The Children of the PoorRiis, Jacob A. (Jacob August)
History
The Children of the Poor
Riis, Jacob A. (Jacob August)
Child welfare -- New York (State) -- New York; Poor; Poor -- New York (State) -- New York
I spoke of managing the girls. It is just the same with them. I have had
the "gang" in mind as the alternative of the club, and therefore have
dealt so far only with their brothers. Girls do not go in gangs, thank
goodness, at least not yet in New York. They flock, until the boys scatter
them and drive them off one by one. But the same instinct of
self-government is in them. They take just as kindly to the club. The
Neighborhood Guild, the College Settlement, and various church and
philanthropic societies, carry on such clubs with great success. The girls
sew, darn stockings, cook, make their own dresses, and run their own
meetings with spirit when the boys are made to keep their profaning hands
off. On occasion they develop the same rugged independence with an extra
feminine touch to it, that is, a mixture of dash and spite. I recall the
experience of a band of early philanthropists, who, a score of years ago
or more, bought the Big Flat in the Sixth Ward and fitted it up as a
boarding-house for working girls. They filled it without any trouble,
though with a rather better grade of boarders than they had expected. No
sooner were the girls in possession than they promptly organized and
"resolved" that the management should make no rules for the house without
first submitting them to their body for approval. Philanthropy chose the
least pointed horn of the dilemma, and retired from the field. The Big
Flat, from a model boarding-house became a very bad tenement, and the
boarders' club dissolved, to the loss and injury of a posterity that was
distinctly poorer and duller, no less for the want of the club than for
the possession of the tenement.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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