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Contents |
CHAPTER III
AMELIORATION OF ECONOMIC
CONDITIONS
It may be possible to extract some small de-
gree 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 phenome-
nal 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 [56]
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 com-
placency, almost with pride, and confidently
depends upon the inner restraint and training of
this girlish multitude to protect it from dis-
aster. 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 [57]
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 cen-
turies, has been the result of her domestic sur-
roundings, 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 [58]
sixteen millions of dollars. Although these enor-
mous profits largely accrue to the men who con-
duct the business side of prostitution, the re-
port 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 ordi-
narily 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 fur-
ther estimates that the average girl who enters
an illicit life under a protector or manager is
able to earn twenty-five dollars a week, repre-
senting 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 [59]
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 suffi-
cient 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 num-
ber 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 [60]
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 en-
deavors 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 per-
severed 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. [61]
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 [62]
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 when-
ever she was summoned by telephone, thus join-
ing that large clandestine group of apparently [63]
respectable girls, most of whom yield to tempta-
tion 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 Amer-
ican 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 clandes-
tine 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 "for-
ever 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 [64]
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 busi-
ness 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 con-
stantly passes in and out, making small purchases
from every pretty girl, opening an acquaint-
ance with complimentary remarks; or the pro-
curess, a fashionably-dressed woman, buys cloth-
ing in large amounts, sometimes for a young [65]
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 pro-
cured. 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 be-
wildering 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 de-
sirable 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 [66]
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 commer-
cial 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 [67]
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 ex-
aggerated 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 [68]
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 em-
ployee 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 es-
pecially exposed to this alluring knowledge is
the waitress in down-town cafes and restaur-
ants. A recent investigation of girls in the seg-
regated district of a neighboring city places
waiting in restaurants and hotels as highest on
the list of "previous occupations." Many wait-
resses 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 [69]
easy conversation while being served. Some of
them are lonely young men who have few oppor-
tunities 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 [70]
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 bur- [71]
dened 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 dis-
advantage 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 wretch-
edness 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 [72]
as he crosses the street, and she vaguely knows
that the sick girl has put herself beyond the pro-
tection 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 oper-
ators, 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 [73]
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 doubt-
less 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 them- [74]
selves.
Only slowly are laws being enacted to limit the
hours of working women, yet the able brief pre-
sented 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 [75]
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 respecta-
bility even more difficult. Varicose veins and
broken arches in the feet are found in every occu-
pation 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 pro-
ceeds 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 [76]
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 tempta-
tion 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 [77]
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," "Impos-
sible 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 dis-
couragement 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 right-
eousness, 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, [78]
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 cloth-
ing for which she is in such desperate need, per-
suade 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 disad-
vantage. The average wage of two hundred
newly arrived girls of various nationalities, Poles,
Italians, Slovaks, Bohemians, Russians, Gala-
tians, Croatians, Lithuanians, Roumanians, Ger-
mans, 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 [79]
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 immi-
grant 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 bor-
rowed 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 [80]
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 de-
monstrating 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 sur-
roundings, 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 [81]
thousands of women who are receiving the pro-
tection 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 insti-
tuted 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 propor-
tion 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 [82]
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 rules
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 as-
sorted 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 comfort-
able neither for receiving friends nor for reading, [83]
and she finds upon the street her entire social
field; the shop windows with their desirable gar-
ments 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 possi-
bilities of the most delightful acquaintance. It
is not astonishing that she insists upon cloth-
ing 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 un-
opened 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 [84]
neck of her ungainly calico gown in a vain at-
tempt 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 at-
tempted 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 [85]
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 there-
fore most prolonged. Perhaps nothing in our [86]
social order is so unorganized and inchoate as
our method, or rather lack of method, of plac-
ing 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 under-
standing 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 cus-
tomary wages to their parents, others fall vic-
tims to unscrupulous employment agencies in
their eagerness to take the first thing offered.
The majority of these girls answer the adver-
tisements 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 [87]
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 any-
one 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 con-
victed 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 adver-
tising 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 depart- [88]
ment 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 morn-
ing 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 pre-
tending 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 [89]
work when her family is exigent and uncompre-
hending, 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 per-
son 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 dan-
ger. Such a girl living in a rented room is usu-
ally without any place in which to properly
receive callers. An investigation was recently [90]
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 bed-
rooms, 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 estab-
lished 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 pro-
ducer in a sense which has never been done before.
Such a study with reference to industrial legisla-
tion will ally itself on one hand with the trades-
union movement, which insists upon a liv-
ing wage and shorter hours for the workers,
and also upon an opportunity for self-direction, [91]
and on the other hand with the efficiency move-
ment, 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 em-
ploying only the girl "protected by home in-
fluences" as a device for reducing wages. Help
may also come from the consumers, for an in-
creasing 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 endea- [92]
vor 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 es-
tablishing 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 appar-
ently 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 as- [93]
pect 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 stub-
born 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 stand-
point 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 employ-
ment 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 [94]
talk constantly of the relation of economic law
to destitution and point out the connection be-
tween industrial maladjustment and individual
wrongdoing, but certainly the study of social
conditions, the obligation to eradicate vice, can-
not belong to one political party or to one eco-
nomic 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.
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