Not long since a woman who devotes much time to social uplift–and whose activities are as wide as her ignorance is deep–wasted a perfectly good evening in trying to enlist my aid in a social-purity campaign in which she is gaining fame and earning a comfortable living. She reproached me for my selfishness and my indifference to present-day social conditions, and insisted that I was a dreamer, who by keeping aloof from the world was enabled to preserve my youth and retain my illusions, but who knew nothing of real life.
After endeavoring to impart to my benighted mind some understanding of the roots and ramifications of the white-slave traffic, the ravages made by drink, and the general feeble-mindedness and incorrigibility of the children of the poor, she advised me to wake up, acquire a first-hand knowledge of these conditions (taking her as teacher and guide), and then assume my share of the world's work.
All of which reminds me that, after many years spent in studying the conditions of which the lady reformer drew such a misleading picture, I still cherished many illusions. After a few years spent in close touch with the uplifters I have none, though I still possess an abiding faith in the eternal justice of God and in the underlying goodness of every human heart.
But there are times when the Lord, knowing that I am tempted to utter words that would place me in the pillory of public obloquy and forever nullify the small measure of usefulness that I now possess, bestows upon me the gift of silence. If the supreme gift of patience is not given me, it is because I am unworthy of it.
I may liken my state of mind to that of a physician who has spent years in the dissecting-room, in the hospitals, and beside the couch of pain, who loves his fellow-men, and who would gladly devote his life to their service; but who, for a sufficient reason, is forced to conceal his knowledge and remain silent, while those who never saw a dissecting-room, and whose hospital experience is confined to a case of measles, endeavor to teach him the science of medicine.
I do not know anything about the so-called white-slave trade, for the simple reason that no such thing exists. I know all there is to be known about prostitution. I know it in all its hideousness; and I know it to be one of the greatest plagues that afflict mankind. But well as I know the underworld, I know more of the hearts and the lives of the individual women of which it is comprised.
Society has decreed for them punishment more cruel than it has decreed for the greatest criminals. It has taken no account of the suffering and atonement of their daily lives; with one breath it softly whispers, "We are followers of the Crucified One; let us teach you the way to Him; let us help you to come back." With the next breath it shrieks in demoniacal fury, "We must have a victim for the sacrifice, and you shall pay! pay! pay!"
Through the countless ages, and on down into our own times, the scarlet woman has been looked upon as one who in sheer wantonness had chosen her evil mode of life. "Very well," said society, "she has made her bed, now let her lie in it." That countless thousands of its fairest and best came to lie in it also matters not at all.
It was left for the enlightened twentieth century to create the Great American Myth. "White slavery is abroad in our land! Our daughters are being trapped and violated and held prisoners and sold for fabulous sums (a flattering unction, this), and no woman is safe."
And forthwith any woman or man who had a financial motive for spreading this myth proceeded to spread it. From stage and pulpit, from press and platform, they hastened to promulgate it, until every silly girl or woman who gets herself into a scrape uses it as a defense measure; and not infrequently is it employed as a weapon of blackmail and revenge. This clamor of the ignorant, the mendacious and self-aggrandizing, and the reformers for revenue only, fills the market-place, until even the ears of the little children are assailed and sullied by it; and only within the last month have I witnessed the sad spectacle of a young woman who came from a remote region to a large city, being driven insane through fear of white-slavers.
The letters of this girl's mother, evidently a woman of considerable intelligence, were an eloquent commentary on the havoc which a belief in this pernicious myth plays with the higher instincts. There was expressed in them the natural anxiety of a mother for her girl alone in a great city, followed by explicit directions for her guidance.
She was to read a certain book dealing with the activities of the white-slave ring; and she was to see a certain lascivious photo-play which had been indorsed by social workers, women's clubs, and ministers, and which was supposed to possess great educational value, especially for the young. She was to avoid all strangers; to question the integrity of any man to whom she applied for employment; and to look upon all women, not indorsed by the pastor to whom she had been referred, as being possible white-slavers. The trend of all these letters was to call the girl's attention to her physical desirability and her marketable value.
Nothing was said about her own conduct; there was no appeal to self-respect, nor mention of those qualities of heart and mind which might reasonably be supposed to keep a girl in the straight path; from first to last, these letters were conducive to pruriency, and voiced an appeal to the basest of all human emotions, fear. When the mind broke down under this strain the heartbroken mother, who arrived in response to a telegram, was forced to listen to incoherent babblings about imaginary white-slavers who had attempted to lure her daughter to ruin. Yet the poor mother herself, no less than the daughter, was a victim of this unspeakable myth.
In the great city in which I live it is almost impossible to pick up a daily newspaper without seeing, in glaring head-lines, the announcement that some girl has disappeared and is supposed to be held by white-slavers. Oftentimes a brief item in an obscure part of a later issue states that the girl has been found to have gone here or there of her own free will; but those who read the first article seldom see the second, and so the belief in this myth has become a fixed delusion in the minds of many otherwise sane persons.
Above the tumult of the white-slave myth promulgators the voice of pseudo-science is striving to make itself heard. "These poor creatures are feeble-minded, they are the ripe and noxious product of poverty and ignorance, of alcohol and disease and degeneracy; this is the fertile and only soil in which they are produced. We must build institutions, that they may neither contaminate our own pure offspring nor propagate their kind."
But sinner or sufferer, victim or fool, or an amalgamation of these elements, the position of the woman who would come back to a life of usefulness has not changed a particle. The present-day Judah who shares her guilt still says with the Judah of old, "Bring her forth and let her be burned." And the multitude still cries, "Let her be stoned." Frequently the woman whose own sins are the blackest casts the first stone.
There are the rare and earnest men and women to who all life is not presented in "stark and rigid outline"; these seek to get under the facts, as well as to get at them; but theirs is the voice crying in the wilderness. The voice of the self-advertising fills the world.
The one person who might reasonably be supposed to know something about the question, the intelligent woman who has lived the life for twenty-four hours a day through several years, who has gone down into the depths of hell and fought her way up again, fighting often in the dark, but always upward; who has returned to a life of decency and usefulness, not through any assistance given her by society, but despite every obstacle that society would place in her path, has not, heretofore, been heard from. On the stage she calls for applause and the tender tear of sympathy. In real life she is crucified.
It is true that occasionally some hystero-religious society picks up a poor derelict whom they induce to pose as a horrible example of depravity, saved by their particular brand of religion. If, by a miracle, such a woman is again made whole and seeks to use her dearly bought knowledge for the benefit of others, these same good Christians will have none of her. She may serve in a lowly capacity, as long as she submits to being exploited by them, but the moment she seeks to serve in a constructive way she is told, in unequivocal terms, that her services are not needed. If she foolishly persists, she is cast out and every infamy which lying tongues can bring forth is attributed to her.
The result of such an experience either drives a woman to suicide or back into the depths from which she has come. And in this last event the good brethren piously fold their hands and say: "You can do nothing for them; they always go back. They love the life and do not want to leave it."
"A lie that is half a truth is ever the blackest of lies." This lie, that they love the life, that they always go back, is the blackest invention of the Father of Lies. Few women, indeed, love the life, but many love the ease and luxury, the power over men, the idleness and freedom from responsibility, which they enjoy. If they pay for these with their souls, they differ in only one respect from the women who sell themselves into unloved and often loathsome marriage–they do not cheat in the delivery of the merchandise for which they are paid.
But there are thousands of women who hate the life with such bitter loathing that nothing that money procures can compensate them for their suffering. They are the ones who strive to prove to themselves that a woman with a past is not a woman without a future. Many of these women do leave the life, and many never return to it. Many make good marriages to men they really care for, and, contrary to the usual belief, these marriages are often happy, and few indeed are the wives who prove unfaithful.
The woman who marries well has few difficulties placed in her path by society. A husband is a visible means of support and covers a multitude of dead sins. It is the woman who goes forth alone to fight for her soul who finds every hand against her and every door of opportunity closed in her face. She is cut off from the world she knew; and the larger world, outside the door of the brothel, seeks to drive her back, as if she were a wild beast who had strayed from her cage.
I remember, vividly, indeed, a woman of means and position who hounded me from one boarding-place to another, and from one employment to another, until there seemed to be no corner where I could find refuge from her. When I called on her to ask the reason for her persecution, to say that I did not know her and could not possibly have injured her, that all I asked was the God-given right to earn a decent living and to be left in peace, she declared that she knew all about my former life and that I had no right and no place among decent people; that my place was in the red-light district, and that she would fulfil her duty to society by seeing that I returned to it.
She had reckoned without her woman, however; for she found herself face to face with a spirit that has always refused to be crushed. The fact that she did not succeed only increased the malevolence with which she pursued me. Finally she encountered a big-hearted man who informed her that he, too, knew all about my former life, that his wife also knew, and that I was not only a valued employee, but an honored friend of the family. Her chagrin knew no bounds. She told him he was a libertine who had duped his poor wife into shielding me; she predicted that the end would be a broken home for him.
She proved a false prophet, however, and by her very malevolence raised up friends for me, after she had succeeded in making my life a hell as black as the one from which I had come. I am no longer in this man's employ, but I am still an honored friend of the family and am looked upon as a second mother by the children.
This woman is no exception; the world is filled with women like her. The beautiful wife of my former employer is the exception, for very few women possess her understanding heart and her great loving-kindness.
At the present time, wherever two or three club-women are gathered together the chief topic of conversation is "soldiers and vampires." It has been decreed that, while prostitution must go, the "vampires" must be kept outside the pale. A most peculiar logic this and one which I am utterly unable to grasp–decrying a sin and yet condemning a fellow-woman to follow it for the term of her natural life.
"Surely, my dear," said a noted club president to me recently–"surely you would not have us condone? If we forgive them and take them back again into decent society, where will the family be? What will become of our social fabric?"
"Madam," I answered, "where is the family now? If the present social fabric is only a moth-eaten piece of cloth, patched up on the under side where the patches will not show, then it is high time we began weaving a clean, strong, new fabric wherein the warp shall consist of the fittest we have and the woof be made up of the broken fragments of life."
THE END
