Essay About Prostitution

Prostitution is common lewdness for hire, the act or practice of a woman who permits a man who will pay her price to have sexual intercourse with her. It is a universal phenomenon with moral, social, cultural, psychological, medical, and other aspects. Although male prostitution is also found, that involving males exclusively is best considered as part of the general problem of HOMOSEXUALITY.

History. Social attitudes toward prostitution have changed through the ages and go on changing. It is difficult to generalize about primitive societies in which prostitution was generally obviated by an early age of marriage, the existence of polygamy or ease of divorce, and the sexual freedoms of some peoples. Instances of prostitution of slaves captured in war are reported, as are customs providing for the earning of dowries by prostitution. In a few African and American Indian tribes, parents

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and husbands prostituted their women for gain. Some advanced peoples also associated prostitution with puberty rites or fertility cults, and some type of prostitution as a religious duty was common among the peoples of the eastern Mediterranean or western Asia. See PROSTITUTION (SACRED). Although condemned, prostitution was prevalent in ancient Palestine.

In ancient Greece expectations of chastity were confined to wives and daughters and to prohibitions against adultery. After 451 B.C., when Athenian citizenship was rigidly defined, the main profession left open to alien women was that of the hetaerae (companions). A large proportion of women of this class, including most of the temple prostitutes, were slaves, often obtained by rearing female infants exposed by fathers unwilling to rear them; freedwomen in this class ...

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...an attempt to stop importation of women from the Continent. In the U.S., although in most states houses of ill repute were never legal, prostitution flourished in the "redlight districts" of cities. The reports of successive municipal investigations, such as the Lexow Investigation in New York during the 1890s, reflect the prevalence of these districts and the large number of houses of ill-repute within them. Police corruption was almost universal, and political control was widespread. Shortly after 1900, civic groups that sprang up in many places called for abolition of the districts. They attained their first success in Chicago, in 1912, and subsequently virtually every city abolished such districts.

Meanwhile the Congress passed, in 1910, the Mann Act or White Slave Traffic Act, which made interstate transportation of women for immoral purposes a federal offense.