Georgina Burros and Siena Fouse Interdisciplinary Project First Quarter Upon rising in the morning, clothed in filth

in the dirty tenement home, Mary Finnegan tends to her 4 brothers and sisters. She prepares them a small meal of oats as they walk to school. Mary, 13, has left school to work. Her father is an alcoholic who beats her mother and returns home occasionally, and her mother is a seamstress with her Aunt. Mary, when she has left the suffocating tenement, goes to work at the beer bottling factory, working for eight hours a day with a small break in between for lunch. She is surrounded by machinery that wears down her hearing, and is frequently seeing her friends hair caught in the machinery. She always leaves the factory early, and spends some time binding newspapers for the local store. Chattering with friends, it is the camaraderie within the girls at the beer bottling plant that keep her going. The little pay at the end of every day is barely enough to feed one person, let alone 6. She stops along the way to pick up more laundry and garments that she carries home in a heavy load from her mothers sweatshop. After work Mary Finnegan comes home to her family where she must help her mother mend clothes with for others. Her mother is a seamstress and demands Marys help so she can put food on the table, even though Marys mother will probably waste all her own earnings on alcohol. After work Mary is already very tired and often pricks herself when trying to help her mother. She spends hours in poor lighting helping her mother sew. She then spends time fixing her own clothes with her siblings to appear as if she tries to look acceptable in society Mary and her siblings receive poor quality hand-me-downs from neighbors. Mary prepares the small dinner the children get in an apartment where there is no space. Fires have been common, the floor is charred and leading out of the stained window is a rickety fire escape. In the cold, it is glazed with ice and in the summer it is too hot to touch. It gives a constant scare of collapsing. The dirty conditions cause disease and all hopes of sanitation are lost with the everlasting grime that coats the walls.