Victorian era - prostitutes?

Question

During the early Victorian era, how were prostitues viewed as? What if they say they were changed, that they wanted to now live as a good person and began to attend church, how would people treat her?? Was society (let's say, society of a small secluded village) a bit violent towards prostitues, like...... for what reason would people try and get ride of a prostitute from their community??

Answer 1

J. - Woman in the Victorian early Victorian era (1840's -1860's) were regarded as pure beings whose moral tone was superior to man's. However, women had few rights of property and were completely dependent on their husbands once they married. Few jobs were open to them. If they became destitute and fell into prostitution, they were regarded as morally sick and corrupt. Many organizations to purify them were active at that time. However, even if they became upright and no longer sold themselves, society did not welcome them back with open arms. As in all societies, there were exceptions for those who married or became wealthy, but for the most part, they continued to be 'soiled doves' to the citizenry. If she remained an active prostitute in a small rural community, she would be ostrasized - no one would have anything to do with her other than her customers. Married women would fear, with justification, that their husbands would bring home venereal diseases (these were the days before the widespread use of condoms).
However, the situation was a little different in the American West. Because there were so few women migrating to the west at first, many prostitutes wound up marrying and having a normal life for that time. Or they went into business for themselves. The key factor in how women and especially prostitutes were treated at that time was how many women there were in the area as opposed to how many men there were. Excessive (or as the Victorians called them, superfluous) numbers of women = marginalization and prostitution. Few women in an area meant that the women were valuable and had the freedom to marry after a career as a prostitute.

Answer 2

In Gibbon's "Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire" there is a long passage of (almost) praise of prostitutes. Gibbon himself was unmarried and excessively unattractive, the latter charactaristic being, at least in part, the explaination of the former. He was, as some cruel observer noted, capabable of wearing his belt in any direction, so globular was his physic.

For all that, he wrote the most beautiful style of English imaginable, and no one who loves this language will ever read his prose without thrilling to the rich espressive and discriptive power as well as the grace and beauty of his writing.

Rome was a-swarm with kept women, many slaves and common ladies of the night, probably catergorized according the individual physical attractiveness. Their services were used then as they were in Victorian England by men of all social grades. Gibbon saw them as suffering escape valves for men who used them like toilet paper and threw them away. He saw them as enduring a life of the most sorded discription and, though inadvertantly, providing an enormously important social service.

Though he was writing about Rome, all the world knew he was often talking about parallel aspects of his own time and his own people. At the time he wrote, owing to the grinding poverty of working girls, London, like Rome, was swarming with prostitutes in his time. It may be thought of as a business, an enterprise of some sort, but only at the sacrifice of any compassion for the feelings of humans who have nothing to offer but a body, and whose use of that throws her before the contempt of the very people who use her services.

Gladstone, the very Escence of Victorian morality, who could never forebear the chance to demonstrate his total commitment to the species of muscular Christianity that crushed normal human impulses in those times, was found after his death to have kept a journal, illustrated with his own crude drawings. It developed, on this incontestable evidence, that in his often publicized "work among the fallen" he had taken more than a salvationist interest in the subjects of his efforts. Indeed, he evidently engaged them for sado-masocistic purposes. Punishment!! Ah, how the righteous suffer, and never more than for their sexuality.

Charles, Prince of Wales has married his, yet she was his whore.

May God forever extend a special blessing and protect the girl who works the fourth shift!

Answer 3

She is a lady from a good kin, set to marry a staggering youthful guy while her character is smeared by way of her callous rape on the palms of her step-father. the marriage is talked approximately as off by way of the potential groom's kin, even with the extra youthful guy nevertheless loving her, and the girl travels for the time of England the place her popularity is unknown so as to discover artwork as a governess. even nonetheless, the father of the abode learns of her previous and he and his cronies gang rape her. She leaves and has to teach to a existence on the streets.