Orphan Trains

by Stephen O'Connor

  a female child of the poor should be permitted to start on its immortal career with almost every influence about it degrading, its inherited tendencies overwhelming toward indulgence of passion, its examples all of crime or lust, its lower nature awake long before its higher, and then that it should be allowed to soil and degrade its soul before the maturity of reason, and beyond all human possibility of cleansing!26

  It is no exaggeration to say that the primary goal of all CAS work with girls was to prevent them from becoming prostitutes. This was especially true at the Girls’ Lodging House. In her reports, Mrs. Trott often bragged about winning girls “from the streets,”27 and her husband, the lodging house’s “superintendent,” described their mission as “to rescue, hold up, and keep from falling every virtuous, industrious girl that applies to us.”28

  The CAS was absolutely obsessed by female sexuality. The erotic life of boys was almost never mentioned in the society’s publications or records, but all extended discussions of girls contained at least one veiled reference to the perils of sex. This obsession was due not only to the notion that girls were too weak to resist their libidinal urges but to the belief that the consequences of indulging those urges were vastly worse for girls than boys. “[T]here is no reality,” Brace claimed, “in the sentimental assertion that the sexual sins of the lad are as degrading as those of a girl.” By offering “for sale that which is in its nature beyond all price,” he added, a girl

  loses self-respect, without which every human being soon sinks to the lowest depths; she loses the habit of industry, and cannot be taught to work. . . . [B]ecoming weak in body and mind, her character loses fixedness of purpose and tenacity and true energy. . . . If in a moment of remorse, she flee away and take honest work, her weakness and bad habits follow her; . . . she craves the stimulus and hollow gayety of the wild life she has led; her ill name dogs her; . . . the world and herself are against reform.29

  The Victorian propensity to condemn girls for not meeting standards that were never applied to boys was particularly horrific because sexual disparities in earning power left many single women with little choice but to turn to prostitution. The needle trades paid so meagerly that it was all but impossible for a woman to support herself, let alone her children, on her earnings. During an era when the humblest two-room apartment rented for $2.50 a week, the average woman made only $1.50 stitching shirts or suits. Domestic service had the advantage of providing room and board but was generally available only to young childless women. A working-class mother who had been widowed or abandoned and had no male relative to support her would be terrifically tempted to at least supplement her earnings by catering to male desire. A prostitute with a working-class clientele could make in a single hour what she would earn in a day for stitching shirts, and more affluent johns commonly paid five and ten dollars for each sex act. Partly because of the Victorian notion that virgin blood cured venereal disease, girls earned ten dollars for their maidenhead at Five Points brothels and were sometimes paid as much as fifty dollars.30

  Given the alternatives available to working-class women (to say nothing of the chafing of Victorian repression), one might be tempted to applaud their desire to profit from and, at least in some instances, enjoy sex—except for the fact that Brace’s description of a prostitute’s decline to the “lowest depths” was far from only a moralistic fantasy.

  In 1855 Dr. William W. Sanger, a resident physician at Blackwell’s Island, interviewed 2,000 New York prostitutes between the ages of fourteen and sixty-two. The statistics he compiled showed that, as a result of disease, drinking, and the brutality of pimps and johns, the average prostitute did not live more than four years after commencement of her career,31 and her lifestyle could be just as hazardous to her offspring—a sad irony given the fact that many women only began selling their bodies so that they could keep their children. At a time when the mortality rate for New York City children five and under was 18.5 percent, the mortality rate for prostitutes’ offspring exceeded 60 percent.32 The truncated lives of prostitutes and their children were partly the result of the city’s wildly misguided attempt to restrain the sex trade. New York doctors were forbidden by law to treat prostitutes for venereal disease. The only way a woman could get treatment was to declare herself a pauper and go to the Charity Hospital on Blackwell’s Island. But since going to the hospital amounted to imprisonment, many women refused treatment until their disease was so far advanced that they could not practice their trade and were in danger of starvation.

  But even before prostitutes reached such grim extremes, they were subjected to all the humiliation and ostracization that Victorian society reserved for “fallen women.” The working class and poor, of necessity, understood the inexorable pressures that drove some women to prostitution. They also were not immune to the glamour of fast-living dancehall girls. But even so, the poor, like the rich, often felt tainted by and shunned their “fallen” friends, sisters and daughters, especially once these women’s best earning years had passed, or they had succumbed to the degradations of alcoholism and opium addiction. Prostitutes were also looked down upon because many of them were pathetic victims. Although nearly one-third of Sanger’s subjects claimed they had taken up the sex trade by “inclination” or for the “easy life,”33 many actually had little choice in the matter. It was not uncommon for desperate and unscrupulous parents to auction off their daughters’ virginity for what could amount to a year’s earnings. Pimps and the mistresses of “low” boardinghouses often tricked, drugged, or bullied unprotected women into sexual slavery. Many women were brought to the city by supposedly loving men who then abandoned them, leaving them penniless and with stained reputations. And many, many others—like Lotte Stern—had been so broken by circumstance that they saw little reason to resist the tendency of men, and of society, to judge them as “disreputable” simply by virtue of their class.

  The Girls’ Lodging House was the idea of William A. Booth, who took over as president of the CAS board in 1861 and was the man who criticized Brace for his abolitionist writing. During 1862, its first year of operation, the lodging house took in roughly 400 girls, and during its second, nearly 800, most of them eighteen years old and younger. By 1877 the Girls’ Lodging House had moved from Canal Street to larger quarters on Saint Mark’s Place and had sheltered more than 14,000 girls for an average stay of ten nights each. Because the CAS was so afraid that financial pressure would only make young women more likely to walk the streets, lodging house residents were allowed to pay the eight cents total charge for their beds and meals by mopping floors, cooking, doing laundry, and especially by stitching dresses and suits for orphan train riders. This needlework was a major operation. During 1864 alone the girls made 2,500 garments.34

  The lodging house’s mission was to rescue those girls who were “[n]ot yet corrupted or ruined, but just on that line”35—a goal that Brace and the matrons believed required excluding girls who had crossed the line. As was typical of the CAS in this era, however, the lodging house matrons did not apply this policy of exclusion rigidly, but they complained bitterly about the exceptions they made. “Occasionally some kind missionary brings in a penitent Magdalen,” wrote Mrs. Hurley,

  who will not consent to go to the Homes for the fallen, and prevails on us to make an exception to the rule, and take her in; but, as far as our experience goes, over this class may almost be written “hopeless”; no matter how seriously they are cautioned not to reveal their past lives, the first night in the dormitories rarely passes without a recital of it, and in a few days they tire of restraint, make some excuse, and are off to their old haunts again.36

  There are many things to object to in this quote. For one, it seems unreasonable and unrealistic to forbid residents from discussing what may be the most troubling aspect of their lives with girls in similar positions. For another, it seems absurd to drive these residents back out onto the streets and, presumably, into grievous sin, merely for talking. Hurley’s sanctimo
nious condescension also seems guaranteed to do anything but allow her to make a strong connection with young women who badly needed her help. And finally, the main effect of excluding prostitutes and sexually active girls was to reinforce the grim fate that the CAS ostensibly sought to ameliorate.

  Brace well understood the role of self-respect in keeping human beings from “sinking to the lowest depths.” The most revolutionary component of his work with boys was his respect for them—his assumption of their competence and fundamental goodness. This respect was so much a part of institutional culture at the CAS that the superintendents of the Newsboys’ Lodging House were all but indifferent to how the boys spent their days or came up with their rent. Had the Girls’ Lodging House matrons been half so respectful of their residents’ abilities and privacy, it might have been a much happier and more successful institution. The girls might have felt they had found true allies in the CAS matrons and been more inclined both to take their advice and to believe themselves capable of profiting from it. But, sadly, this was never really possible. Life on the streets truly was vastly worse for girls than boys—far too miserable for Brace and his colleagues ever to feel they could relax their vigilance against it. The sexism and prudishness that had created this miserable situation had also created their own justification.

  The “rescue” of the girls admitted to the lodging house had two phases. While the girls were actually in residence, the CAS sought to instill in them habits of cleanliness, punctuality, and religious devotion and to teach them all the skills they would need to be domestics. And when it came time for the girls to leave, the CAS sought to find them decent “employers.” Much to Brace’s regret, however, the overwhelming majority of girls were “indisposed to go to the West.”37 During 1863, 111 Girls’ Lodging House residents accepted placement with employers in or near New York City, while only 22 went west.38 In 1876 the contrast was even more stark: a mere 29 girls accepted western placement, while 818 were placed in the New York area.39

  The reasons girls would not go west were not recorded, but it is highly likely that the very ties Brace thought best to sunder were what kept them close to home. According to Bruce Bellingham’s statistical analysis of the CAS’s first year, the stronger a child of either sex’s ties to family and friends, the more likely she or he was to be placed close to home.40 It is also very possible that these Victorian girls did not want to go far from the people they could trust because they, no less than Lotte Stern, knew men.

  Brace and the lodging house matrons saw domestic service as girls’ best hope of escaping prostitution, but William Sanger found that half of the women he interviewed began selling their bodies after having been domestic servants.41 There is no way of knowing how many of these women were driven into prostitution after yielding to or resisting the sexual advances of their employers. Although there was an elaborate mythology about foreign aristocrats impregnating serving girls and fleeing overseas to escape scandal, Victorian Americans were largely silent about the possibility of similar events occurring in their own homes. When such events did come to light, they were generally dealt with by outright denial or by placing all blame on the sluttish, lower-class servant. The effectiveness of such repression mechanisms is clearly demonstrated in CAS policy and writing. As obsessed as Brace and the lodging house matrons were by the sexual dangers their female charges faced in the slums, they seem never to have even considered that such dangers also existed in “respectable” homes. The only problem Brace saw for serving girls who remained in the city was the persistence of their relations with their lower-class friends and family, and he portrayed the West as nothing less than a paradise of sexual decency, where a female orphan train rider need only anticipate the happy fulfillment of marriage.

  The CAS records during Brace’s era are all but silent on the sexual abuses endured by girls in their placements, never being more explicit than references such as “she was not well used by her employer.” The records, however, do contain numerous references to girls being “of low morals” or “unsuitable” or otherwise at fault for whatever misfortune occurred during their placements. It seems reasonable to suspect that victims’ fear of being blamed and punished was another reason for the paucity of reports of sexual abuse in the CAS files.

  The silence imposed by shame and fear was so pervasive that it is only within the last few years that some surviving female orphan train riders have begun to talk about unwelcomed sexual encounters. Marguerite Thomson, who was placed in Nebraska by the New York Foundling Hospital in 1911, reported that she had to leave four out of the five homes where she worked as a housekeeper during the 1920s because the men made sexual advances toward her. When she turned one man down, he raped her and fired her the next morning. Thomson also had sex forced upon her when she was twelve years old by the husband of a woman who had given her refuge after her original placement had become too much to bear. “I’d wake up in the nighttime,” Thomson said,

  and he would be in bed with me. I’d holler to her, and she’d come and get me and tell him to go back to bed. She’d tell me to lock the door, but it didn’t do any good. One time he drilled a hole in it so he could watch me undress, and another time I caught him watching me through the window. They had a daughter too, and she got married at sixteen. I think it was to get away from him. He had been in a mental institution at one time.42

  Alice Bullis Ayler was one of the very last orphan train riders. The CAS slipped her into Kansas in 1930 (the year placement from out of state became illegal) on the excuse that she was visiting her previously placed twin younger brothers. Ayler was only ten when she arrived and lived in three different homes before finally finding one that was tolerable. In two of those homes, she said, she had “to run from every man involved.” One of these men “couldn’t find his own bedroom,” she said, and another would accost her in the corner every time his family went into town on errands.

  “None of those people took me in because they wanted someone to love,” Ayler said. “They didn’t know what love was. They just wanted me for work, and for whatever those old men wanted. The wives took me in knowing what their men wanted. They didn’t want to mess with these men! It wasn’t like modern days where you have to chase the women off. Women had headaches all the time. And this was just a way of getting the husbands off their back.”

  Ayler believes that children placed by the CAS and the Foundling Hospital were easy targets for abuse of all kinds because, as she put it,

  the orphan kid couldn’t tell anybody. They’d say he or she was lying. That was our big problem. We didn’t have an advocate. We didn’t have anybody who would say, “That kid is all right, I’m gonna stand up for him come hell or high water.” Except I had Georgia. Georgia was a person who could listen, and every kid wasn’t a liar. Afterward Georgia became my friend.43

  Georgia Greenleaf, the CAS agent in charge of Ayler’s case, had a strikingly different relationship with her than the Foundling Hospital’s western agent had with Marguerite Thomson. To some extent the difference was a function of time: Ayler was placed nearly twenty years later than Thomson, after laws and attitudes regarding foster children had undergone significant evolution. But the difference also reflected the contrasting values of the two agencies.

  Both Ayler and Thomson suffered several unhappy placements as children. All of Ayler’s were arranged by the CAS, but after her first placement, Thomson had to shift for herself. This first placement was with the Larsons, who ran a boardinghouse and dairy farm in Bertrand, Nebraska. Although the house had five bedrooms, Thomson had to sleep on the living room couch. She was constantly humiliated by her foster mother for her New York accent, for being an orphan, and for clumsiness, and she was beaten with a rawhide whip for minor infractions like breaking a toy or eating jam. Although the Larsons made their living from the sale of milk, Thomson was not allowed to drink any, ostensibly because it was too valuable, but everyone else in the house could have as much as they wanted. The result was that Thom
son’s teeth never developed properly and had to be pulled out and replaced by dentures when she was a teenager. She was also deprived of food, getting one helping when the Larsons’ natural children got two, and being made to go without supper on the slightest pretext—as, for example, when she passed gas at the dinner table.

  Once a year the Foundling Hospital’s agent, Mr. McPhealy, came to the Larsons’ home, and Thomson would dance an Irish jig for him and sing songs like “Looking on the Bright Side.” But she was never allowed to talk to him in private, nor did he ever ask for a word with her. The result was that he never took any sort of action to improve her situation. Finally she took matters into her own hands by moving out when she was eleven and going to live with a family who needed help caring for a new baby. When the baby was a year old, Thomson moved in briefly with the woman whose husband molested her, and finally she had no choice but to return to the Larsons.

  At fifteen Thomson ran away, hoping to become a dancer with a vaudeville troupe that had recently passed through town. She caught up with the troupe in Broken Bow and was put up in a hotel room by the managers, whom she knew from the Larsons’ boardinghouse. But the very next day, through a mix of bad luck and Mrs. Larson’s ill will, a sheriff arrived at the hotel’s front door and took her back to Bertrand. The sheriff had come to Broken Bow only because another girl from Bertrand had run off there independently of Thomson. When Mrs. Larson heard about the sheriff’s trip, she asked him to pick up her foster daughter as well, not because she wanted the girl home again, but only, Thomson believed, to frustrate her dreams of independence and success. As soon as Thomson was back in Bertrand, Mrs. Larson wrote to Mr. McPhealy asking him to take the girl off her hands. McPhealy came to visit and offered two choices: Thomson could either go back to New York or be put in a convent. Naturally, Mrs. Larson chose the more repressive of the alternatives: the convent—and McPhealy never bothered to ask Thomson about her preference or experiences.