Children as young as five worked in factories and mines. With no safety regulations and no laws limiting either the number of hours people could be required to work or the age of factory workers, some factory owners were willing to sacrifice the well-being of their employees for greater profit. In addition, working conditions in factories were deplorable. Hardy forces his readers to question what kind of society would reward prostitution while leaving the virtuous woman in abject poverty. The virtuous young woman, doing honest work on the farm, is wearing rags, digging potatoes by hand for subsistence, and suffering poor health. When she meets a former friend, the contrast between the two women is pronounced: Melia is wearing fine clothes and is well fed and well cared for. One woman, Melia, has left the farm to become a prostitute. Thomas Hardy’s poem “ The Ruined Maid” reveals one reason many women turned to prostitution ( ruined is a Victorian euphemism for an unmarried woman who has lost her virginity): in the poem, two young women converse. Police needed little basis for such suspicions, often simply that a woman was poor. These acts allowed police to detain any woman suspected of having a sexually transmitted disease and to force her to submit to exams that were considered humiliating for women at that time. Because of rampant sexually transmitted diseases among the British military, Parliament passed a series of Contagious Diseases Acts in the 1860s. Historian Judity Walkowitz reports that 19th century cities had 1 prostitute for every 12 adult males ( quoted in “The Great Social Evil”: Victorian Prostitution by Prof. With the influx of population into the cities, desperate working class women turned to prostitution in attempts to support themselves and their children. At the same time, London and other British cities had countless gaming halls which provided venues not just for gambling but also opium dens and prostitution. In fact, the term Victorian has in the past been almost a synonym for prim, prudish behavior. Queen Victoria embodied ideals of virtue, modesty, and honor. zip file containing this book to use offline, simply click here. You can browse or download additional books there. More information is available on this project's attribution page.įor more information on the source of this book, or why it is available for free, please see the project's home page. Additionally, per the publisher's request, their name has been removed in some passages. However, the publisher has asked for the customary Creative Commons attribution to the original publisher, authors, title, and book URI to be removed. Normally, the author and publisher would be credited here. This content was accessible as of December 29, 2012, and it was downloaded then by Andy Schmitz in an effort to preserve the availability of this book. See the license for more details, but that basically means you can share this book as long as you credit the author (but see below), don't make money from it, and do make it available to everyone else under the same terms. This book is licensed under a Creative Commons by-nc-sa 3.0 license.
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