Most of them were unhappy, dissatisfied types.
All of them were greatly attached to children.
Many of them were drunkards.
One half of them were weak minded.
Seven per cent of them had been brought up in institutions.
We have there a striking picture of inferiority. An endocrinological examination of those unfortunates, similar to those which have been conducted recently at St. Elizabeth Hospital, Washington, D. C., would have probably revealed back of their unwillingness to work and of their thirst for money, weak thyroids and poor adrenals, not to mention unbalanced pituitary glands. The fires of the body burnt slow in them, producing and consuming little energy, a condition which, causing an obscure unconscious fear of the future, compelled those women to seek easy ways of gathering money, the only protection they could think of. Their inferiority complex revealed itself in their craving for personal adornment, to which they sacrificed their protective earnings.
Sensuality. All the rant of the purity prophets to the contrary notwithstanding, it is not sensuality which "lures" women into a "life of shame."
If the prostitute sought in her means of livelihood mere gratification of "vicious" instincts, why would she so often submit to the whims of a pimp who despoils her of her earnings. The prostitute hates the men who can compel her thru their financial superiority to submit to their sexual desires. The pimp, whom she keeps and who depends upon her bounty, is her inferior and the more she degrades him, the less she feels her own degradation.
The prostitute, like all inferiors, is dissatisfied, but so are the man of genius, the inventor and the artist. The genius is the dissatisfied individual who organically is able to compensate for his feeling of inferiority by creating a more pleasant environment, physical or mental, and derives therefrom credit, praise, rewards, small as those rewards may be. The prostitute, too weak organically to find a suitable, socially valuable, form of compensation, flees from a reality which is unpleasant to her. Alcohol and drugs supply her with a convenient form of escape from reality, the more acceptable to her as her intelligence is the more limited.
Father Fixation. Kurt Schneider found that fifty per cent of the prostitutes he examined were weak minded. The Chicago Vice report published a few years ago revealed the fact that fifty per cent of the prostitutes examined by the vice investigators were the victims of a violent father fixation.