INTRODUCTION.
Without women, the beginning of our life would be helpless; the middle, devoid of pleasure, and the end of consolation.
The very first
Of human life must spring from woman s breast,
Your first small words are taught you from her lips,
Your first tears quench d by her, and your last sighs
Too often breathed out in a woman s hearing,
When men have shrunk from the ignoble care
Of watching the last hour of him who led them.
In London alone there are eighty thousand fallen women, and, while the number is infinitely smaller in Chicago, they all have a history, an excuse to offer, and a tale to tell.
We have resided upon this terrestrial sphere just long enough to know that the reformation of a fallen woman rivals the labors of Hercules. All men have a physical nature and must meet people who appeal to it.
The conditions are such that there has arisen in society, a figure that is certainly the most mournful, and, in some respects, the most awful, upon which the eye of the moralist can dwell. That unhappy being, whose very name it is a shame to speak; who counterfeits, with a cold heart, the transports of affection and submits herself as the passive instrument of lust; who is scorned and insulted as the vilest of her sex, and doomed, for the most part, to disease and abject wretchedness of men, then death.
Who will pity her? A poor unknown, who shall be lowered into a grave of cold clay (and possibly in the potter s field), among slimy, creeping things that feed on foul air and putrid masses. Not even a slab to say, Here lies.
With dreamy eyes and rum dulled brain, her companions take in the scene without warning. They shrink not from the horrors of the charnel house or the maggot filled grave; sin fascinates them as the cursed death giving flame does the foolish moth. They continue to cultivate avarice, defy all laws of nature and modesty, all rules of etiquette, and break down all barriers which ordinarily defend pure womanhood.
She is a rag and a bone and a hank of hair.
Women of this class feel that they are social outcasts, that their sins are as scarlet; they believe that they are past reform.
Herself, the supreme type of vice, she is usually the most efficient guardian of virtue. But for her, the unchallenged purity of countless homes would be polluted, and not a few, w
