The Wretched, Pitiful Ending of Gezie Bruvatsky,
left by Her Heartless Masters to Die Unattended in Filthy, Squalid Surroundings
The Price of a Living Body
Fifty years ago, down in the Southland of our America, we stood a well formed, sound limbed, healthy, intact young woman on the auction block and sold her to the biggest bidder for her beauty, her virtue, her heart, her honor, her soul and her body, and the established average price paid for such a young woman was eighteen hundred dollars ($1800.00). I take for granted as I write, that if the heart and soul and body of a young black woman of Kentucky, Georgia or Mississippi was in the slave market of fifty years ago worth intrinsically $1800.00, the soul and body of a clean, decent, young Northland white woman is to-day worth about the same. Assistant State Prosecuting Attorney Roe in his speech before the Illinois Vigilance Society, Chicago, February 7th, 1909, placed the number of women in disorderly resorts in Chicago alone at 30,000.
Stop! Listen: If there are 30,000 young women on this City’s Soul-Market, and we place the average value of one of these young women at $1,800, and we certainly do place it there, by established, recognized precedent, then there is $54,000,000 worth of young womanhood in the Slave-Market of our City at the present time. In the same statistical speech Mr. Roe places the number of young girls necessary yearly to recruit the rapidly decimating ranks of this vast Death Army at six thousand; hence, $10,800,000 worth of innocent girlhood must be sacrificed from our stores and factories, our homes or firesides all over the Land every twelve mouths to feed and satisfy the horrible flesh-market of Human Slavery in the “levee” districts of Chicago alone.
Harry A. Parkin, Assistant U. S. District Attorney, in Women’s World, March, 1909, says:
“The Federal investigations in Chicago and other localities have clearly established the fact that, generally speaking, houses of ill-fame in large cities do not draw their recruits to any great extent from the territory immediately surrounding them; for various reasons the White Slavers who are the recruiting agents of this vile traffic prefer to work in States more or less distant from the centers to which victims are destined.”
In view of all this, it must be clearly apparent that the need of the hour is legislation which will make it as difficult and dangerous for a White Slaver to take his victim from one State into another as it is to bring them from France, Italy, Canada or any other foreign country, to a house of ill-fame in Chicago or any American city. Therefore, it is suggested that if each State in the Union would enact and enforce laws against this importation, this terrible traffic would be dealt a blow in its most vulnerable part.
One of the strangest results brought about by the recent White Slave prosecutions in Chicago and the wide publicity which they have received has been the astonishment of thousands of persons, as evidenced by letters, at the fact that such a wholesale traffic is actually in existence, but what is still more astounding, not to say discouraging, is the reluctance of other thousands to believe that many hundreds of men and women are actually engaged in the business of luring young girls and women to their destruction and that this infamous traffic is being carried on in every state of the Union every day of the year.