When she was seventeen years old she was first approached by college students who wanted her to go to dinners, dances, to the theatre, and for motor rides. This was innocent enough for a time. She did not dare do anything wrong because of the Church and her traditional standard of virtue. Then she met an artist who asked her to pose for him, and she consented; and after several sittings he asked her to pose in the nude. Five dollars an hour was a temptation, for it meant almost a whole week’s work in the store (she got seven there) so she consented, not telling her mother. Then her knowledge of sex began. This man kissed her, glorying in her beauty and promised her everything she wanted if she would be his mistress. Shocked, yet tempted, she hesitated. She was not at all passionate, but he roused in her her dominant emotion—love of power, conquest over men—and she realized in one short week that this was to be her life’s exciting game.
Other girls in the shop began to tell her their experiences. The career of a clandestine prostitute seemed rather the common thing. The good girls seemed rather pathetic and poverty struck; most of them were homely anyway; but there was her virtue to consider, the Church, the future. She would want to marry some one who would appreciate her beauty, who would demand that her womanhood be unscathed. She must compromise. She would give the man all that he wanted without losing her virtue technically. No man would have her completely. Then she could play the game. She had never heard of the perversions of sex, but she soon learned them and practised her arts with no sense of shame.
She has no use for the working man—indeed, her life for the last four years has been a mixture of shop work or posing in the day and luxury at night. It would be impossible for her to live at home in an atmosphere of soapsuds and babies, hard work and poverty.
When forced to think out the situation as it is, she is fair-minded. Virtue to her has become a technicality. She is not harmed and no man is strong enough to overcome her if she herself is frigid. She likes to be kissed and adores to rouse men’s passions. She thinks many girls are like her who have never given themselves wholly to men, but most of them are more easily roused. She seldom stays all night with a man. She likes to “keep them guessing.” Besides her mother would make trouble if she stayed out all night. If she thinks she is at a dance, she says nothing about her coming in late.
She admits her scorn of her own station in life but says the luxury-loving age is responsible for that, that no girl who loves pretty things (which most women do) is going to be content with shabby clothes and stupid makeshifts if she can be as feminine and as lovely as other women who do not work and yet have their hearts’ desires. She does not think she does the men harm; in fact, she is a good companion and coarseness of speech is repugnant to her. She smokes cigarettes but drinks very little. She admits she has no motive in life except to marry, some day, a man who has a good deal of money. She could easily marry a rich man; several have already asked her but she intends to wait a while. She knows the pleasures of the intellect are not for her. She says excitement has been her master and that nothing else in the world matters greatly. Cold and superficial, she admits she is not much of a woman but denies that her conscience is dead,—says it has never been born. The girls who are mistresses to one man have more womanly qualities than she because they are aroused and fully developed.
She has no desire for children, does not care for them, but has no aversion to having one. It would have to be a pretty baby and must be brought up nicely. Clutter, pots and pans and drudgery are as remote from her life as if she had been born a princess.
“Probably I am spoiled,” she says, “but there are hundreds of others like me, though most of them are too human to resist sex temptation themselves. There are three types of people responsible for a vast number of girls like me: Mothers who spoil their daughters—anything rather than have them household drudges like themselves; society women who make the poor girl’s lot seem harder to her than she can bear; and the men who are glad to use the working girl for everything in life but marriage. Personally I am to blame, of course, but I consider myself swept by the current—glad to drift—yes; but afraid to think where it may end. I have never been in love. Something is still sleeping in me. Perhaps it will come to life some day.”[[78]]
The last document is very significant. The girl’s schematization of life is further from the bordel and nearer the strategic form of marriage recommended by the wife in document No. 49 (p. 87).
In none of the documents in this chapter up to this point is an unfortunate love affair or a betrayal with promise of marriage mentioned as the cause of later delinquency. Girls do make these representations, and very often, but they are always to be discounted, and for two reasons. In the first place girlhood and womanhood have been idealized to the degree that this explanation is expected and the girl wishes to give it. Betrayal is the romantic way of falling, the one used in the story books and movies. Many girls have finished stories of this kind which they relate when asked to tell about their lives. In addition, a seduction does usually accompany the first adventure into the world, as we have seen in the documents (Nos. 64–69), but we saw also that sex in these cases was used, as a coin would be used, to secure adventure and pleasure. On the other hand, not a few girls have tragedies in connection with courtship, promises of marriage, pregnancy, and childbirth which demoralize them when they had no previous tendency to demoralization. In a few cases girls yield to their own sexual desire.
72. Ellen is twenty years old. When her mother died six years ago her father immediately remarried and she went to an aunt in Poughkeepsie, but when her aunt found out she had broken connections with her father, she turned her out.... The aunt is an old maid living alone in a nice house, with one servant. She stayed with her one year. The aunt made it evident that she disliked Ellen. She did housework in Rochester, and then went to Poughkeepsie and later to Albany. She has worked as a maid, and as a salesgirl in a department store, but would not give the name nor any information regarding her employer.