Page:Margaret Mead - Coming of age in Samoa; a psychological study of primitive youth for western civilisation.pdf/278

 child from the present status of the parent. But this measured comment of the statistician has not filtered into our literature, nor our moving pictures, nor in any way served to minimise the vividness of the improvement in the children’s condition as compared with the condition of their parents. Especially in cities, there is no such obvious demonstration of the fact that improvement is the rule for the children of a given class or district, and not merely a case of John Riley’s making twenty dollars a week as a crossing man while Mary, his daughter, who has gone to business school, makes twenty-five dollars a week, working shorter hours. The lure of correspondence school advertising, the efflorescence of a doctrine of short-cuts to fame, all contrive to make an American boy or girl's choice of a job different from that of English children, born into a society where stratification is so old, so institutionalised, that the dullest cannot doubt it. So economic conditions force them to go to work and everything combines to make that choice a difficult one, whether in terms of abandoning a care-free existence for a confining, uncongenial one, or in terms of bitter rebellion against the choice which they must make in contrast to the opportunities which they are told are open to all Americans.

And taking a job introduces other factors of difficulty into the adolescent girl’s home situation. Her dependence has always been demonstrated in terms of limits and curbs set upon her spontaneous activity in every