ies
gave them citizenship for "their sacrifice for the common good"; in some
places donations were given to those who married, a generous way indeed
to rescue many unfortunates from shame. To make them noticeable, their
garments, usually green in color, were prescribed for them. Augsburg
ordered the hood of their veil to be green and two inches wide; Leipzig
prescribed a short yellow mantle; Bern and Zurich a red cap. Sometimes
luxurious fashions adopted by distinguished ladies were permitted to
prostitutes in order to bring luxury into disrepute.

At the end of the fifteenth century, prostitution had assumed enormous
proportions and carried in its train the terrible, loathsome, venereal
disease. The Renaissance and the Reformation, it is true, had at first
beneficent effects; disreputable houses were closed; a higher spirit
swept over the land, but everything soon returned to its former
condition, as we read in Erasmus's dialogues or Luther's writings. The
brave and patriotic knight and humanist Ulrich von Hutton himself died,
young and abandoned, of the loathsome disease; it is unknown whether he
contracted it through his own fault, or by contagion.

Catholicism performed a noble work by opening many cloisters and asylums
to penitent fallen women, and thus saved many victims. The church
certainly strove, on the whole, to improve the moral conditions of the
country. The monasteries were in most cases resorts for the daughters of
the poorer nobility, and for the pious maidens, whether highborn or
lowly, when marriage was impossible or other motives urged them to
retire from the world. This statement must be made and emphasized for
the honor of the millions of pure and noble women, who lived and worked
and suffered and sacrificed themselves for humanity in the Church and in
the cloisters which were the female academies of the time. Women lived
there a happy and quiet life with intellectual and spiritual
occupations. Reading, writing, religion, sewing, weaving, and embroidery
were taught.

But it is only natural that among the thousands of women in religious
life many failed in their mission, having mistaken their vocation. They
became unhappy in their solitude without love, especially such as had
been forced into the nunnery against their will and inclination. In such
cases their conduct sometimes stands in glaring contrast with their vows
of chastity.

The centuries leading up to the Reformation are full of complain