[185] Thus Moraglia found that among 180 prostitutes in North Italian brothels, and among 23 elegant Italian and foreign cocottes, every one admitted that she masturbated, preferably by friction of the clitoris; 113 of them, the majority, declared that they preferred solitary or mutual masturbation to normal coitus.  Hammer states (Zehn Lebenslaeufe Berliner Kontrollmaedchen in Ostwald’s series of “Grosstadt Dokumente,” 1905) that when in hospital all but three or four of sixty prostitutes masturbate, and those who do not are laughed at by the rest.

[186] Jahrbuch fuer Sexuelle Zwischenstufen, Jahrgang VII, 1905, p. 148; “Sexual Inversion,” vol. ii of these Studies, Ch.  IV.  Hammer found that of twenty-five prostitutes in a reformatory as many as twenty-three were homosexual, or, on good grounds, suspected to be such.  Hirschfeld (Berlins Drittes Geschlecht, p. 65) mentions that prostitutes sometimes accost better-class women who, from their man-like air, they take to be homosexual; from persons of their own sex prostitutes will accept a smaller remuneration, and sometimes refuse payment altogether.

[187] With prostitution, as with criminality, it is of course difficult to disentangle the element of heredity from that of environment, even when we have good grounds for believing that the factor of heredity here, as throughout the whole of life, cannot fail to carry much weight.  It is certain, in any case, that prostitution frequently runs in families.  “It has often been my experience,” writes a former prostitute (Hedwig Hard, Beichte einer Gefallenen, p. 156) “that when in a family a girl enters this path, her sister soon afterwards follows her:  I have met with innumerable cases; sometimes three sisters will all be on the register, and I knew a case of four sisters, whose mother, a midwife, had been in prison, and the father drank.  In this case, all four sisters, who were very beautiful, married, one at least very happily, to a rich doctor who took her out of the brothel at sixteen and educated her.”

[188] This fact is not contradicted by the undoubted fact that prostitutes are by no means always contented with the life they choose.

[189] This point has been discussed by Bloch, Sexualleben unserer Zeit, Ch.  XIII.

[190] Various series of observations are summarized by Lombroso and Ferrero, La Donna Delinquente, 1893, Part III, cap.  IV.

[191] History of European Morals, vol. iii, p. 283.

[192] Similarly Lord Morley has written (Diderot, vol. ii, p. 20):  “The purity of the family, so lovely and dear as it is, has still only been secured hitherto by retaining a vast and dolorous host of female outcasts ... upon whose heads, as upon the scapegoat of the Hebrew ordinance, we put all the iniquities of the children of the house, and all their transgressions in all their sins, and then banish them with maledictions into the foul outer wilderness and the land not inhabited.”