received a fresh impression of the menace to children who became sophisticated by daily familiarity with vice.  Yet many mothers, hard pressed by poverty, are obliged to rent houses next to vicious neighborhoods and their children very early become familiar with all the outer aspects of vice.  Among them are the children of widows who make friends with their dubious neighbors during the long days while their mothers are at work.  I recall two sisters in one family whose mother had moved her household to the borders of a Chicago segregated district, apparently without knowing the character of the neighborhood.  The little sisters, twelve and eight years old, accepted many invitations from a kind neighbor to come into her house to see her pretty things.  The older girl was delighted to be “made up” with powder and paint and to try on long dresses, while the little one who sang very prettily was taught some new songs, happily without understanding their import.  The tired mother knew nothing of what the children did during her absence, until an honest neighbor who had seen the little girls going in and out of the district, interfered on their behalf.  The frightened mother moved back to her old neighborhood which she had left in search of cheaper rent, her pious soul stirred to its depths that the children for whom she patiently worked day by day had so narrowly escaped destruction.

Who cannot recall at least one of these desperate mothers, overworked and harried through a long day, prolonged by the family washing and cooking into the evening, followed by a night of foreboding and misgiving because the very children for whom her life is sacrificed are slowly slipping away from her control and affection?  Such a spectacle forces one into an agreement with Wells, that it is a “monstrous absurdity” that women who are “discharging their supreme social function, that of rearing children, should do it in their spare time, as it were, while they ‘earn their living’ by contributing some half-mechanical element to some trivial industrial product.”  Nevertheless, such a woman whose wages are fixed on the basis of individual subsistence, who is quite unable to earn a family wage, is still held by a legal obligation to support her children with the desperate penalty of forfeiture if she fail.

I can recall a very intelligent woman who long brought her children to the Hull House day nursery with this result at the end of ten years of devotion:  the little girl is almost totally deaf owing to neglect following a case of measles, because her mother could not stop work in order to care for her; the youngest boy has lost a leg flipping cars; the oldest boy has twice been arrested for petty larceny; the twin boys, in spite of prolonged sojourns in the parental school, have been such habitual truants that their natural intelligence has secured little aid from education.  Of the five children three are now in semi-penal institutions, supported by the state.  It would not therefore have been so un-economical to have boarded them with their own mother, requiring a standard of nutrition and school attendance at least up to that national standard of nurture which the more advanced European governments are establishing.