PHILANTHROPIC RESCUE AND PREVENTION
There is no doubt that philanthropy often reflects and dramatizes the
modern sensitiveness of the community in relation to a social wrong,
because those engaged in the rescue of the victims are able to
apprehend, through their daily experiences, many aspects of a recognized
evil concerning which the public are ignorant and therefore indifferent.
However ancient a wrong may be, in each generation it must become newly
embodied in living people and the social custom into which it has
hardened through the years, must be continued in individual lives.
Unless the contemporaries of such unhappy individuals are touched to
tenderness or stirred to indignation by the actual embodiments of the
old wrong in their own generation, effective action cannot be secured.
The social evil has, on the whole, received less philanthropic effort
than any other well-recognized menace to the community, largely because
there is something peculiarly distasteful and distressing in personal
acquaintance with its victims; a distaste and distress that sometimes
leads to actual nervous collapse. A distinguished Englishman has
recently written "that sober-minded people who, from motives of pity,
have looked the hideous evil full in the face, have often asserted that
nothing in their experience has seemed to threaten them so nearly with a
loss of reason."
Nevertheless, this comparative lack of philanthropic effort is the more
remarkable because the average age of the recruits to prostitution is
between sixteen and eighteen years, the age at which girls are still
minors under the law in respect to all matters of property. We allow a
minor to determine for herself whether or not she will live this most
abominable life, although if she resolve to be a thief she will, if
possible, be apprehended and imprisoned; if she become a vagrant she
will be restrained; even if she become a professional beggar, she will
be interfered with; but the decision to lead this evil life, disastrous
alike to herself and the community, although well known to the police,
is openly permitted. If a man has seized upon a moment of weakness in a
girl and obtained her consent, although she may thereafter be in dire
need of help she is put outside all protection of the law. The courts
assume that such a girl has deliberately decided for herself and that
because she is not "of previous chaste life and character," she is lost
to all decency. Yet every human being knows deep down in his heart that
his own moral energy ebbs and flows, that he could not be judged fairly
by his hours of defeat, and that after revealing moments of weakness,
although shocked and frightened, he is the same human being, struggling
as he did before. Nevertheless in some states, a little girl as young as
ten years of age may make this irrevocable decision for herself.
Modern philanthropy, continually discovering new aspects of prostitution
through the aid of economics, sanitary science, statistical research,
and many other agencies, finds that this increase of knowledge
inevitably leads it from the attempt to rescue the victims of white
slavery to a consideration of the abolition of the monstrous wrong
itself. At the present moment philanthropy is gradually impelled to a
consideration of prostitution in relation to the welfare and the orderly
existence of society itself. If the moral fire seems at times to be
dying out of certain good old words, such as charity, it is filling with
new warmth such words as social justice, which belong distinctively to
our own time. It is also true that those for whom these words contain
most of hope and warmth are those who have been long mindful of the old
tasks and obligations, as if the great basic emotion of human compassion
had more than held its own. Certainly the youth of many of the victims
of the white slave traffic, and the helplessness of the older girls who
find themselves caught in the grip of an enormous force which they
cannot comprehend, make a most pitiful appeal. Philanthropy moreover
discovers many young girls, who if they had not been rescued by
protective agencies would have become permanent outcasts, although they
would have entered a disreputable life through no fault of their own.
The illustrations in this chapter are all taken from the Juvenile
Protective Association of Chicago in connection with its efforts to save
girls from overwhelming temptation. Doubtless many other associations
could offer equally convincing testimony, for in recent years the number
of people to whom the very existence of the white slave traffic has
become unendurable and who are determinedly working against it, has
enormously increased.
A surprising number of country girls have been either brought to Chicago
under false pretences, or have been decoyed into an evil life very soon
after their arrival in the city. Mr. Clifford Roe estimates that more
than half of the girls who have been recruited into a disreputable life
in Chicago have come from the farms and smaller towns in Illinois and
from neighboring states. This estimate is borne out by the records of
Paris and other metropolitan cities in which it is universally estimated
that a little less than one-third of the prostitutes found in them, at
any given moment, are city born.
The experience of a pretty girl who came to the office of the Juvenile
Protective Association, a year ago, is fairly typical of the argument
many of these country girls offer in their own defense. This girl had
been a hotel chambermaid in an Iowa town where many of the traveling
patrons of the hotel had made love to her, one of them occasionally
offering her protection if she would leave with him. At first she
indignantly refused, but was at length convinced that the acceptance of
such offers must be a very general practice and that, whatever might be
the custom in the country, no one in a city made personal inquiries. She
finally consented to accompany a young man to Seattle, both because she
wanted to travel and because she was discouraged in her attempts to "be
good." A few weeks later, when in Chicago, she had left the young man,
acting from what she considered a point of honor, as his invitation had
been limited to the journey which was now completed. Feeling too
disgraced to go home and under the glamour of the life of idleness she
had been leading, she had gone voluntarily into a disreputable house, in
which the police had found her and sent her to the Association. She
could not be persuaded to give up her plan, but consented to wait for a
few days to "think it over." As she was leaving the office in company
with a representative of the Association, they met the young man, who
had been distractedly searching for her and had just discovered her
whereabouts. She was married the very same day and of course the
Association never saw her again.
From the point of view of the traffickers in white slaves, it is much
cheaper and safer to procure country girls after they have reached the
city. Such girls are in constant danger because they are much more
easily secreted than girls procured from the city. A country girl
entering a vicious life quickly feels the disgrace and soon becomes too
broken-spirited and discouraged to make any effort to escape into the
unknown city which she believes to be full of horrors similar to those
she has already encountered. She desires above all things to deceive her
family at home, often sending money to them regularly and writing
letters describing a fictitious life of hard work. Perhaps the most
flagrant case with which the Association ever dealt, was that of two
young girls who had come to Chicago from a village in West Virginia,
hoping to earn large wages in order to help their families. They arrived
in the city penniless, having been robbed en route of their one slender
purse. As they stood in the railway station, utterly bewildered, they
were accosted by a young man who presented the advertising card of a
boarding-house and offered to take them there. They quite innocently
accepted his invitation, but an hour later, finding themselves in a
locked room, they became frightened and realized they had been duped.
Fortunately the two agile country girls had no difficulty in jumping
from a second-story window, but upon the street they were of course much
too frightened to speak to anyone again and wandered about for hours.
The house from which they had escaped bore the sign "rooms to rent," and
they therefore carefully avoided all houses whose placards offered
shelter. Finally, when they were desperate with hunger, they went into a
saloon for a "free lunch," not in the least realizing that they were
expected to take a drink in order to receive it. A policeman, seeing two
young girls in a saloon "without escort," arrested them and took them to
the nearest station where they spent the night in a wretched cell.
At the hearing the next morning, where, much frightened, they gave a
very incoherent account of their adventures, the judge fined them each
fifteen dollars and costs, and as they were unable to pay the fine, they
were ordered sent to the city prison. When they were escorted from the
court room, another man approached them and offered to pay their fines
if they would go with him. Frightened by their former experience, they
stoutly declined his help, but were over-persuaded by his graphic
portrayal of prison horrors and the disgrace that their imprisonment
would bring upon "the folks at home." He also made clear that when they
came out of prison, thirty days later, they would be no better off than
they were now, save that they would have the added stigma of being
jail-birds. The girls at last reluctantly consented to go with him, when
a representative of the Juvenile Protective Association, who had
followed them from the court room and had listened to the conversation,
insisted upon the prompt arrest of the white slave trader. When the
entire story, finally secured from the girls, was related to the judge,
he reversed his decision, fined the man $100.00, which he was abundantly
able to pay, and insisted that the girls be sent back to their mothers
in Virginia. They were farmers' daughters, strong and capable of taking
care of themselves in an environment that they understood, but in
constant danger because of their ignorance of city life.
The methods employed to secure city girls must be much more subtle and
complicated than those employed with the less sophisticated country
girl. Although the city girl, once procured, is later allowed more
freedom than is accorded either to a country girl or to an immigrant
girl, every effort is made to demoralize her completely before she
enters the life. Because she may, at any moment, escape into the city
which she knows so well, it is necessary to obtain her inner consent.
Those whose profession it is to procure girls for the white slave trade
apparently find it possible to decoy and demoralize most easily that
city girl whose need for recreation has led her to the disreputable
public dance hall or other questionable places of amusement.
Gradually those philanthropic agencies that are endeavoring to be of
service to the girls learn to know the dangers in these places. Many
parents are utterly indifferent or ignorant of the pleasures that their
children find for themselves. From the time these children were five
years old, such parents were accustomed to see them take care of
themselves on the street and at school, and it seems but natural that
when the children are old enough to earn money, they should be able to
find their own amusements.
The girls are attracted to the unregulated dance halls not only by a
love of pleasure but by a sense of adventure, and it is in these places
that they are most easily recruited for a vicious life. Unfortunately
there are three hundred and twenty-eight public dance halls in Chicago,
one hundred and ninety of them connect directly with saloons, while
liquor is openly sold in most of the others. This consumption of liquor
enormously increases the danger to young people. A girl after a long
day's work is easily induced to believe that a drink will dispel her
lassitude. There is plenty of time between the dances to persuade her,
as the intermissions are long, fifteen to twenty minutes, and the dances
short, occupying but four or five minutes; moreover the halls are hot
and dusty and it is almost impossible to obtain a drink of water. Often
the entire purpose of the dance hall, with its carefully arranged
intermissions, is the selling of liquor to the people it has brought
together. After the girl has begun to drink, the way of the procurer,
who is often in league with the "spieler" who frequents the dance hall,
is comparatively easy. He assumes one of two rôles, that of the
sympathetic older man or that of the eager young lover. In the character
of the former, he tells "the down-trodden working girl" that her wages
are a mere pittance and that he can procure a better place for her with
higher wages if she will trust him. He often makes allusions to the
shabbiness or cheapness of her clothing and considers it "a shame that
such a pretty girl cannot dress better." In the second rôle he
apparently falls in love with her, tells of his rich parents,
complaining that they want him to marry, "a society swell," but that he
really prefers a working girl like herself. In either case he
establishes friendly relations, exalted in the girl's mind, through the
excitement of the liquor and the dance, into a new sense of intimate
understanding and protection.
Later in the evening, she leaves the hall with him for a restaurant
because, as he truthfully says, she is exhausted and in need of food. At
the supper, however, she drinks much more, and it is not surprising that
she is at last persuaded that it is too late to go home and in the end
consents to spend the rest of the night in a nearby lodging house. Six
young girls, each accompanied by a "spieler" from a dance hall, were
recently followed to a chop suey restaurant and then to a lodging-house,
which the police were instigated to raid and where the six girls, more
or less intoxicated, were found. If no one rescues the girl after such
an experience, she sometimes does not return home at all, or if she
does, feels herself initiated into a new world where it is possible to
obtain money at will, to easily secure the pleasures it brings, and she
comes at length to consider herself superior to her less sophisticated
companions. Of course this latter state of mind is untenable for any
length of time and the girl is soon found openly leading a disreputable
life.
The girls attending the cheap theatres and the vaudeville shows are most
commonly approached through their vanity. They readily listen to the
triumphs of a stage career, sure to be attained by such a "good looker,"
and a large number of them follow a young man to the woman with whom he
is in partnership, under the promise of being introduced to a theatrical
manager. There are also theatrical agencies in league with disreputable
places, who advertise for pretty girls, promising large salaries. Such
an agency operating with a well-known "near theatre" in the state
capital was recently prosecuted in Chicago and its license revoked. In
this connection the experience of two young English girls is not
unusual. They were sisters possessed of an extraordinary skill in
juggling, who were brought to this country by a relative acting as their
manager. Although he exploited them for his own benefit for three years,
paying them the most meager salaries and supplying them with the
simplest living in the towns which they "toured," he had protected them
from all immorality, and they had preserved the clean living of the
family of acrobats to which they belonged. Last October, when appearing
in San Francisco, the girls, then sixteen and seventeen years of age,
demanded more pay than the dollar and twenty cents a week each had been
receiving, representing the five shillings with which they had started
from home. The manager, who had become discouraged with his American
experience, refused to accede to their demands, gave them each a ticket
for Chicago, and heartlessly turned them adrift. Arriving in the city,
they quite naturally at once applied to a theatrical agency, through
which they were sent to a disreputable house where a vaudeville program
was given each night. Delighted that they had found work so quickly,
they took the position in good faith. During the very first performance,
however, they became frightened by the conduct of the girls who preceded
them on the program and by the hilarity of the audience. They managed to
escape from the dressing-room, where they were waiting their turn, and
on the street appealed to the first policeman, who brought them to the
Juvenile Protective Association. They were detained for several days as
witnesses against the theatrical agency, entering into the legal
prosecution with that characteristic British spirit which is ever ready
to protest against an imposition, before they left the city with a
travelling company, each on a weekly salary of twenty dollars.
The methods pursued on excursion boats are similar to those of the dance
halls, in that decent girls are induced to drink quantities of liquor to
which they are unaccustomed. On the high seas, liquor is sold usually in
original packages, which enormously increases the amount consumed. It is
not unusual to see a boy and girl drinking between them an entire bottle
of whiskey. Some of these excursion boats carry five thousand people and
in the easy breakdown of propriety which holiday-making often implies,
and the absence of police, to which city young people are unaccustomed,
the utmost freedom and license is often indulged in. Thus the lake
excursions, one of the most delightful possibilities for recreation in
Chicago, through lack of proper policing and through the sale of liquor,
are made a menace to thousands of young people to whom they should be a
great resource.
When a philanthropic association, with a knowledge of the commercial
exploitation of youth's natural response to gay surroundings, attempts
to substitute innocent recreation, it finds the undertaking most
difficult. In Chicago the Juvenile Protective Association, after a
thorough investigation of public dance halls, amusement parks, five-cent
theatres, and excursion boats, is insisting upon more vigorous
enforcement of the existing legislation, and is also urging further
legal regulation; Kansas City has instituted a Department of Public
Welfare with power to regulate places of amusement; a New York committee
has established model dance halls; Milwaukee is urging the appointment
of commissions on public recreation, while New York and Columbus have
already created them.
Perhaps nothing in actual operation is more valuable than the small
parks of Chicago in which the large halls are used every evening for
dancing and where outdoor sports, swimming pools and gymnasiums daily
attract thousands of young people. Unless cities make some such
provision for their youth, those who sell the facilities for amusement
in order to make a profit will continue to exploit the normal desire of
all young people for recreation and pleasure. The city of Chicago
contains at present eight hundred and fourteen thousand minors, all
eager for pleasure. It is not surprising that commercial enterprise
undertakes to supply this demand and that penny arcades, slot machines,
candy stores, ice-cream parlors, moving-picture shows, skating rinks,
cheap theatres and dance halls are trying to attract young people with
every device known to modern advertising. Their promoters are, of
course, careless of the moral effect upon their young customers if they
can but secure their money. Until municipal provisions adequately meet
this need, philanthropic and social organizations must be committed to
the establishment of more adequate recreational facilities.
Although many dangers are encountered by the pleasure-loving girl who
demands that each evening shall bring her some measure of recreation, a
large number of girls meet with difficulties and temptations while
soberly at work. Many of these tempted girls are newly-arrived immigrant
girls between the ages of sixteen and twenty, who find their first work
in hotels. Polish girls especially are utilized in hotel kitchens and
laundries, and for the interminable scrubbing of halls and lobbies where
a knowledge of the English language is not necessary, but where their
peasant strength is in demand. The work is very heavy and fatiguing and
until the Illinois law limited the work of women to ten hours a day, it
often lasted late into the night. Even now the girls report themselves
so tired that at the end of the day, they crowd into the dormitories and
fall upon their beds undressed. When food and shelter is given them,
their wages are from $14.00 to $18.00 a month, most of which is usually
sent back to the old country, that the remaining members of the family
may be brought to America. Such positions are surrounded by temptations
of every sort. Even the hotel housekeepers, who are honestly trying to
protect the girls, admit that it is impossible to do it adequately. One
of these housekeepers recently said "that it takes a girl who knows the
world to work in any hotel," and regretted that the sophisticated
English-speaking girl who might protect herself, was unable to endure
the hard work. She added that as soon as a girl learned English she
promoted her from the laundry to the halls and from there to the
position of chambermaid, but that the latter position was the most
dangerous of all, as the girls were constantly exposed to insults from
the guests. In the less respectable hotels these newly-arrived immigrant
girls, inevitably seeing a great deal of the life of the underworld and
the apparent ease with which money may be earned in illicit ways, find
their first impression of the moral standards of life in America most
bewildering. One young Polish girl had worked for two years in a
down-town hotel, and had steadfastly resisted all improper advances even
sometimes by the aid of her own powerful fist. She yielded at last to
the suggestions of the life about her when she received a telegram from
Ellis Island stating that her mother had arrived in New York, but was
too ill to be sent on to Chicago. All of her money had gone for the
steamer ticket and as the thought of her old country mother, ill and
alone among strangers, was too much for her long fortitude, she made the
best bargain possible with the head waiter whose importunities she had
hitherto resisted, accepted the little purse the other Polish girls in
the hotel collected for her and arrived in New York only to find that
her mother had died the night before.
The simple obedience to parents on the part of these immigrant girls,
working in hotels and restaurants, often miscarries pathetically. Their
unspoiled human nature, not yet immune to the poisons of city life, when
thrust into the midst of that unrelieved drudgery which lies at the
foundation of all complex luxury, often results in the most fatal
reactions. A young German woman, the proprietor of what is considered a
successful "house" in the most notorious district in Chicago, traces her
career directly to a desperate attempt to conform to the standard of
"bringing home good wages" maintained by her numerous brothers and
sisters. One requirement of her home was rigid: all money earned by a
child must be paid into the family income until "legal age" was
attained. The slightly neurotic, very pretty girl of seventeen heartily
detested the dish-washing in a restaurant, which constituted her first
place in America, and quite honestly declared that the heavy lifting was
beyond her strength. Such insubordination was not tolerated at home, and
every Saturday night when her meager wages, reduced by sick days "off,"
were compared with what the others brought in, she was regularly
scolded, "sometimes slapped," by her parents, jeered at by her more
vigorous sisters and bullied by her brothers. She tried to shorten her
hours by doing "rush-work" as a waitress at noon, but she found this
still beyond her strength, and worst of all, the pay of two dollars and
a half insufficient to satisfy her mother. Confiding her troubles to the
other waitresses, one of them good-naturedly told her how she could make
money through appointments in a nearby disreputable hotel, and so take
home an increased amount of money easily called "a raise in wages." So
strong was the habit of obedience, that the girl continued to take money
home every Saturday night until her eighteenth birthday, in spite of the
fact that she gave up the restaurant in less than six weeks after her
first experience. Although all of this happened ten years ago and the
German mother is long since dead, the daughter bitterly ended the story
with the infamous hope that "the old lady was now suffering the torments
of the lost, for making me what I am." Such a girl was subjected to
temptations to which society has no right to expose her.
A dangerous cynicism regarding the value of virtue, a cynicism never so
unlovely as in the young, sometimes seizes a girl who, because of long
hours and overwork, has been unable to preserve either her health or
spirits and has lost all measure of joy in life. That this premature
cynicism may be traced to an unhappy and narrow childhood is suggested
by the fact that a large number of these girls come from families in
which there has been little affection and the poor substitute of
parental tyranny.
A young Italian girl who earned four dollars a week in a tailor shop
pulling out hastings, when asked why she wore a heavy woolen gown on one
of the hottest days of last summer, replied that she was obliged to earn
money for her clothes by scrubbing for the neighbors after hours; that
she had found no such work lately and that her father would not allow
her anything from her wages for clothes or for carfare, because he was
buying a house.
This parental control sometimes exercised in order to secure all of a
daughter's wages, is often established with the best intentions in the
world. I recall a French dressmaker who had frugally supported her two
daughters until they were of working age, when she quite naturally
expected them to conform to the careful habits of living necessary
during her narrow years. In order to save carfare, she required her
daughters to walk a long distance to the department store in which one
was a bundle wrapper and the other a clerk at the ribbon counter. They
dressed in black as being the most economical color and a penny spent in
pleasure was never permitted. One day a young man who was buying ribbon
from the older girl gave her a yard with the remark that she was much
too young and pretty to be so somberly dressed. She wore the ribbon at
work, never of course at home, but it opened a vista of delightful
possibilities and she eagerly accepted a pair of gloves the following
week from the same young man, who afterwards asked her to dine with him.
This was the beginning of a winter of surreptitious pleasures on the
part of the two sisters. They were shrewd enough never to be out later
than ten o'clock and always brought home so-called overtime pay to their
mother. In the spring the older girl, finding herself worn out by her
dissipation and having resolved to cut loose from her home, came to the
office of the Juvenile Protective Association to ask help for her
younger sister. It was discovered that the mother was totally ignorant
of the semi-professional life her daughters had been leading. She
reiterated over and over again that she had always guarded them
carefully and had given them no money to spend. It took months of
constant visiting on the part of a representative of the Association
before she was finally persuaded to treat the younger girl more
generously.
While this family is fairly typical of those in which over-restraint is
due to the lack of understanding, it is true that in most cases the
family tyranny is exercised by an old-country father in an honest
attempt to guard his daughter against the dangers of a new world. The
worst instances, however, are those in which the father has fallen into
the evil ways of drink, and not only demands all of his daughter's
wages, but treats her with great brutality when those wages fall below
his expectations. Many such daughters have come to grief because they
have been afraid to go home at night when their wage envelopes contained
less than usual, either because a new system of piece work had reduced
the amount or because, in a moment of weakness, they had taken out five
cents with which to attend a show, or ten cents for the much-desired
pleasure of riding back and forth the full length of an elevated
railroad, or because they had in a thirsty moment taken out a nickel for
a drink of soda water, or worst of all, had fallen a victim to the
installment plan of buying a new hat or a pair of shoes. These girls, in
their fear of beatings and scoldings, although they are sure of shelter
and food and often have a mother who is trying to protect them from
domestic storms, have almost no money for clothing, and are inevitably
subject to moments of sheer revolt, their rebellion intensified by the
fact that after a girl earns her own money and is accustomed to come and
go upon the streets as an independent wage earner, she finds
unsympathetic control much harder to bear than do schoolgirls of the
same age who have never broken the habits of their childhood and are
still economically dependent upon their parents.
In spite of the fact that domestic service is always suggested by the
average woman as an alternative for the working girl whose life is beset
with danger, the federal report on "Women and Child Wage Earners in the
United States" gives the occupation of the majority of girls who go
wrong as that of domestic service, and in this it confirms the
experience of every matron in a rescue home and the statistics in the
maternity wards of the public hospitals. The report suggests that the
danger comes from the general conditions of work: "These general
conditions are the loneliness of the life, the lack of opportunities for
making friends and securing recreation and amusement in safe
surroundings, the monotonous and uninteresting nature of the work done
as these untrained girls do it, the lack of external stimulus to pride
and self-respect, and the absolutely unguarded state of the girl, except
when directly under the eye of her mistress."
In addition to these reasons, the girls realize that the opportunities
for marriage are less in domestic service than in other occupations, and
after all, the great business of youth is securing a mate, as the young
instinctively understand. Unlike the working girl who lives at home and
constantly meets young men of her own neighborhood and factory life, the
girl in domestic service is brought into contact with very few possible
lovers. Even the men of her former acquaintance, however slightly
Americanized, do not like to call on a girl in someone else's kitchen,
and find the entire situation embarrassing. The girl's mistress knows
that for her own daughters mutual interests and recreation are the
natural foundations for friendship with young men, which may or may not
lead to marriage, but which is the prerogative of every young girl. The
mistress does not, however, apply this worldly wisdom to the maid in her
service, only eighteen or nineteen years old, utterly dependent upon her
for social life save during one afternoon and evening a week.
The majority of domestics are employed in families where there is only
one, and the tired and dispirited girl, often without a taste for
reading, spends many lonely hours. That most fundamental and powerful of
all instincts has therefore no chance for diffusion or social expression
and like all confined forces, tends to degenerate. The girl is equipped
with no weapon with which to contend with those poisonous images which
arise from the senses, and these images, bred of fatigue and loneliness,
make a girl an easy victim. This is especially true of the colored girl,
who because of her traditions, is often treated with so little respect
by white men, that she is constantly subjected to insult. Even the
colored servants in the New York apartment houses, who live at home and
thus avoid this loneliness, because their hours extend until nine in the
evening, are obliged to seek their pleasures late into the night.
American cities offer occupation to more colored women than colored men
and this surplus of women, in some cities as large as one hundred and
thirty or forty women to one hundred men, affords an opportunity to the
procurer which he quickly seizes. He is often in league with certain
employment bureaus, who make a business of advancing the railroad or
boat fare to colored girls coming from the South to enter into domestic
service. The girl, in debt and unused to the city, is often put into a
questionable house and kept there until her debt is paid many times
over. In some respects her position is not unlike that of the imported
white slave, for although she has the inestimable advantage of speaking
the language, she finds it even more difficult to have her story
credited. This contemptuous attitude places her at a disadvantage, for
so universally are colored girls in domestic service suspected of
blackmail that the average court is slow to credit their testimony when
it is given against white men. The field of employment for colored girls
is extremely limited. They are seldom found in factories and workshops.
They are not wanted in department stores nor even as waitresses in
hotels. The majority of them therefore are engaged in domestic service
and often find the position of maid in a house of prostitution or of
chambermaid in a disreputable hotel, the best-paying position open to
them.
When a girl who has been in domestic service loses her health, or for
any other reason is unable to carry on her occupation, she is often
curiously detached and isolated, because she has had so little
opportunity for normal social relationships and friendships. One of the
saddest cases ever brought to my personal knowledge was that of an
orphan Norwegian girl who, coming to America at the age of seventeen,
had been for three years in one position as general housemaid, during
which time she had drawn only such part of her wages as was necessary
for her simple clothing. At the end of three years, when she was sent to
a public hospital with nervous prostration, her employer refused to pay
her accumulated wages, on the ground that owing to her ill health she
had been of little use during the last year. When she left the hospital,
practically penniless, advised by the physician to find some outdoor
work, she sold a patented egg-beater for six months, scarcely earning
enough for her barest necessities and in constant dread lest she could
not "keep respectable." When she was found wandering upon the street she
not only had no capital with which to renew her stock, but had been
without food for two days and had resolved to drown herself. Every
effort was made to restore the half-crazed girl, but unfortunately
hospital restraint was not considered necessary, and a month later, in
spite of the vigilance of her new employer, her body was taken from the
lake. One more of those gentle spirits who had found the problem of life
insoluble, had sought refuge in death.
A surprising number of suicides occur among girls who have been in
domestic service, when they discover that they have been betrayed by
their lovers. Perhaps nothing is more astonishing than the attitude of
the mistress when the situation of such a forlorn girl is discovered,
and it would be interesting to know how far this attitude has influenced
these girls either to suicide or to their reckless choice of a
disreputable life, which statistics show so many of their number have
elected. The mistress almost invariably promptly dismisses such a girl,
assuring her that she is disgraced forever and too polluted to remain
for another hour in a good home. In full command of the situation, she
usually succeeds in convincing the wretched girl that she is irreparably
ruined. Her very phraseology, although unknown to herself, is a remnant
of that earlier historic period when every woman was obliged in her own
person to protect her home and to secure the status of her children. The
indignant woman is trying to exercise alone that social restraint which
should have been exercised by the community and which would have
naturally protected the girl, if she had not been so withdrawn from it,
in order to serve exclusively the interests of her mistress's family.
Such a woman seldom follows the ruined girl through the dreary weeks
after her dismissal; her difficulty in finding any sort of work, the
ostracism of her former friends added to her own self-accusation, the
poverty and loneliness, the final ten days in the hospital, and the
great temptation which comes after that, to give away her child. The
baby farmer who haunts the public hospitals for such cases tells her
that upon the payment of forty or fifty dollars, he will take care of
the child for a year and that "maybe it won't live any longer than
that," and unless the hospital is equipped with a social service
department, such as the one at the Massachusetts General, the girl
leaves it weak and low-spirited and too broken to care what becomes of
her. It is in moments such as these that many a poor girl, convinced
that all the world is against her, decides to enter a disreputable
house. Here at least she will find food and shelter, she will not be
despised by the other inmates and she can earn money for the support of
her child. Often she has received the address of such a house from one
of her companions in the maternity ward where, among the fifty per cent,
of the unmarried mothers, at least two or three sophisticated girls are
always to be found, eager to "put wise" the girls who are merely
unfortunate. Occasionally a girl who follows such baneful advice still
insists upon keeping her child. I recall a pathetic case in the juvenile
court of Chicago when such a mother of a five-year-old child was
pronounced by the judge to be an "improper guardian." The agonized woman
was told that she might retain her child if she would completely change
her way of life; but she insisted that such a requirement was
impossible, that she had no other means of earning her living, and that
she had become too idle and broken for regular work. The child clung
piteously to the mother, and, having gathered from the evidence that she
was considered "bad," assured the judge over and over again that she was
"the bestest mother in the world." The poor mother, who had begun her
wretched mode of life for her child's sake, found herself so demoralized
by her hideous experiences that she could not leave the life, even for
the sake of the same child, still her most precious possession. Only six
years before, this mother had been an honest girl cheerfully working in
the household of a good woman, whose sense of duty had expressed itself
in dismissing "the outcast."
These discouraged girls, who so often come from domestic service to
supply the vice demands of the city, are really the last representatives
of those thousands of betrayed girls who for many years met the entire
demand of the trade; for, while a procurer of some sort has performed
his office for centuries, only in the last fifty years has the white
slave market required the services of extended business enterprises in
order to keep up the supply. Previously the demand had been largely met
by the girls who had voluntarily entered a disreputable life because
they had been betrayed. While the white slave traffic was organized
primarily for profit it could of course never have flourished unless
there had been a dearth of these discouraged girls. Is it not also
significant that the surviving representatives of the girls who formerly
supplied the demand are drawn most largely from the one occupation which
is farthest from the modern ideal of social freedom and self-direction?
Domestic service represents, in the modern world, more nearly than any
other of the gainful occupations open to women, the ancient labor
conditions under which woman's standard of chastity was developed and
for so long maintained. It would seem obvious that both the girl
over-restrained at home, as well as the girl in domestic service, had
been too much withdrawn from the healthy influence of public opinion,
and it is at least significant that domestic control has so broken down
that the girls most completely under its rule are shown to be those in
the greatest danger. Such a statement undoubtedly needs the modification
that the girls in domestic service are frequently those who are
unadapted to skilled labor and are least capable of taking care of
themselves, yet the fact remains that they are belated morally as well
as industrially. As they have missed the industrial discipline that
comes from regular hours of systematized work, so they have missed the
moral training of group solidarity, the ideals and restraints which the
friendships and companionships of other working girls would have brought
them.
When the judgment of her peers becomes not less firm but more kindly,
the self-supporting girl will have a safeguard and restraint many times
more effective than the individual control which has become so
inadequate, or the family discipline that, with the best intentions in
the world, cannot cope with existing social conditions.
The most perplexing case that comes before the philanthropic
organizations trying to aid and rescue the victims of the white slave
traffic, is of the type which involves a girl who has been secured by
the trafficker when so lonely, detached and discouraged that she
greedily seized whatever friendship was offered her. Such a girl has
been so eager for affection that she clings to even the wretched
simulacrum of it, afforded by the man who calls himself her "protector,"
and she can only be permanently detached from the life to which he holds
her, when she is put under the influence of more genuine affections and
interests. That is doubtless one reason it is always more possible to
help the girl who has become the mother of a child. Although she
unjustly faces a public opinion much more severe than that encountered
by the childless woman who also endeavors to "reform," the mother's
sheer affection and maternal absorption enables her to overcome the
greater difficulties more easily than the other woman, without the new
warmth of motive, overcomes the lesser ones. The Salvation Army in their
rescue homes have long recognized this need for an absorbing interest,
which should involve the Magdalen's deepest affections and emotions, and
therefore often utilize the rescued girl to save others.
Certainly no philanthropic association, however rationalistic and
suspicious of emotional appeal, can hope to help a girl once overwhelmed
by desperate temptation, unless it is able to pull her back into the
stream of kindly human fellowship and into a life involving normal human
relations. Such an association must needs remember those wise words of
Count Tolstoy: "We constantly think that there are circumstances in
which a human being can be treated without affection, and there are no
such circumstances."