The causes of prostitution

by James Peter Warbasse

(9) Unhappy childhood, due to unkind parents, intolerable restraints of the puritanic household, and uncongenial toil imposed upon the child, are factors of moment.

The most tragic phase of prostitution is to be found in those girls who are (10) driven into it by parents, guardians, or husbands, as a matter of business. There is a class of men living in idleness in our cities who are supported by the wages of the prostitutes whom they have created by seduction. Under marriage, or the pretense of marriage, these men ruin their victims, install them in houses of prostitution, and appropriate for themselves their bitterly earned wages. Girls are often lured from good homes by them; and many of the murders and suicides which entertain the patrons of the daily press are supplied from this form of enterprise.

(11) Servants seduced by the master of the house or his sons swell the ranks of prostitution. The intimacies of domestic life make this one of the prolific causative factors. Girls in domestic service fall easy victims also to other men, because they live in an environment in which the incompleteness of their own lives is daily manifested to them. Of the first thousand girls admitted to the Bedford Institution, 430 gave their occupation as general housework.

(12) The lack of social democracy, whether in the home or shop, often makes the position of the wage-earner intolerable. The humiliation to which the domestic servant is subjected in many homes renders prostitution attractive to her. If every mistress would put on the servant's garb and go through the servant's life for just one day each year, a lesson in human sympathy might be learned that would help to sweeten human intercourse. If the mistress could be made to realize that the servant is a human being who is possessed of the same longings as she and suffers from the lack of their gratification just as she does, the domestic relations would be improved. Sometimes a servant retaliates for the slights, and evens up the social situation, by winning the master's love. But the life lived by many a domestic servant justifies no blame if she prefers to venture upon prostitution.

(13) Alcohol is the seducer's ally. A large proportion of the involuntary prostitutes are seduced by being first made drunk. This is the prevalent method in the saloon dance-halls. The dance music plays for a few minutes; the intervals between dances are much longer; the girls who do not drink are ordered out; a girl who has drudged in a sweatshop or factory all day must have some pleasure; and the home does not offer it. The social drinking also of alcohol among women and girls breaks down moral resistance. If the great slothful public could have driven home to it the relation of alcohol, not to poverty and crime, but just to sexual wrongs, it is inconceivable that it would not rise up and cast it out.

(14) The inadequacy of public recreations. Education has been socialized, it is no longer of much private profit; but recreation, which comes next in importance to education for the young, is still largely commercialized. We are just beginning to provide recreation facilities as a public duty; but the wider socialization of recreations is one of society's most urgent needs.

As a number of causative factors have been mentioned which play a lesser rôle, and as many factors have been mentioned which are not wholly bad, this résumé cannot be complete without a reference to (15) religion. The fact that the great religions can be traced back to the worship of the creative and life-giving principles, as exemplified by the sun and the sexual organs, that prostitution was at one time a religious rite, and that at present the sexual emotions play a strong rôle in the perpetuation of these rites, renders it but natural that there should be a relation between the two. Religious emotion and sexual emotion are closely related. Religious fervor is a manifestation of sexual lust.

When we come down to the dominant religion of the western world we find that its literature, the Bible, contains recountals of nearly all types of sexual crimes, among which are the most revolting. This, from a historic or scientific standpoint, is not objectionable; but the fact that the halo of sacredness is thrown about the men who committed these immoral acts, that they are held up as being "after God's own heart," that Christendom and Jewdom name their children after them, and that their pictures adorn the temples and the market-places, bears witness that they are approved of men.

It is to be regretted that so much of salaciousness, of degrading obscenity, and of brutal lust is embraced in a literature employed for purposes of moral teaching. The fact that men and women find excuses for their own laches in this literature is not to be wondered at. Sexual sinners often quote the Bible as though it were written specifically for their benefit.

The sexual excitement and immoralities engendered by such factors as the revival and camp-meeting are not to be overlooked. These primitive institutions are passing into history, but among the less enlightened to whom they have been transmitted, they continue to be sexual orgies. The woman who in ecstasy exclaims, "Do what you will with this poor vile body, but my soul belongs to Jesus," possesses faith which represents a dangerous and immoral religious fervor. A long period of connection with a religious denominational hospital has taught me that a pitifully large number of sexually ruined and venereally disabled young women are produced in the atmosphere of the choirs of the churches of this denomination in the small towns of the East. [2]