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Primary source: New York Magdalen Society, First Annual Report of New York Magdalen Society, 1831.
Caption: Led by John Robert McDowell, a Princeton divinity student, the Magdalen Society was founded in 1831 to help reform prostitutes living in the Five Points slum.
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The exorbitant rent of houses, compels them [European immigrants] to occupy a narrow space of house room for their families. One or two rooms is generally as much as one family can afford; thus boys and girls lodge in the bedchamber with their parents, and one room serves for cooking and eating; the children are driven off as early as possible into the streets to run like wild colts. Thus they grow up ignorant, idle, and disobedient to their parents. They make bad apprentices and worse citizens. Money is the only object they ever desire to obtain, and for that object nothing is too mean and scarcely any thing dishonest if they can evade the laws. . . . The girls grow up thus, associating with their depraved brothers, ignorant, vain and idle. Conscious of no other distinctions in society than externals, they look with envy on their wealthy neighbors, and essay every art to equal them in dress and expense. This lays the basis of their ruin, and at an early age makes them easy prey to the profligate libertine. Nay, many of these girls assist their parents with the wages of their shame.
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Another source of this horrid crime arises in the custom of requiring security for house rent. This compels women to resort to some means of obliging a friend to obtain a roof to shelter her family. Men are not generally willing to risk their money for pure friendship; yet security must be had.
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New York Magdalen Society, First Annual Report of New York Magdalen Society (1831), 21.
Courtesy of Municipal Archives, New York City.
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