The Girl That Disappears/Chapter 11
XI
SYSTEM EMPLOYED TO MAKE WOMEN
IMMORAL
THAT, however, is only one of the many methods by which men persuade hitherto innocent and respectable girls to forget their homes and the teachings of their parents. They manage by very subtle ways. Remember that the average victim is of slight education. She belongs to a more or less helpless class. The procurer's task is rendered the easier on account of the victim's lack of intellectual resources. Let one of these unfortunates tell her own story.
She was a clerk in a Brooklyn department store, earning $5.00 a week. The girl had no friends or relatives in the city, and how she managed to exist on such small wages I shall not venture to explain. She yielded to the solicitations of a chance acquaintance, a man who, on one pretense or another, haunted the scene of the girl's daily toil. He was a man of good address and apparent sincerity. When after a very short acquaintance he professed affection and offered marriage, the girl accepted. Any marriage seemed better to her than the ill-paid drudgery in which she had lived. The man represented to this young girl that he was the owner of a prosperous manicuring and hair-dressing establishment, and he proposed to her that she learn the trade and help him to carry on the business, a proposal to which she gladly acceded.
There was no misrepresentation as far as the manicuring establishment was concerned. It did in fact exist but it had immoral features connected with it.
Very soon after her marriage the young woman was introduced to a group of men who dropped in almost every evening to play cards and gossip with the proprietor of the establishment. It was strange talk that the former shop girl listened to. Tale after tale of girls who to show their faithfulness to their husbands in time of financial distress descended into the depths of degradation. These girls were always spoken of in terms of deepest admiration. Their deeds were extolled as examples of heroic self-sacrifice. Other tales more gruesome were unfolded. Tales of terrible retribution that followed attempts of the girls to free themselves. How one girl had wearied of her life and "selfishly" determined to escape from her master. How she slipped away one night, as she believed, without the knowledge of a living soul. Yet as she passed by an unlighted alley a mysterious figure darted out of the darkness and struck the girl fairly in the face with a razor. She arose, dazed and bleeding, her face slashed, her beauty ruined for life.
These tales multiplied until the mind of the young woman became saturated with terror. Yet when her husband made his first dreadful proposals to her she still retained strength of character to refuse to play the part he assigned her. He did not try to force her into a life of immorality but his treatment of her became cruel in the extreme.
This lasted for perhaps a fortnight, at the end of which time she was in a state of desperate fear. Then the man's cruelty ceased and he became kind and attentive once more. He begged her forgiveness for past harshness and suggested to her that they live on terms of mutual kindness and forbearance. The nature of the forbearance, as far as the girl was concerned, was apparent to her, but rather than face again the period of cruelty and abuse she consented to the immorality he had proposed for her in the beginning. Anything seemed to her better than the misery in which she had lived during those few terrible weeks.
Once having entered the life she saw no possible means of escape. Whenever the impulse to run away occurred to her she remembered the tales of slashing and murder related by her husband's associates. She became a veritable white slave. From that time on she was a pliant tool of the system.
It is by means of this kind, by an infernal knowledge of the psychology of wroman's mind that the white slaver is able to manage his victims.