The following case, though noted down over twenty years ago, is fairly typical of a certain class, among the lower ranks of prostitution, in which the economic factor counts for much, but in which we ought not too hastily to assume that it is the sole factor.
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.