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)
Not only have we to admit that no practicable rise in the rate of wages
paid to women in ordinary industries can possibly compete with the wages
which fairly attractive women of quite ordinary ability can earn by
prostitution,[174] but we have also to realize that a rise in general
prosperity--which alone can render a rise of women's wages healthy and
normal--involves a rise in the wages of prostitution, and an increase in
the number of prostitutes. So that if good wages is to be regarded as the
antagonist of prostitution, we can only say that it more than gives back
with one hand what it takes with the other. To so marked a degree is this
the case that Després in a detailed moral and demographic study of the
distribution of prostitution in France comes to the conclusion that we
must reverse the ancient doctrine that "poverty engenders prostitution"
since prostitution regularly increases with wealth,[175] and as a
département rises in wealth and prosperity, so the number both of its
inscribed and its free prostitutes rises also. There is indeed a fallacy
here, for while it is true, as Després argues, that wealth demands
prostitution, it is also true that a wealthy community involves the
extreme of poverty as well as of riches and that it is among the poorer
elements that prostitution chiefly finds its recruits. The ancient dictum
that "poverty engenders prostitution" still stands, but it is complicated
and qualified by the complex conditions of civilization. Bonger, in his
able discussion of the economic side of the question, has realized the
wide and deep basis of prostitution when he reaches the conclusion that it
is "on the one hand the inevitable complement of the existing legal
monogamy, and on the other hand the result of the bad conditions in which
many young girls grow up, the result of the physical and psychical
wretchedness in which the women of the people live, and the consequence
also of the inferior position of women in our actual society."[176] A
narrowly economic consideration of prostitution can by no means bring us
to the root of the matter.
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