James Peter Warbasse

“ The story is the same everywhere in America; so long as there are profits to be made in prostitution, the great spirit of business enterprise will demand and secure the bodies and souls of women for exploitation for profits. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Prostitution means promiscuity for hire.
We should approach its study with sympathetic minds. The prostitute in America is likely to be a weak character who has fallen a victim to the vicious conditions which society maintains. The glamor and gayety, which flippantly are spoken of as associated with her traffic, really do not exist for her. Her lot by no means is a happy one. She reconciles herself to this life usually because her mind is empty of better things. ”

“ Neither poverty nor alcohol nor seduction plays any rôle. She is the seducer from the beginning. Moreover, this tendency toward prostitution, displayed by these girls who are mentally deficient, enters largely into combination with the other causes. Such a girl, under the influence of the excitement of alcohol or religion, or under the stress of poverty or the promise of fine raiment, loses her sexual self-respect forever; whereas a girl of better mind, under the same circumstances, retains hers. ”

“ The latter woman has a better idea of what is right and expedient; she finds some way out without the sacrifice of her chastity; and [pg 11] when she does give herself up to sexual love (marriage unsanctioned by society) , she still retains her self-respect and is not prone to drift on to prostitution. The sexual urge alone in a woman of fair intelligence does not in America make a prostitute of her; in some European countries it may.
The women in whom the sexual urge is intense become prostitutes if mentally deficient; if mentally strong they marry--conventionally or otherwise. ”

“ The simple girl falls, particularly if she have behind her any of the other great causative factors to drive her on. Often the mental and moral weakness may be a matter of ignorance--defective education rather than heredity. These are the pathetic cases in which it is clear that the word of warning should have been a part of the girl's education.
It should be borne in mind that prostitution is recruited from those who once were sexually clean. Many of these women once cherished hopes of love and the domestic joys. Prostitution was not their ambition. Men made it easy for them to fall ”

“ The police courts send women into prostitution by an unwise system of fines and penalties. A girl is brought in by a policeman, charged with vagrancy, disorderly conduct, or some other indefinite offense (which often means simply having refused to be blackmailed) , and the judge sentences her to pay a fine or go to the workhouse. How does this operation affect prostitution? If, being a prostitute, she pays the fine, she goes out on the street again with renewed zeal to get a man to recoup the loss which she has just paid into the treasury of the people. ”

“ Anything that makes for sexual looseness, that breaks down the fiber of sexual morality, makes for prostitution. We may even go so far as to include all agencies which provoke sexual excitement. Among these are many contributing conditions, some predominated by good, some by evil. Thus, as sexual excitants, on the one hand is music, with a maximum power for good and a minimum power for evil; and on the other, alcohol, with a minimum power for good and a maximum power for evil. An analysis of the causative factors is not complete unless it takes into account these secondary influences. ”

“ Boys and girls growing up, first learn of these things from their vulgar companions, stumble into love, courtship, and marriage, blundering and groping--all because they have been denied instruction in one of the subjects which are vital for their health and happiness. Venereal diseases and sexual sins are augmented because of the ignorance which prudishness insists upon. Women fall; men patronize the prostitutes, contract gonorrhea and syphilis, and carry them to their wives, because of this ignorance; and society reaps wretchedness and vice. ”

“ 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 ”

“ If she is a young girl or a first offender, she often is thrown into a cell with some criminal women who make her lose what self-respect she has left, and when she is returned to society it is with resentment, depravity, and the feeling that she has sunk too low ever to hope to rise again, and she proceeds upon the path toward which the finger of society points. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The widespread belief among men in the need of sexual exercise as a preservative of health is a strong influence in the promotion of prostitution. The idea of the sexual necessity for men has been refuted by many students of these problems; but those who want to believe in it continue in the majority. Still it is not difficult to show that more men have their health damaged by prostitutes than have received benefit from their administrations. ”

“ Society makes prostitutes by regarding such women as irretrievable sinners rather than as victims of its own sins.
(6) Social inequalities, which prompt girls to covet the fine raiment and jewels that other women display, is a factor of importance. This is noteworthy because of the fact that most of the display of this sort made by the rich is prompted not by an inherent love of the beautiful, but by the pleasure derived from the consciousness of exciting envy in the minds of others who are less fortunate. ”

“ Poverty causes congestion, and congestion tends to loss of self-respect, to immorality, and to sexual irregularities. The records of our children's societies show to how appalling a degree the chastity of little girls is being sacrificed in the dark halls and crowded rooms of the tenements. ”

“ 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 [pg 9] 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 ”

“ Raines Law hotels, excursion steamboats with rooms to rent, massage parlors, and landlords, all offer inducements for the encouragement of prostitution. The prostitute often pays for protection; she pays extra rent to the landlord, fees to the janitor, and a stipend to her protector; she induces men to drink, which gives a profit to the liquor trade; she uses cabs and the telephone much at night; and it is such business interests as these which often connive to share her profits. ”

“ Lack of opportunity for the woman who has violated society's conventions helps recruit the ranks. A man and a woman together may violate the law of sexual conventionality, the man is received in society, the woman is cast out forever. Here are some of the reasons given by women for entering prostitution: "My lover betrayed me, and I could not go back home." ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 ”

“ 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. ”

“ The causes of deferred marriage are largely economic, and rest upon the disproportion between wages and the cost of living. The wage-earning class is mulcted of most of the material wealth it produces. Men are paid neither their just wage nor enough to warrant assuming the responsibilities of marriage. The social system which bestows upon the non-producing class most of the wealth produced by labor is guilty of withholding from the man the bride to whom his industry entitles him. ”

“ When the courts become chambers for scientific diagnosis and judgment, for discovering the nature of the ill from which the girl is suffering, for determining the real cause of her illness, and for prescribing the treatment necessary for her care--in other words, for social justice, then we shall make progress. ”

“ The absence of good, wholesome, family life, especially in cities, causes prostitution. The majority of girls in the great American cities have no home life worthy of the name. At night they seek the streets, and find there, in the dance-halls, and in the cheap shows, the pleasures which the home fails to supply. ”

“ 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 ”

“ At Bedford, among the first thousand admissions were 137 girls who were classified as "feeble-minded." The sexual perverts and the women of abnormally lustful tendencies belong largely in this class. These are the women who actually become prostitutes because they like it. But it should not be lost sight of that their mental and physical perversions can often be traced back to hereditary and educational wrongs, often born of bad economic conditions. Heredity is undoubtedly a strong factor; mental unbalance is transmitted. ”

“ Any condition which makes for moral and physical deterioration makes ultimately for prostitution.
(4) The profits of vice promote the traffic in women. Women must be got by fair means or foul in the interest of the business. Pimps, police, politicians, proprietors, cadets, madams, and white slavers--all demand girls. In Newark, Ohio, the people imposed a license of $1000 annually upon each saloon. Enough liquor could not be sold, by every effort, to satisfy the license fee--eighty saloons in a town of 25,000 inhabitants, one saloon to every 65 adult men. ”

“ 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. ”