This wider social program is now on the horizon of all those women who supplement individualistic morality by social morality and attempt to understand the causes which operate on men and women in masses. Where the women have this larger vision, they are demanding to know the facts—the plain, unvarnished facts. They will not be put off by a “There, there, now,” or “The time is not propitious.” We see women everywhere backing movements for commissions to study the social evil in all its aspects, individual and social, and where such commissions are established we frequently find women serving on them or coöperating in the investigation.
Vice Commissions
While their presence upon state and city vice commissions is of recent accomplishment, it is one of the striking recognitions of the fact that women have a vital part to play in the solution of the social evil.
Dr. Mabel Sims Ulrich was appointed a member of the vice commission by the mayor of Minneapolis in recognition of her pioneer work in education. She took her medical degree at Johns Hopkins and went to Minneapolis in joint practice with her husband. Gradually the question of sex education obtruded itself into her work. She was a mother as well as a physician and mothers came to her for advice; then the Y. W. C. A. sent her about to colleges and universities to impart knowledge on this subject. Thus her experience made her a valuable member of the vice commission.
The Chicago Vice Commission of 1912, the first of its kind appointed by a municipality and financed by the city treasury, consisted of thirty well-known men and women. An important part of the investigation was made by women or under their direction.
Following upon the recommendation of a Baltimore grand jury, the governor of Maryland appointed in 1913 a commission of fifteen members, some of whom were women.
Lucia L. Jaquith, superintendent of the Memorial Hospital of Worcester, Massachusetts, was a member of the Massachusetts Vice Commission which reported to the legislature in March, 1914. Its recommendations consist of: a modified form of the Iowa injunction and abatement law, penalizing the property in which prostitution is carried on rather than the prostitute; laws giving licensing boards more stringent supervision over cafés, hotels and saloons and authority to license boarding-houses and public dance halls; and a measure requiring all persons found in a building or place used for prostitution to state under oath their true names and residences. “A constructive plan of favorably modifying the conditions of prostitution demands definite knowledge of the class of men who patronize the prostitute,” is the opinion of this commission. Policewomen were suggested and a state police “untrammeled by local prejudices and alliances” to coöperate with local officials in suppressing immoral resorts in small towns and cities.
The Women’s Municipal League of Boston which had made plans for an investigation of vice conditions turned over much valuable data to this state commission. Another group of workers, under the chairmanship of Miss Marion Nickols, had undertaken similar work and also decided to help the commission.
The most notable report of a vice commission recently issued is, according to The Survey, that of Portland, Oregon (a suffrage state):
It includes a series of reports issued since the commission’s appointment in 1911. One of the series deals with the places of public resort and accommodation affected by the social evil. It concludes with the famous “tin-plate ordinance,” which requires that “on the front of every building used, either in whole or in part, as a hotel, apartment house, rooming, lodging, boarding, tenement house, or saloon, there shall be, at the principal street entrance, a conspicuous plate or sign bearing the name and address of the owner or owners of such buildings.” This, of course, greatly facilitates the apprehension and conviction of those responsible for violating the law against disorderly resorts.