Brothels were the "birth control" of the day, if you will.
and the ladies there too, got pregnant--
Yes...and, unfortunately, the female babies there were pretty much born into the life. Raised by their brothel mothers, they were then actually marketed by the madam as virgins, when ready, for inflated fees....sometimes disgracefully underage. An excellent study of this was the Louis Malles film, Pretty Baby, which looked at the late 19th century New Orleans "Storeyville" red-light district through the eyes of famed lithograper, Toulouse-Lautrec. And, remember, New Orleans was the Bible Belt, and still, the well-to-do gentlemen had a second life in these dens of iniquity. It was a magnificiently photographed art film that saw wide release at the time (1978)...but I don't know if it could even get made today with shots of a naked 10 year old actress (Brooke Shields) with her mother (Susan Sarandon), and the not visually graphic but audio-graphic deflowering scene. The other double-standard, of course, was that "good women" (wives) were not supposed to *enjoy sex. Only whores enjoyed sex. Ergo a woman who *enjoyed sex was looked down upon as something of a harlot. And that attitude lingered well into the 1960s...and still does in some quarters today. So husbands looked to their wives to make babies, and to the brothel for their *pleasure. Lusting for one's wife would degrade her virtue.
