Most of the cases of economic responsibility, however, are not due to
chivalric devotion, but arise from a desire to fulfill family
obligations such as would be accepted by any conscientious girl. This
was clearly revealed in conversations which were recently held with
thirty-four girls, who were living at the same time in a rescue home,
when twenty-two of them gave economic pressure as the reason for
choosing the life which they had so recently abandoned. One piteous
little widow of seventeen had been supporting her child and had been
able to leave the life she had been leading only because her married
sister offered to take care of the baby without the money formerly paid
her. Another had been supporting her mother and only since her recent
death was the girl sure that she could live honestly because she had
only herself to care for.
The following story, fairly typical of the twenty-two involving economic
reasons, is of a girl who had come to Chicago at the age of fifteen,
from a small town in Indiana. Her father was too old to work and her
mother was a dependent invalid. The brother who cared for the parents,
with the help of the girl's own slender wages earned in the country
store of the little town, became ill with rheumatism. In her desire to
earn more money the country girl came to the nearest large city,
Chicago, to work in a department store. The highest wage she could earn,
even though she wore long dresses and called herself "experienced," was
five dollars a week. This sum was of course inadequate even for her own
needs and she was constantly filled with a corroding worry for "the
folks at home." In a moment of panic, a fellow clerk who was "wise"
showed her that it was possible to add to her wages by making
appointments for money in the noon hour at down-town hotels. Having
earned money in this way for a few months, the young girl made an
arrangement with an older woman to be on call in the evenings whenever
she was summoned by telephone, thus joining that large clandestine group
of apparently respectable girls, most of whom yield to temptation only
when hard pressed by debt incurred during illness or non-employment, or
when they are facing some immediate necessity. This practice has become
so general in the larger American cities as to be systematically
conducted. It is perhaps the most sinister outcome of the economic
pressure, unless one cites its corollary--the condition of thousands of
young men whose low salaries so cruelly and unjustifiably postpone their
marriages. For a long time the young saleswoman kept her position in the
department store, retaining her honest wages for herself, but sending
everything else to her family. At length however, she changed from her
clandestine life to an openly professional one when she needed enough
money to send her brother to Hot Springs, Arkansas, where she maintained
him for a year. She explained that because he was now restored to health
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