servants is due to the immense numbers of
servants who are seduced by their masters or the young men of the
family, and are thus forced on to the streets. Undoubtedly in a
certain proportion of cases, perhaps sometimes a fairly
considerable proportion, this is a decisive factor in the matter,
but it scarcely seems to be the chief factor. The existence of
relationships between servants and masters, it must be
remembered, by no means necessarily implies seduction. In a
large number of cases the servant in a household is, in sexual
matters, the teacher rather than the pupil. (In "The Sexual
Impulse in Women," in the third volume of these _Studies_, I have
discussed the part played by servants as sexual initiators of the
young boys in the households in which they are placed.) The more
precise statistics of the causes of prostitution seldom assign
seduction as the main determining factor in more than about
twenty per cent. of cases, though this is obviously one of the
most easily avowable motives (see _ante_, p. 256). Seduction by
any kind of employer constitutes only a proportion (usually less
than half) even of these cases. The special case of seduction of
servants by masters can thus play no very considerable part as a
factor of prostitution.

The statistics of the parentage of illegitimate children have
some bearing on this question. In a series of 180 unmarried
mothers assisted by the Berlin Bund fuer Mutterschutz, particulars
are given of the occupations both of the mothers, and, as far as
possible, of the fathers. The former were one-third
servant-girls, and the great majority of the remainder assistants
in trades or girls carrying on work at home. At the head of the
fathers (among 120 cases) came artisans (33), followed by
tradespeople (22); only a small proportion (20 to 25) could be
described as "gentlemen," and even this proportion loses some of
its significance when it is pointed out that some of the girls
were also of the middle-class; in nineteen cases the fathers were
married men (_Mutterschutz_, January, 1907, p. 45).

Most authorities in most countries are of opinion that girls who
eventually (usually between the ages of fifteen and twenty)
become prostitutes have lost their virginity at an early age, and
in the great majority of cases through men of their own