A New Conscience And An Ancient Evil by Jane Addams

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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.

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