One can endure everything except hunger. If I were a man, maybe I would have committed murder to fill my stomach. But as a woman, ...I became a prostitute.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The more one knows of our life the more one must denounce it, lest it be suspected that one has a personal motive in defending it.... When other women speak of us you must assume an attitude of scorn, not only to protect yourself from suspicion, but that you may also feel it for yourself and have no temptation to return. When you think of us do not remember any small kindness that we may have shown you or that we show to one another. Remember only the things that have shocked you and outraged your traditions and your sense of decency. Remember your sufferings at the hands of beasts who are miscalled men. If you keep these things in view you will never again fall into temptation.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Why, since man and woman were created for each other, had He made their desires so dissimilar? Why should one class of women be ab...le to dwell in luxurious seclusion from the trials of life, while another class performed their loathsome tasks? Surely His wisdom had not decreed that one set of women should live in degradation and in the end should perish that others might live in security, preserve their frappeed chastity, and in the end be saved.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The process of education in the oldest profession in the world is like any other educational process, in that it requires time and... effort and patience; it can only be acquired by taking one step at a time, though the steps become accelerated after the first few.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The women who take husbands not out of love but out of greed, to get their bills paid, to get a fine house and clothes and jewels;... the women who marry to get out of a tiresome job, or to get away from disagreeable relatives, or to avoid being called an old maid--these are whores in everything but name. The only difference between them and my girls is that my girls gave a man his money's worth.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
What it comes down to is this: the grocer, the butcher, the baker, the merchant, the landlord, the druggist, the liquor dealer, th...e policeman, the doctor, the city father and the politician--these are the people who make money out of prostitution, these are the real reapers of the wages of sin.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
With the present wage conditions there are thousands of young women who are living in a state of semi-starvation and they are alwa...ys surrounded by the most terrible temptation. Oh, I know that some of [the] greatest reformers insist that a girl's virtue is not affected by under-nourishment, disease and nervous collapse; but if these well housed, well fed, well dressed people were put in a dirty, ugly room, if their clothes did not protect them from the cold, if their stomachs were never filled, would not even the staunchest lose some of her self-respect when looking forward to an old age? It is only a matter of wonder to me that so many girls keep clean and decent through it all.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Prostitutes have very improperly been styled women of pleasure; they are women of pain, or sorrow, of grief, of bitter and continu...al repentance, without a hope of obtaining a pardon.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »