Mental and Moral Deficiency in A High-School Girl
- Author:
Gladys E. Poole, M.A.,
University of Pennsylvania.
Lillian1 was first brought to the Psychological Clinic by her two aunts because of backwardness in school and social non-conformity. She was an unusually attractive girl, nineteen years of age, with good color, regular girlish features and a naive manner which always impressed people favorably. She was attending a Philadelphia high school, nominally doing second-year work, but in reality doing nothing. At the age of four years she had entered kindergarten and had spent two years there; she had repeated every grammar grade. The aunts claimed that even then she had been promoted at their request rather than because of the merit of her work. In the grades she had found arithmetic especially difficult; in the high school English composition and French gave her trouble. Her school program had been gradually reduced until it included only English composition, French, drawing and domestic science. When asked what troubled her in French she said it was sentence structure and verb endings; she could not remember whether or not she had had any irregular verbs. She kept bringing in the phrase “sentence structure” in a parrot-like manner, evidently having no conception of its meaning. As she could not follow a recipe except under the closest supervision she had made no headway in domestic science. She enjoyed school, however, and drudged away at her lessons. She realized that she was “dumb” in school work, but was most optimistic about her future progress.
Lillian’s aunts, with whom she lived, reported her as only moderately helpful about the house; she could dust a room in the order in which she had been trained to do it, but if for any reason the order was changed she invariably omitted a part of the task. She could assist with the preparation of the meals, but could not possibly follow a recipe. She had learned to darn stockings well, but could not do other than plain sewing. Socially, her aunts had not been able to train her to conform to their standards, and they were becoming alarmed over her apparent lack of social conformity. As a child she had gotten along well with other children; she had preferred lCase No. 2010.
younger children as playmates, and she permitted them to impose upon her. She had always shown a preference for the company of boys. She enjoyed dancing and music; she had picked out tunes on the piano by ear, but she could not be made to practice regular music lessons. She seldom read a book of her own accord, and when she did, although she read fluently, she had no real comprehension of the context. Her aunts reported her as forgiving and lovable; she was afraid of making mistakes, and shrank from punishment, and after being scolded was nervous for days. In order to avoid detection she was often deceitful and untruthful, but she was not clever enough to hide her misdemeanors and usually was found out. In spite of her aunts’ rather severe punishments the offenses were soon repeated. She was very fond of the company of men, and made friends with them easily. She made no discrimination, however, between friends of the family and the colored servant. Several young men called at the house each week; the aunt discreetly chaperoned. Her aunts had always felt the necessity of guarding her most carefully. They put the girl on the car to go to school and obtained special permission for her to leave the school grounds when no other pupils were out of doors. Lillian took a particular trolley home each day, and her aunts never failed to meet her; at no time could she follow her own devices. Altogether she seems to have had a good home and careful discipline.
The developmental history was negative. The birth was full time and natural. The mother was twenty years old at the time of pregnancy and in good health. Lillian walked and talked at the usual time. She showed no symptoms of enuresis, convulsions, nor early childhood diseases except pneumonia when she was two years of age. Menstruation began when she was thirteen years of age. She was not slow in learning to dress herself; and as she grew older took considerable pride in her appearance. Physically she represented decidedly normal conditions, with the exception of a very high, but not seriously contracted, palate.
The family history was not so favorable. Lillian’s father is easy going and unreliable. He is reported to have knocked about a great deal with women “not in his social sphere;” finally he became involved with Lillian’s mother, a waitress in his boarding house, and married her shortly before Lillian’s birth. The mother was faithless to her husband and child; she was reported as having been seen in the woods and out of the way places with tough-looking men; finally she ran away with a cousin. Lillian wandered about the streets with no one to care for her until her widowed aunt took her in. This aunt and her unmarried sister have cared for Lillian ever since. The aunts seem to be capable, businesslike women, much concerned over Lillian’s welfare. They firmly resisted any suggestion of “putting her away.”
Nothing more was heard of Lillian until four years later when the aunts again brought her to the clinic; they had a sad tale to tell. She was now twenty-three and a very attractive looking young woman. Her social conduct had been growing steadily worse.
She had developed very strong sexual desires, and it was no longer safe to allow her to ride on the street cars alone. The girl thinks that she is extremely capable, and that she can do anything that other people can do; she has recently developed a mania for earning her own living at some kind of “clerical work,” and her aunts are in constant fear lest she slip away to try it on her own.
Lillian now came to the clinic several times, and a study was made of her intellectual and social conformity. On the Ayres Spelling Scale she tested eighth grade; on the Hillegas Composition Scale she tested seventh grade in composition; on the Courtis Standardized Arithmetic Tests, sixth grade in fundamentals and less than second grade in comprehension; on the Monroe Standardized Silent Reading Test she scored above the median for the fourth grade but less than the lowest fifth grade score. When scored in arithmetic four years before by Dr Maxfield, she scored seventh grade in fundamentals, but did not even attempt the comprehension problems. In light of this poor educational equipment one is lead to wonder how, even with the aunts’ insistence upon her promotions, Lillian managed to get into second-year high school. What weary hours teachers must have expended upon her during her sixteen years in school, yet how meager were the results shown! How was it possible that any girl testing fourth grade in reading and less than second grade in arithmetic comprehension, should have even the chance to fail at high-school work?
Lillian has kept a diary for a good many years, and a leaf, written while she was under observation at the clinic, is printed below because it conveys a true picture of her reaction towards her home environment:
“… got a scolding yesterday for sticking articles away in wrong places?just so as to get them out of sight and have rooms clean?paper and pins, shoe horn all together in silver dish on sideboard? “Clean bureau off and stick things away in drawers which shouldn’t have been there, letters and pencils box of salve and two or three paper books?I still continue to do these things after the scoldings. It is thotless until I remember I got a scolding before and I am afraid of getting it again and then I won’t do these things. When I don’t have fear I still do these wrong things. I do deceitful tricks and don’t tell my aunts. I go to meet some boy outside and when I come home I fib and say I have been to the home of a girl friend?I have done this continually until I was found out by my aunt?She watches me very close everything I do?she don’t like this boy that I meet and I do. My aunt doesn’t seem to have any trust in me at all because I have fibed and deceived so much that everything that I say or do she always thinks it is the opposite. never tell her anything my friends say?I am afraid she won’t allow me to go with them again and I have kissed them which I shouldn’t have done?My aunts are very proper in everything?
“I believe in having a good time once in a while and not sit around so stiff when company comes to see me.
“I don’t read any except the newspaper at night?” Lillian has been “keeping company” with three young men for nearly a year. One of them, a man twenty-eight years of age, wants to marry her at once, but Lillian writes in her diary that she doesn’t care for him; “he is too steady and does not care for movies and will keep me straight.” She adds, however, that he is the aunts’ choice. She loves the second young man, a man of twenty who makes love to her in more approved fashion; he kisses and hugs her whenever they are alone, but wants her to wait two years before they think of getting married; she is loath to do this because she says the aunts watch them very closely when he is calling. The third young man she meets in the park occasionally. The aunts confirmed the above story and said that they would be well pleased to have Lillian marry the first young man if they did not feel that it would be doing him an injustice to permit the marriage.
In order to study at first hand Lillian’s reactions towards men I took her to dinner with me one evening. At the table were three young men, University students, who did not know that she was a subject. During the meal she contented herself with rather witty comments and let some one else carry the burden of conversation. The men afterwards reported that they had found her to have charming table manners and a good stock of the usual light table conversation. They said that she was a “flirt and light-headed like about half the girls that they met!” Perhaps twenty young men met Lillian after dinner, and all of them liked her. Lillian was enthusiastic over these men, and, although she had arranged to meet one of her friends in town and take him to the “movies” with us she urged me to ask two of her new acquaintances to accompany us to the movies. When she found that all the young men were “too busy” to go to the “show” that night, she asked one of them to call upon her the next week end and gave him her address. At the moving picture theater Lillian enjoyed the musical selections played by the orchestra, but she could not follow the simple plot in the “Miracle Man,” a play which she had several times expressed a desire to see because “they say that it is just swell.”
Lillian’s case represents a well-defined problem. The public schools failed to make her intellectual, and her aunts apparently have failed to make her moral. Four years ago Dr Maxfield diagnosed her as feeble-minded, probably high-grade imbecile. Dr. Witmer, who examined her the last time that she was brought to the clinic, diagnosed her mental level as ranging from that of a seven-year-old to that of a twelve-year-old child, depending upon the intellectual operation or social behavior involved. In spite of the fact she had been pushed into second-year high-school work the school, in twelve years, had failed to raise her intellectual level above that of a normal twelve-year-old child. During twenty years of careful supervision and training her aunts had not been able to train her to do even simple household duties without their supervision. The chances of her ever being able to earn her own living are slight, not so much because of her low intellectual level, but rather because of her lack of control. Even the careful guardianship of her aunts no longer insures acceptable social behavior. She is pointed towards the road which ends in exploited vice.
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