Part 23
Frances E. Willard, one of its principal leaders, described the proceedings in the following graphic manner: “Usually the women came in a long procession from their rendezvous at some church, where they had held a morning prayer meeting. Marching two and two in a column, they entered the saloon with kind faces, and the sweet songs of church and home upon their lips, while some Madonna-like leader with the Gospel in her looks, took her stand beside the bar and gently asked if she might read God’s word and offer prayer. After that the ladies seated themselves, took their knitting or embroidery, and watched the men who patronized the saloons. While some of them cursed the women openly, and some quietly slunk out of sight, others began to sign the pledge these women brought with them. In the meantime one of the ladies pleaded with the proprietor to give up his business. Many of these liquor dealers surrendered and then followed stirring scenes, and amid songs and the ringing of the church bells the contents of barrels and bottles were gurgling into the gutter, while the whole town assembled to rejoice in this new fashion of exorcising the evil spirits.
“Not everywhere the ladies met with success. In Cincinnati such a procession of women, including the wives of leading pastors, were arrested and locked up in jail; at other places dogs were set on the crusaders, or they were smoked out, or had the hose turned on them.”
The movement, wholly emotional, and in many cases hysterical, spread throughout the country like a prairie fire. In 1874 it led to the organization of “=The Woman’s Christian Temperance Union=,” and, in 1883, to the founding of “=The World’s Women’s Temperance Union=,” the members of which wear a white ribbon and have the motto: “Woman will bless and brighten every place she enters, and she will enter every place.”
Since the founding of this world’s union the movement has extended over many countries and has branched out into a multitude of organizations. Their influence has been widely felt in legislatures, and in all elections in which laws have been voted upon for the regulation of the production and sale of liquors.—
Another question in which women are deeply concerned is that of =Child-labor=, the reckless exploitation of children in the interest of industry. Evidences that in England the dreadful abuses, committed by unscrupulous mine- and factory-owners, as described in a former chapter, have continued to the present times, were submitted to the International Women’s Congress, held in 1899 in London. It was reported that at that time 144,026 children below the age of 12 years were employed in workshops, mines, factories and warehouses. Of these children 131 had not yet reached the age of 7 years; 1120 were under 8; 4211 under 9; 11,027 under 10, and 122,131 under 11 years of age. Miss Montessori, the Italian delegate to the Congress, described the hard work of the children employed in the sulphur mines of Sicily. As they have to carry heavy loads on their shoulders through low gangways and over steep ladders and stairways, they are compelled to walk in a stooped position, and therefore in time become deformed and crippled.
In the United States the question of child-labor is likewise a matter of deep concern to men as well as to women. As every State has its own Legislature, there exists a varied assortment of child-labor laws. Ten or fifteen years ago several states had none whatever. Others prohibited the employment of children under ten years, while still others had an age limit of twelve or fourteen years. The same diversity prevailed in regard to the hours of labor. Some states had no legislation in this direction, while others forbade any child to work longer than ten hours daily.
During the year 1890 there was a total of 860,786 children between the ages of ten and fifteen years at work in various occupations in the United States. A report of the Bureau of Mines of Pennsylvania for 1901 stated 24,023 of the employees of the anthracite coal mines in Pennsylvania were children.
In 1918 investigators of the children’s bureau of the Department of Labor reported that the number of minors employed in factories, mines and quarries has increased at a rapid rate since the U. S. Supreme Court, on June 5th, 1918, nullified the child-labor act of 1916 as unconstitutional. Not only are a greatly increased number of children employed, but they are kept at work longer hours than before. Since the future of such children as well as the future of the country depend to a very great extent upon what legislators do in regard to children, it is obvious that women are deeply concerned in this question.—
The need of women’s participation in government and of an “occasional house-cleaning” in the Legislatures as well as in the Municipal Administrations becomes evident, when we realize that one of the most revolting crimes is committed daily in our communities, quite often with the silent protection of corrupt officials and politicians. We refer to the =White Slave Trade=. As few people have any definite idea of its extent and terrors, some authentic facts are here given, which, at the same time, demonstrate men’s indifference as well as the urgent need of woman’s interference for its suppression.
As everybody knows, the traffic in young girls for purposes of prostitution is as old as humanity. It has flourished in all ages and in all countries. But it was during the 19th Century that it found its systematic organization and its most extensive development.
With alarming frequency, the papers report that some young woman or girl is “missing,” having stepped out of her home on some household errand, and from this moment having vanished as though swallowed by the earth. Such was the case of Dorothy Arnold, who some years ago left her cosy home in New York, to do some shopping in a department store. She never returned and no trace of her was ever discovered. This particular case attracted wide attention all over the United States, as Miss Arnold, a beautiful girl of eighteen, was the daughter of wealthy parents, who spent a fortune in desperate but futile attempts to recover their child.—
Every year hundreds of similar cases occur in our country, some in San Francisco, some in New York, Baltimore, St. Louis, Chicago and elsewhere. If the exact number of such missing girls could be known, the public might well be shocked; and horrified if it would know the sad lot that befalls the majority of these unfortunate girls. Where efforts to ascertain their fate have met with success, it was found that in ninety out of a hundred cases such girls became victims of the most detestable fiends on earth, human ghouls, who make fortunes by luring innocent and inexperienced women into the most degrading slavery.
There were many events that favored the development of the white slave trade. The discovery of gold in California and the construction of many transcontinental railroads were followed by the opening of the rich mining- and lumber-districts in the northwestern and western parts of the United States, and in Canada. In more recent years came the opening of the gold and diamond fields in South Africa, of the gold grounds in Alaska, the construction of the Panama Canal and the great transcontinental railroads through Siberia and Africa. All these great undertakings attracted many thousands of men, who were ready to squander their earnings in gambling, drinking and any other kind of dissipation. Women, of course, stood at the head of things in demand. And as there are always people eager to profit by catering to such passions, the white slave trade assumed most threatening proportions.
To ensnare victims, the slave dealers insert enticing advertisements offering profitable positions to waitresses, chambermaids, servants, governesses, and other female help in hotels, boarding houses and private families. They send their “procurers” or agents to the dance-halls and cheap pleasure resorts, and to those industrial towns, where large numbers of poorly paid young girls toil in mills and factories. Here they approach their prey under all kinds of disguises and pretenses. One especially ingenious procurer of New York has been credited with gaining the acquaintance of young girls in the garb of a priest. And George Kibbe Turner in an article “The Daughters of the Poor” (published in 1910 in McClure’s Magazine) made the statement that a gang of such fiends worked under the name “The New York Independent Benevolent Association”!
However, the chief recruiting-grounds for the white slave trade are the miserable Jewish Ghettos of Poland, Russia, Galicia, Hungary, Austria and Roumania, where always numbers of degraded men can be found, ready to sell their own kindred for any price offered. With the help of such procurers four principal centers of the white slave trade were created: Lemberg, London, Paris and New York, with branches in all parts of America, Africa and Asia.
Of course such a villainous trade would not be possible without the silent protection of corrupt officials and political machines, who share in its enormous profits. Inside information on this subject was received through the disclosures, made during the latter parts of the last century about conditions in the mining and lumber regions of Michigan and Wisconsin. In January, 1887, Representative Breen appeared before the House Judiciary Committee of the legislature of Michigan and stated the existence of a regular trade in young and innocent girls for purposes of prostitution between Chicago, Duluth and other cities with the mining and lumber districts south of Lake Superior. As he said that the horrors of the camps into which these girls were lured beggared description, several newspapers, among them the “Chicago Herald” and “The New York World,” dispatched representatives, disguised as woodmen, to those regions to investigate the truth of these statements. They found that almost without exception the girls, kept in these camps, had been secured under promise of respectable employment. The houses, in which they were imprisoned, were surrounded by stockades twenty or thirty feet in height, the one door guarded night and day by a man with a rifle, while within were a number of bulldogs to prevent the girls from escaping. In the largest of such lumber camps dens from twenty to seventy-five girls were found.
On January 24, 1887, the “New York World” published the story of an unfortunate girl, who had been lured by an advertisement to work in a lumberman’s hotel in the North. Believing the position to be respectable, she went there, but after her arrival at the place she was taken to a rough two-story building surrounded by a slab fence twenty feet high, within which was a cordon of bulldogs, thirteen in number, chained to iron stakes driven into the ground. In this place she was compelled, like all the other girls, of which there were always from eleven to thirty, to drink and dance with the men of the mining and lumber camps. They were not permitted to refuse any request of those visitors. A complaint of any kind, even of sickness, meant a whipping, frequently with a rawhide upon the naked body, sometimes with the butt of a revolver. When the log drives were going on, there would be hundreds of men there night and day, not human beings, but fiends.
“Oh, it was awful, awful!” cried the girl after her release. “I would rather stay in prison until I die than go back there for one day. I tried to escape three times and was caught. They unchained the dogs and let them get so near me that I cried out in terror and begged them to take the dogs away and I would go back. Then, of course, I was beaten. I tried, too, to smuggle out notes to the Sheriff through visitors, but they would take them to the proprietor instead, and he would pay for them. Once I did get a note to the Deputy Sheriff at Florence, Wisconsin, and he came and inquired. But the proprietor gave him $50, and he went away. I was awfully beaten then. While I lived this life, from March until September, two inmates died, both from brutal treatment. They were as good as murdered. Nearly all the girls came without knowing the character of the house, and first implored to get away. The county officers came to the places to drink and dance with the girls. They are controlled by a rich man in Iron Mountain, who owns these houses and rents them for $100 a month.”
That the den keepers were always on good terms with the officials, appears also from the following report of the “Chicago Herald” of April 17, 1892, in which attention is called to the continuance of the horrible conditions in the mining- and lumber-camps. “Four years ago, when “The Herald” exposed the pinery dens, Marinette was known as the wickedest city in the country. It was the rendezvous of every species of bad men. Thugs, thieves and gamblers practically held possession of the town. Their influence was felt in all municipal affairs. Certain officers of the law seemed in active sympathy with them, and it was almost impossible to secure the arrest and conviction of men guilty of infamous crimes. Dives of the vilest character ran open on the outskirts of the town. Their inmates, recruited from all parts of the country by the subtle arts of well known procurers, were kept in a state of abject slavery. Iron balls and chains, suffocating cords and the whistling lash were used on refractory girls and women. Bodies of ill-starred victims were sometimes found in the woods, but the discovery was rarely followed by investigation. The dive keepers were wealthy and knew how to ease the conscience of any over-zealous officer.”
Another report states: “Many den-keepers wield a powerful influence in the local elections; one of the worst of such, after paying the constable $12 for the return of a girl who had tried to escape, beat her with a revolver until tired and was then only prevented by a woodman from turning loose a bulldog upon her; but such was his political influence that he was elected justice of the peace the following spring!”—
About the same time, at a session of the National Social Purity Congress held in Baltimore, the following statement was made: “Of the 230,000 erring girls in this country, over half have been snared or sold into their lives of shame. Their average life is five years. Forty-six thousand are carted out to Potters Field every year. Over one hundred American homes have to be desolated every day to recruit the ranks of shame. Isn’t it time for somebody to try to save these girls from falling into those dens of iniquity? Twenty million Christians can rescue 230,000 erring girls, or surely the religion of Jesus Christ is a failure.”
Terrible happenings, as for instance the murder of Ruth Cruger of New York in 1917, and similar cases in February and March, 1919, have disclosed that gangs of white slave traders still exist in America and do a flourishing business. The prices paid to agents depend upon the girl’s youth and beauty, ranging from $20 to $1000, and even more.
The enormous and thoroughly organized traffic in girl-children in England was exposed by the revelations of the “Pall Mall Gazette,” which roused the people to earnest efforts against this commerce and secured the formation of the “Society for the Prevention of Traffic in English Girls.” In giving details of this traffic the paper said:
“London, the great metropolis of Christian England, the largest city of ancient and modern times, is acknowledged by statisticians and sociologists to be the point where crime, vice, despair, and misery are found in their deepest depth and greatest diversity. Not Babylon of old, whose name is the synonym of all that is vile; not Rome, “Mother of Harlots,” not Corinth, in whose temple a thousand girls were kept for prostitution in service of God, not the most savage lands in all their barbarity have ever shown a thousandth part of the human woe to be found in the city of London, that culmination of modern Christian civilization. The nameless crimes of Sodom and Gomorrah, the vileness of ancient Greece, which garnered its most heroic men, its most profound philosophers, are but amusements among young men of the highest rank in England; West End, the home of rank and wealth, of university education, being the central hell of this extended radius of vice.”
As in many countries priests and police departments have failed to stop this heinous traffic in young girls, women must step in, and, by their votes, must place such legislators and police commissioners in office, that proper laws and their strict enforcement can be expected.
In Germany the “white slave trade” is practically unknown. For many years two women associations have existed,—a Protestant and a Catholic,—whose representatives, recognizable by distinct arm bands, patrol all important railway stations, in order to furnish correct information to incoming girls who are looking for positions, and to escort them to the homes of the associations, where they may stay till respectable places have been found for them.
It is obvious, that the problems connected with the temperance question, child-labor and the white slave trade are of vital importance to every woman and mother. Salvation must come through the woman’s ballot. They must defend themselves and their children as men have done: by co-operating in the elections, by controlling those that make the laws, and by controlling those who are appointed to enforce them.
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A few words may be said in regard to the claim that woman would cease to vote “after the novelty of her new toy had worn off.” Statistics as well as the testimony of competent observers confute this claim. In all states where women enjoy full suffrage, they have shown themselves eager to vote. In Idaho the Chief Justice and all the justices of the State Supreme Court signed a statement that “the large vote cast by the women establishes the fact that they take a lively interest.” In Wyoming, Colorado and other full suffrage states it has been observed that 90 per cent. of the women vote.
In Australia, in 1903, at the first national election in which women took part, 359,315 women voted; in 1906, 431,033; in 1910, 601,946.
In New Zealand the number has increased at each triennial parliamentary election. In 1893 90,290 women voted; in 1896, 108,793; in 1899, 119,550; in 1902, 138,565; in 1905, 175,046; in 1908, 190,114; in 1911, 221,858.
The following is a testimonial from Sir Joseph Ward, Prime Minister of New Zealand, in regard to Woman Suffrage in practice:
Prime Minister’s Office, Wellington, Oct. 17th, 1907.
Woman Suffrage exists in New Zealand because it dawned upon the minds of thinking men that they were daily wasting an almost unlimited supply of mental and moral force. From the time their baby hands had found support and safety by holding the folds of their mother’s gowns, they had trusted the happiness of their lives hourly to the common sense, the purity and the sympathy of women. Strange to say, in one department of life alone, and that perhaps the most important, viz.: the political, had they denied the right of speech and of direct influence to women. Men of different countries had for centuries preached and written of evils which deformed their systems of Government and even tainted the aspirations of statesmen for just laws within the state, and equitable relations abroad. Nevertheless these men neglected, or refused to avail themselves of the support and counsel of women’s hearts and women’s brains, which they accepted on other matters. Indeed, they were ready to listen to foolish arguments against the idea of women entering political life; such as: women would lose their grace, modesty, and love of home if they voted; since they could not be soldiers, they had no right to control questions of peace and war.
In New Zealand we have not found that making a “pencil mark on a voting paper” once in three years has resulted in any loss of grace or beauty among our women, or even in neglect of home duties. On the contrary the women’s vote has had a distinctly clarifying effect on the process of elections. The old evil memories of election day, the ribaldry, the fighting, have been succeeded by a decorous gravity befitting people exercising their highest national privilege. When the contention, that women should not be entitled to vote because they cannot bear arms, is used by one whose mother could only make his life and citizenship possible by passing through pain and danger greater than the average soldier has to face, it becomes inconsistently ridiculous. Besides, many men (clergymen, government officials, etc., etc.), are exempt from actual military service, and that fact has never been used to deprive them of a vote. The main argument, however, which weighed with us, was that of right, of abstract right. If the foundation of government is the consent of the governed, it appears monstrously unfair that one half of the population should not be represented or have any share in it. Therefore, after long and grave consideration, we gave our women an equal right with men in deciding on the qualifications of candidates to represent them in Parliament.
We have no reason to regret the decision. I feel confident that if any great crisis in national morals should arise, the women’s vote would press with irresistable weight in the direction of clean, honest and efficient legislation. New Zealand has not repented having abolished set disqualifications among those men and women who have unitedly helped to build the foundations of a nation. I write as one who advocated the extension of the franchise to women before my entry into Parliament twenty years ago. I have always supported it in Parliament, and, while closely watching its effect, have never seen any genuine cause for believing that it has not worked for the good of the Dominion.
Similar testimonials have been given by the governors of all Western States of the Union.
Governor Bryant B. Brooks of Wyoming said: “Nothing can be so far from the truth as the idea that Woman Suffrage has the slightest tendency to disrupt the home. Indeed it has the very opposite effect. As a result of it politics is talked freely in the family circle, and political questions are settled by intelligent discussion. This has a great and good influence on the growing generation. The children grow up in an atmosphere that encourages intelligent consideration and debate of public problems, and are thus better equipped to deal with public questions when they reach voting age.”
Governor Shafroth of Colorado said: “Our State has Woman Suffrage for many years, and has found it of inestimable benefit to her people,” and Governor James H. Brady of Idaho said: “Woman Suffrage has been an unqualified success, not only in Idaho, but in all Western States adopting the principle.”
WOMAN’S ACTIVITY DURING THE WORLD WAR.
When in August, 1914, the most dreadful disaster that ever befell humanity burst upon the European nations, women at first stood paralyzed with fear and terror, foreseeing the tremendous burden and sacrifices they would have to bear. But after every hope for a peaceful solution had vanished and nothing remained but to face the inevitable, they rallied and prepared to weather the coming hurricane.