The long road of woman's memory

by Jane Addams

The steady daughter would not permit “such a girl to cross the threshold,” and the little household was finally broken up upon the issue. The daughter went to live with her married sister, while the mother, having moved into one room with “Tommy’s girl,” went back to the laundry in order to support herself and her guest.

The daughters, having impressively told their mother that she could come to live with them whenever she “was willing to come alone,” dropped the entire situation. In doing this, they were doubtless instinctively responding to a habit acquired through years of “keeping clear of the queer people father knew in the circus and the saloon crowds always hanging around Tommy,” in their secret hope to come to know respectable young men. Conscious that they had back of them the opinion of all righteous people they could not understand why their mother, for the sake of a bad girl, had deserted them in this praiseworthy effort in which hitherto she had been the prime mover.

Tommy had sent his “girl” to his mother on the eve of his departure for “a grand tour to the Klondike region,” and since then, almost four years ago, she has heard nothing further from him. During the first half of the time the two women struggled on together as best they could, supporting themselves and the child who was brought daily to the nursery by his grandmother. But the pretty little mother, gradually going back to her old occupation of dancing in the vaudeville, had more and more out-of-town engagements, and while she always divided her earnings with the baby, the grandmother suspected her of losing interest in him, a situation which was finally explained when she confessed that she was about to be married to a cabaret manager who “knew nothing of the past,” and to beg that the baby might stay where he was. “Of course, I will pay board for him, but his father can be made to do something, too, if we can only get the law on him.”

It was at this point that I had the following conversation with the grandmother, who was shrewd enough to see that the support of the baby was being left upon her hands, and that she could expect help from neither his father nor his mother, although she stoutly refused the advice that the whole matter be taken into the Court of Domestic Relations. “If I could only see Tommy once I think I could get him to help, but I can’t find out where he is, and he may not be alive for all I know; he was always that careless about himself. If he put on a new red necktie he’d never know if his bare toes were pushing out of his shoes. He probably didn’t get proper clothes for ‘the Klondike region’ and he may have been frozen to death before this. But whatever has happened to him, I can’t let his baby go. I suppose I’ve learned to think differently about some things after all my years of living with a light-minded husband. Maggie came to see me last week, for she means to be a good daughter. She said that Carrie and Joe were buying a house way out on the West Side, that they were going to move into it this month, and that she and I could have a nice big room together. She said, too, that Carrie would charge only half rate board for me, and would be glad to have my help with her little children, for they both think that nobody has such a way with children as I have. The night before, when she and Carrie were playing with the little boys, they remembered some of the funny songs father used to teach Tommy, and how jolly we all were when he came home good-natured and would stand on his head to make the candy fall out of his pockets. I know the two girls really want me to come back, and that they are often homesick, but when I pointed to the bed where the baby was and asked, ‘What about him?’ Maggie turned as hard as nails and said as quick as a flash, ‘We’re all agreed that you’ll have to put him in an institution. We’ll never have any chance with the nice people in a swell neighborhood like ours if you bring the baby.’ She looked real white then, and I felt sorry for her when she said, ‘Why, they might even think he was my child, you never can tell,’ although she was ashamed of that afterwards and cried a little before she left. She told me that she and Carrie, when they were children, were always talking of what they would do when they got old enough to work, how they would take care of me and move to a part of the city where nobody would know anything about the outlandish way their father and Tommy used to carry on. Of course, it was almost telling me that they didn’t want me to come to see them if I kept the baby.”

My old friend was quite unable to formulate the motives which underlay her determination, but she implied that clinging to this helpless child was part of her unwavering affection for her son when, without any preamble, she concluded the conversation with the remark, “It’s the way I always felt about him,” as if further explanation were unnecessary.

It was all doubtless a manifestation of Nature’s anxious care—so determined upon survival and so indifferent to morals—that had induced her long devotion to her one child least equipped to take care of himself; and for the same reason the helpless little creature whose existence no one else was deeply concerned to preserve had become so entwined in her affections that separation was impossible.

From time to time a mother goes further than this, in her determination to deal justly with the unhappy situation in which her daughter is placed. When the mother of a so-called fallen girl is of that type of respectability which is securely founded upon narrow precepts, inherited through generations of careful living, it requires genuine courage to ignore the social stigma in order to consider only the moral development of her child, although the result of such courage doubtless minimizes the chagrin and disgrace for the girl herself.

In one such instance the parents of the girl, who had been prevented from marrying her lover because the families on both sides objected to differences of religion, have openly faced the situation and made the baby a beloved member of the household. The pretty young mother arrogates to herself a hint of martyrdom for her faith’s sake, but the discipline and responsibility are working wonders for her character. In her hope of earning money enough for two, she has been stirred to new ambition and is eagerly attending a business college. She suffers a certain amount of social ostracism but at the same time her steady courage excites genuine admiration.

In another case a fearless mother exacts seven dollars a week in payment of the board for her daughter and the baby, although the girl earns but eight dollars a week in a cigar factory and buys such clothing for two as she can with the remaining dollar. She admits that it is “hard sledding,” but that the baby is “mighty nice.” Whatever her state of mind, she evidently has no notion of rebelling against her mother’s authority, and is humbly grateful that she was not turned out of doors when the situation was discovered. It is possible that the mother’s remorse at her failure to guard her daughter from wrong doing enables her thus grimly to defy social standards which, although they are based upon stern and narrow tenets, nevertheless epitomize the bitter wisdom of generations. Such mothers, overcoming that timidity which makes it so difficult to effect changes in daily living, make a genuine contribution to the solution of the vexed problem.

In spite of much obtuseness on the part of those bound by the iron fetters of convention, these individual cases suggest a practical method of procedure. For quite as pity and fierce maternal affection for their own children drove mothers all over the world to ostracize and cruelly punish the “bad woman” who would destroy the home by taking away the breadwinner and the father, so it is possible that, under the changed conditions of modern life, this same pity for little children, this same concern that, even if they are the children of the outcast, they must still be nourished and properly reared, will make good the former wrongs. There has certainly been a great modification of the harsh judgments meted out in such cases, as women all over the world have endeavored, through the old bungling method of trial and error, to deal justly with individual situations. Each case has been quietly judged by reference to an altered moral standard, for while the ethical code like the legal code stands in need of constant revision, the remodeling of the former is always private, tacit and informal in marked contrast to the public and ceremonious acts of law-makers and judges when the latter is changed.