The Girl in Her Teens

by Margaret Slattery

As I made a note of the request, I remembered the Edith of a year or more ago. Edith, whose mother found her a great trial; she didn’t “care how she looked.” It was true. She wore her hat hanging down over her black braids, held on by the elastic band around her neck; she lost hair ribbons continually, and never seemed to miss them. She was a good scholar, wide-awake, alert, always ready for the next thing. She loved to recite, and volunteered information generously. In games she was the leader, and on the playground always the unanimous choice for the coveted “it” of the game. She was never in the least self-conscious, and, as her mother had said, how she looked never seemed to occur to her.

And now she came asking for a mirror! Her hair ribbons are always present and her hat securely fastened by hat pins of hammered brass. She spends a good deal of time in school “arranging” her hair. Sometimes spelling suffers, sometimes algebra. Before standing to recite, she carefully arranges her belt. Contrary to her previous custom, she rarely volunteers, although her scholarship is very good. If unable to give the correct answer, or when obliged to face the school, she blushes painfully. One day recently, when the class were reading “As You Like It,” she sat with a dreamy look upon her sweet face, far, far away from the eighth-grade class-room; could not find her place when called upon to read, and, although confused and ashamed, lost it again within ten minutes.

What has happened to Edith, the child of a year ago? She has gone. The door has opened. Edith is thirteen. The door opened slowly, and those who knew her best were perhaps least conscious of the changes, so gradual had they been. But a new Edith is here. One by one the chief characteristics of the childhood of the race have been left behind, and the dawn of the new life has brought to her the dim consciousness of universal womanhood. Womanhood means many things, but always three—dreaming, longing, loving. All three have come to her, and though unconscious of their meaning, she feels their power. Edith has seen herself, is interested in herself, has become self-conscious, and for the next few years self will be the center and every act will be weighed and measured in relation to this new self. Fifty other girls, her friends and companions all just entering their teens, share the same feelings, and manifest development along the same general lines. More than one of those fifty mothers looks at her daughter growing so rapidly and awkwardly tall, and says, “I don’t know what to do with her, she has changed so.” And more than one teacher summons all her powers to active service as she realizes that for the next two years she is to instruct one of the most difficult of pupils, the girl who is neither child nor woman.

But the awkward years of early adolescence, filled with the struggle to get adjusted to the new order of things, with dreams, with ardent worship of ideals embodied in teachers, parents, older girls, imaginary characters, quickly pass.

If they have been years of careful training, if the eager, impetuous day-dreamer and castle-builder has been guarded and shielded, if she has been instructed by mother, teacher, or some wise sympathetic woman in all the knowledge that will help keep her safe and pure and fine, then she is ready for the wealth of emotion, the increase of the intellectual and spiritual power to be developed within her these next few years.

But if not—if the earliest years have been filled with questions for which no satisfactory answers were given, if great mysteries that puzzle are solved for her only by what schoolmates, patent medicine advertisements, and imagination can teach, then she does not have a fair chance. She is not well equipped for life, and if in some moment of trial which we fondly dream will never, never come to her, to others perhaps, but not to her, she is overwhelmed, then we who have left her unguarded are to blame.

If at thirteen she was awkward and sometimes disagreeable, at sixteen we forget all about it, for now she is charming. The floodtide of life is upon her,—it is June, and all the world is her lover. To be alive is glorious; she shows it in all that she says and does. She laughs at everything and at nothing, and she dearly loves “a good time.” She makes use of all the adjectives in her mother tongue, and yet they are not enough to express all that she feels. Superlatives abound, and a simple pronoun, third person, singular number, masculine gender, is introduced so often into her conversation with her girl friends that it reveals at least one prominent “line of interest.”

But she is a dreamer still of new, deeper dreams in which self plays a large part, but a different and more altruistic one; and the longings that dawned on her soul with adolescence have grown in power. She not only longs for the concrete hats and gowns and beautiful things, to sing and play, to be admired, to be popular, but she longs to be good and to do good. Now, when all her powers have awakened, obeying instincts of her womanhood, she is ready to give herself in loving service to some great cause, to serve the world.

All teachers of English composition can testify to the desire to serve which stands out so clearly in the essay work of girls at this period. Hazel is a type of hundreds. She attended a lecture a while ago and saw pictures of the tenements; the crowded conditions, wretched poverty and suffering children stirred her soul. Every composition since has been a record of her dreams and longings. In every written sketch or story a wretched child of the tenements appears. A girl of means, “about sixteen years of age,” with plenty of spending money, seeks out the child, often crippled or blind, gives it food, clothing, a wheel chair, or takes it to a great physician who makes it well. Sometimes the heroine finds work for father and mother, and they move to a cottage in the country and are happy. Always in the story misery is relieved and hearts are made glad. Always the heroine is self-sacrificing and those helped are touched with deepest gratitude. In the last story, “Little Elsie sat comfortably back in her wheel chair too happy even to move it about. Her mother tried to find words to express her gratitude, but could only murmur her thanks. The child looked up into the face of her kind friend with a celestial smile that paid for all the sacrifice.”

This desire to give all in altruistic service, this longing to make the whole world happy, this worship of the Good reveals itself too in the girl’s effort “to find her Lord and worship Him.” The religious sense, so strong in the heart of the race that man must bow down and worship something, some one, be it fire, the moon, the stars, the river, ancestors, idols of wood or stone, is strong in the heart of the girl in her teens. And if rightly taught and presented, the Christ unfailingly becomes her great ideal. All the qualities she most admires she finds in him. Bravery, courage, purity and strength, patience and sympathy, all are there and she worships him. For him she can perform deeds of quiet heroism of which no one dreams,—struggle desperately to overcome her faults, and sacrifice many a pleasure willingly. Her prayers are ardent and sincere, and must rise to heaven as an acceptable offering. I saw such a girl bow her head in prayer in the crowded church on Easter morning. Her face was good to see. Death and the grave meant nothing to her, but oh, LIFE—it was so good. Sixteen found her hard at work in the cotton factory. But looking at her in her new suit and hat and gloves, and at the one bright yellow jonquil she wore so proudly, you would never have guessed that a week of toil lay behind her and another awaited her. That night she sang a brief solo in the chorus choir, and did it well; one of the boys in the church walked home with her, they talked a few moments, and Easter was over. At five-thirty next morning she rose, ate her hasty, meager breakfast, and went to work in the rain. A week later, when we were talking after Sunday-school, she said, “I don’t know as I ever had such a happy Easter. It was such a beautiful day.” And then hesitatingly, “I made up my mind I ought to be better than I have been, and I’m not going to let my sister go to work in the mill, no matter what it costs me. I’m going to send her to high school next year instead of taking singing lessons. I decided Easter night.”