THE DEMI-MONDE.
Reader, did you ever try to estimate the malign influence upon society
of one single fallen woman? Did you ever endeavor to calculate the evils
of such a leaven stealthily disseminating its influence in a community?
Woman, courted, flattered, fondled, tempted and deceived, becomes in
turn the terrible Nemesis--the insatiate Avenger of her sex! Armed with
a power which is all but irresistible, and stripped of that which alone
can retain and purify her influence, she steps upon the arena of life
ready to act her part in the demoralization of society. As some one has
remarked, "the _lex talionis_--the law of retaliation--is hers. Society
has made her what she is, and must now be governed by her potent
influence." Surely the weight of this influence baffles computation!
View it in shattered domestic ties, in the sacrifice of family peace, in
the cold desolation of once happy homes! See the eldest son and hope of
a proud family, educated in an atmosphere of virtue and principle, who
has given promise of high and noble qualities. He falls a victim to the
fashionable vice, and carries back to his hitherto untainted home the
lethal influence he has imbibed. Another and another, within the range
of that influence, suffers for his lapse from moral rectitude, and they
in turn become the agents and disseminators of fresh evils.
This promiscuous association is tacitly regarded as a necessary evil,
the suppression of which would produce alarming and disastrous effects
upon the community at large. The passions, indolence, and the love of
dress and display are the main agents in producing the class of women we
have under consideration. It is a vulgar error and a popular delusion,
that the life of a fallen woman is as revolting to herself as it appears
to the moralist and philanthropist. Authors of vivid imagination love to
portray the misery that is brought on an innocent and confiding girl by
the perfidy and desertion of her seducer. The stage presents the picture
with all its accessories of light, color and morbid emotion. The pulpit
takes up the theme and howls its evangelical horrors, picturing those
women as being a continuous prey to "the long-beaked, filthy vulture of
unending despair." Women who in youth have lost their virtue, often
contrive to retain their reputation, and even when this is not the case,
frequently amalgamate with the purer portion of the population, and
become, to all outward appearance, good members of society.
The love of woman is usually pure and elevated. But when she devotes her
affections to a man who realizes her ideal, she does not hesitate to
sacrifice all she holds dear for his gratification. Actuated by a noble
self-abnegation, she derives a melancholy pleasure from the knowledge
that she has utterly given up all she had formerly so zealously guarded,
and she feels that her love has reached its grand climacteric when she
abandons herself, without redemption, to the idol she has set up in the
highest place in her soul. This heroic martyrdom is one of the
recognizable causes of the immorality that insidiously permeates our
social system.
The crime of prostitution can be witnessed in New York in every phase in
which it invites or repels the passions of men. There are the splendid
parlor houses distributed in the most fashionable parts of the city;
there are the bar houses; there are the dance houses; and there are the
miserable basements where this traffic is seen in its hideous deformity,
divested of the gaslight glare and tinsel of the high-toned seraglios.
The internal arrangements of the palatial bagnios are in many instances
sumptuous, magnificent and suggestive. The walls of these seductive
arsenals, too, are frequently of a color calculated to throw the most
becoming shade over the inmates, while the pictures on the walls usually
suggest resplendent sensuality. Many of these gilded palaces are
patronized by prominent citizens, officials in the government, state and
civic employ. Many of them, already married, keep mistresses in these
establishments, while others are content to be recognized as "lovers" of
the inmates. Many of the country merchants who periodically visit New
York insist on being taken the "grand rounds," as it is termed, before
they will order goods or attend to business at all. The salesmen in our
leading houses are expect to be posted, and to act as escorts sad
chaperones in this wine-guzzling tour. Indeed, so much is this
disgraceful feature recognized in some large business houses, that the
proprietors make an allowance to their salesmen for this purpose.
The proprietresses of these houses are all impervious to shame, and
carry on their trade with the sole ambition of realizing money. Many of
them have summer establishments and suburban villas at the
watering-places, and carry on their nefarious business at Saratoga, Long
Branch, Coney Island, Newport and Cape May during the summer mouths.
Many of them own handsome equipages, in which, gorgeously attired, with
liveried menials, they show themselves in Central Park to the envy of
the virtuous and honest of womankind. It is in the places kept by these
women, where the inmates are usually handsome young girls between the
ages of fifteen and thirty, that the precocious and well-to-do young men
of this city fall an easy prey to vice, and become in time the haggard
and dissolute man of the town, or degenerate into the forger, the bank
defaulter or the swindler.
The bar and basement brothels, profusely scattered over the lower
portions of the city, present the most miserable phase of this
disgusting evil. Nearly all these places are kept by men, though
nominally under control of their mistresses and wives, who are generally
hideous specimens of womanhood, and whose features present the traits of
sensuality, cruelty and avarice as clearly expressed as if traced there
by Belial himself. The men, flashily dressed and bejeweled, their flabby
features decorated by a huge dyed mustache, frequent race courses and
other places of public resort, and loud in appearance as they are
obscene in talk, are, in the estimation of every self-respecting man,
eminently fitted by Lucifer for laboring in the State-prison quarries
for the term of their natural lives.
The inmates of these basement brothels invite the pencil of a Hogarth.
Their bloated forms, pimpled features and bloodshot eyes are suggestive
of an Inferno, while their tawdry dresses, brazen leer, and disgusting
assumption of an air of gay abandon, emphasizes their hideousness and
renders it more repulsive. Most of them have passed through the
successive grades of immorality. Some of them have been the queenly
mistress of the spendthrift, and have descended, step by step, to the
foul, degraded beings of those human charnel-houses. In some instances
fresh-looking girls will be seen, and careful inquiry will discover the
fact that they were either emigrant or innocent country girls, who have
been inveigled into these dens by the arts of procuresses or brought
there by their seducers. Unsophisticated and unacquainted with life in a
great city, without money or friends, they have been entrapped and
compelled to submit to a life of shame by the coarse words and
frequently the brutal violence of their captors.
Between the two extremes of unfortunates already described, there is
another class nomadic in their habits. Some of these are street-walkers,
some frequent dance houses like The Allen's, Billy McGlory's, Owney
Geoghegan's and Harry Hill's, while others circulate around such
up-town, west-side houses as the French Madame's, the Haymarket and Tom
Gould's. They usually live in furnished rooms, in houses owned by
wealthy and respectable citizens, let to them by agents who lease them
at exorbitant rents, paid in advance. In both the eastern, western and
central portions of the city they may be found occupying rooms on the
same floors with respectable families. These women seldom conduct the
prey that they have allured to their home, but to some assignation house
or fourth-rate hotel, of which there are a large number scattered over
the city.
Most of this class of unfortunates have a "lover"--a gambler or pimp,
who occupies their room and assumes the role of husband and protector
for the nonce, with the privilege of spending the girl's blood money in
drink or dissipation, and unmercifully beating her when he feels
inclined that way. The pair call this place their home, and as they are
shiftless in their habits, and careless of sickness, they are frequently
in a condition of chronic impecuniosity and are thus liable to be "fired
out" by the heartless agent. Many of these girls, from their association
with vicious society, become thieves, and ply their light-fingered
privateering while caressing their victim. It is a favorite dodge of
some of the more comely and shapely of this class, especially the
frequenters of such places as Gould's, the Haymarket, the French
Ma-dames, the Star and Garter, and the Empire, to ask gentlemen on whom
they have been unavailingly airing their becks and nods and other
fascinations to put a quarter into the top of their hosiery "for luck."
They usually get the quarter, and sometimes the man as well.
The assignation houses are usually located convenient to the great
arteries of travel, and, as we have already hinted, they are largely
patronized; while the number of "flash hotels" which are frequented by
the "soiled doves" and their mates, is also numerous and scarcely less
notorious than the assignation houses. The proprietors of these
"convenient" hotels invariably keep the hotel register required by law,
but agreeably fail to ask their lodgers for the time being to chronicle
either their own or even a fictitious name, thus, day after day,
violating a specific statute.
Besides these, there are assignation houses of a far different
character. By these we mean the introducing houses, such as ostensible
millinery establishments and the like in fashionable but retired
streets, where ladies meet their lovers. Married women of the _haut
ton_, with wealthy, hard-working husbands courting Mammon downtown,
imitating the custom of Messalina, not uncommonly make use of these
places. Sometimes the lady will even take along her young child as a
"blind," and the little innocent will be regaled with sweetmeats in the
parlor while the mother keeps her appointment up-stairs.
Liberally, every woman who yields to her passions and loses her virtue
is what Tom Hood would have called "one more unfortunate," but many draw
a distinction between those who live by promiscuous intercourse, and
those who merely manifest, like the ladies referred to above, a
_penchant_ for one man. There is still another denomination of this
latter kind, whom all the world has heard of as kept mistresses. These
women exercise a potent influence upon society and contribute largely to
swell the numbers of well-to-do young men who manifest an invincible
distaste to marriage. Lais, when under the protection of a prince of the
blood; Aspasia, whose friend is one of the most influential noblemen in
the kingdom; Phryne, the _chere ami_ of a well-known officer, or a man
of wealth known on the stock exchange and in the city--have all great
influence upon the tone of morality, while the glare of their dazzling
profligacy falls upon and bewilders those who are in a lower condition
of life, and acts as an incentive to similar deeds of licentiousness,
though necessarily on a more limited scale.
The prevalence of the kept mistress surpasses the wildest imagining in
this city, although in many a home her dire influence has extinguished
the Hymeneal torch, and left nothing but ashes and desolation. It is a
great mistake to imagine that these kept women are without friends and
debarred from society. On the contrary, their acquaintance, if not
select, is numerous. They are useful, good-looking, piquant, tasteful
and vivacious. Many of them have more than one lover, and conduct their
amours with singular _finesse_, generally escaping detection. They are
rarely possessed of more than a smattering of education, because their
ranks are recruited from a class where education is not in vogue. They
are not, as a rule, disgusted with their mode of living--most of them
consider it as a means to an end, and in no measure degrading or
polluting. Most of them look forward to marriage and a certain state in
society as their ultimate lot. Many of these women reside in the most
fashionable apartment houses up-town, and successfully conceal their
shame from the inquisitive eye of the respectable matron. They may also
be seen in the most fashionable hotels and boarding houses, while they
have even crept in as members of institutions and organizations which
were incepted solely for the benefit of high-toned and virtuous women.
Moreover, they are to be seen in boxes at the theatre and the opera, and
in almost every accessible place where wealthy and fashionable people
congregate. In point of fact, through the potent influence of their more
or less wealthy protector, they possess the open sesame to all places
where admittance is not secured by vouchers, and in many instances those
apparently insuperable barriers fall before their indorser's tact and
address.