Just how did brothels, gambling dens, illegal saloons in dry counties or states, etc. exist back in the days of extreme moral stricture? Was society not really as straight laced as the moralists wanted or as it appears in hindsight? Were such establishments good at secretly serving the degenerate minority and under constant danger of exposure? Or was the hypocrisy factor about ten-thousand percent higher; men dranked, whored and gambled every Saturday night and then went to church Sunday morning and listened to the preacher’s sermon while hungover, and everyone winked at it?
It was really a combination of all the things you list.
There were, then as now, people who preached one thing and practiced another.
There were also people who didn’t buy into the exhortations of the moralists, and who openly and deliberately flouted the dominant social mores. How many of these people there were, and the extent to which they constituted an open or a secret sub-culture, really depended on the time and place.
I did some work last year copy-editing and formatting a manuscript on the subject, and the book is worth a look if you’re interested in this sort of thing.
My wife, who is a history professor, works on similar material, although her time period is earlier, focusing on the ante-bellum period in US history. I’m not an expert on the period, but i’ve read her stuff and i talk to her about her work, and it really is amazing at how extensive the vice industry was, even in places where there were fairly string attempts to control it. Much of her work focuses on New York City, and her sources indicate a flourishing demimonde of brothels, pornography, etc., known to authorities and often frequented by people of considerable means.
Things were on the “down low” as they say now.
If a “bad place” was known quite often it was tolerated because there was an unwritten rule that all the bad people would go there. This concentrated the evil into an area where it could be monitored.
Also remember people weren’t as mobile as they are now. I recall a study done about 5 years ago on the rural versus urban for cheating. The urban people cheat far more often, but when the reasons behind it were brought out, it was simply that the rural people lacked opportunity. The rural people said, that they probably would’ve cheated on their spouses but there never was an opportunity to do so.
State colleges were often located in small towns away form the evil urban centers (not always but enough)
We tend to see things as black and white, but people do not. For instance, people who would never think of going into Walgreens or CVS and stealing a candy bar will go online and download music or TV shows.
People back then saw nothing wrong with drinking and whooping it up, so to speak, if they went to church the next day to cancel it out.
Risks were also smaller back then.
Look at star athletes. Even if they flop they often wind up millionaires. Even back in the early 70s, a football player when he retired would be lucky to own a bar or resturaunt if he was lucky enough to be on a winning team when he retired.
The greater the money the more people are willing to cheat or do wrong things to get it. This makes cheating far more attractive today than in the past. The more people that cheat, the more that get caught and exposed. This leads to the idea that there is more cheating. And there actually is, but in reality it’s the rewards that have gone up so much more that makes the risk now worth taking, that it wasn’t in the past.
Obviously, there was plenty of vice even in restrictive times. It just went underground, hidden from view.
Or not. Most big cities during Victorian times were filled with opportunities for vice. In the US, prostitutes were endemic (guides were published to brothels, not to lead people to them, you understand, but so people would know what places to avoid. 
).
The authorities turned a blind eye. Bribes were involved, of course. New York actually had an unofficial scale of how much you paid a policeman to leave you alone (the higher your rank, the more you were paid). There’s a section of New York called the Tenderloin District, which was where the brothels were concentrated; it got its name from a comment of a policeman who was transferred there and thus was going to get more bribe money (enough to buy expensive tenderloin) when patrolling there.
The illegal establishments were raided from time to time; that was part of the business. But the madam would usually pay the cops to let her go and would start up elsewhere.
There was also an attitude that unmarried males would go to a brothel when they needed to. After all, it was better than the heinous vice of masturbation.
Vice is very, very hard to stamp out, especially if there is a large portion of the population willing to circumvent it. Even in strictly moralist societies, sin is always a big thing.
I am reminded of the the story of Maria Theresa of Austria. Maria was deeply religious and upon her ascension of the Austrian throne tried to outlaw prostitution. And she was highly successful, the brothels were closed, and known prostitutes were persecuted out of the empire. One named Anna Maria was deported three times, pilloried (placed in a pillory) twice, before she was finally beheaded in 1723.
But the slack was picked up by the maids of Vienna. These were at first true maids who were working for a little extra coin. But the idea worked so well that most well to do gentlemen added at least one new “housemaid” to the payroll. So the prostitution moved into the homes (and under the protection) of the wealthy where the Chasity Commission couldn’t chase them. Pretty soon the maid’s outfit became a symbol of prostitution. And eventually regular prostitutes found ways of running “maid services” for any gentlemen who found himself in need of a little looking after. It was pretty well known that this was what was happening, but even the Chastity Commission was willing to let things slide. And As long as it wasn’t to brazen no action would be taken.
By the time Joseph II assumed the throne the whole system become official -ish, as he had been a regular participant during his mother’s reign. He looked at repealing the laws. But was advised that the then current system was running so smoothly that any interference in the system would be for the worse. So the old laws were kept on the books. And Vienna became the only major capital in Europe with no official brothels… but instead had a brothel in almost every home of at least moderate means.
Like I said, vice finds a way. You may force it underground, but unless you change attitudes
Does anyone have statistics on the following claim?:
Is it true that there was much more prostitution in the 19th century than in the 20th or 21st?
That’s one way to do it, and perhaps naturally the one that occurs to the modern mind.
But I think it was even more common to simply acknowledge oneself a sinner, and to pray for forgiveness in all sincerity.
Or, to acknowledge oneself a sinner, destined for hell.
No proof, but it seems believable to me. Plenty of sexually conservative countries have way more prostitution than our own.
There are probably a few causes…in sexually conservative situations, it’s harder to get it for free since women have a lot to lose by having casual sex and would not do so without a strong incentive. Sexual conservatism is also usually tied to strict gender roles, which can leave prostitution as the only high-paying job available to women. Along with that, “proper” wives in sexually conservative societies have probably been discouraged from masturbating and sexual experimentation, probably though guilt and shame, meaning they probably aren’t that great of sex partners. Add to that the marriage is probably somewhat arranged and husbands and wives probably don’t even like each other that much to begin with, and you have a strong incentive to start seeing prostitutes…
Book titles on this subject? No, I’m not hunting for porn, just a readable history.
Another advantage to turning a blind eye or tacitly tolerating brothels was prevention of social diseases : in many places, doctors did the rounds of the town’s houses of ill repute to diagnose and cure poxy hookers. Cracking down on brothels would have (and did) only meant driving the women underground, where hygiene standards, birth control etc… would be much harder to check on.
Couple other points:
Labor was just crazy cheap and there was less of a social safety net. At a time when a middle-class family could reasonably expect to have at least one domestic servant, it doesn’t seem implausible that prostitution would be likewise much more affordable.
Furthermore, middle class women who had had difficult childbirths (very common) were often told to never get pregnant again, period. And with BC techniques unreliable at best, men are in an uncomfortable place where every single time they had sex with their wife, they risked killing her.
this is not entirely about demand factor (which depends on distribution of moral beliefs and availability of free sex outside marriage). There is also the issue of supply and the cost. In a relatively egalitarian and (relatively) affluent society like America of 1950s few women would want to be prostitutes (why would they, if they could get a job or a decent marriage instead), so prices go up and sales go down. By contrast, in a society with very unequal distribution of income and lots of desperately poor people (e.g. 18th century England, modern China or the West-Thailand tandem considered as a unit) prices are low compared to what the affluent group is willing to pay, so sales go up.
As American economy continues to decline, we will see the same things here. Russia is a case in point, having gone from the puritanism of the egalitarian, economically stable Soviet era to the widespread prostitution amidst economic turmoil and poverty of the post-reforms period.
I think one element that we don’t understand very well is the Victorians’ interest in public morality, while still tolerating quite a lot of private vice. To us it looks hypocritical, but I don’t think they saw it that way. Early Victorians were coming out of an age when vice had gotten steadily more public and flamboyant, and they were tired of it. What with being human beings and all, they knew vice would always exist, but they didn’t want to have all that public encouragement and all. Keeping it on the down-low, cleaning things up, and encouraging public morality were modern, progressive attitudes that went right along with building new sewers and having steam engines and moving into a new, technological, more hygienic age.
From Otto Bettman’s The Good Old Days: They Were Terrible"
“In 1870, when its population was 950,000, New York City had an estimated 10,000 prostitutes; in 1890, the figure given by Police Commissioner Byrnes was 40,000.” (New York, which meant just Manhattan, had a population of 1.5 million.)
If we assume half the 1870 population was female, then over one in five women in New York were prostitutes (it was probably higher if you eliminate pre-pubescent girls from the population figure). In 1890, the population had increased by 50%, but the number of prostitutes had increased four times.
The numbers, of course, are just estimates and could be wrong, and it all depended on how you define prostitutes (some women would go into prostitution when they lost their jobs, and leave when they got work, for instance). But even if the estimates are double the actual figures, that’s a very high percentages.
Further, brothels operated openly, with the woman calling out from the windows to any men passing by to drum up business. In 1882, New York had over 700 known brothels, most in the Tenderloin District.
Another factor was that law enforcement in general used to be a lot more minimal than it is now.
Thanks, RealityChuck, but your arithmetic is wrong.
10,000/495,000 is about two percent, not one in five.
40,000/722,500 is about seven percent.
And, as you say, it’s actually more than this of the part of the female population that isn’t too young or too old to likely be prostitutes.
So how many prostitutes are there in New York today?
That’s what I get for doing math in my head. 
However, the population of Manhattan is about 100,000 more than the population of New York in 1890. I doubt there are 40,000 prostitutes today.
One factor is that a lower percentage of men visit prostitutes than a century ago. The figures I’ve seen was that, prior to the 1950s, 80% of males had gone to a prostitute. Now, I think the figure is about 20%.
The reasons include an acceptance that women could have sex before marriage, which changed as birth control became available, plus the fact that the stigma of masturbation went away. You didn’t have go to a hookerevery time you were horny (male or female – in the 1920s, you weren’t gay even if you had sex with another man, as long as you didn’t “play the woman”). Robert Klein, in his autobiography, writes about visiting a hooker in order to lose his virginity; that was not unusual then; I’d guess it’s pretty rare today. Since the customer base seems to have shrunk, the number of prostitutes has shrunk also. In addition, social services give women other options to make money.
Old joke:
Paddy and Michael are digging ditches, and happen to be working in front of a brothel, when they see a minister go in. “Ah, such times are these,” says Paddy, “To see a man of the cloth frequenting a house of ill repute”. A little while later, they see a rabbi go in. “The degeneracy of these days,” says Mike, “And him a man of God!”. A little while after that, they see a priest go in. “Ah, how sad,” says Paddy, “One of the poor lasses must be sick.”
I’m not doubting the basic correctness of the claim that prostitution was much more common in the 19th than in the 20th or 21st centuries. I agree with pretty much all the reasons that people have given here for this difference. The only thing I’d like to see are some comparable statistics over this entire time period.
My source was The Oldest Profession by Lujo Bassermann. But it has a publishing date of 1965 and may not be easily available. And I’m not sure I would recommend it anyway. I didn’t find it to be terribly well written. So I’m not sure it counts as a readable history.