At the great Hygienic Congress held at Buffalo in 1914 women were prominent during the sessions and they helped largely to awaken public interest in the meeting. Report had it that 7,000 representatives of women’s clubs coöperated to secure the participation of school and civic authorities in the Congress. At the Fifteenth International Congress of Hygiene and Demography which was held in Washington, D. C., last year, women not only participated but furnished one of the most interesting features of the event—a notable health exhibit.
If Lord Beaconsfield’s test of statesmanship were applied today, women would be seen to qualify.
CHAPTER III
THE SOCIAL EVIL
The awakening of women to the low social status of their sex is the most encouraging fact of the century. With the revelations which have come both from women and from men physicians, nurses, and scientists of the causes, spread, and effects of venereal diseases, the conscience and intelligence of women have fairly leaped in response to the demand made upon them for recognition of the situation and for remedies and prevention.
Their work here as elsewhere has been varied; for the problem of prevention is complex, many causes more or less combining to produce the undesirable vice conditions. There are those, for example, who make underfeeding—malnutrition—responsible for the physical and mental defects which distort the mind and the will and which feed houses of prostitution and the clandestine trade. Others lay emphasis upon the liquor traffic and refer to the obvious connection between bars and dance halls, between liquor and feeble-mindedness and degeneracy in general. Yet others see in the commercial spirit of the age and the avarice for profits and unearned livelihoods the basis of sex vice. Education, the responsibility of doctors and parents, marriage laws and customs, recreation, labor conditions and wages all receive their emphasis in the discussion of the causes of sex irregularities and morbidity.
In each line of thought and endeavor women will be found today in the United States as leaders in the crusade against the social evil. The General Federation of Women’s Clubs some time ago took official cognizance of the imperative necessity for women to attack the evils which eat at the heart of womanhood and maternity and thus endanger the infant and the adult man and woman. At its Biennial Convention in Chicago in June, 1914, the Federation made all aspects of this question one of its main considerations for study and action.
As a further evidence of the determination of club women not to shrink from the discussion of this question, we have The American Club Woman, the organ of the Federation, declaring under the heading, “Women Will Not Hush Up,” as follows:
There is deep significance in the fact that women are rejecting the idea of keeping silent about vice problems. There is strong enthusiasm for the suppression of the social evil. A well-known New York club woman said the other day: “I attend committee meetings and discuss the facts about the social evil in as impersonal a manner as I do child labor or the high cost of living. Twenty years ago I would have blushed with embarrassment at the mention of the social evil in a mixed company of men and women. I know my mother would have been terribly shocked at the idea of my reading a report on the white slave traffic.”
Times change. I believe we may make mistakes, but if we women are asking for political equality, we had better know what is happening to other women. It is as much our duty to try to suppress the so-called social evil as it is to promote higher education or secure a living wage for women in employment.
Apropos of this humane sentiment, we note that women in various parts of the country are tackling the problem with a vigor and common-sense that astonishes city officials.