"Come and get a drink," is the usual way of accosting a woman. Yet if a solitary woman once acquires the drink habit, it is nearly impossible to lift her up, the craving is too strong. In the temporary "elevation" of drink she regains her past, forgets the poor bedraggled "low woman" she has become, and dreams of "better days." Suppose she resists drink, at any rate keeping apparently steady, and lives as a "charwoman," it is a most precarious existence, varying with the "times." Such women are taken "on" and sent "off" without compunction. It needs a "good connection" to make a livelihood, at any rate it requires a capacity for continuous hard work, which all do not possess. There are some few trades for destitute women hardly worth calling "trades," yet in some hand-to-mouth fashion thousands of solitary women exist, who are not idle, but try hard to "keep out of the house," so retaining their last possession--liberty! Is it not desirable that these our struggling sisters should live under the conditions that will preserve for them some sort of a "home" feeling?
The "pit" lies just beneath them, that terrible pit, where honour, love, and womanhood are swallowed up. They cling to those who love them, and many of them struggle, oh, so hard! just to keep afloat. God pity them! Every night in this England of ours our sisters are driven by poverty to sin.
"I _must_ get my lodging money and a bit of food," they say. Money, even twopence, is not within the reach of every widow and orphan, and our poor-law conditions are almost prohibitive. Save as a temporary expedient, the casual ward, with its continual "move on," is no refuge. To descend to the common lodging-house is the last stage, just above utter homelessness. There the drink temptations are such that few women can withstand them. In many towns there do not exist lodging-houses for women only.
Yet above all, these women need to be protected, to live under good sanitary conditions, if in poverty. Such a shelter, therefore, as I was sleeping in, is a real social need. It would prevent countless women from drifting into vice if there was somewhere for them to live out of temptation during the night hours. As they grow old especially, their state grows more and more pitiable. They end their days in the workhouse usually, but stave off the evil day as long as they can. I do not believe that even women from the higher ranks can well help drifting to destitution if from any cause friends and foothold are lost. Most people distrust a friendless woman. Yet in many cases it is a matter of clothes!