domestic service, when they discover that they have been betrayed by
their lovers
A surprising number of suicides occur among girls who have been in
domestic service, when they discover that they have been betrayed by
their lovers. Perhaps nothing is more astonishing than the attitude of
the mistress when the situation of such a forlorn girl is discovered,
and it would be interesting to know how far this attitude has influenced
these girls either to suicide or to their reckless choice of a
disreputable life, which statistics show so many of their number have
elected. The mistress almost invariably promptly dismisses such a girl,
assuring her that she is disgraced forever and too polluted to remain
for another hour in a good home. In full command of the situation, she
usually succeeds in convincing the wretched girl that she is irreparably
ruined. Her very phraseology, although unknown to herself, is a remnant
of that earlier historic period when every woman was obliged in her own
person to protect her home and to secure the status of her children. The
indignant woman is trying to exercise alone that social restraint which
should have been exercised by the community and which would have
naturally protected the girl, if she had not been so withdrawn from it,
in order to serve exclusively the interests of her mistress"s family.
Such a woman seldom follows the ruined girl through the dreary weeks
after her dismissal; her difficulty in finding any sort of work, the
ostracism of her former friends added to her own self-accusation, the
poverty and loneliness, the final ten days in the hospital, and the
great temptation which comes after that, to give away her child. The
baby farmer who haunts the public hospitals for such cases tells her
that upon the payment of forty or fifty dollars, he will take care of
the child for a year and that 'maybe it won"t live any longer than
that,' and unless the hospital is equipped with a social service
department, such as the one at the Massachusetts General, the girl
leaves it weak and low-spirited and too broken to care what becomes of
her. It is in moments such as these that many a poor girl, convinced
that all the world is against her, decides to enter a disreputable
house. Here at least she will find food and shelter, she will not be
despised by the other inmates and she can earn money for the support of
her child. Often she has received the address of such a house from one
of her companions in the maternity ward where, among the fifty per cent,
of the unmarried mothers, at least two or three sophisticated girls are
always to be found, eager to 'put wise' the girls who are merely
unfortunate. Occasionally a girl who follows such baneful advice still
insists upon keeping her child. I recall a pathetic case in the juvenile
court of Chicago when such a mother of a five-year-old child was
pronounced by the judge to be an 'improper guardian.' The agonized woman
was told that she might retain her child if she would completely change
her way of life; but she insisted that such a requirement was
impossible, that she had no other means of earning her living, and that
she had become too idle and broken for regular work. The child clung
piteously to the mother, and, having gathered from the evidence that she
was considered 'bad,' assured the judge over and over again that she was
'the bestest mother in the world.' The poor mother, who had begun her
wretched mode of life for her child"s sake, found herself so demoralized
by her hideous experiences that she could not leave the life, even for
the sake of the same child, still her most precious possession. Only six
years before, this mother had been an honest girl cheerfully working in
the household of a good woman, whose sense of duty had expressed itself
in dismissing 'the outcast.'
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