THE CAUSES OF PROSTITUTION

The wonder is that there is not a greater degree of public

appreciation of the prostitute-making conditions

which society harbors because it foolishly

thinks that it profits by them.

By JAMES P. WARBASSE

A prostitute is a woman who offers her body for hire to men for their sexual pleasure. Sexual promiscuity on the part of women, not practised for money, does not constitute prostitution. Nor does the mere granting of sexual privileges for money constitute prostitution; if it did, women who marry for money would fall within this class. Prostitution means promiscuity for hire.

We should approach its study with sympathetic minds. The prostitute in America is likely to be a weak character who has fallen a victim to the vicious conditions which society maintains. The glamor and gayety, which flippantly are spoken of as associated with her traffic, really do not exist for her. Her lot by no means is a happy one. She reconciles herself to this life usually because her mind is empty of better things. When once engaged in prostitution, it is difficult for the woman to escape from it unless powerful social forces are brought to bear.

The specific causes which prompt women to enter this traffic may be classified as follows: (I) those affecting both sexes, (II) those affecting first the male, and (III) those bearing especially upon the female.

Before proceeding with an enumeration of causative factors, let it be noted that the two fundamental causes are (a) sexual lust on the part of men and (b) poverty on the part of women. The other causes which will be given are subsidiary to these two. Anything that makes for sexual looseness, that breaks down the fiber of sexual morality, makes for prostitution. We may even go so far as to include all agencies which provoke sexual excitement. Among these are many contributing conditions, some predominated by good, some by evil. Thus, as sexual excitants, on the one hand is music, with a maximum power for good and a minimum power for evil; and on the other, alcohol, with a minimum power for good and a maximum power for evil. An analysis of the causative factors is not complete unless it takes into account these secondary influences.

I. A chief subsidiary cause common to both sexes is defective education , which is responsible for ignorance of the simple principles of sexual biology, sexual hygiene, and sexual disease. Boys and girls growing up, first learn of these things from their vulgar companions, stumble into love, courtship, and marriage, blundering and groping--all because they have been denied instruction in one of the subjects which are vital for their health and happiness. Venereal diseases and sexual sins are augmented because of the ignorance which prudishness insists upon. Women fall; men patronize the prostitutes, contract gonorrhea and syphilis, and carry them to their wives, because of this ignorance; and society reaps wretchedness and vice.

Were girls told the dangers of extra-marital sexual congress--how it ultimately [pg 4] means either pregnancy or venereal disease--and could they know the meaning and consequences of these two conditions, from both physical and social standpoints, the ranks of the prostitutes would be much depleted.

Many a girl would not have made her sexual mistakes had she been advised. It is not because there was not time in the home or school to teach her a little practical sociology. No, there was time to teach her many other things of minor importance. In fact, it will always be found that these girls have zealously been taught many things that are not true, and that would be of little service to them if they were true. The reason the girl was not given this useful information is that for two thousand years the "pleasures of the flesh" have been regarded as evil. It has been droned out by sad-voiced prelates that "man is conceived in sin." This wretched dogma has made its impression on the human heart; mothers and fathers are loath to speak of these sinful things to the young; and their girls grow up ignorant, and go into prostitution for want of the saving information.

Another defect of education is that which exalts prudishness under the guise of modesty. The draping of the body, to hide its parts from view, had its origin in Christendom in the doctrine that "the flesh is evil." Instead of hiding the body, this practice has directed attention to the covered parts. The vision of imagination has penetrated all draperies, and carried with it the lascivious sense which the unobstructed eye would not. Sensuality has been promoted rather than suppressed. The exhibition of the naked human body is the beginning of sexual morality. Unnecessarily to cover and screen it from vision is to insult it with shame which it does not deserve, proclaim it as evil, and direct attention to its more specialized sexual parts.

II. Of the causes which operate first upon the male factor, (1) the double standard of sexual morals is most important. It prompts men to employ the prostitute. They demand her as a masculine right. (2) Deferred marriage is another element. The causes of deferred marriage are largely economic, and rest upon the disproportion between wages and the cost of living. The wage-earning class is mulcted of most of the material wealth it produces. Men are paid neither their just wage nor enough to warrant assuming the responsibilities of marriage. The social system which bestows upon the non-producing class most of the wealth produced by labor is guilty of withholding from the man the bride to whom his industry entitles him. (3) The inability to regulate satisfactorily the number of offspring is also a potent factor. This, coupled with the superstition against copulation during pregnancy and lactation, drives married men out of the home to seek sexual gratification.

(4) The widespread belief among men in the need of sexual exercise as a preservative of health is a strong influence in the promotion of prostitution. The idea of the sexual necessity for men has been refuted by many students of these problems; but those who want to believe in it continue in the majority. Still it is not difficult to show that more men have their health damaged by prostitutes than have received benefit from their administrations.

(5) Alcohol is the great promoter of sexual lust. Investigators who have questioned many men upon this subject have found that a large proportion of them made their first sexual mistakes while under the influence of alcohol. Young men are especially prone to seduction when intoxicated. Alcohol inhibits the action of the will, benumbs the moral sense, and stimulates the sexual passions. No other poison plays so strong a rôle in the promotion of sex immorality.

(6) The absence of good feminine society in the circles of youth is a factor. [pg 5] Social contact with high-minded women satisfies the craving for feminine society and deters young men from seeking the society of the opposite type of women. A boy who has friendships among good women is apt to be ashamed to go among the lewd.

(7) The unlovable wife encourages prostitution. She may be sexually unattractive to the husband because of disease, pregnancy, fear of pregnancy, or coldness. The husband may be responsible for any or all of these causes; but still he patronizes the other woman.

III. Of the factors that bear directly upon the female, the most important is (1) poverty . It is not only a primary cause of prostitution, but also a secondary cause, running into the other social conditions. In the United States are 6,000,000 women wage-workers, employed in the gainful industries. In New York City are 300,000 wage-earning women, living upon the brink of starvation. The wages which they earn scarcely provide them with the meager necessities of life; of the joys of life they have but little. Many of them cannot live upon their wages and must supplement them from other sources; many have others depending upon them.

Studies of the problem show that wages are regulated by the cost of subsistence. Workers are paid as little as they can exist upon and still be fairly efficient, capital demanding that the pay shall be so near the starvation limit that the workers shall live in fear of want. The interests of capital also demand that there shall at all times be an unemployed class seeking employment.

Most of the money in this great country which is bequeathed by the wealthy to care for damaged human beings has been wrung from those very same human beings who were sacrificed for its production. The curse of capitalistic greed is a basic factor in the social evils, and they will exist so long as the right to exploit human beings is tolerated by society.

August Bebel illustrates the relation of prostitution to wages by the report of the Chief Constable of Bolton, England, showing that the number of young prostitutes increased more during the English cotton famine, consequent upon the Civil War in America, than during the previous twenty-five years. Read the pitiful records of the women who were driven by destitution to sell themselves as reported in Sanger's "History of Prostitution." Of 2000 prostitutes investigated in New York, 525 gave destitution as the cause of their going into that life. This is the largest number under any one cause. But poverty can be read into the others. "Drink," "seduced and abandoned," "ill-treatment by parents or husband," "as an easy life," "bad company," "violated," "seduced on emigrant ships," "seduced in emigrant boarding-houses"--these cover most of the other causes, and all have poverty and bad economic conditions at their base.

Whether it is because of lack of employment or because of the easier means of livelihood which prostitution offers, the earning of a living is the basic factor. A social condition which insured every woman and every man an opportunity to earn a decent living, and which segregated and provided for the few incompetents and moral derelicts, would have no prostitution. There might be women who would indulge in promiscuity or would be licentious, but they would not be prostitutes.

Rich women are not prostitutes, because their livelihood is assured them. Prostitution is largely an economic problem. A woman who has been given the information which every woman should have, and who is not pathologic, does not barter her chastity for money except as a matter of economic expediency.

Edmond Kelly says: "Chastity ought to be a purely moral or social question, [pg 6] not an economic one." Quoting also from the same source a part of the report of Miss Woodbridge, secretary of the Working Women's Society: "It is a known fact that men's wages cannot fall below a limit upon which they can exist, but women's wages have no limit, since the paths of shame are always open to them. The very fact that some of these women receive partial support from brothers or fathers and are thus enabled to live upon less than they earn, forces other women who have no such support either to suffer for necessities or seek other means of support."

Out of these conditions grow the low wages of shop girls and operatives. But even though not driven to it by poverty, the girls who leave the factory for prostitution cannot be blamed. Human automatons, fastened to whirling wheels, consumed by monotonous, soul-destroying days of toil, crawling at night into unlovely beds, crawling forth at break of day to toil again, dull and stolid, with hope half smothered--toiling slaves, who would begrudge them narcosis, death, or prostitution? The wonder is that there is not a greater degree of public appreciation of the prostitute-making conditions, which society harbors because it foolishly thinks that it profits by them.

(2) Crowded tenements belong with the economic factors for only the direst poverty would compel the acceptance of the low standard of living which they impose. They mean absence of true home life, unhygienic conditions, squalor, and lack of privacy. One-thirteenth of the population of New York lives at a density of over 600 to the acre. There are one hundred and five blocks having a density of over 750 to the acre. If everybody lived under such conditions, all the people of the world could be accommodated in the state of Delaware. This is not for lack of land, for it would be possible to have in New York City over ten million people with a density of only 50 to the acre. Many apartments have from three to five occupants per room. In the Borough of Brooklyn, New York, there were in 1911, 127,000 dark rooms, and 50,000 wholly without windows or any other opening except a door. Poverty causes congestion, and congestion tends to loss of self-respect, to immorality, and to sexual irregularities. The records of our children's societies show to how appalling a degree the chastity of little girls is being sacrificed in the dark halls and crowded rooms of the tenements.

(3) Child labor is one of the demoralizing products of our civilization. There are 2,000,000 children wage-earners in the United States. That means children who are denied adequate schooling and free play. They are forced into the mills and factories and tied up to machines. Their minds are dwarfed, their bodies stunted--all for "the hallowed privilege of working for a living." Consult the findings of the U. S. Bureau of Labor, read John Spargo's "Bitter Cry of the Child," peruse the reports of the National Consumers' League and of the National Child Labor Committee, and decide if we are not creating prostitution out of the blood and flesh of children for the money there is in it. Any condition which makes for moral and physical deterioration makes ultimately for prostitution.

(4) The profits of vice promote the traffic in women. Women must be got by fair means or foul in the interest of the business. Pimps, police, politicians, proprietors, cadets, madams, and white slavers--all demand girls. In Newark, Ohio, the people imposed a license of $1000 annually upon each saloon. Enough liquor could not be sold, by every effort, to satisfy the license fee--eighty saloons in a town of 25,000 inhabitants, one saloon to every 65 adult men. Boys had to be made drunkards, gambling had to be added, for the people wanted the $80,000 annually. The [pg 7] burden became so great that the saloons were forced to organize houses of prostitution to help raise the money. By combining these two splendid cooperative business features the town affairs flourished. [1] The story is the same everywhere in America; so long as there are profits to be made in prostitution, the great spirit of business enterprise will demand and secure the bodies and souls of women for exploitation for profits.

Raines Law hotels, excursion steamboats with rooms to rent, massage parlors, and landlords, all offer inducements for the encouragement of prostitution. The prostitute often pays for protection; she pays extra rent to the landlord, fees to the janitor, and a stipend to her protector; she induces men to drink, which gives a profit to the liquor trade; she uses cabs and the telephone much at night; and it is such business interests as these which often connive to share her profits.

(5) Lack of opportunity for the woman who has violated society's conventions helps recruit the ranks. A man and a woman together may violate the law of sexual conventionality, the man is received in society, the woman is cast out forever. Here are some of the reasons given by women for entering prostitution: "My lover betrayed me, and I could not go back home." The lover ( sic ), of course, could go back home. "My father refused to let me stay in the house when he learned that I had been raped, for that was what it was." The father continued to regard himself as good enough to stay in the house. "My brother told on me to my father and he turned me out." Who is my brother? is a pertinent question here. "My stepmother turned me out when she found that I was about to become a mother." This girl was a child of sixteen when thus cast out. These suffice. Society makes prostitutes by regarding such women as irretrievable sinners rather than as victims of its own sins.

(6) Social inequalities , which prompt girls to covet the fine raiment and jewels that other women display, is a factor of importance. This is noteworthy because of the fact that most of the display of this sort made by the rich is prompted not by an inherent love of the beautiful, but by the pleasure derived from the consciousness of exciting envy in the minds of others who are less fortunate. So deeply fixed is this feeling of pleasure in creating envy, on the one hand, and the desire for emulation of the rich, on the other, that the evidences of conspicuous waste among the former class and of tawdry imitation among the latter class give to feminine raiment sundry characteristic and bizarre features. Many a poor girl covets these silly externals above all else. An image of man, in the guise of a lover, offers them to her; and she falls. She reads in the great metropolitan press every day of the sensual indulgences of women who have diamonds, automobiles, and lap dogs, and she feels that there is, perhaps, some connection between the practices and the possessions of these people. The influence of the newspaper notoriety of sexually loose women is confirmed by the stage and the novel, which present to impressionable girls, women of this character in the light of heroines.

(7) The absence of good, wholesome, family life , especially in cities, causes prostitution. The majority of girls in the great American cities have no home life worthy of the name. At night they seek the streets, and find there, in the dance-halls, and in the cheap shows, the pleasures which the home fails to supply. In New York are three hundred dance-halls. The decent ones are so few as to be negligible. Nearly all are [pg 8] demoralizing to the girls who frequent them. Here the pimp, the spieler, and the cadet ply their trade. The conditions are the same in all of our great cities. Of the first thousand girls sent from New York City to the Bedford, N. Y., Reformatory, the majority stated that they took their first downward step in connection with the dance-halls. These institutions are allies of the liquor traffic, and business interests are served by them.

Mothercraft is a neglected science. Not enough of those who give birth to children, "mother" them. Girls are not growing up with the companionship of intelligent mothers. The blame is not the girls'. Girls cannot be expected to care for the companionship of empty-minded mothers.

(8) Seduction in young girlhood is a common result of defective education, deficient mothering, and the unlovely domestic and economic conditions incident to the slums.

(9) Unhappy childhood , due to unkind parents, intolerable restraints of the puritanic household, and uncongenial toil imposed upon the child, are factors of moment.

The most tragic phase of prostitution is to be found in those girls who are (10) driven into it by parents, guardians, or husbands, as a matter of business. There is a class of men living in idleness in our cities who are supported by the wages of the prostitutes whom they have created by seduction. Under marriage, or the pretense of marriage, these men ruin their victims, install them in houses of prostitution, and appropriate for themselves their bitterly earned wages. Girls are often lured from good homes by them; and many of the murders and suicides which entertain the patrons of the daily press are supplied from this form of enterprise.

(11) Servants seduced by the master of the house or his sons swell the ranks of prostitution. The intimacies of domestic life make this one of the prolific causative factors. Girls in domestic service fall easy victims also to other men, because they live in an environment in which the incompleteness of their own lives is daily manifested to them. Of the first thousand girls admitted to the Bedford Institution, 430 gave their occupation as general housework.

(12) The lack of social democracy , whether in the home or shop, often makes the position of the wage-earner intolerable. The humiliation to which the domestic servant is subjected in many homes renders prostitution attractive to her. If every mistress would put on the servant's garb and go through the servant's life for just one day each year, a lesson in human sympathy might be learned that would help to sweeten human intercourse. If the mistress could be made to realize that the servant is a human being who is possessed of the same longings as she and suffers from the lack of their gratification just as she does, the domestic relations would be improved. Sometimes a servant retaliates for the slights, and evens up the social situation, by winning the master's love. But the life lived by many a domestic servant justifies no blame if she prefers to venture upon prostitution.

(13) Alcohol is the seducer's ally . A large proportion of the involuntary prostitutes are seduced by being first made drunk. This is the prevalent method in the saloon dance-halls. The dance music plays for a few minutes; the intervals between dances are much longer; the girls who do not drink are ordered out; a girl who has drudged in a sweatshop or factory all day must have some pleasure; and the home does not offer it. The social drinking also of alcohol among women and girls breaks down moral resistance. If the great slothful public could have driven home to it the relation of alcohol, not [pg 9] to poverty and crime, but just to sexual wrongs, it is inconceivable that it would not rise up and cast it out.

(14) The inadequacy of public recreations . Education has been socialized, it is no longer of much private profit; but recreation, which comes next in importance to education for the young, is still largely commercialized. We are just beginning to provide recreation facilities as a public duty; but the wider socialization of recreations is one of society's most urgent needs.

As a number of causative factors have been mentioned which play a lesser rôle, and as many factors have been mentioned which are not wholly bad, this résumé cannot be complete without a reference to (15) religion . The fact that the great religions can be traced back to the worship of the creative and life-giving principles, as exemplified by the sun and the sexual organs, that prostitution was at one time a religious rite, and that at present the sexual emotions play a strong rôle in the perpetuation of these rites, renders it but natural that there should be a relation between the two. Religious emotion and sexual emotion are closely related. Religious fervor is a manifestation of sexual lust.

When we come down to the dominant religion of the western world we find that its literature, the Bible, contains recountals of nearly all types of sexual crimes, among which are the most revolting. This, from a historic or scientific standpoint, is not objectionable; but the fact that the halo of sacredness is thrown about the men who committed these immoral acts, that they are held up as being "after God's own heart," that Christendom and Jewdom name their children after them, and that their pictures adorn the temples and the market-places, bears witness that they are approved of men.

It is to be regretted that so much of salaciousness, of degrading obscenity, and of brutal lust is embraced in a literature employed for purposes of moral teaching. The fact that men and women find excuses for their own laches in this literature is not to be wondered at. Sexual sinners often quote the Bible as though it were written specifically for their benefit.

The sexual excitement and immoralities engendered by such factors as the revival and camp-meeting are not to be overlooked. These primitive institutions are passing into history, but among the less enlightened to whom they have been transmitted, they continue to be sexual orgies. The woman who in ecstasy exclaims, "Do what you will with this poor vile body, but my soul belongs to Jesus," possesses faith which represents a dangerous and immoral religious fervor. A long period of connection with a religious denominational hospital has taught me that a pitifully large number of sexually ruined and venereally disabled young women are produced in the atmosphere of the choirs of the churches of this denomination in the small towns of the East. [2]

(16) The police courts send women into prostitution by an unwise system of fines and penalties. A girl is brought in by a policeman, charged with vagrancy, disorderly conduct, or some other indefinite offense (which often means simply having refused to be blackmailed), and the judge sentences her to pay a fine or go to the workhouse. How does this operation affect prostitution? If, being a prostitute, she pays the fine, she goes out on the street again with renewed zeal to get a man to recoup the loss which she has just paid into the treasury of the people. If, being a prostitute, she goes to the workhouse, the brothel which is deprived of her services goes about it to replace the vacancy by another girl [pg 10] (here come in the pimp and the procurer). If she is a young girl or a first offender, she often is thrown into a cell with some criminal women who make her lose what self-respect she has left, and when she is returned to society it is with resentment, depravity, and the feeling that she has sunk too low ever to hope to rise again, and she proceeds upon the path toward which the finger of society points. [3] In New York 66 per cent of the women arrested when they come before the judge are so disposed of that they may at once return to the street. A more humane treatment of these unfortunates is beginning to be adopted in some cities; but crimes against them will continue to be committed so long as the courts are the ante-chambers to penal methods. When the courts become chambers for scientific diagnosis and judgment, for discovering the nature of the ill from which the girl is suffering, for determining the real cause of her illness, and for prescribing the treatment necessary for her care--in other words, for social justice, then we shall make progress.

The insane were once treated by throwing them in chains into a dungeon; the sick were once supposed to be bewitched and possessed of devils; criminals and prostitutes are still treated in conformity to the ancient superstitions; but a better day is to dawn when the light of science and humanity will be shed upon their misfortunes.

Besides economic and social causes of prostitution, there are causes which may be called pathologic. (17) Alcoholism and syphilis in the parents , causing physical and moral deterioration in the offspring, are important. (18) Ill health should not be overlooked. Often there is pelvic disease, producing abnormal libidinous impulses; or there may be central nervous disease; or glandular disease affecting the internal secretions; or other physical ailments making for instability. Some women have given as a reason physical inability to perform ordinary laborious work whereby to earn a livelihood.

Finally may be mentioned that peculiar, ill-defined condition, called (19) degeneracy . In this class are the women of abnormal and defective mentality. Anyone who has talked much with prostitutes recognizes this as a not inconsiderable class. The shallow intellect, the perverted points of view, and the absence of sense of responsibility, characterize many of these women. The prevalence of hysteria is well known. At Bedford, among the first thousand admissions were 137 girls who were classified as "feeble-minded." The sexual perverts and the women of abnormally lustful tendencies belong largely in this class. These are the women who actually become prostitutes because they like it. But it should not be lost sight of that their mental and physical perversions can often be traced back to hereditary and educational wrongs, often born of bad economic conditions. Heredity is undoubtedly a strong factor; mental unbalance is transmitted.

In many cases this weakened moral and mental tone makes of the girl a voluntary prostitute. Neither poverty nor alcohol nor seduction plays any rôle. She is the seducer from the beginning. Moreover, this tendency toward prostitution, displayed by these girls who are mentally deficient, enters largely into combination with the other causes. Such a girl, under the influence of the excitement of alcohol or religion, or under the stress of poverty or the promise of fine raiment, loses her sexual self-respect forever; whereas a girl of better mind, under the same circumstances, retains hers. The latter woman has a better idea of what is right and expedient; she finds some way out without the sacrifice of her chastity; and [pg 11] when she does give herself up to sexual love (marriage unsanctioned by society), she still retains her self-respect and is not prone to drift on to prostitution. The sexual urge alone in a woman of fair intelligence does not in America make a prostitute of her; in some European countries it may.

The women in whom the sexual urge is intense become prostitutes if mentally deficient; if mentally strong they marry--conventionally or otherwise. If they do none of these things they must plunge into absorbing work, or they are destined to become intoxicated and destroyed by their own uneliminated products.

It is to the mentally or morally weak that the arguments of the female procurer appeal. This woman tells the girl of the easy way to make money, the easy life, good clothes, good friends, and good times. The simple girl falls, particularly if she have behind her any of the other great causative factors to drive her on. Often the mental and moral weakness may be a matter of ignorance--defective education rather than heredity. These are the pathetic cases in which it is clear that the word of warning should have been a part of the girl's education.

It should be borne in mind that prostitution is recruited from those who once were sexually clean. Many of these women once cherished hopes of love and the domestic joys. Prostitution was not their ambition. Men made it easy for them to fall; and, having fallen, men and women made it difficult for them to rise. They are entitled to the same consideration as are the victims of typhoid fever. Society is guilty in both cases. Prostitution and typhoid are products of vicious social conditions; both are preventable.

Let us not with smugness deny this woman as our sister, for she is; and we have wronged her. She has a better right to reproach us than we have to scorn her. Our guilt is greater than hers. There was a great fire in a factory in New York City. One hundred girls were burned to death or hurled themselves from windows to be crushed and mangled upon the structures below. The women who ply the trade of prostitution are as guiltless of their own destruction as were these poor girls. Their blood is upon society with its greed for money, its apathy, ignorance, indifference, active participation in crime, and its exploitation of the weak.

Let us cease to cry with self-assumed virtue, Spare us from contamination by the prostitute who brazenly has come among us. Let us be honest enough and decent enough to confess: We are guilty; we have made this woman what she is; she is ours. Let us first be just to her; and then let us see to it that no more of our daughters walk in her footsteps.

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