An immigrant girl is occasionally exploited by her own lover whom she
has come to America to marry. I recall the case of a Russian girl thus
decoyed into a disreputable life by a man deceiving her through a fake
marriage ceremony. Although not found until a year later, the girl had
never ceased to be distressed and rebellious. Many Slovak and Polish
girls, coming to America without their relatives, board in houses
already filled with their countrymen who have also preceded their own
families to the land of promise, hoping to earn money enough to send for
them later. The immigrant girl is thus exposed to dangers at the very
moment when she is least able to defend herself. Such a girl, already
bewildered by the change from an old world village to an American city,
is unfortunately sometimes convinced that the new country freedom does
away with the necessity for a marriage ceremony. Many others are told
that judgment for a moral lapse is less severe in America than in the
old country. The last month's records of the Municipal Court in Chicago,
set aside to hear domestic relation cases, show sixteen unfortunate
girls, of whom eight were immigrant girls representing eight different
nationalities. These discouraged and deserted girls become an easy prey
for the procurers who have sometimes been in league with their lovers.
Even those girls who immigrate with their families and sustain an
affectionate relation with them are yet often curiously free from
chaperonage. The immigrant mothers do not know where their daughters
work, save that it is in a vague "over there" or "down town." They
themselves were guarded by careful mothers and they would gladly give
the same oversight to their daughters, but the entire situation is so
unlike that of their own peasant girlhoods that, discouraged by their
inability to judge it, they make no attempt to understand their
daughters' lives. The girls, realizing this inability on the part of
their mothers, elated by that sense of independence which the first
taste of self-support always brings, sheltered from observation during
certain hours, are almost as free from social control as is the
traditional young man who comes up from the country to take care of
himself in a great city. These immigrant parents are, of course, quite
unable to foresee that while a girl feels a certain restraint of public
opinion from the tenement house neighbors among whom she lives, and
while she also responds to the public opinion of her associates in a
factory where she works, there is no public opinion at all operating as
a restraint upon her in the hours which lie between the two, occupied in
the coming and going to work through the streets of a city large enough
to offer every opportunity for concealment. So much of the recreation
which is provided by commercial agencies, even in its advertisements,
deliberately plays upon the interest of sex because it is under such
excitement and that of alcohol that money is most recklessly spent.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account