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CHAPTER VI
INCREASED SOCIAL CONTROL
When certain groups in a community, to whom
a social wrong has become intolerable, prepare
for definite action against it, they almost invari-
ably discover unexpected help from contempo-
raneous social movements with which they later
find themselves allied. The most immediate
help in this new campaign against the social
evil will probably come thus indirectly from
those streams of humanitarian effort which
are ever widening and which will in time slowly
engulf into their rising tide of enthusiasm for
human betterment, even the victims of the white
slave traffic.
Foremost among them is the world-wide move-
ment to preserve and prolong the term of human
life, coupled with the determination on the part
of the medical profession to eliminate all forms
of germ diseases. The same physicians and
sanitarians who have practically rid the modern
city of small-pox and cholera and are eliminating [182]
tuberculosis, well know that the social evil is
directly responsible for germ diseases more preva-
lent than any of the others, and also communi-
cable. Over and over again in the history of
large cities, Vienna, Paris, St. Louis, the medi-
cal profession has been urged to control the
diseases resulting from the commercialized vice
which the municipal authorities themselves per-
mitted. But the experiments in segregation, in
licensed systems, and certification have not
been considered successful. The medical profes-
sion, hitherto divided in opinion as to the feasi-
bility of such undertakings, is virtually united
in the conclusion that so long as commercial-
ized vice exists, physicians cannot guarantee
a city against the spread of the contagious poison
generated by it, which is fatal alike to the individ-
ual and to his offspring. The medical profession
agrees that, as the victims of the social evil
inevitably become the purveyors of germ diseases
of a very persistent and incurable type, safety
in this regard lies only in the extinction of com-
mercialized vice. They point out the indirect
ways in which this contagion can spread exactly
as any other can, but insist that its control is [183]
enormously complicated by the fact that the
victims of these diseases are most unwilling to
be designated and quarantined. The medical
profession is at last taking the position that
the community wishing to protect itself against
this contagion will in the end be driven to the
extermination of the very source itself. A well-
known authority states the one breeding-place
of these disease germs, without exception, is the
social institution designated as prostitution,
but, once bred and cultivated there, they then
spread through the community, attacking alike
both the innocent and the guilty.
We can imagine, after a dozen years of vigorous
and able propaganda of this opinion on the part
of public-spirited physicians and sanitarians,
that a city might well appeal to the medical
profession to exterminate prostitution on the
very ground that it is a source of constant dan-
ger to the health and future of the community.
Such a city might readily give to the board of
health ordered to undertake this extermination
more absolute authority than is now accorded
to it in a small-pox epidemic. Of course, no
city could reach such a view unless the education [184]
of the public proceeded much more rapidly than
at present, although the newly-established custom
of careful medical examination of school-children
and of employees in factories and commercial
establishments must result in the discovery of
many such cases, and in the end adequate provi-
sion must be made for their isolation. A child
was recently discovered in a Chicago school with
an open sore upon her lip, which made her a
most dangerous source of infection. She was just
fourteen years of age, too old to be admitted
into that most pathetic and most unlovely of
all children's wards, where children must suffer
for "the sins of their fathers," and too young
and innocent to be put into the women's ward in
which the public takes care of those wrecks of
dissolute living who are no longer valuable to
the commerce which once secured them, and
have become merely worthless stock which pays
no dividend. The disease of the little girl was
in too virulent a stage to admit her to that
convalescent home lately established in Chicago
for those infected children who are dismissed
from the county hospital, but whom it is impos-
sible to return to their old surroundings. A [185]
philanthropic association was finally obliged to
pay her board for weeks to a woman who care-
fully followed instructions as to her treatment.
This is but one example of a child who was dis-
covered and provided for, but it is evident that
the public cannot long remain indifferent to the
care of such cases when it has already established
the means for detecting them. In twenty-seven
months over six hundred children passed through
this most piteous children's ward in Chicago's
public hospital. All but twenty-nine of these
children were under ten years of age, and doubt-
less a number of them had been victims of that
wretched tradition that a man afflicted with
this incurable disease might cure himself at the
expense of innocence.
Crusades against other infectious diseases,
such as small-pox and cholera, imply well-con-
sidered sanitary precautions, dependent upon
widespread education and an aroused public
opinion. To establish such education and to
arouse the public in regard to this present men-
ace apparently presents insuperable difficulties.
Many newspapers, so ready to deal with all
other forms of vice and misery, never allow [186]
these evils to be mentioned in their columns
except in the advertisements of quack remedies;
the clergy, unlike the founder of the Christian
religion and the early apostles, seldom preach
against the sin of which these contagions are an
inevitable consequence: the physicians, bound
by a rigorous medical etiquette, tell nothing of
the prevalence of these maladies, use a confusing
nomenclature in the hospitals, and write only
contributory causes upon the very death certi-
ficates of the victims.
Yet it is easy to predict that a society com-
mitted to the abolition of infectious germs, to a
higher degree of public health, and to a better
standard of sanitation will not forever permit
these highly communicable diseases to spread
unchecked in its midst, and that a public, con-
vinced that sanitary science, properly supported,
might rid our cities of this type of disease, will
at length insist upon its accomplishment. When
we consider the many things undertaken in the
name of health and sanitation it becomes easy
to make the prediction, for public health is a
magic word which ever grows more potent, as
society realizes that the very existence of the [187]
modern city would be an impossibility had it
not been discovered that the health of the individ-
ual is largely controlled by the hygienic condition
of his surroundings. Since the first commission
to inquire into the conditions of great cities was
appointed in Manchester in 1844, sanitary sci-
ence, both in knowledge and municipal authority,
has progressed until advocates of the most ad-
vanced measures in city hygiene and preventive
sanitary science boldly state that neglected child-
hood and neglected disease are the most potent
causes of social insufficiency.
Certainly a plea could be made for the women
and children who are often the innocent victims
of these diseases. Quite recently in Chicago
there was brought to my attention the incredibly
pathetic plight of a widow with four children
who was in such constant fear of spreading the
infection for which her husband had been re-
sponsible, that she touchingly offered to leave
her children forevermore, if there was no other
way to save them from the horrible suffering
she herself was enduring. In spite of thousands
of such cases Utah is the pioneer and only state
with a law which requires that this infection shall [188]
be reported and controlled, as are other contagious
maladies, and which also authorizes boards of
health to take adequate measures in order to
secure protection.
Another humanitarian movement from which
assistance will doubtless come to the crusade
against the social evil, is the great movement
against alcoholism with its recent revival in
every civilized country of the world. A careful
scientist has called alcohol the indispensable
vehicle of the business transacted by the white
slave traders, and has asserted that without its
use this trade could not long continue. Whoever
has tried to help a girl making an effort to leave
the irregular life she has been leading, must have
been discouraged by the victim's attempts to
overcome the habit of using alcohol and drugs.
Such a girl has commonly been drawn into the
life in the first place when under the influence of
liquor and has continued to drink that she might
be able to live through each day. Furthermore,
the drinking habit grows upon her because she
is constantly required to sell liquor and to be
"treated."
It is estimated that the liquor sold by such [189]
girls nets a profit to the trade of two hundred
and fifty per cent. over and above the girl's own
commission. Chicago made at least one honest
effort to divorce the sale of liquor from prostitu-
tion, when the superintendent of police last year
ruled that no liquor should be sold in any dis-
reputable house. The difficulty of enforcing
such an order is greatly increased because such
houses, as well as the questionable dance halls,
commonly obtain a special permit to sell
liquor under a federal license, which is not only
cheaper than the saloon license obtained from the
city, but has the added advantage to the holder
that he can sell after one o'clock in the morn-
ing, at which time the city closes all saloons.
The aggregate annual profit of the two hundred
and thirty-six disorderly saloons recently investi-
gated in Chicago by the Vice Commission was
$4,307,000. This profit on the sale of liquor
can be traced all along the line in connection
with the white slave traffic and is no less dis-
astrous from the point of view of young men than
of the girls. Even a slight exhilaration from
alcohol relaxes the moral sense and throws a
sentimental or adventurous glamor over an [190]
aspect of life from which a decent young man
would ordinarily recoil, and its continued use
stimulates the senses at the very moment when
the intellectual and moral inhibitions are lessened.
May we not conclude that both chastity and
self-restraint are more firmly established in the
modern city than we realize, when the white
slave traders find it necessary both forcibly to
detain their victims and to ply young men with
alcohol that they may profit thereby? General
Bingham, who as Police Commissioner of New
York certainly knew whereof he spoke, says:
"There is not enough depravity in human nature
to keep alive this very large business. The
immorality of women and the brutishness of men
have to be persuaded, coaxed and constantly
stimulated in order to keep the social evil in
its present state of business prosperity."
We may soberly hope that some of the experi-
ments made by governmental and municipal au-
thorities to control and regulate the sale of liquor
will at last meet with such a measure of success
that the existence of public prostitution, deprived
of its artificial stimulus of alcohol, will in the end
be imperilled. The Chicago Vice Commission [191]
has made a series of valuable suggestions for the
regulation of saloons and for the separation of
the sale of liquor from dance halls and from all
other places known as recruiting grounds for
the white slave traffic. There is still need for
a much wider and more thorough education of
the public in regard to the historic connection
between commercialized vice and alcoholism,
of the close relation between politics and the
liquor interests, behind which the social evil so
often entrenches itself.
In addition to the movements against germ
diseases and the suppression of alcoholism, both
of which are mitigating the hard fate of the vic-
tims of the white slave traffic, other public move-
ments mysteriously affecting all parts of the social
order will in time threaten the very existence of
commercialized vice. First among these, per-
haps, is the equal suffrage movement. On the
horizon everywhere are signs that woman will
soon receive the right to exercise political power,
and it is believed that she will show her efficiency
most conspicuously in finding means for en-
hancing and preserving human life, if only as
the result of her age-long experiences. That [192]
primitive maternal instinct, which has always
been as ready to defend as it has been to nurture,
will doubtless promptly grapple with certain
crimes connected with the white slave traffic;
women with political power would not brook
that men should live upon the wages of captured
victims, should openly hire youths to ruin and
debase young girls, should be permitted to trans-
mit poison to unborn children. Life is full of
hidden remedial powers which society has not
yet utilized, but perhaps nowhere is the waste
more flagrant than in the matured deductions
and judgments of the women, who are constantly
forced to share the social injustices which they
have no recognized power to alter. If political
rights were once given to women, if the situation
were theirs to deal with as a matter of civic
responsibility, one cannot imagine that the exist-
ence of the social evil would remain unchal-
lenged in its semi-legal protection. Those women
who are already possessed of political power have
in many ways registered their conscience in
regard to it. The Norwegian women, for instance,
have guaranteed to every illegitimate child the
right of inheritance to its father's name and [193]
property by a law which also provides for the
care of its mother. This is in marked contrast
to the usual treatment of the mother of an illegiti-
mate child, who even when the paternity of her
child is acknowledged receives from the father
but a pitiful sum for its support; moreover, if
the child dies before birth and the mother con-
ceals this fact, although perfectly guiltless of
its death, she can be sent to jail for a year.
The age of consent is eighteen years in all
of the states in which women have had the
ballot, although in only eight of the others
is it so high. In the majority of the latter
the age of consent is between fourteen and six-
teen, and in some of them it is as low as ten.
These legal regulations persist in spite of the
well-known fact that the mass of girls enter a
disreputable life below the age of eighteen. In
equal suffrage states important issues regarding
women and children, whether of the sweat-shop
or the brothel, have always brought out the
women voters in great numbers.
Certainly enfranchised women would offer
some protection to the white slaves themselves
who are tolerated and segregated, but who, [194]
because their very existence is illegal, may be
arrested whenever any police captain chooses,
may be brought before a magistrate, fined and
imprisoned. A woman so arrested may be
obliged to answer the most harassing questions
put to her by a city attorney with no other
woman near to protect her from insult. She
may be subjected to the most trying examinations
in the presence of policemen with no matron to
whom to appeal. These things constantly hap-
pen everywhere save in Scandinavian countries,
where juries of women sit upon such cases and
offer the protection of their presence to the
prisoners. Without such protection even an
innocent woman, made to appear a member of
this despised class, receives no consideration. A
girl of fifteen recently acting in a South Chicago
theatre attracted the attention of a milkman who
gradually convinced her that he was respectable.
Walking with him one evening to the door of
her lodging-house, the girl told him of her diffi-
culties and quite innocently accepted money for
the payment of her room rent. The following
morning as she was leaving the house the milkman
met her at the door and asked her for the five [195]
dollars he had given her the night before. When
she said she had used it to pay her debt to the
landlady, he angrily replied that unless she
returned the money at once he would call a
policeman and arrest her on a charge of theft.
The girl, helpless because she had already dis-
posed of the money, was taken to court, where,
frightened and confused, she was unable to give
a convincing account of the interview the night
before; except for the prompt intervention on
the part of a woman, she would either have been
obliged to put herself in the power of the milkman,
who offered to pay her fine, or she would have
been sent to the city prison, not because the
proof of her guilt was conclusive, but because her
connection with a cheap theatre and the hour of
the so-called offence had convinced the court
that she belonged to a class of women who are
regarded as no longer entitled to legal protection.
Several years ago in Colorado the disreputable
women of Denver appealed to a large political
club of women against the action of the police
who were forcing them to register under the
threat of arrest in order later to secure their
votes for a corrupt politician. The disreputable [196]
women, wishing to conceal their real names and
addresses, did not want to be registered, in this
respect at least differing from the lodging-house
men whose venal votes play such an important
part in every municipal election. The women's
political club responded to this appeal, and not
only stopped the coercion, but finally turned out
of office the chief of police responsible for it.
The very fact that the conditions and results
of the social evil lie so far away from the knowl-
edge of good women is largely responsible for
the secrecy and hypocrisy upon which it thrives.
Most good women will probably never consent
to break through their ignorance save under a
sense of duty which has ever been the incentive
to action to which even timid women have
responded. At least a promising beginning
would be made toward a more effective social
control, if the mass of conscientious women were
once thoroughly convinced that a knowledge of
local vice conditions was a matter of civic obliga-
tion, if the entire body of conventional women,
simply because they held the franchise, felt con-
strained to inform themselves concerning the
social evil throughout the cities of America. [197]
Perhaps the most immediate result would be
a change in the attitude toward prostitution
on the part of elected officials, responding to
that of their constituency. Although good and
bad men alike prize chastity in women, and
although good men require it of themselves,
almost all men are convinced that it is impossible
to require it of thousands of their fellow-citizens,
and hence connive at the policy of the officials
who permit commercialized vice to flourish.
As the first organized Women's Rights move-
ment was inaugurated by the women who were
refused seats in the world's Anti-Slavery conven-
tion held in London in 1840, although they had
been the very pioneers in the organization of the
American Abolitionists, so it is quite possible
that an equally energetic attempt to abolish
white slavery will bring many women into the
Equal Suffrage movement, simply because they
too will discover that without the use of the
ballot they are unable to work effectively for
the eradication of a social wrong.
Women are said to have been historically
indifferent to social injustices, but it may be
possible that, if they once really comprehend the [198]
actual position of prostitutes the world over,
their sense of justice will at last be freed, and
become forevermore a new force in the long strug-
gle for social righteousness. The wind of moral
aspiration now dies down and now blows with
unexpected force, urging on the movements of
social destiny; but never do the sails of the ship
of state push forward with such assured progress
as when filled by the mighty hopes of a newly
enfranchised class. Those already responsible
for existing conditions have come to acquiesce
in them, and feel obliged to adduce reasons
explaining the permanence and so-called necessity
of the most evil conditions. On the other hand,
the newly enfranchised view existing conditions
more critically, more as human beings and less
as politicians.
After all, why should the woman voter concur
in the assumption that every large city must
either set aside well-known districts for the ac-
commodation of prostitution, as Chicago does,
or continually permit it to flourish in tenement
and apartment houses, as is done in New York?
Smaller communities and towns throughout the
land are free from at least this semi-legal organi- [199]
zation of it, and why should it be accepted as a
permanent aspect of city life? The valuable
report of the Chicago Vice Commission estimates
that twenty thousand of the men daily respons-
ible for this evil in Chicago live outside of the
city. They are the men who come from other
towns to Chicago in order to see the sights.
They are supposedly moral at home, where they
are well known and subjected to the constant
control of public opinion. The report goes on
to state that during conventions or "show"
occasions the business of commercialized vice
is enormously increased. The village gossip
with her vituperative tongue after all performs
a valuable function both of castigation and
retribution; but her fellow-townsman, although
quite unconscious of her restraint, coming into
a city hotel often experiences a great sense of
relief which easily rises to a mood of exhilaration.
In addition to this he holds an exaggerated notion
of the wickedness of the city. A visiting country-
man is often shown museums and questionable
sights reserved largely for his patronage, just as
tourists are conducted to lurid Parisian revels
and indecencies sustained primarily for their [200]
horrified contemplation. Such a situation would
indicate that, because control is much more
difficult in a large city than in a small town,
the city deliberately provides for its own inability
in this direction.
During a recent military encampment in
Chicago large numbers of young girls were
attracted to it by that glamour which always
surrounds the soldier. On the complaint of
several mothers, investigators discovered that
the girls were there without the knowledge of
their parents, some of them having literally
climbed out of windows after their parents had
supposed them asleep. A thorough investigation
disclosed not only an enormous increase of
business in the restricted districts, but the down-
fall of many young girls who had hitherto been
thoroughly respectable and able to resist the
ordinary temptations of city life, but who had
completely lost their heads over the glitter of a
military camp. One young girl was seen by an
investigator in the late evening hurrying away
from the camp. She was so absorbed in her
trouble and so blinded by her tears that she fairly
ran against him and he heard her praying, as [201]
she frantically clutched the beads around her
neck, "Oh, Mother of God, what have I done!
What have I done!" The Chicago encampment
was finally brought under control through the
combined efforts of the park commissioners,
the city police, and the military authorities,
but not without a certain resentment from the
last toward "civilian interference." Such an en-
campment may be regarded as an historic sur-
vival representing the standing armies sustained
in Europe since the days of the Roman Empire.
These large bodies of men, deprived of domestic
life, have always afforded centres in which con-
tempt for the chastity of women has been fostered.
The older centres of militarism have established
prophylactic measures designed to protect the
health of the soldiers, but evince no concern for
the fate of the ruined women. It is a matter of
recent history that Josephine Butler and the
men and women associated with her, subjected
themselves to unspeakable insult for eight years
before they finally induced the English Parlia-
ment to repeal the infamous Contagious Disease
Acts relating to the garrison towns of Great
Britain, through which the government itself [202]
not only permitted vice, but legally provided
for it within certain specified limits.
The primary difficulty of military life lies in
the withdrawal of large numbers of men from
normal family life, and hence from the domestic
restraints and social checks which are operative
upon the mass of human beings. The great
peace propagandas have emphasized the unjusti-
fiable expense involved in the maintenance of
the standing armies of Europe, the social waste
in the withdrawal of thousands of young men
from industrial, commercial and professional pur-
suits into the barren negative life of the bar-
racks. They might go further and lay stress upon
the loss of moral sensibility, the destruction
of romantic love, the perversion of the longing
for wife and child. The very stability and re-
finement of the social order depend upon the
preservation of these basic emotions.
Social customs are instituted so slowly and
even imperceptibly, so far as the conforming
individual is concerned, that the mass of men
submit to control in spite of themselves, and it
is therefore always difficult to determine how
far the average upright living is the result of [203]
external props, until they are suddenly withdrawn.
This is especially true of domestic life. Even
the sordid marriages in which the senses have
forestalled the heart almost always end in some
form of family affection. The young couple who
may have been brought together in marriage
upon the most primitive plane, after twenty
years of hard work in meagre, unlovely surround-
ings, in spite of stupidity and many mistakes,
in the face of failure and even wrongdoing, will
have unfolded lives of unassuming affection
and family devotion to a group of children.
They will have faithfully fulfilled that obligation
which falls to the lot of the majority of men
and women, with its high rewards and painful
sacrifices. These rewards as well as the restraints
of family life are denied to the soldier. A some-
what similar situation is found in every large
construction camp, and in the crowded city
tenements occupied by thousands of immi-
grant men who have preceded their families to
America.
In the light of the history of prostitution in
relation to militarism, nothing could be more
absurd than the familiar statement that virtuous [204]
women could not safely walk the streets unless
opportunity for secret vice were offered to the
men of the city. It is precisely the men who have
not submitted to self-control who are dangerous
and they only, as the court records themselves
make clear.
In addition to the large social movements for the
betterment of Public Health, for the establishment
of Temperance, for the promotion of Equal Suf-
frage, and for the hastening of Peace and Arbitra-
tion is the world-wide organization and active prop-
aganda of International Socialism. It has always
included the abolition of this ancient evil in its
program of social reconstruction, and since the
publication of Bebel's great book, nearly thirty
years ago, the leaders of the Socialist party have
never ceased to discuss the economics of prosti-
tution with its psychological and moral resultants.
The Socialists contend that commercialized vice
is fundamentally a question of poverty, a by-
product of despair, which will disappear only
with the abolition of poverty itself; that it
persists not primarily from inherent weakness
in human nature, but is a vice arising from a
defective organization of social life; that with a [205]
reorganization of society, at least all of prosti-
tution which is founded upon the hunger of the
victims and upon the profits of the traffickers,
will disappear.
Whether we are Socialists or not, we will all
admit that every level of culture breeds its own
particular brand of vice and uncovers new
weaknesses as well as new nobilities in human
nature; that a given social development-such,
for instance as the conditions of life for thousands
of young people in crowded city quarters-may
produce such temptations and present such
snares to virtue, that average human nature
cannot withstand them.
The very fact that the existence of the social
evil is semi-legal in large cities is an admission
that our individual morality is so uncertain
that it breaks down when social control is with-
drawn and the opportunity for secrecy is offered.
The situation indicates either that the best con-
science of the community fails to translate itself
into civic action or that our cities are too large
to be civilized in a social sense. These difficulties
have been enormously augmented during the
past century so marked by the rapid growth of [206]
cities, because the great principle of liberty has
been translated not only into the unlovely doc-
trine of commercial competition, but also has
fostered in many men the belief that personal
development necessitates a rebellion against
existing social laws. To the opportunity for
secrecy which the modern city offers, such men
are able to add a high-sounding justification
for their immoralities. Fortunately, however, for
our moral progress, the specious and illegitimate
theories of freedom are constantly being chal-
lenged, and a new form of social control is slowly
establishing itself on the principle, so widespread
in contemporary government, that the state
has a responsibility for conditions which deter-
mine the health and welfare of its own members;
that it is in the interest of social progress itself
that hard-won liberties must be restrained by
the demonstrable needs of society.
This new and more vigorous development of
social control, while reflecting something of that
wholesome fear of public opinion which the
intimacies of a small community maintain, is
much more closely allied to the old communal
restraints and mutual protections to which the [207]
human will first yielded. Although this new
control is based upon the voluntary co-operation
of self-directed individuals, in contrast to the
forced submission that characterized the older
forms of social restraint, nevertheless in predict-
ing the establishment of adequate social control
over the instinct which the modern novelists so
often describe as "uncontrollable," there is a
certain sanction in this old and well-nigh forgotten
history.
The most superficial student of social cus-
toms quickly discovers the practically unlim-
ited extent to which public opinion has always
regulated marriage. If the traditions of one
tribe were endogamous, all the men dutifully
married within it; but if the customs of another
decreed that wives must be secured by capture
or purchase, all the men of that tribe fared forth
in order to secure their mates. From the primi-
tive Australian who obtains his wives in exchange
for his sisters or daughters, and never dreams of
obtaining them in any other way, to the sophisti-
cated young Frenchman, who without objection
marries the bride his careful parents select for
him; from the ancient Hebrew, who contentedly [208]
married the widow of his deceased brother be-
cause it was according to the law, to the modern
Englishman who refused to marry his deceased
wife's sister because the law forbade it, the entire
pathway of the so-called uncontrollable instinct
has been gradually confined between carefully
clipped hedges and has steadily led up to a house
of conventional domesticity. Men have fallen
in love with their cousins or declined to fall in
love with them, very much as custom declared
marriages between cousins to be desirable or
undesirable, as they formerly married their sis-
ters and later absolutely ceased to desire to
marry them. In fact, regulation of this great
primitive instinct goes back of the human race
itself. All the higher tribes of monkeys are
strictly monogamous, and many species of birds
are faithful to one mate, season after season. Ac-
cording to the great authority, Forel, prostitution
never became established among primitive peo-
ples. Even savage tribes designated the age
at which their young men were permitted to
assume paternity because feeble children were a
drag upon their communal resources. As primi-
tive control lessened with the disappearance of [209]
tribal organization and later of the patriarchal
family, a social control, not less binding, was
slowly established, until throughout the centuries,
in spite of many rebellious individuals, the mass
of men have lived according to the dictates of
the church, the legal requirements of the state,
and the surveillance of the community, if only
because they feared social ostracism. It is
easy, however, to forget these men and their
prosaic virtues because history has so long busied
herself in recording court amours and the gentle
dalliances of the overlord.
The great primitive instinct, so responsive to
social control as to be almost an example of
social docility, has apparently broken with all
the restraints and decencies under two condi-
tions: first and second, when the individual felt
that he was above social control and when the
individual has had an opportunity to hide his
daily living. Prostitution upon a commercial
basis in a measure embraces the two conditions,
for it becomes possible only in a society so highly
complicated that social control may be success-
fully evaded and the individual thus feels supe-
rior to it. When a city is so large that it is ex- [210]
tremely difficult to fix individual responsibility,
that which for centuries was considered the
luxury of the king comes within the reach of
every office-boy, and that lack of community
control which belonged only to the overlord who
felt himself superior to the standards of the
people, may be seized upon by any city dweller
who can evade his acquaintances. Against
such moral aggression, the old types of social
control are powerless.
Fortunately, the same crowded city conditions
which make moral isolation possible, constantly
tend to develop a new restraint founded upon the
mutual dependences of city life and its daily
necessities. The city itself socializes the very
instruments that constitute the apparatus of
social control-Law, Publicity, Literature, Edu-
cation and Religion. Through their socialization,
the desirability of chastity, which has hitherto
been a matter of individual opinion and decision,
comes to be regarded, not only as a personal
virtue indispensable in women and desirable
in men, but as a great basic requirement which
society has learned to demand because it has
been proven necessary for human welfare. [211]
To the individual restraints is added the con-
viction of social responsibility and the whole
determination of chastity is reinforced by social
sanctions. Such a shifting to social grounds is
already obviously taking place in regard to the
chastity of women. Formerly all that the best
woman possessed was a negative chastity which
had been carefully guarded by her parents and
duennas. The chastity of the modern woman
of self-directed activity and of a varied circle
of interests, which gives her an acquaintance
with many men as well as women, has therefore
a new value and importance in the establishment
of social standards. There was a certain basis
for the belief that if a woman lost her personal
virtue, she lost all; when she had no activity
outside of domestic life, the situation itself
afforded a foundation for the belief that a man
might claim praise for his public career even when
his domestic life was corrupt. As woman, however,
fulfills her civic obligations while still guarding
her chastity, she will be in position as never be-
fore to uphold the "single standard," demanding
that men shall add the personal virtues to their
performance of public duties. Women may at [212]
last force men to do away with the traditional
use of a public record as a cloak for a
wretched private character, because society will
never permit a woman to make such excuses for
herself.
Every movement therefore which tends to
increase woman's share of civic responsibility
undoubtedly forecasts the time when a social
control will be extended over men, similar to
the historic one so long established over women.
As that modern relationship between men and
women, which the Romans called "virtue between
equals" increases, while it will continue to make
women freer and nobler, less timid of reputation
and more human, will also inevitably modify
the standards of men.
On the other hand, there is no doubt that this
new freedom from domestic and community
control, with the opportunity for escaping obser-
vation which the city affords, is often utilized
unworthily by women. The report of the Chi-
cago vice commission tells of numerous girls
living in small cities and country towns, who
come to Chicago from time to time under arrange-
ments made with the landlady of a seemingly re- [213]
spectable apartment. They remain long enough
to earn money for a spring or fall wardrobe
and return to their home towns, where their
acquaintances are quite without suspicion of
the methods they have employed to secure the
much-admired costumes brought from the city.
Often an unattached country girl, who has come
to live in a city, has gradually fallen into a
vicious life from sheer lack of social restraint.
Such a girl, when living in a smaller community,
realized that good behavior was a protective
measure and that any suspicion of immorality
would quickly ruin her social standing; but
when removed from such surveillance, she hopes
to be able to pass from her regular life to an
irregular one and back again before the fact
has been noted, quite as many young men are
trying to do.
Perhaps no young woman 18 more exposed to
temptation of this sort than the one who works
in an office where she may be the sole woman
employed and where the relation to her employer
and to her fellow-clerks is almost on a social
basis. Many office girls have taken "business
courses" in their native towns and have come [214]
to the city in search of the large salaries which
have no parallels at home. Such a position is
not only new to the individual, but it is so recent
an outcome of modern business methods, that
it has not yet been conventionalized. The girl
is without the wholesome social restraint afforded
by the companionship of other working-women
and her isolation in itself constitutes a danger.
An investigation disclosed that a startling number
of Chicago girls had found their positions through
advertisements and had no means of ascertaining
the respectability of their employers. In addi-
tion to this, the girls who seek such positions are
sometimes vain and pretentious, and will take
any sort of office work because it seems to them
"more ladylike." A girl of this sort came to
Chicago from the country three years ago at
the age of seventeen and secured a position as a
stenographer with a large firm of lawyers. She
was pretty and attractive, and in her desire to
see more of the wonderful city to which she had
come, she accepted many invitations to din-
ners and theatres from a younger member of the
firm. The other girls in the office, representing
the more capable type of business women, among [215]
whom a careful code of conduct is developing,
although at present it is often manifested only
by the social ostracism of the one of their num-
ber who has broken the conventions, protested
against her conduct, first to the girl and then to
the head of the office. The usual story developed
rapidly, the girl lost her position, her brother-in-
law, learning the cause, refused her a home and
she became absolutely dependent upon the man.
As their relations became notorious, he at length
was requested to withdraw from the firm. When
brought to my knowledge she had already been
deserted for a year. The only people she had
known during that time were those in the dis-
reputable hotel in which she had been living
when her lover disappeared, and it was through
their mistaken kindness in making an opportu-
nity for her in the only life with which they were
familiar, that she had been drawn into the worst
vice of the city.
She was but one of thousands of young women
whose undisciplined minds are fatally assailed
by the subtleties and sophistries of city life,
and who have lost their bearings in the midst of
a multitude of new imaginative impressions. [216]
It is hard for a girl, thrilled by the mere propin-
quity of city excitements and eager to share
them, to keep to the gray and monotonous path
of regular work. Almost every such girl of the
hundreds who have come to grief, "begins" by
accepting invitations to dinners and places of
amusement. She is always impressed with the
ease for concealment which the city affords,
although at the same time vaguely resentful
that it is so indifferent to her individual ex-
istence. It is impossible to estimate the amount
of clandestine prostitution which the modern city
contains, but there is no doubt that the growth
of the social evil at the present moment, lies in
this direction. Another of its less sinister de-
velopments is perhaps a contemporary mani-
festation of that break, long considered neces-
sary, between established morality and artistic
freedom represented by the hetaira in Athens,
the gifted actress in Paris, the geisha in
Japan. Insofar as such women have been
treated as independent human beings and
prized for their mental and social charm,
even although they are on a commercial basis,
it makes for a humanization of this most [217]
sordid business. Such open manifestations of
prostitution hasten social control, because pub-
licity has ever been the first step toward
community understanding and discipline.
Doubtless the attitude toward the victims of
commercialized vice will be modified by many
reactions upon the public consciousness, through
a thousand manifestations of the great democratic
movement which is developing all about us.
Certainly we are safe in predicting that when
the solidarity of human interest is actually
realized, it will become unthinkable that one
class of human beings should be sacrificed to the
supposed needs of another; when the rights of
human life have successfully asserted themselves
in contrast to the rights of property, it will
become impossible to sell the young and heedless
into degradation. An age marked by its vigorous
protests against slavery and class tyranny, will
not continue to ignore the multitudes of women
who are held in literal bondage; nor will an age
characterized by a new tenderness for the losers
in life's race, always persist in denying forgiveness
to the woman who has lost all. A voice which
has come across the centuries, filled with pity [218]
for her who has "sinned much," must at last
be joined by the forgiving voices of others, to
whom it has been revealed that it is hardness
of heart which has ever thwarted the divine
purposes of religion. A generation which has
gone through so many successive revolts against
commercial aggression and lawlessness, will at
last lead one more revolt on behalf of the young
girls who are the victims of the basest and vilest
commercialism. As that consciousness of human
suffering, which already hangs like a black cloud
over thousands of our more sensitive contempo-
raries, increases in poignancy, it must finally
include the women who for so many generations
have received neither pity nor consideration;
as the sense of justice fast widens to encircle
all human relations, it must at length reach the
women who have so long been judged without a
hearing.
In that vast and checkered undertaking of its
own moralization to which the human race is
committed, it must constantly free itself from the
survivals and savage infections of the primitive
life from which it started. Now one and then
another of the ancient wrongs and uncouth [219]
customs which have been so long familiar as to
seem inevitable, rise to the moral consciousness
of a passing generation; first for uneasy contem-
plation and then for gallant correction.
May America bear a valiant part in this inter-
national crusade of the compassionate, enlist-
ing under its banner not only those sensitive
to the wrongs of others, but those conscious of
the destruction of the race itself, who form the
standing army of humanity's self-pity, which is
becoming slowly mobilized for a new conquest!
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