Allison T. French, Excerpt from “The Need for Industrial Homes for Women,” 1919

Allison French served as a lieutenant for the U.S. Sanitary Corps. Congress approved a temporary act creating the Sanitary Corps in 1917, and the unit became a precursor to the Medical Administration Corps. The corps represented the military’s increasing concern with soldier health and efficiency. It was demobilized after World War I ended. In this article printed in the Journal of Social Hygiene, French highlights the dangers of prostitution and offers solutions for control of the sex trade.

The supreme obligation before America today—and all people of the Allied Nations—is winning the war. The struggle for the principles of democracy demands efficiency. Efficiency demands man-power and woman-power.

The greatest destroyer of man-power which the army is fighting in training camps today is venereal disease. The greatest source of venereal disease has been prostitution. . . .

The War and Navy Departments and the United States Public Health Service, have said commercialized prostitution must be stamped out. . . . The government is demanding repression of prostitution with all effective radii of military centers, and asking its patriotic citizens to stamp it out in every village and hamlet in the country.

Bubonic plague and yellow fever were never controlled by shutting our eyes, shrugging our shoulders, and calling rats and mosquitos necessary evils. . . .

But in the case of venereal disease, the carriers are human beings. And the human beings who individually expose the most of the rest of humankind to this disease are women. . . .

For military efficiency,—and for social welfare,—prostitution must go. . . . Closing the houses of prostitution does not cause the women inmates to vanish into thin air. . . . Many, not too enmeshed in the life and in the grasp of pimps, can “come back” into normal life, through the emergency measures looking toward legitimate employment, carried on by government, state, and community social agencies. But what of the feebleminded, the illiterate, and the women who can scarcely remember any other life?

They must be cared for, and must be cared for where they will not constitute a military and a social menace, where they may be given vocational training and a curative treatment, where creative instinct may be encouraged along honest, democratic lines. . . .

Source: Allison T. French, “The Need for Industrial Homes for Women,” Journal of Social Hygiene 5 (January 1919): 11–13, hearth.library.cornell.edu.

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