The Story of Katie MalloyBy Caroline A. Lowe(Well-known as a speaker on the Socialist and labor platforms. From a speech before the Committee on the Judiciary, House of Representatives, Sixty-Second Congress.)
By Caroline A. Lowe
(Well-known as a speaker on the Socialist and labor platforms. From a speech before the Committee on the Judiciary, House of Representatives, Sixty-Second Congress.)
The need of the ballot for the wage-earning woman is a vital one. No plea can be made that we have the protection of the home or are represented by our fathers or brothers....
What of the working girls, who through unemployment are no longer permitted to sell the labor of their hands and are forced to sell their virtue?
I met Katie Malloy under peculiar circumstances. It was because of this that she told me of her terrible struggles during the great garment workers strike in Chicago. She had worked at H——’s for five years and had saved $30. It was soon gone. She hunted for work, applied at the Young Women’s Christian Association and was told that so many hundreds of girls were out of work that they could not possibly do anything for her. She walked the streets day after day without success. For three days she had almost nothing to eat. “Oh,” she said, with the tears streaming down her cheeks, “there is always some place where a man can crowd in and keep decent, but for us girls there is no place, no place but one, and it is thrown open to us day and night. Hundreds of girls—girls that worked by me in the shop—have gone into houses of impurity.”
Has Katie Malloy and the five thousand working girls who are forced into lives of shame each month no need of a voice in a Government that should protect them from this worse than death!