Margaret Slattery - The Girl and Her Religion
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Margaret Slattery >> The Girl and Her Religion
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9 THE GIRL AND HER RELIGION
BY MARGARET SLATTERY
THE PILGRIM PRESS
BOSTON CHICAGO
COPYRIGHT, 1913
BY LUTHER H. CARY
_Fifth Printing_
THE PILGRIM PRESS
BOSTON
[Illustration: WHILE PACKING HER TRUNK SHE DREAMED OF COLLEGE.]
FOREWORD
TO THOSE WHO READ THIS BOOK
It is not a technical book, it does not attempt philosophy. It does not
contain the solution of all girl problems. It is not a great book, it is
simple and concrete. It is a record of some things about which the girls
I have known have compelled me to think. I have but one request to make
of those who read it--that they also _think_--not of the book, not of
the author, but of the _girls_--for _action_ is born of thought.
THE AUTHOR.
CONTENTS
PAGE
THE GIRL
I THE RIGHTS OF A GIRL 3
II THE HANDICAPPED GIRL 9
III THE PRIVILEGED GIRL 19
IV THE GIRL WHO IS EASILY LED 30
V THE GIRL WHO IS MISUNDERSTOOD 41
VI THE INDIFFERENT GIRL 55
VII THE GIRL WHO WORSHIPS
THE TWIN IDOLS 68
VIII THE GIRL WHO DRIFTS 82
IX THE GIRL WITH HIGH IDEALS 96
X THE AVERAGE GIRL 107
HER RELIGION
XI THE GIRL AND THE UNIVERSE 117
XII IN THE HANDS OF A TRIAD 130
XIII THOU SHALT NOT 141
XIV THOU SHALT 152
XV A MATTER OF CULTIVATION 162
XVI A PLEA AND A PROMISE 183
XVII A PERSON NOT A FACT 195
XVIII THE GLORY OF THE CLIMAX 206
ILLUSTRATIONS
While packing her trunk she dreamed of
college _Frontispiece_
FACING PAGE
Unconscious of her handicaps she
anticipates keenly life in the new world 12
She was full of ambition and willing to
work 22
She worships Pleasure and Fashion 68
Her heart is filled with a deep desire to
serve 154
The future promises nothing and she has
lost hope 198
PART I
_The Girl_
I
THE RIGHTS OF A GIRL
She has certain inalienable rights, regardless of race, color or social
state. When it has thought about her at all, society in general has
supposed, until recently, that in a free country, a glorious land of
opportunity, the girl has her rights--the right to work, the right to
play, the right to secure an education and to enter the professions, the
right to marry or to refuse, the right in short to do as she shall
choose. And in a sense and to the casual observer this is true. Our
country gives to her some rights which she can enjoy nowhere else in the
world. But as one learns to know her, little by little the stupendous
fact is impressed upon him that girlhood has been and is being denied
_its rights_.
_It is the right of every girl_ to be born into a community where the
sanitary conditions are such that she has at least a fair chance to
enter upon life without being physically handicapped at the start. But
hundreds of girls every year open their baby eyes in dark inner rooms
where the dim gas light steals what oxygen there may chance to be in the
heavy air, take their first steps in foul alleys, find their first toys
in garbage cans and gutters. They have been denied their rights at the
start. In a Christian land, they grow weak, anemic, yield to the white
specter and in a few years pass out of the unfair world to which they
came, or remain to fight out a miserable existence against terrific
odds. They make up an army of girls who have been denied their rights.
And her religion? What is it that religion may offer to her in
compensation for that which she has been denied?
_It is the right of every girl_ to be born under conditions which will
make possible sufficient food and clothing for her natural growth and
development. But scores of little girls go shivering to school every
morning after a breakfast of bread and tea, they return numb with cold
after a dinner of more bread and tea and they go home to a supper of the
same with a piece of stale cake or a cookie to help out. Nature calls
aloud for nourishment and there is no answer. The girl enters her
teens, finds a "job," goes to work, hungry the long year through,
fighting to win out over the cold in winter, and to endure the scorching
days of summer. And her religion? What is it that religion may offer to
her in compensation for what she has been denied?
_It is the right of every girl_ to receive, through the educational work
of the community, training which shall fit her for clean, honest and
efficient living. Yet every year sees hundreds of girls turned out into
the world wholly unequipped for life, their special talents
undiscovered, their energies undirected, their purposes unformed, their
ambitions unawakened.
_It is the right of every girl_ to be shielded from the moral danger and
physical strain of labor for her daily bread, at least until she shall
reach the age of sixteen. Yet every year sees a long procession of girls
from eight to sixteen entering into the economic struggle who cannot
claim their rights.
_It is the right of every girl_ to have a good time, to play under
conditions that are morally safe, and to enjoy amusements that leave no
stain. Hundreds of girls live in communities where this is absolutely
impossible. What has religion to offer to a girl denied an education
which will fit her for the life she must live, compelled to enter into a
fierce struggle for daily bread while still a child, surrounded by every
sort of cheap, exotic amusement behind which temptation lurks? Has it
anything to offer in compensation, if it permits conditions to go on
unchanged?
_It is the right of every girl_ to enjoy companionship and friends.
Thousands of girls toil through the day in shops, factories, offices and
kitchens and at night sit friendless and alone until the loneliness
becomes unendurable and they seek companionship of the unfit and the
refuge of the street. Has religion anything to do with lonely girlhood?
_It is the right of every girl_ to receive such instruction regarding
her own physical life and development as shall serve to protect her from
the pitfalls laid for the thoughtless and ignorant, and shall fit her to
understand, and when the time comes accept the privileges and
responsibilities of motherhood. Every year sees thousands of girls enter
the teens whose only knowledge of self and motherhood is gained through
the half truths revealed by companions, the suggestions of patent
medicine and kindred advertisements, or the falsehoods of those who seek
to corrupt. What has a girl's religion to do with these simple
undeniable facts?
_It is the right of every girl_ to receive the protection of wise
parental authority. The guidance of parents who earnestly, wisely and
with the highest motives require obedience from those too young to
choose for themselves is the right of every girl. Yet thousands of girls
every year are left to decide life's most important questions, while
parents, weak, indifferent or careless sleep until it is too late. Has
religion anything to offer to girls whose parents have laid down their
task and neglected their duty?
_It is the right of every girl_ to receive such moral and religious
instruction as shall develop and strengthen her higher nature, fortify
her against temptation and lead her in the spirit of the Author of the
Golden Rule into service for her fellows. Yet thousands of girls are
without definite moral and religious instruction and unconscious of the
fact that it is their right, and thousands more receive moral and
religious training in haphazard fashion and from sources inadequate to
the task.
When the community awakens to the necessity for sanitary conditions in
the environment of every girl and honestly seeks the solution of the
problems of economic injustice; when the educational system seeks to
prepare its girls for the life they must live; when laws for the
regulation of labor for girls are made in the interest of the girl
herself; when the community makes it possible for its girls to play in
safety and makes provision for friendless and lonely girlhood; when
mothers instruct their daughters in the most important facts of life,
parents exercise protective authority and the church provides adequate
assistance in the task of moral and religious instruction, then, and not
till then, will the girl receive her rights.
And the girl's religion? The girl is naturally religious. Without
religion no girl comes into her own. Whenever and wherever religion
concerns itself with the rights of a girl it becomes a girl's religion
to which she can pledge body, mind and soul. For the coming of that
religion the world of girlhood eagerly waits.
II
THE HANDICAPPED GIRL
They were both handicapped, as a careful observer could tell at a
glance. One stood behind the counter, the other in front of it examining
the toys she was about to purchase for a Christmas box for some young
cousins in the country. She had not been able to find just what she
wanted and was impatient in voice and manner as she explained to the
girl on the other side of the counter what she had hoped to find. She
was extravagantly gowned in a fashion not at all in good taste for
morning shopping, but she was pretty and her fair complexion, her
shining hair, soft and well cared for, the beautiful fur thrown back
over her shoulders fascinated the other girl and filled her heart with
envy. She was pale and anemic, her hair was dark and there was barely
enough of it to "do up" even when helped out by the puffs she had bought
from the counter on the opposite side. The weather had been bitterly
cold and she was suffering from sore throat and headache. She had turned
up the collar of her thin coat but it had failed to protect her and she
was thinking of that as she looked at the fur. She was worn out by the
strain of the Christmas season, had slept late, and then rushed to the
store with only a cup of coffee to help her do the work of the morning.
She did not care much whether the girl before her found the toys she
wanted or not. Toys seemed such a small part of life and Christmas
aroused in her all sorts of conflicting emotions. It was winter and life
looked very hard, as it can look to a girl of fourteen upon whom poverty
had laid a heavy hand and whose life has been robbed by the sins and
misfortunes of others, who has been handicapped from the beginning.
The girl before the counter finally decided upon the toys, ordered them
sent to her home and looking scornfully at the cheap jewelry and tawdry
ornaments passed out of the store. She was thinking what a nuisance
cousins were, how ridiculous it was in her father to insist each year
upon her remembering his poor relations at Christmas, just when she
needed all her allowance for herself, and planning to tell him that next
year she did not intend to do it. She was in a most unhappy mood because
she had been denied permission to attend a house-party and she could not
bear to be denied anything. She was handicapped by the heavy hand of
money, newly acquired by her father and by the atmosphere of pride,
vanity and social ambition which surrounded her.
All day through the busy streets of the shopping district they
passed--the city's handicapped girls. Some were held back from the best
that life can give by poverty, which like a great yawning chasm lies
between the girl and all her natural desires and ambitions, some held
back from the joy of simple, natural living by the forced, artificial
social system of which they are a part, some pitiful specimens of
physical and mental handicap and some who showed the strain of the
handicap of sin, mingled in that Christmas crowd.
Through the open door of great sea-port cities there have poured during
the years past steady streams of handicapped girls. They are poor, they
are plunged into a life whose manners and customs they cannot grasp,
they are handicapped by a language they do not understand and by great
expectations seldom destined to be fulfilled.
According to our government statistics during nineteen hundred twelve,
ninety three thousand, two hundred sixty-one (93,261) girls from fifteen
to twenty-one years of age came to us from across the sea and in three
years an army of two hundred forty-six thousand, five hundred fifty-four
(246,554) became a part of the girl problem our country must meet. It is
hard to picture in concrete fashion how great this host of girlhood is.
Sometimes when one looks into the faces of a thousand college girls at
Wellesley, Vassar, or Smith and realizes that in a single year more than
ninety three times as many girls from fifteen to twenty-one came to test
the opportunities of a new land, the significance of the figure becomes
a little more clear to him. When he realizes that in three years enough
young girls land in this country to found a city the size of Rochester
or St. Paul, when he tries to imagine this army of girls marching six
abreast through city streets for hours and hours until the thousands
upon thousands, representing scores of tongues and nations, have passed,
some conception of the great task facing any organization attempting to
direct that army of unprepared, unequipped and largely unprotected
girlhood comes to him.
[Illustration: UNCONSCIOUS OF HER HANDICAPS SHE ANTICIPATES KEENLY LIFE
IN THE NEW WORLD]
Where will they be in another year--those ninety-three thousand and more
who came to us in nineteen hundred twelve? What an array of factories
and kitchens, what rows of dingy tenements, the moving picture film
could reveal to us if it followed these handicapped girls! It does not
follow them--they come in over the blue waters of the bay, look with
shining eyes at Liberty with her promise of fulfilment of all the
heart's desires, they sit in the long rows of benches at Ellis Island,
pass through the gate and are gone, the majority to be lost in the mass
that struggles for a mere livelihood--just the chance to keep on living.
What if some summer morning, or in the dim twilight of a bitter winter
day, a miracle should be wrought and the handicapped should be lifted so
that girlhood might be free to work out the realization of its dreams!
Many have prayed for such a miracle, some have hoped for it--but it
will not come. There will be no miracle suddenly wrought for men to gaze
upon in wonder and after a time forget. The release of the handicapped
can come only through man's God-inspired effort on behalf of his brother
man. In removing his brother's handicap he will remove his own and both
shall be free to live. But it cannot be done in a moment. Effort is
slow. It cannot be done by any organization, or church, or creed or
individual. It must be done by the public conscience. Educating the
public conscience is a long process and America is in the midst of that
process now. There are two qualifications without which the educator of
the public conscience cannot succeed--one is patience, the other
persistence. All educators of the public sense of right, like Jane
Addams, have had these two characteristics in marked degree, and all
churches, creeds and organizations which have had local success in
removing local handicaps have shown the ability to wait and the power to
persevere despite every opposition.
How the public conscience will act in directing the work of removing the
conditions which so sadly handicap girlhood today we cannot say. It may
be that vocational schools built and maintained by the State, not by
charity, will be one strong hand laid upon the inefficiency and
ignorance that handicap. It may be that the Welfare teacher whose salary
and rank shall equal that of the teacher of Greek, Ancient History or
arithmetic will be another hand laid upon the shoulder of the girl
limited by the lack of friendship and protection. It may be that houses
maintained as a business proposition and paying honest returns, built in
such a way that girls obliged to work away from home may be decently
housed and have a fair chance for health, will be another strong hand
reached out to release her from the things that handicap. It may be that
a minimum wage, safety devices, laws wiping out sweat-shop methods, will
reduce the number of handicapped girls.
Wise cities may establish special schools for the immigrant girl where
she shall learn something of the language while being taught the making
of beds, simple cooking and the common kitchen tasks, then to be
recommended with some equipment to the homes greatly in need of her.
Even if she should choose later to go into shop or store, the State will
have gone a long way toward removing the great handicap by having taught
her to understand the language of the new land, to care for a room, cook
simple food and keep clean.
It may be that some thoughtful States will require school attendance
until a girl is sixteen, the age under which no girl should enter the
business world as a wage earner.
It may be that the natural good sense of the true American woman will
finally triumph over the extravagant and unnatural living of the present
day and that the handicap of false standards, superficiality, display
idleness, and wild pursuit of exotic pleasures shall be lifted from the
girls now held prisoners by the tyranny of money and complex social
life.
It may be that in all these ways and scores of others, the public
conscience, working out along lines in which it finds itself best fitted
and most interested to work, will solve the problem of the handicapped
girl.
Before one can possibly help another in a permanent way he must know
what is the trouble with him, and then _what_ has _caused_ the trouble.
The greatest encouragement in our girl problem today lies in the fact
that _politics_ is looking at her and asking questions it scarcely dares
to answer; the corporation is looking at her, compelled to do so often
against its will; City Government, School Board, Board of Health are all
looking at her; women's clubs, whose individual members have never given
her a thought, are reaching out a hand to her; the Church, whose part we
shall study definitely later on, is looking more practically and
sensibly and with deeper interest than ever before; the Young Women's
Christian Associations are looking wisely and intelligently, getting
facts which speak with tremendous power and showing them to the world.
More than all this the handicapped girl is looking at herself.
It has become in these days the passionate desire of those who see the
problem with both heart and mind, and are interested not in abstract
girlhood but in the individual, living, real girl, that the public
conscience be more deeply touched and stirred until it shall feel that
by whatever means the thing is to be accomplished, the bounden duty of
Church and State to give themselves to the task of solving the problem
is clear.
For in the midst of every problem--political, social, economic,
religious, there stands _The Handicapped Girl._ God help her--and
us--for until we have gained the wisdom to remove her handicap the whole
problem will remain unsolved. We are learning--every year shows a gain
and in this fact lies our hope.
III
THE PRIVILEGED GIRL
One finds her in all sorts of unexpected places. Last summer I saw her
in a home of wealth and luxury. She was fifteen, the eldest of a family
of four children. Behind her was a long line of ancestry of which anyone
might rightfully be proud. Her face was pure and sweet and her eyes
revealed the frankness and honest purpose of past generations. After
breakfast she played for the hymns at prayers and in a clear, true,
soprano led the singing. A twelve-year-old brother had selected the part
of the Bible to be read and the eight-year-old sister had chosen the
hymns. The father's prayer was simple and sincere and some of its
sentences were remembered for many a day. After prayers the girl
attended to the flowers. This was her work for the summer. I saw her
gather from their lovely garden dainty blossoms and sprays of green,
making them with unusual skill into bouquets for the Flower Mission in
the city. Then three small baskets were filled with pansies. These went
to three old ladies in the factory section of the village. She told me
they were "the sweetest old ladies" and "dear friends" of hers. She
seemed to take real delight in making the baskets beautiful. I saw her
later in the day galloping off through the woods on her horse, her face
glowing with health and happiness. In the afternoon she spent an hour on
German which she said was her "hopeless study," but I found her reading
German folk lore with ease. She was familiar with the best things in
literature, was intensely interested in art and revealed unusual
knowledge without any evidence of precociousness. She was just a normal,
healthy, natural girl, well-born, well-bred, a girl with every
advantage. When I said good-night to her in her lovely room and thought
of her protected, sheltered life, I wondered how she might be helped to
know into what pleasant places her lot had fallen and how she might come
to understand and do in later years her full duty toward the other
fifteen-year-old girl who that day made paper boxes, feathers, flowers
or shirtwaists, toiled in the laundries or the cotton factory, or walked
with heavy heart from place to place searching for work. They are
dependent upon one another, these two. They do not know it now, but if
each is to be her best, they must know.
How to lead her daughter to value and help this _other girl_, that sweet
mother told me as we talked in the library that night she felt was her
great problem. "We women are responsible for so much," she said, "and
our daughters will be responsible for still more. We must help them
estimate things at their right value." With that thought and spirit in
her mother's heart the girl I had watched all day with such pleasure
seemed doubly privileged.
Last September I saw another privileged girl. She showed me her trunk
packed for college. Every member of the family was interested in it,
perhaps most of all her father who had put into the bank that first
dollar on the day that she was born with the faith that what should be
added to it might one day mean college. Behind her was a long line of
honest ancestry, simple people who had worked hard and managed to "get
along." She was the first on either side of the family to "go to
college." No one in the family, even the most distant relative, failed
to feel the importance of the event. "Tom's Dorothy goes to college this
week--think of it," a great aunt, in a little unpainted, low-roofed
farmhouse far away in the hills, told all her friends at church.
Great ambition, hopes and dreams were packed into that trunk and the day
when she should graduate and come back to teach in the high school
seemed near. Jack and Bessie and Newton were in her plans for using the
money she should earn when those four short years were over.
[Illustration: SHE WAS FULL OF AMBITION AND WILLING TO WORK]
Looking at her sweet, fresh face so full of happiness one knew her to be
a privileged girl. All through high school she had had her purpose
clear, her studies were a pleasure, her simple good times were enjoyed
to the full and life, every moment of it, was worth the living. When I
saw her lock the trunk and excitedly instruct the expressman as to just
how it must be carried, I had a sudden vision of the thousands of girls,
with happy faces filled with anticipation of all that is wrapped up in
that one word, _college_. A great army of privileged girls, they are.
One cannot help wishing that he might feel sure that when they leave
those college halls it might be with a deep appreciation and real
sympathetic understanding of the other girls who have turned their eyes
with longing toward four years more of study and fun, but whose feet
were obliged to walk in other pathways. They are so dependent upon one
another, these girls who can go to college and the other girls who
cannot go. They do not know it now but neither girl can ever come to her
best until the privileged girl sees and understands.
One of the most interesting of the privileged girls I met one morning
going to work. It was her third month in the office. "One of the finest
in the city. There's a chance to work up, and me for the top," she told
me, her face beaming. Her father had come across the sea from Sweden
when a boy. Long generations of honest folk were behind him and he made
good in the new land. He saved a good share of the wages he made in the
bicycle shop, studied with a correspondence school and assumed more and
more responsible positions with higher wages. At last he was able to
build a house for his young family, at the end of the car line where the
children had room to play and the cow and chickens kept the boys busy
and taught them to work. Olga was the eldest and it was a proud night
for the family when she graduated from grammar school. Going home on the
trolley her father determined that she should have the desire of her
heart and go for two years to business college. There was great
rejoicing on the part of the family when he made his decision known and
Olga hardly slept that night. When the two years were over the principal
of the school had said such fine things of her work that Olga had
blushed to hear them. More than that, he offered her the best position
open to his students. He was a little astonished the next morning when
Olga's father came down to ask in his careful English regarding the
character of the men in the office where his daughter was to work. To
Olga's great joy he was able to satisfy the father to whom the matter
was of enough importance to make him put on his best clothes and take
half a day off, in order to make sure that all was right.
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