The Spirit of Youth and the City Streets | Page 2

in civilization
have such numbers of young girls been suddenly released from the
protection of the home and permitted to walk unattended upon city
streets and to work under alien roofs; for the first time they are being
prized more for their labor power than for their innocence, their tender
beauty, their ephemeral gaiety. Society cares more for the products they
manufacture than for their immemorial ability to reaffirm the charm of
existence. Never before have such numbers of young boys earned
money independently of the family life, and felt themselves free to
spend it as they choose in the midst of vice deliberately disguised as
pleasure.
This stupid experiment of organizing work and failing to organize play
has, of course, brought about a fine revenge. The love of pleasure will
not be denied, and when it has turned into all sorts of malignant and
vicious appetites, then we, the middle aged, grow quite distracted and
resort to all sorts of restrictive measures. We even try to dam up the
sweet fountain itself because we are affrighted by these neglected
streams; but almost worse than the restrictive measures is our apparent
belief that the city itself has no obligation in the matter, an assumption
upon which the modern city turns over to commercialism practically all

the provisions for public recreation.
Quite as one set of men has organized the young people into industrial
enterprises in order to profit from their toil, so another set of men and
also of women, I am sorry to say, have entered the neglected field of
recreation and have organized enterprises which make profit out of this
invincible love of pleasure.
In every city arise so-called "places"--"gin-palaces," they are called in
fiction; in Chicago we euphemistically say merely "places,"--in which
alcohol is dispensed, not to allay thirst, but, ostensibly to stimulate
gaiety, it is sold really in order to empty pockets. Huge dance halls are
opened to which hundreds of young people are attracted, many of
whom stand wistfully outside a roped circle, for it requires five cents to
procure within it for five minutes the sense of allurement and
intoxication which is sold in lieu of innocent pleasure. These coarse
and illicit merrymakings remind one of the unrestrained jollities of
Restoration London, and they are indeed their direct descendants,
properly commercialized, still confusing joy with lust, and gaiety with
debauchery. Since the soldiers of Cromwell shut up the people's
playhouses and destroyed their pleasure fields, the Anglo-Saxon city
has turned over the provision for public recreation to the most
evil-minded and the most unscrupulous members of the community.
We see thousands of girls walking up and down the streets on a
pleasant evening with no chance to catch a sight of pleasure even
through a lighted window, save as these lurid places provide it.
Apparently the modern city sees in these girls only two possibilities,
both of them commercial: first, a chance to utilize by day their new and
tender labor power in its factories and shops, and then another chance
in the evening to extract from them their petty wages by pandering to
their love of pleasure.
As these overworked girls stream along the street, the rest of us see
only the self-conscious walk, the giggling speech, the preposterous
clothing. And yet through the huge hat, with its wilderness of
bedraggled feathers, the girl announces to the world that she is here.
She demands attention to the fact of her existence, she states that she is

ready to live, to take her place in the world. The most precious moment
in human development is the young creature's assertion that he is unlike
any other human being, and has an individual contribution to make to
the world. The variation from the established type is at the root of all
change, the only possible basis for progress, all that keeps life from
growing unprofitably stale and repetitious.
Is it only the artists who really see these young creatures as they
are--the artists who are themselves endowed with immortal youth? Is it
our disregard of the artist's message which makes us so blind and so
stupid, or are we so under the influence of our Zeitgeist that we can
detect only commercial values in the young as well as in the old? It is
as if our eyes were holden to the mystic beauty, the redemptive joy, the
civic pride which these multitudes of young people might supply to our
dingy towns.
The young creatures themselves piteously look all about them in order
to find an adequate means of expression for their most precious
message: One day a serious young man came to Hull-House with his
pretty young sister who, he explained, wanted to go somewhere every
single evening, "although she could only give the flimsy excuse that