The Washington herald., 1917-07-16
WHY GIRLS LEAVE. HOME.
By DOROTHY DIX.
The Worlds Highest Paid Woman Writer.

The police of New York City are
being bitterly arraigned because they
: so dilatoriy and half-heartedy prose-
cuted the search, when she was first
reported missing. OF pretty little Ruth
Cruger, the high school girl, who went
forth from her fathers house to have
her skates sharpened, and who was
never heard Of again until her man.
gled body was found buried in the
cellar of the shop to which she had
gone.
l hold no brief for the police. Doubt
less they deserve all the blame that is
being visited upon their heads in this
particular case. Doubtless, also, it is
better that the whole energy of the
force should be expended in tracing
down a thousand runaway girls who
have merely eloped with their sweet
hearts than that one abducted girl
should remain unavenged.
Nevertheless, any one who has ever
had any practical experience in trac-
ing down the stories OF the hundreds
of girls who are yearly reported MISS
ing in every great city. can at least
understand the cynical apathy of the
police in the matter. For in over
30 per cent of the cases the girls
are not the victims Of foul play but
of their own folly. They have not
been stolen. They have gone of their
own accord. And the last thing on
earth they want is to be found and
returned to the bosom of the families
they have fed.
The prodigal son who. careless of
the anxiety and misery he caused his
parents. ran away from home in order
to sow his wild oats where he pleased,
IL a figure as old as human society.
The prodigal daughter, who likewise
wishes to be free from home re-
straints in order to follow the de-
sires of her eyes and who treads in
her brothers footsteps, is a new COM
er in our midst, but she is here in
daily increasing numbers and she is
one of the great moral problems of
our day.
The question of why girls leave
home, however, is one that is not so
much up to the police as it is to par
ents. for it is far more important to
keep girl from going than it is to
discover her after she has left home.
The time to prevent a tragedy is be-
fore it happens.
Generally speaking, the reason that
girls leave home is because they either
have grinding tyrants or purblind
idiots for parents. This is true even
when the compelling cause of the
girls going is a man.
When a girl elopes with the sort of
a man to whom she could not be de-
Gently married in orthodox fashion,
it is more often than not her parents
fault. Sometimes the father and
mother have taken a high handed at
titude in the matter that any girl of
spirit would resent. They have an
tagonized her until she wrecked her
life in blind anger that made her un-
able to see the man as he really was.
Sometimes they have been the sort of
parents that never let a girl have a
beau in peace and comfort at home,
so that she meets the kind of men she
should not know outside of her
home.
Never are they the parents who are
sympathetic, and helpful, and tender,
and to whom a girl can open her
heart and tell her secrets. Girls with
that kind of fathers and mothers
never run away with their chauf-
feurs. or their grooms, or married
men with whom they propose to defy
conventions.
Girls leave home because their par
ents are grasping and tyrannical. In
the recent white slave Investigation
one of the men who most successfully
trafticed in the souls and bodies of
young girls said that the easiest girl
in the world to lure into the life was
the working girl whose parents made
her turn over her pay envelope to
them.
Take a young girl who works from
early dawn to night, who tolls to ex-
haUstion every day, and who gets
nothing out of her labor but the few
cents her mother gives her for spend
ing money, who never has any pretty
clothes because her mother doesn't
believe In wasting money on finery,
who never has the price of a. theater
ticket because her mother thinks 1t
sinful to spend money on amuse-
ments; tell this girl you'll put her in
the way Of making money that she
Will have for her own, and that she
can spend as she pleases. and ninety
n.ne times out OF hundred you have
got her." said the evil philosopher.
Possibly he Is right At any rate
II is sadly significant that OF the girls
who leave home a large majority be-
long 10 foreign families In which the
parents hold 10 the old, theory that q
ehild's and especially q Girl child's
earnings belong 10 the parents. and
that . siri should have no liberty Of
action. white the Elrl has BECOME
Americanlrsd aud wants. A isa.t- an.