A campaign for the control of conditions in the public dance halls has been begun. We are told that our young working girls must be given decent dance halls and not publicly and deliberately consigned to the degraded centers which attract them under that name. The West Side girls need much more, however, than protected dance halls. Some of the girls of this district are too poor to go to public dances. But the same dangers which threaten the dance-hall girl stalk unrestrained through the neglected streets and tenements of the West Side, and the girl of fourteen may fall a victim even under her own roof tree.
Demoralizing neighborhood conditions, such as congestion, filth, street temptations, and neighborhood gangs, all of which are practically synonymous with West Side life, influence the girls for evil only to a less degree than they influence the boys. One needs only to talk with any good mother of the district and hear how steadily she is engaged in fending her children against the life of the street to learn how constant and how potent are its influences. Testimony is borne to their power by the iterated complaint of West Side mothers,—of those who do not work away from home as well as of those who do,—that “Mamie is beginning to get out from under me,” or, “Katie was the best girl you ever saw until we came to live on this block.”
The problem of waywardness among West Side girls cannot be solved by long distance methods. Their environment must be made safe and their pleasures recognized and made decent. Some of the things which enlightened criminologists recommend for women in reformatories, after they have completely succumbed to the sort of conditions which abound on the West Side, are regular school attendance with manual training and flexible courses of study; regular hours for sleep, for food, for work, and for play; plenty of nourishing food; fresh air and outdoor life; the social discipline of community life. These are the things which are given to the girls in the reformatory at Bedford as a cure. The same things would help to prevent; they would preserve the West Side girl to society as a daughter and as a mother, as a worker and as a citizen.
CHAPTER II
IN THE GRIP OF POVERTY[69]
“
You’ve got t’ keep your eye on a girl. Now it’s different with a boy. He can take care of himself. But you never can tell, if you don’t keep a watch, when a girl’s goin’ to come back an’ bring disgrace on you.”
Such, in a nutshell, is the attitude of our community toward the adolescent girl. The chances are that she will “never give you worry an’ trouble like a boy.” But if she does, she will give vastly more. The sting of her shame is felt to be keener than any the boy can inflict. And with very few girls in our neighborhood is “trouble” of this sort beyond the range of the possible. Therefore the sense of family responsibility is far more alert in her behalf than on her brother’s account. With few exceptions, the girl is assured of interest and counsel in her home. This counsel is not always wise. Worse still, it is not always tempered with the affection she needs. Here all family life struggles against handicaps. But through all the sorry failures, the ignorance, and the thwarted ambitions, much love and much concern for the girl are to be found in the homes of her people. Almost as a baby she has duties at home. The boy, as a rule, assumes them with his first pay envelope. Or, if he is earlier drafted into service, his chores are outside, probably the gathering of coal or wood while his sister stays at home to mind the babies. He has more freedom. She grows up in a more intimate relation to the family, far more under the eye of her mother. Therefore, family influence, nine times out of ten, is the great factor in her development. To understand her, home conditions must be known.
The most common of family skeletons among this West Side group is one which can scarcely be locked in its closet. It stalks forth, apparent to the casual glance. It is the grim elemental question of primitive needs. The daily struggle for food, shelter, and clothing is a stark reality to which only the youngest babies in the family can be oblivious. The daughter of fourteen knows it to the last sordid detail. In the group of families we knew, poverty was almost universal. Of our 65 girls only eight came from households which had known continuous comfort during these children’s lives. All the others had at some time faced staggering misfortune. Forty of the total 55 families, or 73 per cent, had had records with relief societies, some stretching far back into the past.[70] Forty-three families, from which came 53 of the girls, must be classed with the very poor.[71]
Those of us born into better fortune seldom feel the meaning of this primitive struggle. We have no common denominator with it. We cannot estimate the heroism of “the poor.” We have heard and read much of hunger and exposure. These things play a large part in juvenile literature, whether sensational or classic. There is no little daughter of a comfortable home but is told the sad legend of the match girl who froze in the snow under the lighted windows from which floated sounds of merriment and music. The same little daughter, grown older, goes to school and learns that “man’s three primal necessities are food, shelter, and clothing.” But neither the faraway and sentimental pathos of the match girl’s fate nor the cold scholastic statement of the text book is sufficient to teach one the real meaning of poverty. Only those who follow its trail, step by step, seeing the gradual and tragic disintegration of human worth under its influence, the suffering and waste left in its path, can realize its full power and significance.
To these girls who come forth to their recreation in a skirt worn thin and a gaping, ill-made waist, poverty is neither distant nor sentimentally touching. Possibly no child does starve in these streets. But there are many children who do not need to learn out of books about hunger. At any moment, one may open a door and find it, in all its gaunt, staring reality. We once found a tiny crippled baby who had sat for days in a fireless, barren room, stiffened with cold. She was as helpless and defenseless a little creature as could well be met. But this was the treatment that an indifferent community tolerated for her. And she was only one.