l Queen. These guilds employed strikes as a medium of
improving their condition and keeping a standard price. Certainly
that is more practical a method than the one used by the modern wage
slave in society.

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 the 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 has 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."[4]

"Those women are prostitutes who sell their bodies for the exercise
of the sexual act and make of this a profession."[5]

In fact, Banger goes further; he maintains that the act of
prostitution is "intrinsically equal to that of a man or woman who
contracts a marriage for economic reasons."

Of course, marriage is the