From the book “Madam: The Biography of Polly Adler, Icon of the Jazz Age” by Debby Applegate. Copyright © 2021 by Debby Applegate. Published by Doubleday, a copy of The Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC.
Whore is a word that offends the ear and tastes bitter on the tongue. The English language abounds with more polite, poetic and precise terms to describe a woman exchanging sex for money: prostitute, sex worker, evening lady, working girl, fallen woman, call girl. Many more are apologetically rude: whore, rag, k ** t, and piece of skin were all commonly heard in New York dives after the Great War.
Women who made a business of sex in those days often turned their noses up over the expression prostitute, prefers to call himself hustlers, party girls, or regulars. But everyone in the sex industry used the word whore. “In those days, prostitutes were not called chippies or pies or call girls or other fancy names,” columnist Danton Walker recalled. “They were known, quite rightly, by the biblical name: whores, and their establishments were called brothels.” It was, after all, one of the world’s oldest words, used to describe the world’s oldest profession.