[APPENDIX VII.]
IMMORALITY AS CAUSED BY DESTITUTION AMONG WOMEN.
The causes of immorality among women are deep-seated in modern life. They are due to—(1) widespread changes in sex relationship, combined with (2) changes in modes of life due to the industrial revolution, and complicated by (3) psychic developments in humanity itself.
(1) Suppose we take the largest and most universal change first. In modern civilisation the psychic relationships of man and woman are changing. Intensity has come into sex relationships. It is reckoned right, or at least pardonable, for men and women to do "for love" what may be against the dictates of common sense. To a large extent this is ephemeral, and belongs to the erotic age alone. But necessarily the effect on the young of both sexes of the "novel" with its coloured picture of life, must be great, and greatest on the most emotional sex. Fictitious views of life influence minds just endeavouring to grasp life as a whole. A woman may be placed in circumstances of destitution in pursuit of the ideal life. It matters little to evolution that thousands of lives perish. The evolution of woman involves, like all other evolutions, sacrifice.
(2) Let us now look at the second large factor—what is called the Industrial Revolution. It has been pointed out by Mrs. Stetson, that hitherto man has been the economic environment of woman. We are still in a transition period, but largely in the middle and working classes, women before marriage, and even after, are escaping to economic independence. This change is so vast and far-reaching (involving an adjustment of all our social institutions) that we can hardly yet appreciate it. Once begun, it must go forward. But at present, as half begun, it means in all directions the danger and sacrifice of individual lives. Over against the problem of unemployed men, we now have unemployed women also—women not dependent, but on their own economic footing.
(3) Changes in sex relationship rapidly follow on changes in economic status. The attainment of economic status as distinct from economic value is imperceptibly modifying marriage and the family. Woman and man are partners. While the child becomes more and more the centre on which public interest focusses, at the same time the ties both of wifehood and of parentage and of brotherhood and sisterhood are relaxed. Community interest and life replaces by degrees parental restraint and responsibility. Freedom has its blessings and also its penalties.
Let us trace a woman through her normal life and see what dangers of destitution beset her.
As at first born, the home is her support and natural habitat. But economic independence being possible at an early age, parental restraint is lighter. I have known cases of girls even of fourteen and sixteen leaving home, and with a companion or two, clubbing together and setting up house. They were then free to invite young men, with what consequences may be imagined. A girl in "lodgings" or "with friends" may easily become destitute through changes in employment.
In addition to these wandering children, parents often cast off girls on very slight grounds. To turn a child into the street, if the girl is out of work or supposed to be idle or disorderly, is by no means uncommon. It is so common that some provision for it should be made in every town.