Commercialized Prostitution in New York City

by George J. Kneeland

Unfortunately, we have not the data for the parentage of any group except that of the Bedford cases. [Table II] shows the nationality of parents in detail with the greatest possible attainable accuracy. [Table III] gives the summary. The graph accompanying [Table II] represents the same thing to the eye.

We find that the native-born of foreign parentage is about 51 percent. The native-born of American parentage is 18.5 percent. Mixed parentage means one native-born and one foreign-born parent.

[Table IV] compares these percentages with the parentage of the native population of New York City. The Tribune Almanac for 1912 gives the native white of native parents as 19.3 percent of the total population while the native white of foreign parents is 38.2 percent. Comparing, we see that the native parents contribute about their proportionate quota; the foreign-born of foreign parents contribute less than their quota, while the group that contributes out of proportion to its percentage in the population, is that of the native-born of foreign parents. This is not surprising when we remember that here we have a group in which the fathers and mothers belong to a civilization with speech, tradition and habits different from those of the country in which they are living. The children, native-born Americans with American companions and American schooling, adopt American ideals often not of the highest and are very apt, even when quite young, to feel that they know more than their parents. Lacking in any feeling of reverence, they early refuse to listen to the counsels of their parents. On the other hand, the parents often stand in awe of the superior cleverness, usually superficial, of their American-born children. An observation extending over twelve years of the relations between foreign-born fathers and mothers and their American-born daughters, leads me to feel that right here lies one of the important points of attack in preventive work.

Status of Family:—Occupation of father. Before we are in a position to deal fairly with any problem, we must know all the elements which enter into it. The most important factor in the study of any individual is the kind of family from which he comes. The occupation of a man has very little to do with his moral worth or his good citizenship; but it enables us in a general way, to place him as to his position in society. By his earning capacity we can judge something of the kind of home he can make and the opportunities he can give his children. We have, accordingly, included in our Bedford study, the occupation of the girls’ fathers. It will be observed from [Table V] that the largest single group is that of unskilled labor which forms 21.3 percent of the whole. Men engaged in the mechanical trades form the next largest group, or 18.6 percent; the professions stretched to their limit furnish only 15 individuals or 2.4 percent.

Size of Family:—It has sometimes been claimed that the number of children in a family has a direct bearing on prostitution. One theory suggested is that prostitutes are apt to be members of a large family where economic pressure is great, where a girl is either driven out by want or has failed to receive proper education and training as a result of insufficient means. In individual cases, undoubtedly, this is true. We have a young woman of German parentage, nineteen years of age, at Bedford at the present time, who was the eldest of ten children. She has never been to school a day in her life, nor to church or Sunday School. She is as much of a heathen as if she had been born in Central Africa. As a child, she had to stay at home to “mind the baby” and there was always one. As she grew older, she became tired of the over-crowded home, had never received any training which would fit her for any occupation, fell an easy prey to a young man who took her fancy; and it was but another step into prostitution as a means of livelihood. We could tell a number of such stories where we feel confident that a very large family on very small means is largely to blame for the downfall of the older daughters.

On the other hand, it is held by some that only daughters are more apt to go wrong than those who have brothers and sisters to hold them up to family standards. It is claimed that an only daughter is apt to be pampered and spoiled, never learns obedience and is often discouraged from earning her own livelihood by her parents with the idea that her social position is thus bettered and she will be more likely to make a good marriage. One very marked case of this kind we have at this present moment at Bedford. The girl’s father and mother are small shopkeepers, perfectly respectable but very injudicious people. The girl was allowed to believe all through her girlhood that she could have anything she wanted; and when her wants exceeded the possibility of gratification by her parents, she gratified them in any way she could.

[Table VI], which gives the size of the families from which our 647 cases come, shows that in the largest number of cases our girls were one of three brothers and sisters. The next largest group is that of four in the family, two and five brothers and sisters having the same number of representatives. The average number of children is 3.99, not greatly above the average number of children per family in the general community which is given in the census of 1910 as 2.7 percent for New York City. Our figures, therefore, so far as they go, would seem to prove nothing special except that girls go wrong in families of all sizes.

Occupation of Mother:—Probably of more importance than the size of the family is the economic position of the mother, particularly during the years of the daughter’s adolescence. It is a vital loss if a girl’s mother is away from home all day, leaving her after school hours to associates of whom the mother knows nothing and who may be most questionable in their influence on her developing character. In 145 instances, or in 22.4 percent of the total number of cases studied, the mother worked outside the home. [Table VII] gives a list of the occupations of working mothers, with the number in each group. It will be seen that the women who went out for day’s work are much the largest group. They went out to wash, to clean, to scrub offices and for other unskilled labor. The laundresses were employed partly in steam laundries and partly in private families and came home at night. Of the 145 mothers who worked, there were 94 who were widows; one mother was divorced; the husband and father in one case was an inmate of a sanitarium for tuberculosis; in one case the father was in an insane asylum; in 8 cases the father had deserted his family; in 40 cases the husband and father was alive and working. The necessity for earning a livelihood explains simply the leaving of children alone in the group of widows. In the 40 cases where the husband was working, no special necessity for the mother’s occupation is shown by our data. The 40 husbands and fathers whose wives went out to work, were engaged in thirty-one different occupations, no one group numbering more than four men. These were the day laborers. Three were colored cooks; three were teamsters; two were carpenters; others include a stationary engineer, a walking delegate, an insurance agent, a market man, an elevator man, etc.

Neither did the size of the family afford a special excuse, as in these forty families there was an average of four children. One family contained ten children; two families each had seven and eight respectively, while the greatest number in any one group was ten families with three children each. It may be that the father was inefficient or irregular in his occupation or the family standards of living were higher. It would be necessary to know all of these details in each family to offer any opinion as to reasons and we have not these data.

But the 94 cases of working widows do not cover all the cases where the father was dead. Of these there were 170. Thirty of the mothers had remarried; two received pensions; in three cases the mothers’ whereabouts were unknown and in 41 cases she was supported by her older children or by relatives. Of the total group of fatherless girls there were 154 who had lost their fathers before they had reached an age where they could receive their working papers; 73 were over fourteen; 36 did not know the date of their fathers’ death. Among these were some of the orphans and probably some girls who were not willing to tell all they knew. Of the 94 girls whose widowed mothers were employed, 61, or 64 percent lost their fathers before they had reached a working age. One hundred and two girls whose fathers were living had lost their mothers previous to their admission to Bedford. In 42 instances the father had remarried and in 20 instances the fathers’ whereabouts were unknown, but they were believed to be living. One hundred and fifteen out of 195 girls in the motherless group had lost their mothers when under fourteen years of age. Of the 93 orphans, 43 had been brought up by relatives, 10 by strangers and 20 in orphan asylums; twenty were old enough to earn their living at the time of their father’s death. To summarize, only 282, or 43.5 percent of the women studied, had both parents living.