At nine, Annie was a shy and backward child. Then she lost the sight of one eye by infecting it from an abscessed finger. The new physical defect kept her out of school and the housekeeping was transferred more and more to her young shoulders. She had never had a friend of her own age until at thirteen she attached herself to a girl of a vigorous personality. Agnes was rough and quick to strike, like a boy, strong and generous. She protected her new friend and took her out to see the world. They went to a school recreation center several blocks north and Agnes saw that Annie was not molested on their way. “We wasn’t afraid of anything with Agnes.” Then abruptly the strong protector was removed by a yet stronger power. Agnes was “put away.” Annie reported, “They won’t let her out till she is twenty-one. They’re awful strict. It makes us all feel bad.”
Such things are accepted happenings in Annie’s world. They are the acts of a power quite beyond its influence. Annie took the loss of her champion with philosophy and stayed at home once more. She did not dare go to the recreation center alone. Then came another thunderbolt. Her mother, who had entered upon the familiar way of middle-aged West Side women who lack the stamina that the grim struggle demands, was brought into court, charged with drunkenness, and sentenced to the workhouse. The smaller brothers and sisters were also taken away. Since then life had been one succession of strange women brought in as housekeepers. There were interludes between trials of the various incompetents when the full care fell on the young girl. She was in school only a few hours a day, because her single eye had been weakened. She had grown up on the edge of a volcano. At fourteen she was, by her school record, “peevish and extremely stubborn and difficult to handle.”
Such precarious conditions of living are especially unfavorable for the adolescent daughter. The instability of her age is accentuated by the uncertainties of her life. Foresight and steadiness of purpose are not easily taught when the essentials of existence depend upon chance. The girl sees around her all sorts of makeshifts and haphazard expedients. One of our girls tried to avert a family disaster. Dispossession threatened at the end of the week. Mrs. Derks was in despair, and helplessly she resigned the situation to Emma. With their last $3.00 the girl bought a lamp and some hundreds of printed tickets. The lamp was put in a saloon window. The tickets were to be sold in a raffle which was to pay the rent. They did not sell and the rent went unpaid. “I told her it wouldn’t do no good,” a neighbor said. “She should a’ got a watch.”
But as poverty is the enemy of adolescence, adolescence is the adversary of poverty. The vivifying forces of youth are a protection against the depleting effects of want and insecurity. The girl does not take to drink as her mother does. Weeks of want are quickly forgotten in a following period of comfort. When kindliness and cheer once more prevail in her home, consciousness of the lack of ease and loveliness is shaken from her. With the buoyancy of youth she rebounds at the slightest release. But all too often her respite is brief, and when periods of want follow too closely upon each other, her powers of recovery must fail.
CHAPTER III
WHERE THE SCHOOL LAW FAILED
At five or six years of age, the girl starts to school; between fourteen and sixteen, she leaves school for good and goes to work. The eight or nine years which lie between make up the full period of her formal education. She must acquire during these years of compulsory school attendance all the “learning” which the law of the state fixes as a minimum for its workers.
She has a wide choice of schools. Between Thirty-eighth and Forty-third Streets are the buildings of four different systems. The public schools, the parochial schools, the Children’s Aid Society school, and the American Female Guardian Society school are all waiting with open arms to receive her. Often she is simply sent to the nearest school building. To cross the crowded avenues is more or less hazardous for a six-year-old. Or, she is taken by an older child to the school attended by her protector. In this case, it is “Mary’s school” that is chosen, and the various systems mentioned have nothing to do with the decision. Sometimes, however, one of them is chosen by the parents because of its particular specialty. The church school teaches “prayers,” the “soup” school, as the Children’s Aid Society is called in the neighborhood, gives a free lunch and shoes and warm red petticoats. The children of the poorest poor are likely to go there. The public schools are in general considered best for “learning.”
After the original choice has been made, neither parents nor child feel bound to stick to it. A great deal of shifting about takes place, only a small part of which is necessary. Some of the local schools carry their pupils only through the primary classes and must then transfer their small graduates to another building and another street to enter the grammar grades. For many reasons, this single change may be wise, but very often it is only the beginning of a succession of transfers. The break is an occasion to try out two or three new places before settling down. In the meantime, the little wanderer goes through a period of unsettled plans, and incidentally loses considerable time from her lessons.
A free choice of schools and a free use of the transfer are the chief concessions made by the compulsory school law to parental authority. As a matter of fact, it is not always parental authority which transfers little Mamie from school to school, but the child’s own flitting, aimless spirit. In the middle of a term, for almost any cause, she is likely to drop out of her class and claim the right to transfer. A quarrel with a schoolmate, a friend in another school, a dispute with the teacher,—these are the sort of trivial reasons which result in sudden transfers.
Our girls had made the most of their transfer privileges. One of them had attended nine different schools on the West Side; another had attended eight; two had attended seven; one had attended six; two had attended five; and four had attended four; 16 had attended three; 21 had attended two; and only eight had continued throughout in the same school. There were five girls who had come from institutions, and four whose school careers were unknown.