Realizing that many taboos were being broken down by the lurid nation-wide publicity on the Beecher-Tilton case and that as a result people were more willing to consider subjects which hitherto had not been discussed in polite society, Susan began to plan a lecture on "Social Purity."
She was familiar with the public protest Englishwomen under the leadership of Josephine Butler were making against the state regulation of vice. Following with interest and admiration their courageous fight for the repeal of the Contagious Diseases Acts, which placed women suspected of prostitution under police power, Susan found encouragement in the support these reformers had received from such men as John Stuart Mill and Jacob Bright. Such legislation, she resolved, must not gain a foothold in her country, because it not only disregarded women's right to personal liberty but showed a dangerous callousness toward men's share of responsibility for prostitution.
She was awake to the problems prostitution presented in cities like New York and Washington, its prevalence, the police protection it received, the political corruption it fostered and the reluctance of the public to face the situation, the majority of men regarding it as a necessity, and most women closing their eyes to its existence.
During the winter of 1875, while the Beecher-Tilton case was being tried in Brooklyn, she delivered her speech on "Social Purity" at the Chicago Grand Opera House, in the Sunday dime-lecture course, facing with trepidation the immense crowd which gathered to hear her. Even the daring Mrs. Stanton had warned her that she would never be asked to speak in Chicago again, and with this the manager of the Slayton Lecture Bureau agreed. But they were wrong. The people were hungry for the truth and for a constructive policy. In the past they had heard the "social evil" described and denounced in vivid thunderous words by eloquent men and by the dramatic Anna E. Dickinson. Now an earnest woman with graying hair, one of their own kind, talked to them without mincing matters, calmly and logically, and offered them a remedy.
Calling their attention to the daily newspaper reports of divorce and breach-of-promise suits, of wife murders and "paramour" shootings, of abortions and infanticide, she told them that the prevalence of these evils showed clearly that men were incapable of coping with them successfully and needed the help of women. She cited statistics, revealing 20,000 prostitutes in the city of New York, where a foundling hospital during the first six months of its existence rescued 1,300 waifs laid in baskets on its doorstep. She courageously mentioned the prevalence of venereal disease and spoke out against England's Contagious Diseases Acts which were repeatedly suggested for New York and Washington and which she described as licensed prostitution, men's futile and disastrous attempt to deal with social corruption.
Declaring that the poverty and economic dependence of women as well as the passions of men were the causes of prostitution, she quoted more statistics which showed a great increase in the poverty of women. Work formerly done in the household, she explained, was being gradually taken over by factories, with the result that women in order to earn a living had been forced to follow it out of the home and were supporting themselves wholly or in part at a wage inadequate to meet their needs. No wonder many were tempted by food, clothes, and comfortable shelter into an immoral life.
Her solution was "to lift this vast army of poverty-stricken women who now crowd our cities, above the temptation, the necessity, to sell themselves in marriage or out, for bread and shelter." "Women," she told them, "must be educated out of their unthinking acceptance of financial dependence on man into mental and economic independence. Girls like boys must be educated to some lucrative employment. Women like men must have an equal chance to earn a living."[322]
"Whoever controls work and wages," she continued, "controls morals. Therefore we must have women employers, superintendents, committees, legislators; wherever girls go to seek the means of subsistence, there must be some woman. Nay, more; we must have women preachers, lawyers, doctors—that wherever women go to seek counsel—spiritual, legal, physical—there, too, they will be sure to find the best and noblest of their own sex to minister to them."
Then she added, "Marriage, to women as to men, must be a luxury, not a necessity; an incident of life, not all of it.... Marriage never will cease to be a wholly unequal partnership until the law recognizes the equal ownership in the joint earnings and possessions."