There are many convincing illustrations that this parental
harshness often results in juvenile delinquency. A Polish boy of
seventeen came to Hull-House one day to ask a contribution of
fifty cents "towards a flower piece for the funeral of an old
Hull-House club boy." A few questions made it clear that the
object was fictitious, whereupon the boy broke down and
half-defiantly stated that he wanted to buy two twenty-five cent
tickets, one for his girl and one for himself, to a dance of the
Benevolent Social Twos; that he hadn't a penny of his own
although he had worked in a brass foundry for three years and had
been advanced twice, because he always had to give his pay
envelope unopened to his father; "just look at the clothes he
buys me" was his concluding remark.
Perhaps the girls are held even more rigidly. In a recent
investigation of two hundred working girls it was found that only
five per cent had the use of their own money and that sixty-two
per cent turned in all they earned, literally every penny, to
their mothers. It was through this little investigation that we
first knew Marcella, a pretty young German girl who helped her
widowed mother year after year to care for a large family of
younger children. She was content for the most part although her
mother's old-country notions of dress gave her but an
infinitesimal amount of her own wages to spend on her clothes,
and she was quite sophisticated as to proper dressing because she
sold silk in a neighborhood department store.
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