Marriage is for all these girls the final and greatest adventure of adolescence. They do not look past the adventure at the responsibilities which lie beyond. The question of children is waved aside as scarcely worth a hearing. Here, where the management of a household is so hazardous and stern an affair, it is most lightly assumed. The girl steps carelessly and boldly ahead. Sixteen is a bit early, but eighteen or nineteen is a good age and further delay is considered needless.
Sometimes the girl goes to church with her companion and is married in the presence of her family and friends. But very often she and her boy-husband indulge in a mild elopement. This is not necessarily done to evade the objection of parents. It is partly in obedience to the romantic instinct of youth and partly because the girl and her family cannot afford the parade of a real wedding. After one of these secret marriages, it is not uncommon for the girl to go on living at home and working, while her husband does the same. In a short time the fact of their marriage becomes known; the young pair become the center of neighborhood interest; and then, as a decidedly secondary matter, the question of their “taking up rooms” is considered. Probably the new wife goes on working in order to buy furniture for her home.
“What do you think!” exclaimed Mrs. Attinger to a visitor from the club who dropped in on a Saturday morning. “Our Lizzie’s married. She’s been married two months and they never told me till last week.” Mrs. Attinger seemed not at all displeased with the event, viewing it as a successful joke on herself and Lizzie’s friends. She went on to relate how her daughter had given up her job at the cigarette factory and had gone over to live in New Jersey with her husband, who was a day laborer. It also appeared, from her mother’s story, that the young couple had not started out under the most favorable auspices. Lizzie had visited Mrs. Attinger the day before with the news that her husband expected to be laid off soon and she was looking for work, as she needed money to furnish her house. Mrs. Attinger related these details without seeming to be particularly disturbed by them.
It was, after all, the familiar story of beginning wives and husbands on the West Side. It indicated that Lizzie had quickly found marriage to be an extremely sobering event. Henceforth she would have new problems to face, problems in which the adolescent hunger for good times would cease to be the dominant element. The will to play was to give place to the incessant struggle for existence which makes up the career of the wife of a casual laborer.
CHAPTER VI
THE BREAKDOWN OF FAMILY PROTECTION
Our West Side girls were members of a supposedly protected part of the community. Each of them belonged to a family group; if they were not living with their own parents, near relatives had taken them in. Their homes were in a section which possesses a neighborhood life and neighborhood opinions. The population is far more stable than that of the East Side; recent comers are rare. Some of our girls told of how their mothers had gone to school together. One had started in the same school through which her mother had passed. Many families had shifted around within a range of 10 blocks for a generation. The parents of most of them had been here from ten to thirty or forty years. It is, then, not in the absence but in the breakdown of neighborhood and family protection that we must seek the reasons for social, moral, and physical deterioration in these girls.
The character of the community goes far to counter-balance any advantage the girl may gain from living in an environment familiar to herself and to her parents. If she grows up in one of these blocks, she is, from babyhood, in the midst of lawlessness and rumors of lawlessness. They are afloat in the air she breathes, as certain to be inhaled as are the heavy odors from the gas plants and slaughter pens.
Two girls came excitedly into their club with news of an assault which had just taken place down the block. They had loitered to join the curious crowd and to have a look at the victim. They related the details of the event and commented upon them as upon a familiar story.
There was a ripple of excitement, but no surprise. One girl exclaimed, “Things like that are happening on our block all the time.”
The block where this girl lived bears the distinction of having sheltered, some forty years ago, the original “Hell’s Kitchen” gang.[83] A junk-covered lot is pointed out as the site of the tumble-down shack where the gang met. The shack has disappeared, while in the rear, facing the street to the north, a mission is now in full swing. Still, tradition upholds the desperate character of the locality and gives it a bad reputation. The police declare, however, that it is no worse than many other parts of the neighborhood. Fifteen of our club girls came from this block. All the toughs who gather there are, of course, identified with the “Gopher Gang.” The Gophers were said to have assaulted the housekeeper in 562. She had reported to the police their use of her vacant rooms, and in revenge they had “beaten her up.” It was to this same house, which bears a bad reputation, that a physician had been recently called, late in the evening, to attend a baby. The child was in convulsions, the effect of the whiskey with which she had been “doped.” After a search through the house, he found only one family sober enough to be trusted with the child.