An immigrant girl is occasionally exploited by her own lover whom she has come to America to marry.  I recall the case of a Russian girl thus decoyed into a disreputable life by a man deceiving her through a fake marriage ceremony.  Although not found until a year later, the girl had never ceased to be distressed and rebellious.  Many Slovak and Polish girls, coming to America without their relatives, board in houses already filled with their countrymen who have also preceded their own families to the land of promise, hoping to earn money enough to send for them later.  The immigrant girl is thus exposed to dangers at the very moment when she is least able to defend herself.  Such a girl, already bewildered by the change from an old world village to an American city, is unfortunately sometimes convinced that the new country freedom does away with the necessity for a marriage ceremony.  Many others are told that judgment for a moral lapse is less severe in America than in the old country.  The last month’s records of the Municipal Court in Chicago, set aside to hear domestic relation cases, show sixteen unfortunate girls, of whom eight were immigrant girls representing eight different nationalities.  These discouraged and deserted girls become an easy prey for the procurers who have sometimes been in league with their lovers.

Even those girls who immigrate with their families and sustain an affectionate relation with them are yet often curiously free from chaperonage.  The immigrant mothers do not know where their daughters work, save that it is in a vague “over there” or “down town.”  They themselves were guarded by careful mothers and they would gladly give the same oversight to their daughters, but the entire situation is so unlike that of their own peasant girlhoods that, discouraged by their inability to judge it, they make no attempt to understand their daughters’ lives.  The girls, realizing this inability on the part of their mothers, elated by that sense of independence which the first taste of self-support always brings, sheltered from observation during certain hours, are almost as free from social control as is the traditional young man who comes up from the country to take care of himself in a great city.  These immigrant parents are, of course, quite unable to foresee that while a girl feels a certain restraint of public opinion from the tenement house neighbors among whom she lives, and while she also responds to the public opinion of her associates in a factory where she works, there is no public opinion at all operating as a restraint upon her in the hours which lie between the two, occupied in the coming and going to work through the streets of a city large enough to offer every opportunity for concealment.  So much of the recreation which is provided by commercial agencies, even in its advertisements, deliberately plays upon the interest of sex because it is under such excitement and that of alcohol that money is most recklessly spent.  The great human dynamic, which it has been the long effort of centuries to limit to family life, is deliberately utilized for advertising purposes, and it is inevitable that many girls yield to such allurements.