Nevertheless, when eight million women, in practically every civilized country in the world, organized themselves into an International Council of Women, and began their remarkable survey of the social order in which they live, one of their first acts was to break the Great Taboo.
[Ill.u.s.tration: MISS SADIE AMERICAN]
At early congresses of the International Council Miss Sadie American, Mrs. Kate Waller Barrett, Mrs. Elizabeth Grannis, among American delegates, Miss Elizabeth Janes of England, Miss Elizabeth Gad of Denmark, Dr. Agnes Bluhm of Germany, and others interested in the moral welfare of girls, urged upon the Council action against the "White Slave" traffic. No extensive argument was required to convince the members of the Council that the "White Slave" traffic and the whole subject of the moral degradation of women was a social phenomenon too long neglected by women.
These women declared with refreshing candor that it was about time that the social evil was dealt with intelligently, and if it was to be dealt with intelligently women must do the work. The fussy old gentlemen with white side whiskers and silk-stocking reformers and the other well meaning amateurs, who are engaged in "stamping out" the evil, deserve to be set aside. In their places the women propose to install social experts who shall deal scientifically with the problem.
The double standard of morals, accepted in fact if not in principle, in every community, and so rigidly applied that good women are actually forbidden to have any knowledge of their fallen sisters, was for the first time repudiated by a body of organized women. The arguments on which the double standard of morals is based was, for the first time, seriously scrutinized by women of intelligence and social importance.
The desirability of the descent of property in legal paternal line seemed to these women a good enough reason for applying a rigid standard of morals to women. But they found reasons infinitely greater why the same rigid standard should be applied to men.
The International Council of Women and women"s organizations in every country number among their members and delegates women physicians, and through these physicians they have been able to consider the social evil from an altogether new point of view. Certain very ugly facts, which touch the home and which intimately concern motherhood and the welfare of children, were brought forth--facts concerning infantile blindness, almost one-third of which is caused by excesses on the part of the fathers; facts concerning certain forms of ill health in married women, and the increase of sterility due to the spread of specific diseases among men. The horrible results to innocent women and children of these maladies, and their frightful prevalence,--seventy-five per cent of city men, according to reliable authority, being affected,--aroused in the women a sentiment of indignation and revolt. The International Council of Women put itself on record as protesting against the responsibility laid upon women, the una.s.sisted task of preserving the purity of the race.
In the United States, women"s clubs, women"s societies, women"s medical a.s.sociations, special committees of women in many cities have courageously undertaken the study of this problem, intending by means of investigation and publicity to lay bare its sources and seek its remedy.
The sources of the evil are about the only phase of the problem which has never been adequately examined. It is true that we have suspected that the unsteady and ill-adjusted economic position of women furnished some explanation for its existence, but even now our information is vague and unsatisfactory.
A number of years ago, in 1888 to be exact, the Ma.s.sachusetts Bureau of Labor Statistics made an interesting investigation. This was an effort to determine how far the entrance of women into the industrial world, usually under the disadvantage of low wages, was contributing to profligacy. The bureau gathered statistics of the previous occupations of nearly four thousand fallen women in twenty-eight American cities.
Of these unfortunates over eight hundred had worked in low-waged trades such as paper-box making, millinery, laundry work, rope and cordage making, cigar and cigarette making, candy packing, textile factory and shoe factory work.
About five hundred women had been garment workers, dressmakers, and seamstresses, but how far these were skilled or unskilled was not stated.
The department store, at that time little more than a sweat shop so far as wages and long hours of work were concerned, contributed one hundred and sixteen recruits to the list.
On the whole, these groups were what the investigators had expected to find.
There were two other large groups of prodigals, and these were entirely unexpected by the investigators. Of the 3,866 girls examined 1,236, or nearly thirty-two per cent, reported no previous occupation. The next largest group, 1,115, or nearly thirty per cent, had been domestic servants. The largest group of all had gone straight from their homes into lives of evil. A group nearly as large had gone directly from that occupation which is constantly urged upon women as the safest and most suitable means of earning their living--housework.
Now you may, if you want to drop the thing out of your mind as something too disagreeable to think about, infer from this that at least sixty-two per cent of those 3,866 women deserved their fate. Some of them were too lazy to work, and the rest preferred a life of soiled luxury to one of honest toil in somebody"s nice kitchen. Apparently this was the view taken by the Ma.s.sachusetts Bureau of Labor Statistics, because it never carried the investigation any farther. It never tried to find out _why_ so many girls left their homes to enter evil lives. It never tried to find out _why_ housework was a trade dangerous to morals.
Fortunately it did occur to the women"s organizations to examine the facts a little more carefully. In this article I am going to take you over some of the ground they have covered and show you where their investigations have led them.
South Chicago is a fairly good place to begin. Its ugliness and forlornness can be matched in the factory section of almost any large city. South Chicago is dominated by its steel mills,--enormous drab structures, whose every crevice leaks quivering heat and whose towering chimneys belch forth unceasingly a pall of ashes and black smoke. The steel workers and their families live as a rule in two and three family houses, built of wood, generally unpainted, and always dismally utilitarian as to architectural details.
In South Chicago, four years ago, there was not such a thing as a park, or a playground, or a recreation center. One lone social settlement was just seeking a home for itself. There were public schools, quite imposing buildings. But these were closed and locked and shuttered for the day as soon as the cla.s.ses were dismissed.
In a certain neighborhood of South Chicago there lived a number of young girls, healthy, high-spirited, and full of that joy of life which always must be fed--if not with wholesome food, then husks. For parents these girls had fathers who worked twelve hours a day in the steel mills and came home at night half dead from lack of rest and sleep; and mothers who toiled equally long hours in the kitchen or over the washtub and were too weary to know or care what the girls did after school. For social opportunity the girls had "going downtown." Perhaps you know what that means. It means trooping up and down the main street in lively groups, lingering near a saloon where a phonograph is bawling forth a cheerful air, visiting a nickel theater, or looking on at a street accident or a fight.
About this time the panic of 1907 descended suddenly on South Chicago and turned out of the steel mills hundreds of boys and men. Some of these were mere lads, sixteen to eighteen years old. They, too, went "downtown." There was no other place for them to go.
As a plain matter of cause and effect, what kind of a moral situation would you expect to evolve out of these materials?
Eventually a woman probation officer descended on the neighborhood. Many of the girls whom she rescued from conditions not to be described in these pages were so young that their cases were tried in the Juvenile Court. Most of them went to rescue homes, reformatories, or hospitals.
Some slipped away permanently, in all human probability to join the never-ceasing procession of prodigals.
This is what "no previous occupation" really means in nine cases out of ten. It means that the girl lived in a home which was no home at all, according to the ideals of you who read these pages.
Sometimes it was a cellar where the family slept on rags. Sometimes it was an attic where ten or twelve people herded in a s.p.a.ce not large enough for four. Some of these homes were never warm in winter. In some there was hardly any furniture. But we need not turn to these extreme cases in order to show that in many thousands of American homes virtue and innocence are lost because no facilities for preserving them are possible.
Annie Donnelly"s case will serve as further ill.u.s.tration. Annie Donnelly"s father was a sober, decent man of forty, who drove a cab from twelve to fifteen hours every day in the year, Sundays and holidays included. Before the cab drivers" strike, a year or two ago, Donnelly"s wages were fifteen dollars a week, and the family lived in a four-room tenement, for which they paid $5.50 a week. You pay rent weekly to a tenement landlord. Since the strike wages are fourteen dollars a week for cab drivers, and this fall the Donnelly rent went up fifty cents a week.
The Donnelly tenement was a very desirable one, having but a single dark, windowless room, instead of two or three, like most New York tenements. There were three children younger than Annie, who was fourteen. The family of five made a fairly tight fit in four rooms.
Nevertheless, when the rent went up to six dollars Mrs. Donnelly took a lodger. She had to or move and, remember, this was a desirable tenement because it had only one dark room.
One day the lodger asked Annie if she did not want to go to a dance.
Annie did want to, but she knew very well that her mother would not allow her to go. Once a year the entire family, including the baby, attended the annual ball of the Coachman"s Union, but that was another thing. Annie was too young for dances her mother declared.
The Donnellys paid for and occupied three rooms, but they really lived in one room, the others being too filled with beds to be habitable except at night. The kitchen, the one living-room, was uncomfortably crowded at meal times. At no time was there any privacy. It was impossible for Annie to receive her girl friends in her home. Every bit of her social life had to be lived out of the house.
When the weather was warm she often stayed in the street, walking about with the other girls or sitting on a friend"s doorstep, until ten or even eleven o"clock at night. Every one does the same in a crowded city neighborhood. There comes a time in a girl"s life when this sort of thing becomes monotonous. The time came when Annie found sitting on the doorstep and talking about nothing in particular entirely unbearable. So one balmy, inviting spring night she slipped away and went with the lodger to a dance.
The dance hall occupied a big, low-ceiled bas.e.m.e.nt room in a building which was a combination of saloon and tenement house. In one of the front windows of the bas.e.m.e.nt room was hung a gaudy placard: "The Johnny Sullivan Social Club."
The lodger paid no admission, but he deposited ten cents for a hat check, after which they went in. About thirty couples were swinging in a waltz, their forms indistinctly seen through the clouds of dust which followed them in broken swirls through air so thick that the electric lights were dimmed. Somewhere in the obscurity a piano did its noisiest best with a popular waltz tune.
In a few minutes Annie forgot her timidity, forgot the dust and the heat and the odor of stale beer, and was conscious only that the music was piercing, sweet, and that she was swinging in blissful time to it. When the waltz tune came to an end at last the dancers stopped, gasping with the heat, and swaying with the giddiness of the dance.
"Come along," said the lodger, "and have a beer." When Annie shook her head he exclaimed: "Aw, yuh have to. The Sullivans gets the room rent free, but the fellers upstairs has bar privileges, and yuh have to buy a beer off of "em oncet in a while. They"ve gotta get something out of it."
I do not know whether Annie yielded then or later. But ultimately she learned to drink beer for the benefit of philanthropists who furnish dance halls rent free, and also to quench a thirst rendered unbearable by heat and dust. They seldom open the windows in these places.
Sometimes they even nail the windows down. A well-ventilated room means poor business at the bar.
Annie Donnelly became a dance-hall _habitue_. Not because she was viciously inclined; not because she was abnormal; but because she was decidedly normal in all her instincts and desires.
Besides, it is easy to get the dance-hall habit. At almost every dance invitations to other dances are distributed with a lavish hand. These invitations, on cheap printed cards, are scattered broadcast over chairs and benches, on the floors, and even on the bar itself. They are locally known as "throw-aways." Here are a few specimens, from which you may form an idea of the quality of dance halls, and the kind of people--almost the only kind of people--who offer pleasure to the starved hearts of girls like Annie Donnelly. These are actual invitations picked up in an East Side dance hall by the head worker of the New York College Settlement:
"_Second annual reception and ball, given by Jibo and Jack, at New Starlight Hall, 143 Suffolk Street, December 25. Music by our favorite. Gents ticket 25 cents, Ladies 15 cents._"
"_Don"t miss the ball given by Joe the Greaser, and Sam Rosenstock, at Odd Fellows" Hall, January 29th._"
"_See the Devil Dance at the Reception and Ball given by Max Pascal and Little Whity, at Tutonia Hall, Tuesday evening, November 20th."_
_ "Reception and Ball given by two well known friends, Max Turk and Sam Lande, better known as Mechuch, at Appollo Hall, Chrystmas night. Floor manager, Young Louis. Ticket admit one 25 cents._"
In addition to these private affairs which are arranged purely for the profit of "Jibo and Jack" and their kind, men who make a living in this and in yet more unspeakable ways, there are hundreds of saloon dance halls, not only in New York, but in other cities. These are simply annexes to drinking places, and people are not welcome there unless they drink. No admission is charged.
There are also numberless dancing academies. Dancing lessons are given four nights in the week, as a rule, and the dancing public buys admission the other three nights and on Sunday afternoons. Some dancing academies, even in tenement house quarters, are reputable inst.i.tutions, but to most of them the lowest of the low, both men and women, resort.
There, as in the dance halls, the "White Slaver" plies his trade, and the destroyer of womanliness lays his nets.
Annie Donnelly soon learned the ways of all these places. She learned to "spiel." You spiel by holding hands with your partner at arms" length, and whirling round and round at the highest possible speed. The girl"s skirts are blown immodestly high, which is a detail. The effect of the spiel is a species of drunkenness which creates an instant demand for liquor, and a temporary recklessness of the possible results of strong drink.
Annie also learned to dance what is known as the "half time," or the "part time" waltz. This is a dance accompanied by a swaying and contorting of the hips, most indecent in its suggestion. It is really a very primitive form of the dance, and probably goes back to the pagan harvest and bacchic festivals. You may see traces of it in certain crude peasant dances in out-of-the-way corners of Europe. Now they teach it to immigrant girls in New York dancing academies and dance halls, and tell the girls that it is the _American_ fashion of waltzing.
Annie Donnelly"s destruction was accomplished in less than a year. It was the more rapid because of the really superior character of her home.
There was nothing the matter with that home except that it was too crowded for the family to stay in it. Father and mother were respectable, hard-working people, and after Annie"s first real misadventure, into which she fell almost unwittingly, she was afraid to go home.
The dance hall, as we have permitted it to exist, practically unregulated, has become a veritable forcing house of vice and crime in every city in the United States. It is a straight chute down which, every year, thousands of girls descend to the way of the prodigal. No one has counted their number. All we know of the uncla.s.sed is that they exist, apparently in ever-increasing ma.s.ses.
It was estimated in Chicago, not long ago, that there were about six thousand unfortunate women known to the police, and something like twenty thousand who managed to avoid actual collision with the law. That is, the latter lived quietly and plied their trade on the street so unostentatiously that they were seldom arrested. How many of these unfortunates reached the streets through the dance hall is impossible to know--we only know that it constantly recruits the ranks of the uncla.s.sed.