Prostitutes are mainly recruited from the ranks of factory girls, domestic servants, shop girls, and waitresses. In some of these occupations it is difficult to obtain employment all the year round. In this way many milliners, dressmakers and tailoresses become prostitutes when business is slack, and return to business when the season begins. Sometimes the regular work of the day is supplemented concurrently by prostitution in the street in the evening. It is said, possibly with some truth, that amateur prostitution of this kind is extremely prevalent in England, as it is not checked by the precautions which, in countries where prostitution is regulated, the clandestine prostitute must adopt in order to avoid registration. Certain public lavatories and dressing-rooms in central London are said to be used by the girls for putting on, and finally washing off before going home, the customary paint.[170] It is certain that in England a large proportion of parents belonging to the working and even lower middle class ranks are unacquainted with the nature of the lives led by their own daughters. It must be added, also, that occasionally this conduct of the daughter is winked at or encouraged by the parents; thus a correspondent writes that he "knows some towns in England where prostitution is not regarded as anything disgraceful, and can remember many cases where the mother's house has been used by the daughter with the mother's knowledge."
Acton, in a well-informed book on London prostitution, written in the middle of the last century, said that prostitution is "a transitory stage, through which an untold number of British women are ever on their passage."[171] This statement was strenuously denied at the time by many earnest moralists who refused to admit that it was possible for a woman who had sunk into so deep a pit of degradation ever to climb out again, respectably safe and sound. Yet it is certainly true as regards a considerable proportion of women, not only in England, but in other countries also. Thus Parent-Duchâtelet, the greatest authority on French prostitution, stated that "prostitution is for the majority only a transitory stage; it is quitted usually during the first year; very few prostitutes continue until extinction." It is difficult, however, to ascertain precisely of how large a proportion this is true; there are no data which would serve as a basis for exact estimation,[172] and it is impossible to expect that respectable married women would admit that they had ever been "on the streets"; they would not, perhaps, always admit it even to themselves.