The leaven in a great city

by Lillian William Betts

The influence of working-girls' clubs is positive in its effect on the majority of the members. The girls are taught in the clubs directly and indirectly. It is not only in the teaching of the home arts, but through lectures, talks, books and contact with women of education. The members often astonish those who know them best by their responses to their opportunities. This mental development makes them critical. The men they meet rarely have had their opportunities, and they suffer by comparison. The young women often find they have larger interests and sympathies; far clearer ideas of the responsibilities of life; are better equipped than the men they meet. Every girls' club shows members who thus develop. Often they will not marry. They are the support of one or both parents, now too old to work; they help married sisters and brothers; they are the prop and stay of all the halt and lame of their families; wiser and better guides for growing nephews and nieces than their own mothers and fathers. Frequently they are the most important helpers in club life, exerting a positive, upbuilding influence. Yet one always grows sad when thinking of them. Not thriftlessness, but unselfishness, may leave them penniless in old age. There is no place for them. Rarely is there a corner to which they are welcome in the tenement house; often even where there is love and gratitude there may not be space. Floor space often regulates the expression of love, where the heart may have unlimited space.

THE READING ROOM AT THE SETTLEMENT.

The saddest figure in tenement-house life is the unmarried woman who can no longer work and is dependent. In her effort to serve her people she may have played the critic, and that is remembered when her service is forgotten. It is this type of girl who by instinct refuses to accept attentions that mean the spending of money by men who cannot afford it. Their wages would, if used for themselves, have given social opportunities that did not involve obligations, but family demands seemed to make such use impossible. Sometimes the fun-loving sister will secure both shares. One is taken to a home of her own; the other left to carry the family burden, and no one questions why. If it is unanswered, it is attributed to the lack of attraction in the unmarried sister.

There are homes in the tenements where the wages of the earners make a family income, in which all share equally, independent of the amount contributed. There is a bank account. It may be in the joint name of father and mother, but it is far more commonly the unquestioned property of the mother. The children look upon this as the protection of the parents from dependence in old age, should it not be called upon by illness or misfortune. Such families represent the highest moral development in tenement-house life. The children have been trained to appreciate educational opportunities, and school is through childhood an important factor in life. When the wage-earning period comes, night-school advantages are appreciated and used. When the work is chosen, some thought is given to the promise of future wage-earning powers by the acquiring of skill in that employment. The maximum wages possible at the present time is not the controlling element in the decision. The future is not sacrificed to the present. Such a home is kept, no matter how small, in a condition that makes social life in it possible.

Hallways, street corners, store steps are not the only places for the development of the social instincts of the members of such families. After marriage the family is united, and home, though it be in the top of a tenement, is the Mecca for children and grandchildren.

At the other end of the social scale in this world of workers is the happy-go-lucky family. Here the system of financial management has its faults, but much is found that is better than wisdom in money matters. Spending extravagantly when there is money, going without cheerfully when there is none. Why, the going without is scarcely treated even with the respect of making it a subject of conversation. The habit of sharing when any member has anything to share becomes a fixed habit, and "mine" and "thine" are not in the family vocabulary. The result is a close and inter-dependent family relation, of which the mother is the center. Often you will find that this mother has never had any clothes that would do to wear on the street, except to early Mass, if she is a Romanist, or that she rarely goes to church, if a Protestant, because her clothes are not what she calls "fit." Her life is the gospel of unselfishness, and she reaps the reward of love. One may fret at the waste, resent the short-sightedness, which means ignorance and shiftlessness; but there is so much pleasure in these families, so much that means happiness in them, that one even learns to forget the frets. They never grow beyond childhood in worldly wisdom, and childhood is always attractive. It is so rich in promise. Happiness is the cement of human life. Poverty does not change its power of holding the members together through weal or woe. There is a common inheritance of memories that never lose their power of cohesion where love and friendship reign in families.

The people who do not know the lives of the working people can have no idea of the extent to which the working men trust their wives. The majority of working-men's wives are financially in a far more independent position than the wives even of capitalists, where the wives are without an independent income. Not only is the money given to the wives, but their use of the money is unquestioned. There is a constant revelation of the unselfishness of these men. Children will be overdressed, while the father will not even be comfortable; but there is no complaint, for the pride of the father is gratified. He, with the mother, has one standard—clothes. There are men who say frankly that they would waste the money if it were in their care; that their wives secure far better results than they could; that the practice of having only carfare, at the most lunch money, reduces greatly the much abused social habit of "treating." The married man who can "treat," it is generally conceded, is not fair to his family; he keeps his wages at their expense.

Sometimes the observer marvels at the infinite patience of many men. Their wives drift. Neither money nor time is used for their families. A week's loss of work, and there is debt; a day's sickness, and to its suffering is added the knowledge that there is no money in reserve to meet this emergency, even though the wages insure it. While knowing well the cause, one resents the unjust conditions that control many marriages among the young people of the wage-earning class. The young women rarely have the knowledge that will enable them to do their share in establishing the home. The young man contracting a marriage without the prospect of supporting a home is condemned and his bride pitied; but there is little criticism if she spends years—years that mean discomfort and waste—in learning to do her part, if she ever learns.