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Image provided by: University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Library, Urbana, IL
Newspaper Page Text
O'HARA COMISH REPORT HANDS EMPLOYERS HOT SLAM THEY CANNOT DODGE Springfield, Jan. 21. In one of the most complete reports ever made to the legislature, the O'Hara vice com mission has declared" -that poverty is the principal cause, direct and indirect, of prostitution, after an in vestigation into the causes of vice that covered three years. The report is unequivocal in this assertion. It declared that to arrive at any other conclusion would be to dodge the issue and points to the fact that 70 per cent of the mothers of girls at the Geneva Home for De linquent Girls, who were in employ ment, were either washwomen or scrubwomen. Slightly under 70 per cent of the delinquent girls brought into the ju venile court of Cook county were from families not supported by the fathers, where the mother had be come the wage-earner and conditions of poverty were extreme. "This committee," the report de clares, "was unable to learn of a single prostitute in any city in Illi nois visited, or in which its investi gators operated, who had come from a home of even modest prosperity. Women do not seek lives of prostitu tion excepf under economic pressure or economic expediency or under the handicap of moral and mental defects resulting from previous family eco nomic conditions. "Thousands of girls are driven into prostitution because of sheer inabil ity to keep body and soul together on the low wages received by them. "By the testimony of the girl vic tims, in one unbroken narrative of hopeless struggle; by the reports of their private conversations from ex perienced investigators; by the ob servations and judgments of social workers whose integrity has never been questioned; and, over and above all, by the figures of what the girls are actually paid and what it actual ly costs them to live; the hideous de ficit and the more hideous contempla tion of how sometimes that deficit must be bridged; is your committee brought irretrievably to this finding. It is not a matter of sentiment, or of emotion, or of opinion. It is the fact, cold, not nice, uncomplimentary to all of us; but nevertheless the fact" The report which defines its mean ing of prostitution to refer to girls and women who sell themselves for money and not to the act of immoral ity when not compensated, declares that a girl's hope of redemption after she has errer grades downward with the intensity of her struggle for ex istence and the hope of redemption is dimmest where the temptation is strongest, with the girl whose wage cannot support her. "The girl in receipt of a living wage is not necessarily doomed by the ini tial folly," the report states. "She often redeems herself and is restored to the world of well-behaved, pure minded persons. The girl who is be low the 'bread line,' who is slipping weekly further and further into debt and misery, seldom recovers from the first moral lapse." The report then goes into the tes timony of the State street shopkeep ers and mail order heads and records the "admission of Julius Rosenwald, philanthropist and head of the Sears Roebuck & Co., that 30.96 per cent of all of the females employed by that house received less than $8, after Rosenwald had testified that an in quiry was made by the heads of va rious departments among the em ployes. After showing by the testimony of the employers that they, believed the deficit between the low wage they paid and the least on which a girl could live should be saddled by the parentsyie report tersely shows how this would work out, taking, as it frankly admits after its investigation, what is considered a high averag'j