Certainly enfranchised women would offer some protection to the white slaves themselves who are tolerated and segregated, but who, because their very existence is illegal, may be arrested whenever any police captain chooses, may be brought before a magistrate, fined and imprisoned.  A woman so arrested may be obliged to answer the most harassing questions put to her by a city attorney with no other woman near to protect her from insult.  She may be subjected to the most trying examinations in the presence of policemen with no matron to whom to appeal.  These things constantly happen everywhere save in Scandinavian countries, where juries of women sit upon such cases and offer the protection of their presence to the prisoners.  Without such protection even an innocent woman, made to appear a member of this despised class, receives no consideration.  A girl of fifteen recently acting in a South Chicago theatre attracted the attention of a milkman who gradually convinced her that he was respectable.  Walking with him one evening to the door of her lodging-house, the girl told him of her difficulties and quite innocently accepted money for the payment of her room rent.  The following morning as she was leaving the house the milkman met her at the door and asked her for the five dollars he had given her the night before.  When she said she had used it to pay her debt to the landlady, he angrily replied that unless she returned the money at once he would call a policeman and arrest her on a charge of theft.  The girl, helpless because she had already disposed of the money, was taken to court, where, frightened and confused, she was unable to give a convincing account of the interview the night before; except for the prompt intervention on the part of a woman, she would either have been obliged to put herself in the power of the milkman, who offered to pay her fine, or she would have been sent to the city prison, not because the proof of her guilt was conclusive, but because her connection with a cheap theatre and the hour of the so-called offence had convinced the court that she belonged to a class of women who are regarded as no longer entitled to legal protection.

Several years ago in Colorado the disreputable women of Denver appealed to a large political club of women against the action of the police who were forcing them to register under the threat of arrest in order later to secure their votes for a corrupt politician.  The disreputable women, wishing to conceal their real names and addresses, did not want to be registered, in this respect at least differing from the lodging-house men whose venal votes play such an important part in every municipal election.  The women’s political club responded to this appeal, and not only stopped the coercion, but finally turned out of office the chief of police responsible for it.