Jahrbuch für Sexuelle Zwischenstufen, Jahrgang VII, 1905, p. 148; "Sexual Inversion," vol. ii of these Studies, Ch. IV. Hammer found that of twenty-five prostitutes in a reformatory as many as twenty-three were homosexual, or, on good grounds, suspected to be such. Hirschfeld (Berlins Drittes Geschlecht, p. 65) mentions that prostitutes sometimes accost better-class women who, from their man-like air, they take to be homosexual; from persons of their own sex prostitutes will accept a smaller remuneration, and sometimes refuse payment altogether.
With prostitution, as with criminality, it is of course difficult to disentangle the element of heredity from that of environment, even when we have good grounds for believing that the factor of heredity here, as throughout the whole of life, cannot fail to carry much weight. It is certain, in any case, that prostitution frequently runs in families. "It has often been my experience," writes a former prostitute (Hedwig Hard, Beichte einer Gefallenen, p. 156) "that when in a family a girl enters this path, her sister soon afterwards follows her: I have met with innumerable cases; sometimes three sisters will all be on the register, and I knew a case of four sisters, whose mother, a midwife, had been in prison, and the father drank. In this case, all four sisters, who were very beautiful, married, one at least very happily, to a rich doctor who took her out of the brothel at sixteen and educated her."
This fact is not contradicted by the undoubted fact that prostitutes are by no means always contented with the life they choose.