The Spirit of Youth and the City Streets — John Shaqi
The Spirit of Youth and the City StreetsAddams, Jane
General
The Spirit of Youth and the City Streets
Addams, Jane
Child rearing; Urban youth
A Russian girl who went to work at an early age in a factory, pasting
labels on mucilage bottles, was obliged to surrender all her wages to
her father who, in return, gave her only the barest necessities of
life. In a fit of revolt against the monotony of her work, and "that
nasty sticky stuff," she stole from her father $300 which he had
hidden away under the floor of his kitchen, and with this money she
ran away to a neighboring city for a spree, having first bought
herself the most gorgeous clothing a local department store could
supply. Of course, this preposterous beginning could have but one
ending and the child was sent to the reform school to expiate not only
her own sins but the sins of those who had failed to rescue her from a
life of grinding monotony which her spirit could not brook.
"I know the judge thinks I am a bad girl," sobbed a poor little
prisoner, put under bonds for threatening to kill her lover, "but I
have only been bad for one week and before that I was good for six
years. I worked every day in Blank's factory and took home all my
wages to keep the kids in school. I met this fellow in a dance hall. I
just had to go to dances sometimes after pushing down the lever of my
machine with my right foot and using both my arms feeding it for ten
hours a day--nobody knows how I felt some nights. I agreed to go away
with this man for a week but when I was ready to go home he tried to
drive me out on the street to earn money for him and, of course, I
threatened to kill him--any decent girl would," she concluded, as
unconscious of the irony of the reflection as she was of the
connection between her lurid week and her monotonous years.
Knowing as educators do that thousands of the city youth will enter
factory life at an age as early as the state law will permit;
instructed as the modern teacher is as to youth's requirements for a
normal mental and muscular development, it is hard to understand the
apathy in regard to youth's inevitable experience in modern industry.
Are the educators, like the rest of us, so caught in admiration of the
astonishing achievements of modern industry that they forget the
children themselves?
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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