The Causes of Prostitution

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III. The Causes of Prostitution

The history of the rise and development of prostitution enables us to see that prostitution is not an accident of our marriage system, but an essential constituent which appears concurrently with its other essential constituents. The gradual development of the family on a patriarchal and largely monogamic basis rendered it more and more difficult for a woman to dispose of her own person. She belongs in the first place to her father, whose interest it was to guard her carefully until a husband appeared who could afford to purchase her. In the enhancement of her value the new idea of the market value of virginity gradually developed, and where a "virgin" had previously meant a woman who was free to do as she would with her own body its meaning was now reversed and it came to mean a woman who was precluded from having intercourse with men. When she was transferred from her father to a husband, she was still guarded with the same care; husband and father alike found their interest in preserving their women from unmarried men. The situation thus produced resulted in the existence of a large body of young men who were not yet rich enough to obtain wives, and a large number of young women, not yet chosen as wives, and many of whom could never expect to become wives. At such a point in social evolution prostitution is clearly inevitable; it is not so much the indispensable concomitant of marriage as an essential part of the whole system. Some of the superfluous or neglected women, utilizing their money value and perhaps at the same time reviving traditions of an earlier freedom, find their social function in selling their favors to gratify the temporary desires of the men who have not yet been able to acquire wives. Thus every link in the chain of the marriage system is firmly welded and the complete circle formed.

But while the history of the rise and development of prostitution shows us how indestructible and essential an element prostitution is of the marriage system which has long prevailed in Europe—under very varied racial, political, social, and religious conditions—it yet fails to supply us in every respect with the data necessary to reach a definite attitude towards prostitution to-day. In order to understand the place of prostitution in our existing system, it is necessary that we should analyze the chief factors of prostitution. We may most conveniently learn to understand these if we consider prostitution, in order, under four aspects. These are: (1) economic necessity; (2) biological predisposition; (3) moral advantages; and (4) what may be called its civilizational value.

While these four factors of prostitution seem to me those that here chiefly concern us, it is scarcely necessary to point out that many other causes contribute to produce and modify prostitution. Prostitutes themselves often seek to lead other girls to adopt the same paths; recruits must be found for brothels, whence we have the "white slave trade," which is now being energetically combated in many parts of the world; while all the forms of seduction towards this life are favored and often predisposed to by alcoholism. It will generally be found that several causes have combined to push a girl into the career of prostitution.

The ways in which various factors of environment and suggestion unite to lead a girl into the paths of prostitution are indicated in the following statement in which a correspondent has set forth his own conclusions on this matter as a man of the world: "I have had a somewhat varied experience among loose women, and can say, without hesitation, that not more than 1 per cent, of the women I have known could be regarded as educated. This indicates that almost invariably they are of humble origin, and the terrible cases of overcrowding that are daily brought to light suggest that at very early ages the sense of modesty becomes extinct, and long before puberty a familiarity with things sexual takes place. As soon as they are old enough these girls are seduced by their sweethearts; the familiarity with which they regard sexual matters removes the restraint which surrounds a girl whose early life has been spent in decent surroundings. Later they go to work in factories and shops; if pretty and attractive, they consort with managers and foremen. Then the love of finery, which forms so large a part of the feminine character, tempts the girl to become the 'kept' woman of some man of means. A remarkable thing in this connection is the fact that they rarely enjoy excitement with their protectors, preferring rather the coarser embraces of some man nearer their own station in life, very often a soldier. I have not known many women who were seduced and deserted, though this is a fiction much affected by prostitutes. Barmaids supply a considerable number to the ranks of prostitution, largely on account of their addiction to drink; drunkenness invariably leads to laxness of moral restraint in women. Another potent factor in the production of prostitutes lies in the flare of finery flaunted by some friend who has adopted the life. A girl, working hard to live, sees some friend, perhaps making a call in the street where the hard-working girl lives, clothed in finery, while she herself can hardly get enough to eat. She has a conversation with her finely-clad friend who tells her how easily she can earn money, explaining what a vital asset the sexual organs are, and soon another one is added to the ranks."

There is some interest in considering the reasons assigned for prostitutes entering their career. In some countries this has been estimated by those who come closely into official or other contact with prostitutes. In other countries, it is the rule for girls, before they are registered as prostitutes, to state the reasons for which they desire to enter the career.

Parent-Duchâtelet, whose work on prostitutes in Paris is still an authority, presented the first estimate of this kind. He found that of over five thousand prostitutes, 1441 were influenced by poverty, 1425 by seduction of lovers who had abandoned them, 1255 by the loss of parents from death or other cause. By such an estimate, nearly the whole number are accounted for by wretchedness, that is by economic causes, alone (Parent-Duchâtelet, De la Prostitution, 1857, vol. i, p. 107).

In Brussels during a period of twenty years (1865-1884) 3505 women were inscribed as prostitutes. The causes they assigned for desiring to take to this career present a different picture from that shown by Parent-Duchâtelet, but perhaps a more reliable one, although there are some marked and curious discrepancies. Out of the 3505, 1523 explained that extreme poverty was the cause of their degradation; 1118 frankly confessed that their sexual passions were the cause; 420 attributed their fall to evil company; 316 said they were disgusted and weary of their work, because the toil was so arduous and the pay so small; 101 had been abandoned by their lovers; 10 had quarrelled with their parents; 7 were abandoned by their husbands; 4 did not agree with their guardians; 3 had family quarrels; 2 were compelled to prostitute themselves by their husbands, and 1 by her parents (Lancet, June 28, 1890, p. 1442).

In London, Merrick found that of 16,022 prostitutes who passed through his hands during the years he was chaplain at Millbank prison, 5061 voluntarily left home or situation for "a life of pleasure;" 3363 assigned poverty as the cause; 3154 were "seduced" and drifted on to the street; 1636 were betrayed by promises of marriage and abandoned by lover and relations. On the whole, Merrick states, 4790, or nearly one-third of the whole number, may be said to owe the adoption of their career directly to men, 11,232 to other causes. He adds that of those pleading poverty a large number were indolent and incapable (G. P. Merrick, Work Among the Fallen, p. 38).

Logan, an English city missionary with an extensive acquaintance with prostitutes, divided them into the following groups: (1) One-fourth of the girls are servants, especially in public houses, beer shops, etc., and thus led into the life; (2) one-fourth come from factories, etc.; (3) nearly one-fourth are recruited by procuresses who visit country towns, markets, etc.; (4) a final group includes, on the one hand, those who are induced to become prostitutes by destitution, or indolence, or a bad temper, which unfits them for ordinary avocations, and, on the other hand, those who have been seduced by a false promise of marriage (W. Logan, The Great Social Evil, 1871, p. 53).

In America Sanger has reported the results of inquiries made of two thousand New York prostitutes as to the causes which induced them to take up their avocation:

(Sanger, History of Prostitution, p. 488.)

In America, again, more recently, Professor Woods Hutchinson put himself into communication with some thirty representative men in various great metropolitan centres, and thus summarizes the answers as regards the etiology of prostitution:

(Woods Hutchinson, "The Economics of Prostitution," American Gynæcologic and Obstetric Journal, September, 1895; Id., The Gospel According to Darwin, p. 194.)

In Italy, in 1881, among 10,422 inscribed prostitutes from the age of seventeen upwards, the causes of prostitution were classified as follows:

(Ferriani, Minorenni Delinquenti, p. 193.) The reasons assigned by Russian prostitutes for taking up their career are (according to Federow) as follows:

(Summarized in Archives d'Anthropologie Criminelle, Nov. 15, 1901.)

1. The Economic Causation of Prostitution.—Writers on prostitution frequently assert that economic conditions lie at the root of prostitution and that its chief cause is poverty, while prostitutes themselves often declare that the difficulty of earning a livelihood in other ways was a main cause in inducing them to adopt this career. "Of all the causes of prostitution," Parent-Duchâtelet wrote a century ago, "particularly in Paris, and probably in all large cities, none is more active than lack of work and the misery which is the inevitable result of insufficient wages." In England, also, to a large extent, Sherwell states, "morals fluctuate with trade."[164] It is equally so in Berlin where the number of registered prostitutes increases during bad years.[165] It is so also in America. It is the same in Japan; "the cause of causes is poverty."[166]

Thus the broad and general statement that prostitution is largely or mainly an economic phenomenon, due to the low wages of women or to sudden depressions in trade, is everywhere made by investigators. It must, however, be added that these general statements are considerably qualified in the light of the detailed investigations made by careful inquirers. Thus Ströhmberg, who minutely investigated 462 prostitutes, found that only one assigned destitution as the reason for adopting her career, and on investigation this was found to be an impudent lie.[167] Hammer found that of ninety registered German prostitutes not one had entered on the career out of want or to support a child, while some went on the street while in the possession of money, or without wishing to be paid.[168] Pastor Buschmann, of the Teltow Magdalene Home in Berlin, finds that it is not want but indifference to moral considerations which leads girls to become prostitutes. In Germany, before a girl is put on the police register, due care is always taken to give her a chance of entering a Home and getting work; in Berlin, in the course of ten years, only two girls—out of thousands—were willing to take advantage of this opportunity. The difficulty experienced by English Rescue Homes in finding girls who are willing to be "rescued" is notorious. The same difficulty is found in other cities, even where entirely different conditions prevail; thus it is found in Madrid, according to Bernaldo de Quirós and Llanas Aguilaniedo, that the prostitutes who enter the Homes, notwithstanding all the devotion of the nuns, on leaving at once return to their old life. While the economic factor in prostitution undoubtedly exists, the undue frequency and emphasis with which it is put forward and accepted is clearly due, in part to ignorance of the real facts, in part to the fact that such an assumption appeals to those whose weakness it is to explain all social phenomena by economic causes, and in part to its obvious plausibility.[169]

Prostitutes are mainly recruited from the ranks of factory girls, domestic servants, shop girls, and waitresses. In some of these occupations it is difficult to obtain employment all the year round. In this way many milliners, dressmakers and tailoresses become prostitutes when business is slack, and return to business when the season begins. Sometimes the regular work of the day is supplemented concurrently by prostitution in the street in the evening. It is said, possibly with some truth, that amateur prostitution of this kind is extremely prevalent in England, as it is not checked by the precautions which, in countries where prostitution is regulated, the clandestine prostitute must adopt in order to avoid registration. Certain public lavatories and dressing-rooms in central London are said to be used by the girls for putting on, and finally washing off before going home, the customary paint.[170] It is certain that in England a large proportion of parents belonging to the working and even lower middle class ranks are unacquainted with the nature of the lives led by their own daughters. It must be added, also, that occasionally this conduct of the daughter is winked at or encouraged by the parents; thus a correspondent writes that he "knows some towns in England where prostitution is not regarded as anything disgraceful, and can remember many cases where the mother's house has been used by the daughter with the mother's knowledge."

Acton, in a well-informed book on London prostitution, written in the middle of the last century, said that prostitution is "a transitory stage, through which an untold number of British women are ever on their passage."[171] This statement was strenuously denied at the time by many earnest moralists who refused to admit that it was possible for a woman who had sunk into so deep a pit of degradation ever to climb out again, respectably safe and sound. Yet it is certainly true as regards a considerable proportion of women, not only in England, but in other countries also. Thus Parent-Duchâtelet, the greatest authority on French prostitution, stated that "prostitution is for the majority only a transitory stage; it is quitted usually during the first year; very few prostitutes continue until extinction." It is difficult, however, to ascertain precisely of how large a proportion this is true; there are no data which would serve as a basis for exact estimation,[172] and it is impossible to expect that respectable married women would admit that they had ever been "on the streets"; they would not, perhaps, always admit it even to themselves.

The following case, though noted down over twenty years ago, is fairly typical of a certain class, among the lower ranks of prostitution, in which the economic factor counts for much, but in which we ought not too hastily to assume that it is the sole factor.

Widow, aged thirty, with two children. Works in an umbrella manufactory in the East End of London, earning eighteen shillings a week by hard work, and increasing her income by occasionally going out on the streets in the evenings. She haunts a quiet side street which is one of the approaches to a large city railway terminus. She is a comfortable, almost matronly-looking woman, quietly dressed in a way that is only noticeable from the skirts being rather short. If spoken to she may remark that she is "waiting for a lady friend," talks in an affected way about the weather, and parenthetically introduces her offers. She will either lead a man into one of the silent neighboring lanes filled with warehouses, or will take him home with her. She is willing to accept any sum the man may be willing or able to give; occasionally it is a sovereign, sometimes it is only a sixpence; on an average she earns a few shillings in an evening. She had only been in London for ten months; before that she lived in Newcastle. She did not go on the streets there; "circumstances alter cases," she sagely remarks. Though not speaking well of the police, she says they do not interfere with her as they do with some of the girls. She never gives them money, but hints that it is sometimes necessary to gratify their desires in order to keep on good terms with them.

It must always be remembered, for it is sometimes forgotten by socialists and social reformers, that while the pressure of poverty exerts a markedly modifying influence on prostitution, in that it increases the ranks of the women who thereby seek a livelihood and may thus be properly regarded as a factor of prostitution, no practicable raising of the rate of women's wages could possibly serve, directly and alone, to abolish prostitution. De Molinari, an economist, after remarking that "prostitution is an industry" and that if other competing industries can offer women sufficiently high pecuniary inducements they will not be so frequently attracted to prostitution, proceeds to point out that that by no means settles the question. "Like every other industry prostitution is governed by the demand of the need to which it responds. As long as that need and that demand persist, they will provoke an offer. It is the need and the demand that we must act on, and perhaps science will furnish us the means to do so."[173] In what way Molinari expects science to diminish the demand for prostitutes, however, is not clearly brought out.

Not only have we to admit that no practicable rise in the rate of wages paid to women in ordinary industries can possibly compete with the wages which fairly attractive women of quite ordinary ability can earn by prostitution,[174] but we have also to realize that a rise in general prosperity—which alone can render a rise of women's wages healthy and normal—involves a rise in the wages of prostitution, and an increase in the number of prostitutes. So that if good wages is to be regarded as the antagonist of prostitution, we can only say that it more than gives back with one hand what it takes with the other. To so marked a degree is this the case that Després in a detailed moral and demographic study of the distribution of prostitution in France comes to the conclusion that we must reverse the ancient doctrine that "poverty engenders prostitution" since prostitution regularly increases with wealth,[175] and as a département rises in wealth and prosperity, so the number both of its inscribed and its free prostitutes rises also. There is indeed a fallacy here, for while it is true, as Després argues, that wealth demands prostitution, it is also true that a wealthy community involves the extreme of poverty as well as of riches and that it is among the poorer elements that prostitution chiefly finds its recruits. The ancient dictum that "poverty engenders prostitution" still stands, but it is complicated and qualified by the complex conditions of civilization. Bonger, in his able discussion of the economic side of the question, has realized the wide and deep basis of prostitution when he reaches the conclusion that it is "on the one hand the inevitable complement of the existing legal monogamy, and on the other hand the result of the bad conditions in which many young girls grow up, the result of the physical and psychical wretchedness in which the women of the people live, and the consequence also of the inferior position of women in our actual society."[176] A narrowly economic consideration of prostitution can by no means bring us to the root of the matter.

One circumstance alone should have sufficed to indicate that the inability of many women to secure "a living wage," is far from being the most fundamental cause of prostitution: a large proportion of prostitutes come from the ranks of domestic service. Of all the great groups of female workers, domestic servants are the freest from economic anxieties; they do not pay for food or for lodging; they often live as well as their mistresses, and in a large proportion of cases they have fewer money anxieties than their mistresses. Moreover, they supply an almost universal demand, so that there is never any need for even very moderately competent servants to be in want of work. They constitute, it is true, a very large body which could not fail to supply a certain contingent of recruits to prostitution. But when we see that domestic service is the chief reservoir from which prostitutes are drawn, it should be clear that the craving for food and shelter is by no means the chief cause of prostitution.

It may be added that, although the significance of this predominance of servants among prostitutes is seldom realized by those who fancy that to remove poverty is to abolish prostitution, it has not been ignored by the more thoughtful students of social questions. Thus Sherwell, while pointing out truly that, to a large extent, "morals fluctuate with trade," adds that, against the importance of the economic factor, it is a suggestive and in every way impressive fact that the majority of the girls who frequent the West End of London (88 per cent., according to the Salvation Army's Registers) are drawn from domestic service where the economic struggle is not severely felt (Arthur Sherwell, Life in West London, Ch. V, "Prostitution").

It is at the same time worthy of note that by the conditions of their lives servants, more than any other class, resemble prostitutes (Bernaldo de Quirós and Llanas Aguilaniedo have pointed this out in La Mala Vida en Madrid, p. 240). Like prostitutes, they are a class of women apart; they are not entitled to the considerations and the little courtesies usually paid to other women; in some countries they are even registered, like prostitutes; it is scarcely surprising that when they suffer from so many of the disadvantages of the prostitute, they should sometimes desire to possess also some of her advantages. Lily Braun (Frauenfrage, pp. 389 et seq.) has set forth in detail these unfavorable conditions of domestic labor as they bear on the tendency of servant-girls to become prostitutes. R. de Ryckère, in his important work, La Servante Criminelle (1907, pp. 460 et seq.; cf., the same author's article, "La Criminalité Ancillaire," Archives d'Anthropologie Criminelle, July and December, 1906), has studied the psychology of the servant-girl. He finds that she is specially marked by lack of foresight, vanity, lack of invention, tendency to imitation, and mobility of mind. These are characters which ally her to the prostitute. De Ryckère estimates the proportion of former servants among prostitutes generally as fifty per cent., and adds that what is called the "white slavery" here finds its most complacent and docile victims. He remarks, however, that the servant prostitute is, on the whole, not so much immoral as non-moral.

In Paris Parent-Duchâtelet found that, in proportion to their number, servants furnished the largest contingent to prostitution, and his editors also found that they head the list (Parent-Duchâtelet, edition 1857, vol. i, p. 83). Among clandestine prostitutes at Paris, Commenge has more recently found that former servants constitute forty per cent. In Bordeaux Jeannel (De le Prostitution Publique, p. 102) also found that in 1860 forty per cent, of prostitutes had been servants, seamstresses coming next with thirty-seven per cent.

In Germany and Austria it has long been recognized that domestic service furnishes the chief number of recruits to prostitution. Lippert, in Germany, and Gross-Hoffinger, in Austria, pointed out this predominance of maid-servants and its significance before the middle of the nineteenth century, and more recently Blaschko has stated ("Hygiene der Syphilis" in Weyl's Handbuch der Hygiene, Bd. ii, p. 40) that among Berlin prostitutes in 1898 maid-servants stand at the head with fifty-one per cent. Baumgarten has stated that in Vienna the proportion of servants is fifty-eight per cent.

In England, according to the Report of a Select Committee of the Lords on the laws for the protection of children, sixty per cent, of prostitutes have been servants. F. Remo, in his Vie Galante en Angleterre, states the proportion as eighty per cent. It would appear to be even higher as regards the West End of London. Taking London as a whole the extensive statistics of Merrick (Work Among the Fallen), chaplain of the Millbank Prison, showed that out of 14,790 prostitutes, 5823, or about forty per cent., had previously been servants, laundresses coming next, and then dressmakers; classifying his data somewhat more summarily and roughly, Merrick found that the proportion of servants was fifty-three per cent.

In America, among two thousand prostitutes, Sanger states that forty-three per cent, had been servants, dressmakers coming next, but at a long interval, with six per cent. (Sanger, History of Prostitution, p. 524). Among Philadelphia prostitutes, Goodchild states that "domestics are probably in largest proportion," although some recruits may be found from almost any occupation.

It is the same in other countries. In Italy, according to Tammeo (La Prostituzione, p. 100), servants come first among prostitutes with a proportion of twenty-eight per cent., followed by the group of dressmakers, tailoresses and milliners, seventeen per cent. In Sardinia, A Mantegazza states, most prostitutes are servants from the country. In Russia, according to Fiaux, the proportion is forty-five per cent. In Madrid, according to Eslava (as quoted by Bernaldo de Quirós and Llanas Aguilaniedo (La Mala Vida, en Madrid, p. 239)), servants come at the head of registered prostitutes with twenty-seven per cent.—almost the same proportion as in Italy—and are followed by dressmakers. In Sweden, according to Welander (Monatshefte für Praktische Dermatologie, 1899, p. 477) among 2541 inscribed prostitutes, 1586 (or sixty-two per cent.) were domestic servants; at a long interval followed 210 seamstresses, then 168 factory workers, etc.

2. The Biological Factor of Prostitution.—Economic considerations, as we see, have a highly important modificatory influence on prostitution, although it is by no means correct to assert that they form its main cause. There is another question which has exercised many investigators: To what extent are prostitutes predestined to this career by organic constitution? It is generally admitted that economic and other conditions are an exciting cause of prostitution; in how far are those who succumb predisposed by the possession of abnormal personal characteristics? Some inquirers have argued that this predisposition is so marked that prostitution may fairly be regarded as a feminine equivalent for criminality, and that in a family in which the men instinctively turn to crime, the women instinctively turn to prostitution. Others have as strenuously denied this conclusion.

Lombroso has more especially advocated the doctrine that prostitution is the vicarious equivalent of criminality. In this he was developing the results reached, in the important study of the Jukes family, by Dugdale, who found that "there where the brothers commit crime, the sisters adopt prostitution;" the fines and imprisonments of the women of the family were not for violations of the right of property, but mainly for offences against public decency. "The psychological as well as anatomical identity of the criminal and the born prostitute," Lombroso and Ferrero concluded, "could not be more complete: both are identical with the moral insane, and therefore, according to the axiom, equal to each other. There is the same lack of moral sense, the same hardness of heart, the same precocious taste for evil, the same indifference to social infamy, the same volatility, love of idleness, and lack of foresight, the same taste for facile pleasures, for the orgy and for alcohol, the same, or almost the same, vanity. Prostitution is only the feminine side of criminality. And so true is it that prostitution and criminality are two analogous, or, so to say, parallel, phenomena, that at their extremes they meet. The prostitute is, therefore, psychologically a criminal: if she commits no offenses it is because her physical weakness, her small intelligence, the facility of acquiring what she wants by more easy methods, dispenses her from the necessity of crime, and on these very grounds prostitution represents the specific form of feminine criminality." The authors add that "prostitution is, in a certain sense, socially useful as an outlet for masculine sexuality and a preventive of crime" (Lombroso and Ferrero, La Donna Delinquente, 1893, p. 571).

Those who have opposed this view have taken various grounds, and by no means always understood the position they are attacking. Thus W. Fischer (in Die Prostitution) vigorously argues that prostitution is not an inoffensive equivalent of criminality, but a factor of criminality. Féré, again (in Dégénérescence et Criminalité), asserts that criminality and prostitution are not equivalent, but identical. "Prostitutes and criminals," he holds, "have as a common character their unproductiveness, and consequently they are both anti-social. Prostitution thus constitutes a form of criminality." The essential character of criminals is not, however, their unproductiveness, for that they share with a considerable proportion of the wealthiest of the upper classes; it must be added, also, that the prostitute, unlike the criminal, is exercising an activity for which there is a demand, for which she is willingly paid, and for which she has to work (it has sometimes been noted that the prostitute looks down on the thief, who "does not work"); she is carrying on a profession, and is neither more nor less productive than those who carry on many more reputable professions. Aschaffenburg, also believing himself in opposition to Lombroso, argues, somewhat differently from Féré, that prostitution is not indeed, as Féré said, a form of criminality, but that it is too frequently united with criminality to be regarded as an equivalent. Mönkemöller has more recently supported the same view. Here, however, as usual, there is a wide difference of opinion as to the proportion of prostitutes of whom this is true. It is recognized by all investigators to be true of a certain number, but while Baumgarten, from an examination of eight thousand prostitutes, only found a minute proportion who were criminals, Ströhmberg found that among 462 prostitutes there were as many as 175 thieves. From another side, Morasso (as quoted in Archivio di Psichiatria, 1896, fasc. I), on the strength of his own investigations, is more clearly in opposition to Lombroso, since he protests altogether against any purely degenerative view of prostitutes which would in any way assimilate them with criminals.

The question of the sexuality of prostitutes, which has a certain bearing on the question of their tendency to degeneration, has been settled by different writers in different senses. While some, like Morasso, assert that sexual impulse is a main cause inducing women to adopt a prostitute's career, others assert that prostitutes are usually almost devoid of sexual impulse. Lombroso refers to the prevalence of sexual frigidity among prostitutes.[177] In London, Merrick, speaking from a knowledge of over 16,000 prostitutes, states that he has met with "only a very few cases" in which gross sexual desire has been the motive to adopt a life of prostitution. In Paris, Raciborski had stated at a much earlier period that "among prostitutes one finds very few who are prompted to libertinage by sexual ardor."[178] Commenge, again, a careful student of the Parisian prostitute, cannot admit that sexual desire is to be classed among the serious causes of prostitution. "I have made inquiries of thousands of women on this point," he states, "and only a very small number have told me that they were driven to prostitution for the satisfaction of sexual needs. Although girls who give themselves to prostitution are often lacking in frankness, on this point, I believe, they have no wish to deceive. When they have sexual needs they do not conceal them, but, on the contrary, show a certain amour-propre in acknowledging them, as a sufficient sort of justification for their life; so that if only a very small minority avow this motive the reason is that for the great majority it has no existence."

There can be no doubt that the statements made regarding the sexual frigidity of prostitutes are often much too unqualified. This is in part certainly due to the fact that they are usually made by those who speak from a knowledge of old prostitutes whose habitual familiarity with normal sexual intercourse in its least attractive aspects has resulted in complete indifference to such intercourse, so far as their clients are concerned.[179] It may be stated with truth that to the woman of deep passions the ephemeral and superficial relationships of prostitution can offer no temptation. And it may be added that the majority of prostitutes begin their career at a very early age, long before the somewhat late period at which in women the tendency for passion to become strong, has yet arrived.[180] It may also be said that an indifference to sexual relationships, a tendency to attach no personal value to them, is often a predisposing cause in the adoption of a prostitute's career; the general mental shallowness of prostitutes may well be accompanied by shallowness of physical emotion. On the other hand, many prostitutes, at all events early in their careers, appear to show a marked degree of sensuality, and to women of coarse sexual fibre the career of prostitution has not been without attractions from this point of view; the gratification of physical desire is known to act as a motive in some cases and is clearly indicated in others.[181] This is scarcely surprising when we remember that prostitutes are in a very large proportion of cases remarkably robust and healthy persons in general respects.[182] They withstand without difficulty the risks of their profession, and though under its influence the manifestations of sexual feeling can scarcely fail to become modified or perverted in course of time, that is no proof of the original absence of sexual sensibility. It is not even a proof of its loss, for the real sexual nature of the normal prostitute, and her possibilities of sexual ardor, are chiefly manifested, not in her professional relations with her clients, but in her relations with her "fancy boy" or "bully."[183] It is quite true that the conditions of her life often make it practically advantageous to the prostitute to have attached to her a man who is devoted to her interests and will defend them if necessary, but that is only a secondary, occasional, and subsidiary advantage of the "fancy boy," so far as prostitutes generally are concerned. She is attracted to him primarily because he appeals to her personally and she wants him for herself. The motive of her attachment is, above all, erotic, in the full sense, involving not merely sexual relations but possession and common interests, a permanent and intimate life led together. "You know that what one does in the way of business cannot fill one's heart," said a German prostitute; "Why should we not have a husband like other women? I, too, need love. If that were not so we should not want a bully." And he, on his part, reciprocates this feeling and is by no means merely moved by self-interest.[184]

One of my correspondents, who has had much experience of prostitutes, not only in Britain, but also in Germany, France, Belgium and Holland, has found that the normal manifestations of sexual feeling are much more common in British than in continental prostitutes. "I should say," he writes, "that in normal coitus foreign women are generally unconscious of sexual excitement. I don't think I have ever known a foreign woman who had any semblance of orgasm. British women, on the other hand, if a man is moderately kind, and shows that he has some feelings beyond mere sensual gratification, often abandon themselves to the wildest delights of sexual excitement. Of course in this life, as in others, there is keen competition, and a woman, to vie with her competitors, must please her gentlemen friends; but a man of the world can always distinguish between real and simulated passion." (It is possible, however, that he may be most successful in arousing the feelings of his own fellow-country women.) On the other hand, this writer finds that the foreign women are more anxious to provide for the enjoyment of their temporary consorts and to ascertain what pleases them. "The foreigner seems to make it the business of her life to discover some abnormal mode of sexual gratification for her consort." For their own pleasure also foreign prostitutes frequently ask for cunnilinctus, in preference to normal coitus, while anal coitus is also common. The difference evidently is that the British women, when they seek gratification, find it in normal coitus, while the foreign women prefer more abnormal methods. There is, however, one class of British prostitutes which this correspondent finds to be an exception to the general rule: the class of those who are recruited from the lower walks of the stage. "Such women are generally more licentious—that is to say, more acquainted with the bizarre in sexualism—than girls who come from shops or bars; they show a knowledge of fellatio, and even anal coitus, and during menstruation frequently suggest inter-mammary coitus."

On the whole it would appear that prostitutes, though not usually impelled to their life by motives of sensuality, on entering and during the early part of their career possess a fairly average amount of sexual impulse, with variations in both directions of excess and deficiency as well as of perversion. At a somewhat later period it is useless to attempt to measure the sexual impulse of prostitutes by the amount of pleasure they take in the professional performance of sexual intercourse. It is necessary to ascertain whether they possess sexual instincts which are gratified in other ways. In a large proportion of cases this is found to be so. Masturbation, especially, is extremely common among prostitutes everywhere; however prevalent it may be among women who have no other means of obtaining sexual gratification it is admitted by all to be still more prevalent among prostitutes, indeed almost universal.[185]

Homosexuality, though not so common as masturbation, is very frequently found among prostitutes—in France, it would seem, more frequently than in England—and it may indeed be said that it occurs more often among prostitutes than among any other class of women. It is favored by the acquired distaste for normal coitus due to professional intercourse with men, which leads homosexual relationships to be regarded as pure and ideal by comparison. It would appear also that in a considerable proportion of cases prostitutes present a congenital condition of sexual inversion, such a condition, with an accompanying indifference to intercourse with men, being a predisposing cause of the adoption of a prostitute's career. Kurella even regards prostitutes as constituting a sub-variety of congenital inverts. Anna Rüling in Germany states that about twenty per cent. prostitutes are homosexual; when asked what induced them to become prostitutes, more than one inverted woman of the street has replied to her that it was purely a matter of business, sexual feeling not coming into the question except with a friend of the same sex.[186]

The occurrence of congenital inversion among prostitutes—although we need not regard prostitutes as necessarily degenerate as a class—suggests the question whether we are likely to find an unusually large number of physical and other anomalies among them. It cannot be said that there is unanimity of opinion on this point. For some authorities prostitutes are merely normal ordinary women of low social rank, if indeed their instincts are not even a little superior to those of the class in which they were born. Other investigators find among them so large a proportion of individuals deviating from the normal that they are inclined to place prostitutes generally among one or other of the abnormal classes.[187]

Baumgarten, in Vienna, from a knowledge of over 8000 prostitutes, concluded that only a very minute proportion are either criminal or psychopathic in temperament or organization (Archiv für Kriminal-Anthropologie, vol. xi, 1902). It is not clear, however, that Baumgarten carried out any detailed and precise investigations. Mr. Lane, a London police magistrate, has stated as the result of his own observation, that prostitution is "at once a symptom and outcome of the same deteriorated physique and decadent moral fibre which determine the manufacture of male tramps, petty thieves, and professional beggars, of whom the prostitute is in general the female analogue" (Ethnological Journal, April, 1905, p. 41). This estimate is doubtless correct as regards a considerable proportion of the women, often enfeebled by drink, who pass through the police courts, but it could scarcely be applied without qualification to prostitutes generally.

Morasso (Archivio di Psichiatria, 1896, fasc. I) has protested against a purely degenerative view of prostitutes on the strength of his own observations. There is, he states, a category of prostitutes, unknown to scientific inquirers, which he calls that of the prostitute di alto bordo. Among these the signs of degeneration, physical or moral, are not to be found in greater number than among women who do not belong to prostitution. They reveal all sorts of characters, some of them showing great refinement, and are chiefly marked off by the possession of an unusual degree of sexual appetite. Even among the more degraded group of the bassa prostituzione, he asserts, we find a predominance of sexual, as well as professional, characters, rather than the signs of degeneration. It is sufficient to quote one more testimony, as set down many years ago by a woman of high intelligence and character, Mrs. Craik, the novelist: "The women who fall are by no means the worst of their station," she wrote. "I have heard it affirmed by more than one lady—by one in particular whose experience was as large as her benevolence—that many of them are of the very best, refined, intelligent, truthful, and affectionate. 'I don't know how it is,' she would say, 'whether their very superiority makes them dissatisfied with their own rank—such brutes or clowns as laboring men often are!—so that they fall easier victims to the rank above them; or whether, though this theory will shock many people, other virtues can exist and flourish entirely distinct from, and after the loss of, that which we are accustomed to believe the indispensable prime virtue of our sex—chastity. I cannot explain it; I can only say that it is so, that some of my most promising village girls have been the first to come to harm; and some of the best and most faithful servants I ever had, have been girls who have fallen into shame, and who, had I not gone to the rescue and put them in the way to do well, would infallibly have become "lost women"'" (A Woman's Thoughts About Women, 1858, p. 291). Various writers have insisted on the good moral qualities of prostitutes. Thus in France, Despine first enumerates their vices as (1) greediness and love of drink, (2) lying, (3) anger, (4) want of order and untidiness, (5) mobility of character, (6) need of movement, (7) tendency to homosexuality; and then proceeds to detail their good qualities: their maternal and filial affection, their charity to each other; and their refusal to denounce each other; while they are frequently religious, sometimes modest, and generally very honest (Despine, Psychologie Naturelle, vol. iii, pp. 207 et seq.; as regards Sicilian prostitutes, cf. Callari, Archivio di Psichiatria, fasc. IV, 1903). The charity towards each other, often manifested in distress, is largely neutralized by a tendency to professional suspicion and jealousy of each other.

Lombroso believes that the basis of prostitution must be found in moral idiocy. If by moral idiocy we are to understand a condition at all closely allied with insanity, this assertion is dubious. There seems no clear relationship between prostitution and insanity, and Tammeo has shown (La Prostituzione, p. 76) that the frequency of prostitutes in the various Italian provinces is in inverse ratio to the frequency of insane persons; as insanity increases, prostitution decreases. But if we mean a minor degree of moral imbecility—that is to say, a bluntness of perception for the ordinary moral considerations of civilization which, while it is largely due to the hardening influence of an unfavorable early environment, may also rest on a congenital predisposition—there can be no doubt that moral imbecility of slight degree is very frequently found among prostitutes. It would be plausible, doubtless, to say that every woman who gives her virginity in exchange for an inadequate return is an imbecile. If she gives herself for love, she has, at the worst, made a foolish mistake, such as the young and inexperienced may at any time make. But if she deliberately proposes to sell herself, and does so for nothing or next to nothing, the case is altered. The experiences of Commenge in Paris are instructive on this point. "For many young girls," he writes, "modesty has no existence, they experience no emotion in showing themselves completely undressed, they abandon themselves to any chance individual whom they will never see again. They attach no importance to their virginity; they are deflowered under the strangest conditions, without the least thought or care about the act they are accomplishing. No sentiment, no calculation, pushes them into a man's arms. They let themselves go without reflexion and without motive, in an almost animal manner, from indifference and without pleasure." He was acquainted with forty-five girls between the ages of twelve and seventeen who were deflowered by chance strangers whom they never met again; they lost their virginity, in Dumas's phrase, as they lost their milk-teeth, and could give no plausible account of the loss. A girl of fifteen, mentioned by Commenge, living with her parents who supplied all her wants, lost her virginity by casually meeting a man who offered her two francs if she would go with him; she did so without demur and soon begun to accost men on her own account. A girl of fourteen, also living comfortably with her parents, sacrificed her virginity at a fair in return for a glass of beer, and henceforth begun to associate with prostitutes. Another girl of the same age, at a local fête, wishing to go round on the hobby horse, spontaneously offered herself to the man directing the machinery for the pleasure of a ride. Yet another girl, of fifteen, at another fête, offered her virginity in return for the same momentary joy (Commenge, Prostitution Clandestine, 1897, pp. 101 et seq.). In the United States, Dr. W. Travis Gibb, examining physician to the New York Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, bears similar testimony to the fact that in a fairly large proportion of "rape" cases the child is the willing victim. "It is horribly pathetic," he says (Medical Record, April 20, 1907), "to learn how far a nickel or a quarter will go towards purchasing the virtue of these children."

In estimating the tendency of prostitutes to display congenital physical anomalies, the crudest and most obvious test, though not a precise or satisfactory one, is the general impression produced by the face. In France, when nearly 1000 prostitutes were divided into five groups from the point of view of their looks, only from seven to fourteen per cent, were found to belong to the first group, or that of those who could be said to possess youth and beauty (Jeannel, De la Prostitution Publique, 1860, p. 168). Woods Hutchinson, again, judging from an extensive acquaintance with London, Paris, Vienna, New York, Philadelphia, and Chicago, asserts that a handsome or even attractive-looking prostitute, is rare, and that the general average of beauty is lower than in any other class of women. "Whatever other evils," he remarks, "the fatal power of beauty may be responsible for, it has nothing to do with prostitution" (Woods Hutchinson, "The Economics of Prostitution," American Gynæcological and Obstetric Journal, September, 1895). It must, of course, be borne in mind that these estimates are liable to be vitiated through being based chiefly on the inspection of women who most obviously belong to the class of prostitutes and have already been coarsened by their profession.

If we may conclude—and the fact is probably undisputed—that beautiful, agreeable, and harmoniously formed faces are rare rather than common among prostitutes, we may certainly say that minute examination will reveal a large number of physical abnormalities. One of the earliest important physical investigations of prostitutes was that of Dr. Pauline Tarnowsky in Russia (first published in the Vratch in 1887, and afterwards as Etudes anthropométriques sur les Prostituées et les Voleuses). She examined fifty St. Petersburg prostitutes who had been inmates of a brothel for not less than two years, and also fifty peasant women of, so far as possible, the same age and mental development. She found that (1) the prostitute showed shorter anterior-posterior and transverse diameters of skull; (2) a proportion equal to eighty-four per cent. showed various signs of physical degeneration (irregular skull, asymmetry of face, anomalies of hard palate, teeth, ears, etc.). This tendency to anomaly among the prostitutes was to some extent explained when it was found that about four-fifths of them had parents who were habitual drunkards, and nearly one-fifth were the last survivors of large families; such families have been often produced by degenerate parents.

The frequency of hereditary degeneration has been noted by Bonhoeffer among German prostitutes. He investigated 190 Breslau prostitutes in prison, and therefore of a more abnormal class than ordinary prostitutes, and found that 102 were hereditarily degenerate, and mostly with one or both parents who were drunkards; 53 also showed feeble-mindedness (Zeitschrift für die Gesamte Strafwissenschaft, Bd. xxiii, p. 106).

The most detailed examinations of ordinary non-criminal prostitutes, both anthropometrically and as regards the prevalence of anomalies, have been made in Italy, though not on a sufficiently large number of subjects to yield absolutely decisive results. Thus Fornasari made a detailed examination of sixty prostitutes belonging chiefly to Emilia and Venice, and also of twenty-seven others belonging to Bologna, the latter group being compared with a third group of twenty normal women belonging to Bologna (Archivio di Psichiatria, 1892, fasc. VI). The prostitutes were found to be of lower type than the normal individuals, having smaller heads and larger faces. As the author himself points out, his subjects were not sufficiently numerous to justify far-reaching generalizations, but it may be worth while to summarize some of his results. At equal heights the prostitutes showed greater weight; at equal ages they were of shorter stature than other women, not only of well-to-do, but of the poor class: height of face, bi-zygomatic diameter (though not the distance between zygomas), the distance from chin to external auditory meatus, and the size of the jaw were all greater in the prostitutes; the hands were longer and broader, compared to the palm, than in ordinary women; the foot also was longer in prostitutes, and the thigh, as compared to the calf, was larger. It is noteworthy that in most particulars, and especially in regard to head measurements, the variations were much greater among the prostitutes than among the other women examined; this is to some extent, though not entirely, to be accounted for by the slightly greater number of the former.

Ardu (in the same number of the Archivio) gave the result of observations (undertaken at Lombroso's suggestion) as to the frequency of abnormalities among prostitutes. The subjects were seventy-four in number and belonged to Professor Giovannini's Clinica Sifilopatica at Turin. The abnormalities investigated were virile distribution of hair on pubes, chest, and limbs, hypertrichosis on forehead, left-handedness, atrophy of nipple, and tattooing (which was only found once). Combining Ardu's observations with another series of observations on fifty-five prostitutes examined by Lombroso, it is found that virile disposition of hair is found in fifteen per cent. as against six per cent. in normal women; some degree of hypertrichosis in eighteen per cent.; left-handedness in eleven per cent. (but in normal women as high as twelve per cent. according to Gallia); and atrophy of nipple in twelve per cent.

Giuffrida-Ruggeri, again (Atti della, Società Romana di Antropologia, 1897, p. 216), on examining eighty-two prostitutes found anomalies in the following order of decreasing frequency: tendency of eyebrows to meet, lack of cranial symmetry, depression at root of nose, defective development of calves, hypertrichosis and other anomalies of hair, adherent or absent lobule, prominent zigoma, prominent forehead or frontal bones, bad implantation of teeth, Darwinian tubercle of ear, thin vertical lips. These signs are separately of little or no importance, though together not without significance as an indication of general anomaly.

More recently Ascarilla, in an elaborate study (Archivio di Psichiatria, 1906, fasc. VI, p. 812) of the finger prints of prostitutes, comes to the conclusion that even in this respect prostitutes tend to form a class showing morphological inferiority to normal women. The patterns tend to show unusual simplicity and uniformity, and the significance of this is indicated by the fact that a similar uniformity is shown by the finger prints of the insane and deaf-mutes (De Sanctis and Toscano, Atti Società Romana Antropologia, vol. viii, 1901, fasc. II).

In Chicago Dr. Harriet Alexander, in conjunction with Dr. E. S. Talbot and Dr. J. G. Kiernan, examined thirty prostitutes in the Bridewell, or House of Correction; only the "obtuse" class of professional prostitutes reach this institution, and it is not therefore surprising that they were found to exhibit very marked stigmata of degeneracy. In race nearly half of those examined were Celtic Irish. In sixteen the zygomatic processes were unequal and very prominent. Other facial asymmetries were common. In three cases the heads were of Mongoloid type; sixteen were epignathic, and eleven prognathic; five showed arrest of development of face. Brachycephaly predominated (seventeen cases); the rest were mesaticephalic; there were no dolichocephals. Abnormalities in shape of the skull were numerous, and twenty-nine had defective ears. Four were demonstrably insane, and one was an epileptic (H. C. B. Alexander, "Physical Abnormalities in Prostitutes," Chicago Academy of Medicine, April, 1893; E. S. Talbot, Degeneracy, p. 320; Id., Irregularities of the Teeth, fourth edition, p. 141).

It would seem, on the whole, so far as the evidence at present goes, that prostitutes are not quite normal representatives of the ranks into which they were born. There has been a process of selection of individuals who slightly deviate congenitally from the normal average and are, correspondingly, slightly inapt for normal life.[188] The psychic characteristics which accompany such deviation are not always necessarily of an obviously unfavorable nature; the slightly neurotic girl of low class birth—disinclined for hard work, through defective energy, and perhaps greedy and selfish—may even seem to possess a refinement superior to her station. While, however, there is a tendency to anomaly among prostitutes, it must be clearly recognized that that tendency remains slight so long as we consider impartially the whole class of prostitutes. Those investigators who have reached the conclusion that prostitutes are a highly degenerate and abnormal class have only observed special groups of prostitutes, more especially those who are frequently found in prison. It is not possible to form a just conception of prostitutes by studying them only in prison, any more than it would be possible to form a just conception of clergymen, doctors, or lawyers by studying them exclusively in prison, and this remains true even although a much larger proportion of prostitutes than of members of the more reputable professions pass through prisons; that fact no doubt partly indicates the greater abnormality of prostitutes.

It has, of course, to be remembered that the special conditions of the lives of prostitutes tend to cause in them the appearance of certain professional characteristics which are entirely acquired and not congenital. In that way we may account for the gradual modification of the feminine secondary and tertiary sexual characters, and the appearance of masculine characters, such as the frequent deep voice, etc.[189] But with all due allowance for these acquired characters, it remains true that such comparative investigations as have so far been made, although inconclusive, seem to indicate that, even apart from the prevalence of acquired anomalies, the professional selection of their avocation tends to separate out from the general population of the same social class, individuals who possess anthropometrical characters varying in a definite direction. The observations thus made seem, in this way, to indicate that prostitutes tend to be in weight over the average, though not in stature, that in length of arm they are inferior though the hands are longer (this has been found alike in Italy and Russia); they have smaller ankles and larger calves, and still larger thighs in proportion to their large calves. The estimated skull capacity and the skull circumference and diameters are somewhat below the normal, not only when compared with respectable women but also with thieves; there is a tendency to brachycephaly (both in Italy and Russia); the cheek-bones are usually prominent and the jaws developed; the hair is darker than in respectable women though less so than in thieves; it is also unusually abundant, not only on the head but also on the pudenda and elsewhere; the eyes have been found to be decidedly darker than those of either respectable women or criminals.[190]

So far as the evidence goes it serves to indicate that prostitutes tend to approximate to the type which, as was shown in the previous volume, there is reason to regard as specially indicative of developed sexuality. It is, however, unnecessary to discuss this question until our anthropometrical knowledge of prostitutes is more extended and precise.

3. The Moral Justification of Prostitution.—There are and always have been moralists—many of them people whose opinions are deserving of the most serious respect—who consider that, allowing for the need of improved hygienic conditions, the existence of prostitution presents no serious problem for solution. It is, at most, they say, a necessary evil, and, at best, a beneficent institution, the bulwark of the home, the inevitable reverse of which monogamy is the obverse. "The immoral guardian of public morality," is the definition of prostitutes given by one writer, who takes the humble view of the matter, and another, taking the loftier ground, writes: "The prostitute fulfils a social mission. She is the guardian of virginal modesty, the channel to carry off adulterous desire, the protector of matrons who fear late maternity; it is her part to act as the shield of the family." "Female Decii," said Balzac in his Physiologie du Mariage of prostitutes, "they sacrifice themselves for the republic and make of their bodies a rampart for the protection of respectable families." In the same way Schopenhauer called prostitutes "human sacrifices on the altar of monogamy." Lecky, again, in an oft-quoted passage of rhetoric,[191] may be said to combine both the higher and the lower view of the prostitute's mission in human society, to which he even seeks to give a hieratic character. "The supreme type of vice," he declared, "she is ultimately the most efficient guardian of virtue. But for her, the unchallenged purity of countless happy homes would be polluted, and not a few who, in the pride of their untempted chastity, think of her with an indignant shudder, would have known the agony of remorse and of despair. On that one degraded and ignoble form are concentrated the passions that might have filled the world with shame. She remains, while creeds and civilizations rise and fall, the eternal priestess of humanity, blasted for the sins of the people."[192]

I am not aware that the Greeks were greatly concerned with the moral justification of prostitution. They had not allowed it to assume very offensive forms and for the most part they were content to accept it. The Romans usually accepted it, too, but, we gather, not quite so easily. There was an austerely serious, almost Puritanic, spirit in the Romans of the old stock and they seem sometimes to have felt the need to assure themselves that prostitution really was morally justifiable. It is significant to note that they were accustomed to remember that Cato was said to have expressed satisfaction on seeing a man emerge from a brothel, for otherwise he might have gone to lie with his neighbor's wife.[193]

The social necessity of prostitution is the most ancient of all the arguments of moralists in favor of the toleration of prostitutes; and if we accept the eternal validity of the marriage system with which prostitution developed, and of the theoretical morality based on that system, this is an exceedingly forcible, if not an unanswerable, argument.

The advent of Christianity, with its special attitude towards the "flesh," necessarily caused an enormous increase of attention to the moral aspects of prostitution. When prostitution was not morally denounced, it became clearly necessary to morally justify it; it was impossible for a Church, whose ideals were more or less ascetic, to be benevolently indifferent in such a matter. As a rule we seem to find throughout that while the more independent and irresponsible divines take the side of denunciation, those theologians who have had thrust upon them the grave responsibilities of ecclesiastical statesmanship have rather tended towards the reluctant moral justification of prostitution. Of this we have an example of the first importance in St. Augustine, after St. Paul the chief builder of the Christian Church. In a treatise written in 386 to justify the Divine regulation of the world, we find him declaring that just as the executioner, however repulsive he may be, occupies a necessary place in society, so the prostitute and her like, however sordid and ugly and wicked they may be, are equally necessary; remove prostitutes from human affairs and you would pollute the world with lust: "Aufer meretrices de rebus humanis, turbaveris omnia libidinibus."[194] Aquinas, the only theological thinker of Christendom who can be named with Augustine, was of the same mind with him on this question of prostitution. He maintained the sinfulness of fornication but he accepted the necessity of prostitution as a beneficial part of the social structure, comparing it to the sewers which keep a palace pure.[195] "Prostitution in towns is like the sewer in a palace; take away the sewers and the palace becomes an impure and stinking place." Liguori, the most influential theologian of more modern times, was of the like opinion.

This wavering and semi-indulgent attitude towards prostitution was indeed generally maintained by theologians. Some, following Augustine and Aquinas, would permit prostitution for the avoidance of greater evils; others were altogether opposed to it; others, again, would allow it in towns but nowhere else. It was, however, universally held by theologians that the prostitute has a right to her wages, and is not obliged to make restitution.[196] The earlier Christian moralists found no difficulty in maintaining that there is no sin in renting a house to a prostitute for the purposes of her trade; absolution was always granted for this and abstention not required.[197] Fornication, however, always remained a sin, and from the twelfth century onwards the Church made a series of organized attempts to reclaim prostitutes. All Catholic theologians hold that a prostitute is bound to confess the sin of prostitution, and most, though not all, theologians have believed that a man also must confess intercourse with a prostitute. At the same time, while there was a certain indulgence to the prostitute herself, the Church was always very severe on those who lived on the profits of promoting prostitution, on the lenones. Thus the Council of Elvira, which was ready to receive without penance the prostitute who married, refused reconciliation, even at death, to persons who had been guilty of lenocinium.[198]

Protestantism, in this as in many other matters of sexual morality, having abandoned the confessional, was usually able to escape the necessity for any definite and responsible utterances concerning the moral status of prostitution. When it expressed any opinion, or sought to initiate any practical action, it naturally founded itself on the Biblical injunctions against fornication, as expressed by St. Paul, and showed no mercy for prostitutes and no toleration for prostitution. This attitude, which was that of the Puritans, was the more easy since in Protestant countries, with the exception of special districts at special periods—such as Geneva and New England in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries—theologians have in these matters been called upon to furnish religious exhortation rather than to carry out practical policies. The latter task they have left to others, and a certain confusion and uncertainty has thus often arisen in the lay Protestant mind. This attitude in a thoughtful and serious writer, is well illustrated in England by Burton, writing a century after the Reformation. He refers with mitigated approval to "our Pseudo-Catholics," who are severe with adultery but indulgent to fornication, being perhaps of Cato's mind that it should be encouraged to avoid worse mischiefs at home, and who holds brothels "as necessary as churches" and "have whole Colleges of Courtesans in their towns and cities." "They hold it impossible," he continues, "for idle persons, young, rich and lusty, so many servants, monks, friars, to live honest, too tyrannical a burden to compel them to be chaste, and most unfit to suffer poor men, younger brothers and soldiers at all to marry, as also diseased persons, votaries, priests, servants. Therefore as well to keep and ease the one as the other, they tolerate and wink at these kind of brothel-houses and stews. Many probable arguments they have to prove the lawfulness, the necessity, and a toleration of them, as of usery; and without question in policy they are not to be contradicted, but altogether in religion."[199]

It was not until the beginning of the following century that the ancient argument of St. Augustine for the moral justification of prostitution was boldly and decisively stated in Protestant England, by Bernard Mandeville in his Fable of the Bees, and at its first promulgation it seemed so offensive to the public mind that the book was suppressed. "If courtesans and strumpets were to be prosecuted with as much rigor as some silly people would have it," Mandeville wrote, "what locks or bars would be sufficient to preserve the honor of our wives and daughters?... It is manifest that there is a necessity of sacrificing one part of womankind to preserve the other, and prevent a filthiness of a more heinous nature. From whence I think I may justly conclude that chastity may be supported by incontinence, and the best of virtues want the assistance of the worst of vices."[200] After Mandeville's time this view of prostitution began to become common in Protestant as well as in other countries, though it was not usually so clearly expressed.

It may be of interest to gather together a few more modern examples of statements brought forward for the moral justification of prostitution.

Thus in France Meusnier de Querlon, in his story of Psaphion, written in the middle of the eighteenth century, puts into the mouth of a Greek courtesan many interesting reflections concerning the life and position of the prostitute. She defends her profession with much skill, and argues that while men imagine that prostitutes are merely the despised victims of their pleasures, these would-be tyrants are really dupes who are ministering to the needs of the women they trample beneath their feet, and themselves equally deserve the contempt they bestow. "We return disgust for disgust, as they must surely perceive. We often abandon to them merely a statue, and while inflamed by their own desires they consume themselves on insensible charms, our tranquil coldness leisurely enjoys their sensibility. Then it is we resume all our rights. A little hot blood has brought these proud creatures to our feet, and rendered us mistresses of their fate. On which side, I ask, is the advantage?" But all men, she adds, are not so unjust towards the prostitute, and she proceeds to pronounce a eulogy, not without a slight touch of irony in it, of the utility, facility, and convenience of the brothel.

A large number of the modern writers on prostitution insist on its socially beneficial character. Thus Charles Richard concludes his book on the subject with the words: "The conduct of society with regard to prostitution must proceed from the principle of gratitude without false shame for its utility, and compassion for the poor creatures at whose expense this is attained" (La Prostitution devant le Philosophe, 1882, p. 171). "To make marriage permanent is to make it difficult," an American medical writer observes; "to make it difficult is to defer it; to defer it is to maintain in the community an increasing number of sexually perfect individuals, with normal, or, in cases where repression is prolonged, excessive sexual appetites. The social evil is the natural outcome of the physical nature of man, his inherited impulses, and the artificial conditions under which he is compelled to live" ("The Social Evil," Medicine, August and September, 1906). Woods Hutchinson, while speaking with strong disapproval of prostitution and regarding prostitutes as "the worst specimens of the sex," yet regards prostitution as a social agency of the highest value. "From a medico-economic point of view I venture to claim it as one of the grand selective and eliminative agencies of nature, and of highest value to the community. It may be roughly characterized as a safety valve for the institution of marriage" (The Gospel According to Darwin, p. 193; cf. the same author's article on "The Economics of Prostitution," summarized in Boston Medical and Surgical Journal, November 21, 1895). Adolf Gerson, in a somewhat similar spirit, argues ("Die Ursache der Prostitution," Sexual-Probleme, September, 1908) that "prostitution is one of the means used by Nature to limit the procreative activity of men, and especially to postpone the period of sexual maturity." Molinari considers that the social benefits of prostitution have been manifested in various ways from the first; by sterilizing, for instance, the more excessive manifestations of the sexual impulse prostitution suppressed the necessity for the infanticide of superfluous children, and led to the prohibition of that primitive method of limiting the population (G. de Molinari, La Viriculture, p. 45). In quite another way than that mentioned by Molinari, prostitution has even in very recent times led to the abandonment of infanticide. In the Chinese province of Ping-Yang, Matignon states, it was usual not many years ago for poor parents to kill forty per cent. of the girl children, or even all of them, at birth, for they were too expensive to rear and brought nothing in, since men who wished to marry could easily obtain a wife in the neighboring province of Wenchu, where women were very easy to obtain. Now, however, the line of steamships along the coast makes it very easy for girls to reach the brothels of Shang-Hai, where they can earn money for their families; the custom of killing them has therefore died out (Matignon, Archives d'Anthropologie Criminelle, 1896, p. 72). "Under present conditions," writes Dr. F. Erhard ("Auch ein Wort zur Ehereform," Geschlecht und Gesellschaft, Jahrgang I, Heft 9), "prostitution (in the broadest sense, including free relationships) is necessary in order that young men may, in some degree, learn to know women, for conventional conversation cannot suffice for this; an exact knowledge of feminine thought and action is, however, necessary for a proper choice, since it is seldom possible to rely on the certainty of instinct. It is good also that men should wear off their horns before marriage, for the polygamous tendency will break through somewhere. Prostitution will only spoil those men in whom there is not much to spoil, and if the desire for marriage is thus lost, the man's unbegotten children may have cause to thank him." Neisser, Näcke, and many others, have pleaded for prostitution, and even for brothels, as "necessary evils."

It is scarcely necessary to add that many, among even the strongest upholders of the moral advantages of prostitution, believe that some improvement in method is still desirable. Thus Bérault looks forward to a time when regulated brothels will become less contemptible. Various improvements may, he thinks, in the near future, "deprive them of the barbarous attributes which mark them out for the opprobrium of the skeptical or ignorant multitude, while their recognizable advantages will put an end to the contempt aroused by their cynical aspect" (La Maison de Tolérance, Thèse de Paris, 1904).

4. The Civilizational Value of Prostitution.—The moral argument for prostitution is based on the belief that our marriage system is so infinitely precious that an institution which serves as its buttress must be kept in existence, however ugly or otherwise objectionable it may in itself be. There is, however, another argument in support of prostitution which scarcely receives the emphasis it deserves. I refer to its influence in adding an element, in some form or another necessary, of gaiety and variety to the ordered complexity of modern life, a relief from the monotony of its mechanical routine, a distraction from its dull and respectable monotony. This is distinct from the more specific function of prostitution as an outlet for superfluous sexual energy, and may even affect those who have little or no commerce with prostitutes. This element may be said to constitute the civilizational value of prostitution.

It is not merely the general conditions of civilization, but more specifically the conditions of urban life, which make this factor insistent. Urban life imposes by the stress of competition a very severe and exacting routine of dull work. At the same time it makes men and women more sensitive to new impressions, more enamored of excitement and change. It multiplies the opportunities of social intercourse; it decreases the chances of detection of illegitimate intercourse while at the same time it makes marriage more difficult, for, by heightening social ambitions and increasing the expenses of living, it postpones the time when a home can be created. Urban life delays marriage and yet renders the substitutes for marriage more imperative.[201]

There cannot be the slightest doubt that it is this motive—the effort to supplement the imperfect opportunities for self-development offered by our restrained, mechanical, and laborious civilization—which plays one of the chief parts in inducing women to adopt, temporarily or permanently, a prostitute's life. We have seen that the economic factor is not, as was once supposed, by any means predominant in this choice. Nor, again, is there any reason to suppose that an over-mastering sexual impulse is a leading factor. But a large number of young women turn instinctively to a life of prostitution because they are moved by an obscure impulse which they can scarcely define to themselves or express, and are often ashamed to confess. It is, therefore, surprising that this motive should find so large a place even in the formal statistics of the factors of prostitution. Merrick, in London, found that 5000, or nearly a third, of the prostitutes he investigated, voluntarily gave up home or situation "for a life of pleasure," and he puts this at the head of the causes of prostitution.[202] In America Sanger found that "inclination" came almost at the head of the causes of prostitution, while Woods Hutchinson found "love of display, luxury and idleness" by far at the head. "Disgusted and wearied with work" is the reason assigned by a large number of Belgian girls when stating to the police their wish to be enrolled as prostitutes. In Italy a similar motive is estimated to play an important part. In Russia "desire for amusement" comes second among the causes of prostitution. There can, I think, be little doubt that, as a thoughtful student of London life has concluded, the problem of prostitution is "at bottom a mad and irresistible craving for excitement, a serious and wilful revolt against the monotony of commonplace ideals, and the uninspired drudgery of everyday life."[203] It is this factor of prostitution, we may reasonably conclude, which is mainly responsible for the fact, pointed out by F. Schiller,[204] that with the development of civilization the supply of prostitutes tends to outgrow the demand.

Charles Booth seems to be of the same opinion, and quotes (Life and Labor of the People, Third Series, vol. vii, p. 364) from a Rescue Committee Report: "The popular idea is, that these women are eager to leave a life of sin. The plain and simple truth is that, for the most part, they have no desire at all to be rescued. So many of these women do not, and will not, regard prostitution as a sin. 'I am taken out to dinner and to some place of amusement every night; why should I give it up?'" Merrick, who found that five per cent. of 14,000 prostitutes who passed through Millbank Prison, were accustomed to combine religious observance with the practice of their profession, also remarks in regard to their feelings about morality: "I am convinced that there are many poor men and women who do not in the least understand what is implied in the term 'immorality.' Out of courtesy to you, they may assent to what you say, but they do not comprehend your meaning when you talk of virtue or purity; you are simply talking over their heads" (Merrick, op. cit., p. 28). The same attitude may be found among prostitutes everywhere. In Italy Ferriani mentions a girl of fifteen who, when accused of indecency with a man in a public garden, denied with tears and much indignation. He finally induced her to confess, and then asked her: "Why did you try to make me believe you were a good girl?" She hesitated, smiled, and said: "Because they say girls ought not to do what I do, but ought to work. But I am what I am, and it is no concern of theirs." This attitude is often more than an instinctive feeling; in intelligent prostitutes it frequently becomes a reasoned conviction. "I can bear everything, if so it must be," wrote the author of the Tagebuch einer Verlorenen (p. 291), "even serious and honorable contempt, but I cannot bear scorn. Contempt—yes, if it is justified. If a poor and pretty girl with sick and bitter heart stands alone in life, cast off, with temptations and seductions offering on every side, and, in spite of that, out of inner conviction she chooses the grey and monotonous path of renunciation and middle-class morality, I recognize in that girl a personality, who has a certain justification in looking down with contemptuous pity on weaker girls. But those geese who, under the eyes of their shepherds and life-long owners, have always been pastured in smooth green fields, have certainly no right to laugh scornfully at others who have not been so fortunate." Nor must it be supposed that there is necessarily any sophistry in the prostitute's justification of herself. Some of our best thinkers and observers have reached a conclusion that is not dissimilar. "The actual conditions of society are opposed to any high moral feeling in women," Marro observes (La Pubertà, p. 462), "for between those who sell themselves to prostitution and those who sell themselves to marriage, the only difference is in price and duration of the contract."

We have already seen how very large a part in prostitution is furnished by those who have left domestic service to adopt this life (ante p. 264). It is not difficult to find in this fact evidence of the kind of impulse which impels a woman to adopt the career of prostitution. "The servant, in our society of equality," wrote Goncourt, recalling somewhat earlier days when she was often admitted to a place in the family life, "has become nothing but a paid pariah, a machine for doing household work, and is no longer allowed to share the employer's human life."[205] And in England, even half a century ago, we already find the same statements concerning the servant's position: "domestic service is a complete slavery," with early hours and late hours, and constant running up and down stairs till her legs are swollen; "an amount of ingenuity appears too often to be exercised, worthy of a better cause, in obtaining the largest possible amount of labor out of the domestic machine"; in addition she is "a kind of lightning conductor," to receive the ill-temper and morbid feelings of her mistress and the young ladies; so that, as some have said, "I felt so miserable I did not care what became of me, I wished I was dead."[206] The servant is deprived of all human relationships; she must not betray the existence of any simple impulse, or natural need. At the same time she lives on the fringe of luxury; she is surrounded by the tantalizing visions of pleasure and amusement for which her fresh young nature craves.[207] It is not surprising that, repelled by unrelieved drudgery and attracted by idle luxury, she should take the plunge which will alone enable her to enjoy the glittering aspects of civilization which seem so desirable to her.[208]

It is sometimes stated that the prevalence of prostitution among girls who were formerly servants is due to the immense numbers of servants who are seduced by their masters or the young men of the family, and are thus forced on to the streets. Undoubtedly in a certain proportion of cases, perhaps sometimes a fairly considerable proportion, this is a decisive factor in the matter, but it scarcely seems to be the chief factor. The existence of relationships between servants and masters, it must be remembered, by no means necessarily implies seduction. In a large number of cases the servant in a household is, in sexual matters, the teacher rather than the pupil. (In "The Sexual Impulse in Women," in the third volume of these Studies, I have discussed the part played by servants as sexual initiators of the young boys in the households in which they are placed.) The more precise statistics of the causes of prostitution seldom assign seduction as the main determining factor in more than about twenty per cent. of cases, though this is obviously one of the most easily avowable motives (see ante, p. 256). Seduction by any kind of employer constitutes only a proportion (usually less than half) even of these cases. The special case of seduction of servants by masters can thus play no very considerable part as a factor of prostitution.

The statistics of the parentage of illegitimate children have some bearing on this question. In a series of 180 unmarried mothers assisted by the Berlin Bund für Mutterschutz, particulars are given of the occupations both of the mothers, and, as far as possible, of the fathers. The former were one-third servant-girls, and the great majority of the remainder assistants in trades or girls carrying on work at home. At the head of the fathers (among 120 cases) came artisans (33), followed by tradespeople (22); only a small proportion (20 to 25) could be described as "gentlemen," and even this proportion loses some of its significance when it is pointed out that some of the girls were also of the middle-class; in nineteen cases the fathers were married men (Mutterschutz, January, 1907, p. 45).

Most authorities in most countries are of opinion that girls who eventually (usually between the ages of fifteen and twenty) become prostitutes have lost their virginity at an early age, and in the great majority of cases through men of their own class. "The girl of the people falls by the people," stated Reuss in France (La Prostitution, p. 41). "It is her like, workers like herself, who have the first fruits of her beauty and virginity. The man of the world who covers her with gold and jewels only has their leavings." Martineau, again (De la Prostitution Clandestine, 1885), showed that prostitutes are usually deflowered by men of their own class. And Jeannel, in Bordeaux, found reason for believing that it is not chiefly their masters who lead servants astray; they often go into service because they have been seduced in the country, while lazy, greedy, and unintelligent girls are sent from the country into the town to service. In Edinburgh, W. Tait (Magdalenism, 1842) found that soldiers more than any other class in the community are the seducers of women, the Highlanders being especially notorious in this respect. Soldiers have this reputation everywhere, and in Germany especially it is constantly found that the presence of the soldiery in a country district, as at the annual manœuvres, is the cause of unchastity and illegitimate births; it is so also in Austria, where, long ago, Gross-Hoffinger stated that soldiers were responsible for at least a third of all illegitimate births, a share out of all proportion to their numbers. In Italy, Marro, investigating the occasion of the loss of virginity in twenty-two prostitutes, found that ten gave themselves more or less spontaneously to lovers or masters, ten yielded in the expectation of marriage, and two were outraged (La Pubertà, p. 461). The loss of virginity, Marro adds, though it may not be the direct cause of prostitution, often leads on to it. "When a door has once been broken in," a prostitute said to him, "it is difficult to keep it closed." In Sardinia, as A. Mantegazza and Ciuffo found, prostitutes are very largely servants from the country who have already been deflowered by men of their own class.

This civilizational factor of prostitution, the influence of luxury and excitement and refinement in attracting the girl of the people, as the flame attracts the moth, is indicated by the fact that it is the country-dwellers who chiefly succumb to the fascination. The girls whose adolescent explosive and orgiastic impulses, sometimes increased by a slight congenital lack of nervous balance, have been latent in the dull monotony of country life and heightened by the spectacle of luxury acting on the unrelieved drudgery of town life, find at last their complete gratification in the career of a prostitute. To the town girl, born and bred in the town, this career has not usually much attraction, unless she has been brought up from the first in an environment that predisposes her to adopt it. She is familiar from childhood with the excitements of urban civilization and they do not intoxicate her; she is, moreover, more shrewd to take care of herself than the country girl, and too well acquainted with the real facts of the prostitute's life to be very anxious to adopt her career. Beyond this, also, it is probable that the stocks she belongs to possess a native or acquired power of resistance to unbalancing influences which has enabled them to survive in urban life. She has become immune to the poisons of that life.[209]

In all great cities a large proportion, if not the majority, of the inhabitants have usually been born outside the city (in London only about fifty per cent. of heads of households are definitely reported as born in London); and it is not therefore surprising that prostitutes also should often be outsiders. Still it remains a significant fact that so typically urban a phenomenon as prostitution should be so largely recruited from the country. This is everywhere the case. Merrick enumerates the regions from which came some 14,000 prostitutes who passed through Millbank Prison. Middlesex, Kent, Surrey, Essex and Devon are the counties that stand at the head, and Merrick estimates that the contingent of London from the four counties which make up London was 7000, or one-half of the whole; military towns like Colchester and naval ports like Plymouth supply many prostitutes to London; Ireland furnished many more than Scotland, and Germany far more than any other European country, France being scarcely represented at all (Merrick, Work Among the Fallen, 1890, pp. 14-18). It is, of course, possible that the proportions among those who pass through a prison do not accurately represent the proportions among prostitutes generally. The registers of the London Salvation Army Rescue Home show that sixty per cent. of the girls and women come from the provinces (A. Sherwell, Life in West London, Ch. V). This is exactly the same proportion as Tait found among prostitutes generally, half a century earlier, in Edinburgh. Sanger found that of 2000 prostitutes in New York as many as 1238 were born abroad (706 in Ireland), while of the remaining 762 only half were born in the State of New York, and clearly (though the exact figures are not given) a still smaller proportion in New York City. Prostitutes come from the North—where the climate is uncongenial, and manufacturing and sedentary occupations prevail—much more than from the South; thus Maine, a cold bleak maritime State, sent twenty-four of these prostitutes to New York, while equidistant Virginia, which at the same rate should have sent seventy-two, only sent nine; there was a similar difference between Rhode Island and Maryland (Sanger, History of Prostitution, p. 452). It is instructive to see here the influence of a dreary climate and monotonous labor in stimulating the appetite for a "life of pleasure." In France, as shown by a map in Parent-Duchâtelet's work (vol. i, pp. 37-64, 1857), if the country is divided into five zones, on the whole running east and west, there is a steady and progressive decrease in the number of prostitutes each zone sends to Paris, as we descend southwards. Little more than a third seem to belong to Paris, and, as in America, it is the serious and hard-working North, with its relatively cold climate, which furnishes the largest contingent; even in old France, Dufour remarks (op. cit., vol. iv, Ch. XV), prostitution, as the fabliaux and romans show, was less infamous in the langue d'oil than in the langue d'oc, so that they were doubtless rare in the South. At a later period Reuss states (La Prostitution, p. 12) that "nearly all the prostitutes of Paris come from the provinces." Jeannel found that of one thousand Bordeaux prostitutes only forty-six belonged to the city itself, and Potton (Appendix to Parent-Duchâtelet, vol. ii, p. 446) states that of nearly four thousand Lyons prostitutes only 376 belonged to Lyons. In Vienna, in 1873, Schrank remarks that of over 1500 prostitutes only 615 were born in Vienna. The general rule, it will be seen, though the variations are wide, is that little more than a third of a city's prostitutes are children of the city.

It is interesting to note that this tendency of the prostitute to reach cities from afar, this migratory tendency—which they nowadays share with waiters—is no merely modern phenomenon. "There are few cities in Lombardy, or France, or Gaul," wrote St. Boniface nearly twelve centuries ago, "in which there is not an adulteress or prostitute of the English nation," and the Saint attributes this to the custom of going on pilgrimage to foreign shrines. At the present time there is no marked English element among Continental prostitutes. Thus in Paris, according to Reuss (La Prostitution, p. 12), the foreign prostitutes in decreasing order are Belgian, German (Alsace-Lorraine), Swiss (especially Geneva), Italian, Spanish, and only then English. Connoisseurs in this matter say, indeed, that the English prostitute, as compared with her Continental (and especially French) sister, fails to show to advantage, being usually grasping as regards money and deficient in charm.

It is the appeal of civilization, though not of what is finest and best in civilization, which more than any other motive, calls women to the career of a prostitute. It is now necessary to point out that for the man also, the same appeal makes itself felt in the person of the prostitute. The common and ignorant assumption that prostitution exists to satisfy the gross sensuality of the young unmarried man, and that if he is taught to bridle gross sexual impulse or induced to marry early the prostitute must be idle, is altogether incorrect. If all men married when quite young, not only would the remedy be worse than the disease—a point which it would be out of place to discuss here—but the remedy would not cure the disease. The prostitute is something more than a channel to drain off superfluous sexual energy, and her attraction by no means ceases when men are married, for a large number of the men who visit prostitutes, if not the majority, are married. And alike whether they are married or unmarried the motive is not one of uncomplicated lust.

In England, a well-informed writer remarks that "the value of marriage as a moral agent is evidenced by the fact that all the better-class prostitutes in London are almost entirely supported by married men," while in Germany, as stated in the interesting series of reminiscences by a former prostitute, Hedwig Hard's Beichte einer Gefallenen, (p. 208), the majority of the men who visit prostitutes are married. The estimate is probably excessive. Neisser states that only twenty-five per cent. of cases of gonorrhœa occur in married men. This indication is probably misleading in the opposite direction, as the married would be less reckless than the young and unmarried. As regards the motives which lead married men to prostitutes, Hedwig Hard narrates from her own experiences an incident which is instructive and no doubt typical. In the town in which she lived quietly as a prostitute a man of the best social class was introduced by a friend, and visited her habitually. She had often seen and admired his wife, who was one of the beauties of the place, and had two charming children; husband and wife seemed devoted to each other, and every one envied their happiness. He was a man of intellect and culture who encouraged Hedwig's love of books; she became greatly attached to him, and one day ventured to ask him how he could leave his lovely and charming wife to come to one who was not worthy to tie her shoe-lace. "Yes, my child," he answered, "but all her beauty and culture brings nothing to my heart. She is cold, cold as ice, proper, and, above all, phlegmatic. Pampered and spoilt, she lives only for herself; we are two good comrades, and nothing more. If, for instance, I come back from the club in the evening and go to her bed, perhaps a little excited, she becomes nervous and she thinks it improper to wake her. If I kiss her she defends herself, and tells me that I smell horribly of cigars and wine. And if perhaps I attempt more, she jumps out of bed, bristles up as though I were assaulting her, and threatens to throw herself out of the window if I touch her. So, for the sake of peace, I leave her alone and come to you." There can be no doubt whatever that this is the experience of many married men who would be well content to find the sweetheart as well as the friend in their wives. But the wives, from a variety of causes, have proved incapable of becoming the sexual mates of their husbands. And the husbands, without being carried away by any impulse of strong passion or any desire for infidelity, seek abroad what they cannot find at home.

This is not the only reason why married men visit prostitutes. Even men who are happily married to women in all chief respects fitted to them, are apt to find, after some years of married life, a mysterious craving for variety. They are not tired of their wives, they have not the least wish or intention to abandon them, they will not, if they can help it, give them the slightest pain. But from time to time they are led by an almost irresistible and involuntary impulse to seek a temporary intimacy with women to whom nothing would persuade them to join themselves permanently. Pepys, whose Diary, in addition to its other claims upon us, is a psychological document of unique importance, furnishes a very characteristic example of this kind of impulse. He had married a young and charming wife, to whom he is greatly attached, and he lives happily with her, save for a few occasional domestic quarrels soon healed by kisses; his love is witnessed by his jealousy, a jealousy which, as he admits, is quite unreasonable, for she is a faithful and devoted wife. Yet a few years after marriage, and in the midst of a life of strenuous official activity, Pepys cannot resist the temptation to seek the temporary favors of other women, seldom prostitutes, but nearly always women of low social class—shop women, workmen's wives, superior servant-girls. Often he is content to invite them to a quiet ale-house, and to take a few trivial liberties. Sometimes they absolutely refuse to allow more than this; when that happens he frequently thanks Almighty God (as he makes his entry in his Diary at night) that he has been saved from temptation and from loss of time and money; in any case, he is apt to vow that it shall never occur again. It always does occur again. Pepys is quite sincere with himself; he makes no attempt at justification or excuse; he knows that he has yielded to a temptation; it is an impulse that comes over him at intervals, an impulse that he seems unable long to resist. Throughout it all he remains an estimable and diligent official, and in most respects a tolerably virtuous man, with a genuine dislike of loose people and loose talk. The attitude of Pepys is brought out with incomparable simplicity and sincerity because he is setting down these things for his own eyes only, but his case is substantially that of a vast number of other men, perhaps indeed of the typical homme moyen sensuel (see Pepys, Diary, ed. Wheatley; e.g., vol. iv, passim).

There is a third class of married men, less considerable in number but not unimportant, who are impelled to visit prostitutes: the class of sexually perverted men. There are a great many reasons why such men may desire to be married, and in some cases they marry women with whom they find it possible to obtain the particular form of sexual gratification they crave. But in a large proportion of cases this is not possible. The conventionally bred woman often cannot bring herself to humor even some quite innocent fetishistic whim of her husband's, for it is too alien to her feelings and too incomprehensible to her ideas, even though she may be genuinely in love with him; in many cases the husband would not venture to ask, and scarcely even wish, that his wife should lend herself to play the fantastic or possibly degrading part his desires demand. In such a case he turns naturally to the prostitute, the only woman whose business it is to fulfil his peculiar needs. Marriage has brought no relief to these men, and they constitute a noteworthy proportion of a prostitute's clients in every great city. The most ordinary prostitute of any experience can supply cases from among her own visitors to illustrate a treatise of psychopathic sexuality. It may suffice here to quote a passage from the confessions of a young London (Strand) prostitute as written down from her lips by a friend to whom I am indebted for the document; I have merely turned a few colloquial terms into more technical forms. After describing how, when she was still a child of thirteen in the country, a rich old gentleman would frequently come and exhibit himself before her and other girls, and was eventually arrested and imprisoned, she spoke of the perversities she had met with since she had become a prostitute. She knew a young man, about twenty-five, generally dressed in a sporting style, who always came with a pair of live pigeons, which he brought in a basket. She and the girl with whom she lived had to undress and take the pigeons and wring their necks; he would stand in front of them, and as the necks were wrung orgasm occurred. Once a man met her in the street and asked her if he might come with her and lick her boots. She agreed, and he took her to a hotel, paid half a guinea for a room, and, when she sat down, got under the table and licked her boots, which were covered with mud; he did nothing more. Then there were some things, she said, that were too dirty to repeat; well, one man came home with her and her friend and made them urinate into his mouth. She also had stories of flagellation, generally of men who whipped the girls, more rarely of men who liked to be whipped by them. One man, who brought a new birch every time, liked to whip her friend until he drew blood. She knew another man who would do nothing but smack her nates violently. Now all these things, which come into the ordinary day's work of the prostitute, are rooted in deep and almost irresistible impulses (as will be clear to any reader of the discussion of Erotic Symbolism in the previous volume of these Studies). They must find some outlet. But it is only the prostitute who can be relied upon, through her interests and training, to overcome the natural repulsion to such actions, and gratify desires which, without gratification, might take on other and more dangerous forms.

Although Woods Hutchinson quotes with approval the declaration of a friend, "Out of thousands I have never seen one with good table manners," there is still a real sense in which the prostitute represents, however inadequately, the attraction of civilization. "There was no house in which I could habitually see a lady's face and hear a lady's voice," wrote the novelist Anthony Trollope in his Autobiography, concerning his early life in London. "No allurement to decent respectability came in my way. It seems to me that in such circumstances the temptations of loose life will almost certainly prevail with a young man. The temptation at any rate prevailed with me." In every great city, it has been said, there are thousands of men who have no right to call any woman but a barmaid by her Christian name.[210] All the brilliant fever of civilization pulses round them in the streets but their lips never touch it. It is the prostitute who incarnates this fascination of the city, far better than the virginal woman, even if intimacy with her were within reach. The prostitute represents it because she herself feels it, because she has even sacrificed her woman's honor in the effort to identify herself with it. She has unbridled feminine instincts, she is a mistress of the feminine arts of adornment, she can speak to him concerning the mysteries of womanhood and the luxuries of sex with an immediate freedom and knowledge the innocent maiden cloistered in her home would be incapable of. She appeals to him by no means only because she can gratify the lower desires of sex, but also because she is, in her way, an artist, an expert in the art of feminine exploitation, a leader of feminine fashions. For she is this, and there are, as Simmel has stated in his Philosophie der Mode, good psychological reasons why she always should be this. Her uncertain social position makes all that is conventional and established hateful to her, while her temperament makes perpetual novelty delightful. In new fashions she finds "an æsthetic form of that instinct of destruction which seems peculiar to all pariah existences, in so far as they are not completely enslaved in spirit."

"However surprising it may seem to some," a modern writer remarks, "prostitutes must be put on the same level as artists. Both use their gifts and talents for the joy and pleasure of others, and, as a rule, for payment. What is the essential difference between a singer who gives pleasure to hearers by her throat and a prostitute who gives pleasure to those who seek her by another part of her body? All art works on the senses." He refers to the significant fact that actors, and especially actresses, were formerly regarded much as prostitutes are now (R. Hellmann, Ueber Geschlechtsfreiheit, pp. 245-252).

Bernaldo de Quirós and Llanas Aguilaniedo (La Mala Vida en Madrid, p. 242) trace the same influence still lower in the social scale. They are describing the more squalid kind of café chantant, in which, in Spain and elsewhere, the most vicious and degenerate feminine creatures become waitresses (and occasionally singers and dancers), playing the part of amiable and distinguished hetairæ to the public of carmen and shop-boys who frequent these resorts. "Dressed with what seems to the youth irreproachable taste, with hair elaborately prepared, and clean face adorned with flowers or trinkets, affable and at times haughty, superior in charm and in finery to the other women he is able to know, the waitresses become the most elevated example of the femme galante whom he is able to contemplate and talk to, the courtesan of his sphere."

But while to the simple, ignorant, and hungry youth the prostitute appeals as the embodiment of many of the refinements and perversities of civilization, on many more complex and civilized men she exerts an attraction of an almost reverse kind. She appeals by her fresh and natural coarseness, her frank familiarity with the crudest facts of life; and so lifts them for a moment out of the withering atmosphere of artificial thought and unreal sentiment in which so many civilized persons are compelled to spend the greater part of their lives. They feel in the words which the royal friend of a woman of this temperament is said to have used in explaining her incomprehensible influence over him: "She is so splendidly vulgar!"

In illustration of this aspect of the appeal of prostitution, I may quote a passage in which the novelist, Hermant, in his Confession d'un Enfant d'Hier (Lettre VII), has set down the reasons which may lead the super-refined child of a cultured age, yet by no means radically or completely vicious, to find satisfaction in commerce with prostitutes: "As long as my heart was not touched the object of my satisfaction was completely indifferent to me. I was, moreover, a great lover of absolute liberty, which is only possible in the circle of these anonymous creatures and in their reserved dwelling. There everything became permissible. With other women, however low we may seek them, certain convenances must be observed, a kind of protocol. To these one can say everything: one is protected by incognito and assured that nothing will be divulged. I profited by this freedom, which suited my age, but with a perverse fancy which was not characteristic of my years. I scarcely know where I found what I said to them, for it was the opposite of my tastes, which were simple, and, if I may venture to say so, classic. It is true that, in matters of love, unrestrained naturalism always tends to perversion, a fact that can only seem paradoxical at first sight. Primitive peoples have many traits in common with degenerates. It was, however, only in words that I was unbridled; and that was the only occasion on which I can recollect seriously lying. But that necessity, which I then experienced, of expelling a lower depth of ignoble instincts, seems to me characteristic and humiliating. I may add that even in the midst of these dissipations I retained a certain reserve. The contacts to which I exposed myself failed to soil me; nothing was left when I had crossed the threshold. I have always retained, from that forcible and indifferent commerce, the habit of attributing no consequence to the action of the flesh. The amorous function, which religion and morality have surrounded with mystery or seasoned with sin, seems to me a function like any other, a little vile, but agreeable, and one to which the usual epilogue is too long.... This kind of companionship only lasted for a short time." This analysis of the attitude of a certain common type of civilized modern man seems to be just, but it may perhaps occur to some readers that a commerce which led to "the action of the flesh" being regarded as of no consequence can scarcely be said to have left no taint.

In a somewhat similar manner, Henri de Régnier, in his novel, Les Rencontres de Monsieur Bréot (p. 50), represents Bercaillé as deliberately preferring to take his pleasures with servant-girls rather than with ladies, for pleasure was, to his mind, a kind of service, which could well be accommodated with the services they are accustomed to give; and then they are robust and agreeable, they possess the naïveté which is always charming in the common people, and they are not apt to be repelled by those little accidents which might offend the fastidious sensibilities of delicately bred ladies.

Bloch, who has especially emphasized this side of the appeal of prostitution (Das Sexualleben unserer Zeit, pp. 359-362), refers to the delicate and sensitive young Danish writer, J. P. Jakobsen, who seems to have acutely felt the contrast between the higher and more habitual impulses, and the occasional outburst of what he felt to be lower instincts; in his Niels Lyhne he describes the kind of double life in which a man is true for a fortnight to the god he worships, and is then overcome by other powers which madly bear him in their grip towards what he feels to be humiliating, perverse, and filthy. "At such moments," Bloch remarks, "the man is another being. The 'two souls' in the breast become a reality. Is that the famous scholar, the lofty idealist, the fine-souled æsthetician, the artist who has given us so many splendid and pure works in poetry and painting? We no longer recognize him, for at such moments another being has come to the surface, another nature is moving within him, and with the power of an elementary force is impelling him towards things at which his 'upper consciousness,' the civilized man within him, would shudder." Bloch believes that we are here concerned with a kind of normal masculine masochism, which prostitution serves to gratify.

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