Woman, Church & State

To the honor of the pulpit the sins of men are occasionally made the subject of condemnation. Evangelist Davidson preaching in Syracuse, N.Y. 1887, said:

I pray God to haste the day when vice in man will be marked by society the same as in woman. I know all the popular theories. You admit it is a fearful thing for a woman. There are poor women who are driven to it and you are the ones who drive them. You smile at the one thing in this sermon that ought to make a thinking man cry; the world is so depraved that you laugh at the very idea of a man’s saying he is a pure man.

Like Lecky, Mr. Davidson was correct as far as he went, but he, too, failed to reach the cause of this double code of morals. He did not touch it because in striking that, he would strike a blow at the very foundations of the church.

Christendom is percolated with immorality, large cities and small towns alike giving daily proof. Legislative and police investigations substantiate this statement; woman’s protective agencies and private investigations alike proclaim the same fact. As under the same organic teachings results must continue the same, we find the United States no more free from immorality than European lands; Catholic countries no more vile than Protestant; although feudal law no longer exists, men still rule in church and state. Men’s beliefs, their desires, their passions, create the laws under which the degradation of woman still continues. Evil consequences are not confined to the past, to days of comparative ignorance and tyranny; and in no country has the effect of belief in woman as a mere instrument for men’s pleasure produced more horrible results than in our own. Not to speak of the effort made in Congress a few years since to place all women of the country under suspect law, many cities, among them Washington, Philadelphia, Syracuse,306 have at different periods taken initial steps towards a prohibition of a woman’s appearing in the street un-accompanied by male escort, during the evening, even its earliest hours. Such ordinances, primarily directed against working girls whose chief time for out of door exercise and recreation is during evening hours, and to that other rapidly increasing class of business women, physicians and others, whose vocation calls them out at all hours of day or night; places the liberty of woman at the option of every policeman, as though she were a criminal or a slave.307 There is also proof of regularly organized kidnapping schemes and deportation of girls for the vilest purposes not only abroad, but to the pineries and lumber camps of Michigan and Wisconsin.

Bloodhounds kept for this purpose, or hunting down the girls with shotguns, prevents escape when attempted. In January, 1887, representative Breen appeared before the House Judiciary Committee of the Michigan legislature, confirming the charge that a regular trade in young girls existed between Milwaukee, Chicago and the mining regions of the upper peninsula of that state.308 In case of conviction, the punishment is totally inadequate to the crime of those men; the law giving only one year of imprisonment. The freedom, innocence and lives of such women are of less account in law than the commonest larceny of property. If these girls were robbed of fifty cents the law would punish the theft, but robbed of themselves, enduring such brutal outrages that life continues only from two to twelve months, there have yet no laws of adequate punishment been passed. So little attention have legislators given, that policemen, judges and sheriffs are found aiding and abetting the proprietors of these dens.309 Their emissaries find young girls between thirteen and sixteen the easiest to kidnap, and when once in power of these men, their hair is cut in order that they may be known. A regular system of transfer of the girls exists between the many hundred such dens, where clubs, whips, and irons are the instruments to hold them in subjection.310 The New York World sent a representative disguised as a woodman in order to investigate the truth of these statements. He found these houses surrounded by stockades thirty feet in height, the one door guarded night and day by a man with a rifle, while within were a number of chained bull-dogs that were let loose if a girl attempted escape. Certain men even in these forest depths are especially noted for their cruelty to these victims, who are compelled with club and whips to obey the master of the den. Suicide the only door of escape is frequent among these girls, who almost without exception were secured under promise of respectable employment at Green Bay, Duluth, or other points. From forty to seventy-five girls are found at the largest of such pinery dens.

The World reporter saw them strung up by the thumbs, beaten with clubs, kicked by drunken brutes and driven with switches over the snow. He afterwards interviewed a rescued girl who had engaged to work in a lumberman’s hotel, supposing it to be a respectable place, but instead she was taken to a rough building, surrounded by a slab fence nearly twenty feet in height, within which was a cordon of thirteen bull dogs chained to iron stakes driven in the ground. Many of the details given by this girl are too horrible for relation. Three times she tried to escape and three times she was caught and beaten. The visitors by whom she tried to smuggle notes to the outer world would hand them to the proprietor, who liberally paid for such treason. Even county officers visited the place to drink and dance with the girls, who were not permitted to refuse any request of the visitors. A complaint of any kind, even of sickness, meant a whipping, frequently with a rawhide upon the naked body; some times with the butt of a revolver. Many den-keepers wield a powerful influence in the local elections; one of the worst of such after paying the constable twelve dollars for the return of a girl who had tried to escape, beat her with a revolver until tired and was then only prevented by a woodman from turning loose a bull dog upon her; but such was his political influence that he was elected justice of the peace the following spring.

Under the head of “White Slaves in Michigan” the New York World of January 24, 1887, published a special dispatch from Detroit, Mich., in regard to the case of a rescued girl.

DETROIT, Jan. 23. – One of the infamous resorts maintained in the new iron region in the upper peninsulas, near the Wisconsin state line, was raided last September by the Sheriff’s officers. Hers is the first word to reach the world direct from one of those dens. Many of the details she gave were too horrible to be even hinted. On the strength of inducements now familiar, she went to work in a lumberman’s hotel in the North. She went, accompanied by another girl, both believing the situation to be respectable. She and her companion were taken to a rough two story building, four and a half miles from Iron Mountain, in Wisconsin. The house was surrounded by a slab fence nearly twenty feet high, within which about the building was a cordon of bull dogs, thirteen in number, chained to iron stakes driven into the ground. She said, “Scarcely a day passed that I was not knocked down and kicked. Several times when I was undressed for bed I was beaten with a rawhide on my bare back. There were always from eleven to thirty-two girls in the house and I did not fare a bit worse than the rest. A complaint of any kind, even of sickness, meant a whipping every time. When the log drives were going on there would be hundreds of men there night and day. They were not human beings, but fiends, and we were not allowed to refuse any request of them. Oh, it was awful, awful! I would rather stay in this prison until I die than to go back there for one day. I tried to escape three times and was caught. They unchained the dogs and let them get so near me that I cried out in terror and begged them to take the dogs away and I would go back. Then, of course, I was beaten. I tried, too, to smuggle out notes to the Sheriff by visitors, but they would take them to the proprietor instead and he would pay them. Once I did get a note to the deputy sheriff at Florence, Wis., and he came and inquired, but the proprietor gave him $50 and he went away. I was awfully beaten then. While I lived the life, from March until September, two inmates died, both from brutal treatment. They were as good as murdered. Nearly all the girls came without knowing the character of the house at first implored to get away. The county officers came to the places to drink and dance with the girls. They are controlled by a rich man in Iron Mountain, who owns the houses and rents them for a00 a month. I am twenty-four years old and was a healthy woman when I went into the first house, weighing 156 pounds. I was transferred to the house from which I was released by the officers in August last. When I left it I weighed 120. I now weigh less. When I go home I will be a good woman, if I can only let liquor alone. I was forced to drink that while there.”

The traffic in girls from one part of the American continent to another is under a well organized plan that seldom meets discovery, although a trader of this character is now serving a sentence in Sing Sing prison, N.Y., for sending girls to Panama. Three decoyed young girls found in Jamaica, were happily returned uninjured, to their parents.311 From Canada, girls are imported to the large cities of the United States. The prices paid to agents depend upon a girl’s youth and beauty, varying from $20 to $200 each.312 The traffic at Ottawa resembled that of London in that prominent citizens, leading politicians, and members of the government were implicated.313

The number of women and girls constantly reported “missing” is startling in its great extent. Stepping out on some household errand for a moment they vanish as though swallowed by the earth. A few years ago the Chicago Herald sent one of its reporters into the pineries of Wisconsin, to trace a little girl living on State street of that city who went one evening to get a pitcher of milk and did not return. Not a month, scarcely a week passes, that the disappearance of some woman, girl, or child, is not chronicled through the press, besides the infinitely greater numbers of whom the world never hears. As it was abroad, so in our own country, no energetic steps are taken to put an end to these foul wrongs. Woman herself is needed in the seats of justice; woman must become a responsible factor in government in order to the enactment of laws which shall protect her own sex. The spring of 1892, the Chicago Herald called attention to the continuance of this condition of things.

MARINETTE, Wis., April 17. – Four years ago when the Herald exposed the pinery dens of Wisconsin, Marinette was known as the wickedest city in the country. It was the rendezvous of every species of bad men. Thugs, thieves and gamblers practically held possession of the town. Their influence was felt in all municipal affairs. Certain officers of the law seemed in active sympathy with them, and it was almost impossible to secure the arrest and conviction of men guilty of infamous crimes. Dives of the vilest character ran open on the outskirts of the town. Their inmates, recruited from all parts of the country by the subtle arts of well known procurers, were kept in a state of abject slavery. Iron balls and chains, suffocating cords and the whistling lash were used on refractory girls and women. The dens were surrounded by stockades, and savage dogs were kept unmuzzled to scare those who might try to escape. Bodies of ill-starred victims were sometimes found in the woods, but the discovery was rarely followed by investigation. The dive keepers were wealthy and knew how to ease the conscience of any over-zealous officer.

The outburst of indignation which followed the Herald’s exposure compelled certain reforms in the neighborhood. Sporadic efforts were made to clean out the criminal element; restrictions were placed on saloons and gambling houses; stockades and bloodhounds were removed from the dives near the woods, and gradually an air of semi-decency crept over the district. But the snake was scotched, not killed. For a time more attention was paid to the proprieties, vice and crime were not so open as formerly. By degrees, however, the old conditions assumed sway again. Games of every kind were run openly night and day, dives and dance halls have been thronged and the usual quota of men from the woods deliberately robbed of their winter’s savings.

Man’s assertion that he protects woman is false. Under laws solely enacted by men young girls in christian countries are held as assenting to their own degradation at an age so tender that their evidence would not be received in courts of law. Nor are these the laws of a remote age come down to the present time. As late as 1889, the Kansas State Senate voted 25 to 9 that a girl of twelve years was of sufficiently responsible age “to consent” to take the first step in immorality; the same senate afterwards unanimously voting that a boy of sixteen years was not old enough to decide for himself in regard to smoking cigarettes.314 It should be remembered that youth is the most impressible season of life as well as the most inexperienced. Young girls from thirteen to sixteen, mere children, are most easily decoyed, their youth and innocence causing them to fall the readiest prey; and scarcely a large city but proves the existence of men of mature years whose aim is the destruction of such young girls.315 The state of Delaware yet more infamous, still retaining seven years as the “age of consent.” Seven short years of baby life in that state is legally held to transform a girl-infant into a being with capacity to consent to an act of which she neither knows the name nor the consequences, her “consent” freeing from responsibility or punishment, the villain, youthful or aged, who chooses to assault such baby victim of man-made laws.316 While the doors of irresponsible vice are legally thrown open to men of all ages with girl victims as their prey, the restrictions against marriage with a minor without the parents’ consent are in most states very severe. That the girl-wife herself has consented to the marriage ceremony is of no weight. Where a legitimate union is under consideration she is held as possessing no power to form a contract and can be arrested under a writ of habeas corpus, and kept from her husband at her father’s pleasure. Instances have also occurred where the wife has been punished by him for thus daring to marry.317 Both the husband and the officiating clergyman are also held amenable, the former under charge of abduction, the latter as an accessory in performing the marriage ceremony.

A significant fact is the rapid increase of child criminals throughout christendom; Germany, France and England showing one hundred per cent within ten years, while in the United States more than one-half the inmates of state prisons are under thirty years of age. From criminals it is necessary to look back to crime-making men sitting in earth’s loftiest places, and note the fact that crime germs are not alone generated with the child, but that through the gestative period the mother, a religious and legal slave, struggles between a newly awakened sense of that responsibility which within the last four decades has come to woman, and the crushing influence of religious, political and family despotism which still overshadows her. Moralists have long striven for the suppression of immorality by efforts directed to the reformation of corrupt women alone; for two reasons they have been unsuccessful.

First: the majority of women entering this life are found to have done so under the pressure of abject poverty, and as long as the conditions of society continue to foster poverty for woman it was impossible to create a marked change in morals.

Second: all efforts were directed towards the smallest and least culpable class, as it has been proven that ten men of immoral life are required for the support of one woman of like character. In London alone with its population of five millions, 100,000 women, one-fiftieth of its population are thus enumerated, requiring 1,000,000 men, one-fifth of its population, for their support. Recognizing the fact that men, not women, were most sunken in vice, the number leading vicious lives very much larger, the degradation of these men very much greater, an Italian lady, Madam Venturi, at the International Conference of the British Continental and General Federation for the abolition of governmental regulation of prostitution, while making a brief eloquent address upon the general subject of rescue work, referred to the great importance of reclaiming men as the fundamental work upon which others should be built up. Teach men, she said, to understand that he who degrades a fellow creature, commits a crime, the crime of high treason against humanity. In quick response to those fitly-spoken words, the women of many countries combined in the work of man’s reformation in an organization known as the “White Cross Society” founded in 1886, by Miss Ellice Hopkins of England, and now possessing branches in every part of the civilized world.318 To this society, men alone belong; its work is of a still broader character than mere reformation of the vicious; it seeks to train young men and boys to a proper respect for woman and for themselves.

As the world is indebted to Christine of Pisa for the first public protest against the immorality of christendom, so to Mrs. Josephine Butler,319 Madam Venturi, and Miss Ellice Hopkins are due the inauguration of a new moral standard for man whose results must be of incalculable value to the world. The “White Cross” is a simply organized society without an admission fee, but requiring adherence to a five-fold obligation binding its members to purity of thought and action,320 and maintaining that the law of chastity is equally binding on men and women. The International Federation, a union existing in several European countries, its chief object, work against state protection of vice, roused public thought in this direction as never before. People began to comprehend that a large vicious class was common to every community, a class whose reclamation had never been systematically attempted, never thought necessary or even deemed possible, because of the religious and social training that taught indulgence in vice to be a necessity of man’s nature; and the co-ordinate statement, that protection to the majority of women was to be secured only through the debasement and moral degradation of the minority. For many hundreds of years this has been man’s treatment of the question of vice in Christian lands.

But as soon as advancing civilization permitted woman’s thought to be publicly heard, vice in man was declared to be upon the same basis as vice in woman. Had not man been trained by his religion into a belief that woman was created for him, had not the church for 1800 and more years preached woman’s moral debasement, the long course of legislation for them as slaves would never have taken place, nor the obstacles in way of change been so numerous and so persistent. For nine years the Criminal Reform Act was before Parliament. During that period, petitions, speeches and appeals of every kind in favor of its passage were made by those outside the halls of legislation aided by a few honest men within. But the vicious and immoral fought the act with energy, despite the fact that the women of their own families were exposed to destruction through government protected iniquity. The bitter opposition by legislators to this act, is an additional proof that woman cannot trust man in the state to any greater extent than in the church.

Until woman holds political power in her own hands, her efforts for protective legislation will be arduous and protracted. Among the customs of the early christian church, we are able to trace the inception of marquette, the mundium, the legalization of vice and crimes of kindred character. With exception of among some savage races, that woman should appear unclothed before man, has been regarded as evidence of the deepest sensuality, yet throughout the history of Christianity from its earliest years when women were required to divest themselves of clothing before baptism down to the Endowment House ceremonies of the Mormon Church, we constantly find proof of like sensual exactions by the “Fathers,” priests and lay masculinity of the church. During the earliest days of christianity, women were baptized quite nude, in the presence of men, by men, their bodies being afterwards anointed with oil by the priest who had baptized them. One of the earliest schisms in the church arose from the protest of women against this indignity, their demand to be allowed to baptize those of their own sex, and the opposition of men to this demand.321

The early bishops of the church strenuously used their influence against the baptism of nude women by elders of their own sex. Women were sometimes brought entirely nude upon the stage at Rome, but it was in connection with religious representation, the theater at that period being an element of religious teaching. Lecky speaks of the undisguised sensuality of this practice.322 What must be our conception of a christian custom that placed nude maidens and wives in the very hands of men, not alone for baptism but also for anointing with oil? Nude baptism is still practiced when converts are received into the Greek church, no position or station in life excusing from it, Catharine, the first wife of Peter the Great being baptized in this primitive christian manner.323 As late as the seventeenth century a work upon the “Seven Sacraments” set certain days in which female penitents were to appear entirely unclothed before the confessor in order that he might discipline them on account of their sins.