While the Joplin city council had by 1904 agreed to the necessity of a police matron due to popular demand, a year later, no matron had yet been appointed. As a response, the Joplin Globe ran an article offering proof to the need of the city to hire a matron. The headline read, “PROOF THAT JOPLIN NEEDS A POLICE MATRON,” and the paper argued the following:
“The police records show the arrest of eighty women during the month of May. Eighty women are supposed to have been locked up in the Joplin city jail in the last month without the care of counsel of a police matron. There was none but the regular police force to listen to the appeals of, or to advise these erring women charges of the city. True, most of them were doubtless hardened and seemingly deserving of little better than they got, but who can say?
Who can say to what depths each separate individual has fallen to what extent any one was irreclaimable? The charges as a result were in the cat-purse of blanket charges, if the term may be so used. Twenty-nine of these eighty women were charged with prostitution, twenty-one with lewd conduct, thirteen with street walking, thirteen with disturbing the peace, and one each with drunkenness, petty larceny, interfering with an officer, and being suspected of robbery. Hard charges, those, yet many cried when locked up. Some were not really bad. Surely one or two, at least, might be prevailed upon to repent and change her ways. Certainly enough soul remained to cry out through the tears of those eighty bad women to justify the attention of a good and worthy police matron.
The records prove that one, anyhow, might have been saved from death, if not also from deeper depths of sin, for one of these eighty was Lucy Scott, the young, fair, but wayward girl who took her own life as she confessed, because nobody would come and talk to her about going to a reform school. A police matron could have saved one life last month. Who knows, how many wrecks could have been averted?”
A year later, the position was finally assumed by Ellen Ayers. See our earlier post on Mrs. Ayers concerning her appointment and reaction to the job.
Sources: The Joplin Globe
