Four Years in the Underbrush: Adventures as a Working Woman in New YorkAnonymous
History
Four Years in the Underbrush: Adventures as a Working Woman in New York
Anonymous
Women employees -- New York (State) -- New York
In the third case the father was a Spaniard and the mother an Italian.
Their flat was practically stripped of every piece of salable furniture
before they could be induced to allow themselves or any one of their
children to be taken to Bellevue. On my first visit not one of them had
a change of clothes. There was one bed, and two mattresses on the floor.
Two ragged sheets, spotlessly clean, were all they had in the way of
covers, though it was then the middle of a cold winter. There was a
table, two chairs, a wood-stove, and about a half-dozen pieces of
crockery—every one of these articles was broken. The pot and saucepan,
though old, were whole.
The committee allowed me twenty-five dollars to spend for that family.
Every penny of it went for household furnishings. Later, when I got my
fingers on a few extra dollars, I called at the flat and offered to
spend it for clothing. Courteously but firmly the mother told me that
her husband had said they had taken enough; she must not accept any more
help.
The parents of every one of those one hundred and thirty-seven children
were defective, either mentally or physically, sometimes both. Even in
the three non-pauper families, the bootblack was a cripple, the Finn
tubercular, and the Italian wife of the Spaniard had had both breasts
removed because of cancer.
I did not record the histories of those cases because they were in any
way unusual. They are a fair sample of the cases given to any and every
social worker on the staff of a hospital where the patients come from
the slums of New York City. Of all the cases I investigated—nearly three
hundred—as a social worker, there was not one child of American
parentage—all of them the children of immigrants.
For thirty days during the summer of 1920 I kept a record of the
nationality of the families on whom I called in the capacity of license
inspector. Of the one thousand and six families talked with, eighteen
had both parents American. In twenty-one, one parent was American.
Be it understood that when a family claimed to be Irish-American I rated
them as Irish. There were a lot of such scum in my district. To my way
of thinking the propaganda carried on by such individuals is much more
dangerous to American institutions and ideals than that spouted by the
few I met who claimed to be Bolsheviki.
Some of the most dangerous persons met during my four years in the
underbrush, to American ideals and institutions, had entered the country
after the declaration of peace. Four of them were prostitutes of that
class known as street-walkers, for the time being or until, as they
expressed it:
“I meek von reech haul.”
The fifth, having already made a rich haul, chanced to be visiting her
pals when I called. All of these women were attractive to look at, all
claimed to have come to this country to join relatives, and all were
preaching the downfall of constitutional government. They were here to
get money, and they didn’t care how they got it.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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