Authentic stories of violence came to us from time to time. Many other tales were the product of gossip largely mingled with falsehood. But the brutality of the neighborhood speaks for itself; it is everywhere, in the streets, in the talk, in the minds of old and young. Recklessness and daring are apt to be painted with heightened colors, exaggerated beyond the fact. The child does not discriminate between garbled truth and falsity. In any case, these stories take effect on her. They are poured into her mind and muddy the stream of her imagination. She believes a large amount of what comes to her ears, some of which she sees and knows to be true. The girls who lived in this block, though they were coming and going by night and day, had yet a lively apprehension of its dangers. “When I go home after ten,” said Mamie Stertle, “I always get the cop on the corner to see me to my door.” Mamie had lived uptown for a few months. Up there, far to the north, she had acquired a friend of a superior type, a chauffeur, who worked steadily and always had money in his pocket. When she came back to live on the West Side, she took it for granted that he could not come to her home, lest he be assaulted and robbed.
The young girl shares in all the gossip of her elders. She takes in greedily the idle talk of the kitchen, the stoop, and the street. In this prurient school she becomes familiar, even as a child, with the lowest forms of vice and immorality. Living on the same block with 15 of our girls were two young women who were the “talk of the parish.” “They begun in the dance halls back o’ the saloons,” said Mrs. Ryan, “and look what they are now!” Not one of our 15 girls but was familiar with the talk and with all the details of the two irregular lives about which it centered.
A restaurant was opened on the corner. It was soon noised about that the woman proprietor was identical with a notorious criminal who had served a sentence of twenty years for infanticide. Before long the girls were repeating with gusto horrible stories of her crimes. Sadie Toohey, standing on the corner with a group of schoolmates, informed them concerning the restaurant keeper, “She was a midwife and used to burn babies.” Then, with a toss of her blonde head with its little-girl bows, she added, “She burned one of mine.” The sally was greeted with shouts of appreciation and Sadie’s reputation as a wit rose among her comrades.
A mother, even one of the wisest, finds it no easy task to defend her young against these influences. Life is far too congested in such quarters for the girl to escape any of its aspects. When a family of from six to eight members lives in three or four rooms it is impossible to segregate the young from their elders. Only well-to-do parents can afford to provide a separate life tempered to the needs of young and growing personalities. The poor man’s house has no nursery for its young, no annex like the boarding school, which enlarges the dimensions of the rich man’s house and provides a special environment friendly to youth and its needs. The daughter of fourteen in the tenements must share the experience of the mother of fifty, who, even with the best intentions, cannot shield her girl from her own fifty-year-old materialistic morals. What is true of the individual family is also true of mass life on the block. There is no segregation of youth. The result is precocious hardness or youthful rebellion.
If the practice of pooling the moral standards of old and young is not considered ideal training for children in families whose moral standards meet the usual requirements, it is even less desirable in families which are either degraded or undeveloped. There are here on the West Side many families who have the naïve morality of primitive social groups. The result is that many of the girls are simply reared in a different morality from that of the community at large. Illegitimate births are common. Marriage—even a common law marriage—is accepted as removing any stigma that might attach to an irregular relationship. “Oh, it is all right,” said the parents of one girl-mother, “because she’s been goin’ with Bill now for years. They’ll marry as soon as they can.”
One of our club girls drifted into a temporary union and then drifted out again in the most matter-of-fact way. After a period of absence from the club, she was reported upon inquiry to be married. “She done well for herself,” rumor ran. One day she turned up at the club and brought her boy-husband, apparently a decent, steady sort of chap. Soon we learned that they had not really been married but had started the report in a spirit of fun. However, they now decided to go through the ceremony in earnest and together they went to the priest. Here they met an unexpected obstacle, for their visit had been forestalled by Mattie’s mother, who did not approve of Cleary for a son-in-law and had charged the priest not to marry them. The girl returned home, but continued to meet Cleary on the street and to go around with him. Then gradually she began to shake off the connection, breaking promises to the boy and failing to keep appointments with him. He came to the club one evening expecting to find her there according to her promise. But Mattie did not come to the club that night, and Cleary, after waiting a while in vain, departed saying darkly, “That’s the third time this week she’s give me the hang-up.” There was evidence that Mattie’s mother was more concerned about the loss of her daughter’s earnings than about making her an “honest” girl.
The toleration of moral irregularities is mingled with much harshness of censure. “D’ ye know Jennie Meehan that lives in th’ house next to ours?” Kitty Stevens asks the cooking class. “Well, she’s just had a baby. Father McGratty went there today an’ he married her an’ the feller. Her sister was just th’ same way, only she went and had her baby in Jersey. Me mother says if she had that kind of girl she’d burn her, she w’d. Burnin’ w’d be good enough for the likes o’ her.” But in spite of this severity of comment, the occurrence is accepted philosophically by the elders of the neighborhood, and soon forgotten.
Some families fall below all moral codes, even the simple ethics of the far West Side. The fault which may be forgiven in the girl is not so pardonable in her parents. Open and excessive infidelity on the part of the father and drink or infidelity on the part of the mother may make the family outcasts from among the merely poor. The daughter shares the degradation of the others and can scarcely escape the consequences. Even where the habits of her elders are not the subject of gossip, she herself cannot escape the knowledge and the influence. There was fifteen-year-old Addie Mercer, bright, vivacious, with sparkling dark eyes, who was getting a “bad name.” The unsavory example came from her father. He, as Addie and her mother and all the children knew, maintained a second household with a colored woman in charge. The effects of this constant example, as well as of other demoralizing influences, were already evident in Addie, and the final result threatened to be total moral collapse.
Often the mere physical conditions of life seem enough to account for the moral tragedies. The hallways of these tenements are perennially dark by day, although they are lit by flickering gas jets in the evening. The legal requirements for illumination of dark halls and stairs are too often evaded throughout the tenements. There was one house in our neighborhood where no lights burned in any of the halls day or night, for months. It is not uncommon to find a hall so pitch-dark that one must feel one’s way down the stairs.
A white flower was sent to the sick mother of one of our girls. When a visitor called, it was literally the only thing that could be seen in the woman’s room. All other details—walls, bed clothing, the features of the sick woman—were lost in blackness until the eyes of the visitor became sufficiently accustomed to the darkness to distinguish between them. Men boarders shared from time to time the three rooms of this home. In this flat and others like it a daughter had lived her fourteen years. Then, still a child, she became a mother.