dinary masculine aversion to doing woman's work, is greatly moderated. The boys run home from their play after school hours to start the kitchen fire, so that the water may be boiling when their mothers come home. They make beds and sweep and clean house. I have known a boy of eleven to acquire sufficient knowledge of housework so that, at his mother's death, he was able to do all the work for a family of four. Several times I have come into a home and found the strong young husband washing, and not at all embarrassed to be caught at the wash-tub.
The older children, both boys and girls, take care of the younger ones. They are trained to responsibility from their earliest youth, and make great gains in both strength and charm of character. A girl of thirteen often has the care of several younger children, besides doing much of the housework for the family. A grandfather or a grandmother, even if very feeble, is a great addition to the family life in furnishing the adult point of view in the absence of both parents. A neighbor, too, in case of sudden emergency, often acts in loco parentis, and a very motherly person will sometimes mother a whole neighborhood.
One woman that I knew had ten fine, healthy children—she had never lost a child—and she had been in factory the greater part of the time through the twenty-five years of her married life. The oldest girl was married and was also at work in a cigar factory, but whenever she had a few minutes to spare she came to her mother's home to help with the sewing for those younger brothers and sisters she had brought up.
The clothes of the children are suitable and are often made with particularly good taste. The Bohemians are perhaps the cleanest of the poor people in the city and they struggle manfully against the bad conditions of the New York tenement houses. They are fortunate in being intensely musical, and they find great joy in the occasional dance or picnic.
They are a hard-working people, and both the women and children are often overworked. The girls marry with the expectation of continuing their hard life in the factory.
The poverty of the home is often increased by the intemperance of the father. "It is better to go to a picnic with a woman, a woman does not get drunk," said a wise little maiden six years of age.
To those theorists who look for great progress when women shall obtain a position of economic independence, the Bohemian women cigarmakers ought to be an interesting study. The wife with her quicker fingers often makes better wages than her husband. I asked a thoughtful Bohemian of the educated class why the women did not demand more power, since they contribute so largely to the family finances, and he answered, "Because they would not consider such a demand fitting." Husband and wife seem to go on much as they have always done since "male and female created he them."
The Bohemians are cut off from the life of the city partly by their inability to speak English, and partly by their being so overworked that they have no time even to see what other people are doing.
They are almost always able to read their own tongue—they have several newspapers—and they care a great deal for the education of the children. The children speak Bohemian more than any other New York children speak the tongue of their fathers and the ancestral tongue seems to have a tendency to bind the family together and to preserve its traditions in this new land.
The Struggle in the Family Life.
It is said that the criminals of the cities come from the ranks of the children of the immigrants, not from the immigrants themselves. Those who live near these transplanted people tell us of the struggle in the family life between the standards of the old country father and mother and those of the children who have learned the language and caught the spirit of the new country, and have become the important factor in the family life.
The child stands between the new life and its strange customs; he is the interpreter; he often is the first breadwinner; he becomes the authority in the family.
The parents are displaced because they
