To sum up, we have divided our families on a basis of prosperity and poverty as Miss Breckinridge and Miss Abbott have done in their book on The Delinquent Child and the Home.[93]
Class I represents the very poor, the “submerged tenth,”—the broken family, ill fed, ill clad, ill supported, aided by charity month after month and year after year, sick, wretched, truly poverty stricken. To this class we have judged that 20 of our 55 families, containing 25 of our 65 girls, belonged.
Class II are the poor, those with whom it is a constant struggle to make ends meet, who seldom have comfort but who seldom are on the verge of starvation. In this class we have placed 23 of our families, containing 28 of our girls.
Class III represents the fairly comfortable, those whose chief wage-earner has steady work or in which the children are contributing a fair share of the income; where food is sufficient and overcrowding is not very great. In this class were 11 of our families, with 11 of our girls.
Class IV is the very comfortable group, those who can afford a little more than the minimum of education and of care for their children, and who are never likely to know pressing want. In this class there was one family, containing one of our girls. This child’s grandfather was an early district settler, an Irish builder and contractor. When he died he left to the mother three or four tenement houses, in one of which the family were living, while the rents from the others rendered them, according to local standards, positively affluent.
Thus, to separate poverty from prosperity, roughly though it must be, only 12 of the 55 families could be called comfortable. The remaining 43 families were poor, some of them wretchedly poor. This condition, whatever may have been its cause, was the dominating factor in the lives of all but 12 of our 65 girls.
APPENDIX B
SCHOOL ATTENDANCE DATA
To obtain facts regarding school attendance in the West Side district studied, a special tabulation for four public schools was made in the Bureau of Social Research from schedules obtained for the Committee on School Inquiry of the Board of Estimate and Apportionment of New York City. Public Schools Nos. 17, 32, 51, and 127 were the schools included in the study. The records covered a period of five months, from February 1, 1911, to June 30, 1911, or practically 100 school days. In the following table is shown the relation between the absences of boys and the absences of girls in the four schools mentioned, and the relation between absences in these schools and absences in the entire city.
It will be noted that attendance is poorer for the girls than for the boys. The difference in the average number of days of absence is about 2.6 days, or approximately 2.6 per cent of the term in question.