Note 117 — Chapter III

With regard to the cause given for prostitution Dr. Augagneur says as follows: “The majority of prostitutes are born to prostitution at the same time that they are to puberty. Their moral sense, if such may be called that which no one has ever tried to awaken, is not shocked by their situation; they have prostituted themselves without shame and without regret. They have left normal and respectable society without being really aware of its existence, without the desire of ever returning thither. They have lacked the things necessary to make them respectable women—instruction in virtue, the example of their relatives, the suspicious surveillance of their mothers, and material well-being. The daughters of the people are not, at the day of their birth, of a clay inferior to that of the daughters of the bourgeoisie or of the nobility; they are naturally no less intelligent, no more perverse. And yet if you examine the civil status of a hundred prostitutes, you will find that 95 at least have sprung from the lowest strata of society. The existing social inequality, that is to say, is alone responsible for this unequal distribution.”117