Grant County herald. [volume] (Lancaster, Wis.) 1850-1968, 1913-03-26
URGES WHIP FOR
/ WHITE SLAvERS"
Purity Advocates Would Tax
Bachelors and Bar Joy Rides.
WILSON MAY AID IN FIGHT
President Will Consider Request to
Call a Conference of All Cover
nors to Study Social
Problem.

Washington, March 24.-The whip
ping post for white slave traffickers
and seducers of women, a tax upon
bachelorhood, more careful training
of children, and abolition of joy rides
and ragtime dancing were advocated
as remedies for the social evil at a
hearing here conducted by the Illinois
senatorial vice commission, which
came to Washington plAnarily to in
terest President Wilson in a nation
wide crusade.
The commission obtained the prom
Use Of President Wilson to consider
their request for him to call a confer
ence of governors and representatives
of vice commissioners from various
states to study the social problem, the
conference to be held in Washington
as soon as practicable.
Will Introduce Bill.
Representative Robert Hill of Illi-
nOis agreed, upon request of the com
mittee, to introduce in congress bill
Cheating commission to look into
vice conditions in the District of Col
umbia.
At the hearing attended by many
prominent women and men interested
in social welfare work, the low wage
question as a cause of girls going
wrong was discussed, several of the
witnesses decrying the idea, insisting
that lack Of education and resisting
force had much more to do with the
downfall of women. Men, too, were
blamed as primarily responsible for.
the degradation of girls.
Witnesses who declared that low
wages were not responsible for social
vice admitted, however, on being ques-
toned by Lieutenant Governor O'Hara,
head of the commission, that higher
wages for working girls would better
equip them to resist evil, and all rec
commended that a minimum wage law
for girls would be of great benefit.
Agree on So Week.
Eight dollars a week as a minimum
wage for women was the generally &C
cepted sum estimated by the witness
es. Mrs. Harvey w. Wiley, wife of the
former chief of the bureau of chemis-
try being one who proposed that sum
as minimum living wage for girls.
Mrs. Wiley advocated sex hygiene
instruction of the young as one of the
basic remedies for the social evil,
urged women police for cities and en-
reimbursement of women.
''Give us the franchise" she said.
land we will raise the age of consent
so that twelve-year-old girls cannot
have their bodies given away"
Would Hold Up Charity.
Mrs. Wiley and other witnesses also
declared that employers of underpaid
girls and women had not the moral
right to give money to charities out of
the earnings of their enterprises until
they first had increased the wages of
their employees.
DR.. w. G. Woodward, health officer
of the District of Columbia, urged the
encouragement of early marriages
dies for the social evil, and he placed
the responsibility for the downfall of
80 per cent of women directly at the
door of the men, rather than in the
counting room of the department store
or factory.
He approved suggestion by Sena-
tor Beall of Illinois of laws placing a
tax upon bachelorhood, a graduated tax
between the ages of "a and AZ, provid-
ing that all men more than 50 years
old should pay an annual tax of 500
as long as they remained unmarried.