The leaven in a great city

by Lillian William Betts

There comes to mind now one of the best plans for a tenement having four families on each floor on the East Side. The stairways are lighted by a window on each landing opening on an air shaft, and on each floor is a lavatory with a large window. Each suite consists of four rooms. The parlor has two windows on the street; a kitchen window opening into the parlor, never raised if the family have social standards; and a window on a large air shaft, or space between the two houses, on which the bedroom windows, which are large, open. The rent for these four rooms is seventeen dollars per month, and they are on the fifth floor. The kitchens in this house have been described. The family have to sit at three sides of the table; there is no room to pull it from the wall; even then one side is uncomfortably near the stove. The only space except the parlor for a refrigerator is in the bedroom. As there are three young wage-earners supporting the home, who are social, who are encouraged by the widowed mother to have their friends in their own home, this is not to be tolerated. The refrigerator is in the bedroom. It was in that room when it was occupied for four years by a girl dying of tuberculosis. Is it any wonder that the fight against this disease is again being waged in that family? Yet it is above the average of its class in intelligence, as the apartments are above the average in the region.

The very elementary necessity of space and place for privacy in taking a bath is exceptional. For space, place and light are necessary. A very bright woman, perfectly familiar with the limitations of the tenement-house homes, once said to the writer: "The truth is they cannot be clean if they are decent." A cruel truth which was brought forcibly to the remembrance of the writer one winter afternoon in an East Side home, where a mother was trying to bring up a family to the best of her ability. When the caller went into the living-room of the family a tub stood at the side of the stove, in which was the youngest daughter, a girl about eight; a brother of ten and his boy friend of twelve or fourteen years were playing checkers on the other side of the room. The mother was ironing. There was no consciousness of embarrassment shown by the children. The mother was ashamed, not at the exposure, but at being found out in permitting such an exposure. She was a member of a club where the training of children was a constant theme. The necessity of physical cleanliness, its relation to health, she had grasped, and her children profited by it. The relation between privacy and morals she had not grasped. It was as though a veil had fallen from her eyes as she looked at her daughter of eight standing naked before the two boys. Whether such a thing ever occurred again the caller does not know; that the mother never forgave the caller for finding her out she does know. The family had three bedrooms, but none would permit the placing of a washstand in them. One was the passageway from front to rear, for the family occupied a floor, but could afford only one fire.

Privacy is almost impossible in the tenement-house home. One bedroom is usually the passageway to the next, if there are two, or both bedrooms are passageways from front to rear of the home, and must be used by all the family. Privacy is impossible in these rooms, and there are thousands of just such apartments. Children must grow up in them subject to the limitations, restrictions and exposures their walls compel. This division of space must fix standards of reserve, of privacy, of social life. No amount of love, not even of intelligence, can save the children from the evils such division of space imposes on family life. It deadens the sensibilities. The insidious effects of this is not always realized, even by the intelligent parents who accept them as inevitable.

One hardly knows whether to laugh or cry at the inconsistencies of the standards of those who go to Albany to secure the passage of bills for the betterment of the conditions of the working people. We have secured a law compelling separate closets for men and women in stores and factories, a righteous measure in the interest of morality. But the closets in the tenements must be used by men, women and children of several families. A neighborly courtesy is the loaning of the key, to save a neighbor a journey upstairs. Children run in from the street, several at a time, for it is the only place provided. This publicity and freedom is the crying evil of the tenements, the one from which tragedies come. The marvel is that so few follow; that in spite, seemingly in defiance, of it all, characters develop that are beautiful, harmonious, true.

Can one condemn the girl facing the worst that can befall her who under pressure that her appeal justifies, yes, makes necessary, confides that her relations with the man who is the father of the coming child began when each were little things six or eight years old? A relation that grew out of lack of privacy, the intimacy forced by tenement-house conditions. Both families have gone far beyond their social position at the time these two were children, but the blasting of innocency has left its burning scar on the girl, and she must bear it alone.

Perhaps it is this necessarily open living that gives the love-making in the tenement region a character peculiarly its own. When interest between the sexes is aroused, it is expressed so frankly and publicly. There are times when restraint would seem to improve manners; but among the working young men and women one is constantly reminded of Adam and Eve in the garden of Eden. How frankly and unconsciously they must have shown their interest in each other, and how unconsciously they must have revealed their interest in each other to all the other breathing creatures. Perhaps nothing about the love-making is more interesting than that numbers add to the enjoyment of both lovers. Nothing adds more to the happiness of a wage-earning girl than to have her "chum" deeply interested in and deeply interesting to a young man at the same time she is. It seems to be conceded that two couples can have so much more pleasure than one. The terms applied by these young people to each other will reveal their social level in the wage-earning world. If the term "steady" is used where the world of wealth and leisure would use fiancé, the under wage-earning world is reached. If "friend" is used, the social ladder covered by that word, used in that sense, has many rounds. Knowing many working girls who would use the term "friend" when referring to the man they had accepted as a future husband, or who would in time hold that relation, the writer was constantly impressed by the unconscious protection the girls threw about each other. One would rarely hear of plans made that did not include two beside the couple engaged, or willing to be. Sometimes two girls were to complete the party. It is evident that the more means the merrier time. In every group of girls there will be two or three who cause anxiety; two or three whose influence, unchecked, may lead to trouble. It is not easy to restrain the young people, for so often the offenses are so naturally the result of environment that to speak directly of them would be most unwise. The chances are that reference to them would put the speaker in the position of possessing knowledge of an undesirable kind; it would seem to suggest evil. Often it would be a moral shock to many working girls to have their actions criticised from the impression their freedom makes before the cause is understood.

MUTUAL INTERESTS.