A New Conscience And An Ancient Evil by Jane Addams
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Jane Addams >> A New Conscience And An Ancient Evil
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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!
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