Fighting the Traffic in Young Girls; Or, War on the White Slave Trade
History
Fighting the Traffic in Young Girls; Or, War on the White Slave Trade
Prostitution
Five years ago barred windows on a house of sin, which had been turned
into a mission, alarmed some of us and gave us almost our first ideas of
the fate of the white slaves. The house was a notorious place, the most
notorious in Chicago a dozen years ago. The name of the woman who kept
it was known and is still spoken in the circles of the immoral
throughout Chicago and far beyond it. Stories are told of princes of
European houses, pouring out wine and money like water in this
glittering palace of mirrored walls and brilliant lights.
The woman died and the probate court would not allow her estate to use
the property for immoral purposes. It was leased for a mission and
rescue home by Mr. O. H. Richards, founder and superintendent of Beulah
Home. Many of the windows were barred, and whatever explanations might
be offered, we were never satisfied that they were not barred to keep in
girls who at least at times would gladly escape. When we learned that
many other houses in the vice district had windows similarly barred we
were obliged to conclude that girls were constantly detained against
their will.
To this refuge which had been a dive, Edith E---- fled one morning,
having escaped from a resort on Custom House Place. She ran first to a
drug store, telephoned to the police to get her street clothes from the
dive, and then came to the rescue home. She explained that she had heard
the midnight missionaries two nights before singing, in a gospel meeting
which they were holding in front of the den where she was:
"Throw out the life-line to danger-fraught men,
Sinking in anguish where you've never been."
So deep an impression was made upon her that she was wretched all the
next day, quite unfitted for her old life. Next morning she escaped.
She told me that she had been a very wicked girl, that her young husband
had committed suicide because of her sin. She never went back to her
evil life. Her physical heart was seriously weakened from her addiction
to drugs, liquor and vice.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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