The simple obedience to parents on the part of these immigrant girls, working in hotels and restaurants, often miscarries pathetically.  Their unspoiled human nature, not yet immune to the poisons of city life, when thrust into the midst of that unrelieved drudgery which lies at the foundation of all complex luxury, often results in the most fatal reactions.  A young German woman, the proprietor of what is considered a successful “house” in the most notorious district in Chicago, traces her career directly to a desperate attempt to conform to the standard of “bringing home good wages” maintained by her numerous brothers and sisters.  One requirement of her home was rigid:  all money earned by a child must be paid into the family income until “legal age” was attained.  The slightly neurotic, very pretty girl of seventeen heartily detested the dish-washing in a restaurant, which constituted her first place in America, and quite honestly declared that the heavy lifting was beyond her strength.  Such insubordination was not tolerated at home, and every Saturday night when her meager wages, reduced by sick days “off,” were compared with what the others brought in, she was regularly scolded, “sometimes slapped,” by her parents, jeered at by her more vigorous sisters and bullied by her brothers.  She tried to shorten her hours by doing “rush-work” as a waitress at noon, but she found this still beyond her strength, and worst of all, the pay of two dollars and a half insufficient to satisfy her mother.  Confiding her troubles to the other waitresses, one of them good-naturedly told her how she could make money through appointments in a nearby disreputable hotel, and so take home an increased amount of money easily called “a raise in wages.”  So strong was the habit of obedience, that the girl continued to take money home every Saturday night until her eighteenth birthday, in spite of the fact that she gave up the restaurant in less than six weeks after her first experience.  Although all of this happened ten years ago and the German mother is long since dead, the daughter bitterly ended the story with the infamous hope that “the old lady was now suffering the torments of the lost, for making me what I am.”  Such a girl was subjected to temptations to which society has no right to expose her.

A dangerous cynicism regarding the value of virtue, a cynicism never so unlovely as in the young, sometimes seizes a girl who, because of long hours and overwork, has been unable to preserve either her health or spirits and has lost all measure of joy in life.  That this premature cynicism may be traced to an unhappy and narrow childhood is suggested by the fact that a large number of these girls come from families in which there has been little affection and the poor substitute of parental tyranny.

A young Italian girl who earned four dollars a week in a tailor shop pulling out hastings, when asked why she wore a heavy woolen gown on one of the hottest days of last summer, replied that she was obliged to earn money for her clothes by scrubbing for the neighbors after hours; that she had found no such work lately and that her father would not allow her anything from her wages for clothes or for carfare, because he was buying a house.