Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [921]
Unfortunately for this schema, the male Irish Catholics who had just assumed control of Tammany Hall under Honest John Kelly proved newly powerful enough to insist that the law require children be placed only in institutions controlled by persons of the same religious faith. Catholic nuns moved swiftly to turn their convents into refuges from Protestant childsavers, and did so with public money. Within a year, the number of children in orphanages and asylums nearly doubled. Soon thousands of poor Catholic parents, who had been loathe, even in extremis, to send their children to hated Protestant institutions, were turning to the new Catholic ones, treating them as free and temporary boarding schools. Such families knew that the sisters believed poverty a misfortune to be alleviated, not a condition to be reformed, and while they might resent the nuns for requiring compulsory attendance at Mass, they knew that once they were back on their feet, the sisters would funnel their children home to them again.
By 1885 nuns were rearing over 80 percent of the city’s dependent youths and had won effective control of the metropolitan child care system. Josephine Shaw Lowell and her COS and CAS colleagues were appalled. For all their professions of nonsectarianism, anti-Catholicism ran deep in the childsaving movement; the Children’s Aid Society refused to place Catholic or Jewish children with Catholic or Jewish families, as they weren’t proper homes.
The nuns, moreover, had successfully challenged the hard-won right of Protestant women to mother the children of the immigrant poor, which in turn had justified their own entry into public life. The SCAA fought hard in the mid-1880s to dismantle the convent-based system, arguing it led to child abuse or sowed the seed of “pauper poison.” But Tammany and the archdiocese backed the nuns. So did such powerful Protestant male groups as Gerry’s SPCC, because the women religious were unquestionably efficient, and cheap—having taken a vow of poverty—which meant a saving of tax dollars.
THE WAR ON SIN
Protestant reformers were deeply disturbed by the wide-open wickedness of New York’s teeming entertainment quarters. Saloons were everywhere—the city seemed awash in liquor—and one Methodist speaker at the 1888 Chickering Hall conference noted that where there was but one Protestant church for every 4,464 inhabitants, the saloon-to-inhabitant ratio was one to 150. What was particularly galling to genteel opponents was the de facto legalized status of commercialized vice. The National Police Gazette reported regularly on the fancy life of theaters, gambling dens, and bordellos, and a new generation of sunshine-and-shadow writers provided salacious details on dives and opium dens.
The refusal to pay even decent tribute to the opinions of the respectable drove conservative feminists and cultivated gentlemen (“upright men and virtuous women” in the terminology of the day) into banding together to purify New York City. Rejecting laissez-faire in the moral realm as others were discarding it in the sphere of economics, purity reformers called for greater public regulation of private behavior.
The New York Committee for the Suppression of Legalized Vice, a key organization of the purity movement, was generaled by Aaron Macy Powell and Abigail Hopper Gibbons, two old veterans of the abolitionist crusade (Powell had been an editor of the Anti-Slavery Standard). They set out to free their “fallen sisters” from a “white slavery” as evil as the black slavery that preceded it.
In this they took their cues from England, where since the 1870s a coalition of middle-class nonconformists, feminists, and radical workingmen had been calling for repeal of Britain’s Contagious Diseases Act (1864), which effectively legalized and regulated commercial sex. The British movement received an enormous boost in 1885 with the publication,