What eight million women want

by Rheta Childe Dorr

THE FILENE SYSTEM OF DEVELOPING EFFICIENT WORKERS

There is one department store which has demonstrated that it is profitable to pay higher wages than its competitors, and that it pays to allow the employees to fix the terms of their own employment. This is the Filene store in Boston, which has developed within the past ten years from a conservative, old-fashioned dry-goods business into an extremely original and interesting experiment station in commercial economics.

The entire policy of the Filene management is bent on developing to the highest possible point the efficiency of each individual clerk. The best possible material is sought. No girl under sixteen is employed, and no girl of any age who has not graduated with credit from the grammar schools. There are a number of college-bred men and women in the Filene employ.

Good wages are paid, even to beginners, and experienced employees are rewarded, not according to a fixed rate of payment, but according to earning capacity. Taken throughout the store, wages, plus commissions, which are allowed in all departments, average about two dollars a week higher than in other department stores in Boston.

No irresponsible, automatic employee can develop high efficiency. She does not want to become efficient; she wants merely to receive a pay envelope at the end of the week. In order to develop responsibility and initiative in their employees the Filenes have put them on a self-governing basis. The workers do not literally make their own rules, but the vote of the majority can change any rule made by the firm. The firm furnishes its employees with a printed book of rules, in which the policy of the store is set forth. If the employees object to any of the rules, or any part of the policy, they can vote a change.

The medium through which the clerks express their opinions and desires is the Filene Co-operative Association, of which every clerk and every employee in the place is a member. No dues are exacted, as is the custom in the usual employees' association. The executive body, called the Store Council, and all other officers are elected by the members. All matters of grievance, all subjects of controversy, are referred to the Store Council, which, as often as occasion demands, calls a meeting of the entire association after business hours.

For example: Christmas happens on a Friday. The firm decides to keep the store open on the following day—Saturday. There is an expression of dissatisfaction from a number of clerks. A meeting of the association is called, and a vote taken as to whether the majority want the extra holiday or not; whether the majority are willing to lose the commissions on a day's sales, for, of course, salaries continue. The vote reveals that the majority want the holiday. The Store Council so reports to the firm, and the firm must grant the holiday.

All matters of difficulty arising between employers and employed, in the Filene store, are settled not by the firm, but by the Arbitration Board of Employees, also elected by popular vote. All disagreements as to wages, position, promotion, all questions of personal issue between saleswomen and aislemen, or others in authority, are referred to the Board of Arbitration, and the board's decision is final. There is no tyranny of the buyer, no arbitrary authority of the head of a department. Every clerk knows that her tenure is secure as long as she is an efficient saleswoman.

Surely it is not too much to hope that, in a future not too far distant, all women who earn their bread will serve a system of industry adjusted by law to human standards. In enlightened America the courts, presided over by men to whom manual labor is known only in theory, have persistently ruled that the Constitution forbade the State to make laws protecting women workers. It has seemed to most of our courts and most of our judges that the State fulfilled its whole duty to its women citizens when it guaranteed them the right freely to contract—even though they consented, or their poverty consented, to contracts which involved irreparable harm to themselves, the community, and future generations. The women of this country have done nothing more important than to educate the judiciary of the United States out of and beyond this terrible delusion.

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CHAPTER VI

MAKING OVER THE FACTORY FROM THE INSIDE

The decision of the United States Supreme Court, establishing the legality of restricted hours of labor for Oregon working women, was received with especial satisfaction in the State of Illinois. The Illinois working women, or that thriving minority of them organized in labor unions, had been waiting sixteen years for a favorable opportunity to get an eight-hour day for themselves. Sixteen years ago the Illinois State Legislature gave the working women such a law, and two years later the Illinois Supreme Court took it away from them, on the ground that it was unconstitutional.

The action of the Illinois Supreme Court was by no means without precedent. Many similar decisions had been handed down in other States, until it had become almost a principle of American law that protective legislation for working women was invalid.

The process of reasoning by which learned judges reach the conclusion that an eight-hour day for men may be decreed without depriving anybody of his constitutional rights, and at the same time rule that women would be outrageously wronged by having their working hours limited, may appear obscure.

The explanation is, after all, simple. The learned judges are men, and they know something—not much, but still something—about the men of the working classes. They know, for example, something about the conditions under which coal miners work, and they can see that it is contrary to public interests that men should toil underground, at arduous labor, twelve hours a day. Accidents result with painful frequency, and these are bad things,—bad for miners and mine owners alike. They are bad for the whole community. Therefore the regulation of miners' hours of labor comes legitimately under the police powers of the law.

The learned judges, I say this with all due respect, do not know anything about working women. Their own words prove it. The texts of their decisions, denying the constitutionality of protective measures, are amazing in the ignorance they display,—ignorance of industrial conditions surrounding women; ignorance of the physical effects of certain kinds of labor on young girls; ignorance of the effect of women's arduous toil on the birth rate; ignorance of moral conditions in trades which involve night work; ignorance of the injury to the home resulting from the sweated labor of tenement women. In brief, the learned judges, when they write opinions involving the health, the happiness, the very lives of women workers, might be writing about the inhabitants of another planet, so little knowledge do they display of the real facts.

We have seen how the women of the Consumers' League taught the United States Supreme Court something about working women; showed them a few of the calamities resulting from the unrestricted labor of women and immature girls. The Supreme Court's decision forever abolished the old fallacy that the American Constitution forbids protective legislation for women workers. It remains for women's organizations in the various States to educate local courts up to the knowledge that community interest demands protective legislation.

Following the decision of the Supreme Court in the Oregon case, which flatly contradicted the decision of the Illinois Supreme Court, the working women of Illinois began their educational campaign. They had now, for the first time, a fighting chance to secure the restoration of their shortened work day. The women of fifteen organized trades in the city of Chicago determined to take that chance.

The women first appealed to the Industrial Commission, appointed early in 1908 by Governor Dineen, to investigate the need of protective legislation for workers, men and women alike.

The women were given a courteous hearing, but were told frankly that limited hours of work for women was not one of protective measures to be recommended by the Commission.

The Waitresses' Union, Local No. 484, of Chicago, entered the lists, led by a remarkable young woman, Elizabeth Maloney, financial secretary of the union. Miss Maloney and her associates drafted and introduced into the Illinois Legislature a bill providing an eight-hour working day for every woman in the State, working in shop, factory, retail store, laundry, hotel, or restaurant, and providing also ample machinery for enforcing the measure.

The "Girls' Bill," as it immediately became known, was the most hotly contested measure passed by the Illinois Legislature during the session. Over five hundred manufacturers appeared at the public hearing on the bill to protest against it. One man brought a number of meek and tired women employees, who, he declared, were opposed to having their working day made shorter. Another presented a petition signed by his women employees, appealing against being prevented from working eleven hours a day!

Nine working girls appeared in support of the bill, and after learned counsel for the Manufacturers' Association had argued against the measure, two of the girls were allowed to speak. The Manufacturers' Association presented the business aspect of the question, the girls confined themselves to the human side. Agnes Nestor, secretary of the Glove Makers' Union of the United States and Canada, was one of the two girls who spoke. Miss Nestor, whose eyes are blue, whose manners are gentle, and whose best weight is ninety-five pounds, had to stand on a chair that the law makers might see her when she made her plea: Elizabeth Maloney, of the Waitresses' Union, was the other speaker.

They described details in the daily lives of working women not generally known except to the workers themselves. Among these was the piece-work system, which too often means a system whereby the utmost possible speed is extorted from the toiler, in order that she may earn a living wage. The legislators were asked to imagine themselves operating a machine whose speed was gauged up to nine thousand stitches a minute; to consider how many stitches the operator's hand must guide in a week, a month, a year, in order to earn a living; working thus eleven, twelve hours a day, knowing that the end was nervous breakdown, and decrease of earning power.

"I am a waitress," said Miss Maloney, "and I work ten hours a day. In that time a waitress who is tolerably busy walks ten miles, and the dishes she carries back and forth aggregate in weight fifteen hundred to two thousand pounds. Don't you think eight hours a day is enough for a girl to walk?"

Only one thing stood in the way of the passage of the bill after that day. The doubt of its constitutionality proved an obstacle too grave for the friends of the workers to overcome. It was decided to substitute a ten-hour bill, an exact duplicate of the "Oregon Standard" established by the Supreme Court of the United States. The principle of limitation upon the hours of women's work once established in Illinois, the workers could proceed with their fight for an eight-hour day.

The manufacturers lost their fight, and the ten-hour bill became a law of the State of Illinois. The Manufacturers' Association, through the W.C. Ritchie Paper Box Manufactory, of Chicago, immediately brought suit to test the constitutionality of the law. Two Ritchie employees, Anna Kusserow and Dora Windeguth, made appeal to the Illinois courts. Their appeal declared that they could not make enough paper boxes in ten hours to earn their bread, and that their constitutional rights freely to contract, as well as their human rights, had been taken away from them by the ten-hour law.

There was a terrible confession, on the part of the employers, involved in this protest against the ten-hour day, a confession of the wretched state of women's wages in the State of Illinois. If women of mature years—one of the petitioners had been an expert box maker for over thirty years—are unable, in a day of ten hours, to earn enough to keep body and soul together, is it not proved that women workers are in no position freely to contract? For who, of her own free will, would contract to work ten hours a day for less than the price of life?

There was sitting in the Circuit Court of Illinois at that time Judge R.S. Tuthill. When Judge Tuthill, in old age, reviews the events of his career, I think he will not remember with pride that he was blind to the real meaning of that petition of Anna Kusserow and Dora Windeguth. For Judge Tuthill issued an injunction against the State Factory Department, forbidding them to enforce the ten-hour law.

Immediately a number of women's organizations joined hands with the women's trade unions in the fight to save the bill. When it came up in the December term of the Illinois Supreme Court, Louis D. Brandeis of Boston, the same able jurist who had argued the Oregon case, was on hand. This time his brief was a book of six hundred and ten printed pages, over which Miss Pauline Goldmark, of the National Consumers' League, and a large corps of trained investigators and students had toiled for many months. The World's Experience Against the Illinois Circuit Court, this document might well have been called. It was simply a digest of the evidence of governmental commissions, laboratories, and bodies of scientific research, on the effects of overwork, and especially of overtime work, on girls and women, and through them on the succeeding generation. Incidentally the brief contained three pages of law.

The most striking part of the argument contained in the brief was the testimony of physicians on the toxin of fatigue.

"Medical Science has demonstrated," says this most important paragraph, "that while fatigue is a normal phenomenon ... excessive fatigue or exhaustion is abnormal.... It has discovered that fatigue is due not only to actual poisoning, but to a specific poison or toxin of fatigue, entirely analogous in chemical and physical nature to other bacterial toxins, such as the diphtheria toxin. It has been shown that when artificially injected into animals in large amounts the fatigue toxin causes death. The fatigue toxin in normal quantities is said to be counteracted by an antidote or antitoxin, also generated in the body. But as soon as fatigue becomes abnormal the antitoxin is not produced fast enough to counteract the poison of the toxin."

The Supreme Court of the State of Illinois decided that the American Constitution was never intended to shield manufacturers in their willingness to poison women under pretense of giving them work. The ten-hour law was sustained.

That the "Girls' Bill" passed, or that it was even introduced, was due in large measure to an organization of women, more militant and more democratic than any other in the United States. This is the Women's Trade Union League. Formed in New York about seven years ago, the League consists of women members of labor unions, a few men in organized trades, and many women outside the ranks of wage earners. Some of these latter are women of wealth, who are believers in the trade-union principle, but more are women who work in the professional ranks,—teachers, lawyers, physicians, writers, artists, settlement workers. These are the first professional workers, men or women, who ever asked for and were given affiliation with the American Federation of Labor. They are the first people, outside the ranks of wage earners, to appear in Labor Day parades.

The object of the League, which now has branches in five cities,—New York, Boston, Chicago, St. Louis, and Cleveland,—is to educate women wage earners in the doctrine of trade unionism. The League trains and supports organizers among all classes of workers. As quickly as a group in any trade seems ready for organizing the League helps them. It raises funds to assist women in their trade struggles. It acts as arbitrator between employer and wage earners in case of shop disputes.

The Women's Tracle Union League reaches not only women in factory trades, but it has succeeded in organizing women who until lately believed themselves to be a grade above this social level. One hundred and fifty dressmakers in New York City belong to a union. Seventy stenographers have organized in the same city. The Teachers' Federation of Chicago is a labor union, and although it was formed before the Women's Trade Union League came into existence, it is now affiliated. The women telegraphers all over the United States are well organized.

The businesslike, resourceful, and fearless policy of the League was brilliantly demonstrated during the famous strike of the shirt-waist makers in New York and Philadelphia in the winter of 1910. The story of this strike will bear retelling.

On the evening of November 22, 1909, there was a great mass meeting of workers held at Cooper Union in New York. Samuel Gompers, President of the American Federation of Labor, presided, and the stage was well filled with members of the Women's Trade Union League. The meeting had been called by the League in conjunction with Shirt-Waist Makers' Union, Local 25, to consider the grievances of shirt-waist makers in general, and especially of the shirt-waist makers in the Triangle factory, who had been, for more than two months, on strike.

The story of the strike, the causes that led up to it, and the bitter injustice which followed it were rehearsed in a dozen speeches. It was shown that for four to five dollars a week the girl shirt-waist makers worked from eight in the morning until half-past five in the evening two days in the week; from eight in the morning until nine at night four days in the week; and from eight in the morning until noon one day in the week—Sunday.

The shirt-waist makers in the Triangle factory, in hope of bettering their conditions, had formed a union, and had informed their employers of their action. The employers promptly locked them out of the shop, and the girls declared a strike.

The strike was more than two months old when the Cooper Union meeting was held, and the employers showed no signs of giving in. It was agreed that a general strike of shirt-waist makers ought to be declared. But the union was weak, there were no funds, and most of the shirt-waist makers were women and unused to the idea of solidarity in action. Could they stand together in an industrial struggle which promised to be long and bitter?

President Gompers was plainly fearful that they could not.

Suddenly a very small, very young, very intense Jewish girl, known to her associates as Clara Lemlich, sprang to her feet, and, with the assistance of two young men, climbed to the high platform. Flinging up her arms with a dramatic gesture she poured out a flood of speech, entirely unintelligible to the presiding Gompers, and to the members of the Women's Trade Union League. The Yiddish-speaking majority in the audience understood, however, and the others quickly caught the spirit of her impassioned plea.

The vast audience rose as one man, and a great roar arose. "Yes, we will all strike!"

"And will you keep the faith?" cried the girl on the platform. "Will you swear by the old Jewish oath of our fathers?"

Two thousand Jewish hands were thrust in air, and two thousand Jewish throats uttered the oath: "If I turn traitor to the cause I now pledge, may this hand wither and drop off from this arm I now raise."

Clara Lemlich's part in the work was accomplished. Within a few days forty thousand shirt-waist makers were on strike.

The Women's Trade Union League, under the direction of Miss Helen Marot, secretary, at once took hold of the strike.

There were two things to be done at once. The forty thousand had to be enrolled in the union, and those manufacturers who were willing to accept the terms of the strikers had to be "signed up." Clinton Hall, one of the largest buildings on the lower East Side, was secured, and for several weeks the rooms and hallways of the building and the street outside were crowded almost to the limit of safety with men and women strikers, anxious and perspiring "bosses," and busy, active associates of the Women's Trade Union League.

The immediate business needs of the organization being satisfied the League members undertook the work of picketing the shops. Picketing, if this activity has not been revealed to you, consists in patrolling the neighborhood of the factories during the hours when the strike breakers are going to and from their nefarious business, and importuning them to join the strike.

Peaceful picketing is legal. The law permits a striker to speak to the girl who has taken her place, permits her to present her cause in her most persuasive fashion, but if she lays her hand, ever so gently on the other's arm or shoulder, this constitutes technical violence.

Up to the time when the League began picketing there had been a little of this technical, and possibly an occasional act of real, violence. After the League took a hand there was none. Each group of union girls who went forth to picket was accompanied by one or more League members. Some of these amateur pickets were girls fresh from college, and among these were Elsie Cole, the brilliant daughter of Albany's Superintendent of Schools, Inez Milholland, the beautiful and cherished daughter of a millionaire father, leader of her class, of 1909, in Vassar College, Elizabeth Dutcher and Violet Pike, both prominent in the Association of Collegiate Alumnae. These young women went out day after day with girl strikers, endured the insults and threats of the police, suffered arrest on more than one occasion, and faced the scorn and indignation of magistrates who—well, who did not understand.

The strike received an immense amount of publicity, and organizations of women other than the Women's Trade Union League began to take an interest in it. They sent for Miss Marot, Miss Cole, Miss Gertrude Barnum, and other women known to be familiar with the industrial world of women, and begged for enlightenment on the subject of the strike. They particularly asked to hear the story from the striking women in person.

The exclusive Colony Club, to which only women of the highest social eminence are eligible, was called together by Miss Anne Morgan and several others, including Mrs. Egerton Winthrop, wife of the president of the New York Board of Education, to hear the story from the strikers' own lips. The Colony Club was swept into the shirt-waist strike. More than thirteen hundred dollars was collected in a few minutes. A dozen women promised influence and personal service in behalf of the strikers.

A week later Mrs. O.H.P. Belmont, mother of the Duchess of Marlborough, leader of a large Woman Suffrage Association, engaged the Hippodrome, and packed it to the roof with ten thousand interested spectators. Something like five thousand dollars was donated by this meeting.

At the beginning of the strike fully five hundred waist houses were involved. Many of these settled within a few days on the basis of increased pay, a fifty-two-hour working week, and recognition of the union. Others settled later, and under the influence of the "uptown scum," as the employers' association gallantly termed the Women's Trade Union League, the Colony Club, and the Suffragists, still others reluctantly gave in. Late in January all except about one hundred out of the five hundred had settled with the union, and only about three thousand of the workers were still out of work.

Women have been called the scabs of the labor world. That they would ever become trade unionists, ever evolve the class consciousness of the intelligent proletarian men, was deemed an impossible dream. Above all, that their progress towards industrial emancipation would ever be helped along by the wives and daughters of the employing classes was unthinkable. That the releasing of one class of women from household labor by sending another class of women into the factory, there to perform their historic tasks of cooking, sewing, and laundry work, was to result in the humanizing of industry, no mind ever prophesied.

Yet these things are coming. The scabs of the labor world are becoming the co-workers instead of the competitors of men. The women of the leisure classes, almost as fast as their eyes are opened to the situation. espouse the cause of their working sisters. The woman in the factory is preparing to make over that factory or to close it.

The history of a recent strike, in a carpet mill in Roxbury, Massachusetts, is a perfect history, in miniature, of the progress of the working women.

That particular mill is very old and very well known. When it was established, more than a generation ago, the owner was a man who knew every one of his employees by name, was especially considerate of the women operatives, and was loved and respected by every one. Hours of labor were long, but the work was done in a leisurely fashion, and wages were good enough to compensate for the long day's labor.

The original owner died, and in time the new firm changed to a corporation. The manager knew only his office force and possibly a few floor superintendents and foremen. The rest of the force were "hands."

The whole state of the industry was altered. New and complicated machinery was introduced. The shortened work day was a hundred times more fatiguing to the workers because of the increased speed and nerve-racking noise and jar of the machinery. Other grievances developed. The quality of the yarn furnished the weavers was often so bad that they spent hours of unpaid labor mending a broken warp or manipulating a rotten shuttle full of yarn. Wages, fixed according to the piece system, declined, it is said, at least one-fourth. Women who had formerly earned thirteen dollars a week were reduced to seven and eight dollars.

The women formed a union and struck. Some of them had been in the mills as long as forty years, but they walked out with the girls.

There you have the story of women's realization of themselves as a group. Next you encounter the realization of the sisterhood of women. The Boston Branch of the Women's Trade Union League, through its secretary, Mabel Gillespie, Radcliffe graduate, joined the strikers. Backed up by the Boston Central Labor Union, and the United Textile Workers of Fall River, the strikers fought their fight during ten weeks of anxiety and deprivation.

The employers were firm in their determination to go out of business before treating with the strikers as a group. A hand, mind you, exists as an individual, a very humble individual, but one to be received and conferred with. Hands, considered collectively, have no just right to exist. An employers' association is a necessity of business life. A labor union is an insult to capital.

This was the situation at the end of ten weeks. One day a motor car stopped in front of the offices of the mills and a lady emerged. Mrs. Glendower Evans, conservative, cultured, one might say Back Bay personified, had come to Roxbury to see the carpet manufacturer. Her powers of persuasion, plus her social position and her commercial connections, were sufficient to wring consent from the firm to receive John Golden, president of the United Textile Workers.

John Golden, intelligent, honest, a fine type of workingman, educated in the English school of unionism, held two conferences with the firm. He was able to make the employers see the whole situation in an entirely new light. They were men of probity; they wanted to be fair; and when they saw the human side of the struggle they surrendered. When they perceived the justice of the collective bargain, the advantages to both sides of a labor organization honestly conducted, they consented to recognize the union. And the women went back, their group unbroken.

Thus are women working, women of all classes, to humanize the factory. From the outside they are working to educate the legislatures and the judiciary. They are lending moral and financial support to the women of the toiling masses in their struggle to make over the factory from the inside. Together they are impressing the men of the working world, law makers and judges, with the justice of protecting the mothers of the race.

Now that the greatest stumbling block to industrial protective legislation has been removed, we may hope to see a change in legal decisions handed down in our courts. The educational process is not yet complete. Not every judge possesses the prophetic mind of the late Justice Brewer, who wrote the decision in the Oregon Case. Not every court has learned that healthy men and women are infinitely more valuable to a nation than mere property. But in time they will learn.

In distant New Zealand, not long ago, there was a match factory in which a number of women worked for low wages. After fruitless appeals to the owner for better wages the workers resorted to force. They did not strike. In New Zealand you do not have to strike, because in that country a substitute for the strike is provided by law. To this substitute, a Court of Arbitration, the women took their grievance. The employer in his answer declared, just as employers in this country might have done, that his business would not stand an increase in wages. He explained that the match industry was newly established in New Zealand, and that, until it was on a secure basis, factory owners could not afford to pay high wages.

The judge ordered an inquiry. In this country it would have been an inquiry into the state of the match industry. There it was an inquiry into the cost of living in the town where the match factory was located. And then the judge summoned the factory owner to the Court of Arbitration, and this is what he said to the man:

"It is impossible for these girls to live decently or healthfully on the wages you are now paying. It is of the utmost importance that they should have wholesome and healthful conditions of life. The souls and bodies of the young women of New Zealand are of more importance than your profits, and if you cannot pay living wages it will be better for the community for you to close your factory. It would be better to send the whole match industry to the bottom of the ocean, and go back to flints and firesticks, than to drive young girls into the gutter. My award is that you pay what they ask."

Does that sound like justice to you? It does to me; it does to the eight million women in the world who have learned to think in human terms.

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CHAPTER VII

BREAKING THE GREAT TABOO

At the threshold of that quarter of old New York called Greenwich Village stands Jefferson Market Court. Almost concealed behind the towering structure of the Sixth Avenue Elevated, the building by day is rather inconspicuous. But when night falls, swallowing up the neighborhood of tangled streets and obscure alleyways, Jefferson Market assumes prominence. High up in the square brick tower an illuminated clock seems perpetually to be hurrying its pointing hands toward midnight. From many windows, barred for the most part, streams an intense white light. Above an iron-guarded door at the side of the building floats a great globe of light, and beneath its glare, through the iron-guarded door, there passes, every week-day night in the year, a long procession of prodigals.

The guarded door seldom admits any one as important, so to speak, as a criminal. The criminal's case waits for day. The Night Court in Jefferson Market sits in judgment only on the small fry caught in the dragnet of the police. Tramps, vagrants, drunkards, brawlers, disturbers of the peace, speeding chauffeurs, licenseless peddlers, youths caught red-handed shooting craps or playing ball in the streets,—these are the men with whom the Night Court deals. But it is not the men we have come to see.

The women of the Night Court. Prodigal daughters! Between December, 1908, and December, 1909, no less than five thousand of them passed through the guarded door, under the blaze of the electric lights. There is never an hour, from nine at night until three in the morning, when the prisoners' bench in Jefferson Market Court is without its full quota of women. Old—prematurely old, and young—pitifully young; white and brown; fair and faded; sad and cynical; starved and prosperous; rag-draped and satin-bedecked; together they wait their turn at judgment.

Quietly moving back and forth before the prisoners' bench you see a woman, tall, graceful, black-gowned. She is the salaried probation officer, modern substitute for the old-time volunteer mission worker. The probation officer's serious blue eyes burn with no missionary zeal. There is no spark of sentimental pity in the keen gaze she turns on each new arrival.

When the bench is full of women the judge turns to her to inquire: "Anybody there you want, Miss Miner?"

Miss Miner usually shakes her head. She diagnoses her cases like a physician, and she wastes no time on incurables.

Once in a while, perhaps several times in the course of a night, Miss Miner touches a girl on the arm. At once the girl rises and follows the probation officer into an adjoining room. If she is what she appears, young in evil, if she has a story which rings true, a story of poverty and misfortune, rather than of depravity, she goes not back to the prisoners' bench. When her turn at judgment comes Miss Miner stands beside her, and in a low voice meant only for the judge, she tells the facts. The girl weeps as she listens. To hear one's troubles told is sometimes more terrible than to endure them.

Court adjourns at three in the morning, and this girl, with the others—if others have been claimed by the probation officer—goes out into the empty street, under the light of the tall tower, whose clock has begun all over again its monotonous race toward midnight. No policeman accompanies the group. The girls are under no manner of duress. They have promised to go home with Miss Miner, and they go. The night's adventure, entered into with dread, with callous indifference, or with thoughtless mirth, ends in a quiet bedroom and a pillow wet with tears.

Waverley House, as Miss Miner's home is known, has sheltered, during the past year, over three hundred girls. Out of that number one hundred and nineteen have returned to their homes, or are earning a living at useful work.

One hundred and nineteen saved out of five thousand prodigals! In point of numbers this is a melancholy showing, but in comparison with other efforts at rescue work it is decidedly encouraging.

Nothing quite like Waverley House has appeared in other American cities, but it is a type of detention home for girls which is developing logically out of the probation system. Delinquent girls under sixteen are now considered, in all enlightened communities, subjects for the Juvenile Court. They are hardly ever associated with older delinquents. But a girl over sixteen is likely to be committed to prison, and may be locked in cells with criminal and abandoned women of the lowest order. Waverley House is the first practical protest against this stupid and evil-encouraging policy.

The house, which stands a few blocks distant from the Night Court, was established and is maintained by the Probation Association of New York, consisting of the probation officers in many of the city courts, and of men and women interested in philanthropy and social reform. The District Attorney of New York County, Charles S. Whitman, is president of the Association, Maude E. Miner is its secretary, Mrs. Russell Sage, Miss Anne Morgan, Miss Mary Dreier, president of the New York Women's Trade Union League, Mrs. Richard Aldrich, formerly president of the Women's Municipal League, Andrew Carnegie, Edward T. Devine, head of New York's organized charities, Homer Folks, and Fulton Cutting are among the supporters of Waverley House. Miss Stella Miner is the capable and sympathetic superintendent of the house.

The place is in no sense a reformatory. It is an experiment station, a laboratory where the gravest and most baffling of all the diseases which beset society is being studied. Girls arrested for moral delinquency and paroled to probation officers are taken to Waverley House, where they remain, under closest study and searching inquiry, until the best means of disposing of them is devised. Some are sent to their homes, some to hospitals, some to institutions, some placed on long probation.

Maude E. Miner, who declined a chair of mathematics in a woman's college to work in the Night Court, is one of an increasing number of women who are attempting a great task. They are trying to solve a problem which has baffled the minds of the wisest since civilization dawned. They have set themselves to combat an evil fate which every year overtakes countless thousands of young girls, dragging them down to misery, disease, and death. At the magnitude of the effort these women have undertaken one stands appalled. Will they ever reach the heart of the problem? Can they ever hope to do more than reclaim a few individuals? This much did the missionaries before them.

"We could reclaim fully seventy-five per cent," declares Miss Miner, "if only we could find a way to begin nearer the beginning."

To begin the reform of any evil at the beginning, or near the beginning, instead of near the end is now regarded as an economy of effort. That is what educators are trying to do with juvenile delinquency; what physicians are doing with disease; what philanthropists are beginning to do with poverty.

Hardly any one has suggested that the social evil might have a cause, and that it might be possible to attack it at its source. Yet that any large number of girls enter upon such a horrible career, willingly, voluntarily, is unbelievable to one who knows anything of the facts. There must be strong forces at work on these girls, forces they find themselves entirely powerless to resist.

Miss Miner and her fellow probation officers are the visible signs of a very important movement among women to discover what these forces are. Meager, indeed, are the facts at hand. We have had, and we still have, in cities east and west, committees and societies and law and order leagues earnestly engaged in "stamping out" the evil. It is like trying to stamp out a fire constantly fed with inflammables and fanned by a strong gale. The protests of most of these leagues amount to little more than vain clamor against a thing which is not even distantly comprehended.

The personnel of these agencies organized to "stamp out" the evil differs little in the various cities. It is largely if not wholly masculine in character, and the evil is usually dealt with from the point of view of religion and morals. Women, when they appear in the matter at all, figure as missionaries, "prison angels," and the like. As evangelists to sinners women have been permitted to associate with their fallen sisters without losing caste. Likewise, when elderly enough, they have been allowed to serve on governing boards of "homes" and "refuges." Their activities were limited to rescue work. They might extend a hand to a repentant Magdalene. A Phryne they must not even be aware of. In other words, this evil as a subject of investigation and intelligent discussion among women was absolutely prohibited. It has ever been their Great Taboo.

Nevertheless, when eight million women, in practically every civilized country in the world, organized themselves into an International Council of Women, and began their remarkable survey of the social order in which they live, one of their first acts was to break the Great Taboo.

At early congresses of the International Council Miss Sadie American, Mrs. Kate Waller Barrett, Mrs. Elizabeth Grannis, among American delegates, Miss Elizabeth Janes of England, Miss Elizabeth Gad of Denmark, Dr. Agnes Bluhm of Germany, and others interested in the moral welfare of girls, urged upon the Council action against the "White Slave" traffic. No extensive argument was required to convince the members of the Council that the "White Slave" traffic and the whole subject of the moral degradation of women was a social phenomenon too long neglected by women.

These women declared with refreshing candor that it was about time that the social evil was dealt with intelligently, and if it was to be dealt with intelligently women must do the work. The fussy old gentlemen with white side whiskers and silk-stocking reformers and the other well meaning amateurs, who are engaged in "stamping out" the evil, deserve to be set aside. In their places the women propose to install social experts who shall deal scientifically with the problem.

The double standard of morals, accepted in fact if not in principle, in every community, and so rigidly applied that good women are actually forbidden to have any knowledge of their fallen sisters, was for the first time repudiated by a body of organized women. The arguments on which the double standard of morals is based was, for the first time, seriously scrutinized by women of intelligence and social importance. The desirability of the descent of property in legal paternal line seemed to these women a good enough reason for applying a rigid standard of morals to women. But they found reasons infinitely greater why the same rigid standard should be applied to men.

The International Council of Women and women's organizations in every country number among their members and delegates women physicians, and through these physicians they have been able to consider the social evil from an altogether new point of view. Certain very ugly facts, which touch the home and which intimately concern motherhood and the welfare of children, were brought forth—facts concerning infantile blindness, almost one-third of which is caused by excesses on the part of the fathers; facts concerning certain forms of ill health in married women, and the increase of sterility due to the spread of specific diseases among men. The horrible results to innocent women and children of these maladies, and their frightful prevalence,—seventy-five per cent of city men, according to reliable authority, being affected,—aroused in the women a sentiment of indignation and revolt. The International Council of Women put itself on record as protesting against the responsibility laid upon women, the unassisted task of preserving the purity of the race.

In the United States, women's clubs, women's societies, women's medical associations, special committees of women in many cities have courageously undertaken the study of this problem, intending by means of investigation and publicity to lay bare its sources and seek its remedy.

The sources of the evil are about the only phase of the problem which has never been adequately examined. It is true that we have suspected that the unsteady and ill-adjusted economic position of women furnished some explanation for its existence, but even now our information is vague and unsatisfactory.

A number of years ago, in 1888 to be exact, the Massachusetts Bureau of Labor Statistics made an interesting investigation. This was an effort to determine how far the entrance of women into the industrial world, usually under the disadvantage of low wages, was contributing to profligacy. The bureau gathered statistics of the previous occupations of nearly four thousand fallen women in twenty-eight American cities.

Of these unfortunates over eight hundred had worked in low-waged trades such as paper-box making, millinery, laundry work, rope and cordage making, cigar and cigarette making, candy packing, textile factory and shoe factory work.

About five hundred women had been garment workers, dressmakers, and seamstresses, but how far these were skilled or unskilled was not stated.

The department store, at that time little more than a sweat shop so far as wages and long hours of work were concerned, contributed one hundred and sixteen recruits to the list.

On the whole, these groups were what the investigators had expected to find.

There were two other large groups of prodigals, and these were entirely unexpected by the investigators. Of the 3,866 girls examined 1,236, or nearly thirty-two per cent, reported no previous occupation. The next largest group, 1,115, or nearly thirty per cent, had been domestic servants. The largest group of all had gone straight from their homes into lives of evil. A group nearly as large had gone directly from that occupation which is constantly urged upon women as the safest and most suitable means of earning their living—housework.

Now you may, if you want to drop the thing out of your mind as something too disagreeable to think about, infer from this that at least sixty-two per cent of those 3,866 women deserved their fate. Some of them were too lazy to work, and the rest preferred a life of soiled luxury to one of honest toil in somebody's nice kitchen. Apparently this was the view taken by the Massachusetts Bureau of Labor Statistics, because it never carried the investigation any farther. It never tried to find out why so many girls left their homes to enter evil lives. It never tried to find out why housework was a trade dangerous to morals.

Fortunately it did occur to the women's organizations to examine the facts a little more carefully. In this article I am going to take you over some of the ground they have covered and show you where their investigations have led them.

South Chicago is a fairly good place to begin. Its ugliness and forlornness can be matched in the factory section of almost any large city. South Chicago is dominated by its steel mills,—enormous drab structures, whose every crevice leaks quivering heat and whose towering chimneys belch forth unceasingly a pall of ashes and black smoke. The steel workers and their families live as a rule in two and three family houses, built of wood, generally unpainted, and always dismally utilitarian as to architectural details.

In South Chicago, four years ago, there was not such a thing as a park, or a playground, or a recreation center. One lone social settlement was just seeking a home for itself. There were public schools, quite imposing buildings. But these were closed and locked and shuttered for the day as soon as the classes were dismissed.

In a certain neighborhood of South Chicago there lived a number of young girls, healthy, high-spirited, and full of that joy of life which always must be fed—if not with wholesome food, then husks. For parents these girls had fathers who worked twelve hours a day in the steel mills and came home at night half dead from lack of rest and sleep; and mothers who toiled equally long hours in the kitchen or over the washtub and were too weary to know or care what the girls did after school. For social opportunity the girls had "going downtown." Perhaps you know what that means. It means trooping up and down the main street in lively groups, lingering near a saloon where a phonograph is bawling forth a cheerful air, visiting a nickel theater, or looking on at a street accident or a fight.

About this time the panic of 1907 descended suddenly on South Chicago and turned out of the steel mills hundreds of boys and men. Some of these were mere lads, sixteen to eighteen years old. They, too, went "downtown." There was no other place for them to go.

As a plain matter of cause and effect, what kind of a moral situation would you expect to evolve out of these materials?

Eventually a woman probation officer descended on the neighborhood. Many of the girls whom she rescued from conditions not to be described in these pages were so young that their cases were tried in the Juvenile Court. Most of them went to rescue homes, reformatories, or hospitals. Some slipped away permanently, in all human probability to join the never-ceasing procession of prodigals.

This is what "no previous occupation" really means in nine cases out of ten. It means that the girl lived in a home which was no home at all, according to the ideals of you who read these pages.

Sometimes it was a cellar where the family slept on rags. Sometimes it was an attic where ten or twelve people herded in a space not large enough for four. Some of these homes were never warm in winter. In some there was hardly any furniture. But we need not turn to these extreme cases in order to show that in many thousands of American homes virtue and innocence are lost because no facilities for preserving them are possible.

Annie Donnelly's case will serve as further illustration. Annie Donnelly's father was a sober, decent man of forty, who drove a cab from twelve to fifteen hours every day in the year, Sundays and holidays included. Before the cab drivers' strike, a year or two ago, Donnelly's wages were fifteen dollars a week, and the family lived in a four-room tenement, for which they paid $5.50 a week. You pay rent weekly to a tenement landlord. Since the strike wages are fourteen dollars a week for cab drivers, and this fall the Donnelly rent went up fifty cents a week.

The Donnelly tenement was a very desirable one, having but a single dark, windowless room, instead of two or three, like most New York tenements. There were three children younger than Annie, who was fourteen. The family of five made a fairly tight fit in four rooms. Nevertheless, when the rent went up to six dollars Mrs. Donnelly took a lodger. She had to or move and, remember, this was a desirable tenement because it had only one dark room.

One day the lodger asked Annie if she did not want to go to a dance. Annie did want to, but she knew very well that her mother would not allow her to go. Once a year the entire family, including the baby, attended the annual ball of the Coachman's Union, but that was another thing. Annie was too young for dances her mother declared.

The Donnellys paid for and occupied three rooms, but they really lived in one room, the others being too filled with beds to be habitable except at night. The kitchen, the one living-room, was uncomfortably crowded at meal times. At no time was there any privacy. It was impossible for Annie to receive her girl friends in her home. Every bit of her social life had to be lived out of the house.

When the weather was warm she often stayed in the street, walking about with the other girls or sitting on a friend's doorstep, until ten or even eleven o'clock at night. Every one does the same in a crowded city neighborhood. There comes a time in a girl's life when this sort of thing becomes monotonous. The time came when Annie found sitting on the doorstep and talking about nothing in particular entirely unbearable. So one balmy, inviting spring night she slipped away and went with the lodger to a dance.

The dance hall occupied a big, low-ceiled basement room in a building which was a combination of saloon and tenement house. In one of the front windows of the basement room was hung a gaudy placard: "The Johnny Sullivan Social Club."

The lodger paid no admission, but he deposited ten cents for a hat check, after which they went in. About thirty couples were swinging in a waltz, their forms indistinctly seen through the clouds of dust which followed them in broken swirls through air so thick that the electric lights were dimmed. Somewhere in the obscurity a piano did its noisiest best with a popular waltz tune.

In a few minutes Annie forgot her timidity, forgot the dust and the heat and the odor of stale beer, and was conscious only that the music was piercing, sweet, and that she was swinging in blissful time to it. When the waltz tune came to an end at last the dancers stopped, gasping with the heat, and swaying with the giddiness of the dance.

"Come along," said the lodger, "and have a beer." When Annie shook her head he exclaimed: "Aw, yuh have to. The Sullivans gets the room rent free, but the fellers upstairs has bar privileges, and yuh have to buy a beer off of 'em oncet in a while. They've gotta get something out of it."

I do not know whether Annie yielded then or later. But ultimately she learned to drink beer for the benefit of philanthropists who furnish dance halls rent free, and also to quench a thirst rendered unbearable by heat and dust. They seldom open the windows in these places. Sometimes they even nail the windows down. A well-ventilated room means poor business at the bar.

Annie Donnelly became a dance-hall habitué. Not because she was viciously inclined; not because she was abnormal; but because she was decidedly normal in all her instincts and desires.

Besides, it is easy to get the dance-hall habit. At almost every dance invitations to other dances are distributed with a lavish hand. These invitations, on cheap printed cards, are scattered broadcast over chairs and benches, on the floors, and even on the bar itself. They are locally known as "throw-aways." Here are a few specimens, from which you may form an idea of the quality of dance halls, and the kind of people—almost the only kind of people—who offer pleasure to the starved hearts of girls like Annie Donnelly. These are actual invitations picked up in an East Side dance hall by the head worker of the New York College Settlement:

"Second annual reception and ball, given by Jibo and Jack, at New Starlight Hall, 143 Suffolk Street, December 25. Music by our favorite. Gents ticket 25 cents, Ladies 15 cents."

"Don't miss the ball given by Joe the Greaser, and Sam Rosenstock, at Odd Fellows' Hall, January 29th."

"See the Devil Dance at the Reception and Ball given by Max Pascal and Little Whity, at Tutonia Hall, Tuesday evening, November 20th."

"Reception and Ball given by two well known friends, Max Turk and Sam Lande, better known as Mechuch, at Appollo Hall, Chrystmas night. Floor manager, Young Louis. Ticket admit one 25 cents."

In addition to these private affairs which are arranged purely for the profit of "Jibo and Jack" and their kind, men who make a living in this and in yet more unspeakable ways, there are hundreds of saloon dance halls, not only in New York, but in other cities. These are simply annexes to drinking places, and people are not welcome there unless they drink. No admission is charged.

There are also numberless dancing academies. Dancing lessons are given four nights in the week, as a rule, and the dancing public buys admission the other three nights and on Sunday afternoons. Some dancing academies, even in tenement house quarters, are reputable institutions, but to most of them the lowest of the low, both men and women, resort. There, as in the dance halls, the "White Slaver" plies his trade, and the destroyer of womanliness lays his nets.

Annie Donnelly soon learned the ways of all these places. She learned to "spiel." You spiel by holding hands with your partner at arms' length, and whirling round and round at the highest possible speed. The girl's skirts are blown immodestly high, which is a detail. The effect of the spiel is a species of drunkenness which creates an instant demand for liquor, and a temporary recklessness of the possible results of strong drink.

Annie also learned to dance what is known as the "half time," or the "part time" waltz. This is a dance accompanied by a swaying and contorting of the hips, most indecent in its suggestion. It is really a very primitive form of the dance, and probably goes back to the pagan harvest and bacchic festivals. You may see traces of it in certain crude peasant dances in out-of-the-way corners of Europe. Now they teach it to immigrant girls in New York dancing academies and dance halls, and tell the girls that it is the American fashion of waltzing.

Annie Donnelly's destruction was accomplished in less than a year. It was the more rapid because of the really superior character of her home. There was nothing the matter with that home except that it was too crowded for the family to stay in it. Father and mother were respectable, hard-working people, and after Annie's first real misadventure, into which she fell almost unwittingly, she was afraid to go home.

The dance hall, as we have permitted it to exist, practically unregulated, has become a veritable forcing house of vice and crime in every city in the United States. It is a straight chute down which, every year, thousands of girls descend to the way of the prodigal. No one has counted their number. All we know of the unclassed is that they exist, apparently in ever-increasing masses.

It was estimated in Chicago, not long ago, that there were about six thousand unfortunate women known to the police, and something like twenty thousand who managed to avoid actual collision with the law. That is, the latter lived quietly and plied their trade on the street so unostentatiously that they were seldom arrested. How many of these unfortunates reached the streets through the dance hall is impossible to know—we only know that it constantly recruits the ranks of the unclassed.

The dance hall may be in the rear of a saloon, or over a saloon; it may occupy a vacant store building, or a large loft. Somewhere in its immediate vicinity there is a saloon. A dance lasts about five minutes, and the interval between dances is from ten to twenty minutes. Waiters circle among the dancers, importuning them to drink. The dance hall without a bar, or some source of liquid supply, does not often exist, except as it has been established by social workers to offset the influence of the commercial dance hall.

Some dance halls are small and wretchedly lighted. Others are large and pretentious. Some of them have direct connections with Raines Law hotels and their prototypes. Of hardly a single dance hall can a good word be said. They are almost entirely in the hands of the element lowest in society, in business, and in politics.

From the old-fashioned German family picnic park to Coney Island in New York, Revere Beach in Boston, The White City in Chicago, Savin Rock in New Haven, and their like, is a far cry.

Some of these summer parks try to keep their amusements clean and decent, and some, notably Euclid Park, Cleveland, succeed. But drink and often worse evils are characteristic of most of them. There are parts of Coney Island where no beer is sold, where the vaudeville and the moving pictures are clean and wholesome, where dancing is orderly. But the nearest side street has its "tough joint." The same thing is true of the big summer resorts of other cities.

The dance hall, both winter and summer types, have had a deteriorating effect upon the old-fashioned dancing academy. Formerly these were respectable establishments where people paid for dancing lessons. Now they are a mélange of dancing classes and public entertainments. The dancing masters, unable to compete with the dance hall proprietors, have been obliged to transfer many of the dance hall features to their establishments.

Oddly enough it is rather an unusual thing for a girl to be escorted to a dance in any kind of a dance hall. The girls go alone, with a friend, or with a group of girls. The exceptional girl, who is attended by a man, must dance with him, or if she accepts another partner, she must ask his permission. An escort is deemed a somewhat doubtful advantage. Those who go unattended are always sure of partners. Often they meet "fellows" they know, or have seen on the streets. Introductions are not necessary. Even if a girl is unacquainted with any "fellows," if she possesses slight attractions, she is still sure of partners.

The amount of money spent by working girls for dance-hall admissions is considerable. A girl receiving six or seven dollars a week in wages thinks nothing of reserving from fifty cents to a dollar for dancing.

In going about among the dance halls one is struck with the number of black-gowned girls. The black gown might almost be called the mark of the dance-hall habitué, the girl who is dance mad and who spends all her evenings going from one resort to another. She wears black because light evening gowns soil too rapidly for a meager purse to renew.

An indispensable feature of the dancing academy is the "spieler." This is a young man whose strongest recommendation is that he is a skilled and untiring dancer. The business of the spieler is to look after the wall-flowers. He seeks the girl who sits alone against the wall; he dances with her and brings other partners to her. It would not do for a place to get the reputation of slowness. The girls go back to those dance halls where they have had the best time.

The spieler is not uncommonly a worthless fellow; sometimes he is a sinister creature, who lives on the earnings of unfortunate girls. The dance hall, and especially the dancing academy, because of the youth of many of its patrons, is a rich harvest field for men of this type.

Beginning with the saloon dance hall, unquestionably the most brutally evil type, and ending with the dancing academy, where some pretense of chaperonage is made, the dance hall is a vicious institution. It is vicious because it takes the most natural of all human instincts, the desire of men and women to associate together, and distorts that instinct into evil. The boy and girl of the tenement-dwelling classes, especially where the foreign element is strong, do not share their pleasures in the normal, healthy fashion of other young people. The position of the women of this class is not very high. Men do not treat her as an equal. They woo her for a wife. In the same manner the boy does not play with the girl. The relations between young people very readily degenerate. The dance hall, with its curse of drink, its lack of chaperonage and of reasonable discipline, helps this along its downward course.

Sadie Greenbaum, as I will call her, was an exceptionally attractive young Jewish girl of fifteen when I first knew her. Although not remarkably bright in school she was industrious, and aspired to be a stenographer. She was not destined to realize her ambition. As soon as she finished grammar school she was served, so to speak, with her working papers. The family needed additional income, not to meet actual living expenses, for the Greenbaums were not acutely poor, but in order that the only son of the family might go to college. Max was seventeen, a selfish, overbearing prig of a boy, fully persuaded of his superiority over his mother and sisters, and entirely willing that the family should toil unceasingly for his advancement.

Sadie accepted the situation meekly, and sought work in a muslin underwear factory. At eighteen she was earning seven dollars a week as a skilled operator on a tucking machine. She sat down to her work every morning at eight o'clock, and for four hours watched with straining eyes a tucking foot which carried eight needles and gathered long strips of muslin into eight fine tucks, at the rate of four thousand stitches a minute. The needles, mere flickering flashes of white light above the cloth, had to be watched incessantly lest a thread break and spoil the continuity of a tuck. When you are on piece wages you do not relish stopping the machine and doing over a yard or two of work.

So Sadie watched the needle assiduously, and ignored the fact that her head ached pretty regularly, and she was generally too weary when lunch time came to enjoy the black bread and pickles which, with a cup of strong tea, made her noon meal. After lunch she again sat down to her machine and watched the needles gallop over the cloth.

At the end of each year Sadie Greenbaum had produced for the good of the community four miles of tucked muslin. In return, the community had rendered her back something less than three hundred dollars, for the muslin underwear trade has its dull seasons, and you do not earn seven dollars every week in the year.

Each week Sadie handed her pay envelope unopened to her mother. The mother bought all Sadie's clothes and gave her food and shelter. Consequently, Sadie's unceasing vigil of the needle paid for her existence and purchased also the proud consciousness of an older brother who would one day own a doctor's buggy and a social position.

The one joy of this girl's life, in fact all the real life she lived, was dancing. Regularly every Saturday night Sadie and a girl friend, Rosie by name, put on their best clothes and betook themselves to Silver's Casino, a huge dance hall with small rooms adjoining, where food and much drink were to be had.

There was a good floor at Silver's and a brass band to dance to. It was great! The girls never lacked partners, and they made some very agreeable acquaintances.

In the dressing room, between dances, all the girls exchanged conversation, views on fashions, confidences about the young men and other gossip. Some of the girls were nice and some, it must be admitted, were "tough." What was the difference? The tough girls, with their daring humor, their cigarettes, their easy manners, and their amazingly smart clothes, furnished a sort of spice to the affair.

Sadie and Rosie sometimes discussed the tough girls, and the conversation nearly always ended with one remarking: "Well, if they don't get anything else out of livin', look at the clothes they put on their backs."

Perhaps you can understand that longing for pretty gowns, perhaps you can even sympathize with it. Of course, if you have a number of other resources, you can keep the dress hunger in its proper place. But if you have nothing in your existence but a machine—at which you toil for others' benefit—

Sadie and Rosie continued to spend their Saturday evenings and their Sunday evenings at Silver's Casino. At first they went home together promptly at midnight. After midnight these casino dance halls change their character. Often professional "pace makers" are introduced, men and women of the lowest class, who are paid to inspire the other dancers to lewd conduct. These wretched people are immodestly clothed, and they perform immodest or very tough dances. They are usually known as "Twisters," a descriptive title. When they make their appearance the self-respecting dancers go home, and a much looser element comes in. The pace becomes a rapid one. Manners are free, talk is coarse, laughter is incessant. The bar does a lively business. The dancing and the revels go on until daylight.

The first time Sadie and Rosie allowed themselves to be persuaded to stay at Silver's after midnight they were rather horrified by the abandoned character of the dancing, the reckless drinking, and the fighting which resulted in several men being thrown out. The second time they were not quite so horrified, but they decided not to stay so late another time. Then came a great social event, the annual "mask and shadow dance" of a local political organization. Sadie and Rosie attended.

A "mask and shadow dance" is as important a function to girls of Sadie's and Rosie's class as a cotillion is to girls of your class. Such affairs are possible only in large dance halls, and to do them impressively costs the proprietor some money. The guests rent costumes and masks and appear in very gala fashion indeed. They dance in the rays of all kinds of colored lights thrown upon them from upper galleries. During part of a waltz the dancers are bathed in rose-colored lights, which change suddenly to purple, a blue, or a green. Some very weird effects are made, the lights being so manipulated that the dancers' shadows are thrown, greatly magnified, on walls and floor. At intervals a rain of bright-colored confetti pours down from above. The scene becomes bacchanalian. Color, light, music, confetti, the dance, together combine to produce an intense and voluptuous intoxication which the revelers deepen with drink.

The events of the latter part of that night were very vague in Sadie's memory when she awoke late the next morning. She remembered that she had tolerated familiarities which had been foreign to her experience heretofore, and that she had been led home by some friendly soul, at daylight, almost helpless from liquor.

Frightened, haunted by half-ashamed memories of that dance, Sadie spoiled a good bit of her work on Monday morning. The forewoman descended on her with a torrent of coarse abuse, whereupon Sadie rose suddenly from her machine, and in a burst of hysterical profanity and tears rushed out of the factory, vowing never to return. There was only one course, she decided, for her to take, and she took it.

"Sadie, why did you do it?" wailed Rosie the next time they met.

"It's better than the factory," said Sadie.

Tucking muslin underwear is dull work, but it is, in most ways, a more agreeable task than icing cakes in a St. Louis biscuit factory. All day Edna M—— stood over a tank filled with thick chocolate icing. The table beside Edna's tank was kept constantly supplied with freshly baked "lady-fingers," and these in delicate handfuls Edna seized and plunged into the hot ooze of the chocolate. Her arms, up to the elbows, went into the black stuff, over and over again all day. At noon, over their lunch, the girls talked of their recreations, their clothes, their "fellows."

Edna had not very much to contribute to the girls' stories of gayety and adventure. She led a quieter existence than most of the other girls, although her leanings were toward lively pleasures. She was engaged to a young man who worked in a foundry and who was steady and perhaps rather too serious. He was very jealous of Edna and exacted a stern degree of fidelity of her.

Before her engagement Edna had gone to a decent dancing school and dearly loved the dance. Now she was not permitted to dance with any one but her prospective husband. The bright talk at the noon hour made Edna feel that she was a very poor sport.

The young man's work in the foundry alternated weekly between day and night duty. It occurred to Edna that her young man could not possibly know what she did with those evenings he remained in the foundry. If she chose to go with a group of girls to a dance hall, what harm? The long years of married life stretched themselves out somewhat drably to Edna. She decided to have a good time beforehand.

This girl from now on literally lived a double life. Evenings of the weeks her young man was free from the foundry, she spent at home with him, placidly playing cards, reading aloud, or talking. On the other evenings she danced, madly, incessantly. Her mother thought she spent the evenings with her girl friends. The dancing, plus the deceit, soon had its effect on Edna. She began to visit livelier and livelier resorts, curious to see all phases of pleasure.

Suspicion entered into the mind of her affianced. He questioned her; she lied, and he was unconvinced. A night or two later the young man stayed away from the foundry and followed Edna to a suburban resort. She went, as usual, with a group of girls, but their men were waiting for them near the door of the open-air dancing pavilion. Standing just outside, the angry lover watched the girl "spiel" round and round with a man of doubtful respectability. Soon she joined a noisy, beer-drinking group at one of the tables, and her behavior grew more and more reckless. Finally, amid laughter, she and another girl performed a suggestive dance together.

Walking swiftly up to her, the outraged foundryman grasped her by the shoulder, called her a name she did not yet deserve, and threw her violently to the floor. A terrific fight followed, and the police soon cleared the place.

Edna did not dare go home. An over-rigid standard of morals, an over-repressive policy, an over-righteous judgment, plus a mother ignorant of the facts of life, plus a girl's longing for joy—the sum of these equaled ruin in Edna's case.

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CHAPTER VIII

WOMAN'S HELPING HAND TO THE PRODIGAL DAUGHTER

Annie, Sadie, Edna, thousands of girls like them, girls of whom almost identical stories might be told, help to swell the long procession of prodigals every succeeding year. They joined that procession ignorantly because they thirsted for pleasure. Their days were without interest, their minds were unfurnished with any resources. At fourteen most of them left public school. Reading and writing are about as much intellectual accomplishments as the school gives them, and the work waiting for them in factory, mill, or department store is rarely of a character to increase their intelligence.

Ask a girl, "Why do you go to the dance hall? Why don't you stay home evenings?" Nine times in ten her answer will be: "What should I do with myself, sitting home and twirling my fingers?"

If you suggest reading, she will reply: "You can't be reading all the time." In other words, there is no intellectual impulse, but instead an instinct for action.

The crowded tenement, the city slum, an oppressive system of ill-paid labor, these are evils which a gradually developing social conscience must one day eliminate. Their tenure will not be disturbed to-day, to-morrow, or next day. Their evil influence can be offset, in some measure, by a recognition on the part of the community of a debt,—a debt to youth.

The joy of life, inherent in every young creature, including the young human creature, seeks expression in play, in merriment, and will not be denied.

The oldest, the most persistent, the most attractive, the most satisfying expression of the joy of life is the dance. Other forms of recreation come in for brief periods, but their vogue is always transitory. The roller skating craze, for example, waxed, waned, and disappeared. Moving pictures and the nickelodeon have had their day, and are now passing. The charm, the passion, the lure of the dance remains perennial. It never wholly disappears. It always returns.

In New York City alone there are three hundred saloon dance halls. Three hundred dens of evil where every night in the year gallons of liquid damnation are forced down the throats of unwilling drinkers! Where the bodies and souls of thousands of girls are annually destroyed, because the young are irresistibly drawn toward joy, and because we, all of us, good people, busy people, indifferent people, unseeing people, have permitted joy to become commercialized, have turned it into a commodity to be used for money profit by the worst elements in society. Could a more inverted scheme of things have been devised in a madhouse?

New York is by no means unique. Every city has its dance hall problem; every small town its girl and boy problem; every country-side its tragedy of the girl who, for relief from monotony, goes to the city and never returns.

It is strange that nowhere, until lately, in city, town, or country, has it occurred to any one that the community owed anything to this insatiable thirst for joy.

Consider, for instance, the age-long indifference of the oldest of all guardians of virtue, the Christian Church. To the demand for joy the evangelical church has returned the stern reply: "To play cards, to go to the theater, above all, to dance, is wicked." The Methodist Church, for one, has this baleful theory written in its book of discipline, and persistent efforts on the part of enlightened clergy and lay members have utterly failed to expurgate it. The Catholic, Episcopalian, and Lutheran churches utter no such strictures, but in effect they defend the theory that joy, if not in itself an evil, at least is no necessity of life.

To meet the growing social discontent, the increasing indifference to old forms of religion, the open dissatisfaction with religious organizations which had degenerated into clubs for rich men, there was developed some years ago in America the "institutional church." This was an honest effort to give to church members, and to those likely to become church members, opportunity for social and intellectual diversion. Parish houses and settlements were established, and these were furnished with splendid gymnasiums, club rooms, committee rooms, auditoriums for concerts and lectures, kitchens for cooking lessons, and provision besides for basketry, sewing, and embroidery classes. These are all good, and so are the numberless reading, debating, and study clubs good, as far as they go. But what a pitifully short way they go! They have built up congregations somewhat, but they have made not the slightest impression on the big social problem. The reason is plain. The appeal of the institutional church is too intellectual. It reaches only that portion of the masses who stand least in need of social opportunity.

To this accusation the church, man instituted and man controlled since the beginning of the Christian Era, replies that it does all that can be done for the uplift of humanity. That the church seems to be losing its hold on the masses of people is attributed to a general drift of degenerate humanity towards atheism and unbelief.

The people, the great world of people,—what a field for the church to work in, if it only chose! The great obstacle is that the church (leaving out the institutional church), on Sunday a vital, living force, is content to exist all the other days in the week merely as a building. Six days and more than half six evenings in the week the churches stand empty and deserted. Simply from the point of view of material economy this waste in church property, reduced to dollars and cents, would appear deplorable. From the point of view of social economy, reduced to terms of humanity, the waste is heartbreaking.

What would happen if something should loose those churches, or, at any rate, their big Sunday-school rooms and their ample basements from this icy exclusiveness, this week-day aloofness from humanity? Can you picture them at night, streaming with light, gay with music, filled with dancing crowds?—not crowds from homes of wealth and comfort, but crowds from streets and byways; crowds for which, at present, the underworld spreads its nets? The great mass of the people, packed in dreary tenements, slaves of machinery by day, slaves of their own starved souls by night, must go somewhere for relaxation and forgetfulness. What would happen if the church should invite them, not to pray but to play?

Some of the results might be a decrease in vice, in drinking, gambling, and misery. At least we may infer as much from the success of the occasional experiments which have been tried. We have a few examples to prove that human nature is not the low, brutish thing it has too often been described. It does not invariably choose wrong ways, but, on the contrary, when a choice between right ways and wrong ways is presented, the right is almost always preferred.

A year ago in Chicago there was witnessed a spectacle which, for utter brutality and blindness of heart, I hope never to see duplicated. Chicago had for some time been in the midst of a vigorous crusade against organized vice. Too long neglected by the authorities and the public, the so-called levee districts of the city had fallen into the hands of grafting police officials, who, working with the lowest of degraded of men, had created an open and most brazen vice syndicate. Without going into details, it is enough to say that conditions finally became so scandalous that all Chicago rose in horror and rebellion. The police department was thoroughly overhauled, and a new chief appointed who undertook in all earnestness to suppress the worst features of the system. He had no new weapons it is true, and he probably had no notion that he could make any impression on the evil of prostitution. But he might have restored external decency and order, and he might possibly have prepared the way for some scientific examination of the problem. But a thing happened: one of those shocking blunders we too often let happen. The efforts of the chief of police were set back, because of that blunder, no one can tell how far. A new hysteria of vice and disorder dates from the hour the blunder was made.

In October of 1909 "Gypsy" Smith, a noted evangelical preacher of the itinerant order, was holding revival meetings in an armory on the South Side of Chicago. With mistaken zeal this man announced that he was going down into the South Side Levee and with one effort would reclaim every one of the wretched inhabitants. He invited his immense congregation to follow him there, and assist in the greatest crusade against vice the world had ever seen.

In Chicago, as in other cities, no procession or parade is allowed to march without permission from police headquarters. To the sorrow of all those who believed that reform had really begun, Chief of Police Steward issued a permit to "Gypsy" Smith. It is probable that the chief feared the effect of a refusal. To lift up the fallen has ever been one of the functions of religious bodies. Before issuing the permit, it is said that he used all his powers of persuasion against the parade.

By orders from headquarters every house in the district was closed, shuttered, and pitch dark on the night of the parade. Every door was locked, and the most complete silence reigned within. It was into a city of silence that the procession of nearly five thousand men, women, and young people of both sexes marched on that October midnight. In the glare of red fire and flaming torches, to the confused blare of many Salvation Army brass bands, the quavering of hymn tunes, including the classic, "Where Is My Wandering Boy To-night," and the constant explosion of photographers' flashlights, the long procession stumbled and jostled its way through streets that gave back for answer darkness and silence.

But afterwards! The affair had been widely advertised, and it drew a throng of spectators, not only from every quarter of the city, but from every suburb and surrounding country town. Young men brought their sweethearts, their sisters, to see the "show." As "Gypsy" Smith's procession wound its noisy way out of the district, and back into the armory, this great mob of people surged into the streets pruriently eager to watch the awakening of the levee. It came. Lights flashed up in almost every house. The women appeared at the windows and even in the street. Saloon doors were flung open. The sound of pianos and phonographs rose above the clamor of the mob. Pandemonium broke loose as the crowds flung themselves into the saloons and other resorts. The police had to beat people back from the doors with their clubs. A riot, an orgy, impossible to describe, impossible to forget, ensued. Many of those who took part in it had never been in such a district before.

This horrible scene somehow typified to my mind the whole blind, chaotic, senseless attitude which society has preserved toward the most baffling of all its problems. Nothing done to prevent the evil, because no one knew what to do. After the evil was an established fact, after the hearts of the victims were thoroughly hardened, after the last hope of return had perished, then a "vice crusade"—led by a man!

Another scene witnessed about the same time seems to me to typify the new attitude which society—led by women—is assuming towards its problem. It was in the large kindergarten room of one of the oldest of Chicago's social centers,—the Ely Bates Settlement. A group of little Italian girls, peasant clad in the red and green colors of their native land, swung around the room at a lively pace singing the familiar "Santa Lucia." As the song ended the children suddenly broke into the maddest of dances, a tarantella. Led by a graceful young girl, one of the settlement workers, they danced with the joyous abandon of youthful spirits untrammeled, ending the dance with a chorus of happy laughter.

This was only one group of many hundreds in every quarter of Chicago,—in schools, settlements, kindergartens, and other centers,—who were rehearsing for the third of the annual play festivals given out of doors each year in Chicago. The festivals are held in the most spacious of the seventeen wonderful public gardens and playgrounds established of late throughout the city. Lasting all day, this annual carnival of play is shared by school children, working girls and boys, and young men and women. In the morning the children play and perform their costume dances. In the afternoon the fields are given up to athletic sports of older children, and in the evening young men and women, of all nationalities, many wearing their old-world peasant dresses, revive the plays and the dances of their native lands. Tens of thousands view the beautiful spectacle, which each year excites more interest and assumes an added importance in the civic life of Chicago.

Each of the large parks in Chicago's system is provided with a municipal dance hall, spacious buildings with perfect floors, good light, and ventilation. Any group of young people are at liberty to secure a hall, rent free, for dancing parties. The city imposes only one condition,—that the dances be chaperoned by park supervisors. Beautifully decorated with growing plants from the park greenhouses these municipal dance halls are scenes of gayety almost every night in the year. Park restaurants in connection with the halls furnish good food at low prices. Of course no liquor is sold. Nobody wants it. This is proved by the fact that saloon dance halls in the neighborhood of the parks have been deserted by their old patrons.

Women have recognized the debt to youth and the joy of life, and they are preparing to pay it.

In this latest form of social service they have entered a battlefield where the powers of righteousness have ever fought a losing fight. Men have grappled with the social evil without success. They have labored to discover a substitute for the saloon, and they have failed. They have tried to suppress the dance hall and they have failed. They have made laws against evil resorts, and they have sent agents of the police to enforce their laws, but to no effect.

The failure of the men does not dishearten or discourage the women who have taken up the work. They believe that they have discovered an altogether new way in which to fight the social evil.

They propose to turn against it its own most powerful weapons. The joy of life is to be fed with proper food instead of poison. Girls and young men are to be offered a chance to escape the nets stretched for them by the underworld. In many cities women's clubs and women's societies are establishing on a small scale amusement and recreation centers for young people. In New York Miss Virginia Potter, niece of the late Bishop Potter, and Miss Potter's colleagues in the Association of Working Girls' Clubs, have opened a public dance hall. The use of the large gymnasium of the Manhattan Trade School for Girls was secured, and every Saturday evening, from eight until eleven, young men and women come in and dance to excellent music, under the instruction, if they need it, of a skilled dancing-master. A small fee is charged, partly to defray expenses, and partly to attract a class of people who disdain philanthropy and settlements. The experiment is new, but it is undoubtedly successful. As many as two hundred couples have been admitted in an evening. In half a dozen cities women's clubs and women's committees are at work on this matter of establishing amusement and recreation centers for young people. In New York a Committee on Amusement and Vacation Resources of Working Girls has for its president a social worker of many years, Mrs. Charles M. Israels. Associated with the committee are many other well-known social economists,—women of wealth and influence who have given years to the service of working girls. The committee began its work by a scientific investigation into the dance halls of New York, the summer parks and picnic grounds in the outlying districts, and of the summer excursion boats which ply up and down the Hudson River and Long Island Sound. The revelations made by this investigation, carried on under the supervision of Miss Julia Schoenfeld, were terrible enough. They were made to appear still more terrible when it was known that men of the highest social and commercial standing were profiting hugely from the most vicious forms of amusement. A state senator is one of the largest stockholders in Coney Island resorts of bad character. An ex-governor of the State controls a popular excursion boat, on which staterooms are rented by the hour, for immoral purposes no one can possibly doubt. The women of the committee submitted the findings of their investigators to the managers of these amusement places and to the directors of the steamboat lines, and in many instances reforms have been promised. The point is that a committee of women had to finance an investigation to show these business men the conditions which were adding to their wealth, and into which they had never even inquired.

Another investigation made by the committee revealed the meagerness of the provision made by churches, settlements, and business establishments for working girls' vacations. There are, in round numbers, four hundred thousand working women in Greater New York. Of these, something like three hundred thousand are unmarried girls between the ages of fourteen and thirty. In all, only 6,874 of these young toilers, who earn on an average six dollars a week, are provided with vacation outings. They are usually given vacations, with or without pay, but they spend the idle time at Coney Island, on excursion boats, or in the dance hall.

Of the 1,257 churches and synagogues of New York, only six report organized vacation work for girls and women. Of the twenty or more large department stores, employing thousands of women, only three have vacation houses in the country. Of the hundred or more social settlements in New York only fifteen provide summer homes. There are several vacation societies which do good work with limited resources, but they are able to care for comparatively few. We have heard much of fresh air work for children, and we can afford to hear more. But that the fresh air work for young girls and women who toil long hours in factory and shop must be extended, this committee's investigation definitely establishes.

The first practical work of the committee, after the investigation of amusement and recreation places, was a bill introduced into the State Legislature providing for the licensing and regulation of public dancing academies, prohibiting the sale of liquor in such establishments, and holding the proprietor responsible for indecent dancing and improper behavior.

Against the bitter opposition of the dancing academy proprietors the bill became a law and went into effect in September, 1909. Almost immediately it was challenged on constitutional grounds. The committee promptly introduced another bill, this one to regulate dance halls. This bill, which passed the legislature and is now a law, aims to wipe out the saloon dance hall absolutely, and so to regulate the sale of liquor in all dancing places that the drink evil will be cut down to a minimum. The license fee of fifty dollars a year will eliminate the lowest, cheapest resorts, and a rigid system of inspection will not only go far towards preserving good order, but will do away with the wretchedly dirty, ill-smelling, unsanitary fire traps in which many halls are located. The dance-hall proprietor who encourages or even tolerates "tough" dancing, or who admits to the floor "White Slavers," procurers, or persons of open immorality, will be liable to forfeiture of his license.

The committee has done more than try to reform existing dance halls. It has taken steps to establish, in neighborhoods where evil resorts abound, attractive dance halls, where a decent standard of conduct is combined with all the best features of the evil places—good floors, lively music, bright lights. Two corporations have been organized for the maintenance, in various parts of the city, of model dance halls, and one hall has already been opened. The patrons of the model dance hall do not know that it is a social experiment paid for by a committee of women. It is run exactly like any public dancing place, only in an orderly fashion.

Every extension of use of public places, schools, parks, piers, as recreation places for young people between fifteen and twenty is encouraged and supported by the committee. Already two public schools have organized dancing classes, and several settlements have thrown open their dances to the public where formerly they were attended only by settlement club members.

By helping working girls to find cheap vacation homes in the country, and by establishing vacation banks to help the girls save for their summer outings, the committee hopes to discourage some of the haphazard picnic park dissipation. In summer many trades are slack, girls are idle, and out of sheer boredom they hang around the parks seeking amusement. It is only a theory, perhaps, but Mrs. Israels and the others on her committee believe that if many of these girls knew that a country vacation were within the possibilities, they would gladly save money towards it. At present the vacation facilities of working girls in large cities are small. In New York, where at least three hundred thousand girls and women earn their bread, only about six thousand are helped to summer vacations in the country. What these women are doing now on a small scale, experimentally, will soon be adopted, as their children's playgrounds, their kindergartens, their vacation schools, and other enterprises have been adopted, by the municipalities. Their probation officers, long paid out of club treasuries, have already been transferred to many cities, east and west. Soon municipal dance halls, municipal athletic grounds, municipal amusement and recreation centers for all ages and all classes will be provided.

Already New York is preparing for such a campaign. The newly-appointed Parks Commissioner, Charles B. Stover, looking over his office force, dismissed one secretary whose function seemed largely ornamental, and diverted his salary of four thousand dollars to recreation purposes for young people. Commissioner Stover desires the appointment of a city officer who shall be a Supervisor of Recreations, a man or a woman whose entire time shall be devoted to discovering where recreation parks, dancing pavilions, music, and other forms of pleasure are needed, and how they may be made to do the most good. A neighborhood that thirsts for concerts ought to have them. A community that desires to dance deserves a dance hall. In the long run, how infinitely better, how much more economical for the city to furnish these recreations, normally and decently conducted, than to bear the consequences of an order of things like the present one. The new order must come. It is the only way yet pointed out by which we may hope to close those other avenues, where the joy of youth is turned into a cup of trembling, and the dancing feet of girlhood are led into mires of shame.

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CHAPTER IX

THE SERVANT IN HER HOUSE

According to the findings of the Massachusetts State Bureau of Labor Statistics, whose investigation into previous occupation of fallen women was described in a former chapter, domestic service is a dangerous trade. Of the 3,966 unfortunates who came under the examination of the Bureau's investigators, 1,115, or nearly thirty per cent, had been in domestic service. No other single industry furnished anything like this proportion.

From time to time reformatories and institutions dealing with delinquent women and girls examine the industrial status of their charges, always with results which agree with or even exceed the Massachusetts statistics. Bedford Reformatory, one of the two New York State institutions for delinquent women, in an examination of a group of one thousand women, found four hundred and thirty general houseworkers, twenty-four chamber-maids, thirteen nursemaids, eight cooks, and thirty-six waitresses. As some of the waitresses may have been restaurant workers, we will eliminate them. Even so, it will be seen that four hundred and seventy-five—nearly half of the Bedford women—had been servants.

In 1908 the Albion House of Refuge, New York, admitted one hundred and sixty-eight girls. Of these ninety-two were domestics, one was a lady's maid, and nine were nursemaids.

Of one hundred and twenty-seven girls in the Industrial School at Rochester, New York, in 1909, only fifty-one were wage earners. Of that number twenty-nine had worked in private homes as domestics. Bedford Reformatory receives mostly city girls; Albion and Rochester are supplied from small cities and country towns. It appears that domestic service is a dangerous trade in small communities as well as in large ones.

On the face of it, the facts are wonderfully puzzling. Domestic service is constantly urged upon women as the safest, healthiest, most normal profession in which they can possibly engage. Assuredly it seems to possess certain unique advantages. Domestic service is the only field of industry where the demand for workers permanently exceeds the supply. The nature of the work is essentially suited, by habit, tradition, and long experiment, to women. It offers economic independence within the shelter of the home.

Lastly, housework pays extremely well. A girl totally ignorant of the art of cooking, of any household art, one whose function is to clean, scrub, and assist her employer to prepare meals, can readily command ten dollars a month, with board. The same efficiency, or lack of efficiency, in a factory or department store would be worth about ten dollars a month, without board. The wages of a competent houseworker, in any part of the country, average over eighteen dollars a month. Add to this about thirty dollars a month represented by food, lodging, light, and fire, and you will see that the competent houseworker's yearly income amounts to five hundred and seventy-six dollars. This is a higher average than the school-teacher or the stenographer receives; it is almost double the average wage of the shop girl, or the factory girl. It is, in fact, about as high as the usual income of the American workingman.

It is true that the social position of the domestic worker is lower than that of the teacher, stenographer, or factory worker. This undoubtedly affects the attractiveness of domestic service as a profession. But the lower social position is in itself no explanation of the high rate of immorality. At least there are no figures to prove that the rate of morality rises or falls with the social status of the individual.

In the contemplation of what is known as the "servant problem," I think we have been less scientific and more superficial than in any other social or industrial problem. For the increasing dearth of domestic workers, for the lowered standard of efficiency, for the startling amount of immorality alleged to belong to the class, we have given every explanation except the right one.

At the bottom of the "servant problem" lies the fact that it exists in the privacy of the home. Now, we have reached a point of social consciousness where we allow that it is right to intrude some homes and ask questions for the good of the community. "How many children have you?" "Are they all in school?" "Does your husband drink?" We have not yet reached the point of sending agents to inquire: "How many servants do you keep; what are their hours of work, and what kind of sleeping accommodations do you furnish them?"

Some intelligent inquiry has been made into surface conditions. The Sociological Department of Vassar College, under Professor Lucy Maynard Salmon, during the years 1889 and 1890, made an exhaustive study of wages, hours of work, difficulties, advantages, and disadvantages of domestic service. Professor Salmon's book, "Domestic Service," giving the results of the inquiry, is a classic on the subject. It deals, however, almost entirely with the ethical side of the problem, the social relation between mistress and maid. The relation between the worker and the industry is hardly examined at all.

A later inquiry into the servant problem was conducted in 1903, in half a dozen cities, by organizations of women which associated themselves for the purpose, under the name of the Intermunicipal Committee on Household Research.

The Woman's Municipal League of New York, the Educational and Industrial Union of Boston, the Housekeepers' Alliance, and the Civic Club of Philadelphia were the moving elements in the investigation. Co-operating with them were the College Settlements Association and the Association of Collegiate Alumnae, which together established a scholarship for the research. This research was most ably conducted by Miss Frances Kellor, a Vassar graduate, and nine assistant workers, all of whom were college women. The report of the investigation was published a year later in the volume "Out of Work."[^[1]]

This investigation by organizations of educated and expert women was the first survey ever made of domestic service as an industry, the first scientific study of domestic workers as an industrial group. It was the first intelligent attempt to review housework as if it were a trade.

The most important conclusion of the investigators was that housework, domestic service, although carried on as a trade, is really no trade at all. The domestic worker is no more a part of modern industry than the Italian woman who finishes "pants" in a tenement, or the child who stays from school to fasten hooks and eyes on paper cards.

Do not let us make a mistake concerning the underlying cause of the servant problem. Let us face the truth that we have two institutions which are back numbers in twentieth century civilization: two left-overs from a past-and-gone domestic system of industry. One of these is the tenement sweat shop, where women combine, or try to combine, manufacturing and housekeeping. The other is the private kitchen—the home—where the last stand of conservatism and tradition, the last lingering remnant of hand labor, continues to exist.

No woman who is free enough, strong enough, intelligent enough to seek work in a factory or shop, is ever found in a sweat shop or seen carrying bundles of coats to finish at home.

Exactly for the same reason the average American working woman shuns housework as a means of livelihood. You will find in every community a few women of intelligence who are naturally so domestic in their tastes and inclinations that they shrink from any work outside the home. Such women do adhere to domestic service, but, broadly speaking, you behold in the servant group merely the siftings of the real industrial class.

In a tentative, halting sort of fashion we are learning to humanize the factory and shop. Factory workers, mill hands, department store clerks, have been granted legislation in almost every State of the Union, regulating hours of work, sanitary conditions, ventilation, and in some cases they have been given protection from dangerous machinery. In department stores they have been granted even certain special comforts, such as seats on which to rest while not actually working.

Of course, we have done no more than make a beginning in this matter of humanizing the factory and the shop. But we have made a beginning, and the movement toward securing better and juster and healthier conditions for workers in all the industries is bound to continue. So long as manufacturing was carried on in the home, no such protective legislation as workers now enjoy was dreamed of. We had to wait until the workers came together in large groups before we could see their conditions and understand their needs.

Housework, because it is performed in isolation, because it is purely individual labor, has never been classed among the industries. It has rather been looked upon as a normal feminine function, a form of healthy exercise. No one has ever suggested to legislators that sweeping and beating rugs might be included among the dusty trades; that bending over steaming washtubs, and almost immediately afterwards going out into frosty air to hang the clothes, might be harmful to throat and lungs; that remaining within doors days at a time, as houseworkers almost invariably do, reacts on nerves and the entire physical structure; that steady service, if not actual labor, from six in the morning until nine and ten at night makes excessive demands on mind and body.

Such conditions exist because the workers are too weak, too inefficient, too unintelligent to change them. Yet the demand for servants so far exceeds the supply that they are in a position, theoretically, to dictate the terms of their own employment. If they elected to demand pianos and private baths they could get them; that is, if instead of remaining isolated individuals they could form themselves into an industrial class, like plumbers, or bricklayers, or carpenters. Even as isolated individuals they are able to command a better money wage than more efficient workers, which proves how great is the need for their services.

The housekeeper clings to her archaic kitchen, firmly believing that if she gave it up, tried to replace it by any form of co-operative living, the pillars of society would crumble and the home pass out of existence. Yet so strong is her instinctive repugnance to the medieval system on which her household is conducted, that she shuns it, runs away from it whenever she can. Housekeeping as a business is a dark mystery to her. The mass of women in the United States probably hold, almost as an article of religion, the theory that woman's place is in the home. But the woman who can organize and manage a home as her husband manages his business, systematically, profitably, professionally—well, how many such women do you know?

It would seem as if in the newer generations, the average housekeeper is not in the professional class at all. Usually she lacks professional training. If she was brought up in a well-to-do home where there were several servants, she knows literally nothing of cooking, or of any department of housekeeping. Even when she has had some instruction in household tasks, she almost never connects cooking with chemistry, food with dietetics, cleanliness with sanitation, buying with bookkeeping. She is an amateur. And she takes into her household to do work she herself is incapable of doing, another amateur, a woman who might, in many cases, do well under a capable commander, but who is hopelessly at sea when expected to evolve a system of housekeeping all by herself.

This irregular state of affairs in what should be a carefully studied, well-organized industry is reflected in the conditions commonly meted out to domestics. Take housing conditions, for example. Some housekeepers provide their servants with good beds; of course, not quite as good as other members of the household enjoy, but good enough. Some set aside pleasant, warm, well-furnished rooms for the servants. But Miss Kellor's investigators reported that it was common to find the only unheated room in a house or apartment set aside for the servant. They found great numbers of servants' rooms in basements, having no sunlight or heat.

At one home, where an investigator applied for a "place," the housekeeper complained that her last maid was untidy. Then she showed the applicant to the servant's room. This was a little den partitioned off from the coal bin!

In another place, the maid was required to sleep on an ironing board placed over the bathtub. In still another, the maid spent her night of rest on a mattress laid over the wash tubs in a basement. A bed for two servants, consisting of a thin mattress on the dining-room table, was also found.

Unventilated closets, rooms opening off from the kitchen, small and windowless, are very commonly provided in city flats. Even in spacious country homes the servants' rooms are considered matters of little importance.

"One woman," writes Miss Kellor, "planned her new three-story house with the attic windows so high that no one could see out of them. When the architect remonstrated she said: 'Oh, those are for the maids; I don't expect them to spend their time looking out.'"

I remember a young girl who waited on table at a woman's hotel where I made my home. One morning I sent this girl for more cream for my coffee. She was gone some time and I spoke to her a little impatiently when she returned. She was silent for a moment, then she said: "Do you know that every time you send me to the pantry it means a walk of three and a half blocks? This dining-room and the kitchens and pantries are a block apart, and are separated by three flights of stairs. I have counted the distance there and back, and it is more than three blocks."

"But, Kittie," I said to her, "why do you work in a hotel, if it's like that? Why don't you take a place in a private family?"

"I've tried that," said the girl. "I had a place with the —— family," mentioning an historic name. "They had sickness in the family, and they stopped in town all summer. My room was up in the attic, with only a skylight for ventilation. During the day, except for the time I spent sitting on the area steps after nine o'clock, I was waiting on the cook in a hot kitchen. They let me out of the house once every two weeks. Here I have some freedom, at least."

I have told this story to dozens of domestics, many of them from homes of wealth, and they agree that it is a common case. It is very rare, these girls say, to find a mistress who is willing to allow her maids to leave the house except on their days out. They concede certain hours of rest, it is true, but those hours must be spent within doors. "Why, if you went out I should be sure to need you," is the usual explanation.

Imagine a factory girl or a stenographer being required to remain after hours on the chance of being needed for extra work.

There is an aspect to this phase of the servant question which is generally overlooked by employers. This is an isolation from human intercourse to be found in no other industry. When the household employs only one servant the isolation is absolute. The girl is marooned, within full sight of others' happy life. Even when kindness is her portion she is an outsider from the family circle. Important as her function is in the life of the household, she is socially the lowest unit in it.

During the course of a great strike of mill operatives in Fall River, Massachusetts, a few years ago, a considerable group of weaver and spinner girls were induced, by members of the Women's Trade Union League, to take up domestic service until the close of the strike. As the girls were in acute financial distress they agreed to try the experiment. These were mostly American or English girls, some of them above the average of intelligence and good sense.

Housework with its great variety of tasks made severe draughts on the strength of girls accustomed to using one set of muscles. The long hours and the confinement of domestic service affected nerves adjusted to a legal fifty-eight-hour week.

But the girls' real objection to housework was its loneliness. Hardly a single house in Boston, or the surrounding suburbs, where the girls found places, was provided with a servants' sitting room. There was absolutely no provision made for callers. For a servant is supposed not to have friends except on her days out. On those occasions she is assumed to meet her friends on the street.

In England people recognize the fact that they have a servant class. Every house of any pretentions provides a servants' hall.

In the United States a sitting room for servants, even in millionaires' homes, is a rarity.

More than this, in many city households, especially in apartment households, the servants are prohibited from receiving their friends even in the kitchen. "Are we allowed to receive men visitors in the house?" chorused a group of girls, questioned in a fashionable employment agency. "Mostly our friends are not allowed to step inside the areaway while we are putting on our hats to go out."

There is no escaping the conclusion that a large part of the social evil, or that branch of it recruited every year from domestic service, is traceable to American methods of dealing with servants. The domestic, belonging, as a rule, to a weak and inefficient class, is literally driven into paths where only strength and efficiency could possibly protect her from evil.

Servants share, in common with all other human beings, the necessity for human intercourse. They must have associates, friends, companions. If they cannot meet them in their homes they must seek them outside.

Walk through the large parks in any city, late in the evening, and observe the couples who occupy obscurely placed benches. You pity them for their immodest behavior in a public place. But most of them have no other place to meet. And it is not difficult to comprehend that clandestine appointments in dark corners as a rule do not conduce to proper behavior. Most of the women you see on park benches are domestic servants. Some of them, it is safe to assume, work in New York's Fifth Avenue, or in mansions on Chicago's Lake Shore Drive.

The social opportunity of the domestic worker is limited to the park bench, the cheap theater, the summer excursion boat, and the dance hall. Hardly ever does a settlement club admit a domestic to membership; rarely does a working girls' society or a Young Women's Christian Association circle bid her welcome. The Girls' Friendly Association of the Protestant Episcopal Church is a notable exception to this rule.

In a large New England city, not long ago, a member of the Woman's Club proposed to establish a club especially for domestics, since no other class of women seemed willing to associate with them. The proposal was voted down. "For," said the women, "if they had a clubroom they would be sure to invite men, and immorality might result."

But there is no direct connection between a clubroom and immorality, whereas the park bench after dark and the dance hall and its almost invariable accompaniment of strong drink are positive dangers.

The housekeeper simply does not realize that her domestics are girls, exactly like other girls. They need social intercourse, they need laughter and dancing and healthy pleasure just as other girls need them, as much as the young ladies of the household need them.

Perhaps they need them even more. The girl upstairs has mental resources which the girl downstairs lacks. The girl upstairs has the protection of family, friends, social position. The last is of greatest importance, because the woman without a social position has ever been regarded by a large class of men as fair game. The domestic worker sometimes finds this out within the shelter, the supposed shelter, of her employer's home.

Tolstoy's terrible story "Resurrection" has for its central anecdote in the opening chapter a court-room scene in which a judge is called upon to sentence to prison a woman for whose downfall he had, years before, been responsible. A somewhat similar story in real life, with a happier ending, was told me by the head of a woman's reformatory. This official received a visit from a lawyer, who told her with much emotion that he had, several days before, been present when a young girl was sentenced to a term in a reformatory.

"She lived in my home," said the man. "I believe that she was a good girl up to that time. My wife died, my home was given up, and of course I forgot that poor girl. She never made any claim on me. When I saw her there in court, among the dregs of humanity, her face showing what her life had become, I wanted to shoot myself. Now she is here, with a chance to get back her health and a right state of mind. Will you help me to make amends?"

The head of the reformatory rather doubted the man's sincerity at first. She feared that his repentance was superficial. She refused to allow him to see or to communicate with the girl, but she wrote him regularly of her progress. Several times in the course of the year the man visited the reformatory, and at the end of that period he was allowed to see the girl. This institution happens to be one of the few where a rational and a humane system of outdoor work is in vogue. The girl, who a year back had been almost a physical wreck from drugs and the life of the streets, was again strong, healthy, and sane. The two forgave each other and were married.

If the position of the domestic, while living in the shelter of a family, is sometimes precarious, her situation, when out of a job, is often actually perilous.

If a girl has a home she goes to that home, and regards her temporary period of unemployment as a pleasant vacation. But in most cases, in cities, at any rate, few girls have homes of which they can avail themselves.

"In no city," says Miss Kellor's report, "are adequate provisions made for such homeless women, and their predicament is peculiarly acute, for their friends are often household workers who cannot extend the hospitality of their rooms."

I think I hear a chorus of protesting voices: "We don't have anything to do with the servant class you are describing. Our girls are respectable. They meet their friends at church. They come to us from reputable employment offices, which would not deal with them if they were not all right."

Are you sure you know this? What, after all, do you really know about your servants? What do you know about the employment office that sent her to you? What do you know of the world inhabited by servants and the people who deal in servants? Can you not imagine that it might be different from the one you live in so safely and comfortably?

Are you willing to know the facts about the world, the underworld, from which the girl who cooks your food and takes care of your children is drawn? Do you care to know how a domestic spends the time between places, how she gets to your kitchen or nursery, the kind of homes she may have been in before she came to you? Make a little descent into that underworld with a girl whose experience is matched with those of many others.

Nellie B—— was an Irish girl, strong, pretty of face, and joyful of temperament. The quiet Indiana town where she earned her living as a cook offered Nellie so little diversion that she determined to go to Chicago to live. She gave up her place, and with a month's wages in her pocket went to the city.

It was late in the afternoon when her train reached the station. Nellie alighted, bewildered and lonely. She had the address of an employment agency, furnished her by an acquaintance. Nellie slept that night, or rather tossed sleepless in the agency lodging house, on a dirty bed occupied by two women besides herself. In all her life she had never been inside such a filthy room, or heard such frightful conversation. Therefore next morning she gladly paid her exorbitant bill of one dollar and seventy-five cents, besides a fee of two dollars and a half for obtaining employment, and accepted the first place offered her.

The house she was taken to seemed to be conducted rather strangely. Meals were at unusual hours, and the household consisted largely of young women who received many men callers. For about a week Nellie did her work unmolested. At the end of the week her mistress presented her with a low-necked satin dress and asked her if she would not like to assist in entertaining the men. Simple-minded Nellie had to have the nature of the entertaining explained to her, and she had great difficulty in leaving the house after she had declined the offer. She had hardly any money left, and the woman refused to pay her for her week's work.

Nellie knew of no other employment agency, so she was obliged to return to the one she left. When she reproached the agent for sending her to a disreputable house he shrugged his shoulders and replied: "Well, I send girls where they're wanted. If they don't like the place they can leave."

The fact is, they cannot always leave when they want to. Miss Kellor's investigators found an office in Chicago which sent girls to a resort in Wisconsin which was represented as a summer hotel. This notorious place was surrounded by a high stockade which rendered escape impossible.

The investigators found offices in other cities which operate disreputable houses in summer places. To these the proprietors send the handsomest of their applicants for honest work.

Three girls sent to a house of this kind found themselves prisoners. One girl made such a disturbance by screaming and crying that the proprietor literally kicked her out of the house. The investigators for the Intermunicipal Committee on Household Research saw this girl in a hospital, insane and dying from the treatment she had received. Another of the three escaped from the place. She, too, was discovered in a state of dementia. The fate of the third girl is obscure.

Not all employment agencies cater to this trade. Not all would consent to be accessory to women's degradation. But the employment agency business, taken by and large, is disorganized, haphazard, out of date. It is operated on a system founded in lies and extortion. The offices want fees—fees from servants and fees from employers. They encourage servants to change their employment as often as possible. Often a firm will send a girl to a place, and a week or two later will send her word that they have a better job for her. Sometimes they arrange with her to leave her place after a certain period, promising her an easier position or a better wage. They favor the girl who changes often. "You're a nice kind of a customer!" jeered one proprietor to a girl who boasted that she had been in a family for five years. The girl was a customer to him, and she was nothing more.

To his profitable customer the agent is often very accommodating. If she lacks references he writes her flattering ones, or loans her a reference written by some woman of prominence. References, indeed, are often handed around like passports among Russian revolutionists.

Many of these unpleasant facts were brought to light in the course of the investigation made by the Intermunicipal Committee on Household Research. The result of their report was a model employment agency law, passed by the New York State Legislature, providing for a strict licensing system, rigid forms of contract, regulation of fees, and inspection by special officers of the Bureau of Licenses. The law applies only to cities of the first class, and unfortunately has never been very well enforced. Perhaps it has not been possible to enforce it.

In all the cities examined by the Intermunicipal Committee on Household Research the investigators found the majority of employment agencies in close connection with the homes of the agents. In New York, of three hundred and thirteen offices visited, one hundred and twenty were in tenements, one hundred and seven in apartment houses, thirty-nine in residences and only forty-nine in business buildings. In Philadelphia, only three per cent of employment agencies were found in business buildings. Chicago made a little better showing, with nineteen per cent in business houses. The difficulty of properly regulating a business which is carried on in the privacy of a home is apparent. When an agency is in a business building it usually has conspicuous signs, and often the rooms are well equipped with desks, comfortable chairs, and other office furnishings. But the majority of agencies are of another description. Those dealing with immigrant girls are sometimes filthy rooms in some rear tenement, reached through a saloon or a barber shop facing the street. Often the other tenants of the building are fortune tellers, palmists, "trance mediums," and like undesirables.

A large number of these agencies operate lodging houses for their patrons. There is hardly a good word to say for most of these, except that they are absolutely necessary. Dirty, unsanitary, miserable as they usually are, if they were closed by law, hundreds, perhaps thousands of domestics temporarily out of work, would be turned into the streets. Many are unfamiliar with the cities they live in. Many more are barred from hotels on account of small means. Often a girl finding it impossible to bring herself to lie down on the wretched beds provided by these lodging houses, leaves her luggage and goes out, not to return until morning. She spends the night in dance halls and other resorts.

According to Miss Kellor's report this description of employment agencies and lodging houses attached to them applies to about seventy-five per cent of all offices in the four cities examined. For greater accuracy the investigators made a brief survey of conditions in cities, such as St. Louis, New Haven, and Columbus, Ohio. The differences were slight, showing that the employment agency problem is much the same east and west.

Domestic servants have their industrial ups and downs like other workers. Sometimes they are able to pay the fees required in a high-class employment office, while at other times they are obliged to have recourse to the cheaper places, where standards of honesty, and perhaps also, of propriety, are low. Domestic workers are the nomads of industry. Their lives are like their work,—impermanent, detached from others', unobserved.

It is for the housekeepers of America to consider the plain facts concerning domestic service. Some of the conditions they can change. Others they cannot. No one can alter the economic status of the kitchen. Like the sweat shop, it must ultimately disappear.

What system of housekeeping will take the place of the present system cannot precisely be foretold. We know that the whole trend of things everywhere is toward co-operation. Within the past ten years think how much cooking has gone into the factory, how much washing into the steam laundry, how much sewing into the shop. As the cost of living increases, more and more co-operation will be necessary, especially for those of moderate income. At the present time millions of city dwellers have given up living in their own houses, or even in rented houses. They cannot afford to maintain individual homes, but must live in apartment houses, where the expenses of heat, and other expenses, notably water, hall, and janitor service, are reduced to a minimum because shared by all the tenants. There may come a time when the private kitchen will be a luxury of the very rich.

For a time, however, the private kitchen and the servant in the kitchen will remain. That is one servant problem. But the housekeeper still has another "servant problem," and I have tried to make it clear that this problem pretty closely involves the morals of the community.

Now this matter of community morals has begun to interest women profoundly. In many of their organizations women are studying and endeavoring to understand the causes of evil. They are securing the appointment of educated women as probation officers in the courts which deal with delinquent women and girls. Sincerely they are working toward a better understanding of the problem of the prodigal daughter.

Since about one-third of all these prodigals are recruited from the ranks of domestic workers it is possible for the housekeepers of the country to play an important part in this work. Every woman in the United States who employs one servant has a contribution to make to the movement. The power to humanize domestic service in her own household is in every woman's hand.

Loneliness, social isolation, the ban of social inferiority,—these cruel and unreasonable restrictions placed upon an entire class of working women are out of tune with democracy. The right of the domestic worker to regular hours of labor, to freedom after her work is done, to a place to receive her friends, must be recognized. The self-respect of the servant must in all ways be encouraged.

Above all, the right of the domestic worker to social opportunity must be admitted. It must be provided for.

Yonkers, New York, a large town on the Hudson River, points out one way toward this end. In Yonkers there has been established a Women's Institute for the exclusive use of domestics. It has an employment agency and supports classes in domestic science for those girls who wish to become more expert workers. There are club rooms and recreation parlors where the girls receive and meet their friends—including their men friends. A group of liberal-minded women established this unique institution, which is well patronized by the superior class of domestic workers in Yonkers. The dues are small, and members are allowed to share club privileges with friends. It is not unusual for employers to present their domestics with membership cards. It cannot be said that the Women's Institute has solved the servant problem for Yonkers, but many women testify to its happy effects on their own individual problems.

The Committee on Amusements and Vacation Resources of Working Girls in New York is collecting a long list of farmhouses and village homes in the mountains and near the sea where working girls, and this includes domestics, may spend their vacations for very little money.

Every summer, as families leave the city for country and seaside, domestics are thrown out of employment. A department in the Women's Club can examine vacation possibilities for domestics. The clubs can also deal with the employment agency. Some women's organizations have already taken hold of this department. The Women's Educational and Industrial Union of Boston conducts a very large and flourishing employment agency. Women's clubs can study the laws of their own community in regard to public employment agencies. They can investigate homes for immigrant girls and boarding-houses for working women.

Preventive work is better than reform measures, but both are necessary in dealing with this problem. Women have still much work to do in securing reformatories for women. New York is the first State to establish such reformatories for adult women. Private philanthropy has offered refuges and semipenal institutions. The State stands aloof.

Even in New York public officials are strangely skeptical of the possibilities of reform. Last year the courts of New York City sent three thousand delinquent women to the workhouse on Blackwell's Island,—a place notorious for the low state of its morale. They sent only seventeen women to Bedford Reformatory, where a healthy routine of outdoor work, and a most effective system administered by a scientific penologist does wonders with its inmates. Nothing but the will and the organized effort of women will ever solve the most terrible of all problems, or remove from society the reproach of ruined womanhood which blackens it now.