CHAPTER VII. — часть 5

Rabutaux, in his Histoire de la Prostitution en Europe, describes many attempts to suppress prostitution; cf. Dufour, op. cit., vol. iii.

Dufour, op. cit., vol. vi, Ch. XLI. It was in the reign of the homosexual Henry III that the tolerance of brothels was established.

In the eighteenth century, especially, houses of prostitution in Paris attained to an astonishing degree of elaboration and prosperity. Owing to the constant watchful attention of the police a vast amount of detailed information concerning these establishments was accumulated, and during recent years much of it has been published. A summary of this literature will be found in Dühren's Neue Forshungen über den Marquis de Sade und seine Zeit, 1904, pp. 97 et seq.

Rabutaux, op. cit., p. 54.

Calza has written the history of Venetian prostitution; and some of the documents he found have been reproduced by Mantegazza, Gli Amori degli Uomimi, cap. XIV. At the beginning of the seventeenth century, a comparatively late period, Coryat visited Venice, and in his Crudities gives a full and interesting account of its courtesans, who then numbered, he says, at least 20,000; the revenue they brought into the State maintained a dozen galleys.

J. Schrank, Die Prostitution in Wien, Bd. I, pp. 152-206.

U. Robert, Les Signes d'Infamie au Moyen Age, Ch. IV.

Rudeck (Geschichte der öffentlichen Sittlichkeit in Deutschland, pp. 26-36) gives many details concerning the important part played by prostitutes and brothels in mediæval German life.

They are described by Rabutaux, op. cit., pp. 90 et seq.

L'Année Sociologique, seventh year, 1904, p. 440.

Bloch, Der Ursprung der Syphilis. As regards the German "Frauenhausen" see Max Bauer, Das Geschlechtsleben in der Deutschen Vergangenheit, pp. 133-214. In Paris, Dufour states (op. cit., vol. v, Ch. XXXIV), brothels under the ordinances of St. Louis had many rights which they lost at last in 1560, when they became merely tolerated houses, without statutes, special costumes, or confinement to special streets.

"Cortegiana, hoc est meretrix honesta," wrote Burchard, the Pope's Secretary, at the beginning of the sixteenth century, Diarium, ed. Thuasne, vol. ii, p. 442; other authorities are quoted by Thuasne in a note.

Burchard, Diarium, vol. iii, p. 167. Thuasne quotes other authorities in confirmation.

The example of Holland, where some large cities have adopted the regulation of prostitution and others have not, is instructive as regards the illusory nature of the advantages of regulation. In 1883 Dr. Després brought forward figures, supplied by Dutch officials, showing that in Rotterdam, where prostitution was regulated, both prostitution and venereal diseases were more prevalent than in Amsterdam, a city without regulation (A. Després, La Prostitution en France, p. 122).

It was in 1802 that the medical inspection of prostitutes in Paris brothels was introduced, though not until 1825 fully established and made general.

M. L. Heidingsfeld, "The Control of Prostitution," Journal American Medical Association, January 30, 1904.

See, e.g., G. Bérault, La Maison de Tolérance, Thèse de Paris, 1904.

Thus the circumstances of the English army in India are of a special character. A number of statements (from the reports of committees, official publications, etc.) regarding the good influence of regulation in reducing venereal diseases in India are brought together by Surgeon-Colonel F. H. Welch, "The Prevention of Syphilis," Lancet, August 12, 1899. The system has been abolished, but only as the result of a popular outcry and not on the question of its merits.

Thus Richard, who accepts regulation and was instructed to report on it for the Paris Municipal Council, would not have girls inscribed as professional prostitutes until they are of age and able to realize what they are binding themselves to (E. Richard, La Prostitution à Paris, p. 147). But at that age a large proportion of prostitutes have been practicing their profession for years.

In Germany, where the cure of infected prostitutes under regulation is nearly everywhere compulsory, usually at the cost of the community, it is found that 18 is the average age at which they are affected by syphilis; the average age of prostitutes in brothels is higher than that of those outside, and a much larger proportion have therefore become immune to disease (Blaschko, "Hygiene der Syphilis," in Weyl's Handbuch der Hygiene, Bd. ii, p. 62, 1900).

A. Sherwell, Life in West London, 1897, Ch. V.

Bonger brings together statistics illustrating this point, op. cit., pp. 402-6.

The Nightless City, p. 125.

Ströhmberg, as quoted by Aschaffenburg, Das Verbrechen, 1903, p. 77.

Monatsschrift für Harnkrankheiten und Sexuelle Hygiene, 1906. Heft 10, p. 460. But this cause is undoubtedly effective in some cases of unmarried women in Germany unable to get work (see article by Sister Henrietta Arendt, Police-Assistant at Stuttgart, Sexual-Probleme, December, 1908).

Thus, for instance, we find Irma von Troll-Borostyáni saying in her book, Im Freien Reich (p. 176): "Go and ask these unfortunate creatures if they willingly and freely devoted themselves to vice. And nearly all of them will tell you a story of need and destitution, of hunger and lack of work, which compelled them to it, or else of love and seduction and the fear of the discovery of their false step which drove them out of their homes, helpless and forsaken, into the pool of vice from which there is hardly any salvation." It is, of course, quite true that the prostitute is frequently ready to tell such stories to philanthropic persons who expect to hear them, and sometimes even put the words into her mouth.

C. Booth, Life and Labour, final volume, p. 125. Similarly in Sweden, Kullberg states that girls of thirteen to seventeen, living at home with their parents in comfortable circumstances, have often been found on the streets.

W. Acton, Prostitution, 1870, pp. 39, 49.

In Lyons, according to Potton, of 3884 prostitutes, 3194 abandoned, or apparently abandoned, their profession; in Paris a very large number became servants, dressmakers, or tailoresses, occupations which, in many cases, doubtless, they had exercised before (Parent-Duchâtelet, De la Prostitution, 1857, vol. i, p. 584; vol. ii, p. 451). Sloggett (quoted by Acton) stated that at Davenport, 250 of the 1775 prostitutes there married. It is well known that prostitutes occasionally marry extremely well. It was remarked nearly a century ago that marriages of prostitutes to rich men were especially frequent in England, and usually turned out well; the same seems to be true still. In their own social rank they not infrequently marry cabmen and policemen, the two classes of men with whom they are brought most closely in contact in the streets. As regards Germany, C. K. Schneider (Die Prostituirte und die Gesellschaft), states that young prostitutes take up all sorts of occupations and situations, sometimes, if they have saved a little money, establishing a business, while old prostitutes become procuresses, brothel-keepers, lavatory women, and so on. Not a few prostitutes marry, he adds, but the proportion among inscribed German prostitutes is very small, less than 2 per cent.

G. de Molinari, La Viriculture, 1897, p. 155.

Reuss and other writers have reproduced typical extracts from the private account books of prostitutes, showing the high rate of their earnings. Even in the common brothels, in Philadelphia (according to Goodchild, "The Social Evil in Philadelphia," Arena, March, 1896), girls earn twenty dollars or more a week, which is far more than they could earn in any other occupation open to them.

A. Després, La Prostitution en France, 1883.

Bonger, Criminalité et Conditions Economiques, 1905, pp. 378-414.

La Donna Delinquente, p. 401.

Raciborski, Traité de l'Impuissance, p. 20. It may be added that Bergh, a leading authority on the anatomical peculiarities of the external female sexual organs, who believe that strong development of the external genital organs accompanies libidinous tendencies, has not found such development to be common among prostitutes.

Hammer, who has had much opportunity of studying the psychology of prostitutes, remarks that he has seen no reason to suspect sexual coldness (Monatsschrift für Harnkrankheiten und Sexuelle Hygiene, 1906, Heft 2, p. 85), although, as he has elsewhere stated, he is of opinion that indolence, rather than excess of sensuality, is the chief cause of prostitution.

See "The Sexual Impulse in Women," in the third volume of these Studies.

Tait stated that in Edinburgh many married women living with their husbands in comfortable circumstances, and having children, were found to be acting as prostitutes, that is, in the regular habit of making assignations with strangers (W. Tait, Magdalenism in Edinburgh, 1842, p. 16).

Janke brings together opinions to this effect, Die Willkürliche Hervorbringen des Geschlechts, p. 275. "If we compare a prostitute of thirty-five with her respectable sister," Acton remarked (Prostitution, 1870, p. 39), "we seldom find that the constitutional ravages often thought to be necessary consequences of prostitution exceed those attributable to the cares of a family and the heart-wearing struggles of virtuous labor."

Hirschfeld states (Wesen der Liebe, p. 35) that the desire for intercourse with a sympathetic person is heightened, and not decreased, by a professional act of coitus.

This has been clearly shown by Hans Ostwald (from whom I take the above-quoted observation of a prostitute), one of the best authorities on prostitute life and character; see, e.g., his article, "Die erotischen Beziehungen zwischen Dirne und Zuhälter," Sexual-Probleme, June, 1908. In the subsequent number of the same periodical (July, 1908, p. 393) Dr. Max Marcuse supports Ostwald's experiences, and says that the letters of prostitutes and their bullies are love-letters exactly like those of respectable people of the same class, and with the same elements of love and jealousy; these relationships, he remarks, often prove very enduring. The prostitute author of the Tagebuch einer Verlorenen (p. 147) also has some remarks on the prostitute's relations to her bully, stating that it is simply the natural relationship of a girl to her lover.

Thus Moraglia found that among 180 prostitutes in North Italian brothels, and among 23 elegant Italian and foreign cocottes, every one admitted that she masturbated, preferably by friction of the clitoris; 113 of them, the majority, declared that they preferred solitary or mutual masturbation to normal coitus. Hammer states (Zehn Lebensläufe Berliner Kontrollmädchen in Ostwald's series of "Grosstadt Dokumente," 1905) that when in hospital all but three or four of sixty prostitutes masturbate, and those who do not are laughed at by the rest.

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.

This point has been discussed by Bloch, Sexualleben unserer Zeit, Ch. XIII.

Various series of observations are summarized by Lombroso and Ferrero, La Donna Delinquente, 1893, Part III, cap. IV.

History of European Morals, vol. iii, p. 283.

Similarly Lord Morley has written (Diderot, vol. ii, p. 20): "The purity of the family, so lovely and dear as it is, has still only been secured hitherto by retaining a vast and dolorous host of female outcasts ... upon whose heads, as upon the scapegoat of the Hebrew ordinance, we put all the iniquities of the children of the house, and all their transgressions in all their sins, and then banish them with maledictions into the foul outer wilderness and the land not inhabited."

Horace, Satires, lib. i, 2.

Augustine, De Ordine, Bk. II, Ch. IV.

De Regimine Principum (Opuscula XX), lib. iv, cap. XIV. I am indebted to the Rev. H. Northcote for the reference to the precise place where this statement occurs; it is usually quoted more vaguely.

Lea, History of Auricular Confession, vol. ii, p. 69. There was even, it seems, an eccentric decision of the Salamanca theologians that a nun might so receive money, "licite et valide."

Lea, op. cit., vol. ii, pp. 263, 399.

Rabutaux, De la Prostitution en Europe, pp. 22 et seq.

Burton, Anatomy of Melancholy, Part III, Sect. III, Mem. IV, Subs. II.

B. Mandeville, Remarks to Fable of the Bees, 1714, pp. 93-9; cf. P. Sakmann, Bernard de Mandeville, pp. 101-4.

These conditions favor temporary free unions, but they also favor prostitution. The reason is, according to Adolf Gerson (Sexual-Probleme, September, 1908), that the woman of good class will not have free unions. Partly moved by moral traditions, and partly by the feeling that a man should be legally her property, she will not give herself out of love to a man; and he therefore turns to the lower-class woman who gives herself for money.

Many girls, said Ellice Hopkins, get into mischief merely because they have in them an element of the "black kitten," which must frolic and play, but has no desire to get into danger. "Do you not think it a little hard," she added, "that men should have dug by the side of her foolish dancing feet a bottomless pit, and that she cannot have her jump and fun in safety, and put on her fine feathers like the silly bird-witted thing she is, without a single false step dashing her over the brink, and leaving her with the very womanhood dashed out of her?"

A. Sherwell, Life in West London, 1897, Ch. V.

As quoted by Bloch, Sexualleben Unserer Zeit, p. 358. In Berlin during recent years the number of prostitutes has increased at nearly double the rate at which the general population has increased. It is no doubt probable that the supply tends to increase the demand.

Goncourt, Journal, vol. iii, p. 49.

Vanderkiste, The Dens of London, 1854, p. 242.

Bonger (Criminalité et Conditions Economiques, p. 406) refers to the prevalence of prostitution among dressmakers and milliners, as well as among servants, as showing the influence of contact with luxury, and adds that the rich women, who look down on prostitution, do not always realize that they are themselves an important factor of prostitution, both by their luxury and their idleness; while they do not seem to be aware that they would themselves act in the same way if placed under the same conditions.

H. Lippert, in his book on prostitution in Hamburg, laid much stress on the craving for dress and adornment as a factor of prostitution, and Bloch (Das Sexualleben unsurer Zeit, p. 372) considers that this factor is usually underestimated, and that it exerts an especially powerful influence on servants.

Since this was written the influence of several generations of town-life in immunizing a stock to the evils of that life (though without reference to prostitution) has been set forth by Reibmayr, Die Entwicklungsgeschichte des Talentes und Genies, 1908, vol. ii, pp. 73 et seq.

In France this intimacy is embodied in the delicious privilege of tutoiement. "The mystery of tutoiement!" exclaims Ernest La Jennesse in L'Holocauste: "Barriers broken down, veils drawn away, and the ease of existence! At a time when I was very lonely, and trying to grow accustomed to Paris and to misfortune, I would go miles—on foot, naturally—to see a girl cousin and an aunt, merely to have something to tutoyer. Sometimes they were not at home, and I had to come back with my tu, my thirst for confidence and familiarity and brotherliness."

For some facts and references to the extensive literature concerning this trade, see, e.g., Bloch, Das Sexualleben Unserer Zeit, pp. 374-376; also K. M. Baer, Zeitschrift für Sexualwissenschaft, Sept., 1908; Paulucci de Calboli, Nuova Antologia, April, 1902.

These considerations do not, it is true, apply to many kinds of sexual perverts who form an important proportion of the clients of brothels. These can frequently find what they crave inside a brothel much more easily than outside.

Thus Charles Booth, in his great work on Life and Labor in London, final volume (p. 128), recommends that "houses of accommodation," instead of being hunted out, should be tolerated as a step towards the suppression of brothels.

"Towns like Woolwich, Aldershot, Portsmouth, Plymouth," it has been said, "abound with wretched, filthy monsters that bear no resemblance to women; but it is drink, scorn, brutality and disease which have reduced them to this state, not the mere fact of associating with men."

"The contract of prostitution in the opinion of prostitutes themselves," Bernaldo de Quirós and Llanas Aguilaniedo remark (La Mala Vida en Madrid, p. 254), "cannot be assimilated to a sale, nor to a contract of work, nor to any other form of barter recognized by the civil law. They consider that in these pacts there always enters an element which makes it much more like a gift in a matter in which no payment could be adequate. 'A woman's body is without price' is an axiom of prostitution. The money placed in the hands of her who procures the satisfaction of sexual desire is not the price of the act, but an offering which the priestess of Venus applies to her maintenance." To the Spaniard, it is true, every transaction which resembles trade is repugnant, but the principle underlying this feeling holds good of prostitution generally.

Journal des Goncourt, vol. iii; this was in 1866.

Rev. the Hon. C. Lyttelton, Training of the Young in Laws of Sex, p. 42.

See, e.g., R. W. Taylor, Treatise on Sexual Disorders, 1897, pp. 74-5. Georg Hirth (Wege zur Heimat, 1909, p. 619) narrates the case of a young officer who, being excited by the caresses of his betrothed and having too much respect for her to go further than this, and too much respect for himself to resort to masturbation, knew nothing better than to go to a prostitute. Syphilis developed a few days after the wedding. Hirth adds, briefly, that the results were terrible.

It is an oft-quoted passage, but can scarcely be quoted too often: "You see that this wrought-iron plate is not quite flat: it sticks up a little, here towards the left—'cockles,' as we say. How shall we flatten it? Obviously, you reply, by hitting down on the part that is prominent. Well, here is a hammer, and I give the plate a blow as you advise. Harder, you say. Still no effect. Another stroke? Well, there is one, and another, and another. The prominence remains, you see: the evil is as great as ever—greater, indeed. But that is not all. Look at the warp which the plate has got near the opposite edge. Where it was flat before it is now curved. A pretty bungle we have made of it. Instead of curing the original defect we have produced a second. Had we asked an artisan practiced in 'planishing,' as it is called, he would have told us that no good was to be done, but only mischief, by hitting down on the projecting part. He would have taught us how to give variously-directed and specially-adjusted blows with a hammer elsewhere: so attacking the evil, not by direct, but by indirect actions. The required process is less simple than you thought. Even a sheet of metal is not to be successfully dealt with after those common-sense methods in which you have so much confidence. What, then, shall we say about a society?... Is humanity more readily straightened than an iron plate?" (The Study of Sociology, p. 270.)