BREAKING THE GREAT TABOO
At the threshold of that quarter of old New York called Greenwich
Village stands Jefferson Market Court. Almost concealed behind the
towering structure of the Sixth Avenue Elevated, the building by day is
rather inconspicuous. But when night falls, swallowing up the
neighborhood of tangled streets and obscure alleyways, Jefferson Market
assumes prominence. High up in the square brick tower an illuminated
clock seems perpetually to be hurrying its pointing hands toward
midnight. From many windows, barred for the most part, streams an
intense white light. Above an iron-guarded door at the side of the
building floats a great globe of light, and beneath its glare, through
the iron-guarded door, there passes, every week-day night in the year, a
long procession of prodigals.
The guarded door seldom admits any one as important, so to speak, as a
criminal. The criminal's case waits for day. The Night Court in
Jefferson Market sits in judgment only on the small fry caught in the
dragnet of the police. Tramps, vagrants, drunkards, brawlers, disturbers
of the peace, speeding chauffeurs, licenseless peddlers, youths caught
red-handed shooting craps or playing ball in the streets,--these are the
men with whom the Night Court deals. But it is not the men we have come
to see.
[Illustration: MISS MAUDE E. MINER]
The women of the Night Court. Prodigal daughters! Between December,
1908, and December, 1909, no less than five thousand of them passed
through the guarded door, under the blaze of the electric lights. There
is never an hour, from nine at night until three in the morning, when
the prisoners' bench in Jefferson Market Court is without its full quota
of women. Old--prematurely old, and young--pitifully young; white and
brown; fair and faded; sad and cynical; starved and prosper ous;
rag-draped and satin-bedecked; together they wait their turn at
judgment.
Quietly moving back and forth before the prisoners' bench you see a
woman, tall, graceful, black-gowned. She is the salaried probation
officer, modern substitute for the old-time volunteer mission worker.
The probation officer's serious blue eyes burn with no missionary zeal.
There is no spark of sentimental pity in the keen gaze she turns on each
new arrival.
When the bench is full of women the judge turns to her to inquire:
"Anybody there you want, Miss Miner?"
Miss Miner usually shakes her head. She diagnoses her cases like a
physician, and she wastes no time on incurables.
Once in a while, perhaps several times in the course of a night, Miss
Miner touches a girl on the arm. At once the girl rises and follows the
probation officer into an adjoining room. If she is what she appears,
young in evil, if she has a story which rings true, a story of poverty
and misfortune, rather than of depravity, she goes not back to the
prisoners' bench. When her turn at judgment comes Miss Miner stands
beside her, and in a low voice meant only for the judge, she tells the
facts. The girl weeps as she listens. To hear one's troubles told is
sometimes more terrible than to endure them.
Court adjourns at three in the morning, and this girl, with the
others--if others have been claimed by the probation officer--goes out
into the empty street, under the light of the tall tower, whose clock
has begun all over again its monotonous race toward midnight. No
policeman accompanies the group. The girls are under no manner of
duress. They have promised to go home with Miss Miner, and they go. The
night's adventure, entered into with dread, with callous indifference,
or with thoughtless mirth, ends in a quiet bedroom and a pillow wet with
tears.
[Illustration: IN THE NIGHT COURT, NEW YORK.]
Waverley House, as Miss Miner's home is known, has sheltered, during the
past year, over three hundred girls. Out of that number one hundred and
nineteen have returned to their homes, or are earning a living at useful
work.
One hundred and nineteen saved out of five thousand prodigals! In point
of numbers this is a melancholy showing, but in comparison with other
efforts at rescue work it is decidedly encouraging.
Nothing quite like Waverley House has appeared in other American cities,
but it is a type of detention home for girls which is developing
logically out of the probation system. Delinquent girls under sixteen
are now considered, in all enlightened communities, subjects for the
Juvenile Court. They are hardly ever associated with older delinquents.
But a girl over sixteen is likely to be committed to prison, and may be
locked in cells with criminal and abandoned women of the lowest order.
Waverley House is the first practical protest against this stupid and
evil-encouraging policy.
The house, which stands a few blocks distant from the Night Court, was
established and is maintained by the Probation Association of New York,
consisting of the probation officers in many of the city courts, and of
men and women interested in philanthropy and social reform. The District
Attorney of New York County, Charles S. Whitman, is president of the
Association, Maude E. Miner is its secretary, Mrs. Russell Sage, Miss
Anne Morgan, Miss Mary Dreier, president of the New York Women's Trade
Union League, Mrs. Richard Aldrich, formerly president of the Women's
Municipal League, Andrew Carnegie, Edward T. Devine, head of New York's
organized charities, Homer Folks, and Fulton Cutting are among the
supporters of Waverley House. Miss Stella Miner is the capable and
sympathetic superintendent of the house.
The place is in no sense a reformatory. It is an experiment station, a
laboratory where the gravest and most baffling of all the diseases which
beset society is being studied. Girls arrested for moral delinquency and
paroled to probation officers are taken to Waverley House, where they
remain, under closest study and searching inquiry, until the best means
of disposing of them is devised. Some are sent to their homes, some to
hospitals, some to institutions, some placed on long probation.
Maude E. Miner, who declined a chair of mathematics in a woman's college
to work in the Night Court, is one of an increasing number of women who
are attempting a great task. They are trying to solve a problem which
has baffled the minds of the wisest since civilization dawned. They have
set themselves to combat an evil fate which every year overtakes
countless thousands of young girls, dragging them down to misery,
disease, and death. At the magnitude of the effort these women have
undertaken one stands appalled. Will they ever reach the heart of the
problem? Can they ever hope to do more than reclaim a few individuals?
This much did the missionaries before them.
"We could reclaim fully seventy-five per cent," declares Miss Miner, "if
only we could find a way to begin nearer the beginning."
To begin the reform of any evil at the beginning, or near the beginning,
instead of near the end is now regarded as an economy of effort. That is
what educators are trying to do with juvenile delinquency; what
physicians are doing with disease; what philanthropists are beginning to
do with poverty.
Hardly any one has suggested that the social evil might have a cause,
and that it might be possible to attack it at its source. Yet that any
large number of girls enter upon such a horrible career, willingly,
voluntarily, is unbelievable to one who knows anything of the facts.
There must be strong forces at work on these girls, forces they find
themselves entirely powerless to resist.
Miss Miner and her fellow probation officers are the visible signs of a
very important movement among women to discover what these forces are.
Meager, indeed, are the facts at hand. We have had, and we still have,
in cities east and west, committees and societies and law and order
leagues earnestly engaged in "stamping out" the evil. It is like trying
to stamp out a fire constantly fed with inflammables and fanned by a
strong gale. The protests of most of these leagues amount to little
more than vain clamor against a thing which is not even distantly
comprehended.
The _personnel_ of these agencies organized to "stamp out" the evil
differs little in the various cities. It is largely if not wholly
masculine in character, and the evil is usually dealt with from the
point of view of religion and morals. Women, when they appear in the
matter at all, figure as missionaries, "prison angels," and the like. As
evangelists to sinners women have been permitted to associate with their
fallen sisters without losing caste. Likewise, when elderly enough, they
have been allowed to serve on governing boards of "homes" and
"refuges." Their activities were limited to rescue work. They might
extend a hand to a repentant Magdalene. A Phryne they must not even be
aware of. In other words, this evil as a subject of investigation and
intelligent discussion among women was absolutely prohibited. It has
ever been their Great Taboo.
Nevertheless, when eight million women, in practically every civilized
country in the world, organized themselves into an International Council
of Women, and began their remarkable survey of the social order in which
they live, one of their first acts was to break the Great Taboo.
[Illustration: MISS SADIE AMERICAN]
At early congresses of the International Council Miss Sadie American,
Mrs. Kate Waller Barrett, Mrs. Elizabeth Grannis, among American
delegates, Miss Elizabeth Janes of England, Miss Elizabeth Gad of
Denmark, Dr. Agnes Bluhm of Germany, and others interested in the moral
welfare of girls, urged upon the Council action against the "White
Slave" traffic. No extensive argument was required to convince the
members of the Council that the "White Slave" traffic and the whole
subject of the moral degradation of women was a social phenomenon too
long neglected by women.
These women declared with refreshing candor that it was about time that
the social evil was dealt with intelligently, and if it was to be dealt
with intelligently women must do the work. The fussy old gentlemen with
white side whiskers and silk-stocking reformers and the other well
meaning amateurs, who are engaged in "stamping out" the evil, deserve to
be set aside. In their places the women propose to install social
experts who shall deal scientifically with the problem.
The double standard of morals, accepted in fact if not in principle, in
every community, and so rigidly applied that good women are actually
forbidden to have any knowledge of their fallen sisters, was for the
first time repudiated by a body of organized women. The arguments on
which the double standard of morals is based was, for the first time,
seriously scrutinized by women of intelligence and social importance.
The desirability of the descent of property in legal paternal line
seemed to these women a good enough reason for applying a rigid standard
of morals to women. But they found reasons infinitely greater why the
same rigid standard should be applied to men.
The International Council of Women and women's organizations in every
country number among their members and delegates women physicians, and
through these physicians they have been able to consider the social evil
from an altogether new point of view. Certain very ugly facts, which
touch the home and which intimately concern motherhood and the welfare
of children, were brought forth--facts concerning infantile blindness,
almost one-third of which is caused by excesses on the part of the
fathers; facts concerning certain forms of ill health in married women,
and the increase of sterility due to the spread of specific diseases
among men. The horrible results to innocent women and children of these
maladies, and their frightful prevalence,--seventy-five per cent of city
men, according to reliable authority, being affected,--aroused in the
women a sentiment of indignation and revolt. The International Council
of Women put itself on record as protesting against the responsibility
laid upon women, the unassisted task of preserving the purity of the
race.
In the United States, women's clubs, women's societies, women's medical
associations, special committees of women in many cities have
courageously undertaken the study of this problem, intending by means of
investigation and publicity to lay bare its sources and seek its remedy.
The sources of the evil are about the only phase of the problem which
has never been adequately examined. It is true that we have suspected
that the unsteady and ill-adjusted economic position of women furnished
some explanation for its existence, but even now our information is
vague and unsatisfactory.
A number of years ago, in 1888 to be exact, the Massachusetts Bureau of
Labor Statistics made an interesting investigation. This was an effort
to determine how far the entrance of women into the industrial world,
usually under the disadvantage of low wages, was contributing to
profligacy. The bureau gathered statistics of the previous occupations
of nearly four thousand fallen women in twenty-eight American cities.
Of these unfortunates over eight hundred had worked in low-waged trades
such as paper-box making, millinery, laundry work, rope and cordage
making, cigar and cigarette making, candy packing, textile factory and
shoe factory work.
About five hundred women had been garment workers, dressmakers, and
seamstresses, but how far these were skilled or unskilled was not
stated.
The department store, at that time little more than a sweat shop so far
as wages and long hours of work were concerned, contributed one hundred
and sixteen recruits to the list.
On the whole, these groups were what the investigators had expected to
find.
There were two other large groups of prodigals, and these were entirely
unexpected by the investigators. Of the 3,866 girls examined 1,236, or
nearly thirty-two per cent, reported no previous occupation. The next
largest group, 1,115, or nearly thirty per cent, had been domestic
servants. The largest group of all had gone straight from their homes
into lives of evil. A group nearly as large had gone directly from that
occupation which is constantly urged upon women as the safest and most
suitable means of earning their living--housework.
Now you may, if you want to drop the thing out of your mind as something
too disagreeable to think about, infer from this that at least sixty-two
per cent of those 3,866 women deserved their fate. Some of them were too
lazy to work, and the rest preferred a life of soiled luxury to one of
honest toil in somebody's nice kitchen. Apparently this was the view
taken by the Massachusetts Bureau of Labor Statistics, because it never
carried the investigation any farther. It never tried to find out _why_
so many girls left their homes to enter evil lives. It never tried to
find out _why_ housework was a trade dangerous to morals.
Fortunately it did occur to the women's organizations to examine the
facts a little more carefully. In this article I am going to take you
over some of the ground they have covered and show you where their
investigations have led them.
South Chicago is a fairly good place to begin. Its ugliness and
forlornness can be matched in the factory section of almost any large
city. South Chicago is dominated by its steel mills,--enormous drab
structures, whose every crevice leaks quivering heat and whose towering
chimneys belch forth unceasingly a pall of ashes and black smoke. The
steel workers and their families live as a rule in two and three family
houses, built of wood, generally unpainted, and always dismally
utilitarian as to architectural details.
In South Chicago, four years ago, there was not such a thing as a park,
or a playground, or a recreation center. One lone social settlement was
just seeking a home for itself. There were public schools, quite
imposing buildings. But these were closed and locked and shuttered for
the day as soon as the classes were dismissed.
In a certain neighborhood of South Chicago there lived a number of young
girls, healthy, high-spirited, and full of that joy of life which always
must be fed--if not with wholesome food, then husks. For parents these
girls had fathers who worked twelve hours a day in the steel mills and
came home at night half dead from lack of rest and sleep; and mothers
who toiled equally long hours in the kitchen or over the washtub and
were too weary to know or care what the girls did after school. For
social opportunity the girls had "going downtown." Perhaps you know
what that means. It means trooping up and down the main street in lively
groups, lingering near a saloon where a phonograph is bawling forth a
cheerful air, visiting a nickel theater, or looking on at a street
accident or a fight.
About this time the panic of 1907 descended suddenly on South Chicago
and turned out of the steel mills hundreds of boys and men. Some of
these were mere lads, sixteen to eighteen years old. They, too, went
"downtown." There was no other place for them to go.
As a plain matter of cause and effect, what kind of a moral situation
would you expect to evolve out of these materials?
Eventually a woman probation officer descended on the neighborhood. Many
of the girls whom she rescued from conditions not to be described in
these pages were so young that their cases were tried in the Juvenile
Court. Most of them went to rescue homes, reformatories, or hospitals.
Some slipped away permanently, in all human probability to join the
never-ceasing procession of prodigals.
This is what "no previous occupation" really means in nine cases out of
ten. It means that the girl lived in a home which was no home at all,
according to the ideals of you who read these pages.
Sometimes it was a cellar where the family slept on rags. Sometimes it
was an attic where ten or twelve people herded in a space not large
enough for four. Some of these homes were never warm in winter. In some
there was hardly any furniture. But we need not turn to these extreme
cases in order to show that in many thousands of American homes virtue
and innocence are lost because no facilities for preserving them are
possible.
Annie Donnelly's case will serve as further illustration. Annie
Donnelly's father was a sober, decent man of forty, who drove a cab from
twelve to fifteen hours every day in the year, Sundays and holidays
included. Before the cab drivers' strike, a year or two ago, Donnelly's
wages were fifteen dollars a week, and the family lived in a four-room
tenement, for which they paid $5.50 a week. You pay rent weekly to a
tenement landlord. Since the strike wages are fourteen dollars a week
for cab drivers, and this fall the Donnelly rent went up fifty cents a
week.
The Donnelly tenement was a very desirable one, having but a single
dark, windowless room, instead of two or three, like most New York
tenements. There were three children younger than Annie, who was
fourteen. The family of five made a fairly tight fit in four rooms.
Nevertheless, when the rent went up to six dollars Mrs. Donnelly took a
lodger. She had to or move and, remember, this was a desirable tenement
because it had only one dark room.
One day the lodger asked Annie if she did not want to go to a dance.
Annie did want to, but she knew very well that her mother would not
allow her to go. Once a year the entire family, including the baby,
attended the annual ball of the Coachman's Union, but that was another
thing. Annie was too young for dances her mother declared.
The Donnellys paid for and occupied three rooms, but they really lived
in one room, the others being too filled with beds to be habitable
except at night. The kitchen, the one living-room, was uncomfortably
crowded at meal times. At no time was there any privacy. It was
impossible for Annie to receive her girl friends in her home. Every bit
of her social life had to be lived out of the house.
When the weather was warm she often stayed in the street, walking about
with the other girls or sitting on a friend's doorstep, until ten or
even eleven o'clock at night. Every one does the same in a crowded city
neighborhood. There comes a time in a girl's life when this sort of
thing becomes monotonous. The time came when Annie found sitting on the
doorstep and talking about nothing in particular entirely unbearable. So
one balmy, inviting spring night she slipped away and went with the
lodger to a dance.
The dance hall occupied a big, low-ceiled basement room in a building
which was a combination of saloon and tenement house. In one of the
front windows of the basement room was hung a gaudy placard: "The Johnny
Sullivan Social Club."
The lodger paid no admission, but he deposited ten cents for a hat
check, after which they went in. About thirty couples were swinging in a
waltz, their forms indistinctly seen through the clouds of dust which
followed them in broken swirls through air so thick that the electric
lights were dimmed. Somewhere in the obscurity a piano did its noisiest
best with a popular waltz tune.
In a few minutes Annie forgot her timidity, forgot the dust and the heat
and the odor of stale beer, and was conscious only that the music was
piercing, sweet, and that she was swinging in blissful time to it. When
the waltz tune came to an end at last the dancers stopped, gasping with
the heat, and swaying with the giddiness of the dance.
"Come along," said the lodger, "and have a beer." When Annie shook her
head he exclaimed: "Aw, yuh have to. The Sullivans gets the room rent
free, but the fellers upstairs has bar privileges, and yuh have to buy
a beer off of 'em oncet in a while. They've gotta get something out of
it."
I do not know whether Annie yielded then or later. But ultimately she
learned to drink beer for the benefit of philanthropists who furnish
dance halls rent free, and also to quench a thirst rendered unbearable
by heat and dust. They seldom open the windows in these places.
Sometimes they even nail the windows down. A well-ventilated room means
poor business at the bar.
Annie Donnelly became a dance-hall _habitué_. Not because she was
viciously inclined; not because she was abnormal; but because she was
decidedly normal in all her instincts and desires.
Besides, it is easy to get the dance-hall habit. At almost every dance
invitations to other dances are distributed with a lavish hand. These
invitations, on cheap printed cards, are scattered broadcast over chairs
and benches, on the floors, and even on the bar itself. They are locally
known as "throw-aways." Here are a few specimens, from which you may
form an idea of the quality of dance halls, and the kind of
people--almost the only kind of people--who offer pleasure to the
starved hearts of girls like Annie Donnelly. These are actual
invitations picked up in an East Side dance hall by the head worker of
the New York College Settlement:
"_Second annual reception and ball, given by Jibo and Jack, at New
Starlight Hall, 143 Suffolk Street, December 25. Music by our
favorite. Gents ticket 25 cents, Ladies 15 cents._"
"_Don't miss the ball given by Joe the Greaser, and Sam Rosenstock,
at Odd Fellows' Hall, January 29th._"
"_See the Devil Dance at the Reception and Ball given by Max Pascal
and Little Whity, at Tutonia Hall, Tuesday evening, November
20th."_
_ "Reception and Ball given by two well known friends, Max Turk and
Sam Lande, better known as Mechuch, at Appollo Hall, Chrystmas
night. Floor manager, Young Louis. Ticket admit one 25 cents._"
In addition to these private affairs which are arranged purely for the
profit of "Jibo and Jack" and their kind, men who make a living in this
and in yet more unspeakable ways, there are hundreds of saloon dance
halls, not only in New York, but in other cities. These are simply
annexes to drinking places, and people are not welcome there unless they
drink. No admission is charged.
There are also numberless dancing academies. Dancing lessons are given
four nights in the week, as a rule, and the dancing public buys
admission the other three nights and on Sunday afternoons. Some dancing
academies, even in tenement house quarters, are reputable institutions,
but to most of them the lowest of the low, both men and women, resort.
There, as in the dance halls, the "White Slaver" plies his trade, and
the destroyer of womanliness lays his nets.
Annie Donnelly soon learned the ways of all these places. She learned to
"spiel." You spiel by holding hands with your partner at arms' length,
and whirling round and round at the highest possible speed. The girl's
skirts are blown immodestly high, which is a detail. The effect of the
spiel is a species of drunkenness which creates an instant demand for
liquor, and a temporary recklessness of the possible results of strong
drink.
Annie also learned to dance what is known as the "half time," or the
"part time" waltz. This is a dance accompanied by a swaying and
contorting of the hips, most indecent in its suggestion. It is really a
very primitive form of the dance, and probably goes back to the pagan
harvest and bacchic festivals. You may see traces of it in certain crude
peasant dances in out-of-the-way corners of Europe. Now they teach it to
immigrant girls in New York dancing academies and dance halls, and tell
the girls that it is the _American_ fashion of waltzing.
Annie Donnelly's destruction was accomplished in less than a year. It
was the more rapid because of the really superior character of her home.
There was nothing the matter with that home except that it was too
crowded for the family to stay in it. Father and mother were
respectable, hard-working people, and after Annie's first real
misadventure, into which she fell almost unwittingly, she was afraid to
go home.
The dance hall, as we have permitted it to exist, practically
unregulated, has become a veritable forcing house of vice and crime in
every city in the United States. It is a straight chute down which,
every year, thousands of girls descend to the way of the prodigal. No
one has counted their number. All we know of the unclassed is that they
exist, apparently in ever-increasing masses.
It was estimated in Chicago, not long ago, that there were about six
thousand unfortunate women known to the police, and something like
twenty thousand who managed to avoid actual collision with the law. That
is, the latter lived quietly and plied their trade on the street so
unostentatiously that they were seldom arrested. How many of these
unfortunates reached the streets through the dance hall is impossible to
know--we only know that it constantly recruits the ranks of the
unclassed.
[Illustration: A DANCE HALL]
The dance hall may be in the rear of a saloon, or over a saloon; it may
occupy a vacant store building, or a large loft. Somewhere in its
immediate vicinity there is a saloon. A dance lasts about five minutes,
and the interval between dances is from ten to twenty minutes. Waiters
circle among the dancers, importuning them to drink. The dance hall
without a bar, or some source of liquid supply, does not often exist,
except as it has been established by social workers to offset the
influence of the commercial dance hall.
Some dance halls are small and wretchedly lighted. Others are large and
pretentious. Some of them have direct connections with Raines Law hotels
and their prototypes. Of hardly a single dance hall can a good word be
said. They are almost entirely in the hands of the element lowest in
society, in business, and in politics.
From the old-fashioned German family picnic park to Coney Island in New
York, Revere Beach in Boston, The White City in Chicago, Savin Rock in
New Haven, and their like, is a far cry.
Some of these summer parks try to keep their amusements clean and
decent, and some, notably Euclid Park, Cleveland, succeed. But drink and
often worse evils are characteristic of most of them. There are parts
of Coney Island where no beer is sold, where the vaudeville and the
moving pictures are clean and wholesome, where dancing is orderly. But
the nearest side street has its "tough joint." The same thing is true of
the big summer resorts of other cities.
The dance hall, both winter and summer types, have had a deteriorating
effect upon the old-fashioned dancing academy. Formerly these were
respectable establishments where people paid for dancing lessons. Now
they are a _mélange_ of dancing classes and public entertainments. The
dancing masters, unable to compete with the dance hall proprietors, have
been obliged to transfer many of the dance hall features to their
establishments.
Oddly enough it is rather an unusual thing for a girl to be escorted to
a dance in any kind of a dance hall. The girls go alone, with a friend,
or with a group of girls. The exceptional girl, who is attended by a
man, must dance with him, or if she accepts another part ner, she must
ask his permission. An escort is deemed a somewhat doubtful advantage.
Those who go unattended are always sure of partners. Often they meet
"fellows" they know, or have seen on the streets. Introductions are not
necessary. Even if a girl is unacquainted with any "fellows," if she
possesses slight attractions, she is still sure of partners.
The amount of money spent by working girls for dance-hall admissions is
considerable. A girl receiving six or seven dollars a week in wages
thinks nothing of reserving from fifty cents to a dollar for dancing.
In going about among the dance halls one is struck with the number of
black-gowned girls. The black gown might almost be called the mark of
the dance-hall _habitué_, the girl who is dance mad and who spends all
her evenings going from one resort to another. She wears black because
light evening gowns soil too rapidly for a meager purse to renew.
An indispensable feature of the dancing academy is the "spieler." This
is a young man whose strongest recommendation is that he is a skilled
and untiring dancer. The business of the spieler is to look after the
wall-flowers. He seeks the girl who sits alone against the wall; he
dances with her and brings other partners to her. It would not do for a
place to get the reputation of slowness. The girls go back to those
dance halls where they have had the best time.
The spieler is not uncommonly a worthless fellow; sometimes he is a
sinister creature, who lives on the earnings of unfortunate girls. The
dance hall, and especially the dancing academy, because of the youth of
many of its patrons, is a rich harvest field for men of this type.
Beginning with the saloon dance hall, unquestionably the most brutally
evil type, and ending with the dancing academy, where some pretense of
chaperonage is made, the dance hall is a vicious institution. It is
vicious because it takes the most natural of all human instincts, the
desire of men and women to associate together, and distorts that
instinct into evil. The boy and girl of the tenement-dwelling classes,
especially where the foreign element is strong, do not share their
pleasures in the normal, healthy fashion of other young people. The
position of the women of this class is not very high. Men do not treat
her as an equal. They woo her for a wife. In the same manner the boy
does not play with the girl. The relations between young people very
readily degenerate. The dance hall, with its curse of drink, its lack of
chaperonage and of reasonable discipline, helps this along its downward
course.
Sadie Greenbaum, as I will call her, was an exceptionally attractive
young Jewish girl of fifteen when I first knew her. Although not
remarkably bright in school she was industrious, and aspired to be a
stenographer. She was not destined to realize her ambition. As soon as
she finished grammar school she was served, so to speak, with her
working papers. The family needed additional income, not to meet actual
living expenses, for the Greenbaums were not acutely poor, but in order
that the only son of the family might go to college. Max was seventeen,
a selfish, overbearing prig of a boy, fully persuaded of his superiority
over his mother and sisters, and entirely willing that the family should
toil unceasingly for his advancement.
Sadie accepted the situation meekly, and sought work in a muslin
underwear factory. At eighteen she was earning seven dollars a week as a
skilled operator on a tucking machine. She sat down to her work every
morning at eight o'clock, and for four hours watched with straining eyes
a tucking foot which carried eight needles and gathered long strips of
muslin into eight fine tucks, at the rate of four thousand stitches a
minute. The needles, mere flickering flashes of white light above the
cloth, had to be watched incessantly lest a thread break and spoil the
continuity of a tuck. When you are on piece wages you do not relish
stopping the machine and doing over a yard or two of work.
So Sadie watched the needle assiduously, and ignored the fact that her
head ached pretty regularly, and she was generally too weary when lunch
time came to enjoy the black bread and pickles which, with a cup of
strong tea, made her noon meal. After lunch she again sat down to her
machine and watched the needles gallop over the cloth.
At the end of each year Sadie Greenbaum had produced for the good of the
community _four miles_ of tucked muslin. In return, the community had
rendered her back something less than three hundred dollars, for the
muslin underwear trade has its dull seasons, and you do not earn seven
dollars every week in the year.
Each week Sadie handed her pay envelope unopened to her mother. The
mother bought all Sadie's clothes and gave her food and shelter.
Consequently, Sadie's unceasing vigil of the needle paid for her
existence and purchased also the proud consciousness of an older brother
who would one day own a doctor's buggy and a social position.
The one joy of this girl's life, in fact all the real life she lived,
was dancing. Regularly every Saturday night Sadie and a girl friend,
Rosie by name, put on their best clothes and betook themselves to
Silver's Casino, a huge dance hall with small rooms adjoining, where
food and much drink were to be had.
There was a good floor at Silver's and a brass band to dance to. It was
great! The girls never lacked partners, and they made some very
agreeable acquaintances.
In the dressing room, between dances, all the girls exchanged
conversation, views on fashions, confidences about the young men and
other gossip. Some of the girls were nice and some, it must be admitted,
were "tough." What was the difference? The tough girls, with their
daring humor, their cigarettes, their easy manners, and their amazingly
smart clothes, furnished a sort of spice to the affair.
Sadie and Rosie sometimes discussed the tough girls, and the
conversation nearly always ended with one remarking: "Well, if they
don't get anything else out of livin', look at the clothes they put on
their backs."
Perhaps you can understand that longing for pretty gowns, perhaps you
can even sympathize with it. Of course, if you have a number of other
resources, you can keep the dress hunger in its proper place. But if you
have nothing in your existence but a machine--at which you toil for
others' benefit;
Sadie and Rosie continued to spend their Saturday evenings and their
Sunday evenings at Silver's Casino. At first they went home together
promptly at midnight. After midnight these casino dance halls change
their character. Often professional "pace makers" are introduced, men
and women of the lowest class, who are paid to inspire the other dancers
to lewd conduct. These wretched people are immodestly clothed, and they
perform immodest or very tough dances. They are usually known as
"Twisters," a descriptive title. When they make their appearance the
self-respecting dancers go home, and a much looser element comes in. The
pace becomes a rapid one. Manners are free, talk is coarse, laughter is
incessant. The bar does a lively business. The dancing and the revels go
on until daylight.
The first time Sadie and Rosie allowed themselves to be persuaded to
stay at Silver's after midnight they were rather horrified by the
abandoned character of the dancing, the reckless drinking, and the
fighting which resulted in several men being thrown out. The second time
they were not quite so horrified, but they decided not to stay so late
another time. Then came a great social event, the annual "mask and
shadow dance" of a local political organization. Sadie and Rosie
attended.
A "mask and shadow dance" is as important a function to girls of Sadie's
and Rosie's class as a cotillion is to girls of your class. Such affairs
are possible only in large dance halls, and to do them impressively
costs the proprietor some money. The guests rent costumes and masks and
appear in very gala fashion indeed. They dance in the rays of all kinds
of colored lights thrown upon them from upper galleries. During part of
a waltz the dancers are bathed in rose-colored lights, which change
suddenly to purple, a blue, or a green. Some very weird effects are
made, the lights being so manipulated that the dancers' shadows are
thrown, greatly magnified, on walls and floor. At intervals a rain of
bright-colored confetti pours down from above. The scene becomes
bacchanalian. Color, light, music, confetti, the dance, together
combine to produce an intense and voluptuous intoxication which the
revelers deepen with drink.
The events of the latter part of that night were very vague in Sadie's
memory when she awoke late the next morning. She remembered that she had
tolerated familiarities which had been foreign to her experience
heretofore, and that she had been led home by some friendly soul, at
daylight, almost helpless from liquor.
Frightened, haunted by half-ashamed memories of that dance, Sadie
spoiled a good bit of her work on Monday morning. The forewoman
descended on her with a torrent of coarse abuse, whereupon Sadie rose
suddenly from her machine, and in a burst of hysterical profanity and
tears rushed out of the factory, vowing never to return. There was only
one course, she decided, for her to take, and she took it.
"Sadie, why did you do it?" wailed Rosie the next time they met.
"It's better than the factory," said Sadie.
Tucking muslin underwear is dull work, but it is, in most ways, a more
agreeable task than icing cakes in a St. Louis biscuit factory. All day
Edna M---- stood over a tank filled with thick chocolate icing. The
table beside Edna's tank was kept constantly supplied with freshly baked
"lady-fingers," and these in delicate handfuls Edna seized and plunged
into the hot ooze of the chocolate. Her arms, up to the elbows, went
into the black stuff, over and over again all day. At noon, over their
lunch, the girls talked of their recreations, their clothes, their
"fellows."
Edna had not very much to contribute to the girls' stories of gayety and
adventure. She led a quieter existence than most of the other girls,
although her leanings were toward lively pleasures. She was engaged to a
young man who worked in a foundry and who was steady and perhaps rather
too serious. He was very jealous of Edna and exacted a stern degree of
fidelity of her.
Before her engagement Edna had gone to a decent dancing school and
dearly loved the dance. Now she was not permitted to dance with any one
but her prospective husband. The bright talk at the noon hour made Edna
feel that she was a very poor sport.
The young man's work in the foundry alternated weekly between day and
night duty. It occurred to Edna that her young man could not possibly
know what she did with those evenings he remained in the foundry. If she
chose to go with a group of girls to a dance hall, what harm? The long
years of married life stretched themselves out somewhat drably to Edna.
She decided to have a good time beforehand.
This girl from now on literally lived a double life. Evenings of the
weeks her young man was free from the foundry, she spent at home with
him, placidly playing cards, reading aloud, or talking. On the other
evenings she danced, madly, incessantly. Her mother thought she spent
the evenings with her girl friends. The dancing, plus the deceit, soon
had its effect on Edna. She began to visit livelier and livelier
resorts, curious to see all phases of pleasure.
Suspicion entered into the mind of her affianced. He questioned her;
she lied, and he was unconvinced. A night or two later the young man
stayed away from the foundry and followed Edna to a suburban resort. She
went, as usual, with a group of girls, but their men were waiting for
them near the door of the open-air dancing pavilion. Standing just
outside, the angry lover watched the girl "spiel" round and round with a
man of doubtful respectability. Soon she joined a noisy, beer-drinking
group at one of the tables, and her behavior grew more and more
reckless. Finally, amid laughter, she and another girl performed a
suggestive dance together.
Walking swiftly up to her, the outraged foundryman grasped her by the
shoulder, called her a name she did not yet deserve, and threw her
violently to the floor. A terrific fight followed, and the police soon
cleared the place.
Edna did not dare go home. An over-rigid standard of morals, an
over-repressive policy, an over-righteous judgment, plus a mother
ignorant of the facts of life, plus a girl's longing for joy--the sum of
these equaled ruin in Edna's case.