t home, and
every Saturday night when her meager wages, reduced by sick days "off,"
were compared with what the others brought in, she was regularly
scolded, "sometimes slapped," by her parents, jeered at by her more
vigorous sisters and bullied by her brothers. She tried to shorten her
hours by doing "rush-work" as a waitress at noon, but she found this
still beyond her strength, and worst of all, the pay of two dollars and
a half insufficient to satisfy her mother. Confiding her troubles to the
other waitresses, one of them good-naturedly told her how she could make
money through appointments in a nearby disreputable hotel, and so take
home an increased amount of money easily called "a raise in wages." So
strong was the habit of obedience, that the girl continued to take money
home every Saturday night until her eighteenth birthday, in spite of the
fact that she gave up the restaurant in less than six weeks after her
first experience. Although all of this happened ten years ago and the
German mother is long since dead, the daughter bitterly ended the story
with the infamous hope that "the old lady was now suffering the torments
of the lost, for making me what I am." Such a girl was subjected to
temptations to which society has no right to expose her.

A dangerous cynicism regarding the value of virtue, a cynicism never so
unlovely as in the young, sometimes seizes a girl who, because of long
hours and overwork, has been unable to preserve either her health or
spirits and has lost all measure of joy in life. That this premature
cynicism may be traced to an unhappy and narrow childhood is suggested
by the fact that a large number of these girls come from families in
which there has been little affection and the poor substitute of
parental tyranny.

A young Italian girl who earned four dollars a week in a tailor shop
pulling out hastings, when asked why she wore a heavy woolen gown on one
of the hottest days of last summer, replied that she was obliged to earn
money for her clothes by scrubbing for the neighbors after hours; that
she had found no such work lately and that her father would not allow
her anything from her wages for clothes or for carfare, because he was
buying a house.

This parental control sometimes exercised in order to secure all of a
daughter's wages, is often established with the best intentions in the
world. I recall a French dressmaker who had frugally supported her two
daughters until they were