When Sophie’s manner and dress caused comment among her associates, her club leader, who had been waiting for a suitable opportunity, called to see her on Sunday morning, when the girl would be sure to be at home. Sitting on the edge of the bed in the cramped room, they talked the matter over. As for the paint,—many girls thought it wise to use it, for employers did not like to have jaded-looking girls working for them; and as for the finery,—“Lots of uptown swells are wearing earrings.”
Contrasted with the girl’s generosity to her family the cost of the finery was pathetically small. She had spent on an overcoat for her father the whole of the Christmas gratuity given by her employer for a year of good service, and her pay envelope was handed unopened to her mother every week.
Sophie finally comprehended the reason for her friend’s solicitude, and at the end of their talk said she would have done the same for a young sister.
It is often a solace to find eternal youth expressing itself in harmless gayety of attire, which it is possible to construe as evidence of a sense of self-respect and self-importance. It is, at any rate, a more encouraging indication than a sight I remember in the poor quarter of London. I watched the girls at lunch time pour into a famous tea-house from the nearby factories, many of them with buttonless shoes, the tops flapping as they walked; skirts separated from untidy blouses, unkempt hair,—a sight that could nowhere be found among working girls in America.
In a Club-room
The settlement’s sympathy with this aspect of youth may not seem eminently practical, but when Mollie took the accumulated pay for many weeks’ overtime, amounting to twenty-five dollars, and “blew it in” on a hat with a marvelous plume, we thought we understood the impulse that might have found more disastrous expression. The hat itself became a white elephant, a source of endless embarrassment, but buying it had been an orgy. This interpretation of Mollie’s extravagance, when presented to the mother, who in her vexation had complained to us, influenced her to refrain from nagging and too often reminding the girl of the many uses to which the money might have been put.
At the hearing of the Factory Investigation Commission in New York during the winter of 1914-15 a witness testified regarding the dreary and incessant economies practiced by low-paid working girls. This stimulated discussion, and an editorial in a morning paper queried where the girls were, pointing out that the working girls of New York presented not only an attractive but often a stylish appearance. I asked a young acquaintance, whose appearance justified the newspaper description, to give me her budget. She had lived on five dollars a week. Her board and laundry cost $4. She purchased stockings from push-cart venders, “seconds” of odd colors but good quality, for ten cents a pair; combinations, “seconds” also, cost 25 cents. She bought boys’ blouses, as they were better and cheaper. These cost 25 cents. Hats (peanut straw) cost 10 cents; tooth-paste 10 cents a month. Having very small and narrow feet, she was able to take advantage of special sales, when she could buy a good pair of shoes for 50 cents. Her coat, bought out of season for $7, was being worn for the third winter. Conditions were exceptional in her case, as she boarded with friends who obviously charged her less than she would otherwise have been compelled to pay; but there was practically nothing left for carfares, for pleasure, or for the many demands made upon even the most meager purse; and few people, in any circumstances, would be able to show such excellent discretion in the expenditure of income.
In the tenements family life is disturbed and often threatened with disintegration by the sheer physical conditions of the home. Where there is no privacy there is inevitable loss of the support and strength that come from the interchange of confidences and assurance of understanding. I felt this anew when I called upon Henrietta on the evening of the day her father died. The tie between father and daughter had been close. When I sought to express the sympathy that even the strong and self-reliant need, so crowded were the little rooms that we were forced to sit together on the tenement-house stairs, amid the coming and going of sympathetic and excited neighbors, and all the passing and repassing of the twenty other families that the house sheltered. It would have been impossible for anyone to offer, in the midst of that curious though not ill-meaning crowd, the solace she so sadly needed.