Part 15 (1/2)
Man ever has looked upon the use of prost.i.tution as a privilege due him of right. All the harder and severer does he keep guard and pa.s.s sentence when a woman, who is no prost.i.tute, commits a ”slip.” That woman is instinct with the same impulses as man, aye, that at given periods of her life (at menstruation) these impulses a.s.sert themselves more vehemently than at others,--that does not trouble him. In virtue of his position as master, he compels her to violently suppress her most powerful impulses, and he conditions both her character in society and her marriage upon her chast.i.ty. Nothing ill.u.s.trates more drastically, and also revoltingly, the dependence of woman upon man than this radically different conception regarding the gratification of the identical natural impulse, and the radically different measure by which it is judged.
To man, circ.u.mstances are particularly favorable. Nature has devolved upon woman the consequences of the act of generation: outside of the enjoyment, man has neither trouble nor responsibility. This advantageous position over against woman has promoted that unbridled license in s.e.xual indulgence wherein a considerable part of men distinguish themselves. Seeing, however, that, as has been shown, a hundred causes lie in the way of the legitimate gratification of the s.e.xual instinct, or prevent its full satisfaction, the consequence is frequent gratification, like beasts in the woods.
_Prost.i.tution thus becomes a social inst.i.tution in the capitalist world, the same as the police, standing armies, the Church, and wage-masters.h.i.+p._
Nor is this an exaggeration. We shall prove it.
We have told how the ancient world looked upon prost.i.tution, and considered it necessary, aye, had it organized by the State, as well in Greece as in Rome. What views existed on the subject during the Middle Ages has likewise been described. Even St. Augustine, who, next to St.
Paul, must be looked upon as the most important prop of Christendom, and who diligently preached asceticism, could not refrain from exclaiming: ”Suppress the public girls, and the violence of pa.s.sion will knock everything of a heap.” The provincial Council of Milan, in 1665, expressed itself in similar sense.
Let us hear the moderns:
Dr. F. S. Huegel says:[100] ”Advancing civilization will gradually drape prost.i.tution in more pleasing forms, but only with the end of the world will it be wiped off the globe.” A bold a.s.sertion; yet he who is not able to project himself beyond the capitalist form of society, he who does not realize that society will change so as to arrive at healthy and natural social conditions,--he must agree with Dr. Huegel.
Hence also did Dr. Wichern, the late pious Director of the Rauhen House near Hamburg, Dr. Patton of Lyon, Dr. William Tait of Edinburg, and Dr.
Parent-Duchatelet of Paris, celebrated through his investigations of the s.e.xual diseases and prost.i.tution, agree in declaring: ”Prost.i.tution is ineradicable _because it hangs together with the social inst.i.tutions_,”
and all of them demanded its regulation by the State. Also Schmoelder writes: ”Immorality as a trade has existed at all times and in all places, and, so far as the human eye can see, _it will remain a constant companion_ of the human race.”[101] Seeing that the authorities cited stand, without exception, upon the ground of the modern social order, the thought occurs to none that, with the aid of another social order, the causes of prost.i.tution, and, consequently, prost.i.tution itself, might disappear; none of them seeks to fathom the causes. Indeed, upon one and another, engaged in this question, the fact at times dawns that the sorry social conditions, which numerous women suffer under, might be the chief reason why so many women sell their bodies; but the thought does not press itself through to its conclusion, to wit, that, therefore, the necessity arises of bringing about other social conditions. Among those who recognize that the economic conditions are the chief cause of prost.i.tution belong Th. Bade, who declares:[102] ”The causes of the bottomless moral depravity, out of which the prost.i.tute girl is born, lie in the existing social conditions.... _It is the bourgeois dissolution of the middle cla.s.ses and of their material existence, particularly of the cla.s.s of the artisans_, only a small fraction of which carries on to-day an independent occupation as a trade.” Bade closes his observations, saying: ”Want for material existence, that has partly worn out the families of the middle cla.s.s and will yet wear them out wholly, leads also to the moral ruin of the family, especially of the female s.e.x.” In fact, the statistical figures, gathered by the Police Department of Berlin, between 1871-1872, on the extraction of 2,224 enrolled prost.i.tutes, show:
Number. Per Cent. Father's Occupation.
1,015 47.9 Artisans 467 22.0 Millhands 305 14.4 Small office-holders 222 10.4 Merchants and railroad workers 87 4.1 Farmers 26 1.2 Military service
Of 102 the father's occupation was not ascertainable.
Specialists and experts rarely take up investigations of a deeper nature; they accept the facts that lie before them, and judge in the style of the ”Wiener Medizinische Wochenschrift,” that writes in its No.
35, for the year 1863: ”What else is there left to the large majority of willing and unwilling celibates, in order to satisfy their _natural wants_, than the forbidden fruit of the Venus Pandemos?” The paper is, accordingly, of the opinion that, for the sake of these celibates, prost.i.tution is necessary, because what else, forsooth, are they to do in order to satisfy their s.e.xual impulse? And it closes, saying: ”Seeing that prost.i.tution is necessary, it has the right to existence, to protection, and to immunity from the State.” And Dr. Huegel declares himself in his work, mentioned above, in accord with this view. Man, accordingly, to whom celibacy is a horror and a martyrdom, is the only being considered; that there are also millions of women living in celibacy is well known; but they have to submit. What is right for man, is, accordingly, wrong for women; is in her case immorality and a crime.
The Leipsic Police Doctor, Dr. J. Kuehn, says:[103] ”Prost.i.tution is not merely an evil that must be tolerated, _it is a necessary evil_, because it protects the wives from infidelity, [which only the husbands have the right to be guilty of] and virtue also [female virtue, of course, the husbands have no need of the commodity] from being a.s.sailed [sic.] and, therefore, from falling.” These few words of Dr. Kuehn typify, in all its nakedness, the cra.s.s egoism of male creation. Kuehn takes the correct stand for a Police Doctor, who, by superintending prost.i.tution, sacrifices himself, to the end of saving the men from disagreeable diseases. In the same sense with him did his successor, Dr. Eckstein, utter himself at the twelfth convention of the German a.s.sociations of House and City Real Estate Owners, held in Magdeburg in the summer of 1890. The honorable house-owners wished to know how they could prevent the numerous instances of prost.i.tutes occupying their houses, and how to protect themselves against fines in case prost.i.tutes are caught living in them. Dr. Eckstein lectured them on this head to the effect that prost.i.tution was a ”necessary evil,” never absent from any people or religion. Another interesting gentleman is Dr. Fock, who in a treatise, ent.i.tled ”Prost.i.tution, in Its Ethical and Sanitary Respects,” in the ”Deutschen Vierteljahrschrift fuer offentliche Gesundheitspflege,” vol.
xx, No. 1, considers prost.i.tution ”an unenviable corollary of our civilized arrangements.” He fears an over-production of people if all were to marry upon reaching the age of p.u.b.erty; hence he considers important to have prost.i.tution ”regulated” by the State. He considers natural that the State supervise and regulate prost.i.tution, and thereby a.s.sume the care of providing for the supply of girls that are free from syphilis. He p.r.o.nounces himself in favor of the most rigid inspection of ”all women, proven to lead an abandoned life;”--also when ladies of ”an abandoned life” belong to the prominent cla.s.ses? It is the old story.
That in all logic and justice also those men should be held under surveillance who hunt up prost.i.tutes, maintain them and make their existence possible,--of that no one thinks. Dr. Fock also demands the taxing of the prost.i.tutes, and their concentration in given streets. In other words, the Christian State is to procure for itself a revenue out of prost.i.tution, and, at the same time, organize and place prost.i.tution under its protection for the benefit of male creation. What was it that the Emperor Vespasian said at a somewhat similar juncture? ”_Non olet!_”--it smells not.
Did we exaggerate when we said: Prost.i.tution is to-day a necessary social inst.i.tution just as the police, standing armies, the Church and wage-masters.h.i.+p?
In the German Empire, prost.i.tution is not, like in France, organized and superintended by the State; it is only tolerated. Official public houses are forbidden by law, and procuring is severely punishable. But that does not prevent that in a large number of German cities public houses continue to exist, and are winked at by the police. This establishes an incomprehensible state of things. The defiance of the law implied in such a state of things dawned even upon our statesmen and they bestirred themselves to remove the objection by legislative enactments. The German Criminal Code makes also the lodging of a prost.i.tute a penal offense. On the other hand, however, the police are compelled to tolerate thousands of women as prost.i.tutes, and, in a measure, to privilege them in their trade, provided they enter themselves as prost.i.tutes on the Police Register, and submit to the Police regulations,--for instance, periodically recurring examinations by a physician. It follows, however, that, if the Government licenses the prost.i.tute, and thereby protects the exercise of her trade, she must also have a habitation. Aye, it is even in the interest of public health and order that they have such a place to ply their trade in. What contradictions! On the one hand, the Government officially acknowledges that prost.i.tution is necessary; on the other, it prosecutes and punishes the prost.i.tute and the pimp. But it is out of contradictions that bourgeois society is put together.
Moreover, the att.i.tude of the Government is an avowal that prost.i.tution is a Sphinx to modern society, the riddle which society can not solve: it considers necessary to tolerate and superintend prost.i.tution in order to avoid greater evils. In other words, our social system, so boastful of its morality, its religiousness, its civilization and its culture, feels compelled to tolerate that immorality and corruption spread through its body like a stealthy poison. But this state of things betrays something else, besides _the admission by the Christian State that marriage is insufficient, and that the husband has the right to demand illegitimate gratification of his s.e.xual instincts_. Woman counts with such a State in so far only as she is willing, as a s.e.xual being, to yield to illegitimate male desires, i. e., become a prost.i.tute. In keeping herewith, the supervision and control, exercised by the organs of the State over the registered prost.i.tutes, do not fall upon the men also, those who seek the prost.i.tute. Such a provision would be a matter of course if the sanitary police control was to be of any sense, and even of partial effect,--apart from the circ.u.mstance that a sense of justice would demand an even-handed application of the law to both s.e.xes. No; ”supervision and control” fall upon woman alone.
This protection by the State of man and not woman, turns upside down the nature of things. _It looks as if men were the weaker vessel and women the stronger; as if woman were the seducer, and poor, weak man the seduced._ The seduction-myth between Adam and Eve in Paradise continues to operate in our opinions and laws, and it says to Christianity: ”You are right; woman is the arch seductress, the vessel of iniquity.” Men should be ashamed of such a sorry and unworthy _role_; but this _role_ of the ”weak” and the ”seduced” suits them;--_the more they are protected, all the more may they sin_.
Wherever men a.s.semble in large numbers, they seem unable to amuse themselves without prost.i.tution. This was shown, among other instances of the kind, by the occurrences at the German Schuetzenfest, held in Berlin in the summer of 1890, which caused 2,300 women to express themselves as follows in a pet.i.tion addressed to the Mayor of the German capital: ”May it please your Honor to allow us to bring to your knowledge the matters that have reached the provinces, through the press and other means of communication, upon the German shooting matches, held at Pankow from the 6th to the 13th of July of this year.
The reports of the matter, that we have seen with indignation and horror, represent the programme of that festival with the following announcements, among others: 'First German Herald, the Greatest Songstress of the World;' 'A Hundred Ladies and Forty Gentlemen:'
Besides these smaller _cafes chantants_ and shooting galleries, in which importunate women forced themselves upon the men. Also a 'free concert,'
whose gaily-clad waitresses, seductively smiling, brazenly and shamelessly invited the gymnasium students and the fathers of families, the youths and the grown men alike, to the 'shooting retreats.'... The barely dressed 'lady' who invited people to the booth of 'The Secrets of Hamburg, or a Night in St. Pauli,' should have been enough to justify her removal by the police. And then the shocking announcement, almost incredible of the much boasted about Imperial capital, and hardly to be believed by plain male and female citizens in the provinces, to the effect that the managers of the festival had consented to the employment, without pay, of 'young women' in large numbers, as bar-maids, instead of the waiters who applied for work.... We, German women, have thousands of occasions, as wives, mothers and as sisters, to send our husbands, children, daughters and brothers to Berlin in the service of the fatherland; we, consequently, pray to your Honor in all humbleness and in the confident expectation that, with the aid of the overpowering influence, which, as the chief magistrate of the Imperial capital, lies in your hand, you may inst.i.tute such investigations of those disgraceful occurrences, or adopt such other measures as to your Honor may seem fit, to the end that a recurrence of those orgies may not have to be apprehended at the pending Sedan festival, for instance....”
During the session of the Reichstag, from 1892 to 1893, the united Governments made an effort to put an end to the contradiction that governmental practice, on the one hand, and the Criminal Code on the other, find themselves in with regard to prost.i.tution. They introduced a bill that was to empower the police to designate certain habitations to prost.i.tutes. It was admitted that prost.i.tution could not be suppressed, and that, therefore, the most practical thing was to tolerate the thing in certain localities, and to control it. The bill--upon that all minds were agreed--would, if it became a law, have called again to life the brothels that were officially abolished in Prussia about 1845. The bill caused a great uproar, and it evoked a number of protests in which the warning was raised against the State's setting itself up as the protector of prost.i.tution, and thereby favoring the idea that the use of prost.i.tution was not in violation of good morals, or that the trade of the prost.i.tute was such that the State could allow and approve of. The bill, which met with the strongest opposition both on the floor of the Reichstag and in the committee, was pigeon-holed, and dared not again come into daylight. That, nevertheless, such a bill could at all take shape reveals the embarra.s.sment that society is in.
The administrative regulation of prost.i.tution raises in the minds of men not only the belief that the State allows the use of prost.i.tution, but also that such control protects them against disease. Indeed, this belief greatly promotes indulgence and recklessness on the part of men.