Chicago and its cess-pools of infamy

by Samuel Paynter Wilson

Having quitted the fashionable house, the wretched woman has no recourse but to enter a second-class house, and then go down one grade lower in vice. The proprietress is cruel and exacting, and boldly robs her boarders whenever occasion offers. The visitors are more numerous, but are a rougher and coarser set than those who patronized her in the first stages of her career. Money is less plentiful, her life is harder in every way, and she seeks relief from the reflections that will crowd upon her in drink, and perhaps to drunkenness adds the vice of opium. Her health breaks fast, what was left of her beauty when she entered the house soon fades, and in two or three years she becomes unfit to even remain in a second-class house. She is turned into the street by the proprietress, who generally robs her of her money and jewelry, and sometimes even of her clothing, save what she has on at the time. The wretches who keep these houses do not hesitate to detain a woman’s trunk, or other effects, upon some trumped-up charge of arrears or debt, when they have no longer any use for her. The poor creature has no redress, and is obliged to submit in silence to any wrong practiced upon her.

The woman whose career opened so brilliantly is now a confirmed prostitute and drunkard, bloated, sickly and perhaps diseased; she is without hope, and there is nothing left. It is only four or five years, perhaps less, since she entered the fashionable boulevard mansion, beautiful and attractive in all the freshness of her charms, and little dreaming of the fate in store for her. She is not an exception to the rule, however. She has but followed the usual road, and met the inevitable doom of her class.

Going Down Into the Depths.

From the second-class house the lost woman passes into one of the bagnios of the “red-light district” or some similar place. Here her lot is infinitely more wretched. Her companions are the vilest of her class, and the visitors are among the lowest order of men who cannot gain admittance into places such as she has left. She finds herself a slave to the keeper of the house, who is often a burly ruffian, and even more brutal than a woman would be in the same position. She is robbed of her earnings, is beaten, and often falls into the hands of the police. She becomes familiar with the courts, the bridewell, and whatever of womanly feeling remained to her is crushed out of her. She is a brute simply. She remains in Green, Peoria or some other like street for a year or two—human nature cannot bear up longer under such a life—and is then unfit to remain even there. Would you seek her after this you will find her in the terrible dens and living hells—even in places of infamy and degredation that a former Mayor was compelled to stamp out, so utterly repugnant was it to even the lowest instincts of man. To the burning disgrace of Chicago, some of these pestiferous vice-breeding places are allowed to exist by the “stink-pots” who govern the city. These poor, vile, repulsive women, slowly dying from their bodily ailments, and the effects of drink and drugs, have reached the bottom of the ladder, and can go no lower. She knows it, and in a sort of dumbly, desperate way, is glad it is so. Life is such a daily torture to her, that death only offers her any relief. She is really a living corpse. The end soon comes. Some die from the effects of their terrible lives, and oh! such fearful deaths; and others are killed or fatally injured in drunken brawls which so often occur in this locality; and others still seek an end of their miserable existence in the dark waters of Lake Michigan.

I draw no exaggerated picture of the gradual but inevitable descent of a fallen woman in Chicago. Every detail is true to life. Seven years is the average life of an abandoned woman in the great city. She may begin her career with all the eclat possible, she may queen it by nature of her beauty and charms in some fashionable house, at the beginning, and may even outlast the average term at such places; it matters not; her doom is certain. The time will come when she must leave the aristocracy of shame, must take the second step in her terrible career. Seven years for the majority of these women, then death in its most horrible form. Some may, and do, anticipate the end of it by suicide; few ever escape from it.

“The wages of sin is death.” Some cherish the hope that after a few years of pleasure, they will reform; but alas, they find it impossible to do so. A few, a very few, do escape, through the aid extended to them by the “missions,” but they are so few that they but help to emphasize the hopelessness of the effort. The doom of the fallen woman is swift and sure! “The wages of sin is death.” Once entered upon a career of shame, the whole world sets its face against her. Even the men who associated with her in her palmy days would turn a deaf ear to her appeals for aid after she has gone down into the depths. I would to God that the women who are about to enter upon this terrible life could walk through the purlieu of the “red-light” district and witness the sights that I have seen there. I would they could see the awful, despairing faces that look out from the bagnios of that terrible neighborhood, and realize that, however brilliant the opening of their career may be, this must be the end of it. It is idle for them to hope to escape the doom of the fallen woman. “The wages of sin is death.” Would anyone know what sort of death? Let her come to Chicago and see.

Many of the women of the town never pass through the various gradations of vice that I have described.

Many never see the inside of a fashionable house of ill-fame, but begin lower down the scale, as inmates of second-class houses, as waiter girls in concert saloons, as inmates of dance houses—which were so prevalent in Chicago years ago—or as street walkers. These meet their inevitable doom all the more quickly, but not less surely.

The city is full of people, men and women, whose object is to lead young girls into lives of shame. They watch the hotels, depots and large stores and lure respectable girls away on various pretexts. Every inducement is held out to working girls and women to adopt the vile trade, and many fall willing victims. Hundreds of these women are from rural districts of adjoining states. They come to the city seeking work and are sometimes successful. Often, however, they can find nothing to do, and when poverty and want stare them in the face, they listen to the voice of the tempter, become street walkers or inmates of houses of ill-fame. Sometimes, while they are in the first days of their success, they will write home that they are pursuing honest callings in the city and earning respectable livings, and will even send money home to their deluded parents. After a while the letters cease—the writer has gone into the depths; they are lost!