Such an existence effaces individuality, weighs down the will, clogs the instinct to do battle which is the heritage of man. And so my sisters of the street have not the power to find out newer ways of making pence. They respond automatically to a rebuff and human sympathy has lost for them its interior significance.
Something of this you will meet in a woman who has served a long term of imprisonment. She is, as it were, hypnotised by an unending submission and has lost even the desire to break her bonds. One instinct only remains vital, apart from the desire for food and shelter, and that is the passionate determination not to be trapped into an institution.
“I told one of these women that she was really too ill to be in the streets, and I tried to persuade her to go to a hospital, or to let me get her into the infirmary. I looked round to see if I could find a taxi, so that I could take her right away. But when I went to speak to her she had gone. Now, why do you suppose she did that?”
The question was put to me by a really good woman, who most sincerely wanted to assist the human wreck she had encountered. There was in her mind a suspicion that there was some dark and undesirable reason for this strange evasion.
“Hospitals are always so clean, and you get plenty of care at an infirmary. She must have known she would be more comfortable there than walking about.”
I tried to explain that there is a bondage of the soul more difficult to bear than even those privations of the body that are the daily portion of the homeless. But I could not make this kind, good creature understand.
“She would have been better in an Institution, and I don’t see that it matters even if she doesn’t want to go there. She ought to have been taken.”
Those last words embody the terror of the homeless. It is the trap they always scent, and from which, to the last gasp, they will run away. For there is that in common throughout the whole company of the destitute—workers in slop-shops, street-sellers, tramps and prostitutes, one and all, they will try their strength to the verge of collapse before they will enter the portals of any place within the shadow of state control.
Hospitals, we know, are exempt from constituted authority. But there is always the dread that a case of destitution may be referred to the Poor Law Guardians, and that the unhappy “case” may find herself imprisoned in a workhouse.
What then is to be done for these women?
In the first place I would enlist the help of the charitable to put up a number of free Shelters to be run on the principles adopted by the Salvation Army, which demands no explanations and institutes no inspection, the lack of money for a bed being the sole requirement for admission.
The next step should be shelters where beds can be obtained for threepence, rising in certain districts to fivepence. All these places should afford facilities for washing and should command continual supply of water, hot and cold. There might be an employment bureau in connection with the shelter where those women who are skilled in any domestic work could apply for jobs. The cost of such a scheme would not be enormous. The erection of even one such shelter would do much to assist the work already carried on at the Shelter in Crispin Street, Bishopsgate. It should not be regarded as in any sense a philanthropic enterprise, for philanthropy is generally associated with the idea of dividends, either in this world or the next. It should be, to my mind, a practical recognition of that sisterhood of which we women prate so much, and in whose cause we do so little. While one woman has to walk the streets at night without a place to lay her head, those of us who possess homes, however small, however poor, should regard it as an occasion of reproach. For in the ultimate—I put it to every woman who may read this—there is nothing in ourselves which has accorded us a happier fate. There, but by the favour of circumstances, might go you or I.
Once the homeless woman could feel there was a place for her, the power of resistance would enlarge, and with that quickness, indestructible in our sex, she might rediscover latent abilities. Only, and this is a point whose importance cannot be overestimated, the homeless must not be subjected to any inquisition. If you want to know how they live you must be patient, and if you are of them they will tell you themselves.
Women of the “tramp” category, who, like my splendid Kitty of the Casual Ward, pass their life upon the road, need help of a different kind. What is wanted for them is housing accommodation. It is here that individuals can do very much. Put Kitty, or any of her kind into a room, and she will become a self-supporting citizen. They are splendid workers these women of the soil, who can plant, and hoe and dig with any man, and at the same time possess a talent for the softer things of domestic life. A hostel for women engaged in manual work is what is needed, where at a small rental weekly, each tenant could make her own home.
But such a place must be conserved for women such as these. There are innumerable hostels where members of the middle class, typists, secretaries and the rest, can get ample accommodation. I do not know of any place where rooms are let out to women who, like Kitty, cannot ply their trade because they have no permanent place of abode.
Then we
