Title: The causes of prostitution
Author: Warbasse, James P.
Language: English
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                             The Causes of
                              Prostitution


                           JAMES P. WARBASSE

                             [Illustration]

                           Reprinted from the
                       TWENTIETH CENTURY MAGAZINE
                             of July, 1912



                       THE CAUSES OF PROSTITUTION

       The wonder is that there is not a greater degree of public
            appreciation of the prostitute-making conditions
               which society harbors because it foolishly
                    thinks that it profits by them.


                          By JAMES P. WARBASSE


A prostitute is a woman who offers her body for hire to men for their
sexual pleasure. Sexual promiscuity on the part of women, not practised
for money, does not constitute prostitution. Nor does the mere granting
of sexual privileges for money constitute prostitution; if it did, women
who marry for money would fall within this class. 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.
When once engaged in prostitution, it is difficult for the woman to
escape from it unless powerful social forces are brought to bear.

The specific causes which prompt women to enter this traffic may be
classified as follows: (I) those affecting both sexes, (II) those
affecting first the male, and (III) those bearing especially upon the
female.

Before proceeding with an enumeration of causative factors, let it be
noted that the two fundamental causes are (a) sexual lust on the part of
men and (b) poverty on the part of women. The other causes which will be
given are subsidiary to these two. 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.

I. A chief subsidiary cause common to both sexes is _defective
education_, which is responsible for ignorance of the simple principles
of sexual biology, sexual hygiene, and sexual disease. 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.

Were girls told the dangers of extra-marital sexual congress--how it
ultimately means either pregnancy or venereal disease--and could they
know the meaning and consequences of these two conditions, from both
physical and social standpoints, the ranks of the prostitutes would be
much depleted.

Many a girl would not have made her sexual mistakes had she been
advised. It is not because there was not time in the home or school to
teach her a little practical sociology. No, there was time to teach her
many other things of minor importance. In fact, it will always be found
that these girls have zealously been taught many things that are not
true, and that would be of little service to them if they were true. The
reason the girl was not given this useful information is that for two
thousand years the "pleasures of the flesh" have been regarded as evil.
It has been droned out by sad-voiced prelates that "man is conceived in
sin." This wretched dogma has made its impression on the human heart;
mothers and fathers are loath to speak of these sinful things to the
young; and their girls grow up ignorant, and go into prostitution for
want of the saving information.

Another defect of education is that which exalts prudishness under the
guise of modesty. The draping of the body, to hide its parts from view,
had its origin in Christendom in the doctrine that "the flesh is evil."
Instead of hiding the body, this practice has directed attention to the
covered parts. The vision of imagination has penetrated all draperies,
and carried with it the lascivious sense which the unobstructed eye
would not. Sensuality has been promoted rather than suppressed. The
exhibition of the naked human body is the beginning of sexual morality.
Unnecessarily to cover and screen it from vision is to insult it with
shame which it does not deserve, proclaim it as evil, and direct
attention to its more specialized sexual parts.

II. Of the causes which operate first upon the male factor, (1) _the
double standard of sexual morals_ is most important. It prompts men to
employ the prostitute. They demand her as a masculine right. (2)
_Deferred marriage_ is another element. 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. (3) _The inability to regulate
satisfactorily the number of offspring_ is also a potent factor. This,
coupled with the superstition against copulation during pregnancy and
lactation, drives married men out of the home to seek sexual
gratification.

(4) 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.

(5) _Alcohol_ is the great promoter of sexual lust. Investigators who
have questioned many men upon this subject have found that a large
proportion of them made their first sexual mistakes while under the
influence of alcohol. Young men are especially prone to seduction when
intoxicated. Alcohol inhibits the action of the will, benumbs the moral
sense, and stimulates the sexual passions. No other poison plays so
strong a rôle in the promotion of sex immorality.

(6) The _absence of good feminine society_ in the circles of youth is a
factor. Social contact with high-minded women satisfies the craving for
feminine society and deters young men from seeking the society of the
opposite type of women. A boy who has friendships among good women is
apt to be ashamed to go among the lewd.

(7) The _unlovable_ wife encourages prostitution. She may be sexually
unattractive to the husband because of disease, pregnancy, fear of
pregnancy, or coldness. The husband may be responsible for any or all of
these causes; but still he patronizes the other woman.

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; many have
others depending upon them.

Studies of the problem show that wages are regulated by the cost of
subsistence. Workers are paid as little as they can exist upon and still
be fairly efficient, capital demanding that the pay shall be so near the
starvation limit that the workers shall live in fear of want. The
interests of capital also demand that there shall at all times be an
unemployed class seeking employment.

Most of the money in this great country which is bequeathed by the
wealthy to care for damaged human beings has been wrung from those very
same human beings who were sacrificed for its production. The curse of
capitalistic greed is a basic factor in the social evils, and they will
exist so long as the right to exploit human beings is tolerated by
society.

August Bebel illustrates the relation of prostitution to wages by the
report of the Chief Constable of Bolton, England, showing that the
number of young prostitutes increased more during the English cotton
famine, consequent upon the Civil War in America, than during the
previous twenty-five years. Read the pitiful records of the women who
were driven by destitution to sell themselves as reported in Sanger's
"History of Prostitution." Of 2000 prostitutes investigated in New York,
525 gave destitution as the cause of their going into that life. This is
the largest number under any one cause. But poverty can be read into the
others. "Drink," "seduced and abandoned," "ill-treatment by parents or
husband," "as an easy life," "bad company," "violated," "seduced on
emigrant ships," "seduced in emigrant boarding-houses"--these cover most
of the other causes, and all have poverty and bad economic conditions at
their base.

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.

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.

Edmond Kelly says: "Chastity ought to be a purely moral or social
question, not an economic one." Quoting also from the same source a part
of the report of Miss Woodbridge, secretary of the Working Women's
Society: "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."

Out of these conditions grow the low wages of shop girls and operatives.
But even though not driven to it by poverty, the girls who leave the
factory for prostitution cannot be blamed. Human automatons, fastened to
whirling wheels, consumed by monotonous, soul-destroying days of toil,
crawling at night into unlovely beds, crawling forth at break of day to
toil again, dull and stolid, with hope half smothered--toiling slaves,
who would begrudge them narcosis, death, or prostitution? The wonder is
that there is not a greater degree of public appreciation of the
prostitute-making conditions, which society harbors because it foolishly
thinks that it profits by them.

(2) _Crowded tenements_ belong with the economic factors for only the
direst poverty would compel the acceptance of the low standard of living
which they impose. They mean absence of true home life, unhygienic
conditions, squalor, and lack of privacy. One-thirteenth of the
population of New York lives at a density of over 600 to the acre. There
are one hundred and five blocks having a density of over 750 to the
acre. If everybody lived under such conditions, all the people of the
world could be accommodated in the state of Delaware. This is not for
lack of land, for it would be possible to have in New York City over ten
million people with a density of only 50 to the acre. Many apartments
have from three to five occupants per room. In the Borough of Brooklyn,
New York, there were in 1911, 127,000 dark rooms, and 50,000 wholly
without windows or any other opening except a door. 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.

(3) _Child labor_ is one of the demoralizing products of our
civilization. There are 2,000,000 children wage-earners in the United
States. That means children who are denied adequate schooling and free
play. They are forced into the mills and factories and tied up to
machines. Their minds are dwarfed, their bodies stunted--all for "the
hallowed privilege of working for a living." Consult the findings of the
U. S. Bureau of Labor, read John Spargo's "Bitter Cry of the Child,"
peruse the reports of the National Consumers' League and of the National
Child Labor Committee, and decide if we are not creating prostitution
out of the blood and flesh of children for the money there is in it. 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. Boys had to be made
drunkards, gambling had to be added, for the people wanted the $80,000
annually. The burden became so great that the saloons were forced to
organize houses of prostitution to help raise the money. By combining
these two splendid cooperative business features the town affairs
flourished.[1] 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.

    [1] "The Thin Crust of Civilization," by Ray Stannard Baker, in
        _American Magazine_, April, 1911.

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.

(5) _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 lover (_sic_), of course, could go back
home. "My father refused to let me stay in the house when he learned
that I had been raped, for that was what it was." The father continued
to regard himself as good enough to stay in the house. "My brother told
on me to my father and he turned me out." Who is my brother? is a
pertinent question here. "My stepmother turned me out when she found
that I was about to become a mother." This girl was a child of sixteen
when thus cast out. These suffice. 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. So deeply fixed is this
feeling of pleasure in creating envy, on the one hand, and the desire
for emulation of the rich, on the other, that the evidences of
conspicuous waste among the former class and of tawdry imitation among
the latter class give to feminine raiment sundry characteristic and
bizarre features. Many a poor girl covets these silly externals above
all else. An image of man, in the guise of a lover, offers them to her;
and she falls. She reads in the great metropolitan press every day of
the sensual indulgences of women who have diamonds, automobiles, and lap
dogs, and she feels that there is, perhaps, some connection between the
practices and the possessions of these people. The influence of the
newspaper notoriety of sexually loose women is confirmed by the stage
and the novel, which present to impressionable girls, women of this
character in the light of heroines.

(7) 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. In New York are three hundred
dance-halls. The decent ones are so few as to be negligible. Nearly all
are demoralizing to the girls who frequent them. Here the pimp, the
spieler, and the cadet ply their trade. The conditions are the same in
all of our great cities. Of the first thousand girls sent from New York
City to the Bedford, N. Y., Reformatory, the majority stated that they
took their first downward step in connection with the dance-halls. These
institutions are allies of the liquor traffic, and business interests
are served by them.

Mothercraft is a neglected science. Not enough of those who give birth
to children, "mother" them. Girls are not growing up with the
companionship of intelligent mothers. The blame is not the girls'. Girls
cannot be expected to care for the companionship of empty-minded
mothers.

(8) _Seduction in young girlhood_ is a common result of defective
education, deficient mothering, and the unlovely domestic and economic
conditions incident to the slums.

(9) _Unhappy childhood_, due to unkind parents, intolerable restraints
of the puritanic household, and uncongenial toil imposed upon the child,
are factors of moment.

The most tragic phase of prostitution is to be found in those girls who
are (10) _driven into it_ by parents, guardians, or husbands, as a
matter of business. 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; and many of the murders and suicides
which entertain the patrons of the daily press are supplied from this
form of enterprise.

(11) _Servants seduced_ by the master of the house or his sons swell the
ranks of prostitution. The intimacies of domestic life make this one of
the prolific causative factors. Girls in domestic service fall easy
victims also to other men, because they live in an environment in which
the incompleteness of their own lives is daily manifested to them. Of
the first thousand girls admitted to the Bedford Institution, 430 gave
their occupation as general housework.

(12) 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. 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. If the mistress could be made to realize that
the servant is a human being who is possessed of the same longings as
she and suffers from the lack of their gratification just as she does,
the domestic relations would be improved. Sometimes a servant retaliates
for the slights, and evens up the social situation, by winning the
master's love. 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; and the home does
not offer it. 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 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; but the wider socialization of recreations
is one of society's most urgent needs.

As a number of causative factors have been mentioned which play a lesser
rôle, and as many factors have been mentioned which are not wholly bad,
this résumé cannot be complete without a reference to (15) _religion_.
The fact that the great religions can be traced back to the worship of
the creative and life-giving principles, as exemplified by the sun and
the sexual organs, that prostitution was at one time a religious rite,
and that at present the sexual emotions play a strong rôle in the
perpetuation of these rites, renders it but natural that there should be
a relation between the two. Religious emotion and sexual emotion are
closely related. Religious fervor is a manifestation of sexual lust.

When we come down to the dominant religion of the western world we find
that its literature, the Bible, contains recountals of nearly all types
of sexual crimes, among which are the most revolting. This, from a
historic or scientific standpoint, is not objectionable; but the fact
that the halo of sacredness is thrown about the men who committed these
immoral acts, that they are held up as being "after God's own heart,"
that Christendom and Jewdom name their children after them, and that
their pictures adorn the temples and the market-places, bears witness
that they are approved of men.

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. Sexual
sinners often quote the Bible as though it were written specifically for
their benefit.

The sexual excitement and immoralities engendered by such factors as the
revival and camp-meeting are not to be overlooked. These primitive
institutions are passing into history, but among the less enlightened to
whom they have been transmitted, they continue to be sexual orgies. 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.[2]

    [2] See such works as "Sex Worship" by Howard, "Religion and
        Lust," by Weir, "Ancient Pagan and Modern Christian
        Symbolism" by Inman, etc.

(16) 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.
If, being a prostitute, she goes to the workhouse, the brothel which is
deprived of her services goes about it to replace the vacancy by another
girl (here come in the pimp and the procurer). 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.[3] In New York
66 per cent of the women arrested when they come before the judge are so
disposed of that they may at once return to the street. A more humane
treatment of these unfortunates is beginning to be adopted in some
cities; but crimes against them will continue to be committed so long as
the courts are the ante-chambers to penal methods. 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.

    [3] See the case of Sophie Hirsch, N. Y. _Call_. 20 April, 1911.

The insane were once treated by throwing them in chains into a dungeon;
the sick were once supposed to be bewitched and possessed of devils;
criminals and prostitutes are still treated in conformity to the ancient
superstitions; but a better day is to dawn when the light of science and
humanity will be shed upon their misfortunes.

Besides economic and social causes of prostitution, there are causes
which may be called pathologic. (17) _Alcoholism and syphilis in the
parents_, causing physical and moral deterioration in the offspring, are
important. (18) _Ill health_ should not be overlooked. Often there is
pelvic disease, producing abnormal libidinous impulses; or there may be
central nervous disease; or glandular disease affecting the internal
secretions; or other physical ailments making for instability. Some
women have given as a reason physical inability to perform ordinary
laborious work whereby to earn a livelihood.

Finally may be mentioned that peculiar, ill-defined condition, called
(19) _degeneracy_. In this class are the women of abnormal and defective
mentality. Anyone who has talked much with prostitutes recognizes this
as a not inconsiderable class. The shallow intellect, the perverted
points of view, and the absence of sense of responsibility, characterize
many of these women. The prevalence of hysteria is well known. 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.

In many cases this weakened moral and mental tone makes of the girl a
voluntary prostitute. 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 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. If they do none of these things they must plunge into
absorbing work, or they are destined to become intoxicated and destroyed
by their own uneliminated products.

It is to the mentally or morally weak that the arguments of the female
procurer appeal. This woman tells the girl of the easy way to make
money, the easy life, good clothes, good friends, and good times. 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; and, having fallen, men and women made it
difficult for them to rise. They are entitled to the same consideration
as are the victims of typhoid fever. Society is guilty in both cases.
Prostitution and typhoid are products of vicious social conditions; both
are preventable.

Let us not with smugness deny this woman as our sister, for she is; and
we have wronged her. She has a better right to reproach us than we have
to scorn her. Our guilt is greater than hers. There was a great fire in
a factory in New York City. One hundred girls were burned to death or
hurled themselves from windows to be crushed and mangled upon the
structures below. The women who ply the trade of prostitution are as
guiltless of their own destruction as were these poor girls. Their blood
is upon society with its greed for money, its apathy, ignorance,
indifference, active participation in crime, and its exploitation of the
weak.

Let us cease to cry with self-assumed virtue, Spare us from
contamination by the prostitute who brazenly has come among us. Let us
be honest enough and decent enough to confess: We are guilty; we have
made this woman what she is; she is ours. Let us first be just to her;
and then let us see to it that no more of our daughters walk in her
footsteps.

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