The Rights of Women and the Sexual Relations/Part 1/4. The Passive Prostitution of Women
THE PASSIVE PROSTITUTION OF WOMEN.
Woman has, in advance of man, the bitter sat. isfaction that there is a far greater chasm between the different positions which she occupies in poetry and in life than between all the positions which can be imagined for a male being. Worshipped as an ideal in poetry, degraded below the animal in life, woman may contemplate how much restitution must be made to her in order to fill out the chasm between her degradation and her apotheosis. Indeed, between the most exalted man of history orthe drama, and the lowest slave of the bagnio or the plantation, there is not so great a contrast by far as between a Laura or Heloïse and a prostitute of the street or the brothel.
Woman has a double task of liberation. First she bears with man the common yoke of the prevailing oppression; but if this yoke is cast off, there still remains for her the special yoke which the male sex has placed on her neck. In the man the human being alone can be oppressed or liberated, in the woman the sex as well.
The despot makes a slave of the man by oppression, but even this slave makes a sub-slave of the woman by purchase. Even for the slave the possibility of saving the better self is still conceivable. But a woman in a state of prostitution is both a slave and a human monstrosity at the same time. The woman is born for love, and drowns her heart in a bog of vice; the woman is born for motherhood, and to be a mother becomes a horror to her; the woman is born to be a wife, and of the happiness of a wife she has never any conception. Thus is the woman in a state of prostitution. Surely, to sell one's "love" without choice and without love is the lowest stage of human abjectness. If all women could feel the degradation which is the lot of millions of their sex in the state of prostitution, the whole sex would rise in rebellion and begin a sex war, as there have hitherto been national and religious wars,
The way in which woman has reached this degradation also indicates the way to free herself from it. First came force, which compelled the woman to give herself even to the man she most despised. Asa slave, and as an ornament to the harem, she was in the beginning mere booty. The preponderance of physical strength, force, was the immediate cause that made woman a tool, a thing without rights. This force was converted, also with respect to the men, into political power, the power of princes, and as such became at the same time an object of veneration. The men honored it as subjects, the women as tools of lust. The honor which a woman supposes to be done her when a despot chooses her for his mistress is nothing more than a continuation of the subserviency with which formerly the slave would surrender herself to the murderer.
First made dependent on man through force, the woman fell into twofold dependence as growing civilization made the maintenance of existence more difficult. Woman existed not only for the man, but also through man, who by virtue of his physical strength and his energetic mind found the way to procure the means of existence and of luxury. And when civilization reached a height where the inequality in the economic conditions was so far developed that even a great part of the men could procure none or insufficient means of existence and of luxury, that part of the feminine sex which was dependent on them became completely helpless, completely dependent. The helpless woman, thrown upon herself by the helpless man, but through education and circumstances alike incapacitated to help herself, gave up the only thing she possessed: she sold her body. She sold it first from hunger, then to get means for luxury and amusement. And this lot, originally prepared by force and then decided upon by necessity, has now become an actual profession for millions. Prostitution has become a true branch of industry, which has its employers and contractors, as well as its science and its articles of trade. It is at the same time a hereditary cor ruption which is transmitted from the mother to the children, and pursues entire classes from one generation to the other, inasmuch as the want of means for existence goes hand in hand with the want of means for education.
Out of regard for the weaker nerves of women (since women have weaker nerves than men), I shall refrain from picturing in detail the fate to which so many thousands, especially in great cities, among them a great part in the most tender age of virginity, are consigned. Whatever the imagination can conceive as low and disgusting, that is suffered, is cultivated by a great part of the feminine sex from necessity, and for money. Every hesitation which the feelings or the sensual impressions might oppose in a single case is overcome by necessity and by money; and we may not be far from the truth in imagining the most beautiful and lovable girl in the world transferred to the chambers of a brothel, where she tremblingly begins the practice of her profession in the arms of a decrepit old man, whose aspect causes all the five senses at once to revolt, but whom money enables to stimulate his deadened vitality by means of a youthful beauty for — a double premium.
But now, you women who shudder at the reading of such things, do you believe that prostitution is to be found only in those haunts where a tax is levied on every act of lust? Look about you in your social ranks and you will find that the circle of prostitution encloses thousands of families who make the sign of the cross at the mention of the word brothel. When a girl marries from necessity, or is made to marry from speculation, is not that as much prostitution as when she sells herself from necessity or is sold from speculation? To be sure, by marriage she sells herself only to a single person, but that does not change the immorality of her relationship. Those women who can still say a year after their marriage that their husbands are really the men of their hearts are indeed rare, at least among certain classes; and this confession is nothing more than a confession of prostitution. Most marriages are the product of money or class considerations, or exigencies to avoid in the eleventh hour the entire failure of the sexual design. But where marriage as a rule is a mere charitable institution, it at once becomes by law also an institution of compulsion, which perpetuates prostitution and makes regret useless.
No further exposition is necessary to show that the sources of prostitution, into which the greater part of the feminine sex has fallen, are political disqualification and economic dependence, i.e., the twin tyranny which throws the greatest part of humanity under the feet of the ruling, revelling minority. The abolition of prostitution is possible, therefore, only after the attainment of complete liberty and after the just regulation of the social conditions, of which we shall speak farther on. But pious vulgarity and the moral police are of a different opinion. They think that they stifle prostitution at its source if they drive the unhappy inmates of houses of ill-fame out of town with police force or throw them into prison. It is dreadful that history necessitates more victims of ignorance than enlightenment, when at last attained, is able to make happy beings. How many millions will have perished in misery and degradation before the knowledge has at last been reached that neither the police nor church discipline are able to banish an evil which is the necessary result of legal and economic conditions! And what is easier than this knowledge if we are willing to abandon the obstinacy of our egotism with the slothfulness of our thinking?