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I've said it before and I'll say it again about this particular factoid - 10% of women or 10% of urban women? We are talking about societies which were 80-90% rural, and the brothels were in the towns - and mostly in the large towns and cities. So 5-10% of women in London per jeroboam (and presumably less in smaller towns) being prostitutes equals 1% or slightly less of all women being prostitutes.
10% of all women being prostitutes in the 19th century (where? it matters!) per To_Mandalay would mean that either 30% or more were prostitutes in the big cities, which I don't think anyone has suggested, or that there was a culture of prostitution even in village-sized communities.
Some people did actually. I was thinking not of London but of 19th century New York. According to this book estimates of the percentage of young women in NY who were prostitutes over the 19th century ranged from 1% all the way to 40%. The author says that 5 - 10% seems likely because the police tended to lowball their figures and reformist societies to overstate them. He also suggests that during economic downturns the number may have gone above 10%. Obviously the numbers are extremely uncertain because moralists had a motive to exaggerate them, and at the same time a lot of prostitution was part-time and freelance, and so slipped under the radar. What seems clear is that women being driven to prostitution out of economic desperation was many times more common than it is today.
I have no idea what prostitution looked like in village communities or to what extent it existed. In the 19th century medium-to-large towns and cities in the USA and Western Europe are pretty much the only places with anything resembling reliable statistics.
In modern times we still see that prostitutes tend to concentrate in cities and that rural men will travel to cities to use their services. So the percentage of prostitutes among the rural populace was likely far lower than in the city.
Everyone in this discussion seems to ignore the social issues with prostitutes in small communities, where people are much more aware of the behavior of people in the community than in the city.
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