A medieval or early modern girl would look nice and fresh in her bright colors for maybe a month after getting a new dress… and if someone didn’t propose marriage to her in that time, or she fell in the mud day one and ruined the glamour of the new dress… it’d be a tragedy, her family would resent the wasted investment, would probably beat her, and it’d probably ruin her life and maybe lead to her dying at 30 from syphilis after poverty and lack of prospects forced her into a life of prostitution.
I feel this is a slight exaggeration. Yes, ruining an expensive new set of clothes would be a hardship, but not to the extent of forcing someone to become a whore. As for "harsh and corrosive lye based soaps", ever heard of a beetle? Some people would go down to the river and literally beat the washing against a flat rock to get the dirt out. You wouldn't be using too much soap. Certainly colours would fade over time, but if it's expensive, then people do their best to keep the clothing in wearable condition for as long as possible.
Modern Printed T-Shirts don’t maintain their colors after a few dozen washes when you’ve worn them maybe once or twice per wash, and you’re using gentle detergents with built in fabric brighteners.
Modern fabrics such as T-shirts are cheap disposable shit, and the fabric brighteners etc. are every bit as corrosive as the lye. This is why there is gentle soap for hand washing woollens and delicates.
TV shows and movies were dressing everyone in leather before HD, because they did think it looked cooler than the bright costumes, which reminded the makers of cheesy 50s movies.
And the armour probably wouldn't have been shining in the first place, but blued or coloured or treated in some fashion. The notion of shiny steel plate is 19th century and a result of a lot of 'cleaning up' by curators and restorers.
It’s actually a myth that medieval women who didn’t marry by the end of their teens had to resort to prostitution to survive- in core Europe women tended to marry in their early twenties anyways, and medieval women had economic options other than prostitution which could at least keep them alive, and enough charity available that these kinds of economic setbacks were survivable.
This was when GDP of the Uk was close to 3000-4000 per person, or poorer than modern Ukraine... this was post industrial revolution after London had entered what we'd now say is middle income status...
In the Medieval period when real GDP was $300-600 per person per year it would have been vastly worse and the poverty vastly more pressing.
Seriously. the catholic church was running brothels with ~1000 prostitutes in London in the 1100s... when London's total population was 18,000-40,000... and that was just the one Burough where they owned the brothels... there were plenty of private brothels, speak-easy brothels, and women not affiliated with a brothel working as prostitutes as well.
.
Edit: sorry to pick on you but there's this revisionism I got everywhere I've posted this essay that somehow prostitution wasn't common, people weren't poor in the past, and everything that was expansively written about by contemporaries in early modern novels was just fiction and obviously Feilding, Defoe, Richardson, John Ford, Thomas Middleton, and every other writer about the lower classes from 1500-1900 ever wrote about was just sensationalist fiction to be completely ignored.
London did not represent all of England, nor is extrapolating backward a good idea. People, women included, headed to London because they were desperate and couldn't find work elsewhere. 1887 is also a time where women would get paid far less for factory work than men, and so prostitution is what you resort to not to starve.
Likewise, lower GDP in medieval times can just as easily be read as people not having the actual funds to pay anyone for prostitution. It isn't a metric that'll reveal much either.
And finally: you're sure we should just take contemporary authors at their word? I wouldn't do that today, lest I believe the modern world is irrevocably sexist, racist, evil, and bound for climate death juuuust a couple decades hence. Our ancestors were no more honest than we are, and I'll read into what they say with as much credulity as I'll read contemporary writing.
Contemporary accounts from 400 years of history 1500-1900 (Dickens, Tolstoy, Hardy, and many others wrote extensively on this in the 19th).
Historical records of the Lancet Medical journal from the 19th century ...
And the Historical records of the catholic church from the 12th century.
and the historical GDP which shows this is very much in line with what we find in modern poor societies at these GDP levels like El Salvador, Haiti, and Somalia...
There is no scarcity of women, lower gdp figures don't limit how much is available like iron or timber. or food ...GDP just determines the price of their labour and the poverty that will push them to trade that labour.
and your response amounts to: "Nuh Ugh"
Seriously every single piece of evidence we have says that 1100-1900 a single digit percentage of women were employed in prostitution and maybe a very low double digit percentage had engaged in it at some point in their lives. (And yes how people manage to feed themselves and keep themselves alive absolutely seems like the kind of matter of material necessity than can be extrapolated backwards)
We have bawdy authors from the 16th century painting this picture, senitmental authors from the 17th, moral reformer authors form the 19th, quite impressive records from all these eras including very early records from the 11th century...
and what I consistently find is people just deny it because they don't want to believe it.
I'm not convinced learned city-dwellers' (or soldiers') writings are representative of the rest of the population. I think if you don't live in a city and you have the resources to spare to get yourself a woman to fuck who you don't want to have kids with, you buy (or otherwise obtain) yourself a slave, and have her spinning cloth or do chores around the farm or be otherwise productive the rest of the time. At least she won't necessarily by definition be completely negatively productive for you, the way going to a prostitute is. Prostitutes are for people who are either rich enough that paying one doesn't affect them, or so broken-down that they don't care about tomorrow.
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Notes -
I feel this is a slight exaggeration. Yes, ruining an expensive new set of clothes would be a hardship, but not to the extent of forcing someone to become a whore. As for "harsh and corrosive lye based soaps", ever heard of a beetle? Some people would go down to the river and literally beat the washing against a flat rock to get the dirt out. You wouldn't be using too much soap. Certainly colours would fade over time, but if it's expensive, then people do their best to keep the clothing in wearable condition for as long as possible.
Modern fabrics such as T-shirts are cheap disposable shit, and the fabric brighteners etc. are every bit as corrosive as the lye. This is why there is gentle soap for hand washing woollens and delicates.
TV shows and movies were dressing everyone in leather before HD, because they did think it looked cooler than the bright costumes, which reminded the makers of cheesy 50s movies.
And the armour probably wouldn't have been shining in the first place, but blued or coloured or treated in some fashion. The notion of shiny steel plate is 19th century and a result of a lot of 'cleaning up' by curators and restorers.
It’s actually a myth that medieval women who didn’t marry by the end of their teens had to resort to prostitution to survive- in core Europe women tended to marry in their early twenties anyways, and medieval women had economic options other than prostitution which could at least keep them alive, and enough charity available that these kinds of economic setbacks were survivable.
3% of the victorian population, 6% of the female population, were employed as prostitutes in 1887... in London. One of the most industrialized cities of the day and one that actually had factory work for women.
This was when GDP of the Uk was close to 3000-4000 per person, or poorer than modern Ukraine... this was post industrial revolution after London had entered what we'd now say is middle income status...
In the Medieval period when real GDP was $300-600 per person per year it would have been vastly worse and the poverty vastly more pressing.
Historical GDP source
Hell the Catholic church owned the brothels in many areas because it was just seen as a fact of life and they were trusted to morally absolve and oversee the "sinner"
Seriously. the catholic church was running brothels with ~1000 prostitutes in London in the 1100s... when London's total population was 18,000-40,000... and that was just the one Burough where they owned the brothels... there were plenty of private brothels, speak-easy brothels, and women not affiliated with a brothel working as prostitutes as well.
.
Edit: sorry to pick on you but there's this revisionism I got everywhere I've posted this essay that somehow prostitution wasn't common, people weren't poor in the past, and everything that was expansively written about by contemporaries in early modern novels was just fiction and obviously Feilding, Defoe, Richardson, John Ford, Thomas Middleton, and every other writer about the lower classes from 1500-1900 ever wrote about was just sensationalist fiction to be completely ignored.
London did not represent all of England, nor is extrapolating backward a good idea. People, women included, headed to London because they were desperate and couldn't find work elsewhere. 1887 is also a time where women would get paid far less for factory work than men, and so prostitution is what you resort to not to starve.
Likewise, lower GDP in medieval times can just as easily be read as people not having the actual funds to pay anyone for prostitution. It isn't a metric that'll reveal much either.
And finally: you're sure we should just take contemporary authors at their word? I wouldn't do that today, lest I believe the modern world is irrevocably sexist, racist, evil, and bound for climate death juuuust a couple decades hence. Our ancestors were no more honest than we are, and I'll read into what they say with as much credulity as I'll read contemporary writing.
I've given you 3 types of evidence:
Contemporary accounts from 400 years of history 1500-1900 (Dickens, Tolstoy, Hardy, and many others wrote extensively on this in the 19th).
Historical records of the Lancet Medical journal from the 19th century ...
And the Historical records of the catholic church from the 12th century.
and the historical GDP which shows this is very much in line with what we find in modern poor societies at these GDP levels like El Salvador, Haiti, and Somalia...
There is no scarcity of women, lower gdp figures don't limit how much is available like iron or timber. or food ...GDP just determines the price of their labour and the poverty that will push them to trade that labour.
and your response amounts to: "Nuh Ugh"
Seriously every single piece of evidence we have says that 1100-1900 a single digit percentage of women were employed in prostitution and maybe a very low double digit percentage had engaged in it at some point in their lives. (And yes how people manage to feed themselves and keep themselves alive absolutely seems like the kind of matter of material necessity than can be extrapolated backwards)
We have bawdy authors from the 16th century painting this picture, senitmental authors from the 17th, moral reformer authors form the 19th, quite impressive records from all these eras including very early records from the 11th century...
and what I consistently find is people just deny it because they don't want to believe it.
I'm not convinced learned city-dwellers' (or soldiers') writings are representative of the rest of the population. I think if you don't live in a city and you have the resources to spare to get yourself a woman to fuck who you don't want to have kids with, you buy (or otherwise obtain) yourself a slave, and have her spinning cloth or do chores around the farm or be otherwise productive the rest of the time. At least she won't necessarily by definition be completely negatively productive for you, the way going to a prostitute is. Prostitutes are for people who are either rich enough that paying one doesn't affect them, or so broken-down that they don't care about tomorrow.
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