and women are judged, that while living together in unlegalized marital
relations, the man is welcomed into society, is looked upon as fit for
marriage with the most innocent young girl, while should he partially
condone the wrong done the woman whose life under present condition
of society he has ruined, by marriage with her, society for this one
reputable act brands him as most unworthy. It is but a few years since
a cavalry officer in Washington was court-martialled, found guilty and
sentenced to dismissal from the army on charge of conduct unbecoming an
officer and a gentleman, because of his legally marrying a woman with
whom he had been living un-married. What a commentary upon christian
civilization! While living an illicit relation with this woman, he
was regarded as an officer and a gentleman; when taking upon himself
a legal relation he was court-martialled. Lecky says: “Much of our
own feeling on this subject is due to laws and moral systems which
were founded by men and were in the first instance designed for their
own protection.” As far as he has examined this question, Lecky is
correct, but he has failed to touch the primal cause of such laws and
systems—the church doctrine of woman’s created inferiority to man.
View these questions from any standpoint the cause remains the same.
To this cause we trace the crime and criminals of society today. To
this cause the darkness of an age which has not yet realized that
civilization means a recognition of the rights of others at every point
of contact.
To the honor of the pulpit the sins of men are occasionally made the
subject of condemnation. Evangelist Davidson preaching in Syracuse, N.
Y. 1887, said:
I pray God to haste the day when vice in man will be marked by
society the same as in woman. I know all the popular theories.
You admit it is a fearful thing for a woman. There are poor
women who are driven to it and you are the ones who drive
them. You smile at the one thing in this sermon that ought to
make a thinking man cry; the world is so depraved that you
laugh at the very idea of a man’s saying he is a pure man.
Like Lecky, Mr. Davidson was correct as far as he went, but he, too,
failed to reach the cause of this double code of morals. He did not
touch it because in striking that, he would strike a blow at the very
foundations of the church.
Christendom is percolated with immorality, large cities and small
towns alike giving daily proof. Legislative and police investigations
substantiate this statement; woman’s protective agencies and private
investigations alike proclaim the same fact. As under the same organic
teachings results must continue the same, we find the United States no
more free from immorality than European lands; Catholic countries no
more vile than Protestant; although feudal law no longer exists, men
still rule in church and state. Men’s beliefs, their desires, their
passions, create the laws under which the degradation of woman still
continues. Evil consequences are not confined to the past, to days of
comparative ignorance and tyranny; and in no country has the effect
of belief in woman as a mere instrument for men’s pleasure produced
more horrible results than in our own. Not to speak of the effort
made in Congress a few years since to place all women of the country
under suspect law, many cities, among them Washington, Philadelphia,
Syracuse,[85] have at different periods taken initial steps towards a
prohibition of a woman’s appearing in the street un-accompanied by male
escort, during the evening, even its earliest hours. Such ordinances,
primarily directed against working girls whose chief time for out of
door exercise and recreation is during evening hours, and to that other
rapidly increasing class of business women, physicians and others,
whose vocation calls them out at all hours of day or night; places the
liberty of woman at the option of every policeman, as though she were
a criminal or a slave.[86] There is also proof of regularly organized
kidnapping schemes and deportation of girls for the vilest purposes
not only abroad, but to the pineries and lumber camps of Michigan and
Wisconsin.
Bloodhounds kept for this purpose, or hunting down the girls
with shotguns, prevents escape when attempted. In January, 1887,
representative Breen appeared before the House Judiciary Committee of
the Michigan legislature, confirming the charge that a regular trade in
young girls existed between Milwaukee, Chicago and the mining regions
of the upper peninsula of that state.[87] In case of conviction, the
punishment is totally inadequate to the crime of those men; the law
giving only one year of imprisonment. The freedom, innocence and lives
of such women are of less account in law than the commonest larceny
of property. If these girls were robbed of fifty cents the law would
punish the theft, but robbed of themselves, enduring such brutal
outrages that life continues only from two to twelve months, there have
yet no laws of adequate punishment been passed. So little attention
have legislators given, that policemen, judges and sheriffs are found
aiding and abetting the proprietors of these dens.[88] Their emissaries
find young girls between thirteen and sixteen the easiest to kidnap,
and when once in power of these men, their hair is cut in order that
they may be known. A regular system of transfer of the girls exists
between the many hundred such dens, where clubs, whips, and irons are
the instruments to hold them in subjection.[89] The _New York World_
sent a representative disguised as a woodman in order to investigate
the truth of these statements. He found these houses surrounded by
stockades thirty feet in height, the one door guarded night and day by
a man with a rifle, while within were a number of chained bull-dogs
that were let loose if a girl attempted escape. Certain men even in
these forest depths are especially noted for their cruelty to these
victims, who are compelled with club and whips to obey the master of
the den. Suicide the only door of escape is frequent among these girls,
who almost without exception were secured under promise of respectable
employment at Green Bay, Duluth, or other points. From forty to
seventy-five girls are found at the largest of such pinery dens.
The _World_ reporter saw them strung up by the thumbs, beaten with
clubs, kicked by drunken brutes and driven with switches over the snow.
He afterwards interviewed a rescued girl who had engaged to work in a
lumberman’s hotel, supposing it to be a respectable place, but instead
she was taken to a rough building, surrounded by a slab fence nearly
twenty feet in height, within which was a cordon of thirteen bull dogs
chained to iron stakes driven in the ground. Many of the details given
by this girl are too horrible for relation. Three times she tried to
escape and three times she was caught and beaten. The visitors by whom
she tried to smuggle notes to the outer world would hand them to the
proprietor, who liberally paid for such treason. Even county officers
visited the place to drink and dance with the girls, who were not
permitted to refuse any request of the visitors. A complaint of any
kind, even of sickness, meant a whipping, frequently with a rawhide
upon the naked body; some times with the butt of a revolver. Many
den-keepers wield a powerful influence in the local elections; one of
the worst of such after paying the constable twelve dollars for the
return of a girl who had tried to escape, beat her with a revolver
until tired and was then only prevented by a woodman from turning loose
a bull dog upon her; but such was his political influence that he was
elected justice of the peace the following spring.
Under the head of “White Slaves in Michigan” the _New York World_ of
January 24, 1887, published a special dispatch from Detroit, Mich., in
regard to the case of a rescued girl.
DETROIT, Jan. 23.—One of the infamous resorts maintained
in the new iron region in the upper peninsulas, near the
Wisconsin state line, was raided last September by the
Sheriff’s officers. Hers is the first word to reach the
world direct from one of those dens. Many of the details she
gave were too horrible to be even hinted. On the strength of
inducements now familiar, she went to work in a lumberman’s
hotel in the North. She went, accompanied by another girl,
both believing the situation to be respectable. She and her
companion were taken to a rough two story building, four and
a half miles from Iron Mountain, in Wisconsin. The house was
surrounded by a slab fence nearly twenty feet high, within
which about the building was a cordon of bull dogs, thirteen
in number, chained to iron stakes driven into the ground.
She said, “Scarcely a day passed that I was not knocked down
and kicked. Several times when I was undressed for bed I was
beaten with a rawhide on my bare back. There were always from
eleven to thirty-two girls in the house and I did not fare
a bit worse than the rest. A complaint of any kind, even of
sickness, meant a whipping every time. When the log drives
were going on there would be hundreds of men there night and
day. They were not human beings, but fiends, and we were not
allowed to refuse any request of them. Oh, it was awful,
awful! I would rather stay in this prison until I die than
to go back there for one day. I tried to escape three times
and was caught. They unchained the dogs and let them get so
near me that I cried out in terror and begged them to take
the dogs away and I would go back. Then, of course, I was
beaten. I tried, too, to smuggle out notes to the Sheriff by
visitors, but they would take them to the proprietor instead
and he would pay them. Once I did get a note to the deputy
sheriff at Florence, Wis., and he came and inquired, but the
proprietor gave him $50 and he went away. I was awfully beaten
then. While I lived the life, from March until September, two
inmates died, both from brutal treatment. They were as good
as murdered. Nearly all the girls came without knowing the
character of the house at first implored to get away. The
county officers came to the places to drink and dance with the
girls. They are controlled by a rich man in Iron Mountain,
who owns the houses and rents them for $100 a month. I am
twenty-four years old and was a healthy woman when I went into
the first house, weighing 156 pounds. I was transferred to
the house from which I was released by the officers in August
last. When I left it I weighed 120. I now weigh less. When
I go home I will be a good woman, if I can only let liquor
alone. I was forced to drink that while there.”
The traffic in girls from one part of the American continent to another
is under a well organized plan that seldom meets discovery, although a
trader of this character is now serving a sentence in Sing Sing prison,
N.Y., for sending girls to Panama. Three decoyed young girls found in
Jamaica, were happily returned uninjured, to their parents.[90] From
Canada, girls are imported to the large cities of the United States.
The prices paid to agents depend upon a girl’s youth and beauty,
varying from $20 to $200 each.[91] The traffic at Ottawa resembled that
of London in that prominent citizens, leading politicians, and members
of the government were implicated.[92]
The number of women and girls constantly reported “missing” is
startling in its great extent. Stepping out on some household errand
for a moment they vanish as though swallowed by the earth. A few years
ago the _Chicago Herald_ sent one of its reporters into the pineries
of Wisconsin, to trace a little girl living on State street of that
city who went one evening to get a pitcher of milk and did not return.
Not a month, scarcely a week passes, that the disappearance of some
woman, girl, or child, is not chronicled through the press, besides
the infinitely greater numbers of whom the world never hears. As it
was abroad, so in our own country, no energetic steps are taken to put
an end to these foul wrongs. Woman herself is needed in the seats of
justice; woman must become a responsible factor in government in order
to the enactment of laws which shall protect her own sex. The spring of
1892, the _Chicago Herald_ called attention to the continuance of this
condition of things.
MARINETTE, Wis., April 17.—Four years ago when the _Herald_
exposed the pinery dens of Wisconsin, Marinette was known
as the wickedest city in the country. It was the rendezvous
of every species of bad men. Thugs, thieves and gamblers
practically held possession of the town. Their influence
was felt in all municipal affairs. Certain officers of the
law seemed in active sympathy with them, and it was almost
impossible to secure the arrest and conviction of men guilty
of infamous crimes. Dives of the vilest character ran open
on the outskirts of the town. Their inmates, recruited from
all parts of the country by the subtle arts of well known
procurers, were kept in a state of abject slavery. Iron balls
and chains, suffocating cords and the whistling lash were used
on refractory girls and women. The dens were surrounded by
stockades, and savage dogs were kept unmuzzled to scare those
who might try to escape. Bodies of ill-starred victims were
sometimes found in the woods, but the discovery was rarely
followed by investigation. The dive keepers were wealthy and
knew how to ease the conscience of any over-zealous officer.
The outburst of indignation which followed the _Herald’s_
exposure compelled certain reforms in the neighborhood.
Sporadic efforts were made to clean out the criminal element;
restrictions were placed on saloons and gambling houses;
stockades and bloodhounds were removed from the dives near the
woods, and gradually an air of semi-decency crept over the
district. But the snake was scotched, not killed. For a time
more attention was paid to the proprieties, vice and crime
were not so open as formerly. By degrees, however, the old
conditions assumed sway again. Games of every kind were run
openly night and day, dives and dance halls have been thronged
and the usual quota of men from the woods deliberately robbed
of their winter’s savings.
Man’s assertion that he protects woman is false. Under laws solely
enacted by men young girls in christian countries are held as
assenting to their own degradation at an age so tender that their
evidence would not be received in courts of law. Nor are these the
laws of a remote age come down to the present time. As late as 1889,
the Kansas State Senate voted 25 to 9 that a girl of twelve years was
of sufficiently responsible age “to consent” to take the first step in
immorality; the same senate afterwards unanimously voting that a boy
of sixteen years was not old enough to decide for himself in regard to
smoking cigarettes.[93] It should be remembered that youth is the most
impressible season of life as well as the most inexperienced. Young
girls from thirteen to sixteen, mere children, are most easily decoyed,
their youth and innocence causing them to fall the readiest prey; and
scarcely a large city but proves the existence of men of mature years
whose aim is the destruction of such young girls.[94] The state of
Delaware yet more infamous, still retaining seven years as the “age
of consent.” Seven short years of baby life in that state is legally
held to transform a girl-infant into a being with capacity to consent
to an act of which she neither knows the name nor the consequences,
her “consent” freeing from responsibility or punishment, the villain,
youthful or aged, who chooses to assault such baby victim of man-made
laws.[95] While the doors of irresponsible vice are legally thrown open
to men of all ages with girl victims as their prey, the restrictions
against marriage with a minor without the parents’ consent are in most
states very severe. That the girl-wife herself has consented to the
marriage ceremony is of no weight. Where a legitimate union is under
consideration she is held as possessing no power to form a contract
and can be arrested under a writ of _habeas corpus_, and kept from her
husband at her father’s pleasure. Instances have also occurred where
the wife has been punished by him for thus daring to marry.[96] Both
the husband and the officiating clergyman are also held amenable,
the former under charge of abduction, the latter as an accessory in
performing the marriage ceremony.
A significant fact is the rapid increase of child criminals throughout
christendom; Germany, France and England showing one hundred per cent
within ten years, while in the United States more than one-half the
inmates of state prisons are under thirty years of age. From criminals
it is necessary to look back to crime-making men sitting in earth’s
loftiest places, and note the fact that crime germs are not alone
generated with the child, but that through the gestative period the
mother, a religious and legal slave, struggles between a newly awakened
sense of that responsibility which within the last four decades has
come to woman, and the crushing influence of religious, political and
family despotism which still overshadows her. Moralists have long
striven for the suppression of immorality by efforts directed to the
reformation of corrupt women alone; for two reasons they have been
unsuccessful.
First: the majority of women entering this life are found to have done
so under the pressure of abject poverty, and as long as the conditions
of society continue to foster poverty for woman it was impossible to
create a marked change in morals.
Second: all efforts were directed towards the smallest and least
culpable class, as it has been proven that ten men of immoral life are
required for the support of one woman of like character. In London
alone with its population of five millions, 100,000 women, one-fiftieth
of its population are thus enumerated, requiring 1,000,000 men,
one-fifth of its population, for their support. Recognizing the fact
that men, not women, were most sunken in vice, the number leading
vicious lives very much larger, the degradation of these men very
much greater, an Italian lady, Madam Venturi, at the International
Conference of the British Continental and General Federation for the
abolition of governmental regulation of prostitution, while making
a brief eloquent address upon the general subject of rescue work,
referred to the great importance of reclaiming men as the fundamental
work upon which others should be built up. Teach men, she said, to
understand that he who degrades a fellow creature, commits a crime,
the crime of high treason against humanity. In quick response to those
fitly-spoken words, the women of many countries combined in the work of
man’s reformation in an organization known as the “White Cross Society”
founded in 1886, by Miss Ellice Hopkins of England, and now possessing
branches in every part of the civilized world.[97] To this society,
men alone belong; its work is of a still broader character than mere
reformation of the vicious; it seeks to train young men and boys to a
proper respect for woman and for themselves.
As the world is indebted to Christine of Pisa for the first public
protest against the immorality of christendom, so to Mrs. Josephine
Butler,[98] Madam Venturi, and Miss Ellice Hopkins are due the
inauguration of a new moral standard for man whose results must be
of incalculable value to the world. The “White Cross” is a simply
organized society without an admission fee, but requiring adherence
to a five-fold obligation binding its members to purity of thought
and action,[99] and maintaining that the law of chastity is equally
binding on men and women. The International Federation, a union
existing in several European countries, its chief object, work against
state protection of vice, roused public thought in this direction
as never before. People began to comprehend that a large vicious
class was common to every community, a class whose reclamation had
never been systematically attempted, never thought necessary or even
deemed possible, because of the religious and social training that
taught indulgence in vice to be a necessity of man’s nature; and the
coordinate statement, that protection to the majority of women was to
be secured only through the debasement and moral degradation of the
minority. For many hundreds of years this has been man’s treatment of
the question of vice in Christian lands.
But as soon as advancing civilization permitted woman’s thought to be
publicly heard, vice in man was declared to be upon the same basis
as vice in woman. Had not man been trained by his religion into a
belief that woman was created for him, had not the church for 1800
and more years preached woman’s moral debasement, the long course of
legislation for them as slaves would never have taken place, nor the
obstacles in way of change been so numerous and so persistent. For
nine years the Criminal Reform Act was before Parliament. During that
period, petitions, speeches and appeals of every kind in favor of its
passage were made by those outside the halls of legislation aided by
a few honest men within. But the vicious and immoral fought the act
with energy, despite the fact that the women of their own families
were exposed to destruction through government protected iniquity. The
bitter opposition by legislators to this act, is an additional proof
that woman cannot trust man in the state to any greater extent than in
the church.
Until woman holds political power in her own hands, her efforts for
protective legislation will be arduous and protracted. Among the
customs of the early christian church, we are able to trace the
inception of marquette, the mundium, the legalization of vice and
crimes of kindred character. With exception of among some savage races,
that woman should appear unclothed before man, has been regarded as
evidence of the deepest sensuality, yet throughout the history of
Christianity from its earliest years when women were required to
divest themselves of clothing before baptism down to the Endowment
House ceremonies of the Mormon Church, we constantly find proof of
like sensual exactions by the “Fathers,” priests and lay masculinity
of the church. During the earliest days of christianity, women were
baptized quite nude, in the presence of men, by men, their bodies being
afterwards anointed with oil by the priest who had baptized them. One
of the earliest schisms in the church arose from the protest of women
against this indignity, their demand to be allowed to baptize those of
their own sex, and the opposition of men to this demand.[100]
The early bishops of the church strenuously used their influence
against the baptism of nude women by elders of their own sex. Women
were sometimes brought entirely nude upon the stage at Rome, but it was
in connection with religious representation, the theater at that period
being an element of religious teaching. Lecky speaks of the undisguised
sensuality of this practice.[101] What must be our conception of a
christian custom that placed nude maidens and wives in the very hands
of men, not alone for baptism but also for anointing with oil? Nude
baptism is still practiced when converts are received into the Greek
church, no position or station in life excusing from it, Catharine,
the first wife of Peter the Great being baptized in this primitive
christian manner.[102] As late as the seventeenth century a work upon
the “Seven Sacraments” set certain days in which female penitents were
to appear entirely unclothed before the confessor in order that he
might discipline them on account of their sins.
_Chapter Five_
+Witchcraft+