CHAPTER VI

THE BREAKDOWN OF FAMILY PROTECTION

Our West Side girls were members of a supposedly protected part of the community. Each of them belonged to a family group; if they were not living with their own parents, near relatives had taken them in. Their homes were in a section which possesses a neighborhood life and neighborhood opinions. The population is far more stable than that of the East Side; recent comers are rare. Some of our girls told of how their mothers had gone to school together. One had started in the same school through which her mother had passed. Many families had shifted around within a range of 10 blocks for a generation. The parents of most of them had been here from ten to thirty or forty years. It is, then, not in the absence but in the breakdown of neighborhood and family protection that we must seek the reasons for social, moral, and physical deterioration in these girls.

The character of the community goes far to counter-balance any advantage the girl may gain from living in an environment familiar to herself and to her parents. If she grows up in one of these blocks, she is, from babyhood, in the midst of lawlessness and rumors of lawlessness. They are afloat in the air she breathes, as certain to be inhaled as are the heavy odors from the gas plants and slaughter pens.

Two girls came excitedly into their club with news of an assault which had just taken place down the block. They had loitered to join the curious crowd and to have a look at the victim. They related the details of the event and commented upon them as upon a familiar story.

There was a ripple of excitement, but no surprise. One girl exclaimed, “Things like that are happening on our block all the time.”

The block where this girl lived bears the distinction of having sheltered, some forty years ago, the original “Hell’s Kitchen” gang.[83] A junk-covered lot is pointed out as the site of the tumble-down shack where the gang met. The shack has disappeared, while in the rear, facing the street to the north, a mission is now in full swing. Still, tradition upholds the desperate character of the locality and gives it a bad reputation. The police declare, however, that it is no worse than many other parts of the neighborhood. Fifteen of our club girls came from this block. All the toughs who gather there are, of course, identified with the “Gopher Gang.” The Gophers were said to have assaulted the housekeeper in 562. She had reported to the police their use of her vacant rooms, and in revenge they had “beaten her up.” It was to this same house, which bears a bad reputation, that a physician had been recently called, late in the evening, to attend a baby. The child was in convulsions, the effect of the whiskey with which she had been “doped.” After a search through the house, he found only one family sober enough to be trusted with the child.

Authentic stories of violence came to us from time to time. Many other tales were the product of gossip largely mingled with falsehood. But the brutality of the neighborhood speaks for itself; it is everywhere, in the streets, in the talk, in the minds of old and young. Recklessness and daring are apt to be painted with heightened colors, exaggerated beyond the fact. The child does not discriminate between garbled truth and falsity. In any case, these stories take effect on her. They are poured into her mind and muddy the stream of her imagination. She believes a large amount of what comes to her ears, some of which she sees and knows to be true. The girls who lived in this block, though they were coming and going by night and day, had yet a lively apprehension of its dangers. “When I go home after ten,” said Mamie Stertle, “I always get the cop on the corner to see me to my door.” Mamie had lived uptown for a few months. Up there, far to the north, she had acquired a friend of a superior type, a chauffeur, who worked steadily and always had money in his pocket. When she came back to live on the West Side, she took it for granted that he could not come to her home, lest he be assaulted and robbed.

The young girl shares in all the gossip of her elders. She takes in greedily the idle talk of the kitchen, the stoop, and the street. In this prurient school she becomes familiar, even as a child, with the lowest forms of vice and immorality. Living on the same block with 15 of our girls were two young women who were the “talk of the parish.” “They begun in the dance halls back o’ the saloons,” said Mrs. Ryan, “and look what they are now!” Not one of our 15 girls but was familiar with the talk and with all the details of the two irregular lives about which it centered.

A restaurant was opened on the corner. It was soon noised about that the woman proprietor was identical with a notorious criminal who had served a sentence of twenty years for infanticide. Before long the girls were repeating with gusto horrible stories of her crimes. Sadie Toohey, standing on the corner with a group of schoolmates, informed them concerning the restaurant keeper, “She was a midwife and used to burn babies.” Then, with a toss of her blonde head with its little-girl bows, she added, “She burned one of mine.” The sally was greeted with shouts of appreciation and Sadie’s reputation as a wit rose among her comrades.

A mother, even one of the wisest, finds it no easy task to defend her young against these influences. Life is far too congested in such quarters for the girl to escape any of its aspects. When a family of from six to eight members lives in three or four rooms it is impossible to segregate the young from their elders. Only well-to-do parents can afford to provide a separate life tempered to the needs of young and growing personalities. The poor man’s house has no nursery for its young, no annex like the boarding school, which enlarges the dimensions of the rich man’s house and provides a special environment friendly to youth and its needs. The daughter of fourteen in the tenements must share the experience of the mother of fifty, who, even with the best intentions, cannot shield her girl from her own fifty-year-old materialistic morals. What is true of the individual family is also true of mass life on the block. There is no segregation of youth. The result is precocious hardness or youthful rebellion.

If the practice of pooling the moral standards of old and young is not considered ideal training for children in families whose moral standards meet the usual requirements, it is even less desirable in families which are either degraded or undeveloped. There are here on the West Side many families who have the naïve morality of primitive social groups. The result is that many of the girls are simply reared in a different morality from that of the community at large. Illegitimate births are common. Marriage--even a common law marriage--is accepted as removing any stigma that might attach to an irregular relationship. “Oh, it is all right,” said the parents of one girl-mother, “because she’s been goin’ with Bill now for years. They’ll marry as soon as they can.”

One of our club girls drifted into a temporary union and then drifted out again in the most matter-of-fact way. After a period of absence from the club, she was reported upon inquiry to be married. “She done well for herself,” rumor ran. One day she turned up at the club and brought her boy-husband, apparently a decent, steady sort of chap. Soon we learned that they had not really been married but had started the report in a spirit of fun. However, they now decided to go through the ceremony in earnest and together they went to the priest. Here they met an unexpected obstacle, for their visit had been forestalled by Mattie’s mother, who did not approve of Cleary for a son-in-law and had charged the priest not to marry them. The girl returned home, but continued to meet Cleary on the street and to go around with him. Then gradually she began to shake off the connection, breaking promises to the boy and failing to keep appointments with him. He came to the club one evening expecting to find her there according to her promise. But Mattie did not come to the club that night, and Cleary, after waiting a while in vain, departed saying darkly, “That’s the third time this week she’s give me the hang-up.” There was evidence that Mattie’s mother was more concerned about the loss of her daughter’s earnings than about making her an “honest” girl.

The toleration of moral irregularities is mingled with much harshness of censure. “D’ ye know Jennie Meehan that lives in th’ house next to ours?” Kitty Stevens asks the cooking class. “Well, she’s just had a baby. Father McGratty went there today an’ he married her an’ the feller. Her sister was just th’ same way, only she went and had her baby in Jersey. Me mother says if she had that kind of girl she’d burn her, she w’d. Burnin’ w’d be good enough for the likes o’ her.” But in spite of this severity of comment, the occurrence is accepted philosophically by the elders of the neighborhood, and soon forgotten.

Some families fall below all moral codes, even the simple ethics of the far West Side. The fault which may be forgiven in the girl is not so pardonable in her parents. Open and excessive infidelity on the part of the father and drink or infidelity on the part of the mother may make the family outcasts from among the merely poor. The daughter shares the degradation of the others and can scarcely escape the consequences. Even where the habits of her elders are not the subject of gossip, she herself cannot escape the knowledge and the influence. There was fifteen-year-old Addie Mercer, bright, vivacious, with sparkling dark eyes, who was getting a “bad name.” The unsavory example came from her father. He, as Addie and her mother and all the children knew, maintained a second household with a colored woman in charge. The effects of this constant example, as well as of other demoralizing influences, were already evident in Addie, and the final result threatened to be total moral collapse.

Often the mere physical conditions of life seem enough to account for the moral tragedies. The hallways of these tenements are perennially dark by day, although they are lit by flickering gas jets in the evening. The legal requirements for illumination of dark halls and stairs are too often evaded throughout the tenements. There was one house in our neighborhood where no lights burned in any of the halls day or night, for months. It is not uncommon to find a hall so pitch-dark that one must feel one’s way down the stairs.

A white flower was sent to the sick mother of one of our girls. When a visitor called, it was literally the only thing that could be seen in the woman’s room. All other details--walls, bed clothing, the features of the sick woman--were lost in blackness until the eyes of the visitor became sufficiently accustomed to the darkness to distinguish between them. Men boarders shared from time to time the three rooms of this home. In this flat and others like it a daughter had lived her fourteen years. Then, still a child, she became a mother.

Childhood in the tenements cannot escape the smirch of its brutal and ugly surroundings. The open toilet where little children play has given occasion to the bitterest of tragedies. The corner saloon, without which no block is complete, is always, it must be remembered, a part of some tenement house. It impinges on the homes of 12 or 15 families. The halls reek with the odor of bad whiskey. Snatches of saloon talk and saloon laughter leak through the walls, even by day. Out of homes like this come girls and boys to go to schools from whose neighborhood all liquor selling is legally banished to a distance of at least 200 yards! Truly, our legal protection of childhood is in some respects a farce.

Allowing for great deficiencies, we have still much natural vigor and strength among the young in the district. This is not yet a spot such as some that exist in the London slums, pervaded with the taint of innate mental and physical degeneration. The parents of our girls were mainly Irish immigrants or first generation Irish-Americans. They came of vigorous peasant stock, and from a country which is, by comparison with the rest of Europe, almost free from venereal disease. We found that most of our club girls had a fair physical inheritance. Of a group of 20 who were given physical examinations, 18 were shown to have well-developed muscles and organs. Notwithstanding many signs of weariness and disease, they were not lacking in stamina. All the more for this reason should the girl in her adolescent years live under a régime which will conserve her natural energy. The chance for health and strength should not be thrown away. These are the years of nervous instability in which especially she needs rest, change, exercise, and the healthful freedom of outdoor play and occupation. Her chances for all these things are very limited. Bodies intended to be vigorous are hard used from the start, and during adolescence they are often strained and harried far beyond their recuperative power.

Almost every night some girl came dragging in with heavy eyes and cheeks dead white under the powder. There were complaints galore of weariness and headache. One great reason was the immoderate pace at which the lives of such girls are hurried on. Long hours of work are thrust upon them. Long hours of play are seized with petulant insistence. To wrap packages from 7 a. m. until 5:30 p. m. within the walls of a factory; then several times a week to dance until 2 or 3 a. m. in the stifling closeness, the noise and excitement of a public hall, is a not unusual program. The immature body is bound to fail. With the girl who keeps up her train of pleasures, only a rebellious season now and then, when she loafs and sleeps long mornings, saves her from exhaustion.

Another cause of discomfort and pain, often with serious results, is the prevalence of minor defects of body. They have gone without care for months and years. Practically no girl has had teeth, eyes, and throat kept in good condition. The group of 20 girls were examined for defect in scalp, nose, ears, throat, teeth, eyes, heart, and lungs. Not one examined was without defect. Of the 20, 15 had enlarged tonsils and five had adenoids; 12 had defective teeth; four defective vision; two were cross-eyed; three had spinal curvature; one had trachoma; and one conjunctivitis.

Two sisters brought trachoma to the house from an institution where they had been reared. Sarah had been cured by a delicate and skilful operation. Martha had been discharged without any treatment. She was one of the toughest girls in the club and least concerned about herself or her appearance. When she came to us she was “bumming,” without a job. In her torn and filthy clothing, with reddened eyes half closed with the disease, she looked the most forlorn and neglected of the underworld. For weeks we worked to induce her mother to give her care. “Thank God, there’s nothing much the matter with her eyes,” was the mother’s final answer after she had been warned that blindness was a certain consequence. And from her sister, Sarah’s eyes were re-infected. A case recorded in the group of 20 was also contracted from her.

These examinations were little guide to the most serious physical defects among the girls. Those most in need of care were most difficult and wayward about examination. The mention of a doctor dismayed them. Some who promised to go never reached his office. But a weekly clinic was continued through the winter. Gradually the girls gained confidence and a number of serious troubles came to light. Three cases of tuberculosis--two incipient--were found. The third, which was taking a headlong course, was checked and ultimately cured by sending the girl daily to a hospital boat. Two girls were finally examined and treated for venereal disease. It was noticeable that girls whose histories and habits left little doubt of sexual abuse were under par in general health. Undoubtedly this operated both as cause and as result.

Carrie Fuller drifted into the club irregularly for months. Her voice, her frown, her dragging slouch across the room all told of the absence of any stamina. She never consented to any suggestion of a doctor or of care. It is inevitable that such a condition should make continuous work impossible. She was in a cigarette factory till she “chucked her job.” When we saw her after several weeks of absence, we learned without surprise that she had left home to live with a married sister and “lead a sporting life.” She laughed a bit recklessly and shambled out, leaving only the wonder that she cared to come at all. Without bodily vitality, how shall any of these children live through the long working days of their youth? And, still more, how shall they resist the continual pressure of the viciousness around them? Yet many a girl is scattering to the wind the strength of her youth.

A group composed of 19 of our girls, ranging in age from thirteen to seventeen, were examined in a psychological clinic. Four girls stood above the normal in mental ability, 10 were normal, and two were barely normal. One was below normal, as the result of immoral habits, and two were feeble-minded.

In the full story, broken schooling, low moral standards, the brutal life of the streets, low housing, and physical inferiority all play their part in the coarsened moral outlook of the girls. There is a group demoralized even in childhood by the abuse of their sexual functions. There are some who fall into immorality during the first years of adolescence. For the most part, however, the girls finally slip into the established ways of marriage and family building. From such groups the children of the next generation will be born in the largest proportion. To society, as well as themselves, it matters a great deal whether they have been crippled in mind and body by a wretched and brutal environment.

Such a girl was May Carney, who announced one day to our consternation that she was going to be married. May was only sixteen and a victim of gonorrhea. She had been, however, perfectly “straight” for a couple of years. At the age of sixteen she looked upon herself as a reformed character. “I used to be pretty tough with the boys,” she said. “That’s a pretty bad thing for any girl to say of herself, but I’m over it now.” The physician had said that it would require three years to cure her thoroughly of her disease and had recommended a slight operation immediately. In view of these facts, we could only feel great concern at the news of her immediate marriage. One of the club leaders sought out her mother to remonstrate against the marriage and also to propose that May should go to the hospital for two weeks.

Mrs. Carney was found at home one evening about 8 o’clock, and adjourned with her visitor to the hall outside for a confidential talk. The public passage, lighted by a flaring gas jet, was surrounded by four closed doors shutting off as many different flats and the crowded domestic life within. In the evening, when Mrs. Carney’s family was at home, it was the only spot where she could have a private word with a caller. Her final summing up of her daughter’s situation was this: “You see, if May was to go away to the hospital for two weeks, they’d all say she went away to have a baby. You see them two doors,” pointing to the forward end of the hall. “The girls in there--both of them--have just been away havin’ babies. They didn’t have nobody to take care of them, so they had to bring their babies home. Now, if May was to be gone two weeks, ye couldn’t make nobody believe she wasn’t doin’ just the same as them two.”

In view of this difficulty it was suggested that the operation might be performed at home. This seemed feasible, and the more serious question of May’s marriage was then broached. “Yes, May will be married in September,” said Mrs. Carney. “I know, she’s not seventeen yet, but it’s this way, y’ see. She’s sickly, she won’t never be no good to me,--the two or three dollars she brings home won’t hardly keep her,--and she’s always wantin’ money to spend on herself. What I say is, she’d better get married now. Daley is a good fellow and he’s workin’ steady. She mightn’t have so good a chance again.”

It would not be fair to blame Mrs. Carney very harshly for the materialism of this speech and her total lack of consideration for the “steady fellow” whom May was about to marry, and for their possible children. Mrs. Carney’s moral outlook was the result of the hard school in which she had been educated. As for her willingness to saddle a hardworking young man with her sickly daughter, this was, after all, only her duty as a “good mother.” It would have been hard to make Mrs. Carney see anything wrong in her attitude toward her daughter’s marriage. One has to admit that what we expected of her as a matter of course was from her point of view heroic conduct.

In view of the circumstances surrounding these young lives, it is useless to talk of the “fall” of these girls. Many of them have never lived on a sufficiently high moral level to “fall.” With them immorality is of a piece with the uncleanliness, physical and mental, in which they have been reared. There was, however, one important distinction which we learned to make between the forms of immorality. There was the girl who “solicited” and the girl who did not. One may have courage to grapple with mere immorality, but the girl who has been swept into the currents of commercialized vice is at once allied with secret and powerful forces which enable this trade to hold its own. Once during the year we were compelled to stand by helplessly and see a girl of sixteen slip over the brink of prostitution.

Carrie Drake, who drifted into the club one evening with Winnie Hyland, was a tall, white-faced girl, rather gawky and poorly dressed. She wore a shabby suit, a very dirty white waist of cheap embroidery, and a rackety hat which showed the effects of having been repeatedly rained upon. Carrie’s devotion to this hat was all the more noticeable because the other girls seldom wore any. We soon discovered the reason; an attack of typhoid fever had left her almost bald. Beneath the hat she wore a reddish-brown wig which was so thin that it scarcely covered her new growth of stubby hair of altogether a different shade of brown. She said she had made the wig of “some puffs,” and that it had been very good until some girl had tried to improve it by cutting it. She possessed a low voice and a courteous manner which she had kept as salvage from the wreck of her mother’s training.

Winnie Hyland, who brought her to us, was an irresistible little crippled girl whose faith in the powers of a social worker was the result of having been gently cared for all her life by representatives of one social agency or another. The tubercular hip-bone which she had developed in early childhood had saved her from the worst of the harshness and want which prevailed in her own home. Discovering her friend in search of a job she brought her over to the club to one of the “teachers.”

Carrie was not a hopeful candidate for work. She was only fifteen, still gaunt from the ravages of typhoid, grotesque in appearance. Her mother had died when she was eleven, and she had been promptly taken from school, which she hated, to do the housework. To appease the truant officer, she was sent to another school for a month. Then quietly she dropped out altogether. An attempt at work in a factory at this age was unsuccessful. “My aunt told the forelady how I was poor and hadn’t any mother. So she took pity on me and let me try.” But she was soon discharged and was kept at home to take care of her younger brother and sister, until all three were sent to an institution. Two months later the father died,--as Carrie declared and certainly believed, “of a broken heart.”

After leaving the institution at fourteen, she had lived with her aunts by spells, quarreling and breaking away from time to time. For a while she had stayed with the mother of a friend who found her sitting on the steps in the rain. She tried places at service, but she was not a trained houseworker and did not stay long at any place. Finally she had got a job in a steam laundry, but while working there she sickened with typhoid and was sent to the hospital. When she came to us she was living with an aunt in a furnished room house, a forlorn, three-story shack on one of the river blocks. The halls reeked with odors from the corner saloon. The aunt, her husband, and two children were occupying a single room when they took the girl in. There was only one bed. “I told Carrie she could squeeze in,” she explained. “I couldn’t ask her to sleep on the floor.”

It was slow business finding work for Carrie. She had to have better clothes. She had to be examined by a physician, for there were signs of a venereal disease which would have made her dangerous to fellow-workers in a factory. These things had been arranged for and consented to. But before they could be put into effect and work could be found, Carrie had taken the plunge. She disappeared without leaving a trace, but soon after one of the girls reported seeing her on Eighth Avenue, “in a real wig and a swell new suit.” Immorality was not new to Carrie, but she had found a way to make it pay. She was “on the streets.” There followed an unsuccessful search, inquiries at police headquarters, of prison officials, of probation officers. We enlisted the aid of a strong society, but the agent, though he promised to help, gave us very little encouragement, saying that such a search was pretty hopeless, as there were hundreds of girls in similar circumstances at large in New York.

Carrie slipped out of sight all the more easily because she had no one “who rightly belonged to her.” When a girl disappears from a home presided over by a determined mother, the search which follows is likely to be a desperate one. Mrs. Mullarkey’s search for her Fannie was a mixture of folly, shrewdness, and heroism. Fannie, according to her mother, was “the best girl you ever saw” till she came to live on the “Gopher block.” There she “got in” with an older girl at the factory and began to be tough. She threw up her job, as did her friend, and the two spent their time in secret ways. At first the mother knew nothing of Fannie’s being out of work because the girl left home regularly mornings and came home promptly to her dinner. But at last the fraud was discovered; there was a scene, with “hollerin’ and smashin’,” and upon the heels of it Fannie disappeared. Mrs. Mullarkey’s fears pointed to a certain house on Eleventh Avenue where a woman lived who had the reputation of harboring girls. Not daring to go there alone, she enlisted the aid of Father Langan, “a rough hollerin’ sort of a man that the children was all afraid of.” But the woman would not open even to the Father’s authoritative knock. Eventually they returned with an officer who broke down the door. But Fannie was not there after all.

Mrs. Mullarkey’s two aids, the officer and the priest, could give her no further counsel. But she herself knew of another resource in the person of a young man, about twenty-two years old, a gangster and political scullion, whom she had known from early boyhood. To him she made her appeal for old acquaintance’ sake. “For God’s sake, Petey,” she said, “you are the only one that can get Fannie. Find out where she is.” Moved by the appeal and nothing loath to show his power, Petey promised that he would find the girl; only he stipulated that Mrs. Mullarkey must “leave Fannie be” when once she had her. Mrs. Mullarkey agreed and Petey went forth on his quest. In a couple of hours he returned with the culprit and commanded her to tell her mother where she had been. At first she refused; but Petey, once enlisted on the mother’s side, was a stern and unyielding ally. He brought out a knife and threatened her, so that the poor girl was terrified and stammered forth a confession of how she and her friend had been staying together in a furnished room. Mrs. Mullarkey was so outraged by what she heard that she altogether forgot her promise to Petey. After he had gone she summoned an officer and had the girl taken to court. Fannie was locked up in a cell for twenty-four hours “to cool off.” When she came up before the judge the following day she was “as brazen as could be, not a tear in her eye.” At last, however, she said she wanted to go home, and the judge placed her on probation.

We knew a sorry scrap of a child, five years old, who was already getting her instruction. She was a thin, sharp-featured little creature, uncommunicative, but very watchful out of her clear, bright blue eyes. Her clothing, hands, and face were always unclean. She gave an uncomfortable sense of possessing a great deal of unnatural knowledge for her age. Her home was a kitchen with two windows, and two tiny dark bedrooms, as hopelessly unkempt and dirty as herself. It was the abode of six people and nine cats. Her father was the last of three husbands, all of doubtful legal status. Her mother, who drank heavily on occasion, was unreliable. “Patsy” was the frequent companion of her sister of fifteen. This girl, who had an unusual, vivid, and forceful personality, was alternately sought out by the fellows of the block and censured with their disapproval. She ruled Patsy as an autocrat, petting and punishing her, allowing her to “tag around” and constantly using her as a go-between. There will be no question of a “fall” for Patsy. As she was being taught, so in time she will naturally develop.

With girls from such homes, childhood is the crucial time. It is not temptation, circumstance, or delusion that gets them into “trouble.” It is the faulty moral and mental training which simply expresses itself later in the almost inevitable, natural fashion. A smattering of conventional morality given by the church or by school is of little practical force against the tenor of their lives. “Reform” for such girls does not mean a return to abandoned ideals and desires. This is hard to achieve, but what is required here is still more difficult. It is the graft of new habits and a new outlook. It is the patient training away from the easy ways into the strict new law. Even fourteen or fifteen may be too late an age at which to begin this.

But actual immorality is not the only fruit of the dingy, sordid happenings which compose so large a part of the life of this community. There are girls who grow up in the midst of vicious surroundings with an inward security against harm. They are as trustworthy as the most carefully trained and guarded child--and hardier. For with them there is truth in the familiar boast, “I’m able to take care of myself.” But they pay a price for this fortitude. They are not taught, cleanly and rightly, straight from the shoulder. The taint and grime around them reach to their thoughts and feeling, and they suffer in their conceptions of life and of human experience.

We hear a great deal of the precocious development of New York children. It is most noticeable in girls from homes like these. In spite of the essential helplessness of their age, they acquire a surface hardihood which marks them out from normal children. They have grown up to have a settled distrust of life. They have a lurking bitterness which may be unavoidable in the adult but which ought never to play a part in childhood.

Yet, granting all the untoward conditions and influences which she must face, the problem of our West Side girl is by no means a hopeless one. Watch her as she swings through the streets, lovely through all her tawdriness, fine through all her vulgarity, gentle through all her “toughness.” Seeing her thus we cannot but see also her hopeful possibilities, in spite of the sordidness and evil which have encompassed her.

To strengthen the best elements of the home--this is the surest and most fundamental way to help this girl. The dangers for her family are the most deeply rooted menace to her. And here they are manifold. We may safeguard her recreation; we may improve her schooling; we may regulate her working conditions. But we must remember that she is seldom to be regarded entirely as an individual; she is one of a family group, a unit of a community. Unless she drifts to the streets she will probably remain so. And whatever can lighten and beautify the grimy life of the district, or relieve the intense pressure on family comfort, will give her a better chance.