Employers often paid their female employees below-subsistence wages, regarding their pay as a mere supplement to a male wage earner’s income. Women without enough to live on had to do something. The something was, in some cases, prostitution, but prostitution, though paying twice as much as factory work, was dangerous, and the city also provided other kinds of less dangerous sexual service jobs in cabarets, dance halls, and theaters where attractive women could attract a male clientele.
