WorkJane Addams

A New Conscience and an Ancient Evil

Prostitution set beside slavery: an old trade that cities tolerate, and that better wages, votes for women and public opinion could abolish.

by Jane Addams153 passages held

English, the original language, and your language

First published: 1912(aged 52)
Original language: English

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Overview

Twenty field officers of the Juvenile Protective Association of Chicago reported each day to an office next door to Hull-House, and Jane Addams, who headed the association's publication committee, read what they brought in. They had investigated dance halls, theatres, amusement parks and lake excursion boats, and had taken down the personal histories of two hundred department-store girls, two hundred factory girls, two hundred immigrant girls and two hundred office girls. She wrote, her preface says, as someone who needed to make sense of this material and not as an expert. The result appeared as five articles in McClure's Magazine between November 1911 and March 1912, and then as a book dedicated to the association. Congress had passed the White-Slave Traffic Act in June 1910, and a vice commission appointed in Chicago had just reported that prostitution in the city made a profit of fifteen to sixteen million dollars a year. Most large cities tolerated the trade inside a district set apart for it and left the police to control it, an arrangement she calls a source of police corruption in every American city. Addams argues that it is no more permanent than slavery was: commercial prostitution can be abolished once public opinion refuses to accept it. Her account of where the women come from is economic. The commission found that a working girl ordinarily earned six dollars a week, and that a girl who entered prostitution under a manager could earn twenty-five. The remedies she lists follow from that: higher wages, protection for immigrant girls when they arrive, teaching about sex in schools, decent public recreation, and the vote for women, who she believes would take away the trade's half-legal shelter. The book was widely read and was attacked. Walter Lippmann, then a young political writer, judged in A Preface to Politics in 1913 that the horror of the subject had overpowered her thinking. Historians now describe the white-slavery alarm of those years as a moral panic, and note that the vice commissions themselves found prostitution to be organised locally, with no large business behind it.

Key concepts

What does Addams mean by the 'social evil'?

Commercial prostitution as a city permits it, usually inside a district set apart, where in her words the chastity of women is bought and sold. She keeps the phrase narrow on purpose. Questions of marriage, divorce and private affection are left out, and so is the small remainder she expects always to exist. Her subject is the organised trade and the profit made from it, for which she holds the community answerable.

What is the 'new conscience' of the title?

A new unwillingness, in her own generation, to accept prostitution as inevitable. Addams sees it in the revolt the trade now rouses in people who once looked away, and in the judges, physicians, employers, trade unionists and clergymen who gave time to help a single girl. She compares it to the conscience that first felt slavery as an affront and at length as an impossibility, and she treats the feeling as the preparation for action.

What does 'white slave traffic' mean in this book?

The procuring and selling of girls into prostitution for another person's profit. It was the common term of her day, and Addams uses it to press her comparison with slavery: such women, she writes, are held in literal bondage. She describes men whose business is to find girls hard pressed by loneliness and despair and to persuade them that no one cares what they do. Laws against the traffic had begun, as they once began against the slave trade.

What is a segregated district?

A part of a city where the authorities let prostitution carry on although the law forbids it. Addams describes the arrangement as police regulation taking the place of law enforcement. Because the police decide who may trade, they can be paid for the permission, and she calls this municipal blackmail and one of the great sources of corruption in every American city. The district shows her that the trade is tolerated, not natural.

What does Addams mean by 'sympathetic knowledge'?

Knowing a human problem through the lives of the people in it, and not only through figures. Addams calls it the only way of approach to any human problem. The statistician's information has to be joined by an understanding of how a girl actually came to where she is, which is why the book proceeds by cases. Novelists who take readers inside such lives, she adds, supply this understanding too.

Themes of the book

What this book returns to, gathered into themes and ordered by how much of the text each one occupies.

An evil no more permanent than slavery

Is prostitution a fact of human nature or a trade that a city permits? Addams sets it beside slavery, also once called as old as the race, and argues that what public opinion tolerates it can refuse.

Slavery too was blamed on human nature until one generation uprooted it. Addams lines up the parallels: first rules for the traffic, then the rescue of individuals as by the underground railroad, at last abolition. In the way stands the segregated district, where police regulate a trade the law forbids and are paid for it, a source of corruption in every American city. She limits her claim to commercialised vice and expects an irreducible minimum to remain, as murders do. Her hopes rest on physicians, on the vote for women, who would not leave the trade its half-legal protection, and on a single standard of conduct for men and women.

prostitution
sexual exploitation
human trafficking
social reform
law enforcement
state power
social control
women's suffrage
public health
social stigma
social responsibility

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Sold out for a pair of shoes

Why does a girl who has kept herself honest for years give way in one bad week? Addams answers with a wage book, six dollars a week against twenty-five, and with a loneliness that the men who profit know how to find.

One girl paid two dollars for her room, three for board and sixty cents for carfare, and had forty cents left from six dollars. When her shoes would not bear a third soling she gave up and, in her own phrase, sold out for a pair of shoes. The department store sets an untrained girl among goods piled as high as her head, forbids her to sit down, and leaves the only talk of care to a man who means to ruin her. The immigrant girl walks between tenement and factory with no neighbour's eye on her. Among the remedies Addams lists are minimum wage boards.

poverty
labor conditions
women's labor
labor exploitation
economic vulnerability
unemployment
exploitation
social isolation
immigration
youth
urban life

Enter a dialogue

Within this work

passages held: 153
distinct concepts: 291
by passages held, corpus-wide: #408

What this book thinks together

The wheel takes this book’s leading concepts and shows how often they come up together. The wider the band between two, the more of its passages speak of both. Among them, most often together: “poverty” and “sexual exploitation”.

Concept co-occurrence, strongest first 8 concepts, joined by 17 pairings. 90 pairings reach beyond these concepts and are not drawn.
Concept	Paired concept	Shared passages
poverty	sexual exploitation	11
exploitation	human trafficking	5
sexual exploitation	youth	5
child welfare	social reform	4
exploitation	youth	3
sexual exploitation	social reform	3
child welfare	poverty	2
exploitation	prostitution	2
human trafficking	social reform	2
human trafficking	youth	2
poverty	youth	2
child welfare	sexual exploitation	1
human trafficking	sexual exploitation	1
poverty	prostitution	1
prostitution	sexual exploitation	1
prostitution	social reform	1
social reform	youth	1

Works held

The author's work in order, this book marked in place. Your-language title first, the original beneath it where the two differ; side chips show which full texts are held.

1902 Democracy and Social Ethics
Her first book, published eight years before the memoir Twenty Years at Hull-House. Her later books on youth, prostitution and peace stand on its claim that people must be asked about their own good.
EN
1907 Newer Ideals of Peace
Finished seven years before the war of 1914, this is the hopeful one among her books on peace. Peace and Bread in Time of War returns to its question after that war.
EN
1909 The Spirit of Youth and the City Streets
The one she named as her favourite, written in her twentieth year at Hull-House. Three years later A New Conscience and an Ancient Evil followed the girls of these same streets into the trade in prostitution.
EN
1912 A New Conscience and an Ancient Evil you are here EN
1916 The Long Road of Woman's Memory
The counterpart to The Spirit of Youth and the City Streets: that book listened to the young of the neighbourhood, this one to its old women. Its fifth chapter comes from her journey through wartime Europe in 1915.
EN
1922 Peace and Bread in Time of War
Part memoir and part argument, covering 1914 to 1921. It returns to the question of Newer Ideals of Peace fifteen years on, after the war that book had not expected.
EN

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