Produced by Jeffrey Kraus-yao
A NEW CONSCIENCE AND AN ANCIENT EVIL
By JANE ADDAMS
HULL HOUSE, CHICAGO
Author of Democracy and Social Ethics, Newer Ideals of Peace
The Spirit of Youth and the City Streets
Twenty Years at Hull-House
New York
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
1912
To the Juvenile Protective Association of Chicago, whose superintendent and
field officers have collected much of the material for this book, and whose
president, Mrs. Joseph T. Bowen, has so ably and sympathetically collaborated in
its writing.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER I As inferred from An Analogy
CHAPTER II As indicated by Recent Legal Enactments
CHAPTER III As indicated by the Amelioration of Economic Conditions
CHAPTER IV As indicated by the Moral Education and Legal Protection
of Children
CHAPTER V As indicated by Philanthropic Rescue and Prevention
CHAPTER VI As indicated by Increased Social Control
PREFACE
The following material, much of which has been published in McClure's
Magazine, was written, not from the point of view of the expert, but
because of my own need for a counter-knowledge to a bewildering mass of
information which came to me through the Juvenile Protective Association
of Chicago. The reports which its twenty field officers daily brought to
its main office adjoining Hull House became to me a revelation of the
dangers implicit in city conditions and of the allurements which are
designedly placed around many young girls in order to draw them into an
evil life.
As head of the Publication Committee, I read the original documents in a
series of special investigations made by the Association on dance halls,
theatres, amusement parks, lake excursion boats, petty gambling, the
home surroundings of one hundred Juvenile Court children and the records
of four thousand parents who clearly contributed to the delinquency of
their own families. The Association also collected the personal
histories of two hundred department-store girls, of two hundred factory
girls, of two hundred immigrant girls, of two hundred office girls, and
of girls employed in one hundred hotels and restaurants.
While this experience was most distressing, I was, on the other hand,
much impressed and at times fairly startled by the large and diversified
number of people to whom the very existence of the white slave traffic
had become unendurable and who promptly responded to any appeal made on
behalf of its victims. City officials, policemen, judges, attorneys,
employers, trades unionists, physicians, teachers, newly arrived
immigrants, clergymen, railway officials, and newspaper men, as under a
profound sense of compunction, were unsparing of time and effort when
given an opportunity to assist an individual girl, to promote
legislation designed for her protection, or to establish institutions
for her rescue.
I therefore venture to hope that in serving my own need I may also serve
the need of a rapidly growing public when I set down for rational
consideration the temptations surrounding multitudes of young people and
when I assemble, as best I may, the many indications of a new
conscience, which in various directions is slowly gathering strength and
which we may soberly hope will at last successfully array itself against
this incredible social wrong, ancient though it may be.
Hull House, Chicago.
CHAPTER I
AN ANALOGY
In every large city throughout the world thousands of women are so set
aside as outcasts from decent society that it is considered an
impropriety to speak the very word which designates them. Lecky calls
this type of woman "the most mournful and the most awful figure in
history": he says that "she remains, while creeds and civilizations rise
and fall, the eternal sacrifice of humanity, blasted for the sins of the
people." But evils so old that they are imbedded in man's earliest
history have been known to sway before an enlightened public opinion and
in the end to give way to a growing conscience, which regards them first
as a moral affront and at length as an utter impossibility. Thus the
generation just before us, our own fathers, uprooted the enormous upas
of slavery, "the tree that was literally as old as the race of man,"
although slavery doubtless had its beginnings in the captives of man's
earliest warfare, even as this existing evil thus originated.
Those of us who think we discern the beginnings of a new conscience in
regard to this twin of slavery, as old and outrageous as slavery itself
and even more persistent, find a possible analogy between certain civic,
philanthropic and educational efforts directed against the very
existence of this social evil and similar organized efforts which
preceded the overthrow of slavery in America. Thus, long before slavery
was finally declared illegal, there were international regulations of
its traffic, state and federal legislation concerning its extension, and
many extra legal attempts to control its abuses; quite as we have the
international regulations concerning the white slave traffic, the state
and interstate legislation for its repression, and an extra legal power
in connection with it so universally given to the municipal police that
the possession of this power has become one of the great sources of
corruption in every American city.
Before society was ready to proceed against the institution of slavery
as such, groups of men and women by means of the underground railroad
cherished and educated individual slaves; it is scarcely necessary to
point out the similarity to the rescue homes and preventive associations
which every great city contains.
It is always easy to overwork an analogy, and yet the economist who for
years insisted that slave labor continually and arbitrarily limited the
wages of free labor and was therefore a detriment to national wealth was
a forerunner of the economist of to-day who points out the economic
basis of the social evil, the connection between low wages and despair,
between over-fatigue and the demand for reckless pleasure.
Before the American nation agreed to regard slavery as unjustifiable
from the standpoint of public morality, an army of reformers, lecturers,
and writers set forth its enormity in a never-ceasing flow of invective,
of appeal, and of portrayal concerning the human cruelty to which the
system lent itself. We can discern the scouts and outposts of a similar
army advancing against this existing evil: the physicians and
sanitarians who are committed to the task of ridding the race from
contagious diseases, the teachers and lecturers who are appealing to the
higher morality of thousands of young people; the growing literature,
not only biological and didactic, but of a popular type more closely
approaching "Uncle Tom's Cabin."
Throughout the agitation for the abolition of slavery in America, there
were statesmen who gradually became convinced of the political and moral
necessity of giving to the freedman the protection of the ballot. In
this current agitation there are at least a few men and women who would
extend a greater social and political freedom to all women if only
because domestic control has proved so ineffectual.
We may certainly take courage from the fact that our contemporaries are
fired by social compassions and enthusiasms, to which even our immediate
predecessors were indifferent. Such compunctions have ever manifested
themselves in varying degrees of ardor through different groups in the
same community. Thus among those who are newly aroused to action in
regard to the social evil are many who would endeavor to regulate it and
believe they can minimize its dangers, still larger numbers who would
eliminate all trafficking of unwilling victims in connection with it,
and yet others who believe that as a quasi-legal institution it may be
absolutely abolished. Perhaps the analogy to the abolition of slavery is
most striking in that these groups, in their varying points of view, are
like those earlier associations which differed widely in regard to
chattel slavery. Only the so-called extremists, in the first instance,
stood for abolition and they were continually told that what they
proposed was clearly impossible. The legal and commercial obstacles,
bulked large, were placed before them and it was confidently asserted
that the blame for the historic existence of slavery lay deep within
human nature itself. Yet gradually all of these associations reached the
point of view of the abolitionist and before the war was over even the
most lukewarm unionist saw no other solution of the nation's difficulty.
Some such gradual conversion to the point of view of abolition is the
experience of every society or group of people who seriously face the
difficulties and complications of the social evil. Certainly all the
national organizations--the National Vigilance Committee, the American
Purity Federation, the Alliance for the Suppression and Prevention of
the White Slave Traffic and many others--stand for the final abolition
of commercialized vice. Local vice commissions, such as the able one
recently appointed in Chicago, although composed of members of varying
beliefs in regard to the possibility of control and regulation, united
in the end in recommending a law enforcement looking towards final
abolition. Even the most sceptical of Chicago citizens, after reading
the fearless document, shared the hope of the commission that "the city,
when aroused to the truth, would instantly rebel against the social evil
in all its phases." A similar recommendation of ultimate abolition was
recently made unanimous by the Minneapolis vice commission after the
conversion of many of its members. Doubtless all of the national
societies have before them a task only less gigantic than that faced by
those earlier associations in America for the suppression of slavery,
although it may be legitimate to remind them that the best-known
anti-slavery society in America was organized by the New England
abolitionists in 1836, and only thirty-six years later, in 1872, was
formally disbanded because its object had been accomplished. The long
struggle ahead of these newer associations will doubtless claim its
martyrs and its heroes, has indeed already claimed them during the last
thirty years. Few righteous causes have escaped baptism with blood;
nevertheless, to paraphrase Lincoln's speech, if blood were exacted drop
by drop in measure to the tears of anguished mothers and enslaved girls,
the nation would still be obliged to go into the struggle.
Throughout this volume the phrase "social evil" is used to designate the
sexual commerce permitted to exist in every large city, usually in a
segregated district, wherein the chastity of women is bought and sold.
Modifications of legal codes regarding marriage and divorce, moral
judgments concerning the entire group of questions centring about
illicit affection between men and women, are quite other questions which
are not considered here. Such problems must always remain distinct from
those of commercialized vice, as must the treatment of an irreducible
minimum of prostitution, which will doubtless long exist, quite as
society still retains an irreducible minimum of murders. This volume
does not deal with the probable future of prostitution, and gives only
such historical background as is necessary to understand the present
situation. It endeavors to present the contributory causes, as they have
become registered in my consciousness through a long residence in a
crowded city quarter, and to state the indications, as I have seen them,
of a new conscience with its many and varied manifestations.
Nothing is gained by making the situation better or worse than it is,
nor in anywise different from what it is. This ancient evil is indeed
social in the sense of community responsibility and can only be
understood and at length remedied when we face the fact and measure the
resources which may at length be massed against it. Perhaps the most
striking indication that our generation has become the bearer of a new
moral consciousness in regard to the existence of commercialized vice is
the fact that the mere contemplation of it throws the more sensitive men
and women among our contemporaries into a state of indignant revolt. It
is doubtless an instinctive shrinking from this emotion and an
unconscious dread that this modern sensitiveness will be outraged, which
justifies to themselves so many moral men and women in their persistent
ignorance of the subject. Yet one of the most obvious resources at our
command, which might well be utilized at once, if it is to be utilized
at all, is the overwhelming pity and sense of protection which the
recent revelations in the white slave traffic have aroused for the
thousands of young girls, many of them still children, who are yearly
sacrificed to the "sins of the people." All of this emotion ought to be
made of value, for quite as a state of emotion is invariably the organic
preparation for action, so it is certainly true that no profound
spiritual transformation can take place without it.
After all, human progress is deeply indebted to a study of
imperfections, and the counsels of despair, if not full of seasoned
wisdom, are at least fertile in suggestion and a desperate spur to
action. Sympathetic knowledge is the only way of approach to any human
problem, and the line of least resistance into the jungle of human
wretchedness must always be through that region which is most thoroughly
explored, not only by the information of the statistician, but by
sympathetic understanding. We are daily attaining the latter through
such authors as Sudermann and Elsa Gerusalem, who have enabled their
readers to comprehend the so-called "fallen" woman through a skilful
portrayal of the reaction of experience upon personality. Their realism
has rescued her from the sentimentality surrounding an impossible
Camille quite as their fellow-craftsmen in realism have replaced the
weeping Amelias of the Victorian period by reasonable women transcribed
from actual life.
The treatment of this subject in American literature is at present in
the pamphleteering stage, although an ever-increasing number of short
stories and novels deal with it. On the other hand, the plays through
which Bernard Shaw constantly places the truth before the public in
England as Brieux is doing for the public in France, produce in the
spectators a disquieting sense that society is involved in
commercialized vice and must speedily find a way out. Such writing is
like the roll of the drum which announces the approach of the troops
ready for action.
Some of the writers who are performing this valiant service are related
to those great artists who in every age enter into a long struggle with
existing social conditions, until after many years they change the
outlook upon life for at least a handful of their contemporaries. Their
readers find themselves no longer mere bewildered spectators of a given
social wrong, but have become conscious of their own hypocrisy in regard
to it, and they realize that a veritable horror, simply because it was
hidden, had come to seem to them inevitable and almost normal.
Many traces of this first uneasy consciousness regarding the social evil
are found in contemporary literature, for while the business of
literature is revelation and not reformation, it may yet perform for the
men and women now living that purification of the imagination and
intellect which the Greeks believed to come through pity and terror.
Secure in the knowledge of evolutionary processes, we have learned to
talk glibly of the obligations of race progress and of the possibility
of racial degeneration. In this respect certainly we have a wider
outlook than that possessed by our fathers, who so valiantly grappled
with chattel slavery and secured its overthrow. May the new conscience
gather force until men and women, acting under its sway, shall be
constrained to eradicate this ancient evil!