William Isaac Thomas

“ I myself do not exist. Every enjoyment in life, every happiness to which I give a thought is connected in my mind with my little boy. I myself am as if I were never at all in the world. The child is everything—my soul and my spirit, my breath and my life. He is the air I breathe. I am nothing. I don’t consider myself, I don’t think of myself, just as if I had never been in the world. ”

“ We have been thrown together a great deal through poverty, and I feel that we are alone in the world and facing it together, a not too friendly world at that. Yet with all this love and closeness, I don’t feel that I possess my husband, nor that he does me. I am still the same old girl, the same personality, and my first duty is to develop my own gifts. ”

“ It is certain that we can never be united.... My love is hopeless but I cannot give it up. I run after the person I love, I follow his steps, knowing that it will do me no good. I have simply attached myself to an innocent person and distress him. My conscience tells me that it is not right. I suffer needlessly and I make suffering for another, but I simply have no inclination to stop.
I cannot live without my lover. When I don’t see him at the expected moment I am wild, and I am ready to commit the greatest crime in order to accomplish my purpose. ”

“ Then a high school teacher became interested in the girl and invited her to her summer home for vacation. This was the great turning point in Ruth’s life. Here her desires for social superiority and pleasure were satisfied, and she was surrounded by real people for whom she felt at last the whole-souled genuine devotion and admiration which was essential for her socialization.
From that moment there has been no trouble with Ruth. No more stealing, no more truancy, no shirking of lessons. She has gone to live with another teacher for whom she keeps house. ”

“ She was never a prostitute. One of her friends said, “Martha is a woman to whom everything has happened that should logically break a woman’s character and spirit. She ought to be a demoralized victim of society. She has done nearly everything that is supposed to ruin and destroy a person, especially a woman, but she is not a bit destroyed. She knows the so-called lowest things in life, but she wants the best and feels it. She feels what is beautiful and fine and loves it. She does things that sometimes mean sordidness in others but not in her. ”

“ I am provoked with myself, I am ashamed of myself and I hate myself. How can a person be such a rag? I argue with myself, how can I permit my mind to have no control over my heart? But my arguments with myself do me no good at all. It is work thrown away. I can love no one except him, the only one who has captured my heart and soul. ”

“ Now, I want you to advise me how to find my husband. I do not want to live with him by compulsion, nor do I ask his support, for I earn my living working in a shop. I merely ask his aid in somehow obtaining a divorce, so that I may return to my people, to my God and to my parents. I cannot stand the loneliness and do not want to be hated, denounced and spurned by all. My loneliness will drive me to a premature grave. ”

“ It is a crime to defame the character of a woman if you write on a slip of paper, but no crime at all in the state of New York if you rise in a crowded hall and ruin her forever by word of mouth. It is a crime to steal a banana off a fruit stand, but no crime at all to borrow ten thousand dollars from a man whose entire fortune it is, although you have no expectation of returning it.... It is a crime to ruin a girl of 17 years and 11 months, but not to ruin a girl of 18.... ”

“ The even stretch of green, bedecked with flowers 36to match the color of my pale gold gown, is mine to dance and skip upon. A lightness and a grace comes into my limbs. What joy is mine! I leap and spring and dart in rhythm with nature, and music leaps from my steps and movements and before my eyes are men. Men and women and children with heads bent forward, with eyes aglow with wonder, and with praise and love for this essence of grace and beauty which is I. What more, what more! ”

“ Clutter, pots and pans and drudgery are as remote from her life as if she had been born a princess.
“Probably I am spoiled,” she says, “but there are hundreds of others like me, though most of them are too human to resist sex temptation themselves. There are three types of people responsible for a vast number of girls like me: Mothers who spoil their daughters—anything rather than have them household drudges like themselves; society women who make the poor girl’s lot seem harder to her than she can bear; and the men who are glad to use the working girl for everything in life but marriage. ”

“ Men have always lived together in groups. Whether mankind has a true herd instinct or whether groups are held together because this has worked out to advantage is of no importance. Certainly the wishes in general are such that they can be satisfied only in a society. But we have only to refer to the criminal code to appreciate the variety of ways in which the wishes of the individual may conflict with the wishes of society. And the criminal code takes no account of the many unsanctioned expressions of the wishes which society attempts to regulate by persuasion and gossip. ”

“ In measuring the influence of the school we must recognize two types of success in the adaptation of the individual to life, the one based on his assertion and realization of wide and original claims, the other on contentment with limited claims. If he is contented with claims which are more limited than his powers justify, his adaptation is success through relative failure. To the degree that the school treats children as identical it produces a maximum number of relative failures. To some extent the genius is regarded as a prodigy because so much spontaneity is repressed by the school. ”

“ A social institution can be understood and modified only if we do not limit ourselves to the study of its formal organization but analyze the way in which it appears in the personal experience of various members of the group and follow the influence which it has on their lives. And an individual can be understood only if we do not limit ourselves to a cross-section of his life as revealed by a given act, a court record or a confession, or to the determination of what type of life-organization exists, but determine the means by which a certain life-organization is developed. ”

“ I often wonder what men get married for. They take heavy financial responsibilities. They mortgage their free time to one woman. What a wife’s clothes cost them would enable them to enjoy expensive amusements, extensive travel and better surroundings generally. Then, too, a bachelor, no matter what his age or social position, gets more attention socially than a married man. Children, too, give less pleasure and service to a father than a mother.
But for women, marriage is undoubtedly a success. It raises their position in the community. ”

“ On the other hand the modern world presents itself as a spectacle in which the observer is never sufficiently participating. The modern revolt and unrest are due to the contrast between the paucity of fulfillment of the wishes of the individual and the fullness, or apparent fullness, of life around him. All age levels have been affected by the feeling that much, too much, is being missed in life. This unrest is felt most by those who have heretofore been most excluded from general participation in life,—the mature woman and the young girl. ”

“ All the types of wishes coexist in every person,—the vague desire for new experience, for change, for the satisfaction of the appetites, for pleasure; the new experience contained in a pursuit, as in the cases of Pasteur and Wilken; the desire for response in personal relations (“there was a girl Wilken liked and who liked him”) ; the desire for recognition (Wilken was “ambitious for success, for wealth, for position, for luxury”) ; and the desire for security,—the assurance of the means and conditions for gratifying all the wishes indefinitely. ”

“ The government program acted as a searchlight flashed upon the farce of our dual system of morality. In the case of a child suffering assault or rape she might be detained in an old type of reform school till her majority gave her freedom—a poor preparation for later life—while the man, were he convicted, rarely had a long sentence. Of two parents of a child conceived out of wedlock, for the girl abortion is classed as crime; motherhood brings shame and condemnation; while the part of the man passes as a biological necessity. ”

“ If we invented any device to replace social influence lacking at other points it would be the school. It is probable that the school could be a sort of community forming the background of the family and the child and could supply the elements lacking in the home, at least to the degree of preventing in a large measure delinquency and crime, if it exercised all the influence it could conceivably exercise, and that it could, more than any other agency, socialize the family. From this standpoint the appearance of the visiting teacher in the school has the greatest importance. ”

“ Civilized societies, more especially, have endowed the young girl with a character of social sacredness. She has been the subject of a far-going idealization. “Virginity” and “purity” have almost a magical value. This attitude has a useful side, though it has been overdone. The girl as child does not know she has any particular value until she learns it from others, but if she is regarded with adoration she correspondingly respects herself and tends to become what is expected of her. And so she has in fact a greater value. She makes a better marriage and reflects recognition on her family. ”

“ The chemist or entomologist expects to spoil many materials in the course of his tests. Human material is, however, so precious that the experimenter is not justified in assuming the risk of spoiling it. The child is more precious than the problem. The only field in which experiment on the human being is recognized, or rather practiced without recognition, is medicine, where the material is already threatened with destruction through sickness, and the physician introduces an experimental change, say the use of a serum, which gives a chance of preserving life and restoring health. ”

“ My love for the other sex was always of an innocent kind. I loved men as the birds love sunshine. It is not a passion, but a necessity, like the air. I am light-hearted and buoyant by nature, and never thought of doing wrong. And yet the ugly side of this passion has always been forced upon me. [17]
In many girls the awakening of love and its fixation on an object is slow or incomplete. The girl in the following example is cold as a stone toward everything but herself. Her affection is turned inward. She is the type called narcissistic, in love with herself, like the mythical Narcissus. ”

“ The problem of the individual involves in its details the study of all the social influences and institutions,—family, school, church, the law, the newspaper, the story, the motion picture, the occupations, the economic system, the unorganized personal relationships, the division of life into work and leisure time, etc. But the human wish underlies all social happenings and institutions, and human experiences constitute the reality beneath the formal social organization and behind the statistically formulated mass-phenomena. ”

“ If a young and simple girl is abducted or captured in the most brutal and audacious way she may nevertheless become broken and submissive, as an animal is broken and trained. She will then be put on the street to “hustle”, or in a house, and her earnings collected. She is held first by fear and then acquires habits and works with the system, like a trained animal. Frequently there is marriage or pretense of marriage and the girl finds that the next step is to go on the street. This is the typical procedure of the white slaver. ”

“ Any value may provoke in the individual a variety of tendencies to action which we may call mental attitudes. Thus money as a value may provoke one or another of the attitudes: work for it, save it, borrow it, beg it, steal it, counterfeit it, get it by gambling or blackmail. The attitude is thus the counterpart of the social value; activity, in whatever form, is the bond between them. ”

“ The typical community is vanishing and it would be neither possible nor desirable to restore it in its old form. It does not correspond with the present direction of social evolution and it would now be a distressing condition in which to live. But in the immediacy of relationships and the participation of everybody in everything, it represents an element which we have lost and which we shall probably have to restore in some form of coöperation in order to secure a balanced and normal society,—some arrangement corresponding with human nature. ”

“ If a garment was torn or dirty, get a new one. She thought she ought to be placed where there were servants so she would have no housework and no laundry to attend to. She had no loyalty to any one. She played one person against another and used everything to her own advantage as she saw it. As soon as an effort was made to give her insight she reacted to protect herself from the painful revelations by criticizing the worker and taking the attitude that there was a game going on between her and the worker in which each was trying to get ahead of the other. ”

“ THE WISHES It is impossible to understand completely any human being or any single act of his behavior, just as it is impossible to understand completely why a particular wild rose bloomed under a particular hedge at a particular moment. ”

“ If our public schools really educated, if they understood that education involves a training of the instinctive and emotional life as well as of the intellect, if they saw that they cannot even develop intellect as long as they ignore desire, we should have an agency for adjusting the neurotic girl and boy second only to the home in its power. There is proof for this statement. Enlightenment is coming into education in spots. There are visiting teachers who work on the problem children in a school and get wonderful results. ”

“ In analyzing the process of our successes among the so-called delinquent girl two types are of special interest—those who “make good” without any special kind of treatment, who get well by themselves, that is to say, those who would have succeeded in any case; and second, those who have succeeded by some accident, some course of the girl’s own that ran counter to our wishes, our routine and our expectation; in short, those who “make good” in spite of us.
The second type, those who unexpectedly make good by their own plan, which is not of our making, is of profound sociological significance. ”

“ Patty ends the story by saying that in this man she found the refuge which was her salvation. Though intellectually her superior, her husband is stimulated by her active mind. Their sex relation is perfect. She has plenty of friends, both men and women, and he loves and admires her. Their home is comfortable, secure. They have two lovely children—a boy and a girl.
This woman realizes the faults of her nature. In looking back she thinks she flew blindly as a bird would fly, yet never without a subconscious realization of her folly. ”

“ The agriculture of the peasant and of the old-fashioned farmer was scientific to the degree that they had observed a causal relation between manure, lime, moisture, seasonal changes, varieties of soils, animal and plant pests, and the success or failure of their crops. But science is superior to common sense in its methods of experimentation, measurement, and comparison, in its isolation and intensive study of problems from mere scientific curiosity, without regard to the practical application of its results. ”

“ While on probation she became pregnant. She refused to tell who was responsible but concocted a story of nameless attack. The court commented on her strength, her bravery, her resourcefulness, and gave her two weeks in which to find the man and bring him herself, unaided to court. Surprised but not daunted the girl succeeded. The man proved to be a soldier with a temperament much like her own; on careful examination, physical, mental, and social he was proved to be a fit husband and was permitted to marry Maggie. This social rehabilitation has restored her to club life, much to her delight. ”

“ The importance of recognition and status for the individual and for society is very great. The individual not only wants them but he needs them for the development of his personality. The lack of them and the fear of never obtaining them are probably the main source of those psychopathic disturbances which the Freudians treat as sexual in origin.
On the other hand society alone is able to confer status on the individual and in seeking to obtain it he makes himself responsible to society and is forced to regulate the expression of his wishes. ”