Democratic Sentinel, Volume 20, Number 2, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 17 January 1896 — THE BOWERY INDUCER. [ARTICLE]

THE BOWERY INDUCER.

Chicago women think they know a thing or two about city life, and how to buy a bonnet; but when they get to New York they find they are not on to the ways of a metropolis. Down on Division street, which is a kind of woman’s edition of Baxter, the street Is lined with millinery stores. At the door of each shop stands one, frequently two, muscular and longtongued women who are known as “inducers.” It is their business to persuade every woman who comes along to enter the shop peaceably, If it can be done, but forcibly if necessary, and to sell her as much as she can lie inveigled into taking. At some points these “inducers” are so thick and so voracious that it takes as much as twenty or thirty minutes to get a few floors on the way, as a woman is forced into first one store and then another, no matter how determined she is not to buy. Chicago women who have run the gauntlet of the “inducers" say they prefer the old-fashioned and peaceful methods of their own lake front and suburbs, where the victim is first sandbagged and then robbed while unconscious. It is so much more hiimane.