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Hellraisers Journal – Monday November 16, 1908
Theresa Malkiel: “Prostitution is very seldom a voluntary choice…”
From The Socialist Woman of November 1908:
Our Unfortunate Sisters
THERESA MALKIEL
The quality of mercy is not strain’d,
It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven
Upon the place beneath: it is twice blest;
It blesseth him that gives and him that takes.
It has been estimated that there are six hundred thousand women in the United States who sell their bodies for a living. I know that many of you will shudder reading of this number of unfortunates and will think of them with hatred and disgust.
But be merciful, women, those sisters of yours are not bond slaves like the prostitutes of ancient times, nor are they aliens like the medieval woman of the street. They are gathered from your very midst, from the girls who have by adverse circumstances been impelled to turn to prostitution as a means of livelihood.
Like ourselves, these unfortunates have been carried under a mother’s heart, like ourselves they have been born and destined for an honest life, but victims of force and fraud, or economic conditions, they soon reached the point where society held out nothing better for them than the life of shame.
Prostitution is very seldom a voluntary choice on the part of the fallen. Girls do not elect to cast themselves away, they are driven to the haunts of vice. A young working girl is an easy mark for a man’s designing. And the designers are not wanting. Their most fruitful recruiting grounds are the stores where girls work long hours for small pay; the homes that have few comforts and no pleasures; the streets where girls are often cast while still unknown to sin, but are in want and without shelter; in places where distress and temptation stand ever present.
Every case of prostitution has its cause: The most frequent causes are poverty and the sensuality of beastial men who are creating the demand. It has been calculated, by those who take an interest in the reform of this social evil, that it requires five men to support one woman.
Now think of it! There are three million men in our midst who support this shameful degradation of human beings, and yet we, virtuous women, meet them as our social equals, while the victims of their degraded passion are outcasts from the pale of society.
How often do we make heroes of the men sinners, who boast of having sown their wild oats! We see them enter our homes and marry some of our purest girls, who become mothers of children born with deprived appetites.
At the same time we shut the door in the face of the young girl who has been betrayed and made to commit sin, before she knew what it meant to her; we heap shame and abuse upon the girl who succumbs to starvation, and in distress exchanges her body for bread.
The idea that woman once fallen must always remain in the lowest degradation of vice, is false and untrue. The greatest number of those who have fallen through poverty and fraud are striving to rise from the mire They struggle vainly against a cruel society, which lenient towards the male offender, hurls its whole wrath upon the woman. She and she alone, remains the social pariah and her bitterest enemies are we, her sisters.
Congenital sexual perverts do exist among women, but they form only a negligible fraction of the entire number of prostitutes. But we despise every woman of the street without giving a thought to the cause that brought her there; and yet, when we take into account that practically every fallen woman is a victim of some great wrong, and that most of them want to reform, it becomes evident that our duty to wards them is not to treat them with hatred and contempt, but to pity them, and help them to rise and resume their normal lives.
Those of us who have homes and are respected members of society cannot realize the depth of degradation and misery that those women are subject to. Even the market of shame is over crowded, and after a woman loses the first bloom of youth she is left to starve like a dog in the street, without human pity or help. Often these miserable creatures are left to rot in their own vice, though most of them are victims of the sins of others, who have inflicted the loathsome disease upon them.
In the periodical outbursts of reform sentiment started by well meaning reformers, they are driven in hordes, like beasts from their lairs, and many are the poor victims that turn with disgust from man’s lecherous embraces to the soothing embrace of the river. Still others find shelter in the crowded tenement houses there to spread the poison and help corrupt new victims.
Neither regulative, nor repressive systems are going to eradicate this social evil from our midst. Contrary to the authorities, who affirm that what is best and purest in civilization could not have existed, but for the sacrifice of a portion of womankind to immorality, I say that it is the pure and the good who are responsible for this great and most shameful evil of the twentieth century. It is within your power, mothers of the race. to quench it, before it spreads any further.
Beware women, there is no telling at whose door this misfortune may knock next.
[Photograph added.]
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SOURCES
Quote T Malkiel, Sisters Arise, Sc Woman p10, July 1908
https://play.google.com/books/reader?id=OvM4AQAAMAAJ&printsec=frontcover&pg=GBS.PA40
The Socialist Woman
[Later-The Coming Nation]
-March-Dec 1908
https://books.google.com/books?id=OvM4AQAAMAAJ
SW – November 1908
https://play.google.com/books/reader?id=OvM4AQAAMAAJ&printsec=frontcover&pg=GBS.RA4-PA1
“Our Unfortunate Sisters” by Theresa Malkiel
https://play.google.com/books/reader?id=OvM4AQAAMAAJ&printsec=frontcover&pg=GBS.RA4-PA4
IMAGE
Theresa Malkiel 1874-1949, wiki
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theresa_Malkiel
See also:
Women and American Socialism, 1870-1920
-by Mari Jo Buhle
University of Illinois Press, 1983
(search: prostitution)
https://books.google.com/books?id=d0hBpAdjTSAC
August Bebel – 1910
Woman and Socialism
Jubilee 50th Edition
https://www.marxists.org/archive/bebel/1879/woman-socialism/index.htm
Chapter XII.
Prostitution a Necessary Social Institution of Bourgeois Society.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/bebel/1879/woman-socialism/ch12.htm
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