INCREASED SOCIAL CONTROL
When certain groups in a community, to whom a social wrong has become
intolerable, prepare for definite action against it, they almost
invariably discover unexpected help from contemporaneous social
movements with which they later find themselves allied. The most
immediate help in this new campaign against the social evil will
probably come thus indirectly from those streams of humanitarian effort
which are ever widening and which will in time slowly engulf into their
rising tide of enthusiasm for human betterment, even the victims of the
white slave traffic.
Foremost among them is the world-wide movement to preserve and prolong
the term of human life, coupled with the determination on the part of
the medical profession to eliminate all forms of germ diseases. The same
physicians and sanitarians who have practically rid the modern city of
small-pox and cholera and are eliminating tuberculosis, well know that
the social evil is directly responsible for germ diseases more prevalent
than any of the others, and also communicable. Over and over again in
the history of large cities, Vienna, Paris, St. Louis, the medical
profession has been urged to control the diseases resulting from the
commercialized vice which the municipal authorities themselves
permitted. But the experiments in segregation, in licensed systems, and
certification have not been considered successful. The medical
profession, hitherto divided in opinion as to the feasibility of such
undertakings, is virtually united in the conclusion that so long as
commercialized vice exists, physicians cannot guarantee a city against
the spread of the contagious poison generated by it, which is fatal
alike to the individual and to his offspring. The medical profession
agrees that, as the victims of the social evil inevitably become the
purveyors of germ diseases of a very persistent and incurable type,
safety in this regard lies only in the extinction of commercialized
vice. They point out the indirect ways in which this contagion can
spread exactly as any other can, but insist that its control is
enormously complicated by the fact that the victims of these diseases
are most unwilling to be designated and quarantined. The medical
profession is at last taking the position that the community wishing to
protect itself against this contagion will in the end be driven to the
extermination of the very source itself. A well-known authority states
the one breeding-place of these disease germs, without exception, is the
social institution designated as prostitution, but, once bred and
cultivated there, they then spread through the community, attacking
alike both the innocent and the guilty.
We can imagine, after a dozen years of vigorous and able propaganda of
this opinion on the part of public-spirited physicians and sanitarians,
that a city might well appeal to the medical profession to exterminate
prostitution on the very ground that it is a source of constant danger
to the health and future of the community. Such a city might readily
give to the board of health ordered to undertake this extermination more
absolute authority than is now accorded to it in a small-pox epidemic.
Of course, no city could reach such a view unless the education of the
public proceeded much more rapidly than at present, although the
newly-established custom of careful medical examination of
school-children and of employees in factories and commercial
establishments must result in the discovery of many such cases, and in
the end adequate provision must be made for their isolation. A child was
recently discovered in a Chicago school with an open sore upon her lip,
which made her a most dangerous source of infection. She was just
fourteen years of age, too old to be admitted into that most pathetic
and most unlovely of all children's wards, where children must suffer
for "the sins of their fathers," and too young and innocent to be put
into the women's ward in which the public takes care of those wrecks of
dissolute living who are no longer valuable to the commerce which once
secured them, and have become merely worthless stock which pays no
dividend. The disease of the little girl was in too virulent a stage to
admit her to that convalescent home lately established in Chicago for
those infected children who are dismissed from the county hospital, but
whom it is impossible to return to their old surroundings. A
philanthropic association was finally obliged to pay her board for weeks
to a woman who carefully followed instructions as to her treatment. This
is but one example of a child who was discovered and provided for, but
it is evident that the public cannot long remain indifferent to the care
of such cases when it has already established the means for detecting
them. In twenty-seven months over six hundred children passed through
this most piteous children's ward in Chicago's public hospital. All but
twenty-nine of these children were under ten years of age, and doubtless
a number of them had been victims of that wretched tradition that a man
afflicted with this incurable disease might cure himself at the expense
of innocence.
Crusades against other infectious diseases, such as small-pox and
cholera, imply well-considered sanitary precautions, dependent upon
widespread education and an aroused public opinion. To establish such
education and to arouse the public in regard to this present menace
apparently presents insuperable difficulties. Many newspapers, so ready
to deal with all other forms of vice and misery, never allow these evils
to be mentioned in their columns except in the advertisements of quack
remedies; the clergy, unlike the founder of the Christian religion and
the early apostles, seldom preach against the sin of which these
contagions are an inevitable consequence: the physicians, bound by a
rigorous medical etiquette, tell nothing of the prevalence of these
maladies, use a confusing nomenclature in the hospitals, and write only
contributory causes upon the very death certificates of the victims.
Yet it is easy to predict that a society committed to the abolition of
infectious germs, to a higher degree of public health, and to a better
standard of sanitation will not forever permit these highly communicable
diseases to spread unchecked in its midst, and that a public, convinced
that sanitary science, properly supported, might rid our cities of this
type of disease, will at length insist upon its accomplishment. When we
consider the many things undertaken in the name of health and sanitation
it becomes easy to make the prediction, for public health is a magic
word which ever grows more potent, as society realizes that the very
existence of the modern city would be an impossibility had it not been
discovered that the health of the individual is largely controlled by
the hygienic condition of his surroundings. Since the first commission
to inquire into the conditions of great cities was appointed in
Manchester in 1844, sanitary science, both in knowledge and municipal
authority, has progressed until advocates of the most advanced measures
in city hygiene and preventive sanitary science boldly state that
neglected childhood and neglected disease are the most potent causes of
social insufficiency.
Certainly a plea could be made for the women and children who are often
the innocent victims of these diseases. Quite recently in Chicago there
was brought to my attention the incredibly pathetic plight of a widow
with four children who was in such constant fear of spreading the
infection for which her husband had been responsible, that she
touchingly offered to leave her children forevermore, if there was no
other way to save them from the horrible suffering she herself was
enduring. In spite of thousands of such cases Utah is the pioneer and
only state with a law which requires that this infection shall be
reported and controlled, as are other contagious maladies, and which
also authorizes boards of health to take adequate measures in order to
secure protection.
Another humanitarian movement from which assistance will doubtless come
to the crusade against the social evil, is the great movement against
alcoholism with its recent revival in every civilized country of the
world. A careful scientist has called alcohol the indispensable vehicle
of the business transacted by the white slave traders, and has asserted
that without its use this trade could not long continue. Whoever has
tried to help a girl making an effort to leave the irregular life she
has been leading, must have been discouraged by the victim's attempts to
overcome the habit of using alcohol and drugs. Such a girl has commonly
been drawn into the life in the first place when under the influence of
liquor and has continued to drink that she might be able to live through
each day. Furthermore, the drinking habit grows upon her because she is
constantly required to sell liquor and to be "treated."
It is estimated that the liquor sold by such girls nets a profit to the
trade of two hundred and fifty per cent. over and above the girl's own
commission. Chicago made at least one honest effort to divorce the sale
of liquor from prostitution, when the superintendent of police last year
ruled that no liquor should be sold in any disreputable house. The
difficulty of enforcing such an order is greatly increased because such
houses, as well as the questionable dance halls, commonly obtain a
special permit to sell liquor under a federal license, which is not only
cheaper than the saloon license obtained from the city, but has the
added advantage to the holder that he can sell after one o'clock in the
morning, at which time the city closes all saloons.
The aggregate annual profit of the two hundred and thirty-six disorderly
saloons recently investigated in Chicago by the Vice Commission was
$4,307,000. This profit on the sale of liquor can be traced all along
the line in connection with the white slave traffic and is no less
disastrous from the point of view of young men than of the girls. Even a
slight exhilaration from alcohol relaxes the moral sense and throws a
sentimental or adventurous glamor over an aspect of life from which a
decent young man would ordinarily recoil, and its continued use
stimulates the senses at the very moment when the intellectual and moral
inhibitions are lessened. May we not conclude that both chastity and
self-restraint are more firmly established in the modern city than we
realize, when the white slave traders find it necessary both forcibly to
detain their victims and to ply young men with alcohol that they may
profit thereby? General Bingham, who as Police Commissioner of New York
certainly knew whereof he spoke, says: "There is not enough depravity in
human nature to keep alive this very large business. The immorality of
women and the brutishness of men have to be persuaded, coaxed and
constantly stimulated in order to keep the social evil in its present
state of business prosperity."
We may soberly hope that some of the experiments made by governmental
and municipal authorities to control and regulate the sale of liquor
will at last meet with such a measure of success that the existence of
public prostitution, deprived of its artificial stimulus of alcohol,
will in the end be imperilled. The Chicago Vice Commission has made a
series of valuable suggestions for the regulation of saloons and for the
separation of the sale of liquor from dance halls and from all other
places known as recruiting grounds for the white slave traffic. There is
still need for a much wider and more thorough education of the public in
regard to the historic connection between commercialized vice and
alcoholism, of the close relation between politics and the liquor
interests, behind which the social evil so often entrenches itself.
In addition to the movements against germ diseases and the suppression
of alcoholism, both of which are mitigating the hard fate of the victims
of the white slave traffic, other public movements mysteriously
affecting all parts of the social order will in time threaten the very
existence of commercialized vice. First among these, perhaps, is the
equal suffrage movement. On the horizon everywhere are signs that woman
will soon receive the right to exercise political power, and it is
believed that she will show her efficiency most conspicuously in finding
means for enhancing and preserving human life, if only as the result of
her age-long experiences. That primitive maternal instinct, which has
always been as ready to defend as it has been to nurture, will doubtless
promptly grapple with certain crimes connected with the white slave
traffic; women with political power would not brook that men should live
upon the wages of captured victims, should openly hire youths to ruin
and debase young girls, should be permitted to transmit poison to unborn
children. Life is full of hidden remedial powers which society has not
yet utilized, but perhaps nowhere is the waste more flagrant than in the
matured deductions and judgments of the women, who are constantly forced
to share the social injustices which they have no recognized power to
alter. If political rights were once given to women, if the situation
were theirs to deal with as a matter of civic responsibility, one cannot
imagine that the existence of the social evil would remain unchallenged
in its semi-legal protection. Those women who are already possessed of
political power have in many ways registered their conscience in regard
to it. The Norwegian women, for instance, have guaranteed to every
illegitimate child the right of inheritance to its father's name and
property by a law which also provides for the care of its mother. This
is in marked contrast to the usual treatment of the mother of an
illegitimate child, who even when the paternity of her child is
acknowledged receives from the father but a pitiful sum for its support;
moreover, if the child dies before birth and the mother conceals this
fact, although perfectly guiltless of its death, she can be sent to jail
for a year.
The age of consent is eighteen years in all of the states in which women
have had the ballot, although in only eight of the others is it so high.
In the majority of the latter the age of consent is between fourteen and
sixteen, and in some of them it is as low as ten. These legal
regulations persist in spite of the well-known fact that the mass of
girls enter a disreputable life below the age of eighteen. In equal
suffrage states important issues regarding women and children, whether
of the sweat-shop or the brothel, have always brought out the women
voters in great numbers.
Certainly enfranchised women would offer some protection to the white
slaves themselves who are tolerated and segregated, but who, because
their very existence is illegal, may be arrested whenever any police
captain chooses, may be brought before a magistrate, fined and
imprisoned. A woman so arrested may be obliged to answer the most
harassing questions put to her by a city attorney with no other woman
near to protect her from insult. She may be subjected to the most trying
examinations in the presence of policemen with no matron to whom to
appeal. These things constantly happen everywhere save in Scandinavian
countries, where juries of women sit upon such cases and offer the
protection of their presence to the prisoners. Without such protection
even an innocent woman, made to appear a member of this despised class,
receives no consideration. A girl of fifteen recently acting in a South
Chicago theatre attracted the attention of a milkman who gradually
convinced her that he was respectable. Walking with him one evening to
the door of her lodging-house, the girl told him of her difficulties and
quite innocently accepted money for the payment of her room rent. The
following morning as she was leaving the house the milkman met her at
the door and asked her for the five dollars he had given her the night
before. When she said she had used it to pay her debt to the landlady,
he angrily replied that unless she returned the money at once he would
call a policeman and arrest her on a charge of theft. The girl, helpless
because she had already disposed of the money, was taken to court,
where, frightened and confused, she was unable to give a convincing
account of the interview the night before; except for the prompt
intervention on the part of a woman, she would either have been obliged
to put herself in the power of the milkman, who offered to pay her fine,
or she would have been sent to the city prison, not because the proof of
her guilt was conclusive, but because her connection with a cheap
theatre and the hour of the so-called offence had convinced the court
that she belonged to a class of women who are regarded as no longer
entitled to legal protection.
Several years ago in Colorado the disreputable women of Denver appealed
to a large political club of women against the action of the police who
were forcing them to register under the threat of arrest in order later
to secure their votes for a corrupt politician. The disreputable women,
wishing to conceal their real names and addresses, did not want to be
registered, in this respect at least differing from the lodging-house
men whose venal votes play such an important part in every municipal
election. The women's political club responded to this appeal, and not
only stopped the coercion, but finally turned out of office the chief of
police responsible for it.
The very fact that the conditions and results of the social evil lie so
far away from the knowledge of good women is largely responsible for the
secrecy and hypocrisy upon which it thrives. Most good women will
probably never consent to break through their ignorance save under a
sense of duty which has ever been the incentive to action to which even
timid women have responded. At least a promising beginning would be made
toward a more effective social control, if the mass of conscientious
women were once thoroughly convinced that a knowledge of local vice
conditions was a matter of civic obligation, if the entire body of
conventional women, simply because they held the franchise, felt
constrained to inform themselves concerning the social evil throughout
the cities of America. Perhaps the most immediate result would be a
change in the attitude toward prostitution on the part of elected
officials, responding to that of their constituency. Although good and
bad men alike prize chastity in women, and although good men require it
of themselves, almost all men are convinced that it is impossible to
require it of thousands of their fellow-citizens, and hence connive at
the policy of the officials who permit commercialized vice to flourish.
As the first organized Women's Rights movement was inaugurated by the
women who were refused seats in the world's Anti-Slavery convention held
in London in 1840, although they had been the very pioneers in the
organization of the American Abolitionists, so it is quite possible that
an equally energetic attempt to abolish white slavery will bring many
women into the Equal Suffrage movement, simply because they too will
discover that without the use of the ballot they are unable to work
effectively for the eradication of a social wrong.
Women are said to have been historically indifferent to social
injustices, but it may be possible that, if they once really comprehend
the actual position of prostitutes the world over, their sense of
justice will at last be freed, and become forevermore a new force in the
long struggle for social righteousness. The wind of moral aspiration now
dies down and now blows with unexpected force, urging on the movements
of social destiny; but never do the sails of the ship of state push
forward with such assured progress as when filled by the mighty hopes of
a newly enfranchised class. Those already responsible for existing
conditions have come to acquiesce in them, and feel obliged to adduce
reasons explaining the permanence and so-called necessity of the most
evil conditions. On the other hand, the newly enfranchised view existing
conditions more critically, more as human beings and less as
politicians.
After all, why should the woman voter concur in the assumption that
every large city must either set aside well-known districts for the
accommodation of prostitution, as Chicago does, or continually permit it
to flourish in tenement and apartment houses, as is done in New York?
Smaller communities and towns throughout the land are free from at least
this semi-legal organization of it, and why should it be accepted as a
permanent aspect of city life? The valuable report of the Chicago Vice
Commission estimates that twenty thousand of the men daily responsible
for this evil in Chicago live outside of the city. They are the men who
come from other towns to Chicago in order to see the sights. They are
supposedly moral at home, where they are well known and subjected to the
constant control of public opinion. The report goes on to state that
during conventions or "show" occasions the business of commercialized
vice is enormously increased. The village gossip with her vituperative
tongue after all performs a valuable function both of castigation and
retribution; but her fellow-townsman, although quite unconscious of her
restraint, coming into a city hotel often experiences a great sense of
relief which easily rises to a mood of exhilaration. In addition to this
he holds an exaggerated notion of the wickedness of the city. A visiting
countryman is often shown museums and questionable sights reserved
largely for his patronage, just as tourists are conducted to lurid
Parisian revels and indecencies sustained primarily for their horrified
contemplation. Such a situation would indicate that, because control is
much more difficult in a large city than in a small town, the city
deliberately provides for its own inability in this direction.
During a recent military encampment in Chicago large numbers of young
girls were attracted to it by that glamour which always surrounds the
soldier. On the complaint of several mothers, investigators discovered
that the girls were there without the knowledge of their parents, some
of them having literally climbed out of windows after their parents had
supposed them asleep. A thorough investigation disclosed not only an
enormous increase of business in the restricted districts, but the
downfall of many young girls who had hitherto been thoroughly
respectable and able to resist the ordinary temptations of city life,
but who had completely lost their heads over the glitter of a military
camp. One young girl was seen by an investigator in the late evening
hurrying away from the camp. She was so absorbed in her trouble and so
blinded by her tears that she fairly ran against him and he heard her
praying, as she frantically clutched the beads around her neck, "Oh,
Mother of God, what have I done! What have I done!" The Chicago
encampment was finally brought under control through the combined
efforts of the park commissioners, the city police, and the military
authorities, but not without a certain resentment from the last toward
"civilian interference." Such an encampment may be regarded as an
historic survival representing the standing armies sustained in Europe
since the days of the Roman Empire. These large bodies of men, deprived
of domestic life, have always afforded centres in which contempt for the
chastity of women has been fostered. The older centres of militarism
have established prophylactic measures designed to protect the health of
the soldiers, but evince no concern for the fate of the ruined women. It
is a matter of recent history that Josephine Butler and the men and
women associated with her, subjected themselves to unspeakable insult
for eight years before they finally induced the English Parliament to
repeal the infamous Contagious Disease Acts relating to the garrison
towns of Great Britain, through which the government itself not only
permitted vice, but legally provided for it within certain specified
limits.
The primary difficulty of military life lies in the withdrawal of large
numbers of men from normal family life, and hence from the domestic
restraints and social checks which are operative upon the mass of human
beings. The great peace propagandas have emphasized the unjustifiable
expense involved in the maintenance of the standing armies of Europe,
the social waste in the withdrawal of thousands of young men from
industrial, commercial and professional pursuits into the barren
negative life of the barracks. They might go further and lay stress upon
the loss of moral sensibility, the destruction of romantic love, the
perversion of the longing for wife and child. The very stability and
refinement of the social order depend upon the preservation of these
basic emotions.
Social customs are instituted so slowly and even imperceptibly, so far
as the conforming individual is concerned, that the mass of men submit
to control in spite of themselves, and it is therefore always difficult
to determine how far the average upright living is the result of
external props, until they are suddenly withdrawn. This is especially
true of domestic life. Even the sordid marriages in which the senses
have forestalled the heart almost always end in some form of family
affection. The young couple who may have been brought together in
marriage upon the most primitive plane, after twenty years of hard work
in meagre, unlovely surroundings, in spite of stupidity and many
mistakes, in the face of failure and even wrongdoing, will have unfolded
lives of unassuming affection and family devotion to a group of
children. They will have faithfully fulfilled that obligation which
falls to the lot of the majority of men and women, with its high rewards
and painful sacrifices. These rewards as well as the restraints of
family life are denied to the soldier. A somewhat similar situation is
found in every large construction camp, and in the crowded city
tenements occupied by thousands of immigrant men who have preceded their
families to America.
In the light of the history of prostitution in relation to militarism,
nothing could be more absurd than the familiar statement that virtuous
women could not safely walk the streets unless opportunity for secret
vice were offered to the men of the city. It is precisely the men who
have not submitted to self-control who are dangerous and they only, as
the court records themselves make clear.
In addition to the large social movements for the betterment of Public
Health, for the establishment of Temperance, for the promotion of Equal
Suffrage, and for the hastening of Peace and Arbitration is the
world-wide organization and active propaganda of International
Socialism. It has always included the abolition of this ancient evil in
its program of social reconstruction, and since the publication of
Bebel's great book, nearly thirty years ago, the leaders of the
Socialist party have never ceased to discuss the economics of
prostitution with its psychological and moral resultants. The Socialists
contend that commercialized vice is fundamentally a question of poverty,
a by-product of despair, which will disappear only with the abolition of
poverty itself; that it persists not primarily from inherent weakness in
human nature, but is a vice arising from a defective organization of
social life; that with a reorganization of society, at least all of
prostitution which is founded upon the hunger of the victims and upon
the profits of the traffickers, will disappear.
Whether we are Socialists or not, we will all admit that every level of
culture breeds its own particular brand of vice and uncovers new
weaknesses as well as new nobilities in human nature; that a given
social development--such, for instance as the conditions of life for
thousands of young people in crowded city quarters--may produce such
temptations and present such snares to virtue, that average human nature
cannot withstand them.
The very fact that the existence of the social evil is semi-legal in
large cities is an admission that our individual morality is so
uncertain that it breaks down when social control is withdrawn and the
opportunity for secrecy is offered. The situation indicates either that
the best conscience of the community fails to translate itself into
civic action or that our cities are too large to be civilized in a
social sense. These difficulties have been enormously augmented during
the past century so marked by the rapid growth of cities, because the
great principle of liberty has been translated not only into the
unlovely doctrine of commercial competition, but also has fostered in
many men the belief that personal development necessitates a rebellion
against existing social laws. To the opportunity for secrecy which the
modern city offers, such men are able to add a high-sounding
justification for their immoralities. Fortunately, however, for our
moral progress, the specious and illegitimate theories of freedom are
constantly being challenged, and a new form of social control is slowly
establishing itself on the principle, so widespread in contemporary
government, that the state has a responsibility for conditions which
determine the health and welfare of its own members; that it is in the
interest of social progress itself that hard-won liberties must be
restrained by the demonstrable needs of society.
This new and more vigorous development of social control, while
reflecting something of that wholesome fear of public opinion which the
intimacies of a small community maintain, is much more closely allied to
the old communal restraints and mutual protections to which the human
will first yielded. Although this new control is based upon the
voluntary co-operation of self-directed individuals, in contrast to the
forced submission that characterized the older forms of social
restraint, nevertheless in predicting the establishment of adequate
social control over the instinct which the modern novelists so often
describe as "uncontrollable," there is a certain sanction in this old
and well-nigh forgotten history.
The most superficial student of social customs quickly discovers the
practically unlimited extent to which public opinion has always
regulated marriage. If the traditions of one tribe were endogamous, all
the men dutifully married within it; but if the customs of another
decreed that wives must be secured by capture or purchase, all the men
of that tribe fared forth in order to secure their mates. From the
primitive Australian who obtains his wives in exchange for his sisters
or daughters, and never dreams of obtaining them in any other way, to
the sophisticated young Frenchman, who without objection marries the
bride his careful parents select for him; from the ancient Hebrew, who
contentedly married the widow of his deceased brother because it was
according to the law, to the modern Englishman who refused to marry his
deceased wife's sister because the law forbade it, the entire pathway of
the so-called uncontrollable instinct has been gradually confined
between carefully clipped hedges and has steadily led up to a house of
conventional domesticity. Men have fallen in love with their cousins or
declined to fall in love with them, very much as custom declared
marriages between cousins to be desirable or undesirable, as they
formerly married their sisters and later absolutely ceased to desire to
marry them. In fact, regulation of this great primitive instinct goes
back of the human race itself. All the higher tribes of monkeys are
strictly monogamous, and many species of birds are faithful to one mate,
season after season. According to the great authority, Forel,
prostitution never became established among primitive peoples. Even
savage tribes designated the age at which their young men were permitted
to assume paternity because feeble children were a drag upon their
communal resources. As primitive control lessened with the disappearance
of tribal organization and later of the patriarchal family, a social
control, not less binding, was slowly established, until throughout the
centuries, in spite of many rebellious individuals, the mass of men have
lived according to the dictates of the church, the legal requirements of
the state, and the surveillance of the community, if only because they
feared social ostracism. It is easy, however, to forget these men and
their prosaic virtues because history has so long busied herself in
recording court amours and the gentle dalliances of the overlord.
The great primitive instinct, so responsive to social control as to be
almost an example of social docility, has apparently broken with all the
restraints and decencies under two conditions: first and second, when
the individual felt that he was above social control and when the
individual has had an opportunity to hide his daily living. Prostitution
upon a commercial basis in a measure embraces the two conditions, for it
becomes possible only in a society so highly complicated that social
control may be successfully evaded and the individual thus feels
superior to it. When a city is so large that it is extremely difficult
to fix individual responsibility, that which for centuries was
considered the luxury of the king comes within the reach of every
office-boy, and that lack of community control which belonged only to
the overlord who felt himself superior to the standards of the people,
may be seized upon by any city dweller who can evade his acquaintances.
Against such moral aggression, the old types of social control are
powerless.
Fortunately, the same crowded city conditions which make moral isolation
possible, constantly tend to develop a new restraint founded upon the
mutual dependences of city life and its daily necessities. The city
itself socializes the very instruments that constitute the apparatus of
social control--Law, Publicity, Literature, Education and Religion.
Through their socialization, the desirability of chastity, which has
hitherto been a matter of individual opinion and decision, comes to be
regarded, not only as a personal virtue indispensable in women and
desirable in men, but as a great basic requirement which society has
learned to demand because it has been proven necessary for human
welfare. To the individual restraints is added the conviction of social
responsibility and the whole determination of chastity is reinforced by
social sanctions. Such a shifting to social grounds is already obviously
taking place in regard to the chastity of women. Formerly all that the
best woman possessed was a negative chastity which had been carefully
guarded by her parents and duennas. The chastity of the modern woman of
self-directed activity and of a varied circle of interests, which gives
her an acquaintance with many men as well as women, has therefore a new
value and importance in the establishment of social standards. There was
a certain basis for the belief that if a woman lost her personal virtue,
she lost all; when she had no activity outside of domestic life, the
situation itself afforded a foundation for the belief that a man might
claim praise for his public career even when his domestic life was
corrupt. As woman, however, fulfills her civic obligations while still
guarding her chastity, she will be in position as never before to uphold
the "single standard," demanding that men shall add the personal virtues
to their performance of public duties. Women may at last force men to do
away with the traditional use of a public record as a cloak for a
wretched private character, because society will never permit a woman to
make such excuses for herself.
Every movement therefore which tends to increase woman's share of civic
responsibility undoubtedly forecasts the time when a social control will
be extended over men, similar to the historic one so long established
over women. As that modern relationship between men and women, which the
Romans called "virtue between equals" increases, while it will continue
to make women freer and nobler, less timid of reputation and more human,
will also inevitably modify the standards of men.
On the other hand, there is no doubt that this new freedom from domestic
and community control, with the opportunity for escaping observation
which the city affords, is often utilized unworthily by women. The
report of the Chicago vice commission tells of numerous girls living in
small cities and country towns, who come to Chicago from time to time
under arrangements made with the landlady of a seemingly respectable
apartment. They remain long enough to earn money for a spring or fall
wardrobe and return to their home towns, where their acquaintances are
quite without suspicion of the methods they have employed to secure the
much-admired costumes brought from the city. Often an unattached country
girl, who has come to live in a city, has gradually fallen into a
vicious life from sheer lack of social restraint. Such a girl, when
living in a smaller community, realized that good behavior was a
protective measure and that any suspicion of immorality would quickly
ruin her social standing; but when removed from such surveillance, she
hopes to be able to pass from her regular life to an irregular one and
back again before the fact has been noted, quite as many young men are
trying to do.
Perhaps no young woman is more exposed to temptation of this sort than
the one who works in an office where she may be the sole woman employed
and where the relation to her employer and to her fellow-clerks is
almost on a social basis. Many office girls have taken "business
courses" in their native towns and have come to the city in search of
the large salaries which have no parallels at home. Such a position is
not only new to the individual, but it is so recent an outcome of modern
business methods, that it has not yet been conventionalized. The girl is
without the wholesome social restraint afforded by the companionship of
other working-women and her isolation in itself constitutes a danger. An
investigation disclosed that a startling number of Chicago girls had
found their positions through advertisements and had no means of
ascertaining the respectability of their employers. In addition to this,
the girls who seek such positions are sometimes vain and pretentious,
and will take any sort of office work because it seems to them "more
ladylike." A girl of this sort came to Chicago from the country three
years ago at the age of seventeen and secured a position as a
stenographer with a large firm of lawyers. She was pretty and
attractive, and in her desire to see more of the wonderful city to which
she had come, she accepted many invitations to dinners and theatres from
a younger member of the firm. The other girls in the office,
representing the more capable type of business women, among whom a
careful code of conduct is developing, although at present it is often
manifested only by the social ostracism of the one of their number who
has broken the conventions, protested against her conduct, first to the
girl and then to the head of the office. The usual story developed
rapidly, the girl lost her position, her brother-in-law, learning the
cause, refused her a home and she became absolutely dependent upon the
man. As their relations became notorious, he at length was requested to
withdraw from the firm. When brought to my knowledge she had already
been deserted for a year. The only people she had known during that time
were those in the disreputable hotel in which she had been living when
her lover disappeared, and it was through their mistaken kindness in
making an opportunity for her in the only life with which they were
familiar, that she had been drawn into the worst vice of the city.
She was but one of thousands of young women whose undisciplined minds
are fatally assailed by the subtleties and sophistries of city life, and
who have lost their bearings in the midst of a multitude of new
imaginative impressions. It is hard for a girl, thrilled by the mere
propinquity of city excitements and eager to share them, to keep to the
gray and monotonous path of regular work. Almost every such girl of the
hundreds who have come to grief, "begins" by accepting invitations to
dinners and places of amusement. She is always impressed with the ease
for concealment which the city affords, although at the same time
vaguely resentful that it is so indifferent to her individual existence.
It is impossible to estimate the amount of clandestine prostitution
which the modern city contains, but there is no doubt that the growth of
the social evil at the present moment, lies in this direction. Another
of its less sinister developments is perhaps a contemporary
manifestation of that break, long considered necessary, between
established morality and artistic freedom represented by the hetaira in
Athens, the gifted actress in Paris, the geisha in Japan. Insofar as
such women have been treated as independent human beings and prized for
their mental and social charm, even although they are on a commercial
basis, it makes for a humanization of this most sordid business. Such
open manifestations of prostitution hasten social control, because
publicity has ever been the first step toward community understanding
and discipline.
Doubtless the attitude toward the victims of commercialized vice will be
modified by many reactions upon the public consciousness, through a
thousand manifestations of the great democratic movement which is
developing all about us. Certainly we are safe in predicting that when
the solidarity of human interest is actually realized, it will become
unthinkable that one class of human beings should be sacrificed to the
supposed needs of another; when the rights of human life have
successfully asserted themselves in contrast to the rights of property,
it will become impossible to sell the young and heedless into
degradation. An age marked by its vigorous protests against slavery and
class tyranny, will not continue to ignore the multitudes of women who
are held in literal bondage; nor will an age characterized by a new
tenderness for the losers in life's race, always persist in denying
forgiveness to the woman who has lost all. A voice which has come across
the centuries, filled with pity for her who has "sinned much," must at
last be joined by the forgiving voices of others, to whom it has been
revealed that it is hardness of heart which has ever thwarted the divine
purposes of religion. A generation which has gone through so many
successive revolts against commercial aggression and lawlessness, will
at last lead one more revolt on behalf of the young girls who are the
victims of the basest and vilest commercialism. As that consciousness of
human suffering, which already hangs like a black cloud over thousands
of our more sensitive contemporaries, increases in poignancy, it must
finally include the women who for so many generations have received
neither pity nor consideration; as the sense of justice fast widens to
encircle all human relations, it must at length reach the women who have
so long been judged without a hearing.
In that vast and checkered undertaking of its own moralization to which
the human race is committed, it must constantly free itself from the
survivals and savage infections of the primitive life from which it
started. Now one and then another of the ancient wrongs and uncouth
customs which have been so long familiar as to seem inevitable, rise to
the moral consciousness of a passing generation; first for uneasy
contemplation and then for gallant correction.
May America bear a valiant part in this international crusade of the
compassionate, enlisting under its banner not only those sensitive to
the wrongs of others, but those conscious of the destruction of the race
itself, who form the standing army of humanity's self-pity, which is
becoming slowly mobilized for a new conquest!