In fact, prostitution was sometimes seen as a "necessary evil", a marriage safety entity that allowed men to satisfy their supposedly stronger desires while sparing their wives from unwanted sex. .
After the Civil War, police and medical authorities attempted to legalize and regulate prostitution as a means to control the spread of venereal disease. In the 1870s, a coalition of women's rights activists, temperance reformers, former abolitionists, and Protestant clergy, a social purity movement, arose to oppose this effort to license prostitutes. They contended that prostitution was a vice for both the prostitute and the costumer, and that women and men should be held to a single standard of sexual morality. Many purity reformers, particularly the suffragists, also advocated the notion of voluntary motherhood, the right of wives to abstain from sexual intercourse to avoid unwanted pregnancies and assert some control over family size. .
At the turn of the twentieth century, the pace of American industrialization and technological innovation escalated rapidly. The growth of the manufacturing and retail sectors of the economy created a great demand for labor in the cities. Rural Americans moved to urban areas to take advantage of the new opportunities, as did millions of immigrants arriving from Europe. This fluctuation of the mass-produced goods fostered a shift in middle-class values. A change in values was also reflected in the lives of young people especially young women. Many middle-class daughters left home to attend college or pursue professional careers, postponing or abandoning marriage and domestic life, and a growing number of working-class women sought jobs in factories, stores, and offices. .
As it turns out, this movement into the urban work force afforded women some economic stability and a new sense of independence. Instead of the family-based or church-based diversions of the past, unescorted youths frequented amusement parks, movie theaters, and dance halls.
