The Relations of the Sexes (Duffey)/Chapter 8

THE practical worker in the field of social and moral reform does not go about repeating stale truisms, nor make a weak appeal to sentiment merely. I have learned by a little experience, in watching the operations of a grubber, that if you wish to get rid of a tree, you do not cut it off close to the ground, level the earth over the stump, and go away satisfied that your work is done. If you do, a dozen vigorous shoots will spring up and laugh you in the face. Repression is never suppression. The surest way is to dig down to the roots, and by patient delving, work them gradually out, until there are none left. Now, to complete the radical cure for prostitution and its attendant evils, we must search patiently for causes, and then take measures to remove them all.

I know that those people who never look beyond temporizing measures, will sneer at any attempt to do away with prostitution. They will tell us that it has existed coeval with the race, and will endure with it. I make no prophecies about the future, and admit the ​truth of their statement in regard to the past. But murder came into the world even before prostitution, if we may credit the sacred record, and is still alarmingly common. Is that a sufficient reason for countenancing or even "regulating" it? The impulse which leads to the murderous act is always a human and a natural one—jealousy, covetousness, envy or anger—all failings to which humanity is more or less liable. Shall we, therefore, regard it as a consequence of human sentiments and impulses which, being implanted by nature, should remain unbridled, and therefore murderers be permitted to go unpunished? Sometimes it is the direct result of the system of prostitution. Is it not then excusable on that count at least?

Theft, too, is a world-old crime, based upon human propensities. Let us provide for that by our laws, and recognize it as one of the necessities of our being. We have a natural right to anything in this world that we can get. That right is only qualified by the object of desire being already in the possession of another. Let us insist on exercising this natural right, ignoring its modifying clause, and cause the victims of our wholesale appropriations to be "regulated" in a manner that shall not interfere with our pleasures and desires.

I cannot and I will not accept this view of the case. Prostitution may always have existed—may resist all efforts to eradicate it—but it is no less the duty of every earnest man and woman to do all in their power to lessen ​its influence and to decrease its victims, male and female. While man is human, sin will exist; but we need not justify it, nor let it run rampant.

I think there is one fact which the social reformer can accept as truth, and will so accept with thankfulness. As common as licentiousness is in all its forms to-day, the world is vastly better than it was ages ago. Woman stands higher in civilized nations, and she has led mankind up with her. The world is infinitely better than it was four thousand years ago. It is better than it was two thousand years ago. Our own age stands out against the dark ages like light against shadow. The world has even noticeably progressed in morality in the last few decades, as any one will feel assured who reads the records of prostitution in London and New York but a generation or two ago. There may be really more sin now than then, but the population has increased in still greater proportion, while the methods which sin then devised were more devilish in their working than we dream of now. Not but that there is enough that is bad even now, and the procuress still follows her occupation. But her toils are not so ingenious, so bold, and so dangerous now as then.

The danger which threatens us comes from quite another quarter now. It is from a general lightness which pervades society, that we have most to dread. It has been our national boast that our women were the freest in the world, and this freedon has developed a ​large class of women into the noblest specimens of womanhood the world has ever seen—women rounded out in all womanly proportions, fully able to cope with men in any intellectual pursuit, yet women who have gained rather than lost in the true attributes of motherliness. The matrons of to-day will stand out on the page of history as more noble and more worthy of respect than even the Roman matrons.

But this is only one result of the freedom allowed woman. There is a reverse to the picture. A certain class of women, ignorant in the ways of the world, and undisciplined in their own natures, take advantage of the freedom awarded them in public places, to display a levity shocking to beholders, and which, if persevered in, can hardly fail to lead them directly to evil courses. "Handkerchief flirtations," as they are called, are a peculiar and distinctive amusement of this class of women. A young lady, or one who considers herself such, (and I am sure I would rather call her a lady than a woman, such is my respect for the latter word), as she is walking the streets, sees a young man walking on the opposite pavement, or on the steps of a hotel; he strikes her fancy, and she gives him a signal with her handkerchief, or by throwing him a kiss, or by some other means succeeds in attracting his attention. He joins her, and the flirtation commences. If the acquaintance proves an agreeable one to the lady, he is invited to call at her house, where she entertains him ​alone; since, in a certain not very well defined station of society, mothers, once having passed the age of attractiveness, are excluded from the parlor, and degraded to a secondary position in the household. The acquaintance progresses or is broken off at the young lady's pleasure, without the knowledge, perhaps, of even a single member of her family. Meantime she has no means of knowing anything of the social and moral status of her friend, except what he may choose to tell her. By this very disregard of the proprieties in her intercourse with the other sex, she has herself broken down the outer bulwarks of her virtue, and offered herself an easy prey to evil and designing men. Such a social experience as this is not good for even the best of men. A man might, without really intending to be guilty of any sin, see no harm in beginning and keeping up a handkerchief flirtation; while in the very act his respect for the other sex is inevitably lowered, and the downward steps are easily taken afterwards. But all men are not guiltless or good intentioned. It is safe to say that a good many of them—especially of the class which attracts the regards of these thoughtless girls (I do not like to bestow a harsher adjective upon them), are fast in their character, and would delight in nothing so much as to secure a prey, which fluttered so foolishly to their feet. I fear that future statisticians regarding the inmates of our brothels, will have to put down something to the credit of the handkerchief flirtations of the day.

​But I have not yet told the worst. It is not young girls alone who are guilty of this folly. Young married women, who have no housekeeping, family or business cares, to occupy their time and attention, take this means to enliven the ennui of their otherwise aimless existence. They really see no harm in a little amusement, and are confident of their power of taking care of themselves. The pavement, the street cars, the railroad cars, the parks, and public places of amusement, all afford them opportunity to indulge in this pastime, which, notwithstanding its asserted innocence, has so much of guiltiness about it, that they generally keep their frolics from the knowledge of their husbands. And the end, when secrecy is the beginning, is not difficult to foresee.

Allied to this species of really criminal levity, are the personal advertisements inserted and answered in the newspapers. Yet these are often resorted to for fun by foolish women.

Nor am I done yet. Mere slips of girls, who have not approached womanhood, and have not probably an idea of the gravity of their misdemeanors, will not hesitate to seek for acquaintances of the other sex by accosting them on the steps of hotels and on the streets, hoping to receive in return a few joking, lover-like words, and a treat of candy or ice-cream. The acquaintance thus begun does not take long, with ignorance on one side and unscrupulousness on the other, to ripen into improper intimacy; and the young girl, so easily led ​astray through her own folly, is an outcast for life. There is less hope for this class than for any other. A lady who has spent much time in gathering various statistics regarding brothels, has told me that a large proportion of their inmates, she found, had begun their career before the age of fifteen or sixteen. The same frivolity, exhibiting itself in many other ways, is the undoubted cause of ruin among girls. Wherever you find an undisciplined character, who recognizes no law of principle, but only of impulse and pleasure, there is a person, be it man or woman, who will fall an easy prey to the tempter. That many girls, and women also, are thus undisciplined, is too true, and that the ranks of prostitutes are not replenished more fully from this class, is due rather to happy circumstances than to any other preventing cause. An idle, purposeless life, generally, goes with this want of discipline and tendency toward frivolity. The girl, or woman, has nothing to think about, and little to do. Her mind is given to the devising of selfish pleasures, and her time to trivial affairs.

There are two classes of women of whom this is especially true. First, those in the lower walks of life, who lack both home training and educational advantages, and have therefore nothing to fall back upon in the way of mental resources and sustaining principles. Their time may be given to hard labor, and they see in prostitution an easy, and to them not unattractive, means of escape from the drudgery and hardships of their lot. They do ​not see the horrors of the life as you and I do; they cannot measure the depths of the precipice over which they are leaning, for they have no mental or moral gauge. Its edge is flower-bordered, and its descent at first almost imperceptible. The horrors they have never seen, or having seen, have failed to connect in their minds with their first cause; and of the moral enormity of the offence they understand nothing. They do not realize the dangers they are about to encounter, until they crowd close upon them, and then, when they clutch in terror at anything which may stay their course, their hands are beaten back, and they sink with upturned, agonized faces, and with mingled curses and wailings on their tongue. Oh! let us be pitiful and charitable.

The second class will be found in our ultra-fashionable society, where women flit from pleasure to pleasure with no more care or responsibility in life than the butterflies they emulate women who shirk family duties, that they may give their time and energies to the pleasures and dissipation which constitute what they call life. It is in the heart of this society that so many of our domestic tragedies occur, and so much work for the divorce court originates. Even if these women maintain their virtue in prosperity, when the day of adversity comes, then they are utterly helpless. The brothel is their only refuge.

Idleness and empty-headedness are the two greatest aids the devil has in this business.

Jaines Parton, in his biographical sketch of Fanny Fern, ​gives the following truthful account of the lives of many of our young American women:—

"Owing to many causes, American families in circumstances of ease, have succeeded in severing themselves farther from nature and the home-like realities of life, than any people on the face of the earth. It is only in the United States, and in a few circles in Great Britain, perhaps, that educated women can get to the age of thirty-six, wholly unversed in that useful, unromantic lore which we call knowledge of the world. During childhood they are caressed, indulged, and forbidden to go into the kitchen. They do not know the prices of things. They have not the smallest conception of the difficulty of maintaining human lives. Their burden is borne by others, and they accept the good things of this life as the flowers receive the sunshine and the dew, without any knowledge of the stress and toil by which these things are won; and, during a prosperous and happy married life, all the ugly places in the pathway are hidden from them by their husband's forethought and tenderness. They know nothing of his business. They know nothing of any business. The consequence is, that, if they are suddenly bereft of that strong arm and that providing mind, they are likely to be, for a time, bewildered, distracted, and helpless." Can we wonder that, in their bewilderment and helplessness, some of the weaker ones stumble from the path of moral rectitude?

The next cause of the ruin of women is vanity. The ​desire to appear well among their companions and in public, has probably been the ruin of more girls than even the seducer's arts. A working girl's wages do not generally allow a very expensive outlay for a wardrobe Therefore, a girl who cannot be content to be dressed neatly, plainly and inexpensively, will sometimes sacrifice her chastity at the solicitation of the one who will supply her the means to obtain silks, laces and jewels. Said a man to me: "Why do they not steal, if they must have these things? I would have the more respect for them in that case." Simply, my dear sir, because the laws have placed a heavy penalty upon theft, while there is no such bar in the way of a life of prostitution. There is, besides, in the latter case, apparently so much less danger of detection.

One of the saddest phases of this subject is that connected with the labor question. It cannot be denied that many women are driven to prostitution, either because they are unskilled laborers and cannot earn a living or because they receive an insufficient pay for what they really do. A truly virtuous woman, sustained by unbending principle, might prefer to starve in a garret, or subsist, it may be, upon a crust, rather than compromise her womanhood by seeking a life of vice. But we find many who are not of this sort, and they consequently fall. They, indeed, do not see all the horrors of the abyss below them, or they might hesitate before it was too late. They only see the ease and plenty which are ​held out to their immediate consideration; and I, for one, do not wonder that they yield. It is no use saying that they ought to have prepared themselves better for the battle of life. Of course they ought. But they have not done it, and society has not encouraged them in doing it. They are constantly reminded that it is their duty and privilege to be dependent upon men. Charles Nordhoff, in his recent work, "Politics for Young Americans," makes the following statement: "Of late there has arisen in this country and England, a vigorous discussion of the propriety of woman suffrage, at the same time that women have, in far greater numbers than ever before become independent laborers, which is a calamity to themselves and society." I would like to ask Mr. Nordhoff if it is not a greater calamity to themselves and society, when women are deprived of their natural protectors and providers, and are thrown upon the world, ignorant and helpless, that, for lack of that knowledge which would make them "independent laborers," they find a life of prostitution their only resource against starvation?

Women have been checked, whichever way they have turned out of the old beaten paths of feminine occupation, and have been driven back, if possible, and have been made to suffer as much contumely, perhaps, as though they had really given themselves over to an evil life. It requires a great deal of energy and perseverance for a woman to pursue her steadfast way into remunerative occupation. It requires neither for a woman to ​adopt a bad life. It is simply letting go, and gliding by the easiest and least perceptible of declines, while every man is ready to lend her a helping hand in her downward course. Many women never deliberately take the step at all. They awake to the fact some evil day that the step has been taken all unwittingly, and they cannot retrace it. Besides, to some natures—natures the weakness of which men profess especially to admire—the reproach attending a stepping-out of woman's recognized sphere in an honest endeavor to be self-supporting, is ten times harder to endure than that attending a decline from virtue. That at least is not being unwomanly: so men tell them, and they believe it.

It is a notorious fact that the frailty of women is counted on, and made a matter of gain to employers in some cases. We have had accumulated evidence of this fact. I now recall an incident—one among many—to the point. A young lady applied for the position of bookkeeper in a dry-goods establishment; a responsible position, which commands a high salary when its incumbent happens to be a man. She found the salary was barely sufficient to pay her board, leaving nothing for washing bills, clothing and incidentals. She pointed this out to the man, who asked her pointedly if she had not some gentleman acquaintance who could be induced to contribute the deficiency. In other instances employers themselves have offered liberal additions to scanty wages, or certain conditions which I will not name.

​I come now to the saddest of all the causes which operate to the increase of the ranks of fallen women, and the one which brings the largest proportion of victims to a life of prostitution—that of seduction and subsequent desertion. If there is any crime upon God's earth which deserves and which will surely receive the curse of heaven—as sure as there is a just God ruling over us—it is that which begins by taking advantage of a woman's love and weakness to rob her of her rights to home, and wifehood and social position, and ends by casting her out as a thing dishonored and scorned, to bear her shame and infamy alone; while a little innocent child, born of this trust and treachery, is branded with disgrace, and set apart from its fellow-creatures, as having no rights—no, not even a right to a name! Who have been our lawmakers that this thing could be done with impunity? Where has been the sense of justice in the world, to suffer it to go on unchecked and unchided? Where is the womanhood which rises not up as one body to call for the defence and protection of a weak, it is true, but at the same time a greatly wronged sister? Alas! where?

I should think that the women who have been sent to the depths of earthly perdition through too great love and trust, would be the most dangerous class of prostitutes to deal with. I should expect them to hate men for their perfidy, and women for their unwomanly carelessness and scorn; and hating them with such good reason, I should not wonder if they strove to despoil them.

​Dr. Timothy Dwight, late President of Yale College, thus speaks of seduction: "He who can coolly adopt it has put off the character of a man, and put on that of a fiend; and, with the spirit of a fiend alone, he pursues and accomplishes the infernal purpose. The ruin sought and achieved is immense. It is not the filching of property; it is not the burning of a house; it is not deprivation of liberty; it is not the destruction of life. The seducer plunders the wretched victim of character, morals, happiness, hope and heaven; enthralls her in the eternal bondage of sin; and murders her soul with an ever-living death. With the same comprehensive and terrible malignity he destroys himself; calls down upon his own head the vengeance of that Almighty hand which will suffer no sinner to escape; and wakens the terrors of that undying conscience which will enhance even the agonies of perdition. All this is perpetrated, in the mean time, under strong professions of peculiar affection; with the persuasive language of tenderness, and with the smiles of gentleness and complacency. For the seducer

The Rev. George Gilfillan, of Dundee, Scotland, says with equal force: "Can there be a fiercer hell than we can conceive in a seducer, after long years, meeting with a woman he has deflowered, on the street, and seeing, for the soft and beauteous eyes that once looked love into his—hollow orbs where hunger has come, and where ​death is fast following; for the rosy cheek with the blush of innocence not yet faded from it—the pallor of decay; for the sweet ringing laugh—the wild shriek of false mirth, or the breast-shattering cough of consumption; for the simple dress—the tawdry rags of what was once a fashionable dishabille, won by the wages and worn to tatters in the service of sin; recognizing her while his conscience cries out, 'Behold the work I have wrought!'—her look of astonishment and hideous rage proclaiming that she too has recognized him, and that she would, if she durst, tear him limb from limb, and especially uproot that tongue, which by its glozing falsehoods and poisoned honey-dew had brought her to a shameful calling, nameless diseases, an early death, and, if God's grace prevent not, a fate beyond—more merciful certainly than his, if he repent not, but at which the imagination shudders and the heart recoils!"

I will make another quotation from the Rev. William Arnot: "This is a costly taste of yours, that demands creatures formed in God's image as fuel to its flame. Look at the fruit of your doings in that imbruted soul and bloated body, with hardly any human features left, a mass of incurable corruption now. That lump of yet living flesh was once a woman, her spirit now departing in darkness, and her body returning to dust before the time. Look at that wreck, brother—all that remains of an immortal,—thou art the destroyer!"

Dr. Sanger also says very pertinently in this matter: ​"Men who in the ordinary relations of life, would scruple to defraud their neighbors of a dollar, do not hesitate to rob a confiding woman of her chastity. They who, in a business point of view, would regard obtaining goods under false pretences as an act to be visited by all the severity of the law, hesitate not to obtain by even viler fraud the surrender of woman's virtue to their fiendish lust. Is there no inconsistency in the social laws which condemn a swindler to the state prison for his offences, and condemn a woman to perpetual infamy for her wrongs?"

The most hopeless class of all prostitutes is that which enters the business from pure love of sensuality, or for plain, undisguised money-making purposes. A seduced woman is a woman still, betrayed through her most womanly traits. The woman, profligate from choice, does not wait to be seduced: she is generally the seducer, and takes delight in the mischief she achieves. She is so utterly unwomanly in all her characteristics, that she seems more like a man than a woman. Certainly, the preponderance of sensuality in her character has more of masculinity than femininity in it; and the fact that such women bear few or no children is an evidence in favor of this view. No doubt there is quite a considerable proportion of prostitutes who belong to this class, for they naturally drift into such a life.

Of those who lead the life of prostitutes because they see in it an opportunity for pecuniary gain, and who use ​every means to filch money from their victims, I have nothing to say. There is no more humanity about them than there is about a rum-seller. The two classes will go to perdition together. They are not lost women, strictly speaking, for they never possessed any womanhood to lose.

There are a few who follow a prostitute's life because they have been brought up to it; a few who are forcibly dragged into it, and have found no means of escape until too late; and still a few more who are sacrificed to the cupidity of parents. But these are all inconsiderable classes.

We find, therefore, frivolity, idleness, vanity, love of admiration, unremunerative labor, seduction, sensuality and cupidity, to be the chief causes which produce prostitution. What shall we do? We cannot with clear consciences fold our hands and let the world go on as it has been doing. We find that men have had all the management of the world for the last six thousand years, and still prostitution flourishes. It is useless, then, to hope for men to do anything alone; so the task of aiding in the suppression of prostitution and kindred vices falls upon women. And women must accept it and perform it as a voluntary and grateful tribute to the civilization of the nineteenth century, which has given them such opportunities for self-development, and fitted them to undertake the task.

If ever there is anything done toward checking this ​monster evil, it is certain that it will be done by the help of women—and by good women and pure. They, through the very impulses and emotions of their womanhood and motherhood, will understand how to do, and what to do, better than any man or aggregation of men. This matter touches them in their dearest and closest interests. They feel the wound, and it rankles, but they have not quite yet learned how to probe it, and how to apply the healing remedy. It is through and by these womanly interests and affections that they will at last be spurred on to attempt the salvation and moral redemption of the world.

Mrs. Josephine Butler, an English lady, makes the following beautiful appeal in behalf of the unfortunate:

"There are many tragical histories recorded in the Old Testament, that true mirror of the faith and the righteousness, but also of the depravity of man. Few are more tragical than that story, in the book of Judges, of the wayfaring Levite, who halted at Gibeah of Benjamin, and lodged there with the woman, his companion. We read with a shudder the ghastly details,—the clamoring of the sons of Belial round the door, the suspense, the parley, till, in the cowardice of self-defence, the man brings out that helpless woman, and casts her among the hellish terrors of that awful night. 'All night until the morning,' she endured, 'until the day began to spring; then came the woman in the dawning of the day, and fell down at the door of the man's house where her lord was, till it was light. And her lord rose up in the morning, and ​opened the doors of the house, and went out to go his way; and, behold, the woman was fallen down at the door of the house, and her hands were upon the threshold. And he said unto her, Up, and let us be going! But none answered.' She was dead.

"Christian friends, there is a weak and prostrate figure lying at our door; to this door she turns for help, though it be but in her dying fall. Her hands are upon the threshold—dead hands flung forward in mute and terrible appeal to the God above, who, looking down from heaven, sees not that prostrate form alone, but on the one side the powers of hell, on the other, in their safe dwelling-place, the selfish sleepers to whom the pale, cold hands appeal in vain. The night is far spent; throughout the world's long night the fate of the Levite's concubine has been outcast woman's fate; cast forth in answer to the clamorous cries of insatiable human lusts, and then left to perish in the outer darkness; while 'her lord,' ordained her protector by nature and by the law of God, slumbers unheeding. Her voice is too weak to be heard, the door is too heavily barred for her to open, that she might cross the threshold again; her only appeal is her heavy corpse-like fall beside the door, her silence when invoked, and her cold, dead hands stretched forth. It might well make our morning slumbers uneasy, and cause us to murmur, in our dreams, of the coming judgment, to know that there lies a corpse at our door, crushed with the heaped and pitiless weight of the sins of others and her ​own. But the day is at hand. We have slept long and soundly, while that woman bore the hell without. Shall we sleep still? What if the Judge should come and find us scarcely risen from our torpor, our door scarcely opened, our morning salutation scarcely uttered to the victim whose voice is stilled in death—should come, and should require of us an account of our protectorship, and show to us such mercy as we have shown to her?"