Seduced and Abandoned in an American City: Cleveland and Its Fallen Women, 1869–1936

Journal of Urban History

Volumn 11, Issue 4, 1985, Pages 443-469

  Morton, Marian J ^a  

^a JOHN CARROLL UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 84972605962     PISSN: 00961442     EISSN: 15526771     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/009614428501100404     Document Type: Article

References (44)

1. The title is adapted from Wendy Martin, “Seduced and Abandoned in the New World: The Fallen Woman in American Fiction,” in Wendy Martin, ed., The American Sisterhood: Writings of the Feminist Movement from Colonial Times to the Present (New York), 1972,257-272
2. Egal Feldman, “Prostitution, the Alien Woman, and the Progressive Imagination,” American Quarterly (Summer 1967), 194
3. Ruth Rosen, The Lost Sisterhood: Prostitution in America, 1900-1918 (Baltimore), 1982, xiii, 40-46; Mark Thomas Connelly, The Response to Prostitution in the Progressive Era (Chapel Hill, NC), 1980,29-34
4. On antebellum moral reform, see Barbara Berg, The Remembered Gate: Origins of American Feminism: The Woman and the City, 1800-1860 (New York, 1978); Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, Religion and the Rise of the American City: The New York City Mission Movement, 1812-1870 (Ithaca, NY, 1971); Flora L. Northrup, The Record of a Century, 1834-1934 (New York, 1934); Kathleen D. McCarthy, Noblesse Oblige: Charity and Cultural Philanthropy in Chicago, 1849-1929 (Chicago, 1982); and on later antiprostitution efforts, David Pivar, The Purity Crusade, Sexual Morality, and Social Control (Westport, CT, 1973); Rosen, The Lost Sisterhood; Connelly, The Response to Prostitution. The Salvation Army refuges are described in Herbert A. Wisbey, Jr., Soldiers Without Swords: A History of the Salvation Army in the United States (New York, 1955) and Edward H. McKinley, Marching to Glory: The History of the Salvation Army in the United States (New York, 1980); and those of the National Florence Crittenton Mission in Katherine G. Aiken, “The National Florence Crittenton Mission, 1883-1925: A Case Study in Progressive Reform” (Ph. D. dissertation, Washington State University, 1980) and Otto Wilson, Fifty Years Work with Girls, 1883-1933 (Alexandria, VA, 1933). The Inter-City Conference on Illegitimacy is described briefly in Fred S. Hall, ed., Social Work Year Book, 1935 (New York), 1935, 596, and often is referred to in the minutes of the Cleveland Conference on Illegitimacy in the collection of the Federation for Community Planning, Cleveland, Ohio, MS 3788, Western Reserve Historical Society
5. Barbara Brenzel, Daughters of the State: A Social Portait of the First Reform School for Girls in North America, 1865-1905 (Cambridge), 1983, 107-135; Steven Ruggles, “Fallen Women: The Inmates of the Magdalen Asylum of Philadelphia, 1836-1908,” Journal of Social History (Summer 1983), 65-82; Percy Gamble Kammerer, The Unmarried Mother: A Study of Five Hundred Cases (Boston, 1918)
6. Works Progress Administration of Ohio, Annals of Cleveland, 1818-1935, vol. 52 (1869) (Cleveland), 1937, 614; vol. 48, (1865), 60, 68, 83
7. Quoted in Milred Esgar, “Women Involved in the Real World: A History of the Young Women's Christian Association of Cleveland, Ohio” (unpublished typescript, Western Reserve Historical Society, vol. 1, 41
8. Esgar, “Women,” vol., 1, 42
9. The Earnest Worker, June 1874, 5; Cleveland Plain Dealer, clipping, no date, but probably 1893, unpaged
10. Earnest Worker, Novemer 1875, 2
11. See Berg, The Remembered Gate, 177-193; Smith-Rosenberg, Religion, 98-113
12. YWCA, Cleveland, Annual Report, 1870, 15, Container 8, Folder 1
13. Salvation Army Rescue Home, Cleveland, Ohio, Annual Report, 1893 (Cleveland), 1893, 7
14. YWCA, Cleveland, Minutes, March 4, 1879, Container 1
15. Salvation Army, Diamonds in the Rough: Annual Report, Salvation Army Rescue Work in Cleveland (Cleveland), 1905, 6
16. Salvation Army, Links of Love: Annual Report, Salvation Army Rescue Work in Cleveland (Cleveland), 1904, 10
17. Maternity Hospital, Annual Report (Cleveland), 1909, 17
18. YWCA, Cleveland, Annual Report, 1872, 3, Container 8, Folder 2
19. Salvation Army Rescue Home, Cleveland, Ohio Annual Report, 1893
20. For another example of this technique, see Barbara Brenzel, “Domestication as Reform: The Socialization of Wayward Girls,” Harvard Educational Review 50 (Spring 1980)
21. Salvation Army Rescue Home, Annual Report, 1893, 4
22. YWCA, Cleveland, Annual Report, 1909, 22, Container 9, Folder 7
23. David M. Katzman, Seven Days a Week: Women and Domestic Service in Industrializing America (Urbana, IL), 1981, 44; Rose, Cleveland, 608
24. Katzman, Seven Days, 310, gives salary figures for cities comparable to Cleveland
25. Salvation Army Rescue Home, Annual Report, 1893, 5
26. YWCA, Cleveland, “Minutes,” November 7, 1882, Container 1; Salvation Army, Annual Report of the Salvation Army Home in Cleveland (Cleveland), 1907, 19; Report of St. Ann's Infant Asylum and Maternity Hospital in Cleveland, Ohio, n.p., Archives of the Cleveland Catholic Diocese
27. Richard W. Wertz and Dorothy C. Wertz, Lying-In: A History of Childbirth in America (New York), 1977,132-177
28. The regimen in maternity homes resembled that in women's prisons described by Estelle B. Freedman, Their Sisters' Keepers: Women's Prison Reform in American 1830-1930 (Ann Arbor), 1981,89-96
29. Cleveland Federation of Charity and Philanthropy, The Social Year Book: The Human Problems and Resources of Cleveland (Cleveland), 1913, 8
30. Federated Churches of Cleveland, Ohio, Vice Conditions in Cleveland (Cleveland), 1916, 2
31. City of Cleveland, Ohio, Division of Public Health, Annual Report (Cleveland), 1925, 118, reported that “birth registration has been a favorite subject for annual lamentations by health officials” at least since 1891; the undercount was estimated as low as 75 percent for some years, but by the late 1920s figures were thought to be about 98 percent accurate. However, if anyone got omitted, women who bore illegitimate children did. As Daniel Scott Smith has commented, “The most easily counted events in American history tend to be those belonging to people who ‘counted’ at the time; these are not the people most likely to conceive children out of wedlock,” in “The long Cycle in American Illegitimacy and Prenuptial Bastardy,” in Peter Laslett et al., eds., Bastardy and Its Comparative History (Cambridge, MA), 1980, 364. A contemporary study of unwed mothers in Boston whose conclusions resemble those of the Conference on Illegitimacy in many ways is Kammerer, The Unmarried Mother: A Study of Five Hundred Cases (Boston, 1918); Kammerer points out that “the illegitimacy rate is barely ever accurate, particularly in the United States. A certain group of the population, furthermore, is possessed of sufficient means to enable them to secure abortions which again prevent the registration of their illicit sex intercourse from the pages of birth registration” (p. 2). These records gathered by the Cleveland Conference, therefore, are incomplete, as are the records from the separate institutions, but both sets of records are the best available
32. Proceedings of the National Conference of Social Work, 1917 (Chicago, 1917) 285-286
33. Rosen, The Lost Sisterhood, 21-23, discusses the progressive use of IQ tests on prostitutes and the not surprising results that showed these women too as “feeble-minded.”
34. Mabel H. Mattingly, The Unmarried Mother and her Child: A Fact-Finding Study of Fifty-Three Cases of Unmarried Mothers Who Kept Their Children (Cleveland), 1928, 15 and 26
35. Mattingly, The Unmarried Mother, 25
36. FCP, Container 9, F. 178, disclose shortfalls until 1942
37. Waite, Warm Friend, 239
38. Rose, Cleveland, 912
39. Waite, Warm Friend, 257-258; Bing, Social Work, 23
40. Howard Whipple Greene, Nine Years of Relief, Greater Cleveland, 1928-1937 (Cleveland), 1937, 2; Bing, Social Work, 23
41. YWCA, Cleveland, Annual Report, 1872, 3, Container 8; Folder 2
42. Hobart A. Spalding, Jr., Organized Labor in Latin America (New York), 1977, 8
43. Examples of this literature include Jorge Bal´n, Harley Browning, and Elizabeth Jelin, Men in a Developing Society: Geographic and Social Mobility in Monterrey, Mexico (Austin, 1973); Gino Germani, “Mass Migration and Modernization in Argentina,” Studies in Comparative International Development 2 (1966), 165-182; Alejandro Portes, “Housing Policy, Urban Poverty, and the State: The Favelas of Rio de Janeiro,” Latin American Research Review XIV (1978); and Susan Eckstein, The Poverty of Revolution: The State and the Urban Poor in Mexico (Princeton, 1977)
44. Larissa Lomnitz, “Horizontal and Vertical Relations and the Social Structure of Urban Mexico,” Latin American Research Review XVII (1982), 51-74; Mario Margulis, Migracíon y marginalidad en al sociedad argentina (Buenos Aires, 1968)