![]() ![]() Moth runs away, back to her home, only to find that her mother is gone. Wentworth hacks off Moth’s hair, even slashes her fingers with the scissors when Moth tries to defend herself. Wentworth is abusive, blacking Moth’s eyes and raising welts on her face with a fan. Moth does her best to learn to be a lady’s maid, but Mrs. Her mother, “a slum-house mystic,” sells Moth, not as a prostitute but as a servant to a wealthy woman, Mrs. Most of the story is told in the voice of 12-year-old Moth, who is living in the turbulent slums of Manhattan’s Lower East Side in 1871. It is the 19th-century “virgin cure” that gives this book its title. In the late 19th century, many people in England and the United States believed that it would cure syphilis, and that belief led to a trade in very young women, a trade that was lucrative for madams and parents and devastating to the young women. Many people in the world today reportedly believe that this is a cure for AIDS. ![]() The “virgin cure” is the belief that intercourse with a virgin will cure a man of a sexually transmitted disease. ![]()
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