Twenty tales by twenty women: From real life in ChicagoAnonymous
General
Twenty tales by twenty women: From real life in Chicago
Anonymous
Chicago (Ill.) -- Moral conditions; Prostitution -- Illinois -- Chicago
“You ask me if I am comfortable. Yes. I have everything that my physical
needs require. I have a good home and plenty to eat and wear. You say you
often wonder how I manage to get along in such an expensive city. Now, if
you mean that, you love me and you feel that every dollar I have comes
without the soil of dishonor. I will tell you how I—we—live. You have
raved over my figure; you have worshipped my body as though the presence
of my heart were an unheard of thing. Other men have evidently been
schooled in the same house of learning as you, for they, too, admire my
flesh and bone. Not a day passes but that I form some new acquaintance,
and, as I take it, all on account of my shapely limbs, my slender waist
and swelling bosoms. Those very possessions which were once yours, all
yours for your own aggrandizement and worshipful indulgence; those charms
which held you to me—the wealth of red-gold hair, the pink-tipped ears,
the pearly white teeth, the tapering hands, the high-arched foot, the
delicately moulded ankles, the laughing eyes and supple grace that you so
admired, even before I gave to you a son, are as much admired by other
men as they once were admired by you.
“It is different, though, with them and you. You held all of the then
priceless pearls with nothing but love; the same possessions which were
then yours because I loved you, are now dispensed at intervals to suit
the convenience of other men and for financial consideration.
“We—you and I—can remember the time when no man but you could lay claim
to any of my charms except my ready smile and kindly word.
“Now, and for two years past, my charms have been the property of a
public who, while not so demonstrative as you once were, seem wild to
have me disport myself for the edification of mankind.
“I often ask if I wrong a nature-loving public by allowing the use of my
body to fulfill their desires.
“My natural answer is no. I feel, in fact, that I may be the means of
saving some timid girl the embarrassment of assuming my place in the
world. I am sure I can do more to satisfy the whims of humanity than can
a novice, for I am a student of your school and your ideas are instilled
within me until I feel that my efforts will avail more than the efforts
of an inexperienced girl. Again, I am feeding and clothing myself and
our baby, and I love you. The world will, in part, frown upon me for the
part I am playing; others silently applaud me, and I congratulate myself
and feel, in a certain degree, I am a guardian angel and the precepts
inculcated by my conduct will be fittingly heralded to ears which will
transmit them to the heart with a good effect. I am doing what you might
not object to your divorced wife doing, but that which no man of high
honor would consent to his daughter doing.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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