Economic Factors. Certain radicals simplify a little too much the problem of prostitution by considering it solely as a by-product of the competitive system which would disappear as soon as a more equitable system of production and distribution was introduced into the modern world.
No one can deny that under our social system, woman, burdened as she is, by many physical and social handicaps, is easily driven to the wall in times of stress and compelled to sell her body. Nor is there any doubt that under a system assuring every one a livelihood, regardless of business conditions, many women would be saved from adopting such a disgusting form of labor.
At the same time, the radical interpretation fails to explain why, when submitted to a practically identical pressure, some women do not become prostitutes but either kill themselves or beg or steal.
Lombroso's Theory. Very unsatisfactory also is Lombroso's attitude to prostitution.
He finds a constant coincidence between prostitution and crime and states that the female offender is a prostitute, one of the varieties of the "reo nato," of the born criminal.
The female offender is not always a prostitute and modern research makes the theory of "congenital criminality" untenable.
Kurt Schneider in his exhaustive study of seventy prostitutes brings out interesting details of their biography which throw a clearer light upon the psychology of prostitution.
There were certain characteristics which all of those seventy women exhibited. They were all unwilling to work. They all were very grasping, altho, at the same time, very extravagant spenders when it came to personal adornment. Eroticism seemed to play a very insignificant part in their choice of a livelihood. Most of them were frigid, many homosexual, the majority of them sadistic.
Fifteen of them had been punished for larceny (money and clothes).
Many of them kept a pimp or cadet.