The causes of prostitution - James P. Warbasse (the kiss of deception read online .txt) 📗
- Author: James P. Warbasse
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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 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.
[1] "The Thin Crust of Civilization," by Ray Stannard Baker, in the American Magazine, April, 1911.
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 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 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
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