No form of charitable work undertaken in this busy century holds more perplexity and uncertainty than that for women, who, whether for great or small offenses, have come under the ban of the law, and who pass from the shadow of the prison to confront a public feeling which is, in the main, so absolutely antagonistic as to leave small chance for reform, or hope of making new and better place.
It is certain that there is much justification for such feeling. There are few in whom the missionary spirit is strong enough to enable them to accept undaunted, the possibilities involved in receiving as a member of the family, a woman whose desire for reform may be outweighed a thousand times by the power of her appetites, and whose influence may bring contamination to all within its reach. Even in less dangerous cases, where youth and ignorance are the excuses for the violation of law, there is always the fear that association with older offenders has given a knowledge of evil that will work equal disaster, and thus the door is as effectually closed against the slight as against the confirmed transgressor. It is part of the popular conviction that work for women is far less productive of results than work for men, a conviction that has a certain foundation of truth. Even in the Water Street Mission of New York, in which the most apparently hopeless class was reached and held, McAuley was constantly baffled by this fact, and in time accepted it as inevitable. He did not question, more than other workers have done, why this was so, or how far the world was responsible for the state of things he bewailed, but came at last, by almost unconscious steps, to the conclusion given in a talk with the writer.
“You’ve wondered, at times, that we didn’t have more women here,” he said, a year or two before his death. “Don’t you know that you can haul in a hundred men to one woman? What it means, the good Lord only knows, but they don’t stay put. They cry an’ promise, an’ promise an’ cry, an’ you do for ’em with all your might, an’ all at once they’re off, an’ may be you never see ’em again.… When a girl’s once down, it isn’t once in five hundred times that you can pull her out. Take that very one you was so sorry for. She’s been to every meeting ’round here, an’ cried an’ begged to be helped. She’s been taken first to one ‘Home’ an’ then to another, an’ she’s run from every one back to her old life. The system’s wrong. That’s my opinion. You take a ‘Home’ where a lot are in together, an’ the devil’s let loose. They chew tobacco an’ chew snuff, an’ get drunk on the sly, an’ the old ones tell the young ones all their lives, an’ the last end is worse than the first, for they learn a lot of deviltry to add to their own. There ain’t but one way, as I can see, to save ’em. Keep ’em apart. Let Christian families that can, make up their minds to take one at a time; hedge her round; give her enough to do, an’ get her interested, an’ pray night an’ day she may be kept. That will save a good many, for it’s mostly worked where it’s been tried. But there ain’t anything in our work so discouragin’ as this very thing. What you going to do? These girls comin’ out of homes where a dozen, may be, has herded in one room, what do they know of decency or cleanliness? What can they know, I’d like to know? No, I tell you; the work’s got to begin at the beginning. Get hold of the children. Send them off. Do anything that’ll train them differently. They’re born in sin and born to sin, and the Lord only knows what’ll come if good men and women don’t wake up and take hold.”
Admitting the serious nature of the difficulties involved, it is quite certain that many of them have been born of an utterly false estimate of the relative degrees of guilt in men and women. Neither time nor space allows discussion of this point beyond the suggestion that in the present White Cross movement, and the questions that at once arise as the first necessity in any understanding of its nature or need, may be found the secret of much that has made against women. Simple justice, the last acquired and, it would seem, the hardest won of all virtues, makes chastity as binding an obligation upon man as upon woman, and gives to both, when repentant, the same pardon and the same hope for a future. Thus far, charity has ignored the woman, forcing her to bear not only the pain and sorrow of unblessed motherhood, but the sentence of perpetual banishment from the society whose laws she has defied.
It is at this stage that workers among the poor most often find her, hopeless, and in the large proportion of cases driven back to crime as her only resort. They form a great proportion of the inmates of any prison for women. Every town and village has its quota of candidates for reformatory or jail, and mourns, collectively and individually, over the terrible tendencies of this class, with small thought that prevention may be easier than cure, and that if children born to such conditions come into the world, society is bound to see that their training shall, as far as possible, neutralize the results of such inheritance. Society has no time for prevention. It proposes to pay for prisons rather than for industrial schools; to labor with full fledged criminals, rather than to crush out vice while still in embryo, and congratulates itself on the magnificent liberality of its provision for the criminal, and the remarkable success of the prison system as a whole.
Women are supposed to be merely occasional offenders, and that there are, in every state, hundreds outside of the prison who are habitual law breakers, and an equally large proportion within its walls, is a proposition received as incredible. Yet it was not till Massachusetts found herself forced to deal with eight hundred per year of such cases, that the first reformatory was organized, in 1865, and the number has increased steadily with the increase in population. County prisons, of which there were twenty-one, were, too often, simply nests for propagating vice. In a few of the larger ones great order and system prevailed. In the smaller ones there was next to none, and male and female prisoners, dirty, ragged and obscene, mingled together and interchanged lessons in new forms of vice. In all of them three classes of offenses were to be found, women convicts being sentenced usually for drunkenness, unchastity, or larceny; the relative prevalence of the three being indicated by the order in which they are given. The first class, wherever found, are most often Irish women, at, or past, the middle age. They are not criminals, though at times, in some cases, dishonest or unchaste. Often they are eager to reform, and yield to the temptation to drink as many men yield, for the momentary relief from grinding care and anxiety. Many of them become accustomed to the short sentences usually given by magistrates for this offense, and there are countless women who have had thirty, forty, and even fifty short imprisonments. A long term, or, in aggravated cases, imprisonment for life, affords the only security, the mere smell of liquor being often enough to awaken appetite and bring on a wild debauch. The three crimes can in almost every case be traced back to a neglected childhood.
“My mother died whan I was a bit of a child, an’ my father drank and beat me,” is the story of nine tenths of these cases, and will remain the story. The life of a single great tenement house, if told in full, as it has recently been done, shows how the seed is sown, and what harvest we may expect, and prison systems, however admirable, can touch but the smallest proportion of those who come within their walls. And even here, in this system, which deserves all the eulogy it receives, women have had but the most meager share of the benefit intended. It is only here and there that, spurred on by some great souled woman, wrought to white heat of indignation at the suffering and ignominy heaped upon these weak and most miserable sisters, there has grown up a better system of treatment, or a refuge in which reform has been made possible. Even to-day, in cities where reform is supposed to have perfected itself, there are Houses of Detention, at the mention of which compassionate judges shake their heads, and use any and every pretext to avoid condemning, for even a week, a young girl guilty of some first and slight offense, to their unspeakably infamous walls. Who enters there leaves hope behind, and life in any real sense, is over, once for all, for the sad soul that has learned what awaits it there.
In a little town of Massachusetts, many phases of this question have long since been answered. The work is so quietly carried forward that few save those interested in philanthropic problems have any knowledge of its nature or scope. In the belief that its story will awaken, not only interest, but stronger faith in the possibilities of reform, its outlines are given here. From its success grew the greater work which makes the title of the present article, a work which would have seemed well nigh impossible had not such demonstration first been made of its entire feasibility.
Practically, its foundation was laid in Dedham, thirty years or more ago, where a temporary asylum was afforded to women just discharged from prison, and much the same methods were adopted in the Springfield “Home for Friendless Women.” But as one of the most efficient workers wrote at the time: “The more thoughtful saw from the first that they were working only at the top of the tree, and must go to the root to accomplish real good in large measure. The necessity of making the term of imprisonment one also of instruction, was apparent; also the vital need of purifying the corrupted by personal contact with pure and good women, laboring among them in a spirit of love and sympathy.”