Prostitution is designed to furnish and regulate a supply of women outside the mores of the family whose sex shall be for sale, not for purposes of procreation but for purposes of indulgence.  In the ancient world, temple prostitution was common, the proceeds going to the god or goddess; but the sense of pollution in the sex relation which came to be so potent an element in the control of family life drove the prostitute from the sanctuary to the stews and the brothel, where she lives to-day.  She has become the woman shunned, while the wife and mother who is the centre of the family with its institutional taboos is the sacred woman, loved and revered by men who condemn the prostitute for the very act for which they seek her company.  Such is the irrational situation which has come to us as a heritage from the past.

Among the chief causes which have impelled women into prostitution rather than into family life are the following:  (1) Slavery; (2) poverty; (3) inclination.  These causes have been expanded and re-grouped by specialists, but the only addition which the writer sees as necessary in consequence of the study of taboo is the fact that the way of the woman transgressor is peculiarly hard because of the sex taboo, the ignorance and narrowness of good women, and the economic limitations of all women.  Ignorance of the results of entrance into a life which usually means abandonment of hope may be a contributing cause.  Boredom with the narrowness of family life and desire for adventure are also influences.

That sex desire leads directly to the life of the prostitute is unlikely.  The strongly sexed class comes into prostitution by the war of irregular relationships with men to whom they have been attached, and who have abandoned them or sold them out.  Many authorities agree on the frigidity of the prostitute.  It is her protection from physical and emotional exhaustion.  This becomes evident when it is learned that these women will receive thirty men a day, sometimes more.  A certain original lack of sensitiveness may be assumed, especially since the investigations of prostitutes have shown a large proportion, perhaps one-third, who are mentally inferior.  It is an interesting fact that those who are sensitive to their social isolation defend themselves by dwelling on their social necessity.  Either intuitively or by a trade tradition, the prostitute feels that “she remains, while creeds and civilizations rise and fall, blasted for the sins of the people.”  A beautiful young prostitute who had been expelled from a high grade house after the exposures of the Lexow Investigation, once said to the writer:  “It would never do for good women to know what beasts men are.  We girls have got to pay.”