Bachelor Girl_ The Secret History of Single Women in the Twentieth Century - Betsy Israel [63]
Belle Moskowitz, an impassioned old-school reformer and later a savvy operative in New York State politics, spoke out on drinking and dancing and the “corrosive” influence of these “other,” or lesser, working girls: “[Working] life cries out for rational recreation [but] what?…Girls do not of intention select bad places to go to…. [But] the girl whose temperament and disposition crave un-natural forms of excitement is nearly beyond the bounds of salvation…. she may affect the well being of others.”
One of several sudden reports on female criminal tendencies, The Cause and Cure of Crime (1914), declared, “Many girls are diseased. Physically and mentally contaminated.” The superintendent of one reform school declared, in support, “One bad girl can do more harm than fifty depraved boys…many are…abnormal or feeble-minded and should be held in custody for a long time or for life.”
Slowly, concern that morally corrupt girls were lurking around the thé dansant seemed to fuse with parents’ fears about the men who were forever lurking everywhere. And in this age of new womanhood (or “post” or “fun” new womanhood), when there were “simply more women outside doing things,” these fears were heightened by the sense that girls faced other, unexpected sources of contamination.
BEWARE THE WHITE SLAVER
For several years during the early teens, the nation was captivated by one villain: the White Slaver. He was that legendary fiend who kidnapped young white girls, drugged them with chloroform-drenched kerchiefs, stuck them with morphine needles, then sold them into prostitution. The slaver, usually a “hit man” for a criminal syndicate, preyed most often on new arrivals to the country, single girls just off the boat, the less English spoken the better. Slavers also worked Upstate New York and Pennsylvania towns, luring girls without prospects by promising—and sometimes actually pretending—to marry them, then at some point drugging them and turning them over to colleagues in New York City.
As one typical headline shrieked in 1913: 50,000 GIRLS DISAPPEAR YEARLY! The subhead: “Before the Chloroform, the plaintive cries: ‘Sir, please, I am a decent girl! Who earns her Wages.’”
One girl expanded on this familiar scenario in The Independent: “A girl is sitting there at the films. Or on a bench nearby a tree. They creep behind and…they force a cloth across your face, there goes the needle in your neck or your ankle or arm, and you go dead black for a time, only to wake up in hell. And no chance of getting back.”
As another girl interviewed for the same story put it: “They can take away your own life from you without killing you first.”
Quickly this new terror found its way into melodramatic plots. Especially onscreen. By World War I, movies had evolved from primitive hand-cranked “flickers” into longer films shown in makeshift neighborhood theaters. One of the first box-office hits in film history was called Traffic in Souls (1913), a white-slaving film that was thought to have no commercial prospects. It was seventy minutes—much too long for nickelodeons, which could handle only one-and two-reelers—and required a legitimate theater (where plays such as The House of Bondage and The Lure ran briefly before being shut down). More important, as one critic prematurely put it: “Who among us wants to witness a tale of unfortunates abducted, put to sale, forced to the sickening biddings of madam or whoremonger?”
The answer was just about everyone. Traffic in Souls grossed $450,000 after showing for a few weeks at twenty-eight theaters in New York City.
It is true that hundreds of young women were kidnapped, drugged, and then sold, usually into out-of-state brothels. And it’s true that several state and federal commissions eventually conducted mass investigations. But for a time the white slaver was foremost a mythic devil whose presence seems directly linked