sion
to consider this establishment for America, although the Industrial
Commission of Wisconsin is empowered to investigate wages and their
effect upon the standard of living.

Anyone who has lived among working people has been surprised at the
docility with which grown-up children give all of their earnings to
their parents. This is, of course, especially true of the daughters. The
fifth volume of the governmental report upon "Women and Child Wage
Earners in the United States," quoted earlier, gives eighty-four per
cent. as the proportion of working girls who turn in all of their wages
to the family fund. In most cases this is done voluntarily and
cheerfully, but in many instances it is as if the tradition of woman's
dependence upon her family for support held long after the actual fact
had changed, or as if the tyranny established through generations when
daughters could be starved into submission to a father's will, continued
even after the roles had changed, and the wages of the girl child
supported a broken and dissolute father.

An over-restrained girl, from whom so much is exacted, will sometimes
begin to deceive her family by failing to tell them when she has had a
raise in her wages. She will habitually keep the extra amount for
herself, as she will any overtime pay which she may receive. All such
money is invariably spent upon her own clothing, which she, of course,
cannot wear at home, but which gives her great satisfaction upon the
streets.

The girl of the crowded tenements has no room in which to receive her
friends or to read the books through which she shares the lives of
assorted heroines, or, better still, dreams of them as of herself. Even
if the living-room is not full of boarders or children or washing, it is
comfortable neither for receiving friends nor for reading, and she finds
upon the street her entire social field; the shop windows with their
desirable garments hastily clothe her heroines as they travel the old
roads of romance, the street cars rumbling noisily by suggest a
delectable somewhere far away, and the young men who pass offer
possibilities of the most delightful acquaintance. It is not astonishing
that she insists upon clothing which conforms to the ideals of this
all-absorbing street and that she will unhesitatingly deceive an
uncomprehending family which does not recognize its importance.

One such girl had for two years earned money for clothing by filling
regular appointme