The Vice Commission and Chicago in 1911 Essay

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In 1911, the Vice Commission of Chicago published a report on the working conditions in department stores that lead female employees into prostitution. The source was created in order to evaluate the strain on the nervous system of girls working in department stores and how it pushes them into prostitution. From the modern perspective, it does seem a strange connection to make—but Chicago more than one hundred years ago was a much different place from what it is today, and people in society were much less used to the urban stressors and conditions at that time. The study identified it as “the whole tendency of modern life” (Vice Commission of Chicago, 1911, p. 271) and argued that this tendency was leading to the development of “considerable eroticism” among men and women (Vice Commission of Chicago, 1911, p. 271). To make matters worse, department store female workers were not getting paid a fair wage: the average for them was between six and seven dollars per week, and the study showed that one could not live in the city for less than eight dollars per week. The conclusion was that girls are tempted to enter into prostitution just to survive.



Thus, the study shows that there are social and economic pressures pushing young women in prostitution in Chicago in 1911. The study also describes the various ways that women are pushed by others into the “sporting life” as it calls it. There is the procuress, who comes on to the young ladies as a sympathetic friend and invites them over to her “disorderly house” where the young girl then becomes an “inmate,” and there is the cadet, who stalks the department stores looking for a young girl to take out and make his side girl; there is the married man who will harass the girls while his wife is shopping; there is the male employer who refuses to provide the girls with a decent wage and who will sometimes even take advantage of the girls’ dire situation and take them home for himself while his wife is away; there is the girl who voluntarily enters into the life of crime; and there are many typical cases where the girls simply realize that the “sporting life” pays much better than being a department store clerk.

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References

Vice Commission of Chicago. (1911). The Vice Commission of Chicago reports on the working conditions in department stores that lead female employees into prostitution, 1911. Major Problems in American Women’s History, 270-273.

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