On the other hand, there is no doubt that this new freedom from domestic
and community control, with the opportunity for escaping observation
which the city affords, is often utilized unworthily by women. The
report of the Chicago vice commission tells of numerous girls living in
small cities and country towns, who come to Chicago from time to time
under arrangements made with the landlady of a seemingly respectable
apartment. They remain long enough to earn money for a spring or fall
wardrobe and return to their home towns, where their acquaintances are
quite without suspicion of the methods they have employed to secure the
much-admired costumes brought from the city. Often an unattached country
girl, who has come to live in a city, has gradually fallen into a
vicious life from sheer lack of social restraint. Such a girl, when
living in a smaller community, realized that good behavior was a
protective measure and that any suspicion of immorality would quickly
ruin her social standing; but when removed from such surveillance, she
hopes to be able to pass from her regular life to an irregular one and
back again before the fact has been noted, quite as many young men are
trying to do.

Perhaps no young woman is more exposed to temptation of this sort than
the one who works in an office where she may be the sole woman employed
and where the relation to her employer and to her fellow-clerks is
almost on a social basis. Many office girls have taken "business
courses" in their native towns and have come to the city in search of
the large salaries which have no parallels at home. Such a position is
not only new to the individual, but it is so recent an outcome of modern
business methods, that it has not yet been conventionalized. The girl is
without the wholesome social restraint afforded by the companionship of
other working-women and her isolation in itself constitutes a danger. An