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The "Bad Woman's Vote"

By Lurana Sheldon

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MONG the arguments offered by certain women against woman's acquirement of the ballot is this, "We do not wish the bad woman to vote."

Ignoring the fact that these same women seem entirely satisfied to have the bad man vote, I would ask, "Who and where are the "bad women?"

Presumably it is to the woman of the streets that they apply this adjective-the woman who, lacking sufficient money and wit to deceive the public, takes it into her confidence and frankly makes use of it. The drug victim, or "dope fiend" as she is called; the drinking woman; the frequenter of low resorts; the harlot, and the seemingly inhuman creature who preys indiscriminately upon the immorality of her sister woman.

Although conditions in all large large cities are much the same, let us confine ourselves to New York, as it is the city whose alleys and avenues, hovels and palaces, paupers and millionaires invite the greatest comparisons, and let us light our lanterns and go on a long, still hunt, not for an honest man, but for the so-called "bad woman."

If you are at all timid at the start let me say to you that I have been all over the ground before, and while at times one comes unpleasantly near to some calamity, the path is only dangerous in spots, and where the danger lurks we will take all due precautions.

Let us go to Chinatown first, as that place seems to bear an unsavory reputation.

Of course you have all seen China

town, superficially, at least. You have visited the Joss House and the theatre and eaten Chow Chop Suey sitting on a three-legged stool in a restaurant with sawdust on the floor and dried rats and mice hanging in plain sight in the open kitchen, but have you been down-down much farther than you will be when you are buried to where the fan-tan is played by the solemn Celestial and the long stemmed pipe smoked by both the "Chink" and his patrons?

Here, lying in one of the bunks, her garments disarranged, her hair disheveled, her pipe at her side, totally insensible to her surroundings, lies a once good looking white girl.

The air is sickeningly heavy and the place is not over clean. There are other women in other bunks but the ferret eyed yellow man sitting crosslegged in the corner wears a none too hospitable expression, so as the woman before us is a fair specimen of her class it is not necessary for us to intrude further where we are plainly not wanted.

And now for her story! Born of a drunken father and a slovenly mother, accustomed in childhood to hunger, poverty and blows, she has served her apprenticeship in the sweatshop, graduated from the factory, and without home, friends, health, opportunity, knowledge or money, the pipe offers her the one ray of comfort she has ever known-the one vision of happiness that she has ever beheld.

What she might have been under different environment is as clear as daylight. Her features are good and her record shows her to have been a

faithful worker. In a civilized country, in a wealthy city, she knew no avenue of escape from the condition into which her parents forced her. She is escaping from it now, temporarily, through the medium of a dream, but she will awake later only to a deeper hopelessness and with less physical and mental strength to resist the yellow man's temptings.

Bad? I do not think so. Just a victim of circumstances. But whether she is bad or not she will never vote. With the lash of starvation over her head by day and the fumes of opium in her brain at night it is doubtful if she will ever hear the word Suffrage, so we may as well climb back to the street level and resume our journey.

And now bend low and hold your lanterns near the floor for we must literally pick our way over human beings. This is a Stale Beer Diveperhaps the lowest of all resorts for the lowest of all beings. Men pre

dominate, fortunately, but here, sandwiched in between a drunken sailor and a "doped" negro is a lump of flesh, clothed in rags, that resembles

a woman.

And here also some one says to us reminiscently, "She was a good woman once. Her husband beat her and murdered one of the children in a drunken delirium. She went down after that and the children were taken from her, and when he died in State's prison she struck the bottom level. Of course she was only a poor, ignorant immigrant at the beginning. The country was strange to her and so was the language. Whiskey did. for her husband and stale beer is doing for her."

Bad? I do not know. However, there is no need to fear that she will ever vote. A few more trips with the tin can to drain the sun-baked kegs in front of the corner groggery and Potter's Field will claim her. We must shoulder our lanterns and go on still farther.

There is a dance hall around the corner that seems to be well patronized. Still carrying our lanterns, for

the lights are dim, we will go in for a minute.

Yes, it does look wicked to see that young girl spinning around in the vile air of the room, her waist encircled by the arm of that vicious looking fellow! But this girl is the oldest of eleven. The whole family live together in a miserable tenement, and as most of the children are sickly and her mother a broken down wreck she is obliged to work in a Sweatshop and give her money to her father. It is rarely that she has a square meal and her garments are threadbare. From bending over a sewing machine all day she goes home to crying children and general misery at night, and the dance hall offers her her only respite. If she does drink a little beer froththere is no danger of her getting much. beer-it helps to fill her empty stomach, and if she sometimes goes a little farther in her acquaintanceships than would the daughter of an affluent minister, it is because she is still young and because no one has given her any lessons in conventional decorum.

Bad? Hardly. But she will never vote. Already the deadly Sweatshop air has done its work. A rasping cough, a sore lung, a hemorrhage, and her days are numbered.

And now without leaving the hall we will glance at another girl, the companion of the first but by no means like her. This girl is better dressed and better fed. She is louder in her manner, coarser in her speech and will drink no beer so long as any one will buy her whiskey. By and by she will disappear for a while with one of these rough looking fellows, but she also is a product of ignorance, endowed pre-natally with poverty, viciousness and a non-moral nature.

She, too, served her apprenticeship in the Sweatshop but could see nothing in virtue. It offered her only starvation wages and abuse while the other gave her something to eat, better clothes on her back and a minimum of freedom.

Of course she will drift downward

THE "BAD WOMAN'S VOTE."

-no one knows that any better than herself but with only misery behind one holds to the present. She will not anticipate her "finish" although she knows that it is coming.

Bad? Possibly. I should hate to judge. Compared with the parents who brought her into this existence. she seems almost an angel, but whether good or bad she will never vote. The life has too strong a grip on her for that. She has use for all her energies in the struggle for bread and butter.

And now we will leave the hall before the odors choke us, and, lowering the flames of our lanterns, saunter out upon the street. The graduate from the Sweatshop who is dancing represents the average low grade streetwalker, so we need not tarry on the down-town streets, but can hurry up to Broadway and 42nd Street, so as to be there near midnight.

And now we must extinguish both our lanterns and ourselves, and, being invisible to others, watch the women as they ply their trade in this particular section.

Here are two well dressed women coming along arm in arm. As a lone man passes them one of the women quickens her steps and quietly accosts him. The man's good natured, "Not this evening!" brings her back to her companion, but not until each has found an acquiescent passerby do they leave the vicinity.

Who are these women and why are they here? These must be the bad women for whom we are looking! They have youth, health, good clothing, and are not hungry. There seems no excuse for their trade when they could be earning honest livings.

Their stories are attainable so we may as well hear them. Both were innocent country girls and one was married. Her husband brought her to the city and sold her to slavery, keeping her under lock and key, and when she finally escaped it was only to be the mistress of her benefactor. She was faithful to him but he tired of her, when, broken hearted, dis

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gusted, void of all faith in human honesty, she went onto the street to earn her living.

The other was seduced at fifteen, turned out of her home by her own father and mother, and forced to support herself and her child with no sort of training or experience. The child died from neglect while she was out at a day's work, and half crazed with grief and bitterness she accepted friendship. Her lover failed her also and others filled the gap. With every hope blasted, with every respectable door closed against her, she went onto the street to hold her own in the game with humanity.

Bad? Perhaps so, but suppose she does vote! Does any society woman, sheltered in her own home, know more of the evils in our social and economic conditions? How many respectable women know the political game-the bribery, rascality, double dealing and insatiable greed of "the system" better? Like the girls in the Opium Joints and the dance halls they are victims of parental ignorance, inherent incompetence and uncivilized conditions, and not one of them is so bad that she would make these conditions worse-that she would not improve things if she could for her companions of the gutter.

And now that we are not sure that this is our bad woman let us go down to 14th Street and follow this girl who has just been arrested by a plain clothes man for soliciting on a street corner. Of course he is taking her to Jefferson Market Night Court, and we may find out there that she is the woman we are after.

The mark of the "professional" is stamped all over her, but what is it that His Honor is saying?

"You go to the hospital again, Lizzie, and I guess you will stay there this time. I will not let you have any more of this!"

And after she has been taken away an attendant tells us the story.

"She broke down taking care of her two little children after her husband's death and could not get a job as she

looked consumptive. She finally went into the streets after the Society took her children. She can not live much longer. Nobody knows her folks. She and her husband came over from Ireland in the steerage originally."

As she is not our woman we will try another experiment. There is a house of ill fame just around the corner and by changing our gowns to men's apparel two of us may get in without much trouble.

The stony faced woman with the eagle eyes who met us in the hall is not easily deceived, but we are here in the parlor of what is known as a “fast house" a house from which not a light is visible on the street and which to a passerby seems as silent as a grave yard.

In the heavily curtained parlor it is different. There are several "stunts" being done here that shock us a little, especially as a well known man or two are taking part in the pastime, but the two girls who have corralled us are enough for our purpose.

One is a dashing looking creature who seems well qualified for her place, while the other is plainly a novice and under surveillance. One plays her part easily, the other with restraint, and before judging them morally we will hear their stories.

The mother of the dashing woman was a keeper of just such a resort. But, not unnaturally, she tried to keep her daughter from knowing her true life, and protected her as far as she could from the fate which she had not scrupled at times to force upon the daughters of others.

But "blood will tell" and the girl followed her mother's footsteps. When she learned that her very subsistence from childhood had been derived from this business she went into it boldly. There was force of example here, to say nothing of inheritance.

And the second girl is the typical white slave of history. Inveigled into the house by a professional procuress she has been intimidated, starved, even beaten into submission to the rules and practices of the house. She

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does not even come into the present discussion. We have mentioned her merely because she exists-because we chanced to see her while on the trail of the other.

And is this brazen daughter of the house the woman we are after? Water seeks its level and like produces like. What is bred in the bone will come out in the flesh unless proper precautions are taken and proper remedies administered, and no child is competent to develop its own nature unaided.

This is the natural fruit of a certain seed, planted in impure soil and nurtured improperly. But this woman knows better than any other woman in the land that in the secrets of police protection, political pull and immunity from arrest enjoyed by the keepers of houses of ill fame it is the miserable inmate who pays the largest share of the tribute. That hers is a double sacrifice-she is first burned on the altar of her own need and again on the pyre of her soul's owner-the Madam.

The inside workings of precinct politics are oftentimes clearer to her than to the "ward heelers" themselves, but she is not likely to vote, for Madam's position is too insecure for her to take sides in politics. It is for her to await the election and placate the elected.

And now that we have rounded up the classes of women whose possible vote has so alarmed the anti-suffragists we have only to add the following summary:

The woman whose debasement has through all the ages been the bulwark of safety for another woman—whose voluntary immorality has protected the morality of others from the rapaciousness of man, has little or no reason for taking an interest in woman suffrage, and were her ballot added to the ballot of the bad man it is doubtful if the result would show any appreciable increase. With hardly a child to leave behind her and only a few fleeting years to live, what possible concern can be felt by the social. outcast in more than strictly local

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