“As Long as ‘Night Boats Lure’; as Long as Girls ‘Don't Know’ So Long Will Rescue Homes be Needed” — Says Kate Waller Barrett, Head Of Crittenton Missions, In The Telling Of Her Life Story

Tell YOUR Children Early. In all this wide world nothing causes more woe than ignorance of the truths of sex relations. Mothers should tell these truths to their sons and daughters sometime between their fifth and sixth years, while they still believe in Santa Claus. If the giving of this Information be delayed until after the child begins to realize the sex sense within himself or herself, the effects are more likely to be bad than good.— Kate Waller Barrett, President of the National Florence Crittenden Mission.

By W. G. Shepherd

Washington, D. C., April 6, 1911

In Stafford county, Va., over half a century ago, Kate Waller, a young girl of a proud aristocratic old southern family, stood evening after evening under the trees on her father's estate beside the Potomac river and watched the night boat bound for Washington go past with its crowds, lights and music. This girl is a gray-haired woman now. “If my mother could only have known my thoughts in those days," this gray-haired woman said to me, “her hair would have turned white with horror. I would have given anything in the world I possessed to get out of my dull home life and join the outside world. I was just the sort of a girl that would have gone wrong, as the world calls it. I wasn't wicked. Youth and the world were urging me as they urge every boy and girl. I made up my mind that I would love the first man from the outside world who came along. When he came I was only 18 years old. He proved to be a young Episcopalian clergyman named Barrett. It just happened that he was one of the best men God ever made; but even if he had been a bad man, I think I would have loved him and gone away with him to God only knows what.”

Two years later Kate Waller Barrett sat one June morning in her home in Richmond inexpressibly happy, pouring her love and attentions out on her two-month old baby boy. The knocker on the door sounded. At the door stood a weeping girl, a stranger, in her arms a baby boy. When she had told her story—the old story of a man's deceit the young rector's wife was overcome with pity. “What a terrible thing it is,” she said, “that I can enjoy and love my baby, while yours is only a disgrace to you. And yet the only difference between you and me is that the man I met and love happened to be good and the man you met and loved happened to be bad. It's only an accident that I'm not in your place and you're not in mine. You stay right here in my home until you get ready to face the world again.”

“It's only an accident that you're not like me, and I'm not like you” — that became the life motto of the young rector's wife. She began to seek out the unfortunate girls of Richmond and she cared for them. She realized that these girls, too, had seen their “night boats” and unfortunately, no one had prevented them from following the lights and music.

The clergyman husband rose in the church until he gained the pulpit of a church in Atlanta, the most aristocratic Episcopalian church ln the south. The rector's wife built a cottage for girls. The folks in the church began to talk about her. She began to see that her position was jeopardized in society. This became alarming; the world in these days didn't understand rescue work.

Suddenly an incredible thing happened. The city council of Atlanta passed an ordinance against rescuing girls! The men lawmakers figured it out that if girls knew they could be rescued after they had fallen they would I lose all fear of falling, and would rush into a fallen state with haste and joy.

The chief of policy threatened to arrest Mrs. Barrett lf she didn't close her rescue home. “Arrest me if you must,” she said. “I'm right, and I shall not close this home and turn these girls onto the streets.”

As she sat, on a rainy day, expecting the arrival of the police almost every moment, she noticed that a gang of street laborers had gone to a shed to get out of a shower.

“For no rhyme nor reason,” as she says, she went to them and made the first of her thousands of speeches. She told them her aims and hopes and troubles.

Half an hour later Kate Waller Barrett marched into the city hall followed by 20 workingmen in overalls. Before the aldermen she made the second speech of her life. Then, one after another, the laboring men talked to the aldermen.

The anti-rescue home ordinance was killed and there was started a study of the work, which resulted in their appropriating $200 a month to the rescue home. Today Atlanta has one of the finest rescue homes in the world, with a 20-acre farm on which the girls work in the open air.

And out of this grew the National Florence Crittenden Mission of which Kate Waller Barrett is president. This mission has 78 homes in the United States and five in foreign lands. Last year 23,000 girls received shelter in the homes.

“We never scold an unfortunate girl,” said Kate Waller Barrett to me. “All we try to do is to show the girl where she is, what danger she faces and what she's up against. And then we give her a chance to nurse her own child. That is the only way in which she can pay her debt to the child. And when she goes out into the world from the mission she has done all she can to pay her debt to the child and all her ignorance as to the dangers of prostitution has disappeared. We've told her all about it; she knows where she's at. Her mother should have told it to her. Just as long as the girls don't know and just as long as the "night boats" of youth go by and lure a girl into the world, so long will girls suffer.”

The Tacoma Times. (Tacoma, Wash.), April 6, 1911. Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers. Library of Congress.