Call Them Social Workers

"I will not rest," cried Marthe Richard in 1945, "until Paris is cleansed of these stinking sewers." In the reform wave sweeping postwar France, Parisians agreed with Mme. Richard, the only woman on the city council, about their 178 legalized houses of prostitution and the 7,000 registered whores. Brothel-keepers, a $20-million-a-year industry at stake, pleaded that red-haired Mme. Richard, who won the Legion of Honor as a spy for France in World War I, was a neurotic and a publicity-seeker. They also tried to bribe her. Mme. Richard carried the day: the brothels were closed.

But sin only went outdoors and underground. The same girls, reinforced in numbers, nightly patrolled the Champs Elysees and Place Pigalle and swarmed through the nightclubs. With no police regulation save for sporadic boulevard roundups, and no medical inspection, the venereal disease rate skyrocketed.

Last week Marthe Richard admitted she was wrong. She had just written a new book, L'Appel des Sexes (The Call of Sex), in which she now says: "The situation has become intolerable. We have to reopen the maisons de tolerance." Still a reformer at heart, she wanted new laws so that cops could not tyrannize the girls, and better medical inspection. Also, she added: "The girls should be considered some kind of social workers."

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