To our girls these were harsh facts of everyday knowledge. Familiarity with poverty makes it seem both more and less terrible. It does not kill, perhaps, but it stunts. It does not come as an overwhelming catastrophe; but steadily it saps the vigor of the young as well as of the old. With the more fortunate of families such as these, extreme poverty is only episodic. A fairly decent standard is kept until something goes amiss. But one break in the machinery of their working capacity means hardship. No reserve fund has been possible, or the small amount saved is hopelessly inadequate to meet illness or protracted unemployment. It melts away in a few weeks or months. The family is very soon over the borderline of self-support. With the less fortunate, poverty takes the form of a slow, chronic contest against everlasting odds. This demands every atom of physical and nervous strength, every fraction of intelligence and effort. And the exaction is made from those whose only training has been hard, devastating experience.
In this neighborhood, families are large and wages are small. The size of the family is a definite element in its standard of comfort. Poverty begins not merely at a certain wage but also with a certain number of children.[72] “We’ve got eight,” said Mrs. Meehan, “and by rights we’d only have two if we was to bring ’em up proper. But,” she added, “it’s the littlest one that I love the best.”
Sometimes where the father is living and at work, he earns enough to keep in cleanliness and health, and with at least the necessary medical care, a family of three or four. But with six to support, an income sufficient for four means the lack of essentials for all, loss of health, and sometimes loss of life. Often the mother is compelled to supplement his earnings by her own. Twenty-nine out of the 46 living mothers were contributing a part or the whole of the family income. In 24 of the 55 families the father was dead or incapacitated, and there was no stepfather to take his place as breadwinner.[73]
The mortality among children on the West Side is shockingly high. A family which had not lost at least one child was indeed rare. Fairly accurate records of the births and deaths of children in 31 out of the 55 families show that the number of births averaged nearly eight, and the deaths about three.[74] This average death rate for so small a group is not surprising when one considers the birth rate. The more children that are born into such poverty, the greater the likelihood that many of them will die. On our list were families who had two living children and six dead, five living and five dead, five living and six dead, six living and nine dead, seven living and seven dead, one living and six dead. Though practically all these families carried insurance,[75] the amount for which a baby’s life is insured would not as a rule be sufficient to pay the expense of burial.
The attitude of our community toward birth or death is disheartening in its helplessness. Either event is accepted as the will of God. The idea of voluntarily limiting the size of the family is almost unknown. Mrs. Reilly, bent, deformed, old at fifty, with five children living and eight dead, would ramble on with her dull and listless story of the sickness and suffering those deaths and births had meant, and the constant crushing poverty they had caused; and would finish with, “It’s the poor as can’t take care of them, to whom they’re sent.”
The housing of these families was of a grade commensurate with the degree of their poverty. Dark, unventilated rooms were found in the apartments of 30 families, and about half of the group of 55 had less space than was required for health or comfort. As is generally true with families of their class, the amount of rent paid for poor and inadequate accommodations was relatively high.[76]
In spite of the mountains of difficulty in the way of these mothers, their success in bringing up their children is sometimes great beyond our realization. There was, for instance, one household on a certain block on Eleventh Avenue where the father brought in $12 in return for a full week of unskilled labor. There were four children under working age. Twelve dollars, six persons, city prices—this was the mother’s problem, by no means so discouraging as that of some of her neighbors, but still a difficult one. The answer is not to be written on paper. It is on children’s faces, in the events and outcome of human lives. However successful the present answer, each day sets the old quandary forth anew. Never solved, it stretches on into the years ahead.
With this family, part of the answer was their presence on Eleventh Avenue. It was in the clangor of the freight trains that passed on the street surface by their door and blackened their windows with smoke. It was in the stench of the slaughter house which the breeze brought into their rooms. It was in the soot of the factories and the dangers to child life around the docks. There were outward evidences of family life in the block where they dwelt—dilapidated tenements, with a sordid little grocery store in the middle of the block. A garish little saloon stood on the corner. The houses did not present the solid red brick front of the usual tenement street, with its delusive appearance of respectability. The buildings were irregular; some were low and shack-like. Their windows faced Jersey and the nightly glory of the sunset, but even this could not redeem the sordidness and squalor of the neighborhood.
From these surroundings came two trim little figures. They were school girls, still with all the ways and traits of little girls. Their hair was drawn smoothly into straight black braids. Their eyes were round and wide awake. The neatness of their dress spoke of continual care. They were alert and well-mannered, brimming with interest and comment. In short, they were bright, normal, ordinary children. What this meant as an achievement can only be measured by the obstacles which this one mother had overcome.
She had had the help neither of good fortune nor of training. She had fashioned her product with her own pitiful, clumsy tools. A large-boned, uncouth Irish woman, she still bore the stamp of the soil. Her education had been that of life, a life of hard knocks and rough going. Plain, coarse, with the burr in her speech, bent and weakened physically, she did not present an attractive appearance. But it was her boast that she “never got anything from no society—never knew much about them places—never had to, thank God.” Relatives had helped when the hardest pinches came; but for the most part the family had plodded on alone. But even such parents cannot master poverty. In turn they must pay toll to its resistless strength. For the smallest girl of five was a wan, great-eyed baby whose puckered lips were drawn with pain and on whom the shadow of death already lay. The terms of life cannot be utterly remade.