CHAPTER II

IN THE GRIP OF POVERTY[69]

“You’ve got t’ keep your eye on a girl. Now it’s different with a boy. He can take care of himself. But you never can tell, if you don’t keep a watch, when a girl’s goin’ to come back an’ bring disgrace on you.”

Such, in a nutshell, is the attitude of our community toward the adolescent girl. The chances are that she will “never give you worry an’ trouble like a boy.” But if she does, she will give vastly more. The sting of her shame is felt to be keener than any the boy can inflict. And with very few girls in our neighborhood is “trouble” of this sort beyond the range of the possible. Therefore the sense of family responsibility is far more alert in her behalf than on her brother’s account. With few exceptions, the girl is assured of interest and counsel in her home. This counsel is not always wise. Worse still, it is not always tempered with the affection she needs. Here all family life struggles against handicaps. But through all the sorry failures, the ignorance, and the thwarted ambitions, much love and much concern for the girl are to be found in the homes of her people. Almost as a baby she has duties at home. The boy, as a rule, assumes them with his first pay envelope. Or, if he is earlier drafted into service, his chores are outside, probably the gathering of coal or wood while his sister stays at home to mind the babies. He has more freedom. She grows up in a more intimate relation to the family, far more under the eye of her mother. Therefore, family influence, nine times out of ten, is the great factor in her development. To understand her, home conditions must be known.

The most common of family skeletons among this West Side group is one which can scarcely be locked in its closet. It stalks forth, apparent to the casual glance. It is the grim elemental question of primitive needs. The daily struggle for food, shelter, and clothing is a stark reality to which only the youngest babies in the family can be oblivious. The daughter of fourteen knows it to the last sordid detail. In the group of families we knew, poverty was almost universal. Of our 65 girls only eight came from households which had known continuous comfort during these children’s lives. All the others had at some time faced staggering misfortune. Forty of the total 55 families, or 73 per cent, had had records with relief societies, some stretching far back into the past.[70] Forty-three families, from which came 53 of the girls, must be classed with the very poor.[71]

Those of us born into better fortune seldom feel the meaning of this primitive struggle. We have no common denominator with it. We cannot estimate the heroism of “the poor.” We have heard and read much of hunger and exposure. These things play a large part in juvenile literature, whether sensational or classic. There is no little daughter of a comfortable home but is told the sad legend of the match girl who froze in the snow under the lighted windows from which floated sounds of merriment and music. The same little daughter, grown older, goes to school and learns that “man’s three primal necessities are food, shelter, and clothing.” But neither the faraway and sentimental pathos of the match girl’s fate nor the cold scholastic statement of the text book is sufficient to teach one the real meaning of poverty. Only those who follow its trail, step by step, seeing the gradual and tragic disintegration of human worth under its influence, the suffering and waste left in its path, can realize its full power and significance.

To these girls who come forth to their recreation in a skirt worn thin and a gaping, ill-made waist, poverty is neither distant nor sentimentally touching. Possibly no child does starve in these streets. But there are many children who do not need to learn out of books about hunger. At any moment, one may open a door and find it, in all its gaunt, staring reality. We once found a tiny crippled baby who had sat for days in a fireless, barren room, stiffened with cold. She was as helpless and defenseless a little creature as could well be met. But this was the treatment that an indifferent community tolerated for her. And she was only one.

To our girls these were harsh facts of everyday knowledge. Familiarity with poverty makes it seem both more and less terrible. It does not kill, perhaps, but it stunts. It does not come as an overwhelming catastrophe; but steadily it saps the vigor of the young as well as of the old. With the more fortunate of families such as these, extreme poverty is only episodic. A fairly decent standard is kept until something goes amiss. But one break in the machinery of their working capacity means hardship. No reserve fund has been possible, or the small amount saved is hopelessly inadequate to meet illness or protracted unemployment. It melts away in a few weeks or months. The family is very soon over the borderline of self-support. With the less fortunate, poverty takes the form of a slow, chronic contest against everlasting odds. This demands every atom of physical and nervous strength, every fraction of intelligence and effort. And the exaction is made from those whose only training has been hard, devastating experience.

In this neighborhood, families are large and wages are small. The size of the family is a definite element in its standard of comfort. Poverty begins not merely at a certain wage but also with a certain number of children.[72] “We’ve got eight,” said Mrs. Meehan, “and by rights we’d only have two if we was to bring ’em up proper. But,” she added, “it’s the littlest one that I love the best.”

Sometimes where the father is living and at work, he earns enough to keep in cleanliness and health, and with at least the necessary medical care, a family of three or four. But with six to support, an income sufficient for four means the lack of essentials for all, loss of health, and sometimes loss of life. Often the mother is compelled to supplement his earnings by her own. Twenty-nine out of the 46 living mothers were contributing a part or the whole of the family income. In 24 of the 55 families the father was dead or incapacitated, and there was no stepfather to take his place as breadwinner.[73]

The mortality among children on the West Side is shockingly high. A family which had not lost at least one child was indeed rare. Fairly accurate records of the births and deaths of children in 31 out of the 55 families show that the number of births averaged nearly eight, and the deaths about three.[74] This average death rate for so small a group is not surprising when one considers the birth rate. The more children that are born into such poverty, the greater the likelihood that many of them will die. On our list were families who had two living children and six dead, five living and five dead, five living and six dead, six living and nine dead, seven living and seven dead, one living and six dead. Though practically all these families carried insurance,[75] the amount for which a baby’s life is insured would not as a rule be sufficient to pay the expense of burial.

The attitude of our community toward birth or death is disheartening in its helplessness. Either event is accepted as the will of God. The idea of voluntarily limiting the size of the family is almost unknown. Mrs. Reilly, bent, deformed, old at fifty, with five children living and eight dead, would ramble on with her dull and listless story of the sickness and suffering those deaths and births had meant, and the constant crushing poverty they had caused; and would finish with, “It’s the poor as can’t take care of them, to whom they’re sent.”

The housing of these families was of a grade commensurate with the degree of their poverty. Dark, unventilated rooms were found in the apartments of 30 families, and about half of the group of 55 had less space than was required for health or comfort. As is generally true with families of their class, the amount of rent paid for poor and inadequate accommodations was relatively high.[76]

In spite of the mountains of difficulty in the way of these mothers, their success in bringing up their children is sometimes great beyond our realization. There was, for instance, one household on a certain block on Eleventh Avenue where the father brought in $12 in return for a full week of unskilled labor. There were four children under working age. Twelve dollars, six persons, city prices--this was the mother’s problem, by no means so discouraging as that of some of her neighbors, but still a difficult one. The answer is not to be written on paper. It is on children’s faces, in the events and outcome of human lives. However successful the present answer, each day sets the old quandary forth anew. Never solved, it stretches on into the years ahead.

With this family, part of the answer was their presence on Eleventh Avenue. It was in the clangor of the freight trains that passed on the street surface by their door and blackened their windows with smoke. It was in the stench of the slaughter house which the breeze brought into their rooms. It was in the soot of the factories and the dangers to child life around the docks. There were outward evidences of family life in the block where they dwelt--dilapidated tenements, with a sordid little grocery store in the middle of the block. A garish little saloon stood on the corner. The houses did not present the solid red brick front of the usual tenement street, with its delusive appearance of respectability. The buildings were irregular; some were low and shack-like. Their windows faced Jersey and the nightly glory of the sunset, but even this could not redeem the sordidness and squalor of the neighborhood.

From these surroundings came two trim little figures. They were school girls, still with all the ways and traits of little girls. Their hair was drawn smoothly into straight black braids. Their eyes were round and wide awake. The neatness of their dress spoke of continual care. They were alert and well-mannered, brimming with interest and comment. In short, they were bright, normal, ordinary children. What this meant as an achievement can only be measured by the obstacles which this one mother had overcome.

She had had the help neither of good fortune nor of training. She had fashioned her product with her own pitiful, clumsy tools. A large-boned, uncouth Irish woman, she still bore the stamp of the soil. Her education had been that of life, a life of hard knocks and rough going. Plain, coarse, with the burr in her speech, bent and weakened physically, she did not present an attractive appearance. But it was her boast that she “never got anything from no society--never knew much about them places--never had to, thank God.” Relatives had helped when the hardest pinches came; but for the most part the family had plodded on alone. But even such parents cannot master poverty. In turn they must pay toll to its resistless strength. For the smallest girl of five was a wan, great-eyed baby whose puckered lips were drawn with pain and on whom the shadow of death already lay. The terms of life cannot be utterly remade.

In one of the sordid tenements wedged into a narrow space as yet unclaimed by business this mother had found a shelter for her brood. Four rooms “through” with a cupboard were rented to her for $9.00 a month and her services as janitress, which were reckoned as worth $3.00. Thus, while her flat would otherwise have cost $12 a month and have absorbed exactly one week of her husband’s wages, she saved $3.00 out of the rent to spend on food for her family of six. This was the important fact which had kept them on Eleventh Avenue from year to year, though the mother always hoped that each winter would be her last in the house.

But not all families have the fortitude, the endurance, the power of ceaseless, undiminished effort which this particular group possessed. Even with those who accept the challenge and make the continual effort to keep their heads above water, strength and courage sometimes break. The loss of two days’ work for a daughter whose full week’s wage amounts to only $4.00 or $5.00 may mean a family tragedy. What elsewhere are incidents, are hazards here.

We have fallen into the habit of looking to the mother as the mainstay of the family. She is held to a rigorous standard which neither husband nor children are required to measure up to. We expect her to counteract the difficulties and evil influences of her environment by possessing all the known virtues of character. As a matter of fact, the worry and strain of insecurity become too great for many a woman. She grows apathetic, careless, and stolid, or she becomes querulous and neurotic. Perhaps she takes to drink. Drinking is rife on the West Side; it is the easy and familiar escape from worry and discouragement. For the woman who drinks there is scant sympathy or toleration. The decent, hardworking mother has no patience with her. If the victim is putting up any fight at all it is a desperate and a solitary one, for she can expect no help from others. With every lapse, every slipping back from the precarious foothold gained so painfully, she is met by scorn and reproach from her judges with whom the long weeks of effort do not count when once she has failed. To rise many times from the utmost depths of despair and bitterness is not given to human nature, and she ends as an outcast.

I am thinking of one black, terrible half hour with a woman of my acquaintance. A thunder storm darkened all the outer world and almost no light entered the kitchen where we sat. It was one of the two small rear-house rooms that she rented for $8.50 a month. This day it was stifling and unswept, cluttered with little piles of her rubbish. She was going to move; she had been dispossessed. She had lost her job, a position held for three months after a winter when she had hunted work for weeks. For seven years she had kept up a home for her girl and boy, one year during the illness of her husband who drank and beat her, and six years after his death. She had looked forward to the time when Sadie should get her working papers; but the girl was incompetent and irresponsible and failed to keep any job for long.

This year had brought the mother her first out-of-work experience. In the course of it she had slipped far behind. But with every seven dollars’ pay during the past three months she had climbed slowly back. The rent was even. The insurance agent lacked a single dollar. Every night on coming home she had figured slowly and clumsily with the aid of her boy “Petie.” She had “built castles, which no one had ought to do.” Castles! Dreams of a new suit for herself and Sadie, of whole shoes for Petie which should not be begged from his school; dreams in the future of an “all-through” apartment, even with rugs, and curtains of cheap lace. But again thrown out of work, hope was gone.

She was a woman slow and clumsy of movement, who went through her plodding days quietly and dumbly, with a certain trembling hesitance. But her rusty black clothes were always neat. The housekeeper said, “You c’d tell she was respectable.” It was a cherished respectability. She suffered bitter pangs when she saw it fall away. Today her tongue was loosened by drink. She talked quickly, with an unaccustomed rise and fall of speech, and with fluency of gesture. She clung to Petie, possessed with the idea that some one was trying to take him away. “They shall not take me boy. The girl is wild; she has me heart broke. I’ve worked and I’ve tried an’ it’s all come to this. But I won’t be parted fr’m me boy.” And again and again, the voice rising to a cry, “I’ve been turned down--turned down I am. I’m not a young woman now an’ you know I can’t stand it--turned down hard I’ve been.”

Without doubt some women of the dependent classes are strongly braced in their morals by the rigorous standard to which we hold them. The consciousness that nothing but the best of conduct will be excused in them must serve as a constant stimulus to heroic living. But on the other hand, there are doubtless many who have drifted to the bottom as the result of a first lapse which might have been excused and survived under a less rigorous standard. There are too many who share the decent working woman’s point of view. “When a woman takes to the can, she ain’t got no good left.”

Many of our girls came from homes where the parents were heavy and constant drinkers.[77] They were familiar with the appearance of drunkenness. It does not revolt such girls when it breaks out in a place of amusement. They do not resent it in their boy companions but view it on the whole with unconcern. But they come to be wary of its manifestations in others and even unconsciously expert in inebriate psychology. There was one family where the alcoholic father was always turned over to the fourteen-year-old daughter during his “sprees” to be managed. When he was in this condition she was “the only one who could do anything with him.” Surely an ominous ability for a fourteen-year-old daughter!

In a neighborhood like the Middle West Side, poverty is seldom found isolated from its menacing concomitants--ignorance, immorality, drinking, filth, and degradation. Whether as cause or result, these appear as close companions of want. Some of our girls came from families which hovered constantly on the verge of disruption. The arrogant, decisive power of the law always hung over them like the sword of Damocles, threatening dismemberment.

Here was Annie Brink, who came to her club with Hyde and Jekyll moods. Sometimes she was gentle and tractable. Sometimes she looked out sullenly from a cloud of morbid depression and gloom impossible to pierce. She had grown up in a world of sudden disasters. Almost from babyhood she had been a household drudge. There were seven children in the family and Annie, the eldest daughter, was early pressed into service as general houseworker and nurse for the younger ones. To take proper care of seven young children is too big a job for one woman, and Annie’s mother was certainly much too gay and irresponsible by disposition to attempt it. “There was seven of us kids,” said Annie, “so I had to help. I wasn’t let out on the street much when I was little. One house where we were had a back yard and we’d play there. But then we moved. When we went on to Tenth Avenue there was a fire escape. We’d take pillows out there and sit. It was just grand. Then I always could play on the organ. It was mamma’s since she married, but she don’t use it any more. It’s the same as mine now. It stays locked, because if all seven of us used it there wouldn’t be any organ soon.”

At nine, Annie was a shy and backward child. Then she lost the sight of one eye by infecting it from an abscessed finger. The new physical defect kept her out of school and the housekeeping was transferred more and more to her young shoulders. She had never had a friend of her own age until at thirteen she attached herself to a girl of a vigorous personality. Agnes was rough and quick to strike, like a boy, strong and generous. She protected her new friend and took her out to see the world. They went to a school recreation center several blocks north and Agnes saw that Annie was not molested on their way. “We wasn’t afraid of anything with Agnes.” Then abruptly the strong protector was removed by a yet stronger power. Agnes was “put away.” Annie reported, “They won’t let her out till she is twenty-one. They’re awful strict. It makes us all feel bad.”

Such things are accepted happenings in Annie’s world. They are the acts of a power quite beyond its influence. Annie took the loss of her champion with philosophy and stayed at home once more. She did not dare go to the recreation center alone. Then came another thunderbolt. Her mother, who had entered upon the familiar way of middle-aged West Side women who lack the stamina that the grim struggle demands, was brought into court, charged with drunkenness, and sentenced to the workhouse. The smaller brothers and sisters were also taken away. Since then life had been one succession of strange women brought in as housekeepers. There were interludes between trials of the various incompetents when the full care fell on the young girl. She was in school only a few hours a day, because her single eye had been weakened. She had grown up on the edge of a volcano. At fourteen she was, by her school record, “peevish and extremely stubborn and difficult to handle.”

Such precarious conditions of living are especially unfavorable for the adolescent daughter. The instability of her age is accentuated by the uncertainties of her life. Foresight and steadiness of purpose are not easily taught when the essentials of existence depend upon chance. The girl sees around her all sorts of makeshifts and haphazard expedients. One of our girls tried to avert a family disaster. Dispossession threatened at the end of the week. Mrs. Derks was in despair, and helplessly she resigned the situation to Emma. With their last $3.00 the girl bought a lamp and some hundreds of printed tickets. The lamp was put in a saloon window. The tickets were to be sold in a raffle which was to pay the rent. They did not sell and the rent went unpaid. “I told her it wouldn’t do no good,” a neighbor said. “She should a’ got a watch.”

But as poverty is the enemy of adolescence, adolescence is the adversary of poverty. The vivifying forces of youth are a protection against the depleting effects of want and insecurity. The girl does not take to drink as her mother does. Weeks of want are quickly forgotten in a following period of comfort. When kindliness and cheer once more prevail in her home, consciousness of the lack of ease and loveliness is shaken from her. With the buoyancy of youth she rebounds at the slightest release. But all too often her respite is brief, and when periods of want follow too closely upon each other, her powers of recovery must fail.