by Patricia O'Flinn
Constant and persistent repression of prostitution the immediate method: absolute annihilation the ultimate ideal.
Chicago Vice Commission Report [1]
At the turn of the twentieth century thousands of girls and young women worked in the factories and retail stores of America's cities. Immigrant or native-born, city or country bred, they all shared poor wages, long hours, miserable working conditions, and little prospect for improvement. In this environment some women chose, or were forced into, prostitution. Women became prostitutes for a variety of reasons ranging from pragmatic economic decisions to an unexamined desire for good times and an easy life, to coercion-either physical, mental or emotional. Whatever the reason, prostitution flourished in the early years of the twentieth century, and engendered multiple strands of reform ideologies to combat it. In a society that was no longer predominantly rural, where it was increasingly uncommon for young women to remain under the close supervision of their families, fears about the safety and control of women coalesced in white-slave narratives and moral purity campaigns. Prostitution came to symbolize the many consequences of increasing urbanization and immigration. The strategies developed to combat prostitution reflected the social and political changes of the early twentieth century; the problems of immigration and unemploy-ment, coupled with the advent of social work and special interest politics, nurtured the belief that social ills could be amended through elective and legislative politics.
Although the decrease in-and eventually the elimination of-the demand for prostitution was the ultimate goal of moral purity campaigners, immediate intervention was necessary to curtail existing prostitution. The question of how to deal with the vice problem was answered in two ways: segregation of prostitution into municipally recognized and sanctioned areas; or vigorous enforcement of all vice laws and criminalization of prostitutes.There were those who argued that neither segregation nor the existing vice laws were sufficient to combat the "red-plague"; new laws were necessary to curb what they recognized as the big business of prostitution. The need for a new kind of legislation arose from the awareness that it was not the prostitutes and brothel keepers who became rich from vice, but the businessmen who rented them property and furniture, and sold them clothing and jewelry.
One law that inspired discussion throughout the nation was the Red Light Injunction and Abate-ment Act (RLAA). This law attacked the respectable businessman whose only involvement in the world of vice was the profit derived from property rented to brothel keepers and pimps. This strategy evolved from the debates about the efficacy of segregation and from the belief of moral purity campaigners that prostitution was a social evil that had to be assailed wherever it created profits. First enacted in Iowa in 1909, the Red Light Injunction and Abatement Act was debated by legislatures in Oregon, Washington, California, and the District of Columbia over the next several years. First introduced in the California State Legislature in 1911, the Red Light Abatement Act was enacted in California in 1914. The struggle to institute the Red Light Bill in California reflected the national debate, but included an element not found in other states: woman suffrage. Middle-class clubwomen joined moral purity campaigners in the political campaign for the RLAA as fully enfranchised citizens.
Historians in the last two decades have examined prostitution and the reform movements which arose to combat it. Two books, The Lost Sisterhood: Prostitution in America, 1900-1918, by Ruth Rosen, and The Response to Prostitution in the Progressive Era, by Mark Thomas Connelly, constitute a solid underpinning to the study of prostitution in the United States during the Progressive Era. A third book, Uneasy Virtue: The Politics of Prostitution and the American Reform Tradition, by Barbara Meil Hobson, places both prostitution and reform into the larger context of American society since Colonial times.Both Connelly and Rosen clearly define the subject of their inquiry by time as well as topic: Connelly examines the various ways Americans responded to prostitution; Rosen examines the world of prostitution, the changes in the twentieth century, and the society that created them. Ruth Rosen presents the voice of the prostitute alongside statistics about prostitutes; Mark Connelly lists legal facts and offers textual analysis of white-slave literature and the Chicago vice commission report. Together, these two studies paint a remarkably complete picture of urban prostitution, and the reform movements it spawned, in the Progressive Era.
Ruth Rosen's book, The Lost Sisterhood: Prostitution in America, 1900-1918, focuses on the years in which America discovered prostitution as one of its most serious social problems. Rosen examines the prostitutes' lives and the reform efforts directed toward prostitution. One of the questions she asks is how prostitution changed "From Necessary to Social Evil" during the Progressive Era.[2] Neither the question, nor the answer, is simple. Changes in the way people worked and lived were occurring throughout American society. Traditional roles and values were threatened by great urban centers filled with overwhelming numbers of immigrants. Many immigrant women and their daughters worked in the expanding industrial economy. Even middle-class women were increasingly involved in public life: attending colleges; working for reform; campaigning for suffrage. Ruth Rosen asserts that it was "the changing role of women in society" that helped focus America's attention on prostitution during these years.[3] She argues that the prostitute was a symbol of the disturbing changes in society.
One of the most interesting aspects of Ruth Rosen's work is her exploration of the dichotomous image of the prostitute as either "a passive victim forced into sex," or "a creature so deviant as to scarcely deserve the name of woman."[4] She ascribes this dichotomy to the reformers' own confusion about female sexuality. Brought up by Victorian parents to believe in the natural purity and asexuality of women, they searched for explanations of the prostitute's behavior that would not contradict their image of womanhood. Although reformers in the early twentieth century professed a belief in statistical methodology, they did not allow the data thus acquired to interfere with their conception of prostitutes as immoral foreigners or innocent country girls trapped in the city. Most prostitutes were not immigrants, they were American born.[5] Although reformers argued that forty to one hundred percent of all prostitutes were white slaves,[6] few prostitutes blamed white slavers for their initiation into prostitution": only 2.8 percent specifically cited white slavers and 11.3 percent accused men (lovers, seducers, etc.) of having actively forced, seduced, or betrayed them into prostitution."[7] Yet, nativist rhetoric and the fear of white slavery fueled the anti-prostitution movement of the early twentieth century. Mark Connelly devotes a chapter to white slavery in his book, The Response to Prostitution in the Progressive Era. He examines the "[w]hite slave narratives, or white-slave tracts," which "began to circulate around 1909."[8] These tracts tell the terrible tale of an innocent girl, usually from the country, who was either tricked or abducted, in the city, and forced into prostitution. The author concludes that the white slavery narrative is a variation of colonial captivity literature, a story of a white colonist captured in the forest by savages. The captivity narrative reflects the apprehen-sion of the colonists moving into an alien and dangerous wilderness, while the white-slave narrative mirrors the anxieties of a rural population moving into an urban society. The white slaver was "invariably identified as Jewish, Italian, or Eastern European."[9] Through these narratives, immigration and urbanization are identified as threatening aspects of a changing social and moral landscape.
Connelly's book is a study of the various ways Americans reacted to and tried to change prostitution in the early twentieth century. He analyzes both the causes and effects of the anti-prostitution movement. Connelly uses sources that reflect the wide range of interest groups active in the fight against prostitution during the Progressive Era: industrial America; American medicine; and civic vice commissions, exemplified by the Chicago report, The Social Evil in the City. He also examines the laws passed to deter immigration of prostitutes and other immoral women: the immi-gration acts of 1903, 1907, and 1910, and the Mann Act of 1910. Changes in the legislation, and some of the court cases arising from the legislation, are scrutinized. The author is interested in the evolution of the law regarding prostitution and immigration, especially as laws became less specifically aimed at prostitution in this period. In 1903 it was a felony to import a woman for purposes of prostitution; in 1907 the phrase "or for any other immoral purpose" was added to the law.[10] By 1910, the law had expanded so that any immigrant found in a house of prostitution or any other place frequented by prostitutes was liable for deportation. "The 1910 construction in effect made guilt by association grounds for arrest, prosecution, and possible deportation."[11]
The assumption that the influx of immigrants was undermining traditional American society and morality underlies these changes in immigration law. Yet, Connelly, like Rosen, points out that relatively few immigrant women became prostitutes. "By focusing on the 'importation' of alien prostitutes, federal policy defined immigration as an attack from without, when, in fact, the problem was rooted in domestic social and economic conditions."[12]
Prostitution was not confined to urban areas or, notwithstanding the frenzy of reform in the early twentieth century, to the Progressive Era. Barbara Meil Hobson's work, Uneasy Virtue, reaches the same conclusions about prostitution in the early twentieth century as does Connelly's and Rosen's. However, the perspective of Progressive Era reforms as an incarnation of an American tradition adds valuable background to the understanding of the history of prostitution in the United States.
Barbara Hobson describes the "discovery" of prostitution in the early decades of the nineteenth century in the urban centers of the East. The response to prostitution in the early nineteenth century was no less determined than in the early twentieth century. Stories of young girls tricked or coerced into prostitution were also part of the ante-bellum reform movement; like their Progressive Era counterparts, they reflected the anxieties of the society that created and read them. Uneasy Virtue presents a picture of evolving institutions: prostitution itself and the legal and reform systems inspired by it. By placing Progressive Era reforms into the context of a long reforming tradition, the innovation of using the legislative process to effect social change is emphasized.
In the first decades of the twentieth century, the rules of society were changing fairly quickly. Gender roles were no longer clearly defined, and rural life was not always the norm. Cities were a wilderness of strange people and strange customs. Anti-prostitution reformers were not merely responding fearfully to the changes in their society, many sincerely believed in their ability to change society for the better. There were two main approaches to dealing with vice at the turn of the twentieth century: segregation and moral purity campaigns. Segregationists gradually lost the battle to determine the American response to prostitution in the face of the concerted efforts of moral purity campaigners to frame the debate as a contest between American Christian virtues and a social evil, rather than containment of a civic and public health problem.
Segregationists believed that confinement and regulation of prostitutes and vice districts was necessary because prostitution was not only a moral problem, it was also a public health problem. The spread of venereal infection to innocent wives and children gradually became a topic of public discourse in American society in the latter half of the 19th century. Deadly and incurable, syphilis and gonorrhea came to be recognized as public health hazards. The spread of these deadly diseases was linked to the proliferation of prostitution in the United States and many prominent doctors advocated segregation and civic regulation of vice districts as the only logical prophylaxis for venereal disease.In San Francisco a Municipal Clinic was established to examine prostitutes for evidence of venereal disease. Dr. Julius Rosenstirn was a prominent member of San Francisco society, a member of the Commonwealth Club, and a supporter of the Municipal Clinic. He believed that the clinic was effective in protecting society from "Poisonous Infection Through The Social Malady."[13] Prostitutes were required to submit to a physical examination at regular intervals and to carry a certificate of clean health in order to work. Brothels had to display the certificates of their inmates. The clinic was in operation from 11 March 1913 until September 1913.[14] During its time of operation, the Municipal Clinic claimed not only to act as a check on the spread of venereal disease, but to have rescued women who wanted out of the life of vice, and to have persuaded "over fifty neophytes. . . . to refrain from entering the life."[15]
Public health was not the only argument in favor of segregation. Prostitution, it was argued, had been a scourge on society since the beginning of civilization; wishful thinking and good intentions would not eradicate it. "If the prostitutes of the world were driven into the sea to-day [sic] a new crop would spring up to-morrow [sic]."[16] Segregation thus served to protect the virtuous from contact with-and moral contamination by-prostitutes. In addition, doctors, lawyers, politicians, and police officers expressed fears that unregulated vice would be scattered, thus spreading its moral and physical contagion. James W. Reynolds, Superintendent of Police, New Orleans:
Immoral women should be compelled to live in certain prescribed districts, and forbidden to scatter at will throughout the residential and business precincts of a city.[17]The belief that men were incapable of controlling their sexual urges buttressed the arguments in favor of segregated vice districts. Young, unmarried men must have an outlet for their sexuality, it was argued, while at the same time virtuous young women must be protected from the depredations of uncontrolled male sexuality. The prostitute, by definition unchaste and unvirtuous, had forfeited her rights to societal protection; she was herself an evil influence which must be guarded against.
Not everyone believed prostitution was a necessary institution, however. Some argued that society should expect men, as well as women, to control their sexual natures. The promotion of a single moral standard for men and women would obviate the need for segregated vice districts. The ideal of a single moral standard could never be achieved if society tacitly supported promiscuity in young men while condemning it in young women. Therefore, prostitution must be deplored and attacked in every way possible.In addition, segregation bred corruption in police and government officials. By exploiting the precarious legal position of the prostitutes, pimps, and madams in their districts, these officials had an investment in the continued existence of the institution. The segregation system in Des Moines, Iowa, is one example. Fines were collected by a police sergeant at the houses of prostitution; accounting records were filled out on his return to the police station. No receipts were issued and the amount of money paid into the public treasury was solely at the discretion of the collecting sergeant and his superiors.
Due to public outcry the system was changed, requiring the madams to report to the police station to pay the fines for themselves and their employees. J. L. Hamery, Superintendent, Department of Public Safety, described the impact these visits had upon the police in the segregated Whitechapel district of Des Moines:
"Fine Day" at police station, when the fining system was in vogue, was almost a fete day. All other business would be suspended. The heads of the department who were interested in the collection of fines would dye their hair, curl their moustaches, put on their diamonds and prepare to receive their guests.[18]Moral purity campaigners ultimately rejected segregation as both immoral and unworkable. Even in the cities where segregation was attempted, prostitution was not effectively confined to the approved red-light districts. In Des Moines "brothels existed not only in the business section of East Des Moines, but on the very edge of the most respectable residence districts."[19]
Prostitution could never be eliminated in a society that refused to acknowledge, much less discuss, the problem. Moral purity campaigns were organized on a simple premise: "There is just one way to solve the social evil problem, and that is the way of education."[20] Education took many forms: the inequities of the double standard of morals for men and women were elucidated; young girls were warned about the dangers of professional panders; the teaching of basic knowledge of human biology and respect for human sexuality in schools was advocated.Moral purity campaigners did not confine themselves to working toward a better future, however. Organizations to rescue white slaves existed in many cities. Clifford G. Roe, a former Assistant State's Attorney in Chicago, ran an office dedicated to investigating vice resorts and prosecuting the men and women who lured girls into them. Salvation Army Missions and other, mostly religious, groups, proselytized in red light districts and brothels. A former brothel bartender and pander who was converted to the cause of reform and worked with Clifford Roe in Chicago described the impact these missions had:
If there were any of the Midnight Missionary workers around and would enter all the lights would be turned out and the girls chased up to their rooms till they would leave. If they would stop in front of the place and talk to the passers by the proprietor would be very angry as it hurt his business for some time. On Saturday nights he would hire cabs just to stand in front of the place to keep them from holding religious meetings in front of the place.[21]Women's clubs also took an active role in disseminating information about white slavery and in campaigns to eradicate it. Mrs. Freeman E. Brown, president of the League of Cook County Clubs, expressed a common viewpoint in an article published in The Great War on White Slavery:What grander work can clubs and clubwomen engage in than that of saving our girls? To protect the innocent, and to give the unfortunate ones renewed hope, a wider view and a conception of what life may again become to them.[22]The League of Cook County Clubs formed the White Slave Traffic Committee in 1910. This committee raised $300, $250 of which they gave to Clifford G. Roe "to help defray the expenses of his detective office."[23]Another prominent women's club member active in the fight against vice was Ellen M. Henrotin. Mrs. Henrotin's commitment to public service is evident in a partial list of her accomplishments: president of the General Federation of Women's Clubs in 1894, an office she held for four years; president of the Chicago Woman's Club in 1903-04; named permanent representative of the General Federation of Women's Clubs to the American Peace Society in 1910. Also in 1910, Mrs. Henrotin was appointed to the Chicago Vice Commission-along with twenty-eight men and one other woman-to study the condition of vice in the city of Chicago and report their findings and recommendations to the mayor.
Their report, The Social Evil in Chicago, published in 1911, influenced municipal governments and moral purity campaigners throughout the country. Segregation of prostitution was decried as "degenerating and ineffective."[24] The report advocated a broad range of social changes, including better wages and work conditions for women, safe recreation areas for children, municipal dance halls, and "the wise teaching of sex hygiene in the schools as a means of child protection for the future."[25]
In addition to education and social reform, the Chicago Vice Commission, and moral purity reformers in general, promoted legal and legislative reforms that would impose stiffer penalties on the men and women who directly profited from vice. Anti-pandering laws were enacted in Illinois in 1908 and 1909, and in San Francisco in 1910. The Federal White-Slave Traffic, or Mann, Act was passed in 1910. These laws either targeted procurers, madams, and prostitutes, or increased existing penalties for these offenders. A new type of law attacking prostitution as a business was also being promulgated: The Red Light Abatement and Injunction Act.
Due to widespread political and police corruption, moral purity campaigners and reform legisla-tors in Iowa decided to increase the power of the private citizen in the fight against vice. The Red Light Abatement and Injunction act was created following the precedents established by two existing laws dealing with the prohibition of liquor and the manufacture and sale of cigarettes and cigarette papers. The first law provided that any citizen could prosecute the "occupants and owners of a liquor nuisance under a court injunction," and charge all court costs to the defendant, further providing for the seizure and sale of all furniture, fixtures, and so forth, on the premises, and "effectually close the building for all purposes for one year."[26] The second law provided for a tax of $300 on any business trafficking in cigarettes or cigarette papers, even though such business was illegal. Both laws had been reviewed and sustained by both the Illinois and the U.S. Supreme Courts.On the fourth of July, 1909, the Red Light Abatement and Injunction law went into effect in Iowa. The effect of the legislation, according to John B. Hammond, who lobbied for the law, was immediate: "[O]n the fifth day of July, 1909, there was not an open public house of prostitution in the state of Iowa."[27]
When, in 1913, the Red-Light Abatement Act came before the California State Legislature, it was supported by religious and civic groups as well as women's clubs throughout California. The intent of the bill was to attack prostitution and the established red-light districts not by harassment and incarceration of prostitutes, pimps, or madams, but by making property owners liable for the activities of their renters. "[A]ll buildings and places . . . wherein or upon which acts of lewdness, assignation or prostitution are held or occur or which are used for such purposes" would be closed by order of the court and would remain closed-and unusable for any purpose by the property owner-for one year.[28] The act further provided that all moveable property within the building would be sold and the proceeds would be used to pay court costs, fines, and liens against the building. Any remaining funds would devolve to the owner of the property, although if the proceeds of the sale were insufficient to clear this debt, the building could be sold. The bill was passed and signed by Governor Hiram Johnson on 7 April 1913. Before the law could be implemented, a petition was circulated which called for a statewide referendum. However, the voters of California upheld the legislation at the polls 3 November 1914.The debate about the merits of the Red Light Abatement Act in California paralleled the national debate about prostitution and the most effective way to control or limit it. Segregation and regulation had many proponents, notably V.S. McClatchy, owner and editor of The Sacramento Bee. Mr. McClatchy's newspaper is an interesting source in the study of the Red Light Abatement Act in California because McClatchy wrote several editorials denouncing the RLAA while the paper's political correspondent, Franklin Hichborn, flavored his articles about the Legislative debate with his strong pro-Abatement stance. Joining Hichborn and other moral purity campaigners were hundreds of women social and political activists. Groups like the Women's Christian Temperance Union and the California Federation of Women's Clubs sent delegates to Sacramento as official lobbyists for the bill.
Women did not generally venture into social or political action individually, rather they acted from within the framework of the organized women's clubs and associations that had flowered in the United States since the 1860s. Initially literary and cultural associations, women's clubs changed in character during the last two to three decades of the nineteenth century to become concerned with social conditions and political issues both locally and nationally. Groups like the Women's Christian Temperance Union were national in scope, although local chapters were not required to support all the causes and tactics of the national organization.In 1890, the General Federation of Women's Clubs was founded to promote the formation of women's clubs and to facilitate the exchange of information, ideas, and fellowship among the various organizations throughout the country. The California Federation of Women's Clubs was formed in 1902 as an umbrella organization for local clubs in the state.[29] It promoted statewide conferences and conventions, and participation in the national conventions of the General Federa-tion of Women's Clubs.
In the essay "Women and American Politics, 1880-1920," Suzanne Lebsock argues that "[t]he four decades preceding the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment, in fact, were a great age for women in politics."[30] Although unable to function within the arena of formal politics because they lacked the vote, women actively worked to influence politics through a variety of strategies: writing letters, publishing pamphlets and newspapers, circulating petitions, and organizing and financial-ly supporting charitable institutions. Women who believed that they were especially suited to the management of education and the task of reforming the social polity were frustrated "because of their utter dependence upon the indirect influence so highly commended to women."[31] In many cases the focus on the public sphere, and the use of informal political tactics, engendered a commitment to woman suffrage as a way to accomplish social and political goals.
Unlike most women in the United States, California women were able to act in the formal political arena throughout most of the second decade of the twentieth century. In California a special election was held on 10 October 1911 to vote on Senate Constitutional Amendment no. 8 granting suffrage to women. The amendment passed by a margin of 3,507 votes.[32] Clubwomen of California celebrated the recognition of "their right to representation" and their induction into "the sovereignty of full citizenship."[33]
After the passage of the woman suffrage amendment in California, the California Federation of Women's Clubs organized a series of conferences throughout the state in 1912 to discuss the role that women's clubs should take in the promotion of legislation in the state. At the final conference, held in San Francisco on 7 December 1912, a resolution was passed to organize a Women's Legislative Council of California. The purpose of this council was to set up headquarters in Sacramento during the legislative session of 1913 and to lobby for bills the California Federation of Women's Clubs had agreed to endorse. These included, among others, a tuberculin test for dairies, a minimum wage for women, health certificates for marriage, and a Red Light Abatement and Injunction Act based upon the Iowa model.
The clubwomen of California were ready to translate their organizational and administrative skills and their experience in the realm of indirect politics, into direct political action. To further their legislative agenda, the Women's Legislative Council set up a permanent committee at the state capital to lobby the Legislature. The chairman of this committee, Mrs. Edward Swan of Oakland, expressed the plans of the council in a statement given to The Sacramento Bee on 18 January 1913:
With the privilege of a vote, we feel the time is at hand to take an active interest in politics, especially as regards legislation affecting the home and the welfare of our girls and boys.[34]Although the Iowa Red Light Injunction and Abatement Act had been endorsed by the California Federation of Women's Clubs, the debate about segregation of vice was not settled among the clubwomen in the early weeks of 1913. In an article published by The Sacramento Bee on 15 January 1913, Mrs. Swan expressed support for the Iowa law tempered by her concern for its effect on the moral climate of California's cities:I do not believe in scattering women who have chosen to lead an evil life, and thus assist their bad influence to permeate the residence and other sections of the cities. The young girl and the fallen woman are equal as human souls in the sight of God, but their value in society is decidedly unequal.[35]The gulf between the ideals of moral purity campaigners and the existing realities of vice were succinctly expressed by Mrs. Bradford Woodbridge of Roseville in the same article:I do not admit that the existence of such women [prostitutes] is an imperative necessity, but the younger generation must be safeguarded, and so long as the evil exists as at present, I can see no recourse but to segregate it as much as possible until the enlightened sentiment of the human race eradicates the social evil from our midst.[36]Mrs. C. M. Weymann, secretary of the Women's Legislative Council, was also quoted in the same Sacramento Bee article. She used an expressive metaphor to describe the underlying fear and loathing many reformers felt toward "the unfortunate" prostitute:We do not allow a leper to live in our midst of his own volition, and the unfortunate woman, living in a respectable neighborhood and plying her terrible trade, is a leprous sore on the community which will fester until it leavens others with its dreadful poison.[37]Despite these public statements of disgust for prostitution and guarded support for the ideas of segregation and regulation, all three women were active supporters of the Red Light Abatement Act. Although these women were involved in the creation of the women's legislative council in 1912, and supported the RLAA for California, they could still express ambivalence about the geographic location of prostitution within their cities in January 1913.On 30 January 1913, in a Sacramento Bee article written by Franklin Hichborn describing a Senate hearing on the Red Light bill, Mrs. Swan no longer argued against the scattering of prostitutes. She repeated the moral purity refrain of the need for a single sexual "standard for our sons as for our daughters."[38] Mrs. Swan described the occasion in an issue of The Clubwoman, the journal of the California Federation of Women's Clubs, in almost religious terms. It was evening; the room was crowded and tense; the lights went out in the building just as she began to speak; she was so full of emotion that she continued to speak in the darkness until a page brought two candles-"The darkness but added to the drama of the occasion."[39]
C. K. McClatchy, the editor of The Sacramento Bee, opposed the Red Light Abatement Act because he supported the idea of segregation and registration of prostitutes. The contradictory statements of these three women should be understood within the context of The Bee's editorial position, as well as within the broader context of the moral purity campaign. Reformers envisioned a time when prostitution would no longer be viable or necessary, but they also worked to alleviate the real social problems of graft and public health that they perceived stemming from the business of vice.
C. K. McClatchy and several legislators, including Milton I. Schmitt of San Francisco, W. S. Killingsworth of Vacaville, and W. A. Sutherland of Fresno, opposed the RLAA because they believed segregation of vice was the best method to control prostitution, and the spread of the veneral plagues associated with it. In newspaper editorials and legislative debates, these men asked pointed questions about the effect of closing the Red Light districts-not only on their denizens, but also on the broader community. Their questions were rarely answered with concrete examples or suggestions.McClatchy used his position as editor of The Sacramento Bee to disseminate his opinion about the RLAA. In a series of editorials that appeared 6 February through 8 February 1913, titled "Shall It Be Segregation or Shall It Be Scatteration," McClatchy argued that the social evil cannot be eliminated and must therefore be regulated. Police chiefs, physicians, and judges from all areas of the country who were experienced in dealing with prostitution were quoted to support McClatchy's opinion. Among them were Stephen O'Meara, Police Commissioner of Boston, who referred to moral purity campaigners as "enthusiasts . . . whose admirable purposes are not sustained by straight and intelligent thinking."[40] McClatchy called for medicine, science, common sense, and morality to unite to combat the vice problem in another editorial dated 8 February 1913, titled "Beware of Scatteration of the Social Evil." He advocated sex education for adolescents as well as segregated vice districts. Without segregation, McClatchy argued that the good people of California will be opening wide the houses of their own immediate neighborhood to Lais, Aspasia, and Phryne; they will be inviting the Babylonian to a contest for their own sons right at their own doors.[41]
During the Assembly debate on 20 March, the issue of segregation was brought up by several Assemblymen who opposed the RLAA. Schmitt of San Francisco talked at length about the Municipal Clinic of San Francisco; he quoted the institution's reports "to show that the manner of handling segregated vice in San Francisco [was] effective and should be permitted."[42] Killings-worth of Vacaville, whose district included the Mare Island Navy Yard and Vallejo, argued that the large numbers of transient sailors and marines in his district necessitated a segregated vice district. He went on to ask "What are you going to do with these women anyway when you close the houses in which they live?"[43] Assemblyman Bohnett, the sponsor of the bill, "declared the question absurd, and did not give an answer."[44] James J. Ryan of San Francisco opposed the RLAA because he believed that "the scattering of the women of the underworld through a city like San Francisco would be detrimental to the morals of the community."[45] The segregationists were a minority, however, and the bill passed the Assembly on a vote of 62 to 17.
Eight days later, on 28 March, the Senate passed the bill on a vote of twenty-nine to eleven. Senator Boynton of San Francisco voted against the bill. During the debate letters "in which he was charged with sheltering vice and consorting with crooks and the vicious were read."[46] But Boynton maintained his position that segregation was the most effective strategy against the spread of vice that had thus far been developed.
San Francisco is a clean city. It has its vices and its hell-holes. But you know where the rotten part of the apple is and you can avoid it.[47]The segregationists in California opposed the RLAA because they viewed it as impractical; they believed it would scatter vice and, "if not declared unconstitutional," it would "have the effect of confiscating property."[48]Their arguments were countered by RLAA supporters who pointed to the graft and corruption engendered by segregation. During March 1913, while the legislative debate for the RLAA was at its hottest, The San Francisco Examiner reported that Special Policeman George Downey "and his associates . . . for years have been levying a tax of $5 a month on the resident proprietors of houses in the "regulated" district."[49] The story further reported that Downey owned a saloon on the corner of Jackson street where he made the denizens of the district
buy their liquor . . . (charging them a high price and adding a generous fee for delivery), compelled them to call on him when they wanted anything from carpenter work to a new lodginghouse, and even bullied them into buying pianos through him as agent.[50]With proof of the corrupting power of regulated vice, as well as the moral arguments against protecting those who profited from the social evil arrayed against them, the segregationists were doomed to lose.
During the Assembly debate in 1913, Assemblyman "Schmitt [of San Francisco] said if the vote were taken in secret there would not be more than twenty-eight votes for it."[51] Schmitt was not the only legislator to express dissatisfaction with the bill. During the debate several Assemblymen expressed their opposition to the bill, but explained they would vote for it because their female constituents supported it:Smith of Oakland scored the women's clubs of his county for sending letters to him and other members threatening them if they did not vote for the bill. He said that, although he believed the bill would not work out, he would give it his vote. Johnston of Contra Costa was another who admitted he was voting for the bill because some of his constituents wanted it.[52]Not only did women send letters to the legislature, they packed the galleries of both the Senate and the Assembly when the RLAA was debated. "The Assembly chamber was thronged throughout the debate, a majority of the listeners being women."[53] In the Senate "women wearing white ribbons rushed upon" the Senate floor after the final vote ended in victory on 28 March.[54] Mrs. Swan and other members of the California Federation of Women's Clubs Legislative Council testified at legislative hearings and acted as an official lobbying group throughout the legislative session of 1913.The influence of woman suffrage in California politics is clearly illustrated by the passage of the Red Light Abatement Act in the state legislature in 1913. Throughout the state, religious leaders and women's clubs had been agitating for stricter laws against prostitution, especially pandering or white slavery. The California Women's Christian Temperance Union had supported a bill in the 1911 Legislature identical to the Red Light Abatement Act that passed in 1913. However, the 1911 version of the Red Light Abatement Act never got out of committee to a full vote of the legislature.
The Red Light Abatement Act passed the California Legislature and was signed by Governor Hiram Johnson in the midst of a frenzy of reform politics in California. The proponents of the law viewed legislative politics as an avenue for moral reform. Moral purity groups across the country agitated for legislative change as part of a broader agenda of education and social reform. In California, however, the legislative battle was joined by newly enfranchised women organized through a variety of clubs and associations. The fact that these women had the vote and were willing to engage in direct political action, such as lobbying and going to the polls, had a strong impact on the ultimate outcome of the fight to implement the RLAA.Many legislators voted for the bill despite their public misgivings about its efficacy because their female constituents lobbied them to do so. Yet, there were some legislators who voted their conscience. Assemblyman Sutherland of Fresno said:
that not one of the women who had written to him asking him to vote for the bill knew anything at all as to what it was about.[55]Sutherland believed that the passage of the RLAA would "do more to injure the womanhood of California than it will help."[56]The effect of the RLAA is beyond the scope of this essay, but Assemblyman Sutherland's comments underscore an interesting point about the involvement of middle-class clubwomen in moral reform movements. Women like Mrs. Swann, chairman of the Women's Legislative Council, believed strongly that they could have a positive effect on their society through social and political activism. Yet they did not often appear to think about the effect of their activism on the people they purported to help. The moral purity campaigners held out the hope of education and a bright future where vice would no longer exist, but the question of what would happen to the women who lived in the brothels that were abated through the new law was not satisfactorily addressed.
Although female moral purity advocates were restricted from direct politcal action in most of the United States during this time, they were active in campaigns to change the moral climate of their communities. The public debate about the sexual double standard and the ravages of venereal disease permanently changed the way most Americans learned about sex: sex education in public schools was a major tenet of the moral purity philosophy. The middle-class activist may have suffered a lack of imagination regarding her less fortunate sisters, but she bequeathed a heritage of honest discourse about sexuality.
As the legislative debate in California unfolded, Mrs. Swann and the other clubwomen championed the Red Light Abatement Act as a novel solution to an age-old problem. By concentrat-ing on the landlords and businessmen who profited from the sex trade without active involvement in it, they could attack the business of prostitution without focusing on the more confusing issues of why women became prostitutes-whether it was from economic necessity or inherent depravity. The debate thus became sanitized and simplified; respectable middle-class women could discuss and endorse an issue that, though intimately concerned with illicit sex, centered on illegal and immoral business practices rather than sexual activity.
The women of California had taken a bold step forward into the masculine world of politics; they proved themselves capable and effective as lobbyists and voting citizens. But they could not discard the middle-class values and feminine virtues that propelled them into reform activities in the first place; if woman deserved a place in the public arena, it was because she could bring a higher moral purpose and a housewife's sensibilities to the corrupt and dirty world of politics. The Red Light Abatement Act was a perfect showcase for these beliefs. The bill itself, or the rhetoric surrounding it, attacked political and municipal corruption and promoted high moral standards. Women could, and did, support this bill based on abstract idealism. The role-and success-of organized, enfranchised womanhood in the passage of the Red Light Abatement Act is important, however. Women in California proved they were capable of mastering the intricacies of the political system. They did, in fact, help to permanently change the practice of prostitution in California.
However, prostitution was not eliminated from the state or the nation through legislation or any other strategy of the moral purity campaigns. The Red Light Abatement Act was aptly named: it was the segregated vice districts throughout America that disappeared. With the advent of World War I, leaders in the federal government and the armed forces, both influenced by the public debate fostered by reformers, delivered the final blows to municipally sanctioned red light districts.
Endnotes
1 Quoted in Clifford Roe, ed., The Great War on White Slavery (Chicago, B.S. Steadwell, 1911; repr., New York and London, Garland Publishing, Inc., 1979), 94. Return to essay.2 Ruth Rosen, The Lost Sisterhood: Prostitution in America, 1900-1918 (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982), 1. Chapter title. Return to essay.
3 Ibid., xiii. Return to essay.
4 Ibid., 49. Return to essay.
5 Ibid., 139. Return to essay.
6 Mark Thomas Connelly, The Response to Prostitution in the Progressive Era. (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1980), 130. Return to essay.
7 Ibid., 145. Return to essay.
8 Connelly, 114. Return to essay.
9 Ibid., 118. Return to essay.
10 Ibid., 50. Return to essay.
11 Ibid., 56. Return to essay.
12 Ibid., 60. Return to essay.
13 Julius Rosenstirn, Our Nation's Health Endangered By Poisonous Infection Through the Social Malady: The Protective Work of the Municipal CLinic of San Francisco and Its Fight for Existence, (San Francisco, Talk Town Press, 1913) 20, quoted in Brenda Elaine Pillors, The Criminalization of Prostitution: The Case of San Francisco, (Ph.D. diss., University of California at Berkeley, 1982), 148. Return to essay.
14 Pillors, The Criminalization of Prostitution, 148. Return to essay.
15 Ibid., 152.Return to essay.
16 V. S. McClatchy, "The Venereal Plagues--A Menace to the Human Race," The Sacramento Bee, 18 January 1913: 28. Return to essay.
17 V. S. McClatchy, "Shall It Be Segregation, or Shall It Be Scatteration," The Sacramento Bee, 6 February 1913: 4. Return to essay.
18 Roe, 274. Return to essay.
19 Ibid., 272. Return to essay.
20 Ibid., 5. Return to essay.
21 Ibid., 90. Return to essay.
22 Ibid., 374. Return to essay.
23 Ibid., 375. Return to essay.
24 The Social Evil in Chicago, quoted in The Great War on White Slavery, 383. Return to essay.
25 The Great War on White Slavery, 387. Return to essay.
26 Ibid., 365-366. Return to essay.
27 Ibid., 366. Return to essay.
28 Text of Red Light Abatement and Injunction Law as reproduced in Commonwealth Club of California, IX no.8, 501. Return to essay.
29 Mary Gibson, A Record of Twenty-Five Years of California Federated Women's Clubs 1900-1925, vol. 1, (The California Federation of Women's Clubs), 1927. Return to essay.
30 Suzanne Lebsock, "Women and American Politics, 1880-1920," in Louise A. Tilly, and Patricia Garin, eds., Women, Politics and Change, Russell Sage Foundation, New York: 1990, 35. Return to essay.
31 Mary Gibson, A Record of Twenty-Five Years of California Federated Women's Clubs 1900-1925, 70. Return to essay.
32 Ibid., 68.Return to essay.
33 Ibid. Return to essay.
34 "Legislators Being Watched; Lobby of Women is Vigilant," The Sacramento Bee, 5. Return to essay.
35 "Club Women Urge Segregation: See No Other Sane Recourse," The Sacramento Bee, 15 January 1913, 1. Return to essay.
36 Ibid. Return to essay.
37 Ibid. Return to essay.
38 Franklin Hichborn, "Social Evil Under Hot Fire," The Sacramento Bee, 30 January 1913, 4. Return to essay.
39 Quoted in Mary Gibson, A Record of Twenty-Five Years of California Federated Women's Clubs 1900-1925, 193. Return to essay.
40 McClatchy, "Shall It Be Segregation," 6 February 1913, 4. Return to essay.
41 C.K. McClatchy, "Beware of Scatteration of the Social Evil," The Sacramento Bee, 8 February 1913, 30. Return to essay.
42 Karl M. Anderson, ""Red Light" Bill Passed By The Assembly," The San Francisco Chronicle," 21 March 1913, 3. Return to essay.
43 Ibid. Return to essay.
44 Ibid. Return to essay.
45 Ibid. Return to essay.
46 "Redlight Is Given Curb By Senate," San Francisco Examiner, 29 March 1913, 1. Return to essay.
47 Ibid. Return to essay.
48 Anderson, "Red Light" Bill Passed By The Assembly," The San Francisco Chronicle, 21 March 1913, 3. Return to essay.
49 "Hounded Women Bare 'Coast Protection': Downey Shorn of Power for Police Graft," The San Francisco Examiner, 17 March 1913, 2. Return to essay.
50 Ibid. Return to essay.
51 "'Redlight' Bill Goes Through Assembly," The San Francisco Examiner, 21 March 1913, 7. Return to essay.
52 Ibid. Return to essay.
53 Ibid. Return to essay.
54 "Redlight Is Given Curb By Senate," San Francisco Examiner, 29 March 1913, 1. Return to essay.
55 "Redlight Bill Goes Through Assembly," The San Francisco Examiner, 7. Return to essay.
56 Ibid. Return to essay.