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-vfT'in b fSSSffBKaSfSIf FROM BEGINNING TO END GIRLS IN MORALS COURT ARE EXPLOITED WOMEN This is the first of a series of sto ries dealing with the exploitation of women who are forced into a life of prostitution through theexploitation of big business in the beginning and are victims of further exploitation all along the line. BY JANE WHITAKER Exploited women! Sitting in the morals court I thought of that name and wondered why it has never been applied to the women it fits better than any other name that has been or could be given them. We have coined so many names for them. Legally we have called them prostitutes, but that offends the sen sitive. We have called them fallen women ministers in particular use that term. We have called them "Little Lost Sisters," and second-rate dramatists and others have found that quite appropriate, including some philanthropic women's socie ties. We have called them unfortu nates that is a good newspaper term. But the thing they are we have kept carefully hidden, for they are exploited women. In the morals court it was, watch ing the exploitation of them there, that I resolved to trace the exploita tion of them back to its very begin ning, as a study. Some of them were exploited in their cradles, exploited by the greed of millionaire employers steel trust and oil trust kings and lesser bosses, who have paid such meager wages to labor that the father of a family could not give his wife nourishing food while she caried the girl child under her heart, nor the child ade quate nourishment after it came into the world. The exploitation of girls by the bosses who run kindergarten classes m their factories and mills and shops in which they employ the girl who is still almost a child, when the har rassed father must put her to work that her slender earnings may at least pay for a little of the food she eats and the clothes she wears the while the strength of her is laid on the altar of Mammon, the while the bosses lie about their reason for hir ing her and say it is that she may learn a trade or that they need her nimble fingers, and not that they are exploiting adolescent girlhood be cause it comes cheap. Some of the women who are being exploited in the morals court today have not had to go through the kin dergarten factory and shop, but many of the do meet at this stage of their girlhood on an equal footing in the game of exploited women. Many of the girls who come into the morals court and reiterate tone lessly that they couldn't live on what they made honestly were exploited by Big Business and by society un til they were driven on to the street. You'll see some of them, who have not yet reached the exploitation of the law and the morals court, meet ing men after they get out of the stores where millionaire employers of girls exploit them that the women of their own families may wear dia monds, ride in automobiles and dress in fine raiment and they themselves may drink champagne and belong to exclusive clubs. You see these exploited girls, many of them, making street and moving picture show acquaintances because they need the extra dollar to keep body and soul together. It may shock you, yet it's true, that some of these girls, not yet knowing the ropes of the hotels where one may go and the hotels where one runs a risk, take men into perfectly respectable room ing houses and entertain them as "friends." I know, for I have seen it done in places where I have lived ancl $