A female British subject, who has been entrapped into, and is kept against her will in a maison tolerée in Brussels, is seldom allowed to go out of the house – never unless accompanied by a person in charge; and it has been found almost impossible for friends desiring to assist her, to obtain any help, either from the Belgian Police or the English Diplomatic or Consular authorities. Her condition is that of a slave to the lust of all who will pay the brothel-keeper’s charge for permission to violate and outrage her, until disease renders her unprofitable, or death shall afford release.
Your Memorialists have made themselves acquainted with the cases of English, Scotch and Irish girls who have been decoyed into or detained in this horrible slavery; and some of your Memorialists have personally visited Brussels for that purpose, and have failed in releasing others […]
Your Memorialists submit to your Lordship that such changes ought to be made in the English and Belgian law as shall make it impossible for any woman, who is a subject of Her Majesty the Queen to be deprived of her liberty by fraud or force, and to be kept in that country, in bondage for the vilest of purposes […]
6.1.3 Child Prostitution in London
Minutes of “Select Committee to inquire into the state of the law relative to the protection of young girls,” evidence of Howard Vincent, Director of Criminal Investigation Department, Metropolitan Police, 1881
There are houses in London, in many parts of London, where there are people who will procure children for the purposes of immorality and prostitution, without any difficulty whatsoever above the age of 13, children without number at 14, 15 and 16 years of age. Superintendent Dunlap will tell you that juvenile prostitution is rampant at this moment, and that in the streets about the Haymarket, Waterloo Place, and Piccadilly, from nightfall there are children of 14, 15 and 16 years of age, going about openly soliciting prostitution […] this prostitution actually takes place with the knowledge and connivance of the mother and to the profit of the household. I am speaking of some facts within my own knowledge, from hearsay, of course, but I have no reason whatever to doubt them. These procuresses […] have an understanding with the mother of the girl that she shall come to that house at a certain hour, and the mother perfectly well knows for what purpose she goes there, and it is with her knowledge and connivance, and with her consent that the girl goes […]
591.(Chairman) Do you know whether the police are able to trace these children as they get older, and to know what becomes of them?
I am afraid not. The police are absolutely powerless as regards prostitution in London.
592. With regard to children of this age, or any age, who are soliciting prostitution in the streets, have the police no power at all?
No power whatever.
593. (Lord Aberdare.) Only to keep order?
Only to keep order; and the consequence is that the state of affairs which exists in this capital is such that from four o’clock, or one may say from three o’clock in the afternoon, it is impossible for any respectable woman to walk from the top of the Haymarket to Wellington Street, Strand. From three or four o’clock in the afternoon, Villiers Street and Charing Cross Station, and the Strand, are crowded with prostitutes, who are there openly soliciting prostitution in broad daylight. At half past twelve at night, a calculation was made a short time ago that there was 500 prostitutes between Piccadilly Circus and the bottom of Waterloo-place.
6.1.4 Emma Goldman, The Traffic in Women, 1917
What is really the cause of trade in women? Not merely white women, but yellow and black women as well. Exploitation, of course; the merciless Moloch of capitalism that fattens on underpaid labor, thus driving thousands of women and girls into prostitution. With Mrs. Warren these girls feel, “Why waste your life working for a few shillings a week in a scullery, eighteen hours a day?”
Naturally our reformers say nothing about this cause. They know it well enough, but it doesn’t pay to say anything about it. It is much more profitable to play the Pharisee, to pretend an outraged morality, than to go to the bottom of things.
However, there is one commendable exception among the young writers: Reginald Wright Kauffman, whose work The House of Bondage is the first earnest attempt to treat the social evil – not from a sentimental Philistine viewpoint. A journalist of wide experience, Mr. Kauffman proves that our industrial system leaves most women no alternative except prostitution. The women portrayed in The House of Bondage belong to the working class. Had the author portrayed the life of women in other spheres, he would have been confronted with the same state of affairs.
Nowhere is woman treated according to the merit of her work, but rather as a sex. It is therefore almost inevitable that she should pay for her right to exist, to keep a position in whatever line, with sex favors. Thus it is merely a question of degree whether she sells herself to one man, in or out of marriage, or to many men. Whether our reformers admit it or not, the economic and social inferiority of woman is responsible for prostitution.
Just at present our good people are shocked by the disclosures that in New York City alone one out of every ten women works in a factory, that the average wage received by women is six dollars per week for forty-eight to sixty hours of work, and that the majority of female wage workers face many months of idleness which leaves the average wage about $280 a year. In view of these economic horrors, is it to be wondered at that prostitution and the white slave trade have become such dominant factors?
[…]
Dr. Alfred Blaschko, in Prostitution in the Nineteenth Century, is even more emphatic in characterizing economic conditions as one of the most vital factors of prostitution.
“Although prostitution has existed in all ages, it was left to the nineteenth century to develop it into a gigantic social institution. The development of industry with vast masses of people in the competitive market, the growth and congestion of large cities, the insecurity and uncertainty of employment, has given prostitution an impetus never dreamed of at any period in human history.”
And again Havelock Ellis, while not so absolute in dealing with the economic cause, is nevertheless compelled to admit that it is indirectly and directly the main cause. Thus he finds that a large percentage of prostitutes is recruited from the servant class, although the latter have less care and greater security. On the other hand, Mr. Ellis does not deny that the daily routine, the drudgery, the monotony of the servant girl’s lot, and especially the fact that she may never partake of the companionship and joy of a home, is no mean factor in forcing her to seek recreation and forgetfulness in the gaiety and glimmer of prostitution. In other words, the servant girl, being treated as a drudge, never having the right to herself, and worn out by the caprices of her mistress, can find an outlet, like the factory or shopgirl, only in prostitution.
[…]
It would be one-sided and extremely superficial to maintain that the economic factor is the only cause of prostitution. There are others no less important and vital. That, too, our reformers know, but dare discuss even less than the institution that saps the very life out of both men and women. I refer to the sex question, the very mention of which causes most people moral spasms.
It is a conceded fact that woman is being reared as a sex commodity, and yet she is kept in absolute ignorance of the meaning and importance of sex. Everything dealing with that subject is suppressed, and persons who attempt to bring light into this terrible darkness are persecuted and thrown into prison. Yet it is nevertheless true that so long as a girl is not to know how to take care of herself, not to know the function of the most important part of her life, we need not be surprised if she becomes an easy prey to prostitution, or to any other form of a relationship which degrades her to the position of an object for mere sex gratification.
It is due to this ignorance that the entire life and nature of the girl is thwarted and crippled. We have long ago taken it as a self-evident fact that the boy may follow the call of the wild; that is to say, that the boy may, as soon
as his sex nature asserts itself, satisfy that nature; but our moralists are scandalized at the very thought that the nature of a girl should assert itself. To the moralist prostitution does not consist so much in the fact that the woman sells her body, but rather that she sells it out of wedlock. That this is no mere statement is proved by the fact that marriage for monetary considerations is perfectly legitimate, sanctified by law and public opinion, while any other union is condemned and repudiated. Yet a prostitute, if properly defined, means nothing else than “any person for whom sexual relationships are subordinated to gain.”
[…]
“The wife who married for money, compared with the prostitute,” says Havelock Ellis, “is the true scab. She is paid less, gives much more in return in labor and care, and is absolutely bound to her master. The prostitute never signs away the right over her own person, she retains her freedom and personal rights, nor is she always compelled to submit to man’s embrace.”
Nor does the better-than-thou woman realize the apologist claim of Lecky that “though she may be the supreme type of vice, she is also the most efficient guardian of virtue. But for her, happy homes would be polluted, unnatural and harmful practice would abound.”
Moralists are ever ready to sacrifice one-half of the human race for the sake of some miserable institution which they cannot outgrow. As a matter of fact, prostitution is no more a safeguard for the purity of the home than rigid laws are a safeguard against prostitution. Fully fifty per cent of married men are patrons of brothels. It is through this virtuous element that the married women – nay, even the children – are infected with venereal diseases. Yet society has not a word of condemnation for the man, while no law is too monstrous to be set in motion against the helpless victim. She is not only preyed upon by those who use her, but she is also absolutely at the mercy of every policeman and miserable detective on the beat, the officials at the station house, the authorities in every prison.
*
Although Ibsen had observed both the European revolutions of 1848 and at rather closer hand (during his exile in Germany) the Franco-Prussian war, while Chekhov presaged the Russian Revolution in his plays, only Shaw experienced a major conflict. The death toll and devastation of the First World War in 1914–18 was more extreme than anything that had come before, although the American Civil War had provided a foretaste of the bloodshed that modern weapons could produce. The social structure of European nations was destabilized, with revolutions followed by civil war in Germany as well as Russia, while even the victors were demoralized. The First World War became a watershed in Shaw’s writing, marking the end of his commitment to Naturalism. However, as a citizen of the dominant imperial power Shaw lived in a nation almost continuously at war, and as an Irishman he was acutely aware of military colonialism.
Even before the First World War, Shaw had already commented obliquely on warfare and militarism in various plays. Most of these – Arms and the Man (1894), The Man of Destiny (1895), The Devil’s Disciple (1896) – focus on the popular vision of war promoted by nineteenth-century military melodramas, as being the most egregious example of the “policy of forcing individuals to act upon the assumption that all ideals are real, and to recognize and accept such action as standard moral conduct, absolutely valid under all circumstances, contrary conduct or any advocacy of it being discountenanced and punished as immoral …” (The Quintessence of Ibsenism, 1891). He had also already written widely on the subject in the press, his fundamental position being that all war is “an orgy of crime based on the determination of the soldier to stick at nothing to bring it to an end and get out of the daily danger of being shot” (The Humane Review, January 1901). Between 1899 and 1902, in direct response to the Boer war, Shaw drafted Fabianism and the Empire (a manifesto for the general election of 1900), wrote a number of major essays for periodicals as well as many public letters to newspapers, and delivered several major lectures. In these he proposed a trade union for rank and file soldiers, with full civil rights and pensions, pointed out that there was nothing to choose between the two sides – “the piety of the Boer and the pugnacity of the Briton lead equally to the battlefield” (The Clarion, 26 May 1900) – and attacked jingoistic militarism. In the decade before the First World War Shaw published several essays on disarmament, arguing for an international agreement to outlaw war by force, under which any aggressor nation would be immediately attacked by all other states. And following the Russo-Japanese war, in Major Barbara (1905) he defended armament manufacture – and the international arms trade – as promoting class equality and Socialism.
Unlike almost all other naturalistic playwrights, Shaw intervened publicly in political debate. It is therefore logical to present some of his own writings as a primary context for his drama. All the main points made in his previous essays were summed up in his pamphlet “Common Sense About the War” published as a supplement to the New Statesman on November 14, 1914. However, in the context of national emergency and patriotic fervor, these arguments now aroused intense passions and controversy. The only comparable piece from a naturalistic writer is Emile Zola’s pamphlet on the Dreyfus affair, J’Accuse! (1898). Shaw was vilified in the British press, although his ideas influenced President Wilson and eventually contributed to the founding of the League of Nations (the precursor to the UN). The extract selected deals with Shaw’s analysis of the causes of the war, and gives a sense of the rhetoric – implying that the British were intellectually lazy, blinded by prejudice, blundering, and militaristic – that caused his unpopularity.
After the war, compelled to justify his position, Shaw republished the essay, with commentary, as What I Really Wrote About the War (1931). This emphasizes one of the themes in “Common Sense About the War” encapsulated in the image of “an engagement between two pirate fleets … All the ensigns were Jolly Rogers; but mine was clearly the one with the Union Jack at the corner” – and he went on to claim “that there are only two real flags in the world henceforth: the red flag of Democratic Socialism and the black flag of Capitalism, the flag of God and the flag of Mammon”. Despite this polemic proclamation of the eventual triumph of International Socialism, Shaw’s estimate of the effect of the war in the preface to Heartbreak House is more modest. Reverting to his theme of idealistic illusions, he outlines two opportunities:
first, by the fact that many of us have been torn from the fool’s paradise in which the theatre formerly traded, and thrust upon the sternest realities and necessities until we have lost faith in and patience with the theatrical pretenses that had not root either in reality or necessity; second, by the startling change made by the war in the distribution of income.
His attitude after the defeat of Germany and the personal cost of the war are illustrated by a letter Shaw wrote to the German translator of his plays, Siegfried Trebitsch, in 1920, the years after he finished Heartbreak House.
6.1.5 Bernard Shaw, “The Causes of the First World War”
Commonsense About the War, 1914
We must get rid of the monstrous situation that produced the present war. France made an alliance with Russia as a defence against Germany. Germany made an alliance with Austria as a defence against Russia. England joined the Franco-Russian alliance as a defence against Germany and Austria. The result was that Germany became involved in a quarrel between Austria and Russia. Having no quarrel with France, and only a second-hand quarrel with Russia, she was, nevertheless, forced to attack France in order to disable her before she could strike Germany from behind when Germany was fighting France’s ally, Russia. And this attack on France forced England to come to the rescue of England’s ally, France. Not one of the three nations (as distinguished from their tiny Junker–Militarist cliques) wanted to fight; for England had nothing to gain and Germany had everything to lose; whilst France had given up hope of her Alsace-Lorraine revanche, and would certainly not have hazarded a war for it. Yet because Russia, who has a great deal to gain by victory and nothing except military prestige to los
e by defeat, had a quarrel with Austria over Servia, she has been able to set all three western friends and neighbors shedding “rivers of blood” from one another’s throats: an outrageous absurdity.
[…]
The evidence of how the Junker diplomatists of our Foreign Office let us in for the war is in the White Paper, Miscellaneous No. 6 (1914), containing correspondence respecting the European crisis, and since reissued, with a later White Paper and some extra matter, as a penny bluebook in miniature. In these much-cited and little-read documents we see the Junkers of all the nations, the men who have been saying for years “It’s bound to come,” and clamoring in England for compulsory military service and expeditionary forces, momentarily staggered and not a little frightened by the sudden realization that it has come at last. They rush round from foreign office to embassy, and from embassy to palace, twittering “This is awful. Cant you stop it? Wont you be reasonable? Think of the consequences,” etc., etc. One man among them keeps his head and looks the facts in the face. That man is Sazonoff, the Russian Secretary for Foreign Affairs. He keeps steadily trying to make Sir Edward Grey face the inevitable. He says and reiterates, in effect, “You know very well that you cannot keep out of a European war. You know you are pledged to fight Germany if Germany attacks France. You know that your arrangements for the fight are actually made; that already the British army is commanded by a Franco-British Council of War; that there is no possible honorable retreat for you. You know that this old man in Austria, who would have been superannuated years ago if he had been an exciseman, is resolved to make war on Servia, and sent that silly forty-eight hours ultimatum when we were all out of town so that he could begin fighting before we could get back to sit on his head. You know that he has the Jingo mob of Vienna behind him. You know that if he makes war, Russia must mobilize. You know that France is bound to come in with us as you are with France. You know that the moment we mobilize, Germany, the old man’s ally, will have only one desperate chance of victory, and that is to overwhelm our ally, France, with one superb rush of her millions, and then sweep back and meet us on the Vistula. You know that nothing can stop this except Germany remonstrating with Austria, and insisting on the Servian case being dealt with by an international tribunal and not by war. You know that Germany dares not do this, because her alliance with Austria is her defence against the Franco-Russian alliance, and that she does not want to do it in any case, because the Kaiser naturally has a strong class prejudice against the blowing up of Royal personages by irresponsible revolutionists, and thinks nothing too bad for Servia after the assassination of the Archduke. There is just one chance of avoiding Armageddon: a slender one, but worth trying. You averted war in the Algeciras crisis, and again in the Agadir crisis, by saying you would fight. Try it again. The Kaiser is stiffnecked because he does not believe you are going to fight this time. Well, convince him that you are. The odds against him will then be so terrible that he may not dare to support the Austrian ultimatum to Servia at such a price. And if Austria is thus forced to proceed judicially against Servia, we Russians will be satisfied; and there will be no war.”
A Sourcebook on Naturalist Theatre Page 29