Fallen women

'There is a budding morrow in midnight:'—
So sang our Keats, our English nightingale.
And here, as lamps across the bridge turn pale
In London's smokeless resurrection-light,
Dark breaks to dawn. But o'er the deadly blight
Of love deflowered and sorrow of none avail,
Which makes this man gasp and this woman quail,
Can day from darkness ever again take flight?

Ah! gave not these two hearts their mutual pledge,
Under one mantle sheltered 'neath the hedge
In gloaming courtship? And, O God! today
He only knows he holds her;—but what part
Can life now take? She cries in her locked heart,—
'Leave me—I do not know you—go away!'

Dante Gabriel Rossetti: Found

The term fallen woman was used to describe a woman who has "lost her innocence", and fallen from the grace of God. In 19th-century Britain especially, the meaning came to be closely associated with the loss or surrender of a woman's chastity. Its use was an expression of the belief that to be socially and morally acceptable a woman's sexuality and experience should be entirely restricted to marriage, and that she should also be under the supervision and care of an authoritative man. Used when society offered few employment opportunities for women in times of crisis or hardship, the term was often more specifically associated with prostitution which was regarded as both cause and effect of a woman being "fallen". The term is considered to be anachronistic in the 21st century, although it has considerable importance in social history and appears in many literary works.

The idea that Eve, from the biblical story in the Book of Genesis, was the prototypical fallen woman has been widely accepted by academics, theologians and literary scholars. Eve was not expelled from Eden because she had sex outside of marriage; rather she fell from a state of innocence because she ate forbidden fruit from the Tree of the knowledge of good and evil. That is, Eve and then Adam reached for knowledge, but in reaching for it, they disobeyed God and lost their original innocence - understood as the perfect integration of their bodies and souls, the harmony between their desires and their knowledge. In this interpretation, the consequence was that it became difficult for them to know the truth and love the good. The temptation offered to Adam and Eve in the story was to know what God knows and to see what God sees. It was a temptation based on envy and a desire to be like God. Thus, theologically speaking, there is a metaphor that is related to the Fall of Man from a state of grace as well as to the expulsion and subsequent fall of Lucifer from heaven.

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Wikipedia