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.