Selling Girls

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Mountain View, California · May 20, 1908

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 34, No. 21.

Selling Girls.—Selling girls for a financial consideration before they are hardly old enough to don long skirts is a traffic engaged in by mothers in Alaska, so says Mrs. C. R. Reynolds in a recent interview in Tacoma, Wash. Mrs. Reynolds has spent a number of years in Juneau, Sitka, and Douglas, and the sight of this evil has led her to press the leading men at Washington to adopt measures speedily to suppress the unnatural crime. Some of her own words are these:

“Conditions are simply horrible in parts of Alaska which I visited. Women unblushingly sell their daughters just as they would a nugget of gold or a team of dogs. The traffic has reached such proportions that the moral phase of it is lost sight of. Bargains are made openly and under the very noses of the officers. It is amazing to me that nothing has been done to guarantee protection to these unfortunate children.

“Education is so lacking that the little ones can not see in the shameful bargain made by their mothers any particular evil, and they, as a rule, become a willing party to the crime. This is more especially so among the Russians, who seem to have no conception of the moral phase of the matter.”