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+Project Gutenberg's A New Conscience And An Ancient Evil, by Jane Addams
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: A New Conscience And An Ancient Evil
+
+Author: Jane Addams
+
+Release Date: March 1, 2005 [EBook #15221]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A NEW CONSCIENCE ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Jeffrey Kraus-yao
+
+
+
+
+
+A NEW CONSCIENCE AND AN ANCIENT EVIL
+
+By JANE ADDAMS
+
+
+HULL HOUSE, CHICAGO
+
+Author of Democracy and Social Ethics, Newer Ideals of Peace
+The Spirit of Youth and the City Streets
+Twenty Years at Hull-House
+
+New York
+THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
+1912
+
+
+
+To the Juvenile Protective Association of Chicago, whose superintendent and
+field officers have collected much of the material for this book, and whose
+president, Mrs. Joseph T. Bowen, has so ably and sympathetically collaborated in
+its writing.
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+CHAPTER I   As inferred from An Analogy
+CHAPTER II  As indicated by Recent Legal Enactments
+CHAPTER III As indicated by the Amelioration of Economic Conditions
+CHAPTER IV  As indicated by the Moral Education and Legal Protection
+            of Children
+CHAPTER V   As indicated by Philanthropic Rescue and Prevention
+CHAPTER VI  As indicated by Increased Social Control
+
+
+
+
+PREFACE
+
+The following material, much of which has been published in McClure's
+Magazine, was written, not from the point of view of the expert, but
+because of my own need for a counter-knowledge to a bewildering mass of
+information which came to me through the Juvenile Protective Association
+of Chicago. The reports which its twenty field officers daily brought to
+its main office adjoining Hull House became to me a revelation of the
+dangers implicit in city conditions and of the allurements which are
+designedly placed around many young girls in order to draw them into an
+evil life.
+
+As head of the Publication Committee, I read the original documents in a
+series of special investigations made by the Association on dance halls,
+theatres, amusement parks, lake excursion boats, petty gambling, the
+home surroundings of one hundred Juvenile Court children and the records
+of four thousand parents who clearly contributed to the delinquency of
+their own families. The Association also collected the personal
+histories of two hundred department-store girls, of two hundred factory
+girls, of two hundred immigrant girls, of two hundred office girls, and
+of girls employed in one hundred hotels and restaurants.
+
+While this experience was most distressing, I was, on the other hand,
+much impressed and at times fairly startled by the large and diversified
+number of people to whom the very existence of the white slave traffic
+had become unendurable and who promptly responded to any appeal made on
+behalf of its victims. City officials, policemen, judges, attorneys,
+employers, trades unionists, physicians, teachers, newly arrived
+immigrants, clergymen, railway officials, and newspaper men, as under a
+profound sense of compunction, were unsparing of time and effort when
+given an opportunity to assist an individual girl, to promote
+legislation designed for her protection, or to establish institutions
+for her rescue.
+
+I therefore venture to hope that in serving my own need I may also serve
+the need of a rapidly growing public when I set down for rational
+consideration the temptations surrounding multitudes of young people and
+when I assemble, as best I may, the many indications of a new
+conscience, which in various directions is slowly gathering strength and
+which we may soberly hope will at last successfully array itself against
+this incredible social wrong, ancient though it may be.
+
+Hull House, Chicago.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+AN ANALOGY
+
+
+In every large city throughout the world thousands of women are so set
+aside as outcasts from decent society that it is considered an
+impropriety to speak the very word which designates them. Lecky calls
+this type of woman "the most mournful and the most awful figure in
+history": he says that "she remains, while creeds and civilizations rise
+and fall, the eternal sacrifice of humanity, blasted for the sins of the
+people." But evils so old that they are imbedded in man's earliest
+history have been known to sway before an enlightened public opinion and
+in the end to give way to a growing conscience, which regards them first
+as a moral affront and at length as an utter impossibility. Thus the
+generation just before us, our own fathers, uprooted the enormous upas
+of slavery, "the tree that was literally as old as the race of man,"
+although slavery doubtless had its beginnings in the captives of man's
+earliest warfare, even as this existing evil thus originated.
+
+Those of us who think we discern the beginnings of a new conscience in
+regard to this twin of slavery, as old and outrageous as slavery itself
+and even more persistent, find a possible analogy between certain civic,
+philanthropic and educational efforts directed against the very
+existence of this social evil and similar organized efforts which
+preceded the overthrow of slavery in America. Thus, long before slavery
+was finally declared illegal, there were international regulations of
+its traffic, state and federal legislation concerning its extension, and
+many extra legal attempts to control its abuses; quite as we have the
+international regulations concerning the white slave traffic, the state
+and interstate legislation for its repression, and an extra legal power
+in connection with it so universally given to the municipal police that
+the possession of this power has become one of the great sources of
+corruption in every American city.
+
+Before society was ready to proceed against the institution of slavery
+as such, groups of men and women by means of the underground railroad
+cherished and educated individual slaves; it is scarcely necessary to
+point out the similarity to the rescue homes and preventive associations
+which every great city contains.
+
+It is always easy to overwork an analogy, and yet the economist who for
+years insisted that slave labor continually and arbitrarily limited the
+wages of free labor and was therefore a detriment to national wealth was
+a forerunner of the economist of to-day who points out the economic
+basis of the social evil, the connection between low wages and despair,
+between over-fatigue and the demand for reckless pleasure.
+
+Before the American nation agreed to regard slavery as unjustifiable
+from the standpoint of public morality, an army of reformers, lecturers,
+and writers set forth its enormity in a never-ceasing flow of invective,
+of appeal, and of portrayal concerning the human cruelty to which the
+system lent itself. We can discern the scouts and outposts of a similar
+army advancing against this existing evil: the physicians and
+sanitarians who are committed to the task of ridding the race from
+contagious diseases, the teachers and lecturers who are appealing to the
+higher morality of thousands of young people; the growing literature,
+not only biological and didactic, but of a popular type more closely
+approaching "Uncle Tom's Cabin."
+
+Throughout the agitation for the abolition of slavery in America, there
+were statesmen who gradually became convinced of the political and moral
+necessity of giving to the freedman the protection of the ballot. In
+this current agitation there are at least a few men and women who would
+extend a greater social and political freedom to all women if only
+because domestic control has proved so ineffectual.
+
+We may certainly take courage from the fact that our contemporaries are
+fired by social compassions and enthusiasms, to which even our immediate
+predecessors were indifferent. Such compunctions have ever manifested
+themselves in varying degrees of ardor through different groups in the
+same community. Thus among those who are newly aroused to action in
+regard to the social evil are many who would endeavor to regulate it and
+believe they can minimize its dangers, still larger numbers who would
+eliminate all trafficking of unwilling victims in connection with it,
+and yet others who believe that as a quasi-legal institution it may be
+absolutely abolished. Perhaps the analogy to the abolition of slavery is
+most striking in that these groups, in their varying points of view, are
+like those earlier associations which differed widely in regard to
+chattel slavery. Only the so-called extremists, in the first instance,
+stood for abolition and they were continually told that what they
+proposed was clearly impossible. The legal and commercial obstacles,
+bulked large, were placed before them and it was confidently asserted
+that the blame for the historic existence of slavery lay deep within
+human nature itself. Yet gradually all of these associations reached the
+point of view of the abolitionist and before the war was over even the
+most lukewarm unionist saw no other solution of the nation's difficulty.
+Some such gradual conversion to the point of view of abolition is the
+experience of every society or group of people who seriously face the
+difficulties and complications of the social evil. Certainly all the
+national organizations--the National Vigilance Committee, the American
+Purity Federation, the Alliance for the Suppression and Prevention of
+the White Slave Traffic and many others--stand for the final abolition
+of commercialized vice. Local vice commissions, such as the able one
+recently appointed in Chicago, although composed of members of varying
+beliefs in regard to the possibility of control and regulation, united
+in the end in recommending a law enforcement looking towards final
+abolition. Even the most sceptical of Chicago citizens, after reading
+the fearless document, shared the hope of the commission that "the city,
+when aroused to the truth, would instantly rebel against the social evil
+in all its phases." A similar recommendation of ultimate abolition was
+recently made unanimous by the Minneapolis vice commission after the
+conversion of many of its members. Doubtless all of the national
+societies have before them a task only less gigantic than that faced by
+those earlier associations in America for the suppression of slavery,
+although it may be legitimate to remind them that the best-known
+anti-slavery society in America was organized by the New England
+abolitionists in 1836, and only thirty-six years later, in 1872, was
+formally disbanded because its object had been accomplished. The long
+struggle ahead of these newer associations will doubtless claim its
+martyrs and its heroes, has indeed already claimed them during the last
+thirty years. Few righteous causes have escaped baptism with blood;
+nevertheless, to paraphrase Lincoln's speech, if blood were exacted drop
+by drop in measure to the tears of anguished mothers and enslaved girls,
+the nation would still be obliged to go into the struggle.
+
+Throughout this volume the phrase "social evil" is used to designate the
+sexual commerce permitted to exist in every large city, usually in a
+segregated district, wherein the chastity of women is bought and sold.
+Modifications of legal codes regarding marriage and divorce, moral
+judgments concerning the entire group of questions centring about
+illicit affection between men and women, are quite other questions which
+are not considered here. Such problems must always remain distinct from
+those of commercialized vice, as must the treatment of an irreducible
+minimum of prostitution, which will doubtless long exist, quite as
+society still retains an irreducible minimum of murders. This volume
+does not deal with the probable future of prostitution, and gives only
+such historical background as is necessary to understand the present
+situation. It endeavors to present the contributory causes, as they have
+become registered in my consciousness through a long residence in a
+crowded city quarter, and to state the indications, as I have seen them,
+of a new conscience with its many and varied manifestations.
+
+Nothing is gained by making the situation better or worse than it is,
+nor in anywise different from what it is. This ancient evil is indeed
+social in the sense of community responsibility and can only be
+understood and at length remedied when we face the fact and measure the
+resources which may at length be massed against it. Perhaps the most
+striking indication that our generation has become the bearer of a new
+moral consciousness in regard to the existence of commercialized vice is
+the fact that the mere contemplation of it throws the more sensitive men
+and women among our contemporaries into a state of indignant revolt. It
+is doubtless an instinctive shrinking from this emotion and an
+unconscious dread that this modern sensitiveness will be outraged, which
+justifies to themselves so many moral men and women in their persistent
+ignorance of the subject. Yet one of the most obvious resources at our
+command, which might well be utilized at once, if it is to be utilized
+at all, is the overwhelming pity and sense of protection which the
+recent revelations in the white slave traffic have aroused for the
+thousands of young girls, many of them still children, who are yearly
+sacrificed to the "sins of the people." All of this emotion ought to be
+made of value, for quite as a state of emotion is invariably the organic
+preparation for action, so it is certainly true that no profound
+spiritual transformation can take place without it.
+
+After all, human progress is deeply indebted to a study of
+imperfections, and the counsels of despair, if not full of seasoned
+wisdom, are at least fertile in suggestion and a desperate spur to
+action. Sympathetic knowledge is the only way of approach to any human
+problem, and the line of least resistance into the jungle of human
+wretchedness must always be through that region which is most thoroughly
+explored, not only by the information of the statistician, but by
+sympathetic understanding. We are daily attaining the latter through
+such authors as Sudermann and Elsa Gerusalem, who have enabled their
+readers to comprehend the so-called "fallen" woman through a skilful
+portrayal of the reaction of experience upon personality. Their realism
+has rescued her from the sentimentality surrounding an impossible
+Camille quite as their fellow-craftsmen in realism have replaced the
+weeping Amelias of the Victorian period by reasonable women transcribed
+from actual life.
+
+The treatment of this subject in American literature is at present in
+the pamphleteering stage, although an ever-increasing number of short
+stories and novels deal with it. On the other hand, the plays through
+which Bernard Shaw constantly places the truth before the public in
+England as Brieux is doing for the public in France, produce in the
+spectators a disquieting sense that society is involved in
+commercialized vice and must speedily find a way out. Such writing is
+like the roll of the drum which announces the approach of the troops
+ready for action.
+
+Some of the writers who are performing this valiant service are related
+to those great artists who in every age enter into a long struggle with
+existing social conditions, until after many years they change the
+outlook upon life for at least a handful of their contemporaries. Their
+readers find themselves no longer mere bewildered spectators of a given
+social wrong, but have become conscious of their own hypocrisy in regard
+to it, and they realize that a veritable horror, simply because it was
+hidden, had come to seem to them inevitable and almost normal.
+
+Many traces of this first uneasy consciousness regarding the social evil
+are found in contemporary literature, for while the business of
+literature is revelation and not reformation, it may yet perform for the
+men and women now living that purification of the imagination and
+intellect which the Greeks believed to come through pity and terror.
+
+Secure in the knowledge of evolutionary processes, we have learned to
+talk glibly of the obligations of race progress and of the possibility
+of racial degeneration. In this respect certainly we have a wider
+outlook than that possessed by our fathers, who so valiantly grappled
+with chattel slavery and secured its overthrow. May the new conscience
+gather force until men and women, acting under its sway, shall be
+constrained to eradicate this ancient evil!
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+RECENT LEGAL ENACTMENTS
+
+
+At the present moment even the least conscientious citizens agree that,
+first and foremost, the organized traffic in what has come to be called
+white slaves must be suppressed and that those traffickers who procure
+their victims for purely commercial purposes must be arrested and
+prosecuted. As it is impossible to rescue girls fraudulently and
+illegally detained, save through governmental agencies, it is naturally
+through the line of legal action that the most striking revelations of
+the white slave traffic have come. For the sake of convenience, we may
+divide this legal action into those cases dealing with the international
+trade, those with the state and interstate traffic, and the regulations
+with which the municipality alone is concerned.
+
+First in value to the white slave commerce is the girl imported from
+abroad who from the nature of the case is most completely in the power
+of the trader. She is literally friendless and unable to speak the
+language and at last discouraged she makes no effort to escape. Many
+cases of the international traffic were recently tried in Chicago and
+the offenders convicted by the federal authorities. One of these cases,
+which attracted much attention throughout the country, was of Marie, a
+French girl, the daughter of a Breton stone mason, so old and poor that
+he was obliged to take her from her convent school at the age of twelve
+years. He sent her to Paris, where she became a little household drudge
+and nurse-maid, working from six in the morning until eight at night,
+and for three years sending her wages, which were about a franc a day,
+directly to her parents in the Breton village. One afternoon, as she was
+buying a bottle of milk at a tiny shop, she was engaged in conversation
+by a young man who invited her into a little patisserie where, after
+giving her some sweets, he introduced her to his friend, Monsieur Paret,
+who was gathering together a theatrical troupe to go to America. Paret
+showed her pictures of several young girls gorgeously arrayed and
+announcements of their coming tour, and Marie felt much flattered when
+it was intimated that she might join this brilliant company. After
+several clandestine meetings to perfect the plan, she left the city with
+Paret and a pretty French girl to sail for America with the rest of the
+so-called actors. Paret escaped detection by the immigration authorities
+in New York, through his ruse of the "Kinsella troupe," and took the
+girls directly to Chicago. Here they were placed in a disreputable house
+belonging to a man named Lair, who had advanced the money for their
+importation. The two French girls remained in this house for several
+months until it was raided by the police, when they were sent to
+separate houses. The records which were later brought into court show
+that at this time Marie was earning two hundred and fifty dollars a
+week, all of which she gave to her employers. In spite of this large
+monetary return she was often cruelly beaten, was made to do the
+household scrubbing, and was, of course, never allowed to leave the
+house. Furthermore, as one of the methods of retaining a reluctant girl
+is to put her hopelessly in debt and always to charge against her the
+expenses incurred in securing her, Marie as an imported girl had begun
+at once with the huge debt of the ocean journey for Paret and herself.
+In addition to this large sum she was charged, according to universal
+custom, with exorbitant prices for all the clothing she received and
+with any money which Paret chose to draw against her account. Later,
+when Marie contracted typhoid fever, she was sent for treatment to a
+public hospital and it was during her illness there, when a general
+investigation was made of the white slave traffic, that a federal
+officer visited her. Marie, who thought she was going to die, freely
+gave her testimony, which proved to be most valuable.
+
+The federal authorities following up her statements at last located
+Paret in the city prison at Atlanta, Georgia, where he had been
+convicted on a similar charge. He was brought to Chicago and on his
+testimony Lair was also convicted and imprisoned.
+
+Marie has since married a man who wishes to protect her from the
+influence of her old life, but although not yet twenty years old and
+making an honest effort, what she has undergone has apparently so far
+warped and weakened her will that she is only partially successful in
+keeping her resolutions, and she sends each month to her parents in
+France ten or twelve dollars, which she confesses to have earned
+illicitly. It is as if the shameful experiences to which this little
+convent-bred Breton girl was forcibly subjected, had finally become
+registered in every fibre of her being until the forced demoralization
+has become genuine. She is as powerless now to save herself from her
+subjective temptations as she was helpless five years ago to save
+herself from her captors.
+
+Such demoralization is, of course, most valuable to the white slave
+trader, for when a girl has become thoroughly accustomed to the life and
+testifies that she is in it of her own free will, she puts herself
+beyond the protection of the law. She belongs to a legally degraded
+class, without redress in courts of justice for personal outrages.
+
+Marie, herself, at the end of her third year in America, wrote to the
+police appealing for help, but the lieutenant who in response to her
+letter visited the house, was convinced by Lair that she was there of
+her own volition and that therefore he could do nothing for her. It is
+easy to see why it thus becomes part of the business to break down a
+girl's moral nature by all those horrible devices which are constantly
+used by the owner of a white slave. Because life is so often shortened
+for these wretched girls, their owners degrade them morally as quickly
+as possible, lest death release them before their full profit has been
+secured. In addition to the quantity of sacrificed virtue, to the bulk
+of impotent suffering, which these white slaves represent, our
+civilization becomes permanently tainted with the vicious practices
+designed to accelerate the demoralization of unwilling victims in order
+to make them commercially valuable. Moreover, a girl thus rendered more
+useful to her owner, will thereafter fail to touch either the chivalry
+of men or the tenderness of women because good men and women have become
+convinced of her innate degeneracy, a word we have learned to use with
+the unction formerly placed upon original sin. The very revolt of
+society against such girls is used by their owners as a protection to
+the business.
+
+The case against the captors of Marie, as well as twenty-four other
+cases, was ably and vigorously conducted by Edwin W. Sims, United States
+District Attorney in Chicago. He prosecuted under a clause of the
+immigration act of 1908, which was unfortunately declared
+unconstitutional early the next year, when for the moment federal
+authorities found themselves unable to proceed directly against this
+international traffic. They could not act under the international white
+slave treaty signed by the contracting powers in Paris in 1904, and
+proclaimed by the President of the United States in 1908, because it was
+found impossible to carry out its provisions without federal police. The
+long consideration of this treaty by Congress made clear to the nation
+that it is in matters of this sort that navies are powerless and that as
+our international problems become more social, other agencies must be
+provided, a point which arbitration committees have long urged. The
+discussion of the international treaty brought the subject before the
+entire country as a matter for immediate legislation and for executive
+action, and the White Slave Traffic Act was finally passed by Congress
+in 1910, under which all later prosecutions have since been conducted.
+When the decision on the immigration clause rendered in 1909 threw the
+burden of prosecution back upon the states, Mr. Clifford Roe, then
+assistant State's Attorney, within one year investigated 348 such cases,
+domestic and foreign, and successfully prosecuted 91, carrying on the
+vigorous policy inaugurated by United States Attorney Sims. In 1908
+Illinois passed the first pandering law in this country, changing the
+offence from disorderly conduct to a misdemeanor, and greatly increasing
+the penalty. In many states pandering is still so little defined as to
+make the crime merely a breach of manners and to put it in the same
+class of offences as selling a street-car transfer.
+
+As a result of this vigorous action, Chicago became the first city to
+look the situation squarely in the face, and to make a determined
+business-like fight against the procuring of girls. An office was
+established by public-spirited citizens where Mr. Roe was placed in
+charge and empowered to follow up the clues of the traffic wherever
+found and to bring the traffickers to justice; in consequence the white
+slave traders have become so frightened that the foreign importation of
+girls to Chicago has markedly declined. It is estimated by Mr. Roe that
+since 1909 about one thousand white slave traders, of whom thirty or
+forty were importers of foreign girls, have been driven away from the
+city.
+
+Throughout the Congressional discussions of the white slave traffic,
+beginning with the Howell-Bennett Act in 1907, it was evident that the
+subject was closely allied to immigration, and when the immigration
+commission made a partial report to Congress in December, 1909, upon
+"the importation and harboring of women for immoral purposes," their
+finding only emphasized the report of the Commissioner General of
+Immigration made earlier in the year. His report had traced the
+international traffic directly to New York, Chicago, Boston, Buffalo,
+New Orleans, Denver, Seattle, Portland, Salt Lake City, Ogden, and
+Butte. As the list of cities was comparatively small, it seemed not
+unreasonable to hope that the international traffic might be rigorously
+prosecuted, with the prospect of finally doing away with it in spite of
+its subtle methods, its multiplied ramifications, and its financial
+resources. Only officials of vigorous conscience can deal with this
+traffic; but certainly there can be no nobler service for federal and
+state officers to undertake than this protection of immigrant girls.
+
+It is obvious that a foreign girl who speaks no English, who has not the
+remotest idea in what part of the city her fellow-countrymen live, who
+does not know the police station or any agency to which she may apply,
+is almost as valuable to a white slave trafficker as a girl imported
+directly for the trade. The trafficker makes every effort to intercept
+such a girl before she can communicate with her relations. Although
+great care is taken at Ellis Island, the girl's destination carefully
+indicated upon her ticket and her friends communicated with, after she
+boards the train the governmental protection is withdrawn and many
+untoward experiences may befall a girl between New York and her final
+destination. Only this year a Polish mother of the Hull House
+neighborhood failed to find her daughter on a New York train upon which
+she had been notified to expect her, because the girl had been induced
+to leave the New York train at South Chicago, where she was met by two
+young men, one of them well known to the police, and the other a young
+Pole, purporting to have been sent by the girl's mother.
+
+The immigrant girl also encounters dangers upon the very moment of her
+arrival. The cab-men and expressmen are often unscrupulous. One of the
+latter was recently indicted in Chicago upon the charge of regularly
+procuring immigrant girls for a disreputable hotel. The non-English
+speaking girl handing her written address to a cabman has no means of
+knowing whither he will drive her, but is obliged to place herself
+implicitly in his hands. The Immigrants' Protective League has brought
+about many changes in this respect, but has upon its records some
+piteous tales of girls who were thus easily deceived.
+
+An immigrant girl is occasionally exploited by her own lover whom she
+has come to America to marry. I recall the case of a Russian girl thus
+decoyed into a disreputable life by a man deceiving her through a fake
+marriage ceremony. Although not found until a year later, the girl had
+never ceased to be distressed and rebellious. Many Slovak and Polish
+girls, coming to America without their relatives, board in houses
+already filled with their countrymen who have also preceded their own
+families to the land of promise, hoping to earn money enough to send for
+them later. The immigrant girl is thus exposed to dangers at the very
+moment when she is least able to defend herself. Such a girl, already
+bewildered by the change from an old world village to an American city,
+is unfortunately sometimes convinced that the new country freedom does
+away with the necessity for a marriage ceremony. Many others are told
+that judgment for a moral lapse is less severe in America than in the
+old country. The last month's records of the Municipal Court in Chicago,
+set aside to hear domestic relation cases, show sixteen unfortunate
+girls, of whom eight were immigrant girls representing eight different
+nationalities. These discouraged and deserted girls become an easy prey
+for the procurers who have sometimes been in league with their lovers.
+
+Even those girls who immigrate with their families and sustain an
+affectionate relation with them are yet often curiously free from
+chaperonage. The immigrant mothers do not know where their daughters
+work, save that it is in a vague "over there" or "down town." They
+themselves were guarded by careful mothers and they would gladly give
+the same oversight to their daughters, but the entire situation is so
+unlike that of their own peasant girlhoods that, discouraged by their
+inability to judge it, they make no attempt to understand their
+daughters' lives. The girls, realizing this inability on the part of
+their mothers, elated by that sense of independence which the first
+taste of self-support always brings, sheltered from observation during
+certain hours, are almost as free from social control as is the
+traditional young man who comes up from the country to take care of
+himself in a great city. These immigrant parents are, of course, quite
+unable to foresee that while a girl feels a certain restraint of public
+opinion from the tenement house neighbors among whom she lives, and
+while she also responds to the public opinion of her associates in a
+factory where she works, there is no public opinion at all operating as
+a restraint upon her in the hours which lie between the two, occupied in
+the coming and going to work through the streets of a city large enough
+to offer every opportunity for concealment. So much of the recreation
+which is provided by commercial agencies, even in its advertisements,
+deliberately plays upon the interest of sex because it is under such
+excitement and that of alcohol that money is most recklessly spent. The
+great human dynamic, which it has been the long effort of centuries to
+limit to family life, is deliberately utilized for advertising purposes,
+and it is inevitable that many girls yield to such allurements.
+
+On the other hand, one is filled with admiration for the many immigrant
+girls who in the midst of insuperable difficulties resist all
+temptations. Such admiration was certainly due Olga, a tall, handsome
+girl, a little passive and slow, yet with that touch of dignity which a
+continued mood of introspection so often lends to the young. Olga had
+been in Chicago for a year living with an aunt who, when she returned to
+Sweden, placed her niece in a boarding-house which she knew to be
+thoroughly respectable. But a friendless girl of such striking beauty
+could not escape the machinations of those who profit by the sale of
+girls. Almost immediately Olga found herself beset by two young men who
+continually forced themselves upon her attention, although she refused
+all their invitations to shows and dances. In six months the frightened
+girl had changed her boarding-place four times, hoping that the men
+would not be able to follow her. She was also obliged constantly to look
+for a cheaper place, because the dull season in the cloak-making trade
+came early that year. In the fifth boarding-house she finally found
+herself so hopelessly in arrears that the landlady, tired of waiting for
+the "new cloak making to begin," at length fulfilled a long-promised
+threat, and one summer evening at nine o'clock literally put Olga into
+the street, retaining her trunk in payment of the debt. The girl walked
+the street for hours, until she fancied that she saw one of her
+persecutors in the distance, when she hastily took refuge in a sheltered
+doorway, crouching in terror. Although no one approached her, she sat
+there late into the night, apparently too apathetic to move. With the
+curious inconsequence of moody youth, she was not aroused to action by
+the situation in which she found herself. The incident epitomized to her
+the everlasting riddle of the universe to which she could see no
+solution and she drearily decided to throw herself into the lake. As she
+left the doorway at daybreak for this pitiful purpose, she attracted the
+attention of a passing policeman. In response to his questions, kindly
+at first but becoming exasperated as he was convinced that she was
+either "touched in her wits" or "guying" him, he obtained a confused
+story of the persecutions of the two young men, and in sheer
+bewilderment he finally took her to the station on the very charge
+against the thought of which she had so long contended.
+
+The girl was doubtless sullen in court the next morning; she was
+resentful of the policeman's talk, she was oppressed and discouraged and
+therefore taciturn. She herself said afterwards that she "often got
+still that way." She so sharply felt the disgrace of arrest, after her
+long struggle for respectability, that she gave a false name and became
+involved in a story to which she could devote but half her attention,
+being still absorbed in an undercurrent of speculative thought which
+continually broke through the flimsy tale she was fabricating.
+
+With the evidence before him, the judge felt obliged to sustain the
+policeman's charge, and as Olga could not pay the fine imposed, he
+sentenced her to the city prison. The girl, however, had appeared so
+strangely that the judge was uncomfortable and gave her in charge of a
+representative of the Juvenile Protective Association in the hope that
+she could discover the whole situation, meantime suspending the
+sentence. It took hours of patient conversation with the girl and the
+kindly services of a well-known alienist to break into her dangerous
+state of mind and to gain her confidence. Prolonged medical treatment
+averted the threatened melancholia and she was at last rescued from the
+meaningless despondency so hostile to life itself, which has claimed
+many young victims.
+
+It is strange that we are so slow to learn that no one can safely live
+without companionship and affection, that the individual who tries the
+hazardous experiment of going without at least one of them is prone to
+be swamped by a black mood from within. It is as if we had to build
+little islands of affection in the vast sea of impersonal forces lest we
+be overwhelmed by them. Yet we know that in every large city there are
+hundreds of men whose business it is to discover girls thus hard pressed
+by loneliness and despair, to urge upon them the old excuse that "no one
+cares what you do," to fill them with cheap cynicism concerning the
+value of virtue, all to the end that a business profit may be secured.
+
+Had Olga yielded to the solicitations of bad men and had the immigration
+authorities in the federal building of Chicago discovered her in the
+disreputable hotel in which her captors wanted to place her, she would
+have been deported to Sweden, sent home in disgrace from the country
+which had failed to protect her. Certainly the immigration laws might do
+better than to send a girl back to her parents, diseased and disgraced
+because America has failed to safeguard her virtue from the machinations
+of well-known but unrestrained criminals. The possibility of deportation
+on the charge of prostitution is sometimes utilized by jealous husbands
+or rejected lovers. Only last year a Russian girl came to Chicago to
+meet her lover and was deceived by a fake marriage. Although the man
+basely deserted her within a few weeks he became very jealous a year
+later when he discovered that she was about to be married to a
+prosperous fellow-countryman, and made charges against her to the
+federal authorities concerning her life in Russia. It was with the
+greatest difficulty that the girl was saved from deportation to Russia
+under circumstances which would have compelled her to take out a red
+ticket in Odessa, and to live forevermore the life with which her lover
+had wantonly charged her.
+
+May we not hope that in time the nation's policy in regard to immigrants
+will become less negative and that a measure of protection will be
+extended to them during the three years when they are so liable to
+prompt deportation if they become criminals or paupers?
+
+While it may be difficult for the federal authorities to accomplish this
+protection and will doubtless require an extension of the powers of the
+Department of Immigration, certainly no one will doubt that it is the
+business of the city itself to extend much more protection to young
+girls who so thoughtlessly walk upon its streets. Yet, in spite of the
+grave consequences which lack of proper supervision implies, the
+municipal treatment of commercialized vice not only differs in each city
+but varies greatly in the same city under changing administrations.
+
+The situation is enormously complicated by the pharisaic attitude of the
+public which wishes to have the comfort of declaring the social evil to
+be illegal, while at the same time it expects the police department to
+regulate it and to make it as little obvious as possible. In reality the
+police, as they themselves know, are not expected to serve the public in
+this matter but to consult the desires of the politicians; for, next to
+the fast and loose police control of gambling, nothing affords better
+political material than the regulation of commercialized vice. First in
+line is the ward politician who keeps a disorderly saloon which serves
+both as a meeting-place for the vicious young men engaged in the traffic
+and as a market for their wares. Back of this the politician higher up
+receives his share of the toll which this business pays that it may
+remain undisturbed. The very existence of a segregated district under
+police regulation means, of course, that the existing law must be
+nullified or at least rendered totally inoperative. When police
+regulation takes the place of law enforcement a species of municipal
+blackmail inevitably becomes intrenched. The police are forced to
+regulate an illicit trade, but because the men engaged in an unlawful
+business expect to pay money for its protection, the corruption of the
+police department is firmly established and, as the Chicago vice
+commission report points out, is merely called "protection to the
+business." The practice of grafting thereafter becomes almost official.
+On the other hand, any man who attempts to show mercy to the victims of
+that business, or to regulate it from the victim's point of view, is
+considered a traitor to the cause. Quite recently a former inspector of
+police in Chicago established a requirement that every young girl who
+came to live in a disreputable house within a prescribed district must
+be reported to him within an hour after her arrival. Each one was
+closely questioned as to her reasons for entering into the life. If she
+was very young, she was warned of its inevitable consequences and urged
+to abandon her project. Every assistance was offered her to return to
+work and to live a normal life. Occasionally a girl was desperate and it
+was sometimes necessary that she be forcibly detained in the police
+station until her friends could be communicated with. More often she was
+glad to avail herself of the chance of escape; practically always,
+unless she had already become romantically entangled with a disreputable
+young man, whom she firmly believed to be her genuine lover and
+protector.
+
+One day a telephone message came to Hull House from the inspector asking
+us to take charge of a young girl who had been brought into the station
+by an older woman for registration. The girl's youth and the innocence
+of her replies to the usual questions convinced the inspector that she
+was ignorant of the life she was about to enter and that she probably
+believed she was simply registering her choice of a boarding-house. Her
+story which she told at Hull House was as follows: She was a Milwaukee
+factory girl, the daughter of a Bohemian carpenter. Ten days before she
+had met a Chicago young man at a Milwaukee dance hall and after a brief
+courtship had promised to marry him, arranging to meet him in Chicago
+the following week. Fearing that her Bohemian mother would not approve
+of this plan, which she called "the American way of getting married,"
+the girl had risen one morning even earlier than factory work
+necessitated and had taken the first train to Chicago. The young man met
+her at the station, took her to a saloon where he introduced her to a
+friend, an older woman, who, he said, would take good care of her. After
+the young man disappeared, ostensibly for the marriage license, the
+woman professed to be much shocked that the little bride had brought no
+luggage, and persuaded her that she must work a few weeks in order to
+earn money for her trousseau, and that she, an older woman who knew the
+city, would find a boarding-house and a place in a factory for her. She
+further induced her to write postal cards to six of her girl friends in
+Milwaukee, telling them of the kind lady in Chicago, of the good chances
+for work, and urging them to come down to the address which she sent.
+The woman told the unsuspecting girl that, first of all, a newcomer must
+register her place of residence with the police, as that was the law in
+Chicago. It was, of course, when the woman took her to the police
+station that the situation was disclosed. It needed but little
+investigation to make clear that the girl had narrowly escaped a
+well-organized plot and that the young man to whom she was engaged was
+an agent for a disreputable house. Mr. Clifford Roe took up the case
+with vigor, and although all efforts failed to find the young man, the
+woman who was his accomplice was fined one hundred and fifty dollars and
+costs.
+
+The one impression which the trial left upon our minds was that all the
+men concerned in the prosecution felt a keen sense of outrage against
+the method employed to secure the girl, but took for granted that the
+life she was about to lead was in the established order of things, if
+she had chosen it voluntarily. In other words, if the efforts of the
+agent had gone far enough to involve her moral nature, the girl, who
+although unsophisticated, was twenty-one years old, could have remained,
+quite unchallenged, in the hideous life. The woman who was prosecuted
+was well known to the police and was fined, not for her daily
+occupation, but because she had become involved in interstate white
+slave traffic. One touch of nature redeemed the trial, for the girl
+suffered much more from the sense that she had been deserted by her
+lover than from horror over the fate she had escaped, and she was never
+wholly convinced that he had not been genuine. She asserted constantly,
+in order to account for his absence, that some accident must have
+befallen him. She felt that he was her natural protector in this strange
+Chicago to which she had come at his behest and continually resented any
+imputation of his motives. The betrayal of her confidence, the playing
+upon her natural desire for a home of her own, was a ghastly revelation
+that even when this hideous trade is managed upon the most carefully
+calculated commercial principles, it must still resort to the use of the
+oldest of the social instincts as its basis of procedure.
+
+This Chicago police inspector, whose desire to protect young girls was
+so genuine and so successful, was afterward indicted by the grand jury
+and sent to the penitentiary on the charge of accepting "graft" from
+saloon-keepers and proprietors of the disreputable houses in his
+district. His experience was a dramatic and tragic portrayal of the
+position into which every city forces its police. When a girl who has
+been secured for the life is dissuaded from it, her rescue represents a
+definite monetary loss to the agency which has secured her and incurs
+the enmity of those who expected to profit by her. When this enmity has
+sufficiently accumulated, the active official is either "called down" by
+higher political authority, or brought to trial for those illegal
+practices which he shares with his fellow-officials. It is, therefore,
+easy to make such an inspector as ours suffer for his virtues, which are
+individual, by bringing charges against his grafting, which is general
+and almost official. So long as the customary prices for protection are
+adhered to, no one feels aggrieved; but the sentiment which prompts an
+inspector "to side with the girls" and to destroy thousands of dollars'
+worth of business is unjustifiable. He has not stuck to the rules of the
+game and the pack of enraged gamesters, under full cry of "morality,"
+can very easily run him to ground, the public meantime being gratified
+that police corruption has been exposed and the offender punished. Yet
+hundreds of girls, who could have been discovered in no other way, were
+rescued by this man in his capacity of police inspector. On the other
+hand, he did little to bring to justice those responsible for securing
+the girls, and while he rescued the victim, he did not interfere with
+the source of supply. Had he been brought to trial for this
+indifference, it would have been impossible to find a grand jury to
+sustain the indictment. He was really brought to trial because he had
+broken the implied contract with the politicians; he had devised illicit
+and damaging methods to express that instinct for protecting youth and
+innocence, which every man on the police force doubtless possesses. Were
+this instinct freed from all political and extra legal control, it would
+in and of itself be a tremendous force against commercialized vice which
+is so dependent upon the exploitation of young girls. Yet the fortunes
+of the police are so tied up to those who profit by this trade and to
+their friends, the politicians, that the most well-meaning man upon the
+force is constantly handicapped. Several illustrations of this occur to
+me. Two years ago, when very untoward conditions were discovered in
+connection with a certain five-cent theatre, a young policeman arrested
+the proprietor, who was later brought before the grand jury, indicted
+and released upon bail for nine thousand dollars. The crime was a
+heinous one, involving the ruin of fourteen little girls; but so much
+political influence had been exerted on behalf of the proprietor, who
+was a relative of the republican committeeman of his ward, that although
+the license of the theatre was immediately revoked, it was reissued to
+his wife within a very few days and the man continued to be a menace to
+the community. When the young policeman who had made the arrest saw him
+in the neighborhood of the theatre talking to little girls and reported
+him, the officer was taken severely to task by the highest republican
+authority in the city. He was reprimanded for his activity and ordered
+transferred to the stockyards, eleven miles away. The policeman well
+understood that this was but the first step in the process called
+"breaking;" that after he had moved his family to the stockyards, in a
+few weeks he would be transferred elsewhere, and that this change of
+beat would be continued until he should at last be obliged to resign
+from the force. His offence, as he was plainly told, had been his
+ignorance of the fact that the theatre was under political protection.
+In short, the young officer had naively undertaken to serve the public
+without waiting for his instructions from the political bosses.
+
+A flagrant example of the collusion of the police with vice is instanced
+by United States District Attorney Sims, who recently called upon the
+Chicago police to make twenty-four arrests on behalf of the United
+States government for violations of the white slave law, when all of the
+men liable to arrest left town two hours after the warrants were issued.
+To quote Mr. Sims: "We sent the secret service men who had been working
+in conjunction with the police back to Washington and brought in a fresh
+supply. These men did not work with the police, and within two weeks
+after the first set of secret service men had left Chicago, the men we
+wanted were back in town, and without the aid of the city police we
+arrested all of them."
+
+When the legal control of commercialized vice is thus tied up with city
+politics the functions of the police become legislative, executive and
+judicial in regard to street solicitation: in a sense they also have
+power of license, for it lies with them to determine the number of women
+who are allowed to ply their trade upon the street. Some of these women
+are young earthlings, as it were, hoping to earn money for much-desired
+clothing or pleasure. Others are desperate creatures making one last
+effort before they enter a public hospital to face a miserable end; but
+by far the larger number are sent out under the protection of the men
+who profit by their earnings, or they are utilized to secure patronage
+for disreputable houses. The police regard the latter "as regular," and
+while no authoritative order is ever given, the patrolman understands
+that they are protected. On the other hand, "the straggler" is liable to
+be arrested by any officer who chooses, and she is subjected to a fine
+upon his unsupported word. In either case the police regard all such
+women as literally "abandoned," deprived of ordinary rights, obliged to
+live in specified residences, and liable to have their personal
+liberties invaded in a way that no other class of citizens would
+tolerate.
+
+The recent establishment of the Night Court in New York registers an
+advance in regard to the treatment of these wretched women. Not only
+does the public gradually become cognizant of the treatment accorded
+them, but some attempt at discrimination is made between the first
+offenders and those hardened by long practice in that most hideous of
+occupations. Furthermore, an adult probation system is gradually being
+substituted for the system of fines which at present are levied in such
+wise as to virtually constitute a license and a partnership with the
+police department.
+
+While American cities cannot be said to have adopted a policy either of
+suppression or one of regulation, because the police consider the former
+impracticable and the latter intolerable to public opinion, we may
+perhaps claim for America a little more humanity in its dealing with
+this class of women, a little less ruthlessness than that exhibited by
+the continental cities where regimentation is relentlessly assumed.
+
+The suggestive presence of such women on the streets is perhaps one of
+the most demoralizing influences to be found in a large city, and such
+vigorous efforts as were recently made by a former chief of police in
+Chicago when he successfully cleared the streets of their presence,
+demonstrates that legal suppression is possible. At least this obvious
+temptation to young men and boys who are idly walking the streets might
+be avoided, for in an old formula one such woman "has cast down many
+wounded; yea, many strong men have been slain by her." Were the streets
+kept clear, many young girls would be spared familiar knowledge that
+such a method of earning money is open to them. I have personally known
+several instances in which young girls have begun street solicitation
+through sheer imitation. A young Polish woman found herself in dire
+straits after the death of her mother. Her only friends in America had
+moved to New York, she was in debt for her mother's funeral, and as it
+was the slack season of the miserable sweat-shop sewing she had been
+doing, she was unable to find work. One evening when she was quite
+desperate with hunger, she stopped several men upon the street, as she
+had seen other girls do, and in her broken English asked them for
+something to eat. Only after a young man had given her a good meal at a
+restaurant did she realize the price she was expected to pay and the
+horrible things which the other girls were doing. Even in her shocked
+revolt she could not understand, of course, that she herself epitomized
+that hideous choice between starvation and vice which is perhaps the
+crowning disgrace of civilization.
+
+The legal suppression of street solicitation would not only protect
+girls but would enormously minimize the risk and temptation to boys. The
+entire system of recruiting for commercialized vice is largely dependent
+upon boys who are scarcely less the victims of the system than are the
+girls themselves. Certainly this aspect of the situation must be
+seriously considered.
+
+In 1908, when Mr. Clifford Roe conducted successful prosecutions against
+one hundred and fifty of these disreputable young men in Chicago, nearly
+all of them were local boys who had used their personal acquaintance to
+secure their victims. The accident of a long acquaintance with one of
+these boys, born in the Hull-House neighborhood, filled me with
+questionings as to how far society may be responsible for these wretched
+lads, many of them beginning a vicious career when they are but fifteen
+or sixteen years of age. Because the trade constantly demands very young
+girls, the procurers require the assistance of immature boys, for in
+this game above all others "youth calls to youth." Such a boy is often
+incited by the professional procurer to ruin a young girl, because the
+latter's position is much safer if the character of the girl is
+blackened before he sells her, and if he himself cannot be implicated in
+her downfall. He thus keeps himself within the letter of the law, and
+when he is even more cautious, he induces the boy to go through the
+ceremony of a legal marriage by promising him a percentage of his wife's
+first earnings.
+
+Only yesterday I received a letter from a young man whom I had known
+from his early boyhood, written in the state penitentiary, where he is
+serving a life sentence. His father was a drunkard, but his mother was a
+fine woman, devoted to her children, and she had patiently supported her
+son Jim far beyond his school age. At the time of his trial, she pawned
+all her personal possessions and mortgaged her furniture in order to get
+three hundred dollars for his lawyer. Although Jim usually led the life
+of a loafer and had never supported his mother, he was affectionately
+devoted to her and always kindly and good-natured. Perhaps it was
+because he had been so long dependent upon a self-sacrificing woman that
+it became easy for him to be dependent upon his wife, a girl whom he met
+when he was temporarily acting as porter in a disreputable hotel.
+Through his long familiarity with vice, and the fact that many of his
+companions habitually lived upon the earnings of "their girls," he
+easily consented that his wife should continue her life, and he
+constantly accepted the money which she willingly gave him. After his
+marriage he still lived in his mother's house and refused to take more
+money from her, but she had no idea of the source of his income. One day
+he called at the hotel, as usual, to ask for his wife's earnings, and in
+a quarrel over the amount with the landlady of the house, he drew a
+revolver and killed her. Although the plea of self-defense was urged in
+the trial, his abominable manner of life so outraged both judge and jury
+that he received the maximum sentence. His mother still insists that he
+sincerely loved the girl, whom he so impulsively married and that he
+constantly tried to dissuade her from her evil life. Certain it is that
+Jim's wife and mother are both filled with genuine sorrow for his fate
+and that in some wise the educational and social resources in the city
+of his birth failed to protect him from his own lower impulses and from
+the evil companionship whose influence he could not withstand. He is but
+one of thousands of weak boys, who are constantly utilized to supply the
+white slave trafficker with young girls, for it has been estimated that
+at any given moment the majority of the girls utilized by the trade are
+under twenty years of age and that most of them were procured when
+younger. We cannot assume that the youths who are hired to entice and
+entrap these girls are all young fiends, degenerate from birth; the
+majority of them are merely out-of-work boys, idle upon the streets, who
+readily lend themselves to these base demands because nothing else is
+presented to them.
+
+All the recent investigations have certainly made clear that the bulk of
+the entire traffic is conducted with the youth of the community, and
+that the social evil, ancient though it may be, must be renewed in our
+generation through its younger members. The knowledge of the youth of
+its victims doubtless in a measure accounts for the new sense of
+compunction which fills the community.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+AMELIORATION OF ECONOMIC CONDITIONS
+
+
+
+It may be possible to extract some small degree of comfort from the
+recent revelations of the white slave traffic when we reflect that at
+the present moment, in the midst of a freedom such as has never been
+accorded to young women in the history of the world, under an economic
+pressure grinding down upon the working girl at the very age when she
+most wistfully desires to be taken care of, it is necessary to organize
+a widespread commercial enterprise in order to procure a sufficient
+number of girls for the white slave market.
+
+Certainly the larger freedom accorded to woman by our changing social
+customs and the phenomenal number of young girls who are utilized by
+modern industry, taken in connection with this lack of supply, would
+seem to show that the chastity of women is holding its own in that
+slow-growing civilization which ever demands more self-control and
+conscious direction on the part of the individuals sharing it.
+
+Successive reports of the United States census indicate that
+self-supporting girls are increasing steadily in number each decade,
+until 59 per cent. of all the young women in the nation between the ages
+of sixteen and twenty, are engaged in some gainful occupation. Year
+after year, as these figures increase, the public views them with
+complacency, almost with pride, and confidently depends upon the inner
+restraint and training of this girlish multitude to protect it from
+disaster. Nevertheless, the public is totally unable to determine at
+what moment these safeguards, evolved under former industrial
+conditions, may reach a breaking point, not because of economic freedom,
+but because of untoward economic conditions.
+
+For the first time in history multitudes of women are laboring without
+the direct stimulus of family interest or affection, and they are also
+unable to proportion their hours of work and intervals of rest according
+to their strength; in addition to this for thousands of them the effort
+to obtain a livelihood fairly eclipses the very meaning of life itself.
+At the present moment no student of modern industrial conditions can
+possibly assert how far the superior chastity of woman, so rigidly
+maintained during the centuries, has been the result of her domestic
+surroundings, and certainly no one knows under what degree of economic
+pressure the old restraints may give way.
+
+In addition to the monotony of work and the long hours, the small wages
+these girls receive have no relation to the standard of living which
+they are endeavoring to maintain. Discouraged and over-fatigued, they
+are often brought into sharp juxtaposition with the women who are
+obtaining much larger returns from their illicit trade. Society also
+ventures to capitalize a virtuous girl at much less than one who has
+yielded to temptation, and it may well hold itself responsible for the
+precarious position into which, year after year, a multitude of frail
+girls is placed.
+
+The very valuable report recently issued by the vice commission of
+Chicago leaves no room for doubt upon this point. The report estimates
+the yearly profit of this nefarious business as conducted in Chicago to
+be between fifteen and sixteen millions of dollars. Although these
+enormous profits largely accrue to the men who conduct the business side
+of prostitution, the report emphasizes the fact that the average girl
+earns very much more in such a life than she can hope to earn by any
+honest work. It points out that the capitalized value of the average
+working girl is six thousand dollars, as she ordinarily earns six
+dollars a week, which is three hundred dollars a year, or five per cent.
+on that sum. A girl who sells drinks in a disreputable saloon, earning
+in commissions for herself twenty-one dollars a week, is capitalized at
+a value of twenty-two thousand dollars. The report further estimates
+that the average girl who enters an illicit life under a protector or
+manager is able to earn twenty-five dollars a week, representing a
+capital of twenty-six thousand dollars. In other words, a girl in such a
+life "earns more than four times as much as she is worth as a factor in
+the social and industrial economy, where brains, intelligence, virtue
+and womanly charm should bring a premium." The argument is specious in
+that it does not record the economic value of the many later years in
+which the honest girl will live as wife and mother, in contrast to the
+premature death of the woman in the illicit trade, but the girl herself
+sees only the difference in the immediate earning possibilities in the
+two situations.
+
+Nevertheless the supply of girls for the white slave traffic so far
+falls below the demand that large business enterprises have been
+developed throughout the world in order to secure a sufficient number of
+victims for this modern market. Over and over again in the criminal
+proceedings against the men engaged in this traffic, when questioned as
+to their motives, they have given the simple reply "that more girls are
+needed", and that they were "promised big money for them". Although
+economic pressure as a reason for entering an illicit life has thus been
+brought out in court by the evidence in a surprising number of cases,
+there is no doubt that it is often exaggerated; a girl always prefers to
+think that economic pressure is the reason for her downfall, even when
+the immediate causes have been her love of pleasure, her desire for
+finery, or the influence of evil companions. It is easy for her, as for
+all of us, to be deceived as to real motives. In addition to this the
+wretched girl who has entered upon an illicit life finds the experience
+so terrible that, day by day, she endeavors to justify herself with the
+excuse that the money she earns is needed for the support of some one
+dependent upon her, thus following habits established by generations of
+virtuous women who cared for feeble folk. I know one such girl living in
+a disreputable house in Chicago who has adopted a delicate child
+afflicted with curvature of the spine, whom she boards with respectable
+people and keeps for many weeks out of each year in an expensive
+sanitarium that it may receive medical treatment. The mother of the
+child, an inmate of the house in which the ardent foster-mother herself
+lives, is quite indifferent to the child's welfare and also rather
+amused at such solicitude. The girl has persevered in her course for
+five years, never however allowing the little invalid to come to the
+house in which she and the mother live. The same sort of devotion and
+self-sacrifice is often poured out upon the miserable man who in the
+beginning was responsible for the girl's entrance into the life and who
+constantly receives her earnings. She supports him in the luxurious life
+he may be living in another part of the town, takes an almost maternal
+pride in his good clothes and general prosperity, and regards him as the
+one person in all the world who understands her plight.
+
+Most of the cases of economic responsibility, however, are not due to
+chivalric devotion, but arise from a desire to fulfill family
+obligations such as would be accepted by any conscientious girl. This
+was clearly revealed in conversations which were recently held with
+thirty-four girls, who were living at the same time in a rescue home,
+when twenty-two of them gave economic pressure as the reason for
+choosing the life which they had so recently abandoned. One piteous
+little widow of seventeen had been supporting her child and had been
+able to leave the life she had been leading only because her married
+sister offered to take care of the baby without the money formerly paid
+her. Another had been supporting her mother and only since her recent
+death was the girl sure that she could live honestly because she had
+only herself to care for.
+
+The following story, fairly typical of the twenty-two involving economic
+reasons, is of a girl who had come to Chicago at the age of fifteen,
+from a small town in Indiana. Her father was too old to work and her
+mother was a dependent invalid. The brother who cared for the parents,
+with the help of the girl's own slender wages earned in the country
+store of the little town, became ill with rheumatism. In her desire to
+earn more money the country girl came to the nearest large city,
+Chicago, to work in a department store. The highest wage she could earn,
+even though she wore long dresses and called herself "experienced," was
+five dollars a week. This sum was of course inadequate even for her own
+needs and she was constantly filled with a corroding worry for "the
+folks at home." In a moment of panic, a fellow clerk who was "wise"
+showed her that it was possible to add to her wages by making
+appointments for money in the noon hour at down-town hotels. Having
+earned money in this way for a few months, the young girl made an
+arrangement with an older woman to be on call in the evenings whenever
+she was summoned by telephone, thus joining that large clandestine group
+of apparently respectable girls, most of whom yield to temptation only
+when hard pressed by debt incurred during illness or non-employment, or
+when they are facing some immediate necessity. This practice has become
+so general in the larger American cities as to be systematically
+conducted. It is perhaps the most sinister outcome of the economic
+pressure, unless one cites its corollary--the condition of thousands of
+young men whose low salaries so cruelly and unjustifiably postpone their
+marriages. For a long time the young saleswoman kept her position in the
+department store, retaining her honest wages for herself, but sending
+everything else to her family. At length however, she changed from her
+clandestine life to an openly professional one when she needed enough
+money to send her brother to Hot Springs, Arkansas, where she maintained
+him for a year. She explained that because he was now restored to health
+and able to support the family once more, she had left the life "forever
+and ever", expecting to return to her home in Indiana. She suspected
+that her brother knew of her experience, although she was sure that her
+parents did not, and she hoped that as she was not yet seventeen, she
+might be able to make a fresh start. Fortunately the poor child did not
+know how difficult that would be.
+
+It is perhaps in the department store more than anywhere else that every
+possible weakness in a girl is detected and traded upon. For while it is
+true that "wherever many girls are gathered together more or less
+unprotected and embroiled in the struggle for a livelihood, near by will
+be hovering the procurers and evil-minded", no other place of employment
+is so easy of access as the department store. No visitor is received in
+a factory or office unless he has definite business there, whereas every
+purchaser is welcome at a department store, even a notorious woman well
+known to represent the demi-monde trade is treated with marked courtesy
+if she spends large sums of money. The primary danger lies in the fact
+that the comely saleswomen are thus easy of access. The disreputable
+young man constantly passes in and out, making small purchases from
+every pretty girl, opening an acquaintance with complimentary remarks;
+or the procuress, a fashionably-dressed woman, buys clothing in large
+amounts, sometimes for a young girl by her side, ostensibly her
+daughter. She condoles with the saleswoman upon her hard lot and lack of
+pleasure, and in the role of a kindly, prosperous matron invites her to
+come to her own home for a good time. The girl is sometimes subjected to
+temptation through the men and women in her own department, who tell her
+how invitations to dinners and theatres may be procured. It is not
+surprising that so many of these young, inexperienced girls are either
+deceived or yield to temptation in spite of the efforts made to protect
+them by the management and by the older women in the establishment.
+
+The department store has brought together, as has never been done before
+in history, a bewildering mass of delicate and beautiful fabrics,
+jewelry and household decorations such as women covet, gathered
+skilfully from all parts of the world, and in the midst of this bulk of
+desirable possessions is placed an untrained girl with careful
+instructions as to her conduct for making sales, but with no guidance in
+regard to herself. Such a girl may be bitterly lonely, but she is
+expected to smile affably all day long upon a throng of changing
+customers. She may be without adequate clothing, although she stands in
+an emporium where it is piled about her, literally as high as her head.
+She may be faint for want of food but she may not sit down lest she
+assume "an attitude of inertia and indifference," which is against the
+rules. She may have a great desire for pretty things, but she must sell
+to other people at least twenty-five times the amount of her own salary,
+or she will not be retained. Because she is of the first generation of
+girls which has stood alone in the midst of trade, she is clinging and
+timid, and yet the only person, man or woman, in this commercial
+atmosphere who speaks to her of the care and protection which she
+craves, is seeking to betray her. Because she is young and feminine, her
+mind secretly dwells upon a future lover, upon a home, adorned with the
+most enticing of the household goods about her, upon a child dressed in
+the filmy fabrics she tenderly touches, and yet the only man who
+approaches her there acting upon the knowledge of this inner life of
+hers, does it with the direct intention of playing upon it in order to
+despoil her. Is it surprising that the average human nature of these
+young girls cannot, in many instances, endure this strain? Of fifteen
+thousand women employed in the down-town department stores of Chicago,
+the majority are Americans. We all know that the American girl has grown
+up in the belief that the world is hers from which to choose, that there
+is ordinarily no limit to her ambition or to her definition of success.
+She realizes that she is well mannered and well dressed and does not
+appear unlike most of her customers. She sees only one aspect of her
+countrywomen who come shopping, and she may well believe that the chief
+concern of life is fashionable clothing. Her interest and ambition
+almost inevitably become thoroughly worldly, and from the very fact that
+she is employed down town, she obtains an exaggerated idea of the luxury
+of the illicit life all about her, which is barely concealed.
+
+The fifth volume of the report of "Women and Child Wage Earners" in the
+United States gives the result of a careful inquiry into "the relation
+of wages to the moral condition of department store women." In
+connection with this, the investigators secured "the personal histories
+of one hundred immoral women," of whom ten were or had been employed in
+a department store. They found that while only one of the ten had been
+directly induced to leave the store for a disreputable life, six of them
+said that they had found "it was easier to earn money that way." The
+report states that the average employee in a department store earns
+about seven dollars a week, and that the average income of the one
+hundred immoral women covered by the personal histories, ranged from
+fifty dollars a week to one hundred dollars a week in exceptional cases.
+It is of these exceptional cases that the department store girl hears,
+and the knowledge becomes part of the unreality and glittering life that
+is all about her.
+
+Another class of young women which is especially exposed to this
+alluring knowledge is the waitress in down-town cafes and restaurants. A
+recent investigation of girls in the segregated district of a
+neighboring city places waiting in restaurants and hotels as highest on
+the list of "previous occupations." Many waitresses are paid so little
+that they gratefully accept any fee which men may offer them. It is also
+the universal habit for customers to enter into easy conversation while
+being served. Some of them are lonely young men who have few
+opportunities to speak to women. The girl often quite innocently accepts
+an invitation for an evening, spent either in a theatre or dance hall,
+with no evil results, but this very lack of social convention exposes
+her to danger. Even when the proprietor means to protect the girls, a
+certain amount of familiarity must be borne, lest their resentment
+should diminish the patronage of the cafe. In certain restaurants,
+moreover, the waitresses doubtless suffer because the patrons compare
+them with the girls who ply their trade in disreputable saloons under
+the guise of serving drinks.
+
+The following story would show that mere friendly propinquity may
+constitute a danger. Last summer an honest, straightforward girl from a
+small lake town in northern Michigan was working in a Chicago cafe,
+sending every week more than half of her wages of seven dollars to her
+mother and little sister, ill with tuberculosis, at home. The mother
+owned the little house in which she lived, but except for the vegetables
+she raised in her own garden and an occasional payment for plain sewing,
+she and her younger daughter were dependent upon the hard-working girl
+in Chicago. The girl's heart grew heavier week by week as the mother's
+letters reported that the sister was daily growing weaker. One hot day
+in August she received a letter from her mother telling her to come at
+once if she "would see sister before she died." At noon that day when
+sickened by the hot air of the cafe, and when the clatter of dishes, the
+buzz of conversation, the orders shouted through the slide seemed but a
+hideous accompaniment to her tormented thoughts, she was suddenly
+startled by hearing the name of her native town, and realized that one
+of her regular patrons was saying to her that he meant to take a night
+boat to M. at 8 o'clock and get out of this "infernal heat." Almost
+involuntarily she asked him if he would take her with him. Although the
+very next moment she became conscious what his consent implied, she did
+not reveal her fright, but merely stipulated that if she went with him
+he must agree to buy her a return ticket. She reached home twelve hours
+before her sister died, but when she returned to Chicago a week later
+burdened with the debt of an undertaker's bill, she realized that she
+had discovered a means of payment.
+
+All girls who work down town are at a disadvantage as compared to
+factory girls, who are much less open to direct inducement and to the
+temptations which come through sheer imitation. Factory girls also have
+the protection of working among plain people who frankly designate an
+irregular life, in harsh, old-fashioned terms. If a factory girl catches
+sight of the vicious life at all, she sees its miserable victims in all
+the wretchedness and sordidness of their trade in the poorer parts of
+the city. As she passes the opening doors of a disreputable saloon she
+may see for an instant three or four listless girls urging liquor upon
+men tired out with the long day's work and already sodden with drink. As
+she hurries along the street on a rainy night she may hear a sharp cry
+of pain from a sick-looking girl whose arm is being brutally wrenched by
+a rough man, and if she stops for a moment she catches his muttered
+threats in response to the girl's pleading "that it is too bad a night
+for street work." She sees a passing policeman shrug his shoulders as he
+crosses the street, and she vaguely knows that the sick girl has put
+herself beyond the protection of the law, and that the rough man has an
+understanding with the officer on the beat. She has been told that
+certain streets are "not respectable," but a furtive look down the
+length of one of them reveals only forlorn and ill-looking houses, from
+which all suggestion of homely domesticity has long since gone; a
+slovenly woman with hollow eyes and a careworn face holding up the
+lurching bulk of a drunken man is all she sees of its "denizens,"
+although she may have known a neighbor's daughter who came home to die
+of a mysterious disease said to be the result of a "fast life," and
+whose disgraced mother "never again held up her head."
+
+Yet in spite of all this corrective knowledge, the increasing nervous
+energy to which industrial processes daily accommodate themselves, and
+the speeding up constantly required of the operators, may at any moment
+so register their results upon the nervous system of a factory girl as
+to overcome her powers of resistance. Many a working girl at the end of
+a day is so hysterical and overwrought that her mental balance is
+plainly disturbed. Hundreds of working girls go directly to bed as soon
+as they have eaten their suppers. They are too tired to go from home for
+recreation, too tired to read and often too tired to sleep. A humane
+forewoman recently said to me as she glanced down the long room in which
+hundreds of young women, many of them with their shoes beside them, were
+standing: "I hate to think of all the aching feet on this floor; these
+girls all have trouble with their feet, some of them spend the entire
+evening bathing them in hot water." But aching feet are no more usual
+than aching backs and aching heads. The study of industrial diseases has
+only this year been begun by the federal authorities, and doubtless as
+more is known of the nervous and mental effect of over-fatigue, many
+moral breakdowns will be traced to this source. It is already easy to
+make the connection in definite cases: "I was too tired to care," "I was
+too tired to know what I was doing," "I was dead tired and sick of it
+all," "I was dog tired and just went with him," are phrases taken from
+the lips of reckless girls, who are endeavoring to explain the situation
+in which they find themselves.
+
+Only slowly are laws being enacted to limit the hours of working women,
+yet the able brief presented to the United States supreme court on the
+constitutionality of the Oregon ten-hour law for women, based its plea
+upon the results of overwork as affecting women's health, the grave
+medical statement constantly broken into by a portrayal of the
+disastrous effects of over-fatigue upon character. It is as yet
+difficult to distinguish between the results of long hours and the
+results of overstrain. Certainly the constant sense of haste is one of
+the most nerve-racking and exhausting tests to which the human system
+can be subjected. Those girls in the sewing industry whose mothers
+thread needles for them far into the night that they may sew without a
+moment's interruption during the next day; those girls who insert
+eyelets into shoes, for which they are paid two cents a case, each case
+containing twenty-four pairs of shoes, are striking victims of the
+over-speeding which is so characteristic of our entire factory system.
+
+Girls working in factories and laundries are also open to the
+possibilities of accidents. The loss of only two fingers upon the right
+hand, or a broken wrist, may disqualify an operator from continuing in
+the only work in which she is skilled and make her struggle for
+respectability even more difficult. Varicose veins and broken arches in
+the feet are found in every occupation in which women are obliged to
+stand for hours, but at any moment either one may develop beyond purely
+painful symptoms into crippling incapacity. One such girl recently
+returning home after a long day's work deliberately sat down upon the
+floor of a crowded street car, explaining defiantly to the conductor and
+the bewildered passengers that "her feet would not hold out another
+minute." A young woman who only last summer broke her hand in a mangle
+was found in a rescue home in January, explaining her recent experience
+by the phrase that she was "up against it when leaving the hospital in
+October."
+
+In spite of many such heart-breaking instances the movement for
+safeguarding machinery and securing indemnity for industrial accidents
+proceeds all too slowly. At a recent exhibition in Boston the knife of a
+miniature guillotine fell every ten seconds to indicate the rate of
+industrial accidents in the United States. Grisly as was the device, its
+hideousness might well have been increased had it been able to
+demonstrate the connection between certain of these accidents and the
+complete moral disaster which overtook their victims.
+
+Yet factory girls who are subjected to this overstrain and overtime
+often find their greatest discouragement in the fact that after all
+their efforts they earn too little to support themselves. One girl said
+that she had first yielded to temptation when she had become utterly
+discouraged because she had tried in vain for seven months to save
+enough money for a pair of shoes. She habitually spent two dollars a
+week for her room, three dollars for her board, and sixty cents a week
+for carfare, and she had found the forty cents remaining from her weekly
+wage of six dollars inadequate to do more than re-sole her old shoes
+twice. When the shoes became too worn to endure a third soling and she
+possessed but ninety cents towards a new pair, she gave up her struggle;
+to use her own contemptuous phrase, she "sold out for a pair of shoes."
+
+Usually the phrases are less graphic, but after all they contain the
+same dreary meaning: "Couldn't make both ends meet," "I had always been
+used to having nice things," "Couldn't make enough money to live on," "I
+got sick and ran behind," "Needed more money," "Impossible to feed and
+clothe myself," "Out of work, hadn't been able to save." Of course a
+girl in such a strait does not go out deliberately to find illicit
+methods of earning money, she simply yields in a moment of utter
+weariness and discouragement to the temptations she has been able to
+withstand up to that moment. The long hours, the lack of comforts, the
+low pay, the absence of recreation, the sense of "good times" all about
+her which she cannot share, the conviction that she is rapidly losing
+health and charm, rouse the molten forces within her. A swelling tide of
+self-pity suddenly storms the banks which have hitherto held her and
+finally overcomes her instincts for decency and righteousness, as well
+as the habit of clean living, established by generations of her
+forebears.
+
+The aphorism that "morals fluctuate with trade" was long considered
+cynical, but it has been demonstrated in Berlin, in London, in Japan, as
+well as in several American cities, that there is a distinct increase in
+the number of registered prostitutes during periods of financial
+depression and even during the dull season of leading local industries.
+Out of my own experience I am ready to assert that very often all that
+is necessary to effectively help the girl who is on the edge of
+wrong-doing is to lend her money for her board until she finds work,
+provide the necessary clothing for which she is in such desperate need,
+persuade her relatives that she should have more money for her own
+expenditures, or find her another place at higher wages. Upon such
+simple economic needs does the tried virtue of a good girl sometimes
+depend.
+
+Here again the immigrant girl is at a disadvantage. The average wage of
+two hundred newly arrived girls of various nationalities, Poles,
+Italians, Slovaks, Bohemians, Russians, Galatians, Croatians,
+Lithuanians, Roumanians, Germans, and Swedes, who were interviewed by
+the Immigrants' Protective League, was four dollars and a half a week
+for the first position which they had been able to secure in Chicago. It
+often takes a girl several weeks to find her first place. During this
+period of looking for work the immigrant girl is subjected to great
+dangers. It is at such times that immigrants often exhibit symptoms of
+that type of disordered mind which alienists pronounce "due to conflict
+through poor adaptation." I have known several immigrant young men as
+well as girls who became deranged during the first year of life in
+America. A young Russian who came to Chicago in the hope of obtaining
+the freedom and self-development denied him at home, after three months
+of bitter disillusionment, with no work and insufficient food, was sent
+to the hospital for the insane. He only recovered after a group of his
+young countrymen devotedly went to see him each week with promises of
+work, the companionship at last establishing a sense of unbroken
+association. I also recall a Polish girl who became utterly distraught
+after weeks of sleeplessness and anxiety because she could not repay
+fifty dollars which she had borrowed from a countryman in Chicago for
+the purpose of bringing her sister to America. Her case was declared
+hopeless, but when the creditor made reassuring visits to the patient
+she began to mend and now, five years later, is not only free from debt,
+but has brought over the rest of the family, whose united earnings are
+slowly paying for a house and lot. Psychiatry is demonstrating the
+after-effects of fear upon the minds of children, but little has yet
+been done to show how far that fear of the future, arising from economic
+insecurity in the midst of new surroundings, has superinduced insanity
+among newly arrived immigrants. Such a state of nervous bewilderment and
+fright, added to that sense of expectation which youth always carries
+into new surroundings, often makes it easy to exploit the virtue of an
+immigrant girl. It goes without saying that she is almost always
+exploited industrially. A Russian girl recently took a place in a
+Chicago clothing factory at twenty cents a day, without in the least
+knowing that she was undercutting the wages of even that ill-paid
+industry. This girl rented a room for a dollar a week and all that she
+had to eat was given her by a friend in the same lodging house, who
+shared her own scanty fare with the newcomer.
+
+In the clothing industry trade unionism has already established a
+minimum wage limit for thousands of women who are receiving the
+protection and discipline of trade organization and responding to the
+tonic of self-help. Low wages will doubtless in time be modified by
+Minimum Wage Boards representing the government's stake in industry,
+such as have been in successful operation for many years in certain
+British colonies and are now being instituted in England itself. As yet
+Massachusetts is the only state which has appointed a special commission
+to consider this establishment for America, although the Industrial
+Commission of Wisconsin is empowered to investigate wages and their
+effect upon the standard of living.
+
+Anyone who has lived among working people has been surprised at the
+docility with which grown-up children give all of their earnings to
+their parents. This is, of course, especially true of the daughters. The
+fifth volume of the governmental report upon "Women and Child Wage
+Earners in the United States," quoted earlier, gives eighty-four per
+cent. as the proportion of working girls who turn in all of their wages
+to the family fund. In most cases this is done voluntarily and
+cheerfully, but in many instances it is as if the tradition of woman's
+dependence upon her family for support held long after the actual fact
+had changed, or as if the tyranny established through generations when
+daughters could be starved into submission to a father's will, continued
+even after the roles had changed, and the wages of the girl child
+supported a broken and dissolute father.
+
+An over-restrained girl, from whom so much is exacted, will sometimes
+begin to deceive her family by failing to tell them when she has had a
+raise in her wages. She will habitually keep the extra amount for
+herself, as she will any overtime pay which she may receive. All such
+money is invariably spent upon her own clothing, which she, of course,
+cannot wear at home, but which gives her great satisfaction upon the
+streets.
+
+The girl of the crowded tenements has no room in which to receive her
+friends or to read the books through which she shares the lives of
+assorted heroines, or, better still, dreams of them as of herself. Even
+if the living-room is not full of boarders or children or washing, it is
+comfortable neither for receiving friends nor for reading, and she finds
+upon the street her entire social field; the shop windows with their
+desirable garments hastily clothe her heroines as they travel the old
+roads of romance, the street cars rumbling noisily by suggest a
+delectable somewhere far away, and the young men who pass offer
+possibilities of the most delightful acquaintance. It is not astonishing
+that she insists upon clothing which conforms to the ideals of this
+all-absorbing street and that she will unhesitatingly deceive an
+uncomprehending family which does not recognize its importance.
+
+One such girl had for two years earned money for clothing by filling
+regular appointments in a disreputable saloon between the hours of six
+and half-past seven in the evening. With this money earned almost daily
+she bought the clothes of her heart's desire, keeping them with the
+saloon-keeper's wife. She demurely returned to her family for supper in
+her shabby working clothes and presented her mother with her unopened
+pay envelope every Saturday night. She began this life at the age of
+fourteen after her Polish mother had beaten her because she had
+"elbowed" the sleeves and "cut out" the neck of her ungainly calico gown
+in a vain attempt to make it look "American." Her mother, who had so
+conscientiously punished a daughter who was "too crazy for clothes,"
+could never of course comprehend how dangerous a combination is the girl
+with an unsatisfied love for finery and the opportunities for illicit
+earning afforded on the street. Yet many sad cases may be traced to such
+lack of comprehension. Charles Booth states that in England a large
+proportion of parents belonging to the working and even lower middle
+classes, are unacquainted with the nature of the lives led by their own
+daughters, a result doubtless of the early freedom of the street
+accorded city children. Too often the mothers themselves are totally
+ignorant of covert dangers. A few days ago I held in my hand a pathetic
+little pile of letters written by a desperate young girl of fifteen
+before she attempted to commit suicide. These letters were addressed to
+her lover, her girl friends, and to the head of the rescue home, but
+none to her mother towards whom she felt a bitter resentment "because
+she did not warn me." The poor mother after the death of her husband had
+gone to live with a married daughter, but as the son-in-law would not
+"take in two" she had told the youngest daughter, who had already worked
+for a year as an apprentice in a dressmaking establishment, that she
+must find a place to live with one of her girl friends. The poor child
+had found this impossible, and three days after the breaking up of her
+home she had fallen a victim to a white slave trafficker, who had
+treated her most cruelly and subjected her to unspeakable indignities.
+It was only when her "protector" left the city, frightened by the
+unwonted activity of the police, due to a wave of reform, that she found
+her way to the rescue home, and in less than five months after the death
+of her father she had purchased carbolic acid and deliberately "courted
+death for the nameless child" and herself.
+
+Another experience during which a girl faces a peculiar danger is when
+she has lost one "job" and is looking for another. Naturally she loses
+her place in the slack season and pursues her search at the very moment
+when positions are hardest to find, and her un-employment is therefore
+most prolonged. Perhaps nothing in our social order is so unorganized
+and inchoate as our method, or rather lack of method, of placing young
+people in industry. This is obvious from the point of view of their
+first positions when they leave school at the unstable age of fourteen,
+or from the innumerable places they hold later, often as high as ten a
+year, when they are dismissed or change voluntarily through sheer
+restlessness. Here again a girl's difficulty is often increased by the
+lack of sympathy and understanding on the part of her parents. A girl is
+often afraid to say that she has lost her place and pretends to go to
+work each morning while she is looking for a new one; she postpones
+telling them at home day by day, growing more frantic as the usual
+pay-day approaches. Some girls borrow from loan sharks in order to take
+the customary wages to their parents, others fall victims to
+unscrupulous employment agencies in their eagerness to take the first
+thing offered.
+
+The majority of these girls answer the advertisements in the daily
+papers as affording the cheapest and safest way to secure a position.
+These out-of-work girls are found, sometimes as many as forty or fifty
+at a time, in the rest rooms of the department stores, waiting for the
+new edition of the newspapers after they have been the rounds of the
+morning advertisements and have found nothing.
+
+Of course such a possible field as these rest rooms is not overlooked by
+the procurer, who finds it very easy to establish friendly relations
+through the offer of the latest edition of the newspaper. Even pennies
+are precious to a girl out of work and she is also easily grateful to
+anyone who expresses an interest in her plight and tells her of a
+position. Two representatives of the Juvenile Protective Association of
+Chicago, during a period of three weeks, arrested and convicted
+seventeen men and three women who were plying their trades in the rest
+rooms of nine department stores. The managers were greatly concerned
+over this exposure and immediately arranged both for more intelligent
+matrons and greater vigilance. One of the less scrupulous stores
+voluntarily gave up a method of advertising carried on in the rest room
+itself where a demonstrator from "the beauty counter" made up the faces
+of the patrons of the rest room with the powder and paint procurable in
+her department below. The out-of-work girls especially availed
+themselves of this privilege and hoped that their search would be easier
+when their pale, woe-begone faces were "made beautiful." The poor girls
+could not know that a face thus made up enormously increased their
+risks.
+
+A number of girls also came early in the morning as soon as the rest
+rooms were open. They washed their faces and arranged their hair and
+then settled to sleep in the largest and easiest chairs the room
+afforded. Some of these were out-of-work girls also determined to take
+home their wages at the end of the week, each pretending to her mother
+that she had spent the night with a girl friend and was working all day
+as usual. How much of this deception is due to parental tyranny and how
+much to a sense of responsibility for younger children or invalids, it
+is impossible to estimate until the number of such recorded cases is
+much larger. Certain it is that the long habit of obedience, as well as
+the feeling of family obligation established from childhood, is often
+utilized by the white slave trafficker.
+
+Difficult as is the position of the girl out of work when her family is
+exigent and uncomprehending, she has incomparably more protection than
+the girl who is living in the city without home ties. Such girls form
+sixteen per cent. of the working women of Chicago. With absolutely every
+penny of their meagre wages consumed in their inadequate living, they
+are totally unable to save money. That loneliness and detachment which
+the city tends to breed in its inhabitants is easily intensified in such
+a girl into isolation and a desolating feeling of belonging nowhere. All
+youth resents the sense of the enormity of the universe in relation to
+the insignificance of the individual life, and youth, with that intense
+self-consciousness which makes each young person the very centre of all
+emotional experience, broods over this as no older person can possibly
+do. At such moments a black oppression, the instinctive fear of
+solitude, will send a lonely girl restlessly to walk the streets even
+when she is "too tired to stand," and when her desire for companionship
+in itself constitutes a grave danger. Such a girl living in a rented
+room is usually without any place in which to properly receive callers.
+An investigation was recently made in Kansas City of 411 lodging-houses
+in which young girls were living; less than 30 per cent. were found with
+a parlor in which guests might be received. Many girls quite innocently
+permit young men to call upon them in their bedrooms, pitifully
+disguised as "sitting-rooms," but the danger is obvious, and the
+standards of the girl gradually become lowered.
+
+Certainly during the trying times when a girl is out of work she should
+have much more intelligent help than is at present extended to her; she
+should be able to avail herself of the state employment agencies much
+more than is now possible, and the work of the newly established
+vocational bureaus should be enormously extended.
+
+When once we are in earnest about the abolition of the social evil,
+society will find that it must study industry from the point of view of
+the producer in a sense which has never been done before. Such a study
+with reference to industrial legislation will ally itself on one hand
+with the trades-union movement, which insists upon a living wage and
+shorter hours for the workers, and also upon an opportunity for
+self-direction, and on the other hand with the efficiency movement,
+which would refrain from over-fatiguing an operator as it would from
+over-speeding a machine. In addition to legislative enactment and the
+historic trade-union effort, the feebler and newer movement on the part
+of the employers is being reinforced by the welfare secretary, who is
+not only devising recreational and educational plans, but is placing
+before the employer much disturbing information upon the cost of living
+in relation to the pitiful wages of working girls. Certainly employers
+are growing ashamed to use the worn-out, hypocritical pretence of
+employing only the girl "protected by home influences" as a device for
+reducing wages. Help may also come from the consumers, for an increasing
+number of them, with compunctions in regard to tempted young employees,
+are not only unwilling to purchase from the employer who underpays his
+girls and thus to share his guilt, but are striving in divers ways to
+modify existing conditions.
+
+As working women enter fresh fields of labor which ever open up anew as
+the old fields are submerged behind them, society must endeavor to
+speedily protect them by an amelioration of the economic conditions
+which are now so unnecessarily harsh and dangerous to health and morals.
+The world-wide movement for establishing governmental control of
+industrial conditions is especially concerned for working women.
+Fourteen of the European countries prohibit all night work for women and
+almost every civilized country in the world is considering the number of
+hours and the character of work in which women may be permitted to
+safely engage.
+
+Although amelioration comes about so slowly that many young girls are
+sacrificed each year under conditions which could so easily and
+reasonably be changed, nevertheless it is apparently better to overcome
+the dangers in this new and freer life, which modern industry has opened
+to women, than it is to attempt to retreat into the domestic industry of
+the past; for all statistics of prostitution give the largest number of
+recruits for this life as coming from domestic service and the second
+largest number from girls who live at home with no definite occupation
+whatever. Therefore, although in the economic aspect of the social evil
+more than in any other, do we find ground for despair, at the same time
+we discern, as nowhere else, the young girl's stubborn power of
+resistance. Nevertheless, the most superficial survey of her
+surroundings shows the necessity for ameliorating, as rapidly as
+possible, the harsh economic conditions which now environ her.
+
+That steadily increasing function of the state by which it seeks to
+protect its workers from their own weakness and degradation, and insists
+that the livelihood of the manual laborer shall not be beaten down below
+the level of efficient citizenship, assumes new forms almost daily. From
+the human as well as the economic standpoint there is an obligation
+resting upon the state to discover how many victims of the white slave
+traffic are the result of social neglect, remedial incapacity, and the
+lack of industrial safeguards, and how far discontinuous employment and
+non-employment are factors in the breeding of discouragement and
+despair.
+
+Is it because our modern industrialism is so new that we have been slow
+to connect it with the poverty and vice all about us? The socialists
+talk constantly of the relation of economic law to destitution and point
+out the connection between industrial maladjustment and individual
+wrongdoing, but certainly the study of social conditions, the obligation
+to eradicate vice, cannot belong to one political party or to one
+economic school. It must be recognized as a solemn obligation of
+existing governments, and society must realize that economic conditions
+can only be made more righteous and more human by the unceasing devotion
+of generations of men.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+MORAL EDUCATION AND LEGAL PROTECTION OF CHILDREN
+
+
+No great wrong has ever arisen more clearly to the social consciousness
+of a generation than has that of commercialized vice in the
+consciousness of ours, and that we are so slow to act is simply another
+evidence that human nature has a curious power of callous indifference
+towards evils which have been so entrenched that they seem part of that
+which has always been. Educators of course share this attitude; at
+moments they seem to intensify it, although at last an educational
+movement in the direction of sex hygiene is beginning in the schools and
+colleges. Primary schools strive to satisfy the child's first
+questionings regarding the beginnings of human life and approach the
+subject through simple biological instruction which at least places this
+knowledge on a par with other natural facts. Such teaching is an
+enormous advance for the children whose curiosity would otherwise have
+been satisfied from poisonous sources and who would have learned of
+simple physiological matters from such secret undercurrents of corrupt
+knowledge as to have forever perverted their minds. Yet this first
+direct step towards an adequate educational approach to this subject has
+been surprisingly difficult owing to the self-consciousness of grown-up
+people; for while the children receive the teaching quite simply, their
+parents often take alarm. Doubtless co-operation with parents will be
+necessary before the subject can fall into its proper place in the
+schools. In Chicago, the largest women's club in the city has
+established normal courses in sex hygiene attended both by teachers and
+mothers, the National and State Federations of Women's Clubs are
+gradually preparing thousands of women throughout America for fuller
+co-operation with the schools in this difficult matter. In this, as in
+so many other educational movements, Germany has led the way. Two
+publications are issued monthly in Berlin, which promote not only more
+effective legislation but more adequate instruction in the schools on
+this basic subject. These journals are supported by men and women
+anxious for light for the sake of their children. Some of them were
+first stirred to action by Wedekind's powerful drama "The Awakening of
+Spring," which, with Teutonic grimness, thrusts over the footlights the
+lesson that death and degradation may be the fate of a group of gifted
+school-children, because of the cowardly reticence of their parents.
+
+A year ago the Bishop of London gathered together a number of
+influential people and laid before them his convictions that the root of
+the social evil lay in so-called "parental modesty," and that in the
+quickening of the parental conscience lay the hope for the "lifting up
+of England's moral tone which has for so long been the despair of
+England's foremost men."
+
+In America the eighth year-book of the National Society for the
+Scientific Study of Education treats of this important subject with
+great ability, massing the agencies and methods in impressive array.
+Many other educational journals and organized societies could be cited
+as expressing a new conscience in regard to this world-old evil. The
+expert educational opinion which they represent is practically agreed
+that for older children the instruction should not be confined to
+biology and hygiene, but may come quite naturally in history and
+literature, which record and portray the havoc wrought by the sexual
+instinct when uncontrolled, and also show that, when directed and
+spiritualized, it has become an inspiration to the loftiest devotions
+and sacrifices. The youth thus taught sees this primal instinct not only
+as an essential to the continuance of the race, but also, when it is
+transmuted to the highest ends, as a fundamental factor in social
+progress. The entire subject is broadened out in his mind as he learns
+that his own struggle is a common experience. He is able to make his own
+interpretations and to combat the crude inferences of his patronizing
+companions. After all, no young person will be able to control his
+impulses and to save himself from the grosser temptations, unless he has
+been put under the sway of nobler influences. Perhaps we have yet to
+learn that the inhibitions of character as well as its reinforcements
+come most readily through idealistic motives.
+
+Certainly all the great religions of the world have recognized youth's
+need of spiritual help during the trying years of adolescence. The
+ceremonies of the earliest religions deal with this instinct almost to
+the exclusion of others, and all later religions attempt to provide the
+youth with shadowy weapons for the struggle which lies ahead of him, for
+the wise men in every age have known that only the power of the spirit
+can overcome the lusts of the flesh. In spite of this educational
+advance, courses of study in many public and private schools are still
+prepared exactly as if educators had never known that at fifteen or
+sixteen years of age, the will power being still weak, the bodily
+desires are keen and insistent. The head master of Eton, Mr. Lyttleton,
+who has given much thought to this gap in the education of youth says,
+"The certain result of leaving an enormous majority of boys unguided and
+uninstructed in a matter where their strongest passions are concerned,
+is that they grow up to judge of all questions connected with it, from a
+purely selfish point of view." He contends that this selfishness is due
+to the fact that any single suggestion or hint which boys receive on the
+subject comes from other boys or young men who are under the same potent
+influences of ignorance, curiosity and the claims of self. No wholesome
+counter-balance of knowledge is given, no attempt is made to invest the
+subject with dignity or to place it in relation to the welfare of others
+and to universal law. Mr. Lyttleton contends that this alone can explain
+the peculiarly brutal attitude towards "outcast" women which is a
+sustained cruelty to be discerned in no other relation of English life.
+To quote him again: "But when the victims of man's cruelty are not birds
+or beasts but our own countrywomen, doomed by the hundred thousand to a
+life of unutterable shame and hopeless misery, then and then only the
+general average tone of young men becomes hard and brutally callous or
+frivolous with a kind of coarse frivolity not exhibited in relation to
+any other form of human suffering." At the present moment thousands of
+young people in our great cities possess no other knowledge of this
+grave social evil which may at any moment become a dangerous personal
+menace, save what is imparted to them in this brutal flippant spirit. It
+has been said that the child growing up in the midst of civilization
+receives from its parents and teachers something of the accumulated
+experience of the world on all other subjects save upon that of sex. On
+this one subject alone each generation learns little from its
+predecessors.
+
+An educator has lately pointed out that it is an old lure of vice to
+pretend that it alone deals with manliness and reality, and he complains
+that it is always difficult to convince youth that the higher planes of
+life contain anything but chilly sentiments. He contends that young
+people are therefore prone to receive moralizing and admonitions with
+polite attention, but when it comes to action, they carefully observe
+the life about them in order to conduct themselves in such wise as to be
+part of the really desirable world inhabited by men of affairs. Owing to
+this attitude, many young people living in our cities at the present
+moment have failed to apprehend the admonitions of religion and have
+never responded to its inner control. It is as if the impact of the
+world had stunned their spiritual natures, and as if this had occurred
+at the very time that a most dangerous experiment is being tried. The
+public gaieties formerly allowed in Catholic countries where young
+people were restrained by the confessional, are now permitted in cities
+where this restraint is altogether unknown to thousands of young people,
+and only faintly and traditionally operative upon thousands of others.
+The puritanical history of American cities assumes that these gaieties
+are forbidden, and that the streets are sober and decorous for
+conscientious young men and women who need no external protection. This
+ungrounded assumption, united to the fact that no adult has the
+confidence of these young people, who are constantly subjected to a
+multitude of imaginative impressions, is almost certain to result
+disastrously.
+
+The social relationships in a modern city are so hastily made and often
+so superficial, that the old human restraints of public opinion, long
+sustained in smaller communities, have also broken down. Thousands of
+young men and women in every great city have received none of the
+lessons in self-control which even savage tribes imparted to their
+children when they taught them to master their appetites as well as
+their emotions. These young people are perhaps further from all
+community restraint and genuine social control than the youth of the
+community have ever been in the long history of civilization. Certainly
+only the modern city has offered at one and the same time every possible
+stimulation for the lower nature and every opportunity for secret vice.
+Educators apparently forget that this unrestrained stimulation of young
+people, so characteristic of our cities, although developing very
+rapidly, is of recent origin, and that we have not yet seen the outcome.
+The present education of the average young man has given him only the
+most unreal protection against the temptations of the city. Schoolboys
+are subjected to many lures from without just at the moment when they
+are filled with an inner tumult which utterly bewilders them and
+concerning which no one has instructed them save in terms of empty
+precept and unintelligible warning.
+
+We are authoritatively told that the physical difficulties are
+enormously increased by uncontrolled or perverted imaginations, and all
+sound advice to young men in regard to this subject emphasizes a clean
+mind, exhorts an imagination kept free from sensuality and insists upon
+days filled with wholesome athletic interests. We allow this regime to
+be exactly reversed for thousands of young people living in the most
+crowded and most unwholesome parts of the city. Not only does the stage
+in its advertisements exhibit all the allurements of sex to such an
+extent that a play without a "love interest" is considered foredoomed to
+failure, but the novels which form the sole reading of thousands of
+young men and girls deal only with the course of true or simulated love,
+resulting in a rose-colored marriage, or in variegated misfortunes.
+
+Often the only recreation possible for young men and young women
+together is dancing, in which it is always easy to transgress the
+proprieties. In many public dance halls, however, improprieties are
+deliberately fostered. The waltzes and two-steps are purposely slow, the
+couples leaning heavily on each other barely move across the floor, all
+the jollity and bracing exercise of the peasant dance is eliminated, as
+is all the careful decorum of the formal dance. The efforts to obtain
+pleasure or to feed the imagination are thus converged upon the senses
+which it is already difficult for young people to understand and to
+control. It is therefore not remarkable that in certain parts of the
+city groups of idle young men are found whose evil imaginations have
+actually inhibited their power for normal living. On the streets or in
+the pool-rooms where they congregate their conversation, their tales of
+adventure, their remarks upon women who pass by, all reveal that they
+have been caught in the toils of an instinct so powerful and primal that
+when left without direction it can easily overwhelm its possessor and
+swamp his faculties. These young men, who do no regular work, who expect
+to be supported by their mothers and sisters and to get money for the
+shows and theatres by any sort of disreputable undertaking, are in
+excellent training for the life of the procurer, and it is from such
+groups that they are recruited. There is almost a system of
+apprenticeship, for boys when very small act as "look-outs" and are
+later utilized to make acquaintances with girls in order to introduce
+them to professionals. From this they gradually learn the method of
+procuring girls and at last do an independent business. If one boy is
+successful in such a life, throughout his acquaintance runs the rumor
+that a girl is an asset that will bring a larger return than can
+possibly be earned in hard-working ways. Could the imaginations of these
+young men have been controlled and cultivated, could the desire for
+adventure have been directed into wholesome channels, could these idle
+boys have been taught that, so far from being manly they were losing all
+virility, could higher interests have been aroused and standards given
+them in relation to this one aspect of life, the entire situation of
+commercialized vice would be a different thing.
+
+The girls with a desire for adventure seem confined to this one dubious
+outlet even more than the boys, although there are only one-eighth as
+many delinquent girls as boys brought into the juvenile court in
+Chicago, the charge against the girls in almost every instance involves
+a loss of chastity. One of them who was vainly endeavoring to formulate
+the causes of her downfall, concentrated them all in the single
+statement that she wanted the other girls to know that she too was a
+"good Indian." Such a girl, while she is not an actual member of a gang
+of boys, is often attached to one by so many loyalties and friendships
+that she will seldom testify against a member, even when she has been
+injured by him. She also depends upon the gang when she requires bail in
+the police court or the protection that comes from political influence,
+and she is often very proud of her quasi-membership. The little girls
+brought into the juvenile court are usually daughters of those poorest
+immigrant families living in the worst type of city tenements, who are
+frequently forced to take boarders in order to pay the rent. A
+surprising number of little girls have first become involved in
+wrong-doing through the men of their own households. A recent inquiry
+among 130 girls living in a sordid red light district disclosed the fact
+that a majority of them had thus been victimized and the wrong had come
+to them so early that they had been despoiled at an average age of eight
+years. Looking upon the forlorn little creatures, who are often brought
+into the Chicago juvenile court to testify against their own relatives,
+one is seized with that curious compunction Goethe expressed in the now
+hackneyed line from "Mignon:"
+
+"Was hat Man dir, du armes Kind, gethan?"
+
+One is also inclined to reproach educators for neglecting to give
+children instruction in play when one sees the unregulated amusement
+parks which are apparently so dangerous to little girls twelve or
+fourteen years old. Because they are childishly eager for amusement and
+totally unable to pay for a ride on the scenic railway or for a ticket
+to an entertainment, these disappointed children easily accept many
+favors from the young men who are standing near the entrances for the
+express purpose of ruining them. The hideous reward which is demanded
+from them later in the evening, after they have enjoyed the many
+"treats" which the amusement park offers, apparently seems of little
+moment. Their childish minds are filled with the memory of the lurid
+pleasures to the oblivion of the later experience, and they eagerly tell
+their companions of this possibility "of getting in to all the shows."
+These poor little girls pass unnoticed amidst a crowd of honest people
+seeking recreation after a long day's work, groups of older girls
+walking and talking gaily with young men of their acquaintance, and
+happy children holding their parents' hands. This cruel exploitation of
+the childish eagerness for pleasure is, of course, possible only among a
+certain type of forlorn city children who are totally without standards
+and into whose colorless lives a visit to the amusement park brings the
+acme of delirious excitement. It is possible that these children are the
+inevitable product of city life; in Paris, little girls at local fetes
+wishing to ride on the hobby horse frequently buy the privilege at a
+fearful price from the man directing the machinery, and a physician
+connected with the New York Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to
+Children writes: "It is horribly pathetic to learn how far a nickel or a
+quarter will go towards purchasing the virtue of these children."
+
+The home environment of such children has been similar to that of many
+others who come to grief through the five-cent theatres. These eager
+little people, to whom life has offered few pleasures, crowd around the
+door hoping to be taken in by some kind soul and, when they have been
+disappointed over and over again and the last performance is about to
+begin, a little girl may be induced unthinkingly to barter her chastity
+for an entrance fee.
+
+Many children are also found who have been decoyed into their first
+wrong-doing through the temptation of the saloon, in spite of the fact
+that one of the earliest regulations in American cities for the
+protection of children was the prohibition of the sale of liquor to
+minors. That children may be easily demoralized by the influence of a
+disorderly saloon was demonstrated recently in Chicago; one of these
+saloons was so situated that the pupils of a public school were obliged
+to pass it and from the windows of the schoolhouse itself could see much
+of what was passing within the place. An effort was made by the Juvenile
+Protective Association to have it closed by the chief of police, but
+although he did so, it was opened again the following day. The
+Association then took up the matter with the mayor, who refused to
+interfere, insisting that the objectionable features had been
+eliminated. Through months of effort, during which time the practices of
+the place remained quite unchanged, one group after another of
+public-spirited citizens endeavored to suppress what had become a public
+scandal, only to find that the place was protected by brewery interests
+which were more powerful, both financially and politically, than
+themselves. At last, after a peculiarly flagrant case involving a little
+girl, the mothers of the neighborhood arranged a mass meeting in the
+schoolhouse itself, inviting local officials to be present. The mothers
+then produced a mass of testimony which demonstrated that dozens and
+hundreds of children had been directly or indirectly affected by the
+place whose removal they demanded. A meeting so full of genuine anxiety
+and righteous indignation could not well be disregarded, and the
+compulsory education department was at last able to obtain a revocation
+of the license. The many people who had so long tried to do away with
+this avowedly disreputable saloon received a fresh impression of the
+menace to children who became sophisticated by daily familiarity with
+vice. Yet many mothers, hard pressed by poverty, are obliged to rent
+houses next to vicious neighborhoods and their children very early
+become familiar with all the outer aspects of vice. Among them are the
+children of widows who make friends with their dubious neighbors during
+the long days while their mothers are at work. I recall two sisters in
+one family whose mother had moved her household to the borders of a
+Chicago segregated district, apparently without knowing the character of
+the neighborhood. The little sisters, twelve and eight years old,
+accepted many invitations from a kind neighbor to come into her house to
+see her pretty things. The older girl was delighted to be "made up" with
+powder and paint and to try on long dresses, while the little one who
+sang very prettily was taught some new songs, happily without
+understanding their import. The tired mother knew nothing of what the
+children did during her absence, until an honest neighbor who had seen
+the little girls going in and out of the district, interfered on their
+behalf. The frightened mother moved back to her old neighborhood which
+she had left in search of cheaper rent, her pious soul stirred to its
+depths that the children for whom she patiently worked day by day had so
+narrowly escaped destruction.
+
+Who cannot recall at least one of these desperate mothers, overworked
+and harried through a long day, prolonged by the family washing and
+cooking into the evening, followed by a night of foreboding and
+misgiving because the very children for whom her life is sacrificed are
+slowly slipping away from her control and affection? Such a spectacle
+forces one into an agreement with Wells, that it is a "monstrous
+absurdity" that women who are "discharging their supreme social
+function, that of rearing children, should do it in their spare time, as
+it were, while they 'earn their living' by contributing some
+half-mechanical element to some trivial industrial product."
+Nevertheless, such a woman whose wages are fixed on the basis of
+individual subsistence, who is quite unable to earn a family wage, is
+still held by a legal obligation to support her children with the
+desperate penalty of forfeiture if she fail.
+
+I can recall a very intelligent woman who long brought her children to
+the Hull House day nursery with this result at the end of ten years of
+devotion: the little girl is almost totally deaf owing to neglect
+following a case of measles, because her mother could not stop work in
+order to care for her; the youngest boy has lost a leg flipping cars;
+the oldest boy has twice been arrested for petty larceny; the twin boys,
+in spite of prolonged sojourns in the parental school, have been such
+habitual truants that their natural intelligence has secured little aid
+from education. Of the five children three are now in semi-penal
+institutions, supported by the state. It would not therefore have been
+so un-economical to have boarded them with their own mother, requiring a
+standard of nutrition and school attendance at least up to that national
+standard of nurture which the more advanced European governments are
+establishing.
+
+The recent Illinois law, providing that the children of widows may be
+supported by public funds paid to the mother upon order of the juvenile
+court, will eventually restore a mother's care to these poor children;
+but in the meantime, even the poor mother who is receiving such aid, in
+her forced search for cheap rent may be continually led nearer to the
+notoriously evil districts. Many appeals made to landlords of
+disreputable houses in Chicago on behalf of the children living adjacent
+to such property have never secured a favorable response. It is
+apparently difficult for the average property owner to resist the high
+rents which houses in certain districts of the city can command if
+rented for purposes of vice. I recall two small frame houses identical
+in type and value standing side by side. One which belonged to a citizen
+without scruples was rented for $30.00 a month, the other belonging to a
+conscientious man was rented for $9.00 a month. The supposedly
+respectable landlords defend themselves behind the old sophistry: "If I
+did not rent my house for such a purpose, someone else would," and the
+more hardened ones say that "It is all in the line of business." Both of
+them are enormously helped by the secrecy surrounding the ownership of
+such houses, although it is hoped that the laws requiring the name of
+the owner and the agent of every multiple house to be posted in the
+public hallway will at length break through this protection, and the
+discovered landlords will then be obliged to pay the fine to which the
+law specifically states they have made themselves liable. In the
+meantime, women forced to find cheap rents are subjected to one more
+handicap in addition to the many others poverty places upon them. Such
+experiences may explain the fact that English figures show a very large
+proportion of widows and deserted women among the prostitutes in those
+large towns which maintain segregated districts.
+
+The deprivation of a mother's care is most frequently experienced by the
+children of the poorest colored families who are often forced to live in
+disreputable neighborhoods because they literally cannot rent houses
+anywhere else. Both because rents are always high for colored people and
+because the colored mothers are obliged to support their children, seven
+times as many of them, in proportion to their entire number, as of the
+white mothers, the actual number of colored children neglected in the
+midst of temptation is abnormally large. So closely is child life
+founded upon the imitation of what it sees that the child who knows all
+evil is almost sure in the end to share it. Colored children seldom roam
+far from their own neighborhoods: in the public playgrounds, which are
+theoretically open to them, they are made so uncomfortable by the
+slights of other children that they learn to stay away, and, shut out
+from legitimate recreation, are all the more tempted by the careless,
+luxurious life of a vicious neighborhood. In addition to the colored
+girls who have thus from childhood grown familiar with the outer aspects
+of vice, are others who are sent into the district in the capacity of
+domestic servants by unscrupulous employment agencies who would not
+venture to thus treat a white girl. The community forces the very people
+who have confessedly the shortest history of social restraint, into a
+dangerous proximity with the vice districts of the city. This results,
+as might easily be predicted, in a very large number of colored girls
+entering a disreputable life. The negroes themselves believe that the
+basic cause for the high percentage of colored prostitutes is the recent
+enslavement of their race with its attendant unstable marriage and
+parental status, and point to thousands of slave sales that but two
+generations ago disrupted the negroes' attempts at family life. Knowing
+this as we do, it seems all the more unjustifiable that the nation which
+is responsible for the broken foundations of this family life should
+carelessly permit the negroes, making their first struggle towards a
+higher standard of domesticity, to be subjected to the most flagrant
+temptations which our civilization tolerates.
+
+The imaginations of even very young children may easily be forced into
+sensual channels. A little girl, twelve years old, was one day brought
+to the psychopathic clinic connected with the Chicago juvenile court.
+She had been detained under police surveillance for more than a week,
+while baffled detectives had in vain tried to verify the statements she
+had made to her Sunday-school teacher in great detail of certain
+horrible experiences which had befallen her. For at least a week no one
+concerned had the remotest idea that the child was fabricating. The
+police thought that she had merely grown confused as to the places to
+which she had been "carried unconscious." The mother gave the first clue
+when she insisted that the child had never been away from her long
+enough to have had these experiences, but came directly home from school
+every afternoon for her tea, of which she habitually drank ten or twelve
+cups. The skilful questionings at the clinic, while clearly establishing
+the fact of a disordered mind, disclosed an astonishing knowledge of the
+habits of the underworld.
+
+Even children who live in respectable neighborhoods and are guarded by
+careful parents so that their imaginations are not perverted, but only
+starved, constantly conduct a search for the magical and impossible
+which leads them into moral dangers. An astonishing number of them
+consult palmists, soothsayers, and fortune tellers. These dealers in
+futurity, who sell only love and riches, the latter often dependent upon
+the first, are sometimes in collusion with disreputable houses, and at
+the best make the path of normal living more difficult for their eager
+young patrons. There is something very pathetic in the sheepish, yet
+radiant, faces of the boy and girl, often together, who come out on the
+street from a dingy doorway which bears the palmist's sign of the
+spread-out hand. This remnant of primitive magic is all they can find
+with which to feed their eager imaginations, although the city offers
+libraries and galleries, crowned with man's later imaginative
+achievements. One hard-working girl of my acquaintance, told by a
+palmist that "diamonds were coming to her soon," afterwards accepted
+without a moment's hesitation a so-called diamond ring from a man whose
+improper attentions she had hitherto withstood.
+
+In addition to these heedless young people, pulled into a sordid and
+vicious life through their very search for romance, are many little
+children ensnared by means of the most innocent playthings and pleasures
+of childhood. Perhaps one of the saddest aspects of the social evil as
+it exists to-day in the modern city, is the procuring of little girls
+who are too young to have received adequate instruction of any sort and
+whose natural safeguard of modesty and reserve has been broken down by
+the overcrowding of tenement house life. Any educator who has made a
+careful study of the children from the crowded districts is impressed
+with the numbers of them whose moral natures are apparently unawakened.
+While there are comparatively few of these non-moral children in any one
+neighborhood, in the entire city their number is far from negligible.
+Such children are used by disreputable people to invite their more
+normal playmates to house parties, which they attend again and again,
+lured by candy and fruit, until they gradually learn to trust the
+vicious hostess. The head of one such house, recently sent to the
+penitentiary upon charges brought against her by the Juvenile Protective
+Association, founded her large and successful business upon the
+activities of three or four little girls who, although they had
+gradually come to understand her purpose, were apparently so chained to
+her by the goodies and favors which they received, that they were quite
+indifferent to the fate of their little friends. Such children, when
+brought to the psychopathic clinic attached to the Chicago juvenile
+court, are sometimes found to have incipient epilepsy or other physical
+disabilities from which their conduct may be at least partially
+accounted for. Sometimes they come from respectable families, but more
+often from families where they have been mistreated and where dissolute
+parents have given them neither affection nor protection. Many of these
+children whose relatives have obviously contributed to their delinquency
+are helped by the enforcement of the adult delinquency law.
+
+One looks upon these hardened little people with a sense of apology that
+educational forces have not been able to break into their first
+ignorance of life before it becomes toughened into insensibility, and
+one knows that, whatever may be done for them later, because of this
+early neglect, they will probably always remain impervious to the
+gentler aspects of life, as if vice seared their tender minds with
+red-hot irons. Our public-school education is so nearly universal, that
+if the entire body of the teachers seriously undertook to instruct all
+American youth in regard to this most important aspect of life, why
+should they not in time train their pupils to continence and
+self-direction, as they already discipline their minds with knowledge in
+regard to many other matters? Certainly the extreme youth of the victims
+of the white slave traffic, both boys and girls, places a great
+responsibility upon the educational forces of the community.
+
+The state which supports the public school is also coming to the rescue
+of children through protective legislation. This is another illustration
+that the beginnings of social advance have often resulted from the
+efforts to defend the weakest and least-sheltered members of the
+community. The widespread movement which would protect children from
+premature labor, also prohibits them from engaging in occupations in
+which they are subjected to moral dangers. Several American cities have
+of late become much concerned over the temptations to which messenger
+boys, delivery boys, and newsboys are constantly subjected when their
+business takes them into vicious districts. The Chicago vice commission
+makes a plea for these "children of the night" that they shall be
+protected by law from those temptations which they are too young and too
+untrained to withstand. New York and Wisconsin are the only states which
+have raised the legal age of messenger boys employed late at night to
+twenty-one years. Under the inadequate sixteen-year limit, which
+regulates night work for children in Illinois, boys constantly come to
+grief through their familiarity with the social evil. One of these, a
+delicate boy of seventeen, had been put into the messenger service by
+his parents when their family doctor had recommended out-of-door work.
+Because he was well-bred and good-looking, he became especially popular
+with the inmates of disreputable houses. They gave him tips of a dollar
+and more when he returned from the errands which he had executed for
+them, such as buying candy, cocaine or morphine. He was inevitably
+flattered by their attentions and pleased with his own popularity.
+Although his mother knew that his duties as a messenger boy occasionally
+took him to disreputable houses, she fervently hoped his early training
+might keep him straight, but in the end realized the foolhardiness of
+subjecting an immature youth to these temptations. The vice commission
+report gives various detailed instances of similar experiences on the
+part of other lads, one of them being a high-school boy who was merely
+earning extra money as a messenger boy during the rush of Christmas
+week.
+
+The regulations in Boston, New York, Cincinnati, Milwaukee and St. Louis
+for the safeguarding of these children may be but a forecast of the care
+which the city will at last learn to devise for youth under special
+temptations. Because the various efforts made in Chicago to obtain
+adequate legislation for the protection of street-trading children have
+not succeeded, incidents like the following have not only occurred once,
+but are constantly repeated: a pretty little girl, the only child of a
+widowed mother, sold newspapers after school hours from the time she was
+seven years old. Because her home was near a vicious neighborhood and
+because the people in the disreputable hotels seldom asked for change
+when they bought a paper and good-naturedly gave her many little
+presents, her mother permitted her to gain a clientele within the
+district on the ground that she was too young to understand what she
+might see. This continued familiarity, in spite of her mother's
+admonitions, not to talk to her customers, inevitably resulted in so
+vitiating the standard of the growing girl, that at the age of fourteen
+she became an inmate of one of the houses. A similar instance concerns
+three little girls who habitually sold gum in one of the segregated
+districts. Because they had repeatedly been turned away by kind-hearted
+policemen who felt that they ought not to be in such a neighborhood,
+each one of these children had obtained a special permit from the mayor
+of the city in order to protect herself from "police interference."
+While the mayor had no actual authority to issue such permits, naturally
+the piece of paper bearing his name, when displayed by a child, checked
+the activity of the police officer. The incident was but one more
+example of the old conflict between mistaken kindness to the individual
+child in need of money, and the enforcement of those regulations which
+may seem to work a temporary hardship upon one child, but save a hundred
+others from entering occupations which can only lead into blind alleys.
+Because such occupations inevitably result in increasing the number of
+unemployables, the educational system itself must be challenged.
+
+A royal commission has recently recommended to the English Parliament
+that "the legally permissible hours for the employment of boys be
+shortened, that they be required to spend the hours so set free, in
+physical and technological training, that the manufacturing of the
+unemployable may cease." Certainly we are justified in demanding from
+our educational system, that the interest and capacity of each child
+leaving school to enter industry, shall have been studied with reference
+to the type of work he is about to undertake. When vocational bureaus
+are properly connected with all the public schools, a girl will have an
+intelligent point of departure into her working life, and a place to
+which she may turn in time of need, for help and advice through those
+long and dangerous periods of unemployment which are now so inimical to
+her character.
+
+This same British commission divided all of the unemployed, the
+under-employed, and the unemployable as the results of three types of
+trades: first, the subsidized labor trades, wherein women and children
+are paid wages insufficient to maintain them at the required standard of
+health and industrial efficiency, so that their wages must be
+supplemented by relatives or charity; second, labor deteriorating
+trades, which have sapped the energy, the capacity, the character, of
+workers; third, bare subsistence trades, where the worker is forced to
+such a low level in his standard of life that he continually falls below
+self-support. We have many trades of these three types in America, all
+of them demanding the work of young and untrained girls. Yet, in spite
+of the obvious dangers surrounding every girl who enters one of them,
+little is done to guide the multitude of children who leave school
+prematurely each year into reasonable occupations.
+
+Unquestionably the average American child has received a more expensive
+education than has yet been accorded to the child of any other nation.
+The girls working in department stores have been in the public schools
+on an average of eight years, while even the factory girls, who so often
+leave school from the lower grades, have yet averaged six and two-tenths
+years of education at the public expense, before they enter industrial
+life. Certainly the community that has accomplished so much could afford
+them help and oversight for six and a half years longer, which is the
+average length of time that a working girl is employed. The state might
+well undertake this, if only to secure its former investment and to save
+that investment from utter loss.
+
+Our generation, said to have developed a new enthusiasm for the
+possibilities of child life, and to have put fresh meaning into the
+phrase "children's rights," may at last have the courage to insist upon
+a child's right to be well born and to start in life with its tiny body
+free from disease. Certainly allied to this new understanding of child
+life and a part of the same movement is the new science of eugenics with
+its recently appointed university professors. Its organized societies
+publish an ever-increasing mass of information as to that which
+constitutes the inheritance of well-born children. When this new science
+makes clear to the public that those diseases which are a direct outcome
+of the social evil are clearly responsible for race deterioration,
+effective indignation may at last be aroused, both against the
+preventable infant mortality for which these diseases are responsible,
+and against the ghastly fact that the survivors among these afflicted
+children infect their contemporaries and hand on the evil heritage to
+another generation. Public societies for the prevention of blindness are
+continually distributing information on the care of new-born children
+and may at length answer that old, confusing question "Did this man sin
+or his parents, that he was born blind?" Such knowledge is becoming more
+widespread every day and the rising interest in infant welfare must in
+time react upon the very existence of the social-evil itself.
+
+This new public concern for the welfare of little children in certain
+American cities has resulted in a municipal milk supply; in many German
+cities, in free hospitals and nurseries. New York, Chicago, Boston and
+other large towns, employ hundreds of nurses each summer to instruct
+tenement-house mothers upon the care of little children. Doubtless all
+of this enthusiasm for the nurture of children will at last arouse
+public opinion in regard to the transmission of that one type of disease
+which thousands of them annually inherit, and which is directly
+traceable to the vicious living of their parents or grandparents. This
+slaughter of the innocents, this infliction of suffering upon the
+new-born, is so gratuitous and so unfair, that it is only a question of
+time until an outraged sense of justice shall be aroused on behalf of
+these children. But even before help comes through chivalric sentiments,
+governmental and municipal agencies will decline to spend the
+tax-payers' money for the relief of suffering infants, when by the
+exertion of the same authority they could easily provide against the
+possibility of the birth of a child so afflicted. It is obvious that the
+average tax-payer would be moved to demand the extermination of that
+form of vice which has been declared illegal, although it still
+flourishes by official connivance, did he once clearly apprehend that it
+is responsible for the existence of these diseases which cost him so
+dear. It is only his ignorance which makes him remain inert until each
+victim of the white slave traffic shall be avenged unto the third and
+fourth generation of them that bought her. It is quite possible that the
+tax-payer will himself contend that, as the state does not legalize a
+marriage without a license officially recorded, that the status of
+children may be clearly defined, so the state would need to go but one
+step further in the same direction, to insist upon health certificates
+from the applicant for a marriage license, that the health of future
+children might in a certain measure, be guaranteed. Whether or not this
+step may be predicted, the mere discussion of this matter in itself, is
+an indication of the changing public opinion, as is the fact that such
+legislation has already been enacted in two states, which are only now
+putting into action the recommendation made centuries ago by such social
+philosophers as Plato and Sir Thomas More. A sense of justice outraged
+by the wanton destruction of new-born children, may in time unite with
+that ardent tide of rising enthusiasm for the nurture of the young,
+until the old barriers of silence and inaction, behind which the social
+evil has so long intrenched itself, shall at last give way.
+
+Certainly it will soon be found that the sentiment of pity, so recently
+aroused throughout the country on behalf of the victims of the white
+slave traffic, will be totally unable to afford them protection unless
+it becomes incorporated in government. It is possible that we are on the
+eve of a series of legislative enactments similar to those which
+resulted from the attempts to regulate child labor. Through the entire
+course of the last century, in that anticipation of coming changes which
+does so much to bring changes about, the friends of the children were
+steadily engaged in making a new state, from the first child labor law
+passed in the English parliament in 1803 to the final passage of the
+so-called children's charter in 1909. During the long century of
+transforming pity into political action there was created that social
+sympathy which has become one of the greatest forces in modern
+legislation, and to which we may confidently appeal in this new crusade
+against the social evil.
+
+Another point of similarity to the child labor movement is obvious, for
+the friends of the children early found that they needed much
+statistical information and that the great problem of the would-be
+reformer is not so much overcoming actual opposition--the passing of
+time gradually does that for him--as obtaining and formulating accurate
+knowledge and fitting that knowledge into the trend of his time. From
+this point of view and upon the basis of what has already been
+accomplished for "the protection of minors," the many recent
+investigations which have revealed the extreme youth of the victims of
+the white slave traffic, should make legislation on their behalf all the
+more feasible. Certainly no reformer could ever more legitimately make
+an emotional appeal to the higher sensibility of the public.
+
+In the rescue homes recently opened in Chicago by the White Slave
+Traffic Committee of the League of Cook County Clubs, the tender ages of
+the little girls who were brought there horrified the good clubwomen
+more than any other aspect of the situation. A number of the little
+inmates in the home wanted to play with dolls and several of them
+brought dolls of their own, which they had kept with them through all
+their vicissitudes. There is something literally heart-breaking in the
+thought of these little children who are ensnared and debauched when
+they are still young enough to have every right to protection and care.
+Quite recently I visited a home for semi-delinquent girls against each
+one of whom stood a grave charge involving the loss of her chastity.
+Upon each of the little white beds or on one of the stiff chairs
+standing by its side was a doll belonging to a delinquent owner still
+young enough to love and cherish this supreme toy of childhood. I had
+come to the home prepared to "lecture to the inmates." I remained to
+dress dolls with a handful of little girls who eagerly asked questions
+about the dolls I had once possessed in a childhood which seemed to them
+so remote. Looking at the little victims who supply the white slave
+trade, one is reminded of the burning words of Dr. Howard Kelly uttered
+in response to the demand that the social evil be legalized and its
+victims licensed. He says: "Where shall we look to recruit the
+ever-failing ranks of these poor creatures as they die yearly by the
+tens of thousands? Which of the little girls of our land shall we
+designate for this traffic? Mark their sweet innocence to-day as they
+run about in our streets and parks prattling and playing, ever busy
+about nothing; which of them shall we snatch as they approach maturity,
+to supply this foul mart?"
+
+It is incomprehensible that a nation whose chief boast is its free
+public education, that a people always ready to respond to any moral or
+financial appeal made in the name of children, should permit this infamy
+against childhood to continue! Only the protection of all children from
+the menacing temptations which their youth is unable to withstand, will
+prevent some of them from falling victims to the white slave traffic;
+only when moral education is made effective and universal will there be
+hope for the actual abolition of commercialized vice. These are
+illustrations perhaps of that curious solidarity of which society is so
+rapidly becoming conscious.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+PHILANTHROPIC RESCUE AND PREVENTION
+
+
+There is no doubt that philanthropy often reflects and dramatizes the
+modern sensitiveness of the community in relation to a social wrong,
+because those engaged in the rescue of the victims are able to
+apprehend, through their daily experiences, many aspects of a recognized
+evil concerning which the public are ignorant and therefore indifferent.
+However ancient a wrong may be, in each generation it must become newly
+embodied in living people and the social custom into which it has
+hardened through the years, must be continued in individual lives.
+Unless the contemporaries of such unhappy individuals are touched to
+tenderness or stirred to indignation by the actual embodiments of the
+old wrong in their own generation, effective action cannot be secured.
+
+The social evil has, on the whole, received less philanthropic effort
+than any other well-recognized menace to the community, largely because
+there is something peculiarly distasteful and distressing in personal
+acquaintance with its victims; a distaste and distress that sometimes
+leads to actual nervous collapse. A distinguished Englishman has
+recently written "that sober-minded people who, from motives of pity,
+have looked the hideous evil full in the face, have often asserted that
+nothing in their experience has seemed to threaten them so nearly with a
+loss of reason."
+
+Nevertheless, this comparative lack of philanthropic effort is the more
+remarkable because the average age of the recruits to prostitution is
+between sixteen and eighteen years, the age at which girls are still
+minors under the law in respect to all matters of property. We allow a
+minor to determine for herself whether or not she will live this most
+abominable life, although if she resolve to be a thief she will, if
+possible, be apprehended and imprisoned; if she become a vagrant she
+will be restrained; even if she become a professional beggar, she will
+be interfered with; but the decision to lead this evil life, disastrous
+alike to herself and the community, although well known to the police,
+is openly permitted. If a man has seized upon a moment of weakness in a
+girl and obtained her consent, although she may thereafter be in dire
+need of help she is put outside all protection of the law. The courts
+assume that such a girl has deliberately decided for herself and that
+because she is not "of previous chaste life and character," she is lost
+to all decency. Yet every human being knows deep down in his heart that
+his own moral energy ebbs and flows, that he could not be judged fairly
+by his hours of defeat, and that after revealing moments of weakness,
+although shocked and frightened, he is the same human being, struggling
+as he did before. Nevertheless in some states, a little girl as young as
+ten years of age may make this irrevocable decision for herself.
+
+Modern philanthropy, continually discovering new aspects of prostitution
+through the aid of economics, sanitary science, statistical research,
+and many other agencies, finds that this increase of knowledge
+inevitably leads it from the attempt to rescue the victims of white
+slavery to a consideration of the abolition of the monstrous wrong
+itself. At the present moment philanthropy is gradually impelled to a
+consideration of prostitution in relation to the welfare and the orderly
+existence of society itself. If the moral fire seems at times to be
+dying out of certain good old words, such as charity, it is filling with
+new warmth such words as social justice, which belong distinctively to
+our own time. It is also true that those for whom these words contain
+most of hope and warmth are those who have been long mindful of the old
+tasks and obligations, as if the great basic emotion of human compassion
+had more than held its own. Certainly the youth of many of the victims
+of the white slave traffic, and the helplessness of the older girls who
+find themselves caught in the grip of an enormous force which they
+cannot comprehend, make a most pitiful appeal. Philanthropy moreover
+discovers many young girls, who if they had not been rescued by
+protective agencies would have become permanent outcasts, although they
+would have entered a disreputable life through no fault of their own.
+
+The illustrations in this chapter are all taken from the Juvenile
+Protective Association of Chicago in connection with its efforts to save
+girls from overwhelming temptation. Doubtless many other associations
+could offer equally convincing testimony, for in recent years the number
+of people to whom the very existence of the white slave traffic has
+become unendurable and who are determinedly working against it, has
+enormously increased.
+
+A surprising number of country girls have been either brought to Chicago
+under false pretences, or have been decoyed into an evil life very soon
+after their arrival in the city. Mr. Clifford Roe estimates that more
+than half of the girls who have been recruited into a disreputable life
+in Chicago have come from the farms and smaller towns in Illinois and
+from neighboring states. This estimate is borne out by the records of
+Paris and other metropolitan cities in which it is universally estimated
+that a little less than one-third of the prostitutes found in them, at
+any given moment, are city born.
+
+The experience of a pretty girl who came to the office of the Juvenile
+Protective Association, a year ago, is fairly typical of the argument
+many of these country girls offer in their own defense. This girl had
+been a hotel chambermaid in an Iowa town where many of the traveling
+patrons of the hotel had made love to her, one of them occasionally
+offering her protection if she would leave with him. At first she
+indignantly refused, but was at length convinced that the acceptance of
+such offers must be a very general practice and that, whatever might be
+the custom in the country, no one in a city made personal inquiries. She
+finally consented to accompany a young man to Seattle, both because she
+wanted to travel and because she was discouraged in her attempts to "be
+good." A few weeks later, when in Chicago, she had left the young man,
+acting from what she considered a point of honor, as his invitation had
+been limited to the journey which was now completed. Feeling too
+disgraced to go home and under the glamour of the life of idleness she
+had been leading, she had gone voluntarily into a disreputable house, in
+which the police had found her and sent her to the Association. She
+could not be persuaded to give up her plan, but consented to wait for a
+few days to "think it over." As she was leaving the office in company
+with a representative of the Association, they met the young man, who
+had been distractedly searching for her and had just discovered her
+whereabouts. She was married the very same day and of course the
+Association never saw her again.
+
+From the point of view of the traffickers in white slaves, it is much
+cheaper and safer to procure country girls after they have reached the
+city. Such girls are in constant danger because they are much more
+easily secreted than girls procured from the city. A country girl
+entering a vicious life quickly feels the disgrace and soon becomes too
+broken-spirited and discouraged to make any effort to escape into the
+unknown city which she believes to be full of horrors similar to those
+she has already encountered. She desires above all things to deceive her
+family at home, often sending money to them regularly and writing
+letters describing a fictitious life of hard work. Perhaps the most
+flagrant case with which the Association ever dealt, was that of two
+young girls who had come to Chicago from a village in West Virginia,
+hoping to earn large wages in order to help their families. They arrived
+in the city penniless, having been robbed en route of their one slender
+purse. As they stood in the railway station, utterly bewildered, they
+were accosted by a young man who presented the advertising card of a
+boarding-house and offered to take them there. They quite innocently
+accepted his invitation, but an hour later, finding themselves in a
+locked room, they became frightened and realized they had been duped.
+Fortunately the two agile country girls had no difficulty in jumping
+from a second-story window, but upon the street they were of course much
+too frightened to speak to anyone again and wandered about for hours.
+The house from which they had escaped bore the sign "rooms to rent," and
+they therefore carefully avoided all houses whose placards offered
+shelter. Finally, when they were desperate with hunger, they went into a
+saloon for a "free lunch," not in the least realizing that they were
+expected to take a drink in order to receive it. A policeman, seeing two
+young girls in a saloon "without escort," arrested them and took them to
+the nearest station where they spent the night in a wretched cell.
+
+At the hearing the next morning, where, much frightened, they gave a
+very incoherent account of their adventures, the judge fined them each
+fifteen dollars and costs, and as they were unable to pay the fine, they
+were ordered sent to the city prison. When they were escorted from the
+court room, another man approached them and offered to pay their fines
+if they would go with him. Frightened by their former experience, they
+stoutly declined his help, but were over-persuaded by his graphic
+portrayal of prison horrors and the disgrace that their imprisonment
+would bring upon "the folks at home." He also made clear that when they
+came out of prison, thirty days later, they would be no better off than
+they were now, save that they would have the added stigma of being
+jail-birds. The girls at last reluctantly consented to go with him, when
+a representative of the Juvenile Protective Association, who had
+followed them from the court room and had listened to the conversation,
+insisted upon the prompt arrest of the white slave trader. When the
+entire story, finally secured from the girls, was related to the judge,
+he reversed his decision, fined the man $100.00, which he was abundantly
+able to pay, and insisted that the girls be sent back to their mothers
+in Virginia. They were farmers' daughters, strong and capable of taking
+care of themselves in an environment that they understood, but in
+constant danger because of their ignorance of city life.
+
+The methods employed to secure city girls must be much more subtle and
+complicated than those employed with the less sophisticated country
+girl. Although the city girl, once procured, is later allowed more
+freedom than is accorded either to a country girl or to an immigrant
+girl, every effort is made to demoralize her completely before she
+enters the life. Because she may, at any moment, escape into the city
+which she knows so well, it is necessary to obtain her inner consent.
+Those whose profession it is to procure girls for the white slave trade
+apparently find it possible to decoy and demoralize most easily that
+city girl whose need for recreation has led her to the disreputable
+public dance hall or other questionable places of amusement.
+
+Gradually those philanthropic agencies that are endeavoring to be of
+service to the girls learn to know the dangers in these places. Many
+parents are utterly indifferent or ignorant of the pleasures that their
+children find for themselves. From the time these children were five
+years old, such parents were accustomed to see them take care of
+themselves on the street and at school, and it seems but natural that
+when the children are old enough to earn money, they should be able to
+find their own amusements.
+
+The girls are attracted to the unregulated dance halls not only by a
+love of pleasure but by a sense of adventure, and it is in these places
+that they are most easily recruited for a vicious life. Unfortunately
+there are three hundred and twenty-eight public dance halls in Chicago,
+one hundred and ninety of them connect directly with saloons, while
+liquor is openly sold in most of the others. This consumption of liquor
+enormously increases the danger to young people. A girl after a long
+day's work is easily induced to believe that a drink will dispel her
+lassitude. There is plenty of time between the dances to persuade her,
+as the intermissions are long, fifteen to twenty minutes, and the dances
+short, occupying but four or five minutes; moreover the halls are hot
+and dusty and it is almost impossible to obtain a drink of water. Often
+the entire purpose of the dance hall, with its carefully arranged
+intermissions, is the selling of liquor to the people it has brought
+together. After the girl has begun to drink, the way of the procurer,
+who is often in league with the "spieler" who frequents the dance hall,
+is comparatively easy. He assumes one of two roles, that of the
+sympathetic older man or that of the eager young lover. In the character
+of the former, he tells "the down-trodden working girl" that her wages
+are a mere pittance and that he can procure a better place for her with
+higher wages if she will trust him. He often makes allusions to the
+shabbiness or cheapness of her clothing and considers it "a shame that
+such a pretty girl cannot dress better." In the second role he
+apparently falls in love with her, tells of his rich parents,
+complaining that they want him to marry, "a society swell," but that he
+really prefers a working girl like herself. In either case he
+establishes friendly relations, exalted in the girl's mind, through the
+excitement of the liquor and the dance, into a new sense of intimate
+understanding and protection.
+
+Later in the evening, she leaves the hall with him for a restaurant
+because, as he truthfully says, she is exhausted and in need of food. At
+the supper, however, she drinks much more, and it is not surprising that
+she is at last persuaded that it is too late to go home and in the end
+consents to spend the rest of the night in a nearby lodging house. Six
+young girls, each accompanied by a "spieler" from a dance hall, were
+recently followed to a chop suey restaurant and then to a lodging-house,
+which the police were instigated to raid and where the six girls, more
+or less intoxicated, were found. If no one rescues the girl after such
+an experience, she sometimes does not return home at all, or if she
+does, feels herself initiated into a new world where it is possible to
+obtain money at will, to easily secure the pleasures it brings, and she
+comes at length to consider herself superior to her less sophisticated
+companions. Of course this latter state of mind is untenable for any
+length of time and the girl is soon found openly leading a disreputable
+life.
+
+The girls attending the cheap theatres and the vaudeville shows are most
+commonly approached through their vanity. They readily listen to the
+triumphs of a stage career, sure to be attained by such a "good looker,"
+and a large number of them follow a young man to the woman with whom he
+is in partnership, under the promise of being introduced to a theatrical
+manager. There are also theatrical agencies in league with disreputable
+places, who advertise for pretty girls, promising large salaries. Such
+an agency operating with a well-known "near theatre" in the state
+capital was recently prosecuted in Chicago and its license revoked. In
+this connection the experience of two young English girls is not
+unusual. They were sisters possessed of an extraordinary skill in
+juggling, who were brought to this country by a relative acting as their
+manager. Although he exploited them for his own benefit for three years,
+paying them the most meager salaries and supplying them with the
+simplest living in the towns which they "toured," he had protected them
+from all immorality, and they had preserved the clean living of the
+family of acrobats to which they belonged. Last October, when appearing
+in San Francisco, the girls, then sixteen and seventeen years of age,
+demanded more pay than the dollar and twenty cents a week each had been
+receiving, representing the five shillings with which they had started
+from home. The manager, who had become discouraged with his American
+experience, refused to accede to their demands, gave them each a ticket
+for Chicago, and heartlessly turned them adrift. Arriving in the city,
+they quite naturally at once applied to a theatrical agency, through
+which they were sent to a disreputable house where a vaudeville program
+was given each night. Delighted that they had found work so quickly,
+they took the position in good faith. During the very first performance,
+however, they became frightened by the conduct of the girls who preceded
+them on the program and by the hilarity of the audience. They managed to
+escape from the dressing-room, where they were waiting their turn, and
+on the street appealed to the first policeman, who brought them to the
+Juvenile Protective Association. They were detained for several days as
+witnesses against the theatrical agency, entering into the legal
+prosecution with that characteristic British spirit which is ever ready
+to protest against an imposition, before they left the city with a
+travelling company, each on a weekly salary of twenty dollars.
+
+The methods pursued on excursion boats are similar to those of the dance
+halls, in that decent girls are induced to drink quantities of liquor to
+which they are unaccustomed. On the high seas, liquor is sold usually in
+original packages, which enormously increases the amount consumed. It is
+not unusual to see a boy and girl drinking between them an entire bottle
+of whiskey. Some of these excursion boats carry five thousand people and
+in the easy breakdown of propriety which holiday-making often implies,
+and the absence of police, to which city young people are unaccustomed,
+the utmost freedom and license is often indulged in. Thus the lake
+excursions, one of the most delightful possibilities for recreation in
+Chicago, through lack of proper policing and through the sale of liquor,
+are made a menace to thousands of young people to whom they should be a
+great resource.
+
+When a philanthropic association, with a knowledge of the commercial
+exploitation of youth's natural response to gay surroundings, attempts
+to substitute innocent recreation, it finds the undertaking most
+difficult. In Chicago the Juvenile Protective Association, after a
+thorough investigation of public dance halls, amusement parks, five-cent
+theatres, and excursion boats, is insisting upon more vigorous
+enforcement of the existing legislation, and is also urging further
+legal regulation; Kansas City has instituted a Department of Public
+Welfare with power to regulate places of amusement; a New York committee
+has established model dance halls; Milwaukee is urging the appointment
+of commissions on public recreation, while New York and Columbus have
+already created them.
+
+Perhaps nothing in actual operation is more valuable than the small
+parks of Chicago in which the large halls are used every evening for
+dancing and where outdoor sports, swimming pools and gymnasiums daily
+attract thousands of young people. Unless cities make some such
+provision for their youth, those who sell the facilities for amusement
+in order to make a profit will continue to exploit the normal desire of
+all young people for recreation and pleasure. The city of Chicago
+contains at present eight hundred and fourteen thousand minors, all
+eager for pleasure. It is not surprising that commercial enterprise
+undertakes to supply this demand and that penny arcades, slot machines,
+candy stores, ice-cream parlors, moving-picture shows, skating rinks,
+cheap theatres and dance halls are trying to attract young people with
+every device known to modern advertising. Their promoters are, of
+course, careless of the moral effect upon their young customers if they
+can but secure their money. Until municipal provisions adequately meet
+this need, philanthropic and social organizations must be committed to
+the establishment of more adequate recreational facilities.
+
+Although many dangers are encountered by the pleasure-loving girl who
+demands that each evening shall bring her some measure of recreation, a
+large number of girls meet with difficulties and temptations while
+soberly at work. Many of these tempted girls are newly-arrived immigrant
+girls between the ages of sixteen and twenty, who find their first work
+in hotels. Polish girls especially are utilized in hotel kitchens and
+laundries, and for the interminable scrubbing of halls and lobbies where
+a knowledge of the English language is not necessary, but where their
+peasant strength is in demand. The work is very heavy and fatiguing and
+until the Illinois law limited the work of women to ten hours a day, it
+often lasted late into the night. Even now the girls report themselves
+so tired that at the end of the day, they crowd into the dormitories and
+fall upon their beds undressed. When food and shelter is given them,
+their wages are from $14.00 to $18.00 a month, most of which is usually
+sent back to the old country, that the remaining members of the family
+may be brought to America. Such positions are surrounded by temptations
+of every sort. Even the hotel housekeepers, who are honestly trying to
+protect the girls, admit that it is impossible to do it adequately. One
+of these housekeepers recently said "that it takes a girl who knows the
+world to work in any hotel," and regretted that the sophisticated
+English-speaking girl who might protect herself, was unable to endure
+the hard work. She added that as soon as a girl learned English she
+promoted her from the laundry to the halls and from there to the
+position of chambermaid, but that the latter position was the most
+dangerous of all, as the girls were constantly exposed to insults from
+the guests. In the less respectable hotels these newly-arrived immigrant
+girls, inevitably seeing a great deal of the life of the underworld and
+the apparent ease with which money may be earned in illicit ways, find
+their first impression of the moral standards of life in America most
+bewildering. One young Polish girl had worked for two years in a
+down-town hotel, and had steadfastly resisted all improper advances even
+sometimes by the aid of her own powerful fist. She yielded at last to
+the suggestions of the life about her when she received a telegram from
+Ellis Island stating that her mother had arrived in New York, but was
+too ill to be sent on to Chicago. All of her money had gone for the
+steamer ticket and as the thought of her old country mother, ill and
+alone among strangers, was too much for her long fortitude, she made the
+best bargain possible with the head waiter whose importunities she had
+hitherto resisted, accepted the little purse the other Polish girls in
+the hotel collected for her and arrived in New York only to find that
+her mother had died the night before.
+
+The simple obedience to parents on the part of these immigrant girls,
+working in hotels and restaurants, often miscarries pathetically. Their
+unspoiled human nature, not yet immune to the poisons of city life, when
+thrust into the midst of that unrelieved drudgery which lies at the
+foundation of all complex luxury, often results in the most fatal
+reactions. A young German woman, the proprietor of what is considered a
+successful "house" in the most notorious district in Chicago, traces her
+career directly to a desperate attempt to conform to the standard of
+"bringing home good wages" maintained by her numerous brothers and
+sisters. One requirement of her home was rigid: all money earned by a
+child must be paid into the family income until "legal age" was
+attained. The slightly neurotic, very pretty girl of seventeen heartily
+detested the dish-washing in a restaurant, which constituted her first
+place in America, and quite honestly declared that the heavy lifting was
+beyond her strength. Such insubordination was not tolerated at home, and
+every Saturday night when her meager wages, reduced by sick days "off,"
+were compared with what the others brought in, she was regularly
+scolded, "sometimes slapped," by her parents, jeered at by her more
+vigorous sisters and bullied by her brothers. She tried to shorten her
+hours by doing "rush-work" as a waitress at noon, but she found this
+still beyond her strength, and worst of all, the pay of two dollars and
+a half insufficient to satisfy her mother. Confiding her troubles to the
+other waitresses, one of them good-naturedly told her how she could make
+money through appointments in a nearby disreputable hotel, and so take
+home an increased amount of money easily called "a raise in wages." So
+strong was the habit of obedience, that the girl continued to take money
+home every Saturday night until her eighteenth birthday, in spite of the
+fact that she gave up the restaurant in less than six weeks after her
+first experience. Although all of this happened ten years ago and the
+German mother is long since dead, the daughter bitterly ended the story
+with the infamous hope that "the old lady was now suffering the torments
+of the lost, for making me what I am." Such a girl was subjected to
+temptations to which society has no right to expose her.
+
+A dangerous cynicism regarding the value of virtue, a cynicism never so
+unlovely as in the young, sometimes seizes a girl who, because of long
+hours and overwork, has been unable to preserve either her health or
+spirits and has lost all measure of joy in life. That this premature
+cynicism may be traced to an unhappy and narrow childhood is suggested
+by the fact that a large number of these girls come from families in
+which there has been little affection and the poor substitute of
+parental tyranny.
+
+A young Italian girl who earned four dollars a week in a tailor shop
+pulling out hastings, when asked why she wore a heavy woolen gown on one
+of the hottest days of last summer, replied that she was obliged to earn
+money for her clothes by scrubbing for the neighbors after hours; that
+she had found no such work lately and that her father would not allow
+her anything from her wages for clothes or for carfare, because he was
+buying a house.
+
+This parental control sometimes exercised in order to secure all of a
+daughter's wages, is often established with the best intentions in the
+world. I recall a French dressmaker who had frugally supported her two
+daughters until they were of working age, when she quite naturally
+expected them to conform to the careful habits of living necessary
+during her narrow years. In order to save carfare, she required her
+daughters to walk a long distance to the department store in which one
+was a bundle wrapper and the other a clerk at the ribbon counter. They
+dressed in black as being the most economical color and a penny spent in
+pleasure was never permitted. One day a young man who was buying ribbon
+from the older girl gave her a yard with the remark that she was much
+too young and pretty to be so somberly dressed. She wore the ribbon at
+work, never of course at home, but it opened a vista of delightful
+possibilities and she eagerly accepted a pair of gloves the following
+week from the same young man, who afterwards asked her to dine with him.
+This was the beginning of a winter of surreptitious pleasures on the
+part of the two sisters. They were shrewd enough never to be out later
+than ten o'clock and always brought home so-called overtime pay to their
+mother. In the spring the older girl, finding herself worn out by her
+dissipation and having resolved to cut loose from her home, came to the
+office of the Juvenile Protective Association to ask help for her
+younger sister. It was discovered that the mother was totally ignorant
+of the semi-professional life her daughters had been leading. She
+reiterated over and over again that she had always guarded them
+carefully and had given them no money to spend. It took months of
+constant visiting on the part of a representative of the Association
+before she was finally persuaded to treat the younger girl more
+generously.
+
+While this family is fairly typical of those in which over-restraint is
+due to the lack of understanding, it is true that in most cases the
+family tyranny is exercised by an old-country father in an honest
+attempt to guard his daughter against the dangers of a new world. The
+worst instances, however, are those in which the father has fallen into
+the evil ways of drink, and not only demands all of his daughter's
+wages, but treats her with great brutality when those wages fall below
+his expectations. Many such daughters have come to grief because they
+have been afraid to go home at night when their wage envelopes contained
+less than usual, either because a new system of piece work had reduced
+the amount or because, in a moment of weakness, they had taken out five
+cents with which to attend a show, or ten cents for the much-desired
+pleasure of riding back and forth the full length of an elevated
+railroad, or because they had in a thirsty moment taken out a nickel for
+a drink of soda water, or worst of all, had fallen a victim to the
+installment plan of buying a new hat or a pair of shoes. These girls, in
+their fear of beatings and scoldings, although they are sure of shelter
+and food and often have a mother who is trying to protect them from
+domestic storms, have almost no money for clothing, and are inevitably
+subject to moments of sheer revolt, their rebellion intensified by the
+fact that after a girl earns her own money and is accustomed to come and
+go upon the streets as an independent wage earner, she finds
+unsympathetic control much harder to bear than do schoolgirls of the
+same age who have never broken the habits of their childhood and are
+still economically dependent upon their parents.
+
+In spite of the fact that domestic service is always suggested by the
+average woman as an alternative for the working girl whose life is beset
+with danger, the federal report on "Women and Child Wage Earners in the
+United States" gives the occupation of the majority of girls who go
+wrong as that of domestic service, and in this it confirms the
+experience of every matron in a rescue home and the statistics in the
+maternity wards of the public hospitals. The report suggests that the
+danger comes from the general conditions of work: "These general
+conditions are the loneliness of the life, the lack of opportunities for
+making friends and securing recreation and amusement in safe
+surroundings, the monotonous and uninteresting nature of the work done
+as these untrained girls do it, the lack of external stimulus to pride
+and self-respect, and the absolutely unguarded state of the girl, except
+when directly under the eye of her mistress."
+
+In addition to these reasons, the girls realize that the opportunities
+for marriage are less in domestic service than in other occupations, and
+after all, the great business of youth is securing a mate, as the young
+instinctively understand. Unlike the working girl who lives at home and
+constantly meets young men of her own neighborhood and factory life, the
+girl in domestic service is brought into contact with very few possible
+lovers. Even the men of her former acquaintance, however slightly
+Americanized, do not like to call on a girl in someone else's kitchen,
+and find the entire situation embarrassing. The girl's mistress knows
+that for her own daughters mutual interests and recreation are the
+natural foundations for friendship with young men, which may or may not
+lead to marriage, but which is the prerogative of every young girl. The
+mistress does not, however, apply this worldly wisdom to the maid in her
+service, only eighteen or nineteen years old, utterly dependent upon her
+for social life save during one afternoon and evening a week.
+
+The majority of domestics are employed in families where there is only
+one, and the tired and dispirited girl, often without a taste for
+reading, spends many lonely hours. That most fundamental and powerful of
+all instincts has therefore no chance for diffusion or social expression
+and like all confined forces, tends to degenerate. The girl is equipped
+with no weapon with which to contend with those poisonous images which
+arise from the senses, and these images, bred of fatigue and loneliness,
+make a girl an easy victim. This is especially true of the colored girl,
+who because of her traditions, is often treated with so little respect
+by white men, that she is constantly subjected to insult. Even the
+colored servants in the New York apartment houses, who live at home and
+thus avoid this loneliness, because their hours extend until nine in the
+evening, are obliged to seek their pleasures late into the night.
+American cities offer occupation to more colored women than colored men
+and this surplus of women, in some cities as large as one hundred and
+thirty or forty women to one hundred men, affords an opportunity to the
+procurer which he quickly seizes. He is often in league with certain
+employment bureaus, who make a business of advancing the railroad or
+boat fare to colored girls coming from the South to enter into domestic
+service. The girl, in debt and unused to the city, is often put into a
+questionable house and kept there until her debt is paid many times
+over. In some respects her position is not unlike that of the imported
+white slave, for although she has the inestimable advantage of speaking
+the language, she finds it even more difficult to have her story
+credited. This contemptuous attitude places her at a disadvantage, for
+so universally are colored girls in domestic service suspected of
+blackmail that the average court is slow to credit their testimony when
+it is given against white men. The field of employment for colored girls
+is extremely limited. They are seldom found in factories and workshops.
+They are not wanted in department stores nor even as waitresses in
+hotels. The majority of them therefore are engaged in domestic service
+and often find the position of maid in a house of prostitution or of
+chambermaid in a disreputable hotel, the best-paying position open to
+them.
+
+When a girl who has been in domestic service loses her health, or for
+any other reason is unable to carry on her occupation, she is often
+curiously detached and isolated, because she has had so little
+opportunity for normal social relationships and friendships. One of the
+saddest cases ever brought to my personal knowledge was that of an
+orphan Norwegian girl who, coming to America at the age of seventeen,
+had been for three years in one position as general housemaid, during
+which time she had drawn only such part of her wages as was necessary
+for her simple clothing. At the end of three years, when she was sent to
+a public hospital with nervous prostration, her employer refused to pay
+her accumulated wages, on the ground that owing to her ill health she
+had been of little use during the last year. When she left the hospital,
+practically penniless, advised by the physician to find some outdoor
+work, she sold a patented egg-beater for six months, scarcely earning
+enough for her barest necessities and in constant dread lest she could
+not "keep respectable." When she was found wandering upon the street she
+not only had no capital with which to renew her stock, but had been
+without food for two days and had resolved to drown herself. Every
+effort was made to restore the half-crazed girl, but unfortunately
+hospital restraint was not considered necessary, and a month later, in
+spite of the vigilance of her new employer, her body was taken from the
+lake. One more of those gentle spirits who had found the problem of life
+insoluble, had sought refuge in death.
+
+A surprising number of suicides occur among girls who have been in
+domestic service, when they discover that they have been betrayed by
+their lovers. Perhaps nothing is more astonishing than the attitude of
+the mistress when the situation of such a forlorn girl is discovered,
+and it would be interesting to know how far this attitude has influenced
+these girls either to suicide or to their reckless choice of a
+disreputable life, which statistics show so many of their number have
+elected. The mistress almost invariably promptly dismisses such a girl,
+assuring her that she is disgraced forever and too polluted to remain
+for another hour in a good home. In full command of the situation, she
+usually succeeds in convincing the wretched girl that she is irreparably
+ruined. Her very phraseology, although unknown to herself, is a remnant
+of that earlier historic period when every woman was obliged in her own
+person to protect her home and to secure the status of her children. The
+indignant woman is trying to exercise alone that social restraint which
+should have been exercised by the community and which would have
+naturally protected the girl, if she had not been so withdrawn from it,
+in order to serve exclusively the interests of her mistress's family.
+Such a woman seldom follows the ruined girl through the dreary weeks
+after her dismissal; her difficulty in finding any sort of work, the
+ostracism of her former friends added to her own self-accusation, the
+poverty and loneliness, the final ten days in the hospital, and the
+great temptation which comes after that, to give away her child. The
+baby farmer who haunts the public hospitals for such cases tells her
+that upon the payment of forty or fifty dollars, he will take care of
+the child for a year and that "maybe it won't live any longer than
+that," and unless the hospital is equipped with a social service
+department, such as the one at the Massachusetts General, the girl
+leaves it weak and low-spirited and too broken to care what becomes of
+her. It is in moments such as these that many a poor girl, convinced
+that all the world is against her, decides to enter a disreputable
+house. Here at least she will find food and shelter, she will not be
+despised by the other inmates and she can earn money for the support of
+her child. Often she has received the address of such a house from one
+of her companions in the maternity ward where, among the fifty per cent,
+of the unmarried mothers, at least two or three sophisticated girls are
+always to be found, eager to "put wise" the girls who are merely
+unfortunate. Occasionally a girl who follows such baneful advice still
+insists upon keeping her child. I recall a pathetic case in the juvenile
+court of Chicago when such a mother of a five-year-old child was
+pronounced by the judge to be an "improper guardian." The agonized woman
+was told that she might retain her child if she would completely change
+her way of life; but she insisted that such a requirement was
+impossible, that she had no other means of earning her living, and that
+she had become too idle and broken for regular work. The child clung
+piteously to the mother, and, having gathered from the evidence that she
+was considered "bad," assured the judge over and over again that she was
+"the bestest mother in the world." The poor mother, who had begun her
+wretched mode of life for her child's sake, found herself so demoralized
+by her hideous experiences that she could not leave the life, even for
+the sake of the same child, still her most precious possession. Only six
+years before, this mother had been an honest girl cheerfully working in
+the household of a good woman, whose sense of duty had expressed itself
+in dismissing "the outcast."
+
+These discouraged girls, who so often come from domestic service to
+supply the vice demands of the city, are really the last representatives
+of those thousands of betrayed girls who for many years met the entire
+demand of the trade; for, while a procurer of some sort has performed
+his office for centuries, only in the last fifty years has the white
+slave market required the services of extended business enterprises in
+order to keep up the supply. Previously the demand had been largely met
+by the girls who had voluntarily entered a disreputable life because
+they had been betrayed. While the white slave traffic was organized
+primarily for profit it could of course never have flourished unless
+there had been a dearth of these discouraged girls. Is it not also
+significant that the surviving representatives of the girls who formerly
+supplied the demand are drawn most largely from the one occupation which
+is farthest from the modern ideal of social freedom and self-direction?
+Domestic service represents, in the modern world, more nearly than any
+other of the gainful occupations open to women, the ancient labor
+conditions under which woman's standard of chastity was developed and
+for so long maintained. It would seem obvious that both the girl
+over-restrained at home, as well as the girl in domestic service, had
+been too much withdrawn from the healthy influence of public opinion,
+and it is at least significant that domestic control has so broken down
+that the girls most completely under its rule are shown to be those in
+the greatest danger. Such a statement undoubtedly needs the modification
+that the girls in domestic service are frequently those who are
+unadapted to skilled labor and are least capable of taking care of
+themselves, yet the fact remains that they are belated morally as well
+as industrially. As they have missed the industrial discipline that
+comes from regular hours of systematized work, so they have missed the
+moral training of group solidarity, the ideals and restraints which the
+friendships and companionships of other working girls would have brought
+them.
+
+When the judgment of her peers becomes not less firm but more kindly,
+the self-supporting girl will have a safeguard and restraint many times
+more effective than the individual control which has become so
+inadequate, or the family discipline that, with the best intentions in
+the world, cannot cope with existing social conditions.
+
+The most perplexing case that comes before the philanthropic
+organizations trying to aid and rescue the victims of the white slave
+traffic, is of the type which involves a girl who has been secured by
+the trafficker when so lonely, detached and discouraged that she
+greedily seized whatever friendship was offered her. Such a girl has
+been so eager for affection that she clings to even the wretched
+simulacrum of it, afforded by the man who calls himself her "protector,"
+and she can only be permanently detached from the life to which he holds
+her, when she is put under the influence of more genuine affections and
+interests. That is doubtless one reason it is always more possible to
+help the girl who has become the mother of a child. Although she
+unjustly faces a public opinion much more severe than that encountered
+by the childless woman who also endeavors to "reform," the mother's
+sheer affection and maternal absorption enables her to overcome the
+greater difficulties more easily than the other woman, without the new
+warmth of motive, overcomes the lesser ones. The Salvation Army in their
+rescue homes have long recognized this need for an absorbing interest,
+which should involve the Magdalen's deepest affections and emotions, and
+therefore often utilize the rescued girl to save others.
+
+Certainly no philanthropic association, however rationalistic and
+suspicious of emotional appeal, can hope to help a girl once overwhelmed
+by desperate temptation, unless it is able to pull her back into the
+stream of kindly human fellowship and into a life involving normal human
+relations. Such an association must needs remember those wise words of
+Count Tolstoy: "We constantly think that there are circumstances in
+which a human being can be treated without affection, and there are no
+such circumstances."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+INCREASED SOCIAL CONTROL
+
+
+When certain groups in a community, to whom a social wrong has become
+intolerable, prepare for definite action against it, they almost
+invariably discover unexpected help from contemporaneous social
+movements with which they later find themselves allied. The most
+immediate help in this new campaign against the social evil will
+probably come thus indirectly from those streams of humanitarian effort
+which are ever widening and which will in time slowly engulf into their
+rising tide of enthusiasm for human betterment, even the victims of the
+white slave traffic.
+
+Foremost among them is the world-wide movement to preserve and prolong
+the term of human life, coupled with the determination on the part of
+the medical profession to eliminate all forms of germ diseases. The same
+physicians and sanitarians who have practically rid the modern city of
+small-pox and cholera and are eliminating tuberculosis, well know that
+the social evil is directly responsible for germ diseases more prevalent
+than any of the others, and also communicable. Over and over again in
+the history of large cities, Vienna, Paris, St. Louis, the medical
+profession has been urged to control the diseases resulting from the
+commercialized vice which the municipal authorities themselves
+permitted. But the experiments in segregation, in licensed systems, and
+certification have not been considered successful. The medical
+profession, hitherto divided in opinion as to the feasibility of such
+undertakings, is virtually united in the conclusion that so long as
+commercialized vice exists, physicians cannot guarantee a city against
+the spread of the contagious poison generated by it, which is fatal
+alike to the individual and to his offspring. The medical profession
+agrees that, as the victims of the social evil inevitably become the
+purveyors of germ diseases of a very persistent and incurable type,
+safety in this regard lies only in the extinction of commercialized
+vice. They point out the indirect ways in which this contagion can
+spread exactly as any other can, but insist that its control is
+enormously complicated by the fact that the victims of these diseases
+are most unwilling to be designated and quarantined. The medical
+profession is at last taking the position that the community wishing to
+protect itself against this contagion will in the end be driven to the
+extermination of the very source itself. A well-known authority states
+the one breeding-place of these disease germs, without exception, is the
+social institution designated as prostitution, but, once bred and
+cultivated there, they then spread through the community, attacking
+alike both the innocent and the guilty.
+
+We can imagine, after a dozen years of vigorous and able propaganda of
+this opinion on the part of public-spirited physicians and sanitarians,
+that a city might well appeal to the medical profession to exterminate
+prostitution on the very ground that it is a source of constant danger
+to the health and future of the community. Such a city might readily
+give to the board of health ordered to undertake this extermination more
+absolute authority than is now accorded to it in a small-pox epidemic.
+Of course, no city could reach such a view unless the education of the
+public proceeded much more rapidly than at present, although the
+newly-established custom of careful medical examination of
+school-children and of employees in factories and commercial
+establishments must result in the discovery of many such cases, and in
+the end adequate provision must be made for their isolation. A child was
+recently discovered in a Chicago school with an open sore upon her lip,
+which made her a most dangerous source of infection. She was just
+fourteen years of age, too old to be admitted into that most pathetic
+and most unlovely of all children's wards, where children must suffer
+for "the sins of their fathers," and too young and innocent to be put
+into the women's ward in which the public takes care of those wrecks of
+dissolute living who are no longer valuable to the commerce which once
+secured them, and have become merely worthless stock which pays no
+dividend. The disease of the little girl was in too virulent a stage to
+admit her to that convalescent home lately established in Chicago for
+those infected children who are dismissed from the county hospital, but
+whom it is impossible to return to their old surroundings. A
+philanthropic association was finally obliged to pay her board for weeks
+to a woman who carefully followed instructions as to her treatment. This
+is but one example of a child who was discovered and provided for, but
+it is evident that the public cannot long remain indifferent to the care
+of such cases when it has already established the means for detecting
+them. In twenty-seven months over six hundred children passed through
+this most piteous children's ward in Chicago's public hospital. All but
+twenty-nine of these children were under ten years of age, and doubtless
+a number of them had been victims of that wretched tradition that a man
+afflicted with this incurable disease might cure himself at the expense
+of innocence.
+
+Crusades against other infectious diseases, such as small-pox and
+cholera, imply well-considered sanitary precautions, dependent upon
+widespread education and an aroused public opinion. To establish such
+education and to arouse the public in regard to this present menace
+apparently presents insuperable difficulties. Many newspapers, so ready
+to deal with all other forms of vice and misery, never allow these evils
+to be mentioned in their columns except in the advertisements of quack
+remedies; the clergy, unlike the founder of the Christian religion and
+the early apostles, seldom preach against the sin of which these
+contagions are an inevitable consequence: the physicians, bound by a
+rigorous medical etiquette, tell nothing of the prevalence of these
+maladies, use a confusing nomenclature in the hospitals, and write only
+contributory causes upon the very death certificates of the victims.
+
+Yet it is easy to predict that a society committed to the abolition of
+infectious germs, to a higher degree of public health, and to a better
+standard of sanitation will not forever permit these highly communicable
+diseases to spread unchecked in its midst, and that a public, convinced
+that sanitary science, properly supported, might rid our cities of this
+type of disease, will at length insist upon its accomplishment. When we
+consider the many things undertaken in the name of health and sanitation
+it becomes easy to make the prediction, for public health is a magic
+word which ever grows more potent, as society realizes that the very
+existence of the modern city would be an impossibility had it not been
+discovered that the health of the individual is largely controlled by
+the hygienic condition of his surroundings. Since the first commission
+to inquire into the conditions of great cities was appointed in
+Manchester in 1844, sanitary science, both in knowledge and municipal
+authority, has progressed until advocates of the most advanced measures
+in city hygiene and preventive sanitary science boldly state that
+neglected childhood and neglected disease are the most potent causes of
+social insufficiency.
+
+Certainly a plea could be made for the women and children who are often
+the innocent victims of these diseases. Quite recently in Chicago there
+was brought to my attention the incredibly pathetic plight of a widow
+with four children who was in such constant fear of spreading the
+infection for which her husband had been responsible, that she
+touchingly offered to leave her children forevermore, if there was no
+other way to save them from the horrible suffering she herself was
+enduring. In spite of thousands of such cases Utah is the pioneer and
+only state with a law which requires that this infection shall be
+reported and controlled, as are other contagious maladies, and which
+also authorizes boards of health to take adequate measures in order to
+secure protection.
+
+Another humanitarian movement from which assistance will doubtless come
+to the crusade against the social evil, is the great movement against
+alcoholism with its recent revival in every civilized country of the
+world. A careful scientist has called alcohol the indispensable vehicle
+of the business transacted by the white slave traders, and has asserted
+that without its use this trade could not long continue. Whoever has
+tried to help a girl making an effort to leave the irregular life she
+has been leading, must have been discouraged by the victim's attempts to
+overcome the habit of using alcohol and drugs. Such a girl has commonly
+been drawn into the life in the first place when under the influence of
+liquor and has continued to drink that she might be able to live through
+each day. Furthermore, the drinking habit grows upon her because she is
+constantly required to sell liquor and to be "treated."
+
+It is estimated that the liquor sold by such girls nets a profit to the
+trade of two hundred and fifty per cent. over and above the girl's own
+commission. Chicago made at least one honest effort to divorce the sale
+of liquor from prostitution, when the superintendent of police last year
+ruled that no liquor should be sold in any disreputable house. The
+difficulty of enforcing such an order is greatly increased because such
+houses, as well as the questionable dance halls, commonly obtain a
+special permit to sell liquor under a federal license, which is not only
+cheaper than the saloon license obtained from the city, but has the
+added advantage to the holder that he can sell after one o'clock in the
+morning, at which time the city closes all saloons.
+
+The aggregate annual profit of the two hundred and thirty-six disorderly
+saloons recently investigated in Chicago by the Vice Commission was
+$4,307,000. This profit on the sale of liquor can be traced all along
+the line in connection with the white slave traffic and is no less
+disastrous from the point of view of young men than of the girls. Even a
+slight exhilaration from alcohol relaxes the moral sense and throws a
+sentimental or adventurous glamor over an aspect of life from which a
+decent young man would ordinarily recoil, and its continued use
+stimulates the senses at the very moment when the intellectual and moral
+inhibitions are lessened. May we not conclude that both chastity and
+self-restraint are more firmly established in the modern city than we
+realize, when the white slave traders find it necessary both forcibly to
+detain their victims and to ply young men with alcohol that they may
+profit thereby? General Bingham, who as Police Commissioner of New York
+certainly knew whereof he spoke, says: "There is not enough depravity in
+human nature to keep alive this very large business. The immorality of
+women and the brutishness of men have to be persuaded, coaxed and
+constantly stimulated in order to keep the social evil in its present
+state of business prosperity."
+
+We may soberly hope that some of the experiments made by governmental
+and municipal authorities to control and regulate the sale of liquor
+will at last meet with such a measure of success that the existence of
+public prostitution, deprived of its artificial stimulus of alcohol,
+will in the end be imperilled. The Chicago Vice Commission has made a
+series of valuable suggestions for the regulation of saloons and for the
+separation of the sale of liquor from dance halls and from all other
+places known as recruiting grounds for the white slave traffic. There is
+still need for a much wider and more thorough education of the public in
+regard to the historic connection between commercialized vice and
+alcoholism, of the close relation between politics and the liquor
+interests, behind which the social evil so often entrenches itself.
+
+In addition to the movements against germ diseases and the suppression
+of alcoholism, both of which are mitigating the hard fate of the victims
+of the white slave traffic, other public movements mysteriously
+affecting all parts of the social order will in time threaten the very
+existence of commercialized vice. First among these, perhaps, is the
+equal suffrage movement. On the horizon everywhere are signs that woman
+will soon receive the right to exercise political power, and it is
+believed that she will show her efficiency most conspicuously in finding
+means for enhancing and preserving human life, if only as the result of
+her age-long experiences. That primitive maternal instinct, which has
+always been as ready to defend as it has been to nurture, will doubtless
+promptly grapple with certain crimes connected with the white slave
+traffic; women with political power would not brook that men should live
+upon the wages of captured victims, should openly hire youths to ruin
+and debase young girls, should be permitted to transmit poison to unborn
+children. Life is full of hidden remedial powers which society has not
+yet utilized, but perhaps nowhere is the waste more flagrant than in the
+matured deductions and judgments of the women, who are constantly forced
+to share the social injustices which they have no recognized power to
+alter. If political rights were once given to women, if the situation
+were theirs to deal with as a matter of civic responsibility, one cannot
+imagine that the existence of the social evil would remain unchallenged
+in its semi-legal protection. Those women who are already possessed of
+political power have in many ways registered their conscience in regard
+to it. The Norwegian women, for instance, have guaranteed to every
+illegitimate child the right of inheritance to its father's name and
+property by a law which also provides for the care of its mother. This
+is in marked contrast to the usual treatment of the mother of an
+illegitimate child, who even when the paternity of her child is
+acknowledged receives from the father but a pitiful sum for its support;
+moreover, if the child dies before birth and the mother conceals this
+fact, although perfectly guiltless of its death, she can be sent to jail
+for a year.
+
+The age of consent is eighteen years in all of the states in which women
+have had the ballot, although in only eight of the others is it so high.
+In the majority of the latter the age of consent is between fourteen and
+sixteen, and in some of them it is as low as ten. These legal
+regulations persist in spite of the well-known fact that the mass of
+girls enter a disreputable life below the age of eighteen. In equal
+suffrage states important issues regarding women and children, whether
+of the sweat-shop or the brothel, have always brought out the women
+voters in great numbers.
+
+Certainly enfranchised women would offer some protection to the white
+slaves themselves who are tolerated and segregated, but who, because
+their very existence is illegal, may be arrested whenever any police
+captain chooses, may be brought before a magistrate, fined and
+imprisoned. A woman so arrested may be obliged to answer the most
+harassing questions put to her by a city attorney with no other woman
+near to protect her from insult. She may be subjected to the most trying
+examinations in the presence of policemen with no matron to whom to
+appeal. These things constantly happen everywhere save in Scandinavian
+countries, where juries of women sit upon such cases and offer the
+protection of their presence to the prisoners. Without such protection
+even an innocent woman, made to appear a member of this despised class,
+receives no consideration. A girl of fifteen recently acting in a South
+Chicago theatre attracted the attention of a milkman who gradually
+convinced her that he was respectable. Walking with him one evening to
+the door of her lodging-house, the girl told him of her difficulties and
+quite innocently accepted money for the payment of her room rent. The
+following morning as she was leaving the house the milkman met her at
+the door and asked her for the five dollars he had given her the night
+before. When she said she had used it to pay her debt to the landlady,
+he angrily replied that unless she returned the money at once he would
+call a policeman and arrest her on a charge of theft. The girl, helpless
+because she had already disposed of the money, was taken to court,
+where, frightened and confused, she was unable to give a convincing
+account of the interview the night before; except for the prompt
+intervention on the part of a woman, she would either have been obliged
+to put herself in the power of the milkman, who offered to pay her fine,
+or she would have been sent to the city prison, not because the proof of
+her guilt was conclusive, but because her connection with a cheap
+theatre and the hour of the so-called offence had convinced the court
+that she belonged to a class of women who are regarded as no longer
+entitled to legal protection.
+
+Several years ago in Colorado the disreputable women of Denver appealed
+to a large political club of women against the action of the police who
+were forcing them to register under the threat of arrest in order later
+to secure their votes for a corrupt politician. The disreputable women,
+wishing to conceal their real names and addresses, did not want to be
+registered, in this respect at least differing from the lodging-house
+men whose venal votes play such an important part in every municipal
+election. The women's political club responded to this appeal, and not
+only stopped the coercion, but finally turned out of office the chief of
+police responsible for it.
+
+The very fact that the conditions and results of the social evil lie so
+far away from the knowledge of good women is largely responsible for the
+secrecy and hypocrisy upon which it thrives. Most good women will
+probably never consent to break through their ignorance save under a
+sense of duty which has ever been the incentive to action to which even
+timid women have responded. At least a promising beginning would be made
+toward a more effective social control, if the mass of conscientious
+women were once thoroughly convinced that a knowledge of local vice
+conditions was a matter of civic obligation, if the entire body of
+conventional women, simply because they held the franchise, felt
+constrained to inform themselves concerning the social evil throughout
+the cities of America. Perhaps the most immediate result would be a
+change in the attitude toward prostitution on the part of elected
+officials, responding to that of their constituency. Although good and
+bad men alike prize chastity in women, and although good men require it
+of themselves, almost all men are convinced that it is impossible to
+require it of thousands of their fellow-citizens, and hence connive at
+the policy of the officials who permit commercialized vice to flourish.
+
+As the first organized Women's Rights movement was inaugurated by the
+women who were refused seats in the world's Anti-Slavery convention held
+in London in 1840, although they had been the very pioneers in the
+organization of the American Abolitionists, so it is quite possible that
+an equally energetic attempt to abolish white slavery will bring many
+women into the Equal Suffrage movement, simply because they too will
+discover that without the use of the ballot they are unable to work
+effectively for the eradication of a social wrong.
+
+Women are said to have been historically indifferent to social
+injustices, but it may be possible that, if they once really comprehend
+the actual position of prostitutes the world over, their sense of
+justice will at last be freed, and become forevermore a new force in the
+long struggle for social righteousness. The wind of moral aspiration now
+dies down and now blows with unexpected force, urging on the movements
+of social destiny; but never do the sails of the ship of state push
+forward with such assured progress as when filled by the mighty hopes of
+a newly enfranchised class. Those already responsible for existing
+conditions have come to acquiesce in them, and feel obliged to adduce
+reasons explaining the permanence and so-called necessity of the most
+evil conditions. On the other hand, the newly enfranchised view existing
+conditions more critically, more as human beings and less as
+politicians.
+
+After all, why should the woman voter concur in the assumption that
+every large city must either set aside well-known districts for the
+accommodation of prostitution, as Chicago does, or continually permit it
+to flourish in tenement and apartment houses, as is done in New York?
+Smaller communities and towns throughout the land are free from at least
+this semi-legal organization of it, and why should it be accepted as a
+permanent aspect of city life? The valuable report of the Chicago Vice
+Commission estimates that twenty thousand of the men daily responsible
+for this evil in Chicago live outside of the city. They are the men who
+come from other towns to Chicago in order to see the sights. They are
+supposedly moral at home, where they are well known and subjected to the
+constant control of public opinion. The report goes on to state that
+during conventions or "show" occasions the business of commercialized
+vice is enormously increased. The village gossip with her vituperative
+tongue after all performs a valuable function both of castigation and
+retribution; but her fellow-townsman, although quite unconscious of her
+restraint, coming into a city hotel often experiences a great sense of
+relief which easily rises to a mood of exhilaration. In addition to this
+he holds an exaggerated notion of the wickedness of the city. A visiting
+countryman is often shown museums and questionable sights reserved
+largely for his patronage, just as tourists are conducted to lurid
+Parisian revels and indecencies sustained primarily for their horrified
+contemplation. Such a situation would indicate that, because control is
+much more difficult in a large city than in a small town, the city
+deliberately provides for its own inability in this direction.
+
+During a recent military encampment in Chicago large numbers of young
+girls were attracted to it by that glamour which always surrounds the
+soldier. On the complaint of several mothers, investigators discovered
+that the girls were there without the knowledge of their parents, some
+of them having literally climbed out of windows after their parents had
+supposed them asleep. A thorough investigation disclosed not only an
+enormous increase of business in the restricted districts, but the
+downfall of many young girls who had hitherto been thoroughly
+respectable and able to resist the ordinary temptations of city life,
+but who had completely lost their heads over the glitter of a military
+camp. One young girl was seen by an investigator in the late evening
+hurrying away from the camp. She was so absorbed in her trouble and so
+blinded by her tears that she fairly ran against him and he heard her
+praying, as she frantically clutched the beads around her neck, "Oh,
+Mother of God, what have I done! What have I done!" The Chicago
+encampment was finally brought under control through the combined
+efforts of the park commissioners, the city police, and the military
+authorities, but not without a certain resentment from the last toward
+"civilian interference." Such an encampment may be regarded as an
+historic survival representing the standing armies sustained in Europe
+since the days of the Roman Empire. These large bodies of men, deprived
+of domestic life, have always afforded centres in which contempt for the
+chastity of women has been fostered. The older centres of militarism
+have established prophylactic measures designed to protect the health of
+the soldiers, but evince no concern for the fate of the ruined women. It
+is a matter of recent history that Josephine Butler and the men and
+women associated with her, subjected themselves to unspeakable insult
+for eight years before they finally induced the English Parliament to
+repeal the infamous Contagious Disease Acts relating to the garrison
+towns of Great Britain, through which the government itself not only
+permitted vice, but legally provided for it within certain specified
+limits.
+
+The primary difficulty of military life lies in the withdrawal of large
+numbers of men from normal family life, and hence from the domestic
+restraints and social checks which are operative upon the mass of human
+beings. The great peace propagandas have emphasized the unjustifiable
+expense involved in the maintenance of the standing armies of Europe,
+the social waste in the withdrawal of thousands of young men from
+industrial, commercial and professional pursuits into the barren
+negative life of the barracks. They might go further and lay stress upon
+the loss of moral sensibility, the destruction of romantic love, the
+perversion of the longing for wife and child. The very stability and
+refinement of the social order depend upon the preservation of these
+basic emotions.
+
+Social customs are instituted so slowly and even imperceptibly, so far
+as the conforming individual is concerned, that the mass of men submit
+to control in spite of themselves, and it is therefore always difficult
+to determine how far the average upright living is the result of
+external props, until they are suddenly withdrawn. This is especially
+true of domestic life. Even the sordid marriages in which the senses
+have forestalled the heart almost always end in some form of family
+affection. The young couple who may have been brought together in
+marriage upon the most primitive plane, after twenty years of hard work
+in meagre, unlovely surroundings, in spite of stupidity and many
+mistakes, in the face of failure and even wrongdoing, will have unfolded
+lives of unassuming affection and family devotion to a group of
+children. They will have faithfully fulfilled that obligation which
+falls to the lot of the majority of men and women, with its high rewards
+and painful sacrifices. These rewards as well as the restraints of
+family life are denied to the soldier. A somewhat similar situation is
+found in every large construction camp, and in the crowded city
+tenements occupied by thousands of immigrant men who have preceded their
+families to America.
+
+In the light of the history of prostitution in relation to militarism,
+nothing could be more absurd than the familiar statement that virtuous
+women could not safely walk the streets unless opportunity for secret
+vice were offered to the men of the city. It is precisely the men who
+have not submitted to self-control who are dangerous and they only, as
+the court records themselves make clear.
+
+In addition to the large social movements for the betterment of Public
+Health, for the establishment of Temperance, for the promotion of Equal
+Suffrage, and for the hastening of Peace and Arbitration is the
+world-wide organization and active propaganda of International
+Socialism. It has always included the abolition of this ancient evil in
+its program of social reconstruction, and since the publication of
+Bebel's great book, nearly thirty years ago, the leaders of the
+Socialist party have never ceased to discuss the economics of
+prostitution with its psychological and moral resultants. The Socialists
+contend that commercialized vice is fundamentally a question of poverty,
+a by-product of despair, which will disappear only with the abolition of
+poverty itself; that it persists not primarily from inherent weakness in
+human nature, but is a vice arising from a defective organization of
+social life; that with a reorganization of society, at least all of
+prostitution which is founded upon the hunger of the victims and upon
+the profits of the traffickers, will disappear.
+
+Whether we are Socialists or not, we will all admit that every level of
+culture breeds its own particular brand of vice and uncovers new
+weaknesses as well as new nobilities in human nature; that a given
+social development--such, for instance as the conditions of life for
+thousands of young people in crowded city quarters--may produce such
+temptations and present such snares to virtue, that average human nature
+cannot withstand them.
+
+The very fact that the existence of the social evil is semi-legal in
+large cities is an admission that our individual morality is so
+uncertain that it breaks down when social control is withdrawn and the
+opportunity for secrecy is offered. The situation indicates either that
+the best conscience of the community fails to translate itself into
+civic action or that our cities are too large to be civilized in a
+social sense. These difficulties have been enormously augmented during
+the past century so marked by the rapid growth of cities, because the
+great principle of liberty has been translated not only into the
+unlovely doctrine of commercial competition, but also has fostered in
+many men the belief that personal development necessitates a rebellion
+against existing social laws. To the opportunity for secrecy which the
+modern city offers, such men are able to add a high-sounding
+justification for their immoralities. Fortunately, however, for our
+moral progress, the specious and illegitimate theories of freedom are
+constantly being challenged, and a new form of social control is slowly
+establishing itself on the principle, so widespread in contemporary
+government, that the state has a responsibility for conditions which
+determine the health and welfare of its own members; that it is in the
+interest of social progress itself that hard-won liberties must be
+restrained by the demonstrable needs of society.
+
+This new and more vigorous development of social control, while
+reflecting something of that wholesome fear of public opinion which the
+intimacies of a small community maintain, is much more closely allied to
+the old communal restraints and mutual protections to which the human
+will first yielded. Although this new control is based upon the
+voluntary co-operation of self-directed individuals, in contrast to the
+forced submission that characterized the older forms of social
+restraint, nevertheless in predicting the establishment of adequate
+social control over the instinct which the modern novelists so often
+describe as "uncontrollable," there is a certain sanction in this old
+and well-nigh forgotten history.
+
+The most superficial student of social customs quickly discovers the
+practically unlimited extent to which public opinion has always
+regulated marriage. If the traditions of one tribe were endogamous, all
+the men dutifully married within it; but if the customs of another
+decreed that wives must be secured by capture or purchase, all the men
+of that tribe fared forth in order to secure their mates. From the
+primitive Australian who obtains his wives in exchange for his sisters
+or daughters, and never dreams of obtaining them in any other way, to
+the sophisticated young Frenchman, who without objection marries the
+bride his careful parents select for him; from the ancient Hebrew, who
+contentedly married the widow of his deceased brother because it was
+according to the law, to the modern Englishman who refused to marry his
+deceased wife's sister because the law forbade it, the entire pathway of
+the so-called uncontrollable instinct has been gradually confined
+between carefully clipped hedges and has steadily led up to a house of
+conventional domesticity. Men have fallen in love with their cousins or
+declined to fall in love with them, very much as custom declared
+marriages between cousins to be desirable or undesirable, as they
+formerly married their sisters and later absolutely ceased to desire to
+marry them. In fact, regulation of this great primitive instinct goes
+back of the human race itself. All the higher tribes of monkeys are
+strictly monogamous, and many species of birds are faithful to one mate,
+season after season. According to the great authority, Forel,
+prostitution never became established among primitive peoples. Even
+savage tribes designated the age at which their young men were permitted
+to assume paternity because feeble children were a drag upon their
+communal resources. As primitive control lessened with the disappearance
+of tribal organization and later of the patriarchal family, a social
+control, not less binding, was slowly established, until throughout the
+centuries, in spite of many rebellious individuals, the mass of men have
+lived according to the dictates of the church, the legal requirements of
+the state, and the surveillance of the community, if only because they
+feared social ostracism. It is easy, however, to forget these men and
+their prosaic virtues because history has so long busied herself in
+recording court amours and the gentle dalliances of the overlord.
+
+The great primitive instinct, so responsive to social control as to be
+almost an example of social docility, has apparently broken with all the
+restraints and decencies under two conditions: first and second, when
+the individual felt that he was above social control and when the
+individual has had an opportunity to hide his daily living. Prostitution
+upon a commercial basis in a measure embraces the two conditions, for it
+becomes possible only in a society so highly complicated that social
+control may be successfully evaded and the individual thus feels
+superior to it. When a city is so large that it is extremely difficult
+to fix individual responsibility, that which for centuries was
+considered the luxury of the king comes within the reach of every
+office-boy, and that lack of community control which belonged only to
+the overlord who felt himself superior to the standards of the people,
+may be seized upon by any city dweller who can evade his acquaintances.
+Against such moral aggression, the old types of social control are
+powerless.
+
+Fortunately, the same crowded city conditions which make moral isolation
+possible, constantly tend to develop a new restraint founded upon the
+mutual dependences of city life and its daily necessities. The city
+itself socializes the very instruments that constitute the apparatus of
+social control--Law, Publicity, Literature, Education and Religion.
+Through their socialization, the desirability of chastity, which has
+hitherto been a matter of individual opinion and decision, comes to be
+regarded, not only as a personal virtue indispensable in women and
+desirable in men, but as a great basic requirement which society has
+learned to demand because it has been proven necessary for human
+welfare. To the individual restraints is added the conviction of social
+responsibility and the whole determination of chastity is reinforced by
+social sanctions. Such a shifting to social grounds is already obviously
+taking place in regard to the chastity of women. Formerly all that the
+best woman possessed was a negative chastity which had been carefully
+guarded by her parents and duennas. The chastity of the modern woman of
+self-directed activity and of a varied circle of interests, which gives
+her an acquaintance with many men as well as women, has therefore a new
+value and importance in the establishment of social standards. There was
+a certain basis for the belief that if a woman lost her personal virtue,
+she lost all; when she had no activity outside of domestic life, the
+situation itself afforded a foundation for the belief that a man might
+claim praise for his public career even when his domestic life was
+corrupt. As woman, however, fulfills her civic obligations while still
+guarding her chastity, she will be in position as never before to uphold
+the "single standard," demanding that men shall add the personal virtues
+to their performance of public duties. Women may at last force men to do
+away with the traditional use of a public record as a cloak for a
+wretched private character, because society will never permit a woman to
+make such excuses for herself.
+
+Every movement therefore which tends to increase woman's share of civic
+responsibility undoubtedly forecasts the time when a social control will
+be extended over men, similar to the historic one so long established
+over women. As that modern relationship between men and women, which the
+Romans called "virtue between equals" increases, while it will continue
+to make women freer and nobler, less timid of reputation and more human,
+will also inevitably modify the standards of men.
+
+On the other hand, there is no doubt that this new freedom from domestic
+and community control, with the opportunity for escaping observation
+which the city affords, is often utilized unworthily by women. The
+report of the Chicago vice commission tells of numerous girls living in
+small cities and country towns, who come to Chicago from time to time
+under arrangements made with the landlady of a seemingly respectable
+apartment. They remain long enough to earn money for a spring or fall
+wardrobe and return to their home towns, where their acquaintances are
+quite without suspicion of the methods they have employed to secure the
+much-admired costumes brought from the city. Often an unattached country
+girl, who has come to live in a city, has gradually fallen into a
+vicious life from sheer lack of social restraint. Such a girl, when
+living in a smaller community, realized that good behavior was a
+protective measure and that any suspicion of immorality would quickly
+ruin her social standing; but when removed from such surveillance, she
+hopes to be able to pass from her regular life to an irregular one and
+back again before the fact has been noted, quite as many young men are
+trying to do.
+
+Perhaps no young woman is more exposed to temptation of this sort than
+the one who works in an office where she may be the sole woman employed
+and where the relation to her employer and to her fellow-clerks is
+almost on a social basis. Many office girls have taken "business
+courses" in their native towns and have come to the city in search of
+the large salaries which have no parallels at home. Such a position is
+not only new to the individual, but it is so recent an outcome of modern
+business methods, that it has not yet been conventionalized. The girl is
+without the wholesome social restraint afforded by the companionship of
+other working-women and her isolation in itself constitutes a danger. An
+investigation disclosed that a startling number of Chicago girls had
+found their positions through advertisements and had no means of
+ascertaining the respectability of their employers. In addition to this,
+the girls who seek such positions are sometimes vain and pretentious,
+and will take any sort of office work because it seems to them "more
+ladylike." A girl of this sort came to Chicago from the country three
+years ago at the age of seventeen and secured a position as a
+stenographer with a large firm of lawyers. She was pretty and
+attractive, and in her desire to see more of the wonderful city to which
+she had come, she accepted many invitations to dinners and theatres from
+a younger member of the firm. The other girls in the office,
+representing the more capable type of business women, among whom a
+careful code of conduct is developing, although at present it is often
+manifested only by the social ostracism of the one of their number who
+has broken the conventions, protested against her conduct, first to the
+girl and then to the head of the office. The usual story developed
+rapidly, the girl lost her position, her brother-in-law, learning the
+cause, refused her a home and she became absolutely dependent upon the
+man. As their relations became notorious, he at length was requested to
+withdraw from the firm. When brought to my knowledge she had already
+been deserted for a year. The only people she had known during that time
+were those in the disreputable hotel in which she had been living when
+her lover disappeared, and it was through their mistaken kindness in
+making an opportunity for her in the only life with which they were
+familiar, that she had been drawn into the worst vice of the city.
+
+She was but one of thousands of young women whose undisciplined minds
+are fatally assailed by the subtleties and sophistries of city life, and
+who have lost their bearings in the midst of a multitude of new
+imaginative impressions. It is hard for a girl, thrilled by the mere
+propinquity of city excitements and eager to share them, to keep to the
+gray and monotonous path of regular work. Almost every such girl of the
+hundreds who have come to grief, "begins" by accepting invitations to
+dinners and places of amusement. She is always impressed with the ease
+for concealment which the city affords, although at the same time
+vaguely resentful that it is so indifferent to her individual existence.
+It is impossible to estimate the amount of clandestine prostitution
+which the modern city contains, but there is no doubt that the growth of
+the social evil at the present moment, lies in this direction. Another
+of its less sinister developments is perhaps a contemporary
+manifestation of that break, long considered necessary, between
+established morality and artistic freedom represented by the hetaira in
+Athens, the gifted actress in Paris, the geisha in Japan. Insofar as
+such women have been treated as independent human beings and prized for
+their mental and social charm, even although they are on a commercial
+basis, it makes for a humanization of this most sordid business. Such
+open manifestations of prostitution hasten social control, because
+publicity has ever been the first step toward community understanding
+and discipline.
+
+Doubtless the attitude toward the victims of commercialized vice will be
+modified by many reactions upon the public consciousness, through a
+thousand manifestations of the great democratic movement which is
+developing all about us. Certainly we are safe in predicting that when
+the solidarity of human interest is actually realized, it will become
+unthinkable that one class of human beings should be sacrificed to the
+supposed needs of another; when the rights of human life have
+successfully asserted themselves in contrast to the rights of property,
+it will become impossible to sell the young and heedless into
+degradation. An age marked by its vigorous protests against slavery and
+class tyranny, will not continue to ignore the multitudes of women who
+are held in literal bondage; nor will an age characterized by a new
+tenderness for the losers in life's race, always persist in denying
+forgiveness to the woman who has lost all. A voice which has come across
+the centuries, filled with pity for her who has "sinned much," must at
+last be joined by the forgiving voices of others, to whom it has been
+revealed that it is hardness of heart which has ever thwarted the divine
+purposes of religion. A generation which has gone through so many
+successive revolts against commercial aggression and lawlessness, will
+at last lead one more revolt on behalf of the young girls who are the
+victims of the basest and vilest commercialism. As that consciousness of
+human suffering, which already hangs like a black cloud over thousands
+of our more sensitive contemporaries, increases in poignancy, it must
+finally include the women who for so many generations have received
+neither pity nor consideration; as the sense of justice fast widens to
+encircle all human relations, it must at length reach the women who have
+so long been judged without a hearing.
+
+In that vast and checkered undertaking of its own moralization to which
+the human race is committed, it must constantly free itself from the
+survivals and savage infections of the primitive life from which it
+started. Now one and then another of the ancient wrongs and uncouth
+customs which have been so long familiar as to seem inevitable, rise to
+the moral consciousness of a passing generation; first for uneasy
+contemplation and then for gallant correction.
+
+May America bear a valiant part in this international crusade of the
+compassionate, enlisting under its banner not only those sensitive to
+the wrongs of others, but those conscious of the destruction of the race
+itself, who form the standing army of humanity's self-pity, which is
+becoming slowly mobilized for a new conquest!
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of A New Conscience And An Ancient Evil
+by Jane Addams
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