And this is at once the weakness and the strength of the new element in elections. Those who have watched the ardor of the most eager and high-minded reformers burn out in commissions, in barren resolutions and recommendations, see in the average woman’s limitations that power, that one-idead incapacity to look philosophically on both sides of a question which marks Those Who Can Change Things. You may object that such qualities produce a Carrie Nation. They do, but they also make a Joan of Arc, a Harriet Beecher Stowe....
Her recently awakened realization of equality, the new broom that her conscience is, revolts at a policy that establishes a municipal clinic for women prostitutes, yet by a curious, cowardly subterfuge, overlooks the male’s share in infection; as though the plague created and disseminated in common could have but one source! And in addition to all this, she is learning that when she is ready at last to attack the vested, organized, recognized institution of prostitution, the first result of her activities will mean greater misery and perhaps speedier death for the woman who is already at the lowest point of the social scale....
But over against this set this fact: There are seven hundred women in San Francisco whose one aim in civic life is to found a state training school for girls gone wrong who would go right. This association has a representative in Sacramento whose sole business it is to further a bill for the establishment of a helping station to girls on the way to usefulness and moral health, modeled upon similar establishments in other states. Here is work, backed by thirty thousand club women of the state, proceeding definitely, practically to a solution of one of the most appalling obstacles to the crusade against vice.... But the time has not yet come when woman will face her individual share of atonement for a social sin in which she has acquiesced. Ultimately, with universal suffrage, the wheel of time must place at the door of the protected woman responsibility for the prostitute. As yet she cannot see herself, in her own home, taking up the broken lives, diseased bodies, debased minds and deadened souls—the by-product of that which men tell her has always been and always must be.
Prevention
It is not merely by drastic legislation directed immediately at the social evil that women are attempting to solve the problem. They know full well the complexity of the disease. They are coming more and more to the view that the indirect attack on low wages, bad housing conditions, and the other evils which lower standards of living is more effective than the frontal assault. They are also attacking the problem with measures designed to safeguard young girls who for economic reasons must work out of the home.
In their efforts to trace the whereabouts of immigrant girls, to do follow-up work, to establish immigrant homes, to secure matrons on steamers and women inspectors, women are constantly controlling some portion at least of the social evil. Miss Sadie American, Executive Secretary of the Council of Jewish Women, states that her organization, which does so much to safeguard Jewish girls, could do vastly more if it had the facilities that the government has in the way of registered lists of newly arrived citizens with their destinations. Certainly the organization of women as a social service adjunct to the Department of Immigration would be a step acceptable to women and of incalculable preventive value to the country.
The women of California are preparing to establish preventive and assimilative work among the foreigners who will doubtless pour into that state in a little while as a result of the opening of the Panama Canal.
“A committee for the protection of girls will be organized by Mrs. F. G. Sanborn, president of the Woman’s Department of the Panama-Pacific exposition. This work is regarded as very important when it is remembered that 6,000 girls were lost during the Chicago World’s Fair. Club women in San Francisco are actively interested in the Woman’s Department of the exposition.”[[15]]
Intercommunity and interstate responsibility for the diminution of the social evil receives increased emphasis in the writings and the civic work of women. They have learned that suppression of disorderly houses in one city may only drive evil doers into a neighboring city or a neighboring state. Even eternal vigilance to prevent the return of the traffickers and their victims does not satisfy those parents who read of surrounding iniquity and whose young people travel or work from place to place. By the organization of travelers’ aid societies, women and men have sought to protect girls and women in their travel by train and by boat from kidnapping or allurement on misunderstanding or misdirection. Such societies exist in every large urban center and are of the greatest value as preventive work in safeguarding women and girls from criminals.