Woman's work in municipalities

by Mary Ritter Beard

This ordinance is reported to have had the effect of driving immoral people from the buildings they have occupied for years, because the owners were afraid to risk the publicity and responsibility of their presence and practices. Many of these buildings are now being remodeled and occupied by a better class of tenants.

Another report of the series deals with the legal and police aspect of the social evil which led to the enactment of the law for enjoining and abating houses of ill fame as nuisances. A bill was also recommended creating a morals court. Finding the division of responsibility a cause of inefficiency and corruption in the police department, the commission recommends the vesting of full authority over the department in one man, as the most effective way of handling the social evil problem. Study of the juvenile aspects of the social evil led to specific sources of vice and the beginnings of moral delinquency, and resulted in the recommendation that a child welfare commission be appointed, which should be “charged with the study of the general subject of juvenile life.”

While realizing the desirability of requiring vice diseases to be reported and registered, the commission doubted whether public opinion would support the enforcement of such a law. It considered a vigorous campaign of education the most necessary step for the control of these diseases. It recommended, however, that all cases encountered in dispensaries, hospitals, juvenile and municipal courts, penal institutions, maternity hospitals, rescue homes, and all places of detention, should be officially reported. The commission also urged that the city contribute to the support of free dispensaries for the treatment of these diseases and that the Department of Health make tests for the diagnosis of these diseases without charge.

Wage scales were examined to determine the economic sources of the social evil and much interesting information was gathered. Human interest stories were revealed showing the need of a minimum wage for women workers, improved sanitation in shops and stores, shorter hours of labor and industrial education.

The commission records its emphatic opposition to segregation in Portland for the following reasons:

“Segregation does not segregate; deals only with a small percentage of the sexually immoral; promotes and justifies professional prostitution; does not reduce clandestine immorality; helps to establish a double standard of morality by stigmatizing the woman and ignoring the moral responsibility of the man; rests on the false presumption that sexual immorality is necessary; fosters the debauchery of the sex instinct; promotes the spread of disease; and affords official absolution for illegal and immoral conduct.”

Perhaps the most significant assertion in the whole impressive report is this sentence: “When any considerable number of men question the necessity of an evil it marks the beginning of the end. It is here that this commission rests and finds justification of its labors.”

Portland has since passed the “tin-plate ordinance” recommended by the commission and so strongly approved by women voters. Indeed this measure has commended itself to women everywhere in the country.

The Women’s League for Good Government of Elmira, New York, made an investigation of vice conditions under the American Vigilance Association during the summer of 1913. The results of this investigation were first given to the public at a great mass meeting held in one of the theaters in October. At this meeting a summary of the investigator’s report was given by one of the clergymen of the city. The theater was taxed to its utmost capacity, and the overflow filled the largest church auditorium in the city. The great audiences listened with solemnity to the startling revelations of the report. The Committee on Public Morals was at once organized and it was immediately requested by the newly appointed police commissioners to keep a watchful eye on the cheap theaters and the “movies.” Copies of the Vice Report were sent to the newly elected city officials, and additional copies were requested by the police commissioners, into whose hands was placed the key to the Report (names of persons and places having been printed in cipher). “We have reason to believe that the Report has been helpful to the police commissioners in their efforts to enforce the laws,” say the women of Elmira.

Valuable reports have issued from the Bureau of Social Hygiene in New York, at the present time composed of John D. Rockefeller, Jr., Dr. Katharine Bement Davis, the present city commissioner of corrections and former superintendent of the Woman’s Reformatory at Bedford, Paul M. Warburg, and Starr J. Murphy. For some time this Bureau had maintained a laboratory of social hygiene at the Bedford Reformatory whence Dr. Davis formed her convictions on the causes of sexual immorality. In the first publication of this Bureau—that of Mr. Kneeland on conditions of vice in New York City—Dr. Katharine Davis has a summary of the conclusions of the Bedford laboratory. Her personal convictions she states in this way: “I say unhesitatingly that in the vast majority of cases she [the prostitute] is a victim. Prostitution as now conducted in this country and in Europe is very largely a man’s business; the women are merely tools in the hands of the stronger sex. It is a business run for profit and the profit is large. It is my belief that less than 25 per cent. of the prostitutes in this country would have fallen if they had had an equally good chance to lead a pure life. That they have been dragged into the mire in such large numbers is due to a variety of circumstances, among which are poverty, low wages, improper home conditions and lack of training, the natural desire for pretty things, etc. But while all these may be contributing causes, man is chiefly responsible.”