THE FEEDERS OF THE “REDLIGHT” DISTRICTS.
The other portion of this crime colony reach the centers of vice through the thousands of channels which serve such purposes in the city of Chicago.
We have spoken of the cafe evil, the dance hall, the cheap theater and the vicious hotel. These are the major channels. Yearly, hundreds of girls go from one grade of badness to a lower, until there is nothing left but the house of ill fame in which to hide their shame, feed their passions and nourish their broken-down bodies.
The girl clerk in the department store tires of trying to live on her six dollars a week salary; grows envious of the women who have pretty clothes and costly jewelry, and sets about to sell her young body to buy the luxuries of life. The end is inevitably the house of prostitution.
Or it may be, that some depraved man, possibly her employer, lusts for her purity and with threats of discharge coerces her into sin. She never stops, it is a succession of falls to the last level of degradation.
Another, three years ago may have visited a Bohemian cafe to see the sights and taste the wine. She goes back again and again. Beyond her confines are the forbidden sins, luring and coaxing. She will taste of them, promising herself that she will go back to her former life and never venture into the pathways of sin again. The step is taken and the barrier erects itself behind her—she can never come back. Gradually she drifts down to the hell haunts and with recklessness as to the future, becomes an inmate of a dive.
There is no standing still in any phase of life—good or evil. There is no stationary point in vice. The beginnings are eternally different; the endings of the Scarlet Women are eternally the same.
These women just described, can scarcely be called White Slaves in the proper sense of that term. They are “slaves,” but they brought the slavery upon themselves.
The Summer excursions on the lake in large pleasure boats where vice can revel without fear and where young boys and girls without any restraint fall into sins that lead to terrible social evils, are another primary “feeder” for the “redlight” districts. The city asleep does not realize the fact that the “moonlight” excursions on the waters of Lake Michigan start a hundred girls on the road to ruin and the prostitute’s grave in one night!
And this is the first chapter of the women dressed in scarlet tonight.
Above these women like an ominous shadow is Man and His Lust! Man and his insatiable passions! Man who reckons not the destruction he sows about him, the homes he robs of precious ones, the broken-hearted mothers and fathers sent to an early grave because he inoculated some innocent child with his venom.
To fit our descriptions, somewhere, you can find in the “redlight” districts a woman who will stand up and say:
“That is my story.”
In one night in the South side “redlight” district in a visit to eight houses, twenty-one girls were found who stated that soulless men, who made capital of their ignorance of the world and its ways, robbed them of their virtue while they were under the influence of their first drink, or stole their virginity after they had promised to marry them.