The Girl in the Street

"Mary is an arrogant, aggressive child who makes her way by force. She plays with anyone who happens to be on the street."

"Mary" was born about 1930, "in an eastern city with a population of about a quarter million." She was four years old when Virginia Boggess, a student at the Smith College School of Social Work, studied her and her family for a 1935 thesis titled "Some Factors Accounting for the Variation in the Social Adjustment of Children Living in a Tenement Area." (In those days you didn't have to come up with a belabored pun or some variation of "Transgressing the Boundaries" for your thesis title.) "Mary's" Portuguese-American, Catholic family lived in a "first-floor flat, unattractive and untidy." The family was on the dole; the mother (age 25) had had at least two abortions. (And kids, don't believe the hype that abortions were rare before Roe, or accessible only to rich women. Social-work and medical literature are full of women who had them.) The mother "feels imposed upon because she has to care for her sister's children, and she does not like children."

Virginia Boggess judged "Mary" and her family harshly, and this tells us a lot about her perspective. But the sole sentence she could devote to the girl raises a ton of questions that I wish I could answer. What constituted arrogance and aggression in a four-year-old girl? What were the desires "Mary" was trying to fulfill by "mak[ing] her way by force"? Who did she play with on the street, what were their games, and what kind of social relations did they act out in playing them?

I think we all think we know children like "Mary," but we have to consider what kind of expectations adults had for little girls in the 1930s. To another observer in another time—perhaps even today—"Mary" might simply be a high-spirited youngster, even a tomboy.