Here again the immigrant girl is at a disadvantage. The average wage of
two hundred newly arrived girls of various nationalities, Poles,
Italians, Slovaks, Bohemians, Russians, Galatians, Croatians,
Lithuanians, Roumanians, Germans, and Swedes, who were interviewed by
the Immigrants" Protective League, was four dollars and a half a week
for the first position which they had been able to secure in Chicago. It
often takes a girl several weeks to find her first place. During this
period of looking for work the immigrant girl is subjected to great
dangers. It is at such times that immigrants often exhibit symptoms of
that type of disordered mind which alienists pronounce 'due to conflict
through poor adaptation.' I have known several immigrant young men as
well as girls who became deranged during the first year of life in
America. A young Russian who came to Chicago in the hope of obtaining
the freedom and self-development denied him at home, after three months
of bitter disillusionment, with no work and insufficient food, was sent
to the hospital for the insane. He only recovered after a group of his
young countrymen devotedly went to see him each week with promises of
work, the companionship at last establishing a sense of unbroken
association. I also recall a Polish girl who became utterly distraught
after weeks of sleeplessness and anxiety because she could not repay
fifty dollars which she had borrowed from a countryman in Chicago for
the purpose of bringing her sister to America. Her case was declared
hopeless, but when the creditor made reassuring visits to the patient
she began to mend and now, five years later, is not only free from debt,
but has brought over the rest of the family, whose united earnings are
slowly paying for a house and lot. Psychiatry is demonstrating the
after-effects of fear upon the minds of children, but little has yet
been done to show how far that fear of the future, arising from economic
insecurity in the midst of new surroundings, has superinduced insanity
among newly arrived immigrants. Such a state of nervous bewilderment and
fright, added to that sense of expectation which youth always carries
into new surroundings, often makes it easy to exploit the virtue of an
immigrant girl. It goes without saying that she is almost always
exploited industrially. A Russian girl recently took a place in a
Chicago clothing factory at twenty cents a day, without in the least
knowing that she was undercutting the wages of even that ill-paid
industry. This girl rented a room for a dollar a week and all that she
had to eat was given her by a friend in the same lodging house, who
shared her own scanty fare with the newcomer.
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