It will not be very difficult to quote several authors who, in treating of this subject as regards Germany, have expressed themselves in the same way. But I must be brief, and hence shall content myself with citing a passage from Dr. Frankenstein’s “Die Lage der Arbeiterinnen in den deutschen Grossstädten”, in which he sums up the result of his studies upon this subject: “A very great proportion of the working-women of our great cities receive wages that are not sufficient to provide the most indispensable necessities of life, and find themselves for this cause in the dilemma either of seeking a supplementary trade in prostitution, or of falling into the unavoidable consequences of bodily and spiritual destruction.”[154]
It is evident that the same thing is true of all the countries where capitalism reigns. Here is what Faucher, for example, says in his [[346]]“Études sur l’Angleterre”: “Work with the needle is so poorly paid in London that the young persons who give themselves up to it earn only three or four shillings a week, working sixteen or eighteen hours a day. The wages of a fancy needle worker, for a hard day, are from 50 to 60 centimes, while linen workers generally get 30 centimes for stitching a shirt. Nothing more frightful could be imagined than the existence of these poor girls. They must get up at four or five o’clock in the morning, at all seasons of the year, to go to work, or to receive the orders of the merchants. They work without relaxation until midnight in small rooms, where they are crowded together by fives and sixes for economy in the use of fuel and light. If they are admitted to a dressmaker’s or linen draper’s establishment, they are ill-fed, and under pretext of pressure of business are kept at their task day and night, with only four or five hours of sleep, which are further regularly limited on Saturday. This sedentary life and constant confinement ages them before their time, when phthisis spares them. Is it to be wondered at if some, frightened and disheartened at finding the way of virtue so hard, hold out their arms to prostitution?”[155]
Against these long, hard days and small wages are to be set the easy life and often quite considerable returns—at least in the beginning of their career—which prostitutes enjoy. Moreau-Christophe in his “Du Problème de la Misère” says that in London there are prostitutes who earn $100 to $150 a week, and that the average earnings are $10 a week.[156]
To conclude I wish to call attention to the opinion of Parent-Duchatelet concerning this state of things in Paris. He says: “Of all the causes of prostitution, particularly in Paris, and probably in the other large cities, there is none more active than the lack of work, and the poverty inevitably consequent upon insufficient wages. What do our dressmakers, seamstresses, menders, and in general all those who work with the needle, earn? If we compare the wages of the most capable of them with what those of only moderate abilities can make, we shall see that it is not possible for these last to procure the mere necessaries of life. And if we then compare the price of their labor with that of their dishonor we shall not be surprised that so great a number fall into a life of shame made all but inevitable.”[157] [[347]]
Not only does poverty, taken in the sense of the lack of the actual necessaries of life, act as a cause of prostitution, but also that relative poverty which prevents women from enjoying luxuries which seem necessities, like jewelry and fine clothes. With these same women laziness also plays a part.
Now the general opinion with regard to these factors is that they belong exclusively to the individual nature, that they are innate to some women, and that they consequently have nothing to do with the social environment. In my opinion this is entirely erroneous. Mankind are born with certain needs. The non-satisfaction of these needs causes death or the wasting away of the organism. These needs are what we call the strict necessities. All the other wants are awakened by the environment: that is to say, each possesses them in germ, but they are latent as long as the surroundings do not develop them. For example, no one would suffer from abstaining from tobacco if he did not see someone smoking; no woman would want expensive clothes if others did not wear them; etc. The desire to dress expensively, to wear jewelry, etc., is not at all, then, an individual quality of certain working-women; the germ of this want is innate in each individual, without any exception though in different degrees. The present order of society, by permitting certain women to spend immense sums for senseless luxury, awakens in others the desire to imitate them as far as possible. Since these last have not the means necessary to shine, they seek them where they may find them, and as there is only the way of prostitution, many follow it. We may add to this that a great number of men use their money and their distinguished manners to decide those who hesitate. This is, therefore, also one of the reasons why the ranks of prostitution are so often recruited from among dressmakers and domestics, i.e. from among those who come into direct contact with the luxury of [[348]]others.[158] Another cause which makes women desire expensive and useless things is their low degree of culture, which shows them nothing more preferable than the possession of luxury. And where women who have all the leisure and the means necessary to busy themselves with more serious matters set the example of frivolity, we ought not to be surprised that those without the same advantages try to follow their example.
The same is true of idleness. If each person who is capable of it would do a certain amount of work, any normal individual would be ashamed to pass the day doing nothing. But the fact that there are women who are esteemed though they remain idle, awakens in other women, who are obliged to work long and hard, the desire to do nothing also. As prostitution opens to them the means of remaining unoccupied, they have recourse to it to satisfy their desire.
The irony which comes out so often in the social life shows itself here; the rich women who despise prostitutes never suspect that they themselves are in part the cause of the fall of the others, and that placed in the same poor surroundings they themselves would not act differently.[159]
All those who rank the causes last cited among individual factors base their opinion upon the thesis, equally strange and false, that there are two kinds of persons: those who by birth are destined to command and to enjoy, and those who are destined only to obey, to work, and not to enjoy at all. Looked at from this point of view the person who rejects these conditions constitutes an individual anomaly.