The West Side girl is an independent young person. She has seen a good deal of the world. She has the early sophistication bred of a crowded, close-pressed life. As yet, she has not been battered to the wall in the stress. She has not the pitiful appreciation of the middle-aged woman for slight and passing kindliness. She is self-assertive, arrogant, “able to take care of herself.” She comes, asking nothing, at ease and alert, but ready to give a trial to anything thrown in her way. If it does not suit, she will not be slow to reject it. So she stands, looking bright and curious eyed, straight into the face of her world. She can be defiant at a hint of challenge. And yet one finds that she is suddenly and sharply sensitive. Ridicule and harshness touch her to the quick. Her new-born self-consciousness is easily wounded. A trifling hurt may become a lifelong grievance.
This is a signal of a restlessness beneath the surface which she does not herself understand. It is propelling her onward in an unconscious search. In all her pleasure-loving, drifting adventures she is hunting steadily for the deeper and stronger forces of life. Into her nature are surging for the first time the insistent needs and desires of her womanhood. But this she does not know. She is the daughter of the people, the child of the masses. Athletics, sports, diversions, the higher education, will not be hers to divert this deep craving. She is not close enough to her church for religion to control it. It will stay with her, sweeping her inevitably out of the simplicity of little girlhood into the thousand temptations of her environment, if not, perhaps, into one of the commonest of neighborhood tragedies.
Just now her search is translated very lightly and gaily into the demand for “a good time” and a keen interest in the other sex. She prosecutes it with the imperious heedlessness of her age. Her haphazard and inconsistent training has given her little of the art of self-control. The city bristles with the chances she longs for—“to have fun and see the fellows.” What is to come of this depends on the unformed character of the individual girl, the oversight of her family,—sometimes effective and sometimes not,—and, most of all, on chance.
The control of a little money is far more essential to these girls in their search for enjoyment than to girls in another class. There are many doors which a very small coin will open to her. After she goes to work she usually has a little spending money of her own. As a rule she is given, besides lunch money and carfare, a quarter or 50 cents a week. This may go for candy, carfare to dances and parks, or entrance fees to dance halls and moving picture shows. Sometimes she spends the money given her for carfare on other and more pleasurable things, and walks to work, “wearing out shoe leather, which ain’t right,” as her mother complains. A carfare saved by walking to work is a carfare earned for a trip to a dance hall “away out in the Bronx.” Usually a single fare is enough for the whole trip. The “fellow” who “sees you home” will pay for the return. Thus the little West Sider makes her 25 cents carry her as far along the primrose path as possible.
She has no keener longing than her longing for pretty and becoming clothes. Usually she helps in selection, though now and then the mother buys her clothing from the girl’s own earnings as autocratically as she buys the rest of the home necessities. Sometimes the girl is allowed to keep a dollar or two out of her pay every week with which she buys her own clothes. Often there comes a period of distress which swallows up her whole wages week after week. She sees her earnings go for rent, for fuel, and for food. Hers is not the time of life to be content with shelter, warmth, and nourishment. She would rather starve for these things than miss her worshipped pleasures. Mamie Craven, working steadily in the laundry, turning in her money every Saturday night, once broke out one night in a bitter wail, “Oh, Miss Wright, you don’t know how I want a chinchilla coat.”
There are bound to be many lacks in her wardrobe. Usually the greatest one is that of protective clothing. She has no overshoes and no umbrella. When it rains she comes drenched to her club, but will not think of foregoing the evening’s pleasure on that account. She goes to work in the same unprotected fashion. Winter clothes are thin and inadequate. Many a girl’s vitality is sapped for months in the year through sheer exposure to cold. These deficiencies are endured uncomplainingly. It is much harder if finery or the coveted Easter suit must be foregone. The poorer girl will buy her suit on the instalment plan—$4.00 down and $2.00 each following week. She pays $15 for a suit of the value of $10. She is often guilty, like girls of every class, of some wild bit of extravagance. But in her case extravagance may become heartlessness. A girl whose income was the only regular support of her family spent $5.00—a week’s wages—on a willow plume. “We starved fer that hat,” her mother said, “just plain starved fer it, so we did.”
Social relations between girls of their age and class are very unlike those of boys. A single friend or a little clique takes the place of the gang. They will follow a leader for a moment but not consistently; they are jealous of leadership and slow to acknowledge it. There is almost no natural loyalty to a group. Probably the girl by the time she reaches fourteen has already some special companion. This may be a playmate from her school days, or, very likely, a “pick up” on the street or at work, who soon has the title of “me lady friend.” The relationship may extend over years. It is very constant and means that the two share most of their pleasures together. There are distinct requirements; one must “call up” and “wait in” and not “go round” too much with anyone else. But the girl is rare who has a strong feeling of obligation toward appointments or promises. Therefore the friendship is sure to be checkered by quarrels and reunions. There are besides a thousand and one reasons for dispute. The quarrel is taken very seriously, but the chances are that the breach will heal before long. However, this is not always so; no prediction formed on girl nature is sure. The relationship assumes at times some of the formality and ceremony of the gang. In one case, a definite proposal to be “friends” was made by a girl who had quarreled with her former lady friend. The second girl declined, not from any dislike, but because she was already “going with somebody else.” When a girl begins to have a “gentleman friend” even the slight ceremony of calling up and waiting in for the girl friend is omitted.
The cliques consist of three or four girls, seldom of more. They are likely to exist among the younger girls who have played together as children. They are seldom formed later on, but incline to resolve themselves into the standard couples.
The girls’ homes are not very advantageous places for entertainment and fun. They are too cramped and often too forlorn. Yet everyone here is used to these conditions, and they are not the only difficulties which stand in the way of visits and hospitality. Visits from gentlemen friends are frowned upon and not desired. The parents, especially of the younger girls, look askance on the boys who come to see them.
“My father was always too strict with us girls,” said an older sister, married and established in her own home. “It was always work and keep quiet at home the minute we came in from the factory. He believed that girls must be kept down. He’d have beaten us good if we’d brought a fellow home. So I used to meet my friend at a corner a few blocks off, just the same as my sister Maggie has been doing. It’s only a wonder I didn’t get into trouble the same as she has done and get put away like her. I’m not the one to turn against her now. When she comes out of the Home, she and her baby can come and live with me.”