This parental control sometimes exercised in order to secure all of a
daughter's wages, is often established with the best intentions in the
world. I recall a French dressmaker who had frugally supported her two
daughters until they were of working age, when she quite naturally
expected them to conform to the careful habits of living necessary
during her narrow years. In order to save carfare, she required her
daughters to walk a long distance to the department store in which one
was a bundle wrapper and the other a clerk at the ribbon counter. They
dressed in black as being the most economical color and a penny spent in
pleasure was never permitted. One day a young man who was buying ribbon
from the older girl gave her a yard with the remark that she was much
too young and pretty to be so somberly dressed. She wore the ribbon at
work, never of course at home, but it opened a vista of delightful
possibilities and she eagerly accepted a pair of gloves the following
week from the same young man, who afterwards asked her to dine with him.
This was the beginning of a winter of surreptitious pleasures on the
part of the two sisters. They were shrewd enough never to be out later
than ten o'clock and always brought home so-called overtime pay to their
mother. In the spring the older girl, finding herself worn out by her
dissipation and having resolved to cut loose from her home, came to the
office of the Juvenile Protective Association to ask help for her
younger sister. It was discovered that the mother was totally ignorant
of the semi-professional life her daughters had been leading. She
reiterated over and over again that she had always guarded them
carefully and had given them no money to spend. It took months of
constant visiting on the part of a representative of the Association
before she was finally persuaded to treat the younger girl more
generously.