Ruth responded surprisingly and for six months all went well. Then she began to be unhappy and ask to be removed, saying that she would make removal necessary if something were not done. Finally she had her way. It seemed evident that this home, while successful in many ways, lacked the thoroughly admirable personality which we thought Ruth needed. The woman was hard, set and self-centered. Another home was found in which there proved to be serious marital conflicts in which Ruth was forced to be a party. Here the stealing broke out again. Then a high school teacher became interested in the girl and invited her to her summer home for vacation. This was the great turning point in Ruth’s life. Here her desires for social superiority and pleasure were satisfied, and she was surrounded by real people for whom she felt at last the whole-souled genuine devotion and admiration which was essential for her socialization.
From that moment there has been no trouble with Ruth. No more stealing, no more truancy, no shirking of lessons. She has gone to live with another teacher for whom she keeps house. Six months have passed and there has been no complaint. To complete this treatment and make it permanent, Ruth ought to be given insight into her own behavior and understand just what has happened to her. Then she would be armed against the accident of circumstance.[[98]]
89. ... Mary was an alert, boyish, attractive girl of eighteen ... at work in a department store after having reached first year in High School and reported to have been living with her weak, immoral mother, sharing the mother’s young paramour, a boy only a little older than herself....
The following case history was obtained: Because of the mother’s promiscuity, Mary’s paternity was uncertain. As a child in her mother’s home she had known only loose living, good-natured, easy-going neglect and poverty. Illegitimate births were common in the family. There seems to have been complete lack of ordinary sex morality and social standards. The family lived a roving, hand-to-mouth existence. When Mary was ten, the Court removed her and gave her to a child-placing agency. She was tried out unsuccessfully in several homes and finally made a good adjustment in a country home where she had excellent school opportunities, finishing grammar school at the head of her class. She entered High School with a continuing interest in school, accompanied by an increasing interest in boys. Her late hours, love for good times and her rebellion against restraint worried the foster parents so that they gave her up. She was accepted by a city institution where she was under strict supervision and was sent for the first time to a city school. She tried to enter the second year of High School with inadequate preparation, failing quite completely in every subject. Accident entered at this point in the shape of a new matron at the institution. The girls were trying her out and in her effort to control the situation she threatened to expel the next girl guilty of insubordination. Mary happened to be the victim. She was returned to the Court and discharged to a married and apparently respectable sister. The sister, unequal to disciplining Mary, allowed her to go to her mother, then living in a wretched little house in another town with a young man by whom she was pregnant. There was only one bedroom containing a bed and a cot. Mary shared the cot with the younger brother, a boy of fifteen. For about a year this situation continued. Mary broke away once only to return again. The mother finally went out to work with the new baby, leaving Mary to keep house for her brother and the man. Finally Mary came to the city a second time and got a job. She wandered from one position to another and came in contact with a social agency just as she was about to give up and go home again because she saw no work ahead and was unable to support herself on what she was earning.
The social worker took the matter up as a vocational guidance problem and ... with the psychologist worked out the following picture of Mary:
In earliest childhood she had known little or no restraint and had been familiar with the freest sex life and complete absence of ordinary social standards as regards sex. But there had been affection, easy-going, good-natured attitudes and a great deal of personal freedom. The loose living, the roving, unsettled existence had made it fairly easy for Mary to accept and adjust to varying conditions so that foster-home placement to her was not the agonizing experience that it is to some children. Moreover, she seems to have been from the first an objective, eager, alert, social youngster who most fortunately compensated for her family inferiorities by a complete going over into school life and active energetic expression in work and play....
The dismissal from her foster-home seems to have been caused by behavior which was natural enough on the part of a developing adolescent girl. She merely carried over too much of her superabundant energy into parties and good times with boys.... The dark side of her life here was her introduction to sex experience through the foster father. These experiences, shocking at first, were finally accepted as a matter of course and sank into the background of an existence in which objective interests—school, companions, good times, farm work, held first place. There seems never to have been any deep conflict nor any marked feeling of shame or inferiority. It was taken as part of the day’s work, something which went along with living in this foster-home which for the most part was desirable. She wanted to keep on with her school. She was afraid to tell the wife. She had none of the ordinary sex morality which most of us have absorbed from infancy on. The easiest way was to keep still and adjust. When Mary was asked how she felt about sex, she replied characteristically and cheerfully: “Well, the world is made that way, you just have to accept it. It isn’t any use to worry about it, you might as well take people as they are.”
Although these years in Mary’s life apparently left no scar, they did break down completely any sex inhibitions she might have had, aroused sex needs and accustomed her to the habit of sex expression. It meant that when she went to live with her mother, she experienced no particular shock and was illy prepared to offer resistance to the advances of her mother’s paramour who found her so much more attractive than her mother and with whom she was thoroughly infatuated....
The really critical experience was the transfer to the city institution and the city High School. In neither situation was she at home and for the first time in her life she experienced failure and disgrace in her studies. She now had a genuine inferiority, a discouragement which undoubtedly reacted on her behavior at home. She grew indifferent and reckless, would not respond to scolding or appeal. The objective work and play expressions, as well as the customary sex life, were cut off. There was nothing left but breaking rules to get a good time. Expulsion from the institution meant the final break with school and she thinks it was then that her ambition died. She had no technical training, she could get only underpaid, uninteresting jobs. Where was she to find an outlet for her young energy? The sister, less intelligent than Mary, had no influence and was only a source of irritation. Then in her restless seeking for something more satisfactory, she went to her mother who was living in another city. There she was disturbed chiefly by the mother’s jealousy and feeling she was doing her wrong; also the presence of the younger brother. Finally the glamour wore off and she began to see the man in his true character. He was lazy, unreliable, disloyal, weak. He had none of the straightforward, eager, active attitude which Mary had toward life. Gradually she turned against the kind of person he was and after many struggles, finally broke away.
It was at this point, when her courage was giving way once more, that she was found by the case worker.