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Welty, "The Need of White Cross Work," 1895
both flounder together and remain incomplete. Political emancipation,
full, free, unhampered, is the only leverage that can raise women from
social and industrial damnation. No class of people, not even mothers,
wives and daughters, can, in this democratic America, be denied
political freedom and not suffer wrong and degradation. It is clear the
protection to women--to all women--can be secured only by giving
them a part and a voice in making the laws that concern their honor
and well-being.
4. The need of White Cross work is made imperative because of
the ravages of licentiousness.
Of all the master vices that prey upon and curse American
society, or any other for that matter, it is admitted by those in a position
to know, that licentiousness is the greatest. It is, more than all others,
universal, deep seated and most deadly. It is easily the darkest sin in
all the catalogue of sin and shame.
We have evidence that licentiousness to-day, as never before,
has assumed the proportions and methods of a trade. It has the form,
phases, agencies and machinery of a great, complicated, ramifying
business. Its agents travel everywhere; the telegraph and the United
States mails transmit intelligence for it; and the railroads, express
companies and ships at sea carry its vicious freight. Vile literature in
papers, magazines, books and pictures, full of unspeakable
abominations, abounds everywhere and is propagating ideas of social
nastiness.
The stage, now popular in city and town and village, with its
spectacular scenes of love and lust and managed by a hundred
thousand men and women, mostly low, lewd and lawless, is vitiating
the minds and hearts of thousands, until their sense of the pure and
the impure is obliterated.
The saloon, that legal institution of infamy and tyranny, is firing
the passions of men and sending them down the scarlet avenues that
lead to chambering and wantonness.
We see also that efforts are being made in different places and in
high places and even in legislative halls, and with alarming success, to
establish professional prostitution in our cities under cover of law and
under the control of police force. That means the traffic in and the sale
of untold thousands of the young daughters of the people throughout
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