You may talk to women of the futility of figuring social sex sins, but they seem to be congenitally incapable of believing you. I heard a man talk to an audience in behalf of this measure, and when he touched upon that old, old text—it always has been; it always will be—there came a curious resemblance in every woman’s face within my vision; for every face had hardened, stiffened, was marked with the family likeness of rebellion. The lecturer was addressing himself to deaf ears, to eyes determined not to see.
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 for 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.
This work of restoring the prostitute to decency and happiness is the side of woman’s work in the field of vice least developed; it is, however, a side which is most essential. Says Miss Michelson:
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 women responsibility for the prostitute. As yet she can not 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.
The following passages are from Cardinal O’Connell’s pastoral letter on the labor problem:
The Problem
The social problem of the relations between employers and employed seems to be the one most fraught with danger to our peaceful living.