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Hellraisers Journal – Friday July 22, 1910
Socialists’ Response to Trafficking of Young Woman
From The Progressive Woman of July 1910:
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WHY SOCIALISTS SHOULD EXPOSE
THE WHITE SLAVE TRAFFIC.
———-AGNES H. DOWNING.
1. Because the white slave trade persists because the majority of people do not know that it exists at all.
2. Because exposing renders it less safe and hence less profitable
3. Because in the United States more girls are taken into houses of infamy each year than enter any other one occupation except housewifery. The greater part of these are procured through the white slave trade.
4. Because the girls are practically all working girls and hence poor and helpless.
5. Because the girls are destroyed there; the average length of their lives is four years.
6. Because womanhood and motherhood are degraded in the persons of the girls who are subjected to unnameable abuses.
7. Because men are diseased and brutalized by this institution.
8. Because hundreds of thousands of young girls are lost to the useful walks of life because of this evil.
9. Because there are thousands of men (the cadets) in every large city, literally a standing army to keep those girls in subjection. These men are lost to useful industry and are brutalized by this work.
10. Because a blow at this infamy will help to break machine rule in the cities. The big corporations always have for their allies the cadets and keepers of infamous places, the buyers and sellers of women.
11. Because the Socialist party in declaring for justice and equality of privileges for woman means all women. While the sale or degradation of a single woman is protected it should protest.
12. Because Socialists can offer the only complete permanent remedy, namely, abolishing profit in all dealings of life and the
upbuilding of human character through good economic conditions.13. Because no argument in the wide world shows so vividly the need for a change in the present system as the bare facts of the white slave traffic.
[Photograph and emphasis added.]
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SOURCES & IMAGES
Quote Mother Jones, Great Church upon Bodies of Girls, Dnv Rck Mt Ns p2, Feb 28, 1909
https://www.genealogybank.com/
The Progressive Woman
(Girard, Kansas)
-Mar 1909 to May 1911
(note: some issues missing)
https://books.google.com/books?id=Zo1EAQAAIAAJ
Progressive Woman – July 1910
https://play.google.com/books/reader?id=Zo1EAQAAIAAJ&printsec=frontcover&pg=GBS.PA16-IA209
“Why Socialists Should Expose the White Slave Traffic”
-by Agnes H Downing
https://play.google.com/books/reader?id=Zo1EAQAAIAAJ&printsec=frontcover&pg=GBS.PA16-IA213
Agnes H Downing, Prg Wmn p4, Mar 1, 1910
https://play.google.com/books/reader?id=Zo1EAQAAIAAJ&printsec=frontcover&pg=GBS.PA16-IA148
See also:
The Progressive Woman of March 1910
https://play.google.com/books/reader?id=Zo1EAQAAIAAJ&printsec=frontcover&pg=GBS.PA16-IA148
“Bad Laws and Worse Officials
-by Agnes H. Downing
Article: re light penalties for sexual enslavment of white girls and woman, penalties for selling of Japanese or Chinese girls reduced to a misdemeanor.
The Progressive Woman, 1909-1911
(search separately: “white slave” ; “agnes h downing”)
https://books.google.com/books?id=Zo1EAQAAIAAJ
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Slavinnan – Lucas Stark
Lyrics by Joe Hill