Twenty-six years ago in New York City, when I first began to
feel an interest in unfortunate girls, and established the first
Florence Crittenton home, now known as the Mother Mission, one
of the things which surprized and imprest me most in coming
close in touch with the subject, was that almost every girl
that I met in a house of sin was supporting some man from her
ill-gotten earnings. Either the man was her husband, who had
driven her on the street in order that he might live in luxury
and ease, or else he was her paramour, upon whom with a woman’s
self-forgetful devotion she delighted to shower everything that
she could earn. In addition to this form of slavery, I also
found that the majority had to pay a certain percentage of their
earnings to some individual or organization who had promised
them immunity from arrest and to whom they looked for protection.
But when we began to get closer to the hearts of the girls, to
know their true history, we discovered that the commencement
of this form of slavery had been even in a baser form--that
before the girls had become so-called “willing slaves” they
were “unwilling slaves.” Many of them had fought for their
liberty and had submitted only because they had been overcome
by superior force. Some of them had been drugged; others kept
under lock and key until such time when either their better
nature had been drugged into unconsciousness or hardened into a
devil-may-care recklessness.--ERNEST A. BELL, “War on
the White Slave Trade.”
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