(6) The absence of good feminine society in the circles of youth is a factor. Social contact with high-minded women satisfies the craving for feminine society and deters young men from seeking the society of the opposite type of women. A boy who has friendships among good women is apt to be ashamed to go among the lewd.
(7) The unlovable wife encourages prostitution. She may be sexually unattractive to the husband because of disease, pregnancy, fear of pregnancy, or coldness. The husband may be responsible for any or all of these causes; but still he patronizes the other woman.
III. Of the factors that bear directly upon the female, the most important is (1) poverty. It is not only a primary cause of prostitution, but also a secondary cause, running into the other social conditions. In the United States are 6,000,000 women wage-workers, employed in the gainful industries. In New York City are 300,000 wage-earning women, living upon the brink of starvation. The wages which they earn scarcely provide them with the meager necessities of life; of the joys of life they have but little. Many of them cannot live upon their wages and must supplement them from other sources; many have others depending upon them.
Studies of the problem show that wages are regulated by the cost of subsistence. Workers are paid as little as they can exist upon and still be fairly efficient, capital demanding that the pay shall be so near the starvation limit that the workers shall live in fear of want. The interests of capital also demand that there shall at all times be an unemployed class seeking employment.
Most of the money in this great country which is bequeathed by the wealthy to care for damaged human beings has been wrung from those very same human beings who were sacrificed for its production. The curse of capitalistic greed is a basic factor in the social evils, and they will exist so long as the right to exploit human beings is tolerated by society.
August Bebel illustrates the relation of prostitution to wages by the report of the Chief Constable of Bolton, England, showing that the number of young prostitutes increased more during the English cotton famine, consequent upon the Civil War in America, than during the previous twenty-five years. Read the pitiful records of the women who were driven by destitution to sell themselves as reported in Sanger's "History of Prostitution." Of 2000 prostitutes investigated in New York, 525 gave destitution as the cause of their going into that life. This is the largest number under any one cause. But poverty can be read into the others. "Drink," "seduced and abandoned," "ill-treatment by parents or husband," "as an easy life," "bad company," "violated," "seduced on emigrant ships," "seduced in emigrant boarding-houses"--these cover most of the other causes, and all have poverty and bad economic conditions at their base.
Whether it is because of lack of employment or because of the easier means of livelihood which prostitution offers, the earning of a living is the basic factor. A social condition which insured every woman and every man an opportunity to earn a decent living, and which segregated and provided for the few incompetents and moral derelicts, would have no prostitution. There might be women who would indulge in promiscuity or would be licentious, but they would not be prostitutes.
Rich women are not prostitutes, because their livelihood is assured them. Prostitution is largely an economic problem. A woman who has been given the information which every woman should have, and who is not pathologic, does not barter her chastity for money except as a matter of economic expediency.
Edmond Kelly says: "Chastity ought to be a purely moral or social question, not an economic one." Quoting also from the same source a part of the report of Miss Woodbridge, secretary of the Working Women's Society: "It is a known fact that men's wages cannot fall below a limit upon which they can exist, but women's wages have no limit, since the paths of shame are always open to them. The very fact that some of these women receive partial support from brothers or fathers and are thus enabled to live upon less than they earn, forces other women who have no such support either to suffer for necessities or seek other means of support."
Out of these conditions grow the low wages of shop girls and operatives. But even though not driven to it by poverty, the girls who leave the factory for prostitution cannot be blamed. Human automatons, fastened to whirling wheels, consumed by monotonous, soul-destroying days of toil, crawling at night into unlovely beds, crawling forth at break of day to toil again, dull and stolid, with hope half smothered--toiling slaves, who would begrudge them narcosis, death, or prostitution? The wonder is that there is not a greater degree of public appreciation of the prostitute-making conditions, which society harbors because it foolishly thinks that it profits by them.