CHAPTER VII.
PROSTITUTION.
I. The Orgy:—The Religious Origin of the Orgy—The Feast of
Fools—Recognition of the Orgy by the Greeks and Romans—The Orgy Among
Savages—The Drama—The Object Subserved by the Orgy.
II. The Origin and Development of Prostitution:—The Definition of
Prostitution—Prostitution Among Savages—The Conditions Under Which
Professional Prostitution Arises—Sacred Prostitution—The Rite of
Mylitta—The Practice of Prostitution to Obtain a Marriage Portion—The
Rise of Secular Prostitution in Greece—Prostitution in the East—India,
China, Japan, etc.—Prostitution in Rome—The Influence of Christianity on
Prostitution—The Effort to Combat Prostitution—The Mediæval Brothel—The
Appearance of the Courtesan—Tullia D'Aragona—Veronica Franco—Ninon de
Lenclos—Later Attempts to Eradicate Prostitution—The Regulation of
Prostitution—Its Futility Becoming Recognized.
III. The Causes of Prostitution:—Prostitution as a Part of the Marriage
System—The Complex Causation of Prostitution—The Motives Assigned by
Prostitutes—(1) Economic Factor of Prostitution—Poverty Seldom the Chief
Motive for Prostitution—But Economic Pressure Exerts a Real
Influence—The Large Proportion of Prostitutes Recruited from Domestic
Service—Significance of This Fact—(2) The Biological Factor of
Prostitution—The So-called Born-Prostitute—Alleged Identity with the
Born-Criminal—The Sexual Instinct in Prostitutes—The Physical and
Psychic Characters of Prostitutes—(3) Moral Necessity as a Factor in the
Existence of Prostitution—The Moral Advocates of Prostitution—The
Moral Attitude of Christianity Towards Prostitution—The Attitude
of Protestantism—Recent Advocates of the Moral Necessity
of Prostitution—(4) Civilizational Value as a Factor of
Prostitution—The Influence of Urban Life—The Craving for Excitement—Why
Servant-girls so Often Turn to Prostitution—The Small Part Played by
Seduction—Prostitutes Come Largely from the Country—The Appeal of
Civilization Attracts Women to Prostitution—The Corresponding Attraction
Felt by Men—The Prostitute as Artist and Leader of Fashion—The Charm of
Vulgarity.
IV. The Present Social Attitude Towards Prostitution:—The Decay of the
Brothel—The Tendency to the Humanization of Prostitution—The Monetary
Aspects of Prostitution—The Geisha—The Hetaira—The Moral Revolt
Against Prostitution—Squalid Vice Based on Luxurious Virtue—The Ordinary
Attitude Towards Prostitutes—Its Cruelty Absurd—The Need of Reforming
Prostitution—The Need of Reforming Marriage—These These Two Needs
Closely Correlated—The Dynamic Relationships Involved.
I. The Orgy.
Traditional morality, religion, and established convention combine to
promote not only the extreme of rigid abstinence but also that of reckless
license. They preach and idealize the one extreme; they drive those who
cannot accept it to adopt the opposite extreme. In the great ages of
religion it even happens that the severity of the rule of abstinence is
more or less deliberately tempered by the permission for occasional
outbursts of license. We thus have the orgy, which flourished in mediæval
days and is, indeed, in its largest sense, a universal manifestation,
having a function to fulfil in every orderly and laborious civilization,
built up on natural energies that are bound by more or less inevitable
restraints.
The consideration of the orgy, it may be said, lifts us beyond the merely
sexual sphere, into a higher and wider region which belongs to religion.
The Greek orgeia referred originally to ritual things done with a
religious purpose, though later, when dances of Bacchanals and the like
lost their sacred and inspiring character, the idea was fostered by
Christianity that such things were immoral.[107] Yet Christianity was
itself in its origin an orgy of the higher spiritual activities released
from the uncongenial servitude of classic civilization, a great festival
of the poor and the humble, of the slave and the sinner. And when, with
the necessity for orderly social organization, Christianity had ceased to
be this it still recognized, as Paganism had done, the need for an
occasional orgy. It appears that in 743 at a Synod held in Hainault
reference was made to the February debauch (de Spurcalibus in februario)
as a pagan practice; yet it was precisely this pagan festival which was
embodied in the accepted customs of the Christian Church as the chief orgy
of the ecclesiastical year, the great Carnival prefixed to the long fast
of Lent. The celebration on Shrove Tuesday and the previous Sunday
constituted a Christian Bacchanalian festival in which all classes joined.
The greatest freedom and activity of physical movement was encouraged;
"some go about naked without shame, some crawl on all fours, some on
stilts, some imitate animals."[108] As time went on the Carnival lost its
most strongly marked Bacchanalian features, but it still retains its
essential character as a permitted and temporary relaxation of the tension
of customary restraints and conventions. The Mediæval Feast of Fools—a
New Year's Revel well established by the twelfth century, mainly in
France—presented an expressive picture of a Christian orgy in its extreme
form, for here the most sacred ceremonies of the Church became the subject
of fantastic parody. The Church, according to Nietzsche's saying, like all
wise legislators, recognized that where great impulses and habits have to
be cultivated, intercalary days must be appointed in which these impulses
and habits may be denied, and so learn to hunger anew.[109] The clergy
took the leading part in these folk-festivals, for to the men of that age,
as Méray remarks, "the temple offered the complete notes of the human
gamut; they found there the teaching of all duties, the consolation of all
sorrows, the satisfaction of all joys. The sacred festivals of mediæval
Christianity were not a survival from Roman times; they leapt from the
very heart of Christian society."[110] But, as Méray admits, all great and
vigorous peoples, of the East and the West, have found it necessary
sometimes to play with their sacred things.
Among the Greeks and Romans this need is everywhere visible, not only in
their comedy and their literature generally, but in everyday life. As
Nietzsche truly remarks (in his Geburt der Tragödie) the Greeks
recognized all natural impulses, even those that are seemingly unworthy,
and safeguarded them from working mischief by providing channels into
which, on special days and in special rites, the surplus of wild energy
might harmlessly flow. Plutarch, the last and most influential of the
Greek moralists, well says, when advocating festivals (in his essay "On
the Training of Children"), that "even in bows and harps we loosen their
strings that we may bend and wind them up again." Seneca, perhaps the most
influential of Roman if not of European moralists, even recommended
occasional drunkenness. "Sometimes," he wrote in his De Tranquillilate,
"we ought to come even to the point of intoxication, not for the purpose
of drowning ourselves but of sinking ourselves deep in wine. For it washes
away cares and raises our spirits from the lowest depths. The inventor of
wine is called Liber because he frees the soul from the servitude of
care, releases it from slavery, quickens it, and makes it bolder for all
undertakings." The Romans were a sterner and more serious people than the
Greeks, but on that very account they recognized the necessity of
occasionally relaxing their moral fibres in order to preserve their tone,
and encouraged the prevalence of festivals which were marked by much more
abandonment than those of Greece. When these festivals began to lose
their moral sanction and to fall into decay the decadence of Rome had
begun.
All over the world, and not excepting the most primitive savages—for even
savage life is built up on systematic constraints which sometimes need
relaxation—the principle of the orgy is recognized and accepted. Thus
Spencer and Gillen describe[111] the Nathagura or fire-ceremony of the
Warramunga tribe of Central Australia, a festival taken part in by both
sexes, in which all the ordinary rules of social life are broken, a kind
of Saturnalia in which, however, there is no sexual license, for sexual
license is, it need scarcely be said, no essential part of the orgy, even
when the orgy lightens the burden of sexual constraints. In a widely
different part of the world, in British Columbia, the Salish Indians,
according to Hill Tout,[112] believed that, long before the whites came,
their ancestors observed a Sabbath or seventh day ceremony for dancing and
praying, assembling at sunrise and dancing till noon. The Sabbath, or
periodically recurring orgy,—not a day of tension and constraint but a
festival of joy, a rest from all the duties of everyday life,—has, as we
know, formed an essential part of many of the orderly ancient
civilizations on which our own has been built;[113] it is highly probable
that the stability of these ancient civilizations was intimately
associated with their recognition of the need of a Sabbath orgy. Such
festivals are, indeed, as Crawley observes, processes of purification and
reinvigoration, the effort to put off "the old man" and put on "the new
man," to enter with fresh energy on the path of everyday life.[114]
The orgy is an institution which by no means has its significance only for
the past. On the contrary, the high tension, the rigid routine, the gray
monotony of modern life insistently call for moments of organic relief,
though the precise form that that orgiastic relief takes must necessarily
change with other social changes. As Wilhelm von Humboldt said, "just as
men need suffering in order to become strong so they need joy in order to
become good." Charles Wagner, insisting more recently (in his Jeunesse)
on the same need of joy in our modern life, regrets that dancing in the
old, free, and natural manner has gone out of fashion or become
unwholesome. Dancing is indeed the most fundamental and primitive form of
the orgy, and that which most completely and healthfully fulfils its
object. For while it is undoubtedly, as we see even among animals, a
process by which sexual tumescence is accomplished,[115] it by no means
necessarily becomes focused in sexual detumescence but it may itself
become a detumescent discharge of accumulated energy. It was on this
account that, at all events in former days, the clergy in Spain, on moral
grounds, openly encouraged the national passion for dancing. Among
cultured people in modern times, the orgy tends to take on a purely
cerebral form, which is less wholesome because it fails to lead to
harmonious discharge along motor channels. In these comparatively passive
forms, however, the orgy tends to become more and more pronounced under
the conditions of civilization. Aristotle's famous statement concerning
the function of tragedy as "purgation" seems to be a recognition of the
beneficial effects of the orgy.[116] Wagner's music-dramas appeal
powerfully to this need; the theatre, now as ever, fulfils a great
function of the same kind, inherited from the ancient days when it was the
ordered expression of a sexual festival.[117] The theatre, indeed, tends
at the present time to assume a larger importance and to approximate to
the more serious dramatic performances of classic days by being
transferred to the day-time and the open-air. France has especially taken
the initiative in these performances, analogous to the Dionysiac festivals
of antiquity and the Mysteries and Moralities of the Middle Ages. The
movement began some years ago at Orange. In 1907 there were, in France, as
many as thirty open-air theatres ("Théâtres de la Nature," "Théâtres du
Soleil," etc.,) while it is in Marseilles that the first formal open-air
theatre has been erected since classic days.[118] In England, likewise,
there has been a great extension of popular interest in dramatic
performances, and the newly instituted Pageants, carried out and taken
part in by the population of the region commemorated in the Pageant, are
festivals of the same character. In England, however, at the present time,
the real popular orgiastic festivals are the Bank holidays, with which may
be associated the more occasional celebrations, "Maffekings," etc., often
called out by comparatively insignificant national events but still
adequate to arouse orgiastic emotions as genuine as those of antiquity,
though they are lacking in beauty and religious consecration. It is easy
indeed for the narrowly austere person to view such manifestations with a
supercilious smile, but in the eyes of the moralist and the philosopher
these orgiastic festivals exert a salutary and preservative function. In
every age of dull and monotonous routine—and all civilization involves
such routine—many natural impulses and functions tend to become
suppressed, atrophied, or perverted. They need these moments of joyous
exercise and expression, moments in which they may not necessarily attain
their full activity but in which they will at all events be able, as
Cyples expresses it, to rehearse their great possibilities.[119]
II. The Origin and Development of Prostitution.
The more refined forms of the orgy flourish in civilization, although on
account of their mainly cerebral character they are not the most
beneficent or the most effective. The more primitive and muscular forms of
the orgy tend, on the other hand, under the influence of civilization, to
fall into discredit and to be so far as possible suppressed altogether. It
is partly in this way that civilization encourages prostitution. For the
orgy in its primitive forms, forbidden to show itself openly and
reputably, seeks the darkness, and allying itself with a fundamental
instinct to which civilized society offers no complete legitimate
satisfaction, it firmly entrenches itself in the very centre of civilized
life, and thereby constitutes a problem of immense difficulty and
importance.[120]
It is commonly said that prostitution has existed always and everywhere.
That statement is far from correct. A kind of amateur prostitution is
occasionally found among savages, but usually it is only when barbarism is
fully developed and is already approaching the stage of civilization that
well developed prostitution is found. It exists in a systematic form in
every civilization.
What is prostitution? There has been considerable discussion as to the
correct definition of prostitution.[121] The Roman Ulpian said that a
prostitute was one who openly abandons her body to a number of men without
choice, for money.[122] Not all modern definitions have been so
satisfactory. It is sometimes said a prostitute is a woman who gives
herself to numerous men. To be sound, however, a definition must be
applicable to both sexes alike and we should certainly hesitate to
describe a man who had sexual intercourse with many women as a prostitute.
The idea of venality, the intention to sell the favors of the body, is
essential to the conception of prostitution. Thus Guyot defines a
prostitute as "any person for whom sexual relationships are subordinated
to gain."[123] It is not, however, adequate to define a prostitute simply
as a woman who sells her body. That is done every day by women who become
wives in order to gain a home and a livelihood, yet, immoral as this
conduct may be from any high ethical standpoint, it would be inconvenient
and even misleading to call it prostitution.[124] It is better, therefore,
to define a prostitute as a woman who temporarily sells her sexual favors
to various persons. Thus, according to Wharton's Law-lexicon a
prostitute is "a woman who indiscriminately consorts with men for hire";
Bonger states that "those women are prostitutes who sell their bodies for
the exercise of sexual acts and make of this a profession";[125] Richard
again states that "a prostitute is a woman who publicly gives herself to
the first comer in return for a pecuniary remuneration."[126] As, finally,
the prevalence of homosexuality has led to the existence of male
prostitutes, the definition must be put in a form irrespective of sex, and
we may, therefore, say that a prostitute is a person who makes it a
profession to gratify the lust of various persons of the opposite sex or
the same sex.
It is essential that the act of prostitution should be habitually
performed with "various persons." A woman who gains her living by
being mistress to a man, to whom she is faithful, is not a
prostitute, although she often becomes one afterwards, and may
have been one before. The exact point at which a woman begins to
be a prostitute is a question of considerable importance in
countries in which prostitutes are subject to registration. Thus
in Berlin, not long ago, a girl who was mistress to a rich
cavalry officer and supported by him, during the illness of the
officer accidentally met a man whom she had formerly known, and
once or twice invited him to see her, receiving from him presents
in money. This somehow came to the knowledge of the police, and
she was arrested and sentenced to one day's imprisonment as an
unregistered prostitute. On appeal, however, the sentence was
annulled. Liszt, in his Strafrecht, lays it down that a girl
who obtains whole or part of her income from "fixed
relationships" is not practicing unchastity for gain in the sense
of the German law (Geschlecht und Gesellschaft, Jahrgang 1,
Heft 9, p. 345).
It is not altogether easy to explain the origin of the systematized
professional prostitution with the existence of which we are familiar in
civilization. The amateur kind of prostitution which has sometimes been
noted among primitive peoples—the fact, that is, that a man may give a
woman a present in seeking to persuade her to allow him to have
intercourse with her—is really not prostitution as we understand it. The
present in such a case is merely part of a kind of courtship leading to a
temporary relationship. The woman more or less retains her social position
and is not forced to make an avocation of selling herself because
henceforth no other career is possible to her. When Cook came to New
Zealand his men found that the women were not impregnable, "but the terms
and manner of compliance were as decent as those in marriage among us,"
and according "to their notions the agreement was as innocent." The
consent of the woman's friends was necessary, and when the preliminaries
were settled it was also necessary to treat this "Juliet of a night" with
"the same delicacy as is here required with the wife for life, and the
lover who presumed to take any liberties by which this was violated was
sure to be disappointed."[127] In some of the Melanesian Islands, it is
said that women would sometimes become prostitutes, or on account of their
bad conduct be forced to become prostitutes for a time; they were not,
however, particularly despised, and when they had in this way accumulated
a certain amount of property they could marry well, after which it would
not be proper to refer to their former career.[128]
When prostitution first arises among a primitive people it sometimes
happens that little or no stigma is attached to it for the reason that the
community has not yet become accustomed to attach any special value to the
presence of virginity. Schurtz quotes from the old Arabic geographer
Al-Bekri some interesting remarks about the Slavs: "The women of the
Slavs, after they have married, are faithful to their husbands. If,
however, a young girl falls in love with a man she goes to him and
satisfies her passion. And if a man marries and finds his wife a virgin he
says to her: 'If you were worth anything men would have loved you, and you
would have chosen one who would have taken away your virginity.' Then he
drives her away and renounces her." It is a feeling of this kind which,
among some peoples, leads a girl to be proud of the presents she has
received from her lovers and to preserve them as a dowry for her marriage,
knowing that her value will thus be still further heightened. Even among
the Southern Slavs of modern Europe, who have preserved much of the
primitive sexual freedom, this freedom, as Krauss, who has minutely
studied the manners and customs of these peoples, declares, is
fundamentally different from vice, licentiousness, or immodesty.[129]
Prostitution tends to arise, as Schurtz has pointed out, in every society
in which early marriage is difficult and intercourse outside marriage is
socially disapproved. "Venal women everywhere appear as soon as the free
sexual intercourse of young people is repressed, without the necessary
consequences being impeded by unusually early marriages."[130] The
repression of sexual intimacies outside marriage is a phenomenon of
civilization, but it is not itself by any means a measure of a people's
general level, and may, therefore, begin to appear at an early period. But
it is important to remember that the primitive and rudimentary forms of
prostitution, when they occur, are merely temporary, and
frequently—though not invariably—involve no degrading influence on the
woman in public estimation, sometimes indeed increasing her value as a
wife. The woman who sells herself for money purely as a professional
matter, without any thought of love or passion, and who, by virtue of her
profession, belongs to a pariah class definitely and rigidly excluded from
the main body of her sex, is a phenomenon which can seldom be found except
in developed civilization. It is altogether incorrect to speak of
prostitutes as a mere survival from primitive times.
On the whole, while among savages sexual relationships are sometimes free
before marriage, as well as on the occasion of special festivals, they are
rarely truly promiscuous and still more rarely venal. When savage women
nowadays sell themselves, or are sold by their husbands, it has usually
been found that we are concerned with the contamination of European
civilization.
The definite ways in which professional prostitution may arise are no
doubt many.[131] We may assent to the general principle, laid down by
Schurtz, that whenever the free union of young people is impeded under
conditions in which early marriage is also difficult prostitution must
certainly arise. There are, however, different ways in which this
principle may take shape. So far as our western civilization is
concerned—the civilization, that is to say, which has its cradle in the
Mediterranean basin—it would seem that the origin of prostitution is to
be found primarily in a religious custom, religion, the great conserver of
social traditions, preserving in a transformed shape a primitive freedom
that was passing out of general social life.[132] The typical example is
that recorded by Herodotus, in the fifth century before Christ, at the
temple of Mylitta, the Babylonian Venus, where every woman once in her
life had to come and give herself to the first stranger who threw a coin
in her lap, in worship of the goddess. The money could not be refused,
however small the amount, but it was given as an offertory to the temple,
and the woman, having followed the man and thus made oblation to Mylitta,
returned home and lived chastely ever afterwards.[133] Very similar
customs existed in other parts of Western Asia, in North Africa, in Cyprus
and other islands of the Eastern Mediterranean, and also in Greece, where
the Temple of Aphrodite on the fort at Corinth possessed over a thousand
hierodules, dedicated to the service of the goddess, from time to time, as
Strabo states, by those who desired to make thank-offering for mercies
vouchsafed to them. Pindar refers to the hospitable young Corinthian women
ministrants whose thoughts often turn towards Ourania Aphrodite[134] in
whose temple they burned incense; and Athenæus mentions the importance
that was attached to the prayers of the Corinthian prostitutes in any
national calamity.[135]
We seem here to be in the presence, not merely of a religiously preserved
survival of a greater sexual freedom formerly existing,[136] but of a
specialized and ritualized development of that primitive cult of the
generative forces of Nature which involves the belief that all natural
fruitfulness is associated with, and promoted by, acts of human sexual
intercourse which thus acquire a religious significance. At a later stage
acts of sexual intercourse having a religious significance become
specialized and localized in temples, and by a rational transition of
ideas it becomes believed that such acts of sexual intercourse in the
service of the god, or with persons devoted to the god's service, brought
benefits to the individual who performed them, more especially, if a
woman, by insuring her fertility. Among primitive peoples generally this
conception is embodied mainly in seasonal festivals, but among the peoples
of Western Asia who had ceased to be primitive, and among whom traditional
priestly and hieratic influences had acquired very great influence, the
earlier generative cult had thus, it seems probable, naturally changed
its form in becoming attached to the temples.[137]
The theory that religious prostitution developed, as a general
rule, out of the belief that the generative activity of human
beings possessed a mysterious and sacred influence in promoting
the fertility of Nature generally seems to have been first set
forth by Mannhardt in his Antike Wald- und Feldkulte (pp. 283
et seq.). It is supported by Dr. F. S. Krauss
("Beischlafausübung als Kulthandlung," Anthropophyteia, vol.
iii, p. 20), who refers to the significant fact that in Baruch's
time, at a period long anterior to Herodotus, sacred prostitution
took place under the trees. Dr. J. G. Frazer has more especially
developed this conception of the origin of sacred prostitution in
his Adonis, Attis, Osiris. He thus summarizes his lengthy
discussion: "We may conclude that a great Mother Goddess, the
personification of all the reproductive energies of nature, was
worshipped under different names, but with a substantial
similarity of myth and ritual by many peoples of western Asia;
that associated with her was a lover, or rather series of lovers,
divine yet mortal, with whom she mated year by year, their
commerce being deemed essential to the propagation of animals and
plants, each in their several kind; and further, that the
fabulous union of the divine pair was simulated, and, as it were,
multiplied on earth by the real, though temporary, union of the
human sexes at the sanctuary of the goddess for the sake of
thereby ensuring the fruitfulness of the ground and the increase
of man and beast. In course of time, as the institution of
individual marriage grew in favor, and the old communism fell
more and more into discredit, the revival of the ancient
practice, even for a single occasion in a woman's life, became
ever more repugnant to the moral sense of the people, and
accordingly they resorted to various expedients for evading in
practice the obligation which they still acknowledged in
theory.... But while the majority of women thus contrived to
observe the form of religion without sacrificing their virtue, it
was still thought necessary to the general welfare that a certain
number of them should discharge the old obligation in the old
way. These became prostitutes, either for life or for a term of
years, at one of the temples: dedicated to the service of
religion, they were invested with a sacred character, and their
vocation, far from being deemed infamous, was probably long
regarded by the laity as an exercise of more than common virtue,
and rewarded with a tribute of mixed wonder, reverence, and pity,
not unlike that which in some parts of the world is still paid to
women who seek to honor their Creator in a different way by
renouncing the natural functions of their sex and the tenderest
relations of humanity" (J. G. Frazer, Adonis, Attis, Osiris,
1907, pp. 23 et seq.).
It is difficult to resist the conclusion that this theory
represents the central and primitive idea which led to the
development of sacred prostitution. It seems equally clear,
however, that as time went on, and especially as temple cults
developed and priestly influence increased, this fundamental and
primitive idea tended to become modified, and even transformed.
The primitive conception became specialized in the belief that
religious benefits, and especially the gift of fruitfulness, were
gained by the worshipper, who thus sought the goddess's favor
by an act of unchastity which might be presumed to be agreeable
to an unchaste deity. The rite of Mylitta, as described by
Herodotus, was a late development of this kind in an ancient
civilization, and the benefit sought was evidently for the
worshipper herself. This has been pointed out by Dr. Westermarck,
who remarks that the words spoken to the woman by her partner as
he gives her the coin—"May the goddess be auspicious to
thee!"—themselves indicate that the object of the act was to
insure her fertility, and he refers also to the fact that
strangers frequently had a semi-supernatural character, and their
benefits a specially efficacious character (Westermarck, Origin
and Development of the Moral Ideas, vol. ii, p. 446). It may be
added that the rite of Mylitta thus became analogous with another
Mediterranean rite, in which the act of simulating intercourse
with the representative of a god, or his image, ensured a woman's
fertility. This is the rite practiced by the Egyptians of Mendes,
in which a woman went through the ceremony of simulated
intercourse with the sacred goat, regarded as the representative
of a deity of Pan-like character (Herodotus, Bk. ii, Ch. XLVI;
and see Dulaure, Des Divinités Génératrices, Ch. II; cf. vol.
v of these Studies, "Erotic Symbolism," Sect. IV). This rite
was maintained by Roman women, in connection with the statues of
Priapus, to a very much later date, and St. Augustine mentions
how Roman matrons placed the young bride on the erect member of
Priapus (De Civitate Dei, Bk. iii, Ch. IX). The idea evidently
running through this whole group of phenomena is that the deity,
or the representative or even mere image of the deity, is able,
through a real or simulated act of intercourse, to confer on the
worshipper a portion of its own exalted generative activity.
At a later period, in Corinth, prostitutes were still the priestesses of
Venus, more or less loosely attached to her temples, and so long as that
was the case they enjoyed a considerable degree of esteem. At this stage,
however, we realize that religious prostitution was developing a
utilitarian side. These temples flourished chiefly in sea-coast towns, in
islands, in large cities to which many strangers and sailors came. The
priestesses of Cyprus burnt incense on her altars and invoked her sacred
aid, but at the same time Pindar addresses them as "young girls who
welcome all strangers and give them hospitality." Side by side with the
religious significance of the act of generation the needs of men far from
home were already beginning to be definitely recognized. The Babylonian
woman had gone to the temple of Mylitta to fulfil a personal religious
duty; the Corinthian priestess had begun to act as an avowed minister to
the sexual needs of men in strange cities.
The custom which Herodotus noted in Lydia of young girls prostituting
themselves in order to acquire a marriage portion which they may dispose
of as they think fit (Bk. I, Ch. 93) may very well have developed (as
Frazer also believes) out of religious prostitution; we can indeed trace
its evolution in Cyprus where eventually, at the period when Justinian
visited the island, the money given by strangers to the women was no
longer placed on the altar but put into a chest to form marriage-portions
for them. It is a custom to be found in Japan and various other parts of
the world, notably among the Ouled-Nail of Algeria,[138] and is not
necessarily always based on religious prostitution; but it obviously
cannot exist except among peoples who see nothing very derogatory in free
sexual intercourse for the purpose of obtaining money, so that the custom
of Mylitta furnished a natural basis for it.[139]
As a more spiritual conception of religion developed, and as the growth of
civilization tended to deprive sexual intercourse of its sacred halo,
religious prostitution in Greece was slowly abolished, though on the
coasts of Asia Minor both religious prostitution and prostitution for the
purpose of obtaining a marriage portion persisted to the time of
Constantine, who put an end to these ancient customs.[140] Superstition
was on the side of the old religious prostitution; it was believed that
women who had never sacrificed to Aphrodite became consumed by lust, and
according to the legend recorded by Ovid—a legend which seems to point to
a certain antagonism between sacred and secular prostitution—this was the
case with the women who first became public prostitutes. The decay of
religious prostitution, doubtless combined with the cravings always born
of the growth of civilization, led up to the first establishment,
attributed by legend to Solon, of a public brothel, a purely secular
establishment for a purely secular end: the safeguarding of the virtue of
the general population and the increase of the public revenue. With that
institution the evolution of prostitution, and of the modern marriage
system of which it forms part, was completed. The Athenian dikterion is
the modern brothel; the dikteriade is the modern state-regulated
prostitute. The free hetairæ, indeed, subsequently arose, educated women
having no taint of the dikterion, but they likewise had no official part
in public worship.[141] The primitive conception of the sanctity of sexual
intercourse in the divine service had been utterly lost.
A fairly typical example of the conditions existing among savages
is to be found in the South Sea Island of Rotuma, where
"prostitution for money or gifts was quite unknown." Adultery
after marriage was also unknown. But there was great freedom in
the formation of sexual relationships before marriage (J. Stanley
Gardiner, Journal Anthropological Institute, February, 1898, p.
409). Much the same is said of the Bantu Ba mbola of Africa (op.
cit., July-December, 1905, p. 410).
Among the early Cymri of Wales, representing a more advanced
social stage, prostitution appears to have been not absolutely
unknown, but public prostitution was punished by loss of valuable
privileges (R. B. Holt, "Marriage Laws and Customs of the Cymri,"
Journal Anthropological Institute, August-November, 1898, pp.
161-163).
Prostitution was practically unknown in Burmah, and regarded as
shameful before the coming of the English and the example of the
modern Hindus. The missionaries have unintentionally, but
inevitably, favored the growth of prostitution by condemning free
unions (Archives d'Anthropologie Criminelle, November, 1903, p.
720). The English brought prostitution to India. "That was not
specially the fault of the English," said a Brahmin to Jules
Bois, "it is the crime of your civilization. We have never had
prostitutes. I mean by that horrible word the brutalized servants
of the gross desire of the passerby. We had, and we have, castes
of singers and dancers who are married to trees—yes, to
trees—by touching ceremonies which date from Vedic times; our
priests bless them and receive much money from them. They do not
refuse themselves to those who love them and please them. Kings
have made them rich. They represent all the arts; they are the
visible beauty of the universe" (Jules Bois, Visions de l'Inde,
p. 55).
Religious prostitutes, it may be added, "the servants of the
god," are connected with temples in Southern India and the
Deccan. They are devoted to their sacred calling from their
earliest years, and it is their chief business to dance before
the image of the god, to whom they are married (though in Upper
India professional dancing girls are married to inanimate
objects), but they are also trained in arousing and assuaging the
desires of devotees who come on pilgrimage to the shrine. For the
betrothal rites by which, in India, sacred prostitutes are
consecrated, see, e.g., A. Van Gennep, Rites de Passage, p.
142.
In many parts of Western Asia, where barbarism had reached a high
stage of development, prostitution was not unknown, though
usually disapproved. The Hebrews knew it, and the historical
Biblical references to prostitutes imply little reprobation.
Jephtha was the son of a prostitute, brought up with the
legitimate children, and the story of Tamar is instructive. But
the legal codes were extremely severe on Jewish maidens who
became prostitutes (the offense was quite tolerable in strange
women), while Hebrew moralists exercised their invectives against
prostitution; it is sufficient to refer to a well-known passage
in the Book of Proverbs (see art. "Harlot," by Cheyne, in the
Encyclopædia Biblica). Mahomed also severely condemned
prostitution, though somewhat more tolerant to it in slave
women; according to Haleby, however, prostitution was practically
unknown in Islam during the first centuries after the Prophet's
time.
The Persian adherents of the somewhat ascetic Zendavesta also
knew prostitution, and regarded it with repulsion: "It is the
Gahi [the courtesan, as an incarnation of the female demon,
Gahi], O Spitama Zarathustra! who mixes in her the seed of the
faithful and the unfaithful, of the worshipper of Mazda and the
worshipper of the Dævas, of the wicked and the righteous. Her
look dries up one-third of the mighty floods that run from the
mountains, O Zarathustra; her look withers one-third of the
beautiful, golden-hued, growing plants, O Zarathustra; her look
withers one-third of the strength of Spenta Armaiti [the earth];
and her touch withers in the faithful one-third of his good
thoughts, of his good words, of his good deeds, one-third of his
strength, of his victorious power, of his holiness. Verily I say
unto thee, O Spitama Zarathustra! such creatures ought to be
killed even more than gliding snakes, than howling wolves, than
the she-wolf that falls upon the fold, or than the she-frog that
falls upon the waters with her thousandfold brood" (Zend-Avesta,
the Vendidad, translated by James Darmesteter, Farfad XVIII).
In practice, however, prostitution is well established in the
modern East. Thus in the Tartar-Turcoman region houses of
prostitution lying outside the paths frequented by Christians
have been described by a writer who appears to be well informed
("Orientalische Prostitution," Geschlecht und Gesellschaft,
1907, Bd. ii, Heft 1). These houses are not regarded as immoral
or forbidden, but as places in which the visitor will find a
woman who gives him for a few hours the illusion of being in his
own home, with the pleasure of enjoying her songs, dances, and
recitations, and finally her body. Payment is made at the door,
and no subsequent question of money arises; the visitor is
henceforth among friends, almost as if in his own family. He
treats the prostitute almost as if she were his wife, and no
indecorum or coarseness of speech occurs. "There is no obscenity
in the Oriental brothel." At the same time there is no artificial
pretence of innocence.
In Eastern Asia, among the peoples of Mongolian stock, especially
in China, we find prostitution firmly established and organized
on a practical business basis. Prostitution is here accepted and
viewed with no serious disfavor, but the prostitute herself is,
nevertheless, treated with contempt. Young children are
frequently sold to be trained to a life of prostitution, educated
accordingly, and kept shut up from the world. Young widows
(remarriage being disapproved) frequently also slide into a life
of prostitution. Chinese prostitutes often end through opium and
the ravages of syphilis (see, e.g., Coltman's The Chinese,
1900, Ch. VII). In ancient China, it is said prostitutes were a
superior class and occupied a position somewhat similar to that
of the hetairæ in Greece. Even in modern China, however, where
they are very numerous, and the flower boats, in which in towns
by the sea they usually live, very luxurious, it is chiefly for
entertainment, according to some writers, that they are resorted
to. Tschang Ki Tong, military attaché in Paris (as quoted by
Ploss and Bartels), describes the flower boat as less analogous
to a European brothel than to a café chantant; the young
Chinaman comes here for music, for tea, for agreeable
conversation with the flower-maidens, who are by no means
necessarily called upon to minister to the lust of their
visitors.
In Japan, the prostitute's lot is not so degraded as in China.
The greater refinement of Japanese civilization allows the
prostitute to retain a higher degree of self-respect. She is
sometimes regarded with pity, but less often with contempt. She
may associate openly with men, ultimately be married, even to men
of good social class, and rank as a respectable woman. "In riding
from Tokio to Yokohama, the past winter," Coltman observes (op.
cit., p. 113), "I saw a party of four young men and three quite
pretty and gaily-painted prostitutes, in the same car, who were
having a glorious time. They had two or three bottles of various
liquors, oranges, and fancy cakes, and they ate, drank and sang,
besides playing jokes on each other and frolicking like so many
kittens. You may travel the whole length of the Chinese Empire
and never witness such a scene." Yet the history of Japanese
prostitutes (which has been written in an interesting and
well-informed book, The Nightless City, by an English student
of sociology who remains anonymous) shows that prostitution in
Japan has not only been severely regulated, but very widely
looked down upon, and that Japanese prostitutes have often had to
suffer greatly; they were at one time practically slaves and
often treated with much hardship. They are free now, and any
condition approaching slavery is strictly prohibited and guarded
against. It would seem, however, that the palmiest days of
Japanese prostitution lay some centuries back. Up to the middle
of the eighteenth century Japanese prostitutes were highly
accomplished in singing, dancing, music, etc. Towards this
period, however, they seem to have declined in social
consideration and to have ceased to be well educated. Yet even
to-day, says Matignon ("La Prostitution au Japon," Archives
d'Anthropologie Criminelle, October, 1906), less infamy attaches
to prostitution in Japan than in Europe, while at the same time
there is less immorality in Japan than in Europe. Though
prostitution is organized like the postal or telegraph service,
there is also much clandestine prostitution. The prostitution
quarters are clean, beautiful and well-kept, but the Japanese
prostitutes have lost much of their native good taste in costume
by trying to imitate European fashions. It was when prostitution
began to decline two centuries ago, that the geishas first
appeared and were organized in such a way that they should not,
if possible, compete as prostitutes with the recognized and
licensed inhabitants of the Yoshiwara, as the quarter is called
to which prostitutes are confined. The geishas, of course, are
not prostitutes, though their virtue may not always be
impregnable, and in social position they correspond to actresses
in Europe.
In Korea, at all events before Korea fell into the hands of the
Japanese, it would seem that there was no distinction between the
class of dancing girls and prostitutes. "Among the courtesans,"
Angus Hamilton states, "the mental abilities are trained and
developed with a view to making them brilliant and entertaining
companions. These 'leaves of sunlight' are called gisaing, and
correspond to the geishas of Japan. Officially, they are attached
to a department of government, and are controlled by a bureau of
their own, in common with the Court musicians. They are supported
from the national treasury, and they are in evidence at official
dinners and all palace entertainments. They read and recite; they
dance and sing; they become accomplished artists and musicians.
They dress with exceptional taste; they move with exceeding
grace; they are delicate in appearance, very frail and very
human, very tender, sympathetic, and imaginative." But though
they are certainly the prettiest women in Korea, move in the
highest society, and might become concubines of the Emperor, they
are not allowed to marry men of good class (Angus Hamilton,
Korea, p. 52).
The history of European prostitution, as of so many other modern
institutions, may properly be said to begin in Rome. Here at the outset we
already find that inconsistently mixed attitude towards prostitution which
to-day is still preserved. In Greece it was in many respects different.
Greece was nearer to the days of religious prostitution, and the sincerity
and refinement of Greek civilization made it possible for the better kind
of prostitute to exert, and often be worthy to exert, an influence in all
departments of life which she has never been able to exercise since,
except perhaps occasionally, in a much slighter degree, in France. The
course, vigorous, practical Roman was quite ready to tolerate the
prostitute, but he was not prepared to carry that toleration to its
logical results; he never felt bound to harmonize inconsistent facts of
life. Cicero, a moralist of no mean order, without expressing approval of
prostitution, yet could not understand how anyone should wish to prohibit
youths from commerce with prostitutes, such severity being out of harmony
with all the customs of the past or the present.[142] But the superior
class of Roman prostitutes, the bonæ mulieres, had no such dignified
position as the Greek hetairæ. Their influence was indeed immense, but
it was confined, as it is in the case of their European successors to-day,
to fashions, customs, and arts. There was always a certain moral rigidity
in the Roman which prevented him from yielding far in this direction. He
encouraged brothels, but he only entered them with covered head and face
concealed in his cloak. In the same way, while he tolerated the
prostitute, beyond a certain point he sharply curtailed her privileges.
Not only was she deprived of all influence in the higher concerns of life,
but she might not even wear the vitta or the stola; she could indeed
go almost naked if she pleased, but she must not ape the emblems of the
respectable Roman matron.[143]
The rise of Christianity to political power produced on the whole less
change of policy than might have been anticipated. The Christian rulers
had to deal practically as best they might with a very mixed, turbulent,
and semi-pagan world. The leading fathers of the Church were inclined to
tolerate prostitution for the avoidance of greater evils, and Christian
emperors, like their pagan predecessors, were willing to derive a tax from
prostitution. The right of prostitution to exist was, however, no longer
so unquestionably recognized as in pagan days, and from time to time some
vigorous ruler sought to repress prostitution by severe enactments. The
younger Theodosius and Valentinian definitely ordained that there should
be no more brothels and that anyone giving shelter to a prostitute should
be punished. Justinian confirmed that measure and ordered that all panders
were to be exiled on pain of death. These enactments were quite vain. But
during a thousand years they were repeated again and again in various
parts of Europe, and invariably with the same fruitless or worse than
fruitless results. Theodoric, king of the Visigoths, punished with death
those who promoted prostitution, and Recared, a Catholic king of the same
people in the sixth century, prohibited prostitution altogether and
ordered that a prostitute, when found, should receive three hundred
strokes of the whip and be driven out of the city. Charlemagne, as well as
Genserich in Carthage, and later Frederick Barbarossa in Germany, made
severe laws against prostitution which were all of no effect, for even if
they seemed to be effective for the time the reaction was all the greater
afterwards.[144]
It is in France that the most persistent efforts have been made to combat
prostitution. Most notable of all were the efforts of the King and Saint,
Louis IX. In 1254 St. Louis ordained that prostitutes should be driven out
altogether and deprived of all their money and goods, even to their
mantles and gowns. In 1256 he repeated this ordinance and in 1269, before
setting out for the Crusades, he ordered the destruction of all places of
prostitution. The repetition of those decrees shows how ineffectual they
were. They even made matters worse, for prostitutes were forced to mingle
with the general population and their influence was thus extended. St.
Louis was unable to put down prostitution even in his own camp in the
East, and it existed outside his own tent. His legislation, however, was
frequently imitated by subsequent rulers of France, even to the middle of
the seventeenth century, always with the same ineffectual and worse
results. In 1560 an edict of Charles IX abolished brothels, but the number
of prostitutes was thereby increased rather than diminished, while many
new kinds of brothels appeared in unsuspected shapes and were more
dangerous than the more recognized brothels which had been
suppressed.[145] In spite of all such legislation, or because of it, there
has been no country in which prostitution has played a more conspicuous
part.[146]
At Mantua, so great was the repulsion aroused by prostitutes that they
were compelled to buy in the markets any fruit or bread that had been
soiled by the mere touch of their hands. It was so also in Avignon in
1243. In Catalonia they could not sit at the same table as a lady or a
knight or kiss any honorable person.[147] Even in Venice, the paradise of
prostitution, numerous and severe regulations were passed against it, and
it was long before the Venetian rulers resigned themselves to its
toleration and regulation.[148]
The last vigorous attempt to uproot prostitution in Europe was that of
Maria Theresa at Vienna in the middle of the eighteenth century. Although
of such recent date it may be mentioned here because it was mediæval alike
in its conception and methods. Its object indeed, was to suppress not only
prostitution, but fornication generally, and the means adopted were fines,
imprisonment, whipping and torture. The supposed causes of fornication
were also dealt with severely; short dresses were prohibited; billiard
rooms and cafés were inspected; no waitresses were allowed, and when
discovered, a waitress was liable to be handcuffed and carried off by the
police. The Chastity Commission, under which these measures were
rigorously carried out, was, apparently, established in 1751 and was
quietly abolished by the Emperor Joseph II, in the early years of his
reign. It was the general opinion that this severe legislation was really
ineffective, and that it caused much more serious evils than it
cured.[149] It is certain in any case that, for a long time past,
illegitimacy has been more prevalent in Vienna than in any other great
European capital.
Yet the attitude towards prostitutes was always mixed and inconsistent at
different places or different times, or even at the same time and place.
Dufour has aptly compared their position to that of the mediæval Jews;
they were continually persecuted, ecclesiastically, civilly, and socially,
yet all classes were glad to have recourse to them and it was impossible
to do without them. In some countries, including England in the fourteenth
century, a special costume was imposed on prostitutes as a mark of
infamy.[150] Yet in many respects no infamy whatever attached to
prostitution. High placed officials could claim payment of their expenses
incurred in visiting prostitutes when traveling on public business.
Prostitution sometimes played an official part in festivities and
receptions accorded by great cities to royal guests, and the brothel might
form an important part of the city's hospitality. When the Emperor
Sigismund came to Ulm in 1434 the streets were illuminated at such times
as he or his suite desired to visit the common brothel. Brothels under
municipal protection are found in the thirteenth century in Augsburg, in
Vienna, in Hamburg.[151] In France the best known abbayes of prostitutes
were those of Toulouse and Montpellier.[152] Durkheim is of opinion that
in the early middle ages, before this period, free love and marriage were
less severely differentiated. It was the rise of the middle class, he
considers, anxious to protect their wives and daughters, which led to a
regulated and publicly recognized attempt to direct debauchery into a
separate channel, brought under control.[153] These brothels constituted a
kind of public service, the directors of them being regarded almost as
public officials, bound to keep a certain number of prostitutes, to charge
according to a fixed tariff, and not to receive into their houses girls
belonging to the neighborhood. The institutions of this kind lasted for
three centuries. It was, in part, perhaps, the impetus of the new
Protestant movement, but mainly the terrible devastation produced by the
introduction of syphilis from America at the end of the fifteenth century
which, as Burckhardt and others have pointed out, led to the decline of
the mediæval brothels.[154]
The superior modern prostitute, the "courtesan" who had no connection with
the brothel, seems to have been the outcome of the Renaissance and made
her appearance in Italy at the end of the fifteenth century. "Courtesan"
or "cortegiana" meant a lady following the court, and the term began at
this time to be applied to a superior prostitute observing a certain
degree of decorum and restraint.[155] In the papal court of Alexander
Borgia the courtesan flourished even when her conduct was not altogether
dignified. Burchard, the faithful and unimpeachable chronicler of this
court, describes in his diary how, one evening, in October, 1501, the Pope
sent for fifty courtesans to be brought to his chamber; after supper, in
the presence of Cæsar Borgia and his young sister Lucrezia, they danced
with the servitors and others who were present, at first clothed,
afterwards naked. The candlesticks with lighted candles were then placed
upon the floor and chestnuts thrown among them, to be gathered by the
women crawling between the candlesticks on their hands and feet. Finally a
number of prizes were brought forth to be awarded to those men "qui
pluries dictos meretrices carnaliter agnoscerent," the victor in the
contest being decided according to the judgment of the spectators.[156]
This scene, enacted publicly in the Apostolic palace and serenely set
forth by the impartial secretary, is at once a notable episode in the
history of modern prostitution and one of the most illuminating
illustrations we possess of the paganism of the Renaissance.
Before the term "courtesan" came into repute, prostitutes were
even in Italy commonly called "sinners," peccatrice. The
change, Graf remarks in a very interesting study of the
Renaissance prostitute ("Una Cortigiana fra Mille," Attraverso
il Cinquecento, pp. 217-351), "reveals a profound alteration in
ideas and in life;" a term that suggested infamy gave place to
one that suggested approval, and even honor, for the courts of
the Renaissance period represented the finest culture of the
time. The best of these courtesans seem to have been not
altogether unworthy of the honor they received. We can detect
this in their letters. There is a chapter on the letters of
Renaissance prostitutes, especially those of Camilla de Pisa
which are marked by genuine passion, in Lothar Schmidt's
Frauenbriefe der Renaissance. The famous Imperia, called by a
Pope in the early years of the sixteenth century "nobilissimum
Romæ scortum," knew Latin and could write Italian verse. Other
courtesans knew Italian and Latin poetry by heart, while they
were accomplished in music, dancing, and speech. We are reminded
of ancient Greece, and Graf, discussing how far the Renaissance
courtesans resembled the hetairæ, finds a very considerable
likeness, especially in culture and influence, though with some
differences due to the antagonism between religion and
prostitution at the later period.
The most distinguished figure in every respect among the
courtesans of that time was certainly Tullia D'Aragona. She was
probably the daughter of Cardinal D'Aragona (an illegitimate
scion of the Spanish royal family) by a Ferrarese courtesan who
became his mistress. Tullia has gained a high reputation by her
verse. Her best sonnet is addressed to a youth of twenty, whom
she passionately loved, but who did not return her love. Her
Guerrino Meschino, a translation from the Spanish, is a very
pure and chaste work. She was a woman of refined instincts and
aspirations, and once at least she abandoned her life of
prostitution. She was held in high esteem and respect. When, in
1546, Cosimo, Duke of Florence, ordered all prostitutes to wear a
yellow veil or handkerchief as a public badge of their
profession, Tullia appealed to the Duchess, a Spanish lady of
high character, and received permission to dispense with this
badge on account of her "rara scienzia di poesia et filosofia."
She dedicated her Rime to the Duchess. Tullia D'Aragona was
very beautiful, with yellow hair, and remarkably large and bright
eyes, which dominated those who came near her. She was of proud
bearing and inspired unusual respect (G. Biagi, "Un' Etera
Romana," Nuova Antologia, vol. iv, 1886, pp. 655-711; S.
Bongi, Rivista critica della Letteratura Italiana, 1886, IV, p.
186).
Tullia D'Aragona was clearly not a courtesan at heart. Perhaps
the most typical example of the Renaissance courtesan at her best
is furnished by Veronica Franco, born in 1546 at Venice, of
middle class family and in early life married to a doctor. Of her
also it has been said that, while by profession a prostitute, she
was by inclination a poet. But she appears to have been well
content with her profession, and never ashamed of it. Her life
and character have been studied by Arturo Graf, and more slightly
in a little book by Tassini. She was highly cultured, and knew
several languages; she also sang well and played on many
instruments. In one of her letters she advises a youth who was
madly in love with her that if he wishes to obtain her favors he
must leave off importuning her and devote himself tranquilly to
study. "You know well," she adds, "that all those who claim to be
able to gain my love, and who are extremely dear to me, are
strenuous in studious discipline.... If my fortune allowed it I
would spend all my time quietly in the academies of virtuous
men." The Diotimas and Aspasias of antiquity, as Graf comments,
would not have demanded so much of their lovers. In her poems it
is possible to trace some of her love histories, and she often
shows herself torn by jealousy at the thought that perhaps
another woman may approach her beloved. Once she fell in love
with an ecclesiastic, possibly a bishop, with whom she had no
relationships, and after a long absence, which healed her love,
she and he became sincere friends. Once she was visited by Henry
III of France, who took away her portrait, while on her part she
promised to dedicate a book to him; she so far fulfilled this as
to address some sonnets to him and a letter; "neither did the
King feel ashamed of his intimacy with the courtesan," remarks
Graf, "nor did she suspect that he would feel ashamed of it."
When Montaigne passed through Venice she sent him a little book
of hers, as we learn from his Journal, though they do not
appear to have met. Tintoret was one of her many distinguished
friends, and she was a strenuous advocate of the high qualities
of modern, as compared with ancient, art. Her friendships were
affectionate, and she even seems to have had various grand ladies
among her friends. She was, however, so far from being ashamed of
her profession of courtesan that in one of her poems she affirms
she has been taught by Apollo other arts besides those he is
usually regarded as teaching:
"Cosi dolce e gustevole divento,
Quando mi trovo con persona in letto
Da cui amata e gradita mi sento."
In a certain catalogo of the prices of Venetian courtesans
Veronica is assigned only 2 scudi for her favors, while the
courtesan to whom the catalogue is dedicated is set down at 25
scudi. Graf thinks there may be some mistake or malice here, and
an Italian gentleman of the time states that she required not
less than 50 scudi from those to whom she was willing to accord
what Montaigne called the "negotiation entière."
In regard to this matter it may be mentioned that, as stated by
Bandello, it was the custom for a Venetian prostitute to have six
or seven gentlemen at a time as her lovers. Each was entitled to
come to sup and sleep with her on one night of the week, leaving
her days free. They paid her so much per month, but she always
definitely reserved the right to receive a stranger passing
through Venice, if she wished, changing the time of her
appointment with her lover for the night. The high and special
prices which we find recorded are, of course, those demanded from
the casual distinguished stranger who came to Venice as, once in
the sixteenth century, Montaigne came.
In 1580 (when not more than thirty-four) Veronica confessed to
the Holy Office that she had had six children. In the same year
she formed the design of founding a home, which should not be a
monastery, where prostitutes who wished to abandon their mode of
life could find a refuge with their children, if they had any.
This seems to have led to the establishment of a Casa del
Soccorso. In 1591 she died of fever, reconciled with God and
blessed by many unfortunates. She had a good heart and a sound
intellect, and was the last of the great Renaissance courtesans
who revived Greek hetairism (Graf, Attraverso il Cinquecento,
pp. 217-351). Even in sixteenth century Venice, however, it will
be seen, Veronica Franco seems to have been not altogether at
peace in the career of a courtesan. She was clearly not adapted
for ordinary marriage, yet under the most favorable conditions
that the modern world has ever offered it may still be doubted
whether a prostitute's career can offer complete satisfaction to
a woman of large heart and brain.
Ninon de Lenclos, who is frequently called "the last of the great
courtesans," may seem an exception to the general rule as to the
inability of a woman of good heart, high character, and fine
intelligence to find satisfaction in a prostitute's life. But it
is a total misconception alike of Ninon de Lenclos's temperament
and her career to regard her as in any true sense a prostitute at
all. A knowledge of even the barest outlines of her life ought to
prevent such a mistake. Born early in the seventeenth century,
she was of good family on both sides; her mother was a woman of
severe life, but her father, a gentleman of Touraine, inspired
her with his own Epicurean philosophy as well as his love of
music. She was extremely well educated. At the age of sixteen or
seventeen she had her first lover, the noble and valiant Gaspard
de Coligny; he was followed for half a century by a long
succession of other lovers, sometimes more than one at a time;
three years was the longest period during which she was faithful
to one lover. Her attractions lasted so long that, it is said,
three generations of Sévignés were among her lovers. Tallemant
des Réaux enables us to study in detail her liaisons.
It is not, however, the abundance of lovers which makes a woman a
prostitute, but the nature of her relationships with them.
Sainte-Beuve, in an otherwise admirable study of Ninon de Lenclos
(Causeries du Lundi, vol. iv), seems to reckon her among the
courtesans. But no woman is a prostitute unless she uses men as a
source of pecuniary gain. Not only is there no evidence that this
was the case with Ninon, but all the evidence excludes such a
relationship. "It required much skill," said Voltaire, "and a
great deal of love on her part, to induce her to accept
presents." Tallemant, indeed, says that she sometimes took money
from her lovers, but this statement probably involves nothing
beyond what is contained in Voltaire's remark, and, in any case,
Tallemant's gossip, though usually well-informed, was not always
reliable. All are agreed as to her extreme disinterestedness.
When we hear precisely of Ninon de Lenclos in connection with
money, it is not as receiving a gift, but only as repaying a debt
to an old lover, or restoring a large sum left with her for safe
keeping when the owner was exiled. Such incidents are far from
suggesting the professional prostitute of any age; they are
rather the relationships which might exist between men friends.
Ninon de Lenclos's character was in many respects far from
perfect, but she combined many masculine virtues, and especially
probity, with a temperament which, on the whole, was certainly
feminine; she hated hypocrisy, and she was never influenced by
pecuniary considerations. She was, moreover, never reckless, but
always retained a certain self-restraint and temperance, even in
eating and drinking, and, we are told, she never drank wine. She
was, as Sainte-Beuve has remarked, the first to realize that
there must be the same virtues for men and for women, and that it
is absurd to reduce all feminine virtues to one. "Our sex has
been burdened with all the frivolities," she wrote, "and men have
reserved to themselves the essential qualities: I have made
myself a man." She sometimes dressed as a man when riding (see,
e.g., Correspondence Authentique of Ninon de Lenclos, with a
good introduction by Emile Colombey). Consciously or not, she
represented a new feminine idea at a period when—as we may see
in many forgotten novels written by the women of that time—ideas
were beginning to emerge in the feminine sphere. She was the
first, and doubtless, from one point of view, the most extreme
representative of a small and distinguished group of French women
among whom Georges Sand is the finest personality.
Thus it is idle to attempt to adorn the history of prostitution
with the name of Ninon de Lenclos. A debauched old prostitute
would never, like Ninon towards the end of her long life, have
been able to retain or to conquer the affection and the esteem
of many of the best men and women of her time; even to the
austere Saint-Simon it seemed that there reigned in her little
court a decorum which the greatest princesses cannot achieve. She
was not a prostitute, but a woman of unique personality with a
little streak of genius in it. That she was inimitable we need
not perhaps greatly regret. In her old age, in 1699, her old
friend and former lover, Saint-Evremond, wrote to her, with only
a little exaggeration, that there were few princesses and few
saints who would not leave their courts and their cloisters to
change places with her. "If I had known beforehand what my life
would be I would have hanged myself," was her oft-quoted answer.
It is, indeed, a solitary phrase that slips in, perhaps as the
expression of a momentary mood; one may make too much of it. More
truly characteristic is the fine saying in which her Epicurean
philosophy seems to stretch out towards Nietzsche: "La joie de
l'esprit en marque la force."
The frank acceptance of prostitution by the spiritual or even the temporal
power has since the Renaissance become more and more exceptional. The
opposite extreme of attempting to uproot prostitution has also in practice
been altogether abandoned. Sporadic attempts have indeed been made, here
and there, to put down prostitution with a strong hand even in quite
modern times. It is now, however, realized that in such a case the remedy
is worse than the disease.
In 1860 a Mayor of Portsmouth felt it his duty to attempt to
suppress prostitution. "In the early part of his mayoralty,"
according to a witness before the Select Committee on the
Contagious Diseases Acts (p. 393), "there was an order passed
that every beerhouse-keeper and licensed victualer in the borough
known to harbor these women would be dealt with, and probably
lose his license. On a given day about three hundred or four
hundred of these forlorn outcasts were bundled wholesale into the
streets, and they formed up in a large body, many of them with
only a shift and a petticoat on, and with a lot of drunken men
and boys with a fife and fiddle they paraded the streets for
several days. They marched in a body to the workhouse, but for
many reasons they were refused admittance.... These women
wandered about for two or three days shelterless, and it was felt
that the remedy was very much worse than the disease, and the
women were allowed to go back to their former places."
Similar experiments have been made even more recently in America.
"In Pittsburg, Pennsylvania, in 1891, the houses of prostitutes
were closed, the inmates turned out upon the streets, and were
refused lodging and even food by the citizens of that place. A
wave of popular remonstrance, all over the country, at the
outrage on humanity, created a reaction which resulted in a last
condition by no means better than the first." In the same year
also a similar incident occurred in New York with the same
unfortunate results (Isidore Dyer, "The Municipal Control of
Prostitution in the United States," report presented to the
Brussels International Conference in 1899).
There grew up instead the tendency to regulate prostitution, to give it a
semi-official toleration which enabled the authorities to exercise a
control over it, and to guard as far as possible against its evil by
medical and police inspection. The new brothel system differed from the
ancient mediæval houses of prostitution in important respects; it involved
a routine of medical inspection and it endeavored to suppress any rivalry
by unlicensed prostitutes outside. Bernard Mandeville, the author of the
Fable of the Bees, and an acute thinker, was a pioneer in the advocacy
of this system. In 1724, in his Modest Defense of Publick Stews, he
argues that "the encouraging of public whoring will not only prevent most
of the mischievous effects of this vice, but even lessen the quantity of
whoring in general, and reduce it to the narrowest bounds which it can
possibly be contained in." He proposed to discourage private prostitution
by giving special privileges and immunities to brothels by Act of
Parliament. His scheme involved the erection of one hundred brothels in a
special quarter of the city, to contain two thousand prostitutes and one
hundred matrons of ability and experience with physicians and surgeons, as
well as commissioners to oversee the whole. Mandeville was regarded merely
as a cynic or worse, and his scheme was ignored or treated with contempt.
It was left to the genius of Napoleon, eighty years later, to establish
the system of "maisons de tolérance," which had so great an influence over
modern European practice during a large part of the last century and even
still in its numerous survivals forms the subject of widely divergent
opinions.
On the whole, however, it must be said that the system of registering,
examining, and regularizing prostitutes now belongs to the past. Many
great battles have been fought over this question; the most important is
that which raged for many years in England over the Contagious Diseases
Acts, and is embodied in the 600 pages of a Report by a Select Committee
on these Acts issued in 1882. The majority of the members of the Committee
reported favorably to the Acts which were, notwithstanding, repealed in
1886, since which date no serious attempt has been made in England to
establish them again.
At the present time, although the old system still stands in many
countries with the inert stolidity of established institutions, it no
longer commands general approval. As Paul and Victor Margueritte have
truly stated, in the course of an acute examination of the phenomena of
state-regulated prostitution as found in Paris, the system is "barbarous
to start with and almost inefficacious as well." The expert is every day
more clearly demonstrating its inefficacy while the psychologist and the
sociologist are constantly becoming more convinced that it is barbarous.
It can indeed by no means be said that any unanimity has been attained. It
is obviously so urgently necessary to combat the flood of disease and
misery which proceeds directly from the spread of syphilis and gonorrhœa,
and indirectly from the prostitution which is the chief propagator
of these diseases, that we cannot be surprised that many should eagerly
catch at any system which seems to promise a palliation of the evils. At
the present time, however, it is those best acquainted with the operation
of the system of control who have most clearly realized that the supposed
palliation is for the most part illusory,[157] and in any case attained at
the cost of the artificial production of other evils. In France, where the
system of the registration and control of prostitutes has been
established for over a century,[158] and where consequently its
advantages, if such there are, should be clearly realized, it meets with
almost impassioned opposition from able men belonging to every section of
the community. In Germany the opposition to regularized control has long
been led by well-equipped experts, headed by Blaschko of Berlin. Precisely
the same conclusions are being reached in America. Gottheil, of New York,
finds that the municipal control of prostitution is "neither successful
nor desirable." Heidingsfeld concludes that the regulation and control
system in force in Cincinnati has done little good and much harm; under
the system among the private patients in his own clinic the proportion of
cases of both syphilis and gonorrhœa has increased; "suppression
of prostitutes is impossible and control is impracticable."[159]
It is in Germany that the attempt to regulate prostitution still
remains most persistent, with results that in Germany itself are
regarded as unfortunate. Thus the German law inflicts a penalty
on householders who permit illegitimate sexual intercourse in
their houses. This is meant to strike the unlicensed prostitute,
but it really encourages prostitution, for a decent youth and
girl who decide to form a relationship which later may develop
into marriage, and which is not illegal (for extra-marital sexual
intercourse per se is not in Germany, as it is by the
antiquated laws of several American States, a punishable
offense), are subjected to so much trouble and annoyance by the
suspicious police that it is much easier for the girl to become a
prostitute and put herself under the protection of the police.
The law was largely directed against those who live on the
profits of prostitution. But in practice it works out
differently. The prostitute simply has to pay extravagantly high
rents, so that her landlord really lives on the fruits of her
trade, while she has to carry on her business with increased
activity and on a larger scale in order to cover her heavy
expenses (P. Hausmeister, "Zur Analyse der Prostitution,"
Geschlecht und Gesellschaft, vol. ii, 1907, p. 294).
In Italy, opinion on this matter is much divided. The regulation
of prostitution has been successively adopted, abandoned, and
readopted. In Switzerland, the land of governmental experiments,
various plans are tried in different cantons. In some there is
no attempt to interfere with prostitution, except under special
circumstances; in others all prostitution, and even fornication
generally, is punishable; in Geneva only native prostitutes are
permitted to practice; in Zurich, since 1897, prostitution is
prohibited, but care is taken to put no difficulties in the path
of free sexual relationships which are not for gain. With these
different regulations, morals in Switzerland generally are said
to be much on the same level as elsewhere (Moreau-Christophe, Du
Problème de la Misère, vol. iii, p. 259). The same conclusion
holds good of London. A disinterested observer, Félix Remo (La
Vie Galante en Angleterre, 1888, p. 237), concluded that,
notwithstanding its free trade in prostitution, its alcoholic
excesses, its vices of all kinds, "London is one of the most
moral capitals in Europe." The movement towards freedom in this
matter has been evidenced in recent years by the abandonment of
the system of regulation by Denmark in 1906.
Even the most ardent advocates of the registration of prostitutes
recognize that not only is the tendency of civilization opposed rather
than favorable to the system, but that in the numerous countries where the
system persists registered prostitutes are losing ground in the struggle
against clandestine prostitutes. Even in France, the classic land of
police-controlled prostitutes, the "maisons de tolérance" have long been
steadily decreasing in number, by no means because prostitution is
decreasing but because low-class brasseries and small cafés-chantants,
which are really unlicensed brothels, are taking their place.[160]
The wholesale regularization of prostitution in civilized centres is
nowadays, indeed, advocated by few, if any, of the authorities who belong
to the newer school. It is at most claimed as desirable in certain places
under special circumstances.[161] Even those who would still be glad to
see prostitution thoroughly in the control of the police now recognize
that experience shows this to be impossible. As many girls begin their
career as prostitutes at a very early age, a sound system of regulation
should be prepared to enroll as permanent prostitutes even girls who are
little more than children. That, however, is a logical conclusion against
which the moral sense, and even the common sense, of a community
instinctively revolts. In Paris girls may not be inscribed as prostitutes
until they have reached the age of sixteen and some consider even that age
too low.[162] Moreover, whenever she becomes diseased, or grows tired of
her position, the registered woman may always slip out of the hands of the
police and establish herself elsewhere as a clandestine prostitute. Every
rigid attempt to keep prostitution within the police ring leads to
offensive interference with the actions and the freedom of respectable
women which cannot fail to be intolerable in any free community. Even in a
city like London, where prostitution is relatively free, the supervision
of the police has led to scandalous police charges against women who have
done nothing whatever which should legitimately arouse suspicion of their
behavior. The escape of the infected woman from the police cordon has, it
is obvious, an effect in raising the apparent level of health of
registered women, and the police statistics are still further fallaciously
improved by the fact that the inmates of brothels are older on the average
than clandestine prostitutes and have become immune to disease.[163] These
facts are now becoming fairly obvious and well recognized. The state
regulation of prostitution is undesirable, on moral grounds for the
oft-emphasized reason that it is only applied to one sex, and on practical
grounds because it is ineffective. Society allows the police to harass the
prostitute with petty persecutions under the guise of charges of
"solicitation," "disorderly conduct," etc., but it is no longer convinced
that she ought to be under the absolute control of the police.
The problem of prostitution, when we look at it narrowly, seems to be in
the same position to-day as at any time in the course of the past three
thousand years. In order, however, to comprehend the real significance of
prostitution, and to attain a reasonable attitude towards it, we must look
at it from a broader point of view; we must consider not only its
evolution and history, but its causes and its relation to the wider
aspects of modern social life. When we thus view the problem from a
broader standpoint we shall find that there is no conflict between the
claims of ethics and those of social hygiene, and that the coördinated
activity of both is involved in the progressive refinement and
purification of civilized sexual relationships.
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:
Destitution 525
Inclination 513
Seduced and abandoned 258
Drink and desire for drink 181
Ill-treatment by parents, relations, or husbands 164
As an easy life 124
Bad company 84
Persuaded by prostitutes 71
Too idle to work 29
Violated 27
Seduced on emigrant ship 16
Seduced in emigrant boarding homes 8
-----
2,000
(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:
Per cent.
Love of display, luxury and idleness 42.1
Bad family surroundings 23.8
Seduction in which they were innocent victims 11.3
Lack of employment 9.4
Heredity 7.8
Primary sexual appetite 5.6
(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:
Vice and depravity 2,752
Death of parents, husband, etc. 2,139
Seduction by lover 1,653
Seduction by employer 927
Abandoned by parents, husband, etc. 794
Love of luxury 698
Incitement by lover or other persons outside
family 666
Incitement by parents or husband 400
To support parents or children 393
(Ferriani, Minorenni Delinquenti, p. 193.) The reasons
assigned by Russian prostitutes for taking up their career are
(according to Federow) as follows:
38.5 per cent. insufficient wages.
21. per cent. desire for amusement.
14. per cent. loss of place.
9.5 per cent. persuasion by women friends.
6.5 per cent. loss of habit of work.
5.5 per cent. chagrin, and to punish lover.
.5 per cent. drunkenness.
(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.
IV. The Present Social Attitude Towards Prostitution.
We have now surveyed the complex fact of prostitution in some of its most
various and typical aspects, seeking to realise, intelligently and
sympathetically, the fundamental part it plays as an elementary
constituent of our marriage system. Finally we have to consider the
grounds on which prostitution now appears to a large and growing number of
persons not only an unsatisfactory method of sexual gratification but a
radically bad method.
The movement of antagonism towards prostitution manifests itself most
conspicuously, as might beforehand have been anticipated, by a feeling of
repugnance towards the most ancient and typical, once the most credited
and best established prostitutional manifestation, the brothel. The growth
of this repugnance is not confined to one or two countries but is
international, and may thus be regarded as corresponding to a real
tendency in our civilization. It is equally pronounced in prostitutes
themselves and in the people who are their clients. The distaste on the
one side increases the distaste on the other. Since only the most helpless
or the most stupid prostitutes are nowadays willing to accept the
servitude of the brothel, the brothel-keeper is forced to resort to
extraordinary methods for entrapping victims, and even to take part in
that cosmopolitan trade in "white slaves" which exists solely to feed
brothels.[211] This state of things has a natural reaction in prejudicing
the clients of prostitution against an institution which is going out of
fashion and out of credit. An even more fundamental antipathy is
engendered by the fact that the brothel fails to respond to the high
degree of personal freedom and variety which civilization produces, and
always demands even when it fails to produce. On one side the prostitute
is disinclined to enter into a slavery which usually fails even to bring
her any reward; on the other side her client feels it as part of the
fascination of prostitution under civilized conditions that he shall enjoy
a freedom and choice the brothel cannot provide.[212] Thus it comes about
that brothels which once contained nearly all the women who made it a
business to minister to the sexual needs of men, now contain only a
decreasing minority, and that the transformation of cloistered
prostitution into free prostitution is approved by many social reformers
as a gain to the cause of morality.[213]
The decay of brothels, whether as cause or as effect, has been associated
with a vast increase of prostitution outside brothels. But the repugnance
to brothels in many essential respects also applies to prostitution
generally, and, as we shall see, it is exerting a profoundly modifying
influence on that prostitution.
The changing feeling in regard to prostitution seems to express itself
mainly in two ways. On the one hand there are those who, without desiring
to abolish prostitution, resent the abnegation which accompanies it, and
are disgusted by its sordid aspects. They may have no moral scruples
against prostitution, and they know no reason why a woman should not
freely do as she will with her own person. But they believe that, if
prostitution is necessary, the relationships of men with prostitutes
should be humane and agreeable to each party, and not degrading to either.
It must be remembered that under the conditions of civilized urban life,
the discipline of work is often too severe, and the excitements of urban
existence too constant, to render an abandonment to orgy a desirable
recreation. The gross form of orgy appeals, not to the town-dweller but to
the peasant, and to the sailor or soldier who reaches the town after long
periods of dreary routine and emotional abstinence. It is a mistake, even,
to suppose that the attraction of prostitution is inevitably associated
with the fulfilment of the sexual act. So far is this from being the case
that the most attractive prostitute may be a woman who, possessing few
sexual needs of her own, desires to please by the charm of her
personality; these are among those who most often find good husbands.
There are many men who are even well content merely to have a few hours'
free intimacy with an agreeable woman, without any further favor, although
that may be open to them. For a very large number of men under urban
conditions of existence the prostitute is ceasing to be the degraded
instrument of a moment's lustful desire; they seek an agreeable human
person with whom they may find relaxation from the daily stress or routine
of life. When an act of prostitution is thus put on a humane basis,
although it by no means thereby becomes conducive to the best development
of either party, it at least ceases to be hopelessly degrading. Otherwise
it would not have been possible for religious prostitution to flourish for
so long in ancient days among honorable women of good birth on the shores
of the Mediterranean, even in regions like Lydia, where the position of
women was peculiarly high.[214]
It is true that the monetary side of prostitution would still exist. But
it is possible to exaggerate its importance. It must be pointed out that,
though it is usual to speak of the prostitute as a woman who "sells
herself," this is rather a crude and inexact way of expressing, in its
typical form, the relationship of a prostitute to her client. A prostitute
is not a commodity with a market-price, like a loaf or a leg of mutton.
She is much more on a level with people belonging to the professional
classes, who accept fees in return for services rendered; the amount of
the fee varies, on the one hand in accordance with professional standing,
on the other hand in accordance with the client's means, and under special
circumstances may be graciously dispensed with altogether. Prostitution
places on a venal basis intimate relationships which ought to spring up
from natural love, and in so doing degrades them. But strictly speaking
there is in such a case no "sale." To speak of a prostitute "selling
herself" is scarcely even a pardonable rhetorical exaggeration; it is both
inexact and unjust.[215]
This tendency in an advanced civilization towards the
humanization of prostitution is the reverse process, we may note,
to that which takes place at an earlier stage of civilization
when the ancient conception of the religious dignity of
prostitution begins to fall into disrepute. When men cease to
reverence women who are prostitutes in the service of a goddess
they set up in their place prostitutes who are merely abject
slaves, flattering themselves that they are thereby working in
the cause of "progress" and "morality." On the shores of the
Mediterranean this process took place more than two thousand
years ago, and is associated with the name of Solon. To-day we
may see the same process going on in India. In some parts of
India (as at Jejuri, near Poonah) first born girls are dedicated
to Khandoba or other gods; they are married to the god and termed
muralis. They serve in the temple, sweep it, and wash the holy
vessels, also they dance, sing and prostitute themselves. They
are forbidden to marry, and they live in the homes of their
parents, brothers, or sisters; being consecrated to religious
service, they are untouched by degradation. Nowadays, however,
Indian "reformers," in the name of "civilization and science,"
seek to persuade the muralis that they are "plunged in a career
of degradation." No doubt in time the would-be moralists will
drive the muralis out of their temples and their homes, deprive
them of all self-respect, and convert them into wretched
outcasts, all in the cause of "science and civilization" (see,
e.g., an article by Mrs. Kashibai Deodhar, The New Reformer,
October, 1907). So it is that early reformers create for the
reformers of a later day the task of humanizing prostitution
afresh.
There can be no doubt that this more humane conception of
prostitution is to-day beginning to be realized in the actual
civilized life of Europe. Thus in writing of prostitution in
Paris, Dr. Robert Michels ("Erotische Streifzüge,"
Mutterschutz, 1906, Heft 9, p. 368) remarks: "While in Germany
the prostitute is generally considered as an 'outcast' creature,
and treated accordingly, an instrument of masculine lust to be
used and thrown away, and whom one would under no circumstances
recognize in public, in France the prostitute plays in many
respects the part which once give significance and fame to the
hetairæ of Athens." And after describing the consideration and
respect which the Parisian prostitute is often able to require of
her friends, and the non-sexual relation of comradeship which she
can enter into with other men, the writer continues: "A girl who
certainly yields herself for money, but by no means for the first
comer's money, and who, in addition to her 'business friends,'
feels the need of, so to say, non-sexual companions with whom she
can associate in a free comrade-like way, and by whom she is
treated and valued as a free human being, is not wholly lost for
the moral worth of humanity." All prostitution is bad, Michels
concludes, but we should have reason to congratulate ourselves if
love-relationships of this Parisian species represented the
lowest known form of extra-conjugal sexuality. (As bearing on the
relative consideration accorded to prostitutes I may mention that
a Paris prostitute remarked to a friend of mine that Englishmen
would ask her questions which no Frenchman would venture to ask.)
It is not, however, only in Paris, although here more markedly
and prominently, that this humanizing change in prostitution is
beginning to make itself felt. It is manifested, for instance, in
the greater openness of a man's sexual life. "While he formerly
slinked into a brothel in a remote street," Dr. Willy Hellpach
remarks (Nervosität und Kultur, p. 169), "he now walks abroad
with his 'liaison,' visiting the theatres and cafés, without
indeed any anxiety to meet his acquaintances, but with no
embarrassment on that point. The thing is becoming more
commonplace, more—natural." It is also, Hellpach proceeds to
point out, thus becoming more moral also, and much unwholesome
prudery and pruriency is being done away with.
In England, where change is slow, this tendency to the
humanization of prostitution may be less pronounced. But it
certainly exists. In the middle of the last century Lecky wrote
(History of European Morals, vol. ii, p. 285) that habitual
prostitution "is in no other European country so hopelessly
vicious or so irrevocable." That statement, which was also made
by Parent-Duchâtelet and other foreign observers, is fully
confirmed by the evidence on record. But it is a statement which
would hardly be made to-day, except perhaps, in reference to
special confined areas of our cities. It is the same in America,
and we may doubtless find this tendency reflected in the report
on The Social Evil (1902), drawn up by a committee in New York,
who gave it (p. 176) as one of their chief recommendations that
prostitution should no longer be regarded as a crime, in which
light, one gathers, it had formerly been regarded in New York.
That may seem but a small step in the path of humanization, but
it is in the right direction.
It is by no means only in lands of European civilization that we
may trace with developing culture the refinement and humanization
of the slighter bonds of relationship with women. In Japan
exactly the same demands led, several centuries ago, to the
appearance of the geisha. In the course of an interesting and
precise study of the geisha Mr. R. T. Farrer remarks (Nineteenth
Century, April, 1904): "The geisha is in no sense necessarily a
courtesan. She is a woman educated to attract; perfected from her
childhood in all the intricacies of Japanese literature;
practiced in wit and repartee; inured to the rapid give-and-take
of conversation on every topic, human and divine. From her
earliest youth she is broken into an inviolable charm of manner
incomprehensible to the finest European, yet she is almost
invariably a blossom of the lower classes, with dumpy claws, and
squat, ugly nails. Her education, physical and moral, is far
harder than that of the ballerina, and her success is achieved
only after years of struggle and a bitter agony of torture....
And the geisha's social position may be compared with that of the
European actress. The Geisha-house offers prizes as desirable as
any of the Western stage. A great geisha with twenty nobles
sitting round her, contending for her laughter, and kept in
constant check by the flashing bodkin of her wit, holds a
position no less high and famous than that of Sarah Bernhardt in
her prime. She is equally sought, equally flattered, quite as
madly adored, that quiet little elderly plain girl in dull blue.
But she is prized thus primarily for her tongue, whose power only
ripens fully as her physical charms decline. She demands vast
sums for her owners, and even so often appears and dances only at
her own pleasure. Few, if any, Westerners ever see a really
famous geisha. She is too great to come before a European, except
for an august or imperial command. Finally she may, and
frequently does, marry into exalted places. In all this there is
not the slightest necessity for any illicit relation."
In some respects the position of the ancient Greek hetaira was
more analogous to that of the Japanese geisha than to that of
the prostitute in the strict sense. For the Greeks, indeed, the
hetaira, was not strictly a porne or prostitute at all. The
name meant friend or companion, and the woman to whom the name
was applied held an honorable position, which could not be
accorded to the mere prostitute. Athenæus (Bk. xiii, Chs.
XXVIII-XXX) brings together passages showing that the hetaira
could be regarded as an independent citizen, pure, simple, and
virtuous, altogether distinct from the common crew of
prostitutes, though these might ape her name. The hetairæ "were
almost the only Greek women," says Donaldson (Woman, p. 59),
"who exhibited what was best and noblest in women's nature." This
fact renders it more intelligible why a woman of such
intellectual distinction as Aspasia should have been a hetaira.
There seems little doubt as to her intellectual distinction.
"Æschines, in his dialogue entitled 'Aspasia,'" writes Gomperz,
the historian of Greek philosophy (Greek Thinkers, vol. iii,
pp. 124 and 343), "puts in the mouth of that distinguished woman
an incisive criticism of the mode of life traditional for her
sex. It would be exceedingly strange," Gomperz adds, in arguing
that an inference may thus be drawn concerning the historical
Aspasia, "if three authors—Plato, Xenophon and Æschines—had
agreed in fictitiously enduing the companion of Pericles with
what we might very reasonably have expected her to possess—a
highly cultivated mind and intellectual influence." It is even
possible that the movement for woman's right which, as we dimly
divine through the pages of Aristophanes, took place in Athens in
the fourth century B. C., was led by hetairæ. According to Ivo
Bruns (Frauenemancipation in Athen, 1900, p. 19) "the most
certain information which we possess concerning Aspasia bears a
strong resemblance to the picture which Euripides and
Aristophanes present to us of the leaders of the woman movement."
It was the existence of this movement which made Plato's ideas on
the community of women appear far less absurd than they do to us.
It may perhaps be thought by some that this movement represented
on a higher plane that love of distruction, or, as we should
better say, that spirit of revolt and aspiration, which Simmel
finds to mark the intellectual and artistic activity of those who
are unclassed or dubiously classed in the social hierarchy. Ninon
de Lenclos, as we have seen, was not strictly a courtesan, but
she was a pioneer in the assertion of woman's rights. Aphra Behn
who, a little later in England, occupied a similarly dubious
social position, was likewise a pioneer in generous humanitarian
aspirations, which have since been adopted in the world at
large.
These refinements of prostitution may be said to be chiefly the
outcome of the late and more developed stages in civilization. As
Schurtz has put it (Altersklassen und Männerbünde, p. 191):
"The cheerful, skilful and artistically accomplished hetaira
frequently stands as an ideal figure in opposition to the
intellectually uncultivated wife banished to the interior of the
house. The courtesan of the Italian Renaissance, Japanese
geishas, Chinese flower-girls, and Indian bayaderas, all show
some not unnoble features, the breath of a free artistic
existence. They have achieved—with, it is true, the sacrifice of
their highest worth—an independence from the oppressive rule of
man and of household duties, and a part of the feminine endowment
which is so often crippled comes in them to brilliant
development. Prostitution in its best form may thus offer a path
by which these feminine characteristics may exert a certain
influence on the development of civilization. We may also believe
that the artistic activity of women is in some measure able to
offer a counterpoise to the otherwise less pleasant results of
sexual abandonment, preventing the coarsening and destruction of
the emotional life; in his Magda Sudermann has described a type
of woman who, from the standpoint of strict morality, is open to
condemnation, but in her art finds a foothold, the strength of
which even ill-will must unwillingly recognize." In his Sex and
Character, Weininger has developed in a more extreme and
extravagant manner the conception of the prostitute as a
fundamental and essential part of life, a permanent feminine
type.
There are others, apparently in increasing numbers, who approach the
problem of prostitution not from an æsthetic standpoint but from a moral
standpoint. This moral attitude is not, however, that conventionalized
morality of Cato and St. Augustine and Lecky, set forth in previous pages,
according to which the prostitute in the street must be accepted as the
guardian of the wife in the home. These moralists reject indeed the claim
of that belief to be considered moral at all. They hold that it is not
morally possible that the honor of some women shall be purchaseable at the
price of the dishonor of other women, because at such a price virtue loses
all moral worth. When they read that, as Goncourt stated, "the most
luxurious articles of women's trousseaux, the bridal chemises of girls
with dowries of six hundred thousand francs, are made in the prison of
Clairvaux,"[216] they see the symbol of the intimate dependence of our
luxurious virtue on our squalid vice. And while they accept the
historical and sociological evidence which shows that prostitution is an
inevitable part of the marriage system which still survives among us, they
ask whether it is not possible so to modify our marriage system that it
shall not be necessary to divide feminine humanity into "disreputable"
women, who make sacrifices which it is dishonorable to make, and
"respectable" women, who take sacrifices which it cannot be less
dishonorable to accept.
Prostitutes, a distinguished man of science has said (Duclaux,
L'Hygiène Sociale, p. 243), "have become things which the
public uses when it wants them, and throws on the dungheap when
it has made them vile. In its pharisaism it even has the
insolence to treat their trade as shameful, as though it were not
just as shameful to buy as to sell in this market." Bloch
(Sexualleben unserer Zeit, Ch. XV) insists that prostitution
must be ennobled, and that only so can it be even diminished.
Isidore Dyer, of New Orleans, also argues that we cannot check
prostitution unless we create "in the minds of men and women a
spirit of tolerance instead of intolerance of fallen women." This
point may be illustrated by a remark by the prostitute author of
the Tagebuch einer Verlorenen. "If the profession of yielding
the body ceased to be a shameful one," she wrote, "the army of
'unfortunates' would diminish by four-fifths—I will even say
nine-tenths. Myself, for example! How gladly would I take a
situation as companion or governess!" "One of two things," wrote
the eminent sociologist Tarde ("La Morale Sexuelle," Archives
d'Anthropologie Criminelle, January, 1907), "either prostitution
will disappear through continuing to be dishonorable and will be
replaced by some other institution which will better remedy the
defects of monogamous marriage, or it will survive by becoming
respectable, that is to say, by making itself respected, whether
liked or disliked." Tarde thought this might perhaps come about
by a better organization of prostitutes, a more careful selection
among those who desired admission to their ranks and the
cultivation of professional virtues which would raise their moral
level. "If courtesans fulfil a need," Balzac had already said in
his Physiologie du Mariage, "they must become an institution."
This moral attitude is supported and enforced by the inevitable democratic
tendency of civilization which, although it by no means destroys the idea
of class, undermines that idea as the mark of fundamental human
distinctions and renders it superficial. Prostitution no longer makes a
woman a slave; it ought not to make her even a pariah: "My body is my
own," said the young German prostitute of to-day, "and what I do with it
is nobody else's concern." When the prostitute was literally a slave moral
duty towards her was by no means necessarily identical with moral duty
towards the free woman. But when, even in the same family, the prostitute
may be separated by a great and impassable social gulf from her married
sister, it becomes possible to see, and in the opinion of many
imperatively necessary to see, that a readjustment of moral values is
required. For thousands of years prostitution has been defended on the
ground that the prostitute is necessary to ensure the "purity of women."
In a democratic age it begins to be realized that prostitutes also are
women.
The developing sense of a fundamental human equality underlying the
surface divisions of class tends to make the usual attitude towards the
prostitute, the attitude of her clients even more than that of society
generally, seem painfully cruel. The callous and coarsely frivolous tone
of so many young men about prostitutes, it has been said, is "simply
cruelty of a peculiarly brutal kind," not to be discerned in any other
relation of life.[217] And if this attitude is cruel even in speech it is
still more cruel in action, whatever attempts may be made to disguise its
cruelty.
Canon Lyttelton's remarks may be taken to refer chiefly to young
men of the upper middle class. Concerning what is perhaps the
usual attitude of lower middle class people towards prostitution,
I may quote from a remarkable communication which has reached me
from Australia: "What are the views of a young man brought up in
a middle-class Christian English family on prostitutes? Take my
father, for instance. He first mentioned prostitutes to me, if I
remember rightly, when speaking of his life before marriage. And
he spoke of them as he would speak of a horse he had hired, paid
for, and dismissed from his mind when it had rendered him
service. Although my mother was so kind and good she spoke of
abandoned women with disgust and scorn as of some unclean animal.
As it flatters vanity and pride to be able with good countenance
and universal consent to look down on something, I soon grasped
the situation and adopted an attitude which is, in the main, that
of most middle-class Christian Englishmen towards prostitutes.
But as puberty develops this attitude has to be accommodated with
the wish to make use of this scum, these moral lepers. The
ordinary young man, who likes a spice of immorality and has it
when in town, and thinks it is not likely to come to his mother's
or sisters' ears, does not get over his arrogance and disgust or
abate them in the least. He takes them with him, more or less
disguised, to the brothel, and they color his thoughts and
actions all the time he is sleeping with prostitutes, or kissing
them, or passing his hands over them, as he would over a mare,
getting as much as he can for his money. To tell the truth, on
the whole, that was my attitude too. But if anyone had asked me
for the smallest reason for this attitude, for this feeling of
superiority, pride, hauteur, and prejudice, I should, like any
other 'respectable' young man, have been entirely at a loss, and
could only have gaped foolishly."
From the modern moral standpoint which now concerns us, not only is the
cruelty involved in the dishonor of the prostitute absurd, but not less
absurd, and often not less cruel, seems the honor bestowed on the
respectable women on the other side of the social gulf. It is well
recognized that men sometimes go to prostitutes to gratify the excitement
aroused by fondling their betrothed.[218] As the emotional and physical
results of ungratified excitement are not infrequently more serious in
women than in men, the betrothed women in these cases are equally
justified in seeking relief from other men, and the vicious circle of
absurdity might thus be completed.
From the point of view of the modern moralist there is another
consideration which was altogether overlooked in the conventional and
traditional morality we have inherited, and was indeed practically
non-existent in the ancient days when that morality was still a living
reality. Women are no longer divided only into the two groups of wives who
are to be honored, and prostitutes who are the dishonored guardians of
that honor; there is a large third class of women who are neither wives
nor prostitutes. For this group of the unmarried virtuous the traditional
morality had no place at all; it simply ignored them. But the new
moralist, who is learning to recognize both the claims of the individual
and the claims of society, begins to ask whether on the one hand these
women are not entitled to the satisfaction of their affectional and
emotional impulses if they so desire, and on the other hand whether, since
a high civilization involves a diminished birthrate, the community is not
entitled to encourage every healthy and able-bodied woman to contribute to
maintain the birthrate when she so desires.
All the considerations briefly indicated in the preceding pages—the
fundamental sense of human equality generated by our civilization, the
repugnance to cruelty which accompanies the refinement of urban life, the
ugly contrast of extremes which shock our developing democratic
tendencies, the growing sense of the rights of the individual to authority
over his own person, the no less strongly emphasized right of the
community to the best that the individual can yield—all these
considerations are every day more strongly influencing the modern moralist
to assume towards the prostitute an attitude altogether different from
that of the morality which we derived from Cato and Augustine. He sees the
question in a larger and more dynamic manner. Instead of declaring that it
is well worth while to tolerate and at the same time to condemn the
prostitute, in order to preserve the sanctity of the wife in her home, he
is not only more inclined to regard each as the proper guardian of her own
moral freedom, but he is less certain about the time-honored position of
the prostitute, and moreover, by no means sure that the wife in the home
may not be fully as much in need of rescuing as the prostitute in the
street; he is prepared to consider whether reform in this matter is not
most likely to take place in the shape of a fairer apportionment of sexual
privileges and sexual duties to women generally, with an inevitably
resultant elevation in the sexual lives of men also.
The revolt of many serious reformers against the injustice and
degradation now involved by our system of prostitution is so
profound that some have declared themselves ready to accept any
revolution of ideas which would bring about a more wholesome
transmutation of moral values. "Better indeed were a saturnalia
of free men and women," exclaims Edward Carpenter (Love's
Coming of Age, p. 62), "than the spectacle which, as it is, our
great cities present at night."
Even those who would be quite content with as conservative a
treatment as possible of social institutions still cannot fail to
realize that prostitution is unsatisfactory, unless we are
content to make very humble claims of the sexual act. "The act of
prostitution," Godfrey declares (The Science of Sex, p. 202),
"may be physiologically complete, but it is complete in no other
sense. All the moral and intellectual factors which combine with
physical desire to form the perfect sexual attraction are absent.
All the higher elements of love—admiration, respect, honor, and
self-sacrificing devotion—are as foreign to prostitution as to
the egoistic act of masturbation. The principal drawbacks to the
morality of the act lie in its associations more than in the act
itself. Any affectional quality which a more or less promiscuous
connection might possess is at once destroyed by the intrusion of
the monetary element. In the resulting degradation the woman has
the largest share, since it makes her a pariah and involves her
in all the hardening and depraving influences of social
ostracism. But her degradation only serves to render her
influence on her partners more demoralizing. Prostitution," he
concludes, "has a strong tendency towards emphasizing the
naturally selfish attitude of men towards women, and encouraging
them in the delusion, born of unregulated passions, that the
sexual act itself is the aim and end of the sex life.
Prostitution can therefore make no claim to afford even a
temporary solution to the sex problem. It fulfils only that
mission which has made it a 'necessary evil'—the mission of
palliative to the physical rigors of celibacy and monogamy. It
does so at the cost of a considerable amount of physical and
moral deterioration, much of which is undoubtedly due to the
action of society in completing the degradation of the prostitute
by persistent ostracism. Prostitution was not so great an evil
when it was not thought so great, yet even at its best it was a
real evil, a melancholy and sordid travesty of sincere and
natural passional relations. It is an evil which we are bound to
have with us so long as celibacy is a custom and monogamy a law."
It is the wife as well as the prostitute who is degraded by a
system which makes venal love possible. "The time has gone past,"
the same writer remarks elsewhere (p. 195) "when a mere ceremony
can really sanctify what is base and transform lust and greed
into the sincerity of sexual affection. If, to enter into sexual
connections with a man for a solely material end is a disgrace to
humanity, it is a disgrace under the marriage bond just as much
as apart from the hypocritical blessing of the church or the law.
If the public prostitute is a being who deserves to be treated as
a pariah, it is hopelessly irrational to withhold every sort of
moral opprobrium from the woman who leads a similar life under a
different set of external circumstances. Either the prostitute
wife must come under the moral ban, or there must be an end to
the complete ostracism under which the prostitute labors."
The thinker who more clearly and fundamentally than others, and
first of all, realized the dynamical relationships of
prostitution, as dependent upon a change in the other social
relationships of life, was James Hinton. More than thirty years
ago, in fragmentary writings that still remain unpublished, since
he never worked them into an orderly form, Hinton gave vigorous
and often passionate expression to this fundamental idea. It may
be worth while to quote a few brief passages from Hinton's MSS.:
"I feel that the laws of force should hold also amid the waves of
human passion, that the relations of mechanics are true, and will
rule also in human life.... There is a tension, a crushing of the
soul, by our modern life, and it is ready for a sudden spring to
a different order in which the forces shall rearrange themselves.
It is a dynamical question presented in moral terms.... Keeping a
portion of the woman population without prospect of marriage
means having prostitutes, that is women as instruments of man's
mere sensuality, and this means the killing, in many of them, of
all pure love or capacity of it. This is the fact we have to
face.... To-day I saw a young woman whose life was being consumed
by her want of love, a case of threatened utter misery: now see
the price at which we purchase her ill-health; for her ill-health
we pay the crushing of another girl into hell. We give that for
it; her wretchedness of soul and body are bought by prostitution;
we have prostitutes made for that.... We devote some women
recklessly to perdition to make a hothouse Heaven for the
rest.... One wears herself out in vainly trying to endure
pleasures she is not strong enough to enjoy, while other women
are perishing for lack of these very pleasures. If marriage is
this, is it not embodied lust? The happy Christian homes are the
true dark places of the earth.... Prostitution for man, restraint
for woman—they are two sides of the same thing, and both are
denials of love, like luxury and asceticism. The mountains of
restraint must be used to fill up the abysses of luxury."
Some of Hinton's views were set forth by a writer intimately
acquainted with him in a pamphlet entitled The Future of
Marriage: An Eirenicon for a Question of To-day, by a
Respectable Woman (1885). "When once the conviction is forced
home upon the 'good' women," the writer remarks, "that their
place of honor and privilege rests upon the degradation of others
as its basis, they will never rest till they have either
abandoned it or sought for it some other pedestal. If our
inflexible marriage system has for its essential condition the
existence side by side with it of prostitution, then one of two
things follows: either prostitution must be shown to be
compatible with the well-being, moral and physical, of the women
who practice it, or our marriage system must be condemned. If it
was clearly put before anyone, he could not seriously assert that
to be 'virtue' which could only be practiced at the expense of
another's vice.... Whilst the laws of physics are becoming so
universally recognized that no one dreams of attempting to
annihilate a particle of matter, or of force, yet we do not
instinctively apply the same conception to moral forces, but
think and act as if we could simply do away with an evil, while
leaving unchanged that which gives it its strength. This is the
only view of the social problem which can give us hope. That
prostitution should simply cease, leaving everything else as it
is, would be disastrous if it were possible. But it is not
possible. The weakness of all existing efforts to put down
prostitution is that they are directed against it as an isolated
thing, whereas it is only one of the symptoms proceeding from a
common disease."
Ellen Key, who during recent years has been the chief apostle of
a gospel of sexual morality based on the needs of women as the
mothers of the race, has, in a somewhat similar spirit, denounced
alike prostitution and rigid marriage, declaring (in her Essays
on Love and Marriage) that "the development of erotic personal
consciousness is as much hindered by socially regulated
'morality' as by socially regulated 'immorality,'" and that "the
two lowest and socially sanctioned expressions of sexual dualism,
rigid marriage and prostitution, will gradually become
impossible, because with the conquest of the idea of erotic unity
they will no longer correspond to human needs."
We may sum up the present situation as regards prostitution by saying that
on the one hand there is a tendency for its elevation, in association with
the growing humanity and refinement of civilization, characteristics which
must inevitably tend to mark more and more both those women who become
prostitutes and those men who seek them; on the other hand, but perhaps
through the same dynamic force, there is a tendency towards the slow
elimination of prostitution by the successful competition of higher and
purer methods of sexual relationship freed from pecuniary considerations.
This refinement and humanization, this competition by better forms of
sexual love, are indeed an essential part of progress as civilization
becomes more truly sound, wholesome, and sincere.
This moral change cannot, it seems probable, fail to be accompanied by the
realization that the facts of human life are more important than the
forms. For all changes from lower to higher social forms, from savagery to
civilization, are accompanied—in so far as they are vital changes—by a
slow and painful groping towards the truth that it is only in natural
relations that sanity and sanctity can be found, for, as Nietzsche said,
the "return" to Nature should rather be called the "ascent." Only so can
we achieve the final elimination from our hearts of that clinging
tradition that there is any impurity or dishonor in acts of love for which
the reasonable, and not merely the conventional, conditions have been
fulfilled. For it is vain to attempt to cleanse our laws, or even our
by-laws, until we have first cleansed our hearts.
It would be out of place here to push further the statement of the moral
question as it is to-day beginning to shape itself in the sphere of sex.
In a psychological discussion we are only concerned to set down the actual
attitude of the moralist, and of civilization. The practical outcome of
that attitude must be left to moralists and sociologists and the community
generally to work out.
Our inquiry has also, it may be hoped, incidentally tended to show that in
practically dealing with the question of prostitution it is pre-eminently
necessary to remember the warning which, as regards many other social
problems, has been embodied by Herbert Spencer in his famous illustration
of the bent iron plate. In trying to make the bent plate smooth, it is
useless, Spencer pointed out, to hammer directly on the buckled up part;
if we do so we merely find that we have made matters worse; our hammering,
to be effective, must be around, and not directly on, the offensive
elevation we wish to reduce; only so can the iron plate be hammered
smooth.[219] But this elementary law has not been understood by
moralists. The plain, practical, common-sense reformer, as he fancied
himself to be—from the time of Charlemagne onwards—has over and over
again brought his heavy fist directly down on to the evil of prostitution
and has always made matters worse. It is only by wisely working outside
and around the evil that we can hope to lessen it effectually. By aiming
to develop and raise the relationships of men to women, and of women to
women, by modifying our notions of sexual relationships, and by
introducing a saner and truer conception of womanhood and of the
responsibilities of women as well as of men, by attaining, socially as
well as economically, a higher level of human living—it is only by such
methods as these that we can reasonably expect to see any diminution and
alleviation of the evil of prostitution. So long as we are incapable of
such methods we must be content with the prostitution we deserve, learning
to treat it with the pity, and the respect, which so intimate a failure of
our civilization is entitled to.
[107]
See, e.g., Cheetham's Hulsean Lectures, The Mysteries,
Pagan and Christian, pp. 123, 136.
[108]
Hormayr's Taschenbuch, 1835, p. 255. Hagelstange, in a
chapter on mediæval festivals in his Süddeutsches Bauernleben im
Mittelalter, shows how, in these Christian orgies which were really of
pagan origin, the German people reacted with tremendous and boisterous
energy against the laborious and monotonous existence of everyday life.
[109]
This was clearly realized by the more intelligent upholders
of the Feast of Fools. Austere persons wished to abolish this Feast, and
in a remarkable petition sent up to the Theological Faculty of Paris (and
quoted by Flogel, Geschichte des Grotesk-Komischen, fourth edition, p.
204) the case for the Feast is thus presented: "We do this according to
ancient custom, in order that folly, which is second nature to man and
seems to be inborn, may at least once a year have free outlet. Wine casks
would burst if we failed sometimes to remove the bung and let in air. Now
we are all ill-bound casks and barrels which would let out the wine of
wisdom if by constant devotion and fear of God we allowed it to ferment.
We must let in air so that it may not be spoilt. Thus on some days we give
ourselves up to sport, so that with the greater zeal we may afterwards
return to the worship of God." The Feast of Fools was not suppressed until
the middle of the sixteenth century, and relics of it persisted (as at
Aix) till near the end of the eighteenth century.
[110]
A Méray, La Vie au Temps des Libres Prêcheurs, vol. ii,
Ch. X. A good and scholarly account of the Feast of Fools is given by E. K.
Chambers, The Mediæval Stage, Ch. XIII. It is true that the Church and
the early Fathers often anathematized the theatre. But Gregory of
Nazianzen wished to found a Christian theatre; the Mediæval Mysteries were
certainly under the protection of the clergy; and St. Thomas Aquinas, the
greatest of the schoolmen, only condemns the theatre with cautious
qualifications.
[111]
Spencer and Gillen, Northern Tribes of Central Australia,
Ch. XII.
[112]
Journal Anthropological Institute, July-Dec., 1904, p.
329.
[113]
Westermarck (Origin and Development of the Moral Ideas,
vol. ii, pp. 283-9) shows how widespread is the custom of setting apart a
periodical rest day.
[114]
A. E. Crawley, The Mystic Rose, pp. 273 et seq., Crawley
brings into association with this function of great festivals the custom,
found in some parts of the world, of exchanging wives at these times. "It
has nothing whatever to do with the marriage system, except as breaking it
for a season, women of forbidden degree being lent, on the same grounds as
conventions and ordinary relations are broken at festivals of the
Saturnalia type, the object being to change life and start afresh, by
exchanging every thing one can, while the very act of exchange coincides
with the other desire, to weld the community together" (Ib., p. 479).
[115]
See "The Analysis of the Sexual Impulse" in vol. iii of
these Studies.
[116]
G. Murray, Ancient Greek Literature, p. 211.
[117]
The Greek drama probably arose out of a folk-festival of
more or less sexual character, and it is even possible that the mediæval
drama had a somewhat similar origin (see Donaldson, The Greek Theatre;
Gilbert Murray, loc. cit.; Karl Pearson, The Chances of Death, vol.
ii, pp. 135-6, 280 et seq.).
[118]
R. Canudo, "Les Chorèges Français," Mercure de France,
May 1, 1907, p. 180.
[119]
"This is, in fact," Cyples declares (The Process of Human
Experience, p. 743), "Art's great function—to rehearse within us greater
egoistic possibilities, to habituate us to larger actualizations of
personality in a rudimentary manner," and so to arouse, "aimlessly but
splendidly, the sheer as yet unfulfilled possibilities within us."
[120]
Even when monotonous labor is intellectual, it is not
thereby protected against degrading orgiastic reactions. Prof. L. Gurlitt
shows (Die Neue Generation, January, 1909, pp. 31-6) how the strenuous,
unremitting intellectual work of Prussian seminaries leads among both
teachers and scholars to the worst forms of the orgy.
[121]
Rabutaux discusses various definitions of prostitution, De
la Prostitution en Europe, pp. 119 et seq. For the origin of the names
to designate the prostitute, see Schrader, Reallexicon, art.
"Beischläferin."
[122]
Digest, lib. xxiii, tit. ii, p. 43. If she only gave
herself to one or two persons, though for money, it was not prostitution.
[123]
Guyot, La Prostitution, p. 8. The element of venality is
essential, and religious writers (like Robert Wardlaw, D. D., of Edinburgh,
in his Lectures on Female Prostitution, 1842, p. 14) who define
prostitution as "the illicit intercourse of the sexes," and synonymous
with theological "fornication," fall into an absurd confusion.
[124]
"Such marriages are sometimes stigmatized as 'legalized
prostitution,'" remarks Sidgwick (Methods of Ethics, Bk. iii, Ch. XI),
"but the phrase is felt to be extravagant and paradoxical."
[125]
Bonger, Criminalité et Conditions Economiques, p. 378.
Bonger believes that the act of prostitution is "intrinsically equal to
that of a man or woman who contracts a marriage for economical reasons."
[126]
E. Richard, La Prostitution à Paris, 1890, p. 44. It may
be questioned whether publicity or notoriety should form an essential part
of the definition; it seems, however, to be involved, or the prostitute
cannot obtain clients. Reuss states that she must, in addition, be
absolutely without means of subsistence; that is certainly not essential.
Nor is it necessary, as the Digest insisted, that the act should be
performed "without pleasure;" that may be as it will, without affecting
the prostitutional nature of the act.
[127]
Hawkesworth, Account of the Voyages, etc., 1775, vol. ii,
p. 254.
[128]
R. W. Codrington, The Melanesians, p. 235.
[129]
F. S. Krauss, Romanische Forschungen, 1903, p. 290.
[130]
H. Schurtz, Altersklassen und Männerbünde, 1902, p. 190.
In this work Schurtz brings together (pp. 189-201) some examples of the
germs of prostitution among primitive peoples. Many facts and references
are given by Westermarck (History of Human Marriage, pp. 66 et seq.,
and Origin and Development of the Moral Ideas, vol. ii, pp. 441 et
seq.).
[131]
Bachofen (more especially in his Mutterrecht and Sage
von Tanaquil) argued that even religious prostitution sprang from the
resistance of primitive instincts to the individualization of love. Cf.
Robertson Smith, Religion of Semites, second edition, p. 59.
[132]
Whatever the reason may be, there can be no doubt that
there is a widespread tendency for religion and prostitution to be
associated; it is possibly to some extent a special case of that general
connection between the religious and sexual impulses which has been
discussed elsewhere (Appendix C to vol. i of these Studies). Thus A. B.
Ellis, in his book on The Ewe-speaking Peoples of West Africa (pp. 124,
141) states that here women dedicated to a god become promiscuous
prostitutes. W. G. Sumner (Folkways, Ch. XVI) brings together many facts
concerning the wide distribution of religious prostitution.
[133]
Herodotus, Bk. I, Ch. CXCIX; Baruch, Ch. VI, p. 43. Modern
scholars confirm the statements of Herodotus from the study of Babylonian
literature, though inclined to deny that religious prostitution occupied
so large a place as he gives it. A tablet of the Gilgamash epic, according
to Morris Jastrow, refers to prostitutes as attendants of the goddess
Ishtar in the city Uruk (or Erech), which was thus a centre, and perhaps
the chief centre, of the rites described by Herodotus (Morris Jastrow,
The Religion of Babylonia and Assyria, 1898, p. 475). Ishtar was the
goddess of fertility, the great mother goddess, and the prostitutes were
priestesses, attached to her worship, who took part in ceremonies intended
to symbolize fertility. These priestesses of Ishtar were known by the
general name Kadishtu, "the holy ones" (op. cit., pp. 485, 660).
[134]
It is usual among modern writers to associate Aphrodite
Pandemos, rather than Ourania, with venal or promiscuous sexuality, but
this is a complete mistake, for the Aphrodite Pandemos was purely
political and had no sexual significance. The mistake was introduced,
perhaps intentionally, by Plato. It has been suggested that that
arch-juggler, who disliked democratic ideas, purposely sought to pervert
and vulgarize the conception of Aphrodite Pandemos (Farnell, Cults of
Greek States, vol. ii, p. 660).
[135]
Athenæus, Bk. xiii, cap. XXXII. It appears that the only
other Hellenic community where the temple cult involved unchastity was a
city of the Locri Epizephyrii (Farnell, op. cit., vol. ii, p. 636).
[136]
I do not say an earlier "promiscuity," for the theory of a
primitive sexual promiscuity is now widely discredited, though there can
be no reasonable doubt that the early prevalence of mother-right was more
favorable to the sexual freedom of women than the later patriarchal
system. Thus in very early Egyptian days a woman could give her favors to
any man she chose by sending him her garment, even if she were married. In
time the growth of the rights of men led to this being regarded as
criminal, but the priestesses of Amen retained the privilege to the last,
as being under divine protection (Flinders Petrie, Egyptian Tales, pp.
10, 48).
[137]
It should be added that Farnell ("The Position of Women in
Ancient Religion," Archiv für Religionswissenschaft, 1904, p. 88) seeks
to explain the religious prostitution of Babylonia as a special religious
modification of the custom of destroying virginity before marriage in
order to safeguard the husband from the mystic dangers of defloration.
E. S. Hartland, also ("Concerning the Rite at the Temple of Mylitta,"
Anthropological Essays Presented to E. B. Tyler, p. 189), suggests that
this was a puberty rite connected with ceremonial defloration. This theory
is not, however, generally accepted by Semitic scholars.
[138]
The girls of this tribe, who are remarkably pretty, after
spending two or three years in thus amassing a little dowry, return home
to marry, and are said to make model wives and mothers. They are described
by Bertherand in Parent-Duchâtelet, La Prostitution à Paris, vol. ii, p.
539.
[139]
In Abyssinia (according to Fiaschi, British Medical
Journal, March 13, 1897), where prostitution has always been held in high
esteem, the prostitutes, who are now subject to medical examination twice
a week, still attach no disgrace to their profession, and easily find
husbands afterwards. Potter (Sohrab and Rustem, pp. 168 et seq.) gives
references as regards peoples, widely dispersed in the Old World and the
New, among whom the young women have practiced prostitution to obtain a
dowry.
[140]
At Tralles, in Lydia, even in the second century A.D., as
Sir W. M. Ramsay notes (Cities of Phrygia, vol. i, pp. 94, 115), sacred
prostitution was still an honorable practice for women of good birth who
"felt themselves called upon to live the divine life under the influence
of divine inspiration."
[141]
The gradual secularization of prostitution from its earlier
religious form has been traced by various writers (see, e.g., Dupouey,
La Prostitution dans l'Antiquité). The earliest complimentary reference
to the Hetaira in literature is to be found, according to Benecke
(Antimachus of Colophon, p. 36), in Bacchylides.
[142]
Cicero, Oratio prô Coelio, Cap. XX.
[143]
Pierre Dufour, Histoire de la Prostitution, vol. ii, Chs.
XIX-XX. The real author of this well-known history of prostitution, which,
though not scholarly in its methods, brings together a great mass of
interesting information, is said to be Paul Lacroix.
[144]
Rabutaux, in his Histoire de la Prostitution en Europe,
describes many attempts to suppress prostitution; cf. Dufour, op.
cit., vol. iii.
[145]
Dufour, op. cit., vol. vi, Ch. XLI. It was in the reign
of the homosexual Henry III that the tolerance of brothels was
established.
[146]
In the eighteenth century, especially, houses of
prostitution in Paris attained to an astonishing degree of elaboration and
prosperity. Owing to the constant watchful attention of the police a vast
amount of detailed information concerning these establishments was
accumulated, and during recent years much of it has been published. A
summary of this literature will be found in Dühren's Neue Forshungen über
den Marquis de Sade und seine Zeit, 1904, pp. 97 et seq.
[147]
Rabutaux, op. cit., p. 54.
[148]
Calza has written the history of Venetian prostitution; and
some of the documents he found have been reproduced by Mantegazza, Gli
Amori degli Uomimi, cap. XIV. At the beginning of the seventeenth
century, a comparatively late period, Coryat visited Venice, and in his
Crudities gives a full and interesting account of its courtesans, who
then numbered, he says, at least 20,000; the revenue they brought into the
State maintained a dozen galleys.
[149]
J. Schrank, Die Prostitution in Wien, Bd. I, pp.
152-206.
[150]
U. Robert, Les Signes d'Infamie au Moyen Age, Ch. IV.
[151]
Rudeck (Geschichte der öffentlichen Sittlichkeit in
Deutschland, pp. 26-36) gives many details concerning the important part
played by prostitutes and brothels in mediæval German life.
[152]
They are described by Rabutaux, op. cit., pp. 90 et
seq.
[153]
L'Année Sociologique, seventh year, 1904, p. 440.
[154]
Bloch, Der Ursprung der Syphilis. As regards the German
"Frauenhausen" see Max Bauer, Das Geschlechtsleben in der Deutschen
Vergangenheit, pp. 133-214. In Paris, Dufour states (op. cit., vol. v,
Ch. XXXIV), brothels under the ordinances of St. Louis had many rights
which they lost at last in 1560, when they became merely tolerated houses,
without statutes, special costumes, or confinement to special streets.
[155]
"Cortegiana, hoc est meretrix honesta," wrote Burchard, the
Pope's Secretary, at the beginning of the sixteenth century, Diarium,
ed. Thuasne, vol. ii, p. 442; other authorities are quoted by Thuasne in a
note.
[156]
Burchard, Diarium, vol. iii, p. 167. Thuasne quotes other
authorities in confirmation.
[157]
The example of Holland, where some large cities have
adopted the regulation of prostitution and others have not, is instructive
as regards the illusory nature of the advantages of regulation. In 1883
Dr. Després brought forward figures, supplied by Dutch officials, showing
that in Rotterdam, where prostitution was regulated, both prostitution and
venereal diseases were more prevalent than in Amsterdam, a city without
regulation (A. Després, La Prostitution en France, p. 122).
[158]
It was in 1802 that the medical inspection of prostitutes
in Paris brothels was introduced, though not until 1825 fully established
and made general.
[159]
M. L. Heidingsfeld, "The Control of Prostitution," Journal
American Medical Association, January 30, 1904.
[160]
See, e.g., G. Bérault, La Maison de Tolérance, Thèse de
Paris, 1904.
[161]
Thus the circumstances of the English army in India are of
a special character. A number of statements (from the reports of
committees, official publications, etc.) regarding the good influence of
regulation in reducing venereal diseases in India are brought together by
Surgeon-Colonel F. H. Welch, "The Prevention of Syphilis," Lancet, August
12, 1899. The system has been abolished, but only as the result of a
popular outcry and not on the question of its merits.
[162]
Thus Richard, who accepts regulation and was instructed to
report on it for the Paris Municipal Council, would not have girls
inscribed as professional prostitutes until they are of age and able to
realize what they are binding themselves to (E. Richard, La Prostitution
à Paris, p. 147). But at that age a large proportion of prostitutes have
been practicing their profession for years.
[163]
In Germany, where the cure of infected prostitutes under
regulation is nearly everywhere compulsory, usually at the cost of the
community, it is found that 18 is the average age at which they are
affected by syphilis; the average age of prostitutes in brothels is higher
than that of those outside, and a much larger proportion have therefore
become immune to disease (Blaschko, "Hygiene der Syphilis," in Weyl's
Handbuch der Hygiene, Bd. ii, p. 62, 1900).
[164]
A. Sherwell, Life in West London, 1897, Ch. V.
[165]
Bonger brings together statistics illustrating this point,
op. cit., pp. 402-6.
[166]
The Nightless City, p. 125.
[167]
Ströhmberg, as quoted by Aschaffenburg, Das Verbrechen,
1903, p. 77.
[168]
Monatsschrift für Harnkrankheiten und Sexuelle Hygiene,
1906. Heft 10, p. 460. But this cause is undoubtedly effective in some
cases of unmarried women in Germany unable to get work (see article by
Sister Henrietta Arendt, Police-Assistant at Stuttgart, Sexual-Probleme,
December, 1908).
[169]
Thus, for instance, we find Irma von Troll-Borostyáni
saying in her book, Im Freien Reich (p. 176): "Go and ask these
unfortunate creatures if they willingly and freely devoted themselves to
vice. And nearly all of them will tell you a story of need and
destitution, of hunger and lack of work, which compelled them to it, or
else of love and seduction and the fear of the discovery of their false
step which drove them out of their homes, helpless and forsaken, into the
pool of vice from which there is hardly any salvation." It is, of course,
quite true that the prostitute is frequently ready to tell such stories to
philanthropic persons who expect to hear them, and sometimes even put the
words into her mouth.
[170]
C. Booth, Life and Labour, final volume, p. 125.
Similarly in Sweden, Kullberg states that girls of thirteen to seventeen,
living at home with their parents in comfortable circumstances, have often
been found on the streets.
[171]
W. Acton, Prostitution, 1870, pp. 39, 49.
[172]
In Lyons, according to Potton, of 3884 prostitutes, 3194
abandoned, or apparently abandoned, their profession; in Paris a very
large number became servants, dressmakers, or tailoresses, occupations
which, in many cases, doubtless, they had exercised before
(Parent-Duchâtelet, De la Prostitution, 1857, vol. i, p. 584; vol. ii,
p. 451). Sloggett (quoted by Acton) stated that at Davenport, 250 of the
1775 prostitutes there married. It is well known that prostitutes
occasionally marry extremely well. It was remarked nearly a century ago
that marriages of prostitutes to rich men were especially frequent in
England, and usually turned out well; the same seems to be true still. In
their own social rank they not infrequently marry cabmen and policemen,
the two classes of men with whom they are brought most closely in contact
in the streets. As regards Germany, C. K. Schneider (Die Prostituirte und
die Gesellschaft), states that young prostitutes take up all sorts of
occupations and situations, sometimes, if they have saved a little money,
establishing a business, while old prostitutes become procuresses,
brothel-keepers, lavatory women, and so on. Not a few prostitutes marry,
he adds, but the proportion among inscribed German prostitutes is very
small, less than 2 per cent.
[173]
G. de Molinari, La Viriculture, 1897, p. 155.
[174]
Reuss and other writers have reproduced typical extracts
from the private account books of prostitutes, showing the high rate of
their earnings. Even in the common brothels, in Philadelphia (according to
Goodchild, "The Social Evil in Philadelphia," Arena, March, 1896), girls
earn twenty dollars or more a week, which is far more than they could earn
in any other occupation open to them.
[175]
A. Després, La Prostitution en France, 1883.
[176]
Bonger, Criminalité et Conditions Economiques, 1905, pp.
378-414.
[177]
La Donna Delinquente, p. 401.
[178]
Raciborski, Traité de l'Impuissance, p. 20. It may be
added that Bergh, a leading authority on the anatomical peculiarities of
the external female sexual organs, who believe that strong development of
the external genital organs accompanies libidinous tendencies, has not
found such development to be common among prostitutes.
[179]
Hammer, who has had much opportunity of studying the
psychology of prostitutes, remarks that he has seen no reason to suspect
sexual coldness (Monatsschrift für Harnkrankheiten und Sexuelle Hygiene,
1906, Heft 2, p. 85), although, as he has elsewhere stated, he is of
opinion that indolence, rather than excess of sensuality, is the chief
cause of prostitution.
[180]
See "The Sexual Impulse in Women," in the third volume of
these Studies.
[181]
Tait stated that in Edinburgh many married women living
with their husbands in comfortable circumstances, and having children,
were found to be acting as prostitutes, that is, in the regular habit of
making assignations with strangers (W. Tait, Magdalenism in Edinburgh,
1842, p. 16).
[182]
Janke brings together opinions to this effect, Die
Willkürliche Hervorbringen des Geschlechts, p. 275. "If we compare a
prostitute of thirty-five with her respectable sister," Acton remarked
(Prostitution, 1870, p. 39), "we seldom find that the constitutional
ravages often thought to be necessary consequences of prostitution exceed
those attributable to the cares of a family and the heart-wearing
struggles of virtuous labor."
[183]
Hirschfeld states (Wesen der Liebe, p. 35) that the
desire for intercourse with a sympathetic person is heightened, and not
decreased, by a professional act of coitus.
[184]
This has been clearly shown by Hans Ostwald (from whom I
take the above-quoted observation of a prostitute), one of the best
authorities on prostitute life and character; see, e.g., his article,
"Die erotischen Beziehungen zwischen Dirne und Zuhälter,"
Sexual-Probleme, June, 1908. In the subsequent number of the same
periodical (July, 1908, p. 393) Dr. Max Marcuse supports Ostwald's
experiences, and says that the letters of prostitutes and their bullies
are love-letters exactly like those of respectable people of the same
class, and with the same elements of love and jealousy; these
relationships, he remarks, often prove very enduring. The prostitute
author of the Tagebuch einer Verlorenen (p. 147) also has some remarks
on the prostitute's relations to her bully, stating that it is simply the
natural relationship of a girl to her lover.
[185]
Thus Moraglia found that among 180 prostitutes in North
Italian brothels, and among 23 elegant Italian and foreign cocottes, every
one admitted that she masturbated, preferably by friction of the clitoris;
113 of them, the majority, declared that they preferred solitary or mutual
masturbation to normal coitus. Hammer states (Zehn Lebensläufe Berliner
Kontrollmädchen in Ostwald's series of "Grosstadt Dokumente," 1905) that
when in hospital all but three or four of sixty prostitutes masturbate,
and those who do not are laughed at by the rest.
[186]
Jahrbuch für Sexuelle Zwischenstufen, Jahrgang VII, 1905,
p. 148; "Sexual Inversion," vol. ii of these Studies, Ch. IV. Hammer
found that of twenty-five prostitutes in a reformatory as many as
twenty-three were homosexual, or, on good grounds, suspected to be such.
Hirschfeld (Berlins Drittes Geschlecht, p. 65) mentions that prostitutes
sometimes accost better-class women who, from their man-like air, they
take to be homosexual; from persons of their own sex prostitutes will
accept a smaller remuneration, and sometimes refuse payment altogether.
[187]
With prostitution, as with criminality, it is of course
difficult to disentangle the element of heredity from that of environment,
even when we have good grounds for believing that the factor of heredity
here, as throughout the whole of life, cannot fail to carry much weight.
It is certain, in any case, that prostitution frequently runs in families.
"It has often been my experience," writes a former prostitute (Hedwig
Hard, Beichte einer Gefallenen, p. 156) "that when in a family a girl
enters this path, her sister soon afterwards follows her: I have met with
innumerable cases; sometimes three sisters will all be on the register,
and I knew a case of four sisters, whose mother, a midwife, had been in
prison, and the father drank. In this case, all four sisters, who were
very beautiful, married, one at least very happily, to a rich doctor who
took her out of the brothel at sixteen and educated her."
[188]
This fact is not contradicted by the undoubted fact that
prostitutes are by no means always contented with the life they choose.
[189]
This point has been discussed by Bloch, Sexualleben
unserer Zeit, Ch. XIII.
[190]
Various series of observations are summarized by Lombroso
and Ferrero, La Donna Delinquente, 1893, Part III, cap. IV.
[191]
History of European Morals, vol. iii, p. 283.
[192]
Similarly Lord Morley has written (Diderot, vol. ii, p.
20): "The purity of the family, so lovely and dear as it is, has still
only been secured hitherto by retaining a vast and dolorous host of female
outcasts ... upon whose heads, as upon the scapegoat of the Hebrew
ordinance, we put all the iniquities of the children of the house, and all
their transgressions in all their sins, and then banish them with
maledictions into the foul outer wilderness and the land not inhabited."
[193]
Horace, Satires, lib. i, 2.
[194]
Augustine, De Ordine, Bk. II, Ch. IV.
[195]
De Regimine Principum (Opuscula XX), lib. iv, cap. XIV.
I am indebted to the Rev. H. Northcote for the reference to the precise
place where this statement occurs; it is usually quoted more vaguely.
[196]
Lea, History of Auricular Confession, vol. ii, p. 69.
There was even, it seems, an eccentric decision of the Salamanca
theologians that a nun might so receive money, "licite et valide."
[197]
Lea, op. cit., vol. ii, pp. 263, 399.
[198]
Rabutaux, De la Prostitution en Europe, pp. 22 et seq.
[199]
Burton, Anatomy of Melancholy, Part III, Sect. III, Mem.
IV, Subs. II.
[200]
B. Mandeville, Remarks to Fable of the Bees, 1714, pp.
93-9; cf. P. Sakmann, Bernard de Mandeville, pp. 101-4.
[201]
These conditions favor temporary free unions, but they also
favor prostitution. The reason is, according to Adolf Gerson
(Sexual-Probleme, September, 1908), that the woman of good class will
not have free unions. Partly moved by moral traditions, and partly by the
feeling that a man should be legally her property, she will not give
herself out of love to a man; and he therefore turns to the lower-class
woman who gives herself for money.
[202]
Many girls, said Ellice Hopkins, get into mischief merely
because they have in them an element of the "black kitten," which must
frolic and play, but has no desire to get into danger. "Do you not think
it a little hard," she added, "that men should have dug by the side of her
foolish dancing feet a bottomless pit, and that she cannot have her jump
and fun in safety, and put on her fine feathers like the silly bird-witted
thing she is, without a single false step dashing her over the brink, and
leaving her with the very womanhood dashed out of her?"
[203]
A. Sherwell, Life in West London, 1897, Ch. V.
[204]
As quoted by Bloch, Sexualleben Unserer Zeit, p. 358. In
Berlin during recent years the number of prostitutes has increased at
nearly double the rate at which the general population has increased. It
is no doubt probable that the supply tends to increase the demand.
[205]
Goncourt, Journal, vol. iii, p. 49.
[206]
Vanderkiste, The Dens of London, 1854, p. 242.
[207]
Bonger (Criminalité et Conditions Economiques, p. 406)
refers to the prevalence of prostitution among dressmakers and milliners,
as well as among servants, as showing the influence of contact with
luxury, and adds that the rich women, who look down on prostitution, do
not always realize that they are themselves an important factor of
prostitution, both by their luxury and their idleness; while they do not
seem to be aware that they would themselves act in the same way if placed
under the same conditions.
[208]
H. Lippert, in his book on prostitution in Hamburg, laid
much stress on the craving for dress and adornment as a factor of
prostitution, and Bloch (Das Sexualleben unsurer Zeit, p. 372) considers
that this factor is usually underestimated, and that it exerts an
especially powerful influence on servants.
[209]
Since this was written the influence of several generations
of town-life in immunizing a stock to the evils of that life (though
without reference to prostitution) has been set forth by Reibmayr, Die
Entwicklungsgeschichte des Talentes und Genies, 1908, vol. ii, pp. 73 et
seq.
[210]
In France this intimacy is embodied in the delicious
privilege of tutoiement. "The mystery of tutoiement!" exclaims Ernest
La Jennesse in L'Holocauste: "Barriers broken down, veils drawn away,
and the ease of existence! At a time when I was very lonely, and trying to
grow accustomed to Paris and to misfortune, I would go miles—on foot,
naturally—to see a girl cousin and an aunt, merely to have something to
tutoyer. Sometimes they were not at home, and I had to come back with my
tu, my thirst for confidence and familiarity and brotherliness."
[211]
For some facts and references to the extensive literature
concerning this trade, see, e.g., Bloch, Das Sexualleben Unserer Zeit,
pp. 374-376; also K. M. Baer, Zeitschrift für Sexualwissenschaft, Sept.,
1908; Paulucci de Calboli, Nuova Antologia, April, 1902.
[212]
These considerations do not, it is true, apply to many
kinds of sexual perverts who form an important proportion of the clients
of brothels. These can frequently find what they crave inside a brothel
much more easily than outside.
[213]
Thus Charles Booth, in his great work on Life and Labor in
London, final volume (p. 128), recommends that "houses of accommodation,"
instead of being hunted out, should be tolerated as a step towards the
suppression of brothels.
[214]
"Towns like Woolwich, Aldershot, Portsmouth, Plymouth," it
has been said, "abound with wretched, filthy monsters that bear no
resemblance to women; but it is drink, scorn, brutality and disease which
have reduced them to this state, not the mere fact of associating with
men."
[215]
"The contract of prostitution in the opinion of prostitutes
themselves," Bernaldo de Quirós and Llanas Aguilaniedo remark (La Mala
Vida en Madrid, p. 254), "cannot be assimilated to a sale, nor to a
contract of work, nor to any other form of barter recognized by the civil
law. They consider that in these pacts there always enters an element
which makes it much more like a gift in a matter in which no payment could
be adequate. 'A woman's body is without price' is an axiom of
prostitution. The money placed in the hands of her who procures the
satisfaction of sexual desire is not the price of the act, but an offering
which the priestess of Venus applies to her maintenance." To the Spaniard,
it is true, every transaction which resembles trade is repugnant, but the
principle underlying this feeling holds good of prostitution generally.
[216]
Journal des Goncourt, vol. iii; this was in 1866.
[217]
Rev. the Hon. C. Lyttelton, Training of the Young in Laws
of Sex, p. 42.
[218]
See, e.g., R. W. Taylor, Treatise on Sexual Disorders,
1897, pp. 74-5. Georg Hirth (Wege zur Heimat, 1909, p. 619) narrates the
case of a young officer who, being excited by the caresses of his
betrothed and having too much respect for her to go further than this, and
too much respect for himself to resort to masturbation, knew nothing
better than to go to a prostitute. Syphilis developed a few days after the
wedding. Hirth adds, briefly, that the results were terrible.
[219]
It is an oft-quoted passage, but can scarcely be quoted too
often: "You see that this wrought-iron plate is not quite flat: it sticks
up a little, here towards the left—'cockles,' as we say. How shall we
flatten it? Obviously, you reply, by hitting down on the part that is
prominent. Well, here is a hammer, and I give the plate a blow as you
advise. Harder, you say. Still no effect. Another stroke? Well, there is
one, and another, and another. The prominence remains, you see: the evil
is as great as ever—greater, indeed. But that is not all. Look at the
warp which the plate has got near the opposite edge. Where it was flat
before it is now curved. A pretty bungle we have made of it. Instead of
curing the original defect we have produced a second. Had we asked an
artisan practiced in 'planishing,' as it is called, he would have told us
that no good was to be done, but only mischief, by hitting down on the
projecting part. He would have taught us how to give variously-directed
and specially-adjusted blows with a hammer elsewhere: so attacking the
evil, not by direct, but by indirect actions. The required process is less
simple than you thought. Even a sheet of metal is not to be successfully
dealt with after those common-sense methods in which you have so much
confidence. What, then, shall we say about a society?... Is humanity more
readily straightened than an iron plate?" (The Study of Sociology, p.
270.) |
