(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 ar............