CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTORY

The material for the following studies was collected by four persons. The final chapter, which deals with the Italian girl of the West Side, was prepared by one of the group working independently. This course was necessary, as the Italian girl’s life is inseparable from that of her family and the only approach to her is by way of her own home. One could not know the Italian girl of the West Side without knowing also her father, her mother, and her numerous brothers and sisters, if not, indeed, a great many of her relatives. The other three workers, including the writer, joined in the management of a small house which was used as a recreation center and club house. They also collaborated in keeping a daily journal, to which reference is made in the following pages.

It was our wish especially to gain some knowledge of the type of girl who is seen so frequently at the street corners and who refuses to be attracted to agencies which frankly declare a desire to improve her. The club, therefore, adopted an open-door policy and the leaders tried to refrain from obvious attempts to influence or control the girls who came. The aim was to encourage sincerity among them, and to prevent their “playing up” to superimposed standards “for what there was in it.” Not that we thought that these girls were especially inclined to practice fraud; but we knew from experience that work with too obvious a purpose “to do good” often encourages hypocrisy.

One of our reasons for opening the Tenth Avenue club for girls was that we had found it impossible to be on an intimate footing with them in their homes. The atmosphere of family life was far too often one of mutual reproach and recrimination, and the visitor was likely to find herself in the embarrassing position of a court of appeals. Picture an evening spent in the company of the two Katie Murphys, mother and daughter, thus: Mrs. Murphy, sitting with folded arms in the rocking-chair, rehearses the story of Katie’s sins. Katie leans against the back of the sofa with dropped eyelids and a face as expressionless as putty. All the efforts of the involuntary court of appeals to induce the girl to say a word in her own behalf are met by stony silence. Meanwhile, the mother runs on, zealously driving nails in her own coffin as far as the girl’s affection and confidence are concerned. Harassed by the problem of feeding, clothing, and housing six children on $8.00 a week, Mrs. Murphy has little strength or imagination left for the subtler problem of how to handle an adolescent daughter.

It was such experiences that taught us the necessity of providing some neutral ground on which to meet Katie Murphy, if we were to secure her confidence. This neutral ground took the form of club rooms where we established ourselves with the definite intention of giving Katie the just due of her youth,--a good time.

We continued, however, to visit the families of girls in the course of the investigation, collecting thereby material for the observations on home life contained in the following chapters. The girls themselves welcomed our visits even though they must have realized in a vague way that we were keeping “tab” on conditions in the homes from which our club members came. One day May Sipp,[63] a new girl, came to one of the club leaders and said, “Miss ----, will you come to my house tomorrow?” The leader thought that perhaps a party was being planned and asked for further details. “Why, no one has been to my house yet and I’d like to have you come,” the girl explained. It was evident that she felt a little put out because her home had not as yet been visited.

It was the middle of December when we first opened for the girls in the neighborhood the house which we had taken for the purpose. The place received no more colorful name than the number on the door, “471,” by which it was designated during the whole time we occupied it. “471” was a red brick structure consisting of three stories and a basement. It was rather a friendly looking house with a “stoop” and the remnants of front and back yards; that is, there was a small area in front guarded by a low iron fence with a gate, and a square box in the rear which became a “playground” in summer. A supervisor from Christ Presbyterian Church was placed in charge of the latter, and the children crowded into the little box in such numbers that we soon had complaints from the neighbors against the shrill chorus rising from the back yard.

The front yard was of no particular use except that the iron gate served to stimulate the imagination of the small boys who haunted our premises. It was a continual bone of contention. It was always being carried away by bands of enemies and heroically restored by bands of friends--who were sometimes one and the same--until at last we decided to remove it entirely from the sidewalk, where it was of no earthly use as a gate, and store it in an inner closet.

We occupied two floors of the house, the ground floor and the basement. In the basement was a large, well lighted kitchen and a living room. On the first floor were two large connecting rooms which were furnished with folding chairs and a piano. Though our equipment was meager, we had a cook stove and a piano. These two pieces of furniture we came to regard as the necessary minimum of equipment for a girls’ club under all circumstances.

The occupations of the clubs--cooking, sewing, basket-weaving, brass work--were carried on as pastime rather than as work. It was necessary to vary the program repeatedly, for the shifting attention of the girls refused to consider any occupation as pleasurable for long at a time. The one thing of which they never seemed to tire was dancing, and in spite of the ugly forms which this recreation took, it had always the beauty of spontaneity. Their fondness for popular songs was almost as spontaneous. “The Garden of Love,” “The Hypnotizing Man,” “When Broadway was a Pasture,” “The Girl that Married Dad,” and others of the same lurid and sentimental strain were sung over and over to an unvarying appreciation.

Our relations with our co-tenants at “471” threw much additional light on conditions of life on the West Side. Above us on the second floor lived the McClusky family. Ellen McClusky was fourteen, and since her mother’s death two years before had been housekeeper for her father and three brothers. Lately one of the brothers had sickened of tuberculosis, thus adding to Ellen’s housekeeping duties those of a sick nurse. Her school attendance had suffered. The truant officer was paying visits to the house and the health officer was also knocking at the door. Thus the clouds had already begun to gather on the McClusky horizon even before our entrance on the scene. Ellen’s joy at the news that a club for girls had moved in on the ground floor of the house was unbounded. She was allowed at first to come down to us every evening.

But Mr. McClusky soon turned against us. He was a choleric individual, and was, moreover, constantly agitated over the condition of his son, who was dying by inches. It is not surprising that he turned violently against the social coercion which demanded that Ellen should go to school and his son be put away in a hospital. He mishandled the truant officer and forbade Ellen to have anything to do with the “teachers,” whom he regarded as being in league with the forces that harassed him.

Ellen would hang over the banisters in the evenings watching the hall below. But her father had forbidden her even to speak to us. In March the invalid brother died, and the club rooms were closed for a week during which the house was given over to the solemn splendors of a funeral. After the undertaker had retired, the health officer took possession and the rooms were submitted to a thorough fumigation.

We opened our club once more, but Ellen was still forbidden to come to us. She continued living in the isolation of the second floor, peeping over the banisters in the evening. It was finally a great relief to our overstrained sympathies when an officer of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, upon evidence furnished by Ellen’s aunt, arrived and removed her from her home. This ended the vicissitudes of the McClusky family so far as we had any share in them.

On the top floor lived Mr. Distel, a German mechanic about fifty years old. He was an odd little bitten-off man, unkempt and kindly, who had lived alone in his three little rooms many years. He liked to hear the boys and girls downstairs, he said, and occasionally he made clumsy efforts to join in, but he had been too long a hermit. He could not. Needless to say, Mr. Distel was our most sympathetic neighbor, and the presence of the little man finishing off an industrious and worthy life in his lonely top floor rooms made us but the more determined in our task of supplying wholesome good times to our friends.

The source from which most of our difficulties proceeded was the spirit of disorder abroad in the neighborhood. This was indeed a lawless spirit and, in its extreme form, a sinister and menacing influence. The “Gopher gang”[64] figured largely in the neighborhood gossip, and whatever may have been the actual extent of Gopher operations in our vicinity, the current stories about them, however inaccurate as to facts, were in themselves a sufficiently evil influence in the lives of the boys and girls of the district.

Our most direct contact with local disorderly influences was through the gangs of small boys who haunted our premises, demanding to be admitted. As we were not prepared to open the house to them, our apparent inhospitality drew upon us a series of attacks. Not that all the attacks were acts of deliberate revenge; they were sometimes merely outbursts of habitual rowdyism. Nevertheless, they were a serious element in our situation. We found that we could not run a club for girls on Tenth Avenue without getting the small boys’ consent. Time had to be spent in conciliating them. At first our method was to station an out-post on the sidewalk. To one of the “teachers,” who proved an adept in gang psychology, this difficult task was usually delegated. An entry in her diary under the date of December 20--a date on which the usual Tenth Avenue spirit was enhanced by the approach of the Christmas holidays--reads as follows: “As it was not my night on duty I had no intention of spending the evening at the Tenth Avenue house. I stopped in to speak to Miss Barclay and see how things were going, but the disorder on the outside was so bad that I was forced to spend most of the evening on the sidewalk outside with the boys.”

An adventure which befell us on the second evening after our “opening” might have had very serious results. One of the club leaders was engaged in the front basement room with a group of the older girls. Early in the evening a gang of small boys gathered at the window outside to upbraid their sisters for not letting them come into the club. But they withdrew at a word from the “teacher,” who might have suspected such unusual docility, but did not. An hour later when the girls were engaged in their club occupations, there came crashing through the window a weapon seven feet in length, which proved to be a gun with a bayonet attachment. It struck the chair in which the teacher was sitting with such force as to chip the oaken back. As the gun was slowly drawn into the room there was much wringing of hands and a general desire to get a “cop.” The gang had promptly made off, of course, leaving the sidewalk deserted.

It became apparent that the small boy could do serious damage unless conciliated. Treating with him in the darkness of the sidewalk proved not to be successful. It was evident that we must bring him inside and examine him in the light. One evening just after the front shutters had been pried open by depredators who had then promptly run away, one of the club leaders went out to the sidewalk, closing the door behind her. Nobody was in sight. But she had only to continue long enough in a motionless attitude to coax these young animals from their holes. Presently a head came out from behind a stoop, and another from an area opposite. Soon several boys were edging along the pavement toward the solitary figure in the dark, and in a few minutes the whole gang had closed in a circle around the trapper. She led them up the stoop, into the brightly lighted sitting room, and called for a clear statement of grievances. It was all ready. “Say, ain’t no boys gona be let in never?”

The end of this council and of others which followed was that we gave Saturday night to the boys. Gradually, by this concession and others, we were able to conciliate the gangs. The worst of our troubles were over when they had been somewhat enlisted on our side, but there were occasions when the alliance proved embarrassing. For instance, one of the “teachers” leaving the club late in the evening encountered a group of the older boys who gallantly offered to escort her to the car. As they neared the corner she remarked hastily that she must catch a car which had just stopped there. Before she could get her breath, four of the boys rushed ahead, jumped on the front platform, and began putting on the brakes so that the motorman could not start his car. The astonished club leader found herself seized by the other three youths and hoisted upon the rear platform with a parting shove which sent her hurtling into the car. The hooting and confusion were intense, and the passengers stood up in alarm. The boys, however, stood genially waving their caps as the car started. When the conductor came to collect the fare, he said suspiciously to the new passenger, “Did you know them boys?” The young woman was compelled to say that they were friends of hers, to which he replied, “Gee, but you got tough nuts for your friends!”

Stories of the disorder in the neighborhood came into the house in many ways. For instance, it was vividly reproduced in the conversation of the “gentleman friends” of the girls, who were often our guests. This was full of wild Gopher gossip and stories of arrests. There was one evening in particular when Doran thrilled us all with a long story of how he had gone home early one night and was sitting reading his paper, feeling rather queer--the trouble was in the air--when a terrific noise broke out in the hall. A whole gang of fellows had come into the house through the door on the roof and gone plunging down the stairs pursued by a trail of officers.

At this point in the story, Cleaver suggested that Doran must have kept the door shut pretty tight, to which he agreed. Cleaver then accused him of being afraid, and recalled an instance when, as he claimed, Doran had shut the door against him when the “cops” were after him. Doran hotly denied this. The two ruffled spirits had to be smoothed and then the talk ran on, all about arrests and flights and pursuits. The whole conversation indicated how precariously near the edge of trouble these young men felt themselves to be all the time. It showed also the kind of lawlessness and rowdyism on which they built their youthful ideals, which lead in turn to further acts of lawlessness and rowdyism.

Echoes of the Gophers occurred in the talk of the girls. At one of the first club meetings, a tall, attractive girl arose and proposed as a name for the club, the “Gopherettes.” As a motto, she suggested, “Hit one, hit all.” This was Fanny Mayhew, who turned out on nearer acquaintance to be a wonderfully cheerful girl with a happy disposition and very popular with her family and school teachers. Though perfectly able to hold her own, she proved not so belligerent as the episode had suggested. She told a club leader that she had once belonged to a club of girls called the “Gopherettes.” They had paid dues and even rented a basement room for a short time. Later the club had moved to the dock, and she had not been allowed by her mother to go to its meetings.

It was unavoidable that the girls’ conduct should reflect the character of their environment. However, only once was there an outbreak against a club leader. Among the friends of the house who kindly volunteered from time to time to help with an evening’s entertainment was a young woman from another city who had, thanks to her own efforts and the interest of a wealthy friend, raised herself from the ranks of the girls who composed our clubs. On the occasion of this young woman’s visit with us, there arose from the room where she was engaged with a group of girls the sounds of a violent quarrel. One of the regular leaders hastened to the room, arriving just in time to prevent blows. Julia O’Brien had lifted her arm to strike the young woman who had come up from the ranks and who was, moreover, for the moment the center of a hostile, excited group.

The leader of the riot, led downstairs to the kitchen, became instantly repentant, and the story of the quarrel came out. One of the girls had stepped on Julia’s foot and she had exclaimed, “Oh, hell!” It was an unfortunate slip. Julia knew that swearing was not allowed in the club rooms and she was making strenuous efforts, as the leaders knew, to break a lifelong habit. But the young woman from the ranks did not know this and she had rebuked the guilty Julia in a tone of such cold and stinging contempt that it had not only provoked her victim to the point of striking blows but had drawn upon the tactless leader the wrath of every girl present.

A subsequent talk with this young woman revealed the attitude of offensive superiority which the girls had so hotly resented--an unfortunate by-product of her rapid rise into responsibility. A thoroughly self-respecting and deserving person, she had the peculiarly hard and unsympathetic attitude toward those who had failed to surmount their disabilities so often held by persons who have themselves struggled up from the ranks.

“Fights” among the girls were not infrequent. One unusually peaceful and happy evening, for instance, ended in open warfare because Barbara Egan, apparently with no evil intent, had asked Louisa Storm why her fingers were so crooked. No less painful was the quarrel between Mamie Taggart and Anna Strumpf, which was recorded in the following entry in the diary: “Tonight it was raining heavily but about eight or ten girls of the Wednesday night club turned up. Anna Strumpf sent word that she is not coming any more as she is afraid that Mamie Taggart will do her up outside.”

Not all the “fights” were duels; some of them were petty wars of faction with faction. There was one particularly unfortunate evening when fatal “remarks were passed” and the deadly insult “tough” was used. The waves of bitterness were long in subsiding. The next evening a group of the girls, headed by Maggie Tracy and Clara Denley, appeared at the club wearing large stiff hair bows, some red and some black, which stuck out defiantly on either side. They announced that they had been called tough, so what could one expect? The club leaders began to muster their diplomacy and act as peacemakers, but the air was still belligerent when the opposite faction came in.

Expecting a repetition of the clash between the two sets, we were greatly surprised to see Sadie Fleming, the leader of the newcomers, go up to Maggie Tracy and put her hand affectionately on her enemy’s shoulder, apparently forgetting that a state of war existed between them. Sadie and her companions had collected on their way to the club the most thrilling gossip of the entire year. Father Langan, according to the story, on his way to give holy communion to a woman who was sick, had been attacked by a gang of Gophers. He had thrown open his coat to show the vestment of the priest, but they had robbed him of some money he was carrying and had left him stretched on the sidewalk!

This story was a nine-days’ wonder on the West Side, where, as a usual thing, deeds of violence are promptly forgotten. Father Langan flatly contradicted the report, but this had no effect upon the currency of so picturesque a story. Very likely there were other quarrels besides Sadie’s and Maggie’s which were forgotten and effaced in the mutual thrill over this piece of modernized Irish folklore. Mrs. O’Callahan was graphic, bringing together details heard from various other sources as well.

“The father was just afther going t’ give a dyin’ woman th’ Holy Communion. He was stheppin’ down the street when these fellows set in upon him. ‘B’ys,’ he sez, throwin’ back his coat and takin’ an’ showin’ thim th’ Sacrament which he had in his pocket, ‘d’ye see what I’m carryin’ here? For yer own good,’ he sez, ‘Oi warn ye,’ he sez, ‘not t’ lay hand on a priest,’ he sez, ‘an’ him goin’ t’ a sick old woman,’ he sez. An’ with that they hit him an’ took what money he had--twenty-six dollars he was carryin’, so they say. Oi can’t understand why the fire from above didn’t sthrike thim down dead. In Ireland, a priest there has only t’ stamp with his foot and they’d ha’ been sthruck down where they stood. But America is a bad place, it ain’t like th’ owld counthrey.”

When the youthful gang spirit of Tenth Avenue had been conquered it seemed as though the last difficulty had been surmounted. At the end of ten months we thought we had taken the measure of all the unpropitious influences that threatened our enterprise. But not so. We were yet to capitulate to the last and most powerful enemy of all--industry. First came a “dispossess” notice, and before we could get our breath from the surprise the house-wrecking crew were upon us. It was a simple matter to raze “471” and the adjoining buildings. In a few days they had all disappeared, along with the tiny back yard, where the children had played on hot summer days. On the site was erected a lofty factory building. Tomorrow the machines will be chugging away in the new shops, tended perhaps by some of the same girls who yesterday came knocking at the door of “471” asking for room to play. A neighboring school received the remnants of our clubs. With new conditions, a new environment, and new groups of girls, an entirely new start had to be made.

* * * * *

The observations given in this study of girl life on the West Side do not pretend to be extensive. No attempt was made to gather in numbers. We had 65 girls in our clubs whose home conditions were very well known.[65] But the study was written with much additional information in mind. Other girls came to the house and we were in touch in one way or another with a great many families of the neighborhood besides those of club members. The chief purpose, however, was to know intimately and sympathetically a small group of girls who were typical in many ways of the girls in any poor and neglected city population. As one writer puts it: “The alternative lies, not between knowing a few people and knowing all to an equal degree, but between scratching the surface of the whole field and digging a portion of it spade deep in order to gain some idea of the under-soil throughout.”[66]

How far did our groups represent the girl life of the West Side? It was a comparatively small number whom we knew, and the majority of them came from the “under-soil.” The well cared for did not come to us. Our girls were for the most part the daughters of the poorest poor. As a group they differed essentially from the types of girls usually found in settlement clubs and classes. Some of them were not of the best local repute. They were known as “tough,” and had been practically outlawed by certain settlements and recreation centers for the sake of the more promising element.

The settlement workers in the district repeatedly assured us that it was hard to hold the girls who came from our particular area and impossible to work with them in numbers. This testimony as to the unsocial character of these girls was sadly borne out by our experience in trying to organize them into clubs. There were many who corresponded to the description given by Dr. Katherine Bement Davis,[67] superintendent of Bedford Reformatory: “Our girls as a class are anti-social. It is very hard for them to see their conduct in its relation to the lives of those around them. They are individualistic in the extreme. They have never thought of the necessity for government and law, and can see no reason for obedience to anything but their own impulse.”[68]

But after making all due allowances for the limited number of girls studied and the “tough” reputations of some of them, the fact remains that these 65 girls and their friends were representative of many others who are subjected to the same environment. They had been brought up from babyhood in these blocks. Born in the crowded, dark tenement house they had had for a nursery the crowded sidewalk, and for a playground, the street. They had gone to the nearest school and from there to work in the nearest factory. They had seen the West Side, breathed the West Side, fed on the West Side for fourteen years or more, and had built up their adolescent ideals of the same forlorn material. That they had succumbed to unwholesome influences does not prove them to have been peculiarly weak or susceptible. Nor does it prove that their parents had been culpably delinquent in their duties. Conditions of living in the crowded city have tended to loosen the family bond, and the powerful force of neighborhood influence cannot be adequately combated by parental authority alone. The community must assume the responsibility for the environment of its least protected members.

A campaign for the control of conditions in the public dance halls has been begun. We are told that our young working girls must be given decent dance halls and not publicly and deliberately consigned to the degraded centers which attract them under that name. The West Side girls need much more, however, than protected dance halls. Some of the girls of this district are too poor to go to public dances. But the same dangers which threaten the dance-hall girl stalk unrestrained through the neglected streets and tenements of the West Side, and the girl of fourteen may fall a victim even under her own roof tree.

Demoralizing neighborhood conditions, such as congestion, filth, street temptations, and neighborhood gangs, all of which are practically synonymous with West Side life, influence the girls for evil only to a less degree than they influence the boys. One needs only to talk with any good mother of the district and hear how steadily she is engaged in fending her children against the life of the street to learn how constant and how potent are its influences. Testimony is borne to their power by the iterated complaint of West Side mothers,--of those who do not work away from home as well as of those who do,--that “Mamie is beginning to get out from under me,” or, “Katie was the best girl you ever saw until we came to live on this block.”

The problem of waywardness among West Side girls cannot be solved by long distance methods. Their environment must be made safe and their pleasures recognized and made decent. Some of the things which enlightened criminologists recommend for women in reformatories, after they have completely succumbed to the sort of conditions which abound on the West Side, are regular school attendance with manual training and flexible courses of study; regular hours for sleep, for food, for work, and for play; plenty of nourishing food; fresh air and outdoor life; the social discipline of community life. These are the things which are given to the girls in the reformatory at Bedford as a cure. The same things would help to prevent; they would preserve the West Side girl to society as a daughter and as a mother, as a worker and as a citizen.