CHAPTER IITrade in Women

It is necessary to define clearly the practical form of evil which is now under consideration, and to the effects of which the consciences of men and women must be roused. Ordinary immorality is not the demoralization of the slums—that horrible result of monopoly and speculation in land, where human beings are herded together like pigs—a condition into which the bargains of trade hardly enter. Neither is it the practice of free lust—a practice where unlimited liberty is claimed by both men and women to indulge the impulses of sexual caprice. Ordinary immorality is the distinct, deliberate application to women of the trading system of money values governed by unlimited competition. In this system activity, opportunity, and cleverness carry the day; conscientiousness and spiritual aspiration are out of place; innocence and ignorance constitute weakness, and, of course, go to the wall.

Ordinary immorality or fornication, assuming the female body to be an article of merchandise, necessarilysubjects this merchandise to those fluctuations of the market, those variations in demand and supply, and that tyranny of capital over labour which destroy freedom of contract.

It may be urged that women ‘consent’ to be purchased, and that therefore there is a radical difference between the purchase of the bodies of men and women, which the anti-slavery movement has pronounced illegal, and the purchase of women by men which we are now considering. The sophistry of such evasion will be apparent if the question of ‘consent’ and the specious hypocrisy generally involved in freedom of contract be closely examined. Freedom of contract can only take place between those who in certain essential particulars are equals. The parties to any contract must be so far equals in intelligence, that they can equally understand any risks that may be run, and clearly foresee the probable results of the bargain; and they must be so far equals in social position, that neither party is compelled by the pressure of circumstances or the fear of want, to accept conditions which are unjust or unwise. No freedom of contract is possible where this degree of intellectual and practical equality does not exist. Freedom implies responsibility. There is no freedom if both parties are not free. Any insistence upon consent to a bargain ignorantly or forcibly made is fraud. It is fraud darkened by varying degrees of cruelty, proportioned to the superiority of intelligence and independence possessed by the stronger party in the bargain.

The grave error of excusing purchase by the plea of consent, is fully shown when the relations of capital to labour in the present system of competitive industry are understood. We are now so far removed from the primitive trade of barter, where values were determined by necessities, that first principles are commonly lost sight of. Generations have passed, during which ideas about wealth have become confused through complicated exchanges, stored-up labour inherited by those who no longer labour, violent seizures in the past or cunning ones in the present, with constantly changing standards or ideals. The quite new standard of converting everything into a money value, and measuring its value by money, has taken the place of older methods. As a result, money has become the autocrat of industry. Character, talent, activity still possess their uses, but only as the servants of money or capital, which have practically become interchangeable terms. The weaker portions of the human race are ever more and more deeply crushed down by the misery of a limitless competitive system, which is not based on the legitimate foundations of trust, freedom, and sympathy, and which consequently, by placing money as the irresponsible governor of the industrial world, makes the hypocrisy of so-called ‘freedom of contract’ the most bitter mockery.

It is necessary to realize the overwhelming and illegitimate power of money in the present day, if the condition of any grade is to be justly judged, and the responsibilities for the evils of a vicioustrade rightly apportioned. In the terrible trade which converts the human body into a marketable commodity, it is no figure of speech, but a very weighty fact, that vicious men are the capitalists. The responsibility of that position must be recognised.

In judging either of the parties concerned in the trade, the question, ‘Who are the capitalists or paymasters?’ is the point to be insisted on. This is the fundamental fact to be steadily borne in mind—whether we consider the demoralized women who consent to the conversion of their bodies into merchandise; or the wholesale traders who organize to meet a demand increasing beyond the power of individuals to supply; or the State which connives at the trade; or society which condones it—the capital on which this nefarious traffic rests is supplied by licentious men. This is the great economic fact on which the whole system rests. All legislation and all benevolent effort that do not recognise this fundamental fact, will hopelessly wander in the labyrinth of evil trade, with no clue to direct their energies aright. From this unnatural employment of capital, two other economic evils directly arise—viz., first, the discouragement of honest industry; second, an unfair competition with male labour.

The discouragement of honest industry is a very serious economic evil. Any discouragement to patient industry, thrift, and self-control is direct encouragement to reckless improvidence, vicious indulgence, and the creation of a dangerously increasingpredatory horde. Through obstacles to honest labour, our prisons are now filled with criminals, our streets with the vicious, and our work-houses with paupers. The industrious workers are taxed beyond endurance to support the institutions rendered necessary by the suicidal policy of degrading labour.

The discouraging difficulties which now surround all honest industry press with increased force upon women’s labour, and compel a moral heroism to resist the special temptation which crowds upon them.

It is now a fact that in every large city, no woman with any pretension to natural attractiveness can fail to meet a purchaser. There are men who think it neither shame nor wrong to purchase for shillings or pounds, as the case may be, a temporary physical gratification, without reflection upon the inevitable results, individual and social, of their temporary action. The knowledge that money may be gained so easily, spreads from woman to woman. The contrast between the ease with which the wages of sin may be gained, and the laborious, even crushing methods of honest industry, becomes an ever present and burning temptation to working women.

It is undoubtedly true that the numerical excess of women in Great Britain, with other economic facts, intensifies most heavily upon woman the grinding pressure of our present industrial system. All rescue workers seeking to help their fallen sisters are constantly confronted with the appalling answer, ‘Giveme work; I cannot starve.’ The awful extent of woman’s industrial misery would now be more fully realized, had not well-meant benevolent efforts called in the harsh hand of the police to suppress begging, and thus crush it out of sight.

The increasing and perplexing flood of women in the streets, begging to be bought, is a strange commentary on the effect of the stern repression of begging for alms. If in the future, in addition to the suppression of ordinary begging by men and women, another edict goes forth forbidding women to present themselves for sale, but not forbidding men to purchase them, gross injustice to women will be added to a cruel abuse of power, and fresh impulse given to male vice. Certainly, if it were in the nature of women to become murderous criminals, any increasingly harsh and unjust attempts to crush their misery and degradation out of sight, would drive them into violent crime.

But it is not the seamstress slowly starving in her garret, nor the mass of struggling poverty that is alone, or even chiefly, beset by the fiery temptations of gain, and the enticing pleasures which money can provide. The deterioration of character, which is the gravest result of a false system of political economy, extends to much wider circles of society. This serious fact is sufficient to prove the error of those who look to the industrial independence of women, as the chief means of destroying licentiousness. Although freedom to obtain decent remunerative employment will secure an important conditionfor checking social evil, it will be a means only, it can never attain the end.

The great army of domestic servants, whether in public or private dwellings, are surrounded by constant temptations to supplement their wages or relieve their monotonous labour by selling themselves. When we remember the conditions under which the vast mass of servants have grown up, the exposures and privations of their homes, their undeveloped mental state in relation to social duties, the exhausting work upon which the majority of them enter in hotels, lodging-houses, struggling households, or the special danger of rich, careless establishments, and realize both the condition under which their service drags on and the natural instincts of the human being, then it is easy to understand why to a frightfully increasing extent they yield to the solicitations to which they are exposed. The five shillings secretly gained at night becomes an important addition to scanty wages, the stolen pleasures an intoxicating relief to drudgery. The economic effect of thus bringing the lightly-earned wages of vice into competition with the hard-earned wages of honest industry is to discredit the latter, and to produce discontent and careless, unwilling service in industries for which women are naturally better fitted than men; for the same state of things that is injuring domestic service, exists in dress-making, millinery, and all peculiarly feminine industries.

If we take the wider range of labour in whichwomen compete more directly with men in the labour market, it will be found that this practice of purchasing women introduces an unfair element in remuneration of labour. The introduction of the slave principle (the purchase of the human body) in cheapening women’s labour, has a formidable effect in depressing the wages of working-men. In all systems of industry carried on by slaves the cost of maintenance is, as a rule, the limit of expenditure, the equivalent of wages. Also in the industrial systems of so-called free industry, the maintenance of the labourer again forms a limit beyond which profit cannot be extracted, for no man will consent to labour for less wages than will keep him alive. But this is not the case in regard to women’s labour. As was proved a generation ago in France, and can be amply verified in other civilized countries, women’s wages are forced down below subsistence point.

This important fact, with its cause, has evidently not been fully realized even by so close and impartial an observer as Mill. He says: ‘The wages at least of single women must be equal to their support, but need not be more than equal to it; the minimum in their case is the pittance absolutely requisite for the sustenance of one human being. Now, the lowest point to which the most superabundant competition can permanently depress the wages of a man is always somewhat more than this. Thene plus ultraof low wages can hardly occur in any occupation which the person employed has to live by, except the occupation of a woman.’ Mill isevidently uncertain as to the causes of the under-payment of women in cases of equal efficiency with men, and is inclined to attribute it to injustice and to overcrowding in a few employments. He remarks: ‘When the efficiency is equal but the pay unequal, the only explanation that can be given is custom, which, making almost every woman an appendage of some man, enables men to take the lion’s share of whatever belongs to both.’

But in this generation, which has thrown open the broad gates of education to women, and which has enormously extended the range of employments into which they are invited to enter, the causes which Mill suggests (overcrowding, injustice, etc.) do not seem to give a sufficient economic reason. One powerful and growing cause of derangement in the natural rewards of labour has been overlooked—viz., the unequal competition with male labour which must result, when the wages given by vice are allowed to supplement the under-payment for honest work, and the street-door key makes up for the deficient salary. Whilst this phase of human slavery exists, and the female body remains an article of merchandise, the increasing competition with male labour will make itself more severely felt as wider fields of industry are extended to women and they develop increasing ability to enter them. The wages of women can never permanently rise to a just scale of labour value, until this slavish principle is eliminated, because this purchase introduces an uneconomical element into the remuneration of labour whichdestroys any legitimate effect of demand and supply. It enables competitive employers solely intent on profit to beat down the price of male as well as female labour indefinitely. Indeed, we have by no means reached the limits of this injustice. The practice of purchase is still more dangerous in an economic point of view, because whilst the labour of all women tends to sink to the lowest point of remuneration, this lowest point can be reached in the labour of the young and strong, who are most eagerly sought for as merchandise.

The increasing employment of less remunerated female labour while male labour stands idle, is an alarming fact. The family is barely held together by the earnings, of a daughter, whilst father and brother lounge about the pot-house. The results of any sudden stoppage of a factory where large amounts of this cheap labour has been employed (as in the Barking jute factory, where 800 girls were suddenly thrown out of employment) is an object-lesson in the suicidal policy of degrading women.

The natural order of industry by which the man is the chief material support of the family, is disturbed and destroyed by this unnatural practice.

The purchase of young women adds cruelty to fraud. Youth must always fail to realize results which are only known through the experience of age. No amount of cautious or theoretic teaching given to the young can ever place them on an equality with the experienced adult. Moreover, itis Nature’s law for youth that sexual attraction is quite out of proportion to intellectual development. The fact of this great natural law of slower mental growth is the Creator’s imperative command laid upon the older generation, to protect and guide the youth of both sexes. The corruption of the young by the adult is not only fraud, it is dastardly cruelty.

Moreover, Nature has laid upon woman the more important share in the great work of continuing the race. It is not therefore pity, but justice which requires that reverent and grateful aid should be rendered by men, in the grand duty of creating an ever nobler race.

Trust, freedom, and sympathy form the bases of true relations between men and women, as they are also the moral foundations of political economy.

The depth of that sin against human nature—fornication or purchase—is seen in the results which follow from tempting women away from the paths of honest industry. These effects necessarily extend to the whole position and character of one-half the race, when any portion of women are turned into human merchandise. They are seen, by a careful study of those reckless or hardened ones who have become so direful a problem in all our large towns. How is that growing army of shameless women created who, with their companions, so fearfully avenge all social injustice on our boys and girls and our young men and maidens?

It is well known that there are thousands of ‘fallen women’ in London. What does this generalstatement in relation to women mean in detail? What is involved in living by the sale of the human body? The woman, however ‘fallen,’ is still a human being with its desperate clinging to life. Let it be realized what is involved in thousands of women living to the age of three-score years and ten, who must feed themselves three times a day, and provide lodging, clothing, and the satisfaction of all human needs by the repeated sale of their bodies—thousands of women, with all the craving and ever active necessities of the human being, bodies and souls to be kept alive by the money of their buyers, and who are compelled to use every art of corruption to find the fresh purchasers through whom they have learned to live—women to whom lust and drink rapidly become a second nature, and sloth and falsehood habitual; women driven on by ceaseless material needs to lower and lower phases of misery and vice, in whom a bitterness is engendered that revenges itself on the weakness and innocence of youth, tempting the lad when the adult ceases to purchase; women who—terrible fact—finally losing their own marketable value, and scourged by their own daily recurring needs, throw away the last remnants of womanly instinct, and drag down young girls into their hell of life.

The grave fact must be borne in mind that each one of these thousands of marketable women—although once an innocent infant—now forms a centre of ever-widening corrupt influence in the varied relations of life. Each one, with father andmother, brothers and sisters, friends and acquaintances, servants and tradespeople, is exercising a fatal influence, desecrating the sanctity of sexual relations, proving the ease with which the rewards of vice are gained, bewildering the conscience of the innocent, and transmitting sensual tendencies to their descendants.

From these bought women come those enemies of social progress, who enslave our young men of the higher classes, our future statesmen, those who should be the leaders of the nation. From Skittles to Cora Pearl, our generation has witnessed the enslaving power of these tyrants of lust. They have dried up the generous enthusiasm of our youth, and destroyed those principles of trust, freedom, and sympathy which should guide our domestic and foreign policy.

Who is guilty of this appalling conversion of women into demons, this contagion of evil which in ever-widening circles is destroying our moral health, and injuring the modesty, freedom, and dignity of all womanhood? The immediate cause is the man, whether prince or peasant, who purchases a woman for the gratification of lust. It is this purchase which draws women into the clutches of a godless, money-making machine, which never loosens its hold of the feeble creature until the essential features of womanhood are crushed out of recognition. The irresponsible polyandry of prostitution, with its logical acceptance and regulation of brothels, has replaced in the West the polygamyof the East. In both, degradation, discouragement of marriage, and injustice to women create a fatal barrier to permanent national progress. But there is a more insidious source of evil than the direct purchaser. The conversion of women into merchandise, whilst it produces a dangerous deterioration of female character, unavoidably reacts upon male character. This evil tends in women to produce the vices of the slave—deceit, falsehood, and servility; in men it tends to foster the vices of the slave-holder—arrogance, selfishness, and cruelty. In both it engenders that deadly sin—hypocrisy.

Hypocrisy is the vice which, above all others, our Lord denounces with the most awful condemnation, raising the drunkard and the harlot, with His far-seeing, merciful purity, and thrusting the Scribe and Pharisee—secret fornicators—into their place. ‘He that is without sin, let him cast the first stone.’ Hypocrisy is the vice which distinguishes in the most marked degree those nations which dare to call themselves Christian, but who practically deny every principle of Christ’s teaching in the conduct of public and, to a great extent, private affairs. It is under this reign of hypocrisy that a more dangerous condition of sexual evil has grown up amongst us than has ever existed amongst heathen nations. When a savage tribe enslaves its enemies and trades in human flesh it does not trade against its conscience. In its rudimentary condition of slow emergence from brutish ignorance it knows no higher standard than a savage display of muscular force.When a polygamous nation buys both men and women, or endeavours to enforce the physical chastity of women by harem imprisonment, it obeys the highest authority it knows of, its religion, believed in, although erroneous in its teaching. The bitterest hatred and undying hostility felt by Mohammedan as well as savage communities to their Western invaders is due to the violation of their women, and the treatment of those women according to the hypocritical customs of their lustful conquerors. However false the standard of the savage or semi-barbarous peoples may be, they possess one, and strive to realize it. But the corruption which the latest and intensest phase of competitive money values has introduced into the most enlightened nations, is unexampled in the history of the race. The deliberate reasoning out and justification of the conversion of women into things is the abuse of our highest faculties, our power of reason and conscience.

The cruel vice of fornication, protected by hypocrisy, is sowing moral scrofula broadcast, and, like an insidious poison, producing generations of feeble, rickety wills and maniacal monsters. It is the degeneracy of the race. The palliation of this vice is shaking the foundation of our civilization, by destroying the moral basis on which alone progressive society can rest. The purchaser of a woman is directly guilty, but a deeper source of evil influence is the man or the woman who excuses and sanctions the purchase of women, by upholdinga double standard of morality for the sexes. In the present age, while the actively licentious are following evil customs like sheep, some of their intellectual and spiritual leaders are throwing a veil of hypocrisy over these customs. The God-given faculties for creating literature, investigating science, and promoting religion are being perverted to the justification or palliation of lust.

Our brothers have hitherto been the rough and active pioneers of human progress, first moulding the material framework of society, then becoming its leaders and teachers—teachers of those fundamental moral relations on which human society rests.

But a time has come in the development of the race, when much of the teaching and judgment formed by one-half the race alone, is seen to be liable to error, and requires to be weighed and approved by the other half of mankind.

The women half is necessarily slower in development, from being appointed to bear that great altruistic burden, maternity. But the very shackles or sufferings thus undergone for the sake of the race tend gradually to produce in women special adaptations to the higher spiritual ends of creation.

When we now inquire into and weigh the value of the teachings offered to women as the guide of their human relationship to men, we are struck with its amazing contradictions. All classes and sections bring forth their varying opinions. The scientist and the theologian, the physician, the lawyer andthe journalist, the literary and the business man, the official and the man of leisure, are all seen carrying their load of heterogeneous materials to help build up the Babel of advice to women. All assert their knowledge of ‘Nature and Instinct,’ of ‘Science and History,’ or ‘the tragical plea of material necessity,’ to justify opinions founded on misunderstood data. But the sectional opinions of a portion of the race must necessarily be either imperfect, arrogant, or sentimental, and God confounds the Tower which foolish mortals strive to raise to heaven. All those, both men and women, who retain their reverence for sex, turn away from this unseemly Babel of conceit and short-sightedness, and ponder these things in hearts earnestly seeking truth.

The great question now at issue is the Unity of the Moral Law. This unity is being attacked by the intellectual short-sightedness or unconscious intellectual dishonesty of those who should be its most enlightened upholders.

One of our leading family journals has lately stated that ‘the modern notion of equality impairs the responsibility of special classes for special virtues.’ There is a sense in which special classes may be said to hold special responsibility. Women who are so vitally affected by the relations of the sexes are especially called on to strengthen and guide the sexual virtue of a people. They must consider the conditions essential to such virtue, and when they clearly see the truth, an army of noble men willzealously help in shaping truth in practice. The great truth which women are now learning is the necessity that every man should be chaste. This is the truth so long unrecognised, but at last discovered as the solution of the great social problem. Without male chastity, female chastity is impossible.

Virtue is not self-righteousness. It is unconscious of self, because it has become a mode of individual existence, and it maintains its vitality by care for others. A chaste woman does not think of her own purity; she thinks of the poor girl drudging in cellars, or hurrying at night, waylaid by tempters, to her poor home, or ‘drilled’ in the rich man’s shop; she thinks of her cherished sons with their noble and innocent young manhood exposed to the influence of the corrupt adult. Women’s responsibility for the purity of society commands her to announce the conditions of purity, and unmask with a relentless justice—which is now the truest mercy—those destroyers of national purity, the upholders of a double standard of sexual morality. The fact that so many cultivated intellects resort to fallacy or metaphysical abstraction to palliate the destructive abuse of our sexual powers, is a direct call on women to help in spreading truth.

There cannot be one moral law for human beings, which is at the same time of unequal application to them. Moral law is not the creation of mediæval art, which, substituting a symbol for entity, represents the Great Creator as an aged man with long gray beard seated upon clouds. The moral law isnot the arbitrary dictum of a man. The authority of the moral law springs from its adaptation by the Creator, to the nature of the beings subjected to it. It is the guide to the highest end of that nature, the necessary method by which its welfare is secured. Its authority is absolute, not relative, because it is the method of highest growth. Divine law admits of no exception, it cannot contradict itself. It is equally binding on the weakest as on the strongest, on the man as on the woman, or it is not law. If men are so constituted that they can grow to the full stature of manhood without obedience to the law of purity, then the moral law of purity does not exist for them, because it is not a necessary method of growth to their highest human development; their nature is not adapted by the Creator to the moral law; its influence over them is thus weakened, its absolute authority destroyed.

To profess to accept the unity of the moral law, but at the same time seek to avoid its consequences, is hypocrisy. The moral law cannot be evaded by any metaphysical creation of ‘noble moral paradoxes.’[15]Any attempt to define purity as unequally binding on the sexes by being ‘more for women, but not less for men,’ is worse than nonsense, it is dangerous sophistry. It is a confusion of right and wrong, placing men and women on diverging paths which will lead them ever farther apart. It is a strange spectacle, the nineteenth-century Adam cowering under the overpowering justice of themoral law, seeking refuge behind a paradox! But the weak and erring children of one Great Creator, bound to live together and help or injure one another, must not be turned away from each other by the arrogance or ignorance of any portion of the race. What mortal can determine the varying kind and quality of temptations which assail another mortal life? Who shall dare to say to another, You are not tempted as I am? Who can measure the weakness or the strength of another soul, and measure out judgment by shifting standards of right and wrong? Only by humility can we gain wisdom. Only by doing the will of the Creator shall we learn the doctrine of truth.

FOOTNOTES:[14]‘At a meeting of the British Association, held September 7, 1886, the eminent African explorer,Mr.Joseph Thompson, spoke boldly of the evil influence of Europeans in Africa, remarking that it has been terrible, and that for one negro influenced for good by missionaries there were a thousand who had been driven to deeper degradation. We supplied them still with an incredible quantity of gin, rum, gunpowder, and guns.’[15]See theSpectator, July 31, 1886.

[14]‘At a meeting of the British Association, held September 7, 1886, the eminent African explorer,Mr.Joseph Thompson, spoke boldly of the evil influence of Europeans in Africa, remarking that it has been terrible, and that for one negro influenced for good by missionaries there were a thousand who had been driven to deeper degradation. We supplied them still with an incredible quantity of gin, rum, gunpowder, and guns.’

[15]See theSpectator, July 31, 1886.

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