T*H L,U^ ^^ f^ M, JL M. ^k_j* VORK-A-DAT mmm < mmsam UGHLIN THE WORK-A-DAY GIRL By CLARA E. LAUGHLIN The Penny Philanthropist 12mo, cloth, net $1.00. The story of "Peggy" of The Halsted St. News "Imporium" and her penny-a-day philanthropy. The Gleaners A Novellette. Illustrated, 12mo, decorated boards, net 75c. "If you want a book that will make life look rosier you will find it here." Book News. Everybody's Lonesome A True Fairy Story. Illustrated by A. I. Keller. 12mo, cloth, net 75c. 'No one will read this happily optimistic book, without being the better for it. Book News. The Lady in Gray 12mo, decorated boards, net 50c. "A pretty tale it is, and a dear one, and one full of life's lessons." Chicago Record-Herald. Divided The story of a poem, A story based upon Jean Ingelow's poem of the same name. Marginal dec- orations in two colors. 121110, art cover, net 7$c. Miladi Being sundry little chapters devoted to your day dreams, Dear Miladi, and your House o' Dreams and your Motherhood. i2mo, cloth, net $1.20. When Joy Begins A Study of a Woman's Life. 12mo, half vellum, net 50c. "For a charming little gift that will bless the recip- ient, this book is unsurpassed." Religious Telescope. The Evolution of a Girl's Ideal A Little Record of the Ripening of the Affections to the Time of Love's Coming, i6mo, decorated boards, net oc. ALL THEIR TIME FOR PART OF THEIR "KEEP." These thirteen-year-old girls think they are helping to sup- port their families because they turn over to them the $3.50 per week they earn. The fact is, this is less than their " keep " costs. Who pays the deficit? THE WORK-A-DAY GIRL A Study of Some Present -Day Conditions BY CLARA E. LAUGHLIN Author of "The Evolution of a Girl's Ideal," "Everybody's Lonesome," etc. ILLUSTRATED NEW YORK CHICAGO TORONTO Fleming H. Revell Company LONDON AND EDINBURGH Copyright, 1913, by FLEMING H. REVELL COMPANY New York: 158 Fifth Avenue Chicago: 125 N. Wabash Ave. Toronto: 25 Richmond St., W. London: 21 Paternoster Square Edinburgh: 100 Princes Street To JOHN THOMPSON 272251 CONTENTS INTRODUCTION n I. AT THE NIGHT COURT . . . .21 II. THE EFFORT TO SAVE GIRLS ... 46 III. WHERE THE TROUBLE BEGINS ... 72 IV. THE INDICTMENT OF THE HOME . . 90 V. HER DAILY BREAD 107 VI. THE GIRL WHO EARNS $6 A WEEK . .127 VII. MINIMUM WAGE 156 VIII. MAMIE'S DEFICIT 177 IX. GIRLS' SCHOOLING 210 X. FORCED OUT 237 XI. THE PRICE OF PROGRESS .... 263 XII. "THE WOMAN OF IT" .... 289 ILLUSTRATIONS FACING PAGE All Their Time for Part of Their " Keep " . Title Where Workers and Workless Meet ... 27 A Common Sight in Eastern Cities ... 46 Well-Regulated Work Is the Best Kind of Fun . 72 The Family Breadwinner 90 Learning the Art of Selling 107 A Kitchen Cozy Corner 133 Being Prepared to Earn Their Living . . .177 Learning a Trade That Pays Well . . .210 While Other Folks Sleep 237 An Effort to Revive Wholesome Pastimes . . 263 Her Father's Assistant 289 INTRODUCTION THE chapters of which this book is composed were written from time to time during a period of about three years, on order for magazines. This means that they are journalistic rather than academic. The editorial orders came to the author not because she had any special knowledge of the sub- jects nor any special advantage for observation and investigation, but solely because certain editors be- lieved her sympathetic and candid, and told her to " look into " some phases of the work-a-day girl's re- lations to society. It is hoped, therefore, that the book may be judged not as the work of one speaking with authority, but as the observations of one who can claim scarcely any other qualification for the task than an exceeding great' interest in it, and an " eagerness to know " which has made her study of it at least fairly comprehensive. The range of reading covered in the preparation of these chapters may without exaggeration be called enormous; and the range of personal interviews and investigations was not less. It could scarcely have been possible for any one to put more work into a volume of this size; but the same amount of labour performed by a scholar in social science would doubt- 11 13 INTRODUCTION less have produced a work of authority whereas, the most that can be hoped for these chapters is that here or there among them a reader may find some suggestion upon which he or she may act in the great Opportunity, the great Privilege, of social betterment. Nearly every one, in these days of new visions, is eager to serve ; is saying : ' ' Here am I ! What can I do ? " The author of these chapters has tried very earnestly to learn what can be done not alone by legislators and by others specially empowered, but by average men and women of many cares and limited opportunities. She has endeavoured, in this book, to make some suggestions of great services which are within the power of nearly every reader. The readers' of the magazines in which the articles appeared, showed, in their correspondence with the author, a spirit of eagerness to serve, of wistfulness to be shown a way, that made it seem probable there would be a' public for the chapters in book form. So they are here presented, in the order in which they were written. This order has been preserved because the author thinks it may be somewhat typical of the steps by which many observers go, from effects back to causes. It is a matter of only a very few years some four or five since the American social conscience rebelled against the practice of locking up overnight persons who were arrested after police court hours in the after- noon, and so unable to get a hearing until the next day. INTRODUCTION 13 Many who suffer arrest are able to clear themselves im- mediately on appearing before a magistrate. So, New York City instituted a Night Court where such as were arrested after four o'clock in the afternoon could be heard after not more than a few hours' deten- tion. This Night Court, the only one in the world, aroused wide interest; many persons concerned in the ad- ministration of justice and many more who had never before visited a police court, attended its sessions. The author of these chapters was interested in this as, previously, she had been interested in the pioneer juvenile courts; her interest was like that of thousands, the country over, who rejoice at each new move in what seems the direction of a broader, deeper, kindlier humanitarianism. That was why an editor (to whom she will never be able sufficiently to acknowledge her indebtedness) said to her: " There are a lot of people who have the same kind of interest you have, but have not your opportunity of seeing for themselves. Tell them about the Night Court as you see it." As she first saw it, it was a court for offenders of both sexes and of many sorts; the procession before the magistrate contained boys arrested for playing baseball in crowded streets, men arrested for peddling without a license, chauffeurs who had exceeded the speed limit, dock labourers who had grown too bellig- erent in drink, male creatures of many sorts and ages who had made assaults upon little girls, and a variety 14 INTRODUCTION of other offenders; but the majority were women, and most of them were there on charges of immoral con- duct forbidden by the statutes of New York. After a while it became necessary to have two Night Courts in New York, and the growing feeling that men and women should not be heard at the same tri- bunal, was respected : the original Night Court at Jef- ferson Market became a court for women only. (Bos- ton had led the way in a separate court for women. Chicago is now hearing in private, before a woman judge and women court officers, the cases of delin- quent young girls sparing them both shame and pub- licity. Three or four years ago, when the author of these chapters began frequenting the Jefferson Market Night Court, it seemed a great step forward to find a woman probation officer always on duty; now, in Chicago, it seems no more than a beginning of what should be, to sit in Judge Mary Bartelme's little room with its door locked against the world, and see young girls in close counsel with a wise, tender little woman, wistful to help them redirect their lives.) The Night Court presented, most urgently, a prob- lem in erring girls. It seemed quite reasonable, at that early stage of the author's progress, to ask the girls why they were there. As if they knew! Then, when one had talked with a number of girls like " Florence," it was inevitable that a deep dejection should ensue. Magistrates, matrons, probation officers, rescue workers, all contributed to the feeling of despair INTRODUCTION 15 regarding the Florences. "What's to be done?" " Well, whatever salvage may be effected is to be worked for among the betrayed girls who have not yet become public prostitutes." This led to the article on "The Effort to Save Girls." And that, as inevitably, led to "Where the Trouble Begins " and " The Indictment of the Home " as set forth particularly in the United States Senate Report on " The Relation of Occupation to Crimi- nality and Immorality Among Women." Many per- sons were charging modern industrialism with the downfall of girls crying that there was danger in going away from home to work. The Government investigators found that not industrialism but the slipshod home was the chief contributing source of female delinquency. Then began a study of the kinds of homes from which many of our girl workers come, and of the family economics. The report rendered, after years of thorough investigation, to the United States Senate, was destructive of the old notion that most girls work for pin-money or for gewgaws. Four-fifths of them were found to hand over all their earnings to the family fund. What were the conditions which made this necessary ? How different, essentially, were they from the old conditions whose passing so many persons de- plore? How necessary are these differences? Could they be argued or legislated away? Or are they an inevitable phase of our social and economic evolution? 16 INTRODUCTION These were a few of the questions that arose and demanded inquiry. The notion that money paid to girl workers was in the nature of a contribution to their candy and feather fund, seemed deeply imbedded in many minds es- pecially in the minds of those who employ girls' labour. On one hand were outcries against the small wages paid to girl workers, and demands for Minimum Wage legislation. On the other hand were retorts that girl workers were inefficient, undependable, and worth no more than the small sums for which they willingly sold their labour. In studying the pros and cons of Minimum Wage legislation, it became evident that girls are indeed ill prepared for that industrial phase which most of them now enter upon for a longer or shorter period ; and also that they are ill paid, usually, even for the kind of service they render. A tragic proportion of them are not paid enough to keep body and soul together. The deficit must always be made up. Who pays it? That led to some startling revelations, and disclosed an astoundingly prevalent conviction that women have always been " supported " by some one other than themselves; that their labour has never been reckoned worth their " keep," but that the difference has been obligingly made up by somebody. A very superficial glance at the history of woman and her share in the world's work serves to dispel this curious idea. But only a few persons, it would INTRODUCTION 17 seem, have given the facts even a superficial survey. The last three chapters of this book summarize, to the best of the author's present ability, some of the most salient truths about woman and industry. In the gathering of these truths the author has neglected, she thinks she may say, no important work in English on women and economics, sex and society, or any kindred topic. The gist of them all is very simple: Woman was the creator of industry; she has always performed a major share of the world's work; when she has relinquished to man a field of labour of which neces- sity made her the mother, she has either made for her- self another field or, failing that, has become the pro- genitress of a decadent race. The nations on the " up grade " have always been the nations whose women were vigorous creatprs of industry. The na- tions on the " down grade " have always owed their decline to the wealth which divorced the women of their ruling classes from the development that labour gives, and made of them weak parasites and pamper- ing mothers. Dense ignorance of the past and of its lessons has bred in many persons of to-day an attitude toward women and self-sustaining labour which must be cor- rected. There has been a marvellous increase of com- mon sense in the last few years; but even yet there are too many women who wear an apologetic manner because they earn their bread, and too few who are apologetic because they don't earn it ! Even yet there 18 INTRODUCTION is a great deal of confusion in many minds about women " going to work." As if they had not always been very busily at work, maintaining themselves and others with the labour of their hands, the ingenuity of their brains ! The work-a-day girl is no new product. But she works, now, under new conditions, many of which are bewilderingly strange not to her only, but to her family, to her employer, and to the social order of which she is so important a part. The hope of helping even a few readers to realize how this change has come about and how exceedingly necessary it is that we meet it intelligently, has animated the author of these chapters. She trusts that no explanation of their semi-story form will seem to have been called for. Also, that the plain speaking may nowhere offend. She has a very vivid memory of those not-so-distant years when her own curiosity was set violently in motion by what were meant for " discreet allusions." For instance, it has been suggested that in telling about Florence Arthur, in the first chapter of this book, the author should have contented herself with saying that Florence was ar- rested on a serious charge and taken to the Night Court. Could anything more completely " kill " all that follows, and keep the mind unacquainted with the sorry facts of street-walking, intent on : " What was it that she did ? " Could anything be more im- portant for a fun-loving young girl to know than the INTRODUCTION 19 reason why she must be so circumspect on the streets and in all public places, so that she shall give no one cause to question her? The slogan so reluctantly adopted by poor little Katie (as told in the second chapter) has also been questioned not for its truthfulness, but for the ad- visability of printing it. The phrase was used as in his opinion expressing the crux of a terribly grave situation, by a man who knows more about the tempta- tions of the young working girl than any one the author has ever met. After years of experience on thousands of cases of delinquency, he declared that the hardest thing he had to fight was that oft-repeated cry : " You gotta be a good Indian ! " Few indeed are the girls who, after a very short experience in making their way in the world, have hot had this hideous sug- gestion made to them. What end shall we then serve by eliminating it from a story of their temptations? The author, frankly, cannot grasp this point of view. She cannot believe that chapters written so earnestly and with such deep affection for the little sisters who face the world for their daily bread, can either offend or mislead. If she errs, in this, she very humbly begs pardon. C. E. L. Chicago. AT THE NIGHT COURT THE Saturday night theatre crowds thronged Broadway. It was a few minutes past eight on a mellow October evening, and even people who were anticipating a treat in the playhouse seemed a little loath to go in out of the soft night air. Limousines and taxis, darting at breakneck speed up and down Broadway and around the corners of the cross streets, had their windows down, revealing for a fraction of a second, as they flashed by, glimpses of girls and women in filmy finery, their light wraps not even drawn together over their bare throats. Street cars discharged crowds of hatless femininity in light frocks at the theatre doors. Florists' shop windows were marvels of colour orchids and violets and lilies- of-the-valley and gardenias and chrysanthemums and American Beauties and Killarney roses, displayed against backgrounds of feathery green ferns and bronze autumn leaves. Cheap jewellery stores, and a few of the better class, poured floods of electric light on their glittering displays. Hundreds of young working folk lads and lassies in pairs, in little groups, surged up and down taking in the sights. Hundreds of " has-beens " slouched amid the throngs, 21 22 THE WORK-A-DAY GIRL cynically reflective. Swift and ceaseless as the rush of waters through Niagara Gorge or Yellowstone Canon is the torrent of the human current through the dazzling Great White Way. Near the corner of Thirtieth Street a girl loitered, looking in the windows of a candy shop and a cheap jeweller's next to Daly's Theatre. She was a pretty girl, of a quiet, unobtrusive sort, and as modest-look- ing as any of the girls who thronged the street. Her neat suit was brown, and she had a black hat with ostrich feathers, of the type thousands of working girls buy for " best." A man stopped at the window a-glitter with rhine- stones. Out of the corner of her eye the girl marked him ; he was alone, and his leisurely manner indicated that he had nothing particular to do. The girl moved a little closer. " Good-evening," she said. Her man- ner was almost timid, but the man was city-wise. Whether his morals were offended, or his taste was not appealed to, or his mood was not propitious, the girl would never know; but he moved away. The girl was about to saunter along, when a second man came up to the window and looked in. He lifted his gaze from the glittering gewgaws to glance cov- ertly at the girl. Something indefinable in his manner made her feel that he would not resent being spoken to. She tried again. This man answered. " Good-evening," he said. " It's a fine night, ain't it? " j AT THE NIGHT COURT 23 "Yes," agreed the girl. "Don't you feel like havin' a god)d time?" "Sure! Where?" She nameid a hotel of the kind seldom resorted to for any but disreputable purposes. " You're under arrest ! " said the man, opening his coat and showing his badge. He was a plain-clothes detective from the Thirtieth Street police station. There, a few minutes later, she was booked. She gave her name as Florence Arthur, her age as twenty- three, and her residence as on Twenty-seventh Street between Sixth and Seventh Avenues. The affidavit filed against her set forth that she was " a common prostitute and street walker," and that, in violation of the statute of the State of New York " in such cases made and provided," she had stopped John Feeny " for such purpose," naming the place and the hour. To this John Feeny swore, and Florence was held for an hour or so until there were, at the Thirtieth Street station, enough women who were entitled to immediate hearing at the Night Court, to make a wagon load. Then they and the officers who had made the arrests were driven down to Jefferson Mar- ket Court at Sixth Avenue and Tenth Street. Arrived at the receiving door for prisoners on the Tenth Street side of the Jefferson Market building, John Feeny entered Florence's name, his own, and the charge against her. Then she was locked up in the receiving pen for women and he went to the desk 24s THE WORK-A-DAY GIRL of the clerk of the court and stated the particulars, so that papers might be made out for the case. This done, he awaited the call to appear. In the pen with Florence were eight other women and girls who, like herself, had been arrested since 4 P.M., charged with misdemeanours and disorderly conduct, not felonies. It was a large cell, perhaps twenty-five feet square, and wooden benches ran around three sides; the fourth side was iron-barred and through the bars could be seen all that went on in the corridor outside. The walls of the pen were whitewashed, and it was brightly lighted with elec- tricity. When the first of the night prisoners was put into it, it was quite unobjectionably clean; but already the air in it was becoming foul. Two of the women in the pen were drunk one in a heavy stupor, and one noisy and violent. The woman in the stupor was a white woman, and young; she wore a dark blue calico wrapper and neither hat nor coat, and she was lying in a heap on the stone floor. Two or three times her fellow-prisoners had tried to dispose her decently on the narrow bench, but she repeatedly rolled off. The disorderly drunk was a negress; she was middle-aged and ample and terribly obscene. One woman was crying; she was an eminently re- spectable-looking woman, almost smartly dressed, and she had been arrested just before closing time in a Sixth Avenue store, charged with shoplifting. Try- AT THE NIGHT COURT 25 ing occasionally to console her was a younger woman wearing the full livery of poverty at its pinchingest; she had, too, the mark of consumption in her thin face, as well as signs of the ravages of a vile disease. She was there on a charge of violating the tenement house act which makes it unlawful for a woman to use for immoral purposes a room in any " building occupied as the home or residence of three families or more, living independently of each other and doing their own cooking upon said premises." Besides these, there were four girls. One was very young and very frightened ; she sat still, in a far cor- ner of the pen, cowering, and when any one passed through the corridor, she hid her face with her hands. One girl was expensively dressed and defiant. One, a Jewess, was showily but shoddily dressed, and appar- ently unconcerned. One was a coloured girl, in Sev- enth Avenue finery; she was cheerful, unabashed, and had the same curious interest in her cellmates, their clothes, their grievances, their places of residence and modes of life, that another class of woman shows at a tea party or meeting of the sewing circle. All these girls were booked on the same charge as that made against Florence. The magistrate arrived a little before eight, and promptly at eight an officer came to the pen, called " May Mooney," and the frightened little girl who did not look the seventeen years she claimed, stepped to the gate. The officer unlocked the gate and May 26 THE WORK-A-DAY GIRL passed, trembling, through, hiding her face with her hands as she went. And after an interval of dazed unseeingness, she found herself looking into a not at all unkindly face three feet away from her across a broad desk. All around were other men, some in po- lice uniforms, others in citizens' clothes; but these May felt rather than saw, at first. Her notion of a court had been of something in- quisitorial. Instead, she found herself face to face with a man who talked to her with much kindliness. " How did you come to do such a thing, May? " he was asking. She had admitted the charge against her. " It was like this," she said. " My pa's been sick in the hospital since las' winter, an' he ain't never goin' t' git no better, fer it's the consumption he has. An' all we had t' live on my ma an' us five kids an' my ma's mother that lives with us was what my oldes' brother could earn out o' school hours, runnin' errands an' sellin' papers an' that-like, an' what I got. I had a job in a millinery place on Sixt' Avenoo. I ust t' do kind o' easy things in the workroom, like puttin' in the linin's, an' t' deliver the hats, some- times, an' put away stock. An' I los' my job fer fer foolin' around some, when I was sent out on errands. I ust t' like t' hear the songs an' ragtime on the pianos where they sell music in the department stores, an' sometimes I'd look a little in a penny arcade. An' so I got fired. An' I couldn't bear t' tell my ma. I tried AT THE NIGHT COURT 27 every way I could t' git another job, but I couldn't. An' a girl that spoke t' me when I was sittin' in Union Square lookin' at the Help Wanteds in a paper that a woman left on a bench, she says to me that she knew how I could earn easy money an' I went with her an' she showed me. An' after that, I'd go out every mornin' just like I was goin' t' work, an' go t' one of the parks or some place like that, an' do jus' like she told me; an' I'd git something. An' in the afternoons, maybe I'd go to the stores or to a nickel show; an' at six I'd go home like I was comiri' from work; an' Sat'day night I'd give my ma the money." " And she never knew? " " No; oh, no! She'd 'a' died if she'd ever knew! " " Then you knew you were doing wrong, May ? " " Sure ! I mean, yes, your Honour. But I thought I had to. I didn't see no other way; an' I didn't know you could git arrested for it." " Your kind friend, the girl, didn't tell you that?" " No, sir; I don't think she knew it, either." " Well, you know now, don't you, that you've broken the laws of the State of New York? " :< Yes, your Honour." " And you know that your poor father would die of shame, and your mother's heart would break, if they knew where you are now? " " Yes, your Honour." " Well, May, I believe you're going to be a better girl after this, and I'm going to give you a chance. 28 THE WORK-A-DAY GIRL I'm going to see if the probation officer won't take you on trial. Miss Smith, please ! " Out of the big group of persons behind May bailiffs and reporters and others privileged to come within the rail that separates the judge's bench and prisoners' dock from the spectators' part of the court- room stepped a tall, fine-looking woman of less than middle age, with firmness and gentleness in every line of her commanding figure and of her comely counte- nance. She was Miss Alice Smith, one of the oldest in point of service of women probation officers, and one of the most devoted and most efficient women in that work anywhere. " Come with me, May," she said; and led the way through a gate opposite to that through which May had come from the pen, and into a big, quiet room where a police sergeant off duty dozed behind a high office desk. At the corner of a long table was a chair in which, following Miss Smith's motion, May sat down. The probation officer drew another chair close beside her; for fifteen minutes she questioned May and talked to her as a wise mother might have done. The tender, understanding heart in her was full of sympathy for the girl's pathetic situation, of appre- ciation of the pure human nature in May's love of ragtime and penny arcades; but she was careful not to let May feel that sympathy too much. God knew it was not in her heart to blame the child ! But God knew, too, how bad for the child it would be if the AT THE NIGHT COURT 29 enormity of her offence were not deeply impressed upon her then and there. " Well, May," she said, " I'm going to accept you on probation. Monday morning I shall set to work to get you a job. And I'll go to see your mother. No ! don't look like that ; I sha'n't tell her you've been in trouble not unless you go back to this horrible business again. And if you do, you know you can be rearrested and brought in here and sentenced to the Island or to a reformatory for erring girls. I'll just tell your mother, Monday, that I'm a friend of yours and have heard that your father is ill. I'll see if there isn't something that can be done to save your father's life or to get work for your mother to do at home anything to help you all get along. And you're to come to see me once a week for six months, and tell me how you are getting on and what a good girl you're trying to be. Will you do that? " " Yes, ma'am sure I will." " Then you can go. And if I'm not mistaken, you'll see the day when you'll be glad as I am that you were arrested this afternoon. Your being brought here has given me a chance to know about you and to help you. If you begin, to-night, to be a good, true girl, working hard and keeping yourself self-respect- ing, you may look back on this experience as one of the best that ever happened to you. I don't want you to go from here feeling that the Law has disgraced you but that it has saved you. You did what you could 30 THE WORK-A-DAY GIRL to disgrace yourself; the Law has stepped in to save you. Good-night, May." The woman accused of shoplifting had, meanwhile, been before the magistrate. She had never been ar- rested before and was evidently a decent woman probably one of the many who are kept without pocket money by mean husbands who had found the tempta- tion of some specially coveted bit of finery too strong for her resistance. Being truthful, she had given her own name when arrested; but it was noticed that she had not sent for her husband. When she was dis- missed with a kindly warning the stolen trinket had been given up the moment she was apprehended she thanked the judge and then broke into an impassioned plea for secrecy. The judge looked over the top of his spectacles at the young men from the newspapers ; she followed the direction of his glance, interpreted it, and turned to them. Her pleading was the most dramatic episode the old court had witnessed in some time. She never knew what it cost those boys to promise her what she asked; she was the best " story " the court had offered in many nights. But she won them, and they were heroically true to their word. That is, they wrote the story, but they scrupulously guarded every clue to her identity even the boys of the " Yellow Press," who were taking their lives or at least their jobs in their hands by so doing. The expensively dressed and defiant girl, and the Jewess who was unconcerned, were fined when their AT THE NIGHT COURT 3.1 respective cases were called. The expensively dressed girl paid her fine from a well-filled purse and departed, gathering up her skirts. Not want, but sheer deviltry had brought her there. The Jewess had only part of the amount of her fine, so she was taken to the prison to " sit out " a few hours of confinement in lieu of the remainder. The coloured girl was sentenced to the Island. " Somebody gotter go ter the Islan'," she declared with good-nature apparently unshaken, as she was being conducted to a cell upstairs, " othahwise you-all wouldn' be able ter keep yo' jobs. Somebody that cain't pay gotter make it look like you-all was powah- ful busy; an'/' breaking into a comic-opera lilt, "it might as well be me." At the top of the winding iron stairs she was re- ceived by an ample matron, wholesome-looking in her immaculate uniform of blue and white stripes, white apron, and neat white collar, and decidedly kindlier in manner than the average trained nurse. " Hello, Mamie," she said to the coloured girl, " you up again ? " Mamie grinned. " Yas'm," she assented, submit- ting to being searched for " dope " and razors as if it were the most ordinary of amenities; "when dey cain't ketch nobody else, an' it look bad fer 'em, dey always comes aroun' an' ketches me." Thereupon, with an air not very different from that of a hostess showing a guest to her room, the matron 3 THE WORK-A-DAY GIRL conducted Mamie to a cell which was so many, many degrees cleaner and better aired and more comfortable than Mamie's room on Seventh Avenue that she might well have been philosophic about making it her abode till Monday morning, when she would go to the Island. There was a comfortable, clean cot bed in the cell, which Mamie could hook up against the wall if she wanted more space to move about in; and there were a toilet, and a basin with running water, and an elec- tric light. Perhaps the only discomfort, from Ma- mie's point of view, was the cleanliness of it all. But there was trouble ahead, the matron knew, with Mamie. Before the night was over the effects of the cocaine now in her would have worn off, and she would be clamouring for more. And doubtless before Monday morning she would be under the care of the jail physician and receiving, by his orders, small doses of her " dope," sufficient to keep her from going mad, but not sufficient to keep her from being ugly. Presently the coloured drunk and the white drunk were brought upstairs. The coloured woman was under sentence to the Island. The white woman was being held until her relatives could be found; she was not disorderly, and if her people would take her away and keep her from being harmed while she was help- less, the city had no wish to assume the burden. The probation officer would take her on parole and see what could be done to help the unfortunate creatare overcome her weakness for drink. AT THE NIGHT COURT 33 The receiving pen filled up as fast as it was cleared. Of those who had preceded Florence into it, all were now gone but the wretched violator of the tenement house act; but others, of like sorts, had taken their places. " It's a gay life not ! " the woman of squalor re- marked bitterly to Florence as her turn drew near. " I got a sick kid at home, an' when things got t' the worst, I done the one thing I could t' get a little money." She told her story to the magistrate her common- place story of desertion, struggle, sickness, no work, despair, and final recourse to " the oldest profession in the world " ; and he remanded her, to wait until a court officer investigated her case or, in other words, went to see how far the testimony of her neighbours corroborated her story. Then Florence was called. When the magistrate heard what she had to say for herself which wasn't much, except that she had never been arrested before he directed that she be sent in to Miss Smith, to see if that officer would receive her on probation. Under Miss Smith's kindly questioning, Florence talked rather freely. She was twenty-one, she said, and was born in Georgetown, Maryland. Her father died when she was young, and in a few years her mother married again. Florence was the only child of her mother's first marriage. She didn't like her stepfather, and he didn't like her. When his own 34 THE WORK-A-DAY GIRL children came " he was worse than ever/ 7 Florence had to work hard at home, because her mother was ailing and the babies came close together and were ailing, too. The stepfather was a skilled mechanic who made good wages; but he was "tight" with his money, and he drank Saturday nights. Florence used to steal out in the evenings, sometimes, to have a "little fun," and when he found it out he beat her. Often he beat her for other things, too. And finally she ran away and went to Baltimore, where she worked as a domestic. When she was seventeen and had saved a little money and got herself decently clad, she came to New York, " where wages was big, I heard, and there was lots to see when you wasn't workin'." She had " worked in families," first, but that " wasn't any fun " ; so she got a job as waitress in a cheap cafe. There was " more goin' on " in the cafe, more to see and hear, and it was nearer to the places where Florence liked to spend her " off time." But by and by Fourteenth Street shop windows, the penny arcade, the occasional visit to a five-cent theatre, failed to satisfy Florence. Only the " greenest " girls she met with in the " kuffay " were interested in these cheap delights; the others, who wore the largest pom- padours and the swellest suits and the biggest rhine- stone horseshoes and the most beplumed hats, were far beyond " them jay pleasures." They went to " real theaytres," attended dances " frequent," pat- ronized cafes with ladies' entrances and perpetuated AT THE NIGHT COURT 35 palms and " vodeville," and bought the finery neces- sary for these " swell times " on Sixth Avenue above Fourteenth Street! There was only one way Flor- ence could share in these delights and that was to do as the other girls did. As some measure success in life by the number of dollars they can save, and some women measure it by the number of persons they can afford to snub, so Florence measured it by the amount of " fun you have," and it was her dis- tressful limitation that she knew only one possible kind of fun. Eventually, she had given up the prosaic business of " waiting " and undertaken to support her- self solely by the " oldest profession in the world." But something must have been wrong with her busi- ness methods; for in a city where that business pros- pers, as it has probably never before prospered under the sun, Florence had not made a success of it. And to-night, with her funds down to twenty-nine cents, she had been driven to the street. " Do you support a man, Florence ? " asked Miss Smith. " No," said Florence not convincingly. " And you want to do right ? " Why yes." " If I let you go to-night, instead of having you sent up to the Island, and if I get work for you and do all I can to help you, will you try to keep straight ? Will you come to see me for a few minutes one even- ing each week for a while? " 36 THE WORK-A-DAY GIRL Yes, Florence would; but she was not enthusiastic about it, and she stipulated that the work must not be " in a fam'ly." It must be where the possibilities of " fun " appealed to Florence ; otherwise she would have none of it. " Florence," urged Miss Smith, " I know that every young girl wants to have a good time; that it's part of her youth to crave pretty clothes and parties and beaus. I don't say you mustn't try to have a pleasant time, and meet young men, and wear little ' pretties ' to make them find you attractive. But there are kinds of fun that are safe and wholesome; and the kind you have been having is neither, I suppose you know. Now, I shall be on duty here till long after mid- night, and to-morrow I ought to rest late and I want to go to church. But if you will go with me, I'll take my rest time and go over to Bellevue Hospital with you and get a special permit to take you through the wards where the girls who started out to have fun, as you understand fun, are dying horrible deaths and going into Potter's Field. I'd like to take you a short walk down one of those wards if you can stand the indescribable horror of it so you can say to yourself : ' If I go on as I'm going, here's where I shall be in two years or three years, or possibly five years at the outside.' ' "I don't think I could go," said Florence; "I always hate to see sick people." " Florence ! " Miss Smith's tone suddenly be- AT THE NIGHT COURT 37 came intense, searching. " You haven't any real idea of quitting this life have you?" Florence avoided Miss Smith's eyes. " Well " she began, and hesitated. " I know ! If you can have all the feathers and fun you want, without being vicious, you'd probably a little bit liefer have it that way. But the feathers and the fun you will have, and if you must pay a horrible price for them, you'll pay it. Isn't that it ? " Florence was folding and refolding her handker- chief, minutely fluting the hem of it, and apparently deeply engrossed therein. "Isn't that it?" Miss Smith repeated. " Well " she began again. Miss Smith wanted to sigh, but she forbore. Florence was one of such a large, such a terribly large class; and such a hopeless class, too, as experience had proved. Nevertheless she accepted Florence on probation; she could not bear to let her go to the Island without having tried to do for her what she could. To blame Florence is as impossible as to help her. She is young; she is nice-looking; she is driven by every instinct of that brute part of her which develops itself and asks for no schooling, toward the one and only thing that Nature demands of her. She has had absolutely no education in the control of natural tend- encies by spiritual strength. She wants feathers and fun; she walks on Broadway and sees women having 38 THE WORK-A-DAY GIRL both; girls she knows tell her there is only one way for her kind to share in life's gaieties. What sheer folly to tell Florence she must not want to be gay! What smug hypocrisy, too ! And how begin, now, to teach Florence ways of happiness that do not follow the paths of sin! A victim of resourcelessness is Florence. She craves pleasures; she is incapable of creating pleasures for herself; and the few kinds of pleasure she is able to enjoy are kinds that cost too dear for her slender purse the purse of the unskilled working girl and that easily, when come by as she must come by them, lead to the depths. Nature makes Florence want feathers; and that soul in Florence which ought, if she knew she had one, to hold Nature in sufficient check to keep it from destroying her (and none of Nature's forces is so beneficent that it will not also destroy if it is not held in check), that soul is sleep- ing. Some believe there is a clarion call that can bring it at once into dominant activity; but, even of these, not many believe that the call can be made loud enough to wake Florence's soul at this stage in her piteous career. When she is " down and out," she may be made to hear; but while she is well, and the rhinestones glitter in the windows on Broadway, the ragtime floats out from behind the perpetuated palms of cabaret cafes, and fun and feathers are to be had for a price, Florence is not a hopeful subject for reclaim. AT THE NIGHT COURT 39 More love in her home might have helped Florence ; but it is true, too, that girls have been known to run away from love-lit homes, lured by the burning of those million lights that flood the Great White Way. More education might have helped her; but it is also true that girls from the best colleges in the land have sometimes joined the desperate throng swirling toward Potter's Field. One thing only seems certain to most of those who work with and for Florence and her like; and that is, that more education of one particular sort would have helped more instruction in the penalties of sin. But that is, after all, the restraint of fear which was the only spiritual control the world had until Love be- came incarnate and brought men to seek the better way because it is the happier. Merely to scare Florence so that she will forego the fun and feathers because of the hideous disease and the nameless grave that await her, is not to make Florence over into a very valuable member of society. There are tens of thousands of women in New York and everywhere else who are just like Flor- ence in resourcelessness, in love of feathers and of fun; but, by virtue of kindly circumstance, they have not been driven, as she has, to pay the most hideous price for their amusement. Some man, their rela- tions with whom have the sanction of society, pays for their bridge "and their finery and their motor cars and their pink teas. Only God knows which of these 40 THE WORK-A-DAY GIRL women, if the sanctioned relationship were to fail, to become impossible of renewal, would forego the feathers, and which would forego the sanction. In a world so full of possible happiness, they have never learned how to enjoy anything but feathers. There's the situation ! Human nature will seek delight ! The one possible safety for it is when it can be taught to find its delight in things that uplift and satisfy, and not to seek it in things that deprave and create dissat- isfaction. Meanwhile, what little can be done for Florence and her kind the woman probation officers are seeking to do. And for the others like May Mooney, for instance, and for the woman who was dead drunk, and even for the emaciated violator of the tenement house act they are doing a very great deal. Not only do hundreds of girls owe an infinitely bettered life to the redirection they have had from some fine probation officer to whom they were paroled after their arrest, but in many, many cases the regeneration of whole families has followed on the interest awakened in them by the temporary misfortune of one of their members. It is not easy for a girl to keep good if her father is out of work and all her wages are swallowed up by the hungry necessities of a big family; so, often the probation officer begins her fight for the girl's future by getting work for the father. It is not easy for a girl to grow into fine young womanhood if her mother " tipples " and, as most tipplers do, keeps a slatternly AT THE NIGHT COURT 41 home with the meals never on time; so, often the pro- bation officer bends all her energies to cure the mother of her wretched vice. Through the interest of this fine, strong, thoroughly-informed woman into whose charge a member of the household has been put, sick children (and elders) are sent to the hospitals and ailing ones to the country for " fresh air " vacations ; wayward lads are set to learning, under discipline of school or shop, a good trade; and new vistas of useful- ness and happiness are opened up to every one. So far from being a calamity, it is as it should be fre- quently a great mercy that offenders young in years and young in wrongdoing are brought to the bar of justice and turned over to a probation officer. The work is not yet being adequately done. The appro- priation for it is everywhere too small, and each officer has far too much to do to allow of any of it being done as thoroughly as it should be done. But the idea is unquestionably right and deserves every encourage- ment. The needs of the work are many. One of the chief of them is a Municipal Detention House for Women, where offenders against the law can be held pending a thorough investigation of their case. This house should be graded, so that girls arrested for a first offence need never come in contact with women of long-standing depravity, but now wishing to reform. The dangers of contamination are not only mental and moral, but physical, and the sharpest segregation is 42 THE WORK-A-DAY GIRL the only justice. This should be followed in all re- ceiving pens, also; vile and obscene women should not sit, even for an hour, side by side with girls like May Mooney. In a proper detention home there would be some alternative for Florence besides sending her to the Island or turning her immediately loose into the streets. There would be a place to keep girls who want to abandon the evil life and who are afraid on account of the vengeful ire of the wretch they have been supporting; a place where they might safely stay until work could be found for them and they could be spirited away. Many otherwise decent women drink; they are not offenders against the law, but their help- lessness while intoxicated obliges the law to take care of them, if their relatives cannot immediately be found; it is a pity to lock these women in cells with felons and degraded wretches. A Municipal Deten- tion Home would take care of them. Another pur- pose it would serve would be the safe-keeping of wit- nesses who are now sometimes locked in cells like criminals. Miss Maud Miner, once a probation officer, has opened a temporary home for girls which she calls Waverley House; it is at 38 West Tenth Street, only a few doors from the Jefferson Market Court. Miss Miner, aided by her sister Stella, receives into this home, which is supported by voluntary contributions, girls from the night or day courts of New York. She AT THE NIGHT COURT 43 has accommodations for twenty-five girls and keeps them until a close study of their case shows what kind of care or work they need. Medical help for the sick is secured, work for the workless, clothing for the unclothed. The girls who remain any length of time are taught to cook and sew, and every effort is made to keep them happy. The work of Waverley House has extended far be- yond its original purpose of a temporary home for girls from the courts, and has now many protective features. A big work is being done in prosecuting traffickers in girls, in teaching girls to avoid danger, and in helping parents to safeguard unruly daughters; also in returning runaway girls to their homes. But the Municipal Detention Home is still urgently needed, and no agency is more earnestly working for it than Waverley House, which cannot possibly enlarge its scope to meet the detention needs of the whole great city of Manhattan. Another need of the probation work is a fund for the immediate relief of cases where the straits are so sore that to wait upon the action of any of the various charities may mean all the difference between a new start and abandonment to despair. Until such a fund is raised, any one who mistrusts his or her own ability to give money without encouraging the unworthy, cannot do better than to let one of these devoted probation women know that in one of the emergencies which are always confronting her, she 44 THE WORK-A-DAY GIRL can spend a dollar for food or three dollars for a girl's arrears of rent, or five dollars for a warm coat, and be reimbursed next day. Also, any woman who has clothes to give away would find on any pro- bation officer's list persons in need of just what she has to give; and a bit of fairly suitable finery thus bestowed may save a girl from selling her soul for a gewgaw. Another thing that would help would be the cooperation of a greater number of societies and individuals interested in giving work and friendly en- couragement to girls taken on probation. The Jewish women are of all classes the best to their own. Their organizations are splendidly active in getting places for Jewish girls on probation, in visiting them in their homes, and attending to the needs of the family. More recently, another organization of women in New York has essayed to do the same for English and Canadian girls who come under the law. There ought to be much more assistance of the same sort, so as greatly to increase the number of quarters to which a probation officer can look for work and other assist- ance for girls she receives on probation. And the greatest need of all is a much-extended Big Sister League, the members of which shall take girls of the probation court under their personal, sisterly care. The work of the Big Brother League throughout the country has been magnificent and has done quite as much for the sturdy business and professional men who have assumed the brotherly care of delinquent AT THE NIGHT COURT 45 boys as for the boys themselves. The work of fine organizations is necessary and valuable, but the really vital results are going to come in the close personal contact, the month-in and month-out association of sweet, sheltered women with girls who have felt the " world's rough hand." When those women come to realize, through this immediate contact, the girls' needs, those needs will be supplied. There will be more trade schools for girls, where they can be taught proficiency in work that will bring them a living wage. There will be Industrial Homes for young girls. There will be an enormous increase in the harmless pleasures open to young girls of poor parents and to those who are away from home, strangers in a big city. There will be girls' clubs for dancing and dramatics. There will be abundant places for the girls to entertain their young men friends. And there will be some action taken toward the instruction of girls in the wiles of the seducer. Thousands of girls who never meant harm are yearly led astray through their ignorance of the snares the destroyer uses. The Big Sisters must see to this. It is a great work. Not the punishment but the prevention of crime is the endeavour of the modern reformers. And few steps taken toward that ideal of prevention are more worthy of support from the merciful, the law-loving, than the work of the proba- tion women. II THE EFFORT TO SAVE GIRLS KATIE was sixteen. The time had come for her to go to work. For sixteen years Katie's father had supported her. He was a pretty good sort of father, but his interest in his children was not sentimental merely. Beginning as soon as he could earn enough for two, he had married. Through all the years of his later youth and early prime he had toiled hard and given his children a decent living. He had been investing, as it were, in a family as some men invest in twenty-year paid-up life insurance and he was now approaching the time when he could hope to realize on his investment. Katie was the first " bond " to become due. There was nothing at home that Katie could do to reduce outlay or produce income by her labour, so Katie must go out into the market where labour is bought. And Katie was eager to go. For Katie knew a thing or two ! She knew how much fun she'd have, staying around home and helping her ma. She knew how much chance she'd have of meeting a fel- low. She knew how much finery she could buy, how much spending money she could have. Some of the girls in Katie's class at school were 46 THE EFFORT TO SAVE GIRLS 47 going to a business college to learn stenography and typewriting. But Katie couldn't afford either time or money for more schooling. She must get into the market-place with what she had. But here again Katie was quite content. She had thought it all over, and decided that a big store offered the best chance of fun. If you're a stenographer, you see only the few persons who frequent one office. If you're a factory girl, you work all day and every day among the same people. But if you're a clerk in a depart- ment store, you get to see all the styles ; you're Johnny- on-the-spot when the openings come off; there are heaps of things to do at noon hour; and among so many thousands of customers passing through the aisles, there's no telling what moment a swell fellow will notice you and, having noticed, fall a victim to your charms. Katie got the coveted job. The other girls behind the counter to which she was assigned were very " swell " and they made Katie feel " as green as grass." But she tried to win their favour by the sincere flattery of imitation. They were delighted to show off before Katie, so they allowed her to over- hear their talk of dances and theatres, of suppers in restaurants where orchestras play; to see their silver mesh purses and their willow plumes. These girls " must earn awful much." Katie earned four-fifty a week. She had to give her pay envelope to her father. Out of it he returned her a dollar. This was 48 THE WORK-A-DAY GIRL all she had for her every expense except her board. Things were stirring in Katie that she did not un- derstand. Her little head was whirling with romance. Her young body was waking to Life. It was Spring- time for Katie. Nature, that designed her to mate and to perpetuate her kind, was far from caring how she did it. She filled Katie's mind with dreams about a Prince; she made Katie scan every youth she met, questioning if this be not he; and she tampered for her own purposes with Katie's vision, so that Katie saw things not at all as they were, but as she was wistful to believe them. One day a young man did come along who noticed Katie. He might not meet your ideas of a Prince, nor mine; but he met Katie's. He "made a date" with her to see her after the store closed; he was on the curbstone waiting for her when she came out the employes' door. It was the first time that any one had waited for Katie, and she was very proud. She scanned the scores of men and youths who were waiting for girls and found hers. He " walked a ways " with her and asked her if he couldn't take her out sometime. Of course he could! Katie couldn't ask him to her home. There was no place there to entertain a fellow. The family had four rooms, and one of them was nominally a parlour, but it had divers other uses also and it was never avail- able for the exclusive use of one member of the fam- ily. And anyway, Katie had misgivings as to the way THE EFFORT TO SAVE GIRLS 49 her pa might receive a fellow. So she said nothing at home about the Prince. When she went out, after supper, evenings, no one questioned her particularly as to her destination. Everybody went out, if the evening were at all pleas- ant even Katie's ma. There was always something in the streets to divert a person ; and there was never anything in the house. The first evening Katie spent with her new " friend/' he was a model of propriety. If Katie had ever heard any tales of " fresh guys " with whom it is not wise for girls to go, she had every reason to assure herself that she knew better than to " pick up with anythin' like that." This fellow was a swell, all right. His father was rich; his mother was a society woman. They wanted him to marry " one o' these here society girls. Nothin' to 'em! I never liked 'em. But the minute I seen you, it was all off with them fer keeps. It was love from the word ' Go/ with you, Kid ! " Katie's heart nearly burst with gratification. How could he pick her out from all the world to love ? She was so shabby and " green " ! It was like the story- books. It was real romance. And there were per- sons grown persons, old and sour and unbelieving who said such things never happen in real life. Katie knew better. The second or third evening Katie and her Prince spent together he suggested going to a hotel. Katie 50 THE WORK-A-DAY GIRL did not understand. He explained. She was fright- ened, shocked, inexpressibly hurt. She had heard of such doings, but she associated them solely with " fresh guys " and not with heroes of romance. And in high dudgeon because she " misunderstood " him, he left her to go home alone. Katie cried all night, and for several nights; and pined and watched all day, hoping he would come back to her. In the story-books, the hero always came back to the girl who had been good and true, and besought her to forgive him. But this hero didn't come. Katie's days became flat, stale, and un- profitable again. Then another Prince appeared. But he, too, was like the first. Katie's melancholy had now become so deep that she could not conceal it. Myrtle asked her: "What's ailin' yeh, Kiddo?" And Katie, in a burst of woe, confided her bitterness to Myrtle. Myrtle was sympathetic, but amused. " Why, yeh poor kid ! " she cried. " Ain't yeh got a bit o' sense ? Don't yeh know there ain't no feller goin' t' spend coin on yeh f er nothin' ? Yeh gotta be a good Indian, Kid we all gotta ! " So ! That was it ? Assured that " everybody " did it, Katie concluded it was useless for her to hope for anything different. The next time a fellow took her out and gave her a swell time, then asked her to go to a hotel, she went. Katie is typical not of department store girls as a class, but of a class of girls, some of whom work THE EFFORT TO SAVE GIRLS 51 in department stores and some of whom are trained nurses; some of whom sing in choruses and some of whom sing in church choirs; some of whom are stenographers and some of whom are " stars." Wherever a girl's desire for ease, luxury, and gay times exceeds her ability to provide these for herself, and her preference for virtue is exceeded by her de- sire for these other things, we find the Katies and the distinctions are without a difference, whether they call themselves Katie or Kathryn or Kathleen. Social science calls this thing " occasional prostitu- tion," to distinguish it from the two other main classes of prostitution clandestine and professional. The clandestine class comprises the " kept " women and girls kept temporarily by one man. The profes- sional class is composed of women who ply a public trade in vice. It is possible to estimate the numbers in this latter class; in the two former classes no estimate is pos- sible, but all students of the social question agree that occasional prostitution is practised by a number of girls infinitely greater than any one would believe if the figures could be made known. Under pressure of many different kinds, girls yield ; infatuation for a man who makes them believe all girls do it and it is " the only way"; low wages and meagre comforts ; love of little luxuries and gay times these are the main causes. Some girls who are in it for gain pick up any chance that comes their way 52 THE WORK-A-DAY GIRL to earn extra money. Others set apart stated portions of their time for it. Many girls give their noon hour to this. The cheap hotels and other places of public assignation (among which are reckoned to be eighty per cent, of saloons) house at every noon hun- dreds of girls many of them no more than mere children who sell their dearest treasure for the price of a rhinestone pin or a string of blue beads. Many girls who work in offices and stores spend one or two or three nights a week in some " resort," and earn the difference between shabby insufficiency and the ability to compete with, or even to dazzle, the girls who work beside them. A department manager in one of Chicago's largest and finest dry goods stores recently told Dean Walter T. Sumner, head of Chi- cago's Vice Commission, that of the ten girls under him, seven to his definite knowledge spent either two or three nights each week in houses in the Red Light district. Probably they all began, like Katie, by trying to " be a good Indian ! " It is the girls of this class who are engaging the most serious attention of all who have the nation's welfare at heart. The United States Government, through the Department of Commerce and Labour, has been investigating conditions among these girls for years. Many municipalities are waking to the girls' needs. And much of the religious and private THE EFFORT TO SAVE GIRLS 53 benevolence which used to be directed toward the pro- fessional prostitute class is now exercised to far bet- ter purpose in trying to keep girls from getting into that class. When they are once in, it is exceedingly hard to get them to come out; or, if they come out, to get them to stay. The situation of greatest moment to students of the social question to-day is just this: Economic evolution has brought about a state of affairs wherein the world's labour mart has actually come to depend on the work of women outside the home. It is useless to rail against this development to ask the march of progress to turn back; the condition is here, and it is here to stay and to increase. The girls come into the market young and, for the most part, unskilled. Not many of them expect to stay. It is an adventure. Partly it is, as with Katie, necessary; and largely it is, as also with Katie, quite voluntary. A girl goes to work, now, as eagerly as a boy does but with different purpose. She has sel- dom any idea of developing high proficiency I am not speaking now of the trained, professional girl, but of the great mass of girl labour but is in the mart for two reasons: pleasure and matrimony. She wants a good time; she wants to approve the world, to find life thrilling and satisfying; she wants to be where there are others like her, loving laughter, wist- ful for romance, ardent for adventure, eager to flaunt attractions. She is a young thing, palpitant with all 54 THE WORK-A-DAY GIRL that makes youth wonderful. There is almost noth- ing that she will not dare if her sensitive pulses are stirred. Nature made her that way, for her own purposes. Maternity calls for a sublime daring. Nature takes care of that daring, jealously. Now, the thing that this young creature can do to earn money is little likely to interest her. There isn't a great deal of place in a girl's interests, when Spring- time reigns in the heart, for packing soda biscuit or tucking shirtwaists or selling curtain rings or pound- ing out endless repetitions of " Yours of the tenth inst rec'd and contents duly noted." It isn't that she doesn't like working; only, she is uninterested in the work. Some very dull routines like stitching and sorting and packing and riling provide less entertainment than may be had in other occupations. But no matter what the surroundings, it soon becomes apparent that the Romance of which Katie is in such eager quest lies somewhere beyond; at a dance, maybe; or at a summer park. Occasionally Katie meets him in her work; but oftener she must seek him outside. Where? Well, anywhere that youth finds oppor- tunity for sport, for laughter, for the display of those guiles and graces Nature has given it to make it at- tractive. The female creature may be ever so able to take care of herself, but she loves a male creature with a longer reach and a stronger grasp than her own some one to provide for her. She is thrilled by the experience of being with some one who will show THE EFFORT TO SAVE GIRLS 55 her repeated evidence of his ability and his desire to provide for her. If she is accustomed to a modest scale, she gets the thrill in successive ice-cream cones and nickel shows and in drinks after every dance gets it just as deliciously as others do whose " tokens " come from the florist's or the jeweller's. And the male creature, driven by an instinct just as strong, loves to dazzle, to " show off " ; loves to be led a chase ; loves to overtake at last her whom he has singled out for his mate. Yet there are excellent people who wonder, sadly, why youths will go to White Cities and nickel shows and dances, and why they will not sit contentedly in " classes " for the improvement of their minds or the inculcation of domestic arts! The life these girls will enter upon when they marry is unromantic enough full of toil and poverty and pain and severe renunciation. It is well for the future that Nature's power to dazzle is so strong; for, otherwise, what girl would have the courage to take that burden up? Some one has said of youth and play that, as the sunlight of one age goes into the earth to come out in energy for a later age meaning, of course, our coal deposits so the laughter of youth becomes in due process transmuted into power. All those of us who build for the future and no one has truly lived who has not in some wise so builded should be exceedingly tender of the gaiety of young girls, especially the gaiety of the little daughters of 56 THE WORK-A-DAY GIRL the poor. The children of to-morrow ought not to have mothers who never knew Romance. In other days, play was better managed than it is to-day. In the folk-dances on the village green; the splendid pageants which celebrated ducal weddings and victories in war; the processions of the Saints' Days; the inter-township choral contests; the festivi- ties of the fair and the competitive exhibitions of the great guilds, many people took part. This is the wholesomest kind of play. But it was supplemented by much arena entertainment gladiatorial contests succeeded by tournaments; bullfights in countries where Spanish feeling swayed; athletic games in countries where the Greek spirit survived. We offer our youths far too few occasions of com- ing together in play. One class of our young people has splendid opportunities to enjoy the pleasures of concourse, in the football games of every fall. But these scarcely touch the girls who toil. The Ameri- can boy has baseball to engross him from the time he is three years old. It is magnificent for him when he plays it, and it is great for him when he sees a spirited game played. In a vacant lot my window overlooks, some boys are playing as I write. They are young fellows of twenty or thereabouts, and they come every Sunday morning to that lot to play. The wine-sap air their lungs are drinking in, this golden October morning, is invigorating enough to offset all the dust-laden air they may have breathed through- THE EFFORT TO SAVE GIRLS 57 out the week in shop or office or factory. The exer- cise they are getting is glorious. Once in a while an unusually lusty yell breaks forth as the fringe of on- lookers screams encouragement to some player who is making a good run. What a thing that yell is! When that same youth sits on the bleachers at the Ball Park and yells himself hoarse over some pretty play of a favourite, he is getting the fun of the con- course, and it is doing him a world of good. But here! Here he is himself, for a brief, breathless mo- ment, the hero who wins applause. And I exult with him in the yells that acclaim his prowess. But where is his sister, this wonderful morning his sister who has toiled in shop or factory just as many hours of the week as he has? Where was his " girl " yesterday afternoon when he spent his half- holiday on the " bleachers " ? It is possible she was with him; it is more probable she was not. On one point, nearly all persons who have had wide experience with girls agree ; and that is, that few girls incline naturally to vice, and most girls incline nat- urally to folly. For their tendency to folly we must not blame them. We must remember why they yearn to deck themselves, to attract attention, to laugh and dance and be gay. And because we see through Na- ture's design in dazzling them, in making them mad quite mad with the madness of springtime and the mating season, we must not try to check their folly, 58 THE WORK-A-DAY GIRL only to direct it. They must have their fling. But they ought to have it wholesomely. We owe it to them and to the future that they should have ample opportunity to laugh and to attract and to be courted, in conditions that do not menace them. They don't want to go wrong. When they go, it is because we who ought to be so infinitely concerned about them have neglected some simple safeguard. And safeguard the innocent we must. For after innocence (by which I emphatically do not mean ignorance) is gone, there is woefully little we can do to repair the loss. The safeguarding is being done in three ways : by law, by protection, and by warning. Our national laws are, within the last few years, fairly well designed to take care of immigrant girls. > But these laws apply chiefly to aliens. A much- needed law for the protection of our own girls is re- cently operative in the Mann Law, which provides for the punishment of persons who transport women or girls from one State to another for immoral purposes. Practically every State in the Union has a strict law against the detention of females in immoral resorts against their will. But the detention continues. A law is worth just exactly what the overpowering major- ity of citizens wish it to be worth. We have laws, too, that regulate employment agencies, compelling them to operate under license and making it a misdemeanour for them to send girls unwittingly into vicious places. THE EFFORT TO SAVE GIRLS 59 Girls should know these laws, and they should know that there is redress for them beyond what their own feeble powers can accomplish. Every city, every State, has its associations for the prosecution of any who seek to wrong girls. A girl has only to tell her grievance, and competent pleaders will put it before the law. The nature of these associations differs in different States and cities. Some States have branches of the National which is itself a branch of the International Vigilance Association which exists solely for the protection of girls; and nearly every city of considerable size has a Women's Legal Aid Society and a Young Women's Christian Association. One branch of the Vigilance Association's work is in acquainting girls and their parents with the dangers that beset girls; and with the places where they may apply for direction or protection. In our country the organizations known as Travel- lers' Aids are under Government direction only at ports of entry and in behalf of immigrant girls. The safeguarding of our own girls journeying from coun- try to city in search of employment, is done only by private philanthropy. In some cities it is a depart- ment of the Young Women's Christian Association; in others, it is a distinct organization. But no girl need go friendless into a strange city. There are scores of persons in every place where girls go for work, whose business it is to befriend them. If a girl leaves home to answer an advertisement, she may 60 THE WORK-A-DAY GIRL send the advertisement in advance of her to the Secre- tary of the Vigilance Association or to the Employ- ment Director of the Young Women's Christian As- sociation, and have the advertiser investigated and reported upon. The same sources will yield her addresses of reliable places to board and to seek em- ployment. If a girl has not written before leaving home, and made arrangements about where she will go, she should lose no time, on arriving at the railway station in the strange city, before asking for the ma- tron of the women's waiting room and telling this matron that she wants the Travellers' Aid. If a woman representing this organization does not happen to be at the station, she will come at once on the matron's telephoned request. She will advise the girl where it is safe for her to go to look for lodgings and for employment, and will warn her against all the pitfalls of the city. The great lack is not of organizations to help girls, but of knowledge that such organizations exist. The ignorance not only of girls themselves but of their parents is the thing that is hardest to overcome. The story is current that some employers, so far from taking any care like this, openly encourage im- morality among their girls. Government investigators have found, for one thing, that nearly every city has its whispered legend of a department store manager who tells each girl when he hires her that it is expected she will have " a friend." In other words, that the THE EFFORT TO SAVE GIRLS 61 store does not suppose any girl will try to live on the wages it pays; that it takes either clandestine or occa- sional prostitution for granted. Stories of these managers are told in circumstantial detail; but no actual case has ever been found against any of them. This may be because they are innocent of the charge, or it may be because evidence in such cases is always hard to secure. Another widely current tale the Gov- ernment has tried hard to investigate relates to em- ployers who discharge all girls not found complaisant to the demands of manager, floor-walker, stock-buyer, or the like. There is one thing sure about this: no employer in his senses discharges a thoroughly com- petent girl for defending her honour. If a girl is incompetent as such a terrible majority of them are! she may be forced to hold her place by sacrificing her virtue; an incompetent girl who is acquiescent may be preferred over an incompetent girl who is not. But in a day when the demand for skill so far exceeds the supply, it may safely be taken as axiomatic that efficiency is one of the best protectors a girl can have. Efficiency doesn't preclude immorality but it helps to preclude it. For it usually means an interest in work ; and if a girl has that and the wage that efficiency brings, and wants to be good, she can get along with- out any such severe temptations as beset the girl whose hold on her job is tenuous and whose wage is inade- quate to more than the barest subsistence. The two great safeguards for a girl are knowledge 62 THE WORK-A-DAY GIRL of the pitfalls and skill to earn herself, independent of favour, a decent living these, and the opportunity to engage in recreation that is lively, romantic, and wholesome. There are persons who deplore the necessity of set- ting girls on guard; who declare with loud lamenta- tion that the sweetness of life is gone when fear enters in. " Fools, and slow of heart! " How can there be any who so misremember their own youth? I once took to the park to see the zoo a very small cousin of mine. In a moment when my slow wits were returning from some wool-gathering, she was under the railing and close to the bars of the bear cage, endeavouring to poke a sleeping grizzly with her wee foot. " Baby ! " I cried. " You mustn't do that ! The bear will bite you." "WhufTor?" she asked. When I explained, was her joy in life and in bears gone, do you think? Why, long before she could either walk or talk, she had loved the thrill of danger loved to be " boo-ed " at. Every normal creature is still rich in feelings handed down to him by his forbears, who lived the primitive life with all its instincts of self-preservation. We spiritually blind- fold any one when we ask that one to walk through life unseeing, uncomprehending, the dangers that beset the way. Every soul is entitled to the thrill of picking a safe path through dangers. Our ardour for adventure must have expression somehow. It is in us all to yearn to do battle against our natural ene- THE EFFORT TO SAVE GIRLS 63 mies. Any wise parent teaches the young first of all how to feed ; then how to go in search of sustenance ; then how to avoid enemies or, having met them, how to give most effective battle. A field mouse does this much. Shall a human parent do less? So much for safeguarding. When more of it is done, we shall have less salvage work to do. Just now, the rescue of wreckage is a most necessary activity. Little by little, the efforts to reclaim girls have been tending to centre in two kinds of helpfulness. One branch reaches the young girls, under age, who trans- gress the laws against juvenile delinquency. The other branch reaches the girls who have been betrayed and are about to become mothers. What most surprises each investigator newly en- tered upon the study of girls' reclaim is that, with the exception of houses of correction to which girls are committed from the courts, nearly all the effort ex- pended on unfortunate girls is in what is called ma- ternity work. This is excellent work. It gets hold of great numbers of girls of the clandestine and occa- sional classes, and offers them refuge at a time when they are cast off not only by their associates in evil- doing but, all too often, by their own kindred. These girls are cared for during a period usually of several months; are taught to do some useful work, to forget the past, and to look hopefully toward the future. And when they are ready to leave the Home, there is always a place waiting for them to go to. 64 THE WORK-A-DAY GIRL Almost without exception these workers believe in keeping mother and child together if it can possibly be done. Experience has taught them, they say, that a greater per cent, of girls who keep their fatherless children than of girls who let them go, are restored to the self-respecting life, become good women, and marry good men. On the other hand, there are work- ers no less earnest who deny this; who believe the struggle awaiting the girl-mother will be hard enough for her alone, and that it is asking too much of frail human nature to ask her to keep with her the father- less child. There are points to be considered in each argument. For the girl who wants to keep her child with her, there is but one class of work open and that is house- work, which is usually the last work on earth that a pleasure-loving girl who has fallen from virtue wants to do. Yet every year hundreds of girls, in real hero- ism and beautiful mother love, go out of maternity homes into strange families where their shame is known, and take up the burden of life as domestic servants. And the demand for them always exceeds the supply partly because they work cheaply; partly because most of them go on farms where female labour is extremely difficult to get; and partly because there are in the world many truly good people who are happy to do what they can toward giving somebody's daughter another chance. The greater number of these brave girls marry, and THE EFFORT TO SAVE GIRLS 65 those who keep affectionately interested track of them say that on the whole they marry quite as well as the average girl who has not fallen. The Florence Crit- tenton work is nearly all maternity work; so is the girls' salvage work of the Salvation Army and the Volunteers of America, and of the Baptist and Meth- odist Deaconesses ; and nearly every city has its other maternity homes unaffiliated. with any order, but nearly always under religious influence. All of these workers would welcome the girl of the streets, of the houses of shame; but she seldom comes, and when she does come she seldom stays. The rea- sons for this are many. One of them is that there is scant welcome anywhere in the industrial world for the one-time prostitute. Some persons are afraid of her diseased body, and some are afraid of her polluted mind; some are pharisaical; and some are fearful lest she betray confidence reposed in her and seek to undo some innocent one with whom she is thrust into association. Usually she is unskilled in any kind of labour; and if she has been any length of time in the life of public shame, she is almost sure to be mentally unbalanced by drink and drugs and dis- ease, and by the constant occupation of her mind with vile things. For lewdness gets to be a disorder of the mind and is hard indeed to eradicate. Also, the inability to earn at any form of honest industry more than a starvation wage soon discourages the girl who has been used to " big money." She may or may not 66 THE WORK-A-DAY GIRL have learned to like the life of public prostitution some do, and some do not but she has never learned to love the life of self-respecting toil, or she would not be where she is. And when she comes out of the dis- ordered life and attempts to go back into the decently ordered, she finds that ordered life even less to her liking than it was when its humdrum monotony so palled on her that she fell an easy prey to sin. And yet, the public prostitute is not a wholly hope- less creature. She does reform, sometimes; and sometimes she does stay reformed. But she requires an almost superhuman patience in her would-be re- formers, and an almost superhuman knowledge of human nature. She is nearly always emotional; she will weep hysterically at the mention of home and mother, and may respond with gratifying eagerness to the urging to repent. The amateur reformer grows excited as she tells him how hard the world is on fallen women, and how she would love to do better if she could only get a chance. Perhaps he gets her a situation among people who have no knowledge of her past. And the chances are that she either puts him to shame by declaring herself for what she is (it is a part of the psychology of depravity that it loves to boast) or brings a hornets' nest of just in- dignation about his ears when it is discovered that she is so diseased as to be less safe, physically, than a leper. After one or two failures, the amateur gets discouraged. After scores of failures, even the wise THE EFFORT TO SAVE GIRLS 67 reformers grow disheartened. The girls lie pro- digiously drugs make them lie, and the criminal per- version of their minds makes them lie and their easy emotionalism hardly lasts beyond the appeal. Their minds have got beyond the power of any concentrated thought but one. Industrially they are worthless; they seem not only to lose power to think, but also to lose manual dexterity. Even the simplest tasks to which they can be put, are often beyond their power to accomplish. As one discouraged reformer said: " If you put one of those girls in a mahogany-lined library with nothing to do but answer the telephone and paid her twenty dollars a week, she wouldn't stay." But only a very unwise reformer would put a girl fresh from a life of public prostitution into a mahogany-lined library with nothing to do but answer the telephone. There is only one possible cure for the girl who might be reclaimed, and that is work as hard work as she can gradually and with infinite patience be made capable of, and as interesting, fairly-remunerative work as can be found for her to do. A great deal has been said against those industrial homes to which girls are committed for correction. It is the belief of some persons who might reasonably be expected to know, that more girls graduate out of these institutions into total depravity than graduate out of them into decent self-restraint. If this is so which is open to doubt and perhaps to proof in denial it is sometimes the 68 THE WORK-A-DAY GIRL result of ill-management, but quite as often the result of poor diagnosis. The fumbling diagnosis of med- ical doctors puts many patients in their graves. But also diagnosis being a science yet in the infancy of its development, and the doctors doing the best they can they often strike it right and effect a cure. So- cial diagnosis is an even more undeveloped science; and in this dawn of our consciousness that there can- not always be one just law for many men, we are in- evitably " fumbling." It would be strange if we did not often commit to an institution some girls for whom an institutional life, or that institutional life, is almost predestined to bad results. But if we fail to cure some, it is no less certain that we do great good to others. And the proportion of failures is not greater than that among parents, and probably not in excess of what it would be if the erring girls were parcelled among amateur philanthropists. In hospital and clinic work, nowadays, the wise physician has learned that he fumbles unpardonably when he tries to treat a patient of whose living condi- tions he knows nothing. We have learned the same regarding the sin-sick; and some day when the spirit of social service, of social responsibility, is awakened in us all, we shall have so many persons of the edu- cated and earnest classes interested, each in some little group of the erring and the neglected, as shall make it possible for them to get their other chance in the world. But chiefly, as we have learned the value of hygiene THE EFFORT TO SAVE GIRLS 69 and of sanitation and of a pure food and drugs law, in the world of material health, in the domain of spiritual well-being we are also awakening to the realization that an ounce of prevention is worth a great deal more than a pound of cure. The hand of help, of rescue, of remedy, must never be stayed. But the hand of good guidance must be offered far oftener than it has been ; and it must be so offered that the ardent, adventurous young creatures who need it so, will accept it confident of the love and under- standing that hold it out. Now for a few words of suggestion as to what you and I may do. Charity which is love begins at home. Do you keep a domestic servant ? Do you employ a clerk or an office girl? Do you hire sea- sonal help to aid you in harvesting hops or picking prunes? Have you girls in your employ, few or many, in any sort of capacity? Do you know where they go to look for fun, and what they find? Does it ever occur to you that their innocent pleasure is any part of your obligation? Does it ever occur to you that, all other considerations aside, their every oppor- tunity for wholesome gaiety and recreation makes them of more worth, not to the community alone, but to you? Many employers realize this. Many more do not. But each year sees an increase in the num- ber of the wise. Know something of the moving-picture shows your maid-of-all-work loves to frequent. It will give you 70 THE WORK-A-DAY GIRL another topic of common interest with her, and also an opportunity to satisfy yourself if the films are all they might be, if the conditions of the theatre are safe if a fire or panic should occur, and if the ventila- tion is sufficient. Go, once in a while, to the hall where your little office-girl dances. Make up your mind if it is a good place for her to go, or if there are not others where she could have as much fun with less menace. When you are coming home on Sunday nights, next summer, from your little place up the Sound or down the bay or across the lake, investigate conditions on the steamboat. And if you jfind as you doubtless will that the staterooms are largely used by young excursionists for assignation purposes, present your protest to the navigation company, to the Juvenile Protective League, or to anybody and everybody who will give it heed. Know what the laws made for girls' protection are, and whenever you see one infringed " holler " ! The laws, as we have said before, are worth exactly what the majority of citizens manifestly desire them to be worth. Every one of us can do as much as any other one to pile up the majority on the right side. Find out what your community is trying to do, and " get in on it." Chicago, for instance, has her mu- nicipal pleasure halls beautiful big rooms with floors like glass, many of them decorated with palms and ferns from the park conservatories, all of them with the most up-to-date cloak-room arrangements. There THE EFFORT TO SAVE GIRLS 71 are about fifteen of these, scattered over the city in the small parks and playgrounds. They are free. Any society or individual may have the room on a desired date by speaking for it long enough in ad- vance. There is no charity about it. - Every one un- derstands that the hall is a Park Board property, and feels entitled to use it if he cares to. And thousands of young people every week have their good times here, who used to have no other meeting-places than in the halls run by saloons. A post-card sent to the Superintendent of Small Parks, South Park Board, Chicago, will bring you a detailed history of how this movement has been financed and what it has accomplished. Perhaps you can start a similar movement in your community. Investigation proves that the girls who frequent Settlements seldom patronize the dangerous resorts. Perhaps you can do something to help " get up " things at a Settlement, and keep more girls entertained there. There is no one who cannot do something to help keep one little girl happy and safe. The cheap labour of these little sisters has brought within the reach of multitudes of us such luxuries and gratifica- tions as only the very rich in another age could afford to enjoy. Shall we not make them some affectionate return? If the laughter of youth to-day becomes the energy of the world to-morrow, do we not owe to posterity some investment in glee and the possibilities of Romance? Ill WHERE THE TROUBLE BEGINS SIDE by side at the rail they stood, the American parents and the mother who was foreign-born. It was in the room of the Assistant Chief Pro- bation Officer of the Chicago Juvenile Court, whose business it is to hear complaints and issue warrants for bringing children into court. The American family group was composed of father, mother, and young man son, the latter perhaps twenty years old. They were people of more than comfortable circumstances well educated, well man- nered, well dressed. The father, who gave his occu- pation as that of travelling salesman, was so overcome that he could not conclude his testimony, but had to retire. In his stead his son tried to do what had to be done. The mother grasped the railing for support, and bit her twitching lips in an effort to keep an out- ward calm. She was full of solicitude for " Papa " as she called him and was evidently trying des- perately to keep up for his sake. They were there to entreat the arrest of the only daughter of the household, on the charge that she was " incorrigible." She was not quite sixteen, and they hoped that she might be committed to some insti- 72 ^ bo O WHERE THE TROUBLE BEGINS 73 tution where she could be reclaimed from those last depths of degradation to which she was now slipping. They acknowledged their powerlessness to restrain her. Unless the law would intervene, they could see no hope. Beside them, waiting their turn at the listening ear, stood the foreign-born. The mother was a beak- faced, thin woman, with a curiously crooked, thin- lipped mouth, and small, bead-like eyes. Her head was wrapped in a dirty veil that had once been white. Her hands, gripping the rail beside those of the other mother, were toil-roughened and looked as if they had not been washed in a week. (The hands beside them were neatly kid-gloved.) This woman's sag^ ging, dragging clothes exhibited not one last, linger- ing trace of that feminine pride of appearance which dies so late and so hard; they covered her nakedness and therewith they served their sole purpose. She had brought her daughter to the court. She needed no officer with warrant to enforce her will one look at that thin, crooked mouth made this fact evident. The daughter was a rather handsome girl or she would have been but for her quite terrible ex- pression, compounded of bold defiance and black sul- lenness; in her masses of dark puffs (which suffi- ciently marked her status; she was still wearing an *j effect like three pounds of frankfurters at the back of her head, instead of the newer effect of a row of buns all around it) were two large combs glittering 74 THE WORK-A-DAY GIRL with rhinestones. She had no head-covering except the frankfurters (which in truth were plenty!), but she wore at least three " gilt " rings and her red dress had an indefinable air of having been chosen less to gratify her sense of beauty than to attract a certain kind of attention. She looked as irreclaimable as it is possible for a girl not yet sixteen to look; and yet she was still under a certain terror of that mother with the thin, crooked mouth. There they stood, neat suit of gray brushing non- descript garments of dirt-bespattered black; grimed hand with inky finger-nails, not a foot from shapely hand in well-fitting kid; face of flint, and face of putty invoking the law against their young daughters. That was a week ago. In the meantime the cases (with many scores of others) have been investigated. Here are the results of investigation : Myrtle Taylor is a high school girl. Her father's salary is forty dollars a week, and his expenses are paid when he is on the road. His wife knows exactly how much he gets, but she has no fixed and depend- able part of it. They have a good many unpleasant hours every time he is at home nearly always about money matters. He has some ideas of saving, she has none; when he talks about it, he indicates that it should be done in the household expenditures; w.hen she makes reply, she retorts that it could better be done out of his liberal allowance for himself. They live in a $35.00 flat. Some of the time they keep a WHERE THE TROUBLE BEGINS 75 servant. They sent their boy to high school until he was eighteen, and then to business college for a year. He has had three " jobs," but he kept none of them, because they " weren't much." Just now he is " looking for something " not too tirelessly. The mother belongs to that fast-growing class of American women who are committed to the belief that their young can do no harm and that the world should ask no better boon than the happiness of conforming to the wishes of their youngsters at least as slavishly as their mothers have done. Mrs. Taylor is mildly but inflexibly of the opinion that her children are the handsomest and cleverest and engagingest ever born; that any pleasure they are unable to attain without effort on their part, is withheld from them by an un- kind fate; and that any one who does not instantly fall captive to her children's charms, without waiting to ask that cause be shown therefor, is warped by envy or embittered by inferiority. Secure in her conviction that Myrtle's charms out- class those of every other girl in school, Mrs. Taylor has never been able to see why Myrtle should not have clothes at least as good as any other girl has; why she should not give parties of a superiority commen- surate with her own. In the high school Myrtle goes to, the girls " put on a lot of style." Not to own a silver purse is to be cheap indeed. Not to wear silk stockings is to show that one has none of the instincts of a lady. Not to be taken to parties in a carriage 76 THE WOKK-A-DAY GIRL is to prove that one is not Considered worthy of two dollars of a school boy's pocket money whereas, to be taken in a carriage for two, instead of one shared with another boy and girl, is to flaunt one's self as a belle indeed; one who can make a boy spend four dollars if he wants the honour of escorting her. Myr- tle did not have long to suffer the (degradation ofjteing silver-bagless. And her silk stockings (although they were only " boot-silk," meaning that all was cotton except the part that "showed") were of such an extra-ladylikeness that from a little distance Myrtle looked as if her feet were thrust bare into her pumps. As for the carriage! Mrs. Taylor glowed with tri- umph when she heard that Myrtle was going to a party with the only boy in the class who disdained to share his hired carriage, and the cost of it, with another fellow. Mrs. Taylor didn't know much else about that boy, but she felt signally honoured in her motherhood when he asked her girl to a party; and she got Myrtle a new dress for the occasion. She showed the dress, sorrowfully, to the woman investi- gator from the court, as a proof of her thorough- goingness as a mother. It was a " tunic " effect with a white satin foundation and an overdress of gold-beaded white net, edged with gold bead fringe. With it Myrtle had to have white satin slippers and white silk stockings and long white kid gloves, and other finery of the same order. Mrs. Taylor's tearful manner was as if she would say : " Can you under- WHERE THE TROUBLE BEGINS 77 stand why Myrtle would do wilful, wayward things, when I have tried to give her everything she wanted ? " What she called Myrtle's " incorrigibility " had " developed suddenly," according to the weak-minded mother, who did not know that she herself had sown the seeds and coaxed along the harvest. Myrtle was "very popular," she said, with pride; she went to a great many parties, and to shows and amusement parks. " She always has lots of beaux." Her mother was gratified by this, and encouraged it all she could. But Myrtle began staying out very late later than her mother thought was " ladylike." Myrtle resented any criticism of these late-returnings. When the criticism persisted, she began stopping away from home with girl friends, she said. Her mother had some vague mislike of this, but did not see how she could do anything about it. " I didn't want to make her mad I was afraid she'd run away or do something dreadful." Myrtle showed some signs her mother rather deplored; she was rather coarse and common in her speech; she was loud and rude in her frequent laughter; and her mother often caught her in lies ; but she thought " girls always get that way for a while, when they're growing up." No; she didn't always know where Myrtle was Myrtle resented having to give account of herself. No; she didn't know much about Myrtle's friends; "they're lively young folks and don't spend much time around the house there's nothing to do here." No; she had 78 THE WORK-A-DAY GIRL never asked Myrtle to do any housework, or to learn to sew; " she may have to do these things by and by, and she can only be young once." And when it was brought home to her, so she could not deny it, that Myrtle was leading a fast life with boys, Mrs. Taylor blamed the boys but she never blamed Myrtle, nor herself. It was only when Myrtle eluded home vigi- lance and, being caught, defied home authority, that Mrs. Taylor told her husband, on the occasion of his next being at home. He was outraged; he blamed her; he took matters into his own hands; he forbade Myrtle to go out of the house except with her family. When she disobeyed, he essayed to whip her; her mother intervened and Myrtle ran away. That is Myrtle. Tina, whom her mother had brought to court, is a garment-maker; one of those who, by the infinite sub- division of labour, make one small part of a man's coat. (About 140 pairs of hands are engaged upon every " ready-made " suit.) Tina's father is an un- skilled labourer. That means, he works, now here, now there, not as he needs the work but as this or that work temporarily needs him. Just at present he is employed at the Stock Yards, where he gets $1.75 a day. There are eight children. Tina's mother has had to earn money to help keep them alive; she is a " home-finisher " on men's coats. By using her chil- dren as helpers, she manages to make sometimes as high as seven dollars a week. But this means the WHERE THE TROUBLE BEGINS 79 neglect of her house ; her own weariness unto exas- peration; and the sacrifice of the children's playtime. But what else can she do? Last year, as nearly as they are able to remember, her "man" worked 210 days and earned about $350 less than a dollar a day to house, feed, and clothe ten of a family! No one could question the mother's urgent need to work, and even to " impress " the services of her little chil- dren. But also, no one could question the pity of it all from the children's point of view, and from hers. The ten of them live in four small, dark rooms. Most of the sewing is done by lamplight. The air is bad (and they don't realize what effect bad air has on tempers), the crowding is bad (and wears on strained nerves), and they are all habitually underfed (under- feeding makes any creature snarl). Tina's mother is what almost any well-fed and well-housed woman would call " cruel " to her children. But life has certainly not been kind to her. Her own youth was hard. So far as her experience has taught her, all life is bitter for the poor. If she were just a little less driven, she might be sorry for her children. But she isn't sorry for them she is just exasperated by them. Like all foreign-born parents, she expects Tina to hand over to her an unopened pay envelope. Tina, when she went to work in a shop (at fourteen), had never dreamed of doing otherwise. But when she got among other girls, some of whom had slightly less cruel pressure at home, slightly more indulgent 80 THE WORK-A-DAY GIRL mothers, and saw them flaunting small fineries she could not imitate, her heart grew bitter. One Satur- day she steamed open her pay envelope and abstracted a dollar. (Being a piece-worker, as nearly all gar- ment-makers are, her earnings vary from week to week.) Then she gummed the envelope again, and changed one of the figures marked on it. With the dollar she bought herself a rhinestone comb which she passionately coveted. She told her mother a lie about her slim pay. She had to keep the comb at the shop. Once, she forgot and wore it home. Her mother de- manded to know where she got it. Tina said she had bought it. Her mother beat her, and broke the comb. She was infuriated, but she was too weary to know whether her fury was caused by fear that Tina had sold her virtue to get the comb, or by resent- ment that she had spent a dollar for it. Tina was made rebellious and deceitful by this experience. It was some time before she again tampered with a pay envelope. But she got another rhinestone comb! She was careful to keep the new one out of sight. But the first experience had planted a suspicion in her mother's mind. It is a mind that has little " usage of reason." Tina's youth, her inevitable love of adornment, of gaiety, do not plead for her with her mother. Life is bitter and bread is scarce; what right, then, has Tina with a rhinestone comb? As if stripes would beat out the love of finery, Tina's mother laid them WHERE THE TROUBLE BEGINS 81 on Tina unrelentingly. Tina is accustomed to being beaten; all her life she has paid the penalty for exas- perating her mother's nerves or her father's sullen- ness, by chastisement varying from a cuff on the ear to a whipping with a stick. Any beating that should be memorable to Tina must, in her mother's reasoning, be severer than the ordinary outbursts. Thus she hoped to cure Tina of a weakness for adornment and to prevent her from gratifying it by wrongdoing. By way of further precaution, she put sharp restric- tions on Tina's going out evenings and Sundays. She demanded that Tina come home from the shop, eat a few morsels of hastily-prepared supper, and sit down in the crowded, noisome rooms, to do " finishing " on coats. She thought thus to keep Tina " straight." Tina began to tell lies about " working overtime " so she might go to a nickel show, or for a walk on the bright and busy streets. Once a fellow invited her to go to an amusement park. She did not get home till midnight. Her mother heard her, de- nounced her " overtime " story as a lie, beat her still more cruelly, and next day took time from her " fin- ishing " to go to Tina's shop and inquire how much night work she had been doing. After that, Tina was obliged to be at home every evening before sup- per, unless she could bring her mother a card from the boss showing that he had detained her for overtime work. Tina was growing more and more sullen, but she came home regularly at six-thirty. Her mother 82 THE WORK-A-DAY GIRL was satisfied that she had " cured " Tina. Then one day a neighbour asked : " Ain't Tina workin' no more ? " and when answered that Tina was, de- clared that she had seen Tina " to the park, yeste'day, with a fella." Tina denied this; the neighbour per- sisted, and the truth finally came out: Tina was " sporting " in the daytime, and leading a double life. She left home mornings at the regular hour for going to work. She came home evenings before supper; she brought home a pay envelope which she bought, every Saturday afternoon, from a girl she knew who had no parents and was glad to sell a $5.00 en- velope for $5.50 or $6.00. Her time Tina spent in the cheap stores, at the parks, and in any low, vicious lodging house where she could get a fellow to take her. That is Tina. On adjoining benches in the waiting room of the Juvenile Court, Myrtle and Tina sit. Myrtle's face is swollen with much crying ; Tina's is black with sul- len hate. Myrtle's mother is " overcome," and has frequent outbursts of hysteria which a woman friend tries to hush. Mrs. Taylor is surcharged with bitter- ness against the Law because it will not allow her to recant her plea and take Myrtle home, until the case has been given a hearing. Tina's mother fumes as she thinks of the coats she might be finishing that she should be finishing, now that Tina is to be " put away " where she can contribute nothing to the family WHERE THE TROUBLE BEGINS 83 support; she is enraged at Tina. After all the starva- tion years, just when she could ease the pinch of pov- erty for them all by nearly as much as either of her parents earned, that she should " go an' do like this " proves conclusively to her mother that " she is no good." Now, what's to be done with Myrtle? With Tina? Who can devise anything that Society may do for them, in its utmost tenderness for their sad fortune, whereby they may be absolved from further paying the penalty of their parents' insufficiency ? The court may send them to reformatory institu- tions. Yet, every year we live and struggle to do justly, our social conscience rebels more and more against taking young people out of active life and segregating them with numbers of others who have all suffered like misfortune. It is a poor substitute for justice to Myrtle, to Tina, to brand them (how- ever gently and however reluctantly) on the county records as " incorrigible " ; to send them to the Women's Refuge or the Girls' Industrial School or the House of the Good Shepherd, to pass those years that should be their sweetest (from now till they are eighteen) in the exclusive company of other girls who have suffered moral shipwreck. Yet what may be hoped for them if they are sent back to their homes? What control over Myrtle can that weak-minded, vacillating mother establish at this late day? What realization of youth's needs, and of its rights, can 84 THE WORK-A-DAY GIRL be brought home to that harassed mother of Tina in whom cruelty might well be diagnosed a3 nerves starved and strained to continuous exasperation? Not all the Myrtles, by any manner of means, get into court. Their misdemeanours are oftenest " hushed up " ; their segregation is determined upon by their own families, and its nature is according to the family income. Thousands of Myrtles just ap- proaching ungovernableness, are sent away to schools in the hope of being made amenable to discipline. Hundreds of them are shifted to a distant locality anywhere from visiting a relative in the country to making a tour of Europe in the usually vain hope that removal from " contaminating company " (it always seems certain to weak parents that contamina- tion must come from without!) may miraculously de- velop a strong moral character. Change frequently makes it easier for an individual to start upon a new plane; but only if he has the strong desire to take advantage of fresh surroundings. Shift from one scene to another ought not to be depended on to create a moral impulse, nor to evoke a careful self-govern- ment out of a chaos characterized by years of gov- ernment by whim. Nothing is so certain about any of us as that we must live under the Law. We may live under it willingly, intelligently, approving its wisdom and glad to live by it ; or we may live under it sullenly, grudg- ingly, accepting its dictates only because the strength WHERE THE TROUBLE BEGINS 85 of many is greater than our puny single strength. It is the business of parents to know the laws of nature and of the commonwealth, and to teach their children the wisdom of those laws, the necessity for them, and the sovereignty of upholding, the slavery of defying them. Now, consider the preparation Myrtle has had for entering upon a world where no one has any tender- ness for her except as she wins it ; where she must con- tinue to subsist either as a wage-earner or as some man's household director and the mother and in- structor of his children; where her failures in duty cannot be condoned by a mother " love " complacent in its sloppiness, but must be measured by society's standards and condemned out of society's resentment. Myrtle has been brought up to earn nothing not even respect. She has been nurtured in the belief that she deserved the world's best and that if " the best " recognized its duty, it would arise and come to her. Poor Tina, on the other hand, has been reared in an almost complete denial of her rights. Undoubt- edly she must continue to live without many of her rights; but she will not yield to this hard condition (she should not yield to it!) without making what effort she can to be happy. And who has ever taught her wherein happiness lies even such meagre happi- ness as she may hope to grasp? As between the two girls, sympathy goes out most naturally and most abundantly to Tina. Few parents 86 THE WORK-A-DAY GIRL of the well-fed, comfortably-housed classes are guilty of cruelty to their children at least of such cruelty as Tina has suffered; for that is largely an outcome of nerve-destroying conditions of work and rest and of life in general. It not infrequently happens that an overworked parent of the well-to-do or wealthy class, is occasionally harsh or unkind to a child in a moment of exasperation; but the liability to this de- creases as comforts increase; and the wrong from which too many children of the comfortable suffer, is the neglect that comes from full-fed sloth. So, let us consider Myrtle a little further. If the court commits her to an institution, she will be under restraint of regulations that are necessarily pretty severe. She cannot continue as she has been doing, because she will be shut away from all such opportu- nities, and unremittingly watched. But no institu- tional directors would be so benighted as to imagine for a moment that mere restraint from doing wrong is going to eradicate in Myrtle all those pampered propensities which have been developing for sixteen years. Locking her away from evil is not going to make her good that is why so many parents fail sig- nally when finally they are awakened to the need of correction; they simply deny and prohibit and curb; they do not substitute and build up and encourage. The worst thing that could happen to Myrtle in an institution would be to give her time to dwell on the fact that she is under restraint. The restraint is WHERE THE TROUBLE BEGINS 87 there, and she will feel it every time she goes beyond certain bounds; but the effort, now, is to keep her from wanting to pass those bounds to keep her interest- edly busy inside of them. And this, of course, is just what her parents should have done for her; and did not do. The bounds for a girl like Myrtle, living at home with her parents, ought to be firmly fixed once and for all not shifted and altered according to the parental " nerves " on different occasions nor yet according to the " nuisance " of withstanding Myrtle's teasing or pouting or storming. But if Myrtle can be kept busy continuously busy she will have a minimum of time in which to think about her bounds and long to break them. Idleness is the curse of the Myrtles, as overwork is the danger of the Tinas idle- ness and indulgence, as against exhaustion and denial. Both extremes are full of peril. Myrtle should have helped in the housework from the first day when she was able to serve by saving steps for her mother. She should have gone to the store for purchases, and been entrusted with steadily increasing responsibility in buying, so that she might learn the great business of being a careful and wise spender. She should have been dressed out of a stated portion of the family income, determined upon after thoughtful consideration; most persons of sound sense would agree that the school-girl daughter of a family of four whose total income is $2,000 should not ex- 88 THE WORK-A-DAY GIRL ceed $75 a year; many would put the amount as low as $50 or $60. By the time she is sixteen, Myrtle should have learned enough about money values and about her own needs to be given a monthly allowance for dress and all other expenses. It is little less than a crime against Myrtle to allow her to make demands beyond what the family income warrants, and to ac- cede to those demands. She must not and she cannot carry this demandingness beyond her parents' home. Why should they weakly encourage her to do some- thing which will inevitably bring her sorrow when she tries it with others than themselves? All her life Myrtle, no matter what she attains, will have to con- tent herself without many things that she sees other people enjoying. What preparation for this content- ment is it to buy her a silver bag or a gold-beaded dress which are not only unbecoming her years and her station but are a gross pampering of the prepos- terous notion that Myrtle must have what " other girls have " ? Myrtle is young and eager to be attractive and to be happy. She has a right to be attractive, and she has a right to be happy. She has a right, too, to such bringing-up as shall teach her how to be attractive without being tasteless and wantonly extravagant a gaudy little puppet instead of a winsome, sweet young girl. And she has a right to be taught from her baby- hood to find pleasures well within the bounds of safety and of possible criticism. She has, too, a right to WHERE THE TROUBLE BEGINS 89 be useful. Huxley declares that the sense of useless- ness is the severest shock which the human system can sustain, and that if persistently sustained, it results in atrophy of function. Conversely the sense of use- fulness is the foundation of happiness. What excuse can any parent plead who has not given his child the ecstasy of earning approval, of feeling his usefulness to the world, of glimpsing the larger fields of useful- ness toward which his eager feet may press? There's the crux of the thousands of cases which Myrtle typifies ! Lack of systematized industry in which girls can take an interest and which, by its regu- lating influence, may hold in check propensities to overleap the bounds. That is why the household, the home, directly contributes more than twice as many female offenders as all the new industrial pursuits to- gether; because, when a girl gets under the discipli- nary influence of the world of work, of usefulness, she loses a very great deal of whatever liability she may have had to become a lawbreaker. Even in condi- tions like Tina's, she is less likely to go wrong if she works in a factory than if she stays at home. It is the home, deficient in industry or in leisure, that wrecks Myrtle and Tina. IV THE INDICTMENT OF THE HOME A)ULL session of the Women's Night Court, in New York, was wearing on toward midnight. Since eight o'clock, there had been little va- riety in the deplorable procession that filed past the magistrate : one wretched, tawdry, and apparently un- moved girl after another denied the charge of the officer who had arrested her; and some were fined, some were given sentences, a few were put on proba- tion to Alice Smith, the strong and gentle woman who knows more about erring girls, perhaps, than any one else in the world. Any one of these cases would be a heart-breaking tragedy if the facts about it could be known. But the facts are usually undiscoverable. Nothing is cer- tain about the girls except that they are lying, and will continue to lie. One might easily pardon the poor creatures for not understanding that the Law would be able to deal more intelligently and more mercifully by them if they could be induced to tell the truth. But one finds it hard not to lose patience with them when, knowing perfectly well as they do that finger-print evidence of their previous convic- tions is on file in an adjoining room and will infallibly 90 PQ +- w ^ E H THE INDICTMENT OF THE HOME 91 be brought into refutation of their statements, they stand stolidly before their judge and swear that they have never been arrested before. Hour after hour, with little variation, these cases continue, night after night, year in and year out. The futility, the hopelessness of it weigh like a pall on magistrate and assistants, and on the sentient spec- tator. It is a dreadful clinic to which few come until they are incurably diseased. That is why the grind- ing of the mill grows dull. Despair is in every heart, from that of the judge, raging against his ineffective- ness, to that of the most wretched girl, sullenly resent- ful of this interference with what she considers her personal rights, and that of the soul-sick onlooker who feels himself arraigned with the rest of the social order, and yet doesn't know what to do to check that dreadful procession. On that particular night which I'm describing, there had been little variety, as usual, in the cases called, till toward midnight. Then a girl named Lily was arraigned. Lily had been arrested on complaint of her father. She was over sixteen, so her case was beyond the jurisdiction of the Juvenile Court; but she was under eighteen, so she was still amenable to her father. He complained that she stayed away from home ; that he thought she was " going to the bad " ; that he could do nothing with her, and wanted her put under restraint. He was a brutal-looking little man; bullet-headed, cruel- jawed; and he was vindictive, not 92 THE WORK-A-DAY GIRL sorrowful, in mannef. His wife was called to the stand. She was a frightened creature who kept her fear- full eyes on her husband rather than on the judge as she made her replies. Once, when she hesitated, a threatening glare from her husband caused her to go on quickly, repeating what she had evidently been ordered to say: that Lily spent a good part of her earnings on dress; that she " went to dances with an Eyetalian "; and that for two weeks she had not been home at all. Then the judge questioned Lily, who was crying heart-brokenly. She was a slight little thing who looked to be hardly more than sixteen. Asked why she left home, she said because her father beat her if she did not " give in " all her earnings. No one who had seen the father could doubt that. " Where do you live now, Lily?" the judge asked. Lily told him : at a rooming-house on the East Side. "Who do you live with?" " With a girl Violet." " Violet who ? What is the rest of her name? " " I don't know just Violet." "Where did you meet Violet?" " To a dance." " And you went home to live with her without knowing even her last name? " Lily's blue eyes opened wide in surprise at such a question. " Why, sure ! " she answered. THE INDICTMENT OF THE HOME 93 " How much do you make, Lily ? " " About six a week." " Where ?" " In a fact'ry." "What factory?" Again the surprised look. " Why, dif'rent fact'ries anywheres." The judge conferred with Alice Smith. Lily's case was held over for a half -hour or so, until Miss Smith could talk with the parents and with the terrified child. When it was re-called, the judge said, sadly : " Lily, I'm afraid I shall have to send you away for a little while, where you can learn how to take care of yourself. I'll have to send you to the House of the Good Shepherd " There was a scream of anguish from Lily that made every heart in the courtroom stand still. If the child had been on the torture-rack of ages we condescend- ingly call " Dark," she could not have cried out in greater agony. " Oh, Mamma ! Mamma ! " she implored. " Don't let them send me away. Mamma! Mamma! " The judge looked as if he would gladly exchange his job for that of any care-free street-cleaner. Alice Smith's face was a study in indignation and compas- sion. The spectators showed varying signs of dis- tress, nearly all acute. And as Lily was led away, doors had to be closed behind her, that her cries rising above the roar of the Elevated and the rattle 94 THE WORK-A-DAY GIRL of trolley cars might not drown the hearing of the next case. Only Lily's father was unmoved, and apparently satisfied. Her mother wept convulsively, despite the threatening glare of the bullet-headed little brute who hustled her out of the courtroom. Nearly every one else was bordering on actual physical sickness : the nausea that comes to the witnesses of torture. " But what," said Alice Smith, sadly discussing the case, " could be done ? Lily hasn't good judgment enough to be living alone; and nothing could be so bad for her as to send her back to her home. Lily ought not to be in a correctional home ; she ought not to be ' shut away ' from her world ; she ought to be guided, and guarded, and taught to understand. But there are so few places for the poor little Lilys. The world will never make up, to most of them, what their parents have caused them to suffer." This is the prevailing impression, now, among stu- dents of the Juvenile Court system, where cases like Lily's are the regular order of every court day. The feeling has been growing, for some time, that the homes of delinquent children are, in many, many cases, the last places in the world to which the children should be remanded with any hope of their reform. For three years, the Social Investigation Department of the Chicago School of Civics and Philanthropy, aided by the Russell Sage Foundation, has been gath- ering and compiling data concerning the family condi- THE INDICTMENT OF THE HOME 95 tions of children brought before the Chicago Juvenile Court. The records of ten years have been used as a basis, and a corps of trained investigators has probed, as deeply as persistent effort could make possible, into the vital facts about those cases which could be traced. 1 quote from the proof-sheets of this volume, which will probably have been published before mine is. With the many problems presented by the delinquent boy it is not possible to deal here. This is a brief con- sideration of the delinquent girl as a direct product of the home. More than half of the boys who come into the Juvenile Court are charged with offences which may be grouped as violations of property rights. This means, in the case of boys, window-breaking as well as stealing coal from the railroads, fence-burning as well as cutting lead-pipe out of empty houses; and so on. In the case of girls, only 15 per cent, of whom are charged with violation of property rights, it prac- tically always means stealing, and nearly always the theft of wearing apparel or of money to buy it with. More than 80 per cent, of the girls come into court on charges of immorality; "because their virtue is in peril, if indeed it has not been already lost." Only 2 per cent, of the boys are charged with immorality. More than half of the girls brought to court are committed to institutions; because, as the report says, " the girl is not brought into court until her environ- 96 THE WORK-A-DAY GIRL ment has proved too dangerous to be rendered safe by the services of the probation officer. She is in peril which threatens the ruin of her whole life, and the situation demands immediate action; her only hope of rescue seems to lie in prompt removal from her old surroundings and associates." Now, in connection with these statements, I ask you to consider some of the recent findings of the Government investigation into the Relation Between Occupation and Criminality of Women. There seemed to be a widely prevailing idea that modern industrial conditions, which take girls and women out of the home, are responsible for a great increase in criminality and immorality. The Govern- ment investigation shows that exactly the reverse is true. The traditional pursuits of women housework, sewing, laundry work, nursing, and the keeping of boarders furnish more than four-fifths of all the female criminals, compared with only about one-tenth furnished by all the newer pursuits, including mills, factories, shops, offices, and the professions ! And the number of criminals who have never been wage-earn- ers in any pursuit, but who come directly from their own homes into the courts and penal institutions, is more than twice as large as that coming from all the newer industrial pursuits together. The Chicago investigators gathered vital statistics concerning the occupations of 310 girls committed to the State Training School at Geneva. 53 of THE INDICTMENT OF THE HOME 97 these girls had never worked; 76 either could not or would not tell anything about their occupations (the Government Report says : "It is not uncommon to find a girl who has been at work for a few years who is really unable to give any coherent account of her industrial career; she has been into and out of so many places that she cannot if she would tell just what they have been"), 115 had been domestic serv- ants, 23 had been waitresses, and the small remainder had been in offices, stores, and factories. The Government found that nearly three-fourths of the women criminals come from among domestic servants and waitresses, although less than one-fourth of our gainfully employed girls and women are in those two occupations. They had more than three times their proper proportion of offenders; and the cash girls, saleswomen, bookkeepers, stenographers, telephone and telegraph operators had less than one- third of their " fair share " among the wrongdoers. I might go on and on, multiplying evidence in care- fully collected figures. But I am sure these are enough Tor our purpose which is to show that the unintelligently directed home is giving the powers of Law and Order more grievous concern than any other agency in American life to-day; and that, so far as our girls are concerned, the greatest safeguarding a very great many of them get is what they get in the disciplinary training of the industrial world. What is the relation between domestic service and 98 THE WORK-A-DAY GIRL criminality and immorality? Between erring girls and their own homes as nurseries of weakness and wilfulness? It is this: housework, as a sad majority of women perform it, is the most unsystematized, un- standardized, undisciplinary, unsocial, and uninterest- ing work in the world. And family relations, as a sad majority of our citizens comprehend them, are the most unregulated relations in the world to-day; there are a few standards below which the social con- science of the community will not allow a parent to fall in the treatment of a child, or a mistress to fall in the treatment of a maid; but they are standards so low that almost any other human relationship is better regulated by law and by public sentiment. The home is the most haphazard institution of our day. Not your home, in all probability; nor even, per- haps, the majority of homes you know. But of the twelve or fifteen million homes in the country, prob- ably not one million would pass an efficiency test based on the way they are run and the quality of their output. Years ago, every home was a factory where many things were made everything that was needful to sustain life for its family-group. To-day, nearly every branch of what used to be household labour has been taken out of the home, put into a specializing fac- tory, and standardized. Homes now have but one product: citizens! And every year, the State has THE INDICTMENT OF THE HOME 99 to take more and more spoiled and spoiling products out of slipshod, ignorant, ill-governed homes, and try to repair or reform them in citizenship factories : in- dustrial and parental schools, asylums, refuges, and prisons. There is no other product comparable in importance with the product of the home. And every home that unloads a poor or bad product upon the community lowers the average of the whole, and complicates the problems of those who are earnestly and intelligently doing their full duty. That is why you women whose homes are not under indictment must help to solve the problem of what's to be done with the women who are unloading spoiled human product on the nation far faster than you are able to bring your chil- dren to your high standard of efficiency and useful- ness. The plain truth about a child is that it is not a possession, but a trust : a citizen of the world, to be prepared for life in the world. And the plain truth about a home is that it is a place where persons are rested and refreshed after sharing in the world's work, and made more efficient for re-entering upon it each day. But how many of our hundred millions accept these truths and live by them? The mother of Lily, for instance, is not at all im- probably a " home-finisher," one of the tens of thou- sands of women in New York City who go to factories 100 THE WORK-A-DAY GIRL and get bundles of partially prepared work which they carry home, perhaps to finish, perhaps only to add one process of manufacture. Bullet-headed brutes like Lily's father incline to despotize in inverse ratio to their industry and earning ability; usually their wives as well as their children are made to work for them. Imagine, then, the mother of Lily to be a finisher of men's pants, at which she may earn as much as five cents an hour if she has one of her children to help her. If she gets her work from a shop that makes any effort to obey the law, she has first to show a card indicating that her living conditions have been in- spected by the State authorities and pronounced fairly sanitary; if any member of her household or other dweller in her tenement contracts a contagious or in- fectious disease, she violates the law if she finishes pants under such conditions; if she takes her work to the factory and it is not up to the standard, she must do it over again; if she has spoiled the material, she must pay for it. Home-finishing is the worst-regu- lated of all industries, but, even at that, Lily's mother almost certainly finds the regulations about finishing pants more exacting than the regulations governing conditions in which she may rear Lily. When she has spoiled Lily, or suffered Lily to be spoiled by her father's brutality and tyranny, we take Lily away, and ask the Sisters of the Good Shepherd to patch up the botched job if they can. But even this we do, not of our own initiative, because we are fearful for Lily's THE INDICTMENT OF THE HOME 101 safety; but on complaint of her father, because he is being defrauded of Lily's earnings. The Juvenile Courts and Juvenile Protective Asso- ciations show our disposition to interfere on behalf of some children who are being badly dealt by. But they have shown us, also, that we are poorly equipped with proper kinds of institutions to care for children whom we must take away from their parents ; and also that it is at best a sorry business when a child must be segregated from the world it should be taught to live in : the world of home, of play, of industry. A child who cannot observe family life is being poorly equipped to create and sustain family life. Before we go further than the most urgent necessity demands, in taking out of these homes like Lily's their last and greatest labour, let us see if something cannot be done to standardize the conditions under which parents may be allowed to bear and to rear children, as well, even, as we have attempted to standardize those under which they may finish pants. Here is work for you women who read this; you women who write me the fine, eager letters, saying: " I want to help. What can I do? " Some few of you are now voting. In a little while we shall all be voting voting, not a party ticket, as a majority of men have voted, but for a specific princi- ple, a specific benefit. The suffrages of this nation have too long been cast each in the self-interest of the voter. With your advent into law-making and 102 THE WORK-A-DAY GIRL law-enactment, will come either a tremendous new spirit or a tremendous impetus to an old one. And one of the first of the great problems to which you direct yourselves will concern Lily and her ma millions of Lilys and their ma's. For they also will hold suffrages. And in their ignorance, their fear, their complete unenlightenment, they will cast those suffrages against your most spirited and splendid effort to improve their condition, to make the home a safe and sane nursery for citizens. I entreat you to begin now on Lily and her ma. I ask you to do your utmost now to guard against their votes nullifying yours. I beg you to start now upon your study of their needs, so that you may be ready when the time comes for you to say what social and economic and legislative changes must be wrought for them. You may believe that Lily and her house- hold need your vote, or you may not; but you cannot believe other than that they need you. Much of all that must be done for them cannot be done by public processes, at least until those processes are more adaptable than they are now; and if they are ever to be more adaptable, you must point the way. I ask every honest, earnest woman to undertake one family as a study. None of you will have to look very far. If you can find a family with whom you have some sort of economic relations, so much the better. " Sound " the womati who does your wash- ing; feel your way into the confidence of the butter- THE INDICTMENT OF THE HOME 103 and-egg man, the grocery boy, the scissors-grinder, the milkman, the janitor, the iceman, the remover of garbage, or the purveyor of vegetables and fruits. Every woman has a " back-door world " which might well engross her. If the tailor who presses your hus- band's clothes had a daughter like Lily, would you know it? If the man who exchanges you new pots and kettles for old garments and shoes was a brutal husband, a cruel and neglectful father, would you know how he could be legally restrained? If your " odd-jobs man " had a drunken and vicious wife who was letting her little girl grow up to be like her, would you know what you could do about it? The work of maintaining an efficient home of your own probably leaves you with leisure either scant or indeterminable in advance. You sigh, sometimes, be- cause so many of the " big " endeavours are beyond your reach. I wish you might spend even a single hour, on any ordinary evening, in some such whirlpool of big en- deavours as, say, Hull House. You would find it to be nothing more than an amplification of your " back-door world.'* Hundreds of people come and go; they bring problems, and they take away counsel. Sometimes there is a known remedy for their trouble ; sometimes the need they present demands a new sort of relief legal or economic or social and the resi- dents, when they feel this demand, set about whatever agitation is necessary for its fulfilment. 104 THE WORK-A-DAY GIRL You can run a Social Settlement of your own, at your back-door, no matter where the back-door may be. You can learn what conditions are in your own immediate bailiwick ; and you can discover what reme- dial possibilities exist, what others must be created. I have done this for*a dozen years; and I know! Begin with one family. First step of all, divest your mind of any lingering traces of the notion that Social Service consists in the giving away of things you don't want. It consists in helping people to know their rights and to get them; to know their obligations and to discharge them. Let us suppose, for the sake of illustration, that instead of sighing over the piteousness of Lily's story, and wishing you lived nearer to the Night Court and could do something for that particular girl, you have sympathetically investigated your own immediate sur- roundings and discovered another Lily as any woman only too infallibly may, if she will look! Consider the questions you are confronted with: What are the laws of your State regarding a father's rights in the earnings of his wife and children? Are they just? What proportion of girls like Lily are probably required to hand over unopened pay en- velopes ? How many of them are getting a fair deal ? How many are being taxed beyond their moral strength? How common is it for girls like Lily to drift into and out of nondescript employments, gath- ering no jot of efficiency as they go? What ought to THE INDICTMENT OF THE HOME 105 be done to prepare such girls for self-support? What ought to be done to protect them from moral dangers ? To fit them for probable matrimony and motherhood ? How much does the State save when it allows Lily's ma to toil as a pants-finisher, and pays the Sisters of the Good Shepherd to take care of Lily? Why is Lily's mother in such abject terror of her husband? Does she know that he can be restrained from abusing her and Lily? If Lily were to be sent home instead of to the House of the Good Shepherd, what oppor- tunities for a wholesome social life would she have in their tenement ? What " advisable " pastimes are open to Lily? Where is she to meet young men? Who is to safeguard those meetings? Lily is one of the mothers of to-morrow probably. What is any- body doing to help her make a desirable marriage, or to insure that she will become a better parent than hers have been? I could go on and on and on. There is literally no end to the questions that Lily raises, to the prob- lems that she presents. So far, the world that Lily was called into has not given her a fighting chance. When you have fairly begun on her case, her day of hope will have dawned. Don't switch off; don't sidetrack; don't lose heart; keep after Lily. It may be all the better if you haven't a cent to give her ; charity is a poor substitute for justice. If you can effect any actual betterment in Lily's home, any improvement in her outlook, you 106 THE WORK-A-DAY GIRL are to be envied the happiness that will give you. But even if you can't do that, you can at least learn from that home a hundred lessons, get from it a new under- standing of our complex social relationships. Do for it what you can; but don't be dismayed if this does not seem to you to be considerable, or productive of results. Remember that the wrong conditions which made that home possible (if not inevitable) have been of long, slow growth. You cannot hope to change them in one onslaught nor in a hundred. Rest con- tent with having got to the root of great matters when you have got to the study of home conditions that are responsible for the production of spoiled and socially- dangerous humans. If most men have been selfish in public affairs; if they have sought only such government as would fur- ther their own interests; so have most women been selfish in the affairs of their Kingdom. The day of social blindness is passing. We know, now, that self- interest is suicidal except it keep in line with com- munity-interest. There cannot be a law which is good for your husband's business and bad for the business of his competitors. There cannot be safety for your home and your children, while millions of other homes are disgorging a stunted and misdirected output. You are the wise woman who looketh well to the ways of her own household. But some of you, surely, have wisdom for that, and to spare. Won't you spare a measure of it for Lily's household? V HER DAILY BREAD EUGENIA did not "suddenly find herself obliged to seek a livelihood," like the story- heroines of two and three decades ago. No " crash came " in her family affairs. Her father did not die, their investments did not " prove worthless "; it was not necessary to raise the mortgage because they had no mortgage to raise. She was eighteen years old and had graduated from high school. There were three younger chil- dren. Her father was a small-salaried man who earned no more now than he had earned when Eu- genia was a baby ; and there was no human probability that he would ever earn any more. He carried two thousand dollars' worth of insurance, which would yield them almost two dollars a week if he should die. He had no savings. The cost of living was going up by leaps and bounds. The needs of four children between the ages of twelve and eighteen were a great deal harder to meet than the needs of the same four had been when they were little. Young people in their 'teens presented new demands very just demands, too which went beyond the filling of their stomachs and the covering of their feet and backs and heads. 107 108 THE WORK-A-DAY GIRL There were a score of reasons why Eugenia should go to work. She was perfectly aware of them, and for at least five years she had looked forward to the day when she might be able to " do something " about the eternal problems of the family budget, " instead of just lamenting." That she should lend a helping hand, when she could, seemed quite as inevitable to her as if she had been a boy. There was not nearly enough work in the home to keep three pairs of hands busy; and even if there had been, there was no further possibility in that household of earning a dollar by saving one. They had reached " rock bottom " on that, years ago. Eugenia must sell her labour where labour brought a price. And she faced this necessity far from reluc- tantly. She was generously eager to help. She had a sturdy desire to do for herself to be adequate to her own support and able to gratify some of her long- repressed desires. And she loved the adventure of it. There is no reason in the world why every young soul should not crave the adventure of seeking its fortune; or, rather, of making it. And they all would crave it, as fledglings demand to learn the joy of flight, if we did not warp and twist their natural desires with our false social ideals and our false education. Eugenia hailed the opportunity of going to work, and as there seemed no place for her in their small home town, she went to the nearest big city. No one at school had ever inquired of Eugenia as HER DAILY BREAD 109 to her purposes. No one seemed to feel that it made any difference whether her twelve years of schooling had or had not a definite aim ; whether it left her with some specific ability or with only the vaguest notions of its adaptability to the world's needs. It happened, however, that their town being too small to support a business school there was a de- mand for instruction in stenography and typewriting, and a course was instituted in the high school. Eugenia took it. So did a great many other girls who were similarly circumstanced so many that there were a dozen applicants for each stenographic job in town; and as a consequence, some girls worked for $2.50 a week, while $3.50 and $4.00 were excep- tional salaries for the inexperienced. Eugenia decided to go to the city. Her parents were a little apprehensive over this venture; but Eugenia had a lot of good sense and good principle, and they specially fortified her as well as they were able, with warnings against such dangers as they knew of. She must go to the Young Women's Christian Association; she must avoid making chance acquaint- ances; she must be careful what places of amusement she attended. These were the principal burden of the parental charges ; the school gave her no warnings or suggestions of any sort. She went to the Association House, or Home. She found that if she shared a room with another girl the 110 THE WORK-A-DAY GIRL cheapest room in the house she could board there for $4.00 a week. She found that the labour market was glutted with inexperienced stenographers eager to work for $5 and $6 a week. She found the general, almost the universal attitude, toward her to be : " You ought not to have come here." Half-a-dozen employers to whom the Association sent her refused to take her because she did not live at home. " We can get beginners at $6.00," they said. " But $6.00 will not keep you. We make it a rule not to hire for less than $8 girls who do not live at home. You would not be worth $8 to us. Sorry ! " Eugenia reported this at the Association employ- ment office, and was told that the employers were quite right. There was a decided opinion in that of- fice that inexperienced girls should not come flocking into cities, hoping to live on what they could earn. " What are we to do ? " Eugenia cried. " There isn't work at home for us all. What are we to do? " The head of the employment office had no idea except that the girls should not come. She was be- sieged by them, and every day it was getting harder to place them. Eugenia studied the Help Wanted columns. It was true that not many of the ads. called for beginners. But she answered the few that did. For some reason not at all clear to her, they nearly all read : " Ad- dress, stating full particulars and salary expected," HER DAILY BREAD 111 So-and-So, at the newspaper office. This necessitated a delay of at least two days, besides giving no clue to the location of the advertiser, nor to the nature of his business. She received several letters asking her to call. It did not occur to Eugenia to show these letters to the manager of the Association employment office. She was a little resentful of that lady's attitude. Nor is it at all certain that, if she had shown them, any- thing would have resulted save perhaps a general counsel to " be careful/' Eugenia did not know that it was necessary to be careful in seeking employment. All the adjura- tions with which she was familiar had to do with the need of care in seeking amusements or making ac- quaintances. The first place to which she found her way was in one of the older and dingier office buildings of a dis- trict where innumerable " skyscrapers " of recent erec- tion had almost emptied the old structures or left them to a precarious class of tenants who could not take long leases. The elevator was an " afterthought," put in when the building was no longer new. The stairs were wooden. The halls were gloomy. The air was heavy and bad. Eugenia found Room 52. The lettering on the door said : " The Union Novelty Co." Inside were two men. The office was scantily furnished. There was a cheap roll-top desk of " golden oak " ; a giant 112 THE WORK-A-DAY GIRL cuspidor; a swivel chair, and two others that looked like stray members of an erstwhile dining-room set. Smoking, and aiming at the cuspidor, seemed to be the only business of the place; and while the smoke was voluminous, the other half of the enterprise evi- denced some lack of expertness. When Eugenia an- nounced her errand, the man in the swivel chair gave the other man a meaning look. When the door had closed on the retreating one, he who remained faced Eugenia with a grin. " Si' down, Kiddo," he urged, nodding at the chair just vacated. " So you're a green one, huh ? Just from the country, ain't you ? " Eugenia was uninstructed, but she was no fool. Her fear of this man was as instinctive as that of any wild creature for one of its natural enemies. All that troubled her was to know how to get out. She ignored the urging to " si' down." "I I don't think I'd suit you," she faltered. " You see, I haven't had any experience at all. I ought to begin in a in a place where where " She floundered hopelessly, not knowing how to make a polite evasion. " Oh, that's all right ! " he encouraged. " I can soon learn you all you need to know." Something in his manner made Eugenia forget her effort to be polite. She backed toward the door. He rose to his feet. Without waiting for more parley than if he had HER DAILY BREAD US been a tiger of Bengal, Eugenia leaped for the door, jerked it open, and fled. When she got to the elevator shaft, the antiquated car was at the bottom. Eugenia ran down one flight of the wooden stairs. Then, hearing no sounds of pursuit, she sat down, weak and trembling. It was some minutes before she could gather strength and resolution to go on. She tried to reason with herself; to make herself believe that a dreadful thing like that might not hap- pen again "ever in a lifetime"; to tell herself that she must be " plucky," and not easily dismayed. The next place she tried was some distance from the first. (One of her difficulties was that she did not know the city, and could not " group " her applica- tions.) It was in a large building tenanted by many small manufacturing concerns. The one she sought was " The Sovereign Remedy Co." The first door on which she found this read : " Private. Entrance, Room 112." In Room 112 there was considerable and varied activity. Two girls, neither of whom looked to be more than sixteen, were seated at type- writers. One of them was half-engaged with her ma- chine, which she used awkwardly and unaccus- tomedly: her interest was obviously not in what she was doing, but in the banter being exchanged between the other girl and a coatless, vestless, stoop-shoul- dered, narrow-chested, anaemic-looking youth, who lolled like a jelly-fish, on the end of the second girl's desk. At one table, a little girl with short dresses 114* THE WORK-A-DAY GIRL was pasting labels on bottles containing the Sovereign Remedy, and at another table, a boy was painting an address upon a wooden box containing one-half gross of bottles of the Sovereign Remedy. In a corner was a roll-top desk, half-closed down over a disorderly litter of papers. Everybody present turned an inquiring not to say an inquisitorial eye upon Eugenia. " Is the manager in ? " she asked. " Nope," answered the anaemic youth. " Wha' d'ye want?" " I came to see about a place I answered the ad- vertisement." Just then, the door behind her opened and the manager came in. Eugenia dreaded being inter- viewed in the hearing of these " guying " employes, almost as much as she could have dreaded another tete-a-tete; but she rebuked herself sharply for her timidity, and tried to feel that she was adapting her- self to " business ways " when she answered the ques- tions which he " fired " at her without asking her to sit down likewise, without removing his hat from his head or his cigar from the corner of his mouth. The other occupants of the office listened more at- tentively than most juries. Eugenia's voice shook; but she tried to be " brave." She had her reward. She was engaged to replace the bantering young person, who was leaving to take an eight-dollar job. HER DAILY BREAD 115 There were many things about the place that Eu- genia did not like many even at the outset, and more as she got to know it better but she told herself that she must not be " silly." She wanted experience; everybody told her that beginners were like beggars in that they also could not be "choosers"; and " at least " this place was " safe," she thought, because there were so many employes. (In addition to the second typist, the labeller, the office boy, the anaemic youth, and herself, there were two girls, also very young and inexperienced, who worked in the room marked " Private," under the casual direction of the anaemic youth, compounding the Sovereign Remedy.). Rendering any help at home was out of the ques- tion on six dollars a week. But Eugenia meant to apply herself so earnestly that she would not have to work long at that wage. Her first concern was to " make good." And after that, she was not a little exercised to know how to live on her earnings. At first, she paid her $4.00 a week and stayed at the Association. She was given a light luncheon to carry with her; and when the weather was good she did not mind walking to and from work, a mile each way. She had clothes enough to do her for a while ; and by resisting nearly every temptation that involved spending a nickel, she got through, somehow. But as the fall wore on, she began to need things. Her shoes were nearly " impossible " they had long been shabby ! and she must have a winter coat, and a 116 THE WORK-A-DAY GIRL pair of gloves, and some overshoes, and a makeshift of some sort for a winter hat. She told her plight at the Home. And she was re- minded of what they had warned her when she came : the city is no place for girls without homes, who cannot command more than $6.00 a week. She was advised to go home and work for what she could get there. " I could earn my keep at home," she reflected ; " but that is about all and there wouldn't be any prospect of doing better. I may have it hard here, for a while; but when I can earn more, there are plenty of places that will pay it." So she stayed. She asked to be directed to a cheaper boarding-place, and was given the addresses of several Homes for self-supporting girls. Some of these gave board, and dormitory lodging, as low as $3.50 a week. But they were all full. Eugenia decided to rent a furnished room and " manage " her eating as best she could. Again she had recourse to the ad. columns, and spent two Sun- days in disheartening quest. Any room that she could get, even for two dollars a week, was in a tene- ment. And if she were to keep the cost of food down to the same amount, or less than thirty cents a day, she would be little better off than she was now, at the Association. After trudging weary miles in what seemed an insanely futile quest, Eugenia grew desperate. She HER DAILY BREAD 117 went to a newspaper office and handed in this "ad.": " Board Wanted : By a young girl from the coun- try. Earns only $6.00 a week, and must live for $3.50 at most." It cost her the price of the needed overshoes; but she was hopeful that it would lead to economy in the long run. Her replies included several from ladies who said that they had " lovely " homes, but that their husbands were " away a great deal," and they would be " more than glad " to have a young lady boarder " for com- pany." This seemed perfectly natural to Eugenia, and she discarded in favour of these all the others written, for the most part, in cramped penmanship and as cramped language, and emanating from districts which she was beginning to know as poor and mean. The first " lonesome lady " she called upon (it was in the evening Sunday was four days off) seemed to be making fair feint at beguiling her desolation. Her flat, in a good residence section, was brightly lighted; a burst of ear-splitting ragtime, of the " canned " sort, was uninterrupted by Eugenia's ring. A coloured maid opened the door and summoned her mistress into the hall. " Hello, dearie ! " the mistress cried, as if Eugenia were an old familiar friend. " Got my note, did you ? 118 THE WORK-A-DAY GIRL Well, some o' my young friends are tryin' to keep me from gettin' blue. Come on in." Eugenia felt timid about confronting a roomful of laughing strangers. " I'll come again, when you haven't got company," she pleaded, hanging back. "Don't be a goosie!" she was adjured. "You'll meet them sooner or later and it might as well be now. They want to see my new boarder." So Eugenia followed her in. The young people present, four in number, seemed very well acquainted with one another, and with their hostess. One of the young men, who said his car was outside, proposed a ride, and invited Eugenia to join them. She was tempted. The thought of a ride, in jolly com- pany, was an attractive alternative to going home and to bed in the cheerless little room she shared with a girl whose losing fight with the world had made her morose. But she had not notified the Association office that she might be out late. It was nearly nine o'clock now. " Thank you I don't believe I can to-night," she murmured. " You'll ask her again, when she comes here to keep me comp'ny; won't you?" the hostess said. And, assured that he would, she left her guests and showed Eugenia the room that was to be hers. " Where are you stopping now ? " she inquired. HER DAILY BREAD 119 When Eugenia told her, a peculiar expression came into her face. " If you tell 'em you're comin' to live with me, they'll prcb'ly try to poison you against me," she said. " I got my opinion o' them women chargin' such money for board an' callin' it charity an' I told 'em so, once. They got it in for me." " I don't have to tell them where I'm going," Eu- genia declared, with a flare of pride. " I'm not under any obligations to them." " That's right," her prospective landlady approved. " Well, will you move to-morrow ? " Eugenia said she would, " to-morrow evening." She had a vague uneasiness about the new home, but tried to tell herself that she was getting as suspicious as her room-mate. Of course, the lady she was going to live with did not have gay company every evening ! If she did, she wouldn't want a quiet working girl to keep her from " getting blue." Eugenia began packing her few belongings as soon as she was in her room. There was no time in the morning, and she wanted to move early in the follow- ing evening. Her room-mate was not there when she began to pack, but came in while Eugenia was about her preparations for bed. She knew that Eugenia was looking for a cheaper place to live. " Find a dump ? " she inquired, semi-interest- edly. " I found a very nice place," Eugenia answered, 120 THE WORK-A-DAY GIRL rather stiffly. Her manner invited no questions, promised no confidences. The other girl caught the defiant note, and shrugged. " All right. Only I hope you're on to the kind of ' nice ' places that'll take a girl to board for what you can afford to pay." " I don't know what you mean/' Eugenia said. " I thought you didn't. Well, you better be care- ful." Eugenia's anxiety overcame her pride. She begged the other girl to explain, and her face was a picture of horror as she heard how nearly she had been caught in a trap. The older girl was moved by Eugenia's terror. She had felt that way, too, once on a time; now she was not frightened only morose. " If you want, I'll take a room with you somewhere a room we can get for a dollar each, or so. It's just about impossible to get dinners you can eat under twenty cents; but we can skimp on breakfasts and lunches, and maybe get through on three-and-a-half." " I've just got to ! " Eugenia cried. " And even at that, I don't see how I'm going to get any winter clothes until it's nearly spring." ' You can get clothes on easy payments, if you have to," the older girl said. " They soak you three prices, and hound you to death but if you've got to, you've got to, I suppose." They found a room, within walking distance of the HER DAILY BREAD business centre. It wasn't a " nice " room, but it was the best they could get for their price. And Eugenia got a hat and coat on " easy " payments. Meanwhile, at the office of the Sovereign Remedy Co., Eugenia was making very fair progress. She took most of the manager's letters, now, and the other " stenographer " did little more than addressing, bill- ing, filing, copying, and such work. There were things about the Sovereign Remedy Co. that Eugenia did not like ; but as they did not concern her, she thought she ought to ignore them, for the present. The " Remedy," for instance, was quite} frankly a " joke." Eugenia's heart and conscience both protested against the fraud; against the hilarity with which sick persons' too-confidential letters were read and passed from hand to hand; against the methods of getting "testimonials"; against the manager's slogan : " You can sell anything to any- body, if your ad. dope is right." He even thought well of himself, in comparison with some of his com- petitors, because there was no " knock-out " in his stuff. He boasted of this to Eugenia, when he felt the protest that she durst not speak. And when he saw that he was not able to extenuate himself, he laughed, and called her " Miss Green," and prom- ised her that she would have " city sense " some day. In other ways, though, he was rather " nice " to her: he could tell by the look in her eyes when she 12S THE WOKK-A-DAY GIRL had one of her blinding headaches, and would send her home; he was fairly patient when she made mis- takes; and he taught her a good many things the value of which she could not but recognize. He had been an ad. writer for others, before he embarked with his modest capital on this business of his own; and he had a crisp, pungent style. He laid great stress on punctuation, always naming the " point " he wished used. And, although his office was without dignity or proper business decorum, it was not without a pre- vailing good nature which was friendly, if " fresh." Eugenia described conditions faithfully to her room- mate, Sarah, of whom she was becoming quite fond; and Sarah advised her to " stick." For Sarah, in her varied experience, had found many places that were worse. One evening, Eugenia did not get back to their room in time to go out to dinner. She came in about ten o'clock, explaining that Mr. Ledyard had been out all day and couldn't get his letters done; so he asked her to work in the evening. "Did he take you to supper?" Sarah asked. " Oh, no ! but he gave me fifty cents for supper money. I was glad to get it." The night- work grew to be almost a regular thing; and in consequence of it, Eugenia was allowed to come down late in the morning. Her salary was not raised, but her " supper money " brought her income up to at least eight dollars. HER DAILY BREAD 123 " Does anybody else work, except just you and Mr. Ledyard ? " Sarah demanded. " No. But he's perfectly all right I mean, as far as that goes." " I don't think any man is ' perfectly all right ' who wants an eighteen-year-old girl to work nights in an office alone with him," Sarah declared. " If he has so much night-work, he should get a middle-aged woman there are plenty of them that work cheap." " Well, if I knew where I could get eight dollars in a safer place, I'd go," Eugenia replied. " But I don't know." ''' That's all right, then. But keep your eyes open," Sarah counselled. " Look out for the time when he suggests that you might as well eat together. That never means but one thing." The time came. Eugenia, fortified by Sarah's ad- monitions, declined the invitation as tactfully as she could, but was not able to conceal her dismay. " I'm surprised at you ! " he cried. " You, who pretended to be such a sweet, unsuspecting little girl. But I can tell you that you misjudge me ! I'm sorry you have such an evil mind. But I do not see how I can have a girl go on working for me, that thinks such things of me." "Yes; that's the familiar spiel that's what they always say," was Sarah's comment when Eugenia told her about the loss of her job. Eugenia could not use Mr. Ledyard's name for ref- 124, THE WORK-A-DAY GIRL erence when seeking another place. Sarah told her to keep her tongue in her head about why she had been discharged. " Those that tell mostly bring sus- picion on themselves," she said. " You get the credit for having tried to lead a perfectly good gentleman astray/' " But what shall I say when they ask if I've had any experience ? " Eugenia wept. " Say you have, but " " But I can't get any references ! Won't that be a nice thing to tell ? " " Well, you're a girl and you're up against it. I don't know any way that you can get a fair show. Some girls, when they get up against this, think there's no use trying to fight it. I've fought it but I'm a failure. I don't know whether IVe got any right to recommend you to do as I've done." Eugenia's eyes flashed. " You don't need to recommend me to be decent! I've got something in- side me, I hope, that will keep me pointed straight." Eugenia did " keep pointed straight." She did have something in her that enabled her to endure and to resist. But if that " something " had not been in her what then? Girls like Eugenia ought not to be obliged to trust their own intuitions when looking for employment. They ought not to feel that they are " up against it " when they have angered a man like Ledyard. HER DAILY BREAD 125 To give them protection is not so difficult as many another task of conservation which we unhesitatingly undertake; and few tasks could be more important. In some of the best-governed German cities, all boys and girls under eighteen, who go to work, are placed in positions by the school board and may quit or be discharged only by permission of the school authorities after the reasons for the change have been thoroughly investigated. Edinburgh has a similar system. Lon- don is beginning to assume some responsibility for the early industrial experiences of its children. Cincinnati is doing a notable work in this line. Chicago is taking some first steps toward such guardianship. It is bound to come, everywhere, as people wake up to the great need for it. Nothing helps on a general awakening so well as making a beginning of showing what can be done. In some communities, a handful of earnest women have carried on experiments in safeguarding young workers, blacklisting unscrupulous employers, and rendering like service so successfully that the authorities were impelled to take over the work and make it a depart- ment of the public service. Women's clubs ought to concern themselves with this. They could not pos- sibly be more importantly engaged. There ought not to be in any community containing even one sweet, good, earnest motherly or sisterly woman, a girl like Eugenia, who feels that she has no one to whom she can turn for counsel, for direction, 126 THE WORK-A-DAY GIRL for defence. And with the growth of organization among women, the rapid development of their sense of social service, they will one feels sure soon see to it that their daughters and the daughters of other homes are given every protection necessary in their quest of daily bread, of sane, safe amusement; of those things that sustain life, and of those that transfigure it. VI THE GIRL WHO EARNS $6 A WEEK "\\ THAT could you do if I was to let you w ^r ^ " Mrs. Burkhart's tone was not so chal- lenging as it might well have been; it was merely plaintively inquiring. " Why," Hazel answered, her confidence undimin- ished by the indefiniteness of her reply, " I could do what Minnie does, I guess. She don't know any more than I do or she didn't when she went away." " Don't she say at all what she's workin' at? " Hazel referred to the opened letter in her hand. " No ; she don't say what she does. On'y that there's hundreds of girls workin' where she does, an' she's almost sure she can get me took on." " Wouldn't it be better if she was to find out for certain before you go?" Hazel looked the scorn she felt for her mother's ignorance of the world's ways. " How could she ? Who's goin' to hire a girl they've never seen?" "I guess that's right," Mrs. Burkhart acquiesced, meekly. "But," with sudden spirit, "I'd hate for 127 128 THE WORK-A-DAY GIRL you to be a fact'ry girl. Clerkin's all right; but I'd hate for you to work in a mill or fact'ry." There were a few manufacuring industries in their own small town, and the girl operatives mostly East European were looked down upon as " tough " by the town folk, especially by the mothers who thought themselves and their offspring " nice." " It ain't likely Minnie would work in a fact'ry," Hazel retorted. " If she had been willin' to do that, she could have stayed home an' done it. She says she's earnin' six dollars a week, an' that if I come I can get as much, an' we can live awful nice by clubbin' together." " Well, I should hope you could ! " her mother ejaculated. " That's more'n fifty dollars a month for two girls to live on. Your pa didn't make more'n that when we was married an' had two children. Fact is, he don't spend no more'n that on us now. Whatever else he earns don't go on our backs, nor into our pleasures ! " Hazel recognized at the outset a wearisomely fa- miliar theme; she was in sympathy with it, but whereas her mother seemed to find satisfaction in reiterating her grievances, Hazel was tired of talking and eager to do something. She was sick of the home atmosphere; of its bicker- ings and its pinch-penny restrictions and denials. And, too, she was young and so eager for adventure that she would have left a far softer home-nest for THE GIRL WHO EARNS $6 A WEEK 129 the chance to try her own wings. What we are pleased to call our educational system is such that, while we ply our adolescent things with theory upon theory, we sedulously seek to keep them from testing any of the theories in practice. But Nature is not easily outwitted; she provides younglings, human and otherwise, with a deep desire to test life for them- selves; with a tingling to do and dare, which no cer- tainty of hardship can overcome. It seemed to Hazel that her parents had made a squalid failure of life. What compromise they had effected with their youthful dreams they never hinted to her, and it was not possible, yet, for her to guess. She wanted to get away from the home frets and into the great, free world where one might fly and soar, looking on at life, fetterless, and occasionally dipping down into a bit of it that invited. She wanted move- ment, nights. She wanted to earn money. And she wanted social opportunities. She told herself that it was natural for her to want to be with Minnie; be- cause she and Minnie had been good friends for years. But there was a stronger urging, though Hazel did not recognize it : Minnie might have thrived, forgotten, in the city if the home town held a hope of romance; but it didn't. Hazel did not know a young man about whom she could build a dream. Minnie said that hundreds of young folks, girls and fellows, worked where she did. The statement made Hazel's pulses leap. What infinite possibilities for good times, for 130 THE WORK-A-DAY GIRL new acquaintance, for selecting " Mr. Right " from among a host of eligibles! Mr. Burkhart expressed no fearfulness about Ha- zel's going to the city to join the wolf-packs of the unskilled. He had been an inefficient, less-than-half- equipped worker all his life and had grown dulled to the miseries and the dangers of the condition. It did not even seem to him vital that any of them should discover what Minnie was working at, or how she was living. He took it for granted that Hazel should accept the chances of her class, and bear with what she did not like unless, by some chance, she could better it. A woman who was a fellow-member with Mrs. Burkhart of The Friendly Workers' Aid called when she heard of Hazel's intended departure, and told of some magazine articles she had read about " the girl and the city." She warned Hazel against speaking to any one on the train; against going with any one who came up to her in the depot offering her employ- ment; against answering advertisements that offered large salaries and said " no experience required." She seemed horrified that the Burkharts knew so little about what Hazel was going to do. Unfortunately, she was the sort of person whose cravings for the dramatic led her always to make things out very grave : when any one had the measles she always told of a large list of persons who became permanently blind or deaf or weak of heart as a result of that THE GIRL WHO EARNS $6 A WEEK 18.1 malady; when any one bought a navy blue suit, she could be counted on to tell of many navy blue suits which had " faded something shameful." Cassan- dras are still being discredited, and always will be. Hazel laughed at the warnings; her father swore at them, good-humouredly, because the Cassandra was a spinster and had never been to the city, and he was one of the many men who feel sure that an unmarried woman cannot possibly know anything in general and that no woman can possibly know anything she has not personally experienced. Mrs. Burkhart was faintly perturbed, but allowed herself to be overborne. So Hazel went to the city, having advised Minnie on what train she would arrive. She did not know enough to be fearful that Minnie might not be there. She had Minnie's address, plainly written on a strip of paper, in her purse; and she felt confident of find- ing the place if she needs must. As it happened, Minnie was able to meet the train. Hazel was a bit dismayed when she reached what Minnie called " home " : a windowless wee room off the kitchen of a cluttered, unclean, sour-smelling four- room flat. But Minnie explained that when they " clubbed together " they could have a room twice as good. Hazel had an uncomfortable night, trying to sleep on half of Minnie's cot, whose mattress was so thin that the woven-wire springs seemed to be pressing into Hazel's weary muscles. She was not loath to THE WORK-A-DAY GIRL get up at six; and though she was tired and sleepy, it seemed " fun " to go out to a cheap little restaurant and order a fifteen-cent breakfast. " This is a celebration," Minnie said as they sat at their fried eggs, coffee, and rolls. " We dassent do this again ever." " Dassent we ? " Hazel echoed. " What dast we do other times ? " "Well, it's like this," Minnie went on: "we gotta plan awful careful. Say I get you a job like mine, as I'm hopin' to: we each have six a week. Now, here's what we got to choose from : We kin board in a Home; there's enough of 'em, but they're all fierce. You kin sleep in a dormitory with five other girls, an' get two meals a day, fer three-fifty a week. With a ten-cent lunch a day, and mostly with sixty cents a week carfare, that's four-seventy leavin' you one- thirty a week fer clothes an' amusements an' every- thing. Maybe you could stand it if they wouldn't always be tryin' to improve you. You come home at night dead tired after sellin' brass tacks or makin' paper boxes, and they set you up in the parlour an' have a missionary woman tell you how the Chinese girls bind their feet. It's awful when what you're dyin' for is a chance to shake a leg. You have to get a permit to stay out after 10:30. And you gotta pray before you eat and pray before you sleep, an' give an account of everything you do. Then the matrons or superintendents or whatever they call 'em are the W w THE GIRL WPIO EARNS $6 A WEEK 133 limit. The rich dame that gives the most money to furnish the Home with elevatin' pictures, or some- thing like that, always has a Cousin Maria that's the family Jonah that nobody can stand, but somebody's got to support. So the rich dame says : * Ah, ha ! I'll put Cousin Maria into the Home as matron.' An' she does ! Cousin Maria has an easy way of knowin' right from wrong: if you ever want to do anything, it must be wrong; if you hate it, it's sure to be what you ought to do. You kin try one o' them places if you want to I've had enough o' them." " I don't want to try," Hazel hastened to declare. " Why don't we live in some nice boardin'-house where we can do what we want to?" Minnie laughed. " Say, but you're green ! " she said. : ' There ain't no nice boardin'-houses where six-dollar girls can live. I don't know of one not a nice one, but any old kind where you can get room an' board for four a week. If you gotta board that cheap, it's a cinch you have to pay some other way give some flossy dames the fun of bossing you around and kidding themselves they're doin' good. Nobody that really respecks you is goin' to board you for four a week. Now, what we kin do is this: We kin get a pretty punk room in walkin' distance for about three a week ; or we kin get a better room, far out, for maybe two-fifty. That means one-fifty each for the punk room, or one-eighty-five each, countin' carfare, for the decent one. If we want to live on four a THE WORK-A-DAY GIRL week, so as to leave something for clothes, amuse- ments, and emergencies, we gotta eat twenty-one meals every week for two-thirty-five or two-fifty. If the meals cost ten cents each, we'll have a few cents over for times when we're extra hungry. Or we could have fifteen-cent dinners. But breakfasts have got to stay at ten cents or below, you bet." " Maybe," ventured Hazel, whose appetite was healthy and whose expenditure for clothes and amuse- ments had never reached anything like so large a sum as two dollars a week, " we won't need so much for clothes." Minnie regarded her scornfully. " You wait and see," she admonished. Another thing which she had no right to expect hap- pened to Hazel: she got work at Minnie's place for six a week. It was a factory; but she and Minnie were employed in the offices where they filed letters, addressed envelopes, and did like work which was better than going into a department store, Minnie ex- plained, " because you don't have to buy black clothes an' look like you was gettin' at least fifteen." For two or three evenings the girls did a little desultory room-hunting, then returned to their sour little hole where they could sleep, fitfully, only because they were so tired, and where they woke almost as- phyxiated because one of the members of the family from whom they sub-let was a " fresh guy," and they had to keep their door closed (it wouldn't lock) and THE GIRL WHO EARNS $6 A WEEK 135 tilt their chair so that the back served as a catch for the door-handle. They inquired, vainly, among their fellow-employes about rooms to rent ; scanned advertising columns, and visited a variety of lodgings all distinguished by dirt and smells, but differing in such details as price of room, extra charge for use of kitchen stove, and so on. Finally they decided to " commute/' as Minnie called it : to take a room far out, in one of the newer build- ings which, if they smelled of the present tenants' un- cleanness, at least did not cherish the smells of un- counted past inhabitants. This meant a forty-minute ride, night and morning, in a jammed elevated car which was invariably full when the girls got in, so that they had to sway, strap-hanging, for both prelude and postlude to their day's work which kept them almost constantly on their feet. However, they got a decent little room, with a fairly comfortable bed, for ten dollars a month; and their landlady was kind about letting them boil their coffee on her gas-stove in the mornings and selling them a penny's worth of milk from her own supply. They brought rolls in with them when they came home at night, and sometimes a couple of eggs or of apples. This kept their breakfast cost down to about five cents each, on an average. At noon, they could go to a bakery lunch-room and have coffee and rolls, or coffee and pie, or coffee and doughnuts, for ten cents. The coffee was invariable; and usually what went with it 136 THE WORK-A-DAY GIRL was a sweet something far from filling. At night they were voraciously hungry, and the temptation to spend more than they could afford had to be fought down almost every dinner-hour. Minnie always resisted this temptation because she was clothes-crazy, and resented the demands of her stomach as taking so much from what might else have gone on her back. Hazel was a little slow in accus- toming herself to insufficient food; when a fifteen- cent dinner failed to fill her, she went recklessly on and ate another nickel's worth; she was even known to supplement her luncheon by five cents' worth of jelly-roll or doughnuts which she carried in for sur- reptitious consumption in mid-afternoon. Minnie's scorn of this improvidence had less effect than Min- nie's exemplification of the other course: Minnie was able to " blow herself " to an enormous bunch of new hair, which had transformed her from what she called " a back number " to " something dead swell." Ha- zel watched the transformation at home; she watched its effect among their f ellow- workers ; she tried the hair on her own head, and was fascinated by what the mirror showed her. Then, moved by Minnie's sudden bloom into " style," and by the manner she put on along with the new hair, a youth in their department asked Minnie to a dance. At once, Hazel's attitude toward her stomach changed, and she began to regard its demands resentfully. No more surreptitious jelly- roll; no more twenty-cent dinners; no more eggs for THE GIRL WHO EARNS $6 A WEEK 137 breakfast, at three cents each. She would have a " bun " of hair, and a broad ribbon bandeau, and be taken to a dance. Meanwhile, Minnie's beau was causing complica- tions. He called one evening soon after the dance. It was a rainy evening. The parlour of their land- lady's flat, which served also as sleeping-room for her two school-girl daughters, was in use : the school- girls were entertaining some school-boys. Minnie took her young man into her room. In a few min- utes the landlady knocked peremptorily at the door. When it was opened, she stepped inside and closed the door behind her. " I can't have nothing like this in my house," she declared with virtuous indignation. " I got my girls to think of, and anyway I'm a respectable lady myself, and, even if I wasn't, the other tenants would be sure to make trouble if they knew I let to girls that ain't partic'lar." Minnie's cheeks blazed, and her eyes flashed fire. The young man looked uncomfortable, but said noth- ing except : " I guess I better go." Then Minnie's tears came. She would lose him! He would never come again! He would go back to the office and tell everybody about this call, and they would all laugh ! " You ain't any more respectable than I am ! " she cried. " I can't entertain my comp'ny in the parlour when it's full o' kids." 138 THE WORK-A-DAY GIRL " You ain't payin' rent for no parlour," the land- lady retorted. " It belongs to my family." " Well, then, I guess I can have who I want in the room I am payin' rent for." " Not in my house, you can't ! " " Can't I ? Well, so long as I'm behavin' myself, I don't take no sass from you nor the likes of you. We'll move to-morrow." ;< You're lucky I don't make you move to-night," was the parting shot of the landlady. " Say ! " burst from the young man, when the in- vader had departed, " you got spunk ; you're a dandy!" So Minnie was mollified. She had not lost her young man; rather, she had established herself still further, it seemed, in his admiring regard. She sent word by Hazel next morning that she was " sick" and could not go to work; and when she in- spected rooms that were for rent she was careful to ask about where she might have her company. In no place within their means was the parlour available. In flats, if the parlour was not rented, it might be shared, occasionally, with any member of the family who chanced to be sitting in it, although it must be vacated when the persons who slept in it wanted to go to bed. In lodging-houses the parlour was inva- riably rented ; it had to be, to make ends meet for the landlady. Some places were particular about men company in girls' rooms; some were not. Minnie THE GIRL WHO EARNS $6 A WEEK 139 hired a room in a lodging-house whose keeper assured her, " What ain't none o' my business I don't see." This soon became evident. They moved in the evening. The new room was not inviting, but they thought that perhaps they could make it a little more so. At any rate, it offered " freedom," and to girls looking for mates that seemed worth any price. There were other girl room- ers; and it was not long before Minnie and Hazel had to admit, between themselves, that " things were kind of queer." Still, they argued, " so long as we don't do anything wrong, it ain't goin' to hurt us what some other girls do." But apparently it did. Minnie's young man friend who had been attracted by her " bun " of hair, and aroused to enthusiasm by her de- fiance of conventions, jumped to the not unnatural conclusion that Minnie had no scruples of any kind. He gave Hazel half a dollar one evening when he was calling, and said: " Here, Kiddo! chase yerself." Surmising a proposal of marriage, Hazel reluc- tantly withdrew. She went alone to a nickel theatre, ' wandered about the streets for an hour or so, then returned to their room. Entering cautiously, she heard Minnie sobbing. " He got fresh," was Min- nie's anguished reply to her entreaties. " An' when I said I wasn't that kind of a girl, he was mad and told me I was playing him for a fool." Minnie cried all night. She was incensed at hav- ing been so misunderstood; she was desolated by the 140 THE WORK-A-DAY GIRL loss of her young man whom she mourned, in true feminine fashion, not as he was but as she fancied him; and she was mortified, because she knew he would treat her sneeringly before all their fellow- workers, and when called to account for his change would not hesitate to tell the reason. Any consoling moralist could have told her she ought to be proud of the reason; as, indeed, she knew without being told. But better fortified persons than poor little Minnie have quailed, if they did not waver, when their virtue was made sport of. It took real courage to go back to work next morn- ing; but Minnie went. One thing that helped her was her woman's hope that, when he came to think things over, he would understand, and be sorry for what he had done, and love her better than ever. All our early counsels advise us that this is virtue's re- ward. Or at least that is the way we interpret them. When experience fails to verify this expectation, we are very philosophic indeed if we are able to remind ourselves that the commonest and most natural effect of virtue upon lack of virtue is a fine pretence of con- tempt. Maybe it is pretence and maybe it isn't. But bravado demands a show of contempt; if we break a rule, we must make it appear that we break it, not because we haven't strength to keep it, but because we hold ourselves too clever to be bound by it. So what is there left for us to do toward those who still abide by the rule but look down upon their inferior THE GIRL WHO EARNS $6 A WEEK 141 intelligence? Even if, in his heart, Minnie's young man was forced to respect her, the hurt to his pride would never let him acknowledge it. And Minnie hoped in vain. She was very sore of spirit for a while. Then her bravado asserted itself. Their fellow- workers knew that something had happened between her and Ray; not many of them credited her with making the break. She must show them! Must let them see that she could get another fellow, and a better one than Ray. Then maybe they would believe that she had thrown Ray down! As soon as they could, she and Hazel moved. This time they avoided uninquiring landladies, and delib- erately bound themselves to entertain no men in their room. " I don't care," Minnie said. " The kind of a fellow I want is the kind I wouldn't want to have know I lived like this, anyway. If he's any good, he can find places to take me to when he wants to enjoy my society. The kind of fellow that wants to sit around in a parlour is a cheap skate, and I don't want none o' them. What we gotta do, though, if we want to be taken around by fellows that ain't afraid to spend, is to get ourselves some clothes, so a swell fellow won't be ashamed to be seen with us." To this end, they took the least desirable room on their list of possibilities; because they could get it for two dollars a week. It had no heat, except such as came in from the kitchen, and no light but that of a THE WORK-A-DAY GIRL small glass lamp, and no closet (of course), and there was no bathroom ; the toilet was down three flights of stairs, in a dark closet at the back of a black hall. Furthermore, the woman of whom they rented had a sickly baby that cried almost incessantly, and a hus- band who drank with nearly the same persistence. But the place was within walking distance of their work not a short walk, but still it could be done and they could spend on clothes just as large a part of five dollars weekly as they could induce their stomachs to do without. It was getting late in October, by this time, and every air the girls breathed was full of " winter clothes" : the office girls gathered in the washroom to discuss ulsters; the girls who sat across the table from Minnie and Hazel at the bakery lunch place joked merrily about cutting their food allowance to the limit, because they were saving to buy new furs or velvet shoes or a swell purple hat; the shop win- dows, which were one of the chief sources of enter- tainment and delight to Minnie and Hazel, were an endless display of gaily caparisoned wax ladies with velveteen suits and plumed hats and furs whose be- comingness was more alluring than their cold-defy- ingness; the girls and women in the streets were be- ginning to flaunt their winter gear; there was no get- ting away from the thing. But the best compromise they could make with their stomachs did not leave them quite three dollars a week THE GIRL WHO EARNS $6 A WEEK for clothes. Of course they did their own washing and semi-occasional ironing; for the former they had to buy naphtha soap, because only cold water was available; for the privilege of doing a bit of the latter at the landlady's range on Sunday mornings, they paid a dime. Their daily and Sunday newspaper which, obedient to one of the wisest of her instincts, is among the last things a working girl will deny her- self cost them eleven cents weekly. They limited their indulgence in nickel shows to two a week; their candy allowance to rare half-pounds from the five-and-ten-cent stores; their carfares to nothing at all. Yet the clothes funds grew slowly very slowly. One week Minnie had to have shoes. She bought velvet ones, which were what her heart craved; but even to her far-from-finicky taste, they mocked her battered hat and shabby suit, heart-breakingly. " By the time I get me a suit, or a ulster, and a good hat, the shoes'll be frights," Minnie wailed. " I can't get a hat fit to look at under $4.98 that's two weeks off; and by the time I've got twelve or fifteen dollars saved for a coat or suit, it'll be Christmas ! " This dilemma, disclosed in a burst of washroom confidence, led one of the other girls to ask Minnie why she didn't try the installment plan. Minnie was dumfounded, because she had never thought of it. [< The ninny I am ! " she cried. " An* me starin* them ads. in the face every day I live. Where's a good one o' them places ? " 144 THE WORK-A-DAY GIRL The girl recommended several, but one in particu- lar. " I get everything there," she went on. " It's a reg'lar department store that one is. Some is only for ready-made clothin'. But at Weffler's you can buy shoes an' gloves an' veils and jew'lry an' toilet articles, and anything. You have to tell 'em where you work, an' how much you get. I guess they rub- ber around some, to make sure you ain't stringin' 'em. Then you pay a dollar down, an' a dollar a week, or so." A dollar a week! And wear your clothes while you're paying for them ! It was a " cinch," as Minnie said. That evening she and Hazel could hardly think of eating they were so excited. They had a hasty " supper " of coffee and doughnuts, and hurried, their hearts beating deliriously, to the big " emporium " where, on the payment of only " a dollar down," they would be able to select a winter wardrobe. Hazel had determined on a suit, a hat, a silk waist, a pair of kid gloves, velvet shoes, and possibly a set of furs. Minnie was charmed with the new ulsters double- face cloth with self -trimming, and big buttons; she could see her outfit in her mind's eye : gray ulster, with purple cuffs, revers, and sailor collar; purple hat to match; purple kid gloves; and a purple messaline dress. They spent nearly three hours in the emporium hours of pure ecstasy. And they tried to be prudent THE GIRL WHO EARNS $6 A WEEK 145 in the face of so much temptation. Minnie sacrificed a velvet hat for a quite plain one of felt, and forced herself to turn from a purple messaline with gold lace trimming to one adorned simply with cream-coloured net. Hazel vacillated a long time between fur and feathers, feeling that she hardly dared have both. She had on her blue velveteen suit, pinned for altera- tions; and she tried the effect of furs and a plain hat, feathered hat and no furs, till Minnie declared Wef- fler's would charge her for wear and tear on them all. The salesgirl tried to help. " Are they for best or everyday wear?" she asked. " For both," Hazel laughed. " Then I b'leeve I'd take the furs an' the plainer hat. An' I dunno but I'd git me a cloth suit. They ain't so dressy; but if you wear velveteen to work in, it gits awful mangy-lookin'." "That's right," Minnie counselled. " An' the woman that calls you down if you wear too flossy things might tell you you couldn't wear that suit to work. Then you'd be sore ! " " I hear they're doin' that now in some places," the salesgirl said. " O' course they do it in the depart- ment stores. But wouldn't it jar you when they get t' doin' it in f act'ries ! " " We work in an office," Minnie declared with dig- nity. But Hazel accepted the advice given her, and though the department manager demurred about put- 146 THE WORK-A-DAY GIRL ting the pin-marked velveteen back in stock and tak- ing a double amount of fitter's time to pin a cloth suit, he finally yielded. And Minnie and Hazel, feeling that they had been very prudent indeed, were not so dismayed as they might well have been, when their respective purchases footed up to $41.75 and $42.47. On these amounts they must pay at least $1.75 a week, and of course they understood that the longer they took to pay the more their interest would mount up. They hadn't thought about interest; but they didn't say so. They agreed, however, to pay $2.00 a week each. That meant that by April, when they needed spring clothes, they would have the winter ones paid for. It seemed providentially kind and simple this " Weffler's Way " that they were learn- ing. " And if we get up against it fer underclo'es, we can get 'em here can't we ? " Minnie asked. " Surest thing you know," was the response ; which so assured Minnie that she added fifty cents to her bill, and ordered a bunch of artificial violets to put the finishing touch of elegance to her ulster. Hazel refrained from a similar extravagance; for Hazel had not yet bought her new hair, and her hat would " look fierce " until she got it. The new clothes were turned over to them on Fri- day evening, and worn to work on Saturday with effect electrical: two of the best-looking fellows in THE GIRL WHO EARNS $6 A WEEK 147 the mailing-cage asked Minnie and Hazel to go to sup- per with them that evening " and take in a show." :< You see," said Minnie when they were back in their little room at midnight, " what a difference a few good clothes make ! If you want to get any no- tion took of you, you gotta have some style about you. And anyway! Them clothes has saved us some money a'ready got us free dinners an' free shows an'll save us more. Say! that hamburger was bad huh? My! I didn't know there was anythin' in the world as good as that and them German frys. Hon- est, I didn't." The attentions of the young men continued not often to the extent of suppers and twenty-cent shows, for the young men earned only $12 a week, and they knew nothing of such self-denying frugalities as Min- nie and Hazel practised; but often to the extent of nickel shows and sometimes to the extent of a Satur- day night dance. But it was impossible to stay longer than an hour at a moving-picture show; the November nights were far too chill to permit of much comfort out of doors; and one cannot dance every night and work every day, even if one had the price of so many dances. Of Social Settlements and their classes Min- nie and Hazel knew nothing. Minnie had a bitter aversion for all benevolence, born of her experiences in " Homes " that were ill-managed. Hazel had no prejudices, but she shared Minnie's apathy with re- gard to self-improvement. They had no yearning to 148 THE WORK-A-DAY GIRL join any kind of a " class." They craved pleasure, and opportunity to exercise their feminine wiles to charm a mate. They would dearly have loved a hay- ride or a sleigh-ride, a candy-pull or a men's hat-trim- ming contest with its shrieks of superior feminine glee. They could have giggled coyly through " kiss- ing games," or played merrily at tableaux or charades; have bobbed for apples at Hallowe'en, or stalked in sheet and pillowcase, mystifying their best friends by comic devices. But none of these innocent gaieties came within their range. So they did what they could. When Joe and Walter took them to a nickel show, and they were out in the street again at eight-thirty, there was just one place, or one kind of place, that the boys knew of where they could go : into the back or side room of some saloon. If they went to a soda fountain they were expected to drink hurriedly and give place to others. But in one of these " family " rooms, reached through the " ladies' entrance," they could have a table for quite a while for the price of four beers. The room was warm; usually there were a number of other young people at the other tables; almost always there was " something doing " in the way of music : a phonograph or piano-player with an inexhaustible repertory of ragtime and popular songs; sometimes there would be a little impromptu dancing, or some fellow who had, or thought he had, a voice, would sing to the " canned " accompaniment. It was THE GIRL WHO EARNS $6 A WEEK 149 gay; and at first it looked as innocent as a country school-house spelling-bee. The girls did not touch the beer at first. Later, to avoid " bein' kidded," they drank a little. Their semi-starved bodies responded pleasurably to the least bit of alcoholic stimulant; the glow felt won- derfully good to them; and by and by they craved it found themselves looking forward to " a glass of something " when their day's work was done. At dances it sometimes happened that a fellow with whom they had taken a drink " got fresh " ; but the girls "called him " in no timid tones, and nearly al- ways he laughed it off, and no offence was taken. Once in a while some unknown, on the street, or at a nickel show, would chance a " Hello, Kiddo," but with no response. Minnie and Hazel were happy, as girls incline to be, with Joe and Walter; every work-day was fun, because the boys worked beside them; sev- eral evenings a week were red-letter evenings, spent in a gay quartette; Sundays nearly always had some little pleasuring. Two dollars a week went regularly and quite ungrudgingly to WefHer; and things were going very well indeed, according to the girls' idea of things, when business went into its January slump, and Minnie and Hazel were both " laid off." Things were dull everywhere. There is always room at the top, but seldom at the bottom for all who crowd there with their meagre efficiency. Minnie 150 THE WORK-A-DAY GIRL and Hazel were totally unskilled; they had neither special ability, nor general intelligence. It was a fore- gone conclusion that unless some intercession were made for them, some powerful influence exerted in their behalf, they would not be re-absorbed into the world's work until another seasonal rush created a de- mand for cheap " extras." But they did not realize this. Their experience was exceedingly limited, and no part of their colossally futile " education " had dealt out to them the most fundamental, kindergarten ideas about supply and demand, the uncertainties of the market for unskilled or semi-skilled labour, or anything like that ; although it had caused them to struggle with cube-root and to memorize a vast number of grammar rules which had no relation to language as the persons of their sphere used it to express themselves, and had held it shameful not to know the date of Brandy wine and the gist of the Monroe doctrine. So Minnie and Hazel stumbled more and more de- spairingly on; hunting for work as best they knew how to hunt, and picking up what few crumbs of in- formation they could get about the labour situation from other girls only a degree " wiser " and bitterer than themselves. They knew of no one they could go to for advice or for help. Joe and Walter " staked " them to a dinner now and then ; the land- lady was willing to wait as long as there seemed any hope of the girls getting work and paying her up THE GIRL WHO EARNS $6 A WEEK 151 but if she let their debt grow too huge, the probability of their ever discharging it would be remote; and she, poor creature, had her main subsistence off what they paid her. Quite promptly, on the failure of their weekly payment, Weffler's collector came, employing the time-honoured methods of " bawling out " and threatening. His manner made the girls apprehend nothing less than State's prison if their payments were not made. And no one had ever instructed them as to their rights, nor as to their wrongdoing, in a case like this. The same smirking complacence which had taught them cube-root, but not usurers' interest and their ways of collecting what the law does not allow, had taught them to pronounce the names of places on the field of Waterloo, but not to reckon what is and what is not a justifiable debt to incur or, having in- curred a debt, what is the legal and what the moral responsibility therefor. Because Weffler's collector was so terrifying they began to hate Weffler; to feel as if he had entrapped them. They forgot how eager they had been about " Weffler's Way," and how foolhardily they had reck- oned their ability to pay. They were hungry. They cooked coffee, mornings, on the landlady's stove, and ate dry rolls for breakfast. Luncheon they tried to forget about. Dinner was more coffee and dry rolls unless the boys bought them a meal. Hungry crea- tures snarl easily; and the girls resented the pathetic eagerness with which the landlady, her wailing baby 152 THE WORK-A-DAY GIRL at her flabby breast, would question them as to the result of their day's seeking; they thought she was trying to press them, and they overlooked her need to be pressing. Nothing made life even briefly endur- able except the occasional " glass of something " which the boys provided in those back or side rooms. Hungry creatures snarl easily, and they breed rap- idly. Cattle perishing of hunger on the plains, hu- man beings dying of famine in India or China, multi- ply like rabbits. There are two extremes that affect the passions: hunger and over- feeding; but want gnaws wildly, and repletion tends to somnolence. Nature has no morals as we define morality; and Na- ture in these girls was crying for food and crying, too, in the interests of the future crying that, whether they lived or whether they died, life should go on, and on. No part of their " education " had taught them to recognize that cry or how to answer it. Blindly they fought Nature in their waking hours, and while they slept she tormented them in dreams. No one stood by to tell them what it all meant, to fortify them for this so unequal fight. One evening when they came in from their fruit- less seeking they found their landlady sobbing, her head buried in her arms outstretched upon the kitchen table. It was Saturday; " he " had been paid off at four o'clock, and she had gone to his place of em- THE GIRL WHO EARNS $6 A WEEK 153 ployment, hoping to get some of his wages before he reached a saloon with them. " The rent's due, and I asked him fer it. He cursed me awful, an' yelled out that I should git it from youse," she sobbed. " I don't want to press you girls. I was in your fix a lot o' times before I got married that was why I took a chance on him. Good God! We're in fer it, whichever way we turn us women ! " Sullenly the girls boiled their cheap coffee and ate their bread. They were going to a dance with the boys, and they hoped that some one, during the even- ing, would buy them a little food along with " a glass of something." When Hazel and Walter were ready to start home they could not find Joe or Minnie. ... It was cold winter dawn-light when Minnie came in. "For God's sake where you been?" Hazel cried, wildly. Minnie flung herself on the bed without un- dressing. " Where I never thought I'd be ! " she laughed hys- terically. " I've given up, Hazel ; there ain't no more fight left in me. I gotta eat, and I dassent be particu- lar how I do it. I gotta have a bed to sleep on, and I dassent be particular who pays fer it because / can't. Joe says he'd ask me to marry him, but he can't on twelve a week. So we're goin' to do the next best thing." 154* THE WORK-A-DAY GIRL There was a moment's silence. Hazel understood, but no immediate reply came to her. "You're shocked," Minnie taunted, self-defen- sively. " I'm not," Hazel retorted. " I don't feel like I'm any better'n you, or you're any worse'n me. That ain't got nothin' to do with it, as I can see. We're up against it you see yer way out an' I don't see mine I don't blame you. I know it ain't what you would of done if you could of had a show. But well, I guess it's just the way you feel; you feel like it was worth that to live; / don't. That's all." Minnie melted. " It's on'y to see me through," she wept, her head on Hazel's shoulder. " I ain't goin' to stick to it a minute longer'n I have to. When the spring rush comes on I'm goin' back t' work. But I can't live on hopes an' virtue." "Minnie!" Hazel was on her feet, staring wildly, as if some- thing had suddenly run amuck in her poor, dazed brain. In the tenement hallway, as they talked, they had heard the stumbling, drunken footsteps of their land- lord. As Hazel jumped to her feet, they heard his wife's shrill scream of terror. Hazel clapped both hands to her ears, but there was no drowning out the sound of blows. She toppled faintly toward the door, opened it, and was gone. " Hazel ! He'll hurt you," Minnie screamed. But THE GIRL WHO EARNS $6 A WEEK 155 Hazel did not answer. Fear-frozen, Minnie sat on the edge of their dingy bed, and waited. In a minute or two, which seemed like an eternity, two frowsy, semi-attired men from the floor below, came carrying Hazel. They had picked her up, a limp bit of human wreckage, in the dark hallway, four floors below. VII MINIMUM WAGE THE last article written by William T. Stead for his own publication, The Review of Re- views, and so far as we know the last thing he wrote before going down to his death in the Ti- tanic, was on the outcome of the recent coal strike in England, and the passing of the Minimum Wage bill. The concluding paragraph of that valedictory ar- ticle is this: "When the Minimum bill was passing, a Scandinavian ob- server in the Lobby said: 'This is the greatest event that has happened since the French Revolution.' And a vision of a new Heaven and a new earth has undoubtedly begun to dawn on many darkened eyes all over the world." Therewith a trenchant pen concluded an advocacy of more than forty years in the passionate service of humanity. What is this vision of a new earth which is dawn- ing on darkened eyes all over the world ? It is this : "The body is not one member, but many. . . . And whether one member suffer, all the members suffer with it; or one member be honoured, all the members rejoice with it." Or, as a decree of the United States Supreme Court reminds us, the welfare of the whole nation is " no 156 MINIMUM WAGE 157 greater than the sum of all its parts " ; for " when the individual health, safety, and welfare are sacrificed or neglected, the state must suffer." We have endeavoured very valiantly, especially in the years since the French Revolution, to palliate the suffering of some members of our social body. We are waking to a realization that most of our earnest charity is no better than an opiate : it deadens pain but does not cure the cause; and it breeds, like all opiates, a horrid habit. For a long time we handed out this palliation more or less unquestioningly ; it eased our consciences, and it seemed to ease a little of the world's want and pain for which we felt so comfortably irresponsible! Then we advanced in diagnosis; we saw that what we have been doing is a weak evasion, as if we were keeping down the pain of an ulcer with morphine and disregarding the practical certainty of blood- poisoning. We have learned, too, that circulation in the social system is as circuit-completing as in the physical. And now, because we know we are one body with many members, we are alarmed by the number of impotent poultices we wear, and by the danger of blood-poisoning. We demand that these poultices be stripped off; we look, not without nausea, at the sores; and we cry to Science for a cure. Science repli.es to us that a cure cannot be local: it must reach back to prime causes; that the outward 158 THE WORK-A-DAY GIRL sore is but the indication of impure blood, and to attack the sore without purifying the blood is only to leave the evil germs to make a new attack. We have known this for some time in physiology; we are only waking to it in sociology. And that is the vision of a new earth which has begun to dawn. People used to believe that disease was a dispensa- tion from God. When they learned that it was, very largely, a penalty of dirt and disorder, we will hope that they apologized to the Deity for their former im- piety. They used to think that pestilence was " a visitation," and that it could not be cured. Now we know that it can flourish only through gross negli- gence and it is practically eradicated from the civ- ilized world. There are still some people who think that poverty other people's poverty! is either by the will of God or because the poor " have got all they deserve "; and that insanity and immorality and crime are devastating disorders that must be endured. But they are NOT ! They are the outcome of gross negli- gence; and they can be as nearly eradicated as is smallpox, from which, also, the world suffered through many centuries until we learned how to pre- vent it! And that is why the passing of the Minimum Wage bill was understandingly pronounced the " greatest event that has happened since the French Revolu- tion." Because it proclaims our discovery that, just as there was once a degree of filth which bred small- MINIMUM WAGE 159 pox that rotted kings on their thrones as well as peas- ants in their huts, so there is a degree of poverty which breeds grievous disorders that we have no right to bear and every right to eradicate. England has realized that when the father of a family delved in the bowels of the earth for the coal which is the essential basis of England's prosperity, and got for his long day of fatiguing, life-endanger- ing labour less than five shillings ($1.20), he was not being paid enough to sustain himself and his family in decency and safety; enough to maintain them in health and in surroundings which might encourage self-respect and discourage vice, crime, and other dis- orders of poverty. What standard of human effi- ciency it is possible to maintain on $7.20 a week, without obliging the wife to become a wage-earner, to the neglect of her children, or sending the children to work at the earliest moment the law will allow, it is not the purpose of this one small article to discuss. This is an attempt to state the urgent economic necessity of a minimum wage law for women workers in these United States; of laws, rather for each State must, of course, make its own. In 1900 there were in the United States, according to the reports of the census, 4,833,630 women bread- winners of 16 years and over, or one out of every five in the population. The Government has under- taken to find out all it can about the earnings of those millions of women; how many of them are com- 160 THE WORK-A-DAY GIRL pletely self-supporting; how many are the partial or sole support of others besides themselves; and so on. And on the nth of May, 1911, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts authorized its Governor to " ap- point a commission of five persons, citizens of the Commonwealth, of whom at least one shall be a woman, one shall be a representative of labour, and one shall be a representative of employers, to study the matter of wages of women and minors, and to report on the advisability of establishing a board or boards to which shall be referred inquiries as to the need and feasibility of fixing minimum rates of wages for women or minors in any industry." The com- mission presented its report in January, 1912. The Massachusetts census of 1905 gave the total number of females gainfully employed in that State as 380,675. Many of these were in the cotton textile industry, which was admirably covered in the Fed- eral investigation, and the Massachusetts commission made use of these figures and added to them its own investigation of three others : retail stores, candy fac- tories, and laundries. " Thus altogether, informa- tion, more or less detailed but all of a thoroughly re- liable character, being based upon payrolls and first hand inquiries by trained investigators, was gathered covering 15,278 female wage-earners engaged in four different occupations in the Commonwealth." They found that 41 per cent, of the candy workers, 10.2 per cent, of the saleswomen, 16.1 per cent, of MINIMUM WAGE 161 the laundry workers, and 23 per cent, of the cotton workers earn less than five dollars a week; and that 65.2 per cent, of the candy workers, 29.5 per cent, of the saleswomen, 40.7 per cent, of the laundry work- ers, and 39.9 per cent, of the cotton workers earn le$s than six dollars a week. The Government found that considerably more than a fourth of the store girls and women and just a third of the factory girls and women investigated earn less than six dollars a week ; and that more than two-thirds of them earn less than eight dollars a week. The Government figures show that more than one- fifth of these girls and women are completely self- dependent and in many cases the partial or whole sup- port of others (on an average wage of $7.33, which high average more than a fourth of them do not come within $1.33 of touching) ; and of those who live at home, more than four-fifths contribute their entire earnings to the family fund. " What," asks the Government report, " has this condition to do with the faith current among so many employers and accepted by the public that the girls who have homes work only for ' pin-money ' ? " And what constitutes the right of the employer to make his wages to women on a pin-money basis, smugly replying to all criticism that he knows girls cannot live on the wages he pays but that he " endeavours to employ only girls living at home " ? If a girl worker is a member of a family of five 162 THE WORK-A-DAY GIRL who all work (the mother as housekeeper for the group) and they live in five rooms for which they pay $3.25 a week, her share of the rent will be 65 cents. If the heat and light cost $1.50 a week, her share will be 30 cents. If the furniture cost $300 and the annual upkeep is $25, her share of the in- terest on the investment and of the repair and re- placements will be 15 cents a week. If the cost of food for five is $10, her share will be $2. And if the services of the mother are reckoned at $8 a week (based on rates for housework, with board) the girl's share will be $1.60. This totals $4.70 which a girl living in a decent home should contribute as her share of its support. The same authorities (30 prominent social workers in conference on " what it would cost a woman of average ability, initiative, and intelligence when liv- ing at home, and also when living away from home, to secure the necessary comforts of life ") estimated the fair personal expenses of such a worker to be: Carfares .......... $0.52 Clothes .......... 1.92 Dentistry, doctor's fees, medicine, oculist ..... 52 Recreation and vacation . . ...... 54 Education (papers, magazines) ....... 07 Church . . ......... TO This would put the minimum wage for such a worker at $8.37 a week exclusive of savings or in*- surance, and taking for granted 52 weeks of pay MINIMUM WAGE 163 which only a small fraction of all these workers receive. So that if an employer hires a girl or woman, a member of an average family who live in a tenement even as decent as can be rented for $14 a month, and knows that she is one of four wage-earners none of whom contributes less than $4.70 a week to the family support, he can justify himself in paying her less than $8.37 a week ^only by denying her right to spend $100 a year on clothes, or $27 a year on the preservation of her health, or a little more than that on a two weeks' vacation and fifty weeks of such recreation as can be bought for twenty-five cents a week. Yet few girls working for a low weekly wage live in families where there are three other continu- ously employed workers none of whom contributes less than $4.70 to the family budget. And 57.5 per cent, of store employes and 74.3 per cent, of factory workers earn less than $8 a week. For the girl or woman not living at home, the fol- lowing estimate was made: Rent and carfare $3.00 Food 4.60 Laundry .&5 ftyjjjj^ Clothes . ... .... 1.92 * Dentistry, doctor's fees, medicine and oculist's fees . . .42 Recreation and vacation 54 Church 10 Education (newspapers) 07 Total $10.60 164 THE WORK-A-DAY GIRL Here, again, is no margin for unemployment, sick- ness, accident, nor for saving toward old age; nor for those contributions to needy relatives which almost every self-supporting woman makes. In determining what rent a woman should be able to pay to maintain her efficiency and her self-respect, the conference decided that: " She should have a window in her room. " She should have a room larger than a hall bedroom because this room is her home, where she receives her friends of both sexes and passes her leisure. " She should have a heated room, and not have to rely on an oil or gas stove for heat, on account of her health. "The standard should not require her to live in one room with another woman. She may prefer to do so, but most wage- earners over twenty-five, where they can possibly do so, room alone, showing a willingness to sacrifice other things for privacy." Rooms of this sort, comfortably furnished, lighted, and heated, in respectable rooming houses within walking distance of industrial centres, are hard to find for less than $3.00 a week. " The principles considered in determining a standard of food were that it should be sufficient in quantity, quality, and variety, to preserve health." Four dollars a week for food allows 15 cents each for breakfast and luncheon, and 25 cents for dinner, with 15 cents a week for fruit or other extras. " Board and lodging with heat and light would be $7.00 a week at the lowest in a decent boarding house with a standard room." (This was based on Boston prices. They are hardly lower in any of the principal cities, although they would be considerably less in small communities.) MINIMUM WAGE 165 The laundry allowance is based on the presump- tion that the girl will wash her own handkerchiefs, stockings, flannels, and send away principally shirt- waists and a limited supply of muslin underwear. With one hundred dollars a year to spend for clothing a worker who refrains from the tax on her strength of more sewing at night than is necessitated by mending and remodelling will have to be an intel- ligent buyer to make a good appearance on that dress allowance. The St. George's Working Girls' Club of New York City estimated $65.85 as the smallest practicable yearly expenditure for clothing for a self- supporting girl in New York. But they reckoned on two pairs of $2 shoes, which is insufficient for most girls ; and their allowance was based on such items as " i flannel petticoat, 25 cents; 4 corset covers at 25 cents, $i ; 2 combination suits at 50 cents, $i ; and so on including two hats at $2.50, $5." Whereas in the Working Girls' Budgets tabulated by Mrs. Clark and Miss Wyatt ("Making Both Ends Meet") few girls were found who were able to dress themselves for $65 a year, even when they earned much less than the $8 a week which the St. George's Club estimated as the smallest wage on which a girl could live in decent comfort and have a margin of $65 for clothes. And this brings us to the question propounded: "Who pays the deficit?" From $8 to $10 is the variously computed mini- mum at which a woman or girl worker may maintain 166 THE WORK-A-DAY GIRL efficiency by affording herself " the necessary com- forts of life." Less than a third of our women or girl workers earn so much as $8 a week. Who pays the deficit? If the underpaid girl lives at home, and contributes less than her fair share of the family expense, her father if she has one, and he is working and paying all that he earns for day-to-day family upkeep pays part of the deficit, either by having to forego saving for his old age, or by a continued denial of his desire for comforts. The average workingman has reached the zenith of his earning powers long before he has a child old enough to go to work. He has probably, while sup- porting a wife and three or four or more children, been able to make no provision for those days of declining industrial worth which set in so comparatively early for him. When his daughter goes to work, she should be able to relieve the strain by a little more than the cost of her keep; but she should be able to do it without those hardships of renunciation to which so very many of our young workers are driven by their parents' desperate desire to save against old age. The girl's mother pays part of the deficit if the household budget is too small to provide her with a share of unchallenged income for her personal de- sires. The girl's younger brothers and sisters pay a part MINIMUM WAGE 167 of the deficit if they have to be hurried into the wage- earning ranks the moment the law will allow, re- gardless of whether they are fitted to take a place in industry that may give them a good opportunity for competence. (About 90 per cent, of the boys and even more of the girls who leave school at or under fourteen to go to work enter industries whose av- erage weekly wage for all employes is under $10. And so great a commonwealth as Massachusetts has to admit that only 2 per cent, of her army of child- workers are in high-grade industries where they can hope to maintain themselves and, eventually, their families in decent comfort.) And the girl herself pays the deficit in many ways. She almost undoubtedly pays part of it in too-crowded living quarters where she has no parlour to which she can bring her friends (obliging her to have her social life in the amusement parks and dance halls and skating rinks and on the crowded streets, all beyond the guardianship of her parents) and where she sleeps in a small, perhaps unventilated, room with one or two other members of the family. The phys- ical drain of modern industry, with its constantly in- creasing tendency toward " speeding up/' is frightful. And the recuperation so desperately needed is hard to get in such sleeping quarters as the vast majority of underpaid working girls are herded into. She pays it in insufficient food, quite certainly. (Pro- fessor Frank Underhill of Yale estimates that of 168 THE WORK-A-DAY GIRL families with less than $600 income 76 per cent, are underfed; they eat actually less than enough to repair the waste of tissues and supply heat and energy.) Or, if she does not pay in hunger for food, she must pay in hunger for pretty clothes and for girlish pleas- ures, as Well as in foregoing a vacation and probably in neglecting her teeth or other things necessary to her health. And when the girl is idle (as the " seasonal " nature of many industries causes so many thousands of girls to be for weeks out of every year) the family pays the deficit in supporting the girl whose inadequate wages have left her nothing to save. If she is ill, the family pays if it can if not, the community pays with its clinics and hospitals. The " girl adrift," as the Government characterizes the girl not living at home and solely dependent on her own resources, pays the deficit in hunger of some sort, if not of many sorts. Most commonly she pays it in hunger for food. If she does not do this, she denies herself many little indulgences in dress and pleasure, which denial is more than likely to make her bitter in heart. She pays in health if she tries to save in the price of lodging; if she wearies herself by working at night, washing and ironing, mending and making, to present a decent appearance without sacrifice of sufficient food; if she neglects her eyes or her teeth because she cannot afford to have them attended to; if she MINIMUM WAGE 169 cannot give herself a restful vacation; if she is ner- vous, yet forces herself to keep down her room-rent by having a room-mate whose tastes clash with hers; and so on. Sometimes she pays that deficit in morals; not because she is weaker than she should be, but because the pressure upon her is much stronger than it has any right to be. Where she resists, she shows a sturdy power far, far beyond what I dare to believe I should have under equal pressure, to be met with equal advantages. When she falls, it is seldom if ever for clothes, or even for food in the first in- stance. She falls because she thinks some fellow loves her; and the strongest desire in her is, by Nature's ordering, the desire for love. Afterward when she feels that, having begun, she may as well go on she may cold-bloodedly acknowledge to her- self, and even to you, that she is " in it " for fun or for feathers. But the vilest vulture that preys on the weakness of girls will admit that they must prac- tically always be wooed to the downward path with some pretence of love. And, lastly, the community pays that deficit in part. The community helps to ease the mind of many employers every time it contributes toward the support of some Home where girls adrift may board for $2.50 or for $3 a week. There are never enough of these places to house one in a hundred of the girls adrift. But without troubling to find that out, or to 170 THE WORK-A-DAY GIRL remember it if the fact has been called to his atten- tion, the salary-paring superintendent, eager to make a great showing for his hundred-million-dollar boss, goes on hiring girls at wages no girl can live on; and, if reprehended, retorts that "there are plenty of Homes where they can get board for $2.50 a week." The community pays the deficit of those girls in other ways ; in fresh air charities and vacation funds ; in tubercular asylums; in clinics and hospitals; in Homes for the Aged Poor, and for the friendless ; in Juvenile and Night Courts; in Maternity Homes and Erring Women's Refuges; in industrial schools; and sometimes in prisons and houses of correction. Only 8 per cent, of the women in our penal institutions are serious offenders; the others are what are known as " accidental or occasional " criminals, and those that have come out of the industrial world have come, almost without exception, out of the ranks of the poorly paid. For an employer to answer his workers, and you and me, that he cannot afford to make up any of this deficit is no excuse. As the report of the Massachu- setts Commission says : " If an industry is perma- nently dependent for its existence on underpaid labour, its value to the Commonwealth is question- able." But few, if any, industries are so dependent. The cost of labour in a pound of chocolates which whole- MINIMUM WAGE 171 sale at fifty cents is from 4 to 5% cents. What part of the other 45 cents may be charged to the cost of materials, overhead charges, and cost of doing busi- ness I do not attempt to say ; although it seems doubt- ful that a manufacturer would let them total much more than four times the cost of labour which would still leave him a net profit of 100 per cent. A company owning a number of five-and-ten-cent stores, and wishing to increase its capital stock, assured prospective shareholders that: " Five-cent articles cost $2.50 to $5.50 per gross, and ten-cent articles $5.50 to $11 per gross, showing a profit of 33 per cent, to 188 per cent, on the cost.'* Yet there is almost no other labour in the country so poorly paid as that of the overworked girls in the five-and-ten-cent stores. Boston finds that more than 12 per cent, of its girls and women employed in retail businesses receive help from organized charity. The percentage would probably be higher in some other cities. Think of this, the next time you pride fully escort a country cousin through one of your city's many-million-dollar department stores. Think of it, you in the small town, the next time you gloat over a " bargain " in your five-and-ten-cent store. The man-of -many-millions who owns an ocean-to- ocean chain of five-and-ten-cent stores cannot answer you that, out of his hundred per cent, gross profit, he is unable to pay his girl employes a living wage. He 172 THE WORK-A-DAY GIRL must answer, if you can get him to answer at all, that while the wage he pays f( may not be " half enough to subsist on, it is all the girls are worth to him, and that he never has the slightest difficulty in getting plenty of girls to work for it. And as long as the Law allows him to so do, he may take advantage of its latitude and try to cut the throats of such competitive merchants as have seen a vision of a new day and are endeavouring to live by it. Even in the days when sea-piracy was at its worst there was a preponderance of men whose consciences were infinitely above such villainy. But it was grimly enforced Law on the high seas that put down piracy and not the example of the conscientious. A noble example of enlightened and high-minded merchandizing has recently been given in Boston, where the following circular was issued : MINIMUM WAGE SCALE EFFECTIVE BEGINNING MARCH I, IQI2 Much work has been done by our employes, by the Filene Co-operative Association, and by the Manage- ment to increase the efficiency of our force. In view of this and also of the needs of our coming New Store, we believe the time has come when we can justly and for the benefit of the business make the following announcement : MINIMUM WAGE 173 The study of conditions has convinced the man- agement that a female must have a wage of at least $8.00 to pay her way, living even very moderately. While a great part of our female force now receives more than $8.00 a week (our saleswomen, for in- stance, averaging $10.00), we have apprentices, bun- dle desk girls, examiners, etc., who now get less than $8.00 per week. With this in mind, and believing that every one in our employ can make themselves worth $8.00 a week, beginning March i, we shall establish a Mini- mum Wage of $8.00 a week for females, and, on a sliding scale, a Minimum Wage of $6.00 a week for males (boys, etc.), under the following votes of the Board of Managers That beginning March first, 1912, no female in our employ shall receive a fixed wage of less than eight dollars ($8.00) per week. Any tem- porary female employe hired for a period of less than a week shall receive a wage of not less than $1.50 per day. No male employe shall receive a fixed wage of less than $6.00 per week for the first six months of employment, of less than $7.00 per week for the second six months, nor of less than $8.00 per iveek if employed for one year or longer. Male employes engaged for a period of 174 THE WORK-A-DAY GIRL less than one week shall receive a wage of not less than $1.00 per day. BOARD OF MANAGERS, F. W. TULLY, Chairman. This is an answer better far than any argument you or I could make to the reiteration that four and five dollar wages are all that it is practicable to pay, in view of competition among employers and of the over-supply of cheap help; and that such wages are all that the girls who receive them can possibly make themselves worth to the firm. Kindly note the declaration of the managers of this big department store, that they believe there is no apprentice, bundle wrapper, or other girl in their employ who cannot make herself worth $8.00 a week ; AND THEN NOTE THAT AS A FIRST STEP TOWARD SUCH EFFICIENCY THEY PAY HER THE EIGHT DOLLARS! They do this not because they want to make a noble test of a noble theory; but because their experience in the results of fair treatment for their workers jus- tifies them in their expectation that this announce- ment will be " for the benefit of the business." That is enlightened common sense. It is, however, too much enlightenment to expect from some, save under compulsion. So, when your Association of Commerce, or your City Club, or your Federation of Women's Clubs, or whatever agency for social betterment is yours, gets MINIMUM WAGE 175 before your legislature a bill to establish a Minimum Wage Board, you write to your assemblyman and to your state senator, and say: " I'm tired of paying my share of the deficit. I am tired of seeing working women and their families paying their far heavier share of it. / want that bill passed" And when your assemblyman or your senator dis- regards your plea and argues in defence of his act that the appointment of Minimum Wage Boards is "of doubtful constitutionality/' reply to him by the next mail that you will welcome any amendment to the Constitution which may make it more conform- able to the spirit of the times. If, then, he hedges by declaring that such wage arbitration cannot be made practicable, refer him to what has been accomplished in Australia and New Zea- land, and in England even before the coal strike. Then, when you have helped to get such a law passed, do not think to rest! The making of laws is comparatively easy; the enforcement of them is enormously difficult. The success of such a law will lie with the number and the vigilance of the volun- teers who will make its enactment their business. Don't let it become another of those dead-letter laws for which humanitarians have fought valiantly. Your power and mine seem dishearteningly lim- ited against some abuses, but here at least we can do a good deal. To a producer or a merchant every 176 THE WORK-A-DAY GIRL purchaser is sovereign; every buyer's good opinion is courted; no customer is affronted if he can possibly be pleased. It is a long way from us to the repre- sentatives who make our laws and much lies be- tween. It is a short way from us to the man who wooes our wages and courts our trade. Good lusty public opinion will reach him promptly. See to it that the minimum wage board bill is passed in your State. If you are not benevolent, do this because you are selfish. If you are not selfish, do it because you are benevolent. Remember that "whether one member suffer, all the members suffer with it; or one member be honoured, all the members rejoice with it." Or, as Jane Addams says : " The best speculative philosophy sets forth the solidarity of the human race; the highest moralists have taught that, without the advance and improvement of the whole, no man can hope for any lasting improvement in his own moral or material individual condition." The seers have had this vision from aforetime. But now, as Stead declared with his final words, it " has undoubtedly begun to dawn on many darkened eyes all over the world." BEING PREPARED TO EARN THEIR LIVING. These little girls will never wander about looking for " Girl Wanted " signs. They are heing taught, in a public trade school, to make straw hats. They will probably have jobs awaiting them, and they will not have to start on apprentice pay. VIII MAMIE'S DEFICIT ON the way home from school in the afternoon Mamie met Rose Smulska, who used to live " upstairs of " Mamie. " Ain't you workin' ? " Mamie asked. " No; I'm laid off. It's fierce. My pa's sick all winter." "Can't you git you another job?" " I'm lookin'. But this here's a slack time ; there ain't hardly nobody hirin'. I chase aroun' all I can without spendin' carfare. But gee! you git sore when you been turned down about ten times a day." " I'm goin' to be fourteen by May," Mamie said. " I hope they'll be hirin' good then." " You can't never tell," Rose answered. " I s'pose you'll stay in school till June ; won't you ? " Mamie didn't know. Some one had told her that it would be better to hunt a job as soon as she was fourteen and could get a " stif'kit," because at the end of June there are thousands of fourteen-year-old girls looking for jobs either vacation or steady jobs. "That's right," Rose agreed, gravely. "I'll tell you what, though! If I was you, I'd stay in school 177 178 THE WORK-A-DAY GIRL up to sixteen, if you can. I b'lieve you git better chances." , Mamie shook her head. " I don't know's I can," she said. " But in some ways I'd like to. I'm pretty good at learnin'; I'm in seventh grade already. Teacher's awful nice; but the eighth grade teacher ain't the kids hate her; maybe I wouldn' learn good next year, anyways." Rose looked at her as one old in experience looks at the young who are so blissfully ignorant. Rose was sixteen and had been a wage-earner for two years. " Take it from me," she counselled, " there ain't no teacher that's in it with most foreladies fer bein' mean. Teachers dassen't be as mean as foreladies dast!" " Dassent they?" Mamie echoed, apprehensively. "You bet not!" This was putting upon wage-earning a new aspect for Mamie, who had thought of it as a delightful ad- venture, even apart from the crowning feature, the pay envelope. She was still pondering when she reached home. Mamie's father was a teamster. He earned twelve dollars a week when he " was on reg'lar," and he was a bit more than ordinarily steady in his habits and successful in getting jobs and fortunate in the posses- sion of health. Once he had had pneumonia, and since then he had to be a little more careful about MAMIE'S DEFICIT 179 exposure ; and every winter he was more or less both- ered with rheumatism. But he was a perfect tower of health and strength compared with most of the men of his age in their tenement, their neighbour- hood. In consequence of this, and of the compara- tively small amounts he spent on beer and tobacco, his family lived on a far more even plane of comfort than most of the families they knew. They paid eleven dollars a month for their four rear rooms. That was more than they could afford; but Mrs. Costello (Mamie's ma) could not find a three-room flat, and though there were four-room flats to be had for nine dollars, they were few and highly undesirable in damp basements, in old frame houses impossible to heat in winter, or at great dis- tance from Joe's work. (This was in Chicago, where rents, especially tenement rents, are very much lower than in New York.) So they took the eleven-dollar rooms and sub-let one of them, or a part of one, as they could. Mrs. Costello had tried various kinds of lodgers and boarders. Sometimes she let the room, without board, to a man, for two dollars a week. This would have been an ideal arrangement if some of the lodgers had not been obstreperous when they were drunk, and some had not been lecherous when they were sober, and some had not been bad pay and so on. Two or three experiences had made Mrs. Costello think fearfully for Mamie and Nellie and she let her room, next, to " a widow lady " who paid 180 THE WORK-A-DAY GIRL only a dollar and a quarter a week and, having few interests of her own, had too many of her neighbours' and was in consequence exasperatingly " incompat- ible." Sometimes she had a boarder a boy earning small wages, whom she lodged in the room with her own two boys, and fed for $2.50 or $3.00 a week; or a working girl who roomed with Mamie and Nellie and paid a like sum. The flat was like most four-room flats in tenement houses of the cheaper class : it had two fair-sized rooms and off each of them a small bedroom. One of the fair-sized rooms was the kitchen; the other was " the rentin' room." The disposition of the family in their available sleeping-space depended on " who had the rentin' room," because (as is usually the case) the small room off it had no communication with the kitchen and other small room, except through the " rentin' room." If there was a man lodger, Mrs. Costello put Joe and the boys in that " front " bed- room, took Nellie and Annie in with her, and made Mamie a shake-down in the kitchen. If the lodger were female, she and two of the girls would move into the " front " room and leave the kitchen bedroom to Joe and the boys. If they had a boy-boarder, it was awkward and unpleasant because either Mamie and Nellie, or Mrs. Costello and Annie, had to go back and forth through the boy's room to the kitchen. A girl boarder was better, for some reasons, but still a disturber of family life, because Mr. Costello was MAMIE'S DEFICIT 181 separated from his wife and relegated with the boys to the kitchen-quarters. Mrs. Costello was usually, now that all her children, except possibly Annie, were of age when the decencies should be considered, at her wits' end to know how to parcel out her flock and get from that " rentin' room " something con- siderable toward the rent. This may seem like a good deal of consideration to devote to the Costellos' housing problem; but in reality it is far too little as I hope presently to help you to see. When Mamie came in from school, her mother was ironing. The day was damp and chill Winter was lingering in the lap of Spring. Mr. Costello's thick woolen underwear had not dried out of doors, and it was hanging on a line in the kitchen, along with Annie's " galatea " dress, and Mrs. Costello's gray cotton-flannel petticoat, and sundry other slow- drying things. The room smelled of soap-suds of those that had " boiled over " onto the stove, and of those Mrs. Costello had dumped on the floor when her washing was done, to give it a " broom scrub- bing"; the boards were still wet and reeking of suds. Annie (who was seven) had not gone to school that day because she had a sore throat; for the same reason, her mother was afraid to let her go out to play; so she was confined to the kitchen the only room that had any heat in it and she had Bessie Cohen in to play with her. 182 THE WORK-A-DAY GIRL " Wash them dishes, will you, Mamie? " her mother said, nodding toward the sink where the lunch dishes were piled. Mamie took off her hat and coat and got out the dish-pan. " I seen Rose Smulska when I was comin' home," she said. " Her pa's been sick all winter, and she ain't got no work." " Her pa ain't never goin' to git no better," Mrs. Costello declared, not unsympathetically yet with that matter-of-fact acceptance of such situations which comes from much experience of them. " He's got the con; I could see it comin' when they lived here. I'm thankful your pa ain't no tailor not that it's a real man's business, anyhow! Teamin's hard, but it's healthier. I wonder what them Smulskis'll do nine of 'em ! Lord ! " " Rose says if she was me she'd try'n' stay in school till I'm sixteen," Mamie said more intent on her own prospects than on the Smulskis'. "Why?" " She thinks you git on better if you got more edu- cation. It's hard to git took on in a good job when you're on'y fourteen, she says." " Well, if you was learnin' anything in school that might help you but land! seems to me you'd be learnin' faster if you had almost any kind of a job an' be drawin' pay besides! I'll be awful glad when MAMIE'S DEFICIT 183 you can earn enough so's we can pay the rent without havin' no lodger." Yes; Mamie would be glad of that, too. Even if she could only get three dollars or three and a half a week, it would be enough to pay her carfare, buy her shoes and clothes, and help the family dispense with a stranger in the house. Mamie's pa, when the matter was broached to him, couldn't see what Mamie might hope to get in two more years of schooling that would recompense her for staying on and him for keeping her there. "If they learned you anything you could earn a livin' with, I wouldn't care," he said. " But, like it is, I don't see it. I'll be glad when you can earn your keep. I'm forty, an' it won't be no matter of a hundred years before bosses git to thinkin' I'm too old to drive a team, or my rheumatiz'll be that bad I can't git the best of it. I ain't never laid up a cent of all I've earned ain't got a ' red ' between me and the poorhouse. Strikes me you might as well fall to, when the time comes." So Mamie went to work in May; she got a job as errand girl in a cheap department store, at a weekly wage of three-fifty. The store was fully a mile and a half from her home, and as she was on her feet all day the walk to and from work seemed a hardship; but she usually endured it, because fifty cents was all her mother gave her back, each week, out of her pay envelope. A dollar of the three "went again' the 184 THE WORK-A-DAY GIRL rent," a dollar " again' food," and the third dollar for clothes and shoes principally, it seemed, for shoes; Mamie had to have a pair at least every six weeks, and several pairs of ten-cent stockings. She carried her lunch with her a couple of pieces of bread and a piece of pie or cake, an apple or a doughnut. But it was hard to save anything from supper for the next day's lunch the boys would always eat up everything in sight and in the morn- ing there was little time to stop and buy a bke of something. Moreover, dry, cold lunch did not " taste good " to a growing girl who was making heavy de- mands on her energy; and most of the other girls bought lunch in the store lunch-room, or outside. Mamie was " crazy " to buy lunch ; to sit at a table or counter and have things served to her order. She liked the food and she liked the sensation of choosing. It made her feel blissfully important to " order " and get what she ordered ! But the cheapest " meal " of currant buns and coffee or baked beans without bread, or rolls and cream-slice, was ten cents. And out of which of those three dollars could Mamie hope to requisition sixty cents? She asked her ma, and her ma agreed to give her thirty cents weekly out of the food-allowance; the rest she would have to make up out of her fifty cents for carfare. Alternately, Mamie trudged and bought lunch, rode and ate " three bananas fer a nickel " or, on very hot days, tried to sustain life and (what is equally dear MAMIE'S DEFICIT 185 to the heart of youth) delight, on a " five-cent soda." Sometimes she " fell fer " a nickel show at the ex- pense either of food or feet as she chose. Once on Fourth of July she went to an amusement park and " blew in " thirty cents, which crippled her finances all the rest of the week. During the intense, humid heat of the " dog-days," Joe Costello suffered a sunstroke and narrowly es- caped more serious injury by falling off his wagon. He was laid up for ten days; but that was, as re- garded suffering and loss of pay, nothing compared with his fear that he might thereafter be considered less " safe " to trust with horses and loads than he had been before. It had long been his custom to give his wife nine dollars of his weekly twelve, keeping three for his lunches, beer, tobacco, clothes, and Union dues. Out of her nine dollars she paid rent, bought fuel, and paid gas-bills, fed seven, and clothed six. Mamie's wages helped to the extent of nearly three dollars a week. That didn't pay Mamie's way, but it was "something," and it seemed to her parents to be urgently needed. At the end of three months, Mamie was " raised to four " dollars. But she got a dollar a week of it for carfare, lunches, and spending money, and very nearly a dollar more for shoes and clothes. She was eking out the family income by not more than ten dollars a month. Still, that nearly paid the rent. 186 THE WORK-A-DAY GIRL Mamie had deep longings for pretty things, but in the main she stifled these longings although once in a great while she " fell " (as she phrased it) for a ten- cent string of beads or a red ruching or a new hair- bow, or some other thing that was not necessary to cover nakedness of body; she had more or less con- tinual hunger, like all young, growing things, for food not merely that which fills the stomach but that which satisfies the cravings of the " sweet tooth " and of the eye but in the main she stifled this hunger, too, although she indulged it to the extent of spend- ing her ten cents on two sweets, sometimes, instead of on rolls and milk which would have been better for her; she had her full share of youthful ardour for excitement, for entertainment, for romance in life, but she resigned herself with fairly good grace to the idea that these things were, in the main, impos- sible to her. One day, a girl in the store who had taken quite a liking to Mamie, asked Mamie to go to her house for supper on Sunday evening. Mamie had never been to anybody's house " to eat " except to the houses of some of her relatives. She was shy about going, but her eagerness was greater than her shy- ness. When she came home, her eyes were shining. " Oh, Ma ! " she cried, " they live grand. They got six rooms a parlour an' a dinin'-room an' a kitchen an' three bedrooms. We et in the dinin'- MAMIE'S DEFICIT 187 room. They had ham an' potato salad an* bread an' butter an' choc'late cake an' tea an' canned peaches. It was swell. An' after supper we set in the parlour, an' they have a phonograph. There was another girl there besides me, and two real nice boys they go to her church. Say, Ma ! How much d'you suppose six-room flats cost ? " " More'n we'll ever be able to pay," her mother answered. " Your pa ain't never goin' to make no more'n he does now, an' it's on'y a question o' time till he gits to be an ' extra,' on odd shifts an' no tellin' what he'll git for a week's work. I used to have dreams of a sittin'-room, an' all that goes with it; but I've give 'em up, long ago." " I can't never ask Myrtle to come here" Mamie declared. "No, you can't an' I'm sorry fer it! I'd like fer you to go with nice folks, an' be somebody! I'd be willin' to work my fingers to the bone if I knew how I could git you them things. But what kin / do ? An' what kin your pa do? He's a good, steady, hard-workin', reliable man. But he don't earn no more wages now'n what a boy of eighteen kin earn at drivin', an' hardly any more'n he earned when we was married. Yet he's took care of seven, an* I can't say as we've ever been what you could just call hungry, once! I'd hate fer him to think we was complainin' he might git discour'ged. An' I'd hate fer you to git discour'ged, neither. I'll tell you what 188 THE WORK-A-DAY GIRL I'll do: If yer pa'll agree to it, he kin take the kitchen bedroom with the boys, like he used to do sometimes, and me an' you three girls kin have two beds in the other bedroom, if we don't try to have nothin' else in; an' I'll try to fix up the front room for a parlour, so's you kin have a place to ask yer frien's to." "Will you? Oh, Ma!" Mamie went to bed that night happier than she could remember ever to have been in all her life. She dreamed wonderful dreams her own little Apoca- lypse of a stuffed parlour suite and a carpet with red roses in it, and " worked " sofa pillows and pic- tures with " drapes " on the corners of their frames, and a centre-table with a fancy lamp on. Yes, even of a phonograph. Myrtle's ma had said she never knew the like of the phonograph for keeping the young folks in and giving them a lively time. They sang with it and danced to its gay ragtime and laughed at its minstrel jokes. You could get them " on time," Mamie knew; and even in her sleep she wondered how much you have to pay " down," and how much a month. The next night, after supper, she and her ma and Nellie and Annie went over on the Avenue and wan- dered blissfully among the furniture " emporiums," admiring and pricing and planning. But when they came to " figger," Mrs. Costello was dismayed. Carpet and stuffed suite and centre table and lamp and a couple o' pictures couldn't be had under forty MAMIE'S DEFICIT 189 to fifty dollars three dollars " down " and two-fifty a month. " Why, that ain't much," the clerk assured her. * Two-fifty a month ain't even nine cents a day. An* how could youse spend nine cents a day an' git you as much f er it as what this here swell parlour'll be ? " True! Mamie thought that the parlour would be so sustaining that she could forego some nickels, weekly, from her lunch-money. So they " ordered it"; but could not pay the three dollars "down" until the next Saturday, because last Saturday's pay envelopes (Mamie's and her father's) were already depleted by reason of last Saturday having been the first of the month rent day. However, one could spend a quite endurable week with such anticipations. And on the way home they stopped in a paper-hanger's to ask the prices of wall paper and of a fresh coat of calcimine. The next day, at lunch hour, Mamie " priced " phonographs, in the store where she worked. Of course, she couldn't hope to get one yet; not until the furniture was paid for unless, of course, she should get a raise. When she thought how pretty that parlour was go- ing to look, and how she would have Myrtle and the nice boys " over to see " her, if not for supper yet awhile at least to spend the evening and have " re- freshments," she was so happy she wanted to skip and dance and sing. Myrtle told her that she knew 190 THE WORK-A-DAY GIRL a boy who had a machine that you could stick picture post-cards in and show 'em up grand, on a sheet, like a magic-lantern. And this boy had promised to bring it over " by " Myrtle's house some evening. When he did, she would ask Mamie to come. Mamie had never supposed there could be so much pleasantness in the world. But the sword fell! On Saturday evening when the papers were to have been signed and the three dollars paid that would have insured the delivery of " the parlour " on Monday, Joe Costello had to tell his family that he was " let off." He had had sev- eral " spells " of giddiness, since his stroke. One day that week, when his head went queer, he had not pulled up in time to keep his wagon-pole from scrap- ing a fine limousine; the chauffeur, to save himself from censure, reported Joe as drunk; the owner of the limousine complained to Joe's boss and demanded from him the price of the repairs to his car. So the barn-boss discharged Joe. No, not "just for that"; but because he had been a little fearful, anyway, since Joe had the stroke ; if Joe " was to let one o' them valu'ble horses git injured, who'd have the blame?" It was the beginning of the end! Joe looked for another job. He got one, after a while; but it wasn't " steady." When it was finished, he looked for an- other. He had reached that dreaded state of " odd jobs," intermittent work. . . . There was no par- lour, let alone any phonograph! The rentin'-room MAMIE'S DEFICIT had to go to a lodger. Mamie " got ashamed," after a while, to go to Myrtle's house and never ask Myrtle to hers. And the crowded, noisy kitchen irked her as it never had before she knew anything better. Her mother was afraid to " leave her go by dances," because of the inevitable " bar " ; nickel shows were an expensive luxury, impossible except maybe once a week; the weather was too cold to per- mit of pleasant lingering in the parks; and it was a mile and a half to the nearest small park with a free dance hall pretty far to walk often, after walking home from work, and not to be thought of if carfare must be spent. Mamie went to it, sometimes when her shoes were good and came home unescorted, because she had to promise her mother that she wouldn't " pick up nobody, nor go no place with 'em, nor leave 'em bring you home, nor get you nothin' to drink." Several times some nice boy, circum- stanced much like Mamie's self, wanted to take her home ; but she was afraid. A girl who lived " up- stairs of " Mamie, where Rose Smulska used to live, had gone terribly, flagrantly wrong, so wrong that she got arrested; and it was said that the dance halls had done it. Mamie's mother was afraid to hold Mamie in too tight; but she filled her with fear-full caution. When Mamie was sixteen, she was getting five dol- lars and a half ; she was a bundle wrapper, called " an inspector." Nellie went to work, then; she started 192 THE WORK-A-DAY GIRL at three-fifty, as Mamie had done. But Joe Costello was not averaging nine dollars a week, now; and the family lived in terror lest his discouragement lead him to drink. His wife did all she could to keep him in that crowded kitchen at night, and away from its alternative, the saloon; she encouraged him to bring his men friends there to play cards and smoke their pipes and drink beer. The present lodger was a man; a good-natured, decent, kindly chap who worked in a barn where Joe sometimes got a job at driving. The lodger was a hostler. He had few places to go and no particular predilection for saloons ; so he and Joe used to spend most of their evenings at home, sometimes with friends, sometimes without. Mrs. Costello and the three girls slept in the tiny bedroom off the kitchen, and they often woke up in the morning with headaches which lasted all day. But anything was better than having Joe in a saloon wasting his bit of money and making himself drunk. Mamie and Nellie acquiesced in this, and did what they could on their mother's urging, to hide their repugnance for the " smelly " barn-men with their rank pipes and loud talk and vocabulary none-too- nice. But after a long day in a store so " close " and with air so vitiated that two hours of breathing it leaves most shoppers " tireder than if I'd done a hard day's work," the reeking kitchen and crowded wee bedroom still further sapped the two girls' energy and tried their spirits. Their mother couldn't blame MAMIE'S DEFICIT them for wanting to go out, evenings. ... So Mamie and Nellie sought diversion where they could, and had no one to scrutinize it in their interests and tell them what promised real happiness and what threatened to destroy. They had to use their own undeveloped discretion as to how their mother's cau- tion should be applied. And if they were not always successful, is it any matter for surprise? Not one semblance of the old social intercourse between young persons of their class, remains. Gone are the may- pole and the village green, the public rejoicings when kings married or queens gave birth to heirs; gone the pageants and most of the great games or rights for the equal enjoyment of both sexes and of all classes; gone are the sleigh-rides and the barn-raisings and the spelling matches and the husking and quilting bees gone, at any rate, out of the lives of these mil- lions, herded in city tenements; gone is all the old neighbourhood life, and nearly all the old social life of schools and churches. What per cent, of the little Mamies and Nellies live in flats of more than four rooms? What per cent, of them have any possibili- ties of social life in their homes, under the guardian- ship of their parents? What per cent, of them have ever known the simple happiness of asking young friends to their home to eat a meal, or of being asked to sit at the table of a girl like Myrtle? Mamie and Nellie went to Wonderland, one night in the summer after Mamie's seventeenth birthday. 194* THE WORK-A-DAY GIRL (Mamie was getting six a week now, and Nellie, four; and though the family income was no better than it had been years ago, because Joe Costello's jobs grew fewer and farther between, Mrs. Costello allowed each of the girls to keep two dollars a week for carfare, clothes, lunches, and amusements.) And in the dance hall at Wonderland, Mamie met a fellow. She danced with him, and he bought her lemonade; later, when they left the dance hall, he treated her, and Nellie, to ice-cream cones and to rides on the scenic railway. He wanted to " see them home," but they thought they'd "better not." But he learned where Mamie worked, and the next day he came by her counter and said Hello to her in her perch aloft; and that night he was at the employes' entrance when she came out. Mamie thought it wouldn't be any harm to let him walk home with her " before supper," and she was delighted to let the girls she knew see that she had a beau. He was " real swell-looking," and she was loath to let him know how mean a street she lived in ; also, she felt she must make some excuse for not being able to ask him " to call." So she told him her folks thought she was too young to have company, and excused herself at a distance of several blocks from her home. He took her to lunch, next day, in a grand place with men waiters and an orches- tra. Mamie was entranced. And he asked her to go to a show at a " reg'lar theaytre," a down-town one, and see a show such as Mamie had never seen. MAMIE'S DEFICIT 195 Mamie just had to tell Nellie these things; she felt as if she would burst if she couldn't tell somebody. But they agreed that it would be better not to say any- thing about Ralph to Mrs. Costello yet. " Ma^s always scairt we'll fall fer some fresh guy," Mamie explained to Nellie. "But Ralph ain't like that, at all. He's as nice an' gen'lemanly as he can be. And oh, Nellie ! I love him like everything ! I don't know how I used to live, before this. And if anythin' was to happen between him an' me, I know I'd die." It being summer, and very hot, there was no ex- pectation at home that Mamie would sit in the Stirling kitchen, evenings; so her absence, in the parks or at the beaches or the Magic Cities or Wonderlands, excited little comment. Sometimes she said where she had been, sometimes she didn't. But she never mentioned Ralph; because she knew that if she did, her mother would want to see him, and the idea of bringing Ralph to that stewing kitchen was intoler- able she might lose him! Ralph loved her dearly, she told Nellie; and she believed she loved him more than any girl had ever loved any fellow in all the world before. There were some things she did not confide to Nellie. In September there were several days of intense heat ; scorching, withering winds blew clouds of dust ; the store was like a furnace. About three in the afternoon, Mamie fainted and fell forward, limp and 196 THE WORK-A-DAY GIRL ghastly white, across her wrapping paper, paste pot, and pneumatic carriers. She was carried to the store's hospital-room, and " brought to." The nurse questioned her sharply. Mamie denied the imputa- tion. That night she told Ralph what the nurse had suggested. . . . She never saw him again. She had no idea where to look for him; she could only wait, and wonder, and pray, in an agony of fear and shame. On Sunday she got on a car and rode miles, then hunted a doctor to whom she gave a false name. He confirmed her fears. Mamie came out of his office and walked and walked, in a daze. She would lose her job! She couldn't get another for a long while. She would disgrace her family. She would never see Ralph again. Her brief bliss was over. There was noth- ing left but misery and shame. . . . Somebody called her by name. Startled, she shook off her trance. " Say ! you look as if you'd lost your last friend." He was one of the men in the store; he came around, several times a day, pushing a box on wheels and collecting packages for delivery. Mamie knew him to speak to, to chaff with as she tossed bundles to him; but that was all. She made an effort to appear gay. He asked her to go to a show. Grasp- ing at anything as an escape from her thoughts, Mamie went. After the show, he invited her to a chop suey place. And after they left the chop suey MAMIE'S DEFICIT 197 place, he begged her to go to a " hotel." Mamie hesitated. " I'll be good to you, little girl," he urged. And Mamie, her eyes tear-filled, pressed his arm in voice- less assent. . . . Mamie never went home again. She never went back to the store. The store's nurse told Mrs. Cos- tello what she surmised. " Why didn't she tell me? " the mother moaned. "Oh, God! it's terrible. If on'y we could of had some place at home fer her, where she could bring her friends an' leave us see what they was like ! " Nellie told what little she knew about " Ralph " ; but it was very little, and led to nothing. . . . But how tell, in a paragraph, of the months that followed? Of the unending search, the undying hope, the un- ceasing prayer? They could not understand how Mamie could so doubt their love as to stay away. They could not realize that somewhere, somehow, lit- tle Mamie was in bondage in bondage to threats, to force, or to persuasion that she was an outcast and in the only kind of place where she would henceforth be tolerated. As those months of anguish in the Costello home wore on, something happened in Mamie's city: The Senate of Illinois, stirred by reports of the prevalence of white slavery, and confronted with a bill to make a minimum wage for any female worker in Illinois 198 THE WORK-A-DAY GIRL two dollars per day, appointed a Commission to probe the connection, so repeatedly alleged, between low wages and vice. The Chairman of this Commission is Barratt O'Hara, recently elected Lieutenant-Gov- ernor and, as such, presiding officer of the Senate. After taking the testimony of a great number of fallen women and girls, most of whom attributed their descent into the evil life to their inability to earn in any other wise enough to live on, the Commission determined to call before it a number of employers, to see what they had to say as to the wages they paid and their ability or inability to pay more. The first employers subpoenaed were the heads of two large mail-order concerns, one big clothing house (men's and boys' clothing) and nine department stores. On Friday morning, March 7, at ten o'clock, the Commission met for the public hearing of witnesses. The sessions were held in the red banquet-room of the La Salle Hotel heavily gilt and crimson, flag- decorated and " gilt-chaired." On that platform where, usually, the speakers' table is, sat the Commis- sion, Lieutenant-Governor O'Hara in the chair. At four tables in front of the Commission sat reporters, " covering " this dramatic and pregnant story for the press of the city and of the nation. A squadron of newspaper photographers hovered on the fringes of the scene, busy with their flashlight apparatus. The gold chairs were filled with eager auditors a class of auditors (or classes, rather!) clearly indicating what MAMIE'S DEFICIT 199 kinds of persons feel intense concern in white slavery and low wages. Here sat a deaconess from the Red Light district, there a group from some prominent woman's club; here a representative of a chain of homes for underpaid working girls, there a well-known magazine editor from New York; here a "welfare worker " in the employ of a big corporation, and there a wealthy woman specially devoted to the work of the Immigrants' Protective League. In the in- tensity and almost complete unity of interest, every- body felt akin with everybody else; everybody ex- changed views with everybody else. It was a re- markable audience, considering the occasion. Almost every one in it was more or less deeply informed on economic questions and more or less unified with regard to many of them. The first witness called was a public-spirited gen- tleman who is a generous contributor to a major pro- portion of the worthiest charities in his city, and to a great many outside of it. He was a member of the Chicago Vice Commission which returned its report two years ago. This report said: " Let us do something to give her (the girl who gets six dollars a week, or less) at least a living wage. If she is not sufficiently skilled to earn it, let us mix some religious justice with our business and do some- thing to increase her efficiency which through no fault of her own she has never been able to develop." Nevertheless, he testified that his payroll for that 200 THE WORK-A-DAY GIRL week included the names of 4,732 women drawing an average weekly salary of $9.12. Some salaries of from $2i to $60 brought up the " average." 1,465 girls in his employ are paid less than $8.00 a week, which sum he admitted was probably the least on which a girl not living at home should be asked to subsist. But he contended that it was the rule of his house not to employ for less than $8.00 a week any girl who does not live at home. Asked how he knew those 1,465 girls lived at home, he said he had only their own word for it; that his firm made no effort to verify the statements of girls seeking work. He declared his belief that there is practically no connec- tion between low wages and immorality; that the home conditions of girls are the determining factor in their ability to resist temptation. No one asked him if he thought there was a possible connection between low wages and home conditions. He testified that the profits of his company in 1911 were " approximately " $7,000,000. The company is capitalized at $50,- 000,000. Senator Juul figured rapidly, as the exami- nation proceeded, and announced that something like a quarter of a million dollars, or one-twenty-eighth of the annual profits would bring all those 1,465 girls up to the " bread line " where they would not have to depend on the assistance of their families or of any charity. Witness admitted that this could be done without materially affecting the dividends; but he did not admit that he thought it necessary, nor that he be- MAMIE'S DEFICIT 201 lieved it would keep any girl from vice. " A girl who gets $10 a week is just as likely to use that as a subter- fuge," he declared, " as a girl getting any other wage." The second witness testified that his store employs 1,866 women and girls at an average wage of $9.86. Sixty girls get $5 and under. He was not aware that any girls in his employ were of other than the highest moral character. He was not aware that floor-walkers or others attempted to persuade girls into occasional or professional prostitution; he was not aware that any girl seeking employment in his store and complaining that the wages were too small to live on, was told that she could have " a gentleman friend." He was con- vinced that wages have nothing to do with the morality of women. He did not cause the girls' liv- ing conditions to be investigated. When a girl said she was living at home, he believed her. Asked to submit an estimate of what an entirely self-dependent girl might live on, he gave the following: Clothes, including shoes $1-00 Laundry 25 Room and board 4-oo Carfare 60 Lunch 7O Church 10 Sickness, dentist, oculist and emergencies . . . .1.25 $7-90 He did not know where a girl could get room and board for $4.00, but he had " heard that there are places." He did not know how $52 a year can be THE WORK-A-DAY GIRL made to keep a girl neatly dressed in black and white when $15 of it at least would have to go for shoes and stockings. He did not consider that amusements or a two-weeks' vacation trip might be any part of " living." He did not believe that girls were worth $6 a week as beginners; he refused to tell his firm's earnings, but admitted that the $26,000 a year neces- sary to lift all his girl employes to the $8 " bread line " would not cripple his business. The third witness represented a store which employs 4,222 girls and women at eight hours a day, and 440 others at short hours. The lowest wage of the " regu- lars " is $5, the lowest wage of the waitresses and other " short-hour " help, $4. The full average is $10.76, and the average of the 1,895 wno se ^ mer ~ chandise (exclusive of department heads) is $12.33. (" Department stores out here," whispered a New York woman with great knowledge of the wages and conditions in New York stores, " must be the nearest thing to Heaven! ") This witness admitted that he had no idea on what wages a girl who was not partially supported by her family, her friends, charity, or vice, could live; but he had " heard it asserted by good authorities that $8 was about right." He has 1,035 gi^ employes who get less than $8, including 163 women of over 18 years who receive only $6. He refused to give any figures showing his firm's earnings even when reminded that he was liable to be cited for contempt MAMIE'S DEFICIT 203 of court. He was sure that wages have nothing to do with morals. And he thought that it was " the business of parents " to board young workers and to shield them from temptation. Next witness testified that his firm employed 1,200 girls " at an average of $8.56," but about 500 received less than that average. He said " morality is a state of mind. Our girls are model girls. ... A good, honest girl will not resort to anything immoral to eke out her salary. . . . Girls do not become immoral be- couse of low wages. They turn in such a direction because they have immoral minds." The vice-president of a firm employing 1,973 women and girls, 1,140 of whom average $9.25 a week, con- tended that employers were relieving, not oppressing, families when they paid $5 a week to inexperienced girls living at home. He shared the belief of most of the witnesses (if not all!) that a girl is entitled to support by her relatives and that whatever she gets in wages is a sort of " velvet." The old idea dies hard! He does not believe that girls tell " the entire truth " when they blame low wages for their downfall. The testimony, as a whole, was marked by these conclusions : None of the employers had given any thought to the purchasing power of the wages they paid, further than to make a rule (which hard-pressed girls might break, unchallenged, if they wished) that the low-paid workers must be girls living at home. None of the 204 THE WORK-A-DAY GIRL employers had thought of a girl's continued depend- ence, in part, on her family as tending to make the overburdened poor households subsidizers of busi- nesses that pay 30 per cent, to their stockholders. None of them believed in a probable connection be- tween low wages and immorality. None of them denied that they could pay a good deal higher wages and still do business at a more than fair profit. None of them ventured to say that a self-dependent girl could sustain life in any sort of tolerable com- fort, for less than $8 a week. The most interesting points in the general discus- sion provoked by the hearings are: First, the notion that some unthinking persons got, that the moral characters of all low-paid girls are impugned. Nothing could be further from the truth. A very great majority of those girls are straight, sturdy souls with a resisting power far beyond what you or I dare to say we would have in their places. But ought they be obliged to wage so fierce a battle between pinching want on the one hand and the art- fully-covered lure of the white-slaver? Has any em- ployer a right to take eight, nine, ten hours a day out of youth in service more or less uncongenial and per- formed under conditions more or less undermining to health, and pay for it a wage so small that the worker is continually semi-starved either for food or for recreation? Can society do much toward regulating and diminishing the social evil, whilst it allows thou- MAMIE'S DEFICIT 205 sands of little girls in the first flush of physical awak- ening and of mental excitability, to live on or under the dry-bread line? Another curious misconception that many persons got, was that when a girl may be said to have suc- cumbed to the evil life because she could not get along on the wages paid her, she rose one morning and said: " I'm tired of the struggle. I'll go to the devil." They argued that a girl would not do that " once in a thousand times." Of course she wouldn't. That isn't the way they go ! That isn't the kind of relation there is between low wages and going astray. That's why I wanted to tell about Mamie. Mamie was better protected than most girls on low wages; poverty had not wreaked its worst on her home. Consumption had not sapped the life of their bread- winner, industrialism had not crippled nor poisoned him. Her mother was less disheartened than many poor mothers are. Their tenement was less crowded, and left some show for the maintenance of modesty, of decency! There was no drunkenness. There was no quarrelling of the hungry- wolves sort. But neither was there " a fair show " for Mamie. Some girls survive valiantly in conditions no better, or even worse. But ought anybody to be surprised when they don't? Thirdly, but by no means lastly, it was argued that few girls are worth $8 a week when they are begin- ners. Senator Juul's reply to this was that such 206 THE WORK-A-DAY GIRL girls are apprentices; that $8 a week no more than houses, feeds, and decently clothes them; and that apprentices have always been reckoned " worth their keep." What might further have been argued is that expenditure for the development of an A-i working force is one of the most legitimate items of business upkeep; it may as fairly be charged to the necessary running expenses as advertising more fairly than that lavish " entertaining " which most firms charge to the " cost of doing business." One of the men who testified spends thousands of dollars annually giving free automobile rides to country customers; this is reckoned legitimate expenditure, for which his firm gets a good return. Why might not wages that would enable a girl's family to have five rooms instead of four, to have a room for social life instead of leav- ing that social life to the streets and nickelodeons and dance halls, be also a good economic, not merely sen- timental, investment? The Chicago Telephone Com- pany finds it remunerative, not philanthropic, to give its girls, free, a good, hot luncheon. Why might it not " pay " to give every girl who works eight, nine, ten hours a day, in more or less nerve-racking condi- tions, wages enough to assure her a room to herself at night, a room with a window, a room where she might have recuperative sleep and nerve-relaxation? Considering her as probably one of the mothers of to-morrow, might it not actually save money now outlaid on repair and reform institutions? The em- MAMIE'S DEFICIT 207 ployers said they could pay for this without materially affecting profits, but they all expressed solicitude lest there be some " smaller concerns " that could not do it. As this is probably the first time they have ever been solicitous about those " small concerns," nobody need feel too terribly harrowed by this sympathy. It is not likely that any State will pass a " $12 mini- mum " law. It is not at all desirable that any should. That would be going too fast. The immediate results would be very disastrous. Thousands of the neediest little girls and young women would be " dispos- sessed," with no hope or chance of getting back or going elsewhere. A Minimum Wage Board, of Ar- bitration, is better. . . . Failing that, the minimum wage should not be over $8, until things have been worked out on that basis. It would better be raised a second time, than put too high at first. One result of a minimum wage will be to discon- tinue the employment of fourteen-year-old girls; to force girls to undergo a longer, a more thorough, and a more specific preparation to get $8 jobs. This will seem hard in many families, where the pressure of poverty is very great by reason of the death or deser- tion or incapacitation of the adult wage-earner. But it were better that some of our present philanthropy be applied to the " tiding over " of such cases (pend- ing the general adoption of mothers' pensions by the States), thereby saving money from what is now spent on the reclamation of industrial wreckage. 208 THE WORK-A-DAY GIRL There must be longer childhood, to store up energy for the frightful drains of modern industrial and commercial life. There must be better-directed edu- cation. There must be far more abundant opportu- nities for healthful, wholesome play during child- hood and in youth. There must be a tremendous reform in housing conditions in the interests not alone of physical but of social well-being. There must be a check not in sumptuary laws such as are actually. pending now in some States, but in the edu- cation of taste from the top stratum downwards! on the riot of extravagance and unfitness to which dress has gone in this country as in no other. But there must be a check on the ever-widening inequality between the richest and the poorest, or our social structure will not endure; we shall have revolution, not evolution; cataclysm, not growth. Revolution destroys indiscriminately; years are required to re- cover from its devastation. It is only about a hun- dred and eighteen years since Thomas Paine brought to George Washington the great key of the Bastille, symbolizing the attitude of the new French Republic toward these colonies which had given France the encouragement of an example. It is a great deal less than half a hundred-and-eighteen years since these United States ceased to exemplify such sim- plicity and sincerity of true democracy as made even the dreamers of Utopia, in the Old World, marvel and admire. Those men are not yet old men who in MAMIE'S DEFICIT 209 their boyhood knew a social structure that now seems as remote as the Golden Age. In some of the Old World countries the inequality is of such long growth that one can hardly imagine its breaking-up without violence. With us it is not yet so adamantine. Pray God it never may be! IX GIRLS' SCHOOLING F OOK at her ! Eighteen years old never had A a year's schooling in her life and earning $225 a week; not merely getting it, but earn- ing it ! " "Never a year's schooling? Why, she's been schooled for sixteen years to do this thing: ever since she could toddle across a stage and lisp a sentence or two. After sixteen years of concentrated application to any trade or profession, one usually begins to realize fair rewards from it. Of course, on the stage $225 a week doesn't mean $1.1,700 a year. Acting's a seasonal occupation very! But this girl is em- ployed for as long a season each year as almost any one in the business: she averages thirty-two weeks. That puts her annual income at about $7,000; which is not extraordinary after sixteen years of well-directed study. One reason more professions do not net their practitioners so well after a like term of service, and that this girl's earnings are very exceptional even in her profession, is because most persons begin their special training so late in life that by the time they have given sixteen years to it they have reached, if indeed they have not passed, their meridian of life 210 5 '5 W o I __) i>^ W '^C ^ t! o ^ e-s 11 W be Q .