The Girl That Disappears/Chapter 19
XIX
LITTLE USE FOR THE ONE RATIONAL INSTI-
TUTION FOR FALLEN WOMEN
LESS than fifty miles from New York City there is an institution known as the Bedford Reformatory. It exists for the reformation of delinquent women, and once in a great while a city magistrate will send a woman there instead of to the workhouse. I think I saw it stated that in the year 1909 three thousand women were sent to the workhouse and eleven to Bedford. This does not argue malevolence on the part of the magistrates. The fact is they cannot get it out of their heads that sending a woman to a reformatory is a punishment. They can't imagine doing anything for an unfortunate woman except punishing her; and Bedford they consider a very severe punishment indeed. Why? Because women must be committed to Bedford on an indeterminate sentence, the limit being three years, and many a magistrate has been quoted as saying that a three years' sentence was too severe.
The falsity of this position is apparent to anybody who knows anything about the system in vogue at Bedford. Under the superintendency of Miss Katherine Bement Davis, Bedford presents a perfectly rational plan for the reformation of those women who have not sunk too low for the helping hand to grasp. It is operated on the cottage system, the women proceeding from a fairly severe degree of detention and discipline to the lightest possible. They are first taken to a reception cottage, carefully examined by a competent woman physician, and, if necessary, segregated in a hospital.
As soon as a woman is placed in a normal state of mind and body she is given work to do, household work of course, but other work as well according to her individual capacity. A great deal of gardening and outdoor work is done at Bedford, and the handsome concrete walk and long flight of steps across the grounds is entirely the work of women's hands. A group of unusually strong and musuclar women did the work, and when it was finished the other women in their cottages rewarded them with a banquet.
Putting all prejudice, all hypocrisy aside, what system seems to you most sensible, most humane, most civilized, most Christian. The old system of closing our eyes to facts, denying the plain truth, and allowing a monstrous evil to exist unchanged; to allow countless thousands of its miserable victims to suffer infamy, pain and death; to permit that monstrous thing fitly termed "the black plague" to continue year after year, maiming and destroying innocent women and children; to acknowledge the truth, segregate and control it and establish institutions like Bedford for the rescue of those women and girls still capable of being rescued?