hundreds of girls every year open their baby eyes in dark inner rooms
where the dim gas light steals what oxygen there may chance to be in the
heavy air, take their first steps in foul alleys, find their first toys
in garbage cans and gutters. They have been denied their rights at the
start. In a Christian land, they grow weak, anemic, yield to the white
specter and in a few years pass out of the unfair world to which they
came, or remain to fight out a miserable existence against terrific
odds. They make up an army of girls who have been denied their rights.
And her religion? What is it that religion may offer to her in
compensation for that which she has been denied?

_It is the right of every girl_ to be born under conditions which will
make possible sufficient food and clothing for her natural growth and
development. But scores of little girls go shivering to school every
morning after a breakfast of bread and tea, they return numb with cold
after a dinner of more bread and tea and they go home to a supper of the
same with a piece of stale cake or a cookie to help out. Nature calls
aloud for nourishment and there is no answer. The girl enters her
teens, finds a "job," goes to work, hungry the long year through,
fighting to win out over the cold in winter, and to endure the scorching
days of summer. And her religion? What is it that religion may offer to
her in compensation for what she has been denied?

_It is the right of every girl_ to receive, through the educational work
of the community, training which shall fit her for clean, honest and
efficient living. Yet every year sees hundreds of girls turned out into
the world wholly unequipped for life, their special talents
undiscovered, their energies undirected, their purposes unformed, their
ambitions unawakened.