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Contents |
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 im-
propriety 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 sacri-
fice of humanity, blasted for the sins of the peo-
ple." 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, up-
rooted 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 [4]
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 educa-
tional efforts directed against the very existence
of this social evil and similar organized efforts
which preceded the overthrow of slavery in Amer-
ica. Thus, long before slavery was finally de-
clared illegal, there were international regulations
of its traffic, state and federal legislation concern-
ing its extension, and many extra legal attempts
to control its abuses; quite as we have the inter-
national regulations concerning the white slave
traffic, the state and interstate legislation for
its repression, and an extra legal power in con-
nection with it so universally given to the munic-
ipal 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 rail-
road cherished and educated individual slaves; it [5]
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 detri-
ment 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 por-
trayal 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 lit- [6]
erature, 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 agita-
tion there are at least a few men and women who
would extend a greater social and political free-
dom to all women if only because domestic con-
trol has proved so ineffectual.
We may certainly take courage from the fact
that our contemporaries are fired by social com-
passions 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 [7]
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 re-
gard to chattel slavery. Only the so-called ex-
tremists, 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 as-
serted 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 union-
ist 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 difficul-
ties and complications of the social evil. Certainly
all the national organizations-the National
Vigilance Committee, the American Purity Fed-
eration, the Alliance for the Suppression and
Prevention of the White Slave Traffic and many [8]
others-stand for the final abolition of commer-
cialized 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 com-
mission that "the city, when aroused to the
truth, would instantly rebel against the social
evil in all its phases." A similar recommenda-
tion 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 legit-
imate 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 dis-
banded because its object had been accomplished.
The long struggle ahead of these newer associa- [9]
tions 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 ex-
acted 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 ques-
tions 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 com-
mercialized 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 vol-
ume does not deal with the probable future of
prostitution, and gives only such historical [10]
background as is necessary to understand the
present situation. It endeavors to present the
contributory causes, as they have become regis-
tered in my consciousness through a long resi-
dence in a crowded city quarter, and to state the
indications, as I have seen them, of a new con-
science 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 conscious-
ness 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. [11]
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 wretch-
edness must always be through that region which
is most thoroughly explored, not only by the
information of the statistician, but by sympa-
thetic understanding. We are daily attaining the
latter through such authors as Sudermann and
Elsa Gerusalem, who have enabled their readers [12]
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-crafts-
men 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 pub-
lic in France, produce in the spectators a dis-
quieting sense that society is involved in com-
mercialized 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 [13]
handful of their contemporaries. Their readers
find themselves no longer mere bewildered spec-
tators 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 contempo-
rary literature, for while the business of literature
is revelation and not reformation, it may yet per-
form 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 pro-
cesses, we have learned to talk glibly of the obli-
gations 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!
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