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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 experi-
ences, many aspects of a recognized evil concern-
ing which the public are ignorant and therefore
indifferent. However ancient a wrong may be,
in each generation it must become newly em-
bodied in living people and the social custom into
which it has hardened through the years, must be
continued in individual lives. Unless the con-
temporaries 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-recog- [142]
nized 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 philan-
thropic 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 inter-
fered with; but the decision to lead this evil life,
disastrous alike to herself and the community, [143]
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 con-
sideration of the abolition of the monstrous [144]
wrong itself. At the present moment philan-
thropy 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 compas-
sion 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 enor-
mous force which they cannot comprehend,
make a most pitiful appeal. Philanthropy more-
over 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 [145]
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. [146]
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 dis-
graced 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 [147]
the Association, they met the young man, who
had been distractedly searching for her and had
just discovered her whereabouts. She was mar-
ried the very same day and of course the Associa-
tion 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 dis-
couraged to make any effort to escape into the
unknown city which she believes to be full of
horrors similar to those she has already encoun-
tered. 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 [148]
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 in-
nocently 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 police-
man, seeing two young girls in a saloon "with-
out 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 [149]
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 imprison-
ment 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 Pro-
tective Association, who had followed them from
the court room and had listened to the conversa-
tion, 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, [150]
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 con-
stant 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 coun-
try 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 [151]
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 enor-
mously 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 [152]
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 pro-
curer, 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 con-
siders 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 [153]
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 con-
sents to spend the rest of the night in a nearby
lodging house. Six young girls, each accom-
panied 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 dis-
reputable life.
The girls attending the cheap theatres and the
vaudeville shows are most commonly approached
through their vanity. They readily listen to the [154]
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 dis-
reputable places, who advertise for pretty girls,
promising large salaries. Such an agency oper-
ating 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 immor-
ality, 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 [155]
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, how-
ever, 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 de-
tained for several days as witnesses against the
theatrical agency, entering into the legal prosecu-
tion with that characteristic British spirit which
is ever ready to protest against an imposition,
before they left the city with a travelling com- [156]
pany, 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 con-
sumed. It is not unusual to see a boy and girl
drinking between them an entire bottle of whis-
key. 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 [157]
the Juvenile Protective Association, after a
thorough investigation of public dance halls,
amusement parks, five-cent theatres, and excur-
sion boats, is insisting upon more vigorous en-
forcement 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 appoint-
ment 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 [158]
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 organi-
zations 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 recrea-
tion, a large number of girls meet with difficulties
and temptations while soberly at work. Many
of these tempted girls are newly-arrived immi-
grant girls between the ages of sixteen and twenty,
who find their first work in hotels. Polish girls
especially are utilized in hotel kitchens and laun-
dries, and for the interminable scrubbing of halls
and lobbies where a knowledge of the English
language is not necessary, but where their peas- [159]
ant 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 pro-
tect 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 posi-
tion of chambermaid, but that the latter position
was the most dangerous of all, as the girls were[160
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 [161]
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 con-
form 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, "some- [162]
times 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 appoint-
ments 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 [163]
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 un-
happy 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 bastings,
when asked why she wore a heavy woolen gown
on one of the hottest days of last summer, re-
plied 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 [164]
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 [165]
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 dis-
covered 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 [166]
envelopes contained lees than usual, either be-
cause 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 de-
pendent upon their parents.
In spite of the fact that domestic service is [167]
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 sug-
gests that the danger comes from the general
conditions of work: "These general conditions
are the loneliness of the life, the lack of opportuni-
ties for making friends and securing recreation
and amusement in safe surroundings, the monoto-
nous 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 abso-
lutely 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 I
a mate, as the young instinctively understand.
Unlike the working girl who lives at home and [168]
constantly meets young men of her own neighbor-
hood and factory life, the girl in domestic service
is brought into contact with very few possible
lovers. Even the men of her former acquaint-
ance, 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 mayor 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 expres-
sion and like all confined forces, tends to degen-
erate. The girl is equipped with no weapon with [169]
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 occu-
pation 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 [170]
white slave, for although she has the inestimable
advantage of speaking the language, she finds
it even more difficult to have her story cred-
ited. 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 disreput-
able 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 [171]
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 prostra-
tion, 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 [172]
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 situa-
tion 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 com-
mand of the situation, she usually succeeds in
convincing the wretched girl that she is ir-
reparably ruined. Her very phraseology, al-
though 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 natu- [173]
rally 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 [174]
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 moth-
ers, 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, [175]
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 [176]
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 un-
doubtedly 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 industri-
ally. As they have missed the industrial disci-
pline that comes from regular hours of systema-
tized work, so they have missed the moral
training of group solidarity, the ideals and re-
straints which the friendships and companionships
of other working girls would have brought them. [177]
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 what-
ever 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 un-
justly faces a public opinion much more severe
than that encountered by the childless woman [178]
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, how-
ever 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 fellow-
ship and into a life involving normal human
relations. Such an association must needs re-
member those wise words of Count Tolstoy:
"We constantly think that there are circum-
stances in which a human being can be treated
without affection, and there are no such cir-
cumstances."
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