Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 6: Sex in Relation to SocietyEllis, Havelock
Science
Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 6: Sex in Relation to Society
Ellis, Havelock
Sex; Sex (Psychology)
Widow, aged thirty, with two children. Works in an umbrella
manufactory in the East End of London, earning eighteen shillings
a week by hard work, and increasing her income by occasionally
going out on the streets in the evenings. She haunts a quiet side
street which is one of the approaches to a large city railway
terminus. She is a comfortable, almost matronly-looking woman,
quietly dressed in a way that is only noticeable from the skirts
being rather short. If spoken to she may remark that she is
"waiting for a lady friend," talks in an affected way about the
weather, and parenthetically introduces her offers. She will
either lead a man into one of the silent neighboring lanes filled
with warehouses, or will take him home with her. She is willing
to accept any sum the man may be willing or able to give;
occasionally it is a sovereign, sometimes it is only a sixpence;
on an average she earns a few shillings in an evening. She had
only been in London for ten months; before that she lived in
Newcastle. She did not go on the streets there; "circumstances
alter cases," she sagely remarks. Though not speaking well of
the police, she says they do not interfere with her as they do
with some of the girls. She never gives them money, but hints
that it is sometimes necessary to gratify their desires in order
to keep on good terms with them.
It must always be remembered, for it is sometimes forgotten by socialists
and social reformers, that while the pressure of poverty exerts a markedly
modifying influence on prostitution, in that it increases the ranks of the
women who thereby seek a livelihood and may thus be properly regarded as a
factor of prostitution, no practicable raising of the rate of women's
wages could possibly serve, directly and alone, to abolish prostitution.
De Molinari, an economist, after remarking that "prostitution is an
industry" and that if other competing industries can offer women
sufficiently high pecuniary inducements they will not be so frequently
attracted to prostitution, proceeds to point out that that by no means
settles the question. "Like every other industry prostitution is governed
by the demand of the need to which it responds. As long as that need and
that demand persist, they will provoke an offer. It is the need and the
demand that we must act on, and perhaps science will furnish us the means
to do so."[173] In what way Molinari expects science to diminish the
demand for prostitutes, however, is not clearly brought out.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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