Fallen woman
"Fallen woman" is an archaic term which was used to describe a woman who has "lost her innocence", and fallen from the grace of God. In 19th-century Britain especially, the meaning came to be closely associated with the loss or surrender of a woman's chastity[2] and with female promiscuity. Its use was an expression of the belief that to be socially and morally acceptable, a woman's sexuality and experience should be entirely restricted to marriage, and that she should also be under the supervision and care of an authoritative man. Used when society offered few employment opportunities for women in times of crisis or hardship, the term was often more specifically associated with prostitution, which was regarded as both cause and effect of a woman being "fallen". The term is considered to be anachronistic in the 21st century,[3] although it has considerable importance in social history and appears in many literary works (see also Illegitimacy in fiction).
Theological links[edit]
The idea that Eve, from the biblical story in the Book of Genesis, was the prototypical fallen woman has been widely accepted by academics,[4] theologians and literary scholars.[5] Eve was not expelled from Eden because she had sex outside of marriage; rather she fell from a state of innocence because she ate forbidden fruit from the Tree of the knowledge of good and evil. That is, Eve and then Adam reached for knowledge, but in reaching for it, they disobeyed God and lost their original innocence, as shown by their sudden awareness of and shame at their nakedness. The temptation offered to Adam and Eve in the story was to know what God knows and to see what God sees. It was a temptation based on covetousness and a desire to be like God. (See: Prometheus) Thus, theologically speaking, there is a metaphor that is related to the Fall of Man from a state of grace as well as to the expulsion and subsequent fall of Lucifer from heaven.
Social situation[edit]
The term "fallen" was nevertheless most often conflated with sexual "knowledge" (i.e., experience), particularly for women at a time when the social value of their sexual inexperience was insisted upon. As the term narrowed to imply any socially unauthorized sexual activity, including premarital or extra-marital sex, whether initiated by the woman or not, it concealed the different reasons for such a "falling" out of God's and society's favor. "Fallen" was therefore an umbrella term that was applied to a variety of women in a variety of settings: she may have been a woman who had had sex once or habitually outside the confines of marriage; a woman of a lower socioeconomic class; a woman who had been raped or sexually coerced by a male aggressor; a woman with a tarnished reputation; or a prostitute. Furthermore, prostitution was defined in a range of ways and the "reality was that hard economic times meant that for many women, prostitution was the only way to make ends meet. Many ... were only transient fallen women, moving in and out of the profession [of prostitution] as family finances dictated."[6]
In some cases, a woman may have been regarded as fallen simply because she was educated, eccentric, or elusive. Whatever the case may be, female fallenness as it appears in each of these renderings was the result of a woman’s deviation from social norms, and in turn strongly linked to moral expectations. In the mid 19th century, for example, "For middle-class men seeking to establish a different basis for authority, from that which had been used by the nobility, moral authority became the key issue, evident in the power exercised by a man over the nuclear or bourgeois family and in his ability to regulate women's sexuality through her protection and containment in the domestic sphere."[7]
Female dancers and performers have been regarded as deviating from social norms that expect women to stay away from the male gaze, and hence have been described as belonging to the class of "fallen women". In Europe, women dancers were not socially acceptable and in Arabia, "the unveiled ghawazi, who performed publicly for men, were not respected".[8]
In film[edit]
In cinema, the fallen woman is one of the earliest representatives of the female prostitute, and the theme had great appeal during the silent era.[30] By the mid 20th century, when women had access to a variety of jobs and their sexual activity was no longer necessarily associated with moral corruption, the fallen woman as a theme was no longer relevant. The films sometimes intended to convey a moral lesson; sometimes they were a social commentary on poverty; sometimes they explored the idea of redemption or the consequences of coercion; and sometimes they were about self-sacrifice. These contrasts, such as innocence and experience; sin and redemption; vice and virtue, as well as ideas about corruption, class, exploitation, suffering and punishment, build on themes in earlier literature. Some films, such as The Red Kimono (1925)[31] in which the fallen woman was allowed to live happily at the end, were subject to severe censorship.[30] The Road to Ruin (1928)[32] was banned.[33] Protect Us (1914)[34] and The Primrose Path (1931)[35] are films that emphasize the fault of the woman. The Jungle (1914)[36] and Damaged Goods (1919)[37] consider the element of coercion, whereas poverty is important in Out of the Night (1918),[38] The Painted Lady (1924),[39] and Die freudlose Gasse (Joyless Street, 1925).[40]