Woman's work in municipalities

by Mary Ritter Beard

Vice Commissions

While their presence upon state and city vice commissions is of recent accomplishment, it is one of the striking recognitions of the fact that women have a vital part to play in the solution of the social evil.

Dr. Mabel Sims Ulrich was appointed a member of the vice commission by the mayor of Minneapolis in recognition of her pioneer work in education. She took her medical degree at Johns Hopkins and went to Minneapolis in joint practice with her husband. Gradually the question of sex education obtruded itself into her work. She was a mother as well as a physician and mothers came to her for advice; then the Y. W. C. A. sent her about to colleges and universities to impart knowledge on this subject. Thus her experience made her a valuable member of the vice commission.

The Chicago Vice Commission of 1912, the first of its kind appointed by a municipality and financed by the city treasury, consisted of thirty well-known men and women. An important part of the investigation was made by women or under their direction.

Following upon the recommendation of a Baltimore grand jury, the governor of Maryland appointed in 1913 a commission of fifteen members, some of whom were women.

Lucia L. Jaquith, superintendent of the Memorial Hospital of Worcester, Massachusetts, was a member of the Massachusetts Vice Commission which reported to the legislature in March, 1914. Its recommendations consist of: a modified form of the Iowa injunction and abatement law, penalizing the property in which prostitution is carried on rather than the prostitute; laws giving licensing boards more stringent supervision over cafés, hotels and saloons and authority to license boarding-houses and public dance halls; and a measure requiring all persons found in a building or place used for prostitution to state under oath their true names and residences. “A constructive plan of favorably modifying the conditions of prostitution demands definite knowledge of the class of men who patronize the prostitute,” is the opinion of this commission. Policewomen were suggested and a state police “untrammeled by local prejudices and alliances” to coöperate with local officials in suppressing immoral resorts in small towns and cities.

The Women’s Municipal League of Boston which had made plans for an investigation of vice conditions turned over much valuable data to this state commission. Another group of workers, under the chairmanship of Miss Marion Nickols, had undertaken similar work and also decided to help the commission.

The most notable report of a vice commission recently issued is, according to The Survey, that of Portland, Oregon (a suffrage state):

It includes a series of reports issued since the commission’s appointment in 1911. One of the series deals with the places of public resort and accommodation affected by the social evil. It concludes with the famous “tin-plate ordinance,” which requires that “on the front of every building used, either in whole or in part, as a hotel, apartment house, rooming, lodging, boarding, tenement house, or saloon, there shall be, at the principal street entrance, a conspicuous plate or sign bearing the name and address of the owner or owners of such buildings.” This, of course, greatly facilitates the apprehension and conviction of those responsible for violating the law against disorderly resorts.

This ordinance is reported to have had the effect of driving immoral people from the buildings they have occupied for years, because the owners were afraid to risk the publicity and responsibility of their presence and practices. Many of these buildings are now being remodeled and occupied by a better class of tenants.

Another report of the series deals with the legal and police aspect of the social evil which led to the enactment of the law for enjoining and abating houses of ill fame as nuisances. A bill was also recommended creating a morals court. Finding the division of responsibility a cause of inefficiency and corruption in the police department, the commission recommends the vesting of full authority over the department in one man, as the most effective way of handling the social evil problem. Study of the juvenile aspects of the social evil led to specific sources of vice and the beginnings of moral delinquency, and resulted in the recommendation that a child welfare commission be appointed, which should be “charged with the study of the general subject of juvenile life.”

While realizing the desirability of requiring vice diseases to be reported and registered, the commission doubted whether public opinion would support the enforcement of such a law. It considered a vigorous campaign of education the most necessary step for the control of these diseases. It recommended, however, that all cases encountered in dispensaries, hospitals, juvenile and municipal courts, penal institutions, maternity hospitals, rescue homes, and all places of detention, should be officially reported. The commission also urged that the city contribute to the support of free dispensaries for the treatment of these diseases and that the Department of Health make tests for the diagnosis of these diseases without charge.

Wage scales were examined to determine the economic sources of the social evil and much interesting information was gathered. Human interest stories were revealed showing the need of a minimum wage for women workers, improved sanitation in shops and stores, shorter hours of labor and industrial education.

The commission records its emphatic opposition to segregation in Portland for the following reasons:

“Segregation does not segregate; deals only with a small percentage of the sexually immoral; promotes and justifies professional prostitution; does not reduce clandestine immorality; helps to establish a double standard of morality by stigmatizing the woman and ignoring the moral responsibility of the man; rests on the false presumption that sexual immorality is necessary; fosters the debauchery of the sex instinct; promotes the spread of disease; and affords official absolution for illegal and immoral conduct.”

Perhaps the most significant assertion in the whole impressive report is this sentence: “When any considerable number of men question the necessity of an evil it marks the beginning of the end. It is here that this commission rests and finds justification of its labors.”

Portland has since passed the “tin-plate ordinance” recommended by the commission and so strongly approved by women voters. Indeed this measure has commended itself to women everywhere in the country.

The Women’s League for Good Government of Elmira, New York, made an investigation of vice conditions under the American Vigilance Association during the summer of 1913. The results of this investigation were first given to the public at a great mass meeting held in one of the theaters in October. At this meeting a summary of the investigator’s report was given by one of the clergymen of the city. The theater was taxed to its utmost capacity, and the overflow filled the largest church auditorium in the city. The great audiences listened with solemnity to the startling revelations of the report. The Committee on Public Morals was at once organized and it was immediately requested by the newly appointed police commissioners to keep a watchful eye on the cheap theaters and the “movies.” Copies of the Vice Report were sent to the newly elected city officials, and additional copies were requested by the police commissioners, into whose hands was placed the key to the Report (names of persons and places having been printed in cipher). “We have reason to believe that the Report has been helpful to the police commissioners in their efforts to enforce the laws,” say the women of Elmira.

Valuable reports have issued from the Bureau of Social Hygiene in New York, at the present time composed of John D. Rockefeller, Jr., Dr. Katharine Bement Davis, the present city commissioner of corrections and former superintendent of the Woman’s Reformatory at Bedford, Paul M. Warburg, and Starr J. Murphy. For some time this Bureau had maintained a laboratory of social hygiene at the Bedford Reformatory whence Dr. Davis formed her convictions on the causes of sexual immorality. In the first publication of this Bureau—that of Mr. Kneeland on conditions of vice in New York City—Dr. Katharine Davis has a summary of the conclusions of the Bedford laboratory. Her personal convictions she states in this way: “I say unhesitatingly that in the vast majority of cases she [the prostitute] is a victim. Prostitution as now conducted in this country and in Europe is very largely a man’s business; the women are merely tools in the hands of the stronger sex. It is a business run for profit and the profit is large. It is my belief that less than 25 per cent. of the prostitutes in this country would have fallen if they had had an equally good chance to lead a pure life. That they have been dragged into the mire in such large numbers is due to a variety of circumstances, among which are poverty, low wages, improper home conditions and lack of training, the natural desire for pretty things, etc. But while all these may be contributing causes, man is chiefly responsible.”