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In the title of this book we see a sign-post on the road of humanistic progress. Twenty years ago it might have been called “The Woman Criminal “; ten years ago it would have been” The Female Delinquent”; now it is “The Unadjusted Girl.”
The book is, like so many studies of behavior problems have necessarily become, a collection of case histories, with illuminating comments. Mr. Thomas has for years been familiar through study at first hand with the problem of the immigrant, and in this book are found many instances of illiterate foreign girls, thrust into a strange, hostile community to sink or swim, who were forced to the street level through circumstances.
Thomas' first chapter is devoted to a consideration of the several desires which impel human activity. He distinguishes desire for experience, for adventure, for work, and for security. In his second chapter on the regulation of the wishes, he“holds that there is, before any action, a” stage of examination and deliberation which we may call the definition of the situation” (p. 42). His conception of conscious action is then a voluntary choice, a weighing of the various possibilities and a willing “to do this or that.” This is, of course, in accord with the assigning of different parts of the mind or brain to different functions, the old faculty psychology.
The remainder of the book is devoted to histories of girls who have gone wrong, as the saying is. These histories are depressingly similar. A squalid home with no ethical training, a glimpse of the glitter of a tawdry night-life, the incidental and often casual loss of virginity, and the natural drifting into sexual vagabondage as the easiest way to survive.
The book closes with chapters on social influence and social agencies. These are necessarily only sketchy, although there are many indications of the ways in which these problems may be approached. Unfortunately