Woman under socialism

by August Bebel

Of the 16,605 girls, arrested in 1890, there were 9,162 carried for sentence before the Judge. There were, accordingly, 30 of these at every session of the court, and 128 of them were placed under the police by judicial decree. Already in 1860, it was calculated in Hamburg that every ninth woman was a prostitute. Since then the proportion has become greatly worse.

In Germany, the number of prostitutes probably runs up to 180,000. Accordingly, we here have to do with a large female army, that considers prostitution as a means of livelihood; and the number of victims, whom disease and death claim, is in proportion.[114]

Tait calculates for Edinburg that the average life of the prostitute is 22 to 25 years. According to him, year in and year out, every fourth aye, every third prostitute seeks to take her own life, and every twelfth actually succeeds in killing herself. A truly shocking state of things. The majority of prostitutes are heartily tired of their way of living; aye, that they are disgusted thereat, is an experience admitted by all experts. But once fallen into prostitution, only to very few is the opportunity ever offered to escape.

And yet the number of prostitutes increases in the same measure that does that of the women engaged as female labor in the various branches of industry and trade, and that are paid off with wages that are too high to die, and too low to live on. Prostitution is, furthermore, promoted by the industrial crises that have become a necessity of the capitalist world, that commence to become chronic, and that carry want and misery into hundreds and thousands of families. According to a letter of the Chief Constable of Bolton, October 31, 1865, to a Factory Inspector, the number of young prostitutes had increased more during the English cotton famine, consequent upon the North American war for the emancipation of the slaves, than during the previous twenty-five years.[115] But it is not only the working-women, who, through want, fall a prey to prostitution. Prostitution also finds its recruiting grounds in the higher walks of life. Lombroso and Ferrero quote Mace,[116] who says of Paris that "a governess certificate, whether of high or low degree, is not so much a draft upon bread, as upon suicide, theft and prostitution."

Parent-Duchatelet made out in his time a statistical table, according to which, out of 5,000 prostitutes there were 1,440 who took to the occupation out of want and misery; 1,250 were orphaned and without support; 80 prostituted themselves in order to feed poor parents; 1,400 were concubines left by their keepers; 400 were girls whom officers and soldiers had seduced and dragged to Paris; 280 had been deserted by their lovers during pregnancy. These figures speak for themselves. They need no further explanation. Mrs. Butler, the zealous champion of the poorest and most wretched of her sex in England, says on the subject of prostitution: "Fortuitous circumstances, the death of a father, of a mother, lack of work, insufficient wages, misery, false promises, snares, have led them to sin." Instructive also is the information given by K. Schneidt[117] on the causes, that lead the Berlin bar-maids so often into the arms of prostitution. Shockingly large is the number of female servants that become barmaids, and that almost always means prostitutes. The answers that Schneidt received on his schedules of questions addressed to bar-maids, ran like this: "Because I got a child from my master and had to earn my living;" or "Because my book was spoiled;" or "Because with sewing shirts and the like too little is made;" or "Because I was discharged from the factory and could get no more work;" or "Because my father died, and there were four other little ones." That, particularly, servant girls, after they fall a prey to seduction by their masters, furnish a large contingent to the prostitutes, is a known fact. On the subject of the shockingly large number of seductions of servant girls by their masters or by the sons of these, Dr. Max Taude expresses himself reproachfully.[118] When, however, the upper classes furnish their quota to prostitution, it is not want but seduction and the inclination for an easy life, for dress and for pleasures. On that subject a certain work[119] utters itself this wise:

"Cold with horror and dismay, many a staid citizen, many a parson, teacher, high official, high military dignitary, etc., learns that his daughter has secretly taken to prostitution. Were it allowable to mention all these daughters by name, either a social revolution would take place on the spot, or the popular ideas concerning honor and virtue would be seriously damaged."

It is especially the finer prostitutes, the haute volee among the prostitutes, that are recruited from these circles. Likewise do a large portion of actresses, whose wardrobe outlays alone stand in crass disproportion to their salaries, depend upon such unclean sources of revenue.[120] The same with numerous girls, engaged as sales-ladies, and in similar capacities. There are employers dishonorable enough to justify the low wages that they pay by referring their female employes to the aid of "friends." For instance: In 1889 the "Sachsische Arbeiter Zeitung" of Dresden published a notice that ran as follows: "A cultured young lady, long time out of work on account of lung troubles, looked, upon her recovery, for work of any sort. She was a governess. Nothing fit offered itself quickly, and she decided to accept the first job that came along, whatever it was. She first applied to Mr.——. Seeing she spoke readily several languages, she was acceptable; but the 30 marks a month wages seemed to her too small to get along with. She stated to Mr.——, and his answer was that most of his girls did not get even that much, but from 15 to 20 marks at most, and they all pulled through quite well, each having a 'good friend,' who helped along. Another gentleman, Mr. ——, expressed himself in the same sense. Of course, the lady accepted a place in neither of the two establishments."

Seamstresses, female tailors, milliners, factory girls by the hundreds of thousands find themselves in similar plight. Employers and their subalterns—merchants, mill owners, landlords, etc.,—who keep female hands and employes, frequently consider it a sort of privilege to find these women handy to administer to their lusts. Our pious and conservative folks love to represent the rural districts as truly idyllic in point of morality, compared with the large cities and industrial centers. Everyone acquainted with the actual state of things knows that it is not so; and the fact was evidenced by the address, delivered by a baronial landlord of Saxony in the fall of 1889, reported as follows in the papers of the place:

"Grimma.—Baron Dr. v. Waechter of Roecknitz, recently delivered an address, before a diocese meeting that took place here, upon the subject of 'Sexual Immorality in Our Rural Communities.' Local conditions were not presented by him in a rosy color. The speaker admitted with great candor that employers, even married ones, are frequently in very intimate relations with their female domestics, the consequences of which were either cancelled with cash, or were removed from the eyes of the world through a crime. The fact could, unfortunately, not be cloaked over, that immorality was nursed in these communities, not alone by girls, who, as nurses in cities, had taken in the poison, or by fellows, who made its acquaintance in the military service, but that, sad to say, also the cultured classes, through the stewards of manorial estates, and through the officers on the occasions of field manoeuvres, carried lax principles of morality into the country districts. According to Dr. v. Waechter, there are actually here in the country few girls who reach the age of seventeen without having fallen." The open-hearted speaker's love of truth was answered with a social boycott, placed upon him by the officers who felt insulted. The jus primae noctis of the medieval feudal lord continues in another form in these very days of ours.

The majority of prostitutes are thrown into the arms of this occupation at a time when they can hardly be said to have arrived at the age of discretion. Of 2,582 girls, arrested in Paris for the secret practice of prostitution, 1,500 were minors; of 607 others, 487 had been deflowered under the age of twenty. In September, 1894, a scandal of first rank took the stage in Buda-Pest. It appeared that about 400 girls of from twelve to fifteen years fell prey to a band of rich rakes. The sons of our "property and cultured classes" generally consider it an attribute of their rank to seduce the daughters of the people, whom they then leave in the lurch. Only too readily do the trustful daughters of the people, untutored in life and experience, and generally joyless and friendless, fall a prey to the seduction that approaches them in brilliant and seductive guise. Disillusion, then sorrows, finally crime,—such are the sequels. Of 1,846,171 live births in Germany in 1891, 172,456 were illegitimate. Only conjure up the volume of worry and heartaches prepared for a great number of these mothers, by the birth of their illegitimate children, even if allowance is made for the many instances when the children are legitimatized by their fathers! Suicide by women and infanticide are to a large extent traceable to the destitution and wretchedness in which the women are left when deserted. The trials for child murder cast a dark and instructive picture upon the canvas. To cite just one case, in the fall of 1894, a young girl, who, eight days after her delivery, had been turned out of the lying-in institute in Vienna and thrown upon the streets with her child and without means, and who, in her distress and desperation, killed the infant, was sentenced to be hanged by a jury of Krems in Lower Austria. About the scamp of a father nothing was said. And how often do not similar instances occur! The seduced and outrageously deserted woman, cast helpless into the abyss of despair and shame, resorts to extreme measures: she kills the fruit of her womb, is dragged before the tribunals, is sentenced to penitentiary or the gallows. The unconscionable, and actual murderer,—he goes off scott-free; marries, perchance, shortly after, the daughter of a "respectable and honest" family, and becomes a much honored, upright man. There is many a gentleman, floating about in honors and distinctions, who has soiled his honor and his conscience in this manner. Had women a word to say in legislation, much would be otherwise in this direction.