Flutterby™! : Sailors' Women

Charlene has asked me if there are any books I can purge, and I'm catching up on a couple that I'd picked up at some point because they looked interesting and never got around to. One such is Women Sailors & Sailors' Women by David Cordingly, and I'm having a fascinating jaunt through sailing history. Wow, the Brits were some mean nasty schmucks, makes me rather sympathetic to the pirates of that era. I'll probably drop assorted random observations in from time to time, but here's a note derived from William Sanger's study in New York prostitution in 1858:

The traditional explanation for why women became prostitutes was that they were seduced by men and then abandoned. But of the 2,000 women studied by Sanger, only 258 gave this as a reason. The largest number, 525, gave destitution as the cause for their taking to the streets, and 515 gave "inclination".