In the winter of 1902, the people of St. Louis gathered by the thousands in heated public meetings to debate a question that the city had never satisfactorily solved: where to confine the “social evil,” prostitution. Thirty years before, St. Louis was the first city in the United States to legalize prostitution, in an attempt to control its red-light districts and the spread of venereal disease. Though the medical doctors hailed this legislation as enlightened and effective, the doctors of divinity, as one commentator observed, opposed it. An aggressive repeal campaign led by William Greenleaf Eliot gathered 100,000 signatures presented in “a wheelbarrow decorated with white ribbons, and accompanied by a group of innocent young girls attired in spotless gowns.” “St Louis threatened to become the harlot of the Western world, rivalling Babylon in her debaucheries,” a contemporary wrote, “but she drew back in time,” and the law was overturned in 1874. Business continued as usual in the “great, seething, sinful city, where shameless bawds are to be enumerated by the thousands.” In 1888, the year of T. S. Eliot's birth, a US Department of Labor report based on interviews of working women in twenty-two major American cities judged that “The moral conditions [in St. Louis] are generally of a lower standard than is found in many other cities.”

Neither the “social evil” nor the controversy about how to address it seems to have abated during the years of Eliot's St. Louis childhood. His family's attitude toward prostitution and disease, local debate about the location of red-light districts (not resolved before he departed for Milton Academy in 1905), and the actual proximity of these areas to the Eliot homestead on 2635 Locust Street are important contexts for his early poetry. These local childhood experiences also took place within a broader transatlantic public-health movement aimed at controlling venereal disease by instilling fear in young men. Eliot came into contact with a particularly raw form of this anti-syphilitic prophylaxis campaign when he began reading French literature and traveled to Paris for the 1910–11 academic year, where he composed the major poems of Prufrock and Other Observations.