ABSTRACT
The huge army of women who are almost entirely excluded from any intense enjoyment of life, denoted in the frank cruelty of popular speech by the term old maids are found especially in the middle and lower middle class. Yet although actually working among the proletariat there exist — leaving domestic servants out of consideration — hardly any old maids, none the less there is a vast number of unmarried adult women recruited from the proletarian ranks. The depends upon the fact that in England wages range higher than elsewhere, so that English girls have less occasion to earn their daily bread on the streets than the proletarian women of countries with a lower standard of life. Sexually hyperaesthetic women of the possessing classes become professional fornicatresses; they do not become prostitutes in the technical sense of the word.
