leader that she had once belonged to a club of girls called the “Gopherettes.” They had paid dues and even rented a basement room for a short time. Later the club had moved to the dock, and she had not been allowed by her mother to go to its meetings.

It was unavoidable that the girls’ conduct should reflect the character of their environment. However, only once was there an outbreak against a club leader. Among the friends of the house who kindly volunteered from time to time to help with an evening’s entertainment was a young woman from another city who had, thanks to her own efforts and the interest of a wealthy friend, raised herself from the ranks of the girls who composed our clubs. On the occasion of this young woman’s visit with us, there arose from the room where she was engaged with a group of girls the sounds of a violent quarrel. One of the regular leaders hastened to the room, arriving just in time to prevent blows. Julia O’Brien had lifted her arm to strike the young woman who had come up from the ranks and who was, moreover, for the moment the center of a hostile, excited group.

The leader of the riot, led downstairs to the kitchen, became instantly repentant, and the story of the quarrel came out. One of the girls had stepped on Julia’s foot and she had exclaimed, “Oh, hell!” It was an unfortunate slip. Julia knew that swearing was not allowed in the club rooms and she was making strenuous efforts, as the leaders knew, to break a lifelong habit. But the young woman from the ranks did not know this and she had rebuked the guilty Julia in a tone of such cold and stinging contempt that it had not only provoked her victim to the point of striking blows but had drawn upon the tactless leader the wrath of every girl present.

A subsequent talk with this young woman revealed the attitude of offensive superiority which the girls had so hotly resented—an unfortunate by-product of her rapid rise into responsibility. A thoroughly self-respecting and deserving person, she had the peculiarly hard and unsympathetic attitude toward those who had failed to surmount their disabilities so often held by persons who have themselves struggled up from the ranks.

“Fights” among the girls were not infrequent. One unusually peaceful and happy evening, for instance, ended in open warfare because Barbara Egan, apparently with no evil intent, had asked Louisa Storm why her fingers were so crooked. No less painful was the quarrel between Mamie Taggart and Anna Strumpf, which was recorded in the following entry in the diary: “Tonight it was raining heavily but about eight or ten girls of the Wednesday night club turned up. Anna Strumpf sent word that she is not coming any more as she is afraid that Mamie Taggart will do her up outside.”

Not all the “fights” were duels; some of them were petty wars of faction with faction. There was one particularly unfortunate evening when fatal “remarks were passed” and the deadly insult “tough” was used. The waves of bitterness were long in subsiding. The next evening a group of the girls, headed by Maggie Tracy and Clara Denley, appeared at the club wearing large stiff hair bows, some red and some black, which stuck out defiantly on either side. They announced that they had been called tough, so what could one expect? The club leaders began to muster their diplomacy and act as peacemakers, but the air was still belligerent when the opposite faction came in.

Expecting a repetition of the clash between the two sets, we were greatly surprised to see Sadie Fleming, the leader of the newcomers, go up to Maggie Tracy and put her hand affectionately on her enemy’s shoulder, apparently forgetting that a state of war existed between them. Sadie and her companions had collected on their way to the club the most thrilling gossip of the entire year. Father Langan, according to the story, on his way to give holy communion to a woman who was sick, had been attacked by a gang of Gophers. He had thrown open his coat to show the vestment of the priest, but they had robbed him of some money he was carrying and had left him stretched on the sidewalk!

This story was a nine-days’ wonder on the West Side, where, as a usual thing, deeds of violence are promptly forgotten. Father Langan flatly contradicted the report, but this had no effect upon the currency of so picturesque a story. Very likely there were other quarrels besides Sadie’s and Maggie’s which were forgotten and effaced in the mutual thrill over this piece of modernized Irish folklore. Mrs. O’Callahan was graphic, bringing together details heard from various other sources as well.

“The father was just afther going t’ give a dyin’ woman th’ Holy Communion. He was stheppin’ down the street when these fellows set in upon him. ‘B’ys,’ he sez, throwin’ back his coat and takin’ an’ showin’ thim th’ Sacrament which he had in his pocket, ‘d’ye see what I’m carryin’ here? For yer own good,’ he sez, ‘Oi warn ye,’ he sez, ‘not t’ lay hand on a priest,’ he sez, ‘an’ him goin’ t’ a sick old woman,’ he sez. An’ with that they hit him an’ took what money he had—twenty-six dollars he was carryin’, so they say. Oi can’t understand why the fire from above didn’t sthrike thim down dead. In Ireland, a priest there has only t’ stamp with his foot and they’d ha’ been sthruck down where they stood. But America is a bad place, it ain’t like th’ owld counthrey.”

When the youthful gang spirit of Tenth Avenue had been conquered it seemed as though the last difficulty had been surmounted. At the end of ten months we thought we had taken the measure of all the unpropitious influences that threatened our enterprise. But not so. We were yet to capitulate to the last and most powerful enemy of all—industry. First came a “dispossess” notice, and before we could get our breath from the surprise the house-wrecking crew were upon us. It was a simple matter to raze “471” and the adjoining buildings. In a few days they had all disappeared, along with the tiny back yard, where the children had played on hot summer days. On the site was erected a lofty factory building. Tomorrow the machines will be chugging away in the new shops, tended perhaps by some of the same girls who yesterday came knocking at the door of “471” asking for room to play. A neighboring school received the remnants of our clubs. With new conditions, a new environment, and new groups of girls, an entirely new start had to be made.

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The observations given in this study of girl life on the West Side do not pretend to be extensive. No attempt was made to gather in numbers. We had 65 girls in our clubs whose home conditions were very well known.[65] But the study was written with much additional information in mind. Other girls came to the house and we were in touch in one way or another with a great many families of the neighborhood besides those of club members. The chief purpose, however, was to know intimately and sympathetically a small group of girls who were typical in many ways of the girls in any poor and neglected city population. As one writer puts it: “The alternative lies, not between knowing a few people and knowing all to an equal degree, but between scratching the surface of the whole field and digging a portion of it spade deep in order to gain some idea of the under-soil throughout.”[66]

How far did our groups represent the girl life of the West Side? It was a comparatively small number whom we knew, and the majority of them came from the “under-soil.” The well cared for did not come to us. Our girls were for the most part the daughters of the poorest poor. As a group they differed essentially from the types of girls usually found in settlement clubs and classes. Some of them were not of the best local repute. They were known as “tough,” and had been practically outlawed by certain settlements and recreation centers for the sake of the more promising element.

The settlement workers in the district repeatedly assured us that it was hard to hold the girls who came from our particular area and impossible to work with them in numbers. This testimony as to the unsocial character of these girls was sadly borne out by our experience in trying to organize them into clubs. There were many who corresponded to the description given by Dr. Katherine Bement Davis,[67] superintendent of Bedford Reformatory: “Our girls as a class are anti-social. It is very hard for them to see their conduct in its relation to the lives of those around them. They are individualistic in the extreme. They have never thought of the necessity for government and law, and can see no reason for obedience to anything but their own impulse.”[68]

But after making all due allowances for the limited number of girls studied and the “tough” reputations of some of them, the fact remains that these 65 girls and their friends were representative of many others who are subjected to the same environment. They had been brought up from babyhood in these blocks. Born in the crowded, dark tenement house they had had for a nursery the crowded sidewalk, and for a playground, the street. They had gone to the nearest school and from there to work in the nearest factory. They had seen the West Side, breathed the West Side, fed on the West Side for fourteen years or more, and had built up their adolescent ideals of the same forlorn material. That they had succumbed to unwholesome influences does not prove them to have been peculiarly weak or susceptible. Nor does it prove that their parents had been culpably delinquent in their duties. Conditions of living in the crowded city have tended to loosen the family bond, and the powerful force of neighborhood influence cannot be adequately combated by parental authority alone. The community must assume the responsibility for the environment of its least protected members.

A campaign for the control of conditions in the public dance halls has been begun. We are told that our young working girls must be given decent dance halls and not publicly and deliberately consigned to the degraded centers which attract them under that name. The West Side girls need much more, however, than protected dance halls. Some of the girls of this district are too poor to go to public dances. But the same dangers which threaten the dance-hall girl stalk unrestrained through the neglected streets and tenements of the West Side, and the girl of fourteen may fall a victim even under her own roof tree.

Demoralizing neighborhood conditions, such as congestion, filth, street temptations, and neighborhood gangs, all of which are practically synonymous with West Side life, influence the girls for evil only to a less degree than they influence the boys. One needs only to talk with any good mother of the district and hear how steadily she is engaged in fending her children against the life of the street to learn how constant and how potent are its influences. Testimony is borne to their power by the iterated complaint of West Side mothers,—of those who do not work away from home as well as of those who do,—that “Mamie is beginning to get out from under me,” or, “Katie was the best girl you ever saw until we came to live on this block.”

The problem of waywardness among West Side girls cannot be solved by long distance methods. Their environment must be made safe and their pleasures recognized and made decent. Some of the things which enlightened criminologists recommend for women in reformatories, after they have completely succumbed to the sort of conditions which abound on the West Side, are regular school attendance with manual training and flexible courses of study; regular hours for sleep, for food, for work, and for play; plenty of nourishing food; fresh air and outdoor life; the social discipline of community life. These are the things which are given to the girls in the reformatory at Bedford as a cure. The same things would help to prevent; they would preserve the West Side girl to society as a daughter and as a mother, as a worker and as a citizen.

CHAPTER II
IN THE GRIP OF POVERTY[69]

“

You’ve got t’ keep your eye on a girl. Now it’s different with a boy. He can take care of himself. But you never can tell, if you don’t keep a watch, when a girl’s goin’ to come back an’ bring disgrace on you.”

Such, in a nutshell, is the attitude of our community toward the adolescent girl. The chances are that she will “never give you worry an’ trouble like a boy.” But if she does, she will give vastly more. The sting of her shame is felt to be keener than any the boy can inflict. And with very few girls in our neighborhood is “trouble” of this sort beyond the range of the possible. Therefore the sense of family responsibility is far more alert in her behalf than on her brother’s account. With few exceptions, the girl is assured of interest and counsel in her home. This counsel is not always wise. Worse still, it is not always tempered with the affection she needs. Here all family life struggles against handicaps. But through all the sorry failures, the ignorance, and the thwarted ambitions, much love and much concern for the girl are to be found in the homes of her people. Almost as a baby she has duties at home. The boy, as a rule, assumes them with his first pay envelope. Or, if he is earlier drafted into service, his chores are outside, probably the gathering of coal or wood while his sister stays at home to mind the babies. He has more freedom. She grows up in a more intimate relation to the family, far more under the eye of her mother. Therefore, family influence, nine times out of ten, is the great factor in her development. To understand her, home conditions must be known.

The most common of family skeletons among this West Side group is one which can scarcely be locked in its closet. It stalks forth, apparent to the casual glance. It is the grim elemental question of primitive needs. The daily struggle for food, shelter, and clothing is a stark reality to which only the youngest babies in the family can be oblivious. The daughter of fourteen knows it to the last sordid detail. In the group of families we knew, poverty was almost universal. Of our 65 girls only eight came from households which had known continuous comfort during these children’s lives. All the others had at some time faced staggering misfortune. Forty of the total 55 families, or 73 per cent, had had records with relief societies, some stretching far back into the past.[70] Forty-three families, from which came 53 of the girls, must be classed with the very poor.[71]

Those of us born into better fortune seldom feel the meaning of this primitive struggle. We have no common denominator with it. We cannot estimate the heroism of “the poor.” We have heard and read much of hunger and exposure. These things play a large part in juvenile literature, whether sensational or classic. There is no little daughter of a comfortable home but is told the sad legend of the match girl who froze in the snow under the lighted windows from which floated sounds of merriment and music. The same little daughter, grown older, goes to school and learns that “man’s three primal necessities are food, shelter, and clothing.” But neither the faraway and sentimental pathos of the match girl’s fate nor the cold scholastic statement of the text book is sufficient to teach one the real meaning of poverty. Only those who follow its trail, step by step, seeing the gradual and tragic disintegration of human worth under its influence, the suffering and waste left in its path, can realize its full power and significance.

To these girls who come forth to their recreation in a skirt worn thin and a gaping, ill-made waist, poverty is neither distant nor sentimentally touching. Possibly no child does starve in these streets. But there are many children who do not need to learn out of books about hunger. At any moment, one may open a door and find it, in all its gaunt, staring reality. We once found a tiny crippled baby who had sat for days in a fireless, barren room, stiffened with cold. She was as helpless and defenseless a little creature as could well be met. But this was the treatment that an indifferent community tolerated for her. And she was only one.

To our girls these were harsh facts of everyday knowledge. Familiarity with poverty makes it seem both more and less terrible. It does not kill, perhaps, but it stunts. It does not come as an overwhelming catastrophe; but steadily it saps the vigor of the young as well as of the old. With the more fortunate of families such as these, extreme poverty is only episodic. A fairly decent standard is kept until something goes amiss. But one break in the machinery of their working capacity means hardship. No reserve fund has been possible, or the small amount saved is hopelessly inadequate to meet illness or protracted unemployment. It melts away in a few weeks or months. The family is very soon over the borderline of self-support. With the less fortunate, poverty takes the form of a slow, chronic contest against everlasting odds. This demands every atom of physical and nervous strength, every fraction of intelligence and effort. And the exaction is made from those whose only training has been hard, devastating experience.

In this neighborhood, families are large and wages are small. The size of the family is a definite element in its standard of comfort. Poverty begins not merely at a certain wage but also with a certain number of children.[72] “We’ve got eight,” said Mrs. Meehan, “and by rights we’d only have two if we was to bring ’em up proper. But,” she added, “it’s the littlest one that I love the best.”

Sometimes where the father is living and at work, he earns enough to keep in cleanliness and health, and with at least the necessary medical care, a family of three or four. But with six to support, an income sufficient for four means the lack of essentials for all, loss of health, and sometimes loss of life. Often the mother is compelled to supplement his earnings by her own. Twenty-nine out of the 46 living mothers were contributing a part or the whole of the family income. In 24 of the 55 families the father was dead or incapacitated, and there was no stepfather to take his place as breadwinner.[73]

The mortality among children on the West Side is shockingly high. A family which had not lost at least one child was indeed rare. Fairly accurate records of the births and deaths of children in 31 out of the 55 families show that the number of births averaged nearly eight, and the deaths about three.[74] This average death rate for so small a group is not surprising when one considers the birth rate. The more children that are born into such poverty, the greater the likelihood that many of them will die. On our list were families who had two living children and six dead, five living and five dead, five living and six dead, six living and nine dead, seven living and seven dead, one living and six dead. Though practically all these families carried insurance,[75] the amount for which a baby’s life is insured would not as a rule be sufficient to pay the expense of burial.

The attitude of our community toward birth or death is disheartening in its helplessness. Either event is accepted as the will of God. The idea of voluntarily limiting the size of the family is almost unknown. Mrs. Reilly, bent, deformed, old at fifty, with five children living and eight dead, would ramble on with her dull and listless story of the sickness and suffering those deaths and births had meant, and the constant crushing poverty they had caused; and would finish with, “It’s the poor as can’t take care of them, to whom they’re sent.”

The housing of these families was of a grade commensurate with the degree of their poverty. Dark, unventilated rooms were found in the apartments of 30 families, and about half of the group of 55 had less space than was required for health or comfort. As is generally true with families of their class, the amount of rent paid for poor and inadequate accommodations was relatively high.[76]

In spite of the mountains of difficulty in the way of these mothers, their success in bringing up their children is sometimes great beyond our realization. There was, for instance, one household on a certain block on Eleventh Avenue where the father brought in $12 in return for a full week of unskilled labor. There were four children under working age. Twelve dollars, six persons, city prices—this was the mother’s problem, by no means so discouraging as that of some of her neighbors, but still a difficult one. The answer is not to be written on paper. It is on children’s faces, in the events and outcome of human lives. However successful the present answer, each day sets the old quandary forth anew. Never solved, it stretches on into the years ahead.

With this family, part of the answer was their presence on Eleventh Avenue. It was in the clangor of the freight trains that passed on the street surface by their door and blackened their windows with smoke. It was in the stench of the slaughter house which the breeze brought into their rooms. It was in the soot of the factories and the dangers to child life around the docks. There were outward evidences of family life in the block where they dwelt—dilapidated tenements, with a sordid little grocery store in the middle of the block. A garish little saloon stood on the corner. The houses did not present the solid red brick front of the usual tenement street, with its delusive appearance of respectability. The buildings were irregular; some were low and shack-like. Their windows faced Jersey and the nightly glory of the sunset, but even this could not redeem the sordidness and squalor of the neighborhood.

From these surroundings came two trim little figures. They were school girls, still with all the ways and traits of little girls. Their hair was drawn smoothly into straight black braids. Their eyes were round and wide awake. The neatness of their dress spoke of continual care. They were alert and well-mannered, brimming with interest and comment. In short, they were bright, normal, ordinary children. What this meant as an achievement can only be measured by the obstacles which this one mother had overcome.

She had had the help neither of good fortune nor of training. She had fashioned her product with her own pitiful, clumsy tools. A large-boned, uncouth Irish woman, she still bore the stamp of the soil. Her education had been that of life, a life of hard knocks and rough going. Plain, coarse, with the burr in her speech, bent and weakened physically, she did not present an attractive appearance. But it was her boast that she “never got anything from no society—never knew much about them places—never had to, thank God.” Relatives had helped when the hardest pinches came; but for the most part the family had plodded on alone. But even such parents cannot master poverty. In turn they must pay toll to its resistless strength. For the smallest girl of five was a wan, great-eyed baby whose puckered lips were drawn with pain and on whom the shadow of death already lay. The terms of life cannot be utterly remade.

In one of the sordid tenements wedged into a narrow space as yet unclaimed by business this mother had found a shelter for her brood. Four rooms “through” with a cupboard were rented to her for $9.00 a month and her services as janitress, which were reckoned as worth $3.00. Thus, while her flat would otherwise have cost $12 a month and have absorbed exactly one week of her husband’s wages, she saved $3.00 out of the rent to spend on food for her family of six. This was the important fact which had kept them on Eleventh Avenue from year to year, though the mother always hoped that each winter would be her last in the house.

But not all families have the fortitude, the endurance, the power of ceaseless, undiminished effort which this particular group possessed. Even with those who accept the challenge and make the continual effort to keep their heads above water, strength and courage sometimes break. The loss of two days’ work for a daughter whose full week’s wage amounts to only $4.00 or $5.00 may mean a family tragedy. What elsewhere are incidents, are hazards here.

We have fallen into the habit of looking to the mother as the mainstay of the family. She is held to a rigorous standard which neither husband nor children are required to measure up to. We expect her to counteract the difficulties and evil influences of her environment by possessing all the known virtues of character. As a matter of fact, the worry and strain of insecurity become too great for many a woman. She grows apathetic, careless, and stolid, or she becomes querulous and neurotic. Perhaps she takes to drink. Drinking is rife on the West Side; it is the easy and familiar escape from worry and discouragement. For the woman who drinks there is scant sympathy or toleration. The decent, hardworking mother has no patience with her. If the victim is putting up any fight at all it is a desperate and a solitary one, for she can expect no help from others. With every lapse, every slipping back from the precarious foothold gained so painfully, she is met by scorn and reproach from her judges with whom the long weeks of effort do not count when once she has failed. To rise many times from the utmost depths of despair and bitterness is not given to human nature, and she ends as an outcast.

I am thinking of one black, terrible half hour with a woman of my acquaintance. A thunder storm darkened all the outer world and almost no light entered the kitchen where we sat. It was one of the two small rear-house rooms that she rented for $8.50 a month. This day it was stifling and unswept, cluttered with little piles of her rubbish. She was going to move; she had been dispossessed. She had lost her job, a position held for three months after a winter when she had hunted work for weeks. For seven years she had kept up a home for her girl and boy, one year during the illness of her husband who drank and beat her, and six years after his death. She had looked forward to the time when Sadie should get her working papers; but the girl was incompetent and irresponsible and failed to keep any job for long.

This year had brought the mother her first out-of-work experience. In the course of it she had slipped far behind. But with every seven dollars’ pay during the past three months she had climbed slowly back. The rent was even. The insurance agent lacked a single dollar. Every night on coming home she had figured slowly and clumsily with the aid of her boy “Petie.” She had “built castles, which no one had ought to do.” Castles! Dreams of a new suit for herself and Sadie, of whole shoes for Petie which should not be begged from his school; dreams in the future of an “all-through” apartment, even with rugs, and curtains of cheap lace. But again thrown out of work, hope was gone.

She was a woman slow and clumsy of movement, who went through her plodding days quietly and dumbly, with a certain trembling hesitance. But her rusty black clothes were always neat. The housekeeper said, “You c’d tell she was respectable.” It was a cherished respectability. She suffered bitter pangs when she saw it fall away. Today her tongue was loosened by drink. She talked quickly, with an unaccustomed rise and fall of speech, and with fluency of gesture. She clung to Petie, possessed with the idea that some one was trying to take him away. “They shall not take me boy. The girl is wild; she has me heart broke. I’ve worked and I’ve tried an’ it’s all come to this. But I won’t be parted fr’m me boy.” And again and again, the voice rising to a cry, “I’ve been turned down—turned down I am. I’m not a young woman now an’ you know I can’t stand it—turned down hard I’ve been.”

Without doubt some women of the dependent classes are strongly braced in their morals by the rigorous standard to which we hold them. The consciousness that nothing but the best of conduct will be excused in them must serve as a constant stimulus to heroic living. But on the other hand, there are doubtless many who have drifted to the bottom as the result of a first lapse which might have been excused and survived under a less rigorous standard. There are too many who share the decent working woman’s point of view. “When a woman takes to the can, she ain’t got no good left.”

Many of our girls came from homes where the parents were heavy and constant drinkers.[77] They were familiar with the appearance of drunkenness. It does not revolt such girls when it breaks out in a place of amusement. They do not resent it in their boy companions but view it on the whole with unconcern. But they come to be wary of its manifestations in others and even unconsciously expert in inebriate psychology. There was one family where the alcoholic father was always turned over to the fourteen-year-old daughter during his “sprees” to be managed. When he was in this condition she was “the only one who could do anything with him.” Surely an ominous ability for a fourteen-year-old daughter!

In a neighborhood like the Middle West Side, poverty is seldom found isolated from its menacing concomitants—ignorance, immorality, drinking, filth, and degradation. Whether as cause or result, these appear as close companions of want. Some of our girls came from families which hovered constantly on the verge of disruption. The arrogant, decisive power of the law always hung over them like the sword of Damocles, threatening dismemberment.

Here was Annie Brink, who came to her club with Hyde and Jekyll moods. Sometimes she was gentle and tractable. Sometimes she looked out sullenly from a cloud of morbid depression and gloom impossible to pierce. She had grown up in a world of sudden disasters. Almost from babyhood she had been a household drudge. There were seven children in the family and Annie, the eldest daughter, was early pressed into service as general houseworker and nurse for the younger ones. To take proper care of seven young children is too big a job for one woman, and Annie’s mother was certainly much too gay and irresponsible by disposition to attempt it. “There was seven of us kids,” said Annie, “so I had to help. I wasn’t let out on the street much when I was little. One house where we were had a back yard and we’d play there. But then we moved. When we went on to Tenth Avenue there was a fire escape. We’d take pillows out there and sit. It was just grand. Then I always could play on the organ. It was mamma’s since she married, but she don’t use it any more. It’s the same as mine now. It stays locked, because if all seven of us used it there wouldn’t be any organ soon.”

At nine, Annie was a shy and backward child. Then she lost the sight of one eye by infecting it from an abscessed finger. The new physical defect kept her out of school and the housekeeping was transferred more and more to her young shoulders. She had never had a friend of her own age until at thirteen she attached herself to a girl of a vigorous personality. Agnes was rough and quick to strike, like a boy, strong and generous. She protected her new friend and took her out to see the world. They went to a school recreation center several blocks north and Agnes saw that Annie was not molested on their way. “We wasn’t afraid of anything with Agnes.” Then abruptly the strong protector was removed by a yet stronger power. Agnes was “put away.” Annie reported, “They won’t let her out till she is twenty-one. They’re awful strict. It makes us all feel bad.”

Such things are accepted happenings in Annie’s world. They are the acts of a power quite beyond its influence. Annie took the loss of her champion with philosophy and stayed at home once more. She did not dare go to the recreation center alone. Then came another thunderbolt. Her mother, who had entered upon the familiar way of middle-aged West Side women who lack the stamina that the grim struggle demands, was brought into court, charged with drunkenness, and sentenced to the workhouse. The smaller brothers and sisters were also taken away. Since then life had been one succession of strange women brought in as housekeepers. There were interludes between trials of the various incompetents when the full care fell on the young girl. She was in school only a few hours a day, because her single eye had been weakened. She had grown up on the edge of a volcano. At fourteen she was, by her school record, “peevish and extremely stubborn and difficult to handle.”

Such precarious conditions of living are especially unfavorable for the adolescent daughter. The instability of her age is accentuated by the uncertainties of her life. Foresight and steadiness of purpose are not easily taught when the essentials of existence depend upon chance. The girl sees around her all sorts of makeshifts and haphazard expedients. One of our girls tried to avert a family disaster. Dispossession threatened at the end of the week. Mrs. Derks was in despair, and helplessly she resigned the situation to Emma. With their last $3.00 the girl bought a lamp and some hundreds of printed tickets. The lamp was put in a saloon window. The tickets were to be sold in a raffle which was to pay the rent. They did not sell and the rent went unpaid. “I told her it wouldn’t do no good,” a neighbor said. “She should a’ got a watch.”

But as poverty is the enemy of adolescence, adolescence is the adversary of poverty. The vivifying forces of youth are a protection against the depleting effects of want and insecurity. The girl does not take to drink as her mother does. Weeks of want are quickly forgotten in a following period of comfort. When kindliness and cheer once more prevail in her home, consciousness of the lack of ease and loveliness is shaken from her. With the buoyancy of youth she rebounds at the slightest release. But all too often her respite is brief, and when periods of want follow too closely upon each other, her powers of recovery must fail.

CHAPTER III
WHERE THE SCHOOL LAW FAILED

At five or six years of age, the girl starts to school; between fourteen and sixteen, she leaves school for good and goes to work. The eight or nine years which lie between make up the full period of her formal education. She must acquire during these years of compulsory school attendance all the “learning” which the law of the state fixes as a minimum for its workers.

She has a wide choice of schools. Between Thirty-eighth and Forty-third Streets are the buildings of four different systems. The public schools, the parochial schools, the Children’s Aid Society school, and the American Female Guardian Society school are all waiting with open arms to receive her. Often she is simply sent to the nearest school building. To cross the crowded avenues is more or less hazardous for a six-year-old. Or, she is taken by an older child to the school attended by her protector. In this case, it is “Mary’s school” that is chosen, and the various systems mentioned have nothing to do with the decision. Sometimes, however, one of them is chosen by the parents because of its particular specialty. The church school teaches “prayers,” the “soup” school, as the Children’s Aid Society is called in the neighborhood, gives a free lunch and shoes and warm red petticoats. The children of the poorest poor are likely to go there. The public schools are in general considered best for “learning.”

After the original choice has been made, neither parents nor child feel bound to stick to it. A great deal of shifting about takes place, only a small part of which is necessary. Some of the local schools carry their pupils only through the primary classes and must then transfer their small graduates to another building and another street to enter the grammar grades. For many reasons, this single change may be wise, but very often it is only the beginning of a succession of transfers. The break is an occasion to try out two or three new places before settling down. In the meantime, the little wanderer goes through a period of unsettled plans, and incidentally loses considerable time from her lessons.

A free choice of schools and a free use of the transfer are the chief concessions made by the compulsory school law to parental authority. As a matter of fact, it is not always parental authority which transfers little Mamie from school to school, but the child’s own flitting, aimless spirit. In the middle of a term, for almost any cause, she is likely to drop out of her class and claim the right to transfer. A quarrel with a schoolmate, a friend in another school, a dispute with the teacher,—these are the sort of trivial reasons which result in sudden transfers.

Our girls had made the most of their transfer privileges. One of them had attended nine different schools on the West Side; another had attended eight; two had attended seven; one had attended six; two had attended five; and four had attended four; 16 had attended three; 21 had attended two; and only eight had continued throughout in the same school. There were five girls who had come from institutions, and four whose school careers were unknown.

These interruptions mean a serious waste from the girl’s meager allowance of time for schooling. She passes at each shift to a new set of teachers who know nothing of her record and tendencies. Frequently she is put back a grade. She resents this, grows discouraged, and perhaps loses interest. Besides, so much ease in changing weakens the school’s authority. It is, however, a safeguard against the rigidity of a single autocratic system. It gives some room for experiment with a difficult child, until the régime and the teacher with whom she will fit may be found. A restriction of the transfer would certainly be a blow to the truant officer’s method of dealing with girls. At present it constitutes his one suggestion, his only “golden cure.”

The girl’s schooling begins to suffer as soon as there is any especial need for assistance at home.[78] Two or three days are dropped repeatedly. Wage-earning sisters cannot stop at home to nurse an invalid or care for younger children while the mother works. When a new baby comes, it is the oldest school girl who carries the extra burden of work. Even the most devoted mothers make these encroachments on the time which belongs to the school. They are driven to it by necessity. “What can I do? There ain’t nobody else and I’ve got to keep Mamie t’ help.”

When Mrs. Kersey went to the hospital, it was “Baby,” the eleven-year-old daughter, who was kept out of school to do the work, and not her older sister employed in a factory. “You ought t’ ’a’ seen how Baby run our house,”—her wage-earning sister was giving the account. “Gee, but she was that strict, believe me. I couldn’t have a cent o’ my money. No shows them days fer mine. She cried if me father didn’t give ’er his pay an’ she made him, too. She’d give him his quarter fer shavin’ money, but not a cent more. An’ she bought everythin’ an’ run things herself. Me mother was away sick fer nine months. Baby, she’s an awful good girl.”

Emma Larkey, having at last struggled up to Class 5B, had just dropped out of school for good. She was normal in body and mind. She should have been in the graduating class. Why wasn’t she? In the first place, she had changed schools eight times since her start, wandering indifferently from public to parochial school and then back again. In the second place, there were five younger children and she was constantly being kept at home. The mother patched grain sacks in order to pay rent for a well lighted apartment of five rooms. “There are nine of us, and if I don’t work, we’d have to crowd up an’ sleep in those black stuffy bedrooms. I can’t bear for the children to do that.” Decent living quarters and fresh air for the whole family seemed more important than Emma’s schooling. Something must give way under such pressure and so it was Emma who went down. She had braced her young shoulders to tasks more difficult than school lessons and had lost all desire to finish the grammar grades by the time the second girl was old enough to relieve her at home.

The result of so much absence was seen in the great retardation among our girls. Thirteen to fifteen is regarded as the normal age for graduation,[79] and by this standard only 10 of our 65 girls were in the normal grade. All the rest were “laggards.” There were, for instance, 35 girls who were fourteen years old, the normal age for graduation. Some of them had gone to work, while others were still in school. The grades they had left or were still attending are shown in the following distribution: Two had reached the 3B grade; four, 4A; three, 4B; one, 5A; four, 5B; four, 6A; four, 6B; five, 7A; three, 7B; and four, 8A. One girl had been in an institution. The girls are thus seen to have been distributed almost impartially from the third to the eighth grade. There was for them practically no relation between age and grade.

An occasional girl is defiantly truant. Her refusal to fit into the school system marks a deeper vein of rebellion than in the case of the boy, who more commonly slips the leading strings. Or else it marks an undeveloped body and spirit in dealing with which the usual forcible methods of combating truancy are often ineffectual.

Annie Gibson was a slim, undersized girl of fifteen. Her light, almost colorless hair hung down around small, undeveloped features, strikingly vacant and weak. Her teeth, very small and deeply set, might have been the milk teeth of a well-developed baby. Surrounded by a cover of reticence and a surface of embarrassment, her real thoughts were impossible to discover. She would agree to anything but would seldom volunteer an opinion of her own.

In school she was a passive pupil, never “giving trouble” but learning little, and her attendance record was very low. In time she furnished-one of the most stubborn cases of truancy in the school and the truant officer was sent after her. He found her at home alone, the girl’s mother being away at her regular work as chambermaid in a hotel. As the officer laid his hand on her arm to take her back to school, the child’s passivity suddenly broke and she flung herself on the floor, screaming. The man retreated in consternation, fearful that he might be accused of having physically mishandled the child, while Annie was left to recover from her hysterical outbreak as well as she could. This is only one instance of the futility of applying our present method of dealing with truancy to these exceptional cases. This child was primarily in need of careful mental and physical examination and probably of special training which could only be defined after such an examination had been made.

When the difficulty rests with the girl there is no course between threats and a sentence of great severity. The parent may be fined, but then the punishment does not fall on the child. If she is sent away it must be to a reformatory, not to a school. Let us see how these methods would work applied to Christina Cull, another of our girls who was a stubborn truant. At fourteen, she had reached Class 4A. She had not “made her days”; that is, attended school for 130 days during the year prior to her fourteenth birthday. Nor had she gone far enough in her classes to get her working papers. But Christina refused to pass the doorway of a school. She had gone far beyond the influence of the ordinary school.

Five years before, one of the Catholic fathers had found her loitering in the rear of his church. It was soon after Christmas and he stopped to ask about her holiday. She answered shortly that she had had neither presents nor a good time. His interest in the pathetic, sullen child took him later to her home. The family was squalidly poor. They lived in three dark basement rooms, without comfort or decency. The father, after four years of desertion, had returned home in the final stage of tuberculosis to be cared for until his death.

Christina had grown into a forbidding girl. Her face was so lined and so hard that she looked years older than she was. The childlike effect of her flowing hair and long bangs contrasted oddly with the age and hardness of her features. She might almost have been a middle-aged woman masquerading as a little girl. The truant officer went after her time and again, only to listen to the mother’s repeated complaint. Christina was “out from under” her; she went where she listed. Threats were long since outworn and useless. She had heard them from babyhood. “Aw—they talk but they won’t do nothin’.” Occasionally she would grow frightened and penitent for the moment. But re-enter the ordinary school and sit in the classes with the younger children, she would not.

No course was left but to take the culprit before the superintendent and enter a formal complaint against her. There would then be two plans of action which might be followed: Christina’s mother—her father had died in the meantime—might be fined in the magistrate’s court or Christina might be committed to a reformatory. To fine the mother of a family already on the verge of dependency was manifestly futile. On the other hand, a reformatory sentence for a girl whose only offense was that she refused to go to school seemed much too severe. In the face of this dilemma no action at all was taken. Christina, without working papers, without work, was left to employ her illegal holidays in her own way. Her only chance for positive discipline was that she might soon become a serious offender for whom a reformatory sentence might not be too severe. For girls like Christina the only remedy seems to be that they shall grow worse before they can grow better. Such a roundabout and wasteful course might be obviated if we had a truant school for girls, as we already have for boys, especially planned for their needs.

It is a common occurrence for a girl to escape from school at thirteen or fourteen without open defiance of the labor law. Of our 65 girls, at least nine had left school illegally. Their escape was accomplished by petty frauds of various kinds. One girl gave the school a false address; another altered the date on her birth certificate. Two had been absent for illness and had never returned. Others simply “dropped out” and their defection was not followed up by the school, which with its limited number of attendance officers is bound to neglect many such cases. These are some of the usual loopholes by which the girl evades the school law.

The young refugee does not always find it easy to get her working papers at once. The required record of 130 days’ attendance during the previous year is a serious stumbling block, although it allows for 70 absences out of a possible 200 attendances. In the public schools she has to reach a 5B grade[80] and pass an educational test before the school papers which she must present at the board of health are signed. There the mental test is simpler—a mere proof of ability to read and write. She is tested on two or three primer sentences, such as, “Is my mother in this room?” She is then weighed and measured; and occasionally a child much under average is rejected. Failing in any of the requirements, the girl must wait until she is sixteen, when she may legally go to work without papers. In the meantime she helps at home, or “lives out,” or finds an employer who is willing to connive at her lack of working papers.

These are the girls who evade the law. Those who are obedient to its requirements are scarcely less eager to escape. Almost without exception, the girls of our district step eagerly forth from the school at the earliest possible moment. Not a girl of our clubs had stayed in school longer than the law required or long enough to “graduate” from the eighth grade. To continue in school after you can get your working papers is a sign of over-education and is not popular.

In thus leaving school as soon as the law allows, family need very often plays a part. Sometimes the younger girl has begun to lend a hand during vacations. The Donovans tell how “Sissy” got a job at eleven. It was the summer when both parents were ill and out of work. They still chuckle with appreciation of Sissy’s enterprise. “You’d ought to ha’ seen her. She let down her skirts and done up her hair. She was just a bit o’ a thing—not twelve then. She come out one mornin’ an’ said, ‘Ma, I’m goin’ to go to work’s well as Mame.’ We laughed at ’er but she set out. So that day she come back an’ sure enough she’d got a job in a chewin’ gum fact’ry, wrappin’ packages. There was a graphophone an’ at lunch time all the girls danced. Oh, she had a grand time, be-lieve me. There was a lot o’ little girls whose mothers were poor. When the inspector come, they’d hide Sissy under the table. We most died laughin’ when she brought her first week’s pay—85 cents! Now, what d’ye think about that? She come in here an’ give it t’ me as proud ’s if it had been dollars instead.”

It is not surprising that after a vacation adventure like this Sissy began to lose interest in school. Working in a factory is not all fun, but it brings a measure of independence which the young personality craves beyond all else. It is not always stern need alone which sends the girl out to work at such an early age. Parents may call on her in times of special stress and insist on her returning to school as soon as the pressure is removed. But public opinion among the girls themselves is strong and decided on this point. “I don’t mind studyin’, but all my friends are goin’ t’ work, an’ I don’t want t’ stay. My mother an’ brothers all holler at me, but I’m kickin’ to leave. Graduate? Gee, stay two years? Not for me—it’s too slow.”

The girl’s restlessness demands at this age something very new and vivid. This the school has so far failed to supply. She thinks she may find it in work. And by the time she has discovered that work too grows tedious and monotonous, her greater independence has enabled her to make free use of her evenings for the changes and new experiences she craves.

CHAPTER IV
WAGE-EARNING AND NEW RELATIONS AT HOME

Our West Side girl sets out some morning, short-skirted, hair in braids, absurdly childish, to find her minute place in the great industrial world. Probably she strolls through the streets, looking for “Girl Wanted” signs. She will try at one of the big factories nearby. Or, if she is fortunate, some friend who is already working there speaks for her. The more enterprising buy the World and consult its long columns of advertisements.

The West Side factories take in the majority of the work seekers. A few with especial pretensions to “refinement,” or whose families sincerely dread the physical strain and supposedly lower social and moral standards of the factory, go into department stores or become errand girls to milliners or dressmakers. But most of the girls prefer the higher wages of the factory. Lizzie Wade, herself a laundry worker, was perfectly clear in her sixteen-year-old mind as to the advantages of factory work over department store work. “In the first place,” she pointed out, “the factory girl gets better pay, and if she hasn’t any home, she can always get a family to live with. The girl that works in a store lives in the cheapest boarding houses, and gets soaked for her board just the same.”

Few sixteen-year-old workers are as wise as Lizzie. Many of them, no doubt, are vaguely influenced by reasons just as practical in preferring the factory to the store, though they are less able to express them. But if they are asked to justify their preferences, they are likely to return very childish answers. “Tootsie” O’Brien had achieved her working papers at fourteen and a half and was looking for a place. It was significant that Tootsie, who had qualified as a wage-earner, had not yet outgrown her baby name at home. She was willing to take any kind of work, she said, but liked housework best. She wanted to “live out” because her brother was always fighting with her. However, she soon changed her mind, as her sister, who had been a servant before her marriage, told her that she wouldn’t be allowed out when at service. She finally went to work in a factory.

Girls of this type do the most unskilled work in the entire scale of factory occupations. They are not equal to the high grade, skilled work of the garment trades and textile industries. An inquiry concerning the occupations of 26 girls showed the following results: One was a trimmer in a necktie factory; three were folding or slip-sheeting in bookbinderies; one was rolling wall paper; one was working in a tin can factory, operating a machine which fixed the bails in lard cans; nine were packers or wrappers in factories producing biscuits, candy, cigarettes, or drugs; three were markers and shakers in steam laundries; eight were errand girls and messengers for milliners or dressmakers.

These occupations are patently without educational value. The factory processes are the sort of lightweight machine work usually assigned to young girls after the last drop of individual responsibility has been squeezed out. Their chief characteristic is a degree of monotony in which no discipline for the young worker is possible because their effect is stupefaction. The work soon palls on the girl’s restless spirit. Martie Sheridan, after five months of this grinding monotony, secretly cut the belt of her machine just to get a day off. Another girl probably, long before the end of five months, would have thrown up her job and tried another, if not several others.

Finding a new place is always something of an adventure, and in the process of shifting she enjoys a few days of freedom. Pauline Stark, throughout her four years of wage-earning, had been a “rover.” She had had no trouble in finding new places and had tried so many that she had lost count of the number. “I see a sign up an’ I go an’ try. Then sometimes I meet some one I know. I stop an’ get to talking an’ mebbe I won’t look any more that day. But it don’t take long. Sometimes I throw up a job the first day. I can tell. I take a look around an’ see that it ain’t for me. Then I work out the day an’ don’t go back.”

It is difficult for the girls to give an accurate account as to where they have worked and the changes they have made. They are hazy as to places and quite unreliable as to the length of stay. With great effort we pieced together the industrial histories of girls who had been employed for some time. Although most of them had been at work less than a year, they had tried a great number of occupations. The 30 wage-earners in our club mustered among them 120 different jobs, an average of four apiece. Two girls of sixteen had held 12 positions each; one girl of sixteen, 10 positions; and one fifteen-year-old had had nine. One-third of the 30 had had five or more positions. These instances give some idea of the way in which the girl of fourteen and fifteen flits from job to job. It is no wonder that she is inaccurate concerning the details of her industrial experience when each connection is so brief and episodic. A further reason for her haziness is that her point of contact with the great factory and its processes is so slight. Nellie Sherin, aged fourteen, worked in one of the largest and best of the West Side factories. Her childish description of her work is the best indication of her incompetence. “I have to run a machine that pastes the labels. If you don’t get the boxes in right the knife breaks and a man comes and hollers at you.”

The girl of this class accepts in a matter-of-fact way conditions of work that impress the outsider as very hard. Sometimes she tells of having cried with weariness when she started. But complaints of the long day, the meager reward, and the monotony are few. She has not thought out the general aspects of the factory. Comparisons between individual places are constant, as also are personal grievances, usually against a “cranky forelady.” She rebels against the tediousness of her job. “You can hear talkin’ all over our room when the forelady goes out. Then we’ll hear her comin’ in an’ it stops short. Soon’s she goes, we all start again.” As often as not she throws up her job for a personal grievance—a quarrel with another worker, a grudge against a “boss.” Fanny Mullens left the Excelsior Laundry because her friend quarreled with the foreman and Fanny’s loyalty would not permit her to remain. The human factor is the strongest with these young workers.

The girl starts in a store at $3.00 or $3.50 a week; in a factory, at $4.00 or $5.00. The 26 wage-earning girls concerning whom information was obtained were receiving sums which varied from $3.00 to $7.50. Of this group, three were earning $3.00 or $3.50; eight were earning $4.00, and eight were earning $5.00. Thus 19 out of 26 were earning $5.00 or less. The remaining seven girls were receiving $6.00 or over; three received $6.00; two, $6.50; and two, $7.50.

One of the girls earning $6.00 had been working five years; another earning the same amount had been working but a few months. Of the two girls earning $7.50, one had been working four years in the same position and the other five months. As far as our little group of girls was concerned, there was no connection between age or experience and wages. Practically all the girls were doing such unskilled work that additional years and additional experience were idle commodities. There was, on the other hand, some divergence between what the different factories of the district were accustomed to pay for the same grade of labor.

Along with her first humble job and her first meager wage, there comes to the young girl her first taste of power. Her first pay envelope is the outward and visible sign of many changes. Her position at home is altered. She has more prestige, the first beginning of authority. Her family may be actually dependent for comfort on what she brings in. This gives to her desires and wishes a new importance. However autocratic her parents’ rule may have been, they must now turn to her for assistance. There must follow a certain loosening of the reins. Every now and again there is a girl who in these early, headstrong years will press her advantage to the full.

To these girls has come the age of self-assertion. The experience is common to adolescence of becoming intensely aware of oneself. With the new intensity of self-consciousness comes the desire to assume control. At this age the girl resents being “bossed.” It is the time when many families feel the increased friction between brothers and sisters. Interference and guidance need to be gentle. Because the girl is young she is apt to be extreme and her assertion will often be crass and ill-balanced. These are traits of the adolescent girl of all classes, but this phase among our girls is accentuated sharply by a very definite set of circumstances.

Tradition still upholds her parents’ authority. What they ask from her is their right. They are backed by the practical code of morals which, in any community, counts more than many sermons. Public opinion demands the continued subservience of both boy and girl. The precarious state of family wellbeing has instituted a rigid system of household economics; this is needed for mere preservation. It is zealously guarded by the mother, ever the most wary of anything which threatens the group. According to custom she is the spender. All wages come to her untouched; the broken envelope violates the social standard. Husband, sons, and daughters alike are supposed to come under this rule. There should be no exception until the children reach the age of eighteen or nineteen. The mother doles out spending money according to the needs and the earnings of each.

There is no pity felt by her world for the girl who must turn over her meager pay. This is a duty taken for granted. It is the least return for the years during which her parents have made sacrifice and effort for her. The feeling has reason for holding good while economic conditions remain as they are. Each item in the family income is far too important for the girl to escape her toll. She is born to a contest in which she, too, must take part. Only a lucky accident can free her from this inheritance,—accident or rebellion. The pay envelope passes through her hands, and this means the possibility of some independence. At least the choice is hers to give grudgingly or freely. With the responsibilities which come to her so much earlier than to those more sheltered, comes also this earlier power.

Every degree of willingness or resentment in assuming her share of the burden is met with in the various girls. Little wisps and snatches of talk are straws that point to the set of the wind. “Oh, sure, there’s a lot o’ girls that ‘knock down.’ You take this week in our place,—we all made good overtime. I know I got two forty-nine. Well, I guess there wasn’t a single girl but me that didn’t change her envelope, on our floor. Whatever you make is written outside in pencil, you know. That’s easy to fix—you have only to rub it out, put on whatever it usually is, and pocket the change. They think I’m a fool. But I wouldn’t lie to my mother. She has to work an’ she ain’t had things none too easy. Some girls are like that. They’re only too proud to make so much t’ take home.”

A common trick is to pretend to the mother that wages are smaller than they actually are. Katie at seventeen was getting $7.50 a week; in six months she had risen from $5.00. This was unusually good for her set of girls. But her mother believed that she earned only $6.00.

On the other hand, there is the “worrisome” type of girl who surrenders all. Her unselfishness is as extreme as the wilfulness of others. She accepts her hard surroundings, as the others rebel against them, without counting the cost, and sacrifices unsparingly her youthful right to gaiety and pleasure. Mamie Reilly’s mother watched with anxious regret the effect of premature care and responsibility on her daughter. Mamie had been working five years since, as a child of thirteen, she first insisted on getting a job. “She’s a good girl, Mame is, but y’ never seen anything like her. Every pay night reg’lar she’ll come in an’ sit down at that table. ‘Now, Ma,’ she’ll say like that, ‘what are you goin’ to do? How ever are y’ goin’ t’ make out in th’ rent?’ ‘Land sakes,’ I’ll say, ‘one w’d think this whole house was right there on your shoulders. I’ll get along somehow.’ But y’ can’t make her see into that. ‘Now, what’ll we do, how’ll you manage, Ma?’ she’ll keep askin’. She’s too worrisome—that’s what I tell her. An’ she don’t care to go out. Mebbe she’ll take a walk, but like’s not she’ll say, ‘What’s th’ use?’ Night after night she jest comes home, eats ’er supper, sits down, mebbe reads a bit, an’ then goes t’ bed.”

Through everything Mamie had done more than her share. At eighteen she was tall and awkward, quiet and shy. Almost alone among these girls, she had never learned to dance. She had none of the frills—bangs, powder, and gewgaws—the cheap frivolities which were the joy of the rest. But she had a dignity and reliability which the other girls respected. In the whirl of excitement beckoning to the girl in New York, she had led a staid, colorless life. She had never “gone out” anywhere because she had never had any clothes. The price she had given had been the very sap of her youth. Her mother said, “She is too quiet-like an’ gettin’ humdrum at her age. It ain’t right as I know.”

There is less revolt against these early exactions among the girls than among the boys. In the midst of working hours groups of young fellows may be seen any day of the week idling on the street corners. They are significant of something badly awry in the social machinery here. But the girl who refuses to work is less usual by far. Often the loafer’s sister is going each day to her job, turning her money in to the common fund, while he is a parasite who drains the meager supply. Although she probably protests, it is amazing to find how often she tolerates a scheme so unfair. One reason, perhaps, is that a stay-at-home life is too dull to tempt her into idleness there, and to spend time on the streets speedily brands her as “tough.” But the chief reason is that she is ruled by the popular conception of duty. Inheritance and custom force her to a conformity which is not required of her brother. Her protest is fainter than his.

But within the home circle she makes her revolt felt. Rarely is a girl “worrisome,” like Mamie Reilly; few girls surrender so much. The trail of her way, a way glittering with “good times and fun,” carries her often to the other extreme. She follows the lure of her desires with an imperious insistence which does not scruple to shirk the irksome claims of her home. The result is an atmosphere surcharged with wrangling and spite. The girl who as a little child may have been devoted to her father, now switches away impatiently under his scolding. He, for his part, complains bitterly that she thinks only of dancing and new clothes.

One German father whom we knew, at home with his broken ankle bound in a cast, used his crutch on his fourteen-year-old daughter. “Don’t tell me about talkin’ to girls—I know how to take care o’ them.” He brandished his weapon with ire. The home was the scene of quarrels and threats. Amelia was given the worst of reputations by her parents. She “had been a disgrace to them.” She stayed out till two in the morning, hung around halls with boys, and had been brought home by a policeman. They had tried keeping her in and putting her under the surveillance of her nine-year-old brother, but no amount of punishment would change her fundamentally. Rancor and hatred had bitten into her soul. She was a strong, tall girl, loud, unkempt, and disorderly. She was more frank than most girls, partly from recklessness. But the bitterness with which she spoke of her parents, the coldness with which she said, “They can have my money if that’s what they want,” was that of hardened maturity.

The parents often get a settled distrust of a girl with which they do not hesitate to confront her. Distrust is too often justified, for there are few girls who scruple about telling a lie. But constant accusation and doubt serve only to deepen suspicion and drive the girl on to more crafty concealment. The crassness of the punishment administered is especially bad for her years. To this can be traced so much of the “wildness” of the children here. But familiar as she is with brutality of one kind or another, a special resentment comes to the girl at this age. Violence outrages her self-respect and the ideals which are struggling for a foothold in her imagination.

The greatest strain in such households is that between mother and daughter. The girl is starting her course, undisciplined and eager. The woman has lived through checkered and hazardous years. She has suffered the bearing of many children; she has watched the death of some. What she has attained has been hardly won. Through it all, constant labor has drained her physical strength. She is spent, dragged, and worn, in pitiful need of the younger, more vigorous life at her side. As she turns to it there creeps into her attitude the note of appeal which the girl is too young to appreciate. If she deals a rebuff with the half conscious brutality of youth, her mother may draw back into a shell of hardness. Out of the scant wisdom of her years the child has been forced to a decision pregnant with results for her future; for often upon her response to the older woman’s first appeal trembles her entire relationship with her mother and her home.

There is no getting away from the girl’s economic value to her family. It seems ugly and crass that a child’s contribution to the common purse should have any bearing on the affection or guidance she will receive. Yet it has, and her manner of contributing has even more. Out of the conditions of this engulfing, material struggle, rise the spiritual forces at work in each narrow tenement home. Whatever breeds there of loyalty or bitter estrangement works out its certain effect. And the spirit of the household is of no greater import to any member than to the young, venturesome girl.

Here is a household where the girl’s wages have been the mainstay for the whole winter. Louisa’s father, a German, has always been frugal and hardworking and was even penurious in better days. He is now seventy-four. His eyes were weakened in the days of his strength by the strain of his trade as a tailor. Later he came to porter’s work, but now he is too feeble for this. The mother, like so many women in the neighborhood, earns the rent as a janitress. Louisa’s brother, a young man of twenty-one, is a glass cutter by trade. His work might be steady and his wages good, but the common blight of the West Side has struck him; he chooses to loaf with the gang and take things easy. The old father, inveighing against him, has wished to turn him out. But his mother, although she too takes her turn at upbraiding, shields him against the others and clings to a desperate belief in his transparent excuses.

In this crisis, they have looked to the $5.00 which Louisa brings home every week from the candy factory. She is a wilful little person, frail, underdeveloped, weak of build in character as in physique. The reins have been put into her hands. She has used her new-found power to add to her long day at the factory several nights every week at dance halls where she stays until 1 or 2 o’clock. The reproaches of her parents have no effect. “You say that you like me,” she wails, “but you make me miserable here. I’ll go out if I want to, and I’ll not tell where I am going. Anyhow I don’t come home drunk like Bill and make a fuss in the hall. And I work while he hangs around doing nothing.”

Leading the Grand March at the racket of the “Harlem Four,” Louisa has forgotten her outburst, and the dull, sad, cramped existence at home. She is thin, pale, sharp-featured, yet with a certain daintiness. Her attire is “flossy” tonight. She cannot boast a ball dress, to be sure. But her scant suit of brown serge with its sateen collar is trim and new. It was bought at an Eighth Avenue store on the instalment plan. Four out of the twelve dollars have been paid down. A great encircling hat of cheap black straw reaches to the middle of her back and bends under the weight of an enormous “willow.” It sets off her hair, which has been bleached with peroxide. A long bang hangs to her eyes. Her moment of elation comes as she receives the favor for the ladies who lead, a huge bunch of variegated flowers—roses, carnations, and daffodils. But the costume in which she steps out so triumphantly has cost many bitter moments at home. She has gotten it by force, with the threat of throwing up her job.

The breach is widening between her and the parents to whom she clung as a child. There comes the time when she gets a steady “gentleman friend.” She is out now almost nightly. At last the mother appears with her tale, tearful and anxious. “I don’t know whatever I’m goin’ to do with that girl. I’ve just beat her, I have—I guess I ruined three dollars’ worth o’ clothes. But I lost my temper. She stands up and answers me back. An’ she’s comin’ in at 2 o’clock, me not knowin’ where she has been. Folks will talk, you know, an’ it ain’t right fer a girl.” So Louisa is losing her only safeguards. Foolish, childish, easily flattered, she is drifting into a maelstrom of gaiety and pleasure from which only chance will bring her out unscathed.

The great issue between the home and the girl is the question as to whether her affections will center there. Only an emotional hold will take effect on this girl. Her mind is undeveloped. She is not going to reason far. Habit has not yet fastened her in a rut of eternal work and decency. Possibilities that menace health and strength and, in the long run, happiness, hedge her round. If she becomes estranged from those who are naturally near to her, she is set adrift. She is bound to express in some way the chaotic emotional forces within her. She is dangerous then to herself and others, in surroundings like these of the far West Side.

CHAPTER V
THE WILL TO PLAY

A girl from fourteen to eighteen is about as unstable and kaleidoscopic as any quantity in nature. She is changing, almost from day to day. It may be that poverty in her home has deprived her of her full share of youth’s vigor and supreme physical wellbeing. Even so, she keeps its impatient desire for action and experience. She feels its disdain of restraint and hindrance; its zest for swallowing life in hot, hasty gulps. The desire to play is strong in her. Lack-luster resignation and pessimism are rare among the young even where poverty weighs most heavily. The girl’s buoyant spirit breaks loose at the instant of release from factory walls or from the momentary depression of family want. It bubbles forth in girls’ laughter and girls’ play, and in girls’ capricious, whimsical, egoistic moods.

The West Side girl is an independent young person. She has seen a good deal of the world. She has the early sophistication bred of a crowded, close-pressed life. As yet, she has not been battered to the wall in the stress. She has not the pitiful appreciation of the middle-aged woman for slight and passing kindliness. She is self-assertive, arrogant, “able to take care of herself.” She comes, asking nothing, at ease and alert, but ready to give a trial to anything thrown in her way. If it does not suit, she will not be slow to reject it. So she stands, looking bright and curious eyed, straight into the face of her world. She can be defiant at a hint of challenge. And yet one finds that she is suddenly and sharply sensitive. Ridicule and harshness touch her to the quick. Her new-born self-consciousness is easily wounded. A trifling hurt may become a lifelong grievance.

This is a signal of a restlessness beneath the surface which she does not herself understand. It is propelling her onward in an unconscious search. In all her pleasure-loving, drifting adventures she is hunting steadily for the deeper and stronger forces of life. Into her nature are surging for the first time the insistent needs and desires of her womanhood. But this she does not know. She is the daughter of the people, the child of the masses. Athletics, sports, diversions, the higher education, will not be hers to divert this deep craving. She is not close enough to her church for religion to control it. It will stay with her, sweeping her inevitably out of the simplicity of little girlhood into the thousand temptations of her environment, if not, perhaps, into one of the commonest of neighborhood tragedies.

Just now her search is translated very lightly and gaily into the demand for “a good time” and a keen interest in the other sex. She prosecutes it with the imperious heedlessness of her age. Her haphazard and inconsistent training has given her little of the art of self-control. The city bristles with the chances she longs for—“to have fun and see the fellows.” What is to come of this depends on the unformed character of the individual girl, the oversight of her family,—sometimes effective and sometimes not,—and, most of all, on chance.

The control of a little money is far more essential to these girls in their search for enjoyment than to girls in another class. There are many doors which a very small coin will open to her. After she goes to work she usually has a little spending money of her own. As a rule she is given, besides lunch money and carfare, a quarter or 50 cents a week. This may go for candy, carfare to dances and parks, or entrance fees to dance halls and moving picture shows. Sometimes she spends the money given her for carfare on other and more pleasurable things, and walks to work, “wearing out shoe leather, which ain’t right,” as her mother complains. A carfare saved by walking to work is a carfare earned for a trip to a dance hall “away out in the Bronx.” Usually a single fare is enough for the whole trip. The “fellow” who “sees you home” will pay for the return. Thus the little West Sider makes her 25 cents carry her as far along the primrose path as possible.

She has no keener longing than her longing for pretty and becoming clothes. Usually she helps in selection, though now and then the mother buys her clothing from the girl’s own earnings as autocratically as she buys the rest of the home necessities. Sometimes the girl is allowed to keep a dollar or two out of her pay every week with which she buys her own clothes. Often there comes a period of distress which swallows up her whole wages week after week. She sees her earnings go for rent, for fuel, and for food. Hers is not the time of life to be content with shelter, warmth, and nourishment. She would rather starve for these things than miss her worshipped pleasures. Mamie Craven, working steadily in the laundry, turning in her money every Saturday night, once broke out one night in a bitter wail, “Oh, Miss Wright, you don’t know how I want a chinchilla coat.”

There are bound to be many lacks in her wardrobe. Usually the greatest one is that of protective clothing. She has no overshoes and no umbrella. When it rains she comes drenched to her club, but will not think of foregoing the evening’s pleasure on that account. She goes to work in the same unprotected fashion. Winter clothes are thin and inadequate. Many a girl’s vitality is sapped for months in the year through sheer exposure to cold. These deficiencies are endured uncomplainingly. It is much harder if finery or the coveted Easter suit must be foregone. The poorer girl will buy her suit on the instalment plan—$4.00 down and $2.00 each following week. She pays $15 for a suit of the value of $10. She is often guilty, like girls of every class, of some wild bit of extravagance. But in her case extravagance may become heartlessness. A girl whose income was the only regular support of her family spent $5.00—a week’s wages—on a willow plume. “We starved fer that hat,” her mother said, “just plain starved fer it, so we did.”

Social relations between girls of their age and class are very unlike those of boys. A single friend or a little clique takes the place of the gang. They will follow a leader for a moment but not consistently; they are jealous of leadership and slow to acknowledge it. There is almost no natural loyalty to a group. Probably the girl by the time she reaches fourteen has already some special companion. This may be a playmate from her school days, or, very likely, a “pick up” on the street or at work, who soon has the title of “me lady friend.” The relationship may extend over years. It is very constant and means that the two share most of their pleasures together. There are distinct requirements; one must “call up” and “wait in” and not “go round” too much with anyone else. But the girl is rare who has a strong feeling of obligation toward appointments or promises. Therefore the friendship is sure to be checkered by quarrels and reunions. There are besides a thousand and one reasons for dispute. The quarrel is taken very seriously, but the chances are that the breach will heal before long. However, this is not always so; no prediction formed on girl nature is sure. The relationship assumes at times some of the formality and ceremony of the gang. In one case, a definite proposal to be “friends” was made by a girl who had quarreled with her former lady friend. The second girl declined, not from any dislike, but because she was already “going with somebody else.” When a girl begins to have a “gentleman friend” even the slight ceremony of calling up and waiting in for the girl friend is omitted.

The cliques consist of three or four girls, seldom of more. They are likely to exist among the younger girls who have played together as children. They are seldom formed later on, but incline to resolve themselves into the standard couples.

The girls’ homes are not very advantageous places for entertainment and fun. They are too cramped and often too forlorn. Yet everyone here is used to these conditions, and they are not the only difficulties which stand in the way of visits and hospitality. Visits from gentlemen friends are frowned upon and not desired. The parents, especially of the younger girls, look askance on the boys who come to see them.

“My father was always too strict with us girls,” said an older sister, married and established in her own home. “It was always work and keep quiet at home the minute we came in from the factory. He believed that girls must be kept down. He’d have beaten us good if we’d brought a fellow home. So I used to meet my friend at a corner a few blocks off, just the same as my sister Maggie has been doing. It’s only a wonder I didn’t get into trouble the same as she has done and get put away like her. I’m not the one to turn against her now. When she comes out of the Home, she and her baby can come and live with me.”

The sequel of Maggie’s story only served to prove the unwisdom of the parental policy which had tried to “keep her down.” One day Maggie returned to her sister’s home with her six-months-old baby. A week later her sister announced with the utmost gratification and relief that Maggie was married. “If she’d only told us at the start, there’d never been any need for all this trouble. Hannick is a decent fellow and has steady work. He was looking for Maggie all the time she was in the hospital and he was afraid to ask her folks what had become of her. As soon as she came back here, he sent word to me and asked if he could see her. That was the first time I knew who her fellow was. When he came around I told them they ought to go straight off to the priest, and they did.”

The street corner has become, with its free and easy etiquette, a substitute for the home. It is very popular in spite of nagging from the “cop.” Still, the policeman is not a very censorious chaperon. Even the older girl whose parents have opened their door to her company has often learned to prefer its lack of supervision. As a place of rendezvous it is greatly preferred to a parlor of one’s own where one must be “real lady-like.” “You see,” one of the girls explained, “my friend comes to my home; then if he wants me to go somewhere to a dance, my mother’ll likely hear and won’t let me. My brother knows all the places and he’ll tell my mother there’s likely to be shooting there. He makes it bad for me that way.”

The boys’ preference for the street corner is quite as strong as the girls’. Their habit is to send a small boy as intermediary to the girl’s door to tell her who is waiting in the hall below. An incident at “471” gave the smaller boys a chance to express their sentiment. Their gang, known in the neighborhood as “tough young nuts,” were giving a return party to their girl friends. It was to be a “swell” affair, and had involved much consultation and collecting of money beforehand. The instructions had been, “Buy three times as much ice cream as the girls had at their party. Get a cake as big as the cover of this table (a centerpiece 22 inches round). Get three pounds of good candy. Get all the milk and cocoa you want for them girls, but none of that for us. We want soda and ginger ale and celery tonic.” These concoctions, not as harmless as their names suggest, had been purchased by the boys. Everything was elaborately ready and the party had begun. All the guests had arrived except the special friends of two of the boys. A club leader’s naïve suggestion was that Peter and “Gimp” should call for the girls at their homes. Gimp leaned forward, astonished, as if uncertain of what he had heard. “Homes,” he gasped, in a tone surcharged with dismay. “Gee,” the other boy added, “that sure w’d be some place to go, a’right.”

Still, the home is by no means to be discounted entirely as a place for recreation. There is too much Irish jollity and good-fellowship in our neighborhood to make it altogether a tame and stupid place. The “house party,” as any home gathering is known, is not unusual. Music, dancing, and drinking are the chief features of the entertainment on such occasions. A Thanksgiving party at the McKeevers’, for instance, to which the family invited one of the club leaders, showed that the happy good-fellowship which Goldsmith mourned as forever departed from the “Deserted Village” has crossed the ocean with the Irish immigrants and is still preserved to some extent in their newer stronghold on the Middle West Side.

The homelike spirit of the gathering was noticeable. Mrs. McKeever, gray-haired, fifty-two years of age, presided over the festivities. She sat in the only rocking chair, holding in her arms the small son of a neighbor, aged three, extremely dirty and ragged, and as a companion a fox terrier, the pet of the McCormick family. Then came Mrs. O’Hara, the neighbor from the next tenement, large and fat and slovenly, but perfectly good-natured and kindly. She was nursing a small child who was boarded with her by some organization. The child was sleepy and tired and whenever he dozed off was wakened by the music and dancing. In the corner of the sofa next to Mrs. O’Hara was a small, undeveloped specimen of humanity in a faded flannellette dress and very much broken shoes whose appearance classed her as degenerate. She was also a neighbor and had come in to take part in the Thanksgiving festivities. On the same sofa with her at the other end sat a well made-up Negro minstrel, with feet crossed and a large guitar in his arms, who played and sang as well as many a man in a minstrel show on the stage. Next to him, on a kitchen chair, sat a chap of probably thirty-five years. A crutch stood beside his chair, and upon a closer look one could see that one of his legs had been amputated. He was very dreamily playing an accordion, and had had just enough drink to make him very solemn and uninterested in people and things in general. Mrs. McKeever several times deposited the small child and the fox terrier in the middle of the floor and went over to remonstrate with him for not being willing to take part in the ceremonies. He, however, could not be persuaded and sat perfectly still, only occasionally extracting a glass of beer from under his chair and offering it to the others. Over in the corner next to the man with the accordion was a short, stout boy, probably of seventeen years, in his shirt sleeves, whose chief desire was to dance, but who found it difficult to procure partners.

These were the guests on one side of the room. In front of the large pier glass at the end the chair was occupied by an immense Teddy bear, who occasionally was forced into taking part in the dances and general merrymaking. The next seat was occupied by Delia McKeever. Delia was a remarkably good-looking girl, and on most occasions was neat and tidy, but this evening she was conspicuous because of her untidiness. She had had enough beer to make her unusually mirthful and to make her dance much better than usual. Next to Delia sat Annie, also in most untidy condition. Lizzie, the youngest daughter, was sent for to come in from the street. She was dressed in boy’s clothes and had been out masquerading. Holding the center of the floor was a rather handsome chap who played the mandolin well and had a bellowing baritone voice.

The McKeever family were very solicitous that their guests should have a good time, and went around whispering to the musicians, telling them to play or sing whatever the visitors suggested. Everyone sang “The Suwanee River,” and the players of the mandolin and accordion sang several of the latest popular songs. Delia and Annie did a fancy dance known as the “Novelty.” Delia also danced with the chap in the corner, who was ever busy trying to procure a partner. He was so much shorter than Delia that she could conveniently rest her forehead on his head, which she did during the entire dance, making him act very much as a prop to her wilful, antic steps.

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There are two places in which the unoccupied of all ages and types may be seen—the streets and the moving picture shows. Eighth Avenue, the residence street of our aristocracy, is the promenade of the district. No one has better expressed the essential spirit of these promenades than Mr. Wells has done in The New Machiavelli.[81]

“Unkindly critics, blind to the inner meanings of things, call them, I believe, Monkey’s Parades—the shop apprentices, the young work girls, the boy clerks, and so forth, stirred by mysterious intimations, spend their first-earned money upon collars and ties, chiffon hats, smart lace collars, walking-sticks, sunshades, or cigarettes, and come valiantly into the vague transfiguring mingling of gas light and evening, to walk up and down, to eye meaningly, even to accost and make friends. It is a queer instinctive revolt from the narrow, limited, friendless homes in which so many find themselves, a going out toward something, romance, if you will, beauty, that has suddenly become a need—a need that hitherto has lain dormant and unsuspected. They promenade. Vulgar!—it is as vulgar as the spirit that calls the moth abroad in the evening and lights the body of the glow-worm in the night.”

Here also are the flashing, gaudy, poster-lined entrances of Hickman’s and of the Galaxy. These supply the girls with a “craze,” the same that sends those with a more liberal allowance to the matinees. Their pictures spread out adventure and melodrama which are soul-satisfying. The vaudeville is even more popular and not so clean.

Sooner or later almost every girl drifts into some club or settlement. She is a wandering spirit, difficult to hold, still more difficult to tie down to any definite program. She wants activity but soon tires of any one form of it. She cannot concentrate, especially on any finely co-ordinated work requiring time and patience. Dancing and music make the strongest appeal to her. A boisterous club room will quiet suddenly to the sound of “Oh! Mr. Dream Man, let me dream some more.” The dark-eyed girl at the piano drawls in shrill nasal mimicry of the vaudeville “artist,” copying her air and mannerisms.

Cheap and shoddy—but the scene typifies that groping for the ideal which is universal. Look along the line of faces, stilled and attentive. Something is there neither cheap nor small. Here the face of a youngster is caught an instant from its impish drollery. The hardening lines are soft as with a child’s wonder at something beautiful and new. Next to her an older girl is leaning forward. Her features are haggard and drawn, a ghastly white. But she sits with opened lips and a look in her eyes as if she heard beyond the singing something half articulate and far-away. The song has brought a quickening of the imagination, a stirring of childish, unformed aspirations, half gropings for a world finer than the one she knows.

In these girls the longing for the unreal is overlaid by much that is commonplace and sordid. To come upon this sudden, vivid glimpse of it takes away one’s breath. At the same instant some of the faces are prophetic of its final dying out. The girls’ instinctive idealism, a wild thing here, unnurtured, is as elusive and fleeting as it is beautiful. It is foredoomed to fade swiftly in the midst of unfriendly reality.

Only a fleeting glimpse of the ideal, and soon the club room is again a clamorous, gay, turbulent place. There is much energy that must be let off; nothing but dancing will satisfy the demand. This means that the doors must be opened to “the fellows” too. They, meantime, have been besieging the club from the outside. If the older girl is to be held, some concession must be made to her chief desire. Once it is made, many difficulties arise. The interest between the girls and boys here is almost wholly one of sex. They are farther apart than in other circles. As children, there has been very little playing in common. The boys’ interests are more energetic; group athletics have seldom been opened to the girls of the elementary schools. Both boys and girls have a narrow range of knowledge and impersonal interests. Conversation is a mere exchange of personalities, gossip, and bickering, and there is little even of that. The girls line up on one side of the room; the boys group together on the other side. Games are sidetracked as foolish. There is only dancing to bring them together, and so the club dances. This is doubtless the reason why the dance hall holds the first place in the girl’s estimation of a good time. In these places she learns the “tough” dances in their worst forms and with all their suggestive details. If she attends these dubious resorts freely, she is marked socially by it.

Most of the girls under sixteen and the most strictly guarded of the older girls go to dances only occasionally. Then they attend some “racket” given by their special friends, their fathers’ association, or their church. They may go with their families or be taken by a boy friend with their parents’ knowledge and consent. Perhaps a younger sister is allowed to go along, much below the age when the first daughter started, because “she’s company for May.” This occasional ball, with its more or less formal invitation, its sanction by the parents, and its semi-chaperonage, is considered a very different thing from the promiscuous attendance of dance halls.

Many of the older girls, as we have seen, go much as they choose, in a free and easy fashion. They are not restricted, or if they are they “sneak” away. Two girls go together as a rule. They must have a little money—carfare and a quarter for entrance. But that is all that is needed; no chaperon and no escort. Bonds are off; freedom is absolute; the range of possibilities is almost limitless. From Fourteenth Street to 162nd Street, East Side and West, from Coney to Jersey, these eager feet in the path of pleasure find their way. They are not even dependent on the initiative of an escort for their good time. The girls decide on their dance hall, and once on the floor, a “pick-up” is easy to acquire. If they dance together, two men are sure to “break” provided the girls are good looking and dance well. Etiquette demands that they remain through the dance with this random partner. To desert him on the floor is an insult which he may avenge with violence. To sneak between the halves is somewhat risky and is considered mean. It is better, as one of our girls pointed out, to tell him frankly that “you can’t seem to keep step and you’d rather not dance it out.”

The dance hall, with its air of license, its dark corners and balconies, its tough dancing, and its heavy drinking, is becoming familiar to every reader of the newspapers. To the girls who attend them they are not all of one kind by any means. The best places are perhaps too “classy” for the West Side girl, and she has not the proper clothes. The character of the dances at any hall depends, our informants said, entirely upon the club that manages the affair. “If they don’t want nothing but society dancing, why the cop’ll keep the floor clear for them. But if some of these tough fellows are running the racket off they go to the cop and say, ‘We don’t want any dancing stopped here. See?’ and he leaves them alone.”[82] Home-going is not thought of until 1 or 2, often 3 or 4 a. m. The ball is often followed by a trip to a restaurant and home is finally reached at 6 a. m.

A party of this kind is not the single carnival of the year. Once a week, if not twice or thrice, the girl who goes to the dance hall goes through its round of excesses. The most startling fact in this connection is that it is the little girls who are doing the dancing in the public places of amusement in New York. The young girl usually settles down to keeping steady company some time before her early marriage, and goes less to the dance halls. Sixteen-year-old Josie, spending three out of every seven nights of the week at public dances, said, “When I’m eighteen or nineteen I won’t care about it any more. I’ll have a ‘friend’ then and won’t want to go anywheres.”

There is another group of girls who do not go to the dance halls. They have not even the small amount of money that would take them there, nor the one suit of good clothes that would make them presentable among the others. Lacking the tawdry finery and the superficial good manners of the other set, they are shabby and dirty and are known throughout the block as tough. Between them and the upper set, those who hover on the edge of toughness and fight for the poor distinction of just escaping it, there is a chasm of dislike, suspicion, and jealousy. The tough girls have the two universal amusement places—the street and the nickel “dump” (moving picture show). Besides these, they can make meeting places of the alleys, the docks, and vacant rooms in the tenements. These neglected, unlit cracks and crannies serve as traps for childhood of both sexes. Here children are snared in the darkness long before they are old enough to know the meaning of temptation. This is the most sinister phase of the recreation problem.

Marriage is for all these girls the final and greatest adventure of adolescence. They do not look past the adventure at the responsibilities which lie beyond. The question of children is waved aside as scarcely worth a hearing. Here, where the management of a household is so hazardous and stern an affair, it is most lightly assumed. The girl steps carelessly and boldly ahead. Sixteen is a bit early, but eighteen or nineteen is a good age and further delay is considered needless.

Sometimes the girl goes to church with her companion and is married in the presence of her family and friends. But very often she and her boy-husband indulge in a mild elopement. This is not necessarily done to evade the objection of parents. It is partly in obedience to the romantic instinct of youth and partly because the girl and her family cannot afford the parade of a real wedding. After one of these secret marriages, it is not uncommon for the girl to go on living at home and working, while her husband does the same. In a short time the fact of their marriage becomes known; the young pair become the center of neighborhood interest; and then, as a decidedly secondary matter, the question of their “taking up rooms” is considered. Probably the new wife goes on working in order to buy furniture for her home.

“What do you think!” exclaimed Mrs. Attinger to a visitor from the club who dropped in on a Saturday morning. “Our Lizzie’s married. She’s been married two months and they never told me till last week.” Mrs. Attinger seemed not at all displeased with the event, viewing it as a successful joke on herself and Lizzie’s friends. She went on to relate how her daughter had given up her job at the cigarette factory and had gone over to live in New Jersey with her husband, who was a day laborer. It also appeared, from her mother’s story, that the young couple had not started out under the most favorable auspices. Lizzie had visited Mrs. Attinger the day before with the news that her husband expected to be laid off soon and she was looking for work, as she needed money to furnish her house. Mrs. Attinger related these details without seeming to be particularly disturbed by them.

It was, after all, the familiar story of beginning wives and husbands on the West Side. It indicated that Lizzie had quickly found marriage to be an extremely sobering event. Henceforth she would have new problems to face, problems in which the adolescent hunger for good times would cease to be the dominant element. The will to play was to give place to the incessant struggle for existence which makes up the career of the wife of a casual laborer.

CHAPTER VI
THE BREAKDOWN OF FAMILY PROTECTION

Our West Side girls were members of a supposedly protected part of the community. Each of them belonged to a family group; if they were not living with their own parents, near relatives had taken them in. Their homes were in a section which possesses a neighborhood life and neighborhood opinions. The population is far more stable than that of the East Side; recent comers are rare. Some of our girls told of how their mothers had gone to school together. One had started in the same school through which her mother had passed. Many families had shifted around within a range of 10 blocks for a generation. The parents of most of them had been here from ten to thirty or forty years. It is, then, not in the absence but in the breakdown of neighborhood and family protection that we must seek the reasons for social, moral, and physical deterioration in these girls.

The character of the community goes far to counter-balance any advantage the girl may gain from living in an environment familiar to herself and to her parents. If she grows up in one of these blocks, she is, from babyhood, in the midst of lawlessness and rumors of lawlessness. They are afloat in the air she breathes, as certain to be inhaled as are the heavy odors from the gas plants and slaughter pens.

Two girls came excitedly into their club with news of an assault which had just taken place down the block. They had loitered to join the curious crowd and to have a look at the victim. They related the details of the event and commented upon them as upon a familiar story.

There was a ripple of excitement, but no surprise. One girl exclaimed, “Things like that are happening on our block all the time.”

The block where this girl lived bears the distinction of having sheltered, some forty years ago, the original “Hell’s Kitchen” gang.[83] A junk-covered lot is pointed out as the site of the tumble-down shack where the gang met. The shack has disappeared, while in the rear, facing the street to the north, a mission is now in full swing. Still, tradition upholds the desperate character of the locality and gives it a bad reputation. The police declare, however, that it is no worse than many other parts of the neighborhood. Fifteen of our club girls came from this block. All the toughs who gather there are, of course, identified with the “Gopher Gang.” The Gophers were said to have assaulted the housekeeper in 562. She had reported to the police their use of her vacant rooms, and in revenge they had “beaten her up.” It was to this same house, which bears a bad reputation, that a physician had been recently called, late in the evening, to attend a baby. The child was in convulsions, the effect of the whiskey with which she had been “doped.” After a search through the house, he found only one family sober enough to be trusted with the child.

Authentic stories of violence came to us from time to time. Many other tales were the product of gossip largely mingled with falsehood. But the brutality of the neighborhood speaks for itself; it is everywhere, in the streets, in the talk, in the minds of old and young. Recklessness and daring are apt to be painted with heightened colors, exaggerated beyond the fact. The child does not discriminate between garbled truth and falsity. In any case, these stories take effect on her. They are poured into her mind and muddy the stream of her imagination. She believes a large amount of what comes to her ears, some of which she sees and knows to be true. The girls who lived in this block, though they were coming and going by night and day, had yet a lively apprehension of its dangers. “When I go home after ten,” said Mamie Stertle, “I always get the cop on the corner to see me to my door.” Mamie had lived uptown for a few months. Up there, far to the north, she had acquired a friend of a superior type, a chauffeur, who worked steadily and always had money in his pocket. When she came back to live on the West Side, she took it for granted that he could not come to her home, lest he be assaulted and robbed.

The young girl shares in all the gossip of her elders. She takes in greedily the idle talk of the kitchen, the stoop, and the street. In this prurient school she becomes familiar, even as a child, with the lowest forms of vice and immorality. Living on the same block with 15 of our girls were two young women who were the “talk of the parish.” “They begun in the dance halls back o’ the saloons,” said Mrs. Ryan, “and look what they are now!” Not one of our 15 girls but was familiar with the talk and with all the details of the two irregular lives about which it centered.

A restaurant was opened on the corner. It was soon noised about that the woman proprietor was identical with a notorious criminal who had served a sentence of twenty years for infanticide. Before long the girls were repeating with gusto horrible stories of her crimes. Sadie Toohey, standing on the corner with a group of schoolmates, informed them concerning the restaurant keeper, “She was a midwife and used to burn babies.” Then, with a toss of her blonde head with its little-girl bows, she added, “She burned one of mine.” The sally was greeted with shouts of appreciation and Sadie’s reputation as a wit rose among her comrades.

A mother, even one of the wisest, finds it no easy task to defend her young against these influences. Life is far too congested in such quarters for the girl to escape any of its aspects. When a family of from six to eight members lives in three or four rooms it is impossible to segregate the young from their elders. Only well-to-do parents can afford to provide a separate life tempered to the needs of young and growing personalities. The poor man’s house has no nursery for its young, no annex like the boarding school, which enlarges the dimensions of the rich man’s house and provides a special environment friendly to youth and its needs. The daughter of fourteen in the tenements must share the experience of the mother of fifty, who, even with the best intentions, cannot shield her girl from her own fifty-year-old materialistic morals. What is true of the individual family is also true of mass life on the block. There is no segregation of youth. The result is precocious hardness or youthful rebellion.

If the practice of pooling the moral standards of old and young is not considered ideal training for children in families whose moral standards meet the usual requirements, it is even less desirable in families which are either degraded or undeveloped. There are here on the West Side many families who have the naïve morality of primitive social groups. The result is that many of the girls are simply reared in a different morality from that of the community at large. Illegitimate births are common. Marriage—even a common law marriage—is accepted as removing any stigma that might attach to an irregular relationship. “Oh, it is all right,” said the parents of one girl-mother, “because she’s been goin’ with Bill now for years. They’ll marry as soon as they can.”

One of our club girls drifted into a temporary union and then drifted out again in the most matter-of-fact way. After a period of absence from the club, she was reported upon inquiry to be married. “She done well for herself,” rumor ran. One day she turned up at the club and brought her boy-husband, apparently a decent, steady sort of chap. Soon we learned that they had not really been married but had started the report in a spirit of fun. However, they now decided to go through the ceremony in earnest and together they went to the priest. Here they met an unexpected obstacle, for their visit had been forestalled by Mattie’s mother, who did not approve of Cleary for a son-in-law and had charged the priest not to marry them. The girl returned home, but continued to meet Cleary on the street and to go around with him. Then gradually she began to shake off the connection, breaking promises to the boy and failing to keep appointments with him. He came to the club one evening expecting to find her there according to her promise. But Mattie did not come to the club that night, and Cleary, after waiting a while in vain, departed saying darkly, “That’s the third time this week she’s give me the hang-up.” There was evidence that Mattie’s mother was more concerned about the loss of her daughter’s earnings than about making her an “honest” girl.

The toleration of moral irregularities is mingled with much harshness of censure. “D’ ye know Jennie Meehan that lives in th’ house next to ours?” Kitty Stevens asks the cooking class. “Well, she’s just had a baby. Father McGratty went there today an’ he married her an’ the feller. Her sister was just th’ same way, only she went and had her baby in Jersey. Me mother says if she had that kind of girl she’d burn her, she w’d. Burnin’ w’d be good enough for the likes o’ her.” But in spite of this severity of comment, the occurrence is accepted philosophically by the elders of the neighborhood, and soon forgotten.

Some families fall below all moral codes, even the simple ethics of the far West Side. The fault which may be forgiven in the girl is not so pardonable in her parents. Open and excessive infidelity on the part of the father and drink or infidelity on the part of the mother may make the family outcasts from among the merely poor. The daughter shares the degradation of the others and can scarcely escape the consequences. Even where the habits of her elders are not the subject of gossip, she herself cannot escape the knowledge and the influence. There was fifteen-year-old Addie Mercer, bright, vivacious, with sparkling dark eyes, who was getting a “bad name.” The unsavory example came from her father. He, as Addie and her mother and all the children knew, maintained a second household with a colored woman in charge. The effects of this constant example, as well as of other demoralizing influences, were already evident in Addie, and the final result threatened to be total moral collapse.

Often the mere physical conditions of life seem enough to account for the moral tragedies. The hallways of these tenements are perennially dark by day, although they are lit by flickering gas jets in the evening. The legal requirements for illumination of dark halls and stairs are too often evaded throughout the tenements. There was one house in our neighborhood where no lights burned in any of the halls day or night, for months. It is not uncommon to find a hall so pitch-dark that one must feel one’s way down the stairs.

A white flower was sent to the sick mother of one of our girls. When a visitor called, it was literally the only thing that could be seen in the woman’s room. All other details—walls, bed clothing, the features of the sick woman—were lost in blackness until the eyes of the visitor became sufficiently accustomed to the darkness to distinguish between them. Men boarders shared from time to time the three rooms of this home. In this flat and others like it a daughter had lived her fourteen years. Then, still a child, she became a mother.

Childhood in the tenements cannot escape the smirch of its brutal and ugly surroundings. The open toilet where little children play has given occasion to the bitterest of tragedies. The corner saloon, without which no block is complete, is always, it must be remembered, a part of some tenement house. It impinges on the homes of 12 or 15 families. The halls reek with the odor of bad whiskey. Snatches of saloon talk and saloon laughter leak through the walls, even by day. Out of homes like this come girls and boys to go to schools from whose neighborhood all liquor selling is legally banished to a distance of at least 200 yards! Truly, our legal protection of childhood is in some respects a farce.

Allowing for great deficiencies, we have still much natural vigor and strength among the young in the district. This is not yet a spot such as some that exist in the London slums, pervaded with the taint of innate mental and physical degeneration. The parents of our girls were mainly Irish immigrants or first generation Irish-Americans. They came of vigorous peasant stock, and from a country which is, by comparison with the rest of Europe, almost free from venereal disease. We found that most of our club girls had a fair physical inheritance. Of a group of 20 who were given physical examinations, 18 were shown to have well-developed muscles and organs. Notwithstanding many signs of weariness and disease, they were not lacking in stamina. All the more for this reason should the girl in her adolescent years live under a régime which will conserve her natural energy. The chance for health and strength should not be thrown away. These are the years of nervous instability in which especially she needs rest, change, exercise, and the healthful freedom of outdoor play and occupation. Her chances for all these things are very limited. Bodies intended to be vigorous are hard used from the start, and during adolescence they are often strained and harried far beyond their recuperative power.

Almost every night some girl came dragging in with heavy eyes and cheeks dead white under the powder. There were complaints galore of weariness and headache. One great reason was the immoderate pace at which the lives of such girls are hurried on. Long hours of work are thrust upon them. Long hours of play are seized with petulant insistence. To wrap packages from 7 a. m. until 5:30 p. m. within the walls of a factory; then several times a week to dance until 2 or 3 a. m. in the stifling closeness, the noise and excitement of a public hall, is a not unusual program. The immature body is bound to fail. With the girl who keeps up her train of pleasures, only a rebellious season now and then, when she loafs and sleeps long mornings, saves her from exhaustion.

Another cause of discomfort and pain, often with serious results, is the prevalence of minor defects of body. They have gone without care for months and years. Practically no girl has had teeth, eyes, and throat kept in good condition. The group of 20 girls were examined for defect in scalp, nose, ears, throat, teeth, eyes, heart, and lungs. Not one examined was without defect. Of the 20, 15 had enlarged tonsils and five had adenoids; 12 had defective teeth; four defective vision; two were cross-eyed; three had spinal curvature; one had trachoma; and one conjunctivitis.

Two sisters brought trachoma to the house from an institution where they had been reared. Sarah had been cured by a delicate and skilful operation. Martha had been discharged without any treatment. She was one of the toughest girls in the club and least concerned about herself or her appearance. When she came to us she was “bumming,” without a job. In her torn and filthy clothing, with reddened eyes half closed with the disease, she looked the most forlorn and neglected of the underworld. For weeks we worked to induce her mother to give her care. “Thank God, there’s nothing much the matter with her eyes,” was the mother’s final answer after she had been warned that blindness was a certain consequence. And from her sister, Sarah’s eyes were re-infected. A case recorded in the group of 20 was also contracted from her.

These examinations were little guide to the most serious physical defects among the girls. Those most in need of care were most difficult and wayward about examination. The mention of a doctor dismayed them. Some who promised to go never reached his office. But a weekly clinic was continued through the winter. Gradually the girls gained confidence and a number of serious troubles came to light. Three cases of tuberculosis—two incipient—were found. The third, which was taking a headlong course, was checked and ultimately cured by sending the girl daily to a hospital boat. Two girls were finally examined and treated for venereal disease. It was noticeable that girls whose histories and habits left little doubt of sexual abuse were under par in general health. Undoubtedly this operated both as cause and as result.

Carrie Fuller drifted into the club irregularly for months. Her voice, her frown, her dragging slouch across the room all told of the absence of any stamina. She never consented to any suggestion of a doctor or of care. It is inevitable that such a condition should make continuous work impossible. She was in a cigarette factory till she “chucked her job.” When we saw her after several weeks of absence, we learned without surprise that she had left home to live with a married sister and “lead a sporting life.” She laughed a bit recklessly and shambled out, leaving only the wonder that she cared to come at all. Without bodily vitality, how shall any of these children live through the long working days of their youth? And, still more, how shall they resist the continual pressure of the viciousness around them? Yet many a girl is scattering to the wind the strength of her youth.

A group composed of 19 of our girls, ranging in age from thirteen to seventeen, were examined in a psychological clinic. Four girls stood above the normal in mental ability, 10 were normal, and two were barely normal. One was below normal, as the result of immoral habits, and two were feeble-minded.

In the full story, broken schooling, low moral standards, the brutal life of the streets, low housing, and physical inferiority all play their part in the coarsened moral outlook of the girls. There is a group demoralized even in childhood by the abuse of their sexual functions. There are some who fall into immorality during the first years of adolescence. For the most part, however, the girls finally slip into the established ways of marriage and family building. From such groups the children of the next generation will be born in the largest proportion. To society, as well as themselves, it matters a great deal whether they have been crippled in mind and body by a wretched and brutal environment.

Such a girl was May Carney, who announced one day to our consternation that she was going to be married. May was only sixteen and a victim of gonorrhea. She had been, however, perfectly “straight” for a couple of years. At the age of sixteen she looked upon herself as a reformed character. “I used to be pretty tough with the boys,” she said. “That’s a pretty bad thing for any girl to say of herself, but I’m over it now.” The physician had said that it would require three years to cure her thoroughly of her disease and had recommended a slight operation immediately. In view of these facts, we could only feel great concern at the news of her immediate marriage. One of the club leaders sought out her mother to remonstrate against the marriage and also to propose that May should go to the hospital for two weeks.

Mrs. Carney was found at home one evening about 8 o’clock, and adjourned with her visitor to the hall outside for a confidential talk. The public passage, lighted by a flaring gas jet, was surrounded by four closed doors shutting off as many different flats and the crowded domestic life within. In the evening, when Mrs. Carney’s family was at home, it was the only spot where she could have a private word with a caller. Her final summing up of her daughter’s situation was this: “You see, if May was to go away to the hospital for two weeks, they’d all say she went away to have a baby. You see them two doors,” pointing to the forward end of the hall. “The girls in there—both of them—have just been away havin’ babies. They didn’t have nobody to take care of them, so they had to bring their babies home. Now, if May was to be gone two weeks, ye couldn’t make nobody believe she wasn’t doin’ just the same as them two.”

In view of this difficulty it was suggested that the operation might be performed at home. This seemed feasible, and the more serious question of May’s marriage was then broached. “Yes, May will be married in September,” said Mrs. Carney. “I know, she’s not seventeen yet, but it’s this way, y’ see. She’s sickly, she won’t never be no good to me,—the two or three dollars she brings home won’t hardly keep her,—and she’s always wantin’ money to spend on herself. What I say is, she’d better get married now. Daley is a good fellow and he’s workin’ steady. She mightn’t have so good a chance again.”

It would not be fair to blame Mrs. Carney very harshly for the materialism of this speech and her total lack of consideration for the “steady fellow” whom May was about to marry, and for their possible children. Mrs. Carney’s moral outlook was the result of the hard school in which she had been educated. As for her willingness to saddle a hardworking young man with her sickly daughter, this was, after all, only her duty as a “good mother.” It would have been hard to make Mrs. Carney see anything wrong in her attitude toward her daughter’s marriage. One has to admit that what we expected of her as a matter of course was from her point of view heroic conduct.

In view of the circumstances surrounding these young lives, it is useless to talk of the “fall” of these girls. Many of them have never lived on a sufficiently high moral level to “fall.” With them immorality is of a piece with the uncleanliness, physical and mental, in which they have been reared. There was, however, one important distinction which we learned to make between the forms of immorality. There was the girl who “solicited” and the girl who did not. One may have courage to grapple with mere immorality, but the girl who has been swept into the currents of commercialized vice is at once allied with secret and powerful forces which enable this trade to hold its own. Once during the year we were compelled to stand by helplessly and see a girl of sixteen slip over the brink of prostitution.

Carrie Drake, who drifted into the club one evening with Winnie Hyland, was a tall, white-faced girl, rather gawky and poorly dressed. She wore a shabby suit, a very dirty white waist of cheap embroidery, and a rackety hat which showed the effects of having been repeatedly rained upon. Carrie’s devotion to this hat was all the more noticeable because the other girls seldom wore any. We soon discovered the reason; an attack of typhoid fever had left her almost bald. Beneath the hat she wore a reddish-brown wig which was so thin that it scarcely covered her new growth of stubby hair of altogether a different shade of brown. She said she had made the wig of “some puffs,” and that it had been very good until some girl had tried to improve it by cutting it. She possessed a low voice and a courteous manner which she had kept as salvage from the wreck of her mother’s training.

Winnie Hyland, who brought her to us, was an irresistible little crippled girl whose faith in the powers of a social worker was the result of having been gently cared for all her life by representatives of one social agency or another. The tubercular hip-bone which she had developed in early childhood had saved her from the worst of the harshness and want which prevailed in her own home. Discovering her friend in search of a job she brought her over to the club to one of the “teachers.”

Carrie was not a hopeful candidate for work. She was only fifteen, still gaunt from the ravages of typhoid, grotesque in appearance. Her mother had died when she was eleven, and she had been promptly taken from school, which she hated, to do the housework. To appease the truant officer, she was sent to another school for a month. Then quietly she dropped out altogether. An attempt at work in a factory at this age was unsuccessful. “My aunt told the forelady how I was poor and hadn’t any mother. So she took pity on me and let me try.” But she was soon discharged and was kept at home to take care of her younger brother and sister, until all three were sent to an institution. Two months later the father died,—as Carrie declared and certainly believed, “of a broken heart.”

After leaving the institution at fourteen, she had lived with her aunts by spells, quarreling and breaking away from time to time. For a while she had stayed with the mother of a friend who found her sitting on the steps in the rain. She tried places at service, but she was not a trained houseworker and did not stay long at any place. Finally she had got a job in a steam laundry, but while working there she sickened with typhoid and was sent to the hospital. When she came to us she was living with an aunt in a furnished room house, a forlorn, three-story shack on one of the river blocks. The halls reeked with odors from the corner saloon. The aunt, her husband, and two children were occupying a single room when they took the girl in. There was only one bed. “I told Carrie she could squeeze in,” she explained. “I couldn’t ask her to sleep on the floor.”

It was slow business finding work for Carrie. She had to have better clothes. She had to be examined by a physician, for there were signs of a venereal disease which would have made her dangerous to fellow-workers in a factory. These things had been arranged for and consented to. But before they could be put into effect and work could be found, Carrie had taken the plunge. She disappeared without leaving a trace, but soon after one of the girls reported seeing her on Eighth Avenue, “in a real wig and a swell new suit.” Immorality was not new to Carrie, but she had found a way to make it pay. She was “on the streets.” There followed an unsuccessful search, inquiries at police headquarters, of prison officials, of probation officers. We enlisted the aid of a strong society, but the agent, though he promised to help, gave us very little encouragement, saying that such a search was pretty hopeless, as there were hundreds of girls in similar circumstances at large in New York.

Carrie slipped out of sight all the more easily because she had no one “who rightly belonged to her.” When a girl disappears from a home presided over by a determined mother, the search which follows is likely to be a desperate one. Mrs. Mullarkey’s search for her Fannie was a mixture of folly, shrewdness, and heroism. Fannie, according to her mother, was “the best girl you ever saw” till she came to live on the “Gopher block.” There she “got in” with an older girl at the factory and began to be tough. She threw up her job, as did her friend, and the two spent their time in secret ways. At first the mother knew nothing of Fannie’s being out of work because the girl left home regularly mornings and came home promptly to her dinner. But at last the fraud was discovered; there was a scene, with “hollerin’ and smashin’,” and upon the heels of it Fannie disappeared. Mrs. Mullarkey’s fears pointed to a certain house on Eleventh Avenue where a woman lived who had the reputation of harboring girls. Not daring to go there alone, she enlisted the aid of Father Langan, “a rough hollerin’ sort of a man that the children was all afraid of.” But the woman would not open even to the Father’s authoritative knock. Eventually they returned with an officer who broke down the door. But Fannie was not there after all.

Mrs. Mullarkey’s two aids, the officer and the priest, could give her no further counsel. But she herself knew of another resource in the person of a young man, about twenty-two years old, a gangster and political scullion, whom she had known from early boyhood. To him she made her appeal for old acquaintance’ sake. “For God’s sake, Petey,” she said, “you are the only one that can get Fannie. Find out where she is.” Moved by the appeal and nothing loath to show his power, Petey promised that he would find the girl; only he stipulated that Mrs. Mullarkey must “leave Fannie be” when once she had her. Mrs. Mullarkey agreed and Petey went forth on his quest. In a couple of hours he returned with the culprit and commanded her to tell her mother where she had been. At first she refused; but Petey, once enlisted on the mother’s side, was a stern and unyielding ally. He brought out a knife and threatened her, so that the poor girl was terrified and stammered forth a confession of how she and her friend had been staying together in a furnished room. Mrs. Mullarkey was so outraged by what she heard that she altogether forgot her promise to Petey. After he had gone she summoned an officer and had the girl taken to court. Fannie was locked up in a cell for twenty-four hours “to cool off.” When she came up before the judge the following day she was “as brazen as could be, not a tear in her eye.” At last, however, she said she wanted to go home, and the judge placed her on probation.

We knew a sorry scrap of a child, five years old, who was already getting her instruction. She was a thin, sharp-featured little creature, uncommunicative, but very watchful out of her clear, bright blue eyes. Her clothing, hands, and face were always unclean. She gave an uncomfortable sense of possessing a great deal of unnatural knowledge for her age. Her home was a kitchen with two windows, and two tiny dark bedrooms, as hopelessly unkempt and dirty as herself. It was the abode of six people and nine cats. Her father was the last of three husbands, all of doubtful legal status. Her mother, who drank heavily on occasion, was unreliable. “Patsy” was the frequent companion of her sister of fifteen. This girl, who had an unusual, vivid, and forceful personality, was alternately sought out by the fellows of the block and censured with their disapproval. She ruled Patsy as an autocrat, petting and punishing her, allowing her to “tag around” and constantly using her as a go-between. There will be no question of a “fall” for Patsy. As she was being taught, so in time she will naturally develop.

With girls from such homes, childhood is the crucial time. It is not temptation, circumstance, or delusion that gets them into “trouble.” It is the faulty moral and mental training which simply expresses itself later in the almost inevitable, natural fashion. A smattering of conventional morality given by the church or by school is of little practical force against the tenor of their lives. “Reform” for such girls does not mean a return to abandoned ideals and desires. This is hard to achieve, but what is required here is still more difficult. It is the graft of new habits and a new outlook. It is the patient training away from the easy ways into the strict new law. Even fourteen or fifteen may be too late an age at which to begin this.

But actual immorality is not the only fruit of the dingy, sordid happenings which compose so large a part of the life of this community. There are girls who grow up in the midst of vicious surroundings with an inward security against harm. They are as trustworthy as the most carefully trained and guarded child—and hardier. For with them there is truth in the familiar boast, “I’m able to take care of myself.” But they pay a price for this fortitude. They are not taught, cleanly and rightly, straight from the shoulder. The taint and grime around them reach to their thoughts and feeling, and they suffer in their conceptions of life and of human experience.

We hear a great deal of the precocious development of New York children. It is most noticeable in girls from homes like these. In spite of the essential helplessness of their age, they acquire a surface hardihood which marks them out from normal children. They have grown up to have a settled distrust of life. They have a lurking bitterness which may be unavoidable in the adult but which ought never to play a part in childhood.

Yet, granting all the untoward conditions and influences which she must face, the problem of our West Side girl is by no means a hopeless one. Watch her as she swings through the streets, lovely through all her tawdriness, fine through all her vulgarity, gentle through all her “toughness.” Seeing her thus we cannot but see also her hopeful possibilities, in spite of the sordidness and evil which have encompassed her.

To strengthen the best elements of the home—this is the surest and most fundamental way to help this girl. The dangers for her family are the most deeply rooted menace to her. And here they are manifold. We may safeguard her recreation; we may improve her schooling; we may regulate her working conditions. But we must remember that she is seldom to be regarded entirely as an individual; she is one of a family group, a unit of a community. Unless she drifts to the streets she will probably remain so. And whatever can lighten and beautify the grimy life of the district, or relieve the intense pressure on family comfort, will give her a better chance.

CHAPTER VII
THE ITALIAN GIRL

By Josephine Roche

From out the big candy factories of the Middle West Side throngs of workers, one Saturday night, came hurrying into the December darkness. Eagerly they turned their steps toward their tenement homes. Many of them were Italian girls, and very young.

Across the street from Kohlberger’s candy factory a child waited, peering anxiously at every group of girls that left the building. “Lucy!” she called out suddenly. Three girls stopped and the child ran up to them crying, “Oh, Lucy, your sister Mary’s got twins!” Lucy’s shriek of delight was echoed rapturously by her companions; they caught hold of the child and besieged her with questions. Several friends stopped to hear the glad tidings. Then the little group set out up Ninth Avenue for Lucy Colletti’s home to see Mary and the new arrivals.

The noise of the elevated trains drowned their voices and the crowds held them back, but they talked happily on. After the first excitement of the news had abated a little, they turned to other matters. “Perhaps your friend will be at your house, Lucy,” said one of the girls.

Lucy’s happy look faded.

“No, he won’t.”

“But he’s there at the door every night, and he goes up the stairs with you.”

“My father’s got no use for him, so I told him .... Well, what’s the use, we ain’t allowed to do anything,” she ended sullenly.

“Why don’t you do like Jennie does, and not let them know?” asked the other.

“They’d know. They don’t ever let me out at night, not even to go to the club. It’s just sit around the house all evening. If you’ve got a husband, he’ll take you out somewhere. Mary got married when she was fifteen and after that she went out all the time. I wisht I was married!”

As they turned from Ninth Avenue west into one of the Forties a girl and a young man approached them. “There’s Angelina!” exclaimed Jennie, calling to the girl. Angelina greeted them warmly. She was thin and looked delicate, as though she had just recovered from a severe illness. In answer to the girls’ eager questions she said that she was better; that she and Nick were to be married at Christmas and go to live in the Bronx; that she’d get well fast then. She asked in turn about the girls at the factory and said that she missed them.

Angelina was sixteen. Two years before, she had gone into the candy factory. She started at $3.50 a week and after a year got $4.00, packing chocolates in the basement. It was cold there and damp, and in spite of her heavy sweater and two pairs of stockings she had contracted a severe cold which lingered on her lungs. She failed steadily until one day after a bad fit of “coughing blood” she fainted and had to be taken home. She could not go back, although her mother missed the $4.00 sadly, as her father too was out of work. But when she was able to be up and care for the baby and do her mother’s work as janitress, the latter managed to get cleaning jobs and things were easier. This last week her father had got employment. He was washing dishes in a saloon for $9.00 a week. Now it would be possible for Angelina to marry. Her friends shared in her happiness with quick responsiveness, and continued to talk of her marriage to Nick until the nearness of Lucy’s house brought them back to the first interesting topic of the evening.

“My, I’m glad I don’t have to work tonight!” Lucy exclaimed.

“Yes, but we must work tomorrow!” exclaimed Jennie. “I just hate going on Sunday. Gee! I don’t want no candy for a Christmas present!”

Through cold, ill-smelling hallways, the girls trooped up the four flights of narrow stairs to Lucy’s home. The gas flame which flickered feebly on each landing revealed the dirty, crumbling walls. It was the social hour of the tenements. Fathers were returning from the day’s toil and the children were welcoming them. Mothers were cooking the evening meal, whose various odors mingled in the passage-way with those of bad plumbing, the common toilets, escaping gas, wet plaster, and garbage. Half-dressed babies crept out to the open doors or rolled on the bare, grimy hall floors, peering with curious eyes through the banisters at the new arrivals. The little knots of neighbors gathered about the doorways hailed Lucy with words of rejoicing. A continuous sound of voices arose, sometimes low and laughing, again, high and excited, but tinged with the varying cadences and the finely shaded meanings with which the Italian language abounds. Accustomed to a life of the greatest intimacy with relatives and neighbors, the Italians will sacrifice any comfort to preserve this condition.

In the Collettis’ flat a stream of smiling friends passed in and out congratulating Mary and touching with warm brown fingers the babies’ cheeks. Each drank two tiny glasses of crème de menthe to the health of mother and children. Four generations lived in that flat—a family of eleven. Mrs. Colletti was seated near her daughter’s bed, nursing her own year-old baby. Mrs. Colletti’s mother, who had been a midwife in Italy, tended her daughter and the newborn babies after the manner in which she had cared years ago for the peasant women of Calabria. The Collettis were prosperous; their fruit stand did a good business. All the family helped. Mrs. Colletti spent every morning at the stand, and the children were there after school and at night. They were able to afford a five-room flat and some pretentious furniture. The front room was particularly splendid with its brilliant green-flowered rug, stiff Nottingham curtains, and equally stiff “parlor set.” Mary’s wedding presents, bright painted vases, imitation cut glass, enormous feather roses, and pink celluloid album, were arranged around the room. Staring likenesses in heavy oil paint of the bride and groom were the crowning glory of the parlor.

Lucy dropped her pay envelope into her mother’s lap. Then she and her friends surrounded the sixteen-year-old mother and told her of the day’s happenings, of meeting Angelina, and how she was soon to be married. Mary was as eager as the others over the idea of a wedding and a dance. Indeed she would be able to go! And she would wear her blue dress, the one she bought when she “stood up” with Flora at her wedding.

Lucy’s friends promised as they said goodnight, to explain to the “boss” why she could not come on Sunday morning for extra work. They ran downstairs out into the street, and as they passed the steam laundry on the block, from which came the dull thump of subsiding machinery, a girl came through the iron gateway. She was a short, stocky peasant type, but her shoulders were stooped, her flesh flabby, and she looked far from strong. She shivered as she came out of the hot, steaming workroom into the chill December air. The girls greeted her.

“You wasn’t at the club last night, Rose, so we came up to see you,” said Jennie.

“No, I never get home till most 9 o’clock on Fridays and on Mondays. It’s awful busy at the laundry these days,” Rose explained. “I wisht I was back at the factory packing peanut brittle. It’s no joke standin’ foldin’ all day long. My side hurts something fierce; it wakes me up at night.” The group walked along arm in arm toward the tenement in which Rose Morelli lived.

“Have you heard from Tony?” Jennie asked as they entered the Morelli flat.

Rose shook her head and glanced at her mother who sat monotonously jigging a dull-looking baby on her lap. At the mention of her son’s name she raised her great, heavy eyes and spoke to Rose in Italian. Then she dropped them again and the tears ran quietly down her face. Tony was the oldest of the family, the only boy, and he had run away to Florida six weeks before. He had been led to do so by another boy—a bad boy. The Morellis always explained that it was not Tony’s fault; he was a good boy but he had got tired of working for the butcher. He had written them a postal from Jacksonville saying that he was having a grand time and was stable boy on the race track. But no further word had come. They did not know where he was. But the mother had not given up hope that he would come back, though each day she grew thinner and the heavy marks under her eyes grew darker. She watched on the fire escape each night, peering down the street for Tony’s familiar figure. Now, as she wept for him, she drew the baby to her and kissed it passionately.

The baby was not her own. It was a little Jewish foundling she had taken from the “Home” to nurse when her last baby died seven months ago. Four children had died before that when “so leetle.” Over the mantelpiece hung a large, shiny photograph of the last baby lying in its casket. The, casket had been very expensive, but it had been a great comfort to the mother to put so much money into it, quite unconscious that the living children were paying its heavy price in lowered health and vitality.

The Morellis’ three rooms had none of the air of prosperity that characterized the Colletti home. They were bare, and would have been dingy except for the bright bedspread, the gayly colored wall decorations, and advertising calendars, pictures of the royal family, the pope, the saints, and the Holy Virgin. Under this last a candle burned, an offering for Tony’s return. In the tiny dark box of a room back of the kitchen a cot and two chairs served Rose and the two younger girls as sleeping accommodations. A shakedown in the kitchen had been Tony’s bed. It was still there, unused. No one else would have thought of sleeping in it. It would have been an acknowledgment that he might not need it again.

As Rose went on talking of their “trouble” to her friends, they responded with quick sympathy. They lamented with the Morellis as sincerely as they had rejoiced with the Colletti family. They felt with Rose as keenly and genuinely as with Mary and Lucy. Sympathy is the keynote of the Italian community. It binds together not only members of the same family but relatives of all degrees, friends, fellow-tenants, speakers of the same dialect, those from the same Latin town. It extends to the little foundling, the tiny boarder, whose frequent presence in the home is such sad evidence of the high infant mortality in the Italian families. The $10 which the foster mother receives from the institution as board money does not prevent her from loving her little nursling with the same passionate abandon with which she loves her own.

Whether a girl comes from the higher income group like the Collettis, whose home runs the whole depth of the house and has circulation of fresh air, or from the group that feels the pressure of bare living in three choking, dark rooms as do the Morellis, she is touched by the same deep influence of family bonds and customs. A tying-up of the individual with the group, an identity of interests with those of one’s kin—these are the factors which dominate the lives of the family into which the Italian girl is born and which present a valiant front to the forces of personal independence that meet her in her American life, at school, in industry, and in recreation.

The claims of the school weigh little against the claims of the family. While she is a little girl in the grades, having difficulty perhaps with her lessons, the disadvantage to her of being “kept out” a few days does not weigh an instant against some temporary family need in which she may be of help. Illness, financial loss, trouble of any kind, not merely in her own home but in that of an aunt or uncle, keep many a young girl out of school if only to lament with the afflicted.

Let us glance into the Belsito kitchen on a winter evening after Adelina Belsito has been absent from school for a week. Over at the school the teacher’s register shows that this last week’s defection is only the latest of a long series of absences on the part of “Belsito, Adelina.” On this particular evening a number of friends are collected in the kitchen; their sympathetic and concerned expressions show that they are discussing some grave and anxious matter. Presently there enters upon the scene the school visitor. Will she not be seated and have a glass of wine and Adelina will tell the long story of the family’s misfortunes.

Illness, accident, death, and loss of savings have followed each other in rapid succession, topped now by the burning of a stable and the loss of Mr. Belsito’s two draft horses, the sole capital of the family. Angelina tells the story eagerly in great detail, Mrs. Belsito nodding mournfully at times and adding to her daughter’s account. The father is absent because he is out looking for more horses. He has borrowed money from a friend who is “rich” and the family is anxiously waiting to know his luck. Presently he comes, the children running to him and clinging to his legs. No, he has not been able to find horses; all cost too much; there is nothing, nothing to be had. He clasps his head with his hands and sits with it tragically bowed. Fresh commiseration arises from the gathering, and animated suggestions are offered.

Adelina must go to work. That is the consensus of opinion. But upon inquiry, the school visitor learns that Adelina is not yet entitled to working papers, being only in the fourth grade, although nearly fifteen. No, she does not like to go to school; she did like it until a year ago, but lately there has been “so much trouble” that she has been often absent. Of course she has not gone this week! After her father’s horses had burned! Adelina lifts surprised, hurt eyes at the question, though she is not able to explain just what aid she has been able to give by staying at home. And they have been sending her cards from the school, the last one demanding that her father come before the principal and explain her absence. Adelina and her family find this very hard and unjust “when there is so much trouble.” Besides, the father could not go; he had to look for horses. The father lifts his head and speaks to the girl in Italian. Presently she explains, “My father say he have it in his head what he do for you if you speak to the principal for me.”

And through the slight service which the “school lady” later rendered, the Belsitos became her fast friends.

In the Ruletti home down the block there is trouble of another kind. This time it is the mother’s grief which the daughter shares. Mrs. Ruletti is a slender, bent little woman in black. She is not over thirty-three but her deeply lined face looks all of fifty. Just home from work, she snatches up the baby and kisses it passionately, murmuring to it in Italian. She weeps as she talks. Lucrezia Ruletti explains, “They’re going to take it back; they wouldn’t let her keep it any longer and she feels just like she did when our baby died.”

“Take it back?”

“Oh, yes, to the ‘Home.’ Bennie isn’t our real brother; he’s a foundling. You see, when the last baby died in the winter my mother took Bennie from the Home and now we all love him and they want to take him back.”

Mrs. Ruletti breaks in. “They say to me, ‘You have no milk now, bring Bennie back.’ But I feed him bread, meat, oh! he can eat soon. I no want him to go; like loosa my own baby.”

In the Italian household the daughter of fourteen is expected to bear a full share of the mother’s responsibilities. She keeps the house, cooks, washes, dresses and disciplines the children. Laura Tuzzoli, with her old little face and her maternal air, is a not unusual type. Going to call for the first time I paused before the tenement, uncertain as to their floor. A group of dark-eyed children around an ash can nearby watched me curiously. One tiny four-year-old flashed a quick smile of friendliness and a brilliant glance from her black eyes, then edged a little away from her companions. Asked where Laura Tuzzoli lived, she straightened her slight, ragged shoulders and informed me that she was also a “Tuzzoli.” She slipped her mite of a hand into mine and led me up the dirty, unsteady stairs to “our house.”

There the fourteen-year-old sister was presiding in the mother’s absence. She had just begun to bathe the one-year-old baby, having finished cleaning their three rooms. The windows had been washed as had the gilt-framed, cracked mirror which hung proudly in the space between them. On a shelf beneath a picture of the Virgin stood a clean jelly-glass filled with water on which floated a cork bearing a freshly lighted candle.

Presently little Lizzie Tuzzoli came in from school carrying her books and papers for “home work.” Fourteen-year-old Laura put her through a rapid fire of questions about her behavior and whether she had “made up” with a certain Mamie. Lizzie suddenly dived into her bag and produced from it a wonderful pink pencil of the screw variety. Pride of possession shone in her eyes as she displayed it.

“I got it off Lena Perella,” she announced. Laura seized the pencil, touched it carefully, then gave Lizzie a sharp look. “Did she give it to you?” she demanded.

Lizzie squirmed a little. “Yes. She—I found it and didn’t know it belonged to her, and Carrie Bussi said Lena didn’t want it anyway, so——”

Laura handed the pencil back with a scorching glance and a dictum whose tone permitted no rejoinder, “You take that back to school tomorrow and give it to Lena, d’ye hear?” Then she became the gracious hostess again.

The bond between Zappira Blondi and her mother was of another sort. When Zappira was twelve years old her father had sailed away to America leaving his family in the little village near Naples to wait until he could earn a home for them in the new country. But work was harder to find than he expected. After a year’s absence he wrote a letter home filled with discouragement and reporting dreary failure. Zappira, who was the oldest of the children, shared in her mother’s keen disappointment. The two put their heads together and laid a plan whereby they could earn their passage. The mother borrowed a sum of money sufficient to stock a small store in their village. This she and Zappira proceeded to conduct so successfully that at the end of the year the small debt had been repaid and the passage money laid aside. Their venture had been kept a secret from the father, and when they were all ready to make the journey they wrote him the good news and named the date when he should meet them at Ellis Island. Great was the joy of the family at being together, but hard work still lay ahead of these brave women. They took two small rooms in Mott Street, and for a year mother and daughter worked in a factory, eking out a bare living. The girl was now sixteen, old enough to be married, and though the family could ill afford to lose her wages her father did not fail in what he considered his duty. He soon found a husband for her. Although so young, Zappira had, through years of close partnership with her mother, already acquired many of the sober qualities of middle age.

The unity of the Italian family has an economic as well as an emotional basis. Father, mother, and children often form a single industrial unit. “I works for me fader,” says the urchin whom you meet on the stairs carrying a pail of coal to a customer. Visit the Sabbio family and you find Mrs. Sabbio presiding at the bar in a small saloon. In response to your question whether her husband owns the saloon, she answers, “Both of us, we work together.”

In the dark, damp little coal and ice cellars, the cluttered tailor and cobbler shops, the grocery and candy stores, at the fruit stands, and in the saloons, all members of the family take a hand and help to bring in the common income. Stroll along Ninth Avenue and you may see sometimes one member of the family “on the job,” sometimes another; at busy times, all are there. The mother is almost always on duty, delegating the housekeeping and tending of babies to the daughter at home. But very often the baby is also in evidence, and is unceremoniously dumped from his mother’s or sister’s arms into a perambulator when attention must be given to a customer.

Similarly, the Italian of this West Side community makes common financial cause with his relatives and friends in business enterprises. He is likely to be in partnership with his father-in-law or one of his numerous brothers or cousins in the ownership of dray-horses, of a candy or notion store, or a stand. Whenever an Italian begins to thrive in any kind of joint business one may at once be assured that his relatives are “in on it.” And one may be equally sure that in times of hard luck or slack work the temporary deficit of the family will be met by relatives and friends. This is taken as a matter of course. “In Italy everybody helps everybody else” is the answer you receive if you express surprise. If the head of the household falls ill, the neighbors drop in daily to see how he is, and rarely does one leave without first slipping into the sick man’s hand a nickel, a dime, or perhaps a quarter. Not the slightest thought of charity is entailed by the act, either in the giver’s mind or the receiver’s. It is understood, however, that the act of kindness will be reciprocated when occasion arises.

When the social worker visits such a home and notes that the signs of real want are lacking, in spite of the fact that the sole income is the $4.00 or $5.00 a week which the daughter earns, the suspicion arises that these people must have profited in business before the father’s illness and put by more than they will admit. Then the next-door neighbor enters, a coin is dropped quite openly on the bedcover, and the social worker departs with a deeper insight into the ways and character of the Italian. Small wonder that charitable societies of this district have comparatively few Italian families in their charge.[84] So common is the feeling of loyalty and responsibility among them that it is like the old tribal sense of oneness, an entire merging of the personal in the group interest, and the group’s bearing as its own the burden of the individual.

The protection and watchfulness of the family are constantly about the girl. And the family circle from which surveillance proceeds is usually intact unless death has entered it. Only in rare cases is a “broken home” the result of desertion. The Italian does not abandon his wife and family, nor is his relation to his children that of breadwinner only. He shares with the mother the intimate care and close watchfulness over them. It is always “I ask my father” with these young Italian girls, and in spite of the over-strictness which so many of them resent and from which they take refuge in deception, there is between the Italian father and his daughter a close degree of companionship seldom found in Americans of their position. Perhaps this is due to the fact that he is more in touch with American life than the shut-in Italian mother, whose life is almost wholly occupied with child-bearing and child-burying.

The eagerness of most Italian parents for the arrival of a daughter’s fourteenth birthday strikes one with no little pathos when one bears in mind how pitifully small is the equipment of the child at that age grown up in so restricted an environment. The girl herself is as eager to go to work as her parents are to have her. She takes it for granted that she should help in the family income. Carlotta gets a job not because she feels the need of self-support as an expression of individuality, of self-dependence, but because she feels so strongly the sense of family obligation. Lucy Colletti turned her weekly wages into the more generous family income as readily and unquestioningly as Rose Morelli gave hers to meet the needs of bare subsistence.

The West Side Carlotta is not a recent immigrant. Her family came through Ellis Island probably as much as ten years ago,[85] settling first in one of the lower and more congested districts of New York. Later they moved up to this district, attracted by reports of cheaper rents or simply following, as is the Italian way, relatives already there. Her father is probably a naturalized citizen.

Notwithstanding the exotic community in which the Italian lives and his loyalty to Latin traditions, ten years of New York are bound to leave their mark. This is particularly true of the West Side Italians, so many of whom carry on a petty but independent business. Owning a fruit stand, a coal cellar, or a trucking business is in itself evidence of long residence and some Americanization.[86] “The Italian with the stand—eh, he is well off—long time here,” is a common remark among his compatriots.

Other signs of long residence on the West Side are the changes in names. Not only does “Lucrezia” become “Lucy”; “Dominica,” “Minnie”; “Giovannina,” “Jennie”; “Fortunata,” “Nettie”; “Francesca,” “Fannie” and so on, but even the family names sometimes suffer a change. The “Aquinas” become the “Quinns,” the “D’Adamos” become the “Adamses.” The old names to which still cling some of the grandeur that was Rome are often gladly exchanged for a genuine West Side cognomen.

Perhaps the chief evidence of Americanization, however, appears when the daughter of the family begins wage-earning. For this she goes directly to the factory. She does not join the ranks of the Italian women who form so large a proportion of the out-workers or home workers of New York City. Only those who are familiar with the submissive way in which the Old World Italian women endure industrial exploitation can understand what a stride toward independence the Italian girl has made by simply working in a factory instead of at home.

A trade-union organizer and a home-work investigator were recently discussing the Italian girl of sixteen. The former had found Italian girls slow to respond to trade organization and was pessimistic about their economic future. “They will not progress, nor can you blame them when you think of the history of their women in Italy.” “You forget how far these Italian girls in the factory have already progressed,” said the home-work investigator. “The Italian women I know best are doing tenement house work and earning pitifully low wages because they will not leave their homes to work in a factory.”

The Italian girl works in the factories nearest home. These on the West Side happen to be principally candy factories and laundries—such as Kohlberger’s, where Lucy Colletti worked, and the laundry where Rose Morelli was employed as a folder. Should the factory move she looks for another nearby. Evil lies in strange parts. If the neighboring candy factory overworks its employes, as it usually does during the weeks before Christmas, requiring night work[87] and Sunday work, the girls and their families regretfully submit to these weeks of exploitation.

But although economic necessity may force Carlotta into the factory, it does not make her otherwise more independent of her family. Her father and mother cling persistently to the old-country custom of close watchfulness over her. Parental surveillance may be relaxed during her hours of work, but it is promptly revived when the day’s work is over. The streets, the dance hall, even the well chaperoned amusement club are prohibited; nor may she spend her money on dress or choose a “fellow” for herself. Italian girls have acquired to a less degree than American girls the habit of spending.

But of course this system breeds an occasional rebel. There was Filamina Moresco, for instance, whose calm investment of $25 in a pink party dress, a beaver hat, and a willow plume, was reported as little less than the act of a brigand. If she had withheld 20 cents out of her pay envelope from her mother she would probably have been beaten. As it was, she appropriated $25 and her high-handedness was her protection. Jennie Polini’s form of rebellion—choosing a “fellow” for herself and “seeing him on the sly”—was not as successful. The other girls regarded her conduct with doubt and disapproval, though they shared all of Jennie’s bitter resentment against the stern discipline of her parents from whom she was separated by the old abyss between the generations, widened and deepened by the disparities of the old world and the new. The pleasures which the Italian parents permit their daughter are those which she may enjoy in their company. She shares in the celebration of family events which the church recognizes and dignifies with a ritual; such as a birth, a death, or a wedding, the seasons of Christmas and Easter, the saints’ days, and the American holidays. These latter she interprets in her own way. Angelina Costa informed her parents on Lincoln’s birthday that the schools were closed because it was an “American saint’s day.”

The patriarchal festivals of the Italian contadini are reproduced, however sordidly, in the christening parties, the wedding dances, and the burial ceremonies of the West Side. To the daughter of fourteen a wedding party is the summit of bliss. She lives from wedding to wedding, treasuring memories of the last one or preparing for the next, until her own turn comes to be the central figure. One cannot fancy her stealing away to a secret marriage as so many of the West Side daughters are inclined to do. That would be to miss the most glorious day of her life.

The “school lady’s” invitation to Angelina Marro’s marriage announced that the wedding dance would begin at 5 in the afternoon, immediately after the marriage ceremony. The “West Side Café” had been engaged for the night’s celebration. Surely a place with so high-sounding a name must lay claim to considerable pretension! It was with some disillusionment that the “school lady” entered a small doorway and groped her way through a narrow, dingy, and perfectly dark passage toward a tiny slit of light which promised another door in the far distance. Repeated knocks on the panels below this ray finally caused a slipping of bolts. A huge black Italian appeared at the opening. Near him stood a countryman. They were both engaged in getting ready the refreshments, but they welcomed the intruder. On a big, round table stood a large tin washtub filled with water for rewashing the beer mugs after use. Large wooden trays were piled high with a quantity of sandwiches that one could not believe any crowd, however large, could consume. An enormous Italian cheese, plates of Italian cakes, and a number of crates of beer completed the preparation for the feast.

The room may have been 30 by 50 feet; the ceiling was low and the only means of ventilation were two small windows at one end which opened on a court. These were tightly closed, with shades and curtains drawn. Around the walls were benches and chairs. At the end opposite the windows were the piano and chairs for the musicians. The walls were decorated with cheap prints, a large color print of George and Martha Washington being most conspicuous among them. Stretching from the four corners of the ceiling to the gas chandelier in the middle of the room were strings of flags, representing all nations, but most of them were American and Italian.

The bride and groom had not yet arrived, but one of the bridesmaids, Lucy Colletti, came forward and greeted the visitor cordially. The bride was having her picture taken, she explained, but would arrive very soon. The room began to fill up with relatives and friends of the married pair. There was no dressing room. All the wraps were piled together on the top of a high narrow wardrobe. One of the men stood on a chair and threw on top of the fast growing pile the additional coats, hats, and furs.

Guests of all ages, from grandparents to toddling children, continued to arrive in parties. Suddenly the outer door opened and the young bride and groom entered. There were cries of welcome, a burst of hand-clapping, and a general rush for the pair. The dark, frail little bride in her elaborate costume looked like a child playing at “dressing up.” The fine net gown and veil, the white slippers and gloves, must have meant months of saving and stern denials of necessities. She was only sixteen, and Nick, who walked beside her bearing his head like a young prince instead of the young butcher’s helper that he was, had barely turned nineteen. One could not but reflect that if he had been living in Gramercy Park instead of on the West Side he might now be receiving his high school diploma instead of assuming the burden and responsibility of a family. And the little bride might be heading the freshman basketball team with years of care-free development ahead of her, instead of facing the imminent trials of child-bearing with the probable addition of factory labor.

The wedded pair made their way down the hall to the chairs placed for them at the end. The fact most striking to the outsider was the total lack of self-consciousness or awkward embarrassment on the part of either, young as they were, at being the center of attention, the object of laughing comments and affectionate raillery from all present.

The bride took her seat behind a table at the end of the room, removed her flowers and put them in a pitcher of water, and having carefully arranged her veil was ready to receive her friends. “Come,” said Lucy Colletti, “we must go up to the bride.” This ceremony over, we stood back and watched the children scramble wildly for the pennies the men tossed up. Although the musicians were nearly an hour late, no one seemed to mind. The children raced and played and rolled on the freshly waxed floor with fearful results to their clothes.

By the time the music began, the room had grown so crowded that the dancers were confined to a small circle in the center. As the evening passed the air became blue with dust and tobacco smoke, and the physical discomforts of the place increased to the point of general exhaustion. Yet one could not but take delight in a scene where enjoyment was so evident and so thoroughly sincere. Every guest participated; no one was neglected. Grandmothers were led out for a gay turn by grandsons who cavaliered their little sisters in the next dance. Fathers and daughters, sons and mothers, made light-hearted couples. It was a sight never to be seen at an American gathering, but common enough wherever Italians are assembled for any kind of celebration or enjoyment. In pleasure, as in work, the family rules.

But weddings and family dances do not come very often, and other evenings must be spent in the tenement home under strict guardianship and oversight. Against this strictness of another land are constantly beating all the new, free customs of America. The conflict begins as soon as Carlotta gets her working papers and takes her place in the factory. Inevitably the influences of the new life in which she spends nine hours of the day begin to tell on her. Each morning and each evening, as she covers her head with an old crocheted shawl and walks to and from her factory, she passes the daughters of her Irish and American neighbors in their smart hats, their cheap waists in the latest and smartest style, their tinsel ornaments, and their gay hair-bows. A part of the contents of their pay envelopes goes into the personal expenses of those girls. Nor do they hurry through the streets to their homes after working hours, but linger with a boy companion making “dates” for a “movie” or an “affair.”

Slowly but surely their example is beginning to have its effect on the docile little Italian whose life has hitherto swung like a pendulum back and forth between her labors at the factory and the duties and restraints of home. She begins to long for the same freedom that the other girls enjoy. But freedom does not mean for her what it means for the American girl, trained in a different school from the beginning. She has not the same hard little powers of resistance, nor can she make the same truculent boast of being able to “take care of herself.” She is not able to present the same rough and ready front to rowdy good times.

Free and easy as are the manners of her American sisters, they usually draw a line, distinct enough from their own point of view, at “tough” and “fresh.” The Italian girl has no idea of where the line is, or whether these bold-appearing girls really have any standards of conduct. Her line, the line her people have drawn for her, is placed well in front of the commonest enjoyments of the West Side girl. Once it is broken over by a “lark” with a crowd of boys and girls, then she is, by her own and her people’s standards, condemned. Very often, however, she fails to feel the weight of her old friends’ disapprobation as heavily as might be expected because she is still accepted by the standards of the new country, her country. As long as she does not overstep its particular line, she is safe. But to her the American line of conduct is blurred and indistinct. It is determined by conditions which she does not recognize or understand. The little tragedies and conflicts of this semi-Americanization are familiar enough to those who know the Italian girl of some years’ residence.

It is useless to expect that her young, wholesome craving for amusement will continue to be satisfied in the ways approved by her people. The irresistible lure of America which has already drawn her parents from the ancestral plains of Italy continues still to draw her. She must enter upon her kingdom. But unaccustomed as she is to the newer ways, the Italian daughter must be taught intelligently to meet American conditions and trained in the forms of self-protection which they necessitate. Her parents cannot do this. They have themselves still too much to learn. But the community to which she has come, bringing her all—her health, her strength, her industry, and her children—owes it at least to her to safeguard the innocent joys of her youth.