But over against this set this fact: There are seven hundred women in San Francisco whose one aim in civic life is to found a state training school for girls gone wrong who would go right. This association has a representative in Sacramento whose sole business it is to further a bill for the establishment of a helping station to girls on the way to usefulness and moral health, modeled upon similar establishments in other states. Here is work, backed by thirty thousand club women of the state, proceeding definitely, practically to a solution of one of the most appalling obstacles to the crusade against vice.... But the time has not yet come when woman will face her individual share of atonement for a social sin in which she has acquiesced. Ultimately, with universal suffrage, the wheel of time must place at the door of the protected woman responsibility for the prostitute. As yet she cannot see herself, in her own home, taking up the broken lives, diseased bodies, debased minds and deadened souls—the by-product of that which men tell her has always been and always must be.
It is not merely by drastic legislation directed immediately at the social evil that women are attempting to solve the problem. They know full well the complexity of the disease. They are coming more and more to the view that the indirect attack on low wages, bad housing conditions, and the other evils which lower standards of living is more effective than the frontal assault. They are also attacking the problem with measures designed to safeguard young girls who for economic reasons must work out of the home.
In their efforts to trace the whereabouts of immigrant girls, to do follow-up work, to establish immigrant homes, to secure matrons on steamers and women inspectors, women are constantly controlling some portion at least of the social evil. Miss Sadie American, Executive Secretary of the Council of Jewish Women, states that her organization, which does so much to safeguard Jewish girls, could do vastly more if it had the facilities that the government has in the way of registered lists of newly arrived citizens with their destinations. Certainly the organization of women as a social service adjunct to the Department of Immigration would be a step acceptable to women and of incalculable preventive value to the country.