Every movement therefore which tends to increase woman’s share of civic responsibility undoubtedly forecasts the time when a social control will be extended over men, similar to the historic one so long established over women.  As that modern relationship between men and women, which the Romans called “virtue between equals” increases, while it will continue to make women freer and nobler, less timid of reputation and more human, will also inevitably modify the standards of men.

On the other hand, there is no doubt that this new freedom from domestic and community control, with the opportunity for escaping observation which the city affords, is often utilized unworthily by women.  The report of the Chicago vice commission tells of numerous girls living in small cities and country towns, who come to Chicago from time to time under arrangements made with the landlady of a seemingly respectable apartment.  They remain long enough to earn money for a spring or fall wardrobe and return to their home towns, where their acquaintances are quite without suspicion of the methods they have employed to secure the much-admired costumes brought from the city.  Often an unattached country girl, who has come to live in a city, has gradually fallen into a vicious life from sheer lack of social restraint.  Such a girl, when living in a smaller community, realized that good behavior was a protective measure and that any suspicion of immorality would quickly ruin her social standing; but when removed from such surveillance, she hopes to be able to pass from her regular life to an irregular one and back again before the fact has been noted, quite as many young men are trying to do.

Perhaps no young woman is more exposed to temptation of this sort than the one who works in an office where she may be the sole woman employed and where the relation to her employer and to her fellow-clerks is almost on a social basis.  Many office girls have taken “business courses” in their native towns and have come to the city in search of the large salaries which have no parallels at home.  Such a position is not only new to the individual, but it is so recent an outcome of modern business methods, that it has not yet been conventionalized.  The girl is without the wholesome social restraint afforded by the companionship of other working-women and her isolation in itself constitutes a danger.  An investigation disclosed that a startling number of Chicago girls had found their positions through advertisements and had no means of ascertaining the respectability of their employers.  In addition to this, the girls who seek such positions are sometimes vain and pretentious, and will take any sort of office work because it seems to them “more ladylike.”  A girl of this sort came to Chicago from the country three years ago at the age of seventeen and secured a position as a stenographer with a large firm of lawyers.  She was pretty and attractive, and in her desire to see more of the wonderful city