LEADERS IN THE MONTH’S MAGAZINES
The Case of Laura Sylvia. By Mary Vida Clark. Outlook. This is the almost unbelievable story of the finding and rehabilitation of a little savage child found living with savage people in the midst of a prosperous farming community in the Hudson River Valley. Miss Clark tells the story from her long experience in placing out work of the State Charities Aid Association of New York. It is not an unusual one, and her comment suggests the possibilities of neglected and degenerate families in the cabin homes of the New England and the southern mountains.
Tiger. By Witter Bynner, and State Regulation of Vice and Its Meaning. By Anna Garlin Spencer. Both in the Forum. The first is a one act play dealing with prostitution. A father, a patron, finds his daughter a prisoner in a house of ill fame. “Painful and terrible” says the editorial introduction, “as this may seem to some readers it merely focuses, in dramatic form, the abominable realities to which ‘civilized’ people have so long shut their eye publicly and pharisaically; but to which, in tens of thousands of cases, they have given vicious private and personal encouragement.”
Mrs. Spencer’s article is a careful historical study of state efforts to deal with vice by regulation instead of abolition and to protect monogamy by putting vice on a legal footing.
What We Are Trying to Do. World’s Work. Thirty-five teachers in the Washington Irving High School tell how they are trying in this model New York school to “improve the human machine,” to “form character” and to “perfect womanhood.”
The Coming City. By John S. Gregory, and My Work for Crippled Children. By Blanche VanLeuvan Browne. Both in the World’s Work. In the latter article a cripple woman tells with magnetic simplicity, how, beginning only seven years ago with $6 in her pocket, she has succeeded in building up a hospital-school for cripples in Detroit.
The Coming City tells of the remarkable work of another single individual, John Nolen, who has made more than twenty American municipalities more convenient and more beautiful. It is the record of “a rapidly growing national movement to correct the evils of careless growth and to insure that the cities of the future shall be definitely planned to serve and please their citizens.”
“Conservation as Practised.” By Gifford Pinchot. Pearson’s. The origin and purport of this important article is thus told by the editor: It is written in answer to the article on conservation by Edward H. Thomas, which was published in the January issue of this magazine. Mr. Thomas’s article submitted that conservation in principle was all right but that conservation in practice was nowhere near the principle; that conservation as practised aids monopoly instead of hindering it: and that the West, where conservation is being practised, is getting sick of it.
Mr. Pinchot holds that conservation as practised is for the greatest good of the greatest number. He asked for space in which to correct what he held was a wrong impression on the minds of the magazine’s readers. He answers Mr. Thomas, point by point.
The Cost of Modern Sentiment. By Agnes Repplier. Atlantic. This writer on matters of culture and art for leisurely readers, a vigorous defender of child labor on the stage on the ground of its artistic value, has had it borne in upon her that human interests are today arousing more and more public interest and emotion. Three of these absorbing human issues are the progress of women, the condition of labor and the social evil. Miss Repplier counsels against the misdirecting of sentiment through incomplete knowledge.
The recall last month of a San Francisco municipal court judge, for setting so low a bail on a man charged with rape as to make it possible for him to escape trial by skipping bail, gives special interest to a recent article in The Sunset Magazine by Miriam Michelson. This is an analysis of the dawning sense of responsibility of the women of a suffrage state toward the social evil:
Now this threatened recall of a police judge is undertaken, I should say, not because the women believe this particular judge to be unique in flagrant adherence to a police court system of leniency in sex-crimes; not because they think him the worst of his type that San Francisco has known; but because they consider him a type and because they consider the police court system one that must be changed. This recall presents something definite, something to do, which feminine hands have been aching for.
Miss Michelson continues:
You may talk to women of the futility of figuring social sex sins, but they seem to be congenitally incapable of believing you. I heard a man talk to an audience in behalf of this measure, and when he touched upon that old, old text—it always has been; it always will be—there came a curious resemblance in every woman’s face within my vision; for every face had hardened, stiffened, was marked with the family likeness of rebellion. The lecturer was addressing himself to deaf ears, to eyes determined not to see.
And this is at once the weakness and the strength of the new element in elections. Those who have watched the ardor of the most eager and high-minded reformers burn out in commissions, in barren resolutions and recommendations, see in the average woman’s limitations that power, that one-idead incapacity to look philosophically on both sides of a question which marks Those Who Can Change Things. You may object that such qualities produce a Carrie Nation. They do, but they also make a Joan of Arc, a Harriet Beecher Stowe....
Her recently awakened realization of equality, the new broom that her conscience is, revolts at a policy that establishes a municipal clinic for women prostitutes, yet by a curious, cowardly subterfuge, overlooks the male’s share in infection; as though the plague created and disseminated in common could have but one source! And in addition to all this, she is learning that when she is ready at last to attack the vested, organized, recognized institution of prostitution, the first result of her activities will mean greater misery and perhaps speedier death for the woman who is already at the lowest point of the social scale....
But over against this set this fact: There are seven hundred women in San Francisco whose one aim in civic life is to found a State Training School for girls gone wrong who would go right. This association has a representative in Sacramento whose sole business it is to further a bill for the establishment of a helping station for girls on the way to usefulness and moral health, modeled upon similar establishments in other states. Here is work, backed by thirty thousand club women of the state, proceeding definitely, practically to a solution of one of the most appalling obstacles to the crusade against vice.
This work of restoring the prostitute to decency and happiness is the side of woman’s work in the field of vice least developed; it is, however, a side which is most essential. Says Miss Michelson:
But the time has not yet come when woman will face her individual share of atonement for a social sin in which she has acquiesced. Ultimately, with universal suffrage, the wheel of time must place at the door of the protected women responsibility for the prostitute. As yet she can not see herself, in her own home, taking up the broken lives, diseased bodies, debased minds and deadened souls—the by-product of that which men tell her has always been and always must be.
The following passages are from Cardinal O’Connell’s pastoral letter on the labor problem: