CHAPTER X THE ECONOMIC PROBLEM

(4) The Prostitute
“Jenny, you know the city now.
A child can tell the tale there, how
Some things which are not yet enroll’d
In market lists are bought and sold
Even till the early Sunday light,
When Saturday night is market-night
Everywhere, be it dry or wet,
And market-night in the Haymarket.
…
Of the same lump (as it is said)
For honour and dishonour made,
Two sister vessels. Here is one.
It makes a goblin of the sun.”
D. G. Rossetti.

When considering the reasons for women’s lower wages, reference was made to the fact that women had other sources of income than those derived from their work; and no discussion of the economic position of women would be honest which did not take into account the undoubted fact that women can make more money by the sale of their bodies than in any other way. This may sound an extreme statement, but it is advisedly[100] made. Kings have given their mistresses titles, and have made their sons peers. How many women have been ennobled for any other services? While a first-class university woman rarely gets a higher salary than five hundred pounds a year, an illiterate courtesan, if she plays her cards well and has luck, may dip her hands into millions. The two cynical volumes of Emil Reich, entitled, Woman through the Ages, give proof of those qualities in woman which man has chosen to reward with the highest titles and the greatest riches. Every poor sweated girl knows she can in one night double her week’s wage if she chooses. This is a fact. If we do not fearlessly face it, we may as well give up talking about the women’s movement, for it will only be play. The clearest knowledge, the closest thinking, are wanted on the part of women and men; hitherto, except for those personally involved either as buyers or sellers, knowledge has been confined to the police (almost entirely occupied with penalising one only of the two parties to the transactions), to doctors and nurses and officials of workhouses and asylums of many sorts, and to a small body of rescue-workers. The list is significant.

It is to be wished that this subject could be approached free from the falseness of sentimentality. It is not possible, nor is it desirable to abolish all feeling when we come to act. Feeling is the property of sentient beings, and actions are not right or wrong quite independently of their effects on feeling. Women do well to feel intensely in[101] matters so closely affecting themselves, their sisters, their children and their husbands. We are sometimes told that women must be kept out of dealing with these things, because of their emotionalism: yet is it not the passions and appetites of men which largely create the whole problem, and are we to believe that men, when they come to making laws and regulations, forget their passions and appetites, and become as gods? We all know they do not, and the feeling of women is every bit as respectable and deserving of attention. So we must feel, and we do well to feel, when we come to act; but when we are studying the facts,—the deeds of men and of women, and their consequences,—it is well to banish feeling for a time, so that we may know first.

It has been the easy custom of most men to divide women crudely into good and bad. The good woman is superhuman, and she is a very homogeneous and monotonous sort of person; the bad woman is subhuman, but often very amusing and attractive. The good woman is put on a pedestal, where she finds life very restricted and dull; the bad woman is segregated, either literally or metaphorically, into compounds, where the delusion is nursed that she will not infect the good woman, either with her wickedness or her diseases. This is all unreal and tiresome and stupid and harmful enough, but there is little to choose between it and a view of woman which is too often put forward by women themselves, and that is the[102] view that all women are angels, and so angelic that nothing can corrupt them. We may reverence the soul in every living person, we may keep our faith strong in the miraculous power of recovery, we may humbly own that none of us is entitled to cast a stone, we may even have come to see that stone-throwing has not a reforming influence, and yet, if we are honest, we must admit that there are women who have no personal pride and no reverence for the body: covetous women; cold women, who do not know the purification of passion; sensual women, who know only appetite; lazy women; vain women; cowardly women. It is cant to insist that we must reverence such women, any more than we would reverence covetous, cold, sensual, lazy, vain or cowardly men. The life of prostitution tends to encourage all these vices; that is one of the strongest reasons for hating the life; but, undoubtedly, some persons have more aptitude for it than others.

The questions we must ask ourselves are: (1) What is prostitution? (2) Is it an evil? (3) Is it necessary? (4) If it is not necessary, how can it be checked or prevented?

It is not easy to find a definition of prostitution which will be accepted by all. I propose to define it as the yielding up for material advantages only of something which should be given for other purposes. A man prostitutes his pen if he takes money for writing lies; it is no prostitution if he accepts money for writing what he believes to be[103] truth. A woman prostitutes her body when she yields it to a man for whom she has no love, in return for money; it is not prostitution if she accepts money from the man she loves. Many other definitions are possible, but if we take this one, we have to admit that there is a vast deal of prostitution within the marriage state, and here, in addition to material advantage, there is often the added sop of social position. Even when not entered into for gain, the marriage is often persisted in for that motive. The effects on men and women and children are bad, but no one has even suggested that reform should be introduced by any methods other than educational ones: to give every girl the means of earning a decent livelihood, so that she is not forced into marriage as into a trade; to encourage reverence for the body and faith in the clean passion of love in both men and women; to create a healthy public opinion in which traffic in the appetites is regarded as repulsive, so that it will be thought as shameful for men to buy as for women to sell gratification; these are the only possible ways of dealing with loveless marriages. What is commonly known as prostitution is, however, carried on outside of marriage, and is promiscuous. It arises from the fact that large numbers of men either have no wife or find one woman insufficient for their gratification.

I have said that there are large numbers. Estimates vary enormously as to what proportion of men resort to prostitutes. More facts are badly[104] wanted, but the Chicago Vice Commission of 1911, a commission instituted and carried out by the municipality, states that the number of prostitutes in the city who do nothing else is approximately 5000. It is impossible even to estimate the number of casual and clandestine prostitutes, but they are certainly many. To arrive at some estimate, the commission takes only the 1012 inmates of certain houses, from whose books it appeared that there was a nightly average of fifteen men per inmate,[4] and this gives the total of 5,540,700 visits per year. It does not seem likely that Chicago is singular, and until we have trustworthy evidence to the contrary, these facts form almost the only basis for estimating the extent of these practices.

When we come to the question whether prostitution is an evil, we shall find that some of the consequences are evil in themselves, and some are evil because of the way society treats them. There can be no possible doubt that the practice is of the greatest injury to the health of the women engaged in it. Those who persist in it die young, though here the Chicago Commission suggests there has been exaggeration. The injury to the health of the men might be decreased if there were no disgrace attached to the practice, and if medical advice were always invoked and carefully followed; there would still, however, be considerable risk to the health of the men, even if excess were not added,[105] as a cause of disease. The injury to the health of wives is very grave indeed, and those who will take the trouble to consult such books as Social Diseases and Marriage, by Prince A. Morrow, M.D., or Hygiene and Morality, by Lavinia L. Dock (Secretary of the International Council of Nurses), will find there justification enough for the statement that prostitution is not only an evil, but it is the evil which is felt most disastrously by women of all ages and classes. It affects the children, who are afflicted with many ghastly diseases, as a result of their father’s conduct; it affects the wives, who, besides the moral suffering they may endure, are frequently rendered barren, and themselves diseased; it affects all women wage-earners and, through them, men wage-earners. Concerning the moral evil, a whole book might and I hope will be written, from a modern standpoint. A great deal of purity-preaching fails because it is out of touch with modern minds. If you want men to have a horror of using a woman merely “as a convenience,” if you want women to resent such a use of themselves, you will have to replace semi-savage tabus with science. And this is not to say that religion has nothing to do here. For those who believe in a God who made things must believe He meant us to find out His law. There is a sense in which the sneer of the Pharisee is bare truth, and “this people that knoweth not the law is accursed.”

People have called it a “necessary evil,” and we shall do well to inquire what they mean by “necessary,”[106] for they generally use it in at least two senses: (1) necessary for the health of men; (2) a necessary consequence of the evil nature of men and women. It is impossible to believe that, if it is necessary for the health of men, it can also be evil. It is impossible to believe that a state of affairs can be natural in which the health of men can only be secured by the degradation, barrenness, disease and early death of women and children. Prostitution in itself is degrading to both sexes, and cannot be necessary. What people mean is that sexual intercourse is necessary for the health of men, and that if they cannot have enough of it within marriage, it is necessary that they should have it outside marriage. If we regard marriage as a divine institution, it is impossible to believe that a good God would have made it necessary to desecrate this divine institution. If we regard marriage as a human institution, it is for us to adapt it to human needs and so arrange society that men and women should have the intercourse necessary for their health. The truth is that sexual intercourse is as necessary for women as for men, and the opportunity of bearing children just as much part of the wider scope that we desire for women as opportunities for education and wage-earning. Because women have always been in subjection, however, their needs have always been overlooked, and not only law but custom has ignored them.

If one wife were not sufficient for a man, we should recognise the fact and not outlaw the women who[107] are rendering a service. There are about 3? millions of unmarried men over 20 in England. Since we know that a very large proportion of them do not forgo sexual intercourse, this argues an immense discrepancy between our professions with regard to marriage and our performance. If social conditions were altered, should we not find that a large number of women at present unmarried would be willing to enter into relations of love and affection with men, and might not this greatly diminish the “necessity” for prostitutes? We can most of us imagine a state of things infinitely preferable to the present, in which the virginity of some 3? millions of women is secured by the holocaust of the remaining quarter of a million, and all the attendant evils and disasters to the rest of humanity. What does the bachelor condition of so many men betoken? That they cannot, or will not undertake marriage. Is it not time that some serious thought were given to finding out what is wrong with marriage, or with women, or with men, or with all three?

But when “necessary” is used to signify the “necessary consequence of evil human nature,” there is some truth in that; if we add, “and of evil human institutions,” we may say that we have got the whole truth. If human nature and human institutions are evil in this direction, can we not alter them? Women certainly will not be content, with their new knowledge and their growing powers, to sit down helpless before these evils. We may be quite certain that they are going to move very[108] seriously, and it is to the interests of men and of the whole community that there should be sympathy and understanding and co-operation between men and women reformers. Women must beware of allowing themselves to be infected, when they obtain more power, with the brutality which has for ages robbed law of its moral sanctions, or with the legalism which has robbed conduct of the grace of the spirit. The social evil is largely the result of brutality, and brutal punishments are no remedy, even if you can persuade men to inflict them. We do relapse periodically into brutality, such as the introducing of flogging into a recent Act. But it is remarkable that this particular lapse occurred in a measure that had been hung up for a very long time and that was terribly overdue; therefore feeling was exasperated and the measure was finally pushed through on a wave of emotionalism when Members of Parliament scarcely dared oppose the flogging, lest they should be accused of sympathy with the offenders. One could not help feeling that a good many men found, in the easy enactment of flogging, relief from the necessity of thinking out and carrying out the far more difficult and searching reforms which might have some permanent effect. The flogging clause was detestable, both for what it did and for what it prevented being done. It is a matter for regret that women did not oppose it, as women; but brutality has had its effect on them too. If women were admitted to full citizenship there might be more hope that reforms could be[109] carried gradually and thoughtfully. As it is, women must be excused for seizing any temporary breeze of emotionalism (such as was caused by the death of W. T. Stead) to move on their ship of reform from the doldrums where it lies neglected.

It is not reasonable to say off-hand that legislation can do nothing to diminish the social evil, and a good deal of nonsense is talked about not making men good by Act of Parliament. The causes of prostitution are very many and complex, and though direct repressive legislation has always been worse than useless, because its only effect has been to harry and persecute and degrade still further the unhappy women, yet there are many directions in which legislation could touch the causes.

The movement, now already strongly on the way, for further knowledge is one of the most hopeful of all. Most thinking people are now agreed that children should be taught the nature of their bodies, and respect and care for them, and the only questions are how to give the teaching, by whom and at what age. Adult women, as well as men, should also know something of the pathology of sex, so that they can guard themselves, and so that men may realise more than they do now the fearful suffering which their excesses entail on the innocent. Purity has been preached to boys and men far too much as a vague ideal. If the results of lust appeared to them in their true form of hideous cruelty and cowardice, it would make the most thoughtless pause. Girls must no longer be taught[110] that subservience and sacrifice to men is woman’s virtue; boys must be taught to take a pride in a woman’s pride, achievement and independence. The incredibly mean jealousy of these which we frequently see, has its roots far back in childish days when “only a girl” was a phrase that passed unrebuked by the mother. If a girl has not learned to value herself, to respect her own body and soul, and dedicate them to some worthy purpose, what wonder if she sells for cash that for which she herself has so little value? The cult of the “womanly” woman is for much in the venality of women. Besides this property of whispering humbleness, she is to be all softness and weakness and yielding grace, and she is to be so unlettered and inexperienced that the veriest scoundrel can impose upon her. The law does much to encourage this low status of women, and until women have attained full citizenship, it is not to be wondered at if young men grow up with a slight contempt for them.

The fact that a woman can sell herself tends, as we have seen, to keep women’s wages down, and the temptation to add to her income is increased by the low wages. This is a vicious circle, from which escape can only be made by raising wages, since you cannot directly stop prostitution. The fact that men will probably always be richer than women, and that men very much desire women, will perhaps always prevent the total disappearance of prostitution, but at least we know[111] that if we make it possible for every woman to live decently, there will be an immense reduction. It is in the highest degree unlikely that there are many women who would deliberately choose the horrible life. They drift, fall and are pushed into it and then cannot get out. One hears stories of actual starvation leading to it. These may be true, but there are far more cases (and this is proved by the fact that domestic servants and daughters at home form the largest classes of recruits) where the natural love of pleasure and finery, the natural sex attraction, and in many cases aversion from hard or monotonous work have been the temptations. It is an appalling thought that these, which are, at worst, faults and weaknesses, should be seized hold of by men, to make, of what should be a woman—
“A cipher of man’s changeless sum
Of lust, past, present and to come,”

a creature whom law and society combine to treat as subhuman, a thing, not a person.

Much indiscriminate abuse is hurled by sentimentalists at the mistresses of households who discharge a servant leading an immoral or irregular life, and many most worthy mistresses, feeling acutely their responsibilities for young maids, and knowing of many temptations, endeavour, by severe restrictions, to keep the girls straight. Both seem to me mistaken. Employers of male labour do not keep workmen and pay them good wages when they do their work badly. Especially not[112] when their delinquencies are voluntary. And the mistress of a household has not only to consider the amount of work she is getting in return for the wages she pays, she has also the grave responsibility of considering all the other inmates of her house, the fellow-servants and her own family, and the effect upon them of the presence, as a member of the household, of a woman of loose character or conduct. It is almost always the best thing for the woman herself to make a change in her life. But when we come to the efforts of so many mistresses to keep their girls straight by denying them pleasure, or prescribing to them the exact kind of pleasure and refusing them liberty, these efforts appear often pathetically misdirected, and only increase the contrast between the girl’s actual life and what the tempter promises her. It is natural for a girl, whether she be a servant or a young lady, to “have a young man.” The young lady can see her young man as much as she likes, in drawing-rooms and at legitimate entertainments; the servant, too often, can see her young man only by stealth, alone, in the dark roads, on the bench of a park, or in houses where there is little of the control of normal family life. And her interviews with him are full of angry revolt against her mistress’s prohibition, and of plots with him as to how to circumvent the tyrant. The said tyrant is often desperately perplexed and anxious, but worse than helpless, because of her ignorance and her sometimes wilful refusal to admit[113] the facts of human nature. I have known a woman who said, “I don’t allow my girl to go anywhere without me, except to church and to the G.F.S.”; but I had myself met the girl in a variety of other places. Another employer, with two daughters who often went to dances, refused to allow her pretty parlourmaid (who helped to dress the young ladies) to go to a ball which her friends and brothers were attending. The employer thought balls were not good “for that class of person.” Another lady, who was constantly seen at dinner parties, theatres and receptions, said, when asked that her servant should be allowed to join a social club, where there was singing and dancing and acting and billiards, “I don’t believe you can help that class of people except through religion.” Such employers as these, and they are very many, bring into disrepute not only the employment of domestic service, but the whole of the standard of morals which they imagine themselves to be upholding. Young people will have pleasure if they can get it, and to make their lives dreary and lonely is to drive them underground for pleasure and for companionship. The desolate loneliness of many domestic servants, far from home and friends, and with well-meaning, puritanical mistresses, is a cause perhaps quite as effective as service in a disorderly house or with an immoral master. The living-in system is full of difficulties, and I believe it is one of the systems which will have to go; but the only chance of success is[114] either to make the girl a part of the family she serves, or to give her opportunities for a cheerful life of her own.

Another contributory cause, whose effect it is very difficult to estimate, is the low state of public opinion, encouraged by the law, with regard to physical brutality. Science recognises the close connection between the lusts of cruelty and of sex. Public opinion must be brought to support far more truly protective law for women and for little children. We hear much just now of the segregation of feeble-minded women, but we need, just as much, the segregation of men who have become a danger to women and children. When women make public opinion much more than they do now, and if only they will steer clear of retaliatory brutality, we shall move much faster.

Again, consider what endless ripples of effects there will be when once we begin seriously to tackle the housing question. What is the use of talking about decency, when a girl or boy has never known it? When the conditions of their daily life from childhood have been such as to make decency and continence things never experienced?

Alcohol taken in excess loosens all the powers of inhibition, and increases the appetites. When by improvements in the living conditions of the masses we have tackled the disease of alcoholism, we shall find we have made some way in other directions too.

It is a frequent easy generalisation that a “bad” woman is much worse than a “bad” man. It is[115] said that there is always hope for a fallen man and none for a fallen woman. We shall have to be given far more proof of this than we have ever had, before we will believe that it is a property inherent in the sexes. If we must admit that we do not know how much of the virtue of women is due to the severe penalties on vice, we must also admit that we do not know how much of the incurable badness of women is due to these severe penalties; for society makes it next to impossible for a “fallen” woman to rise, whereas society does not trouble itself even to know whether a man is “fallen” or not. When women think these matters out, they will come to the conclusion that where it takes two to commit an offence, the one who escapes scot-free and attempts to leave the other to bear the double penalty, is perhaps the greater criminal of the two. If two boys steal apples together and A escapes, leaving B to be birched, public opinion is apt to think A rather a mean lad. If, instead of receiving one birching, B were flogged daily for the rest of his life because of A’s delinquency, what would public opinion say of A? or of the wisdom of the schoolmaster? Prostitution will diminish when it is made possible for women to recover lost ground; when a silly girl, who has been enticed away by some man watching for her day of weakness, is not treated as a pariah or expected to lead a life of penitential expiation for ever after. The tone which some rescue-workers adopt towards such girls makes one almost despair. It is an unfortunate thing that, owing to the painful[116] and distasteful nature of what is called rescue work, so much of it is in the hands of women of a devoted and often exalted temperament, which has almost no points of contact with that of the girl who has drifted into an irregular life. Rescue work should be done by men and women who realise that the appetite for pleasure is not an unhealthy appetite, and that affection and a normal family life are the most hopeful engines of rescue.