AMELIORATION OF ECONOMIC CONDITIONS
It may be possible to extract some small degree of comfort from the
recent revelations of the white slave traffic when we reflect that at
the present moment, in the midst of a freedom such as has never been
accorded to young women in the history of the world, under an economic
pressure grinding down upon the working girl at the very age when she
most wistfully desires to be taken care of, it is necessary to organize
a widespread commercial enterprise in order to procure a sufficient
number of girls for the white slave market.
Certainly the larger freedom accorded to woman by our changing social
customs and the phenomenal number of young girls who are utilized by
modern industry, taken in connection with this lack of supply, would
seem to show that the chastity of women is holding its own in that
slow-growing civilization which ever demands more self-control and
conscious direction on the part of the individuals sharing it.
Successive reports of the United States census indicate that
self-supporting girls are increasing steadily in number each decade,
until 59 per cent. of all the young women in the nation between the ages
of sixteen and twenty, are engaged in some gainful occupation. Year
after year, as these figures increase, the public views them with
complacency, almost with pride, and confidently depends upon the inner
restraint and training of this girlish multitude to protect it from
disaster. Nevertheless, the public is totally unable to determine at
what moment these safeguards, evolved under former industrial
conditions, may reach a breaking point, not because of economic freedom,
but because of untoward economic conditions.
For the first time in history multitudes of women are laboring without
the direct stimulus of family interest or affection, and they are also
unable to proportion their hours of work and intervals of rest according
to their strength; in addition to this for thousands of them the effort
to obtain a livelihood fairly eclipses the very meaning of life itself.
At the present moment no student of modern industrial conditions can
possibly assert how far the superior chastity of woman, so rigidly
maintained during the centuries, has been the result of her domestic
surroundings, and certainly no one knows under what degree of economic
pressure the old restraints may give way.
In addition to the monotony of work and the long hours, the small wages
these girls receive have no relation to the standard of living which
they are endeavoring to maintain. Discouraged and over-fatigued, they
are often brought into sharp juxtaposition with the women who are
obtaining much larger returns from their illicit trade. Society also
ventures to capitalize a virtuous girl at much less than one who has
yielded to temptation, and it may well hold itself responsible for the
precarious position into which, year after year, a multitude of frail
girls is placed.
The very valuable report recently issued by the vice commission of
Chicago leaves no room for doubt upon this point. The report estimates
the yearly profit of this nefarious business as conducted in Chicago to
be between fifteen and sixteen millions of dollars. Although these
enormous profits largely accrue to the men who conduct the business side
of prostitution, the report emphasizes the fact that the average girl
earns very much more in such a life than she can hope to earn by any
honest work. It points out that the capitalized value of the average
working girl is six thousand dollars, as she ordinarily earns six
dollars a week, which is three hundred dollars a year, or five per cent.
on that sum. A girl who sells drinks in a disreputable saloon, earning
in commissions for herself twenty-one dollars a week, is capitalized at
a value of twenty-two thousand dollars. The report further estimates
that the average girl who enters an illicit life under a protector or
manager is able to earn twenty-five dollars a week, representing a
capital of twenty-six thousand dollars. In other words, a girl in such a
life "earns more than four times as much as she is worth as a factor in
the social and industrial economy, where brains, intelligence, virtue
and womanly charm should bring a premium." The argument is specious in
that it does not record the economic value of the many later years in
which the honest girl will live as wife and mother, in contrast to the
premature death of the woman in the illicit trade, but the girl herself
sees only the difference in the immediate earning possibilities in the
two situations.
Nevertheless the supply of girls for the white slave traffic so far
falls below the demand that large business enterprises have been
developed throughout the world in order to secure a sufficient number of
victims for this modern market. Over and over again in the criminal
proceedings against the men engaged in this traffic, when questioned as
to their motives, they have given the simple reply "that more girls are
needed", and that they were "promised big money for them". Although
economic pressure as a reason for entering an illicit life has thus been
brought out in court by the evidence in a surprising number of cases,
there is no doubt that it is often exaggerated; a girl always prefers to
think that economic pressure is the reason for her downfall, even when
the immediate causes have been her love of pleasure, her desire for
finery, or the influence of evil companions. It is easy for her, as for
all of us, to be deceived as to real motives. In addition to this the
wretched girl who has entered upon an illicit life finds the experience
so terrible that, day by day, she endeavors to justify herself with the
excuse that the money she earns is needed for the support of some one
dependent upon her, thus following habits established by generations of
virtuous women who cared for feeble folk. I know one such girl living in
a disreputable house in Chicago who has adopted a delicate child
afflicted with curvature of the spine, whom she boards with respectable
people and keeps for many weeks out of each year in an expensive
sanitarium that it may receive medical treatment. The mother of the
child, an inmate of the house in which the ardent foster-mother herself
lives, is quite indifferent to the child's welfare and also rather
amused at such solicitude. The girl has persevered in her course for
five years, never however allowing the little invalid to come to the
house in which she and the mother live. The same sort of devotion and
self-sacrifice is often poured out upon the miserable man who in the
beginning was responsible for the girl's entrance into the life and who
constantly receives her earnings. She supports him in the luxurious life
he may be living in another part of the town, takes an almost maternal
pride in his good clothes and general prosperity, and regards him as the
one person in all the world who understands her plight.
Most of the cases of economic responsibility, however, are not due to
chivalric devotion, but arise from a desire to fulfill family
obligations such as would be accepted by any conscientious girl. This
was clearly revealed in conversations which were recently held with
thirty-four girls, who were living at the same time in a rescue home,
when twenty-two of them gave economic pressure as the reason for
choosing the life which they had so recently abandoned. One piteous
little widow of seventeen had been supporting her child and had been
able to leave the life she had been leading only because her married
sister offered to take care of the baby without the money formerly paid
her. Another had been supporting her mother and only since her recent
death was the girl sure that she could live honestly because she had
only herself to care for.
The following story, fairly typical of the twenty-two involving economic
reasons, is of a girl who had come to Chicago at the age of fifteen,
from a small town in Indiana. Her father was too old to work and her
mother was a dependent invalid. The brother who cared for the parents,
with the help of the girl's own slender wages earned in the country
store of the little town, became ill with rheumatism. In her desire to
earn more money the country girl came to the nearest large city,
Chicago, to work in a department store. The highest wage she could earn,
even though she wore long dresses and called herself "experienced," was
five dollars a week. This sum was of course inadequate even for her own
needs and she was constantly filled with a corroding worry for "the
folks at home." In a moment of panic, a fellow clerk who was "wise"
showed her that it was possible to add to her wages by making
appointments for money in the noon hour at down-town hotels. Having
earned money in this way for a few months, the young girl made an
arrangement with an older woman to be on call in the evenings whenever
she was summoned by telephone, thus joining that large clandestine group
of apparently respectable girls, most of whom yield to temptation only
when hard pressed by debt incurred during illness or non-employment, or
when they are facing some immediate necessity. This practice has become
so general in the larger American cities as to be systematically
conducted. It is perhaps the most sinister outcome of the economic
pressure, unless one cites its corollary--the condition of thousands of
young men whose low salaries so cruelly and unjustifiably postpone their
marriages. For a long time the young saleswoman kept her position in the
department store, retaining her honest wages for herself, but sending
everything else to her family. At length however, she changed from her
clandestine life to an openly professional one when she needed enough
money to send her brother to Hot Springs, Arkansas, where she maintained
him for a year. She explained that because he was now restored to health
and able to support the family once more, she had left the life "forever
and ever", expecting to return to her home in Indiana. She suspected
that her brother knew of her experience, although she was sure that her
parents did not, and she hoped that as she was not yet seventeen, she
might be able to make a fresh start. Fortunately the poor child did not
know how difficult that would be.
It is perhaps in the department store more than anywhere else that every
possible weakness in a girl is detected and traded upon. For while it is
true that "wherever many girls are gathered together more or less
unprotected and embroiled in the struggle for a livelihood, near by will
be hovering the procurers and evil-minded", no other place of employment
is so easy of access as the department store. No visitor is received in
a factory or office unless he has definite business there, whereas every
purchaser is welcome at a department store, even a notorious woman well
known to represent the demi-monde trade is treated with marked courtesy
if she spends large sums of money. The primary danger lies in the fact
that the comely saleswomen are thus easy of access. The disreputable
young man constantly passes in and out, making small purchases from
every pretty girl, opening an acquaintance with complimentary remarks;
or the procuress, a fashionably-dressed woman, buys clothing in large
amounts, sometimes for a young girl by her side, ostensibly her
daughter. She condoles with the saleswoman upon her hard lot and lack of
pleasure, and in the rôle of a kindly, prosperous matron invites her to
come to her own home for a good time. The girl is sometimes subjected to
temptation through the men and women in her own department, who tell her
how invitations to dinners and theatres may be procured. It is not
surprising that so many of these young, inexperienced girls are either
deceived or yield to temptation in spite of the efforts made to protect
them by the management and by the older women in the establishment.
The department store has brought together, as has never been done before
in history, a bewildering mass of delicate and beautiful fabrics,
jewelry and household decorations such as women covet, gathered
skilfully from all parts of the world, and in the midst of this bulk of
desirable possessions is placed an untrained girl with careful
instructions as to her conduct for making sales, but with no guidance in
regard to herself. Such a girl may be bitterly lonely, but she is
expected to smile affably all day long upon a throng of changing
customers. She may be without adequate clothing, although she stands in
an emporium where it is piled about her, literally as high as her head.
She may be faint for want of food but she may not sit down lest she
assume "an attitude of inertia and indifference," which is against the
rules. She may have a great desire for pretty things, but she must sell
to other people at least twenty-five times the amount of her own salary,
or she will not be retained. Because she is of the first generation of
girls which has stood alone in the midst of trade, she is clinging and
timid, and yet the only person, man or woman, in this commercial
atmosphere who speaks to her of the care and protection which she
craves, is seeking to betray her. Because she is young and feminine, her
mind secretly dwells upon a future lover, upon a home, adorned with the
most enticing of the household goods about her, upon a child dressed in
the filmy fabrics she tenderly touches, and yet the only man who
approaches her there acting upon the knowledge of this inner life of
hers, does it with the direct intention of playing upon it in order to
despoil her. Is it surprising that the average human nature of these
young girls cannot, in many instances, endure this strain? Of fifteen
thousand women employed in the down-town department stores of Chicago,
the majority are Americans. We all know that the American girl has grown
up in the belief that the world is hers from which to choose, that there
is ordinarily no limit to her ambition or to her definition of success.
She realizes that she is well mannered and well dressed and does not
appear unlike most of her customers. She sees only one aspect of her
countrywomen who come shopping, and she may well believe that the chief
concern of life is fashionable clothing. Her interest and ambition
almost inevitably become thoroughly worldly, and from the very fact that
she is employed down town, she obtains an exaggerated idea of the luxury
of the illicit life all about her, which is barely concealed.
The fifth volume of the report of "Women and Child Wage Earners" in the
United States gives the result of a careful inquiry into "the relation
of wages to the moral condition of department store women." In
connection with this, the investigators secured "the personal histories
of one hundred immoral women," of whom ten were or had been employed in
a department store. They found that while only one of the ten had been
directly induced to leave the store for a disreputable life, six of them
said that they had found "it was easier to earn money that way." The
report states that the average employee in a department store earns
about seven dollars a week, and that the average income of the one
hundred immoral women covered by the personal histories, ranged from
fifty dollars a week to one hundred dollars a week in exceptional cases.
It is of these exceptional cases that the department store girl hears,
and the knowledge becomes part of the unreality and glittering life that
is all about her.
Another class of young women which is especially exposed to this
alluring knowledge is the waitress in down-town cafés and restaurants. A
recent investigation of girls in the segregated district of a
neighboring city places waiting in restaurants and hotels as highest on
the list of "previous occupations." Many waitresses are paid so little
that they gratefully accept any fee which men may offer them. It is also
the universal habit for customers to enter into easy conversation while
being served. Some of them are lonely young men who have few
opportunities to speak to women. The girl often quite innocently accepts
an invitation for an evening, spent either in a theatre or dance hall,
with no evil results, but this very lack of social convention exposes
her to danger. Even when the proprietor means to protect the girls, a
certain amount of familiarity must be borne, lest their resentment
should diminish the patronage of the café. In certain restaurants,
moreover, the waitresses doubtless suffer because the patrons compare
them with the girls who ply their trade in disreputable saloons under
the guise of serving drinks.
The following story would show that mere friendly propinquity may
constitute a danger. Last summer an honest, straightforward girl from a
small lake town in northern Michigan was working in a Chicago café,
sending every week more than half of her wages of seven dollars to her
mother and little sister, ill with tuberculosis, at home. The mother
owned the little house in which she lived, but except for the vegetables
she raised in her own garden and an occasional payment for plain sewing,
she and her younger daughter were dependent upon the hard-working girl
in Chicago. The girl's heart grew heavier week by week as the mother's
letters reported that the sister was daily growing weaker. One hot day
in August she received a letter from her mother telling her to come at
once if she "would see sister before she died." At noon that day when
sickened by the hot air of the café, and when the clatter of dishes, the
buzz of conversation, the orders shouted through the slide seemed but a
hideous accompaniment to her tormented thoughts, she was suddenly
startled by hearing the name of her native town, and realized that one
of her regular patrons was saying to her that he meant to take a night
boat to M. at 8 o'clock and get out of this "infernal heat." Almost
involuntarily she asked him if he would take her with him. Although the
very next moment she became conscious what his consent implied, she did
not reveal her fright, but merely stipulated that if she went with him
he must agree to buy her a return ticket. She reached home twelve hours
before her sister died, but when she returned to Chicago a week later
burdened with the debt of an undertaker's bill, she realized that she
had discovered a means of payment.
All girls who work down town are at a disadvantage as compared to
factory girls, who are much less open to direct inducement and to the
temptations which come through sheer imitation. Factory girls also have
the protection of working among plain people who frankly designate an
irregular life, in harsh, old-fashioned terms. If a factory girl catches
sight of the vicious life at all, she sees its miserable victims in all
the wretchedness and sordidness of their trade in the poorer parts of
the city. As she passes the opening doors of a disreputable saloon she
may see for an instant three or four listless girls urging liquor upon
men tired out with the long day's work and already sodden with drink. As
she hurries along the street on a rainy night she may hear a sharp cry
of pain from a sick-looking girl whose arm is being brutally wrenched by
a rough man, and if she stops for a moment she catches his muttered
threats in response to the girl's pleading "that it is too bad a night
for street work." She sees a passing policeman shrug his shoulders as he
crosses the street, and she vaguely knows that the sick girl has put
herself beyond the protection of the law, and that the rough man has an
understanding with the officer on the beat. She has been told that
certain streets are "not respectable," but a furtive look down the
length of one of them reveals only forlorn and ill-looking houses, from
which all suggestion of homely domesticity has long since gone; a
slovenly woman with hollow eyes and a careworn face holding up the
lurching bulk of a drunken man is all she sees of its "denizens,"
although she may have known a neighbor's daughter who came home to die
of a mysterious disease said to be the result of a "fast life," and
whose disgraced mother "never again held up her head."
Yet in spite of all this corrective knowledge, the increasing nervous
energy to which industrial processes daily accommodate themselves, and
the speeding up constantly required of the operators, may at any moment
so register their results upon the nervous system of a factory girl as
to overcome her powers of resistance. Many a working girl at the end of
a day is so hysterical and overwrought that her mental balance is
plainly disturbed. Hundreds of working girls go directly to bed as soon
as they have eaten their suppers. They are too tired to go from home for
recreation, too tired to read and often too tired to sleep. A humane
forewoman recently said to me as she glanced down the long room in which
hundreds of young women, many of them with their shoes beside them, were
standing: "I hate to think of all the aching feet on this floor; these
girls all have trouble with their feet, some of them spend the entire
evening bathing them in hot water." But aching feet are no more usual
than aching backs and aching heads. The study of industrial diseases has
only this year been begun by the federal authorities, and doubtless as
more is known of the nervous and mental effect of over-fatigue, many
moral breakdowns will be traced to this source. It is already easy to
make the connection in definite cases: "I was too tired to care," "I was
too tired to know what I was doing," "I was dead tired and sick of it
all," "I was dog tired and just went with him," are phrases taken from
the lips of reckless girls, who are endeavoring to explain the situation
in which they find themselves.
Only slowly are laws being enacted to limit the hours of working women,
yet the able brief presented to the United States supreme court on the
constitutionality of the Oregon ten-hour law for women, based its plea
upon the results of overwork as affecting women's health, the grave
medical statement constantly broken into by a portrayal of the
disastrous effects of over-fatigue upon character. It is as yet
difficult to distinguish between the results of long hours and the
results of overstrain. Certainly the constant sense of haste is one of
the most nerve-racking and exhausting tests to which the human system
can be subjected. Those girls in the sewing industry whose mothers
thread needles for them far into the night that they may sew without a
moment's interruption during the next day; those girls who insert
eyelets into shoes, for which they are paid two cents a case, each case
containing twenty-four pairs of shoes, are striking victims of the
over-speeding which is so characteristic of our entire factory system.
Girls working in factories and laundries are also open to the
possibilities of accidents. The loss of only two fingers upon the right
hand, or a broken wrist, may disqualify an operator from continuing in
the only work in which she is skilled and make her struggle for
respectability even more difficult. Varicose veins and broken arches in
the feet are found in every occupation in which women are obliged to
stand for hours, but at any moment either one may develop beyond purely
painful symptoms into crippling incapacity. One such girl recently
returning home after a long day's work deliberately sat down upon the
floor of a crowded street car, explaining defiantly to the conductor and
the bewildered passengers that "her feet would not hold out another
minute." A young woman who only last summer broke her hand in a mangle
was found in a rescue home in January, explaining her recent experience
by the phrase that she was "up against it when leaving the hospital in
October."
In spite of many such heart-breaking instances the movement for
safeguarding machinery and securing indemnity for industrial accidents
proceeds all too slowly. At a recent exhibition in Boston the knife of a
miniature guillotine fell every ten seconds to indicate the rate of
industrial accidents in the United States. Grisly as was the device, its
hideousness might well have been increased had it been able to
demonstrate the connection between certain of these accidents and the
complete moral disaster which overtook their victims.
Yet factory girls who are subjected to this overstrain and overtime
often find their greatest discouragement in the fact that after all
their efforts they earn too little to support themselves. One girl said
that she had first yielded to temptation when she had become utterly
discouraged because she had tried in vain for seven months to save
enough money for a pair of shoes. She habitually spent two dollars a
week for her room, three dollars for her board, and sixty cents a week
for carfare, and she had found the forty cents remaining from her weekly
wage of six dollars inadequate to do more than re-sole her old shoes
twice. When the shoes became too worn to endure a third soling and she
possessed but ninety cents towards a new pair, she gave up her struggle;
to use her own contemptuous phrase, she "sold out for a pair of shoes."
Usually the phrases are less graphic, but after all they contain the
same dreary meaning: "Couldn't make both ends meet," "I had always been
used to having nice things," "Couldn't make enough money to live on," "I
got sick and ran behind," "Needed more money," "Impossible to feed and
clothe myself," "Out of work, hadn't been able to save." Of course a
girl in such a strait does not go out deliberately to find illicit
methods of earning money, she simply yields in a moment of utter
weariness and discouragement to the temptations she has been able to
withstand up to that moment. The long hours, the lack of comforts, the
low pay, the absence of recreation, the sense of "good times" all about
her which she cannot share, the conviction that she is rapidly losing
health and charm, rouse the molten forces within her. A swelling tide of
self-pity suddenly storms the banks which have hitherto held her and
finally overcomes her instincts for decency and righteousness, as well
as the habit of clean living, established by generations of her
forebears.
The aphorism that "morals fluctuate with trade" was long considered
cynical, but it has been demonstrated in Berlin, in London, in Japan, as
well as in several American cities, that there is a distinct increase in
the number of registered prostitutes during periods of financial
depression and even during the dull season of leading local industries.
Out of my own experience I am ready to assert that very often all that
is necessary to effectively help the girl who is on the edge of
wrong-doing is to lend her money for her board until she finds work,
provide the necessary clothing for which she is in such desperate need,
persuade her relatives that she should have more money for her own
expenditures, or find her another place at higher wages. Upon such
simple economic needs does the tried virtue of a good girl sometimes
depend.
Here again the immigrant girl is at a disadvantage. The average wage of
two hundred newly arrived girls of various nationalities, Poles,
Italians, Slovaks, Bohemians, Russians, Galatians, Croatians,
Lithuanians, Roumanians, Germans, and Swedes, who were interviewed by
the Immigrants' Protective League, was four dollars and a half a week
for the first position which they had been able to secure in Chicago. It
often takes a girl several weeks to find her first place. During this
period of looking for work the immigrant girl is subjected to great
dangers. It is at such times that immigrants often exhibit symptoms of
that type of disordered mind which alienists pronounce "due to conflict
through poor adaptation." I have known several immigrant young men as
well as girls who became deranged during the first year of life in
America. A young Russian who came to Chicago in the hope of obtaining
the freedom and self-development denied him at home, after three months
of bitter disillusionment, with no work and insufficient food, was sent
to the hospital for the insane. He only recovered after a group of his
young countrymen devotedly went to see him each week with promises of
work, the companionship at last establishing a sense of unbroken
association. I also recall a Polish girl who became utterly distraught
after weeks of sleeplessness and anxiety because she could not repay
fifty dollars which she had borrowed from a countryman in Chicago for
the purpose of bringing her sister to America. Her case was declared
hopeless, but when the creditor made reassuring visits to the patient
she began to mend and now, five years later, is not only free from debt,
but has brought over the rest of the family, whose united earnings are
slowly paying for a house and lot. Psychiatry is demonstrating the
after-effects of fear upon the minds of children, but little has yet
been done to show how far that fear of the future, arising from economic
insecurity in the midst of new surroundings, has superinduced insanity
among newly arrived immigrants. Such a state of nervous bewilderment and
fright, added to that sense of expectation which youth always carries
into new surroundings, often makes it easy to exploit the virtue of an
immigrant girl. It goes without saying that she is almost always
exploited industrially. A Russian girl recently took a place in a
Chicago clothing factory at twenty cents a day, without in the least
knowing that she was undercutting the wages of even that ill-paid
industry. This girl rented a room for a dollar a week and all that she
had to eat was given her by a friend in the same lodging house, who
shared her own scanty fare with the newcomer.
In the clothing industry trade unionism has already established a
minimum wage limit for thousands of women who are receiving the
protection and discipline of trade organization and responding to the
tonic of self-help. Low wages will doubtless in time be modified by
Minimum Wage Boards representing the government's stake in industry,
such as have been in successful operation for many years in certain
British colonies and are now being instituted in England itself. As yet
Massachusetts is the only state which has appointed a special commission
to consider this establishment for America, although the Industrial
Commission of Wisconsin is empowered to investigate wages and their
effect upon the standard of living.
Anyone who has lived among working people has been surprised at the
docility with which grown-up children give all of their earnings to
their parents. This is, of course, especially true of the daughters. The
fifth volume of the governmental report upon "Women and Child Wage
Earners in the United States," quoted earlier, gives eighty-four per
cent. as the proportion of working girls who turn in all of their wages
to the family fund. In most cases this is done voluntarily and
cheerfully, but in many instances it is as if the tradition of woman's
dependence upon her family for support held long after the actual fact
had changed, or as if the tyranny established through generations when
daughters could be starved into submission to a father's will, continued
even after the rôles had changed, and the wages of the girl child
supported a broken and dissolute father.
An over-restrained girl, from whom so much is exacted, will sometimes
begin to deceive her family by failing to tell them when she has had a
raise in her wages. She will habitually keep the extra amount for
herself, as she will any overtime pay which she may receive. All such
money is invariably spent upon her own clothing, which she, of course,
cannot wear at home, but which gives her great satisfaction upon the
streets.
The girl of the crowded tenements has no room in which to receive her
friends or to read the books through which she shares the lives of
assorted heroines, or, better still, dreams of them as of herself. Even
if the living-room is not full of boarders or children or washing, it is
comfortable neither for receiving friends nor for reading, and she finds
upon the street her entire social field; the shop windows with their
desirable garments hastily clothe her heroines as they travel the old
roads of romance, the street cars rumbling noisily by suggest a
delectable somewhere far away, and the young men who pass offer
possibilities of the most delightful acquaintance. It is not astonishing
that she insists upon clothing which conforms to the ideals of this
all-absorbing street and that she will unhesitatingly deceive an
uncomprehending family which does not recognize its importance.
One such girl had for two years earned money for clothing by filling
regular appointments in a disreputable saloon between the hours of six
and half-past seven in the evening. With this money earned almost daily
she bought the clothes of her heart's desire, keeping them with the
saloon-keeper's wife. She demurely returned to her family for supper in
her shabby working clothes and presented her mother with her unopened
pay envelope every Saturday night. She began this life at the age of
fourteen after her Polish mother had beaten her because she had
"elbowed" the sleeves and "cut out" the neck of her ungainly calico gown
in a vain attempt to make it look "American." Her mother, who had so
conscientiously punished a daughter who was "too crazy for clothes,"
could never of course comprehend how dangerous a combination is the girl
with an unsatisfied love for finery and the opportunities for illicit
earning afforded on the street. Yet many sad cases may be traced to such
lack of comprehension. Charles Booth states that in England a large
proportion of parents belonging to the working and even lower middle
classes, are unacquainted with the nature of the lives led by their own
daughters, a result doubtless of the early freedom of the street
accorded city children. Too often the mothers themselves are totally
ignorant of covert dangers. A few days ago I held in my hand a pathetic
little pile of letters written by a desperate young girl of fifteen
before she attempted to commit suicide. These letters were addressed to
her lover, her girl friends, and to the head of the rescue home, but
none to her mother towards whom she felt a bitter resentment "because
she did not warn me." The poor mother after the death of her husband had
gone to live with a married daughter, but as the son-in-law would not
"take in two" she had told the youngest daughter, who had already worked
for a year as an apprentice in a dressmaking establishment, that she
must find a place to live with one of her girl friends. The poor child
had found this impossible, and three days after the breaking up of her
home she had fallen a victim to a white slave trafficker, who had
treated her most cruelly and subjected her to unspeakable indignities.
It was only when her "protector" left the city, frightened by the
unwonted activity of the police, due to a wave of reform, that she found
her way to the rescue home, and in less than five months after the death
of her father she had purchased carbolic acid and deliberately "courted
death for the nameless child" and herself.
Another experience during which a girl faces a peculiar danger is when
she has lost one "job" and is looking for another. Naturally she loses
her place in the slack season and pursues her search at the very moment
when positions are hardest to find, and her un-employment is therefore
most prolonged. Perhaps nothing in our social order is so unorganized
and inchoate as our method, or rather lack of method, of placing young
people in industry. This is obvious from the point of view of their
first positions when they leave school at the unstable age of fourteen,
or from the innumerable places they hold later, often as high as ten a
year, when they are dismissed or change voluntarily through sheer
restlessness. Here again a girl's difficulty is often increased by the
lack of sympathy and understanding on the part of her parents. A girl is
often afraid to say that she has lost her place and pretends to go to
work each morning while she is looking for a new one; she postpones
telling them at home day by day, growing more frantic as the usual
pay-day approaches. Some girls borrow from loan sharks in order to take
the customary wages to their parents, others fall victims to
unscrupulous employment agencies in their eagerness to take the first
thing offered.
The majority of these girls answer the advertisements in the daily
papers as affording the cheapest and safest way to secure a position.
These out-of-work girls are found, sometimes as many as forty or fifty
at a time, in the rest rooms of the department stores, waiting for the
new edition of the newspapers after they have been the rounds of the
morning advertisements and have found nothing.
Of course such a possible field as these rest rooms is not overlooked by
the procurer, who finds it very easy to establish friendly relations
through the offer of the latest edition of the newspaper. Even pennies
are precious to a girl out of work and she is also easily grateful to
anyone who expresses an interest in her plight and tells her of a
position. Two representatives of the Juvenile Protective Association of
Chicago, during a period of three weeks, arrested and convicted
seventeen men and three women who were plying their trades in the rest
rooms of nine department stores. The managers were greatly concerned
over this exposure and immediately arranged both for more intelligent
matrons and greater vigilance. One of the less scrupulous stores
voluntarily gave up a method of advertising carried on in the rest room
itself where a demonstrator from "the beauty counter" made up the faces
of the patrons of the rest room with the powder and paint procurable in
her department below. The out-of-work girls especially availed
themselves of this privilege and hoped that their search would be easier
when their pale, woe-begone faces were "made beautiful." The poor girls
could not know that a face thus made up enormously increased their
risks.
A number of girls also came early in the morning as soon as the rest
rooms were open. They washed their faces and arranged their hair and
then settled to sleep in the largest and easiest chairs the room
afforded. Some of these were out-of-work girls also determined to take
home their wages at the end of the week, each pretending to her mother
that she had spent the night with a girl friend and was working all day
as usual. How much of this deception is due to parental tyranny and how
much to a sense of responsibility for younger children or invalids, it
is impossible to estimate until the number of such recorded cases is
much larger. Certain it is that the long habit of obedience, as well as
the feeling of family obligation established from childhood, is often
utilized by the white slave trafficker.
Difficult as is the position of the girl out of work when her family is
exigent and uncomprehending, she has incomparably more protection than
the girl who is living in the city without home ties. Such girls form
sixteen per cent. of the working women of Chicago. With absolutely every
penny of their meagre wages consumed in their inadequate living, they
are totally unable to save money. That loneliness and detachment which
the city tends to breed in its inhabitants is easily intensified in such
a girl into isolation and a desolating feeling of belonging nowhere. All
youth resents the sense of the enormity of the universe in relation to
the insignificance of the individual life, and youth, with that intense
self-consciousness which makes each young person the very centre of all
emotional experience, broods over this as no older person can possibly
do. At such moments a black oppression, the instinctive fear of
solitude, will send a lonely girl restlessly to walk the streets even
when she is "too tired to stand," and when her desire for companionship
in itself constitutes a grave danger. Such a girl living in a rented
room is usually without any place in which to properly receive callers.
An investigation was recently made in Kansas City of 411 lodging-houses
in which young girls were living; less than 30 per cent. were found with
a parlor in which guests might be received. Many girls quite innocently
permit young men to call upon them in their bedrooms, pitifully
disguised as "sitting-rooms," but the danger is obvious, and the
standards of the girl gradually become lowered.
Certainly during the trying times when a girl is out of work she should
have much more intelligent help than is at present extended to her; she
should be able to avail herself of the state employment agencies much
more than is now possible, and the work of the newly established
vocational bureaus should be enormously extended.
When once we are in earnest about the abolition of the social evil,
society will find that it must study industry from the point of view of
the producer in a sense which has never been done before. Such a study
with reference to industrial legislation will ally itself on one hand
with the trades-union movement, which insists upon a living wage and
shorter hours for the workers, and also upon an opportunity for
self-direction, and on the other hand with the efficiency movement,
which would refrain from over-fatiguing an operator as it would from
over-speeding a machine. In addition to legislative enactment and the
historic trade-union effort, the feebler and newer movement on the part
of the employers is being reinforced by the welfare secretary, who is
not only devising recreational and educational plans, but is placing
before the employer much disturbing information upon the cost of living
in relation to the pitiful wages of working girls. Certainly employers
are growing ashamed to use the worn-out, hypocritical pretence of
employing only the girl "protected by home influences" as a device for
reducing wages. Help may also come from the consumers, for an increasing
number of them, with compunctions in regard to tempted young employees,
are not only unwilling to purchase from the employer who underpays his
girls and thus to share his guilt, but are striving in divers ways to
modify existing conditions.
As working women enter fresh fields of labor which ever open up anew as
the old fields are submerged behind them, society must endeavor to
speedily protect them by an amelioration of the economic conditions
which are now so unnecessarily harsh and dangerous to health and morals.
The world-wide movement for establishing governmental control of
industrial conditions is especially concerned for working women.
Fourteen of the European countries prohibit all night work for women and
almost every civilized country in the world is considering the number of
hours and the character of work in which women may be permitted to
safely engage.
Although amelioration comes about so slowly that many young girls are
sacrificed each year under conditions which could so easily and
reasonably be changed, nevertheless it is apparently better to overcome
the dangers in this new and freer life, which modern industry has opened
to women, than it is to attempt to retreat into the domestic industry of
the past; for all statistics of prostitution give the largest number of
recruits for this life as coming from domestic service and the second
largest number from girls who live at home with no definite occupation
whatever. Therefore, although in the economic aspect of the social evil
more than in any other, do we find ground for despair, at the same time
we discern, as nowhere else, the young girl's stubborn power of
resistance. Nevertheless, the most superficial survey of her
surroundings shows the necessity for ameliorating, as rapidly as
possible, the harsh economic conditions which now environ her.
That steadily increasing function of the state by which it seeks to
protect its workers from their own weakness and degradation, and insists
that the livelihood of the manual laborer shall not be beaten down below
the level of efficient citizenship, assumes new forms almost daily. From
the human as well as the economic standpoint there is an obligation
resting upon the state to discover how many victims of the white slave
traffic are the result of social neglect, remedial incapacity, and the
lack of industrial safeguards, and how far discontinuous employment and
non-employment are factors in the breeding of discouragement and
despair.
Is it because our modern industrialism is so new that we have been slow
to connect it with the poverty and vice all about us? The socialists
talk constantly of the relation of economic law to destitution and point
out the connection between industrial maladjustment and individual
wrongdoing, but certainly the study of social conditions, the obligation
to eradicate vice, cannot belong to one political party or to one
economic school. It must be recognized as a solemn obligation of
existing governments, and society must realize that economic conditions
can only be made more righteous and more human by the unceasing devotion
of generations of men.