FACING PAGE
Unconscious of her handicaps she
anticipates keenly life in the new world 12

She was full of ambition and willing to
work 22

She worships Pleasure and Fashion 68

Her heart is filled with a deep desire to
serve 154

The future promises nothing and she has
lost hope 198

PART I

_The Girl_

I

THE RIGHTS OF A GIRL

She has certain inalienable rights, regardless of race, color or social
state. When it has thought about her at all, society in general has
supposed, until recently, that in a free country, a glorious land of
opportunity, the girl has her rights--the right to work, the right to
play, the right to secure an education and to enter the professions, the
right to marry or to refuse, the right in short to do as she shall
choose. And in a sense and to the casual observer this is true. Our
country gives to her some rights which she can enjoy nowhere else in the
world. But as one learns to know her, little by little the stupendous
fact is impressed upon him that girlhood has been and is being denied
_its rights_.

_It is the right of every girl_ to be born into a community where the
sanitary conditions are such that she has at least a fair chance to
enter upon life without being physically handicapped at the start. But
hundreds of girls every year open their baby eyes in dark inner rooms
where the dim gas light steals what oxygen there may chance to be in the
heavy air, take their first steps in foul alleys, find their first toys
in garbage cans and gutters. They have been denied their rights at the
start. In a Christian land, they grow weak, anemic, yield to the white
specter and in a few years pass out of the unfair world to which they
came, or remain to fight out a miserable existence against terrific
odds. They make up an army of girls who have been denied their rights.
And her religion? What is it that religion may offer to her in
compensation for that which she has been denied?

_It is the right of every girl_ to be born under conditions which will
make possible sufficient food and clothing for her natural growth and
development. But scores of little girls go shivering to school every
morning after a breakfast of bread and tea, they return numb with cold
after a dinner of more bread and tea and they go home to