Fighting the Traffic in Young Girls; Or, War on the White Slave Trade

by Unknown

I did not know the character of what are called "disorderly houses."

It seems to me that good people, pious fathers and mothers, who let their girls grow up and go out into the world without a word of real instruction that will protect them in such crises which may come in life to any woman, are not wholly innocent—I am tempted to say are frightfully guilty of the destruction of their own daughters.

To make a long story short, and to tell a hideous tale in a few very plain words, I accepted the proposition and found myself installed in one of the protected vice dens of Chicago as housekeeper and the special personal slave of this man, whom I now found to be a slave trader, the practical owner of other women and girls in various dives, as well as the driver of gangs of procurers. This man almost owned me. My salary—such small parts of it as I got—went into his pocket upon one excuse and another, while I was subject to his brutal will constantly.

I will not shock my readers by telling the details of my horrid life in that place, but I must give them some facts that ought to be in possession of the unsuspecting decent people who sit quietly and virtuously in their own homes while a slaughter more terrible than Herod ever dreamed of goes on unceasingly.

I am asked to say whether the unfortunate girls in these places are slaves in the sense that they can not get away. My answer to that must depend upon your interpretation of "can not."

In my own case there never was a time when I could not have walked out of the building, had I chosen to do so, but my promised salary was always in arrears and I was penniless, with nowhere to go and no friends.

To walk out on a winter's day into the streets of Chicago, with nothing with which to buy a meal and no shelter and no friend under the wide, pitiless sky, is a heroic course to which some resolute Spartan matron might be driven in protection of her virtue, but it's a course which can hardly be expected from a mistreated, deluded, ignorant, disgraced, modern American girl.

And it must be understood that my situation was very different from that of the "girls." I was in the position of a superintendent. They were under me. What would have been possible for me was practically impossible for them.

To begin with: No inmate of these vice dens is allowed to have clothing with which she could appear on the street. It is taken away from her by fraud or by force, as soon as she arrives, and is locked up. She never sees it again until she is regarded as thoroughly trustworthy and sure to come back if she does get out.

Then, too, she is in debt. As soon as she arrives at the house, an account is opened with her, although, perhaps, she never sees the books. She is charged with the railroad fare that has been paid to bring her to the city; she is charged with the price that was paid for her to the thief who betrayed and stole her; she is charged for the alleged garments that are given her in exchange for her clothing—charged four times the price that they cost.