"It has been authoritatively stated that there are, in our large cities, hundreds of young women who, being able to earn barely enough to buy food and fuel and pay the rent of a dismal attic, take the advice offered by their employers, “Get some gentleman friend to dress you for your company.” Others spend all their small earnings to keep themselves “respectably” dressed, and share the board and lodgings of some young “roué” as heartless as incontinent. Persons unaccustomed to city life, and thousands of people in the very heart of our great metropolis, have no conception of the frightful prevalence of this kind of prostitution. Young women go to our large cities as pure as snow. They find no lucrative employment. Daily contact with vice obtunds their first abhorrence of it. Gradually it becomes familiar. A fancies life of ease presents allurements to a hard-worked sewing girl. Fine clothes and comfortable lodgings increase the temptation. She yields, and barters her body for a home without the trouble of a marriage ceremony. Wealthy women could do more to cure the “social evil” by adopting plain attire than all the civil authorities by passing license laws or regulating ordinances. Have not Christian women a duty here? A few years ago, some Nashville ladies mad e slight move in the right direction, as indicated in the following paragraph; but we have not heard that their example has been followed:- “the lady member of the first Baptist Church, of Nashville, Tenn., have agreed that they will dispense with a ll finery on Sunday, wearing no jewels but consistency, and hereafter appear at church in plain calico dresses.” A more radical reform would have been an extension of the salutary measure to all other days of the week as well as Sunday; though we see no reason for restricting the material of clothing to calico, which might, indeed, be rather insufficient for some seasons of the year."
January 1, 1970