Selling Sex in The City - A Global History of Prostitution
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Studies in Global Social History
Editor
Marcel van der Linden (International Institute of Social History,
Amsterdam, The Netherlands)
Editorial Board
Sven Beckert (Harvard University, Cambridge, ma, usa)
Philip Bonner (University of the Witwatersrand Johannesburg, South Africa)
Dirk Hoerder (University of Arizona, Phoenix, ar, usa)
Chitra Joshi (Indraprastha College, Delhi University, India)
Amarjit Kaur (University of New England, Armidale, Australia)
Barbara Weinstein (New York University, New York, ny, usa)
VOLUME 31
The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/sgsh
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Selling Sex in the City:
A Global History of Prostitution,
1600s–2000s
Edited by
Magaly Rodríguez García
Lex Heerma van Voss
Elise van Nederveen Meerkerk
LEIDEN | BOSTON
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Cover illustration: Oud neg.nr. 15a-q + reserve. ‘“Die Stadt der Frauen in Casablanca’’. Met een notitie van de
beschrijving van de afzonderlijke negatieven.’ Photograph and copyright Joh. de Haas, 1939. Collection Joh.
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ISSN 1874-6705
isbn 978-90-04-34624-6 (hardback)
isbn 978-90-04-34625-3 (e-book)
Copyright 2017 by Magaly Rodríguez García, Lex Heerma van Voss and Elise van Nederveen Meerkerk.
Published by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands.
Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Hes & De Graaf, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Rodopi,
Brill Sense, Hotei Publishing, mentis Verlag, Verlag Ferdinand Schöningh and Wilhelm Fink Verlag.
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Contents
Acknowledgements IX
List of Illustrations X
Notes on Contributors XII
1 Selling Sex in World Cities, 1600s–2000s: An Introduction 1
Magaly Rodríguez García, Elise van Nederveen Meerkerk and
Lex Heerma van Voss
Part 1
Urban Overviews
Section 1
Europe
2 Selling Sex in Amsterdam 27
Marion Pluskota
3 Selling Sex in a Provincial Town: Prostitution in Bruges 60
Maja Mechant
4 Sex for Sale in Florence 85
Michela Turno
5 A Global History of Prostitution: London 111
Julia Laite
6 Prostitution in Moscow and St. Petersburg, Russia 138
Philippa Hetherington
7 The Paradoxes and Contradictions of Prostitution in Paris 171
Susan P. Conner
8 Prostitution in Stockholm: Continuity and Change 201
Yvonne Svanström
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vi Contents
Section 2
Africa and the Middle East
9 Prostitution in Cairo 233
Hanan Hammad and Francesca Biancani
10 Colonial and Post-Colonial Casablanca 261
Liat Kozma
11 Selling Sex in Istanbul 278
Mark David Wyers
12 Sexualizing the City: Female Prostitution in Nigeria’s Urban Centres
in a Historical Perspective 306
Mfon Umoren Ekpootu
13 Sex Work and Migration: The Case of Tel Aviv and Jaffa,
1918–2010 329
Deborah Bernstein, Hila Shamir, Nomi Levenkron and Dlila Amir
Section 3
The Americas
14 A Social History of Prostitution in Buenos Aires 357
Cristiana Schettini
15 Prostitution in the us: Chicago 386
Mary Linehan
16 Prostitution in Havana 414
Amalia L. Cabezas
17 Facing a Double Standard: Prostitution in Mexico City,
1521–2006 441
Fernanda Nuñez and Pamela Fuentes
18 The Future of an Institution from the Past: Accommodating
Regulationism in Potosí (Bolivia) from the Nineteenth to
Twenty-first Centuries 466
Pascale Absi
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Contents vii
19 Sex Work in Rio de Janeiro: Police Management without
Regulation 490
Thaddeus Blanchette and Cristiana Schettini
Section 4
Asia-Pacific
20 Commercial Sex Work in Calcutta: Past and Present 519
Satarupa Dasgupta
21 Prostitution in Colonial Hanoi (1885–1954) 538
Isabelle Tracol-Huynh
22 Prostitution in Shanghai 567
Sue Gronewold
23 Selling Sex in Singapore: The Development, Expansion, and Policing
of Prostitution in an International Entrepôt 594
Shawna Herzog
24 Prostitution in Sydney and Perth since 1788 621
Raelene Frances
Part 2
Thematic Overviews
25 “We Use our Bodies to Work Hard, So We Need to Get Legitimate
Workers’ Rights”: Labour Relations in Prostitution, 1600–2010 653
Marion Pluskota
26 Working and Living Conditions 677
Raelene Frances
27 Migration and Prostitution 707
Nicole Keusch
28 Prostitution and Colonial Relations 730
Liat Kozma
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viii Contents
29 Seeing Beyond Prostitution: Agency and the Organization of
Sex Work 748
Thaddeus Gregory Blanchette
30 Coercion and Voluntarism in Sex Work 775
Mark David Wyers
31 A Gender Analysis of Global Sex Work 801
Elise van Nederveen Meerkerk
32 The Social Profiles of Prostitutes 833
Maja Mechant
Part 3
Conclusion
33 Sex Sold in World Cities, 1600s–2000s: Some Conclusions to the
Project 861
Elise van Nederveen Meerkerk, Magaly Rodríguez García and
Lex Heerma van Voss
Index 881
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Acknowledgements
The conference on which this book is based was made possible by the net-
work and the very existence of the International Institute of Social History in
Amsterdam. We are grateful to the institute and its then Director of Research,
Marcel van der Linden, for the hospitality and general support for the project,
and to Ineke Kellij at the iish for taking care of the logistics. Additional fund-
ing was supplied by Huygens Institute for the History of the Netherlands, Van
Winter Fonds and Vrije Universiteit Brussel (Belgium).
We also would like to thank Mark David Wyers for correcting the texts of
non-English authors and Babere Kerata Chacha, Ziyad Choonara, Jan MacKell,
Jürgen Nautz and Rhys Glyn Llwyd Williams, who contributed their insights to
the project.
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List of Illustrations
Graphs
8.1 Number of regulated women in Stockholm, 1866–1917 215
8.2 Reported crimes and sentences for buying sexual services, Stockholm County
1999–2011 227
21.1 Annual activities of the vice squad police in Hanoi, 1913–1942 550
21.2 Arrested clandestine prostitutes, Hanoi 1913–1929 553
21.3 Patrons of the 20 authorized brothels of Hanoi in 1930 (%) 559
33.1 Trends in legislation, 1600–2000 871
Tables
3.1 Origins of Bruges’ sex workers, 1750–2011 70
3.2 Ages of Bruges’ sex workers, 1750–2011 73
3.3 Marital status of Bruges’ sex workers, 1750–1945 74
3.4 Bruges’ sex workers with one or more children, 1750–2011 75
4.1 Origins of Florence’s sex workers, 1816–1851 96
6.1 Marital status of prostitutes in St. Petersburg and Moscow, 1889 154
7.1 Occupations of women arrested for prostitution, prison Saint Martin, 1755, 1765,
1770 183
7.2 Occupations of women arrested for prostitution in Butte des Moulins,
1792–1793 187
7.3 Married and unmarried males and females, Paris 1851 189
8.1 ‘Careers’ of regulated women, Stockholm 1859 214
8.2 Estimates of number of women in street prostitution, Stockholm
1998–2008 224
11.1 Length of time of employment as sex workers, Istanbul 2010 296
11.2 Age of sex workers, Istanbul 2010 296
20.1 Reasons for entering sex work, Sonagachi 2010–2011 531
21.1 Place of origin of some Hanoi prostitutes in 1914 555
33.1 Trends in legislation, 1600–2000 878
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List of Illustrations xi
Maps
8.1 Stockholm between the bridges showing domiciles of registered and regulated
women, 1847–1869 210
13.1 Areas of sexual commerce in the Tel Aviv-Jaffa urban complex in the early
twentieth century 336
13.2 Other areas where prostitution began to be carried out in Tel Aviv-Jaffa 341
19.1 Rio de Janeiro, 2012 499
19.2 Movement of prostitution from the Mangue to Vila Mimosa, 1922–2013 503
19.3 Sex venues in Copacabana, 2011 509
19.4 Sex venues in downtown Rio de Janeiro, 2011 510
21.1 Official brothels in Hanoi, 1896–1951 549
21.2 Growth of the city and expansion of prostitution in Hanoi 556
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Notes on Contributors
Pascale Absi
PhD in Anthropology, is researcher at the Institut de Recherche pour le Dével-
oppement (ird), cessma, Université Paris 7. Her field work has primarily
taken place in Bolivia.
Dlila Amir
PhD, University of Pennsylvania. Prof. Emerita, Gender Studies, Tel Aviv Uni-
versity. Written extensively on abortion, medicine and gender. Recent book—
Abortion—A Silenced Issue in Israel (Ressling, 2016) (Hebrew).
Deborah Bernstein
PhD, University of Susex. Prof. Emerita, Department of Sociology and Anthro-
pology, University of Haifa. Published extensively on Israeli society, ethnic,
national class and gender relations. Among recent articles, D. Bernstein and
B. Hasisi, “Multiple Voices and the Force of Custom on Punishment: Trial
of ‘Family Honor Killings’ in Mandate Palestine”, Law and History Review,
34 (2016), pp. 115–154.
Francesca Biancani
PhD (2012) London School of Economics, is Adjunct Professor of History
and Institutions of the Modern Middle East at Bologna University. She pub-
lished a number of articles among which “International Migration and
Sex Work in Early Twentieth Century Cairo” in L. Kozma, A. Witznisher
and C. Shayegh (Eds.) Globalization and the Making of the Modern Middle
East, London: I.B. Tauris, 2014. Her monograph entitled Sex Work, Mobil-
ity, and Modernity in Colonial Cairo, 1882–1952 is under contract with IB
Tauris.
Thaddeus Gregory Blanchette
PhD (2006), National Museum. He is an adjunct anthropology professor at the
Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. He has been researching prostitution in
Rio since 2004 and immigration and other connected issues since 1999. His
best known publication in the field of sex work is “On Bullshit and the Traf-
ficking of Women: Moral Entrepreneurs and the Invention of Trafficking of
Persons in Brazil” (2012—together with Ana Paula da Silva).
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Notes on Contributors xiii
Amalia L. Cabezas
PhD (1998) is an Associate Professor at the University of California, Riverside.
Her research and publications include Economies of Desire: Sex and Tourism in
Cuba and the Dominican Republic (Temple University Press, 2009).
Susan P. Conner
PhD (1977), Florida State University, is retired Professor of History and Provost
of Albion College (Michigan, u.s.a.). She is the author of numerous articles
and chapters in women’s and gender studies, European social history, women
in the military, and prostitution in Paris, as well as an edited volume and The
Age of Napoleon (Greenwood, 2004).
Satarupa Dasgupta
has a PhD in health communication and eleven years of experience work-
ing in research and academia. She specializes in sexual rights advocacy,
health education and reproductive healthcare services. In her current role
as an advocate at Manavi, a not for profit organization based in New Jer-
sey, she is designing and implementing culturally and linguistically spe-
cific sexual assault services for South Asian immigrant population in
New Jersey.
Mfon Umoren Ekpootu
PhD (2008) is a lecturer at the University of Port Harcourt, Nigeria. She has
published widely on historical, social policy and legal questions on gender
and sexuality in Africa including Interrogating Policies on Human Trafficking in
N
igeria (Africa World Press, 2013).
Raelene Frances
PhD (1989), Monash University, is Professor of History and Dean of Arts at
that university in Melbourne. She has published extensively on the history of
women’s work, including Selling Sex: A Hidden History of Prostitution (unsw
Press, 2007).
Pamela Fuentes
PhD (2015), York University, Assistant Professor at Pace University, Manhattan
campus. She has published several articles on Mexican history, including “En-
tre Reivindicaciones Sexuales y Reclamos de Justicia Económica: Divisiones
Políticas e Ideológicas Durante la Conferencia Mundial del Año Internacional
de la Mujer. México, 1975” (Secuencia, 2014).
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xiv Notes on Contributors
Sue Gronewold
PhD in Modern Chinese History, Columbia University, (1996), teaches in
the History Department and Asian Studies Program at Kean University. She
writes on gender issues and transnational exchanges and is the author of
Beautiful Merchandise: Prostitution in China 1856–1937 (Haworth Press,
1985).
Hanan Hammad
PhD (2009) University of Texas-Austin, is Associate Professor of history and the
director of the Middle East studies at Texas Christian University. Her research
focuses on sexuality, working classes and popular culture. Her latest publica-
tion is Industrial Sexuality: Gender, Urbanization, and Social Transformation
in Egypt (Austin: utp, 2016)
Lex Heerma van Voss
PhD (1990), is director of the Huygens Institute for the History of the Neth-
erlands (knaw) and professor in the History of Social Security at Utrecht
University. He has published on the international comparative history of
work.
Shawna Herzog
PhD (2013), Washington State University, is an instructor at that University. She
has published articles on women in world history and a review for the Journal
of Religious History. Her research focuses on slavery and abolition within colo-
nial Southeast Asia.
Philippa Hetherington
PhD (Harvard, 2014), is lecturer in Modern Eurasian History at the School of
Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London. She has pub-
lished on gender and consumption under Stalin, the regulation of pornogra-
phy in late imperial and early Soviet Russia, and is currently completing a book
manuscript entitled Circulating Subjects: The Traffic in Women and the Russian
Construction of an International Crime.
Nicole Keusch
works on the intertwined histories of Africa and East Asia, especially Japan.
The research project on transcultural migration was accomplished during her
time at the Cluster of Excellence “Asia and Europe in a Global Context” of Hei-
delberg University and at Goethe University Frankfurt.
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Notes on Contributors xv
Liat Kozma
PhD (2006), New York University, is a senior lecturer at the Department of
Islamic and Middle East Studies at the Hebrew University. Her latest book is
Global Women, Colonial Ports: Prostitution in the Interwar Middle East (suny
Press, 2016).
Julia Laite
PhD (Cambridge, 2009), lecturer in history at Birkbeck, University of London.
She has published articles on prostitution, trafficking and migration and is the
author of Common Prostitutes and Ordinary Citizens: Commercial Sex in Lon-
don, 1885–1960 (2011).
Nomi Levenkron
PhD candidate, Faculty of Law, Tel Aviv University. Levenkron Nomi and
Rosenberg-Dancig Hadar, “Migratory Violence”, Tel Aviv University Law Review,
37(2) 341 (2015). [in Hebrew]; “What Is a Law Student Doing in a Brothel?”
Hamishpat, 17(1) 190 (2013) [in Hebrew].
Mary Linehan
is an Associate Professor of History at the University of Texas at Tyler. Her pub-
lications include works on rape, prostitution, and girls’ sexuality in the late
19th century.
Maja Mechant
is a PhD candidate in the History Department at Ghent University. Her doctor-
ate on the life courses of prostitutes working in Bruges during the eighteenth
century is funded by the Research Foundation Flanders (fwo).
Elise van Nederveen Meerkerk
PhD (2007), is a global labour and gender historian, working as associate pro-
fessor at Wageningen University, the Netherlands. She has published on wom-
en’s and children’s work, and participated in several projects comparing the
history of workers worldwide.
Fernanda Nuñez
PhD (1996), Paris vii-Denis Diderot, is researcher at the National Institute of
History and Anthropology, Veracruz-Mexico. She has published books and
many articles on mexican women’s history, sexuality and prostitution.
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xvi Notes on Contributors
Marion Pluskota
PhD (2012), University of Leicester, uk, is an assistant professor in social
history at Leiden University, The Netherlands. She has published on pros-
titution Prostitution and Social Control in Eighteenth-Century Ports (Abing-
don: Routledge, 2015), co-offending and gender differences in prosecution
patterns.
Magaly Rodríguez García
PhD (2008), is lecturer of contemporary history at the ku Leuven, Belgium.
She has published on the International Labour Organization, the League of
Nations’ campaigns against trafficking and child labour, the history and defini-
tions of prostitution and coerced labour.
Cristiana Schettini
PhD (2002) State University of Campinas (unicamp), Brazil, is a researcher
of the National Council of Scientific and Technical Research (conicet) at
the Social Sciences Institute of the University of San Martín, in Argentina. She
has published articles and books on the social history of prostitution in South
America, especially Rio de Janeiro and Buenos Aires.
Hila Shamir, S.J.D.
(2008), Harvard University. Faculty of Law, Tel Aviv University. Recent publica-
tion include “The Public/Private Distinction Now: The Challenges of Privati-
zation and of the Regulatory State”, 15 Theoretical Inquiries in Law 1 (2014), “A
Labor Paradigm for Human Trafficking”, 60 ucla Law Review 76 (2012).
Yvonne Svanström
PhD (2000), is a senior lecturer and Associate Professor in Economic History at
Stockholm University. Last publication: “From contested to consensus: Swed-
ish politics on prostitution and trafficking”, in Eilís Ward &Gillian Wylie, The
Politics of Neo-Abolitionism: Prostitution, Feminism and the State (Routledge,
2017).
Isabelle Tracol-Huynh
PhD (2013), Ecole Normale Supérieure de Lyon (France), is an associate Re-
search scholar at Lyons Institute of East Asian Studies. Her thesis focused on
prostitution in colonial Northern Vietnam and she has published several ar-
ticles on that subject, including “The Shadow Theatre of Prostitution in French
Colonial Tonkin: Faceless Prostitutes under the Colonial Gaze” Journal of Viet-
namese Studies, (2012).
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Notes on Contributors xvii
Michela Turno
PhD (2012), University of Leicester, is an independent historian. She has pub-
lished monographs and articles on prostitution and Italian women’s history.
Forthcoming chapter: “Discussing Prostitution: The Experience of the Genoese
Coordinamento donne flm, 1981–1983”.
Mark David Wyers
PhD candidate, Leiden University, has written a history of prostitution titled
“Wicked” Istanbul: The Regulation of Prostitution in the Early Republic of Turkey
(Libra, 2012) and translated numerous novels from Turkish into English.
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chapter 1
Selling Sex in World Cities, 1600s–2000s:
An Introduction
Magaly Rodríguez García, Elise van Nederveen Meerkerk and
Lex Heerma van Voss
Christian Grey’s biological mother was Ella, a drug-addicted sex worker. Chris-
tian and Ella lived in extreme poverty in Detroit and both were badly abused by
Ella’s pimp. Christian was 4 years old when his mother committed suicide; he
spent four days with her dead body until the pimp found them and called the
police. In later life, Christian only referred to his mother as “the crack whore”.
The background of one of the main characters of the best seller Fifty Shades
trilogy is characterized by platitudes that are all too often believed to be
“typical” of prostitution: poverty, male abuse, economic exploitation, drugs,
decadence, and trauma. Yet the extent to which these representations of pros-
titution are supported by sound empirical evidence has since the last decades
of the twentieth century increasingly been questioned by scholars, activists,
and sex workers who call for the integration of commercial sex in the realm of
labour. This book seeks to engage in this ongoing debate by means of a global
and comparative history of female prostitution in cities worldwide from 1600
to the present.
Notwithstanding the large number of national studies on particular aspects
of prostitution (policies, attitudes, and labour market), no international com-
parison over a significant span of time has ever been attempted. We start in
the early modern period in order to gauge whether practices and attitudes re-
garding prostitution have altered throughout the last four centuries around the
world. By including the precolonial situation, we aim to observe to what extent
prostitution changed with the settlement of Europeans in overseas territories.
Although the distinction between “premodern” and “modern” prostitution is
perhaps not very sharp, we presume that the important political, military, and
socioeconomic changes that took place from ca. 1600 onward have had a pro-
found impact on the sale of sex. The long historical and broad geographical ap-
proach of our project permits us to draw some general conclusions regarding
the extent to which the practice of prostitution and societal reactions to it have
been influenced by processes of colonization, industrialization, urbanization,
the rise of nation-states, nationalism, and war, as well as revolutions in the
© Magaly Rodríguez García et al., 2017 | doi 10.1163/9789004346253_002 - 978-90-04-34625-3
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2 Rodríguez García, van Nederveen Meerkerk and Heerma van Voss
realms of politics, transport, and communication. Furthermore, the increased
organization of prostitutes in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, as well
as the increased scholarly attention that has been paid to prostitution and the
main actors in the sex industry (prostitutes, pimps, brothel keepers, traffickers,
and clients), have encouraged us to extend the research to the present. The
focus on female prostitution in urban settings is justified on the one hand be-
cause commercial sex has nearly always been an urban phenomenon involving
women servicing men, and on the other hand because the information avail-
able is limited, as male and transgender prostitution in the past, as well as rural
prostitution, have been even more elusive than female sex work.
The project follows the research model used in earlier comparative projects
carried out by the International Institute of Social History (Amsterdam, the
Netherlands) on the history of dock and textile workers.1 In the first phase of
the project we solicited a set of urban studies on the history of prostitution
in different countries for the period between 1600 and the present. To facili-
tate international comparisons, the authors of these urban overviews were
requested to systematically address a number of topics/questions that were
listed in a framework document. The latter is included below as an appendix
to this introduction. In the second phase of the project, we invited a number of
authors to write thematic comparative essays based on the collection of urban
overviews. In the third stage of the project, the authors of the urban and the-
matic papers, as well as other experts on prostitution (in total nearly forty re-
searchers from around the world) came together at the conference “Selling Sex
in the City: Prostitution in World Cities, 1600 to the Present”, which took place
at the International Institute of Social History from 25 to 27 April 2013. This
volume contains the revised versions of a selection of the papers presented at
that conference. More information about the book’s structure and the regions
and themes contained therein will be provided at the end of this introductory
note. Priority is given first to a justification of the choices we have made for this
collective research project.
Even though the participants in the project were not explicitly required to
adopt a particular approach to prostitution, we requested that they focus not
only on the policies, societal attitudes, and structural factors that have influ-
enced the sex industry but also on prostitutes’ profiles and culture, as well as on
working and living conditions. We—and many of the authors involved in this
1 These projects resulted in the publication of two edited volumes: Sam Davies et al. (eds),
Dock Workers: International Explorations in Comparative Labour History, 1790–1970 (Aldershot,
2000) and Lex Heerma van Voss, Els Hiemstra-Kuperus, and Elise van Nederveen Meerkerk
(eds), Ashgate Companion to the History of Textile Workers, 1650–2000 (Farnham, 2010).
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Selling Sex in World Cities, 1600s–2000s: An Introduction 3
and other scientific studies—understand prostitution to be a form of work and
therefore attempt to achieve a comprehensive overview of this activity from a
global labour history perspective. This approach is linked to our understanding
of work, which goes beyond the exclusionary concepts of labour that became
dominant from the nineteenth century onward. For instance, writing in the
1830s, French nobleman Adolphe Granier de Cassagnac divided the proletariat
into four groups, “the workers, the beggars, the thieves and the public women”,
implying an understanding of only the first category to be “real” workers. In his
view, “the worker is a proletarian, because he works in order to live and earns
a wage; the beggar is a proletarian, who does not want to work or cannot work,
and begs in order to live; the thief is a proletarian, who does not want to work
or beg, and, in order to make a living, steals; the prostitute is a proletarian,
who neither wants to work, nor beg, nor steal, and, in order to live, sells her
body.”2 Around the same period, the Communist League articulated the desire
of “respectable” and “free” workers (meaning male wage earners) to distinguish
themselves from slaves and other unfree labourers, the self-employed and the
lumpenproletariat. And although Karl Marx himself seems to have been rather
ambiguous about prostitutes and their relation vis-à-vis the working class,3
most nineteenth-century commentators defined survival activities such as
prostitution as unproductive, work-shy, deviant, or even criminal.4
This narrow conceptualization of work, which led to the institutionalization
and idealization of wage labour, has increasingly been challenged. Already at
the end of the 1800s, new terms were introduced to describe activities that
take place outside or at the edge of the conventional labour market. The po-
litical scientist Rotering, for example, referred to activities that are perceived
as a public nuisance and that are distinct from “decent” or “formal” work as
2 Adolphe Granier de Cassagnac, Histoire des classes ouvrières et des classes bourgeoises (Paris,
1838), p. 30. See also Jan Lucassen, “Writing Global Labour History c. 1800–1940: A Historiog-
raphy of Concepts, Periods and Geographical Scope”, in idem (ed.), Global Labour History: A
State of the Art (Bern, 2008), pp. 39–90, 51.
3 As Marcel van der Linden, Workers of the World: Essays towards a Global Labour History
(Leiden, 2008), p. 22, footnote 15 argues, “When [Marx] discusses the relative surplus popula-
tion in Capital, he regards prostitutes as an important part of the ‘actual lumpenproletariat’
(Capital, i, p. 797). Elsewhere, especially in the Theories of Surplus Value, i, pp. 166 and 186,
Marx says that prostitutes, if they work for a brothel keeper, perform (unproductive) wage
labor, like actors or musicians, and thus are, by implication, part of the proletariat in the nar-
row sense of the word.”
4 Sebastian Conrad, et al., “Die Kodifizierung der Arbeit: Individum, Gesellschaft, Nation”, in
Jürgen Kocka and Claus Offe (eds), Geschichte und Zukunft der Arbeit (Frankfurt [etc.], 1999),
pp. 449–475; van der Linden, Workers of the World, pp. 10, 266–268.
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4 Rodríguez García, van Nederveen Meerkerk and Heerma van Voss
“negative work”.5 But the expansion of the concept of work has only recently
become popular among scholars and activists. Over the last decades, terms
such as “precarious labour” and “informal” and “irregular work” have been used
to depict (respectively) poorly paid, short-term, and unstable occupations,
jobs excluded from the formal economy, and income-generating activities to
which “a heterodox or even asocial character is attributed inasmuch as they
lack general approval.”6 These novel conceptualizations have enabled the in-
clusion of reproductive or “female activities” such as care work and domestic
service within the world of labour.7
The labour approach to prostitution follows this recent shift in the social
sciences. In particular, historians have been of crucial importance in the re-
moval of prostitution from the literature of crime and deviancy and the inclu-
sion of prostitutes in the history of work.8 Yet, to paraphrase Timothy Gilfoyle,
new academic interpretations of prostitution hardly undermine tradition-
al views on commercial sex.9 Broadly speaking, we can identify four trends
(which are not necessarily mutually exclusive) within societal analyses and the
scientific study of prostitution.10 The deviant framework—much in vogue in
5 “Die negative Arbeit”, Von Landesgerichtsdirektor Rotering zu Beuthen (Oberschlesien),
Zeitschrift für die gesamte Strafrechtswissenschaft, 16 (1896), pp. 198–223, 198, quoted in
Sigrid Wadauer, “Work, Non-Work and Negative Work”, paper presented at the xiv Inter-
national Economic History Conference, Helsinki, 2006, p. 2, available at: www.helsinki.fi/
iehc2006/papers2/Wadauer.pdf; last accessed 7 July 2017.
6 Thomas Buchner and Philip R. Hoffmann-Rehnitz, “Introduction: Irregular Economic
Practices as a Topic of Modern (Urban) History—Problems and Possibilities”, in idem
(eds), Shadow Economics and Irregular Work in Urban Europe: 16th to Early 20th Centuries
(Vienna, 2011), pp. 3–36, 18; Sudhir Alladi Venkatesh, Off the Books. The Underground Econ-
omy of the Urban Poor (Cambridge, 2006).
7 See for example, Dirk Hoerder, Elise van Nederveen Meerkerk, and Silke Neunsinger
(eds), Towards a Global History of Domestic and Caregiving Workers (Leiden, 2015).
8 Timothy Gilfoyle, “Prostitutes in History: From Parables of Pornography to Metaphors of
Modernity”, The American Historical Review, 104 (1999), pp. 117–141, 120. According to Ju-
dith Walkowitz, there seems to be a consensus among American and British historians
who treat prostitutes as “workers and agents in history” and who interpret prostitution as
a form of labour, not necessarily “noble or dignified labor, but labor nonetheless.” Judith
Walkowitz, “History and the Politics of Prostitution: Prostitution and the Politics of His-
tory”, keynote address delivered at the second meeting of the cost Action “Comparing
European Prostitution Policies: Understanding Scales and Cultures of Governance”, Sala-
manca, 11 September 2014.
9 Gilfoyle, “Prostitutes in History”, p. 120.
10 Joyce Outshoorn, “Introduction: Prostitution, Women’s Movements and Democratic Poli-
tics”, in idem (ed.), The Politics of Prostitution. Women’s Movements, Democratic States and
the Globalisation of Sex Commerce (Cambridge, 2004), pp. 1–20, 6–9. Since the list of works
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Selling Sex in World Cities, 1600s–2000s: An Introduction 5
the modern period but certainly not defunct in the twentieth and twenty-first
centuries—departs from the assumption that prostitution creates a law and
order problem because it gives rise to all kinds of uncivilized, asocial, criminal,
and unhealthy behaviour. Scholars, social workers, activists, and public author-
ities who support this view define prostitution in terms of deviant behaviour
that needs to be controlled, regulated, or prohibited.11 In the morality view,
prostitution is perceived as a sin and a social evil or as symbolic of the double
sexual standard for men and women.12 Somewhat linked to the former, the op-
pression model holds that prostitution comes about through gender inequality
and poverty. Its proponents insist that disadvantaged socioeconomic circum-
stances and gendered power relations force women into prostitution. Their
“appalling” condition thus exposes them to exploitative situations as well as vi-
olence and human trafficking. Within this approach, the “prostituted woman”
is not criminalized but victimized. Since these women are not seen as persons
who exchange sexual services for money or other benefits but as victims who
are compelled to sell their bodies in patriarchal societies, prostitution is often
defined as rape or sexual slavery.13 The sex work paradigm also departs from
a socioeconomic and gender analysis but contrary to the oppression view, it
stresses the agency of the people involved in prostitution. It focuses on the
opinions and motivations of the concerned actors who implicitly or explicitly
perceive prostitution as an alternative way to make a living, often preferable to
other strenuous, dangerous, and low-paid jobs.
on prostitution that represent these trends is enormous, we will only cite here a few ex-
amples of each of them.
11 Cesare Lombroso and Guglielmo Ferrero, La donna delinquente, la prostituta et la donna
normale (Torino, 1893); this work has been translated in its totality by Hahn Rafter and
Mary Gibson: Criminal Woman, the Prostitute and the Normal Woman (Durham, 2004).
See also, Sybil Neville Rolfe, “Biological Aspects of Prostitution”, in idem, A Social Problem
Group (London, 1937); Hilary L. Surratt et al., “Sex Work and Drug Use in a Subculture of
Violence”, Crime & Delinquency, 50 (2004), pp. 43–59.
12 William Acton, Prostitution, Considered in its Moral, Social and Sanitary Aspects, in London
and other Large Cities. With Proposals for the Mitigations and Prevention of its Attendant
Evils (London, 1857); Prevention of Prostitution. A Study of Measures Adopted or Under Con-
sideration Particularly with Regard to Minors (Geneva, 1943).
13 Kathleen Barry, Female Sexual Slavery (Englewood Cliffs, 1979); Carole Pateman, “Defend-
ing Prostitution: Charges against Ericsson”, Ethics, 93 (1983), pp. 561–565, 562; Ashwini
Tambe, Codes of Misconduct. Regulating Prostitution in Late Colonial Bombay (Minneapo-
lis, 2009); Sheila Jeffreys, The Idea of Prostitution (North Melbourne, 1997); idem, The In-
dustrial Vagina: The Political Economy of the Global Sex Trade (London [etc.], 2009). How
men and transgender persons involved in commercial sex fit within this analytical frame-
work is unclear.
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6 Rodríguez García, van Nederveen Meerkerk and Heerma van Voss
The labour approach to prostitution has been influenced by various inter-
twined forces, the first of which is the increasing participation of women in
public protests. Even though the beginning of the sex workers’ movement is
commonly located in the 1970s, evidence exists of prostitutes organizing pro-
tests and stating their demands to the authorities already by the end of the
nineteenth century. In British territories, Indian prostitutes protested against
the harsh regulation system; in imperial Russia, they demanded health exami-
nations of clients, not just prostitutes; in New Orleans in 1907, prostitutes or-
ganized a successful strike against rent increases; and in the 1930s, Argentinian
women involved in prostitution used printed media to call for better work-
ing conditions and respect for prostitutes as workers. In interwar Germany,
prostitutes developed various strategies to resist abuse and gain more control
over their working conditions; some even formed their own union, the Asso-
ciation of the Legal Prostitutes of Hamburg and Altona. In the United States
too, early trade unions like the Industrial Workers of the World approached
prostitution as work and had prostitutes as members.14 Then, as the politi-
cal and cultural changes brought about by the 1960s and ’70s led to a further
strengthening of the feminist movement, prostitutes in different parts of the
world became more vocal and appropriated the language of human rights to
create more stable structures. The introduction of the terms “sex work” and
“sex worker” has been an important semantic shift signifying the growth of a
movement that understands commercial sex in terms of labour and expects
state protection.15
Obviously, stretching the concept of labour to include societal phenomena
such as prostitution within the legal parameters of work can have political and
socioeconomic consequences that (with a few exceptions) not even secular,
highly sexualized societies seem prepared to cope with. On a theoretical level,
this conceptual expansion can also have implications for the social sciences.
As Yvonne Svanström questions, “How far can the work-concept be stretched
14 Eileen Boris and Heather Berg, “Protecting Virtue, Erasing Labor: Historical Responses to
Trafficking”, in Kimberley Kay Hoang and Rhacel Salazar Parreñas (eds), Human Traffick-
ing Reconsidered. Rethinking the Problem, Envisioning New Solutions (New York, 2014), pp.
19–29, 21; Gregor Gall, An Agency of their Own: Sex Worker Union Organizing (Winchester,
2012), p. 13; Donna J. Guy, Sex and Danger in Buenos Aires: Prostitution, Family and Nation
in Argentina (Lincoln, 1991), p. 200; Victoria Harris, Selling Sex in the Reich: Prostitutes in
German Society, 1914–1945 (Oxford, 2010), pp. 61–64.
15 Jo Bindman, “Redefining Prostitution as Sex Work on the International Agenda” (Anti-
Slavery International, 1997), available at: http://www.walnet.org/csis/papers/redefining
.html#text1; last accessed 7 July 2017.
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Selling Sex in World Cities, 1600s–2000s: An Introduction 7
without losing its meaning?”16 Should all remunerated activities, including
begging, petty crime, surrogate pregnancy, and so on, as well as unpaid oc-
cupations such as elder and child care, housekeeping, subsistence farming or
volunteer work be treated as work irrespective of how the people involved or
society at large perceive these tasks?
John Budd offers a broad conceptualization which makes it possible to un-
derstand all such activities as work: “work is defined […] as purposeful human
activity involving physical or mental exertion that is not undertaken solely
for pleasure and that has economic or symbolic value.”17 True, the boundaries
between work and non-work/leisure are often blurred, especially when enter-
tainment, sexuality, and emotions are involved. But if we understand work to
be the “production of useful objects or services”,18 then prostitution is a form
of labour. There is no reason why overtly or less overtly sexualized activities
such as acting, modelling, professional dancing, massaging, and so on should
be viewed as work/service and prostitution should not. The working and liv-
ing conditions of prostitutes are often substandard and degrading but as the
contributions to this book evidence, this situation seems to come about due to
a lack of state protection, outright repression, and stigma rather than from an
intrinsically harmful nature associated with prostitution. Moreover, detrimen-
tal physical and psychological effects can occur in all kinds of occupations. As
Kimberly-Anne Ford has demonstrated in her comparative study of hospital
work and prostitution in Montreal, the stress levels and assault rates among
orderlies and prostitutes were surprisingly similar.19
Hence if we treat prostitution as the provision of sexual services, shouldn’t
we, once and for all, get rid of the old terms and systematically use “sex work”
and “sex worker” instead? We choose not to, and use both “sex work/er” and
“prostitution/prostitute” nearly interchangeably throughout this book. Even
though some authors have a preference for one over the other, sex work (in
the narrow sense) is used here as a synonym for prostitution. This brings us to
16 Comments on the papers of the session “Selling Sex in the City 1600–2000: Comparison”,
European Social Science History Conference, Vienna, 23 April 2014.
17 John W. Budd, The Thought of Work (Ithaca, 2011), pp. 2–3.
18 Marcel van der Linden, “Studying Attitudes to Work Worldwide, 1500–1650: Concepts,
Sources, and Problems of Interpretation”, International Review of Social History, 56 (2011),
pp. 25–43, 27.
19 Kimberly-Anne Ford, “Evaluating Prostitution as a Human Service Occupation”, in James
E. Elias et al. (eds), On Whores, Hustlers, and Johns (Amherst, ny, 1998), cited in Lena
Edlund and Evelyn Korn, “A Theory of Prostitution”, Journal of Political Economy, 110
(2002), pp. 181–214, 188–189.
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8 Rodríguez García, van Nederveen Meerkerk and Heerma van Voss
another intricate issue: a justification for the terms used and the definition of
prostitution.
At the start of the project that led to this publication we did not offer the
participants a definition of prostitution, but we asked them to pay atten-
tion to the overlapping of legal and cultural conceptualizations throughout
place and time. In other words, we asked them to make clear what in the
city or town discussed a prostitute was considered to be, and what kind of ac-
tivities constituted prostitution and which ones did not. As the authors of this
book demonstrate, the variety of sexual arrangements or “loose behaviours”
that public authorities and private actors have perceived to be outright or
close to prostitution is immense. We prefer the simplest possible definition.
A barebones definition of prostitution would be that it is the provision of
physical sex for payment and this is done with no prospects for marriage. The
latter is included to distinguish prostitution from long-term socially accept-
ed relationships that involve sexual exchange and financial arrangements.20
Payment is intentionally imprecise so that it can include other forms of re-
muneration besides money, and to leave the distinction between “treating”21
and payment to the cultural norms of the time and place in question. That
the sex should be physical is included to distinguish prostitution from paid
sexually-charged services like stripping, phone sex, or pornography. All these
forms of commercial sex are included in the (broadly understood) term “sex
work”.
Recently, other notions have been introduced to describe situations in
which an upfront monetary transaction does not take place, like sex-tourism
relations and sexual-economic relationships with teenagers or young men and
20 Edlund and Korn, “A Theory of Prostitution”, pp. 181–214, 183–184, from which we bor-
row the basic elements of our definition, also claim that sex in prostitution is, from the
man’s/client’s point of view, non-reproductive. This is useful in their analysis, where they
compare marriage with the selling of reproductive sex, with prostitution as the selling
of non-reproductive sex. For the long-term and global approach taken up in this project,
this distinction seems too narrow. It assumes, for instance, that effective contraceptive
measures and/or knowledge about them were/are always available, and unnecessarily
excludes the practice of short-term marriages from prostitution, or forms of prostitution
that mimic marriage.
21 The custom of “treating” became popular at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of
the twentieth centuries in New York. It referred to the trade of sexual favours for theatre
tickets, drinks, and other small presents by working-class women or “charity girls”, as they
were known in underworld slang. Kathy Peiss, Cheap Amusements: Working Women and
Leisure in Turn of the Century New York (Philadelphia, 1986); Elizabeth Alice Clement, Love
for Sale: Courting, Treating and Prostitution in New York City, 1900–1954 (Chapel Hill, 2006).
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Selling Sex in World Cities, 1600s–2000s: An Introduction 9
women, where gifts such as trips, meals, phones, drugs, or school tuition are
seen as being compensation for the services rendered. According to Kamala
Kempadoo, the notion “transactional sex” is more useful in describing the
activities of persons who are located outside the sex industry. Transactional
sex can be read as “the umbrella term for all acts, including but not limited
to sex work, where sexuality is exchanged for material and other non-sexual
benefits.”22 Similarly, Amalia Cabezas challenges the concept of sex work as
the only viable tool for understanding interactions between tourists and locals
in Cuba and the Dominican Republic. She argues that important issues such as
affection, companionship, and intimacy are absent in the terms “prostitution”
and “sex work”. For this reason, Cabezas chooses to use the term “tactical sex”,
which serves as a better means of understanding the “complex circulation of
sex and affect”. The importance of gifts is emphasized, as they represent an
“important feature of exchange and solidarity” and can transform the sexual
relationship into one of courtship and love.23
Neologisms like sex work, transactional sex, or tactical sex stress the self-
perception of the actors concerned and avoid the stigma surrounding prostitu-
tion. As with “charity girls”,24 people involved in transactional or tactical sex do
not define themselves as “prostitutes” or “sex workers” but rather as “escorts”,
“entertainers”, “business girls”, “beach boys”, “friends”, and so on; and, people
engaged in the unambiguous exchange of sex for money today tend to prefer
the term “sex worker”.25 Yet the new terminology has its limitations. As Kamala
Kempadoo admits, “the notion of tactical sex closely approximates what has
been described […] as transactional sex, even while the definitions of both
22 Kamala Kempadoo, Prostitution, Sex Work and Transactional Sex in the English-, Dutch-
and French-Speaking Caribbean: A Literature Review of Definitions, Laws and Research
(Greater Georgetown, 2009), p. 14.
23 Amalia Cabezas, Economies of Desire: Sex and Tourism in Cuba and the Dominican Repub-
lic (Philadelphia, 2009), pp. 120, 122.
24 See footnote 21.
25 Not all persons involved in prostitution like the term “sex worker”. Some perceive it as
being a politically-correct word that does nothing to de-stigmatize prostitution. Others
seem to dislike it because it would transform prostitution into an ordinary occupation; in
their view, it is the taboo that makes it appealing and profitable. However, most of them
acknowledge the political strength of the term, which can help to improve their work-
ing and living conditions. Melissa Hope Ditmore, “Introduction”, in idem (ed.), Encyclope-
dia of Prostitution and Sex Work (Westport, 2006), pp. xxv–xxxvii. These points were also
made during a study-day on prostitution organized by the city of Antwerp, Belgium (June
2014), to which public authorities, social workers, prostitutes, and academics (including
Magaly Rodríguez García) were invited to participate.
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10 Rodríguez García, van Nederveen Meerkerk and Heerma van Voss
remain fuzzy.”26 Furthermore, the boundary between transactional/tactical
sex and prostitution/sex work is not always clear.
According to Amalia Cabezas, the term “tactical sex” makes it possible for
us to acknowledge that commodification and affection are not mutually exclu-
sive, but this can also be said of unequivocal sex work. Sufficient empirical evi-
dence exists which testifies that prostitutes in past and present societies have
often offered much more than fast and unceremonious sexual intercourse, and
that their relations with loyal clients frequently involved friendship and even
affection.27 Transactional sex is said to respond to the interest of new needs
(the “commodities of modernity”), rather than basic ones.28 However, past and
contemporary prostitutes have often justified their involvement in commercial
sex in terms other than pure economic survival. The proponents of these new
terms also aim to avoid the so-called essentialism of words like prostitution
and sex work. They correctly point out that these activities (particularly when
practised by women) have since ancient times been understood in terms of
identity, not mere occupations. But this is not inherent in prostitution. In nu-
merous (past and present) cultures, the link between one’s/somebody else’s
job and identity is very strong.29
This conceptual overview demonstrates that there is no single word that
encompasses the complexity of commercial sexualities.30 The new lexicon is a
26 Kempadoo, Prostitution, Sex Work and Transactional Sex, p. 15.
27 A recent study on purchasers of sex conducted at Simon Fraser University, Canada, found
that male clients often value companionship as much as sex. Chris Atchison, “Report for
the Preliminary Findings for John’s Voice: A Study of Adult Canadian Sex Buyers”, 2010,
available at: http://www.johnsvoice.ca/; last accessed 7 July 2017. When the oldest pros-
titute from Brussels retired in 2011, she told the press her life story. During the thirty-five
years she spent behind a window in the red-light district, she had had five long relation-
ships with men who had been her clients before. Paul Demeyer, “Sonia (59) heeft haar
laatste klant ontvangen”, Nieuwsblad, 2 March 2011, available: at http://www.nieuwsblad.
be/cnt/gvi3716p8; last accessed 7 July 2017. Stories of sex workers establishing affectionate
bonds with clients abound in ego documents and Internet blogs.
28 Suzanne Leclerc-Madlala, “Transactional Sex and the Pursuit of Modernity”, Social Dy-
namics: A Journal of African Studies, 29 (2003), pp. 213–233.
29 “Except for the sexist language that should not be seen as excluding women, noted soci-
ologist Everett Hughes’s observation from 1971 remains relevant today: ‘A man’s work is
one of the things by which he is judged, and certainly one of the more significant things
by which he judges himself.’” Quoted in Budd, The Thought of Work, p. 149.
30 For a long-term overview of the notions that have been used to refer to the sex trade in
different times and societies, see: Magaly Rodríguez García, “Defining Commercial Sex-
ualities, Past and Present”, in Kath Browne and Gavin Brown (eds), Routledge Research
Companion to Geographies of Sex and Sexualities (Surrey, 2016), pp. 321–329.
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Selling Sex in World Cities, 1600s–2000s: An Introduction 11
welcome warning against the myths, generalizations, and oversimplifications
that abound whenever commercial sex is discussed. This has been achieved
through the bottom-up approach of research initiatives that include the points
of view of the people directly involved in these activities. Yet the danger of de-
constructing the use of sexuality in the exchange of material or non-material
benefits is that some “sexual-affective-economic activities”31 become roman-
ticized as feelings or companionship are stressed at the expense of economic
considerations. After all, we should keep in mind that authorities, jurists, doc-
tors, and social workers were and are not the only ones who seek to construct
commercial sexualities within the scope of single terms such as “fornication”,
“whoredom”, or “prostitution”. The actors who are involved themselves contrib-
ute to the creation of new discourses which attempt (but often fail) to draw
a radical distinction between prostitution, sex work, sexual barter, and trans-
actional or tactical sex. Indeed, as Amalia Cabezas compellingly states, “the
exchange of goods and money for sexual services is not an unambiguous com-
mercial endeavour but a discursive construction that is contested and in mo-
tion, changing across time and space.”32
So for the sake of clarity, the traditional words “prostitution/prostitute” will
be continued to be used here. Prostitution is more straightforward than the
terms sex work, transactional sex, treating, and so on, even though all of them
refer to “a sexual exchange for money or other valuables.”33 It is also a con-
cept that appears in the legislation and popular writings of most countries.
Admittedly, as various authors in this book point out, “prostitution” and “pros-
titute” (and its foreign equivalents) became widely used only after the end of
the eighteenth century to differentiate the sale of sex from simple fornication
and adulterous behaviour. But their origins lay in antiquity. Both words are
based on the Latin terms prostituere or prostare which referred to methods and
places of solicitation: standing in front of a brothel.
Another reason why the maintenance of these terms seems to be justifiable
is that they reflect the stigma that has characterized prostitution throughout
most of history, or perhaps more accurately, the history of prostitutes. As Lena
Edlund and Evelyn Korn state in their theory of prostitution, “while attitudes
toward prostitution have vacillated between c ondemnation and laissez-faire,
the prostitute herself has suffered a consistently poor reputation.”34 Indeed,
although some forms of high-level prostitution in earlier times commanded
31 Kempadoo, Prostitution, Sex Work and Transactional Sex, p. 15.
32 Cabezas, Economies of Desire, p. 4.
33 Ditmore, “Introduction”, p. xxv.
34 Edlund and Korn, “A Theory of Prostitution”, pp. 207–208.
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12 Rodríguez García, van Nederveen Meerkerk and Heerma van Voss
respect and prestige, most societies have treated prostitutes with contempt. At
times, they were seen as being part of the working class but the efforts made
to differentiate “good” from “bad” women seem to have been ubiquitous. From
antiquity to the present, the use of distinguishable c lothing or ornaments and
zoning laws have served the purpose of singling out and keeping sex workers
at a safe distance from “respectable” society.
The poor reputation of prostitution has deep roots. Throughout time and
space the notions used to describe commercial sexualities have nearly always
involved a condemnation of atypical sex acts. In spite of the geographical and
time differences in the way the sex trade has been practised and policed, the
available literature demonstrates that sexual desire has been deemed disrup-
tive in most cultures. As it became increasingly commodified with the rise
of industrial societies, the nation-state, and globalization, commercial sex
became a constant preoccupation of elites and the bourgeoisie. Particularly
women using sex for purposes other than (future) procreation were (and still
are in many places) openly or less openly incriminated.35 Female promiscuity
has been commonly condemned in all patriarchal societies as it threatens the
ability to ascertain paternity on the part of men and, from women’s point of
view, to secure faithful and healthy husbands or partners. Moreover, the nexus
between female licentiousness and financial or material gain exacerbates the
anxiety of men in their traditional roles as family heads and breadwinners.
In short, the “female capacity of opportunistic promiscuity threatens the very
premise of the patriarchal family, and the prostitute is a constant reminder of
this ability.”36
However, since the nineteenth century the vilification of sex workers has
increasingly made room for victimization. The increasing commercialization
of sexual activities in capitalist societies seems to have run parallel with an
increased sense of moral opprobrium, either because it is associated with
wantonness, unruly behaviour, and laziness or because it is understood to be
a violation of women’s dignity. Indeed, the notion of the “fallen woman” could
refer to the sinful or unruly behaviour for which she is responsible, but also to
situations of vulnerability in which women fall prey to malevolent men. Since
the second half of the nineteenth century, women involved in p rostitution
35 Michel Foucault, Histoire de la sexualité: La volonté de savoir (Paris, 1976); Robert Barker,
Kathleen Wininger and Frederick Elliston, The Philosophy of Sex (New York, 1984); Nina
Peršak and Gert Vermeulen, “Faces and Spaces of Prostitution”, in idem (eds), Reframing
Prostitution. From Discourse to Description, from Moralisation to Normalisation? (Antwerp,
2014), pp. 13–24.
36 Edlund and Korn, “A Theory of Prostitution”, p. 208.
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Selling Sex in World Cities, 1600s–2000s: An Introduction 13
have been increasingly perceived as victims in western countries where the
feminist movement gained ground. In Great Britain, feminists and libertar-
ians helped publicize a series of sexual scandals in the 1880s which ended with
the reporting on Jack the Ripper and the murder of five prostitutes. William
Stead’s publication of newspaper articles about the abduction of English girls
who were then sold to continental brothels, in addition to the media attention
given to the Ripper murders, rendered all men suspect and strengthened the
notions of urban danger and female fragility.37 The link between (migration
for) prostitution, male violence, economic oppression, and trafficking was es-
tablished in this way; by the end of the nineteenth century, a movement for
the suppression of the “white slave traffic”38 emerged in Britain and spread
internationally. Since the early twentieth century, national and international
initiatives to curtail female trafficking have gone in crescendo, and the view
of prostitution as a harmful activity in which women are the main victims has
become increasingly influential.39
The idea of “unusual sexuality” and the perception of sex workers as threats
or victims have not only reinforced the bad reputation of prostitution, but
they have also made it more difficult to study. Until recently, very few persons
directly involved in the sex trade left first-hand accounts of their activities
and motivations. Scientific analyses containing information about the social
backgrounds and the working and living conditions of prostitutes in the past
are usually based on sources (such as police records, judicial files, medical re-
ports, data collected by relief institutions, newspapers clippings, and so on)
that are inevitably incomplete and biased. What is more, in contrast to the
analysis of other forms of work, it appears that the study of prostitution is also
heavily influenced by emotions and personal views about female sexuality
37 Judith Walkowitz, “Jack the Ripper and the Myth of Male Violence”, Feminist Studies, 8
(1982), pp. 542–574.
38 The term “white slavery” was used in the early 1800s to denounce the plight of sailors of
“white” nations captured by pirates in the North of Africa. Only by the end of the nine-
teenth century had the term become feminized and linked to the traffic of women for
prostitution. In 1921, the League of Nations replaced the racialized term “white slavery”
with “traffic in women and children”.
39 This trend has not progressed in a linear way towards repression. Instead, waves of strong
anti-trafficking and anti-prostitution campaigning can be discerned from the late 1800s
until the end of the 1930s and again since the last decades of the twentieth century. The
last wave has run parallel to a movement that demands the recognition and redefinition
of prostitution as sex work.
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14 Rodríguez García, van Nederveen Meerkerk and Heerma van Voss
and intimacy.40 Because sexuality evokes both empowerment and vulnerabil-
ity, the bodily contact involved in prostitution can be seen as a reminder of
women’s capacity to adapt to harsh life circumstances, or as the quintessential
symbol of female oppression. In both cases, the reputation of the trade is to a
greater or lesser extent tarnished as the participants’ consent is repeatedly put
into question.
Many authors, policy makers, and activists argue that consent in prostitu-
tion is impossible or at least highly problematic. Inspired by radical feminism,
some claim that prostitution is always coercive because no person can ever
consent to rape. Women’s consent to prostitution would simply be another
sign of their “multi-layered oppression” and submission to male supremacy
and violence.41 This is the logic behind the criminalization of purchasing sex,
a move that was first made in Sweden at the end of the 1990s followed by a
few other countries in subsequent decades and passed by the European Parlia-
ment as a non-binding resolution in 2014.42 Others do not go as far as to equate
prostitution with rape or sexual slavery but stress the gendered socioeconomic
factors that push many women into prostitution. Even observers who treat
prostitution as a form of work often specify that it is not a job like any other
or create new concepts to draw a line of demarcation between sex work and
other sexual-economic relationships. By doing so, they unwillingly reinforce
the poor reputation of prostitution as well as the idea that real consent to this
kind of unconventional occupation is unlikely.43
Since consent, agency, and coercion are dealt with in two separate chapters
in this book, we wish here only to specify why the issue is so important to sex
workers and highlight the argument that consent to sex work is no less possible
than consent to other (substandard or stigmatized) jobs. As stated above, some
40 We are thankful to Jan Lucassen for bringing this point to our attention during the Eu-
ropean Social Science History Conference, Vienna, April 2014. Hendrik Wagenaar and
Sietske Altink, “Prostitution as Morality Politics or Why it is Exceedingly Difficult To
Design and Sustain Effective Prostitution Policy”, Sexuality Research and Social Policy, 9
(2012), pp. 279–292, argue that prostitution policy can be understood as an instance of
morality politics. As such, much of prostitution policy is influenced by ideology, is emo-
tionally charged, and is resistant to empirical evidence.
41 Jeffreys, The Idea of Prostitution, pp. 135–137.
42 “Punish the Client, Not the Prostitute”, available at: http://www.europarl.europa.eu/news/
en/news-room/content/20140221IPR36644/html/Punish-the-client-not-the-prostitute;
last accessed 7 July 2017.
43 We would like to thank the members of the cost Action “Comparing European Prostitu-
tion Policies: Understanding Scales and Cultures of Governance” who raised this point
during the second Action meeting, Salamanca, 10–13 September 2014.
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Selling Sex in World Cities, 1600s–2000s: An Introduction 15
writers have argued that prostitution is so traumatizing that it is impossible to
really consent to it, and that by consequence prostitution always lacks consent.
Yet there is no lack of (past and contemporary) statements by women who
insist that they work in the sex industry voluntarily. We do not deny that some
women are forced to work in the sex trade. We also acknowledge that many
women (and men) accept jobs under unfavourable circumstances, and only
have unattractive options from which to choose. Many workers, both histori-
cally and today, have had to accept jobs which involved risks (including sexual
harassment) or were unhealthy or demeaning.44 Hence we see no reason to
treat sex work as a special case, unequal to all other kinds of work,45 or to
disregard the voices of women who say that sex work was their choice among
the options available to them. Acknowledgement of the existence of consent
and agency in prostitution strengthens the view of prostitutes as workers and
could facilitate the legalization of sex work and subsequent protection of the
trade’s employees.46
44 Economic constraints force millions of men and women into situations that are not
necessarily of their liking and that are often harmfully exploitative. At its most abstract,
all forms of labour can be described as coercive, as work implies a choice between two
disagreeable alternatives and in extreme cases between two evils. According to Robert J.
Steinfeld and Stanley L. Engerman, “Labor—Free or coerced? A Historical Reassessment
of Differences and Similarities”, in Tom Brass and Marcel van der Linden (eds), Free and
Unfree Labour: The Debate Continues (Bern, 1997), pp. 107–126, no real distinction exists
between free and slave labour in terms of a requirement to work in order to survive. In
their view, the classification of labour into “free” or “unfree” is arbitrary. It is the law which
determines “what kinds of coercive pressures are legitimate and illegitimate in labour
relations.”
45 As we write in the conclusion, we see prostitution as highly sexualized and highly gen-
dered. In this characterization, it would perhaps be a better argument to treat sex work as
a special category rather than dwell on the coercive, unhealthy and demeaning character
of the occupation, but in our opinion treating sex work as incomparable with other kinds
of work which often exhibit similar characteristics is not warranted either.
46 Barbara Sullivan, “Rethinking Prostitution and ‘Consent’”, in F. Castles and J. Uhr (eds),
Proceedings of the 2000 Conference of the Australasian Political Studies Association (Can-
berra, 2000), pp. 1–7, argues that for a long period sex workers have been unable to press
charges when they were raped, as they were seen as always being available to men. In
the countries she has researched (the United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, and New Zea-
land), this changed in the 1980s and ‘90s. This new trend, as well as sex workers’ increased
involvement in public debates, are proof that the women concerned “negotiate consent
within a particular set of power relations and are able to distinguish between their con-
sensual work as prostitutes and non-consensual rape” (p. 3). If prostitution is seen as al-
ways involving rape, there is a risk that this change can become undone again. See also
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16 Rodríguez García, van Nederveen Meerkerk and Heerma van Voss
However, this has not convinced the advocates of the moral and oppres-
sion approaches to prostitution, who claim that women are either made to
lie about their consent or have deluded themselves into believing that they
do of their free will what they are really forced to do at home or abroad. In-
deed, the issue of consent has been raised in relation to sex migration since
the end of the nineteenth century. Even though the conflation of prostitution
and “white slavery” was predominantly made in relation to underage white
girls,47 the idea that no woman, regardless of her age, could consent to travel
abroad and become engaged in prostitution became increasingly popular from
the interwar period onward. During the 1920s, the League of Nations still made
a differentiation between consenting adult women and underage children
taken abroad for prostitution; the latter were always treated as victims of traf-
fic, consent not being a defence.48 By the 1930s, however, the League strength-
ened the argument that “even if a woman over age freely consents to being
the object of the traffic, in the majority of cases she is not fully aware of the
disaster to which she is being led.”49 Subsequent conventions approved by the
League and the United Nations made the consent of women irrelevant.50 In
the year 2000, the United Nations approved the Protocol to Prevent, Suppress
Barbara Sullivan, “Rape, Prostitution and Consent”, Australian and New Zealand Journal of
Criminology, 40 (2007), pp. 127–142.
47 In 1910, the International Convention for the Suppression of White Slave Traffic was
signed, and it included the offence of procuring adult women by means of fraud, vio-
lence, or other forms of compulsion, and women under the age of twenty even with their
consent, for immoral purposes abroad.
48 In 1921, the International Convention for the Suppression of Traffic in Women and Chil-
dren supplemented the provisions of earlier international agreements by extending the
protection to women of twenty-one and to minors of either sex.
49 League of Nations Traffic in Women and Children Committee, Minutes of the Twelfth Ses-
sion, Third Meeting, Geneva, 7 April 1933, p. 5, ctfe/12th Session/PV.3, League of Nations
archives, United Nations Office at Geneva.
50 The 1933 International Convention for the Suppression of the Traffic in Women of Full
Age covered the offence of procuring, enticing or leading away even with her consent, a
woman or girl of full age for immoral purposes to be carried out in another country. In
1937, the League drafted a Convention for Suppressing Exploitation of the Prostitution of
Others, intended to fill the gap in the existing conventions by protecting adults of either
sex against procuration, even when they consented and were not taken abroad. The out-
break of World War ii prevented its approval by the League’s Assembly, but many of the
main ideas included in the draft convention were taken up by the 1949 un Convention
for the Suppression of the Traffic in Persons and of the Exploitation of the Prostitution of
Others. Magaly Rodríguez García, “The League of Nations and the Moral Recruitment of
Women”, International Review of Social History, 57 (2012), pp. 97–128.
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Selling Sex in World Cities, 1600s–2000s: An Introduction 17
and Punish Trafficking in Persons Especially Women and Children, commonly
known as the Palermo Protocol, and defined the crime of human trafficking as
follows:
“Trafficking in persons” shall mean the recruitment, transportation,
transfer, harbouring or receipt of persons, by means of the threat or use
of force or other forms of coercion, of abduction, of fraud, of deception,
of the abuse of power or of a position of vulnerability or of the giving or
receiving of payments or benefits to achieve the consent of a person hav-
ing control over another person, for the purpose of exploitation.
Article 3(b) of the Palermo Protocol specifies that the consent of a victim of
trafficking is deemed irrelevant if any of the means cited above have been
used.51 What was new about the Palermo Protocol was that it introduced a
definition of trafficking in international law and that the issue of coercion and
deceit are therein included. However, the definition is so broad that it can in-
clude cases in which the nature of coercion or control over another person is
difficult to determine.
The problem with this broad understanding of trafficking and its blending
with the migration of women who are in “a position of vulnerability” is that it
reifies the mental binaries of victim/perpetrator without taking into account
the fluidity and complexity of labour relationships in the sex trade (as well
as in other economic activities). This approach easily negates the agency of
migrant workers who often respond to push factors “rather than the pull factor
of trafficker enticement.”52 It also simplifies labour arrangements which often
result in both progress and subjugation as well as improvements in workers’
economic opportunities, and at the same time subjects them to exploitative
working conditions.53
51 Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons Especially Women and
Children, supplementing the United Nations Convention against Transnational Orga-
nized Crime, available at: http://www.ohchr.org/EN/ProfessionalInterest/Pages/Protocol-
TraffickingInPersons.aspx; last accessed 7 July 2017.
52 Ronald Weitzer, “New Directions in Research on Human Trafficking”, The ANNALS of the
American Academy of Political and Social Science, 653 (2014), pp. 6–24, 16.
53 Kimberley Kay Hoang and Rhacel Salazar Parreñas, “Introduction”, in idem, Human Traf-
ficking Reconsidered, pp. 1–18, 7–9. See also Lex Heerma van Voss, “The Worst Class of
Workers: Migration, Labor Relations and Living Strategies of Prostitutes around 1900”, in
Marcel van der Linden and Leo Lucassen (eds), Working on Labor: Essays in Honor of Jan
Lucassen (Leiden [etc.], 2012), pp. 153–170.
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18 Rodríguez García, van Nederveen Meerkerk and Heerma van Voss
Human trafficking is therefore an ambiguous notion that requires further
empirical research54 and that has, in our view, no linear relation with prosti-
tution. Just like issues of concepts, policies, race, ethnicity, class, health, vio-
lence, space, the role of war, and male concentrations in industrial, military,
and administrative hubs, forced (migration for) prostitution is a theme that
appears in all the contributions to this book but receives no special treatment
in a separate comparative chapter.
The volume is divided into two parts, one containing twenty-three urban
overviews while the other includes eight thematic papers. All the authors of
the urban essays were required to cover prostitution in the city or town in
question between 1600 and the present, or for the time it existed if the city did
not exist as a town of sufficient size for the full four centuries. As stated above,
the authors were instructed to follow a framework document and to answer a
set of questions on three broad themes. This explains the (relative) homoge-
neity of all the urban overviews. Since we were interested in how the history
of sex work has been approached in different times and places, as well as in
the various legal and cultural definitions used by state and non-state actors in
each city, one section of each paper is devoted to historical contextualization,
historiography, and definitions. A second theme is related to societal reactions
regarding prostitution. Society is here broadly conceptualized and refers to the
way that public authorities and private actors have responded to prostitution
across time and space. Local, national, and international initiatives to control,
regulate, and/or repress the sex trade, as well as the role played by religious and
secular organizations in “redeeming” prostitutes or defending their interests,
are included in the analyses. The third theme concerns the labour market for
prostitution, more precisely the prostitutes’ social profiles; political and socio-
economic factors influencing the sex trade (urbanization, i ndustrialization, col-
onization, war, demographic transitions, and revolutions in communications
and transport); changes in working conditions (indoor or outdoor p rostitution,
payment systems, prostitution as a part- or full-time activity, relations to other
forms of “female occupations”, and so on); the prostitute/employer/client-
relationship; and sex workers’ culture (hierarchy, solidarity, organization, self-
representation, and views on prostitution). The urban o verviews are organized
54 On the difficulties of measuring the phenomenon and on the absence of the opinions of
sex-work migrants in narratives of human trafficking, see: Paul Knepper, “Measuring the
Threat of Global Crime. Insights from Research by the League of Nations into the Traffic
in Women”, Criminology, 50 (2012), pp. 777–809; Brenda Oude Breuil et al., “Human Traf-
ficking Revisited: Legal Enforcement and Ethnographic Narratives on Sex Trafficking to
Western Europe”, Trends in Organized Crime, 14 (2011), pp. 30–46.
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Selling Sex in World Cities, 1600s–2000s: An Introduction 19
in four regional sections: Europe, Africa and the Middle East, the Americas,
and Asia-Pacific.
The willingness of the authors to respond to (most of) these issues facili-
tated the preparation of comparative papers on prostitution in relation to la-
bour relations, working conditions, migration, colonization, agency, coercion,
gender, and social profiles. Hence the thematic overviews are based on the
results of the different urban papers but the authors were given the liberty
to use the available literature and approaches they deemed necessary to dis-
cuss the theme under consideration. Inevitably, there is some overlap in the
various themes, but we do not consider this to be a problem. On the contrary,
the interrelation between various issues—for example, migration and working
conditions or gender and colonization—adds to a better understanding of the
complexity of prostitution.
The intricacy of the subject, combined with the almost complete lack of
information for many periods, places, and actors, results in a global history that
does not cover each corner of the globe or each period to the same degree. We
have covered every region of the world, but sub-Saharan Africa is underrepre-
sented. Information about many ex-colonies in the Americas, Africa, and Asia
for the period before the nineteenth century, as well as on prostitution in rural
or suburban areas is often unavailable. Similarly, historical data about male
and underage prostitutes or on clients and third parties is even more scarce
than material on female sex workers. Yet, as is demonstrated in the concluding
chapter, the cities and themes included in this volume provide a solid basis
for a global history of prostitution and we are confident that they also make
a valuable contribution to a more comprehensive understanding of the world
of labour.
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20 Rodríguez García, van Nederveen Meerkerk and Heerma van Voss
Appendix 1: Framework Document for Urban Overviews
1. Introduction: A few paragraphs historiography, methodology and sources
2. Definitions: overlapping of legal and cultural definitions throughout place and time:
This section should make clear what in the town (country, culture) discussed a prosti-
tute was considered to be; what activities constituted (also) prostitution (e.g. adultery
and which did not (e.g. sexual services from a slave to her master); which sexual ser-
vices were considered close to or distinct from prostitution?
3. The labour market for prostitution:
Push and pull factors
Urbanization and industrialization
Proletarization and pauperization
Gender segregation in the “regular” labour market
Demographic transition (delayed marriages and family formation)
Concentrations of males with money to spend: mines, garrison towns, naval bases,
ports …
War
Migration
Women’s economic emancipation: decline of prostitution? (possible to measure?)
Communication and transport revolutions and their influence on prostitution
Changes of working conditions throughout time and place
Indoor, outdoor soliciting
Payment systems (exchange of sex for any valued commodity/sexual barter: also con-
sidered prostitution?)
Independent work or under protection of madams, pimps or escort agents?
Prostitution during wartime and near military concentrations in times of peace
Prostitution as casual or permanent employment: part- or full-time activity?
Relation to other forms of sex work (dancing, stripping, massage) or related profes-
sions (masseuse, nightclub hostess)
Prostitutes’ social profiles
Religious, racial and ethnic backgrounds
Education level
Employment prior or parallel to prostitution
Family situation (married; unmarried; children …)
Age structure (age of beginning and end of prostitution): temporary or life-long
activity?
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Selling Sex in World Cities, 1600s–2000s: An Introduction 21
Prostitute/employer/client-relationship
Conditions of compliance and traces of defiance (formal and informal activism) to-
wards clients, employers and/or labour intermediaries (pimps, madams, brothel
keepers, escort agents, owners of massage parlours or barber shops …)
Material conditions of subservience imbedded in a wider structure of gendered, eco-
nomic, class or racial subservience?
Prostitutes’ culture
Hierarchy
Did issues of race, ethnicity and class play a role in the shaping of hierarchy? And vice
versa: did prostitution help produce racial and class hierarchies?
How did location, types of clients, levels of protection (madams, pimps, escort agents,
etc.) and earnings influence the shaping of hierarchies?
Solidarity: Did social constructs based on race, religion, class and age encourage or
discourage group solidarity?
Self-presentation and prostitutes’ attitudes towards prostitution: survival, inclination,
emancipation, desire for luxury consumption, attraction to easy earnings, disdain
of “normal” work …?
4. Society and prostitutes:
State and non-state persecution and violence
State regulation/prohibition/tolerance
Prostitutes’ physical and psychological health
Non-state actors’ activism: religious and secular social workers; feminists
Effects of women liberalization (tolerance of pre-marital sex): decline of prostitution?
Increased acceptance of prostitution as a way of life?
5. (Optional) Special cases:
Child prostitution
Male and homosexual prostitution
Prostitution in non-urban areas
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part 1
Urban Overviews
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section 1
Europe
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chapter 2
Selling Sex in Amsterdam
Marion Pluskota
Amsterdam, now the capital of the Netherlands, was founded in the twelfth
century, and it grew rapidly during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries
thanks to the development of its port and colonial ventures. The city suffered
a decline from the mid-eighteenth century onwards but with industrialization
picking up at the end of the nineteenth century, Amsterdam regained its status
as an influential European city. In parallel with liberal legislation on certain
drugs, Amsterdam also has a worldwide reputation regarding prostitution. The
red-light district and the whole city to a certain extent appear in contemporary
popular culture as the epitome of permissiveness and luxury. It has attracted
international attention as indicated by the fact that millions of tourists visit
the city every year. Amsterdam caters for international sex tourists, and in the
global market and global imaginary, the city’s red-light district has acquired a
reputation comparable to that of Thailand with its open and visible sex mer-
chandizing. From a legal point of view, contemporary Amsterdam (and the
Netherlands in general) is an interesting case study on legalized prostitution,
showing the drawbacks and positive aspects of national and municipal efforts
to control and supervise prostitution in a legal environment greatly influenced
by globalization. The history and reputation of prostitution in Amsterdam ren-
der it unique, and the abundant sources available make it possible to trace
the evolution of this trade and its relations with the city, its citizens, and the
official institutions which have governed urban spaces. Because of this long
history and the different policies that have been implemented over the cen-
turies, the links between prostitution and urban space can be studied much
more effectively than in most other cases. From the micro-scale to global in-
teractions, Amsterdam’s history of prostitution shows how location, migration,
and the global market have influenced prostitutes’ work, whilst having a non-
negligible impact on the city’s economy.1
1 Lotte van de Pol, The Burgher and the Whore: Prostitution in Early Modern Amsterdam (Oxford,
2011); Michaël Deinema and Manuel B. Aalbers, “A Global Red-Light City”, in Michael de
Waard (ed.), Imagining Global Amsterdam: History, Culture, and Geography in a World City
(Amsterdam, 2012), pp. 273–287.
© Marion Pluskota, 2017 | doi 10.1163/9789004346253_003
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28 Pluskota
Historiography and Sources
Despite its long history, the historiography on Amsterdam prostitution is im-
balanced, as is shown by the fact that the Middle Ages and early modern pe-
riod have been little researched. One history of prostitution in Amsterdam
is the well-known book by Lotte van de Pol which gives interesting insights
into the role of prostitution in the seventeenth and eighteenth century port
economy of the city. However, no recent academic work has focused on the
early modern period although various sources exist which could be used to
study prostitution in the city in depth.2 Confessie boeken (sentencing records
which include the testimonies of parties accused of crimes) and the other ju-
dicial archives which were extensively used by van de Pol offer various details
about prostitutes’ lives in the port city. These sources can be complemented
with a study of the literature of the time. Indeed, both Dutch and international
travellers wrote about the harbour district of Amsterdam and complimented
(or wrote scathingly about) the entertainments available and the presence
of prostitutes on the streets and in public houses.3 For example, Het Amster-
damsch Hoerdom was published in 1681 and reprinted nine times. Translated
into French and German, it was used as a template for London Jilt (1683). These
works of fiction followed a literary trend which started at the end of the seven-
teenth century and exploded in the eighteenth century with a proliferation of
novels featuring prostitutes as their main characters, and sometimes the books
verged on pornography.4 Though the various adventures of the main protago-
nists are fictitious, many authors seemed to have relied on their personal ex-
periences when they described the places their characters inhabited, allowing
for a more nuanced representation of seventeenth-century music houses and
2 van de Pol, The Burgher and the Whore; J.F. van Slobbe, Bijdrage tot de geschiedenis en de
bestrijding der prostitutie te Amsterdam (Amsterdam, 1937); Sijmons Diet, “Een noodzakelijk
kwaad, maar voor wie? Prostitutie in de tweede helft van de negentiende eeuw”, in Jaarboek
voor Vrouwengeschiedenis (1980), pp. 65–110; Petra de Vries, Kuisheid voor mannen, vrijheid
voor vrouwen (Amsterdam, 1997); Petra de Vries, “Josephine Butler and the Making of Femi-
nism: International Abolitionism in the Netherlands (1870–1914)”, Women’s History Review, 17
(2008), pp. 257–277.
3 van de Pol, The Burgher and the Whore, pp. 9, 19; J.H. Bose, “Had de mensch met één vrouw
niet connen leven…”, in Prostitutie in de literatuur van de zeventiende eeuw (Zutphen, 1985).
4 See for example Anonym, D’Openhertige Juffrouw (Amsterdam, 1680), a sixteenth-century
century “sex manual” republished regularly in the seventeenth century; Pietro Aretino, The
School of Whoredom (London, 2003); Inger Leemans, Het woord is aan de onderkant (Nijme-
gen, 2002); Gert Hekma and Herman Roodenburg, (eds), Soete minne en helsche boosheit,
seksuele voorstelling in Nederland 1300–1850 (Nijmegen, 1988), pp. 109–144.
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Selling Sex in Amsterdam 29
e ighteenth-century brothels. Prostitutes and brothel scenes were also often
painted by Dutch artists in the seventeenth century, despite the Calvinist influ-
ence on artistic creation. Although the representations did not correspond to a
realistic depiction of prostitution, elements in the paintings give information
about the environment surrounding exchanges with prostitutes.5
The few studies on prostitution in early modern Amsterdam have focused
on the representation of prostitutes but the relations between the authorities,
inhabitants, and prostitutes have not been studied in depth (with the excep-
tion of the work by van de Pol). This lack of a reflection on social control is
somewhat counterbalanced by studies on prostitution in nineteenth-century
Amsterdam. Indeed the moral and legal status of prostitutes changed after the
French invasion of 1806. The French system of municipal regulation was put
in place by French officials in garrison towns and to a certain extent also in
Amsterdam during the French presence. However, the municipal authorities
in Amsterdam were not keen on strictly regulating prostitutes and the French
system was quickly abandoned, although other Dutch cities such as The Hague
kept it in place. The existing historiography has tended to focus on the rela-
tions between the municipality, the police, and prostitutes; indeed, despite the
lack of official regulation, the police kept an eye on prostitutes.6 Petra de Vries
has published various studies on the discrepancies between legal municipal
systems and how they influenced the development of the abolitionist move-
ment in the Netherlands. De Vries’ works also show how concerns about the
white slave trade (linked with the abolitionist movement) led to the closure of
Amsterdam’s brothels in 1897 and state-wide prohibition on brothel-keeping in
1911. Studies have shown that both officials and the population in general were
not in favour of the harsh treatment of prostitutes and the authorities tended
to apply the regulations loosely; the closure of brothels (Bordelenverbod) has
been seen by historians as a measure to prevent trafficking without criminal-
izing prostitutes.7 Research on the ban on brothels has shown how men and
women adapted to this regulation and how certain places, such as cigar-shops,
became façades for brothels.8
Contemporary Amsterdam is a particularly useful ground for anthropologists,
sociologists, geographers, and researchers working in the fields of criminology
5 Lotte van de Pol, “Beeld en wekerlijkheid van de prostitutie in de zeventiende eeuw”, in Ibid.
6 Martin Bossenbroek and Jan Kompagnie, Het mysterie van de verdwenen bordelen (Amster-
dam, 1998).
7 de Vries, Kuisheid voor mannen, vrijheid voor vrouwen; de Vries, “Josephine Butler and the
Making of Feminism”; An Huitzing, Betaalde Liefde (Bergen, 1983), p. 57.
8 Bossenbroek and Kompagnie, Het mysterie van de verdewenen bordelen, pp. 302–303.
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30 Pluskota
and law.9 Since the early debates in parliament on the legalization of prostitu-
tion in the Netherlands, which was officially enacted in 2000, both the national
government and the city of Amsterdam have c ommissioned various research
projects about the pros and cons of the legalization of prostitution and broth-
els from human and economic perspectives.10 Contemporary research has
often been based on interviews, and photographs, documentaries, films, and
biographies have also been used to collect information on prostitution in the
twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Official data has been collected by the
city council, the government, and independent researchers, but it is still dif-
ficult to analyse and compare certain findings, notably on human trafficking.
The number of women trafficked in the Netherlands is not definitively known,
but the main issue with studies on trafficking relates to the various definitions
and methodologies used to calculate the extent of trafficking; for example, cer-
tain studies published before the legalization of prostitution in the Nether-
lands considered most foreign women as having been trafficked even though
they went to the Netherlands willingly.11 These discrepancies in definitions
(trafficking can also involve local women) make it difficult for researchers to
give a clear picture of the reality, all the more as the media have been known to
relay misleading information.12
Indeed, some researchers have been interested in demystifying certain ideas
that the media have reported about human trafficking, coercion in prostitu-
tion, and pimping. The Dutch character known as the “loverboy”, for instance,
came into being at the beginning of this century as the result of the unease
9 Phil Hubbard, “Afterword: Exiting Amsterdam’s Red Light District”, City, 16 (2012),
pp. 195–201, 195.
10 See for example, Beke’s research and Anton van Wijk et al., Kwetsbaar beroep, onderzoek naar
de prostitutiebranche in Amsterdam (Amsterdam, 2010) which was commissioned by the
government; available at: https://www.amsterdam.nl/projecten/project-1012/publicaties-
project/externe-onderzoeken/kwetsbaar-beroep/; last accessed 7 July 2017; Marcel Buster,
Straatprostitutie & vrouwennachtopvang in Amsterdam (Amsterdam, 2007), which was
commissioned by the Amsterdam municipality; Dirk J. Korf et al., Tippelen na de zone,
straatprostitutie en verborgen prostitutie in Amsterdam (Amsterdam, 2005); Sasja Biesma
et al., Verboden bordelen, evaluatie opheffing bordeelverbod: niet legale prostitutie (Gron-
ingen, 2006).
11 For instance, Fanny Polania Molina and Marie-Louise Janssen, I Never Thought This Would
Happen to Me (Rotterdam, 1998).
12 Frank Bovenkerk and Marion Van San, “Loverboys in the Amsterdam Red Light D istrict:
A Realist Approach to the Study of a Moral Panic”, Crime, Media, Culture, 7 (2011),
pp. 185–199; Marion Van San and Frank Bovenkerk, “Secret Seducers”, Crime, Law and
S ocial Change, 60 1 (2013), pp. 67–80.
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Selling Sex in Amsterdam 31
caused by young Dutch girls falling under the “spell” of young men (usually, but
not always, a second or third generation child of immigrants) who would then
force them into prostitution. However, such so-called “loverboy” practices are
not in any way different from other pimping methods, nor have cases of forced
prostitution increased over time.13 It should also be noted that researchers’ in-
terviews with prostitutes and pimps have produced results that contradict the
aims and missions of municipal projects.
Though contemporary prostitution in Amsterdam is well known, the main
subject(s) of research have been the women working behind the windows,
which is a specific type of prostitution, as well as women working in registered
brothels and adult entertainment venues where live sex acts are performed.
These women are part of the legal area of prostitution and therefore are more
accessible to the police, social workers, and researchers but unregistered
prostitution is the fastest growing type in Amsterdam and research on these
women remains difficult.14 Through registration with the Chamber of Com-
merce (Kamer van Koophandel—KvK) women have been granted the status of
independent workers and employees, and they are taxed; while women work-
ing at licensed houses were compelled to register, a study carried out in 2005
showed that 70 per cent of the women working at licensed houses were not
registered with the tax office.15 Moreover, these figures do not include women
who worked with escort services or from home, as these forms of prostitution
were not covered by the lifting of the ban on brothels in 2000. This issue is
now covered by new legislation that was enacted in 2014 (see below). Although
there are some figures on street prostitutes, women working as escorts and in-
dependently outside the red-light areas, as well as former prostitutes, have not
been the subject of academic research yet. It is unclear how women working
without being registered and registered women working in the windows com-
pare. The links between different working spaces deserve further analysis;16 for
example, how do women move from one working space to another and how
do they think of them? Changing work patterns and environments are most
likely a career choice and the extent of prostitutes’ agency in this regard is dif-
ficult to evaluate. The most recent report on prostitution in Amsterdam states
13 Bovenkerk and Van San, “Loverboys in the Amsterdam Red Light District”; Bovenkerk and
Van San, “Secret Seducers”; and for the general public, H. Korterink, Echte mannen eten
wel kaas (Amsterdam, 2010).
14 van Wijk et al., Kwetsbaar beroep, p. 213.
15 Helga Dekker et al., Evaluatie opheffing bordeelverbod: De sociale positie van prostituees,
2006 (Amsterdam, 2006), p. 30.
16 Note the exception of Lucie van Mens, Prostitutie in Bedrijf (Rotterdam, 1997).
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32 Pluskota
that social mobility between working spaces can be quite high (for instance
between brothel prostitution and window prostitution), but more academic
research on this topic would be welcome,17 as would work on the issues of
segregation by age, gender, and nationality, and further studies on prostitutes’
life-cycles in any given period should be encouraged.
What Defines Prostitution in Amsterdam?
Prostitution has never been a uniform, clearly defined business. Over time its
definition has changed, influenced by external and internal factors. Prostitutes
themselves differentiate between amateurs and professionals, and historically
a hoer (whore) was a woman who had sexual intercourse outside of marriage
but not for money.18 Fornication and adultery were considered degrading be-
haviours and as such were frowned upon by the community. The exchange of
money was not the main concern of the authorities in the early modern period;
however, it is under the terms hoer and hoererij that prostitutes can be found
in the Amsterdam archives. Van de Pol noticed a semantic shift in the expres-
sions used by the court and in prostitutes’ testimonies over the years. Towards
the end of the eighteenth century, prostitution started to be considered a live-
lihood distinct from immoral behaviour and adultery.19 The uniqueness of
Amsterdam in comparison to other cities such as Paris or Florence was its strict
Calvinist culture which forbade sexual relations between unmarried people;
prostitutes could therefore be arrested for having sexual encounters without
being married but the exchange of money was not the decisive factor. As such,
we can find them in the judicial archives but as the Amsterdam municipality
had a very limited “police force”, restraining the growth of prostitution appears
to have been very difficult.20
The term prostitute will be used in place of “whore” (hoer) and sex worker in
this chapter, although all of them can be seen as being anachronistic. The term
“prostitute”, which was not in use in official regulations until the nineteenth
century, refers to a more neutral term than “whore”, whereas the expression
“sex worker” reflects a postmodernist idea of prostitution as a form of labour
to which rights and regulations can be applied. Contemporary sex workers,
17 van Wijk et al., Kwetsbaar beroep, p. 33.
18 van de Pol, The Burgher and the Whore, pp. 5–6.
19 Ibid., p. 6.
20 Available at: http://publications.nichibun.ac.jp/en/item/symp/2001-03-30/pub; last ac
essed 7 July 2017.
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Selling Sex in Amsterdam 33
some of whom are union members, demand labour rights and defend their
way of earning money. The notion of the “pressure group” is often associated
with the expression “sex worker”; they consider themselves, as do the state or
state authorities for example in the Netherlands, Germany, and Nevada where
prostitution is legal, to be a particular group of workers. Such a characteriza-
tion in the early modern period was more or less absent. Historically, while
some prostitutes defended their right to work, there were no large national or
international pressure groups as is the case today. Admittedly, the French sys-
tem of regulation created a new category of workers based on the authorities’
perceptions of prostitution, but we do not know to what extent this change
of attitude also applied to these women; did they consider themselves to be
members of one specific group of workers or did they keep defining them-
selves as seamstress, washerwomen, or milliners? The absence of the proof of
a common reference between nineteenth-century prostitutes or of a pressure
group led by prostitutes makes “sex worker” look like an anachronism when
applied to periods before the end of the twentieth century.
The basic understanding of the prostitutional exchange since the nine-
teenth century has involved the exchange of money for a sexual act and in this
study that is taken up within the scope of such acts between men and women.
This demarcation unfortunately leaves aside men and transgender individuals
working in the sex industry, as well as the people whose initial work contracts
did not include sexual relations with a client, such as strippers and other per-
formers.21 The sexual encounter is often preceded by an act of soliciting by
which a person accosts someone in order to offer sexual services. While selling
one’s body for sex has never been legally condemned in Amsterdam, soliciting
has often been targeted by legislators, notably within the framework of “disor-
derly behaviour”. This distinction is based on moral considerations; the act of
soliciting is understood to be an interaction visible to the public and occurring
in the public sphere. The sexual intercourse and the exchange of money that
follow soliciting are deemed to be private matters that are usually kept out
of the public eye.22 Because of this distinction, sexual exchanges for money
cannot be supervised as effectively as the processes that occur before sexual
intercourse and payment.
Definitions of prostitution also vary according to the location of the pros-
titutes. In contemporary Amsterdam the working spaces of prostitution took
21 See for example Christine Harcourt and Basil Donovan, “The Many Faces of Sex Work”,
Sexually Transmitted Infections, 81 (2005), pp. 201–206.
22 Joyce Outshoorn, “Policy Change in Prostitution in the Netherlands: From Legalization to
Strict Control”, Sexuality Research and Social Policy, 9 (2012), pp. 233–243, 234.
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34 Pluskota
and still take multiple forms, from street work to private clubs and homes. The
international reputation of Amsterdam for prostitution led to the diversifica-
tion of entertainment venues open to both tourists and locals. Live sex shows,
strip clubs, massage parlours, and theme nights in brothels cater for all types
of customers. According to the woman’s status and her labour relations, she is
more or less mobile in the city and can use one working space to solicit and
another to have sexual intercourse. The working space often defines the type
of prostitutional exchange offered, or in other words, the sexual services pro-
vided. These range from a hand job to a full night with a “girlfriend experience”
which appends emotions to an otherwise impersonal sexual encounter.
Different categories of prostitutes existed in Amsterdam throughout the
centuries. Streetwalking has always been considered to be the lowest type of
prostitution; these women solicit on the street and either go to a hotel or have
sex in the client’s car. In earlier times, they used parks, alleys, and empty build-
ings, as it may still happen nowadays. There is no fixed time limit but quick
sexual encounters mean more clients in one day/night. The prices are lower
than in other settings as no rent is involved (less than €50). Streetwalking is
forbidden in Amsterdam but it is known that a few women (around 45 women
in 2009) still work the streets.23 It is not always known if they are independent
or working for a pimp. A window prostitute solicits and provides her services in
the same working space; that seems to be the most desirable place of work for
prostitutes as, once they move from private clubs to window prostitution, they
tend to never go back to the brothels.24 As Sabat explains, window prostitution
is “enabled by contemporary economic values that simulate efficiency, produc-
tivity and fast consumption”; a “suck and fuck” costs €50 for twenty minutes
and is the most common service provided.25 Some other forms of sexual ac-
tivities can be bought from window prostitutes for a higher fee but not every
woman offers those services; in general, sexual intercourse is performed with a
condom. The rent of a window for a day’s work (usually an 8-hour shift) varies
from €80 to €150 (2014 prices), depending on the day of the week, the time of
the day, and the location of the window. Ashworth et al. have pointed out the
similarities between “shoe shopping” and choosing a prostitute; the display and
atmosphere surrounding the women improve the customers’ experience and
commodify, to the extreme, the bodies of the women (and men) behind these
windows.26 The concept of the window display has been in existence since the
23 van Wijk et al., Kwetsbaar beroep, pp. 111–112.
24 Ibid., p. 58.
25 Magdalena Sabat, “From Red Light to Black Light”, City, 16 (2012), pp. 158–171, 158.
26 Gregory Ashworth et al., “The Red-Light District in the West European City: A Neglected
Aspect of the Urban Landscape”, Geoforum, 19 (1988), pp. 201–212, 208.
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Selling Sex in Amsterdam 35
late 1950s, a time when brothels were officially banned, although already be-
tween the two World Wars prostitutes could be seen loitering near their doors
and windows.27 Since the 1950s, the well-known windows have offered the am-
bivalence of public and private spheres in Amsterdam. The women are visible
to the public whilst being in a private environment. Despite being on display,
they remain in control of their interactions with the public and can choose to
ignore customers and other pedestrians. The windows can be seen as a dual
environment that is both private and public but which remains the prostitute’s
own space. Ideally, she has total control over who is allowed to enter her room.
Under the terms of the regulation enacted in the year 2000, window prostitutes
were required to be registered with the municipality (not the police), but that
did not bring pimping to a halt (see below).28
Women working at brothels tend to solicit in the bar area (if there is one)
before moving to a private room with a client or they can be on display in an
anteroom for the customer to choose. Brothels or contemporary “private clubs”
are defined as establishments where men can meet prostitutes and perform
sexual acts, usually in a private room. When a woman works in a totally en-
closed environment such as a brothel, she is most likely under the supervision
of a third party and therefore compelled to give away some of her wages (to
her employer or protector). This also means that she cannot make the work-
ing space her own. Early modern taverns, inns, and other non-licensed places
referred to as bawdy-houses (and some music houses) served as the precursors
of brothels. The meaning of “brothel” became restricted over time; the pro-
cess of the privatization of prostitution over the centuries meant that brothels
came to systematically offer rooms to their customers. Live-in prostitutes were
common in the nineteenth century as part of attempts to regulate prostitution
and supervise establishments where prostitution occurred, but in the early
modern period “fetched whores” counted for a fifth of the arrests in brothels.29
Nowadays in Amsterdam, brothels are clubs or privéhuis where men can meet
prostitutes and have sexual intercourse in one of the rooms of the house. A
man, a woman, or a couple can be in charge of the establishment; prostitutes
themselves are rarely the owners (except when they own a privéhuis, a house
shared with other prostitutes), but they can work as employees or indepen-
dent workers, in the latter case paying a fee to use the premises. Brothel o wners
27 Sabat, “From Red Light to Black Light”, p. 160; Fred Stemvers, Meisjes van plezier: de ge-
schiedenis van de prostitutie in Nederland (Weesp, 1985), p. 119.
28 Wim Huisman and Edward Kleemans, “The Challenges of Fighting Sex Trafficking in
the Legalized Prostitution Market of the Netherlands”, Crime, Law and Social Change, 61
(2014), pp. 215–228, 227.
29 van de Pol, The Burgher and the Whore, p. 27.
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36 Pluskota
tend to employ women as independent workers in order to avoid paying taxes.
Current legislation is meant to give sex workers sufficient autonomy but re-
search has shown that some women often have to surrender much of their in-
dependence to the owner; this is particularly the case for non-EU nationals or
minors who are working as prostitutes illegally without a work permit.30 These
women are often dependent on their employers as they need protection from
the police and the risk of deportation.
In the upper levels of the prostitution hierarchy there are escorts who work
independently or are employed by an agency to cater to specific clients. Their
work tends to be less regular than women working in the windows and in sex
clubs but their wages are often higher; they meet fewer clients than the other
prostitutes and offer their company as well as sexual services. Their working
spaces vary and they are much more mobile during their shifts than a window
prostitute or streetwalker (their services can include accompaniment to a din-
ner, party, or room). It can be more difficult for them to refuse certain sexual
acts and they are often more vulnerable than window prostitutes, as they are
working in environments which afford them less social control; in the same
way, their mobility within the city can make their encounters with clients un-
safe, as they might not be able to choose the meeting place. However, working
in the upper hierarchy of prostitution has its advantages in the sense that the
women are often less subject to the control and supervision of the authorities
and police. In Amsterdam before the legislation enacted in 2014, some escorts
working with unregulated agencies or prostitutes based from home worked in
a grey area with looser social ties; indeed these women were not working in a
regulated environment and therefore had less contact with the authorities. Al-
though they were required to register as independent workers for tax purposes,
few of them complied. Independent workers were advised to register with the
KvK under the title “prostitute”, “erotic service provider”, or “personal service
provider”; since the KvK registers are public, prostitutes were also advised to
register under a professional name as their home address was also available
to the public.31 Such employees must be registered with the tax office and in
this way they can enjoy the same rights as other workers (including retire-
ment pension, sick leave, and unemployment benefits). However, this lack of
privacy explains why many single women have worked as independent escorts
or worked from home; in that way, they could ensure that their privacy was
30 Lisa Sanchez, “Sex and Space in the Global City”, in Richard Warren Perry and Bill Maurier
(eds), Globalization under Construction (Minnesota, 2003), pp. 151–178.
31 Available at: http://www.amsterdam.nl/zorg-welzijn/programma/algemene-artikelen/
inschrijven-kamer/; last accessed 7 July 2017.
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Selling Sex in Amsterdam 37
respected and no trace of their profession was registered in official documents.
However, the new legislation promulgated in 2014, the aim of which was to
change this situation, stated that these women have to register with the tax
bureau. This change in the legislation was meant to cover this area of prostitu-
tion which was not regulated and thus leaves women open to certain risks (in
terms of dependence on a third party).
Mapping Amsterdam’s Prostitution over the Centuries
The geography of prostitution in Amsterdam is particularly interesting as we
can follow, to a certain extent, the spatial development and regression of many
districts in relation to prostitutes’ working spaces. Indeed there exists a link
between the prostitutional spaces and socio-economic development of the
districts, especially before the invention of cars, which led to a dispersion of
prostitutes in the urban landscape. In 1925, Burgess et al. defined the specifici-
ties of urban spaces where “vice” developed and stated that these were most
likely zones of transition where social and economic development came to a
halt and a clear decline was experienced both structurally and morally with
increasing rates in crime, poverty, degradation, and disease.32 However, Am-
sterdam’s areas of prostitution have not experienced the same socio-economic
evolution and it appears that the relationship between prostitution and urban
space is more complex than a mere correlation between a zone of transition
and the development of prostitution. Red-light districts in Amsterdam have
not been displaced according to the transitional zone theory. On the contrary,
we see in Amsterdam a historical continuity in the use of urban space for pur-
poses related to selling sex; thus, the notion of spaces of transition, though
relevant in certain periods, cannot be considered to be a fundamental element
of the location of red-light districts in Amsterdam. Prostitution grew in the city
centre (from the Middle Ages to today) in the newly built residential district
of the Pijp (especially from the end of the nineteenth century onwards), or
more recently in 1996 around the new harbour. As will be seen below, many
variables need to be taken into account if we want to understand the locations
of prostitution. Confinement has never been strongly imposed by the munici-
pality, although the authorities tried to maintain certain boundaries between
the districts. However, for these boundaries to be respected prostitutes have to
implicitly agree with the municipality’s legislation; indeed from an economic
32 Robert E. Park et al., The City (Chicago, 1967), p. 54.
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38 Pluskota
point of view, it is unlikely that women would agree to move if this meant los-
ing customers.
Starting at least in the Middle Ages, prostitutes could be found in the city
centre near the port. First, only two streets were allocated to prostitution
but the trade quickly expanded at the same pace as the maritime trade and
economic development of the city. Catering for mariners was a lucrative af-
fair, so these women remained close to the port in what is now known as the
red-light district of De Wallen (including Zeedijk Street, which nowadays is
more reputed for its bars and restaurants than for prostitution). But the trade
also extended towards the Dam, Rokin, and the Nieuwe Stadhuis in the seven-
teenth century, and the Kalverstraat, which adjoins the Dam square, became a
cruising lane by the twentieth century. Indoor prostitution in the nineteenth
century was concentrated in these areas but with the closing of the brothels
in 1897, prostitution moved to new districts, as well as to hotels and cover-up
businesses. As de Wildt and Arnoldussen explain, spatial dispersal and the use
of non-specific premises meant that prostitution blended into the everyday
urban landscape.33 At the end of the eighteenth century, the newly-built Plan-
tage district saw a rise in outdoor prostitution, whilst the northern part of the
Pijp became another red-light district when new social housing was built in
the mid-nineteenth century. Rembrandt and Thorbeckeplein could be visited
at night although streetwalking had been forbidden starting in 1889. The pres-
ence of a park in this district meant that prostitutes could bring their custom-
ers there, which was impossible in the old city centre as it was overcrowded
and had few quiet dark alleys suitable for sexual intercourse. The geography of
prostitution in Amsterdam confirms Symanski’s argument; he showed how the
geography of prostitution is based on the proximity of customers (economic
opportunities) and the working space available, with disused buildings, parks,
and abandoned spaces being particularly attractive for streetwalkers.34
Despite an increase in car ownership in the 1950s and 60s, streetwalkers did
not move outside the city but remained inside the Singels around Leidseplein
and Utrechtsestraat and also behind the train station. In the meantime, the
relative indifference of the authorities and the local community in the de Wal-
len and Nieuwmarkt districts meant that prostitution continued to develop in
this environment.35 In an attempt to regulate streetwalking, the Amsterdam
33 Annemarie de Wildt and Paul Arnoldussen, Liefde te koop: Vier eeuwen prostitutie in
A
msterdam (Amsterdam, 2002).
34 Richard Symanski, The Immoral Landscape: Female Prostitution in Western Societies
(Toronto, 1981).
35 Deinema and Aalbers, “A Global Red-Light City”, p. 284.
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Selling Sex in Amsterdam 39
municipality opened a tippelzone (streetwalking zone) in 1996 near the new
port, in the West-Eilanden district and on Theemsweg, which was reserved for
streetwalkers and their clients who picked them up by car. Due to its limited
success in terms of control and safety, it was closed in 2003. Street prostitu-
tion is officially illegal in Amsterdam although researchers found that in 2007
around fifty women were still practicing streetwalking (this figure dropped to
forty-five in 2009). The decrease of streetwalking is linked with the develop-
ment of the internet and new technologies which make it possible for women
to find clients online and get in touch with them in a less visible way. Many of
the street prostitutes went to work either in the escort business or worked from
home and dispersed around the city.36
Window prostitution can be found in the de Wallen district in the Pijp (be-
hind the Rijksmuseum) and de Singel (between Raadhuistraat and Centraal
Station) whilst brothels are spread all over the city. Each urban space offers
specific services and is used in a different manner; the old city centre, close to
the train station and constant streams of tourists, promotes window displays
and wild, often homosocial entertainment. Though sex workers are spread
around the city, the de Wallen district remains the main red-light district and
is considered nowadays to be a very safe area: the police patrol the streets on
a regular basis and renewed social control has emerged, and it has been nur-
tured by the sex-workers themselves, the men they employ for their safety, the
inhabitants of the district, and the people working in this district but not in
sex work (for example at pubs, coffee-shops, and other such establishments).
To a certain extent, this form of social control resembles the atmosphere in
the 1950s and ‘60s,37 although the crowds, displays, and working conditions
have changed. The most famous brothels which cater for a more distinguished
clientele have moved out of the red-light district and can be reached by car
or taxi. While streetwalkers and window and brothel prostitutes are linked
to specific urban spaces, escorts are more mobile than other sex workers and
they have unlimited access to the urban space. The geography of Amsterdam
prostitution is therefore defined by three variables: the proximity of customers
(or ease of access), the type of customers targeted, and the type of prostitu-
tion offered. These elements explain the concentration, or on the contrary the
spread, of prostitution in the urban environment and must be taken into ac-
count by the authorities when they try to implement new laws targeting the
location and development of prostitution.
36 van Wijk et al., Kwetsbaar beroep, pp. 111–113.
37 Sabat, “From Red Light to Black Light”, p. 161.
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40 Pluskota
The Historical Development of Legislation on Prostitution
The growth of Amsterdam in the seventeenth century brought about many
economic and social opportunities for city dwellers and migrants, and most
likely rates of prostitution increased accordingly. Indeed the urban environ-
ment always had a specific allure for migrants because it offered work, op-
portunities, money, and anonymity. Amsterdam grew steadily from the low
Middle Ages to the eighteenth century, and in the first half of the seventeenth
century it was considered to be the economic centre of Europe. Maritime
traffic brought money to the city and the Dutch East India Company was a
constant recruiter of young men for its ships. The territorial and commercial
expansion of the Low Countries abroad also led to the expansion of the city;
new quays, warehouses, buildings, and canals were built, for which both skilled
and unskilled labour were needed. More women were also needed in domestic
services such as in the clothing industry but they also worked in food services
and as charwomen, as well as in other areas of the informal economy.38
Favourable economic development encouraged male and female migra-
tion from the countryside (usually single young migrants) but that process
was not reversed when the economy of the country started to weaken at the
end of the seventeenth century. Marked by crises in the textile industry and
maritime rivalries with England, the Amsterdam market and international
exchange gradually slowed down at the same time as the economic situation
in the countryside deteriorated; nonetheless, migration patterns towards ur-
ban centres did not follow the same downward trend.39 Men could still enlist
with the Dutch East India Company but for women, their chances of finding
work were decreasing and this may well have swelled the ranks of prostitutes.
Amsterdam, like many early modern cities, had an unfavourable gender ratio
due to the number of men going to sea while women’s migrations ended in the
city. It is therefore likely that these socio-economic changes led to an increase
in prostitution.
Between 1600 and 2000, the municipality followed a policy of “regulated
tolerance”, a term coined by Chrisje Brants. Starting out with a laissez-faire
attitude at the end of the Middle Ages, the reformed municipality enacted
legislation against prostitution in 1578 which sought to “protect” family hon-
our. However, its impact was limited and despite pressure from the reformed
38 Lotte van de Pol and Erika Kuypers, “Poor Women’s Migration to the City: The Attrac-
tion of Amsterdam Health Care and Social Assistance in Early Modern Times”, Journal of
U
rban History, 32 (2005), pp. 44–60, 48.
39 Ibid.
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Selling Sex in Amsterdam 41
Church to condemn prostitutes, they did not have the financial and admin-
istrative means to enforce the law. Except during the time of French control
and the period following the closing of the brothels, the city council rarely
enforced its own regulations.40 Hubbard and Whowell have noted the impor-
tance of legislation in the displacement and re-location of red-light districts in
recent history,41 but from an historical point of view, this argument has limited
relevance as the combined coercive power of the municipality and the police
nowadays are not comparable to what authorities could do in the early mod-
ern period or even in the nineteenth century. The municipality may have an
impact on the locales of prostitution nowadays, as it has sufficient financial
means to impose its control, but early municipal authorities never had enough
resources to influence the development and distribution of prostitutes around
the city. Other forms of social control created at the level of the district by the
neighbourhood residents and prostitutes “regulated” where prostitution was
practised.
The first real increase in the number of prostitutes getting arrested occurred
in 1670, when music halls multiplied and the municipality felt that its inter-
national reputation was under threat by the licentiousness that seemed to be
common in those establishments.42 However, those efforts were short-lived
and after 1710 the municipality decided to focus more on the procuresses and
people benefiting from the revenues of prostitution.43 With the introduction
of the French penal code in 1811, only the pimping of minors was criminalized
but at the local level the police actively carried out their duties. Starting in
1806, there was an increasing number of French troops in the Netherlands, so
the director of the police, Devilliers Duterrage, introduced the French regula-
tory system to prevent the spread of syphilis, and the registration of prostitutes
and medical check-ups were made compulsory. The prostitutes had to be ex-
amined by a surgeon and carry a red card which contained their personal de-
tails. However, in 1813 the regulation was abandoned in Amsterdam although
there was still a drive to find ways to better control prostitutes.44 Officials and
the police tacitly agreed that the removal of prostitutes to brothels made it
40 Chrisje Brants, “The Fine Art of Regulated Tolerance in Amsterdam Prostitution”, Journal
of Law and Society, 25 (1998), pp. 621–635, 622–623.
41 Phil Hubbard and Mary Whowell, “Revisiting the Red Light District: Still Neglected,
Immoral and Marginal?” Geoforum, 39 (2008), pp. 1743–1755, 1753.
42 Slobbe, Bijdrage tot de geschiedenis en de bestrijding der prostitutie, p. 28; van de Pol, The
Burgher and the Whore, pp. 36–42.
43 Ibid., p. 37.
44 Slobbe, Bijdrage tot de geschiedenis et de bestrijding der prostitutie, pp. 37–38.
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42 Pluskota
easier for them to keep tabs on the women; to a certain extent, prostitution
appeared to be necessary for the city and, more importantly, could not be
eradicated.45 While some cities and garrison towns in the Netherlands chose
to keep the regulation system, the decision made in Amsterdam to repeal the
laws on the regulation of prostitution can be seen as the result of a traditional
view of prostitutes and their role in the economy of the city. However, even if
the municipal authorities did not impose strict control over prostitutes, the
police could arrest and confine prostitutes to a hospital if they appeared to be
diseased.46 This form of supervision was implemented in an attempt to reduce
the spread of venereal diseases, but by the end of the nineteenth century it
became apparent to hygienists and municipal authorities that the system was
an overall failure.
The moral panic over the “white slavery” that erupted at the end of the
nineteenth century brought a whole new dimension to the issue of controlling
prostitutes.47 Josephine Butler and various men’s and women’s associations
petitioned governments to end the traffic of (white) women. Drawing upon
these fears of white slavery, the Amsterdam municipality followed the advice
of the abolitionists and in 1897 the city’s brothels were closed down on the
grounds that they encouraged the traffic of women and procuring was heavily
punished. The result was that prostitution (prostitutes, pimps, and intermedi-
aries) was driven underground, leading to a new distribution of prostitution in
the city. Women started working at cover-up businesses such as massage par-
lours, cigar stores, and cheap hotels.48 The brothel ban was nationalized in 1911
but prostitution continued unabated and the ban created a grey zone as pros-
titutes moved to new locations to meet customers and worked in an illegal en-
vironment.49 Some women continued to work in the city centre whilst others,
possibly under the supervision of ex-brothel owners, moved out to other dis-
tricts. Prostitution benefitted from a certain degree of indifference on behalf
of the municipality after the Second World War, and the 1950s saw an increase
in women soliciting from their windows in the de Wallen district. However, the
atmosphere of the red-light district started going downhill by the end of the
1970s as organized crime started taking more control of the streets and with
45 de Vries, Kuisheid voor mannen, vrijheid voor vrouwen, p. 28.
46 Annet Mooij, Out of Otherness (Amsterdam, 1998), p. 53.
47 Petra de Vries, “‘White Slaves’ in a Colonial Nation: The Dutch Campaign Against the
Traffic in Women in the Early Twentieth Century”, Social & Legal Studies, 14 (2005),
pp. 39–60, 52.
48 Bossenbroek and Kompagnie, Het mysterie van de verdwenen bordelen.
49 Vries, “‘White Slaves’ in a Colonial Nation”, p. 56.
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Selling Sex in Amsterdam 43
the arrival of hard drugs and junkies, some of whom were prostitutes.50 The
red-light district became a no-go area and streetwalking increased.51 Victims
of the aids epidemic and junkie prostitutes became a serious issue for public
health.52
As in many other western cities, the city centre of Amsterdam in the 1980s
suffered from pauperization as the middle classes left the decrepit centre for
suburban areas. The red-light district, which had previously been inhabited
by working class families and was used as a working space for prostitutes in
the 1960 and 1970s, gradually fell into disrepute. In parallel with the exodus of
families to suburban areas and a decrease of demographic diversity, the level
of social control based on neighbourhood ties also declined. The district was
gradually taken over by organized crime which invested in the decrepit build-
ings and turned them into cover-up businesses for prostitution and gambling.
Facing such large-scale prostitution and drug crimes, the municipality, in con-
sultation with the police, decided to take action against the illegal business
that was carried out in the district. By the mid-1990s, the renewal of licenses
for entertainment businesses was restricted and the municipality passed a
number of laws which allowed for the repossession of buildings where ille-
gal activities were engaged in, in an attempt to reduce organized crime in the
city centre.53 Similarly, discussions were held to determine how to cut ties
between prostitution and organized crime. Since the banning of brothels in
1897, prostitutes had been tolerated as long as they worked “alone” and no pro-
curing was involved. However, pimping and brothels continued to exist and
were gradually tolerated by the authorities as well but the police struggled to
regulate activities that were officially forbidden.54 The rise of criminality in
the 1980s put a strain on the municipality and forced it to revise its position
50 Wim Huisman and Hans Nelen, “‘Gotham’ unbound Dutch Style”, Crime, Law and Social
Change, 48 (2007), pp. 87–103, 95; see also J. Anneke van den Hoek et al., “hiv Infection
and std in Drug Addicted Prostitutes in Amsterdam: Potential for Heterosexual hiv
Transmission”, Genitourinary Medicine, 65 (1989), pp. 146–150; Harry J. van Haastrecht
et al., “hiv Prevalence and Risk Behaviour Among Prostitutes and Clients in Amster-
dam: Migrants at Increased Risk for hiv Infection”, Genitourinary Medicine, 69 (1993),
pp. 251–256.
51 Liza Nell and Jan Rath, “Ethnic Groups in Amsterdam’s Public Spaces”, in Liza Nell and
Jan Rath (eds), Ethnic Amsterdam: Immigrants and Urban Change in the Twentieth Century
(Amsterdam, 2009), pp. 23–40, 28.
52 Brants, “The Fine Art of Regulated Tolerance”, pp. 627–628.
53 Ibid., p. 632; Hubbard and Whowell, “Revisiting the Red Light District”, p. 1748.
54 Joyce Outshoorn, “Policy Change in Prostitution in the Netherlands: From Legalization to
Strict Control”, Sexuality Research and Social Policy, 9 (2012), pp. 233–243, 234.
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44 Pluskota
regarding prostitution. By legalizing prostitution and brothels at the end of the
1990s, the city council and the police hoped to supervise the trade and reduce
the main-mise of organized crime in the business. The de Wallen district was
equipped with cctvs and the police patrolled more often, gradually making
the old streets safer for pedestrians and the women working there.
The increase of organized crime and other serious offences in the Neth-
erlands prompted debates in parliament, and the Amsterdam municipality
pushed for the legislation to be changed so that the police could take control
of the district and reduce the nuisances caused by prostitution and drug mar-
kets. One of the first such attempts was the opening of a tippelzone in 1996.
The tippelzone offered walled car park spaces and a place for prostitutes to
meet and visit social workers and doctors. The municipality wanted to reduce
criminal activities in connection with prostitution, in particular streetwalking,
such as drug sales, human trafficking, and child abuse.55 The municipality then
had to deal with disagreements about how to relocate prostitution; sex workers
were not willing to leave the streets and the prostitutes whom the authorities
hoped to see relocated in the tippelzone remained in the city centre whilst new
prostitutes, often illegal immigrants, came to work in the new official area.56
Registration and the legalization of prostitution in 2000 revealed the extent of
illegal prostitution occurring in the tippelzone; the majority of women working
in this area were illegal immigrants from outside the eu. Fears of trafficking
darkened the image of the tippelzone. While this zoning was meant to improve
security for streetwalkers and remove pressure on them from criminal orga-
nizations, research showed that improvements in prostitutes’ working condi-
tions had been limited. The failure of this project led to its cessation in 2003.
Official debates and pressure from women’s movements led to the legaliza-
tion of prostitution at the national level in 2000. Huisman and Kleemans have
summarized the assumptions of the parliament that prompted the vote to lift
the ban in the following terms: the illegal aspects of prostitution could be re-
duced if rules were implemented to define what was allowed and the various
actors and institutions could become jointly responsible in efforts to improve
conditions for prostitution.57 Prostitution was defined as sexual intercourse in
exchange for money between two (or more) consenting adults. Brothels were
55 Sander Flight et al., Evaluatie tippelzone theemsweg, effect extra beheersmaatre-
gelen (Amsterdam, 2003), available at: http://publicaties.dsp-groep.nl/getFile.cfm?
file=1SFTippel_Evaluatie_tippelozone_Theemsweg_Amsterdam2003.pdf&dir=rapport;
last accessed 7 July 2017.
56 Ibid., p. 31.
57 Huisman and Kleemans, “The Challenges of Fighting Sex Trafficking”, p. 217.
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Selling Sex in Amsterdam 45
also legalized and women could therefore work legally for an intermediary and
be wage earners instead of just self-employed. The legislation also encouraged
the registration of prostitutes as a specific type of worker (independent worker
or employee) for tax purposes. Members of the eu could work legally as pros-
titutes, but legalization did not apply to people from outside the eu. The new
legislation also granted new rights to prostitutes and instituted new require-
ments; the windows and rooms in brothels had to be fitted with a minimum
of conveniences and a panic button had to be installed. Medical check-ups
were encouraged but not compulsory, and free screenings for venereal diseas-
es were offered. In terms of labour rights, women who were registered with
the tax office could access social benefits and should, in theory, be entitled to
sick leave and unemployment benefits. In practice, researchers showed that
the administrative and legal status of prostitutes remained precarious, espe-
cially in relation to their employers who often refused to declare them as em-
ployees.58 In parallel, the authorities’ requirements concerning the women’s
working conditions applied only to window and brothel prostitution (as well
as street prostitution before the closing down of the Theemsweg), meaning
that much prostitution remained unregulated, such as (some) escort services
and home prostitution. Recent figures have shown that these last two forms of
prostitution are practised by a third to half of the total number of prostitutes
in Amsterdam.59 The lack of control over this type of prostitution led to a revi-
sion of the legislation in 2013 and 2014. Along with raising the age of entry into
prostitution to 21, the new legislation required that escorts and home-based
prostitutes register with the tax office or the KvK to ensure that they have ac-
cess to social services and give the authorities more control over the women,
with the aim of reducing trafficking.
More than a decade after the legalization of prostitution, the authorities
managed to come to terms with the failures of some aspects of the legisla-
tion. For instance, the working conditions of prostitutes have not improved
as expected; pimps are still present in the red-light district and although the
women are registered as independent workers, some give a large share of their
earnings to pimps. Secondly, as mentioned above, the non-regulated trade en-
courages the illegal prostitution of minors and illegal immigrants, over which
control is relatively hard to impose. Police resources are stretched and although
parts of the illegal business were shifted to the unregulated sector, to a certain
extent the legalized market remains an informal economy marked by illegal
58 Ibid.
59 van Wijk et al., Kwetsbaar Beroep, p. 202.
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46 Pluskota
practices.60 Verhoeven and van Gestel’s article on police efforts to gain insights
into traffic rings shows that the majority of trafficking cases prosecuted by the
police occurred in the regulated branch of prostitution.61 Lastly, the discrepan-
cies between the databases and the aims of the police and the KvK/tax office
have prevented them from joining forces to fight illegal forms of prostitution.
This short account of the historical changes in Amsterdam’s legislation on
prostitution shows how the municipality has tried to impose a certain form
of control over prostitutes when their actions or behaviour have had negative
effects on the image and reputation of the city. A dialogue was not set up be-
tween the prostitutes, municipality, and police, and no single voice stood up
for these women prior to the end of the twentieth century. Even the Dutch
abolitionist movement remained estranged from the reality of prostitution
and what the women really needed and wanted;62 official control was clearly
imposed upon them rather than being the product of a consensus between the
various actors involved. It was not until the 1970s that sex workers’ unions were
created with the aim of working with the authorities to improve the working
conditions of prostitutes. In the early 1980s in Amsterdam, the licensing of
prostitution was advocated by the de Graaf Foundation to improve sex work-
ers’ working conditions; the idea was well received by the media and the pub-
lic, and this was followed by parliamentary recommendations.63 In 1985, the
first international meeting of sex workers was held in Amsterdam and this led
to the creation of the International Committee for Prostitutes’ Rights (icpr).64
Sex workers, by signing the World Charter for Prostitutes’ Rights, took a pub-
lic stand to defend their right to work and to receive the same social benefits
as other workers; also, they opted for the decriminalization of adult prostitu-
tion and encouraged the changing of attitudes towards prostitution in order
to lessen the social stigma linked with this form of work. Emphasis was also
placed on the freedoms that should be granted to prostitutes so that they can
live and work where they wish, and regular dialogues between the authorities,
prostitutes, and professionals such as lawyers, doctors, and social workers were
60 Ibid., p. 221; Maite Verhoeven et al., “Legale Sector, Informele Praktijken”, Cahiers Politie
studies, 29 (2013), pp. 115–130.
61 Maite Verhoeven and Barbara van Gestel, “Human Trafficking and Criminal Investiga-
tion Strategies in the Amsterdam Red Light District”, Trends in Organized Crime, 14 (2011),
pp. 148–164.
62 de Vries, “‘White Slaves in a Colonial Nation”, p. 53.
63 Jackie West, “Prostitution: Collectives and the Politics of Regulation”, Gender, Work and
Organization, 7 (2000), pp. 106–118, 112.
64 Teela Sanders et al., The Sociology of Sex Work. Prostitution: Sex Work, Policy and Politics
(London, 2009), pp. 96–98.
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Selling Sex in Amsterdam 47
encouraged. Nevertheless, the debates between the Amsterdam municipality
and prostitutes have not always been successfully resolved and recent policies
on the red-light district show a clear negation of sex workers’ voices.
One of the most recent initiatives to control prostitution is called Project
1012. It was launched in 2007 and it aims to gentrify the red-light district; as part
of this, the municipality promotes events distinct from sex work such as fash-
ion displays and art exhibitions.65 These events are held in building windows
bought by the municipality on nearby streets. The officials’ goal was to close
down 40 per cent of the 482 windows open in 2007; currently 290 of them are
still open.66 It appears that the municipality has succumbed to the laws of the
global market and the need to present to the world “a varied and high quality
image for the city approach area”, which happens to be the district close to
the station and the city centre.67 This has led to a reappraisal of prostitution’s
position in the urban environment and the municipality has started to regard
window prostitution as an aesthetic and “moral” issue. Indeed the association
between the display of scantily clad women with the global image of the city
goes against the municipal promotion of familial tourism. To back up their
concerns about the aesthetic display of window prostitutes, officials looked
into the extent of the relation between human trafficking and prostitution,
and fears of organized crime came flooding back. Recent researchers’ apprais-
als of the situation tend, however, to highlight the municipality’s debatable
assumptions and encourage more in-depth dialogues with the district’s main
workers.68 Prostitution is not always linked with criminality, nor does it create
a criminogenic environment. This division between prostitution and criminal-
ity had already been highlighted by Reckless in 1926 and was stated again by
Ashworth et al. in 1988.69 Likewise, a recent study on crime rates in and around
the tippelzone when it was still open shows that although fears about criminal-
ity rose, criminality itself did not increase; on the contrary, the closure led to
65 Available at: http://www.amsterdam.nl/gemeente/organisatie-diensten/sites/project_
1012/1012/; last accessed 7 July 2017.
66 Available at: https://www.amsterdam.nl/projecten/project-1012/aanpak-project-1012/
gebieden/; last accessed 7 July 2017.
67 White paper Heart of Amsterdam (Amsterdam, 2009), quoted in Deinema and Aalbers,
“A Global Red-light City?”, pp. 273–274.
68 Huisman and Nelen, “‘Gotham’ unbound Dutch Style”, pp. 87–103; Gail M. Zuckerwise,
“Governmentality in Amsterdam’s Red Light District”, City, 16 (2012), pp. 146–157, 153.
69 Walter Reckless, “The Distribution of Commercial Vice in the City: A Sociological Analy-
sis”, Publications American Sociology Society, 20 (1926), pp. 164–176; Ashworth et al., “The
Red-Light District in the West European City”, p. 210.
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48 Pluskota
an increase of offences in the neighbourhood.70 The art and fashion initiatives
were launched to bring a new public to the district and to recreate social di-
versity, but this process has had a direct impact on prostitutes’ working spaces
and conditions; the rents of the windows have increased and it has become
more difficult to find available windows. Prostitutes who were not able to meet
the new requirements were forced to leave the district and start streetwalking
or work from home. By gentrifying the district, the municipality is excluding
some of its workers and forcing them to work in a risky environment, a situa-
tion that the municipality initially wanted to avoid when they agreed to legal-
ize prostitution. By marginalizing some prostitutes, they are also fuelling the
non-regulated market of prostitution, which is, unsurprisingly, the most diffi-
cult market to control and the fastest growing sector of prostitution in Amster-
dam.71 As Deinema explains, Project 1012 affects the visibility of prostitution
and attacks its aesthetics but does not have an impact on the excesses of illegal
prostitution and human trafficking.72
Social Profiles of Amsterdam Prostitutes
Single women always represented the majority of prostitutes in Amsterdam
but widows and sailors’ wives, more commonly called “grass widows”, must not
be forgotten when looking at the early modern period. Prostitution became a
part of female economic strategies early on73 and since two-thirds of the sail-
ors on East Indian Company ships never returned, it can be assumed that many
married women suffered from early widowhood.74 Turning to prostitution in
the early modern period was often part of poor women’s economy of make-
shift. The ease of entering and leaving the sex trade meant that poor women
could rely on it when in distress. Indeed women’s access to the labour market
in the early modern period in the Netherlands was relatively free compared to
other European countries and this facilitated entering and leaving prostitu-
tion. Prostitutes came mainly from the poorest classes, as is the case nowadays,
and single female migrants in Amsterdam could be in a precarious situation
as well-paid jobs were reserved for burghers’ wives and daughters. Entering
domestic service was the wisest choice but without letters of r ecommendation
70 Paul Bisschop et al., “Effect van Tippelzones Op Lokale Criminaliteit”, Tijdschrift van
C
riminologie, 54 (2012), pp. 320–334.
71 van Wijk et al., Kwetsbaar beroep, p. 213.
72 Deinema and Aalbers, “A Global Red-Light City”, p. 284.
73 Olwen Hufton, The Poor in France (Oxford, 1974), p. 355.
74 van de Pol and Kuypers, “Poor Women’s Migration to the City”, p. 46.
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Selling Sex in Amsterdam 49
or contacts, it was difficult for women to settle in the city; in addition, wages
for prostitution were higher than what could be earned with unqualified jobs,
especially for women. When Amsterdam started industrializing in the mid-
nineteenth century, the work offered to women remained poorly paid com-
pared to men’s work. Families tended to be more secure financially than single
women, as long as both parents were employed, leaving unemployed single
women in a precarious situation.
Prostitution was also a last resort job for women left by their husbands or
lovers.75 Prostitutes both in the early modern period and nowadays in Amster-
dam have tended to come from disrupted family environments marked by the
death of one or both parents, violence at home, remarriage, abandonment by
the husband, and unwanted pregnancies, and any combination of these can
be a trigger to enter prostitution. Van de Pol and Kuipers noted that unwanted
pregnancy was a serious push factor for women migrating to Amsterdam in
the early modern period.76 Women could receive some financial help and de-
liver their infants safely at no cost but complicated circumstances may have
pushed them to find money in prostitution or, if they were already prostitutes,
to continue their trade in Amsterdam. The situation is similar for contempo-
rary Dutch prostitutes who are often victims of violence and flee abusive rela-
tionships; with few resources, they enter prostitution as a quick means to earn
some money to survive.77 It is interesting to compare the familial environments
of migrants with Dutch prostitutes. Women from Africa or eastern Europe do
not always come from a disrupted familial environment but do suffer from
poverty. Family contact can be very frequent and a system of remittances may
be put in place or they can serve as an intermediary for taking up prostitution,
which is less often the case with native prostitutes.78 The few Dutch women
who in recent decades entered prostitution because of their difficult situation
as single mothers usually try to hide it from their children.79 Foreign women
may also have children of their own whom they left behind in their countries
of origin. Some women went to western Europe knowing they would become
prostitutes,80 whilst others ended up working in the trade because they could
not find another job. However, their entry into the prostitution market often
reveals a different economic approach to the job; while prostitution is often a
75 van de Pol, The Burgher and the Whore, p. 150.
76 van de Pol and Kuypers, “Poor Women’s Migration to the City”, p. 57.
77 Bovenkerk and van San, “Loverboys in the Amsterdam Red Light District”, p. 186.
78 Rutvica Andrijasevic, Migration, Agency and Citizenship in Sex Trafficking (Amsterdam,
2010), p. 73.
79 van Wijk et al., Kwetsbaar beroep, p. 173.
80 Dina Siegel, “Mobility of Sex Workers in European Cities”, European Journal on Criminal
Policy and Research, 18 (2012), pp. 255–268, 261–262.
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last resource for indigenous women, foreign women may choose to do it as an
economic springboard to escape a difficult economic environment.
Contemporary legal prostitution in Amsterdam facilitates the setting up of
fixed-term contracts with brothel owners or window renters, and prostitution
is carried out on a full- or part-time basis for a fixed amount of time. As with
any other employee, if the woman stops working before the end of her con-
tract she will not be entitled to unemployment benefits but will receive the
help of a social worker to find a new job in another sector if she so desires.
Although employment contracts are legal, women tend to be registered as
independent workers as a “compromise” between brothel owners and prosti-
tutes. This is often part of an economic strategy which is based on earning the
maximum amount possible in a short time. It also shows what these women
think in general of this form of work: they do not wish to pursue it after a few
years and they see it as transitional, although it may also reflect contemporary
views on beauty and sex appeal. Rarely did older prostitutes earn much, nor do
they today. The less “attractive” a woman becomes, the less likely she is to get
customers.81 Nevertheless, relationships can be formed over the years between
regular customers and prostitutes and to some extent these can compensate
for a decrease in the number of a woman’s customers. Ageing prostitutes also
tend to practise prostitution differently, for example leaving a window to rent
a flat and using small ads (or specialist agencies) to find customers. In the ear-
ly modern period, ageing prostitutes tended to fall into the lower classes of
prostitutes, such as streetwalkers, or they became domestics in the brothel in
which they used to work. Also, getting married was often an opportunity to get
out of prostitution (as it is today). The development of the welfare state may
have helped create a way out of prostitution for ageing prostitutes or single
mothers, although in many cases prostitution may offer a better income than
social welfare.
Prostitution and Health
As in any early modern city, Amsterdam prostitutes suffered greatly from vene-
real diseases, as did their customers. From the start of the epidemics of syphilis
onwards, the municipality took charge of those who were afflicted by sending
them to the Pesthuis.82 We know now that early modern remedies were ineffec-
tive and tended in the long run to weaken the immune system of the patient.
81 Of course, the notion of attractiveness is very subjective and cannot be generalized.
82 van de Pol and Kuypers, “Poor Women’s Migration to the City”, p. 53.
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Selling Sex in Amsterdam 51
However, the treatment offered by this institution was considered to be better
than what was sold by quack doctors, and people from the entire Dutch Repub-
lic went to Amsterdam to be cured. Different establishments were used to ac-
commodate the diseased, though at the beginning of the seventeenth century
no strict distinctions were made yet between the patients; some were sent to
the Spinhuis and others to the Aalmoezeniershuis (both workhouses).83 The
Spinhuis was for women only and many prostitutes went there to be cured. The
authorities were concerned with the spread of the disease as many sailors and
soldiers had contracted it or risked getting it in the taverns on the Zeedijk. In
the French period (early nineteenth century), the authorities sought to control
the illness by requisitioning a hospital to treat the diseased.84 Only with the
discovery of penicillin in the twentieth century did syphilis start to regress,
however. Still, it was not long before the sex trade was plagued with the epi-
demic of aids that began in the 1980s in correlation with an upsurge in hard
drug consumption. aids contamination through sexual encounters and by
sharing infected needles had serious consequences on prostitutes’ health in
the two last decades of the twentieth century.85 Campaigns to promote the use
of condoms and clean needles were set up by the municipality, and counsel-
ling, medical help, and condoms were dispensed freely to prostitutes. Nowa-
days, the majority of legal prostitutes use condoms and the risk of catching a
venereal disease is extremely low. However, it is known that some prostitutes
agree to have sex without protection for varying reasons such as to earn more
money, or because they do not know that they can refuse non-protected sex or
are prevented from doing so by a third party.
The impact of prostitution on women’s physical health has been studied
for a long time but the psychological effects have only recently been looked at.
The importance of studying psychological effects in prostitution relates to the
question of the integrity of the body in a work context.86 Recent research in
other contexts (where prostitution is not legal) has shown that a large number
of prostitutes (between 67 per cent and 72 per cent) suffer from post-traumatic
stress disorder due to the violence they face quite regularly (from their pimp
or clients, stressful situations at work, and confrontations with the police).87
83 Johan Wilhelm van der Valk, Bijdrage tot de kennis van de geschiedenis der syphilis in ons
land (Amsterdam, 1910), p. 130.
84 Ibid., pp. 151–152.
85 van den Hoek et al., “hiv Infection and std in Drug Addicted Prostitutes in Amsterdam”,
pp. 146–150.
86 See Kathleen Barry, The Prostitution of Sexuality (New York, 1996).
87 See for example Hyunjung Choi et al., “Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (ptsd) and Dis-
orders of Extreme Stress (desnos) Symptoms Following Prostitution and Childhood
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The long-term psychological effects of prostitution have not been studied
enough and more research in this field is necessary so that we can understand
if the legalization of prostitution has a positive effect on working conditions
and the mental well-being of the women. Indeed, in relation to psychological
pressure, the impact of social stigma on this type of work has not been elimi-
nated yet despite the legalization of prostitution in Amsterdam. Analyses on
the cultural representation of prostitution also need updating to better define
the evolution of public mentalities and attitudes since legalization. The de-
bates in the 1980s and recent research have shown that the Dutch population
generally supports the legalization of prostitution but this does not mean that
prostitution is accepted as a career; in short, the legalization of prostitution
has not made it a respectable job. Many women working behind the windows
confess to living a double life, as their families are unaware of their job.88 Hid-
ing their profession has a direct impact on their mental well-being; prostitutes
have themselves internalized this social stigma and want to “protect” their
families against the shame that would befall them if they and the community
found out. Long-term psychological studies looking at the women’s perspec-
tives on their occupations and their lives in and out of prostitution would
greatly benefit our understanding of prostitution’s impact. Indeed it is not well
known what women think of their past lives after getting out of prostitution
and how they reflect upon their experiences. The constant exchanges over the
years between society’s perceptions of prostitution and women’s own judge-
ments about their jobs need to be better understood to reveal the internaliza-
tion process at stake in (former) prostitutes’ minds.
Migration, Recruitment and Trafficking in Amsterdam
As mentioned earlier, the development of Amsterdam into a major interna-
tional port in the seventeenth century led to a major migration influx not only
from the countryside but also from neighbouring countries such as England,
the southern Netherlands, Germany and Norway. Therefore prostitutes’ e thnic
Abuse”, Violence Against Women, 15 (2009), pp. 933–951; Melissa Farley and Howard Bar-
kan, “Prostitution, Violence, and Posttraumatic Stress Disorder”, Women & Health, 27
(1998), pp. 37–49; Melissa Farley, “Prostitution in Vancouver: Violence and the Coloniza-
tion of First Nations Women”, Transcultural Psychiatry, 42 (2005), pp. 242–271.
88 This explains their reluctance to be photographed and filmed. See Manuel Aalbers, “‘Big
Sister Is Watching You!’: Gender Interaction and the Unwritten Rules of the Amsterdam
Red-Light District”, Journal of Sex Research, 42 (2005), pp. 54–62.
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Selling Sex in Amsterdam 53
backgrounds were not homogenous, and women of many nationalities took
part in Amsterdam’s prostitution market. In the early modern period, on av-
erage 30 per cent of prostitutes were from abroad.89 Stachhouwer noted that
in the first third of the twentieth century only 17.5 per cent of them were
foreigners,90 but the recent opening of borders and the improvement of trans-
portation has led to an increase of the number of women who migrated to the
Netherlands. These days the number of Dutch prostitutes working behind the
windows has fallen to under 16 per cent.91
The origins of prostitutes changed according to the process of globaliza-
tion happening at the time, ease of transportation, and the opening of bor-
ders. Prostitutes moving to Amsterdam could be sent there by a procuress, and
the mobility of prostitutes in the early modern period attests to the mobil-
ity of female migrants in general.92 While European women were the main
immigrants in the early modern period (notably German women), migration
patterns changed after the Second World War. South American women and
women from the former Dutch colonies of Indonesia and Surinam, as well as
other countries in South East Asia, migrated to Amsterdam, followed in the
1980s by West African women.93 After the fall of the Berlin wall, the number of
women coming from the former ussr exploded and since the legalization of
prostitution in 2000, European women are allowed to register as prostitutes in
the city; when Romania and Bulgaria entered the European Union in 2007, two
countries that have gdps which are relatively low compared to other eastern
European countries, women migrated to Amsterdam from those countries and
they are now the largest group of prostitutes in Amsterdam.94 Women from
outside the eu can still work as prostitutes, but they need to have a work per-
mit which can be obtained only under certain conditions, such as knowledge
of the Dutch language. Without having official papers and a secure place to
stay, migrant prostitutes are more likely to work for a third party with little
89 Lotte van de Pol, Het Amsterdams hoerdom (Amsterdam, 1996), p. 103.
90 Jan Dirk Feiko Stachhouwer, Criminaliteit, prostitutie en zelfmoord bij immigranten in
A
msterdam (Amsterdam, 1950), p. 85.
91 van Wijk et al., Kwetsbaar Beroep, p. 32.
92 van de Pol and Kuypers, “Poor Women’s Migration to the City”, p. 44.
93 Van San and Bovenkerk, “Secret Seducers”, p. 68; Marriane Marchand and Boukje Berents,
“Migration, (Im)mobility, and Modernity”, Millennium: Journal of International Studies,
27 (1998), pp. 955–981, 955–956; Siegel, “Mobility of Sex Workers in European Cities”,
pp. 261–262.
94 Manuel Aalbers and Magdalena Sabat, “Re-Making a Landscape of Prostitution: The
Amsterdam Red Light District”, City, 16 (2012), pp. 112–128, 121.
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54 Pluskota
social and economic independence.95 The diversity behind the windows is
striking and a representative picture of the globalization process in action.
The issue of trafficking is inherently linked with the study of female migra-
tion, and the legality of prostitution has made the city an important migra-
tion destination for eastern European women who can easily enter the Dutch
labour market as members of the eu. Because of these major influxes of young
women, human trafficking issues were raised at the municipal and interna-
tional levels. Human trafficking is defined by the un as “the recruitment, trans-
port, transfer, harbouring or receipt of a person by such means as threats or
use of force or other forms of coercion, of abduction, of fraud or deception
for the purpose of exploitation; exploitation shall include, at a minimum, the
exploitation of the prostitution of others or other forms of sexual exploitation,
forced labour or services, slavery or practices similar to slavery, servitude or the
removal of organs.”96 This definition is broad and encompasses a wide range of
crimes, from coercion to fraud and bodily exploitation.
Trafficking in the sense that women are moved from one place to another
and forced to work as prostitutes for someone else can also be found in ear-
lier periods, although evidence of large-scale criminal networks has not yet
been demonstrated. Van de Pol described the first brothel owner to be put on
the scaffold in Amsterdam in 1706; she was a German “bawd” who had held
a Danish girl prisoner and forced her to have sex with a Jew.97 Testimonies
of prostitutes being held against their will or being deeply in debt with their
“bawds” and therefore unable to leave the brothel show up occasionally in
early modern judicial archives but they are individual stories, not the result of
international criminal organizations.
At the end of the nineteenth century, new light was cast upon the threat
of trafficking in women. Abolitionist movements in the Netherlands sought
to eradicate all forms of prostitution and they started a national campaign
against brothels. In 1903, 3,000 people gathered in Amsterdam in front of the
Paleis voor Volksvlijt to condemn brothels as an essential component of the
white slave trade.98 The image of the prostitute and the white slave merged
and the moral panic that arose at the turn of the century had a major impact
on the population of Amsterdam as it was relayed by the press of the time.
Although brothels had been banned in Amsterdam since 1897, it quickly came
95 Ibid.
96 Available at: http://www.unodc.org/unodc/en/human-trafficking/what-is-human-
trafficking.html; last accessed 7 July 2017.
97 van de Pol, The Burgher and the Whore, p. 96.
98 de Vries, “‘White Slaves’ in a Colonial Nation”, p. 52.
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Selling Sex in Amsterdam 55
to light that prostitution (and brothel owners) had merely relocated to more
neutral and less stigmatized places. To what extent women were trafficked to
and from Amsterdam is unknown; testimonies of sordid arrangements be-
tween intermediaries were recorded by the police or by men sent by various in-
stitutions (abolitionist associations, religious associations, and governments)
to investigate the reality of forced prostitution in Amsterdam; a report dating
from 1901 written by a policeman named Balkenstein for instance mentioned
underage French girls being sent to Amsterdam with fake documents to work
in a brothel.99 As a consequence, these reports and references in the newspa-
pers to captive women fuelled anger against brothel owners, leading to the
national legislation of 1911 which was against brothels and the trafficking of
women. Notably, in the six months following the ban only one case of traffick-
ing was prosecuted. Rather than being indicative of large international crimi-
nal networks organizing the trafficking of women, the reported cases seemed
to concern relatively small numbers of women from neighbouring countries.
The rate of trafficked women in Amsterdam nowadays is still difficult to
gauge; the legislation in place is meant to prevent the registration of women
who do not want to work as prostitutes; however, it is unclear how the authori-
ties ascertain that pressure or if threats have been made. Although more wom-
en than previously thought willingly choose to enter the prostitution market,
the social networks built up by prostitutes remain dependent on the labour
relations into which the prostitutes have entered; cases of migrant prostitutes
having very little contact with their colleagues or the outside world because
of confinement imposed by their pimps are not rare, even in Amsterdam.100
Various investigations about the trafficking of women working in the legalized
market have been carried out; the Sneep case of 2007 for instance involved a
Turkish gang accused of running a prostitution ring in Belgium and the Neth-
erlands (including Amsterdam), and Verhoeven and van Gestel mention three
other cases of trafficking and exploitation, all of which occurred in Amster-
dam.101 All these cases of trafficking happened within the scope of the legal
regulated market of prostitution behind the windows.102 Criminal organiza-
tions use the legal framework to commit crimes, often successfully as suggest-
ed by the low number of busts that are made. In addition, numerous women
do not register with the tax office and therefore have little contact with the
99 de Vries, Kuisheid voor mannen, vrijheid voor vrouwen, pp. 252–253.
100 van Wijk et al., Kwetsbaar beroep, pp. 157–178.
101 Siegel, “Mobility of Sex Workers in European Cities”, p. 263; Verhoeven and Gestel, “ Human
Trafficking and Criminal Investigation Strategies”, pp. 148–164.
102 Huisman and Kleemans, “The Challenges of Fighting Sex Trafficking”, p. 223.
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authorities. Another issue concerns the underground prostitution carried out
by non-registered women.103 Not every non-registered prostitute is a victim of
trafficking but our lack of knowledge of this milieu leaves us without answers
regarding the scale of trafficking in a country where prostitution is legal. Eth-
nicity, levels of education, and legal status are factors that influence women’s
ability to secure safe working conditions; the building-up of a network is often
a strong element in the improvement of prostitutes’ working conditions
One of the limitations of the definition of “trafficking” in the case of prosti-
tution relates to the fact that some women choose voluntarily to enter the pros-
titution market and use smugglers to cross borders. The fact that they choose
to work in prostitution has been documented in various studies; an early study
showed that 50 per cent of the women who were recruited in central Europe
knew they were going to work in prostitution.104 Highly educated women from
the former Soviet Union were interviewed in 2004 and they all claimed to be
travelling voluntarily to the Netherlands to work as prostitutes, as did almost
all of the thirty Dominican and Colombian women interviewed by Janssen.105
Siegel also studied the horizontal and vertical mobility of foreign prostitutes
in the Netherlands; she claims that the choice of prostitution as a career path,
the “attraction of sex work in Europe”, has been too often dismissed for a more
acceptable discourse on women’s trafficking.106 This of course does not mean
that the psychological effects of prostitution are less strong for migrant women
but from an economic point of view, prostitution offers more opportunities
than most of the other jobs available to them either in their native countries
or even in Amsterdam.
Foreign women entering the prostitution market are often helped by third
parties and although the literature usually refers to the contemporary pimp or
trafficker as a male figure, the role of women in recruiting must not be ignored.
The concepts of trafficking and traffickers do not really encompass what the
women who willingly became prostitutes go through; migrant smuggling
in certain cases could be a more adequate definition of the crime commit-
ted by the third party. Siegel and de Blank worked on women intermediaries
103 van Wijk et al., Kwetsbaar beroep, p. 178.
104 Judith Vocks and Jan Nijboer, “The Promised Land: A Study of Trafficking in Women from
Central and Eastern Europe to the Netherlands”, European Journal on Criminal Policy and
Research, 8 (2000), pp. 379–388, 383.
105 D. Siegel, “Recent Trends in Women Trafficking and Voluntary Prostitution: Russian-
Speaking Sex-Workers in the Netherlands”, Transnational Crime, 4 (2005), pp. 4–23;
Marie-Louise Janssen, Reizende sekswerkers: Latijns-Amerikaanse vrouwen in de Europese
prostitutie (Apeldoorn, 2007).
106 Siegel, “Mobility of Sex Workers in European Cities”, pp. 261–262.
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Selling Sex in Amsterdam 57
in the Netherlands before and after the legalization of prostitution and they
showed that women could also be at the head of traffic scandals, though most
of the women involved in procuring or sexual offences were either “support-
ers” or “partners in crime” together with a man.107 For instance, in the 1980s
Nigerian women who migrated to the Netherlands and eventually became
prostitutes convinced male “supporters” to help them smuggle women into the
Netherlands by lending them money.108 Van de Pol showed a similar interac-
tion between the sexes in the early modern period: both men and women were
involved in the running of brothels, although it was easier for men to have
access to capital, credit, and living spaces.109 Both sexes have been and are in-
volved in prostitution and this puts into perspective the gender differentiation
that is often made in studies on prostitution: there exists a dialogue between
men and women in this trade in which power relationships are not unidirec-
tional and evolve according to attitudes and economic rationales.
Conclusion: Prostitution in Amsterdam, Urban Spaces,
and Global Images
Prostitution develops to a greater extent in urban areas than in rural environ-
ments for different reasons: the proximity and number of potential customers
who reside in or visit a city; the anonymity offered to urban citizens and the
resulting disappearance or diminution of the feeling of shame; the ease with
which prostitutes create new and parallel networks; and, the higher wages that
can be earned in a city.
Working space is, as mentioned earlier, one of the main elements of the
definition of prostitution. By changing places and swapping spaces of work,
prostitutes must contend with varying sets of working conditions and labour
relations but they must also deal with different types of danger. The risk/
benefit ratio varies according to the type of space they are working in. As a
result of the communication revolution, prostitutes can more easily work in-
dependently from their homes or by meeting customers in hotel rooms. The
internet and before that small ads in newspapers and sex shop windows mean
that there is no need for an intermediary between the woman and the client.
Working under such conditions nevertheless has its own dangers: the social
107 Dina Siegel, “Women Who Traffic Women: The Role of Women in Human Trafficking
Networks—Dutch Cases”, Global Crime, 11 (2010), pp. 436–447, 440.
108 Ibid., pp. 444–445.
109 van de Pol, The Burgher and the Whore, p. 25.
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control and security that exists among window prostitutes in the red-light dis-
trict and in well-run brothels is absent when working alone and it is important
for the woman to create and maintain links and contacts with friends to avoid
being stuck in a dangerous situation with a customer.
State and municipal legislation pertaining to prostitution must be based
on thorough research about the interactions between working spaces and the
above-mentioned variables so that prostitutes can have a safe working envi-
ronment. Over the centuries, soliciting became more and more privatized;
while early modern prostitutes would solicit in public by walking on the street
or by standing at the door of a tavern, this practice changed towards the end of
the seventeenth century with the opening of music houses, and this pattern re-
emerged in the mid-eighteenth century and later on in more or less regulated
brothels. These places became linked with the presence of prostitutes. Even if
they were primarily intended to offer musical entertainment and to encour-
age male sociability, customers in these houses knew that the women present
were potential prostitutes; their behaviour in this specific space was also an
indication of their availability. Via ear-to-mouth dissemination of information
(particularly effective, as the reputation of Amsterdam music houses crossed
borders), soliciting gradually moved indoors.
This also means that in this earlier era entertainment, homosociality, and
sexuality’s boundaries were blurred; not everyone entering a tavern in de Wal-
len in the seventeenth century was looking for a prostitute or went there for
female company. The division was not as clear as today, when people entering
certain bars in the de Wallen district go there aiming to enjoy a performance
of a sexual nature. Homosociality can be, and often still is, a component of
the establishments’ atmosphere but it differs from seventeenth century inns
which could be sporadically, according to its clientele and probably the time of
the day, characterized as a brothel. The sexual component of certain establish-
ments was not as obvious and visible as in today’s red-light districts.
The same process of privatization and specialization became visible after
the attempt to regulate prostitution in nineteenth-century Amsterdam. The
women were then linked to a specific space and therefore their working prac-
tices changed. This does not mean that streetwalking and outdoor solicitation
disappeared; poor or casual prostitutes could still be seen on the streets, as was
the case in the red-light districts in the 1980s or nowadays along Amsterdam’s
old docks. Working space clearly defines prostitutes’ categories and it affords
them more or less agency in refusing customers, keeping their earnings, or
avoiding the police.
Quite early on compared to other European cities, Amsterdam’s officials
recognized the importance of prostitution and the economic advantages it
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Selling Sex in Amsterdam 59
provides. But in contemporary Amsterdam, the dialogue between prostitutes
and the municipality still seems to be inexistent, despite the financial gains
it provides for the city. Hubbard argues that the red-light district in Amster-
dam is “by no means a typical red-light district.”110 This is true in the sense
that sex is not advertised to such an extent in other European cities, nor is it a
distinct part of tourists’ “must-see” experiences, except perhaps for Pigalle in
Paris. But even if the landscape and global imaginary linked to Amsterdam’s
red-light district of De Wallen is somewhat different, the prostitution market
is very similar to what can be seen in other settings. What appears to be the
same is the distinction between spaces and within that scope there are varia-
tions based on where a woman (or man) works, the existing labour relations,
working conditions, and the risk/benefit ratio. Space and location therefore
have a direct impact on prostitutes’ experiences and must be taken into ac-
count when new policies are introduced. The closing down of windows by the
municipality and to a certain extent the gentrification of the red-light district
run counter to prostitutes’ needs and right to security; new legislation should
do more to ensure that these women are able to work in a safe environment.
110 Hubbard, “Afterword”, p. 196.
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chapter 3
Selling Sex in a Provincial Town: Prostitution
in Bruges
Maja Mechant
Introduction
At first glance, Bruges—a provincial town in Belgium—and prostitution may
appear to be worlds apart. With its mediaeval and mediaeval-esque buildings,
cobblestone streets, and canals, Bruges is known as a picture-perfect tour-
ist destination. Its charms attract people from all over the world, but unlike
in Amsterdam, the must-sees in Bruges do not include the red-light district.
Moreover, visitors who are not deliberately on the lookout for prostitutes are
unlikely to have spotted a single one in the last decade because commercial sex
is simply not part of the scenery.1 Of course, that is not to say that the sex trade
is non-existent or that it has always been as small-scale and inconspicuous as
it is now. As is the case elsewhere, prostitution evolved in tandem with the
city’s size and economy, and at the end of the Middle Ages, Bruges was one of
Europe’s largest, most thriving urban centres, and commercial sex was readily
available.2 However, unlike most of the cities discussed in this volume, Bruges’
past is not characterized by progressive growth, urbanization, or industrializa-
tion, or by a concomitant increase in its prostitution sector. Rather, contem-
porary Bruges is a small provincial town, and as such it is an interesting case
study because it affords us the opportunity to see how prostitution evolved in
a languishing urban centre during the early modern and modern eras.
There is less literature on the sex trade in Bruges than there is for larger
cities. Only one monograph has been published on the subject to date, n amely
* I am grateful to Thomas Donald Jacobs for reading this paper, improving it, and giving advice
1
2 regarding my use of English, which was truly a great help. I am also grateful to the editors of
this volume for their comments on an earlier version of this article.
1 Despite the nuanced differences between “prostitute” and “sex worker”, I have occasionally
used them synonymously in this chapter because of linguistic variations.
2 Guy Dupont, Maagdenverleidsters, hoeren en speculanten: Prostitutie in Brugge tijdens de
Bourgondische periode (1385–1515) (Bruges, 1996), pp. 161–162.
© Maja Mechant, 2017 | doi 10.1163/9789004346253_004
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Selling Sex in a Provincial Town: Prostitution in Bruges 61
Guy D upont’s work regarding prostitution during the Burgundian period
(1385–1515).3 The aim here, however, is to provide a long-term overview of the
seventeenth century and onwards. In doing so, I will rely on unpublished re-
search and data collected by myself, masters students, and Pasop, a non-profit
organization that works with prostitutes in the region.4 The availability of in-
formation means that my emphasis here is on the evolution that took place
between the second half of the eighteenth century, the second half of the nine-
teenth century, both World Wars, and the present day. Under discussion are the
push and pull factors involved in the trade, the legal norms concerning prosti-
tution, the social profiles of sex workers, their dependency on their employers,
and their working conditions. Not all of these topics are analysed in depth for
all the periods covered due to the limitations of the primary source material,
which include normative sources, registration lists, police and court records,
interviews, and social statistics. Each type of source has particular advantages
and disadvantages, but discussing these in detail here would take us too far from
the matter at hand. What is important to keep in mind is that the availability of
a specific source largely depends on the legal framework of the era. However,
before examining the legislation, I will first outline the context, as well as the
factors that have influenced the supply and demand of commercial sex.
The Bruges Context
As mentioned in the introduction, while prostitution was widespread in Bruges
at the end of the Middle Ages, the situation has since greatly altered. Two peri-
ods proved decisive in bringing about this change. The first came at the end of
3
4
3 Ibid.
4 Maja Mechant, “Vrouwen met een uitzonderlijke overlevingsstrategie? De levenslopen van
prostituees in Brugge (1750–1790)” (ongoing doctoral research, Ghent University); Israel
Mertens, “Prostitutie in Vlaanderen: een sociografische en kwantitatieve studie van het pros-
titutioneel kader. Brugge en Gent, 19e/begin 20e eeuw” (Unpublished m.a., Ghent University,
1981); Bernard Schotte, “Bestrijding van quat gedragh te Brugge in de 18de eeuw (1724–1774)”
(Unpublished m.a., Ghent University, 1982); Vania Vande Voorde, “Prostitutie te Brugge ti-
jdens de Eerste en de Tweede Wereldoorlog” (Unpublished m.a., Ghent University, 2007).
Pasop, established in 1990, provides medical and social services to sex workers in the Belgian
provinces of East and West Flanders. I am very grateful to Martine Claeyssens for allowing
me to look at Pasop’s annual reports and for putting together tables pertaining to Bruges. I
am equally indebted to Ans Traen, a doctor, and An Mortier, a nurse, for their willingness to
share their knowledge and experiences when I interviewed them in Ghent on 12 June 2012.
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62 Mechant
Bruges’ “golden age” in the fifteenth century, when the city’s primary economic
sectors, textile production and international commerce, dwindled, as did the
numbers of businessmen and sailors. The population decreased from 42,000
inhabitants in 1477 to 29,000 just one hundred years later,5 and the sex trade
shrank to meet the needs of the remaining locals as well as soldiers, merchants,
and sailors. The second turning point came during the second half of the twen-
tieth century when Bruges finally overcame its stagnation and increasingly was
profiled as a tourist destination. Moreover, the development of Zeebrugge as
a major European port shifted the focal point of the city’s economic life away
from Bruges proper.6 This reorganization, along with the city’s new image as an
affluent and wholesome tourist destination, led the sex workers who had been
present in the heart of Bruges for centuries to relocate outside its mediaeval
walls to the roadways around the town.
However, this is merely the long-term evolution, and a simplified picture
of it at that. The era between the fifteenth and twentieth centuries was not a
single uninterrupted run of financial desolation. Bruges did experience eco-
nomic upswings, particularly during the region’s peaceful interludes, and it
would be imprudent to use the city’s golden age as the yardstick for prosperity.
For example, periodic improvements to the port and waterways brought re-
peated cycles of growth to the trade sector. When Ghent was reconnected with
the sea around 1750, the canal shipping trade in Bruges thrived yet again.7 In
fact, the end of the seventeenth century and the second half of the eighteenth
century proved exceptions to the city’s long-term economic stagnation. Tex-
tile production, although it had been in a state of crisis since the seventeenth
century, remained important until it failed to industrialize in the nineteenth
century. At that time it completely collapsed, resulting in the most sombre
chapter of Bruges’ history. Abject poverty became widespread, and the crop
failures of the 1840s worsened an already dire situation.8 Bruges was known as
the poorest city in nineteenth-century Flanders, and while this portrayal has
5
6
7
8
5 Heidi Deneweth, “Brugge, een veilige enclave in het krijgsgewoel”, in Valentin Vermeersch
(ed.), Brugge (Antwerp, 2002), pp. 100–107, 105.
6 Romain Van Eeno, “Een onomkeerbare evolutie”, in Vermeersch, Brugge, pp. 142–155.
7 Ludo Vandamme and Jan D’hondt, “17de en 18de eeuw: Op zoek naar een nieuwe bestem-
ming”, in Marc Ryckaert, André Vandewalle, and Jan D’hondt (eds), Brugge, de geschiedenis
van een Europese stad (Tielt, 1999), pp. 141–165, 144–151; Heidi Deneweth, “Brugge, een veilige
enclave in het krijgsgewoel”, pp. 100–107; Heidi Deneweth, “De twee gezichten van Brugge”, in
Vermeersch, Brugge, pp. 108–123.
8 Romain Van Eeno, “De confrontatie met een gewijzigde wereld”, in Vermeersch, Brugge,
pp. 124–131, 129; Romain Van Eeno, “Een politieke machtsverschuiving”, in Vermeersch, Brugge,
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Selling Sex in a Provincial Town: Prostitution in Bruges 63
been somewhat altered in the current historiography, there is no doubt that
the city was extremely impoverished.9
As the analysis of prostitutes’ wages below will make clear, these economic
changes had an obvious impact on the demand and supply aspects of commer-
cial sex, but until recently there was always a sizable call for such services in the
city itself. Today’s clients are more mobile and tend to seek their sexual gratifi-
cation further away, but in the past the prostitution sector catered to both the
local townsmen and the surrounding rural population. Their customer base
was varied, consisting of youngsters, married men, and the clergy as well, the
latter being a fairly large group in Bruges. The presence of itinerates such as
sailors, traveling merchants, and military troops caused the supply to exceed
local demand, and the latter group in particular fuelled the trade. Bruges be-
came a garrison town in the seventeenth century, and soldiers of all ranks show
up as clients in the source materials well into the twentieth century. Between
1865 and 1882, for example, Bruges’ garrison consisted of about 1,200 men, a
considerable number in a population of only 45,000.10
The constant demand by soldiers and other men for sex was met by a steady
supply of impoverished women during all but the last period under discussion.
In Bruges, as elsewhere, women’s employment opportunities were limited, and
what work there was did not pay well. For example, in the eighteenth century,
lace makers and spinners—the most common occupations among Bruges’ fe-
male population—only earned two to four pennies a day, while an unskilled
male labourer received about twelve.11 Moreover, Bruges was characterized de-
mographically by a preponderance of females, a high age of marriage, and a
large proportion of permanently unwed women.12 This imbalance reached its
peak at the start of the nineteenth century when only 36 per cent of women
9
10
11
12
pp. 132–141, 133–135; Jan D’hondt, “Een moeizame industriële en sociale ontplooiing”, in
Marc Ryckaert, André Vandewalle and Jan D’hondt, Brugge, pp. 167–189, 176–186.
9 Jan D’hondt, “Een moeizame industriële en sociale ontplooiing”, pp. 176–186.
10 Mertens, “Prostitutie in Vlaanderen”, pp. 189–190.
11 Yvan Vanden Berghe, Jacobijnen en traditionalisten: de reactie van de Bruggelingen in de
revolutietijd (1780–1794) (Brussels, 1972), pp. 71–76; Conny Deneweth, “Vrouwenarbeid te
Brugge in de achttiende eeuw” (Unpubished m.a., Ghent University, 1987), p. 108; Jan De-
nolf, “Brugge 1748: Een socio-demografische schets van een stedelijke samenleving rond
het midden van de 18e eeuw” (Unpublished m.a., Ghent University, 1981), p. 135.
12 Richard Wall, “The Composition of Households in a Population of 6 Men to 10 Women:
South-East Bruges in 1814”, in Richard Wall (ed.), Family Forms in Historic Europe (Cam-
bridge, 1983), pp. 421–474, 428–430; Mertens, “Prostitutie in Vlaanderen”, p. 264; Sofie De
Langhe, “Oude vrijsters; Bestaansstrategieën van ongehuwde vrouwen op het Brugse plat-
teland, late achttiende—begin negentiende eeuw”, (Unpublished Ph.D., Ghent University,
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64 Mechant
above the age of 15 were married, as opposed to 57 per cent of the men.13 So
at any given time there were many single females who had to survive without
the benefit of a spouse. And while Bruges did not attract many immigrants,
foreigners did supplement the local labour force; prostitution was a mobile
occupation and women involved in it could pass through many urban centres
in the region since the distances involved were small. Those travelling between
Ghent, Dunkirk, Lille, and Ostend all stopped in Bruges on the way.
The Legal Framework
Just as Bruges’ socio-economic circumstances changed over the centuries, so
too did the way in which the city dealt with prostitution. During the mediaeval
and early modern eras, prostitution was handled via a combination of repres-
sion and tolerance. The proportions of repression and tolerance, however, fluc-
tuated over both the short term and in the long run, although the terminology
used sometimes makes this difficult to determine from the materials available.
Prostitution as such is not discussed in Bruges’ early normative sources, which
only deal with adultery and encouraging fornication as criminal offences.14 In
fact, no word even existed for a person selling sexual services, and the nearest
equivalent—“whore”—was applied to any women engaging in extra-marital
sex. Economic transactions were not entirely irrelevant, as the authorities did
prosecute those who remunerated more often than women who had mere-
ly had premarital sex. However, the sources require careful reading in order
to distinguish which was which. Eventually, professional “whores” evolved
into a separate category over the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth
13
14
2013), p. 8. The mean age at first marriage for women at the end of the eighteenth cen-
tury was 27. This was calculated on the basis of a database constructed by volunteers at
the Bruges archives, which contains 925 first marriages for 1796–1800, and 916 brides for
which the age at marriage was known. According to the 1815 census, around one fifth of
women never married at all; their exact numbers could not be determined, but the per-
centage of unmarried women above the age of 50 is estimated to have been between 18
per cent and 28 per cent. J. De Belder, L. Jaspers, C. Gyssels, and C. Vandenbroeke, Arbeid
en tewerkstelling in West-Vlaanderen 1814–1815, een socio-professionele en demografische
analyse: Werkdocumenten 6 (n.p., 1986), pp. 1392–1393.
13 Wall, “The Composition of Households”, p. 431.
14 Joos de Damhouder, Practycke ende handbouck in criminele zaeken, republished by Jozef
Dauwe and Jos Monballyu (Roeselare, 1981), pp. 144–159.
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Selling Sex in a Provincial Town: Prostitution in Bruges 65
centuries15 as reflected by the appearance of the word “prostituting”, which
gradually replaced “whoring” when the case involved commercial sex.16
Even so, actual prostitution was not always prosecuted. Tolerance prevailed
during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and while brothel keepers were
routinely fined, the collection pattern demonstrates that the fines were not
meant to be punitive, but instead functioned as a form of taxation.17 Given
Bruges’ status as a centre of international trade, the authorities may have
found it convenient to allow a relatively free market for sexual gratification,
and it seems that commercial sex was only cracked down on when excesses
occurred. However, an increasing number of brothel keepers were prosecut-
ed towards the end of the fifteenth century—perhaps not coincidentally, as
Bruges was past its peak—and so tolerance gradually gave way to repression.18
It is not clear when this changed yet again, but it appears that tolerance once
more dominated during most of the early modern period; in the mid-seven-
teenth century, a mere handful of brothel keepers and prostitutes were prose-
cuted and years could pass without a single arrest.19 However, this laissez-faire
approach stands in sharp contrast with the eighteenth century, particularly
during the second half, in which an average of nine prostitutes were prose-
cuted a year. This was quite a substantial number given that the average in
Ghent—a city almost twice the size of Bruges—was only two a year.20 Presum-
ably this had more to do with the mechanisms of social control available in
15
16
17
18
19
20
15 Adultery could be prosecuted both by the secular and the ecclesiastical courts, but moral
offences committed by the laity were increasingly—and eventually exclusively—dealt
with by the former.
16 This evolution was also found elsewhere: Lotte Van de Pol, Het Amsterdams hoerdom:
Prostitutie in de zeventiende en achttiende eeuw (Amsterdam, 1996), pp. 26–35; Ruth Mazo
Karras, “Sex and the Singlewoman”, in Judith M. Bennett and Amy M. Froide (eds), Single-
women in the European Past, 1250–1800 (Philadelphia, 1999), pp. 127–145, 130–131.
17 Dupont, Maagdenverleidsters, hoeren en speculanten, p. 52.
18 Ibid., pp. 159–162.
19 Marleen Mullie, “Zedendelicten te Brugge in de late 17de en 18de eeuw” (Unpublished
m.a., Ghent University, 1995), pp. 84–87.
20 The average for Ghent between 1750 and 1779 was calculated on the basis of two other
studies because the requisite information was not included in the criminal archives.
Anne Marie Roets, “‘Rudessen, dieften ende andere crimen’: Misdadigheid te Gent in de
zeventiende en achttiende eeuw: een kwantitatieve en kwalitatieve analyse” (Unpub-
lished Ph.D., Ghent University, 1987), iii, p. 1; Frédéric Van Waeijenberge, “Collocatie te
Gent (1750–1779)” (Unpublished m.a., Ghent University, 1994), p. 124.
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66 Mechant
both cities than a difference in attitudes, and in any case Bruges had a larger
police force.21
Nevertheless, the policy of repression was aimed at regulation rather than
abolition, and as long as social norms were by and large respected, prostitution
was tolerated to varying degrees. Many prostitutes were only brought to trial as
the result of complaints or at the request of family members.22 And in many
hearings, other prostitutes and brothel keepers were named who were not ar-
rested afterwards. It seems that when the Bruges authorities deviated from this
pattern it was because of a perception on the part of the authorities that the
sector was growing too conspicuous. In some years, they raided brothel houses
and arrested all the women present, which resulted in peaks in the prosecution
rate of up to thirty-eight a year.
Indeed, visibility seems to have both triggered periods of repression and in-
fluenced policy towards prostitution in general. Eighteenth-century court re-
cords show that public solicitation was judged more harshly than prostitution
hidden behind brothel doors, even though these houses were located in the
centre of Bruges. When Louis Stevens was interrogated following an accusa-
tion of brothel keeping in 1770, the aldermen seem to have been most upset by
the fact that he lured in customers by sending his girls out onto the streets to
seduce men.23 Moreover, there were a few city council resolutions concerning
prostitution showing that Bruges’ authorities had experimented with segrega-
tion at times. In 1491, nocturnal streetwalking in the town centre was prohib-
ited and in 1624, an ordinance was adopted stipulating that “those keeping a
brothel or dishonest house within the city would be confined and forced to
21
22
23
21 Bruges’ police force was well established by early modern standards. In 1757, the city’s
two permanent bodies of officers numbered 160 men in total, while Ghent had only
forty-seven policemen in 1752. Although Ghent’s force quadrupled in the decades after,
it is clear that Bruges still maintained a relatively large police presence. A. Vandewalle,
Beknopte inventaris van het stadsarchief van Brugge (Bruges, 1979), pp. 77–78; Mullie,
“Zedendelicten te Brugge”, p. 28; Piet Lenders, Gent, een stad tussen traditie en verlicht-
ing (1750–1787), (Courtrai, 1990), pp. 383–385; Harald Deceulaer, “Implicaties van de straat:
Rechten, plichten en conflicten in Gentse gebuurten (17de en 18de eeuw)”, Handelingen
der maatschappij voor geschiedenis en oudheidkunde te Gent: Nieuwe Reeks, 50 (1996), pp.
121–147, 137–139.
22 Fernand Vanhemelryck, “De criminaliteit in de Ammanie van Brussel van de late mid-
deleeuwen tot het einde van het Ancien Regime (1404–1789)” (Unpublished Ph.D., Ghent
University, 1968), pp. 164–165.
23 Municipal Archives of Bruges [hereafter mab], 188, Criminele Informatiën, 2 June 1770,
Louis Stevens.
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Selling Sex in a Provincial Town: Prostitution in Bruges 67
move outside the old town to an area provided outside the city walls.”24 These
laws cannot have been valid for very long, as court records do not indicate that
any such policies were put into practise. Nevertheless, they show that the au-
thorities were looking to remove prostitution from public spaces, not put a
stop to it. As in most places in the early modern period, prostitution in Bruges
was judged a “necessary evil”, impossible to repress entirely but still requiring
some form of control.
The same attitude prevailed into the nineteenth century but was translated
into an entirely different policy: regulation instead of repression or segrega-
tion. Prostitution was allowed but could only take place in official brothel
houses, and the prostitutes had to be registered and medically monitored. This
approach was first put into practice in France at the start of the revolution, and
under Napoleon it spread throughout much of Europe, including the south-
ern Netherlands. Bruges, however, followed suit somewhat later. While Ghent
already had an ordinance regarding the regulation of prostitution in 1809, the
first such law in Bruges dates from 1839.25 It stipulated that brothel houses had
to request a license to operate, and prostitutes had to register in what was com-
monly called het hoerenboek—the book of whores. Furthermore, they were not
allowed to solicit customers outside of the brothel and they had to undergo
a weekly medical examination; if infected with a venereal disease, they were
hospitalized. By 1841, the town had ten official brothels and twenty-two reg-
istered prostitutes. However, many more worked illicitly; there were at least
seventeen clandestine houses of ill repute and forty-five illegal prostitutes at
the time.26 In order to come to grips with the problem, the authorities revised
the legislation in 1871 to allow the police to register prostitutes on their own
initiative.
Prior to World War ii, Bruges adjusted the ordinances pertaining to prostitu-
tion three more times, in 1884, 1920, and 1939. And while regulation remained
the primary focus of the new laws, both the changes that were made and how
24
25
26
24 Dupont, Maagdenverleidsters, hoeren en speculanten, p. 51; L. Gilliodts—Van Severen,
Essais d’archéologie Brugeoise: Mémoriaux de Bruges. Recueil de textes et analyses de
documents inédits ou peu connus, concernant l’état social de cette ville, du quinzième au
dix-neuvième siècle (Bruges, 1920), iii, p. 167.
25 Marie-Sylvie Dupont-Bouchat, “Verdraagzaamheid en repressie: Fascinatie en weerzin:
Elkaar dwarsende blikken op de prostitutie in België (15de–20ste eeuw)”, in Kathleen De-
volder (ed.), Van badhuis tot eroscentrum: Prostitutie en vrouwenhandel van de middeleeu-
wen tot heden (Brussel, 1995), pp. 63–66; Mertens, “Prostitutie in Vlaanderen”, pp. 34–39.
26 Koen Rotsaert, “Beteugeling van de prostitutie te Brugge in de 19de eeuw”, Brugs omme-
land, 41 (2001), pp. 154–174, 158–161.
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68 Mechant
the policies were enforced show that the influence of the abolitionist move-
ment had grown. For example, clandestine houses were harshly suppressed
several times at the end of the nineteenth century.27 All brothels were abol-
ished in 1939; prostitution was not punishable as such, but it was no longer
permitted for third parties to profit from it.28 The Germans had changed local
policies during World War i, and during World War ii they did the same, re-
pealing the 1939 legislation. They shared the social and moral considerations
of the abolitionists, but their policy was primarily concerned with ensuring
that soldiers had access to a disease-free sexual outlet. It was believed that
banning commercial sex outright would have affected morale and also encour-
aged homosexuality and clandestine prostitution. As such, strict regulations
were put in place with regard to brothels and prostitutes servicing the troops,
and other forms of prostitution were forbidden.29
In 1948, regulations pertaining to prostitution throughout Belgium were
formally declared null and void by the central government, which opted
to take an abolitionist approach that has lasted to this day.30 The end of
regulation—the first national legislation about prostitution—was brought
about for several underlying reasons. Attempts to control venereal diseas-
es had not been effective, and it was considered immoral for the state to be
involved with the sex industry at any level. This move was also in line with
international trends, given that Belgium was one of the few countries still at-
tempting to regulate prostitution.31 Yet while it remains legal, the legislation
since passed is highly ambiguous in the sense that many related activities
such as running a brothel and advertising are subject to prosecution, which
means that the sector is still linked with criminality. Moreover, prostitution
is still handled by municipal governments and local policies are not always in
line with national law. In Ghent, for example, sex workers are registered and
prostitution is tolerated within a specific neighbourhood; furthermore, renting
windows so that p rostitutes can showcase their bodies, while illegal according
to the criminal code, is permitted in that area. In Bruges, on the other hand,
27
28
29
30
31
27 Rotsaert, “Beteugeling van de prostitutie”, pp. 167–173.
28 Vande Voorde, “Prostitutie te Brugge tijdens de Eerste en de Tweede Wereldoorlog”,
pp. 53–67.
29 Ibid., pp. 192–196.
30 Tina Van Loon, “Een moraalwetenschappelijke analyse van het Belgische prostitutie-
beleid: 1830–2007”, cevi (Center for Ethics and Value Inquiry) working paper 2008, pp. 1–25,
8, available at: http://www.cevi-globalethics.ugent.be/file/14; last accessed 1 August 2017.
31 Ibid., p. 8.
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Selling Sex in a Provincial Town: Prostitution in Bruges 69
there is no divergence between legislation and local policy simply because the
sector is so small.32
The ambiguous and varied nature of Belgium’s approach has been subject
to critique from different angles. In 2013, the Minister of the Interior, Joëlle
Milquet, while speaking at an international conference on human traffick-
ing and sexual exploitation stated that the extant national legislation should
be strictly adhered to.33 Legal specialists and those actually working with sex
workers, on the other hand, pled for change. While forced prostitution and
human trafficking are issues that must be dealt with, they pointed out that the
majority of sex workers are not working under such circumstances. They ar-
gued that the legislation was only created to address a minority of prostitutes,
and that by concentrating on this group alone legislators have turned all sex
workers into passive victims despite the fact that many are making their own
decisions.34 An analysis of the social profiles of prostitutes in Bruges supports
the reformers’ critiques.
Social Profiles
Foreign women are overrepresented in the sex trade, but that does not change
the fact that prostitution is not just “migrant work” or solely the result of hu-
man trafficking. In smaller cities and places not characterized by much mo-
bility, locals constitute the majority of the prostitute population. Indeed, less
than 35 per cent of Bruges’ current sex workers were born outside of Belgium.
In the past, the number of foreigners was smaller, although given the city’s
appeal during the Burgundian period, it is likely that the number of immi-
grant prostitutes at that time was relatively large—an assumption that is thus
far only supported by sparse data regarding the origins of brothel keepers.35
When looking at prostitutes’ origins in more recent centuries, improvements
in transportation as well as globalization have had a clear impact (see
32
33
34
35
32 Interview with Emmanuel Warnier, Bruges Police, 12 July 2012.
33 “Milquet wil strengere toepassing prostitutiewetten”, De Morgen, 30 September 2013.
34 Gert Vermeulen, “Zelfregulering via kwaliteitsnormen in de seksuele dienstensector?”
in Gert Vermeulen (ed.), Betaalseksrecht. Naar regulering of legalisering van niet-
problematische prostitutie? (Antwerp, 2007), pp. 15–26; Van Loon, “Een moraalweten-
schappelijke analyse”, pp. 1–25; Sylvia Sroka, “Prostitutie: roep om legalisering?” RoSa,
Documentatiecentrum en Archief voor Gelijke Kansen, Feminisme en Vrouwenstudies,
pp. 1–5, available at: http://www.rosadoc.be; last accessed 9 July 2012.
35 Dupont, Maagdenverleidsters, hoeren en speculanten. pp. 129–138.
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70 Mechant
Table 3.1). The number of foreign sex workers gradually increased, as did the
distances travelled—a trend only interrupted by major wars and the resultant
constraints on movement. Nineteenth-century Bruges had roughly the same
number of foreign sex workers as today, but their origins were quite different.
In 2011, 20 per cent of non-native prostitutes came from countries outside of
the European Union and 12 per cent from western Europe, while in the nine-
teenth century one woman hailed from the United States and 97 per cent from
neighbouring countries.36 Clearly not all sex workers are migrants; nor is it
reasonable to expect that they would be. Individual career possibilities are de-
termined by a complex interplay of personal traits and circumstances. Indeed,
one of the most decisive factors in determining what professional opportuni-
ties are available to people is their socio-economic background—an element
that intersects with migrants’ origins (Table 3.1) as they are often poor and, at
least by the standards of their adopted country, poorly educated.
Nevertheless, the sparse evidence concerning the education of Bruges’ sex
workers confirms that the majority—regardless of their origin—have never
been highly educated, although in the past, prostitutes were not exceptional
in this regard. In the eighteenth century, the majority of the city’s prostitutes
were trained to work in the low-skilled textile industries, just as many other
women in the region were. An educational gap does not appear until the nine-
teenth century, when 49 per cent of the prostitutes were found to be illiterate
Table 3.1 Origins of Bruges’ sex workers, 1750–2011.37
1750–1790 1872–1909 1910–1921 1940–1945 2011
Bruges 42.2% 14.6% 61.8% 37.5%
West Flanders 16.4% 20.3% 17.6% 38.7% 65.3%
S. Netherlands/ 33.2% 32.6% 17.6% 19.3%
Belgium
Abroad 8.2% 32.5% 2.9% 4.5% 34.7%
N 268 616 68 269 95
36
37
36 Alfons Theerens, “Op herbergbezoek te Brugge (1750–1850)” (Unpublished m.a., Univer-
sity of Leuven, 1981), p. 233.
37 Mechant (ongoing doctoral research based on eighteenth-century court records);
Mertens, “Prostitutie in Vlaanderen”, p. 68; Vande Voorde, “Prostitutie te Brugge tijdens de
eerste en de tweede wereldoorlog”, pp. 98–101 and 107; 2011 Annual Report, Pasop.
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Selling Sex in a Provincial Town: Prostitution in Bruges 71
as opposed to 41 per cent of the total female population.38 However, this di-
vergence from the general populace only began to widen during the twenti-
eth century. Specific figures for Bruges are not available, but in present-day
Flanders the mean age at which prostitutes quit school is nearly 18, although
education is compulsory until this age and the majority of teenagers go on
to study at a university or take part in another form of higher education. Of
course, this can partially be explained by general evolutions in education, such
as increased access and greater diversity within the curriculum, but it does
indicate that prostitutes have become a more distinct group within society.39
Prostitutes’ professional lives evolved in a similar fashion. During the early
modern period, poorly paid jobs in textile production and the garment trade
were the most common occupations among Bruges’ prostitutes simply be-
cause that was the case for most women. Their numbers only declined in the
nineteenth century after the collapse of the textile industry. Domestic service
then became the single most important employment sector for young women
and the number of servants who ended up in prostitution markedly increased.
The common belief that domestic servants were particularly vulnerable to
prostitution cannot be confirmed, but it may be explained somewhat by both
differences in professions and a certain degree of compartmentalization with-
in the prostitution sector. In the early modern period, domestic servants were
better off than lace makers because they lived with their employers and were
not dependent upon the vagaries of the market. However, servants had more
to lose if they lost their position, and therefore turned more easily to work as
full-time brothel prostitutes. Lace makers, on the other hand, were more likely
to supplement their meagre incomes by occasional streetwalking.40
38
39
40
38 Mertens, “Prostitutie in Vlaanderen”, pp. 106–108.
39 In general, more than half of the dropouts and graduates in Flanders are 22 years of age
when first employed, while only 7 per cent are 18 or younger: Maarten Tielens and Wim
Herremans, “Schoolverlaters in hun eerste job: Een analyse op basis van het Dataware-
house am&sm, Boordtabel jongeren”, in Rapport steunpunt werk en sociale economie, p. 8,
available at: https://lirias.kuleuven.be/bitstream/123456789/326009/2/WSE; last accessed
8 July 2012; Karolien van Nunen, Charlotte Gryseels and Guido Van Hal, Effectonderzoek
naar preventie bij sekswerkers (Antwerp, 2012), pp. 135–136. The distinction can partly be
explained by the finding that many sex workers originate from areas where only lower
levels of education are readily available, yet this is not an entirely sufficient explanation
given the fact that local prostitutes are also not as educated as other Belgians.
40 On the likelihood of women working in various sectors becoming prostitutes, see Van de
Pol, Het Amsterdams hoerdom, p. 104, although Van de Pol does not distinguish between
different kinds of prostitution.
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72 Mechant
Employment opportunities for women only became truly diverse in the
twentieth century, and this is again reflected by sex workers’ previous or other
professions. At the start of the century, an increasing number of prostitutes
worked at one point in manufacturing or catering, and by the turn of the cen-
tury they had been joined by part-time cleaners, nurses, saleswomen, labour-
ers, and others.41 So today, sex workers’ professional backgrounds reflect the
entire gamut of employment opportunities available to women in general, and
this includes those in high-end jobs, although low-skilled and low-paid pro-
fessions still predominate. Nevertheless, it is worth noting that women with
a higher degree of education often occupy the profession’s upper levels and
tend to earn the most money in the sector. This is hardly surprising given that
prostitution has always offered comparatively higher wages, which is the pri-
mary motivation for women joining the profession, even among those already
earning a decent income. In the eighteenth century, the smallest recorded
amount for the services of a prostitute was five pennies, whereas Bruges lace
makers only earned two to four pennies a day.42 And today, Ghent’s window
prostitutes earn €50 in fifteen minutes, while the mean hourly wage in Bel-
gium amounts €11.43
Sex workers’ ages also vary from individual to individual, but their mean
ages reflect a clear trend towards prostitutes now being considerably older
than their predecessors, as seen in Table 3.2. In the eighteenth century, the
mean age of prostitutes at the time of their first arrest was 23, while the esti-
mated mean now is 34. For the most part, this was a gradual shift. The nine-
teenth-century mean was 26, which then dipped slightly in the first half of the
twentieth century to 25. This means that the bulk of the increase came in the
second half of the twentieth century. This trend is related to shifts in the ages
at which they joined and then left the profession.
Nearly three in four of all prostitutes in eighteenth-century Bruges were
younger than 24–25 at the time of their first arrest, and the court records con-
taining such information indicate that most had started in their late teens or
41
42
43
41 Van Nunen, Effectonderzoek, p. 136.
42 mab, 188, Criminele informatiën, 4 March 1775, Angeline Meijers. On the mean wages of
Bruges lace makers, see p. 3 of that text.
43 Interview with Ans Traen and An Mortier, Pasop, Ghent, 12 June 2012. Excluding extremes,
the net monthly income in Belgium is €1909, or €90 a day in a month with twenty-one
working days, or €11 an hour. Information available at: http://www.vacature.com/blog/
hoeveel-belgen-verdienen-gemiddeld-meer-dan-2000-euro-netto; last accessed 8 July
2012.
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Selling Sex in a Provincial Town: Prostitution in Bruges 73
Table 3.2 Ages of Bruges’ sex workers, 1750–2011.44
1750–1790 1872–1909 1910–1921 1940–1945 2011
10–14 0.4% – – – –
15–19 27.8% 6.1% 17.2% 23.2% 4.3%
20–24 43.2% 43.1% 37.4% 35.1% 13.0%
25–29 13.2% 29.0% 28.3% 19.9% 18.5%
30–34 9.8% 14.1% 9.1% 12.2% 21.7%
35–39 2.6% 4.4% 3.0% 5.9% 13.0%
40 + 3.0% 3.3% 5.1% 3.7% 29.3%
N 266 610 99 271 92
early twenties, although a few had started as young as 14, and one even at 13.
This remained unchanged in the nineteenth century; while 45 per cent of pros-
titutes began working in the sector before the age of 20, 38 per cent indicated
they had started between the ages of 20 and 24.45 The mean age at which pres-
ent-day prostitutes working in East and West Flanders started, however, is 26.
Changes in the legislation and alterations in the norms surrounding adulthood
and the appropriate age at which to start working help explain this evolution.
In the eighteenth century, there was no legal distinction between those who
had turned 25—the actual age of majority at the time—and those who had
not. People began working at much younger ages than today and were consid-
ered to be adults well before that time. In the early-modern era, women were
seen as being adults from their mid-teens onward, a time when they were paid
as adult labourers and no longer referred to as children.46 Today, prostitution
is legal for women who attain the age of majority—now 18—and people start
working at much later ages.47 Juvenile prostitutes still exist, but they are the
44
45
46
47
44 Mechant (ongoing doctoral research based on eighteenth-century court records);
Mertens, “Prostitutie in Vlaanderen”, p. 56; Vande Voorde, “Prostitutie te Brugge tijdens de
eerste en de tweede wereldoorlog”, pp. 78–79 and 82; 2011 Annual Report, Pasop.
45 Van Nunen, Effectonderzoek, p. 141; Mertens, “Prostitutie in Vlaanderen”, p. 58.
46 Amy M. Froide, Never Married: Singlewomen in Early Modern England (New York, 2005),
p. 9.
47 For the legislation regarding prostitution by minors, see Stevens, Strafrecht en seksualiteit,
pp. 518–519.
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74 Mechant
exception rather than the norm because the authorities are quick to intervene
in such cases.48
The stopping age has undergone a similar evolution. While nearly one in
three contemporary sex workers are 40 or over, this was almost never the case
in the eighteenth century. In his research on prostitution in eighteenth-century
London, Randolph Trumbach argued that prostitutes stopped when they got
too old because once youth and beauty were gone, the clients disappeared.49
And for the eighteenth century, this does indeed seems to have been true.
The few older prostitutes operated at the margins of the sector. For example,
45-year-old Marie Bosan clearly had trouble finding clients as the aldermen
stated that “she not only called the married men and youngsters in, but chil-
dren of ten to twelve years as well.”50 Today, physical ageing takes its toll more
gradually thanks to better living conditions, hygiene, and cosmetics, as well as
improvements in and greater access to medical care, and while the increase
in sex workers’ ages may not be entirely related to these developments, they
certainly play an important role. In any case, the ageing of the prostitute popu-
lation has had important consequences, such as extending the length of their
careers in the profession and changes in their family circumstances.
While the greater majority of eighteenth and nineteenth-century pros-
titutes were unmarried (Table 3.3), today more than half are in a long-term
48
49
50
Table 3.3 Marital status of Bruges’ sex workers, 1750–1945.51
1750–1790 1872–1909 1910–1921 1940–1945
Unmarried 81.7% 81.7% 57.6% 58.1%
Married 7.0% 7.2% 27.1% 30.1%
Married but living alone 7.7% 7.2% 8.5% 5.2%
Divorced 0.0% 0.0% 1.7% 3.1%
Widowed 3.5% 3.9% 5.1% 3.5%
N 284 180 59 229
51
48 Interview with Traen and Mortier.
49 Randolph Trumbach, Sex and the Gender Revolution, Vol. 1: Heterosexuality and the Third
Gender in Enlightenment London (Chicago, 1998), p. 136.
50 State Archives of Bruges [hereafter sab], Tychten, 659, cahier 12, folio 13, 3 September
1790, Marie Bosan.
51 Mechant (ongoing doctoral research based on eighteenth-century court records);
Mertens, “Prostitutie in Vlaanderen”, p. 64; Vande Voorde, “Prostitutie te Brugge tijdens de
eerste en de tweede wereldoorlog”, pp. 87 and 90; 2011 Annual Report, Pasop.
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Selling Sex in a Provincial Town: Prostitution in Bruges 75
relationship.52 Again, general developments were responsible for this, includ-
ing the decreasing age of marriage and the shrinking number of spinsters prior
to the second half of the twentieth century, and the increase in cohabitation
afterwards.53 Spikes during wartime in the number of married women engag-
ing in the sex trade probably reflect temporary situations in which wives left on
their own may have turned to prostitution in their struggle to survive, although
this is hard to estimate. It is certainly possible that the historical sources avail-
able did not always note when an absent husband had been mobilized.54 The
number of prostitutes with children (see Table 3.4) was likewise subject to
change. The contemporary sex worker population contains the greatest num-
ber of mothers—a rather notable finding given the widespread use of birth
Table 3.4 Bruges’ sex workers with one or more children, 1750–2011.55
1750–1790 1872–1909 1910–1921 1940–1945 Pasopa
Number of women 41 68 14 58 48
with children
Total number of 284 172 69 270 74
women
Per cent of sex 14.4% 39.5% 20.3% 21.5% 64.9%
workers with children
a Data pertaining to the entire provinces of East and West Flanders
52
53
54
55
52 No sets of data are currently available on the official marital status of contemporary Bru-
ges sex workers, but 46.6 per cent of East and West Flemish sex workers are not in a rela-
tionship. van Nunen, Effectonderzoek, p. 134.
53 Between the end of the eighteenth century and the end of World War ii, the age at first
marriage for women decreased. In Flanders and Brabant, it was 27.3 in 1780–1789 and
26.2 in 1890–1899. In Belgium, it was 25.7 and 23.4 in 1947. Meanwhile, the proportion
of spinsters decreased from 23.5 per cent in 1829 to 10.4 per cent in 1947. Isabelle Devos,
“Marriage and Economic Conditions since 1700: the Belgian Case”, in Isabelle Devos and
Liam Kennedy (eds), Marriage and Rural Economy. Western Europe since 1400 (Turnhout,
1999), pp. 118, 124, 128.
54 Vande Voorde, “Prostitutie te Brugge tijdens de Eerste en de Tweede Wereldoorlog”,
pp. 96–97.
55 Mechant (ongoing doctoral research based on eighteenth-century court records);
Mertens, “Prostitutie in Vlaanderen”, p. 67; Vande Voorde, “Prostitutie te Brugge tijdens de
eerste en de tweede wereldoorlog”, pp. 93–97; 2011 Annual Report, Pasop.
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76 Mechant
control. However, there are some reasonable explanations. Present-day pros-
titutes tend to be older when joining the profession, and having been fertile
longer than women in the past they are thus more likely to have children in
general. Furthermore, both having children out of wedlock and being a single
mother are normal features of today’s society. Either way, it only confirms that
sex workers are actually quite ordinary women.
Certainly, they’re just as varied as the general population, although some
trends are present among their profiles. While they cannot all be stereotyped
as poor young migrants, analyses do show that some groups are overrepresent-
ed. Women with minimal prospects, such as migrants or the poorly educated,
do indeed become prostitutes more often than others; moreover, as Bruges has
become more diverse, offering more possibilities to more people, prostitutes
increasingly come from distinct social groups. However, this does not make
them passive victims. This stereotype of prostitutes as being “vulnerable” is
linked to the impression that they fall prey to unscrupulous exploiters, but
what do we actually know about the circumstances of their employment?
Sex Workers and Their Employers
While it is the case that some sex workers, both official and illicit, work under
the oversight or protection of a brothel owner, madam, procurer, or pimp, this
is not true of all. Many prostitutes have operated independently throughout
history. Even in the nineteenth century, when prostitutes were not legally al-
lowed to work outside of Bruges’ official brothels, a considerable number still
walked the streets or received men in private.56 Presumably profitability has
always been the most important factor in determining working arrangements.
When the sector is lucrative, it attracts more people seeking to arrange contact
between prostitutes and their clients—intermediaries, in other words. Prosti-
tution is not as profitable in Bruges now, and as a result there are many more
independent sex workers in the city; nearly half operate in private settings,
whereas this is only the case for one fourth of the prostitutes in East and West
Flanders as a whole.57 In the eighteenth century, about a third of the Bruges’
prostitutes were streetwalkers or women who frequented dishonest inns, but it
is not clear at all as to how many were actually working on their own. The court
56
57
56 Mertens, “Prostitutie in Vlaanderen”, p. 162.
57 2011 Annual Report, Pasop.
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Selling Sex in a Provincial Town: Prostitution in Bruges 77
records indicate that some were accompanied by an intermediary or were
called to a house of ill repute whenever they had customers, while others had
arrangements with the inns they frequented. However, few streetwalkers were
entirely dependent on intermediaries and about one in ten of all prostitutes
received customers in their own homes—an activity that they often combined
with running their own brothels.
All the same, the level of organization involved in eighteenth-century pros-
titution is remarkable. At the time of their arrest, four out of ten prostitutes
lived—or had lived—in a “closed brothel”, that is to say an establishment, usu-
ally an inn run by a keeper in which they both lived and worked. While individ-
ual circumstances varied, there is no doubt that this system generally curtailed
prostitutes’ freedom; some women informed the authorities that they could
leave the house at any moment and many clearly did, while others stated they
were practically imprisoned. In Bruges, as in other early modern cities, debt
bondage was the most common method employed for keeping prostitutes in
such houses.58 Debts could be accrued for boarding costs but also for cloth-
ing, drinks, travel costs, and the like, and the most remorseless brothel keepers
charged so much for these services that prostitutes’ expenses exceeded their
incomes. Marianne Stiers, for instance, declared that even though she earned
a lot of money, she had to give it all to the bawdy woman to cover the debts she
had run up because of the wine she drank, thus making it impossible to leave.59
Marie De Faït similarly said, “She did not know how to pay off her debts when
she was charged for everything she consumed.”60
Indeed, few of the eighteenth-century prostitutes indicated that they had
started against their will but many claimed that they lost their freedom after
entering the brothel house. Marie Le Boeuf testified that she entered the broth-
el on her own initiative, but when she thought better of it, she could not leave
because she was under surveillance, and she said that her only hope was that
her father would come to fetch her.61 Unfortunately, there are no more recent
sources that can tell us whether such practises continued, but it is likely that
prostitutes’ circumstances remained just as diverse, with some working inde-
pendently to varying degrees and others becoming trapped. Presumably, the
latter situation became increasingly uncommon over time due to increased
regulations, particularly in the last few decades. According to Ans Traen and
58
59
60
61
58 Van de Pol, Het Amsterdams hoerdom, p. 300; Benabou, La prostitution et la police des
moeurs, p. 223.
59 sab, Tychten, 658, cahier 6, folios 29–30, 6 October 1789, Marianne Stiers Marianne.
60 sab, Tychten, 656, cahier 1, folios 19–20, 6 February 1787, Marie De Faït.
61 sab, Tychten, 656, cahier 1, folios 9–10, 19 January 1787, Marie Le Boeuf.
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78 Mechant
An Mortier from the ngo Pasop, forced prostitution is much less widespread
today than is often believed. They indicated that they do not know of a sin-
gle sex worker in West Flanders who is constrained by an intermediary or for
whom it is impossible to stop. And while they conceded that quitting the sec-
tor is difficult as a result of other circumstances such as the problems involved
in explaining away such a gap in a résumé, this is a different issue.62
However, while few eighteenth-century women declared that they were
forced into prostitution, “choice” is a relative concept. Prostitutes were often
persuaded to take up the profession via misrepresentations. For example,
Jacoba Mesijs said that she started because her prospective madam claimed
to know girls in Antwerp who had earned eighty-one guilders in sixteen
days.63 Jacoba entered prostitution to earn a lot of money, but the amount
she was promised clearly was exaggerated. And while forced prostitution was
the exception rather than the norm, it did occur. Anne Marie Cootens testi-
fied that while looking for work, she had moved in with Marie Callens, who,
unbeknownst to her, ran a house of ill repute. When she had not found a job
after a few days, Anne Marie had to sell some of her clothing. Callens “saw
that she was in need” and gave her clothes but “forced her to go into a room
with the clients of the inn.”64 Anne Marie informed the aldermen and Callens
was jailed, but other women were not so fortunate. Rather, they acquired more
debt and were passed between brothels, thus becoming trapped in trafficking
networks.
Indeed, trafficking—meaning here all assisted migration, both voluntary
and involuntary—is not a modern phenomenon. Eighteenth-century brothel
owners in Bruges corresponded with colleagues elsewhere to exchange girls
and plan their travel. The only thing that changed over the course of time
was the expanse of territories they operated across. While Bruges’ eighteenth-
century networks did not reach further than Brussels, those of the nineteenth
century crossed some national borders and the present ones cross even more.65
A substantial number of immigrant prostitutes were trafficked, especially
those from farther away. In fact, eighteenth-century sex workers who were not
native to Bruges rarely began their careers there. Most were prostitutes on the
move and the city was just one more stop on the road. Indeed, such networks
allowed for a great deal of mobility; some women only stayed in Bruges for a
62
63
64
few weeks or months before they continued on their way.
65
62 Interview with Traen and Mortier.
63 sab, Informatieboeken, 642, folio 242, 30 December 1758, Jacoba Mesijs.
64 sab, Registers instructies, 712, cahier 4, folios 35–37, 7 June 1777, Anne Marie Cootens.
65 Dupont, Maagdenverleidsters, hoeren en speculanten, p. 98.
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Selling Sex in a Provincial Town: Prostitution in Bruges 79
The role played by trafficking networks is hard to pin down. Yet it is certain
that they were not merely mechanisms of forced prostitution, although they
did operate as such in some cases. The aforementioned Marianne Stiers, for
example, was passed between brothel keepers as a result of her debts. Other
women, however, willingly took part in trafficking. Clara Van den Brugge of
Brussels told the Bruges aldermen that she voluntarily went to the city along
with a friend in order to live in Jan De Met’s house of ill repute.66 For their part,
Bruges’ Macqué sisters accepted a brothel madam’s offer for employment in
her Ostend establishment because their reputation in Bruges was at stake as a
result of the fact that they had been streetwalking.67 In the nineteenth century,
the police investigated accusations of trafficking levelled against Léon Désiré
Thibault, a French brothel owner. He was not found guilty because the women
involved were of age and were already working as prostitutes before travel-
ling to Bruges, which—according to the police—meant that they had not been
forced.68 Although this may be disputable, it is clear that trafficked prostitutes
rarely fit the standard image of innocent young girls. Prostitutes have always
had many reasons for moving, including the avoidance of social stigma or
simply looking out for greater profits. In addition, they were often forced to
travel onwards in the eighteenth century because of court judgements banish-
ing them. Willingly or not, trafficked women ended up working under highly
diverse conditions, whether in brothels that varied in terms of their size, or-
ganisation, profitability, and amenities or in the precarious circumstances ex-
perienced elsewhere by the prostitute population at large.
Working Conditions
In the early modern period, the boundaries between different types of prosti-
tution were less clear than they are today. Streetwalkers solicited for c ustomers
around military barracks and theatres and retired to soldiers’ quarters,
cemeteries, or the town ramparts for sexual intercourse.69 Most prostitutes,
66
67
68
69
66 sab, Tychten, 656, cahier 1, folios 17–18, 6 February 1787, Clara Van den Brugge.
67 sab, Tychten, 655, cahier 8, folios 6–7, 11 July 1786, Rosa Macqué.
68 Mertens, “Prostitutie in Vlaanderen”, pp. 79–80. The primary source material concerning
this network consists of correspondences between the city governments of Bruges and
Versailles.
69 Cemeteries are often mentioned in the court records, presumably because at night they
offered the privacy requisite for sexual encounters.
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80 Mechant
owever, combined indoor and outdoor transactions. They either looked for
h
costumers at inns or brought in those that they had found elsewhere. On some
days, they did not leave the bars they frequented, while on others they stayed
outdoors completely. Prostitutes working in closed brothel houses usually
plied their trade inside the building, but some did go out to look for clients
when none appeared on the premises. Women working from home similarly
found customers on the streets or called out to them from their windows. The
rare upper-class prostitute was more discrete, however, and remained indoors
like the mistresses who were installed in private houses or brothel rooms to
provide services for one man. It is likely that similar practises were employed
in the nineteenth century and at the beginning of the twentieth, although
maintaining the same level of the flexibility between indoor and outdoor busi-
ness must have been made complicated by the legal framework that only al-
lowed prostitution inside registered brothels.
Today, visible forms of prostitution have entirely disappeared from Bruges.
There are no sex workers soliciting in parks, nor are there window prostitutes;
as mentioned above, this change is related to evolutions in both Bruges’ econ-
omy and public image. The other side of the spectrum—the escorts—are not
represented either, or at least they are not known. Rather, Bruges’ sex workers
operate out of bars (52 per cent), private settings (44 per cent), and saunas and
massage parlours (4 per cent).70 Although it is hard to generalize, the city’s
prostitutes today seem to work in relatively decent circumstances. They are
sheltered from the dangerous and unpleasant situations related to working
on the streets and they are not completely dependent on pimps or procurers.
However, each type of prostitution and each individual situation have their
own benefits and drawbacks, particularly when it comes to earning potential.
The price of sex depends on several interrelated factors. In addition to the
setting, the service provided, and the class of the prostitute, the client also
matters. What little data is available from the eighteenth-century records in-
dicate that prices ranged from five pennies to one crown, which is between
half and five times the daily wage of an unskilled labourer.71 In the nineteenth
century, prices fluctuated between one and fifty francs.72 The first was the stan-
dard price for soldiers visiting brothels, while the latter was the amount paid
70
71
72
70 2011 Annual Report, Pasop.
71 mab, 188, Criminele informatiën, 29 February 1768, Marianne Cortenbos; sab, Registers
instructies, 725, cahier 6, folios 1–7, 16 June 1789, Anna Van Vijve.
72 The nineteenth-century data are based on two main sets of sources: the correspondences
between the police and the city council, and the testimonies given by informers, soldiers
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Selling Sex in a Provincial Town: Prostitution in Bruges 81
by a Bruges baron to a Brussels prostitute who regularly travelled to Bruges at
his request; a special room was readied for their use upon each occasion. Most
revealingly, the woman slept with another client for just two francs.73 Similar
examples can be found in the eighteenth century, and they all make it clear
that historical prices depended more on the class of the client than that of the
sex worker. Contemporary data for Bruges could not be retrieved, but it seems
modern prices are more consistent: window prostitutes in Ghent charge €50
for fifteen minutes, while a brothel visit of half an hour costs around €100.74
Despite the large range, prices have remained remarkably stable over the
long run. According to Chris Vandenbroeke, the mean price of a half hour in
a brothel is invariably the equivalent of one male day’s wage.75 And the data
discussed here more or less confirm this: the mean price in the eighteenth cen-
tury was 113 per cent of one daily wage, 117 per cent in the nineteenth century,
and the mean net daily wage of Belgians today amounts to around €100—just
enough for thirty minutes in a brothel.76 Still, these long-run comparisons
obscure short-term fluctuations. Nineteenth-century data indicate that in
the 1880s, a time of economic crisis in which there was an exceptionally high
number of prostitutes, the mean price dropped to just 40 per cent of the daily
wage.77 The current economic crisis has also affected prostitutes. As Traen and
Mortier put it, “The demand side decreases while the supply side increases.”
The result is that prostitutes have more down time between customers, while
the costs of certain types of accommodation, like windows in Ghent, have sub-
stantially increased. So even though the prices have not changed in twenty
years, the net daily wage earned by sex workers has declined over the last
decade.78
While sex workers’ wages—even at the low end of the sector—have always
been high compared to those of other women, the sums paid by customers do
73
74
75
76
77
78
who consequently became ill, as well as others. As such, the prices only refer to clandes-
tine prostitution. Mertens, “Prostitutie in Vlaanderen”, pp. 218–220. Mertens also found a
few references to the price of 0 francs, but this might refer to a soldier who had an actual
relationship with the prostitute.
73 Mertens, “Prostitutie in Vlaanderen”, pp. 183, 186, 386.
74 Interview with Traen and Mortier.
75 Chris Vandenbroeke, “De prijs van betaalde liefde”, Spiegel historiael, 2 (1983), pp. 90–
94. The prices for the nineteenth century were drawn from the dissertation written by
Mertens. According to Dupont, fifteenth and sixteenth century prices were lower: Du-
pont, Maagdenverleidsters, hoeren en speculanten, pp. 126–127.
76 See note 42.
77 Mertens, “Prostitutie in Vlaanderen”, pp. 230 and 267.
78 Interview with Traen and Mortier.
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82 Mechant
not tell us much with regard to their actual earnings. There are always costs in-
volved. Prostitutes working with an intermediary have to hand over about half
their pay—a proportion that has not changed over the centuries79—and oth-
ers have to pay rent for a window or a room, and all must compensate for the
hours spent without clients. Sex workers’ net wages are therefore extremely
variable. Not only do they fluctuate daily, but a great deal depends on individu-
al circumstances and the economic climate. So while it is true that sex workers
can potentially make a good living, it all hinges on their operating expenses vs.
turnover, as with any other small business.
Unfortunately, we have little information regarding prostitutes’ average
number of clients or the length of time between them. What we do know is
that many prostitutes are not employed in the sector full-time; instead, they
often combine sex work with another job, or only occasionally use prostitu-
tion to supplement wages earned elsewhere. Quantitative data is not available
for historic or contemporary Bruges alone, but in a survey conducted in the
present-day provinces of East and West Flanders as a whole, 13 per cent of sex
workers indicated that prostitution is not their primary means of support and
29 per cent declared that prostitution is not their only source of income.80
Presumably, these proportions were much higher in previous centuries, when
combining several occupations was a more common survival strategy. Nearly
all eighteenth-century prostitutes interrogated in Bruges stated that they had
some other form of employment, and while such claims have to be interpreted
within the judicial context, there is no reason to assume that the occupations
they provided to the court were not practised at all, particularly among street-
walkers. In all likelihood, full-time prostitution was most common among those
working in brothel houses, but even under those circumstances there may not
have been enough customers to support women without additional income.
And indeed, there were brothel workers who had other employment; Anna
Helders, who lived in De Vlagge (The Flag) brothel, for instance, informed the
court that she worked part-time as both a fille de joie and domestic servant.81 In
nineteenth-century Bruges, registered prostitutes were not permitted to have a
second job, but that does not mean that those working illicitly did not combine
79
80
81
79 sab, Tychten, 658, cahier 4, folios 19–21, 7 July 1789, Marie Roselie Duhamel; mab, 188,
Criminele informatiën, 4 March 1775, Angeline Meijers; Mertens, “Prostitutie in Vlaan-
deren”, p. 219 ; Interview with Traen and Mortier.
80 van Nunen, Effectonderzoek, pp. 136–138.
81 sab, Tychten, 659, cahier 1, folio 28, 10 February 1790, Anna Helders.
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Selling Sex in a Provincial Town: Prostitution in Bruges 83
occupations or that those in official brothels did not do so as well. Certainly
data from the eighteenth century and today make it clear that flexibility was
and still is crucial in the prostitution sector.
Conclusion
We can draw two main conclusions from this brief history of prostitution in
Bruges. First, the sector is characterized by a remarkable degree of long-term
stability. Although at first sight there seem to have been many changes, most
of the developments are in line with general societal evolutions or represent
continuity in another guise. For example, legislation progressed from criminal-
ization to regulation to abolition, but in the end all the changes were merely
different approaches to controlling prostitution—a profession still considered
a “problem”, one with which the authorities continue to struggle. The number
of migrants working in the sector has increased substantially, but so has the
number of migrants in the overall population. The territory of prostitution net-
works has grown, but overall mobility has increased quite extensively as well.
Public solicitation has disappeared and the sector’s different branches have
grown more distinct, but at the same time labour demarcations in general have
become more pronounced. Even the prices for sexual services have remained
remarkably constant when compared to daily wages, as have the sums that
dependent prostitutes are expected to give to intermediaries. Individual rev-
enues are not constant but there is no evidence to suggest that they ever have
been, and meanwhile, the hourly wage earning potential remains considerably
higher than that of other occupations. This overall continuity also suggests
that prostitution in Bruges does not differ substantially from the sector else-
where and that what changes it has undergone merely correspond to the city’s
own evolution, most notably with regard to its size.
The second conclusion is that while the sector shows a high degree of con-
tinuity as a whole, individual circumstances have always been subject to a
great deal of variability. Some women fall victim to exploiters, others make
their own arrangements with intermediaries, and still others work entirely
independently. So while forced prostitution and abuses do take place, this is
not the general state of affairs. Trafficking networks are similarly diverse. Some
women were brought to Bruges to work as prostitutes without their consent,
but most already had experience in the sex trade before they took up such long
journeys and either agreed with travel proposals when they were made or were
seeking opportunities to move. Working situations and wages have remained
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84 Mechant
diverse as well. Lastly, the prostitution sector has internal divisions which mir-
ror the existing hierarchies and classes in society, and prostitutes’ profiles are
also quite diverse as a result. Migrants and locals, rich and poor, young and
old, single and attached: all work in the sex industry. Yet some groups, such as
migrants, the young, and the poor have always been overrepresented among
prostitute populations, which explains our current stereotypes regarding sex
workers. However, it does not then follow that all prostitution is the result of
force or the exploitation of the vulnerable. As this brief essay has shown, some
women took their lives into their own hands, deciding to become prostitutes
for their own reasons.
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chapter 4
Sex for Sale in Florence
Michela Turno
Introduction
Despite the often heated debates at the national and local levels about prosti-
tution that have been ongoing since the 1950s, commercial sex has only quite
recently begun to receive more attention among Italian historians. This is ap-
parent in the lack of studies covering the last four centuries of Florentine pros-
titution. While the most relevant publications devoted to this subject focus on
the late mediaeval and Renaissance periods,1 none fully addresses the seven-
teenth or the eighteenth century,2 and only one study explores the sex trade
from the Restoration to 1888.3 All this research is mainly based on documents
preserved at the Archivio di Stato in Florence, from the Ufficiali dell’Onestà
(Office of Decency 1403–1747) to the Buongoverno (1814–1848), and from the
Prefettura del Compartimento Fiorentino (1848–1858 and 1859–1864) to the
Prefettura (1865–1952) and Questura (1860–1888).
To date, no studies have investigated male prostitution which, according
to Michael Rocke, was a well-known phenomenon in Florence starting in the
* I would like to thank Franco Nudi and Nicoletta Vernillo of the Archivio Centrale dello Stato
in Rome for their help in going through the ministerial files, and I would also like to thank
Christian De Vito and Giovanni Focardi for their comments, critiques, and suggestions. Por-
tions of this article have been drawn from two contributions previously published by the
Annali di Storia di Firenze and by the publisher Giunti.
1 See Richard Trexler, “La Prostitution florentine au xve siècle: Patronages et clienteles”, An-
nales, 1 (1981), pp. 983–1015; Maria Serena Mazzi, “Il mondo della prostituzione nella Firenze
tardo medievale”, Ricerche Storiche, 14 (1984), pp. 337–363; Prostitute e lenoni nella Firenze del
Quattrocento (Milan, 1991).
2 On the institutions created with the aim of reforming former prostitutes and providing a ref-
uge for married prostitutes, see Sherrill Cohen, The Evolution of Women’s Asylums since 1500:
From Refuges for Ex-prostitutes to Shelters for Battered Women (New York [etc.], 1992); John
K. Brackett, “The Florentine Onestà and the Control of Prostitution, 1403–1680”, Sixteenth
Century Journal, 2 (1993), pp. 273–300.
3 Michela Turno, “Il malo esempio”: Donne scostumate e prostituzione nella Firenze dell’Ottocento
(Florence, 2003) and Michela Turno, “Postriboli in Firenze: Un’inchiesta del prefetto del 30
novembre 1849”, Annali di Storia di Firenze, 2 (2007), pp. 233–246. For the period from unifica-
tion until 1914, see Mary Gibson, Prostitution and the State in Italy, 1860–1915 (Columbus, 1999).
© Michela Turno, 2017 | doi 10.1163/9789004346253_005
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86 Turno
fourteenth century.4 Likewise, no studies concerning twentieth-century pros-
titution have been carried out so far.5 Twentieth-century archival documents,
such as those preserved at the Archivio Centrale di Stato in Rome, do not seem
to have information that could provide good insights into the last century.
The relative paucity of sources is mainly the result of the partial reform of the
regulation of prostitution dating back to 1860 and definite abrogation in 1958.
Following the early feminists’ battles against regulation, some measures were
introduced in 1888 which limited the state to regulating places of prostitution
but not the persons involved. However, it is possible that health and police
statistics and, in particular, press reports might offer a very general picture of
the trade in the early 1950s when the socialist senator Lina Merlin presented to
parliament her draft bill on the abolition of regulation.
The details of prostitutes’ working conditions, family situation, media-
tion, and profiles are largely unknown, but could perhaps to some extent be
gathered from court records and newspaper articles. Florentine non-profit
organizations, such as the c.a.t. social co-operative and Associazione Arco-
baleno, provide additional sources of information, as they produced note-
worthy documentation between the late 1990s and the first decade of the
twenty-first century. These organizations offer medical and legal support to
both those who want to leave the business of sold sex and those who decide
to keep working as streetwalkers. Given the state of research and the nature
and lack of available sources, providing a satisfying overview of prostitution
in Florence from the seventeenth century to the present is not an easy task.
However, this chapter will attempt to draw a reasonable, though necessarily in-
complete, picture based primarily on what the law has said about prostitution,
archival findings, and what is known about the social and economic structure
of Florentine society.
The Seventeenth Century: Laws, Definitions, and Social Profiles
Until 1680, prostitution in Florence, which was then the capital of the Grand
Duchy of Tuscany, was under the administration and control of the Onestà
4 Michael Rocke, Forbidden Friendships: Homosexuality and Male Culture in Renaissance
F lorence (Oxford, 1996).
5 As far as I know, only two studies have focused on late-twentieth century Florentine prostitu-
tion: Laura Lucani, “Criminalità femminile: informazione e ricerca nell’area fiorentina degli
anni ‘80” (Unpublished m.a., University of Florence, 1989) and Raffaele Palumbo, La tua città
sulla strada: Cronache di ordinarie prostituzioni (San Domenico di Fiesole, 1997).
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Sex for Sale in Florence 87
(hereafter Office of Decency). Created in 1403, this magistracy was to “estab-
lish brothels in the city, licence prostitutes and pimps to work in them, regu-
late their activities, and adjudicate criminal cases involving the women under
[its] supervision.”6 At the same time, it was expected to generate revenue by
granting licenses and permission to meretrici (prostitutes) on the basis of a
fee and the imposition of pecuniary penalties.7 Over the course of three cen-
turies, the magistracy imposed several restrictions on prostitutes’ freedom but
also granted some concessions, such as protection from other magistracies, im-
munity from prosecution for debt, and the right to bring injustices before the
Office. In fact, according to Cohen, “Prostitutes enjoyed more direct access to
the courts than did their respectable female contemporaries, who had to rely
on male representatives to bring their cause to court.”8 Moreover, the Office of
Decency was not infrequently asked to establish whether “loose-living wives
and spinsters” or “a woman with only one lover […] were to be counted as pub-
lic prostitutes.”9 The decisions of the court varied from one woman to another;
while some were punished, others were exonerated.
By the end of sixteenth century, however, the Office of Decency had already
tightened control over both the resources and the movement of prostitutes.
Permission to traverse the city at night or change residences had to be pur-
chased from the Office. Any violation was duly fined but “exemptions to most
of these regulations were also sold to those able to pay, which was a quicker
method to generate revenue than was the collection of fines.”10 Moreover, in
line with this trend, registered prostitutes who were married and could general-
ly have expected to escape prosecution for adultery saw a deterioration in their
position. In 1635 the grand-ducal government allowed the criminal magistracy,
the Otto di Guardia e Balia, to charge registered women who were married with
adultery if they did not withdraw from their “shameless life” and return to their
husbands.11 Adultery was certainly considered to be worse than prostitution as
6 Rocke, Forbidden Friendships, p. 31. According to Cohen, “Early modern Tuscany rec-
ognized several variations on the general term meretrice. They spoke of streetwalkers
(cantoniere), brothel prostitutes (meretrici in postribulo), parlour whores (donne di par-
tito), and courtesans (cortigiane).” Cohen, The Evolution of Women’s Asylums, p. 46.
7 Brackett, “The Florentine Onestà”, pp. 273–300, 281–285.
8 Cohen, The Evolution of Women’s Asylums, p. 44.
9 Ibid., pp. 47–48. Generally, an anonymous denunciation was enough to raise suspicions
which would lead to an investigation. See Andrea Zorzi, “The Judicial System in Florence
in The Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries”, in Trevor Dean and K.J.P. Lowe (eds), Crime,
Society and the Law in Renaissance Italy (Cambridge, 1994), pp. 41–58.
10 Brackett, “The Florentine Onestà”, pp. 273–300, 295–296.
11 Ibid., p. 298; Cohen, The Evolution of Women’s Asylums, p. 49.
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88 Turno
it undermined the institution of the family and challenged male prerogatives.
Even so, this and other edicts making it possible for husbands and relatives to
denounce married prostitutes had few consequences in practice. Cohen sug-
gests that “prostitution might seem to be not a sin but a rational strategy, nec-
essary along with marriage, for women to make economic ends meet.”12
Laws attempting to control married prostitutes were as ineffective as those
decrees concerning unregistered prostitutes and suspect women. More numer-
ous than any other, unregistered prostitutes were perceived to be an additional
serious problem but, at the same time, an additional source of revenue. By
buying their own immunity, they could avoid wearing the prostitute’s identify-
ing sign (a piece of yellow ribbon) and they didn’t have to work in bordellos or
reside on those streets designated for prostitution.13 They could enjoy a degree
of freedom as long as they behaved with “apparent modesty and decency.”14
They could preserve their reputations and independence and move about free-
ly, increasing their opportunities for better business. In fact, “only unregistered
prostitutes had property” while “the registered prostitutes were ‘like a snail’
owning so little they could carry it on their backs.”15 Social background, inde-
pendence, and the ability to make the most of their entrepreneurial activities
could determine (or improve) the living conditions of a prostitute.
According to contemporary observers,16 the number of prostitutes in Flor-
ence seems to have increased in the seventeenth century. The great majority
were single, but widowed and married women were not infrequently regis-
tered with the Office of Decency and they were also among those taken in as
repentant prostitutes.17 Reversing the trend of the previous century which was
characterized by a predominance of foreign and northern Italian women,18
prostitutes were now mostly of Florentine origin and from Tuscany. Among
the 767 meretrici registered with the Office of Decency between 1606 and 1650,
12 Cohen, The Evolution of Women’s Asylums, p. 50.
13 “What was for Florence a new method of controlling prostitution was initiated in 1544
[…] with the first creation of official streets of residence for prostitutes”. However, the
wealthiest prostitutes “could live where they pleased.” Brackett, “The Florentine Onestà”,
pp. 273–300, 291–292.
14 Cohen, The Evolution of Women’s Asylums, p. 51.
15 Ibid., p. 55.
16 Ibid., p. 60; Brackett,“The Florentine Onestà”, pp. 273–300, 296; Giulia Calvi, History
of a Plague Year: The Social and the Imaginary in Baroque Florence (Berkeley, 1989),
p. 134.
17 Cohen also reports that “very few of these women left evidence of having had children.”
Cohen, The Evolution of Women’s Asylums, p. 57.
18 Trexler, “La Prostitution”, pp. 983–1015, 985–988.
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Sex for Sale in Florence 89
only twenty were not Italian.19 However, according to Brackett, the “1627–50
period saw a drop in all types of enrolments” as a result of the progressive re-
strictions imposed on meretrici and, above all, the criminalization of married
prostitutes. He suggests that “what probably happened was that many prosti-
tutes simply refused to register and went underground.”20 Yet, according to the
Census of 1631, 4 per cent of the women whose occupations are known were
involved in prostitution.21
The development of textile manufacturing attracted many women from the
countryside throughout the sixteenth and seventieth centuries. Brown and
Goodman report that “surveys of both the silk and the wool industries com-
pleted in 1662–1663 show that female employment [constituted] about 38 per
cent of wool workers and 84 per cent of workers in silk.”22 Nevertheless, the
majority were employed in the lowest-paid jobs in this industry, thus inducing
some of them to seek additional sources of income. Despite social disapproval,
the violence to which they were subjected,23 and the taxes and limitations on
their freedom imposed by the Office of Decency, selling sex could be seen as
a profitable option. Moreover, Calvi notes that “the crisis in manufacturing, in
conjunction with the widespread poverty of the popular classes, forced many
women, particularly in the textile industry, to become prostitutes.”24
An important aspect of the system created by the Office of Decency was the
relationship between the Monastero delle Convertite and the rescue homes
such as the Casa delle Malmaritate and Santa Maria Maddalena. Paradoxi-
cally, the fines and taxes that prostitutes had to pay to the Office were used to
finance the homes for those who gave up the trade.25 Later on, cancellations
19 Brackett, “The Florentine Onestà”, pp. 273–300, 299. More precisely, there were 390 Flo-
rentine women, 258 Tuscan women (from Medici territories), 65 north Italians and 34
south Italians.
20 Ibid., pp. 298–299.
21 “Over 80 per cent of women whose occupations are listed were employed in textiles while
the remainder were scattered over a number of other occupations such as making cloth-
ing (5.9 per cent), prostitution (4 per cent), domestic work (3 per cent), and a variety of
activities ranging from making gold thread to selling liquor.” Judith C. Brown and Jordan
Goodman, “Women and Industry in Florence”, The Journal of Economic History, 40 (1980),
pp. 73–80, 78.
22 Ibid.
23 Cohen, The Evolution of Women’s Asylums, p. 55.
24 Calvi, History of a Plague Year, pp. 133–134. For the economic decline of the wool and silk
industry, see the bibliographic reference in Richard A. Goldthwaite, Economy of Renais-
sance Florence (Baltimore, 2009), pp. 268, 282–283. See also Furio Diaz, Il Granducato di
Toscana (Turin, 1976), in particular pp. 388–408.
25 Brackett, “The Florentine Onestà”, pp. 273–300, 296–298.
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90 Turno
and immunities granted to unregistered prostitutes and women of bad repu-
tation provided the additional income that the Monastero delle Convertite
sorely needed. The widespread practice of granting concessions made it more
difficult to identify prostitutes and keep control over them. Nevertheless, the
grand-ducal government never ceased to exhort (even by threats) registered,
unregistered, and suspect women to reform themselves.
The Eighteenth Century
The lack of available research makes it difficult to offer up a detailed account
of prostitutes and prostitution in eighteenth and early nineteenth-century
Florence. Nevertheless, some sources and legislation on this matter, as well
as an initial superficial exploration of the available sources, allow us to out-
line some general considerations. The Office of Decency was absorbed by the
city’s chief criminal court in 1680 but, so far as is known, no substantial chang-
es were made to the regulatory and fiscal system of prostitution until the late
eighteenth century. There is no doubt, however, that Cosimo iii de Medici’s
reign (1670–1723) was characterized by bigotry and corruption. His decisions
influenced, to a greater or lesser degree, his subjects’ lives, including the lives
of prostitutes. In a burst of anti-Semitism, for instance, he enacted several
laws against the Tuscan Jewish population. Among them, he banned all “sexual
interactions between Jews and non-Jews (which targeted Jewish men who paid
for Christian prostitutes).”26
After the short reign of Gian Gastone, the last Medici grand duke, Tuscany
came under the control of Pietro Leopoldo of Lorraine, whose policy on pros-
titution tended towards repression. Known for having abolished capital pun-
ishment and torture in 1786, Pietro Leopoldo’s efforts were also directed to the
improvement and protection of public morality. In January 1777 he abolished
the tax imposed on meretrici, and in 1780 he banned prostitution from Tus-
can territories with the exception of Livorno. A pragmatist, Pietro Leopoldo
allowed the toleration of prostitution in this important harbour and centre
of trade and business. Leopoldo’s policy regarding prostitution seemed to be
efficacious. By this time, Florence was already one of the main destinations of
European travellers who made the Grand Tour. According to Rosemary Sweet,
“references to prostitutes or ‘public women’ in Florence were extremely rare:
they formed no part of the discourse around the city, unlike Naples, or Venice,
26 Francesca Trivellato, The Familiarity of Strangers: The Sephardic Diaspora, Livorno, and
Cross-Cultural Trade in the Early Modern Period (New Haven, 2009), p. 89.
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Sex for Sale in Florence 91
or even Rome.”27 Archival sources, however, seem to reveal that some form of
control over prostitution remained at work in Florence despite the ban. It ap-
pears, in fact, that a compulsory monthly health check for all “parlour whores”
(so-called donne di partito) was a practice that had been contemplated but not
enacted.28
Control over suspect women and indecent behaviour was the responsi-
bility of the four Commissari di quartiere, the post of the community police
offices created in Florence in 1777.29 In February of 1780, for instance, they
were asked to provide both a list of the “more libertine and scandalous, more
loose-tongued, mordacious and chatterbox ecclesiastics and regulars” and
a “note of the men and women who are the more libertine and scandalous.”
The latter included a number of married women who, with the more or less
explicit consent of their husbands, were having “friendships” with married
men.30 Procuring was forbidden and punished. In March of the same year, the
commissario of San Giovanni produced a record of those women who acted
as procurers (ruffiane). The list was actually very short as it indicated only two
female pimps, both of whom were married. According to a police report, one
of them was arrested for violating an injunction against admitting anyone into
her house, and a parlour whore had been found in company with a married
man at her place.31
This and other documents suggest that, in the economy of neighbourhood
life, men were generally not involved in procuring and prostitution was often
an all-female affair. Moreover, they reveal what was still an unbroken bond
between women selling sex and their communities that dates back to the pre-
vious centuries. In fact, as already noted, “Despite the state’s attempt to stigma-
tize […] prostitution from the sixteenth century on, leading citizens still saw
27 Rosemary Sweet, Cities and the Grand Tour: The British in Italy, c. 1690–1820 (Cambridge,
2012), p. 72.
28 Archivio di Stato, Florence [hereafter, asf], Commissario di quartiere (1777–1808),
Quartiere di S. Giovanni, 52, 1 August 1780.
29 On the Florentine police, see Carlo Mangio, La polizia toscana: Organizzazione e criteri
d’intervento (1765–1808) (Milan, 1988); Alessandra Contini, “La città regolata: Polizia e
amministrazione nella Firenze leopoldina (1777–1782)”, in Istituzioni e società in Toscana
nell’età moderna: Atti delle giornate di studio dedicate a Giuseppe Pansini, 2 vols, (Rome,
1994), i, pp. 426–508.
30 asf, Commissario, 29 February 1780. Viene richiesta una nota degli ecclesiastici e regolari
più libertini e scandalosi, più linguacciuti, mordaci e ciarloni. Nota degli uomini e donne che
sono i più libertini e scandalosi.
31 Ibid., March 1780, Nota di quelle donne che si danno per ruffiane. The second woman kept
and prostituted a girl in her house.
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92 Turno
it as something that has to be tolerated ‘in order to avoid the worst.’”32 Thus, it
is no wonder that not only ordinary citizens but also patrician men could be
found among the clients of average prostitutes. Anna Tamburini, for instance,
the mother of a 5 year-old boy and the wife of a debtor who had taken refuge in
Naples, could count on the “friendship” of the noble Francesco Palli, the Count
Niccolò Acciaioli, and the Marquis Giuseppe Riccardi.33 Perhaps because of
her involvement with nobility, Anna was not immediately sentenced to pun-
ishment. On being ordered to join her husband in Naples, she pleaded against
the judgement and obtained probation by promising to keep good conduct,
which she did.34 But that was not her first time in court.
Anna’s story tells us about the importance of having good relationships,
some form of silent support from both families and neighbours, and the abil-
ity of some women to slip through the spaces left between the law and its
practice.35 Her activities dated back to 1773 when she was 20 years old and
her husband was still in Florence. In the following seven years, Anna had a
child whom her mother cared for, she started practicing the art of comica, and
she continued to maintain her various “friendships”. As far as the documents
reveal, she received no sentences; rather, she asked for probation twice, which
she judiciously used as a means of loosening the grip of the watchful police.
Continuously scrutinized, suspect married women and married prostitutes
tried to find or make room for themselves so they could negotiate their way
out of police control.
The Nineteenth Century: Towards the End of an Epoch
The dissolution of the Grand Duchy and the creation of the Kingdom of Etru-
ria in 1799 did not bring about a change in the policy on prostitution. However,
the annexation of the Tuscan territory by Napoleon brought about a significant
novelty, referred to by the maire of Florence in the following terms: “since the
French government [took power] those women are quartered in twenty-seven
different districts of the city.”36 It is probable that the French rulers tried to
introduce a new model already implemented in France that was based on the
compulsory registration of prostitutes, medical examinations, and the police
32 Cohen, The Evolution of Women’s Asylums, p. 52.
33 asf, Commissario, 6 September 1780.
34 asf, Commissario, October 1780.
35 Cohen, The Evolution of Women’s Asylums, pp. 55–56.
36 Turno, “Il malo esempio”, p. 79 [my translation].
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Sex for Sale in Florence 93
supervision of brothels.37 What was left, however, was the perception of a gen-
eralized lack of control over prostitution: “Such a large and badly regulated
license”, wrote the maire of Florence in the aftermath of the Restoration in 1814,
“demands from the present wise government vigorous measures.”38
Despite complaints made by the “most respectable individuals”, no specific
decrees on prostitution were enacted, and no written regulation existed. A fter
an initial outburst of activity, the interest of the restored Buongoverno ap-
peared to decline.39 In May of 1814 a circular was sent by the Buongoverno to
the prefects of the main Tuscan cities ordering the closure of brothels located
along the busiest streets and the expulsion of all foreign prostitutes. It was sup-
posed to be a temporary solution until a definitive regulation was drafted. A
few days later, the Buongoverno instructed police commissioners about how
to distinguish between women assigned to a brothel and those engaged in
“scandalous practices”, between the meretrici and libertines. Once identified,
the latter were normally subjected to a number of precepts, such as de non con-
versando (injunction to stop talking to men) or della sera (requirement to stay
indoors after dark), and they were only sent to prison as a last resort.
Throughout the forty years after the Restoration in 1814, no other measures
on prostitution were introduced and, with some exceptions,40 no particular
anxiety was expressed on the subject of venereal diseases. In 1830 the pre-
existing regulations on the medical examination of tolerated prostitutes were
merely renewed and slightly modified. The number of inspections was in-
creased to three per month, and infected prostitutes were sent to the hospital
until the disease went into remission. If concerns were raised, they were of a
moral nature, that is to say the protection of public mores and decency from
this “necessary evil”.
Particular emphasis was placed on the protection and re-education of those
girls and young women who did not adhere to gender roles or were exposed
to “bad examples” but not all of them could be defined as libertines. In daily
37 Claude Quétel, History of Syphilis (Baltimore, 1990), pp. 211–215.
38 Turno, “Il malo esempio”, p. 79. Unless otherwise indicated, the following data and quota-
tions are from this source.
39 The Presidenza del Buongoverno was created by Pietro Leopoldo in 1784. It controlled
the police functions and, after the Restoration, its powers also included the direction of
Tuscany prisons, press censorship, and control over foreigners.
40 This is the case of Portoferraio (Island of Elba), where a large garrison was kept. In 1820,
the governor of the Island of Elba noted the spread of diseases among those soldiers who
had commercial sex with clandestine prostitutes. His main concern, however, was the
spread of sex among the men because of their compulsory celibacy and the lack of a
proportionate number of meretrici.
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94 Turno
practice, the law in fact distinguished between girls in moral danger (peri-
colanti), concubines, and women of ill repute (scostumate), applying to each
distinctive and personalized measures and solutions. A paternal and flexible
attitude seems to have characterized the relationship between the grand-ducal
authorities and some of their weakest subjects. The network of institutions—
used both as refuges and as places of internment—played an important role in
this regard.41 Yet, thirty years later sources describe what was defined as “gov-
ernmental leniency” precisely towards those women known for their “loose
behaviour”, not to mention the issue of married prostitutes and libertines.42
At the beginning of the Restoration, in 1814 Florence counted thirty-three
official brothels that were generally small and only one or two women were
working there. Two years later there were forty-six registered prostitutes but
their number decreased throughout the following decades from twenty-two
in 1822 to only five in 1846. Following the revolution of 1848, however, a re-
verse trend took place. The arrival of Austrian troops in May 1849 was a turn-
ing point. A convention signed between Austria and Grand Duke Leopold ii
stipulated that ten thousand soldiers were to be kept in Florence and in the
Tuscan territories for an indefinite period.43 The presence of a foreign army
was certainly a source of unexpected revenue for many but it was also a great
concern for the Austrian command. Less than a month later, the military au-
thorities filed complaints to the prefect over the spread of venereal diseases
among the troops.44
In a few months the number of prostitutes leaped to twenty-one, and they
were housed in six brothels. A later survey conducted at the request of the
prefecture referred to a further, although not spectacular, increase to thirty-
three women in eight brothels. Moreover, an unknown number of unregis-
tered prostitutes or women who were suspected of libertinage should also be
noted. Pressured by the Austrian command, the grand-ducal authority ordered
that stricter watch be kept over suspect women and that medical examina-
tions should be carried out according to the circumstances. At the same time,
41 On nineteenth-century Florentine institutions, see Turno, “Il malo esempio”, pp. 54–78.
Also, Giovanni Gozzini, Il segreto dell’elemosina: Poveri e carità legale a Firenze, 1800–1870
(Florence, 1993); David Scaffei, “La povertà a Firenze a metà dell’Ottocento. Lavoro, fami-
glia, sanità e beneficenza” (Unpublished m.a., University of Florence, 1987).
42 Turno, “Il malo esempio”, p. 85.
43 It was also agreed that while salary and clothing were to be supplied by the Austrian
Emperor, the grand ducal treasury should provide accommodation and provisions for the
army until 1855. See also Turno, “Postriboli in Firenze”, pp. 233–234, 245.
44 Turno, “Il malo esempio”, p. 88. Unless otherwise indicated, all data and quotations are
from this source.
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Sex for Sale in Florence 95
following the instructions of the Home Minister of August 1849, the Prefect
of Florence began to work on a project for the regulation of prostitution that
took six years to complete. It is notable that the regulation of prostitution was
enacted just a few months before the end of the Austrian occupation. It seems
that silent resistance against regulation may have involved anti-Austrian senti-
ment and the financial distress caused by the foreign occupiers.
On 17 March 1855, the Home Minister finally enacted “Instructions on the
Toleration of Public Prostitutes”, acknowledging and reflecting the influence of
the “imported” French regulation system. Despite other more repressive sug-
gestions, the new measure did not include the compulsory registration of clan-
destine prostitutes. Rather, being granted the formal status of prostitute was
considered to be a concession given only to those women who made a request
and on the basis of certain pre-requisites. They were to be at least 18 years old,
not pregnant, free from contagious diseases, and have no criminal record. If
they were from the grand duchy, they were to be single or a widow with no
children, and their parents or relatives should not be opposed to their partici-
pation in prostitution. At the same time, it was permissible to renounce the
licence and leave a brothel after giving notice to the police. Former prostitutes,
however, were to be kept under control with the aim of preventing clandes-
tine prostitution. Compulsory medical examinations and restrictions on these
women’s movements characterized the life of registered prostitutes who also
had to pay doctor’s fees and the costs of their own hospitalization. They could
work (and live) on their own or with other prostitutes in a brothel overseen by
a woman older than 40 years of age.
Sources indicate that the geographical origins of prostitutes tended to vary
from decade to decade. Among the forty-six meretrici registered in 1816, only
seven were “foreign” born (15 per cent), while Florentine and Tuscan women
represented 45 and 36 per cent, respectively. Foreigners (estere) were consid-
ered to be women who came from outside the grand duchy. Most of them were
from the Papal States and a few were from Venice and Padua, while none were
from southern Italy. Three decades later, in 1846, none were described as being
as Florentine and only three were from Siena. Following the Austrian occupa-
tion, however, almost 43 per cent of the prostitutes registered in November
1849 were from grand ducal cities and the countryside, 30 per cent were for-
eigners, and the remaining 19 per cent were from Florence. In 1851, there was a
partial reversal in that trend. The number of foreign prostitutes dropped while
women who were Florentine and Tuscan increased to 33 and 45 per cent, re-
spectively (Table 4.1).
According to the 1849 Note and the 1851 survey, the average age of regis-
tered prostitutes was 23. The youngest, ranging between 17 and 20 years old,
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Table 4.1 Origins of Florence’s sex workers, 1816–1851.
1816 1826 1836–1846 1849 1851
Florence 45% - - 19% 33%
Grand-Duchy 36% 69.2% 20% 42.8% 45%
Foreign 15% 30.8% 80% 30% 22%
N 46 13 5 21 33
d iminished from 47 to 35 per cent in 1851 after the Restoration, while those in
their early and late 20s increased from 47 to 61 per cent. Very few were over the
age of 30. The great majority were single, as married women were generally not
allowed to be registered. Very little is known about their former occupations,
as the available sources provide information only for sixteen prostitutes. It ap-
pears, however, that most of them were farm labourers (braccianti), while five
had worked as domestic servants. These and other figures would dramatically
change after the unification of Italy in 1861.
1861: The Cavour Regulation
In fact, the grand ducal regulations lasted only five years and were swept
away by the introduction of the new and more repressive Cavour Regulation.
Enacted by an administrative decree in February 1860 and extended to Tuscany
two months later, the regulation “adopted a three-pronged strategy of registra-
tion, examination, and treatment. A special polizia dei costumi (moral police)
were put in charge of the surveillance over the prostitutes, while subordinate
uffici sanitarii (health offices) carried out vaginal examinations.”45 Prostitutes
could voluntarily request registration, but it could also be done without their
consent. In other words, any woman who was known to be or was suspected
of being a prostitute was sent for a medical examination and forcibly regis-
tered. According to Cavour, morality and public health were thus guaranteed.
In reality, “the threat of registration constituted a powerful mechanism of
harassment potentially applicable to every lower-class woman.”46 Mistresses,
courtesans, and other categories of “high-class” prostitutes were generally ex-
cluded from registration. However, abuse and intimidation by the police and
45 Gibson, Prostitution and the State, p. 28.
46 Ibid., p. 148.
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Sex for Sale in Florence 97
within the brothels became a daily occurrence for many prostitutes. While the
grand-ducal authorities wanted to maintain a distinction between women of
ill reputation and those involved in prostitution, the unified Italian state dis-
tinguished only between clandestine and public prostitutes. No negotiation
was allowed.
The regulation soon turned into an extremely repressive and intrusive
measure. Only a few months after its practical implementation, the number
of registered prostitutes jumped from thirty to 300, subsequently decreasing
in 1863. According to the prefecture, in fact, eighty-four were prostitutes al-
ready regularly registered by the office of health. In addition, 134 women were
registered throughout the year, thirty-three by order of the moral police and
the remainder presented themselves voluntarily for registration.47 Unlike the
previous regulation, Cavour’s law allowed for the registration of girls aged 16.
This might explain the slight decrease in the average age in comparison to the
previous period, from 23 to 21. 58 per cent were under 21, 35 per cent between
21 and 25, and only 6.7 per cent between 26 and 30.48 Moreover, 81 per cent of
the 134 women registered in 1863 were single, 16 per cent married, and 22 per
cent widowed. These percentages were not so different from the national data,
but higher compared to Florentine women as a whole.49
Like most Italian women, the majority of prostitutes were not educated al-
though the level of illiteracy was generally higher among the latter, with signifi-
cant local variations within the two groups.50 Demographic growth and lack
of land and work opportunities pushed many peasants, including women, to
migrate to the main urban centres. As a consequence, the Florentine popula-
tion increased by 63 per cent between unification (1861) and 1911.51 Unskilled,
uneducated young women moved from the countryside to Florence where,
however, the jobs available to them were not well paid. This might explain the
change in the geographical origins of prostitutes after unification. According
to the statistics on prostitution in 1863, 20 per cent were from Florence where-
as 49 per cent were from Tuscany, and 22 per cent were from other provinces
and 4.3 per cent were from foreign countries.
47 Turno, “Il malo esempio”, p. 126.
48 Sources refer to the clandestine phenomenon of minor prostitution. Annarita Buttafuo-
co, Le Mariuccine. Storia di una istituzione laica: l’Asilo Mariuccia 1902–1932 (Milan, 1985);
Turno, “Il malo esempio”, pp. 131–132.
49 Turno, “Il malo esempio”, p. 217.
50 Gibson, Prostitution and the State, p. 96.
51 Ibid., pp. 17–18.
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Moreover, as mentioned above, the data on prostitutes’ former occupations
began to indicate a slight change; according to the same statistics, 30.5 per cent
declared that they had worked as domestic servants,52 27.6 per cent had been
farm workers, 24 per cent had been garment workers, 8.9 per cent had been mil-
liners, and 3.7 per cent had been straw workers. The remaining 4.4 per cent had
been unemployed. Domestic service, straw work, and farm work in particular
were seasonal and poorly paid, which explains the tendency of women to com-
bine part-time occupations, including prostitution.53 Mobility characterized
prostitutes’ lives. On the one hand, this was a means of “refreshing” the women
in the brothels. On the other hand, it was a way of evading police control and
the compulsory bi-weekly medical examinations.54 In other words, mobility
can also be seen as a form of resistance: “the easiest way to remove oneself from
police lists was secretly to leave one city and set up shop in another.”55
According to the regulation, prostitutes could live in groups in tolerated
brothels or work alone (meretrici isolate). Florence had a high number of
“special places” (case particolari) where lone prostitutes carried out their work.
In 1860, the San Giovanni quarter had sixty-four such lodgings, whereas Santa
Maria Novella, Santo Spirito, and Santa Croce had twenty, seventeen, and six-
teen, respectively. Ten years later, 100 lone prostitutes legally worked in the San
Giovanni quarter. Working alone as a prostitute was highly valued. By working
in that way, prostitutes could avoid the intolerable work rhythm imposed in
the brothels and, above all, they could enjoy the right to refuse clients. In other
words, they could achieve a degree of autonomy that was unheard of in terms
of freedom from pimps and, in particular, their clients. It made it possible for
such women to have an appearance of normality, develop more complex re-
lationships, and increase their chances of finding an “honest” job or someone
who would agree to provide them with economic support. Under Article 33 of
the regulation, registered prostitutes could move in with citizens who formally
agreed to be responsible for their behaviour and were able to support them.
Women could thus avoid the compulsory health checks while they were being
supported.56
52 On the feminization of domestic service in Florence and the connection with prostitu-
tion, see Maria Casalini, Servitù, nobili e borghesi nella Firenze dell’Ottocento (Florence,
1997).
53 Gibson, Prostitution and the State, p. 111.
54 Ibid., pp. 100–101.
55 Ibid., p. 100.
56 Turno, “Il malo esempio”, pp. 119, 146–147.
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Sex for Sale in Florence 99
As for the past two centuries, very little is known about prostitutes’ clients
in terms of their numbers, ages, civil status, and social standing. The sources
available vaguely refer to plebeians and boors (plebei and beceri), distinguished
gentlemen, Florentine and foreign aristocrats, and soldiers of all ranks. Howev-
er, the requests made by aspiring guarantors of registered prostitutes between
1861 and 1888 help shed some light on their clients. They came from all classes
and professions, and on average they were 35 years old; most of them were
artisans, shopkeepers, domestic servants, and civil servants, and there were
also, albeit fewer, wealthy land owners, bookkeepers, shop helpers (garzoni),
innkeepers, and nobles. The majority were single but widows with children
were common as well.57
An abolitionist campaign against Cavour’s regulation began soon after its
implementation.58 This campaign obtained partial success only in 1888 when
Prime Minister Francesco Crispi introduced a new set of rules. The most im-
portant innovation was the closure of the health offices and the sifilicomi (spe-
cial hospitals for the treatment of venereal diseases) and the abolition of the
compulsory health check; as a result, “the police could no longer force women
[to] undergo vaginal examinations.” Moreover, “only places—[…] in which
prostitution is exercised habitually—not persons, were suitable objects of po-
lice registration.”59 Treatment of venereal diseases was guaranteed and free
for both sexes. Three years later, Home Minister Giovanni Nicotera enacted a
third and more restrictive regulation, a compromise between the decrees of
Cavour and Crispi. Under this regulation, the registration of prostitutes was
still prohibited but madams had to provide the authorities with a list of the
women working in their brothels. In this way, the police could keep brothels
and lone prostitutes under surveillance and they had the authority to send
prostitutes who refused to undergo medical examinations to the hospital. In
1905, some aspects of the Nicotera law were mitigated by a health regulation
which stripped the police of the power to carry out sanitary interventions. That
regulation remained in place until the Fascist era, when a different approach
was adopted.
57 Ibid., pp. 146–149.
58 Early feminists/emancipationists such as Anna Maria Mozzoni, Sara Nathan, and Jessie
White Mario played an important role in promoting abolition, which was, and remained,
a bourgeois movement. See Gibson, Prostitution and the State, pp. 37–76.
59 Ibid., pp. 53–54.
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The Twentieth Century
Between 1923 and 1940 a set of laws was passed under Mussolini’s dictator-
ship with the aim of isolating prostitutes from the “healthy” segment of society,
and this was a step backwards towards repressive regulation. As a whole, the
new legislation not only re-asserted most of the pre-existing rules, but also
introduced surveillance over those women who worked outside the autho-
rized brothels.60 All prostitutes, including lone practitioners, were “ordered to
carry a special passport with records of their vaginal examinations for venereal
diseases.”61 Although prostitution was tolerated, the police could arrest a wom-
an who was suspected of having a venereal disease, refused to undergo a medi-
cal examination, practised clandestine prostitution, or merely had an “attitude
of soliciting”.62 The transmission of venereal diseases “was transformed from a
minor offence into a crime against the race.”63 Because they were institution-
alised in brothels and trapped for life by criminal and sanitary records, women
had few opportunities to stop engaging in prostitution. Victoria De Grazia sug-
gests that, in so doing, the fascist regime intended to emphasise women’s bio-
logical mission, their motherhood: “Only by segregating illicit sex from public
view and by drawing a sharp line between bad women and good ones might
the state preserve the site and purpose of legitimate sex, namely, in marriage,
at the initiative of the man and for the purpose of procreation.”64
As mentioned in the introductory section of this chapter, the available
archival sources do not allow us to provide, at this stage, much information
about prostitutes for this time period. The sources reveal very little about
these women’s profiles and families; likewise, they do not indicate to what
extent prostitution took place in brothels and was carried out alone, nor can
we know how widespread clandestine prostitution was. In reply to questions
posed by the abolitionist senator Lina Merlin in March of 1949, the Public Se-
curity Division of the Ministry of Interior Affairs revealed that, following the
abolition of registration in 1888, no details whatsoever could be found. It was
suggested that the High Commissioner for Public Health and Hygiene could
provide some data, while answers to other queries would have to be obtained
60 Alessia Sorgato, I reati in materia di prostituzione (Padua, 2009), pp. 7–8.
61 Victoria De Grazia, How Fascism Ruled Women: Italy, 1922–1945 (Berkeley [etc.], 1992),
p. 44.
62 Testo unico delle leggi di Pubblica Sicurezza, 18 June 1931, art. 213.
63 Ellen Victoria Nerenberg, Prison Terms: Representing Confinement During and After Italian
Fascism (Toronto, 2001), p. 113.
64 De Grazia, How Fascism Ruled Women, p. 45.
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Sex for Sale in Florence 101
by carrying out a survey with prostitutes.65 Piecing together and analysing the
scattered and fragmentary information available in ministerial archives, news-
papers, trial records, parliamentary acts,66 literary works,67 and personal recol-
lections68 might help us reconstruct some of the many aspects of prostitution
in this era that are still unknown.
Tragic events, however, can lead to the disclosure of personal details, life
stories, and information about the business. For instance, this is the case for
Valmiria P., a woman 25 years of age who was killed in one of the fourteen
brothels of Florence in September of 1954, as newspapers and the Ministry
of Interior Affairs reported on the event. Born in the province of Modena,
Valmiria left behind a 7 year-old son and her family, who, for all appearances,
had not been aware of her activities. According to the available sources, in the
year before her death she started working with her cousin in Turin as a seam-
stress and then started working in a brothel where she stayed until July of 1954
when she headed to Florence together with two other women. After spending
fifteen days with her son at a hotel in Rimini, where she had relations with two
young men, she returned to Florence.69 This account reveals some aspects of
the trade, such as the turnover of women in brothels and hotels, as well as their
movement between cities; it also tells us about the autonomous choices that
women made, their independence, and their family relations.
In general, very little is known about the working conditions in Florentine
brothels. However, Lettere dalle case chiuse, a collection of letters written by
women employed in public houses that was sent to Lina Merlin, the socialist
senator who fought for the abolition of regulationism, provides a glimpse of
those places that we may assume was common to most of the case (brothels).70
65 Archivio Centrale di Stato, Rome [hereafter acs], Ministero dell’Interno, Direzione
Generale di Pubblica Sicurezza, Divisione Polizia, b. 332, 13600, Dati statistici sulla prosti-
tuzione, 14 March 1949. According to a later note, 3,929 women held a “sanitary passport”.
66 In his speech against the abolition of regulation, Florentine senator Gaetano Pieraccini
provided some more or less reliable information on prostitution in Florence. See Senato
della Repubblica, Atti parlamentari, I Legislatura, Discussioni, vol. ix, 16 November 1949,
pp. 11,952–11,967.
67 See, for instance, A Tale of Poor Lovers by the Florentine writer Vasco Pratolini. In his nov-
el, published in 1947 and set in Florence during the Fascist regime, the author describes
police round-ups of prostitutes in the streets each night.
68 See Gian Carlo Fusco, Quando l’Italia tollerava (Rome, 1965); Indro Montanelli, Addio,
Wanda! Rapporto Kensey sulla situazione italiana (Milan, 1956). See also Le Case Chiuse,
available at: http://www.memoro.org/it/video.php?ID=123; last accessed 2 July 2017.
69 acs, Ministero dell’Interno, Direzione Generale di Pubblica Sicurezza, b. 304, 13600.30/6.
70 Cara Senatrice Merlin… Lettere dalle case chiuse (Turin, 2008).
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The letters disclose a world far from the glamorous images later depicted by
some of the brothels’ customers who nostalgically remembered them; that
world was also a far cry from the atmosphere of lust and perversion that mor-
alists and Catholics imagined. Rather, the eloquent and lively accounts of pros-
titutes paint a picture that reveals dimly lit interiors, repetitive daily routines,
and tense relations with madams. Some of them provide harsh and embittered
details about careless clients who “come to us routinely, as if they were barber’s
clients”,71 and they indicate that the women had from thirty to thirty five men
per day, or more.72 The enquiry carried out by Lina Merlin (cited in her speech
to the Senate) estimated that prostitutes had an even higher average number
of colloqui (sexual intercourse) per day, but that figure may have been exag-
gerated to serve her purposes. The price was 100 to 200 lire for each encounter
and the madams kept half of that while prostitutes had to pay for admission,
room and board, health checks, and medical treatment, as well as the perfume
they used.73
Archival documents shed some light on madams and their brothels and,
occasionally, on clandestine prostitution for the time period leading up to 1958
when regulation was abolished. According to a report dated 2 November 1923,
Florence had thirty-five tolerated brothels where around 150 women worked
under the supervision of the so called tenutarie (madams). Most likely, the
madams were former prostitutes and generally middle-aged and unmarried,
and more than fifty madams were listed as having been managers of broth-
els between the 1920s and 1958. Over 70 per cent of them were from northern
Italy, and some of them were from the same village and even from the same
family, while 20 per cent were from Florence and the rest from Tuscany.74 The
figures might suggest that Florentines themselves were more inclined to run
clandestine brothels in order to avoid public notoriety, police restrictions, and
tax payments. These women frequently replaced each other as managers of
the houses, sometimes in rapid succession. However, they appear regularly as
brothel-keepers in the prefecture records, and some of them ran the same casa
for over twenty years.75
71 Ibid., p. 94.
72 A letter-writer recalls a “special day” when she received 120 clients, in Ibid., p. 117.
73 Senato della Repubblica, Atti parlamentari, I Legislatura, Discussioni, vol. ix, 12 October
1949, p. 10812.
74 These percentages varied from year to year. In 1923, 38 per cent were Florentine or Tuscan-
born madams. In 1927 the number decreased to 33 per cent, falling to 14 per cent by 1957.
See acs, Ministero dell’Interno, Direzione Generale di Pubblica Sicurezza, b. 304, nn. 1–16.
75 acs, Ministero dell’Interno, Direzione Generale di Pubblica Sicurezza, b. 304, nn. 1–16.
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Sex for Sale in Florence 103
Madams, often referred to as turpi megere (filthy hags),76 were subject to po-
lice control in the running of their houses. It was illegal to sell alcohol or drugs
on the premises, and entrance was forbidden to minors. Above all, madams
were expected to promote and ensure sanitary surveillance over the women
working in the case. Their houses could be temporarily or permanently closed
down if they didn’t follow the regulations and they could also face trial and im-
prisonment. In February of 1941, for instance, the local questura (office of the
questore) imposed three days of suspension for a house in via Burrella. It had
been reported that poor-quality condoms had been distributed to clients in
place of those recommended by the provincial surgeon in conformity with the
law on prophylaxis against venereal diseases.77 On the other hand, an anony-
mous tip reporting the presence of an underage youth led to the closure of a
brothel in via dell’Amorino 4 for fifteen days.78 Brothels could also be closed
and reopened purely for economic reasons. A house of prostitution in via Bor-
gognona 1 was closed down because its manager went bankrupt in March of
1935, and then it was reopened in January of 1936 in the “interests of the mass
of creditors.”79
Following a national trend, the number of registered brothels in Florence
decreased over time from thirty-five in 1923 to fourteen in the 1940s. They were
mainly concentrated around the S. Croce area, between the central market and
the train station, around S. Maria Novella Church and the cathedral, and not
far from the Ponte Vecchio (Old Bridge). Only two brothels operated on the
other side of the Arno River (Oltrarno). After having been closed down by the
Allies just after the liberation of the city in August 1944, the surviving fourteen
brothels were reopened three months later as a means of containing the pro-
liferation of clandestine prostitution in hotels and private houses and stopping
the spread of venereal diseases. According to a report issued by the prefecture
of Florence on 18 November 1944, the questura together with the Allied Mili-
tary Police arrested 569 prostitutes over a period of two weeks.80 The number
of tolerated brothels remained constant for another decade until their closure.
76 Senato della Repubblica, Atti parlamentari, I Legislatura, Discussioni, vol. ix, 12 October
1949, p. 10809 (Discorso al Senato).
77 acs, Ministero dell’Interno, Direzione Generale di Pubblica Sicurezza, b. 304, 13600.30/7,
Locale di meretricio in via della Burella 8. Profilassi delle malattie veneree, 27 February 1941,
xix.
78 Ibid., b. 304, 13600.30/3, 13 September 1939, Locale di meretricio in via dell’Amorino 4.
79 Ibid., b. 304, 13600.30/6, Locale di meretricio in via Borgognona 1.
80 Ibid., b. 338, n. 13631/A, Firenze—Prostituzione clandestina—Misure di vigilanza e repres-
sione—Relazione quindicinale, Reale Prefettura di Firenze, 18 November 1944. On the
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Regulation was repealed in 1958 when, after ten years of debates, Parlia-
ment approved the Merlin law. The new measure abolished the regulation of
prostitution and forbade the running of brothels, whether state-run or private.
It also obviated the requirement for the registration and recording of women
working as prostitutes, and abolished compulsory medical examinations and
treatment. It also prohibited trafficking and the exploitation of women as well
as all forms of aiding and abetting. Under the law, street prostitution was legal
and women could engage in prostitution at their own homes. The Merlin law
was expected to be a milestone for civil rights, as female prostitutes could, un-
der the terms of the law, enjoy freedoms never known before. Reality, however,
fell far short of expectations. The law was a compromise between libertarian
and repressive intentions, as some of its articles increased the discretionary
powers of the authorities to excessive and dangerous levels.81 Although selling
sex was not illegal, it was bounded by a network of prohibitions that heavily re-
stricted prostitutes’ rights to the point that, for all appearances, it was an illicit
activity. The law is still in effect, although several attempts have been made
over time to reform or abrogate it. Some media outlets periodically supported
parliamentarians who launched campaigns against street prostitution, which
was considered to be the most visible consequence and legacy of the closure
of brothels.82
Street prostitution, however, was not a novelty but it did become more con-
spicuous starting in the late 1950s. At the same time, brothels did not disappear;
police investigations led (and still lead) from time to time to the discovery
of clandestine houses.83 What is new is the increasing visibility of potential
clients and simple onlookers who have started cruising in their cars looking
question of prostitution in Italy in the aftermath of liberation, see Isobell Williams, Allies
and Italians under Occupation: Sicily and Southern Italy, 1943–1945 (New York, 2013).
81 In reality the law had lost track of its original aim. According to Lina Merlin’s original
view, for instance, both prostitutes and clients would be involved in the safeguarding of
public hygiene without compromising personal freedom. See Tamar Pitch, Limited Re-
sponsibilities: Social Movements and Criminal Justice (London [etc.], 1995).
82 Given the invisible and relatively comfortable status accorded to clients by the law, not all
proposals had a long life. The suggestion to fine both clients and prostitutes began to raise
some interest, especially among the most conservative and populist politicians only in
the late 1990s. See Daniela Danna, “Italy: The Never-ending Debate”, in Joyce Outhshoorn
(ed.), The Politics of Prostitution: Women’s Movements, Democratic States and the Global-
ization of Commercial Sex (Cambridge, 2004), pp. 165–184.
83 See, for instance, “Bella indossatrice processata per le ‘case squillo’ di Firenze”, La Stampa,
24 March 1965, p. 15; “Direttore di periodico arrestato per lenocinio”, La Stampa, 8 Novem-
ber 1973, p. 20.
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Sex for Sale in Florence 105
for prostitutes, often impeding the flow of traffic.84 Moreover, crucial trans-
formations in the structure and location of the trade occurred in subsequent
years, and perceptions have changes as well. The founding of the Comitato per
i diritti civili delle prostitute (Committee for Prostitutes’ Civil Rights, cdcp) in
Pordenone in 1982, the emergence of the aids epidemic in the 1980s, and the
phenomenon of immigration marked a turning point. We can safely say that
selling sex in Florence, as well as in the rest of Italy, profoundly changed in the
last four decades of the twentieth century.
By the early 1970s, for instance, male and transvestite prostitutes had be-
come increasingly common in public spaces as they joined their female coun-
terparts in the Cascine, a park that runs along the northern edge of the Arno
River.85 A more conspicuous transformation took place between 1970 and the
early 1980s when West African women and, later, South American transgender
individuals began to populate certain areas of the city along with prostitutes
who were drug addicts. In particular, transsexual prostitution would go on to
dominate and symbolize the Florentine street sex market until the early 1990s
(in Cascine Park, Lungarno Vespucci, and along Florence’s inner ring-roads).86
Its supremacy has been undermined by the arrival of young Albanian women
who, it seems, have been brought into Italy by smuggling organizations.87 As
a consequence, most of the Italian Florentine female and transsexual prosti-
tutes have abandoned the streets and now work mainly indoors, attracting cli-
ents with newspaper advertisements. The overall picture of the trade has been
complicated by new waves of women from countries in eastern Europe such as
84 The “puttan tour” is a common term referring to cruising around looking for prostitutes
without actually being interested in buying sex. See Carla Corso and Sandra Landi, Quan-
to vuoi? Clienti e prostitute si raccontano (Florence, 1998), pp. 107–108.
85 In his novel dating from 1963, La costanza della ragione, Florentine writer Vasco Pratolini
refers to the Cascine Park as a zone where both male and female prostitutes and their
clients could meet. Raffaele Palumbo claims that the Cascine is the place of the sex trade
“par excellence” in Florence, where “voluntary, coerced, Italian, foreign, child, and drug-
addict prostitution can be found all together” [my translation], in Palumbo, La tua città
sulla strada, p. 19. Unless otherwise indicated, the following information come from this
source.
86 See also Francesco Matteini, “Le Cascine monumento nazionale”, La Stampa, 26 July 1986,
p. 9; Piero Taddei, “Quando il parco diventa una bolgia d’inferno”, Cronaca Vera, 3 August
1988, n. 830, pp. 36–37.
87 “It is common opinion among journalists, Italian prostitutes, the magistracy and police
detectives that the organization of prostitution in Florence, as well as in other Italian cit-
ies, is run by Albanian groups not connected to each other” [my translation], in Palumbo,
La tua città sulla strada, p. 20.
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106 Turno
ex-Yugoslavian states, Romania, and Poland, thus multiplying both supply and
demand. From the late 1980s onward, in fact, the Florentine market has been
characterized by a high turnover of women, adaptability to contingencies, and
a variety of services that are available twenty-four hours a day.88
Various sources estimate that, between 1996 and 1998, about 700 prostitutes
worked in Florence, 200 of whom were streetwalkers.89 Albanian women were
the most numerous, followed by eastern European and West African women.
South American, Italian, and in particular transsexual prostitutes now repre-
sent a very small heterogeneous part of the total, along with prostitutes who
are drug addicts. The prostitutes who work indoors are mainly Italian and they
are the largest group. Palumbo has noted that the working conditions of foreign
prostitutes have generally deteriorated in comparison with the two previous
decades and with those enjoyed by their Italian colleagues.90 He distinguishes
between sex workers and “new prostitutes”. While the former are mainly Ital-
ian or are well-integrated into Italian society, free from the pressure of pimps
and other exploiters, the latter are younger, generally foreign, often controlled
by pimps/traffickers, exposed to higher degrees of violence and police harass-
ment, and have less control over their clients, working conditions, and income.
More recent reports have identified further changes in terms of the num-
bers, gender, age, ethnic composition, geography, and structure of the trade. A
press release issued by the Florence City Council in June of 2001, for instance,
refers to a slight reduction in the daily presence of prostitutes on the streets
(confirmed by later estimations), from 200 to 160 individuals. 32 per cent of
the prostitutes were from Nigeria, 19 per cent were from Albania, 24 per cent
were from ex-ussr states and 16 per cent were from other countries.91 An un-
known number of children and young boys from Romania should be added to
those figures, and they have tended to hang around in, or according to some
88 See also Ministero dell’Interno, 2010. Osservatorio sulla prostituzione e sui fenomeni delit-
tuosi ad essa connessi Relazione sulle attività svolte, 1° semetre 2007, available at: http://
www.osservatoriopedofilia.gov.it/dpo/resources/cms/documents/141.Osservatorio_pros-
tituzione.pdf; last accessed 2 July 2017.
89 Gruppo Abele, Annuario sociale 2000: Cronache dei fatti, dati, ricerche, statistiche, leggi,
nomi, cifre (Milan, 2000), p. 575; Palumbo, La tua città sulla strada, pp. 59–60.
90 Palumbo, La tua città sulla strada, pp. 51–53.
91 Comune di Firenze, “Prostituzione: Assessore Lastri, non possiamo ridurlo ad un
fenomeno di Ordine pubblico”, 26 June 2001, available at: http://press.comune.fi.it/
hcm/hcm5353-7_7_24051-Prostituzione%3A+assessore+Lastri,+non+possiamo+ridu
.html?cm_id_details=30305&id_padre=5080; last accessed 2 July 2017.
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Sex for Sale in Florence 107
newspapers have “dominated”, Cascine Park since 2006.92 Moreover, activities
related to prostitution have spread beyond the city centre and the Cascine to-
wards other areas, in particular in the north close to the motorway and the
airport, and in the southwest across the Arno River. In these neighbourhoods
and nearby outskirts, the prostitutes who work on the streets are foreign, ar-
rived illegally, and had their travel organized by smugglers or traffickers; some
of them have been forced into prostitution, while others have been deceived
about the nature of the work and yet others chose it but were not informed
about the working conditions.93 Although periodic police raids are carried out
with the aim of cracking down on trafficking and exploitation, they often sim-
ply lead to the arrest and deportation of sex workers who are in the country
illegally. In other words, police action represents an additional threat to the
daily lives of streetwalkers.
The available sources do not disclose much information about the social
profile of female streetwalkers in Florence. More attention seems to have been
placed on the system of smuggling, its repression, and the impact of street
prostitution in specific areas of the city. We know, however, that most of the
Nigerian streetwalkers are between 17 and 27 years old, come from large poor
families in the south of Nigeria, only have secondary school educations, and
did not work as prostitutes in their home country.94 They seem to have long-
term migratory plans to break out of poverty which is the result of relative
social deprivation, high rates of youth unemployment, and gender-based in-
equality.95 Albanian streetwalkers enjoyed a brief period of autonomy in the
early stages of Albanian emigration to Italy in 1990 and 1991. Subsequently, the
trade in coerced (kidnapped or deceived) women and those who came to work
as prostitutes of their own accord has been under the firm control of Albanian
criminal organizations. Romanian women seem to migrate temporarily and
92 Franca Selvatici, “Ragazzini in vendita alle Cascine, indaga la questura”, La Repubblica, 28
September 2007, available at: http://Firenze.repubblica.it/dettaglio/ragazzini-in-vendita
-alle-cascine-la-procura-indaga/1372588; last accessed 3 July 2017.
93 Cambini Tosi Sabrina (ed.), Prostituzione e comunità locale: percezione del fenomeno, vi-
vibilità urbana, mediazione di conflitti, sperimentazioni sul territorio: Rapporto (Florence,
2006), available at: http://www.coopcat.org/cultura/ricerche/; last accessed 28 June 2017.
94 Valentina Cipriani and Elena Micheloni, “…non ti vedo”: La città di Prato e la prostituzione
sommersa (Prato, 2010), available at: http://www.provincia.prato.it/w2d3/internet/down-
load/provprato/intranet/utenti/domini/risorse/documenti/store--20120613124101429/
LE+TELE+PROSTITUZIONE+L.pdf; last accessed 28 June 2017.
95 Ifeanyi O. Onyeonoru, “Pull Factors in the Political Economy of International Commercial
Sex Work in Nigeria”, African Sociological Review, 8 (2004), pp. 115–135, 118.
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108 Turno
generally take up consensual sex work after agreeing to pay half of their earn-
ings to their recruiters.96
Forms of indoor prostitution have also been observed with increasing
frequency in the last fifteen years. This form of prostitution is carried out in
rented apartments and hotels with the complicity of the landlords, hotel man-
agers, and receptionists, and it is mainly advertised in print, via the internet,
or by word of mouth.97 Occasionally, anonymous tips or neighbours’ protests
against the unusual comings and goings of people lead to the discovery of ille-
gal activities in apartments where one or more sex workers take their clients in
succession during the day. The hidden character of indoor prostitution, howev-
er, makes it impossible for us to know more about these women’s profiles and
their relationships with the urban context. Non-profit organizations that deal
with sex work find it difficult to create and maintain stable contacts because
of the high turnover rate, which is even higher in indoor prostitution than in
street prostitution.
In comparison to streetwalkers, indoor prostitutes appear to be more inde-
pendent and less exploited, and they often have a residence permit and enjoy
more control over their money and rhythms of work.98 Most of them are South
American transgender individuals, Italians, eastern Europeans, and, more re-
cently, Chinese women, while high-class escorts seem to be mostly from e astern
Europe. However, according to non-profit organizations working in Florence,
the picture is often far from idyllic and is even more complex. Indoor Chinese
prostitution, for instance, seems to range from sex work in old-fashioned clan-
destine brothels in the Chinese community to self-entrepreneurial work, and
from servile subjection to economic exploitation at the hands of Chinese or
Italian-Chinese organizations.99
96 Cipriani and Micheloni, “…non ti vedo”: La città di Prato e la prostituzione sommersa, p. 18.
97 In May 2013, police discovered that two Florentine luxury hotels were meeting places for
high-class escorts (mainly from eastern Europe) and their clients. In this case, the en-
counters were organized through a specialised web page and a number of escort agen-
cies. See (Anon.), “Firenze, festini a luci rosse in hotel: Clienti vip, quattordici indagati”,
La Nazione, 16 May 2013, available at: http://www.lanazione.it/cronaca/2013/05/16/889426
-festini-luci-rosse-hotel-clienti-vip.shtml; last accessed 28 June 2017.
98 Cambini Tosi, Prostituzione e comunità locale, p. 16.
99 Andrea Cagioni (ed.), Sintesi della ricerca sulla prostituzione indoor e sull’assoggettamento
para-servile nel territorio della regione Toscana, settembre 2009–giugno 2010: La vulnerabil-
ità invisibile (Florence, 2010), available at: http://www.coopcat.org/cultura/ricerche/; last
accessed 28 June 2017; see also Cipriani and Micheloni, “…non ti vedo”, La città di Prato e la
prostituzione sommersa, pp. 21–22.
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Sex for Sale in Florence 109
Conclusion
This paper has illustrated some aspects of the sex trade in Florence and some
of the changes that have taken place in the city during the period taken into
consideration. The lack of information regarding prostitutes’ clients is notable
for these time periods, which is hardly surprising. Clients simply disappear
from police records, media accounts, and sociological studies, as the stigma
and criminalization has usually been heaped on prostitutes. By virtue of a tacit
agreement, clients’ presence has been merely taken for granted and rarely in-
vestigated. Only very recently have Italian researchers turned their attention to
the buyers of sexual services, in particular as regards the demand for trafficked
women.100 At the same time, the legal framework has limited, or even blocked,
an exhaustive exploration of questions related to the social profiles of female
(and male) prostitutes and their families, the mediation of sex work, and the
working conditions of prostitutes.
On the other hand, both the legislative approach and the demographics of
prostitution have undergone several transformations, in particular since Ital-
ian unification in 1861. The introduction of the regulation of prostitution was a
dramatic turning point for Italian women in the sex industry regardless of their
standard of living. Its abrogation in 1958 was a milestone for women’s rights.
The closure of the brothels, however, brought about as a consequence a drastic
increase in street prostitution, which is now a feature of the Florentine urban
scene both day and night. Nonetheless, illegal indoor sex work is believed to be
increasing, and it is carried out in hotels and rented apartments. Both indoor
and outdoor prostitution have spread well beyond the city centre and the Cas-
cine Park towards the periphery and other areas.
The geographical composition of Florentine prostitution and the gender
of the individuals engaged in sex work have greatly changed in the last forty
years. By the early 1970s, male and transvestite prostitutes had taken on an in-
creasingly stable and visible presence in the city followed later on by West Afri-
can women and South American transsexuals. After the fall of the communist
regimes, women from eastern and central Europe started to work the streets,
100 See, for instance, Maria Serena Natale and Silvia Turin, “Prostituzione, sono tre milioni
gli uomini che pagano”, Corriere della sera, 4 March 2016, available at http://www.corriere
.it/cronache/sesso-e-amore/notizie/sesso-a-pagamento-inchiesta-27ma-956b45a6
-e13b-11e5-86bb-b40835b4a5ca.shtml; last accessed 28 June 2017; Di Nicola et al. (eds),
Prostitution and Human Trafficking: Focus on Clients (New York, 2009). See also Corso and
Landi, Quanto vuoi?, pp. 61–209; Luisa Leonini and Sonia Bella, Sesso in acquisto: Una
ricerca sui clienti della prostituzione (Milano, 1999).
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110 Turno
replacing transsexual and Italian sex workers who now work mainly indoors.
Recent statistics show that Nigerian women, together with Romanians, are the
most conspicuous, while Italian sex workers seem to represent a small minor-
ity among street walkers. Moreover, outdoor and in particular indoor prosti-
tution carried out by Chinese women appears to be a phenomenon that has
become well-established despite its newness.
It is commonly thought that the majority of the women involved in prostitu-
tion are victims of trafficking for sexual exploitation rather than autonomous
migrants, thus emphasising the so-called “victimhood” narrative.101 However,
as non-profit and sex work organizations have argued, it is also true that this
phenomenon co-exists with other forms of “self-entrepreneurial” sex work.
Despite their claims, the media, politicians, and institutional feminists have
firmly repositioned (some) prostitutes as victims and clandestine migrants as
criminals, together with or in a strategic shift away from a civil rights discourse.
As a consequence, contradictory local policies regarding commercial sex may
very likely contribute to a worsening of the living and working conditions of
prostitutes, in particular for street-based sex workers. In Florence, for instance,
mediation and harm-reduction projects led by non-profit local organizations
and mainly financed by the regional government are constantly undermined
by the so-called “incisive action of the police force.”102
101 In 1998, the Italian parliament passed an article that makes it possible to grant a “pro-
tection permit” which allows people to stay in the country if they are determined to be
victims of traffickers. See Danna, “Italy: The Never-ending Debate”, pp. 165–184, 168.
102 Ministero dell’Interno, Osservatorio sulla prostituzione (2010), p. 11 [my translation].
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chapter 5
A Global History of Prostitution: London
Julia Laite
Introduction
London is deeply connected with prostitution in the popular historical imagi-
nation. A skim through a library catalogue, a history channel, or a bookstore
reveals many accounts of “bawdy” London through the ages. Any given night
in the East End, crowds pad around the old haunts of “Jack the Ripper”, hearing
about the prostitute women whose lives have been revealed to us through their
murders. The modern gates that enclose “Crossbones Graveyard” in Southwark
are covered in ribbons and tokens, commemorating the Tudor prostitutes that
some believe to be buried there. Tourists and punters alike flock to Soho, and
peek down side roads where sex is for sale up bright staircases, its flavours ad-
vertised on a neon poster board. The city described in 1885 by William Stead as
“the largest market in human flesh in the whole world” remains central to both
historical and contemporary understandings of worldwide commercial sex.1
Academic historians share in this fascination, and a number of important
works have appeared in recent decades that consider the history of London
prostitution in social, cultural, and economic terms. This research has revealed
striking changes in metropolitan commercial sex over the early modern and
modern periods, but also some fascinating continuities. The following ac-
count, a brief history of female prostitution in London since 1600, is organized
thematically and draws attention to both change and continuity over time. It
considers the geography of commercial sex in a changing urban landscape; it
assesses the way that women’s labour choices and urban masculinities created
supplies and demands for sex; and it looks at the backgrounds of the women
who sold sex in London and the experiences they had. Through this discus-
sion, I will also address conceptual issues and historiographical debates sur-
rounding prostitute women’s agency and victimhood. Finally, this account will
examine the complex ways that prostitution was controlled, regulated, and re-
pressed in London over the past four hundred years, and how this has helped
dramatically reshape commercial sex in the present-day metropolis.
1 William T. Stead, “The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon”, Part iv, Pall Mall Gazette, 10 July
1885.
© Julia Laite, 2017 | doi 10.1163/9789004346253_006
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112 Laite
Space and Place
London saw immense changes in its physical and cultural geography in the
400-year period under examination. Much of its mediaeval core was destroyed
by fire in 1666, and there was also a massive expansion of its suburbs over
the next three centuries. It witnessed one of the most significant population
growths in Europe, going from as little as 200,000 people at the start of the sev-
enteenth century to over eight million regular residents (and many more daily
commuters) in the present day. As London grew and shifted and changed, so
too did the areas in which prostitution occurred. In the seventeenth century,
most of the sex for sale in the metropolis could be found in Southwark around
London Bridge, harking back to the Tudor and mediaeval periods which saw
the official regulation of brothels there.2 On the margins of the early modern
city’s commercial and political centre, these “suburbe stewes” were also known
for their street and theatrical entertainments.3 Seventeenth-century prostitu-
tion in London could also be found around the busy docks just east of the City
of London, which saw the arrival of people and merchandise from the Conti-
nent and, increasingly, the colonies.4 Prostitutes and their clients could also
be found in well-known streets within the City itself, and Ian Archer’s map of
late sixteenth century bawdy houses shows them scattered around Cheapside,
Whitefriars, Clerkenwell, Aldgate, Shoreditch, and Smithfield.5 Despite the
changes wrought by the Great Fire, the City of London remained a popular
area for commercial sex in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries,
particularly the areas of Outer Farringdon such as Turnbull Street.6
Tony Henderson has charted a distinct move of on- and off-street prosti-
tution out of the City and, overwhelmingly, to the west by the 1750s, which
mirrored the shift in population centres more generally, but likely at a greater
pace.7 While it was already infamous by the late seventeenth century, by the
late eighteenth century Covent Garden could claim to be the most popular
2 Ruth Mazo Karras, Common Women: Prostitution and Sexuality in Medieval England (Oxford,
1996), pp. 37–41.
3 Paul Griffiths, Lost Londons: Change, Crime, and Control in the Capital City, 1550–1660 (Cam-
bridge, 2008), pp. 78, 96–97.
4 Ibid., p. 79.
5 Paul Griffiths, “The Structure of Prostitution in Elizabethan London”, Continuity and Change,
8 (1993), pp. 39–63, 54; Ian Archer, The Pursuit of Stability: Social Relations in Elizabethan Lon-
don (Cambridge, 1991), p. 212.
6 Griffiths, Lost Londons, pp. 77–78, 85.
7 Tony Henderson, Disorderly Women in Eighteenth Century London: Prostitution and Control in
the Metropolis, 1730–1830 (London, 1999), p. 74.
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A Global History of Prostitution: London 113
home of the metropolitan sex industry.8 By the early nineteenth century,
meanwhile, prostitution was even more widely distributed, with major centres
throughout the West End, but also in the East End.9 All over London, prostitu-
tion was closely associated with music halls, pleasure gardens, and fairgrounds,
as well as certain bars and restaurants.
By the later years of the nineteenth century, prostitution had become more
concentrated in the West End, where women selling sex mingled with the
evening crowds of Regent Street, the Haymarket, and Piccadilly and in places
where apartments and furnished rooms nestled on top of or beside workshops,
restaurants, and working-class housing. Yet despite this concentration, it is in
fact difficult for the historian to pin-point any area that developed into a red-
light “zone” to rival those in Continental and colonial cities. Prostitution in
modern London remained geographically diverse and dispersed, and even
areas where there were large concentrations had no clearly defined or per-
manent boundaries. This era also witnessed the expansion of rail travel, and
women who sold sex tended to find good business around London’s major ter-
minuses such as Paddington, Euston, King’s Cross, and Waterloo. Prostitution
was also predictably clustered around other entertainment districts outside
the West End (for instance, Commercial Road in Whitechapel, and Earl’s Court
in the west), in parklands (especially Hyde Park), and near docklands and mili-
tary bases.10
Throughout the early modern and modern periods and until the mid-
twentieth century, prostitutes in London primarily solicited on the street, in
entertainment establishments, and in parklands. Some would also perform sex
acts outside, but many others would go to a “bawdy house” or “brothel” (usually
a house that rented rooms by the hour or part-hour, or one that rented rooms
on a longer term basis to individual women) in order to have sex. Because of
the lack of formal regulation in both the early modern and modern periods,
the relationship between indoor and outdoor commercial sex in London was a
loose and fluid one.11 In seventeenth century London, as Faramerz Dabhoiwala
points out, “a bawdy house could be any number of things: a private home
8 For Covent Garden in the late seventeenth century, see for instance the ditty “HELLS
Nightwalker: / OR, / The Devil in Petticoats. / Being a dismal Ditty concerning two Gen-
tlemen, / who went to pick up a fine Lady, as they thought, walking in Covent-Garden”,
c. 1690–1700, Facsimile on the English Broadside Ballad Archive, available at: http://ebba
.english.ucsb.edu/ballad/32797/image; last accessed 7 July 2017.
9 Henderson, Disorderly Women, pp. 52–75.
10 Julia Laite, Common Prostitutes and Ordinary Citizens: Commercial sex in London, 1880–1960
(Basingstoke, 2011), pp. 78–83.
11 Henderson, Disorderly Women, pp. 23–27; Laite, Common Prostitutes, pp. 60–62.
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114 Laite
or a tavern or a brothel, of greater or lesser sophistication and expense.”12
Tony Henderson has found that in eighteenth century London, most women
worked for themselves, using bawdy houses by the hour or for the evening.
Other indoor public sites proved equally popular for solicitation and commer-
cial sex, such as the bagnios or hot-houses which were a common feature of
the eighteenth century cityscape. These gave way later in the century to cheap
hotels, of which prostitutes made equal use, alongside the public and lodging
houses of various stripes that could be found everywhere in the metropolis.13
In the nineteenth century, many prostitutes worked in cafés, coffeehouses,
and restaurants, while others lived and took clients to their own rooms, flats,
apartments, and lodging houses. In part instigated by the legal crackdown on
brothels after 1885, women also began to work in massage parlours and other
clandestine establishments that advertised modelling or health services in the
late nineteenth century.14 Less common were enclosed brothels, where women
lived and worked under a madam or brothel-keeper and where clients would
come to find them, like in many maisons found in Paris. However, as with street
prostitution, brothel prostitution in London was marked above all by diversity,
and throughout the period, we catch glimpses of very exploitative brothels
where women worked under the control of another woman or a man.15
These disperse geographic locations and diverse on- and off-street spaces
persisted into the twentieth century. There were more dramatic changes in the
spatial pattern of prostitution in London during World War i and World War ii,
as prostitutes flocked to areas where troops would be concentrated. But how-
ever dramatically the World Wars affected commercial sex, it was moral panic
about the state of London’s postwar streets and legal developments in the so-
called “permissive” era that were to have the most significant impact on the
spaces and places of London prostitution. The Street Offences Act of 1959, put
into place after the recommendations of the Wolfenden Committee on Ho-
mosexual Offences and Prostitution, significantly increased police powers to
clear the streets and imposed much tougher penalties for street solicitation.16
12 Faramerz Dabhoiwala, “The Pattern of Sexual Immorality in Seventeenth and Eighteenth
Century London”, Londinopolis: Essays in the Cultural and Social History of Early Mod-
ern London (Manchester, 2000), pp. 86–106, 93; Griffiths, “The Structure of Prostitution”,
pp. 43–45.
13 Henderson, Disorderly Women, pp. 30–32.
14 Laite, Common Prostitutes, pp. 135–148.
15 Griffiths, “The Structure of Prostitution”, p. 45; Laite, Common Prostitutes, p. 61.
16 For an extensive account of the Wolfenden Committee and the formulation of the 1959
Street Offences Act, see Helen Self, Prostitution, Women, and the Misuse of the Law: The
Fallen Daughters of Eve (London, 2001).
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A Global History of Prostitution: London 115
Almost overnight, London street prostitution had all but disappeared, replaced
by off-street establishments, such as the walk-up flats in Soho that became so
iconic of the sex trade in London in the second half of the twentieth century.
Women also worked increasingly in massage parlours, as call girls, and in fur-
nished rooms and their own homes. While some street prostitution remained,
especially around rail stations and in more derelict areas, London went from
being a primarily street-based prostitution scene to a primarily indoor scene in
less than a decade.17 That being said, prostitution did not stay entirely indoors
for long; not only did some areas, such as Stepney, see a rise in street solicita-
tion and indecency in the 1960s, becoming a home for young and poor women
who could not afford indoor accommodation, other areas such as King’s Cross
re-emerged in the 1980s as problem areas, in the context particularly of rising
drug addiction problems in the population at large.
Changing technologies of communication and transport—especially the
telephone and the motorcar—also had an immense impact on the geography
and economy of commercial sex in London. Car-based solicitation of women,
described by police and prostitutes alike as dangerous, became a chief form of
street prostitution by the second half of the twentieth century.18 On the other
hand, the telephone came to be of vital importance to women who wished to
work indoors. By the early 1960s London telephone booths were already plas-
tered with the calling cards for which they are so well known in the present
day.19 In the twenty-first century, commercial sex in London is once again be-
ing dramatically reshaped, this time by online technology.20
There are some enduring themes we can see when examining the spaces
and places of London prostitution over a four hundred year period. The first
is the importance of micro-geographies of prostitution. No defined and de-
lineated red-light zone developed in London, although certain spaces were
concentrated sites of commercial sex.21 Spaces of prostitution could be very
small and bleed into one another, and they existed all over the metropolis.
17 See for instance, Phil Hubbard, “Cleansing the Metropolis: Sex Work and the Politics of
Zero Tolerance”, Urban Studies, 41 (2004), pp. 1687–1702.
18 Cecil Hewitt Rolphe (ed.) (Rosalind Wilkinson unattributed author), Women of the Streets:
A Sociological Study of the Common Prostitute (London, 1955), p. 9.
19 A prostitute calling card ephemera collection going back to the 1960s is archived at the
Wellcome Library. See also, Caroline Archer, Tart Cards: London’s Illicit Advertising Art
(West New York, 2003).
20 There is very little work focusing on the impact of the internet on the sex industry in
Britain and London. For general research with an American focus, see Scott Cunningham,
and Todd Kendall, “Prostitution 2.0: The Changing Face of Sex Work”, Journal of Urban
Economics, 69 (2011), pp. 273–287.
21 Henderson, Disorderly Women, p. 70; Laite, Common Prostitutes, p. 80.
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Another enduring feature of London prostitution through the ages was the
“mixed economy” of commercial sex, where street prostitution and off-street
prostitution were interrelated, and where women solicited on the street but
also kept flats for clients. Thirdly, prostitution was always spatially linked to
areas of entertainment, transportation terminuses, eating and drinking, mili-
tary encampments, and areas of shipping and receiving. From the seventeenth
to the twenty-first century, prostitution was woven into the fabric of London’s
economy: leisure, transport, commerce, and trade.
There are also some striking spatial and geographic changes that are worth
noting. Since around 1600, there has been a move of prostitution outside of
the City and mostly into the west. The greatest change of all occurred after
the 1950s, when a perfect storm of criminalization and technological change
meant that women moved off the street and worked in walk-up flats, as call
girls, in massage establishments and saunas, or on the internet. And yet, the
occasional street prostitute who works around King’s Cross in 2013 still shares
some fundamental experiences with her seventeenth century counterpart,
both of whom were and are caught up within the geographic complexity of
the ever-changing metropolis.22
Supply, Demand, and “Causes” of Prostitution
While there is much historical distance between the women who sold sex in the
sixteenth century and those who sell sex in the twenty-first century, historical
and sociological studies of the reasons why women became involved in pros-
titution in London point to some very important continuities. Chief among
these is the relationship between female prostitution and other forms of wom-
en’s unpaid, underpaid, interrupted, exploited, and menial labour. In the early
modern period, prostitution in the metropolis appears to have been deeply
connected to—and often done at the same time as—other forms of female
employment. Women used the sale of sex acts as a way to supplement mea-
gre, scant, or unpredictable earnings elsewhere, often just for a short period of
their lives or in any given year. Many left prostitution for a time or altogether if,
22 King’s Cross remains one of the few areas of London that has a comparatively prominent
street sex scene. See for instance Erin Sanders and Lucy Neville, “Women’s Open Space
Project Evaluation: Final Report”, New Horizon Youth Centre and Middlesex University,
2012, available at: http://www.nhyouthcentre.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/WOS-
Final-Report-12-Sept.pdf; last accessed 18 November 2013.
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A Global History of Prostitution: London 117
in the words of Paul Griffiths, “a better job or husband came along.”23 Frequent
unemployment, particularly in the domestic service sector, was a very signifi-
cant factor determining the patterns of casual prostitution in the 1600s and
little had changed by the eighteenth century, where “economies of makeshift”,
as Tony Henderson deploys the term, saw women selling sex casually at times
when they were unemployed or denied poor relief. Meanwhile, other women
made a regular, or “professional”, living from prostitution.24
G.P. Merrick, a prison chaplain at Millbank and other women’s prisons in the
second half of the 1800s, provides a striking snapshot of women who used the
sale of sex as a response to a market that exploited their labour.25 20 per cent
claimed that unemployment and severe poverty had led them to prostitution,
while a full 40 per cent had been domestic servants who had left or lost their
positions, some surely because of pregnancy.26 As in the eighteenth century,
it seems that many women who sold sex in London in the nineteenth century
did so casually or temporarily.27 While historians of prostitution in Britain
emphasize the enormous variety of experiences that compelled, coerced, or
outright forced women into prostitution, they also note that very often pros-
titution was part of a chosen economic and social strategy for disadvantaged
women.28 There is not a great deal of evidence about women exiting prosti-
tution in any period, but it does seem that many women eventually stopped
selling sex altogether, perhaps before or after marriage or when they had saved
enough money to invest in a licit business.29
In addition to economic need, abject poverty, and constrained labour choic-
es, a woman’s move into prostitution could include factors such as loneliness,
23 Dabhoiwala, “The Pattern of Sexual Immorality”, p. 94; Eleanor Hubbard, City Women:
Money, Sex and the Social Order in Early Modern London (Oxford, 2012), pp. 107–110;
Griffiths, Lost Londons, pp. 149–150.
24 Henderson, Disorderly Women, pp. 14–16; Henderson is following Olwen Hufton’s concept
of “economy of makeshifts” developed in her work on the poor in eighteenth century
France. Olwen Hufton, The Poor of Eighteenth Century France, 1750–1789 (Oxford, 1974),
p. 16.
25 Merrick, Work among the Fallen as Seen from a Prison Cell (London, [circa 1891]), p. 46.
26 Ibid., p. 23.
27 Mary Higgs, Glimpses into the Abyss (London, 1906), pp. 208–209.
28 Daboiwala, “The Pattern of Sexual Immorality”, p. 98; Paula Bartley, Prostitution: Preven-
tion and Reform in England, 1860–1914 (London, 2000), pp. 6–12; Judith Walkowitz, Prostitu-
tion and Victorian Society: Women, Class and the State (Cambridge, 1980), p. 219.
29 Griffiths, Lost Londons, p. 5; Henderson, Disorderly Women, p. 109; William Acton, Prostitu-
tion: Considered in its in its Moral, Social, and Sanitary Aspect (London, 1858), pp. 57–58;
Wilkinson, Women of the Streets, p. 99.
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a lack of a support network, violence and abuse, and isolation in the city.30
Merrick found that many women had begun to sell sex after having been
turned out by their parents because of “bad habits”; again we must suspect
that pregnancy must have been one of the factors here.31 Yet it is very difficult
for the historian, given the sources available and the extreme under-reporting
of domestic and sexual violence in any era, to determine whether prostitutes
experienced neglect, abuse, and violence more frequently than other girls and
women, and it seems evident that we must consider the abuse and dislocation
experienced by women who entered prostitution as part of a more general and
upsetting pattern of violence and abuse against all women.32
These sorts of motivations for choosing prostitution—money, labour, lack
of social support, and experiences of abandonment and abuse—persisted into
the twentieth century. Despite the fact that there was a growing sense amongst
pundits and politicians that no woman needed to sell sex because of econom-
ic necessity any longer, there is plenty of evidence to suggest that financial
struggles remained the primary reason why women got involved in prostitu-
tion after 1900.33 Nonetheless, especially by the interwar years, more and more
people began to claim that psychological and sexual pathology, not poverty,
was the strongest “push” factor for prostitution. As one member of parliament
crudely put it, “There is none of the romance of ‘Fanny by Gaslight’ in this
modern tart […]. She is a hard girl who knows exactly what her value is.”34
From the perspective of history in the longue durée, this seems a striking re-
turn to the mediaeval and early modern concepts of prostitution as wanton-
ness, a significant reversal of the idea, popular from the seventeenth century,
that prostitutes were victims of men’s lust and systemic social and economic
inequality.
By the second half of the twentieth century, more sources became available
that can tell contemporary historians and sociologists about why women sold
and sell sex, but these sources also serve to corroborate the diversity of rea-
sons and motivations that historians have uncovered in earlier periods. Some
women appear to have chosen prostitution as a kind of labour that pays well,
30 Griffiths, Lost Londons, pp. 49–50; Merrick, Work among the Fallen, p. 46.
31 Ibid.
32 Hubbard, City Women, pp. 100–101; Garthine Walker, Crime, Gender and Social Order in
Early Modern England (Cambridge, 2003), pp. 56–58.
33 The Report of the Departmental Committee on Homosexual Offences and Prostitution
(London, 1957), p. 79.
34 Mr. Reese-Davis, MP, House of Commons Debate, 29 January 1959, Hansards vol. 598 cc 1,
pp. 267–386, 1267.
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others did it to pay off student loans, while others sold sex as a way to fund
drug addictions, particularly after drugs like heroin and crack cocaine became
readily available on London’s streets.35 Still other women were and are forced
into selling sex by family members and boyfriends, or because of illegal immi-
gration statuses that render them susceptible to trafficking and human smug-
gling.36 In any case, the growing number of first-hand sources has complicated
rather than clarified the reasons why women get involved in prostitution in
twenty-first century London.
The question of prostitute’s agency remains a contentious one, and one
that lies at the heart of the divisions within present-day feminism over the
issue of prostitution. For those feminists who see prostitution as inherently
exploitative and violent, prostitutes cannot choose to sell sex: they are pros-
tituted women. Other feminists, while recognizing the large amount of abuse
and exploitation within the sex industry, acknowledge that prostitutes tend to
frame their move into prostitution as a choice, albeit a difficult choice amongst
worse ones. Historians of London and British prostitution have uncovered evi-
dence that in the main supports the latter view, and argue that the decision
to become involved in prostitution must be considered alongside women’s
other—often poor—economic choices. Prostitution routinely challenges any
tidy historical conceptualization of agency and victimhood, which appear as
false dichotomies in the face of individual women’s complex and contradictory
experiences.
Another line of historical and sociological enquiry has also complicated our
understanding of commercial sex by pointing out that while women make up
by far the largest proportion of prostitutes, there was nonetheless—and es-
pecially in London—a very significant market for males who sell sex.37 The
motivations and experiences of these men could differ dramatically from
those of female prostitutes, but could also, and perhaps more strikingly, have
much in common with them. This calls into question any simple gendered
35 Sophie Day, On the Game: Women and Sex Work (London, 2007) passim; Teela Sanders,
Maggie O’Neill and Jane Pitcher, Prostitution: Sex Work, Policy and Politics (London, 2009),
pp. 39–40.
36 For prostitution, trafficking, and immigration law in the wider European context, see
Rutvica Andrijasevic, Migration, Agency, and Citizenship in Sex Trafficking (Basingstoke,
2010).
37 For early modern male prostitution see Rictor Norton, Mother Clap’s Molly House: The
Gay Subculture in England 1700–1830 (Stroud, 2006). For modern male prostitution, see for
instance Katie Hindmarch-Watson, “Male Prostitution and the London gpo: Telegraph
Boys’ ‘Immorality’ from Nationalization to the Cleveland Street Scandal”, Journal of British
Studies, 51 (2012), pp. 594–617.
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understandings of prostitution in the past and present. While male prostitu-
tion is not considered in this chapter, it is important to note its prevalence
in London and its important spatial and experiential parallels with female
prostitution.
Largely due to the fact that laws against street solicitation were directed
at prostitutes, they are rendered historically visible in a way that male clients
were not. We know more, in other words, about the supply side of prostitution
than the demand. In a sample compiled from court records and literature, Paul
Griffiths has suggested that the largest group (40 per cent) of prostitutes’ cli-
ents in seventeenth century London were apprentices and servants, 12 per cent
were craftsmen and tradesmen, while just over 10 per cent were “gentlemen”.
He also argues that “the bawdy house [was] an expression of the sexual vitality
and camaraderie’s of males”, especially young urban ones.38 This observation
mirrors other findings from different periods and different cities, suggesting
that prostitution has long been an important part of the masculine urban en-
vironment and not easily relegated to the disconnected “underworld”. In the
late 1700s, meanwhile, Patrick Colquhoun described the clients of prostitutes
as “the multitudes of young men yearly arriving at the age of puberty—the
strangers who resort to the metropolis—the seamen and nautical labourers
employed in the trade of the River Thames, who amount at least to 40,000.”39
By the late nineteenth century the middle class “gentleman” had become the
stereotypical buyer of sex, but there is convincing evidence that the purchase
of sex occurred at all levels of the social spectrum. As one Police Commissioner
complained at the turn of the century, “The apparent admirers of these women
belong to all classes from the peer to the shop-boy.”40 While these comments
demonstrate the ubiquity of sex-buying they also suggest that it was consid-
ered a natural, inevitable, and normal thing that all groups of men would do.
The historical record in this case is likely sharply skewed, seeing as we have
compelling evidence that higher-class brothels—the sort to which the rich-
est and most powerful men would resort—were ignored and at times outright
protected by the authorities. The most striking case is that of the unsuccessful
prosecution of Mary Jeffries’ Chelsea brothels in the late nineteenth century;
not only did it take a great deal of pressure to compel the vestry to prosecute
in the first place, when the prosecution was underway the lawyers and judges
38 Griffiths, Lost Londons, p. 55.
39 Patrick Colquhoun, A Treatise on the Police of the Metropolis (London, 1806), p. 340.
40 Edward Bradford to Home Office, 27 November 1901, London, National Archives, ho
45/10123/B13517.
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A Global History of Prostitution: London 121
insisted on total anonymity for all the male clients who were involved. That
was a courtesy they did not extend to the women.
Despite these often deliberate obscurities, there does nonetheless seem to
have been a greater concentration of clients of prostitutes in certain occupa-
tions. Soldiers and sailors were disproportionately represented amongst the
buyers of sex throughout the entire period, and it was certainly these catego-
ries of men—and their attendant sexual health—that most concerned the
state. For the four hundred years in question, London was a hub for both these
groups: along the docklands mercantile sailors came and went in droves, and
several barracks in and around the city were home to thousands of soldiers.
During the Napoleonic Wars and the two World Wars, these numbers were far
higher, and evidence suggests that at these times the commercial sex market
was booming. Meanwhile, another study of London sex-buying in the mid-
twentieth century found that men from “mobile occupations”, commercial
travellers, and lorry drivers, for instance, were far more likely to buy sex. In
a rare instance where male sex buying was denaturalized and even patholo-
gized, the researcher concluded that the psychological factors that had driven
these men toward such occupations also drove them toward buying sex; this
pathologization of sex buying would gain ground in the later twentieth centu-
ry.41 Despite the fact that some historians have argued that the popularity of
sex buying declined in the twentieth century as more non-mercenary sex be-
came available, by the early twenty-first century surveys in Britain continued
to suggest that anywhere from one in ten to one in twenty men buy sex in the
u.k.42 It is therefore surprising that there continues to be a real dearth of re-
search into male sex-buying in London even in the twenty-first century, while
the writing on prostitutes could fill a library.
Demography, Labour, and Lifestyle
One of the key questions about prostitution in any city is how much of it there
was at any given time. I remain circumspect overall about any historian’s ability
41 Trevor Gibbens and Martin Silberman, “The Clients of Prostitutes”, British Journal of Vene-
real Disease, 36 (1960), pp. 113–117.
42 This most recent study also found that men who bought sex were more likely to be be-
tween the ages of 25 and 34, never married, and living in London. They also had a higher
rate of stis. Helen Ward et al., “Who Pays for Sex? An Analysis of the Increasing Preva-
lence of Female Commercial Sex Contacts among Men in Britain”, Sexually Transmitted
Infection, 81 (2005), pp. 467–471.
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to come up with a firm answer. Even in regulated systems, a lot of prostitution
went unmonitored, and in unregulated systems, the dark figure is simply enor-
mous. Trying to work backwards from information like arrest statistics and the
highly flawed reports of social investigators and moral reformers can give us
only the vaguest idea of numbers. London furnishes a very good example of
these uncertainties.
Part of the problem lies in the imprecision and blurriness of historical la-
bels and identities. When a historical source makes claims about “whores”,
“harlots”, and “prostitutes”, about whom are they speaking? At the start of the
early modern period, while the concept of prostitution as a mercenary activ-
ity certainly existed, the courts and wider culture made very little distinction
between prostitution and other forms of fornication or adultery. Not only was
the term “whore” used synonymously and more commonly than “prostitute”,
both these terms could mean any “unchaste” or unruly woman.43 From a social
standpoint, Dabhoiwala has found that “women who engaged in prostitution
were not, as a group, socially or economically distinct from respectable society.
They were part of wider metropolitan communities.”44 Little had changed in
the eighteenth century; there were only vague distinctions between “prosti-
tutes” and “mistresses”, and “whore” remained a very loose term. Henderson,
like Dabhoiwala, has argued that a distinct “class” of prostitutes in eighteenth
century London is impossible to find.45
In keeping with more general attitudes to social categories and crime, it is
in the nineteenth century that we start to see more attempts to classify, define,
and count prostitutes in London. In this statistics-loving era, several commen-
tators and authorities attempted to enumerate prostitutes, although most re-
lied on each other’s estimates, and most included all unmarried mothers and
other “unchaste” women in their figures which could reach as high as 80,000.46
The mid-nineteenth century Metropolitan Police estimates ranged from 8,000
to 12,000 women, although they were criticized for not accounting for the vast
swathes of casual prostitution. In any case, all attempts to enumerate prosti-
tutes in the nineteenth century were inseparable from the biases of moralizers
or the politics of crime control.
Are we able to get a better sense of numbers by the twentieth century? Cer-
tainly there are more and better standardized sources, particularly within the
criminal justice system. In addition, by the mid-century there appeared to be
43 Dabhoiwala, “The Pattern of Sexual Immorality”, p. 88.
44 Ibid., p. 101.
45 Henderson, Disorderly Women, pp. 43–47.
46 See for instance Acton, Prostitution, p. 15.
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A Global History of Prostitution: London 123
more carefully delineated sociological research that examined prostitution
and offered estimates. Looking at arrest and recidivism statistics, it seems that
by the twentieth century the levels of casual prostitution were falling, meaning
fewer and fewer women sold sex but those who did so did it more frequently
than ever before. It is, however, difficult to be sure, because just as the police,
the courts, and social sciences were getting better at statistics, prostitution in
London was effectively pushed out of public view. Another attempt to enumer-
ate the vast world of off-street commercial sex in London in 2008 by the Pop-
py Project estimated that there was an “absolute minimum” of two thousand
women working in the off-street industry.47 However, this report was criticized
by social scientists as deeply methodologically flawed.48 It seems that only a
little more certainty about numbers can be found in the present age of infor-
mation than could be found in Elizabethan London.
Historians have been able to collate other kinds of quantitative data—found
for instance in court records, police files, rescue home reports, social investiga-
tions, and lock hospital records—to build a picture of women who sold sex in
different time periods. From the seventeenth to the twentieth century, there
seem to be some broad demographic trends. Various investigators (both his-
torical and contemporary) have found that around 40 per cent of prostitutes in
London were born there, a lower proportion, generally, than the female popu-
lation of London at large. Around 10 to 15 per cent each came from Ireland,
the Home Counties, and the Southwest, with other areas of Britain and “every-
where else” making up between 2 and 5 per cent.49 By the late nineteenth and
early twentieth century, there was an important demographic change, when
significant numbers of London prostitutes began to come from the Continent,
especially France and Germany.50 By the late twentieth century, meanwhile,
new European and global migration trends had reshaped the ethnic profile of
London prostitutes; while white British women still engaged in prostitution
in high numbers, women of Afro-Caribbean descent, Southeast Asian wom-
en, and most markedly women from eastern and southern Europe (especially
47 Julie Bindel and Helen Atkin, “Big Brothel: A Survey of the Off-Street Sex Industry in
London”, Poppy Project/Eaves (London, 2008), p. 5.
48 United Kingdom Network of Sex Work Projects (uknswp), “Academic Response to ‘Big
Brothel’”, available at: http://www.uknswp.org/wp-content/uploads/AcademicResponse-
BigBrothelFinSept2008.pdf; last accessed 7 July 2017.
49 Paul Griffiths, “Meanings of Nightwalking in Early Modern England”, The Seventeenth Cen-
tury, 13 (1998), pp. 212–238, 228; Henderson, Disorderly Women, p. 19; Merrick, Work Among
the Fallen, p. 27.
50 Laite, Common Prostitutes, pp. 106–107.
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124 Laite
non-eu countries) are disproportionately represented in the London prostitu-
tion market.51
We also have some information about the families of prostitute women.
Many women who sold sex—likely across the periods—were married or had
long-term romantic partners, although many experienced estrangement and
abandonment as well.52 A high proportion of them were orphans, or had lost
one parent, but this is a family experience that women who sold sex largely
shared with other groups, such as domestic servants and female migrants.53
Prostitutes were also often parents themselves, though we have strong reasons
to believe that rudimentary condoms and other forms of birth control and
abortifacients were often used by prostitutes, even in the seventeenth century,
to limit fertility. The effects of undiagnosed and untreatable venereal diseases,
especially syphilis and gonorrhoea, may have meant that many prostitutes
were infertile. Throughout the period, while many prostitute women—like
single or widowed mothers more generally—gave their children up, many oth-
ers kept them, sharing their care with other members of their community, or
paying for their care and board elsewhere with the proceeds of their prostitu-
tion. By the late nineteenth century, legal measures that enabled the British
state to take children found in the company of prostitutes from their homes
meant that there was increased incentive for prostitutes to conceal their moth-
erhood; many preferred to send their children away to school or out to board.54
And so again, historians are faced with increased clandestinity just as statistics
were becoming more available.
Similar guessing games must be engaged in when trying to determine pros-
titutes’ health experiences, particularly their experiences with venereal dis-
eases. Before the Wasserman test in the early twentieth century, syphilis and
gonorrhoea were both difficult to diagnose, and rates of the disease (as well
as other venereal diseases) are extremely difficult to determine. We do know
that from the very early seventeenth century, syphilis was common amongst
the sexually promiscuous in London, and there were certainly many cases
of “the pox” in London’s Bridewell and workhouses.55 By the late eighteenth
century, the London Lock Hospital, specializing in the treatment of venereal
diseases, had opened its doors and was admitting, often via the courtroom or
51 Bindel and Atkin, “Big Brothel”, pp. 17–19.
52 Merrick, Work Among the Fallen, p. 46.
53 Ibid., p. 31.
54 1880 Industrial Schools Amendment Act (43 & 44 Vic, ch. 15), 1908 Children Act (8 Edw 7,
Ch. 67).
55 Griffiths, Lost Londons, pp. 266–267.
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A Global History of Prostitution: London 125
rescue home, high numbers of women who sold sex.56 Prostitutes who were
suspected of carrying a disease were frequently coerced into being examined
and treated in lieu of (or during their) imprisonment, a practise that contin-
ued, it seems, well into the twentieth century. During the two World Wars,
London prostitutes were made de facto targets for exceptional wartime legisla-
tion that attempted to curb the spread of venereal diseases.57 In the present
day, hiv/aids is the most significant venereal disease within the commercial
sex industry, though the evidence for the rate amongst prostitutes who do not
use intravenous drugs has been called into serious question. Similarly, pros-
titutes in the present day are also frequently associated with drug addiction,
though researchers Helen Ward and Sophie Day, reporting on a longitudinal
study of sex workers in London, stress that the correlation between mental
health, venereal infections, drug addiction, and prostitution is “complex”.58 It
therefore remains difficult to separate the actual health experiences of prosti-
tutes from their pathologization within the British criminal justice and social
work systems.
For other women, avoiding penile-vaginal intercourse was their chief strat-
egy to avoid pregnancy as well as infection. This points to a much wider and
often overlooked question; namely, which sex acts were performed by women
who sold sex. There is an assumption that most prostitutes sold vaginal inter-
course; however, a great deal of evidence from London challenges this. Many
women traded only in masturbation, while others allowed men to ejaculate
between their thighs, breasts, or in their mouth.59 Henderson has uncovered
convincing evidence that masturbation was a very common form of prostitu-
tion in eighteenth century London; and in the nineteenth century it is likely
that the “knee tremblers” of Victorian lore were offering similar acts.60 Even
in the twentieth century, manual and oral sex remained more common than
56 Linda E. Merians, “The London Lock Hospital and the Lock Asylum for Women”, in Linda
E. Merians (ed.), The Secret Malady: Venereal Disease in Eighteenth-century Britain and
France, (Lexington, 1996), pp. 128–148.
57 Pamela Cox, “Compulsion, Voluntarism, and Venereal Disease: Governing Sexual Health
in England after the Contagious Diseases Acts”, Journal of British Studies, 46 (2007),
pp. 91–115.
58 Helen Ward and Sophie Day, “What Happens to Women who Sell Sex? Report of a Unique
Occupational Cohort”, Sexually Transmitted Infection, 82 (2006), pp. 413–417.
59 Dabhoiwala, “The Pattern of Sexual Immorality”, p. 89.
60 Henderson, Disorderly Women, p. 38. For the immense variety of sex acts for sale in nine-
teenth century London, see “Walter” (Anonymous), My Secret Life, 11 vols (London, 1995
[1888]).
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126 Laite
penetrative sex, and was preferred by many women as a much less unsavoury
(if also less lucrative) way to sell sex.61
As might be imagined, prostitutes’ earnings varied widely and were deter-
mined in no small part by the sex acts they were willing to perform. In his
study of Bridewell records, Griffiths has found evidence of very high earnings
(ten pounds, in one instance) by London prostitutes in the seventeenth cen-
tury and he posits a very tentative 4 shilling 3 pence average charge in this
period, which was striking considering the average male day labourer earned
only around twelve pence a day in this same period.62 There is also evidence
that women would frequently supplement their earnings with petty theft from
clients, especially inebriated ones, and also often trade for forms of payment
other than cash (drink, food, and clothes, for instance). When more figures do
start to become available for the nineteenth century, their range is striking.
Some women would charge as little as 3 pence, almost certainly for mastur-
bation; while others could earn incredible annual sums (as much as a male
professional salary) working in higher-class (though still street-based) prosti-
tution. A similar range can be found in the twentieth century. Although there is
some evidence to suggest that the average prices of sex acts like oral and pen-
etrative sex were falling by the late twentieth and early twenty-first century,
there were (and are) also women who charge thousands of pounds as escorts
to London’s super-rich.63 Despite some changes, the continuity here is just as
significant: women still charge a huge diversity of prices, many still engage in
barter (for drugs, for instance) instead of cash payment, and most could earn
more through prostitution than through any other form of labour that was
open to unskilled women in any given time period. However, particularly after
third-party control began to rise, we must also consider what percentage of her
earnings a prostitute—working under the control of a pimp or owing rent to
exploitative landlords—was able to keep for herself.
The experience of selling sex varied so dramatically from woman to woman
it belies a totalizing term like “prostitution”. Women who sold sex belonged to
different “classes” both within society at large and within the world of com-
mercial sex. Some women worked in isolation, or under third-party control,
while others worked in highly sociable environments with other prostitutes.
Still others worked as part of wider communities and families, sometimes in
licit and sometimes illicit labour. Some women earned very little, some earned
61 Wilkinson, Women of the Streets, pp. 59–60; Laite, Common Prostitutes, p. 37.
62 Griffiths, Lost Londons, pp. 48–49; Jeremy Boulton “Wage Labour in Seventeenth Century
London”, Economic History Review, 49 (1996), pp. 268–290, 278.
63 Sanders et al., Prostitution, pp. 36–37.
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A Global History of Prostitution: London 127
staggering sums. Some only masturbated their clients while others offered
“fetish”, anal, and other “perverse” activities. This highly diverse and dynamic
character of commercial sex is one of its most enduring historical realities.
There are, however, some ways that experiences, at the macro-level, have
changed. A greater and greater percentage of prostitutes in London now hail
from eastern Europe and Southeast Asia, and often encounter language bar-
riers as well as the vulnerabilities that come with having the status of being
an illegal migrant. This must dramatically reshape some of the fundamental
experiences of selling sex. But by far the most significant macro-level change
that affected women’s experiences of prostitution was their increasingly com-
mon encounters with the criminal justice system and the rescue and reform
industry, which sought to more carefully define their activities as a legal cat-
egory, more thoroughly monitor and record them, more effectively police and
prosecute them, and more consistently punish and reform them according to
new moral, social, and medical understandings of prostitution.
Official Attitudes, Control, and Punishment
This account begins just a few decades after Henry viii outlawed the licensed
“stewes” of London’s then disreputable South Bank in 1546, effectively ending
the city’s use of regulationism as a way to control prostitution. The period from
1600 to the present in London has been marked by many different attempts to
control and repress prostitution and punish prostitutes, but none have taken
the form of official regulation. London had a very brief, early, and ultimately
abandoned experiment with official regulation, setting it apart from many
other world and European cities (including many within the British Empire).64
The laws and regulations that were used to govern prostitution in London
were and remain a patchwork, developed in the absence of a criminal code and
combining specific clauses against prostitution in statutes with more general
national and municipal regulations that came to be directed against prostitu-
tion. Within London, the licensing and legal powers of individual local author-
ities (parishes and vestries, and later Borough Councils, the London County
Council, and the Greater London Authority) were immensely important in the
control of commercial sex in the metropolis. As with most precedent-based
legal systems, legislation surrounding prostitution in London is historical in
64 Karras, Common Women, pp. 34–35. On regulation in the colonies, see Philippa Levine,
Prostitution, Race and Politics: Policing Venereal Disease in the British Empire (London,
2001).
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its very nature; the law which operates to outlaw street solicitation today can
be very clearly traced back to the nineteenth century, while these Victorian
laws were also based upon much older jurisprudence from the early modern
period. This makes it very hard for the historian to tell a simple story of prosti-
tution control in London, dealing as they are with a system that was dynamic,
complex, administered by multiple and changing officials, and subject to im-
mense amounts of discretion on the part of different local authorities, police
officers, magistrates, and social workers. Drives against prostitution also came
in waves, ebbing and flowing according to public pressure and the politics of
crime control.
Nonetheless, one pattern does emerge: between the seventeenth and the
twenty-first century, prostitution in London came to be increasingly—though
not straightforwardly—criminalized. While the actual buying and selling of
sex was not (and, as of the time of writing, is still not) illegal in Britain, over the
four hundred year period in question prostitution was separated from other
forms of moral offence and public disorder, authorities found ways to more
effectively identify women as prostitutes, and there was a marked increase
in statutory laws, regulations, and licensing restrictions designed to suppress
commercial sex.
At the close of the sixteenth century, prostitution was conceptualized, on
the one hand, as part of a spectrum of sexual behaviours—like fornication
and adultery—that were considered felonious and punishable under church
court jurisdiction and, on the other hand, as entangled with wider laws against
vagrancy. This rendered prostitutes, according to Melissa Mowry, “indistin-
guishable from their underclass brethren and thus legally invisible.”65 As the
seventeenth century progressed, however, in the words of Faramerz Dabhoi-
wala, “sexual discipline in the capital was changed out of all recognition”; adul-
tery and fornication were no longer prosecuted, and churches began to pass
responsibility for the control of sexuality over to increasingly professionalized
police and municipal authorities.66 Prostitution—referenced in terms like
“nightwalking” and “wicked and lewd practises”—was one of several problems
of public and moral order (such as vagrancy and begging) that came under
65 Melissa Mowry, “London’s Bridewell: Violence, Prostitution, and Questions of Evidence”,
in Joseph P. Ward (ed.), Violence, Politics, and Gender in Early Modern England (Basin-
stoke, 2008), pp. 207–222, 211.
66 Faramerz Dabhiowala, “Sex, Social Relations and the Law in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-
century London”, in Michael J. Braddick and John Walter (eds), Negotiating Power in Early
Modern Society: Order, Hierarchy and Subordination in Britain and Ireland (Cambridge,
2001), pp. 85–101, 86–87.
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A Global History of Prostitution: London 129
increasing attack in London in the seventeenth century under the reinstated
Poor and Vagrancy Laws.67 There was a growing understanding that there were
important differences between private and public immorality; in other words,
in this period we see sex crimes going down and street crimes going up.68
At the same time, the concept of “nightwalking”, used in regulations since
the fourteenth century, became increasingly “feminized” and associated with
female sexual misbehaviour in London.69 London’s Bridewell prison and hos-
pital, established in the mid-sixteenth century as a kind of summary court
and site of incarceration for London’s “idle and disorderly persons”, became
a common destination for women who came under the notice of the night
watchmen and the parish beadle for vagrancy and nightwalking. While it is ex-
tremely difficult to determine which of these women were selling sex, it is safe
to say that Bridewell saw many prostitutes come through its gates and, given
that its records show a sharp rise in female recidivism, it seems many passed
through several times.70
Despite these new measures and definitions, open and visible prostitu-
tion remained a common feature of London street life, which inspired a late
seventeenth-century explosion of moral reform and anti-vice associations (the
influential London Society for the Reformation of Manners was founded in 1691,
for instance).71 They had few legal powers but, together with Justices of the Peace,
they found informal methods of dealing with prostitutes in public, 0including
binding them over to keep the peace, and committing them for other offences to
the Bridewell, whose incarceration numbers peaked during this time.72 These
informal, de facto, and backdoor tactics of arrest and imprisonment would
become one of the defining features of the control of prostitution in London,
stretching into the nineteenth century and the present day.
In the first few decades of the eighteenth century, “a narrower, sharper defi-
nition of public prostitution and its legal culpability […] slowly emerged.”73
While there was still no law that referred to prostitutes by name, general laws
preventing vagabondage, begging, thieving, and disorderly behaviour were
increasingly aimed at them. Still, as Henderson has described, “flexibility,
67 Mowry, “London’s Bridewell”, pp. 211–212.
68 Griffiths, Lost Londons, p. 203; Dabhiowala, “Sex, Social Relations and the Law”, pp. 86–87.
69 Griffiths, “Meanings of Nightwalking”, pp. 216, 221, 223.
70 Griffiths, Lost Londons, pp. 205–206.
71 For a full account of late seventeenth and early eighteenth century anti-vice movements
in London, see Alan Hunt, Governing Morals: A Social History of Moral Regulation (Cam-
bridge, 1999), pp. 28–54.
72 Henderson, Disorderly Women, pp. 86–89.
73 Dabhoiwala, “Sex, Social Relations and the Law”, p. 93.
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130 Laite
compromise, and absence of system were almost defining characteristics of
the policing of street prostitution in this period.”74 Anti-vice campaigners
were more successful, to a certain extent at least, in bringing brothels under
the law. The Disorderly Houses Act of 1752 gave local authorities more power
to monitor and deny licenses to establishments, and a later Act allowed them
to prosecute disorderly houses through their own time and cost.75 Although
this system was very prone to corruption and the costs were a disincentive to
potential prosecutors, it is a model of local authority control over “brothels”
that persists into the present day.
The nineteenth century brought some very important legal changes, which
came along with wider changes in policing and criminal justice. A clause in the
Vagrancy Act of 1824 stipulated that any “common prostitute found wandering
and behaving in a riotous or indecent manner” could be liable to arrest, and a
fine or incarceration; this was the first time that the term “common prostitute”
was used in a statute.76 The most significant law for the policing of London
prostitution was the 1839 Metropolitan Police Act. Clause 54 of the Act stated
that “any common prostitute loitering or soliciting for the purposes of prostitu-
tion to the annoyance of inhabitants or passengers” would be liable to arrest.77
This law only allowed for the magistrate to sentence with a fine, though pros-
titutes were frequently subsequently given prison time in default of fine pay-
ment. Together, these two laws formed the backbone of prostitution control in
the metropolis in the nineteenth century; it is very important to note that the
Contagious Diseases Acts, though very famous in the historiography of British
prostitution, were never put into effect in London.
Nineteenth-century prostitution control, like its antecedents, was sporadic
and poorly monitored. Statistics are very unreliable before the 1890s, and many
arrested prostitutes have been hidden from history forever by the use of a dif-
ferent clause in the Vagrancy Act directed against “drunk and disorderly per-
sons” and another in the Metropolitan Police Act against those likely to “cause
a breach of the peace”. Until the very end of the century, many arrests in Lon-
don were recorded as “drunk and disorderly prostitute”, even though no such
charge actually existed in the statute books. This example illustrates nicely the
idiosyncratic nature of prostitution control in the capital in the modern pe-
riod: despite firmer laws and better policing techniques, the policing of com-
mercial sex remained disorganized, informal, localized, and very often corrupt.
74 Henderson, Disorderly Women, p. 140.
75 1751 Disorderly Houses Act (25 Geo. ii, c. 36) s. 5 and 25.
76 1824 Vagrancy Act (5. Geo. iv, c. 83) s. 3, 4, and 5.
77 1839 Metropolitan Police (2 & 3 Vict., c. 47) s. 54.
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A Global History of Prostitution: London 131
By the late nineteenth century, a series of scandals that highlighted the ex-
tent of corruption within the police and exploitation within the commercial
sex industry forced new changes in the law. In 1885, journalist William Stead
painted London as a “modern Babylon”—where poor children were bought
and sold for sex under the averted eyes of the Metropolitan Police—and helped
to push the Criminal Law Amendment Bill into law. The new Act, by making
it cheaper and easier for local authorities to prosecute brothels in their areas,
witnessed a very large increase in prosecutions, going from seventy per annum
before the Act to almost 900 by the early years of the twentieth century.78
Yet again, however, prostitution control in London was anything but
straightforward. The Criminal Law Amendment Act failed to define a “broth-
el”, and up to the present day police and borough councils struggle to address
the legal loopholes that saw women operating out of individually rented flats.
Meanwhile, simultaneous attempts to crack down on street solicitation met
with still greater and more scandalous challenges: a series of cases of mistaken
identity, and police brutality and corruption, culminated in several govern-
ment committees, inquiries, and commissions that looked at the policing of
prostitution in the first half of the twentieth century.
Despite this, the early twentieth century saw some increasing power and ef-
ficiency in the control of prostitution. Arrest rates, and more importantly rates
of conviction, began to rise and (apart from during World War i) remained
largely steady. Police began fingerprinting prostitutes in 1917, and this system
began to improve the criminal justice system’s ability to identify, arrest, and
punish prostitutes. By 1950, 99.97 per cent of prostitute’s arrests ended in their
conviction, a truly stunning figure in relation to almost all other offences.79
Despite these moves towards criminalization, informal regulation was still
alive and well. There were countless reports from prostitutes that police oper-
ated a “rota” system of arrests, for example, using the fines imposed as a kind of
licensing fee; local efforts to repress prostitution in one area merely displaced
it to others, and many brothels continued to be tolerated so long as they con-
ducted their business quietly. As one sociologist argued in the 1950s, the rela-
tionship between the police and prostitutes was a “working, though pointless,
compromise.”80 Unlike in the seventeenth century, criminalization and orga-
nized repression had become the official stance toward prostitution. Much like
78 1885 Criminal Law Amendment Act (48 & 49 Vict., c. 69); The Judicial Statistics of England
and Wales.
79 Judicial Statistics of England and Wales; Laite, Common Prostitutes, p. 225.
80 Wilkinson, Women of the Streets, p. 18.
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in the seventeenth century, however, the situation on the ground was complex,
regulatory, and frequently ineffective.
But while systems of prostitution control may have been ineffective in deal-
ing with the overall problem of prostitution in London, this does not mean
that these attempts to repress or regulate prostitution did not seriously affect
the lives of women who sold sex, as they were subjected to a number of differ-
ent official and unofficial controls and abuses. While statistics from the eigh-
teenth century suggest that the majority of London prostitutes were simply
discharged after being arrested, for example, this benign calculation surely
hides a great deal of potential emotional duress, harassment, and sexual and
physical violence that many accused prostitutes must have experienced be-
tween their arrests and their release the next morning. For those who were not
discharged, they could be sent to a higher court, committed to a hospital, or
sent to a prison.81 And while most women who were incarcerated in the eigh-
teenth century (and, for that matter, in the nineteenth century) saw sentences
of only seven to fourteen days, we must not be quick to assume that this was
an easy experience for these women.
The institutional alternative to prison, for much of the period in question,
was a reform or rescue home; these various private philanthropic initiatives
also formed part of the informal system of control and punishment. Histori-
ans have charted a “radical cultural shift” in attitudes toward prostitution in
the eighteenth century, when more and more people began to consider the
prostitute not as a licentious villain, but an exploited victim.82 It was in this cli-
mate that reform homes were established as places to rehabilitate recalcitrant
prostitutes; the London Magdalene Hospital for Penitent Prostitutes opened
its doors in 1758, and it and similar institutions grew into very popular chari-
ties.83 Yet, within the walls of these reform homes the “the janus-like nature
of the sentimental discourse” surrounding prostitution in the eighteenth cen-
tury was revealed, and “reform” looked a great deal like punishment.84 These
complicated and contradictory attitudes and practises persisted within the
prostitute reform charities into the nineteenth century, and many prostitutes,
given the choice between a long stay in a reform home (with its strict sched-
ules, spartan meals, and domestic service training) and a short stay in prison
81 Henderson, Disorderly Women, p. 134.
82 Mary Peace, “Figuring the London Magdalen House: Mercantalist Hospital, Sentimental
Asylum or Proto-Evangelical Penitentiary?”, in Ann Lewis and Markman Ellis (eds), Pros-
titution and Eighteenth-Century Culture, (London, 2012), pp. 141–156, 141.
83 Henderson, Disorderly Women, pp. 186–187.
84 Peace, “London Magdalen House”, p. 155.
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A Global History of Prostitution: London 133
chose the latter.85 This helps to explain why reform homes were frequently
under-utilized and tended to cater to young women who were pregnant out of
wedlock, sexually promiscuous, or sexually abused, rather than to women who
regularly earned their living selling sex.86 By the turn of the twentieth century,
many of these organizations had begun to act in concert with the state, espe-
cially through their monitoring of immigrant prostitutes.87
The second half of the twentieth century witnessed a rising panic about
prostitution on London’s streets which were, some felt, “without parallel in the
capital cities of other civilised countries.”88 The 1959 Street Offences Act was
the product of a significant rethinking of London prostitution policy in the
1950s, and its simple legal adjustment belied a major change in approach. The
Act largely kept the working of the 1839 Metropolitan Police Act, but removed
the need to prove that the “common prostitute” in question was doing any-
thing to the annoyance of other people. While this clause had often been over-
looked by police and magistrates in the past, its sanctioned removal, alongside
a steeply increased fine and the distinct possibility of imprisonment, allowed
the Metropolitan Police to effectively clear prostitution from London’s streets.
Virtually overnight, London went from being a city with one of the most sig-
nificant street prostitution scenes in the western world to one in which prosti-
tution occurred almost exclusively behind closed doors.
Even this was not without its subtleties, however, and a resurgence of street
prostitution in the 1980s saw the passing of the very first prostitution law in
the history of Britain to be directed against the male customers of prostitutes,
addressing habitual solicitation of prostitutes by men in cars, known as “kerb
krawling”: the measure enjoyed some limited success in reducing traffic in
problem areas, however, the need to prove “habitual” male solicitation made
the measure difficult to enforce overall and ineffective for foot traffic or so-
licitation by telephone.89 By the 1990s, “Anti-Social Behaviour Orders” also
began to be used against women who sold sex in public, and served as a way
to reintroduce prison sentences.90 More “backdoor” attempts to criminalize
85 Third Annual Report of the National Vigilance Association, 1888, London, London Metro-
politan Archive, LMA A/FWA/C/D150/1.
86 Bartley, Prostitution, pp. 94–115.
87 See “Expulsion of Foreign Prostitutes: Co-operation of the National Vigilance Association,
1913–1933”, London, n.a., ho 45/15041.
88 Report of the Departmental Committee on Homosexual Offences and Prostitution, p. 81.
89 Teela Sanders, “Kerbcrawler Rehabilitation Programmes: Curing the ‘Deviant’ Male and
Reinforcing the ‘Respectable’ Moral Order”, Critical Social Policy, 29 (2009), pp. 77–99.
90 Catherine Jane Benson and Roger Matthews, The National Vice Squad Survey (Middlesex,
1995).
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134 Laite
prostitutes were included in the new immigration acts of the early 2000s,
which played upon fears of trafficking to strengthen older laws against the
immigration of “undesirable” people into Britain.91 The early twentieth first
century has witnessed several more significant attempts to “rethink” prosti-
tution policy in Britain, including using “tolerance zones” as well as legalized
brothels; however these regulatory measures have largely been discarded and
at the time of writing, the u.k. has been embroiled in serious debates about
dealing with prostitution through what is known as the “Nordic model”, which
criminalizes the purchase of sex.92
While the criminalization of prostitution in the metropolis has never been
able to totally repress it, it has had a major role to play in shaping the geog-
raphies, structures, and experiences of people within the commercial sex in-
dustry. There is very clear evidence that as legal sanctions against prostitution
increased, so too did third party involvement, as women sought the assistance
and protection of pimps, touts, landlords, and human smugglers to secure
their workspaces, their bodies, and their mobility in a socio-political landscape
that was increasingly intolerant of prostitution. Third parties had of course al-
ways had an interest in prostitution, and seventeenth- and eighteenth-century
sources provide us with glimpses of the bawds, pimps, and advertisers who
helped prostitutes secure custom and often exploited them within the “black
economies” of early modern London.93 But by the late nineteenth century,
even the police themselves were frequently noting the ways in which legal re-
strictions encouraged pimping, and the first laws were passed directly address-
ing crimes such as procurement for the purposes of prostitution and living on
the earnings of prostitution, whose application was (for the former) extremely
rare and (for the latter) extremely patchy.94 In the twenty-first century, prosti-
tutes’ exploitation and abuse by third parties is tied most significantly to the
politics and economics of undocumented migration.95
91 Home Office (2007) The Criminal Justice and Immigration Bill, available at: http://www
.parliament.uk/commons/lib/research/rp2007/rp07-065.pdf; last accessed 20 November
2013.
92 Marianne Hester and Nicole Westmarland, Tackling Street Prostitution: Towards a Holis-
tic Approach (London, 2004); “Paying the Price: A Consultation Paper on Prostitution”
(London, 2006).
93 Griffiths, “The Structure of Prostitution”, pp. 45–46; Griffiths, Lost Londons, pp. 148–149.
94 Laite, Common Prostitutes, pp. 87–99.
95 Andrew Boff, “Silence on Violence: Improving the Safety of Women. The policing of off-
street sex work and sex trafficking in London” (London, 2012), available at: http://www
.uknswp.org/wp-content/uploads/SILENCEONVIOLENCElondonmajorofficereport19th-
march2012.pdf; last accessed 7 July 2017.
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A Global History of Prostitution: London 135
The legacy of the 1959 Street Offences Act also set firmer borders between in-
door and outdoor sex in London, and created a hierarchy of commercial sex in
which street sex workers became the poorest, most vulnerable, and most mar-
ginalized.96 The late twentieth century has also witnessed new crusades against
brothels and lap-dancing clubs, made possible not only through the Sexual Of-
fences Act of 1956 (which reiterated the terms of the 1885 Criminal Law Amend-
ment Act) but also through a patchwork of licensing regulations and local
bylaws.97 Meanwhile, sporadic raids on brothels and walk-ups in areas like Soho
and the East End have become a regular feature of twenty-first century prosti-
tution control in the metropolis. These are joined by crusades against calling
cards, lap-dancing clubs, escort services, and internet sites, and spurred on by
specific moments of heightened panic. During the recent London Olympics,
for instance, there was heightened concern over the threat of migrant and traf-
ficked prostitutes flooding London, echoing earlier panics surrounding such
events as the Franco-British Exhibition and the Olympics in 1908, the Festival
of Britain in 1951, and the Coronation in 1953. As was the case in the centuries
before, today local community organizations, private and quasi-governmental
charities, local authorities, and local health care and social work initiatives
join special police squads and general beat officers in the effort to control and
suppress commercial sex. London prostitution, always important in a global
context, has also become, increasingly, a global affair, and the control of com-
mercial sex has expanded significantly into the control of migration and inter-
national organized crime. The sex industry in the metropolis today is marked by
postcolonial and new European immigration, as well as by human trafficking,
as the legacies of historical, imperial, and present-day global inequalities and
migration patterns play out in London’s streets, saunas, telephone booths, and
walk-up flats. Meanwhile, despite the discussions surrounding the criminaliza-
tion of clients, male buyers of sex remain almost as culturally and legally invis-
ible as they did in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries.98
96 Rosie Campbell and Lynn Hancock “Sex Work in the Climate of Zero Tolerance: Hearing
Loud Voices and the Silence of Dissent”, paper presented at the Sex Work Reassessed con-
ference, University of East London, 2008; Phil Hubbard, “Morality, Sexuality and the City:
The Marginalisation of Street Prostitutes”, Gender, Place and Culture, 5 (2008), pp. 55–72;
Sanders and O’Neill, Prostitution, p. 35.
97 Phil Hubbard, “Cleansing the Metropolis: Sex Work and the Politics of Zero Tolerance”,
Urban Studies, 41 (2004), pp. 1687–1702; Phil Hubbard, “Legal Geographies: Controlling
Sexually Oriented Businesses: Law, Licensing, and the Geographies of a Controversial
Land Use”, Urban Geography, 30 (2009), pp. 185–205.
98 Susan Collinson, Reg Straub, Georgina Perry, “The Invisible Men: Finding and Engag-
ing with the Male Partners of Street Sex Workers”, Journal of Men’s Health, 8 (2011),
pp. 202–207.
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136 Laite
Conclusion
It is possible to trace important continuities as well as significant changes
in the control of prostitution in London over the past four hundred years.
Throughout both the early modern and the modern period, we can see the
importance of de facto regulation and tolerance, accommodation, and com-
promise. Even as prostitution in London fell increasingly under the jurisdic-
tion of the modern and centralized criminal justice system, local authorities
and charities have remained central to prostitution control right into the pres-
ent day. However, we can also see important changes. There was an enormous
increase in the power and technology of the state to control and identify pros-
titutes, reflected in the dramatic rise in the conviction rate and the introduc-
tion of near countless direct and indirect laws and regulations to the arsenal
of prostitution control. This gave rise to a growth in the off-street and clan-
destine commercial sex industry and contributed to a significant increase in
third-party involvement in prostitution in London. In other words, the increas-
ing legal prohibition of activities associated with prostitution helped to shape
prostitute women’s experiences of selling sex. Prostitution became more pro-
fessionalized, as women were less able to move in and out of the trade without
legal stigma and third-party pressure, and as firmer lines between prostitution
and other kinds of semi-commercial promiscuity were drawn by society and
by the law. As the inequalities within British society were mirrored on a much
larger scale with the rise of globalization, more and more women of colour
and immigrants could be found within London’s sex industry. Women worked
increasingly indoors, and street solicitation—at one point the norm for most
women who sold sex, including very high-class prostitutes—came to be seen
as the resort of the poorest and most marginalized women, even as indoor
prostitution also rendered many women isolated and vulnerable.
One of the most significant narratives of prostitution control in London
over the course of 400 years is the increasingly careful and in some ways suc-
cessful attempts to separate prostitution from other kinds of moral and pub-
lic order offences and to separate prostitutes from other kinds of potentially
transgressive women and women in public. That being said, the actual defini-
tion of prostitution, and the line between who is and who is not a prostitute,
continues to defy tidy categorizations every bit as much as it did in the seven-
teenth century. Nowhere do the lines between “prostitutes” and “other women”
appear blurrier than within the glimpses we get of the lives, experiences, and
opinions of women who sell sex. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries,
such sources are rare indeed, and while “whore biographies” (of mostly high
class prostitutes) were a popular genre, they tell us much more about the social
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A Global History of Prostitution: London 137
and political context of these highly stylized accounts than about most women
who sold sex in this period.99 In the nineteenth and early twentieth century,
London prostitutes appear within the police files and reform home records
that were steadily growing and yet their experiences remain fragmented with-
in these sources, and are heavily mediated by the authorities that produced
them. Most of all, these women only appear to us in times of duress: after an
arrest, within a prison, as a victim of an attack. For historians of the future, the
late twentieth century and early twenty-first century will mark an immense
change in this regard. This era has seen the proliferation of stories from women
who sell sex, sometimes through the work of sociologists, but also through the
narration of their own lives. Unlike in past sources, where they are caricatured,
ventrioloquized, or marginalized, we are now getting a real sense of the ex-
periences and opinions of many different women who sell sex in their own
words.100
99 For a critical edited collection of these biographies, see Julie Peakman (ed.), Whore Biog-
raphies: 1700–1825, Parts i and ii (London, 2006 & 2007).
100 More pamphlets and accounts began to be published from the late 1970s with the rise
of the organized prostitutes’ rights movement, some of which can be found in the Eng-
lish Collective of Prostitutes’ files at the Women’s Library, London (see for instance
3AMS/B/16/05). However, the internet has been the most significant medium facilitating
an even wider range of prostitutes’ voices. See for instance the “Sex Workers” subreddit on
Reddit, a popular community-focused and community-moderated web content aggrega-
tor, available at: http://www.reddit.com/r/sexworkers; last accessed 7 July 2017.
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chapter 6
Prostitution in Moscow and St. Petersburg, Russia
Philippa Hetherington
Introduction
In the years immediately following the disintegration of the Soviet Union in
1991, migrant prostitution from the former Soviet areas became one of the
most visible manifestations of the political and economic uncertainty pervad-
ing the region. In contemporary Turkey, sex workers from the former Soviet
Union are considered so ubiquitous that the nickname “Natasha” is often used
to refer to prostitutes in general.1 The association of prostitution from and in
Russia with recent geopolitical shifts has, however, served to occlude wider dis-
cussions of sex work as a historical phenomenon in the region. Furthermore,
the fact that prostitution was considered a politically unacceptable topic of
discussion in the postwar Soviet Union meant that no historical work on com-
mercial sex was produced in Russia itself before the late twentieth century.
In the last twenty years scholars writing in English and Russian have made
up for lost time, publishing innovative studies of prostitution regulation in
nineteenth-century Russia, philanthropic and scientific activism surrounding
commercial sex before and after the revolution, and social historical analyses
of women who sold sex in the early Soviet period.2
This chapter examines the history of prostitution in Moscow and St.
Petersburg from 1600 to the present. It is based on both primary and
secondary sources, although it is important to note that historiography on
1
2
1 Leyla Gulcur and Pinar Ilkkaracan, “The ‘Natasha’ Experience: Migrant Sex Workers from the
former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe in Turkey”, Women’s Studies International Forum, 25
(2002), pp. 411–421.
2 See for example Laurie Bernstein, Sonia’s Daughters: Prostitutes and their Regulation in Impe-
rial Russia (Berkeley, 1995); Laura Engelstein, The Keys to Happiness: Sex and the Search for
Modernity in Fin-de-Siecle Russia (Ithaca, 1994), pp. 128–164; Richard Stites, “Prostitute and
Society in Pre-Revolutionary Russia”, Jahrbuch fur Geschichte Osteuropas, 31 (1983), pp. 348–
364; Aleksandr Antonovich Iliukhov, Prostitutsiia v Rossii s xvii veka do 1917 goda (Moscow,
2008); Natalia B. Lebina and Mikhail V. Shkarovskii, Prostitutsiia v Peterburge (40-e gg xix
v–40-e gg. xxv) (Moscow, 1994); Frances Bernstein, The Dictatorship of Sex: Lifestyle Advice for
the Soviet Masses (De Kalb, 2007).
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Prostitution in Moscow and St. Petersburg, Russia 139
Russian prostitution is sparse except for the period between 1843 and the
mid-1920s. As a result, my coverage of earlier periods, and the mid-Soviet pe-
riod (in which prostitution was supposedly non-existent) is correspondingly
much less dense.
The study also draws on the considerable statistical material available
on prostitution from the mid-to-late nineteenth century, when the imperial
Russian police regulated prostitution. Even mildly reliable statistics for the so-
cial backgrounds and experiences of prostitutes are not available for Moscow
or St. Petersburg until the birth of the regulation of prostitution in 1843, when
the state’s own interest in the surveillance of prostitutes necessitated the col-
lection of information about them. Even then, the high point of statistical re-
search into prostitution came between 1885 and 1917, and in the Soviet period
the ideological necessity of claiming that prostitution was a problem that was
disappearing under socialism (and by 1945, was deemed to have been eradi-
cated) militated against the systematic collection of information about it. As
a result, by far the richest data comes from the 1885–1917 period. Government-
collected data on legally registered prostitutes, mediated as it was through a se-
ries of legal and social constructs denoting what sex work or prostitution was
at that particular time, can only give us a small snapshot of prostitution as a
legal identity, social category, and daily practice in Moscow and St. Petersburg
in this period. Nonetheless it does give us a sense of how certain important so-
cial phenomena (such as urbanization, industrialization, war, revolution, and
mass migration) may have impacted commercial sex as a practice as it was
understood by the late imperial state.
Finally, a minor point on chronology: while Moscow existed in the seven-
teenth century, St. Petersburg was not founded until 1703, at which point Peter
the Great made it the new imperial capital. Thus, all reference to information
about the pre-1703 period pertains to Moscow only, and after 1703 the text will
note which city is being referred to at any given time.
Definitions
The legal, cultural, social, and philosophical definitions of prostitution in Rus-
sia, and therefore in its two capitals, St. Petersburg and Moscow, have changed
greatly since 1600. To give a very rough outline of the contours of the many and
overlapping definitions of prostitution (explained in more detail below), it is
worth noting that in the early seventeenth century, the state did not consider
prostitution to be a crime separate from that of adultery, as “ecclesiastical lit-
erature did not distinguish between a prostitute and a woman who slept with
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140 Hetherington
a man other than her husband voluntarily, without financial gain.”3 The Old
Church Slavonic word for both was bludnitsa, and whether money changed
hands was irrelevant to the ecclesiastical authorities’ harsh judgement of ex-
tramarital sex.4 It was not until the landmark Law Code of 1649 that secular
law took a stance on offences relating to prostitution, in this case outlawing
the procurement of women for fornication and assigning the death penalty
for women who live by “fornication and vileness” and destroy any resultant
offspring.5
On his ascension to power, Peter the Great, ever careful about the health
and strength of his military, proved much more ready to legislate against pros-
titution as a crime against the secular order, as opposed to a moral crime to be
treated by the Church. In 1716, his “Military Statutes” ordered that “no whores
[bludnitsy] will be permitted near the regiments.”6 His successors Empress
Anna Ioannovna (1730–1740) and Catherine the Great (1762–1796) placed fur-
ther restrictions on the movement and activities of women “of debauched be-
haviour”, underlining the crime of commercial sex as a threat to public order.7
It was in the nineteenth century that the exigencies of public health became
the overwhelming justification for restrictions on the activities of prostitutes,
and rather than prohibit commercial sex altogether state authorities sought to
legalize it in restricted circumstances and thus control the activities of “public
women”.8 Just as in France, the Russian state enacted regulations in 1843 that
allowed for tolerated prostitution in cities as long as prostitutes were registered
with the police and submitted to weekly medical examinations.9
This position, and the accompanying legal entity of the “public woman”, re-
mained until 1917, when the Provisional government overthrew the system of
regulated prostitution. This paved the way for the Bolsheviks after the October
Revolution, who perceived prostitution as a prime example of the structural
inequality of men and women, and its eradication as an important step on
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
3 Eve Levin, Sex and Society in the World of the Orthodox Slavs (Ithaca, 1995), pp. 190–191.
4 Ibid.
5 See the English translation of the Sobornoe Ulozhenie of 1649 at http://pages.uoregon.edu/
kimball/1649-Ulj.htm#ch22, which is based on the translation by Richard Hellie of The Mus-
covite Law Code (Ulozhenie) of 1649.
6 Cited in Bernstein, Sonia’s Daughters, p. 13.
7 Ibid., pp. 13–15.
8 Laurie Bernstein, “Yellow Tickets and State-Licensed Brothels: The Tsarist Government and
the Regulation of Urban Prostitution”, in Susan Soloman and John Hutchinson (eds), Health
and Society in Revolutionary Russia (Bloomington, 1990), pp. 233–252.
9 Bernstein, Sonia’s Daughters, pp. 17–20.
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Prostitution in Moscow and St. Petersburg, Russia 141
the path to gender equality. Thus, rather than reintroduce criminal measures
against commercial sex or the medical supervision of women engaged in it,
Bolshevik officials developed a system whereby they sought to rehabilitate and
educate former prostitutes so they no longer needed to sell sex. However, the
system of labour colonies they enacted for these purposes proved useful ve-
hicles for a punitive shift against women who sold sex in the Stalin period,
during which time such women came to be deemed “social parasites” and “so-
cially harmful elements”.10 Many were shot during the terror of the late 1930s.11
In a discursive development that highlights the deep ambiguity of Soviet ap-
proaches to sex work, the language of prostitutes as “social parasites” in police
reports and even some official proclamations of the Soviet government ap-
peared alongside the continued existence of the idea that the “ideal prostitute”
was an economic victim. By the late 1920s and early ‘30s, however, the state’s
declaration that socialism had been achieved “in one country” and that there
was accordingly full employment for all women meant that such an ideal type
(the woman driven to commercial sex because of unemployment and desti-
tution) was supposed to have disappeared.12 Indeed, her very presence could
serve to undermine the notion that socialism had been achieved at all. Accord-
ingly, police and policy makers spoke more frequently of “professional prosti-
tutes” who supposedly chose prostitution because of their criminal deviance,
rather than because of economic need.13 The entrenchment of the category of
10
11
12
13
10 For a succinct discussion of the category of socially harmful elements (sotsial’nye vred-
nye elementy or sotsvredelement), which frequently included women selling sex, see Paul
Hagenloh, “Socially Harmful Elements and the Great Terror”, in Sheila Fitzpatrick (ed.),
Stalinism: New Directions (London: 2000), pp. 286–308. See also David Shearer, “Social
Disorder, Mass Repression, and the nkvd during the 1930s”, Cahiers du Monde Russe, 42
(2001), pp. 505–534.
11 On the persecution of “socially harmful elements” in the “Terror” see Hagenloh, “Socially
Harmful Elements and the Great Terror”, pp. 286–308. On the further disenfranchisement
of prostitutes, see Golfo Alexopoulos, Stalin’s Outcasts: Aliens, Citizens, and the Soviet
State, 1926–1936 (Ithaca, 2003), pp. 62–63.
12 On the discourse of full employment see David L. Hoffmann, Cultivating the Masses: Mod-
ern State Practices and Soviet Socialism, 1914–1939 (Ithaca, 2011), pp. 56–57.
13 For police accusations that “professional prostitutes” had emerged as women who sold
sex out of deviance not poverty, see State Archive of the Russian Federation [hereafter
garf], Fond A390, Opis’ 21, Dela 1, “Narkomtrud. Komissiia po izucheniiu i ulucheniiu
zhenskogo truda: Materialy o bor’be s prostitutsiei”, 1923–1928, l.54; garf, Fond 393,
Opis’ 43, Dela 12, 1922, “Proekty postanovleniia Sovnarkoma rsfsr i proekt polozheniia
administrativnogo vozdeistviia po bor’be s prostitutsiei, protokoly zasedanii mezhdu-
vedomstvennoi komissii ot 27 fevralia 1922, i perepiska s Glavnym upravleniem militsii
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142 Hetherington
rofessional prostitute enabled the Soviet authorities to demonize women who
p
sold sex as social parasites while continuing to insist that the primary cause of
prostitution was economic want. Police repression of prostitution continued
from the late 1920s throughout the Soviet period. Despite this, selling sex was
not actually prohibited again until 1987, when it became an administrative of-
fence during the moral regeneration campaigns that accompanied glasnost.14
In contemporary Russia, prostitution is an administrative but not a criminal
offence, and thus operates in a liminal space between censure and sanction.15
Throughout the 1990s in particular it came to be seen as an especially visible
sign of the sexual anarchy and social breakdown that accompanied the transi-
tion to capitalism.16
From this sketch, we can see that the legal and social definitions of prosti-
tution shifted over time from those constructing it as a moral crime or crime
against God (pre-1649 Muscovy), to that of a crime of against secular public
and military order (under Peter the Great in particular), and to that of a threat
to public health (under the system of regulation, 1843–1917). In the Soviet
period it became a vestige of the inequality of the past and a sign of “social
parasitism”, and finally a somewhat tolerated “perversion” that symbolized the
confusion of the post-Soviet period. These categorizations were not, of course,
clear-cut, particularly in the overlapping of moral and religious disapproval
and the need for public order. The vestiges of pre-1649 ecclesiastical censure
can be seen, for example, in the 1736 declaration against secret brothels by the
governing senate, which stated that “many debauched women and girls can be
14
15
16
nkvd rsfsr”, l. 46; garf, Fond r-393, Opis’ 43, Delo 14, 1923–1924, “Postanovleniia
VTsIK s Sovnarkoma rsfsr, instruktsiia i perepiska s VTsIK i VSNKk ob okhrane mor-
skikh predosteregatel’nykh znakov, merakh bor’by s prostitutsiei i po drugim voprosam”,
ll.48–48(ob).
14 Elizabeth Waters, “Restructuring the Woman Question: Prostitution and Perestroika”,
Feminist Review, 33 (1989), pp. 3–19, 12.
15 Engaging in prostitution is administratively prohibited under article 6.11 of the Admin-
istrative Offences Code of the Russian Federation (Kodeks Rossiiskoi Federatsii ob admin-
istrativnykh pravonarusheniiakh) and punishable by a small fine. “Federalnyi Zakon ot
22 iiunia 2007 g. N. 116-FZ,” Sobranie zakonodatel’stva Rossiiskoi Federatsii, No. 26, 2007,
p. 3089. Enticing another person into prostitution, or organising the prostitution of
others, is a criminal offence punishable by a jail term, as per articles 240 and 241 of the
Criminal Code of the Russian Federation (Ugolovnyi Kodeks Rossiiskoi Federatsii). “Feder-
alnyi zakon Rossiiskoi Federatsii ot 8 dek. 2003 N.162-FZ,” Sobranie Zakonodatel’stva Ros-
siiskoi Federatsii, No. 50, 2003, p. 4848.
16 For a detailed discussion of the images of prostitution in Russia in the 1990s, see Eliot
Borenstein, Overkill: Sex and Violence in Contemporary Russian Popular Culture (Ithaca,
2008), especially the chapter “Pimping the Motherland”, pp. 77–97.
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Prostitution in Moscow and St. Petersburg, Russia 143
found in charitable homes, which is indeed against pious Christian law.”17 Fur-
thermore, the legal definition of a “prostitute” was often unclear, with vague
references to fornication (1649 Law Code), whoring (1716 Military Statutes),
public women (nineteenth century regulations) and social parasites (Soviet
declarations). Throughout all of this, however, context demonstrates that there
were some features that these categories had in common. With the excep-
tion of the pre-1649 ecclesiastical laws, all legal and administrative mention
of prostitution made reference to commercial sex or the exchange of money,
and the law recognized such actions as a separate crime from adultery more
broadly (albeit many social commentators did not differentiate so starkly be-
tween women who sold sex and any women who had sex outside marriage).
The nineteenth-century statute defined prostitutes through the language of
“trade”, referring to them as “women who traded in vice” and who “made de-
bauchery into a trade.”18 Prostitutes could be women of any age, but under the
nineteenth-century regulations, one could only be a “public woman” registered
with the police if above the age of 16 (18 after 1903).19
The Great Soviet Encyclopaedia (gse) provides a good source for thinking
about shifts in the semi-official definition of prostitution in the twentieth cen-
tury. The first entry on prostitution, from 1940, declares that prostitution con-
stituted “the offering of one’s body in exchange for money, in order to satisfy
sexual desires.”20 The longest entry on prostitution of any edition of the gse,
the 1940 text unsurprisingly links prostitution to poverty (referencing Engels’
The Origins of the Family, Private Property and the State) as well as vagrancy,
before stating that neither of these exists in the Soviet Union. The 1955 edition
of the gse ties the definition of prostitution even more tightly to conditions
of material need, defining it as “the sale of one’s body, usually by a woman, in
order to make a living.”21 It is interesting to note the inclusion of the qualifier
17
18
19
20
21
17 Cited in entry “Prostitutsiia”, in Entsiklopedicheskii Slovar’ Brokgaus i Efron (St. Petersburg,
1899), available at: http://www.vehi.net/brokgauz/index.html; last accessed 10 July 2017.
18 Barbara Alpern Engel, “St. Petersburg Prostitutes in the Late Nineteenth Century: A Per-
sonal and Social Profile”, Russian Review, 48 (1989), pp. 21–44, 23.
19 “Polozhenie ob organizatsii gorodskoi prostitutsii v Imperii’ (Tsirkuliar Ministerstva Vnu-
trennikh Del po Departamentu Meditsiny, 8-go Oktiabr 1903)” published in Alfavitnyi
Sbornik rasporiazhenii po S-Peterburgskomu gradonachal’stvu i politsii, izvlechennykh iz
prikazov za vremia s 1902 g. po 10 Iiulia 1904 (St. Petersburg, 1904), pp. 291–301.
20 Bolshaia Sovetskaia Entsiklopediia (pod redaktsii N.I. Bukharina i Glavnyi Redaktor O.Iu.
Schmidt), 65 vols (Moscow, 1926–1947), xlvii, p. 330.
21 Bolshaia Sovetskaia Entsiklopediia, 51 vols (1949–1958), xxxv, p. 100.
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144 Hetherington
“usually by a woman”, one of the very few acknowledgments in imperial or So-
viet discourse that men could theoretically also be prostitutes. This post-World
War ii entry also claimed that by eliminating the social conditions that led to
prostitution, the Soviet Union and all “socialist democracies” had liquidated
prostitution. Finally, the 1975 edition of the gse provided the shortest and
most perfunctory definition of prostitution of all, describing it as “a type of
socially-deviant behaviour.”22 The entry repeated the assertion that prostitu-
tion did not exist in the Soviet Union, despite considerable evidence to the
contrary (discussed below).
The Labour Market for Prostitution
The first reliable data we have on the labour market for prostitution comes
from the mid-nineteenth century, when both the increasing reliance of profes-
sionals on statistical measures and the interest of the state in controlling pros-
titution in part through knowledge of it sparked a number of investigations of
the brothel system in both St. Petersburg and Moscow. Under the nineteenth-
century regulation of prostitution, brothels were legal if registered, although
only women could run them (thus technically excluding men from the possi-
bility of making money from the sexual labour of women). Other than brothel
prostitution, women who wished to sell sex could also be registered as “street”
prostitutes, which meant that they lived individually and solicited for clients in
public rather than through a brothel.
According to an extensive 1889 census of registered prostitution across the
empire, the division of labour between brothel prostitutes and “street” prosti-
tutes was strikingly different between St. Petersburg and Moscow. In the former
city, of 2,232 registered prostitutes, 584 (26 per cent) were brothel prostitutes,
while 1,649 (74 per cent) were street prostitutes.23 In Moscow, conversely, of
1,068 registered prostitutes in 1889 (less than half the number in St. Peters-
burg), 924 (86.5 per cent) were brothel prostitutes and only 144 (13.5 per cent)
were street prostitutes.24 This suggests that, at least in the waning decades of
the nineteenth century, the brothel system was considerably more developed
22
23
24
22 Bolshaia Sovetskaia Entsiklopediia (glav. redaktor A.M. Prohkorov), 31 vols (Moscow, 1970–
1981), xxi, p. 114.
23 A. Dubrovskii (ed.), Statistika Rossiiskoi Imperii, Tom xiii: Prostitutsiia (St. Petersburg,
1889), pp. 16–17.
24 Ibid., pp. 10–11.
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Prostitution in Moscow and St. Petersburg, Russia 145
in Moscow than in St. Petersburg, whereas the geography of legal commercial
sex in the latter unfolded far more publicly (in the streets, taverns, and court-
yards frequented by street prostitutes) than in the former. Furthermore, the
registered prostitute population of Moscow was less than 50 per cent of that
in St. Petersburg. While St. Petersburg was indeed a larger city than Moscow in
this period, the difference was not immense; in 1897 the capital had a popula-
tion of 1,132,677 while Moscow had a population of 988,614.25
These figures are open, of course, to various interpretations. One is that the
market for commercial sex was greater in the imperial capital, potentially be-
cause of a higher number of single men moving to the centre of power for
employment. However, when we look at the gender breakdown of the cities,
we find that in fact it was Moscow that had the higher ratio of male to female
population (56.7 per cent male compared to 46.3 per cent female) in this pe-
riod, as opposed St. Petersburg (which was 54.5 per cent male to 45.5 per cent
female).26 Perhaps a more plausible explanation comes from the structure of
regulation in St. Petersburg. The urban regulation of prostitution in the Rus-
sian empire was mandated by the Ministry of Internal Affairs, but the structure
of regulation itself was left up to local authorities to determine. In some cases,
regulation was managed by a particular Medical-Police Committee, which was
a combined force of police and civilian medical practitioners (this was the case
in St. Petersburg). In others, it was managed under the aegis of the local Sani-
tary Commission or similar organization charged with the general upkeep of
hygiene and sanitation methods in the city, which acted independently of the
police.27 In still other cities, regulation was subsumed under the general work
of the police in carrying out surveillance of the population.28 As this typology
shows, the goals and means of the various bodies managing prostitution in ur-
ban centres across the Empire could vary greatly. This in turn could influence
the availability for brothel work in particular cities, for example in St. Peters-
burg where we see it was rare for a registered prostitute to work at a brothel.
At the brothels in both Moscow and St. Petersburg there was considerable
stratification, which influenced the availability and types of sexual labour per-
formed by women. For Moscow, Dubrovskii’s 1889 census reports that the cost
25
26
27
28
25 Tsentral’nyi Statisticheskii Komitet mvd, Pervaia Vseobshchaia Perepis’ Naselenie Rossiis-
koi Imperii 1897, Tom 2 (St. Petersburg, 1897), pp. 13, 18.
26 Ibid.
27 Iliukhov, Prostitutsiia v Rossii s xviii veka do 1917 goda, p. 45.
28 For a thorough description of the various legal forms regulation could take in Russian cit-
ies, see Vrachebno-Politseiskii Nadzor za Gorodskoi Prostitutsiei (St. Petersburg, 1910).
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146 Hetherington
for a visit at the highest category of brothels (which employed 110 prostitutes
in all) was 5 rubles, while a whole night was 10. In the middle tier of brothels,
which employed 304 prostitutes, he recorded a price of 1–2 rubles per visit and
2–6 rubles for a night, while in the lowest tier, employing 537 prostitutes, a
visit was 20–50 kopecks (a ruble was 100 kopecks) and a night was 50 kopecks
to 2 rubles.29 Thus we can see that by far the majority of women worked in
the “lowest” type of brothel, suggesting that the majority of clients had little
money to spend and probably came from the working class of the city. In St.
Petersburg, which, as I have noted above, had a far smaller proportion of broth-
el prostitutes than Moscow, the highest tier of houses charged 3–5 rubles a
visit and 5–15 rubles a night, employing eighty-two women. The medium tier
charged 1–2 rubles a visit and 2–5 rubles a night, with 262 prostitutes, and the
lowest tier charged 30–50 kopecks a visit and 1–2 rubles a night, with 435 pros-
titutes.30 Once again, we can see that the lowest tier of houses held the largest
number of registered prostitutes. We also see that the percentage of brothel
prostitutes in the “lowest” houses is fairly constant between Moscow and St.
Petersburg; in both cities it is between 55.8 and 56.5 per cent of all registered
brothel prostitutes.
In analysing the above data, it is worth repeating the caveat that, even by
imperial statisticians’ own admission, only a small number of women selling
sex registered with the police as legal prostitutes (prostitutki). Furthermore,
the statistics are open to the critiques of underreporting and inaccuracies that
plague all attempts to collect data, particularly in the context of quasi-legality
29
30
29 Dubrovskii, Statistika, pp. 4–5. It is important to note that the historic value of the ruble
is notoriously difficult to pin down, particularly as there were three rubles in circulation
in the nineteenth century: the gold ruble, the silver ruble, and the assignat (credit ruble).
Dubrovskii’s statistics do not identify to which ruble he refers; however, by the last half
of the nineteenth century the credit ruble was in the ascendant, and the most reasonable
assumption would be that this was the relevant currency. See Thomas Owen, “A Standard
Ruble of Account for Russian Business History, 1769–1914: A Note”, Journal of Economic
History, 49 (1989), pp. 699–706. See also the discussion on the problem of the ruble’s value
in Tracy Dennison, The Institutional Framework of Russian Serfdom (Cambridge, u.k.,
2014), pp. xv–xvi. Although such flaws in the data make it difficult to delineate the pur-
chasing power of the ruble in this period, we can compare these prices to, for example,
the average wages for a female factory worker. In the 1890s, this rose to between twelve
and thirteen rubles per month, considerably higher than it had been in the previous de-
cade. See Barbara Alpern Engel, Between the Fields and the City: Women, Work and Family,
1861–1914 (Cambridge, 1996), p. 108.
30 Dubrovskii, Statistika, pp. 4–5.
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Prostitution in Moscow and St. Petersburg, Russia 147
and clandestinity that pervaded sex work in the imperial period. Nonetheless,
they are able to hint at least to the state’s perception of the labour market for
prostitution at this time; furthermore, the fact that they were collected at all
highlights the increasing scrutiny with which social scientists and bureaucrats
viewed prostitution in this era.
Prostitutes’ Social Profiles
Once again, there is very little information on prostitutes’ social profiles in
Moscow and St. Petersburg before the late nineteenth century. The informa-
tion for that period, however, is quite extensive (this is particularly true for
St. Petersburg). The imperial Russian state generally categorized its subjects
by “estate” (soslovie) and confession. In 1888, Aleksandr Fedorov, a doctor and
member of the Medical-Police Committee, surveyed 2,915 registered prosti-
tutes in St. Petersburg. Of these, 49 per cent belonged to the peasant estate, 35
per cent were born townspeople (meshchanki), and 12 per cent were soldier’s
wives, or soldatki.31 Although the smallest number by proportion, soldatki were
perceived as particularly susceptible to prostitution, representing as they did
the wives of absent conscripts. As Beatrice Farnsworth has noted, the soldatka
was “stereotyped as abused, neglected, and without resources, [and] seen as a
loose woman who drank and the bearer of illegitimate children.”32 As such, she
represented the paradigmatic prostitute for many contemporary observers, de-
spite being outnumbered by her peasant and urban dwelling sisters. This repu-
tation was apparent even before the advent of nineteenth-century attempts to
quantify it; Barbara Alpern Engel states that in the eighteenth century, “enough
women turned to prostitution as a temporary or a permanent expedient that
soldier’s wives obtained an unsavoury reputation.”33
The state regulation of prostitution facilitated information collection on
prostitutes’ social profiles; once it was deregulated in 1917 and declared “liqui-
dated” in the early 1930s, there was once again very little information collected
on the backgrounds of people who sold sex. Historians who have consid-
ered Soviet prostitution have suggested that, in the early years of the new
regime, urban women and many “former” elite women (that is, women from
31
32
33
31 Bernstein, Sonia’s Daughters, p. 95.
32 Beatrice Farnsworth, “The Soldatka: Folklore and Court Record”, Slavic Review, 49 (1990),
pp. 58–73.
33 Barbara Alpern Engel, Women in Russia: 1700–2000 (Cambridge, ma, 2004) p. 62.
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148 Hetherington
the former aristocratic and middle classes now deprived of most rights and
privileges) turned to casual prostitution in Moscow and St. Petersburg in the
1920s.34 High unemployment in the period also fed into a perceived growth in
urban prostitution.35 From the mid-1930s, prostitution was officially declared
eradicated in the Soviet Union, and historians have not yet thoroughly investi-
gated the newly-available archival records of the police units and administra-
tive courts to potentially correct this view. Prostitutes do occasionally appear
in the historical record in the period between the 1930s and the opening up of
the Soviet Union under perestroika. One example is in memoirs of the Gulags,
where women sometimes turned to prostitution in an attempt to leverage bet-
ter conditions or food. Further, as prostitution had itself become a forbidden
activity (through claims of its impossibility), some women were purportedly
sent to camps as punishment for commercial sex, a practice many continued
in the Gulag.36
In the late 1980s, in the resurgence of interest in prostitution that came with
perestroika, newspapers in Moscow began printing descriptions of the social
makeup of “women of loose morals” who had been identified by the police.
Although these were by no means scientific statistical studies, they do pro-
vide a picture of the evolving ways in which Russians were reconsidering the
possibility of commercial sex in their midst. The women purportedly fell into
two distinct groups: those with existing connections to the criminal under-
world whose activities were part of a general conglomeration of “anti-Soviet”
activities, and homeless women or bomzhi, many of whom lived in railway
stations and sold sex in return for food or clothing.37 This picture contrasted
with that which developed around prostitution in the port cities, especially
St. Petersburg. There, prostitution was very much associated with women who
went to bars and restaurants known to be frequented by foreigners, and who
very explicitly sold sex for hard international currency.38 The press described
34
35
36
37
38
34 Dan Healy, Homosexual Desire in Revolutionary Russia: The Regulation of Sexual and Gen-
der Dissent (Chicago, 2001), p. 54.
35 Lebina and Shkarovskii, Prostitutsiia v Peterburge (40gg xix v–40gg xxv) (Moscow, 1994).
36 Prostitution is mentioned briefly, for example, in volume two of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s
The Gulag Archipelago, where he recalls prostitutes who were sent to Solovki for three
years continuing to sell sex in return for small amounts of money or gifts from Red Army
guards. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago: Volume 2 (New York, 2007), pp.
66–67. See also the brief mention in Wilson Bell, “Sex, Pregnancy and Power in the Late
Stalinist Gulag”, Journal of the History of Sexuality, 24 (2015), pp. 198–224, 215.
37 Waters, “Prostitution and Perestroika”, p. 6.
38 Ibid., pp. 3–19.
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Prostitution in Moscow and St. Petersburg, Russia 149
the world of foreign-currency prostitutes in terms of glamour, high fashion,
and the promise of international travel, a theme that was the subject of one
of the most successful (and controversial) Soviet films of the 1980s, Interde-
vochka (Inter-Girl). Interdevochka tells the story of Tatiana, a beautiful, kind
and plucky nurse who by night sells sex to foreign men in fancy hotels. At the
beginning of the film, Tatiana is planning to leave St. Petersburg (then Lenin-
grad) with a client-turned-lover, to marry him in Sweden. However, before she
is able to leave, friends and family find out about her work, and after she goes
to Sweden her mother commits suicide out of shame. Interdevochka highlights
the paradox of the perestroika approach to sex work. On the one hand, in an
era in which foreign currency was everything, it could be a woman’s path out
of a crumbling state; on the other, its fundamental moral ambivalence ensured
that no good could come of it, even for the most well-meaning such as Tatiana.
Researchers examining prostitution in contemporary Moscow have found
that the social stratification that seemed to emerge among prostitutes in the
1980s has largely carried over into the post-Soviet period. The most presti-
gious sex work is still done in hotels, serving a largely foreign (or very wealthy
Russian) clientele. A study in 2003 found that hotel prostitutes were charg-
ing between us$50 and us$200 per client in the city.39 Falling just under this
were brothel, massage parlour, and sauna sex workers (us$26–us$150 per cli-
ent), then street sex workers ($50–$100 per client), and truck stop sex workers
(us$4–us$6 per client). As in the late Soviet period, the “lowest” rung on the
sex worker hierarchy was that of the bomzhi, or the railway station sex workers,
who charged anything from a crust of bread to us$6 per client.40 It is clear that
there is a precipitous drop between even street sex workers, many of whom
solicit by the highways in the city and on the way out to the airport, and the sex
workers who operate at the train stations and roadside houses of the region.
Religious, Racial and Ethnic Backgrounds
The religious, racial and ethnic backgrounds of Russian prostitutes differed
significantly between St. Petersburg, located on the far-western edge of the
empire, and Moscow, considered to be in the Russian heartland. Regarding the
pre-nineteenth century situation, historian Alexander Kamenskii states that
39
40
39 Segvi Aral et al., “The Social Organization of Commercial Sex Work in Moscow, Russia”,
Sexually Transmitted Diseases, 30 (2003), pp. 39–45, 40.
40 Ibid., p. 40.
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150 Hetherington
foreigners (inostrantsy) made up the majority of prostitutes in St. Petersburg
in the eighteenth century, although he does not provide an archival source to
back this up.41 Whether or not this was the case, by the mid- and late-nine-
teenth century the picture was very different. Fedorov’s 1888 study of regis-
tered prostitutes in St. Petersburg found that of the 2,915 women studied, 87
per cent were of Russian ethnicity, 9 per cent were Russian subjects but of a
different nationality or ethnicity (such as Poles, Finns, Latvians and Jews), and
4 per cent were foreign subjects.42 It is important to note that the fact that
these statistics only pertained to registered prostitutes is particularly pertinent
in the case of ethnicity, as foreigners and even Russian subjects without per-
mission to live in the city may have been particularly likely to avoid the police
scrutiny that came with registering with the police and worked instead as clan-
destine prostitutes.
Dubrovskii’s 1889 census of prostitutes in the Russian empire gave figures
for the ethnic and religious background of prostitutes surveyed, but it did this
by province (guberniia) rather than city. However, in both Moscow province
and St. Petersburg province, the titular cities had by far the largest number of
registered prostitutes in the region, which means we can draw some conclu-
sions, albeit imperfect ones, from the data. In Moscow province, 97 per cent of
brothel prostitutes resided in the city of Moscow. 87 per cent (1,009) of these
women were classified as being of Russian “ethnicity” by the imperial state,
while 6 per cent (71) were German, 5.5 per cent (65) were Polish, 0.5 per cent
(5) were Jewish, and 0.4 per cent (4) were Latvian. Also there was one Swede,
one Estonian, and one black woman (negritianka) registered as prostitutes.43
In St. Petersburg province, a slightly lower proportion of registered prostitutes
in the region resided in the city itself; most of the remainder resided in Kro-
nstadt, a small town just nineteen miles west of St. Petersburg that was histori-
cally the home of the Russian admiralty and the base of the Baltic Fleet. In St.
Petersburg province, the prostitute population was slightly more ethnically di-
verse, with 84 per cent (2,186) of surveyed prostitutes categorized as ethnically
Russian, 4.6 per cent (121) German, 3.4 per cent (89) Finnish, 2.5 per cent (66)
Estonian, 2 per cent (56) Polish, 0.6 per cent (17) Jewish, 0.5 per cent (13) Swed-
ish, and small numbers of women of Hungarian (3), Greek (5), Romanian (1),
Czech (3) French (6) and Lithuanian (1) nationality.44 In both cities, women
41
42
43
44
41 Alexander Kamenskii, “Mikroistoriia: Deviantnoe Povedenie v Russkom Gorode xviiiv”,
in Odissei: Chelovek v Istorii (Moscow, 2005), p. 377.
42 Bernstein, Sonia’s Daughters, p. 97.
43 Dubrovskii, Statistika, pp. 24, 28.
44 Ibid., pp. 25, 29.
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Prostitution in Moscow and St. Petersburg, Russia 151
who were neither Russian nor one of the main minorities (Polish or German)
were considerably more likely to be “street” prostitutes working on their own,
rather than brothel prostitutes.45
In terms of religion, the vast majority of registered prostitutes in both St.
Petersburg and Moscow in the nineteenth century were Russian Orthodox,
with Protestant and Roman Catholic distantly behind in terms of numbers.
According to Dubrovskii, of the total number of brothel prostitutes in Moscow
province, 87 per cent were Russian Orthodox, 9 per cent were Roman Catholic,
3.5 per cent were Protestant, and just one was Jewish.46 Of the total number of
street prostitutes in Moscow province, 87 per cent were Russian Orthodox, 3
per cent were Roman Catholic, 9 per cent were Protestant, one was Jewish, one
was Muslim and one was an Old Believer (a member of a schismatic branch of
Orthodoxy that adhered to pre-1666 liturgical practices).47
Of the brothel prostitutes in the St. Petersburg province, 83.5 per cent were
Russian Orthodox, 13 per cent were Protestant, and 3.5 per cent were Roman
Catholic.48 As for street prostitutes, 86 per cent were Russian Orthodox, 10
per cent were Protestant, 3 per cent were Roman Catholic, 0.5 per cent were
Jewish, and one was an Old Believer.49 Thus, comparing the two regions, the
primary substantive difference was the higher number of Protestant prosti-
tutes in St. Petersburg, unsurprising given the proximity of the region to the
predominantly Lutheran Baltic provinces and Finland. The proportion of Rus-
sian Orthodox prostitutes stayed relatively constant across the two regions
(around 83–87 per cent). St. Petersburg had the highest proportion of Jewish
prostitutes, but at 0.5 per cent this was still an infinitesimal number compared
to other confessions (it is important to remember that in this period most Jew-
ish subjects of the Tsar were confined to residence in the Pale of Settlement,
the region covering roughly what is today Belarus, Eastern Poland and Central
Ukraine).
Once again, for the Soviet period, the dearth of statistical information makes
it difficult to draw conclusions about the ethnic and religious makeup of pros-
titutes. One important thing to note is that if, as stated above, we take the con-
clusion that in the 1920s many urban and “former” (disenfranchised) women
turned to prostitution, this would suggest that the percentage of prostitutes
45
46
47
48
49
45 Ibid., pp. 24–25, 28–29.
46 Ibid., p. 20.
47 Ibid., p. 21.
48 Ibid., p. 20.
49 Ibid., p. 21.
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152 Hetherington
in the two cities of Russian ethnicity would have increased if it changed at all.
The Soviet state, officially a (militantly) atheist one, no longer collected infor-
mation on the religious backgrounds of its citizens, which were supposedly
non-existent.
In contemporary Moscow, the ethnic stratification of prostitution appears
to map closely onto the hierarchy within sex work itself. According to eth-
nographic research from the 1990s and early 2000s, the highest-class (hotel)
prostitutes tend to be ethnically Russian (the most privileged ethnic group
generally) while the lowest rung, the bomzhi in the rail stations and truck
stops, are usually non-Muscovites and often non-Russian migrants from for-
mer Soviet states.50
Employment Prior or Parallel to Prostitution
The most common path to prostitution in the nineteenth century was by way
of domestic service. According to Dubrovskii’s 1889 census of prostitutes, 46
per cent of women surveyed stated that they were in domestic service prior to
prostitution.51 Citing the domestic servant’s lack of protection in late imperial
society, the historian David Ransel has said that “the female domestic often
lived in a kind of personal bondage” in the period, and “frequently her position
was far from secure and subject to great abuse.”52 The precariousness and often
misery of a domestic servant’s employment conditions would thus help to ex-
plain the frequency with which women often left domestic service and entered
prostitution. Writing in 1927, the doctor V.M. Bronner and jurist A.I. Elistratov
claimed on the basis of the 1897 All-Russian census that, in that year, 6 per
cent of domestic servants became prostitutes (compared with 4.6 per cent of
needle workers and 1 per cent of factory workers).53
The second most common employment background for women working as
prostitutes was the needle trades, which despite requiring considerable skill
and years of experience, paid barely subsistence wages (women made 64 per
cent of what men did in these trades).54 Further undermining women’s ability
to make a living in this line of work was its seasonal nature; usually, it involved
50
51
52
53
54
50 Aral, “The Social Organization”, p. 40.
51 Dubrovskii, Statistika, pp. 74–75.
52 David Ransel, “Problems in Measuring Illegitimacy in Pre-revolutionary Russia”, Journal of
Social History, 16 (1982), pp. 111–123, 123.
53 Iliukhov, Prostitutsiia, p. 400.
54 Engel, “St. Petersburg Prostitutes”, p. 30.
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Prostitution in Moscow and St. Petersburg, Russia 153
four to five months of work a year, and was not able to support women who
had moved permanently from their village to the city.55 Finally, the third larg-
est group of prostitutes were former factory workers, comprising 6.4 per cent
of prostitutes according to Dubrovskii. As Barbara Alpern Engel has noted,
this group was the only one in which their proportion among prostitutes was
smaller than their proportion in the female workforce as a whole (around 20
per cent in 1890).56 Arguably, this suggests that even as factory work involved
long hours and often poor pay (particularly when compared to men) the work
was stable enough to keep most female employees out of sex work. However,
there was always a large oversupply of female migrants to the city looking for
factory employment relative to the number of jobs available. The ranks of St.
Petersburg and Moscow prostitutes likely contained a large number of women
who were aspiring, but had never been actual, factory workers.
Family Situation
Nineteenth-century studies suggested that many registered prostitutes were
full or half orphans; according to Dubrovskii’s 1889 study, fewer than 4 per cent
of prostitutes reported that both their parents were still living.57 Historian Lau-
rie Bernstein reports that disrupted family backgrounds were the most distin-
guishing characteristic of prostitutes in nineteenth-century Russia, with many
telling social workers and journalists about parents who beat them or relatives
who drove them out of the home.58 This model of family crisis as a driver of
prostitution was also reflected in the rise of concerns about child prostitution,
particularly after 1905. Concern about sex work among vagrant and homeless
juveniles contributed to the notion that many who ended up prostitutes came
from broken homes and financially unstable backgrounds.59
Dubrovskii also gives us figures on the percentage of prostitutes who were
married, widowed or divorced at the time of the 1889 survey. Perhaps unsur-
prisingly, the vast majority of prostitutes were unmarried. In Moscow province,
91 per cent of brothel prostitutes were unmarried, 7 per cent were married,
55
56
57
58
59
55 Ibid.
56 Ibid.
57 Dubrovskii, Statistika.
58 Bernstein, Sonia’s Daughters, p. 101.
59 See for example M.K. Mukalov, Deti Ulitsy: Maloletnie Prostitutki (St Petersburg, 1906),
as well as discussions in Engelstein, The Keys to Happiness, pp. 291–298, and Bernstein,
S onia’s Daughters, pp. 42–46.
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154 Hetherington
2 per cent were widowed and 0.3 per cent were divorced.60 In terms of street
prostitutes in Moscow, 77 per cent were unmarried, 13 per cent were married,
7 per cent were widowed and 3 per cent were divorced.61 In St. Petersburg prov-
ince, 95 per cent of brothel prostitutes were unmarried, 3 per cent were mar-
ried, 1.5 per cent were widowed and 0.4 per cent were divorced.62 Among street
prostitutes, 90 per cent were unmarried, 6 per cent were married, 3.4 per cent
were widows, and 0.7 per cent were divorced (see Table 6.1).63
A preoccupation with the spectre of child prostitution continued into the
early Soviet period, when official discussions of the problem of prostitution
was frequently yoked together with discussion of child homelessness (bezpr-
izornost’) and poverty (nishchenstvo). In the chaotic years of the revolution and
civil war, and the ensuing famine of the early 1920s, observers claimed that
homeless orphans were flooding the streets of the capital (then Moscow) in
particular. Commentators claimed that the number of child prostitutes had
increased twenty-fold.64 In 1920, a survey of 5,300 street girls indicated that
88 per cent of them had engaged in prostitution, supporting the fears of those
who saw in the increased child homelessness of the period a direct increase in
child prostitution.65
Table 6.1 Marital status of prostitutes in St. Petersburg and Moscow, 1889.66
Brothel Married Un-Married Widow Divorced
Moscow 66 (6.9%) 871 (91.2%) 15 (1.6%) 3 (0.3%)
St. Petersburg 20 (2.7%) 695 (95.3%) 11 (1.5%) 3 (0.4%)
Street Married Un-Married Widow Divorced
Moscow 25 (13.4%) 143 (76.9%) 13 (7.0%) 5 (2.7%)
St. Petersburg 110 (5.9%) 1670 (89.9%) 64 (3.4%) 13 (0.7%)
“Street” denotes odinochki or women registered individually.
60
61
62
63
64
65
66
60 Dubrovskii, Statistika, pp. 40–41.
61 Ibid., pp. 44–45.
62 Ibid., pp. 40–41.
63 Ibid., pp. 44–45.
64 Alan Ball, And Now My Soul is Hardened: Abandoned Children in Soviet Russia, 1918–1930
(Berkeley, 1994), p. 57.
65 Ibid.
66 Ibid., pp. 40–41, 44–45.
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Prostitution in Moscow and St. Petersburg, Russia 155
Age Structure
Although we lack any quantitative data on the ages of prostitutes in Moscow
and St. Petersburg in the eighteenth century, we do know that the image of a
very young woman with an older man was a popular trope signalling prostitu-
tion in the woodcut prints (lubki) of the period.67
Dubrovskii’s 1889 survey suggests that, despite the above-mentioned fears of
the prevalence of child prostitution, in the late nineteenth century the median
age of (registered) prostitutes was well into adulthood. In Moscow, the median
age of brothel prostitutes was 23, while that of street prostitutes was slightly
lower at 22.68 In St. Petersburg, the median age of registered prostitutes was no-
ticeably higher, at 25 for brothel prostitutes and 24 for street prostitutes.69 Both
of these figures suggest that, contrary to popular opinion, the majority of regis-
tered prostitutes at the time were not under the age of sexual consent (between
18 and 21 in nineteenth-century Russia). Nonetheless, it is important to note that
this excludes all clandestine prostitutes; furthermore, women and girls may well
have been over-reporting their age in order to be able to legally sell sex. In 1903
the Ministry of Internal Affairs published a circular forbidding any Medical-
Police Committees from registering a woman under the age of 18, which does
suggest that prior to that moment this had been an acceptable practice.70
An important factor in the length of time that registered women spent in
prostitution was the fact of registration itself, as it was difficult to be taken off
the list of prostitutes which the police kept ostensibly to protect public health.
Formally, women had to die, enter a philanthropic shelter for reformed pros-
titutes, or marry to be taken off the list, a factor that could both inflate the
numbers of women police believed to be in prostitution, and act as a disincen-
tive for women to change professions in the first place. As Laurie Bernstein has
pointed out, however, police records show that many women simply disap-
peared from registered prostitution, somehow evading inspection by starting
new families or bribing officials for new documents, untainted by the shame
of the yellow ticket. Despite police attempts to keep track of all those they had
registered, in reality women frequently slipped through the cracks, highlighting
67
68
69
70
67 Dianne Eckland Farrell, “Popular Prints in the Cultural History of Eighteenth Century
Russia” (Unpublished Ph.D., University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1980), pp. 163–164.
68 Dubrovskii, Statistika, Part ii, pp. 10–11.
69 Ibid., pp. 16–17.
70 See “Polozhenie ob organizatsii gorodskoi prostitutsii v Imperii”, Tsirkuliar Ministerstva
Vnutrennikh Del po Departamenty Meditsiny, 8-go Oktiabr 1903, no. 1611, published in
Alfavitnyi Sbornik rasporiazhenii po S-Peterburgskomu gradonachal’stvu I politsii, izvlech-
ennykh iz prikazov za vremia s. 1902 g. po 10 Iiulia 1904 (St. Petersburg, 1904), pp. 291–301.
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156 Hetherington
the “permeability of the trade of prostitution”, which was for many a temporary
retreat from economic uncertainty or even starvation.71
Prostitutes’ Physical Health
Syphilis had been considered a major scourge since at least the eighteenth cen-
tury, when Catherine the Great declared in her famous “Great Instruction” in
1767 that syphilis “spreads wide its mournful and destructive Effects in many
of our Provinces. The utmost Care ought to be taken for the Health of the Citi-
zens. It would be highly prudent, therefore, to stop the Progress of this Disease
by the Laws.”72 It was also in her reign that the first hospital for the treatment
of syphilis and other venereal diseases was founded exclusively for women on
the Vyborg side of St. Petersburg, and the financial means for the hospital’s run-
ning came from the Empresses own finances.73 The police in Moscow and St.
Petersburg sponsored “private” homes for the treatment of syphilis starting in
1765, although these were primarily aimed at treating military personnel rather
than prostitutes. Historian John T. Alexander has stated that the significance
of syphilis for the development of public health policies in the eighteenth cen-
tury was high, as Catherine’s concern about it encouraged the development
of interventionist “medical police” methods for curing it.74 This in turn can be
seen as a precursor to the regulation of prostitution, ostensibly also designed
to stop the spread of venereal diseases in the nineteenth century.
As noted above, a perceived prevalence of venereal diseases among prosti-
tutes was the major motivating factor behind introducing regulation. Through-
out the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, prostitutes were consistently
associated with disease and physical danger. Statistical studies of registered
prostitutes in the late nineteenth century suggest the number of prostitutes
with venereal diseases was reasonably high. According to Dubrovskii, in 1889,
of 924 brothel prostitutes in Moscow city, 632 (68 per cent) currently had or
had previously contracted syphilis and other venereal diseases, while 91 (63 per
cent) of street prostitutes were in the same position.75 In St. Petersburg, 497
(85 per cent) of brothel prostitutes had or had previously contracted venereal
71
72
73
74
75
71 Bernstein, Sonia’s Daughters, pp. 79–82.
72 Cited in John T. Alexander, “Catherine the Great and Public Health”, Journal of the History
of Medicine, 36 (1981), pp. 185–204, 199.
73 A.A. Khitrovo, Istoricheskii Ocherk i Meditsinskii Otchet’ Kliniki Kozhnykh i Venericheskikh
Boleznei Imperatorskago Kazanskago Universiteta za 1899–1898 gody (Kazan, 1902), p. 1.
74 Alexander, “Catherine the Great and Public Health”, pp. 185–204, 199.
75 Dubrovskii, Statistika, Part ii, pp. 10–11.
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Prostitution in Moscow and St. Petersburg, Russia 157
diseases, while 1044 (63 per cent) of street prostitutes had.76 The most at-risk
group for the contraction of such diseases thus appears to have been brothel
prostitutes in St. Petersburg, something that went counter to the claims of pro-
regulationists such as Aleksandr Federov who saw street prostitutes as most
likely to spread disease amongst the population.
In the early Soviet period, and despite the supposed reformulation of prosti-
tutes as economic victims, sex workers continued to be seen as “the most valent
visual image of the source of venereal disease” in public health propaganda.77
Even up to the late 1920s, when prostitution was increasingly becoming a dis-
couraged topic of discussion even among doctors, the primary journal for the
study of venereal diseases, Venerologiia i Dermatologiia, was publishing articles
about the high rates of venereal diseases among prostitutes.78 From the 1930s
onwards, however, the issue of venereal diseases among prostitutes disappeared
from scientific study, as the official line of the Soviet government was that pros-
titution had been eradicated in Russia with the transition to communism.
In contemporary Russia, the prevalence of venereal diseases among pros-
titutes, particularly hiv and aids, has once again become a frequent topic of
discussion among public health experts. A 2003 study found that venereal dis-
eases, in particular syphilis, were especially common amongst the lowest stra-
ta of prostitutes in Moscow, the bomzhi who work in the railway stations and
truck stops (a local clinic reported that 54 per cent of the sex workers they saw
were infected with venereal diseases).79 The authors of the study emphasized
that the high rate of such diseases among bomzhi was due both to the higher
number of sexual encounters they typically had and to a generally lower level
of condom use, as well as the fact that they rarely used health services. This
situation was compounded by the socially marginal position of many of these
women, as they did not have legal residence permits for Moscow.80
Push and Pull Factors
Urbanization and Industrialization
The growth of Russian cities occurred later than the traditional chronology
of urbanization in Western Europe, although by the end of the nineteenth
76
77
78
79
80
76 Ibid., pp. 16–17.
77 Frances Bernstein, “Envisioning Health in Revolutionary Russia: The Politics of Gender in
Sexual-Enlightenment Posters of the 1920s”, Russian Review, 57 (1998), pp. 191–217, 202.
78 See for example O.N. Ostrovskii, “K voprosu o metodakh raboty v oblasti bor’by s prosti-
tutsiei”, Venerologiia i Dermatologiia, 3 March 1927, pp. 265–269.
79 Aral, “The Social Organization”, p. 40.
80 Ibid.
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158 Hetherington
century, migration from the fields to the city was in full swing. In the eigh-
teenth and early nineteenth centuries, Russian cities were primarily defined
juridically according to their military, political, and cultural functions.81 Serf-
dom kept the vast majority of Russian peasants tied to the land, and hampered
(although it did not completely prevent) outmigration to the cities. Indeed,
prominent Russian social historian Boris Mironov has argued that the second
half of the eighteenth century saw a considerable decline in urban popula-
tions, as many members of the urban estates (re)migrated to the countryside
to work in agriculture.82 Moscow and St. Petersburg themselves constituted
partial exceptions to this rule; movement to the two capitals for trade, busi-
ness, or government service was facilitated by special rules which provided for
temporary residence in the cities for people taking up employment.83 Howev-
er, the legal infrastructure of serfdom, according to which the majority of peas-
ants could not change residence without their overlord’s permission, largely
made even travel to the capitals impossible for most subjects of the tsar.
The emancipation of the serfs in 1861 raised the hope that restrictions on
peasant movements to the cities would be lifted, although this was not a prom-
ise on which the reform followed through quickly. Initially, the freed serfs were
still tied to their land by crippling redemption payments and collective respon-
sibility to the mir or village commune. However, the increased pull of job op-
portunities in rapidly industrializing Russian cities, not least of which were
Moscow and St. Petersburg, encouraged an upsurge in temporary labour mi-
gration to the cities in the 1880s and ‘90s. In the mid-1890s, a series of reforms
changed passport laws, easing travel restrictions and allowing individuals to
move within the county (uezd) in which they lived without special permission
for up to six months.84 Finally, in 1906, the land reforms of Stolypin gave rural
dwellers the right to change their places of residence.85 By 1915, Moscow and
St. Petersburg provinces were the two most urbanized in the country, with 75
per cent of St. Petersburg province’s population living in cities, and 53 per cent
of Moscow province’s population being city-dwellers.86
81
82
83
84
85
86
81 Boris Nikolaeivich Mironov, Russkii gorod v 1790–1860 gody: Demograficheskoe, sotsial’noe i
ekonomicheskoe razvitie (Leningrad, 1990), pp. 16–17.
82 Mironov, Russkii Gorod.
83 Mervyn Matthews, The Passport Society: Controlling Movement in Russia and the ussr
(Boulder, 1993), p. 6.
84 Ibid., p. 11.
85 On the Stolypin reforms, see Abraham Ascher, P.A. Stolypin: The Search for Stability in Late
Imperial Russia (Stanford, 2001).
86 Diane Koenker, “Urbanization and De-urbanization in the Russian Revolution and Civil
War”, The Journal of Modern History, 57 (1985), pp. 424–450, 429.
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Prostitution in Moscow and St. Petersburg, Russia 159
The high point of Russian urbanization and industrialization would come,
however, in the Soviet period, particularly during the great transformation
of Stalinism. Soviet authorities, like their imperial predecessors, were very
concerned with preventing unauthorized movement to the cities. However,
particularly after the collectivization of agriculture and the disenfranchisement
of hundreds of thousands of peasant landowners (known as kulaks) in the late
1920s and early ‘30s, there seemed little that Soviet authorities could do to stem
the movement of millions of Soviet citizens to urban areas in search of work.
Unsurprisingly, these social phenomena played an enormous role in struc-
turing the growth, geography, and practices of prostitution in Moscow and
St. Petersburg. As Barbara Alpern Engel has argued, the years between serf
emancipation and the Russian revolution saw an unprecedented number of un-
attached women travel from the village to the city. Despite rapidly growing in-
dustry, the demand for jobs far outstripped the supply, and in need of cash many
women turned to casual or even registered prostitution, or a more temporary ex-
change of sexual services for small amounts of money, food, or warm clothing.87
Carried out in 1889, at the crest of a wave of migration to the cities that
would continue almost unabated for the next five decades, Dubrovskii’s cen-
sus of Russia’s prostitutes provides invaluable information about the effects of
industrialization and urbanization on sex work in Moscow and St. Petersburg.
His information shows that, for example, of 1,068 prostitutes registered in Mos-
cow in 1889, only 293 were born in Moscow guberniia, and 730 were from other
guberniia within Russia, while 45 were not Russian subjects.88 In St. Peters-
burg, the difference was less striking if nonetheless significant; of 2,231 regis-
tered prostitutes in the city, 939 came from St. Petersburg province, 1,220 came
from other provinces, and seventy-two were from outside the empire.89 As we
can see from this information, peasant women were moving to the major cities
and working as prostitutes not only from the rural areas surrounding Moscow
and St. Petersburg, but also from much farther afield. This was an important
development particularly when we bear in mind the great distances that had
to be travelled between provinces in the vast Russian Empire.
Proletarianization and Pauperization
As noted above, poverty brought on by unemployment and a sundering of ties
to traditional networks of support led many women to prostitution in the late
87
88
89
87 Barbara Alpern Engel, Between the Fields and the City: Women, Work and Family, 1861–1914
(Cambridge, 1996), p. 166.
88 Dubrovskii, Statistika, pp. 10–11.
89 Ibid., pp. 16–17.
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160 Hetherington
imperial period. A number of early twentieth-century commentators attrib-
uted the apparent surge in prostitution to the comparatively impoverished
position of female workers. The secretary of a Moscow printer’s union, Pavel
Pavlov, told the First All-Russian Congress for the Struggle against the Trade in
Women that women in the printing industry earned 40 per cent of the salaries
of their male counterparts, a figure that was not unusual in other industries
such as the important garment industry in the Moscow region.90
Arguably, the influence of pauperization and proletarianization on the sex-
ual economy was even greater in the early Soviet period, when the enormous
upheavals of revolution, civil war, collectivization, and rapid industrialization
produced an underclass of disenfranchised women who sold sex in order to
survive. At first, during and immediately after the Civil War, many women (and
men) left the cities, often starving for want of supplies cut off by war, and re-
turned to the land where they could eke out a living. Thus for example, the pop-
ulation of St. Petersburg fell from 2.5 million in 1917 to only 700,000 in 1920.91
However, particularly with the beginning of collectivization and the first Five
Year Plan in 1928, this situation was entirely reversed. The twin processes of
collectivization of agriculture and “de-kulakization” (the confiscation of the
land of “kulaks”) left millions of people without the ability to sustain them-
selves on the land, and they flooded the cities. This in turn led to a major hous-
ing crisis, as the housing in both Moscow and St. Petersburg was nowhere near
sufficient for the number of people trying to live in the cities.92 Although we
do not have statistics on the residences or social profiles of prostitutes working
in Moscow and St. Petersburg in the 1930s until the ‘80s, we can extrapolate
from the historical evidence of the extreme social dislocation, unemployment,
and homelessness of the Stalin years that the need to sell sex for money may
have increased in this period. Further, some historians have suggested that the
social changes of the Stalin period changed the urban geography of prostitu-
tion in the cities, as “the housing shortage and the decline in private control
over sheltered urban spaces appeared to drive illicit heterosexual sex into the
streets, railway stations and carriages, restaurants, bathhouses and taxicabs.”93
In the post-Soviet period, high rates of unemployment for women is a fre-
quently cited factor for a perceived growth in sex work in both Moscow and
90
91
92
93
90 Bernstein, Sonia’s Daughters, p. 113.
91 Koenker, “Urbanization and Deurbanization”, p. 424. Moscow’s population also fell, al-
though not as dramatically, from 1,533,000 in 1910 to 1,028,000 in 1920.
92 Sheila Fitzpatrick, Everyday Stalinism: Ordinary Life in Extraordinary Times (New York,
1999), pp. 46–53.
93 Healey, Homosexual Desire in Revolutionary Russia, p. 54.
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Prostitution in Moscow and St. Petersburg, Russia 161
St. Petersburg. As in the imperial and Soviet periods, unemployment and fe-
male poverty in the cities are strongly linked to migration, both from less eco-
nomically developed areas in Russia and from former Soviet countries. A 2005
study of prostitution in Moscow found that almost all sex workers in the city
were not legal residents and therefore had very few opportunities to find other
employment or gain access to government services, a fact that heavily influ-
enced their likelihood to go into sex work.94
War
In Russia, as in many other European states, the primary motivation for the
regulation of prostitution between 1843 and 1917, and for much consternation
and marginalization of it in other periods, was fear that diseased prostitutes
would negatively impact the prowess of the state’s military. It is no surprise
that some of the first secular laws criminalizing prostitution in Russia were
Peter the Great’s “Military Articles”, which directly linked their proscriptions
on “whoring” to protection of Peter’s beloved army. In the nineteenth century,
many commentators worried that regulation of prostitution in urban centres,
begun in 1843, was failing to properly protect itinerant soldiers, and ad hoc
regulation was common in barrack towns and camps. According to local lore,
the famous General Skobelev who led the Russians in the conquest of Turkes-
tan created the first regimental brothels in Russia in the mid-nineteenth cen-
tury, and the well-respected venerologist Veniamin Tarnovskii recommended
this as an approach for all military units in the 1880s.95 While mobile military
brothels were never instituted as official policy, barrack towns usually regu-
lated prostitution with a combination of civilian medical police committees
(authorized by the Ministry of Internal Affairs) and military medics. Reflect-
ing on the evolution of regulation in the Empire, an early twentieth-century
observer credited the high concentration of local Medical-Police Committees
on the western border to the similarly high concentration of military barracks
on this heavily guarded frontier with the rest of Europe.96
A key example of the desire to regulate prostitution more heavily around
military barracks, as well as the role of the military in encouraging sexual
94
95
96
94 Julie A. Stachowiak et al., “Health Risks and Power among Female Sex Workers in Mos-
cow”, siecus Report, 33 (2005), pp. 18–29, 23.
95 Iliukhov, Prostitutsiia, p. 310.
96 M.M. Borovitinov, speaking at the First All-Russian Congress on the Struggle Against the
Trade in Women; see Trudy pervogo vserossiiskogo s”ezda po bor’be s torgom zhenshchina-
mi i ego prichinami, proiskhodivshego v S-Peterburge s 21 po 25 aprelia 1910 goda (St. Peters-
burg, 1912), p. 343.
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162 Hetherington
commerce in its environs, is the case of Kronstadt. Founded in 1703, the same
year as Petersburg itself, Kronstadt was entirely devoted to the maintenance of
the navy. According to Dubrovskii’s 1889 census, there were 219 registered pros-
titutes in Kronstadt, of whom 103 worked in brothels and 116 were street pros-
titutes.97 This was in a period in which the overall population of Kronstadt was
around 59,000, 70 per cent of which was male and only 30 per cent female.98
Registered prostitutes made up 0.4 per cent of the city’s population, and 1.19
per cent of its overall female population. This can be compared with Moscow,
which had a population of around 980,000 in this period, and where the 1,068
registered prostitutes in 1889 thus made up 0.1 per cent of the overall urban
population, and just 0.2 per cent of the overall female population.99
Despite the heavy emphasis on registration around military barracks (and
especially in times of war), nineteenth-century commentators noted the con-
tinued high rates of venereal diseases in the armed forces, a factor driving calls
for even greater surveillance of women in military areas. In 1872, syphilis was
the second most common illness in the army, with around 5 per cent of sol-
diers suffering from it, constituting 26.7 per cent of all cases of disease in the
forces.100 The effect of army service on the rates of syphilis could also be seen
in the fact that the rates of venereal diseases among recruits on first joining
the army were comparatively low; in 1879 just 0.63 per cent of recruits had
any form of sexually transmitted disease (including syphilis, gonorrhoea, and
cancroids).101
In the Soviet period, protection of the army from venereal diseases contin-
ued to be a major concern. In the early years of the Russian Civil War, from
1919–1920, venereal diseases were a major cause of casualties, ranking along-
side typhus and smallpox as the most deadly diseases on the front.102 It was
in part for this reason that Soviet bureaucrats in the Commissariat of Health
decided to set up prophylactoria for the treatment of venereal diseases in
the 1920s, a system that then continued throughout the twentieth century,
including during World War ii. The motivations behind the prophylactoria
were twofold: on the one hand, to protect civilians and military officers from
97
98
99
100
101
102
97 Dubrovskii, Statistika, Part ii, pp. 16–17.
98 This information is based on the slightly later All-Russian Census of 1897. Pervaia vseobsh-
chaia perepis’ naseleniia Rossiiskoi Imperii 1897 (St. Petersburg, 1897), p. 16.
99 Dubrovskii, Statistika, Part ii, pp. 10–11.
100 Iliukhov, Prostitutsiia, p. 306.
101 Ibid., p. 307.
102 Roger R. Reese, The Soviet Military Experience: A History of the Soviet Army, 1917–1991 (Lon-
don, 2002), p. 14.
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Prostitution in Moscow and St. Petersburg, Russia 163
contagion by informing them about appropriate ways to guard against venere-
al diseases, and on the other to treat and “re-educate” prostitutes as a measure
to further insulate the population and especially the army against disease.103
The fundamental importance of a strong and healthy army in the u.s.s.r., par-
ticularly during the Cold War, meant that the prophylactoria continued to play
an important role well into the postwar era.
Prostitute/Employer/Client Relationships
Much of the historical data we have on prostitution in Moscow and St. Peters-
burg suggests that pimps and madams were a common and central part of the
organization of sex work. Under regulation, brothels were legal if registered,
and it was also legal to be a “madam” or soderzhatel’nitsa, whose job it was to
manage the brothel and ensure proper adherence with the public health poli-
cies governing regulated prostitution. Madams had to be women (thus suppos-
edly protecting prostitutes from exploitation by men) and different regulations
across the nineteenth century stipulated minimum ages for madams, which
were generally above 35.104 Pimping, however, was never legal. Nonetheless,
anecdotal evidence suggests it was common. Nineteenth-century descriptions
of the Khitrov Market in Moscow, a notorious slum area and centre of the city’s
criminal underworld, abound with descriptions of the pimps (known as “cats”
or “koty”) who supposedly ran the local sex trade, filling the taverns and door-
ways of the least salubrious corners of town.105
In the Soviet period, both pimping and brothel-keeping were crimes. The
1922 Criminal Code listed pimping (or “bringing people together for prostitu-
tion”) a crime under Article 171, and brothel-keeping a crime under Article 172.
Both crimes carried sentences of up to three years’ imprisonment.106 The pros-
ecution of pimping and brothel-keeping was meant to ensure the eradication
of prostitution without the persecution of prostitutes themselves, who were
103
104
105
106
103 On the Soviet prophylactoria, as both labour colony (for former prostitutes) and venereal
dispensary, see Frances Bernstein, “Prostitutes and Proletarians: The Soviet Labor Colony
as Revolutionary Laboratory”, in William Husband (ed.), The Human Tradition in Modern
Russia (Lanham, 2000), pp. 113–128.
104 Joseph Bradley, Muzhik and Muscovite: Urbanization in Late Imperial Russia (Berkeley,
1985), pp. 279–281.
105 Ibid.
106 Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, The Criminal Code of the Russian Soviet Fed-
erative Socialist Republic (London, 1922), p. 41.
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164 Hetherington
assumed to have been economically coerced into their positions. However, the
notion, common from the mid-1930s, that any sign of prostitution was a hold-
over from supposedly liquidated capitalism, made prostitutes victims of ad-
ministrative sanctions or criminal sanctions on vagrancy or begging (as per, for
example, the 1970 Criminal Code which outlawed “Malicious Refusal to Carry
Out a Decision to Take a Job”).107
Studies suggest that a large number of contemporary prostitutes in Moscow
and St. Petersburg work under pimps. Engaging in prostitution is not prohib-
ited by the Russian Criminal Code, but it continues to be closely linked to other
criminal activities (including drug trafficking). Estimates suggest that up to 80
per cent of Moscow’s prostitutes, for example, are street prostitutes, and many
have close links to pimps who provide some measure of protection but also
garnish a large amount of the women’s earnings.108
Traces of Defiance
There is not a strong tradition of sex work collectives or unionization in either
Moscow or St. Petersburg. In the late imperial period, there were few instances
in the official record in which prostitutes, so long an object of analysis for bu-
reaucrats, police, philanthropists, and social commentators, spoke back. One
that stands out, however, occurred in 1910 when a group of sixty-three prosti-
tutes signed a petition that they then sent to the First All-Russian Congress on
the Struggle against the Trade in Women in St. Petersburg. The Russian Society
for the Defense of Women had organized the Congress and, although it had
invited a broad range of social activists involved in questions about prostitu-
tion (medical society representatives, government bureaucrats, university pro-
fessors, feminists, temperance organizations, and delegates from district and
municipal councils), it had not invited any actual sex workers.109 In response,
the group of sixty-three prostitutes wrote a petition, asking that the delegates
at the congress consider the issue they thought most pertinent and pressing
for sex workers themselves; namely, the lack of any health checks on men who
were the clients of prostitutes. As the women pointed out, the entire burden
of protection against venereal diseases was laid on the women themselves,
107
108
109
107 John Quigley, “The Dilemmas of Prostitution Law Reform: Lessons from the Soviet Russia
Experience”, American Criminal Law Review, 29 (1991–1992), pp. 1197–1234, 1222.
108 Aral, “The Social Organization”, p. 40.
109 Robin Bisha, Jehanne M. Gheith, Chistin C. Holden, and William G. Wagner, Russian
Women, 1698–1917: Experience and Expression, an Anthology of Sources (Bloomington,
2002), pp. 138–139.
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Prostitution in Moscow and St. Petersburg, Russia 165
and their own health was constantly placed at risk.110 As this petition demon-
strates, sex workers in the period were aware of many of the public health and
regulatory debates surrounding their profession, and were not afraid to voice
their own position on the matter (albeit rarely).
In contemporary Russia, efforts to unionize have generally faced tough op-
position by the government and legal authorities. Organizations such as the
St. Petersburg group Silver Rose (Serebrianaia Roza) do exist, which seeks to
(according to their website) “promote the development of state policy with
regards to sex workers (seks rabotniki) on the basis of humanity, tolerance, the
defence of health, dignity and human rights.”111 However, such organizations
are not officially recognized by the state. As recently as May 2013, Silver Rose
made a request to register with the Ministry of Justice as an official ngo, and
was denied on the basis that “sex worker” is not a recognized profession.112 This
decision is currently under appeal.
Prostitutes’ Culture
Much of our image of prostitute culture comes from the records of brothel
prostitutes from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as they are much
more present in the historical record than either the criminalized women who
preceded them or the street prostitutes of their own time. However, by ex-
trapolating from this information we can make inferences about earlier or less
legible sex workers as well. For example, we know from the data cited above as
well as the structuring factor of urbanization that most prostitutes were new
arrivals to St. Petersburg and Moscow, and they were peasant migrants from
villages. Accordingly, many of the rituals associated with brothel life came
from peasant folklore. For example, prostitutes and madams were said to invite
110
111
112
110 See “Prostitutes’ Petition”, translated by Laurie Bernstein, in Ibid., pp. 139–140.
111 As per the “O nas” section of Silver Rose’s official website; available at: http://www.silver
-rose.org; last accessed 10 July 2017.
112 The ongoing attempts to appeal this decision are recorded in the “Forum” of the web-
site of the organization Silver Rose; available at: http://www.silver-rose.org/?p=bbs&id=
1&cmd=read&ms=642&page=1; last accessed 10 July 2017. Silver Rose’s efforts have also
been reported in tabloid newspapers such as Komsomolskaia Pravda and the website
Gazeta.ru; see for example “Prostitutki khotiat svoi profsoiuz, a ikh pugaiut politsiei”,
Komsomolskaia Pravda, 9 June 2013; available at: http://spb.kp.ru/daily/26089/2990464/;
last accessed 10 July 2017; “Net takoi professii: Sud otkazal prostitutkam v prave na
professional’nye ob’edineniia i zashchitu”, Gazeta.ru, available at: http://www.gazeta.ru/
social/2013/12/24/5818081.shtml; last accessed 10 July 2017.
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166 Hetherington
seers and wise women to eject bad spirits from their establishments in order to
attract more (and wealthier) clients.113
Commentators in the nineteenth century also claimed to perceive a strong
tendency among brothel prostitutes to form same-sex relationships within the
brothel. While sociologists and venerologists in Western Europe less common-
ly observed this, in Russia it appeared in the writings of physician Boris Ben-
tovin and gynaecologist Ippolit Tarnovskii.114 As Laura Engelstein has argued,
in the hands of a sympathetic observer such as Tarnovskii, evidence of lesbian-
ism in brothels could be used to challenge the supposed pathology of lesbian
sex. Tarnovskii believed that it demonstrated disgust with men on the part of
prostitutes, motivated by their experience of exploitation.115 The perception of
lesbianism as particularly common among brothel prostitutes increased after
1905, when the image of the prostitute as victim was giving way to the notion
of the prostitute as “sexually deviant”.116 Lesbianism among prostitutes also
emerged as a popular motif in literary treatments of prostitution in Russia, as
evidenced by Aleksandr Kuprin’s infamous 1915 novel about prostitution in an
(unnamed) Russian port city, Iama (The Pit), and Sholem Asch’s classic Yiddish
play God of Vengeance about a sexual relationship between the daughter of a
pimp and one of his prostitutes in the Pale of Settlement.117
Society and Prostitutes
As noted above, prostitution went through a variety of legal frameworks in
Moscow and St. Petersburg from 1600 to the present day. Throughout this
period, but especially from 1843 with the dawn of regulation and continuing
through the Soviet period (despite official denials that prostitution existed),
the Russian state showed an abiding interest in careful control of commer-
cial sex. In particular, the motivation for this attention was the protection of
the military from venereal diseases, but also at times (especially in the Soviet
113
114
115
116
117
113 Bernstein, Sonia’s Daughters, p. 167.
114 Ibid., pp. 172–173; Laura Engelstein, “Lesbian Vignettes: A Russian Triptych from the 1890s”,
Signs, 15 (1990), pp. 813–831.
115 Ibid., p. 816.
116 See Healey, Homosexual Desire in Revolutionary Russia, pp. 51–59.
117 Alexandre Kuprin, Yama: The Pit: A Novel of Prostitution (trans. Bernard Guilbert Guer-
ney) (Honolulu, 2001); Sholem Asch, God of Vengeance (trans. Caraid O’Brien) (New York,
2000).
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Prostitution in Moscow and St. Petersburg, Russia 167
period) the desire to demonstrate an “emancipated” female populace and also
to cleanse society of apparent sexual “perversions”.118
Operating symbiotically with this state attention to commercial sex was
a deep concern on the part of non-state actors, particularly the Church and,
increasingly throughout the nineteenth century, non-governmental social
welfare groups. To take first the case of the Church, as noted above prostitu-
tion was initially in the seventeenth century viewed more as a religious/moral
crime than a crime against secular law. The Russian Orthodox Church, the of-
ficial church of the empire starting with the creation of the Holy Synod by
Peter the Great in 1721, took a generally dim view of any form of adultery or sex
outside of marriage, which included commercial sex. In the early nineteenth
century, people affiliated with both Russian Orthodox and Lutheran churches
were among the first to set up shelters and reformatories for prostitutes in
St. Petersburg, ushering in a growing movement to provide both charity and
moral uplift for women who would otherwise be prostitutes.119 This process
preceded the regulation of prostitution in 1843 (the first “Magdalene House” to
“promote the return of repentant public women to the path of honest labour”
was set up in St. Petersburg by two Lutheran women in 1833).120 Magdalene
Houses and other philanthropic institutions designed to “save” fallen women
proliferated in the nineteenth century, involving not only the church but also
many aristocratic and medical activists.121
By the late nineteenth century, the philanthropic desire to save fallen women
had begun to dovetail with discussions of the “woman question” which called
for more civil rights for women to make them equal with men. This fostered
the formation of a number of non-governmental associations that focused on
the question of prostitution, the most prominent of which was the Russian So-
ciety for the Defense of Women (Rossiiskoe Obshchestvo Zashchity Zhenshchin
or ROZZh) founded in 1899.122 Ostensibly most concerned with campaigning
for an end to the international traffic in women (then emerging as a distinct
focus for social activists in Russia), ROZZh also made it a goal to rescue pros-
titutes in Russia from sex work and to found homes for indigent and illiterate
118
119
120
121
122
118 See the section under “Definitions” above for a more precise investigation of the develop-
ment of the laws and regulations surrounding prostitution.
119 Marianna G. Murav’eva, “Gosudarstvennoe Prizrenie Prostitutsii v Predrevoliutsionnom
Peterburge”, Zhurnal Issledovanii Sotsial’noi Politiki, 3 (2005), pp. 163–186.
120 Bernstein, Sonia’s Daughters, p. 192.
121 Murav’eva, “Gosudarstvennoe prizrenie”, pp. 163–186.
122 Nadezhda K. Martyenko, Rossiiskoe Obshchestvo Zashchity Zhenshchin v Bor’be s Prosti-
tutsiei (1900–1915 gg) (Togliatti, 2006).
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168 Hetherington
girls to prevent their descent into prostitution. In 1910 it helped convene the
first All-Russian Congress on the Struggle against the Traffic in Women, which
attracted over 700 participants and resulted in the publication of a two-volume
collection of conference proceedings examining in depth the social problems
surrounding prostitution in Russia.123
Women working as prostitutes in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century
Russia did not, however, only receive pity. They were also the subject of consid-
erable censure and marginalization in a society that was highly disapproving
of commercial sex. According to the official Ministry of Internal Affairs regula-
tions on registered brothels, no brothels could be within a certain distance of
a school, a church, or heavily residential areas (the exact distance stipulated
waxed and waned over the course of the nineteenth century). The archival re-
cords of the St. Petersburg and Moscow Medical-Police Committees are full
of petitions from concerned residents who were horrified at the prospect of
a brothel in the vicinity of their homes and who insisted that the brothel in
question contravened the required distance from a church or school (gen-
erally it didn’t, but the local Committees often caved to the concerns of the
residents).124 Russian literature from the period generally presented a differ-
ent, less accusatory attitude towards prostitution, one that reflected the con-
cerns of engaged intelligentsia with the social problems of the day and saw
prostitutes as “victims of the social temperament” rather than perpetrators of
moral crimes. This can be seen most famously in the case of the saintly Sonia
Marmeladova in Crime and Punishment, but also in characters such as Katiu-
sha Maslova, the exploited former-maid-turned-prostitute in Tolstoy’s Resur-
rection, or the characters in Gorky’s 1902 play The Lower Depths.125
In the early Soviet period, this image of the prostitute as a victim was
only strengthened, although now the primary victimizer was not a nefarious
criminal or pimp, but capitalism itself which drove women into poverty and
thus forced them to sell sex for a living. This interpretation of the causes of
123
124
125
123 For the proceedings of the conference see Trudy Pervago Vserossiiskago S”ezda po bor’be s
torgovlei zhenshchinami i ego prichinami (St. Petersburg, 1911–1912).
124 See for example garf, f. 102, opis’ 47, Deloproizvodstvo 2, d. 297, “O dopushchenii domov
terpimosti na rasstoianii blizhe 150 sazhen ot nachal’nykh gorodskikh lits”, 1890; garf, f.
102, Opis’ 26, Deloporizvodstvo 2, d. 271, “O perenose domov terpimosti raspolozhennykh
po Podolskoi i Peterburgskoi ulitsam goroda Dvinska”, 1899.
125 Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment (New York, 1992) (first published in Russian
in 1866); Leo Tolstoy, Resurrection (Oxford, 2009) (first published in Russian in 1899);
Maksim Gorky, The Lower Depths and Other Plays (New York, 1978) (first performed in
Moscow in 1902).
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Prostitution in Moscow and St. Petersburg, Russia 169
prostitution was indeed in accordance with much of the social data from the
nineteenth century (as evidenced by the discussions above of the prevalence
of former domestic servants and illiterate women among the ranks of prosti-
tutes). However, it also led to the corollary claim that with the transition from
capitalism to communism, prostitution would per force disappear. As a result
of this ideological shift, by the late 1920s prostitutes began to be seen not so
much as victims of fortune but as obnoxious evidence of the failure of Soviet
society to remake economic relations and build real existing socialism.126
In the 1980s, under the influence of perestroika and glasnost’, Soviet com-
mentators admitted what had gone unmentioned since the 1930s: prostitution
continued to exist in the Soviet Union. Its continuation proved an analytic
problem, however: in a society purported to have shed the vestiges of capi-
talism, the old explanation of prostitution as a result of economic inequality
raised thorny questions. As historian Elizabeth Waters noted, most commenta-
tors solved this by reworking the classic Soviet understanding of prostitution
as an economic problem and labelling it a moral failing instead; specifically, a
moral failing on the part of the prostitutes themselves. This shift set the scene
for the explicit condemnation of prostitution as an administrative offence dur-
ing Gorbachev’s glasnost’ regeneration campaigns.127
Conclusion
An examination of the history of prostitution in Russia demonstrates the deep
ahistoricity of the cultural assumptions that link the spread of prostitution
(and especially migrant prostitution) with the fall of the Soviet Union. The
lack of historical research on commercial sex in the Soviet period in particular,
when prostitution was deemed to have been eradicated (but archival glimpses
suggest otherwise), arguably contributes to the contemporary wilful blindness
towards prostitution as a part of the everyday fabric of Russian life. Such at-
titudes are not new. As this survey demonstrates, the shifting Russian defini-
tions of and approaches to prostitution in both religious and secular contexts
have generally shared one abiding characteristic: an insistence that the sale of
sex is something deviant that needed to either be tightly regulated or entirely
prohibited. Despite their loudly proclaimed plan to abolish punitive sanctions
on women who sold sex, to be replaced by economic and social initiatives that
126
127
126 Frances Bernstein, The Dictatorship of Sex, pp. 185–190.
127 Waters, “Perestroika and Prostitution”, pp. 4, 13.
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170 Hetherington
would remove the need to do so, successive Soviet governments subjected sus-
pected prostitutes to state power as violent as the imperial police, if not more
so. From what little we know about prostitution in contemporary Russia, there
is very little state or social protection for women working in the sex industry to-
day, as evidenced by the refusal of state authorities to allow for official recogni-
tion of sex workers’ ngos or unions. Ambivalence towards commercial sex in
Russia continues, even as the figure of the sex worker with a heart of gold, from
Sonia Marmeladova to the Interdevochka, remains one of the most famous and
abiding tropes in Russian literature and culture.
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chapter 7
The Paradoxes and Contradictions of
Prostitution in Paris
Susan P. Conner
Overview and Sources
Paris, France changed dramatically between the seventeenth century and the
beginning of the twenty-first century. As the population of Paris increased
from nearly 250,000 residents in 1600 to a current population of approximately
2.2 million in the city centre,1 the city was redefined by its revolutions, sub-
sequent industrialization and immigration, and wars. During those centuries,
prostitution was redefined as well. Originally prostitution was a moral offense
and an issue of public order. Individual prostitutes, who were defined collec-
tively under the law, were typically poor, young women from the provinces.2
They were dealt with in three ways: the judicial system if they committed other
more serious infractions, prison hospitals if they were diseased, or the police in
an effort to enforce order.
* I would like to thank Central Michigan University for several Research and Creative En-
deavors Grants in support of this project, the neh for a Travel to Collections Grant, and col-
leagues who have given critiques on aspects of this research including Dena Goodman, Isser
Wolloch, Alan Williams, Linda Merians, Tim Shaffer, and Rosamond Hooper-Hamersley. Por-
tions of this research have been published as “The Pox in Eighteenth-Century France”, in
Linda Merians (ed.), The Secret Malady: Venereal Disease in Eighteenth-Century England and
France (Lexington, ky, 1996), pp. 15–33; “Public Women and Public Virtue: Prostitution in
Revolutionary Paris”, Eighteenth Century Studies, 28 (1994–1995), pp. 221–240; “Politics, Pros-
titution and the Pox in Revolutionary Paris, 1789–1799”, Journal of Social History, 22 (1989),
pp. 713–734; and “Prostitution and the Jacobin Agenda for Social Control”, Eighteenth-Century
Life, 12 (1988), pp. 42–51.
1 Initially the walled city of Paris was defined by its customs barriers. Today the city centre is
defined by its twenty arrondissements which include 2.2 million residents, and the metro-
politan area includes nearly 12 million inhabitants and casual residents. Without the customs
wall of the eighteenth century, there is little distinction between the city and the outskirts.
2 Court records confirm this demographic, although period writers often described prostitutes
as lazy, slothful do-nothings who were courting luxury.
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172 Conner
In the seventeenth century, the system of dealing with prostitution in Paris
changed from sporadic toleration briefly to confinement. In the eighteenth
century, toleration and social control characterized governmental practices.
At the beginning of the nineteenth century, houses of prostitution or brothels
(lupanars, maisons closes, maisons de tolérance, and bordels) were licensed,
and the “French System” was inaugurated. As a regulationist system, it also al-
lowed for toleration because prostitution remained untouched by governmen-
tal legislation. Functionally, the “French System” protected those prostitutes
whom it enclosed while expanding police surveillance. Toleration continued
to be a hallmark of the first half of the twentieth century, in spite of aboli-
tionist assaults on the system. Even when the regulated houses of prostitution
were closed after World War ii, prostitution per se was unaffected. This posi-
tion was consistent with how the French have historically defined prostitution
in classical terms, i.e., prostitution as a “sewer in the palace” or an unavoidable
necessity.
In 1960, the French adopted the un “Convention for the Suppression of the
Traffic in Persons and the Exploitation of the Prostitution of Others” (1949),
which officially placed France among abolitionist countries.3 Yet, the French
also clarified their position; they would continue to respect the liberty of an in-
dividual to be a prostitute. There was little debate until the 1990s, so the police
continued their surveillance and monitoring of prostitutes. Toleration, for all
intents and purposes, continued. Only very recently has a new, systematic re-
evaluation of prostitution taken place. Fundamentally this is because Paris has
changed dramatically. There are far more defined types of sex work than even
a half century ago, and morality is not an unimportant element in the debates.
In Paris today, prostitution is not viewed as a singular type of female solicit-
ing. There are multiple prostitutions, each with its own character, and they are
viewed differently by those in authority. In fact, the most recent French na-
tional legislation (the Sarkozy Law) placed sex workers, the majority of whom
are immigrants, under the legal umbrella of a “danger to domestic security”.4
As of 2013, with a change in the government, the debate on prostitution was
3 “Circulaire du 25 novembre 1960 à la répression du proxénétisme”, available at: http://www
.legifrance.gouv.fr/jopdf/common/jo_pdf.jsp?numJO=0&dateJO=19601127&numTexte=1060
9&pageDebut=10609&pageFin; last accessed 7 July 2017.
4 “Loi n° 2003–239 du 18 Mars 2003 dite la Loi Sarkozy ii pour la sécurité intérieure”, available
at: http://www.legifrance.gouv.fr/affichTexte.do;jsessionid=83ED992BAE071FD7FA1CF83853
CFF981.tpdjo10v_3?cidTexte=LEGITEXT000005634107&dateTexte=20120426; last accessed 7
July 2017. See also Marie Elisabeth Handman and Janine Mossuz-Lavau (eds), La prostitution
à Paris (Paris, 2005).
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The Paradoxes and Contradictions of Prostitution in Paris 173
renewed, and on 4 December, the National Assembly (the lower house of the
French Parliament) overwhelmingly passed a law to criminalize clients while
reversing the Sarkozy Law and decriminalizing the outward manifestations of
prostitution. When the French Senate received the bill for review and action,
it was far less enthusiastic and referred the legislation to a Select Committee
which rejected the stringent fines on customers, saying that prostitution would
be driven underground, tying it more directly to human trafficking and endan-
gering prostitutes further.5 Since then, the government has taken new action,
rejecting the criminalization of clients and reinstating the crime of passive
solicitation against prostitutes. One opponent of the 2015 Senate measure re-
marked, “Prostitutes are always the offenders; the client is always king.”6
In this urban overview of prostitution in Paris, I have employed a number of
studies defining prostitution, outlining its context, and delineating prostitutes’
social profiles. I have also attempted to provide evidence about governmental
and church responses to the work done by prostitutes in Paris, along with the
challenging issues of migration, industrialization, late marriage, the impacts of
war, and ultimately the market for sex. There are clear changes in policy during
this four-century period, particularly the explicit gender and class differentia-
tions that were firmly established in the nineteenth century.7 I will also address
the agency of prostitutes themselves as they have, over time, exhibited differ-
ent responses to their employment and their condition.
In France, commercial sexuality has most often been viewed in terms of its
relationship with the authorities. Therefore, it is important to note that the le-
gal, juridical, and administrative approaches to prostitution often obscure the
ways prostitutes operated. Prostitutes had their own networks, whether they
were members of a family in pre-industrial France, supporting the family, or
separated from it. Later, in post-revolutionary France, industrialization alone
did not set the context for prostitution; nor were prostitutes always voiceless
as moral crusaders have typically characterized them. Their relationship to the
French state and to bourgeois society was much more complex. Finally, it is
5 France 24 coverage of the National Assembly, available at: http://www.france24.com/en/
20131204-french-assembly-parliament-votes-fine-pay-sex-clients-prostitution/; last accessed
11 March 2016. See also Gert Vermeulen and Nina Peršak, Prostitution: From Discourse to De-
scription, from Moralization to Normalization (Antwerp, 2014), p. 200. For additional cover-
age, see “Congratulations to Sex Workers in France”, available at: http://prostitutescollective
.net/2014/07/23/congratulations-sex-workers-france/; last accessed 7 July 2017.
6 “Le Sénat pénalise les prostituées mais pas leur clients”, Le Monde.fr Société, 30 March 2015,
available at: http://www.lemonde.fr/societe/article/2015/03/30/prostitution-le-senat-retablit
-le-delit-de-racolage_4606124_3224.html; last accessed 7 July 2017.
7 See especially Jill Harsin, Policing Prostitution in Nineteenth-Century Paris (Princeton, 1985).
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174 Conner
true that police, court, and prison dossiers reflect the words of the bureau-
crats who recorded them; but they also contain the words of their subjects, and
those truths and fictions can be ferreted out.8
I have based this study of prostitution in Paris on the following types of
sources: royal decrees, administrative and police circulars, and national laws;
case studies (also collected as aggregate data) based on the records of tribu-
nals such as the Châtelet and transcripts of the Correctional Police; prison
ledgers such as those of the Salpêtrière and Saint Martin, as well as records of
police clerks of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; scientific and medical
treatises and studies on venereal diseases; the work of moral crusaders and
crusaders for individual liberty; and the words of sex labourers themselves, as
they have been collected.9
Finally, it should be noted that Paris is an interesting case study because
of its historic paradox. During the Revolution of 1789, individual liberty was
enshrined in the French pantheon of virtues (although large segments of the
population, including women, were excluded at that time) while, at the same
8 See the approach taken by Natalie Davis in Fictions in the Archives: Pardon Tales and their
Tellers in Sixteenth Century France (Stanford, 1987).
9 The laws, decrees, and circulars through 1870 are itemized in a number of sources including
La prostitution à Paris et à Londres by C.J. Lecour (Paris, 1870) who was commissioner and
bureau chief at the Préfecture de Police. His work also includes descriptions of prostitutes,
statistics on those who were registered and those who were not, and additional statistics on
venereal diseases. Similarly, Handman and Mossuz-Lavau’s work (see note 4) defines each
type of prostitution in Paris in 2002–2004, with demographics and legal restrictions when
applicable. Other works dealing with the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic periods
use archival collections at the Archives de la Préfecture de Police [app], the Archives de
l’Assistance publique [aap], and the Archives nationales [an], as well as published works at
the app and the Bibliothèque nationale [bn]. Nineteenth-century studies rely heavily on the
collections of the Bibliothèque Marguerite Durand. Contemporary works concerning the lat-
ter nineteenth century include Emile Richard, La prostitution à Paris (Paris, 1890), Josephine
Butler, Personal Reminiscences of a Great Crusade (New York, 1896), Dr Oscar Commenge, La
prostitution clandestine à Paris (Paris, 1897), and Louis Fiaux, La police des moeurs devant la
commission extraparlementaire du régime des moeurs (Paris, 1907–12). Important secondary
sources include Philip Riley, A Lust for Virtue: Louis xiv’s Attack on Sin in Seventeenth-Century
France (Westport, 2001); Erica Marie Benabou, La prostitution et la police des moeurs au xviiie
siècle (Paris, 1987); Harsin, Policing Prostitution on the nineteenth century (see note 7) and
Alain Corbin, Women for Hire: Prostitution and Sexuality in France after 1850 (Cambridge, ma
1990) on the latter nineteenth century; and Mary Louise Roberts, What Soldiers Do: Sex and
the American gi in World War ii France (Chicago, 2013) and Lilian Mathieu, “The Emergence
and Uncertain Outcomes of Prostitutes’ Social Movements”, The European Journal of Women’s
Studies, 10 (2003), pp. 29–50, on aspects of the twentieth century.
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The Paradoxes and Contradictions of Prostitution in Paris 175
time and since then, there has been a continuing history of governmental reg-
ulation through which the public is deemed to need protection from disorder
and particularly from disease. Three questions should be kept in mind in this
regard. First, where does individual liberty end, including the right to use one’s
body as a means of labour? Second, where does governmental intervention for
the protection of others begin? Third, during these four centuries, how and
why did prostitutes navigate the spaces they inhabited or in which they found
themselves?
Defining Prostitution in Paris
The next paragraphs provide definitions of the terms associated with the prac-
tice of prostitution in Paris and its regulation, focusing in particular on four
words: prostitution, soliciting, pimping, and procuring. “Prostitution” has typi-
cally meant the provision of sexual services, later defined as the exchange of
sexual services for payment. While it has generally been seen as a female pro-
fession, prostitution has not historically been gendered; and in Paris in the late
twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, prostitution has taken many forms
among female, male, and transgendered practitioners.
“Soliciting”, the second term identified with prostitution, is the act of at-
tracting clients. While simple on face value, soliciting is strikingly complex
because of its variations. Overt solicitation or le racolage actif has always been
under legal sanction, whether in the army encampments of Louis xiv, under
the arcades of the Palais Royal, or along the rue Saint-Denis. Penalties for overt
solicitation were most often meted out by the police, and they varied dramati-
cally. Passive solicitation or le racolage passif is something quite different be-
cause it assumes that the prostitute makes no strikingly outward overtures to
the potential client. Yet, a slight glance, an uncategorized attitude, an inad-
vertent approach, or perceived provocative poses can all be deemed passive
solicitation by authorities. Codified most recently under the Sarkozy Law, such
actions were subject to police intervention.10 Historically, passive solicitation
was considered a corollary of prostitution so long as it was not scandalous; but
as of 2003, it was classed as criminal. Such remains the case today.
“Pimping”, the third term associated with prostitution, is carried out by a
pimp who serves as an agent for a prostitute, receiving a portion of the pros-
titute’s earnings. In return, the pimp provides physical protection, advertis-
ing, and/or a location for practise of the trade. Contrary to contemporary
10 See above, note 4.
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176 Conner
prostitution, during most of the pre-twentieth century Parisian brothels were
actually run by madams, the female equivalent of a pimp. “Procuring”, the
fourth term associated with prostitution, has been identified since the turn of
the twentieth century with international slave trafficking and human bondage.
Prior to that time, procurers were often synonymous with pimps and madams
who lured prostitutes into their brothels, promising them a better life than un-
protected street walkers. In the last several decades, procuring has taken on
a more sinister meaning because of organized crime which is identified with
cartels and mafia-type networks.
Another set of definitions is in order as well to set the stage for the history of
French prostitution. In France from the sixteenth century to the present, there
have been three governmental positions regarding the external manifestations
of prostitution: toleration, regulation, and abolition. The legal position called
“toleration” characterized most of the late mediaeval period, the early modern
period except for the reign of Louis xiv, and the Revolutionary years. Pros-
titutes were free to practise their trade unless they were engaged in another
proscribed activity or they engaged in notorious or scandalous behaviour. The
legal position known as “regulationism” was incorporated into French practice
and law by 1804. Under the system of regulation, the “French System” was es-
tablished to register and monitor prostitutes. The intent was to encourage pros-
titutes to practise their trade in houses of prostitution (maisons de tolérance or
maisons closes) that were under the surveillance of the state. Allegedly families
were protected in this way, innocent women could venture from their homes
without fear of being mistaken for prostitutes, and a healthy population was
assured because of the examinations and confinement of prostitutes for vene-
real diseases. Ultimately France became a model for other countries in dealing
with prostitution.
“Abolition” is the third position, and it is the most difficult to define. Two
contradictory meanings have been associated with abolitionism: (1) the elimi-
nation of regulationist laws including particularly brothel prostitution, while
allowing for the continued practice of prostitution, or (2) the eradication of
prostitution, particularly forced prostitution.11 The first meaning characterizes
some debates and actions that occurred in the twentieth century, while the
second meaning represents some of the current discourses.
11 Debates since the nineteenth century often have centred on whether any form of prosti-
tution is a choice. According to some arguments, it cannot be a choice because it is either
a form of sexual slavery to a procurer or pimp or a response to poverty and need.
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The Paradoxes and Contradictions of Prostitution in Paris 177
A Social and Labour History of Prostitution in Paris
Antecedents: Mediaeval Prostitution as a Function of Urban Life
Throughout most of the history of Paris, efforts to suppress prostitution have
been “few, short-lived and ineffective.”12 While this study of prostitution in
Paris officially begins in the seventeenth century, it is important to trace ante-
cedents to earlier times. Prostitution was a fact of urban life; prostitutes were
indeed sex labourers, and licensed brothels and bathhouses (public stews)
were ubiquitous during the Middle Ages. Common language differentiated the
types of prostitutes, e.g., public prostitutes in the brothels, street walkers, “easy
women” who might also be vagabonds, and women who practised clandestine-
ly.13 In Latin texts, prostitutes were called meretrices; in impolite French, putain
or whore.14 Ultimately, prostitution was restricted to an area that today corre-
sponds to portions of the 1st through 4th arrondissements on the Right Bank.
The area was a labyrinth of narrow streets with colourful and earthy names
that described the commerce that took place there: la rue du Poil-au-con, la
rue Tire-Vit, la rue Gratte-Cul, la rue Pute-y-Musse, and la rue Trousse-nonnain.15
As the fourteenth century dawned, Paris boasted 200,000 inhabitants,
making it the largest city in western Europe, and a reasonably loose code of
morality governed the court, the well-off, and even the poor. While not wide-
spread, there had been earlier church teachings that rendered judgement on
whether or not prostitutes’ earnings could be contributed to church coffers.
12 Jacques Rossiaud, Medieval Prostitution (New York, 1988), p. 9. The most notable attempts
to eradicate prostitution were made by Louis ix in 1254 to expel all “women of evil life”
from the kingdom of France and to confiscate their belongings. Two years later, Louis ix
demanded that they be expelled from the centre of the city, particularly from anywhere
near “holy places, such as churches and cemeteries.” Louis ix revised his position in 1269,
establishing extramural areas for the practice of prostitution. His son took a repressive
position regarding procurers (who were mostly female). Under the law they could be
burned alive, subjected to the pillory, scourged, or mutilated. See also Leah Otis, Pros-
titution in Medieval Society: The History of an Urban Institution in Languedoc (Chicago,
1985), p. 20, and William Sanger, The History of Prostitution: Its Extent, Causes, and Effects
throughout the World (New York, 1858), pp. 95–97.
13 Rossiaud, Medieval Prostitution, pp. 7–8.
14 Bronislaw Geremek, The Margins of Society in Late Medieval Paris (Cambridge, ma, 1987),
p. 215.
15 See Jacques Hillairet, Dictionnaire historique des rues de Paris, 2 vols (Paris, 1961). One
must search alphabetically by modern street names. See also Benabou, La prostitution,
p. 21. I have not attempted to translate the names of these streets since words change over
time. For readers who do not know French, note that the names generally reflect private
parts of the body, the acts themselves, or anti-clerical fixations.
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178 Conner
The question revolved around whether a prostitute was actually engaged in
work. According to Thomas of Chobham, a canon of the cathedral of Notre
Dame, women who took pleasure in the act of venal sex “accomplished no
work”, and the church could not receive their offerings. On the other hand, he
noted that the majority of prostitutes were women who had no choice: “they
rent their body and furnish work.” In essence, he classed most prostitutes as
working poor and therefore their offerings to the church could be accepted.16
The poor married late and female mortality was higher than male mortal-
ity, creating a gender imbalance. In this context, not only was prostitution
accepted, it became a function of public order, institutionalized at the local
municipal level.17 While prostitutes were among those regarded as marginal,
their relationship to the police and to their clients placed them squarely in
the labour market. In fact, police directives established their working hours,
regulated their observance of holidays, and treated them more generously
than people in many other occupations. In spite of our modern perceptions of
prostitution as a nocturnal job, Parisian curfews affected all labourers, includ-
ing prostitutes who were required to leave their brothels at dusk. Nonetheless,
their working hours were allowed to be among the longest relative to other
labourers in the city.18
Over the next two centuries, because of the prevalence of venereal diseases
prostitutes sporadically would be driven from the streets; but, regardless of the
ordinances and decrees, very little actually changed until the latter half of the
seventeenth century.19 For the most part, the city of Paris practised toleration,
which included the regulation of prostitution by the police.
The Seventeenth Century: Morality, Repression, and Confinement
By the time of Louis xiv in the last half of the seventeenth century, the popu-
lation of Paris had grown to 500,000. Although Louis xiv had established his
residence at Versailles, he kept an eye on Paris, and he intended to bring a re-
generation of morality to the French kingdom’s largest city. As one historian
16 Rossiaud, Medieval Prostitution, pp. 82–83.
17 Otis, Prostitution in Medieval Society, pp. 100–102.
18 See Geremek, Margins of Society, p. 217; Rossiaud, Medieval Prostitution, p. 64.
19 A compilation of these laws and ordinances from 1496 to 1644 may be found at the Ar-
chives de la Préfecture de Police (Paris), Les moeurs, 2 vols (handwritten manuscript).
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The Paradoxes and Contradictions of Prostitution in Paris 179
described the king, he was the “watchdog of Parisian sin”.20 Systematically,
Louis xiv chartered the Hôpital-Général in 1656, including the Salpêtrière as a
prison-hospital for women, created the office of lieutenant of police in 1667 to
consolidate royal authority, established the Bon Pasteur in 1698 for repentant
prostitutes as a model for other places of refuge and Christian rehabilitation,
and created systems to deal with petty crime, felonies, gambling, smuggling,
sorcery, recalcitrant subjects, and anything that seemed outside of good public
order. Because he had created a powerful bureaucracy and a policing system
to work with him, he was the first French king to produce significant results.
Breaking with the historic French tradition of toleration, Louis xiv insti-
gated the “Great Confinement”. The police swept “the mad, sinful, and non-
compliant”, including prostitutes, into the Hôpital-Général.21 Corruption of
the flesh and corruption of the soul were seen as being equally pernicious and
in some ways synonymous, so both were placed under the control of the po-
lice. In essence, prostitution became linked to sin, and sin was linked to pun-
ishment, rehabilitation, and/or confinement.22 Simply speaking, the earlier
discourse on public order had been taken to a new level; everything tied to
prostitution was an assault on society and a denigration of the kingdom and
God’s order. Prostitutes were not sex workers, they were “fallen women”.
The most significant statement of this conflation of social order and spiri-
tual order was found in the Réglement du Roi of 20 April 1684. Its provisions
included the following: (1) that debauched women, public prostitutes, women
engaged in scandalous behaviour, or those who led others into prostitution
would be imprisoned in the Salpêtrière by order of the king, the court, or the
lieutenant of police; (2) that incarcerated women would be required to par-
ticipate in mass, medical treatments if needed, a regimen of prayer and cat-
echism, and appropriate work; (3) that they could wear only coarse homespun
garments and clogs, eat only bread, soup, and water, and sleep on straw mat-
tresses; and (4) that, if they deviated from their regimen or exhibited slothful
behaviour, they would be subject to severe measures including solitary confine-
ment and loss of any previously earned privileges.23 It was a penitentiary re-
gime in which prison terms were not specified, but up to six months tended to
be the duration of their incarceration so long as they showed signs of remorse,
20 Philip Riley, A Lust for Virtue: Louis xiv’s Attack on Sin in Seventeenth-Century France
(Westport, 2001), p. 15.
21 Ibid., p. xiii.
22 Ibid., p. 111.
23 François André Isambert, Recueil général des anciennes lois françaises depuis l’an 420
jusqu’à la Révolution de 1789, 29 vols (Paris, 1821–1833), xix, pp. 441–445.
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180 Conner
repentance, or contrition. Three years later, Louis xiv further protected his “is-
land of purity” by declaring that all prostitutes found in Versailles or within
a radius of two leagues would be mutilated, i.e., their ears would be clipped.
Regardless of whether prostitutes arrived in Paris alone or found companion-
ship with other menial working girls, there appeared to be no subculture of
prostitution. There was, however, a mixed message. Some prostitutes could be
rehabilitated; others would be permanently marked for what they were.
The Eighteenth Century: Redefining Prostitution, Police Control,
and Hygiene
At the end of Louis xiv’s reign came the most significant ordinance that gov-
erned the remainder of the pre-Revolutionary eighteenth century. It was the
Ordonnance royale of 26 July 1713. With this declaration, the authority of the
police over prostitution in Paris was assured, shifting jurisdiction from courts
such as the Châtelet directly to the police. Interpretations of this ordinance
vary dramatically, but instead of providing common prostitutes with more due
process, those who were rounded up in the raids were judged en masse. On
average, 600 to 800 cases were handled by the lieutenant general per year. Only
one or two cases were heard by the Châtelet (criminal court), and no appeals
reached the Parlement (highest court of France). What did all of this mean?
Ultimately there were two definitions spelled out in the royal ordinance. The
first was public debauchery and scandalous behaviour, and the second was
procuring. The first definition was expressly vague and therefore less punitive.
Were these women prostitutes? According to the law, not necessarily, so they
were judged by the lieutenant general, sentenced with a fine or forced to make
a payment to charity, stripped of their belongings which were distributed to
the poor, and required to leave the city or face more stringent penalties. If they
chose to appeal, they would remain in custody until the appeal was completed.
This first type of behaviour was classed as a misdemeanour, with no prison time
necessarily assigned. According to studies of the period, few women chose to
appeal, and their choice not to appeal was a very conscious one. They could
begin again, reconstruct themselves, ply their trade elsewhere, and retain their
economic independence. Ultimately, their survival depended on their ability
to control their earnings.24 Under the royal ordinance, the streets could be
cleaned up rather quickly, and nightly rounds became more and more routine.
24 It is important to note the importance of families in the early modern period. As such,
young women were part of the family economy, either leaving it to support themselves,
so as not to be a drain on the family, or contributing to the entire upkeep of the family.
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In the second case of procuring or organized prostitution, for which corpo-
ral punishment would likely be invoked, cases were remanded to the crimi-
nal courts. Because due process had to be carefully applied, evidence suggests
that few cases went this route.25 In other words, the system simply avoided the
more difficult cases. While jurists argued the nuances of the law, the police
took the most direct route to assuring public order, and prostitutes looked out
for themselves.
During the time of the Regency after Louis xiv’s death, the language of sin no
longer dominated the discourse on prostitution. By mid-century, prostitution
came more and more to be defined as a condition, not yet pathological, or as a
state of being. Importantly, prostitutes served a purpose because they often led
police to other criminal elements in society. Mistresses, who were under the
surveillance of a Department of Kept Women beginning in 1747, were also im-
portant to the police. They were ultimately part of the intelligence apparatus
of the Paris police inspectors.26 Like many common prostitutes, the dames en-
tretenues (kept women or mistresses) frequently came from the subordinate
classes or the lower-middling groups in society, but their pathways led to
greater economic security. They could move in the same circles as actresses
or those in the theatre and opera, take on the style and pretensions of those
above them, and negotiate relationships that sometimes provided permanent
patron-mistress arrangements, marriage, or other access to steady income. The
police watched them closely because it was believed that they could enfeeble
and impoverish those who fell prey to them. Ultimately those who came to
Paris, mostly from the north and east of France, followed several paths to elite
prostitution. They were sold into elite prostitution to s upport their families,
fled their families because of a sexual encounter, sought other ways to assist
their families by seeking employment in Paris and ended up first as prostitutes
and then as kept women, or consciously chose a better life among the Parisian
25 Benabou, La prostitution, pp. 24–25.
26 Nina Kushner, Erotic Exchanges: The World of Elite Prostitution in Eighteenth Century Paris
(Ithaca, 2013), p. 30 ff; and Nina Kushner, “The Case of the Closely Watched Courtesans”,
Slate (15 April 2014), pp. 1–3, available at: https://longform.org/posts/the-case-of-the-
closely-watched-courtesans; last accessed 29 June 2017. The Department of Kept Women
was one part of a massive police apparatus that dealt with everything from markets to
cemeteries and hygiene (as it was in the eighteenth century) and to the portion of the
population that was not under the supervision of a family or husband. The incredibly
rich dossiers that are part of the collection of the Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal detail how the
demimonde was used to maintain order as police inspectors demanded current informa-
tion from them, as the police also protected unsuspecting upper class males from mésal-
liances should they become too closely allied with one of the dames entretenues, and as
the police created a growing network of surveillance in the eighteenth century.
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demimonde.27 What separates them from other prostitutes was their ability
to accumulate more than subsistence earnings, either through their patrons
or other networks. They worked a system that seemed to always have a place
for them.
When it came to police targets, the eighteenth-century obsession was with
non-resident paupers, the homeless, and beggars.28 During this period of scar-
city, more young women moved to Paris, looking for a marriage and a better
life. Yet, the city had little to offer them. They were targets for unscrupulous
employers and at the mercy of those who rented them furnished rooms. Not
surprisingly they became easy prey for pimps and madams, particularly if they
had no network or means of sufficient support. Many public women avoided
police notice, but those who were disruptive or who had caused a scandal in
the eyes of the police or their neighbours were rounded up for police audi-
ences and transported in an open cart, often with their heads shaved and in
chains, to prison-hospitals.29
Additional ordinances in this century condemned sodomites and women
found in military encampments. Interestingly, the ordinance only covered
women who were not native to the area and who were without employment.
By 1768, the ordinance was re-issued to cover all women who were suspected
of prostitution. Penalties were increased to incarceration and treatment for
venereal diseases. Laws were mute on prostitution per se, but its public mani-
festations were to be masked. Other pre-revolutionary ordinances in 1778 and
1780 established fines for renting properties to prostitutes, for allowing unmar-
ried men and women to cohabit, for welcoming them into cabarets and places
of entertainment, as well as for not filing the appropriate paperwork for per-
sons living in boarding houses and furnished rooms. New curfews were also
established.30
The Demographics of Eighteenth-Century Prostitutes
Who were the Paris prostitutes of the eighteenth century? Based on the records
of Saint-Martin for 1765, 1766, and 1770, over 97 per cent of the 2,069 women
who were arrested were employed in some manner, although their occupations
27 Archives de la Bastille in Kushner, Erotic Exchanges, p. 72 ff.
28 Robert M. Schwartz, Policing the Poor in Eighteenth-Century France (Chapel Hill, 1988),
pp. 27–28.
29 Benabou, La prostitution, p. 62.
30 Isambert, Recueil général, xxv, pp. 448–450.
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The Paradoxes and Contradictions of Prostitution in Paris 183
were self-reported. Three-quarters of the women were between 18 and 30 years
of age, and there were very few who were younger than 15, in spite of period
literature that painted prostitutes as pubescent girls ready for the taking. Of
the prostitutes in Saint-Martin, 49.3 per cent cited that they were employed in
clothing, textiles, or decorative trades, e.g., from menders, seamstresses, artifi-
cial flower makers, and embroiderers to designers of luxury wardrobes. Yet, the
greatest number of prostitutes fell among the most menial and least paid oc-
cupations.31 It was widely stated that the clothing trades were the pathways to
becoming a prostitute or a courtesan, and that, in some cases, shops were used
for soliciting. Table 7.1 provides specific data on their occupations.
For the most part, the women were single, either earning less than they
needed to survive or not earning enough for the support of their families or
partners. When the price of bread climbed dramatically in the 1770s, surviv-
al hung in the balance. During most of the eighteenth century, prostitution
was not a particularly permanent profession, but it was employment. Women
passed in and out of it as needed or as they wanted to finance a better life.32
Table 7.1 Occupations of women arrested for prostitution, Prison Saint Martin, 1755, 1765, 1770.
Occupation Number Percentage of total
Clothing trades and textiles including 1021 49.3%
fabrication, repair, sales
Washing 300 14.5%
Small business or shop assistants 272 13.1%
Servants 263 12.7%
Artisans (not including textiles) 94 4.5%
Day laborers 39 1.9%
Agricultural laborers 15 0.7%
Transport, message carriers, errand runners 11 0.5%
Entertainment 4 0.2%
Diverse 2 0.1%
Unemployed or not known 48 2.3%
Total 2069 99.8%
Source: Benabou, La prostitution, pp. 280–285.
31 Benabou, La prostitution, pp. 280–285. Saint Martin was a transit location for women po-
tentially destined for incarceration in the Salpêtrière after their police audience.
32 Ibid., p. 319.
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Regardless of the data, contemporary accounts of prostitution argued that
permanent prostitution had become a scourge. In 1762, one writer estimated
that there were 25,000 prostitutes in Paris, although another later writer specu-
lated that there were 30,000 on the streets and another 10,000 who were kept
women or who were brothel residents.33 In that context, Nicholas Restif de La
Bretonne published Le Pornographe, which was a treatise on prostitution, a call
for public health measures, and a recommendation for the regulation of prosti-
tution in what he called the Parthénions. These proposed “houses of pleasure”
required clients to bathe, have appointments lasting no longer than half an
hour with the resident prostitutes, and avoid drunkenness. Women would be
subject to a regimen of reading, work of their choice, walking in the on-site
park, or studying music or dancing. The Parthénions were also destined to have
another function as “houses of populationism” because children borne from
the liaisons would be raised there. In this way, the French population would
grow, venereal disease would be managed, and prostitution would be con-
tained. In particular, Restif argued that the basest, foulest forms of prostitution
would be eradicated. The “meat markets” of brazen, half nude, lewd women
would be gone from the streets of Paris. All prostitutes would be required to
enter the Parthénions under penalty of prison, and outside of extraordinary
circumstances like marriage, they would remain there for their entire lives.34
Some of what Restif wrote sounded like a return to the mediaeval municipal
brothels. But, the Parthénions were also idyllic, even romantic, in their plan,
and they also were designed to remove the stigma of venal sex and illegitimate
children.
In the writings of Restif and his contemporaries (and there were many) it
was argued that prostitution should be firmly institutionalized.35 A few cahiers
de doléances (grievances to the king) on the eve of the Revolution condemned
immorality with a broad brush; but, next to them, there was a wildly popular
33 See a recent version of the work by Alexandre Parent-Duchâtelet, La prostitution à Paris
au xixe siècle: Texte présenté et annoté par Alain Corbin (Paris, 1981), pp. 87–94. It was
originally published in 1836. Women who lodged in brothels often paid for rent, food, and
clothing. If they were unable to work because of pregnancy or an illness, they could ac-
cumulate large debts to the madam.
34 See Nicholas Restif de La Bretonne, Le pornographe ou idées d’un honnȇte homme sur un
projet du réglement pour les prostituées (Paris, 1769), p. 111 ff. Maisons d’abbatage were also
called “slaughterhouses” in vernacular French.
35 Louis-Sébastien Mercier, Panorama of Paris: Selections from Le Tableau de Paris (Univer-
sity Park, 1999), p. 148. Mercier, among others, counselled fellow Parisians to consider so-
lutions like the Parthénions: “Administrators, mark, read, and digest The Pornographer of
Restif de la Bretonne.”
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The Paradoxes and Contradictions of Prostitution in Paris 185
trade in satires, lampoons, pornography, and scandal sheets. Those publica-
tions were joined by a number of almanacs of the “girls” of the Palais Royal
that described prostitutes’ individual physical properties, the variety of sexual
acts they could provide, their addresses, and their rates.36 To a certain degree,
prostitution was being confirmed as a fact of life, whether tolerated or regulat-
ed. Even the Encyclopédie Méthodique’s article on prostitution confirmed that
a woman had the right to dispose of her body as she pleased. Ultimately the
key was that notoriety be avoided and no scandals should result.37 There were
underlying reasons for prostitution: male desire and female misery. Neither
was going to be remedied in the short term, if at all. The discussion during the
Revolutionary years, therefore, dealt with individual liberty, public order, and
public health.
Cleaning up the Streets: Prostitution and Social Control during
the French Revolution
Among the first acts of the Revolution was a sweeping away the ordinances
and decrees of the Old Order, creating the need for new principles of law and
a new judicial structure. Yet again, regulations on prostitution per se were not
introduced. A law of 16–24 August 1790 specified that good order in public
places had to be maintained, and a decree of 10 July 1791 remanded women
found in army barracks to the civilian police rather than to the military. The
omnibus Code of 19–22 July 1791 brought no further direction to policing pros-
titution. While it dealt with problems like noise, public gatherings, counterfeit
keys, rickety street-side display racks, transvestites, pots of urine thrown from
windows, and pots of flowers perched perilously close to window ledges, defi-
nitions of anything relating to prostitution were entirely absent.38
In this fluid population of 630,000 Parisians, the police went to work. The
mandate was not just to purge the streets of undesirables and effluvia, but to
36 Hector Fleischman, Les demoiselles d’amour du Palais-Royal: Avec la réimpression integral
de dix pamphlets libres sur les filles publiques du Palais-Egalité et le bibliographie des libelles
galants qui leur sont consacrés (Paris, 1911).
37 Benabou, La prostitution, p. 501. Benabou was citing the Encyclopédie méthodique ou
par ordre des matières, par une Société de Gens de lettres, de savants et d’artistes (Paris,
1782–1791) rather than the better known Encyclopédie by Diderot and D’Alembert which
was published earlier.
38 “Décret”, 19–22 July 1791, in Jean-Baptiste Duvergier, Collection complete des lois, décrets,
ordonnances, réglements, et avis du Conseil d’Etat de 1788 à 1824, 78 vols (Paris, 1824–1878)
iii, pp. 114–126.
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186 Conner
clean up any and all dangers to citizens. One of the most striking dangers was
venereal disease. In 1793, when health inspections were required for all women
who were arrested for soliciting, over 40 per cent of the women were found
to be diseased. These women were referred to the Hospice des Vénériens for
treatment; others were sent to nearby prisons depending on the gravity of their
offences. Penalties for prostitutes who ended up at the Correctional Tribunal
were significantly less severe than for offenses which were explicitly covered
in the code. Begging, for example, carried a one-year prison term. Debauchery,
if applied under Title 2 of the Code of 1791, carried a one-year prison term and
a fine. Women who chose prostitution, however, generally served three to four
months, even if they were caught committing a flagrant offense. If a woman
could supply character witnesses, if there wasn’t sufficient evidence to make a
case against her, or if there wasn’t enough space in the police holding tank, it
was likely that she would be released within a period of hours or days.39
The Demographics of Prostitutes during the French Revolution
Who were these women? According to one study of this period,40 of the 251
prostitutes who were arrested for solicitation in the section of Paris called
Butte des Moulins, 62 per cent were born in the provinces and had recently
arrived in the city. Nearly 92 per cent were single. They were also younger than
their counterparts earlier in the century. For the first time, a significant num-
ber of prostitutes stated that they had no occupation other than prostitution.
Table 7.2 provides a more detailed view of the jobs of the 227 who reported an
occupation.
Gone from the occupations were laundresses and errand runners. In many
cases, their clients had emigrated from France prior to or during the Terror. In
the case of washerwomen, the price of soap had become prohibitive, and the
supply of clients was uncertain. Given the strict penalties for begging, being a
prostitute had its positive aspects. If arrested, the prison sentence was shorter.
If a prostitute lived in a house that was not known by the police, she could
effectively be invisible and immune from prosecution. Policies such as these
could not have gone unnoticed. While unstated, the national policy was noth-
ing less than a form of social control. Prostitutes would frequently be swept
from the streets and bawdy houses, they would be punished but not too severe-
ly, those who were diseased would be treated, and a firm moral order would be
claimed by those in authority.
39 Susan P. Conner, “Prostitution and the Jacobin agenda for Social Control”, Eighteenth Cen-
tury Life, 12 (1988), pp. 42–51, 48.
40 Ibid.
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Table 7.2 Occupations of women arrested for prostitution in Butte des Moulins, 1792–1793.
Occupation Number Percentage of total
Clothing trades and textiles including 91 40.0%
fabrication, repair, sales
Small business or shop assistants 28 11.0%
Servants 13 6.0%
Artisans (not including textiles) 4 2.0%
Day laborers 24 10.5%
Diverse 16 7.0%
Prostitute or mistress 51 22.5%
Total 227 99.0%
Source: Susan P. Conner, “Prostitution and the Jacobin agenda for Social
Control”, Eighteenth Century Life, 12 (1988), pp. 42–51.
The Birth of the “French System”
Already in 1791, the police had begun what was tantamount to registration.
This practice was regularized under the Central Bureau of the Paris police by
1799. Prostitutes were also subject to medical examinations as early as 1792 and
automatically sent for prison treatment if they were infected with the “venere-
al poison”. This practice was institutionalized under Napoleon in 1802, and, in
1805, the Dispensary of Saint Lazare was established. By 1810, fortnightly medi-
cal inspections were mandated.41 According to contemporary accounts, mai-
sons de tolérance (licensed brothels) began springing up in Paris, and 180 were
recognized by the end of the First Empire in 1815. By 1823, all brothels were
licensed. On two points, all French governments—Revolutionary, Napoleonic,
and Restoration—agreed: there was a proper role for women as moral, upright
mothers who taught their children the virtues of the Fatherland, but there was
also a place for prostitution as a continuing means of social control. Men, who
tended to marry later in life, needed an outlet for their “excess” sexuality; the
family needed to be preserved; and women who fell into prostitution, whether
through poverty, rape, or fornication, should be monitored because they would
41 Elizabeth A. Weston, “Prostitution in Paris in the Later Nineteenth Century: A Study of
Political and Social Ideology” (Unpublished Ph.D., State University of New York at Buffalo,
1979), p. 25.
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188 Conner
never turn back. Ultimately, public women played a role in the public life of
France so long as they did not challenge bourgeois sensibilities.42
From 1836 until 1848, under the Prefect of Police Gabriel Delessert a series
of police ordinances and practices were put into place consolidating what was
becoming the regulation of prostitution in France, particularly in Paris. Beyond
the licensing of brothels and registration of prostitutes, many other aspects of
venal sex had to be defined. It is important to note that at the beginning of
the century prostitutes had already been designated as soumises or inscrites
(registered) and insoumises (unregistered). The Réglement of 16 November 1843
finalized police action regarding the two types of prostitution: clandestine and
tolerated. In both cases, according to authorities these women were likely to
spread venereal diseases. According to the statute, the punishments should
be severe enough to make them register or enter a licensed brothel because
maisons de tolérance were governed by very specific regulations, including the
daily surveillance of brothels, the expectation that madams would follow all
police procedures including medical examinations for the residents, confor-
mity to all curfews, and the interdiction of admitting students, uniformed sol-
diers, and youths under 18 years of age.43 To a certain degree, madams had
become agents of the government if they wished to continue their business.
As nineteenth-century bureaucrats, doctors, and politicians became ob-
sessed with urban pathology, they studied prostitutes along with “other urban
untouchables who work[ed] with mire, ordure, excrement, and carrion.”44 Be-
sides the scientific methods with which they intended to count everything,
they also considered what they believed to be the needs of nineteenth-century
bourgeois society. Railroads and industrialization had brought more young
people into Paris. In fact, the city grew in size from 657,172 inhabitants in 1817
to over one million inhabitants in 1851.45 Table 7.3 breaks down the numbers
of unmarried males and females as of mid-century. It should be noted that ac-
cording to common practice and Napoleonic law46 men tended to marry later
(by a half decade) and represented a larger portion of the population aged
between 15 and 35.
42 Ibid., p. 7. See also Susan P. Conner, “Public Virtue and Public Women”, Eighteenth Century
Studies, 28 (1994–1995), pp. 193–219.
43 Yves Guyot, La prostitution, (Paris, 1882), pp. 555–559.
44 Alain Corbin, “Commercial Sexuality in Nineteenth-Century Paris: A System of Images
and Regulations”, Representations, 14 (1986), pp. 209–219, 212.
45 Statistique de la France, 2nd series, Territoire et population (Paris, 1855) 2, p. 440.
46 Under the Code Napoléon, males could marry at age 25 and females at 21 with the con-
sent of their parents, or their father alone if there was disagreement. Until 1965, married
women did not have the right to work without their husband’s permission.
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The Paradoxes and Contradictions of Prostitution in Paris 189
Table 7.3 Married and unmarried males and females, Paris 1851.
Age range Unmarried Married Unmarried Married
males males females females
15–20 45,672 204 39,338 4,735
20–25 57,747 7,730 33,258 23,046
25–30 41,189 25,671 24,340 37,697
30–35 18,357 33,642 11,730 33,847
Total 15–35 298,703 213,246 244,823 215,845
Source: Statistique de la France, 2nd series, Territoire et population
(Paris, 1855) 2, p. 440.
Among the most influential writers on prostitution in nineteenth-century
Paris was Alexandre Parent-Duchâtelet, whose De la prostitution dans la ville
de Paris, considérée sous le rapport de l’hygiène publique, de la morale et de
l’administration was published in 1836. In his meticulous study of registered
prostitutes, he searched for anything that would define them sociologically,
biologically, or geographically.47 Of the 12,707 prostitutes who registered be-
tween April 1816 and April 1831, he traced father’s employment, domiciles, ages,
networks, and physical features, including whether or not their genitalia were
like non-prostitutes. He concluded that for the most part the prostitutes were
“constrained by economic need to practice [their] trade.” If they were Parisian
born, they generally were daughters of artisan fathers who were not well edu-
cated and who became domestics or were employed in the trades. One out
of two was marginally literate, and only one fourth of the women were ille-
gitimate. Of more than 5,000 prostitutes who provided a reason for taking up
prostitution, half reported that they had chosen to do so because they were
destitute or had lost their parents or home. Of the remainder, they had been
abandoned by lovers, soldiers, or students, or they were responsible for family
members, from siblings to elderly parents. Finally, there were those who had
come to Paris to escape their previous provincial existence and to find a better
life in the city. Among the prostitutes whom Parent-Duchâtelet interviewed, he
found that they often took on pseudonyms, used argot peculiar to their trade,
and drank hard liquor but they formed communities in which they cared for
47 A more recent edition is Alexandre Parent-Duchâtelet, La prostitution à Paris au xixe siè-
cle: Texte présenté et annoté par Alain Corbin (Paris, 1981), p. 70 ff. In the text of this article,
I have preferred to use the original title.
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190 Conner
each other, nursed each other during pregnancies, and communally cared for
children.48
Although Parent-Duchâtelet first hypothesized that that vice was heredi-
tary, a belief common among many of his contemporaries, his evidence did
not support that position. In the end, he saw prostitution as a passage in life,
a category of labour. He stated, “Like begging, like gambling, it is an industry,
a resource against hunger or against dishonour, because one does not know to
what ends an individual will go when they have no resources.”49 Because his
conclusions were very nuanced, De la prostitution dans la ville de Paris was used
both as an apology for and a justification of regulated houses of prostitution.
The Second Empire and the Formalization of the “French System”
Growth during the Second Empire doubled the size of Paris yet again.50 This
increase in the population was partially a continuing result of migration from
the provinces, typically from the north of France. The pattern of employment
had also changed as industrialization grew. Although entire non-Parisian fami-
lies had been employed in small enterprises in the first half of the nineteenth
century, by the latter half men were the most likely to be employees in larger
factories that required some level of skill. Nonetheless, Paris had more adult
bachelors than any other city in the French state because salaries were still too
low for them to support dependents. As a corollary, single women who moved
to Paris were the least likely to find employment, and salaries were predicated
on the assumption that females had membership in a family. Therefore, sala-
ries for young women were even lower, often forcing them into multiple posi-
tions, including prostitution.
While prostitution did not increase in proportion to the growth of the city,
concerns about venereal disease did. The language of depopulation again sur-
faced, and there was the further fear that prostitution would undermine fami-
lies. As the result of an administrative note of 1864, prostitutes could no longer
refuse to register if they were in police custody or working in brothels.51 Indi-
vidual liberty, it appeared, had been sacrificed to public protection. By 1878 and
1879, additional regulations supporting the police des moeurs (vice squad) had
been added to remind madams of their service to the government; brothels
48 Ibid., pp. 80–107.
49 Ibid., p. 204.
50 Part, but not all, of this growth can be attributed to the expansion of the city limits.
51 Guyot, La prostitution, p. 62.
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The Paradoxes and Contradictions of Prostitution in Paris 191
had to be dispersed to avoid scandals, windows had to be shuttered or covered,
a potentially diseased woman had to be taken to the dispensary immediately,
and madams were responsible for the actions of their prostitutes even outside
of the house of prostitution.52 Was it a form of labour? Yes, the police and other
regulationists agreed. Was it consistent with bourgeois sensibilities? The an-
swer depended on the point of view. William Acton, who studied prostitution
in Paris and London, noted that the Parisian system calmed the streets and led
to less bawdiness and gaudiness. Therefore, it protected sensibilities.53 Other
writers repeated that it was not consistent with bourgeois sensibilities, but it
was a necessity of life to avoid even worse sexual abuses and dangers to the
family.
Demographics of Late Nineteenth Century Prostitutes
Prostitution during the last quarter of the century was directly related to
women’s place in the economy and their personal circumstances. By 1876, the
workforce in Paris was more than half female, and 80 per cent of those female
workers were wage labourers. While it is difficult to know how many prosti-
tutes in total (registered and unregistered) there were in Paris, the vice squad
reported there were 4,242 registered prostitutes in 1872 and 5,440 in the 1880s.
Almost 75 per cent were over 21, and the vast majority of them were born out-
side of Paris. As registered prostitutes, they were considered to have no other
occupation. Of the unregistered prostitutes who were arrested by the police,
39 per cent reported being domestic servants and 30 per cent were seamstress-
es.54 According to one period writer, a garment worker could earn two or three
francs per day, but even if she were healthy and never absent from work, her
earnings would most often be insufficient to cover her expenses. Likely she
would live in a garret and consume a diet of starchy food.55 Not only did wom-
en’s salaries remain low, they declined relative to prices throughout the century.
Furthermore, the percentage of single women in Paris increased as a result of
the overall scarcity of jobs for females even in the rural areas surrounding Paris
and more young women were cut off from their families. Writers like Parent-
Duchâtelet and Commenge, who published his study of prostitution in 1894,
bemoaned the poverty in which prostitutes typically found themselves, but
52 Ibid., pp. 64–65.
53 William Acton, “Prostitution in France”, as extracted from the edited 2nd edition by Peter
Frye (London, 1968), pp. 97–107, available at: http://chnm.gmu.edu/history/faculty/kelly/
wciv/women/prostitution.htm; last accessed 7 July 2017.
54 Weston, “Prostitution in Paris”, ch. 2; Corbin, Women for Hire, p. 42.
55 Ibid., p. 53.
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192 Conner
they made no recommendations.56 The sentiment was that prostitution was
more of a solution than a problem, as long as it was regulated. Furthermore,
prostitution came to be viewed as a “state of being” rather than a profession.57
Proponents of the “French System” noted that there was a certain pathology
attached to women who registered. On the other hand, survival often hung in
the balance; prostitution was an economic choice.
Turn-of-the-Century Reform Efforts
The end of the nineteenth century brought new reasons to deal with pros-
titution: the repeal of the Contagious Diseases Acts in England, the visits of
international reformers like Josephine Butler, and the continuing spectre of
venereal diseases. The new discourse of abolitionism combined civil liberties,
double standards, medical reform, and the protection of women. Some aboli-
tionists demanded the elimination of the vice squad while others established
a crusade against immorality, debauchery, and the victimization of women.
Although some momentum was gained through this abolitionist coalition, the
governmental crisis of 1877 halted national debates. In the interim, the Union
international des amies de la jeune fille stepped in to monitor employment bu-
reaus and railroad stations which were widely seen as the hubs of the white
slave trade.
Just after the turn of the century, two other sources of abolitionist senti-
ment rekindled the debate. Cases of venereal disease in France and among
French troops in the colonies had increased alarmingly, and the international
press thrived on exposés of white slavery. In Paris, for example, from 13 to 15 per
cent of the male population was syphilitic,58 infants allegedly died at an alarm-
ing rate, and, in its later stages, the ravishing disease could be undetectable. In
the case of white slavery, it was argued that procurers established themselves
at railway stations near the Tour Saint-Jacques in the city centre and on the
heights of Montmartre providing promises of lodging and employment. By the
time of the 1902 international conference on white slavery, newspapers widely
reported that there was a traffic in virgins, suppliers were growing wealthy,
and the overseas military was playing a role in creating demand for prosti-
tutes.59 The results of the conference were promulgated in France in 1905, but
56 Commenge, La prostitution clandestine à Paris (Paris, 1897).
57 Corbin, Women for Hire, p. 30.
58 Ibid., p. 204.
59 Ibid., pp. 289–293.
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The Paradoxes and Contradictions of Prostitution in Paris 193
the international convention functionally reaffirmed surveillance rather than
abolishing the trade.
Throughout the debates, there was one other position voiced on prostitu-
tion: neo-regulationism. In the absence of national or international law, this
became the new “French System”. The system blended bourgeois values and
a more humane treatment of prostitutes. Over time, fewer and fewer prosti-
tutes lived in maisons de tolérance and more practised their trade in what were
called maisons de rendez-vous, which were non-residential houses of prosti-
tution. Owners monitored the women who worked there, photographing and
registering them, forbade alcohol and advertising, and required that prosti-
tutes undergo their medical examinations. The change to maisons de rendez-
vous had taken place gradually, so much so that by 1903 less than 1 per cent of
prostitutes lived in the houses where they worked.60 Furthermore, proposals
made by the Prefect of Police, Louis Lépine, carried the day: a sanitary office
replaced the hated police des moeurs, health cards and health inspections were
required, and a more humanitarian treatment of venereal diseases was insti-
tuted. Although debates continued at the municipal level, the only national
legislation that was passed was the Rousseil Law of 15 April 1908 which dealt
with the prostitution of minors.61
From the World Wars to Abolitionism
In the period just before World War i, neo-regulationism, toleration, and in-
creased surveillance defined prostitution. During the war, prostitutes left Paris
briefly, fearing that they would be confined to work camps, and three-quarters
of the brothels closed. By the time of the armistice, however, new maisons de
rendez-vous had been established, some of them quite deluxe. More policing
occurred around railway stations and barracks, and sanitary measures were
dramatically increased. Already in decline, the maisons de tolérance did not
reappear; in fact, no more than thirty were in existence after the war.62 In the
interwar period, as sexuality became less confined, dance halls, cinemas and
theatres were combined with maisons de rendez-vous to draw clients into the
establishments. Maisons d’abbatage also sprang up, offering quick sex without
60 Weston, “Prostitution in Paris”, p. 65. See also Emile Richard, La prostitution à Paris (Paris,
1890). Richard was a leading neo-regulationist.
61 Ibid., pp. 173, 178. Minors under the age of 21 were not to be registered, and those who were
arrested could be taken from their parents as wards of the Bureau of Public Assistance.
62 Corbin, Women for Hire, pp. 334–336.
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194 Conner
entertainment or any ambiance. In these larger establishments, each prosti-
tute typically serviced thirty to fifty clients per day.63 Allegedly, any type of sex
could be requested.
World War ii, the fall of France, and the German occupation created an
interesting new political coalition between the reactionary right and the re-
publican left. The 1930s, after all, had been perceived as entirely too liberating,
particularly for women, and it was argued that patriarchal authority needed to
be re-established. Not surprisingly, there were serious discussions about ending
the “French System” but what occurred instead was a movement to purify mor-
als and protect the family. Maisons de tolérance were recreated, soon becoming
a “masterful piece of the social and moral order” because they were discrete,
carefully regulated, and provided a service.64 Under the German occupation,
certain brothels were reserved for officers, while others were maintained for
enlisted men. Brothels, made famous by their earlier clientele, gained new no-
tice, e.g., Le Chabanais, Le Sphinx, and the One Two Two.
The first major change in French policy occurred immediately after World
War ii with the Marthe Richard Law, so named for a former prostitute and
member of the municipal council of the 4th arrondisement of Paris. Reflect-
ing on the use of brothels by the German Wehrmacht and French collabora-
tors, Richard demanded their closure, citing the sordid memories attached
to the houses of prostitution, the vast numbers of women whose heads had
been shaved and who had been assaulted for “horizontal collaboration”,
and an increase in venereal diseases that had taken place in spite of alleged
health examinations.65 All prostitutes—whether registered, independent,
or occasional—were, in a common phrase, “spreading disease like shotgun
pellets”.66 Furthermore, Richard championed a new regard for women, stat-
ing unequivocally: “A woman is a human being, not merchandise.”67 Richard
was not alone in wanting the brothels closed, and a short-lived coalition pro-
vided the votes. When all was said and done, 178 brothels were closed along
63 Ibid., p. 339.
64 Patrick Buisson, Années érotiques: De la Grande Prostituée à la revanche des mâles (Paris,
2009), pp. 172–174.
65 Another view of the postwar environment leading to the closing of maisons de tolérance
may be found in Mary Louise Roberts, “The Silver Foxhole: The gis and Prostitution in
Paris, 1944–1945”, French Historical Studies, 33 (2010), pp. 99–128. She argues that the num-
ber of American soldiers on leave in Paris destabilized the entire regulationist system.
66 Buisson, Années érotiques, p. 631.
67 Marthe Richard, Mon destin de femme (Paris, 1974), p. 336. Significant portions of Marthe
Richard’s memoirs are fictionalized. See also Natacha Henry, Marthe Richard, l’aventurière
des maisons closes (Paris, 2006).
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The Paradoxes and Contradictions of Prostitution in Paris 195
with 6,000 hotel rooms that were turned into lodgings. Police registration was
ended, and the formal elements of regulationism were dismantled.68 Yet, only
a few days after enactment of the Marthe Richard Law, a new social and health
registration was placed on the books.69
Abolitionism, French Equivocation, and Prostitute Protests
French policy toward the outward manifestations of prostitution officially
changed from regulationism to abolitionism in 1960 when the French govern-
ment ratified the un “Convention for the Suppression of the Traffic in Persons
and the Exploitation of the Prostitution of Others”.70 In spite of adopting an
abolitionist position, the following three decades in France saw little change
in the governmental response to prostitution. Police cleaned up the streets,
defined offenses as they saw them, and acted on interpretations of the law be-
cause there were few absolutes. Only in 1975, when police harassment became
particularly visible, was there a visceral response by prostitutes themselves.
The response began in Lyons on 2 June 1975, when nearly a hundred prosti-
tutes occupied a church to bring media attention to police harassment. Paris
prostitutes immediately joined what became a national demonstration, go-
ing on strike and demanding health benefits and changes to the Penal Code.71
However, without continuing formal leadership, the movement died out by
spring 1976.
What had occurred was the beginning of a dramatic change. Prostitutes
explicitly defined themselves as sex workers, became their own advocates,
expressed their own grievances, sought allies, and began a social movement.
Historically, regulationists and abolitionists had excluded prostitutes from de-
bates about them. As such, prostitutes often were characterized as having no
agency, being mere pawns because they had no choice, or being pathologically
68 “Loi n° 46–685 du 13 avril 1946 dite Marthe Richard tendant à la fermeture des maisons
de tolérance et au renforcement de la lutte contre le proxénétisme”, Journal official de la
République française (14 April 1946), pp. 3138–3139.
69 “Loi n° 46–795 du 24 avril 1946 portant institution d’un fichier sanitaire et social de la
prostitution”, cited in Sarah-Marie Maffesoli, “Le traitement juridique de la prostitution”,
Sociétés, 99 (2008), pp. 33–46, 39.
70 “Circulaire du 25 novembre 1960 à la repression du proxénétisme”.
71 Lilian Mathieu, “An Unlikely Mobilization: The Occupation of Saint-Nizier Church by the
Prostitutes of Lyon”, Revue française de sociologie, 42 (supplement, 2001), pp. 107–131, 107.
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196 Conner
inclined to delinquency.72 Furthermore, prostitutes tended to come from the
lowest classes and often had little education. According to a study of French
prostitutes, “only 39 per cent had access to health insurance; approximately 50
per cent lived in temporary accommodation (hotel or no fixed address); 37 per
cent were dependent upon one or several drugs (including alcohol); and 33 per
cent had been victims of physical assault during the five months preceding the
study.”73 It is not surprising that aid societies, Christian organizations, organi-
zations offering medical support, and the occasional liberal feminist became
the spokespersons for prostitutes.
In the late 1990s, debates on prostitution resurfaced at the same time as
international and European measures were endorsed on child pornography,
child prostitution, and transnational crime cartels. In Paris, the increase of im-
migrants created a new focus, reflecting on all forms of prostitution—female,
male, and transgendered. As such, the Penal Code of 1994 provided a specific
definition of procuring in a number of paragraphs in Chapter 5, Article 225:
(1) making a profit from prostitution or receiving an immoral income; (2) liv-
ing above one’s own means, while either living with a prostitute or being in
continual relations with one or more habitual prostitutes; (3) selling or of-
fering non-public locations to known prostitutes; and (4) selling, leasing, or
providing vehicles that could be used in forms of prostitution.74 Because of
the specificity of the definitions, prostitutes actively challenged the law. The
sanctions could, in fact, encompass taxi drivers who took them to their clients,
hotel managers and staff who rented rooms to them, and even an unemployed
or invalid husband who lived from the proceeds of his wife’s prostitution.
Lines were drawn in a false dichotomy of abolitionism versus regulationism.
New abolitionists adopted a platform of aid to victims, defining all prostitutes as
victims and not questioning distinctions between forced prostitution and vol-
untary (free) prostitution. According to them, prostitution needed to be eradi-
cated to protect women from violence and dehumanization. In opposition,
72 Idem., “The Emergence and Uncertain Outcomes of Prostitutes’ Social Movements”, The
European Journal of Women’s Studies, 10 (2003), pp. 29–50, 30.
73 François-Rodolphe Ingold and Mohamed Toussirt, “Le travail sexuel, la consummation
des drogues et le vih: Investigation ethnographique de la prostitution à Paris (1989–1993)”,
Bulletin épidémiologique hebdomadaire, 27 (1994), pp. 119–120; for additional statistics, see
also Anne Serre et al., “Conditions de vie de personnes prostituées: consequences sur la
prevention de l’infection à vih”, Revue d’Epidémiologie et de Santé publique, 44 (1996),
pp. 328–336.
74 “Code Pénal” (as amended); available at: http://www.legifrance.gouv.fr/affichCode.do?ci
dTexte=LEGITEXT000006070719&dateTexte=19960810; last accessed 7 July 2017. See par-
ticularly Book 2, Title 2, Chapter 5, Articles 225-4-1 to 225-4-9 and 225–5 to 225–12.
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The Paradoxes and Contradictions of Prostitution in Paris 197
sex workers, their allies, and their advocates framed their arguments around
labour rights, arguing that prostitution was a legitimate economic choice and
practitioners should be given rights and protections under the law.
In 2002, with the election of a centrist-right government, prostitution be-
came a “law and order” issue of domestic security.75 Even before the Sarkozy
Law had been fully vetted, masked Parisian prostitutes took to the streets,
protesting the criminalization of passive soliciting which could lead to “six
months in jail for a smile.”76 Issues included lengthier detentions for illegal
immigrants and the potential deportation of non-French prostitutes if they
did not identify their pimps. According to a well-known abolitionist organiza-
tion, 70 per cent of immigrant prostitutes who work in France have no identity
papers. More than half of the prostitutes are foreigners and most come from
eastern Europe and former French colonies in Africa.77 Because they are often
controlled by pimps and foreign procurers, according to the police, they are
a threat to law and order. They are also engaged in a lucrative trade that at-
tracts further crime. According to government statistics, they each annually
pay approximately €150,000 to their pimps for massive earnings of millions of
euros.78
When the government of France moved forward with its anti-crime agenda,
the mayor of Paris conducted his own enquiry into the implications of the
Sarkozy Law. He authorized a group of scholars and urban researchers affili-
ated with the Centre national de recherche scientifique (cnrs) to gather facts,
statistics, and human stories. The result of their research was a 300-page vol-
ume, simply titled La prostitution à Paris.79 Without making value judgements,
they identified and interviewed male, female, and transgendered prostitutes,
bar girls, street walkers (regardless of gender), and those who practised their
trade in cars and vans.
75 Gill Allwood, “Prostitution Debates in France”, Contemporary Politics, 10 (2004), pp. 145–157,
145.
76 “French Prostitutes March against Ban on Soliciting”, The New York Times International,
5 November 2002, available at: http://nytimes.com/2002/11/05/international/05WIRE
-FRANCE.html; last accessed 7 July 2017.
77 Statistics from the Office Central pour la répression de la traité des ȇtres humains, accord-
ing to La Fondation Scelles; available at: http://www.fondationscelles.org/; last accessed 7
July 2017. The statistics date to 2011.
78 “Proxénétisme: des réseaux démantelés chaque année”, Le Figaro, 27 February 2012; avail-
able at: http://www.lefigaro.fr/actualite-france/2012/02/27/01016-20120227ARTFIG00544
-proxenetisme-la-realite-des-chiffres-en-france.php; last accessed 7 July 2017.
79 Handman and Mossuz-Lavau, La Prostitution à Paris.
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198 Conner
As the mayor’s enquiry progressed, certain areas in Paris came to be viewed
as “prostitute-friendly” including the Bois de Boulogne and the Bois de
Vincennes.80 Researchers interviewed their subjects in those areas, while also
developing a classification of current prostitution. Unlike the taxonomies of
Parent-Duchâtelet, twenty-first century prostitution is defined by location as
a function of age, longevity as a sex worker, drugs, and nationality. Along the
old streets in the centre of the city, traditional French prostitutes still remain.
Averaging 40 years of age, they are viewed as vestiges of a certain Parisian life-
style. Along the boulevards named for the marshals of France and around the
old city customs barriers, one finds Africans and eastern Europeans. With the
arrival of sex shops in the 1970s, more Chinese entered the trade. In the Bois
de Boulogne, South-American transsexuals, along with other male prostitutes,
work the winding paths and conduct their trade in parked cars. According to
voyeurs, of whom there are many, there is a certain theatricality to the activi-
ties in the Bois de Boulogne. In the Bois de Vincennes, on the eastern periphery
of Paris, prostitution is more traditionally female, made up predominantly of
African immigrants and conducted in panel trucks or vans.81
For the researchers involved in the mayor’s project, there was only one con-
clusion: prostitutes who wished to leave sex work should be assisted in doing
so, and the conditions for prostitutes who continued their profession should
be ameliorated.82 To “exit” prostitution is costly, potentially dangerous, and
fraught with delays. Prostitutes must pay retroactive taxes to the government;
and, if they are immigrants, they must divulge the name of their pimp or pro-
curer, leading to his or her arrest. If they do not have identity cards, they can be
deported even if they inform on their pimp or procurer. Critics of the current
system charge the government with acting as a pimp. It receives tax revenues
from prostitutes and benefits from their earnings.
While there is an historic and literary French nostalgia about prostitution,
new, young, non-French, racially and ethnically diverse prostitutes have not
been romanticized. Instead, the discourse about prostitution has left pros-
titutes entangled in a web of contradictory practices. While prostitution re-
mains a civil liberty, the increasing number of foreign sex workers, the assaults
on neighbourhood security by crime cartels, and illegal immigration have all
placed sex work in the popular press and on the floor of the National Assembly.
In December 2011, French deputies, both of the left and right, adopted a non-
binding resolution reconfirming the un Convention of 1960 and the proposed
80 Ibid., p. 13.
81 Ibid., pp. 48–60.
82 Ibid., p. 16.
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The Paradoxes and Contradictions of Prostitution in Paris 199
sentencing of clients of prostitutes to six months in prison with a fine of €3,000.
Headlines declared, “The deputies adopted an anti-prostitution resolution”.83
Yet, even when the French government adopted the un “Resolution Suppress-
ing the Traffic in Persons”, it did so with a caveat: “The free exercise of prostitu-
tion is allowed for those who practise it individually.”84 In this statement, one
can almost hear the voices of Augustine, Aquinas, and the French Revolution-
aries: i.e., prostitution is a necessary part of life and an individual liberty. So,
prostitution per se remained outside the statute, and prostitutes continued to
be subjected to police harassment and arrest, although le racolage passif (pas-
sive soliciting) was removed from the Sarkozy Law in 2012, but only briefly.
As of December 2013, with the support of the socialist Hollande government,
the French National Assembly overwhelmingly approved a bill to impose a
€1,500 fine on persons who pay for sex.85 Seen as one of the most expansive
pieces of legislation for the abolition of prostitution, it was patterned after the
Swedish model of going after clients of prostitutes. When the bill reached the
French Senate in early 2014, the Senate established a Special Commission to
review the findings and implications of the proposed legislation. For the first
time, legislators actually gathered testimony from sex workers. On 8 July 2014,
the Senate commission highlighted the two most significant provisions: con-
tinuation of the decriminalization of soliciting and removal of the fine for cli-
ents.86 The latter elicited significant responses from both sides of the political
spectrum. Ultimately, the debate continued, even with topless prostitutes tak-
ing over the Senate chamber in support of their clients.87 As of 30 March 2015,
the Senate returned to a position akin to the Sarkozy Law.88 Since then, both
83 Kim Willsher, “Scandal-weary France to Vote on Outlawing Prostitution”, The Observer,
3 December 2011; available at: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/dec/04/france
-prostitution-scandal-imprisonment/; last accessed 7 July 2017.
84 The intent was to prohibit procurers, pimps, and organized prostitution in accord with
the un Convention while confirming individual liberty.
85 France 24 coverage of the National Assembly vote, available at: http://www.france24
.com/en/20131204-french-assembly-parliament-votes-fine-pay-sex-clients-prostitution/;
last accessed 7 July 2017.
86 Report of the Commission spéciale chargée d’examiner la proposition de loi renforçant la
lutte contre le système prostitutionnel, available at: www.senat.fr/commission/spec/lutte
_contre_le_systeme_prostitutionnel/index.html; last accessed 7 July 2017.
87 France 24 coverage of the femen protest on 17 July 2014, available at: http://www.france24
.com/en/20140717-femen-members-do-topless-protest-french-senate-prostitution/; last
accessed 7 July 2017.
88 “Le Sénat pénalise les prostituées mais pas leur clients”, Le Monde.fr Société, 30 March
2015, available at: http://www.lemonde.fr/societe/article/2015/03/30/prostitution-le-senat
-retablit-le-delit-de-racolage_4606124_3224.html; last accessed 7 July 2017.
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200 Conner
houses of France’s parliament have made further modifications to the statute,
particularly concerning the links between prostitution and human trafficking,
reinsertion of former prostitutes into French society, and what to do about In-
ternet sites for cyber soliciting.
While prostitution cannot be separated from disease, violence, crime, and
human trafficking, the French situation is complex and fraught with paradox-
es. Where does individual liberty end, including the right to use one’s body as
a form of labour? Where does governmental intervention for the protection
of others begin? Is prostitution forced or free? Are all prostitutes victims, or
do some practise prostitution as a choice? Is prostitution a form of labour? If
prostitutes use parts of their bodies to ply their trade, in doing so, are they so
different from manual labourers who use their arms, backs, and hands to earn
a living?
Over a half century has passed since the adoption of the un Convention
and more than a decade since the Sarkozy Law magnified the contradictions
in French policy. The French are attempting to find a middle path, but it is not
possible to separate prostitution from prostitutes, whether they are French or
immigrant. If prostitution is permissible under the law, then it might be argued
that prostitutes should be entitled to equal protection and equal benefits. If
they attempt to leave prostitution, government support should be provided,
including access to social services, health care, and transitional training and
employment. If there are other issues, e.g., crime cartels, a continuing traffic
in human beings, and international procuring, then those issues must be dealt
with on their own terms. In the end, there are no easy answers, but as they have
been framed, the current laws remain unsatisfactory.
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chapter 8
Prostitution in Stockholm: Continuity and Change
Yvonne Svanström
Introduction
In 1889 a woman wrote to the Prostitution Bureau in Stockholm, Sweden, ask-
ing if she really did have to keep on visiting the bureau since she was working:
“…when I return [from visiting relatives] I will myself come and can perhaps
talk to the Constable if I have to visit the bureau since I work every day but
if they only once see you outside they think you are only looking for men.”1
The bureau the woman is referring to embodied the regulation system in the
1800s; in 1889 it had been in place in Stockholm for more than thirty years and
was a part of everyday life for people in Stockholm. It was supposedly in place
to control the spread of venereal diseases through medical examinations of
women involved in prostitution. But the woman was also referring to the arbi-
trariness of a system that was created through force and had developed into an
administration of prostitution rather than a tool for disease control; according
to her letter, she had another trade and should not have to be subject to such
examinations. But the system had created an identity known as a “prostitute”,
which meant that such women had less space for mobility.
The main purpose of this chapter is to discuss continuity and change con-
cerning what is termed prostitution. Trying to cover a time-span of 400 years,
starting off when prostitution in the capitalist sense did not exist, and end-
ing in a time when the purchase of what is termed “sexual services” is illegal,
makes comparisons problematic. This chapter has an empirical character and
it tries to cover both the social aspects of the lives of the women involved in
prostitution as well as consider the economic, spatial, and cultural aspects in-
volved. However, since Sweden, and thus Stockholm, was the first country to
criminalize the purchase of sex, this institutional change will be given some
space. Recently what has been termed “feminist institutionalism” has been
the focus in feminist political science specifically as regards the political.2 For
1 ei Inkomna skrivelser 1859–1918, Prostitutionsbyrån, Överståthållarens arkiv (öä), Stock-
holm City Archive [hereafter ssa].
2 Fiona Mackay “Conclusion: Towards a Feminist Institutionalism?” in Lena Krook et al., (eds),
Gender, Politics and Institutions (Basingstoke, 2010), pp. 181–196.
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202 Svanström
g ender historians, the aim of discussing and understanding change or a lack of
institutional change and its consequences for gender relations has been the fo-
cus for a long time. Sweden has had a strong state, from the absolute state into
the modern welfare state, and during the latter period it has been referred to as
“women-friendly”, although it has a labour market that is segregated according
to gender combined with a pay gap between men and women.3 How the state
has acted when it comes to prostitution has had impacts on both formal and
informal institutions; legislation has changed, but have the gendered power
relations and attitudes towards prostitution changed?4
Prostitution is historically constructed, and political and economic institu-
tional changes over time have led to both change and continuity in how pros-
titution is comprehended. However, the changes that have occurred during
the period covered here have been immense. Stockholm in the 1600s was an
impoverished small town in the Swedish Bothnian Empire which was more or
less constantly at war; four hundred years later Stockholm is a medium-sized
city (by European standards) in a post-welfare state which was left out of the
two World Wars. In the early 1600s Sweden had a harsh Protestant society com-
prised of four estates in which women were subordinated to men. In the 2000s,
Sweden is a supposedly gender-equal secularised democratic state, but with
widening economic and societal gaps. The settings are thus essentially differ-
ent, as is prostitution and how it has been perceived.5
Legislation on Extra-Marital Relations
Until 1999 the only legislation concerning prostitution pertained to brothel-
keeping and procuring. Brothel-keeping and procuring according to the 1734
criminal code were, and still are, illegal; women were fined, sent to the work-
house, or flogged if sentenced when found in a brothel.6 However, the charge
was not prostitution but fornication. In the criminal code of 1864, procuring
3 Helga Hernes, Welfare State and Woman Power: Essays in State Feminism (London, 1987);
Anette Borchorst and Birte Siim, “Woman-friendly Policies and State Feminism”, Theorizing
Scandinavian Gender Equality, Feminist Theory, 9 (2008), pp. 207–224.
4 Yvonne Svanström, “Through the Prism of Prostitution: Conceptions of Women and Sexual-
ity in Sweden at Two Fins-de-Siècle”, Nordic Journal of Women’s Studies, 13 (2005), pp. 48–58,
55–56.
5 For the sake of simplicity I will use the term “prostitution” throughout the chapter.
6 Underdånigt betänkande angående åtgärder för motarbetande af de smittosamma könssjuk-
domarnas spridning, 4 vols, (Stockholm, 1910) i, p. 179; Yvonne Svanström, Policing Public
Women: The Regulation of Prostitution in Stockholm 1812–1880 (Stockholm, 2000), p. 120.
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Prostitution in Stockholm: Continuity and Change 203
was penalized by forced labour for a period of six months to four years.7 At
the beginning of the second millennium, grave procuring is punished with a
maximum sentence of eight years imprisonment.8
Still, extra-marital sexuality was harshly penalized by both the state and
the church during the early modern period, in some instances by death. The
death penalty was introduced through the reformation, and perhaps because
of the country’s rural character the harshness regarding extra-marital sexual-
ity seems to have lingered on longer in Sweden than on the continent.9 Sexual
intercourse between unmarried couples, i.e. fornication, was also punished by
heavy fines, and if the parties could not pay they were sentenced to forced la-
bour. Both women and men were punished. It was the immorality of the crime,
the breaking of the commandments, that was penalised; hence both parties
had to pay. The severity of the punishment for these crimes was lessened over
time, and in practice the parties in adultery cases were often pardoned from
death.10 It was also common that the death punishment was reduced to flog-
ging.11 Still, when the first national codex was passed in Sweden in 1734, it was
largely uninfluenced by the Enlightenment, and even by contemporary com-
mentators it was considered to be conservative, especially concerning the fam-
ily and sexuality which it codified in the early-modern tradition.12 A number of
liberal reforms introduced in the late 1700s and early 1800s concerning extra-
marital sexuality mitigated the early modern legislation, and in the new crimi-
nal code of 1864, illegitimate sexual intercourse was decriminalized.
A piece of legislation that prevailed through the better part of the period
and was used to monitor prostitution was the vagrancy law. Under the terms
of the law, persons without employment or legal means to support themselves
would receive a warning and a chance to find employment, and if they did
not they would be incarcerated in the workhouse or sentenced to forced la-
bour.13 A new vagrancy law came into effect in 1885 and two categories of va-
grants were constructed: persons who wandered between different locations
7 Underdånigt betänkande, i, p. 46.
8 Svensk författningssamling, Brottsbalken, Ch. 6, §12.
9 Jonas Frykman, Horan i bondesamhället (Stockholm, 1993), passim.
10 Jan Eric Almquist, Karl ix och den mosaiska rätten (Uppsala, 1942), pp. 24–25.
11 Rudolf Thunander, Förbjuden kärlek: Sexualbrott, kärleksmagi och kärleksbrev i 1600-talets
Sverige (Stockholm, 1992), pp. 27–29.
12 Jan Sundin, För Gud, staten och folket: Brott och rättskipning i Sverige 1600–1840, (Stock-
holm, 1992), pp. 135–136. Sundin compares Sweden to the puritan colonies in North
America and finds that their legislation was more liberal.
13 Hans Wallentin, Lösdriveri och industrialism: Om lösdriverifrågan i Sverige 1885–1940
(Östersund, 1989), pp. 4–5.
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204 Svanström
and those whose lifestyles were a threat to common decency and society at
large. The legislation on extra-marital sexuality and the vagrancy legislation
constituted the legal foundation on which the regulation of prostitution was
built. After the abolishment of the regulation system, the vagrancy legislation
became the sole way of monitoring prostitution. The legislation was kept in
place until 1964.14
Early-Modern Stockholm: A Small Town
Stockholm was a small town for quite a long time. The town was poorly built
and had wooden houses and narrow alleys. However, during Sweden’s period
as a great power in the 1600s, the town changed; in 1634 the Royal Court, the
government, the parliament, and the central administration were located in
Stockholm which lead to an influx of merchants, civil servants, soldiers, and
citizens. In 1600 there were around 9,000 inhabitants and that figure increased
to 40,000 by the year 1700, largely due to immigration.15 Only after 1750 did the
population of Stockholm increase through birth. In fact, the many wars, the
decline of Sweden as a great state, and pestilence and cholera resulted at times
in decreases in the population. After losing the Great Northern War in 1721,
Sweden’s period as a super-power was over. In the 1700s Stockholm was Swe-
den’s largest manufacturing town, but there were high levels of unemployment
and poverty because of the stagnating economy, and the capital experienced
long-term stagnation and slow population growth until 1850. The consumption
of alcohol was high and so was mortality.16 Thus, during this long period of
both supremacy and stagnation Stockholm remained a small town, and there
were major economic differences between the estates and those outside the
estates, and women were at the bottom of that scale.
For One Daller and a Pair of Gloves: Prostitution in the 1600s
Society in the 1600s was patriarchal. The husband acted as the legal guardian
of the household and his wife. The religious ideology after the reformation up-
graded matrimony, and extra-marital sexuality was condemned both by the
14 Yvonne Svanström, “Prostitution as Vagrancy: Sweden 1923–1964”, Journal of Scandinavian
Studies in Criminology and Crime Prevention, 7 (2006), pp. 142–163.
15 Rapporten befolkningen i Stockholm 1252–2005. Stockholm with the closest suburbs, p. 55.
16 Lars Nilsson and Margareta Rye (eds), Staden på vattnet 1 (Stockholm, 2002).
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Prostitution in Stockholm: Continuity and Change 205
church and the state. This development coincided with a central state with
increasing power and a strong military complex, together with an increasing
bureaucratization of society. Living conditions were poor, especially as the re-
sult of constant wars and the taxes levied to finance them. Still, the absence
of men due to constant warfare created openings for women when it came
to undertaking novel labour. Women also started living with other men, since
their husbands had been gone for long periods of time. Such cases sometimes
ended up in court as adultery. The numbers of extra-marital relations were
probably rather low in this God-fearing Protestant small town, and a reason-
able assumption is that the women who were involved in “whoring” during this
time were among the worst off and already outside society.
The Stockholm City Memorials, a series of protocols or memoranda kept
at the magistrates’ courts, provide evidence of cases of “whoring” in the early
1600s.17 There were also cases of “insults” in which both men and women had
been called “whores” or accused of “whoring”. In one case, the maid of a man
named Christopher Keise was accused of having “earned 16 r.daller through
whoring.”18 If the accusation was true, prostitution seems to have been very
well paid; 16 r.daller would equal more than €400 in 2007.19
In the Stockholm City Memorials for 1618 there are references to what seems
to have been a fairly well-established brothel where a woman received 1 daller
and a pair of gloves for intercourse.20 The customers mentioned were both
married and unmarried: several merchants from Germany, a shoemaker, the
man-servant of a military commander, a soldier, a Dutch emissary, and others.
The married men who had had intercourse with married women at the brothel
were sentenced to steep fines (200 daller, the equivalent of more than €5000
in 2007), and when only one of the parties was married the fine was halved.
The women escaped from prison during the proceedings but appeared in court
again five years later for whoring and theft. Two of the women, one of whom
was also accused of procuring, were to lose an ear, be flogged by the pillory,
and be banned from the city. The other two were to “go by the cart for a time”
17 For this chapter, the period 1614–1635 is what has been possible to research, and obviously
the court material says nothing on the prevalence of “prostitution” as a whole.
18 Stockholms tänkeböcker från år 1592, Utgivna av Stockholms Stadsarkiv, vol. viii, 1614–
1615, 27 March 1615; Stockholms tänkeböcker, vol. x, 17 June 1618; Stockholms tänkeböcker,
vol. xii, 1620–1621, 27 September 1621. Also 17 December 1623; Stockholms tänkeböcker,
vol. xiii, 1622–1623, 22 August 1623, 17 October 1623.
19 Available at: http://www.historia.se/; last accessed 7 July 2017. Measured against consum-
er price index. Rodney Edvinsson, and Söderberg, Johan, 2011, “A Consumer Price Index
for Sweden 1290–2008”, Review of Income and Wealth, 57 (2011), pp. 270–292.
20 Stockholms tänkeböcker, vol. x, 4 November 1618.
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206 Svanström
(i.e. pull the latrine cart) and be flogged if they reappeared.21 About a week
later some of the women reappeared in court in connection with theft and “…
it was proven that Limping Margret has been whoring while her husband was
alive, and she will lose her life.”22
Twelve years later, in 1635, the pattern was different. Of the sixteen cases in
which sentencing occurred, there were no accusations of whoring.23 Instead
the cases concern adultery and fornication. Two women and three men were
sentenced to death (in at least one case this was carried out), two men were
pardoned, and seven women and three men were sentenced to fines.24
Based on the small sample investigated for this chapter, flogging and being
banned from the city seems to have been the most common punishment for
whoring/prostitution, and the only death sentence seems to have been con-
cerning adultery, or fornication when both parties were sentenced.25
“Maiden Cages” and the Mitigation of Sexuality: Prostitution
in the 1700s
Studies on Stockholm for the period of the 1700s mention frivolous attitudes
towards sexuality and there was a softening in perceptions of extra-marital
sexuality. At the turn of the 1700s, Stockholm had a population of 40,000 and
around 1,200 establishments licensed to sell liquor on their premises. Many
of these were run by women, with other women working as servant girls and
some establishments were run as brothels. By 1813 the number had decreased
to 700, and a new decree from the office of the governor stated that the num-
ber of taverns should be further reduced to 400 in order to control what was
regarded as excessive alcohol consumption among the citizens.26 So-called
coffee-houses eventually earned a bad reputation and were no longer “visited
21 Ibid., and vol xiii, 22 September 1623. Two days later it was reported that the punishments
had been carried out.
22 Stockholms tänkeböcker, vol. xiii, 4 October 1623.
23 In one case where an illegitimate child had been born the woman stated that the man
had promised her marriage and given her blue woollen socks for the harsh winter. This is
the only mention of gifts or remuneration. Stockholms tänkeböcker, vol. xxiii, 30 January
1635.
24 Stockholms tänkeböcker, vol. xxiii, 1635, pp. 2, 6, 20, 31–32, 37, 49, 62–63, 65, 90, 97, 103, 197,
202, 216–217, 223, 225, 230, 234, 244, 246, 259, 281, 290, 306–307, 312.
25 Stockholms tänkeböcker, vol. xii, 1620–1621, 28 March, 13 December 1620; 1 January, 14
March, 17 March, and 13 August 1621. In three cases the sentence was transformed.
26 Svanström, Policing Public Women, p. 55
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Prostitution in Stockholm: Continuity and Change 207
by proper people”, and in the 1800s they were more or less associated with
prostitution.27 The euphemism for brothels in the 1700s was “maiden cages”
and one case shows what seems to have been a well-known brothel in Stock-
holm that catered for high-class clientele.28 The father of one of the girls at the
brothel brought his daughter to court in 1747, and the madam was indicted as
a procurer.29
In the late 1700s a Polish Jesuit named Albertrandi visited Stockholm. He
wrote in a letter in 1789 that drinking alcohol was customary among men,
women, and children and that prostitution was plentiful; as he said, there was
“…an unrestricted looseness, which among the women in particular, knows no
boundaries; there are not even any attempts to keep this a secret.”30 The women
were said to be especially prone to wandering close to the theatres, indicating
a connection between the arts and prostitution.31 In the early 1700s, vagrancy
and begging was a growing problem and the number of men and women with-
out property increased. In 1724 a spinning workhouse was established in Stock-
holm “to fight vagrancy and begging”. “Loose” women who “ran with baskets in
the streets and inside the houses” were to be taken to the spinning workhouse.
According to the authorities, the selling of fruit was a cover for engaging in
prostitution. The same held true in the 1800s when “orange girls” (young girls
selling oranges) were assumed to be involved in prostitution.32 Earlier research
into the social and economic conditions of the late 1700s shows that the major-
ity of the women sentenced for “prostitution”, i.e. fornication, were categorized
as thread spinners. It is likely that the decline of the manufacturing industry in
27 Claes Lundin and August Strindberg, Gamla Stockholm, (Stockholm, 1882 [1974]), p. 506.
28 Among those were one major and two barons. Mila Hallman, Målare och urmakare, flickor
och lösdrivare. Historier från Gamla Stockholm (Stockholm, 1907), p. 123.
29 Hallman, Målare, pp. 126–27; Södra förstadens kämnärsrätt, A3A Protokoll och domar
i kriminalmål 30 June–2 October, 1747, ssa. The madam, Lovisa von Platen, is also men-
tioned in the well-known composer and poet Carl Michael Bellman’s “Fredmans Testa-
mente”, n. 149. The street mentioned is Baggensgatan, a street where a substantial number
of informal brothels existed during the 1800s. Svanström, Policing Public Women, pp. 298,
373, 463–464, 466.
30 Dagmar Anckarsvärd, “Stockholm 1789–1790 skildrat av en polsk kanik [Johannes Baptista
Albertrandi], in Samfundet St. Eriks Årsbok, (Stockholm, 1933).
31 The notion that women at the opera or the ballet in the 1700s at times acted as “call girls”
is to some degree corroborated through archival evidence, but the extent is not known.
Gunilla Roempke, Vristens makt. Dansös i mätressernas tidevarv (Stockholm, 1994).
32 Gunnar Rudstedt, Långholmen: Spinnhuset och fängelset under två sekler (Stockholm,
1972), p. 14.
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208 Svanström
the late 1700s, together with more lenient judicial practices, led women to try
other ways to make a living, perhaps by prostitution.33
Regulated Prostitution in the Modern Era
As in many other cities, the 1800s was an era of regulation and a fully-fledged
system was launched in the second half of the century. For the Swedish popu-
lation, the century began with the Napoleonic wars, but in 1809 a peace treaty
was signed by which Sweden lost its territory of Finland to Russia and entered
a long period without wars. The increase of venereal diseases and infected sol-
diers in the garrisons became the stepping stone for a regulation scheme.
Stockholm was still in demographic and economic stagnation and con-
tinued to be so until the mid-1800s. Industrialization took off rather late in
Sweden, but during the last decades of the century Stockholm stood out as
a booming industrial town which attracted immigrants from the rest of the
country. Women mostly worked as unskilled labourers in factories or as home
workers. In the 1860s the textile industry’s workforce consisted of up to 67 per
cent women, and the cigar industry employed women as well, but 66 per cent
of all working women in Stockholm worked as domestic servants.34 The early
introduction of a public school system guaranteed that the majority of the in-
habitants could read and write on a basic level.
Extra-marital sexual relations were still punishable at the beginning of the
century, but the inhabitants’ sexual habits had already made the legislation
obsolete. “Stockholm-marriages” was used as a term to describe common-law
marriages in the 1800s, indicating that Stockholm was a town where sexual and
family norms were different from other parts of Sweden. The number of chil-
dren born out of wedlock in Stockholm was considerably higher than in any
other town in Sweden and also higher than in larger cities in Europe.35
Early Attempts at Control
The prevalence of venereal diseases in the country led the Four Estates to
issue a Royal Circular in 1812 stipulating that before issuing in-country trav-
elling passes, “wandering” groups in society should be subjected to medical
33 Johan Söderberg et al., A Stagnating Metropolis: The Economy and Demography of Stock-
holm, 1750–1850 (Cambridge, 1991), p. 62.
34 Hammarström, Stockholm i svensk ekonomi, p. 11. Table i:1. Söderberg et al., A Stagnating,
p. 54.
35 Svanström, Policing Public Women, p. 52.
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Prostitution in Stockholm: Continuity and Change 209
examinations, and that included “loose women” but also men who were part
of “wandering trades”. In Stockholm, the municipality chose to focus solely on
women from the start, raiding certain coffee houses and inns and examining
the women there. The military filed complaints, asking for further measures
because the number of infected soldiers had increased. Attempts in 1835 to
force women in the streets to undergo medical examinations failed after vio-
lent opposition from the women themselves.
The next attempt made by the authorities was the establishment of munici-
pal brothels in 1838, although these establishments were illegal according to
the existing legislation. The brothels were named the Stadt Hamburg and the
London, as seen in the area shown in Map 8.1, signifying that this “sin” came
from abroad. The high prices at these brothels suggest that they catered for
a high-class clientele. These establishments only stayed open for a couple of
months and after some protests and rioting they were shut down in their mu-
nicipal capacity.36
The actual regulation of prostitution in Stockholm started in 1847 with
municipally organised medical examinations, but it was not until 1859 that a
proper regulation system was established. The Stockholm system was partly
fashioned after the French model; the section that stipulated women’s mobil-
ity and dress-codes was an exact replica of the French by-law, but after the inci-
dent in 1838, brothels were never included in the statutes. However, there were
a significant number of unofficial brothels, so-called coffee-houses (indicated
on Map 8.1 as domiciles), where regulated women lived and were subjected to
medical examinations.37
The Demographic and Economic Patterns of Regulated Women
Among the women involved in the regulated system of prostitution in 1859,
79 per cent had previously worked in domestic service.38 This pattern holds
true for the remainder of the century, although over time the number of wom-
en who had been involved in industrial and manual labour increased some-
what.39 During the period 1885–1904, the background of some women was
lower middle-class but the majority came from poorer segments of society and
the majority of the women were born in Stockholm.40 This is of course related
36 Ibid., pp. 259–275, 328–329.
37 Ibid., passim.
38 Stamrulla 1 1859–1866, DVa1, Prostitutionsbyrån, öä, ssa.
39 Johan E. Johansson, Reglementeringen i Stockholm, (Stockholm, 1913), p. 47.
40 Johan E. Johansson, “Statistisk utredning angående reglementeringen i Stockholm
1859–1905” in Underdånigt, vol. iii, pp. 75–76.
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210 Svanström
n
THE INSPECTION
BUREAU
o
r
THE
LONDON
bs
kpp
e
S
THE STADT HAMBURG
Domicile of medically registered women in 1847
Domicile of regulated women in 1859
Domicile of medically registered women in 1847 and regulated women in 1859
Domicile of regulated women in 1859 and 1869
All indicated domiciles had three or more regulated women as inhabitants at
the same time
Map 8.1 Stockholm between the bridges showing domiciles of registered and regulated women,
1847–1869 (currently the Old Town).
Source: Policing Women, p. 352.
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Prostitution in Stockholm: Continuity and Change 211
to the limitations of travel but still in the late 1900s the majority of the women
involved in prostitution were born in Sweden.41
The women were on the whole very young when they were first taken into
the system; during the period 1859–1904, the median age varies from 21.1 to
24.3 years of age. The highest median age, 24.3, dates from 1859, which can be
explained by the fact that the women who were then registered in the new
system had been active for a long time and were already known to the police.42
Of all the women registered in the first year, 30 per cent had children but in 14
per cent of those cases the children were dead. Only 3 per cent of the women
had children while registered in the system and very few of them were mar-
ried. The figures for the period 1885–1904 show that 29 per cent of the women
had had children before being registered.43 As regards religion and ethnicity,
Sweden was a fairly homogenous country during the major part of the period
discussed in this chapter, and as many as 66 per cent of the regulated women
had given their confirmation.44
The Structure of Prostitution
As can be deduced from Map 8.1, the Old Town had a large number of coffee-
houses and this area was also where soliciting was primarily carried out until
the 1870s. With a booming economy came a restructuring of the town with
new industries and shopping areas, and prostitution moved to Norrmalm, an
area close to the Opera House, and to the garrison area, Östermalm, which
in the late 1870s was restructured and gradually was frequented by high-class
clientele. Women who were registered for the first time in 1869, all gave one
of those two areas as their area of residence. Left in the Old Town, by then a
dilapidated area, were women who were in trouble with the police, whereas
the more “professional” women had moved to the new areas.45 At the end of
the 1800s and in the early 1900s so called “party-hotels” appeared on the scene,
renting out rooms by the hour to “parties of two”. The ill-reputed street Norra
Smedjegatan in Norrmalm had seven hotels with a total of 130 rooms.46 At the
beginning of the 1900s so-called “girls’ places” were also very common. These
were run by a madam or the proprietor of the house; only in 4 per cent of the
41 Johansson, “Statistisk”, p. 69.
42 Johansson, Reglementeringen, p. 41; Stamrullor 1859, DVa1, Prostitutionsbyrån, öä, ssa.
43 Johansson, “Statistisk”, p. 68.
44 Johansson, Reglementeringen, p. 41. Stamrullor 1859, DVa1, Prostitutionsbyrån, öä, ssa.
45 Svanström, Offentliga, p. 268.
46 The same area, but further north, has since the 1970s been connected to street soliciting
and kerb crawling, where the street Malmskillnadsgatan is singled out.
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212 Svanström
cases were any of the women also actively involved in prostitution herself, a
pattern that seems to hold true also in more recent times. The places were run
more or less like brothels, sometimes with a common room for “socializing”
with over-priced drinks and fruit. The women lived in the brothels.47
An official investigation was appointed in 1902 concerning the regulation
system and resulted in a report which stated that male procurers or brothel
owners were not as common as they were on the continent. However, the capi-
tal was an exception, and the pimping business was a permanent phenom-
enon in the late 1890s, most commonly in the Old Town, but few of the women
worked with pimps.48 There is no substantial evidence concerning violence
or the conditions in which the women worked. The majority of the registered
women in the 1800s had had venereal diseases, but there is little data concern-
ing other conditions. However, the mortality rate among registered women
during from 1871 to 1890 was twice as high as among unmarried women on
the whole in Stockholm.49 Data show that some of the women tried to pro-
tect themselves from diseases; more than 73 per cent performed some sort of
check-up on the men before intercourse or insisted on contraceptives. At times
they would also let themselves be examined, and some women showed marks
of candle and cigarette burns which they stated came from those occasions,
but more likely those were marks resulting from violence.50
Careers in Prostitution? Creating “the Prostitute”
The regulation dating from 1859 did not mention prostitution in terms of work
or discuss economic remuneration; rather, the focus was on offenses against
public decency and morals. The women who were to be examined were
47 Johansson, “Statistisk”, p. 179.
48 Hjalmar von Sydow, “Om soutenörväsendet”, in Underdånigt, vol. iv, p. 11. von Sydow was
the chief of police in Stockholm in 1898 and 1899. Letters to the Prostitution Bureau also
bore witness to women living with men and accepting customers at the same house. agw
Hillerstrand, Letter to the Prostitution Bureau, Stockholm den 20 April 1867, ei Inkomna
skrivelser 1859–1918, Prostitutionsbyrån, öä, ssa.
49 Johansson, “Statistisk”, pp. 105–106.
50 Anders Lindgren, “Statistisk undersökning angående skörlevande”, in Underdånigt vol. iii,
pp. 38–39. Nevertheless, there is good reason to be careful when using these figures, since
all women in the research population except 41 (who were in Magdalene homes or at the
poor house) were at the lock hospital, and the person interviewing them was the chief
physician at the same hospital. His approach in the report is quite misogynist.
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Prostitution in Stockholm: Continuity and Change 213
described as women who were “engaged in lecherous living […].”51 In 1875 the
system of regulation was revised, and for the first time the commercial charac-
ter of prostitution was mentioned as well as the word “prostitute”: “A prostitute
is considered to be each and every woman who has been proven to be leading
a lecherous life as a profession.”52
Until the last decades of the 1800s, payment is hardly mentioned in pam-
phlets and other documents on prostitution. Prostitution was portrayed as an
immoral act rather than as an (immoral) economic transaction. A study con-
ducted on 800 women at the lock hospital between 1904 and 1906 gives some
indications regarding remuneration in the early 1900s. Prices ranged between
25 öre to 25 crowns per sexual contact (mostly intercourse). Older women had
the lowest pay; one of them stated that sometimes she only got a couple of
drinks as payment, and if she occasionally got a crown it was “grand”.53 5–10
crowns per act of intercourse was the average payment, and according to a
contemporary investigation the absolute minimum a working class woman
needed for sustenance was 10 crowns a week.54 10 crowns in 1906 would equal
around €50 in 2007.55 However, statistics show that the women on average
spent about 25 per cent of the year off the streets, either in forced labour, the
lock hospital, or in prison (see also differences between groups in Table 8.1.)
and thus were unable to make money. Registered women also had to pay more
than the average rent.56
As many as 64 per cent of the women registered in 1859 left the regulated
system after six years or less and had few or no dealings with the authorities,
and they were fairly young. The remaining 36 per cent were older and stayed
in the system between 14 to 18 years. Two different types of life stories may be
distinguished here: one a sort of “professional” career with little contact with
the police or physicians, and the other a more troubled life with several arrests
and periods spent at the lock hospital (see Table 8.1).
51 Svanström, Policing Public Women, p. 146.
52 Clas Malmroth, “Om de smittosamma könssjukdomarnas bekämpande i Sverige m. m”, in
Underdånigt, vol. iv, p. 197.
53 Lindgren, “Statistisk undersökning”, p. 50.
54 Gerda Meyerson, Våra arbeterskors ställning och medlen att förbättra den (Stockholm,
1907).
55 Available at: http://www.historia.se/; last accessed 7 July 2017. Measured against consum-
er price index.
56 Lindgren, “Statistisk undersökning”, pp. 51–59.
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214 Svanström
Table 8.1 ‘Careers’ of regulated women, Stockholm 1859.
Group N=211a Age(median) of Years at the Punishments Visits at Number of
last notation in Bureau (average) the kurhus women and %
register (median) (average) of N
1. Beginners 26 1 0 0 62 (29%)
2. “Average” 31 6 0.7 0.7 73 (35%)
3. Professionals 40 14 2.1 1 26 (12%)
4. Disorderly 42 18 7.9 8 50 (24%)
Total 211 (100%)
a The total number of regulated women in 1859 weas 220, but due to falling offs the number is
here reduced to 211.
Source: Stamrulla 1, 1859–1866, Dva1a, Prostitutionsbyråns arkiv, öä, ssa (here
from Svanström, Policing Public Women, p. 384)
Over time it seems that the women tended to stay longer in prostitution.
The number of women who stayed in the system steadily increased although
the number of women who were registered for the first time (mean value)
remained at around 109 women per year (see Graph 8.1). This increase is most
likely explained by the system itself, in terms of increased police attention in
combination with women’s increased awareness of the system; entering pros-
titution may have been a calculated risk or a sign of destitution but either way
the regulation system was a reality. The revision carried out in 1875 also en-
tailed an intensification of controls.
Graph 8.1. also indicates that there was a significant decrease in registered
women from 1902 until the outbreak of World War i. A public commission
tasked with investigating the future of the regulation system was appointed
in 1902, meaning that the vigilance of the police wavered as they awaited the
outcome. The increase in registered women from 1914 until 1917 must be seen
in light of World War i and military preparedness; the increased number of
Home Guards and drafted servicemen in the capital city drew the attention of
the police towards possible soliciting. In 1904, the number of registered women
was at its peak with 904 women in the system in Stockholm.57 Over time it be-
came more and more difficult to leave the system of regulation, which resulted
in the creation of a group of “professionalized” public women.
57 Johansson, “Statistisk”, p. 7.
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Prostitution in Stockholm: Continuity and Change 215
600
500
400
300
200
100
0
1866
1867
1868
1869
1870
1871
1872
1873
1874
1875
1876
1877
1878
1879
1880
1881
1882
1883
1884
1885
1886
1887
1888
1889
1890
1891
1892
1893
1894
1895
1896
1897
1898
1899
1900
1901
1902
1903
1904
1905
1906
1907
1908
1909
1910
1911
1912
1913
1914
1915
1916
1917
Year
Regulated at the beginning of the year Regulated for the first time
Re-regulated (after hospital or prison)
Graph 8.1 Number of regulated women in Stockholm, 1866–1917.
Absolute numbers.
Sources: Graph earlier published in Svanström, Offentliga
kvinnor where the sources are accounted for.
Questioning the System: The Abolishment of the Regulation
of Prostitution
Sweden and Stockholm were not the first to abolish the regulation system; in
fact, in the Nordic context, it was the last. When the system of regulation was
abolished in 1918, it had outlived itself by far. A law which dictated mandatory
medical examinations for both sexes (when individuals themselves suspected
they were infected, or when they were reported on by others for suspicion of
venereal diseases) was voted through in parliament in 1918.
On the one hand, we could say that the system of regulation created modern
prostitution, a phenomenon overseen by the state and its acting institutions
such as legislative, punitive, and medical institutions. The system was enforced
at the municipal level when the country was still governed by the Four Estates,
but more to the point it was upheld during a period of liberal breakthroughs
by which individual rights for women gradually increased and the system of
regulation was revised according to the commercial standards of an industrial
market society. The rights of the women whose lives were controlled by the
regulation system thus decreased over time. On the other hand, when change
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216 Svanström
finally came about it came from within the state itself, although it was pre-
ceded by the critiques of autonomous groups of different kinds.
The Aftermath of the Regulation System
Sweden did not actively take part in World War i, but Stockholm was affected
in terms of food crises and the rationing of food, which led to revolutionary
tendencies and food riots. The presence of the Home Guards during the war
years increased police alertness regarding prostitution (see Graph 8.1.). The
interwar years were a period of transformations in different ways; a popula-
tion explosion occurred and the population increased by almost 100,000, and
by 1930, Stockholm was a city of 502,000 inhabitants.58 Most women worked
in trade and public services.59 Unemployment was high, around 25 per cent
in the early 1920s and 10 per cent for the rest of the decade. Unemployment
increased again in the 1930s, and not until after World War ii did those figures
drop down to around 1–2 per cent. In 1921 women acquired the right to vote,
and married women gained their legal majority—three years after the regula-
tion system was abolished. The old shacks in various areas in Stockholm were
demolished and replaced by apartment buildings, but the need for housing
was great. It was during the postwar years that the Swedish economy really
took off and a welfare society developed.
Prostitution as Vagrancy or Psychopathology
After the abolition of the regulation system, there is scattered information
about prostitution in Stockholm. The control of women involved in prostitution
continued but on a less transparent level, and there were complaints about the
arbitrariness of the legislation. During the interwar years, which were marred
by high unemployment and numerous strikes, anti-vagrancy legislation was
often invoked—both for men and women—and after the regulation system
was abolished, vagrancy legislation was the sole control mechanism for pros-
titution. In this period it was argued that prostitution had changed and that
“full-time” prostitutes did not exist anymore; instead the women were younger
and held regular employment, and did prostitution on the side.60 This was also
the opinion stated in various government reports on vagrancy.
58 Rapporten befolkningen i Stockholm 1252–2005, p. 55.
59 Lena Eriksson, Arbete till varje pris: arbetslinjen i 1920-talets arbetslöshetspolitik, (Stock-
holm, 2004), p. 152.
60 Tidevarvet, 1930:51/52, p. 2. However, the occurrence of youths in prostitution is a com-
mon subject for debate, and also occurred in the late 1800s as well as the late 1900s.
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Prostitution in Stockholm: Continuity and Change 217
The reports and discussions in the 1800s had focused on what was seen as
depravity and the “sinful” disposition of the women involved in prostitution.
From the 1920s onwards this approach was replaced by the then-current de-
velopment of psychopathology. The mental state of these women was given
centre stage, and state investigations showed the expected result: the majority
of prostitutes were “sociopaths”, prostitution was seen as hereditary, and ster-
ilization was proposed as one way of preventing future prostitution.61 Pimping
was reported to have increased and the claim was made that some male pimps
who worked with women were also prostituting themselves to other men and
then blackmailing them. According to the same report the women held prosti-
tuted men in contempt.62
During the period 1923–1937, between 412 and 550 women were warned, de-
tained, or arrested yearly for vagrancy and 68 per cent of the time it was for
soliciting.63 For the period 1945–1959 that figure decreased from 675 in 1945 to
250 in 1959; the high figure in 1945 was likely the result of military preparedness
during World War ii which resulted in an increased number of men in the cap-
ital and police alertness.64 We cannot assume that all of the women who were
arrested for vagrancy were involved in prostitution but it makes it possible to
make a rough guess. In the 1950s the legislation on vagrancy was invoked less,
and in 1964 it was abolished.
The Swedish Sin
During the immediate after-war years and in the 1950s and ‘60s Sweden en-
joyed a period of almost zero unemployment. During such times of prosperity
it was possible for some married women to stay at home, but because the ma-
jority of the Swedish population was involved in agricultural production well
into the 1930s, most married women were working alongside their husbands.
The 1950s are thus seen as a period when married women from all segments
61 Svanström, “Prostitution as Vagrancy, pp. 148–152.
62 Gustav Jonsson, “Soutenören som psykologisk och social typ”, in Festskrift tillägnad Olof
Kinberg på 65-årsdagen 23/9 1938 av vänner och lärjungar (Stockholm, 1938), p. 190. Ho-
mosexuality was a criminal offence until 1944, and termed a psychological disorder until
1979.
63 Betänkande med förslag till lagstiftning om åtgärder mot lösdriveri samt åtgärder mot sedes-
löst leverne av samhällsskadlig art, (Stockholm 1929), p. 205. An additional six women of
foreign nationality had been arrested for vagrancy. In 1928 Stockholm only had around
474,000 inhabitants. Betänkande med förslag till lag om arbetsfostran m.m, (Stockholm,
1939), Bilaga D., p. 22.
64 Samhällsfarlig asocialitet (Stockholm, 1962), p. 212.
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218 Svanström
of society could and perhaps were expected to refrain from work and stay at
home. During this period there seems to have been no need to investigate or
debate prostitution as a societal phenomenon, or even as a work-related prob-
lem regarding women.65 The 1960s was a decade when “sexuality became the
talk of the day”, and there were concerns about Sweden’s reputation abroad
because of what was perceived as a massive export of pornographic magazines
and a more liberal attitude towards portraying nudity and sexuality in motion
pictures than in other countries.66 Massage parlours and nude photograph stu-
dios were established, and at the end of the 1960s the first topless cafés started
opening in Stockholm, and some of these later developed into brothel-like es-
tablishments.67 At the same time, reports about what were seen as the short-
comings of the welfare state described prostitution as a “white stain on the
otherwise so detailed map of the welfare state.”68 In the early 1970s the pub-
lishing of “material offensive to public decency” was decriminalised, and por-
nographic pictures could be printed freely.69 The evening papers’ Stockholm
editions were filled with advertisements for pornographic shows and sex clubs.
Street prostitution, nude studios, and sex clubs could be established and oper-
ate with little or no interference from the authorities.70
The Structure of Prostitution
At the beginning of the 1970s the number of massage parlours and nude pos-
ing studios was around 100 to 110, but ten years later it had decreased to twenty.
65 However, there were reports of both prostitution and procuring in the late 1930s and in
the ‘40s and ‘50s: “We are around 10–12 in the gang—it is almost possible to form a union.
We all walk the street, us girls, but the others also have a permanent position so they
don’t get caught. The boys don’t do anything, they mostly live off us.” Gunnar Inghe and
Maj-Britt Inghe, Den ofärdiga välfärden (Stockholm, 1968), p. 163.
66 Klara Arnberg, “Under the Counter, Under the Radar? The Business and Regulation of
the Pornographic Press in Sweden 1950–1971”, Journal of American History, Enterprise &
Society, 13 (2012), p. 350–377; Lena Lennerhed, Frihet att njuta: Sexualdebatten i Sverige på
1960-talet (Stockholm, 1994), p. 99.
67 Leif G.W. Persson, Horor, hallickar och torskar: en bok om prostitutionen i Sverige (Stock-
holm 1981), pp. 68–69; Arne Borg et al., Prostitution: beskrivning, analys, förslag till åt-
gärder (Stockholm, 1982), p. 513.
68 Inghe and Inghe, Den ofärdiga, p. 164.
69 Klara Arnberg, Motsättningarnas marknad: Den pornografiska pressens kommersiella ge-
nombrott och reglering av pornografi I Sverige 1950–1980 (Lund, 2010), p. 277.
70 A proposal for state-run brothels was raised in parliament by a conservative member of
parliament but was opposed. Susanne Dodillet, Är sex arbete? Svensk och tysk prostitution-
spolitik sedan 1970-talet (Stockholm, 2009), pp. 52–64.
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Prostitution in Stockholm: Continuity and Change 219
The decline had to do with restrictions on placing advertisements in the news-
papers, and the fact that the market was saturated. Police attention increased
after a number of illegal brothels were discussed in the media, which scared
some landlords into not renting out their apartments to women in prostitution
(see below). In these establishments around 145 women had been active, fifty
of them on a regular basis. The majority was born in Sweden and around 15
per cent of the women were from countries in eastern Europe. Around 30 per
cent of the women were married. In general they were older than the women
involved in street prostitution.71 At the end of the same decade street prostitu-
tion in Stockholm constituted about 50 per cent of the total street prostitu-
tion in Sweden. The areas used for streetwalking were more or less the same as
in the late 1800s. More than 95 per cent of the prostitution was at Malmskill-
nadsgatan, and on a daily basis from fifty to hundred women were active day
and night.72 Although the majority of the women were still of Swedish origin
(74 per cent), the number of women born outside of Sweden had increased.
Of those, 14 per cent were from Finland and the rest were from Poland, Yu-
goslavia, Turkey, and some non-European countries; very few were married.73
Only around a hundred women were active in prostitution for more than three
years—a significant change compared to the period of regulation.74 In 1977 the
price for intercourse was estimated to be 300 crowns, around €130.75 Pimping
occurred but had become more professionalised; although men living off one
“girlfriend” continued to exist, the prevalence of men who “kept” a number of
women had increased.76
Reactions against a “Commercialisation of Sexuality”
In the mid-1970s a number of events coincided which changed how prostitu-
tion was perceived, both nationwide but mostly in the country’s capital. In 1976
a public commission’s report on sexual crimes suggested that the severity of
the penalty for rape, incest, and sexual contacts with children, should, among
other things, depend on the victims’ actions before the occasion. The report
71 Borg, Prostitution, pp. 476–478.
72 Ibid., pp. 468–469, Persson, Horor, pp. 57–58, 80–82.
73 Persson, Horor, pp. 83–84. Because of issues relating to social security numbers the group
was reduced from 339 to 309. Borg, Prostitution, pp. 471–472.
74 Ibid., p. 474.
75 Ibid., p. 465. More available at: http://www.historia.se/; last accessed 7 July 2017. Measured
against consumer price index.
76 Persson, Horor, pp. 131, 138–139.
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220 Svanström
was severely criticized and as a consequence a new public commission on sex-
ual crimes was appointed, together with a separate commission tasked with
looking into prostitution.77
The same year a call girl ring in Stockholm was broken up after extensive po-
lice surveillance. It led to imprisonment for the woman in charge. There were
around forty women involved in the business, some of them underage. The
case received much media attention, especially since there were rumours that
high-ranking politicians were among the clients.78 A series of television shows
in 1976–1978 had a major impact. In one programme young girls on Malmskill-
nadsgatan were interviewed which led to an extensive debate in the media.
Another mapped the prevalence of apartment brothels in Stockholm; it was
estimated that 170 brothels existed and landlords had organized them, acting
as brothel-keepers and charging the women over-priced rents. The result of the
television programme was that the landlords evicted these women out of fear
of being accused of pimping and intensified raids by the police.79
In the print media a debate emerged in which three prostitutes who had
established a small organization called the Sexual Political Front (Sexual-
politisk front) participated.80 They had ten demands, and they identified
three approaches to handling prostitution: legalization, criminalization, or
abolition. The merits of the last alternative were pointed out: “It would help
prostitutes get away from pimps and move on to education, work and a new
identity.”81 However, the Sexual Political Front saw the first approach as be-
ing more realistic: “Only when prostitutes pay tax […] can they have demands
on society.”82 Their other demands were liberalized legislation on procuring
and putting a halt to clampdowns on visible prostitution. They also pointed
out that the recruitment of women into prostitution could also be stopped by
enabling “women’s right to work with decent pay.”83 In Stockholm a number
77 Ulrika Thomsson, “‘Rätten till våra kroppar’: Kvinnorörelsen och våldtäktsdebatten”, Kvin-
novetenskaplig tidskrift, 4 (2000), pp. 51–64.
78 Hanna Olsson, “Från manlig rättighet till lagbrott: prostitutionsfrågan i Sverige under 30
år, Kvinnovetenskaplig tidskrift, 4 (2006), pp. 52–73.
79 Kvinnobulletinen, 4–1 (1977/78), pp. 36–37. Persson, Horor, pp. 213–215.
80 Kvinnobulletinen, 4–1 (1977/78), pp. 36–37. The organisation was rather small. Of the three
women two were based in Stockholm and the third was in Malmö.
81 Kvinnobulletinen, 2 (1977), p. 4.
82 Ibid.
83 Sexualpolitisk front: “Detta är sexualpolitisk front: Förbundet presenterar sitt program”,
Pockettidningen R¸7 (1977), pp. 128–129.
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Prostitution in Stockholm: Continuity and Change 221
of public protests occurred where political groups that would not normally
come together joined in protests against what was seen as a more brutal and
commercialized form of sexuality, and they demanded that prostitution and
pornography be abolished.84
The period 1918–76 can be seen as the aftermath of the regulation system of
the 1800s, a time that was characterized by both a state and municipality that
was clutching at straws when it came to handling prostitution, which, needless
to say, affected women involved in prostitution and society’s views.
Criminalizing the Purchase of Sexual Services
The 1980s marked a turning point in how prostitution was discussed and char-
acterized. In 1981 the commission on prostitution that had been appointed in
1976 produced its results.85 The politically appointed commissioner proposed
to the government that the organizing of public pornographic shows should be
prohibited (which would in effect put the so-called sex-clubs out of business)
and state economic support for preventive work against prostitution should
be provided.86 The ensuing bill produced by the government was similar in
content; it was voted through in parliament and implemented in 1982.87 Prosti-
tution was framed as a societal issue and a result of a patriarchal and capitalist
84 Jeanette Gentele (ed.), Ta strid för kärleken—kamp mot porr och prostitution: En antologi
utgiven av Aktionen kamp mot porr och prostitution (Stockholm, 1979); Gunilla Fredelius
(ed.) Ett onödigt ont: En antologi mot porr och prostitution (Stockholm, 1978). Protests had
occurred earlier as well; in 1973 about thirty women went into one of the sex clubs and
protested against the selling of sex. The women in the club threw them out, after allegedly
having been told by the manager they would not get paid if they did not act against the
protesters. There were different reactions within the women’s movement about whether
this was an efficient way to protest, as it would seem that women within the autonomous
women’s movement and women in prostitution were in disagreement. Kvinnobulletinen,
3/4 (1973), p. 34.
85 Persson, Horor, pp. 215–218; Dodillet, Är sex arbete?, pp. 124–127; Borg, Prostitution, p. 15;
Olsson, “Från manlig rättighet”, p. 62.
86 Undercover research by a sociologist participating in the public commission came to the
conclusion that if there was prostitution at the sex-clubs in Stockholm “it must be both
discreet and of little degree.” Persson, Horor, p. 74.
87 Regeringens proposition 1981/82:187, pp. 1–4. Noteworthy is that the commission report,
and also the separate publication from the experts, all advised against a legislation that
would only criminalize the client.
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222 Svanström
society, whereas earlier reports had described women in prostitution as either
morally depraved or psychologically abnormal. Furthermore, the focus started
to shift from the seller in prostitution to the demand for sexual services.
Increased Parliamentary Activity
After the change in legislation in 1982 there was increased activity in parlia-
ment. From 1983 to 1993 more than fifty bills were presented regarding pros-
titution, and of those about thirty proposed criminalizing the purchase of
sex. In 1992 another public commission on prostitution was appointed; it was
to map out the prevalence of both homo- and heterosexual prostitution and
also to look into possibilities of criminalization. When the result came back,
there were disagreements within the commission on the final recommen-
dation about whether or not to criminalize both the client and the seller of
sex. According to the commissioner this was to be undertaken in the name of
Swedish gender equality; since there were two parties involved, both should
be criminalized.88 The report was severely criticised, both in the media and
in the remiss89 procedure: only two of the sixty-four bodies invited to give an
opinion supported the proposal. After the 1970s and ’80s when the issues of
exploitation, male patriarchy, and women’s rights were on the agenda, the pro-
posal made by the commission can be seen as a nullification in which gender
equality was reduced to counting participants, regardless of society’s power
structures. The report did not lead to a government bill and instead the govern-
ment awaited the recommendations from the commission on violence against
women. In the final bill, prostitution was taken up together with violence
against women. The criminalization of the client, rather than both parties, was
proposed and voted through in parliament and the legislation was introduced
in 1999. Until 2010 the maximum penalty was 6 months imprisonment which
in 2010 was increased to one year. The debate around the legislation was in-
tense, and it continued among researchers and in the media and parliament,
and continues to do so. Women involved in prostitution argued both for and
88 Yvonne Svanström, “Criminalising the John: A Swedish Gender Model?” in Joyce Out-
shoorn (ed.), The Politics of Prostitution: Women’s Movements, Democratic States, and the
Globalisation of Sex Commerce (Cambridge, 2004), pp. 225–244, 233–235.
89 The “remiss” procedure is where parts of the state apparatus and organisations outside
the state with special competence give their expert opinion on reports before a legislative
bill is drafted.
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Prostitution in Stockholm: Continuity and Change 223
against the legislation, and so did others. This was more or less the first time
the term “sex worker” was used in the debate.90
Voices Speaking Out about the Legislation
The change that took place in the early 1900s when the regulation system was
abolished was by no means responded to with silence, nor was the legislation
that replaced it. In the same way, the legislation dating from 1999 was both
globally unique and celebrated, and also criticised and ridiculed. Since then
the legislation has been copied in various countries, but is hotly contested.
What the advocates of the legislation hoped to achieve was to support women
in prostitution, using the legislation as a deterrent both for women to enter
and to make it easier to leave prostitution while deterring prospective clients
from buying sex. Critics argued that the legislation would only increase the
number of violent clients since the “good guys” would refrain from taking part.
It was also predicted that prostitution would go underground, making it more
difficult to assist women in need of help.
In 2008 there were two organizations for women involved in prostitution:
The Prostitutes’ Rights/Revenge in Society pris (Prostituerades Rätt/Revansch
i Samhället) and The Sex Sellers’ and Allies’ Network in Sweden sans (Sexsäl-
jares och allierades nätverk i Sverige).91 The 1999 legislation has been interpret-
ed in diverse ways among women working in prostitution. How these opinions
are dispersed differs depending on which report or research you rely on. Some
argue that you cannot see that people involved in prostitution are less enthu-
siastic about the legislation than those who have left sex work, whereas oth-
ers argue that there is such a pattern.92 One the one hand, some sex workers
say that the legislation deters women from prostitution (and men from buy-
ing) and that they would be personally offended if the authorities accepted
prostitution. On the other hand, some women argue that the legislation gives
women poor protection. One woman stated that if she experienced violence as
an escort she did not report it for fear of being exposed and losing customers.93
90 Svanström, “Criminalising the john”, pp. 225, 236–241.
91 Förbud mot köp av sexuell tjänst: en utvärdering 1999–2008: sou 2010:49 (Stockholm, 2010).
The first organization is available at: http://www.nätverketpris.se; last accessed 7 July
2017. The second organization’s webpage cannot be found.
92 Kännedom om prostitution 2007 (Socialstyrelsen, 2007), p. 47; Förbud mot köp av sexuell,
pp. 129–130.
93 Kännedom om prostitution 2007, p. 47
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224 Svanström
Initially, when the legislation to criminalize the purchase of prostitution
was launched, there was, if no resistance, still certain question marks regarding
how judicial institutions implemented the legislation. Special consideration
was shown to the buyers of sex; summons to interrogations in connection with
reported crimes were sent to men’s places of work rather than to their homes.94
Public polls showed that there was strong support for the legislation and many
agreed with the idea that buying sexual services is wrong: from 2001 to 2009, 76
to 71 per cent of the population supported the legislation.95
The Structure of Prostitution in the Second Millennium
Immediately after the legislation on prostitution was put into place, street
prostitution in Stockholm decreased by 64 per cent, and while it varied over
the following ten-year period that the legislation has been in place, that de-
crease has remained constant. The prevalence of prostitution in Stockholm
has been estimated more or less regularly since the legislation was implement-
ed in 1999. Figures from the early 1990s, however, are more difficult to obtain.
In an interview in 1992, a social worker at Malmskillnadsgatan estimated that
the number of working women in street prostitution was around 200 and that
they had varying backgrounds and education levels (see Table 8.2).96
Table 8.2 Estimates of number of women in street prostitution, Stockholm 1998–2008.
Stockholm 1998 1999 2003a 2005 2006 2008
280 170 200 150 200 180
Population in 1998 736 113, in 2008 810 000
a There was a high level of discrepancy in Stockholm between estimates in 2003. Social ser-
vices estimated the number of women to between 180 and 200, and the police estimated 50–60
women. The report (Kännedom om prostitution, 2004) suggests the discrepancies may derive
from groups of women being in the street at different hours and on different weekdays. I have
chosen to use the highest estimates in this table. Another version of this table was earlier pub-
lished in Svanström, “Prostitution in Sweden” in Gangoli and & Westmarland (2006).
Source: Förbud mot köp av sexuell tjänst. En utvärdering 1999–2008, sou
2010:49, Statistiska centralbyrån, befolkningsstatistik 2001.
94 Svanström, “Handel”, p. 310
95 Förbud mot köp av sexuell, pp. 124–125.
96 Interview with Inger Lantz, City Section, Stockholm, in Kvinnobulletinen, 1992:3, p. 7.
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Prostitution in Stockholm: Continuity and Change 225
The demographic structure in prostitution has changed dramatically: in 1993,
between 20–30 per cent of the women were born outside of Sweden, and in
2008 more than half of the women came from abroad. The majority came from
the Baltics or eastern Europe (countries such as Hungary and Romania are
mentioned), but some women also came from other parts of the world. Part of
the explanation, according to people in the field, is the ease of moving across
borders, but also the worsening of the economic circumstances in countries
in eastern Europe.97 The age structure has changed since the 1970s; in the sec-
ond millennium the majority of women who take part in other activities aside
from street prostitution were between the ages of 18 and 30, while thirty years
ago they were all above 25 years of age. However, when it comes to women
forced into prostitution and procuring, the women are mostly younger, around
20 years old.98
No sex buyers have been sentenced to prison; so far, the sentences have
only involved fines and summary punishments. The most recent investigation
about the legislation showed that street prostitution in Stockholm and Sweden
has not increased in recent years, while it has in neighbouring countries such
as Norway and Denmark, where it has increased by close to 50 per cent.99 Ac-
cording to recent research, the number of women involved in prostitution is
still low, and the number of buyers has gone down compared to the time be-
fore the legislation was put into effect.100
However, as in many other countries prostitution on the internet has in-
creased, but its prevalence is difficult to ascertain.101 A national survey by the
National Board for Health and Welfare undertaken in 2007 determined that
there were 299 web pages and 304 sellers (fifty-seven men), mostly serving cli-
ents in the Stockholm region. The use of mobile phones and the mediating of
telephone numbers seem to have reduced the use of internet advertisements
since 2007, but the anonymity of internet advertising may also have lowered
97 Förbud mot köp av sexuell, p. 108. In a few cases women were from Albania and Thailand.
It has also been noted that the number of women from Nigeria has increased. Människo-
handel för sexuella och andra ändamål, rps rapport 2011, Lägesrapport 12 (Stockholm, 2011)
p. 21.
98 Förbud mot köp av sexuell, pp. 110–113.
99 Jari Kuosmanen, “Tio år med lagen: Om förhållningssätt till och erfarenheter av prostitu-
tion i Sverige”, in Charlotta Holmström and May-Len Skilbrei (eds), Prostitution i Norden:
Forskningsrapport (Köpenhamn, 2008), pp. 357–382.
100 Förbud mot köp av sexuell, p. 157.
101 One seller can be behind several advertisements, or more than one person behind one ad-
vertisement. Furthermore, these advertisements can stay on the internet after the service
has ended.
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226 Svanström
the threshold for entering prostitution. Ethnicity stood out as an important
marketing strategy: the advertisements almost invariably stated nationality or
skin colour.102
Trafficking and Carrying Out the Legislation
In the 1800s what was called “the white slave trade” was a topic in many Euro
pean countries and larger cities. Some argue that this was a hysterical reac-
tion with racial overtones, others claim that the slave trade was a fact and was
organized by criminal networks. Sweden had organizations such as Awareness,
situated in Stockholm, which scrutinized newspaper advertisements for em-
ployment offers abroad and offered rooms in a hostel in Stockholm for women
who came in search of employment.103 The Stockholm chief of police respond-
ed to inquiries from Europe regarding Stockholm. Nevertheless, the records
show little evidence of trafficking at the turn of the last century. For instance,
a request in 1910 from the chief of police in Czernowitz and Vienna, Austria,
led to an investigation into persons advertising for girls to play in a women’s
orchestra in Stockholm. The police found nothing indicating a “white slave
trade”.104
In 2000, the Swedish government ratified the un Declaration on trafficking,
which was criminalized in Sweden in 2002.105 Trafficking in todays’ Stockholm
is believed to be comparatively rare; the legislation makes it less “profitable” to
traffic women to Sweden since using women in street prostitution is more risky.
Thus, the majority of trafficking cases have been discovered after police sur-
veillance of apartment brothels in Stockholm (see Graph 8.2). Recent reports
102 Kännedom om prostitution 2007, pp. 8, 27–30.
103 Ann Hallner, “Från vit slavhandel till trafficking: En studie om föreställningar kring män-
niskohandel och dess offer”, Historisk tidskrift, 129 (2009), pp. 429–433.
104 Rapport angående Gerschberg, Adele, 25 February, 1910, and Rapport angående Berger,
Frans, 23 August, 1910, FXIV1 Handlingar angående vit slavhandel, 1905–23, Detektivavdel-
ningen, Handlingar angående vit slavhandel, 1905–23, Polismästaren, Detektivavdelnin-
gen, öä, ssa.
105 See Svanström, “Handel med kvinnor: Debatten i Sverige och Nederländerna om prostitu-
tion och trafficking” in Christina Florin and Christina Bergqvist (eds), Framtiden i sam-
tiden: Könsrelationer i förändring i Sverige och omvärlden (Stockholm, 2004), pp. 290–323,
for a discussion on the discrepancies between the Swedish state approach concerning
trafficking, where the state for a long time argued for proof of a woman actually being
forced into prostitution through trafficking, versus the offence of buying sexual services
where “choice” is irrelevant, all buying of prostitution being illegal. In 2010 the legislation
on trafficking changed and the so-called “control prerequisite” was replaced.
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Prostitution in Stockholm: Continuity and Change 227
450
400
350
Reported for buying sexual
300 services
Fines
250
Order of summary
200
punishment
150 Nolle prosequi (voluntarily
dismissal)
100 Sum of sentences
50
0
99
00
01
02
03
04
05
06
07
08
09
10
11
20
20
20
20
20
20
20
20
20
20
20
20
19
Graph 8.2 Reported crimes and sentences for buying sexual services, Stockholm County
1999–2011.
Absolute numbers. The information on reported crimes can be accessed for
Stockholm city, but has been downloaded for the county to make comparisons
possible with sentences (which can only be downloaded on the regional level).
Source: Brottsförebyggande rådet, http://statistik.bra.se/
solwebb/action/index and http://www.bra.se/bra/brott--statistik/
statistik/personer-l agforda-for-brott.html Brottsförebyggande
rådet, table 521, 01, Stockholms län.
show a change in the countries from which women are trafficked; earlier, Esto-
nia and Russia and to some extent Poland were the most common countries of
origin but in 2012 the most common were Romania and Nigeria. Furthermore,
the trafficking organizations are believed to be less “multi-criminal” and more
focused solely on sexual trafficking. Prostitution is organized both in apart-
ments rented for a week or so and in hotel rooms at bargain hotels where the
reception is located in another building, or at self-service hotels. The women
are also used in what is phrased “outcalls”, i.e. they are brought to the clients’
home.106
In practice, the crime of buying sexual services is a “surveillance crime”, i.e.
more resources for the police equals more reported crimes. This is also what
is signalled in Graph 8.2, in which the increase in reported crimes in 2003, for
106 Brottslighet och trygghet i Malmö, Stockholm och Göteborg: En kartläggning (Stockholm,
2012), pp. 176–177.
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228 Svanström
instance, was generated through the breaking of an apartment brothel ring
on the outskirts of Stockholm.107 Similarly, the increase in reported crimes in
2005 and later from 2008 onwards can be explained through the increase in
resources made available to the police on a national scale for working against
trafficking.
Concluding Remarks
If we look at the last 400 years of prostitution in Stockholm, two things stand
out. Firstly, prostitution in Sweden and Stockholm has been a quantitatively
small phenomenon relative to the country’s and city’s population (the excep-
tion being the late nineteenth century with increasing industrialization and
immigration pared with a regulation system that locked women in). Secondly,
the state and the municipality have been involved in regulating extra-marital
sexuality and prostitution for the better part of that period.
There seems to have been two different state institutional approaches:
legislation and laissez-faire, although these approaches have varied over the
centuries. The 1600s had a harsh regime that gradually gave way to a more per-
missive attitude towards sexuality in the late 1700s that eased the harsh legal
institutions. A regulation system was put into place in the mid-1800s followed
by the abolishment of the system in 1919 until the early 1980s, when a laissez-
faire system was applied; in this system, women in prostitution were taken up
within the scope of the vagrancy law, but the state fumbled in its attempts to
find ways to control prostitution. From the 1980s onwards, there was a change
in the state’s views about how to tackle prostitution and it was seen as a so-
cietal problem, not the individual problem of women. The institutional ap-
proach manifested itself in the legislation in 1999, criminalising the purchase
of what was then termed sexual services—a complete ideological turnaround
in how to conceptualize prostitution. From the material available for this over-
view it is possible to at least hypothesize about the consequences of institu-
tional measures and the magnitude of prostitution; regulating prostitution
increased the number of women involved in prostitution, whereas legislating
against extra-marital relations with severe punishment in a small-sized town
with harsh corporal a moral punishments based on Protestant religious beliefs
seems to have kept prostitution at lower levels. Still, institutional measures are
not enough to interpret how prostitution changes. It is apparent that the so-
cial and economic circumstances of the women involved matter: living condi-
tions in the early 1600s were harsh, and the majority of the citizens lived in
107 Svanström, “Handel”, pp. 308–309.
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Prostitution in Stockholm: Continuity and Change 229
severe poverty and getting involved in activities that would render them the
death punishment may have been a small price to pay for some money and
food. The changing circumstances during the growing industrial period in the
1800s as well as changing economic circumstances in countries/cities outside
of Sweden in the early 2000s may make prostitution a viable alternative. Still,
the level of prostitution is lower than in many other cities and countries, which
at least for the earlier periods must be seen in light of the rural character of the
country and small-town character of the city; only in 1960 did the city attain a
population of over 800,000. However, as with many studies on individuals on
the margins of society, the historian often gets information through the very
channels that are controlling the same individuals, which is also the case here.
Focusing on the last two hundred years we could say that the Swedish regu-
lation system, which presented itself in Stockholm in its fullest form, came
together with an equivalent development in other countries and cities. Large
parts of the system were imported to Stockholm. Needless to say, the long pe-
riod of regulation had a profound effect on women in general, and on women
who were registered in particular. Over time, the women stayed in prostitu-
tion for longer and longer periods. In the end, it was the state itself that initi-
ated which was then a radical step in introducing a legislation that covered all
citizens—at least on paper. During a period of almost sixty years, controlling
prostitution was not on the state agenda more than in passing, and only in the
1970s was there another shift. Although underrepresented in the debates, the
women involved in prostitution presented their demands to the state, asking
for changes in legislation and a change of terms. However, when it came to
the more radical change, i.e. to criminalizing the purchase of sexual services,
it was again the state itself that made the decision, although ngos such as
the women’s movements and others played a significant role in promoting the
legislation. Needless to say, the Swedish state has changed. The presence of
women in political parties fundamentally changed how certain questions per-
taining to women and women’s bodily integrity have been politicised. What
effect has this development had on prostitution and the women involved in
prostitution—or for all women, for that matter? The legislative changes in
recent years have been received differently among women—both inside and
outside prostitution—and some are critical while others welcome it. However,
supporting a change in formal legislation is not the same as changing norms,
as informal institutions change slower. The late 1800s and the regulation sys-
tem was pivotal in the matter of crafting “the prostitute”, and that image still
lingers in terms of how women involved prostitution are perceived. Still, the
1999 legislation was unique at the time, and has in a sense turned attention
from prostitution as a question of women or the “seller” to a question of men
and their demands for sexual services.
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Section 2
Africa and the Middle East
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chapter 9
Prostitution in Cairo
Hanan Hammad and Francesca Biancani
Prostitution, in Arabic bigha’, da‘arah, and ‘aharah, is the providing of sexual
services for payment. This definition makes prostitution in Islamic law a prac-
tice of adultery, zina, which includes any sexual intercourse between an un-
married couple except a master and his female slave, jariyyah. Very recently,
sex work and illicit sexuality in Egypt have become new terrain for historical
enquiry. Lack of historical sources has been a major challenge, of course. While
reconstructing the history of ordinary people is always a difficult task, it is even
more so as regards those who practised such a highly gendered and legally con-
troversial activity as prostitution. Local historiographers of mediaeval and pre-
modern Egypt’s capital Cairo tended to overlook sex work as a social practice
in the urban fabric. Some of them made references to the existence of prosti-
tutes in passing in the chronicles and biographies of rulers and notables and in
comments on the state system. European travellers in pre-modern Egypt gave
accounts of nomadic and urban groups practicing prostitution in Egyptian
towns. Given the lack of corroborating sources, however, it is quite difficult to
differentiate between what is myth, fiction, and reality in these accounts. Yet,
these sources are useful for exploring the European construction of sexuality
in Egypt.
Some recent Egyptian studies have succeeded in bringing to light a great
deal of obscure local sources from the nineteenth century and hence have
provided ground-breaking ethnographies of areas which used to have licensed
prostitution throughout the first half of the twentieth century.1 Although this
scholarship is valuable and bravely steps into a field that has previously been
* This article is the result of joint research and an ongoing dialogue between the authors about
the social history of sex work, gender, sexuality, and society in Egypt. We would like to note
that Hanan Hammad authored the introduction and the sections about prostitution during
the periods of Mamluk and Ottoman rule and during abolitionism and postcolonial times.
Francesca Biancani authored the section on colonial prostitution. The paragraph about pros-
titution under Muhammad Ali and the conclusion was jointly written by the two authors.
1 ‘Abd al-Wahab Bakr, Mujtama‘ al-Qahirah al-sirri, 1900–1951 (Cairo, 2001); ‘Abd al-Wahab Bakr,
al-Jarimah fi Misr fi al-nisf al-awwal min al-qarn al-‘Ishshrin: ash-Shawari‘al-khalfiyyah (Cairo,
2005); ‘Imad Hilal, al-Baghaya fi Misr: Dirasah tarikhiyyah ijtima‘iyyah 1834–1949 (Cairo, 2001).
© Hanan Hammad and Francesca Biancani, 2017 | doi 10.1163/9789004346253_010
This is an open access chapter distributed under the terms of the CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license. - 978-90-04-34625-3
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234 Hammad and Biancani
overlooked in Egyptian historiography, it replicates a particularly static image
of prostitution quarters that has been rendered in popular fiction and oriental-
ist writings. Western scholarship has started to explore prostitution in Egypt
through broad discussions of gender history, state-society relationships, and
the role of power discourses in restructuring society, an approach that could be
very promising.2 Employing the same approach, this paper traces the history of
prostitution in Cairo from Ottoman times until today. The focus is on the for-
mal relationship between the state, society, and prostitution. It highlights the
shifting trajectory ranging from fiscal control without strict regulation in pre-
modern times, when Cairo was the capital of an Ottoman province enjoying
virtual autonomy from the Empire’s centre, to the state regulation of sex work
during the British colonial period and the subsequent abolition and criminal-
ization of sex work in the post-independence era.
This paper aims to give an overview that is as extensive as possible of the
ways in which sex work was practised and how it changed over time from the
1600s until today. Far from considering prostitution to be the “oldest profes-
sion”, this overview endeavours to set up the context for studying prostitution
as a complex historically situated phenomenon. This study reveals how the
management of gender and sexuality were closely connected with the story of
the state and its capacity for penetrating, controlling, and disciplining society,
and it tells us about the ways in which women, as well as men, adapted to
sweeping social and economic changes.
Prostitution under the Mamluks and Ottomans
Cairo entered the seventeenth century as the provincial capital of Egypt un-
der the Ottoman Empire. Consistent with their tradition of governing newly
conquered territories, the Ottomans preserved many institutions and adminis-
trative systems from the Mamluk period (1250–1517), and the Mamluks them-
selves were incorporated into the ruling elite. Thus, many Ottoman governors
2 Liat Kozma, Policing Egyptian Women: Sex, Law, and Medicine in Khedival Egypt (Syracuse,
2012); B.W. Dunne, “Sexuality and the ‘Civilizing Process’ in Modern Egypt” (Unpublished
Ph.D., Georgetown University, 1996); Francesca Biancani, “Let Down the Curtains around Us:
Sex Work in Colonial Cairo, 1882–1949” (Unpublished Ph.D., London School of Economics,
2012); Khaled Fahmy, “Prostitution in Egypt in the Nineteenth Century”, in Eugene Rogan
(ed.), Outside In: On the Margins of the Modern Middle East (London, 2001), pp. 77–103; Judith
E. Tucker, Women in Nineteenth-century Egypt (Cambridge, 1985).
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Prostitution in Cairo 235
continued the Mamluk tradition of tolerating prostitution as an urban service.
Aside from the orthodox Islamic prohibition on sex outside marriage and
between masters and slaves, prostitution in Cairo can be traced back to the
Fatimid period (969–1171).3 Sex workers in Cairo were more integrated than
ostracized and were part of the larger labouring class. Dressed in the tradi-
tional milayyah, which is a wrapping cloth, and a tarhah, a loose head veil, sex
workers were distinguished with red anklets on their legs.4 They were visible in
marketplaces and public festivities. They were also concentrated in particular
areas known as harat al-Khawaty or harat al-Zawani (quarters of “fallen” or
adulterous women).5 These quarters were mostly hilly areas that were distant
from the residential neighbourhoods or adjacent to entertainment centres
around lakes. This location outside residential areas distinguished prostitutes
from al-ahrar, which literarily means “free people” but was used as a term in
pre-modern times until the early twentieth century to refer to “respectable”
people. This distance helped to ease social anxieties about public morality.
Social protests against prostitution were usually stirred up when sex workers
lived and openly practised their trade in regular neighbourhoods.
Brothels and taverns also mushroomed in entertainment areas around lakes
such as the Azbakiyyah and al-Ratli lakes, where male and female slaves were
employed in sex work.6 Prostitutes in Ottoman Cairo were active during festi-
vals, including the celebrations of saints, known as mawalid. This was a contin-
uation of mediaeval practices in which some festivals became characterized by
sexual overtones.7 Prostitutes attended the celebrations of the annual increase
of the waters of the Nile when they reached the point that the dam could be
opened and flow into the Azbakiyyah Lake.8 The prostitutes of the Azbakiyyah
area openly conducted their trade and performed alluring dances. A street
show called the Bee Dance became very popular under the Ottomans. In that
show, which seems to have been a sort of strip dance, women pretended to
have a bee in their clothing and started to take off their clothes one piece after
another, keeping on only a light unveiling garment. Al-Azbakiyyah attracted
3 Taqi al-Din Ahmad ibn ‘Ali al-Maqrizi, al-Mawaiz wa al-‘i‘tibar bi dhikr al-khitat wa al-athar,
2 vols, (Cairo, 1997), ii, p. 357.
4 Ahmad ‘Abd al-Raziq, al-Mar’ah fi Misr al-mamlukiyyah (Cairo, 1999), p. 39.
5 Jamal al-Din Abu al-Mahasin Yusuf bin Taghribirdi, al-Nujum al-zahirah fi muluk Misr wa’l-
Qahirah, 2 vols, (Cairo, 1929), ii, p. 389 and al-Maqrizi, al-Mawaiz, p. 658.
6 Al-Maqrizi, al-Mawaiz, p. 750.
7 Boaz Shoshan, Popular Culture in Medieval Cairo (Cambridge, 1993), p. 43.
8 Muhammad Sayyid Kilani, Fi-Rubu‘al-Azbakiyyah: Dirasah adabiyyah, tarikhiyyah wa ijiti
ma‘iyyah (Cairo, 1985), p. 10.
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236 Hammad and Biancani
many men who would spend their nights free from any moral bondage, caus-
ing “immoral chaos”.9
Al-Ratli Lake was another area where prostitution was practised openly
around the year. It was part of the Ard at-Tabbalah area, which was so well
known for illicit activities that men from all over the town visited it for sex and
hashish.10 Poets celebrated their pleasures in the area by drinking, consum-
ing hashish, listening to music, and watching unveiled “moon-faces”. When the
rulers demanded that all the owners of the buildings around the lake prohibit
illicit sexual activities, its sex workers and entertainers moved to Azbakiyyah.11
In the late eighteenth century, well-known Egyptian historian Abd al-Rahman
al-Jabarti (1754–1825) mentioned that religious scholars at al-Azhar patronized
prostitutes.12 Lower-class workers and peasants were able to afford inexpen-
sive prostitutes among the Gypsy and Gi‘idi tribes. The Azbakiyyah, particular-
ly Wajh al-Birkah Street, became such a famous spot among Cairene pleasure
seekers that one scholar noted that a literary genre called Wajh al-Birkah flour-
ished among contemporary authors.13 Some of that literature was so sensa-
tional that it spoke of the quality of male organs and encouraged the public to
commit adultery.14 An eighteenth-century poet named Muhammad Shabanah
(d. 1795) mentioned a brothel owned by a certain Kuwaik in Azbakiyyah who
secured boys and women for customers.15 Without state intervention in Wajh
al-Birkah, cafés were open late at night, dancers appeared almost naked, and
prostitution and illicit activities that people did not allow in their residential
neighbourhoods were carried out.16
Prostitution was associated with lower-class entertainers, e.g. male and fe-
male musicians and dancers. This would explain the use of the term maghani,
literary male singers, for prostitutes in pre-modern times. Lower-class en-
tertainers who performed for male and female audiences on streets and in
cafés were called ghawazi. They were different from ‘awalim, high-ranking
performers for female audiences who only performed in wealthy harems or
sang for mixed groups from behind the mashrabiyyat, carved wood windows
9 Cited in Kilani, al-Azbakiyyah, pp. 12–13.
10 Muhammad Ibn Ahmad Ibn Iyas, Bada’i‘al-zuhur fi waqai‘al-duhur, 6 vols (Istanbul, 1931),
v, p. 11 and al-Maqrizi, al-Mawaiz, pp. 357, 750.
11 al-Kilani, al-Azbakiyyah, p. 12.
12 Ibid., p. 19.
13 Ibid., pp. 36–49.
14 An example of that poetry is mentioned in al-Kilani, al-Azbakiyyah, pp. 47–48.
15 Mustafa As’ad ibn Ahmad al-Luqaymi, al-Mudamah al-urjwaniyyah fi-al-maqamah al-
ridwaniyyah, unpublished manuscript cited in Kilani, al-Azbakiyyah, pp. 13–14.
16 Ibid., p. 27.
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Prostitution in Cairo 237
o verlooking the salons of upper class houses.17 According to British traveller
Edward William Lane, who toured Egypt in 1825–28, many ghawazi, while be-
ing “public women”, meaning that they were available for promiscuous sex for
money, were in fact married and dominant over their subdued husbands.18
Singers, male and female dancers, prostitutes, and beggars were grouped into
distinct trade groups and participated in guild processions, marching at the
end of the parade, but it seems they were not fully integrated within the guild
system. According to Ottoman traveller Evliya Çelebi, three pimps controlled
most of the prostitutes in seventeenth-century Cairo and pimps operated in
a system that was close to the guild. Known as Sheikh al-‘Arsat or the head of
pimps, those three pimps kept records of all the prostitutes and supervised
their work.19 Nonetheless, prostitution was not institutionalized with the seg-
regation of licensed sex workers in state-authorized brothels. At the same time,
women workers in general experienced a great deal of exclusion and marginal-
ization in the guild system.20
Pre-modern sex work was a highly informal sector. In Mamluk and Ottoman
Cairo, the state subjected sex workers to taxation. Under the Mamluks, these
taxes, known as maghani taxes, were substantial sources of revenue for the
state.21 A female tax collector known as the Daminat al-Maghani functioned as
a tax farmer who bought from the state the right to collect taxes with a profit
and kept records of the prostitutes. These taxes were taken in return for the
state protection of prostitutes; hence it could be taken as state recognition of
sex workers as a professional group.22 In the seventeenth century, the state
designated the position of aminshikar, and whoever was in charge of that posi-
tion collected taxes from prostitutes. The position and the tax were annulled in
1643.23 Subsequently, taxes were imposed again on prostitutes as part of what
became known as khurdah taxes that were levied on people with lowly occupa-
tions such as snake charmers, hashish sellers, and mountebanks.
17 Karin Van Nieuwkerk, “Changing Images and Shifting Identities: Female Performers in
Egypt”, in Ann Dils and Ann Cooper Albright (eds), Moving History/Dancing Cultures:
A Dance History Reader (Middletown, ct, 2001), pp. 136–143.
18 Edward William Lane, An Account of the Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians,
the Definitive 1860 Edition Introduced by Jason Thompson (Cairo, 2006), pp. 380.
19 Hilal, al-Baghaya, p. 115.
20 Judith E. Tucker, Women in Nineteenth-century Egypt, p. 108.
21 Ibn Taghrabardi, al-Nujum al-Zahirah, i, p. 47.
22 ‘Abd al-Raziq, al-Mar’ah fi Misr al-mamlukiyyah, p. 40.
23 Hilal. al-Baghaya, p. 30.
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238 Hammad and Biancani
Prostitution and taxation also intersected in the slave trade.24 Caucasian
and farangi (European) girls were brought to Cairo for sex work.25 A particular
tax called the huquq al-qinat was imposed on every male and female who pro-
vided sexual services in taverns.26 There was also a similar tax on those slave-
prostitutes known as huquq al-Sudan.27 Court records of the Ottoman period
reveal cases in which pimps bought women for their brothels.28 A European
traveller to Egypt mentioned that some ghawazi forced their African slaves to
practise prostitution.29 Slave merchants operated brothels in Cairo and in once
case the head of their guild complained of a lack of state control over this illicit
business.30
Taxes on prostitutes constituted an important source of revenue for the gov-
ernor, the wali, and his Turkish policemen, the aghas. They functioned as tax
farmers who bought from the state the right to collect taxes from prostitutes
and retain a certain amount of profit. In the eighteenth century, Vasir Abdul-
lah Pasha Alkibralli had to provide huge financial compensation.31 In the rest
of the Ottoman period, the police chief kept records of prostitutes for taxa-
tion purposes. The authorities were abusive in their tax-collecting practices
and casual female labourers were constantly under threat of being registered
as prostitutes. Khurdah multezim (the khurdah tax-collector) and state officials
had a free hand in placing women’s names on the registers and removing them,
and this often depended on whether a good bribe had been paid or not.
Evliya Çelebi estimated that there were forty policemen who oversaw the
brothels and made sure that every prostitute stayed at home overnight.32 This
heavy policing might have been related to public security issues in addition
to fiscal ones. There were accounts of gangs that employed “fallen” women in
their thieving operations. The women of a gang called the al-baqar al-wahshi
(antelopes) walked around the Wajh al-Birkah to pick up wealthy-looking cus-
tomers. If they succeeded in being invited to their victims’ homes, they would
24 See ‘Imad Hilal, al-Raqiq fi Misr fi al-qarn al-tasi‘ ‘ashar (Cairo, 1999).
25 Al- Kilani, al-Azbakiyyah, p. 13.
26 Al-Maqrizi, al-Kutat, p. 144; Jalal al-Suyuti, Husan al-Muhadarah, ii, p. 218.
27 Al-Bayumi Isma‘il, al-Nuzum al-maliyyah fi-Misr wa al-sham zaman salatin al-mamalik
(Cairo, 1998), p. 201.
28 Hilal, al-Baghaya, p. 115.
29 E.D. Lane, Customs and Manners, p. 328.
30 Hilal, al-Raqiq, p. 227.
31 Ahmad Shalabi ‘Abd al-Ghani, Awdah al-isharat fiman tawla Misr al-Qahirah min al-
wuzara’ wa al-bashawat (Cairo, 1978), pp. 574–575.
32 Hilal, al-Baghaya, p. 30.
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Prostitution in Cairo 239
get them intoxicated and rob them, and kill them as well at times.33 Another
gang was called the al-Baqar al-Sarih (roaming cows) and their women would
go to drink with their customers at their homes. Once the man got drunk, they
would rob the house and then flee.34 Theft and murder involving prostitution
was a two-way road. Prostitutes also fell victim to the abuses of their customers.
In one incident in mediaeval Cairo, three men habitually invited prostitutes to
their homes and then murdered them and stole their clothes. Ultimately they
were executed and their corpses were carried through the streets together with
cages containing the bones of their victims.35
In Mamluk and Ottoman times, the position of prostitutes and brothels was
unstable. On the one hand, the brothel provided sources of revenue and was
accommodated or de facto recognized by the state. Society tolerated it as long
as it was marginalized outside the regular residential neighbourhoods where
the ahrar lived. On the other hand, sex work was resented for both moral and
practical reasons. It offended religious sensibilities and the collective notions
of propriety and decorum. It sometimes caused problems for urban security,
particularly when prostitution was associated with theft and public drunken-
ness as mentioned above. The authorities sporadically outlawed prostitution in
Cairo for moral reasons. The last Mamluk Sultan, Qunsuh al-Ghuri (1501–1516),
ordered the destruction of the prostitution shacks around the al-Ratli Lake.36
The Ottoman vasir Husayn Pasha (r. 1635–1637) was the first Ottoman ruler
to shut down brothels. The story goes that he had a man hung on the spot when
he saw him leaving one of the shacks around the Mujawarin Lake and ordered
that all the brothels in Bab al-Luq be demolished.37 The prostitutes fled and
their shacks were removed. Shortly after, prostitution became relatively free
again until Maqsud Pasha (r. 1642–1643) banned it along with public singing
and dancing.38 Up until the end of the century, the state tolerated prostitution
for taxation purposes, and complaints about prostitution and their taxes were
ignored. Yet, there is an account that the eighteenth-century vazir Isma‘il Agha
ordered severe physical punishment for a prostitute and her customer when
he saw them close to the hilly area of al-Tibi Mosque.39 In 1733 Isma‘il Agha
33 al-Kilani, al-Azbakiyyah, p. 50.
34 Ibid., pp. 50–51.
35 Shoshan, Popular Culture in Medieval Cairo, p. 5.
36 al-Kilani, al-Azbakiyyah, p. 10.
37 Muhammad bin Abu al-Surur al-Bakri, al-Rawdah al-ma’nusah fi-akhbar Misr al-
mahrusah (Cairo, 1996), p. 148.
38 al-Bakri, al-Rawdah al-ma’nusah, p. 158.
39 ‘Abd al-Ghani, ‘Awdah al-Isharat, p. 218.
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240 Hammad and Biancani
ordered that all brothels and pubs had to be shut down. As a way of dealing
with the resentment the policemen felt because they had lost their share of the
taxes, he offered them the compensation of twelve cases of money from the
provinces, so the police chief there had to live off the prostitutes’ earnings.40
It is believed that this was a single incident and the state’s policy of tolerating
prostitution continued for the sake of taxation until the French invasion.41
During their campaign in Egypt (1798–1801) the French authorities first
imposed health and security regulations on prostitutes in an effort to protect
their soldiers from infection. Al-Jabarti wrote in 1798 that when the French
came to Egypt “loose women and prostitutes of low breeding became attached
to the French and mixed with them.”42 Initially, the French required that pros-
titutes register and undergo health inspections. They also issued orders stat-
ing that the soldiers could only visit registered prostitutes and they considered
using registered pimps who would be responsible for the safety and protec-
tion of the soldiers. The regulations required that the doors of brothels be lit
by lamps and open onto streets so that soldiers could easily get help if they
experienced problems.43 The costs of spending time with a prostitute were
posted outside the brothels in both writing and symbols to minimize any dis-
agreements or misunderstandings caused by language barriers. Eventually, the
death toll brought about by venereal diseases among both the French troops
and Egyptians alarmed the French about contact between their men and local
prostitutes.
In the first two years of the occupation 2,419 French men died of venereal
diseases.44 Subsequently the French authorities had about 400 infected wom-
en drowned in the Nile and imprisoned many more.45 Napoleon Bonaparte
banned women who were known for practicing prostitution from being in
Cairo.46 This war on prostitutes was a short-lived bout of hysteria rather than a
systematic policy, and hardly a dent was made in the sex trade.47 Sex workers
were sent to the countryside in order to prevent them from having relations
with the soldiers garrisoned in towns, but they practised their trade openly
away from police harassment in provincial towns such as Dusuq, al-Mahallah
40 Ibid., pp. 574–575.
41 Hilal, al-Baghaya, p. 32.
42 Cited in Louis Awad, The Literature of Ideas in Egypt (Atlanta, 1986), pp. 22–23.
43 al-Kilani, al-Azbakiyah, pp. 56–57.
44 Juan Cole, Napoleon’s Egypt: Invading the Middle East (New York, 2007), p. 235.
45 André Raymond, Égyptiens et Français au Caire 1798–1801 (Cairo, 1998), p. 303.
46 Fahmy, “Prostitution in Egypt in the Nineteenth Century”, p. 78; Tucker, Women in
Nineteenth-century Egypt, p. 150.
47 Cole, Napoleon’s Egypt, p. 235.
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Prostitution in Cairo 241
al-Kubra, and Tanta in the middle of the Delta. Moving to provincial towns
made it easier to avoid taxation, but it deprived them of the bulk of their
customers, who were French army officers. In cities under French occupa-
tion, women often exchanged sexual services for greater economic stability,
although their vulnerability in the sex-gender system always made them vul-
nerable to abuse and violence; they often also became mistresses of French
officials or lived with them as concubines.
Sex Work in Muhammad ‘Ali’s Cairo
Under the reign of Muhammad ‘Ali (r. 1805–48), sex workers enjoyed a strong
presence in Cairo and were subject to taxation until Muhammad ‘Ali banned
the sex trade and ordered that the brothels be shut down in 1834. In 1836, he
banished many sex workers to Upper Egypt. Historians cite different moti-
vations behind this change in Muhammad ‘Ali’s treatment of prostitution.48
Judith Tucker emphasises the influence of the Muslim ‘ulama, while Khalid
Fahmy argues that concerns over health and public order were behind the
banishing of sex workers to areas outside Cairo.49 Banishing sex workers to
provincial towns that were far from the main cities, schools, and barracks de-
prived the women of their sources of income and worsened their economic
condition in general. According to a contemporary witness, clandestine prosti-
tution nonetheless managed to survive underground.50 More importantly, the
ban on prostitution and female entertainment deprived self-employed women
of much of their autonomy and control over their profession. State interven-
tion invariably led to the marginalization of prostitutes and to their subordina-
tion to pimps and procurers in return for protection from coercive state power.
Around the 1860s, prostitutes and dancing girls came back to Cairo, maybe as
the opportunity to tax them acquired primacy over every other consideration.
In 1866, Khedive Isma‘il introduced a new tax on public women which allowed
tax-farmers to assess the amount levied. Lady Lucie Duff Gordon, an aristo-
cratic Englishwoman travelling in Egypt at the time, reported the grievances
of a dancer as tax farmers made each woman pay according to her presumed
gains, i.e. her good looks, and the poor women were exposed to all the caprices
48 Karin Van Nieuwkerk, A Trade like any Other (Austin, 1995), pp. 31–32.
49 Tucker, Women in Nineteenth-century Egypt, pp. 151–152; Fahmy, “Prostitution in Egypt in
the Nineteenth Century”, pp. 77–103.
50 See Gustave Flaubert, Flaubert in Egypt: A Sensibility on Tour (London, 1992), p. 39.
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242 Hammad and Biancani
and extortion of the police.51 This taxation led some people in Egyptian society
to refer to Isma‘il as “Pimp Pasha.”52
Colonial Prostitution: Urban Change
Cairo grew very rapidly to become a global metropolis from the 1860s onwards.
While Khedive Isma‘il (r.1863–1879) was the first to launch an ambitious pro-
gramme of urban planning, rapid processes of economic and social change
boosted by the British occupation in 1882 radically transformed the city.53 The
British deposed Isma‘il and installed his son Tawfiq in 1879 and eventually oc-
cupied Egypt in response to a broad proto-nationalist movement which devel-
oped around the figure of Colonel Ahmad ‘Urabi in 1882. The occupation of
Egypt developed into a full-fledged colonial enterprise lasting formally until
the country’s unilateral independence in 1922 but which truly ended in 1952
with the Free Officers’ Revolution. In this way, the British secured control over
the Suez Canal, the key sea-route to India.
Egypt was integrated into the global market as a supplier of raw materials to
the British textile manufacturing industry and a purchaser of finished goods.
Relations of production and patterns of land ownership in rural areas changed
as an export-oriented plantation economy was encouraged with the aim of
maximizing output for the global market. Peasants watched as the pace of the
processes of dispossession they had been subjected to since the middle of the
nineteenth century rapidly increased. Rural migration to urban centres was
a major consequence, and one that greatly changed the face of Egypt’s main
urban centre, Cairo, although it was a complex and gradual process.54 Colonial
elites, a foreign comprador bourgeoisie, and rich locals populated the wealthy
quarters, which seemed to combine European high society life with the exoti-
cism of the Orient. Meanwhile, “subsistence migrants” from southern Europe
(Italy, Malta, Greece, and France in particular) crossed the Mediterranean to
compete with local unskilled labourers. Due to favourable investment condi-
tions under the Capitulations, the European presence in the city was constant-
ly growing.55 According to urban historian André Raymond, Cairo’s population
51 Lucie Duff Gordon, Letters from Egypt (London, 1997), p. 322.
52 Ibid.
53 André Raymond, Cairo (Cambridge, 2000), p. 318.
54 Roger Owen, The Middle East in the World Economy, 1800–1914 (London [etc.], 1981), p. 235.
55 Raymond, Cairo, p. 320. Aggregate data given by Raymond again show that the number of
foreign residents in Cairo rose from 18,289 in 1882 to 76,173 in 1927.
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Prostitution in Cairo 243
increased from 374,000 in 1882 to 1,312,000 in 1937, that is, by 250 per cent in
forty-five years.56 This steady population growth resulted in the dramatic ex-
pansion of Cairo’s built-up area from 1,000 hectares in 1882 to 16,330 hectares
in 1937.57 The urban landscape changed with the introduction of municipal
utilities such as gas lighting and piped water in the rising middle-class areas.
Transportation in the city was made easier via the paving of large tracts of the
street system and the development of large-scale transport infrastructure in
the form of electric tramlines.58 Between the end of the nineteenth and the
beginning of the twentieth century, Cairo’s spaces became increasingly sani-
tized with the introduction of clinics and hospitals and, more importantly, a
drainage and sewage system. The four districts of the Mediaeval City quickly
became overpopulated, and services and infrastructure started to crumble.59
In this new urban context, sex work was restructured and transformed into
a dramatically new phenomenon. The expansion of prostitution had much to
do with the encroachment of the global capitalist economy and colonial state
power over the lives of individual Egyptians, men and women alike. New op-
portunities materialized in the bustling and booming metropolis with its fi-
nancial and real estate speculation, internal and international migration, the
advent of mass tourism, colonial warfare during World War i and World War ii,
and the emergence of a local middle class with greater purchasing power; all
these fundamental factors accounted for the diffusion of prostitution as a re-
sponse to the increased economic and social vulnerability of women within
the capitalist wage labour market. Women faced great difficulties in adapting
to the urban job market which left them very few occupational choices outside
the casual and informal sector. In some cases, working conditions could be so
strenuous and unrewarding that prostitution could be a more desirable oc-
cupational alternative. Most working women were active in domestic service
and as servants, and they were often tacitly expected to give sexual services to
their masters as well.60 It is no coincidence that agencies recruiting domestic
workers frequently collaborated with procurers and bordello-keepers to fill the
ranks of brothels with inmates.
56 Raymond, Cairo, p. 319.
57 Ibid., p. 322.
58 See John T. Chalcraft, The Striking Cabbies of Cairo and Other Stories: Crafts and Guilds in
Egypt, 1860–1914 (Albany, ny, 2004), pp. 134–135.
59 Marcel Clerget, Le Caire, etude de géographie urbaine et d’histoire économique, 2 vols,
(Paris, 1934), i, pp. 242–244.
60 Women’s Library, London [hereafter wl], 4/IBS/6/044, Cairo, Miscellaneous Correspon-
dence, 1924–1930.
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244 Hammad and Biancani
The Legal Framework: Regulationism and the Colonial Order
Cairene prostitution changed qualitatively with the enforcement of new legis-
lation aimed at the strict supervision and containment of women engaged in
sold sex. Sex workers were given a definite social persona, that of the prosti-
tute, according to which women were essentially identified with a certain type
of anti-social behaviour: promiscuous sexual activity in exchange for money.
In order to protect “decent” people from their “corrupting” influence, prosti-
tutes had to be supervised and restricted to certain areas of the city where they
could ply their trade in licensed houses and be under medical control. That is,
in short, the philosophy of regulationism. Following decades of administrative
interventionism without strict regulations, an Egyptian version of a French-
inspired regulation system was introduced by the British authorities in 1882. It
was aimed at securing tax revenues from sex trade practitioners and other low-
status and “morally suspect activities”, which included dancing and singing.
Regulationism meant the institutionalization of prostitution by the establish-
ment of state-licensed brothels in reserved urban areas where registered sex
workers would offer their services under close surveillance by the authorities.
It also entailed the creation of a system of oversight, constituted by the brothel,
where prostitutes worked under the supervision of brothel keepers and were
subjected to weekly medical inspections as well as the lock hospital, where the
treatment of venereal sex workers took place. Regulationism was framed by an
extensive medical discourse on social hygiene, which reflected the emerging
political priority of creating a normative corpus of knowledge concerning all
that was biological. Moreover, the regulationist project was characterized by
blatant class and gender biases, since its stance was directed at the control of
working-class women.
On the 31 October 1882, the first law disciplining sex work was drafted in
Egypt. The “general decree” of 1882 aimed to define carefully segregated and
contained spaces for medicalized commercial sex. Regular medical check-ups
were made compulsory for licensed prostitutes with the establishment of in-
spection rooms in Cairo and Alexandria managed by the central health admin-
istration. Women’s names had to be listed in special registers, which recorded
the results of their weekly examinations. If found diseased, women would
be hospitalized for treatment; they could resume their activities after being
dismissed from the lock hospital upon issuance of a medical certificate. Pros-
titutes had to obtain licenses as proof of their professional status and, more
importantly, third parties were granted the right to legally run brothels by ap-
plying for a regular license.
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Prostitution in Cairo 245
The general decree was passed only fifteen days after the occupation of
Egypt by the British army. According to Egyptian social historian ‘Imad Hilal,61
the British authorities forced the Egyptian government to adopt legislation
that would have been vehemently opposed back in Britain. Sex work was con-
doned as a professional activity recognized by the state as a means to protect
the health of the troops, given their eagerness to consort with prostitutes and
the difficulty of preventing them from doing so. Such a decision was predi-
cated on a belief in the existence of a racial moral double standard, by which
prostitution was considered to be endemic in the “backward” Orient and
women were considered loose and debased.62 Local women were not con-
sidered amenable to moral regeneration and were designated as professional
prostitutes to be placed in clearly signalled brothels. The general decree of
1882 constituted the first attempt by the Egyptian administration to organize
and supervise sex work. It was subsequently followed by a number of legal
texts specifying the aspects that were perceived to be the most detrimental
in the trade, namely the sanitary emergency brought about by the spread of
venereal diseases (syphilis, gonorrhoea, and cancroid) and the disturbance of
public order.
In accordance with this, in July of 1885 an ordinance was promulgated by the
Minister of the Interior, ‘Abd al- Qadir Hilmi Pasha, on the medical inspections
of prostitutes.63 It stipulated that the inspection bureaus of Cairo and Alexan-
dria would be staffed by one or two doctors, a nurse, a secretary with knowl-
edge of Arabic and French, a police officer, and a suitable number of guards.
According to Article 3 of the decree, every prostitute working in a place known
for prostitution was obliged to register her name with the local police in the
bureau of medical inspection. She was given a card that showed her name, age,
address, personal characteristics, and the name of the brothel keeper for which
she was working. The women had to undergo weekly sanitary inspections, the
results of which were reported on her card. Inspections took place daily from
8 a.m. to 1 p.m. in summer and from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. in winter; doctors were
prohibited from carrying out sanitary check-ups at the women’s domiciles.
Those prostitutes who were unable to attend the weekly sanitary inspection
because of an illness had to send a certificate from their medical doctors on
the day designated for their medical check-up proving that their condition
61 Hilal, al-Bighaya, p. 165.
62 wl 3/AMSH/B/07/05, Reports of vds amongst soldiers in Egypt (1916).
63 al-Qarrarat wa al-manshurat al-sadirah sanat-1885, (Cairo, 1886), pp. 153–157; Dikritat wa
Lawa’ih Sahhiyyah (Cairo, 1895), pp. 54–56.
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246 Hammad and Biancani
revented them from being present at the medical inspection. The same kind
p
of provisions applied to female brothel keepers, with the exception of women
older than fifty. The concern for clearly defining the marginal status of prosti-
tutes is evident in Article 13; every prostitute who wished to leave the trade ei-
ther through marriage or repentance had to produce two witnesses and apply
to the Public Health Administration in order to have her name crossed off the
registration list.64 Pecuniary fines were used to enforce the law; all women who
failed to attend medical examinations or did not produce their certificates at
their regular weekly medical check-ups were subjected to a fine of fifty piasters
in the first instance, followed by a fine of 100 piastres or imprisonment for two
to eight days in the second instance.65
A number of decrees reiterated and specified norms regarding the function-
ing of brothels as contained in the general decree of 1882 until the promulga-
tion of a comprehensive Law on Brothels (La’ihah Buyut-al-‘ahirat) dated 15 July
1896.66 This law marked the real beginning of licensed prostitution in Egypt
and it constituted the basis of the 1905 Arête which, as the ultimate legal text
on state-regulated sex work, disciplined the activities of licensed prostitutes
who were resident in brothels until the abolition of prostitution in 1949. Article
1 of the 1896 law defined a brothel as “the place where two or more women are
living permanently or assembling temporarily for the purpose of prostitution.”
According to Article 5, in order to open a brothel it was necessary to present
a written request to the Governorate or the Provincial Administration at least
fifteen days prior to the proposed opening date. The name, birth place, and
nationality of all applicants, as well as information about the location of the
establishment, the number of rooms, and details about the legal owners of the
premises was also to be included in the request. All applicants, both foreigners
and locals, could apply for a permit provided they were not minors and had
never been indicted for a crime. A detailed list with the names of registered
prostitutes and other people living and working in the house, such as servants,
had to be supplied by the brothel keeper to the authorities. Prostitutes had
to be at least 18 years old, and every prostitute was given a photo-card by the
police which was to be renewed annually. Moreover, according to Article 15,
women had to submit to a weekly medical examination.
The whole text was characterized by an emerging preoccupation with segre-
gated areas set aside for sex work and keeping their inhabitants away from the
rest of the population; Article 2, for instance, established that brothels could
64 The content of this article was further specified in a special decree in November of 1885.
65 La’ihah maktab al-kashf ‘ala al-niswah al-’ahirat, article 14.
66 Nidarah al-Dakhiliyya, al-Qawanin al-idariyyah wa al-jina’iyyah, al-juz’ al-rabi’ al-qawanin
al-khususiyya (Cairo, 1896), pp. 430–435.
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Prostitution in Cairo 247
be opened only in reserved areas of the city. There could be no more than one
door opening onto the street and the brothel was to be completely detached
from “other buildings, shops or public places”, so as to avoid grievances from
respectable people. Women were not allowed to stand in the doorways or
windows of brothels; ideally they were to be invisible. There was, however, a
striking contrast between the strict segregation described in legal texts and
the reality described in coeval narrations.67 Russell Pasha described sex work-
ers in the Wass‘ah district as sitting in front of brothels and behind the iron
bars of the windows of ground-floor rooms. Women would solicit openly in
the streets and invite their prospective customers to follow them into build-
ings along the alleys. This image was in fact typical of orientalist iconography,
evoking women’s sexual segregation in the harim and sexual enslavement,
traits which were considered instances of Muslim backwardness according to
western stereotypes. The idea of a hyper-sexualized harim space, for example,
was a recurrent theme in early twentieth century pornographic studio por-
traits in which indigenous women, mostly sex workers, posed naked behind
iron bars.68 A specific apparatus of control and supervision was devised which,
although largely ineffective, aimed to contain and neutralize prostitution and
its dangerous social effects; these included the brothel, the medical inspection
bureau, and the lock hospital for the treatment of diseased women, as well as
the police station.
The Geography of Sex Work
The spatial organization of sex work in Cairo was somewhat dualistic, circum-
scribed, and highly visible on the one hand, and decentred, multiple, and abso-
lutely undefined on the other. The main red-light area in Cairo was in the city
centre, not far from the Azbakiyyah quarter. Officially opened in 1872, the Az-
bakiyyah Garden was located on the original site of the Birkat-al-Azbakiyyah,
the Azbakiyyah Pond. The octagonal park was surrounded by large streets
and four large squares: Opera, ‘Ataba al Khadra’, Khazindar, and Qantarat-al-
Dekkah. From the 1840s onwards, an increasing number of traditional build-
ings were replaced by western-style constructions. Cafés, taverns, and dancing
halls mushroomed, and there a mix of Italian, Turkish, Greek, Arab, and French
songs were played and heavily made-up European women welcomed custom-
ers. A heterogeneous crowd of travellers and locals, street vendors of various
67 See Sir Thomas Russell Pasha, Egyptian Service: 1902–1946 (London, 1949), p. 80; wl,
4/IBS/6/034, Egypt- Messageries Maritimes (1925–1930).
68 Malek Alloula, The Colonial Harem (Minneapolis, ms, 1997), p. 24.
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248 Hammad and Biancani
types, mountebanks, snake charmers, storytellers, and others populated the
esplanade. Cairo’s main red-light district was located a stone’s throw from the
Azbakiyyah. The brothel area was divided into two zones. The Wajh-al-Birkah
had the highest concentration of foreign prostitutes who were licenced. The
street was flanked by three-storey Mediterranean-style buildings with balco-
nies extending out over the streets. Women wearing light gowns would lean
out over the balconies, trying to catch the attention of those promenading on
the street.69 The Wass‘ah quarter was an area for regulated native prostitution
where Egyptians, Nubians, and Sudanese solicited in front of their “shops”
which were one-room shacks, and they also assembled in front of the larger
establishments.70 Cairo’s sex zones, however, were not in any way limited to
the licensed area. Much of the trade took place outside the segregated areas,
disguised under a cover of decorum in anonymous flats in “respectable” neigh-
bourhoods. From 1926 to 1936, the Cairo City Police found and raided 2,654
clandestine brothels,71 and that number is most probably far from the totality
of illicit establishments present in the city.
The vast majority of Cairo sex workers did not work in the brothel system
and they plied their trade on a more flexible basis in clandestine maisons de
rendez-vous.72 A Cairo City Police memorandum on prostitution issued in
192673 confirms that transactional sex was integrated rather than marginalized
in the everyday lives of popular neighbourhoods, as long as it did not disturb
the public order. Clandestine sex workers came from a variety of working-class
backgrounds; most of the time they were women living on the margins of the
peddler economy as seamstresses, washerwomen, dressmakers, servants, and
shop assistants. Despite the strain of economic hardship and impoverishment,
these women retained their family ties; many of them were married and prac-
tised prostitution in order to supplement their meagre family incomes.
69 Douglas Sladen, Oriental Cairo: The City of the Arabian Nights (London, 1911), p. 60; Guy
Thornton, With the Anzacs in Cairo: The Tale of a Great Fight (London, 1917?), pp. 77–78.
70 W.N. Willis, The Anti-Christ in Egypt (London, 1914), p. 28.
71 See Wizarat-al-Dakhaliyyah, Taqrir bulis madinat-al qahirah li-sanat 1935 (Cairo, 1936),
p. 102; Wizarat- al-Dakhaliyyah, Taqrir bulis madinat al qahirah li-sanat 1936 (Cairo, 1937),
p. 102; see Abu Bakr, al Mugtama’ al-Qahira, p. 160, on the ‘awwamas, boathouses moored
on the Nile’s shore in the Gezirah and Imbabah.
72 Corbain’s term is used here to define a private house the tenants of which made it avail-
able to third parties for commercial sexual encounters. Women were not inmates, but
frequented the house for the purpose of prostitution. Clients could be either procured by
the keeper or by the women themselves. See Alain Corbin, Women for Hire: Prostitution
and Sexuality in France after 1850 (Cambridge, 1990), pp. 174–175.
73 wl, 4/IBS/ 5/2/040, Miscellaneous-conferences, Egypt, proposed congress.
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Prostitution in Cairo 249
Organization of the Trade
According to the 1926 Cairo City Police Report, of the 1,184 registered prosti-
tutes working in Cairo, 859 were Egyptians and 325 were foreigners.74 Brothels
would usually house five or six resident prostitutes. Given the high density of
the red-light district,75 brothels would normally occupy small premises with a
ground floor vestibule and a staircase leading to the first floor where bedrooms
were located. A fairly detailed description of a brothel was made in a British
consular record concerning a murder in a house of ill-fame.76 This particular
brothel was owned by a European prostitute, Santa Coppola, and it was located
in Shari‘ ‘Abd al-Khaliq in the Wajh al-Birkah area. Five girls and the mistress
worked there; four of the women were Italian and the other was a Greek wom-
an. The brothel had three steps which led to the street and that is where some
of the girls waited for customers while others sat in the hall. A five-meter-long
corridor ended at a staircase which led to the first floor, where a large sitting
room overlooked the hall with two adjoining rooms. In the sitting room, cus-
tomers waited for the girls to receive them, spent time in conversation with
their mistresses, drank alcohol, and gambled. The rooms were quite simple,
consisting of “a bedstead, a table with marble top and some other things.”
Brothels in the poorer area of the Wass‘ah were certainly more destitute and
shabbier. Prostitutes received clients in rooms directly overlooking the street.
British Cairo Police Chief Russell Pasha described the Wass‘ah at the turn of
the twentieth century as a place where sex workers were so miserable that they
lived “in one-room shacks. […] Here in the Wass‘ah, Egyptian, Nubian and Su-
danese women plied their one shilling trade in conditions of abject squalor,
though under medical control.”77
New forms of prostitution developed due to the increasing expansion of
international tourism and business in the Azbakiyyah district, which, as we
saw previously, had always been where entertainment venues and large hotels
were concentrated. In addition, the emergence of new patterns of middle-class
nocturnal sociability which were made possible by technological changes in-
cluding gas lighting and electrified public transportation impacted the ways
74 Ibid.
75 Azbakiyyah had the second highest population density in Cairo after the nearby area of
Bab-al-Sha‘riyyah with 36,323 inhabitants per sq. kilometre in 1926. See Abu Bakr, Mu-
jtama’ al-Qahirah, p. 28.
76 See National Archives, Kew [hereafter na], FO/841/62, Consular Police Reports, Cairo (29
August 1899). Report on a murder in a brothel.
77 Russell Pasha, Egyptian Service, p. 178.
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250 Hammad and Biancani
in which urban space was utilized. Increasing levels of consumption drove
the spread of leisure spaces where it was possible for people of all social and
economic backgrounds to find forms of amusement suitable for their budgets.
Imperial troops constituted a permanent source of demand, especially during
World War i and World War ii when the presence of soldiers on Egyptian soil
dramatically increased. Soldiers regularly patronized brothels and this result-
ed in heated debates about the standards of morality among troops, leading to
the imposition of a harsh, albeit short-lived, measure of “social purification”
in Cairo during World War i. Up until 1916, the military authorities allowed
troops to frequent the brothels. After World War i, however, their approach
changed. In 1916, brothels with native sex workers were declared out of bounds
for imperial troops, and in 1921 patronizing both native and European brothels
was forbidden. The spread of venereal diseases among colonial troops brought
about the emergence of prohibitionism. In practice though, toleration went
unabated; while soldiers were formally barred from frequenting brothels, they
were given anti-venereal prophylaxis and the addresses of establishments con-
sidered to be medically safe were posted in the barracks.
From that time on, the number of large brothels declined. Instead, unregu-
lated prostitution, both disguised and clandestine, thrived. In the nightlife dis-
trict of Azbakiyyah, disguised prostitution was practised by women employed
as barmaids, waitresses, and performers. Freed from police supervision on the
one hand and the protection of pimps on the other, these women became the
rank and file of “a new form of procuring that […] formed networks whose
sheer size helps to explain the currency of the theme of the ‘White Slave Trade’
during the early years of the twentieth century.”78
Even during the economic depression of the 1930s, nightlife in Cairo flour-
ished despite the growing dissent of local conservative groups and foreign
moralist associations. Concerns over vice and moral degradation were increas-
ingly framed within anti-colonial sentiment. Subordination to western cultural
influences and political encroachment was often considered to be at the core
of ethical moral degradation. Moreover, the proliferation of vice and crime
in discourses articulated by Islamic political movements such as the Muslim
Brethren, which was founded in 1928, played an ever-increasing role in Egyp-
tian politics in the 1930s and ‘40s. It is within this context that a wave of purity
laws targeting nightclubs and entertainment emerged. Clubs and nightclubs
were to be patrolled and monitored by the local police. Since police officers
were relatively easy targets for bribes, however, the enforcement of restrictive
regulations was quite uneven. During World War ii, Cairene nightlife boomed
78 Corbain, Women for Hire, p. 168.
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Prostitution in Cairo 251
and the sex market readily expanded mainly due to the massive military pres-
ence in the city. Artemis Cooper, author of a brilliant account of Cairo’s mili-
tary and social history from 1939 to 1945, states that there were from 80,000 to
100,000 British soldiers on Egyptian soil at the beginning of the war. In 1941,
however, 140,000 men were stationed in Cairo. Venturing into the city, the sol-
diers would get on a tram and head to the nightlife district in order to spend
the money they had acquired during their time spent in action in the desert.79
Life in the Brothel
Life in the brothel was marked by stiff competition between the women’s over-
seer and her employers. In these establishments, women normally had to rely
on a pimp in order to be protected from greedy keepers and their relentless
physical and economic exploitation, as well as from violent and rowdy custom-
ers. Getting a lover/pimp meant more protection for the women, but that often
added to their subordinate position as an element of exploitation.
As for the social profiles of pimps, the vast majority were young working-
class men, both locals and foreigners, and they were generally unskilled casual
labourers. Most of the men had spent much time in the Azbakiyyah district
temporarily working in bars and taverns where they made the acquaintance
of the prostitutes as they plied their trade in the area. Among the cases dis-
covered during the course of our research, there were at least four pimps who
had previously served in the British Army, two of whom had been members of
the Cairo City Police under the command of Russell Pasha. Others were part
of loose networks of international recruiters and lived constantly on the run,
crossing the Mediterranean to procure women for Cairene establishments and
deliver them to their workplaces. Foreign brothel keepers always profited from
the virtual immunity bestowed upon them by the Capitulations.
The earnings of prostitutes were favourable compared to current wages but
they varied depending on the areas in which they worked. Prostitutes charged
ten piastres per customer in the Wass‘ah and double that in the European
Wajh-al-Birkah. A woman could earn from eighty piastres to around one and
a half Egyptian pounds a day depending on the number of clients they had.80
While prostitution was quite lucrative in terms of wages, many of the women
79 Artemis Cooper, Cairo in the War, 1939–1945 (London, 1989), p. 112.
80 wl, 4/IBS/6/037, Egypt. Worker sent by aab and Association for Social and Moral Hy-
giene, 1928–32. By way of comparison, it will suffice to say that a local mason earned 6–12
piastres per day, while a rail worker’s family of six lived in a three-room flat on a daily
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252 Hammad and Biancani
had to share out their earning with their padronas or souteneurs. Brothel in-
mates kept half of their earnings and paid the keeper for board plus various
extras, usually at very high prices. In some cases, women could retain their
earnings but paid a monthly fee for the rooms they used. Other expenses in-
cluded medical fees and annual registration fees. In many instances the prosti-
tutes had children and relatives who were dependent on them and part of their
earnings often went to pimps and bullies. Many women became indebted to
their padronas or found it very difficult to save up money to reinvest in a trade
or exit strategy.
Prostitutes were thus in a weak and subordinate position, but this does not
mean they did not try to resist or renegotiate the terms of their exploitation.
When sex workers attempted to subvert the power relations they had with their
exploiters (their pimps), they did not hesitate to make use of the law system as
plaintiffs in courts. Among the consular minutes we researched there are cases
which provide interesting insights into the relationship between prostitutes
and their pimps, and these show how women were able to sue their exploiters
and haul them before a court for mistreatment.81
Abolitionism
In the 1920s, abolitionism became a prominent issue in public discourses and
a number of civil society organizations actively campaigned for it. National-
ists, religious authorities, local feminists, British purity movement advocates,
and colonial administrators all joined forces in supporting the cause of the
abolition of licensed prostitution. While liberal-bourgeois groups such as the
feminists led by Hudà Sha‘arawi rejected licensed prostitution on the basis of
universalist humanist discourses, religious leaders were concerned with mor-
al regeneration of correct Muslim practices as a form of resistance to west-
ernization and degeneration of the believers’ community. Shaykh Mahmud
income of 6 piastres. See Marcel Clerget, Le Caire: Étude de geographie urbaine et d’histoire
économique (Paris, 1934), p. 156.
81 It is not possible to elaborate on this point here because of space constraints. Primary
sources include na, fo 841/146- Rex versus Giuseppe Vassallo for living wholly or in part
on the proceedings of prostitution; na, fo 841/164- Rex versus Pasquale Magri for wholly
or in part living on the proceedings of prostitution; na, fo 841/186- Rex Versus James Kelly
alias James Hughes for living partially or in part of the proceeds of prostitution; Archivi
di Stato del Ministero degli Affari Esteri, Rome [hereafter asmae], Casi Penali Regio Tri-
bunale Consolare Italiano del Cairo, 1932, folder 2, cases 41–95; asmae, Casi Penali Regio
Tribunale Consolare Italiano, 1926, cases 1–65.
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Prostitution in Cairo 253
bu-al-‘Uyun, a prominent social reformist from al-Azhar, the Cairo-based
A
centre for Islamic learning in the Muslim world and the most important of
its kind, fulminated against the danger of public vice in the pages of al-Ahram
while the state authorities decidedly put abolitionism on the political agenda
and started to study proposals for the suppression of licensed prostitution.
After the First World War and increasingly after formal independence in
1922, the realms of sexuality and morality were tackled by nationalists as dis-
cursive areas to be conquered in order to define archetypical notions of Egyp-
tian community and family. Licensed prostitution involving native women
increasingly came to be seen as intolerable in terms of race and, of course, its
blatant incompatibility with Islamic laws. In April of 1926, a memorandum was
published containing the views of the local authorities on licensed prostitu-
tion.82 It reported that no justification could be found for the preservation of
such legislation when countless studies had demonstrated that, due to a lack
of adequate sanitary structures and juridical barriers, legalization of sex work
had not succeeded in curbing venereal diseases. The authors recommended
the repeal rather than the modification of the existing law on prostitutes: “The
Egyptian government should follow in the steps of those Nations who led the
struggle against licensed prostitution and in defence of public health.”83 In
1932, a mixed Anglo-Egyptian commission was formed and charged with the
task of investigating all the circumstances relevant to licensed prostitution in
the country and its impact on public health and security; the aim of this was to
establish once and for all whether the system was desirable or not. The com-
mission worked for three years and the final report was published in 1935.84
In the report a draft law was proposed. It called for the arrest and detention
of all third parties involved in the sexual exploitation of minors, both in legal
brothels and clandestine houses, and punishment of up to fifteen years or a
fine of 500 Egyptian pounds. Those aiding prostitution by knowingly renting
out rooms or flats for debauchery and those earning their living by prostitut-
ing themselves would be subject to detention for up to two years and a fine of
up to fifty Egyptian pounds. On 26 March 1938, the Ministry of Health issued
a decree forbidding the licensing of new prostitutes and the opening of new
brothels. One year later, a new commission of enquiry was appointed under
the auspices of the Ministry of Health and it reasserted the conclusion reached
by the previous one. The topic of the fate of sex workers was also tackled by the
82 “Ta’adil La’ihat- al -’ahirat”, in al-Ahram, 13 April 1926, n.p.
83 Ibid.
84 Commission of Enquiry into the Problem of Licensed Prostitution, Report of the Commis-
sion of Enquiry into the Problem of Licensed Prostitution in Egypt (Cairo, 1935).
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254 Hammad and Biancani
commission; it recommended the opening of four refuges for “fallen women”
in Cairo, Alexandria, Tanta, and Asiut, and they were to provide the women
with marketable skills such as cooking and sewing. As a last measure to stop
“social derangement”, abolitionism was eventually implemented in 1949 when
Ibrahim ‘Abd-al-Hadi Basha, the Prime Minister and Commander in Chief,
promulgated Military Decree 76 on the closure of brothels. Article 1 called
for the closure of all bordellos in the country where more than one woman
worked as a prostitute, and they were to be closed within two months of the
decree’s issuance. As is evident from this article, prostitution per se constituted
no criminal offence, while third-party exploitation was prosecuted by law, un-
like the situation under regulationism. Two months after the issuance of the
decree, anyone who was found to be managing houses of ill fame or living on
the proceedings of women’s prostitution was to be subject to arrest and deten-
tion for one to three years, and two to four years if the souteneur was a relative
of the exploited woman. Article 5 of the decree stated that if a woman suffer-
ing from a venereal disease was found to be practicing prostitution in a house
of ill fame, she was to be arrested and detained for three to five years and fined
100 Egyptian pounds.
The complete criminalization of sex work was legally established in 1951
when Law 68, a regulation against debauchery, was passed. This law, which
is still force today, calls for the prosecution of third parties as well as women
working as prostitutes. Any woman found engaging in paid sex was and is sub-
ject to at least three months imprisonment and a fine of 250 to 300 Egyptian
pounds. Egyptian lawmakers went further and supported the outright restric-
tion of sexual freedom outside wedlock. Law 68 on Combating Prostitution,
which was promulgated in 1951, decidedly criminalized sex workers and de-
fined prostitution as “the practice of vice with others with no distinction.” The
transactional or monetary nature of sex work was not recognized, thus equat-
ing prostitution with consensual extra-marital sexual activity.
Postcolonial Prostitution: When Sex Workers Became Criminals
Sex workers in the 1950s were the first generation to work against the legal
system and consequently were treated as criminals. After all of the licensed
brothels were shut down in 1949, Law 68 criminalized sex work. This occurred
on the eve of the Revolution of 1952 which resulted in the end of British Oc-
cupation, the abolishment of the monarchy, and the establishment of the re-
public. During the short-lived period of unification with Syria (1958–1961), Law
10 of 1961 extended the criminalization of prostitution to Syria. All activities
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Prostitution in Cairo 255
related to sex work such as facilitating sold sex, pimping, soliciting, recruit-
ing sex workers, and managing or providing places for commercial sex became
punishable crimes. Clients were the only party not to be criminalized and they
were treated as witnesses.85 In this process, scholars joined the state authori-
ties in criminalizing sex work.
Interestingly, the label “registered prostitute” was kept in use but it did not
refer to a licensed sex worker anymore. It now applied, and still does, to a wom-
an who, having been arrested at least once for a commercial sex-related activ-
ity, is still considered to be suspicious and is subject to being arrested. Egyptian
sociologists, anthropologists, criminologists, and legal scholars have studied
prostitutes, pimps, and madams as criminals, social deviants, and psychopaths.
Thus, most of the information available is based on surveys of prostitutes who
have been arrested and/or imprisoned.86 The major goal of scholars has been
to make suggestions to policy makers about how to eliminate everything re-
lated to prostitution. Despite their different disciplines and approaches, most
Egyptian scholars hold to the idea that sex work is a dangerous evil and threat
to society that requires harsh legal treatment. At least one of those scholars
went so far as to recommend curtailing female sexuality and denying women’s
right to fall in love and choose their partners.87 Notably, scholarship on pros-
titution in postcolonial Egypt has been based on the narratives of prostitutes
themselves while their voices were mostly absent in previous studies. Clients
are always absent from research because they are never treated as partners in
violations of the law. Thus, they are never arrested and the state does not keep
records of them.
Sex work in postcolonial Cairo became structurally adjusted so that it could
manoeuvre within the strict legal boundaries that came into existence. Ac-
cording to a study carried out in 1961, most sex workers (78.7 per cent) were
under 30 years old. The largest age group was between 20 and 24 years old
85 For the laws and legal procedures concerning sex work since 1951, see As’ad, Ahmad Sabri,
Qanun al-uqubat al-misri mu‘allaqan ‘ala nususihi wa mudhayyalan biahkam mahkamat
al-naqd (Cairo,1964); ‘Izzat Muhammad Nimr, Jara’im al-‘ird fi qanun al-‘uqubat al-misri
(Cairo, 1984); Muhammad ‘Izzat ‘Ajwah, Jara’im al-‘ird wa ifsad al-akhlaq fi qanun muka-
fahat al-da‘arah raqm 10 li-sanat 1961 wa-qanun al- ‘uqubat: Dirasah tahliliyyah muzaw-
wadah bi-ahkam mahkamat al-Naqd wa-muqaranah fi bad tashriat al-duwal al-‘arabiyyah
(Cairo, 1972).
86 A notable exception is an ethnographical study in which a scholar with the permission
of the police pretended to be a client and surveyed sex workers and pimps in their work
places. See ‘Abd Allah ‘Abd al-Ghani Ghanim, al-Baghaya wa al-bagha’: Dirasah susiyu-
anthrubulujiyyah (Alexandria, 1990).
87 Ghanim, al- Baghaya wa-al-bagha’, p. 317.
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256 Hammad and Biancani
(33.8 per cent), followed by those who were between 15 and 19 years old (24 per
cent). There were also prostitutes under 15 years old and over 45 years of age.88
Madams, the women who facilitated the sale of sex through various activities
such as recruiting sex workers and clients and arranging places for sexual en-
counters, were all ages. In addition to being sex workers themselves, younger
madams exploited other women while the older ones (over 40) focused more
on facilitating prostitution since their services were no longer in demand. Ma-
jor differences can be identified in commercial sex since the mid-1970s. Most
of the sex workers in the 1950s were illiterate and came from poor families, and
for them selling sex was a way to make ends meet.89 They lacked the skills to in-
tegrate into the formal job market. Half of them worked solely in prostitution
while the other half could not generate enough income to support themselves
and their dependants by working low-paying jobs such as street vending and
domestic services. Only 3.5 per cent of their families were indifferent about
their involvement in the sex trade, while the vast majority of women had to
conceal it out of fear and a sense of shame. In contrast to stereotypes, very few
of those sex workers drank alcohol and/or smoked hashish or used any other
drugs. The few who did were merely trying to please their clients and only two
women admitted that they enjoyed alcohol and hashish. Their clients were
mostly Egyptian and a few were from other Arab states.
Throughout the 1950s, Azbakiyyah continued to be an important residential
area for sex workers and 33 per cent of those who were arrested in association
with prostitution lived there. None of them managed brothels or received cli-
ents at their homes in Azbakiyyah. Women could be accused of soliciting in
the street, or according to the legal terms, “urging men to commit adultery, wa
fujur, and committing shameful acts in public”, and they didn’t have to just be
caught providing services or managing secret brothels. This was because sex
workers took it upon themselves to find clients rather than waiting for them
in their professional places and very few of them were willing to use their own
homes. Most of the time their clients arranged the places where sexual en-
counters took place. Sex workers usually took the risk of going with a group of
clients, mostly a group of friends who shared the cost. This meant that women
had to work more, serve more men for less money, and agree to go with groups
of strangers to unfamiliar places where they would not be able to get help if
88 Hassan al-Sa‘ati, al-Bigha’ fi al-Qahirah (Cairo, 1961), p. 15.
89 The information on sex workers in the 1950s is based on a contemporary survey con-
ducted by a team of the Egyptian National Center for Social and Criminal Research. See
al-Markaz al-Qawmi lil-Buhuth al-Ijtimia‘iyyah wa al-Jina’iyyah, al-Bigha’ fi al-Qahirah:
Mash ijtima‘i wa dirasah iklinikiyyah (Cairo, 1961).
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Prostitution in Cairo 257
they needed it. Prostitutes also provided sexual services in cars and boats. This
is a reflection of the fact that prostitutes had to work beyond the boundaries
of law but also reveals that they were free from pimps and mediators in the
early phase of criminalization. Three quarters of the women worked autono-
mously, which was a short-lived radical departure from licensed prostitution.
The few mediators involved in commercial sex in the 1950s were mostly men
whose businesses set up prostitutes with clients and they were often hairdress-
ers, waiters, and cab drivers. Although there were a few male pimps, women
dominated pimping and they were mostly older retired prostitutes.90
The changes in the structure and dynamics of sex trade throughout the sec-
ond half of twentieth century not only reflect the state’s treatment of commer-
cial sex but also the rapid course of socio-economic and political changes in
Egypt and its Arab environment as a whole. After the Arab-Israeli war in 1973,
wealth flooded into Arab oil-producing countries. Egypt emerged as an attrac-
tive hub for wealthy Arab tourists, particularly in the summer. Coincidently,
Egyptian society was going through socio-economic changes associated with
reintegration in the open market and the global economy, which is known as
the Infitah, the Open Door Policy. Many observed how these sudden changes
widened the gap between the rich and the poor, unleashed consumerism, in-
creased unemployment even among the educated, and undermined moral val-
ues; at the same time, observers noted the importance of wealth regardless of
its source. These developments brought about changes in the structure of sex
work. The sex trade witnessed a geographical shift from downtown Cairo to
Pyramids Street and the Mohandiseen and Doqqi areas in Giza, which is the
twin city of Cairo. These newly developed areas became home to internation-
al restaurants, nightclubs, discotheques, dance halls cabarets, and cafés. The
modern appeal of these areas and their proximity to the pyramids made them
a hub for tourists, particularly those from the Arab states of the Persian Gulf. A
substantial number of residences are rented out fully furnished to those tour-
ists who flood to the country during the summer and around New Year’s Eve.
Since the late 1970s, Arab tourists, backed by their financial wealth, have
represented an important segment of the sex market and pimps have regained
their importance in a complex network structure. The importance of pimps
and mediators since the mid-1970s cannot be overestimated. In that illegal
trade, male and female pimps provide prostitutes with protection, expertise,
and guaranteed work throughout the year. About 70 per cent of pimps are
90 See al-Markaz al-Qawmi lil-Buhuth al-Ijtimia‘iyyah wa al-Jina’iyyah, al-Bigha’ fi al-
Qahirah: Mash Ijtimia‘i Iklinikiyyah, pp. 58–60; al-Sa‘ati, Al-Bigha’ fi al-Qahirah, pp. 82–83.
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258 Hammad and Biancani
women and are currently or former sex workers.91 By connecting sex workers
with clients and arranging places for them to operate, they save sex workers
from soliciting in the streets and consequently protect them from the police
and clients. Some sex workers get daily wages from their pimps regardless of
how many customers they serve. Although this system guarantees a regular
income, it is not favoured by women as pimps can exploit them to serve a high
number of clients for a fixed wage. Thus, only unexperienced prostitutes agree
to work with that system.92 Although many prostitutes resent the exploita-
tion of pimps who take up to 50 per cent of the income, they prefer to work
with pimps and even do their best to protect their pimps if they are arrested.93
This is because pimps are usually committed to paying legal fees for lawyers
and supporting the women when they get arrested and they also take care
of their dependants while the women are in prison. Pimps pay visits and/or
ask other sex workers to visit their imprisoned colleagues, which gives them
much moral support, particularly if they do not have a family or their family
has abandoned them.
Prostitution networks geared toward the tourism market are not restricted
to providing sex; they also offer a wide variety of services including picking up
tourists at the airport. A sex worker who has also pimped other women nar-
rated the nature of her tasks and daily route: “I pick them up from the airport,
show them furnished apartments to rent, arrange a domestic servant, do shop-
ping, bring other prostitutes and let them choose [one], I take them to night
clubs, dance with them, and then go to their apartment to sleep with them
while I’m totally drunk.”94 She stated that she makes a lot of money through
fees, gifts, tips, and commissions, and also by being involved in the apartment
rental process and the prices of commodities and services. On the other hand,
women who have the dual task of pimping and providing sex have to be gener-
ous in paying other sex workers and domestic servants well so they can secure
their loyalty and facilitate the work. They also spend a great deal of their in-
come on rental cars, fancy clothing, and lavish residences with phone lines,
a luxury that was rare in Cairo until the last decade of the twentieth century.
Male and female pimps are very receptive to particular demands such as
providing young girls and virgins for high prices. When a pimp fails to recruit a
91 Wazarat al-Dakhiliyyah, Bayan ihsa’i bi-majhudat qism mukafahat jara’im al-adab (Cairo,
1990).
92 Ghanim, al-Baghaya wa-al-bagha’, p. 181.
93 Ibid., p. 183.
94 Muhammad ‘Arif, Tariq al-inhiraf: bahth maydani ‘an ihtiraf al-Bigha’ (Cairo, 1986),
pp. 120–121.
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Prostitution in Cairo 259
virgin, an experienced sex worker will undergo minor surgery to get a fake hy-
men and is thus able to meet the demand. When tourists patronize young girls,
the clients sign a civil marriage contract known as ‘urfi marriage, which is legal
but does not have to be registered in the state records.95 The interaction be-
tween male Arab tourists and female Egyptian sex workers has triggered focal
polemics and stereotyping on both sides in the last few decades. Some Egyp-
tian films have dealt with the theme of Arab men only seeking sexual pleasure
and dragging destitute Egyptian women into prostitution or prostitution-like
marriages.96 One sex worker who often dealt with tourists said she was deeply
offended and angered when a tourist-client suggested that all Egyptian women
were like her.97 She said she slapped him and terminated her two-week service
agreement after only one week because he insulted her country, Egypt. This
narrative is notable in that it both implies that this particular sex worker has a
low view of herself and also that sex work is perceived negatively in Egypt and
the Arab World.
Another structural change associated with developments in Egypt and the
Arab region after the boom of oil wealth and Infitah has been an increase in
trafficking networks. The police arrested three people involved in a case of the
smuggling of a woman in 1984. That number jumped to twenty-six people in-
volved in three cases in 1988, not to mention those whose activities went un-
noticed or to whom the authorities turned a blind eye. These networks bring
foreign women to work as prostitutes in Egypt and export Egyptian women to
the prostitution market in other countries such as Lebanon and the states of
the Arab Gulf. Very often women are granted real or fake employment contracts
as domestic servants. Networks incorporate those who have access to fake vi-
sas, passports, and other documents, since most such women were blacklisted
and unable to leave the country.98 Unsurprisingly, 15 per cent of those who
were arrested in 1990 were students in middle and high school and even uni-
versity students.99 One of the dramatic aspects of the illegal but flourishing
sex business in Cairo is that it has been used to generate politically-motivated
sensational media coverage.100 By exploiting public interest, the former ruling
95 Ghanim, Baghaya wa-al-bagha’, p. 276.
96 Among many examples, Egyptian films such as Ayam al-Ghadab (Days of Anger) by Munir
Radi, (1989) and Lahm Rakhis (Cheap Meat) by Iynas al-Dighidi (1995) are good represen-
tatives of this kind of polemic.
97 ‘Arif, Tariq al-Inhiraf, p. 114.
98 Ghanim, Baghaya wa-al-bagha’, pp. 293–300.
99 Ibid., p. 106.
100 For examples of press coverage of issues concerning sex work, see app. 1 in Ghanim,
Baghaya waal-bagha’, pp. 321–328.
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260 Hammad and Biancani
regime frequently waged arrest campaigns against celebrities in association
with sex work networks.101 These cases captured the public attention for weeks
and were skilfully used by the Mubarak government to steer public opinion
away from its failing economic policies and political repression. The ways that
the Egyptian regime has employed sex work to conceal its shortcomings is a
matter which certainly deserves further investigation.
Conclusion
This paper has tried to provide a rather extensive overview of sex work in the
city of Cairo from roughly 1600 to the present day. By drawing upon a diverse
array of sources including mediaeval chronicles, police files, court cases, abo-
litionist societies’ papers, the press, travelogues, socio-criminal reports, and
ethnographies, we have tried to give a detailed account of the ways in which
sex work was carried out and how it changed in the rapidly transforming urban
environment in precolonial, colonial, and postcolonial times. In particular we
focused on the early modern and modern state regulations of commercial sex
and the political economy of prostitution, taking into consideration the char-
acteristics of the sex trade and how working conditions changed at particular
junctures of time.
The process of the consolidation of state authority and colonial control
resulted in the increasing marginalization of women marketing their sexual
services as a separate professional category endowed with a sexualized social
persona, that of the prostitute. By shunning a legalistic and social approach
that separates prostitutes from the broader class of Egyptians, we tried to high-
light the links between prostitution and the political economy of the labouring
class since the nineteenth century. In this introductory overview, we focused
on the relationship between prostitution and society, not just prostitutes’ sub-
culture. Far from being the “oldest trade” as is often maintained in traditional,
essentializing understandings of this phenomenon, prostitution underwent
a shifting trajectory from regulation to abolitionism in colonial Egypt, and
criminalization in the postcolonial state has been closely intertwined with the
articulations of an indigenous nationalist discourse and the process of nation-
building in Egypt.
101 The most sensational case was that of cinema stars Hanan Turk and Wafa’ ‘Amir. For more
on the sensational coverage of prostitution and sexual matters in the Egyptian press,
see Muhammad al-Baz, Sahafat al-itharah: al-siyasah wa al-din wa al-jins fi al-suhuf al-
misriyya (Cairo, 2010).
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chapter 10
Colonial and Post-Colonial Casablanca
Liat Kozma
Introduction
Casablanca is the largest city in Morocco and its largest port. Before the 1912
French occupation of Morocco, Casablanca had been a town of 20,000. In the
1910s, the city started attracting migrants because of French colonial policies
and the city’s subsequent growing importance for Morocco’s economy. French
urban policies in Casablanca, the construction of its new port and its designa-
tion as a commercial and administrative centre attracted both European and
rural migrants to the city, which transformed its demographic composition.
By 1936, it was a city of over 250,000 inhabitants; by 1951, it was a metropolis
of 700,000 people. Part of its growth was a result of European immigration; as
the capital of French-occupied Morocco, the city attracted European admin-
istrators, businessmen, and settlers. The larger share of immigrants, however,
came from the Moroccan countryside. Both Europeans and Jews left Morocco
shortly after it achieved independence in 1956. The city, however, continued to
grow and now has a population of more than 3.5 million.1
Casablanca is an interesting case study of regulated prostitution. Like other
French-colonized cities, it instituted regulated prostitution. In addition, how-
ever, for about three decades, from 1922 to 1953, state-regulated prostitution
was carried out in a walled-off brothel district called Bousbir, which is located
a few kilometres to the southeast of the city. In this “urbanist and hygienic
utopia”2 regular police and medical inspections were used to ostensibly pro-
tect women from exploitation and their clients from venereal diseases. French
administrators in Hanoi, Tunis, and Beirut saw it as a model for emulation, in
part or in full. Medical doctors and abolitionists in the metropole debated the
pros and cons of regulation based on what they heard about Bousbir.3
1 André Adam, Casablanca: Essai sur la transformation de la société marocaine au contact de
l’Occident, 2 vols, (Paris, 1972), ii, p. 149.
2 Christelle Taraud, “Urbanisme, hygiénisme et prostitution à Casablanca dans les années
1920”, French Colonial History, 7 (2006), pp. 97–108.
3 Julia Christine Scriven Miller, “The Romance of Regulation: The Movement against State-
Regulated Prostitution in France, 1871–1946” (Unpublished Ph.D., New York University, 2000),
pp. 387–388.
© Liat Kozma, 2017 | doi 10.1163/9789004346253_011
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262 Kozma
For that reason we know much more about prostitution in protectorate Cas-
ablanca than in later periods. In this laboratory of social hygiene, French of-
ficials and medical doctors conducted frequent studies, mapping the quarter’s
demographics and collecting information about prostitutes’ personal histories
and health as well as data about their clientele. The overview of prostitution
in the protectorate period presented below is based mostly on a report dating
from 1935 which was prepared for the French authorities in Tunisia, as they had
considered constructing a similar quarter in Tunis; it is also based on a report
that two medical doctors wrote in 1951 in preparation for Bousbir’s subsequent
closure in 1953. After that point in time, such detailed data on prostitution in
Casablanca is less available. At the moment, virtually no academic research
has been carried out about the first decades of Morocco’s independence from
the late 1950s to the early 1990s.
For more recent periods, this survey relies on sociological studies which
were generally based on interviews with a few dozen sex workers. Sara Carmen
Benito’s research in this regard has been criticized for a lack of historical depth,
and historian Frédéric Abécassis has raised valid questions about the represen-
tativeness of such a sample in a city whose prostitute population is estimated
to be 2,000 women.4 These critiques are valid, but nonetheless such sociologi-
cal research does provide us with a preliminary understanding of some of the
challenges that Casablanca’s prostitutes face in the new legal and social reali-
ties of independent Morocco.
The Protectorate Period
Prostitution existed in historical Islamic societies, but mostly as a social rather
than a legal category. In Islamic law, zina, or non-marital sex, was defined as
sexual relations between a man and a woman who was neither his wife nor
his slave; prostitution thus constituted an offense within this category.5 Little
is known, however, about social attitudes regarding prostitution in precolonial
Morocco. During the French protectorate (1912–56), prostitution was regulated
and prostitutes were divided into two categories: registered and non-registered
4 Sara Carmen Benito, La prostitution dans les rues de Casablanca (Casablanca, 2008); Frédéric
Abécassis, “Sara Carmen Benito, La prostitution dans les rues de Casablanca”, Lectures: Les
comptes rendus, 2009, available at: http://lectures.revues.org/718; last accessed 26 June 2017.
5 Colin Imber, “Zina in Ottoman Law”, Studies in Ottoman History and Law (Istanbul, 1996),
pp. 187–219.
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Colonial and Post-Colonial Casablanca 263
(filles soumises [literally: submissive girls, or supervised girls] and clandestines,
respectively).
Immediately after the 1912 occupation of Morocco, prostitutes began to be
supervised by military doctors and the gendarmerie in order to protect French
troops from venereal diseases. At the time of the French occupation, Casablan-
ca’s rather modest brothel district consisted of three or four brothels located
on a central street that had been leased from a Frenchman named Prosper
Ferrieu who held several diplomatic positions in the local French consulate
early in the twentieth century. The local pronunciation of his Christian name
resulted in the small quarter being referred to as Bousbir.
In 1914, civil administration replaced the military one and as a consequence
prostitutes were placed under police supervision, but their residential choices
were not yet restricted. In 1921, the colonial administration decided to relocate
the Bousbir brothels a few kilometres away from the city in a dedicated en-
closed quarter, and all indigenous prostitutes were required to move there in
a transfer that was completed in 1923. The municipality rented the 24,000m2
quarter to a private concessionaire for an annual fee of 43,200 francs, while he
received from ten to twenty times that amount from the prostitutes alone, not
counting the profits made from café and shop owners.6
Bousbir and French Colonial Casablanca
Historians of French colonialism in Morocco have presented Casablanca as a
social laboratory, particularly with regards to the regulation of urban space.
The creation of walled-off quarters was part of an urban experiment involv-
ing policies and practices that would have been impossible to implement or
even be inconceivable in the metropole.7 French urban policy was based on
the calculated ideas of Morocco’s governor, Hubert Lyautey; his approach was
premised on notions about modernization and development on the one hand
and the preservation of Morocco’s perceived cultural character on the other.
Accordingly, particularly in the early years of the protectorate, the French
administration promoted the accelerated development of the commercial,
6 Driss Maghraoui, “Knowledge, Gender and Spatial Configuration in Colonial Casablanca”,
in Driss Maghraoui (ed.), Revisiting the Colonial Past in Morocco (London, 2013), pp. 64–
86; Taraud, “Urbanisme, hygienisme et prostitution à Casablanca dans les années 1920”,
pp. 97–108.
7 Christelle Taraud, La prostitution coloniale: Algérie, Tunisie, Maroc, 1830–1962 (Paris, 2003),
p. 22.
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264 Kozma
industrial, and European sections of the city while struggling to preserve the
separate “traditional” Arab quarters.8
Segregating respectability from vice, colonizer and colonized was part of
this design, as was dividing the wealthy from the poor. The modernization of
urban space was marked by anxiety and tension regarding the city’s rational-
ity on the one hand and the irrationality of desire and the constant threat of
venereal diseases on the other. In this specific colonial context, such anxieties
were focused on rural immigrants, who were now much less supervised than
they had been in their former social environment, and they were considered to
be more vulnerable to the temptations of city life.9
Bousbir as a Rational Utopian Urban Design
In its design, Bousbir embodied an orientalist fantasy, mimicking and adapting
oriental architectural styles. Its public spaces included a cinema, a hamam, a
few shops, cafés, dance halls, gardens, and decorative fountains. Buses to the
district left the city centre every ten minutes, and a bicycle shed, taxi station,
and parking lot were constructed. The only gate leading to Bousbir was closed
for three hours each night, from 3 a.m. to 6 a.m., and it was constantly guarded
by both the police and the military.10 A dispensary was located in front of the
police station, an example of the conflation of police intervention and medical
inspections.11
In 1935, Bousbir had 179 houses of prostitution with 497 rooms, as well as
forty-eight boutiques. Rooms were rented for 5 francs per day. The rooms had
electricity, but no running water. Most houses had one floor with two or three
rooms, and a small kitchen and patio. Some prostitutes lived alone, while oth-
ers worked for a brothel keeper in exchange for room and board.12 Official de-
signs notwithstanding, visitors to Bousbir described fly-infected garbage cans,
women emptying filthy buckets onto the streets, a lack of running water, and
dirty bathrooms.13
8 Gwendolyn Wright, The Politics of Design in French Colonial Urbanism (Chicago, 1991),
pp. 85–159; Maghraoui, “Knowledge, Gender and Spatial Configuration”, p. 65.
9 Taraud, La prostitution coloniale, pp. 101–105; Mathieu and Maury, Bousbir, p. 41.
10 Taraud, La prostitution colonial, pp. 105–109; Mathieu and Maury, Bousbir, p. 41; “La
Prostitution et le contrôle sanitaire des moeurs à Tunis, à Alger et à Casablanca”, Centre
des Archives diplomatiques de Nantes [Hereafter cadn], Tunisie- Fonds de la résidence,
TU-V-1888, 1.1.1935, pp. 45–51, 57.
11 Maghraoui, “Knowledge, Gender and Spatial Configuration”, p. 78.
12 “La Prostitution et le controle sanitaire”, pp. 54–55.
13 Taraud, La prostitution colonial, pp. 108–112; Mathieu and Maury, Bousbir, pp. 41–44.
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Colonial and Post-Colonial Casablanca 265
In 1949, Bousbir’s filles soumises charged 45 to 500 francs for a single sexual
encounter and 250 to 2,000 francs for an entire night. Women normally had
three to six sexual encounters per day (each lasting no more than five to fif-
teen minutes), and one or two full nights a week. Brothel keepers sometimes
supplemented their income by having prostitutes sell mint tea and charged
the women if they didn’t sell enough. Travelers sometimes used Bousbir for an
overnight stay instead of staying at a hotel in the city as they could get meals, a
bed for the night, and sexual services.14
According to Jean Mathieu and P.H. Maury, frequent police action against
clandestines who worked outside of Bousbir resulted in medical examinations.
Women found to be healthy were warned and released. A third arrest and con-
viction resulted in women being forcibly taken to Bousbir, which, as we see
below, they were not free to leave. Women found to be infected with venereal
diseases were sent to the hospital, and once released were transferred directly
to Bousbir. Brothel keepers used the dispensaries as recruitment grounds, or as
Mathieu and Maury termed it, as a “slave market”.15
Demographics
We know quite a bit about the social profile of Casablanca’s registered prosti-
tutes in the protectorate period. Taking it as a model for French colonial regu-
lation, administrators and medical doctors throughout this period mapped the
demographic distribution of the city’s prostitutes, keeping track of their week-
ly routines and health. Most of these reports were biased in that they focused
on Bousbir and ignored non-registered prostitutes. Bousbir’s filles soumises
obviously represented only part of the city’s prostitute community, however;
estimates varied widely from half to as little as 10 per cent of the number of
those practicing at least occasional prostitution in Casablanca at the time.16
The main social groups in Bousbir were Muslims, Jews, and Europeans. The
first two were native to Morocco, and were thus classified as indigène. The third
were part of a European migratory community that came into being in North
Africa in the mid-nineteenth century. As in the entire region, Casablanca’s
European population increased rapidly, growing from a few hundred early in
the century to about 35,000 in 1925 and 133,000 in 1952. Most of these migrants
were French, with smaller Italian and Spanish communities, which again is
representative of the general pattern.17
14 Mathieu and Maury, Bousbir, pp. 105–106.
15 Ibid., pp. 69–70, 125.
16 Ibid., p. 37.
17 Adam, Casablanca, p. 162.
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266 Kozma
Mathieu and Maury found that of the 1,500 prostitutes living in Bousbir in
the late 1940s, including both practicing prostitutes and those housed there
during the years preceding their investigation, only 265 came from the city and
its suburbs. 312 originated from around Marrakesh, 84 from around Rabat, 47
from around Fes, 37 from around Agadir, and 36 from around Meknes, and the
rest came from the countryside. Some of them moved there from regulated
brothels in other Moroccan cities. A small minority came from Algeria and
other North African countries or from Europe.18 Mathieu and Maury conclud-
ed that 83 per cent of the city’s prostitutes originated from the same regions as
those of the inhabitants of its new slums; they were from the coastal plains of
southern Morocco and the High Atlas. By the late 1940s, single women residing
in those slums were often employed as workers or maids in the indigenous or
European quarters of the city. It was their typically low salaries which drove
them to prostitution.19
Between 1920 and 1950 there were from 400 to 900 registered prostitutes
in Bousbir at any given moment. In 1935, for example, in a city of a quarter
of a million inhabitants, Bousbir housed 466 women, of which 391 were Mus-
lim, 30 were Jewish, and 35 were European, as well as 20 “entertainers” under
police control.20 In 1951, Mathieu and Maury claimed that there were 98 Eu-
ropean prostitutes in Casablanca and 657 Moroccan. Most of the European
prostitutes, however, were located in the old city, while only a handful worked
in Bousbir. Jewish prostitutes usually lived alone, although some worked at
Jewish or Muslim brothels in Bousbir. They were better educated than their
Muslim counterparts, and charged higher fees. Mathieu and Maury also esti-
mated that during the decade preceding their study the number of clandestine
prostitutes in Casablanca had been from 3,000 to 5,000, with as many as 30,000
women engaged in at least occasional prostitution.21
Alongside Bousbir, Casablanca also had maisons de rendezvous, the resi-
dents of which were also supervised and medically examined. The 1935 report
estimated that many more dancers and singers supplemented their income
with clandestine prostitution and noted that countless indigenous lower-class
women occasionally practised prostitution as well.22
At the time of the 1951 report, the average age of prostitutes in Bousbir was
21, with few over 26 and none over 35. By that age, some became madams,
18 Taraud, La prostitution coloniale, p. 76.
19 Ibid., pp. 205–206; Mathieu and Maury, Bousbir, pp. 45–50.
20 “La Prostitution et le controle sanitaire”, p. 51.
21 Taraud, La prostitution coloniale, pp. 68–70; Mathieu and Maury, Bousbir, pp. 37, 76,
148–149.
22 “La Prostitution et le controle sanitaire”, pp. 70–72.
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Colonial and Post-Colonial Casablanca 267
others worked as maids for younger women, and still others left the quarter to
be reintegrated into “respectable” society. Officially, women could only start
working as prostitutes if they were 17 years old or older, but this restriction was
not enforced. The average age of voluntary onset was 18, but it ranged widely
from 12 to 26. Almost two thirds of the women practicing prostitution moved
to Bousbir voluntarily, while the rest were brought there by the police at an av-
erage age of 16. Those who resided in Bousbir voluntarily were predominantly
poor women who turned to prostitution after getting divorced or getting preg-
nant outside of wedlock, as it offered them a degree of economic stability that
the precarious life of a clandestine could not.23
Most residents (64 per cent) had not been engaged in any other kind of em-
ployment before they started working in Bousbir. Of those who were employed,
about half were domestic servants, and the rest were skilled or unskilled la-
bourers. They resorted to clandestine prostitution to supplement their meagre
incomes, taking advantage of the anonymity of the city and distance from fam-
ily supervision until the police took them to Bousbir. Some were driven into
prostitution after having been orphaned or widowed and subsequently had to
support their children or siblings.24
In terms of marital status, 78 per cent of the prostitutes interviewed by Ma-
thieu and Maury had been married at an average age of 14 (with a range of
10 to 16 years of age). About a third terminated their marriages on their own
initiative due to physical or verbal abuse at the hands of a husband or in-law;
the rest were divorced, abandoned, or widowed. Some had their first sexual
encounters outside of marriage, and this often occurred in the form of rape;
some of the women mentioned that American soldiers were their first sexual
partners (following the Anglo-American landings in North Africa in November
of 1942).25
Professional and Personal Life
Mathieu and Maury identified three categories of relationships between prosti-
tutes and brothel keepers: 47.6 per cent of women were completely dependent
on their madams, who provided them with room and board but no share in
profits; 23.8 per cent shared their profits with the brothel keeper; and 28.6 per
cent were independent but had to pay high rent.26 The more well-to-do hired
a maid, sometimes a former prostitute, who cooked, cleaned, went shopping,
23 Mathieu and Maury, Bousbir, p. 55.
24 Ibid.; Maghraoui, “Knowledge, Gender and Spatial Configuration”, pp. 75–76.
25 Mathieu and Maury, Bousbir, pp. 58–67, 135.
26 Ibid., pp. 106, 124–125.
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268 Kozma
and prepared tea for the clients. In addition, they made sure the prostitute was
not robbed by her clients and that she reported all her clients to her madam.27
As for the clientele, many of prostitutes’ clients were sailors and soldiers
who came to the city on shore leave. Because the city was an administrative
centre for the French occupying army, some of the clients were French, Moroc-
can, and Senegalese soldiers. In 1935, Bousbir had from 1,000 to 1,500 daily visi-
tors. These were Senegalese and French soldiers on even days and Moroccan
soldiers on odd days; such segregation, common in many colonial contexts,
was intended to maintain racial hierarchies and the distinction between colo-
nizer and colonized.28
Women were not allowed to leave Bousbir without a permit, which was usu-
ally issued once or twice a week; the authorities feared that the prostitutes
might get infected by casual or commercial sexual encounters in their free
time. Indeed, many prostitutes supplemented their income with unsupervised
sexual encounters in Casablanca’s hotels while on leave. About 10 per cent
never left Bousbir, and 4 per cent left only on Muslim holidays. The rest used
their leave for leisure activities such as going to a hamam, watching movies,
going to the municipal swimming pool, going to holy shrines, and going on
picnics.29 On workdays, they spent the mornings at cafés, public baths, beauty
salons, and laundry facilities. Most of them consumed alcohol, cannabis, and
cigarettes.30 Mathieu and Maury took note of the women’s tattoos; some of
them were decorative, and some were intended to conjure the evil eye or “en-
chain” a lover. Most were in French. Some prostitutes had scars which were the
result of wounds they inflicted on themselves during their attempts to remove
old tattoos.31
The pronatalism of Moroccan society made abortions rare and prostitutes’
children were either put up for adoption or raised by the women’s families.
Pregnancies among prostitutes, however, were rare, due to the effects of vene-
real diseases.32 Although children were not allowed to reside in Bousbir after
the age of 4, visitors noted that they encountered older ones. In some cases,
prostitutes maintained close contact with their families of origin, mainly their
sisters. Some left Bousbir after a few years and started families.33
27 Ibid., pp. 120–121.
28 “La Prostitution et le controle sanitaire”, p. 52.
29 Mathieu and Maury, Bousbir, pp. 80–82.
30 Maghraoui, “Knowledge, Gender and Spatial Configuration”, pp. 79–80.
31 Mathieu and Maury, Bousbir, pp. 99–104.
32 Ibid., p. 152.
33 Ibid., pp. 58–67, 135.
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Colonial and Post-Colonial Casablanca 269
More than two thirds of the women interviewed by Mathieu and Maury
were completely cut off from their families; they were either too ashamed
or they feared that they would suffer physical violence. The rest visited their
families at least once a year on Muslim holidays and often funded the family’s
festivities.34
Health
During the period of the protectorate, the main health concerns were syphilis
and gonorrhoea, the rates of which among non-registered prostitutes were no-
tably high. Clandestines were arrested in police raids, medically examined, and
then sent either to Bousbir or to a secure hospital. Casablanca’s Health Inspec-
tor, Eugène Lépinay, insisted that the strict medical inspections in the quarter
had managed to completely eradicate syphilis in the 1930s, but other medical
professionals disagreed. Sailors moved unrestricted to and from the port and
regularly infected the women in Bousbir. At any rate, Casablanca itself could
not remain a sterile environment, particularly as most clients preferred the
company of clandestines over the brief and less romantic experience offered
in Bousbir’s brothels.35
To protect the health of French troops stationed in Morocco, however, the
municipality operated prophylactic dispensaries. Bousbir had two separate
clinics: one for Europeans, Jews, and Senegalese, and the other for Moroccan
Muslims.36 Mathieu and Murray claimed that most women did little in the
way of hygiene aside from washing their genitals with water and only rarely
used soap, and they noted that prostitutes used the quarter’s dispensary very
rarely.37
Independent Morocco
Several significant developments affected prostitution in Casablanca following
Morocco’s independence. First, regulation was abolished and prostitution was
34 Ibid.
35 For the medical debates on Bousbir, see for example, “Etrange progress”, L’Abolitioniste,
2 (1934), p. 4; Dr Lépinay, “Le traitement volontaire et le traitement obligatoire des mala-
dies vénérienne chez les prostituées: Résultat compte d’après les observation faite à Cas-
ablanca”, Union International contre le Peril Vénérien, Assemblée Générale, Le Caire, 1933,
pp. 142–145; Esquier and Chevalider in La Prophylaxie Antivenerienne, 5 (1933), p. 429.
36 “La Prostitution et le controle sanitaire”, p. 53.
37 Mathieu and Maury, Bousbir, p. 141.
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270 Kozma
criminalized. Article 490 of the Moroccan penal code criminalizes non-marital
sex, while articles 491 and 497–503 specifically criminalize prostitution and re-
lated offenses such as living off the profits of prostitutes, renting rooms for
prostitution, and solicitation.38 Research conducted about a decade after inde-
pendence to assess the effects of these changes concluded that the conditions
of prostitutes worsened while their numbers actually multiplied, especially in
Casablanca.39
Second, the demographic composition of Moroccan society changed with
the dwindling of the European and Jewish communities after independence.40
This made the classification of prostitutes along national/ethnic lines no lon-
ger relevant. Third, due to those demographic changes as well as changes in
the education system following independence, social norms were undergo-
ing a transformation, particularly in the cities. Benito points in particular to
double sexual standards in Moroccan society by which—like in other times
and places—women are expected to remain virgins until marriage while men’s
virility is measured by their sexual conquests.41 Although somewhat stereotyp-
ical, her observation does point to a shift that occurred in the transformation
from colonial rule to independence. The ideal of premarital chastity, particu-
larly for women, has been maintained while the average marriage age has been
on the rise, making that ideal more difficult to achieve. Non-vaginal sex and hy-
men reconstruction surgery are some of the individual strategies employed to
resolve this tension. Since abortion is illegal in Morocco, women also resort to
back-alley abortions. Socially, one recent outcome has been the limited accep-
tance of premarital sex. Another outcome has been an increase in occasional
prostitution among young women, as detailed below.42
38 Benito, La prostitution dans les rues de Casablanca, pp. 21–22.
39 Mesdali Bennani, “Quelques considerations sur la prostitution au Maroc”, Revue Tunis-
sienne de Sciences Sociales, 4 (October 1967), pp. 79–84.
40 On the emigration of Europeans from North Africa see for example, Colette Dubois,
“La nation et les Français d’outre-mer: Rapatriés ou sinistrés de la décolonisation?” in
Jean-Louis Miège and Colette Dubois (eds), L’Europe retrouvée: Les migrations de la décol-
onisation (Paris, 1994), pp. 75–134. On Jewish emigration, see Michael M. Laskier, “Jewish
Migration from Morocco to Israel: Government Policies and the Position of International
Jewish Organizations, 1949–56”, Middle Eastern Studies, 25 (1989), pp. 323–362; and “The
Instability of Moroccan Jewry and the Moroccan Press in the First Decade after Indepen-
dence”, Jewish History, 1 (1986), pp. 39–54.
41 Benito, La prostitution dans les rues de Casablanca, pp. 32, 37–39, 53.
42 Ibid., pp. 19–20. Moroccan scholars have been discussing the complex relationship of
Moroccan society with women’s sexuality since the 1980s. See Fatima Mernissi, “Virgin-
ity and Patriarchy”, Women’s Studies International Forum 5 (1982), pp. 183–191; Soumaya
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Colonial and Post-Colonial Casablanca 271
Demographics
In the 1990s and the first decade of the 2000s, the demography of Casablanca’s
prostitutes continued to be affected by rural immigration to the city, particu-
larly from the High Atlas. Rural women were employed mainly as maids by
middle class families. Geographic, economic, and ethnic distances stripped
these women of the protection of their families and communities, exposing
them to abuse. Most lived in urban slums and constituted the lower classes of
Morocco’s prostitution sector.43
As noted above, although most Moroccan women are illiterate, the average
age of first marriage has been steadily increasing along with women’s educa-
tion levels. The result is a growing group of educated women who live alone or
with a female roommate. Because of the limited job opportunities available
and the lower salaries paid to women, some of them substitute dependence on
parents with dependence on a lover, sometimes involving occasional prostitu-
tion. As in other societies, Moroccan women who exchange sex for monetary
compensation do not necessarily consider themselves to be prostitutes. The
women whom Meriam Cheikh interviewed in 2007 and 2008 did not consider
the exchange of money for sex with a regular partner to be a form of prostitu-
tion but rather part of a normative heterosexual relationship.44
Several studies were conducted in the last few decades about Casablanca’s
prostitutes. Between 1985 and 1998, Fatima Zahra Azruwil interviewed sixty
prostitutes.45 Benito interviewed seventy-three prostitutes in Casablanca
in the early 2000s, of whom only 40 per cent were born in the city while the
rest had migrated there from the countryside (22 per cent of them with their
families).46 Cheikh interviewed dozens of single women involved in fulltime
or occasional prostitution in Casablanca and Tangiers. Those women worked
Naamane-Guessous, Au-delà de toute pudeur: la sexualité féminine au Maroc (Casablanca,
1987); Abdessamad Dialmy, Sexualité et discours au Maroc (Casablanca, 1988); Abdessa-
mad Dialmy, Jeunesse, sida, et islam au Maroc: Les comportements sexuels des marocains
(Casablanca, 2000).
43 Nasima Moujoud and Dolorès Pourette, “‘Traite’ de femmes migrantes, domesticité et
prostitution: Á propos de migrations interne et externe”, Cahiers d’études africaines, 45
(2005), pp. 1093–1121; Benito, La prostitution dans les rues de Casablanca, p. 59.
44 Meriam Cheikh, “Echanges sexuels, monétarisés, femmes et féminité au Maroc”, Autre-
part, 49 (2009), pp. 173–188, 178; see also Benito, La prostitution dans les rues de Casablan-
ca, pp. 39, 55.
45 Her interviewees were 18 to 38 (mostly 20 to 27) years old. Fatima Zahra Azruwil, al-Bighaʾ
aw al-jasad al-mustabah (Casablanca, 2001), p. 23.
46 Age range: 17 to 44; mean: 30. Benito, La prostitution dans les rues de Casablanca, pp. 59–
60, 93.
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272 Kozma
simultaneously or successively as prostitutes, waitresses, and domestic work-
ers. All had long-term intimate relations with men who financially supported
them and they engaged in occasional prostitution with others.47
The family histories collected by Azruwil and Benito suggest that early mar-
riage, early divorce, and pregnancy outside of wedlock were common factors
that led women to take up prostitution. Social isolation and limited labour op-
portunities left these women with few options to support themselves. A zruwil
traced a history of domestic violence in the women’s families and marriages.
The stigma attached to a woman losing her virginity outside of marriage,
whether voluntary or as a result of rape, left women with no family protection,
and some of them fled their homes due to fears of violence and even death at
the hands of family members. According to Azruwil, the lack of communal and
legal protection for divorced women often drove women to destitution; 60 per
cent of the women in her sample were divorced, with two thirds of them sup-
porting at least one child.48
The women Benito interviewed started working as prostitutes from 16 to 20
years of age and normally retired by the age of 40 to 44; 53 per cent were di-
vorced, 40 per cent were single, and 5.5 per cent were married. More than half
(55 per cent) had children; many of them left their children alone when they
went to work, while others relied on the help of family members, neighbours,
or colleagues. Those who had children old enough to go to school sent them to
school, but 10 per cent of school-age children lived on the streets.49
Both Azruwil and Benito point to women’s illiteracy as a contributing factor
to their entry into prostitution. According to Azruwil, illiteracy rates among
women in Morocco are as high as 75 per cent, leaving them with few alterna-
tive employment opportunities if they are widowed or divorced.50 Some two
thirds of the women Benito interviewed were illiterate. Almost half had previ-
ously worked in other trades, mostly as domestic workers.51
In present-day Morocco, most working women have low-income jobs and
work in the services sector, at factories (mainly food and textile factories),
and as domestic workers. Many of Azruwil’s interviewees stated that sexual
47 Cheikh, “Echanges sexuels, monétarisés”, p. 173. A 1967 study concluded that 15 per cent
of prostitutes left their families by the age of 12; half of them worked as domestic servants
and 10 per cent as barmaids before or in addition to prostitution. K. Mesdali-Bennani,
“Quelques considerations sur la prostitution au Maroc”, Revue Tunissienne de Sciences So-
ciales, 4 (1967), pp. 79–84.
48 Azruwil, al-Bighaʾ aw al-jasad al-mustabah, pp. 32–33, 41–43.
49 Benito, La prostitution dans les rues de Casablanca, pp. 59–60, 92–93.
50 Azruwil, al-Bighaʾ aw al-jasad al-mustabah, pp. 32–33.
51 Benito, La prostitution dans les rues de Casablanca, p. 67.
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Colonial and Post-Colonial Casablanca 273
arassment was common in their low-income fields of work, and given the
h
lack of labour protection laws they stated it was difficult to resist such advanc-
es. They thus resorted to prostitution as a form of labour which at least com-
pensated them for sexual favours. The lack of social services also means that
illiterate widows and divorcees have to support themselves with limited labour
skills. Girls whose fathers pass away sometimes have to leave school and help
support their families.52
As one of the only unskilled jobs available, domestic work exposes women
to sexual and economic exploitation. Masima Moujoud and Dolorès Pourette
point out that there is a continuity between the employment of slaves in
Moroccan households until as late as the 1930s and the sexual exploitation of
maids in present-day Morocco. In the slave system, female slaves were both
domestic servants and concubines, and this occurred within the scope of an
oppressive set of rules which also included basic legal protections. Such a safe-
ty net is not available for maids today, some of whom end up in prostitution.53
The social profile of the women described in Cheikh’s research is distinctly
different. From 1960 to 1999 the average age of first marriage in Morocco has
risen from 17 to 27 for women and from 24 to 31 for men, and this has been
accompanied by an increase in the numbers of single mothers.54 As a result,
more women are able to live alone, sometimes cohabiting with other young
women. Away from their families, they can host male friends and clients, but
they have to depend on men for their rent and clothing and in some cases the
support of other family members.55
Homosexuality is illegal in Morocco and socially unacceptable. Journalists,
and later academicians, brought the existence of male prostitution in present-
day Morocco to the attention of the public. Many male prostitutes resorted to
prostitution after being rejected by their families because of their sexual orien-
tation. Others do not necessarily define themselves as gay, and like the women
in Cheikh’s study, they consider prostitution to be a normative way of making
a living via sexual relations with both men and women.56
52 Azruwil, al-Bighaʾ aw al-jasad al-mustabah, pp. 60–72; Benito, La prostitution dans les rues
de Casablanca, pp. 56, 65–67.
53 Moujoud and Pourette, “‘Traite’ de femmes migrantes, domesticité et prostitution”,
pp. 1093–1121; Benito, La prostitution dans les rues de Casablanca, p. 59.
54 Cheikh, “Echanges sexuels, monétarisés”, p. 176.
55 Ibid., pp. 178–182.
56 Amine Boushaba, Oussama Tawil, Latéfa Imane and Hakima Hammich, “Marginalization
and Vulnerability: Male Sex work in Morocco”, in Peter Aggleton (ed.), Men Who Sell Sex:
International Perspectives on Male Prostitution and aids (London, 1999), pp. 263–274.
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274 Kozma
Professional and Personal Life
The fact that prostitution is illegal affects every aspect of prostitutes’ social in-
teractions. Azruwil’s interviewees said that they had to bribe or endure sexual
harassment by members of the police force in order to avoid imprisonment.
Periodical police raids are a constant threat. Benito’s interviewees also report-
ed being subjected to arbitrary arrests and demands for bribes by the police.57
Prostitutes no longer live in licensed houses and they rarely have a pimp or
madam. They are in constant contact with taxi drivers who sometimes spend
entire nights driving them around the city and often help them find clients
for a fee; women who refuse to pay a taxi driver run the risk of being reported
to the police.58 Aside from taxi drivers, prostitutes rarely use male pimps, and
those that did told Azruwil that they had bad experiences with them. Some-
times older prostitutes find clients for younger ones. Prostitutes also some-
times pay younger men to protect them from violent clients, but those men do
not interfere with their choice of clients nor do they manage them or receive
a fixed percentage of their earnings but only payment for services rendered.59
Prostitutes also reported that they are under the constant threat of violence,
theft, and rape. Since prostitution is illegal, they cannot take legal recourse
against their assailants.60
Most of the prostitutes’ clients are Moroccan and the rest are usually tourists
from the Gulf area or Europe. The latter can offer, besides monetary compen-
sation or gifts, the possibility of travelling to their countries.61 Some workers
supplement their income with street-based prostitution; they find clients on
the street and go with them to a hotel, which receives half of the money they
get.62 Others find their clients in night clubs.63 Most of the women Benito in-
terviewed met their clients at the client’s home, others used hotels, and others
had sexual relations in the client’s car or on the street. 3 per cent of the inter-
viewees were homeless; others reported that they had gone through periods of
homelessness when they could not pay their rent.64
57 Azruwil, al-Bighaʾ aw al-jasad al-mustabah, p. 74; Benito, La prostitution dans les rues de
Casablanca, pp. 74–75.
58 Azruwil, al-Bighaʾ aw al-jasad al-mustabah, pp. 75–76.
59 Ibid., pp. 104, 111–112.
60 Ibid., p. 98; Benito, La prostitution dans les rues de Casablanca, pp. 72–75, 78–79.
61 Azruwil, al-Bighaʾ aw al-jasad al-mustabah, p. 106; Benito, La prostitution dans les rues de
Casablanca, pp. 34, 79.
62 Azruwil, al-Bighaʾ aw al-jasad al-mustabah, p. 86.
63 Ibid., 104.
64 Benito, La prostitution dans les rues de Casablanca, pp. 61, 79.
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Colonial and Post-Colonial Casablanca 275
Streetwalking, Benito argues, has been changing in recent years in Casablan-
ca. First, police raids have forced women to move, so they constantly have to
seek out new areas in which to work. Second, mobile phones have made it pos-
sible for prostitutes to be contacted by clients without having to solicit on the
street. Some women find entertainment venues to be more difficult because
they require verbal interaction and convincing while approaching clients on
the street is much more straightforward and certain.65 Streetwalkers usually
work independently, but sometimes they pay colleagues or male prostitutes to
find clients for them.66
High-class prostitutes work at high-end hotels, as they are not subject to
police raids. Lower-class hotels also receive a certain percentage of prostitutes’
fees and in that way some operate as de facto brothels. Other prostitutes use
rented apartments. The cost of a prostitute’s services vary according to her
looks, level of education, and age, and women in their late twenties are thought
to be too old to charge high rates. Protected sex is paid less than unprotected
sex.67 Lower-class prostitutes often live in the outskirts of the city. Many of
them are rural immigrants who wear traditional garb, supplementing their low
legal income with prostitution.68
In the early 2000s, prostitutes in Casablanca were paid 30 to 250 dirhams
(roughly 3 to 25 dollars) per encounter. They work four to six days a week and
have between two and ten clients per day. The highest rates are charged by
women who are 24 to 29 years old because they are already experienced but
still young. Women can thus make an average of 3,000 to 4,000 dirhams per
month, much more than the 1,000 dirhams made by domestic or other un-
skilled workers. A fifth of the women Benito interviewed made less than 2,500
dirham per month, which hardly sufficed for their daily needs and the needs
of their dependent children or parents. Only 4 per cent made 10,000 dirham
per month.69
Health
Since the 1980s, the main health concern has been hiv. Moroccan ngos dis-
seminate information about hiv to the Moroccan public, since this problem
65 Ibid., p. 47.
66 Ibid., p. 77.
67 Azruwil, al-Bighaʾ aw al-jasad al-mustabah, pp. 77–80, 84–85; Benito, La prostitution dans
les rues de Casablanca, pp. 47–48.
68 Azruwil, al-Bighaʾ aw al-jasad al-mustabah, pp. 111–113; Benito, La prostitution dans les rues
de Casablanca, p. 68.
69 Benito, La prostitution dans les rues de Casablanca, pp. 77–78.
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276 Kozma
is not officially recognized by the government.70 The estimated number of
people in Morocco who have hiv is 30,000, or about 0,1 per cent of the popula-
tion.71 Little is known, however, about how much the spread of hiv in Morocco
can be ascribed to prostitution.72
Most of the women Benito interviewed rarely consulted medical doctors;
about 60 per cent consulted a doctor when they felt sick, and 40 per cent just
bought a painkiller from a pharmacist when they felt unwell. Likewise they
rarely are examined by a gynaecologist, and they only do so when they get preg-
nant or suffer from an acute medical problem. In any case, most cannot afford
to consult a doctor. Socially isolated and legally marginalized, these women
cannot rely on family support when they become ill or ask them to look after
their children.73 Most (85 per cent) of the women Benito interviewed smoked
at least one packet of cigarettes per day, 25 per cent regularly smoked hashish,
and 88 per cent drank alcohol, a quarter of them on a daily basis; 20 per cent
abused other drugs on a daily basis.74
The women Benito interviewed reported that they mainly use contracep-
tives, and they stated that condoms deter clients. Some of the Moroccan sex
workers Benito interviewed told her that they preferred non-vaginal sex be-
cause it kept their hymens intact and hence did not threaten their marital
prospects.75 Many of them reported that they use birth control pills in atypical
ways in order to avoid menstrual bleeding; they take the pill continuously for
three to six months, or even permanently, so that they won’t get their periods
and hence can work four weeks per month. As a result, and due to the lack of
regular medical supervision, they suffer from complications such as blood cir-
culation disorders. Moreover, 20 per cent of the women interviewed reported
that they had undergone an illegal abortion.
Most of the women interviewed by Benito reported that they do not know
much about the symptoms of venereal diseases. As a result, they usually are
treated quite late. Some believe, for example, that hiv is a European disease,
or a homosexual disease, and thus they think it does not pose a threat to them.
Those diagnosed with hiv told Benito that they did not tell anyone about it.76
70 Ibid., p. 29.
71 https://www.aidsalliance.org/about/where-we-work/59-association-marocaine-de-soli-
darite-et-developpement-amsed; last accessed 7 July 2017.
72 Benito, La prostitution dans les rues de Casablanca, p. 90.
73 Ibid., pp. 82–83.
74 Ibid., p. 90.
75 Ibid., p. 47.
76 Ibid., pp. 83–89.
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Colonial and Post-Colonial Casablanca 277
Conclusion
Prostitution in Casablanca underwent several major transformations in the
years discussed in this chapter. The first was legal, as it went from strict regula-
tion to criminalization. Regulation affected the geography of prostitution as
prostitutes were required to live in the enclosed quarter of Bousbir, or they
worked independently and illegally around the city. Bousbir lost its function as
a red-light district in the early 1950s, and in the years following independence,
criminalization forced prostitutes to work underground in and around Casa-
blanca. It also affected prostitutes’ interactions with clients, the police, and
others.
A second significant change is demographic. In the protectorate period,
most prostitutes were Muslims and the rest were European and Jewish. Both
Jews and European settlers left Morocco en masse in the early and mid-1950s,
and the prostitutes in independent Morocco are predominantly Muslim. The
demography of prostitutes in Casablanca throughout the twentieth century
has been affected by migration from the countryside, and those are the people
who populate the city’s slums and the ranks of lower-class prostitutes. More
recent demographic changes in Morocco have led to the proliferation of a class
of educated women who marry later in life, and some of those women resort
to prostitution.
Prostitution in Morocco shares several characteristics with sold sex in other
Islamic societies as well as with other colonial and postcolonial societies. Like
in other Islamic societies, the social taboo and the legal ban on prostitution is
related to a wider taboo on non-marital sex. Women sometimes resort to pros-
titution because the loss of virginity makes them ineligible for marriage, or
automatically they are labelled as prostitutes. A taboo on sexuality also means
that venereal prophylactics are not openly discussed, which is detrimental to
prostitutes’ sexual health.
As in other colonial societies, prostitution in Casablanca was regulated in
the protectorate period. Like the other urban centres discussed in this volume,
the city attracted both rural and European migration, and the demand for
prostitution increased especially among administrators, soldiers, and factory
workers. As with many other postcolonial societies, Morocco had to devise new
ways of dealing with prostitution, and abolition was the ultimate choice as it
conformed to the regime’s Islamic ideology and was seen as an anti-colonial
move. Criminalization, however, does not provide solutions for marginalized
women who often resort to prostitution in order to survive.
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chapter 11
Selling Sex in Istanbul
Mark David Wyers
Introduction
Historically, prostitution has always existed in Istanbul, which was the capi-
tal of the Ottoman Empire and is situated on the Bosphorus Strait between
the Black Sea and Marmara Sea, but the most salient feature of sold sex there
may well be the silence that often surrounds it. Unlike in many other European
countries in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the issue of prostitution
was never incorporated into vocal and influential feminist movements as a
symbol of the oppression of women in Turkey. Of course, while there was a bur-
geoning women’s movement in Istanbul in the late Ottoman Empire and early
Republic of Turkey (which was founded in 1923), and while there were isolated
calls for the abolition of regulated prostitution, women’s lobbying power over
state policy did not materialize until quite recently and even now it is limited;
and, as sex work in Turkey has long been a taboo issue, an ngo dedicated to
the support of sex workers was not founded until the mid-2000s. Consequent-
ly, since it is largely such organizations that carry out research on prostitution,
there is a relative lack of source material available for the researcher for more
recent times regarding sold sex. In academia, there has been a similar silence;
only in the past five years or so has the subject begun to receive scholarly atten-
tion from historians. Additionally, the state committee responsible for oversee-
ing the system of licensed sex work in Istanbul does not share its data for the
most part and there is a lack of governmental transparency, particularly under
the current conservative ruling party which is self-avowedly dedicated to pro-
moting “family values” over women’s (and workers’) rights.
Notably, women’s movements in Turkey today, still struggling as they are to
acquire large-scale legitimacy in the eyes of the public, have also been reluc-
tant to vocally address such a taboo issue, and even within these movements
there is some ambivalence arising from traditions of “virtue” which are inti-
mately bound up with conceptualizations of female sexuality. In recent years,
this shroud of silence surrounding sex work has begun to fall away, however,
even if slightly, and increasing numbers of women’s groups and the transgen-
der community, including sex workers themselves, have begun to raise their
voices. This was largely made possible by the efforts of two sex workers, Ayşe
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Selling Sex in Istanbul 279
Tükrücü and Saliha Ermez, who attempted to run for parliament in 2007; while
their bid was unsuccessful, they did help bring sex work into the open as an
issue demanding attention.
Taking into consideration these limitations, this overview has drawn upon
the material available in the Ottoman archive in Istanbul for the earlier period
of Istanbul, and also the growing number of studies which have been conduct-
ed utilizing those sources. The Republican archive in Ankara, which contains
far less information, was also consulted, as well as the archive of the League
of Nations in Geneva, as the League’s Body of Experts carried out studies on
Istanbul due to the fact that in the early twentieth century, Istanbul had ac-
quired a global reputation, deservedly or not, as a major centre for prostitu-
tion. A survey of Turkish newspapers provided further materials regarding the
early years of the republic when the regulated system was adopted from its Ot-
toman predecessor, and recent studies on sex work in contemporary Istanbul
were also consulted.
For the sake of clarity, this overview of prostitution in Istanbul is roughly di-
vided into three time periods: 1600–1880, 1881–1950, and 1951-present. The first
time period represents the era prior to the time when the Ottoman authorities
instituted a system of regulated prostitution, a period best defined as prohibi-
tionist marked by periods of tolerance and suppression. The next time period
bridges the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and the founding of the Repub-
lic of Turkey in 1923, and represents the era in which sold sex in Istanbul was
brought under state control via a system of regulation. In the final time period,
large-scale internal migration and the opening up of the Turkish economy to
global capital had a large impact on the unfolding of prostitution in Istanbul,
and in recent years there has been increased agitation for recognition of the
rights of sex workers. This shift has gone hand in hand with government at-
tempts to quietly dismantle the state-regulated system of prostitution that has
been in place for over a century. This tri-bloc time frame, while artificial in the
sense that changes do not happen so abruptly, nonetheless makes it possible to
identify and examine moments of continuity and rupture as regards prostitu-
tion in Istanbul over roughly the last 400 years.
Disciplining “Vice” in the City of Sultans
Prostitution in Ottoman Istanbul, which was a bustling multi-ethnic, multi-
religious city, underwent periods of suppression and toleration, but it was a
regular feature of the urban landscape and was carried out by women from all
religious backgrounds. Under the Sultanic Code of Law promulgated in 1530, in
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280 Wyers
the early years of the Ottoman Empire prostitution was subject to what could
be called a “sin tax” which required that the “gypsies of Istanbul, Edirne Plo-
vdiv and Sofia pay a fixed tax of one hundred aqches per month for each of
their women who perform acts contrary to Sharia [Islamic law].”1 Sharia strict-
ly forbade sexual relations outside of marriage, so this tax indicated a tacit
recognition that these women, as prostitutes, were regularly engaging in acts
that ran contrary to theological doctrine and making money from their clients.
This practice would soon be discontinued, however;2 a code of law for prostitu-
tion was introduced stating that such “undesirable” women could be chastised
and then banished from a town if they did not correct their behaviour.3 In this
way, even though a prostitute would have been culpable as having committed
fornication (zinā), which under the Ottoman system of kanun law entailed the
payment of a fine, she was in fact a separate legal subject bound to regulations
that differed from those that applied to “virtuous” women who committed
adultery; if a woman who was not a prostitute was found guilty of engaging in
sexual relations outside the confines of marriage, she was technically subject
to a monetary fine, not banished.4 This blurring of the status of prostitutes
thus granted them a form of recognition, and exempting prostitutes from pe-
cuniary punishment made it possible for the authorities to avoid being placed
in the morally awkward position of “taxing” prostitution. This is not to say,
however, that the presence of prostitutes in Istanbul was broadly tolerated.
As indicated by court records, throughout the seventeenth, eighteenth, and
nineteenth centuries, prostitutes were regularly banished from Istanbul to the
interior of Anatolia or islands in the Mediterranean, and imprisonment was
1
2
3
4
1 Colin Imber, Ebu’s-su’ud: The Islamic Legal Tradition (Edinburgh, 1997), p. 45.
2 The suppression of prostitution under Suleiman the Magnificent, also known as the Law-
giver, and Selim ii coincided with a trend towards religious conservatism in the Porte. Lesley
Pierce, The Imperial Harem: Women and Sovereignty in the Ottoman Empire (New York, 1993),
p. 272.
3 Uriel Heyd, Studies in Ottoman Law (Oxford, 1973), p. 130.
4 During the reign of Suleiman the Magnificent, a new system of laws (known as kanun) was
drawn up which often paralleled Sharia but differed greatly in terms of punishment. While
Sharia prescribed corporal punishment for sexual crimes, kanun stipulated that fines would
be paid based on the gender, class, and religious background of the offender. This was partly
a matter of practicality, as Sharia law made it quite difficult to prove the guilt of a suspected
offender, requiring numerous witnesses and strict punishments for the crime of bearing false
witness. Dror Ze’evi, Producing Desire: Changing Sexual Discourse in the Ottoman Middle East,
1500–1900 (Berkeley, 2006), pp. 59–60.
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Selling Sex in Istanbul 281
also used as a form of discipline, in addition to capital punishment, although
executions were quite rare.5
The ownership of domestic slaves, which was common practice among
the wealthy and elite in Ottoman society,6 was also implicated in practices of
prostitution in Istanbul. Under Islamic law, men were entitled to an unlimited
number of female slaves, with whom they were entitled to have sexual rela-
tions, although religious law encouraged slave owners to eventually free them
and treat them well; it should be pointed out, however, that women could own
female but not male slaves, while men could own both. On wealthy Ottoman
estates, female slaves served as domestic servants, maids, and nurses, and also
as concubines,7 and while sex between a master and female slave was viewed
as legitimate, the procuring of slaves for the purpose of prostitution was ex-
pressly forbidden by Islamic law.8 One such practice was the purchase of a slave
at a certain price for the purpose of sexual gratification; the buyer would then
sell that slave back to the owner at a slightly lower price, resulting in a profit
for the original seller. The Ottoman authorities were aware that slave traders in
Istanbul, and other Ottoman cities as well, were engaging in the prostitution of
slaves, and guilds were charged with ensuring that it did not occur.9
It was illegal to sell Muslim men or women as slaves, and although Otto-
man Istanbul was a multi-ethnic, multi-religious city populated by Christians,
Jews, and Muslims, it was forbidden for Muslim women to marry or engage in
sexual affairs with non-Muslim men. Contrarily, it was permitted for Muslim
5
6
7
8
9
5 Başbakanlık Osmanlı Arşivi/Ottoman Archive of the Office of the Prime Minister [hereafter
boa], ie.dh 15/1384; C.ZB, 28/1355; C.ZB, 25/1236; C.ZB, 60/2995; C.ZB, 11/502; C.ZB, 41/2037;
C.ZB, 20/995; mvl, 679/88; dh.eum.adl, 12/31; Fariba Zarinebaf, Crime and Punishment in
Istanbul, 1700–1800 (Berkeley, 2010), p. 108; Fikret Yılmaz, “Zina ve fuhuş arasında kalanlar:
Fahişe, subaşıya karşı”, Toplumsal Tarih, 220 (2012), pp. 20–29, 23.
6 Ehud Toledano, “Late Ottoman Concepts of Slavery, 1830–1880”, Poetics Today, 14 (1993),
pp. 477–506, 479.
7 Female slaves could, through marriage, be manumitted, whereupon they could be integrated
into society with all the rights of free individuals; male slaves were also often manumitted. In
the sixteenth century, most slaves were from Russia and eastern Europe. Yvonne J. Seng, “Fu-
gitives and Factotums: Slaves in Early Sixteenth-Century Istanbul”, Journal of the Economic
and Social History of the Orient, 39 (1996), pp. 136–169, 145–157.
8 Various royal edicts were issued prohibiting this practice, particularly in relation to its perva-
siveness in Ottoman caravanserais. Heyd, Studies in Ottoman Law, p. 126.
9 Zarinebaf, Crime and Punishment, pp. 96–97. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centu-
ries, the Ottoman government reluctantly became a signatory to international treaties ban-
ning the slave trade, although the trade persisted, albeit on a diminished scale, in Istanbul
into the early twentieth century. Toledano, “Late Ottoman Concepts of Slavery”, p. 485.
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282 Wyers
men to marry non-Muslim women. Nonetheless, it was well-known that Mus-
lim women were involved in prostitution in pre-regulatory Ottoman Istanbul,
often working out of their homes and at night in public spaces such as parks
and cemeteries,10 although efforts were made to ensure that confessional
lines were not crossed. While local religious (Muslim, Christian and Jewish)
and civil authorities were entrusted with overseeing the morality of Istanbul’s
neighbourhoods, archival evidence indicates that local residents of different
religious backgrounds sometimes came together to petition authorities about
the presence of prostitutes, particularly when they had crossed confessional
lines with their clients.11 It should be pointed out that temporary marriage
(nikah mut‘ah, a temporary contract of marriage which can last from a few
minutes to years) was generally not practised in Ottoman territories, as Sunni
Muslims believe it was abolished in the early years of Islam. In Shi’a Islamic
belief, however, it is permitted, and has been used in sold sex exchanges in
Shi’a areas such as Iran, where it is referred to as sigheh and can be used to
“legitimize” paid sexual encounters within the sanctity of marriage.
Although comprehensive education for girls did not exist until the early
twentieth century, at which time it was still accessible only for the elites, some
Muslim and non-Muslim women were involved in work and business in early
modern Istanbul, but on a rather small scale, so it is likely that selling sex was
one of the only options for lower-class women in times of financial duress.
The Ottoman craft guilds were closed to women for the most part, but lower-
and middle-class women did engage to some extent in cottage industries while
wealthier women made investments and were involved in real estate transac-
tions.12 However, because court records concerning prostitutes in this period
often do not provide much personal information about the women them-
selves, it is difficult to know if and how they were employed prior to taking up
sex work. The scant evidence available suggests that widows, perhaps for lack
of another source of income, may have turned to prostitution, and archival
documentation indicates that the streetwalkers of Istanbul in the eighteenth
century were often homeless women, most likely migrants from rural areas.13
10
11
12
13
10 Zarinebaf, Crime and Punishment, pp. 91–92. In Ottoman Istanbul, cemeteries were public
spaces where people would go to spend time, as they were (and are) filled with trees; also,
unlike in the Christian tradition, cemeteries were not necessarily seen as “spooky” places.
11 Ibid., pp. 90–94.
12 Fariba Zarinebaf-Shahr, “The Role of Women in the Urban Economy of Istanbul”, Interna-
tional Labor and Working-class History, 60 (2001), pp. 141–152, 142.
13 Ahmet Refik Altınay, Onuncu asr-ı hicride İstanbul hayatı (Ankara, 1987), p. 57; Zarinebaf,
Crime and Punishment, p. 91.
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Selling Sex in Istanbul 283
The early eighteenth century was a tumultuous period in the Ottoman
Empire, marked by extensive banditry in Anatolia and tax farming practices
which forced peasants off the land, and large numbers of the dispossessed be-
gan migrating to cities. The extent of urban migration reached such an alarm-
ing rate that imperial orders were issued which forbade men and women,
whether married or not, from moving to the capital, and women had to obtain
permission to travel to Istanbul for business or to see relatives.14 In addition,
single male labourers and the unemployed were rounded up every few years
and banished from the city, but despite these precautions, the population of
Istanbul continued to grow throughout the eighteenth century.15
As the end of the eighteenth century drew to a close, war broke about be-
tween the Ottoman Empire and Russia and Austria, resulting in large numbers
of Ottoman troops and naval officers being stationed in Istanbul. Aware that
this was leading to an increase in prostitution, authorities conducted raids
and imprisoned women who were suspected prostitutes. Similarly, houses
for single male labourers and sailors located in the district of Üsküdar, on the
Anatolian shores of Istanbul, were occasionally raided in 1790, resulting in the
imprisonment of women caught engaging in sold sex. It was not only military
personnel and workers, however, who were known clients of female prosti-
tutes; archival evidence indicates that students at Islamic theological schools
in Istanbul also brought prostitutes to their residences.16 In the later years of
the eighteenth century, authorities began pinning the blame for the repeated
Ottoman losses to the Russians on the moral degradation of society, and the
spread of prostitution in the capital city was seen as one aspect of this. Efforts
were made to eradicate prostitution in Istanbul, and royal edicts were issued
which sought to restrict the public presence of women and to strictly regulate
the clothing they wore in public.17 This wariness concerning the presence of
women in urban areas coincided with economic strains as well; inflation levels
had increased as the result of debasements of the currency, leading to a sharp
spike in prices and widespread poverty.18
14
15
16
17
18
14 Zarinebaf-Shahr, “The Role of Women”, p. 143.
15 Mehmet Demirtaş, “xviii. yüzyılda İstanbul’a göçü önlemek için alınan tedbirler ve görül-
en aksamalar’, Ekev Akademi Dergisi, 33 (2007), pp. 195–214, 208.
16 Osman Köse, “xviii. yüzyıl sonları Rus ve Avusturya savaşları esnasında Osmanlı devletin-
de bir uygulama: İstanbul’da içki ve fuhuş yasağı”, Turkish Studies, 2 (2007), pp. 104–123,
112–113.
17 Ibid., p. 110. Aydın Yetkin, “ii. meşrutiyet dönemi’nde toplumsal ahlâk bunalimi: Fuhuş
meselesi”, Tarihin Peşinde, 6 (2011), pp. 21–54, 24.
18 Süleyman Özmucur and Şevket Pamuk, “Real Wages and the Standard of Living in the
Ottoman Empire, 1489–1914”, Journal of Economic History, 62 (2002), pp. 293–321, 300.
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284 Wyers
Prostitution in early modern Istanbul took numerous forms. Some Muslim
women working alone solicited in public areas at night; women also worked
together, bringing clients (often janissaries and sailors) to the rooms they rent-
ed.19 Not all women worked independently, however, and both Muslim and
non-Muslim men and women were involved in organizing prostitution. These
included women working independently as madams, as well as imams and non-
Muslim tavern owners working as pimps. The punishment for procuring often
took the form of banishment for both women and Muslim religious figures.20
During periods of moral fervour, persecution of sold sex did result in the
occasional execution of prostitutes.21 In the tumultuous years of the late eigh-
teenth century, it was decided that merely banishing prostitutes would not
put an end to the practice in Istanbul, and the authorities opted to take more
drastic measures. Five well-known prostitutes were drowned, and the bodies
of three of them were hung up at different locations in the city as a warning.
Other known prostitutes were then forced to repent, and many of them were
banished from the city. This draconian approach achieved limited results,
however, and despite continued raids and banishment, women continued to
clandestinely engage in sold sex.22 Occasionally prostitutes were imprisoned,
particularly during religious holidays; records indicate that Muslim prostitutes
were sometimes arrested and placed under the supervision of local imams.23
While foundations to support the poor existed in early modern and mod-
ern Ottoman Istanbul,24 an organized system of charitable societies providing
support for the “rehabilitation” of women who sold sex was never founded, nor
does it seem that female prostitutes in Istanbul were ever organized as a guild. It
should be noted, however, that not only women engaged in prostitution in early
modern Istanbul; the taverns owned by non-Muslim Ottoman citizens, and
likely coffee shops as well, were also fronts for the prostitution of young men.25
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
19 Zarinebaf, Crime and Punishment, pp. 90–91.
20 Ibid., pp. 98–101.
21 In 1602, three prostitutes were caught soliciting; two of them were punished by branding
of the genitals and the third was drowned in the Bosphorus. Yetkin, “Rus ve Avusturya
savaşları”, p. 25.
22 Köse, “Yüzyıl sonları”, pp. 115–116.
23 Zarinebaf, Crime and Punishment, p. 110.
24 Relli Shechter, “Modern Welfare in the Early-modern Ottoman Economy: A Historio-
graphic Overview with Many Questions”, Journal of the Economic and Social History of the
Orient, 48 (2005), pp. 253–276, 263.
25 Zarinebaf, Crime and Punishment, pp. 100–101; Ralph S. Hattox, Coffee and Coffeehouses:
The Origins of a Social Beverage in the Medieval Near East (Seattle, 1988), p. 109.
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Selling Sex in Istanbul 285
Throughout the nineteenth century, Istanbul continued to grow, and so did
the city’s prostitution “problem”. In 1859 the Grand Vizier issued a mandate
stipulating prison terms of forty-eight hours to three months or banishment
from three to six months for individuals caught engaging in prostitution.26
Despite this effort, prostitution continued to proliferate, and the municipality
began considering other options to limit the proliferation of sold sex in the
streets of Istanbul.
Regulation and the “Sick Man of Europe”
The Ottoman nineteenth century witnessed pervasive transformations as the
state sought to reform its military, centralize state authority, and transform
social structures. These reforms were aimed at maintaining the waning integ-
rity of the empire, precipitated by Ottoman military losses in the Balkans and
Crimea, coupled with internal disarray and separatist nationalist movements.
The rapid expansion of state medical institutions was part of modernizing ef-
forts, leading to the founding of numerous hospitals throughout the nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries.27 In Istanbul, increased interaction between
Ottoman and European physicians fuelled the development of hospitals and
medical facilities and the dissemination of medical practices based on western
models in Ottoman territories, including the regulated system of prostitution.
In 1878 the first move towards initiating regulation in Istanbul took place un-
der the guidance of non-Muslim municipal authorities in a rather European-
ized quarter of the city,28 and in 1880, after an experimental phase, the plan
was given full royal approval and the authorities began licensing brothels.29
The law did not provide a clear definition of prostitutes, but when it was
re-drafted in 1915, a definition was included: “A prostitute is a woman who of-
fers herself for the pleasure of others and has relations with numerous men for
the purpose of monetary profit.”30 Until 1914, however, Muslim women could
26
27
28
29
30
26 Yetkin, “Rus ve Avusturya savaşları”, p. 26.
27 İbrahim Kalkan, “Medicine and Politics in the Late Ottoman Empire (1876–1909)” (Un-
published m.a., Boğaziçi University, 2004), p. 15.
28 Osman Nuri Ergin, Nuri, Mecelle-i umur-i belediye: birinci cilt, tarih-i teşkilat-ı belediye: ik-
inci bölüm (Istanbul, 1995), p. 3300.
29 Ibid., p. 3297.
30 Emraz-ı zühreviyenin men-i sirayetine dair neşr olunan nizamnameye müteallik talimat-
name (Istanbul, 1915), p. 4.
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286 Wyers
not be registered as prostitutes,31 and Muslim authorities took little interest in
the issue when Christian and Jewish women took up the practice.32 Investiga-
tions carried out during and after World War i indicated that large numbers of
Muslim women were in fact clandestinely engaging in prostitution, at times
even perhaps to a greater extent than their Christian and Jewish counterparts.
The presence of over 50,000 Entente troops in Istanbul during the occupation
of the city33 from 1918 to 1923 contributed to the proliferation of sold sex, and a
red-light district was opened on the Anatolian side “to prevent foreign soldiers
from harassing virtuous women.”34 The British, French, Italian, and American
troops stationed in Istanbul were barred from brothels where Muslim women
worked, but there were over fifty bars in which over 200 young women, both
registered and unregistered prostitutes, were employed, and these were often
frequented by Entente soldiers. It was reported that the young women work-
ing in these bars often ended up being registered.35 Although the authorities
sought to segregate female Muslim prostitutes from non-Muslim men, it ap-
pears that women themselves were blurring confessional lines. An editorial
dating from 1923 in an Ottoman daily newspaper noted that some Greek pros-
titutes in Istanbul were donning the veil and posing as Muslim prostitutes be-
cause this allowed them to charge higher prices, purportedly because Muslim
women were seen as being more “exotic” due to the taboo on Muslim women
entering into sexual relations with men of other religious backgrounds.36
This segregation of prostitutes along religious lines was reflected in the
moral geographies of the city; registered Christian and Jewish prostitutes
worked on the European side of Istanbul, while Muslim women worked in the
licensed brothels of the Anatolian districts of the city, which were closed to
non-Muslim men and were opened after 1914, when Muslim prostitutes started
being registered. Of course, women working clandestinely transgressed these
geographies, frustrating municipal efforts to create clearly delineated “confes-
sional” districts of vice. State records indicate that prior to the outbreak of
31
32
33
34
35
36
31 İnci Hot, “Ülkemizde frengi hastalığı ile mücadele”, Tıp Etiği, Hukuk, Tarihi Dergisi, 12
(2004), pp. 36–43, 37.
32 Rıfat Bali, The Jews and Prostitution in Constantinople: 1854–1922 (Istanbul, 2008), p. 78.
33 Erik J. Zürcher, Turkey: A Modern History (London, 1997), p. 145.
34 Mark D. Wyers, “Wicked” Istanbul: The Regulation of Prostitution in the Early Turkish Re-
public (Istanbul, 2012), p. 113.
35 Charles Riggs, “Adult Delinquency”, in C.R. Johnson (ed.), Constantinople Today or the
Pathfinder Survey of Constantinople: A Study in Oriental Social Life (Istanbul, 1922), pp.
343–370, 362–363.
36 Sadık Albayrak, Meşrutiyet İstanbul’unda kadın ve sosyal değişim (Istanbul, 2002), p. 422.
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Selling Sex in Istanbul 287
war, police took Muslim women into custody when they were caught engaging
in sold sex alongside non-Muslim women, particularly in the predominantly
Christian and Jewish district of Beyoğlu,37 and non-Muslim women were ar-
raigned for employing Muslim women in their brothels.38 During these years,
the cup government had also issued a regulation concerning the operations
of hospitals in Istanbul which stipulated that the Beyoğlu Women’s Hospital
was to be reserved for the medical treatment of non-Muslim prostitutes and
Muslim prostitutes were to be taken to the Haseki Women’s Hospital.39
At this point, it will be helpful to briefly discuss how the Capitulations im-
pacted the Ottoman government’s ability to police prostitution.40 Under the
Capitulations, foreign citizens were not subject to Ottoman laws on prostitu-
tion and the local police were powerless to close down or regulate brothels
owned by foreigners; also, they did not have the authority to arrest or pros-
ecute individuals involved in helping women secure work as prostitutes.41 As
an example of this, in 1876 the Ottoman authorities arrested a number of for-
eign women for prostitution and intended to deport them back to their home
countries by ship. The foreign consuls intervened and forced the Ottoman au-
thorities to release the women.42 By the early twentieth century, Istanbul had
become stigmatized as a centre for the “traffic in women”, and only with the
outbreak of World War i was the Ottoman government able to abolish the Ca-
pitulations and take more stringent measures in the policing of sold sex.
Numerous investigations were carried out by foreign organizations con-
cerning the “international traffic in white women” in Istanbul. These efforts
37
38
39
40
41
42
37 boa, zb, 621/78.
38 boa, dh.eum.adl, 74/6.
39 Nuri Ergin, Mecelle-i umur-i belediye, pp. 3469–3470. The cup (Committee of Union and
Progress) began as a secret society in the late nineteenth century and later was trans-
formed into a liberal reform movement and political party that called for democratiza-
tion and reform in the Ottoman Empire; because of their calls for a constitutional form of
rule, members were persecuted by the imperial government. By 1913, the cup had consoli-
dated its power and led the Ottoman Empire into World War i on the side of the Germans.
40 The Capitulations were a series of trade agreements initially instated as a means of
encouraging trade in the Empire but which eventually resulted in western governments
having the power to limit Ottoman authority on its own territory.
41 Malte Fuhrmann, “‘Western Perversions’ at the Threshold of Felicity: The European Pros-
titutes of Galata-Pera, 1870–1915”, History and Anthropology, 21 (2010), pp. 159–172; Bali,
The Jews and Prostitution, p. 31; Müge Özbek, “The Regulation of Prostitution in Beyoğlu,
1875–1915”, Middle Eastern Studies, 46 (2010), pp. 555–568, 567.
42 Fuhrmann, “Western Perversions”, p. 160.
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288 Wyers
were led by leading feminists such as Bertha Pappenheim and Eugene Simon,
as well as such organizations as the Association for the Protection of Young
Women and the Jewish Hilfsverein and B’nai B’rith societies.43 It was argued
that by the early twentieth century “trafficking” to Istanbul served local de-
mand as well as transport to the brothels in Latin America, northern Egypt,
and further east. As a major port city linking the Mediterranean and Black Sea,
Istanbul was a crucial transit point for ship traffic coming from southern Rus-
sia (particularly Odessa), Romania, and Bulgaria onwards to points south and
west. The claim was made that it was primarily men who were involved in this
transport ring but that women took part as well, German Jews from Galicia and
Bukovia, areas from which many Jewish women migrated to Istanbul, along
with women from southern Hungary.44 While there was a significant number
of Ashkenazi Jews, often migrants and refugees from eastern Europe, who ran
brothels in Istanbul, they were by no means the majority, and many people
involved in prostitution were in fact Ottoman citizens, Muslim or otherwise.45
Beginning in 1910, the Ottoman authorities, aware that increasing numbers
of Muslim women had begun engaging in prostitution in Istanbul for lack of
another source of income, attempted to launch initiatives aimed at providing
destitute (Muslim) women with employment.46 These efforts, however, sought
to prevent Muslim women from taking up prostitution rather than providing
assistance for those who had “fallen”, as the common perception was that their
“virtue” had already been “corrupted”.47 While debates ensued about labour
rights for Muslim women, it was actually the fact that Muslim women were
engaging in prostitution that sparked initiatives to incorporate (“virtuous”)
Muslim women into the workforce. There was not an organized movement
to push for labour equality, however, so women’s wages remained far below
those of men, often 50 per cent less,48 holding back women’s socio-economic
43
44
45
46
47
48
43 Bali, The Jews and Prostitution, p. 32.
44 Fuhrmann, “Western Perversions”, p. 160.
45 Bali, The Jews and Prostitution, pp. 19–23.
46 Kemal Yakut and Aydın Yetkin, “ii. meşrutiyet döneminde toplumsal ahlâk bunalımı:
fuhuş meselesi”, Kebikeç, 31 (2011), pp. 275–307, 284; Yavuz S. Karakışla, “Arşivden bir belge:
Askeri dikimevlerinde çalıştırılan Müslüman fahişeler”, Toplumsal Tarih, 112 (2003), pp.
98–101, 99.
47 On 14 August 1916, a Society for the Employment of Ottoman Muslim Women was found-
ed. Yavuz S. Karakışla, Women, War and Work in the Ottoman Empire: Society for the Em-
ployment of Ottoman Muslim Women, 1916–1923 (Istanbul, 2005), pp. 55, 148.
48 Ahmet Makal, “Türkiye’de erken Cumhuriyet döneminde kadın emeği”, Çalışma ve
Toplum, 2 (2010), pp. 13–39, 20–21.
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Selling Sex in Istanbul 289
emancipation. Even by 1920, some occupations were closed to women; to cite
an example, it was forbidden for Muslim women to work on stage as actors,
as this profession was deemed “unfit” for “honourable” women.49 A survey
conducted in the same year in Istanbul indicated that widowed Muslims in
Istanbul were, in contrast with their non-Muslim (Greek, Armenian, and Jew-
ish) counterparts, less educated, had the lowest earnings, and were the least
healthy.50
Large numbers of Muslim refugees flooded Istanbul in the wake of Ottoman
losses in the Balkans in the early twentieth century, and the government was
financially unable to settle all of them elsewhere. As a result, large numbers
of Muslim women were left without a means of income; in twelve provinces
of the empire, 30 per cent of the female population was comprised of wid-
ows.51 Displacement due to war, as well as migrations, deportations, and the
persecution of Greeks and Armenians in Anatolia led to destitution among
non-Muslim subjects in the capital as well.52 Furthermore, tens of thousands
of White Russian refugees also settled in the city in 1920.53 Opportunities for
work, however, were few and far between.
Industrialization in Istanbul was minimal compared with other cities in
western Europe in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and
small-scale workshops run by men tended to dominate.54 Nonetheless, newly
emergent industries did create opportunities for women to work, but it was
primarily non-Muslim women who began to participate in the economy via
factory labour55 due to the fact that such employment was often seen as being
49
50
51
52
53
54
55
49 İlbeyi Özer, “Mütareke ve işgal yıllarında Osmanlı devletinde görülen sosyal çöküntü ve
toplumsal yaşam”, Osmanlı Tarih Araştırma ve Uygulama Dergisi, 14 (2003), pp. 247–271,
255.
50 Mabelle C. Phillips, “Widowhood: A Study of Dependency due to War”, in C.R. Johnson
(ed.), Constantinople Today or the Pathfinder Survey of Constantinople: A Study in Oriental
Social Life (Istanbul, 1922), pp. 343–370, 313.
51 Zürcher, Turkey, p. 171.
52 Avigdor Levy, “The Siege of Edirne (1912–1913) as Seen by a Jewish Eyewitness: Social,
Political and Cultural Perspectives”, in Avigdor Levy (ed.), Jews, Turks and Ottomans:
A Shared History, Fifteenth through the Twentieth Century (New York, 2002), pp. 174–181.
53 Özer, “Mütareke ve işgal yıllarında”, p. 251.
54 Cengiz Kirli, “A Profile of the Labor Force in Early Nineteenth Century Istanbul”, Interna-
tional Labor and Working-class History, 60 (2001), pp. 125–140, 127–128.
55 Ahmet Makal, “Türkiye’de erken Cumhuriyet döneminde kadın emeği”, pp. 17–18; Donald
Quataert, “Labor History and the Ottoman Empire, 1700–1922”, International Labor and
Working-class History, 60 (2001), pp. 93–109, 104; Edward C. Clark, “The Ottoman Indus-
trial Revolution”, International Journal of Middle East Studies, 5 (1974), pp. 65–76, 70.
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290 Wyers
below the status of Muslim women. During the war, however, a small number
of Muslim women did take up employment in the fabric industry and in sew-
ing houses, the internal spaces of which were often segregated by gender,56 but
large swathes of the female population were left without recourse to avenues
of work that offered competitive wages.
The Founding of the Republic and Perpetuation of
Licensed Prostitution
Studies carried out in 1919/1920 in Istanbul claimed that there were approxi-
mately 2,000 registered prostitutes in the city, 60 per cent of whom were non-
Muslim (Greek, Jewish, and Armenian) and 40 per cent Muslim,57 out of a
total population of around one million.58 There was also a small number of
non-Ottoman citizens employed in the state-licensed brothels, the majority
of whom were Russian (forty-three women in total), and a few German, Ital-
ian, Romanian, Bulgarian, French, and Polish women.59 Over time, after the
founding of the Republic of Turkey in 1923, the number of Muslim women
employed as registered prostitutes increased, and there was a corresponding
decrease in the number of non-Muslim registered women. This trend towards
a “Muslim-Turkification” of sold sex in Istanbul in the 1920s and ‘30s paralleled
large-scale efforts undertaken to “Turkify” the nation. In the late Ottoman and
early republican eras, the Greek, Armenian, and Jewish populations of Istan-
bul declined sharply as the result of nationalist policies aiming for the homog-
enization of Turkish society; the system of registered prostitution remained
in place, however, and, over time, Muslim women became the majority in the
state-licensed brothels. Under pressure from organizations such as the League
of Nations, which was undertaking efforts to curtail the “international traffic”
in women, the number of foreign women employed in the licensed brothels in
Istanbul also decreased as the government sought to reassure the international
community that Turkey was not a haven for “traffickers” and was not employ-
ing foreigners in state-sanctioned brothels, which the League had identified as
56
57
58
59
56 Gülhan Balsoy, “Gendering Ottoman Labor History: The Cibali Régie Factory in the Early
Twentieth Century”, International Review of Social History, 54 (2009), pp. 45–68, 65.
57 Riggs, “Adult Delinquency”, p. 358; Mustafa Galip, Fahişeler hayatı ve redaet-i ahlâkiye
(Istanbul, 1920), p. 74.
58 Hatice Bayartan, “Geçmişten günümüze İstanbul’da Nüfus”, Coğrafya Dergisi, 11 (2003),
p. 5–20, 10.
59 Riggs, “Adult Delinquency”, p. 367.
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Selling Sex in Istanbul 291
a “leading culprit” in the “trafficking of women”.60 By the 1930s, Turkish state
law mandated that non-citizens could not be employed as registered prosti-
tutes in Turkey, and henceforth foreign women caught engaging in sold sex
were deported, just as they are today.
While there are no statistics available concerning the education levels of
women engaged in prostitution in late Ottoman and early republican Istan-
bul, it is possible to infer that few had attended school; while education for
girls in the Ottoman Empire became increasingly available from the middle of
the nineteenth century onwards, this was largely reserved for the children of
the wealthy elite. Although more women received at least a primary education
after the founding of the republic, by 1935 the national average for women’s
literacy was still below 10 per cent,61 and of the nearly 40,000 villages in Turkey,
only about 5,000 had schools.62
In 1925, investigators for the League of Nations visited Istanbul and inter-
viewed local officials, prostitutes, and brothel owners as part of a global study
on the trafficking in women. It was reported that women were forcibly regis-
tered as prostitutes if the police caught them three times in the act of trying
to sell sex and that most women working in licensed brothels were overseen
by a pimp or madam. It was also noted that many of the women were locked
in a debtor system, in which a debtor would “loan” money to prostitutes at
extraordinarily high interest rates, making it difficult for the women to pay off
their debts. The report stated that although Istanbul was not a major destina-
tion for prostitutes, it was a transit point for women travelling from Romania
and Poland to colonial Egypt and Syria, as well as South and Central America.
In 1925, it was reported that there were 241 licensed houses in Istanbul, the
majority of which were owned by Turkish citizens; thirty-seven of the houses
were reserved solely for Muslim women (and hence solely for Muslim men).63
60
61
62
63
60 It should also be noted that in the first half of the twentieth century, it seems that the
number of foreigners residing in Turkey decreased steadily, from 0.6 in 1927 to 0.2 per cent
in 1945. W.C. Brice, “The Population of Turkey in 1950”, Geographical Journal, 120 (1954),
pp. 347–352, 350.
61 Bruce Rankin and Işık Aytaç, “Gender Inequality in Schooling: The Case of Turkey”, Soci-
ology of Education, 79 (2006), pp. 25–43, 29; Fevziye Sayılan and Ahmet Yıldız, “The His-
torical and Political Context of Adult Literacy in Turkey”, International Journal of Lifelong
Education, 28 (2009), pp. 735–749, 743; Jenny White, “State Feminism, Modernization, and
the Turkish Republican Woman”, nwsa Journal, 15 (2003), pp. 145–159, 150.
62 Zürcher, Turkey, p. 202.
63 League of Nations [hereafter lon], Report of the Special Body of Experts on the Traffic
in Women and Children, Part ii (Geneva, 1927), pp. 166–172. This report contains only
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292 Wyers
As indicated in a study carried out by a Turkish journalist in 1928, the num-
ber of registered houses had decreased to 110, and the segregation of prostitutes
by religious affiliation had begun to fall away. Women working in higher-class
houses did not solicit on the street, but less privileged women would approach
clients outside and bring them to their rented rooms. State law required that
owners of brothels be female and stipulated that women could voluntarily ap-
ply to be registered or be forcibly registered by the police if repeatedly caught
engaging in prostitution. The study noted that aside from becoming the owner
of a brothel, the future prospects for prostitutes were bleak, and that most reg-
istered women, since they did not have the right to collect retirement, eventu-
ally became beggars. It was reported that the majority of women employed in
state-licensed houses were from the lower classes, having worked as waitresses
or servants, or had been previously convicted of petty crimes. Also, the major-
ity of women in the study were single mothers whose fathers had passed away,
and most of them had a male “friend” who lived off her earnings.64
In the early years of the republic, violence committed by clients against
prostitutes occurred regularly, often taking place in brothels; it should also be
noted, however, that there were reports of violence perpetrated by prostitutes
against their clients as well.65 A report issued by the League of Nations in 1938
provided some details about the personal lives of women employed at state-
sanctioned brothels; while most of the data concerned women in Ankara, it
is likely that the registered women in Istanbul had similar backgrounds. The
report stated that the majority of women had not attended school, had never
been employed or had worked as domestic servants, and had begun engaging
in prostitution under the age of 23. Also, the report noted that all of the regis-
tered women in Istanbul had contracted a venereal disease within six years of
working, and that all of the women who had married were divorced.66
As in early modern Istanbul, it appears that there were virtually no organi-
zations seeking to “rehabilitate” or provide services for prostitutes in the late
Ottoman and early republican eras, and as discussed above, state-led efforts to
provide employment for women were almost exclusively off-limits to women
64
65
66
abstracts of the information gathered by the undercover investigators during the course
of their research.
64 “İstanbul’da fuhuş meselesi: Mecmuamızın içtimai tetkiki”, Resimli Ay, March 1928, p. 22. A
first-hand account given in 1931 by a registered sex worker in Istanbul similarly indicated
that prostitutes often had such a “male companion.” Wyers, Wicked Istanbul, pp. 117–118.
65 Wyers, Wicked Istanbul, pp. 163–166.
66 lon, Prostitutes: Their Early Lives (Geneva, 1938), pp. 112–114.
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Selling Sex in Istanbul 293
who had previously engaged in prostitution.67 In 1921, a Prostitution Preven-
tion Society was founded under the guidance of the foreign ambassadors in
Istanbul, but it does not appear to have had a lasting existence or impact on
sold sex in Istanbul.68 A handful of Turkish feminists did protest the state regu-
lation of brothels in newspaper columns,69 and the Turkish Women’s League,
which was created in 1923 after the newly founded Turkish government refused
permission for the opening of a women’s political party, asserted that one of
its founding tenets was the abolition of the regulated system. Under govern-
ment pressure, however, the League’s efforts would remain limited to social aid
projects, and in 1935 the Turkish Women’s League was shut down by the gov-
ernment following the hosting of the annual conference of the International
Alliance of Women for Suffrage and Equal Citizenship, which was held in Is-
tanbul. At the conference, western representatives of the alliance, aware that
Turkey maintained a system of licensed prostitution, decried the regulated
brothel system, stating that it was the root cause of “trafficking in women”.70
While legislation concerning women in the early years of the republic pro-
moted their increased public presence by encouraging their participation in
the labour force, this did not entail increased personal freedoms for women
in Turkey in the sense of sexual liberation; strict Islamic sexual mores, with
a focus on women’s “sexual purity” have remained strong. Additionally, while
there was an active albeit rather small women’s movement in Istanbul in the
early years of the republic, it did not have the power to lobby the government;
although women were granted municipal suffrage in 1930 and parliamentary
suffrage in 1934, this was the result of “state feminism” and not agitation on
behalf of women themselves. Likewise, government legislation on prostitution
was drafted solely by male politicians; the Penal Code implemented in 1926
67
68
69
70
67 In 1898, a shelter was opened in Istanbul for poor female teachers and servants to prevent
them from falling into a life of prostitution. Fuhrmann, “Western Perversions”, p. 162. It
appears that in 1911, there was a hospice for the homeless which accepted sex workers, but
the details of its operations or scale of work are not clear. Bali, The Jews and Prostitution,
p. 45.
68 Ibid., p. 57.
69 Ada Holland Shissler, “‘If You Ask Me’: Sabiha Sertel’s Advice Column, Gender Equity, and
Social Engineering in the Early Turkish Republic”, Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies,
3 (2007), pp. 1–30.; idem, “Womanhood is not for Sale: Sabiha Zekeriya Sertel against Pros-
titution and for Women’s Employment”, Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies, 4 (2008),
pp. 12–30.
70 Yeşim Zihnioğlu, Kadınsız inkılap: Nezihe Muhiddin, kadınlar halk fırkası, kadın birliği (Is-
tanbul, 2003), p. 258.
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294 Wyers
diminished the rights of prostitutes on the basis that they were “dishonour-
able”, and the crimes of rape and kidnapping could be punished 60 per cent
less severely if committed against a prostitute.71 This article was repealed in
1990 after successful lobbying by women’s groups.
In 1929, the Ministry of the Interior successfully pushed legislation to even-
tually eliminate the regulated system. After a three-year experiment with abo-
lition, during which time clandestine prostitution in Istanbul had reportedly
proliferated and the economy deteriorated as the result of the global economic
depression,72 the government in Ankara argued that public health was under
threat because of the spread of venereal diseases and opted to reinstate the
system, which remains in place to the present day.73 In 1950, under pressure
from the abolitionist World Health Organization, the government once again
considered eliminating the licensed system, but in the end decided that public
hygiene took precedence, and it was maintained.74
The Other Side of the Turkish “Economic Miracle”
Large-scale internal migration to the urban centres of Turkey, including Istan-
bul, began in earnest in the 1950s as the result of population growth, the mech-
anization of agriculture, the development of highways, and industrialization
(prompted by an emphasis on isi policies).75 However, migration outpaced
job creation, and large numbers of migrants, including women, were forced to
take up menial labour positions in cities,76 and some turned to prostitution. By
the 1980s, liberal economic policies had led to new patterns of mass consump-
tion in Turkish society, despite the fact that economic prosperity had devel-
oped in a lopsided manner; while some profited from the liberalized economy
and flaunted their wealth in unprecedented ways, others suffered, as real
71
72
73
74
75
76
71 Aslı Zengin, İktidarın mahremiyeti: İstanbul’da hayat kadınları, seks işçiliği ve şiddet (Istan-
bul, 2011), p. 102.
72 Turkey, due to its heavily agricultural economy, was severely impacted by the depression.
Zürcher, Turkey, p. 205.
73 Wyers, Wicked Istanbul, pp. 119–142.
74 “Genelevlerin kapatılması meselesi”, Milliyet, 25 August 1950; “Genelevler kapatılıyor”, Mil-
liyet, 16 October 1950; “Genelevlerin kapatılması”, Milliyet, 19 October 1950; “Beyaz kadın
ticaret”, Milliyet, 2 February 1954.
75 Burak Gürel, “Agrarian Change and Labour Supply in Turkey, 1950–1980”, Journal of Agrar-
ian Change, 11 (2011), pp. 195–219, 204.
76 Zürcher, Turkey, p. 284.
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Selling Sex in Istanbul 295
purchasing power had dropped between 40–60 per cent from 1979 to 1989.77
Reflecting these economic and social trends, reports in Turkish newspapers in
the 1980s noted that increasing numbers of Turkish women had begun work-
ing as registered and clandestine prostitutes. In 1980 there were roughly 11,000
registered women in Turkey, and by 1985 that number had risen to 15,000.78
The number of licensed brothels in Turkey also increased, from 405 in 1980 to
800 in 1988.79 The collapse of the Soviet bloc in 1989–91 also contributed to an
increase in sold sex in Istanbul as impoverished women took up sex work. By
1990, Ukrainian women represented the largest group of foreign women engag-
ing in prostitution in Istanbul;80 in a study conducted in 2005, the claim was
made that Turkey was a major transit point and destination for women looking
for sex work, in order of frequency from Moldova, Ukraine, Russia, Azerbaijan,
Kyrgyzstan, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Belarus, Uzbekistan, and Romania.81
Today, sex work is carried out in two ways in Istanbul: on a very small scale,
legally in the red-light district, and illegally otherwise. By law, all sex workers
employed in the licensed houses must be Turkish citizens and female by birth
or by gender reassignment surgery and been issued a pink (female) identity
card. The state-licensed brothels are located on a single street in the district
of Beyoğlu, the main entertainment hub of the city. The street is accessible by
a single gate manned by a police officer, and the houses within are not visible
to passers-by. Aside from registered sex workers, women are not allowed to
enter the street, and men must show a valid id indicating that they are over
the age of 18 before they can pass through the gate; non-Turkish citizens who
don’t have a residence permit in Turkey are not allowed to enter. Presently,
there are only around 130 women working in the district,82 and this number
will continue to go down as the police launch occasional raids on the brothels
for supposed infractions of the law; women are either forced to leave as their
houses are closed down or leave voluntarily as they grow older and can no
77
78
79
80
81
82
77 Ibid., p. 316.
78 “Geçim sıkıntısı kadın tellallarının işini kolaylaştıyor”, Milliyet, 19 September 1985.
79 “‘Vesikalı yar’ bolluğu”, Milliyet, 31 August 1988.
80 Donna M. Hughes, “The ‘Natasha’ Trade: The Transnational Shadow Market of Trafficking
in Women (1990)”, available at: http://www.prostitutionresearch.com/pdfs/natasha_trade
.pdf; last accessed 10 July 2017.
81 Önder Karakuş and Edmund F. McGarrell, “Association between Migrant Prostitution,
Trafficking in Women, and Serious Crime in Turkey”, Uluslararası Güvenlik ve Terörizm
Dergisi, 1 (2010), pp. 79–103, 87.
82 Muhtar Çokar and Habibe Yılmaz Kayar, Seks işçileri ve yasalar: Türkiye’de yasaların seks
işçilerine etkileri ve öneriler (Istanbul, 2011), pp. 28–29.
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296 Wyers
longer work. Under the current conservative government, new women are not
being registered, despite the fact that there are a reported 6,000 pending ap-
plications for registration in the state brothels.83 As with many systems of reg-
istration, Istanbul’s legal sex workers are required to undergo tests for venereal
diseases twice a week.
The period of employment for registered sex workers is fairly level across
the board (Table 11.1), with no large differences in the sizes of the groups who
have worked varying periods of time. The majority of women are over 30 years
of age (Table 11.2). As for reasons for beginning sex work, some stated that they
were forced by someone else, such as a “friend” or relative, and others stated
that they voluntarily began working out of financial need. The Ankara Cham-
ber of Commerce indicated in a report on sex workers in Turkey that the main
Table 11.1 Length of time of employment as sex workers,
Istanbul 2010.84
Number of years Percentage
1–5 21%
6–10 26%
11–15 19%
16–20 19%
21+ 15%
Table 11.2 Age of sex workers, Istanbul 2010.85
Age Percentage
21–25 2%
26–30 20%
31–35 20%
41–45 20%
46–50 6%
51+ 12%
83
84
85
83 Wyers, Wicked Istanbul, p. 16.
84 Data from Çokar and Kayar, Seks işçileri, pp. 28–29. Interview with 138 sex workers.
85 Ibid.
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Selling Sex in Istanbul 297
reason women voluntarily engage in sex work is financial necessity, pointing
out that women’s wages in Turkey are significantly lower than men’s.86
Although steps to alleviate the situation of women’s employment have been
taken in recent years albeit with patchy implementation,87 women’s urban la-
bour market participation in Turkey is quite low at 22 per cent, in contrast to
70 per cent for men. In 2009, the un ranked Turkey 206 out of 215 countries for
women’s labour participation.88 Studies have noted that one of the primary
factors for women’s low rates of labour participation in Turkey is the tradition-
al priority placed on their roles as mothers and wives, and even women who
do work often do so on a part-time basis so that they can fulfil their domestic
responsibilities.89 A lack of childcare services also has a prohibitive effect on
women’s participation, and a large number of women who are employed but
have low levels of education do not have access to social security, meaning that
they cannot obtain maternity leave or receive retirement benefits.90 As a num-
ber of female sex workers have pointed out, the reason that they resorted to sex
work was because they were single mothers who felt that they could not sup-
port their children on the wages available to them or found that they were able
to make more money through sex work.91 A report compiled by an ngo about
prostitution in Turkey also indicated that the majority of registered female sex
workers are internal migrants to the city living under financial duress.92
A survey of registered sex workers carried out in 2010 indicated that 66 per
cent were single, 8 per cent were married, and 26 per cent were divorced. It
should be pointed out that the law forbids married women from working in
licensed houses, however, so the women who claimed to be married were most
likely involved in a common-law marriage.93 Another study found that over 70
per cent of registered women who had married had done so at the age of 20 or
younger, with some married as young as 13 years of age. Many were married off
while in their teens; unhappy in marriage, they were unable to return home, as
local tradition holds that this is “disgraceful” for the family, so they eventually
86
87
88
89
90
91
92
93
86 Çokar and Kayar, Seks işçileri, pp. 28–29.
87 Nellie Munin, “Female Employment and Turkey’s eu Accession Process”, Mediterranean
Politics, 16 (2011), pp. 449–457, 451.
88 İpek İlkkaracan, “Why so Few Women in the Labor Market in Turkey?” Feminist Econom-
ics, 18 (2012), pp. 1–37, 2.
89 Ibid., p. 6.
90 Ibid., pp. 16, 21.
91 Fügen Yıldırım, Fahişeliğin öbür yüzü (Istanbul, 2004), pp. 43, 47, 97, 102, 109, 125.
92 Çokar and Kayar, Seks işçileri, p. 30.
93 Ibid., p. 31.
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298 Wyers
took up sex work. A significant number of the women working in the Istan-
bul licensed brothels have children and spend large amounts of money for
childcare.94
Education levels among registered sex workers in Istanbul are low, but not
entirely. While the numbers vary slightly in different studies, on average about
25 per cent of registered women completed primary school and 10 per cent
completed middle school, and although the figures vary from 12 to 23 per cent
for high school graduates, at least 7 per cent attended university. Rates of con-
trolled substance and alcohol abuse among registered sex workers are high,
as well as use of tobacco.95 Although they should have access to state health
insurance as workers, the owners of licensed brothels often do not make full
payments for the social security benefits of registered sex workers, so they are
not covered by health insurance and are generally unable to retire. If forced
to undergo treatment for a venereal disease, they are unable to work for that
period and hence unable to look after their children’s needs.96
As of 2011, the rate at the Istanbul licensed brothel for one visit was 35 Turk-
ish lira,97 the equivalent of approximately €15. However, since registered wom-
en are often required to purchase food, beverages, and cigarettes at inflated
rates in the brothel, in addition to paying for electricity, water, and cleaning,
they are forced to accept large numbers of clients to make a profit. Addition-
ally, the owner and manager of the house take a large cut of each payment; this
situation, however, seems to have improved starting in the early 2000s, pos-
sibly because sex workers began lobbying for improvements in their working
conditions. Encounters in the licensed houses of Istanbul tend to be short, last-
ing 5–10 minutes in general, as the owners of licensed houses think that longer
encounters mean that the worker is getting more money and hence attempt
to extract more money from the workers.98 In interviews, registered workers
have complained that owners harass them about concealing profits and that
they are forced to hide their tips upon leaving the house at the end of the day.99
It appears that until recent years, it was fairly common for a woman to be
driven to work at a licensed brothel by a husband, relative, or male “friend”,
94
95
96
97
98
99
94 Ibid., p. 46.
95 Ibid., p. 36.
96 Yıldırım, Fahişeliğin öbür yüzü, p. 46.
97 “Dimming the Red Lights in Turkey”, New York Times, 8 August 2011.
98 Some registered women reported having up to 30 to 50 clients per day, particularly on
holidays and weekends. Yıldırım, Fahişeliğin öbür yüzü, pp. 76, 105; Çokar and Kayar, Seks
işçileri, p. 46.
99 Zengin, İktidarın Mahremiyeti, pp. 113–114.
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Selling Sex in Istanbul 299
who took a sum of money when she was registered at the brothel, and that she
would then be forced to work off her “debt”, a process which, combined with
the cut taken by the house, meant that women could be required to work for
years before paying back what she supposedly owed. Since the licensed hous-
es do not appear to be accepting new workers, it seems that this trend is on
the decline. It has also been reported that the majority of women have a male
“friend” to whom they give the majority of their earnings.100 Prior to beginning
work at a licensed house, it has been reported that some women worked in
low-level positions as factory labourers, secretaries, dishwashers, hair stylists,
and club entertainers.101
Even within the small red-light district in Istanbul, it seems that working
conditions differ, and some sex workers claim that they work on their own
schedule, choosing to work part time or full time based on their financial
needs.102 Until the early 2000s, when a series of sting operations were conduct-
ed, it was reported that women worked part-time illegally (without registering)
in the licensed houses of Istanbul to offset their salaries in times of financial
difficulty, and that some of these women were teachers, bank workers, and
government employees.103 For such women, their biggest fear was to be caught
and forcibly registered by the police, as once a woman is registered with the
police as a sex worker, it is nearly impossible to have it retracted;104 addition-
ally, the children of registered sex workers are banned from government posi-
tions with the military and police force.105 Some brothel workers who receive
a pension in their father or mother’s name do not file their working hours with
social security, because once a woman becomes employed, she loses all rights
to that pension.106 In any case, most licensed houses underreport the working
hours and wages of sex workers to save on taxes, making it difficult for regis-
tered women to retire, as retirement in Turkey is based on years of employ-
ment. In recent years, this seems to be changing, and a few legally employed
female sex workers have successfully retired.107
Although registered women in Istanbul are allowed to live outside the
brothel complex (unlike in other cities in Turkey), they are required to register
100
101
102
103
104
105
106
107
100 Yıldırım, Fahişeliğin öbür yüzü, pp. 23, 76, 79, 82, 103; Zengin, İktidarın mahremiyeti, p. 59.
101 Ibid., pp. 19, 49, 82, 92, 118–119.
102 Ibid., pp. 75, 84.
103 Zengin, İktidarın mahremiyeti, p. 110.
104 Yıldırım, Fahişeliğin öbür yüzü, p. 124; Zengin, İktidarın mahremiyeti, pp. 117, 121.
105 Zengin, İktidarın mahremiyeti, p. 106.
106 Yıldırım, Fahişeliğin öbür yüzü, p. 35.
107 Ibid., p. 76.
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300 Wyers
their home address with the local authorities and the police have the right
to raid a registered sex worker’s home at any time they please.108 Due to the
strong stigma of sex work in Turkey, most registered sex workers are extremely
afraid of being “found out” by their neighbours and the physical/psychological
violence they could be subjected to if discovered.109 This stigma is also why
collecting data on sex workers, whether registered or not, is difficult, as they
are afraid of being “tipped off” to their neighbours or families;110 one Turkish
woman reported that her family had found out that she was a sex worker and
had sent her brother to kill her to “save” the family’s honour.111 Such honour
killings occur most often in the southeast of Turkey, and are reflective of em-
bedded cultural beliefs in which the concept of family honour is heavily predi-
cated on women’s (“proper”) sexual conduct.112
The paragraphs above outline the situation as regards the legal red-light dis-
trict of Istanbul; as noted above, outside of the state licensed brothel, sex work
is not permitted by law.113 Turkish nationals who are caught engaging in pros-
titution are held for a medical examination and may be detained for a number
of days, and foreign nationals, if not found to be “victims of trafficking” (and
it seems that few are found to be such “victims”), are deported; the most com-
monly deported sex workers are from Moldova, Ukraine, Russia, Azerbaijan,
Kyrgyzstan, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Belarus, Uzbekistan, and Romania. A study
carried out by a team of Turkish researchers claimed that some women are
enticed to the city on false promises of employment, while others come to
work temporarily to take up sex work; upon arriving in Istanbul, it has been
reported that some women are forced to pay off the debt they acquired upon
arrival, which can include the costs of visas, plane tickets, passports, bribes,
and daily living expenses.114 While Turkey is a signatory to numerous anti-
trafficking protocols and procuring is a crime,115 the infrastructure for identify-
ing and providing support for women who have been caught in debt bondage
108
109
110
111
112
113
114
115
108 Ibid., p. 81.
109 Ibid., p. 30.
110 Zengin, İktidarın mahremiyeti, p. 64.
111 Yıldırım, Fahişeliğin öbür yüzü, p. 120.
112 Filiz Kardam, The Dynamics of Honor Killings in Turkey (Ankara, 2005), p. 16.
113 A report issued by the Ankara Chamber of Commerce estimated that in 2010 there were
approximately 100,000 sex workers in Turkey, only 3,000 of which were registered and
work in the fifty-six state-licensed brothels located around the country. Çokar and Kayar,
Seks işçileri, p. 26.
114 Ibid., pp. 22–23, 51.
115 Ibid., p. 53.
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Selling Sex in Istanbul 301
is underdeveloped.116 As studies on contemporary sold sex in Istanbul have in-
dicated, however, it is difficult to gather data about non-registered sex workers
for the reason that the workers themselves, for fear of being tipped off to the
police, are reluctant to divulge information about themselves to outsiders.117
The most salient feature of non-registered prostitution in Istanbul is the
violence with which it is policed; bribery or sexual favours also appear to be
a common occurrence.118 In recent years, it appears that the police have been
increasingly issuing fines to non-registered prostitutes and utilizing tactics of
intimidation, increasing sex workers’ isolation as they are forced to go further
underground.119 There have also been reports of foreign women being taken
into custody as “prostitutes” simply because they were “too scantily” dressed.120
The physical health of sex workers has been reported to be low, and some
have been identified as being at high risk for illness due to poor living condi-
tions and lack of access to healthcare. Sleeplessness, malnutrition, respiratory
infections, skin diseases, venereal diseases, and mental illness are common
ailments, often brought about by stressful working conditions.121 Violence,
including rape and shootings, has been reported in interviews; of fifty non-
registered sex workers, forty-three reported that they had been victims of vio-
lence including rape, battery, abduction, and extortion.122 But as sex workers
have pointed out, they cannot apply to the police for help or bring the perpe-
trator to justice because they themselves could also then be subject to legal
action, such as arrest or deportation.123
Through the use of the internet and telephones to set up appointments,
non-registered prostitution has become less visible, and some sex workers
have used this as a means to develop a small but steady group of clients to
minimize the risk of violence and police harassment.124 Other venues for find-
ing and meeting clients exist as well, including massage parlours and hotels
116
117
118
119
120
121
122
123
124
116 “2011 Trafficking in Persons Report”, available at: http://www.unhcr.org/refworld/docid/
4e12ee3dc.html; last accessed 3 June 2012.
117 Zengin, İktidarın mahremiyeti, p. 64; Çokar and Kayar, Seks işçileri, p. 27.
118 Zengin, İktidarın mahremiyeti, pp. 74, 86, 123–125; Yıldırım, Fahişeliğin öbür yüzü, p. 98;
Çokar and Kayar, Seks işçileri, p. 80.
119 Çokar and Kayar, Seks işçileri, p. 80.
120 Zengin, İktidarın mahremiyeti, p. 74.
121 Çokar and Kayar, Seks işçileri, pp. 38–39.
122 Ibid., p. 44.
123 Zengin, İktidarın mahremiyeti, p. 131.
124 Çokar and Kayar, Seks işçileri, p. 18.
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302 Wyers
which have made arrangements with sex workers,125 but it appears that in-
creasing numbers of sex workers are turning to the internet as a “safer” means
of drawing clients, even though some continue to work on the streets. Escort
websites for sold sex can be divided into two groups: those for foreign women,
and those for Turkish women. The websites for both groups include detailed
information about physical characteristics and sexual services. There is a clear
division in terms of cost, with foreign women charging up to double the price
of what Turkish sex workers charge. It is not clear whether the sex workers who
advertise online work for a pimp or madam, but the fact that a large number of
Turkish sex workers use their own rented homes to meet clients suggests that
they may work independently. Also, the websites provide dates for availability,
suggesting that some sex workers, including university students, may be using
it for part-time income rather than full-time employment.
Research has indicated that approximately 20 per cent of men in Turkey
have their first sexual encounters with sex workers, and this has been attribut-
ed to the conservative sexual climate of the country which is based on cultural
values promoting female virginity before marriage and the belief that women’s
sexuality must be concealed and controlled.126 Also, studies indicate that a
large number of the clients of sex workers are married men who claim that
they are unable to achieve sexual satisfaction at home because of their wives’
sexual conservatism.127 While Istanbul, as a large metropolitan city, has in re-
cent years witnessed an increase to a certain degree in sexual liberation, this
is limited to a relatively small segment of the population and sexual conser-
vatism remains the norm. This has also been accompanied by the increasing
popularity of conservative Islam praising traditional family values, as reflected
in the rise to power of the current conservative regime which advocates the
family unit as the cornerstone of a “strong” society.
Currently, there is one organization, Kadınkapısı (Women’s door), which is
solely dedicated to supporting the sexual health of sex workers and providing
counselling as well as education regarding venereal diseases. It was founded in
1996 by sex workers and social workers and has since participated in numerous
125
126
127
125 Ibid., p. 61.
126 Ibid., p. 47; Zengin, İktidarın mahremiyeti, p. 100. See also Nuray Sakalil-Ugurlu and Peter
Glick, “Ambivalent Sexism and Attitudes toward Women who Engage in Premarital Sex in
Turkey”, The Journal of Sex Research, 40 (2003), pp. 294–303. Just to cite one example, this
has been reflected in the debates that have arisen over forced virginity examinations for
young women in schools. Ayşe Parla, “The ‘Honor’ of the State: Virginity Examinations in
Turkey”, Feminist Studies, 27 (2001), pp. 65–88.
127 Sakalil-Ugurlu and Glick, “Ambivalent Sexism and Attitudes towards Women”, p. 47.
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Selling Sex in Istanbul 303
events and activities to promote the well-being and fair treatment of sex work-
ers in Istanbul.128 Developing connections with non-registered sex workers
have proven problematic, however, because either their pimps do not allow it
or the sex workers themselves are wary of being tipped off.129 Although state
law concerning the regulation of sex work dictates that a state-run support
centre for sex workers should be located in the vicinity of the brothel district
and be open at all hours to provide support and treatment, this has never been
implemented. Likewise, the law stipulates that there should be organizations
providing support for women who would like to quit sex work, but these also
have not materialized.
In an attempt to provide haven for the large number of women in Turkey
who are victims of domestic violence, a small number of shelters have been
opened in recent years as the result of lobbying by women’s groups. However,
under the current regulation, it is not permitted for sex workers or hiv-positive
women to stay in shelters,130 although revisions currently underway may lift
the restriction for sex workers. Significantly, the issue of sex work has largely
been excluded from discussions among women’s groups in Turkey, and the
voices of female sex workers have not been incorporated into feminist move-
ments, perhaps out of fear that in the eyes of society, as a “shameful” issue, it
would “de-legitimize” them.131
There is also a notable silence regarding the issue of child prostitution;
while it has been acknowledged to exist, to date a sound investigation into the
matter has not been carried out. Studies have highlighted the fact, however,
that the majority of sex workers began working before the age of eighteen and
that there is a severe lack of preventative and protective infrastructure regard-
ing child prostitution.132 As with female sex work, male and homosexual sex
work in Istanbul has taken on a prominent web presence as an anonymous
way to contact clients; however, a distinction should be made, as many men
who are the active partner in a male-male sexual encounter report that they do
not perceive themselves as being homosexual.133
128
129
130
131
132
133
128 http://www.kadinkapisi.org/.
129 Çokar and Kayar, Seks işçileri, pp. 72–74; Zengin, İktidarın mahremiyeti, pp. 60–61.
130 Şule Toktaş and Çağla Diner, “Feminists’ Dilemma: With or without the State? Violence
against Women and Women’s Shelters in Turkey”, Asian Journal of Women’s Studies, 17
(2011), pp. 49–75, 59.
131 Zengin, İktidarın mahremiyeti, pp. 139–140.
132 Çokar and Kayar, Seks işçileri, pp. 32–33, 92.
133 Ibid., p. 36.
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304 Wyers
It has been estimated that there are 5,000 transgender people in Istanbul,
4,000 of whom are engaged in sex work, which is nearly 15 per cent of the esti-
mated non-registered 30,000 sex workers in the city. Due to the strong discrimi-
nation against transgender people in Turkey, it is nearly impossible for them to
find employment, and hence many turn to sex work as a source of income. In
contrast to twenty years ago, when they resided and worked in a central loca-
tion in Istanbul and had a sense of group solidarity, transgender sex workers
have become more and more isolated as a result of increasing levels of vio-
lence and police intimidation.134 In 2009, the Istanbul police initiated a “bonus
system” in which police officers can fine transgender persons who are in pub-
lic on the grounds of “disturbing the peace” and are rewarded for the number
of tickets they issue; as a result, transgender individuals have been forced to
relocate and have a reduced public presence,135 and while some continue to
work on the streets, many advertise on the internet to reach clients. It has been
noted that male clients seeking transgender encounters often prefer individu-
als who have not undergone gender reassignment surgery as the clients wish
to be anally penetrated.136
Conclusion
Sold sex in Istanbul over the past 400 years has undergone significant shifts, but
certain continuities are prominent as well. Some of the shifts include changes
in the way that prostitution is monitored and changes in the demographics of
the women (and men) who sell sex. Prior to the introduction of a regulated sys-
tem of prostitution, while royal Ottoman edicts may have been issued against
sold sex, local dignitaries and religious figures, whether Christian, Jewish, or
Muslim, were in charge of overseeing the sexual morality of Istanbul’s districts;
residents also filed petitions complaining about the existence of prostitution
as well. With the adoption of licensed prostitution, this power was transferred
to the secular authorities—that is, police, local health officials, and municipal
officers.
One point of shift is the demographics of prostitution; from the sixteenth
century until the 1930s, prostitutes were from all religious and ethnic back-
grounds, but as the result of vigorous efforts to “Turkify” the nation under
134
135
136
134 Ibid., p. 35. Between 2007 and 2009 alone, thirty transgender persons were murdered.
Ibid., p. 97.
135 Zengin, İktidarın mahremiyeti, p. 72.
136 “Bu işi yapmak ruhumda var”, Radikal, 16 June 2007.
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Selling Sex in Istanbul 305
both the Ottoman and republican governments, the non-Muslim segments of
society shrank drastically, and this is reflected in the fact that the registered
women in the state-regulated brothels of Istanbul are predominantly Muslim
(and Turkish citizens, as state law requires). Control over prostitution through
regulation was seen by state and municipal authorities as necessary to pre-
vent further “damage” to the body of the nation through the spread of disease,
even if this entailed populating the state brothels with Muslim women who,
once placed on the records, could never rescind registration. In this way, these
(irrevocably) “fallen women”, sealed in behind the walls of the legal brothel,
could serve the state by ensuring that men’s sexual desires were, in theory, bol-
stered against infections and shunted away from the “virtuous” remainder of
the female population. However, as in the early twentieth century when Is-
tanbul was internationally condemned for its role in “trafficking”, with the fall
of the Soviet Union and the economic boom in Turkey in the 1980s, clandes-
tine prostitution increased, as women from eastern Europe and ex-Soviet bloc
countries began engaging in illegal sex work in the city. Another point of conti-
nuity is that today there seems to be a repetition of the abolitionist trend that
occurred in the 1930s; new sex workers are not being licensed, and whether
female, transgender, or male, they are primarily outside the legal system of
state-recognized brothels, working on the streets but also taking advantage of
technologies such as the internet.
At this point, the future of sex work in Istanbul is unclear. The staunchly
“pro-family” government, a strong supporter of traditional values (including
virtue as a reflection of “properly expressed” female sexuality), which at pres-
ent has little opposition in parliament and has made slow steps to implement
the gender equity laws and labour legislation required for eu accession, has
been quietly closing down the few remaining brothels where sex workers can
legally work. At the same time, sex workers, a few female activists, and the
transgender community have been pressing for an expansion of laws to pro-
vide protection for individuals who engage in sold sex and for equitable labour
practices; to date, such laws have not been enacted. To further complicate the
narrative, some female sex workers themselves have rallied for the elimination
of licensed brothels, claiming that they represent the patriarchal oppression
of women. Nonetheless, regardless of the approach that is ultimately taken, as
Istanbul continues to grow (with a population fast approaching 14,000,000),
the number of sex workers will also likely increase from the estimated 30,000
already in existence.
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chapter 12
Sexualizing the City: Female Prostitution in
Nigeria’s Urban Centres in a Historical Perspective
Mfon Umoren Ekpootu
The work of prostitutes cannot be understood separate from the particular his-
torical and socio-cultural context in which it is carried out, all of which shape
the sexual agency of the women involved. In studying commercial sexual rela-
tions in urban Nigeria, this paper problematizes prostitution, examining shifts
in meanings, perceptions, and the organization of prostitution. How was a
prostitute defined in different epochs in Nigeria’s history? How did society or-
ganize sex and sexuality and how did these shape commercial sex relations?
The discourses on prostitution in Nigeria have focused mainly on human traf-
ficking and migrant prostitution. On the other hand, attempts to document
domestic prostitution, as well as its development and mutations over time, in
addition to operational and regulatory mechanisms have so far been the pre-
occupation of but a few scholars.1 In this literature, the colonial antecedent of
commercial sex trade is underscored.
Lagos presents a viable site for an overview of prostitution because of its cos-
mopolitan landscape and socio-economic and cultural heterogeneity which
allow for a mapping of the forms and patterns of prostitution that emerged
over time. In the fifteenth century it grew from a fishing settlement engaged
in local trading with neighbouring communities2 into a locale of commercial
importance trading with Europe thanks to its strategic location. As a port city,
Lagos attracted people of diverse origins, from European traders to freed slaves
1 Benedict B.B. Naanen, “‘Itinerant Gold Mines’: Prostitution in the Cross River Basin of
Nigeria, 1930–1950”, African Studies Review, 34 (1991), pp. 57–79; Saheed Aderinto, “‘The Girls
in Moral Danger’: Child Prostitution and Sexuality in Colonial Lagos, Nigeria 1930 to 1950”,
Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences, 1 (2007), pp. 1–22; Mfon Ekpootu, “Interrogating
Policies on Human Trafficking in Nigeria”, in Toyin Falola and Bridget Teboh (eds), The Power
of Gender, the Gender of Power: Women’s Labor, Rights and Responsibility in Africa (Trenton,
2013), pp. 551–566.
2 Quoted in Oluwole Ajala Alagbe, “Combating the Challenges of the Rise of Urban Slums in
Cities of the Developing World: A Case Study of Lagos” (Unpublished Paper, International
Conference on the Built Environment: Innovation Policy and Sustainable Development,
Covent University, Otta, Ogun State, 2003), p. 3.
© Mfon Umoren Ekpootu, 2017 | doi 10.1163/9789004346253_013
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Female Prostitution in Nigeria’s Urban Centres 307
from Brazil as well as migrants from the interior. In 1861 Lagos was annexed by
the British, and with the amalgamation of the northern and southern Nigerian
protectorates with the Colony of Lagos in 1914, Lagos became the headquar-
ters of the Federation of Nigeria.3 Colonial capitalist development stimulated
more migratory flows in response to perceived opportunities in Lagos. It has
grown to become the most populous city in modern Nigeria and is its com-
mercial capital. In 1967, Lagos became a state with an area of 3,577 square ki-
lometres. As a wetland on the coastal plains of the Atlantic, much of the state
is covered with water.
For this study, colonial records were used, including police records and ad-
ministrative correspondences. The private letters of prostitutes and petitions
written by ethnic associations as well as the letters of abandoned husbands
found in the colonial archives were utilized to allow a glimpse into the ways
the prostitutes and family members made sense of the sexual spaces of the
city. Interviews with sex workers were also conducted to bring to light the de-
tails of contemporary forms of prostitution.
Defining Prostitution
Previous studies have pointed to the definitional problems implicit in attempts
to neatly categorize prostitution.4 As Forster has rightly argued, in western so-
cieties the definitional space of prostitution is muddled but this becomes even
more complicated when attempting to draw up a cross-cultural perspective.
The sexual terrain of precolonial Nigeria has been subjected to varied read-
ings in local and colonial imaginaries. Prostitution as the commoditization of
sexual services didn’t exist in the local lexicon but there existed several sexual
activities that fell outside conjugal relations. For instance, the engagement of
women in extra-marital sexual liaisons was permissible and conducted within
culturally sanctioned parameters. In Lagos and other Yoruba communities
wives could take a lover, who secured her husband’s approval through payment
of a fine for encroaching on “his property” and the performance of culturally
3 See Robin Law, “Trade and Politics behind the Slave Coast: The Lagoon Traffic and the Rise of
Lagos”, The Journal of African History, 24 (1983), pp. 321–348.
4 Peter G. Forster, “Prostitution in Malawi and the hiv/aids Risk”, Nordic Journal of African
Studies, 9 (2000), pp. 1–9; Marjolein van der Veen, “Rethinking Commodification and Pros-
titution: An Effort at Peacemaking in the Battles over Prostitution” Rethinking Marxism, 13
(Summer 2001), pp. 30–51.
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308 Ekpootu
approved rites. The husband remained the rightful spouse and the children
born of such illicit relations belonged to the husband.
Polygamy and concubinage were also widely practised and they increased
after 1850.5 From the fifteenth to the nineteenth century the number of male
slaves transported across the Atlantic outstripped the number of females who
were more in demand domestically.6 By 1800 Lagos had become the principal
slave port in West Africa. Its supply of slaves was further increased by Yoruba
warfare.7 Given the fact that most young men couldn’t marry because of high
bride prices, female slaves acquired great importance for their reproductive
and economic roles. Military expeditions took on increased significance as
well in the acquisition of slave wives, and this was one avenue for young men
who lacked the financial ability to marry freeborn women as marrying a slave
wife exempted one from the obligation to pay a bride price. The price of a bride
increased from two shillings in the 1890s to about £2 in 1903, and in many cases
young men found themselves deeply in debt. Historical accounts illustrate the
preponderance of female slaves in the harems of military men. These slaves
were often taken as spoils of war, or they were given as gifts or in some cases
purchased. It is difficult to determine the difference in price between a slave
wife and a bride because of the paucity of data in Yoruba lands. However, its
prevalence among the various communities in the area suggests that it did
have certain advantages. Aside from their reproductive and economic func-
tions, female slaves also played a role in forging alliances between communi-
ties and individuals, and they facilitated the “control of state mechanisms”.8
They were valued objects of exchange and their sexual services were traded by
their owners for political and economic power. The servility of female slaves
and the control of their masters makes it difficult to define their sexual services
as prostitution.
Precolonial sexual practices in Lagos and the local geographical landscape
which is now Nigeria suggest that women exercised sexual freedom in terms
of non-marital sex. Such sexual liberty was incomprehensible to early Euro-
pean travellers and merchants because it was at odds with Victorian ideals
so colonial powers sought to control it. Labelling and representation was one
5 Olatunji Ojo, “Reviewed Beyond Diversity: Women, Scarification, and Yoruba Identity”, His-
tory in Africa, 35 (2008), pp. 347–374.
6 Ibid.; Claire Robertson and Martin Klein (eds), Women and Slavery in Africa (Portsmouth,
1997).
7 For a detailed analysis of the rise of Lagos and its commerce in slaves, see Robin Law, “Trade
and Politics behind the Slave Coast”, pp. 321–348.
8 Ojo, “Reviewed Beyond Diversity”, p. 354.
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Female Prostitution in Nigeria’s Urban Centres 309
approach to achieving a neat form of categorization for administrative pur-
poses in this regard as well as controlling those who were colonized through
knowledge and possession.
It would be erroneous to equate the sexual practices of married women in
precolonial Lagos with some form of prostitution. Rather it should stimulate
questions about the meanings of such behaviour for the people who engaged
in such practices. An important factor here is the dynamics through which
such acts occurred and this is related to the traditional Nigerian context, not
western notions. In their study of polygamy in South Africa, Delius and Glaser9
argue that marriage in precolonial Africa was less about control of sexuality
and more about fertility and labour productivity, and historical accounts of Yo-
ruba society in Nigeria attest to this.10 The practice of women marrying other
women into the family was one avenue for those who were infertile or had few
children. In this way, they could secure a place in the family by having their
husbands get married and acquiring the children that were subsequently born.
In their negative readings of the sexual intimacy of the local population,
European writers and the colonial state eroticized what was non-erotic and
represented as socially deviant what was culturally legitimate. A good example
of this can be seen in the way the colonial imaginary saw the baring of wom-
en’s breasts as sexual vulgarity and evidence of female lasciviousness. This
inappropriate reading and labelling of non-conjugal sexual liaisons in Africa
as prostitution has drawn criticism.11 It has been argued that the agrarian set-
ting in precolonial Africa precluded the independent capital accumulation of
women. More importantly, certain salient features of prostitution such as the
indiscriminate sale of sexual services were lacking in the precolonial environ-
ment. The relevance of these factors should not be overlooked in the creation
of definitions of prostitution for that era, and the origins of prostitution in
Nigeria are still unclear. Also, data for the precolonial era is lacking and hence
historical explorations of the issue of prostitution remain highly problematic.
What is clear is that it was in the colonial period that the prostitute became
imprinted in the social imaginary and was subjected to codes of control.12
9 Peter Delius and Clive Glaser, “The Myths of Polygamy: A History of Extra-marital and
Multi-Partnership Sex in South Africa”, South African History Journal, 50 (2004), pp. 84–114.
10 Ojo, “Reviewed Beyond Diversity”, pp. 347–374.
11 See for example Suzette Heald, “The Power of Sex: Some Reflections on the Caldwells
‘African Sexuality’ Thesis”, Africa, 65 (1995), pp. 489–505; Hilary Standing “aids: Concep-
tual and Methodological Issues in Researching Sexual Behaviour in Sub-Saharan Africa”,
Social Science and Medicine, 34 (1992), pp. 475–483.
12 Naanen, “‘Itinerant Gold Mines’”, pp. 57–79; Aderinto, “The Girls in Moral Danger”,
pp. 1–22; Ekpootu, “Interrogating Policies”, pp. 551–566.
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310 Ekpootu
rostitution became criminalized and the women who earned their livelihood
P
by selling sex were identified and made visible. Colonial narratives discursively
produced the prostitute as the female “other” through a motif of degeneracy
and a threat to moral order.
State Regulation/Prohibition/Tolerance
With the sustained presence of Europeans in the colonies, sexual prescriptions
based on class, race, and gender became increasingly central to the politics
of the empire and they were subject to varying degrees of scrutiny by colo-
nial powers. Media publications directed the public’s attention to the rising
criminality in Lagos, and this included the “dangers” brought about by young
women who engaged in hawking because it was argued that this not only led
to prostitution but resulted in them being harassed; in turn, this was linked to
prostitution and the spread of venereal diseases amongst European and Afri-
can military personnel in Nigeria and the Gold Coast,13 which led the colonial
government to criminalize prostitution.
The policing of illicit sexuality was subsumed under the Undesirable Ad-
vertisement Ordinance of 1932, the Unlicensed Guide (Prohibition) Ordinance
of 1941, and the Venereal Disease Ordinance of 1943.14 These interjections into
female sexual spaces were narratively produced as a state concern for pub-
lic health and morality by eliminating the sources of such “moral decay” and
physical disease. Underlying these concerns were more complex issues con-
cerning modernity and the British role in how that unfolded. The relevant legal
documents for stamping out prostitution were mainly enshrined in the Crimi-
nal Code of Nigeria of 1916, later amended in 1944, and the Child and Young
Person’s Ordinance (cypo) of 1943. The cypo criminalized child prostitution
and after being reviewed in 1958, it remained the legal framework relating to
child prostitution and other forms of child labour until the promulgation of
the Child Rights Acts in 2003.
Sections 222A–222B of the Criminal Code dealt with the procurement,
abduction, or encouragement of girls under the age of 16 for the purposes of
sold sex; Sections 225 focused on young persons under 18 while Sections 225A
13 Carina Ray, “The Sex Trade in Colonial West Africa” (Part 2), New African, 458 (2007),
pp. 66–68.
14 Saheed Aderinto, “Sexualized Nationalism: Lagos and the Politics of Illicit Sexuality in
Colonial Nigeria, 1918–1958” (Unpublished Ph.D., University of Texas at Austin, 2010), p. 61.
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Female Prostitution in Nigeria’s Urban Centres 311
criminalized third parties. The definition of prostitution as “the offering by
the female of her body commonly for acts of lewdness for payment” created
a broad ambiguous space of sexuality that extended beyond women engaged
in the sale of sexual services to varying degrees of sexual relations, and it was
evidence of a colonial imaginary of local women as sexually gluttonous. At-
tempts by the colonial state to criminalize prostitution did not go uncontested.
Indeed local realities often forced administrators to retrace and reformulate
policies. The laws and legislation that were enacted were shaped by these con-
testations.15 State policies and social views about prostitution in the colonial
era have strongly influenced postcolonial policies on prostitution. These laws
are codified in the Trafficking in Persons Law Enforcement and Administration
Act (tip) dating from 2003 and the Child’s Right Act of 2003. The tip, as its
name implies, focuses on the elimination of human trafficking. Migrant pros-
titutes discursively tagged as “victims” are therefore targeted for rescue and
rehabilitation while all third parties involved in the “trafficking” process face
punitive measures.
Push and Pull Factors
Determining factors for prostitution cannot realistically be said to constitute
either/or factors but in most cases involve a complex mix of diverse factors.
For many young women in rural areas, prostitution has represented more than
a means of livelihood or a survival strategy. As commonly depicted in the lit-
erature, it has been seen as a viable means of participating in global consumer
culture, in other words “modern urban culture”. This plays an important, albeit
unrecognized, part in the mix of push/pull factors. Lagos for female rural mi-
grants has been perceived as a haven of opportunities not just in terms of wage
employment (which has been difficult because of inadequate schooling) or
marital aspirations but with regards to a loosening of sexual constraints im-
posed by traditional censors. The multi-cultural landscape of Lagos has led to
an increase in the sense of freedom. The only entry requirement into the sex
market has been the female body, and this has facilitated the ease of entry for a
heterogeneous mix of women. While lived experiences in the city reflect depri-
vation, social dispossession, and disillusionment with the romanticized image
of city life, shame of failure prevents a return home.
15 Richard Roberts and Kristen Mann, “Introduction”, in Kristen Mann and Richard Roberts
(eds), Law in Colonial Africa (London, 1991), pp. 15–23.
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312 Ekpootu
In the urban landscape of Lagos in the early twentieth century, reflections
of colonial power were visible in colonialist capitalist structures. As the most
industrialized city in the area and the biggest employer of wage labour, Lagos
attracted many migrants from rural areas and processes of urbanization in-
tensified; the population grew from 38,387 in 1901 to 73,766 in 1911. By 1921, it
had increased to 99,700 and ten years later it was 126,000. From 1951 to 1953,
there was significant growth and the population surged to 230,250 and when
Nigeria proclaimed independence the population of Lagos was 665,246.16 The
phenomenon of male immigration has been widely noted in the literature as
contributing to the growth of prostitution.17 The urban landscapes of Lagos
have shared the characteristics of mining camps, military settlements, and
port cities, common sites of commercial sex. Aderinto has demonstrated how
the influx of soldiers and sailors into Lagos spurred on the trade in sex. It was
noted that a flourishing sex market existed in those parts of the city that had
military encampments such as Ikoyi, Ijora, Surulere, Cumberland, and Yaba.18
Prostitutes who catered to the military were known as “ammunition wives”.
World War ii accelerated the selling of sex, particularly among young wom-
en in Lagos. The influx of soldiers and European sailors into Lagos during this
period sexualized the city, creating a demand for sex that was filled by pros-
titutes. The incidence of venereal diseases recorded among the troops of the
West African Frontier Force (waff) in 1942 was 43.2%, which was higher than
cases of malaria.19 The war and soldiers’ sexual proclivities caused concerns
about the impact of venereal diseases on colonial security forces and the im-
plications that could have for Britain’s racial and moral superiority. This has
been explored by Levine in her examination of how colonial policing of prosti-
tution in British colonies, ostensibly to protect the Empire’s troops, was impli-
cated in European imperial designs.20 From 1967 to 1970, Nigeria was engulfed
in a civil war that plunged the country into poverty. For many women, their
bodies became weapons of survival, a tool that could be used to negate the
effects of war. Women took up the selling of sex for diverse reasons, including
access to food and security.
16 Laurent Fourchard, “Lagos and the Invention of Juvenile Delinquency in Nigeria 1920–60”,
Journal of African History, 47 (2006), pp. 115–137, 117.
17 See for example Luise White, The Comforts of Home: Prostitution in Colonial Nairobi
(Chicago, 1990); Philippa Levine, “A Multitude of Unchaste Women: Prostitution in the
British Empire”, Journal of Women’s History, 15 (2004), pp. 159–163.
18 Aderinto, “The Girls in Moral Danger”, pp. 18–19.
19 Ibid., p. 19.
20 Philipa Levine, Policing Venereal Disease in the British Empire (New York, 2003).
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Female Prostitution in Nigeria’s Urban Centres 313
Entry into the sex industry in Lagos was not always voluntary but involved
forms of coercion and trafficking, especially in cases of underage girls. Evi-
dence from the 1920s shows that a large number of young girls from rural areas
engaged in prostitution in Lagos.21 The sex trade was in many cases mediated
by third parties, sometimes with kinship affiliation, and they exploited tradi-
tional fostering practices of placing children in the homes of extended fam-
ily members or reputable households for a moral upbringing. The practice of
child marriage meant that child trafficking could be disguised as such. As a
resident of Ogoja Providence acknowledged, “the traffic in girls is most popu-
lar and more generally admitted to than the traffic in boys for which no legal
colour can be found.”22
The romanticization of Lagos as a haven of opportunity and the desire to
escape the drudgery of agricultural life made girls vulnerable to “traffickers”,
but I use the term “traffickers” with caution. While it is true that trafficking
did exist, the need for an ordered sexual landscape in the enhancement of
European control and the erasure of “tainted femininity” to facilitate the ac-
ceptance of local elite women into European spaces likely brought about an
overgeneralization of the term. Colonial data does address the coercive nature
of child prostitution, which appeared frequently in administrative correspon-
dences, especially from the 1930s onwards. The public imaginary, reflected in
newspaper reports and the statements of women’s organizations, condemned
the effects of trafficking on children and society’s morality.
There were large numbers of migrant Nigerian prostitutes across the border
in the Gold Coast and Equatorial Guinea. The increased visibility of migrant
sex workers from Nigeria in the 1930s led Nigerians living in the Gold Coast
to feel that their national identity was under threat, and the Nigerian Youth
Movement sent a petition to the colonial government protesting the “shame”
brought to the country by Nigerian sex workers. Under Gold Coast law, West
African prostitutes were allowed to operate in the country and this facilitated
the Nigeria-Gold Coast sex trade (Gold Coast Criminal Code Section 435 ap-
plied only to non-West African prostitutes).23
Attempts made by the colonial state to control prostitutes and their mobili-
ty included medical regulation, strengthening immigration controls, and repa-
triation. Criminalization as a state policy was deployed as a means of tackling
21 Aderinto, “Girls in Moral Danger”; Mfon Ekpootu, “Prostitution and Child Labor in the
Cross River Region of Southern Nigeria from 1900” (Unpublished Ph.D., University of Port
Harcourt, 2008).
22 Ekpootu, “Prostitution and Child Labour”, p. 133.
23 Carina Ray, “The Sex Trade in Colonial West Africa”, pp. 66–68.
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314 Ekpootu
the problem of migrant prostitutes. The imaging and imagining of the prosti-
tute were means by which her identity as the “other” was produced. The eroti-
cizing of migrant prostitutes in trafficking narratives as sexually rapacious and
morally corrupt was bound up with western cultural imperialism in which the
differentiation and hierarchical placement of cultures enabled political and
economic dominance. Criminalization continues to be the premise on which
legal policies on prostitution in postcolonial Nigeria are based.
Prostitution in Relation to the Labour Market
The sale of sex is not necessarily an exclusive activity and over the years in
different parts of the world it has often been engaged in alongside other
income-generating activities. In colonial Lagos, these alternate forms of earn-
ing an income mostly existed in the informal sector. Studies have shown that
most runaway wives, divorcees, and widows combined sex peddling with al-
ternate forms of economic activities, mostly petty trading and hawking.24 By
1932, the colonial authorities were agitating against the widespread practice
of street trading, and it was noted, “There is no street in Lagos or Ebute Metta
where hawking or selling outside the houses does not take place.”25 For young-
er women, prostitution was a supplement to employment in both the formal
and informal sectors. Little reports that there were young women who worked
during the day as “seamstresses and in shops and offices […] and dress smartly
in European clothes” but they also engaged in prostitution at night by solicit-
ing for clients in bars, clubs, and restaurants visited by members of the upper
class, in the process acquiring Europeans and wealthy Africans as patrons.26
As was the case in other colonial cities,27 prostitution was closely linked to
beer brewing and bar girls traversed the fluid space between catering to male
customers in bars and prostitution. As mentioned above, a major concern in
colonial times that surfaced in colonial narratives and the popular imaginary
was the close link between street hawking by girls and prostitution. The former
24 Kenneth Little, “West African Urbanization as a Social Process”, Cahiers D’Etudes Afric-
aines, 1 (1960), pp. 90–102, 96.
25 Laurent Fourchard, “Lagos”, in Simon Bekker and Göran Therborn (eds), Capital Cities in
Africa: Power and Powerlessness (Dakar [etc.], 2011), pp. 66–82, 69.
26 Little, “West African Urbanization”, p. 96.
27 Luise White, The Comforts of Home: Prostitution in Colonial Nairobi (Chicago, 1990).
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Female Prostitution in Nigeria’s Urban Centres 315
was seen as facilitating entry into the sex market and indeed police reports and
court cases do give credence to the blurred boundaries between the two.28
It can’t be said that engaging in the commercial sex trade as a full time activ-
ity was the norm, and in postcolonial times as well women have continued to
combine the sale of sex with other forms of income. In some cases, the income
derived from sex work is invested in entrepreneurial activities. The studies of
Ngambouk Vitalis Pemunta29 and Margaret Niger-Thomas30 indicate that in
the 1980s prostitutes from Mamfe in Cameroon were engaged in smuggling
and cross-border trading in various parts of Nigeria including Lagos, Kaduna,
and Calabar. Prostitution as a sole activity does exist, however, among women
from lower income groups who sell sex in the slums. In most cases, prostitu-
tion is thus a means of survival and the income derived from it is used for
daily needs. This group of prostitutes usually lack educational training which
further inhibits access to other forms of employment as a supplement to sex
work. In contemporary Nigeria, however, the widespread prevalence of cross-
border migrant prostitution as well as new globally compliant forms of the
sex trade have resulted in a flurry of literature on sex trafficking from a variety
of perspectives.31 Low income sex peddlers in Nigerian urban centres on the
other hand have continued to receive little attention. One of the few studies in
this regard is a socio-medical study of prostitutes in Lagos by Oleru.32
Universities and other institutions of higher learning in Nigeria have ac-
quired a reputation as breeding grounds for prostitutes. Termed “runs” in
Nigerian parlance, the practice of commercial sex by college girls has become
for many of them a means of accessing societal resources and meeting family
obligations. The income they earn is often used to set up businesses, in most
cases hair salons, bars, and boutiques. Thus for these girls the “runs” trade is
carried on alongside their schooling and a benevolent patron establishes some
28 Ekpootu “Prostitution and Child Labour in the Cross River Region”, pp. 149–150; George
Abosede “Within Salvation: Girl Hawkers and the Colonial State in Development Era
Lagos”, Journal of Social History, 44 (2011), pp. 837–859.
29 Ngambouk Vitalis Pemunta, “Challenging Patriarchy: Trade, Outward Migration and the
Internationalization of Commercial Sex among Bayang and Ejagham Women in South-
west Cameroon”, Health, Culture and Society, 1 (2011), pp. 167–192.
30 Margaret Niger-Thomas, “Women and the Arts of Smuggling” African Studies Review, 44
(2001), pp. 43–70.
31 Tim S. Braimah, “Sex Trafficking in Edo State Nigeria: Causes and Solutions”, Global Jour-
nal of Human Social Science Research, 13 (2013), pp. 17–29; Rasheed Olaniyi, “Global Sex
Trade and Women Trafficking in Nigeria”, Journal of Global Initiatives, 6 (2011), pp. 111–131.
32 U.G. Oleru, “Prostitution in Lagos: A Sociomedical Study”, Journal of Epidemiology and
Community Health, 34 (1980), pp. 312–315.
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316 Ekpootu
form of capital venture for them, or they use remunerations to take up entre-
preneurial activities or “business” in popular terms becomes the second alter-
nate activity to prostitution or “runs”. Media reports have bemoaned the trans-
formation of female dorms and rental residences at the University of Lagos
and other such spaces into brothels.
Prostitution as part of the sex industry in Lagos has been linked to an ex-
tensive range of activities that integrate lap dancing, striptease, nude dancing,
and in recent times internet and live cam sex. Revolutions in technology and
communication have impacted the organization of the sex trade, enabling a
diversity of indoor sex work. Independent escorts are able to market them-
selves and solicit for clients on the internet and beyond it.
In Lagos today, strip clubs and nude bars can be found in different parts of
the city including Ikeja on the mainland. While live sex acts are not explicitly
allowed at the clubs, the dancers are allowed to go an extra mile with vip cli-
ents. It is also here that other sexual activities short of penetration are allowed
such as oral sex and masturbation. Girls can leave with patrons they like after
work hours. Such commercialized sex spaces tend to normalize prostitution.33
It is difficult to conclusively pin down popular perceptions about such practic-
es due to a lack of research but fragmentary evidence suggests that lap dancers
are less stigmatized than women and girls engaged in selling sex on the streets.
The intertwining of such spaces with the corporate industry neutralizes the
stigma involved. This was demonstrated with the closure of four strip clubs
including Ocean Blue by the Lagos State Environmental Task Force on Novem-
ber 2009. The raids on the clubs elicited mixed reactions but largely criticism
for infringement of the rights of the women involved. Going to such clubs was
seen as a private affair because it was indoors and consensual. The state legisla-
tive body toed the line and the following year the clubs were reopened.
Prostitutes’ Social Profiles
In the colonial period, Lagos had an eclectic mix of prostitutes from differ-
ent parts of the country. Colonial accounts, however, stated that the majority
of women involved were from southern Nigeria, primarily the Cross River re-
gion (present day Akwa Ibom Cross River, and some parts of Ebonyi, and Abia
33 Maddy Coy, Joseph Wakeling, and Maria Garner, “Selling Sex Sells: Representations of
Prostitution and the Sex Industry in Sexualised Popular Culture as Symbolic Violence”,
Women’s Studies International Forum, 34 (2011), pp. 441–448.
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Female Prostitution in Nigeria’s Urban Centres 317
States), as well as Owerri Province.34 Hausa prostitutes were also prominent in
the field of commercial sex, but as Aderinto has rightly argued, their geograph-
ical confinement to Hausa enclaves in the Sabon Gari and foreigners’ areas
such as Agege gave them an invisibility that was not the case with other prosti-
tutes and barred the policing of Hausa prostitutes by the colonial state.35 Aside
from Nigerian prostitutes, there is evidence to suggest that West African pros-
titutes from the Gold Coast (present-day Ghana) and Dahomey (present-day
Republic of Benin) were present in Lagos, but it does not seem that European
women were involved in prostitution.36 By the 1990s, there were prostitutes
from other African countries and Asia. The large numbers of wealthy Nigerians
and foreigners in the city have created a niche for non-Nigerian prostitutes,
mostly from China and African countries. A perusal of the services offered by
escort services in Lagos such as Valentine Creamy Escorts shows that there is
a diverse mix of women including some from other parts of Africa like South
Africa, Ghana, and Benin, as well as Asian and European countries.
The ages of prostitutes constituted a problem for the colonial adminis-
tration. Undoubtedly the problem of underage girls selling sex had become
a social issue by the 1940s and a broad categorization of “child prostitutes”
as codified by the colonial government was deemed to be problematic.37 As
Isuigo-Abanike has noted,38 girls of similar ages were getting married; within
the socio-cultural milieu, girls from the age group labelled “underage” were ac-
tually of marriageable age and indeed a 15-year-old, according to the Children
and Young Person Ordinance, was not a child. The incidence of “child prostitu-
tion” was nonetheless fuelled by the demand for young prostitutes by soldiers
and sailors, and several brothels on Lagos Island and other places were noted
for having young prostitutes, and they were frequented by European sailors.39
In contemporary Nigeria, there is a discernible trend in the sex industry that
demonstrates that there is a higher percentage of sex workers in their twenties;
34 Aderinto, “The Girls in Moral Danger”, pp. 9–11; Ekpootu, “Prostitution and Child Labour”,
p. 152; Ekpootu “Interrogating Policies”, p. 545.
35 Aderinto, “The Girls in Moral Danger”, p. 22.
36 Ibid., p. 21.
37 In 1943, via the Children and Young Person’s Ordinance an attempt was made to distin-
guish between a child and a young person. A child thus came to be a person under 14
years old and a young person was anyone between the ages of 14 and 17. These policies
provided the means by which the sexual activities of persons labelled as children came to
be criminalized by the colonial government.
38 Uche Isiugo-Agbanike, “Nuptiality and Fertility Patterns among Adolescent and Young
Adults”, in CHESTRAD Status of Adolescents and Young Adults in Nigeria (1997), pp. 17–36.
39 Laurent Fourchard, “Lagos and the Invention of Juvenile Delinquency”, p. 126.
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318 Ekpootu
this is the result of several factors including the growing number of women
who are marrying later, the sexual emancipation of Nigerian women, and the
growing influence of prostitutes’ organizations and activism.
The available data on the age structure of prostitutes in postcolonial Nigeria
shows that there is a preponderance of women between the ages of 20 and 30
involved in the sex trade.40 John Lekan Oyefara’s study showed that 89.1 per
cent of those surveyed were below 30 years of age while 16.3 per cent were
younger than 20.41 However, the age of entry, as indicated in studies and media
reports, falls within a range of 13 to 15 years of age. The Nigerian anti-trafficking
agency (naptip) has reportedly evacuated girls as young as 12 from brothels in
the course of sporadic raids.42 Engaging in prostitution is perceived as a tran-
sient stage before marriage. This is particularly true for sex workers in Lagos
who command a more affluent clientele and are in the 20 to 30 age range.
Interviews conducted at the University of Port Harcourt with female students
engaged in “runs” show that they do not perceive themselves as prostitutes.
That label seems to be reserved for brothel-based and street prostitutes. For
them “runs” are part of living the “modern life”, which in their terms incorpo-
rates a high life style, adventure, and being financially solvent. As they see it, it
is a transitory stage leading towards a sedentary life of marriage. In the course
of the fieldwork I conducted for my dissertation, I found that for girls whose
preferred clientele are foreigners they hit a goldmine if they get one of their
“oyigbo” (white) patrons to marry them. Such a position ensures financial sta-
bility for them as well as their families.
In general, kinship networks have been an important part of sex workers’
ability to negotiate the often difficult spaces of commercial sex. Writing in 1972,
Kenneth Little demonstrated the importance of ethnic associations in the mi-
gration strategies of women in West Africa.43 These relationships formed the
social nexus through which new migrants were able to make sense of the city’s
resources. Prostitutes from the Upper Cross River region employed boys of the
same ethnic affiliation to act as intermediaries and facilitate access to clients.
This reflects the complex relationship between pimps and prostitutes in which
the former moved freely between the status of employer/employee. Ethnic
40 John Lekan Oyefara, “Food Insecurity, hiv/aids Pandemic and Sexual Behaviour of Fe-
male Commercial Sex Workers in Lagos Metropolis, Nigeria”, Journal of Social Aspects of
hiv/aids, 4 (2007), pp. 626–635, 630; Oleru, “Prostitution in Lagos”, pp. 312–335.
41 Oyefara, “Food Insecurity, hiv/aids Pandemic”, p. 630.
42 Available at: www.naptip.org; last accessed 15 April 2012.
43 Kenneth Little, “Voluntary Associations and Social Mobility among West African Women”,
Canadian Journal of African Studies, 6 (1972), pp. 275–288.
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Female Prostitution in Nigeria’s Urban Centres 319
associations for the welfare of prostitutes were also formed. As migrants, pros-
titutes usually stayed with family members or people of the same ethnic group
in Lagos.
There is a paucity of data for the colonial period on the children of sex
workers in Lagos and whether or not they stayed with their mothers. However,
evidence from the Calabar and Ogoja provinces of the Cross River region in
southern Nigeria suggests that migrant prostitutes from these communities
left their children behind with their families and remittances were sent for
their maintenance.44 This trend continued in post-independent Lagos and
seemed to be a preferred way for sex migrants at least in the initial stages of
migration. It is possible that after obtaining stability in Lagos, children and
other dependants may have emigrated as well.
From the late 1980s onwards, the hiv/aids scare has brought the attention
of the commercial sex trade to the scholarly community and studies have pro-
vided a glimpse into the household strategies of sex workers. Oleru’s study of
150 hotel prostitutes in Lagos shows that 40.7 per cent were married in the
1990s, 70 per cent had previously been married, and 57.8 per cent had their
children staying with them.45 In Caldwell’s work, which was premised on a
field study conducted in 1990, more than half of the prostitute population un-
der study had children who were being looked after by the sex workers’ moth-
ers in rural areas.46 While about 60 per cent were determined to be single, she
points out the likelihood of previously married women self-identifying as sin-
gle. About a decade later, Oyefara’s research in the Ikeja and Surulere areas of
Lagos showed a higher percentage: 73.1 per cent of the women in the sex trade
were single while 20.3 per cent were either divorced or separated.47
As regards education, the colonial state and popular narratives suggested
that migrant prostitutes were from rural areas, particularly the endemic south-
ern region, and that they were uneducated runaway wives who added to the
population of “undesirables” in Lagos. By the 1970s, few prostitutes had sec-
ondary educations because such an education would have ensured that they
obtained some form of employment. Structural adjustment programmes in the
1980s and the exacerbated economic situation increased unemployment rates
and pushed many women, some with secondary school educations, into the
sex market. By the late 1980s, migration for prostitution had become a growing
44 Ekpootu, “Prostitution and Child Labour”, p. 145.
45 Oleru, “Prostitution in Lagos”, p. 313.
46 Pat Caldwell, “Prostitution and the Risk of stds and aids in Nigeria and Thailand”, Health
Transition Review, supplement to vol 5 (1995), pp. 167–172, 170.
47 Oyefara “Food Insecurity”, p. 630.
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320 Ekpootu
trend. Nigerian women began migrating to European countries, particularly
Italy, to work as prostitutes. The “success” stories, and the prospect of earn-
ing foreign currencies at a time when university professors earned less than
N2000, (us$333) pushed educated women into prostitution. Lagos was seen as
a training ground for the European sex market. In a 1980 survey of hotel-based
prostitutes in Lagos, Oleru found a correlation between prostitutes’ levels of
education and health risk and resource management. For example, 60 per cent
of those who were selective of the types of clients they accepted had some
form of education beyond primary school. Choice of clients was a factor that
impacted the women’s’ financial and health status.48
In the twenty-first century, the Lagos sex industry has become highly diver-
sified with different typologies of sex work and practitioners who are hetero-
geneous not only in terms of working conditions and economic status, but also
with regards to education levels. “High-class” prostitutes or sex workers are
mostly young women with more than secondary schooling, and they often are
attending university or other tertiary institutions like polytechnic schools. The
forms of prostitution that exist include escort services, clubbing (soliciting for
clients at clubs, bars, and hotels), and in a few cases brothel prostitution. Low
education levels would seem to correlate with low incomes and high-risk com-
mercial sexual services. A 2003 survey of “house” (brothel- and hotel-based)
prostitutes by Oyefara in Ikeja, the capital city of Lagos, showed that a signifi-
cant number of prostitutes (39.7 per cent) had a minimum of secondary school
education, 12.2 per cent had some form of post-secondary schooling and 12.5
per cent were illiterate.49
Changes in Working Conditions throughout Time and Space
Outdoor prostitution is usually equated with street soliciting and is usually tar-
geted for criminalization because of its high visibility.50 Though a large num-
ber of practitioners of outdoor soliciting are either very young or old and have
low levels of education, it would be wrong to imagine that there are clear-cut
categorizations. University students engage in street soliciting at places that
are geographically distant from their places of residence; for example, young
women from Port Harcourt engage in street prostitution on the street corners
48 Oleru “Prostitution in Lagos”, p. 312.
49 Oyefara, “Food Insecurity”, p. 630.
50 See Ronald Weitzer (ed.), Sex for Sale: Prostitution, Pornography, and the Sex Industry
(New York, 2009).
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Female Prostitution in Nigeria’s Urban Centres 321
of affluent neighbourhoods in Lagos to avoid stigmatization. Several places
in Lagos have gained notoriety for street prostitution. In the 1990s, Ayilara in
Ojuelegba on the mainland was discursively produced in the media and popu-
lar imaginary as the “hotspot” of prostitutes in Lagos. In the twenty-first cen-
tury, it has been overtaken by places like Obalende on Lagos Island.
Like other forms of prostitution, indoor prostitution is varied and hierarchi-
cal. In Lagos there are women who work with escort services as independent
call girls, at strip clubs, and in brothels. Technological developments and the
internet have brought about online sex and soliciting. It is common to find
younger and more educated women involved in this form of prostitution. Uni-
versity students with their “runs” make up a significant number of this group
of sex workers. Closely tied to campus prostitution rings are cults and frater-
nity groups. Brothels differ in class and type of clientele, ranging from shanty
rooms in poor neighbourhoods like Ajegunle and Kango in Alagba Rago mar-
ket on the Badagry highway; semi-classy brothels are located in places like
Ogba, Ikeja and Surulere, and high-end brothels are located on Victoria Island,
in Ikoyi, and on Lekki Peninsula. The spatial and socio-economic differentia-
tion of brothels and resident prostitutes is not neatly defined, and as the result
of overpopulation in Lagos and the encroachment of slum quarters there are
makeshift low-class brothels alongside more affluent ones. A typical example
of this are the run-down brothels in Obalende in close proximity to the afflu-
ent Ikoyi neighbourhood.
Up until the 1980s, brothels generally housed older prostitutes engaging in
survival sex. However, in the late 1980s the increasing number of sex workers
who are more educated and the interest of the corporate sector have changed
the face of the industry. Not only are education levels increasing but prosti-
tutes have come to include a rather high number of young single women and
girls.51 Not only are there high-class brothels on the affluent Lekki Peninsula,
but young educated women, as well as some working class women, are renting
rooms in five-star hotels like the Sheraton Lagos Hotel and Towers and The
Federal Palace Hotel to do sex work.
The sex market in Lagos and Nigeria is variegated and complex, involving
differences in working conditions, price, and organizational structure that re-
sult in hierarchies. At the top of the pyramid are the high-class call girls and
escorts whose clientele include the rich and powerful. They are usually young,
attractive, and educated, and they solicit at expensive bars, highbrow hotels,
parties, public functions, and weddings. In bars the normal practice is to lounge
51 Chimaraoke O. Izugbara, “Constituting the Unsafe: Nigerian Sex Workers’ Notions of Un-
safe Sexual Conduct”, African Studies Review, 50 (2007), pp. 29–49, 33.
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322 Ekpootu
around nursing a drink and when they see a wealthy-looking man or a foreign-
er they walk up to them and ask, “Do you want company?” In some cases, they
give tips to hotel staff members in exchange for information about potential
clients. By virtue of the income they earn, their levels of education, and the
power of social networking, this category of sex workers feel that they are so-
cially and economically superior to other groups of prostitutes. They perceive
themselves as businesswomen rather than prostitutes. This class distinction,
enhanced by the cultural acceptance of transactional sex and the cloaking of
commoditized sex with semblances of romance and domesticity, ascribes to
escorts and call girls a status and acceptability that is denied to others and cre-
ates a hierarchy of demand in which they are privileged. Societal perceptions
and criminalization/non-criminalization have further impacts on spatial dif-
ferentiation as high-end sex workers are able to access safer and more comfort-
able work sites and vice versa.
Occupying the middle category are brothel prostitutes, but they are not
an undifferentiated mass group. Some of them belong to the lowest rung of
the prostitution hierarchy. At the base of this group are brothels in places like
Obalende, a commercial district on Lagos Island next to Ikoyi, and Ayilara in
Ojuelegba, a commercial district on the mainland. Ayilara in the 1990s was the
most widely known red-light district and clients were drawn from all parts of
Lagos. In a report published in 2009, the Vanguard noted that the growth of the
trade in Ayilara led some property owners to turn their homes into brothels.
The cost of sex in such brothels ranged from N500 to N1000 (about $3 to $6).52
According to the Vanguard the brothels in Obalende were being rented out per
hour at a cost of N100, less than a dollar. In brothels located in middle-class
neighbourhoods, the residents are more diverse and have varied educational
backgrounds including college education. Another Lagos newspaper, pm News,
reported that there was a brothel in Iju-Ishaga, one of the middle-class neigh-
bourhoods in the suburbs of Lagos where many of the tenants are girls studying
at institutions of higher education.53 It was reported that rooms were rented
for N3000 to N5000 ($18 to $31) for a week and clients were charged from N1000
to N2000 for quick sex, and without a condom the price went up to N2000. All-
night sex or what is called tdb (till day break) cost from N3000 to N5000. Prices
could go up to N8000 ($49) for a night at brothels where rent was higher.
52 Newsnigeria, “Ayilara Still Mother of Lagos Sex Trade”, available at: http://www.nigeria70
.com/nigerian_news_paper/ayilara_still_mother_street_of_lagos_sex_trade/106474; last
accessed 11 July 2017.
53 pm News, “Varsity Students Besiege Lagos for Prostitution”, available at: http://news1
.onlinenigeria.com/templates/?a=1708&t=Varsity%20Students%20Besiege%20
Lagos%20For%20Prostitution; last accessed 11 July 2017.
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Female Prostitution in Nigeria’s Urban Centres 323
At the lowest end of the hierarchy are brothels located in slums, and they
are usually ramshackle structures with poor ventilation; sold sex at such places
is mostly for survival. Examples include dingy brothels located on Empire, a
side street near Ojuelegba, an area known for its drug users and miscreants
otherwise called “area boys”. Sexual services can be bought for N200, less than
$2. Sexual services vary and this impacts the form of remuneration. In one of
the strip clubs in Ikeja, formerly known as Ocean Blue, a session of lap dancing
(three sound tracks) cost N1000 ($6) and the girls could make up to N20,000
($122) on a good night. In the vip section which is privately enclosed, the
prices are higher, and a session costs N3000 ($18). In most cases sex is sold for
monetary payment but in other cases where the woman is engaged in part-
time sex work, payment may also include sexual bartering for material goods.
From its inscription in Lagos’ urban spaces, prostitution has from the 1990s
onwards come to incorporate women and girls who engage in sex work pe-
riodically for diverse reasons that extend beyond poverty. There has been a
proliferation of new sites of leisure and entertainment imbued with a sense of
romance frequented by clandestine prostitutes who, though not subjected to
discriminatory laws and policies, exemplify the discourses of prostitution even
while not specifically labelled as such. These women offer variegated sexual
services that encompass inter-personal elements lacking in brothel and street
prostitution. By extending the interactive space beyond the narrow confines
of the “sale of sex” to include companionship and hostess activities, it allows
for a broadening of the form of payment. In spite of the media outcry about
the moral degeneration of college students in Nigeria, there remains a tacit
tolerance of such forms of commercial sex, mostly because of its social invis-
ibility and its pervasiveness in society; it extends to the political class on the
one hand and on the other derivable income benefitting and thus silencing
family and kinsmen.
The social imaginary of prostitutes’ bodies as carriers of disease that was
propagated by colonial narratives still resonates in postcolonial Nigeria. The
health of prostitutes and the wider implications of health on the politics of the
empire have been discussed in various scholarly works.54 In Nigeria the high
incidence of venereal diseases among members of the colonial army at the
turn of the twentieth century resulted in the criminalization of prostitutes for
being carriers of disease. Interestingly, Aderinto’s study indicates that colonial
efforts to tackle the menace of venereal diseases were exclusive of prostitutes
54 Levine “Venereal Disease, Prostitution, and the Politics of Empire”, pp. 579–602; Ray, “The
Sex Trade in Colonial West Africa”, pp. 66–68; Aderinto “Sexualized Nationalism”.
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324 Ekpootu
and rather targeted the Nigerian colonial army. Efforts were centred on cura-
tive measures including punitive actions that were deterrent in nature, from
“cock-pulling or public displays of genitals” for contracting venereal diseases
to fines of 6d per day for concealing a disease.55 In spite of the high incidence
of venereal diseases in the 1940s during World War ii and the increase in the
size of the Nigerian contingent of the colonial army as well as an influx of
European seamen, no state efforts were made to carry out medical interven-
tions with prostitutes.56
In postcolonial Nigeria, the hiv/aids epidemic has resulted in the focus-
ing of the state and public gaze on sex workers as a high-risk group and drawn
increased scrutiny from health organizations for the purposes of intervention.
Statistics from unaids/who indicate that the estimated hiv prevalence rate
for adults (15–49 age group) in 2001 was from 2.5 to 5.7 per cent, and this had
decreased by 2007 to a range of 2.3 to 3.8 per cent. Aside from hiv/aids, other
venereal diseases like syphilis and gonorrhoea are common. There is a correla-
tion between a sex worker’s level of education and her ability to negotiate safe
sexual relations. A prostitute’s socio-economic status also plays a part as those
engaged in survival sex are less able to assert some form of agency in terms of
the health risks they take. Physical violence, unwanted pregnancies, gynaeco-
logical complications arising from improper abortions, and to a lesser extent
ritual deaths (killing for occult sacrifices) are some of the physical health issues
faced by sex workers. Infertility was particularly rife in the early twentieth cen-
tury among prostitutes, and the procurement of children from rural provinces
by prostitutes in urban centres such as Lagos and across the border in Sekondi-
Takoradi and Accra in Ghana were means by which disease-ridden, infertile
prostitutes could assuage their maternal urges.57 In the twenty-first century,
medical technology and its greater accessibility for a wider group of people,
especially in cosmopolitan areas like Lagos, have mitigated the problem of in-
fertility though it is still major issue especially among prostitutes practicing in
the slums of Lagos.
Prostitute/Employer/Client Relationships
Prostitutes in Lagos in the early twentieth century worked independently for
the most part. There was, however, a blurring of the operational spaces of
55 Aderinto, “Sexualized Nationalism”, p. 32.
56 Ibid., pp. 33–37.
57 Ekpootu, “Prostitution and Child Labour”, pp. 99–100.
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Female Prostitution in Nigeria’s Urban Centres 325
women selling sex and “boma” and “jaguda” boys (street boys) who engaged
in theft and criminal activities.58 Referring to them as pimps, Fourchard notes
that the boys directed clients to prostitutes and provided security in the red-
light district when needed.59 It would be erroneous however to label the young
boys who assisted in procuring clients for prostitutes as “pimps” as we use the
term today. In the contemporary era, pimping is popularly perceived as the
management of sex work which involves more than periodic guidance and
the providing of information. In its legal sense, pimping means living off the
earnings of a prostitute. Inasmuch as the jaguda boys were remunerated for
their services, they could in a broad and simplistic way be said to have lived
off the earnings of a prostitute. An important element in pimping, however,
is control which is sometimes coercive in nature, representing power over a
prostitute and her income, and that did not exist. The prostitutes in colonial
Lagos controlled their income and the way they worked. An exception to this
rule was underage girls whose entry into the trade was often brokered by a
third party. In this case, their services and working hours were controlled by
their broker, mostly older or retired prostitutes.60
From the 1980s onwards, there has been an increasing diversification of the
sex industry and this is evident in the increase in migration for prostitution,
linkages between sold sex and corporate culture, and what Coy, Wakeling, and
Garner term the “pornification of popular culture”.61 This has turned the sex
industry into a multi-dollar business managed by organized crime syndicates.
A flourishing form of prostitution in which pimps and madams are commonly
utilized is the abovementioned “runs” of educated women, most of whom are
students at universities or other institutions of higher learning. At the Univer-
sity of Lagos, girls’ dorms and their environs have become sexualized spaces
where sex is bartered and sold. While some of the girls work independently,
many others employ the services of a pimp or madam (who may also be a
student).
Interviews conducted with young women at the University of Lagos and
Port Harcourt indicate that madams are often used in prostitution rings which
are part of female gangs or fraternities at these institutions. The leader au-
tomatically assumes the position of madam, while pimps on the other hand
58 Aderinto, “Girls in Moral Danger” (2007); Fourchard, “Lagos and the Invention of Juve-
nile Delinquency” (2006); Simon Heap “Their Days are Spent in Gambling and Loafing,
Pimping for Prostitutes, and Picking Pockets: Male Juvenile Delinquents on Lagos Island,
1920s–1960s”, Journal of Family History, 35 (2010), pp. 48–70.
59 Fourchard, “Lagos and the Invention of Juvenile Delinquency”, p. 124.
60 Ekpootu, “Prostitution and Child Labour”, pp. 99–100.
61 Coy, Wakeling, and Garner, “Selling Sex Sells”, p. 442.
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326 Ekpootu
can be male students or the personal assistants of politicians. They arrange
for girls from the university campus to be taken to meeting points, usually a
party. Prices may be set before the girls meet the clients or decided upon at the
meeting point. Costs vary according to the economic status of the clients and
range from N25,000 ($160) to N250,000 ($1,600). The role of pimps is gradually
decreasing as more and more girls work independently as they solicit for cli-
ents through social networking and the use of internet sites like online dating.
Escort services are more likely to be used by more educated women such as
those enrolled at institutions of higher education and those employed in the
formal sector. Escorts perceive themselves as being superior to lower-end pros-
titutes and often enjoy a lavish lifestyle. They tend to exercise more control
in terms of the clients they take and their working conditions. However, the
ability to self-advertise has expanded the population of escort girls. The Lagos
escort and strip club directory offers a list of escort girls, strip clubs, and escort
agencies.62
Conditions of Compliance and Traces of Defiance
Prostitution is a heterogeneous space involving a diversity of forms, working
conditions, status, and self-perceptions. The question of choice is closely in-
terwoven with this and forms part of the dynamics of the trade. The extent
to which coercion or choice determines a prostitute’s sexual activities is de-
pendent on the position she occupies in the hierarchy in sex work. It is easy
to discern coercion in cases of trafficked girls and women. Forced prostitution
is more commonly experienced in such cases, as earlier noted among under-
age rural girls trafficked into prostitution in Lagos. For other women such as
runaway wives, working girls, and other young women, entry into the sex trade
occurred without coercion. Indeed commercialized sex has been utilized in
many cases as a way for women to circumvent male control. Ssewakriyanga63
posits that in the sale of sexual services, the prostitute could be said to be resist-
ing patriarchy and one-man control, thus defying stereotypical ideas of power.
Prostitution can be seen as an act of defiance and resistance directed against
the social spaces to which women are traditionally confined, a countering of
prescribed notions of womanhood and thus a threat to patriarchy. Relegated
62 Available at: www.cityoflove.com.
63 Richard Ssewakriyanga, “Interrogating Sexual Identities and Sex Work: A Study on Con-
structed Identities among Female Sex Workers in Kampala”, in Gender, Economies and
Entitlements in Africa: CODESRIA Gender Series (Dakar [etc.], 2004), p. 115.
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Female Prostitution in Nigeria’s Urban Centres 327
to the fringes of society, prostitutes continuously engage in ways to assert their
individuality and rights with clients, pimps, and madams, as well as with so-
ciety. The ability to do this and the extent to which this is done is dependent
on several factors, one of which is socio-economic status. The more educated
a sex worker is, the more she is able to negotiate the type of clients she takes
and exert more control over her working conditions to mitigate occupational
hazards. Meeting clients at neutral places, usually hotel rooms, is one such ap-
proach. Those who solicit for clients at bars and clubs often do it in groups, and
they tell each other if anyone is going with a client. More importantly, many of
the educated clandestine prostitutes have more access to the police.
The question of forced or free prostitution becomes problematic when con-
sidered in light of the number of people in the sex industry who are able to
exercise choice. In other words, the freedom of “choice” is not so free but can
only be exercised by a select few. Poverty can be read as a state of being that
robs a prostitute of the right to make an informed choice because of a lack of
other choices. This is particularly evident among poor prostitutes practicing
in the slums of Lagos. It can also be applied to women who are forced to sell
their sexual services to maintain their households, and students who sell sex to
pay for their education. Free choice thus remains more elusive for low-ranking
prostitutes in Lagos.
Conclusion
With the expanded field of permissible sexual expression and the loosening of
societal constraints, young Nigerian women are increasingly employing their
bodies as economic tools to gain access to societal resources. This choice has
been further enhanced by increased knowledge about reproduction and the
use of contraceptives. The Nigerian Demographic and Health Survey (ndhs)
carried out in 2008 showed that over 50 per cent of women aged 25 to 49 had
their first sexual encounters by the age of 18, and about 20 per cent by the age
of 15. Knowledge about family planning methods has increased and 70 per cent
of women are knowledgeable about family planning.
The female body has become demystified and female agency has been high-
lighted. However, as I have argued elsewhere,64 a woman’s choice to trade her
body as a marketable product cannot be analysed outside the value society
places on female sexuality. It could be argued therefore that prostitution among
64 Mfon Ekpootu, “The Body as a Tool: Negotiating the New Global Order by Female Youths
in Nigeria”, National Development Studies, 5 (2012), pp. 1–17.
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328 Ekpootu
women in Nigeria develops out of the symbolic meaning that N igerian cul-
ture assigns to the female being. In tandem with societal conceptions of their
sexuality, young women place their sexual demands within these boundaries
to elicit male responses. This sexual objectification of the female is discursively
produced as the norm and sustained by the sexual domination i mplicit in me-
dia representations of women. Visible in many newsstands across the country
are sexually graphic magazines and pornographic videos that can be accessed
by young and old alike, and media adverts are projected through sexually
coded language. This representation of women as objects of desire goes hand-
in-hand with images of the sexy chic woman. Prostitution, whether cloaked
as “clubbing” or “campus runs”, thus becomes a means of attaining the “ideal”
look. The body therefore becomes an economic tool and a source of capital.65
65 Ekpootu, “The Body as a Tool”, p. 1.
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chapter 13
Sex Work and Migration: The Case of Tel Aviv and
Jaffa, 1918–2010
Deborah Bernstein, Hila Shamir, Nomi Levenkron and Dlila Amir
Introduction
This chapter will examine sex work as it developed and changed in Jaffa and
Tel Aviv during the twentieth century. Jaffa and Tel Aviv are located on the
Mediterranean coast of what is now the State of Israel. Jaffa is an ancient port
town. Tel Aviv was established in 1909 by Jewish residents of Jaffa, as a suburb
to the north of Jaffa. By 1921 new Jewish neighborhoods emerged which were
granted the status of an autonomous township by the new British colonial rule
(the British mandate granted by the League of Nations). Jaffa was a predomi-
nantly Arab town with a Jewish minority, while Tel Aviv was an almost exclu-
sively Jewish town which became an independent municipality in 1934. Both
Tel Aviv and Jaffa were important urban centres for the national Jewish and
national Palestinian communities, respectively. During the war of 1948 and the
establishment of the State of Israel, the majority of the Arab population of
Jaffa left, fled, or were expelled. Jaffa was then populated mainly by new Jewish
immigrants, with a minority of Palestinian Arabs. In 1949 the two towns were
united as Tel Aviv/Jaffa.
We argue in this chapter that the case of Israel, as represented by the urban
centres of Tel Aviv and Jaffa, is a prime example of the centrality of migration
for the formation and shaping of society, and of the link between migration
and sex work. We shall attempt to show that sex work has been linked to migra-
tion through different associations shaped by the particular features of migra-
tion and the state’s responses to such movements of people. Indeed that was
the case under British colonial rule in Palestine and after the establishment of
a sovereign Jewish state in 1948. We begin by briefly presenting the theoretical
links between sex work and migration, after which, in the following section,
we discuss the different periods and waves of migration to Israel (to Palestine
prior to 1948) and their particularities. In the chapter’s subsequent sections we
elaborate on the connection between these waves of migration and the forms
and characteristics of sex work/prostitution.
The close link between migration and sex work has been noted in the so-
ciological and historical literature for several decades. Migration, which has
© Deborah Bernstein et aL., 2017 | doi 10.1163/9789004346253_014 - 978-90-04-34625-3
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330 Bernstein ET AL.
assumed numerous forms, can result in sex work, and conversely sex work
can initiate migration. Three types of associations between migration and sex
work are relevant for this chapter. The first is women who migrate, often as
part of a large migration wave, and opt for sex work owing to difficulties in
making a living in the destination country. An inability to speak the local lan-
guage, lack of knowledge concerning the formal and informal rules in the des-
tination country, and a lack of skills suitable for the given labour market can
lead to short-term involvement in sex work. In some cases, if difficulties are
aggravated by various personal and familial conditions, or if individual women
find this work to be a preferred option, such involvement has the potential
to become long term. The second form is women who move from one place
to another specifically to engage in sex work at their new destination. Some
of them search independently for new markets and new clients. This can re-
sult in women migrating from one country to another, or moving around in
their original country from small outlying towns to larger cities, where greater
anonymity can be assured. Some women have experienced severe economic
hardships which propelled them into sex work in search of real or promised
improved economic options, while still others were coerced physically by peo-
ple on whom they depended. Thirdly, the link between migration/migrants and
prostitution is also one of stigmatization. Migrant women are generally prone
to stereotyping. As foreigners who can be ethnically different, they are often
perceived by the host society as immoral, sexually loose, and/or vulnerable
to exploitation. As a result they may be more frequently labelled as sex work-
ers, regardless of the actual circumstances of their lives and occupations. Such
stigmatization can have a dual effect: it might create a false impression of the
over-representation of specific groups of migrant women among sex workers,
and on the other hand it might draw the attention of the police, social work-
ers, and judges, thereby reinforcing both the stigma and women’s vulnerability.
Israeli Society, Migration and Sex Work
Israeli society is predominantly Jewish, and since the late nineteenth century
it has consisted of immigrants from the large concentrations of Jewish com-
munities in eastern and central Europe, North African and Middle Eastern
countries, and later once again from eastern Europe, especially the former
Soviet Union (fsu). Over time, second and third generations of earlier immi-
grants have become an important component of the Jewish population. Prior
to 1948 under the British Mandate, the majority of the population was Palestin-
ian Arab, a point to which we shall return. The circumstances surrounding the
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The Case of Tel Aviv and Jaffa, 1918–2010 331
recurrent waves of Jewish migration were related to both push and pull factors,
predominantly global and local, respectively.
In the first half of the twentieth century (1918–1948) Palestine was under
British colonial rule as stipulated by the mandate granted to Britain by the
League of Nations following World War i. The country witnessed rapid demo-
graphic growth among both the Arab and Jewish populations, with Tel Aviv
and Jaffa on the Mediterranean coast being the foci of this development. The
main factor affecting Jewish migration to Palestine was worsening conditions
for Jewish communities in eastern and central Europe and the closure of the
major previous destination, the United States, to Jewish immigration. There
were also pull factors, above all the emergence of a well-organized and highly
ideological national collective.
Under British colonial rule Tel Aviv was the fastest growing urban centre in
the region; it was very much a Europe-style town-cum-city, which eventually
developed its own core and periphery.1 Jaffa was a rapidly growing urban hub
of Palestinian Arab society, one of the country’s two major ports, and the heart
of the Palestinian national movement.2
The development of these two related yet separate urban centres changed
drastically with the establishment of the State of Israel and the ensuing war of
1948. The Arab population in much of Palestine dispersed as the result of evic-
tion and/or flight immediately prior to the formal creation of the state and dur-
ing the ensuing war. Jaffa quickly fell into ruin. From being the urban heart of
Arab Palestine (“The Bride of the Sea”) it became a run-down appendage of Tel
Aviv, inhabited by a small Arab population and a majority of Jews, arrivals who
were part of the new large-scale post-state migration. As we shall see, these dra-
matic developments led to both continuity and change concerning sex work.
The establishment of the State of Israel changed patterns of migration. The
state planned and controlled migration, as it was no longer dependent on the
colonial government. The state legislated the Law of Return, which granted im-
migration rights and citizenship to all Jews worldwide. This led to mass Jew-
ish migration, doubling the size of the Jewish population in less than a decade
and transforming the balance of Jews and Arabs. While the earlier migration
consisted predominantly of Jews from Europe, the new wave of migration
in the 1950s and early ‘60s was composed predominantly of Jews from North
Africa and the Middle East. In those early years of statehood, this huge influx
1 Ilan Troen and Maoz Azaryahu (eds), Tel Aviv, The First Century: Vision, Designs, Actualities
(Indiana, 2011).
2 Mark LeVine, Overthrowing Geography: Jaffa, Tel Aviv, and the Struggle for Palestine, 1880–1948
(Berkeley, 2005).
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332 Bernstein ET AL.
created severe hardship for immigrants and for the state, which had to ensure
that their basic needs were met. The magnitude of migration, the new arrivals’
lack of adequate cultural, educational, and economic resources, and a dearth of
accommodation and employment drove many immigrants to the periphery of
the existing veteran Israeli Jewish society. This was clearly evident in the case
of Tel Aviv. The city remained the social, cultural, and political core of Israeli
society, with new peripheries developing on it boundaries, both near and far.
Jewish migration to Israel declined greatly in the 1970s and ‘80s, decades
which were mainly a time of consolidation. By the mid-1960s mass migration
had become integrated into a hierarchical structure, often referred to as the
“first Israel”—mainly the veteran population of European origin, and the “sec-
ond Israel”—mainly new immigrants from North Africa and the Middle East.
In the 1970s a small wave of migration from the Soviet Union took place, and
these migrants were principally Jews who fought to leave the Soviet Union,
driven by their ideological Zionist commitment.
A much larger wave arrived two decades later in the 1990s after the disinte-
gration of the Soviet Union and changes in its policy on emigration. This mas-
sive influx from the fsu was made up primarily of Jews taking advantage of the
Law of Return, but also non-Jews as well. This influx significantly changed the
composition of Israeli society, bringing in over one million people predomi-
nantly Jewish and of Russian, Ukrainian, Lithuanian, and central Asian origin;
it also changed many of the features of sex work, as will be discussed later.
Four main phases of migration can be identified here: pre-state Jewish
migration (mostly from Europe and to a lesser extent from the Middle East)
during the British mandate; mass migration in the decade and a half af-
ter statehood (1948); a steep fall in migration in the 1970s and ‘80s; and the
large-scale migration of the 1990s from the fsu, which included Jewish and
non-Jewish migrants. Each of these resulted in sex work and sex workers with
varying characteristics.
Before turning to the impact of migration on sex work, we shall briefly note
several other factors which were also significant. The first of these is the in-
equality of women in the Israeli labour market. Despite an image of equality,
relatively high rates of labour market participation of women, and progressive
anti-discrimination legislation and policies, women generally remain a disad-
vantaged group in the Israeli labour market. Low wages are especially charac-
teristic of unskilled jobs frequently held by women, and of casual labour which
is often the lot of immigrant women regardless of their previous status in their
countries of origin. Secondly, as with most wars, Israel’s wars impacted the
demand for sexual services. While these conflicts did not have major impacts,
at least not after the end of World War ii and colonial rule, some demand was
created by soldiers coming home on leave. Thirdly, state policy, especially in
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The Case of Tel Aviv and Jaffa, 1918–2010 333
the early statehood years and later at the beginning of the twenty-first century,
was affected by Israel’s desire to establish itself globally and win respect in the
international arena.
Before discussing each of these four periods and the characteristics of
sex work, we would like to draw attention to several features common to all.
Throughout the period under study, except partially in the 1990s, we have little
concrete, detailed, and substantiated information. It is necessary to carefully
piece together newspaper articles, state and ngo reports, court cases, and ar-
chival material to be able to note some major trends and shifts. We know even
less about the Arab women in the State of Israel.3 Also, in all periods, despite
changes in the labour market and women’s position within it, the earnings of
sex workers have been higher than those of unskilled and often semi-skilled
women workers. In the case of upper-class sex work, the pay may be higher than
that of most working women of the middle class, perhaps even of the upper
middle class.
Finally, a number of methodological points should be raised regarding both
our definitions and sources. We can distinguish legal definitions of prostitution
from the popular definitions of this occupation that exist in the Jewish and the
Arab/Muslim communities. Initially the penal code contained no clear legal
definition of prostitution. By implication, the legal understanding of prosti-
tution was the provision of sexual intercourse in return for monetary pay, an
act which in itself was in most cases not criminalized. Under the abolition-
ist approach introduced by the British and later adopted by the Israeli penal
code, those who benefitted from a sex worker’s income were to be criminalized
rather than the sex worker herself. Likewise public soliciting was criminalized
as a public disturbance.
Within both Jewish and Muslim (and probably more generally Arab) soci-
ety there were other definitions which did not cancel out the definition given
above.4 In the Jewish community, a woman who associated with a man who
was foreign to the Jewish collective was often referred to as a “whore” (Hebrew:
zona), and she did not necessarily have any connections with commercial sex.
In the Arab-Muslim community, in our case in Jaffa, the terms prostitute/whore
were used even more broadly to refer to women who had sex outside marriage,
regardless of monetary returns or any other commercial aspects. Note that “sex
3 The one survey which referred explicitly to Arab sex workers (compiled in 1960) claimed
that they comprised only 1 per cent of all sex workers, much below their percentage of the
population. Yehuda Rimmerman and Shlomo Shoham, Seker HaZnut [Survey of Prostitution]
(Jerusalem, Ministry of Welfare, Probation Services, 1962), p. 69.
4 Deborah Bernstein, “Gender, Nationalism and Colonial Policy: Prostitution in the Jewish
Settlement of Mandate Palestine, 1918–1948”, Women’s History Review, 21 (2012), pp. 81–100.
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334 Bernstein ET AL.
work” and “sex workers” are not prevalent terms in Israeli discourse whether
official, popular, or academic.5
Sex Work during the British Mandate Period
In the first half of the twentieth century, sex work in Tel Aviv and Jaffa was
affected by the political and social changes taking place. The change from
Ottoman to British colonial rule affected the legislation on prostitution. Large-
scale Jewish migration resulted in large numbers of immigrants seeking em-
ployment and income, and newcomers were finding it difficult to find a place
in the existing labour market. The urbanization of Palestinian society resulted
in internal migration from rural areas, as well as the development of an urban
centre on the seacoast which offered some of the same attractions as Beirut
and Alexandria, albeit in a far more humble form. Colonial rule and the nation-
al clash between Jews and Arabs in Palestine created recurrent unrest and at
times violent confrontation. This in turn brought in a concentration of British
imperial forces, which greatly enlarged sex workers’ clientele. The demand for
commercial sex services was further reinforced by the five years of World War
ii when Palestine served as the location of numerous military camps and was
a destination for troops all across the Middle East when they went on leave.
Jewish sex workers (according to the only comprehensive report for the Tel
Aviv area) were mainly new female immigrants6 in their twenties or older. They
were primarily from eastern and central Europe and had arrived in Palestine in
the 1920s and in larger numbers in the ‘30s. There was a much smaller number
of teenage Jewish girls, most of whom were from Middle Eastern and North Af-
rican immigrant families. Jewish migration to Palestine was strictly controlled.
Migration permits were allocated to applicants from European countries. One
of the regulations stipulated that people considered to be a danger to the pub-
lic good, among them those who pursued “radical” (i.e., communist) politics
5 There are few secondary sources, academic or otherwise. Reports about prostitution have
been written for and submitted to international organizations, and recently also to the United
States. Other reports were initiated by the Knesset or by government ministries. Numerous
reports have been written since the 1990s by local and international ngos. We also made use
of the daily press, especially after 1948. Archival sources, mainly the Israel State Archive, in-
clude criminal legislation and related debates, court cases, Knesset debates, policy-oriented
committees, ministerial correspondences and policy, and attorney-general directives.
6 Report submitted to the Rabbinical Authority in Tel Aviv, 18 April 1945, Tel Aviv Municipal
Archive [henceforth tama], 8–887.
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The Case of Tel Aviv and Jaffa, 1918–2010 335
and prostitutes, were not to be admitted.7 Furthermore, the Jewish settlement,
with its recurring economic downturns and political unrest, was hardly an at-
tractive place for sex workers (or procurers) seeking out a profitable destina-
tion. On the other hand, studies have shown that there were high levels of un-
employment among women and they struggled to enter the organized labour
market. Neither the colonial state nor the Jewish community could provide ad-
equate social services for families, single parents, or single adults in need, de-
spite some elementary aid provided by Jewish municipal, national, and private
institutions.8 Jews from Middle Eastern and North African countries were in
the lowest socio-economic strata, and girls (as well as boys) often dropped out
of school after two or three elementary grades because they were expected to
contribute to the family income through domestic service or forms of appren-
ticeship.9 Sex workers were mainly somewhat older women who had difficulty
securing an income for themselves and their children, and younger women
who preferred to leave highly exploitative domestic work. At the same time,
the presence of soldiers and officers who went to Tel Aviv with the money they
had saved up for their leave was attractive, offering the “promise” of luxuries in
the form of money and gifts.
The Arab women involved in commercial sex, mainly in Jaffa, appear to have
had a different history. The reports sent by the colonial administration to the
League of Nations indicate that most of the prostitutes were from Lebanon and
Syria, where commercial sex was regulated and licensed.10 The workers in the
registered brothels were in some cases local Arab women, and in others they
were women from mainly southern Mediterranean countries. The reports from
Palestine noted that women who had worked for some time in the registered
brothels in countries to the north of Palestine but were no longer considered
sufficiently attractive made their way south on their own initiative, usually il-
legally, to Palestine to continue working in Jaffa (and in Haifa and Jerusalem).11
Other sex workers were women who had left their homes in rural settlements
in Palestine or in neighbouring countries owing to domestic strife. There was
7 Henrietta Szold to the National Executive (Va’ad leumi), 24 October 1934, Central Zionist
Archive, J1/4013.
8 Deborah Bernstein, Nashim BaShula’yim (Women on the Margins) (Jerusalem, 2008),
pp. 115–128.
9 Tammy Razi, Yaldei HaHefker (Forsaken Children: The Backyard of Mandate Tel Aviv) (Tel
Aviv, 2009), pp. 116–122.
10 Samir Khalaf, Prostitution in a Changing Society (Beirut, 1965).
11 Government of Palestine, Chief Secretary’s Office, Report on Traffic in Women and Chil-
dren for the Calendar Year of 1937 and Report on Traffic in Women and Children for the Cal-
endar Year of 1942, Israel State Archive [henceforth isa], CT/1299/41.
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336 Bernstein ET AL.
little opportunity for single Arab women to live on their own and provide for
themselves, and those with no familial support would turn to commercial sex
work (or would be suspected of doing so). Commercial sex was concentrated
in a number of areas in the Tel Aviv-Jaffa urban complex, as seen in Map 13.1.
Sexual services were sold along the seafront, as is often the case in coastal
towns. That was the case in Jaffa at the turn of the century and continued to
Map 13.1 Areas of sexual commerce in the Tel Aviv-Jaffa urban complex in the early twentieth
century.
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The Case of Tel Aviv and Jaffa, 1918–2010 337
be so a ccording to the reports to the League of N
ations.12 Prostitution was also
carried out on the beach of Tel Aviv, which is the northern continuation of
the Jaffa coast. Other locales of sold sex were the Herbert S amuel Promenade
and nearby alleys, both outdoors and indoors. Yet another location was the
boundary between Jewish Tel Aviv and Arab Jaffa, on the margins of both
towns.13
Sex work was done in a wide range of settings, especially in Tel Aviv. In Jaffa
commercial sex was available mainly in brothels, some of which were situ-
ated in hotels and cafés. In Tel Aviv, due to women’s far greater presence in
the public sphere, commercial sex was provided outdoors along the seafront,
in brothels (though there appear not to have been many, and those few were
closed down owing to community and neighbourhood pressure), in the back
rooms of cafés, in women’s rented rooms and jointly-rented apartments, and
in taxis roaming the streets; prostitutes at this time were mainly in search of
soldiers on leave.
It is difficult to determine how independent the sex workers were or if they
were part of a hierarchical network that controlled their conditions of work
and income. The piecemeal evidence points to both situations. Most Jewish
sex workers, especially adult women, seem to have been able to determine
their own conditions of work and were not restricted to establishments that
kept them against their will. As for monetary arrangements, when work was
done in an apartment or a house run or rented by someone else, sex workers
received about half the clients’ payment. As noted above, wages for sex work
were much higher than the wages for other forms of women’s work.
Legislation changed with the transition from Ottoman to British rule. Un-
der the former there was no legislation on prostitution or the management
of brothels. The British, upon their takeover of Palestine in 1917–18 and the
granting of the mandate by the League of Nations in 1923, introduced leg-
islation on sold sex, at first in line with the directives of the League. Later,
however, legislation and overall policies on prostitution implemented in
the British metropolis were applied in Palestine. In most colonial countries
the administration tended to accept the army’s demands for regulation and
medical supervision of prostitution.14 In contrast, the Palestine government,
12 Report on Traffic in Women and Children for the Calendar Year of 1937 and Report on Traffic
in Women and Children for the Calendar Year of 1942.
13 Deborah Bernstein, “Contested Contact: Proximity and Social Control in pre-1948 Jaffa
and Tel-Aviv”, in Daniel Monterescu and Dan Rabinowitz (eds), Mixed Cities, Trapped
Communities (Oxford, 2007), pp. 215–242.
14 Philippa Levine, Prostitution, Race and Politics (London, 2003).
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338 Bernstein ET AL.
following public opinion in Britain, which had rejected previous forms of
the state regulation of prostitution for being immoral and contributing to
the trafficking of women,15 rejected registration, compulsory medical exami-
nations, and hospitalization, which would have controlled, but also legiti-
mated, prostitution. Accordingly, in the early years of civil government two
ordinances regarding prostitution were passed, the first in 1925 (under High
Commissioner Herbert Samuel) and the second in 1927 (under H.C. Herbert
Onslow Plumer). Together they amounted to the wholesale introduction of
British legislation. Hence the amendments, later included in the new Pal-
estine Penal Code of 1936, contained a range of prohibitions, among them
keeping or managing a brothel, living off the earnings of a prostitute, and
soliciting in public.16 In this way, prostitution, if carried out in private by
a woman living on her own, was not considered an offence. There are also
some indications that during World War ii the British army in Palestine was
able to regulate and medically supervise a number of brothels for soldiers in
Jaffa, while Tel Aviv remained unregulated, and all forms of brothel manage-
ment and soliciting were illegal.
The communal attitude to prostitution in the nationally-oriented Jewish
society in Palestine reflected a broad definition and understanding of the occu-
pation, unlike the more restricted and focused perspective of the penal legisla-
tion. In Jewish tradition women were considered the embodiment of personal
and social purity. They were the guardians of the family, the basic building
block of society, and by extension, at least metaphorically, the guardians of the
larger collective. This view was incorporated into the national ideology. The
concept of a prostitute, of a woman who sold sex for money, was absorbed into
a wider perception of the “promiscuous” woman. Thus, all “boundary-crossing”
behaviours were associated with prostitution; women who “crossed boundar-
ies” were thus seen as “whores” whether they were engaged in commercial sex
or not. We don’t have adequate information, however, concerning attitudes re-
garding prostitution in the Palestinian Arab community. Considering the very
strong condemnation of Arab women suspected of extra-marital sex, it is quite
likely that female prostitutes were likewise condemned. In this context we es-
chew the term “sex workers” as it is too remote from the discourse of the time
and place. The consumption of commercial sex by Arab men was accepted as
part of urban leisure.
15 Trevor Fisher, Prostitution and the Victorians (New York, 1997), pp. 133–136.
16 Supplement No. 1 to the Palestine Gazette Extraordinary No. 625 of 14 December, 1936,
Ch. xvii, “Offences against Morality”.
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The Case of Tel Aviv and Jaffa, 1918–2010 339
Sex Work in the Early Years of Israeli Statehood: The 1950s and ‘60s
The massive waves of Jewish migration that followed the establishment of the
sovereign state of Israel brought about changes which affected sex work and
workers. The new state experienced severe difficulties in providing employ-
ment and accommodation for the newcomers. Most of them lived in transit
camps, in temporary accommodations usually erected on the outskirts of vet-
eran Jewish cities and small towns. Many of the men from North African and
Middle Eastern countries had worked as craftsmen and traders, while most
of the women had not been previously employed. The inability of many men
to continue in their role as family providers imposed extra responsibilities on
women and caused them great hardship; many of them became the sole or the
chief provider. Their distress was exacerbated by the large number of children
per family, which was much higher than in Jewish families from European coun-
tries. Immigrant women who entered the labour market took on casual, infor-
mal work, temporary jobs with low pay and little financial security. They tackled
these difficulties in various ways, sex work being one of them. In other words,
among sex workers a relatively high proportion of women immigrants could
presumably be found who had to fend for themselves, had lost their earlier sup-
port systems, and found it very difficult to obtain sufficient employment in the
formal or informal labour market in their new location. Thus we conclude that
Jewish women immigrated to Israel as part of the large waves of migration of
Jewish communities, not in order to work in prostitution. They did so because
of the hardship and difficulties faced by female immigrants, and they took ad-
vantage of this option either as a preference or because of economic hardship.
The scarcity of information available from that period prevents us from
making any assessments regarding the women who turned to sex work in com-
parison with women who did not. The main source for these years is the Inter-
Ministerial report submitted in 1955 to the Ministry of Justice, complemented
by articles in the daily press.17 While the report was not meant for publication,
which may add to its credibility, it might well have been affected by the stereo-
typing of immigrants in general and those from North Africa and the Middle
East in particular, who were at times labelled immoral and primitive.18 The
greater visibility of immigrants, concentrated as they were in temporary ac-
commodation and new urban slums, most probably attracted greater attention
in the press and among social workers than did veteran sex workers. There are
17 See Ministry of Justice, Din VeHeshbon Pnimi BeBe’ayat HaZnut (Internal Report Concern-
ing the Problem of Prostitution) (Jerusalem, 1955).
18 Shlomo Shoham and Giora Rahav, “Social Stigma and Prostitution”, International Annals
of Criminology, 6 (1967), pp. 479–513.
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340 Bernstein ET AL.
also initial indications that many sex workers in the 1940s abandoned such
work, leaving most of it to the new immigrants.
According to the Inter-Ministerial report, the change in the demographic
composition of Jewish society in Palestine was reflected, and even highlighted,
in sex work. Before 1948 about 90 per cent of the Jewish population was from
eastern and central Europe; among Jewish sex workers the proportion was
only slightly lower, a point discussed in the previous section. By the mid-1950s,
and still more by the early ‘60s, the composition of the Jewish population had
fallen to about 60 per cent from Europe and 40 per cent from North Africa and
the Middle East. Among sex workers (as claimed in the Inter-Ministerial report
as well as the press), the majority were immigrant women from North Africa
and the Middle East, and only a minority were from European countries.19 The
migration of young teenagers, mainly from North Africa without their families,
was another route to sex work. The youngsters, both boys and girls, were direct-
ed by the state authorities to collective agricultural settlements (kibbutzim)
where they both studied and worked. Those who found the discipline too strict
and missed their home communities left the secure setting of the kibbutz and
went to the cities, hoping to fend for themselves. Some of these youngsters be-
came underaged sex workers, sometimes only until their families immigrated
to Israel but in other cases for longer periods as well. According to the Inter-
Ministerial report, many of the younger sex workers, aged approximately 15
to 17, were from broken families. This may well have been a result of the pro-
cess of migration, or the difficulty young girls experienced reuniting with their
families after having been independent for some time.
The sex workers were from a wide range of family circumstances: married,
divorced, widowed, and single, with or without children. Higher-class prosti-
tutes sometimes worked in other professions as well, or went in and out of
sex work according to the availability of other options. Those who engaged in
lower-class prostitution often had no other sources of income or occupational
alternatives. This was the case especially among younger and somewhat older
women addicted to drugs. Some of the women and teenagers working in the
Tel Aviv/Jaffa area had migrated there from outlying small towns. This again
was especially the case with immigrants who had been directed by the state to
reside in peripheral settlements and who preferred to move of their own ac-
cord to the urban centres in the hope of finding more affluent clientele.
Prostitution in the Tel Aviv and Jaffa area continued to operate as before,
along the seafront of both towns and in the adjacent back alleys, but also in
some new places (Map 13.2.). While sex work took place both in the open and
19 A similar conclusion was reached by a survey conducted in 1960 (Rimmerman and Sho-
ham, Seker HaZnut) even before the end of the large-scale immigration from North Africa.
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The Case of Tel Aviv and Jaffa, 1918–2010 341
Map 13.2 Other areas where prostitution began to be carried out in Tel Aviv-Jaffa.
indoors, according to the 1960 survey mentioned above most of it was con-
ducted outside, with brothels accounting for only a small share.20 Soliciting
also took place in cafés, as it had under the British mandate, but now cafés
and clubs provided various forms of commercial sex, far more than before
20 Survey of Prostitution, p. 71.
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342 Bernstein ET AL.
statehood. Two significant changes impacted Jaffa and the immigrant transit
camps. During the 1948 war, which led to the eviction of most of the Palestin-
ian Arabs from the subsequent territory of the State of Israel, Jaffa was left
almost in ruins. The town centre became a “no man’s land” where the under-
world, both Jewish and Arab, thrived, and there were night clubs and brothels,
as well as various other kinds of commercial sex. Only a small Arab population
remained in Jaffa, which was now populated by new Jewish immigrants, and
we have no data on the relative composition of Arab and Jewish sex work in the
town. Newspaper items do indicate that there was some cooperation between
Arab men sometimes serving as the pimps of Jewish women and Arab women
managing brothels where both Jewish and Arab women were employed.21 Fur-
thermore, the immigrant transit camps were a location for the provision and
consumption of sex services. There were large camps on the periphery of Tel
Aviv, and male procurers brought clients from the nearby city to the sex work-
ers in the camp. Regrettably we do not know whether the women who worked
in the transit camps had special characteristics, or whether they continued
with this work after moving out of the camps to their permanent settlements.
Many of the women seem to have had pimps rather than working indepen-
dently. It is impossible to document this point, but from the piecemeal evi-
dence we would make the claim that in the pre-state British mandate period a
majority of the women, especially Jewish women, worked on their own. They
kept all their income or shared it with the owner of the apartment or brothel.
During early statehood the impression we get is that many more women had
pimps. When a pimp operated with only one sex worker, he and she were often
married.22 At times pimps were a means of protection for the women, espe-
cially those working outdoors. Yet they could also be physically coercive, pre-
venting women from leaving sex work or appropriating their income.
State legislation and policy also exhibited continuity together with change.
The new state continued with the penal legislation of the former British law.
Changes were introduced only in 1962, as will be discussed later on. Yet the
new state also had its own specific priorities, one of which was to establish its
position in the international arena as a liberal and socially progressive state.
Motivated by this goal, the new State of Israel took its most significant step
regarding prostitution by signing the 1949 un Convention for the Suppression
of the Traffic in Persons and of the Exploitation of the Prostitution of Others.
Debates took place mainly in the Knesset and the government ministries
21 Internal Report Concerning the Problem of Prostitution.
22 Survey of Prostitution, p. 75.
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The Case of Tel Aviv and Jaffa, 1918–2010 343
c oncerning the legislation that should be passed to implement the convention.
But there were internal considerations as well.
The veteran leaders of the new state and its Members of Knesset (mks)
hoped to establish what they considered a just society. The exploitation of sex
workers—or to keep to their perspective and terminology, the exploitation of
prostitutes—was considered the epitome of injustice, especially in the case
of young girls. As a left-wing mk said in a debate concerning changes in the
penal code in 1961, “Members of Knesset: The soliciting of a woman, especially
a young girl of 16 or 17, and then forcing her to prostitute herself and live off
the income of her deeds, is, to my mind, the murder of a human’s soul, and I
cannot understand why the murder of a soul is any less significant than the
murder of the body.”23 As a result of the international convention of 1949 and
a desire to restrict prostitution as much as possible, an amendment was in-
troduced in 1962. Its foremost purpose was to introduce changes to the penal
code which would provide for far more severe punishments for anyone, mainly
pimps and brothel managers, living off the earnings of sex workers. One clause
of the amendment stated: “Holding or managing a place for the purpose of
prostitution will be punished by five years’ imprisonment.”24 This clause, prob-
ably unintentionally, affected the status of independent sex workers operating
alone in their own homes or other places they rented out. According to the
Palestine Criminal Code of 1936, still in effect in the State of Israel at the time
of the amendment, “managing a place for the purpose of prostitution” referred
only to a place where two or more women were engaged in sex work. Omit-
ting this specification made it possible for both the police and courts to treat
independent women working on their own as if they were managing a brothel.
Between Migrations: Consolidation in the 1970s and ‘80s
The large waves of migration to the State of Israel after its declaration of sover-
eignty and independence came to a halt by the middle of the 1960s, only to be
renewed on a large scale in the early 1990s. Most of the transit camps had been
dismantled, and new settlements, urban and rural, had been established in
peripheral areas. These served to accommodate immigrants from North Africa
and the Middle East and to a lesser extent from Europe, and to thicken Jewish
23 Nahum Nir Reflex, Knesset assembly, no. 273, 16 May 1961.
24 Quoted in the Report of the Committee for the Study of Prostitution, headed by Judge Ha-
dassa Ben-Ito, in Carmel Shalev (ed.), Ma’amad HaIsha BaHevra VeBaMishpat (The Status
of Women in Society and Law) (Tel Aviv, 1995), p. 179.
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344 Bernstein ET AL.
settlements on the long borders of the state. This transition from a large wave
of migration in need of immediate provisions to a society with a more stable
socio-economic ethnically-based system of stratification characterized the
1970s. It also characterized some of the main features of sex work. According to
the Committee for the Study of Prostitution headed by the judge Hadassa Ben-
Ito, most sex workers were from the immigrant families of previous decades.
These were mainly women in their twenties, although according to the reports
of social work and police authorities, there seemed to be an increase in the
proportion of teenage girls. While most of the women came from families suf-
fering from economic hardship, which was their lot as immigrants, they seem
to have entered sex work voluntarily and not by force. Some lived in small
towns on the outskirts of Tel Aviv and others in new more distant settlements
that were built for the immigrants. In the latter case, many of the sex workers
moved from the periphery to the central large city where they pursued their
occupation. By leaving the new immigrant settlements they hoped to increase
their anonymity and take advantage of the greater resources and opportunities
of the large urban centre.
In Tel Aviv and Jaffa, sex work became more apparent and visible than
before. This was due to changes in police surveillance and law enforcement.
The legal penal amendment of 1962, discussed above, prohibited women from
taking up sex work in their own homes, even when they were living indepen-
dently on their own. This led to sex work being conducted predominantly in
public spaces outdoors. Concomitantly it led to stricter supervision by the po-
lice, who recurrently detained women for a few hours or a few days on grounds
of soliciting, often in contradiction to the guidelines of the law. By the mid-
1970s the middle-class residents of Tel Aviv started voicing their indignation at
the prevalence of sex work, and some politicians, among them mk Shoshana
Arbeli-Almoznino, called for the regulation and institutionalization of sex
work. As a result, in 1975 the government appointed District Judge Ben-Ito to
head a committee that would survey the state of sex work and recommend an
appropriate policy.
The Ben-Ito Committee recommended a different balance between the
implementation of the law and police supervision.25 The committee strongly
opposed regulation or institutionalization. It stated that the police had tran-
scended their authority in their frequent arrests. They should, instead, de-
tain clients who had sex with minor sex workers, rather than harass women
25 The Report of the Committee for the Study of Prostitution, headed by Judge Hadassa Ben-
Ito, p. 182.
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The Case of Tel Aviv and Jaffa, 1918–2010 345
orkers who did not cause public disturbances. It was also recommended that
w
health services should be provided by the state free of charge and state welfare
services should also create various institutions to help women who wished to
quit sex work. Finally, the Ben-Ito Committee recommended a return to a more
tolerant approach, whereby law enforcement authorities would overlook cases
of women working independently so long as they were not coerced and did
not cause a breach of the peace. Few of these recommendations were put into
practice. According to Ben-Ito in her autobiography, the committee’s recom-
mendations were never implemented and remained a dead letter, as often hap-
pened with the suggestions of state-appointed committees.26
The interim period between the large migration of the early decades of the
state and the later migration of the 1990s was coming to an end. This time, sex
work was directly shaped by migration from the fsu.
From the 1990s Onwards
From the mid-1990s to the late 2000s migration from the fsu brought about
a new and clearly visible distinction in the Israel sex industry between Israeli
citizens and non-citizens (whether undocumented migrants or trafficked per-
sons). During these two decades, two distinct migration waves reached Israel
from the fsu and they affected the Israeli sex industry. The first was a large-
scale migration of Jews, who under the Law of Return were granted immediate
citizenship. Among them were women who were sex workers. Because the mo-
rality of immigrating women in general was deemed suspect, or owing to the
higher proportion of women from the fsu in the Israeli sex industry, women
from that region were often perceived as “prostitutes” regardless of their em-
ployment or way of life.27 The second wave was predominantly of non-Jewish
women who did not obtain Israel citizenship and had migrated to Israel to
work in the sex industry. Some of these women migrated intentionally, some
were smuggled, and others were “trafficked”. It is estimated that each year from
1995 to 2006, 3,000 women entered Israel illegally; some of them were traf-
ficked from fsu countries (Moldova, Russia, and Ukraine) to work in Israel’s
26 Hadassa Ben-Ito, Pninim Vrudot MeShenghai (Pink Pearls from Shanghai) (Tel Aviv, 2008),
pp. 230–235.
27 Deborah Golden, “A National Cautionary Tale: Russian Women Newcomers to Israel Por-
trayed”, Nations and Nationalism, 9 (2003), pp. 83–104.
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346 Bernstein ET AL.
sex industry.28 Many of the labour migrants incurred large debts in order to
travel to Israel, making them particularly vulnerable to exploitation and debt
bondage.
These migrations from the fsu transformed the Israeli sex industry. There is
disagreement about how many of the women who entered Israel illegally were
migrant sex workers and how many were victims of trafficking. Under Israeli
law, trafficking is defined as the “selling or purchasing of a person or conduct-
ing other transactions via a person, with or without consideration.” Trafficking
was recognized as a crime in 2001, first only in relation to prostitution and in
2006 in relation to other end purposes, including forced labour, slavery, organ
harvesting, and more.29 For the purpose of this article we assume that while
some women were indeed trafficked into the Israeli sex industry, or trafficked
once in Israel—namely bought and sold between brothels, as ngo reports and
court opinions suggest—others were migrants in search of work. We there-
fore use both terms—migrant sex workers and trafficked women—to describe
non-Israeli workers in the Israeli sex industry in those years.
These women entered the country mostly as tourists and overstayed their
visas, or entered with false documents, posing as Jewish immigrants. As aware-
ness of sex trafficking increased in the early 2000s, border controls were tight-
ened, and young women arriving from the fsu became subject to suspicion.
As a result, migration routes changed, and women were mostly smuggled or
trafficked through a third country, mainly across the Egyptian border on the
fringes of the Sinai desert. This route usually involved walking long distanc-
es in the relentless desert sun with few supplies, and often entailed rape and
violence.30
In this period, migrant sex workers and trafficked women replaced Israeli
workers in the sex sector and enlarged it. Hardly any research has been done
on the scope and nature of prostitution by Israeli workers in these years. There-
fore there is no definite answer to the question of what Israeli sex workers did
when the industry was flooded by migrants, and how migration influenced the
28 Nomi Levenkron and Yossi Dahan, Isha Overet LaSoher (Women as Commodities) (Tel Aviv,
2003), p. 19.
29 Hok LeMeni’at Sahar BiVnei Adam (Tikunei Hakika) (Prohibition of Trafficking in Per-
sons (Legislative Amendments) Law), 5766–2006, sh no. 2067 p. 2 (Isr.); Hok HaOnshin
(Penal Code) 5737–1977, sh no. 2067 p. 2, 377A (Isr.).
30 Ministry of Public Security, Din VeHeshbon Shel HaTsevet HaBein-Misradi LaPe’ulot
SheNe’esu BeTguva LeShinuy Dfusei HaSahar BeNashim LeMatrut Znut VeAverot Nilvot
(Report of the Inter-Ministerial Team on the Actions to be Taken in Response to Changing Pat-
terns in Human Trafficking for the Purpose of Prostitution and Related Crimes) (Jerusalem:
Ministry of Public Security, 2010), p. 3.
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The Case of Tel Aviv and Jaffa, 1918–2010 347
market; but it was clear at the time that an overwhelmingly high percentage
of all sex work in Israel was conducted by migrant sex workers from the fsu,
some of whom were victims of trafficking.31 Owing to successful enforcement
of anti-trafficking laws, police raids on brothels, deportations, and repatria-
tion, the number of non-Jewish sex workers declined from the mid-2000s on-
ward. Following the removal of migrant sex workers and victims of trafficking
from the Israel sex industry, most sex workers were, once again, Israeli citizens
of diverse ethnic origin, many of them, as already noted, Jewish immigrants
from the fsu.32
Most of our information about non-Jewish sex workers and their working
conditions was obtained by Israeli ngos through interviews. Their content
suggests that the women came to Israel to improve their and their families’
economic situation. A minority arrived in Israel not knowing they would pro-
vide sexual services, and did so under coercion and because of their depen-
dence on their traffickers and employers. Others, possibly the majority, came
to Israel knowing they would engage in sex work, but many of them were put
to work under extremely coercive and exploitative conditions, that is, they
were subjected to human trafficking according to Israeli law. Some migrant sex
workers had previously worked in prostitution, some had been unemployed,
and others had worked in middle- to low-range typically female occupations.
In their countries of origin they had been promised earnings from sex work in
Israel that was at least twenty times higher than their earnings at home.33
As far as we can tell from the few systematic surveys of women who had
been detained prior to deportation, the average education level of non-Jewish
migrant sex workers was eleven years of schooling; approximately one quarter
were university students or had already completed their studies. There was a
small number of minors, but the majority were women in their twenties, most-
ly single with no children.
31 Levenkron and Dahan, Women as Commodities, pp. 26–30.
32 Menachem Amir, a specialist in organized crime in Israel, estimated that 70 per cent of
the women involved in prostitution in Tel-Aviv were from former Soviet republics; see
Martina Vandenberg, Havrahat Nashim LeYisrael VeZnut Bekfiya: Din VeHeshbon Shdulat
HaNashim BeYisrael (Trafficking of Women into Israel and Forced Prostitution: Report of
The Israel Women’s Network) (Tel Aviv, 1997).
33 Hana Safran and Rita Haikin, “Bein Sahar BeNashim LeZnut: Gilgulo Shel Ma’avak Hevra-
ti” (“Between Trafficking in Women and Prostitution: The Evolution of a Social Struggle”),
in Esther Herzog and Erella Shadmi (eds), Basar VeDamim: Znut, Sahar BeNashim VePor-
nographia BeYisrael (Blood Money: Prostitution, Trafficking in Women and Pornography in
Israel) (Haifa, 2013), pp. 237–238.
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348 Bernstein ET AL.
ngo reports from the early 2000s suggest that the working conditions of at
least some of the migrant women who entered Israel were harsh. They were
bought and sold, and moved from one brothel to another; their travel docu-
ments were taken from them, they incurred huge debts, and they had little or
no control over the number of clients they were forced to receive. Some were
imprisoned in brothels or apartments, and were victims of frequent rape, vio-
lence, and death threats to themselves and their families by traffickers, pimps,
and clients. A minority of women received no pay for their work; most received
little pay, and some managed to earn a satisfactory living.
In contrast to the abundant reports about migrant sex workers and victims
of trafficking, little is known about the characteristics of Israeli sex workers
during these years. In the 1990s, as in the earlier periods, most Israeli sex work-
ers apparently chose this occupation. Some did so on account of the few la-
bour market alternatives, while others did so in spite of the fact that they had
other alternatives available. Yet others might have been drug addicts and chose
sex work to support their addiction. Our general impression is that many Is-
raeli sex workers, especially those who operated outdoors, did not hold any
other steady jobs.
While most migrant sex workers worked in brothels, the anti-trafficking
campaign of the 2000s resulted in the closure of most well-known brothels
and there was a transition to “discreet apartments” scattered in all parts of the
town, as well as strip clubs and hotels.34 At present, there is disagreement as
to the level of involvement of pimps in the industry. The police claim that fol-
lowing the eradication of sex trafficking most sex workers now work indepen-
dently and violence is relatively rare. Feminist ngos, on the other hand, argue
that violence is endemic to the sex industry, and now new more sophisticated
and perhaps subtler forms of pimping are at work.35
Despite the abolitionist stance in the Penal Code, before public awareness
of sex trafficking increased, prostitution in Israel was widely tolerated.36 The
main indication of this attitude was the Attorney General’s directive “Inves-
tigation and Prosecution Policy in Offences of Prostitution and Trafficking
in Persons for the Purpose of Prostitution”.37 The directive asserted that the
34 Levenkron and Dahan, Women as Commodities, pp. 12, 20–21, 26–30.
35 Ministry of Public Security, Changing Patterns Report, p. 16.
36 Ibid., p. 19.
37 Hila Shamir, “Gishot Feministiyot LaRegulatsia Shel HaZnut: Mabat Ohed Al Hapa’ar
SheBein HaMishapt Alei Sefer LaMishpat BiF’uula” (“Feminist Approaches to the Regula-
tion of Sex Work in Israel: A Sympathetic Reading of the Gap between Law on the Books
and Law in Action”), in Yishai Blank, David Levi-Faur and Roy Krietner (eds), Regulatsiot
(Regulations) (Tel Aviv, forthcoming 2016).
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The Case of Tel Aviv and Jaffa, 1918–2010 349
olice should not investigate “regular” prostitution unless there was suspicion
p
of aggravating circumstances. The latter, according to the directive, included
trafficking, underage prostitution, drugs, involvement of known criminal ac-
tors, or neighbourhood disturbances. All other forms of prostitution were
therefore tolerated—in the sense that the criminal law was not enforced in
relation to them—even if it wasn’t fully legalized. Various other state institu-
tions also broadly tolerated sex work. The Labour Court issued rulings granting
sex workers full workers’ rights despite claims that under Israeli Criminal Law
their contracts of employment violated public policy and therefore should not
be enforced. In a similar vein, other institutions also acknowledged sex work as
a form of employment, both to sex workers’ benefit and detriment; for exam-
ple, the Tax Authority regularly collected taxes from sex workers, viewing sex
work as a legitimate source of income, and the National Insurance Institute,
which granted sex workers their rights as workers while also denying them so-
cial security benefits on account of the fact that they made their money from
sex.38 Another indication of the high level of tolerance was the existence of
distinct urban areas where unofficial “red-light” districts existed, which aside
from occasional random raids were generally left undisturbed.
This contradictory yet tolerant approach changed somewhat—but was not
wholly abandoned—with the growth of international and national awareness
of human trafficking generated by the international Anti-Trafficking Protocol
(the Palermo Protocol 2001) and the passage of us legislation, “The Victims of
Trafficking and Violence Protection Act of 2000” (tvpa). The tvpa authorized
an annual Trafficking in Persons (tip) Report which categorizes countries’
efforts into one of three tiers of compliance: countries fully complying with
the minimum standards (tier one); countries that are not yet fully complying
with these standards but are making significant efforts to bring themselves
into compliance (tier two); and countries that do not fully comply with the
minimum standards and are not taking any significant steps to comply (tier
three). A country that receives a noncomplying assessment (tier three) risks
the withholding of financial assistance from the United States which is not
humanitarian or trade-related, as well as American opposition to the same as-
sistance from the International Monetary Fund and multilateral development
banks. In the 2001 us tip report, Israel was placed in tier three.39 Taking to
38 Medini’yut Ha’Akhifa BeAverot HaNilvot La’Isuk BeZnut, Hanhayot Praklit HaMedina 2.2
(Enforcement Policy in Offences of Prostitution and Trafficking in Persons for the Purpose of
Prostitution, 2.2 Attorney General) (amended 2012) (Isr.).
39 Va’adat HaHakira HaParlamentarit LaMa’avak BaSahar BeNashim: Din VeHeshbon Me-
sakem (The Parliamentary Commission of Inquiry on the Subject of Trafficking in Women:
Final Report) (Jerusalem: The Knesset, 2005); Gilad Natan, Siyu’aa HaRashuyot LeKorbanot
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350 Bernstein ET AL.
heart the economic consequences, the Israeli government began to treat traf-
ficking more seriously. These efforts bore fruit: in the 2002 report Israel was
placed on the second tier, and in 2012 it was upgraded to the desired first tier.40
Still, as early as 2000, when it became clear that Israel would fare poorly
in the us tip report, Israeli legislators criminalized the trafficking in wom-
en.41 The amendment continued the abolitionist approach of the Israeli Penal
Code and did not require that women consent to migrate for the purpose of
sex work, on the assumption that all migrant sex workers were a priori vic-
tims of trafficking. The amendment was heavily criticized by ngos as being
too narrow in that it dealt only with trafficking for purposes of prostitution
and was concerned with the punishment of the traffickers alone, and not with
the rights of victims.
As noted above, in the following years, and owing to the relentless work
of Israel ngos backed by the us threat embodied in the tvpa, Israel estab-
lished an elaborate anti-trafficking policy, one aspect of which was a victim-
centred approach. This included the establishment of a rehabilitative shelter
for women victims of trafficking, legal aid funded by the state, and the receipt
of visas and work permits—at first in exchange for testimony for the prosecu-
tion against traffickers but later without this proviso.42
In recent years, since about 2006, intense enforcement of anti-trafficking
laws and strict migration measures have led to general agreement among the
authorities and civil society that the migration and trafficking of non-Israeli
women into the Israeli sex industry has practically ceased to exist.
During these recent years, policy developments occurred in relation to
Israeli sex workers as well, some positive and some negative. A positive de-
velopment is the growing attention paid to their plight by both civil society
organizations and the Ministry of Social Services. One outcome has been the
establishment of two rehabilitation frameworks for women who want to leave
the sex industry. On the negative side, increased police enforcement has led
to higher levels of police violence and harassment against sex workers, and
to greater surveillance of sex workers operating without pimps, resulting in
Sahar BiVnei Adam Bet’humei HaRevaha VeHaBri’ut (Authorities’ Assistance to Victims of
Human Trafficking in Welfare and Health) (Jerusalem, 2009).
40 Office of the Under Secretary for Global Affairs, us Dept. of State, Trafficking in Persons
Report (2001), p. 88.
41 Office of the Under Secretary for Global Affairs, us Dept. of State, Trafficking in Persons
Report (2002), p. 63; Office of the Under Secretary for Global Affairs, us Dept. of State,
Trafficking in Persons Report (2012), pp. 194–195.
42 Hok HaOnshin (Penal Code) 203A–D (Amendment no. 56), 5760–2000, 1746 s.h. 226 (2000)
(Isr.).
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The Case of Tel Aviv and Jaffa, 1918–2010 351
public shaming and difficulty in making a living.43 Another policy change
looming over the Israeli sex industry is an End Demand Bill, which seeks to
criminalize clients who purchase sex services. The bill was proposed in 2008
but to date has not been enacted.44
In response to the new circumstances, Israeli sex workers have begun orga-
nizing once again after earlier attempts to do so failed. In 2013 a group of sex
workers established the Association for the Regulation of Sex Work. Their rep-
resentatives have begun writing op-eds, giving press interviews, and attending
sessions of the appropriate Knesset committee, all in an attempt to present an
alternative position to the End Demand Bill.45 It remains to be seen whether
the voices of sex workers themselves will be heard in a political arena over-
crowded with feminist organizations who claim to speak on their behalf.
Concluding Comments
Our case study as set forth in this chapter has indicated that there are three
major issues concerning migration for sex work in Palestine/Israel. The first is
sex work as a response to problems in the receiving country and community,
which drove migrants to engage in sex work upon arrival. This, we have argued,
was the major feature in Palestine/Israel until the 1990s. The second associa-
tion is migration for the specific purpose of sex work, characteristic mainly
since the 1990s. The third is the stigmatization of migrant women, as they are
thought of as working in prostitution, and more generally as guilty of engaging
in immoral sexual behaviour, whether they are or not. Such stigmatization,
which due to a lack of space we have not adequately elaborated upon, is char-
acteristic of Jewish and Arab communities alike, past and present.
Some final comments are called for concerning common trends. The vari-
ous sources used in our study for the colonial period and after the founding
43 Dafna Hacker and Orna Cohen, Research Report: The Shelters in Israel for Survivors of Hu-
man Trafficking (submitted to the us Department of State, 2012); Maria Rabinovitz, Skirat
Pe’ilut Medinat Yisrael BeT’hum HaMa’avak BaSahar BiVnei Adam: HaTipul BeTofa’at
HaSahar BeNashim (Survey of the Actions Taken by Israel to Combat Human Trafficking:
Dealing with Trafficking in Women) (Jerusalem, Knesset Research and Information Center,
2013), pp. 55–57.
44 Nomi Levenkron, “Ma La LaStudentit LeMishpatim BeVeit Zonot?” (“What is a Law Stu-
dent Doing in a Brothel?”), Hamishpat, 17 (2013), pp. 161–208, 190, 198.
45 Hatsa’at Hok: Isur Tsrikhat Znut VeTipul BaKehila (Tikunei Hakika) (Draft Bill: Prohibi-
tion of Consumption of Prostitution Services and Community Treatment (Legislative
Amendments)) (No. 1), 2013 hh 1, 1(Isr.).
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352 Bernstein ET AL.
of the Israeli state indicate that most women, Jewish as well as Arab, were not
forced into sex work by others. In many cases economic and social hardship
characterized the women’s lives, although we have no way of identifying which
of the many women who experienced hardship, through migration or other-
wise, chose to engage in sex work and which adopted other means to contend
with such difficulties. Also, during the various periods under discussion, in Tel
Aviv and Jaffa, as in many other places, most women in the sex industry earned
significantly more than they could doing other work, unskilled or even skilled.
This factor may be a consideration for entering sex work. Still more, it may
deter those contemplating exiting such work from actually taking this step.
Thus we conclude that most women were not forcibly coerced into sex work.
Nevertheless, we suggest that the distinction between physical coercion and
choice is often, perhaps usually, blurred. Economic hardship, being the sole
provider for one’s family, collapse of support systems, and at times a history of
domestic violence and addiction may all make women opt for sex work. Many
of these phenomena may be initiated or exacerbated by migration, as we have
tried to demonstrate in the case of Israel, focusing on the urban centres of Tel
Aviv and Jaffa.
Official policy during the British mandate period and later in the Israeli state
was broadly similar. Open and direct regulation of prostitution was clearly
avoided, but so was de facto prohibition. The major orientation of legislation,
and even more so of enforcement agencies, was toleration of the existence of
prostitution, while focusing legal criminalization on those who directly ben-
efitted financially from the sex worker’s income and on public disturbances.
Issues of “disturbances” placed a wide range of law enforcement regulations at
the disposal of the police and the courts. From time to time there have been
proposals and debates about the possibility of regulation, the prohibition of
prostitution, or the criminalization of clients, but to date nothing has come of
them.
However, law and order were and are only one aspect of social reactions
to prostitution. Historically, society was on the whole far less forgiving. The
stigmatization of sex workers was often linked to a much more general and
encompassing stigmatization of immigrant women, regardless of their work or
source of income. The morality and sexual behaviour of women coming from
elsewhere were often suspect, as were women deemed to have crossed nor-
mative social and collective boundaries, regardless of the nature and grounds
of such crossings. Thus the derogatory popular terms commonly used—the
Hebrew prutsa, literally “without boundary”, and mufkeret, “wanton” and “reck-
less”, or the coarse Arabic sharmuta, “slut”, “loose woman”—created a catego-
ry of women that was sexually immoral and a threat to the basic patriarchal
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The Case of Tel Aviv and Jaffa, 1918–2010 353
order, regardless of whether they actually engaged in commercial sex or not.
This vulgar rhetoric, stigmas, and denunciations held true for both the Jewish
society of Tel Aviv and the predominantly Arab society of Jaffa. We should
point out that the terms “sex worker” and “sex work” have not been used in
policy debates, in popular speech (Hebrew or Arabic), or in feminist discourses
in Israel. The term commonly used in policy debates is “prostitutes”, and in
feminist circles “prostituted women” or more recently “victims of trafficking in
women”. The use of these terms in this paper enabled us to study much about
“sex work” in Israel, but in a rhetoric that is foreign to the societies discussed.
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Section 3
The Americas
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chapter 14
A Social History of Prostitution in Buenos Aires
Cristiana Schettini
Historiography, Methodology, and Sources
Established in 1580 as a minor commercial and administrative Spanish settle-
ment, the city of Buenos Aires began to experience a certain amount of eco-
nomic and political development in the eighteenth century. In the beginning
of the nineteenth century, it became the centre for the demand for autonomy
from Spain, which was finally obtained in 1816. Its population grew from 14,000
in 1750 to 25,000 in 1780, and to 40,000 by the end of the century. In 1880, after
decades of political instability, the city was federalized, thereby concentrating
the political power of the Argentine Republic. From then on, massive influxes
of Europeans changed the city’s demographics, paving the way for its transfor-
mation into a major world port and metropolis with a population of 1,300,000
by 1910 and around 3,000,000 as the twentieth century wore on.
The study of prostitution in Buenos Aires has attracted the attention of re-
searchers from various fields such as social history and cultural and literary
studies, and more recently urban history and the social sciences, especially
anthropology. Although the topic has been addressed in its symbolic dimen-
sion, much less attention has been devoted to the social organization of the sex
trade, its changes, the social profiles of prostitutes, and their relationships with
other types of workers and social groups. Similarly, the importance granted to
the period of the municipal regulation of prostitution (1875–1936) and to stories
about the trafficking of European women stands in stark contrast to the scar-
city of studies on the long period since 1936, especially as regards issues aside
from public policies implemented to fight venereal diseases. In the last decade,
the unionization of prostitutes and the reappearance of narratives about traf-
ficked women in public debates have captured the interest of social scientists.
The centrality of prostitution in popular culture and public debates about
the nation in Buenos Aires at the end of the nineteenth century were major
factors that may explain the profusion of historical research about the period
* I am very grateful to Eleanor Rylance and to Constanza Dotta for the work they put into
translating and re-translating this text. The editors’ comments and suggestions made by Mir
Yarfitz, María Luisa Mugica, Isabella Cosse, and Valeria Manzano also helped me improve
this chapter.
© Cristiana Schettini, 2017 | doi 10.1163/9789004346253_015 - 978-90-04-34625-3
This is an open access chapter distributed under the terms of the CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license.
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358 Schettini
of municipal regulation. In fact, throughout the first half of the twentieth
century prostitution was intrinsically linked to various aspects of public de-
bates about national cultural identity that were taking place in Buenos Aires.
Prostitutes occupied an important role in national literature and theatre plays;
they were part of popular sociability and took centre stage in stories about
broken hearts, as told through the lyrics of tangos.1 Narratives about the white
slave trade, particularly those identifying Buenos Aires as one of the main re-
ceiving centres of European prostitutes at the turn of the twentieth century,
were also widespread in literature, plays, and films.
While in some European cities narratives of this kind served as a morality
tale for young female migrants going to the Americas and gave voice to the gen-
dered social fears of diverse European reformist and nationalist groups, such
stories took on particular connotations in Buenos Aires, a city undergoing a
process of rapid urbanization at that time and an important port of arrival for
European immigration starting in the last decades of the nineteenth century.
References to prostitutes, particularly foreign ones, fulfilled a range of discur-
sive purposes in turn-of-the-century Buenos Aires. In essence, they strength-
ened the link between female honour and national honour; the symbolic
centrality of foreign prostitutes from this period onwards, combined with their
notorious over-representation in the municipal regulation registers, generated
a debate in which domestic prostitutes were relegated to the background. In
literature, Argentinian women generally were not involved in prostitution;
rather, they were ascribed values of authenticity and purity, and were tasked
with facing the challenges of modernity, such as consumerism, fashion, and
presence in the public space.2 The negative—or at the very least, ambiguous—
connotations of social changes at the turn of the twentieth century were there-
fore focused on the foreign prostitute, a figure that enabled writers to elaborate
1 Domingo Casadevall, El Tema de la mala vida en el teatro nacional (Buenos Aires, 1970); José
Sebastián Tallón, El Tango en sus etapas de música prohibida (Buenos Aires, 1959); Sirena
Pellarolo, Sainetes, cabaret, minas y tangos (Buenos Aires, 2010). For an analysis of photo-
graphs of male sociability in an Argentinian brothel, see Dora Barrancos, “Sexo-s en el
lupanar: Un documento fotográfico (circa 1940)”, Cadernos Pagu, 25 (2005), pp. 357–390. See
also Pablo Ben, “Plebeyan Masculinity and Sexual Comedy in Buenos Aires, 1880–1930”, Jour-
nal of the History of Sexuality, 16 (2007), pp. 436–458.
2 Donna Guy, El Sexo peligroso: La prostitución legal en Buenos Aires 1875–1955 (Buenos Aires,
1994); Francine Masiello, Entre civilización y barbarie: Mujer, nación y cultura literaria en la
Argentina moderna (Rosario, 1997). For the changes that occurred in the 1920s, see Cecilia
Toussonian, “Images of the Modern Girl: From the Flapper to the Joven Moderna (Bue-
nos Aires, 1920–1940)”, Forum for Inter American Research, 6 (2013), available at: http://
interamericaonline.org/volume-6-2/tossounian/#more-35; last accessed 7 July 2017.
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A Social History of Prostitution in Buenos Aires 359
on tensions arising from the commercialization of social relationships. From
a local perspective, the (foreign) prostitute embodied the effects of money cir-
culation and of the “otherness” that was invading Argentina.3
At the same time, hygienist physicians saw prostitutes as part of their wider
interest in “marginality”. Such interest was evidenced by their obsession with
observing different subjects who, in their minds at least, represented the dan-
gers of disorder resulting from the growing cultural heterogeneity that charac-
terized the city in those years.4
The most significant historiographical research about the period of regu-
lated prostitution in Buenos Aires (1875–1936) was written by Donna Guy, a
North American historian, and it was published in 1991. Her time frame partly
overlaps with the period of consolidation of the nation-state (1880–1910), a
time characterized by economic growth, the mass immigration of European
workers, and the establishment of a national plan of organization following
the long period of instability that had characterized most of the nineteenth
century. This period has come to be seen as a foundational time in the history
of a modern, prosperous, and cosmopolitan Argentina, and it has also been
seen as indicative of its contradictions, social tensions, and authoritarian prac-
tices. The policies that were implemented to control the sex trade can also be
included under this heading. Thus, it is commonplace in the diverse literary
and historiographical productions on the subject to find reiterations of rapid
urban changes, massive European immigration, and the high number of men
among immigrants as factors that drove prostitution.5
Influenced by Foucauldian and gender-based approaches to social history,
Guy sought to study prostitution in connection with debates about definitions
of family, nation, and citizenship.6 Among the wide variety of primary sources
she used, Guy privileged the contributions of politically active professional men
and women to public debates about the regulation of prostitution and their
3 Masiello, Entre civilización y barbarie, pp. 156–157.
4 Guy, El Sexo Peligroso, pp. 104–137; for more on contemporary scientific thinking about crimi-
nals (and prostitutes), see Lila Caimari, Apenas un delincuente: Crimen, castigo y cultura en la
Argentina, 1880–1955 (Buenos Aires, 2004), pp. 75–99.
5 Ernesto Goldar, La “Mala Vida” (Buenos Aires, 1971); Guy, El Sexo peligroso; Yvette Trochon, La
Ruta de Eros (Montevideo, 2006). For a global perspective, see Pablo Ben, “Historia global y
prostitución porteña: El fenómeno de la prostitución moderna en Buenos Aires, 1880–1930”,
Revista de Estudios Marítimos, 5/6 (2012/2013), pp. 13–26. Also see Lex Heerma van Voss, “The
Worst Class of Workers: Migration, Labour Relations and Living Strategies of Prostitutes
around 1900”, in Marcel van der Linden and Leo Lucassen (eds), Working on Labor: Essays in
Honor of Jan Lucassen (Leiden, 2012), pp. 153–170, 162.
6 Guy, El Sexo peligroso, p. 11.
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360 Schettini
e ffects in terms of the definition of the limitations of citizenship. Her research
underpins a large part of what is now known about the social organization of
the sex trade in Buenos Aires. In particular, it has shed light on the disputes
that occurred between the municipal authorities, police, and d octors about
the social control of the sex trade, as well as on the local meanings of the global
dissemination of stories about the trafficking of women. Attention was espe-
cially paid to the overrepresentation in the contemporary official and literary
registers of European women, particularly Jewish women, in stark c ontrast to
the significant and enduring silence about native prostitutes.
Recent debates about the unionization of prostitutes attracted the atten-
tion of scholars in the social sciences. In the last few years, several scholars
have focused on the meanings and implications of the Argentinean Female
Sex Workers Organization, ammar (Asociación de Mujeres Meretrices de la Ar-
gentina), and they have studied its trajectory, relationships with other work-
ers’ organizations, and its fight for the derogation of Article 81 of the Code
of Contraventions (Código Contravencional/Código de Convivencia Urbana),
in addition to the political identity of its members and its conflicts and divi-
sions.7 Thus, the period of regulation (1875–1936) and the period initiated in
1994 have received the most attention, leaving the majority of the twentieth
century understudied.
The period that opens with Law 12.331 (1936), which abolished regulated
prostitution nationwide, has been relatively understudied with regard to the
dynamics of the sex trade. The implications of the law itself, especially in the
medical debates, have, however, been the subject of a few studies.8 The scarce
7 Mario Pecheny and Mónica Petracci, “Derechos humanos y sexualidad en la Argentina”, Hori-
zontes Antropológicos, 12 (2006), pp. 43–69; Carolina Von Lurzer, “Putas, el estigma: aproxi-
mación a las representaciones y organización de las mujeres que ejercen la prostitución en
la ciudad de Buenos Aires”, Question, 1 (2006), available at: http://perio.unlp.edu.ar/ojs/in-
dex.php/question/article/view/295/232; last accessed 10 July 2017; Silvana Gurrera and Juan
Pablo Ferrero, “Prostitución, búsqueda de reconocimiento y reivindicación de derechos en
la Ciudad de Buenos Aires”, in Gabriela Delamata (ed.), Movimientos sociales: ¿Nuevas ciu-
dadanías? Reclamos, derechos, estado en Argentina, Bolivia y Brasil (Buenos Aires, 2009), pp.
85–108; Kate Hardy, “Incorporating Sex Workers into the Argentine Labor Movement”, Inter-
national Labour and Working Class History, 77 (2010), pp. 89–108.
8 On the law of social prophylaxis, see, among others, Carolina Biernat, “Médicos, especialistas,
políticos y funcionarios en la organización centralizada de la profilaxis de las enfermedades
venéreas en la Argentina (1930–1954), Anuario de Estudios Americanos, 64 (2007), pp. 257–
288; Marisa Miranda, “Buenos Aires, entre Eros y Tánatos: La prostitución como amenaza
disgénica (1930–1955), Dynamis 32 (2012), pp. 93–113, available at: http://www.raco.cat/index.
php/Dynamis/article/viewFile/257776/344970; last accessed 7 July 2017; Karin Grammático,
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A Social History of Prostitution in Buenos Aires 361
available references suggest that from that moment on a long period began
in which prostitution came under police control within an abolitionist frame-
work.9 Backed up by the code of contraventions and police edicts (Código de
Faltas y Edictos Contravencionales), the police acted in order to create a sphere
of legitimacy for moralizing measures in public spaces, which coexisted with
a more or less veiled acceptance of cabarets, night clubs, and hotels that rent
out rooms by the hour.10
In the mid-twentieth century, the moralizing police campaign and periodic
raids not only affected prostitutes but eventually cast vast sectors of the young
“porteño” citizens and a variety of groups of women under broad moral sus-
picion.11 The more recent historiographical work that has looked into the im-
pacts of sexuality on definitions of social identities since the mid-twentieth
century has contributed to our understandings of those times. With an em-
phasis on the middle social sectors and specifically on the young, these works
indicate the forms and movements of a mass consumer market, its relation-
ship with the expansion of new gendered spheres of sociability, the circulation
“Obreras, prostitutas, y mal venéreo: El Estado en busca de la profilaxis”, in Valeria Pita et
al., Historia de las mujeres en la Argentina (Buenos Aires, 2000), pp. 116–135. See also Maria
Luisa Mugica, La ciudad de las Venus Impudicas: Rosario, historia y prostitución, 1874–1932
(Rosario, 2014).
9 There was a brief interruption at the end of the second Peronist government when pros-
titution was regulated again in 1954 within the context of an increasing conflict with the
Catholic Church. Guy, El Sexo peligroso, pp. 213–239.
10 This picture also appears to be pertinent for the city of Rosario, a port near Buenos Aires
that had regulated prostitution two years before the capital city (1873) and had abolished
it in 1932, four years before the rest of Argentina. In the debates about the social prophy-
laxis law of Rosario, there was fear that the new legal framework would grant the police
too much power and warnings were made about the risks of bribery. Mugica, La ciudad de
las Venus. One of the few studies on the activities of the paramilitary organization “Triple
A” in systematically persecuting prostitutes in the city of Mendoza in the 1970s was car-
ried out by Laura Rodriguez Aguero, “Mujeres en situación de prostitución como blanco
del accionar represivo: El caso del Comando Moralizador Pío xii, Mendoza, 1974–1976”,
in Andrea Andujar et al., De Minifaldas, militancias y revoluciones (Buenos Aires, 2009),
pp. 109–126. See also Santiago Morcillo and Carolina Justo Von Lurzer, “Mujeres públicas
y sexo clandestino: Ambigüedades sobre la normativa legal sobre la prostitución en la
Argentina”, in Daniel Jones et al., La producción de la sexualidad: Políticas y regulaciones
sexuales en Argentina (Buenos Aires, 2012), pp. 89–121, 190–192.
11 Andrés Carretero, Prostitución en Buenos Aires (Buenos Aires, 1998), pp. 182–200; Valeria
Manzano, “Sexualizing Youth: Morality Campaigns and Representations of Youth in Early
1960s Buenos Aires”, Journal of the History of Sexuality, 14 (2005), pp. 433–461.
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362 Schettini
of new ideas and life styles, and the standards of respectability that involved
variations of sexual relationships, couples, and intimacy.12
Andrés Carretero, a traditional historian of prostitution, studied police ac-
tions regarding meeting places such as bars, artistic spaces like the Di Tella
Institute, long-haired young men, and women in miniskirts by looking through
police documents dating from the 1960s. More recently, Valeria Manzano
found scattered references to the dangers of the traffic in women in the same
period which in her interpretation may have served to express moral fears
about young women leaving their homes or acting against paternal and mater-
nal mandates.13 The shift in focus from prostitution to a much broader range
of moral behaviour, both by the police and historians, has left us with scarce
information about the social organization of the sex trade in this period, which
included two strongly moralistic military dictatorships: the Onganía dictator-
ship (1966–1970) and the last Military Dictatorship (1976–1983).
The question as to how the social and cultural changes in the field of sexual-
ity in Argentina specifically affected the exercise and the organization of pros-
titution cannot be explored yet, as there is a lack of more detailed research into
not only the living and working conditions of prostitutes, but also the links
between the moralizing campaigns by democratic and authoritarian govern-
ments over the course of the twentieth century.
The sources most frequently consulted by researchers consist of medical
and public authority reports which show the privileged position occupied
by public health opinions focused on social reform in Buenos Aires. Histori-
ans have also consulted works of fiction, newspapers, and works of popular
culture. Overall, historians combined a wide range of documents, including
tango lyrics, plays, memoirs, travel writings, and even brothel plans.14 Legal
documentation, both civil and criminal, has not yet been examined in detail,
12 Andrea Andújar et al., De Minifaldas, militancias y revoluciones; Isabella Cosse, Pareja, sex-
ualidad y familia en Buenos Aires (Buenos Aires, 2010); Isabella Cosse et al., Los 60 de otra
manera: Vida cotidiana, género y sexualidades en Argentina (Buenos Aires, 2010); Karina
Felitti, La Revolución de la píldora: Sexualidad y política en los Sesenta (Buenos Aires, 2012);
Valeria Manzano, The Age of Youth in Argentina: Culture, Politics and Sexuality from Peron
to Videla (Chapel Hill, n.c., 2014).
13 Carretero, Prostitución en Buenos Aires, p. 182; Valeria Manzano, “Sexualizing Youth”, pp.
433–461.
14 Pablo Ben, “Historia global y prostitución”. Horacio Caride analysed municipal sources
together with plans of prostibules found in the archives of the National Sanitary Works
Agency (Dirección Nacional de Obras Sanitarias de la Nación), “Lugares de mal vivir: Una
historia cultural de los prostíbulos de Buenos Aires, 1875–1936” (Unpublished Ph.D., Uni-
versity of Buenos Aires, 2014).
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A Social History of Prostitution in Buenos Aires 363
but it would improve our knowledge of strategies for survival and negotiations
between prostitutes and the public authorities.15
Finally, another source used in research on prostitution are the reports
produced by international observers. In fact, in international reports on the
traffic of women, Buenos Aires is represented as the epitome of a destination
for European prostitutes in the early decades of the twentieth century. The
widespread existence of more or less sensationalist white slave trade stories
frequently involving the Argentinian capital attracted the attention of various
observers. Particularly worthy of note are reports produced by reformist or-
ganizations, especially Jewish ones, and the documentation produced by the
League of Nations Body of Experts, plus those of independent observers. In
this documentation, prostitution carried out by Jewish women and the activi-
ties of groups of Jewish pimps were given a central and far more visible posi-
tion than other protagonists in the Buenos Aires sex trade.16
Definitions
As was the case in other societies that were part of the Spanish Empire, female
sexuality was an important issue for the Catholic Church—formally at least—
in Buenos Aires throughout the colonial period until 1810. In contrast with the
central position occupied by virginity in the Catholic view, the diversity of af-
fective arrangements and sexual relations that actually existed in colonial soci-
ety led to a large number of women being likened to the image of a prostitute,
the symbol of a disorderly woman, in the rhetoric present in many social set-
tings. In practice, however, as Ann Twinman has suggested, it is most likely that
15 Mir Yarfitz uses the judicial reports in the Gaceta del Foro to trace the development of the
case against the association of Jewish traffickers, the “infamous” Zwi Migdal. Mir Yarfitz,
“Polacos, White Slaves and Stille Chuppahs: Organized Prostitution and the Jews in Bue-
nos Aires, 1890–1939” (Unpublished Ph.D., University of California, 2012), pp. 145, 133, 224.
See also Sandra McGee Deutsch, Crossing Borders, Claiming a Nation: A History of Argen-
tine Jewish Women, 1880–1995 (Durham, 2010).
16 League of Nations, Report of the Special Body of Experts on Traffic in Women and Chil-
dren (Geneva, 1927). Sandra McGee Deutsch also employed the registers from the Jewish
Association for the Protection of Girls and Women, which worked “to maintain Jewish
immigrants out of commercial sex”, particularly with “Ezras Noschim”, the Buenos Ai-
res branch: Crossing Borders, pp. 107–108; Guy, El Sexo Peligroso; Yarfitz, “Polacos, White
Slaves and Stille Chuppas”, pp. 53–110. The telling exception is Albert Londres’ journalistic
research on the traffic in women in Buenos Aires which highlighted French pimps’ prac-
tices. Albert Londres, The Road to Buenos Aires (London, 1928).
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364 Schettini
colonial society recognized “varying degrees of illicit (sexual) activity”, similar
to the way colonial Latin American societies viewed race relations.17 In fact,
the same author suggests that a “creative ambiguity” existed in the complex
connection between illicit sexual relations and honour. There were multiple
ways to regain honour that was lost.
Towards the end of the eighteenth century, the city of Buenos Aires under-
went major changes that reflected the crisis in colonial dominance, which also
represented a shift towards local expansion and modernization. For the first
time, the city began to take a distinct position in the economy and administra-
tion of the region, culminating in the 1810 crisis that led to independence. In
her survey of crimes involving women in the last decades of the colonial era,
Susan Socolow describes a society dominated by men, in which most of the
offences committed against women were sexual in nature. Married women, or
those under the protection of a man, were most often the victims of violence
committed by men known to them, and the vulnerability of single women to
violent sexual advances suggests that unprotected women were largely at risk
of being considered to be sexually available.18 Single women and slaves were
able to take legal action against men who committed violence against them;
qualitative evidence from criminal courts suggests that women in some social
groups had a certain amount of sexual autonomy.19 Nevertheless, their ability
to act did not override what the author identifies as a generalized perception
that women were naturally subject to sexual excess and violent acts.
In post-revolutionary Buenos Aires, contemporary commentators noted
that there was an increase in prostitution, which they believed was related to
the broader context of political changes and social instability, geographical
17 Ann Twinman, “Honor, Sexuality and Illegitimacy in Colonial Spanish America”, in Asun-
ción Lavrín (ed.), Sexuality and Marriage in Colonial Latin America (Lincoln [etc.], 1989),
pp. 118–155, 148–149.
18 Susan Socolow, “Women and Crime: Buenos Aires, 1757–97”, in Lyman L. Johnson (ed.),
The Problem of Order in Changing Societies: Essays on Crime and Policing in Argentina and
Uruguay (Albuquerque, 1990), pp. 1–19, 8, 11.
19 Historian José Luis Moreno observes that towards the end of the colonial period, the
Spanish justice system was receptive to claims made by members of lower social groups,
including slaves. He analysed a judicial case in which a freedwoman accused a man of
trying to re-enslave her and take over her gains made via prostitution. To achieve his aims,
the accused apparently threatened to send her to the “prostitutes’ jail”. In this particular
case, the freedwoman succeeded in mobilising her former owner and the Ombudsman
(Defensor de Pobres) in her favour. José Luis Moreno, “Conflicto y violencia familiar en
el Río de la Plata, 1770–1810”, Revista de Historia Social y de las Mentalidades, 6 (2002),
pp. 13–38, 37.
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A Social History of Prostitution in Buenos Aires 365
mobility, and wars of independence. Mark Szuchman has linked contempo-
rary preoccupations with the sex trade to evidence of a greater participation
by women in public life throughout the early decades of the nineteenth cen-
tury.20 In this context of major social and political uncertainty and shifts in
behaviour, narratives on prostitution served to express social anxieties in the
face of larger social changes.
During the second half of the nineteenth century, political stability in-
creased and public debates began to focus on the municipal regulation of
prostitution, which came into force in Buenos Aires in 1875. A few years earlier,
in the 1869 National Census 361 people identified their occupation as “pimp”
or “prostitute”. Of 301 prostitutes, 198 worked in Buenos Aires while the oth-
ers were spread throughout the country. In 1889, the number of prostitutes
registered in the municipality rose as high as 2,007 for the first and only time.
That was the first year in which regulation statistics were published. In the
following years, persecution by the police and the closure of houses located
outside the area stipulated for prostitution also led to a decrease in the num-
ber of registered houses. Historian Mirta Lobato has noted that there were
disparities in the numbers which were certainly related to differences in the
organization of the sex trade but chiefly expressed the preoccupations of those
counting the prostitutes. Despite the fact that the information was obtained
through the declarations of women, what those figures did not register was
the power relationships that led women to identify themselves as prostitutes.
Moreover, they did not register “the fragile line separating the work of bring-
ing pleasure with that of other female work related to the ideal of domesticity,
such as sewing and cleaning.”21
The 1875 municipal ordinance considered women to be prostitutes if they
sold sexual favours to more than one man.22 However, it soon became clear
that the diversity of short-term sexual arrangements could never be socially
isolated as laid down in the ordinance. Public officials and doctors resorted to a
broader category of “clandestine prostitution” which included various types of
occupations, such as actresses, waitresses in cafés and taverns, and a multitude
of other types of activities carried out by female workers who went about their
20 Mark Szuchman, Order, Family and Community in Buenos Aires, 1810–1860 (Stanford, 1988),
p. 119.
21 Mirta Lobato, Historia de las trabajadoras en la Argentina (1880–1960) (Buenos Aires,
2007), pp. 72–73; Cristiana Schettini, “Esclavitud en blanco y negro: Elementos para una
historia del trabajo sexual femenino en Buenos Aires y en Río de Janeiro, a fines del siglo
xix”, Entrepasados, 29 (2006), pp. 43–62.
22 Guy, El Sexo peligroso, p. 69.
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366 Schettini
business in the city. In a society in which women working in the sex trade often
shared the same spaces and performed the same jobs as most other female
workers, ordinances that regulated prostitution were repeatedly reformed
without ever managing to reduce the numbers of women involved in various
forms of “clandestine” activities. This expression would continue to be used by
public officials throughout the twentieth century, both during periods of regu-
lation and during predominantly “abolitionist” phases, stigmatizing a range of
women who worked in places where men socialized in contexts loaded with
class and gender tensions.23
Successive municipal ordinances regulating public prostitution from 1875 to
1936 were based on public health arguments, namely protecting the health of
customers and safeguarding the future of the Argentinian nation against the
menace of syphilis, and they were also based on moral arguments quite famil-
iar to contemporary commentators. As was the case in other countries that
implemented regulations concerning prostitution, the municipality of Bue-
nos Aires created a separate legal status for prostitutes, stipulated that regis-
tered prostitutes had to get compulsory medical examinations, established the
hours which they could be on the streets, and defined the outer a ppearance
of brothels and their location in relation to places of worship, theatres, and
educational establishments. In other words, it regulated their living and work-
ing conditions. Of course, such controls suggested that there were serious dif-
ficulties in implementation of the law and tremendous challenges in defining
who was a prostitute. Guy points out that those suspected of being clandestine
prostitutes had to pay a fine to the municipality but were not obliged to register;
those who registered had to submit to regular medical examinations and pay
taxes besides being treated like “part-time jail inmates”.24 Thus, in one sense
the ordinance for regulating prostitution attempted to create mechanisms in
order to separate prostitutes from “honest women” both spatially and legally
while at the same time it had the practical effect of encouraging avoidance,
which meant an increase of the “clandestine” sex trade.
The 1875 ordinance was also based on a peculiar legal fiction aimed at
avoiding another point that was difficult to define: coercion. In the municipal
regulation, it was assumed that, in order to be registered, a prostitute had to be
a free person of legal age who spontaneously decided to submit herself to the
municipal laws. The idea was that a registered woman freely and voluntarily
23 Marcial Quiroga, “Aspecto actual de la prostitución”, Semana Médica, 3 (1962), p. 1785;
Carretero, La Prostitución en Buenos Aires, p. 196; Sandra Gayol, Sociabilidad en Buenos
Aires: Hombres, honor y cafés, 1862–1910 (Buenos Aires, 2000).
24 Guy, El Sexo peligroso, p. 69.
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A Social History of Prostitution in Buenos Aires 367
renounced her honesty and, by the same token, state protection of it. Public
intervention in prostitution, therefore, was justified in order to protect public
health and public order. The failure of municipal regulation to separate situ-
ations of “free will” from “coercion” became evident over the years. Particu-
larly embarrassing was the widely-known registration of minors who could not
legally consent. Nevertheless, “everybody knew”, as a deputy stated, that any
minor could register herself in the municipality even though she could not get
married.25
The general attitude of the authorities regarding the issues of minors and
coercion in regulated prostitution is evident in a case about the corruption
of youths who were taken to court in 1877. Through it, we also have access to
some basic aspects of prostitution that Donna Guy argues had remained invis-
ible during the regulatory period.26 Two girls from the Argentinian provinces
of Santa Fe and Tucumán were found in a (licensed) brothel in the port area of
Paseo de Julio. Due to uncertainty about whether they were minors, police offi-
cers investigated their previous lives. Both women had not come directly from
their provinces to become prostitutes in Buenos Aires but had been working
in local brothels in the port city of Rosario. One of them stated that she had
previously worked in “houses of ill-repute” in small villages in rural areas, such
as Pergamino and San Pedro. The girl told the police chief that she had decided
to go to Buenos Aires because the owner of the brothel “whom she had met in
Santa Fe” had come to San Pedro and “told her that he was going around look-
ing for girls to bring to this city.” All the people involved seemed to agree that
the dispute over their ability to give full and spontaneous consent to live in
that brothel was, in practice, more related to their previous experience in pros-
titution than to their ages. Besides this, their story inadvertently made a record
of an internal circuit in Argentina which involved native young women who
made contacts and travelled in search of better working conditions. Through
this glimpse into a specific moment of their lives, we can imagine that the legal
definition of consent and corruption did not match their daily decisions.
25 For more on records of the legislative debates on the minimum age for women to reg-
ister themselves and the common knowledge that minors were working as prostitutes,
see Enrique Feinmann, Policía Social: Estudio sobre las costumbres y la moralidad pública
(Buenos Aires, 1913), pp. 38–76, esp. p. 48.
26 Colón or Alzarán, Cristobal, and Rosa Zabaleta for prostitution of minors. C, 12, A–F,
Criminal Court, National Archive, 1877. For further analysis on this and similar cases, see
María Dolores Quaglia, “Corrupción y prostitución infantil en Buenos Aires (1870–1904):
Una aproximación al tema”; José Luis Moreno, La Política social antes de la política social
(Caridad, beneficencia y política social en Buenos Aires, siglos xvii a xx) (Buenos Aires,
2000), pp. 205–223; Schettini, “Esclavitud en blanco y negro”, pp. 43–64.
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368 Schettini
Actually, every time an amendment to the regulation was discussed, leg-
islators had to tackle this legal fiction and the definition of prostitution that
it encompassed. As early as in 1887, nearly a decade after the first ordinance
came into force, Doctor Eugenio Ramirez, enthusiastic about A. Fournier’s
neo-regulationist ideas, found it important to explain in his reform proposals,
that “no woman may remain in a brothel against her will and she will only have
to mention this to the visiting inspector in order to have her request attended
by the police.”27 Besides hinting at the increasing criticism raining down on
regulationists, that statement suggests that there were increasing social dif-
ficulties in accepting coercive practices as being relevant in defining who was
a prostitute.
For this reason, during the 1890s municipal legislators once again returned
to the subject of how to define a prostitute while debating reforms to increase
the effectiveness of the regulations and overcome their many failings. In subse-
quent years, national and municipal legislators would return to the discussion
of the legal status of prostitutes several times when reforming municipal regu-
lations and when drawing up definitions of offences such as the corruption of
minors. From 1913 onwards, at the time of the adoption of the so-called Pala-
cios Law against the trafficking of women, the offence of procurement came
under scrutiny. Although it recognized that adult women could be forced into
prostitution, the Palacios Law was seen more as a “national” response to the
increasingly negative international reputation that Buenos Aires was acquir-
ing and less as a way of protecting the victims of sexual exploitation.28 The
notion that prostitutes were a vector for venereal diseases was invoked as a
justification for state regulation of the sex trade and it would not be strongly
challenged again until the 1920s. From 1921 onwards, the Argentine Penal Code
incorporated some features of the Palacios Law, and reforms of the municipal
regulation focused more on sexual exploitation.
In 1936, a social prophylaxis law was passed, giving rise to a broader de-
bate about whether this law ceased to regulate prostitution or whether it
27 By linking syphilis and degeneration, French doctor Alfred Fournier became the most
important exponent of neo-regulationism and the redrafting of regulations in the face of
abolitionist arguments. See Sergio Carrara, Tributo a Venus: A luta contra a sífilis no Brasil,
da passagem do século aos anos 40 (Rio de Janeiro, 1996), pp. 61–64. The author of the 1887
proposal was Doctor Eugenio Ramirez, Profilaxis Pública de la Sífilis. Reformas urgente a la
reglamentación de la prostitución (Estudios de higiene social) (Buenos Aires, 1887) (under-
lining as in the original).
28 Guy, El Sexo peligroso, pp. 41–42.
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A Social History of Prostitution in Buenos Aires 369
s pecifically outlawed brothels.29 The law banned “the creation of houses or
places in which prostitution is exercised or incited” and punished those who
“sustained, administered, or managed houses of ill-repute whether in an ex-
plicit or covert way.” Presidential Decree number 10.638 of 1944 reformed the
prophylaxis law, accepting the existence of regulated brothels near barracks on
the grounds that they would help tackle what was viewed as the threat of male
homosexuality. That decree also consolidated the interpretation that the 1936
law did not ban the exercise of prostitution but the “houses of ill-repute” in
which many women gathered. It set out that the “mere exercise of prostitution
by a woman in her home, individually or independently, does not constitute an
offence.” From that point onwards, whilst prostitution began to be discussed
publicly as an antidote to homosexuality, especially male homosexuality, it
was not deemed necessary to define “prostitution” or “brothel” any further.30
The absence of a new vocabulary to describe the abolitionist context, the
blaming of “clandestine prostitutes” (also at this point meaning “women who
worked in dance halls or boarding houses”) for the rise in venereal diseases to-
wards the end of the 1940s, and even the brief return to regulated prostitution
between 1954 and 1955 in the final days of the second Perón government, are all
factors suggesting that the community of Buenos Aires had been profoundly
marked by the experience of regulation that had left in its wake a particular
way of approaching and organizing the sex trade within the urban environ-
ment.31 In fact, throughout the second half of the twentieth century municipal
debates about where prostitution should be carried out continued to suggest
the idea that known prostitutes would voluntarily submit to an exceptional
order at first managed by the municipality and then by the police; that “order”,
however, was not written down.32
Once the social prophylaxis law of 1936 had shifted public debates to the
topic of venereal diseases, the problems associated with monitoring and lo-
cating prostitutes were also progressively removed from public debate, and
ultimately they were left in the hands of the police and their discretionary
29 Biernat, “Médicos, especialistas, políticos y funcionarios en la organización centralizada
de la profilaxis de las enfermedades venéreas en la Argentina (1930–1954)”, Anuario de
Estudios Americanos, 64 (2007), pp. 257–288, 278. For Rosario, see Mugica, La ciudad de las
Venus.
30 Guy, El sexo peligroso, p. 213. Horacio Caride argues that the regulation created the figure
of the “prostibule” in a state of tension with other collective housing and forms of com-
merce. Caride, “Lugares de mal vivir”, pp. 89–249.
31 Biernat, “Médicos, especialistas, políticos y funcionarios”, p. 285.
32 Goldar, La Mala vida; Carretero, Prostitución en Buenos Aires, pp. 173–200.
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370 Schettini
power which could be unleashed against women “soliciting” in the street.33
In this new era, the notion that most prostitutes operated alone in their apart-
ments or picked up clients in the street gave rise to police actions against a va-
riety of women, mostly Argentinian, who were often identified as “servants” or
“employees”, and this brought about a practice that would endure into the sec-
ond half of the twentieth century.34 At the same time, an international debate
was taking place about the hitherto undefined boundaries between consent
and coercion in the course of attempts to define the idea of sexual exploitation
itself.35 Thus, in Buenos Aires the definitions of prostitution, prostitute, and
brothel were negotiated with the public authorities throughout the twentieth
century in multiple social relations that were typically at the edge of legality.
The Labour Market: Regulated Prostitution
One of the main effects of the regulation of prostitution in Buenos Aires be-
tween 1875 and 1936 was the production of information about regulated pros-
titutes to the detriment of the unregulated sex trade that was registered only
in an indirect manner. The data available about registered women represent a
relevant source of information for historians as regards the characteristics of
the trade—that is, once its partiality in relation to the complexity of the sex
trade has been taken into account.
It is crucial to ponder over some of these indicators in light of other avail-
able documents. The over-representation of foreign prostitutes in the munici-
pal registers is arguably the one feature that has attracted the most attention
from contemporary commentators and historians. Donna Guy points out that
foreign observers were likely to misinterpret the official lists of houses due to
33 Grammático, “Obreras, prostitutas y mal venéreo”, pp. 116–135.
34 Goldar, La Mala vida; Carretero, Prostitución en Buenos Aires, pp. 173–200; Omar
Acha’s articles “Las sirvientas asesinas: Mal paso, delito y experiencia de clase en la Ar-
gentina peronista” and “Cuerpos y Sexualidades”, in Herramienta: Debate y crítica marxis-
ta (2013), discuss tensions over domestic workers’ sexuality in the context of the first
Peronism.
35 Cecilia Varela, “Entre las demandas de protección y autodeterminación: Los procesos de
judicialización de la trata de mujeres y niñas en la Argentina (2008–2011)”, in José Olivar et
al. (ed.), La prostitución hoy en América Latina: Entre el trabajo, políticas y placer (Bogotá,
2011); Cecilia Varela, “La campaña antitrata en la Argentina y la agenda supranacional”,
in Debora Daich and Mariana Sirimarco (eds), Género y violencia en el mercado del sexo:
politica, policia y prostitucion (Buenos Aires, 2015), pp. 109–150.
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A Social History of Prostitution in Buenos Aires 371
the recorded preponderance of foreign women at least in the early years, and
those lists usually referred to the owners of the houses rather than to the ten-
ants, among whom there were many more Argentinians.36
The brothel licensing system that came into force in 1875 seems, at least
in the early years, to have encouraged the development of regulated brothels
with numerous inmates and that made it much easier for owners to pay the
fees requested by the municipality. As a matter of fact, regulating prostitution
became a mechanism for transferring revenues generated by prostitution into
municipal coffers. Thus, multiple interests converged in the regulation of pros-
titution, which helps us understand why this was one of the main causes of
conflicts between the municipal authorities, the police, brothel owners, and
the prostitutes themselves.
The number of registered women rose from around 600 early in the twen-
tieth century to 1,128 in 1910.37 In 1910, Argentinian women represented just
14.2 per cent of the total number of registered women. Of the foreign women,
22.3 per cent were identified as Russian, 20 per cent as French, and almost the
same proportion, 20.4 per cent, as Uruguayan (although these were probably
European women). Spanish women represented 8 per cent and Italians 6.7 per
cent. The demographic profile remained roughly constant after the end of the
nineteenth century; registered prostitutes were mostly 18 to 25 years old, with
a literacy rate of 40 per cent.38 Although around one third of the women seem
to have had children or dependant relatives, the young age at which women
were registered might suggest a prevailing profile of women who had recently
arrived and had no local connection, and there were thereby more vulnerable
to being registered. This was the opinion of many contemporaries, such as for
example Doctor Looyer, who commented that trafficked women “are poor,
miserable women who do not know the language and who, despite earning 20
pesos a day, are content to receive only 3 pesos for themselves.”39
Throughout this period, the proportion of Jewish women among the owners
of licensed brothels was much higher than the overall proportion of the Jewish
population in Buenos Aires. Furthermore, in 1930, Jewish prostitutes were
estimated to represent around 30 per cent of registered prostitutes, while Jews
as a whole represented no more than 5 per cent of the population, and French
and Argentinian prostitutes each constituted approximately 22 per cent of the
36 Guy, El Sexo peligroso, p. 83.
37 Ibid., p. 92.
38 Ibid., p. 93.
39 Dr Carlos Looyer, Los Grandes misterios de la mala vida en Buenos Aires (Buenos Aires,
1911), p. 248.
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372 Schettini
total number of prostitutes.40 Yarfitz has pointed out that there was a particu-
lar concentration of registered brothels in the Once neighbourhood where the
Jewish population gradually converged in this period. This showed that there
was a link between prostitution and other types of business, and this helps to
contextualize the preoccupation of members of the Jewish community with
those involved in the sex trade.41
All of the authors working on this issue observed that those figures became
increasingly unreliable not only because they were influenced by the interests
of those producing them but also because they may reveal the efforts of the
women themselves to appear as being from the nationalities most valued by
customers. In fact, there are many references to Argentinian men having a pre-
dilection for French women, as they were seen as being synonymous with “civi-
lized” sex, and Jewish women for their sexual and racial “otherness”.42
Likewise, Guy has argued that the figures produced by the regulatory system
were used by foreign observers as proof that legalized prostitution in Buenos
Aires sustained the traffic of women. Besides taking no account of the local
female employment market, anti-trafficking organizations pulled a veil over
Argentinian-born prostitutes who were not registered in Buenos Aires but who
nonetheless were far more visible and active in inland cities such as Tandil and
Rosario.43
Local and foreign observers ascribed different meanings to the various na-
tionalities of the prostitutes they saw. Indirectly, those meanings revealed frag-
mentary aspects of the prostitutes’ work experiences and life after prostitution.
In 1907, for instance, criminologist Eusebio Gómez referred to native “creole”
prostitutes’ expectation that they would eventually return to their “place of
birth to live out a life of rest and relative honesty.”44 Although his observa-
tions were designed to differentiate native women from foreign ones, it is pos-
sible to find evidence, also among the European prostitutes, of expectations or
hopes for a chance to retire and move back to be with their families. As with
the overrepresentation of eastern European and Jewish prostitutes in official
40 McGee Deutsch, Crossing Borders, p. 110.
41 Yarfitz, “Polacos, White Slaves and Stille Chuppahs”, pp. 89–110.
42 McGee Deutsch, Crossing Borders, p. 106; Guy, El Sexo peligroso; Yarfitz, “Polacos, White
Slaves and Stille Chuppahs”, p. 93.
43 Guy, El Sexo peligroso, p. 94; McGee Deutsch, Crossing Borders, p. 110. 41 per cent of
Argentinian women were owners of brothels outside Buenos Aires; Yarfitz, “Polacos,
White Slaves and Stille Chuppahs”, p. 93, found many women who were “native to Argen-
tina” in census data for the year 1895.
44 Eusebio Gómez, La Mala vida en Buenos Aires (Buenos Aires, 2011 [1908]).
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A Social History of Prostitution in Buenos Aires 373
municipal documentation, there are also more accounts of the life experiences
and pathways of Jewish women who were the main focus of anti-trafficking
organizations in the early twentieth century.
That was the case of a Russian woman named Raquel Liberman, whose story
has endured because of her fame in denouncing the Jewish mutual aid society
Zwi Migdal as a white slavery organization that was trafficking Jewish women.
Her story became paradigmatic of the cause-effect connection between regu-
lation and traffic that was sustained by abolitionists internationally. Although
she was portrayed as a typical victim of traffickers, more recent information
brings to light aspects of her life that were not covered in the various reports.
Liberman arrived in a village in the province of Buenos Aires in the early 1920s
with her two young sons to live with her husband, who very soon afterwards
died of tuberculosis.45 Only then did she leave her family and go to Buenos
Aires to work as a prostitute. Neither Zwi Migdal nor the police ever knew ei-
ther that Liberman had been legally married in Warsaw or that she had two
sons who had stayed in the province in the care of family members.46 With
her silence and her decision to protect certain aspects of her life, she herself
helped perpetuate the stereotype of the Jewish prostitute who was tricked and
forced into prostitution. Likewise, whilst her decision to denounce her exploit-
ers to the police in Buenos Aires may be viewed as a courageous and excep-
tional one, it can be put in context by evidence that many other women from
a s imilar background in different parts of South America denounced their for-
mer partners and other men as pimps in certain circumstances.47
Frequent amendments to the municipal ordinances that regulated pros-
titution affected the organization of brothels. Whilst in the early years of
45 For different portrayals of Raquel Liberman and her image as the “typical victim of traf-
fickers”, see Myrtha Shalom, La Polaca: Inmigrantes, rufianes y esclavas a comienzos del
siglo xx (Buenos Aires, 2009); Patricia Suarez, Las Polacas: historias tártaras, casamentera,
La Varsovia (Buenos Aires, 2002); Nora Glickman, The Jewish White Slave Trade and the
Untold Story of Raquel Liberman (New York [etc.], 2000); Larry Levy, La Mancha de la
Migdal (Buenos Aires, 2007); for a broad discussion, see Yarfitz, “Polacos, White Slaves
and Stille Chuppahs”, pp. 111–149.
46 Glickman, The Jewish White Slave Trade, pp. 43–47.
47 Cristiana Schettini, “Viajando solas: prácticas de vigilancia policial y experiencias de pros-
titución en la América del Sur”, in Jorge Trujillo Bretón (ed.), En la Encrucijada. Historia,
marginalidad y delito en América Latina y los Estados Unidos de Norteamérica, siglos xix y
xx (Guadalajara, 2010), pp. 331–353. Yarfitz describes previous legal actions taken against
Zwi Migdal, which contextualizes the impact of Liberman’s denunciation. Yarfitz, “Pola-
cos, White Slaves and Stille Chuppahs”, pp. 115–116.
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374 Schettini
regulation houses with many residents were more convenient as they offset
the high cost of the licence that had to be purchased, the ordinances passed
from 1903 onwards legislated a reduction in the number of women per house
and abolished the defined areas for brothels. This gave way to the opening of
brothels in many more quarters of the city.48 At the same time, new ordinances
began to regulate the work of café waitresses, the main source of clandestine
prostitution according to the doctors of the time. The strictness of the new
rules seems to have increased clandestine prostitution.49 In 1908 there was a
return to a system of a dedicated zone for brothels located away from the city
centre. This new situation of spatial segregation contributed to a division be-
tween the “pure” and the “impure” Jewish communities.
In practice, throughout the whole period of regulation police officials re-
peatedly complained that municipal officials limited their freedom to act both
in terms of tackling the sex trade and in persecuting pimps. Meanwhile, ac-
cusations of police corruption were on the rise in line with reports on the traf-
ficking of women.
Narratives of the White Slave Trade
Narratives on the traffic of European women who might have been tricked and
enslaved in Buenos Aires brothels thanks to the wide scope for action made
possible via regulation by pimps and house owners and police corruption were
widespread in Argentina during the years of regulation. Buenos Aires also
gained an international reputation as a centre for the trafficking of women
in newspapers, League of Nations documents, and other reports produced
outside Argentina. This reputation should be seen in light of a confluence of
factors, among which stands out international abolitionist militancy in the
context of the persistence of licensed brothels in various forms during the first
decades of the twentieth century.
Locally, the existence of trafficking and its characteristics were the subject
of public debate. In 1908, in contrast to the many sensationalist stories in cir-
culation at the time, the young criminologist Eusebio Gómez stated in one of
his many studies on the underworld:
It is not exactly a question of the sale and purchase of women, as is widely
thought; nor did wily trickery, devious seduction, or violent sequestration
48 Guy, El Sexo peligroso, p. 83.
49 Ibid., p. 80.
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A Social History of Prostitution in Buenos Aires 375
play a part; no. The trade of white women in its truest form was nothing
more than the recruitment of women aware of their future fate and who
with a certain degree of freedom accepted the terms of a service hire con-
tract, whose iron regime was bearable and possibly even comfortable to
them […].50
Gómez’s and others’ ideas about trafficking indicate a distrust in the massive
waves of immigrants disembarking in Buenos Aires; for this reason, the inter-
national character of the sex trade was attributed to the cultural characteristics
of the recently-arrived unknown foreigners in terms of “a spirit of vassalage
and sensual corruption”. Some pages later, however, Gómez argued that there
was a “perverse” system that prevented women from changing their lives: when
they left the control of one exploiter, it was said that they fell straight into the
hands of another.
A few years later in 1913, as the tarnished reputation of Buenos Aires wors-
ened still more, Samuel Cohen, the Secretary General of the London-based
Jewish Association for the Protection of Girls and Women, visited the city and
found reason to doubt the outlines and dimensions of the stories circulating
in Europe.51 The registered women with whom he spoke told him that they
had already worked as prostitutes in Europe and that they had gone to Buenos
Aires expecting that they would continue to work in the sex trade.52 There was
a similar expectation when immigration resumed after the First World War. At
the beginning of the 1920s, a researcher working for the League of Nations was
told by a brothel owner in Europe, “They keep on going [to Buenos Aires] as if
they expected to find gold in the streets. It must be good as they say because
they won’t come back.”53 In a way, that is not so different from the expectations
of many other European migrants at the time who had gone in the hope of
finding a better life in the Americas.54 However, for the League of Nations, this
was further proof of the existence of the traffic.
50 Gómez, La Mala vida, p. 119.
51 On the subject of the worsening reputation of Buenos Aires, see Ernesto Bott, who tells
how at the start of 1913 the Foreign Affairs Minister began to distribute a publication to
Argentinian consulates and a memo to the press contradicting reports in the European
publications about the white slave trade in Buenos Aires. Ernesto Bott, Las Condiciones de
lucha contra la trata de blancas en Buenos Aires (Buenos Aires, 1916), p. 15.
52 McGee Deutsch, Crossing Borders, p. 111.
53 League of Nations, Report of the Special Body of Experts, p. 12.
54 A similar argument is developed by Yarfitz when he suggests that Zwi Migdal basically
worked like any other mutual aids association of Jewish immigrants at the time; Yarfitz,
“Polacos, White Slaves and Stille Chuppahs”, pp. 150–196.
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376 Schettini
The adoption of the Palacios Law in 1913, a law that criminalized for the first
time the exploitation of women over 21 years of age, was widely criticized for
its ineffectiveness. General police corruption and the contradictions between
the law and the regulatory system were the main factors that contemporaries
stressed as causes for its failure. In a revealing remark, another contemporary
observer, Ernesto Bott, commented that the law was “contrary to the customs
of Buenos Aires”, which suggested the reach of a “regulatory culture”, albeit
increasingly challenged.55 Bott’s observation allows us to add “internal condi-
tions” to the internationally established association between regulation and
trafficking. These included the naturalization of licenced brothels and cultural
tensions generated by a major increase in European immigration; the flourish-
ing of anti-liberal, nationalist, and conservative currents of ideas tinged with
anti-Semitism; and, finally, the actions of the Jewish community itself which
were organized against the stigma of prostitution.
In a detailed study of the many Jewish voluntary organizations and indi-
viduals involved in the fight against the trafficking of women, Edward Bristow
was of the opinion that the high visibility of Jews in Buenos Aires could partly
be an unintended consequence of the intervention in public debates by the
Jewish community through its reformist and rescue organizations. Because of
its preoccupation with the differentiation between “pure” and “impure” people
and with safeguarding the public image of the community in an increasingly
anti-Semitic context, its public actions in segregating the “impure” sectors of
the community ended up working against it by granting higher visibility to the
part of the community involved in the international sex trade.56
Coexistence in the same urban spaces and economic activities among
Jewish groups connected to white slavery and those who weren’t was made
more difficult by the reaction to the creation of the Mutual Aid Society
Varsovia (formally organized in 1906 and called Zwi Migdal after 1927), which
in 1930 was accused of covering for an organization of Jewish traffickers. As
happened in other places that received Jewish immigrants, the “impure”
(t’meiim) in Argentina faced discrimination from both their host society and
from the Jewish community. And as happened in other cities, Jewish men and
women involved in the sex trade were the first to acquire land to build a cem-
etery (1904) and a synagogue before the formal community was organized. The
organization performed burials and religious ceremonies in their own temple.
55 Guy, El Sexo peligroso, p. 150; Bott, Las Condiciones.
56 Edward Bristow, Prostitution and Prejudice: The Jewish Fight against White Slavery 1870–
1939 (Oxford, 1982).
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A Social History of Prostitution in Buenos Aires 377
Yarfitz has argued that the association actually fulfilled religious and mutual
aid duties among its members.
The legal case against Zwi Migdal came about during the rise to power of
a conservative government and at a time of economic crisis and increasing
nationalism.57 The evidence that Zwi Migdal was essentially an organization
of pimps operating under the guise of a mutual aid association was mainly
produced by police officer Julio Alsogaray. The main accusation against the
Zwi Migdal was about illegal association, not trafficking, which suggests that
there was a lack of legal proof.58 In fact, the case ended with the application of
the Ley de Residencia, as the law for the expulsion of foreigners was called. This
law, which was implemented in 1902, gave the Executive Branch Authority the
power to expel “undesirable” aliens without judicial proceedings.59 Alsogaray’s
book, La Trilogía de la trata de blancas, has been the main source for research
on the topic. However, some recent works have posited that there is a serious
need to further study the case in connection with other aspects of ethnic and
immigration experiences.60
The Labour Market: The World beyond Regulation
Authors who wrote on the topic of prostitution in Buenos Aires were unanimous
in acknowledging that the formal terms underpinning the municipal
regulations did not correspond to a complex and contradictory reality. Few
authors, however, made progress in identifying the scope for action and the
57 The existence of a mutual aid society and its achievements, such as purchasing a cem-
etery and a synagogue, later brought to light in the midst of a public scandal that re-
inforced the association between the trafficking of women and the Jewish community,
reflects and condenses the contradictions between the liberal principles that organised
society and the spreading of nationalistic, conservative, and anti-Semitic thinking in Ar-
gentina. For more on this see among others McGee Deutsch, Crossing Borders and Daniel
Lvovich, Nacionalismo y antisemitismo en la Argentina (Buenos Aires, 2003).
58 Julio Alsogaray, Trilogía de la trata de blancas (Buenos Aires, 1933); Levy, La Mancha de la
Migdal, p. 243.
59 Levy asserts that, based on the law, the members of the organization were deported to the
neighbouring country of Uruguay from where they had no difficulty in returning. Levy, La
Mancha de la Migdal, p. 248.
60 Yvette Trochon, La Ruta de Eros (Montevideo, 2006); José Luis Scarsi, “Cómo y por qué
se formó la Zwi Migdal”, Todo es historia, 482 (2007), pp. 6–22; McGee Deutsch, Crossing
Borders; Yarfitz, “Polacos, White Slaves and Stille Chuppahs”.
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378 Schettini
nanticipated ways that the prostitutes used this body of norms. From 1887
u
onwards, regulated brothels had to display a notice that stated that women
were “free to stay or not to stay there”. The forces that led them to stay, however,
were not always linked to the mythical figure of the pimp nor to the organi-
zation of pimps that benefited from the regulation but rather to a myriad of
complex factors including economic and cultural motivations. Indeed, the ma-
damas carried on several of these factors, such as, for example, Madam Blanca,
who had set up a brothel in La Boca at the start of the twentieth century and
bragged about having sway with the local police; she bound her women to the
brothel via everlasting debts that were never paid.61 As a law student, writer
Manuel Galvez also identified and described multiple forms of oppression of
foreign prostitutes in regulated brothels in 1905. Some years later however, he
offered up a different portrait of the world of prostitution in his novel Nacha
Regules (1918) whose main character was an Argentinian prostitute who was
a prisoner not of regulations or pimps but her own story of impossible love.62
Perhaps the most visible form of prostitution away from the regulated broth-
els was the so-called “casas de citas” or call houses (they also flourished in the
centre of Rio de Janeiro at the time to evade the vigilance of a police force that
lacked municipal ordinances). Descriptions from the time characterize them
as places where clandestine prostitutes worked, adulteresses could meet up
with their lovers, and minors ended up being seduced. According to Goldar,
the women who frequented these houses (but never lived there) were “newly
initiated into the life or pretended to be.”63 Descriptions like his suggest that
an increase in the number of these places of a more or less distinguished kind
gave rise to a wide variety of affective and sexual encounters. Classified by doc-
tors and police officers as acts of “clandestine prostitution”, these encounters
may better be understood as part of the changes in urban nightlife and enter-
tainment, the increased circulation of women in the urban environment, and
the possibilities for the sex trade that were very different from the stereotypes
of pimp and slave.
Also highly revealing are observations by the poet Sebastián Tallón about
the so-called “casas de comisionistas” or “agent houses”, a kind of intermedi-
ary between city and rural brothels. Besides suggesting the existence of na-
tional sex work circuits linking small villages to the city (overshadowed by the
61 Goldar, La Mala vida, pp. 34–35.
62 Manuel Gálvez, La trata de blancas (Buenos Aires, 1905); Manuel Gálvez, Nacha regules
(Buenos Aires, 1919).
63 Goldar, La Mala vida, p. 39.
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A Social History of Prostitution in Buenos Aires 379
predominance at the time of reports on the white slave trade), Tallón outlines
the operation of these houses which displayed similarities with many other
employment agencies for women seeking work as domestic servants or wet-
nurses, mirroring the pattern of female employment at the beginning of the
century.64 According to this author, it was a form of “legal white slavery” of
which very little was known at the time, involving women who “came from afar
without a protector, and stayed there, paying for their lodging. For them these
houses were something akin to an employment agency.”65 In this way, some
women waited for “a job inland” to materialize, whilst others waited for a job in
the capital. The “comisionista”, or agent, made arrangements with “the inland
boss requiring staff” and the “rentistas” or “rentiers” who left the women in
their care while the women tended to remain trapped in these circuits through
debts that were impossible to repay. In this peculiar organization of the sex
work market, the disruptive element was, according to Tallón, men identified
as “cafishos” or “pimps” and even tango musicians who took the women with
them to other places.
That was how Tallón contextualizes prostitution in the female labour
market at the time. He points to the existence of women who lived in r elative
autonomy and portrays the pimp not as an agent of coercion, but precisely
the opposite: as a break in the circuits set up by these employment agencies.
Finally, he notes the importance of prostitution as a setting for male and
popular socializing. Around it, diverse elements of the informal economy
flourished. In these “agent houses”, for instance, there was non-stop dancing,
which created work opportunities for many creole tango orchestras.66
Similarly, a few cases of men who were expelled from Brazil and travelled
from Buenos Aires with young “artists” on tour further distinguishes the men
identified in police documents as “pimps”, “procurers”, or “cáftenes” from the
stereotypical coercive exploiter. An analysis of the police investigations upon
which the expulsions were based in light of the organization of a labour
market in the variety theatre in South American cities reveals the existence of
transnational employment circuits and sheds light on the conflicts between the
“artists” and entrepreneurs. This was a market in which young female singers
and dancers travelled under employment contracts that imposed on them
64 Cecilia Allemandi, “El servicio doméstico en el marco de la transformaciones de la ciudad
de Buenos Aires, 1869–1914”, Diálogos, 16 (2012), pp. 385–415. For more on the Argentinian
female labour market, see Lobato, Historia de las Trabajadoras en la Argentina.
65 Sebastián Tallón, El Tango en sus etapas de música prohibida (Buenos Aires, 1959), p. 42.
66 Tallón, El Tango en sus etapas, p. 44; Pellarolo, Sainetes, cabaret, minas y tangos.
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380 Schettini
many hours of rehearsal, many hours on stage, and other unwritten conditions
such as having to live in particular “artists’ boarding houses” and accept visits
from men who would pay their bills in return for their company. In this respect,
any male companion who occasionally prevented women artists from carrying
out some of these activities came to be viewed as a threat by entrepreneurs,
directors, and managers. Oddly, it was usually at this point that the local police
accused these young men of being pimps whilst the entrepreneurs, directors,
and managers who more directly benefited financially from the sexual, social,
and artistic activities of the women were never investigated.67
This is evidence that suggests that regulated prostitution coexisted with
multiple forms of work. Both worlds did not seem so radically separated.
Many foreign women arrived within the framework of dependency relation-
ships with the owners of the licenced houses who paid for their tickets, and
eventually those women changed houses and dependency relationships. Oth-
ers set out as independent workers with the expectation of finding an opening
in licensed houses. In order to define the “real” characteristics of traffic, the
League of Nations sent a team of North American undercover agents to Bue-
nos Aires (followed by Montevideo and Rio de Janeiro, in the South American
part of the research) in 1924. The agents observed that many of the women
working on the streets in the port area solicited discretely, taking their cli-
ents to flats or hotel rooms. They also found women who solicited in certain
restaurants and at the Casino Theatre. During interviews made with some
of these women, they confirmed what an owner of licenced houses had told
them: if prostitutes specialized in oral sex (the “French way” or “perversion”),
they could make between 10 and 20 pesos per client, while at an “honest”
job they would not make more than 4 pesos a day. A girl could see an average
of 15 men per day, as one informant e xplained. Even if they had to give half the
money obtained to the house owner, “they can get a nice few dollars together
in a few years.”68
Thus, even having to pay high percentages to different people, such as the
owner of the hotel or the brothel they frequented, those women expected to
make enough to save up and increase their margin of autonomy in the market.
The exploratory trips made by the League of Nations’ agents in Buenos A ires
show a diverse universe of possibilities of dependency relationships. Their
questions revealed a preconceived idea about such relationships, such as
67 Cristiana Schettini, “South American Tours: Work Relations in the Entertainment Market
in South America”, International Review of Social History, 57 (2012), pp. 129–160.
68 “Clandestine Prostitution”, 24 June, 1924. League of Nations Archive [hereafter lna], box
S 171.
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A Social History of Prostitution in Buenos Aires 381
that they involved young and inexperienced women (“greenies”) who were
seduced and induced into prostitution. However, their vision was repeatedly
questioned and broadened by their interlocutors from the “underworld”. The
interviewed women often told stories in which they cast out their husbands or
lovers for being virtual parasites. A Turkish woman at the Casino Theatre sum-
marized it thus: “That’s all the men here are good for! They won’t work and they
want money! I kicked him out!” At the same time, a male informant explained
over and over again that the best women for a sex market like Buenos Aires
were not the inexperienced young women but “business girls”, experienced
girls who were willing to give oral sex.69
They could work on their own, with or without a steady partner; however,
the informant stressed, probably trying to make himself sound important, that
they still needed “a man” to negotiate working conditions with the owners of
the houses, municipal officials, and the police.70 Nevertheless, the pathways of
some of the women who were identified as members of Zwi Migdal in Yarfitz’s
study, some of whom prosperous house owners, former prostitutes, and ma-
damas, demonstrate that for some women, such accumulations of profit and
degrees of autonomy were carefully brought into being.
The Abolitionist Period
Initial resistance to the regulation of prostitution was replaced at the begin-
ning of the twentieth century by a widely extended vision that the coercive
aspects of the system were in accordance with Argentinian “customs” and
“nature”. Nevertheless, critics of the regulation system, such as feminists and
socialists, went about denouncing the limits and inefficiencies of the system,
even as it was repeatedly reformed. In 1934, licensed brothels were abolished
in the federal capital, and in 1936 the regulatory system was abolished nation-
ally through the adoption of the social prophylaxis law which was based on a
draft law project by socialist deputy Angel Giménez. This was a time when an
69 Argentine Report. Appendix n.4: “Suspicious Case”. lna, box S 171. The extra value ac-
corded to foreign and older prostitutes due to their greater experience in the trade was
a recurrent theme among clients. In the mid-1930s, for instance, police officer Ernesto
Pareja suggested that men from Buenos Aires preferred European prostitutes because
they were seen as “veterans of the trade”. Ernesto Pareja, La Prostitución en Buenos Aires
(Buenos Aires, 1937).
70 At one point, the informant told the undercover investigator: “A green girl is twice as
much trouble as a wife. […] The girl must be an expert.” “Traffic in women and children”,
pp. 7–9, June, 1924. lna, box S 171.
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382 Schettini
increasingly eugenic perspective was spreading through Argentina. Giménez
himself was a member of the Argentinian Society of Biotypology, Eugenics,
and Social Medicine. The 1936 law made provisions for coercive mechanisms
aimed at preventing the spread of venereal diseases. It made prenuptial medi-
cal certificates compulsory for young men, with medical treatment and obliga-
tory medical interment for those found to be sick, along with sex education.71
At the time, people disputed whether prostitution practised outside of
houses of ill-repute, basically individual prostitution, was prohibited or not
under this law. Its adoption heralded a long period in which the police ap-
pear to have acquired more routine discretion to act in terms of monitor-
ing brothels and prostitutes who carried out their business in the streets.
In the beginning, for example, Manuel Fresco, governor of the province of
Buenos Aires, closed some of the brothels until they complied with the new
rules of the General Office of Hygiene.72 In subsequent years, the uncer-
tainty surrounding this legal framework seems to have fostered greater police
monitoring, repression, and probably even involvement in running brothels
from apartments in the vein of the old regulated brothels, along with action
against women who picked up their clients on the streets, or in cafés or bars
in various parts of the city, but especially in areas near the river. From the
1950s onwards, women waited for clients at different times in cafés in the city
centre.73
Although the bibliography for this period focuses on official policies on the
topic and mostly on the legislation and conditions of anti-venereal disease
campaigns, there is evidence that various “regulationist” practices were
retained, such as the closure of particular brothels, medical interventions, and
the acceptance of legal brothels in military areas and national territories.74 In
fact, between 1954 and 1955 there was a brief return to regulation in response to
a sex scandal involving young soldiers which occurred in the midst of a conflict
71 Miranda, “Buenos Aires, entre Eros y Tanatos”, p. 109.
72 Ibid., p. 110.
73 Carretero, Prostitución en Buenos Aires, p. 189.
74 María Luisa Mugica found that in the first months after the law of social prophylaxis
was implemented some prostitutes in the city of Rosario tried to attract their clients by
proudly exhibiting their health booklets. They used this document like the earlier official
medical examination, unintendedly putting doctors in the awkward position of being
their guarantors. In the doctors’ view, this was a regular medical certificate that had no
resemblance to the previous official medical certificates issued under the system of regu-
lation. Mugica, La ciudad de las Venus.
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A Social History of Prostitution in Buenos Aires 383
between the Peronist government and the Catholic Church.75 The argument
in evidence from the mid-twentieth century onwards that the regulation of
prostitution might be an effective response to male homosexuality and to what
continued to be called “clandestine prostitution” (in reference to women work-
ing as prostitutes in a covert form in bars and cafés) offers hints about the
impact in subsequent public debates of the five decades of regulation between
1875 and 1936.
Recent Trends
Throughout the second half of the twentieth century, the control and moni-
toring of prostitution was carried out through the discretionary activities of
police officers, which led to the police becoming increasingly involved in orga-
nizing the sex trade in the city. This was evident in the periodical outlining of
red zones, but also in their participation as organizing agents in the sex busi-
ness. Prostitution thereby became yet another activity that contributed to the
financial autonomy of the police.76 Because of this, debates about prostitution
began to reflect the tensions and broader public debates about the limits and
scope of police powers in the city and about constitutional and human rights.
Although there are no substantial studies on the period from the 1950s to the
1990s, there is scope for further investigations into whether the ensuing peri-
ods of the military dictatorship (1966–1970 and 1976–1983) had a legitimizing
effect on police activities in the sex trade.
The scarce information and knowledge about this period, which reflects
a particular view that associated prostitution with cultural and behavioural
shifts in Buenos Aires society during this period. Throughout the decades
following the 1930s, the police practice of imprisoning people to interrogate
them became generalized, giving rise to a wide range of abuse. Statistics avail-
able for the period usually refer to women interned in hospitals to be t reated
75 Guy, El Sexo peligroso, pp. 213–239.
76 Sofía Tiscornia (ed.), Burocracias y violencia. Estudios de antropología juridica (Buenos
Aires, 2004), esp. pp. 89–125; Marcelo Sain, “La policía en las ciencias sociales: Ensayo
sobre los obstáculos epistemológicos para el estudio de la institución policial en el campo
de las ciencias sociales”, in Mariana Sirimarco (ed.), Estudiar la policía: La mirada de las
ciencias sociales sobre la institución policial (Buenos Aires, 2010), pp. 27–56; and Debora
Daich, “Contravenciones y prostitución: La producción burocrática-administrativa de es-
tadísticas”, Papeles de Trabajo, 24 (2012), pp. 31–48; Deborah Daich and Mariana Sirimarco,
“Policías y prostitutas en la Argentina: el control territorial en clave de género”, in Daich
and Sirimarco, Género y violencia, pp. 61–84.
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384 Schettini
for syphilis, which very often was brought about through violent police
intervention.
In 1994, ten years after the 1983 return to democracy, the city of Buenos Ai-
res became autonomous. One of the first effects of this was that in 1998 the
police lost its power to arrest prostitutes as a way of controlling and moni-
toring the sex trade. In turn, a reform of the contravention code was debated
once the municipal government was back in the hands of politically conser-
vative groups. The debate once again turned to determining the advantages
and disadvantages of drawing up a red zone, and to stipulating a minimum
required distance from places of worship and educational establishments.
At the beginning of 1994, women prostitutes founded ammar, Asociación
de Mujeres Meretrices de la Argentina (Association of Prostitute Women of Ar-
gentina). Today there are two basic trains of thought regarding prostitution:
one trend has been influenced by radical feminist groups, which see prostitutes
as victims and prostitution as “sexual exploitation”, whilst the other tends to
conceive of them as “sex workers” and pursues policies of de-victimization and
acknowledgement of basic labour rights.77
Recent anthropological scholarship has identified a wide variety of situ-
ations, working arrangements, and employment conditions behind the
small clues left by sex trade advertising, such as the widespread practice of
distributing small flyers in public spaces advertising sexual services in apart-
ments. These small ads, which include photos of naked women and telephone
numbers, may be a front for women working independently, either alone or
with other women, or they may be managed by the police or pimps. On the
whole, they reveal the existence of women seeking to leave street prostitution,
whilst also hinting at a reality far more complex than the one-dimensional
concept of the sexual exploitation view of prostitution espoused by the aboli-
tionist feminist hegemony in Argentina.78
For her part, Cecilia Varela explains the local, national and transnational
connections involved in the strong resurgence of stories about the traffick-
ing of women in the last decade in Argentina. Varela identifies a resurgence
of trafficking stories about Dominican women based on reports in the pop-
ular press. There are remarkable similarities with the stories that circulated
at the start of the twentieth century. The basic storylines emphasize trickery
77 See note 7 and Mario Pecheny and Mónica Petracci, “Derechos humanos y sexualidad en
la Argentina”, pp. 43–69.
78 Debora Daich, “Los Papelitos de la prostitución: Hacia una descripción feminista y densa
de la prostitución en Buenos Aires”, in José Olivar et al. (eds), La prostitución hoy en Améri-
ca Latina: Entre el trabajo, políticas y placer (Bogotá, 2011).
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A Social History of Prostitution in Buenos Aires 385
through promises of work, indebtedness, and the kidnapping of women who
are then obliged to live and work in brothels. These stories conceal a range of
arrangements “featuring varying levels of autonomy” for the women, and also
the varying conditions of the sex trade involving the street, cabarets, and apart-
ments. The spread of trafficking narratives from 2005 onwards has occurred in
parallel with criticisms of the existing legal framework, which was said only
to cover up the international dimension of trafficking without acknowledging
the existence of internal networks. Abolitionist feminist organizations there-
fore began to call for the creation of legal policies for trafficking, even in the
case of women of legal age who consent to be prostitutes.79
On the whole, the history of sexual work in Buenos Aires is a good case for
a reflection on the historical construction of certain legal frameworks and
the meanings they acquire in the lives of different individuals. Between both
extremes—that of the regulatory fiction, which assumes the existence of self-
determined women, free from any coercion, and that of abolitionism, which
tends to see all prostitutes through the prism of victimization (in as far as
prostitution is always seen as a “form of violence against women”)—the wom-
en who have been involved in prostitution in Buenos Aires have shed light,
through their livelihood strategies, on the contradictions, borders, and gaps in
the diverse forms of the organization of sexual commerce over the last century.
79 Varela, “Entre las demandas de protección y autodeterminación”.
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chapter 15
Prostitution in the us: Chicago
Mary Linehan
Introduction
Chicago, Illinois, is located on the south-eastern shore of Lake Michigan. As
a portage between the Great Lakes and Mississippi River, it has always been
an international trade and transportation centre. By the mid-eighteenth cen-
tury, the Potawatomis controlled the area. In the 1780s, the first non-native
settler—a trader with French and African antecedents—arrived. Around 1800,
Chicago was home to troops and rival traders from France, England, and the
United States, as well as the Potawatomi. The us solidified its position in Chi-
cago during the War of 1812. By 1833, the Potawatomi were forcibly removed
and, in 1837, Chicago was incorporated as a town with 200 residents. It very
quickly grew. Between 1840 and 1890, the population grew from 4,000 to over
one million making Chicago the fifth largest city in the world. This population
was predominantly white, with 77 per cent being immigrants or their children.
They came from all parts of Europe, the Middle East, and Asia, but the majority
were German, Irish, Polish, and Italian. From 1910–1930, the number of black
Chicagoans increased from about 44,000 to 234,000. Still, as late as 1940, 91 per
cent of Chicagoans were white. Since the 1950s, however, the city’s population
has declined from 3.6 million to about 2.7 million. It is now the third largest
city in the us. The population decline was spurred by racially-motivated sub-
urbanization by whites who opposed integration, as well as by the changing
global economy and deindustrialization through which the city lost hundreds
of thousands of working class jobs. Today, Chicago remains an international
transportation and trade hub, with a diverse population that is roughly 33 per
cent black, 32 per cent white, 29 per cent Latino, and 6 per cent Asian.
Befitting Chicago’s historic role as a major industrial city, a transportation
hub, a centre for academic research, and the epicentre of Progressive Era (1891–
1920) prostitution policy, there is a richly documented history of sex work in
the city. However, the scholarship is stronger in some periods than in others.
There are two eras in which substantial research has been done. The first ex-
tends from the end of the Civil War in 1865 to the early 1930s. The second pe-
riod encompasses the first eight years of the twenty-first century. Based on the
availability of source material, this paper will often compare these two periods.
© Mary Linehan, 2017 | doi 10.1163/9789004346253_016
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Prostitution in the us: Chicago 387
The historical research that has been carried out includes Mary Line-
han’s dissertation, “Vicious Circle: Prostitution, Reform, And Public Policy in
Chicago”, which surveys much of the nineteenth century through 1930. Strong
studies focusing on the Progressive Era include Cynthia Blair’s book I’ve Got
to Make My Livin’: Black Women’s Sex Work in Turn of the Century Chicago and
Kevin Mumford’s Interzones: Black/White Sex Districts in Chicago and New York
in the Early Twentieth Century. This history is continued in an article by Anya
Jabour, “Prostitution Policies and Feminism in Modern America”, which dis-
cusses the evolution of the Chicago Morals Court from 1913 to 1932.1
Serious social science research into Chicago’s sex industry has also focused
on the Progressive Era, as with The Social Evil in Chicago which was written by
the municipally appointed Chicago Vice Commission (cvc). In 1933, a Uni-
versity of Chicago sociology student, Walter Reckless, published his disserta-
tion as a book titled Vice in Chicago. However, sixty-eight years passed before a
new spate of empirical works emerged. In 2001 and 2002, the Center for Impact
Research released two studies that used interviews with prostitutes, police,
and service providers to document the lives and work experiences of Chicago
sex workers. In 2004, legal researcher Jody Raphael used the story of Olivia,
a woman who spent nineteen years working the streets of Chicago, to trace
the trajectory of a woman’s entrance into prostitution and the difficulties in-
volved in exiting the business. Three years later, Steven Levitt and Sudhir Alladi
Venkatesh used economic and ethnographic research to calculate the experi-
ences of streetwalkers in three south-side neighbourhoods.2
1 Mary Linehan, “Vicious Circle: Prostitution, Reform, and Public Policy in Chicago, 1830–1930”,
(Unpublished Ph.D., University of Notre Dame, 1991); Cynthia Blair, “I’ve Got to Make My Liv-
in’”: Black Women’s Sex Work in Turn-of-the-Century Chicago (Chicago, 2010); Kevin Mumford,
Interzones: Black/White Sex Districts in Chicago and New York in the Early Twentieth Century
(New York, 1997); Anya Jabour, “Prostitution Politics and Feminist Activism in Modern Amer-
ica“, Journal of Women’s History, 25 (2013), pp. 141–164. Only one woman is known to have
written of her own experiences as a prostitute in Chicago; see Ben Lindsey, Madeleine: An
Autobiography (New York: 1919).
2 Chicago Vice Commission, The Social Evil in Chicago (Chicago: 1911), hereafter cited as The So-
cial Evil; Walter Reckless, Vice in Chicago (Chicago: 1933); Claudine O’Leary and Olivia How-
ard, “The Prostitution of Women and Girls in Metropolitan Chicago”, (Chicago: Center for
Impact Research, 2001); Jody Raphael and Deborah L. Shapiro, “Sisters Speak Out: The Lives
and Needs of Prostituted Women in Chicago”, (Chicago: Center for Impact Research, 2002);
Jody Raphael, Listening to Olivia: Violence, Poverty, and Prostitution, (Boston: 2004); Steven
Levitt and Sudhir Alladi Venkatesh, “An Empirical Analysis of Street-level Prostitution”, (Un-
published report, University of Chicago, 2007).
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388 Linehan
To complement the Chicago story, reference will occasionally be made to
prostitution in New York City to the east, New Orleans to the south, and San
Francisco to the west. Like Chicago, these cities were important centres of sex-
ual commerce from, at least, the nineteenth century to the present and are his-
torically well-documented. Timothy Gilfoyle’s City of Eros considers sex work
in New York from 1790–1920 and that history is continued through World War ii
in Elizabeth Clement’s Love for Sale. Alecia Long’s The Great Southern Babylon
considers race and sex work in New Orleans between 1865 and 1920. Josh Sides
surveys prostitution in San Francisco from the 1849 Gold Rush to the present
in Erotic City. Finally, sexual commerce in the Progressive Era and in the post-
industrial north are, respectively, the focus of Ruth Rosen’s The Lost Sisterhood
and Susan Dewey’s Neon Wasteland.3
Definitions
Despite tremendous increases in opportunities for women, several sexual revo-
lutions, and a myriad of policies and programmes designed to end prostitution
and, at times, improve the lives of sex workers, prostitution in 2014 has many
similarities to the way it was practiced in the past. It is still the work choice of
primarily young, marginalized women with financial needs. Violence, disease,
and police malfeasance are often the hazards of doing business. Prostitutes are
still publicly stigmatized and shunned by “respectable” Chicagoans. However,
women in this line of work continue to express agency and strive, with more
or less success, to make the realities of sex work more amenable to their needs.
Three things about commercial sex in Chicago should be noted from the
outset. Firstly, boys, men, and transgender individuals have prostituted in the
city since at least the 1880s. However, women and girls have always predomi-
nated and they are the focus of this essay. Secondly, while scholars have in-
tensely debated the use of the words “prostitution” and “sex work”, the terms
are used interchangeably in this study. For some women, it was an empower-
ing opportunity to control and profit from their own sexuality and sex work
seemed little different than the other options available to them. For others,
it was degrading, desperate, and exploitive. The interchanging terminology
reflects both of these realities. Thirdly, the extant sources do not generally
3 Timothy Gilfoyle, City of Eros (New York, 1992); Elizabeth Clement, Love for Sale (Chapel
Hill, 2006); Alecia Long, The Great Southern Babylon (Baton Rouge, 2004); Josh Sides, Erotic
City (New York, 2009); Ruth Rosen, The Lost Sisterhood (Baltimore, 1982); Susan Dewey, Neon
Wasteland (Berkeley, 2011).
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Prostitution in the us: Chicago 389
present both realties. The scholarship and memoirs available overemphasize
the negative aspects of prostitution and only occasionally grant agency to the
women they study. Accordingly, this paper must be speculative about the po-
tential rewards of sex work in Chicago.
Social Profiles
Prostitution, or sex as a purely commercial transaction, was rare among the
Potawatomi, if it existed at all before Europeans arrived in the Chicago area.
The first French traders found native women to be “modest” and intermarried
with them, either formally or “in the manner of the country”, without legal or
religious sanction. These unions gave traders acceptance and access to trade
networks and produced strong networks of métis or biracial children. For
British officers, however, this miscegenation created a race of “base, cowardly,
abandoned wretches”.4
As the lands in the area of what would become Chicago came under the
control of the us government, British prejudices remained. Racial mixing and
“in-country” marriages were considered grossly immoral and resulted in pros-
ecution for adultery or fornication. Potawatomi women were seen as entirely
lacking in purity and submissiveness. There is some indication that deteriorat-
ing conditions for natives in the 1820s and ‘30s led to increased alcohol con-
sumption and some debauchery that served to confirm the purview of whites
about “immodest” native women. It is possible that as they struggled to ac-
culturate and watched the destruction of their homeland and culture, some
women coped through—or were forced into—prostitution. By the time of
the signing of the 1833 Treaty of Chicago, the Potawatomi and other tribes had
been driven from Chicago.5
For the remainder of the nineteenth century, white women provided most
of the sexual labour in Chicago. Although white women are historically over-
represented in brothel prostitution, only 15 per cent of brothel prostitutes in
Chicago in 1880 were black. Of the white women, 78 per cent were native born.
In a southern city like New Orleans, whose culture of commercial sexuality
rested on the allure of sex across the colour line, black women were more
4 Albert Hurtado, “When Strangers Met”, Frontiers, 17 (1996), pp. 52–75, 54; Ann Searcy, “The
Value of Ethnohistorical Reconstructions of American Indian Type Personality”, Transactions
of the Kansas Academy of Science, 68 (1965), pp. 274–282, 274–275; Lucy Eldersveld Murphy,
“Public Mothers”, Journal of Women’s History, 14 (2003), pp. 142–166.
5 Murphy, “Public Mothers”, pp. 146, 152.
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390 Linehan
prominent in off-street prostitution. As a more remote, western town, San
Francisco sex workers were even more racially and ethnically diverse, includ-
ing European immigrants and African Americans, as well as Mexican, Chinese,
and Japanese women.6 Frontier cities were overwhelmingly male (62 per cent
in nineteenth century Chicago), transient, and working class. Since such men
were often unable to marry and start a family, prostitution was accepted as a
“necessary evil” to meet the sexual demands of these men and preserve the
social order. While seeing prostitution as necessary for public order, most
nineteenth-century Chicagoans also saw people who engaged in extra-marital
sex as sinful and thus prostitution was also a moral problem. These women
may have been considered “morally weak”, but they built a large and, for some,
lucrative industry. Sex work in Chicago was never legal as it was elsewhere, but
it was not entirely illegal either. In 1881, the Illinois Appellate Court ruled that
the cursory laws against prostitution applied only to patrons and pimps. While
women, especially women of colour, who sold sex were occasionally arrested
for fighting, public intoxication, and theft, as long as they confined their sex
work to recognized vice districts they were not bothered by the police. Outside
the districts, prostitutes were viewed as a nuisance and small fines were used
to shepherd prostitution back into the districts.7 After 1865, doctors wanting to
expand their powers over women’s bodies (as they had done with the first anti-
abortion laws) persuaded profit-seeking municipal officials to establish regu-
lated, medically inspected sex districts as was being done in many European
cities. Whether such us districts were legalized, as in New Orleans’ Storyville,
or tacitly tolerated as in Chicago, they became the standard response to the
“necessary evil” of prostitution in the last third of the nineteenth century.8
By the start of the twentieth century, Chicago was an established city with
a more equalized sex ratio and new ideas about sexuality and policing began
to spread across the country. These changes led to a criminalization of female
sexuality outside of marriage, including prostitution. Instead of small fines, sex
workers were placed in newly built institutions, sent to specialized courts, and
entered into probation.9 Chicago’s Revised Criminal Code of 1905 made pros-
titution a crime. By 1911, there were ten state and city laws against sexual com-
merce and the city authorities used them to close the tolerated sex districts
6 Blair, “I’ve Got to Make My Livin’”, p. 28; Long, Great Southern Babylon, p. 193; Sides, Erotic City,
p. 20.
7 The Social Evil, pp. 25–26, 127; Chicago Tribune, 6 February 1856, 20 August 1857, 9 April 1859,
14 August 1871; Chicago Times, 6 January 1864, 20 February 1870.
8 Long, Great Southern Babylon, p. 107.
9 Rosen, The Lost Sisterhood, pp. 19–27.
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Prostitution in the us: Chicago 391
as part of a global effort to abolish prostitution.10 This process was completed
by 1913 and the criminality of women’s sexual labour was confirmed by the
creation of a specialized Morals Court that prosecuted and even persecuted
prostitutes. As this happened, the sex industry became dominated by men, in-
cluding men involved in organized crime, and they had the wherewithal to buy
or bail women’s way out of court.
Criminalization separated sex work in the public mind from “immoral”
behaviour like adultery and premarital sex. A new definition of prostitution
emerged. In the words of a modern researcher, it is “the exchange of money or
something of value—including drugs, shelter, or other survival needs—for sex-
ual activity. This includes vaginal, oral, and anal sex, as well as manipulation of
another person’s genitals for the purpose of sexual arousal.”11 By the turn of the
twenty-first century, there were approximately 16,000 women in the six-county
Chicagoland area who met the definition of a professional prostitute (at least
part of the time), although many of them did not identify themselves as pros-
titutes. These women saw the commodification of sex as “how women get by”,
“dating for dollars”, and “survival sex”. The latter term dates to the nineteenth
century for black women and at least back to the Great Depression for white
women. It connotes that prostitution is one of many albeit highly stigmatized
forms of gendered labour that poor people engage in as part of a broader mix
of strategies for economic survival.12 In 2000, there were thirty-three munici-
pal and state criminal statues directly related to prostitution. They are primar-
ily enforced against women, although there have been brief periods in which
male customers were subject to more police harassment.13
Throughout the 1900s and beyond, its centrality to international transporta-
tion and its large immigrant communities allegedly made Chicago a locus for
sexual trafficking. During the Progressive Era, Chicago was the us centre of a
widespread belief that innocent, white, country girls were being kidnapped
and forced into sexual slavery by sinister immigrant men. This myth was pro-
moted by ministers, state’s attorneys, the Women’s Christian Temperance
Union, prominent feminists like Jane Addams, and the us Congress as a way
10 George Worthington and Ruth Topping, Specialized Courts Dealing with Sex Delinquency
(New York, 1925), pp. 6–11; Michael Willrich, City of Courts: Socializing Justice in Progressive
Era Chicago (Cambridge, 2003), p. 61; Jabour, “Prostitution Politics”, p. 144.
11 O’Leary and Howard, “The Prostitution”, p. 6.
12 Dewey, Neon Wasteland, p. 4; Rosen, Lost Sisterhood, p. 80.
13 Ibid., pp. 6, 29; Chicago Tribune, 30 September 2007, 11 January 2008, 27 February 2009, 17
September 2009.
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392 Linehan
to capture attention and push for other reform objectives.14 In the 1930s, a Uni-
versity of Chicago sociologist disproved the “white slavery” accusations of the
Progressive Era. Other researchers, however, maintained that, almost always
by coercion or force, women and girls from other countries or other places in
the us were brought to Chicago. It was claimed that they were compelled to
prostitute themselves for the profit of the traffickers and then they moved to
other locations.15 It was argued that constant relocation kept women from es-
tablishing contacts with those who might provide assistance and made it pos-
sible for traffickers to avoid detection by law enforcement agencies. Because of
the supposed coercion involved, such “sex slaves” were perceived to be victims
and received public and police sympathy that is often withheld from other sex
workers.16 In the 2010s, local women controlled by pimps are also beginning to
be viewed as victims of trafficking and to receive a share of the small amount
of aid and resources available.17
Prostitution in Chicago has always been a young woman’s enterprise. Al-
though census records from the Gilded Age and Progressive Era (1880–1920)
reveal that there were self-identified prostitutes in their 50s and 60s, the vast
majority of women were in their 20s. In the 1880s, most women entered Chi-
cago prostitution between 19 and 22 years of age, with black women at the
older end of the spectrum. By the turn of the century, as more employment
opportunities for women became available, the age of entrance rose, yet most
prostitutes were in their 20s. This is consistent with studies on other us cit-
ies although outside of Chicago women entered sex work almost two years
earlier.18 The population of sex workers in the city included girls as young as
12. Men paid extra for teenagers, and the daughters of prostitutes frequently
performed sexual labour. In all, 15 per cent of women in the 1880, 1900, and
1910 censuses who claimed to be prostitutes were younger than 19 years of age.
According to the cvc, the average age of women who entered sex work was
18, but because it was illegal for persons under that age to enter a brothel, it
is conceivable that some women may have lied to investigators. However, un-
like in New York City, few would truly be considered child prostitutes. Chicago
police made a concerted effort to keep those between the ages of 3 and 18 out
14 See, for example: Jane Addams, A New Conscience and an Ancient Evil (Chicago, 1912); Jean
Turner Zimmerman, Chicago’s Black Traffic in White Girls (Chicago, 1911).
15 O’Leary and Howard, “The Prostitution”, p. 3.
16 Raphael, Listening, p. 40; O’Leary and Howard, “The Prostitution”, pp. 3, 28; Chicago Tri-
bune, 5 August 2005, 3 February 2013, 3 September 2010.
17 Chicago Tribune, 4 March 2013.
18 Blair, “I’ve Got to Make My Livin’”, pp. 19–14, 35–39; Rosen, Lost Sisterhood, p. 144.
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Prostitution in the us: Chicago 393
of brothels and off the streets, and most madams refused to employ teens.19
The authors of contemporary studies have also had difficulty pinpointing the
mean age of new sex workers, and the ages of such women range from 15 to
almost 21. In 2004, it appeared that 15 per cent of girls began prostitution be-
fore the age of 13 and more than half begin by 17, and 72 per cent of those early
starters were runaways. 13 per cent of prostitutes were found to be over 40, but
because these samples were drawn from prison populations, this may be an
over-representation. Because sex work privileges the young, mature women
have fewer options for employment and concentrate on street-level prostitu-
tion which makes them much more vulnerable to arrest. It is, and has always
been, a business for the young.20
In the twentieth century, sex work in Chicago was increasingly identified
with immigrants, whether European, Asian, or Central American, and native-
born women of colour. There is some justification for this perception. As the
most economically marginalized members of society, and as newcomers with
few social resources, prostitution becomes both a hazard and a survival option.
It also produced unintended consequences in group perceptions. In the first
half of the nineteenth century, the identification of prostitution in New
Orleans and New York City in areas with high concentrations of non-white res-
idents led to the erroneous belief that such women were innately highly-sexed
and more prone to prostitution.21 Originally, there was great sensitivity to the
over-representation of black women in sex work in Chicago. In 1910, 2 per cent
of the population was black but women of colour represented 15 per cent of
arrested prostitutes. The cvc decried the prejudices which existed that limited
the alternatives for earning a living and drove such women to prostitution. But
when the great migration (1915–1930) increased the black population of Chi-
cago to 6.9 per cent, whites were less sanguine about the matter. As a result
of outside pressure and racist policing, black women became almost entirely
identified with sex work. Around 1905, Chicago police began clamping down
on interracial intimacy and banned black men from brothels. As a result, black
women were increasingly driven to more “extreme” and “perverse” sexual acts
in order to retain white male customers and they took to the streets to service
19 Gilfoyle, City of Eros, pp. 63–75; Rosen, Lost Sisterhood, p. 79.
20 us Federal Manuscript Census, 1880, 1900, 1910; Chicago Tribune, 9 March 1858, 23 March
1858, 26 February 1874; The Social Evil, p. 169; Raphael, Listening, pp. 35, 143; O’Leary and
Howard, “The Prostitution”, pp. 8–9, 17, 26; Raphael and Shapiro, “Sisters Speak”, pp. 4–5;
Margot Patterson, “Hard Truths About Prostitution”, National Catholic Reporter, 2 March
2007, pp. 12–14.
21 Long, Great Southern Babylon, p. 129; Gilfoyle, City of Eros, pp. 6, 41–42.
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394 Linehan
black men.22 Prior to 1928, arrested prostitutes were 85 per cent white and 15
per cent black. After 1928, those numbers were reversed and, without public
comment, black women continued to account for about 80 per cent of pros-
titution arrests. Today, while about 36 per cent of the Chicago population is
black, 74 per cent of arrested prostitutes are women of colour, 19 per cent are
white, and Latinas account for 6 per cent of arrests. In part, black women are
more vulnerable to arrest because sex work today is loosely stratified by race.
Asian women most often work in massage parlours, Caucasians dominate es-
cort prostitution, Latinas solicit in clubs and bars, and black women are most
often found working the streets. As the most visible practitioners, they are the
easiest to arrest. However, as black women’s presence on the streets in the first
place is often a matter of prejudice, because other work options are less open
to them, racism cannot be divorced from the long-standing myth that women
of colour are more prone to prostitution than white women.23
Across the centuries, family dynamics have been a much more accurate
predictor of potential prostitution than race or ethnicity. In the Gilded Age
and Progressive Era, 87 per cent of sex workers came from two-parent families.
However, poverty, alcoholism, violence, and sexual abuse made these homes
far from safe and they were not ideal environments for the rearing of girls. For
later generations, much more precise data is available. Of twenty-first century
Chicago prostitutes, 25 per cent grew up without a mother figure and 59 per
cent had no father figure. 82 per cent of women came from homes with sub-
stance abuse, and 30 per cent were from homes where someone prostituted. 61
per cent of sex workers grew up with domestic violence and 50 per cent were
victims of physical abuse. 53 per cent of prostitutes were sexually abused as
children and, as a group, they are three to five times more likely to have experi-
enced incest. In both time periods, such family dysfunction could deprive girls
of self-esteem, a sense of personal efficacy, and the emotional and financial
support to withstand the lure of sexual commerce. More than that, it was often
the need to support children or other family members that made a woman’s
choice to prostitute herself so inevitable.24
Troubled childhoods may contribute to the educational gaps found among
many sex workers, but that does not mean that they are deficient in term of
22 Blair, “I’ve Got to Make My Livin’”, pp. 140–143; Rosen, Lost Sisterhood, 80.
23 Henry William Herbert, The Tricks and Traps of Chicago (Chicago, 1859); The Social Evil,
p. 39; Reckless, Vice, p. 2006; Linehan, “Vicious Circle”, p. 294; O’Leary and Howard, “The
Prostitution”, pp. 6, 10; Raphael, Listening, p. 142.
24 The Social Evil, pp. 93, 127, 134, 237–241; Linehan, “Vicious Circle”, p. 219; Raphael and Sha-
piro, “Sisters Speak”, pp. 4–5, 13–15, 17; Raphael, Listening, pp. 19–23.
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Prostitution in the us: Chicago 395
intelligence. As early as 1870, a Chicago Times survey indicated that few pros-
titutes had much formal education. The cvc report refined this in 1911 when
they claimed that sex workers were “not necessarily unintelligent, but cer-
tainly, from their opportunity and environment since birth, uneducated, un-
skilled, and with little opportunity for or possibility for social advancement.”
Since then, compulsory schooling and alternate modes of instruction have
changed the educational profile of women involved in prostitution. Studies
have shown that the majority of women who entered the business after age 15
graduated from high school or gotten a Graduate Equivalency Degree, while 19
per cent of 2001 prostitutes attended college. It is the early starters, typically
runaways, who have not completed their schooling. However, in these cases sex
work did not disrupt their education; rather, it was their home conditions that
prompted the child to leave home, which in turn meant that they had to drop
out of school, and that brought about their entrance into sexual commerce.25
Incomplete education is one factor involved in unemployment and employ-
ment is the area in which there is the biggest difference between twenty-first
century prostitutes and their counterparts in the Gilded Age and Progressive
Era. 90 per cent of the earlier generation had engaged in legal employment be-
fore prostituting. They were primarily servants, clerks, and waitresses, and their
average weekly wage of $5 was 80 per cent less than what could be made in sex
work. Not only was $5 about half of what was considered necessary to support
an individual, but women’s work was often seasonal with long periods of un-
employment. Consequently, there were even girls who were legally employed
engaged in “treating” (sex play for gifts or other non-monetary considerations).
They came from a culture that admired people who made large amounts of
money with little physical labour, and commercializing their sexuality was the
only way working-class women could accomplish this version of the American
dream. From the end of the nineteenth century until World War ii, treating al-
lowed working class girls to negotiate the boundaries between respectable sex
play and prostitution, while granting them access to recreation opportunities
and material goods they could not afford to buy for themselves.26
Conversely, service providers in the twenty-first century report that most
sex workers have never earned money outside of prostitution. Modern laws
25 The Social Evil, p. 110; Linehan, “Vicious Circle”, pp. 103, 287; Raphael and Shapiro, “Sisters
Speak”, p. 11; Patterson, “Hard Truths”, p. 12.
26 State of Illinois Bureau of Labor Statistics, Fourteenth Biennial Report (Springfield, 1908),
pp. 181, 244–247; Broad Ax, 22 June 1911; The Social Evil, pp. 43, 92, 169–170; Joanne J. Mey-
erowitz, Women Adrift: Independent Wage Earning Women in Chicago, 1880–1930 (Chicago,
1988), p. 34; Clement, Love For Sale, pp. 3–4, 58, 238.
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396 Linehan
against child labour mean girls do not enter the paid labour force as early as
they once did and the large number of young prostitutes in Chicago means
that few girls have had the opportunity to try legitimate work before prostitu-
tion. As a result, “most of the women have not had any other skills [or options]
for making money except prostitution.”27 Likewise, as 71 per cent of such wom-
en grew up knowing sex workers, including their own mothers, these women
often experience prostitution as a legitimate occupational choice and not a
taboo. One prostitute recalls watching women work the streets when she was
a child and thinking, “I’ll probably do that.” As a 16-year-old with two babies to
support, this woman began a twenty-five year career as a Chicago prostitute.
Still, in this case, as in many others, it is impossible to separate sex work as an
employment option from social factors such as this woman’s early experiences
of sexual abuse and alcoholic caregivers. And even when sex work is a first
choice for a job, many women try to supplement their earnings by also working
legally. These jobs are about evenly divided between the formal economy, the
informal economy, and childcare. However, their average wage of $110 in 2001
was 60 to 75 per cent less than what they earned while working on the streets.28
The health of prostitutes is a subject of much greater concern today. In
the past, despite the myth that all prostitutes died within five years, only two
health issues received attention. The Morals Court found that 11 per cent of
prostitutes arrested between 1913 and 1930 had a venereal disease. At that time,
beginning with the most elite class of sex workers, oral and anal sex were pro-
moted to reduce the transmission of disease. The other health issue was drug
addiction. An opium dealer claimed that 75 per cent of his clientele were ad-
dicted prostitutes. The cvc concluded, “it is generally recognized that [most]
[…] are addicted to the use of cocaine and morphine.”29 Among today’s prosti-
tutes, drug use may be as high as 90 per cent of all women involved in prostitu-
tion.30 As one streetwalker said, “it is impossible to do these kinds of acts and
be treated in that manner in the right state of mind.” Addiction is as likely to
be a cause as a woman’s decision to prostitute herself. We are also aware that
there are a myriad of other health issues that accompany twenty-first century
sex work. These include post-traumatic stress disorder and depression as well
as venereal diseases. 50 per cent of women have migraines and 44 per cent
27 O’Leary and Howard, “The Prostitution”, p. 3.
28 Ibid., p. 29; Raphael and Shapiro, “Sisters Speak”, pp. 14, 17; Raphael, Listening, p. 136;
Patterson, “Hard Truths”, p. 12.
29 Chicago Tribune, 26 November 1867, 29 January 1868, 4 March 1881, 6 April 1886, 26 January
1898; The Social Evil, pp. 73, 84; Linehan, “Vicious Circle”, p. 286.
30 O’Leary and Howard, “The Prostitution”, p. 3.
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Prostitution in the us: Chicago 397
have menstrual problems. 22 per cent of all sex workers—and 60 per cent of
those who began before age 18—are hiv positive. This is partially due to the
infrequent use of condoms in Chicago prostitution. Because it costs $2 extra,
only 20 per cent of customers use prophylactics. While venereal diseases are
not unique to sex workers, no matter what the illness or condition, prostitutes
face significant barriers in getting treatment and often lack consistent health
care. Though there is no known empirical evidence, it is the opinion of po-
lice and service providers that women in sex work are getting “younger and
younger and sicker and sicker.”31
Push and Pull Factors
Over time, a combination of emotional, external, and economic causes have
factored into women’s decision to prostitute themselves. Among the emotion-
al factors is a sense of guilt which often accompanies childhood sexual abuse,
something experienced by many women, including some sex workers. This
cause appears prominent in accounts from the early twentieth century. At that
time, according to prostitute Madeleine Blair and brothel physician Benjamin
Reitman, there were few options for unwed mothers, and brothels were one of
the few places where a woman could receive the emotional and financial sup-
port needed by lone mothers.32 Motherhood as a pull factor was not limited
to historic Chicago. In a Progressive Era study of Massachusetts prostitutes,
one-third were mothers. Many more supported other family members through
the proceeds of sex work. Twenty-first century erotic performers are likewise
engaged in sexual commerce to provide for children.33
External causes figured heavily in accounts from the Progressive Era, though
they tended to be written by reformers eager to imagine women as being in-
nately pure and relatively sexless. The women interviewed by the cvc reported
the influences of lewd vaudeville shows, growing up in neighbourhoods with
“immoral influences”, and the lack of moral teaching in schools and homes
31 Ibid.; Raphael and Shapiro, “Sisters Speak”, pp. 4–5, 14, 27; Raphael, Listening, pp. 55,
101, 116; Levitt and Venkatesh, “Empirical Analysis”, pp. 15–19; Patterson, “Hard Truths”,
p. 1; Emily Muskovitz Sweet, “The Intersystem Assessment of Prostitution in Chicago”,
(Chicago, Mayor’s Office on Domestic Violence, 2006), p. 4.
32 Chicago Tribune, 9 March 1858, 21 October 1858, 24 December 1858, 23 March 1859, 26
February 1874; Lindsey, Madeleine, p. 13; Benjamin Reitman, The Second Oldest Profession:
A Study of the Prostitute’s Business Manager (New York, 1931), p. 229.
33 Rosen, The Lost Sisterhood, pp. 143–151; Long, Great Southern Babylon, p. 174; Dewey, Neon
Wasteland, p. 6.
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398 Linehan
as the precipitating causes in their decision to take up prostitution, although
they chose from a pre-determined list of causes that may have reflected re-
formers’ biases. Newspapers noted the emerging culture of recreation at the
turn of the century—and as peer supervision replaced parental supervision of
courtship—peer pressure caused some girls to engage in “treating”, dress pro-
vocatively, and flirt. It was argued by those outside the peer culture that these
forms of behaviour led to increased sexual expression and, ultimately, prostitu-
tion.34 20 per cent of contemporary prostitutes reported that they were under
“pressure” from their boyfriends or girlfriends, and others reported that they
had partners who forced them to get involved in prostitution or passed them
around to service a debt.35
The very real and most commonly cited cause of prostitution in the history
of Chicago was economic need. The most revolutionary part of the cvc report
asked, “Is it any wonder that a tempted girl who receives only six dollars per
week working with her hands sells her body for twenty-five dollars per week
when she learns there is a demand for it and men are willing to pay the price”?
In its ninety-two recommendations, however, the cvc did not call for econom-
ic justice. A century later, need still compels women into sex work. For some
women, getting involved in prostitution is a response to the loss of a job, a cut
in benefits, or other temporary setbacks. Others begin as strippers or exotic
dancers, but find they cannot make a living in those enterprises without selling
sex. For runaways and homeless mothers, survival sex is a means of obtain-
ing food, shelter, or protection. Some drug addicts prostitute themselves while
others use drugs and alcohol to self-medicate and deal with the trauma of sex
work. While some sex workers feel empowered by their choices and the rela-
tively high pay they receive compared to other forms of work, many women
become trapped in prostitution as they find it difficult to make enough money
to support their habits. Historically, women have suffered economically, espe-
cially poorly educated working-class women. They often lack the skills and op-
portunities needed to make a living wage in the formal economy.36
The economic factors pushing women into prostitution are not specific
to any one time or place, though they do come with regional variations. The
California Gold Rush made prostitution in 1850s San Francisco one of sever-
al ways the very small minority of women in the frontier town could acquire
34 Clement, Love for Sale, pp. 222–223.
35 Broad Ax, 22 June 1911; The Social Evil, pp. 34–36; Reckless, Vice, p. 42; O’Leary and Howard,
“The Prostitution”, pp. 27–28; Raphael and Shapiro, “Sisters Speak”, p. 17.
36 The Social Evil, pp. 40, 43, 169–172; O’Leary and Howard, “The Prostitution”, pp. 9, 14, 17–18,
24, 29; Raphael and Shapiro, “Sisters Speak”, p. 24.
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Prostitution in the us: Chicago 399
some of that newfound wealth for themselves. In New Orleans, the post-Civil
War sex work of black women cannot be understood divorced from the sexual
and economic exploitation of slavery. Similarly, throughout the north, young
black women were less likely than whites to have family nearby. Without fami-
ly support and supervision, they were especially vulnerable to sexual abuse. As
the lowest paid workers in the city and exceedingly vulnerable to exploitation,
prostitution was for many black women a practical, and even empowering,
strategy for achieving economic independence. This belief that sex work is the
best available option is also present in modern deindustrialized cities where it
represents the best hope of upward mobility for unskilled women in economi-
cally depressed areas. For all of these women, however, sex work was believed
to be a temporary path to betterment amid the structure of poverty in the us.37
Historically, the economic impact of prostitution on women’s lives has been
minimal, though this does not mean the economic impact of prostitution is
minimal. A recent study shows that the average Chicago streetwalker earns
about $20,000 a year, which is about $5,550 more than a full-time minimum
wage worker. While income from prostitution is tax-free and requires only
about thirteen hours of work (ten sex acts) per week, it is not a wage on which
women will grow rich or lead lives of luxury. However, it is still better paid
than other jobs and offers non-economic advantages, including flexibility for
single moms. While escorts and women in massage parlours earn more money,
this is predicated on youth and attractiveness and is very short-lived. Although
prostitution does make economic sense in the short term, it is a very uncertain
way to make a living. Prostitution at all levels carries the risk of arrest, disease,
violence, and quickly ageing out of the business with few prospects for the
future. At the height of brothel prostitution in Chicago, the financial gains for
most women were limited and short-lived (though always higher than in other
available jobs). Prostitutes in the cvc sample claimed to make $28 to $50 per
week for forty to fifty-six sex acts. While this was up to eight times what they
could expect to make in legal work, women did not retain all the money they
earned.38
The money made in sex work has mostly always gone to other people. In
the brothel period, madams took 40–50 per cent of a woman’s total earnings as
board. As prostitution was criminalized and brothels were eliminated, women
retained even less of their earnings. Pimps and people involved in organized
37 Long, Great Southern Babylon, p. 5; Blair, “I’ve Got to Make My Livin’”, pp. 10, 33; Dewey,
Neon Wasteland, pp. 21–23.
38 O’Leary and Howard, “The Prostitution”, pp. 19, 23; Levitt and Venkatesh, “Empirical Anal-
ysis”, pp. 2–3, 14.
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400 Linehan
crime controlled prostitution and took 60 per cent of what women made in sex
work. In this century, pimps still arrange meetings and protection from the po-
lice, but they have lost power. Pimps now only receive 25 per cent of a woman’s
wages and, while they may protect women from arrest, one in every twenty sex
acts a woman performs is a “freebie” for policemen. Even without pimps, more
than half of prostitutes give their money to someone else and most fear they
will be “harmed” if they stop.39 This, however, may be said to be true of other
jobs held by economically marginalized women.
While some people took an unfair cut of women’s earnings, other individ-
uals and businesses profited from the existence of prostitution. Historically,
prostitutes could not shop in ordinary stores and had to buy their clothes,
wigs, make-up, birth control pills, and other supplies from traveling salesman
at inflated prices. Druggists, doctors, abortionists, grocers, liquor dealers, coal
dealers, and other merchants charged premium prices to brothel residents. On
the streets, women paid policemen, taxi drivers, and bellboys as part of the
cost of doing business. Ancillary businesses in the vice district like saloons,
theatres, and dance halls profited handsomely from the existence of prosti-
tutes nearby, but none of that money went to the women themselves. In the
twenty-first century, there is also a long list of profiteers making money from
the labour of sex workers. These include gangs that allow women to work the
streets they control for a fee. Motels that offer “nap rates” and hotels which
look the other way also profit from prostitution. Other profiteers include traf-
fickers, drug dealers, and advertisers. This includes internet service providers
and media where escorts and massage parlours advertise, phone books, spe-
cialized newspapers like Chicago after Dark and The Gentlemen’s Pages, and
reputable newspapers like the Reader and Sun Times.40
Changes in Working Conditions
The places where prostitution takes place have changed a bit over the centu-
ries, but other aspects of sex work such as uncertainty, violence, and police
harassment have remained constant. This does not mean that all women who
choose this line of work are victims or lack agency. They often find ways to
make the most of the situation for themselves. Prostitutes have always worked
39 The Social Evil, pp. 39–40, 82, 97, 119, 198, 392; Reckless, Vice, p. 271; Jabour, “Prostitution
Politics”, pp. 146, 150.
40 O’Leary and Howard, “The Prostitution”, pp. 18, 21–23, 28–29; Raphael and Shapiro, “Sisters
Speak”, p. 5; Levitt and Venkatesh, “Empirical Analysis”, pp. 12, 15.
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Prostitution in the us: Chicago 401
all over the city in rooms, parks, salons, and a variety of other venues. From the
1830s until 1913, however, most women involved in prostitution congregated
in restricted districts where sex work, though never fully legal, was tolerated.
These districts provided institutions and a community, and they also created
some degree of security for prostitutes. The first district was the Sands located
on the beach north of the Chicago River. It was torn down in 1857 and for the
rest of the nineteenth century the downtown Levee, from Wabash to the River
and from Van Buren to 16th Street, was Chicago’s premiere vice district. By the
start of the twentieth century, police pressure and improved public transporta-
tion forced sex businesses to relocate to the near South side, centred on 22nd
and Dearborn. The recommendations of the Chicago Vice Commission led to
the closing of the vice districts in 1913 and increased the marginality and vul-
nerability of prostitutes.41
In 1913, a lame duck State’s Attorney in Chicago closed down the tolerated
Levee district. This was in keeping with developments in cities across the us.
San Francisco closed its district in 1915 and New Orleans and New York did the
same in 1917. That same year, the federal government—perpetuating the myth
that prostitutes spread venereal diseases—ordered all sex districts in the vicin-
ity of military training camps to close. While these bans were never fully real-
ized—and many districts were back in business by the 1930s—the closures,
when coupled with Prohibition (1920–1933), led to great increases in other
forms of sexually-oriented commercial leisure. Burlesque, taxi dance halls,
speakeasies, cabarets, buffet flats, and “slumming” in African American com-
munities provided new opportunities for sex workers. Racial prejudice meant
that most of these jobs—though primarily located in black neighbourhoods—
were reserved for white women. Black prostitutes were relegated to streetwalk-
ing which made them vulnerable to aggressive racist policing. By the 1930s,
most white prostitutes and some black women worked for organized crime
syndicates. Mobsters like Lucky Luciano and Dutch Schultz in New York and Al
Capone in Chicago used violence to control women. Though organized crime
protected women from over-zealous police and threatening customers, they
also involved sex workers in more criminal activities like driving for rum run-
ners and fostering the sale of illegal alcohol which were federal crimes. Orga-
nized crime’s reach was extensive—Chicago mobsters controlled prostitution
in the city, suburbs, and neighbouring states—but it was temporary. As the fbi
began to reign in the syndicates, madams regained control of the sex business,
41 Linehan, “Vicious Circle”, Ch. 1.
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402 Linehan
often as fronts for gangsters, though they more frequently operated call girl
rings than brothels.42
Today, street prostitution is still dominated by black women and they con-
tinue to work many of the same streets that have been used for prostitution
for decades. Most of these locations are near train stations and major roads,
though researchers report that some streets on the west side are used by street-
walkers for miles, especially Madison between Damen and Cicero. Yet, in the
twenty-first century, they account for less than 20 per cent of all sex workers.
Most sexual commerce is conducted at massage parlours and strip clubs or
by on-call escorts. The development of the internet and cell phones has fa-
cilitated the growth of off-street sexual commerce in such venues as health
spas, beauty salons, bars, truck stops, private residences, and other locations.
Reportedly, most of this kind of prostitution is still controlled by organized
criminal networks.43
Prostitute/Employer/Client Relationships
The locations of sex work have changed over the years, as have the sexual ser-
vices women provide. At one point, oral and anal sex were considered per-
versions and were restricted to specialized brothels and offered at premium
prices. Today, they are standard options offered to customers, and generally
cost less than genital intercourse. Escorts used to dance or model lingerie
while men masturbated. Now, they are expected to provide penetrative sex.
Similarly, stripping and exotic dancing were stand-alone jobs. Nude danc-
ing, for example, emerged in the late 1960s but was soon in competition with
pornographic videos. As had historically happened, competition meant sex
workers had to perform increasingly sexually explicit acts fuelled by econom-
ic desperation. Today, women report that “it is so easy for the line to become
blurred” because they cannot make much money without offering sex in back-
rooms or accepting outside dates. Some customers have little respect for sex
42 The Social Evil, pp. 73–74; Reckless, Vice, pp. viii, 12, 96, 271; Joel E. Black, “Space and Status
in Chicago’s Legal Landscapes”, Journal of Planning History, 12 (2013), pp. 227–244, 234;
Sides, Erotic City, p. 24; Clement, Love for Sale, pp. 128, 177–179, 204–205; Blair, “I’ve Got to
Make My Livin’”, pp. 233–234; Genevieve Davis, Secret Life, Secret Death, (Milwaukee, 2013),
pp. 221, 255, 282.
43 O’Leary and Howard, “The Prostitution”, pp. 3, 14–15; Levitt and Venkatesh, “Empirical
Analysis”, pp. 3, 7.
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Prostitution in the us: Chicago 403
workers and behave in sadistic ways.44 Moreover, repetitive labour of any kind
is not an easy or appealing way to make a living. Over the years, Chicago pros-
titutes have described their work as “joyless”, “tiresome”, and “distasteful”, yet
this is true for many low-wage occupations. Researchers also claim that many
women become repressed in their personal lives as a response to repulsive sex
acts and talk in their work lives. This constant splitting of personal and public
intimacy may result in emotional trauma, another costly result of sex work
conditions in Chicago.45
Violence has always been a regular part of the work of prostitution, as well
as a factor in the personal lives of many women. Olivia, a 25-year veteran street
worker, claimed, “You expect violence at any time and you are scared at all
time. For the most part, I tried to be as quick as I could.” The average street-
walker is assaulted by a customer once per month and violence is not limited
to the streets. Even during the brothel era when women were ostensibly bet-
ter protected, physical abuse at the hands of customers was common and, be-
cause women could not fight back, they often turned violent with each other.
At all times, rape was a fact of life and, like being robbed by clients, considered
to be part of the cost of doing business.46 Murders of prostitutes have not been
uncommon, as in the period between 1995 and 1999 when twelve sex work-
ers were killed. They all worked the lucrative corner at 51st and Halsted; dna
analysis revealed that there were four different perpetrators involved, but no
arrests were made. Historically, the assault and murder of prostitutes has re-
ceived little police attention. Ostensibly, this is because violence is assumed to
be an omnipresent feature of the sex business. Frontier mobs, other women,
customers, pimps, mobsters, and police all targeted sex workers.47
Problems with the police have been part of the work life of Chicago prosti-
tutes since the 1830s. The cvc reported that police leadership was “ignorant”
of actual conditions and that beat officers were susceptible to bribes, drank
in saloons while on the job, and ignored brothel prostitution. They focused
44 Madeleine, p. 110; Reitman, Second Oldest Profession, pp. 43, 75; Ruth Rosen, The Lost Sis-
terhood: Prostitution in America, 1900–1918 (Baltimore: 1982), p. 95; Alexa Albert, Brothel:
Mustang Ranch and Its Women (New York: 2000), p. 89; Dewey, Neon Wasteland, p. 30.
45 The Social Evil, p. 73; Madeleine, p. 110; Reitman, Second Oldest Profession, pp. 43, 75, 199;
O’Leary and Howard, “The Prostitution”, pp. 20–24; Rosen, Lost Sisterhood, p. 95; Albert,
Brothel, p. 89.
46 Chicago Tribune, 12 February 1856, 13 July 1858, 17 January 1860, 16 November 1864, 9 Sep-
tember 1867, 24 January 1871, 12 December 1876, 22 July 1879, 22 October 1890.
47 Raphael and Shapiro, “Sisters Speak”, pp. 19–20, 30; Raphael, Listening, p. 92; Levitt and
Venkatesh, “Empirical Analysis”, pp. 3, 14; “Murder Times Four”, Newsweek, 6 September
1999, p. 33.
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404 Linehan
their attention on outdoor prostitution, and streetwalkers complained, “There
is not a policeman around here that doesn’t hold us up” and “you can’t trust
a copper.” One woman left the streets for a brothel “to be protected from the
police.” Older, underage, less attractive, disabled, and non-white women did
not have this option and were the ones most often arrested and imprisoned
for prostitution-related offenses. The end of the brothel era brought no real
improvements. Crime bosses took control of prostitution and stayed in power
by bribing politicians and police officers. Those women not “protected” by the
mob were threatened with arrest if they did not offer sex and money. The spe-
cialized Morals Court was designed to help women, but from 1913 to 1932 it
subjected them to mandatory examinations doe venereal diseases and con-
fined those found to be infected without trial or a conviction; a positive exami-
nation result was considered to be proof of guilt. For non-infected women, a
policeman’s word was proof that she was a prostitute and resulted in criminal
penalties.48
Although changing moral standards and policing priorities mean that fewer
arrests are made in the twenty-first century, women still have much to fear
from the police. Today, most arrests are driven by community complaints and
the average sex worker is only arrested once in every 450 transactions. The ma-
jority of women are charged with misdemeanours, released without bail, and
fail to show up for court dates. Avoiding trial, however, makes women liable
for re-arrest and indictment on more serious charges; until 2013, after the sec-
ond charge of prostitution became a felony, women became more vulnerable
to police officers seeking bribes or “freebies”. Additionally, there are reports
that the police perpetrate a “great deal” of the violence to which women are
subjected and more than 25 per cent of the rapes of sex workers.49 Prostitutes
also have complicated and contested relationships with the men with whom
they work, including both customers and pimps. Customer relations can be
very antagonistic. The typical client has always been a man under 40 years of
age. Working-class men in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era often could not
afford to marry and support a family. For their more affluent counterparts, a
sporting culture among young men applauded sexual expressiveness and cul-
tivated anti-marriage attitudes. For both of these groups, going to prostitutes
was an expedient method of sexual release. Subsequently, the introduction of
more reliable and accessible forms of birth control, the feminist drive for more
equality in all spheres, and a pronounced lessening of sexual taboos combined
to create greater opportunities for consensual sexual activity by unmarried
48 The Social Evil, pp. 150, 160, 198; Reitman, Second Oldest Profession, pp. 15, 144, 271; Jabour,
“Prostitution Politics”, p. 146.
49 O’Leary and Howard, “The Prostitution”, pp. 10, 12.
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Prostitution in the us: Chicago 405
people.50 However, some men still preferred sex with no strings attached. Oth-
ers lacked confidence with women, were unattractive, or were physically or
mentally challenged and had fewer alternatives for female companionship and
sex. Contemporary prostitutes service all these men.
Despite men’s real or imagined need for women’s sexual labour, some cus-
tomers have historically been cruel to sex workers. Anecdotal evidence shows
men who are violent, thieving, and cheap. One woman left Chicago in the mid-
twentieth century when she realized the city’s men were “tighter than the bark
on a tree.” Most aggravating were the men who expected to know a woman’s
real name and her life story and considered such personal information to be
part of the services they paid for. A brothel physician in the Progressive Era
noted that most customers were “brutal” and forced women to practise “all
sorts of perversions”, though what was considered perverse changed over time.
Many men wanted prostitutes to cut and hurt them, but more found sexual
release in dominating and abusing women. Rape was their preferred sexual
fantasy. Men have never been shy about publicly attacking a woman’s appear-
ance, attitude, or sexual skills. In the earlier period there were red-light district
newspapers like the Chicago Street Gazette which rated and critiqued women
for the entertainment of other men. Today, women are similarly judged and
their livelihoods threatened by reviews on specialized websites and Craig’s
List.51
Although customers had most of the power in these relationships, sex work-
ers have never been passive victims. From the beginning, they learned to de-
mand payment in advance. They also overcharged drunks, teamed up to pick
the pockets of unwary customers, and, more recently, attempted to create new
types of economically advantageous relationships. Many sex workers today
seek to find “sugar daddies”, while younger women live with elderly men in
public housing and perform errands, and occasionally provide sex, in exchange
for money. These relationships combine a sense (or illusion) of affection and a
regular source of income, thereby blurring the lines between prostitution and
dating.52
50 Howard Chudacoff, The Age of the Bachelor: Creating an American Subculture (Princeton,
1999), pp. 35–36; Gilbert Geis, “Prostitution as a Reckless Enterprise”, Sociological Focus, 30
(1997), pp. 17–29, 26.
51 Madeleine, pp. 110, 189; Reitman, Second Oldest Profession, p. 20; Polly Adler, A House is
Not a Home (New York, 1953), p. 238; Josie Washburn, The Underworld Sewer: A Prostitute
Reflects on Life in the Trade, 1871–1909 (Lincoln, 1997), p. 92; Raphael and Shapiro, “Sisters
Speak”, p. 8; Levitt and Venkatesh, “Empirical Analysis”, p. 3.
52 Chicago Tribune, 31 March 1858, 16 December 1866, 18 July 1876, 14 January 1877, 26 Sep-
tember 1879; Lindsey, Madeleine, p. 38; O’Leary and Howard, “The Prostitution”, pp. 18, 25.
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406 Linehan
Racial politics also complicate the transactions between prostitutes and cli-
ents. In the brothel period, the vice districts were the most integrated sections
of Chicago. White men of any income bracket could be serviced by a large sup-
ply of white, black, and Asian women. However, black men were excluded from
all but the lowest-priced brothels and, even then, many women refused to ser-
vice them; up until 1905, however, there were a small number of white women
in Chicago who specialized in servicing black men. In the south of the us, how-
ever, sex across the colour line was a driving force of the sex business. Vice dis-
tricts, like Storyville in New Orleans, became notorious largely because of their
toleration of interracial intimacy allowing white men to fulfil their fantasies of
sex with a black woman. Racial politics were no less a part of the sex business
on the west coast. In the nineteenth century, San Francisco women worked
in the same brothels, but English, French, and American women were on the
top floors, while Mexican, Japanese, and Chinese women were available—at
lower prices—downstairs. Today, black streetwalkers charge premium prices
to white and Latino men while offering black men discounts. Because prices
are generally negotiated on a case-by-case basis and are not pre-determined,
other racially motivated price discrepancies probably exist among groups of
women that have not been studied by researchers. Repeat customers and more
attractive men also receive discounts.53
Another complication is the unfairness of the criminal justice system. Al-
though men and women engage in the same illegal behaviour, the consequenc-
es for women are much more severe. Customers are sometimes arrested but
not to the extent that women are jailed. There are no standardized sentencing
guidelines for johns and when women were forced to submit to disease test-
ing, men were exempt. For men, the biggest risk of prostitution may be having
a mug shot posted on the Chicago Police Department website. For women, the
penalties may escalate to felony convictions and mandatory prison sentences.
As early as 1911, the Chicago Vice Commission noted the inherent injustice in
the city’s prostitution policy: “it is a man and not a woman problem which
we face today—commercialized by man—supported by man—the supply of
fresh victims furnished by man.” Yet, more than one hundred years later, wom-
en still bear the brunt of the punishment and the stigma inherent in sexual
commerce.54
53 Linehan, “Vicious Circle”, ch. 1; Levitt and Venkatesh, “Empirical Analysis”, pp. 3, 15; Blair,
“I’ve Got to Make My Livin’”, p. 183; Long, Great Southern Babylon, pp. 88, 129, 192–198;
Rosen, Lost Sisterhood, p. 80.
54 The Social Evil, p. 47; Sweet, “The Intersystem”, pp. 2, 7; Levitt and Venkatesh, “Empirical
Analysis”, p. 5; Jabour, “Prostitution Politics”, p. 149.
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Prostitutes have always had complicated relationships with their customers
and these are well-documented. Relationships between sex workers and pimps
are harder to understand as women seldom acknowledge they exist. Although
the term “pimp” was used in Chicago newspapers as early as 1861 to denote
men who lived off the earnings of prostitutes, the women interviewed by the
cvc denied that they supported men. The commission concluded that “cadet”
was the preferred term for a complicated partnership between young wom-
en and men of their own age and class. While the women earned the money,
the man “looks after her” and used his political connections to get her out of
trouble when she was arrested. The women viewed these men as lovers and
beaus and, although often the men were abusive, the women would not testify
against them because “she loves him.” Thus men could not be prosecuted for
pimping. Today, police believe there are few pimps working in Chicago, though
service providers disagree. Researchers found streetwalkers on the south side
of the city working alone and working with pimps. Those who operated alone
claimed they would prefer to have a pimp because of the higher pay and pro-
tection from the police. All told, it is estimated that about half of Chicago sex
workers give the money they earn to someone else whether they use the term
“pimp” or not and that the majority of those fear they will be harmed if they
stop prostituting.55
Prostitute Culture
In the brothel era, there was a strong sub-culture uniting the women of prosti-
tution. Nineteenth-century sex workers wore a distinctive outfit consisting of
wigs, jewellery, heavily embellished gowns, and fancy hats, and they also wore
makeup. As the women of their times, they also developed a strong female
network of comfort and companionship. Those from abusive homes sought
new families in the Levee. They chose new names to symbolize their break
from their previous lives. Brothel prostitutes referred to madams as “mother”.
Although they were businesswomen primarily concerned with profits, many
madams did generally care for the women they employed. Co-workers who
became like sisters also helped defuse the harsher realities of sex work. Asked
if a sense of sisterhood pervaded at Mother Herrick’s Prairie Queen, one pros-
titute replied, “You bet your life there is.” Women lent money to each other,
55 Chicago Tribune, 2 July 1861; The Social Evil, pp. 170, 184; O’Leary and Howard, “The Prosti-
tution”, pp. 16, 17; Raphael and Shapiro, “Sisters Speak”, p. 5; Raphael, Listening, p. 48; Levitt
and Venkatesh, “Empirical Analysis”, pp. 2–4.
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408 Linehan
shared clothes, cared for each other during pregnancy and illness, and paid for
each other’s funerals. Such bonds, however, could be fragile. Though some rela-
tionships did become romantic and many friendships were very tender, these
women also competed with each other for financial survival. This made it dif-
ficult for them to trust each other and necessitated a long initiation period of
intimidation and tricks played on newcomers who challenged the status quo.
Survivors of this initiation were allowed into the sisterhood. In the late nine-
teenth century and into the twentieth century, sex workers in cities like New
York were also deeply entrenched in the working class communities in which
they lived and, generally, were accepted by their neighbours.56
By the 1930s, the culture of sex work had been shattered. Criminalization
drove prostitution underground and organized crime networks pushed wom-
en across the city, forcing them to frequently move from place to place. Under
these conditions, it was impossible for women to recreate the sisterly relation-
ships of brothel life or the close bonds of community with their neighbours.
Moreover, the unique accoutrements of prostitutes—rouge, bleached hair,
strong perfume, shorter dresses—were being adopted by other women. As
women outside of sex work engaged in street flirtation with unknown men,
prostitutes refined their manners and became more subtle in their approach
to prospective clients. By the mid-century, not only had the number of pros-
titutes declined, it was also increasingly difficult for the uninitiated to distin-
guish prostitutes on the street or in bars from other young women.57
Today, prostitutes may be recognized by the fact that they frequent certain
city streets or work in massage parlours or gentlemen’s clubs. They also may
be found on the internet or through advertisements. There are some 4,000
Chicago women who may be identified as full-time professional prostitutes.
These women share many of the same problems and often come from similar
backgrounds. Yet, contemporary research finds that public and private shame
discourages collective labour action among sex workers and that they remain
largely socially invisible. Yet, a sense that they are engaged in an adversarial
relationship with authority also helps some women forge short-lived solidar-
ity and support networks. This suggests, but does not prove, that most women
in prostitution in Chicago have only tenuous and fleeting connections with
56 Chicago Daily Journal, 19 July 1853; Chicago Tribune, 29 May 1857; Chicago Times, 16 De-
cember 1866, 27 November 1870; Frederick Francis Cook, Bygone Days in Chicago: Reflec-
tions on the Garden City of the Sixties (Chicago, 1910), pp. 131–133; Lindsey, Madeleine, pp.
55, 65, 113, 165; Albert, Brothel, p. 161; Rosen, Lost Sisterhood, p. 105; Clement, Love for Sale,
p. 113.
57 Reckless, Vice, pp. 12, 55, 159.
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other sex workers. Since the 1980s, agencies have offered coffee, interaction,
condoms, and necessary medical and legal services for prostitutes, but the ul-
timate objective of these organizations has been to get women out of prostitu-
tion. It is not clear where women committed to remaining in the business can
find respite and support.58
It has never been easy for women to leave prostitution and, in the nine-
teenth century, conventional wisdom was that women didn’t leave the trade.
The myth was that most prostitutes died of disease and degradation within five
years. In reality, many women moved west and re-established themselves. By
the early twentieth century, researchers and madams agreed that women left
prostitution to make “good marriages to men they really cared about”, or, at
least, “men willing to overlook the past.”59
Society and Prostitution
Prior to the 1930s, periodic efforts were made by reformers to assist prostitutes
trying to leave sex work. In the 1860s, Catholic sisters founded the House of the
Good Shepherd, while Protestant women opened the Chicago Erring Women’s
Refuge for Reform. Founded on a religious basis, both institutions strove to cre-
ate a family environment and to instil moral training in their “inmates.” They
also provided obstetric care, medical services, education, job training, and
emotional support. The House of the Good Shepherd also offered women the
opportunity to enter a permanent, quasi-religious order of penitents. The ref-
uge found women jobs, often away from the city, and sponsored some former
prostitutes who pursued teacher training at the Illinois Normal School. As they
were dependent on public funding, however, by the end of the century they
turned to the more publicly pleasing (and therefore more lucrative) preventa-
tive work among young and relatively innocent girls. At the same time, New
Orleans established its Storyville district to control the lives and movement
of women. Conversely, in the chaos following the 1906 earthquake, the city
opened a non-punitive, municipal venereal disease clinic to help women. How-
ever, the national trend was towards criminalization and, in 1914, San Francisco
adopted a Red-light Abatement Act to force prostitutes out of business. In 1913
58 O’Leary and Howard, “The Prostitution”; Raphael and Shapiro, “Sisters Speak”; Levitt and
Venkatesh, “Empirical Analysis”; Dewey, Neon Wasteland, pp. 35, 104–105.
59 Chicago Tribune, 26 November 1867; Linehan, “Vicious Circle”, p. 286; Reckless, Vice, p. 57;
Madeleine, pp. 325–326; Pauline Tabor, Memoirs of the Madam on Clay Street (Louisville,
1972), p. 218.
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410 Linehan
Chicago created the first Morals Court to investigate social problems and as-
sign social workers who were tasked with helping women leave prostitution. In
practice, however, the court persecuted women, subjected them to mandatory
medical examinations, and placed them in confinement for having contracted
a venereal disease before their guilt or innocence was even determined. Under
these circumstances, very little attention was given to the provision of social
services.60
Today, the difficulties women experience transitioning out of sex work
are understood, but rather inadequately handled, by service providers. Legal
scholar Jody Raphael has documented the many obstacles to exiting prostitu-
tion. Foremost among these problems is the fact that many women have never
done anything else and, for them, the notion of “escape” is meaningless. When
Raphael asked one long-term prostitute why she did not leave, the woman
replied, “leave for what?”. Even for women who can envision an alternative
life, serious and persistent violence, addiction to drugs and alcohol, physical
and mental health problems, and frequent homelessness make it difficult to
leave prostitution. Other sex workers, friends, and family members who feel
threatened by a woman’s independence withhold support, sabotage attempts
at change, and argue that the lack of education and finances make escape im-
possible. Traffickers may take foreign-born women’s passports, restrict their
movements, and control them with violence or threats to hurt their families to
hinder escape. Compounding all of these obstacles is the rarity of specialized
social service programmes available to prostitutes.61
In 1983, lay missionary Edwina Gateley opened Genesis House as part of
her ministry dedicated to north side prostitutes. The house, located down the
street from Wrigley Field, was to be a safe place where, in her words, women
in trouble could “find some external order amid their personal chaos: a haven
to cry, spill their guts, drink a cup of coffee, and work on their recovery within
rules, but at their own pace.”62 Like its nineteenth-century predecessors, the
House of the Good Shepherd and the Erring Women’s Refuge, Genesis House
had a long-term residential component and offered a spiritual basis for trans-
formation. It also provided educational and medical services, court advocacy,
and support groups. As aids became a crisis, Genesis House became a source
for condoms and clean needles. However, when Gateley left the ministry, the
60 Linehan, “Vicious Circle”, ch. 2; Suellen Hoy, Good Hearts: Catholic Sisters in Chicago’s Past
(Urbana [etc.], 2006); Long, Great Southern Babylon, p. 103; Sides, Erotic City, pp. 22–23;
Jabour, “Prostitution Politics”, pp. 144, 155.
61 Raphael and Shapiro, “Sisters Speak”, pp. 5–6; Raphael, Listening, pp. 8, 40, 136, 143, 212.
62 Chicago Reader, 30 July 1987.
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Prostitution in the us: Chicago 411
home entered a period of decline. By 1997, the three-year residential pro-
gramme had been “streamlined” to six months, and the hospitality and spiritu-
ality programmes were discontinued. In April 2006, the Executive Director and
Chief Financial Officer were charged with embezzling more than a half million
dollars of taxpayer funding from the home and using the money for personal
expenses. This created an irreparable financial crisis and, no longer able to pro-
vide vital services to sex workers, the home closed its doors for good.63
Brenda Myers-Powell was a Genesis House resident during Gateley’s minis-
try and is now using her own successful rehabilitation to help other women. A
sexually abused child, she began her “inevitable” life in prostitution at the age
of 14 in order to support her two children and grandmother. At first, she was
ecstatic about the large sums of money she was earning on Chicago’s streets.
But soon, Myers-Powell was kidnapped by two men—“pimp arrested”—and
forced to prostitute herself for their profit. She also did exotic dancing and be-
came addicted to crack cocaine; she stayed in sex work for twenty-four years
before she met Gateley. Today, she is a member of the Cook County Sheriff’s
Department prostitution intervention team and runs support groups and
counsels women who have been incarcerated for prostitution. Myers-Powell
also conducts and presents scholarly research on prostitution and trains social
workers how to understand human trafficking and provide for victims. With
another survivor, she co-founded the Dreamcatcher Foundation. This non-
profit for young women aged 12 to 24 helps victims transition to a new life
through a residential programme and trains and empowers vulnerable girls so
that they can better resist exploitation.64
As an activist, Myers-Powell has successfully challenged the laws which hin-
der women’s exit from prostitution; those laws place all of the criminal pen-
alties on the vulnerable woman while the pimps and johns who profit from
the crime go unpunished. In 2013, two laws were changed. First, the Justice
for Victims of Sex Trafficking Crimes Act clears the criminal records of people
who can prove they were sexually trafficked, including those forced to work
in prostitution. Also, the law which made a third conviction for prostitution a
felony was repealed. These legal changes remove some of the obstacles women
face in transitioning out of prostitution. They also improve women’s prospects
for employment, clear the way for legal immigration status, and offer former
sex workers the opportunity to adopt and foster children.
63 Patterson, “Hard Truths”, pp. 12–14; Chicago Tribune, 27 December 1995, 3 October 2006;
Chicago Sun Times, 4 October 2006; Chicago Reader, 30 July 1987; Edwina Gateley, I Hear a
Seed Growing (Naperville, 1990).
64 Chicago Tribune, 14 March 2011.
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412 Linehan
As a survivor, Myers-Powell is in a unique position. Historically, she is the
first Chicago sex worker to play a prominent role in the establishment of mu-
nicipal prostitution policy. While women in the sex business have always had
problems, concerns, issues, and needs, Myers-Powell is the first to have ac-
quired a wide public audience to advocate on sex workers’ behalf. Moreover,
she is also uniquely qualified to work with women in the business and those in
danger of being trafficked. She understands how difficult it is to change lives
when women feel like “damaged goods”, and outsiders are reluctant to help
because they don’t see prostitutes as “salvageable”. Thus, Myers-Powell believes
in survivors helping each other. As she explains, “a woman like myself who
started as a youth and didn’t get out until I was 39 years, proves that if it can
happen to me, it can happen to anybody.”65
Brenda Myers-Powell tells the women and girls she works with that “you are
never too young or too old to start a new life.”66 She is a woman of profound
wisdom, survival experience, abundant compassion, and enormous energy,
but she is just one woman and there are at least 16,000 prostitutes in the Chica-
goland area. While there are certainly more non-profits and government agen-
cies working to help sex workers than there have ever been before, they are still
woefully inadequate for the needs at hand. The vast majority of prostitutes in
Chicago are—as they have always been—virtually alone as they negotiate the
dangers of their risky profession and the uncertainty of their futures.
Conclusion
Despite the passage of time, there are more commonalities than differences in
the ways prostitution was practised, policed, and viewed between the Gilded
Age and the early twenty-first century. Women and girls may enter sex work at
younger ages and spend fewer hours engaging in penetrative intercourse these
days, but sex work can still be a dangerous, tedious, exploitive, and low-paying
occupation. However, these choices have always been the same for young,
economically marginalized women. Moreover, sex work has always provided
the flexibility and resources that single mothers need to tend to their fami-
lies. Prostitution is more criminalized than it was in the past and the penal-
ties still primarily affect women. The laws that do apply, however, are seldom
enforced, but when they are used they still tend to disproportionately penalize
black women. Then as now, sex workers’ biggest problems with the police are
65 Ibid., 14 March 2011, 4 March 2013, 23 August 2013.
66 Ibid., 14 March 2011.
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Prostitution in the us: Chicago 413
constant harassment and demands for cash and sexual bribes. In both time
periods, prostitutes were the subject of ribald humour, derision, and social
stigmatization. However, there is now a greater public understanding of the
factors—internal, external, and economic—that lead women into sex work.
As a result, public policy is slowly adjusting to the needs of these women, and
prostitution survivors—though not active sex workers—are accorded a great-
er role in the shaping of policy and provision of services in Chicago. However,
as in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, most Chicagoans still perceive prosti-
tution as something a woman would never actually want to do.
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chapter 16
Prostitution in Havana
Amalia L. Cabezas
The Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries
For more than 200 years, from 1566–1790 Havana, Cuba was central to the Span-
ish flota, or fleet system, a convoy designed to avoid and repel attacks by other
European pirates and privateers. By 1592, the Spanish crown granted Havana
the title of “city” due to its large population. Its strategic importance as a ship-
ping port and its location facilitated the conquest of new lands throughout the
Americas. As historian Alejandro de la Fuente explains, “With the organiza-
tion of the great viceroyalties of Mexico and, later, Peru, the crown’s emphasis
shifted from Cuba’s settlements on the southern coast to the Cuban northwest,
particularly the Bay of Havana.”1 Ships returning treasure and goods from the
ports of Veracruz, Portobelo, and Cartagena congregated at Havana harbour
in order to return together to Spain. For several weeks, sometimes months,
Havana was a city filled with sailors, soldiers, merchants, adventurers, and trav-
ellers passing the time until the ships were ready to sail back to Spain. Scholar
Antonio Benítez-Rojo notes, “In 1594 the people of Havana had to provide lodg-
ing, food, drink, and entertainment with song and dance for seven months to
the 5,000 people who visited […] many of whom had sufficient means for the
enjoyment of the pleasures that the city then offered.”2
The city of Havana is located approximately 170 kilometres from Key West,
Florida at the junction of the Caribbean Sea and the Atlantic Ocean. Its clos-
est neighbours are the United States, Mexico, Jamaica and Haiti. Since its
inception, Havana was a city with a multinational character, a feature that
continued to distinguish the capital into the twentieth century. As the city
grew, it became increasingly populated by large numbers of young single men
traveling from France, Italy, Portugal, and Germany, as well as Jews and Moors
escaping the clutches of religious persecution.3 These voyages also brought
1 Alejandro de la Fuente, Havana and the Atlantic in the Sixteenth Century (Chapel Hill, 2008),
p. 4.
2 Antonio Benítez-Rojo, “Creolization in Havana: The Oldest Form of Globalization”, in Frank-
lin W. Knight and Teresita Martínez-Verge (eds), Contemporary Caribbean Cultures and Soci-
eties in a Global Context (Chapel Hill, 2005), pp. 75–96, 78.
3 de la Fuente, Havana and the Atlantic, p. 94.
© Amalia L. Cabezas, 2017 | doi 10.1163/9789004346253_017 - 978-90-04-34625-3
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Prostitution in Havana 415
what were known as mujeres de mal vivir, or women of ill repute, who were es-
caping the clutches of the Inquisition in Spain, women who were widowed or
left behind by husbands traveling to the Americas, and impoverished women
without dowries.4
Unaccompanied and unmarried women residing in Havana provided sexu-
al and domestic services to sailors, soldiers, merchants, and adventurers. The
governing institutions of the island profited from women’s labour. In 1584 the
Cuban Governor wrote a letter to the King of Spain reproaching Havana’s mili-
tary officer for “housing” several women. Later, in 1657, the clergy were accused
of having disputes over prostitutes.5 These historical references suggest that
the sale of sexual services was an activity that entangled the military and eccle-
siastic power structures of the Spanish colony.
Havana became dominated by a “service” economy that was characterized
by music-making, gambling, and prostitution. Thus, idle travellers “fostered
robbery and speculation, as well as the growth of social vices.”6 The procure-
ment of sexual services was a vital part of the formation of the city and of
conquest and colonialism. The sexual-service economy was important to the
growth of Havana as a port city and as a crossroads for trade. Because the ma-
jority of women during the sixteenth century were illiterate, part of the wider
pattern of limited or prohibited education and employment outside the home
for women and girls, they often found a livelihood working in taverns and lodg-
ing houses offering domestic and sexual services to the soldiers and merchants
who migrated to or were transient travellers in the city by the bay.7 Those who
provided sexual services were often times destitute and enslaved.
During the sixteenth century, besides working in taverns and boarding
houses, women who sold sexual services were connected to the service econo-
my in the delivery of domestic services. Enslaved women brought to Cuba from
Africa were able to operate taverns out of their homes, hire themselves out
for household work, and, given the high demand, provide sex. Some of these
slaves were employed on small farms in the areas surrounding the city, and
they also worked as itinerant street vendors, coming into contact with tran-
sient travellers such as sailors and using sexual commerce to supplement their
earnings and, in some cases, to save and eventually buy their manumission.
Freed women slaves working in the city also used sexual services as a way to
survive and to complement their wages in other sectors of the economy.
4 Mayra Beers, “Murder in San Isidro: Crime and Culture during the Second Cuban Republic”,
Cuban Studies, 34 (2003), pp. 97–129, 104.
5 Beers, “Murder in San Isidro”, p. 104.
6 Benítez-Rojo, “Creolization in Havana”, p. 78.
7 de la Fuente, Havana and the Atlantic, p. 205.
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416 Cabezas
For slave-owning entrepreneurs, Havana offered the perfect setting for cater-
ing to the sexual desires of large numbers of men from the metropolis, young
single men who arrived in Cuba either as immigrants or as itinerant travellers.
These early procurers exploited slave women and took advantage of the short-
age of white women to cater to the men staying in Havana. In 1658, Havana’s
governor Juan de Salamanca sought to “require the owners of black women
and mulattos to keep them within their houses and not give them permis-
sion to live outside nor to go to the mills and corrals […] because these slaves
thus earn for their owners wages much greater than those that are [ otherwise]
earned.”8 Even after emancipation, many of the women continued to perform
these same activities, as there were no other segments of the wage economy
where they could earn a living. Selling sex to the military garrisons and tran-
sient travellers, such as sailors, was an important aspect of African women’s
survival and processes of manumission in Havana.
Slave-owning families of Havana greatly benefited from being able to hire
out their women slaves as prostitutes but other groups also profited from hu-
man trafficking and sexual slavery. It was common, for instance, for soldiers
and clergy to purchase one or two female slaves so they could rent them out to
other men and thereby increase their revenues.9
The vibrant mercantile economy reproduced the gender-based, economic,
and racial division of labour in the Iberian Peninsula, where women of subor-
dinated status were over-represented in sexual markets. Thus, mulattas, slaves,
and free women of colour worked in saloons, lodging houses, and households
offering domestic and sexual services to soldiers, sailors, and the large itinerant
population in the port city. As historian Alejandro de la Fuente states, “Some
of Havana’s most humble residents, frequently black women, made a living
cooking for them [men in the garrisons], laundering their clothing, and selling
sexual services.”10 More or less from the inception of the city of Havana, sexual
commerce was an income-generating activity for women and a source of so-
cial reproduction that maintained the power structures of the military and the
colonial mercantilist economy.
Even while being economically vital to the city and colonialism, women
who sold sexual services were stigmatized. Although government decrees did
not prohibit the sex trade, women of the elite classes were socially secluded
in their homes. Therefore, early on a dichotomy and distinction between pri-
vate and public, and good and bad women, existed and was enabled by the
development of racial systems of categorization. During the seventeenth
8 Dick Cluster and Rafael Hernández, The History of Havana (New York, 2006), p. 13.
9 Ibid.
10 de la Fuente, Havana and the Atlantic, p. 78.
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Prostitution in Havana 417
c entury, policies enacted regulatory measures to control women’s sexuality,
mobility, and behaviour, imposing standards of comportment that defined vir-
tual womanhood according to patriarchal parameters. For centuries to come
these strictures continued to influence the perception and treatment of mu-
jeres públicas, or public women.
Hospitals and prisons were some of the earliest institutions established to
contain and punish wayward or public women. Unruly and disorderly women,
including prostitutes, were originally housed in the city’s first hospital, San
Francisco de Paula. Founded in 1664, it served both medical and penal func-
tions. The mix of races in the hospital and the mingling of women from various
backgrounds was cause for consternation, however, resulting in the establish-
ment of a housing-penal institution called the Casa de Recogidas to confine
and correct the behaviour of women considered to be rebellious.11 Inaugurated
in 1746 with a focus only on wayward women, the institution was initially built
as a home for poor and destitute young women.12 With the stated intent of
protecting women’s virginity and segregating them by race and class, it housed
women who did not obey social norms and who were marginal in the social
order. Indigent and poor women, slaves, alcoholics, adulteresses, murderesses,
thieves, the mentally ill, political prisoners, and mujeres públicas were also
housed there.
The Casa de Recogidas sought to reform women through work and religious
instruction, and it was modelled after similar efforts in Spain with the Casa
de Arrepentidas or Recogidas. In both Spain and the colonies, women were
incarcerated to penalize and rehabilitate sexual transgressors. Sentenced by
judicial authorities for defiant behaviour, incarcerated women could not leave
the premises without the permission of a judge. Many were unable to escape.
It was not until 1917 that the system of Casa de Recogidas was abolished but, as
we will see, in the twentieth century similar efforts were made to restrict and
rehabilitate “wayward” women.
The Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries
Havana in the 1770s was the largest port in the Spanish-American colonies with
an estimated population of 40,000.13 The sex industry continued to e xpand
11 Tiffany A. Sippial, Prostitution, Modernity, and the Making of the Cuban Republic, 1840–1920
(Chapel Hill, 2013), p. 27.
12 Rolando Alvarez Estévez, La “Reeducación” de la Mujer Cubana en la Colonia: La Casa de
Recogidas (La Habana, 1976).
13 Benítez-Rojo, “Creolization in Havana”, p. 78.
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418 Cabezas
together with the many social and political developments that dramatically
transformed the population of the capital city. During this time, women be-
came central to debates encompassing public health, race, nation-building,
and morality.
The wars fought to win independence from Spain—the Ten Years’ War
(1868–1878), the Little War (1879–1880), and the Spanish-American war (1895–
1898)—led the population of the island to flee to Havana, as it offered more
possibilities for survival than the countryside. This internal displacement re-
sulted in an economic and social crisis which caused many families to lose
their homes, jobs, and titles to their land. Impoverished rural workers migrated
to cities to find work. Women who were excluded from paid employment in
most sectors of the economy made a livelihood selling sex and domestic ser-
vices, while men laboured or became beggars, vagrants, and petty thieves.14
Havana sustained its place as one of the busiest ports in the Americas. The
internally displaced population could find opportunities for survival in what
was a thriving and cosmopolitan city. As Cuba became the largest producer of
sugar in the world, merchant ships were at the port of Havana during the sugar
harvest for weeks and months at a time, and crews numbering in the tens of
thousands spent their time ashore in pursuit of diversion and entertainment.
Steamship lines linked Havana to New Orleans, and over 150 ships from the city
of Philadelphia visited the port yearly.15 In addition, there were also travellers
passing through Cuba on their way to the California Gold Rush. As in its incep-
tion, the city offered gambling, dancing, merry-making, and sex.
Against a backdrop of economic and political uncertainty, during the nine-
teenth century a more intimate relationship developed between the United
States and Cuba and this greatly influenced and transformed the sex indus-
try. By the mid-nineteenth century, as North American tourists began to visit
Havana regularly for work, business, and pleasure, a tourist industry grew to
accommodate northern travellers. As historian Louis A. Pérez emphasizes,
“Bars, brothels, and bistros, operated by North Americans principally for North
Americans, expanded along both coasts. They became familiar features of the
bay streets of the port cities; around these streets there developed a nether
world into which North Americans of almost every social type descended.”16
Women from the us travelled to work in the brothels, “many hired directly
from the United States, others stranded in Cuba without resources or a job,
14 Louis A. Pérez, Cuba: Between Reform and Revolution (New York, 1988), p. 133.
15 Benítez-Rojo, “Creolization in Havana”, p. 78.
16 Louis A. Pérez, On Becoming Cuban: Identity, Nationality, and Culture (Chapel Hill, 1999),
p. 23.
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Prostitution in Havana 419
some newly widowed, others recently unemployed.”17 Such was the case of a
nanny from Connecticut who was fired at a sugar estate in the interior. She
migrated to a brothel in Havana to eke out a living. Another occurrence was a
penniless North American actress who turned to prostitution in Havana after
being abandoned by her lover.18
us labourers also travelled to Havana. In the 1880s an estimated 32,000 us
seamen visited Havana annually. Migrant us railroad and construction work-
ers, merchant seamen, and women selling sexual services crowded the city.19
It was the transient nature of the travellers, their tenuous social location, and
loose connections to the social networks of the city that further expanded
prostitution in the capital.
Another force shaping the sex trade of Havana was the slave trade. In the
city of Havana, city residents owned on average 3.1 domestic slaves each. As in
earlier periods, women of African descent were sexually enslaved to their own-
ers and rented out to clients. The connection between domestic and sexual
services was exacerbated by the shortage of women and easy access to slaves.20
As the sex trade grew at a rapid pace, displays of sexual commerce increas-
ingly offended influential members of society; the sale of sex was too public
and too close to the centre of the city where wealthy families lived. To better
implement state surveillance and address complaints, the colonial authorities
moved women who were selling sex to a geographically circumscribed area.
Concerned with the dual purpose of controlling health and morality, the co-
lonial administrators sought to contain and isolate the sale of sexual services
within a designated tolerance zone on the outskirts of the capital. Regulations
were also implemented to prevent the spread of venereal diseases. Syphilis
in particular was said to be responsible for the death of many of the Spanish
military troops that arrived in Havana to fight the wars of independence, and
it killed “from 14,000 in 1868 to well over 97,000 by 1877.”21 For Spain, it was
intolerable that the majority of imperial soldiers were dying of disease and not
in combat.
The category of prostitute had not received explicit juridical or disciplinary
consideration. The police generally responded to common “delinquent” behav-
iour and not prostitution per se, particularly when the offending person was
17 Ibid.
18 Ibid.
19 Ibid.
20 Camillia Cowling, Conceiving Freedom: Women of Color, Gender and the Abolition of Slav-
ery in Havana and Rio de Janeiro (Chapel Hill, 2013).
21 Ibid., p. 49.
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420 Cabezas
located in a central area of the city where influential families lived. In response
to complaints about “public women”—implying delinquent and scandalous
female behaviour such as drinking in public, using offensive language, and
generally offending bourgeoisie sensibilities and norms—they were removed
from affluent neighbourhoods and sent to the fringes of the city.
Beginning with the “Edict of Governance and Police for the Island of Cuba”
enacted in 1842, legislation targeting prostitution began to be implemented.
The law specifically outlawed brothels, and it stated that “houses of prostitu-
tion are prohibited and will be prosecuted according to the law.”22 By 1853,
policy shifted from outright prohibition to sanctioning prostitution within the
aforementioned officially authorized zones of tolerance. These zones replaced
total prohibition and marked the beginning of a new era of legal regulation
and control. But the overwhelming concern in the creation of zones of toler-
ance was more about moving public soliciting to marginal parts of the city and
not so much with controlling activities within brothels. It was illegal to estab-
lish brothels outside of the geographical areas zoned for prostitution. Within
the segregated district, they were further regulated by the police. Prostitutes
resisted by devising various schemes and techniques to evade their stigmati-
zation, forced relocation, and curtailed mobility. For the most part, however,
there wasn’t enough funding to implement the laws and the police were rather
lax in enforcing the regulation.
Starting in 1860, the city’s chief of police called for a padrón, or master list of
prostitutes that counted all prostitutes according to race, to be drawn up. How-
ever, it was not until 1869 that the list was created, and it appears to have been
the first and only such record to have survived. It took ten years to complete,
and the methodologies used to create it are unclear. For instance, how was the
information gathered? How were the racial categories determined? Was the
identity of prostitutes imposed on the women or supplied voluntarily? His-
torian Tiffany Sippial maintains that police officers relied on their knowledge
of known or reputed prostitutes. Women who only performed sexual services
on an “as-needed” basis, clandestine prostitutes, and those living in the centre
of the city away from the zones of tolerance were excluded from the padrón.
According to these unreliable statistics, the 1869 census of brothels and pros-
titutes included 498 prostitutes in total, with most of the women living close
to the centre of the city.23 Although madams did not have an assigned racial
category, the majority of the prostitutes were classified as white (85 per cent)
22 Ibid., p. 31.
23 Alberto J. Gullón Abao, “La Prostitución en la Habana en los primeros años del siglo xx”,
Trocadero, 14–15 (2003), pp. 93–105, 26.
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Prostitution in Havana 421
and 6 per cent were determined to be of mixed race and 9 per cent black.24
These figures remained fairly stable in various other estimates of that period
of Havana’s history. For instance, Historian Gullón Abao claims that there were
500 prostitutes in Havana in 1878 and that the number of prostitutes did not
increase until 1899 when it rose to 774 as a result of the war that broke out.25
The most notorious sex district was known as Colón, an area between Ha-
bana Vieja and Centro Habana. Another district was on Zanja Street. But be-
cause the tolerance zone was vaguely defined—no one was sure where the
hodgepodge of nonadjacent spaces was exactly located—the loosely defined
policy was difficult to enforce and easy to evade. Ultimately, the method of
geographically segregating prostitutes proved inadequate for the metropolitan
government. It was abandoned in 1868 as colonial officials turned to medical-
scientific regimes of regulation that were becoming increasingly popular in
Paris. It was during this time that the loose and indistinct category of “public
women”, or the demimonde, was replaced by that of “prostitutes”, a term that
focused exclusively on sexual commerce.
For the colonial government, the census revealed that the policy of tolerance
was not meeting their expectations. Creole elites and the colonial regime fo-
cused on marking and controlling prostitutes and prostitution with increased
efficiency. Influenced by the debates and practices taking place with the rise of
science, medicine, public health regimes, and in particular the work of French
physician Alexandre Parent-Duchâtelet, a system of mandatory registration for
prostitutes within tolerance zones together with medical examinations and
the issuance of identity cards was implemented. Similar efforts were made in
London with the British Contagious Diseases Acts and they spread through-
out the western European colonies in more or less the same form.26 Similar
measures were enacted in German Africa, Argentina, Brazil, India, Guatemala,
Japan, the Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, Mexico, and Russia.27 In this way,
the colonial policies and systems regarding prostitution that were established
in Cuba were comparable to those developed to protect imperial soldiers in
other areas of the world.
In 1873 a statutory law called the Special Public Hygiene Regulation (Regla-
mento de Higiene Públicas) was implemented and it stipulated that a hospi-
tal would be established with the aim of examining and treating sex workers
24 Sippial, Prostitution, Modernity, and the Cuban Republic, p. 51.
25 Gullón Abao, “La Prostitución en la Habana en los primeros años del siglo xx”, p. 26.
26 Laura Briggs, Reproducing Empire: Race, Sex, Science, and us Imperialism in Puerto Rico
(Berkeley, 2002).
27 Ibid., p. 29.
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422 Cabezas
who had contracted venereal diseases and an asylum was to be set up to house
homeless women and girls who were infected. The Special Public Hygiene
Regulation brought into being a regulatory scheme of surveillance through the
registration of brothels, madams, and prostitutes.28 The law called for all regis-
tered women to carry at all times a cartilla sanitaria, an identity card identify-
ing them as prostitutes, and they were to be examined twice weekly, “once for
a general exam and once internally by use of a speculum.”29 Those infected
with venereal or other contagious diseases were remanded to the new hospital
for treatment or sent to the Casa de Recogidas. No efforts were made to regu-
late male access to sexual services as this was deemed to be a natural part of
manhood.
By instituting a skeletal administrative and medical staff, the regulation
sought to register madams and remand women to the hospital where they
were examined and treated by medical personnel. The process of documenta-
tion involved the creation of a public record of prostitutes, medical check-ups
every two weeks, and mandated hospitalization in cases of venereal infections.
A letter was also issued to inform clients and the police when a prostitute was
determined to be free of venereal diseases. All the costs were borne by the
registered brothel madams. The fees paid by brothel workers were also used
to pay a special police force that was tasked with carrying out the legal obli-
gations outlined by the Reglamento. In essence, all of the costs related to the
implementation of this policy were paid for by the fees collected from the sex
industry. The regulation thus created a system in which those who could not
afford to pay for the regulations were criminalized.
Every year after the implementation of the law new requirements were
added to the legislation to closely circumscribe the public comportment of
prostitutes. Women employed in brothels were not allowed to stand near win-
dows, look outside, be drunk, or follow people on the streets. The system also
included detailed rules that stipulated how often prostitutes needed to change
bed linens and when they could receive visitors and for how long.30 Brothel
owners were also forced to cover their windows to prevent people from look-
ing inside. The legislation also curtailed public behaviour in terms of soliciting
customers, “gathering in open doorways, occupying balconies in theaters, or
riding through public streets in open carriages.”31 Under the new directives,
28 Beatriz Calvo Peña, “Prensa, política y prostitución en La Habana finisecular: El caso de La
Cebolla y la ‘polemica de las meretrices’”, Cuban Studies 36 (2005), pp. 23–49.
29 Beers, “Murder in San Isidro”, p. 104.
30 Calvo Peña, “Prensa, política y prostitución en La Habana finisecular”, p. 25.
31 Sippial, Prostitution, Modernity, and the Cuban Republic, p. 57.
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Prostitution in Havana 423
prostitutes were also not allowed to sing or use profane or provocative words
in public.
Women evaded the forms of surveillance created by the system of regula-
tion any way they could. They used pseudonyms when stopped by the police
and avoided the imposition of fees, and they also moved frequently to evade
detection. Before being subjected to medical examinations they used powders,
creams, and astringent solutions to hide signs of venereal diseases and others
simply refused to undergo the examinations. Clandestine prostitutes refused
to register or carry the cartilla sanitaria, and it did not help that the police were
lax in collecting fees. By 1876, the new regulatory system was under consider-
able pressure, and the first chief officer of the Special Hygiene Section was
fired for living in a brothel.32 Nevertheless, these challenges proved surmount-
able. A renewed effort was made with new legislation and leadership to ex-
ecute the policy. In 1877, the General Regulation of Public Hygiene promoted a
more rigorous surveillance process that called for higher fees, increased police
supervision, intensified administrative accountability, and more staff to man-
age and control the system of regulation.33 A maximum penalty was enforced
for madams and prostitutes who violated the laws repeatedly and they were
subject to three months of imprisonment and the closure of their brothels.
Stiffer state regulatory measures resulted in higher revenues for the state from
fines. It also solidified the formation of a class system that differentiated be-
tween types of prostitutes.
La Cebolla: The Onion
From evasion to outright confrontation, prostitutes challenged and insti-
gated numerous forms of resistance against unjust regulations and policies.
Perhaps the most creative form was the creation of a newspaper detailing their
complaints and calling for the formation of a political party run by prostitutes.
Financed by wealthy prostitutes and supported by the collaboration of an an-
archist who served as the editor, the newspaper run by Havana’s sex workers
was a means by which they voiced their complaints against unjust laws and
corrupt government officials.34 For the first time in the history of Havana and
perhaps of Latin America, a publication emerged which openly advocated for
the rights of prostitutes. In 1888, La Cebolla: Periódico Ilustrado. Órgano Oficial
32 Beers, “Murder in San Isidro”, pp. 97–129.
33 Sippial, Prostitution, Modernity, and the Cuban Republic, p. 65.
34 Beers, “Murder in San Isidro”, p. 105.
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424 Cabezas
del Partido de su Nombre (The Onion: Illustrated Newspaper, Official Organ of
the Party with the Same Name) appeared in the capital city.35 La Cebolla, which
was “published by and for prostitutes”, was in direct opposition to the Regla-
mento de Higiene Pública and directly opposed the system of regulation. The
articles in the newspaper ridiculed and complained about the high regulatory
fees and the medical check-ups. One unsigned letter stated:
The Mayor, who is so old and cranky that not even a fly dares to land on
him, has decreed that we cannot exhibit ourselves in the doorways of our
own establishments. […] Is this fair? What country prohibits a business-
man from showing the public his merchandise? The “horizontals” of this
city pay more contributions to the state than necessary. Yet, even though
we contribute more than any other sector to bolster the revenues of the
state with the sweat of our […] brows, we are treated as if we were slaves,
as if we were outlaws. In other words, we are considered citizens so as to
meet our obligations but not to enjoy the rights of citizenship.36
La Cebolla protested against the control of prostitutes’ lives by challenging an
exploitative administrative system that was paid for with all the regulations
enacted over their bodies. One of the articles appearing in La Cebolla declared
“!Basta Ya! (Enough is enough!)” and objected to the fact that a child was used
to take down the names of prostitutes who were found to be looking out win-
dows and standing in doorways.37 Another article advocated for the forma-
tion of a prostitute’s professional guild so they could back their demands. The
newspaper carried full-length pictorials of the women, who used nicknames
to conceal their identities, and it was produced four times during the month
of September in 1888 and was widely distributed throughout Havana and the
provinces.
Scholars dispute the authenticity of the writings and the legitimacy of the
newspaper. Beatriz Calvo Peña’s argument is that Victorino Reineri Jimeno,
a progressive journalist, penned all the articles. However, historian María
del Carmen Barcia Zequeira speculates that literate and wealthy sex work-
ers financed the paper and wrote some of the articles. Barcia Zequeira argues
that a number of factors, including the rise of civil society, helped to solidify
35 María del Carmen Barcia Zequeira, “Entre el poder y la crisis: Las prostitutas se defien-
den”, in Luisa Campuzano (ed.), Mujeres latinoamericanas: Historia y cultura: Siglos xvi al
xix (La Habana, 1997), pp. 263–273.
36 Beers, “Murder in San Isidro”, p. 105.
37 Calvo Peña, “Prensa, política y prostitución en La Habana finisecular”, p. 26.
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Prostitution in Havana 425
a context in which prostitutes could become organized and voice their con-
cerns. S ippial’s textual analysis of the writings further supports this conten-
tion. Instead of arguing that Reineri, the anarchist who was the editor, wrote
all the articles, she points out how a multi-vocal and gendered writing style
differentiated the prose, concluding that prostitutes contributed articles to the
newspaper that were different in style from Reineri’s prose. She ascertains that
an alliance between the anarchist and a specific group of prostitutes made the
publication possible.
Irrespective of its exact origins, the newspaper challenged the social order
of late nineteenth-century Havana by affirming the demands of women who
sold sexual services. But it also highlighted that, unlike in previous historical
periods, so-called public women were no longer uneducated and illiterate. For
instance, in 1853, Luisa Bonetti, who was born in Germany and was 26 years
of age, was detained and subsequently deported for creating a public scandal
and being intoxicated in public numerous times. Before being deported, she
fought back against numerous arrests and contested her criminalization to the
local authorities. As historian Maria del Carmen Barcia illustrates, Bonetti was
the literate mother of a six-year-old daughter who refuted the charges against
herself by writing many letters to the governor and Captain General of Cuba
contesting her case.38 Bonetti’s case further confirms the findings of a study
showing that 32 per cent of the Cuban-born women treated at the hygiene
hospital between 1889 and 1902 were literate.39
La Cebolla was an act of defiance against a colonial administration that was
under constant attack. The newspaper was quickly banned and its editor was
fined and incarcerated. Nevertheless, the exploitation of sex workers was pub-
lically discussed and inspired the creation of a new identity for prostitutes as
labouring women.
Class and Racial Differences
La Cebolla brought to light the economic and educational hierarchies that
had solidified with the system of regulation, a framework establishing socio-
economic classes, and geographical demarcations. Race figured significantly
in the stratified sex trade. There is evidence to suggest that women and men
38 Barcia Zequeira, “Entre el poder y la crisis: Las prostitutas se defienden”, Contrastes, 7
(1991–1993), pp. 7–18, 10.
39 Sippial, Prostitution, Modernity, and the Cuban Republic, p. 96.
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426 Cabezas
of African descent had to deal with the harshest working conditions and the
lowest pay.
In the brothels and zone of tolerance pimps and madams were at the cen-
tre of a process of social differentiation and organization. In the pimp hierar-
chy, those at the top lived solely off the earnings of several women, and they
wore fine clothes and ostentatious jewels. Such was the case of Alberto Yarini
y Ponce de León (1882–1910). In the world of the Havana demimonde, he was
commonly referred to as Yarini; he was the popular son of an aristocratic fam-
ily and a leader in the conservative party who was well-known and respected
in the tolerance zones as a chulo, or pimp. In the end, Yaniri was killed during
a quarrel with French pimps.40 Indeed, long-running feuds between French
pimps, known as apaches, and guayabitos—specifying Cubans—were com-
mon. Yaniri’s funeral was attended by as many as 10,000 people from all ranks
of society and received coverage in us newspapers.
Yaniri was the pinnacle of the sex industry’s upper-level rank. Beneath him
were working-class pimps who did not enjoy the same social admiration. Pimps
known as café con leche chulos (“coffee with milk pimps”) were such pimps,
and they had few women working for them, wore cheap watches and shabby
outfits, sold drugs, and had other occupations to supplement their earnings.
They came up with various recruitment and money-making schemes so they
could make a living off new arrivals from the countryside, underage girls, and
young women seeking work at employment agencies.41 Some used newspaper
advertisements or theatrical agencies to recruit women,42 or they served as
intermediaries between madams and clients, utilizing photographic albums of
available women.43 Others joined a host of businessmen and property owners
who charged exorbitant prices for products and living arrangements sold to
sex workers.
White matrons who owned brothels were able to make a decent living in
the sex industry as well. Many of these business owners had previously worked
in brothels in Europe, the Canary Islands, Mexico, Panama, Venezuela, and
the us, and they had earned large sums of money in their youth.44 They in-
vested their savings in the launching of entertainment venues that offered
40 Cañizares, Dulcira, San Isidro 1910: Alberto Yarini y su época, (La Habana, 2000).
41 Alberto J. Gullón Abao, “Un acercamiento a la prostitución cubana de fines del siglo xix”,
in Consuelo Naranjo Orovio and Miguel Puig-Samper (eds), La Nación Soñada: Cuba Puer-
to Rico y Filipinas ante el 98 (Madrid, 1996), pp. 497–507, 503.
42 Gullón Abao, “Un acercamiento a la prostitución cubana”, p. 503.
43 Tomás Fernández Robaina, Recuerdos secretos de dos mujeres públicas, (La Habana, 1983).
44 Barcia Zequeira, “Entre el poder y la crisis”, p. 11.
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Prostitution in Havana 427
rostitution, gambling, and dancing. In Havana it was well-known that they
p
treated their “pupils”, as their workers were known, harshly, keeping them un-
der tight control to deter them from “escaping” and stealing.45 As intermediar-
ies in the sex trade, matrons had influential relationships with the medical and
administrative officials and this made it possible for them to carry out their
business by paying out bribes.
Lower-ranking prostitutes were those who could not afford the high fees
associated with working in the brothels. Those at the bottom strata were wom-
en of African descent who worked as fleteras, (women for hire or for rent),
and they were unregistered clandestine streetwalkers. More visible and hence
more vulnerable, fleteras found clients on the streets and dark alleys, as well
as by the docks and warehouses next to the bay. Often they were the most ex-
posed to violence, and they received the lowest remunerations. Fleteras were
usually women in ill health, the older prostitutes who were generally from vul-
nerable segments of society, and in their trade they faced greater stigma and
denigration.46 As illegal sex workers they were easy prey for the police who
regularly rounded them up, beating and sending them to the local prison.47
In contrast, registered brothel workers, while subject to the reach of the hy-
giene law, had more protection from police violence and exploitation. Never-
theless, they were subordinated by the madams who curtailed their mobility
and extracted as much money from them as possible. Registered brothel work-
ers earned more money but they had to deal with the matrons’ absolute power
over them, as the matrons charged them for supposed debts for clothing and
furnishings that were never incurred.
Between fleteras and registered brothel workers, and between high society
and low-class pimps, there was a fuzzy economy of people who dabbled tem-
porarily in the sex trade. Because they were not poor, black, or working class,
their activities were invisible and not necessarily marked as sex work. These in-
cluded white women who provided occasional sexual exchanges in houses not
registered as brothels. Women who worked out of restaurants, bars, cafés, and
hotels were morally suspect but not readily identified as sex workers. Women
who did not lead marginal lives were able to negotiate sex for jewellery, theatre
tickets, and fine garments in a discreet manner without marking their identity
as sex workers. The general lack of employment for women, exclusionary prac-
tices in the labour market, and the low wages in most sectors of the gendered
45 Gullón Abao, “Un acercamiento a la prostitución cubana”, p. 503.
46 Ibid., p. 497.
47 Beers, “Murder in San Isidro”, p. 106.
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428 Cabezas
economy led women to provisionally engage in short term sexual arrange-
ments so they could secure a livelihood.
Migration and Prostitution
During this epoch of massive European migration to the Americas, Havana
attracted many settlers. For example, between the end of the eighteenth and
the beginning of the twentieth centuries more than half a million Spaniards
immigrated to Cuba. In 1850, Spain initiated large-scale trans-Atlantic migra-
tion which brought many Gallegos (people from the Galician region of Spain)
and Canary Islanders to Cuba.48 Young, single men went there in search of
better opportunities. Women from Spain and the Canary Islands also migrated
there. Some went there with the express intent to work in the sex industry
or ended up there because they had no other options for employment. They
joined trans-Caribbean migrant women arriving from countries such as Mexi-
co, Puerto Rico, New Orleans, Jamaica, and Haiti.49 Journalist and travel writer
Basil Woon cautioned visitors about meeting up with such women:
It may be as well to warn you here that few of these “beautiful young
things”—and they are both beautiful and young—are Cuban. Most of
them are from Panama or Chile or Ecuador. But they all speak Spanish
and only a few know any English.50
Historian Rosalie Schwartz states that “more than a few North American la-
dies of the evening traveled to Havana to compete with the locals.”51 For the
most part these women made their voyages voluntarily, even though Cuban
immigration officials sought to deter the organized “white slave” trade. Some
of the women established their pseudonyms based on their foreign identities.
For instance, the women writing for the newspaper La Cebolla assumed names
such as La Madrileña, La Catalana, La Isleña, and La Charo, emphasizing a
48 Alejandro Vázquez González, “Algunos aspectos do transporte do emigración galega a
América 1850–1930” in Jesús de Juana and Xavier Castro (eds), Galicia y América: El papel
de la emigración (Ourense, 1990), pp. 117–134.
49 Gullón Abao, “La prostitución en la Habana en los primeros años”, p. 26; Beers, “Murder
in San Isidro”, pp. 97–129; Basil Woon, When It’s Cocktail Time in Cuba (New York, 1928),
p. 268.
50 Ibid., p. 276.
51 Rosalie Schwartz, Pleasure Island: Tourism and Temptation in Cuba (Lincoln, 1997), p. 86.
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Prostitution in Havana 429
foreign place of origin. However, xenophobic anxieties, particularly aimed at
racial “others”, became a regular part of calls to ban the sale of sex. The racial
attitudes of the petite bourgeoisie disparaged immigrants and non-whites and
blamed them for the multitude of problems that challenged an over-crowded
city filled with new immigrants.
The influx of migrants further cemented class hierarchies in Havana. For the
elites of society, the issue of prostitution was thought of either as a problem of
immoral immigrants or part of the practices of “depraved” racial groups such
as Afro-Cubans and Chinese labourers. As Sippial argues, the origins of sexual
vice on the island were thus externalized.52 Prominent feminists, doctors, and
influential leaders decried the existence of “undesirable” immigration, accus-
ing immigrants and Afro-Cubans of fomenting the sex trade.
Large groups of indentured Chinese labourers began arriving in Cuba in
1847, and an additional 5,000 Chinese emigrated from the United States to
avoid the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act.53 These migrants, principally single
men, made a perilous and arduous journey to work in the agriculture sector
for eight years and then made their way back to Havana from the countryside
where they established a Chinese community. In 1872, it was estimated that
there were 58,000 men and thirty-two women of Chinese descent in Cuba.54
As researchers point out, slavery-like conditions existed in the migration of
Chinese people, particularly women: “One such advertisement indicated the
sale of a ‘Chinese woman of twenty one years’ and another announced the sale
of ‘a Chinese girl.’”55 Another example, this time from an advertisement in a
Havana-based newspaper, read: “For sale: A Chinese girl with two daughters,
one of 12–13 years [of age] and the other of 5–6, useful for whatever you may
desire. Also one mule.”56 The traffic in Chinese girls emerged in various periods
but was not recorded in the official records. Sippial found an interesting case of
two Chinese “criminal” females who had been remanded to the San Francisco
de Paula hospital in 1856.57
We know very little about the racial and national backgrounds of those who
worked in the sex industry in Havana. There are few reports from the era, as
many documents were destroyed after the us–Spanish War. Nevertheless, we
52 Sippial, Prostitution, Modernity, and the Cuban Republic, p. 117.
53 Lisa Yun, The Coolie Speaks: Chinese Indentured Laborers and African Slaves in Cuba,
(Philadelphia, 2008).
54 Juan Pérez de la Riva, Demografía de los culíes chinos, 1853–1874 (La Habana, 1996), p. 23.
55 Yun, The Coolie Speaks, p. 63.
56 Ibid., p. 64.
57 Sippial, Prostitution, Modernity, and the Cuban Republic, p. 27.
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can make an approximation. For instance, of the 461 women that were treated
in the Hygiene Hospital between 1873 and 1876, 151 were from Spain, 116 were
from the Canary Islands, 145 were “almost all” Cubans of colour, and 49 were
foreigners.58 The note that 145 Cuban women were “casi todas de color” (al-
most all of colour) suggests a racial imperative that would serve to hide the
number of white women in the sex trade. Indeed, in his report as secretary
of the Commission of Hygiene, Ramón Mariá Alfonso indicated that 77 per
cent of the prostitutes were white and he argued that other reports lacked
objectivity.59 By the end of the 1880s, a report indicated that 77 per cent of
registered prostitutes were Cuban and mainly white.60 Again, we know little
about how these racial classifications were arrived at or what constituted cer-
tain categories such as “foreigners.” Historians have pointed out that the wars
of independence in Cuba drew large numbers of displaced internal migrants
to the capital city as they were looking for employment.61 Some were newly
freed slaves who were quite vulnerable, and exclusionary practices could be
temporarily circumvented by selling sex. By the end of the nineteenth century,
as in the centuries before, the sex industry offered a livelihood for foreigners
and Cubans alike.
The Twentieth Century
In the beginning of the twentieth century, the tumultuous nature of the nine-
teenth century continued unabated. Havana served as the entry point and
destination for many internal migrants who were fleeing displacement result-
ing from more than thirty years of wars of independence. Emancipated slaves,
unemployed rural workers, and international immigrants sought to make the
city their home. The us had used the sinking of a boat off the Havana Bay
as an excuse to enter the war of independence against Spain and occupy the
island of Cuba. Havana therefore was in a transitional period of transforma-
tion as Cubans adjusted to their newfound independence from Spain and us
occupation.
The occupying regime installed a provisional government and embarked on
a process of making the Cuban nation receptive to its capitalist goals. While
there were many efforts to “Americanize” the country in this period, the us
58 Barcia Zequeira, “Entre el poder y la crisis”, p. 11.
59 Ibid., p. 12.
60 Ibid.
61 Ibid., p. 11.
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Prostitution in Havana 431
did not radically change or alter existing laws concerning prostitution. As one
commentator expressed in a Cuban newspaper, “The Americans here abol-
ished cockfighting, bullfighting and the lottery. Why did they leave prostitu-
tion in the Republic? It does not exist in the United States […] nor in other
civilized nations.”62 As historian Laura Briggs points out, “During a brief period
during us occupation in Cuba the us military government briefly repealed
(1898), then reinstated (1899) prostitution regulation.”63 The policies that were
re-established were basically the same; the only difference was that alcohol
sales were now prohibited in brothels. us soldiers certainly took advantage
of the restored policy. One 17-year-old patient in the Special Hygiene Section
told medical personnel that she had sexually serviced forty-one us soldiers in
a single day. Many Cubans felt that us policy was a mere extension of Spanish
colonial exploitation.
With the endorsement of the occupying government, a regulation ratified in
1902 raised the legal age for registration from 15 to 18 years of age in an attempt
to curtail prostitution carried out by young girls. The regulation also clearly de-
fined the geographic parameters of the tolerance zone and hence it decreased
the ambiguity of the previous policy. But because no new zones were added
and the sex trade persisted in the same space as it had been since 1850, it re-
sulted in over-crowding in the zone, thus increasing rents. Sippial contends
that, “Fully aware that their tenants were bound to the tolerance zone, land-
lords split rental properties into ever-smaller units, for which they charged
astronomical prices.”64 Years later, an informant told researcher Fernández
Robaina, “We had to rush those who were making love in the rooms to be able
to service our clients. In houses of six or more rooms, there were as many as
fifteen whores.”65 The informant added, “That is to say, in the amount of time
that before we were with one client, now we had to service two or three.”66
Sexual commerce took on an assembly-line approach as women had to work
faster to pay the exorbitant rents.
The dense population of Havana was further augmented by us-based tour-
ism. A new law outlawing the sale of alcohol in the us, the Volstead Act of 1919,
served to expand the steady flow of North American tourists to Cuba.67 With
62 Diario de la marina, (Havana, November 22, 1910) as quoted in Fernández Robaina, Recu-
erdos secretos de dos mujeres públicas, p. 42.
63 Briggs, Reproducing Empire: Race, Sex, Science, and us Imperialism, p. 32.
64 Sippial, Prostitution, Modernity, and the Making of the Cuban Republic, p. 145.
65 Tomás Fernández Robaina, Historias de Mujeres Públicas (La Habana, 1998), p. 45.
66 Fernández Robaina, Historias de Mujeres Públicas, p. 46.
67 Pérez, On Becoming Cuban, p. 167.
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their proximity to Havana—us travellers seeking to escape the long arm of us
morality could flee to Cuba for a weekend of partying and indulging in out-
lawed behaviour. Havana became known as a place where Americans went to
do what they were not allowed to do in their own country. In this way, Havana
became known solely as a city of depravity.
From 1915 to 1930, Havana had the largest number of foreign visitors in
the Caribbean. Mass-marketing campaigns stimulated pleasure-seeking visi-
tors to come to a place that was “so near, yet so foreign”, as one travel poster
proclaimed—in essence, a place that was exotic but not too exotic. During
a period in which the us outlawed “pleasure” activities such as drinking and
prostitution, Havana provided an outlet to satisfy demand. Visitor arrivals
steadily grew in the twentieth century. In the heyday of North American tour-
ism, visitor arrivals increased from 180,000 in 1940 to a high of 350,000 in 1957.68
Gambling, prostitution, and pornographic theatres propagated an outlaw
culture that entertained tourists. Havana became known as the “Brothel of the
Caribbean”. As one us men’s publication proclaimed,
Havana is indeed geared to the tourist trade as are few other capital cities
in the world. It’s a huckstering holiday town with one main pitch: Come
on, you thousands of Americans, throw off your inhibitions and play
in an old Spanish city which never heard of the bourgeois squeamish-
ness of American play lands! There’s something for every taste and every
pocketbook!69
Even tourist guidebooks promoted sex tourism, as the following guide book
from 1928 indicates:
For your benefit then, you gay old dog, we’ll append a few brief and easily
learned phrases:
“Will you come for a ride?”—“Quierespasaearconmigo?”
(Keeayryspasayarconmeego?)
“Give me a kiss?”—“Dame un beso, chica?”
(Darmyoonbaysimcheeka?)
“Will you sup with me?”—“Quierescenarconmigo?”
(keeayryssaynarconmeego?)
“I love you very much.”—“Tequiero mucho.” (Taykeeayromoocho.)
“How much?”—“Cuanto es?” (Kwantoays?)70
68 Evaristo Villalba Garrido, Cuba y el turismo (La Habana, 1993), p. 54.
69 Robert Fortune, “Sin—With A Rhumba Beat!” Stag, 1 (1950), pp. 22–23, 58.
70 Basil Woon, When It’s Cocktail Time in Cuba (New York, 1928), p. 277.
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Prostitution in Havana 433
Guidebooks even remarked on the class stratification of the sexual economy,
referring to hidden places with better reputations and this offered not only
anonymity from the sex industry, but also refined accommodations located in
affluent areas of Havana where embassies were located and privileged sectors
of society resided. For instance, the exclusive stratum of casas de cita charged
higher prices and catered to a clientele consisting of politicians, businessmen,
and professionals. Mafia-owned casinos frequented by affluent Cubans and us
tourists were well-known as places where sex workers could be contacted. Even
the lowest echelons of sexual exchange, the waterfront in Old Havana where
sex could be purchased more cheaply, were mentioned in the guidebooks.
The districto de tolerancia, or tolerance zone, had been closed down by the
time Basil Woon, a British journalist and author, wrote When it’s Cocktail Time
in Cuba. In his travelogue, Woon remarks how by the 1920s prostitution was
no longer segregated into vice areas but had spread throughout the city.71 He
details strip shows where “few of the girls wear any clothes to speak of. This is
the ‘naughtiest’ public show in Havana, although downtown there is a theatre
which is not allowed to admit women and children, so risqué are its shows.”72
His guidebook also mentions “French” motion-picture shows, alluding to por-
nographic film theatres that were increasing in number in the city. The sex
industry was emerging in new sectors and providing employment for a multi-
tude of people.
The heterogeneity of the sex businesses in Havana resulted in many different
outcomes for women. A sex worker by the name of Consuelo la Charmé who
was interviewed by Fernández Robaina stated that she liked her occupation
and was proud of her skills.73 She considered it to be a professional endeavour,
and she worked into old age by receiving regular clients at her home. Another
woman stated that she had never worked at a brothel or on the streets. Instead,
she found clients in a bar where she worked selling over-priced, watered-down
drinks. She paid the bar owner 50 per cent of the money she made from the
drinks she sold but was able to lie about her proceeds so she could keep more
of her earnings. Sex workers employed as waitresses in bars benefited from
anonymity and independence from procurers. The testimonies collected by
Fernández Robaina indicate that prostitutes were careful and discriminating
in what types of sexual activities they performed. One of the sex workers, for
example, refused to service over-weight men. Therefore, while there is little
information about the different categories of workers or types of experiences,
71 Woon, When It’s Cocktail Time in Cuba, p. 160.
72 Ibid., p. 164.
73 Fernández Robaina, Recuerdos secretos.
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434 Cabezas
the diversity of arrangements made it possible for many women not only to
make a living through prostitution but to exercise some agency in their work.
Nevertheless, the testimonies of former sex workers also confirmed the
types of oppressive culture in which poor women in particular struggled. The
narratives collected by researcher Tomás Fernández Robaina tell the story of
two former prostitutes who grew up in poverty.74 While we are not given many
details or exact dates, the women speak of being forced to pay exorbitant pric-
es for rooms, paying madams 40 to 50 per cent of their wages, and dealing with
police harassment and extortion. They weren’t arrested for prostitution per
se but they were incarcerated as the result of periodic sweeps carried against
people for “offending” public morals or committing “scandals” in public. Even
when brothel owners paid their required registration dues, sex workers were
subject to police extortion, or what they called the “legalized mafia”; they had
to regularly give bribes such as cigarettes or half a peso to the police watch-
men. Police harassment was less severe at other places where women sold sex
such as cabarets and bars. In the social hierarchy of prostitution, streetwalkers
were consistently the most vulnerable and suffered the greatest abuse. Some of
them conducted business fully exposed between parked trucks by the railroad
yard, and as such they were unprotected from all kinds of police extortion,
violence, and abuse.
The police were not the only ones to exploit sex workers. One of the women
interviewed by Fernández Robaina described how pimp violence was a means
of manipulating prostitutes. In the twentieth century, procurers also became
entangled in the sale of illicit drugs such as cocaine and marijuana. In particu-
lar, lower-class pimps were often involved in illegal activities, including bur-
glaries and petty thefts. With the exception of Yarini and references to French
pimps, we know little about the identities and social characteristics of the men
who worked as intermediaries or procurers in the sex districts of Havana.
In the turbulent political climate of the twentieth century, a young lawyer
from a privileged white family launched his political career by using the imag-
ery of sex and sin tourism to call for radical social change and armed revolt on
the island. On the way to Colombia in 1948, young Fidel Castro was shocked by
the “endless succession of brothels, nightclubs, and other lurid amusements”
near the us naval base there. Oddly, he compared these to Havana and not
to the us occupation of the Guantanamo military base where Cuban prosti-
tutes servicing us soldiers was also rampant. Castro commented, “The famous
Panama Canal Zone was the final destination of women from humble families
turned into prostitutes by the Cuban bourgeoisie and its system of corruption,
74 Ibid.
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Prostitution in Havana 435
unemployment, hunger, and despair.”75 He reasoned that this was the only
reason why Cuba was so well-known and liked in the world. In his political
speeches the suffering prostitute emerged as a symbol of political corruption
and us imperialism.76 Castro and his followers promised to reform Cuba’s
political and moral economy. Indeed, as historian Skwiot claims, the political
movement led by Fidel Castro, M-26, prohibited its members from patronizing
nightclubs, and “Gambling, whoring, and ‘lavish living’ were strictly against the
rules.”77
In the 1950s, as Time magazine called Havana “one of the world’s fabled
fleshpots”,78 the sex districts were not only proliferating but also diversifying.
Pornographic theatres and sex clubs were expanding in various parts of the
city, no longer contained to sex districts.79 On an entire city block neighbour-
ing the Plaza del Vapor at the end of Galiano Street, prostitutes were exchanged
like any other commodity. Havana embodied the essential characteristics of
a playground atmosphere where “anything goes”. In his autobiography, Frank
Ragano, an attorney who worked for the mafia in the 1950s, recalled a conversa-
tion with mafia boss Santo Trafficante about Havana:
Frank, you’ve got to remember, over here there’s something for every-
body. You want opera, they have opera. You want baseball, they have
baseball. You want ballroom dancing, they have ballroom dancing. And
if you want sex shows, they have live sex shows. That’s what makes this
place so great.80
The number of brothels and the sex trade in general continued to increase in
the early 1950s. Commercial sex included everything from live sex shows to
pornography, but it also integrated other businesses as well. Connections to
hotels and gambling casinos facilitated the sale of sex as well. A North Ameri-
can magazine advised its readers, “If you brush past the airport and dockside
pimps on entering the picturesque old city, you merely dodge the first sinful
invitation of the community. Desk clerks in a good half of the town’s hostelries
75 Christine Skwiot, The Purposes of Paradise: us Tourism and Empire in Cuba and Hawai’i
(Philadelphia, 2010), p. 157.
76 Ibid., p. 169.
77 Ibid., p. 191.
78 Ibid., p. 155.
79 Peréz, On Becoming Cuban, p. 23.
80 Ragano and Raab in John Jenkins, Travelers’ Tales of Old Cuba (Melbourne, 2002) as quot-
ed in Amalia Cabezas, Economies of Desire (Philadelphia, 2009).
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436 Cabezas
are likely to ask if you would like to meet a young lady tonight. Or would to-
morrow be soon enough?”81
By the late 1950s there were about 270 brothels operating in Havana, with
more than 11,500 women working as prostitutes.82 But by the end of the de-
cade, the abolition of brothels and prostitution became a regular part of dis-
courses that justified revolutionary social change.
Revolutionary Cuba
I cannot believe that there are no madams; that there are no brothels and
cabarets where women have to be on the lookout for customers to have
money for a bite to eat; the police are not like before, feared by all. I seem
to be living in a dream […]83
The Cuban Revolution of 1959—which evolved into a Marxist-Leninist
regime—did not make false promises about eliminating the sex industry. The
new revolutionary government sought to eliminate gambling and prostitution,
condemning them as vices connected to us imperialism and to the regime of
Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista. The new regime abolished street prostitu-
tion, brothels, pornographic theatres, and casas de cita; in short, all businesses
related to sexualized entertainment were banned. This was followed by a gov-
ernment programme that sought to “rehabilitate” sex workers through alterna-
tive forms of employment and education. Women were trained and given jobs
at various kinds of factories, laboratories, and offices.84 Pimping was punished
by heavy fines. Many men and women, however, refused to be placed in the re-
habilitation centres and some fled the country. The reforms, nevertheless, were
successful in the eradication of visible commercial sex. Only a small number of
prostitutes were said to be practicing in Havana by the time of the economic
collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.
The alliance between Cuba and the former communist regimes in eastern
Europe and the Soviet Union facilitated the growth and development of the is-
land. As during earlier periods, Havana continued to be prioritized as the capi-
tal and cultural centre of Cuba. In the post-Soviet period, Havana continued to
81 Fortune, “Sin—With a Rhumba Beat!”, p. 58.
82 Peréz, On Becoming Cuban, p. 193.
83 Fernández Robaina, Recuerdos secretos, p. 85.
84 Rosa del Olmo, “The Cuban Revolution and the Struggle against Prostitution”, Crime and
Social Justice, 12 (1979), pp. 34–40.
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Prostitution in Havana 437
provide more economic and social prospects than other parts of the country.
As the government moved to attract western capitalism by entering into joint
ventures with transnational tourism corporations, Havana was prioritized for
development because of its existing touristic infrastructure and its easy ac-
cess to air and marine transportation. A mass exodus of people occurred from
the countryside and the eastern part of the island as people sought to make a
living by becoming involved in the tourist economy as it rapidly developed in
the city.
The cessation of Soviet subsidies sent the economy into a rapid downward
spiral, and female workers, including professionals such as doctors, econo-
mists, and lawyers, became involved with tourism in the capital, the only dy-
namic sector of the economy. Hotel workers and freelancers working in areas
near tourist areas facilitated contact with foreign tourists. Their relationships
with foreigners involved the selling of goods such as rum and cigars as well as
tour guide services and sex. Initially understood to be hustling or a necessary
intervention for survival, sex was not the main feature that defined Cuban-
foreigner relationships. The changing interpretations of these relationships
became evident in the jargon used to describe them. Instead of prostitute, a
pejorative term associated with pre-Revolutionary Cuba and stigmatized iden-
tities, a new term came into existence, jinetear. Jinetear involved relationships
that involved the sale of goods, service activities, companionship, and sex. By
the end of the twentieth century, the term jinetear became a pejorative and
racialized term that stigmatized Afro-Cubans as prostitutes and made white
Cubans invisible in the sex trade. A new term emerged, luchadora, and it has
been used to de-emphasize the sexual aspect of tourist-related relationships to
encompass many forms of illicit activities and to de-stigmatize relationships
involving tourists.
What the new jargon initially emphasized was a form of agency (jinete
means a “jockey”), a lack of social disapproval, and a shared understanding of
the struggles that people faced. The difficulties of survival and creating other
ways of getting by were understood by the women I interviewed as a means of
calling upon affective and sexual exchanges without reinforcing an entrenched
sex worker identity. What I term “tactical sex” captures the sporadic use of sex
and affect to fulfil economic necessity. Without an established sex industry and
with high levels of human capital formation, identities remain flexible and it is
difficult to distinguish between market and non-market transactions. Tactical
sex, therefore, makes it possible for relationships to evolve over time into more
legitimate arrangements.
In the late twentieth century, state responses to prostitution, which had
increased and become more visible, were contradictory. From ignoring the
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problem to curtailing it, the state responded by identifying women as prosti-
tutes and ignoring males, either as clients or as sex workers. In the 1990s, the
government began to regulate and penalize many activities connected to for-
eigners, although the sale of sex is not directly prohibited. Under Cuban law,
a person deemed to have a proclivity to commit an offense in contradiction
with the norms of socialist principles may be arrested under quite variable
circumstances and conditions. Since prostitution is not illegal, the state uses
a law in which it defines a “state of dangerousness” to incarcerate women. As
in the early sixties, rehabilitation centres were established with the assistance
of the Federation of Cuban Women (fmc), Cuba’s state-sponsored women’s
organization. Judicial authorities placed so-called “dangerous women” in re-
habilitation camps for up to four years. The length of stay at the rehabilitation
centre depended on the degree of risk to society that the women supposedly
posed and the likelihood they would be rehabilitated. Once a woman was in-
carcerated, she had to prove by her attitude and behaviour that she had been
rehabilitated. Radhika Coomaraswamy, the United Nations special rapporteur
on violence against women and the first un human rights official to be invited
by the Cuban government to visit the island, questioned the arbitrariness of
leaving a sentence open until officials determined that the person no longer
poses a social threat.85 In her report Coomaraswamy noted, “Anti-social behav-
ior and causing disturbances to the community are considered manifestations
of such dangerousness.”86 When someone is determined to be dangerous in
accordance with this provision, the penal code permits the imposition of pre-
criminal measures resulting in re-education. Coomaraswamy emphasized that
this leaves room for abuse and subjective treatment and is inconsistent with
fair judicial procedures.87
Women found hanging out with tourists or engaging in any other form of
behaviour that is deemed to be anti-social can be arrested and the government
can issue a carta de advertencia, or a letter of warning. If a woman receives
three such warnings she is then incarcerated in a rehabilitation centre for up
to four years. The state’s crusade targets rural migrants, working class women,
and mulatas, subjecting them to gynaecological exams, surveillance, arrest,
incarceration, and forced labour. Reminiscent of earlier efforts such as the
Casa de Recogidas and the legal regulation of women selling sex, state policies
continue to target women, stigmatizing and subjecting them to rehabilitation.
85 Commission on Human Rights, Fifty-sixth Session, Item 12(a) of the Provisional Agenda
E/CN.4/2000/68 Add.2, 8 February. Report, United Nations (New York, 2000), p. 13.
86 Ibid.
87 Ibid., p. 14.
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Prostitution in Havana 439
Men hustling in tourist spaces, particularly black men, are also harassed and
routinely stopped for identity checks; they are often fined and incarcerated
for minor violations. Generally, however, men as clients or sex workers are not
taken up in rehabilitation efforts.
The goal of the fmc in instituting the rehabilitation camps was to redirect
women away from selling sex to foreigners by providing them with training in
other more “appropriate” work such as hairstyling. As in many cases of social
hysteria, once the panic subsided, so did interest in maintaining the camps.
One communist party official whom I interviewed said that they were too ex-
pensive to run and that they never did contain the problem. Repressive policies
have continued with periodic police sweeps of the city streets. They have also
instigated a move for male control of the sex trade, facilitating new brokers
who arrange encounters between male tourists and Cuban women. A young
doctor/choreographer whom I interviewed is a case in point. During the day he
worked as a medical doctor, but in the evening he served as director and cho-
reographer for a nightclub dance revue at a hotel cabaret. His business scheme
called for dancers to pose for a photo album that he presented to prospective
clients—men he met at the nightclub. He coordinated the rendezvous and of-
ten took a gratuity from the men and a cut of the dancers’ earnings. Although
he claimed to have received invitations to travel to Europe to work as a chore-
ographer, he was content to make money by providing foreigners with access
to the women of his dance troupe.
Another new form of commercial sex has arisen through the use of the in-
ternet and the spread of cybercafés all around the city as they have facilitated
sexual interactions between Cubans and foreigners. Since 2003, these new op-
portunities have made it easier to develop friendships, find marriage partners
overseas, and sell sex. Many women and men visit chat rooms or post pho-
tographs on Internet websites looking for romance, travel, and friendships.
Others use the services of intermediaries. Compared to previous periods in
Cuban history, there is more indeterminacy and ambiguity in these relation-
ships. The exchange of money for sex is veiled and does not necessarily con-
firm a sex-worker identity. The internet also provides some protection from
police harassment and extortion.
Unlike in previous historical periods in Havana, there is no longer a vice
district. Gambling, pornography, and drugs are strictly prohibited. The sale of
sex, while unstructured, takes place on the streets, in parks, and through tour-
ism companies. In contrast to other times, women in Cuba have high levels of
education and high levels of participation in the workforce. Since education in
Cuba is universal and free, lack of literacy skills or advanced training is not an
impediment for earning a livelihood. Rather, it is due to the lack of well-paid
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440 Cabezas
jobs, racial discrimination, and lack of social mobility. Sex work not only pays
better, it also offers more opportunities for leisure and travel than other forms
of labour.
Conclusion
The city of Havana, traditionally the largest city of the Caribbean, remains the
most populous and economically developed urban space in Cuba, and as the
capital of the nation, it has always held a privileged place in Cuban society.
The city has been home to conquerors, pirates, immigrants, slaves, and internal
migrants. Among these were the freed slave women who made their way from
plantations to Havana to survive. Havana offered many advantages, the most
important of which was that it was a place of economic growth and urbanity,
in contrast to other parts of the island that to this day remain underdeveloped.
New technologies have regularly reshaped sexual commerce, but there are
more continuities in the last five hundred years of prostitution in Havana than
there are disruptions in the structure of the sex trade.
From mujeres de mal vivir to mujeres públicas, prostitutas, jineteras, and
luchadoras, the lexicon has denoted women and aspects of sexual exchange.
Sexual commerce created possibilities for independence, agency, and progress
even while it entangled some women in dangerous exploitative relationships.
Whether as a provisional approach to earning a livelihood or the elaboration
of a worker identity as we saw with La Cebolla, the sale of sex has been an eco-
nomic recourse in the history of the city. The role of the state has seldom been
kind in this regard. Persecution, violence, extortion, incarceration, regulation,
prohibition, rehabilitation, stigma, and shame are some of the approaches that
have been used by the authorities. In different historical periods a combina-
tion of these approaches have been tried with the aim of deterring the sex
trade, but none have worked for very long.
From its very inception, Havana has had structures in place that offer sexual
services to those who reach its shores. There was a short period of time in its
five-hundred-year history when prostitution was prohibited, but for the most
part it has been part of the landscape of the city by the bay. Even though sex
work has existed at the margins of society, its divergent historical potentiali-
ties have benefitted society and culture at large. Sexual services have made it
possible for many people to make a living, not just sex workers, and it has fa-
cilitated sexualized entertainment for many others as it has been a way to find
care, love, and sexual pleasure for over five hundred centuries.
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chapter 17
Facing a Double Standard: Prostitution in
Mexico City, 1521–2006
Fernanda Nuñez and Pamela Fuentes
The Emergence of a Social “Problem”: Prostitution in Mexico City
Background
Given the absence of reliable historical information, we do not want to repro-
duce what the academic doxa insists on repeating, that is, descriptions of pre-
Hispanic societies using documents produced during the sixteenth-century
Spanish conquest and redefined by the nationalist anthropology of the late
twentieth and the early twenty-first centuries. We know very little about the
extinct pre-Hispanic world and their sexuality, nor do we know much about
the ways by which the pre-Hispanic people fulfilled their erotic fantasies and
sexual physicality, and even less about the existence of what we now call
prostitution.
The beautiful statuettes exhibited at anthropology museums all over the
country bear silent witness to the greatness of a society whose interpreta-
tive clues are still quite unknown to us. Osseous remains showing successful
surgical procedures, ceramic figures of detailed bodies that are scarified, tat-
tooed, and painted are all evidence of bodies that are different from western
ones, bodies which were not led by the notion of sin and therefore had guilt-
less sex. It is difficult for us to think, as some researchers have suggested,1 that
pre-Hispanic societies had also adopted patriarchy and its well-known “double
morality” practised since early Christian times as a “necessary evil”, ensuring
that some women were sexually available through some kind of compensation
to men, whose nature was considered to be untamed, violent, and impossible
to contain, so they wouldn’t rape their wives and daughters.2
1 María J. Rodríguez Shadow, La mujer azteca (Mexico City, 1977).
2 Since the 1940s, a Mexican historiographical school of thought, which we do not share, has
insisted on describing a presumed pre-Hispanic sexual morality. But it has done so through
the filter of the feudal Catholic morality that carried out the descriptions of this ancient
world that disappeared in the sixteenth century. They therefore claim that these cultures
© Fernanda Nuñez and Pamela Fuentes, 2017 | doi 10.1163/9789004346253_018
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442 Nuñez and Fuentes
Prostitution in the Colonial Era
What we do know is that western cities developed various forms of prostitu-
tion; hence, since very early times, both the municipal authorities and the
Catholic Church tried to control it. The durability of Saint Augustine’s state-
ment “if prostitution were to be suppressed, capricious lusts would then over-
throw society” proves how difficult it has been for western culture to restrain
male sexuality and this is a testament to its need to route it to specific places
where women served men’s sexual desires.
Because New Spain entered very early into the same Judeo-Christian cul-
tural model as its metropolis and as the various society-regulating institutions
were established, the crown granted the municipal authority of Mexico City a
permit to open and control the first “concubinary house” in 1538. It was thought
that the existence of these houses, if properly supervised and controlled by the
authorities, would be useful for the kingdom’s morale, health, and well-being,
just as it had been since the Middle Ages in Spain, in spite of the church’s con-
tinuous disapproval and condemnation of lust and fornication.3
Although we do not know for sure if that state-authorised brothel ever actu-
ally opened, that does not mean venal love did not proliferate in the i ncipient
colonial society of New Spain. It was inevitable given that society consisted
largely of white males, most of whom were celibate and little inclined to
marriage. The destruction of the existing society, as well as several epidem-
ics, facilitated white men’s sexual access to indigenous women and to the few
white women who had migrated there alone.
The conquest was a male enterprise led by men who left their women and
children behind and who sought to reinvent themselves by setting sail to
shared the Catholic rejection of prostitution, homosexuality, and abortion, as well as what
western societies consider “sins of the flesh”.
3 Mexico City, the capital of Mexico, is located in a large valley at the centre of the country.
In this area the Aztecs founded Mexico Tenochtitlan in 1325, which was almost completely
destroyed during the Spanish conquest. After 1521, the former capital of the Aztec empire was
rebuilt according to the Spanish standards of urbanization. Over a decade later, the Span-
ish crown established several viceroyalties to govern its possessions in the Americas. During
those years, Mexico City was named as such by the colonial authorities and became the capi-
tal of New Spain. This viceroyalty comprised what is now Mexico, Central America, nearly
all of the southwestern United States, Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Philippines, and several Pacific
Islands. After three centuries of colonization, Mexico declared its independence and cre-
ated the Federal District. In daily life the inhabitants of the country have used both names,
Federal District and Mexico City, interchangeably. After a political reform in 2016, it officially
ceased to be named the Federal District, and currently both politicians and citizens are en-
gaged in a major political debate regarding the first constitution of the city.
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Prostitution in Mexico City, 1521–2006 443
America. In spite of royal orders issued on the matter, during the early peri-
od of the conquest very few married women joined their husbands, leading
to a unique society. Although colonial legislation was in essence the same as
in Spain, its practice was more lenient in New Spain. The carnal relations be-
tween white males and indigenous women or women from the various castes4
that emerged, whether stable or not, were an acceptable standard. Widows
and orphans, as well as women who were alone, poor, or had been abandoned,
lacked job opportunities and hence found a means to support themselves by
selling sex.
In order to safeguard “the honour” of such impoverished white women and
to prevent others from falling again prey to prostitution, charity institutions
known as recogimientos (“seclusion institutions”) were established. It is known
that by the end of the seventeenth century, Recogimiento Jesus de la Peni-
tencia for instance sheltered a hundred “Spanish” women and rejected many
others due to lack of space; this can give us a glimpse of the extent of the prob-
lem faced by white women who didn’t have a male figure to look after them.5
Women from the lower castes could not access these types of establishments.
Unlawful sexual relations between white men of “high” status and women
of the different castes was so common that it affected the priests and even the
bailiffs involved in the Inquisition, becoming an informally accepted standard.
This standard coexisted with the traditional value of family honour linked to
feminine virtue which prevailed throughout the Hispanic world.
One of the difficulties we have in understanding the phenomenon of pros-
titution as practised in the New World has to do with concepts; as in Spain, the
words “prostitute” or “prostitution” were not used until the eighteenth century.
Scholars have concluded that there was a certain parallel between women
“living in sin”, or concubines, and “public” or “low-life” women or “whores”,
as prostitutes were also called. Both could keep long-term relationships with
their lovers or clients, received money or means of sustenance in exchange for
sexual favours, and they even had children with their male partners.6
Another problem has been that the sources have not proved to be very elo-
quent in detailing what prostitution was like, which and how many women
practised it, who their clients were, and if there were any intermediaries acting
4 In New Spain this system of social representation was an attempt to categorize and stratify
the racial mix into white, indigenous, and black people. However, the fact that individuals
were able to escape from one caste and construct strategies for survival in another dem-
onstrates the limited social and political utility of this attempt to control a population that
became more and more mixed over time.
5 Josefina Muriel, Los Recogimientos de Mujeres (Mexico City, 1974).
6 Ana María Atondo Rodríguez, “El amor venal y la condición femenina en el México colonial”
(Unpublished Ph.D., Sorbonne University, 1986), pp. 33–37.
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444 Nuñez and Fuentes
between them. The lack of legal interest in prosecuting these kinds of suppos-
edly deviant behaviour suggests that in reality colonial society was very toler-
ant of these extra-marital sexual practices.
It seems that “favours” from public women, mainly the few white ones, were
generously remunerated by their clients. They bought them clothes, gave them
jewellery, and paid them well, so much so that both “honourable” society and
the crown dictated measures to halt the “scandals” and “excesses” in which
these women participated publicly. They were forbidden from going out in
public wearing fine clothing, riding in carriages, and taking cushions and rugs
to church, nor were they allowed to be escorted by their maids, as was common
among cavaliers’ wives. This gives us an idea of both how booming the busi-
ness was, and how it drove these women’s social success.
There are criminal and inquisitorial records which make it possible for us to
re-think what could have been taking place in such a society, and they point
to the existence of a great range of activities that today we could call “prostitu-
tional”. Women of all ethnic categories sold their “charms” according to their
own social status in brothels, private houses, inns, pubs, the sweat-chamber
baths known as temazcales, and even on the streets.
There were black slaves who were forced by their masters, generally trad-
ers, to prostitute themselves to compensate for the bad sales of the day. And
there was the seductive Bernarda de la Encarnacion, the slave of a judge who
bought back her freedom thanks to the proceeds she made through prostitu-
tion (which she practised into old age), which made it possible for her to take
on the habit in the Recogimiento de San Miguel de Belen, where she passed
away at the end of the seventeenth century. It seems that other “licentious”
women in that century made the same choice when their good looks were di-
minished by age.7
If we look at the abundant records relating to witchery and superstition
during the Inquisition, we find an unexpected window onto the activities of
many of these women. These documents reveal that many of the black slaves
and mulatto women who were on trial were engaging in prostitution as a way
of life; apparently, men appreciated their skills and were willing to pay for
them. There is much less information regarding the prostitution of indigenous
women, who, because of their subordinated situation, suffered the most sexual
violence. In addition, it was no sin for Spaniards to abuse Indians, as was open-
ly declared in several inquisitorial records.8
7 Muriel, Los Recogimientos, pp. 47–56.
8 Solange Alberro, “La sexualidad manipulada en Nueva España: modalidades de recuper-
ación y de adaptación frente a los tribunales eclesiásticos”, in Familia y sexualidad en Nueva
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Prostitution in Mexico City, 1521–2006 445
It seems that the Spanish provisions aiming at the repression of prostitution
that reached New Spain in the seventeenth century did not affect the practice
in Mexico City, because men were still finding solace in the arms of public
women from different categories corresponding to their budgets. It was not
until the end of the eighteenth century that a more repressive attitude was ad-
opted against these “scandalous” women and the pimps whom they supported
with their labours. Some recogimientos, which tried to safeguard women from
a “life of sin”, were transformed into prisons to punish those practicing public
prostitution. Prisons and sweatshops became places where incarcerated mad-
ams and pimps coexisted with thieves and other criminals.
However, once again, the few cases of convictions give us an idea about
the indulgence of both the crown and the church regarding the “loose” sexual
practices which were widespread in society. Well-known cases against female
entertainers and women with “loose” lifestyles having relations with high of-
ficers, some of them married and not only from the municipality but also from
the church, reveal a very ancien régime form of sociability that was quite festive
and had a taste for ostentation in which women played an important role.
State Regulation in the Nineteenth Century
The phenomenon of prostitution spread throughout Mexico City and en-
dured through the first part of the nineteenth century, which was inaugurated
with the War of Independence and decades of political turbulence. It was not
until the end of the 1860s that something fundamentally new began to appear:
public prostitution stopped being linked to the quite elastic notion of sin and
became a medical and public hygiene issue to be handled by the state.
We begin to find in the city archives traces of alarm caused by the propa-
gation of venereal disease spread by the “swarm of public women” linked
since then to the “immorality of lower classes”. The necessity of sanitizing and
cleaning up a city of 200,000 inhabitants—the largest in Latin America at the
time—led social observers to study what was being done in other countries in
order to find solutions for Mexico. Many of them were doctors but there were
also lawyers, journalists, and writers who left a vast body of documentation
which makes it possible for us to point out two clearly differentiated moments
in the approach to the “problem” of prostitution.9
E spaña, Memoria del Primer Simposio de Historia de las Mentalidades: familia, matrimonio y
sexualidad en Nueva España (Mexico City, 1982), pp. 238–257.
9 From the second half of the century onwards, thanks to peace and progress in hygiene but
mainly due to migratory flows from all around the republic, the population of the city increased
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446 Nuñez and Fuentes
The first period of official tolerance came about with the implementation of
the “French” or regulatory system, which lasted from 1865 until the beginning
of the Mexican Revolution in 1910. At this point, “modern” scientists, with clear
Lombrosian influences who saw official tolerance as a “license to licentious-
ness”, began to endorse “abolitionism”. In spite of these discussions, Mexico
regulated prostitution until 1940. This section will describe the first period.
Emperor Maximilian of Habsburg brought the French system to Mexico in
the ephemeral period known as the Second Empire. On 17 February 1865, the
first register of public women in Mexico City was initiated. Once the republic
was restored in 1867, a bylaw to standardize its practice was passed, and it was
progressively promulgated in several states of the country, undergoing some
modifications.
For that system to work as enacted by hygienist Parent du Châtelet in France
in the 1830s two institutions had to be founded and they were to be in charge
of its implementation. One was a medical examination department which had
doctors responsible for recording, classifying, and checking on a weekly basis
all the women who were registered, as well as the brothels where they worked.
Policemen were responsible for bringing, by force if necessary, all women sus-
pected of prostitution to the medical examination department and to pros-
ecute clandestine prostitutes. The other institution was a special section of the
San Juan de Dios Hospital10 which treated women who had syphilis or other
venereal diseases, and they had to stay there, forcefully secluded, “kidnapped”
until they were cured. Syphilis was perceived to be a modern plague, a danger
that threatened not only the individual but also the human species as a whole;
its prevention and eradication was the reason behind the implementation of
the regulatory system. Frías y Soto, the head of the municipality of Mexico City
and an expert on the subject, explained in 1873 that “prostitution is a wound
that cannot be suppressed without damaging the noblest organ of the people,
which is family; that is why all enlightened governments try, through tolerance,
not to extirpate it, but to regulate it.”11
from 200,000 inhabitants in 1860 to 471,066 in 1910, just before the revolution broke out.
Migration was so intensive that in 1880, 47 per cent of the urban population had been
born in another state. Ariel Rodríguez Kuri, La experiencia olvidada: El Ayuntamiento de
México, política y gobierno, 1876–1912 (Mexico City, 1996), p. 82.
10 Soon after, it would be called the Hospital de la Mujer.
11 Fernanda Núñez Becerra, La prostitución y su represión en la Ciudad de México, siglo xix:
Prácticas y representeaciones (Barcelona, 2002), p. 64.
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Prostitution in Mexico City, 1521–2006 447
It was thought that even benign venereal diseases exercised “an ill-fated ac-
tion upon the fecundity of marriage”,12 and the fear of syphilis increased in this
period due to the perception that it had the power to annihilate the human
race. Prostitutes were seen as the vector of contagion of “decent” families, in-
nocent wives, and children, as they were visited without reservations by ar-
dent youngsters and incontinent husbands, and in the government’s eyes it
had to be sanitized and controlled at all costs. The ideal of this system was that
all prostitutes would practise their profession at controlled brothels but this
soon proved to be an impossible dream. The doctors maintained that there
was an increasing number of women practicing prostitution individually who
were known as “isolated” or non-registered prostitutes, and they were called
“clandestines”.
According to the Reglamento de la Prostitución issued in 1872,13 a prostitute
was a woman over 14 years old who was no longer a virgin and had regular sex-
ual relations with more than one man, and also willingly expressed her desire
to engage in this profession. For many doctors, however, “looking like” a pros-
titute, being caught in “low-life” places that prostitutes frequented or hanging
out with various men who did not vouch for them, was proof enough of being
a prostitute. Others didn’t even realize there were differences between those
who had sexual relations with many men to survive and those who charged
for it, which led inspectors to seize women with these characteristics on the
streets at night.14
Women who were willing to enter the prostitution business, whether
at brothels or working alone, had to register with the medical inspection
department—or be forcefully registered—and they received a passbook (a
form of identity) which contained information about their weekly medical ex-
aminations. As a protective measure, those who were under the age of 14 had to
submit documentation of their parent’s permission and married women had to
prove that they had their husbands’ permission in order to be registered. Most
of the women registered in 1865 (584 in total) were single and claimed to be
between 16 and 22 years old. The doctors were convinced that prostitutes were
lying about their age, and because of that women could be registered starting
12 Francisco Güemes, Algunas consideraciones sobre la prostitución pública en México
( Mexico City, 1888), p. 89.
13 In 1898, the minimum age for a woman to be registered was raised to 16. Since the begin-
ning, doctors thought that girls engaged in prostitution should be controlled even if they
were underage. Manuel Alfaro, Anales de la Asociación Larrey (Mexico City, 1875).
14 Núñez, La prostitución, p. 69.
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448 Nuñez and Fuentes
at the age of 14, although some looked even younger. On the other hand, only
one confessed to being 35 years old. The doctors in those times reported that
after that age women were considered to be “old” and hence became madams
who ran brothels. In several cases, the doctors reported about prostitutes’ preg-
nancies, deliveries, miscarriages and death; in others, they complained that in
spite of the express prohibition against keeping their children in the brothels,
many of them continued to do so. We also know that the “isolated” women
actually lived in groups in patios de vecindad (courtyards)15 which were also
home to midwives,16 who surely helped them with remedies to solve problems
of “menstrual unpunctuality”.
In spite of the general disapproval of the activity of pimps and hoodlums
who were known as “vile men”, some of whom were former policemen who
made a living by sexually exploiting women, no specific cases against them
can be found in the records. Also, we did not discover cases of men selling sex
to other men on the streets, yet their “repulsive” existence was referred to. The
regulatory discourse mainly dealt with women, and they were generally im-
poverished young women from other villages or the countryside, evidence of
the gender and class ideology that formed Mexican society in the nineteenth
century.
Once registered, they were classified by an inspector according to their
physical attributes and clothing into first, second, third, and even “lowest”
classes. Some doctors even classified them as beautiful, plain, or ugly. This
categorization was used to charge a tax that was used to cover the expenses
of examination, but many women refused to pay it. Brothels and “assignation
houses”17 were similarly divided into categories.
The hospital played an important role in this idealistic system. Apart from
curing prostitutes physically, it intended goal was to cleanse their souls and
moralize them. Taking advantage of the long stays that were required, the
workers there tried to ingrain in the women principles of Christian and bour-
geois morality. Moreover, sick or pregnant prostitutes were used as subjects
by medical and obstetric students who could not practise anywhere else. It
was thought that because of their profession such women had no modesty and
hence could openly be examined by men.
15 These low-cost tenement houses were buildings constructed for workers in that century,
consisting of rooms which housed whole families; they had a courtyard in the centre, a
water faucet for washing, and common baths.
16 Alfaro, Anales de la Asociación Larrey.
17 These were not brothels but more like no-tell hotels, places only frequented for sexual
relations.
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Prostitution in Mexico City, 1521–2006 449
Mercury treatments for syphilis were very long, and as dangerous as the dis-
ease itself; their side effects were serious and painful. Mexican doctors stud-
ied the issue, wrote about it, and used the same products that were used at
the time in the us and Europe. Doctors wrote about the difficulties of curing
women in the hospital. They thought that by constructing a special room for
“prominent” women they would convince those of the “better class”—women
who could not bear the idea of mixing with the poor—to stay there; although
the project was not a success, it is evidence that doctors and their clients repro-
duced class prejudices that existed in society at that time.
There were several riots in the hospital; furious prostitutes burnt mattresses
and destroyed the items in their rooms to protest the conditions which had
been imposed upon them. Life in the hospital was not very different from life
in prison; in fact, sick prisoners were treated there. Jailbreaks were frequent,
and several times requests were made for bars to be put on the windows and
means of locking up the women.
All of this, along with a general fear of hospitals, led many women to resist
being “subjected” to sanitary control. When they could, both they and the mad-
ams of the brothels paid private doctors for the examinations, and they figured
out ways to apply make up on their wounds so they could avoid spending long
terms in the syphilitic room. That was another weak spot of the system be-
cause the authorities never managed to register all the prostitutes, many of
whom escaped this system of surveillance, and as such there were always more
clandestine or “rebellious” prostitutes than known ones. Also, the authorities
were also unable to properly cure women infected with diseases and keep
them sexually inactive while infected.
The Prostitute Population
For the first time in the history of Mexico, the first Record of Public Women
used photographs for police purposes. These are accessible in the archives and
hence we can find out about their names, nicknames, ages, categories, and for-
mer occupations, as well as the names of the madams and the addresses of
the sixty-six registered brothels in the city. The 584 women in that first record
stated that they had the following occupations: 167 seamstresses and 151 do-
mestic servants, while 138 did not declare a profession. The rest took up the
job opportunities available to poor women at the time: shoe-shiners, butch-
ers, match girls, cigarette girls, mattress sellers, candy and flower merchants,
cooks, newsstand sellers, rebozo (shawl) makers, tobacco and tortilla sellers,
hemmers, braiders, and shoe makers.
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450 Nuñez and Fuentes
Several reports issued between 1868 and 1909 mentioned the same propor-
tions in the professions of women; more than half of them stated that they
were or had been a maid, washerwoman, or seamstress; the rest were engaged
in manual labour and the craft activities made available by the city or did not
declare a profession.18
Out of the 584 women registered in 1865, 125 said they were from Mexico City
and its surrounding areas, while the rest were from other states in the republic;
there was also one woman of German nationality. In later registries there were
some foreign women from Spain, Cuba and France but it is quite likely that
foreign women, who were more highly valued, could evade the authorities.
There were women who were classified as first-class, and many observers
referred to beautiful, well-dressed clandestine prostitutes who lived among
“respectable” members of society. Yet, the ones of concern were “the maids, la-
bourers, and married women who brought their lovers into their houses when
their husbands left for work”,19 as they were thought to be the ones spreading
disease. Observers also mentioned the loathing and envy that existed among
the various classes of prostitutes and the quarrels that broke out when they all
gathered for the health examinations. To remedy this, the times and dates of the
examinations were set at different times for the various categories of women.
Nineteenth-century Working Women
Indigenous or mestizo women from the lower social classes had always worked,
in spite of the social stigma and deviation from the ideal of standard feminin-
ity. Given the scarcity of working opportunities for women and the very low
wages these opportunities offered, the fact that they had to go out and make
a living was seen as proof of their “loose” morals. Nineteenth-century society
in Mexico was convinced that a “decent” woman was a wife and a mother, and
that she should remain in her “natural” environment, the home. As in other
western countries in the same period, gender relations explained the sexual
segregation at work and the wage difference between genders.
In the first census of 1811, women represented more than a third of the work-
force in Mexico City, most of whom were employed in domestic service. H aving
maids and not having to work was a distinctive mark of class and social status.
The ideal of society was having several maids with specific tasks at home; but
even middle and lower class families had at least one maid that did all the work
18 Núñez, La prostitución.
19 Güemes, Algunas consideraciones, p. 64.
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Prostitution in Mexico City, 1521–2006 451
in exchange for shelter, food, and sometimes a small amount of remuneration.
In spite of that stigma, throughout the century more “respectable” working
opportunities became available to middle-class women at schools and busi-
nesses, in stores, in textile production, and, by the end of the period, at offices
and in the state bureaucracy.20
When Porfirio Díaz became president in 1876 there was an expansion of in-
dustrial production, mainly in the last decade of the century. On its way to mo-
dernity, Mexico City underwent major changes in terms of demographics, ur-
ban spaces, politics and economics. Although women had always been present
on the streets of the city since the colonial era, their public visibility increased
as more factories opened their doors to them. Between 1870 and 1920 women
comprised one third of the industrial work force. Cigarette factories employed
over 1,000 cigarette makers and established differentiated shifts and spaces for
each gender with the aim of “safeguarding” women’s honour. For that reason,
this was an “ideal” job for working women; even though they earned less than
men, it allowed them not only to avoid prostitution, but to maintain their repu-
tation. Also, large clothing and silk factories hired a large percentage of wom-
en and reserved special spaces for them. Other women continued working at
home, or worked long shifts at small manufacturing workshops; they were also
involved in various tasks outside factories, sharing the public space with ped-
dlers and prostitutes, and they occasionally resorted to prostitution in order to
complement the meagre earnings of the day.
Social observers linked honour, respectability, and sexual morality with the
type of work performed. For them, it was completely “natural” for men to earn
more for the same work because they were supposedly the heads of house-
holds. The work of women was always seen as complementary, even though
women were often responsible for supporting their families or their partners.
In spite of the entrance of the female workforce into industrial and manufac-
turing workplaces, in 1940 one out of three working women still worked in
domestic service.21 Many of the prostitutes registered between 1865 and 1910
claimed that they worked in domestic service, for which no special training
was required; for this reason, the notion that they were illiterate and “uncul-
tured” was constantly emphasized.
Specialists wrote about the “lack of morality” of the “dangerous” classes
to which supposedly all prostitutes belonged; they complained about their
drinking habits, illiteracy, the low number of legal marriages, “hordes” of
20 Silvia Arrom, Las mujeres de la Ciudad de México, 1790–1857 (Mexico, 1988), pp. 123–252.
21 Susie Porter, Working Women in Mexico City: Public Discourses and Material Conditions,
1879–1931 (Tucson, 2003), p. xiii.
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452 Nuñez and Fuentes
illegitimate children, and single mothers living in “promiscuous” circumstanc-
es. However, they also noted that some prostitutes wanted to officialise their
removal from the registries because, even though the specialists could not be-
lieve it, there were men willing to marry those women and to give them any
guarantee required. This suggests that honour and respectability were also a
matter of class. Even though there were extraordinary cases in which a good-
looking prostitute could be chosen as a lover by a man from a higher class, in
general prostitutes developed informal relationships or even got married and
had children with workers from their own social class.
During this period, the agencies involved in controlling prostitution came
into conflict, each blaming the other for the failure of the system. The High-
er Council of Public Health and the Medical Examination Department were
staffed by doctors whose prestige and power was growing in society, and they
were genuinely preoccupied with controlling prostitution, introducing hygiene
to the popular classes, stopping syphilis, and lowering mortality rates (while
lacking the coercive power to achieve those goals). Both of those institutions
accused the government of the federal district of not helping them. Indeed,
the political logic of each agency was different, and their lack of interest in
tackling issues that had always existed in the city was self-evident. Doctors of-
ten accused the government of having arrangements with the prostitutes and
“protecting” them, cancelling registrations, letting them be treated by private
doctors, or, still worse, of being their clients, lovers, or even their pimps.
By the end of the nineteenth century there were some voices pleading for
the end of the atmosphere of tolerance which they argued didn’t do any good
because there were always more clandestine than registered prostitutes, and
syphilis continued to ruin lives. They demanded that prostitution be consid-
ered a felony and be prosecuted and punished as such.
Regardless of how “advanced” the abolitionist position might appear—by
comparing tolerated prostitution to slavery—most of the doctors kept writ-
ing about the ineffectiveness of prohibiting an unavoidably needed activity,
at least until men learned to control their impulses and chastely wait for mar-
riage to have sex.22
Some Conclusions about Registered Prostitution
Our sources indicate that such remarks were true; while in 1865 there were
584 women registered, by 1890 only 287 prostitutes were regularly examined.
22 Eduardo Lavalle Carvajal, La buena reglamentación de las prostitutas es conveniente y sin
peligros (Mexico, 1911).
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Prostitution in Mexico City, 1521–2006 453
The French system could not control the women involved in prostitution nor
could it eradicate syphilis. The heads of the agencies themselves complained
about this situation in various reports which were sent to the authorities, and
in those reports they offered up analyses of this “huge” social problem.
Through discursive analysis we can see that there was a certain amount of
compassion and a genuine preoccupation among doctors regarding the fate
of these “poor unfortunate” women that were so necessary in society. They
thought of ways of protecting them from exploitation at the hands of madams
and pimps and devised ways to “rescue” them while preventing pubescent girls
from registering.
However, they could not understand that most of those women who resort-
ed to prostitution in that first period of state regulation only did so temporarily.
The mobility of those recorded in the initial registry revealed that they stayed
briefly at the brothels where they were first registered or at the addresses pro-
vided; doctors often noted, “She fled”, and they were never heard from again.
The brothels themselves often closed and reopened elsewhere.
Although “registered prostitution” can be linked to limited work opportuni-
ties, low wages, and the difficulties poor women and young immigrants faced
in finding other jobs outside domestic service, we should not forget this warn-
ing issued by the doctors: there was an unknown number of women from high-
er social classes engaging in the same profession. The doctors commented that
the situation resembled a French novel; there were attractive, gallant women
who moved from one lover to another because their purpose in life was “to
satisfy the desires for luxury and coquetry that are inherent to women.”23 The
outbreak of the Mexican revolution ushered in a new period.
Prostitution in the Twentieth Century
In the twentieth century, Mexico City underwent several transformations that
changed the urban landscape completely. The centralization of political pow-
er, as well as the concentration of social and cultural life in the capital city from
the 1940s onwards, attracted millions of migrants that have made the federal
district and its metropolitan area one of the most densely populated regions
all over the world.24
The last century also witnessed radical changes in relation to prostitution.
The end of the regulation system in combination with other factors such as
23 Güemes, Algunas consideraciones, p. 68.
24 María Cristina Sánchez-Mejorada Fernández, Rezagos de la Modernidad: Memorias de
una ciudad presente (Mexico City, 2005), pp. 171–224.
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454 Nuñez and Fuentes
corruption prompted gender changes in the administration of sexual com-
merce as well as a rise in the rates of violence against women engaged in sexu-
al commerce. Decades later, feminists and some prostitutes joined forces in a
struggle for the recognition of prostitution as work. While some goals were ac-
complished, sex workers have not been fully recognized as subjects with labour
rights and obligations. Moreover, the alarming increase of human trafficking in
the country and the horror brought on by criminal organizations involved in
sex commerce-related activities have blurred the lines between voluntarism
and coercion. As a result, at the beginning of the second decade of the twenty-
first century various social actors are redefining the borders between sexual
commerce and forced prostitution. At the same time, a heated debate about
the best possible system (abolitionist, prohibitionist, regulationist) that can be
used to ameliorate the current situation of sex workers and victims of sexual
exploitation is currently taking place.
The Mexican Revolution
General Porfirio Díaz ruled the country between 1876 and 1911 with the aid of
a group of consultants who banded together under the motto “order and prog-
ress”. This circle of advisors was called “the scientists” because the programme
they designed to modernize the country was inspired by positivist ideas, as
well as the theories of organicism and social Darwinism.25 This governing elite
maintained the rules for supervising prostitution proposed in the French sys-
tem. It was never considered proper to regulate the behaviour of the men visit-
ing brothels nor to submit them to state medical supervision,26 and there was
no questioning about whether they had anything to do with the contagion of
social or venereal diseases. Parents and husbands were in charge of making
sure that their women behaved properly; namely, to stay a virgin until marriage
and not engage in inappropriate sexual behaviour.
25 Social Darwinism was a very popular theory in the late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries. According to its main principles, humans, like animals and plants, are subject
to the same laws of natural selection that Charles Darwin perceived in nature. Generally,
poor people were seen as weak, and the well-off class was in power because their culture
and “natural” skills had put them at the top of the evolutionary ladder. Organicism was a
term closely related to these ideas. Supporters of both theories saw society as the equiva-
lent of a live organism. In this system poverty, prostitution, and vice were considered
social illnesses.
26 Mark Overmyer-Velazquez, “Portraits of a Lady: Visions of Modernity in Porfirian Oaxaca
City”, Mexican Studies/Estudios Mexicanos, 23 (2007), pp. 63–100, 65–66.
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Prostitution in Mexico City, 1521–2006 455
In keeping with the logic of the nineteenth century, brothels were divided
into different classes based on the level of luxury, facilities, contributions paid
to the government, and the women working there. In first-class brothels, cli-
ents could enjoy private, comfortable, luxuriously decorated rooms, while in
low-class ones the prostitutes and their clients had only cots or mats with only
old sheets hung up for privacy. Legally, the owners of these places were respon-
sible for containing the spread of the social and venereal diseases that could
pose a risk for the general population and the city itself.27
Although the revolutionary movement of 1910 delayed debates about pros-
titution, some of the main arguments were first outlined in the early years of
the twentieth century. Among the most respected abolitionists at the end
of the Porfiriato period was Dr Luis Lara y Pardo, a well-known intellectual at
the time who wrote a sociological essay in 1908 for the general public entitled
Prostitution in Mexico. Its main objective was to make information regarding
venereal diseases available to the largest number of people possible.28
The arguments of Lara y Pardo were based on sources obtained from courts,
hospitals, and official statistics, and he tried to model social criteria based on
the ideology of the regime; thus, his ideas were strongly influenced by organi-
cism and positivism. The essay begins with a discussion about what should be
understood by “prostitution” and “prostitute”, because, according to the author,
the legal definitions of the terms did not embrace the nuances of many wom-
en’s sexual activities and excluded women who could also be considered pros-
titutes based on their behaviour. According to Lara y Pardo, receiving money in
exchange for sexual services was an insufficient description and he proposed
the following one: “Prostitution is a common act by which a person has in-
discriminate transient sexual relations with many persons.”29 Love, selectiv-
ity, and fidelity could result in a woman’s sensibilities being offended if a man
who was not their partner proposed a romantic or sexual relationship. In this
way of thinking, women who had sexual intercourse regardless of monetary
exchange, without sentimental connections or simply for pleasure with men
they knew nothing or almost nothing about should be considered prostitutes.
The perception that elites had about the madams owning brothels is related
to their ability to survive in and even dominate certain sectors of the under-
world of the dangerous social classes. These women were defined by Lara y
Pardo as prostitutes with experience, women “who had the guts and attitude
27 Katherine E. Bliss, Compromised Positions: Prostitution, Public Health and Gender Politics
in Revolutionary Mexico City (Pennsylvania, 2001), pp. 31–32.
28 Luis Lara y Pardo, Estudio de Higiene Social: La prostitución en México (Mexico, 1908).
29 Ibid., p. 10.
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456 Nuñez and Fuentes
to pass from the exploited class to the exploiting class in that overprotected
industry.”30 These women’s ability to stand out from the rest and take the reins
of a business permitted by the state was harshly criticized by the author, as
they were argued to be the result of a twisted ingenuity used in the fields of
vice, perversion, and weakness that characterized prostitution.31
The author described madams as “old, cruel, greedy, and despotic”, women
in their late 30s, or maybe older, whose best years have long gone and whose
only motivation was greed. Cunningness and shrewdness were not only two
of the few abilities attributed to madams, but their only sign of intelligence,
which was of little value as it was in the service of ambition and social decay.
The sex business in Mexico City in the early twentieth century was mostly in
women’s hands. That is not just because of the number of women who traded
their bodies—the lack of data on male prostitution does not allow for an ac-
curate comparison—but also because the interaction between prostitutes and
the authorities was a task legally assigned to madams. Legislation exclusively
targeted the owners of brothels and houses of assignation, and they had to be
responsible for their “personnel” in negotiating—either by regarding or disre-
garding the law—with government agents (public health inspectors, doctors,
and police officers).
Nonetheless, in the pages of Prostitution in Mexico one can find (although
as a very brief reference) details concerning the relationships prostitutes had
with the men who lived off their profits. Those men, who several decades later
would take control of the sex business as the result of the banning of broth-
els in the city, can be classified into four categories: agents instructed by the
madams to seek out new prostitutes outside the brothel; relatives, for example
parents, who depended on the sexual trade of their daughters; souteneurs or
“fancy men” who had love affair with prostitutes, sometimes the same men
who had taken their virginity and lived off the woman’s income; and pimps,
who kept an eye on clandestine prostitutes while they worked at hotels or
rooms in tenement houses.32
The interest in the abolition of laws regulating prostitution was not only
concerned with the inefficiency of the regulations in the reduction of vene-
real disease but a desire to put an end to the popularity brothels enjoyed as
“social centres” facilitating corruption. However, the start of the revolution in
1910 not only postponed the debates about the regulation of prostitution but
30 Ibid., p. 81.
31 Ibid., pp. 81–83.
32 Ibid., pp. 59, 87, 96.
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Prostitution in Mexico City, 1521–2006 457
also strengthened the role of brothels as ideal places for the development of
relationships going beyond sexual services.
In spite of the fact that some of the major political leaders of the revolution
tried to concentrate brothels as well as gambling houses in restricted areas,
the war increased the number of women working in the sex trade, especially
those who practised prostitution outside the brothel and without the authori-
zation of the state. For some of those women, prostitution was an opportunity
to receive as payment money or goods that had been stolen during the battles
by both federal army soldiers and revolutionaries, even though on other occa-
sions they had to “work” for free under the threat of physical violence.33
During the war, both the physical characteristics of the women working in
brothels and the condition of the establishments themselves continued to de-
termine the division of classes. In the poorest neighbourhoods in areas where
the government relocated some of the houses of prostitution to create a toler-
ance zone, prostitutes (the majority of whom did not meet the ideals of beauty
and youth) worked with or without authorization on unpaved, mosquito-
infested streets with no sewage system and had to deal with neighbours who
wanted them far from “honourable homes”.34 In the meantime, in the first-class
brothels madams made sure that the most attractive women pleased their in-
fluential clientele in elegant houses with all kinds of amenities and services.
The Start of a New Era
The authorities reported that by the late 1910s there were 114 houses of pros-
titution in the city.35 These brothels were used to plan military conspiracies,
and sometimes they served as select clubs where high-ranking military officers
gathered to make political alliances which would define their political future.
Additionally, during and after the armed stage of the revolution (1910–1917) mil-
itary members of all ranks invested money in brothels, gambling houses, and
cabarets, which contributed to the continuation of the regulated prostitution
system for many more years. In 1913, the regulations in effect since 1898 were
replaced and in 1918, the Council of the Health Department was created. The
task of this council was to plan and implement strategies to fight against vene-
real diseases, which increased during the war. The last regulations c oncerning
33 José Luis Trueba Lara, La vida y la muerte en los tiempos de la Revolución (Mexico, 2010),
p. 208.
34 Bliss, Compromised Positions, p. 66.
35 Trueba Lara, La vida y la muerte, p. 210.
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458 Nuñez and Fuentes
prostitution were passed in 1926. The legislative changes maintained the main
principles of registration, examinations, and incarceration but the state incor-
porated the idea of rehabilitating prostitutes through labour.
In the late 1930s, when the state emerging from the revolution was in full
consolidation, international recognition became a priority for the Mexican
government. In 1927, the League of Nations had pointed to Mexico as one
of the main destinations for the sexual exploitation of women coming from
Europe in the interwar period. In 1938, Mexico signed the International Con-
vention for Suppression of the Traffic in Women of Full Age, approved by the
League of Nations in 1933, and in 1940, the laws regulating prostitution were
abolished. As a result, exploitation and human trafficking were deemed to be
a crime and that triggered an intense campaign to shut down brothels of all
types and to arrest people involved in the sex trade, most of them women who
were making money from selling the sex of other women.36
Furthermore, in the context of World War ii the fight against venereal dis-
ease became an issue of national security and of bilateral concern between
Mexico and the us. The first campaigns were implemented in the cities of
northern Mexico to supposedly stop the increasing number of American
soldiers who crossed the border looking for entertainment and pleasure and
returned home with syphilis. Actions were taken to close down houses of pros-
titution, prevent the selling of alcohol, and stop admitting both American and
Mexican soldiers to “centres of vice”.37
Out of all these provisions, maybe the most successful one was that of sup-
pressing brothels. In the early 1940s all the governors of the states and territo-
ries of the Mexican Republic received a memorandum signed by the president
in which he asked them to follow the example of Ciudad Juarez and double
their efforts to eliminate houses of prostitution, close zones of tolerance, and
eliminate “centres of vice” where dangerous antisocial activities were promot-
ed.38 This memorandum also stated that venereal diseases caused the greatest
number of disabilities, which made the state’s task of defending the nation
more difficult both in military and in civil life.
36 Ricardo Franco Guzman, “El régimen jurídico de la prostitución en México”, Revista de la
Facultad de Derecho de México, 85–86 (1972), pp. 99–123.
37 Archivo General de la Nación, Mexico [hereafter agn], Fondo Presidentes, Manuel Ávila
Camacho [187]/Box 381 A, “Carta del General Miguel Flores Villar al Presidente” (1944).
Miguel Flores Villar attached to his letter a newspaper clipping related to the us army and
venereal diseases in Mexico: “Reynosa Starts a Cleaning Up Drive”, Valley Evening Monitor,
16 January 1944.
38 agn, Fondo Presidentes, Manuel Ávila Camacho, file 462.3155, memorandum signed by
Manuel Ávila Camacho, “Recientemente me Dirigí a Todos los Gobiernos” (1942).
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Prostitution in Mexico City, 1521–2006 459
While commercial sex in Mexico City was not considered to be a crime and
the main goal in closing down brothels was eliminating exploitation, both
madams and prostitutes implemented various strategies to stop the disappear-
ance of the organized prostitution system in establishments; one such strat-
egy was to shift business activities to restaurant-bars. After police raids, the
“workers” declared to the judge that although they were picked up in what was
thought to be a brothel, they were just having drinks with potential clients (sex
was had in hotels), and they paid no money to the owner for spending time
there. Sometimes prostitutes admitted they had paid some money but they
were very careful to assure the judge that it was for lodgings, as they had no
place to live and no support from their families.39
The most spectacular strategy used by brothel owners in Mexico City was the
formation of a union, which, following the promises of the revolution, would
defend their rights as working people. In spite of the assistance of the former
attorney general of Mexico City and the secretary general of the M exican
Federation of Work, their claims were dismissed by the authorities. In 1941, the
press in Mexico City reported the onerous amounts of money that politicians
requested from madams for protection. In this way, the careers of these men
in the government came to an end, as did the hope for the comeback of state-
regulated prostitution. Few brothels survived this aggressive campaign. One of
them was the house of the Bandida, the most exclusive and famous brothel in
Mexico City in the 1940s and ‘50s.40
By 1945, five years after the abolition of regulation, government statistics
showed that the number of cases of syphilis had decreased. In fact, this was
not because of government actions but because of the introduction and avail-
ability of penicillin in the mid-1940s which decreased the rate of venereal dis-
eases. That was not the only change; in those years, both the urban landscape
and the dynamics of prostitution differed from the state of affairs in the early
twentieth century. The city witnessed an unprecedented population increase,
and processes of urbanization displaced prostitutes from areas where prosti-
tution had been most concentrated.41 The efforts of the Mexican state against
pimping focused on closing brothels. For several years the authorities pros-
ecuted madams and the staff that worked for them, but they paid no attention
to pimps on the streets. Cabarets, bars, and cheap hotels were not subject to
the same measures as brothels. Consequently, many prostitutes started to look
39 This kind of argumentation was repeated over and over during criminal trials for procur-
ing. Historic Archive of Mexico City, Fondo: Cárceles, Sección: Penitenciaría, 1940–1941.
40 Eduardo Muñuzuri, Memorias de La Bandida (Mexico, 1967).
41 Bliss, Compromised Positions, pp. 153–183.
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460 Nuñez and Fuentes
for clients on the streets and their protection was taken over by pimps who
began to strengthen their presence in prostitution.
In 1972, Salvador Novo, one of the most important chroniclers of Mexico
City, recalled the days when prostitution was an activity largely controlled by
women. In his essay “Brothels and the Decay of Conversation” he compared
the brothels and madams of Mexico City with department stores and manag-
ers. At the same time, the writer criticized the role that the Mexican govern-
ment played in the disappearance of brothels from the streets of the nation’s
capital.
Novo’s reflections on brothels focused on two main aspects: the zero ben-
efits that the revolution brought for prostitutes and the importance that
brothels had as social spaces and private areas that promoted education and
conversation, as well as acting as sources of inspiration for writers. Accord-
ing to Novo, while the post-revolutionary state boasted about improvements
in labour rights, prostitutes lost all the social guarantees that the government
could have offered them as workers, making these women “the disinherited of
the Revolution”. The chronicler lamented the situation of sex workers after the
ban on brothels in Mexico City and the “sad fate of these self-employed work-
ers who now work without a title and guarantees […] scattered, persecuted.
[…] [T]he noble service which once flourished, fully organized in brothels [is
now gone].”42
Social Activism and New Challenges
The 1980s brought a new epidemic that had a direct impact on the dynamics of
prostitution. In Mexico, the first aids case was recorded in 1983 and in 1988 the
government called for the creation of the National Council for the Prevention
and Control of aids. In the same year, some prostitutes contacted governmen-
tal and feminist organizations with the aim of forming working groups that
would establish services for information about and the detection of hiv, as
well as campaigns to raise awareness about the disease.
Towards the 1990s the physical characteristics of women who could be hired
for sex and the condition of their workplaces were marked by social and class
differences. Wealthier customers used credit cards to pay for beautiful models
or virgin teens chosen from a catalogue. These sexual encounters took place in
elegant apartments and a waiter/barman served both as a guard and money
42 Salvador Novo, “Los burdeles y la decadencia de la conversación”, in Salvador Novo, Las
locas, el sexo y los burdeles (Mexico, 1979), pp. 75–81, 78.
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Prostitution in Mexico City, 1521–2006 461
collector. In middle-class areas there could be found street prostitutes who
took their clients to hotels, women working in brothels disguised as massage
or beauty parlours, and call girls who advertised in the newspapers’ classified
ads section. Many of the clandestine brothels were located in the poorest areas
of the city. There, women with limited resources, usually rural immigrants with
basic or no education, worked for men who asked for 50 per cent of their prof-
its. Usually they had to go looking for men in areas close to the brothel, which
was nothing more than a large room with spaces divided by curtains.43
Currently, in certain areas of the city the authorities tolerate street prostitu-
tion. The people responsible for overseeing sex workers there and negotiating
with the authorities are usually men called “representatives” and they are re-
sponsible for groups of ten to forty women. The women usually have to have
sex with their representatives and some of the representatives are both pimps
and the lovers of the women under their control. There are some madams
(mostly former prostitutes, although we also find relatives of prostitutes) who
exercise control differently; they often force prostitutes to consume goods and
services offered by their contacts and friends, thereby ensuring a permanent
workforce of women who are in debt to them.44
One of the most visible areas of prostitution is La Merced. Dedicated to
commercial activities since the early colonial years, La Merced remained the
largest marketplace of Mexico City until the 1990s. In this neighbourhood a
large number of street solicitors coexist with shopkeepers, hotel owners, ped-
dlers, and inhabitants classified as lower and lower-lower class. According to a
census provided by organized groups of sex workers, around 2,000 prostitutes
worked in the area in 2006.45 Although there are some independent sex work-
ers, most belong to organized groups controlled by men dedicated to human
trafficking in complicity with the authorities (some of whom are former police
officers). According to several sex workers interviewed by social researchers,
these criminal organizations kidnap or deceive young women in order to ex-
ploit them. On other occasions their own parents or other relatives sell the girls
to these men, a common phenomenon in rural areas where indigenous young
girls are the most common victims.46 The vast majority of women forced into
43 Marta Lamas, “El fulgor de la noche: Algunos aspectos de la prostitución callejera en la
Ciudad de Mexico”, Debate Feminista, 4 (1993), pp. 103–134, 111–114.
44 Ibid., pp. 114–115.
45 Angélica Bautista López and Elsa Conde Rodríguez, Comercio sexual en la Merced: Una
perspectiva constructivista del sexoservicio (México, 2006), pp. 18–20.
46 Soledad González Montes, “Violencia contra las mujeres: Derechos y ciudadanía en con-
textos rurales e indígenas de México”, Convergencia: Revista de Ciencias Sociales, 50 (2009),
pp. 165–185.
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462 Nuñez and Fuentes
prostitution come from other provinces, particularly from impoverished rural
areas or small towns and cities.
Sex workers are well aware of the way ageing affects their earnings. Purchas-
ing the virginity of a girl between 10 and 13 years old can cost up to 2,000 dollars,
which is delivered to the madam. Procurers look after young girls very closely,
because they know they can get the best money with them. In the hours or
days following the first sexual intercourse they can charge their clients a little
over 200 dollars for every additional sexual encounter. When sex workers are
around 15 years old, the price for every act is 30 dollars, while a woman closer
to 20 earns from 10 to 20 dollars. Younger sex workers are very selective about
their customers because they know they need to save money for the future.
They know that with each year that passes their value decreases in the eyes
of their costumers and procurers. For instance, women in their 30s, if they are
attractive, charge every client up to 10 dollars while older women charge 2 dol-
lars or less.47
Some women begin to work in prostitution after the age of 40 because they
lost their husbands by separation or death, or because they failed to find an-
other job after facing extreme economic situations. Young women may say that
they fled from a very troubled home. In the street, hunger prevails and their
bodies become their instrument for survival. Sex workers have told interview-
ers that they were initiated “by chance” because another friend that already
worked in prostitution invited them into the business. Some others declared
that they had been deceived by professional pimps and madams.48
When street solicitors remember their first days as sex workers, they expe-
rience mixed emotions. On the one hand, they say that the street gives them
“freedom”, saying, “Here nobody tells you what to do. You can go wherever you
want.” On the other hand, they accept that it is extremely difficult to deal with
such a hostile environment by themselves without a sense of belonging: “After
a while you feel terrible because you sleep wherever you can, and it is cold and
you are hungry.”49 That is one of the main reasons why women join groups
controlled by pimps.
Money is the element that allows sex workers to put their occupations on the
same level as other economic activities. In this respect, their self-descriptions
shed light on the way they live out the moral contradictions of being involved
in prostitution. On the one hand, they speak of a “regular job” and even so-
cial clichés are used to define it, such as the phrase “the oldest profession in
47 López and Rodríguez, Comercio sexual, pp. 90–94.
48 Ibid., pp. 91–94, 105–108.
49 Ibid., p. 107.
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Prostitution in Mexico City, 1521–2006 463
the world.” On the other hand, they talk about the existence of their work as
“a necessary evil” that has always involved persecution, using the following
adjectives to describe it: “ugly”, “horrible”, “the worst thing in life”, “bad”, and
“shameful”.50 In addition, they are fully aware that their job is full of risks, not
just because of the sexual and physical violence they experience on a regular
basis but also because of the threat of contracting venereal diseases.
Despite the efforts of some sex workers to prevent the spread of aids among
their colleagues through the use of condoms, research has shown that the
campaigns were only partially successful. Most clients refuse to use condoms
and they offer extra payment to women who are willing to have sex without
condoms. According to some reports, the competition between women and
the increasing number of transgender individuals working on the streets of
the city has made many prostitutes choose to risk their health in order to get
more clients.51
Perhaps the greatest legacy of the 1980s and ‘90s has been an accumula-
tion of knowledge concerning the organization and social mobilization of sex
workers, which has allowed some of them to negotiate with government repre-
sentatives, make alliances with feminists and intellectuals, talk about prostitu-
tion as an option for making a living, and speak about prostitutes as women
with rights. As a result, an organized group of women established a shelter for
more than twenty senior prostitutes in 2006 after several talks with the leftist
government of the city.
That same year marked the beginning of the government’s war against
drugs in the country. One of the most serious consequences of this complex
phenomenon has been the rapid growth of human trafficking in Mexico. Men,
women, children, indigenous persons, and undocumented migrants have been
(and still are) victims of sex trafficking and forced labour. In this process, ge-
ography plays a major role. Lured by false promises of employment or love,
and under the threat of having their personal documents taken away or being
tipped off to migration officers, Mexicans as well as others (mainly from Cen-
tral and South America), are exploited by organized criminal groups in Mexico
and the United States.52
The number of victims of severe forms of sexual exploitation has signifi-
cantly increased from 2006 onwards. Federal and local governments have
made some efforts to bring themselves into compliance with international
50 Ibid., pp. 96–98.
51 Lamas, El fulgor de la noche, pp. 121–122.
52 us Department of State, Trafficking in Persons Report, 2013 (Washington, 2013), p. 261.
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464 Nuñez and Fuentes
standards dictated by the United Nations or the us Department of State.53 In
2013, the authorities approved a national anti-trafficking law that increased the
legal punishment for trafficking offenders on a federal level. However, Mexico
still does not fully comply with the minimum international requirements to
eliminate sexual exploitation, which includes forced prostitution. Problems
still to be solved include the complicity of the authorities in all levels of the
justice system, threats of violence from criminal organizations, poor coordina-
tion between local and national agencies, and a lack of adequate attention and
protection for victims.54
In Mexico City, the authorities as well as ngos have been engaged in a de-
bate on how to eradicate sexual exploitation in both the capital city and the
country. Since 2007, the Criminal Code of the Federal District has stipulated
that human trafficking is a criminal offense.55 Unlike other states in the coun-
try, Mexico City provides some specialized services and has shelters and active
campaigns in order to help victims of forced prostitution. Academics, ngos,
international agencies, and foreign governments have joined in active cam-
paigns to raise awareness, particularly among the most vulnerable groups such
as young and indigenous people. However, all of these efforts are still under
way and there is a lot to do before we can claim that significant results have
been achieved.56
A major concern is corruption among policemen, judges, and officials who
do not apply the law, put victims in danger, and otherwise fail to ensure that
adequate legal processes are put into place. There is no official data about the
number of victims of sexual exploitation in the city, nor a consensus on the
steps that should be followed to remedy the problem. In 2013, the Women’s
National Institute, in collaboration with the Coalition against Trafficking in
Women and Girls in Latin America and the Caribbean, presented an assess-
ment on the structural causes of sexual exploitation in Mexico City and a plan
of action. According to this study (which is based on neo-abolitionist ideas),
there are around 250,000 women engaged in sexual commerce. Of those, 88
per cent are immigrants, and 99 per cent are exploited by criminal organiza-
tions in areas like La Merced.57 During the first months of the same year, the
53 United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, Global Report on Trafficking in Persons 2012
(New York, 2012).
54 us Department of State, Trafficking in Persons Report, pp. 261–262.
55 catwlac-InMujeresDF, Diagnóstico de causas estructurales y sociales de la trata de perso-
nas en la ciudad de México (Mexico, 2012), p. 81.
56 us Department of State, Trafficking in Persons Report, pp. 262–263.
57 catwlac-InMujeresDF, Diagnóstico de causas estructurales, pp. 83–85.
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Prostitution in Mexico City, 1521–2006 465
authorities in Mexico City launched police raids on establishments offering
lap dances, looking for victims of sexual exploitation and closing down such
business, but they did not find many culprits.
Several social organizations that work close to the city government share
the point of view that most of the women engaged in sexual commerce are
victims, either because they were deceived or captured by pimps or criminal
organizations or because the existing “patriarchal culture” obliges women to
engage in sexual activities for money.58 As a consequence of the arrest of some
table dancers as well as sex workers, some have protested on the streets, argu-
ing that they are not exploited, nor are they victims of coercion. Some of them
have claimed that the figures and arguments presented by some ngos are in-
accurate and that some sex workers have been forced by the authorities to sign
written statements against the owners and workers at their former places of
employment.59
The debate is still ongoing. Several organizations have addressed the harsh
life stories told by victims of sexual exploitation and been able to make their
voices (as well as victims’ voices) heard in the media, academia, and legislative
spaces like never before. However, there is a major risk of erasing their agency
in this way, as well as taking a step back from the achievements that some
sex workers have made in recent years. Unfortunately, the undeniable horror
lived by the victims of forced prostitution is not only casting a shadow on the
incipient activism of sex workers but also puts at risk the goal that one day they
could be considered as labourers with rights. Based on our historical research
and observations of the current debates in academia, mass media, and legisla-
tion, we have noticed that several factors are reducing the space of action for
those voluntarily engaged in sexual commerce, and their actions are getting
lost under the weight of the discussions going on around them, discussions
that do not incorporate the possibility of free will in prostitution.
58 Ibid., pp. 45–50.
59 News on the closure of a place called “El Cadillac” that prompted a heated debate as well
as protests by street solicitors on Sullivan Street in June, July, and August of 2013 can be
found in several online resources, such as: http://www.animalpolitico.com/2013/07/baila-
rinas-del-cadillac-denuncian-que-fueron-forzadas-a-firmar-declaracion-contra-el-table/,
http://www.razon.com.mx/spip.php?article179595&tipo=especial and http://razon.com
.mx/spip.php?article179365; last accessed 8 July 2017.
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chapter 18
The Future of an Institution from the Past:
Accommodating Regulationism in Potosí (Bolivia)
from the Nineteenth to Twenty-first Centuries
Pascale Absi
Introduction
This article uses the present tense to discuss an institution from the past: the
regulationist approach to prostitution developed in France in the nineteenth
century. While this system has gradually disappeared in Europe, its survival in
present-day Bolivia means that the similarities and ruptures between current
and past methods used in the public and social management of prostitution
can be analysed. Most of the research was carried out in Potosí, a mining city
founded by the Spanish conquistadores in the heart of the Bolivian Andes.
With a population of 170,000 (2012 census), Potosí is a large city in Bolivian
terms, attracting rural migrants who make up much of the workforce in the
mines, the income from which keeps the brothels going.
Since the end of the 2000s, under the banner of the Bolivian prostitutes’
organization (onaem)1 a group of women has been fighting for recognition
as sex workers.2 All of them work—or used to work—in houses of prostitu-
tion (lenocinio) that are regulated and controlled by municipal government
authorities. Nobody appears to be concerned by the contradiction between
the operation of these establishments and the criminal code, which expressly
* An initial version of my analysis of regulationism in Bolivia was published in Pascale Absi,
“Femmes de maison: Les avatars boliviens du réglementarisme”, Actes de la recherche en sci-
ences sociales, 198 (2013), pp. 78–93. This text was translated by Sara Shields. I am grateful to
the editors of this publication for their comments.
1 Organización Nacional para la Emancipación de la Mujer (National Organization for the
Emancipation of Women).
2 Until 2009, onaem’s leaders were opposed to professionalization. The shift that occurred is
largely due to the work they did together with the Danish ngo ibis-hivos, which manages
the funds allocated to Bolivia by the Global Fund to fight aids and the TraSex Network (Red
de mujeres trabajadoras sexuales de América Latina y el Caribe). Since it was set up in 1997
under the auspices of unaids and hivos, that network has been campaigning for prostitu-
tion to be recognized as a profession.
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Accommodating Regulationism in Potosí (Bolivia) 467
condemns the running of brothels and the earning of money from another
person’s prostitution.
The legal framework governing prostitution in Bolivia is an eclectic mix
of traditional European-style regulationism and abolitionist laws inspired
by United Nations conventions, especially the New York Convention and the
Palermo Protocol. In their day-to-day actions the police, health services, and
municipal government alternate between using the tools of regulationism and
abolitionism to organize prostitution, while at the same time cracking down
on its most unacceptable facets (especially when there are minors involved).3
Nobody—either from the state or on the side of the prostitutes and the institu-
tions that work with their sector—currently seems willing to tackle this con-
tradiction in the law. There is nothing to indicate that the situation will change
if onaem obtains official recognition of sex work.
After describing how regulationism was introduced in Bolivia, I will attempt
to describe the reasons for its survival. I will look at how the weakening of coer-
cion and the improvement of working conditions in brothels allowed the sys-
tem to become even more legitimate. This chapter therefore aims to contribute
to a comparative discussion of historical forms of the sex trade by looking at
the particular evolution of the classical way of managing prostitution exported
by France in the nineteenth century, as well as examining the conditions that
have led to certain arrangements being seen as more positive (or less negative)
by the people involved in it.
It would not make much sense to go further back in time within the param-
eters of this study. Very little (practically nothing) has been written about the
history of prostitution in Bolivia. That said, it is most likely that prostitution
expanded after the Spanish conquest together with the arrival of the market,
money, wage labour, industrialization, and the concentration of the workforce
in urban areas. References to previous practices of providing sexual services
in exchange for goods can be read between the lines in the earliest chronicles
that exist.4 However, exchanging sex for something is not the same as modern
3 This situation may be somewhat similar to other countries such as Belgium, in which some
cities tolerate the existence of establishments of prostitution despite the country’s abolition-
ist legislation. In Antwerp, for example, the Schipperskwartier where window prostitution
takes place has been strictly controlled by the municipal authorities since the end of the
twentieth century. I would like to extend my thanks to Magaly Rodríguez García for bringing
this issue to my attention.
4 In the sixteenth century, for example, a scandalized Father Álvarez recounts how women
from the Altiplano would have sexual relations with coca growers in the Andean foothills in
exchange for the highly prized leaf. One wonders, however, whether what the priest calls the
“sale” of sex might in fact be the transfer of women—a practice typical of the inter-ethnic
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468 Absi
prostitution (understood as a practice not bound by prior social obligations
between the parties involved),5 and an understanding of what was going on
before the conquest cannot be gleaned from these writings.6 Likewise, taking
up the Spanish courtesans or the indigenous and mestizo women who became
prostitutes during the colonial period will not be of much help in understand-
ing the situation today. As we will see, the ways in which ethnic categories in-
fluence the practice of prostitution do not even offer a glimpse of a structural
inheritance from colonial times. On the contrary, the way in which prostitu-
tion is organized today is entirely consistent with the modernizing project of
the republican state that followed independence in 1825. If the colonial period
has left any trace other than the formation of an urban proletariat that pro-
vides today’s brothels with their workers, we would have to look for it in the
sphere of morals.
Rooting out the worship of idols went hand in hand with reforming the
sexuality of the indigenous peoples along with introducing the Catholic insti-
tution of monogamous marriage, condemning premarital sex, and polygamy.7
This is the context in which the boundary between acceptable and unaccept-
able female behaviour was drawn, giving rise to the stigmatization of the puta
(whore) as the opposite of the decent woman. At least since the eighteenth
century, the words ramera and puta have been used in Bolivia to disparage
women—including indigenous women—who are of dubious character.8 In
more contemporary terms, we are talking about women who in one way or
another challenge men’s patriarchal rights over women and their productive
and reproductive capacities.9 Today, among the Bolivian working classes those
women who work outside the home, thereby threatening male hegemony
by generating their own income outside the family sphere, are particularly
alliances in the prehispanic Andean region. Bartolomé Álvarez, De las costumbres y conver-
sión de los indios del Perú: Mémorial a Felipe ii (1588) (Madrid, 1998), pp. 337–338, 608.
5 Paola Tabet, La grande arnaque: Sexualité des femmes et échange économico-sexuel (Paris,
2004), p. 207.
6 In what is now Peru, Garcilaso de la Vega mentioned the existence of “public women” called
pampairunas who lived in hovels outside villages during Inca times. Unfortunately little is
known about where these women came from or what they actually did. Garcilaso Inca de la
Vega, Comentarios reales de los Incas (1609) (Madrid, 2004), p. 320.
7 Fernando Armas Asín, “Religión, género y construcción de una sexualidad en los Andes
(ss. xvi y xvii)”, Revista de Indias, 61 (2001), pp. 673–700.
8 Ward Stavig, Amor y violencia sexual: Valores indígenas en la sociedad colonial (Lima, 1995),
pp. 57, 93.
9 Tabet, La grande arnaque, p. 207. See also Gail Pheterson, The Whore Stigma: Female Dishonor
and Male Unworthiness (La Haye, 1986), p. 116.
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Accommodating Regulationism in Potosí (Bolivia) 469
exposed to being classified as putas. In fact, selling their bodies or making
themselves available to the public for sex is not the worst thing that prostitutes
perceive about their activity. Instead of talking about the sanctity of the body
or monogamous marriage, they constantly refer back to their domination of
male clients and their money. It is considered the very epitome of women’s
naked ambition to refuse to accept low incomes in work traditionally done by
women and/or bestowed on a woman by her husband.10 These same women
reject being called prostitutas and prefer to be known as meretrices or more re-
cently as “sex workers”. They consider “prostitutes” to be women who have the
bad habit of sleeping around without being paid. As they tell their clients, “The
puta is your wife who has sex with other men while you’re working.”
The qualitative data in this study was taken from a classic ethnographic
study carried out between 2005 and 2009 in legal brothels in Bolivian cities,
particularly the mining city of Potosí. Because I was living in Bolivia at the
time, I was able to visit the brothels almost every week. I began by making
contacts in the health centres where the women go for their weekly medical
check-ups. Over time, I was accepted by the brothel owners, their clients, and
the women who worked there (or perhaps they just became resigned to my
presence). As a result, I was able to conduct more formal interviews with over
a hundred women in their rooms and houses, as well as in my own residence.
The quantitative data in the section on the women’s social background are
taken from a study done with the geographers Hubert Mazurek and Noemi
Chipana.11
From French-style Regulationism to Its Bolivian Avatar
As is the case in many abolitionist countries, Bolivian law is silent about
prostitution itself. The 1972 Criminal Code (updated in 2010) is limited to con-
demning procuring, trafficking, and the corruption of minors, and this con-
demnation is expressed in terms inspired by the abolitionist United Nations
conventions to which Bolivia is a signatory, the New York Convention (1949,
ratified in 1983), and the Palermo Protocol to combat trafficking (2000, ratified
in 2001). If these moves reflected a real desire to change things, they have come
up against the inertia of custom.
10 Pascale Absi, “La professionnalisation de la prostitution: Le travail des femmes (aussi) en
question”, L’Homme et la société, 176–177 (2010), pp. 193–212.
11 Pascale Absi, Hubert Mazurek, and Noemi Chipana, “La categoría ‘prostituta’ a prueba de
las estadísticas en Bolivia”, Migración y desarrollo, 10 (2012), pp. 5–39.
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470 Absi
Municipal by-laws easily coexist today with the 1949 convention’s provision
ordering states not to regulate prostitution and to punish those who profit
from it (that would include brothel owners and Bolivia’s public administra-
tion in terms of operating licences, fines, and—until recently—obligatory pay-
ments to health services and the police). And while Article 321 of the Criminal
Code condemns “anyone who, on their own account or on behalf of someone
else, openly or secretly runs a house of prostitution or meeting place for lewd
purposes”, municipal governments continue to issue operating licences to es-
tablishments classified as lenocinios. A parliamentary proposal to restrict the
exploitation of prostitution is currently completely blocked due to the health-
oriented rationale of regulationism. Instead of being considered procurers, the
owners of the establishments are seen as playing an essential role in ensur-
ing that the women go for their medical check-ups. Consequently, it is no sur-
prise that in 2011 the Bolivian police registered just twenty-two cases of alleged
procuring and only nine in 2010.12 These figures are paltry in comparison with
the number of officially recognized establishments—ranging from a dozen to
more than fifty in each of the country’s large cities—not to mention the clan-
destine ones.
The law against trafficking enacted in 2006 is likewise inapplicable in this
context. In keeping with the Palermo Protocol, Article 281 of this law con-
demns anyone who, “by means of deception, coercion, threats, the use of
force, or the abuse of a position of vulnerability, even with the consent of the
victim, directly or through a third party brings about, carries out, or promotes
the transport or recruitment, deprivation of liberty, harbouring, or receipt of
human beings within or outside the territory of this country”, particularly for
the purposes of prostitution. Similar to the condemnation of all forms of in-
termediation, ruling out the idea that a person may consent to be recruited for
prostitution makes no sense here. The existence of the health card is proof of
the official recognition of voluntary prostitution dependent on a third party.
When the health card is first issued, there is no interview to assess the begin-
ner’s motives, whether or not she gave her consent, or the way in which she
was recruited. Determining whether she was in a vulnerable position would
also be complicated to say the least. Despite its abolitionist orientation, in its
application Bolivian law therefore accepts the existence of non-criminal pro-
curing and recruitment. Indeed, a review of press reports shows that, similar
12 David Chacón Mendoza, “Modificación al art: 281bis del código-penal-boliviano”, avail-
able at: http://www.monografias.com/trabajos93/modificacion-al-art-281-bis-del-codigo
-penal-boliviano/modificacion-al-art-281-bis-del-codigo-penal-boliviano6.shtml; last ac-
cessed 8 July 2017.
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Accommodating Regulationism in Potosí (Bolivia) 471
to the condemnation of procuring, the possibility of consent is only ruled out
when the procuring and recruitment practices defined in the regulations too
evidently come into conflict with morals and are compounded by other crimes
(the corrupting of minors or the presence of undocumented foreigners). But
recourse to the law mainly takes place when there is a failure to comply with
the health checks on prostitutes.
Thus, the practice of prostitution appears trapped between official aboli-
tionism and de facto regulationism, with national laws doing nothing to dis-
turb the operations of brothels. Furthermore, most of the municipal by-laws
that regulate these establishments have not been updated for more than a
hundred years. They stipulate the locations of brothels and the health-related
obligations of their residents, as well as the role of public officials and medical
services, abiding by the same concerns with hygiene and morals as the regula-
tions in France13 which they parallel chapter and verse.14
According to Paredes Candia,15 the first brothel in the modern sense of the
word opened in 1870 in the city of La Paz. Less than one hundred years after
independence, the prevailing concerns of eugenicists at the time confused the
future of the country with the reproductive capacity of women, and prostitu-
tion became a political concern from the beginning of the twentieth century.16
With growing urbanization and the rise to power of the proletariat of indig-
enous and mestizo origins,17 one can assume that legislation was designed to
take back power from the working classes in a situation in which recent union-
ization and social mobilization destabilized the old order of class and sexes.
As with the 1906 “Regulation Regarding lenocinios in La Paz”,18 the first mu-
nicipal by-laws regulated the confinement of women (called asiladas), man-
dated gynaecological check-ups, prohibited minors below the age of seventeen
from entering prostitution, and placed the sick in a lazaretto. The women had
to register with the local government, the madams presented their new re-
cruits to the police, and the doctor kept a register of his patients. In 1938, the
Ministry of Hygiene and Health and the municipality were placed in charge of
13 Alain Corbin, Les Filles de noces: Misère sexuelle et prostitution au XIXe siècle (Paris, 1982),
p. 470.
14 Probably via the regulations introduced in Argentina in 1875 (see Schettini, this volume,
Buenos Aires).
15 Antonio Paredes Candia, De rameras, burdeles y proxenetas (La Paz, 1998), pp. 28, 114.
16 Ann Zulawski, Unequal Cures: Public Health and Political Change in Bolivia, 1900–1950
(Durham, 2007), pp. 119, 141, 264.
17 Herbert S. Klein, Historia de Bolivia (La Paz, 1987), pp. 233, 361.
18 Paredes Candia, De rameras, burdeles y proxenetas, pp. 87–108, 114.
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472 Absi
overseeing these regulations.19 In 1957, a Supreme Decree opened the doors
of the brothels to the national police force and put them in charge of enforc-
ing the law that prohibited minors from entering and staying in brothels.20 In
1962, the police’s jurisdiction was expanded with the creation of the matrículas
office which registers prostitutes and oversees their places of work.21
Up until the early 2000s, life in the brothels was organized by a system of
confinement. As in the previous century, the asiladas could not leave the
brothel, move from one brothel to another, or move to another city without a
pass issued by the police. Registered women had to get a stamp every week and
pay to be registered and for their check-ups. The principal way for a woman to
remove her name from the register of prostitutes was for her to get married.
Brothels must still register with the municipal government today. It issues
the licences that authorize establishments of prostitution, discotheques, and
any other type of premises that serves alcoholic drinks to operate. These per-
mits are sent to the Environmental Health Office, which is responsible for en-
suring compliance with hygiene regulations. Its officers make regular checks
on these establishments. Meanwhile, the Public Entertainments Department
is in charge of enforcing compliance with operating hours (usually between
8 pm and 4 am). In an establishment that is also a place where people live, this
is complicated to say the least. During the day, the ballroom and the bar are
closed, but the women’s bedrooms are not, and they continue to receive their
clients there. But keeping the operating licence depends above all on the wom-
en and the male waiters having an up-to-date health card, and medical officers
check this during their visits. Failure to present the cards leads to a fine, and
the establishment would normally be closed down were it not for corruption.
Each week, everyone must therefore undergo a gynaecological check-up in the
health centre that runs the departmental government’s std/aids programme.
Relaxing the Rules
The confinement regime has gradually fallen into disuse since the 1990s. Wom-
en are now free to move around and change brothels, move to other cities, and
alter their way of life. In the past, female residents used to eat, sleep, and spend
their leisure time within the four walls of the house, where their children
19 Feliciano Peña Berazaín, Estudio social y legal de la prostitución en Bolivia (Unpublished
m.a., The Higher University of San Andrés, 2001).
20 Peña Berazaín, Estudio social y legal de la prostitución.
21 Ibid.
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Accommodating Regulationism in Potosí (Bolivia) 473
sometimes used to live as well. Door-to-door vendors would call regularly to
offer food, clothes, and hygiene products. The only occasion when the women
were allowed out was for their visit to the doctor. Otherwise, they had to nego-
tiate permission by paying the police and the brothel owner.
The increase in the number of players involved in the control system (the
police, the municipal government, and health services) offered many opportu-
nities for corruption and the abuse of power. The fines and temporary arrests
(lasting from twenty-four to seventy-two hours) with which women found out-
side without permission were threatened could be avoided by offering bribes
as well as domestic and sexual services free of charge. The medical officers who
came to check the health cards were not slow to take advantage of such op-
portunities either. Their surprise visits often ended with them sitting at the bar
drinking a round of drinks they had been offered by the owner or her asiladas.
The house itself was far from being a refuge. Everything, including food, show-
ers, television, permission to go out, the sale of articles at inflated prices, and
dodgy accounting practices served as a pretext for the owners to make deduc-
tions from the women’s pay and build up debts that kept them locked in even
more securely. Meanwhile, the captive workers also had to put up with pres-
sure regarding the number of services they had to provide. Through a closed
working and living space, in which the inmates’ day-to-day lives were com-
pletely dependent on the good will of the owners, the brothel operated as one
of those “total institutions” described by Erving Goffman.22 Despite the open-
ing up of the brothels, the lack of a distinction between private and public life,
together with the confusion between personal and working relationships, has
left a lasting mark, still visible today in the way prostitutes operate.
Complaints about ill-treatment, abuses of power, corruption, and videos
filmed and broadcast by the media without authorization were presented by
the women to the Defensor del Pueblo23 (Human Rights Defence Office) during
the first meeting of Bolivian sex workers in 1998. Following an investigation,
at the end of 2000 the Defensor del Pueblo managed to get individual regis-
tration abolished and the health card institutionalized at the national level
(rather than by locality). The police found that their power was reduced to
acting against trafficking—especially involving minors—and the presence of
illegal immigrants, as well as punishing public order disturbances near broth-
els. This victory consolidated the process of organizing Bolivian sex workers,
which had been promoted two years earlier by the Defensor del Pueblo itself.
Today, onaem has become the legitimate interlocutor for institutions working
22 Erving Goffman, Asiles (Paris, 1968), p. 452.
23 A public institution that mediates between citizens and state institutions.
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474 Absi
with the prostitution sector.24 Another achievement occurred in 2004 when
medical check-ups were made free of charge.
I have not been able to determine the exact circumstances in which the
confinement regime came to an end. “One day I went to matrículas [the po-
lice registration office] and they just said to me, ‘No, we’re not doing that any
more,’” is how Cristina, who was working in Cochabamba at the time, laconi-
cally sums it up. The opening up of the brothels does not seem to have been
accompanied by a public debate, nor has it given rise to changes in the law.
This is understandable because the municipal by-laws I was able to examine
(La Paz 1906, La Paz 1927, Potosí 1997) never mention a ban on the women’s
freedom of movement. They only stipulate that women are obliged to inform
the health services of any change of address and if they quit prostitution. This
means that the women’s confinement and control by brothel owners and the
police was determined by custom, not the law. In one of my interviews, Betty
Pintos, who worked for the Vice-Ministry of Gender Affairs at the time, also
described a growing concern with the situation of the asiladas as a result of the
World Conference on Women held in Beijing in 1995.
Paradoxically, the aids epidemic, which reinforced the legitimacy of the
health check-ups, also strengthened criticisms of the confinement regime.
Dr. Rengifo, who has been in charge of the medical control of prostitutes in
Potosí since 1991, recalls that in those days the health authorities saw promis-
cuity as a factor in the spread of the disease. After a transition period, during
which the women were allowed to go out if they obtained the agreement of the
brothel owners, the lifting of the requirement to register with the police put an
end to the confinement system in the early 2000s. Today it is possible to work
in a brothel without living there, although in practice most women are still
residents and restrict their movements for fear of bumping into someone they
know. Internalization of the stigma surrounding prostitution has replaced the
physical boundaries of regulationism.
Since the establishments have ceased to lock up their staff, the legitimacy
of the practice of prostitution no longer concerns the locale and now centres
24 The project for an organization of Bolivian prostitutes arose as a result of the “Second
Meeting of Latin American Female Sex Workers in Bolivia” organized in 1998 and sup-
ported by usaid, which at the time was funding the health centres where the prostitutes
go to have their medical check-ups. By 2005, local organizations had been set up with the
support of the Bolivian Trade Union Confederation (Central Obrera Boliviana—cob) in
all the large cities. Inspired by the Argentinian precedent, the objective was to set up a na-
tional organization of sex workers with a view to their affiliation with the cob. However,
the organization never joined the cob (due to personal conflicts).
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on the women themselves. For an adult, having an up-to-date health card is all
that is needed to practise legitimately anywhere.25 The concerns that justify
the continuation of regulationism are no longer so much moral as hygiene-
related; in short, the authority of the doctor has replaced that of the police.
A consequence of the end of the confinement regime and the restriction
of police powers has been that the sex trade has diversified outside the tradi-
tional establishments; now there are newspaper advertisements, massage par-
lours, karaoke clubs, the internet, escort agencies, and so on. A parallel market
has always existed, but now it has been legalized in practice. These days, many
women move from one form of prostitution to another, going back and forth
between different types of establishment, working as call girls and picking up
clients in discotheques. These pathways are evidently guided by the extent to
which what the woman can offer (in terms of their physical appearance, age,
level of schooling, and background) fits with the prostitution venue’s particu-
lar specialization. But whether they come from the highlands or the tropical
lowlands, they are usually from a low-income background and were recruited
by means of similar mechanisms.
Arriving in the Brothel
Trafficking in the strict sense of the term does exist in Bolivia; girls who have
suffered abuse have their identity documents taken away and are locked up
and threatened in order to force them to prostitute themselves, at least until
they pay back—with interest—their travel costs and the advances they were
given under the pretext of being offered a job in another occupation, especial-
ly the restaurant trade. Nevertheless, even though the recruitment methods
identified may coincide with what international abolitionist conventions un-
derstand by trafficking, once they have embarked upon prostitution the wom-
en are silent about the existence of coercion. Through their discourses they
insist that they were not deprived of choices or room for manoeuvring, and
they may even go so far as to present their introduction to prostitution as an
opportunity. It must be assumed that this is not the case when the coercion is
more openly violent, but my random ethnographic surveys and the particular
context of official brothels did not allow me to gather testimonies of that type.
Most of the recruiters are informal intermediaries. They work in a brothel
themselves or are known to the owner (taxi drivers, for example). They are
opportunists rather than professionals. The women they target may be a
25 At least in large cities. In the provinces, brothel workers are often not controlled.
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neighbour, an old school-friend, a waitress in the restaurant where they have
lunch, or girls they met at a party or a discotheque, in most cases domestic
workers going out to have fun on their day off. These intermediaries often—
but not always—charge a commission. Many sincerely believe that they are
doing the women a favour. Helping an acquaintance or a relative, sometimes
even their own sister, to get out of a run of bad luck is also the main motive
mentioned by the women from the brothels who, at the end of the day, are
their main recruiters. Professional recruiters are less numerous. They know
the market well and offer their services to establishments around the country.
They may even be the owners of such establishments. They operate mainly
in brothels (whose staff they poach) and entertainment venues, but they also
hang around in bus stations, where migrants are arriving every day in search of
work, and outside employment agencies (where they may also place advertise-
ments). They quickly identify women who appear to be on their own or a little
lost (especially young runaways), those who cannot make ends meet until the
next month’s wages, or those who seem daring.
The revelation that takes place upon arrival at the house of prostitution
tends to be brutal for those who were not expecting it. The owners usually
try to prolong the illusion created by the recruiter, switching between coer-
cion (scolding, confiscating identity documents, demanding to be paid back
for travel and accommodation costs, and so on) and showing what prostitu-
tion promises. The new recruit tends to be invited to start as an escort who
has a drink with the men, promising her that she will not be obliged to sleep
with them. The testimonies reveal an ambivalent process in which the seduc-
tion of quick money is an essential driver leading women to perceive the pres-
sure they are under from the owners but also from the other women, who urge
them to take the step, as mild. Deceptions and pressure are recounted in an
informative, never vengeful tone. Other testimonies indicate that the decision
was made more quickly, linked to an urgent need for money due to the loss of a
job, the illness of a family member, or debt. Then, once the routine becomes es-
tablished, and regardless of the degree of coercion that has been exerted over
them, the women’s accounts coincide in terms of reinterpreting their entry
into prostitution in terms of an encounter with a welcome mediator.
Presenting the recruiter as a helper, while concealing coercion in order to
highlight freedom and choice, is a classical idealization process in the life sto-
ries I’ve encountered. The influence of regulationism and its practices prob-
ably also restrains the emergence of the figure of the victim introduced by the
abolitionist discourse. But neither the legal environment nor the narrative pro-
cedures that arise from the speaker’s psychological make-up can fully account
for this. Instead of mentioning deceit to justify their entry into prostitution,
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Accommodating Regulationism in Potosí (Bolivia) 477
most of my interviewees systematically placed the emphasis on their decision
to continue with it. They state that they could have turned back, but they de-
cided otherwise. Of course, the possibility of escape is made more complicated
by the fact that their papers were confiscated or the shame of having had sex-
ual relations in exchange for payment, as well as the pressure from the owners
to pay back advances. The younger women, especially the underage girls, often
do not have the resources—both psychological and financial—to resist their
influence. But what about the others, the older ones, who started when they
were twenty or older and constitute the vast majority of my interviewees? They
usually had a period of latency before they became active, a time when, once
they had understood what awaited them, they could have decided to leave. In-
deed, some do leave. Health service records show that some women ask medi-
cal staff for help to get out. In this way, the obligatory health check-ups curb
the ability of the owners of official establishments to keep the women there
against their will.
If the description of the processes of enlistment in prostitution in the par-
ticular context of Bolivia contributes to thinking about the internalization of
coercion which leads to consent, it is because it shows that the process is not
unequivocal. Contradictory feelings come and go. We see women resisting,
then giving in to pressure before presenting themselves as consenting and,
finally, if not exactly happy with it, at least accepting being where they are.
Of course, reinterpretations after the fact tend to be appeasing. But we need
to admit that the decision to remain in prostitution implies that women do
have real room to manoeuvre. The fact that many abandon the work when
they have achieved certain objectives (accumulating capital, buying a home,
finding a man to support them, etc.) refutes the hypothesis that degradation
(physical and psychological) and social exclusion do not allow them to even
think about leaving. Indeed, since the brothels were opened up most women
live a double life, spending long periods of time with their families and their
children, to whom they lie about where their money has come from. Others
own a shop or raise livestock. The women’s young age, between 20 and 30 on
average, also shows that there is life after prostitution. The comings and goings
that characterize some career paths (where women return to prostitution fol-
lowing the failure of a business or seek to increase their capital or cope with
other expenses) complicate the analysis still further. In these cases, the women
undoubtedly knew what they were getting into. Considering the lack of posi-
tive professional and economic alternatives, there is clearly a limited degree
of consent within the range of options available. But choice is not totally ab-
sent and the decision they make is understandable because, once the resis-
tance has been overcome, in the women’s eyes the benefits outweigh the losses
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478 Absi
(in terms of their day-to-day lives, their view of themselves, and the burden of
secrecy). Understanding this means considering what their lives could have
been like outside prostitution, as they themselves do. Devoting a few lines to
the socio-demographic profile and life paths of the women who work in Boliv-
ian brothels will enable us to understand the position from where prostitution
may become an alternative.
Prostitution and Migration Pathways
The statistical data presented here is based on a review of the medical records
of 2,474 sex workers registered between 2003 and 2005 in the ten main cities
of Bolivia.26 Most of them work in brothels but some work on the streets or
advertise their services in the newspaper, and they undergo health checks.
Forty-one life stories reconstructed from the information in the ethnographic
survey complement the analysis. The typical portrait that emerges from the
two approaches is of a young woman who lives in a city, has a secondary school
education, and supports family members.
The average age of the people registered in the health centres covered by
the study is 23.9. There are few underage girls registered in the legal brothels
(they have to keep out of the sight of the health services or falsify their papers),
and older “less profitable” women are usually turned away. Almost all of them
are women; we only recorded thirty-five men. Along with the transgender in-
dividuals who work on specific streets, there are also homosexual waiters in
the brothels who will trade sex for cash with men. It is exceedingly rare for
transgender individuals to work as prostitutes in the brothels.
Most of the registered sex workers were born in urban areas. 41 per cent
came from municipalities with more than 500,000 inhabitants and 70 per cent
came from municipalities with a population of over 50,000, cities which are
considered large in the Bolivian context. Very few sex workers come from re-
gions distant from the large urban centres. This leads to the conclusion that
one factor that influences entry into prostitution is the proximity of a market.
For half of the women registered, working as a prostitute implies living some-
where larger than their hometown. This confirms that prostitution is essential-
ly an urban-based profession. It also reveals a key link between migration and
26 Absi, Mazurek, and Chipana, “La categoría ‘prostituta’”, pp. 5–39. The sample does not
aim to reflect the number of people working as prostitutes in Bolivia as it is impossible
to attempt to quantify that because many people are not registered and some only work
intermittently, clandestinely, or in provinces far from the std/aids programme offices.
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Accommodating Regulationism in Potosí (Bolivia) 479
prostitution: 68 per cent of the women work as prostitutes in a department
(regional division) other than the one in which they were born. A further 17.9
per cent were born in the same department but not in the city where they are
working.27
Now that the seclusion regime has come to an end, many women adopt a
nomadic lifestyle. When business wanes, clients get bored of the same faces,
or they long for a change of scenery, they move to other cities in search of
better opportunities. Nevertheless, migration tends to be an experience that
precedes prostitution. Of the forty-one life pathways documented, thirty-one
attest that our interviewees (one of whom is Chilean and another Ecuadorean)
were no longer living in the place where they grew up when they began work-
ing as prostitutes. They left home to join other relatives or because they got a
live-in job as domestic workers with a family or in a restaurant far from their
homes. Few had no prior contacts in the place to which they moved. Migration
is part of the economic strategies of Bolivian women in general, especially the
younger ones. It may be the result of a desire to break away from parents or a
difficult family situation, but leaving home is mainly motivated by a search for
economic independence. Entering prostitution may be an indication of how
difficult women migrants find it to achieve their employment and economic
goals. At the same time, it reflects the vulnerability, but also the freedom, of
young women who have escaped from parental surveillance. Having migrated
beforehand provides the sense of anonymity that is so important for sex work.
This migration is understood to take place principally within Bolivia. In re-
cent years, Bolivian women have migrated abroad in large numbers, especially
to Spain, but they do not appear to be a significant group in studies on the
European prostitution market.28 Neither is Bolivia today an attractive destina-
tion for foreigners looking for work, including in prostitution.
The boom in the Bolivian mining industry at the beginning of the twentieth
century attracted an influx of foreign prostitutes. In the 1930s, the mining cit-
ies were home to Chilean and Peruvian prostitutes whose male compatriots
replaced the Bolivian miners enlisted to fight during the Chaco War against
Paraguay.29 These foreign prostitutes were joined by Argentinian and French
women who had probably come through Buenos Aires. Nowadays, however,
our sample showed that only 8.5 per cent of the prostitutes came from abroad.
Over half were Brazilian women working in the border city of Cobija. The rest
27 Bolivia has ten million inhabitants living in nine departments.
28 Laura Oso Casas, “Prostitution et immigration des femmes latino-américaines en
Espagne”, Cahiers du genre, 40 (2006), pp. 91–113.
29 Paredes Candia, De rameras, burdeles y proxenetas, pp. 26, 114.
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also came from South American countries, especially Argentina, Peru, Ecua-
dor, and Paraguay. Most report having worked as prostitutes before entering
Bolivia.
As well as physical appearance, age, and level of schooling, geographical ori-
gin and ethnic identity influence the women’s career paths in the segregated
and hierarchical sex market. Websites, escort agencies, massage parlours, and
the most prestigious nightclubs pride themselves on offering young women
who meet the criteria of being models, being able to converse easily, and, in
the case of the nightclubs, knowing how to perform a striptease routine. They
include foreign women and black women (from the small Afro-Bolivian com-
munity, and from Ecuador and Colombia). The owners therefore use intermedi-
aries to poach staff from establishments in neighbouring countries, especially
Brazil. However, their workers do not include women from an indigenous
background wearing the traditional dress of the highlands (the so-called cho-
litas) who work in lower-category establishments.30 But, even though cholitas
are rarely present in the fantasies of more well-to-do men and those from the
lowlands, they are highly sought after in the rich mining regions of the high-
lands as indicated by the fact that some women there will dress like cholitas to
attract clients. They are known as transformers.
Education, Career Pathways, and Family Lives
Prostitution is not the first choice of occupation. Testimonies reveal women
who started to work when they were very young, at 12 or 13 years old, which is
still common in Bolivia. Many experienced poverty when they were children.
Their parents generally worked in the informal sector as small traders, often on
the street, or had a workshop or, less frequently, were farmers or miners. Two
thirds of the women interviewed reported having worked as a live-in maid with
a family or in a restaurant. These employment opportunities are highly sought
after because they require no funding or special skills, and migrants receive
lodging and support (including cash advances and gifts) from their employers.
These conditions are similar to those offered in the brothels, which facilitates
the move from domestic employment to prostitution.
32 per cent of the sex workers covered by our study only attended primary
school, which is the same rate for all Bolivian women. Over 50 per cent attended
30 There are also indigenous women from the lowlands who work as prostitutes in the cit-
ies in eastern Bolivia. However, these women account for a very small percentage of the
prostitutes working in the country.
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Accommodating Regulationism in Potosí (Bolivia) 481
secondary school. The same levels can be found for further education, proving
that there is no significant difference between the education level of prosti-
tutes and the overall female population of the same age group. This disproves
the general view that the level of education is a factor that conditions women’s
entry into prostitution.
Almost half of the women interviewed became prostitutes before their
youngest child turned three. These are very young mothers who were often un-
derage when they became pregnant for the first time. In addition to not being
supported by the father of the child, many were rejected by their families be-
cause they were pregnant, at least to begin with. Because they did not have the
money to pay a nanny, they had to leave their jobs (although maternal grand-
parents often take charge of raising the children after the mother’s entry into
prostitution). To be able to live with their children under the same roof and
earn money quickly to pay somebody else to look after them is an advantage
that prostitution offers whereas live-in domestic service often does not.
Once women become prostitutes, they usually work full time. Their spend-
ing habits reflect the first objective of their entry into prostitution. Their first
wages are certainly not spent on luxury items. They often buy goods that they
lacked previously and that mark their independence such as clothes, beds,
wardrobes, televisions, or cookers. Being able to pay someone to do housework
is another luxury for women who are more used to being servants than em-
ployers. Once they have satisfied their basic needs they look towards improv-
ing their family’s house and/or buying a piece of land and setting up a business
of their own. Many of the women yearn to find a stable partner and (re)build a
family, although few consider it to be a good idea to look for a husband among
their clients.
The Place of Prostitution in the Women’s Life Stories
The small number of women working as prostitutes who come from the poor-
est areas of the country contradicts the hypothesis that prostitution goes hand
in hand with extreme poverty. Our study shows that background and, even
less so, level of education have little to do with a person’s decision to become
a prostitute. Coming from a poor family or not having studied beyond primary
school do not have a knock-on effect, as seen by the fact that the majority of
female prostitutes grew up in cities and have a similar level of education with
the national averages. Prostitution seems to arise as a backlash against social
frustration (the labour market cannot cope with the expectations created by
achieving a higher level of education and migration) rather than poverty, and
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it does not lead to the constitution of a marginalized population (meaning
that it can be recognized by the social characteristics taken into account in our
study).
Difficult family situations, a succession of poorly paid short-term jobs, mi-
gration in search of better prospects, the lure of independence and leisure
activities for young people, an early pregnancy—all of these are recurrent
links in the chain of events involved in prostitution pathways. Nevertheless,
the women rarely identify these factors as having motivated them to take the
first step towards prostitution. Instead, the fact that they needed money and a
roof over their heads was more often cited. The lure of the big city, such as the
promise of money and increased social position, also plays an important role.
Prostitution may make it possible to achieve a life project rarely accessi-
ble from the kinds of jobs traditionally reserved for women with their social
characteristics. Having started working from an early age, the women in the
brothels are well aware of their position in the labour market. Although the in-
come from prostitution is unreliable—varying from day to day and dependent
on how dynamic the city’s economy is—it is quite a lot more than the wages
received by a domestic worker (less than €100 per month), and the dream of
“a good night’s takings” constantly renews the women’s motivation. Thanks to
their work they also meet men—sometimes comfortably-off men—who are
willing to give them a helping hand or even to maintain them. And, in a coun-
try where assistance from the state (in terms of childcare, support for single
mothers, and welfare benefits in general) is more than deficient, people can
only depend on the market to achieve their objectives.
Thus, when I spoke of the women having a certain attachment, this should
not be understood as an attachment to prostitution itself so much as to the
possibilities it offers for achieving a type of social ascent that would hardly
be viable in other circumstances. As Paola Tabet argues, comparing “degrees
of coercion or the women’s level of autonomy in the different forms of rela-
tionships has a specific purpose: to respect, try to understand, and analyse the
choices the women themselves make, even if all these choices remain within
systems of male domination and do not allow them to escape from these.”31
In a world with limited opportunities, at the end of the day the women are ex-
changing one form of domination—that of the coercion involved in prostitu-
tion work—for another, that of resigning themselves to spending their entire
lives being subaltern employees or depending on a spouse. Once they enter a
relationship, women from working-class backgrounds in Bolivia are generally
31 Tabet, La grande arnaque, pp. 116, 118.
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Accommodating Regulationism in Potosí (Bolivia) 483
excluded from the labour market by the men whose role as provider ensures
their domination over women. This economic dependence is the main cause
of domestic violence against women. The money they earn from prostitution,
in contrast, allows them to pay for their children’s schooling, buy a house, in-
vest in a business, and renegotiate their place in society and within the family.
Thus, some girls have regained the respect of their parents—with whom they
had quarrelled—by paying for things they need. Yuli, a mature woman who
entered prostitution relatively late in life, eloquently compares the violence
she suffered as a wife with her new position: “Before I started this work, my
husband never stopped calling me ‘puta’. Now the clients say to me: ‘Hello prin-
cess, I fancy you, would you like a drink?’” The women’s stories are rife with
sexual, physical, and emotional abuses and emotional and economic depriva-
tions, but these did not begin when they entered prostitution. In fact, many
remark that they feel less invisible and marginalized than when they were do-
mestic workers and enjoy manipulating men who are from the same social
class as their former employers.
There are many types of brothels. Some are more expensive than others, or
more luxurious. Many operate at the same time as bars, some offer shows, and
others look like dingy dives (most of the field work was carried out in these).
Finally, in others the women work without leaving their rooms, receiving one
client after another. A base rate (€3 to €10 on average) is negotiated with the
client and approximately €1 is withheld to be paid to the owner of the estab-
lishment for providing the room reserved for sexual relations. Because they are
considered to be “unnatural”, anal and oral sex cost more. When a client is tak-
ing too long, a waiter will knock on the door, allowing the prostitute to charge a
second time. Clients may also request company outside the establishment for
several hours or for the night, paying the owner and the woman for the time
spent outside. The women also receive a commission for the drinks consumed
by their clients while they are talking and dancing.
In return for complying with fixed working hours (five to seven hours per
night, six days a week), women may benefit from being allowed to use a shared
room inside the establishment. There they can keep their belongings, sleep,
cook, or receive certain privileged clients. Most of the younger women still
practise this custom inherited from the days of the seclusion regime. But the
opening up of the brothels has led to the emergence of a new type of prosti-
tute: one who lives elsewhere and decides whether or not to come to work,
and when. This is the best position to be in if the aim is to prepare for a change
of course. Living outside the four walls of the brothel allows women to have a
family life, sometimes another job, or to continue studying—something that
is impossible for those who have to stay up and end up getting drunk almost
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every night. It also favours a more distanced relationship with the establish-
ments’ owners and administrators.
“Mamas Grandes”, Owners, and Administrators
In the brothels, the women work under the supervision of an administrator
(who may be the owner of the establishment him or herself, a relative of theirs,
or an employee). From behind the counter, the administrator takes the pay-
ments, keeps track of the drinks consumed as well as the use of the rooms
set aside for sexual relations, and hands out the bracelets that indicate the
commission due to the women for the drinks they have sold. These will be ex-
changed for cash the following day. Owners and administrators are careful to
keep order day and night. Inside, a system of fines regulates the work; women
are fined when they arrive late, get into fights, or fail to attend meetings held to
deal with routine matters. Outside, the administrators ensure that good rela-
tions are maintained with the police, health services, municipal authorities,
and so on. A few male waiters, likewise paid on a commission basis, also work
in the establishments.
In lower-class brothels, the owners are usually women, probably because of
time-honoured rules (the regulations from the last century only mention mad-
ams, calling them regentas). The majority are ex-prostitutes who have climbed
the social ladder but in the more upmarket establishments in the large cities
the owners are generally men, sometimes with connections to the drug trade
and mafia networks.
Administrators or owners are invariably addressed as “Don” and “Doña” fol-
lowed by their first name, and are spoken to with the respect which they say is
necessary to ensure order which is constantly under threat by drunken clients.
Their authority is maintained primarily through their manipulation—not nec-
essarily cynical in nature—of affections in their relationship with their resi-
dents. Their behaviour is typical of procurers, alternating between displays of
maternalism (or paternalism) and enforcing discipline, as well as meting out
punishments and rewards (financial and emotional), which evokes the mecha-
nisms of the mistress/maid relationship in the Latin American context of do-
mestic labour. This is what the madams’ nickname mama grande refers to. In
counterpoint to this figure—and what she/he represents in terms of the infan-
tilization of the women, typical of regulationism—they are always referred to
as las chicas (the girls), even by public officials.
Thus, the brothel functions as a surrogate family around the mama grande
(or another maternal figure, such as a long-standing trusted worker), especially
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Accommodating Regulationism in Potosí (Bolivia) 485
for the younger women. The position of the madam is linked to her capacity
to create debts, both financial and affective. She takes charge of the arrival
and sometimes the travel costs of new recruits and gives them cash advances.
Later, she dispenses her favours by providing money, a private room, a night
off, permission to take a client to the prostitute’s room, special help in cases of
sickness or pregnancy, and so on. She also gives advice on various subjects such
as relations with men, organised theft, or how to bring up children. On bank
holidays the owners or madams will organize an outing, such as a barbecue.
Some of the women choose to cement this relationship by designating them as
the godparent of their children.
All this does not prevent conflicts, of course. The women’s main complaints
hardly ever concern the existence of the owners, who are not seen as pimps.
They mainly complain about not being paid on time or being cheated in the
accounts, unsanitary conditions, and extra charges for electricity, water, tele-
vision, showers, and so on, as well as extended working hours. They also fear
being fired when they are no longer deemed profitable (usually because of
their age). However, an establishment that has a lot of workers is much more
attractive, and the lack of women is a recurrent problem. This is why, since the
opening up of the brothels, the risk of seeing their workers run away obliges
administrators to treat the women with more respect and be more honest with
the accounts. “If you don’t like it, you grab your card [identity documents] and
you leave”, explains Carlos, a homosexual waiter who occasionally works as a
prostitute. For this same reason, the women tend to be allowed to refuse cer-
tain sexual services and clients. The appearance of the prostitutes’ organiza-
tions raises the possibility that conflicts with management will no longer be
resolved solely between individuals. After their initial opposition, the propri-
etors have resigned themselves to the existence of onaem. They did not have
much choice, as the survival of their business depends on the health institu-
tions that support these organizations. Now that prostitutes are no longer kept
locked up to preserve the moral order, the owners’ social legitimacy is based
solely on their ability to ensure compliance with regulationism’s health objec-
tives. They are therefore the first to remind the women to go for their medical
check-ups and they obsequiously attend the meetings convened by the health
staff. The demands regarding the recognition of sex work are likewise to their
advantage. Turning prostitutes into workers would institutionalize their status
as micro-entrepreneurs.
Thus, the opening up of the brothels has reconfigured the power relations
between the women and the owners without so far having displaced the pri-
macy of the inter-personal dimension in work relationships which, in the ab-
sence of written contracts, continue to be governed by custom. The loyalty or
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even affection that the women often show toward the owners (“He/she treats
us with respect / gives us advice / gives us a helping hand” or “He/she is a
good person”) has been interpreted as a sort of Stockholm syndrome, a trau-
matic bonding created by the alternation between good and bad treatment.32
The interpretation that has been criticized by Dominique Vidal,33 according
to which servants in Latin America are said to be reproducing a traditional
model whereby the subaltern submits to the master in exchange for protec-
tion, is equally reductionist for prostitutes as well. Of course, some women
are emotionally vulnerable and, in a context in which social security is not
provided by the state, they all appreciate the assistance they get from the own-
ers. Nevertheless, like the simplistic image of the heteronomous victim, these
explanations ignore the economic project involved in prostitution and the
weight it carries in the way women experience their presence in the brothel.
Indeed, when the behaviour of the owners—their honesty, how quickly they
pay, their solidarity—does not serve the women’s objective of social ascent,
they do not hesitate to go elsewhere, even when the madam is godmother to
their children.
Clients and Prostitutes
In the lower-class establishments where the ethnographic study was carried
out, the women and their clients come from the same social background, while
higher-class clients have been taken up by the increasing number of alterna-
tive venues such as karaoke bars, together with small ads placed in the press.
This favours the establishment of individual relationships orchestrated by the
women who try to neutralize the power of the clients and their money through
what they call their domination over the men.34
Domination, as the prostitutes understand it, involves obliging clients to
spend their money by whatever means necessary and it also includes theft.
As a result, this constructs the sexual-financial exchange as an unlimited debt
32 Donald Dutton and Suzanne Painter, “Traumatic Bonding: The Development of Emo-
tional Attachments in Battered Women and Other Relationships of Intermittent Abuse”,
Victimology: An International Journal, 6 (1981), pp. 139–155.
33 Dominique Vidal, Les bonnes de Rio: Emploi domestique et société démocratique au Brésil
(Lille, 2007).
34 Pascale Absi, “De la subversion à la transgression: La valeur de l’argent dans les maisons
closes de Bolivie”, in Christophe Broqua and Catherine Deschamps (eds.) L’échange
économico-sexuel (Paris, 2014), pp. 61–88.
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Accommodating Regulationism in Potosí (Bolivia) 487
which cancels out the idea of a price. Domination also consists of humiliating
the clients. It is enough for a man to enter a brothel alone or be a little shy for
him to find himself the butt of jokes about his appearance, his clothes, or his
way of speaking. Laughter is an incredibly powerful weapon that can be used
to annihilate the power that men attribute to their money. They must never
think that they are doing the prostitute a favour. Men always have to take the
first step and the women see it as their prerogative to be able to negotiate their
price loudly or send the client packing: “A discount? Are you kidding me? Any-
way, with a dick that size you must be looking for a miracle. You’d be better off
going to church!” By being bawdy with their clients, the women rebel not only
against traditional gender stereotypes but also against society’s concept of a
submissive, seductive prostitute willing to do anything for money. The group
effect is clearly in operation here; when they are on their own, the women are
often more relaxed and can act the seducer (or let themselves be seduced).
Even so, this is not the ideal basis on which to conduct the relationship with
clients.
The women’s behaviour is facilitated by the way in which the brothels
are organized; the owner’s constant surveillance allows them to pile on the
provocations and abuses fearlessly (the more prestigious establishments
are probably not quite as tolerant). Unlike methods used to control situations
physically and emotionally (restraining a drunk or potentially violent client,
hiding certain emotions, etc.), the interactions described previously also im-
ply a tacit acceptance on the part of the men who recognize that they do not
always have the upper hand. This switch in position has a positive effect on
the women who become aware that gender roles can be bent. The question
of violence on the part of clients, regularly discussed in the press, is met with
the automatic response of “You have to know how to make them respect you.”
Guided by the norm of domination and regulation of the relationship be-
tween prostitute and client also involves the collective use of coercive mecha-
nisms. Those who do not play the game of domination or who put themselves
forward (hooking clients too blatantly or lowering prices) are immediately ac-
cused of being “easy” women and they run the risk of physical punishment.
The main targets for collective beatings are the new recruits. “When you first
get here, they all have the right to smash your face”, one woman explains. This
initiation rite punishes the new women for behaving seductively with the men
until they take their place, through charisma or violence, within a hierarchy
that distinguishes the novices from the experienced women. These norms that
the women themselves impose and enforce serve to fill the gaps left by regula-
tionism, which is only interested in how prostitution relates to society rather
than the prostitutes’ living and working conditions.
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488 Absi
Concluding Remarks
A few years ago, Bolivia’s brothels became famous for being the target of a wave
of violence on the part of local residents in the city of El Alto.35 Less violently,
people in other cities have been asking repeatedly for the establishments to
be moved further away from residential neighbourhoods. But they are not de-
manding that they be closed down. There is a consensus about the current
system among the state, society and ngos, as well as international funders36
and the prostitutes themselves. The demand for recognition as professionals
has not changed the prostitutes’ campaign objectives, which are aimed at safe-
guarding or improving the practice of prostitution without questioning regu-
lationism or the existence of the owners of houses of prostitution. Although
some of the organization’s leaders have expressed mild criticism of the health
card, most grassroots members continue to be in favour of it. This card, which
functions like a work permit, is resignified as a professional licence that for-
malizes what the women see as their particular skills and their role in society.
Thus, on onaem’s website the online newsletter Emancipación announced:
“Sex Workers are combating the std/aids epidemic openly and head-on, both
in our role as activists and promoters of condom use, and in our day-to-day
dealings with clients.”37 The women are therefore showing that they are will-
ing to act as the guarantors of the system, providing that the pact with the
authorities is not broken. When a conflict arises with a public authority, they
invariably threaten to stop complying with the health check-ups and to carry
on working as prostitutes clandestinely, using the press as their witness. This
blackmail is a reminder of how much regulationism depends for its survival
35 In October 2007, locals (including artisans, traders, and low-ranking civil servants), both
male and female, looted over twenty establishments (legal and illegal) and justified their
actions by saying they were a result of the crimes and displays of public disorder gen-
erated by the establishments. The belongings of those working in those establishments
were burnt and some people were physically harassed, although not to a great extent. The
police waited for several hours to intervene, once again proving the workers’ vulnerability
to local people’s increasing tendency to take justice into their own hands given the state’s
lack of response to growing demands for increased citizen security.
36 Only a feminist collective, Mujeres Creando, is calling strongly for an end to compulsory
health check-ups. Meanwhile, although the international policies of the who, unaids
and the Global Fund to fight aids criticize the issuance of the health card by claiming
that it is contrary to universal public health and argue that ultimately it is an unproduc-
tive prevention measure, these same organizations manage to accommodate it when they
provide funding to Bolivia.
37 The quote is from issue 1 (2011), 18. The newsletter is available at: www.onaem.org; last
accessed 8 July 2017.
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Accommodating Regulationism in Potosí (Bolivia) 489
on the goodwill of official prostitutes. At the same time, and although they
complain about abuses in the current system, they do not unanimously agree
with the idea of becoming workers legally recognized as being governed by
the Labour Code. They recognize the importance of having rights as workers,
but they fear that having formal employment contracts will restrict the au-
tonomy they enjoy at the moment in terms of the freedom to choose from a
range of benefits and working hours, the possibility of moving to another es-
tablishment from one day to the next, the ability to refuse clients and services,
and so on. This room for manoeuvring that has been available to them since
the opening up of the brothels is a contributory factor in prostitution coming
to be thought of as an opportunity in a quest for social ascent. Thus, Bolivian
regulationism operates today as a joint construction in which regulationism’s
legacy comes together with the prostitutes’ reinterpretations of it to serve their
own purposes. The threat to refuse to comply with the health checks is tangible
proof of how the women subvert a system whose original aim was to deprive
them of their agency as subjects.
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chapter 19
Sex Work in Rio de Janeiro: Police Management
without Regulation
Thaddeus Blanchette and Cristiana Schettini
Introduction: An Imperfect History
The history of prostitution in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil is the story of police inter-
vention in the organization of sexual commerce, how this gained legitimacy,
and how that legitimacy has been questioned and subverted. Originally found-
ed by the French in 1555 as a means of dominating the sea routes of the South
Atlantic, Rio de Janeiro was conquered by the Portuguese a decade later, serv-
ing as the seat of the Portuguese viceroyalty from 1763, the capital of the inde-
pendent Empire of Brazil from 1822, and the capital of the Brazilian Republic
from 1889 until the founding of Brasília in 1960.
Prostitution was largely accepted during the colonial and imperial eras, but
since the birth of Brazil’s first republic in 1889 the powers that be in Rio de
Janeiro have intensified earlier attempts to concentrate sexual commerce in
certain areas. Although these efforts have often enjoyed social approval, they
have never been coupled with laws regulating prostitution, as was the case in
many Latin American cities. Public policy with regards to prostitution in Rio
de Janeiro can thus be understood as an extra-legal form of regulation which
concentrates immense discretionary power in the hands of the police and
charges them to “control” sexual commerce. On occasion, this has resulted in
the indirect management of brothels by the authorities. In spite of these ef-
forts, however, after almost a century and a half of direct police intervention,
prostitution in Rio de Janeiro continues to be widespread, sharing spaces and
interests with a series of other urban actors.
Prostitution began to interest Brazilian historians as part of a renewal of
historiography that took place in the 1980s and which focused on the years be-
tween 1870 and 1930, an era considered to have been of fundamental impor-
tance in the creation of modern, urban, capitalist Brazil. Historians have placed
the first republican initiatives to police prostitution within the context of radi-
cal urban reforms which took place in Rio de Janeiro during this era, reforms
which attempted to transform the city—then the capital of Brazil—into the
© Thaddeus Blanchette and Cristiana Schettini, 2017 | doi 10.1163/9789004346253_020
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Sex Work in Rio de Janeiro 491
nation’s showcase.1 Unfortunately, almost no historiographic work on prostitu-
tion has yet been done on other parts of the twentieth century, Juçara Leite’s
little-known work on the so-called “República do Mangue”2 being a sterling ex-
ception to this general rule.
Anthropology and sociology became interested in prostitution in Rio from
the late 1980s on and ethnographic studies have created a panorama of sex
work in the city over the last thirty years. This has greatly improved our un-
derstanding of sex as it is sold in Rio, but unfortunately, like the historians,
anthropologists and sociologists have generated relatively little information
regarding the period stretching from 1930 to 1990.
Because of this unevenly focused scholarship, the history of prostitution in
Rio is unbalanced. We know quite a bit about the years stretching from 1870
to 1930, as well as from the late 1980s on. We still know very little about pros-
titution before the 1870s or after the inaugural years of Vargas’ Estado Novo,3
however. What information exists about the sale of sex in Rio from 1930 to 1990
has largely been produced by journalists, medical professionals, and the police,
but no-one has yet collated or systematically reviewed this material.
Legal Definitions
Brazilian legislation has concentrated on repressing the exploitation of prosti-
tutes rather than repressing prostitution itself. Laws are written in such a vague
fashion, however, that any social relation involving prostitutes can be criminal-
ized, if the authorities so desire. This power has historically been utilized by
the police to manage prostitution without instituting formal regulation.
The young medical students who began to study prostitution during the
nineteenth century were inspired by what they understood to be the French
1 Luis Carlos Soares, Rameiras, ilhoas e polacas: a prostituição no Rio de Janeiro do século xix
(São Paulo, 1992); Magali Engel, Meretrizes e doutores: O saber médico e a prostituição na ci-
dade do Rio de Janeiro, 1845–1890 (São Paulo, 1990); Rachel Soihet, Condição feminina e formas
de violência: Mulheres pobres e ordem urbana (1890–1920), (Rio de Janeiro, 1989).
2 Juçara Luzia Leite, “A República do Mangue: Controle Policial e Prostituição no Rio de Janeiro
(1954–1974)”, (Unpublished m.a., Fluminense Federal University, 1993).
3 Getulio Dornelles Vargas was the president of Brazil from 1930 to 1945. He inaugurated a
period of dictatorship known as “Estado Novo”, or “New State” from 1937 to 1945. Ironically,
however, the inauguration of the Estado Novo coincided with a deterioration of Brazil’s rela-
tions with the Axis powers and the country entered wwii on the side of the Allies in 1942.
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492 Blanchette and Schettini
model and they pushed for the regulation of sexual commerce.4 These early
scholars understood prostitution as going well beyond the simple exchange
of money for sexual favours and included in their studies a series of sexual-
affective relationships established outside the bounds of matrimony along the
borders between sex work and other forms of domestic and sexual/affective
labour.
The definition of who was a “prostitute” in nineteenth century Rio de Ja-
neiro depended upon intersections between class, gender, and race in the sur-
rounding society and the eye of the beholder. Medical and legal authorities
tended to apply the term to a wide variety of women who were not necessarily
charging for sex. In the early 1870s, for example, a medical student included
in his list of prostitutes any woman living in an intimate relationship outside
the bounds of formal matrimony, a definition that took in the greater part of
Brazilian women. This same student also classified as prostitutes those wom-
en involved in the city’s incipient nocturnal life, such as “theatre goers” and
“women who live in hotels.” Finally, he also appended “flower vendors, fashion
designers, seamstresses and cigar sellers” to his list. Few women working in
Rio’s service sector escaped being labelled as prostitutes by this gentleman.5
This wide definition was not shared by the large majority of cariocas.6 It
demonstrates, however, that the affective arrangements then common among
the city’s working class (which included serial monogamy, often outside the
bounds of marriage), were seen as suspect by the city’s lettered men of means.
These scholars found the elastic and vague term “clandestine prostitution” to
be a useful descriptor for such relationships. As Sueann Caulfield and Juçara
Leite point out, this view of sex, work, and marriage continued throughout the
first half of the twentieth century.7
The Brazilian Imperial Criminal Code of 1830 makes only one reference to
prostitutes: reducing the penalty for rape to a maximum of one year if the
victim was adjudged to be a “whore”. The First Republic’s penal code (1890),
however, was inspired by German legal tradition and incorporated lenocínio8
4 Herculano Augusto Lassance Cunha, Dissertação sobre a prostituição, em particular na cidade
do Rio de Janeiro (Rio de Janeiro, 1845); Miguel Antônio Heredia Sá, Algumas reflexões sobre
a cópula, onanismo e prostituição (Rio de Janeiro, 1945). See also Luis Carlos Soares Rameiras,
ilhoas … and Sérgio Carrara Tributo a Vênus: A luta contra a sífilis no Brasil, da passagem do
século aos anos 40 (Rio de Janeiro, 1996).
5 Soares, Rameiras, ilhoas e polacas, pp. 31–32.
6 Carioca is the adjective form that refers to people and things from Rio de Janeiro.
7 Sueann Caulfield, “O nascimento do Mangue: Raça, nação e controle da prostituição no Rio
de Janeiro, 1850–1942”, Tempo, 9 (2000), pp. 43–63; Juçara Luzia Leite, A República do Mangue.
8 The act of “maintaining a brothel” but also being a go-between for prostitutes and clients.
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Sex Work in Rio de Janeiro 493
as a crime. It thus became illegal in Brazil to “excite, favour, or facilitate the
prostitution of another in order to satisfy dishonest desires and lascivious
passions”, criminalizing intermediaries such as brothel owners and managers,
madams, and other agents, but officially touching neither prostitutes nor their
clients.9
The 1890 penal code also criminalized inducing women into prostitution, in
order to target pimps but affecting broader groups. The new code declared it
illegal to give assistance, housing, or aid to prostitutes. These laws placed the
owners of the places where prostitutes worked or lived under the gimlet eye of
the law and were also used to attack prostitutes’ roommates, family members,
and—indeed—potentially anyone who associated with them.
In the first years of the twentieth century, laws were widened in scope in
response to international pressure over “white slavery” and the traffic in wom-
en. Changes made in 1915 allowed people who rented rooms by the hour (to a
public which was not exclusively composed of prostitutes) to be charged with
lenocínio. Precinct captains took advantage of the new laws to prohibit the
establishment of rendez-vous along certain streets, especially in the districts
targeted by the city’s urban reform plans.10
The 1940 Penal Code, established by the Vargas dictatorship, defined
lenocínio according to five different modalities.11 While commercial sex itself
was neither regulated nor criminalized, its activities were controlled accord-
ing to laws which linked prostitution to prohibited forms of labour and habi-
tation. These laws also criminalized a wide spectrum of people who could
be charged with benefiting from prostitution. The resultant legal structure
continues in place in today and when authorities wish to crack down on pros-
titutes, they charge the police to enforce the laws pertaining to lenocínio. This
situation has resulted in the effective regulation of prostitution throughout
the twentieth century, a “regulation” without a specific legal mandate but
under the aegis of widespread social stigmatization. Meanwhile, the non-
criminalization of prostitution itself offers the police a convenient reason to
ignore the sale of sex when it occurs within the spaces and times in which it
is socially tolerated.
9 Cristiana Schettini, “Que Tenhas Teu Corpo”: Uma história social da prostituicao no Rio de
Janeiro das primeiras décadas republicanas (Rio de Janeiro, 2006), pp. 171–173.
10 Ibid., pp. 195–200.
11 Miguel de Campos Júnior, “Do lenocínio e do tráfico de mulheres”, in Anais do Primeiro
Congresso Nacional do Ministério Público, 256 vols, (Rio de Janeiro, 1943), iv.
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494 Blanchette and Schettini
Ethnicity, Class, and the Markets for Prostitution in the Early
Twentieth Century
Brazil had finally rid itself of slavery just as the international debate regard-
ing the abolition of regulation intensified at the end of the nineteenth cen-
tury. Thus, as sexual commerce began to be seen as a problem by local elites, it
also became a moral issue that resonated with the struggle to abolish slavery.
These resonances can still be found in the rhetoric of Brazil’s anti-trafficking
movements today. More worrisome to the fin de siècle elite of Rio de Janeiro,
however, was the visibility of sexual commerce in the city, especially in those
regions populated by increasing numbers of African-descended workers and
poor European immigrants.
Brazil’s immigration policies, which sought to “ease the transition” from
slave to free labour, were based upon a peculiar local reading of Social Darwin-
ism. According to so-called “whitening thesis”, increasing the flow of European
immigrants into Brazil would “racially improve” the national population. How-
ever, the prospect of intermixture between the recently arrived “women of all
nationalities” and those who “already existed [in Rio], exercising the lowest
of professions”, especially those women “who are not subject to the rules of
hygiene”,12 generated considerable worry among carioca elites.
Over the years, Rio has received large numbers of immigrants: African
slaves up to the mid-nineteenth century; Europeans from the late nineteenth
to the mid-twentieth century; and, finally, workers from other parts of Brazil
throughout the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Prostitution exercised
by slaves and their descendants was one of the most noteworthy character-
istics of local sexual commerce throughout the nineteenth century. African
and African-descended women were prominent in all parts of the city and it
was common for carioca men to buy slaves as “prostitutes, lovers, concubines,
or companions.” Slave prostitution in Rio de Janeiro was therefore part of a
greater continuum of activities that included domestic services, concubinage,
and street commerce.13
It should not be presumed, however, that slave prostitution was the only
sort of commercial sex on display in nineteenth-century Rio. Contempo-
rary observers made descriptions of many kinds of sexual labour, identifying
12 Barão do Lavradio, apud Cristiana Schettini, Que Tenha seu Corpo, p. 139.
13 Luiz Carlos Soares, O Povo de Cam na capital do Brasil: A escravidão urbana do Rio de Ja-
neiro do século xix (Rio de Janeiro, 2007); Carlos Eugênio Líbano Soares, Flávio dos Santos
Gomes and Juliana Barreto Farias, No labirinto das nações: Africanos e identidades no Rio
de Janeiro, século xix (Rio de Janeiro, 2005).
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Sex Work in Rio de Janeiro 495
hierarchies based upon the origins and racial identities of the women engaged
in prostitution. In 1819, Prussian immigrant Theodor Von Leithold described
the diversity of the city’s prostitutes in the following terms:
Easy women … are present in great numbers: white, black and of all cat-
egories … At night, from eight to ten, they invade the streets dressed in
black taffeta or wool and wrapped in mantles. The ones of the first class
also come out by day, accompanied by two slaves. They use their arts to
pass for high-quality ladies and they know how to ensnare foreign men
in their nets.14
The arrival of Portuguese prostitutes in the mid-nineteenth century created a
visible contrast with the black slaves and native-born free women with whom
they shared downtown.15 Both black and white prostitutes circulated in the
city streets, or called to potential clients from the windows and doorways of
houses. Often, the places classified by observers as “centres of immoral behav-
iour and prostitution” (such as the zungus) were also in fact centres of cultural
resistance for black cariocas.16
Though French prostitutes had been a fixture in Rio since the early 1800s,17
the numbers of foreign-born sex workers increased in the late nineteenth cen-
tury. This resulted in the identification of two types of sex workers which would
persist into the twentieth century. On the one hand, there were the women
designated as “French”. In contemporary media and literature, these “artists”
were portrayed as living in expensive hotels or elegant boarding houses, or liv-
ing alone. They were high-priced prostitutes who were understood as exercis-
ing a civilizing influence upon the city, the counterparts of a local male elite
whose identity was informed by an abiding Francophilia. As consumer fetish-
ism grew, the ability to buy “French” sex became an identifying characteristic
of the carioca’s socially distinct masculinity.18
At the other extreme were the “Poles”, poor white and generally Jewish im-
migrants who were associated with the kind of sex work decried by local elites
14 Theodor von Leithold, O Rio de Janeiro visto por dois prussianos em 1819 (São Paulo, 1966
[1819]).
15 Friederike Strack, Mulher da Vida—Frauen des Lebens: Brasiliens Prostituierte im Wider-
stand gegen Stigmatisierung und Repression (Berlin, 1996), p. 66.
16 Tenements occupied by the city’s black population. Carlos Eugenio Líbano Soares, Zungu:
Rumor de muitas vozes (Rio de Janeiro, 1998), p. 30.
17 Karl von Schelichthorst, O Rio de Janeiro como é (Rio de Janeiro, 1943 [1825]), pp. 100–101.
18 Jeffrey Needell, Belle Époque Tropical: Sociedade e cultura de elite no Rio de Janeiro na vi-
rada do século (1890–1930), (São Paulo, 1993).
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496 Blanchette and Schettini
as “trafficking in women”. These women shared the same decrepit downtown
knocking-shops and street spaces with Rio’s poor black and brown prostitutes.
The term “Pole” was thus often applied to cheap prostitutes in general, no mat-
ter their colour or origin.19
In spite of the symbolic importance of the European presence in Rio de
Janeiro, contemporary reports indicate that Brazilian prostitutes were always
in the majority. A third category of prostitute that began to gain in visibility in
the early twentieth century was the mulatta. From the 1920s on, carioca mag-
azines poked fun at local men’s ambivalent attraction to women of African
descent, a situation which was to persist throughout the twentieth century.
The term mulatta became associated with sensuality and African-descended
beauty, contrasting with the negative associations connected to the word preta
(black woman), which referenced degraded sexual practices, poverty, and ugli-
ness. In erotic stories published in 1914, mulattas were cast as specializing in
anal sex and were also understood as easily falling in love with their clients.
Meanwhile, European prostitutes were characterized as being oral sex special-
ists and were renowned for practicing their trade in a disinterested fashion, not
allowing “affairs of the heart” to mix with commerce.20
Over time, the terms “French” and “Pole” began to be used as short-hand for
two different styles of commercial sex: the first geared towards the sensibili-
ties of the middle- and upper-classes and the second towards the working and
lower classes. Mulattas, while generally situated towards the lower end of this
dichotomous hierarchy could, in fact, be classified as “French-style” (or upper
class) prostitutes.21 In reality, these two idealized extremes of prostitution were
composed of a wide spectrum of colours and nationalities competing for space
and clients in the townhouses and streets of central Rio de Janeiro. Photos of
elegant boarding houses dating from the second decade of the twentieth cen-
tury, for example, show that these brothels contained many different “types”.
Literary references reveal stories such as that of “Rocking Horse Alice”, a well-
known madam of the 1910s who was described as a “great mulatta” and who
had many important republican politicians among her clientele.22 Likewise, in
19 All quotes from Cristiana Schettini, Que Tenhas seu Corpo, p. 138; Beatriz Kushnir, Baile de
Máscaras—mulheres judias e prostituição: As polacas e suas associações de ajuda mútua
(Rio de Janeiro, 1996).
20 Dom Felicio, “Na Zona”, Contos Rápidos n. 11 (Rio de Janeiro, 1914); Alessandra El Far, Pá-
ginas de Sensação: Literatura popular e pornográfica no Rio de Janeiro (São Paulo, 2004);
Schettini, Que Tenha seu Corpo, pp. 231–242.
21 Caulfield, “O nascimento do Mangue”.
22 Orestes Barbosa, Bambambã (Rio de Janeiro 1993 [1922]).
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Sex Work in Rio de Janeiro 497
Marques Rabelo’s novel Marafá, first published in 1935, a lower-class boarding
house is shown as being inhabited by three Polish prostitutes and a mulatta.23
The result of a long and complicated cultural dialogue between Brazilian
modernist intellectuals and popular culture, the mulatta became established
as the symbolic quintessence of Brazilian sensuality in the interwar period,
figuring in romanticized portrayals of bohemian carioca nightlife and prosti-
tution.24 This racialized moral construction of feminine sexuality served as a
guide to authorities, denoting which females needed to be watched and po-
liced. African-descended carioca women continued to be described as possess-
ing an “uncivilized, natural” sexuality which needed to be maintained within
certain limits. Tiago M. Gomes cites a journalist of the times regarding the
racially-marked frontiers of the liberalization of public sexuality during this
period:
A kiss in a bedroom is not a crime, nor is the kiss one gives to a hand or
a forehead. It’s when a guy smooches on Flamengo Beach, for example,
and starts sniffing up a mulatta’s neck that he ends up in the slammer.25
The mulatta was often set in idealized opposition to “family girls” (moça de
família), understood as white, middle-class, and chaste. This dichotomy has
permeated discussions of Brazilian sexuality since the early 1900s.26 During
the interwar period, however, the “modern woman” began to interest medical
and legal authorities as Rio’s nightlife flourished and already blurried lines be-
tween “honest” and “dishonest” women were perceived as even more unstable.
Cafés, bars, cabarets, theatres, and other entertainment venues multiplied in
Rio and behavioural patterns began to take on a new, more liberal and global-
ized complexion. New fashions and the “feminine invasion” of public space
were understood by the city’s masculine elite in racialized and sexualized
terms. As Gomes reports, when middle-class white girls began to wear their
23 Marques Rabelo, Marafa (Rio de Janeiro, 2003 [1935]).
24 Regarding the uses of the imagery of the mulatta, see Martha Abreu, “‘Sobre mulatas or-
gulhosas e crioulos atrevidos’: Conflitos raciais, gênero e nação nas cancões populares
(Sudeste do Brasil, 1890–1920)”, Tempo, 8 (2004), pp. 143–173.
25 Fortunato Padilha, “As Entrevistas Momentosas”, O Paiz, 23 October 1925 (Rio de Janeiro,
1925), apud Tiago de Melo Gomes, “Mulatas, massais e meretrizes: Imagens da sexuali-
dade feminina no Rio de Janeiro dos anos 1920”, Cadernos Pagu, 23 (2004) pp. 121–147.
26 Thaddeus G. Blanchette and Ana Paula Silva, “Mulheres vulneráveis e meninas más: Uma
análise antropológica de narrativas hegemônicas sobre o tráfico de pessoas no Brasil”, in
Ferreria et al. (eds), A Experiência migrante: Entre deslocamentos e reconstruções (Rio de
Janeiro, 2010), pp. 325–360, 352.
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498 Blanchette and Schettini
hair short, drink in public, and dance the Charleston and samba,27 they began
to be criticized as indistinguishable from their black and mulatta maids.
Young female workers who insisted upon participating in nightlife without
giving up their identification as “honest women” soon became involved in a
conflict-ridden dialogue with carioca police and lawyers. These gentlemen, in
turn, were forced to rethink the unequivocal borders which had been estab-
lished around feminine honour.28 One of the results of this conflict was a nar-
rowing of the category “prostitute”, which became increasingly applicable only
to those women who exchanged sex for money.
Extra-official Regulation
As we discussed above, representations of prostitution in Rio de Janeiro associ-
ated sexual styles with national and racial identities in a hierarchical, if ambig-
uous, fashion. Available data regarding the spatial organization of commercial
sex in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, however, suggests the existence
of complex patterns of shifting relationships between sex-working women and
their neighbours set against a backdrop of increasing police intervention.
The most common and visible modality of prostitution in the centre of Rio
de Janeiro up until the 1920s was “window prostitution”, where women would
hang out of townhouses, calling to passers-by. In the late 1890s, the owners
of the houses where prostitutes lived and worked were often women of 30-
plus years of age, typically Brazilian, Austrian, or Portuguese, who might own
two or three houses in the same region. These buildings were subdivided and
rented out, with prostitutes paying a much higher rent than was the norm.29
Physical proximity between prostitutes and other downtown workers and
residents was a characteristic of Rio de Janeiro in the eighteenth and nine-
teenth centuries. Sex workers were an integral part of a more general urban
commercial scene. In the mid-1890s, however, a few years after the abolition
of slavery, a precinct captain launched a “moral sanitation” campaign in down-
town Rio, ordering the eviction of the prostitutes. The courts were used to slow
down the captain’s measures (which were an early example of the hygienist
policies that would be soon enacted) and neighbours often testified in favour
27 Mariza Corrêa, “Sobre a invenção da mulata”, Cadernos Pagu, 6/7 (1996), pp. 35–50; Tiago
de Melo Gomes, “Mulatas, massais e meretrizes”.
28 Sueann Caulfield, Em Defesa da honra: Moralidade, modernidade e nação no Rio de Janeiro
(1918–1940), (Campinas, 2000).
29 Schettini, Que tenhas seu corpo, pp. 184–193.
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Sex Work in Rio de Janeiro 499
Map 19.1 Rio de Janeiro, 2012
of the women.30 Strenuous efforts were made by police in the following de-
cades to push sex-working women out of downtown, however. The establish-
ment of the “Mangue” (literally “the Marsh”) as a segregated red-light district in
the 1920s was the principal result of this tendency. The story of the founding of
the Mangue illustrates how Rio’s newly established “extra-official” regulation
of prostitution functioned. In 1920, King Albert of Belgium was invited to visit
Rio. This was to be the consecrating act of the past two decades of intense ur-
ban reform and hygienization. As historian Paulo Donadio puts it, Albert’s visit
was “an opportunity to showcase the country in Europe: he would be a perfect
representative of civilization who could attest to Brazil’s progress.”31
30 Ibid., pp. 29–43.
31 Paulo Donadio, “Tem rei no mar”, Revista de História, 7 July 2008.
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500 Blanchette and Schettini
City Hall never officially decided to confine sex workers to the Mangue as
part of the preparations for the King’s visit; this policy was enforced extra-
officially by the police. According to Sueann Caulfield:
Instructed to “clean up” the areas through which His Highness would
pass, the police rounded up lower-class prostitutes on the allegation that
they were “bums” and kept them under arrest until the end of the royal
visit, later gathering them all together in brothels around the nine streets
of the Mangue. Here, a few kilometres away from the shores of Guana-
bara Bay, far from the modernized centre of town, there began a series of
experiments in police administration of prostitution.
Two prostitution-related institutions were founded in the Mangue. In 1922, the
São Francisco de Assis hospital opened its doors, specializing in treating ve-
nereal diseases.32 The second institution was the 13th Police Precinct, charged
with registering and maintaining the records of every prostitute in Rio. In the
words of anthropologist Soraya Simões:
These measures made the Mangue appear to be the ideal place for situat-
ing carioca prostitution, contributing to the definition of the city’s [new]
moral spaces and to the hygienist view of the times, as well as to the con-
trol of syphilis and the other venereal diseases which haunted the city
at the beginning of the twentieth century […]. The great mobility of the
inhabitants of the area was also one of the distinct characteristics which
gave it the reputation of being the “natural region” for lower-class prosti-
tution in Rio de Janeiro.33
Informal regulation resulted in an explosion of clandestine and semi-
clandestine forms of prostitution outside of the Mangue, which allowed the
majority of sex workers “to hide in plain sight.”34 These women would meet
clients in bars, streets, trolley stations, or cafés and would then go to hotels,
rooming houses, or the ubiquitous rendez-vous. A growing concentration of
establishments in the bohemian district of Lapa, west of downtown, was also
due to police repression in the newly renovated centro (see map 19.1).
32 Carrara, Tributo à Venus.
33 Soraya Simões, “Identidade e política: A prostituição e o reconhecimento de um métier no
Brasil”, Revista de Antropologia Social dos Alunos do PPGAS-UFSCar, 2 (2010), pp. 24–46.
34 Caulfield, “O nascimento do Mangue”.
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Sex Work in Rio de Janeiro 501
In 1923, the precinct chiefs of Lapa and the Mangue made lists of prosti-
tutes.35 In Lapa, 453 sex-working women were found, of which only 232 were
Brazilian. These women were distributed in 179 establishments. Meanwhile,
in the Mangue, the police registered 674 women working in 112 houses, with
Brazilian women tallying 421 of the region’s prostitutes.
Although Lapa concentrated elegant and bohemian establishments and the
Mangue specialized in a supposedly more sordid form of prostitution, journal-
ist Ricardo Pinto remarked in 1930 (as anthropologist Ana Paula Silva would ob-
serve eight decades later36) that these differences referred more to the profile
of the men that frequented the two districts rather than the women working
in them. Pinto commented that the Mangue actually generated more money
because the women could do window prostitution, as had been the case in
downtown. Furthermore, in the elegant boarding houses of Lapa, the women
needed to invest more of their earnings in dresses and accessories. The main
barrier to working in Lapa was the establishment of the necessary contacts
and this was especially difficult for lower-class women.37
The cabaret singers and variety artists who rented rooms in Lapa during
their tours of South America had a distinct advantage in this regard, given that
they could count upon contacts acquired during their theatrical work. This
restricted their movements, pushing them to follow rigid working hours and
obliging them to be housed within a specific hotel or boarding house. However,
it also guaranteed these “artists” a fixed clientele.38
A glimpse into artistic prostitution during this period can be seen in the
documents of the us Embassy dealing with the Baxter and Willard burlesque
company’s 1917–1918 tour of Brazil. The company had come at the behest of
Djalma Moreira, the owner of several nightspots. According to the Embassy
authorities, Moreira’s clubs attracted “cheap gamblers […], business travellers,
other tourists, young bohemians and the less offensive class of prostitutes”,
many of whom “lived off the gaming tables when they don’t have a tempo-
rary protector to pay their bills.” After their shows, the troupe’s dancers would
35 6C–751A, 1923, gifi (Police Papers). Arquivo Nacional, Rio de Janeiro.
36 Ana Paula Silva, “‘Cosmopolitanismo tropical’: Uma análise preliminar do turismo sexual
internacional em São Paulo”, unpublished paper presented at the seminar “Trânsitos Con-
temporâneos: Turismo, migrações, gênero, sexo, afetos e dinheiro”, unicamp, Campinas,
2010.
37 Ricardo Pinto, Tráfico das brancas: Observacoes em torno aos cáftens franceses que vivem
no Rio de Janeiro (Rio de Janeiro, 1930), p. 25.
38 Cristiana Schettini, “Circuitos de trabalho no mercado de diversoes sul americano no
começo do século xx”, Cadernos ael, 17 (2010).
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502 Blanchette and Schettini
frequent Moreira’s clubs where their sexual favours could be negotiated for a
price, a situation which alarmed the American consular officials.39
Attempts to Clean up and Eliminate the Mangue
From the 1940s on, prostitution in Rio de Janeiro can best be characterized by a
general official tolerance, punctuated by short but intense campaigns to elimi-
nate sexual commerce or at least restrict it to controlled areas. Inspector Ar-
mando Pereira, who studied carioca prostitution for some 30 years, described
this cyclical movement in 1967:
Brazil has an abolitionist tradition. During the Republic, we didn’t pass
laws or measures which would regulate prostitution […]. However, in
practice, we have always adopted a mitigated form of regulation. We
tolerate houses of prostitution […]. There is no continuity in this policy
[…], however. There have been periods in which all the houses are closed.
Others in which [the police] only fiercely persecute streetwalkers. Still
others in which they attack the numerous sex hotels now proliferating
across the city.40
The organization of prostitution in Rio changed substantively due to one
of these abolitionist campaigns. In 1943, Chief of Police Colonel Alcides
Gonçalves Etchegoyen decreed the expulsion of prostitution from Glória
(a neighbourhood adjacent to Lapa), giving the women thirty days to evacu-
ate. “When this time limit had run out”, legal scholar Waldyr Abreu writes,
“[Etchegoyan] asked someone, presumably a jurist, [as to what he could do]
and was informed that the law had nothing to say about prostitution. So, with
characteristic simplicity, [the Colonel] liquidated the problem, manu mili-
tari” by putting several thousand women onto the streets. He also closed the
Mangue and Lapa’s commercial sexual venues.41
39 Thaddeus Blanchette and Ana Paula Silva, “As American Girls: Migração, sexo e status
imperial em 1918”, Horizontes Antropológicos, 15 (2009), pp. 75–99.
40 Pereira, Sexo e Prostituição, p. 90.
41 Waldyr Abreu, O submundo do jogo de azar, prostituição e vadiagem: Aspectos jurídicos,
sociais e psicológicos (Rio de Janeiro, 1984), pp. 130–131. The boundaries between Lapa and
Glória were imprecise. “Glória”, in this case, almost certainly takes in some of the houses
of Lapa. In Leite, A República do Mangue.
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Sex Work in Rio de Janeiro 503
As occurred during the previous moral crusades, most of the city’s pros-
titutes retreated to clandestine activities during Etchegoyan’s reign. Accord-
ing to Armando Pereira, who began to work in the 13th district around this
time, the Mangue became an “underground citadel”, with many of its women
continuing to work in the neighbourhood’s streets and tenements. The crack-
down was short-lived, however, and in 1945, tolerance returned. The Mangue,
although reduced in size, resumed operations.42
By the mid-1950s, the prostitutes of the Mangue were almost all Brazilian,
usually women recently arrived from the country’s hinterlands: “only the mad-
ams were foreign (and then not always): Poles who said they were French and
stubborn Jewish women who’d survived the crisis” of the neighbourhood’s clo-
sure in 1943. In 1967, a census found that the majority of the 600 women in the
Mangue were illiterate immigrants from rural Brazil. Meanwhile, only twelve
foreign women were left, including 77-year-old Philipine Renoir, born in 1891 in
Belgium, the one remaining “French” prostitute in the Mangue, a refugee from
“the old days of splendour in Lapa.”43
In 1954, the police in charge of the Mangue inaugurated an intervention
which attempted to put direct control of the brothels into the hands of the
prostitutes by kicking out the madams and pimps. The cops then turned the
Map 19.2 Movement of prostitution from the Mangue to Vila Mimosa, 1922–2013
42 Pereira, Sexo e prostituição, pp. 139–140.
43 Ibid., pp. 55, 152, 162–163.
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504 Blanchette and Schettini
houses over to the women, who held elections to determine their managers
on a rotating basis. This new form of cooperative management—nicknamed
“the Mangue Republic”—was quickly revealed to be another form of extra-
official regulation of sex work, however. Prostitutes were still arrested outside
the Mangue. Moreover, they continued to be registered by the 13th Precinct.
Without police permission, they could neither work in the Mangue nor move
to another house. Women who wanted to quit prostitution, in fact, had to
obtain police permission. Working hours (noon to 2 a.m.) were also defined
by the cops.
Thus in spite of Brazil’s formal adherence to abolition, police management,
supplemented by medical surveillance, continued de facto in Rio de Janeiro.44
As Inspector Pereira cynically observed, the job of the police was to close down
all prostitution venues outside of the Mangue while “not only tolerating, [but]
effectively managing” those within the district itself.45
With the beginning of the military dictatorship in 1964, however, Rio be-
gan to pass through yet another wave of urban renewal. The Mangue was tar-
geted by successive projects that included the construction of subway lines
and modern high-rises.46 The district’s demolition began in the late 1960s, but
picked up speed in December 1970 with the appropriation of twenty-eight
properties.47 Part of the neighbourhood was bulldozed in 1973 to make way for
the subway, but the mortal blow came in November of 1977 with the razing of
the rest of the neighbourhood.48 The film Mangue by Cecilia Resende docu-
ments the brutality of the expulsion. The police arrived before dawn and set
fire to the neighbourhood’s houses. Many women, faced with the prospect of
having nowhere else to go, attempted suicide.49
The destruction of the Mangue pushed prostitution into the streets sur-
rounding Praça da Bandeira, a few blocks west of the old red-light district.
Here, in 1979, the survivors of the Mangue established a new concentration of
44 small brothels in what became known as Vila Mimosa (vm; see map 19.2).
Continued urban redevelopment in the region, particularly the construction
44 Leite, A república do mangue, p. 57.
45 Pereira, Sexo e prostituição, pp. 152, 160.
46 Leite, A república do mangue, pp. 86–87; Strack, Mulher da Vida; Pereira, Sexo e prostitu-
ição; Soraya Simões, “Identidade e política”.
47 Flávio Lenz, Beijo da rua (Rio de Janeiro, 1990), p. 10.
48 Strack, Mulher da vida, p. 90.
49 Caulfield, “O nascimento do Mangue”; Simões, “Identidade e política”; Abreu, O submun-
do do jogo de azar, prostituição e vadiagem.
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Sex Work in Rio de Janeiro 505
of a new City Hall complex (immediately baptized by cariocas as “The Big
Whore”), led to yet another expulsion of the sex workers in 1995, this time with
indemnification. The money received allowed Vila Mimosa to relocate even
farther west to an abandoned warehouse along R. Sotero dos Reis. Today, “vm”
contains some 70 bars packed into a block-long strip surrounding the old ware-
house, with some 1,000 women working as prostitutes in the region. Sex gener-
ally costs from us$10–20 for 20 minutes in small cabines above the bars. The
women are generally “independent workers”, but 30 to 50 per cent of the price
of the trick goes to the bar owners as “cabine rental”.50
Vila Mimosa is tolerated as a “controlled” red-light district and, in this sense,
many of its relations with power replay those of the earlier Mangue. Police no
longer force women to work in the district, but raids against sex workers occur
with much greater frequency outside the boundaries of vm. It is a tribute to the
durability of Rio’s policy of unofficial regulation of prostitution that the city’s
most notorious red-light district has soldiered on despite of the best efforts of
two dictatorships to eliminate it.
Praça Mauá, Copacabana, and Downtown
During World War ii, prostitution intensified around the Praça Mauá port
district (see map 19.2). The region quickly became Rio’s first example of a pros-
titution district organized around foreign customers.51 Describing the flows of
foreigners through the port during and following the war, Cezar and Viveiros
de Castro claim that these men “were the main clientele of the ‘girls’ of Praça
Mauá, who often spoke five different languages—or at least dominated the es-
sential vocabulary of their profession in these languages.”52 By the late 1960s,
however, the port was decaying and street prostitution had become common
in the neighbourhood. Following the urban renewal campaigns of the early
years of the military dictatorship (1964–1985), the police moved in on Praça
Mauá and implemented yet another form of unofficial management, even as
they began to close down the Mangue.53
50 Soraya Simões, Vila Mimosa: Etnografia da cidade cenográfica da prostituição Carioca (Ni-
terói, 2010).
51 Although foreigners frequented Rio’s houses of ill-repute in earlier decades.
52 Paulo Bastos Cezar and Ana Rosa Viveiros de Castro, A Praça Mauá (Rio de Janeiro, 1989),
pp. 64–76.
53 Ibid., p. 76.
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506 Blanchette and Schettini
In 1971, the newspaper Jornal do Brasil described how police worked
with local club owners (who might have been accused of lenocínio under
other circumstances) to maintain control of prostitution around Praça
Mauá by forcing prostitutes off the streets and into the bars and clubs,
where they became the responsibility of—and placed under the con-
trol of—club owners. This was seen by police as an anti-crime measure.
According to one Inspector Cartola, “we’ve had no robberies of johns in
our jurisdiction for quite some time now because the club owners them-
selves are now selecting the women that they’ll allow into their houses.”54
This story highlights several persistent themes in the extra-official regulation
of prostitution by the police in Rio de Janeiro. The sale of sex was understood
as a professional (if immoral and degraded) activity and not a crime. Never-
theless, it was seen as something that must be tightly disciplined, conducted
out of the public view, and wholly separate from the population at large, who
should not be “importuned by whores”. In the case of the Mangue in 1954, the
prostitutes were organized to provide order under police oversight. In 1971 in
Praça Mauá, it was the owners of the nightclubs who were empowered by the
police to fulfil this role.
Praça Mauá thus became established as yet another one of Rio’s unofficial
police-moderated sex work ghettos where prostitution was tolerated as long
as it didn’t interfere with the “morals and good customs” of carioca society.
Until very recently, the region still contained many of the clubs established
there in the 1940s and was still catering to foreigners who were itinerant sea-
men, mostly Filipinos, Indians, and Chinese. In 2012, however, Rio began an ur-
ban renewal project centred on transforming Praça Mauá into a “festival port”.
Large sections of the neighbourhood have subsequently been confiscated and
demolished.
Two other directions prostitution moved after World War ii was towards
downtown and into Rio’s south zone, particularly the residential neighbour-
hood of Copacabana. One of the effects of the periodic anti-prostitution blitzes
during the 1940s and ‘50s was the camouflaging of the sex trade. With the clos-
ing of the old rendez-vous and boarding houses in Lapa and Glória, sex work
moved into hotels and private apartments. According to Inspector Armando
Pereira, the number of hotels used specifically for commercial sexual encoun-
ters tripled during the 1950s. Prostitutes would make a deal with a hotel owner
and bring clients back from the streets or bars, paying a full day’s rent, but only
54 T. Baltar, P.C. Araujo and A. Jacob, “Praça Mauá abriga em 11 boates mercado de sexo para
os homens do mar”, Jornal do Brasil, 7–8 (1971), p. 40.
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Sex Work in Rio de Janeiro 507
using the room for a couple of hours. This modification in sex work practices
was facilitated by the liberalization in bourgeois sexual mores, which led to
Supreme Court decisions in the 1950s stipulating that hotel owners were not
responsible for verifying the marital status of guest couples.55
In spite of a police campaign to close down sex hotels in 1959, they continued
to proliferate. By 1967, there were over 500 in Rio. After the sexual revolution
of the 1970s, sex hotels began to service ever greater numbers of unmarried
couples. Today, these hotels are still used by sex workers and non-sex workers
alike for temporary trysts.56
Other forms of sex work were developed to avoid police repression during
the 1950s and ‘60s. The first bathhouses and saunas began to appear in police
records during this period. Pereira labelled them “an invert’s [read: homosex-
ual] paradise”, but many catered to the heterosexual trade as well. Today, Rio’s
top-end middle-class commercial heterosexual venues are all saunas. Cheap
cabarets and recreational clubs with floor shows and back rooms also became
common meeting spots for prostitutes and clients, as did massage parlours and
theatres. All of these types of venues soldier on in downtown and south zone
Rio today.57
Another new form of prostitution was enabled by women’s increased lib-
erty. This was the apartment brothel, which began to fill the gap left by the old
rendez-vous and boarding houses in the late 1950s and early ‘60s. As Pereira
describes them, these venues were two- or three-bedroom apartments rented
out to young prostitutes. The women would bring clients home, using the bed-
rooms for work during the day and a living space at night. The police were
often incapable of distinguishing between establishments of this type and
apartments rented by the growing numbers of independently living single fe-
males who were increasingly part of the city’s urban scene.58
What particularly frustrated Rio’s anti-vice specialists, however, was the fact
that these new forms of prostitution were concentrated downtown and in the
residential, middle-class south zone of Rio de Janeiro, precisely the regions for
which the Mangue was supposed to serve as a social prophylactic. Police at-
tempts to keep prostitution out of the burgeoning new bohemian beach-side
neighbourhoods were particularly fierce.
The decadence of Lapa prompted a drift of Rio’s bohemians towards the
south zone beaches of Copacabana, which came to be associated with Bossa
55 Pereira, Sexo e Prostituição, pp. 94–95.
56 Ibid., p. 100.
57 Ibid., p. 104; Blanchette and Silva, “Sexo a um real por minuto”.
58 Pereira, Sexo e prostituição, pp. 102–103.
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508 Blanchette and Schettini
Nova and the city’s nightlife in the 1950s. The artistic prostitution earlier found
in Lapa was part of this migration, with women establishing themselves in
places such as the Beco das Garrafas (Bottle Alley, a strip of clubs and bars in
Copacabana famous for Bossa Nova).59
The new apartment-style mini-brothels were perfect for this scene and were
almost impossible to repress, although the police tried. Pereira recounts a story
which demonstrates the methods employed in this struggle, which involved
extralegal and “arbitrary” measures, combined with “a measured dose of vio-
lence” to force the prostitutes and madams to hand over their apartments to
the police and leave the neighbourhood for “more liberal parishes” (presum-
ably the Mangue).60 Pereira shows how the carioca police operated outside the
Mangue in the 1950s and ‘60s (and, indeed, since the beginning of the Repub-
lic): in order to keep prostitutes out of “regular family” areas, they went outside
the law and illegally imprisoned and brutalized people they viewed as “pimps”
and “madams”. This was not to end prostitution, but simply to “convince” it to
move elsewhere—most probably to the Mangue or Mauá. Pereira was aware
that this sort of operation was illegal, but he was also so convinced of its ac-
ceptability that he recounts it in a humorous tone.
Police attempts to keep prostitution out of Copacabana were doomed to
failure, however. The neighbourhood’s main prostitution strip61 became a con-
centrated region of bars, nightclubs, and cabarets in the 1970s and ‘80s. Fifty-
four of 279 commercial sexual venues identified in Rio de Janeiro in 201162
were situated in Copacabana, with twenty-six of these within two blocks of the
old strip. These establishments are also far and away the oldest venues in the
neighbourhood. Some of them possibly evolved directly out of the bohemian
scene of the 1950s.
By the late 1970s in Copacabana, as shown in map 19.3, prostitution had
increasingly integrated foreign tourists as clients. Today, the majority of Rio’s
luxurious heterosexual saunas and first-rank night-clubs are in the neighbour-
hood and, although foreign clients would never be the majority in most of Co-
pacabana’s prostitution venues, they would dominate many of the wealthiest.
59 Abreu, O submundo do jogo de azar, prostituição e vadiagem, p. 130; Marcello Cerqueira
Beco das garrafas: Uma lembrança (Rio de Janeiro, 1994).
60 Pereira, Sexo e prostituição, p. 102, fn. 1.
61 Ibid.
62 Thaddeus G. Blanchette and Ana Paula Silva, “Prostitution in Contemporary Rio de Janei-
ro”, in Susan Dewey and Patty Kelly (eds), Policing Pleasure: Sex Work, Policy and the State
in Global Perspective (New York, 2011). Blanchette and Silva count each address where
prostitution takes place. Vila Mimosa’s 78 micro-establishments are thus one “venue”.
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Sex Work in Rio de Janeiro 509
Map 19.3 Sex venues in Copacabana, 2011
In 1984, the famous Help discotheque was established, eventually becoming
the main focal point for encounters between foreign tourists and carioca pros-
titutes. Help was finally confiscated by the state government in 2010 in order to
make way for a new museum as part of the general hygienization plans being
implemented prior to the World Cup and Olympics.
While Copacabana began to specialize in sexual tourism and the bohemian
prostitution that had earlier been Lapa’s métier, downtown Rio de Janeiro in
the 1960s and ‘70s began to develop a commercial sexual scene geared towards
a Brazilian clientele made up of male workers. This process sped up consid-
erably as the Mangue was demolished. Theatre, cabaret, and hotel prostitu-
tion, as well as massage parlours, became quite common downtown by the late
1970s. Even a few posh heterosexual saunas became established in the region.
In 2011, there were 92 commercial sexual venues within a five-block radi-
us of the intersection of Ave. Getulio Vargas and Ave. Rio Branco, visible in
map 19.4. Urban renewal for the World Cup and Olympic Games has sparked a
wave of real estate speculation downtown, however. As old buildings are reno-
vated, many commercial sexual venues are being evicted. The smaller venues
established office-spaces in high rises and known locally as “privés” or massage
parlours seem to be maintaining a consistent presence in the centre. A typical
establishment is set up in an office, subdivided into three or four “cabines” with
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510 Blanchette and Schettini
Map 19.4 Sex venues in downtown Rio de Janeiro, 2011
a half dozen women working. The clientele is principally made up of down-
town workers and peak hours come at noon and 5 p.m., when work lets out.63
The privé/massagem is an adaptation to Rio’s tradition of extra-official regu-
lation. Because they require little in the way of capital investment, they can
move to a new address when they encounter police “regulation”. The fact that
many privés manage to go on for years located in the same apartment, however,
shows that, in spite of the repeated attempts by the carioca police to segregate
prostitution, it is still common for sexual commerce to exist side-by-side with
other establishments.
The Carioca Prostitute Today
From the second half of the twentieth century on, the division between
“Europeans” and “Brazilians” became less demarcated in Rio de Janeiro as
immigration dried up. Internal migration, especially from the north-eastern
and northern regions of Brazil, began to have an impact on commercial sex in
the city as Rio expanded from 1,500,000 inhabitants in 1930 to some 6,300,000
63 Blanchette and Silva, “Prostitution in Contemporary Rio de Janeiro”.
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Sex Work in Rio de Janeiro 511
in 2010. During this period, the rural or small-town girl from the interior of
Brazil who arrives in the city and works as a prostitute became a stock figure
in literature and news.
The growing role of Rio as a destination for international tourism from the
1950s on also brought a new and important male client—the foreign tour-
ist—into the city’s sexual/affective markets. This development combined with
long-extant stereotypes of the nation as exceptionally “hot, tropical and sen-
sual” to establish the “Brazilian woman” as a much-appreciated racialized and
sexualized feminine type in the global sexscape.64 The figure of the mulatta
has become so associated with this style of femininity that racial admixture,
female sensuality, and Brazilianess are now almost synonymous in the inter-
national media.
The negative classification of the lower-class preta (black woman) still lives
on, however, in the association of prostitution with residency in one of the
city’s favela shantytowns. The urban reforms of the twentieth century failed
to resolve Rio’s housing problems and, in fact, intensified them through the
bull-dozing of many poor neighbourhoods.65 Coupled with the increase in
the population, this resulted in the expansion of ad hoc housing solutions on
irregularly-occupied lands, often situated on slopes of the city’s mountains. In
the carioca popular media, the inhabitants of these favelas are racialized as
black and are often stereotyped as the creators of much of the city’s disorder.
The favelas are a source of anxiety for local elites, who classify them as beyond
the State’s control. The preta prostitute—black, poor, favelada and sexually
degraded—can still be seen in the popular media and certain ngo and policy-
maker portrayals of prostitution.
Recent ethnographic work, however, suggests that many, if not most, of Rio
de Janeiro’s prostitutes do not live in the favelas and are not particularly poor,
nor do they see themselves as black or are seen that way by their clients.66
64 By “global sexscape”, we follow Denise Brennan’s lead in applying Arjun Appadurai’s un-
derstanding of global flows to the sexual and affective sphere. Denise Brennan, What’s
Love Got to do with It? Transnational Desires and Sex Tourism in the Dominican Republic
(Durham, 2004); Arjun Appadurai, “Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Culture
Economy”, in Mike Featherstone (ed.), Global Culture: Nationalism, Globalization and Mo-
dernity (London, 1990).
65 Maurício Abreu, A evolução urbana do Rio de Janeiro (Rio de Janeiro, 2006).
66 Blanchette and Silva, “Prostitution in Contemporary Rio de Janeiro”, pp. 130–145; see
also by the same authors “Amor a um real por minuto: A prostituição como atividade
econômica no Brasil urbano”, in Sonia Correa and Richard Parker (eds), Sexualidade e
política na América Latina: Histórias, interseções e paradoxos (Rio de Janeiro, 2011).
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512 Blanchette and Schettini
Today, there is still a large number of diverse types of sex-working women in
Rio de Janeiro. While it is impossible to describe the average carioca prosti-
tute, we can create a Weberian ideal type of the kind of woman found today in
pretty much every commercial sexual venue in the city.67
She has brown skin and dark hair (often dyed blonde and straightened)
and racially classifies herself as mixed. She was born in Rio and lives in the
working class suburbs. Her parents are working or lower middle class, with
the mother often being a housewife. She has a high-school education, but at-
tended low quality institutions. She probably wouldn’t be able to pass the en-
trance exams for Brazil’s free federal and state universities. She began sexual
activity between 13 and 16 years of age and often was “married” (typically a
non-formalized consensual union) before the age of 18. She is currently in her
mid-20s. She is a mother and usually lives with her family. She has held other
jobs, usually feminized work in the service economy. She got into prostitution
as an adult, generally at the behest of a friend or by answering an ad. Prostitu-
tion is the most lucrative form of employment that she has had, paying four
to ten times more than any of her prior jobs. She sees sex work as a way to
achieve more than survival and plans on attending school, opening a business,
building a house, or consuming luxury items otherwise beyond her means. She
is not a drug addict. She does drink alcohol, but rarely anything stronger than
beer or wine. She isn’t controlled by a pimp and is not forced to work, but if she
works in a closed venue she is answerable to that venue’s manager with regards
to how many days and hours a week she works and may be fined if she doesn’t
show up. There’s a good chance that she is an evangelical Christian.
The “ideal typical prostitute” in Rio de Janeiro today is, in short, almost
indistinguishable from the non-prostitute female majority. In fact, while the
popular media and policy makers still believe in the “high class” and “low class”
model of prostitution encoded in the “French/Pole” dichotomy of the early
twentieth century, it is very difficult to say today that there are clear physical or
social types dominating one or another form of carioca sex work. In the words
of anthropologist Ana Paula Silva, “What determines [the] price in a commer-
cial sexual venue in Rio today is not the style or beauty of the women so much
as the social class of the male clients.”68
67 Max Weber, The Methodology of the Social Sciences (New York, 1997 [1903–1917]), p. 90.
This ideal typification is based on interviews conducted by Blanchette and Silva in a wide
variety of commercial sex venues, as well as eight years of participant-observation.
68 Silva, “‘Cosmopolitanismo tropical’”.
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Sex Work in Rio de Janeiro 513
Finally, ethnographic studies69 confirm that the dividing lines between pros-
titution and other forms of sexual-affective relationships are still ambiguous
and shifting. Among international sexual tourists, for example, Rio de Janeiro
has a reputation of being the place to go for “girlfriend experience”70 commer-
cial sex. These same foreign men also claim that it is easy to convince “normal”
(i.e. non-prostitute) cariocas to engage in sexual exchanges for money while
carioca sex-working women affirm that when it comes to foreign tourists “you
get paid more as a girlfriend than as a prostitute.”71
The Persistent Ambivalence of Prostitution Laws in Rio
In 1915, Police Commissioner Aurelino Leal resumed what he believed had be-
come the dominant tendency in the country with regards to prostitution. Leal
claimed that the police were empowered to exercise a preventive role and giv-
en a certain degree of leeway in the measures to be employed. These included
the power to decide where and when prostitution could be exercised.72
As we have seen, this idea was translated into operations that tried to re-
move prostitution from this or that part of the city, beginning with the prohi-
bition of prostitution in the downtown area, moving through the attempts to
concentrate prostitutes in Lapa and the Mangue, later drives to demolish these
two regions, and efforts to “moralize” prostitution in the port and keep it out
of Copacabana. Indeed, the same policy can be seen today, as the police seem
to consider themselves empowered to eliminate any bar or establishment
where prostitution occurs, especially if said venue occupies land needed for
“improvements” scheduled for the World Cup and the Olympics.73
69 Thaddeus Blanchette and Ana Paula Silva, “Nossa Senhora da Help: sexo, turismo e deslo-
camento transnacional em Copacabana”, Cadernos Pagu, 25 (2005), pp. 249–280; Adriana
Piscitelli, “On ‘Gringos’ and ‘Natives’: Gender and Sexuality in the Context of Internation-
al Sex Tourism in Fortaleza, Brazil”, Vibrant, 1 (2001).
70 According to Elizabeth Bernstein, a commercial sexual experience where what is sold is a
manufactured authenticity that tries to simulate reciprocal desire and pleasure. Elizabeth
Bernstein, Temporarily Yours: Intimacy, Authenticity, and the Commerce of Sex (Chicago,
2007), pp. 125–130.
71 Blanchette and Silva, “Nossa senhora da help”, pp. 277–278.
72 Aurelino Leal, Polícia e poder de polícia (Rio de Janeiro, 1918).
73 Julie Ruvolo, “Rio’s Biggest Prostitution Crackdown in a Generation”, The Atlantic: Cities,
7 September 2012; available at: http://www.theatlanticcities.com/jobs-and-economy/
2012/09/rios-biggest-prostitution-crackdown-generation/3199/; last accessed 8 July 2017.
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514 Blanchette and Schettini
From the end of the military dictatorship on to the present day, the system
of extra-official regulation of prostitution in Rio de Janeiro has continued on
largely intact, although in a less institutionalized and more personalized form,
perhaps, than in the Mangue in the 1920s or ‘50s. Ethnographic research car-
ried out in Rio in recent years74 indicates that it is almost impossible for a pros-
titution venue to function in the city without “oversight” by the police. Such
involvement often takes the form of having a police officer as a silent partner,
interceding in day-to-day conflicts with the neighbours or local administrative
authorities and guaranteeing the “moralization” of the house by keeping its
activities quiet and indoors.
In recent years, however, police involvement in the administration of pros-
titution has come to be seen as corruption. In early 2012, a coordinated series
of raids on Rio’s largest and most well-known commercial sex venues was car-
ried out, resulting in the closure of several houses which had been functioning
for some thirty years. These raids were the largest anti-prostitution activities
carried out by the carioca police since the expulsion of the remnants of the
Mangue in 1979. They were justified by the State Prosecutor’s Office as a blow
against police corruption.75 With a new wave of urban renewal taking over the
city, it seems that Rio is once again on the cusp of a transformation in how
its public authorities deal with prostitution; everything indicates that another
crackdown, similar in scope and severity to those of 1943, 1959, or 1970–1971,
is on the way. Meanwhile, however, it does not appear that Brazil is any more
likely to resolve its legal ambivalence regarding prostitution.
In light of the continuing ambiguities in prostitution law, a Congressional
Judicial Committee suggested in 2012 that parts of the laws regarding lenocínio
be overturned. In support of their position, they argued that “In fact, prostitu-
tion is not now and never has been a crime in Brazil”:
Punishing the establishment of “houses of prostitution” and “procure-
ment” is nonsensical if the sexual encounters in question are established
by consenting adults. We thus propose to [decriminalize these conducts].
What is important is that we only punish sexual exploitation. It does not
matter where this occurs or who are the intermediaries.76
74 Blanchette and Silva, “Sexo a um real”.
75 Waleska Borges, “Três pessoas são presas na Zona Sul acusadas de incentivar a prosti-
tuição”, O Globo; available at: https://oglobo.globo.com/rio/tres-pessoas-sao-presas-na-
zona-sul-acusadas-de-incentivar-prostituicao-5213176; last accessed 7 July 2017; Ruvolo,
“Rio’s Biggest Prostitution Crackdown”.
76 Senado Federal, Relatório final da comissão de juristas para a elaboração de anteprojeto de
código penal, criada pelo requerimento n° 756, de 2011 (Brasília, 2012).
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Sex Work in Rio de Janeiro 515
While the jurists’ proposal does not completely do away with the crime of
lenocínio (after all, what exactly is “sexual exploitation”?77), it does take a
step in the direction of recognizing that sex work, freely engaged in by adults,
should not be criminalized.
Predictably, the religious right and certain sectors of the feminist left in the
Brazilian congress are against the proposed changes and there seems to be
little chance that they will be encoded as law. As these groups’ political op-
position to prostitution has grown, the Federal Health and Labour Ministry—
traditionally two of sex workers’ stauncher allies in government—have backed
away from supporting prostitutes.
Conclusions
The absence of prostitution regulation in Rio de Janeiro cannot be understood
as the result of state inaction regarding sex work; rather, it should be construed
as a policy of putting the largest amount of control over prostitution in police
hands. By not defining prostitution as illegal while repressing the vaguely de-
fined lenocínio, the Brazilian state has decided to leave everyday decisions re-
garding sex work and its conflicts up to individual precinct captains who apply
their own personal understandings, prejudices, and interests to the situation
in accordance with whatever fashions are current in the surrounding society.
However, while this peculiar Brazilian system gives the police a wide scope of
action when dealing with prostitutes, it also gives sex workers more space to
manoeuvre and negotiate than is perhaps possible in other urban contexts.
Prostitution in Rio de Janeiro can only be understood in light of the tense
negotiations that have marked the control of sexual commerce in the city dur-
ing the last 120 years. Today, however, many sectors of carioca society wish to
once again reform the city as a showcase for Brazil during a period of intense
international retrenchment with regards to prostitution. As a result, city au-
thorities are increasingly under pressure to remove prostitution from public
view, especially in those areas of the city slated for rapid development, in order
to accommodate upcoming international megaevents. Almost overnight, long-
established prostitution venues have been raided, harassed, and shuttered and
the city’s sex workers are having to once again reformulate survival and work
strategies in an increasingly unfavourable legal and economic environment re-
inforced by often hysterical popular media reports that associate prostitution
77 The same Judicial Committee suggests that “sexual exploitation” be redefined as “forcing
someone to work as a prostitute or impeding them from leaving work as a prostitute.”
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516 Blanchette and Schettini
with the trafficking of drugs and people and the sexual exploitation of children.
What the future will bring is uncertain, but one thing is becoming increasingly
clear: It is unlikely that faced with these new/old dilemmas regarding sex work,
Rio de Janeiro will radically break with its traditional history of regulating
prostitution through direct and extra-legal police action.
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Section 4
Asia-Pacific
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chapter 20
Commercial Sex Work in Calcutta: Past and Present
Satarupa Dasgupta
Introduction
It is estimated that India has over 3 million commercial sex workers.1 Approxi-
mately 2.9 million women or 1.1 per cent of the adult women in India are com-
mercial sex workers. The rest of India’s sex worker population is comprised of
male and transgender sex workers. Female, male, and transgender commercial
sex workers in India often ply their trade within the confines of a designated
red-light district, or they are “flying” sex workers without a fixed place of opera-
tion. A small segment also operates as contractual workers in establishments
such as hotels, massage parlours and places providing escort services.
Notwithstanding the large population involved in the profession, commer-
cial sex work in India is illegal and treated as a criminal act. Indian legislation
on sex work criminalizes sex workers and their clients and pimps, as well as
brothel owners, subjecting them to fines and imprisonment for three to five
years. The Immoral Trafficking (Prevention) Act (ita) of India defines prosti-
tution as “sexual exploitation or abuse of persons for commercial purposes or
for consideration of money or in any other kind.”2 The ita also criminalizes
living off of sex workers’ earnings, and as a result, a sex worker’s children and
family members can be imprisoned for subsisting on his or her income.
Sex workers in India constitute a severely deprived segment of the popu-
lation which lacks access to services and support from the health sector.
Ascribing a criminal status to sex work often results in an increase in violence
against Indian sex workers who have little recourse against such acts of ag-
gression.3 The criminalization of sex work also makes it possible for pimps
and police to extort money from sex workers for protection from violence or
1 National aids Control Organization, Ministry of Health and Family Welfare, Government of
India, available at: http://naco.gov.in/; last accessed 10 July 2017.
2 Government of India, “The Immoral Traffic (Prevention) Act 1956”, available at: http://ncpcr
.gov.in/showfile.php?lang=1&level=1&&sublinkid=272&lid=719; last accessed 10 July 2017.
3 Flora Cornish, “Changing the Stigma of Sex Work in India: Material Context and Symbolic
Change”, Journal of Community & Applied Social Psychology, 16 (2006), pp. 462–471.
© Satarupa Dasgupta, 2017 | doi 10.1163/9789004346253_021
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520 Dasgupta
imprisonment.4 A conviction of the criminal or coercive nature of their trade
often precipitates a legal and moral imperative to rescue or rehabilitate the
sex workers. The option to rescue and rehabilitate “criminal” or “immoral” sex
workers often provides law enforcement agencies, pimps, and brothel own-
ers with more opportunities to carry out violence and extortion against them.
Violence against sex workers, as a fallout of criminalization and rescue and
rehabilitation propositions, is commonplace and recurrent in India, while the
prosecution of perpetrators is rare.5
In this chapter I present a historical analysis of the dominant discourses of
the delegitimization of sex work in India, specifically in metropolitan Calcutta,
and the stigmatization of sex workers as “fallen women” in need of rehabilita-
tion, with the overall aim to obtain a better understanding of the structural po-
sition of the workers in contemporary India. I also examine the representation
of sex workers in contemporary vernacular print media in Calcutta in order
to achieve an understanding of public perceptions of their vocation. For this
study I conducted interviews with thirty-seven commercial female sex workers
in Sonagachi—the red-light district of Calcutta and one of the largest red-light
areas in South Asia—so I could assess their opinions concerning the status of
commercial sex work, delegitimization, and stigmatization.
The Discourse of the Delegitimization of Sex Work
The discourse of the delegitimization of sex work in India, as prevalent today,
was not in force in ancient India. A thousand years ago, sex workers were part
of the mainstream populace in India. Their profession was considered to be a
legitimate one and sex workers possessed labour rights. This stands in remark-
able contrast to present-day India where sex work is conflated with traffick-
ing and is a criminal offence subject to prosecution. This section discusses the
transformation of sex work from a legitimate vocation to a criminal activity.
Ancient Indian works of literature such as Mrichhakatika, Kathasaritasag-
ara and Kalavilasa mentioned sex workers as a professional part of main-
stream society worthy of and deserving love and respect.6 There were about
4 Kate Shannon and Josephine Csete, “Violence, Condom Negotiation and hiv/sti Risk among
Sex Workers”, Journal of the American Medical Association, 304 (2010), pp. 573–574.
5 A.K. Jayshree, “Searching for Justice for Body and Self in a Coercive Environment: Sex Work
in Kerala, India”, Reproductive Health Matters, 12 (2004), pp. 58–67.
6 Pradip Bakshi, A Note on the Reconstruction of the Herstory of Sexuality and Sex Work in
Sonagachi, Kolkata, West Bengal, India (Kolkata, 2005), pp. 7–18.
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Commercial Sex Work in Calcutta: Past and Present 521
fifty synonyms for sex workers in Sanskrit and Pali literature composed be-
tween a few centuries b.c. and the twelfth century a.d.7 Some of the names
conveyed reverence, such as brajayitri (the woman who provides happiness),
nagarashovini (the woman who is the grace of the whole town), and janapa-
dakalyani (the woman who takes care of the entire settlement).8 The Sanskrit
texts Arthashastra and Kamasutra, and the Pali texts Majhjhimnikaya and San-
juttanikaya noted the practice of state sector employment and state-funded
education for sex workers in ancient India. Sex workers paid income taxes and
were given pensions on retirement.9
In the nineteenth century, India became a British colony. At the time, sex
workers were still part of mainstream society and maintained the rights of le-
gitimacy conferred upon them by ancient Hindu India. The rights of sex work-
ers were initially recognized by the ruling colonial courts. Up until 1850, the
courts in Calcutta issued summons against clients who didn’t pay sex workers:
“Though reformation in Europe brought in stricter control of brothels, even
their closure, some of the early colonial administrators understood that the life
of a professional courtesan in India was not the same as that of a sex worker
in England; nor were sex workers here looked down upon by all other sections
of society.”10
The Crimean War precipitated significant changes in the fortunes of sex
workers in India. In the aftermath of the Crimean War, between 1853 and 1856
the number of British soldiers suffering from venereal diseases increased sig-
nificantly.11 Subsequently, in 1864 the British Government passed the Conta-
gious Diseases Act, which was enforced in different parts of the empire. The
Contagious Diseases Act xiv of 1868 was implemented in India in 1869.12 The
act brought about the compulsory registration and medical examination of
Indian sex workers, especially those located in regimental towns and whose
clientele included British soldiers. The Contagious Diseases Act marked the
designation of Indian sex workers as the colonial subjects of British rule.13
In cases of non-registration or absenteeism from medical examinations on
the part of a sex worker, a warrant for arrest was issued for her. The family
7 Sukumari Bhattacharya, Pracheen Bharat: Samaj o sahitya (Kolkata, 1988), pp. 30–42.
8 Ibid.
9 Ibid.
10 Bakshi, A Note on the Reconstruction of the Herstory, p. 14.
11 S. Basu, Sambad samayikpatra unish shataker bangali samaj (Calcutta, 2003), pp. 56–72.
12 Ratnabali Chatterjee, “The Indian Prostitute as a Colonial Subject”, Canadian Women
Studies, 19 (1992), pp. 51–60, 51.
13 Svati Shah, “Prostitution, Sex Work and Violence: Discursive and Political Contexts for
Five Texts on Paid Sex”, Gender & History, 16 (2004), pp. 794–812, 797.
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522 Dasgupta
members of the non-compliant sex workers also faced punitive measures and
harassment by British law enforcement agencies. Bakshi notes that “through a
relentless game of chase and run with the colonial police, the Indian sex work-
er, once accepted and revered, then scorned yet tolerated, was finally branded
as a criminal running away from a ‘beneficial’ law.”14
Bhandari notes that the British rulers passed the Act not to prevent vice
amongst its own soldiers, but rather to “denigrate the body of the prostitute as
a receptacle of all that was filthy and impure. Under this Act and the Canton-
ment rules, the British and other European soldiers in India were not only per-
mitted but promoted to hold native young and good-looking girls as prostitutes
for their carnal pleasure. These very ‘white clients’ of the native prostitutes,
who spread venereal diseases not only amongst themselves but upon these un-
fortunate women, would themselves remain untouched and their integrity and
respectability untarnished. It would be the Indian girls and women (mostly of
poor families) who would be first trapped into a life of sin because the society
and colonial government not only disallowed them any opportunity to earn an
independent income but encouraged a system which preyed upon their help-
lessness and lack of better options.”15
Phillipa Levine notes that British soldiers stationed in colonial India had a
limited number of native sex workers to meet their sexual needs. A regiment
of three hundred soldiers stationed at Bengal would have around twelve sex
workers at their service, around 4% of the client population. These sex workers
could offer sexual service to the British soldiers only. They were registered and
kept secluded in smaller dwellings within the cantonment area. Subjected to
weekly physical examinations at cantonment prison hospitals to check for ve-
nereal diseases, these women would be periodically transferred with the regi-
ments to the latter’s destination. The disparity in the number of soldiers and
sex workers meant that the latter had to offer sexual services to a sizeable pop-
ulation of soldiers daily. If weekly physical check-ups showed the presence of
a venereal disease, the woman’s registration was cancelled, she was expelled,
and a “newer and healthier” woman was employed in her place.16
The native sex workers were tainted with the conflicting colours of crimi-
nality and victimhood. Bhandari quotes a British Medical officer posted in Cal-
cutta on sex workers in the city as saying, “Everything about them bears the
14 Bakshi, A Note on the Reconstruction of the Herstory, p. 15.
15 Sudhanshu Bhandari, “Prostitution in Colonial India”, Mainstream, 26 (2010), available at:
https://www.mainstreamweekly.net/article2142.html; last accessed 10 July 2017.
16 Philippa Levine, Prostitution, Race and Politics: Policing Venereal Disease in the British
E mpire (London, 2003), pp. 185–186.
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Commercial Sex Work in Calcutta: Past and Present 523
total absence of religious, moral or social feeling. Here, they swarm not only
the by-lanes and back-slums of Calcutta, but also its principal thorough-fares,
polluting the atmosphere of our neighbourhood and scandalising the morals
of the population.” The European missionary groups that were active in India
in the nineteenth century strongly condemned the swelling ranks of sex work-
ers in regimental towns and supported the Act. However, missionary discours-
es on the Act acquired a distinctive character because they characterized sex
workers not as criminals but as victims of moral depravity and socio-economic
oppression.17 Such an emphasis on the victimhood of sex workers prompted
missionaries to preach for the salvation and rehabilitation of sex workers.18
In colonial India sex work among the colonized population offered the
scope of a discourse for moral hierarchies of race, nation and gender. As Levine
notes, the ample presence of the sex trade among the native populations in
India reinforced the British colonial rulers’ perception of moral superiority
and convinced the latter of the need for setting boundaries of rule.19 Bhandari
cites Levine and concludes “The east’s problem was its failure to move beyond
the primitivism of unchained nature, to contain sex within boundaries that
made it productive and purposeful rather than merely sensual and pleasur-
able. Prostitution’s emphasis on pleasure rather than procreation drove home
this divide between the Christian and the heathen, the former claiming sex as
a procreative and biblically ordained duty, the latter merely wallowing in its
sensuality.”20
There was a significant rise in the number of sex workers in Calcutta in the
nineteenth century. Banerjee attributes it to several factors.21 There was an
increasing migration of single indigenous men to Calcutta in search of jobs.
These men who left their families back in villages and yearned for female
company boosted up sex trade in the city. An exponential number of Hindu
widows formed the ranks of sex workers in Calcutta. Deserted by their fami-
lies and left with no “respectable” means of earning an income, commercial
sex work often offered these women a means of subsistence. Poorer working
class women also used sex work to supplement their meagre earnings through
sex work irrespective of marital status. “In 1853, Calcutta with a population of
about 400,000 people, supported 12,419 prostitutes. Of these more than 10,000
17 Chatterjee, “The Indian Prostitute as a Colonial Subject”, pp. 51–60.
18 Bhattacharya, Pracheen Bharat, pp. 30–42.
19 Levine, Prostitution, Race and Politics, pp. 193–194.
20 Bhandari, “Prostitution in Colonial India”.
21 Sumanta Banerjee, “Marginalization of Women’s Popular Culture in Nineteenth Century
Bengal”, Recasting Women, 1 (1989), pp. 127–177, 143.
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524 Dasgupta
were Hindus, including several daughters of kulin22 Brahmins. More than a de-
cade later, in 1867, although the city’s total population had come down to some
extent, the number of prostitutes rose to more than 30,000. We are told that
it was mostly women of the weaver, barber, washermen, milkmen, fishermen
and other lower castes who resorted to this profession.”23
Banerjee provides a layout of the differentiation of sex workers in Calcutta
into various categories created by the British colonialists. This distinction—
based on the latter’s perception of caste and class hierarchies, and religious dif-
ferences among the sex workers in the city—provides a limited profile of the
sex workers operating in the city. The first two categories consisted of Brahmin
sex workers and other higher caste sex workers. The latter were not Brahmins
but hailed from higher levels of the caste hierarchies. Both these categories of
sex workers had clients who hailed from their own or superior castes. These cli-
ents were mostly well-off and maintained the women financially, consequent-
ly these women could maintain their own independent establishments. The
third were sex workers who could not maintain their own establishments and
used rented properties. They entertained clients of all castes and their clientele
generally had limited financial means. The fourth category was the dancing
women who were of Hindu and Muslim religious affiliation and entertained
clients of any caste, class and religion. The fifth category consisted of Muslim
sex workers. The sixth category consisted of women who were Christian and
of European origin. The last category formed a small portion of sex workers
operating in nineteenth century Calcutta.24
Bhandari provides a breakdown of the sex workers operating in Calcutta in
the middle of the nineteenth century. “After the 1868 Contagious Diseases Act,
under the category of ‘Registered Prostitutes’, there were in 1872, 6,871 such
prostitutes of whom 5,804 were Hindus, 930 Muslims and the remaining small
minority comprised a tremendous heterogeneity belonging to Irish, Polish,
Russian, Hungarian, Italian, French and Spanish women”.25
The sex workers of Calcutta submitted petitions against the Contagious
Diseases Act and held public demonstrations in protest. In 1869, the police
arrested 1,527 sex workers in Calcutta and 499 in the city’s suburbs for flouting
22 Kulin means higher caste in Bengali.
23 Banerjee, “Marginalization of Women’s Popular Culture in Nineteenth Century Bengal”,
p. 143.
24 Sumanta Banerjee, Under the Raj: Prostitution in Colonial Bengal (London, 2000),
pp. 72–103.
25 Bhandari, “Prostitution in Colonial India”.
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Commercial Sex Work in Calcutta: Past and Present 525
the Act and organizing protests.26 In 1869, there were estimated to be 30,000
female sex workers in Calcutta and most of them were not registered in ac-
cordance with the Act. The Act was suspended in 1883 and finally repealed in
1888.27 However, the sex workers of Calcutta remained in a paradoxical situa-
tion: “As colonial rule consolidated itself in our country, our sex workers fearful
of losing their only source of income, by being officially deregistered, clung to
the alien identities of either a criminal or a victim imposed upon them through
the dominant colonial and missionary discourses.”28
The Calcutta Suppression of the Immoral Traffic Act was passed in 1923 with
the support of the League of Nations Committee on Trafficking in Women and
Children. The Act was intended to tackle the issue of trafficking and the sale
and purchase of women shipped from Europe to the eastern colonies. The Act
criminalized prostitution and conflated trafficking with sex work. As Bakshi
has observed, the chief concern of the ruling elites in India was to prevent
women from their own racial groups from being channelled into sex work.
Incidences of raids on brothels with the aim of “rescuing” sex workers who
were not deemed to be “common prostitutes” became more frequent after the
passage of this Act.29
In August of 1947, India became independent from British rule. In indepen-
dent, postcolonial India, the Immoral Trafficking Prevention Act was passed
in 1956, and it reiterated the discourses of the Act of 1923 and criminalized sex
work and connected the latter with trafficking. The colonial relationships be-
tween race, sexuality, and social control in the European colonies in the nine-
teenth century appeared to have an impact on concerns about sex work and
its regulation. Walkowitz has argued that concerns about “white slavery” in the
nineteenth century precipitated a moral panic about the potential degrada-
tion of female sexuality through sex work.30 This was defined “in relation to
fears of young white women being abducted into prostitution.”31
Theoretical and dialectic tensions in the debates on the status of sex work
and sex workers in the twenty-first century appear to have antecedents in such
“early moral panics, fears of ‘white slavery’ and in the nineteenth-century ra-
cialization of sexuality within the context of the imperial project itself, which
26 Bakshi, A Note on the Reconstruction of the Herstory, pp. 7–18.
27 Basu, Sambad samayikpatra, pp. 56–72.
28 Bakshi, A Note on the Reconstruction of the Herstory, p. 16.
29 Ibid., pp. 7–18.
30 Judith Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late-Victorian
London (London, 1992), pp. 202–206.
31 Svati Shah, “Prostitution, Sex Work and Violence”, pp. 795.
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526 Dasgupta
came to rely on sexuality as an important frame for the articulation of colonial
power.”32 These tensions may have resonances in the history of postcolonial
states’ regulation of women engaged in sex work. An understanding of colo-
nial history and its background can be utilized to analyse sex workers’ status,
regulations on the sex trade, and the hierarchical process of marginalization
among commercial female sex workers in India.
In present-day India, sex work is illegal and a criminal activity. The rescue
and rehabilitation of sex workers is a matter of national policy. Indian legisla-
tion frames sex work as a direct consequence of trafficking, deception, and
coercion, and it regards sex workers as being in a state of sexual servitude.
I have examined historical data about sex workers around Calcutta to obtain
an understanding of the notions of coercion and deception in their choice of
profession. Amritabazar Patrika, a national Indian English daily no longer in
circulation, published a survey of 200 sex workers in Calcutta documenting the
reasons behind their choice of profession on 20 February 1868.33
The survey showed that 64.3 per cent of the women voluntarily opted for the
profession. While 26.2 per cent of the surveyed women were daughters of sex
workers and their choice of profession was passed down, 9.5 per cent of them
were deceived or sold into sex work against their will. Of the 64.3 per cent who
voluntarily opted for sex work, 78 per cent were widows. Upon the deaths of
their spouses they had no means of economic support or sexual fulfilment, as
remarriage for women was a taboo in Indian society in the past. These women
noted economic exigencies and sexual deprivation to be a motivating factor
behind taking part in sex work. The survey was one of a kind and cannot be
said to be representative of the actions and aspirations of all the sex workers
of nineteenth century Calcutta. However, it provides a snapshot of the factors
that motivated women to opt for sex work during that period.
I also looked into the representation of sex workers in contemporary ver-
nacular print media in Calcutta in order to obtain an understanding of pub-
lic perceptions of their vocation. I examined articles, editorials, and letters to
the editor about the red-light district of Calcutta and its residents in Bengali
newspapers; the period I examined was from 1997 to 2009. I found a total of
twenty-eight articles and editorials and forty-seven letters to the editor dealing
with the issue.
Among the twenty-eight articles and editorials, seventeen highlighted the
drawbacks of commercial sex work and eleven emphasized the need to eradi-
cate sex work altogether. Sex work was noted in thirteen articles/editorials to be
32 Ibid., pp. 796.
33 Amritabazar Patrika, “Survey on Sex Workers” (20 February 1868).
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Commercial Sex Work in Calcutta: Past and Present 527
a violation of human rights and in eight articles/editorials it was presented as
a perpetuation of slavery-like practices. Eleven articles and editorials stressed
the importance of improving the lot of sex workers as they were claimed to be
a marginalized, oppressed, and impoverished community. Five of the articles
and editorials stated that there is a need to legalize sex work to ameliorate the
condition of sex workers in India and stem the spread of venereal infections.
Among these articles was one penned by the famous Bengali author and
feminist critic Bani Basu. She wrote an op-ed piece on the sex trade in the larg-
est circulating Bengali daily, Anandabazar Patrika, on 1 April 2001. She argued
that sex work violates human dignity, and she made the claim that sex workers
urgently need to be rehabilitated and trained for alternative professions. Basu
also questioned the demands of sex workers for the legalization of sex work,
opining that such insistence on the part of sex workers stemmed from their
direct brainwashing by the agents of patriarchy. She equated the legalization of
sex work with the legitimization of human sexual servitude and a direct viola-
tion of human rights. She referred to sex workers in the article as jounodashi
(sex slaves). She expressed concern that condoning sex work could result in
the prevalence of the sex trade among the mainstream middle-class populace.
The letters to the editor were published as responses to news articles on the
activities of sex workers in Sonagachi who are unionized and striving for their
profession to be granted legal status. Among a total of forty-seven letters to the
editor, thirty-eight were written by the general public and nine by sex work-
ers from Sonagachi as responses to previous letters published on the subject.
Twenty-nine of the letters had a negative view of sex work and sex workers. In
four of the letters sex work was considered to be a direct outcome of traffick-
ing and coercion. Eleven letter-writers considered sex workers to be in a state
of servitude and in grave need of rescue and rehabilitation. Five of the letters
identified sex workers as vectors of hiv/aids and hosts of other infectious
diseases. Seven letter-writers argued that sex work is a sin and its legalization
would signify the state sanctioning of moral transgression. Eight letter-writers
also noted that if sex work was legalized, common middle-class housewives
and girls would be encouraged to start offering sex for money. This would re-
sult, according to the letter-writers, in an unravelling of the traditional family
structure of Indian society.
The articles, editorials and letters to the editors published in Bengali news-
papers present a negative perception of sex work in general among the public.
Sex work was depicted as an immoral trade that threatens the family values of
middle class Indians. The legalization of sex work was not supported in most
of the letters, as it was claimed that such legitimization would entail the sanc-
tioning of a criminal offence and had the potential to lure women from the
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528 Dasgupta
domestic sphere into the realm of moral transgression. This historical analysis
of the process of the delegitimization of sex work in India, and cursory look
at the Bengali print media publications, offer a means of assessing the issues
underlying the structural inequalities suffered by groups such as commercial
female sex workers. Such an analysis is relevant for understanding the histori-
cal marginalization of, and attribution of “victimhood” status to, sex workers in
an erstwhile colonized nation like India.
It seems that the articulation of sex work frequently invokes a connection
between sex work and trafficking, the proposed delegitimization of sex work,
and rescue and rehabilitation propositions for sex workers, both in India and
globally. The distinction between sex work and trafficking is not a well-defined
one, and the conflation of trafficking and sex work can problematize health
and social activism among sex workers, and jeopardize intervention projects.
The equation of trafficking with sex work has been promoted vigorously by
anti-trafficking organizations active in the us and other areas of the world.
The common usage of the term “prostitution” for sex work is in itself contro-
versial, as people associated with the profession tend to refer to themselves as
sex workers rather than prostitutes. The latter term is widely considered to be
stigma-inducing and derogatory: “The core debate is that for many stakehold-
ers, the category of sex workers includes consenting adults who sell sex of their
own volition, who are not trafficking victims, and who have called for recogni-
tion of their rights as workers.”34
However, the exercise of volition on behalf of sex workers in carrying out
their profession is not widely acknowledged in India or globally, and the artic-
ulation of sex workers as passive victims of trafficking, abuse, and slavery-like
practices is very common. In India, anti-trafficking measures often evolve into
combating sex work through rescue and rehabilitation propositions, but such
rescue and rehabilitation projects for sex workers can be morally problematic.
As Cohen noted in a report published by the Guttmacher Institute, a policy re-
search organization working on human sexual and reproductive health,35 the
moral imperative to rescue women from brothels is compelling when young
girls are involved or there is clear evidence of duress, but “rescuing” adult wom-
en from brothels against their will can mean an end to their health care and
economic survival. In countries and situations in which basic survival is a daily
struggle, the distinction between free agency and oppression may be more a
grey area than a bright line.
34 Nicole Frank Masenior and Chris Beyrer, “The us Anti-Prostitution Pledge: First Amend-
ment Challenges and Public Health Priorities”, plos Medicine, 4 (2007), pp. 1158–1161.
35 Susan Cohen, “Ominous Convergence: Sex Trafficking, Prostitution and International
Family Planning”, The Guttmacher Report on Public Policy, 8 (2005), pp. 12–14.
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Commercial Sex Work in Calcutta: Past and Present 529
In this regard I sought the opinions of sex workers themselves concerning
the nature of the trade. I conducted interviews with thirty-seven commer-
cial female sex workers in Sonagachi. With a population of more than 50,000
commercial sex workers, Sonagachi is one of the largest red-light districts in
the region. The sex workers of Sonagachi are unionized and carry out peer
outreach-based campaigns to increase condom usage compliance and reduce
rates of hiv and venereal diseases among their colleagues. The sex workers’
union is called the Durbar Mahila Samanway Committee (dmsc) and it has of-
fices in the heart of Sonagachi itself.
I conducted structured and semi-structured interviews with my subjects at
the dmsc offices and at their places of work. My data collection was carried
out between 6 December 2010 and 12 January 2011. My project sources included
research papers, internal project reports, unpublished manuscripts provided
by dmsc members, and best practice synopses that have been published by
dmsc. In Sonagachi, there are concentrated pockets of sex work zones amid
regular neighbourhoods. At the entrance of each neighbourhood, the sex
workers, who wear colourful garb and make-up, solicit for clients. This practice
is colloquially referred to as “standing at the gates” and signifies the presence
of sex work sites within the neighbourhood.
It needs to be noted that all of the interviewees were active members of the
dmsc and were also peer outreach workers in the hiv/sti intervention proj-
ect conducted by the union. Most of the interviewees were heavily involved
in the daily operations of the dmsc and various other projects. The subjects
I interviewed cannot be said to be representative of all the sex workers plying
their trade within the borders of the red-light district of Calcutta. However,
their voices offer glimpses of the opinions of sex workers which traditionally
go unheard and unrecognized in the public sphere.
Prior permission was obtained from the dmsc central governing committee
before the commencement of my research and interviews. This permission was
obtained by sending an application letter drafted in Bengali and addressed to
the Central Management Committee of the dmsc which is headed by Bharati
Dey, its president. Institutional Review Board (irb) research approval was also
received (Protocol # 13456). The narratives of the sex workers as gathered from
the interviews will be discussed in the following sections.
Disarticulating Trafficking and Sex Work and Reasons
for Entering Sex Work in Sonagachi
All of the thirteen interviewees in Sonagachi emphasized the distinction be-
tween trafficking and sex work. Eight of the interviewees noted that there is
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530 Dasgupta
a conflation of sex work and trafficking in general discourses about sex work.
Three of the interviewees also pointed out that sex work is perceived as being
the same as trafficking and hence considered a punishable criminal offence by
the media and the intelligentsia in India. Sapna excitedly noted, “We are consid-
ered to be sex slaves and sold or trafficked into this profession by the media, by
all the important people and by the entire society. Why doesn’t anybody ask us?”
When questioned whether women are coerced or trafficked into the pro-
fession, thirty-six of the thirty-seven interviewees noted that they entered the
profession of their own accord and had not been trafficked or sold or coerced
into sex work. One of the interviewees, however, stated that she was introduced
to sex work against her will by a close family member. She noted that after ini-
tial abuse she managed to break ties with an exploitative brothel owner and
worked independently by renting rooms in the red-light area. She has contin-
ued in the profession since, as she said, it provides her with a steady source of
income. She added that her forced introduction into the profession had oc-
curred almost forty years ago, and the current mechanism of self-regulatory
boards that the dmsc has installed prevents cases like hers today.
The reason that the Sonagachi women engage in sex work appeared to be
primarily economic. Nineteen of the interviewees, 54.2 per cent of the sample
size, mentioned financial exigencies as a reason for entering the profession.
Twelve of the interviewees noted that they could afford a comfortable stan-
dard of living through sex work. Nine of the interviewees observed that they
had been subjected to violence by a spouse or family member prior to entering
sex work. Sapna said, “My ex-husband beat me up to the point of breaking my
limbs. I had no support. The red-light area was my refuge for it gave me the
income to survive and escape my partner.”
Thirteen of the interviewees reported sexual assaults in prior professions,
which included domestic help, construction work, brick kiln labour, and sec-
retarial jobs. Krishna, who had previously worked at a secretarial job, recalled
how she had been sexually harassed by her employer. She noted, “I was com-
pelled to offer sexual favours to my boss. Yet my salary was a pittance. I was
finding it really hard to make ends meet. Well, then I decided I might as well
get paid for sex.”
Interviewees also noted the existence of mechanisms of sexual harassment
in the construction and menial labour industries in India. “To get a job and
maintain it in bricklaying, masonry, and construction, you have to sleep with
the rajmistri,36 his assistant, and respective subordinates. You need to keep
them happy and also do back-breaking physical work to earn your meagre
36 Rajmistri means “head mason” in Bengali.
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Commercial Sex Work in Calcutta: Past and Present 531
salary”, noted Purnima. Her views echoed those of Krishna: “You see, after be-
ing exploited by a string of supervisors one generally decides to get paid for
sex.” Sapna recounts being raped by her employer while working as a domestic
helper. “No more free and forced sex”, she quipped.
A survey was conducted by Sanlap, a nongovernmental organization, with
580 sex workers from Sonagachi about the reasons why sex workers join the
profession. Table 20.1 shows the results of the survey.
In addition to the reasons mentioned by the interviewees, this survey also
showed that harassment by in-law families concerning dowry issues and being
cheated by lovers were motivating factors for joining the profession. Joining sex
work as a family profession and following in the footsteps of a mother was an
additional reason for entering the trade. A total of 1.2 per cent of the interview-
ees were noted to be sold into sex work and 1.5 per cent appeared to have been
ensnared by false promises. The total percentage of women supposedly co-
erced or misled into this profession did not appear to be more than 2.7 per cent
according to the survey. The results of the survey are consistent with the testi-
monies of my interviewees, all but one of whom noted her entry into the pro-
fession was voluntary. Poverty and an urgent need to provide for their families
appear to be the most important motivating factors for joining the profession.
All of the thirty-seven interviewees emphasized the harmful effects of traf-
ficking and said that there is a pressing need to curb trafficking. Seventeen of
Table 20.1 Reasons for entering sex work, Sonagachi 2010–2011
Reasons for entering sex work n(total: 580) %
Financial (to sustain self and family members) 136 23.4
For a better living 134 23.1
Harassment due to non-payment of dowry 102 17.6
Domestic violence by spouse, in-laws, 91 15.7
intimate partners, and extended family
Sexually assaulted in previous professions 47 8.1
Jilted by lover 34 5.9
Sex work is a family profession 15 2.6
Lured by the promise of a job 9 1.5
Sold into sex work 7 1.2
Brought by a spouse or a family member into the 5 0.9
profession
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532 Dasgupta
the interviewees stated that women are often trafficked into sex work. The po-
rous border between Bangladesh and India was noted as a reason for the easy
trafficking of women for the sex trade on the Indian side. The interviewees
also noted that women from Nepal are trafficked into India to work in red-light
areas in and around eastern India. Sadhana noted:
I will not say that sex workers are not trafficked, as sometimes they are.
But many times they are not trafficked against their will. It often hap-
pens that they will pay an agent for trafficking them across the border
for work. Many girls come in from across the [Indian] border to work in
Sonagachi. Why do you think they come? It is because they have heard
of this place. They know they can earn some money from sex work and
feed their family. What is a girl who is extremely poor and has no educa-
tion and has five or ten mouths to feed [to] work in? She knows sex work
can provide her [with] a steady source of income. She needs sex work to
survive, to provide for herself and for her family. When it comes to hunger
there is no good profession or bad profession.
According to the interviewees, a mechanism for paying traffickers and sneak-
ing across the Indian border appears to be in place in many places in Bangla-
desh and Nepal. However, these women aid in their own trafficking and come
voluntarily, and their motivation is the prospect of earning money through sex
work in India and providing for their families in neighbouring countries. The
Indian government’s attempt to curb trafficking across its borders and stem
the flow of sex work seekers has been futile so far, according to Rama:
The government has tried to seal the borders before and it is still trying
to do so now. What is the result of that? Has it succeeded in reducing
trafficking? No, it has not. Thousands have crossed the border seeking to
work in Sonagachi in spite of government efforts. Trafficking will not stop
and the entry of women into this profession will not stop. Do you know
why? It is because there is a huge demand for this profession. And then
there is hunger. Who will feed them and their children? The government
does not provide food, it only provides laws and bans.
The sex workers’ entry into this profession is thus noted to be voluntary and
sometimes a result of their own collusion with traffickers. This information is
in direct disagreement with current policy research documents on sex work
and hiv/aids intervention, most of which characterize sex workers as victims
of trafficking, coercion, and sexual servitude.
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Commercial Sex Work in Calcutta: Past and Present 533
The single interviewee who said she was forced into this profession noted
that she did not leave sex work even when she got a chance, as it gave her a
steady and secure source of income. Seven of the interviewees stated that sex
work was not their primary source of income and they had additional means of
making money such as small businesses. Eight of the interviewees did not live
within the perimeters of the red-light district and commuted daily or weekly to
Sonagachi. The presupposition of coercion in sex work and sexual servitude in
the profession as assumed by global and Indian policy-makers and legislation
appears to be in direct contradiction to the testimonies of the women I inter-
viewed in Sonagachi. The sex workers entered the profession of their own voli-
tion, as emphasized by Bisakha:
I am here working in this profession out of my own free will. Nobody
has forced me into this profession. If I go to work as a domestic help[er]
in somebody’s house I am going there voluntarily, right? Similarly when
I come here to work as a sex worker I come voluntarily. I am not com-
pelled by anyone. Why do people think that sex workers are sex slaves? I
think it is because they make [up] their own ideas, they do not care to ask
the opinion of sex workers.
The Rescue and Rehabilitation of Sex Workers
My interviews with the sex workers of Sonagachi showed that propositions of
rescue and rehabilitation were not considered to be feasible options. I found
that the interviewees considered the rehabilitation approach to be impracti-
cable for several reasons. One of the points raised against the rescue and re-
habilitation option was that such a proposition violated the rights of the sex
workers as a legitimate labour group.
Fourteen of the interviewees subscribed to the notion that rescue and reha-
bilitation entailed the violation of the rights and dignity of sex workers. The
interviewees noted that rehabilitation is applicable for the poor and destitute,
the homeless and the dispossessed, but sex workers were noted to belong to
none of these categories. The interviewees also noted that individuals in dan-
gerous or coercive situations have to be rescued. The sex workers were pursu-
ing their vocation voluntarily, and were not in distressed circumstances. Hence
the proposition of rescuing the sex workers was questionable. Santana noted:
Well, if they have to rehabilitate, why don’t they rehabilitate the home-
less people, the people displaced by floods, the street dwellers who are
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534 Dasgupta
starving? We are not starving, we have a job. Why don’t they rehabilitate
the poor beggars? Does the government classify us as beggars? We are not
beggars. We have a job. We can look after ourselves and our families. We
don’t need rehabilitation.
Most of the interviewees assumed that the rescue and rehabilitation proposi-
tion for sex workers had moralistic undertones. Such schemes framed by mor-
alistic motives were noted to be in violation of the dignity of sex workers and
their profession.
Another reason for repudiating the rescue/rehabilitation proposition was
economic. It was noted by sixteen interviewees that rehabilitation was not
feasible for financial reasons, as the income generated by sex work was often
more than they could make from proposed alternate professions. The women
noted that sex workers were mostly illiterate and lacked educational skills that
would enable them to be placed in anything other than minimum-wage jobs.
The alternative professions proposed to sex workers by government agencies
were generally domestic help jobs and menial labour.
Certain ngos have also proposed providing sex workers with training in
weaving, knitting, and bead-working as alternative vocations. However, as the
interviewees pointed out, those vocations generate considerably less remuner-
ation than sex work and payments are also often irregular. The interviewees
noted the scope of sexual abuse in the vocations of domestic help and con-
struction labour. Bishakha remarked:
I earn 20,000 rupees a month by sex work. I need that money to live well.
If I leave my profession will the government give me 20,000 rupees a
month? Well they will tell me to become a domestic help[er] or a nan-
ny or a bead-worker. How much will I earn by that? 3,000 rupees, 4,000
rupees? That is not enough to cover my expenses. Tell me, why should
I leave this profession and become a domestic help[er]?
The hazards of the alternative professions were noted by Purnima:
If you work in construction you cannot get a day’s job without sleeping
with the rajmistri. Have you seen those women standing for menial la-
bour jobs on the streets of Razabajar? They will not get a paisa37 without
pleasing the rajmistri and his subordinates. You give your sex and then
37 Paisa is a unit of Indian currency worth approximately 1/47th of a cent.
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Commercial Sex Work in Calcutta: Past and Present 535
they may not give you a job. They may not pay you for it. The rehabilitation
people want us to take those jobs? Thank you very much but I like to be
paid for sex. And I like a steady income. The rehabilitation people tell me
the job I do is not moral. How is it moral to be raped by your employer or
a whole gang of labourers? How is it immoral to be paid for sex?
The views of Bishakha and Purnima were echoed by other interviewees. Alter-
native vocations like handicrafts and domestic labour, which are considered
to be “honourable” rehabilitation options for sex workers by aid agencies, the
government, and ngos, are not considered to be financially viable. The inter-
viewees were also extremely wary about the chances of sexual violation in the
suggested alternative professions and hence questioned the moral ground of
such a rehabilitation proposition.
Another reason for dismissing the rehabilitation proposition was the pros-
pect of sexual violation and exploitation in the process of rehabilitation itself.
Eleven of the sex workers noted that such rehabilitation projects had failed
previously because rehabilitated sex workers were often sexually harassed by
the officials engaged in the process.
Rehabilitated sex workers who were situated in mainstream residential ar-
eas were often ostracized by their neighbours once their erstwhile professions
became known. They were also forced by the male members of their neigh-
bourhood to engage in sexual relations. Lacking the protection of the red-light
district and the sex workers’ union, they found themselves to be victims of
sexual abuse and constant harassment. Krishna noted:
The government officials or the ngos who come to rehabilitate us, we are
most wary of them. You know why? It is those officials or the ngo work-
ers who will try to take advantage of us. They will say, we will rehabilitate
you, we are your saviours. So you will have to give us sex whenever you
want. You are sex workers after all. And we have done you an immense
favour. You now return the favour. We want sex anytime. No, this is not
rehabilitation. It is called abuse. And we refuse to be abused. You want
sex? Okay, you pay for it. We do not need to be saved. We work hard day
and night, we earn money. We don’t need any favours. We don’t need any
saviours. You see, this is why we need labour rights, to prevent this kind
of abuse.
I could not obtain any data on sex workers who were rehabilitated by the gov-
ernment or ngo initiatives to judge the success or the lack of it as regards
such rehabilitation projects. Based on the interviewees’ statements it appeared
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536 Dasgupta
that such rescue and rehabilitation endeavours were often motivated by ulte-
rior factors and were futile in the end. The interviewees may be motivated by
scepticism about external interventions to view such rescue and rehabilita-
tion endeavours with suspicion. Logistical realities such as stigmatization, os-
tracization, and sexual harassment of rehabilitated sex workers might render
such rehabilitation efforts futile. Furthermore, the sexual exploitation of sex
workers by rehabilitation workers might be a reality in red-light areas that un-
ravels the impact of such external interventions.
Conclusion
A historical analysis of the evolution of sex work in India shows a remarkable
shift in the status of the trade, from a mainstream and legitimate one recog-
nized as a labour right, to an illegal and criminal vocation subject to prosecu-
tion. The colonization of India and the colonial relationships between race,
sexuality, and social control aggravated the process of the delegitimization
of sex work and tightened its regulation in urban centres, including Calcutta.
A look at the history of sex work in Calcutta and the contemporary representa-
tion of sex work in the vernacular media, offers an opportunity for assessing
the issues of structural inequalities suffered by groups like commercial female
sex workers. In India and around the world, the underlying equation of traf-
ficking and sex work is persistent and is utilized to delegitimize the latter pro-
fession. The delegitimization and criminalization of sex work often threatens
the health and safety of sex workers as they are then forced to ply their trade
secretly and become victims of sexual assault and violence. Compliance with
safe sex practices declines significantly and there is a consequent increase in
the spread of hiv and venereal diseases in these cases. The rescue and rehabili-
tation of sex workers generally fails because alternative vocations to sex work
are often not viable options.
My interviews with the commercial female sex workers in the red-light dis-
trict of Calcutta in Sonagachi present a striking picture. A state of “servitude”,
of women compelled into their professions and incarcerated in the red-light
zone as it has been portrayed by legislators, policy makers, and feminist schol-
ars, was not discernible. Almost all of the sex workers I interviewed voluntari-
ly entered the profession; rather, economic exigencies were noted to be the
primary reason for entering sex work. Trafficking, however, was noted to be a
present and persistent problem by the interviewees. But they also noted it to
be a process aided by desperately poor individuals striving to get into a voca-
tion like sex work to support their family members.
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Commercial Sex Work in Calcutta: Past and Present 537
While I do not offer the conclusion that sex workers are not trafficked or co-
erced into their profession, my work shows that not all sex workers are victims
of trafficking and sexual servitude. In such a case, the application of legislation
that uniformly treats them as victims of trafficking and sexual slavery might
well be impractical. The interviews I carried out with the Sonagachi women
indicated that they chose this profession due to financial duress. Yet the inter-
viewees asked that their choice of livelihood be respected and not subjected to
moralistic evaluations. They demand legalization and the decriminalization of
their vocation as well as the granting of labour rights guided by international
labour regulations.
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chapter 21
Prostitution in Colonial Hanoi (1885–1954)
Isabelle Tracol-Huynh
Introduction
The celebration of the millennial anniversary of Hanoi in 2010 reminds us that
this city has a very long history.1 In 1010, the emperor Lý Thái Tổ moved his
capital to the Đại La Citadel2 and Hanoi was officially born, albeit with the
name Thăng Long.3 It remain the capital until 1802, when the Nguyễn dynasty
moved it to Hué. Even though Hanoi was an important city and prostitution
was not a colonial invention in Vietnam, studying the precolonial period is
difficult because sources are quite scarce. In addition, the available sources
do not explicitly mention prostitutes but generally discuss songstresses and
courtesans. One of the most famous Vietnamese novels, Kim Vân Kiều, was
written at the turn of the nineteenth century, well before the beginning of
French colonization, and its heroine is a courtesan.4 The words “prostitution”,
“prostitute”, and “brothel” do not occur in this long poem; rather, Kiều was a
ca nhi, a courtesan, trapped in a lầu xanh, a green house.5 Yet, the sexual and
venal dimension was quite present in her life: “Birds flocked the branch, wind
stirred the leaves—she’d speed / some beau at dawn, wait for some spark at
dusk / […] poor body bees and butterflies gorged on.”6 Courtesans were the
* I owe a special word of thanks to Mark David Wyers for his help with the complexities of
English grammar.
1 William S. Logan, Hanoi: Biography of a City (Seattle, 2000); Philippe Papin, Histoire de Hanoi
(Paris, 2001).
2 The history of Hanoi is in fact older: the site was mentioned in the sixth century and citadels
were built there in the seventh and eight centuries. The importance of the city grew during
the ninth century and it became the capital of the Chinese protectorate from 866 until 939.
Its name was Đại La.
3 The city was first called Thăng Long, then Đông Đô, Đông Quan, Đông Kinh, and Thăng Long
again. The city was renamed Hanoi (Hà Nội) in 1831. This will be the name used here since
this study focuses on the French colonial period (1885–1954).
4 The author of the text, Nguyễn Du, died in 1820.
5 Nguyễn Du, The Tale of Kiều, trans. Huynh Sanh Thông (New Haven, 1983), line 62 p. 4 and
line 809 p. 70.
6 Ibid., lines 1231–1232 and 1238, p. 65. The expression “Bees and butterflies” refers to clients.
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Prostitution in Colonial Hanoi (1885–1954) 539
elite of prostitutes and the prostitutes of the elite, but they were still viewed
as prostitutes. They were morally condemned and relegated to life outside the
city. In Hanoi, songstresses lived in Thái Hà district, which is on the southern
outskirts of the city.7
The same ambiguous distinction between courtesans, songstresses, and
prostitutes can be found in Vietnamese imperial law. Article 340 of Gia Long’s
Code, which was enacted in 1812, referred to both prostitutes and s ongstresses.8
It did not, however, make a clear distinction between those professions.
The attitude of the authorities towards prostitution was ambiguous as well.
Article 340, and in particular the notes and comments of the legislator, men-
tioned prostitution as a social category, and yet the same article forbade civil
and military servants from interacting with prostitutes and songstresses. Fur-
ther complicating the issue was article 332, which prohibited prostitution as
well as other illicit sexual relations, such as extra-marital sex and homosexual
relations.9 It should be noted that since China was the suzerain of Vietnam un-
til 1885, Vietnamese law reproduced a Chinese law; Gia Long’s Code was based
on Qing’s Code, which tried to moralize Chinese society by condemning all
illicit sexual relations, and after 1723, “the legal space for tolerated sex work
entirely disappeared.”10 The same process occurred in Vietnam after 1812, but
there was a discrepancy between the law, its application, and reality. In his
comment on the Vietnamese law, Philastre stated that “legislators condemned
the principle but did not try to punish the fact itself, because they may have
considered that to be impossible.”11
The colonial period was a turning point in the history of prostitution in
Vietnam because it was no longer forbidden but authorized and regulated.
In colonial Hanoi (1885–1954), the regulation of prostitution was a concern
starting from the establishment of the Hanoi municipality until the end of
French rule.12 Physicians, police, and administrators tried to control the world
of prostitution because Hanoi had a significant European population as well
7 Charles-Édouard Hocquard and Philippe Papin (eds), Une Campagne au Tonkin (Paris,
1999), pp. 302–303.
8 Paul-Louis-Félix Philastre, Le Code annamite (Paris, 1909), pp. 546–548.
9 Ibid., pp. 524–525.
10 Matthew H. Sommer, Sex, Law and Society in Late Imperial China (Stanford, 2000), p. 210.
11 Philastre, Le Code annamite, p. 548. The same comment can be found in P.J. Silvestre,
Considérations sur l’étude du droit annamite (Saigon, 1922 [first ed. 1901]), p. 145.
12 Hanoi citadel was attacked by the French first in 1873, which led to the creation of the
French concession in 1875, then again in 1882. In 1885, the French protectorate over
Tonkin, and therefore over Hanoi, was officially recognized by China, Vietnam’s centuries
old suzerain.
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540 Tracol-Huynh
as troops, and the authorities were concerned about protecting them from
venereal diseases. The regulation of prostitution was also implemented to pro-
tect morality and, as the city was the capital of Tonkin (northern Vietnam) and
of the whole of French Indochina, authorities believed that Hanoi should be
a “perfect” colonial city and an example of French colonial success. Colonial
authorities used several means such as architecture, hygiene, science, and edu-
cation to control the population by setting up a process of dressage (breaking
in) of souls and bodies, which included the regulation of prostitution.13
The mission of the municipality was difficult because Hanoi had a unique
administrative status. Although it was the capital of the French protectorate,
it was not part of the protectorate itself because the city had been granted
to France by the Vietnamese emperor in 1888. Hanoi was therefore a French
enclave where French law applied, and it was surrounded by the Tonkin pro-
tectorate where Vietnamese law still held sway. As it has been noted, “Hanoi’s
borders are not just municipal; they are national frontiers.”14 This situation had
consequences for the administration of prostitution. Regulation in Hanoi did
not apply outside the city limits and the vice squad police had no authority
over suburban areas and the many prostitutes who lived and worked there. It
was noted that “a dozen clandestine prostitutes and prostitutes running from
the vice squad police are working in a furnished room located right outside
the city limit. They scoff at the police since they are protected by the city post
which is as powerful as the China border post.”15 This complex situation lasted
until 1943, when the Special Division of Hanoi was created with the aim of con-
trolling prostitution, both inside and outside municipal limits. However, even
after 1943, the problem still remained since this inclusion only drove houses of
prostitution further away.
The transformation of prostitution during French colonization explains
how, for some authors, prostitution was a colonial invention. One of Dr Cop-
pin’s former students (Dr Coppin was the director of the municipal clinic of
Hanoi where prostitutes were examined) stated that venereal diseases and
prostitution had been brought to Vietnam by the French, and he argued that
“before the conquest, they did not exist.”16 Dr Dang Van Chin, the director of
13 Emmanuelle Saada, Les Enfants de la colonie: Les métis de l’Empire français entre sujétion
et citoyenneté (Paris, 2007), p. 79.
14 Bernard Joyeux and Henri Virgitti, “Le Péril vénérien dans la zone suburbaine de Hanoi”,
Bulletin de la Société Médico-Chirurgicale de l’Indochine [hereafter bsmci] (1937), pp. 73–
108, 73. See also Philippe Papin, Histoire de Hanoi (Paris, 2001), pp. 43–59.
15 Joyeux and Virgitti, “Le Péril vénérien dans la zone suburbaine”, pp. 75–76.
16 Henri Coppin, “La Prostitution, la police des mœurs et le dispensaire municipal à Hanoi”,
bsmci (1925), pp. 243–271, 247.
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Prostitution in Colonial Hanoi (1885–1954) 541
the municipal clinic of Saigon in the 1940s and ‘50s, corroborated this idea
when he wrote that prostitution had existed in Vietnam for just a century,
referring to the beginning of French colonization.17 The same stance can be
seen in some contemporary researchers’ work. According to Ngô Vĩnh Long,
“prostitution in Vietnam was a nineteenth century phenomenon born out of
the impacts of colonialism, imperialism, and war.”18 Although prostitution
did exist before French colonization, it is true that because of all the changes
that occurred, colonial prostitution radically differed from the precolonial
one.19 In the 1880s in Hanoi, the setting up of the French municipality and
the regulation of prostitution marked the beginning of a new era for sold sex,
which drew to a close in 1954. After this date, prostitution was strictly forbid-
den by the Communist Party in North Vietnam, and prostitutes were sent to
re-education camps. Nowadays, prostitution remains illegal in Vietnam, but
it exists nonetheless. Unfortunately, there is no literature on prostitution in
contemporary Hanoi, and the few studies that exist focus mostly on Ho Chi
Minh City and more precisely on post-Đổi Mới Ho Chi Minh.20 This period is
seen as a major turning point in Vietnamese history, especially for gender stud-
ies, because there were numerous changes which impacted women’s place in
society. In these studies, the private, political, and economic spheres are linked
together to explore the new governance of the Vietnamese state in the global
economy:21 “The role of the state and the politics of đổi mới or reform are thus
gendered projects and the đổi mới state uses constructions of gender as a form
of state power.”22
17 The colonization of the southern part of Vietnam, Cochinchina, started in the 1850s, thir-
ty years before the conquest of Tonkin and Annam, the northern and central regions of
Vietnam.
18 Ngô Vĩnh Long, “Social and Legal Definitions of Prostitution”, in Nanette J. Davis (ed.),
Prostitution: an International Handbook on Trends, Problems, and Policies (Westport, 1993),
pp. 327–350, 327.
19 During the colonial period, prostitution was authorized and expanded in both quality
and quantity; there were increasing numbers of prostitutes and new forms of sold sex
appeared, such as taxi-girls and entraîneuses.
20 Đổi Mới is the name given to the economic reforms initiated in Vietnam in 1986 by the
Communist Party to create a socialist market economy. Philippe Le Failler, “Le renouveau
des lentilles d’eau: de la prostitution à Hanoi à la toute fin du XXe siècle”, Moussons 29,
(2017), pp. 127–142.
21 The title of Nguyễn-Võ Thu Hương’s Ph.D. thesis illustrates this focus: “Governing the So-
cial: Prostitution and Liberal Governance in Vietnam during Marketization” (Ph.D., Uni-
versity of California, 1998). She published it under another title: The Ironies of Freedom:
Sex, Culture, and Neoliberal Governance in Vietnam, (Seattle, 2008).
22 Jayne Werner, “Gender Matters: Gender Studies and Việt Nam Studies”, in Gisèle Bousquet
and Nora Taylor (eds), Le Việt Nam au féminin Việt Nam: Women’s Realities (Paris, 2005),
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542 Tracol-Huynh
This focus on the colonial period is related to the global coherence of the
era and the lack of sources and information for the pre- and postcolonial eras.
There is a fairly significant amount of archival material about prostitution in
Hanoi during the period of colonization since the city was the seat of several
administrations, not just the municipality but also the Résidence supérieure au
Tonkin (the government of Tonkin) and the Résidence générale de l’Indochine
(the government of Indochina). There were medical associations as well, such
as the Medical Society of Indochina and the Prophylactic League of Hanoi.
However, the materials available are quite fragmentary because the majority
of documents, for example the vice squad police reports and medical texts,
have not been preserved at the archives.23 In short, the existing sources are
by no means exhaustive. While it may be easier to obtain information about
the regulation of prostitution or about venereal diseases, it is more difficult to
find out about prostitutes’ lives or glean information about the brothels since
the colonial authorities, whether medical, police or administrative, did not pay
much attention to such subjects. Their main, if not only, concern was medi-
cal; although the most detailed report about prostitution in Hanoi provides a
wealth of information about the various kinds of houses of prostitution (broth-
els, songstresses’ houses, maisons de rendez-vous, etc., along with their address-
es) and the names and amounts of drugs used to treat prostitutes’ diseases,
there is no information about their ages or social backgrounds, for example.24
The available sources are also biased because they are largely univocal; French
men wrote about Vietnamese women with all their incumbent stereotypes
about their race and sex. In the 1930s, however, some Vietnamese journalists
took interest in the issue of prostitution in Hanoi.25 These works provide an
pp. 19–41, 34. See also Lisa Drummond, “Introduction”, in Helle Rydstrøm (ed.), Gender
Practices in Contemporary Vietnam (Singapore, 2004), pp. 1–25.
23 These are preserved at the Archives Nationales d’Outre-Mer in Aix-en-Provence, France
[hereafter anom] and, for Hanoi and the Tonkin, in the Vietnamese National Archives’
Centre 1 in Hanoi [hereafter vna1].
24 Bernard Joyeux, “Le Péril vénérien et la prostitution à Hanoi”, bsmci (1930), pp. 453–675.
See Isabelle Tracol-Huynh, “The Shadow Theatre of Prostitution in French Colonial
Tonkin: Faceless Prostitutes under the Colonial Gaze”, Journal of Vietnamese Studies,
7 (2012), pp. 10–51.
25 Việt Sinh, “Hà Nội Ban Đêm” [“Hanoi by Night”], in Phóng Sự Việt Nam 1932–1945 (Hanoi,
Nhà xuất bản văn học, 2000 [first ed. in the newspaper Phong Hóa, 1933]), pp. 685–705;
Vũ Trọng Phụng, S., Lục xì: Prostitution and Venereal Diseases in Colonial Hanoi, trans.
Kinglsey Malarney (Honolulu, 2011); Làm đĩ [“Prostitution”] (Haiphong, Nhà xuất bản Hải
Phòng, 2001 [1936]); Trọng Lang, “Hà Nội Lầm Than” [“Miserable Hanoi”], in Phóng Sự Việt
Nam 1932–1945 (Hanoi, Nhá xuất bản văn học, 2000 [first ed. in the newspaper Đời nay,
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Prostitution in Colonial Hanoi (1885–1954) 543
abundance of information about prostitutes’ lives, but still, they were not writ-
ten by the prostitutes themselves. The journalists were men and they likely had
their own agendas when they wrote news stories about prostitutes. In these
articles, prostitutes tend to become the object of a discourse that overtakes
them in the sense that the stories were used to denounce either the women’s
living conditions, the danger that venereal diseases posed for society, or the
occidentalization of Vietnamese society.26 Because of the nature of these frag-
mentary and biased sources, some aspects of the world of prostitution will not
be covered in this article.
A Complex Definition of Prostitution
In metropolitan France and in the French empire, prostitution was neither
a crime nor an offence, unlike soliciting and procuring. The authorities per-
ceived it to be something immoral but inevitable because they believed that
men could not remain chaste, especially when they were soldiers: “Are the co-
lonial troops chaste? It may be a good title for a novel, but this question is too
ridiculous to even think about seriously.”27 Prostitution was therefore accepted
as a natural outlet for masculine needs, but only if strictly regulated. For the
authorities, prostitution was a better solution than concubinage, which “was
replaced by more restricted sexual access in the politically safe (but medically
unsatisfactory) context of prostitution, and, where possible, in the more de-
sirable setting of marriage between ‘full-blooded’ Europeans.”28 The French
regulatory system was therefore exported to Vietnam in the early years of the
colonial period. The protectorate of Tonkin was officially created in 1885, and,
in the same year, the Military Commandment and the Military Health Services
laid the foundations of the first prophylactic campaign. The French military
authorities were concerned about the physical health of the troops and about
the conservation of manpower, since the tropical climate had already taken a
toll on their military forces. The first civil regulation regarding prostitution was
adopted in 1886 in Haiphong and Hanoi. After this date, the mayors of Hanoi
1938]), pp. 93–243; Thao Thao, “Gái Lục-sì” [“Dispensary’s Girls”], Việt Báo (February and
March 1937).
26 See Isabelle Tracol-Huynh, “Entre ordre colonial et santé publique: la prostitution au
Tonkin de 1885 à 1954” (Unpublished Ph.D., Université Lyon, 2013), pp. 366–381.
27 Bernard Joyeux, “Projet de lutte antivénérienne à Hanoi”, bsmci (1934), pp. 901–923, 904.
28 Ann Laura Stoler, “Making Empire Respectable: The Politics of Race and Sexual Morality
in 20th-Century Colonial Cultures”, American Ethnologist 16 (1989), pp. 634–660, 639.
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544 Tracol-Huynh
issued several decrees with the aim of improving the regulation of prostitu-
tion, and sold sex was still regulated in the 1950s, even after the replacement of
the French municipality by a Vietnamese system in 1949.29 The decree issued
in 1951 was a translation of the one enacted in 1915 by the French authorities.
In the first decrees, there was no precise definition of prostitution, as if the
authorities believed it to be sufficiently obvious.30 The 1906 decree mentioned
women who were “notoriously known for being prostitutes” without explain-
ing what that meant exactly.31 The 1907 decree was more precise and, even
though it did not provide a clear definition of prostitution, it gave some crite-
ria: A woman was deemed to be a prostitute if she often spent time with other
prostitutes, frequented brothels, breached moral standards by soliciting on the
streets, if she was diagnosed with a venereal disease, or invited various men
into her house.32 Later, a prostitute was defined as “a woman who exchanged
her own body for money to all and sundry without choice.”33 One issue, how-
ever, was clear; even in the first succinct decrees, in the authorities’ eyes pros-
titutes were women and women only.34 However, male prostitution did exist
in Hanoi and in Vietnam in general, but it was not regulated even though ho-
mosexuality was no longer specified as a crime in France after 1791.35 In Hanoi,
male prostitution existed in clandestine brothels which were referred to as
maisons de boys.36 Despite their well-known existence, male prostitutes were
not included in the regulation of prostitution because it went against accepted
gender roles in the world of prostitution; prostitutes were thought only to be
women, while men were conceptualized as clients by the authorities in charge
of the police and members of medical committees of regulation. The discourse
about male prostitution in colonial Tonkin was therefore highly moralizing;
29 Michael G. Vann, “White City on a Red River: Race, Power, and Culture in French Colonial
Hanoi, 1872–1954” (Upublished Ph.D., University of California, 1999), p. 302.
30 Paola Tabet, La grande Arnaque. Sexualité des femmes et échange économico-sexuel (Paris,
2004), p. 7.
31 Decree of the Hanoi mayor, 24 January 1906, article 1.
32 Decree of the Hanoi mayor, 25 April 1907, article 35.
33 Decree of the resident superior in Tonkin, 3 February 1921, article 34.
34 Words like femme (woman) or fille (girl) were used in the decrees of 1886, 1888, 1891 and
1906.
35 Régis Revenin, Homosexualité et prostitution masculines à Paris, 1870–1918 (Paris, 2005),
p. 166.
36 Record Group [hereafter rg] Mairie de Hanoi, Serie D638, File 2583, Correspondances
relatives à la prostitution à Hanoi en 1910 (1910), vna1; Adrien-Charles Le Roy Des Barres,
“La Prostitution à Hanoi”, bsmci (1912), pp. 21–28, 27; Joyeux, Projet de lutte antivénéri-
enne à Hanoi, p. 911.
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Prostitution in Colonial Hanoi (1885–1954) 545
male prostitution, as well as homosexuality in general, was described as an
“unnatural and despicable vice”.37 In parallel with this discourse, justifications
were made which asserted that European men were “corrupted” by “depraved”
Vietnamese boys, opium, the tropical climate, and so on.38 The main goal was
to protect the virile image of the European colonizers and, therefore, coloniza-
tion itself.
Prostitution was defined as an exchange between a woman and a man in
which the man paid money for the sexual services provided by a woman, but
prostitution was certainly not limited to this legal definition. There were many
situations prostitutionnelles, and male prostitution was one of them. In her
study of prostitution in contemporary Ho Chi Minh City, Kimberly Kay Hoang
writes that “women [can] offer a variety of services that go beyond sex, in re-
turn for various forms of payment beyond money.”39 This analysis was valid for
the colonial period as well, and the French authorities were well aware of the
issue. They thus tried to apply the regulation of prostitution to other categories
of women, such as songstresses and the concubines of Europeans, as though
they were trying to control all women who were in contact with Europeans.
Nevertheless, they failed in this attempt and Europeans’ concubines, taxi-girls,
and songstresses were not officially treated like prostitutes in Hanoi. The taxi-
girls and the songstresses had their own regulation which clearly distinguished
them from prostitutes. One of this decree’s articles stated that “prostitution is
strictly forbidden at bar-dancing and songstresses houses.”40
In this way, the boundaries between prostitutes, taxi-girls and songstresses
were more ambiguous, as shown by the example of songstresses.41 Originally,
37 See, for example, rg: Mairie de Hanoi, Serie D638, File 2583, Correspondances relatives à
la prostitution à Hanoi en 1910 (1910), vna1.
38 About these justifications, see Jennifer Yee, Clichés de la femme exotique: Un regard sur la
littérature coloniale française entre 1871 et 1914 (Paris, 2000), p. 192; Franck Proschan, “Syphi-
lis, Opiomania, and Pederasty: Colonial Constructions of Vietnamese (and French) Social
Diseases”, Journal of the History of Sexuality, 11 (2002), pp. 610–636, 622–625.
39 Kimberly Kay Hoang, “‘She’s Not a Low-Class Dirty Girl!’: Sex Work in Ho Chi Minh City,
Vietnam”, Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, 40 (2011), pp. 367–396, 368–369.
40 Decree of the resident superior in Tonkin, 22 May 1939, article 9.
41 The same process occurred with concubines; the colonial authorities tried their best to
control the women living with Europeans, especially soldiers, by forcing them to get cards
and be medically examined, like prostitutes. They failed, however, since these measures
were illegal as concubines did not fulfil the criteria of the legal definition of prostitute. On
this subject, see VũTrọng Phụng, The Industry of Marrying Europeans (Ithaca, 2006 [1934])
and Tracol-Huynh, “Entre ordre colonial et santé publique”, pp. 43–58. For an example
of the authorities’ attempt to include concubines in the regulation of prostitution, see
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546 Tracol-Huynh
songstress houses were not brothels but places where men listened to tradi-
tional Chinese music.42 In the 1920s, these houses began to evolve into regular
brothels and the sexual aspect of the relations between prostitutes and their
clients tended to prevail, if not become exclusive. This evolution was deeply
regretted by some Vietnamese journalists, one of whom noted, “Nowadays, in
a century where materialism prevails, songstresses who claim to respect the
honourable manners of Ng-Công-Tru and Yên-Dô’s times are nothing but truly
established prostitutes.”43 Songstresses were an issue for the French colonial
authorities in the whole of Tonkin.44 The authorities tried to subject them
to regulation, but they were unsuccessful because songstresses did not fall
within the scope of the juridical definition of a prostitute.45 In 1944, the mayor
of Hanoi ordered the police to raid songstress houses and arrest the women
working there, with the aim of taking them to the dispensary. After the raids,
an arrangement was made; the police would no longer raid songstress houses
and the owners would rent a quiet place where their employees would un-
dergo medical examinations. These examinations were part of the regulation
of prostitution and therefore a tacit indicator that songstresses were, in fact,
prostitutes. The resident superior in Tonkin approved this arrangement but
pointed out that “the measures are difficult to reconcile with the 22 May 1939
decree which forbids prostitution in songstress houses and is still in force […].
This experience should therefore remain unofficial.”46
An Ineffective yet Long-lasting Regulation
Officially, prostitution was strictly regulated. The main aspects of the regu-
lation of prostitution were the registration of every prostitute with the vice
squad police, a weekly medical examination the results of which had to be not-
ed on the prostitutes’ cards, the automatic confinement of diseased p
rostitutes
at the municipal dispensary or in hospitals, the compulsory placement of a
rg: Mairie de Hanoi, Serie D638, File 2587, Correspondances relatives à la prophylaxie des
maladies vénériennes (1917), vna1 or rg: rstnf, File 00746, Prostitution pièces de principe
(1938–1940), anom.
42 Hocquard, Une campagne au Tonkin, p. 303.
43 “Prostitution”, Annam nouveau, 6 February 1936. Nguyên Công Tru and Yên Do were fa-
mous Vietnamese poets who lived in the first half of the nineteenth century.
44 Tracol-Huynh, “Entre ordre colonial et santé publique”, pp. 99–110.
45 Decree of the resident superior in Tonkin, 3 February 1921, article 34.
46 rg: Mairie de Hanoi, Serie D638, File 2596 Interdiction de faire de la prostitution dans les
maisons de chanteuses (1944), vna1.
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Prostitution in Colonial Hanoi (1885–1954) 547
washbasin, soap, and prophylactic products in brothels, a permit had to be is-
sued by the district authorities when brothels were opened, and the taxation
of brothels. The first decrees were accompanied by the creation of a vice squad
and a dispensary, the two indispensable tools for establishing a regulatory sys-
tem along French lines. In 1886, prostitution was regulated in Hanoi, and ar-
chival documentation indicates that in March of 1888 for the first time there
was a municipal clinic for prostitutes, and in December of 1888, a vice squad
was created.47 The police were in charge of implementation of the law, as “all
prostitutes [had] to register with the vice squad police.”48 After registration,
each prostitute was provided with a card which included her photograph and
a physical description of her, and she had to show it to policemen whenever
they requested to see it.49 When she registered with the police, she also had
to provide information such as her name, age, place of birth, last address, last
occupation, and, more importantly, the address of the brothel in which she
would work.50
Prostitutes’ lives were, in theory, under the constant surveillance of police-
men and physicians. In practice, however, regulation failed due to the discrep-
ancy between the regulations and the actual extent of state power. The vice
squad was never given the necessary resources to enforce the regulation; in 1912,
there was only one policeman responsible for registering prostitutes, guarding
the dispensary, watching over the nurses, and so on. He was also charged with
finding clandestine prostitutes and brothels throughout the whole city, which
meant that he had to do eighty kilometres of rounds on foot, since he had no
vehicle at his disposal.51 The vice squad also lacked the means to keep tabs
on all the prostitutes and brothels. In the 1930s, attempts were made to rec-
tify this situation, and the number of police on the vice squad was increased
fivefold, but these agents were still unable to monitor the 3,000 to 5,000 pros-
titutes in Hanoi, a fact confirmed by the director of the local Health Board; he
noted, “Due to the qualitative and quantitative deficiency of an inexistent or
embryonic vice squad […] we check 5 per cent of the prostitutes at most.”52
In the 1940s, there was one European policeman and an additional twelve
47 Decree of the resident superior in Tonkin, 28 April 1886; rg: rst, Serie S15, File 73684,
Réglementation de la prostitution. Dispensaires de Hanoi, Haiphong et autres (1888–1913),
vna; decree of the resident mayor of Hanoi, 21 December 1888, article 1.
48 Decree of the resident superior in Tonkin, 3 February 1921, article 4.
49 Ibid., article 5.
50 Ibid., article 3.
51 Le Roy Des Barres, “La Prostitution à Hanoi”, pp. 26–27.
52 rg: rstnf, File003856 Prophylaxie des maladies vénériennes (1917–1940), anom.
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548 Tracol-Huynh
Vietnamese policemen on the squad, but this was still not enough because the
number of prostitutes and brothels continued to increase.53 The police were
also faced with the fact that brothels were spread throughout the city, which
made it almost impossible to control them.54 From the very beginning of regu-
lation in the 1890s, the police requested that brothels be gathered together in
one red-light district, as they argued that this would make it easier to control
them:55 “The creation of a red-light district is essential, but this measure will
be quite problematic.”56 In Hanoi, the question was recurrent throughout the
colonial period and the municipality placed this idea on the agenda several
times (in 1916, 1917, 1926, 1932, and 1951),57 yet it was never implemented. The
geography of prostitution in the city did not change much between the 1890s
and the 1950s, and as one commentator stated, “The brothels are scattered in
the city, as they used to be in the past”,58 as seen in map 21.1. The areas where
prostitution was carried out remained largely the same; around the Citadel,
in the Vietnamese quarter, and in the suburban zone which was known as the
“Venus belt” of Hanoi.59
The primary role of the vice squad was to identify and register all prostitutes
and to make them visible to the authorities, but this goal was rather utopian:
There are more than 2,000 prostitutes in Hanoi [in 1915]. Among them,
only 909 are registered and among those 909 prostitutes, only 82 are regu-
larly examined at the dispensary. The surveillance which is carried out by
just one vice squad officer is extremely inadequate because only a few
53 rg: Mairie de Hanoi, Serie S03, File 5769, Rapport annuel sur le fonctionnement du service
municipal d’hygiène de Hanoi en 1942 (1942), vna1; rg: Mairie de Hanoi, Serie D638, File
2595, Rapport sur la prostitution à Hanoi en 1943 (1943), vna1.
54 See, for example, rg: Mairie de Hanoi, File 2585, Correspondances relatives à la prostitu-
tion à Hanoi (1915–1916), vna1.
55 The ideal of a red-light district was first implemented in French Morocco, in Casablanca.
See Christelle Taraud, La Prostitution coloniale Algérie, Tunisie, Maroc (1830–1962) (Paris,
2003), pp. 81–125.
56 rg: Mairie de Hanoi, Serie D638, File 2580, Rapport du commissariat de police sur les mai-
sons de tolérance sises à Hanoi (1896), vna1.
57 rg: Mairie de Hanoi, Serie D638, File 2585, Correspondances relatives à la prostitution à
Hanoi (1915–1916) and File 2587, Correspondances relatives à la prophylaxie des maladies
vénériennes (1917), vna1; rg: rst, File 78667, Dossiers divers relatifs à la police de la voie
publique (1921–1942), vna1; rg: Mairie de Hanoi après 1945, Serie D638, File 294, Bài trừ
nạn mãi dâm—Quy chê nhà chứa (1948–1953), vna1.
58 rg: rst, File 78667, Dossiers divers relatifs à la police de la voie publique (1921–1942), vna1.
59 rg: Mairie de Hanoi, Serie D638, File 2593, Mesures prophylactiques des maladies vénéri-
ennes à Hanoi (1936–1938), vna1.
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Prostitution in Colonial Hanoi (1885–1954) 549
Map 21.1 Official brothels in Hanoi, 1896–1951
Source: Annual reports of the municipal Bureau of Hygiene, vna1.
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550 Tracol-Huynh
prostitutes are checked. 82 prostitutes are examined but only about 40
receive regular medical examinations.60
There were therefore two categories of prostitutes. On the one hand, there
were prostitutes who had registered with the police and who obeyed the regu-
lations and were called filles soumises; on the other hand, there were all the
other prostitutes who were described as clandestine and who outnumbered by
far those of the first category. The number of clandestine prostitutes indicated
in graph 21.1 is far lower than the actual number because it only indicates those
that the police were able to arrest, and by no means could they arrest them all.
For the most part, prostitutes did not want to register with the police and be
medically examined, so they did everything they could to avoid registration.
They also were terrified of being confined at the municipal dispensary, which
was likely little more than a prison. Even the municipal doctor criticized the
Hanoi dispensary for being too coercive: “This sanitary institution is in fact a
prison. The poor girls are confined behind thick wire fences as if they were
wild animals. The harshness of this confinement is not even compensated by
the quality of the treatment because this treatment is notoriously inadequate,
due to a lack of means and staff.”61 In the 1930’s, improvements were made and
the mayor of Hanoi stated:
800
700
600
500
400
300
200
100
0
1913 1915 1919 1920 1921 1922 1923 1924 1925 1926 1927 1928 1929 1930 1931 1942
Controlled prostitutes Clandestine prostitutes arrested by the police
Graph 21.1 Annual activities of the vice squad police in Hanoi, 1913–1942
Source: Annual reports of the municipal Bureau of Hygiene, vna1.
60 rg: Mairie de Hanoi, Serie D638, File 2585, Correspondances relatives à la prostitution à
Hanoi (1915–1916), vna1.
61 rg: rstnf, File 003856, Prophylaxie des maladies vénériennes (1917–1940), anom.
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Prostitution in Colonial Hanoi (1885–1954) 551
Despite what some people still say, the dispensary is no longer a coercive
hospital. It is a true hospital, more pleasant than an ordinary sanitary
institution thanks to its garden, its pagoda, and its sources of entertain-
ment. It is coupled with a charitable organization which works for the
moral and material improvement of prostitutes, and their results are very
promising.62
However, the coercive aspect of the Hanoi dispensary was still denounced by
journalists such as Thao for “having all the characteristics of a coercive hospi-
tal; nothing can escape from it, thanks to the sky-high walls [and] grey doors,
which are always silently closed.”63 Fear of confinement explains why prosti-
tutes, whether registered or clandestine, who had been arrested by the police
tried their best to conceal their diseases from the physician and why most
prostitutes did not want to register.
Regulation was a blatant failure, even in the eyes of some of the people who
had to enforce it.64 However, it was never abrogated because it was seen as be-
ing the lesser evil. The debate between abolitionists and regulationists which
was going on in Europe at that time started in Hanoi only in 1930, but it con-
cluded rather quickly because physicians, policemen, and the authorities all
thought that the colony was not ready for abolition and that a system of regula-
tion had to be maintained:65
Abolitionism is an elegant solution for a State because it involves a high
degree of evolution and organization that only a few States, even among
the abolitionist ones, really and totally achieve. If we choose to adopt
that solution, we would claim that pauperism does not exist, that census-
es are perfectly conducted, that administrative services are serious and
thorough, that the civic and juridical education system is satisfactory,
that the sanitary facilities are well supplied with staff and medicine, etc.,
etc. In a word, we would proclaim that we are extremely civilized and
meticulously organized. I do not think that Indochina has reached that
level yet. […] In this country, one cannot be regulationist nor abolitionist
but opportunist—in other words, evolutionist.66
62 Henri Virgitti, Quelques Œuvres sociales dans la ville de Hanoi (Hanoi, 1938), p. 61.
63 Thao Thao, “Gái Lục-Sì”.
64 For example, in the 1930s the director of the municipal clinic, Dr Joyeux, and Mayor Henri
Virgitti were very critical of the system.
65 Tracol-Huynh, “Entre ordre colonial et santé publique”, pp. 291–354.
66 rg: Commission Guernut, File 24Bd, anom.
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552 Tracol-Huynh
The main purpose of the regulation of prostitution was to protect the popula-
tion from venereal diseases. The end of the nineteenth and the beginning of
the twentieth century constituted “the golden age of the venereal threat.”67
Doctors, administrators, journalists, and even novelists seized on the issue
and turned venereal diseases into an issue that threatened to bring about the
degeneration of the entire race, especially since syphilis was described as be-
ing hereditary. This threat was felt in both metropolitan France and the colo-
nies, but it was more feared in the colonies. According to some physicians, the
symptoms in the colonies, and especially in Tonkin, were aggravated by the
climate. Venereal diseases were therefore described as “endemic” and the sta-
tistics provided by civilian and above all military physicians were particularly
alarming;68 the average venereal morbidity rate was around 30 per cent among
colonial troops.69
Therefore it was argued that prostitutes had to be controlled as rigorously as
possible, and they were seen as the main, if not the only, source of contagion.70
The main purpose of regulation was to keep prostitutes healthy, insofar as the
available drugs made that possible, in order to prevent men from contracting
venereal diseases, especially European men. Prostitutes were not perceived as
being morally repulsive because they sold their bodies but because their bod-
ies represented the threat of venereal diseases which could spread to the entire
social body. It was for this reason that they were described as being particularly
filthy.71 Furthermore, prostitutes were “well known for being concerned with
neither their own health nor that of their partners.”72 This, according to physi-
cians, explained the high rates of venereal contamination among prostitutes
and more specifically among clandestine prostitutes who did not undergo
weekly medical examinations.
A critical reading should be made of graph 21.2. Firstly, clandestine prosti-
tutes were more numerous, so the vice squad police could not arrest them all.
67 Alain Corbin, “Le Péril vénérien au début du siècle, prophylaxie sanitaire et prophylaxie
morale”, Recherches, 29 (1977), pp. 245–283, 246.
68 rg: rstnf, File 03856, Prophylaxie des maladies vénériennes (1917–1940), anom.
69 Abadie-Bayro, “Morbidité vénérienne des troupes européennes”, p. 31; gaide, Le Péril
vénérien en Indochine, p. 23.
70 Annick Guénel, “Prostitution, maladies vénériennes et médecine coloniale”, in John
Kleinen (ed.), Vietnamese Society in Transition: The Daily Politics of Reform and Change
(Amsterdam, 2001), pp. 233–249; Tracol-Huynh, “Entre ordre colonial et santé publique”,
pp. 156–158.
71 Joyeux, “Le Péril vénérien”, p. 570.
72 rg: Mairie de Hanoi, Serie D638, File 2593, Mesures prophylactiques des maladies vénéri-
ennes à Hanoi (1936–1938), vna1.
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Prostitution in Colonial Hanoi (1885–1954) 553
300
250
200
150
100
50
0
1913 1914 1915 1916 1917 1918 1919 1920 1921 1922 1923 1924 1925 1926 1927 1928 1929
Arrested clandestine prostitutes
Arrested clandestine prostitutes with venereal diseases
Graph 21.2 Arrested clandestine prostitutes, Hanoi 1913–1929
Source: Bulletin de la société medico-chirugicale de l’Indochine.
Secondly, and more importantly, the figures are distorted by the fact that the
arrests of prostitutes and the subsequent reporting of their diseases were often
the result of clients denouncing them to the police after they themselves had
contracted a venereal disease. This explains the high rate of contamination
among arrested prostitutes in the figure. Clandestine prostitutes were, without
a doubt, neither more nor less affected by venereal diseases than registered
prostitutes. Reports always emphasized the health dangers posed by clandes-
tine prostitutes and this type of argument was invoked wherever the authori-
ties attempted to ensure that prostitutes underwent medical examinations. Vũ
Trọng Phụng, Thao, and other Vietnamese journalists shared the French au-
thorities’ anxieties about the venereal danger and, therefore, their ideas about
prostitution and its regulation.73 Vũ Trọng Phụng, for example, gave a scathing
description of the prostitutes being held at the dispensary. According to him,
prostitutes were “fetid bodies […] ugly, filthy ghosts whose flesh reeks of nau-
seating cheap perfume, [and they have] saggy breasts, the skin of their thighs
is inflamed with scabies or ringworm or marked with scattered black circles,
the historical vestiges of the syphilis germ.”74 Thao entitled one of his pieces
73 For example: “No one has ever doubted the existence of the venereal danger in Indochi-
na’s big cities, in Hanoi and in the suburban zone. The Vietnamese were unanimous when
they asked the authorities to urgently find a solution to that very dangerous situation.”
“Les conceptions modernes de la lutte contre le péril vénérien”, Annam nouveau (1938).
74 Vũ Trọng Phụng, Lục xì, p. 74.
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554 Tracol-Huynh
“Society of Germs” and warned that the entire population of Hanoi would soon
be infected.75
There was a consensus on the necessity of regulation; the idea was that it
had to be maintained but it also had to be improved. Police monitoring could
not prevail because the vice squad did not have the means to fulfil its duty.
Chasing after clandestine prostitutes was no longer seen as the right way to
protect the population from venereal diseases, especially since there were
now new medicines that were more effective than the previous ones.76 It was
argued that prostitutes should go willingly to the dispensary to be medically
treated and they should not fear going there. That was one of the reasons why
improvements were made to the Hanoi municipal dispensary in the 1930s:77
All things considered, the dispensary is a hospitable prison where poor
girls are incarcerated despite the fact that they committed no crime. They
are only suffering from one or several venereal diseases which were given
to them by men. No one has ever taken action against these men, and
nothing has been done. In order to conceal the harsh truth behind the
prostitutes’ detention, the Prophylactic League is endeavouring to create
games and distractions [in the dispensary].78
Physicians called for the humanization of the way prostitutes were treated,
and they tried to develop a more social form of practicing medicine; special
consultations for venereal patients in regular hospitals were organized, and
visiteuses sociales (social nurses) were sent to the brothels, whether regulated
or clandestine, in order to teach basic hygiene to prostitutes.79 Despite all these
75 “Xã hội … vi trùng” and “Dân thành-phố Hanoi sẽ trở nên những dân ‘ốm’ cả”, Thao Thao,
“Gái Lục-sì”, Việt Báo, 26 February 1937.
76 Laurence Monnais, “From Colonial Medicines to Global Phamarceuticals? The Introduc-
tion of Sulfa Drugs in French Vietnam”, East Asian Science, Technology and Society: an In-
ternational Journal, 3 (2009), pp. 257–285.
77 Henri Virgitti was the perfect example of the shift in the French colonial authorities’ con-
ception of the management of prostitution. He was the mayor of Hanoi in the 1930s and
also the director of the Prophylactic League which tried to improve the regulation of pros-
titution and make it more humane. In his book Quelques œuvres sociales dans la ville de
Hanoi (the title sums it up) he described the changes he made at the dispensary.
78 Joyeux and Virgitti, “Le Péril vénérien dans la zone suburbaine”, p. 121.
79 Starting in 1937, physicians began asking for nurses but they only appeared in the reports
in 1942. See rg: Mairie de Hanoi, Serie S03, File 5769, Rapport annuel sur le fonctionnement
du service municipal d’hygiène de Hanoi en 1942 (1942), vna1. However, the reports starting
from 1938 and going up to and including 1951 are missing from the archives.
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Prostitution in Colonial Hanoi (1885–1954) 555
changes, the regulation of prostitution remained coercive and the dispensary
was still feared by prostitutes.
Prostitution in the City
In February 1914, the Hanoi vice squad arrested twenty-six clandestine pros-
titutes. The report issued on this occasion provides information about these
prostitutes, such as their place of origin.80
Most of them were from various rural provinces around Hanoi and from
small villages, and they had no education. In a newspaper article, N. T., a Viet-
namese journalist, reported that a prostitute told him, “I am just a country
girl, with no instruction, with nothing […]. I am wandering around the city
with an empty stomach and an empty head.”81 Urbanization was on the rise
throughout the French colonial period; in 1907, there were 51,000 people living
in Hanoi, 86,000 in 1913, and 145,000 in 1937.82 The growth of prostitution was
Table 21.1 Place of origin of some Hanoi prostitutes in 1914
Province of origin Number of prostitutes Distance from Hanoi (km)
Hanoi 7 (3 from the city itself) –
Hà Đông 9 15
Hưng Yên 2 40
Phủ Lý 1 60
Hà Nam 1 60
Nam Định 5 75
Haiphong 2 (1 from the main city) 105
Kiến An 1 105
Thái Bình 2 110
Source: rg: Mairie de Hanoi, Serie D638, File 2584, Rapports de police et lettres
diverses au sujet de la police des mœurs (1913–1916), vna1.
80 rg: Mairie de Hanoi, Serie D638, File 2584, Rapports de police et lettres diverses au sujet de
la police des mœurs (1913–1916), vna1.
81 N. T., “Deux heures avec une prostituée”, Annam nouveau (15 March 1936).
82 Henri Brenier, Essai d’atlas statistique de l’Indochine française (Hanoi, 1914), p. 48; Le Roy
Des Barres, “Rapport annuel sur le fonctionnement du Bureau d’Hygiène de la ville de
Hanoi, année 1920”, bsmci (1921), pp. 29–50, 29; rg: ggi, File 53655, Commission d’enquête
dans les territoires d’Outre-Mer. Recensement de la population du Tonkin (1937), anom.
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556 Tracol-Huynh
Limits of the Hanoi municipality
River, lake
Vietnamese part of the city
European part of the city
Citadel
Train station
Prostitution area
Urban expansion
Expansion of prostitution
Map 21.2 Growth of the city and expansion of prostitution in Hanoi
Source: tracol-huynh, “Entre ordre colonial et santé
publique”, p. 505.
closely linked to the expansion of the city, as indicated by the fact that some
legal brothels in the 1930s and ‘40s were located around the train station and
in the newly built area in the south and west of the city, as seen in map 21.2.
This was the cause and consequence of a migratory movement that drove
many young women to leave the overpopulated countryside and try their luck
in the city. Life there was reputed to be easier than in the countryside, and
working as a prostitute might have seemed to be more lucrative than working
in the rice paddies. As shown by the 1914 report, most of the prostitutes were
young (77 per cent of those arrested were younger than 25), and they had no
education and might not have known anyone in Hanoi.
Those young girls from the countryside often tried to get by in the city by
selling fruit at the markets and often ended up working as prostitutes, like
Lành, a prostitute who was interviewed by journalist Vũ Trọng Phụng.83 Most
of the jobs open to young women were not well paid; in 1910, a woman earned
only 3 piastres (hereafter $) per month working at one of the cotton factories
83 Vũ Trọng Phụng, Lục xì, p. 128.
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Prostitution in Colonial Hanoi (1885–1954) 557
of Nam Dinh; $3 was the monthly salary for a housemaid in Haiphong in 1914,
but in 1925, the pay was only $1.84 It is difficult to know how much a prosti-
tute earned per sexual encounter since the archives provide very little infor-
mation. The price varied depending on the clients (whether they were coolies
or soldiers for example, or Vietnamese or European), or it depended on the
prostitutes themselves. The Japanese prostitutes who worked there were well-
known for being more expensive than the Vietnamese or even the Chinese
prostitutes.85 In 1930, coolies paid from $0.20 to $0.30 for a Vietnamese pros-
titute; Vietnamese soldiers paid $0.25; Vietnamese officers and European sol-
diers had to pay $0.50; and European civilians paid from $3 to $5.86
Telling the story of a prostitute’s life in Saigon, Haydon Cherry wrote:87
There were few jobs open to Vietnamese women in Saigon and Cholon in
the early twentieth century. Some women worked as itinerant merchants
who walked the streets, a pole across their shoulders, selling fruits and
vegetables. Others hawked bowls of noodles or plates of rice for a few
sou on the pavement. In the marketplace, women sold spun goods and
small handicrafts that they had made at home, but Luong Thi Lam had
run away from home. A few women became midwives or fortune tell-
ers. The homes of the French and the rich Vietnamese also provided jobs
as cooks, cleaners, and nannies. For such work they might have received
their room and keep and a small sum each week. But Luong Thi Lam
came without references and she was not known in the city. Vietnam-
ese nuns worked in the hospitals and orphanages of the colony, but they
had often been raised Catholic as orphans themselves. This left the cafés,
opium dens, and brothels among the few places open to Luong Thi Lam,
and of these, a brothel provided not only a wage, but also a place to sleep.
84 rg: rst, Serie F76, File 55381, Traite des enfants et des femmes annamites (1906–1908),
vna1; rg: Tribunal de Haiphong, File 677, Délit de mise en gage de mineur et d’excitation de
mineure à la débauche (Art. 334, 59, 60, 344 cp) (1914), vna1; rg: Tribunal de Haiphong, File
1831, Délits d’excitation de mineure à la débauche commis par Nguyen Thi Hai, Nguyen Thi
Thuan … à Haiphong (1925), vna1.
85 Frédéric Roustan, “Mousmés and French Colonial Culture: Making Japanese Women’s
Bodies Available in Indochina”, Journal of Vietnamese Studies, 7 (2012), p. 70.
86 Joyeux, “Le Péril vénérien”, p. 480. For more details about prices, see Tracol-Huynh, “Entre
ordre colonial et santé publique”, pp. 434–435.
87 Haydon Cherry, The Woman who Ran Away (Unpublished paper submitted to the vsg
Student Paper Prize, 2001).
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558 Tracol-Huynh
Those low wages explained why some women had no other choice than to turn
to prostitution: “One evening, in Paul Bert Square, an older Vietnamese soldier
bought a few pomelo sections and then told her to come with him […]. Her
basket was full, and in her pocket she didn’t have the money to buy even a
measure of rice. That was a powerful reason to make her decide.”88 In one of
his interviews, Việt Sinh asked a madam to arrange a meeting with a young
girl working at the market. As he wondered whether or not the meeting would
be arranged, his friend reassured him, saying, “A woman earns only a few sous
selling goods all day long at the market, but if she decides to come here, she
will quickly earn $3. Who wouldn’t choose that?”89 In short, poverty was the
main reason a woman would become a prostitute. In the 1930s, the global eco-
nomic crisis struck Indochina and poverty increased, as well as prostitution.
Prostitution had become a social problem, as evidenced by the interest shown
by Vietnamese journalists in that decade. All journalists’ news stories shared
a common theme: poverty.90 The same process occurred in the late 1940s and
early ‘50s because of the Indochina war.91
Whether voluntary or not, these women greatly increased the ranks of
prostitutes, especially as there was growing demand. The development of a
Vietnamese middle class with disposable income resulted in “an explosion of
pleasure-seeking” and an increase in both the forms and sites of pleasure.92
Moreover, the presence of colonial troops meant that there were more sol-
diers, the traditional clientele of brothels, and that was particularly true in
Hanoi, a very important garrison town93 especially during the Indochina War
88 Vũ Trọng Phụng, Lục xì, p. 128.
89 Việt Sinh, “Hà Nội Ban Đêm”, p. 690.
90 For example, “Cô Xuần, cô Hảo, cô Tuyết … Cỏn biết bao nhiêu cô nữa? Mỗi cô là một
thảm sử. Những thảm sử trrongf chất trong nhà Lực-sì. Mà nguyên nhân? Không ngoài
sự nghèo túng” [“Miss Xuần, Miss Hảo, Miss Tuyết … Who knows how many more? Each
of them has a tragic story. There are only tragic stories in the dispensary. What is the
reason behind all of those stories? Nothing more than poverty”]; Thao Thao, “Gái Lục-sì”
(24 Februrary 1937).
91 rg: rstnf, File 03856, Prophylaxie des maladies vénériennes (1917–1940), anom.
92 Nguyễn Văn Ký, “La Société vietnamienne face à la modernité, le Bắc Bộ de la fin du
XIXème siècle à la seconde guerre mondiale” (Ph.D., Université Paris 7, 1992), p. 637 [pub-
lished version: La Société vietnamienne face à la modernité, le Tonkin de la fin du XIXème
siècle à la seconde guerre mondiale (Paris, L’Harmattan, 1995)]. See also Vũ Trọng Phụng,
Làm đĩ, p. 17; Trọng Lang, “Hà Nội Lầm Than”, p. 94.
93 In 1909, there were 2,599 soldiers based in Hanoi and 1,842 in 1914. Adrien-Charles Le
Roy Des Barres, “Rapport sur la natalité, la morbidité et la mortalité à Hanoi, année 1909”,
bsmci (1910), pp. 179–191, 179; “Rapport sur le fonctionnement du Bureau d’Hygiène de la
ville de Hanoi, année 1914”, bsmci (1915), pp. 162–186, 162.
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Prostitution in Colonial Hanoi (1885–1954) 559
( 1946–54). The geography of prostitution in Hanoi illustrates the link between
soldiers and prostitutes, because several of the legal brothels were convenient-
ly situated close to the Hanoi citadel. This was even more evident for clandes-
tine houses; a military physician wrote in the 1910s that “the temptation begins
right after the barracks’ door, next to the guardroom.”94 A few years later, an-
other military physician recalled that he “often saw [clandestine prostitutes]
in the evening, on the East street for example, leaning against trees in a sug-
gestive posture, or crouching down in groups of 10 or 15 in a ditch against the
walls of the barracks.”95 Prostitutes and brothels were easily found around the
Hanoi citadel because “it is written that a garrison cannot operate without a
brothel.”96 Soldiers were not confined within the citadel all the time and they
were allowed into the city, so they were able to visit brothels throughout Hanoi.
See graph 21.3 for the types of clients that visited the legal brothels of the city.
During the Indochina War, Hanoi was a very strategic city where numerous
regiments were stationed, and this also increased the numbers of prostitutes.
In the 1940s, the army created military brothels called Bordel Militaire de Cam-
pagne (bmc), and in 1954, there were ten bmc in Hanoi where a total of around
one hundred prostitutes worked.97
When they came to Hanoi, many young women ended up working in broth-
els, and as discussed above, with the introduction of the French regulation of
prostitution, brothels were opened in Hanoi. There were twenty five official
brothels in Hanoi in 1932 and the most important of these housed twenty
100
90
80
70
60 Civilians
50
40 Soldiers
30
20
10
0
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20
Graph 21.3 Patrons of the 20 authorized brothels of Hanoi in 1930 (%)
Source: joyeux, “Le péril vénérien”, p. 480.
94 Abadie-Bayro, “Morbidité vénérienne des troupes européennes de l’Annam-Tonkin, moy-
ens prophylactiques proposés”, bsmci (1915), pp. 30–62, 39.
95 Alexandre Gauducheau, Contre un Fléau (Paris, Stock, 1923), p. 104.
96 Coppin, “La Prostitution”, p. 246.
97 rg: 10H, File 2099, Maladies vénériennes (1946–1955); diagnostic et traitement des maladies
vénériennes (1952), Service Historique de la Défense [Defence Historical Service], Vin-
cennes, France.
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560 Tracol-Huynh
prostitutes.98 At first, prostitutes had to work inside the brothels, since this
was the only authorized form of prostitution. Later, they were also allowed to
work out of their own homes, but brothels remained the ideal for the colo-
nial authorities because surveillance was easier; the vice squad could enter the
brothel at any hour of the night in the line of their duty.99 Brothels had to
be clearly identifiable so that men could find them easily and decent people
wouldn’t mistakenly enter them. At the same time, they also had to be as hid-
den as possible for the sake of public morality. At brothels, there was a red-
light above the door and the street number was clearly indicated, and thus
they were easily identifiable.100 Houses of prostitution had previously been
called “green houses”, but during the colonial period, they came to be known
as nhà số đỏ [red houses] because of this light.101 Brothel owners had to keep
their doors and windows shut at all times and prostitutes were not to be seen
from the outside and they had to behave decently.102 Outdoor soliciting was
an offense; in short, although prostitution was legal, it was not to be visible.
However, some streets such as Hàng Bông Street and Khâm Thiên Street were
well-known areas of prostitution and were quite lively at night. In October of
1910, a vice squad agent wrote a report about clandestine prostitutes on Hàng
Bông Street, noting the lively evenings where some women showed off their
legs, sometimes even above the knee, and he wrote about one woman who
strolled in front of her house in a red dressing gown with her hair loose as she
smoked cigarettes, and another one accosted the police agent, saying: “Come
on, honey!”103 Prostitution, despite all the authorities’ attempts to render it un-
seen, was quite visible in the city.
The World of Prostitution
The world of prostitution was a world of violence. On account of their young
age, prostitutes were often at the mercy of madams and pimps, even more
98 rg: Mairie de Hanoi, Serie T12, File 4920, Ville de Hanoi: Liste des maisons de tolérance en
1932 en vue de l’établissement du rôle des patentes (1932), vna1.
99 Decree of the General Governor in Indochina, 29 November 1924, article 2.
100 rg: rst, File 80983, Arrêtés des Résuper au Tonkin régissant les maisons de tolérance 1901,
vna1.
101 See for example Việt Sinh, “Hà Nội Ban Đêm”, p. 698; Thao Thao, “Gái Lục-sì”, 16 February
1937; Vũ Trọng Phụng, Lục xì, p. 43.
102 For example see the decree of the Hanoi mayor, 18 May 1915, article 163.
103 rg: Mairie de Hanoi, Serie D638, File 2583, Correspondances relatives à la prostitution à
Hanoi en 1910 (1910), vna1.
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Prostitution in Colonial Hanoi (1885–1954) 561
so if they were sold to them by their own parents or if they were indebted to
them. The lending of clothes and jewels was a practice commonly employed
by madams to transform prostitutes into debtors and thereby keep them at
their establishment.104 Although it was illegal for madams to hold prostitutes
against their will, certain prostitutes nevertheless had no choice but to try to
escape.105 However, one should not think that all prostitutes were being held
by force and compelled to practise prostitution. Prostitution was also a matter
of free choice, as the vice squad was also confronted with recidivist clandestine
prostitutes. Violence existed outside of brothels as well and extended into the
heart of the dispensaries, which were described as being very unwelcoming
places; the warden behaved brutally towards prostitutes, and he, and even the
chief supervisor, extorted money from them.106 Violence and extortion could
also be found in the relationship between prostitutes and the police.
The second characteristic of the world of prostitution in Hanoi was its ra-
cial diversity. Prostitution in colonial Hanoi was a multiracial world in which
Vietnamese prostitutes outnumbered by far those of other origins, includ-
ing Chinese, Japanese, European, and Eurasian prostitutes. The Chinese and
Japanese prostitutes came from poor provinces of China and Japan and could
be found in other Southeast Asian cities at the time, such as Saigon and even
more in Singapore.107 In Hanoi, there were few Chinese prostitutes compared
to Haiphong, for example, and they were mostly songstresses, at least officially.
There were no more than 100 Japanese prostitutes but they were quite visible
since they were easily recognizable by their kimonos and wooden clogs. Their
hairstyle, a very elaborate chignon, was also specific and made it possible to
distinguish Japanese prostitutes from their Vietnamese and Chinese counter-
parts. The Japanese were therefore a visible alien element of Indochina and
easily classifiable in French exotic stereotypes.108 Colonial discourses depicted
Vietnamese prostitutes as being dirty and dangerous in terms of the transmis-
sion of diseases, whereas Japanese prostitutes were regarded as being safer,
104 Ibid.
105 Decree of the resident superior in Tonkin, 3 February 1921, article 30.
106 rg: Mairie de Hanoi, Serie D638, File 2584, Rapports de police et lettres diverses au sujet de
la police des mœurs (1913–1916), vna1.
107 James Francis Warren, Ah Ku and Karayuki-san. Prostitution in Singapore 1870–1940 (Singa-
pore, 2003 [1993]).
108 Frédéric Roustan, “Mousmés and French Colonial Culture Mousmés: Making Japa-
nese Women’s Bodies Available in Indochina”, Journal of Vietnamese Studies, 7 (2012),
pp. 52–105.
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562 Tracol-Huynh
medically speaking.109 Japanese prostitutes did not belong to the same cate-
gory as the Chinese and Vietnamese, and their higher prices were an obvious
distinctive sign of this difference. Their prices were up to ten times higher
than those charged by the Vietnamese but they were still cheaper than the
European prostitutes who were considered to be the most luxurious. In this
racial hierarchy of stereotypes, Chinese prostitutes were located somewhere
in the middle, as they were perceived as being not so different from Vietnam-
ese women in the European mind, although they were not colonized. This ra-
cial hierarchy could be found in the regulation of prostitution which clearly
distinguished between prostitutes, and granted some of them privileges; for
example, from 1902 until 1918, European and Japanese prostitutes had a special
room at the dispensary.110
Japanese prostitution disappeared in the 1920s when the Japanese govern-
ment condemned it and asked all prostitutes to return to Japan: “It was a ques-
tion of national honour and prestige, and of being viewed as a ‘civilized’ nation
in the eyes of the West.”111 In this way, prostitution challenged the way that the
country wanted to be seen by the rest of the world. That was true for Japan in
the 1920s and it was also true for France in its colonies. French and European
prostitution was a political issue in a colonial setting, and European prostitutes
were seen as a threat. As such, there were fewer European prostitutes com-
pared to native prostitutes. However, the colonial order had to be maintained,
and this could not be achieved purely through military force. Moreover, as time
passed, the memory of the colonial conquest and of the military superiority of
the French army waned. The enforced prestige of the “white man” became the
main means of ensuring colonial supremacy. Accordingly, Europeans had to
maintain an exemplary appearance at all times. Within this context, it is quite
clear that European prostitutes were a major problem for two reasons. Firstly,
European prostitutes were not a “good” example of correct “white” behaviour.
Secondly, Vietnamese men—the colonized—could buy sex from European
women if they had enough money. Indeed, there was no racial segregation for
clients. The only criterion was money; if a man had enough, regardless of where
he was from, he could choose whichever prostitute he wanted. Therefore, since
there were no racial distinctions for clients, the only categories that existed
were those constructed by the colonial authorities regarding prostitutes. And
109 Ibid., and Michael Vann, “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly: Variation and Difference in
French Racism in Colonial Indochine”, in Sue Peabody and Tyler Stovall (eds), The Color of
Liberty Histories of Race in France (Durham, 2003), pp. 187–205.
110 Joyeux, “Le Péril vénérien”, p. 488.
111 Warren, Ah Ku and Karayuki-san, p. 161.
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Prostitution in Colonial Hanoi (1885–1954) 563
these categories were closely linked to racial categories and to political and
social domination. European women could not be treated like native women,
even if they were prostitutes. A distinction had to be made in order to maintain
racial boundaries and, consequently, the colonial order.112
The first solution for the French colonial authorities was simply to not talk
publicly about European prostitutes. The monthly reports of the municipal
hygiene service of Hanoi often used the following expression in their reports:
“Officially, European prostitution does not exist.”113 The second was to treat
them differently from Asian prostitutes. The European prostitutes were of-
ten called Valaques. Valachie was part of mediaeval Romania, and the word
Valaque was used for those European prostitutes supposedly originating from
eastern Europe. They had their own regulations in which the word “prostitute”
did not appear, and Valaque houses were not described as brothels but as more
or less respectable cafés. Valaque women were gradually incorporated into the
general regulation of prostitution, but they were granted privileges:
Art. 2: The medical examinations prescribed in Article 6 of the aforemen-
tioned article will take place at the municipal dispensary twice a week.
The hours and days will be determined at a later date. However, if they
so desire, the girls are allowed to undergo this medical examination at
their own homes. In that case, the municipal doctor will have to receive
financial compensation from them.114
On the one hand, the police and administrative authorities tried their best to
shed light on the world of prostitution by chasing down clandestine prosti-
tutes or looking for clandestine houses of prostitution; on the other hand, they
hid European prostitutes. “For many reasons, whether good or bad, Tonkinese
colonial authorities did not want to register Europeans as prostitutes.”115
There was another hierarchy among prostitutes which had a major impact
on Vũ Trọng Phụng: the social hierarchy. He wondered why “two hundred
people are confined because they worked as prostitutes, while at the same
112 Tracol-Huynh, “Entre ordre colonial et santé publique”, pp. 202–210. See also Stoler, “Mak-
ing Empire Respectable”, p. 636; Ania Loomba, Colonialism/Postcolonialism (London, 2005
[1998]), p. 135.
113 rg: Mairie de Hanoi, Serie S03, File 5757, Rapports mensuels sur le fonctionnement du ser-
vice municipal d’hygiène de Hanoi (1931), vna1.
114 rg: rst, File 1985, Réglementation des femmes dites “valaques” dans la ville de Hanoi 1906–
1910, vna1.
115 Joyeux, “Le Péril vénérien”, p. 465.
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564 Tracol-Huynh
time numerous other prostitutes are still known as miss, madam, [and] es-
teemed lady.”116 In their reports about prostitution in 1930s Hanoi, Vietnamese
journalists carried out research to determine why a woman would become a
prostitute. When he began his interviews, Vũ Trọng Phụng was convinced that
prostitutes worked “as prostitutes only because they like it” and he was con-
cerned about the moral dimension of prostitution.117 He gradually changed his
mind and, in Chapter 7 of his report, he realized that the reason why some
women worked as prostitutes was not moral corruption but destitution. In an
earlier text, Làm đĩ, he blamed the rapid social changes plaguing Vietnamese
society, and he listed those as materialism, romanticism, the absence of sexual
education, and westernization. Other journalists blamed arranged marriages,
second-rank marriages, and cohabitation, and more generally the condition of
women. The prostitute in N. T.’s interview was forced to marry an older wealthy
man who already had a wife. The first wife mistreated her and after one rather
brutal fight she left her husband and village and went to Hanoi where she end-
ed up working as a prostitute.118
Stories about prostitution were used by journalists to discuss, as well as criti-
cize, society. Even though these journalists had their own particular agenda,
they provided information and described prostitutes as being actors in colo-
nial society. It would be true to say that violence and domination were, and
still are, central in prostitution. However, prostitutes were not passive objects,
and they had agency. In one of Việt Sinh’s articles, prostitutes were described
as makers of fashion and a bridge between two civilizations.119 They were
deemed to be the first Vietnamese women to discover western civilization and
it was said that they had to learn how to dress up to please their European cli-
ents. For example, they stopped painting their teeth black, which had been a
local tradition, because it repulsed European men. Later in the 1930s, women
who thought of themselves as modern did the same, and some of them also
wanted to emulate their European counterparts but were afraid they would be
called prostitutes.120 Việt Sinh wrote that the Vietnamese people should not be
surprised if modern girls wear high heels, carry purses, and look at themselves
in the mirror and powder their faces while on the street because prostitutes
already did that.121
116 Vũ Trọng Phụng, Lục xì, p. 86.
117 Ibid., p. 46.
118 N. T., “Deux heures avec une prostituée”.
119 Việt Sinh, “Hà Nội Ban Đêm”, pp. 695–696.
120 Nguyễn Văn Ký, “La Société vietnamienne face à la modernité”, p. 552.
121 See also Vũ Trọng Phụng, Lục xì, pp. 88, 102–103.
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Prostitution in Colonial Hanoi (1885–1954) 565
The materials in the archives do not explain how prostitutes left prostitu-
tion, nor do the news stories. Prostitutes could ask to have their names re-
moved from the prostitution record, but the formalities were difficult since
they had to prove that they had enough ressources to live on their own.122 They
could leave prostitution by marrying a long-term client but the authorities
deliberately made this process difficult:
Therefore, getting married is easy; getting divorced is also easy, and after
only a little while we again see that the woman who has made the turn
must again go back toward the road of prostitution. […] If it’s too easy for
them, then in only a few months the man will abandon his wife and the
woman will return to debauchery, if she hasn’t been forced by her hus-
band to go back to prostitution to take care of her gigolo.123
As shown by the 1914 report, prostitutes were young because, after around 30
years of age, they were no longer attractive for clients, who, in Asia, preferred
young girls. Even though the legal age to be registred as a prostitute was 18 years
old, there was a large number of underage prostitutes working at the brothels,
even at the legal ones. Lành, one of the prostitutes interviewed by Vũ Trọng
Phụng, started at the age of 15.124 But what happened to the prostitutes who
did not marry and did not die from disease, venereal or otherwise?125 Some
went back, perhaps, to their native villages after having made some money
in the city, and others opened their own businesses. The archives are silent
on this issue, however, as if prostitutes were no longer interesting once they
retired from the occupation.
Conclusion
During the entire colonial period, regulation remained the same; prosti-
tutes had to register with the police and undergo medical examinations at
the dispensary, two requirements with which they were not eager to comply.
From the very beginning up through the end of colonization, regulation was,
122 Decree of the Hanoi mayor, 18 May 1915, article 161.
123 Vũ Trọng Phụng, Lục xì, pp. 142, 144.
124 Ibid., p. 125.
125 In 1926, 6 of the 621 prostitutes registered in Hanoi died at the hospital. rg: rst, Serie D64,
File 78667, Municipalité de Hanoi—Dossiers divers relatifs à la police de la voie publique
1921–1942, vna1.
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566 Tracol-Huynh
nonetheless, a failure. However, for physicians, the police, and administra-
tors, whether French or Vietnamese, it was still better than doing nothing to
prevent the spread of venereal diseases. Prostitutes’ lives were defined by the
regulatory system, whether they respected it or hid from its agents. Neverthe-
less, we must go beyond this institutional framework, for it tells us little about
the prostitutes themselves or the world of prostitution. In this complex set-
ting, antagonistic notions were inextricably intertwined, such as visibility and
invisibility, and violence and agency, when it came to houses of prostitution
and prostitutes themselves. The framework remained the same throughout
the colonial period, but changes did occur in that prostitution became more
and more visible and increasingly diverse. For the authorities, prostitution was
supposed to be a regular occupation; in reality, it was more often a second oc-
cupation to which women could turn when they ran out of money. Maintain-
ing control over it was therefore almost impossible; prostitution was, and still
is, a phenomenon which cannot be enclosed within a system of regulation, no
matter how meticulously planned and strict it may be.
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chapter 22
Prostitution in Shanghai
Sue Gronewold
Introduction
Shanghai and Prostitution
This chapter traces the history of sex work in Shanghai over four centuries
and views the history of prostitution in Shanghai as one part of the story of a
changing city in a radically changing China. Of the countries included in this
project, China is of particular interest since it represents a case in which pros-
titution was historically tolerated and regulated legally and socially by a highly
centralized state1 which went through dramatic transformations in the twenti-
eth century, with policies on prostitution shifting just as extremely.
* In the footnotes, Chinese names are rendered in the western fashion with personal name first
and family name last but in the text the traditional Chinese style is maintained.
1 There has been interest in and concern about prostitution throughout Chinese history, and
it has long been a subject of literature, drama, and poetry as well as law, with wide-ranging
sources, especially since the boom in printing in the late sixteenth century and subsequent
rise of vernacular fiction that allowed for much more nuanced and full descriptions of gender
models and sexual mores. Giovanni Vitiello, Libertine’s Friend: Homosexuality and Masculin-
ity in Late Imperial China (Chicago, 2011), pp. 4–5. Another category mined by social histori-
ans has been unofficial histories (yeshi) which were touted by late Qing reformers as the most
useful way to educate the public “to save the nation with fiction.” Quoted in Madeleine Yue
Dong, “Unofficial History and Gender Boundary Crossing in the Early Chinese Republic: Shen
Peizhen and Xiaofengxian”, in Beata Goodman and Wendy Larson (eds), Gender in Motion:
Divisions of Labor and Cultural Change in Late Imperial China (Lanham, 2005), pp. 169–188,
184f1. For Shanghai, good sources exist from the Qing Dynasty, including literary works and
official gazetteers, imperial reign histories, law codes, and court documents. See the discus-
sion in Linda C. Johnson, Shanghai: From Market Town to Treaty Port 1074–1857 (Stanford,
1995), pp. 17–18, 403. For the period covered in this chapter, the increasing variety of sources
include administration and police records about social control as well as medical records
tracking health concerns, with perhaps the most useful popular guidebooks and travellers’
accounts, both Chinese and foreign. Gail Hershatter, Dangerous Pleasures: Prostitution and
Modernity in Twentieth Century China (Berkeley, 1997), pp. 14–17; Christian Henriot, Prostitu-
tion and Sexuality in Shanghai: A Social History 1849–1949 (trans. Noel Castelino) (Cambridge,
2001), pp. 69–70. By the nineteenth century, sensational stories about prostitutes appeared
frequently in popular newspapers and modern periodicals like Shenbao that boomed during
© Sue Gronewold, 2017 | doi 10.1163/9789004346253_023
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568 Gronewold
Early in the Qing Dynasty (1644–1911), the system of court-run brothels was
gradually abolished (along with the status of “outcast” for prostitutes), and
prostitution was exclusively a commercial private enterprise, although regu-
lated by law and controlled by social custom.2 Public policy changed dramati-
cally in the course of the twentieth century, with early calls for abolition in
Republican China (1911–1949) culminating in its presumable total prohibition
under the communist government in 1949. Since 1978, in the aftermath of the
most radical phase of the Maoist revolution, prostitution has re-emerged with
a vengeance in a liberalizing China (although still legally prohibited), and its
relationship with the state continues to be complicated.
this period plus literary sources that include novels, modern plays, cabaret, and film. There is
much recent work on prostitution (and sex in general) by sociologists, anthropologists, and
students of law and criminal justice. Susan Mann, Gender and Sexuality in Modern Chinese
History (Cambridge, 2011); Ruan Fangfu, Sex in China: Studies in Sexology in Chinese Culture
(New York, 1991); Harriet Evans, Women and Sexuality in China: Female Sexuality and Gen-
der since 1949 (New York, 1997); Min Liu, Migration, Prostitution, and Human Trafficking: the
Voice of Chinese Women (New Brunswick, 2011); and Tiantian Zheng, Red Lights: The Lives of
Sex Workers in Post-Socialist China (Minneapolis, 2009). Prostitution and sexuality are also
increasingly popular topics for social historians, many of whom maintain feminist approach-
es to sex work. See Hershatter, Dangerous Pleasures; Evans, Women and Sexuality; Elaine
Jeffreys (ed.), Sex and Sexuality in China (London, 2006). Yet historians of women and sexual-
ity still decry the lack of attention in the official record given to prostitution and have to ferret
out data from disparate sources; see Ruan, Sex in China; Henriot, Prostitution and Sexuality.
Although it has long been standard in China to explain prostitution on economic grounds,
relatively few studies of prostitution regard it primarily as a labour issue, including those
looking at labour migration. Hershatter, Dangerous Pleasures, pp. 388–392, identifies sexolo-
gist Pan Suiming as the closest to offering a labour-market analysis. Lastly, the lack of writing
and research on prostitution reflects the voice of the prostitute herself—and occasionally
himself. Travis S.K. Kong, Chinese Male Sexualities: Memba, Tongzhi, and Golden Boy (New
York, 2010); Kam Louie, Theorizing Chinese Masculinities: Society and Gender in China (Cam-
bridge, 2002), although there is a long tradition of writers conveying the voice of the girl gone
astray. Today, with more openness both in public and in academia, a growing number of
anthropologists, sociologists, sexologists, and photographers are transcribing the stories and
documenting the lives of sex workers up close. Zheng, Red Lights; Liu, Migration; Hershatter,
Dangerous Pleasures, pp. 3–4.
2 At its height during the Tang and Sung Dynasties, government-run brothels included both
those under local officials and the imperial government. Prostitutes were included in China’s
hereditary outcast system along with other rootless people such as actors, barbers, transport
workers, and exiled prisoners. Early Qing emperors ended the government-run brothel sys-
tem and formally abolished hereditary categories, putting in place greater systems of control
for the entire population. See Shunu Wang, Zhongguo Changji Shi [A History of Prostitution in
China] (Beijing, 1934).
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Prostitution in Shanghai 569
Much of what follows could be said for many cities in China, particularly
on the eastern seaboard, but there are a few significant differences. One as-
pect of Shanghai that distinguished it from cities like Hangzhou, Suzhou, and
Nanjing in central China and Beijing in the north is that it was always more
of a commercial than an administrative centre. In Chinese terms, this meant
the predominance of merchants, markets, and guildhalls thriving among the
jumble of docks, warehouses, and shipyards in the surrounding suburbs and
dominating the temples and gardens in the city centre.3 As for the entertain-
ment districts in the city centre, entertainers for the most part catered more to
merchants than to scholar/official elites as in many other cities in the region.
And as an important commercial centre perfectly located at the confluence of
river access to the interior and northern and southern coastal routes, Shanghai
always attracted men looking for sexual services—as well as women in the city
and environs trying to make a livelihood by providing them—but it did not of-
fer the fine courtesan culture of Hangzhou or Suzhou. And its trajectory across
the modern era was also distinct; Shanghai today, like treaty-port Shanghai,
still attracts a disproportionate amount of businessmen, merchants, and en-
trepreneurial outsiders.
Five Distinct Eras
For the period from 1600 to the present, I have identified five distinct eras of
prostitution. The last dynasty, the Manchu Qing Dynasty, which was estab-
lished in 1644, is the start date, and the first phase covers nearly two centuries
of rule by energetic emperors, when the entertainment culture of the previ-
ous high Ming became more regulated. The second phase, from 1830 to 1911,
covers the period when Shanghai was designated a treaty port by the British
after the Opium War (from 1843). During that era, Shanghai’s treaty port devel-
opment, combined with an influx of economic and political refugees fleeing
political uprisings and extreme economic impoverishment, largely reshaped
its population, politics, and power balances. During the third period of Repub-
lican China (1912–1949), after the fall of the last imperial dynasty, Shanghai was
overrun with drugs, prostitutes, gangs, and gambling. Although it was not the
political capital (nearby Nanjing had that distinction), it became in this period
a cultural capital strongly identified with the Chinese Enlightenment of May 4
1919. Near the end of this period, from 1937 to 1945, Shanghai experienced life
as a “lonely island” under Japanese control, with the end of the war bringing
civil war and Communist victory, although practically without bloodshed in
Shanghai. Next, under Mao and the consolidation of the socialist revolution
3 Johnson, Shanghai, Ch. 4.
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570 Gronewold
from 1949–1976 in the People’s Republic of China (prc), the city was allowed
to languish, as it was too closely identified with capitalist commerce. But since
1978 in the current Reform Era, the fifth period, Shanghai’s commercial char-
acter has revived and taken off again—along with an exploding demand for
sexual services.
Definitions
From early imperial times4 until the present, prostitution has been addressed
in both civil and criminal law and defined generally as “the exchange of sexual
services for money or other material recompense”, although the very terms
used for it have been much debated.5 Contemporary sexologist Pan Suiming
suggests that, due to widespread official corruption, China has a special form
of prostitution today through which sex is traded for privileges.6 For most of
Chinese history, prostitution was not illegal in itself, but activities surrounding
it were restricted, particularly trafficking and the disruption of public order.
And the main concern has always been to protect “good” women (liangmin)
in order to maintain patriarchal family honour and ensure it remained distant
from “illicit” sex, which was outside the family and occurred with socially un-
acceptable partners.7
Throughout Chinese history, prostitution was loosely monitored by the im-
perial and/or local state, and it was at times licensed, registered, monitored,
and/or taxed. Although there were and are state-wide laws on the books, most
administrative regulations were and are still local, with each city and admin-
istrative entity having its own variations of categories of prostitutes, affiliated
people, and activities that are regulated. And throughout history there have
been regular debates about whom to include among their ranks. High-level
4 By convention, since 73 b.c. during the great Han Dynasty. Ruan, Sex in China, p. 69;
Matthew Sommers, Sex, Law, and Society in Late Imperial China (Stanford, 2000).
5 For insights into this debate, see Hershatter, Dangerous Pleasures, p. 329; Elaine Jeffreys,
“Feminist Prostitution Debates: Are There any Sex Workers in China?” in Ann E McLaren
(ed.), Chinese Women: Living and Working (London, 2004), pp. 83–105, 98. In pre-1949
Chinese, the general term used for prostitute (which is still common) was jinu. Only recently
has the government used the term maiyin funu (woman who sells sex), while feminists and
international ngos increasingly use terms like xing gongzhe, a direct translation of “worker
in sex trades”. See China Sex Work Organization Network Forum “Research on the Impact of
2010 Crackdown on Sex Work and hiv Intervention in China” (Shanghai, 2011), p. 3.
6 Suming Pan, “Jinchang: Wei shui fuwu?” [“The Prohibition of Prostitution: Whom does it
Serve?”] in Aizibing: shehui, lunli, he falu wenti zhuanjia yantaohui [Report on the Expert Work-
shop on hiv and Prostitution: Social, Ethical, and Legal Issues] (Beijing, 1996), pp. 19–21, 20–21.
7 Mann, Gender and Sexuality, Ch. 1.
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Prostitution in Shanghai 571
courtesan-entertainers from the late Ming period on had much social and liter-
ary clout, refusing to be included under the umbrella of prostitution, like many
high-class entertainers today.
Although prostitution was almost exclusively defined in laws as a female
phenomenon, there is also an extensive tradition of male prostitution, often
linked to actors who almost exclusively serviced other men (see discussion be-
low of other sexualities). But the emphasis throughout Chinese history, espe-
cially since the early Qing, on the family as the key social unit and on sex for
reproduction, has kept discussions of homosexual prostitution muted.8
Throughout history, sex work tended to be episodic for many, and that cer-
tainly applies to much contemporary prostitution. In fact, many young women
exchanging sex for material benefits today would not consider themselves to
be prostitutes. Episodic prostitution also includes needy husbands and their
families pawning wives, and some scholars suggest that perhaps half of all
prostitutes in the past had been pawned. Interviews with poor women today
suggest the practice has not disappeared.9
The Labour Market for Prostitution
Push/Pull Factors and Transformations in Shanghai
To understand the labour market for prostitution in Shanghai, we must first
look more closely at the changes in Shanghai over the centuries. It had long
been one of a number of “gateway cities”10 to the rich Yangzi Valley with rich
agricultural and manufacturing potential, albeit with more commercial than
8 Susan Mann argues there was an inherent contradiction in state policy with homosexual-
ity continuing as an elite literati practice yet at the same time criminalized in 1740 and the
state backing the family as the key social unit, which it has continued to do since, with sex
within marriage the overwhelming ideal. Ibid., pp. 142–158.
9 Hershatter, Dangerous Pleasures, p. 197. Matt Sommers argues that polyandry was so
widespread, with contractual arrangements and an extensive language for renting out
wives for sex work or bringing in another man to work and share the marital bed as “part
of a portfolio of strategies that enable a family to get by” (p. 33), that both forms of poly-
andry should be an integral part of any discussion about marriage in China. “Making Sex
Work: Polyandry as a Survival Strategy in Qing Dynasty China”, in Goodman and Larson,
(eds), Gender in Motion, pp. 29–54.
10 The title of Mary Gamewell’s 1916 book on Shanghai was The Gateway to China: Pictures
of Shanghai (New York, 1916; 2012 reprint); Marie Claire Bergere uses the term in her
seminal article, “The Other China: Shanghai from 1919–1949”, in Christopher Howe (ed.),
Shanghai: Revolution and Development in an Asian Metropolis (Cambridge, 1981), pp. 1–34.
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572 Gronewold
administrative activities in contrast to the other Jiangnan (south of the Yangzi)
cities.11 The early Qing period marked the completion of a cotton revolu-
tion in the region, making Shanghai a major commercial centre (70 per cent
of arable land was planted in cotton by the mid-seventeenth century)12 and
by then13 Shanghai was a key port, especially for trade with Japan and South
and Southeast Asia. Its rising economic importance led merchants to go to
Shanghai from all over the empire where they congregated in hostels linked to
their hometowns (huiguan), and these were quite important in the economic
and social life of the city.
Over time, these factors together reshaped the population and thus the cus-
tomers for its entertainment quarters. Capitalist development also produced
people with great wealth who could afford more public displays of consump-
tion, which often included multiple wives and visits to courtesans.
The key turning point came in the mid-nineteenth century with a huge in-
flux of Chinese from the hinterlands fleeing political and economic turmoil,
especially the calamitous Taiping civil war (1851–64) followed by the Small
Swords Uprising (Xiaodao) that occupied Shanghai from 1853 to 1855 and
forced many people, including the Jiangnan elite, to move to Shanghai and its
protective foreign enclaves.14 Aggressive foreigners whose imperialist policies
created political, economic, and social turmoil as well as international rival-
ries for empire exacerbated these upheavals from 1846 to 1853.15 These disloca-
tions led to more needy women becoming sex workers and to more men of all
It continues to be used into the twenty-first century such as in Edward Denison and Yu
Ren Guang’s Building Shanghai: The Story of China’s Gateway (New York, 2006).
11 Shanghai was first designated a market town in 1074 and a market city, shi, in 1159, finally
reaching the administrative status of a county seat (xian) in 1292 (the lowest political unit
in the Chinese state with a magistrate appointed by the central government), with its own
xian college in 1294 for aspirants for the civil service examination and posts (Johnson,
Shanghai, Ch. 1). Its role as a port in the Yuan and Ming Dynasties vacillated with chang-
ing rivers, silting harbours, and, in the Ming era (1388–1644) with prohibitions on mari-
time trade, was replaced up to the early Qing era by a major cotton revolution in the
region. Its success can again be measured in its promotion to higher administrative
status; by 1740 it was styled a circuit (dao). These changes had various implications for
sex work.
12 Johnson, Shanghai, p. 58.
13 Zhang Zhongmin, Shanghai cong kaifa zouxiang kaifang, 1368–1842 [Shanghai from Incep-
tion to Opening] (Kunming, 1990), p. 178; Bergere, Other China, p. 24.
14 Frederic Wakeman Jr. and Wen-hsin Yeh (eds), Shanghai Sojourners (Berkeley, 1993).
15 A period Johnson calls the “internationalization of Shanghai.” Johnson, Shanghai, Ch. 9.
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Prostitution in Shanghai 573
c lasses and provenances seeking sexual services. The designation of Shanghai
as a treaty port also led to its bifurcation into a Chinese city and foreign city, with
parallel administrations in the International Settlement (primarily British),
the French Concession, and the Chinese city proper and extensive surround-
ing suburbs. Prostitutes, gangs, and political activists all manipulated the
different regulations, populations, and institutions in these separate adminis-
trative areas. Thus, by the early twentieth century, Shanghai became, in com-
mon parlance, the “brothel of Asia”.16
Trafficking in girls and women was endemic in twentieth-century Republi-
can China, as it had been throughout Chinese history, with females available
among the poorest strata everywhere, particularly in the increasingly impov-
erished countryside. Recruiters in Shanghai were either local abductors, trans-
porters who located and conveyed women back from the hinterlands usually
from regions suffering from famine or other catastrophes, or they were local
brokers, called “white ants” who were often themselves women.17 Girls and
women of all ages were pulled into what Matthew Sommers calls “the per-
vasive market for women’s sexual and reproductive labor”,18 often with some
degree of choice but parents or husbands making economic decisions for the
women themselves, calculating their (often dire) options. Gail Hershatter ar-
gues that sex work as a choice, involving some kind of economic calculation,
was perhaps more prevalent than coercion, given the continued contact be-
tween most prostitutes and their families.19
By the twentieth century, Shanghai was a booming entrepot for both prod-
ucts from the interior leaving its port and for the manufacture and sale of
many goods, particularly textiles. By the 1920s its factories had been modern-
ized and predominately employed women.20 Warlord violence in the 1920s and
Japanese control from 1937 to 1945 meant there was a constant influx of mi-
grants and refugees into Shanghai, resulting in crowded conditions and fierce
competition for work that left many women vulnerable to prostitution. Not
all women in Shanghai could find other employment, and job security was
16 Henriot, Prostitution and Sexuality, p. 6.
17 Bai maiyi. See Hershatter, Dangerous Pleasures, p. 7.
18 Sommers, Gender in Motion, p. 51; Sue Gronewold, Beautiful Merchandise: Prostitution in
China 1860–1937 (New York, 1984), Ch. 3; Henriot, Prostitution and Sexuality, Ch. 7.
19 Hershatter, Dangerous Pleasures, p. 182.
20 Marie Claire Bergere, The Golden Age of the Chinese Bourgeoisie (Cambridge, 1989);
Emily Honig, Sisters and Stranger: Women in the Shanghai Cotton Mills, 1919–1949
(Stanford, 1986).
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574 Gronewold
uneven at best, so many women (married or not) moved in and out of prostitu-
tion to supplement their income. Shanghai was also the centre of other kinds
of production and services, with an underworld involved in opium, gambling,
and pornography, much of it intertwined with prostitution.21
Distinct about Shanghai (and China more generally) are the swings of po-
litical fortunes and their implications for women and prostitution. During the
Maoist period, prostitution was linked to the imperial and “feudal” past, and it
was harshly punished and forcefully condemned. After a period of strong re-
pression, it was claimed that prostitution had been totally eradicated by 1958.22
Banned sexual practices therefore took place furtively, with almost nothing
written about them except for some mention in literature and films.23
Since 1978, the migration of large numbers of young male (and female)
workers to Shanghai from the countryside has contributed to a booming com-
mercial sex industry. Under Mao a rigidly enforced new residential registra-
tion system (hukou) tied the entire population to fixed places of residency,
but this system has been considerably relaxed since 1978, creating a mobile
national labour force,24 and there are perhaps 150 million migrants in China
today.25 Migration results in men and women being more tenuously attached
to traditional families and social norms, and their greater freedom in sexual ac-
tivities is literally remaking social mores. Both male migrants and local males
take advantage of available, vulnerable young women, sometimes involving
21 Fred Wakeman described the liminal area of the extra-boundary “Badlands”, the less-
patrolled western end of the foreign concessions, where poorer women carried out sex
work in a threatening climate of violence and criminality. Frederic Wakeman, Jr, Shanghai
Badlands: Wartime Terrorism and Urban Crime (Cambridge, 1996).
22 Evans, Women and Sexuality in China, p. 175.
23 For example, sexual violence against youth “sent down” in the countryside during the Cul-
tural Revolution in 1966–1976. See Guangnai Shan, Zhongguo changji—guoquo he xianzai
[Chinese Prostitution Past and Present], (Beijing 1995), p. 3; Hershatter, Dangerous Plea-
sures, p. 332; see also two films about “sent down” youth during the Cultural Revolution:
“Wild Mountain” (Ye shan), and “Xiu: Sent Down Girl”, plus Yuan-Tsung Chen, Dragon’s
Village: An Autobiographical Novel about Revolutionary China (New York, 1981) about 1950s
land reform and the challenges it faced.
24 Arianne Gaetano and Tamara Jacka, “Introduction”, in On the Move: Women in Rural to Ur-
ban Migration in Contemporary China (New York, 2004), pp. 14–20. For Shanghai’s chang-
ing hukou policies, see Ibid., p. 34, 49f, 51f.
25 Liu, Migration, Prostitution, p. 3, quoting 2007 China Labor Bureau Statistics. According
to the recent Chinese press, policies will soon be put into place that further modernize
agriculture, releasing between 100–200 million rural residents from agricultural work and
moving them to urban residences.
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Prostitution in Shanghai 575
prostitution.26 Today, the media is filled with stories of men (and women) who
have been exposed and prosecuted for trafficking children (including boys)
and young women.
While migrant men are bound to their original homes, returning frequently
to take care of farmlands or filial duties, more and more migrant women, since
they are fated to be removed from their families anyway, are choosing to stay
in these new work places so they can enjoy the greater freedom available to
them in both work and marriage (even though they will always be regarded as
outsiders).27 Not finding other suitable work and/or marriage, some migrant
women choose prostitution, fall victim to deceit,28 or are pressed by their
bosses to offer sexual services to attract customers.29 Hostessing seems to be
preferable for some to labour intensive industries that offer meagre wages in
often exploitative, dead-end jobs,30 but living “the life” is doubly hard for poor
women migrants who face tremendous amounts of discrimination as rural
women workers.31
Not all prostitution today in Shanghai is the result of traffickers, an excess
of men, or wretched poverty. By the 1980s Reform Era, when the economy
opened up and prostitution reappeared in most Chinese cities, new economic
motivations for sex work emerged. The general consumer ethos of the period
combined with the relatively easy access to call girls, taxi dancers, masseuses,
and karaoke bar workers for men, and the availability of these jobs for women,
means that shop girls or women in sweatshop jobs can aspire to buy urban
fashions, jewellery, and apartments that their meagre incomes would not ordi-
narily allow.32 Prostitution draws on all manner of women in China today, from
26 Liu, Migration, Prostitution argues that while there is some trafficking, most migrants
move of their own volition and then enter prostitution as the best choice available to
them.
27 Louise Beyon, “Dilemmas of the Heart: Rural Working Women and their Hopes for the
Future” in Gaetano and Jacka, On the Move, pp. 131–150; Lin Tan and Susan E. Short, “Living
as Double Outsiders: Migrant Women’s Experiences of Marriage in a County Level City”,
in Gaetano and Jacka, Ibid, pp. 151–176.
28 Binbin Lou et al., “Migration Experiences of Young Women from Four Counties in Sichuan
and Anhui”, in Gaetano and Jacka, Ibid., pp. 207–242, 223–224.
29 Tamara Jacka, “Migrant Women’s Stories”, in Gaetano and Jacka, Ibid., pp. 279–285, 282.
30 Tiantian Zheng, “From Peasant Women to Bar Hostesses” in Gaetano and Jacka, Ibid.,
pp. 80–109, 91.
31 Called pejoratively dangongmei. Tamara Jacka, Rural Women in Urban China: Gender,
Migration, and Social Change (Armonk, ny, 2006).
32 Liu, Migration, Prostitution, Ch. 5, in which she finds all manner of reasons, from sup-
porting families to paying for expensive urban lifestyles; Zheng, “From Peasant Women
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576 Gronewold
poorly paid young girls to older women laid off in the great textile contraction
of the 1990s and to migrant women of all ages.33 Roaring capitalism has re-
sulted in great economic inequality, and rampant consumerism has produced
both the ability to pay for sexual services and men and women craving instant
fashion and status not attainable on most salaries. The private businesses, both
Chinese and foreign, that have boomed since the 1980s now seek “Miss Proto-
cols”, a new category of employees: attractive young women for very visible pr
office jobs.34
Social Profiles
The best introduction to the social profiles of prostitutes is to look at legal/
customary categories, both traditional and contemporary.35 Pre-1949 Shang-
hai had its own legal and popularly accepted hierarchy,36 with at least four
and sometimes as many as six categories.37 The seven categories used in China
today in fact come from standard Shanghai police usage.38 The top category,
loosely and controversially linked to prostitution and whose disappearance
was mourned in the late nineteenth century, were high-class courtesans, often
called “storytellers”, who prided themselves on being entertainers with musi-
cal, poetic, dramatic, and dance skills, not sex, to share.39 These women were
to Bar Hostesses”, pp. 82–85, stresses rural women’s need to adopt urban styles to avoid
discrimination and to be able to both find work and a husband.
33 According to 1991 and 1999 Women’s Federation surveys, reported in Ren Xin, “Prostitu-
tion and Employment Opportunities for Women”, available at: http://www.lolapress.
org/artenglish/xinre13.htm; last accessed 10 July 2017, and Quanhe Yang and Guo Fei,
“Occupational Attainments of Rural to Urban Temporary Economic Migrants in China
1985–1990”, International Migration Review, 30 (1996), pp. 771–787, more than 800,000
women were laid off in the 1990s and the Women’s Federation retrained over 990,000.
34 Xin, “Prostitution and Employment”. See the discussion of “pr Ladies” in Ann Jordan, “Hu-
man Rights, Violence against Women, and Economic Development”, Columbia University
Online Journal of Gender and Law, 5 (1996), pp. 216–272, 261 fn17.
35 Most writing about prostitution proceeds from these hierarchies with their differences
in women’s backgrounds, education, age, health, and economic status, although some
scholars see the categories as more ideal than real; see Henriot, Prostitution and Sexuality,
p. 14.
36 Ibid., Chs 1, 3; Hershatter, Dangerous Pleasures, Ch. 2.
37 Henriot, Prostitution and Sexuality, pp. 76–79.
38 “Sex Work in China”, Asia Monitor Resource Center, available at: http://www.amrc.org.hk/
content/sex-work-china; last accessed 12 July 2017.
39 Called shuyu, a term that harks back nearly 1,000 years, but also known as guanren, “official
persons”, perhaps harking back to Yuan and Ming court prostitution, xiansheng (mister),
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Prostitution in Shanghai 577
inextricably linked to scholar-officials in the popular mind. By the twentieth
century, however, these elite courtesans had been collapsed into the next cat-
egory popularly known as “sing song girls” who dressed in elaborate costumes
and specialized in hosting banquets and gambling parties for merchants and
well-placed officials.40 Sometimes they accompanied clients to plays or other
forms of entertainment. Their brothels charged a set fee for all services. Next
in the hierarchy were “tea-house” prostitutes whose houses were larger but had
smaller rooms; their singing was not as refined and sex was more immediately
and readily available.41 The next category which was purely about sex involved
trysting houses where wealthy merchants could discretely meet concubines
or those who professed to be respectable women needing a safe, secret place.
By the twentieth century, trysting houses gave way to “salt pork shops” for
immediate sex.42 The largest category of prostitutes in Shanghai in the late
Republican era, “wild chicks” or “pheasants”,43 lived and sometimes enter-
tained in brothels, but most of their work was done as streetwalkers and they
took men back to their rooms. Consisting of many subcategories, these mobile
prostitutes ran the gamut from a middling more selective class with fancier
rooms to poorer prostitutes in more sordid surroundings. This appears to have
been a new category, with no mention of public solicitation in China before
the twentieth century. Also numerous were those in opium dens that gradu-
ally became brothels called “flower smoke rooms”44 and at the very bottom
were “nailsheds”, flophouses that were small, dirty, barely furnished, and had
no amenities.45 Another group often assumed to be prostitutes were actors and
singers—prostitution in China having always been linked, even in the breach,
“singsong girls”, or shushi, “storytelling officials.” The most well-known were ming-
ji “famous/prestigious courtesans”. Hershatter, Dangerous Pleasures.
40 These women were referred to as changsan, the “long three”, referring to dominos and the
old fee of 3 yuan for a drink and another 3 for sex; they were at the top of the hierarchy in
Shanghai in the twentieth century.
41 Called ersan, “two-three” and yao-er, “one-two” also named for dominos, with ersan
absorbed into changsan (and both still calling themselves courtesans). Yao er survived
through the Republican era.
42 Trysting houses were referred to first as taiji and then later as xianrouzhuang with the fast
food connotations of salt pork.
43 Yeji or zhiji, these mobile (liuji) sex workers were further divided into xiaji (“lower class”)
or putong (“ordinary”).
44 Huayan jian or yanhua jian.
45 Dingpeng. All the above categories are described in Hershatter, Dangerous Pleasures,
pp. 41–53; Henriot, Prostitution and Sexuality, Chs 1–3; Baosheng Yu [Wang Tao], Yinru
Zazhi [Miscellaneous Notes from the Seaside] (Shanghai, 1870, reprinted in 1989). Henriot
lists other groups important in the 1930s and ‘40s that probably involved occasional pros-
titution, but he argues they should not be included in any official taxonomy; they include
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578 Gronewold
with entertainment—and women returned to the stage in Shanghai with the
first all-female troupe in 1870,46 and after 1911 women performed in new-style
teahouses where they often cross-dressed and portrayed men, as well as in the
new, popular Yue opera imported from the Zhejiang countryside.47
Today the quasi-official categories used by the police and public alike num-
ber approximately seven. The most elite companion is a new-style concubine
or second wife serving one client alone, although now kept not on the family
estate but in a separate apartment, with regular, usually monthly, payments.
The second category, contracted wives, have less security and their length of
service is not assured but they are “packaged”, essentially rented short-term
for business trips or official events. The third category includes escort girls and
ktv (karaoke) hostesses, bar girls who may but are not required to have sex,
available instead primarily as companions for men while they eat and drink at
bars, restaurants, and dance halls. They are sometimes called “three accompa-
niment girls” because they offer the three services of drinking, dancing, and
singing. There are many of these in Shanghai. The fourth category are “ding
dong girls” who call men in their hotel rooms and invite them out. The fifth
are also ubiquitous in China today, “massage parlour” or “hair salon” girls who
provide services like massages, haircuts or hairstyling, or sauna visits along
with sex, usually inside an establishment, not outside (unless their services are
provided on the street, which does happen). The sixth category of prostitutes,
street walkers, solicit their customers from bars or hotels, sometimes for fon-
dling in movie houses, and, as is general in China, they work without pimps.
The last are literally at the bottom of society, “women who live in a shed” who
service the poorest men, usually migrant workers, sometimes living with or
among them, exchanging sex for food, shelter, and basic survival.48
There is some dispute about the common belief that prostitutes, their hous-
es, and their clients shared the same regional, class, or ethnic backgrounds.
masseuses, waitresses, and professional (taxi) dancers in the new dance halls. Henriot,
Prostitution and Sexuality, Ch. 4.
46 Mann, Gender and Sexuality, p. 149.
47 Hui-ling Chou, “Striking Their Own Poses: the History of Cross-Dressing on the Chinese
Stage”, The Drama Review, 42 (1997), pp. 130–152, 147; Jin Jiang, Women Playing Men: Yue
Opera and Social Change in Twentieth Century China (Seattle, 2009), pp. 46–59; Mann,
Gender and Sexuality, p. 150.
48 In Chinese, second wives are ernai; contracted girls are baopo; escort girls are peinu; “three
accompaniment girls” are sanpeixiaojie; “ding dong girls” are ding dong xiaojie; massage
parlour girls are falangmei; streetwalkers are jienu; and at the bottom, shantytown prosti-
tutes are xiagongpeng. See the discussion in Asia Monitor Resource Center, “Sex Work in
China.”
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Prostitution in Shanghai 579
Instead, it appears that sex work lacked the long procurement chains found in
other kinds of work.49 In fact, most brothels and entertainment establishments
were notable for the diverse origins and backgrounds of the women within.50
As for their exact provenance, although there was a scattering of some from
further afield, nearly all Shanghai prostitutes were found to be from the city
and its suburbs or had migrated from towns and cities in the two closest prov-
inces, Zhejiang and Jiangsu.
The situation today, however, reflects new patterns of migration which re-
spond to the burgeoning growth of China in the world economy and the vora-
cious need for female labour. In 1920, an estimated 82 per cent of Shanghai’s
population were migrants, primarily from close-by areas. It is estimated that
today about 25 per cent of the population in major Chinese cities is “floating”
away from their official hometowns, with migrants traveling to work on the
eastern seaboard today from further afield, particularly from the poor and
overpopulated provinces of Sichuan, Hunan, and Guizhou. Today most seem
to have accompanied or “followed” earlier migrants from their region, district,
town, or village.51
In the past, women’s social background, educational level, and general
health declined down the ranks in the hierarchy of sex workers. Age was of-
ten inverse; women at the bottom were older, with many former higher-class
49 As described in Honig, Sisters and Strangers.
50 Henriot, Prostitution and Sexuality, p. 135.
51 Both twentieth-century social surveys and extensive records kept at rescue institutions
like the Anti-Kidnapping Society (set up by local Chinese) and the western missionary-
run Door of Hope have provided little evidence for regional or ethnic compartmentaliza-
tion. Most elite courtesans claimed to have come from Suzhou with its traditional literati
allure, but much of this was probably false advertising. Comparatively small numbers of
elite prostitutes from Canton and Ningbo entertained men from those areas. Prostitutes
from eastern Guangdong who had first serviced foreign sailors there, derogatorily labelled
“salt water sisters”, made their way to Shanghai by the late nineteenth century to work
with poor dock workers and sailors in the Hangkou port area. Some authors assert that
only poor, desperate, and unhealthy women would do this work, while others attest to the
striking differences in style, song, and dress of these women and their rejection by other
prostitutes and Chinese clients; Hershatter, Dangerous Pleasures, p. 40. Jacka and Gaeta-
no, On the Move, pp. 24–25 report that in one establishment 72 per cent were from a single
area and 95 per cent were from a single area in another, with another study reporting
that 51 per cent of migrants from Sichuan follow their provincial counterparts. Perhaps
migrants travel with fellow migrants and separate later. Also, see the women interviewed
by Wei Zhong, “Red Light District” cited in Zhong, “A Close Look at China’s Sex Industry”
in Lianhe Zaobao (October 2, 2000).
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580 Gronewold
prostitutes.52 What has changed dramatically today is the background of
women involved in prostitution. The top three categories today often include
women with more education and social standing. Even the fourth category
of women soliciting in hotels might include local university students.53 Most
researchers, scholars, and popular writers on sexuality, gender, and prostitu-
tion in China today have remarked on this change. One scholar, while trying to
explain the extraordinary figure of perhaps 20 million (some estimates reach
30 million or more) prostitutes in China—perhaps 500,000 in Shanghai
alone—posits that there has been a restructuring of morality with prostitutes
in bars and dance halls now including a range from migrants with no education
to urban girls who want fancy things and highly educated, pretty urban girls
who “go into it voluntarily to have a golden nest.”54 The bottom two categories
of sex work continue to be carried out by the poorest, least educated women
who often are migrants, or, as was the case in the past, women who were at
one time higher-level prostitutes. The age of prostitutes has also changed. A
comparison of arrest records from 1991 and 1999 shows an increase in the age
of the oldest from 37 to 54, reflecting the social and economic restructuring
that has left older women without adequate incomes.55 It is estimated that
there are perhaps 100 million unemployed women in China,56 and Shanghai, a
textile centre that saw massive firings of women workers in the 1990s, provides
a large share of the total.
Other Kinds of Sex Work
Child Prostitution
There were always children in brothels, the daughters of prostitutes plus young
girls procured to be trained and brought up as entertainers, as well as girls do-
ing any manner of work. Customers preferred sex with young girls; brothels
demanded higher fees for virgins, with special initiation ceremonies in better
establishments. There is still a preference across China for young sex workers,
and that has been reinforced since the appearance of aids as there is common
belief that young girls are freer of disease. There is some implication that the
52 Gronewold, Beautiful Merchandise; Hershatter, Dangerous Pleasures, p. 48; Henriot, Pros-
titution and Sexuality, p. 90.
53 Hershatter, Dangerous Pleasures, pp. 333–343.
54 Zong, “Close Look”.
55 Xin, “Prostitution and Employment Opportunities for Women”.
56 Zhong, “Close Look”.
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Prostitution in Shanghai 581
One Child Policy combined with the cultural preference for a male heir has
resulted in more trafficked girl babies, but that has been little studied.57
Male Homosexual Prostitution
Male homosexual prostitution was quite common throughout Chinese history
and is a major theme in literature and art. Male entertainers, especially those
who played female roles (dan) in opera, were the most sought after, and in
the early twentieth century, popular female impersonators in Shanghai like
Mei Langfang attracted particularly wealthy benefactors.58 In the 1920s and
‘30s, however, both homosexuality and prostitution were labelled deviant and
criminal, resulting in their prohibition and then total suppression under Mao.
Today, male prostitution has resurfaced and is particularly visible in Shanghai,
an international destination for gay men (and women), even though homosex-
uality has been strongly suppressed by the socialist state and was labelled “hoo-
liganism” (liumang) in the 1979 legal code. Newspapers frequently run exposes
of young men who turn to prostitution for quick money, as in a spate of sto-
ries in 2011 and 2012 about a high school male prostitution ring in Shanghai.59
A 2011 national survey of prostitutes which included Shanghai found that over
a third of their respondents were male, almost all between the ages of 20 and
30; they are called “money boys” and primarily work at clubs or rental houses.
They are often migrants, and there is great demand for their services, but their
lives are unstable, marked by frequent moves—they are constantly harassed
and their customers seem to want greater variety—and a very high incidence
of venereal diseases and aids.60
57 One of the unintended consequences of China’s draconian One Child Policy which has
been effect since 1980 is that there are now an average of 100 females for every 120 males in
the population, and in some areas the demographic sex imbalance exceeds 100/150. Pre-
dictions are that by 2020 there will be 40 million men unable to find wives. The result will
be a far higher demand for sex workers, which ironically will remove even more women
from the marriage market. Under these circumstances, the sale and/or kidnapping of fe-
male children for wives or prostitutes is likely to increase, and there is anecdotal evidence
that this is happening already. Susan Greenhalgh, “Patriarchal Demographics: China’s Sex
Ratios Reconsidered”, Population and Development Review, 38 (2013), pp. 130–149, 134–135.
58 Vitiello, Libertine’s Friend, pp. 6–9, 251 fn 6; Ruan, Sex in China, Ch. 7.
59 Widely reported on, as in the South China Morning Post, 12 November 2011.
60 Xiao di are “money boys”. Kong, Chinese Male Homosexualities, argues that many migrant
males turn to prostitution as the only way to make money but as the result of government
repression, their low rural status and general homophobic culture, these men are the
“transient queer labour” who are always on the move; also see Xing Zhao “Selling Smiles:
Inside the World of Shanghai’s Male Sex Workers” in cnn International, 30 June 2010;
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Transgender Sex Workers
A new category among Shanghai sex workers includes those who are transgen-
dered or ambiguously gendered and who argue for its long history in China, but
as yet there is little mention of it in studies of prostitution. According to a few
surveys, transgender sex workers are perhaps the worst treated, with high lev-
els of violence, disease, and psychological problems with trauma and identity
issues (one respondent in the survey called people like himself “evil spirits”.)61
Changing Working Conditions
Working conditions for prostitutes in Shanghai have always varied greatly, de-
pending on the prostitute’s class and clientele, and that is still the case. Like
modern day mistresses, in the past the most sought-after courtesans would
attend to only one or two clients a night, usually of her own choosing, and
they would respect the elaborate rules that governed her art; she would enter-
tain them at elegant teahouses, restaurants, and hotels attended by her large
retinue, while, at the other end of the spectrum, the lowest level of prostitute
would be pressed to service dozens of men a day in an unsanitary brothel.
Those in the middle were available for sex, not entertainment, and they had
to accept all who came to them; they were probably in debt to their madams,
who also often used drug addiction as a means of control. Like the streetwalk-
ers in China today, they were increasingly desperate for customers and money
to survive (and in many cases, gave most of what they made to their families).62
Violence seems always to have been an occupational hazard at all levels of
sex work, both at brothels at the hands of harsh madams and customers or the
public at large, as well as the state (police in particular), and it is an issue now
as much as it was in the past. Fear of violence and mistreatment by both clients
and managers have always been the major reasons prostitutes try to escape the
life.63
available at: www.cnngo.com/shanghai/life/selling-smiles-shanghais-male-sex-workers;
last accessed 23 September 2011; Vivien Cui “Money Boys Become Currency of Pimps”,
in South China Morning Post, 25 October 2005; China Sex Worker Organization Network
Forum, “Research”.
61 China Sex Worker Organization Network Forum, “Research”; also see Ruan, Sex in China,
Ch. 8.
62 Henriot, Prostitution and Sexuality, Ch. 3.
63 Zheng, Red Lights, pp. 70–72, 83–85, 90–92, 104, 159; Min, Migration, pp. 133–138; Henriot,
Sex and Sexuality, Ch. 6; Hershatter, Dangerous Pleasures, pp. 145–165.
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Prostitution in Shanghai 583
In addition, there are and have always been serious health risks associ-
ated with prostitution, from diseases like syphilis (almost half of the prosti-
tutes arrested by the police in 1951 had a combination of both syphilis and
gonorrhoea64) and problems of pregnancy and frequent abortions to today’s
hiv/aids epidemic.65 In the past, the majority of prostitutes suffered from
diseases but were not treated. There were attempts in the late nineteenth cen-
tury to impose medical examinations patterned after the Contagious Diseases
Act in Britain, and in 1877 a venereal disease lock hospital was opened in the
International Settlement,66 but both only dealt with women servicing foreign-
ers and neither managed to treat many prostitutes as they avoided anything
that would prevent them from working.67 Today, hiv/aids is rapidly spread-
ing through the population among intravenous drug users and sex workers on
the east coast as the result of a general lack of information and infrequent
condom use (60 per cent of males who have sexual encounters with sex work-
ers in high class hotels use condoms versus 30 per cent in karaoke bars).68 It is
estimated that 1.5 million Chinese nationals are currently infected, and there
has been a 30 per cent increase per year of infections on some parts of the east
coast where there are many rural migrants, mostly men who often utilize the
services of prostitutes; at the same time, many migrant women there turn to
prostitution. Health officials and advocates who work with prostitutes worry
that one result of harsh “strike hard” campaigns is that prostitutes tend to forgo
the use of condoms both during and after campaigns so they can attract more
customers to make up for lost time and money paid for fines.69
64 Henriot, Prostitution and Sexuality, p. 149.
65 Hershatter, Dangerous Pleasures, pp. 36, 143, 174–176, 316, 348, 463 fn 138, Ch. 9; Henriot,
Prostitution and Sexuality; Zheng, Red Lights.
66 Kyle Macpherson, A Wilderness of Marshes: The Origins of Public Health in Shanghai,
1 843–1893 (Berkeley, 1987), pp. 213–258.
67 Hershatter, Dangerous Pleasures, Ch. 8.
68 Zheng, Red Lights, p. 62; another study found only 13 per cent in 1995 reported using con-
doms with 20 per cent in 2002; condom use does not appear to have been openly dis-
cussed until the 1940s and even now discussions of it are relatively rare, although the
medical literature suggests there were rather effective traditional methods for preventing
pregnancy.
69 Joan Kaufmann “hiv, Sex Work, and Civil Society in China”, Journal of Infectious Diseases,
204 supplement 5 (2011), pp. 218–222. Also see China Sex Worker Organization Network
Forum “Research on Crackdown”. According to an article by Maureen Fan, “Prostitution
Flourishes in China”, Washington Post 8 April 2007, sociologist Jing Jun reported that in
one study, older more desperate female sex workers had higher rates of infection, with
60 per cent of workers aged over 60 infected with hiv.
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584 Gronewold
Prostitute/Employer/Client Relationships
Most traditional prostitution was carried out at registered brothels or other
establishments run by madams who were often retired prostitutes and staffed
mostly by female servants for cleaning, makeup, sewing, and foot care, plus
teachers of dance and music. Many writers commented on the fictive kin rela-
tionships that existed at such establishments, where madams were addressed
as “mother”, older women as “aunts”, and other prostitutes as “sisters.”70 It ap-
pears that the language of family in such relationships persists today; sex work-
ers often call their madam “mother” and even male managers are referred to as
“mamasan” in ethnographies of the world of male prostitutes.71 Although the
Chinese system did not and still does not include pimps as in the west, in the
multiple new venues for sex services like clubs and bars there is an increasing
need for managers who not only supervise but also protect and control the
working girls (and boys). The relationship, particularly when sex workers are
not able to “go out”, verges on enslavement.
Interactions with courtesans required an elaborate code of conduct, and
only men who were cognizant of its intricate rules were allowed to partici-
pate (novices and “country bumpkins” were the subject of much ridicule in
this regard in novels and films). Elaborate rules and customs continue to be
part of prostitutes’ lives, as in the description in contemporary ethnographies
of karaoke and dance hall girls today,72 along with popular films, novels, and
blogs (like Shanghai Baby). The game involves getting as much from clients
as possible without giving up their freedom, or much sex. But there is as wide
a range of prostitute/employer/client relationships as there are multiple ar-
rangements at all levels.
Prostitutes’ Agency and Resistance
Certainly courtesans and entertainers at the top of their profession had a great
deal more freedom than the “good” women cloistered in their homes. F eminists
70 My research on rescued prostitutes at the Door of Hope attests to the often powerful
ties that existed within these establishments, even though many verged on the abusive.
Gronewold, Beautiful Merchandise, 1984.
71 Vivien Cui, “Money Boys”, cites the cases of Li Ning, who manages money boys in Nanjing,
and Bing Bing in Dalian, who at any time has thirty money boys in his employ with hun-
dreds of clients, having worked over the years with more than 500 boys.
72 Zheng, Red Lights, Ch. 7.
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Prostitution in Shanghai 585
and sex researchers have debated endlessly about the meaning of this freedom
as well as the issue of agency for women and sex work.73 At all levels of society,
there always have been some women who started sex work of their own voli-
tion, deciding that engaging in this kind of work was the most preferable way
to support themselves—and often their families, husbands, or children—and
many make the same decision in today’s Shanghai.
Likewise, there have been many debates about the notion of resistance.
There have been cases of prostitutes protesting in groups, most famously in
Shanghai in 1920, a time of mass strikes, when sing-song girls demonstrated
on the streets to protest new laws that categorized them as prostitutes; their
banners read, “We sell our smiles, not our bodies.”74 There are also celebrated
stories of prostitutes joining together in the twentieth century to show their
patriotism, especially the (most likely) apocryphal story of prostitutes in near-
by Nanjing offering their own bodies to save “good” women from rampaging
Japanese troops in 1937.75 Today, there are scattered instances of prostitutes
and their advocates using international human rights appeals and legal lan-
guage, such as the well-known feminist activist Ye Haiyan, known as Liumang
Yan or “Hooligan Sparrow”, who has taken the fight for prostitutes’ rights to the
internet. In Shanghai, an advocacy group for male prostitutes, Shanghai Leiyi
73 In fact, Catherine Vance Yeh has argued that when high-level courtesans moved from
Jiangnan to Shanghai after the mid-nineteenth century rebellions, courtesans themselves
took advantage of the foreign concessions to redefine their use of space and time so they
could attract more wealthy merchants rather than traditional literati as lovers (often
popular male opera stars) in their private houses (sidi or sifang) and to use parks and
carriages as newly defined public spaces for their own purposes. Yeh, “Playing with the
Public: Late Qing Courtesans and their Opera Singer Lovers” in Goodman and Larson,
Gender in Motion, pp. 145–168, 145–156.
74 Gronewold, Beautiful Merchandise; Henriot, Prostitution and Sexuality, pp. 62–64.
75 Portrayed most recently in the Zhang Yimou film, Flowers of War based on the Yan Galing
novel of the same name. Historian Catherine Vance Yeh in Gender in Motion, “Playing
with the Public”, asserts that one of the most famous women in Republican China was
a courtesan, Xiaofengxian, the favourite of prominent general Cai E. She was literate, in-
terested in literature and politics, and independent (she paid the madam in her brothel
so she could choose her visitors), and she took great political risks for her lover. Hershat-
ter, Dangerous Pleasures, pp. 171–174, recounts stories of prostitutes around the turn of
the century getting involved in patriotic actions; one contributed to the rights recovery
movement in 1906, another established a Courtesan Evolution Corps in 1914 to support
the new nation, and several prominent courtesans were involved in establishing schools
for prostitutes, in line with calls for women’s education in general.
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586 Gronewold
(now Shanghai Xinsheng), offers services and legal help in combating forms of
abuse.76
Prostitutes’ Culture
As entertainers traditionally linked to the world of literate scholar-officials,
Shanghai prostitutes, particularly higher level courtesans, were associated
with elite culture, singing and playing classical songs especially on the pipa
(Chinese lute), acting out scenes from traditional opera, dancing, reciting po-
etry, and other social skills such as serving tea and playing elaborate drinking
games with classical allusions. Courtesans were known for their trend-setting
elaborate fashion.77 By the late nineteenth century, the formless traditional
women’s tunic was transformed into the sexy chipao (cheong sam) by tailor-
ing it tighter with a high side slit, and it became identified with the “sing-song
girls” now included as part of the new “courtesan” world.78 Courtesans’ elabo-
rate makeup, jewellery, hairdos, accessories, and foot-binding shoes were all
were closely watched and copied. Their exploits, romances, intrigues, and
petty fights were followed in the tabloid press and formed the substance of
a distinct courtesan novel genre. Visiting courtesans in their dazzlingly beau-
tiful establishments, engaging them for formal banquets in restaurants and
teahouses, and trying to become a favoured client were all part of elaborate
rituals of which the courtesans were masters and ostensibly in control.79
76 China Sex Worker Organization Network Forum, “Report”; Sara Davis, “Police Crackdowns
in China: The Health and Human Rights of Sex Workers”, in Harvard School of Public
Health’s blog for Health and Human Rights: An International Journal, 25 March 2012; avail-
able at: http://www.hhropenforum.org/tag/anti-prostitution-laws/; last accessed 23 Sep-
tember 2012; Zhao, “Selling Smiles”; Daily Beast, 31 July 2012.
77 As celebrated in 1980s nostalgic films like Hou Hsiao-hsien’s Flowers of Shanghai, Chen
Kaige’s Farewell my Concubine and the images in popular late nineteenth- and early
twentieth-century Shanghai pictorials like Duanshizhai huabao with flamboyant clothing
of bright colours and extravagant embroidery.
78 See Henriot, Ch. 1, for the evolution of the chipao; see also Antonia Finnane, Changing
Clothes in China: Fashion, History, Nation (New York, 2008), p. 121.
79 Like Precious Mirror of Flowers (Pinhua baojian, 1849), Traces of Flowers and Moon (Hua-
yuehen, 1872), Han Bangqing’s The Sing Song Girls of Shanghai (Haishanghua liezhuan,
1894), the sordid Nine-Tailed Tortoise (Jiuweigui, 1911) or for a later period, Eileen Zhang’s
Lust, Caution and Love in a Fallen City (New York, 2007). Hershatter, Dangerous Pleasures,
p. 417 fn 8. See also Stephen Cheng, “Flowers of Shanghai and the Late Ch’ing Courtesan
Novel” (Unpublished Ph.D., Harvard University, 1979).
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Prostitution in Shanghai 587
Traditionally, Chinese cities had zoned entertainment districts for teahous-
es, restaurants, stages, and brothels, all of which were controlled by the state.
In the late Ming and early Qing eras, the entertainment area in Shanghai was
in the northern part of the walled city.80 Later with the growth of the merchant
population with their regional associations, temples, and markets, the enter-
tainment area diversified and spread beyond the walls. Shanghai in the late
nineteenth and twentieth centuries did not have specific zoned quarters but
did have concentrations of brothels, especially downtown in the International
Settlement along Fuzhou Road, along with poorer prostitutes concentrated in
more marginal areas.81
Prostitutes’ culture today is perhaps even more varied, with high-class call
girls living in extreme luxury. Sex work is now viewed by many women as an
easy way to earn money, participate in contemporary fashion, and be modern
and fashionable, and this is accompanied by a disdain of regular employment
on farms, at factories and in shops. On the other hand, there are perhaps mil-
lions of women, many of them poor older migrants or unemployed older wom-
en living in abominable conditions, who service the old, the very poor, and
the criminal in so-called “ten yuan” (us$2) brothels.82 Prostitution is a popular
topic in newspapers, journals, on television, in movies, in advice columns, on
the internet, and in literature, with regular scandals that involve corrupt of-
ficials either as purchasers of sexual services or having been tolerant of and
perhaps profiting from sex work.83
State, Society, and Prostitution
Scholars such as Susan Mann have convincingly argued that prostitution
should be understood not just as entertainment or as a means to survival but,
more importantly, within the context of arranged marriage in a highly patri-
archal society which has resulted in male prerogatives in social and sexual
conduct both inside and outside the home and in the need to protect (their)
80 Johnson, Shanghai, p. 118.
81 See Henriot for detailed Shanghai maps showing the shifting geography of prostitution in
late Qing/early Republican Shanghai, Prostitution and Sexuality, pp. 205–222.
82 Paul Mooney, “China’s Sex Worker Warrior Fights for Prostitutes’ Rights”, Daily Beast,
31 July 2012; Peter Barefoot, “10 rmb Brothel Sex Workers”, available at: https://www.chi-
nasmack.com/10-rmb-brothel-sex-workers-comparing-prostitution-to-farming; last ac-
cessed 10 July 2017.
83 See Elaine Jeffreys, “Debating the Legal Regulation of Sex Related Bribery and Corruption
in the prc”, in Jeffreys, Sex and Sexuality, pp. 158–178; Elaine Jeffreys, Prostitute Scandals
in China: Policing, Media, and Society (London, 2012).
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588 Gronewold
women while making others available to them as social companions and (of-
ten) sexual servicers.
Though prostitution was legal before 1949, there were always contradic-
tions; the state used extensive means to limit and control prostitution and it
was powerfully condemned in popular morality, with a major distinction be-
tween liangmin (good people) and jianmin (base people) who had to be kept
separate and distinct. Due to heavy doses of Confucian morality and Daoist
ideas about the body,84 men were pressured to stay loyal to their families and
not take risks, whether moral, legal, or medical.
Before 1949 there was a tradition of state oversight of prostitution so that
it could regulate prostitution (and profit from it), promote public health, and
maintain public order. State and society acknowledged that prostitutes played
a necessary role, but also recognized that their presence was quite dangerous,
so they had to be specially monitored, regulated, and controlled.85 Often part
of the underworld with its gangsters and brotherhoods, prostitution was thus
connected with opium, alcohol, stolen goods, and other criminal activities.
Prostitution had long been addressed in state and local legal codes and
regulations, both criminal and civil, which traditionally had not expressly
prohibited prostitution but regulated and limited it, with status differences as
an integral part of the law.86 Although law codes underwent much revision
and clarification under the Republican and prc regimes, it has often been re-
marked that many of the traditional Confucian assumptions that undergirded
imperial law about prostitution and sexuality remained and are still dominant
in China today; these notions include the idea that people are innately good
and educable, with the family being the key socializing unit rather than the
84 Ruan, Sex in China, Ch. 2; Mann, Gender and Sexuality, pp. 85–95.
85 Entertainment districts in the past and brothel districts in the twentieth century were
sites of frequent violence and legal disputes, from patrolling police to constant court cas-
es. Henriot, Prostitution and Sexuality, pp. 154–162; Hershatter, Dangerous Pleasures, Ch. 8.
86 Officials and their sons who frequented brothels were punished; respectable families
were legally separated from prostitutes, actors, and singers, and they were forbidden
from buying, adopting, or bringing them into their families through marriage. Under the
activist Yongzheng emperor (1723–1735), the state undertook far-reaching legal reforms,
attempting to incorporate formerly outcast groups within the law, and at the same time
invoking the importance of marriage as necessary to bring all men under state control
and provide uniformity throughout the empire. Relative tolerance of prostitution (at least
when used by men of high status) gave way to powerful prohibitions on the selling of
(good) women into prostitution and laws against harbouring prostitutes. Certain sexual
practices were forbidden, such as anal penetration, which severely restricted (as least in
law) male prostitution. Sommers, Sex, Law, and Society, pp. 292–357; Ruan, Sex in China,
p. 97; for the text of the Qing code, see Hershatter, Dangerous Pleasures, pp. 474–476, fn 1.
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Prostitution in Shanghai 589
state with its laws and punishment, and universal marriage therefore being
absolutely essential.87
During the Republican period (1911–1949), law codes were updated and
made more “modern”, and the 1923 Provisional Law Code prohibiting pro-
curing and trafficking was revised in 1935 to make it a crime to take anyone
younger than 20 years of age from his/her family, particularly if the aim were
“carnal knowledge or [intent] to do a lascivious act.”88 The endless succession
of court cases, as in the Qing, attests not only to the control of the state, but
also to the awareness by ordinary Chinese subjects and citizens of their right
to legal protection.
Faced with a burgeoning prostitution problem and powerfully influenced
by western attitudes about women’s status, the treatment of social problems,
public health concerns, and sexuality, late nineteenth-century reformers
linked prostitution to China’s backwardness, and twentieth-century May 4th
Enlightenment thinkers called for a strong, modern state. They both argued
that prostitution should be closely regulated, with some even arguing for its
abolition, as had been done in England and the United States.89 Prostitution
was thus more tightly regulated by all of the Shanghai governments until 1949
through licensing and taxation (via a five-class system). Extensive registries
of both brothels and prostitutes were kept as part of a significant source of
municipal income,90 and weekly health examinations were made manda-
tory in the International Settlement in 1877.91 Shanghai, like other cities, also
87 Mann, Gender and Sexuality, pp. 67–68.
88 Quoted in Hershatter, Dangerous Pleasures, p. 187.
89 Recent work by Elizabeth Remick argues that the early twentieth century regulatory sys-
tem with its systems of licensing, health examinations, taxation, and a mandatory wom-
en’s refuge was borrowed whole cloth from European models in an attempt to thoroughly
modernize the state. Elizabeth Remick, Regulating Prostitution: Gender and Local State-
building, 1900–1937 (Stanford, 2014). An ill-fated policy of prohibiting prostitution, with a
bizarre programme of first thoroughly licensing and then progressively closing brothels,
was attempted in 1923, spearheaded by western missionaries (Shanghai was the head-
quarters for most foreign missionary organizations) working with Chinese Christians in
a strident Moral Welfare League, but only in the International Settlement, not the French
or Chinese cities. Sue Gronewold, “Encountering Hope: the Door of Hope Mission in
Shanghai and Taipei” (Unpublished Ph.D., Columbia University, 1996); Hershatter, Dan-
gerous Pleasures, pp. 272–288; Henriot, Prostitution and Sexuality, Ch. 12.
90 According to a 1922 survey, half of seventy-one Chinese cities had some kind of prostitute
tax; noted in Hershatter, Dangerous Pleasures, p. 477 fn 4. Shanghai’s five types of houses
that were licensed and taxed were: changsan, yao er, “pheasants”, “salt-pork”, and opium.
91 Further police regulations in the early twentieth century forbade prostitutes from public
soliciting, gathering in groups, making fun of each other, speaking in a lascivious or lewd
manner, and wearing clothing that was improperly seductive. As prostitution increased,
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590 Gronewold
attempted gradual abolition. Of course, when prohibited, prostitution merely
moved elsewhere, street and unlicensed prostitution exploded, and the policy
was a disastrous failure. But the notion of abolition had been put on the table.
When in 1928 Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist government banned prostitution
from neighbouring provinces in general and in the national capital in Nanjing
in particular, prostitutes moved in droves to Shanghai.92
After 1949, the strong popularly supported Maoist state that governed all
of China focused on the complete eradication of prostitution (along with the
sale and use of opium) as a major symbol of capitalist vice. Banned in Shang-
hai in 1951, prostitution was deemed to have been eliminated in 1958; it was
claimed that venereal disease clinics were no longer necessary and they were
shut down in 1965.93 The state claimed that it had enacted total abolition, al-
though there were scattered stories from 1950 until 1980 of poor women resort-
ing to prostitution, officials having access to sexual services from various kinds
of women (for example, drama troupes consisting of women with “bad” class
backgrounds), and guest houses that offered sexual services for special foreign
visitors.94
Prostitution reappeared with a vengeance in the early 1980s under Deng
Xiaoping’s reform economy which permitted private entrepreneurship along
with increasing geographic mobility and the development of market socialism
new regulations forbade the use of indecent language and immoral conduct on roads and
in public places and outlawed nudity and gambling. Prostitutes could not drink or spend
the night in hotels, nor could guests entertain them there. Later, in 1936, escort agencies
and dancing companion societies were forbidden. Children were also taken into account;
no-one under sixteen could stay overnight in brothels and brothels could not be located
near schools. Ibid., pp. 207–213; Henriot, Prostitution and Sexuality, Ch. 11.
92 Hershatter, Dangerous Pleasures, p. 287.
93 This was helped by the presence of a strong Chinese state, the disappearance of powerful
gangs who had either fled in 1949 or been executed as counterrevolutionaries, and the
fact that many women returned to their rural homes or found other jobs. The execution
of traffickers, the arrest of brothel owners, and the closing of all brothels were coupled
with the forced re-education of prostitutes in a Women’s Labour Training Institute under
the aegis of the Social Affairs Bureau; many women were eventually moved back to their
rural homes, some got jobs in the city, and a large group who did not have families were
sent to state farms in remote border regions. Marriage was part of the package for as many
as possible, in line with Chinese attitudes about marriage as a form of social control. Ibid.,
Ch. 13; Kong, Chinese Male Homosexualities, p. 153, discusses the conundrum that those
with alternative sexualities find themselves in, as their lifestyles are labelled deviant and
pathological.
94 Hershatter, Dangerous Pleasures, p. 332.
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Prostitution in Shanghai 591
and Chinese capitalism; wealth and profits skyrocketed, first in the country-
side and then in cities. Prostitution looks quite different in the Reform Era, as
old-fashioned brothels were relatively rare (and there were still relatively few
pimps) but sexual services were now intertwined with an explosion of new
entertainment venues open to all such as movie houses, dance halls, bars, hair
salons, barbershops, coffeehouses, roadside shops, train stations, parks, and
especially karaoke bars. In some of these establishments, madams were man-
agers and sex workers lived on the grounds and were prohibited from “going
out.” In the 1990s, a new kind of upper-level sexual servicer emerged, first in the
Special Economic Zones (sez) in the south and then in Shanghai and northern
cities: women who are neither poor nor rural and who more aggressively seek
out wealthy foreign men or overseas Chinese in particular. These women are
able to advertise in a myriad of ways, using new technologies like cell phones,
pagers, and all manner of social media available today, which allow them to
maintain their own rosters of men they regularly service.95
Although prostitution is formally illegal in the prc, its forceful reappear-
ance in the 1980s has led to a spate of regulations attempting to limit and con-
trol this new phenomenon.96 Government at all levels has attempted to rein
in prostitution, but, as has already been noted, due to a general culture of cor-
ruption, officials at all levels are often implicated in prostitution. Both national
and local “strike hard” (yan da) campaigns against illegal activities that include
sex work, gambling, drug use, and trafficking are waged regularly with great
drama and visibility but with unclear results.97
95 Ren Xin, “Prostitution and Economic Modernization of China” in Violence against Wom-
en, 5 (1999), pp. 1411–1414; Hershatter, Dangerous Pleasures, pp. 333–343.
96 Early in the Reform Era, when it appeared that prostitution might make a come-back,
all other provinces followed Guangdong province in the south (where many of the first
special economic zones were located) in issuing “Provincial Provisional Rules on Ban-
ning Selling and Buying of Sex”, followed ten years later in 1991 by the National People’s
Congress’ “Decision on Strictly Forbidding the Selling and Buying of Sex” and in 1993 by
the State Council’s “Rules Regarding the Detention and Education of People Who Sell
and Buy Sex” particularly aimed at the prevention of venereal diseases. In 1997 the prc’s
Criminal Code law reaffirmed the prohibition on organizing, coercing, inducing, shelter-
ing, or facilitating prostitution, accompanied that year by Communist Party rules against
Party members engaging in the buying or selling of sex. In 1999 the State Council issued
rules banning businesses from engaging in prostitution: “Regulations Regarding the Man-
agement of Public Places of Entertainment”. Zhang Heqing, “Female Sex Sellers and Pub-
lic Policy in the People’s Republic of China”, in Jeffreys, Sex and Sexuality, pp. 139–158, 142.
97 A particularly aggressive campaign is going on at present under an administration that
came into office promising to eradicate high-level corruption and special privileges; the
previous national campaign was in 2010, with a special urgency in Shanghai because
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592 Gronewold
The increasing prevalence of prostitution (estimates range widely, from the
official government figure of six million in 2004 to perhaps more than 30 mil-
lion today)98 has resulted in challenges for the state and its work with women,
most notably for the quasi-state All-China Women’s Federation (Quanguo
Funu Lianhehui, known popularly as Fulian). While on the one hand decrying
the exploitation of women, the Women’s Federation as a whole has tended
to defend traditional marriage and urged women not to migrate, for example,
but to stay at home and be filial and “ideal” women, lest they become “bad” or
“fallen” women,99 although the sensational press and public are equally fasci-
nated by lurid stories of the sex industry largely filled with migrant women.
Attitudes toward sexuality in general and particularly about men’s use of
sexual services seem to be undergoing major transformations. Men’s attitudes
have changed dramatically, from the traditional concern over saving one’s
male yang and imbibing as much female yin as possible to a general accep-
tance today of frequent sex and sex services. In a 2006 national survey, 7.2 per
cent of urban males and 1.8 per cent of rural men reported that they purchase
sexual services.100 Women’s attitudes have changed as well, particularly among
young women, as a result of the One Child Policy; ironically, it has shifted the
focus on sex for procreation to sex for pleasure.
the Shanghai Expo was being held that year. An earlier campaign in 1997 netted 432,000
sex workers, a number that has grown exponentially. Those arrested are often treated
harshly, beaten, fined (frequently as much as 5,000 yuan, us$800), and perhaps sent to
spend years in one of more than 1,000 labour re-education camps (laogai) located in poor
remote provinces. China Sex Worker Organization Network, “Research”; Davis, “Police
Crackdowns in China”. Forced labour apparently has little effect; most women return to
prostitution, probably having learned more about the trade from fellow inmates. Evans,
Women and Sexuality, p. 171.
98 Estimates vary widely. Xue Bai, Toushi sanpeinu [Looking into Escort Girls] (Beijing, 2002)
estimated 6–8 million in 2000; the who report in 2004 gave a figure of 6 million with esti-
mates ranging up to 30 million as posited by Huang Yingying et al., “hiv/aids Risk among
Brothel-based Female Sex Workers in China: Assessing the Terms, Content, and Knowl-
edge of Sex Work”, Journal of the Sexual Transmission of Disease, 31 (2004), pp. 695–700.
99 As exhorted in their publications; see Wanning Sun, “Indoctrination, Fetishization, and
Compassion: Media Constructions of the Migrant Woman”, in Jacka and Gaetano (eds),
On the Move, pp. 109–130, 114–115.
100 Suiming Pan, William Parish, and Yingying Huang, “Clients of Female Sex Workers: A
Population-Based Survey of China”, Journal of Infectious Diseases, 204 supplement 5 (2011),
pp. 1211–1217.
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Prostitution in Shanghai 593
Lively debates continue in the Reform Era, especially among feminists,
around the issue of either eradicating or ameliorating prostitution by coun-
selling and helping prostitutes and women with sex issues in general, and
tolerating sex work. Sexologists in China are divided about public policy to-
wards prostitution, with many arguing for decriminalization.101 These issues
are much discussed in Shanghai today, along with the concomitant issues of
venereal diseases, aids, abortion, divorce, and domestic violence, bolstered
through the establishment of clinics, women’s shelters, and hotlines. There is
a myriad of advocacy groups—religious organizations, both foreign and Chi-
nese ngos, and feminist and LGTB organizations that focus on health, safety,
security, and other issues that affect sex workers, although the impact of the
recent government crackdown on civil society is unclear.102
At the end of her recent book on karaoke bar hostesses, anthropologist
Zheng Tiantian returned to visit the women she came to know. Business had
been sluggish, but instead of redefining the audience to include families, as
in Japan, karaoke bar owners in China instead began offering naked hostesses
who sang, danced, and touched customers’ genitals “to see their reactions”, a
change that was so popular that there were hour-long lines outside the bars.
Lamenting this increasingly demeaning work for what she calls the new “entre-
preneurial man” in China, Zheng closes with the conclusion—an apt conclu-
sion for this paper—that “the demand for naked hostesses is a long way from
the scholar’s relationship with the courtesan in classical China.”103
101 Zhang quoting Li in Jeffreys “Female Sex Sellers”, pp. 139–141. Although researchers like
Pan Suiming hasten to add that the changes are gendered and generational, with young
men and women most affected in the shift from sex for reproduction to sex for pleasure
and even sex for leisure, young women are still more constrained by social considerations.
Pan, “Transformations in the Primary Life Cycle”. For the effects on the economy, see Ming
Xia in Joseph T.H. Lee (ed.), Marginalization in China: Recasting Minority Politics (New
York, 2012), p. 111, who quotes prominent economists Ning Liu and Huiming Tien (eds),
Heise youhuan [Black Fear] (Beijing, 2001) as saying that twenty million sex workers are
involved in an economy of 500 billion yuan (6 per cent of the gdp) and bring in 1,000 bil-
lion yuan for spending and consumption.
102 The ngo Shanghai Leyi (now Xinsheng) works with male sex workers; Project Hope
from Hong Kong works on education; other ngos in Shanghai work on health, especially
hiv/aids, such as Asia Catalyst, unffa and Amity, a philanthropic missionary group.
There are many philanthropic arms of missionary groups such as Amity. To follow govern-
ment suppression see: http://chinadevelopmentbrief.cn/; last accessed 8 July 2017.
103 Zheng, Red Lights, p. 245.
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chapter 23
Selling Sex in Singapore: The Development,
Expansion, and Policing of Prostitution
in an International Entrepôt
Shawna Herzog
Introduction
Commercial sex has been an available and important part of Singapore’s econ-
omy and society since Sir Stamford Raffles—representative of the British East
India Company (e.i.c.)—negotiated Singapore’s acquisition in 1819. Before
this, it was a small Malaysian fishing village ruled by the Johor Sultanate and
used by the Temmenggong, the sultan’s military leadership, as a personal get-
away from politically tumultuous court life. The island retreat would certainly
have included a population of slaves to attend to both the domestic and sexual
needs of its residents.1 Until the late eighteenth century, women were incon-
spicuous commodities in Southeast Asian slave markets, and native, Arab, and
Chinese merchants sold them throughout ancient trading networks. Since at
least the fourteenth century, the southern tip of the Malayan Peninsula was
a vital artery of trade for merchants in Southeast Asia, which connected the
eastern and western hemispheres. Stopping between the silver mines in Latin
America and the spice and luxury markets in Asia, Spanish and Portuguese
merchants traded with local chiefs for women in ports throughout the Philip-
pines and along the Malayan coast to solidify business relationships in the late
1 Abdulla Munshi, The Hikayat Abdullah : An Annotated Translation, trans. A. H. Hill ( Kuala
Lumpur, 1970), pp. 140–147; Carl Trocki, Singapore: Wealth, Power, and the Culture of Control
(New York, 2006), pp. 21–47; Carl Trocki, Prince of Pirates: The Temenggongs and the Develop-
ment of Johor and Singapore, 1784–1885 (Singapore, 1979), pp. 1–6; Barbara Watson Andaya,
“Temporary Wife to Prostitute: Sexuality and Economic Change in Early Modern Southeast
Asia”, Journal of Women’s History, 9 (1998), pp. 11–34, 13. Andaya’s description of society and
the roles of women and slaves during this period in Southeast Asian society, supports this
presumption. Moreover, during times of difficulty, slaves often chose to sell their bodies as
an additional means to support their household (p. 14). While this type of behaviour was not
likely exemplary for women and girls of the upper classes, contemporary Southeast Asian
society did not see the choice of selling sexual services with the same negative moral judge-
ment as their European colonizers.
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Selling Sex in Singapore 595
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.2 During this period, merchants frequent-
ly negotiated for a local “wife” or concubine to gain access to local markets;
these women were important assets because, in addition to providing domes-
tic labour and serving sexual desires, they functioned as intermediaries and
formed critical connections within the community necessary for successful
trade.3 The Dutch maintained this practice for hundreds of years and by end of
the eighteenth century they had formed vital relationships with local women
of influence in the region, which allowed them to reap remarkable profits in
Indonesia and build a global empire. However, these relationships were eroded
by emerging ideas of nationalism and racial degeneration. Eventually, concu-
binage, and the resulting métis/métisse, or “mixed-blood” children became a
threat to imperial power and the colonial government strongly discouraged
marriages with indigenous women.4 Moreover, in addition to these more per-
manent relationships, there were also taverns, inns, and opium dens in which
men could purchase more temporary encounters with slave girls or local
women who performed sex work as an income supplement. By the nineteenth
century, individual entrepreneurs, businessmen, and women from around the
region capitalized on the growing demand for domestic and sexual services
from increasing populations of migrant male labourers and began to import
women and girls to supply a growing commercial trade for colonial centres
throughout Southeast Asia.
Britain’s development of Singapore into an international entrepôt during
the first half of the nineteenth century changed well-established trading pat-
terns and brought both a demand for and supply of commercial sex to the
island. Singapore’s development as a hub for British power in the latter half
of the nineteenth century offered employment opportunities for millions of
unattached male labourers from around the world; at the same time, the col-
ony became a primary distribution centre for the trade in women and girls
who provided these labourers with highly sought after domestic and sexual
2 For more on women in “early modern” Southeast Asia, see Barbara Watson-Andaya, Other
Pasts: Women, Gender and History in Early Modern Southeast Asia (Honolulu, 2000). For more
on early colonial concubinage in Southeast Asia, see Tamara Loos, “A History of Sex and the
State in Southeast Asia: Class, Intimacy and Invisibility”, Citizenship Studies, 12 (2008), pp.
27–43.
3 Loos, “A History of Sex and the State in Southeast Asia”, pp. 31–37.
4 Ann Stoler, Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule
(Berkeley, 2002), pp. 22–110; Jean Gilman-Taylor, The Social World of Batavia: Europeans and
Eurasians in Colonial Indonesia (Madison, 1983), pp. 91–113.
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596 Herzog
services.5 By the 1870s, at the height of the controversy surrounding Britain’s
Contagious Disease Ordinances, the colonial state had grown large enough to
enforce its legislation and Singapore’s government attempted to regulate the
local sex industry. However, Singapore was already a key centre for what was a
sophisticated, intricately organized, and highly prosperous underground net-
work, and colonial officials struggled unsuccessfully to curb it. By this point,
women regularly travelled to, or were smuggled into, the colony’s notoriously
accommodating brothel districts from around the globe.
Singapore’s separation from British authority and the establishment of an
independent government and legislative code in 1959 once again brought local
officials’ attention to the commercial sex trade. Then, a new surge of economic
growth and prosperity between the 1960s and ‘80s initiated a transition in the
market. An explosion of economic excess increased inequalities and initiated
an expansion of Singapore’s sex industry. The country’s new government took
what Jin Hui Ong, Director of Advanced Studies at the National University of
Singapore, describes as a “puritanical approach” and attempted to push the sex
industry out of the city.6 This new administration created a campaign against
“yellow culture” in order to expel all forms of vice.7 Still, regardless of official
policy, brothel owners, women, and law enforcement officers eventually nego-
tiated unofficial systems of regulation and control in response to the realities
of an entrenched trade that to this day remains intact.
This study examines the development of Singapore’s sex industry from 1600
to the present and by focusing on the precolonial, colonial, and postcolonial
periods, explores the most important influences that inhibited and propelled
its expansion. The island’s position as a strategic trading and military centre
located between the Pacific and Indian Oceans has been the root of its politi-
cal importance and caused the population to swell, which meant that over the
years colonial officials, military commanders, and corporate investors were,
and still are, keenly interested in local affairs and governance. In the past two
centuries, colonization, war, and unprecedented economic growth drove waves
of unattached male labourers, soldiers, seamen, and businessmen to take up
temporary residence in Singapore. Simultaneously, women from around the
world have voluntarily travelled, or were trafficked against their will, to supply
5 James Francis Warren, Ah ku and Karayuki-San: Prostitution in Singapore 1870–1940 (Singa-
pore, 2003), pp. 67–72.
6 Jin Hui Ong, “Singapore”, in Nanette Davis, (ed.), Prostitution: An International Handbook on
Trends, Problems, and Policies (London, 1993), pp. 243–272, 246.
7 Ibid.
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Selling Sex in Singapore 597
these men with domestic and sexual labour. As a result, urbanization and the
development of Singapore as an international maritime power fuelled the
formation and expansion of its current multi-billion dollar sex industry.8 As
a result, for the past 200 years Singapore’s officials have taken a variety of ap-
proaches to manage—or eliminate—the sale of sex in this city, but ultimately
have had little success.
Historiography
While Southeast Asia is a relatively understudied region, there are a few impor-
tant studies that demonstrate the critical connections between prostitution,
the trade economy, and the implementation of political power in Singapore.9
Until the last decades of the twentieth century, scholars working on Southeast
Asian history had largely ignored the influence of women and gender on its
past. Focused on the paths of emerging independent nations, the bulk of his-
torical research about Southeast Asia sought primarily to describe developing
nationalisms, and the influential men that drove these movements, which fu-
elled and shaped later independence movements. Women, as primary subjects
of historical enquiry, did not enter the discourse until the late 1990s.10 Since
then, like most other fields of history, Southeast Asian scholars have begun
8 It is important to note that there have been, and still are, plenty of women voluntarily go-
ing to Singapore to work as prostitutes; but, it is difficult to tell if someone has voluntarily
immigrated, or if recruiters or traffickers coerced or kidnapped them, took them against
their will, and forced them—directly or indirectly—to prostitute themselves. As this
chapter demonstrates, attempting to differentiate between the two has historically been
a primary focus of anti-trafficking policies and governmental legislation in Singapore.
9 The following studies are some of the key works shaping our current understanding
of prostitution in Singapore: Watson-Andaya, “Temporary Wives to Prostitute”; Antho-
ny Reid, “The Decline of Slavery in Nineteenth Century Indonesia”, in Martin A. Klein,
(ed.), Breaking the Chains: Slavery, Bondage, and Emancipation in Modern Africa and Asia
(Madison, 1993), pp. 65–79; Ong, “Singapore”, pp. 243–272; Philippa Levine, Prostitution,
Race and Politics: Policing Venereal Disease in the British Empire (New York, 2004), passim;
Philip Howell, Geographies of Regulation: Policing Prostitution in Nineteenth Century Brit-
ain and the Empire (Cambridge, 2009), pp. 188–229; James Warren, Pirates, Prostitutes and
Pullers: Explorations in the Ethno- and Social History of Southeast Asia (Crawley, Australia,
2008), pp. 220–309; Warren, Ah Ku and Karayuki-san, pp. 25–91; Loos, “A History of Sex
and the State in Southeast Asia”, pp. 27–43.
10 Watson-Andaya, Other Pasts, pp. 1–7.
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598 Herzog
to incorporate women into their analyses and expand theoretical applications
of gender within established narratives. This historical investigation of the
sex trade in Singapore is a direct result of this increased focus on women in
Southeast Asian history. At the same time, current research on prostitution has
primarily used undercover journalism, government reports, and ngo records
to explain the demographic and sociological aspects of the region’s modern
sex trade. Yet, historians such as Anthony Reid, Barbara Watson-Andaya, James
Warren, Philippa Levine, and Eric Tagliacozzo have highlighted the historical
connections between sexual services, the trade economy, and the execution of
political and legal power. These foundational works create a new understand-
ing of the commercial sex trade’s history in Southeast Asia and the country of
Singapore, and set a high standard for future scholarship. Nonetheless, there is
still a need for further research.
Selling Sex in Precolonial Singapore and Southeast Asia
The southern portion of the Malayan Peninsula connects the eastern and west-
ern hemispheres and has long been a vital artery of trade for merchants in
Southeast Asia. Before British colonization at the end of the eighteenth centu-
ry, the small island of Singapore, or “Singapura”, was merely a small fishing vil-
lage and private retreat for Malay royalty and officials.11 Long before the arrival
of Europeans, women were an important commodity in Southeast Asian slave
markets and sold by native, Arab, and Chinese merchants throughout trade
networks that by the beginning of the seventeenth century encompassed the
globe.12 In the late seventeenth century, Spanish and Portuguese merchants
travelling between the silver mines in Latin America and the spice and luxury
markets in Asia began trading with local chiefs for women in ports throughout
the Philippines and along the Malayan coast to solidify business relationships.13
11 Trocki, The Prince of Pirates, pp. 21–30.
12 Shawna Herzog, “Convenient Compromises: A History of Slavery and Abolition in the
British East Indies, 1795–1841” (Unpublished Ph.D., Washington State University Depart-
ment of History, 2013), pp. 136–179; Richard Allen, “Suppressing a Nefarious Traffic: Britain
and the Abolition of Slave Trading in India and the Western Indian Ocean, 1770–1830”,
The William and Mary Quarterly, 66 (2009), pp. 873–894; Richard B. Allen, “Satisfying the
‘Want for Laboring People’: European Slave Trading in the Indian Ocean, 1500–1850”, Jour-
nal of World History, 21 (2010), pp. 45–73.
13 For more on women in early modern Southeast Asia, see Andaya, Other Pasts, Chapters
4–7. Additional discussion of early colonial concubinage in Southeast Asia can be found
in Loos, “A History of Sex and the State in Southeast Asia”, pp. 27–43.
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Selling Sex in Singapore 599
These merchants often negotiated for a local “wife”, or concubine. Here women
were important assets because, in addition to providing domestic labour and
appeasing sexual desires, they also functioned as important intermediaries
and formed critical connections linking them to, as Southeast Asian historian
Barbara Watson-Andaya describes, “a network of kin” within the community
that was necessary for successful trade.14 At first, because these relationships
were still rare, the women also acquired a great deal of prestige by having a for-
eign husband or lover.15 In fact, this system allowed the Dutch to reap remark-
able profits in Indonesia; they formed relationships with local women with
influence in the region, which allowed them to dominate trade for nearly 300
years.16 However, during the end of the eighteenth century, changes within the
indigenous elite and the encroachment of European imperial centres caused
a shift in attitudes towards these women and their sexuality. Additionally, by
the beginning of the nineteenth century, European ideas were also changing.
Emerging nationalist perceptions of European superiority and fears of racial
degeneration initiated a shift in opinions about colonial societies and Europe-
ans began to denigrate and castigate these intercultural relationships.17 Euro-
peans believed that concubinage, and the resulting metis/se, or “mixed-blood”
children threatened imperial power and colonial governments strongly dis-
couraged interracial intimacies.18 Consequently, as Watson-Andaya explains,
“foreigners increasingly preferred slaves, or ex-slaves who could act as both
servants and sexual partners, [and] the status of the temporary wife was per-
manently eroded.”19
The Colonial Period
Although Europeans were well established in Southeast Asia by the beginning
of the nineteenth century and had already explored a variety of intimate re-
lationships with native women, it is unlikely that the small fishing village of
14 Ibid., pp. 31–37.
15 Watson-Andaya, “Temporary Wives to Prostitute”, p. 13.
16 For a concise description of Dutch history in Southeast Asia, see Anthony Reid, Chart-
ing the Shape of Early Modern Southeast Asia (Chiang Mai, 1999), pp. 92–99, 155–179; Eric
Tagliacozzo, Secret Trades, Porous Borders: Smuggling and States Along a Southeast Asian
Frontier, 1865–1915 (New Haven, 2005), pp. 1–19, 28–47.
17 Gilman-Taylor, The Social World of Batavia, p. 99.
18 Stoler, Carnal Knowledge and Imperial, pp. 22–110; Gilman-Taylor, The Social World of Bata-
via, pp. 91–113.
19 Watson-Andaya, “Temporary Wives to Prostitute”, p. 11.
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600 Herzog
Singapore had more than a few—if any—local women supplementing their
incomes before the British arrived.20 In fact, it was Britain’s colonization of
Singapore in 1819 that laid the foundations for the island’s sex market; the
Empire’s aversion to interracial marriage combined with shifts in the percep-
tions of local elites initiated restrictions that encouraged the development of a
commercial sex trade. In contrast to other European empires, the British con-
cerned themselves with the sexuality of their subjects early on in their imperial
projects, and although they were relatively ineffective, the authorities cre-
ated policies to prohibit the familial connections that were often established
in interracial relationships and marriages in other colonial outposts around
the globe.21 Much earlier than the French or the Dutch, the British sought a
solution to the complications and challenges caused by the intimacies of con-
cubinage, such as interracial children, unconventional family loyalties, and
challenges to imperial policy. Fearing racial degeneration, religious corruption,
and the collapse of social constructs, the British began defining themselves
in opposition to the “others” far beyond their shores.22 Eventually, the Empire
outlawed interracial marriage “among the higher ranks” throughout all of its
colonies. In response, officials in India and the e.i.c. supplied British military
encampments with a contracted labour force of prostitutes regulated by colo-
nial authorities.23 Within this setting, British officials believed that prostitu-
tion was a solution to, and a preferable alternative for, either homosexuality or
long-term relationships with indigenous women. Since Singapore was a colony
administered first by the e.i.c at the India Office and then by the Colonial Of-
fice, these perceptions offer some insight into why officials initially attempted
to regulate rather than prohibit prostitution altogether.
Established as a trading station, Singapore initially had very few female im-
migrants and colonial officials worried about the disproportionate ratio of men
to women. An 1830 census revealed that there were only 4,121 women com-
pared to 12,213 men in the colony.24 Although the colonial government banned
the slave trade in British territories, there is evidence that local a uthorities
20 Andaya, Other Pasts, pp. 1–7.
21 Stoler’s Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power is the premier work on this subject. In her
study, she clearly illustrates shifts in European ideology and imperial paranoia about
colonial intimacies for fear of racial degeneration and compromises of imperial power
relationships.
22 Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation 1707–1837 (Yale, 1992), pp. 2–7.
23 Betty Joseph, Reading the East India Company, 1720–1840: Colonial Currencies of Gender
(Chicago, 2004), pp. 100, 104–105; Karen Weierman, One Nation, One Blood : Interracial
Marriage in American Fiction, Scandal, and Law, 1820–1870 (Amherst, 2005), pp. 45–48.
24 “Census”, Singapore Chronicle, 15 July 1830.
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Selling Sex in Singapore 601
may have overlooked the import of women and girls, because it reduced the
disparity between the sexes and provided both domestic and sexual labour.25
In the British colonial records, Chinese traders were often blamed for the il-
licit traffic from local islands like Batta, Balli, Nias, and the interior of Borneo;
Malay and Bugis traders also brought Batak women from the east coast of
Sumatra into the Straits Settlements and Singapore.26 Existing flows of women
and girls that supplied other Southeast Asian maritime centres like Malacca,
Manila, and Batavia, combined with professional prostitutes seeking new mar-
kets immigrating from poverty or entrenched systems of brothel-prostitution
in places like Japan, China, and South Asia, poured into Singapore’s developing
sex trade.
Anthony Reid argues that the prohibition of slavery and slave trading in Eu-
ropean centres “increased the traffic in many of these independent corners
of Indonesia.”27 Indeed, most of this new traffic consisted of women and girls
imported to service the increasing male migrant labour force pouring into the
region. Arab and Chinese merchants brought girls from China and South Asia
who had either been sold outright, or whose poverty-stricken families had con-
tracted their sexual labour for a specified period. In colonial Singapore, these
women were often black-market commodities; some became the wives or con-
cubines of wealthy merchants while many others did not. However, not all of
the women working in the sex trade were forced or coerced. In some cases,
women already working as prostitutes in other cities heard about Singapore’s
prosperity and negotiated their own passage.28 Although some women went to
mining camps and plantations, most worked within the community in a vari-
ety of capacities and provided both domestic and sexual services to transient
merchants, sailors, and soldiers accumulating in the growing international
port.
The colony also functioned as a depot for large volumes of imported prod-
ucts and a stopping point for migrant labourers making their way in and out
25 William Evans, Slave Trade (East India) Slavery in Ceylon: Copies or Abstracts of All Corre-
spondence Between the Directors of the E.I.C. and the Company’s Government in India, Since
the 1st Day of June 1827, on the Subject of Slavery in the Territories Under the Company’s Rule:
Also Communications Relating to the Subject of Slavery in the Island of Ceylon (London,
1838), pp. 237–239.
26 Evans, Slave Trade (East India) Slavery in Ceylon, p. 306.
27 Reid, “Decline of Slavery in Indonesia”, p. 71.
28 Correspondence Respecting the Alleged Existence of Chinese Slavery in Hong Kong: Present-
ed to Both Houses of Parliament by Command of her Majesty (London, 1882), pp. 37–49.
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602 Herzog
of the East Asian markets.29 At the same time, floods of migrant men created
demand for a secondary stream of innkeepers, tailors, interpreters, prostitutes,
and other service providers ready to bring them the “comforts of home”.30
There were no laws prohibiting prostitution or brothels in early Singapore, and
since slavery had been legally abolished, colonial officials labelled most of the
women they encountered working in Singapore’s brothels as slave-debtors. In
the eyes of the colonial state, these women were indentured labour, but not
true slaves. This superficial label allowed officials to overlook circumstances
they knew to be illegal slave trading in order to accommodate their perceived
need for more women in the colony and avoid uncomfortable international
legal disagreements with regional leaders. With very little power to actually
enforce them, British officials established perfunctory regulations that legally
nullified any financial obligations if a debtor’s master or mistress were in “any
manner an accessory to her prostitution.”31 The reality, however, was that these
women and girls were debtors only in name; most were bought or traded as
slaves and their masters expected them to deliver whatever type of labour re-
quested. Some worked as cooks, maids, and laundresses in addition to provid-
ing sexual services for their master’s clientele. Others worked exclusively in
taverns, opium dens, and brothels offering sexual services for the rest of the
developing entrepôt. There is also evidence that some girls were trafficked to
Singapore after being purchased as young slaves at the age of 4 or 5. Then,
while working as household servants, their masters trained them to work as
prostitutes upon turning 14, the age at which girls were legally able to “choose”
prostitution as a profession.32 This was a legal parameter established by the
colonial authorities at the end of the eighteenth century in an attempt to curb
the illegal trade in women and girls for the purposes of prostitution. None-
theless, even after debt-slavery was abolished in 1830, the demand for women
was so great that supply continued to flow into Singapore’s commercial sex in-
dustry relatively unimpeded. By 1855, Singapore’s officials followed the model
of the colonial authorities in Hong Kong and included an early form of
brothel registration in its business registry, becoming among the first colonies in
29 Carl Trocki’s Prince of Pirates and James Warren’s Ah ku and Karayuki-San both examine
the development of Singapore’s labour market as well as the thriving economy within it,
which attended to the needs of displaced workers passing through the international port.
30 I am deliberately invoking the language of Luise White’s work, The Comforts of Home (Chi-
cago, 1990), pp. 6–37 to illustrate the vital function prostitutes performed in colonial soci-
ety, as well as how various administrators reacted to and accommodated their presence.
31 Sir John Hobhouse, Slavery (East Indies): Return to an Order of the Honorable (The House
of Commons, 22 April 1841), p. 111.
32 Hobhouse, Slavery (East Indies), p. 109.
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Selling Sex in Singapore 603
the Empire to regulate its brothels.33 By the time Britain’s Parliament passed the
Contagious Disease Acts between 1864 and 1869, making the regulation of
prostitution an imperial policy, Singapore had already started the process of
categorizing brothels and regulating prostitutes.
There were a variety of women and positions within colonial Singapore’s sex
industry. During the first few decades of Singapore’s development, the major-
ity of prostitutes were Chinese, Indonesian and Malay women, and residents
complained in local newspapers about prostitutes working in public; they did
not complain about the existence of prostitution, just that prostitutes per-
formed sexual acts in public spaces.34 However, by the 1870s there was much
more diversity among the prostitutes and most business was conducted in
brothels. As scores of brothels profited from selling sex to this flood of immi-
grants, local merchants and traders made a killing by furnishing the women
with essential commodities like fabric for dresses, perfumes, make-up, soaps,
and liquor.35 As the city grew, Chinese secret societies already in control of
sophisticated underground networks of human traffickers imported a variety
of women and girls—primarily Chinese—to satisfy the exploding popula-
tion of male labour.36 In fact, studies by scholars such as Philippa Levine and
33 The Straits Times, 17 October 1855, p. 1.
34 “Sobriety”, Singapore Chronicle, 23 June 1831.
35 Warren, Ah ku and Karayuki-San, pp. 32–36.
36 During this period, according to colonial records the British deemed “traffickers” to be
those in the business of illegally purchasing, selling, and/or transporting people from one
place to another. Evans, Returns: Slave Trade (East India), pp. 3–4. The label of “trafficker”
automatically implied the illegal transportation of people across political borders and
was associated with the slave trade. Beginning in the late nineteenth century, antislavery
associations and women’s groups worked to prohibit regulated brothels within the British
Empire and created a more inclusive and expansive definition of both perpetrator and
victim. As Carina Rays’ research illustrates, by the beginning of the twentieth century,
trafficking had become a much more specific legal concept which focused on underage
girls who were forced, coerced, or manipulated under false pretences. A trafficker was
anyone who assisted in the procurement or transportation of these girls for “immoral pur-
poses or to gratify another person’s passions within and across national borders” (p. 102).
In the late 1920s, the newly formed League of Nations took up the task of investigating the
issue, and it added young boys to their scope of victims and by the late 1930s the defini-
tion included adult women trafficked across international borders. For more see: Carina
Ray, “Sex Trafficking, Prostitution, and the law, in Colonial British West Africa, 1911–43”, in
Benjamin Lawrence and Richard L. Roberts (eds), Trafficking in Slavery’s Wake: Law and
the Experience of Women and Children in Africa (Athens, oh, 2012), pp. 101–120, 102–105.
In the 1950s, the United Nations took up trafficking as an issue of human rights, but the
Cold War complicated the enforcement of relatively vague international laws. A survey
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604 Herzog
Phillip Howell illustrate that in the second half of the nineteenth century, Sin-
gapore had clearly identified and geographically segregated commercial sex
districts that were organized according to the ethnicity of the clientele.37 By
the last decade of the nineteenth century, both the wealthy and poor areas of
the city had their own red-light districts, and this system lasted well into the
twentieth century.38
Much of what we know about prostitution in Singapore after 1860 comes
from Warren’s research on the Chinese Ah ku and Japanese Karayuki san who
worked in the city’s sex industry during the height of British regulationism be-
tween 1864 and 1888 and the two world wars.39 In addition to the Ah ku and
Japanese Karayuki san, Warren’s work also provides important insight into
Singapore’s commercial sex trade and describes the environments of its east-
ern and western sectors. The eastern district contained almost as many Eu-
ropean prostitutes, and the “respectable colonial female population [was]
living in nearby residential areas.”40 Since the colonial government main-
tained a strict ban on British women working as prostitutes in its eastern
colonies, most were poor women from central and eastern Europe, mainly
from Hungary and Poland. There were some Russian Jewesses as well as a few
made by interpol in the 1970s brought the topic to the attention of the un again there
have been consistent efforts to strengthen and enforce international anti-trafficking laws;
Kathleen Barry, Female Sexual Slavery (New York, 1979), pp. 283–298. According to the
United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, “Article 3, paragraph (a) of the Protocol to
Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons defines Trafficking in Persons as the
recruitment, transportation, transfer, harbouring or receipt of persons, by means of the
threat or use of force or other forms of coercion, of abduction, of fraud, of deception, of
the abuse of power or of a position of vulnerability or of the giving or receiving of pay-
ments or benefits to achieve the consent of a person having control over another person,
for the purpose of exploitation. Exploitation shall include, at a minimum, the exploita-
tion of the prostitution of others or other forms of sexual exploitation, forced labor or ser-
vices, slavery or practices similar to slavery, servitude or the removal of organs”; available
at: http://www.unodc.org/unodc/en/human-trafficking/what-is-human-trafficking.html;
last accessed 8 July 2017. For a complete history see: Anne T. Gallagher, The International
Law of Human Trafficking (Cambridge, 2010), pp. xxiii–34.
37 The following works are dedicated to this argument: Levine, Prostitution, Race, and Poli-
tics and Howell, Geographies of Regulation.
38 Warren, Ah ku and Karayuki San, p. 34.
39 According to Warren, “Ah ku” was a respectable term for Chinese prostitutes in colonial
Singapore; a Karayuki san in Singapore referred to “women from the poorest sectors of
society during the Mejii-Taisho periods who lived and worked abroad as prostitutes.” War-
ren, Ah ku and Karayuki San, p. 3.
40 Ibid., p. 40.
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Selling Sex in Singapore 605
French and German women as well.41 Yet, according to Warren, European wom-
en had a “notorious reputation” for being loud “foul-mouthed” street-walkers
whose assumed privilege as “courtesans of a superior race” made them behave
in a manner that appeared gross and vulgar to local authorities. In contrast,
one colonial officer lauded the “quiet charm of the native women.”42 European
women generally arrived with their souteneur, or pimp, who sold their “wares”
to passers-by.43 They solicited from doorways and street corners; five or six
girls worked in a brothel servicing a variety of clients, primarily British or other
Europeans, in narrow cubicles. The demand for these women was created al-
most entirely by European residents, merchants, or tourists visiting the port.44
Until the latter half of the nineteenth century, Chinese women formed the
largest portion of sex workers in Singapore. Internal conflict, expansion of ex-
ternal trade, poverty, and famine in China during the seventeenth and eigh-
teenth centuries initiated a flow of Chinese into Southeast Asia who quickly
established themselves as merchants, shopkeepers, and plantation owners,
which provided an external boost to the Chinese economy.45 By the 1780s,
there were at least 100,000 Chinese men working work in tin mines and on
gambier plantations throughout Southeast Asia.46 At the same time, C hinese
law prohibited the emigration of married Chinese women, so the mines and
plantations were filled with a multitude of unattached men and very few
women. However, wealthy merchants, and the Secret Societies to which they
41 Ibid.
42 Warren, Ah ku and Karayuki San, p. 40. Of course, there are layers of gender construction
and British perceptions of prostitution, orientalism, and imperial categorization at work
here, but the image is nonetheless vivid. For more on British perceptions of commercial
sex, as well as discussions about the role of gender and Empire, see: Judith Walkowitz,
Prostitution and Victorian Society (Cambridge, 1980), pp. 1–48; Judith Walkowitz, City of
Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late-Victorian London (Chicago, 1992),
pp. 1–40; Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial
Contest (New York, 1995), pp. 236–257; Stoler, Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power, pp.
22–79; Philippa Levine, Gender and Empire (Oxford, 2004), pp. 14–46, 134–156; Tony Bal-
lantyne and Antoinette Burton (eds), Bodies in Contact: Rethinking Encounter in World
History (Durham [etc.], 2005), pp. 1–19, 125–142.
43 Warren, Ah ku and Karayuki San, p. 88.
44 Ibid., p. 75.
45 Diana Lary, Chinese Migrations: The Movement of People, Goods, and Ideas over Four
Millennia (Lanham, uk, 2012), pp. 92–94; Eric Tagliacozzo and Wen-Chin Chang (eds),
Chinese Circulations: Capital, Commodities, and Networks in Southeast Asia (Durham,
2014), pp. 24–27; Barbara Watson-Andaya and Leonard Andaya, A History of Malaysia
(London, 1982), pp. 94–97.
46 Trocki, Prince of Pirates, p. 4.
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606 Herzog
belonged, had direct connections to China’s supply of poverty stricken, famine
driven, or kidnapped slaves.47 As previously mentioned, when Raffles acquired
Singapore from the Sultan of Johor in 1819, an entrenched traffic of indigenous
and Chinese women and girls already circulated throughout the region.48 By
1868, a year after the e.i.c officially transferred control of the colony to British
Parliamentary rule, 2,061 prostitutes worked in the 349 brothels operating in
the tolerated districts in Singapore; there were nine Europeans, 408 “native”
women, and 1,644 Chinese.49 In 1877, the colonial government established the
office of the Chinese Protectorate in order to curb Chinese organized crime,
alleviate the abuse of poor migrants, and, as Philippa Levine explains, to bring
the Chinese under the “control of the administration”.50 Supervision of the
colony’s numerous Chinese brothels was one of the Protectorate’s many re-
sponsibilities. Although a few indigenous, South Asian, and European women
provided sexual services, the majority of prostitutes before the 1880s were
Chinese Ah ku.
Japanese women started to arrive in Singapore during the 1860s, after Japan
opened its port in Nagasaki to international trade and began sending coal to
Southeast Asia. By the 1880s, many—if not most—ships leaving Nagasaki had
women hidden on board.51 Along with increased mobility, Bill Mihalopoulos
explains that “the movement of young Japanese women into sex work occu-
pations abroad was one spontaneous reaction by the rural poor to the radi-
cal social restructuring unfolding in Japan from 1850 onwards.”52 In fact, food
shortages, heavy taxation, and corveé systems strained the peasantry to such
a desperate point that between 1865 and 1867 there were seventy-five peasant
uprisings.53 Poverty and famine pushed young girls to seek a living overseas
at a time when expansion of exports established new connections between
47 The following works discuss the importance and connections Chinese Secret Societies
held within Southeast Asia: Andaya, A History of Malaysia, pp. 141–143; Trocki, Prince of
Pirates, pp. 107–111; Tagliacozzo, Secret Trades, Porous Borders, p. 372.
48 Herzog, “Convenient Compromises”, pp. 30–35.
49 British National Archives, Colonial Office [hereafter co] /273/91/75, “Appendix N”, “Ab-
stract of Return of Brothels and Prostitutes of Singapore”, in “Governor of Straits Settle-
ments to the Colonial Office”, 24 February 1869, pp. 75–77.
50 Levine, Prostitution, Race, and Politics, p. 25.
51 Bill Mihalopoulos, “Ousting the ‘Prostitute’: Retelling the Story of the Karayuki–san”, Post-
colonial Studies, 4 (2001), pp. 169–187, 173.
52 Ibid., p. 170.
53 Mikiso Hane, Peasants, Rebels, Women, and Outcasts: The Underside of Modern Japan
(Oxford, 1982), p. 12.
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Selling Sex in Singapore 607
Japanese communities in the Amakusa Islands, the Shimabara Peninsula, and
Nagasaki. At the same time, newly developing colonies like Hong Kong and
Singapore had a deficit of women and the promise of prosperity. Japan’s transi-
tion to a money economy in the 1870s, and the falling price of rice in the 1880s,
led to the bankruptcy and eviction of many farm families. As Hane explains,
“in 1883 there were 33,845 such cases”; by 1885, 108,050 families were homeless
and without a means to support themselves.54
According to government reports, in 1878 there were only two Japanese
brothels open for business. However, by 1905, “37 years after the Meiji Resto-
ration, and the year of the advent of the Russo-Japanese War”, there were 109
Japanese brothels and 633 Japanese prostitutes, or Karayuki san, registered in
the colony.55 In 1906, Tanaka Tokichi, the Japanese consul in Singapore, argued
that thousands of women were pouring into the city; he estimated that approx-
imately twenty women each week arrived from Moji, Kuchinotsu, and Kobe
with the intention to work as prostitutes. Fleeing desperation and violence,
Karayuki san used what Mihalopoulos described as “subterranean economies”
to make their way out of Japan.56 However, while some went with their par-
ents’ permission (they likely received between 300 and 500 yen for a five-year
contract), and with full knowledge that they would be working as prostitutes,
Hane reminds us not to ignore the fact that many were, “sold into slavery or
tricked into their situation through their sense of responsibility toward their
poverty-stricken parents and siblings.”57 In fact, the parents and procurers of-
ten prearranged the amount of money to be remitted to the family once the
girls were sold and working. Local “procurers” (zegen), employment agencies,
and third party brokers promised young girls “a better life overseas” and stabil-
ity for their families.58 In some cases, former prostitutes at the end of their
contracts returned to Japan and visited villages describing the luxury and suc-
cess that awaited them. Unfortunately, as Mihalopoulos asserts, “the journey
from Japan to Hong Kong or Singapore transformed the women into a basic
54 Ibid., p. 23.
55 Warren, Ah ku and Karayuki San, p. 47.
56 Mihalopoulos, “Ousting the ‘Prostitute’”, p. 177.
57 Ibid.; Hane, Peasants, Rebels, Women, and Outcasts, p. 207. According to Hane, the aver-
age monthly income for peasants in 1878 was 1 yen 75 sen (there are 100 sen in a yen), and
the situation did not improve until after the Second World War (p. 21). An average textile
worker earned between 13 and 20 sen per day and “superior workers” saw an increase from
9 yen 22 sen per year in 1875, to 17 yen and 69 sen in 1881. A family could have a two-story
home built for around 100 yen (p. 176).
58 Mihalopoulos, “Ousting the ‘Prostitute’”, p. 175.
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608 Herzog
commodity for everyday usage.”59 Once they arrived, brokers immediately sold
them to brothels for between 200 and 300 yen, from which they subtracted be-
tween forty-five and fifty yen for personal and travel expenses. Then they sent
another thirty to fifty yen to their parents—a sum their parents pre-arranged
with the broker based on the woman’s attractiveness and earning potential—
while earning between seventy and 100 yen for themselves.60 Of course, the
young women became responsible for the entire cost of the journey, which the
brothel keepers withheld from their earnings. As a result, the Karayuki san who
arrived in Singapore during this period were already straining under the debt
for money “loaned” to their families: the cost of their journey, food and lodging,
as well as any clothing or personal items before meeting their first customer.
Prostitution was a lucrative business in colonial Singapore, but not all
brothels, or prostitutes for that matter, were the same. While Europeans gen-
erally visited the eastern side of the city, Chinese, Japanese, Malay, Indian,
and Javanese men tended to frequent the western quarter. Serving a sec-
ond-class clientele, these women also divided their services by ethnicity. As
Warren explains, the Ah ku, Malay, and European prostitutes worked in “all-
nationality” establishments, but Cantonese women accepted only Chinese
clients.61 However, the Karayuki san, who did not arrive in significant num-
bers until the 1880s, also accepted foreign patrons. Poverty and famine pushed
some families to sell daughters they were unable to feed; at the same time,
Singapore’s booming economy drew people from poor regions in search of pros-
perity. Clients looking for overnight stays with Chinese prostitutes visited the
larger, cleaner, and better-decorated loh kui chai brothels; the cheaper brothels,
or pau chai, were poorly ventilated, cramped, and dirty. The bigger houses had
as many as seventeen to eighteen girls working in them.62 The Ah ku lived in
“two-, three-, or four-storied buildings with large numbers painted or affixed to
the fanlights over the doors, with a red (or some other colour) lamp behind the
number.”63 The Karayuki san did not generally discriminate between clients;
their primary goal was to make as much money as possible to send home to
their families, who knew they were in Singapore doing sex work. Like the Ah
ku, there were higher and lower grades of Japanese prostitutes; some took ap-
pointments and never left their lavish apartments, while others waited behind
screens for clients and worked in dingy though less cramped conditions.64
59 Ibid., p. 178.
60 Ibid., p. 177.
61 Warren, Ah ku and Karayuki San, p. 42.
62 Ibid., p. 47.
63 Ibid., p. 49.
64 Ibid., p. 51.
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Selling Sex in Singapore 609
The kwai po, who were at the top of the social hierarchy in Singapore’s com-
mercial sex industry, managed brothels’ business affairs. The kwai po was re-
sponsible for guarding the owner’s “property” and often policed the women
mercilessly. This is the person who quantified the value of the women’s bod-
ies and was often the liaison between prostitutes and local authorities. More
than just brothel managers, kwai po were interpreters, bookkeepers, parental
figures, debt-collectors, and prison guards for the girls working inside. In fact,
the majority of women in these brothels were their “virtual prisoners” because
working prostitutes were rarely able to pay off their compounding debts. As
debtors enslaved in exchange for money given to them or their families, many
prostitutes owed money for their passage in addition to loans they may have
taken out; the kwai po added this debt to any personal costs above and beyond
their room and board, which accumulated quickly.65 Moreover, if the kwai po
learned that a woman planned to run away without paying her debt, she was
often drugged, taken away, and sold to another brothel. Regardless of how
much of her contract she may have already worked off, she incurred an en-
tirely new debt and contract that she had to repay.66 Warren estimates that in
the 1880s, “80 per cent of young Chinese girls brought to Singapore” worked in
brothels within this system.67 Although it is clear that not all of these women
were completely victimized, their “choices” were regularly shaped by poverty,
famine, abuse, or neglect and the disposition of their kwai po. For some mi-
grant women, prostitution could be a means to relatively lucrative employ-
ment, but it regularly required a relinquishment of their personal rights.
Chinese prostitutes in Singapore were generally ranked according to their
financial relationship to the house; they were “sold”, “pawned”, or “voluntary.”68
The kongchu or “sold” women were particularly helpless; the kwai po purchased
them from traffickers, so they were considered property of the brothel. These
women were in essence “the adopted daughters” of the brothel owner.69 The
house provided for the kongchu’s basic necessities but the kwai po retained
all of their earnings. The pongnin, or those “pawned or hired to a house”, were
prostitutes like the Karayuki san who were working off a debt.70 Indentured for
65 Adam McKeown discusses the lives of indentured labour in Singapore in his chapter, “The
Social Life of Chinese Labour”, in Eric Taggliacozzo and Wen-Chin Chang, (eds), Chinese
Circulations: Capital, Commodities, and Networks in Southeast Asia (Durham, 2011), pp. 62–
83, 75–78.
66 Warren, Ah ku and Karayuki San, p. 55; McKeown, “The Social Life of Chinese Labour”,
pp. 76–77.
67 Warren, Ah ku and Karayuki San, p. 91.
68 Ibid., p. 52.
69 Ibid.
70 Ibid.
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610 Herzog
a minimum of six years, the pongnin had to give half their profits to the kwai po
in return for room and board. The other half of their income was theirs to ei-
ther send home or pay down their original debt. However, as previously stated,
the cost of needs beyond room and board were added to their totals, which
regularly created a debt-cycle that kept many perpetually indentured. More-
over, if she felt so inclined, a kwai po could sell off or transfer a pongnin’s debt
towards the end of her term and obligate the woman to a new term of service.
Both the kongchu and the pongnin depended upon the good nature of the kwai
po. The tap tang were women that had not been bought and did not owe a debt
to the house, but they still had to give half of their earnings to the kwai po for
food and rent. If they were truly free agents, they kept the remainder of their
earnings for themselves. However, it was not unusual in the 1920s for a tap tang
to send money to a “pocket mother”, usually ex-prostitutes who purchased or
indebted young women to provide for them once they were no longer able to
work.71 Although the kongchu, pongnin, and tap tung all—to some degree—
worked under the thumb of the kwai po, their independence and autonomy
was in direct correlation to the amount of debt they carried with the house.
As one of the easiest ways to accumulate capital before the turn of the cen-
tury, brothel prostitution in Singapore funded many Japanese and Chinese
businesses during this period; they played an important role in Singapore’s eco-
nomic development.72 Brothels made money from both prostitutes and their
clients. Receiving well over what they initially paid for the women, brothel
owners often sold girls after a few months of work and made money on the sale
in addition to receiving a portion of her earnings. Warren explains that there
would have been a daily profit of $1,650 if every Ah ku listed in the 550 houses
registered in Singapore. Each worked “at the standard rate of $3” per night; this
converts to approximately us$131, which would be $267 today.73 Extrapolating
that amount with the minimum of 288 days that he avers they worked, War-
ren contends that the profits from these prostitutes, “would have easily been
over $475,200 a year”, which would have been a staggering $37,805,400 today.74
The Japanese houses worked “24 hours a day, 7 days a week” and the average
71 Warren, Ah ku and Karayuki San, p. 52; Major, Slavery, Abolitionism and Empire in India,
1772–1843 (Liverpool, 2012), pp. 131–162.
72 Warren, Ah ku and Karayuki San, pp. 52–67; Levine, Prostitution, Race, and Politics, pp.
29–30.
73 Warren, Ah ku and Karayuki San, p. 61. All references to dollars in Warren’s work refer to
contemporary Straits dollars.
74 Ibid. All currency conversions were performed with the British National Archive’s cur-
rency converter available at: http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/currency/default0
.asp#mid; last accessed 8 July 2017.
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Selling Sex in Singapore 611
prostitute grossed “about 250 yen a month”, which meant exorbitant profits for
the more than 100 registered brothels in the city. Although the Women’s Pro-
tection Act in 1880 officially prohibited the illegal traffic in women and girls,
the misguided ordinance actually caused an increase in prices and certainly
did not stop the trade. The value of the women changed according to demand
and went up as Chinese immigration increased. Brokers sold girls for as much
as $500 each, “depending on the woman’s ‘virginity, age, beauty, and origin.’”75
Regulationism
In response to an epidemic of venereal diseases that began in the 1860s, the
colonial government began legislative efforts to contain and regulate the com-
mercial sex industry in the name of public health. The passage of Singapore’s
local Contagious Disease Ordinance (cdo) in 1870 marked the beginning of
Singapore’s enduring legislative struggle with the realities of a thriving com-
mercial sex industry and the social, ethical, and political consequences of
maintaining it. The colonial authorities had already created a system to cat-
alogue the various brothels within their business registry in the 1850s. The
cdo granted colonial officials the legal authority to interrogate, examine,
and detain women known for or suspected of working as prostitutes. Initially,
women and brothel owners throughout Singapore resisted and avoided the
government’s system of examinations and detainment; but within a few years,
incidences of disease diminished and prostitutes began going to their exami-
nations voluntarily.76 Moreover, officials noticed a levelling off in the opening
of new brothels. Many argued that regulationism was noticeably successful in
reducing incidences of syphilis and gonorrhoea and it gave officials the author-
ity to offer assistance to victims who had been trafficked or were being abused.
Still, there was overwhelming evidence showing that in parts of England and in
some British colonies there were officials who misused the authority granted
by the cd Acts to terrorize middle- and working-class women.77 Consequently,
anti-prostitution and anti-trafficking activists fought hard to abolish what they
saw as a blatant exploitation of working women and girls, and in 1888 Parlia-
ment repealed the imperial cdo.
75 Ibid., p. 63.
76 Yong Kiat Lee, “Prostitution and Venereal Disease in Early Singapore (1819–1889), Part ii”,
Singapore Medical Journal, 21 (1980), pp. 781–791, 782.
77 For more on officials misusing authority granted by cd Acts, see Judith Walkowitz, Prosti-
tution and Victorian Society, pp. 79–85.
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612 Herzog
In spite of vocal objections by Singapore’s officials, residents, and the medical
community, the colonial government—wary of public censure—ordered that
mandatory registration and examination systems be dismantled and all women
detained in lock hospitals be released. However, to mitigate the effects of the
repeal, from 1889 to 1927, unbeknownst to the British public, Singapore’s of-
ficials expanded the role and authority of the Chinese Protectorate through
“legal measures pertaining to the Protection of Women and Girls Ordinance”
to allow for the maintenance of an “extra-legal system of publicly recognized
houses”.78 This period of “quasi-regulation” allowed the city to profit from
brothels’ services through taxes and it gave local police the authority to close or
tolerate a brothel at their discretion. An unofficial list contained the names of
brothels and prostitutes regularly seen by private physicians and those not on
the list were not allowed to operate. This system primarily focused on control-
ling brothels, particularly the Japanese houses that serviced European clien-
tele; but as Warren explains, in the Chinese brothels venereal diseases spread
“as immigrant labour kept on increasing right up to the First World War.”79
In 1912, public scandal about “white slavery” made popular by Mrs.
Archibald MacKirdy and W.N. Willis’ book, The White Slave Market, resulted in
intense scrutiny of Singapore’s extra-legal system, forced officials to address
the illegal trade in women and girls more seriously, and motivated officials to
push the commercial sex industry out of public view.80 Anti-trafficking activ-
ists quickly took notice of Singapore’s “tolerated houses” and began a vitriolic
public campaign for their abolition.81 Exaggerating an already dismal situa-
tion, abolitionists offered up public descriptions of miserable, drug-addicted
European women who had been stolen from their homes and were in need of
rescue. Even though European women were the minority in Singapore, the cam-
paign focused on the trade’s degradation of “white European daughters”. Social
reformers used every avenue at their disposal to bring attention to the fact
that British officials had allowed Singapore’s authorities to tolerate the s ystem
of brothels, which were notoriously responsible for the sexual exploitation of
women and girls. The political pressure eventually forced the Colonial Office
78 Warren, Ah ku and Karayuki San, p. 147.
79 Ibid., p. 149.
80 Mrs. Archibald MacKirdy and W.N. Willis, The White Slave Trade (London, 1912). Warren
discusses the impact this had on the British and Singaporean public: Warren, Ah ku and
Karayuki San, pp. 151–158. For more on the reactions of the British public to regulationism,
see: John F. Decker, Prostitution: Regulation and Control (New York, 1979); Paul McHugh,
Prostitution and Victorian Social Reform (New York, 1980); Donald Thomas, The Victorian
Underworld (New York, 1998).
81 Warren, Ah ku and Karayuki San, pp. 154–156.
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Selling Sex in Singapore 613
to take action and authorities used an emergency amendment to the Women
and Girls Protection Ordinance to expel all European prostitutes from the city;
by 1916, there were no officially-known European prostitutes in Singapore.82
Of course, the campaign against the “white slave trade” did not bring about the
end of prostitution in Singapore, as some may have wanted, but the movement
did make it more difficult to own and run a brothel in the city.
In the late 1920s, an increasingly powerful nationalist movement and po-
litical tensions motivated the Japanese government to make efforts to have all
its citizens removed from the city and sent back to Japan. With the help of
the British Parliament, the Japanese Consul took steps to deport all Karayuki
san from the colony. Although Japan had profited from their sexual labour for
more than twenty years, Karayuki san were forced out of Singapore and went
back to generally unwelcoming communities in Japan. Some Karayuki san pro-
tested and challenged the local government’s authority to force them out; oth-
ers stayed due to outstanding debts or because they had a venereal disease,
while others disappeared into the city and sold sex privately to earn a living.
Those taken back to Japan were left on the docks with no financial assistance
or means of support. With few economic options left open to them, some fol-
lowed the Japanese army as they prepared to invade China; many committed
suicide as a result of shame from discrimination and lack of opportunity.83
Nonetheless, neither the efforts of the British authorities nor the Japanese gov-
ernment could completely eliminate the populations of Karayuki san work-
ing in Singapore’s sex market. Meanwhile, groups such as the Association for
Moral and Social Hygiene continued to critique the tolerated system, which
gained new support as venereal diseases spread rapidly during World War i.84
Increased overhead costs, scrutiny from the local authorities, and the mass
deportation of Japanese prostitutes also pushed many Ah ku underground and
initiated a dramatic rise in clandestine prostitution in the city. The combina-
tion of high fees and taxes required to run a brothel forced many of the Chinese
establishments to close.85 At the same time, the removal of the Karayuki san
encouraged more Eurasian, Malay, and Thai women to enter into Singapore’s
now clandestine sex markets. As a result, many women went to work at cof-
fee shops, teahouses, markets, laundry shops, and eating-houses, and offered
82 Ibid., p. 155.
83 Ibid., pp. 157–165; Warren, Pirates, Prostitutes, and Pullers, pp. 240–247.
84 Regulationism and the effects of its repeal were part of a long and protracted debate in
British Parliament. For more on this, see: Levine, Prostitution, Race and Politics, pp. 37–145
and Howell, Geographies of Regulation, pp. 113–188.
85 Warren, Ah ku and Karayuki-San, p. 167.
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614 Herzog
sexual services on the side. The surreptitious manner in which they worked
also meant that they did not have the same open access to medical services
they had during regulationism and many saw regular check-ups as an easily
avoidable financial imposition. Thus, the steady stream of military troops that
flowed into the barracks and clandestine brothels during and after the war
took a variety of venereal diseases back home with them.
Consequently, rates of venereal infections in Singapore reached epidemic
proportions and by the 1920s local authorities scrambled for ways to control
it. Appealing to the Colonial Office, Singapore’s officials once again proposed
a system of brothel regulation reminiscent of the 1870 Ordinances. However,
changes in the political leadership and sentiment resulted in little support for
state-sanctioned and controlled prostitution; seizing the opportunity, social
reformers called attention to the epidemic and pushed for abolition. By 1927,
officials attempted to eliminate “professional prostitution” in Singapore with-
out actually prohibiting the practice, but by implementing a ban on the immi-
gration of known prostitutes.86 Additionally, authorities made brothels illegal
and by 1930, Singapore’s notorious brothel districts were closed. Many women
returned home to their countries, found jobs as servants, cooks, or washwom-
en, or married former clients. Others tried their luck in the underground mar-
ket, since the act of selling sexual services was still legal in Singapore.87
Postcolonial Singapore
The Second World War brought another influx of military battalions onto the
island and generated a dramatic increase in the number of brothels, prosti-
tutes, and yet another outbreak of venereal infections. This revitalization of
the industry led Singapore’s authorities to once again rethink their policies on
prostitution. Between 1930 and 1960, local officials changed their focus from
abolition to containment in an effort to curb the spread of diseases and the
abuse suffered by women working in illegal clubs and houses.88 Underground
brothel prostitution had survived, and by the time Singapore gained its inde-
pendence from British rule in 1959 and formed an independent government in
1963, the old colonial red-light districts thrived and serviced men from around
the world. Regulations against maintaining brothels, soliciting, and zoning
86 Ibid., p. 175.
87 Ong, “Singapore”, p. 245.
88 Ibid., p. 246.
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Selling Sex in Singapore 615
o rdinances, which quarantined the commercial sex sector in specific parts of
the city, pushed Singapore’s sex trade out of public view but made way for a
new extra-legal system that accommodated the persistent demand.
This change initiated an entirely new organizational structure in Singapore’s
sex market. The elimination of secret societies did remove much of the coercion
that existed in brothels, and the availability of other work made prostitution—
at least for local women—more of a personal choice than a last resort. Nev-
ertheless, an underground trade in trafficked women and girls still exists in
Singapore and authorities have been only minimally successful at suppressing
it. The economic boom that occurred between 1970 and 1990 created another
surge in demand in Singapore’s commercial sex trade. A recession in the 1980s
brought a new supply of unskilled Malay women unable to find factory or
manufacturing work, and women from rural India migrated to Singapore with
their children and worked as prostitutes trying to support their families.89 In
the urban centre, Chinese women are still the dominant ethnicity among Sin-
gapore’s commercial sex workers. However, as Ong’s research demonstrates,
an increase in construction, the result of an explosion in tourism in the 1990s,
drew in increasing numbers of Korean and Thai prostitutes who made money
following the pool of single men working in construction and providing servic-
es at job sites.90 Still, the primary centres are the “Designated Red-Light Areas”,
where in the 1990s women earned between $7 and $120 per client for a variety
of sexual services.91
In spite of decades of legislation, there remains a teeming commercial
sex market in Singapore. According to researchers Shyamala Nagaraj and Siti
Rohani Yahya, since laws prohibit “the use of premises for prostitution, most
legal establishments tend to observe the rules and to keep the business of com-
mercial sex independent of their operations.”92 Their study, “Prostitution in
Malaysia”, examines Singapore’s sex industry extensively as a part of the Malayan
peninsula and describes the development of the “sex sector”.93 They illustrate
the role Singapore’s sex sector plays as a central economic feature of the island.
For example, the “freelancers” and “special workers” operate in dance halls,
89 Shyamala Nagaraj and Siti Rohani Yahya, “Prostitution in Malaysia”, in Lin Lean Lim (ed.),
The Sex Sector: the Economic and Social Bases of Prostitution in Southeast Asia (Geneva,
1998), pp. 67–99, 70–73.
90 Ong, “Singapore”, p. 257.
91 Ibid.
92 Nagaraj and Yahya, “Prostitution in Malaysia”, p. 76; the amounts in Nagaraj and Yahya’s
study are given in contemporary us dollars.
93 Ibid.
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616 Herzog
nightclubs, karaoke lounges, and supper clubs, and there are strip clubs and
lounges where clients pay for nude dances, touching, and other forms of sexual
intimacy. The women might be contracted by the house or work independent-
ly, but they negotiate intercourse outside their duties as employees. Taxi driv-
ers are important links for sex workers in an era of increased police raids and
underground prostitution; drivers are regularly a client’s connection to clubs,
establishments, and streets where sexual services are offered.
This same study explains that commercial sex workers in Singapore are clas-
sified by either their means of procurement or their employment status. Using
methods of procurement as categories, Singapore’s prostitutes work as “market
prostitute[s] (at the lowest rung of the earnings ladder)” in the local markets;
“streetwalker[s]” who are more mobile and advertise inconspicuously to avoid
solicitation charges; “the employed commercial sex worker”, or those em-
ployed by an establishment rather than working independently; “massage par-
lor, bar or nightclub workers; the freelancers; and the special workers (social
escorts).”94 However, the “employment status”, and full- or part-time work are
also important factors. Prostitutes in the “primitive labour market”, such as the
streetwalkers and clandestine brothel workers who worked full-time, earned
the least and were at the bottom of the hierarchy.95 The “enterprise labour
market” included women working at massage parlours, taverns, and lounges,
and they generally worked part-time and had more autonomy in stipulating
their prices and choosing clientele.96 Finally, those who were “self-employed”,
the call girls and special escorts, generally earned the most. Ranging in age
from the early teens to seniors, many of these women according to Nagaraj
and Yahya willingly entered prostitution, while others were sold or forced into
the business by family members, spouses, or boyfriends. While the above cat-
egories are certainly problematic, they are descriptive categories that give us
an idea of the ways sex workers have adapted to legislative prohibitions, while
continuing to accommodate customer demands.
There are a few women in Singapore who are full-time employees, with
“specified duties, leave and other employment benefits”, and whose sexual la-
bour is contracted on the side. However, most prostitutes in Singapore work
in brothels or as independent agents and, according to a 1992 study, averaged
about us$28 per client and us$1,400 per month.97 Still, there was a remarkable
disparity between the highest earners, making us$11,200 per month, and the
94 Ibid.
95 Nagaraj and Yahya, “Prostitution in Malaysia”, p. 78.
96 Ibid., p. 79.
97 Ibid., p. 84.
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Selling Sex in Singapore 617
lowest, making a mere pittance of us$40 per month. As one would imagine,
the same contingencies of youth, beauty, and ethnicity determine the value of
these women’s bodies, just as for their nineteenth-century counterparts. Older
prostitutes are not able to charge as much as younger women, but young wom-
en who are deemed unappealing are also limited in how much they can charge.
Additionally, Nagaraj and Yahya explain that “transvestites and transsexuals
form a special category because they cater mainly to homosexual clients” and
generally use prostitution as a primary means of support. They are outcasts
of a still predominantly Islamic society, where homosexuality is a punishable
crime and they are often subject to even more harassment and abuse by the
authorities.98 The researchers also found that there is a small population of
male prostitutes in Singapore who are generally frequented by wealthy wom-
en, work in exclusive locations, and charge exorbitant rates. As one of the only
studies even making mention of male, transsexual, or child prostitution, it is
clear that these areas need further investigation.
There are still several local ordinances and acts that prohibit various aspects
of the sex trade in Singapore, but the primary concern at the moment is the ac-
tive movement of underage girls being trafficked into the market.99 As of 2012,
prostitution—the act of selling sexual intimacies—is not illegal; however, so-
liciting, running a brothel, and profiting from the earnings of someone else’s
sexual labour are. In July of 2012, after a series of public scandals about under-
age prostitution, freelance journalist Paul Fitzpatrick wrote an article for the
Singapore Business Review exposing the character of prostitution in Singapore
today. Unknowingly, the journalist described what, for Singapore, had become
a curiously familiar pattern. He reported that while they are not legal, the
“police unofficially tolerate and monitor a limited number of brothels. Pros-
titutes in such establishments are required to undergo periodic health checks
and must carry a health card.”100 Other prostitutes, Fitzpatrick claimed, can
98 Ibid.
99 Nagaraj and Yahya, “Prostitution in Malaysia”, p. 90.
100 Paul Fitzpatrick, “Into the Red Light: Prostitution in Singapore”, Singapore Business Re-
view, 20 July 2012; available at: http://sbr.com.sg/leisure-entertainment/commentary/red
-light-prostitution-in-singapore; last accessed 8 July 2017. The following articles de-
scribe two separate scandals about officials and public figures purchasing underage
women for sexual services: Cheryl Ong and Jalelah Abu Baker, “In Singapore Clients
will Face Charges if Prostitutes are Under the Age of 18”, Straits Times Indonesia, 13
February 2012, available at: http://jakartaglobe.id/archive/in-singapore-clients-will-
face-charges-if-prostitutes-the-under-age-of-18/; last accessed 30 June 2017; Sanat
Valilikappen and Andrea Tan, “Singapore Charges 48 in Underage Prostitution Scan-
dal”, Bloomberg, 18 April 2012; available at: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012
-04-18/singapore-charges-48-in-underage-prostitution-scandal.html; last accessed 21 May
2012.
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618 Herzog
be found in massage parlours and karaoke bars, while “street girls”, “ding dong
girls”, “packaged women”, “second wives”, and “female companions” are some
of the many options for commercial sex.101 Women continue to use prostitu-
tion as a means to compensate for the difficulty of finding other employment
and Chinese prostitutes are still making a “significant contribution to China’s
economy.”102 Although he fails to comment on the advantages that Singapore’s
sex trade creates for Singapore’s economy, Fitzpatrick does describe a familiar
world of extra-legal conditions for unofficial brothels, sex work veiled behind
other service industries, and a categorized hierarchy determined by employ-
ment status, method of procurement, and potential earnings. He explains that
self-employed “second wives”, or “packaged women” make more than “street
girls”, and a woman’s youth, beauty, and ethnicity remain key to top profits in
the city’s sex industry.
With such detailed descriptions of this underground and seemingly nefari-
ous trade, it is important not to assume that all sex workers have been trafficked,
coerced, or forced into the business. As mentioned frequently above, prostitu-
tion can be a lucrative business and Singapore’s growth and prosperity, along
with the notoriety of its red-light districts, have drawn professional prostitutes
from around the world for more than a century. The numbers of men passing
through this international entrepôt have promised both security of employ-
ment and the potential for prosperity. Nonetheless, Singapore’s authorities have
historically battled the illegal trade in women and girls who were unwillingly
trafficked into Singapore’s brothels; smugglers have supplied young women and
girls, either indentured or sold outright, in Singapore since the beginning of the
nineteenth century in spite of local political and legal authorities’ efforts to stop
it. In fact, an article in the Jakarta Globe claims that in 2008 officials tightened
laws to combat human trafficking and Singapore’s authorities recently uncov-
ered a ring of “vice syndicates” providing patrons with underage girls.103 So,
while prostitution itself is still legal in Singapore and there are many women
voluntarily working in its booming sex industry, there is also still a thriving il-
licit trade to accommodate the unfulfilled demands of migrant consumers.
Conclusion
Singapore’s sex industry developed, expanded, and fluctuated according to his-
torical waves of unattached merchants, labourers, soldiers, and businessmen
101 Fitzpatrick, “Into the Red Light: Prostitution in Singapore”.
102 Ibid.
103 Ong and Baker, “In Singapore Clients will Face Charges”.
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Selling Sex in Singapore 619
flowing through this international entrepôt. In fact, prostitution has been an
important part of Singapore’s culture, politics, and economy since its found-
ing in 1819. Moreover, persistent themes within discussions about sex work in
Singapore have shaped public perceptions and occupied the attention of gov-
ernment officials for almost two centuries; the traffic in women and girls has
been a concern since the abolition of the slave trade in the Straits Settlements
in 1807. From the beginning, officials worried that there were not enough wom-
en for the flood of male labourers immigrating to the port city and “turned a
blind eye” to the illegal flow of women and girls imported into Malacca, Penang,
and Singapore in spite of explicit legislation.104 Singapore’s sex industry grew
so quickly that the city joined Hong Kong to become the first of Britain’s colo-
nies to include brothels within their business registries and built a system of
municipal regulation. However, venereal diseases, the second most important
theme in the history of prostitution in Singapore, brought the colony’s broth-
els and prostitutes into an international discourse. Britain’s passage of the
imperial cd Acts between 1864 and 1869 granted Singapore’s government the
imperial authority to expand and enforce regulationism as they attempted to
gain control of the commercial sex trade. Officials passed the colony’s cdo in
1870 and implemented practical reforms, such as establishing health codes and
providing access to health care for women working in brothels. These provi-
sions made noticeable differences in the lives of prostitutes over the f ollowing
two decades. Another spike in disease and increases in military encampments
followed the repeal of the imperial cd Acts in 1888 and forced local officials
to find a way to accommodate the obvious demand for commercial sex, while
complying with imperial policy. In the early twentieth century, the British
public’s reaction to news of Singapore’s extra-legal system of regulationism
pushed the trade underground; it is remarkable how strikingly similar this
scenario is to the unofficial lists of tolerated houses in the city’s current sex
market described by Nagaraj, Yahya, and Fitzpatrick. Since the first ordinance
prohibiting the immigration of identified prostitutes in 1927, the authorities
in Singapore have worked to contain sex work within designated areas of the
city; they have attempted to identify and examine working prostitutes, while
continuously fighting a black market element that has been consistently out of
reach.
Unfortunately, the historical record contains very little information about
the prostitutes themselves; save for a few diaries and oral histories from the
latter half of the nineteenth century, their stories almost always emerge from
court hearings and legal complaints made to the magistrate. As one might
104 Reid, “The Decline of Slavery in Indonesia”, p. 72.
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620 Herzog
imagine, these are generally the stories of women coerced or trafficked into
the trade, or abused and mistreated by a client or proprietor. Written by le-
gal officials, those reports also regularly confirm widespread preconceptions
about the violence, exploitation, and degradation of the thousands of women
who have worked in Singapore’s sex trade. Without challenging the veracity of
these perceptions, those reports do not reflect the existence of women who, for
almost 200 years, travelled willingly to the city as prostitutes or with the inten-
tion to work as one, in search of a fortune. Like any other migrant labourer,
Singapore’s prosperity lured prostitutes in search of work and, although the
records are scarce, we know that some were quite successful. Still, historically
even the wealthiest concubines and successful brothels have been subject to
the scrutiny of local authorities attempting to curb the illicit trade in wom-
en and girls or control the spread of venereal diseases. In the end, Singapore
seems to be in another period of “extra-legal” regulation; local citizens, author-
ities, and Singapore’s government officials are—once again—grappling with
attempts to control the business of selling sex in the city.
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chapter 24
Prostitution in Sydney and Perth since 1788
Raelene Frances
Introduction
Prostitution, in the sense of the commercial exchange of sexual services for
material advantage, was unknown in Aboriginal society in Australia prior to
European settlement.1 It arrived in Australia with the First Fleet which brought
convicts and their jailers to establish a new colony in Sydney, New South Wales
in 1788.2 Commercial sex persisted as an important part of Australian society
after the end of the convict period in the middle of the nineteenth century.
* The author wishes to acknowledge the support of the Australian Research Council for the
broader project from which this study is drawn.
1 In the early colonial Australian context, “prostitution” was a term that was used loosely and
often included any extra-marital sexual contact as well as the sale or barter of sexual services.
Historians who have studied this topic have attempted to distinguish between these different
uses of the term in the interests of clarity. A similar slippage continued into the twentieth
century, when the concept of the “amateur prostitute” entered the lexicon and was especially
popularised during World War i. This term referred to young women—often characterised as
shop-girls—who engaged in promiscuous sexual activity but did not necessarily seek finan-
cial reward. Later in the twentieth century, this concept was expressed in the term “charity
girls”, that is, women who gave away sex for free. This study attempts to survey the spectrum
of the exchange of sexual services for financial reward, and includes barter as well as cash
transactions.
2 However, there was a sexual dimension to the complex exchange of goods and services be-
tween Aboriginal people and the fishermen from Macassa in Sulawesi who visited the north-
ern coasts of Australia annually from at least the late 1600s. Raelene Frances, Selling Sex:
A Hidden History of Prostitution (Sydney, 2007), pp. 77–80; Christine Choo, “The Impact of
Asian-Aboriginal Australian Contact in Northern Australia, Particularly the Kimberley, West-
ern Australia”, Asian and Pacific Migration Journal, 3 (1994), pp. 295–310; Ian Crawford, We
Won the Victory: Aborigines and Outsiders on the North-West Coast of the Kimberley (Freman-
tle, 2001), Ch. 4; Lloyd Warner, A Black Civilisation (New York, 1964); Campbell McKnight, The
Voyage to “Marege”: Macassan Trepangers in Northern Australia (Melbourne, 1973); Ronald M.
Berndt and Catherine H. Berndt, Arnhem Land: Its History and its People (Melbourne, 1954);
Derek Mulvaney, Encounters in Place: Outsiders and Aboriginal Australians 1606–1985 (Bris-
bane, 1989).
© Raelene Frances, 2017 | doi 10.1163/9789004346253_025
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622 Frances
Even in the British colonies that were not originally convict settlements—
namely western Australia and south Australia—prostitution was always a part
of the social fabric of the immigrant society and increasingly drew indigenous
Australians into these exchanges. This chapter focuses on two case studies
from different sides of the Australian continent: Sydney, on the east coast, and
Perth, on the west coast. Their different histories illuminate key themes in the
history of sex work in Australia. In the case of Sydney, we see a convict soci-
ety gradually evolving into a free settlement and in the case of Perth, a colony
established by free settlers. These two cities provide interesting contrasts, too,
in that they developed quite different ways of dealing with prostitution, even
when their legal frameworks were very similar. This essay will explore these
differences, as well as the similarities between the sex industries in each city.3
Social Profiles of Sex Workers
Sydney
The early convict colony of New South Wales was viewed by many contempo-
raries as one vast brothel, and its capital, Sydney, was regarded as the centre of
3 Despite its long history, prostitution was not treated as a serious subject of historical inves-
tigation until the advent of feminist historiography in the 1970s. Anne Summers, in Damned
Whores and God’s Police: The Colonization of Women in Australia (Melbourne, 1975), examined
the official categorising of colonial women as either good or bad, with sex workers firmly in
the latter. The first major study of prostitution in Australia, a collection edited by Kay Dan-
iels, was published in 1984. Tellingly entitled So Much Hard Work, this volume represented
the dominant strand in Australian feminist historiography of prostitution, one that saw pros-
titution as sex work. Although radical feminists such as Sheila Jeffreys have challenged this
theoretical approach—arguing that “sex work” normalizes an institution that is inherently
oppressive of all women—the first major survey of prostitution across the whole continent,
published in 2007, was firmly within the tradition set by the contributors to the Daniels
volume. Kay Daniels (ed.), So Much Hard Work: Prostitution in Australian History (Sydney,
1984); Frances, Selling Sex. Another important study includes Barbara Sullivan, The Politics
of Sex: Prostitution and Pornography in Australia since 1945 (Melbourne, 1997). For a succinct
overview of this history and historiography, see Raelene Frances, “Prostitution”, in Graeme
Davison, John Hirst and Stuart Macintyre (eds), The Oxford Companion to Australian History
(Melbourne, 1996), pp. 530–531; also Raelene Frances, “A History of Female Prostitution in
Australia since 1788”, in Roberta Perkins et al., Sex Work and the Sex Industry (Sydney, 1994),
pp. 27–52. For alternative approaches, see Sheila Jeffreys, The Idea of Prostitution (Melbourne,
1997); Carole Pateman, The Sexual Contract (Cambridge, 1988); Cheryl Overs, “Prostitution:
We Call it Sex Work Now”, Lilith, 6 (1989), pp. 64–68; Christine Overall, “What’s Wrong with
Prostitution”, Signs, 17 (1992), pp. 705–724.
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Prostitution in Sydney and Perth since 1788 623
this “vice”.4 There was certainly a strong demand for sexual services in a colo-
ny where white men outnumbered white women by at least four to one until
the middle of the nineteenth century. A substantial proportion of the women
transported over the six decades from 1788 had been selling sex in the cities of
Great Britain prior to setting sail for Australia. Around 20 per cent were official-
ly recorded as prostitutes in the British jail records, while the records collected
on the journey out suggest a much higher proportion had been involved in
commercial sex in some way prior to setting sail. Apart from women who were
full-time sex workers, it was common in British cities of the eighteenth and
early nineteenth centuries for women to combine the sale of sexual services
with other trades, so that many convict women had dual occupations recorded
on their jail entries, such as, “framework knitter and prostitute”, “weaver and
prostitute”, and “factory girl and prostitute”.5 Some of these women continued
to sell sex on arrival in Australia and they were joined by women who sold or
bartered sexual services for the first time either on the convict ships or in the
new colony.
As the convict colony increasingly attracted free immigrants, many of the
new female settlers from poorer backgrounds in Britain also sold sex. Through-
out the colonial period and until the 1950s the urban sex industry was domi-
nated by women of British descent, with English women forming the majority
of these. The majority of these women were nominally Protestant Christians,
although the presence of a significant number of women of Irish descent
meant that Catholics were also represented. The migration of a small number
of Jews from Poland and Russia from the late nineteenth century also added a
few Jewish women to the ranks of Australia’s sex workers. And from the early
days of colonization, Aboriginal women, dispossessed of their land and tradi-
tional economies, also provided sexual services to the colonizers in exchange
for food, money, or alcohol. But their numbers diminished over the course of
the nineteenth century as they were increasingly pushed out of urban areas.6
Immigration programmes after the Second World War contributed to a more
diverse ethnic composition of the Sydney sex workforce as some immigrant
4 Summers, Damned Whores and God’s Police.
5 Lloyd Robson, The Convict Settlers of Australia (Melbourne, 1994 [1965]), p. 67; Henry
Mayhew, “The Slop-workers and Needlewomen”, in E.P. Thompson and Eileen Yeo (eds), The
Unknown Mayhew: Selections from the Morning Chronicle 1849–50 (Melbourne, 1973), pp. 201,
211, 216; Deborah Oxley, Convict Maids: The Forced Migration of Women to Australia (Cam-
bridge, 1996), p. 166; Plummer to Macquarie, 4 May 1809, Historical Records of Australia, series
i, vol 7, p. 205; Katrina Alford, Production or Reproduction?: An Economic History of Women in
Australia, 1788–1850 (Melbourne, 1984), p. 15.
6 Frances, Selling Sex.
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624 Frances
and second-generation women also became involved in selling sexual services.
These included women from Greek, Italian, Polish and Balkan backgrounds as
well as British women. From the late 1970s onwards Australia also became a
destination for Asian immigrants, and Vietnamese, Philippine, Chinese, Thai
and Indonesian women entered the industry. By the turn of the twenty-first
century, immigrant sex workers also included a number of women from the
former Soviet Union.
Perth
Like Sydney, Perth was colonized by the British, although it was not initially
a convict colony (only between 1850 and 1868 did it take a limited number
of male convicts on probation). Established in 1829, the small settlement on
the Swan River struggled to survive until gold was discovered 600 kilometres
inland to the east of the capital in the 1890s. Few white women sold sex in
the early years, and those that did were drawn from the population of British
immigrants and their descendants, as well as the few Aboriginal women who
existed on the fringes of the township. The gold rushes to the fields around
Coolgardie and Kalgoorlie in the 1890s brought a dramatic change to the coast-
al town as Perth (and its port, Fremantle) became a major staging post for trav-
ellers and goods to and from the gold fields. Sex workers came from around the
world to service the now thriving township and the mining districts. Of these,
French women formed the largest single national group, comprising around 20
per cent of sex workers known to the authorities. Next came the Japanese, with
10 per cent, followed by Italians, with 1.5 per cent. Moreover, these numbers
were disproportionate to the numbers of those groups in the Australian popu-
lation as a whole, the census recording 0.1, 0.5 and 0.7 per cent respectively for
French, Japanese and Italian nationals in western Australia in 1901. Australian-
born women made up around half of the total known sex workers, whereas all
persons of Australian birth made up 70 per cent of the total West Australian
population (excluding indigenous people).7
The numbers of Japanese sex workers decreased rapidly after 1901 but
French and Italian women continued to play an important part in the city’s sex
industry until World War ii as both workers and madams, although women
of British descent always formed the majority of sex workers. After the war,
Perth experienced similar changes as those noted in Sydney: more workers
from different immigrant groups, initially European but also including Asians,
7 Raelene Davidson (now Frances), “Prostitution in Perth and Fremantle and on the Eastern
Goldfields, 1895–1939” (m.a. thesis, University of Western Australia, 1980), p. 137.
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Prostitution in Sydney and Perth since 1788 625
especially from South East Asia starting in the 1970s, and more recently, wom-
en from former Soviet Union countries.
Education
The evidence we have about the educational levels of sex workers suggests that
in general they were no more nor less educated than the rest of the working
classes, from whom most were drawn. After the introduction of compulsory
education in the late nineteenth century, almost all Australian-born prosti-
tutes were literate. One exception to this is indigenous women, who had lower
levels of literacy in general, especially if they had not had mission education.
The other exception is the various waves of transitory sex workers coming from
Asia, who (apart from women coming on student visas) have tended to come
from poor rural families with low levels of access to education.8
Prior/Parallel Employment
For many women, sex work was only one of many occupations they engaged
in during the course of their lives, although for a minority it was their sole
career. More commonly, women sold sexual services for a short period of their
lives before leaving to marry or to take up other work or establish a business. A
minority also sold sex in conjunction with other types of work, such as factory,
shop, bar, or office work, either to supplement low wages in these occupa-
tions or to tide them over periods of underemployment and unemployment.
However, it was difficult to retain a “respectable” job if it became known that a
woman was also selling sex and this difficulty increased from the second half
of the nineteenth century onwards as middle class notions of respectability
permeated the working classes. Since the introduction of fees for university
education in the 1990s and the decriminalization of prostitution in several
states, more tertiary students have taken up sex work on a part-time basis.9
8 This conclusion is based on analyses of police records, which recorded whether those ar-
rested could read and write as well as other details such as religion, occupation, age, marital
status, and address.
9 Sarah Lantz, “Sex Work and Study: Students, Identities and Work in the 21st Century” (Un-
published Ph.D., University of Melbourne, 2003); Priscilla Pyett et al., Profile of Workers in the
Sex Industry: Melbourne (Melbourne, 1995); Jocelyn Snow, “Female Sex Workers in Victoria”
(Unpublished m.a., University of Melbourne, 1999); Sarah Lantz, “Students Working in the
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626 Frances
Family Situation
The ranks of Australia’s sex workers comprised women from every type of fam-
ily situation—single, married (both legal and de facto), widowed and divorced.
They were mothers, daughters and sisters, and sometimes they operated in
collaboration with another female member of their family—two sisters work-
ing together, for example, or mother-daughter partnerships. It was not unusual
for women to marry their clients, and some continued to earn a living in the
sex industry after marriage. Aboriginal women usually operated within an ex-
tended network of kinship relationships, their earnings contributing to the
economic sustenance of the wider group.10 Non-Aboriginal women also used
the sale and barter of sex as one of a range of strategies by which they contrib-
uted to the household economy, especially in times of economic depression.
From the late nineteenth century, however, it became increasingly difficult
for women to maintain “normal” family structures whilst working in the sex
industry: government child welfare agencies increasingly considered prostitu-
tion a disqualifying factor for motherhood, and removed the children of pros-
titutes from the “moral risk” of such homes. From the early twentieth century
onwards, stronger legislation against men living off “immoral” earnings meant
that it was more difficult for women to live with male relatives whether or not
the men were receiving the earnings of their prostitution. Asian women who
came to work in Australia throughout this period tended not to have family
with them, except sometimes in the case of sisters. However, many had fami-
lies in their country of origin, whether parents or children, and sent a propor-
tion of their earnings home.
Age Structure
As far as historians can tell, most women who worked in the sex industries of
Sydney and Perth were in their twenties and thirties, although it was not un-
usual to find both younger and older women also working. A study of western
Australia’s prostitutes from the 1890s to World War ii found that those women
coming under police attention as a group was ageing over this period. But so
too was the general female population as the youthful immigrants of the 1890s
Melbourne Sex Industry: Education, Human Capital and the Changing Patterns of the
Youth Labour Market”, Journal of Youth Studies, 8 (2005), pp. 385–401.
10 Frances, Selling Sex.
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Prostitution in Sydney and Perth since 1788 627
either aged or departed the state. It is difficult to be very precise about the ages
of prostitutes, however, as those coming under police attention may not have
been representative of the total prostitute population; it is possible that the
police were more inclined to prosecute older women soliciting, for example,
or older women may have been more likely to be working on the streets be-
cause they were less employable in brothels. Child prostitution has not been
a prominent feature of either of these cities, although it has certainly existed
with cases of children as young as 10 and 11 selling sex.11
Physical and Psychological Health
Venereal disease was an occupational hazard for all sex workers in both Perth
and Sydney, with the incidence of infection increasing in the late nineteenth
century.12 Greater awareness of prevention amongst some sections of the sex
industry at this time provided some protection for women in the early twen-
tieth century, although it was not until the later stages of World War ii that
effective treatment became available for the more virulent venereal diseases.13
The late 1960s brought new challenges as diseases developed resistance to anti-
biotics and new strands were introduced at the time of Australia’s involvement
in the war in Vietnam. When the worldwide hiv/aids crisis emerged in the
1980s, Australia’s sex workers were seen as particularly vulnerable. However,
in this instance health authorities worked closely with sex worker organiza-
tions to ensure that Australia’s sex industry generally responded effectively to
this threat, with education campaigns and prophylactic measures adopted to
minimize the impact on sex workers and their clients.14
Sex workers were also liable to fall pregnant, particularly before the devel-
opment of more reliable forms of female-controlled contraception like the pill.
Pregnancy itself held dangers for mothers, especially before the development
of antibiotics in the 1930s, and maternal death rates were high, as were deaths
from abortions.15
11 Davidson, “Prostitution in Perth, Fremantle and the Eastern Goldfields”, Ch. 4.
12 Frances, Selling Sex, pp. 40–41, 58–59, 68, 72–73, 79, 100, 135–136, 139–140, 157–162, 180–181,
207–210.
13 Ibid., p. 261. The famous 1864 Contagious Diseases Act was not adopted in New South
Wales, although it was in Queensland, Tasmania, and Victoria.
14 Paul Sendziuk, Learning to Trust: Australian Responses to aids (Sydney, 2003).
15 Frances, Selling Sex, pp. 40–41,135–136, 139–141.
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628 Frances
The Market for Sex
From the earliest days of European settlement, Australia has been a very urban
society, despite its rural image. By the late nineteenth century it was one of
the most urbanized countries in the world. These centres always provided the
major base for the sex industry, particularly the ports, which provided the es-
sential link between this island continent and the rest of the world.
Until the early twentieth century, Australia’s white population was dispro-
portionately male, a fact which also increased the demand for commercial sex.
This was especially the case in the early days of Sydney, where women com-
prised less than a quarter of the population for much of the first sixty years
of the convict settlement and even at the end of the transportation period
were outnumbered two to one.16 The sex ratio in the city began to even out by
the middle years of the century, but the seasonal influx of itinerant rural and
maritime workers continued to ensure that Sydney retained its predominantly
masculine demographic. While the limited labour market for women ensured
a steady supply of workers in the sex industry, the ongoing imbalance in the
ratio of men to women ensured a ready demand for their services. Even when
the balance in the cities had evened out later in the century, there was clearly
still a high demand for commercial sex. And visiting seamen and rural work-
ers were by no means the only customers. Many contemporary commentators
believed that young single men provided the major demand, a demand made
stronger by the fact that many men deferred marriage until they felt they were
in a secure financial position. In the last half of the nineteenth century, around
60 per cent of men in Australia under thirty remained unmarried—a much
higher proportion than in England or Wales. This was particularly so in the
middle classes and aspiring segments of the working classes, where material
expectations were higher and men took longer to establish careers. In some
cases, such as banks, employees were actually forbidden to marry before they
had achieved a certain level of seniority, and hence salary.17
16 Plummer to Macquarie, 4 May 1809, Historical Records of Australia, series i, vol. 7, p. 205;
Katrina Alford, Production or Reproduction?: An Economic History of Women in Australia,
1788–1850 (Melbourne, 1984), p. 15.
17 Mark Finnane and Stephen Garton, “The Work of Policing: Social Relations and the
Criminal Justice System in Queensland 1880–1914, Part ii”, Labour History, 63 (1992),
pp. 43–64, 45; Graeme Davison, The Rise and Fall of “Marvellous Melbourne” (Melbourne,
1978), pp. 193–195; “Report from the Select Committee upon a Bill for the Prevention of
Contagious Diseases …”, Victorian Parliamentary Papers, 1878, pp. 67–68. For marriage
patterns, see Peter F. McDonald, Marriage in Australia: Age at First Marriage and Propor-
tion Marrying, 1860–1971 (Canberra, 1975).
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Prostitution in Sydney and Perth since 1788 629
But it was not only single men who wished to buy sexual services. Apart
from the desire for variety in their sexual lives, married men in colonial Austra-
lia had additional reasons to seek sexual satisfaction outside the home. With
contraceptive techniques unreliable, married couples faced the prospect of ei-
ther numerous pregnancies and abortions, or periods of abstinence from sex
in order to limit their families. We know that the middle classes were success-
fully limiting their families in the last three decades of the nineteenth century,
and abstinence within marriage played a major part in this success. It is not
surprising, then, that married men of this class availed themselves of the ser-
vices of sex workers, who would take responsibility for any babies conceived.
They were also in a financial position to afford such services.18
Perth’s sex ratios in the early days of settlement were less severely skewed
than those in convict Sydney, but still dominated by men. The discovery of gold
in the 1880s had a dramatic impact on the numbers of men in the capital, as
men flocked from all over the world to try their luck on the fields.19
In Perth as in Sydney, wars also provided a magnet for men, as troops assem-
bled and disembarked from these centres. There have been three main wars
affecting the sex industry in Australia: the two world wars and the Vietnam
War. In the case of World War i, the major impact was to increase demand
for sexual services in the cities where troops gathered for disembarkation to
the war zone. Both Sydney and Perth were thus affected, with increases in the
numbers of women engaging in prostitution and increases in earnings. World
War ii had an even more marked impact, as hundreds of thousands of troops,
including us troops, were stationed in or passed through both cities. Sydney, in
particular, experienced unprecedented demand for sexual services after Aus-
tralia became the headquarters for the allied campaign in the Pacific. Simi-
larly, during the Vietnam War Sydney became a popular destination for both
Australian and us servicemen on rest and recreation and once again demand
for sexual services escalated. The impact on Perth/Fremantle was much less,
although the visit of us naval vessels continued to provide periodic boosts to
demand both during and after the war, up to the present.20
Since the earliest days of European colonization, both Perth and Sydney
have been subject to high levels of immigration, originally from Britain. From
the latter half of the twentieth century immigrants came from a wider range
of countries in both Europe and Asia, and more recently, the Middle East and
Africa. Migration provided both a demand for prostitution and supplied many
18 Frances, Selling Sex, pp. 133–134.
19 Davidson, “Prostitution in Perth, Fremantle and the Eastern Goldfields”.
20 Frances, Selling Sex, pp. 208–209, 229, 235, 249–252, 252–268.
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630 Frances
of the women who worked as prostitutes. Most noticeable, however, was the
arrival in the late 1880s and ‘90s of significant numbers of women from Japan.
The Karayuki san, as they were known, were brought from poor areas of Japan
under a form of debt bondage which saw them bound to sexual service for
many years. During this time, they worked in brothels throughout the mining
and port cities of northern Australia. Some also worked in Perth and its port of
Fremantle in the 1890s and early 1900s, before the Immigration Restriction Act
of 1901 prevented further arrivals.21
The arrival of the telegraph in Australia in the 1870s, at the same time as
steam ships came to dominate maritime passenger routes, facilitated greater
movement and higher levels of coordination and professionalism in the in-
ternational sex industry. The opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 cut weeks off
the sea journey from Europe to Australia and Asia, further contributing to the
speed at which sex industry entrepreneurs could respond to shifting markets
for sexual labour. Australia was part of this international movement, with
workers and entrepreneurs (both male and female) from Europe and Asia ar-
riving in Fremantle/Perth to take advantage of the booming mining economy.
In some cases, Australian women joined the international traffic, travelling to
Asia and Europe, and sometimes stopping off in Buenos Aires. The reduction
in the cost of air travel in the 1970s facilitated the increase in numbers of wom-
en arriving in Australia specifically to work in the sex industry, initially from
Asia but more recently also from eastern Europe, the former Soviet Union and
Africa.22
Starting in the 1920s, cars also formed an important part of the sex industry,
in some cases providing vehicles from which women solicited. Tilly Devine, a
notorious Sydney sex worker and entrepreneur, solicited from the back seat
of her husband’s Cadillac in the early 1920s. More commonly, motor vehicles
provided an opportunity for men to solicit and pick up street workers. In the
1960s, escort agencies used cars to transport workers to clients’ homes, busi-
nesses, or hotels.
21 Frances, Selling Sex, pp. 46–60, 112, 236, 76–77, 93; Noreen Jones, No. 2 Home: A Story
of Japanese Pioneers in Australia (Fremantle, 2002); Sone Sachiko, “Karayuki-san of
Asia 1868–1938: The Role of Prostitutes Overseas in Japanese Economic and Social
Development”, (Unpublished M.Phil., Murdoch University, 1980); James Warren, Ah Ku
and Karyuki-san: Prostitution in Singapore 1870–1940 (Singapore, 1993); David C. Sissons,
“Karayuki-san: Japanese Prostitutes in Australia 1887–1916: i”, Historical Studies, 17
(1968), pp. 323–341; David C. Sissons, “Karayuki-san: Japanese Prostitutes in Australia
1887–1916: ii”, Historical Studies, 10 (1977), pp. 474–488.
22 Frances, Selling Sex, pp. 60–73.
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Prostitution in Sydney and Perth since 1788 631
The increasing use of telephones in the early twentieth century contributed
to the ease of communications, but the impact was felt more at the local than
international level: in the 1920s, Sydney’s first “call girls” made their appear-
ance, the telephone allowing them to conduct their business more discretely
with a select clientele. Public phone boxes also provided convenient places for
women to advertise their services with a contact phone number. By the late
twentieth century, phone sex had arrived, with women charging customers for
erotic conversations over the telephone. The internet provided further oppor-
tunities for technologically-assisted virtual sex, as well as a new medium for
advertising sexual services.
Changing attitudes to women and sexuality also had an impact on the mar-
ket for sex. The movement for greater equality for women, which began in
Australia in the 1870s, had only a limited impact on the demand and supply of
commercial sexual services before the 1960s. Although employment opportu-
nities for women did widen somewhat in the late nineteenth century, prosti-
tution was still the most lucrative economic option. The “first wave” women’s
movement affected the sex industry indirectly through feminists’ agitation for
stronger laws and enforcement in relation to so-called “trafficking”, or coerced
prostitution, and to men living off the proceeds of prostitution.23 The revived
feminist movement in the 1960s and ‘70s contributed to new official approach-
es which decriminalized prostitution and made it easier for women to work
in the sex industry. At the same time, more relaxed attitudes to sexuality in
Australian society generally meant that women outside the sex industry were
more willing to engage in extra-marital sex. This also reduced the demand for
commercial sexual services, particularly for straight vaginal intercourse. The
net effect of this increased supply and reduction in demand has been reduced
earnings for sex workers over the period since the 1970s, and a greater demand
for more “exotic” kinds of services from sex workers.24
Legalislative and Policing Context
All of this commercial sexual exchange occurred within a specific legislative
and policing framework which changed over time. For most of the colonial pe-
riod up to 1901, Australian authorities treated prostitution as a “necessary evil”,
seeking to ameliorate those aspects that offended neighbours and the public,
23 Raelene Frances, “Women in White Australia”, in Michelle Hetherington (ed.), 1913: Year of
Dreams (Canberra, 2013), pp. 94–105.
24 Frances, Selling Sex, Part 5.
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632 Frances
such as rowdy brothels and flagrant soliciting, through the disorderly houses
acts and vagrancy laws. This was the case for both Sydney and Perth, although
in both cities the situation began to change in the late nineteenth century.
Perth
Until the outbreak of war in 1914, Perth’s sex workers had operated with a mini-
mum of police intervention, as long as they were not too overt about soliciting
in the main streets of the city or too disruptive to neighbours. The major legis-
lative change before the war was the introduction of the “Evil Fame” clause of
the Police Offences Act in 1904. This was aimed more at men living off the pro-
ceeds of prostitution than at women and gave the police a very powerful weap-
on to deal with these so-called “bludgers” and exclude them from the industry.
With the outbreak of war, military, medical, and police authorities combined
to institute a kind of de facto regulation of Perth’s sex industry. Brothels were
localized on Roe Street and prostitutes were required to undergo regular medi-
cal examinations by a government doctor. This move was intended to make
policing of the booming wartime sex industry easier, and also to reduce the
risks of the troops becoming infected with venereal diseases.25
On Roe Street the number of brothels increased to fifteen in 1915 and sta-
bilized at around ten by 1918, and there was a gradual decline in the number
of brothels outside this street. This trend continued until the 1920s, by which
time there was a dramatic reduction in “street strolling”. There were isolated
houses in the surrounding suburbs such as Subiaco, East Perth, Victoria Park,
West Perth, and Leederville, but these seem to have been few in number and
catered for the upper end of the market. The remaining premises used by pros-
titutes as their addresses in the city centre catered mainly for the homeless.
They were usually “coffee palaces” and were notorious for their cheapness and
filthy conditions.26
The red-light district on Roe Street was closed in 1958 and the inmates dis-
persed to massage parlours and escort agencies in the suburbs, again prompted
by a change in police practice rather than a change in the law. For the remainder
of the twentieth century and until 2011, the laws remained largely unchanged,
and the police continued to exercize a “containment” policy in relation to the
25 Chief Secretary’s Office file 1083/1915, State Records Office of Western Australia [hereafter
srowa].
26 Raelene Davidson (now Frances), “Dealing with the ‘Social Evil’: Prostitutes and Police
in Western Australia, 1895–1924”, in Kay Daniels (ed.), So Much Hard Work (Sydney, 1984),
pp. 162–191; Paul Hasluck, Mucking About: An Autobiography (Perth, 1977), p. 116; Health
Department versus People’s Palace, Magistrate’s Evidence Book, Perth Police Court Petty
Sessions, 11 December 1914, srowa; “Glimpses of the City”, Sunday Times, 22 August 1920.
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Prostitution in Sydney and Perth since 1788 633
sex industry. Under this policy, they tolerated a certain number of establish-
ments providing they operated under a set of unwritten police rules.
Sydney
The sex industry in Sydney took a very different course. While Perth’s sex in-
dustry came increasingly under police control to the exclusion of organized
crime, Sydney’s commercial sex scene fell increasingly into the hands of crim-
inal gangs. From 1908 to the mid-1920s it became embroiled with organized
crime, culminating in the famous “razor wars” of the late 1920s when violence
erupted on the streets of Darlinghurst as rival gangs struggled for control of
Sydney’s criminal scene. These decades saw the rise of two legendary women,
Kate Leigh and Tilly Devine, who dominated Sydney’s sex industry from the
1920s until well into the 1950s.27
Five important factors contributed to this development. Changes to the
Police Offences Act in 1908 provided the first precondition. Under this legis-
lation men, but not women, could be convicted of living off the earnings of
prostitution. Men who had previously owned brothels and associated openly
with female prostitutes thereafter risked prosecution. These risks and penal-
ties increased with changes to the Crimes Act in 1924 that provided a three-year
prison sentence for re-convicted “bludgers”. Most of these men retreated from
open involvement in the sex industry. At the same time, stronger provisions
against street soliciting gave the police more power over the movement of
prostitutes, while the attack on their male associates made them more vulner-
able both to arrest and to violence from clients.28
Secondly, the imposition of six o’clock closing hours on hotels in 1916 pro-
vided an opportunity for the illegally inclined to profit from the illicit sale of
liquor after hours, as well as making brothels more attractive as sites of evening
entertainment. Thirdly, troops returning from World War i brought with them
a taste for cocaine and other narcotics, and when these drugs were made il-
legal in the 1920s another avenue of illicit traffic opened up. Fourthly, Sydney
was the only Australian city, apart from Melbourne, large enough to sustain a
market in illicit gambling, alcohol, drugs, and sex to support extortion rackets.
Finally, New South Wales had a long history of police corruption, which argu-
ably predisposed them to cooperate with organized criminal gangs. The last
factor seems to have been the most important, since Melbourne shared all the
27 Judith Allen, Sex and Secrets: Crimes Involving Australian Women since 1880 (Melbourne,
1990), pp. 192–193; Frances, Selling Sex, Ch. 13.
28 Under-Secretary to Secretary, Prime Minister’s Department, 15 December 1953, aa Series
1838/1, item 856/14/8/2, National Archives of Australia [hereafter naa].
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other preconditions but did not develop a network of organized crime trading
in illegal vice on anywhere near the scale found in Sydney.
These criminals received a setback when changes to the law in 1929 made
it an offence to consort with convicted criminals, and in the next decade Syd-
ney’s leading criminals in the sex industry faced prosecution and expulsion.
Criminal dominance was quickly replaced by corrupt police control. No further
major changes occurred in the legal framework governing prostitution until
the 1960s. By that time, Sydney’s longstanding culture of police corruption had
reached new heights. Women who worked in the inner city were required to
pay a regular fee to each of the two police branches that covered the area. But
“weighing-in”, as bribing the police was called, was no guarantee of immunity.
There were still a few honest policemen who regularly arrested women for of-
fences such as soliciting, consorting, and offensive behaviour. And a special
blitz occurred before almost every state election, regardless of the party in
government at the time. In 1964 alone there were 14,850 prostitution-related
arrests—averaging approximately 30 arrests per woman that year. Nor was this
unusual: from 1963 to 1966 the number of arrests annually never fell below
12,000. Some women had up to 1,000 convictions recorded against them.29
Other legislative changes at this time had a major impact on the operations
of the sex industry in both Sydney and Perth. The federal government had as-
sumed control of income taxes from the states during World War ii and in the
decades afterwards it adopted an aggressive approach to collecting revenue,
actively seeking out those engaged in illicit enterprises. Despite bribes paid to
the police, women who sold sex on the streets and in the brothels were often
charged, and once they were convicted the Taxation Department would also
insist that they pay taxes. Call girls were less susceptible to prosecution and
taxation, unless someone informed on them to the Taxation Department.
At the same time as workers were subject to increasing pressure from the
police and taxation officials, a struggle for control of Sydney’s sex industry co-
incided with a rise in organized criminal syndicates associated with the traffic
in marijuana and, more particularly, heroin. Conditions in Sydney were ripe
for aspiring gangsters. The Askin Liberal Government, elected on a “law and or-
der” platform in 1965, was in fact closely associated with criminals involved in
gambling, prostitution, drugs, and extortion. The first us troops from Vietnam
brought with them in 1966 not just an apparently insatiable demand for sex-
ual services but also well-established drug-taking habits. No city in Australia
29 Perkins, “Being and Becoming ‘Working Girls’”, p. 180.
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Prostitution in Sydney and Perth since 1788 635
was more affected by this phenomenon than Sydney. By the end of the decade
powerful and violent syndicates, in collaboration with a corrupt police force
and politicians, were attempting to monopolize Sydney’s sex industry. For any-
one not wishing to conform, life became very dangerous indeed.30
The Askin Government’s amendments to the law in 1968 increased the range
of offences for which women selling sex could be convicted, including loitering
for the purposes of prostitution in, or in sight of, a public place. Penalties for
some existing offences were increased, and for the first time women as well as
men became liable for living on the earnings of prostitution.
Workers, brothel-keepers, and brothel employees thus all became much
more vulnerable to the law, a fact that the police were quick to exploit. De-
spite increasing amounts being paid to the police and their criminal associ-
ates in “protection money”, arrests and convictions of sex workers increased
dramatically after the legislation: charges for soliciting jumped from 90 in 1969
to 3,631 in 1970. “The Doors”—as the individual one-woman brothels operating
on a shift basis were called—were finally closed in late 1968 and the inmates
dispersed to the increasing number of massage parlours appearing in the sub-
urbs, or moved to other parts of Darlinghurst.31
Further dramatic changes occurred after the defeat of the Askin Govern-
ment in 1976. Neville Wran’s subsequent Labor Government was influenced by
libertarian and feminist critiques of the criminalization of prostitution. Lib-
ertarians argued that the criminal law should not interfere in private sexual
acts between consenting adults, while feminists also objected to the way in
which prostitution laws discriminated against women selling sex but provided
no penalty for the male clients. Both groups argued for the decriminalization
of most aspects of prostitution, making an exception for activities that caused
public nuisances or involved exploitation.
While such arguments were present to greater or lesser degrees in all Aus-
tralian states, New South Wales became the first to experiment with decrimi-
nalization. In 1979 it decriminalized soliciting for the purposes of prostitution
(although “truly offensive” soliciting was still an offence under the Offences
in Public Places Act). It was also no longer an offence for a reputed prostitute
to be found on premises used for prostitution. However, brothel-keepers and
workers were still liable under the Disorderly Houses Act, and new provisions
30 Although widely suspected at the time, these suspicions were not finally confirmed until
the investigations of the Wood Royal Commission in 1995–1956: “Royal Commission into
the New South Wales Police Services”, Final Report (Sydney, 1997).
31 Allen, Sex and Secrets, pp. 192–193.
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imposed penalties for advertising sexual services and operating brothels under
the guise of another service, such as massage. As a result, street prostitution
boomed and spread out of Kings Cross into neighbouring residential areas,
upsetting the other residents, who were increasingly from a different social
class as the inner-city suburbs gentrified.32
Not surprisingly, the police were less than happy about this reduction in
their powers and campaigned actively against the change. Prostitution became
both more visible and more contentious, with local councils like Sydney City
Council under pressure to deal with the residents’ complaints. The government
amended the laws in 1983 to make soliciting “near” schools, churches, hospitals,
and dwellings an offence. It also appointed a select committee to inquire into
prostitution, and this committee recommended further sweeping changes. The
changes included a major shift in emphasis in the management of prostitution
away from criminal law and towards town planning, bringing brothels under
the control of local councils. However, the Wran Government was defeated in
the 1988 election before the recommendations could be implemented.
The incoming Greiner Liberal Government introduced a new Summary Of-
fences Act, which increased penalties for all existing prostitution-related of-
fences (reintroducing jail sentences in some cases) and made clients liable for
the first time—although very few men have since been charged. The new leg-
islation allowed more scope for police judgement in enforcing the law, particu-
larly in regard to soliciting, thus once again increasing the scope for selective
enforcement and police corruption.33
The extent of this corruption was exposed when the new Carr Labor Gov-
ernment appointed Justice James Wood to lead a royal commission of enquiry.
The government immediately moved to deal with the findings of this enquiry
via a new Disorderly Houses Act, which set up clear criteria under which broth-
els could be closed by the Land and Environment Court. In effect, after 1995
brothels in New South Wales could operate legally if they had a planning per-
mit from their local council, although there is no requirement for licensing or
registration of these businesses. Soliciting continues to be legal unless it occurs
within sight of a school, church, residence, or hospital.
32 Sullivan, Politics of Sex, pp. 180–182. See also Raelene Frances and Alicia Gray, “‘Unsatisfac-
tory, Discriminatory, Unjust and Inviting Corruption’: Feminists and the Decriminalisa-
tion of Street Prostitution in New South Wales”, Australian Feminist Studies, 22 (2007),
pp. 307–324.
33 Marcia Neave, “Prostitution Laws in Australia: Past History and Current Trends”, in
Roberta Perkins, Garnett Prestage, Rachel Sharp and Frances Lovejoy (eds), Sex Work and
Sex Workers in Australia (Sydney, 1994), pp. 67–99, 80.
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Prostitution in Sydney and Perth since 1788 637
Impact of Policing Regimes on Working Conditions
All these shifts in the legislative environment and in policing regimes had pro-
found effects on the working conditions of women in the sex industry. The
ability of women to solicit in public is a case in point. Both Perth and Sydney
are blessed with relatively mild climates, making outdoor soliciting a more
comfortable option than in many other parts of the world. Such soliciting—
and, indeed, outdoor sexual activity—has existed to varying degrees through-
out the history of both cities. Street soliciting was widespread in Sydney in the
colonial period, becoming more heavily policed in the late nineteenth century
as middle-class women began to use public urban streets more frequently for
shopping and recreation. A similar development occurred in Perth, where so-
liciting in the central business district was more heavily policed starting in the
early twentieth century and streetwalkers pushed across the railway line into
the area north of the city now known as Northbridge. As we have seen, during
World War i a section of Roe Street in this area became an unofficial red-light
area supervised by the police. Brothels were allowed to operate in this area pro-
viding they abided by a set of police rules, one of which was that the women
did not solicit in the street. This arrangement was in place until the brothels
were closed in 1958. Thereafter, street soliciting reappeared sporadically, par-
ticularly in the northern and eastern areas adjacent to the central business dis-
trict. Most of Perth’s sex industry was, however, conducted in massage parlours
and from escort agencies.
Although central Sydney housed some large brothels in the early 1850s,
these were dispersed by the police in the mid-1850s, their inmates scattering to
the adjoining streets and lanes and to the portside suburb of Woolloomooloo.
For the rest of the nineteenth century, large numbers of women continued
to solicit quite openly in streets adjoining Sydney’s central business district.
However, after changes in the law in 1908, police action against soliciting in-
creased.34 As we have seen, the legal changes of 1908 also made it virtually
impossible for men to be involved in the sex industry without facing criminal
charges, which also contributed to a decline in street prostitution as without
their male associates women were more vulnerable to violence from clients
and other men. In the decades after 1908, Sydney’s sex industry increasingly
moved indoors to brothels owned and managed by women who were not liable
under the legislation for living off the proceeds of prostitution.
34 “Select Committee into the Condition of the Working Classes of the Metropolis”, New
South Wales Legislative Assembly [hereafter sc on Working Classes, New South Wales],
Votes and Proceedings, 1854–1860, vol iv, Evidence, p. 22.
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With the exception of a small group of call girls who began operations in Syd-
ney’s wealthier eastern suburbs in the 1930s, between 1908 and the 1960s almost
all of the city’s commercial sex was sold in the streets, brothels, and bars of the
inner suburbs, stretching from the Woolloomooloo wharves through East Syd-
ney to Surry Hills. In the 1950s, a prominent feature of this area was “The Doors”,
which were rented to individual women on a half-day shift basis. There were up
to forty such houses operating at any one time, employing between them over
one hundred women. The working women usually had an older woman as a
“sitter”, who provided security. These “shabby but homely” houses catered for
the many visiting seamen and for the thousands of immigrant men who, from
the late 1940s, often came to Australia before their wives or as single men.35
The older style brothel with a madam and a number of girls was almost
unknown in Sydney in the 1960s, having gradually disappeared in the 1950s
to be replaced by this more intimate style of brothel. The only other kind of
“in-house” prostitution took place at coffee shops and green grocer stores that
took a commission from clients sent to women working in the upstairs rooms.
Massage parlours were only beginning to appear on the scene in the mid-1960s,
and initially these offered only “hand relief”.
As well as the easily identified “Doors”, prospective clients would still find
plenty of streetwalkers plying their trade in the suburbs east of the city centre.
These women tended to be younger, in their teens and 20s rather than their 30s
and 40s as were the women of the Doors. The beats frequented by streetwalk-
ers were along the streets of Kings Cross, including Darlinghurst Road. Each
stretch of a beat was occupied by a particular woman or group of women, who
defended the territory with enthusiasm, and violence if necessary. These work-
ers were subject to considerable harassment from the police, and paid heavily
in fines and bribes, until changes to the law in 1979 (amended in 1983) decrimi-
nalized street prostitution. Thereafter, street work became more attractive and
still flourishes in commercial areas of the city.
Impact of Policing Regimes on Relations with Clients
and Employers
Legislative and policing frameworks also affected relations within the sex
industry. Women selling sex in convict Sydney were often associated with
35 Marcel Winter, Prostitution in Australia, (Sydney, 1976), pp. 32–39; Jan Aitkin, “Prostitutes
in New South Wales”, seminar on Victimless Crime, Seymour Centre, Sydney, Background
Papers, 1977, p. 204; Roberta Perkins, Working Girls: Prostitutes, Their Life and Social Con-
trol (Canberra, 1991), p. 131.
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Prostitution in Sydney and Perth since 1788 639
“bullies” or “bludgeoners”—men who provided physical protection for the
women against other men but often also inflicted violence on the women
themselves. But this was not always the case, and others operated as individu-
als or as madams independently of men. The changes to the law in 1908 which
made men associated with prostitution liable to criminal charges and impris-
onment meant that thereafter only the most criminally-inclined men contin-
ued to openly associate with prostitutes. This fostered the emergence of the
criminal gangs who dominated the Sydney scene in the 1920s and early ‘30s
until harsher consorting laws in the early 1930s disbanded them. At the same
time, the 1908 laws opened the way for the famous Sydney “vice queens”, Tilly
Devine and Kate Leigh, who dominated Sydney’s underworld in the interwar
years. Unlike men, they could not be prosecuted for living off the proceeds of
prostitution.
As we have seen, the tougher laws against soliciting and more vigorous polic-
ing, combined with criminal sanctions against male “protectors”, drove many
women off the streets into the brothels. Here they were forced to share their
earnings with the madam and lost the independence they had as freelancers.
While women working in these brothels received some protection, they were
also often paid for their services in cocaine and the drug was used as a way to
keep sex workers dependent.
A similar situation arose in the 1960s, when the increasing traffic in heroin,
combined with the presence of Vietnam War troops, saw another boom in
organized crime in Sydney. Sydney’s sex workers at that time found it almost
impossible to escape extortion and violence at the hands of criminal gangs.
Crime and police corruption continued to be prominent features of Sydney’s
sex industry for the remainder of the twentieth century, although the decrimi-
nalization of many forms of prostitution in the 1980s reduced but did not elim-
inate the scope for these activities.
At the same time as Sydney’s prostitution laws were being liberalized, Aus-
tralia became the destination for a new wave of immigrant sex workers, pri-
marily from Asia. These workers arrived under various kinds of debt bondage
arrangements, whereby they were required to repay their fares, visas, etc., be-
fore receiving any earnings. These “debts” often amounted to tens of thou-
sands of dollars, and could increase after arrival in Australia. Likewise, some
operators ensured that the women never earned any money of their own by
informing on them to the immigration authorities, who then deported the
women as illegal immigrants. Since the turn of the twenty-first century, greater
awareness of this issue and new federal legislation and more energetic polic-
ing has meant that more of these operators have been prosecuted, but the
practice still exists.
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640 Frances
Perth
Legislative and policing environments similarly shaped relations in Perth’s sex
industry. In colonial Perth and Fremantle, the majority of women selling sex
did so on a relatively independent basis, working from homes, on the streets, or
in small brothels. Individual operators often had a male “protector” who usu-
ally took a proportion of their earnings. These men were increasingly the target
of criminal legislation in the early 1900s, particularly the “Evil Fame” clauses
of the 1904 Police Act. These laws were aimed particularly at the group of men
who had arrived in western Australia from Europe during the gold rushes of
the 1890s, bringing with them women who worked in the sex industry. The re-
lationship between these men and their female companions varied: there were
clear cases of deception and coercion, but also relationships that looked more
like partnerships. These criminal “syndicates”, comprised of small groups of
men in loose alliances, cooperated to transport women around the Mediterra-
nean, Egypt, Asia, South Africa, and the Americas as well as Australia, depend-
ing on where the most favourable market and legal climate was to be found. As
the international traffic in women and children became an increasing focus
of official attention in the first three decades of the twentieth century, this
trade became increasingly difficult to sustain. Australia was an active partici-
pant in these policing efforts, using the Federal Immigration Restriction Act of
1901 to exclude and deport persons suspected of being associated with the sex
industry.36
At the same time, the efforts of the local police in Perth and Fremantle to
localize and control prostitution resulted in the setting up of a semi-official
red-light district in Roe Street. Until the closure of these brothels in 1958, most
of Perth’s sex workers operated under strict rules enforced by the police with
the cooperation of madams. One of these rules was than women were not al-
lowed to have male associates. Workers were free to come and go on Roe Street,
but while residents they led fairly restricted lives and, as was always the case in
brothels, shared their earnings with the madam.
The police were always the most important controlling force in the West
Australian sex industry, ensuring that the criminal organizations that were so
prominent in Sydney did not secure a foothold. This was the case even after
Roe Street was closed, when the new policy of police “containment” continued
the earlier tradition of de facto toleration for selected operators who worked
within a set of police guidelines.
36 Raelene Frances, “White Australia and the White Slave Traffic: Gender, Race and Citizen-
ship”, International Review of Social History, 44 (1999), supplement, pp. 101–122.
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Prostitution in Sydney and Perth since 1788 641
Other Factors Shaping Working Conditions and Cultures
It was not only the policing regimes that affected the shape of the sex industry
and the experience of those involved in it. As the case studies of Perth and
Sydney illustrate, the nature and size of cities was an important determinant
of the scale and diversity of the industry and associated workplace cultures.
In convict Sydney, prostitution was closely associated with the convict sys-
tem: most of the women selling sex were either convicts or former convicts.
With the assisted immigration of free women in the 1830s, free working class
women also entered the sex industry. However, for the most part, the sex indus-
try was still integrally related to the rough culture of convictism and merged
into the communities of convicts, ex-convicts, and poorer immigrants who
settled in the areas around the Rocks in Sydney.
With the end of convictism and increasing free immigration, especially with
gold discoveries in the 1850s, the sex industry expanded and diversified. In the
second half of the nineteenth century, the police in Sydney counted upwards
of 500 women selling sex on a full-time basis, while Perth recorded up to sever-
al hundred.37 The sex industry at this time was structured hierarchically, with
conditions, earnings, and status varying according to one’s location in this hi-
erarchy. The types of establishments selling sex proliferated with increasing
urbanization: the bigger and more prosperous the city, the greater the variety.
At the top end of the market, defined by the prices charged and the status of
the clientele, were the “grand brothels”, which flourished for a short period of
time in mid-nineteenth-century Sydney. Such brothels were lavishly furnished,
equipped with the best champagnes and spirits, and staffed by well-dressed,
attractive young women. Their prices reflected their pretensions to exclusivity.
The women in these houses had no need to solicit custom, as the notoriety of
the houses ensured that clients sought them out. Alternatively, Sydney’s higher
class demi-monde might rendezvous with potential clients in the private boxes
of the theatres.
At the next level down the status ladder were those brothels that were com-
fortably if not expensively furnished and which employed young women to so-
licit custom from prominent city streets in the evenings and from the theatres
and racetracks. Also found soliciting at the theatres and in the streets were the
so-called “clandestines”, women who came in from the suburbs for a few hours
each evening. These women took their customers to houses of assignation or
37 As the Census did not have a category for sex workers, and many women concealed their
occupation, the only figures we have come from police reports, and all figures must be
treated with great caution.
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642 Frances
short-time houses—sometimes a hotel—where they could purchase the use
of a room for as long as their customer’s payment allowed. Although not as
elaborately attired as the “dressed girls”, these women adopted the appearance
of “decency” rather than conspicuous sexual allure, appealing to men who pre-
ferred a quiet woman to an obvious harlot. Such a woman might build up a
small but regular clientele who visited her in her own suburban house, rather
than have to go into the city to seek custom.
Below these women were the streetwalkers more usually referred to as “com-
mon prostitutes”, women and girls who were seen frequently about the streets
and hotels of the cities and wharves both in the daytime and throughout the
night, maximizing their earnings by the number of customers rather than the
scale of their fees. They were often older than the average sex worker, and more
likely to be diseased and heavy drinkers. These women might reside in a house
with a few other such women, or live with men who “protected” them and with
whom they shared their earnings. They took customers back to their homes,
short-time houses, or hotels. More economically if less comfortably, women
transacted their business in one of the many public parks.
At the very lowest end of the market were those women who operated out
of the meaner dwellings in the back lanes of the central city and near the
wharves. On par with these women were the sex workers who catered for “co-
loured” clients, who were mostly Chinese, but also Syrians, Indians, and Las-
cars. The status of a sex worker was thus defined by the race and class of her
clients as well as by her age, appearance, and habits.38
Each class of sex worker attracted a certain type of client, although these
were not rigid categories. As we have noted, the “grand brothels” were patron-
ized by those with money and often with social position. The middle range of
options were, not surprisingly, patronized by a variety of men of the middling
classes: both married and unmarried and of moderate means. The men who
sought out the “clandestines”, particularly those who operated discretely in
suburban houses, were perhaps looking for the illusion of romance and even
domesticity. Women who frequented the wharves dealt mainly with seamen
and wharf labourers, while the customers who found themselves in the “dens”
in the back lanes of the major capital cities were more likely to be rural workers
who had come to the city to spend their end-of-season cheques. Streetwalkers,
however, picked up a diverse clientele which included clerks and tradesmen as
well as labourers.
As well as affecting the volume of sold sex, client demand clearly shaped
the types of services provided by sex workers. This demand varied with the
38 “1878 Inquiry into cd Bill”, p. 10.
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Prostitution in Sydney and Perth since 1788 643
class of the client, being a product of both masculine desires and the client’s
ability to pay to satisfy these desires. The experience of working in the sex in-
dustry at this time thus depended very much on which part of the industry a
woman worked in: women in the higher-class brothels were expected to pro-
vide a greater range of both sexual and emotional services than those offering
a cheap, quick outlet for the pent-up lusts of visiting seamen or bushmen. For
the madams of the elite brothels, the industry was generally comfortable and
lucrative. For every pound the “girls” earned, they took ten shillings. Also, sales
of liquor contributed in no small way to their total earnings. The only risk such
women faced was the threat of prosecution for keeping a disorderly house.
However, it was rare for the keepers of these houses to be charged by the po-
lice, because they both operated discreetly and therefore did not offend “pub-
lic order”, and also because policemen were reluctant to embarrass clients who
included their superior officers and members of the colonial establishment.
Even when prosecutions were launched, the bench often proved reluctant to
convict the keepers or inmates of these “flash” houses. Operating with virtual
immunity from police intervention, such women could become very wealthy
indeed.
For the “girls” in their employ, the opportunity to work in comfortable, even
luxurious, surroundings, and not have to solicit in public, must have been
enormously attractive. For women who feared public notoriety, these high-
class establishments provided a degree of protection from the public gaze and
were a favoured first port of call for “respectable” women deciding on a career,
or short stint, in the sex industry. These brothels also protected their inmates
against male violence and arrest. For those able to avoid the temptations of
alcohol, the relatively high earnings allowed women to accumulate sufficient
savings to finance an independent life, either as a madam or in some other
business venture. Some, too, became mistresses or even wives of their clients.39
Their working lives were not, however, without risks. Venereal diseases were
no respecters of social class. Although madams kept a close eye on their work-
ers and encouraged regular medical check-ups, infection was not unheard of.
Once infected, the “girls” could find themselves turned out of these “grand
brothels” and forced to seek a livelihood elsewhere, moving down through
the options outlined above if unable to secure a cure. Likewise, pregnancy
was a real possibility although the risks of pregnancy were less for well-paid
women working in “flash” houses with good sanitary facilities and could avail
themselves of the increasing range of contraceptive devices coming onto the
39 “Inquiry into Chinese Gambling”, New South Wales Parliamentary Papers, Legislative As-
sembly, 8 (1891–1892), p. 318.
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644 Frances
colonial market. Pessaries, douches, “Dutch caps”, and condoms were all avail-
able in Australia in the 1880s and ‘90s, although relatively expensive, the latter
providing protection against venereal diseases as well as pregnancy. That these
devices were commonly used by sex workers is indicated by the fact that they
were regarded by disapproving contemporaries as “the contrivances of the
brothel”.40 If all else failed, such women could afford the services of a medical
practitioner to secure an abortion, and these “flash” houses had doctors regu-
larly attending the inmates to monitor their health.
Women and girls employed in the medium-range brothels also enjoyed a
certain degree of protection from violence, but those located in residential ar-
eas could face prosecution if their presence upset their neighbours.41 Women
working in medium-range brothels also shared their earnings with the brothel-
keeper, but generally earned enough to live well and save provided they did not
drink heavily. Like their counterparts in the more elite establishments, they
too faced the risks of disease and pregnancy, but probably many took precau-
tions. Like the madams in the elite brothels, the women who operated these
medium-grade brothels could accumulate considerable wealth, allowing them
to invest in additional brothels. At both the top and middle levels of the indus-
try, women operated independently or in partnership with another woman, re-
lying on word of mouth and/or commissions to cab drivers for their custom.42
At the bottom of the brothel hierarchy were those in the less salubrious
parts of town that catered for visiting sailors and rural workers as well as Chi-
nese and other “coloured” labourers. These were often run by men as well as
women, and tended to be more disorderly in the literal sense of the word, en-
couraging heavy drinking and gambling as well as sex, and often being the site
of drunken brawls between clients and sometimes between the women. The
women who worked in these brothels did not necessarily live on the premises
but paid the keeper for the use of a room and access to the custom that the
house’s notoriety ensured.43 The conditions under which these women and
girls worked were often appalling. Housing was substandard and overcrowded,
and furniture, if it existed, of the crudest form.
Pregnancy and venereal disease were always a reality, although women
did seek treatment if not prevention. Those who went to jail received some
40 Evidence, Dr Charles Mackellar to Royal Commission into the Decline of the Birth Rate,
New South Wales Parliamentary Papers, 1903.
41 Cited in Andrew Brown-May, Melbourne Street Life (Melbourne, 1998), p. 58.
42 West Australian, 15 November 1901.
43 See a police superintendent file note, March 1893, cso 5/6123, srnsw. See also Daily Tele-
graph, 15 March 1893, “1878 Inquiry into cd Bill”, p. 40.
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Prostitution in Sydney and Perth since 1788 645
treatment, however inadequate. Others sought free treatment at the various
underfunded asylums and public hospitals, some of which provided separate
wards for cases of venereal diseases. As well as being vulnerable to disease,
women who worked in the Chinese and other so-called “lower class” brothels
were often arrested on vagrancy charges. Racial prejudices ensured that the
former were particularly singled out by the police and treated unsympatheti-
cally by magistrates. The major compensations for women who worked in the
lower end of the sex trade were the conviviality and comradeship of working
with “mates”, and, of course, the money they earned, which even at the lowest
end of the scale was at least double what a woman could earn at a respectable
occupation.
The “clandestines” who visited the city from the suburbs took more risks
than the “dressed girls” and the brothel inmates. They might pick up a violent
customer, and the houses of assignation and short-time houses provided less
protection against such men than the brothels. On the other hand, it was easier
for such women to avoid being classed as common prostitutes, especially if
they could demonstrate an alternative means of income. These women could
also keep most of their earnings, their major expense being for “short-time”
accommodation. Dressed less conspicuously and typically coming into town
only two or three nights a week, and then for only a few hours, they were less
visible and less likely to be identified as sex workers by either the police or the
general public. They were, however, likely to be more vulnerable to disease,
not having the benefit of any treatment while in jail and also being less likely
to seek treatment privately.
As well as disease, “clandestines” were particularly vulnerable to pregnancy.
Women identifying as prostitutes had few babies, particularly when compared
to married women. While it is clear that an enormous number of abortions
were carried out in the late nineteenth century, women without professional
connections in the sex industry would have found it more difficult to access safe
and affordable practitioners. They were no doubt well represented amongst
the women who died as a result of botched and unsanitary abortions.44
Women and girls who worked full-time as streetwalkers were potentially the
most vulnerable, being about the streets at all hours and often taking their cus-
tomers to exposed and dangerous places like public parks. These women were
the targets for gangs of youths—“larrikins”, as they were called—who perpe-
trated pack rape upon them, secure in the knowledge that the courts were
lenient in cases of the rape of prostitutes. To give themselves a measure of pro-
tection, women tended to solicit in groups and have male companions watch
44 Frances, Selling Sex, Ch. 8.
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them from a safe distance. They also became adept at avoiding the uniformed
police, who were required to keep to a regular beat. Homeless women found in
the streets were especially liable to arrest, and could be charged as vagrants for
having no fixed address and insufficient lawful means of support. Those whom
the police said were selling sex were very likely to be sent to jail, rather than to
private benevolent homes, as were “respectable” homeless women.45
Streetwalkers were also the most vulnerable to disease and pregnancy, as it
was more difficult to afford and to use prophylactic techniques in such circum-
stances. The major advantage of streetwalking, however, was that it allowed a
woman a great deal of independence. She was not subject to surveillance by a
brothel-keeper, and could keep all her earnings. Some streetwalkers reportedly
did manage to accumulate enough to invest in a business of their own, where
they became the madam. The independence of the streetwalker, however,
could come at a huge cost, and sometimes proved illusory. Male companions
could turn out to be exploiters and abusers rather than protectors, and certain
identification as a common prostitute placed women at a serious disadvantage
in colonial society.46
It is important to note that women did move between the various types of
sex work in colonial times. Some accumulated enough capital from street-
walking to set up as brothel-keepers; an individual brothel-keeper, renting her
house, might make enough to buy the property or even several properties. On
the other hand, women could move down as well as up, especially if they be-
came addicted to alcohol. Thus, a woman might begin her days in a high-class
brothel and gradually make her way down to the brothels of the back lanes.
To some extent, these gradations and hierarchies of status and income per-
sisted into the twentieth and twentieth-first centuries. But as we have seen,
the world that professional prostitutes encountered in the late 1930s was very
different from the one that confronted their nineteenth-century counterparts.
Changes to laws and methods of policing, coupled in the case of New South
Wales with the rise of organized crime, meant that it became much more dif-
ficult to operate as a full-time freelance worker. These changes also altered the
relationship of prostitutes to the working-class communities in which they tra-
ditionally operated, increasingly marking out full-time sex workers as part of
a deviant underworld. The 1904 Evil Fame legislation in western Australia, and
45 “Royal Commission on the Victorian Police Force”, Victorian Parliamentary Papers, 3
(1906), p. 135; Argus, 16 March 1863, p. 5; see also Christina Twomey, Deserted and Destitute:
Motherhood, Wife Desertion and Colonial Welfare (Melbourne, 2002), pp. 83–84.
46 William Augustus Miles, “The Registry of Flash Men”, available at: www.records.nsw.gov
.au; last accessed 10 July 2017.
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Prostitution in Sydney and Perth since 1788 647
the later New South Wales consorting laws, made respectable sections of the
population subject to imprisonment for associating with criminals and known
prostitutes.
Similarly, the stronger laws against soliciting in public meant that any
women seen talking in the street to sex workers risked being accused of solicit-
ing, while all men living with prostitutes fell under suspicion of the new laws
against living off the earnings of prostitution. This meant that even male rela-
tives in paid employment could be convicted of living off the earnings of their
mothers, wives, sisters, or daughters simply because they shared a house with
them or were “habitually in their company”. Penalties for landlords who know-
ingly let their premises to those engaged in the sex industry drove a wedge
between respectable property owners and women who had previously found
landlords keen to accept the higher rents they could pay. This opened up an-
other opportunity for criminal elements to exploit the need of prostitutes for
accommodation. Stricter enforcement of licensing laws similarly made it more
risky for hotel licensees to allow known prostitutes to linger on their premises,
literally forcing such women out into the cold to ply their trade.
These changes were part of a broader attempt in western society to mark
out “deviant” sections of the working class and isolate them from the respect-
able mainstream in order to maintain more effective surveillance and control
of their activities. Certain modes of behaviour that had once been accepted
became pathologized and criminalized, and individuals who persisted in these
behaviours found themselves the targets of police, medical, and other atten-
tion, often ending up in asylums, prisons, reformatories, or other institutions.47
In Australia this class-based assault took on a particular racial/ethnic char-
acter, as governments attempted to contain the potentially “contaminating”
influences of Aboriginal populations by confining them to reserves, restrict-
ing their employment opportunities, and attempting to control their personal/
sexual relationships. Even the tolerated brothels of western Australia can be
seen in this light: institutions in which the authorities hoped to isolate and
control the potentially disruptive freelance prostitutes.
But while these efforts were successful in changing the working lives and
personal relationships of full-time sex workers, it is equally apparent that many
women avoided the attention of the authorities by selling sex in “a quiet way”,
usually on a part-time basis. These “amateurs” and “clandestines” continued
to challenge the controlling attempts of the state, which in turn tried harder
to classify women on the basis of their sexuality. The desire to mark out and
47 Lynette Finch, The Classing Gaze: Sexuality, Class and Surveillance (Sydney, 1993), pp.
47–49.
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control those selling sex thus affected the lives of all women, as their sexuality
was under constant scrutiny and classification, regardless of economic class.
Although these attempts clearly impinged on women’s lives, they were only
ever partially successful and often contested. Women selling sex were particu-
larly resourceful in resisting attempts to stigmatize them and regulate their
behaviour. They were always creative in finding ways to avoid arrest and pros-
ecution. The case of Sydney madam Kate Leigh demonstrates how some wom-
en campaigned to counter attempts to stereotype and isolate them from local
communities. Leigh wrote letters to the press contesting media representa-
tions of her actions, and dispensed largesse to local charities; she was engaging
in what today would be regarded as a very successful public relations exercise.
On a less grand scale, some women cultivated relationships in the neigh-
bourhoods in which they lived and worked, with apparent success. They were
generous in providing financial support to those less fortunate, and careful not
to offend sensibilities by exposing their children to foul language and male cli-
ents. Some also minded children so that their mothers could go out to work.48
On the other side of the continent a woman with a police record for
prostitution-related offences protested Policewoman Dugdale’s allegation
that she was a negligent mother: “I’m as good a bloody woman as any other
bloody woman around here”, she shouted.49 Such talking back may not have
convinced the police or the court, but it indicated that women did not neces-
sarily accept or internalize the labels put on them by authorities.
A more subtle example of this linguistic contest appears in evidence given
to the Royal Commission into the Perth City Council in 1938. Asked how and
why she embarked on a career in the sex industry, one Roe Street brothel resi-
dent explained:
I have been all sorts of things. First of all, I worked in a [sic] office as
a bookkeeper, then I had a business of my own, and I finished up as a
barmaid. It was from the bar that I went to Roe Street. I found that at the
occupation I was following I could not earn a decent wage to keep myself
properly […].50
48 Margaret Fitzpatrick, interviewed by Judy Wing, 9 July 1987, New South Wales Bicenten-
nial Oral History Project, ms. 5163, Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales;
also comments from an anonymous caller to Richard Glover’s programme, abc Radio
National, 3 August 2005.
49 Police vs. Francis, Perth Police Court Minutes, 1386/44, 3 April 1920, srowa.
50 “Royal Commission into Perth City Council Administration 1938, Report of Evidence”, pp.
844–845, Hansard Library, Western Australian Parliament.
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Prostitution in Sydney and Perth since 1788 649
It is the use of the word “decent” that is especially challenging. In selling sex,
she is able to earn a decent living for the first time; this completely reverses
the usual terminology, which would have classed sex work as thoroughly in-
decent. Her further evidence sheds light on what she means by “decent”: it is a
reference to dignity and security rather than morality. Her ambition is to save
enough to provide for herself in old age, to avoid the indignity of dependence
and institutionalization.
While women’s own efforts to assert a counter-definition of what it meant
to sell sex were clearly important, perhaps most important in undermining
and complicating official attempts to mark out prostitutes as a deviant sub-
class was the advent of the “spectacular modern woman” in the person of the
flapper. Arriving in the cities and towns of Australia in the later wartime years
and the 1920s, the modern young woman challenged traditional notions of re-
spectable femininity not just by her short skirts and “look at me” appearance
but also by her financial independence, her presence on the streets and pub-
lic transport, and her pursuit of pleasure. Smoking cigarettes and dancing the
Charleston, wearing revealing clothes and make-up, indulging in the pleasures
of consumerism—modern young women confused observers who sought
a clear demarcation between “good” and “bad” women.51 All this confusion
was to the great advantage of women selling sex, many of whom continued
to evade easy classification by moving between and across, or by redefining,
the boundaries of the respectable: “as good a bloody woman as any other …”52
Conclusion
This study has shown that similar legislative frameworks can produce radi-
cally different outcomes for working conditions in the sex industry. In both
Sydney and Perth the increasing criminalization of prostitution-related activi-
ties in the early twentieth century created new opportunities for individuals
and groups to exert control over sex workers. In the case of Perth, the police,
sometimes in collusion with local governments and medical authorities, were
able to introduce an unofficial policy of “containment” whereby sex work-
ers operated in places and under rules established by the police. In Sydney,
harsher laws provided an opportunity for criminal gangs to work in collusion
with a corrupt police force to extort payments and exert physical control over
51 See Liz Conor, The Spectacular Modern Woman: Feminine Visibility in the 1920s (Blooming-
ton/Indianapolis, 2004).
52 Police vs. Francis, Perth Police Court Minutes, 1386/44, 3 April 1920, srowa.
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650 Frances
sex workers. In both instances, the outcomes for sex workers were worse, with
decreased earnings and less control over the location and nature of the sexual
services provided and the conditions under which these were delivered. This
situation persisted until the late twentieth century when new approaches to
decriminalizing aspects of prostitution in Sydney reduced the opportunities
for extortion and police corruption. Perth has resisted making changes, despite
attempts in recent years to partially decriminalize and license the sex indus-
try.53 In both cases, attitudes continue to change, as legislators grapple with
the ongoing tension between the civil rights of sex workers and the perceived
interests of the wider community.
53 “Liberal Rebellion over Prostitution Laws”, West Australian, 8 April 2013.
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part 2
Thematic Overviews
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chapter 25
“We Use our Bodies to Work Hard, So We Need to
Get Legitimate Workers’ Rights”*: Labour Relations
in Prostitution, 1600–2010
Marion Pluskota
Researchers in the history of prostitution have only very rarely questioned
the notion of labour relations in prostitution in a comparative perspective.1
Similarly, the role of prostitution in the early modern economy or in the family
economy has not been discussed in depth. However, prostitution was an es-
sential component of the economy of makeshift of eighteenth-century urban
working-class women, as highlighted by Olwen Hufton in 1974, but very little
since then has been said on the means at the disposal of the prostitute to ne-
gotiate working conditions and labour relations.2 Under a Marxist interpreta-
tion, “prostitution is only a specific expression of the general prostitution of
the labourer”, meaning that in a capitalist economy, any sale of service creates
a relation of subordination that transforms the worker into a commodified
object.3 In economistic analyses of prostitution, such as the work of Rosner,
prostitution is seen as a viable and cost-effective choice, maximizing the util-
ity of one’s body.4 Prostitution follows the mechanisms of the free market and
responds to an important demand from mainly male clients.5 And with the rise
of prostitutes’ activist groups staking claims for their rights as sex workers, a
call has been made for historical studies on their working conditions as well as
on the networks and exchanges facilitating or restraining their rights and their
struggles to be recognized as citizens and workers.
The prostitutional exchange seems to be a very basic paradigm for labour re-
lations: one producer and one buyer, with the production of surplus (historically
* Quoted from an interview with a sex worker in Kolkata in Dasgupta, this volume, Calcutta.
1 Note the exception of Lex Heerma van Voss, “The Worst Class of Workers: Migration, Labor
Relations and Living Strategies of Prostitutes around 1900” in Marcel van der Linden and Leo
Lucassen, (eds), Working on Labor: Essays in Honor of Jan Lucassen (Leiden, 2012), pp. 153–170.
2 Olwen H. Hufton, The Poor of Eighteenth-Century France (Oxford, 1974).
3 Quoted in Jessica Spector, Prostitution and Pornography (Stanford, 2006), p. 64.
4 Richard Posner, Sex and Reason (Cambridge, 1992).
5 Marjolein van der Veen, “Rethinking Commodification and Prostitution: An Effort at Peace-
making in the Battles over Prostitution”, Rethinking Marxism, 13 (2001), pp. 30–51, 30.
© Marion Pluskota, 2017 | doi 10.1163/9789004346253_026
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654 Pluskota
prostitutes earn more than other women in low-skill employment). Neverthe-
less, the prostitutional exchange is rarely the making of only two people; the
sexual intercourse is most often based on a reciprocal exchange (money-sex),
but the process leading to this intercourse involves more complex relations
between various actors negotiating the sexual encounter. Besides, the situa-
tion of a post-monetary exchange also leaves the prostitute facing a new set of
negotiations in the course of which, according to her own economic status, she
has to decide how the surplus will be spent. The income provided by the sex
trade can be used for different purposes such as to redistribute money, often
from urban to rural areas, to cope with poverty, to compensate for the lack of
social welfare and income maintenance programmes6 or to build up capital.
The organizational structures and relations in prostitution are diverse and
complex, and the analytical tools of labour history seem particularly adequate
for analysing in depth the working relations that are built up in the sex mar-
ket. The study of labour relations looks at the relationships between differ-
ent instances (employees, unions, management, the state, and consumers) in
a working environment and how the work is organized in terms of contracts,
payment, and use of surplus value. It differs from the study of working con-
ditions which focus on the outcome of the negotiation process. Early labour
relations studies focused on the analysis of relations between unions and the
state, and how unions’ claims were negotiated in a capitalist economy. This
approach is particularly relevant when studying contemporary prostitution
and the protests of unionized sex workers but this scope would limit our re-
search only to the past fifty years, whereas the construction and recognition
of prostitutes as a group of workers are the results of a long-term evolution of
working practices that have been defined and negotiated by various people
and subjected to important legal and social changes over the past four centu-
ries. Only by studying these interactions can we consider prostitution as a form
of labour and understand the evolution of labour relations from a pre-modern
to a global economy. The aim of this chapter is therefore twofold: firstly, to
categorize the type of labour relations prostitutes established over time and
space and how they negotiated them; secondly, to point out the different fac-
tors that influence labour relations and to show how changing patterns can be
connected globally.
This chapter on labour relations in prostitution is based on the overviews
collected for the project Selling Sex in the City, many of which appear in this
volume. Though it focuses on the economy of prostitution and labour rela-
tions in particular, working conditions, gender issues, and migration studies
6 Lin Lean Lim, The Sex Sector (Geneva, 1998), p. 10.
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Labour Relations in Prostitution, 1600–2010 655
are embedded in my analysis. The setting chosen for this study is the urban
environment, and as we will see, labour relations are often influenced by the
environment surrounding the prostitutional exchange. Depending on the time
and place, work structures can be socially institutionalized, and the effects of
this institutionalization on labour relations will be analysed here.7 Lastly, these
labour relations in prostitution will be thought of as occurring in a monetized
economy, even though payments are not restricted to cash; payments in kind
or gifts are also possible and are more common in conditions of survival sex, a
type of prostitution engaged in by people in extreme need as obtaining basic
necessities such as food is the foremost priority.8 In order to understand the
evolution through time and space of labour relations and the role of global-
ization in this process, I have decided to follow a thematic approach to the
subject, as prostitution and labour relations did not evolve in a linear way in
varying urban contexts.
Types of Labour Relations in Prostitution9
In most papers, the word “whore” (and its equivalents in other languages) does
not refer to a type of work. It refers to and denigrates the “morality” of women
as regards their sexuality. At the beginning of the period studied, judicial ar-
chives on trials for scolding shows the omnipresence of the word “whore” as
an insult.10 In Bolivia nowadays, prostitutes themselves make a difference be-
tween una puta and una meretriz: one is giving her body to anyone, without
payment, while the other is a working woman.11 By avoiding the word puta,
7 The categories of labour relations are based on the iish definitions from the global proj-
ect on the history of labour relations. Available at: https://collab.iisg.nl/web/labourrela-
tions/explanation-of-the-different-labour-relations; last accessed 9 January 2015.
8 The expression “survival sex” is open to debate but in this paper “survival sex” refers to
people who engaged in sexual relations for subsistence needs. Melissa Ditmore, Prostitu-
tion and Sex Work (Historical Guides to Controversial Issues in America) (Westport, 2010).
Jody M. Greene et al., “Prevalence and Correlates of Survival Sex among Runaway and
Homeless Youth”, American Journal of Public Health, 89 (1999), pp. 1406–1409.
9 Note that the position of slave will not be described under a specific subheading, as it ap-
pears that women could be owned and used as slaves in different labouring contexts such
as within the family economy or in a brothel; each time a relation similar to slave work
can develop, it will be discussed.
10 See for example, Sandy Bardsley, Venomous Tongues: Speech and Gender in Late Medieval
England (Philadelphia, 2006).
11 Absi, this volume, Bolivia.
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656 Pluskota
these women try to get rid of the stigma of immorality linked to this expres-
sion. Even the term “prostitute”, which appeared in western legislation only
in the nineteenth century, is subject to questioning: in eighteenth-century
France, the Encyclopédie claimed that “une prostituée est celle qui s’abandonne
à la lubricité de l’homme pour quelque motif vil et mercenaire”,12 accentuating
both the immoral behaviour and the financial gain. But definitions of prostitu-
tion are still in a state of flux and prostitution has not been broadly accepted
as a form of labour; abolitionist states and some non-state actors today refuse
to consider prostitution to be a legitimate type of labour and they compare it
to slavery, with women working under exploitative labour conditions. Facing
this impossible neutral definition and the burden of social stigma carried by
the word “prostitute”, in the 1970s the expression “sex worker” appeared (the
Oxford English Dictionary included it in 1971)13 and it was reused later by Carol
Leigh, a prostitute and feminist, and popularized by her book Sex Work: Writ-
ings by Women in the Sex Industry.14 The expression sex worker refers to much
more than the simple recognition of the labour-power of prostitutes; by us-
ing this expression, some prostitutes ask for the right to be treated like any
worker. They are selling a service15 and as a consequence, demand workers’
rights, including written contracts when dealing with employers, retirement
funds, health care, child support, the right to pay taxes, and to be free from
state and social harassment. These claims for rights proceed from the same
motivations that pushed workers in the nineteenth century to gather in unions
and denounce their working conditions. Because of the social and legal aspects
underlying the notion of sex workers in relation to the state and their employ-
ers, this expression seems better suited when applied to the recent history of
prostitution, when a group mentality and collective actions were developed to
stake claims to common rights.16 For that reason I have opted to use the word
“prostitute” in this paper in discussing the labour relations created by women
involved in selling sex over the centuries.
12 “A prostitute is a woman who abandons herself to the lubricity of man for wrong and
mercenary reasons”, Diderot and D’Alembert, L’Encyclopédie ou Dictionnaire raisonné des
Sciences, des Arts et des Métiers (Paris, 1775), p. 450.
13 Available at: http://www.oed.com; last accessed 10 July 2017.
14 Frederique Delacoste et al., Sex Work: Writings by Women in the Sex Industry (1997).
15 van der Veen, “Rethinking Commodification and Prostitution”, p. 32.
16 Holly Wardlow, “Anger, Economy, Female Agency: Problematizing ‘Prostitution’ and ‘Sex
Work’ among the Huli of Papua New Guinea”, Signs, 29 (2004), pp. 1017–1040, 1018. “Sex
worker” is far from being a neutral expression and academics have often discussed the
implications underlying this term, not always being able to reach a consensus.
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Labour Relations in Prostitution, 1600–2010 657
Prostitution and the Family Economy
The family economy is not always the first issue that comes to mind when talk-
ing about commercial sex and labour relations; however, the importance of
the family when a woman decides (or is obliged) to enter prostitution often
first comes into play, before the involvement of third parties. Too often and for
too long the role of women and prostitutes in particular has been neglected in
research on the family economy. In reality, very different structures have been
put in place that include prostitution in the family economy, and based on the
information provided in the urban overviews, it becomes clear that the surplus
produced by prostitutes was included in the family economy in six different
ways. As an household kin producer: A subordinate kin, such as a spouse or
children of the head of household who live mainly through self-subsistence
and contributes to the maintenance of the household by performing produc-
tive work for the household. As an household kin non-producer: subordinate
kin such as a spouse (man or woman) and children of heads of households
who can support the household (under either reciprocal or commodified la-
bour relations), so the spouse and kin dependants are free from productive
work but they contribute to the maintenance of the household by perform-
ing reproductive work for the household. Other labour positions in a family
economy include being an indentured worker, a leading household producer, a
self-employed worker or a wage-earner.17
Analyses of the labour relations in a family economy are based on four
variables: Who claims the money earned by the woman? What type of labour
relation is put in place? Is it part- or full-time labour? And what is the surplus
value used for? In most of the overviews collected here, the social structures
are based on a patriarchal society and based on this basic family structure, a
wide array of labour relations exist in which women produce reciprocal and
commodified labour, from slave work to independent wage work. The difficulty
of studying labour relations in prostitution in a family economy is based on the
fact that a woman often carries out unpaid services for her father or husband,
upon which prostitution can be superimposed. For instance, a daughter can
contribute directly towards the earnings of the household by being a prosti-
tute, with her mother or parents being the brokers. The daughter lives with the
family but her earnings are taken by the head of the household, and thus she
directly contributes to the family needs, whilst she is also requested to carry
out domestic chores. In 1753 in Nantes for example, neighbours c omplained
17 Available at: https://collab.iisg.nl/c/document_library/get_file?p_l_id=273223&folderId=
277142&name=DLFE-186110.pdf; last accessed 10 July 2017.
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658 Pluskota
that a widow named Jacquette kept a disorderly house on the place Ste Cath-
erine, St Nicolas parish, where her daughters worked as prostitutes. In 1761, La
Couillaud was sentenced to a house of correction for six months after being
denounced by her neighbours for living a debauched life and disturbing the
peace in an apartment on rue du Bois-Tortu, St Nicolas parish, where she was
living with her father and mother. In both cases, the daughters played an ac-
tive part in the family economy; La Couillaud seemed to have been the only
member of the household to earn any money. Their occupation was therefore
essential to the maintenance of their family unit.18 Playing such an active part
in the family economy, the young woman can be caught up in an exploitative
framework; with no contract or means to get help or escape (as the money
is collected by supervising kin), she is trapped in a highly dependent labour
relation. This form of sex work is seen in cases of extreme poverty but also in
societies where access to the labour market for women is restricted such as in
early Johannesburg, where mining exploitation was at the core of the labour
market.19 Women in these situations are forced to live off on an economy of
makeshifts to survive in the urban environment.
A more reciprocal labour relation can be developed when a prostitute works
with a sister or another member of a family and they form an independent
household; this leaves them more freedom to dispose of the surplus value as
wish. In Nigeria in the Hausa culture, kinship networks become an important
tool for negotiating the difficult space of prostitutional work; it offers protec-
tion and “know-how” for adapting to and being integrated in the world of com-
mercial sex.20
Another type of labour relation found in a family economy is based on in-
dentured work and the pawning of wife and daughter into the sex trade. This
type of contract seems to have been especially developed in the Middle East
(in Istanbul until recently) and Asia (China, Singapore and India) but cases of
brothers pimping their sisters have also been found in Havana.21 The family
makes the first move to get the wife or daughter involved in the trade and finds
a suitable broker, either to get a loan or to repay a debt. The woman works most
likely on a full-time basis and all of her earnings are used to repay the debt.
18 Marion Pluskota, Prostitution and Social Control in Eighteenth-Century Ports (Abingdon,
2015).
19 Ziyad Choonara, “Selling Sex in Johannesburg: From 1886 to the Present”, unpublished
paper collected for the project “Selling Sex in the City”, 2013.
20 Ekpootu, this volume, Nigeria.
21 Wyers, this volume, Istanbul; Gronewold, this volume, Shanghai; Herzog, this volume,
Singapore; Dasgupta, this volume, Calcutta; Cabezas, this volume, Havana.
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Securing the release of the woman after payment has been made is not always
an easy task. This form of work can be found throughout the period studied.
Wives working as part-time prostitutes and whose earnings partly con-
tribute to household revenues or are the only revenue in the family are in a
particularly difficult situation. Family labour relations place intense pressure
on women, and even though they earn enough to be more independent, they
are forced to remain in the household structure. This situation can also trig-
ger tensions relative to gender expectations in the household. By contribut-
ing actively to the earning of monetary capital for the household, the woman
goes against the traditional pattern confining her to domestic duties and an
economic situation of dependence. Ghosh, who studied such women in Kol-
kata, claims that their “gendered identity of housewife contradicts [their] class
identity as a worker.”22 By confiscating her income or not acknowledging these
essential resources, as is the case in India for the “Flying Prostitute”, male rela-
tives succeed in keeping the woman in an exploitative relation. Approval and
recognition within the family is not always easy and many women have been
struggling to find a compromise between their domestic position (i.e. as a mar-
ried woman) and their working position. Women who have to complement
the income of the family by selling their bodies intermittently are neither
recognized as full-time prostitutes (registered officially in certain countries)
nor as full-time housewives. This puts them in a difficult social situation and
leaves them isolated as they struggle to be socially recognized and identified
as workers. They remain part of the familial economy and their wages are the
basis for the survival of the family, but through the denial of their work and the
source of their wages, they are “excluded even from the category of marginal
worker.”23 In many ways, the situation of these women can be compared with
the “housewifization” of garment workers studied by Mies, in the sense that
their contribution to the household is not recognized by the community, their
family, or their “employer”.24 It is also interesting to note that if a woman’s job
is well-integrated in the family economy and is accepted, the power relation
between gender in the house remains unaffected by the fact that the woman is
earning more than the man; expectations from male kin and the community
remain the same (respect for the male head of the household and carrying out
required female domestic duties) even if she is active in the labour market.
22 Swati Ghosh, “The Flying Prostitute: Identity of the (Im)possible Other”, Hecate, 29 (2003),
pp. 199–214.
23 Ibid., p. 202.
24 Quoted in Peter Custers, Capital Accumulation and Women’s Labour in Asian Economies
(New York, 2012), pp. 170–177 and 190–191.
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Only in the case of self-employment or in the situation of independent
wage-earners outside the boundaries of the family setting can a woman get out
of this subordinate position within the family and community, as she is able to
renegotiate her place in society. Social pressure to fulfil family expectations of
earning a living can also lead young women to prostitution; in the case of Thai-
land for example, Muecke argues that Thai prostitutes are the foundation for
keeping traditional institutions alive, as “through home remittances and merit-
making activities, it enables women to fulfil the traditional cultural functions
of daughters.”25 The food-vending activities (also a female activity) of former
generations are thus compared to prostitution and the same process of home
remittances is put in place by prostitutes, and these young women are able
to send money home per the terms of Buddhist belief. It is not always known
back in the village that they are working as prostitutes but in some instances
their families are aware of it and condone their actions.26 In Nigeria, remit-
tances are also expected, especially if their children are staying in the village.27
This also shows that the notion of immorality in prostitution is flexible, as we
can see in the case of eighteenth-century European labouring classes.28 By be-
ing a bond between the girl and the sex trade, the family can create a morally
and economically sustainable environment for its daughters and wives. The
economic necessity of sustaining a family in an environment that has limited
job opportunities for women sometimes makes it all the easier to accept.
The Brothel Economy
If the woman is not working at home, she is either working indoors or outdoors;
these situations lead to different labour relations with the people that employ
her. In an indoor setting that is not privately rented, such as a brothel, karaoke
bar, or massage parlour, women’s work is often based on an oral contract with
the brothel owner or the manager of the place, although written contracts can
also be drawn up—but they are of little value if prostitution has not been legal-
ized and subjected to employment laws. The employment status of a prostitute
25 Marjorie Muecke, “Mother Sold Food, Daughter Sells her Body: The Cultural Continuity of
Prostitution”, Social Sciences and Medicine, 35 (1992), pp. 891–901.
26 See also Lisa Taylor, “Dangerous Trade‐offs: The Behavioral Ecology of Child Labor and
Prostitution in Rural Northern Thailand”, Cultural Anthropology, 46 (2005), pp. 411–435.
27 Ekpootu, this volume, Nigeria.
28 Pluskota, Prostitution and Social Control, pp. 25–48.
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in a brothel is difficult to define if she is working in a country where running
a brothel is illegal; ideally, the woman should be able to sign a contract and
denounce any misconduct by her employer, the brothel owner. In Israel, the
Labour Court recognized the employment relationship between procurers and
sex workers when in 2005 a sex worker succeeded in getting compensation
after being injured in a blaze while at work in the brothel.29 This is an impor-
tant step for the recognition of prostitutes’ rights, as contractual employment
rights are rarely respected (as in modern Istanbul, Rio, and Kolkata) and the
women are forced into a position of dependency.30 Women have little say over
the price of the transaction or what is done during this transaction. The price
and time are set by the brothel owner but some stipulations can be made con-
cerning how they could increase their wages by getting a percentage of drinks
sold or by offering hourly or nightly services at a high fixed price.
Regardless of whether a man or a woman owns and supervises the working
space, the monetary aspect remains the basis of the labour relation; a third
to half of the money earned by the woman goes to the brothel keeper to pay
for rent, clothes, laundry, and food. A debt system is commonly put in place,
which limits the possibility of exiting prostitution or leaving the establish-
ment. By living in the brothel, the woman loses most of her negotiating power
in dealing with the owner. This debt-bondage can be added to a family’s debt
if the daughter or wife has been pawned. By putting in place a debt system, the
labour relation of employer-wage earner is biased and becomes an indentured
relation.
This situation, however, should not occur in countries or states where pros-
titution and the running of brothels are legal and regulated. For example in
contemporary Amsterdam, prostitutes working in brothels are to be duly reg-
istered and are most often wage-earners.31 They do not live in the brothel, and
in practice, only rent a room from the establishment’s owner. In this case, no
employment contract exists between the owner and the woman as she is not
working for him/her.32 By legalizing brothels, the Dutch government sought
to limit the exploitation of women and the development of clandestine estab-
lishments by putting in place, at a local level, a licensing system and therefore
29 Amir et al., this volume, Tel-Aviv/Jaffa.
30 Blanchette and Schettini, this volume, Rio; Wyers, this volume, Istanbul; Dasgupta, this
volume, Calcutta.
31 Pluskota, this volume, Amsterdam.
32 Available at: http://prostitution.procon.org/sourcefiles/NetherlandsPolicyOnProstitutio
nQ&A2005.pdf, from the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs; last accessed 10 July 2017.
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opening the doors of these establishments to official controls. This was, how-
ever, not the case in the nineteenth century, when women often had to incur
debts to pay for medical fees and registration; only recent legislation, which
includes labour regulations, has been brought into being to prevent, to certain
degrees of success, the system of debt bondage.
Pimps and Brokers
Intermediaries aside from the family can take part in the negotiation of pros-
titutes’ work. Working with a pimp, especially when soliciting outdoors, offers
protection and facilitates making contact with customers. According to the
Oxford English Dictionary (oed), the term “pimp” originally meant “procurer”,
someone who facilitates illegal encounters; nowadays it refers to someone liv-
ing off the earnings of a prostitute in exchange for protection and setting up
meetings with clients.33 The difference between a pimp and brothel owner lies
in the environment, the spatial context; while a brothel owner negotiates la-
bour conditions in connection with a specific place, a pimp does not own a
place for the woman to work, and he can be working or hired just as a temporary
broker. Different intermediaries can be used by migrants to negotiate working
contracts. In Buenos Aires, casas de comisionistas, or agent houses, made the
link between rural and urban work placement; women were often aware of
the work they were going to do, and the agencies made the arrangements with
brothel owners in the city.34 Reciprocal dependence can sometimes be the ba-
sis of a labour contract. In Argentina, for certain self-employed women pimps
were used to get them out of the system put in place by employment agencies
and they “helped” prostitutes gain more independence.35 In Nigeria, women
use Jaguda boys to interact with clients and give them protection but these men
have no control over the more experienced women.36 Relations with a pimp
are based on two factors: the experience of the woman (young prostitutes in
Cairo were said to pay fixed wages to pimps whereas this was not economically
viable)37 and if a woman has been coerced and therefore is in a relation of de-
pendence with the pimp. The situation of prostitutes working in cabarets and
33 http://www.oed.com.
34 Schettini, this volume, Buenos Aires.
35 Schettini, this volume, Buenos Aires.
36 Ekpootu, this volume, Nigeria.
37 Hammad and Biancani, this volume, Cairo.
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theatres is particularly interesting from a labour and migration history point
of view. With the revolution of transport and increased transnational female
migratory movements in the nineteenth century, European prostitutes left for
Asia, South America, and the us, hoping to find good wages abroad. Racial
preferences and stereotypes in the sex market were encouraged (and still are)
and women’s ethnicity or nationality could add extra value to their assets.38
The hiring of singers and actresses also serving as prostitutes could already
be found in Cairo at the beginning of the early modern period, but that was
also common practice in China, in Argentina in the nineteenth century, and
in Switzerland at the end of the twentieth century.39 The particularity of this
kind of prostitution is that a written contract exists between both parties; ide-
ally, the employee should be able to see that her rights are respected. However,
it appears that through artistic contracts, entrepreneurs, directors of theatres,
and managers directly benefitted from the artists’ talents and sexual favours
but forced them into a situation of dependency and indentured work. Manag-
ers and other brokers developed systems of debt bondage which downgraded
the initial contracted relation into indenture. According to the un, the main is-
sues lay in the immigration laws that prevent trafficked women from asking for
help and threaten indirectly to send them back to the hands of their traffickers.
The economy of prostitution became part of the global or at least transna-
tional economy and market at a very early stage. Migrant women have almost
always been the main contingent of prostitutes in cities. In eighteenth century
Nantes for instance, only 40 per cent of the prostitutes were born in the city, a
figure similar to London and Paris. Female migrants who became prostitutes
in early modern Europe were usually from the surrounding villages, often from
the same region and almost always from the same country; only capital cities
such as London and Paris and “touristic” cities such as Florence and Venice
had foreign prostitutes. Colonial cities and penal colonies also drew female
migrants from surrounding countries. European prostitutes could be found in
Singapore, though these women mainly entertained (white) officials only and
had relatively good living conditions compared to indigenous women; they
were able to negotiate with their customers and came to those areas with the
aim of working as prostitutes. In parallel with free migration, the trade in wom-
en existed already at the beginning of the early modern period in cities such as
38 Tracol-Huyn, this volume, Hanoi.
39 Hammad and Biancani, this volume, Cairo; Gronewold, this volume, Shanghai; Schettini,
this volume, Buenos Aires; on Switzerland, see Marjan Wijers and Lin Lap-Chew, Traffick-
ing in Women (Utrecht, 1997), p. 143.
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Cairo, Istanbul, and seventeenth-century Singapore. In relation to slavery, it is
unclear if raids were organized solely to kidnap women for sexual exploitation,
but the sources show that there was a market for female slaves for domestic
and sexual exploitation already in place in the pre-modern period and at the
beginning of the colonial period (seventeenth century).
It should be noted that on a global level, there exists some confusion about
the definition of trafficking; coercion or an exploitative relation is the basis of
trafficking according to some but for others, the crossing of borders is the key;
another definition relies on a third party as a necessary element of traffick-
ing. In between these migrant categories (voluntary and coerced), we can find
women who are not being trafficked but smuggled across borders to work in
prostitution. Indeed, transnational prostitution is characterized by economic
inequalities and it flourishes in socially unstable countries (e.g. eastern Euro-
pean trafficking after the collapse of the Soviet regime).40 Women’s motiva-
tions for leaving their home countries are often economic and/or a desire to
escape a situation of violence, either domestic violence or warfare. To be able
to cross borders they rely on criminal organizations which take care of their
transport for a certain fee, payable in advance or by working for them at the
final destination. These women usually have a certain amount of control over
their earnings and should be free to leave once their debts are paid,41 but some
are forced into very coercive working conditions that prevent their release,
such as migrants from North Africa and eastern Europe in Jaffa/Tel Aviv at the
beginning of the 2000s.42
Union movements have called for national and international changes and
they often challenge the role of the state in discrimination against prostitutes
and condemn the alienating conditions in which they work, conditions that
could be improved by legal requirements and the recognition of business re-
lations between prostitutes, clients, and brokers. But the role of the state in
labour relations in prostitution is very complex as policies vary. As Conner
points out, even in France where the state has defended abolitionist poli-
cies since 1960, its actions regarding prostitutes are very uncertain and even
contradictory.43
40 Amir et al., this volume, Tel-Aviv/Jaffa.
41 See Rutvica Andrijasevic, Migration, Agency and Citizenship in Sex Trafficking (Amster-
dam, 2010) on eastern European women migrating to Italy to work as prostitutes.
42 Amir et al., this volume, Tel-Aviv/Jaffa.
43 Conner, this volume, Paris.
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Self-employment
With the development of the internet and mobile phones, communications
have been made sex work easier and offers for private sex are increasing; the
number of self-employed women is on the rise, as procurers are not needed
to get in touch with clients.44 Historically, self-employed women were mostly
from the labouring class and engaged in survival sex, and prostitution was part
of their makeshift economy. Nowadays, these women are from different so-
cial classes and some of them have university educations, though women from
the labouring class remain the most numerous. Voluntary migrants (with or
without papers) can also be self-employed; often they have previous experi-
ence in prostitution and can travel alone more easily from one city to another.
Demand fluctuates and as customers may get “tired” of the same women, it is
therefore more profitable to move to another city. These experienced women
are self-employed, though they can stop at a specific brothel for a while (i.e.
in Bolivia where registration is on a national basis)45 and be in a position to
negotiate with the brothel owner and the customers for fair prices and inex-
pensive accommodations. Another example of women’s migration motivated
by demand was observed by Bradley in the 1970s; the number of sex workers
increased around the Persian Gulf after the oil boom and there was an increas-
ing number of wealthy Arab men in the region.
Being self-employed does not always entail security and choice, and in the
case of streetwalkers working on their own, it can even be dangerous. The
living conditions of self-employed women are therefore defined on a large
spectrum; a relatively wealthy student in Nigeria taking up escorting so she
can afford luxury items is not as vulnerable as a drug addict in Paris Bois de
Boulogne. Negotiating power over price, security, and safety, or the possibility
of being able to refuse a client, is increased only if the self-employed prosti-
tute is not in a dire economic and/or physical situation (perhaps suffering
from an addiction). Research shows that self-employed women are more likely
to suffer violence at the hands of their customers than prostitutes in broth-
els or those under the protection of a pimp.46 The poorest of these women,
those who are self-employed but practicing survival sex, suffer the long-lasting
44 Scott Cunningham and Todd Kendall, “Prostitution 2.0: The Changing Face of Sex Work”,
Journal of Urban Economics, 69 (2011), pp. 273–287, 274.
45 Absi, this volume, Bolivia.
46 Gail Pheterson, “The Whore Stigma”, Social Text, 37 (1993), pp. 39–64, 40.
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666 Pluskota
effects of illnesses and diseases, as they are unable to pay for doctors and
treatment.47
The motivations given for their entry into prostitution are wide-ranging;
historically, economic needs were the most common reason given for getting
involved in prostitution (whether self-employed or not) and this could have
been triggered by a traumatizing event such as rape (sometimes by employ-
ers), violence, and domestic abuse. The risk of being a target of bosses and co-
workers has also pushed women into prostitution; rather than enduring work
harassment, they leave their place of work and choose prostitution instead.
But recently, more and more self-employed women have another middle-class
job (in business, management, or in teaching) and say that they have chosen
prostitution not out of necessity, but because they are hoping to earn enough
money so they can take part in consumer society. This seems to be a new trend
in the current market as women who are already financially secure use pros-
titution as a source of extra income. Bernstein also found that “a new ethic of
fun, sexual experimentations and freedom” led middle-class European women
to take up prostitution.48
Negotiating with Customers
So far customers have been absent from this discussion, but that is for a reason;
even though prostitution exists where there is demand, it is important to con-
sider the network that is in place before the prostitute reaches the client. But
the interaction with the client is also the result of a set of negotiations based
on power relations between genders. These power relations can be distorted or
even culturally inversed from the usual man-woman relation. In local broth-
els in Bolivia, women can mock customers with the blessing of the brothel
owner when customers refuse a drink or ask for a bargain.49 For “passenger
women” in the Papua New Guinea Huli culture, the fact that the man offers
money for sexual intercourse is proof that the woman has vanquished him and
debilitated his integrity.50 In the case of internet dating and self-employment,
47 Lin Leam Lin also notes that children are often self-employed in the Philippines, selling
sex as well as other services. The Sex Sector, p. 5.
48 Elizabeth Bernstein, Temporarily Yours: Intimacy, Authenticity, and the Commerce of Sex
(Chicago, 2007) quoted in Ine Vanwesenbeeck, “Prostitution Push and Pull: Male and Fe-
male Perspectives”, The Journal of Sex Research, 50 (2013), pp. 11–16, 13.
49 Absi, this volume, Bolivia.
50 Wardlow, “Anger, Economy, Female Agency”, p. 1032.
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a sex worker can also refuse certain clients, proving again that she is in a posi-
tion to make her own choices. In Shanghai, contemporary forms of prostitu-
tion in karaoke bars still force the clients to respect a certain code of conduct,
an echo from ancient relations with high-class courtesans.51 In Amsterdam,
Aalbers studied the hunting “techniques” of clients and window prostitutes:
the initial step is not always taken by the man and the woman plays an active
role in starting the negotiation process by tapping on her window or smiling at
a customer.52 She is also free to refuse the customer’s proposal and to close her
door on him. These are the main instances in which women remain in control
and are able to dictate their will and price.
However, the customer is not always a simple consumer. The possibility of
choice for customers for example is greatly reduced when the women are un-
der the control of a pimp or brothel owner. Similarly, women in dire economic
situations or in need of money to fuel their addiction are not in a position to
choose or to negotiate the terms of the transaction. This puts them in a situa-
tion where the client, who should only be a consumer, has sufficient power to
negotiate the sexual transaction to his advantage, by asking more for less, by
refusing to wear a condom, or in particularly violent situations by refusing to
pay or by forcing the woman to provide sexual acts that were not part of the
initial deal. Donovan and Harcourt drew tables on “risk levels” linked with cer-
tain types of prostitution and labour relations which summarize well the pow-
er relation in place between prostitutes and clients according to location.53 For
instance, they argue that women working in a legal brothel or behind a win-
dow are at lower risk of violence as a relatively similar status existed between
the customer and the woman (also a wage-earner). Besides, massage-parlours
where non-penetrative sex is the norm lower the health risks for the women
working in these establishments. Security mechanisms may vary but they are
not accessible to every prostitute, and the context and location of the sexual
intercourse have a major impact on women’s power to negotiate and thus on
their health and safety as well. In this way, customers create a labour relation
with prostitutes as soon as they are able to bargain during a transaction; nego-
tiating a deal can also often lead to a dangerous situation for prostitutes (also
51 Gronewold, this volume, Shanghai.
52 Manuel B. Aalbers, “Big Sister Is Watching You! Gender Interaction and the Unwritten
Rules of the Amsterdam Red-Light District”, Journal of Sex Research, 42 (2005), pp. 54–62,
57–58.
53 Christine Harcourt and Basil Donovan, “The Many Faces of Sex Work”, Sexually Transmit-
ted Infections, 81 (2005), pp. 201–206, 202–204.
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in the long term as regards the risk of catching a disease) and when negotiating
with the police, as has been widely decried by ngos in recent years.
Factors Influencing Labour Relations in Prostitution
The Regulation System
In order to rationalize the labour market and control the economic and social
environment surrounding prostitutes, early modern states/cities implemented
different acts of legislation that recognized prostitutes as workers. In early
modern Cairo, though no state-run brothels existed, pimps were organized in
a type of guild; this meant that women had to pay taxes but it also allowed
them to have access to the court and be able to participate in the traditional
parade of the guilds every year.54 In early modern Florence, a court for prosti-
tutes was instated and women were required to pay taxes; they enjoyed more
freedom and had more opportunities to use the city’s institutions and had
larger properties than other women.55 In imperial China, the whole market
of prostitution was de facto regulated and categorized, offering a relatively
safe environment for prostitutes.56 By recognizing and also taxing prostitutes,
these states and cities allowed prostitutes to live in an economically and legally
bound environment, which was preferable to a hazy and blurred legal setting,
as was the case in European countries. However, with the rise of the state and
nineteenth-century colonial expansion, new regulation systems were put in
place and exported to the colonies. The French system of regulation was tried
in Cairo when Napoleon’s troops were stationed in Egypt, and it was imple-
mented for a longer period than in other colonies.57 Later in the century, Eng-
land imposed the Contagious Disease Act on its colonial territories.58 These
legislations restricted the movement of prostitutes and implemented stricter
controls on their health; these regulations were created in response to increas-
ing fears over venereal diseases but could only be implemented e ffectively
with the development of bureaucratization and the strict policing of urban en-
vironments. The system relied on the will to protect customers and society in
general from being “infected” (physically and morally) by prostitutes; this fear
54 Hammad and Biancani, this volume, Cairo.
55 Turno, this volume, Florence.
56 Gronewold, this volume, Shanghai.
57 Hammad and Biancani, this volume, Cairo.
58 Rhys Glyn Llwyd Williams, “Towards a Social History of London Prostitution”, unpub-
lished paper collected for the project “Selling Sex in the City”, 2013.
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of contagion was accentuated in colonial territories, where interracial sexual-
ity was widely disapproved of by official standards.59
Distinctions were made in cities that had a system of regulation between
registered and non-registered prostitutes. In terms of labour relations, non-
registered women, whose number had always been higher than the number
of registered prostitutes, could engage in less oppressive forms of work in the
sense that they could move in and out of prostitution more easily. But they
risked being arrested, harassed by the police, or denounced by their neigh-
bours, and thus they lived in a socially tense situation. Registered women
(often registered by force) had to endure discrimination and suffered major
spatial and physical restrictions.60 They were also harassed by the police (i.e.,
to submit to health checks) and became dependent on brothel owners, the un-
official agents of the state. This had a long-term effect on the development of
labour relations in prostitution both in Europe and in the colonies; clandestine
prostitutes had to go underground whilst registered prostitutes had to submit
to harsh legal requirements. The regulatory system can indeed create oppres-
sive labour conditions for prostitutes, still visible today in certain countries:
leaving prostitution is made extremely difficult due to the registration process
in Istanbul, whereas in the Netherlands, even though the registration process
is reversible, a certain wariness remains among sex workers.61
Space and Negotiating Power
By confining and restricting prostitutes’ use of the urban space, the state weak-
ened their negotiating power and limited both their independence and their
use of urban areas; first, prostitutes were unable to negotiate their working
conditions as they were forced to work under the supervision of the police or
brothel owners. Secondly, the use of space in prostitution is extremely mean-
ingful in the negotiating process; in mid-nineteenth century Shanghai, when
high class courtesans migrated to the city, “they redefined their use of time and
space, to attract customers (rather merchants than literati), to take their own
lovers in their private houses and to use parks and carriages as newly defined
public spaces for their own purposes.”62 The importance of the spatial con-
text is clearly underlined here: by reshaping their use of space, both private
59 See Philippa Levine, Prostitution, Race, and Politics: Policing Venereal Disease in the British
Empire (New York, 2003).
60 Judith Walkowitz, Prostitution and Victorian Society (Cambridge, 1980).
61 Wyers, this volume, Istanbul; Pluskota, this volume, Amsterdam.
62 Catherine Yeh, “Playing with the Public”, in Wendy Larson (ed.), Gender in Motion (Lan-
ham, 2005), pp. 145–156.
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and public, courtesans put themselves in a better position to negotiate their
contracts and prices with customers. Similarly, by being restricted to an of-
ficial brothel, prostitutes had to comply with the will and wages of the brothel
owner. In cities where regulation was implemented, prostitutes lost control of
their own working spaces, and their negotiating power was strongly affected
as well. By confining them to specific spaces and restricting their use of public
space in addition to compulsory registration, the state led the way to exploit-
ative labour relations and dependence on third parties.63
The figure of the brothel keeper has changed over time, mostly according to
the legislation in place; in Europe, before the development in the nineteenth
century of the regulation system which generally forbade men from living off
the wages of prostitutes, men, women, and couples were tenants of “disorderly
houses” where prostitutes could be found. Prostitutes either lodged there on
a full-time basis or were called in by the owner when needed. Contemporary
interviews as well as eighteenth- and nineteenth-century reports have not-
ed that a process of mimetization of family relations was sometimes visible
within the brothel, notably in small establishments (with 3 to 4 prostitutes).
This was often seen when a madam was in charge, a woman who played the
role of a surrogate mother and took part in the prostitutes’ life experiences
such as pregnancy or illnesses (at least as long as the women remained an
economic asset). In Florence, for example, until recently and due to the large
amount of migrants and trafficked women, prostitution was an all-woman
trade.64 Observers also noticed that madams were often former prostitutes
who had managed to earn enough money to reinvest it in a business (as in
eighteenth-century London and twentieth-century Mexico City and Cairo).65
The gendering process in labour relations is important when working indoors
because it can change the basic employer-wage earner relation into a rela-
tion comparable to a family economy and dependence; as noted for Shanghai,
“powerful ties existed within these establishments, though many verged on
the abusive.”66
The domination of brothel keepers over prostitutes in western Europe di-
minished by the beginning of the twentieth century but labour relations were
63 Registration does not always mean confinement in a brothel. The Chinese system and
early modern Florentine system, which sought to supervise prostitutes, did not have such
an oppressive impact on women engaging in sex work.
64 Turno, this volume, Florence.
65 Nuñez and Fuentes, this volume, Mexico City; Hammad and Biancani, this volume, Cairo.
66 Sue Gronewold, Beautiful Merchandise: Prostitution in China 1860–1936 (New York, 1985).
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Labour Relations in Prostitution, 1600–2010 671
profoundly affected by the change of legislation. In former colonial territories
where forms of regulation remained such as in Indonesia, brothels now operate
on a large scale, employing mainly smuggled women working in a debt bond-
age system.67 By repealing the Contagious Disease Acts (cdas), the British gov-
ernment left the prostitutes in its colonies in an undefined legal situation, and
as such these women were at the mercy of traffickers, police, and pimps with
little means to defend themselves. In Sydney, for example, outdoor prostitu-
tion greatly diminished after World War i as regulation was put into place, and
clandestine prostitutes had to look for the protection of a pimp to avoid being
harassed by the police.68
A Homogenous Group of Workers? Labour Relations between
Prostitutes and a Sense of Belonging
Labour relations are also affected by distinctions within the prostitutes’ group;
these can be based on social class, ethnicity, or services provided and be fu-
elled by officials and prostitutes’ attitudes. By turning a blind eye to European
prostitutes in colonial times and the owners of luxurious brothels, officials
created a double standard that accentuated the tensions between sex work-
ers who struggled to recognize themselves as members of a singular group.
We can therefore see a double dynamic in state efforts to define prostitution;
historically it has accepted some forms of prostitution whilst denigrating oth-
ers. By implementing regulation, the state tried to create a homogenous group
of prostitutes but officials continued to discriminate against certain women
and so did society. This double standard was accentuated by the ethnicity, age,
and economic situation of the prostitutes.69 As a result, the dynamics within a
group of women working in the same trade is also dual. Aims and motivations
do not always mesh and labour relations clearly reflect the impact of this dis-
continuity between sex workers’ identities, and exploitative agents can benefit
from these discrepancies.
67 Lim, The Sex Sector, p. 29.
68 Frances, this volume, Sydney/Perth.
69 Researchers working on British colonial prostitution have been particularly active. See
for example Philip Howell, Geographies of Regulation: Policing Prostitution in Nineteenth-
Century Britain and the Empire (New York, 2009); Levine, Prostitution, Race and Politics;
Luise White, The Comforts of Home: Prostitution in Colonial Nairobi (Chicago, 1990).
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The implementation of regulatory laws in the colonies and in Europe also
had an impact on the social definition and recognition of prostitution. Prosti-
tutes were segregated and discriminated against; even if prostitution as such
was not illegal, the activities surrounding it often were. Because of the latter,
prostitutes were in a grey zone and immersed in the context of crime. This
was particularly relevant in the colonies as this definition went against the
traditional view of prostitution and lowered the position of prostitutes within
society, be it in India, Singapore, or Nigeria. By institutionalizing prostitution
in cities such as Lagos, Johannesburg, Perth, and Sydney, the colonial adminis-
tration took from women their negotiating power and often their recognition
by the community. The first collective forms of resistance appeared during
this time of tensions in Europe and in the colonies; in India the women com-
plained to the court about the cda’s legal requirements and wrote petitions;
in Europe, the first feminists took the side of prostitutes to defend their free-
dom and denounce harassment by the police, and at the same time other
groups of workers were fighting for their rights and renegotiating their work-
ing conditions.
Further collective actions were carried out in the course of the twentieth
century; in 1970 in France, after an increase of police harassment, sex work-
ers demonstrated in Lyon and Paris side by side with feminist activists. But
it was only with the aids pandemic, the fear of global trafficking due to the
high number of women being smuggled across borders to work in prostitution,
and the development of women’s rights groups that prostitutes finally made
their voice heard internationally as a group in the 1990s and early 2000s. In or-
der to respond to the physical risks faced by sex workers and to be recognized
as workers, different movements were born with the aim of defending pros-
titutes’ rights at the national level. Two trends have motivated these groups;
first, the abolitionist trend considers prostitution to be a form of slavery and
sees it as the ultimate commodification of women. They fight with the aim
of eliminating prostitution by condemning traffickers, customers, and any-
one living off the money made through prostitution; they also describe pros-
titutes as victims who should not be condemned for the economic situation
that pushed them into the trade. The second trend is motivated by groups who
support decriminalization and call for the legalization of prostitution so that
it can be recognized as a legitimate form of labour (as is the case in Australia,
the Netherlands, Curacao, and Bolivia to some extent). Movements uniting sex
workers (the choice of expression has a strong significance) demand improve-
ments in working conditions, ask for the same social benefits as other workers,
and call for a halt to police harassment and discrimination. Their voice is being
echoed by human rights ngos at the national and international level. In some
instances, results can already be seen; in Bolivia, the police lost the power to
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Labour Relations in Prostitution, 1600–2010 673
supervise prostitution in 2000 and this greatly reduced the number of bribes
and forced sexual favours.70
At a local level, the relations between sex workers have an influence on
their daily lives, their work, and the security mechanisms they can put in
place. On a daily basis, it is common to see women working in the same area
talking together, even looking after each other, for example by keeping track
of how long a woman is with a customer. Even before the expansion of the
use of cars, prostitutes tended to walk in groups of two or three to create a
feeling of security. However, such labour arrangements do not indicate the
existence of a group mentality or the feeling of belonging to a large workers’
group. They are the result of private negotiations on a one-to-one basis. Sex
workers often see themselves as part of different categories based on the type
of work they do and the wages they receive. This distinction is key to under-
standing labour relations in these networks: elite escorts would not compare
themselves to streetwalkers, as they claim that they provide both entertain-
ment and company to their customers, not exclusively sexual intercourse. La-
bour relations are therefore based on the economic value of the women but
also on the spaces in which they work. Both factors affect the network and the
labour relations they develop by framing their expectations and the people
surrounding them.
The Globalization of Prostitution: Homogenization?
This reflection on the labour relations in prostitution had two aims. First, to
show the intricacies of the labour relations in prostitution and to reveal how
prostitutes have negotiated these relations. Secondly, it sought to outline the
effects of the globalizing process and the role of the state in the creation of
group identities. Over the centuries, prostitutes, like most labouring women,
have mostly been engaged in dependent labour relations, from slave work to
wage earning in combination with domestic duties. However, some prostitutes
have been able to negotiate their working conditions and have engaged in re-
ciprocal or independent relations with brothel owners, pimps, and even the
state. In parallel with this, the number of women working part-time in prosti-
tution in order to build up capital and not only as a means of subsistence has
exploded in the course of the last century as they are motivated by a desire to
enter consumer society. In the past, however, prostitution was part of a make-
shift economy and was clearly dominated by the poor working class but we
see nowadays a multiplication of middle-class women using prostitution as a
70 Absi, this volume, Bolivia.
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supplementary source of revenue so they can have access to goods which are
not of the first necessity.
Sheila Jeffreys claims that
[…] in recent decades prostitution has been industrialized and global-
ized. […] [T]raditional forms of organization of prostitution are being
changed by economic and social forces to become large scale and con-
centrated, normalized and part of the mainstream corporate sphere.
Prostitution has been transformed from an illegal, small scale, largely lo-
cal and socially despised form of abuse of women into a hugely profitable
and either legal or tolerated international industry.71
I believe this statement should be re-evaluated as regards the previous argu-
ments. It is undeniable that the profits made through the sex trade and the
number of women trafficked or smuggled purposely for this trade reached,
during these past decades, unprecedented levels,72 which meshes with Jef-
freys’ notion of industrialization. But it also appears that prostitution has been
part of the transnational economy for centuries; voluntary female migration
and women forced into prostitution could already be seen integrating with the
international market in the early modern period and it boomed with coloniza-
tion and the revolution of transportation. Prostitution can neither be consid-
ered an “illegal, small scale, largely local form of abuse” in the period preceding
the 1970s, firstly because it is only since the twentieth century via prohibition-
ist policies that prostitution became illegal in countries such as Egypt, China,
the us (Nevada excepted) and Russia.73 Certain prohibitionist countries such
as Norway and Sweden have made purchasing sexual acts illegal, but they have
targeted clients and do not condemn the women who sell sex. Even in aboli-
tionist countries, prostitution itself is not illegal, only the activities surround-
ing it are. Secondly, though we are lacking definite figures here, prostitution
was probably not “small scale”; it had become part of the makeshift economy
for many single women in urban environments already in the eighteenth cen-
tury when the job market for women started to shrink. It was also part of the
makeshift economy of women who moved to newly built colonial towns such
71 Sheila Jeffreys, The Industrial Vagina (London, 2008), p. 3.
72 Paola Monzini, Sex Traffic: Prostitution, Crime, and Exploitation (London, 2005).
73 This is a non-exhaustive list.
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Labour Relations in Prostitution, 1600–2010 675
as Johannesburg, Sydney, Perth, and Lagos.74 The job markets in those towns
did not require women’s participation nor encourage their migration, therefore
leaving them with few opportunities to work except in prostitution. As regards
trafficking, as the result of the economic development of Hanoi, Shanghai, and
more particularly Singapore in the nineteenth century, colonial capitals and
international ports favoured the creation of well-organized slave-trade sys-
tems that brought ashore women from Japan and China.75 It can be argued
that the colonial system, with its double-standard regarding prostitution, en-
couraged the development of transnational prostitution on a larger scale,76 but
this must be analysed in comparison with the increasing number of economic
exchanges on a global scale. By considering only the last forty decades as be-
ing significant for the integration of prostitution into the global economy, Jef-
freys (and Barry) misconstrue the evolution of labour relations in prostitution
and the scale of this trade.77 Labour relations in prostitution over the last forty
years have not been widely different from the previous centuries; indentured
work, debt bondage, wage earning, slave work, and even self-employment are
categories that have existed since the early modern period. Similarly, new mi-
grants are still in the most vulnerable position and they are the most likely to
enter a dependent labour relation in which they have little negotiating power
over a brothel owner or client. Only the places where prostitutional exchanges
occur have changed to a certain degree (karaoke clubs, strip clubs, and vans)
with a preponderance of male owners/managers, and this stands in contrast to
the regulated colonial brothels that were supervised by women. Admittedly, in
a global context organizations that support the rights of sex workers and are
opposed to trafficking tend to address their demands to international organi-
zations such as the un, but the locus of power has not shifted to a global level
yet; it is at the national level that decisions are being made and responsibility
is taken, sometimes even at a local level (the legalization of prostitution in
Australia for instance was done at a county level), and on a daily basis, negotia-
tions occur at the level of the community.
It has become clear that there are various types of sex workers (not to men-
tion the other aspects of the sex trade such as pornography and lap dancing)
and these differences have been recognized and promoted by sex workers
74 Choonara, “Selling Sex in Johannesburg”; Frances, this volume, Sydney/Perth; Herzog, this
volume, Singapore.
75 Tracol-Huynh, this volume, Hanoi; Gronewold, this volume, Shanghai; Herzog, this vol-
ume, Singapore.
76 Ashwini Tambe, Codes of Misconduct (New Delhi, 2009).
77 Kathleen Barry, The Prostitution of Sexuality (New York, 1995), p. 122.
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themselves. This puts into question the politics of states and ngos: Are they
taking into consideration every kind of sex worker or are they reflecting only
the will and need of the loudest? Sex work is an expression which is meant
to reflect more accurately what women feel they are doing when selling their
body in terms of the monetary exchange (working) and the reasons for doing
so (economic needs). But what stands out in this article is also how individu-
alistic the reality of sex work is. Huli passenger women and the flying women
of Kolkata are ramparts against the normalization, the uniform shaping of sex
work due to the globalization of sex workers’ movements; so, different socio-
economic statuses and different life experiences need to be taken into account
to avoid confining women in oppressive labour relations.78
78 See also Jackie West, “Prostitution: Collectives and the Politics of Regulation”, Gender,
Work and Organization, 7 (2000), pp. 106–118.
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chapter 26
Working and Living Conditions
Raelene Frances
Introduction
This chapter surveys the ways in which working and living conditions for
women in the sex industry have varied across the globe since 1600. It draws
on the city-specific studies in this volume as well as primary research and the
broader secondary literature on prostitution. Unless otherwise indicated, in-
formation about particular cities is taken from the relevant urban case studies
in this volume.
This chapter argues that five key factors have shaped the working and liv-
ing conditions of sex workers across the globe since the beginning of the sev-
enteenth century.1 These include the degree to which women were bound or
“free”, or were able to exercise power in relation to employers and clients. Relat-
ed to this is the location of individual women within the sex industry—where
they existed within any particular hierarchy based on the class of clients, eth-
nicity, and so on.
Market forces have also been major determinants of the pay and working
conditions in the sex industry. Shifts in the economy have impacted sex work-
ers as well as other workers, affecting both the demand for sexual services and
the supply of women willing to sell sex.
A third major influence on sex workers’ lives has been the responses to pros-
titution of the community in which they worked. This has included both in-
formal and official responses which often determined where and how women
could sell sex and under what circumstances.
1 I have used the terms “sex worker” and “prostitute” interchangeably, while being aware that
both are contested terms and “sex worker” is in many cases anachronistic. Both of these
terms are shorthand for the more accurate term: “a provider of sexual services for material
gain.” Similarly, the designations “pimp” and “madam” are charged terms, but they are used
here because of their common usage in the places and times under discussion. “Pimp” refers
to males who act as intermediaries between client and worker in the exchange of sexual ser-
vices; he may or may not be in an additional relationship to the woman. “Madam” refers to a
female brothel-keeper.
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678 Frances
The formation, expansion, and disintegration of nations and empires have
had a similar impact on the market for sex and have contributed to official
responses to prostitution. Finally, developments in technology and medicine,
especially since the early twentieth century, have contributed to significant
changes in the ways in which sexual services are delivered and also impacted
the health of sex workers.
Degrees of Freedom and Power
Rebecca Scott has employed the concept of “degrees of freedom” in relation
to post-emancipation slave societies in the us and Havana, alerting historians
to the spectrum of power that emancipated slaves exercised, depending on lo-
cal circumstances.2 One can usefully employ the same concept in relation to
women engaged in commercial sex in this survey across time and place.
However, as the chapters on coercion and agency in this volume canvass,
the concepts of free will, choice, and agency are extremely complex and dif-
ficult to unpack in relation to prostitution, as they are so frequently overlaid
with moral and political assumptions and judgements. Nevertheless, histori-
ans must recognize that women have had varying degrees of power in their
dealings with clients and employers/owners and that the degree of autonomy
enjoyed by an individual woman at any particular time has been enormously
important in determining how much control she has had over the type and
quantity of services she provided and the remuneration she received. And in
societies where women could be owned—such in Nigeria/Lagos, Shanghai,
Singapore, Calcutta, Japan, and Istanbul—women were more likely to be in-
volved in some kind of unfree sex work.
The most common form of unfree sex labour encountered in the studies
in this volume was debt bondage, whereby women were “sold” or pawned to
entrepreneurs, usually by their families. These women then had to provide
sexual services for the profit of the entrepreneurs until the original price paid
for them, plus any additional debts subsequently accrued, was recovered. In
such circumstances, women had little control over the number of clients they
received, the services they provided, or the conditions in which they worked.
Chinese women working in Singaporean brothels at the turn of the twen-
tieth century could earn five times the amount that had been paid for their
purchase price in one year, but were rarely able to pay off the original debt
quickly as brothel keepers made sure they continued to accumulate debts for
2 Rebecca Scott, Degrees of Freedom: Louisiana and Cuba after Slavery (Cambridge, 2005).
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Working and Living Conditions 679
personal items, clothing, food, and medical expenses.3 Similarly in Istanbul
until quite recently it was apparently fairly common for a woman to be “sold”
into a licensed brothel by a husband, male relative, or male “friend”, and she
would then be forced to work off the money, a process which meant that wom-
en would have to work for years before becoming free of the debt.4
Even women who had not been sold or pawned to brothel keepers often
became indebted to their keepers through high-interest loans for clothes or
jewellery as part of a deliberate strategy by the keepers to keep women in a
dependent relationship.5 In some cases it was husbands rather than brothel
keepers who directly controlled the sexual labour of their wives or concubines.
In Southeast Asia, for instance, European traders put their wives to work sew-
ing, weaving, cleaning, and selling sex, especially if they were slave women.
This was similar to the practice of Chinese merchants in Singapore, who im-
ported women from China to sell merchandise, provide for their domestic and
sexual needs, and work as prostitutes.6
Other examples of the spectrum of unfree labour include the thousands of
Japanese prostitutes who were in debt bondage throughout Southeast Asia,
Australia, Canada, the us, and as far afield as South Africa in the period from
the 1870s to the 1920s. Many of these women did eventually work off their debts
and become independent sex workers or brothel keepers, and some married,
took jobs, or started businesses outside of the sex industry. But during the time
they were in bondage they were very much under the direction of those to
whom they were indebted.7
3 Herzog, this volume, Singapore.
4 Wyers, this volume, Istanbul.
5 Tracol-Huynh, this volume, Hanoi; Wyers, this volume, Istanbul; Jürgen Nautz, “Urban Over-
view: Vienna”, unpublished paper collected for the project “Selling Sex in the City”, 2013; Amir
et al., this volume, Tel Aviv/Jaffa; Herzog, this volume, Singapore; Gronewold, this volume,
Shanghai; Nuñez and Fuentes, this volume, Mexico City; Hammad and Biancani, this vol-
ume, Cairo; Blanchette and Schettini, this volume, Rio de Janeiro; Mechant, this volume,
Bruges; Absi, this volume, Bolivia; Conner, this volume, Paris.
6 Herzog, this volume, Singapore.
7 James Francis Warren, Ah Ku and Karayuki-San: Prostitution in Singapore 1870–1940 (Oxford,
1993); Sone Sachiko, “Karayuki-san of Asia 1868–1938: The Role of Prostitutes Overseas in
Japanese Economic and Social Development”, (Unpublished M.Phil., Murdoch University,
1980); Hiroshi Shimizu, “Karayuki-san and the Japanese Economic Advance into British
Malaya, 1870–1920”, Asian Studies Review, 20 (1997), pp. 107–132; David Sissons, “Karayuki-San:
Japanese Prostitutes in Australia 1887–1916”, Historical Studies, 17 (1976), pp. 323–341; Yamaza-
ki Tomoko, Sandakan Brothel No. 8 (trans. Karen Colligan-Taylor) (New York, 1999); Clive
Moore, “‘A Precious Few’: Melanesian and Asian Women in Northern Australia”, in Kay Saun-
ders and Raymond Evans (eds), Gender Relations in Australia: Domination and Negotiation
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680 Frances
The case of Chinese women working on the us frontier illustrates the effects
of unfree labour relations on working conditions. While a minority of Chinese
women who came to America became wives or concubines of Chinese men,
the majority came under a form of debt bondage. According to contemporary
reports, their situation often resembled that of slaves, with women kept virtual
prisoners in sub-standard rooms and forced to take on all comers.8
The practice of debt bondage persists into the present century, especially
amongst women who cross national borders to work in the sex industry and
accrue debts to those who make the travel arrangements. Itinerant sex workers
in this case are especially disadvantaged in their power relationship with their
employers as they often do not speak the language of the country in which
they are working and are vulnerable to prosecution and deportation by im-
migration authorities.9
Even where more overt forms of coercion such as slavery and debt bond-
age were not a factor, the general trend towards capitalist labour relations in
the sex industry over the last two centuries, which mirrored broader changes
within capitalist economies, led to brothel workers in particular being subject
to demands to supply more and varied services.10
One could also include drug dependency as a form of bondage, especially
when many employers deliberately encouraged such dependency. This was
clearly a strategy used by Sydney’s notorious Tilly Devine in the 1920s to in-
crease her control over the working lives of prostitutes.11 And even when
drug or alcohol addiction gets started outside the context of an employment
relationship, the result is usually a worsening of the working conditions of the
(Sydney, 1992), pp. 59–81, 67; John Ramseyer, “Indentured Prostitution in Imperial Japan:
Credible Commitments in the Commercial Sex Industry”, Journal of Law Economics and
Organisation, 7 (1991), pp. 89–116; Bill Mihalopoulos, “The Making of the Prostitutes: The
Karayuki-san”, Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars, 25 (1993), pp. 41–56; Motoe Terami-
Wada, “Karayuki-san of Manila: 1880–1920”, Philippine Studies, 34 (1986), pp. 287–316;
Ichioko Yuji, “Ameyuki-san: Japanese Prostitutes in Nineteenth-century America”, in Mark
Caprio and Matsuda Koichiro (eds), Japan and the Pacific, 1540–1920, The Pacific World:
Lands, Peoples and History of the Pacific, 1500–1900, 10 vols (London, 2006), i, pp. 355–376;
Bill Mihalopoulos, “Ousting the ‘Prostitute’: Retelling the Story of the ‘Karayuki-san’” in
Postcolonial Studies, 4 (2001), pp. 169–187; Motoe Terami-Wada, “Karayuki-san of Manila:
1890–1920”, Philippine Studies, 34 (1986), pp. 287–316; Bill Mihalopoulos, Sex in Japan’s Glo-
balization, 1870–1930: Japanese Prostitutes Abroad and Nation Building (London, 2011).
8 Jan MacKell, “Frontier Prostitution in the United States”, unpublished paper collected for
the project “Selling Sex in the City”, 2013.
9 Raelene Frances, “White Slaves/White Australia: Prostitution and the Making of Austra-
lian Society”, Australian Feminist Studies, 19 (2004), pp. 185–200.
10 Williams, this volume, London; Conner, this volume, Paris.
11 Frances, this volume, Sydney/Perth.
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Working and Living Conditions 681
individual concerned, as they are more likely to take on dangerous, unsanitary,
and lower-paid work. Drug-affected workers have also been less likely to show
solidarity with other sex workers in their attempts to exert collective pressure
to maintain standards of pay and conditions.12
The extent to which such collective organisation occurred must also be con-
sidered in evaluating power relationships and their impacts on the lives of sex
workers. In some places, such as Mexico City, the hostility of different groups
of prostitutes to each other has been more noticeable than their solidarity.13
A few exceptions include the petitions of women in India in the nineteenth
century against the Contagious Diseases Acts, a petition by Russian prostitutes
in 1910 seeking official health inspections of clients for diseases, and collective
appeals for better working conditions through the newspapers by sex workers
in Argentina in the 1930s.14
More formal and representative organisations of sex workers are a prod-
uct of the late twentieth century, beginning with street demonstrations by sex
workers in Paris and Lyon in the 1970s.15 In Sydney in the late 1970s, sex work-
ers allied with feminists and civil libertarians to decriminalise street solicit-
ing, while in Johannesburg both black and white sex workers united to call
for legalization concerning prostitution starting in the 1970s.16 Such collective
action can be effective not just in increasing workers’ bargaining power in rela-
tion to employers but in lobbying for improvements in the official treatment of
prostitution and prostitutes.
Perhaps the most effective example of the latter is the impact that sex
worker organisations had on the response of the Australian government to
the aids pandemic. What this study clearly shows is that the most effective
responses to the hiv/aids pandemic occurred in cities like Sydney and Perth
where sex worker organisations worked closely with state health departments
to mount very successful education and support campaigns. Not only did these
campaigns dramatically reduce the spread of infection through commercial
sexual contacts, but also the campaign had flow-on effects to the population as
12 Raelene Frances, Selling Sex: A Hidden History of Prostitution (Sydney, 2007), Ch. 11.
13 Nuñez and Fuentes, this volume, Mexico City.
14 Dasgupta, this volume, Calcutta; Hetherington, this volume, Moscow/St. Petersburg;
Blanchette and Schettini, this volume, Rio de Janeiro.
15 Conner, this volume, Paris.
16 Raelene Frances and Alicia Gray, “‘Unsatisfactory, Discriminatory, Unjust and Inviting
Corruption’: Feminists and the Decriminalisation of Street Prostitution in New South
Wales”, Australian Feminist Studies, 22 (2007), pp. 307–324; Ziyad Choonara, “Selling Sex
in Johannesburg: From 1886 to the Present”, unpublished paper collected for the project
“Selling Sex in the City”, 2013.
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682 Frances
a whole through the education of clients.17 The least effective responses have
occurred where states took a punitive approach to the sex industry and suf-
ferers, as in the case of China. Condom use has never been common in China
and state crackdowns on prostitution made women more desperate to make
up for lost earnings and therefore be more willing to take risks and not insist
on condom use. It is estimated that around 1.5 million Chinese are currently
infected with hiv/aids.18
Clearly, the degree of control any individual woman has had over her work-
ing conditions—where she worked, how many clients she took, what kind of
services she provided, and so on—has been enormously important in deter-
mining the kind of working life she has as a sex worker. Another important and
often related determinant of this experience has been her location within the
hierarchy of the sex industry at any given point in time.
In every city surveyed, women have been engaged in commercial sex in a
great variety of locations and conditions. At the “higher” end of the occupa-
tion, courtesans and high-class escorts entertained their clients in sumptu-
ous surroundings with fine food and wine. At the other end of the spectrum,
women had hurried sex in parks or alleyways, or on filthy rags in overcrowded
dens. In between these two extremes an endless range of gradations of broth-
els and private houses, tents, hotels, assignation houses, restaurants, boats, and
other means of transport have hosted an almost equally diverse range of sexual
services.
The class background of customers, the place of origin of both customers
and prostitutes, and the appearance and age of prostitutes structured Shang-
hai’s hierarchy of prostitution.19 Thus in Shanghai in the nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries, the hierarchy of sex work ranged from the exclusive, cul-
tured, entertaining, and expensive courtesans at one end to the women who
served dozens of men a day in unsanitary hovels in the city’s slums. In be-
tween these two extremes women negotiated different levels of debt and drug
17 Frances, this volume, Sydney/Perth.
18 Tiantian Zheng, Red Lights: The Lives of Sex Workers in Postsocialist China (Minneapolis,
2009), p. 62.
19 Gail Hershatter, Dangerous Pleasures: Prostitution and Modernity in Twentieth-Century
Shanghai (Berkeley [etc.], 1997), p. 34. See also Gail Hershatter, “The Hierarchy of Shang-
hai Prostitution, 1870–1949”, Modern China, 15 (1989), pp. 463–498. The precise nature of
this hierarchy is the subject of an exchange between Hershatter and Christian Henriot;
see Christian Henriot, “‘From a Throne of Glory to a Seat of Ignominy’: Shanghai Prostitu-
tion Revisited (1849–1919)”, Modern China, 22 (1996), pp. 1332–1363; Gail Hershatter, “‘From
a Throne of Glory to a Seat of Ignominy’: Shanghai Prostitution Revisited (1849–1949): A
Response”, Modern China, 22 (1996), pp. 164–169. See also Sue Gronewold, Beautiful Mer-
chandise: Prostitution in China, 1860–1936 (New York, 1982).
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Working and Living Conditions 683
dependency and like the women on the lowest level they provided sex rather
than entertainment. The many gradations of prostitutes associated with vari-
ous forms of entertainment and companionship or concubinage in Shanghai
became increasingly commodified by the twentieth century, and street solicit-
ing was introduced as a new form of sex work. But gradations remained, with
at least seven different categories recognized by both police and the public in
contemporary Shanghai.20
Similarly, in the early twentieth century in the poorest neighbourhoods of
Mexico City, and in the area where the government decided to relocate some
of the houses of prostitution to create a tolerance zone, older and less attrac-
tive prostitutes worked on mosquito-infested, unpaved streets with no sew-
age system, and had to deal with the hostility of neighbours who did not want
them near their houses. At the same time, in first-class brothels the most at-
tractive women serviced their influential clientele in elegant houses with all
kinds of amenities and services.21
Similar variations occurred in the physical surroundings of Cairo’s sex work-
ers in the early decades of the twentieth century, but in this case gradations
of status and pay were also associated with racial differences. The majority of
the sex workers in the Wass’a and Waugh-al-Birka were local women: Egyptian,
Nubian, and Sudanese. They lived in overcrowded and squalid conditions, usu-
ally working in the same small room in which they lived and charging one shil-
ling for sex. The European women enjoyed better conditions and pay, usually
living five or six to a brothel but had sitting and reception areas separate from
the simply furnished bedrooms where they took their clients.22
In Singapore, the red-light areas were also racially segregated both geo-
graphically and in terms of clientele. The small number of European prostitutes
lived in the northern part of the city, serviced only European customers, and
led lives of relative autonomy. Chinese women serviced only Chinese men, but
the Japanese prostitutes were available for all clientele. Chinese sex workers
were divided according to class and degree of bondage: voluntary prostitutes
were distinguished from those who had been trafficked and sold as they were
in a situation similar to those who were pawned, and they could earn back
their independence.23 Chinese brothels were also divided by class: higher-class
20 Gronewold, this volume, Shanghai; Christian Henriot, Prostitution and Sexuality in Shang-
hai: A Social History, 1849–1949 (trans. Noël Castelino) (Cambridge, 2001 [first published in
French in 1997]).
21 Nuñez and Fuentes, this volume, Mexico City.
22 Hammad and Biancani, this volume, Cairo.
23 Herzog, this volume, Singapore; Lai Ah Eng, Peasants Proletarians and Prostitutes: A Pre-
liminary Investigation into the Work of Chinese Women in Colonial Malaya (Singapore,
1986), p. 30.
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prostitutes served wealthy Chinese merchants and lower class girls serviced
the large numbers of coolie labourers. Both Chinese and Japanese brothels
were found in the western part of Singapore.24
Racially-demarcated geographies were a feature of the sex industries of
many of the cities in our survey. In Havana, most of the women working in
brothels were categorized as white while women of colour exposed themselves
at windows or worked on the streets as hustlers or fleteras, street prostitutes.25
In Rio, “Poles” generally shared the same run-down central urban spaces as
poor black and brown prostitutes, whereas the so-called “French artists” (who
may or may not have actually been French) lived in hotels, expensive and ele-
gant boarding houses, or alone in private houses or apartments. Between these
two extremes, however, was a wide spectrum of colours and nationalities com-
peting for space and clients in the townhouses and streets of central Rio de
Janeiro.26 Examples of racially-demarcated urban geographies of prostitution
can be found in many colonial cities in the nineteenth and twentieth centu-
ries, including Calcutta, Hong Kong, and Gibraltar.27
In Istanbul, where the authorities attempted to institute religious segrega-
tion, this was reflected in the moral geographies of the city, with registered
Christian and Jewish women working mainly on the European side of the Bos-
phorus and registered Muslim women in the licensed brothels on the Anatolian
side (which were closed to non-Muslim men). This attempt was only partially
successful, as some women transgressed these boundaries.28
The Market for Sex
It is, of course, very difficult to generalize about the payment for sexual servic-
es across five centuries and such a wide variety of locations. Nonetheless, it is
consistently the case that selling sex has been more lucrative for women than
engaging in almost any other occupation open to them. In all the case studies
24 Herzog, this volume Singapore; Warren, Ah Ku and Karayuki-San, p. 43.
25 Cabezas, this volume, Havana.
26 Blanchette and Schettini, this volume, Rio de Janeiro.
27 Stephen Legg, “Stimulation, Segregation and Scandal: Geographies of Prostitution Regu-
lation in British India, between Registration (1888) and Suppression (1923)”, Modern Asian
Studies, 46 (2012), pp. 1459–1505; Philip Howell, “Sexuality, Sovereignty and Space: Law,
Government and the Geography of Prostitution in Colonial Gibraltar”, Social History, 29
(2004), pp. 444–464; Philip Howell, “Race, Space and the Regulation of Prostitution in
Colonial Hong Kong”, Urban History, 31 (2004), pp. 229–248.
28 Wyers, this volume, Istanbul.
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Working and Living Conditions 685
surveyed in this volume, everyone was marked by highly gender-segmented
labour markets, which meant that women had access to a very limited range
of jobs. Low rates of pay and high levels of insecurity invariably characterized
these jobs. In many cases, gender segmentation was accompanied by ethnic/
racial segmentation, with minority, migrant, and colonized women having ac-
cess to an even more restricted range of jobs. In practice, the occupations open
to most women were the so-called unskilled work associated with women’s
domestic roles: housework, sewing, spinning, weaving, and preparing and
serving food and drink. In some cases, such as in nineteenth-century South
Africa, domestic service was also closed to women as it was performed by
black men, making women’s economic options even more limited.29 In these
circumstances, selling sex was and is a relatively lucrative option for women,
with some women doing this on a full-time basis and others combining the
sale of sex with other forms of economic activity.
Where women’s wages were generally a half or less than men’s, it was com-
mon for a sex worker to charge the equivalent of around a male labourer’s daily
wage for a “short time”, while some would charge a little less and others consid-
erably more. This meant that women could earn many times more for selling
sex than for any other kind of work, assuming they could even secure other
kinds of work. In many cases, alternative work was either not available or was
so erratic that selling sex was the only option.
Over the last century, economic opportunities for women have expanded to
varying degrees in all the cities surveyed, but the discrepancies between wom-
en’s and men’s earnings have persisted. In the early twentieth century, Cairo’s
lowest paid prostitutes were paid more than ten times the daily wage of an
unskilled male labourer for a single sex act. A century later, even the cheapest
prostitutes in Rio could earn as much for one sex act as a male on the mini-
mum wage could earn in a day.30
And although the relative price for sexual services has declined over the last
four decades, it is still the case that sex work is more lucrative than almost any
other occupation open to women. As in the past, for some women sex work
provides the only viable economic option, while for others it is a way of ac-
cessing a greater quantity and range of consumer goods and services and/or of
29 Black women were only drawn into domestic service and sex work after the formation of
the Union of South Africa in 1910, when they also lived in “slumyards” and mining com-
pounds as the “wives” of miner and labourers.
30 Hammad and Biancani, this volume, Cairo; Blanchette and Schettini, this volume, Rio de
Janeiro.
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achieving a greater degree of long-term financial security through accumula-
tion of savings or investments.31
While this generalization about the value of women’s sexual labour com-
pared to other forms of labour holds true, the picture is complicated by the
enormous variation in prices charged among different groups of sex workers.
In the case of Rio cited above, the city’s most expensive women charged up to
seven times the amount paid to the cheapest prostitutes while in nineteenth
century Moscow they were paid around ten times as much.32 Ethnicity as
well as class have also affected prices and earnings. Cairo’s licensed brothels
in the early twentieth century provide a good example of such differences in
the sex industry where European women earned twice as much as natives.33
In contemporary Moscow, the highly paid hotel prostitutes tend to be ethni-
cally Russian while those who sell cheap sex in the rail stations and truck stops
tend to be non-Muscovites and often non-Russian migrants from former Soviet
states.34
In French colonial Hanoi, even more extreme racially-based differences
occurred, with Japanese prostitutes being paid more than Chinese and Viet-
namese women. But while they were paid up to ten times the price paid to a
Vietnamese, Japanese women still received considerably less than the prices
paid to European prostitutes.35
The biggest differential was usually between white and black women in
countries colonised by Europeans, with Europeans being paid much more
than others. But this was not the only distinction. In Rio de Janeiro the im-
migration of large numbers of eastern European women in the first half of the
twentieth century led to the formation of a sub-class of European prostitutes
referred to as “Poles”, who were considered to be more or less on par with local
black and brown prostitutes. “Poles” were paid less than women identified as
being “French” (even though both categories were rather flexible in the actual
nationalities included).36
In Istanbul under the Ottoman Empire, distinctions were based on religion
rather than ethnicity. While the authorities attempted to prevent non-Muslim
men from accessing Muslim sex workers, the prices charged by Muslim women
31 Note the students in Lagos who use their earnings to finance small businesses such as hair
salons, bars, and boutiques. Ekpootu, this volume, Lagos.
32 Hetherington, this volume, Moscow/St. Petersburg.
33 Hammad and Biancani, this volume, Cairo.
34 Hetherington, this volume, Moscow/St. Petersburg.
35 Tracol-Huynh, this volume, Hanoi.
36 Blanchette and Schettini, this volume, Rio de Janeiro.
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Working and Living Conditions 687
were considerably higher than those commanded by Christian and Jewish
prostitutes.37
As well as differentials based on the ethnicity of the sex worker, consider-
able variations could also occur in the prices charged for services depending
on the “class” of the worker and the clients. Virgins have always attracted a
premium, in some cultures more than others, such that in Egypt today women
undergo surgery to reconstruct their virginity in order to increase the price
of their sexual labour.38 Youth and beauty in general have been more highly
valued by clients, but the ability of individual women to capitalize on these
assets has depended very much on their position in the sexual labour market
and their relationship to intermediaries in negotiating the price. While there is
a general trend in which younger, more attractive, and better educated wom-
en can demand higher prices for their services, in some instances the same
woman would charge a different fee depending on the social status of the
client—apparently based on the client’s capacity to pay. In Rio, for instance,
what determines the price in a commercial sexual venue is not the attractive-
ness of the women so much as the attractiveness or luxury of the surroundings
and, more importantly, the social class of male clients.39
How much of this money women have been able to keep has depended very
much on their individual situation. Those in brothels usually gave half their
earnings to the brothel keeper as commission, board, or rent. They also had to
pay a range of other expenses, including medical fees and the cost of maintain-
ing an attractive wardrobe and grooming. In officially regulated brothels, they
often also had to pay medical examination fees.
The contemporary situation in Istanbul is representative of a long history of
brothel prostitution in this city and elsewhere. In 2011, the rate at the Istanbul
licensed brothel was 35 Turkish Lira per visit, approximately 15 Euro. Regis-
tered women are often required to purchase food, beverages, and cigarettes
at inflated rates in the brothel, in addition to paying for electricity, water, and
cleaning, and so they are forced to accept large numbers of clients to make a
profit—up to 50 clients in a day. Additionally, the owner and manager of the
house takes a large cut of each payment, the precise amount varying.40
In some places and times, such as Istanbul under the Ottomans, Cairo,
and Shanghai, and more recently where prostitution has been legalised or
37 Wyers, this volume, Istanbul.
38 Hammad and Biancani, this volume, Cairo.
39 Blanchette and Schettini, this volume, Rio de Janeiro.
40 Wyers, this volume, Istanbul.
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decriminalised, the government has also taxed prostitutes.41 Even in cases
where prostitution was illegal, such as Perth and Sydney, the government taxed
workers and brothel keepers from World War ii on.42
Women working privately have been able to keep a much larger proportion
of their earnings but have often found that their rent was inflated once the
landlord became aware of their occupation. And where they worked in asso-
ciation with pimps or protectors, they were required to share their earnings,
usually on a fifty/fifty basis or more. The exact amount that individual women
received also depended on their employment relationship, i.e. whether they
were self-employed, indentured, enslaved, or under a form of debt bondage, as
noted earlier in this chapter.
Within the broad picture sketched above, there was also considerable varia-
tion in earnings over time. Periods of economic depression put pressure on
earnings as more women engaged in commercial sex at a time when men
could afford to spend less. In Shanghai as well, fierce competition for custom-
ers over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries led to a reduc-
tion in prices.43
On the other hand, sudden increases in the male population occasioned
by such factors as wars or mining booms could lead to temporary increases in
both prices and earnings. Wars could also depress prices by disrupting local
economies and when conflicts led to large numbers of impoverished female
refugees or war widows, as was the case in Istanbul in the turbulent years be-
tween 1912 and 1923 and in Havana during the wars of independence.44
Other factors affected the demand side of the sex market, which in turn af-
fected prices and earnings. Thus, in many western countries since the 1960s the
ready availability of safe contraception and greater sexual permissiveness have
increased the willingness of women generally to have sex outside of marriage,
which in turn has reduced demand for commercial sexual services.45
The advent of mass sex tourism in the twentieth century has also had a
major impact on the demand for commercial sexual services and the working
conditions of those supplying them in many cities. Havana became the ulti-
mate pleasure escape for us travellers in the early twentieth century with sex
provided in casinos, pornographic theatres, and clubs as well as in hundreds of
brothels before the sex industry virtually came to a close with the communist
41 Prostitutes had been taxed for centuries in China as part of the official regulation of
prostitution.
42 Frances, this volume, Sydney/Perth.
43 Gronewold, this volume, Shanghai.
44 Wyers, this volume, Istanbul; Cabezas, this volume, Havana.
45 Frances, this volume, Sydney/Perth.
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Working and Living Conditions 689
revolution in 1959. In recent decades, however, the industry has been revived in
the wake of the collapse of the Russian economy in the early 1990s.46
Cairo opened up to the global economy after the 1973 war with Israel and be-
came a particularly attractive destination for Arabs seeking commercial sexual
services. Other places that have become notable sex tourism destinations in
recent decades include Morocco, Cambodia, the Dominican Republic, Japan,
Amsterdam, Kenya, the Philippines, Colombia, Thailand, and Indonesia.47
Nairobi has also become one of the world’s top sex tourism destinations and
as in Rio de Janeiro, these tourists often seek a kind of “girlfriend experience”
where sexual services are provided in the context of a manufactured romance.
Modern sex tourists include women as well as men seeking both same sex and
heterosexual encounters.48
The increased mobility of clients has its counterpart in the increasing mo-
bility of young working class women. This in turn has given rise to a kind of
reverse of the “white slave” narratives of the early twentieth century, as black
women from South America migrate to Europe and African women find their
way onto the streets of cities like Florence.49 And in Australia, as we have seen,
a new wave of Asian sex workers, many of them in debt bondage, follow in
the tradition of Japanese women who came in the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries. In all these cases it is probably fair to say that the condi-
tions under which these migrants work are less favourable than those of local
women.50
Nations and Empires
The formation, expansion and disintegration of nations and empires over the
last 500 years has had profound repercussions for sex workers, affecting both
46 Cabezas, this volume, Havana.
47 Kemala Kempadoo (ed.), Sex, Sun and Gold: Tourism and Sex Work in the Caribbean
(Oxford, 1999); Michael Hall and David Harrison, “Sex Tourism in South-east Asia”
in David Harrison (ed.), Tourism and the Less Developed Countries (Chichester, 1992)
pp. 64–74; Martin Opperman, Sex Tourism and Prostitution: Aspects of Leisure, Recreation
and Work (New York, 1998); Nancy Wonders and Raymond Michalowski, “Sex Tourism in
a Globalised World: A Tale of Two Cities—Amsterdam and Havana”, Social Problems, 48
(2001), pp. 545–571.
48 Babere Kerata Chacha, “An Over-view History of Prostitution in Nairobi: From the Preco-
lonial Period to the Present”, unpublished paper collected for the project “Selling Sex in
the City”, 2013; Blanchette and Schettini, this volume, Rio de Janeiro.
49 Turno, this volume, Florence.
50 Frances, this volume, Sydney/Perth.
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690 Frances
the supply of workers and clients and the location and conditions of work. In
China, the aggressive expansion of the Qing dynasty drew thousands of people
from captured territories to Shanghai where men increased the demand for
sexual services at the same time as immigrant women (and some men) en-
gaged in prostitution and other forms of work in the modernizing city.51 The
expansion of the Japanese empire into mainland Asia and Southeast Asia in
the 1930s and ‘40s had similar impacts, which included the formation of the
notorious system of “comfort women” forced to work in military brothels.52
The most widespread impacts, however, occurred in conjunction with the
major expansion of European empires in the nineteenth century. New forms of
commercial sex arose in the context of new material circumstances created by
colonialism. Most importantly, sex workers were increasingly drawn into the
massive migration of labour, both free and unfree, around the world in the late
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Millions of Indian, African, Chinese,
and Pacific Islander labourers travelled to work in the cities and on the rural
estates mushrooming in European colonies. They migrated to build railways,
ports, and other infrastructure, as well as to work in factories, mines and on
rubber, sugar, and tea plantations. The overwhelming majority of these labour-
ers were single men and this created huge imbalances in the ratios of men
to women amongst these ethnic groups and in the receiving colonies in gen-
eral. In some cases, up to 98 per cent of the migrant communities were male.53
These male enclaves created in turn a huge demand for sexual services and
women and children were brought in to meet the demand. Large-scale pros-
titution thus arguably emerged as “the feminized auxiliary service industry to
51 Gronewold, this volume, Shanghai.
52 George Hicks, The Comfort Women: Japan’s Brutal Regime of Enforced Prostitution in the
Second World War (New York, 1999); Maria Rosa Henson, Comfort Woman: A Filipina’s
Story of Prostitution and Slavery Under the Japanese Comfort Woman (Oxford, 1999); Sang-
mie Choi Schellstede and Soon Mi Yu, Comfort Women Speak: Testimony by Sex Slaves of
the Japanese Military (Oxford, 2000); Chunghee Sarah Soh, The Comfort Women: Sexual
Violence and Postcolonial Memory in Korea and Japan (Chicago, 2009); Yoshiaki Yoshi-
mi, Comfort Women: Sexual Slavery in the Japanese Military During World War ii (trans.
Suzanne O’Brien) (New York, 2002).
53 Lenore Manderson, “Colonial Desires: Sexuality, Race, and Gender in British Malaya”,
Journal of the History of Sexuality, 7 (1997), pp. 372–388, 374; Lenore Manderson, Sickness
and the State: Health and Illness in Colonial Malaya, 1870–1940 (Cambridge, 1996), p. 166. Of
the 5,580 Chinese residents of Manila in 1855, only ten were female; Luis C. Dery, “Prosti-
tution in Colonial Manila”, Philippine Studies, 39 (1991), pp. 475–489, 447.
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Working and Living Conditions 691
changing male work patterns” which accompanied imperial expansion.54 In
Calcutta alone the number of prostitutes reportedly increased from around
12,000 in the early 1850s to around 30,000 in 1867, despite no significant in-
crease in the total population of the city.55
The colonizers also fuelled this demand for commercial sex as government
officials, entrepreneurs, workers, and soldiers accompanying the spread of em-
pires were also overwhelmingly male. For some of these, at least, the prospect
of exotic sexual experiences was part of the attraction of the empire.56 Euro-
pean colonial economies therefore increased the total demand for commercial
sexual services, drawing new groups of women into prostitution and requiring
that sex workers be much more mobile. At the same time, the infrastructure
that supported modern empires—communications systems such as telegraph
services and the opening of the Panama and Suez Canals, together with the
use of steamships—facilitated this movement of both sex workers and clients
from one part of the world to another.57
The individuals who met this burgeoning demand for commercial sex
came from many parts of the world, augmenting the local supply of sex work-
ers drawn from both rural and urban areas, both male and female. In colonial
Malaya, for instance, they came from Japan, China, Java, India, Thailand, and
eastern Europe to work in brothels in the cities and smaller settlements that
grew up around the plantations and mines.58 Japan and China supplied the
54 Philippa Levine, “‘Rough Usage’: Prostitution, Law, and the Social Historian”, in Adrian
Wilson (ed.), Rethinking Social History: English Society 1570–1920 (Manchester, 1993),
pp. 266–292, 276; Raelene Frances, “Prostitution: the Age of Empires”, in Chiara Beccalossi
and Ivan Crozier (eds), A Cultural History of Sexuality in the Age of Empire (Oxford, 2011),
pp. 145–171.
55 Sumanta Banerjee, Under the Raj: Prostitution in Colonial Bengal (New York, 1998), p.77.
56 Kenneth Ballhatchet, Race, Sex and Class Under the Raj: Imperial Attitudes and Policies and
their Critics, 1793–1905 (London, 1980); for a debate about the coercive nature of this sexual
adventuring, see Ronald Hyam, “Empire and Sexual Opportunity”, Journal of Imperial and
Commonwealth History, 14 (1986), pp. 34–90; Mark T. Berger, “Imperialism and Sexual Ex-
ploitation: A Response to Ronald Hyam’s ‘Empire and Sexual Opportunity’”, Journal of
Imperial Commonwealth History, 17 (1988), pp. 83–89; Ronald Hyam, “‘Imperialism and
Sexual Exploitation’: A Reply”, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 17 (1988),
pp. 90–99. See also Ronald Hyam, Empire and Sexuality: The British Experience (Manches-
ter, 1991).
57 Frances, “Prostitution: The Age of Empires”, pp. 145–171.
58 Manderson, Sickness and the State, p. 166. See also Lenore Manderson, “Migration, Pros-
titution and Medical Surveillance in Early Twentieth-century Malaya”, in Lara Marks and
Michael Worboys (eds), Migrants, Minorities and Health: Historical and Contemporary
Studies (London [etc.], 1997), pp. 49–69; Lai Ah Eng, Peasants, Proletarians and Prostitutes:
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692 Frances
majority of women operating in in the Asia-Pacific region, while French na-
tionals, Italian nationals, and eastern European Jews (principally from Poland
and later Russia) were involved in an international movement of procurers,
pimps, and workers that followed the trade routes west to South America, es-
pecially Brazil, Argentina, and Uruguay, and on to South Africa and Australia.
Another route ran to the east through North Africa, Egypt, and Constantinople,
and the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 provided easy access to Bombay, Co-
lombo, Singapore, Saigon, Hong Kong, Shanghai, and Manila. A further traffic
existed between Russia, Manchuria, and North China, especially through the
rail-head at Harbin.59 This highly mobile itinerant workforce moved not just
within empires but also across imperial and national borders, seeking out new
opportunities wherever they existed.60
A Preliminary Investigation into the Work of Chinese Women in Colonial Malaya, Research
Notes and Discussion Paper No. 59 (Singapore, 1986), pp. 29–30.
59 Hyam, Sexuality and Empire, pp. 142–145.
60 Harald Fischer-Tiné, “‘White Women Degrading Themselves to the Lowest Depths’: Eu-
ropean Networks of Prostitution and Colonial Anxieties in British India and Ceylon ca.
1880–1914”, The Indian Economic and Social History Review, 40 (2003), pp. 163–190, 172;
Raelene Frances, Selling Sex: A Hidden History of Prostitution (Sydney, 2007), Ch. 11; Ta-
mara Adilman, “A Preliminary Sketch of Chinese Women and Work in British Columbia
1858–1950”, in Barbara K. Latham and Robert J. Pazdro (eds), Not Just Pin Money: Selected
Essays on the History of Women’s Work in British Columbia (Victoria, 1984), pp. 53–78, 59;
Lucie Cheng Hirata, “Chinese Immigrant Women in Nineteenth-century California”, in
Carol Ruth Berkin and Mary Beth Norton (eds), Women in America: A History (Boston,
1979), pp. 223–224; James Francis Warren, Ah Ku and Karayuki-San: Prostitution in Sin-
gapore 1870–1940 (Oxford, 1993), Ch. 2; Ah Eng, Peasants, Proletarians and Prostitutes;
Elizabeth Sinn, “Chinese Patriarchy and the Protection of Women in 19th-century Hong
Kong”, in Maria Jaschok and Suzanne Miers (eds), Women and Chinese Patriarchy, Submis-
sion, Servitude and Escape (Hong Kong,1994), pp. 161–170; Julia Martinez, “La Traite des
Jaunes: Trafficking in Women and Children across the China Seas”, in Cassandra Pybus,
Markus Rediker and Emma Christopher (eds), Many Middle Passages: Forced Migration
and the Making of the Modern World (Berkeley, 2007), pp. 204–221; Julia Martinez, “The
Chinese Trade in Women and Children from Northern Vietnam”, in Pierre le Roux, Jean
Baffie, and Gilles Faure (eds), The Trade in Human Beings for Sex (Bangkok, 2010), pp.
47–58; see also Paul Monet, Les Jauniers, Histoire Vraie (Paris, 1930); Henriot, Prostitution
and Sexuality in Shanghai; Luise White, The Comforts of Home: Prostitution in Colonial
Nairobi (Chicago [etc.], 1990); Charles van Onselen, Studies in the Social and Economic
History of the Witwatersrand 1886–1914, 2 vols (New York, 1982), i, pp. 109–164; Elizabeth
B. van Heyningen, “The Social Evil in the Cape Colony, 1868–1902: Prostitution and the
Contagious Diseases Acts”, Journal of Southern African Studies, 10 (1984), pp. 170–197. See
also references to Japanese prostitutes (karayuki-san) in note 5 above.
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Working and Living Conditions 693
European colonialism also redefined some female occupations as “prostitu-
tion” which in precolonial times had enjoyed a much more complex status. This
was the case in India where temple-dancers were criminalized as prostitutes
in the 1860s.61 Courtesans in China, Japan, and other parts of Asia underwent
a similar kind of commodification.62 Australia’s indigenous population had no
concept of prostitution prior to European colonization but its women were
quickly drawn into commercial sexual transactions with the colonizers and
treated as prostitutes, as was also the case in Canada and New Zealand.63
Finally, the existence of prostitution in European empires, while in some
ways assisting the colonial project, also created issues for colonizers’ power as
regards the health of their subjects and the maintenance of racial hierarchies
in colonized societies. The issues and the responses varied from empire to em-
pire and even within empires, but in each case they had significant impacts on
prostitutes’ working lives. These impacts could include restrictions on where
they lived and worked, as well as new levels of policing, medical surveillance,
and incarceration. In the case of Bangalore, women identified as prostitutes
had their hair cut off and were then publicly expelled.64
Community and Government Responses
A major factor influencing the working lives of prostitutes has been the ap-
proach of governments in responding to prostitution. The cities in this study
exhibit a wide range of both community and government responses, ranging
from extreme forms of repression to direct control to regulation, legalization,
and decriminalization. Sue Gronewold’s chapter in this volume ably charts
these complex state interventions in prostitution. Rather than replicate that
61 Kunal M. Parker, “‘A Corporation of Superior Prostitutes’: Anglo-Indian Legal Concep-
tions of Temple Dancing Girls, 1900–1914”, Modern Asian Studies, 32 (1998), pp. 559–633,
559–560; Veena Talwar Oldenburg, “Lifestyle as Resistance: The Case of the Courtesans of
Lucknow, India”, Feminist Studies, 16 (1990), pp. 259–288; Dagmar Engels, “The Changing
Role of Women in Bengal, 1890–1930” (Unpublished Ph.D., School of Oriental and Asian
Studies, London, 1987), pp. 90–92; Frederique Appfel-Marglin, Wives of the God King
(Delhi, 1984).
62 Hanneke Ming, “Barracks-Concubinage in the Indies, 1887–1920”, Indonesia, 35 (1983),
pp. 65–94, 70–71; Ah Eng, Peasants, Proletarians and Prostitutes, pp. 29–30.
63 Frances, Selling Sex, Ch. 4; Jo-Anne Fiske, “Colonization and the Decline of Women’s Sta-
tus: The Tsimshian Case”, Feminist Studies, 17 (1991), pp. 509–535, 523.
64 Sundara Raj, Prostitution in Madras: A Study in Historical Perspective (Delhi, 1993), p. 25.
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analysis, however, I will highlight some of the major impacts that different
policy regimes have had on living and working conditions in the sex industry.
Repression
Wherever prostitution and related activities have been criminalised, the effect
has been not to eradicate prostitution but to expose those involved in the sex
industry to varying levels of police corruption and violence.65 And this his-
torical situation persists into the present. In contemporary Istanbul, bribery
or sexual favours appear to be a common occurrence in interactions with the
police, as well as police violence, regardless of whether the sex workers are
registered or not.66
While most forms of repression have resulted in fines or imprisonment,
more extreme forms have included execution, which happened from time to
time in Istanbul when particular regimes launched campaigns against vice. On
a larger scale was the drowning of 400 prostitutes in the Nile by the French
authorities because they had allegedly infected the invading French troops.67
The French authorities also mutilated prostitutes in Paris in the seventeenth
century by clipping their ears, as did authorities in Stockholm in the early
modern period. In Stockholm and Vienna at that time it was also common to
flog prostitutes and repeat offenders in Stockholm could be executed. Sweden
in the 1920s also introduced programmes of forced sterilization of prostitutes
in an attempt to eradicate what was seen as an inherited moral weakness.68
These measures pale into insignificance when compared to the state vio-
lence meted out to prostitutes and others involved in the sex industry by twen-
tieth century totalitarian regimes in the ussr, China, Japan, and Germany.
This included executions as well as forceful removal to labour/reform camps
and virtual slavery in military brothels.69
65 Choonara, “Selling Sex in Johannesburg”; Turno, this volume, Florence.
66 Wyers, this volume, Istanbul.
67 Hammad and Biancani, this volume, Cairo.
68 Conner, this volume, Paris; Svanström, this volume, Stockholm.
69 Golfo Alexopoulos, Stalin’s Outcasts: Aliens, Citizens, and the Soviet State, 1926–1936 (Ithaca,
2003), esp. pp. 62–63; Dagmar Herzog, “Hubris and Hypocrisy, Incitement and Disavowal:
Sexuality and German Fascism”, Journal of the History of Sexuality, 11 (2002), pp. 3–21; Julia
Roos, “Backlash against Prostitutes’ Rights: Origins and Dynamics of Nazi Prostitution
Policies”, Journal of the History of Sexuality, 11 (2002), pp. 67–94; Hicks, The Comfort Wom-
en; Henson, Comfort Woman; Schellstede and Yu, Comfort Women Speak; Soh, The Comfort
Women; Yoshimi, Comfort Women.
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Working and Living Conditions 695
While most forms of repression historically have been directed at female
prostitutes, the recent Swedish approach targets the clients. The advantage of
this approach for women is that they are not criminalised. However, the re-
duction in clientele in Sweden has meant that selling sex is no longer a viable
economic option for most Swedish women, who must then try to find other
employment or resort to social welfare. Their place has been taken by immi-
grant women from the former Soviet Bloc who have fewer economic alterna-
tives.70 It is too early to gauge the impact of the introduction of a similar law
in France in 2013.
Regulation
Systems of regulation, along the lines of what was generally referred to as the
“French system”, developed in Europe at the turn of the eighteenth century
and were introduced in many parts of the world in the nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries.71 A system of regulation was present even earlier in China.
The French model of regulation generally provided for prostitution to be
conducted within officially recognized brothels where the women underwent
compulsory medical examinations and treatment.72
And even where such systems were not legislated, some local police and
medical authorities imposed a de facto form of regulation. Thus in Perth in
the years from World War i to the 1950s, prostitutes were required to live in
brothels in the designated red-light area of Roe Street adjacent to the central
business district. Conditions in these houses were reported to be comfortable,
although not luxurious. Inmates had their meals provided and their washing
and cleaning done for them and were allowed one week off in four. Their lives
were constrained because they had to abide by the unofficial rules set by the
police, which prohibited relationships with men other than clients and en-
forced medical examinations and treatment, but the women had little reason
70 Svanström, this volume, Stockholm.
71 For a general survey of these measures see Philippa Levine, Prostitution, Race and Poli-
tics: Policing Venereal Disease in the British Empire, (New York [etc.], 2003); see also Rae-
lene Frances, “Prostitution: the Age of Empires”, in Chiara Beccalossi and Ivan Crozier
(eds), A Cultural History of Sexuality, in the Age of Empire, 6 vols (Oxford [etc.], 2011), v,
pp. 145–171.
72 Official regulation existed in many parts of the world during this time period, includ-
ing Bolivia, Bruges, Russia, Sweden, Austria, Turkey, Buenos Aires, Cairo, India, Florence,
Hanoi, Havana, Johannesburg, Mexico City, Paris, Florence, Malta, Hong Kong, Gibraltar,
the Philippines (under both Spanish and American rule), the Netherlands, Dutch East
Indies, Cape Colony, Tasmania, Queensland, New Zealand, Canada, Ceylon, Jamaica, Bar-
bados, Trinidad, Penang, Malacca, Labuan, and Fiji.
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to fear violence from clients or extortion from criminals. And in Perth as in
other places where regulation operated, there was always a smaller number of
“high-class” women who were allowed to operate independently of the police
rules.73 A similar situation existed in Rio de Janeiro in the late nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries, when police introduced a form of regulation with-
out legislative sanctions. In Buenos Aires the police continued to enforce a de
facto form of regulation despite the official repeal of this system in 1936.74
This kind of unofficial regulation mirrored in many respects the classic
French system, which provided a degree of physical security for inmates of
brothels at the cost of close surveillance and compulsory medical scrutiny and
treatment. In some versions of this system women were required to live on the
premises of licensed brothels, but the trend has generally been for this practice
to be relaxed over time, so that women could live privately and still work in the
brothels. In Paris, the requirement to live on the premises was falling out of
favour at the same time as it was being instituted in Perth. By 1903, less than 1
per cent of Paris’s sex workers lived in regulated houses known as maisons de
tolérance and more practised their trade in what were called maisons de ren-
dez-vous, which were non-residential houses of prostitution. The women were
still registered and monitored by their employers and the medical authorities,
but had more of a sense of a private life than those living and working in a
brothel. While this was a positive development for Paris’s sex workers, other
changes were more negative. A new type of prostitution known as maisons
d’abattage—or slaughter houses—was introduced in the interwar period and
women allegedly offered any service and typically served thirty to fifty clients
a day. One can only imagine the toll that such a high turnover of clients had on
the women concerned.75
In the French colony of Hanoi, prostitutes also initially had to work inside
the brothels, since that was the only authorized form of prostitution. Later on,
they could also work in their own homes, but brothels remained the ideal for
the colonial authorities because surveillance was easier that way. In this case,
as in all cases where officials restricted where women could sell sex, workers
lost a certain amount of control over their own working space, which in turn
affected their ability to negotiate with clients over prices and services.76
In Florence, regulations first introduced as long ago as 1403 allowed wom-
en to work either in groups in the tolerated brothels or alone. Florence had a
73 Frances, this volume, Sydney/Perth; Tracol-Huynh, this volume, Hanoi.
74 Blanchette and Schettini, this volume, Rio de Janeiro.
75 Conner, this volume, Paris.
76 Tracol-Huynh, this volume, Hanoi.
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Working and Living Conditions 697
large number of individual women who operated independently. Such women
valued their autonomy from both clients and pimps, and the opportunity to
escape the stigma and imposed pace of work that inevitably impacted those
who worked in brothels.77
However, the continued existence of registration, whether it involved
women living and working inside brothels or not, usually also made it more
difficult for registered women to leave prostitution. There has been a general
tendency for sex workers under systems of legal and de facto regulation to be-
come increasingly full-time and to stay in prostitution for longer periods of
time in their lives. This was especially the case where the regulations required
women to give their identification cards to the regulating authority, which was
the case in Stockholm after 1875. It was very difficult to find other work with-
out an identity card. Even the fact of registration tended to mark women out
from the rest of the working class in a way they had not been previously done,
making it more difficult for them to take on other part-time work or to leave
prostitution.78
However, this generalization does not always apply. Even within the small
legal red-light district in Istanbul, it seems that working conditions differ, and
some sex workers claim that they work on their own schedule, choosing to
work part time or full time based on their financial needs. Until the early 2000s,
when a series of raids were conducted, it was reported that women worked
part-time illegally (without registering) in the licensed houses of Istanbul to
offset their salaries in times of financial duress, and that some of these women
were teachers, bank workers, and government employees.
Registration also entailed a considerable loss of personal freedom and ad-
ditional expenses for workers in other places as well. In Havana, for instance, a
system of regulation instituted by the metropolitan government involved reg-
istration, compulsory medical checks, and hospitalization in the event a wom-
an was diagnosed with a disease.79 In Rio, all the costs were borne by brothel
prostitutes and those who could not afford to pay were punished. The fees paid
by brothel workers were also used to employ special police to enforce the legal
obligations as outlined by the Reglamento, and these rules multiplied as time
passed, resulting in increasing restrictions on the way women carried out their
work and interacted with the public.80
77 Turno, this volume, Florence.
78 Svanström, this volume, Stockholm.
79 Cabezas, this volume, Havana.
80 Blanchette and Schettini, this volume, Rio de Janeiro.
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Under the Florentine system, prostitutes and pimps were licensed. This
system restricted prostitutes’ freedom but also granted them protection from
other magistracies, gave them immunity from prosecution for debt, and grant-
ed them the right to bring cases of injustice before the Onestà (the licensing
body). Fines and taxes on prostitutes were used to fund refuges. Heavier taxes
on unregistered women meant that they didn’t have to bear the sign of the
prostitute that women under the Onestà had to wear.81
The medical surveillance that usually accompanied systems of regulation
was often experienced as a further intrusion over the bodies and lives of pros-
titutes. Lock hospitals were particularly dreaded, as they were akin to prisons,
held the women to harsh routines, and prevented them from working. War-
dens and supervisors in the medical dispensaries, notably in the case of Hanoi,
also sometimes carried out acts of violence and extortion.82
But while working in regulated brothels involved considerable restrictions
for workers, the forceful closure of brothels, whether regulated or not, often
led to an increase in street prostitution that was generally more hazardous and
less well paid. When the regulated brothels in Cairo closed and prostitution
was criminalized in 1951, street soliciting increased, with workers taking clients
to cars and boats. Women often went with a group of men and worked more
for less payment.83 A similar situation occurred in Florence when its licensed
brothels were closed in 1958.84 And although London did not have licensed
brothels, official attempts to suppress brothels in the late nineteenth century
forced women to ply their trade on the streets, shifting the balance of sex work
out of doors.85 The same occurred in Mexico City after 1945. In many cases this
change also meant a change in control over the labour of sex workers from
female “madams” to male “pimps”.86
We should also bear in mind that in all the cases examined in this volume,
there were always more women selling sex outside the official regulated sys-
tem than within it, with numbers outside the official system increasing during
times of high demand. In Cairo during the World War ii, for instance, esti-
mates put the number of unlicensed women selling sex at over 4,300 compared
to 631 licensed women. These women enjoyed more independence than reg-
istered women and also escaped the stigma of registration but at the risk of
81 Turno, this volume, Florence.
82 Tracol-Huynh, this volume, Hanoi.
83 Hammad and Biancani, this volume, Cairo.
84 Turno, this volume, Florence.
85 Williams, this volume, London.
86 Nuñez and Fuentes, this volume, Mexico City.
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Working and Living Conditions 699
being prosecuted and harassed by the police for working outside the approved
system.87
Decriminalization/Legalization
Where prostitution is not criminalized—as is the case in some states in
Australia as well as in the Netherlands and Bolivia—sex workers are free from
the burdens of police harassment and extortion that inevitably accompany
illegal activities. Workers also have access to social welfare, superannuation,
bank loans, and other benefits that non-prostitute workers enjoy. This has had
a profound impact on workers’ lives, giving them greater personal and finan-
cial security and the ability to plan for retirement. Workers can also call on the
law for redress in cases of violence or exploitation.88
Sex workers historically have in general been very vulnerable to various
forms of violence, whether at the hands of clients, pimps, or the authorities. A
survey of sex workers in Paris in 1975 found that one third of the women had
been victims of violent physical assault in the previous five months.89 In Shang-
hai, fear of violence at the hands of clients and managers continues to be the
major reason prostitutes want to leave sex work.90 In early republican Turkey,
violence committed by clients against sex workers was a regular occurrence.91
In addition to violence from clients, sex workers in Turkey could be at risk
of so-called “honour killings” if male relatives discovered that they were sell-
ing sex. In contemporary Istanbul, violence, including rape and shootings, was
reported in interviews conducted by a contemporary researcher; of fifty non-
registered sex workers, forty-three reported that they had been victims of vio-
lence including rape, battery, abduction, and extortion. But as sex workers have
pointed out, they cannot apply to the police for help or bring the perpetrator
to justice because they themselves would then be subject to police action.92
This was true of women in other times and places, as sex workers had little
recourse to the law for protection against violence. This was partly because
in many cases their activities were illegal and they were therefore keen not to
draw the attention of the authorities to themselves. In other cases, the law was
simply unsympathetic to their plight. It was common, for instance, for the rape
87 Hammad and Biancani, this volume, Cairo.
88 Frances, Selling Sex, Ch. 16; Absi, this volume, Bolivia.
89 Conner, this volume, Paris.
90 Zheng, Red Lights, pp. 70–72, 83–85, 90–92, 104, 159; Henriot, Prostitution and Sexuality in
Shanghai, esp. Ch. 6; Hershatter, Dangerous Pleasures, pp. 145–165.
91 Wyers, this volume, Istanbul.
92 Ibid.
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of prostitutes to be either tolerated or treated as far less serious than the rape
of a “respectable” woman.93
Immigration Restrictions
As well as laws and practices that affected the working lives of women in the
sex industry in particular locations, changes in official attitudes to immigra-
tion could have major impacts on the ability of prostitutes to move between
countries. This in turn could have a major effect on their ability to earn an
income. Thus in Australia, the laws of the newly federated Commonwealth of
Australia instituted after 1901 restricted the entry of all persons of colour, effec-
tively ending the entry of Japanese women who had been working in the min-
ing towns and ports of central and northern Australia since the 1880s.94 Similar
restrictions, either racially based or specifically aimed at prostitutes, affected
Japanese prostitutes in other parts of South East Asia and the us in the early
decades of the twentieth century.95 In the British colony of Gibraltar, colonial
authorities used a longstanding law relating to “aliens” to regulate prostitutes,
expelling any women (alien or not) who did not conform to the de facto system
of registration, examinations, and hospitalization.96
Similarly, many countries changed their approach to prostitution in the
late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in the wake of internation-
al campaigns against the so-called “white slave traffic”. Many sex industry
entrepreneurs left New York after the crackdown on foreigners connected
with prostitution there in the 1890s. They turned their attention to the gold-
fields of South Africa, only to be excluded from the cities of Johannesburg
and Cape Town by official action in the 1890s.97 Starting in the 1930s, foreign
women found working in Istanbul’s registered brothels were deported.98
French prostitutes who found the Egyptian authorities less tolerant after the
First World War moved on to Perth in Australia, only to be harassed by local
93 For example in Brazil, Criminal Code 1830 specified one year prison for the rape of a pros-
titute compared to up to twelve years for “honest” victims; Blanchette and Schettini, this
volume, Buenos Aires.
94 Frances, this volume, Sydney/Perth.
95 See note 7 above for sources on Japanese prostitution in the Asia-Pacific region.
96 Philip Howell, “Sexuality, Sovereignty and Space”, p. 445.
97 Charles van Onselen, “Prostitutes and Proletarians 1886–1914” in Studies in the Social and
Economic History of the Witwatersrand 1886–1914, 2 vols (New York, 1982), i, pp. 103–162,
108; Elizabeth B. van Heyningen, “The Social Evil in the Cape Colony 1868–1902: Prostitu-
tion and the Contagious Diseases Acts”, Journal of Southern African Studies, 10 (1984), pp.
170–197.
98 Wyers, this volume, Istanbul.
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Working and Living Conditions 701
i mmigration and police as part of A
ustralia’s response to the League of Nations
Convention on the Traffic in Women and Children, which was issued in the
1920s. Constantly moving around in this way meant that individual women
found it more difficult to earn a living and accumulate assets. Ironically, such
official responses aimed at reducing “trafficking” may have in fact extended the
working life of prostitutes who had to work longer to make up for lost earnings
and property investments.99
Technological and Medical Developments
Since the 1990s, the trend of cybersex and the use of the internet to get in touch
with clients have had a significant impact on the ways sex workers can mini-
mize the violence to which they are exposed, both from the police and clients.
Instead of soliciting in public places, the internet has enabled workers to op-
erate from private homes or other indoor arrangements. Just as telephones
enabled “call girls” to build up a clientele of discreet and trusted clients, the
internet also makes it possible for workers to build up a small but steady group
of clients and minimize the risk of violence and police harassment. And in
both cases, remote sex, whether on the phone or the net, offers much more
safety and anonymity to providers of the service than actual physical contact.
However, just as earlier sexual markets were segmented, websites for sold
sex also display elements of ethnic and other kinds of segmentation. In Istan-
bul, for instance, websites are divided between those for foreign women and
those for Turkish women, with foreign women charging twice as much as Turk-
ish women.100
Clearly, though, the extent to which sex workers can make use of the inter-
net to increase their independence and invisibility is very much dependent
on the education levels of both workers and clients. Thus, it is very important
in Cuba because of the high literacy rates occasioned by free universal educa-
tion under Fidel Castro’s regime. In Johannesburg, in contrast, the internet has
made remote sex work possible and cell phones have become a vital tool in the
business, but low levels of literacy limit the ability of street-based workers to
use these technologies to improve their working lives. And it is not always the
99 Raelene Frances, “White Australia and the White Slave Traffic: Gender, Race and Citizen-
ship”, International Review of Social History, 44 (1999), supplement, pp. 101–122.
100 Wyers, this volume, Istanbul.
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case that the internet reduces the risk of violence as workers may be lured to
unsafe meeting places via this means.101
Developments in transport as well as communications have also affected
the ways in which sex is sold. Motor vehicles allowed for new forms of contact
between clients and workers, while cheaper and faster ships and airplanes fa-
cilitated greater mobility of both. Many of Perth’s sex workers, for example, live
in the capital but regularly fly to the remote mining towns in the north to work
for varying periods of time.102
It is apparent that there is a strong link between working conditions, hours
of work, earnings, and health. Venereal diseases present a major health risk for
all sex workers. Syphilis was seen as a major problem in Europe from the end
of the fifteenth century onwards. It was spread by armies around the world, so
all sex workers in this study were and are vulnerable to infection. The spread
of European empires in the nineteenth century was partly responsible for the
increasing incidences of and concerns about syphilis in the second half of the
nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth. It was this concern that
prompted the first systems of regulated prostitution in France and also their
adoption in other jurisdictions in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
These systems attempted to control prostitutes as they were posited as the al-
leged vectors of disease.103 Nigeria was the only example in this study in which
anti-venereal disease measures targeted men rather than women; soldiers
were subjected to “cock-pulling or public display of genitals” for contracting
venereal diseases and they had to pay a fine of six pence per day for conceal-
ment of the disease.104
However, the health benefits of these systems for sex workers are far from
clear. Apart from inaccurate methods of diagnosis used in most of this period,
there weren’t any effective cures for syphilis until the introduction of penicil-
lin in the 1940s. All of the various systems of regulation, whether official or de
facto, were also applied unevenly and those who escaped surveillance—the
so-called clandestine prostitutes—always outnumbered those who were reg-
istered. In Hanoi in 1915, for instance, of more than 2,000 prostitutes, less than
half were registered and of those only 82 had been examined at all; of those
women, only 40 were examined regularly. In the 1930s, less than 5 per cent
101 Cabezas, this volume, Havana; Choonara, “Selling Sex in Johannesburg”.
102 Frances, this volume, Sydney/Perth.
103 Frances, “Prostitution: The Age of Empires”.
104 Chacha, “An Over-view History of Prostitution in Nairobi”.
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Working and Living Conditions 703
of the estimated 3,000 to 5,000 prostitutes were examined and many women
avoided treatment as it prevented them from working or looking after their
children.105
Indeed, opponents of the system argued that the regulations were actually
counterproductive, encouraging complacency amongst clients who believed
that regulated women were medically “clean”. The health outcomes for women
involved in sold sex were mixed. While it is probably true that few were cured
by the draconian but largely ineffective treatment regimes in place before the
1940s, it also seems that for some poor prostitutes the compulsory health care
that accompanied regulation was the only medical service to which they had
access. James Warren argues that the end of regulation in Singapore, for in-
stance, meant that the health of many brothel inmates deteriorated because
they no longer had access to any medical care.106 It is also possible that the
heightened awareness of venereal diseases that accompanied compulsory in-
spection and treatment prompted many sex workers to take prophylactic mea-
sures. It was certainly the case in Australia that French women, accustomed
to the regulatory regimes of France, were much more inclined to inspect their
clients for disease, to require the use of condoms, and to douche with anti-
septics between customers.107 Similarly, a 1906 study of registered women in
Stockholm found that 73 per cent performed some kind of inspection of clients
and many also insisted on contraceptives (presumably condoms).108
But even after the discovery of penicillin in 1938 and when it became avail-
able in 1943, for many poorer women the chances of getting cured did not im-
prove. Almost half of the prostitutes arrested by the police in 1951 in Shanghai
had a combination of both syphilis and gonorrhoea. Traditional medicines like
mercury and calomel were used in China and modern medicines were intro-
duced later, but western medicines were too expensive for many Chinese pros-
titutes. Condom use was also not openly discussed in China until the 1940s and
it is still relatively rare decades later; as a result, the large majority of prosti-
tutes suffered from disease but were not treated.109
There is also a correlation between education levels and the ability to ne-
gotiate safe sexual relations. A prostitute’s socio-economic status also plays a
part, as those engaged in survival sex are less able to assert agency in terms of
105 Tracol-Huynh, this volume, Hanoi.
106 Warren, Ah Ku and Karayuki-san.
107 Frances, this volume, Sydney/Perth.
108 Svanström, this volume, Stockholm.
109 Henriot, Prostitution and Sexuality in Shanghai, p. 149.
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the health risks they take.110 Similarly, drug addicts tend to take more risks than
other workers as regards their health.
But while venereal diseases such as syphilis and gonorrhoea were the main
health issue for sex workers for the past 500 years, the late twentieth century
was to bring an even more debilitating disease. As we have seen in the case
of early venereal diseases, prostitutes were targeted as major vectors of the
hiv/aids pandemic that struck most parts of the world in the 1980s. In most
cases, the authorities and workers were caught completely unprepared.111
While venereal diseases are the most obvious health risk for prostitutes
alongside violence, female prostitutes also face serious health risks as a re-
sult of pregnancies and abortions. These risks have been ameliorated to some
extent with new technologies such as the contraceptive pill and the more
widespread use of condoms to avoid infection. Similarly, abortions are now
more readily available and are safer in many countries as there are better
medical procedures and drugs to control infections. However, there are still
large populations of sex workers who do not have access to such contracep-
tion and medical treatment, and traditional methods of avoiding pregnancy
are not as effective.112 On the other hand, for women in Nigeria high rates of
infertility probably caused by venereal diseases are seen as a more significant
problem than pregnancies. In the past, urban sex workers adopted children to
compensate for this, and more recently have taken advantage of programmes
using fertility technologies. However, the expense of these programmes means
that they provide no solution for childless sex workers occupying the slums of
Lagos.113
Anecdotal evidence and popular literary and film stereotypes suggest that
the physical and psychological health of sex workers is generally poor and
results in high rates of suicide. However, few systematic surveys have been
carried out to support this. One study of regulated sex workers in Stockholm
found the mortality rate among the women from 1871 to 1890 was twice as
high compared to unmarried women on the whole in Stockholm and was
110 Hetherington, this volume, Moscow/St. Petersburg, notes that in contemporary Russia
those most vulnerable to venereal diseases are the poorest prostitutes.
111 Paul Sendziuk, Learning to Trust: Australian Responses to aids (Sydney, 2003), Ch. 8, pro-
vides an excellent summary of the aids issue as it related to prostitution.
112 See reference in the overview of Shanghai regarding traditional forms of contraception;
Gronewold, this volume, Shanghai.
113 Chacha, “An Over-view History of Prostitution in Nairobi”.
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Working and Living Conditions 705
possibly higher since a number of the women left the regulation system be-
fore dying.114
One can speculate on the reasons for the poor health of sex workers, and
in some cases the causes are fairly obvious, as in the case of Shanghai workers
suffering from severe psychological trauma after being tortured in prison.115
It is also probable that where sex work is still illegal, the associated stress for
workers takes its toll on both their physical and mental health. Researchers
in Istanbul found that the reported low general health of workers in Istanbul
was attributed to the legal and social conditions under which they live. Poor
working conditions contributed to sleeplessness, malnutrition, respiratory in-
fections, skin diseases, venereal diseases, and mental illness.116
Lack of affordable medical care is also a factor in poor health for sex work-
ers. A survey of sex workers in Paris in 1975 found that less than 40 per cent had
health insurance. In the registered brothels in Istanbul, even though keepers
are supposed to pay for the health insurance and social security of their work-
ers, many fail to do so.117
Developments in medicine could also have indirect consequences for the ex-
perience of working in the sex industry. The availability of drugs such as Viagra
since 1999 has allowed some clients to perform sexual intercourse for much
longer periods of time, increasing the stress on the body of the sex worker.
Conclusion
This comparative analysis has revealed a number of key factors that have
shaped the working and living conditions of sex workers across the globe. Of
these, the degree to which women were bonded or “free” was probably the
most significant as it affected individual women’s autonomy and bargaining
power and thus most aspects of their working lives.
State responses to prostitution were also significant, often determining
where and how women could sell sex and affecting their levels of exposure to
violence both from the state and from clients. Colonialism also played a major
role in shaping the evolution of commercial sex and in constructing racially
segmented sex industries. Major economic shifts also impacted sex workers,
114 Svanström, this volume, Stockholm.
115 Gronewold, this volume, Shanghai.
116 Wyers, this volume, Istanbul.
117 Conner, this volume, Paris.
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706 Frances
affecting both the market for sexual services and the supply of women willing
to sell sex. Civil upheavals and wars have had a similar impact on the market
for sex, and have contributed indirectly to official responses to prostitution.
Collective organisation by prostitutes has, since the 1970s in some cases, been
important in influencing how governments treat workers in the sex industry.
Finally, developments in technology and medicine, especially starting in the
early twentieth century, have contributed to significant shifts in the ways in
which sexual services are delivered and also on the health of sex workers.
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chapter 27
Migration and Prostitution
Nicole Keusch
Introduction
Prostitution is considered to be a profession of high mobility; it is almost tempt-
ing to say that probably every prostitute migrates at least once in her lifetime.
Despite this fact, the share of prostitutes in the flows over and across the con-
tinents has been widely neglected in migration studies. Migration is thought
to be a “basic condition of human societies”1 and “central to the human experi-
ence [and] the major forces for historical change.”2 Nevertheless, many studies
focus solely on the movements of European male settlers. In particular, labour
migration was long held to be a male domain, keeping up the idea of males as
breadwinners and the main actors in history.3 Hoerder offers up the critique
that migration studies emphasize “the westward flow of agrarian settlers and
neglect [the] moves of workers and of women” and has made a call for more re-
search on non-western interperiphery mobility,4 just as Lucassen et al. identify
state-centrism, modernization-centrism, and Atlanto- or Euro-centrism as the
main frameworks that shape and thus bias migration studies.5
The neglect of women and the biased Eurocentric perspective in migration
studies shall be taken up in this paper by highlighting migration history from
* I am deeply indebted to the editors of this volume, Magaly, Elise and Lex, for inviting me to
join this project, their helpful comments on earlier versions of this paper, and especially their
almost Buddha-like patience.
1 Dirk Hoerder, Cultures in Contact: World Migrations in the Second Millennium (Durham,
2002), p. ix.
2 Patrick Manning, Migration in World History (New York, 2005), pp. 6f.
3 Hoerder, Cultures in Contact., p. 13; Jan Lucassen, Leo Lucassen and Patrick Manning (eds),
Migration History in World History: Multidisciplinary Approaches (Leiden, 2010), pp. 10, 14.
4 Hoerder, Cultures in Contact, pp. 8, 12.
5 Jan Lucassen and Leo Lucassen, “Migration, Migration History, History: Old Paradigms and
New Perspectives”, in Jan Lucassen and Leo Lucassen (eds), Migration, Migration History, His-
tory: Old Paradigms and New Perspectives (Bern, 1997), pp. 9–38, 26–28. See also the critique
of Pooley et al. on migration research in Colin G. Pooley and Jan D. Whyte (eds), Migrants,
Emigrants and Immigrants: A Social History of Migration (London [etc.], 1991), pp. 4–6.
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708 Keusch
the perspective of women in the sex business on the basis of the urban over-
views in this volume which discuss various cities around the world. The first
section will give an overview of how the movements of prostitutes fit into the
general history of global migration. Afterwards, several characteristics com-
mon to the decisions and lives of many prostitutes will be discussed in order to
give an idea about when migration and prostitution overlapped in their lives,
where they came from and where they decided to go, how and under what
circumstances they undertook their journeys, and finally why they chose to
change places and what factors influenced their choices. In the last section, the
narratives surrounding migrating prostitutes are brought together and anal-
ysed. While migration is indeed frequent and often a necessity for the women
in the sex business, the image of prostitutes is also deeply shaped by a sense of
foreignness and volatility. Thus, mobility becomes not only a part of real expe-
riences, but also a central aspect of how they are perceived by others.
Throughout this paper, only the movements of prostitutes are considered.
Other actors such as pimps, madams, clients, brokers, and individuals assisting
in travel are not taken into account, although the shifting structures of this
network would surely provide interesting insights that would help us better
understand the circumstances under which prostitutes live.
Periodization of the Migration of Prostitutes
European Expansion and Mercantilism, 1600 to 1850
By 1600, the exploration of the world was almost complete. Migration to newly
discovered regions was now connected to the hope for a better life. Short-term
encounters turned into long-term relationships between locals and migrants,
and permanent routes of exchange were established. European imperialist
intentions were accompanied by economic expansion, and European admin-
istration and settlements shaped the structural development and monetary
flows in many places.6 Industrialization changed societies, leading to new
working structures and accelerating urbanization and labour migration. Com-
mercial centres formed where wage labour, resources, and infrastructure met.
Travelling was expensive and time consuming, and networks facilitating jour-
neys were still rudimentary. However, the pace of migration accelerated over
the years and both labour migration and forced migration of varying levels of
free will increased.7
6 Hoerder, Cultures in Contact, p. 4.
7 For an overview of the general history of migration in that period, see Chapters 7 and 8 of
Manning, Migration in World History.
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Migration and Prostitution 709
During this period, records about mobility were few; border crossings were
seldom documented and health records and censuses barely existed. How-
ever, attempts to confine and control prostitutes’ mobility such as by the use
of medical examinations and travel passes were initiated8 and legislation on
prostitution slowly developed, mostly in order to prevent the spread of venere-
al diseases and “immorality”. Still, regulations on both migration and prostitu-
tion were not laid down precisely, and especially outside of Europe they were
almost non-existent. Even in more strictly controlled European cities, there
was still plenty of freedom for the business and movements of prostitutes. If
the interactions of prostitutes went against ideas of racial purity, they were
rather tolerated as an urban service, and sex workers were relatively integrated
into society. Fighting prostitution was not a priority and therefore the women
were left widely unattended as long as no problems occurred. In some cases,
the migration of prostitutes was even promoted by the authorities.9
Cities developed into regional centres; infrastructure like ports und in-
dustries attracted people in search of work, and the unfavourable economic
situation in the countryside drove people to urban centres. Those were char-
acterized by a disproportionate number of men who had to pay for sex and
women without good prospects for finding a job. In the large metropolises,
women mostly arrived from neighbouring regions and countries. In smaller
cities, urbanization and labour migration did play a role, but the numbers of
incoming women were lower and the distance migrated shorter.10 At the inter-
sections of European and Asian domains, prostitution was more diverse and
not restricted to local women. Here, single male migrants from the countryside
and settlers from Europe created a high demand for prostitutes and more cases
of long-distance migration occurred.
European women arrived in the colonies, hoping for a better future. On the
other hand, forced migration mostly in the form of the slave trade took women
from one colony to another. The major influx of people and the accompanying
service economy in these parts of the world led to a high demand for prosti-
tutes, which was allayed by both migrant and local women.11
8 Svanström, this volume, Stockholm.
9 Biancani and Hammad, this volume, Cairo; Wyers, this volume, Istanbul. Compare also
Hoerder, Cultures in Contact, p. 431 and Eithne Luibhéid, “Sexuality and International Mi-
gration”, in Robert M. Buffington, Eithne Luibhéid and Donna J. Guy (eds), A Global His-
tory of Sexuality: The Modern Era (Chichester, 2014), pp. 119–150, 124.
10 Mechant, this volume, Bruges; Pluskota, this volume, Amsterdam; Turno, this volume,
Florence.
11 Biancani, Hammad, this volume, Cairo; Blanchette and Schettini, this volume, Rio de Ja-
neiro; Cabezas, this volume, Havana; Wyers, this volume, Istanbul.
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710 Keusch
Imperialism and the Era of Steamships, 1850 to 1920
Starting in the beginning of the nineteenth century, new transportation and
communication technologies changed the movement of people considerably.
All over the world, ongoing industrialization led to a further increase in the
demand for cheap labour and contributed to urbanization.12 This period of
globalization was marked by an immense increase in long-distance migration.
The emergence of steamships for passenger services made travelling possible
for larger numbers of people. The opening of new transport routes like the
Suez Canal shortened sea journeys, and the financial cost of migrants’ jour-
neys decreased as well. Postal services and telegraph lines enhanced levels of
coordination. Networks facilitating travel grew in scope and living standards
improved, making it easier for individuals to move to new places.13 The result-
ing diasporas were far more closely linked to their homelands than in earlier
periods, and they shared a strong sense of nationhood and national culture.14
This new mobility and professionalism changed the sex business. In the
first decades when legislation was not so restrictive yet, migration increased
immensely. European women migrated to the colonies mostly voluntarily
and they were individually motivated to escape either the harsh conditions
at home or government policies.15 In general, internationalization was at its
height around the mid-nineteenth century, and many European prostitutes
could be found abroad. Because of the prevailing romantic nationalism and
ethnocentrism, the new communities in the colonies tried to be similar to
their home countries so demand for European prostitutes grew considerably.
The migration of women from Europe to the colonies was sometimes actively
promoted by governments and thus it was not just an option for poor lower-
class women.16
In urban colonial contexts, the lack of women was also compensated with lo-
cal concubines or prostitutes who sometimes became cultural agents between
12 See Chapter 8 and 9 of Patrick Manning, Migration in World History.
13 Timothy J. Hatton and Jeffrey G. Williamson, The Age of Mass Migration: Causes and Eco-
nomic Impact (New York [etc.], 1998), p. 251.
14 Manning, Migration in World History, pp. 158–161.
15 Ibid., pp. 151–153.
16 Biancani and Hammad, this volume, Cairo; Gronewold, this volume, Shanghai; Herzog,
this volume, Singapore; Jan MacKell, “Frontier Prostitution in the United States”, unpub-
lished paper collected for the project “Selling Sex in the City”, 2013; Schettini, this volume,
Buenos Aires. On the situation of migrant prostitutes in the us see Eileen Scully, “Pre-
Cold War Traffic in Sexual Labor and its Foes: Some Contemporary Lessons”, in David Kyle
and Rey Koslowski (eds), Global Human Smuggling Comparative Perspectives (Baltimore
[etc.], 2001), pp. 74–106.
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Migration and Prostitution 711
their clients and their home community. Colonial administrations used sev-
eral methods like gender ratios in migration in order to control such inter-
racial sexuality with varying levels of success.17 Despite these attempts, most
prostitutes in many places around the world were locals or from surrounding
areas.18
Starting in 1900, national legislation on migration changed worldwide, bring-
ing about immigration laws and other restrictions. The setting of boundaries,
wars, and conflicts led to a rapid increase in refugee movement.19 The global
community was ruled by a few economically strong states, so the established
system of migration controls multiplied inequalities among countries.20 Mo-
bile women were increasingly eyed with suspicion, and a moral panic about
the “white slave trade” arose at the beginning of the twentieth century. In many
places, administrational monitoring and health checks were established.21 Not
only the governments of sending and receiving countries, but also families
and communities were deeply worried about the rising number of prostitutes
because deviation from sexual norms was interpreted as a general failing of
women’s families, communities, and countries of origin.22
International Monitoring in the Interwar Years, 1920 to 1950
World War i led to refugee migration and the warfare mobility of people pro-
viding services for army troops. After the war, state-run bureaucracies insti-
tutionalized control of borders23 so migration decreased during the interwar
period. Legislation on both migration and prostitution became stricter, and
strong initiatives to suppress the traffic in persons emerged. In 1921, the Inter-
national Convention for the Suppression of the Traffic in Women and Children
17 Hoerder, Cultures in Contact, pp. 434f.
18 Blanchette and Schettini, this volume, Rio de Janeiro; Cabezas, this volume, Havana; Con-
ner, this volume, Paris; Gronewold, this volume, Shanghai; Herzog, this volume, Singa-
pore; Hetherington, this volume, St. Petersburg/Moscow; Mechant, this volume, Bruges;
Jürgen Nautz, “Urban Overview: Vienna”, unpublished paper collected for the project
“Selling Sex in the City”, 2013; Nuñez and Fuentes, this volume, Mexico City; Schettini, this
volume, Buenos Aires; Turno, this volume, Florence.
19 Manning, Migration in World History, pp. 163–167.
20 Luibhéid, “Sexuality and International Migration”, pp. 119f.
21 Blanchette and Schettini, this volume, Rio de Janeiro; Conner, this volume, Paris; Frances,
this volume, Sydney/Perth; MacKell, “Frontier Prostitution in the United States”; Pluskota,
this volume, Amsterdam; Svanström, this volume, Stockholm; Wyers, this volume,
Istanbul.
22 Luibhéid, “Sexuality and International Migration”, pp. 126f.
23 Lucassen et al., “Migration, Migration History, History”, p. 32.
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712 Keusch
was drawn up by the League of Nations which subsequently opted for stronger
international regulation and monitoring.24
Around the world, legislation and administration were strongly influenced
by European standards. Laws restricting sex work drove prostitutes to flee to
places with more favourable legislation and sometimes resulted in them being
deported to their home countries. Anti-trafficking movements became more
and more influential, but in effect, many of those initiatives focused on Euro-
pean prostitutes.25
The debates on forced migration and prostitution carried out in the League
of Nations led to the abolition of regulated brothels in the 1940s, for they were
seen as the main market for migrant prostitutes. This was followed by a un
convention against forced migration for prostitution in 1949. This develop-
ment may be the main cause for a decline in both the voluntary and involun-
tary migration of prostitutes from 1930 to 1960. However, these new conditions
drove much of the business underground so the actual effect remains vague.26
Decolonization and Liberalization, 1945 to 1990
After World War ii, the colonial structures which had dominated migration in
previous centuries slowly disintegrated. European prostitutes in former colo-
nies returned when their main clientele, the European settlers and bureau-
crats, left. Staying behind to serve the remaining potential local clients was
obviously not an option.27 The relative size of a city was not so important any-
more because even smaller towns now offered the anonymity and the diverse
customers needed in the sex business. The general division between rich and
poor countries continued, but the movement and destinations of women be-
came more diverse. From the 1960s onward, a general “feminization of migra-
tion” occurred, especially in the case of forced migration and prostitution.28
Mobility again increased around 1970, when growing literacy and the in-
crease of cheap transport, electronic communications, and broadcasting
24 Robert M. Buffington and Donna J. Guy, “Sex Trafficking”, in Buffington et al., A Global His-
tory of Sexuality: The Modern Era, pp. 151–194, 161f.
25 Amir et al., this volume, Tel Aviv/Jaffa; Biancani and Hammad, this volume, Cairo; Das-
gupta, this volume, Calcutta; Ekpootu, this volume, Nigeria; Herzog, this volume, Singa-
pore; Nuñez and Fuentes, this volume, Mexico City; Tracol-Huynh, this volume, Hanoi;
Wyers, this volume, Istanbul.
26 Marlou Schrover, Joanne van der Leun, Leo Lucassen and Chris Quispel (eds), Illegal Mi-
gration and Global and Historical Perspective (Amsterdam, 2008), p. 30.
27 Kozma, this volume, Casablanca.
28 Hoerder, Cultures in Contact, p. 517.
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Migration and Prostitution 713
devices opened up new opportunities for prostitutes.29 Decolonization and the
lifting of migration restrictions brought migrants to western countries, and the
poorest countries started to participate more actively in migration networks.30
Relatively inexpensive flights made it easier to cross great distances and means
of staying connected fuelled the movement of people from poorer countries
to better-off regions. As Hoerder states, “[t]he internationalized non-White
underclass began to migrate into social spaces that internationalized white-
colored middle classes had reserved for themselves.”31 The trend in which mo-
bility in colonial countries was mainly restricted to neighbouring regions while
women from Europe looked for the best opportunities all over the world was
partly reversed, and the first world turned into a new destination for women
from the former colonies.32
On the other hand, the sex market in many developing countries became
more local again after the fairly international years of colonial rule. Incoming
prostitutes arrived from neighbouring countries and regions, while outgoing
women headed for better markets in wealthier countries.33 With the advent
of mass tourism, the clientele of prostitutes started to travel in order to find
inexpensive sex services with an exotic flair so less prostitutes had to leave the
country in search of business.
Globalization and the Digital Revolution, 1990 to 2010
In the last decade of the twentieth century, the end of the Cold War changed
the global situation. Women from eastern Europe and especially Russia had
already spread around the world, and this reached a peak after the collapse
of the eastern bloc. The opening of the eu to poorer countries in southern
and eastern Europe like Romania and Bulgaria boosted the influx of women
from those countries. These women had now even better working conditions
than those from the former colonies, as they did not need a special working
permit.34 The new freedom of travelling and easily attained resident permits
made moving to more promising destinations extremely attractive and easy,
29 Manning, Migration in World History, p. 157.
30 Lucassen et al., Migration History in World History, p. 16.
31 Hoerder, Cultures in Contact, p. 7.
32 Conner, this volume, Paris; Pluskota, this volume, Amsterdam; Svanström, this volume,
Stockholm; Turno, this volume, Florence.
33 Blanchette and Schettini, this volume, Rio de Janeiro; Ekpootu, this volume, Nigeria.
34 Amir et al., this volume, Tel Aviv/Jaffa; Conner, this volume, Paris; Frances, this volume,
Sydney/Perth; Hetherington, this volume, St. Petersburg/Moscow; Pluskota, this volume,
Amsterdam; Svanström, this volume, Stockholm; Turno, this volume, Florence; Wyers,
this volume, Istanbul.
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714 Keusch
and women intentionally migrated in order to work as prostitutes. The liberal-
ization and toleration of sexual services in many western countries facilitated
this trend. The revolution of communication networks with new broadcasting
and data transmission services made it easier for a wider range of customers to
make contacts, and new forms of cybersex developed.35
The Characteristics of the Migration of Prostitutes
Prostitution and migration are closely connected, and it is extremely difficult
to tell whether a migrant woman prostitutes herself or whether a woman in
prostitution migrates. Sometimes being engaged in prostitution makes moving
beneficial or necessary, and sometimes being a migrant leads to engaging in
occasional prostitution, getting arrested, and finally to long-term sex work.36
When we observe the temporal relationship between migration and the en-
trance to sex business, we can differentiate between migration before, during,
and after taking up prostitution. In the first case, rural locations are usually the
starting point. Women seek new job opportunities and move to a new town
where they then decide to take up prostitution because of economic n ecessity,
the allure of better pay, or force. In the unfamiliar urban environment, the gen-
erally low wages available to uneducated women from the countryside make
them extremely vulnerable to sexually exploitative male–female relation-
ships.37 In the second case, the move to prostitution coincides with a change
of location, for instance because a woman anticipates a good start in business
somewhere else or because she wants to avoid the shame that her new oc-
cupation could bring to herself or her family. The third case is when a woman
moves while already engaged in prostitution. This commonly happens when
she decides to move to another urban centre, for instance because she expects
the market to be better or because she is pursued by the authorities.38 Presum-
ably a change of place also occurs when women quit the business, but there is
not much information on this aspect of prostitutes’ lives.
The fact that almost all of the cities and towns in this compilation are
global migrant centres demonstrates the intimate link between urbanity and
35 Blanchette and Schettini, this volume, Rio de Janeiro; Ekpootu, this volume, Nigeria; Plus-
kota, this volume, Amsterdam; Svanström, this volume, Stockholm; Wyers, this volume,
Istanbul.
36 Kozma, this volume, Casablanca.
37 Hoerder, Cultures in Contact, p. 434.
38 Amir et al., this volume, Tel Aviv/Jaffa; Mechant, this volume, Bruges.
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Migration and Prostitution 715
prostitution. Urban environments are a prime destination because they usu-
ally offer work opportunities, money, and anonymity, which are important for
a rather precarious profession in the sex sector. Labour migration mostly starts
as short-distance migration from rural areas to urban cities, followed by long-
distance cross-community migration. The move from the periphery to regional
centres provides better opportunities for economic success39 and is sometimes
the first stage of migrating overseas.40 Examples of women travelling from ur-
ban places to rural settlements are rare and mostly connected to administra-
tional restraints or demographical changes. Places with a large share of single
men and therefore potential clients, like army bases and booming businesses,
can be attractive destinations even in remote areas.41 Hoerder introduced the
category of circular migration which occurs when migrants return regularly to
their hometown or have at least the intention to do so, as is typical for many
labour migrants. This option is almost non-existent for women in the sex busi-
ness because of the stigma attached to their profession.42
In the sex sector, the relationship between organized travel and coercion is
rather complicated. Generally speaking, there are three levels of freedom or
a lack therein: Women may migrate and decide to engage in sex work them-
selves; they may migrate voluntarily but be forced into prostitution; or, they
may be forced to move to another country for the purpose of engaging in
prostitution.
When women leave a place voluntarily for any reason, such as because of
the unfavourable conditions there or because of run-ins with the law, they still
have a choice about when and how to leave. They may decide to do so on their
own, or with the help of friends or family members.43 Although some of the
overviews do tell of friendships at brothels and solidarity between prostitutes,44
39 Amir et al., this volume, Tel Aviv/Jaffa; Dasgupta, this volume, Calcutta; Frances, this vol-
ume, Sydney/Perth; Kozma, this volume, Casablanca; Mechant, this volume, Bruges.
40 Hatton et al., The Age of Mass Migration, p. 17; Manning, Migration in World History, pp. 5f,
144f.
41 Absi, this volume, Bolivia; Biancani and Hammad, this volume, Cairo; Frances, this vol-
ume, Sydney/Perth; Hetherington, this volume, St. Petersburg/Moscow; MacKell, “Fron-
tier Prostitution in the United States”.
42 Dirk Hoerder, “Segmented Macrosystems and Networking Individuals: The Balancing
Functions of Migration Processes”, in Lucassen et al., Migration, Migration History, His-
tory: Old Paradigms and New Perspectives, pp. 73–84, 74.
43 Leslie Page Moch, “Dividing Time: An Analytical Framework for Migrant History Peri-
odization”, in Lucassen et al., Migration, Migration History, History: Old Paradigms and
New Perspectives, pp. 41–56, 44.
44 Frances, this volume, Sydney/Perth.
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716 Keusch
evidence of women having company during their travels is rare. They follow
specific paths of migration and rely on social networks established by fellow
villagers or family members,45 and those networks have shifted throughout the
centuries according to the needs at hand.46 In many cases, the cost of passage
is financed by family members and friends who have already migrated. The
decision who will migrate is often negotiated within the context of the family
economy, kin relations, sibling order, and friendship ties, and is much influ-
enced by the power hierarchies of gender and generations.47 Migration gener-
ally demands a lot of adaption and the will to build up a new life.48 Gathering
together in ethnic communities after arrival in the host society makes it easier
to adapt to the new surroundings, and in this way social and kinship networks
develop.49 Societies with strong kinship bonds actually seem to rely more on
this kind of support. Nevertheless, after departure many women have to be
self-reliant until they are able to build up new networks.50
Leaving one’s social environment can result in isolation and loneliness.
Compared to earlier times, it is today much easier to stay in contact using mod-
ern means of communication. Therefore, women’s breaks with their home
communities may now be less significant than before. If a migrant prostitute
breaks off contact with her family today it is either her own decision—may-
be out of fear, shame, or as a form of emancipation—or she is actively be-
ing prevented from contacting other people.51 According to Peach, much of
the human trafficking for sex that exists today is facilitated by the restrictive
immigration policies of destination countries, the growth of international or-
ganized crime, the large profits that can be made through human smuggling,
the rise of sex tourism, government corruption and complicity, and inadequate
and ineffective legal mechanisms.52
45 Hoerder, “Segmented Macrosystems and Networking Individuals”, p. 80; Hoerder, Cultures
in Contact, p. 5.
46 Manning, Migration in World History, p. 8f.
47 Hoerder, Cultures in Contact, pp. 16, 19, 379.
48 Ibid., pp. ixf, 13.
49 Hatton et al., The Age of Mass Migration, pp. 14, 23.
50 Ekpootu, this volume, Nigeria; Pluskota, this volume, Amsterdam.
51 Pluskota, this volume, Amsterdam.
52 Lucinda Joy Peach, “Female Sex Slavery or Just Women’s Work? Prostitution and Female
Subjectivity within Anti-trafficking Discourses”, in Kathy E. Ferguson, Monique Mirones-
co (eds), Gender and Globalization in Asia and the Pacific: Method, Practice, Theory (Hono-
lulu, 2008), pp. 233–252, 233. On the role of international human rights in the trafficking
of women and the problems connected to that, especially in the Asia-Pacific region, see
also Nancie Caraway, “‘Do No Harm’: The Asian Female Migrant and Feminist Debates in
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Migration and Prostitution 717
In earlier centuries, migrating was difficult and sometimes dangerous be-
cause there was less information available about job opportunities and the
social and legal situation of the destination. Decisions had to be made on the
basis of outside knowledge and women had to trust their informants. The fact
that many women were illiterate suggests that they were dependent on infor-
mal information. Moreover, the flow of information was rather slow, so mi-
grants never knew what the conditions would be like when they arrived. If
women did not have personal acquaintances to gather such information, they
had to consult professional organizations which assisted them in their choices
about where to go and how to get there. Thus, professional networks in the sex
business became common,53 and the difficulties and expense of long distance
travel therefore created attractive business opportunities for networks in both
free and unfree migration.54 Such networks worked internationally and had
access to the main systems of transport. Many of them maintained employ-
ment agencies which offered jobs and collaborated with people in the trans-
port and supply sector.55
It is not clear to what extent women were involved in their travel preparations
and to what extent they were informed about where they were going and what
the situation would be like at their destination. When women voluntarily con-
sulted an employment agency but had to be smuggled illegally across a border,
they became vulnerable to be forced into sex work. Illegal travel required a high-
er degree of organization and young uneducated women from rural areas who
had no experience with travelling were dependent on others. Because they were
cut off from their personal acquaintances, such women might find themselves
the Global Anti-trafficking Movement”, in Ferguson et al., Gender and Globalization in Asia
and the Pacific: Method, Practice, Theory, pp. 253–271. On the situation of migrant prosti-
tutes in the us, see Scully, “Pre-Cold War Traffic in Sexual Labor and its Foes”, pp. 74–106.
53 Ziyad Choonara, “Selling Sex in Johannesburg from 1886 to the Present”, unpublished pa-
per collected for the project “Selling Sex in the City”, 2013; Ekpootu, this volume, Nigeria;
Frances, this volume, Sydney/Perth; Mechant, this volume, Bruges; Pluskota, this volume,
Amsterdam; Schettini, this volume, Buenos Aires. On the Chinese trade of women and
girls between the ports of colonial Vietnam and other Asian cities, see Julia Martinez,
“La Traite des Jaunes: Trafficking in Women and Children across the China Sea”, in Emma
Christopher, Cassandra Pybus, Marcus Rediker (eds), Many Middle Passages: Forced Mi-
gration and the Making of the Modern World (Berkley [etc.], 2007), pp. 204–221.
54 Buffington et al., “Sex Trafficking”, p. 158.
55 Biancani and Hammad, this volume, Cairo; Frances, this volume, Sydney/Perth; Schettini,
this volume, Buenos Aires.
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in a position where they were forced into prostitution.56 There is evidence
that women engaged in prostitution during their travels for protection and to
improve their travelling conditions.57 When legislation became stricter around
the turn of the twentieth century, more and more people had to travel illegally
which may have resulted in more cases of coerced prostitution.
The most extreme form of coercion occurs when women are pushed or
lured to migrate and then forced into prostitution. In such cases, they may
have been persuaded to migrate by friends or family, talked into migrating by
strangers, sold to procurers by family members, or simply kidnapped by traf-
fickers. In almost all cases, a professional organization is involved in one way
or another. Procurers try to keep the women isolated and therefore dependent
on them. Such professional traffickers usually operate on established routes
and the women are taken to places based on their suitability for the clientele
in terms of their attractiveness and youth.58 Despite the common view that
such involuntary migration and forced prostitution is the rule, many of the
overviews stress that women took part in the business both knowingly and
voluntarily.59
For those women who had the chance to decide themselves, there are sev-
eral reasons to leave for a new destination. Moch defines migration as a change
in residence beyond a communal border triggered by demand for labour, de-
ployment of capital, shifts in population patterns, landholding regimes, family,
and inheritance systems, as well as state politics and policies.60 Naturally, most
such factors typical for labour migration also drive prostitutes’ movements, for
example more or less practical aspects like overpopulation at the place of de-
parture, the level of industrialization and hence opportunities to earn money
at the destination, the existence of suitable transport and infrastructure for
56 Amir et al., this volume, Tel Aviv/Jaffa; Biancani and Hammad, this volume, Cairo;
Ekpootu, this volume, Nigeria; Frances, this volume, Sydney/Perth; Kozma, this volume,
Casablanca; Nuñez and Fuentes, this volume, Mexico City; Svanström, this volume, Stock-
holm; Wyers, this volume, Istanbul.
57 Emma Christopher, “‘The Slave Trade Is Merciful Compared to [This]’: Slave Traders, Con-
vict Transportation, and the Abolitionists”, in Christopher et al., Many Middle Passages:
Forced Migration and the Making of the Modern World, pp. 109–128, 119f.
58 Biancani and Hammad, this volume, Cairo; Frances, this volume, Sydney/Perth; Linehan,
this volume, Chicago.
59 Amir et al., this volume, Tel Aviv/Jaffa; Biancani and Hammad, this volume, Cairo; Das-
gupta, this volume, Calcutta; Herzog, this volume, Singapore; Hetherington, this volume,
St. Petersburg/Moscow; Kozma, this volume, Casablanca; Mechant, this volume, Bruges;
Pluskota, this volume, Amsterdam; Schettini, this volume, Buenos Aires.
60 Moch, “Dividing Time”, p. 43.
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Migration and Prostitution 719
both the basic needs of everyday life and the job in particular, sufficient pro-
spective clients and suppliers to support the business, or networks and ac-
quaintances. Especially important for women engaging in a business which is
restrained in most societies are favourable legal conditions promising a certain
degree of personal freedom and freedom to do business, as well as a society
that is not excessively prejudiced and discriminatory towards the migrant’s ori-
gin or lifestyle. Not all of these conditions have to be fulfilled at the same time,
and the prospect of relative improvement is sufficient to make people move as
long as both the actual and social costs such as the loss of relationships or the
danger of change are worthwhile.
The prime reasons for prostitutes to migrate are indeed economic consid-
erations. Hatton and Williamson describe the typical male migrant as single
men from rural regions, unskilled labourers who leave their homes in order to
improve their economic status.61 Moch likewise identifies the search for better
job opportunities combined with demographical factors as the main reasons
for changing places.62 The same can be stated for the women who engage in
sex work, especially in the case of poorer prostitutes. Prospects for improve-
ment like benefits for the family and the contribution of resources to the com-
munity play an important role for many women.63 Sometimes we can also ob-
serve cases of refugee migration among prostitutes, for example because of
persecution, war, violence, or disasters. In any case, the goal of migration is
generally to improve one’s situation and guarantee subsistence.64 Practically
all of the urban overviews, whether they describe colonial locations or indus-
trialized areas, tell of women leaving the countryside and going to the city in
order to find employment. As already mentioned, preparations are sometimes
laid out quite strategically and sometimes rather randomly; some women orig-
inally plan to find jobs in other sectors but end up in prostitution, while others
seek to work as prostitutes from the beginning.
Very closely tied to the desire to find employment is the hope of escaping
personal and structural poverty. Varying degrees of overpopulation and pov-
erty are the main push factors everywhere. Rural areas do not have much to
offer, so migrants, including women, seek out a better standard of living else-
where. In some cases, women may hope to get rich, or at least earn easy or extra
money so they can participate in the global consumer culture or take part in
modern urban life. Such cases show that women willingly take up p rostitution,
61 Hatton et al., The Age of Mass Migration, p. 11f.
62 Moch, “Dividing Time”, pp. 45, 50, 54.
63 Manning, Migration in World History, p. 7.
64 Lucassen et al., “Migration, Migration History, History”, pp. 14, 18f.
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choosing it over the other options available. At other times, prostitution can be
a survival option for people who have been marginalized and for newcomers
with few social resources, and it can also be a means of escaping a negative
economic environment.65
While already conducting business, people migrate mainly in order to im-
prove their own position, for example by seeking out or following clientele
when commercial centres change or new places become more attractive. Simi-
larly, people may migrate because of shifts in the gender balance, or they may
want to flee from “disturbing” factors such as jealous or problematic spouses.
A change in infrastructure can facilitate travel and places can become more or
less attractive because of the existing facilities, taxes, or costs of doing busi-
ness. For example, mass tourism increases the number of people visiting a
given area, bringing a steady pool of rotating clientele. Many of the overviews
also cite worsening social situations as push factors for migration, caused for
example by civil unrest, rebellions, war, catastrophes, and famine, along with
dispossession, changing production systems, and the discovery of natural
resources.66
Besides economic considerations, legal conditions are another cause for mi-
gration, but the major waves of migration seem to be generally prompted by
the labour market rather than state politics.67 While economic considerations
appear to be equally important in all periods of time, the scope of official sur-
veillance and legislation concerning sold sex has become globally broader and
more comprehensive over the centuries. This trend was driven by a generally
negative attitude towards prostitution in western Christian countries, the poli-
cies of which have shaped other systems of legislation. Eventually this trend
gave way to more liberal attitudes especially in western countries by the end of
the twentieth century, causing a reversal of the migration trend.
65 Amir et al., this volume, Tel Aviv/Jaffa; Biancani and Hammad, this volume, Cairo; Blanch-
ette and Schettini, this volume, Rio de Janeiro; Conner, this volume, Paris.; Ekpootu, this
volume, Nigeria; Gronewold, this volume, Shanghai; Pluskota, this volume, Amsterdam;
Schettini, this volume, Buenos Aires; Tracol-Huynh, this volume, Hanoi; Turno, this vol-
ume, Florence.
66 Absi, this volume, Bolivia; Amir et al., this volume, Tel Aviv/Jaffa; Biancani and Hammad,
this volume, Cairo; Choonara, “Selling Sex in Johannesburg”; Ekpootu, this volume, Nige-
ria; Frances, this volume, Sydney/Perth; Gronewold, this volume, Shanghai; Hetherington,
this volume, St. Petersburg/Moscow; MacKell, “Frontier Prostitution in the United States”;
Wyers, this volume, Istanbul.
67 Lucassen and Lucassen, “Migration, Migration History, History”, p. 27.
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Migration and Prostitution 721
The choice to take up prostitution as a means of subsistence almost natural-
ly leads to a preference for places where legislation is less strict and neighbour-
hoods where the police are lenient. In particular, women leave places where
legislative racial or religious constraints make it difficult or impossible to work.
In other cases, prostitutes migrate when a system of licensed prostitution is
enacted or compulsory medical examinations are enforced. Turno offers an in-
teresting interpretation of mobility as a form of resistance. On the other hand,
forced migration for legal reasons can take the form of bans on certain people
living in certain areas, deportation, or the closing of settlements.68
Social realities also cause people to migrate so they can be either closer to
or further from family and friends. Many women migrate in order to help their
families, and those who do so are mostly from poor or overpopulated areas.
In some cases, women leave their homes because of family problems, to es-
cape the control of the family or husband, or get out of a situation in which
they do not receive sufficient support. The pressure of traditional rules, mar-
ginalization in the household, religious constraints, social deprivation, and in-
equality in the community are other reasons to migrate. In an urban setting,
women selling sex can enjoy a certain amount of anonymity and avoid being
stigmatized. Sometimes curiosity about a new place can also prompt women
to migrate.69
Social factors are much more individual than economic or legal motivations
and thus differ greatly. The degree of freedom and liberalization that exists in
a given society can indicate how decisive such aspects are. Factors like role al-
location in the household, gender equality, moral duties, the rigidity of ethical
concepts, and attitudes towards sexuality in general set the background for
decisions about migrating and taking up sex work. It seems that as an incen-
tive, social factors generally are minor, especially when compared to economic
68 Amir et al., this volume, Tel Aviv/Jaffa; Biancani and Hammad, this volume, Cairo; Frances,
this volume, Sydney/Perth; Gronewold, this volume, Shanghai; Herzog, this volume, Sin-
gapore; Hetherington, this volume, St. Petersburg/Moscow; Kozma, this volume, Casa-
blanca; Linehan, this volume, Chicago; Tracol-Huynh, this volume, Hanoi; Turno, this vol-
ume, Florence; Wyers, this volume, Istanbul; Choonara, “Selling Sex in Johannesburg”.
69 Absi, this volume, Bolivia; Amir et al., this volume, Tel Aviv/Jaffa; Biancani and Hammad,
this volume, Cairo; Conner, this volume, Paris; Dasgupta, this volume, Calcutta; Ekpootu,
this volume, Nigeria; Gronewold, this volume, Shanghai; Kozma, this volume, Casablan-
ca; Turno, this volume, Florence; Wyers, this volume, Istanbul; Choonara, “Selling Sex in
Johannesburg”.
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reasons. In individual cases, however, social considerations may be the deci-
sive ones. Overall it can be observed that female migrants do not necessarily
have dysfunctional family backgrounds but in most cases they do suffer from
poverty.70
Narratives about Migrant Prostitutes
Most narratives are initially based on facts but are quickly conflated with other
issues and perceptions in society, resulting in a blend of fantasy and reality.
They sometimes tell more about the standards and concepts of the society in
which they arose, but a combination of all narratives creates a mosaic of a pro-
totype of “the migrant prostitute”. Nevertheless, the border between concepts
like “foreign” and “migrant”, or “local” and “native” becomes opaque so it is dif-
ficult to tell whether a woman is an actual newcomer who has just arrived or if
it is her appearance or a lack of integration that makes her an outsider. Many
of the narratives tell of a general othering of foreign elements in society, while
others are directly built around the mobility of women.
One common dichotomy is that of the “local wife” and the “mobile prosti-
tute”. Especially before World War ii, women who travelled alone were often
associated with prostitution, regardless of their actual occupation. In many so-
cieties, women were expected to stay at home with the family. Those seeking
independence and autonomy did not fit with the expected moral and ethical
standards. Such “misconduct” was therefore interpreted to be a general lack of
decency and a sign of loose morals, thus leading to accusations of prostitution.
This idea that migrant women are more likely to end up in the sex business has
led to many restrictions on their movement via various travel and health con-
trols. While mobile men were a cause for pride, as they were seen as pioneering
explorers and visionary innovators, the mobility of women posed a threat to
patriarchal traditions and the moral integrity of society. According to H oerder,
Asian societies place particularly strict restrictions on female migration by
drawing upon systems of family values and gendered power hierarchies,71
but examples of hostility towards mobile women are numerous in all parts of
the world.72
70 Pluskota, this volume, Amsterdam.
71 Dirk Hoerder, Cultures in Contact, p. 379.
72 Amir et al., this volume, Tel Aviv/Jaffa; Babere Kerata Chacha, “An Overview History of
Prostitution in Nairobi: From the Precolonial Period to the Present”, unpublished paper
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Migration and Prostitution 723
The fear of female mobility has intensified the notion that foreign women
in general are closer to crime and prostitution than “local” women, i.e. those
women who are integrated into society and whose outward appearance fit resi-
dent patterns. Therefore, the greater visibility of women believed to be foreign
and thus migrant has been a cause for a generally precarious position in so-
ciety. Furthermore, foreign women who are proven to be involved in the sex
business are prime suspects for other illegal activities such as smuggling or
drug use. With both migration and prostitution being a crime or at least close
to criminality, the idea has become widespread that a person guilty of one is
involved in other more serious infractions of the law. Sometimes the condem-
nation of foreign prostitutes has been utilized to cover up the presence of local
prostitutes and create the image of a healthy society that is being “invaded”
by dangerous elements. Thus, some sources state that there are more foreign
prostitutes than local ones, although the figures available often do not support
this view.73
Nevertheless, women who are not integrated into the host society and phys-
ically look different are indeed more vulnerable, and therefore they may actu-
ally end up being involved in criminal activities or prostitution more easily
than their local counterparts.74 According to Hoerder, the extent of migrants’
interaction with the host society depends less on choice than on access to daily
necessities and facilities.75 Especially in cases when their legal status is not
clear, foreign women may have difficulties in maintaining a stable and secure
life. Things that local women can easily access like housing and social integra-
tion are problematic and can be made up for by taking up work in a bordello.76
Thus, heightened visibility and actual vulnerability lead to a situation in which
mobile women are more likely to be involved in activities that may be criminal.
A more favourable imagining of the migrant prostitute is that of a poor na-
ïve girl in a dangerous world. This idea is partly based on a similar notion as
collected for the project “Selling Sex in the City”, 2013; Gronewold, this volume, Shanghai;
Svanström, this volume, Stockholm.
73 Amir et al., this volume, Tel Aviv/Jaffa; Blanchette and Schettini, this volume, Rio de J aneiro;
Cabezas, this volume, Havana; Ekpootu, this volume, Nigeria; Frances, this volume, Syd-
ney/Perth; Gronewold, this volume, Shanghai; Hetherington, this volume, St. Petersburg/
Moscow; Linehan, this volume, Chicago; Nautz, “Urban Overview: Vienna”; Schettini, this
volume, Buenos Aires; Svanström, this volume, Stockholm; Wyers, this volume, Istanbul.
74 MacKell, “Frontier Prostitution in the United States”; Wyers, this volume, Istanbul.
75 Hoerder, Cultures in Contact, p. 435.
76 Ekpootu, this volume, Nigeria.
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that of the “loose” criminal whore: A “decent” girl would not leave her family
and start working in the sex sector. So single women far away from their fami-
lies can only be either complete villains, or force must have been involved in
luring her from home. Especially in Christian societies and in those controlled
by a Christian colonial administration, the ideal of purity made it beneficial
to play the role of an innocent girl from the countryside that had been tricked
into prostitution. Clients seem to prefer this idea of the fallen girl to that of a
wise business woman, and both procurers and prostitutes are keen to satisfy
customers. For some women, this positive image of a morally pure but fallen
woman might help her find a client who pities her enough to free her from
prostitution. In colonial times, this victim narrative was also used by European
administrations to explain the existence of European prostitutes who were
thought to tarnish notions of European moral supremacy and the integrity of
the ruling European class.77
The sexual availability of women of one’s own nationality was not only a
source of shame for Europeans in Europe, but also in countries in Asia, Af-
rica and Latin America. Even today, debates condemning prostitution on the
grounds of national dignity can be observed. Turno argues that the fact that
the trafficking of women and children are often discussed together strength-
ens this idea concerning the victimization of women.78 This perception of dis-
grace may have also led to a change in the victim narrative in the twentieth
century. In Brazil, for example, the victim is now construed as a local mixed-
race or black woman who is tricked into prostitution by foreign agents. As in
former times, the women are depicted as being sexually inexperienced, rather
passive, and cut off from outside contact.79
The status of prostitutes in the sex business is defined by their age, appear-
ance, habits, class, and their clientele, but also by their actual or presumed
origin. When a woman’s origin is apparent via physical traits, this establishes
and strengthens hierarchies in business.80 Those are in many cases not a direct
result of actual migration but a general characteristic of a business sector that is
powerfully shaped by mixed origins and appearance. Categorizing sex workers
according to their origin reflects thus not only the reality of the social hierarchies
77 Blanchette and Schettini, this volume, Rio de Janeiro; Herzog, this volume, Singapore;
Mechant, this volume, Bruges; Schettini, this volume, Buenos Aires; Schrover et al., Illegal
Migration and Global and Historical Perspectives, p. 11f.; Tracol-Huynh, this volume, Hanoi.
78 Blanchette and Schettini, this volume, Rio de Janeiro; Ekpootu, this volume, Nigeria;
Herzog, this volume, Singapore; Schettini, this volume, Buenos Aires; Tracol-Huynh, this
volume, Hanoi; Turno, this volume, Florence.
79 Blanchette and Schettini, this volume, Rio de Janeiro.
80 Absi, this volume, Bolivia; Frances, this volume, Sydney/Perth; Herzog, this volume, Sin-
gapore; Schettini, this volume, Buenos Aires.
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Migration and Prostitution 725
and the categories in the sex sector, but also echoes common notions about the
expectations of such women. These hierarchies are sometimes also reflected in
official regulations and administrations’ attitudes towards certain prostitutes,
and many cities had quarters set aside for prostitutes of different origins who
charged different prices.81 Knowledge about these hierarchies may lead women
to prefer or avoid certain locations, making ethnic background both a real and
a constructed marker. Women frequently adopt ethnic identities and present
themselves in whatever role best suits their business. They also tend to serve a
particular clientele, and the origin and status of the client corresponds in most
cases to the social ranking of the prostitute.82
In colonial contexts, racial categories were common, and inevitably a di-
chotomy between a mostly privileged white category and a coloured category
came into being. Therefore in most places prostitutes of European origin used
to be the most sought after. Among them, “French” prostitutes were generally
the most popular, and they charged the highest prices and worked in the best
environments. They were thought to be elegant and refined and associated
with “civilized”, i.e. expensive, quality services. On the other hand, many wom-
en from eastern Europe were associated with forced prostitution and cheap
sex. Despite the lightness of their skin, they often lived in run-down quarters
together with local “coloured” prostitutes.83
However, racial categories were not always an advantage for white p rostitutes
and sometimes led to the denial of their existence or a ban on their business.
Their existence was a cause of shame for European administrations, especially
when the women were available for the local population, as the “prestige of
the white man” was seen as a means of ensuring colonial supremacy. White
women were ascribed family roles and the task of maintaining normative stan-
dards and respectability.84 Prostitution was considered to be a backwards trade
in the orient, where local women were thought to be loose and debased. The
imagining of white women as the pure and chaste keepers of the family did
not allow for erotic fantasies and hence European p rostitution was strictly con-
demned, while the prostitution of coloured women was seen as a “necessary
81 Absi, this volume, Bolivia; Biancani and Hammad, this volume, Cairo; Frances, this vol-
ume, Sydney/Perth; Herzog, this volume, Singapore; Kozma, this volume, Casablanca;
MacKell, “Frontier Prostitution in the United States”; Blanchette and Schettini, this vol-
ume, Buenos Aires; Tracol-Huynh, this volume, Hanoi.
82 Frances, this volume, Sydney/Perth; Herzog, this volume, Singapore; Tracol-Huynh, this
volume, Hanoi.
83 Blanchette and Schettini, this volume, Rio de Janeiro; Herzog, this volume, Singapore.
84 Chacha, “An Over-view History of Prostitution in Nairobi”; Herzog, this volume, Singa-
pore; Tracol-Huynh, this volume, Hanoi.
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evil”.85 Hoerder explains the toleration of sexual relations between white men
and non-white women in colonial societies in light of the fact that the sexual
activities of male colonial officers and settlers were thought to be unavoidable.
Although such interactions went against concepts of racial purity, it helped
maintain the purity of home societies since the men were prohibited from
bringing back coloured wives and children.86
Black and “coloured” women had to deal with a rather sexualized image.
They were strongly associated with otherness and exoticism mixed with an
erotic flair, but still viewed with suspicion and distrust. The idea that certain
races are more prone to prostitution led to situations in which the working
conditions of coloured women were better in terms of being less controlled,
as long as they confined their sex work to the recognised sector. Nevertheless,
indigenous women have in many cases been at the bottom of social and busi-
ness hierarchies. The roots of such racialized eroticism can be traced back to
colonial thought; in the colonial imagining, black women were seen as sexually
rapacious and morally corrupt. In countries with a highly mixed population
like Brazil, racial categories were especially complex, with light coloured wom-
en believed to be pretty, sentimental, and loving, and dark coloured women
thought to be ugly and sexually depraved.87 For Hoerder, the construction of
native women’s sexuality was carried out in terms of the sexual deprivation
of colonial officers and settlers. White women were seen as inviolable, while
colonized female bodies were easily accessible.88
In Asia, Europeans did not seem to have the same privileged position as
elsewhere. European prostitutes from central and eastern Europe did not
necessarily have a good reputation in contrast to the “quiet charm” ascribed
to the native women. European prostitutes were said to practise their trade
coldly in contrast to the passionate and loving local women. In contrast,
the hierarchy was often influenced by women’s level of education. In many
cases migrants represented the poorest and least educated group, so they
were of the lowest class. National categories also influenced how prostitutes
dressed, which was important in differentiating the various groups of people.
85 Biancani and Hammad, this volume, Cairo; Chacha, “An Over-view History of Prostitu-
tion in Nairobi” Choonara, “Selling Sex in Johannesburg”; Herzog, this volume, Singapore;
Tracol-Huynh, this volume, Hanoi.
86 Hoerder, Cultures in Contact, p. 431.
87 Biancani and Hammad, this volume, Cairo; Blanchette and Schettini, this volume, Rio de
Janeiro; Choonara, “Selling Sex in Johannesburg”; Ekpootu, this volume, Nigeria; Frances,
this volume, Sydney/Perth; Linehan, this volume, Chicago; Nuñez and Fuentes, this vol-
ume, Mexico City; Schettini, this volume, Buenos Aires.
88 Hoerder, Cultures in Contact, p. 431.
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Migration and Prostitution 727
In colonial Hanoi, Japanese prostitutes wore traditional outfits, makeup, and
hairstyles that clearly distinguished them from the cheaper Chinese and Viet-
namese prostitutes who were thought to be unclean and carriers of diseases.89
Stereotypes and hierarchies in prostitution persist today, if not in law then at
least in practice. Governments habitually differentiate between migrants who
enter a country for temporary labour and permanent settlers on the grounds
of racial, gendered, geopolitical, and economic hierarchies.90 The tendency to
value women from richer first-world countries more than those from poorer
countries continues until today. In modern cyber prostitution there are differ-
ent websites with different rates for foreign and local prostitutes. As in former
times, it is still easier for local women who are comparatively well integrated
to maintain their business unobserved by the authorities. Foreign prostitutes
are exposed to more violence and police harassment, and have less control
over their clients, working conditions, and money. There is also evidence of
a division of labour based on origins which is still shaped around the social
hierarchies of race and country of origin.91 On the other hand, an exotic flair
is still a way to enliven sex fantasies: After World War ii, Havana’s exotic image
was exploited in order to attract sex tourists from the us to a place that was “so
near, yet so foreign”.92
Conclusion
Changing places is a lifetime experience of women involved in the sex sec-
tor, and in many cases, they travel far more than people in other sectors. In
addition, mobility and its attendant foreignness are both real and presumed
characteristics which determine how those women are perceived by others
and how they arrange their lives. Many aspects of their movement around the
world fit some general notions in migration history, but several factors have led
to a neglect of their involvement in research.
Pooley et al. identify five general problems in migration research which prove
to be true for the migration of prostitutes: First, the life stories of people are
overshadowed by the analysis of increasingly large data sets. This lack of indi-
vidual sources is compensated for by the large-scale evaluation of quantitative
89 Blanchette and Schettini, this volume, Rio de Janeiro; Gronewold, this volume, Shanghai;
Herzog, this volume, Singapore; Tracol-Huynh, this volume, Hanoi.
90 Luibhéid, “Sexuality and International Migration”, pp. 125f.
91 Linehan, this volume, Chicago; Turno, this volume, Florence; Wyers, this volume, Istanbul.
92 Cabezas, this volume, Havana.
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material. Second, this focus on numbers and statistics provides a rather static
and non-dynamic view of the events which led people to decide to change
their lives and move. Third, many studies tend to focus on one small commu-
nity so it is difficult to come to general findings that are also useful for other
places and time periods. Fourth, explicit information from direct sources—if
available—about the motives and effects of migration are often anecdotal and
therefore not representative. Fifth, most research concentrates on periods and
places for which data are relatively abundant and detailed regardless of their
historical significance.93
Gender studies have already made a major contribution to the inclusion of
women’s experiences in global history. The initial focus of migration studies
on settlers’ movements has also slowly started to fall away. Still, the precarious
situation of prostitutes brought about by the fact that sex work makes them
social outsiders in most societies has led them to be disregarded. Their work
and lifestyle are consequently stigmatized and criminalized, and they mostly
belong to the social underclass. This leads to the perception that their experi-
ences are of minor importance in terms of ground-breaking developments in
global history. Indeed, if one is interested in pioneering explorations of new
worlds, prostitutes do not provide new insights, as they tend to follow their
male clients. Still, they provide a service, and a stable clientele is the basis for
their living, so the fact that they follow their clientele is not a sign of passivity
or subordination but simply a sensible business strategy.
Besides the neglect of women’s experiences in general and the disregard of
women in the sex sector in particular, it is difficult to provide a globally bal-
anced view of the movement of people for another reason. The term “migra-
tion” connotes long-distance mobility, border-crossing, and leaving or entering
nation-states, thus maintaining a basic European concept which has shaped
historiography until today. Local and regional mobility between areas that are
not so rigidly administered (or in pre-nation-state periods and places) has been
naturally far more widespread but is extremely difficult to trace, so many stud-
ies rely on the state as the basic analytical element and m odernization as the
main stimulus for migration. This approach almost automatically leads to an
overemphasis on international mass migration as well as the role of the state
administration, and internal and short distance migration as well as personal
or communal considerations remain widely unobserved. European actors tend
to be overrepresented and changes in global history brought about by Europe
are overly emphasized.94
93 Pooley et al., Migrants, Emigrants and Immigrants, pp. 4–6.
94 Hoerder, Cultures in Contact, p. xxi.
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Migration and Prostitution 729
The main sources available for migration studies are administrational re-
cords of border crossings, local censuses registering the numbers and origins
of residents, and police and court records that indicate conflicts. They rein-
force the impression that laws and regulations dominate people’s lives and
decisions, highlighting the role of Europeans as rulers in the colonial period.
In the case of sex workers, such sources almost inevitably lead to an outlook
tinged by criminalization, underscoring the need for women to do business in
the underground which makes their decisions and actions much more opaque
and thus unavailable for research.
But without consulting passports and immigration records, it is indeed dif-
ficult to find adequate criteria to identify “migrants”. Personal information
concerning language, race, religion, ethnic markers, family background and
self-ascription is difficult to obtain and ambiguous as well, for it implies that
“foreigners” and social outsiders are the same as “migrants” and vice versa. Di-
rect sources concerning migrants might reveal their actual and felt status, but
in the case of prostitutes, they are extremely rare because many such women
were illiterate (and there is also the problem of language barriers), as well as
the fact of their illegality and marginalization within society. Existing non-
administrational sources, especially in colonial locations, were written by male
observers or the clients who share neither the language nor the cultural back-
ground of the women, and thus reflect not only a male perspective but also
European values.95 Therefore, a wider variety of direct sources as well as more
transnational research going beyond European concepts is needed in order to
present the history of the migration of prostitutes in a more balanced light.
95 See Kozma, this volume, Casablanca; Biancani and Hammad, this volume, Cairo.
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chapter 28
Prostitution and Colonial Relations
Liat Kozma
Colonial encounters played a significant role in shaping policies and desires in
both Europe’s colonies and in Europe itself, and thus they deserve their own
thematic overview. I define colonial relations as ethnic or racial-based hierar-
chies and segregations which developed as a consequence of western imperial
expansion. These were unequal power relations in which the colonizer had
control over, or at least attempted to control, residential choices, mobility in
public space and across borders, and who wedded and bedded with whom.
I thus follow Ann Stoler’s contention that the very intimate domain of desire
was shaped by these colonial interactions.1
Historical research on prostitution and colonialism is relatively recent. The
argument historians present is that colonial domination and colonial power
relations affected prostitution on multiple levels. First, the migration of wom-
en for prostitution to, between, from, and within Europe’s colonies was facili-
tated, encouraged, or restricted by colonial authorities. Second, colonial urban
planning segregated colonizers from colonized, industrial from residential,
and respectability from vice. Such segregations did not mean, of course, that
different social groups did not interact or even live together. It means, how-
ever, that questions of racial and class interactions were central to the colo-
nial vision of the city. These policies, in turn, affected the urban geography of
prostitution, its interaction with the city’s inhabitants, and divisions within
brothels or prostitutes’ quarters. Furthermore, the permanent and temporary
migration of men—as soldiers, sailors, or industrial workers—created highly
gender-imbalanced environments, and prostitutes were the only women of-
ficially allowed in some of them.2
1 Ann Laura Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault’s History of Sexuality and the Co-
lonial Order of Things (Durham, 1995); Ann Laura Stoler, “Rethinking Colonial Categories: Eu-
ropean Communities and the Boundaries of Rule”, Comparative Studies in Society and History,
31 (1989), pp. 134–161; Ann Laura Stoler, “Tense and Tender Ties: The Politics of Comparison
in North American History and (Post) Colonial Studies”, The Journal of American History, 88
(2001), pp. 829–865.
2 Raelene Frances, “Prostitution: The Age of Empire”, in Chiara Beccalossi and Ivan Crozier
(eds), A Cultural History of Sexuality in the Age of Empire (Oxford, 2011), pp. 145–170; Philip
Howell, Geographies of Regulation: Policing Prostitution in Nineteenth-Century Britain and the
© Liat Kozma, 2017 | doi 10.1163/9789004346253_029
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Prostitution and Colonial Relations 731
The processes and categories of regulation—of prostitutes, brothels, and
red-light districts—were not unique to the colonial context, and they are out-
lined in detail in the other urban and thematic overviews. What I try to do here
is examine the specificities of colonial contexts and the various levels of power
relations between the state and its subjects as well as between individuals on
different sides of ethnic or racial hierarchic divides.
Sources
Sources for precolonial periods are often very rare or non-existent because
many colonized societies were predominantly illiterate or because records
were not preserved. Hammad and Biancani’s work on Cairo is able to recon-
struct the precolonial history of prostitution because in Islamic Cairo decrees,
chronicles and court records were kept.3 This was not the case for colonial Nai-
robi or Lagos, for which very little information is available. Some colonial cities
discussed here, such as Singapore, Casablanca, and Nairobi, were not urban
centres or did not exist at all before the colonial encounter, and thus only pro-
vide a roughly century-long historical survey.4
Sources for the colonial period were produced mostly by the colonizers.
Historians of prostitution in these societies therefore use sources written by
colonial administrators or imperial voluntary organizations who sought to
civilize indigenous populations, combat global prostitution, salvage colonial
reputation, and/or mitigate the flaws of colonial rule. Ekpootu’s research on
colonial Nigeria, for instance, relies mainly on colonial police records and ad-
ministrative correspondence. Similarly, Tracol-Huynh’s article on Hanoi notes
that most available sources on prostitution are French and that French writ-
ings about Vietnamese women were imbued with stereotypes of their race
and sex.5
Empire (Cambridge, 2009); Philippa Levine, Prostitution, Race and Politics: Policing Venereal
Disease in The British Empire (New York, 2003); Ashwini Tambe, Codes of Misconduct: Regulat-
ing Prostitution in Late Colonial Bombay (Minneapolis, 2009); Luise White, The Comforts of
Home: Prostitution in Colonial Nairobi (Chicago, 1990).
3 Biancani and Hammad, this volume, Cairo.
4 Babere Kerata Chacha, “An Over-view History of Prostitution in Nairobi: From the Precolo-
nial Period to the Present”, unpublished paper collected for the project “Selling Sex in the
City”, 2013; Ekpootu, this volume, Nigeria; Herzog, this volume, Singapore; Kozma, this vol-
ume, Casablanca.
5 Ekpootu, this volume, Nigeria; Tracol-Huyn, this volume, Hanoi.
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732 Kozma
Indeed, in most historical societies the life stories of the women in pros-
titution are often mediated through those who tried to reform, regulate, or
discipline them. In colonial contexts, notably, such mediation is further ex-
tenuated by racial divisions and colonial power relations. So, those who wrote
about prostitutes and recorded their life stories did not share these women’s
language, and, as I demonstrate below, often held specific assumptions about
the sexuality of non-European women.
Sexuality and Colonial Relations
Colonial relations were often metaphorically depicted as sexual encounters,
be it the “virgin African continent”,6 or the likes of Kuchuk Hanem, the dancer
who fascinated Flaubert in his mid-nineteenth century visit to Egypt and be-
came a metaphor of the colonial coveting gaze in Edward Said’s Orientalism.7
Consequently, colonized women themselves became an object of colonial
sexual fantasy, curiosity, and gaze. In certain cases, such as Kenya or India, the
colonized woman was perceived as exotic and hypersexual.8 In other cases,
such as Islamic societies, women’s sexuality was perceived, by definition, to
be oppressed, and Muslim women were to be saved by colonial authorities
or benevolent voluntary organizations. Such metaphors were translated into
colonial erotic imagery, both at home and in the colonies themselves: erotic
representations of the colonized, and sexual fantasies of the colonizer.9
Colonial policies in regulating and policing prostitution are best understood
within a conceptual framework mindful of the role of desire and sexuality in
shaping colonial relations. On the one hand, Ann Stoler has shown how the
intimate domain of human interactions was central to colonial policies. British
colonial officers, for example, were not allowed to age in the colonies so that
imperial prestige would not be questioned by the sight of an elderly English-
man. English and Dutch youth in the colonies were sent to boarding schools
in Europe, so that affection toward their childhood nannies or desire toward
indigenous girls would not undermine well-kept distinctions between colo-
nizers and colonized. The policies that ensued from these anxieties differed
6 Chacha, “An Over-view History of Prostitution in Nairobi”.
7 Edward Said, Orientalism (New York, 1978), pp. 186–190.
8 Chacha, “An Over-view History of Prostitution in Nairobi”.
9 See, for example, Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colo-
nial Contest (New York, 1995); Malek Alloula, The Colonial Harem (Minneapolis, 1986).
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Prostitution and Colonial Relations 733
in different imperial contexts. All, however, saw interracial sexual relations
or the potential for such relations as a matter fit for state intervention.10 In
several colonial contexts, such as the Dutch Indies or Singapore, concubinage
and the existence of “mixed-blood” children were perceived as a threat to co-
lonial power and prestige and were strongly discouraged. Much earlier than
the Dutch and the French, Herzog argues, the British created policies prevent-
ing interracial relations and marriage, and they were outlawed throughout the
Empire already at the end of the eighteenth century.11
On the other hand, as Franz Fanon has famously argued, colonial relations
also produced and channelled desire itself. White men’s access to colonized
women had distinctly different cultural meanings and different histories from
colonized men’s desire for white women. The former was sometimes banned,
but sometimes encouraged by colonial authorities, for example by operating
indigenous brothels to cater to the “needs” of occupying armies or colonial
administrations. The desire of indigenous or non-white men for white women,
Fanon argued, was created and nurtured by colonial relations and anti-colonial
sentiment. The colonized, he stated, desired that which belonged to the colo-
nizer: to sit at the settler’s table and to sleep in the settler’s bed, “preferably
with his wife.” The political desire to take the place of the colonizer and reverse
power relations is translated here into sexual desire.12 A black man’s desire, in
turn, was translated into colonial or white anxieties about the uncontrollable
sexuality of the colonized. This can be seen, for example, in French colonial
policies toward its colonial soldiers, both oversees and in France itself. Simi-
lar concerns influenced highly racially-segregated societies, for example the
American South of the Jim Crow era.13
Women’s sexual desires are rarely part of this paradigm. They were deemed
irrelevant in colonial discourses, and were rarely discussed when describ-
ing relations between prostitutes and their patrons. European reformers and
officials described white women merely as victims of “white slavery” (to be
described below) or as victims of deception which led them into interracial
10 Stoler, Sex and the Education of Desire, pp. 137–164; Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival
Grain: Thinking through Colonial Ontologies (Princeton, 2009), pp. 57–104.
11 Herzog, this volume, Singapore.
12 Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (New York, 2004), p. 5; see also his book Black
Skin, White Masks (London, 2008).
13 On sexual anxieties and racial violence in the American south, see for example Jane Dai-
ley, Before Jim Crow: The Politics of Race in Post-Emancipation Virginia (Chapel Hill, 2000),
and on African-American masculinity in the Jim Crow era, see Marlon Bryan Ross, Man-
ning the Race: Reforming Black Men in the Jim Crow Era (New York, 2004).
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734 Kozma
intimacy or even marriage. Female desire within colonial relations is therefore
not a part of my explanatory framework, and although it surely deserves its
own theoretical discussion, unfortunately it is beyond the scope of this paper.14
To summarize, colonial regimes of regulation differed from those in the
metropolis by incorporating racial assumptions about sexuality into everyday
policies of rule. Imperial and/or racial prestige affected policy and this was
implemented in the most intimate domains of human interactions.
Indigenous Sexuality and Early Colonial Encounters
For many precolonial societies, we know little about how colonial encoun-
ters affected patterns of non-marital or commercial sex. Very schematically,
historical research points to at least three categories of precolonial sexual/
commercial practices: first, prostitution, or a phenomenon that closely resem-
bled it (as in Vietnam and the Islamic world); second, an exchange of sex for
money, the cultural connotations of which were different enough from prosti-
tution to be considered as something else (such as Indian temple prostitution
or North African courtesans); and third, societies in which there was no pros-
titution as the society had little or no money/wage labour, and therefore there
was no exchange of sex for money (as, for example, in Nairobi). A fourth cat-
egory might be distinguished as cases in which we have no information at all,
due to a lack of sources. All were transformed in the period of colonial control.
In Latin America, for example, we know that there were sexual encoun-
ters between Spanish and Portuguese men and local women that were either
encouraged or tolerated by the colonial authorities. Little historical research,
however, is available on commercial sex here.15 As early as 1538 the Spanish
Crown granted the municipal authority of Mexico City a permit to operate
a properly supervised “concubinary house” to service Spanish men, but it is
unknown whether such a house was indeed opened at that point. Spanish
14 On North African soldiers in the French army, see for example Ethan M. Orwin, “Of Cous-
cous and Control: The Bureau of Muslim Soldier Affairs and the Crisis of French Colo-
nialism”, The Historian 70 (2008), pp. 263–284, 272; Glenford D. Howe, “Military-Civilian
Intercourse, Prostitution and Venereal Disease Among Black West Indian Soldiers During
World War i”, The Journal of Caribbean History, 31 (1997), pp. 88–102.
15 See, for example, Asuncion Lavrin (ed.), Sexuality and Marriage in Colonial Latin America
(Lincoln, 1989); the more recent book by Karen Vieira Powers, Women in the Crucible of
Conquest: The Gendered Genesis of Spanish American Society, 1500–1600 (Albuquerque,
2005); Asunción Lavrin, “Sexuality in Colonial Spanish America”, in Jose C. Moya (ed.),
The Oxford Handbook of Latin American History (New York, 2011), pp. 132–152.
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Prostitution and Colonial Relations 735
men, sent to rule over a non-Christian population, left their women and chil-
dren behind. Sexual relations with indigenous women became acceptable, and
these women sometimes resorted to selling their bodies as a means of survival.
It is difficult to determine which such relations were indeed commercial, since
all non-marital sex was similarly referred to as “life in sin”. Women known to
be leading such a life were banned from leaving their houses when dressed up
glamorously, riding in carriages, or bringing cushions or rugs to church. It was
only in the eighteenth century that prostitutes and pimps were legally identi-
fied, punished, and imprisoned.16
Until the 1830s, the East Indian Company was wary of allowing European
women into India, fearful it might destabilize the company’s relationship with
India’s rulers. As a consequence, British men entered into concubinal or mari-
tal relations with Indian women. The British authorities, however, became
increasingly intolerant toward such relations. By the late eighteenth century,
persons of mixed race were excluded from holding political or military office
with the company. At about the same time, venereal diseases came to be de-
fined as a medical problem which threatened the wellbeing of British soldiers
and officers. Low-class prostitutes who were found to be diseased were con-
fined to a lock hospital and segregated from society until cured. The regulation
system was designed to ensure that soldiers had access to sex while being pro-
tected from venereal diseases. In different times and places, such access was
regulated along ethnic or racial lines, while in others it was not. In any case,
white men’s access to non-white women was more acceptable than non-white
men’s access to white women.17
In some cases, traditions of public entertainers, some of whom were en-
gaged in occasional prostitution, disappeared with the colonial encounter. The
women engaged in such professions were eroticized, sexualized, and then in-
tegrated into a system of regulated prostitution. In precolonial Vietnam, for
example, legislators condemned prostitution but did not try to punish prosti-
tutes. Colonial legislation replaced precolonial forms of non-marital sex and
institutionalized commercial prostitution.18 In Egypt, alongside prostitutes
there were singing and dancing women who would perform for upper-class
16 Nuñez and Fuentes, this volume, Mexico City.
17 Erica Wald, “From Begums and Bibis to Abandoned Females and Idle Women: Sexual
Relationships, Venereal Disease and the Redefinition of Prostitution in Early Nineteenth-
Century India”, Indian Economic Social History Review, 46 (2009), pp. 5–25; Judy White-
head, “Bodies Clean and Unclean: Prostitution, Sanitary Legislation, and Respectable
Femininity in Colonial North India”, Gender & History, 7 (1995), pp. 41–63.
18 Tracol-Huynh, this volume, Hanoi.
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736 Kozma
families and they were known for their refinement and style. In the nineteenth
century, with the influx of European tourists to Egypt, they came to be con-
fused with prostitutes and their title, ʽawalim, became synonymous with pros-
titution.19 Similarly, women of the Ouled Naïl tribe, who served as professional
dancers, concubines, and courtesans in precolonial Algeria, came to be clas-
sified as prostitutes; the name of the tribe itself came to be synonymous with
prostitution. Their traditional dance was turned into an erotic tourist attrac-
tion which also featured in orientalist fantasy and imagery of colonial Algeria.
In precolonial Algeria, these women were socially acceptable and could go on
to marry. In colonial Algeria, they were branded as prostitutes, both legally and
socially.20
Similarly, in colonial India the category of prostitution was extended to
women whose activities had not been previously classified as criminal or im-
moral, particularly courtesans. These were women who lived and entertained
in salons which came to be known as centres of music and culture. They also
provided sexual services to a limited upper-class clientele. As the Indian court
centres lost their standing with the strengthening of the East India Company,
the women lost their former support, and their role came to be restricted solely
to the sexual sphere. These women were transformed from trusted companions
into medical threats. The Indian woman alone, rather than her sexual partners,
was singled out as a transmitter of venereal diseases. Temple prostitution and
traditional dance, both containing a sexual component, were also classified
by the British as prostitution. In earlier periods, British officials distinguished
between these categories of women and bazar prostitutes, but these distinc-
tions later disappeared and these women’s social and religious functions were
erased.21
In Yoruba communities in Nigeria, a wife could take a lover who secured her
husband’s approval by paying a fine and performing culturally-approved rites.
European writers, and later European administrators, Ekpootu argues, eroti-
cized non-erotic practices and represented as socially deviant what had been
culturally legitimate. The colonial economic system introduced new economic
19 John Rodenbeck, “ʻAwalim; or, The Persistence of Error”, in Jill Edwards (ed.), Historians in
Cairo: Essays in Honor of George Scanlon (Cairo, 2002); Karin van Nieuwkerk, “A Trade like
Any Other”: Female Singers and Dancers in Egypt (Austin, 1995), pp. 33–36.
20 Barkahoum Ferhati, “La danseause prostitutée dite ‘Ouled Naïl’, entre mythe et réalité
(1830–1962): Des rapports sociaux et des pratiques concretes”, clio: Femmes, Genre, His-
toire, 17 (2003), pp. 101–113; Barkahoum Ferhati, “Enquête sur la prostitution en Algérie:
Souvenirs de Bou-Saâda”, L’Année du Maghreb, 6 (2010), pp. 253–268.
21 Wald, “From Begums and Bibis”.
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Prostitution and Colonial Relations 737
relations within families and communities. Colonial policies were also affected
by the Victorian gender ethos which favoured men and devalued women’s la-
bour and relegated women to the domestic sphere, marginalizing them eco-
nomically. Migration of males within the colony also resulted in an increase in
female-headed households, thus feminizing poverty and driving some women
to prostitution as a means of supporting their families. Some were driven to
the city where they hoped to find opportunities, as village life offered little.22
The legacy of slavery and abolition is also present in some of our case stud-
ies. European powers had a complicated and ambiguous relationship with
slavery. Until the early to mid-nineteenth century most colonial powers en-
joyed the cheap labour provided by existing systems of slavery, sometimes in-
corporating them into capitalist expansion. Britain was the first to ban slavery
in its colonies in the 1830s, and others followed, sometimes substituting it with
other forms of bonded labour.23 The abolition of slavery in the nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries created new realities. Men and women could
no longer legally be purchased, for example in Lagos, Casablanca, or in Cairo,
and abolition gave rise to other forms of exchange and employment. In some
of these localities, manumitted slaves, who had nowhere to go and little sup-
port within the community, had little choice but to resort to prostitution. In
late nineteenth century Egypt, for example, references to manumitted slaves
in brothels suggest such a predicament. The British authorities established
homes for manumitted slaves with the declared aim of directing those women
to domestic labour rather than prostitution.24
Urban Spaces
The history of prostitution is predominantly an urban one, and the colonial
context is no exception. Here, histories of colonial prostitution are intimately
linked to histories of colonial urbanism in terms of how colonial authorities
chose to construct and transform urban spaces. Historians of prostitution in
22 Ekpootu, this volume, Nigeria.
23 See, for example, Kenneth Morgan, Slavery and the British Empire: From Africa to America
(Oxford, 2007); Lawrence C. Jennings, French Anti-slavery: The Movement for the Abolition
of Slavery in France, 1802–1848 (Cambridge, 2000); Marcel van der Linden (ed.), Humani-
tarian Intervention and Changing Labor Relations: The Long-Term Consequences of the
Abolition of the Slave Trade (Leiden, 2011).
24 Judith Tucker, Women in Nineteenth Century Egypt (Cambridge, 1985), p. 174; Diane
Robinson-Dunn, The Harem, Slavery and British Imperial Culture: Anglo-Muslim Relations
in the Late Nineteenth Century (Manchester, 2006), pp. 84–85.
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738 Kozma
colonial societies connect the transformation of prostitution to the transfor-
mations of urban space brought about by the colonial presence. In the passage
cited below, Fanon famously demonstrated the effects of colonial relations on
how urban spaces were experienced by both colonizer and colonized:
The settler’s town is a strongly built town, all made of stone and steel.
It is a brightly lit town; the streets are paved with asphalt, and the gar-
bage cans swallow all the leavings, unseen, unknown, and hardly thought
about… The settler’s town is a well-fed town, an easygoing town; its belly
is always full of good things. The settler’s town is a town of white people,
of foreigners.
The town belonging to the colonized people, or at least the native
town, the Negro village, the medina, the reservation, is a place of ill fame,
peopled by men of evil repute. They are born there, it matters little where
or how; they die there, it matters not where, nor how. It is a world with-
out spaciousness; men live there on top of each other, and their huts are
built one on top of the other. The native town is a hungry town, starved of
bread, of meat, of shoes, of coal, of light. The native town is a crouching
village, a town on its knees, a town wallowing in the mire. It is a town of
niggers and dirty Arabs.25
Colonial urbanism was a modernizing project in the sense that it relegated
urban planning to experts who relied on supposedly impartial social science to
generate objective criteria and techniques often termed “colonial l aboratories”.
Europe’s colonies were territories in which methods could be implemented,
tried out, modified, and improved if necessary.26 Colonial urbanism was
colonial in relying on unofficial zoning and de facto class- and race-based seg-
regation and inequalities. Colonial cities segregated the respectable from vice,
indigenous from the foreign, and lower-class from upper-class clientele. These
districts were monitored by a system of gates and walls, as well as curtains and
glazed windows.27 In Johannesburg, for example, the 1923 Act removed black
people from the city’s centres and settled them on the outskirts of the city.
25 Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, pp. 38–39.
26 See for example, Omnia El Shakry, The Great Social Laboratory: Subjects of Knowledge in
Colonial and Postcolonial Egypt (Stanford, 2007).
27 Gwendolyn Wright, The Politics of Design in French Colonial Urbanism (Chicago, 1991),
pp. 3–11; Christabelle Taraud, La prostitution coloniale: Algérie, Tunisie, Maroc: 1830–1962
(Paris, 2003), p. 85.
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Prostitution and Colonial Relations 739
In Shanghai, the various international concessions and the Chinese town had
different prostitution regulations (and practices) and in Nairobi, blacks were
confined to certain neighbourhoods.28
In North Africa, colonial urbanism entailed opening up the old city and
making it more accessible to colonial policing; the gates which divided urban
quarters after nightfall, for example, were removed. The winding alleyways and
the rooftops which one could easily use for escape were most problematic in
maintaining law and order. In addition, colonial authorities constructed new
quarters adjacent to the old one, implementing rational principles of visibility
and accessibility: standardized buildings, wide boulevards, and segregation be-
tween residential and industrial regions. The tramway, and later the bus, also
facilitated mobility within the city and necessitated urban planning which
made it possible for these vehicles to move around the city.29
The geography of prostitution in colonized urban spaces was marked by
the complex relationship between settlers’ and indigenous neighbourhoods,
or between the indigenous city and the colonial city which developed around
it. Postcolonial cities often bear the mark of this bifurcated past to this day.
Colonial cities marked an unequal encounter between different social and
economic systems, one imposed upon the other, causing social and economic
ruptures and dislocations. These, in turn, created economic instability which
drove women to prostitution. These processes supplemented, rather than re-
placed, traditional modes of control and supervision of women with modern,
bureaucratized ones.30
In the various case studies discussed in this volume, the colonial presence
affected the geography of prostitution in several important ways. First, the co-
lonial administration transformed urban geographies either by creating new
urban centres or transforming existing ones. Nairobi and Casablanca are two
examples of small towns/villages which became administrative colonial cen-
tres, thus attracting both European and local immigrants in search of skilled
or unskilled jobs.31 In some urban localities, this created a gender imbalance:
male labour was much more in demand in these new or growing urban centres
28 Ziyad Choonara, “Selling Sex in Johannesburg: From 1886 to the Present”, unpublished
paper collected for the project “Selling Sex in the City”, 2013; Gronewold, this volume,
Shanghai.
29 Taraud, La prostitution coloniale, pp. 81–83.
30 Ibid., pp. 11–13; Wright, The Politics of Design; Anthony D. King, Spaces of Global Cultures:
Architecture, Urbanism, Identity (London, 2004).
31 Chacha, ”An Over-view History of Prostitution in Nairobi”.
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740 Kozma
than female labour, and female migration was either discouraged or actively
banned. As Ekpootu demonstrates, colonial Lagos became a colonial adminis-
trative centre and colonial capitalist development attracted indigenous migra-
tory flows in response to perceived opportunities. These migratory flows, in
turn, changed Lagos into a commercial centre.32
Nairobi provides an example of the effects of the monetization of a tradi-
tional economy and the dislocation of social and familial relations following
colonial intervention which drove families to poverty and women to prosti-
tution. Nairobi became an administrative and commercial centre during the
colonial period. Mining camps, military settlements, and port cities attracted
commercial prostitution to their predominantly male environments. The colo-
nial administration prohibited wives from joining their husbands at the work-
place. Culturally, moreover, it was not acceptable for respectable women to
abandon their lands and move to the city as dependents with their husbands.
In non-colonial situations it was the presence of western settlements or
armies, such as in nineteenth-century Shanghai and early twentieth-century
Istanbul, that attracted the migration of prostitutes and pimps.33 Singapore
changed from a small fishing village into the centre of British colonial rule and
British influence in the region, thus creating both supply and demand for pros-
titution. Herzog shows that although trafficking in women and the slave trade
were illegal in British territories, in Singapore the British authorities ignored
the import of non-European women, mainly from neighbouring islands, be-
cause it reduced the gender imbalance and provided both domestic and sexual
labour that was sought after by sailors, merchants and soldiers. As Singapore
grew, these were joined by voluntary migration as well.34 Johannesburg’s ex-
istence and growth were related to the imperialist expansion of capital and
the discovery of gold. In the early twentieth century, it was inhabited mainly
by men, as black women’s entry to the city was restricted. Consequently, it at-
tracted both African and eastern European prostitutes and trafficking.35
Commercial sex arrived in Australia with the first European colonizers who
set up a convict colony in Sydney in 1788. Some of them had been selling sex in
Great Britain before being deported to Australia. Aboriginal women who were
dispossessed from their land and from their traditional economies also provid-
ed sex to the colonizers in exchange for money, food, or alcohol. European set-
tlement in Australia also attracted southern and eastern European immigrants,
32 Ekpootu, this volume, Nigeria.
33 Chacha, “An Over-view History of Prostitution in Nairobi”.
34 Herzog, this volume, Singapore.
35 Choonara, “Selling Sex in Johannesburg”.
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Prostitution and Colonial Relations 741
including prostitutes. These served men in the new townships and mining
districts, which like in Nigeria and Johannesburg, were composed mainly of
men.36
In other places, urban development contributed to the growth of particular
cities and with them the development of a middle class with a dispensable
income, which increased the demand for leisure and pleasure opportunities
for the male bourgeoisie. In Hanoi, the growing city offered an easier life, a
standard of living that was better than in the countryside, and anonymity, and
thus it attracted many young women from rural areas.37
Regulation
The regulation of prostitution in colonized societies was often related to the
presence of colonial military forces. So while regimes of regulation were in-
creasingly criticized or abolished in Europe, regulation was imposed on colo-
nized societies, first and foremost in order to protect colonial soldiers from
venereal diseases, which could be, until the beginning of the twentieth cen-
tury, fatal. The debilitating effects of syphilis on the military made regulation
appear to be a viable tool even after medical advancements improved the qual-
ity of care and thus the chances of recovery.38 In the case of Singapore, Herzog
claims that even when it was clear that the medical regulation of prostitution
was not effective, regulatory measures were maintained because they served
a secondary goal of maintaining order and supervising the conduct of both
prostitutes and soldiers.39
More generally, controversial medical practices were maintained in the colo-
nies because they made it possible for colonial authorities to protect their sol-
diers and settlers from disease while at the same time monitoring and regulating
interracial sexual encounters. Actual policies and practices varied between and
36 Frances, this volume, Sydney/Perth.
37 Tracol-Huynh, this volume, Hanoi.
38 See, for example, Michelle K. Rhoades, “Renegotiating French Masculinity: Medicine and
Venereal Disease during the Great War”, French Historical Studies, 29 (2006), pp. 293–327;
Laura Doan, “Sex Education and the Great War Soldier: A Queer Analysis of the Practice
of ‘Hetero’ Sex”, Journal of British Studies, 51 (2012), pp. 641–663; Mary Louise Roberts, “The
Price of Discretion: Prostitution, Venereal Disease, and the American Military in France,
1944–1946”, 115 (2010), pp. 1002–1030; Glenford D. Howe, “Military-Civilian Intercourse,
Prostitution and Venereal Disease Among Black West Indian Soldiers During World War
i”, Journal of Caribbean History, 31 (1997), pp. 88–118.
39 Herzog, this volume, Singapore.
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742 Kozma
within different empires. Britain, for example, had abolished formal regulation
in Britain already in 1886 and in Singapore two years later. It did, however, im-
pose regulation on Egypt in 1883 and on Iraq in 1921, while regulating prostitu-
tion in Palestine for only a couple of years after World War i. The French, on
the other hand, abolished regulation at home only in 1946 and their regulation
regimes in the colonies faced very little domestic criticism. Such differences
can be ascribed to both imperial considerations and to circumstances on the
ground, which comparative studies are now beginning to unravel.40
The abolition of licensed brothels, at home and throughout the empire, was
one of the causes that British and French women organized around before
they obtained the right to vote. In Britain, Josephine Butler led a successful
campaign against the contagious disease act.41 In France, abolitionist cam-
paigns began in the 1870s and enjoyed only partial success until the official
closing of licensed brothels in 1946. French regulationists justified the persis-
tence of licensed houses in both France and the colonies in terms of a “need” to
find a legitimate sexual outlet for colonized men who would otherwise prey on
“respectable” women. Abolitionists, for their part, maintained that regulated
brothels undermined men’s respect for respectable French women. They like-
wise described the operation of licensed brothels in the colonies as a betrayal
of the sacred trust of civilization. Reserved quarters, such as in Casablanca or
Saigon, particularly embarrassed French reformers.42
Colonial regulation policies included regular medical examinations, restric-
tions on prostitutes’ residential choices, the establishment of state-controlled
brothels and at times red-light districts or designated quarters, and control-
ling such women’s mobility not only within urban spaces but also nationally
and globally. Colonial rule introduced a new language of hygiene and public
order as well as new bureaucratic apparatuses to enforce it. Colonial rule also
introduced and codified new anxieties about miscegenation and the different
sexuality of the colonized. These also relied on specific assumptions about
masculinity, especially that of young soldiers. Sexual intercourse was seen as
40 Three notable examples are Howell, Geographies of Regulation; Levine, Prostitution, Race,
and Politics; Stephanie A. Limoncelli, The Politics of Trafficking: The First International
Movement to Combat the Sexual Exploitation of Women (Stanford, 2010).
41 Judith R. Walkowitz, Prostitution and Victorian Society: Women, Class, and the State (Cam-
bridge, 1980); Antoinette Burton, Burdens of History: British Feminists, Indian Women, and
Imperial Culture, 1865–1915 (Chapel Hill, 1994), pp. 127–170.
42 Julia Christine Scriven Miller, “The ‘Romance of Regulation’: The Movement against State-
Regulated Prostitution in France, 1871–1946” (Unpublished Ph.D., New York University,
2000), pp. 361–446.
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Prostitution and Colonial Relations 743
a biological necessity, and abstinence was unthinkable for young men when
they were away from their wives or were still single; masturbation or homo-
sexuality were frowned upon and this left prostitution as the only option.43
As a result, while regulated prostitution had been losing ground in Britain
since the 1880s and increasingly throughout continental Europe in the follow-
ing decades, it was perceived as being indispensable in the colonies. On the
one hand, colonial troops had to be protected. On the other hand, indigenous
prostitutes could not be trusted to care for their own health without compul-
sory supervision. Again, the question of interracial sex, and then of the frater-
nization of colonial soldiers and administrators with indigenous men at the
same brothels, required strict regulation and segregationist policies.
The centrality of colonial armies in policies regarding prostitutes is demon-
strated through those policies that targeted the spread of venereal diseases; in
Hanoi, if it was determined that a man had a venereal disease he was required
to report the prostitute who infected him to the vice squad, and she could then
be punished. The authorities sought mainly to regulate those women who
were in contact with Europeans. Although regulation was applied only to pros-
titutes, artists and concubines were in some cases also under various kinds of
supervision, with varying levels of success.44
In Singapore, the Contagious Disease Act was repealed in 1888 after a long
struggle between state authorities and social reformers who saw these acts as
state-sponsored prostitution and an affront to British morality. Pressure from
London further prevented the reinstatement of the Act. Singapore’s officials,
however, devised new ways of monitoring and regulating commercial sex.45 As
stated above, in Egypt and in Iraq the controversy over the cda in Britain itself
did not prevent the authorities from regulating prostitution in both localities.
Racial Hierarchies
Colonial prostitution, like colonial urban policies in general, relied on spatial
segregation and legalized hierarchies between different populations. These
could be simple dichotomous relations between colonizers and colonized,
such as Europeans and non-Europeans, as was for instance the case in C airo
43 Rhoades, “Renegotiating French Masculinity”, pp. 293–327; Doan, “Sex Education and the
Great War Soldier”, pp. 641–663.
44 Tracol-Huynh, this volume, Hanoi.
45 Hertzog, this volume, Singapore.
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744 Kozma
and Casablanca.46 These hierarchies were more complex or nuanced in
Nairobi and Johannesburg, as Asians, Indians, and “coloured” constituted a
third category.47 Such hierarchies could determine who would be subjected
to regulatory measures and who would not; where one was allowed to reside;
whether a woman was subjected to medical examinations at a public clinic or
could consult a private physician; how much she was allowed to charge; who
she was allowed to have sex with; and, to what extent she could turn to the
police for assistance.
In Singapore, sex workers were divided by class and ethnicity; different eth-
nic groups inhabited different parts of the city and those were divided by class
as well.48 In South Africa, European and black prostitutes were treated differ-
ently. Black prostitution was less of a concern in colonial and independent
South Africa, as long as black prostitutes stayed in “native locations” and did
not cross the colour line. It was not prostitution or black prostitution as such
that were state concerns, but rather interracial sex: at first only non-marital
sex, and later also interracial marriage.49
These considerations did not have equal importance for British and French
authorities. Whereas the French did not discourage the migration of French
prostitutes to their colonies, the British strictly banned the migration of British
prostitutes, while permitting the prostitution of other white women. As Tambe
argues, the presence of eastern European Jewish women in Indian brothels
served Britain’s dual purpose of supplying its soldiers with women who were
“white enough” but not endangering its imperial reputation as these women
were considered “non-quite-white”; colonial officials emphasized the Jewish
background of these women, and thus from their perspective, respect for the
empire was left intact as Indian men were not exposed to British prostitutes
and had no opportunity to frequent them.50 In Singapore as well, the immi-
gration of eastern and central European women was encouraged, while the
immigration of British prostitutes was banned.51
The legal status of white women often differed from non-white women, just
as the status of immigrant women differed from that of indigenous women.
In different colonial settings, the division was not clear-cut; mixed-blood or
46 Biancani and Hammad, this volume, Cairo.
47 Chacha, “An Over-view History of Prostitution in Nairobi”; Choonara, “Selling Sex in
Johannesburg”.
48 Herzog, this volume, Singapore.
49 Choonara, “Selling Sex in Johannesburg”.
50 Tambe, Codes of Misconduct, pp. 57–67.
51 Herzog, this volume, Singapore.
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Prostitution and Colonial Relations 745
ulatta women could be classified as white, non-white, or in-between, accord-
m
ing to the context. These divisions, moreover, played on colonial male fantasies
and on scientific assumptions about racial difference. In Vietnam, the colonial
authorities saw Vietnamese prostitutes as dirty and dangerous, whereas Japa-
nese women were considered to be medically safer and Chinese women were
somewhere in the middle. European prostitutes, moreover, were considered
to be a bad example of European behaviour, especially since they could be
“bought” by Vietnamese men. In Vietnam, eastern European prostitutes had
the privilege of being able to get private medical examinations.52
Colonial regulation also meant that colonized women were treated differ-
ently than European women. Levine notes, for example, that in Britain itself
women were registered after being arrested while the colonial assumption was
that Indian women would register voluntarily because prostitution was not
shameful in Indian culture. The colonial authorities also considered physical
contact with colonized women to be a form of contamination that threatened
to orientalise and degenerate British soldiers.53
White slavery was also a concept that European empires employed in at-
tempts to understand and later regulate the prostitution of white women in
the colonies. It was Victor Hugo who coined the term “white slavery” in the
1870s to designate the denigration of French women in state-licensed broth-
els in France itself. In later decades, however, it was used to describe the kid-
napping and trafficking of young women overseas such as English girls in the
brothels of Brussels or Jewish women in Buenos Aires. The very existence and
scope of such a trade has been controversial from the early days of the twenti-
eth century up through present-day historical debates; it is clear that women
migrated to work in prostitution and it is also clear that violence and decep-
tion were involved in some of these cases and that women were often much
more vulnerable in foreign lands than at home. The controversy lies in the ex-
tent of coercion vs. consent involved, both in the past and present.
In the colonial context, these concerns were intimately related to imperial
honour and prestige, as outlined above. The ability of the Empire to protect
European girls and to a lesser extent indigenous girls from being trafficked and
coerced into prostitution was a matter of state policy with regards to limiting
the migration of unaccompanied women to colonial possessions and restrict-
ing admission to licensed brothels. These concerns were taken up in the 1920s
by the League of Nations’ Committee on Traffic in Women and Children. Both
52 Tracol-Huynh, this volume, Hanoi.
53 Philippa Levine, “Venereal Disease, Prostitution and the Politics of Empire: The Case of
British India”, Journal of the History Sexuality, 4 (1994), pp. 579–602.
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746 Kozma
Britain and France were represented in the committee and adhered to the
relevant international conventions, but they were very hesitant to adhere on
behalf of their colonial and mandatory possessions, and this was critiqued by
international women’s organizations as well as some of the members of the
committee, especially the Danish feminist Valentine Dannevig.54
The question of white slavery or trafficking in women and children as it was
later called was related to the presence of white prostitutes abroad, both in
Europe and overseas. In the colonies, as Chacha demonstrates, the presence of
white women was supposed to civilize the colony by encouraging white men to
adopt normative standards of respectability.55 White prostitutes, on the other
hand, had the potential to reduce the reputation of the empire in the eyes of
the colonized.
Conclusion
The current overview first examined how colonial expansion affected the glob-
al geography of prostitution. The formation of colonial outposts and capitalist
enterprises attracted migratory populations and with them the urban devel-
opment of prostitution. Thus, communities of migrants from the countryside,
in addition to European women and migrants from neighbouring regions or
settlements, came into being throughout the colonized world. The regulation
of prostitution and commercial forms of exchange replaced a variety of for-
mer prostitutional practices which disappeared in places like India and North
Africa. Colonial policies also affected urban spaces, leading to the creation of
walled brothel districts where there had been none, and some of those urban
layouts outlasted colonial rule.
Prostitution in colonial settings differed from prostitution in the metropolis
in several important respects. One was racial segregation which is common, in
one degree or another, to all colonial contexts. Another was colonial armies,
the presence of which dictated policies, regulations, and practices. Yet another
54 On the League of Nations’ Committee on the Traffic in Women and Children, see Jessica
R. Pliley, “Claims to Protection: The Rise and Fall of Feminist Abolitionism in the League
of Nations’ Committee on the Traffic in Women and Children, 1919–1936?” Journal of
Women’s History, 22 (2010), pp. 90–113; Magaly Rodríguez García, “The League of Nations
and the Moral Recruitment of Women”, International Review of Social History, 57 (2012),
pp. 97–128; Katarina Leppänen, “International Reorganisation and Traffic In Women: Ven-
ues of Vulnerability and Resistance”, Lychnos (2006), pp. 110–128.
55 Chacha, “An Over-view History of Prostitution in Nairobi”.
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Prostitution and Colonial Relations 747
characteristic was the marginal effect that the indigenous population had on
regulation policies, which were decided by colonial authorities with little re-
gard for the population’s needs or concerns.
Alongside these commonalities, this paper highlighted several important
differences. French authorities were more likely to regulate prostitution than
British ones, and Spanish colonialism tended to tolerate interracial sex more
than the British model. Also, official red-light districts were more character-
istic of French colonial cities than their British counterparts. An explanation
for these differences cannot be offered in this overview, as that would require
more thorough research in colonial archives. Such research would also be able
to address questions that urban overviews situated in specific urban settings
cannot address about inter- and intra-colonial influences. We know that poli-
cies in the colonies and medical knowledge acquired in colonial hospitals af-
fected policies in the metropole but the multiple ways they did so are subjects
beyond the scope of this volume that demand further research.
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chapter 29
Seeing Beyond Prostitution: Agency and the
Organization of Sex Work
Thaddeus Gregory Blanchette
In order to understand the role agency plays in sex work, we must first divest
ourselves of the liberal belief that the term is a synonym for free will, sover-
eignty, or untrammelled choice. Furthermore, we must also challenge two
common positions regarding prostitution: its naturalization as a moral cat-
egory and the belief that it is simply work, like any other work under capital-
ism. Finally, we must also question as analytical categories certain emic1 or
accusatory categories such as trafficking, pimp, and prostitute. Only by culti-
vating a cultural studies approach that looks at commercial sex as a rich field
of human activities intimately intertwined with wider forms of engendered
labour performed by women can we understand the role individual agency
plays in the (re)production of forms of sexual/affective exchange understood
to be prostitution.
I am not a libertarian, I rarely talk about rights and freedoms. I also am
not a neoliberal proponent of the happiness of making money in a free
marketplace. What I am is a believer in human agency. I believe that dis-
advantaged persons with limited options of how to proceed in life have,
until they are actually put in chains, some space to move, negotiate, pre-
fer one option to another. This position hardly seems philosophical to
me, and I am not going to get credit for inventing a new theory with it. Yet
time and again it turns conversations upside down.
laura agustin
Stop punishing me just because you may not be able to imagine being me.
Artist and sex worker sadie lune
1 Emic categories are those used by a group of insiders—members of a certain population—to
describe reality. In the case of sex work, the emic categories that are usually employed, sans
analysis, come from law enforcement, social work, and so-called “rescue” groups.
© Thaddeus Gregory Blanchette, 2017 | doi 10.1163/9789004346253_030
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This is an open access chapter distributed under the terms of the CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license.
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Seeing Beyond Prostitution 749
Introduction
My partner, Dr Ana Paula da Silva, does a lot of her research into prostitution
in restrooms. One evening, she went into one and found a young woman crying
alone over an industrial sink. Ana is an excellent ethnographer and a sympa-
thetic person, so it didn’t take her long to find out what was wrong.
The young woman was working to support her family, in which she was the
only labouring adult. She had been on the job for three months—some days
for up to twelve hours—but had yet to be paid. She had met her household’s
expenses by borrowing at exorbitant interest rates. Now, word had come down
that her pay would be delayed for a fourth month running. She had no effec-
tive legal response and was at wit’s end. As she talked to Ana, she confessed
that she was thinking of killing herself. Only the thought of her family being
stripped of any income kept her going.
“After all”, she said, half declaring, half entreating, “as long as I keep working,
they have to pay me some day. Right?”
Many of you reading this story in its present context—a volume on the
global history of prostitution—are probably recognizing this young woman’s
plight. After all, the received wisdom regarding those who sell sex highlights
the variety of deceptions that are used to exploit them. We have read thou-
sands of pages on sex worker enslavement, recruitment under false pretences,
indebtedness… The terms “pimp”, “trafficker”, and “exploiter” fall glibly from
our tongues. If there’s one thing the histories in this collaborative volume em-
phasize, it’s that prostitutes2 are often exploited and sometimes enslaved.
2 What to call those who sell or exchange sex for livelihood is quite complicated. Most of the
people I interact with prefer “sex worker” while many wish to reclaim “prostitute”. Both terms
have problems. As prostitute rights activist Gabriela Leite points out, “sex worker” is a con-
ceptually more general word which can be applied to anyone involved in the commercializa-
tion of sex, including strippers, phone sex workers, and even people otherwise glossed as
“pimps”. “Prostitute”, according to Leite, has the advantage of referring specifically to the per-
son having sex for money. It is in this sense that many of the authors in this volume seem to
use the term. However, this is also problematic because people who may not actually sell sex
(but rather trade it) are often understood to be prostitutes. Furthermore, people who actually
do sell sex but do so in relatively privileged social circumstances that permit destigmatiza-
tion (i.e. bar hostesses in upper class clubs, middle class “party girls”, some sexual therapists,
and certain wives and mistresses) manage to largely avoid being qualified as prostitutes. Fi-
nally, the view that prostitution refers to the simple commercial sale of sex is empirically
complicated by the fact that many sex workers sell a wide range of things that go beyond sex,
such as companionship and affective services of all sorts (Elizabeth Bernstein, Temporar-
ily Yours: Intimacy, Authenticity and the Commerce of Sex (Chicago, 2007)). Nevertheless, we
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750 Blanchette
But I haven’t been entirely honest with you. Although Ana does much of
her ethnographic work in restrooms, this particular incident didn’t happen in
a brothel, but at her university. unisuor3 is a private school in Rio de Janeiro.
The woman in question was a newly employed professor with a master’s de-
gree. Her monthly salary was around 4,000 reais, which at the time made it
the equivalent of eight minimum wages or four times what fully 72 per cent of
Brazilian workers earn (around 1,000 reais monthly in 2010).4 In 2008, only 17
per cent of all Brazilian households were earning what she was earning.5 All of
this presumes, of course, that she was receiving her salary—which she wasn’t.
The dilemma faced by this young professor is nothing new to Brazilian
workers, especially those who (like the majority of female workers) struggle in
the economy’s lower reaches.6 Brazilian workers are vulnerable to gross exploi-
tation. Having a job does not necessarily mean that one receives a salary and
for those caught in this cycle of late- or unpaid work, the means to confront
one’s bosses are few and the opportunities to go into debt while awaiting pay-
ment are many.
It is certainly true that prostitutes and professors are not the same. Pros-
titution involves stigma and risks that professors do not face and these have
real consequences for sex workers’ lives. What the above story illustrates, how-
ever, is the degree of exploitation and lack of options faced even by privileged
female workers. Often when we talk about prostitution, the common labour
practices of the neo-liberal globalized economy disappear and exploitation is
conceived of outside its larger economic framework. Prostitution is analysed
as if it were a separate field from life and labour in general, not just in moral or
theoretical terms, but in terms of life as it is lived. Because of this, the question
of why many women enter into prostitution is stripped of any real context.
Nowhere is this perhaps more apparent than in discussions about agen-
cy and prostitutes’ ability to choose sexual labour. Few people ask if maids,
must have labels. In this chapter, I will use “sex worker” and “prostitute” interchangeably to
refer to women who exchange sex for livelihood. Obviously, there are also male prostitutes,
but given that the histories collected here rarely mention them, my focus here will likewise
be restricted to women.
3 unisuor is a fake name and an in-joke between me and Ana Paula. It means “UniSweat” and
it reflects the belief of many of the institution’s professors that it is a sweatshop for educators.
4 ibge, Mulher no mercado de trabalho: perguntas e respostas (Brasília, 2012); uol “ibge: 72%
dos brasileiros ganhavam até 2 salários mínimos em 2010”, uol Economia, 19 March 2012,
available at: http://economia.uol.com.br/noticias/redacao/2012/12/19/ibge-72-dos-brasileiros
-ganhavam-ate-2-salarios-minimos-em-2010.htm; last accessed 2 August 2017.
5 ibge, Pesquisa nacional por amostra de domicílio 2002/2008 (Brasília, 2009).
6 ibge, Mulher no mercado de trabalho.
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Seeing Beyond Prostitution 751
check-out counter girls, baby-sitters, street cleaners, or factory workers (and
certainly not professors) “really want” to do their jobs. In fact, for almost every
kind of labour except sex work, workers’ ability to choose and act tends to be
simply presumed; they do that job because they chose to and they can leave
any time they want. Agency, however, must be questioned when the work is
sexual and the worker is female.
In this chapter, I will argue that sex work occurs in a specific engendered
context and that in order to understand agency in sex work, we must first divest
ourselves of the belief that the term is a synonym for free will, sovereignty, or
untrammelled choice. Agency is much less, but also much more than that. We
must also denaturalize prostitution itself, as well as the terms which surround
sex work; these are not etic7 or analytical categories, but rather accusations.
When I say that prostitution occurs in a specific engendered context, I am
saying that when we look at agency, we need to perceive that sex work has gen-
erally taken place as part of what Gayle Rubin calls “the world historical defeat
of women”8 in which women’s sexual/reproductive capacities have been alien-
ated and their labour situated as private services or obligations to men and not
socially productive work or, indeed, as the woman’s own labour.9
As both Rubin and anthropologist Sherry Ortner point out, it is precisely
female sexual-reproductive capacities that seem to have created “woman”
as a social category whose sexuality needs to be constrained and possessed,
especially in the context of patriarchal hypergamic societies.10 Women’s de-
sires and interests have rarely been foregrounded in any form of socially legiti-
mated sexual interaction and it is important to remember in this context that
marriage has first and foremost been an economic and (re)productive arrange-
ment between non-equal parties throughout most of human history. Only rela-
tively recently has it taken on its idealized role in bourgeois western thought
as a source of sexual and emotional fulfilment based upon equal partnership.
If we define prostitution as the exchange of sexual/reproductive/affective
acts for livelihood, it encompasses a series of interactions that include so-
called “transactional sex”, many stable affective/sexual relationships, and
7 Etic categories stand in contrast to emic categories (see footnote 1). They are science
-oriented and speak to a wider audience than one small cultural group. They seek to de-
scribe cultures impartially.
8 Gayle Rubin, “The Traffic in Women: Notes on the ‘Political Economy’ of Sex”, in Reiter
(ed.), Toward an Anthropology of Women (New York, 1975), pp. 157–210.
9 Friedrich Engels, “The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State”, in Karl Marx
and Friedrich Engels: Selected Works (New York, 1986), pp. 468–595.
10 Sherry Ortner, “Is Female to Male as Nature is to Culture?” and “The Virgin and the State”,
in Ortner, Making Gender: The Politics and Erotics of Culture (Boston, 1996), pp. 21–58.
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several types of pre-capitalist exchange (outlined by Mauss and more recently
discussed by Graeber).11 Without wishing to reinforce the old saw that prosti-
tution is the world’s oldest profession, it seems that we must accept the fact
that the use of sex in instrumentalist exchange certainly pre-dates capital-
ism, patriarchy, and even perhaps the human condition.12 Capitalism, in other
words, has not commodified women’s sexual-reproductive capacities; these
were alienated as items of exchange long before the modern era, as Rubin, fol-
lowing Leví-Strauss, points out.13 As Engels himself noted, the development
of industry has actually provided the conditions through which women have
begun to free themselves, if imperfectly, from this commodification.14
It is within this historical context in which women’s work has been bracket-
ed by unpaid obligations on the one hand, and restricted or devalued employ-
ment on the other, that we must understand agency in sex as work. We thus
need to look at the conditions, freedoms, and restrictions involved in different
forms of prostitution and how these combine with women’s needs, plans, and
desires in the face of the other engendered opportunities available on their
horizon of possibilities. In this view, prostitution should not be treated as a
homogenous category, but rather as a series of diverse activities that can en-
compass a variety of lived exchanges, oppressions, and liberties. Women who
engage in the sale of sex generally have these factors in mind and not a utopian
promise of a world freed from the shackles of class and gender.
It is when we understand prostitution within this larger context that agen-
cy becomes important but not as a synonym for free will or opportunity. The
reason one discusses agency is not to reify the individual human will but to
understand the how’s and why’s of an individual’s actions in the face of a so-
cially constrained horizon of possibilities. Unlike social determinists, more-
over, those who take a relational perspective of agency see a dialectic existing
between individuals and social structure. To properly apprehend this dialectic,
one cannot explain micro-scale effects exclusively by looking at large order
structures; one needs to specify and see how the macro is also constituted from
11 Marcel Mauss, The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies (London,
1990) and David Graeber, Debt: The First 5000 Years, (Brooklyn, 2011).
12 Gomes and Boesch, for example, show that wild chimpanzees apparently exchange meat
for sex. Christina M. Gomes & Christophe Boesch, “Wild Chimpanzees Exchange Meat
for Sex on a Long-Term Basis”, PLoS ONE, 4 (2009), available at: http://www.plosone.org/
article/citationList.action;jsessionid=2F5438EB4D946ACD217EF1EAB223B541?articleURI
=info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0005116; last accessed 2 August 2017.
13 Rubin, “The Traffic in Women”; Claude Leví-Strauss, The Elementary Structures of Kinship
(New York, 1969).
14 Engels, “The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State”, pp. 509–510.
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Seeing Beyond Prostitution 753
the apparent chaos of the micro. In the case of prostitution, this means ap-
preciating the plurality of sexual exchanges themselves and their interactions
with other sorts of exchanges in a given socio-economic context.
Agency and Prostitution
Debates about agency and its relation to structure have a long history in the
social sciences, reaching back to sociologist Émile Durkheim’s comments re-
garding the interplay between individual will and social facts.15 The problem of
agency revolves around to what degree, if any, human beings can make choices
in the face of coercive social pressures.
As Durkheim pointed out, society cannot be understood as the sum of indi-
vidual human actions as it exists outside the individual and exerts a coercive
power upon her:
[T]here are ways of acting, thinking and feeling which possess the re-
markable property of existing outside the consciousness of the indi-
vidual. Not only are these types of behavior and thinking external to the
individual, but they are endued with a compelling and coercive power
by virtue of which, whether he wishes it or not, they impose themselves
upon him.16
For Durkheim, however, this coercive power of the social is not absolute; it is
refracted through the individual conscience, creating a situation in which the
effects of social facts are inevitably different from the facts themselves. Indi-
viduals, in other words, retain the ability to modulate social coercion through
their performance in the face of social strictures and structures and they inevi-
tably exercise this ability even when they attempt to faithfully follow rules and
laws.17 Individuals, however, notoriously do not always attempt to follow their
society’s precepts. Even such strict anti-liberal social determinists as Berger
and Luckmann point out that institutions break down and lose their relevance
15 Émile Durkheim, The Rules of the Sociological Method (New York, 1982), pp. 50–59. In fact,
the debate reaches further back still to Marx and Engels and even to the acrimonious
arguments surrounding predestination during the Reformation. The question concerning
to what extent humans are actually free to choose has been perennial within western and,
indeed, human thought.
16 Durkheim, The Rules of the Sociological Method, p. 51.
17 Ibid., pp. 54–59.
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754 Blanchette
to the degree that they become divorced from the concrete praxis of socialized
individuals:
Deviance from the institutionally “programmed” courses of action be-
comes likely once the institutions have become realities divorced from
their original relevance in the concrete social processes from which they
arose. To put this more simply, it is more likely that one will deviate from
programmes set up for one by others than from programmes that one has
helped establish oneself.18
The trend within recent sociology and social anthropology has been towards
seeing agency in light of this dialectical relationship between the individual
conscience and social structure. This tendency has perhaps reached its apex
in certain lines of post-structuralist anthropology. An example is Pierre Bour-
dieu’s understanding of habitus as the internalized expression of external
social constraints, with individual actions that have been modulated by inter-
ests transmitting change to the social fields that are productive of habitus.19 A
similar understanding can be found in Marshall Sahlins’ Islands of History20
with culture providing the rules for individual behaviour and praxis inevitably
leading to cultural change. A good workable definition of agency within this
intellectual trend has been provided by Emirbayer and Mische, who see it as
…a temporally embedded process of social engagement, informed by
the past (in its “iterational” or habitual aspect) but also oriented towards
the future (as a “projective” capacity to imagine alternative possibilities)
and toward the present (as a “practical-calculative” capacity to contex-
tualize past habits and future projects within the contingencies of the
moment).21
Within the debates surrounding prostitution, however, agency has taken on
a different connotation. Contrary to its current use within sociology and an-
thropology, the word seems to be generally used as a synonym for free will,
especially by feminist theorists whose opinions inform a large portion of the
18 Peter L. Berger & Thomas Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the
Sociology of Knowledge (London, 1984), p. 80.
19 Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice (Cambridge, 1972).
20 Marshall Sahlins, Islands of History (Chicago, 1985).
21 Mustafa Emirbayer & Ann Mische, “What is Agency?” The American Journal of Sociology,
103 (1998), pp. 962–1023.
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Seeing Beyond Prostitution 755
debates surrounding sex as work. Take, for example, this statement by prostitu-
tion scholar Julia O’Connell-Davidson:
Though some […] women and children have been forced into prostitu-
tion by a third party, it is dull economic compulsion that drives many of
them into sex work, just as in America (a country with a per capita gdp
of us $21,558), many women and girls “elect” to prostitute themselves
rather than join the 35 per cent of the female workforce earning pover-
ty-level wages […]. To describe such individuals as exercising rights of
self-sovereignty seems as spurious as stating that their prostitution rep-
resents a violation of their right to dignity. There is no dignity in poverty,
which denies the person full powers of agency. Yet the right to sell one’s
labor (sexual or otherwise) does not guarantee the restitution of dignity
or moral agency.22
Here, O’Connell-Davidson implies that agency is synonymous with self-
sovereignty and is something that increases as one’s economic status improves.
She seems to be saying that within a capitalist society, rich people have more
agency than poor people. Furthermore, it is their relative lack of agency that
“forces” women23 into prostitution through “dull compulsion”. The choice be-
tween sex work and “poverty-level wages” is understood to not be a real choice
at all and is thus not “full […] agency”.
O’Connell-Davidson understands prostitution to be a form of labour and
prostitutes as women who exercise some degree of agency, however con-
strained. Her principal abolitionist interlocutors—people such as Sheila
Jeffreys, Catherine McKinnon, Meghan Murphy, and Melissa Farley—oppose
the very notion of sex as work, claiming that prostitution is ipso facto engen-
dered violence comparable to slavery. According to these intellectuals, to talk
about agency in such a situation borders upon the obscene.
The most commonly encountered abolitionist feminist view is that pros-
titution cannot be work because in it, the woman transforms her body into a
22 Julia O’Connell Davidson, “The Rights and Wrongs of Prostitution”, Hypatia, 17 (2002),
pp. 84–98, 90.
23 Obviously, many categories of people other than women and girls—men, boys and the
transgendered—enter into sex work. Debates regarding prostitution have historically
revolved around the question of female prostitution, however. That is also the focus of
my own research and of every article in the current volume. Given this, the present ar-
ticle concentrates on the heterosexual prostitution of women and girls. The question of
whether or not the analysis presented here is of use in discussing other forms of sex work
is something I leave for future debate.
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756 Blanchette
good that is then alienated on the market. This argument is expanded through
the addition of the “pimp” (a very poorly defined accusatory figure, as we shall
see below), who is understood to actually own the prostituted woman’s body,
transforming her into a slave.24
There are several problems with this viewpoint, beginning with the observ-
able fact that bodies are not alienated and sold in prostitution any more than
they are in the production of any other non-concrete good. As Brazilian sex
worker rights activist Indianara Siqueira pithily remarked at a seminar at the
National Law College in Rio de Janeiro: “Honey, if I sold my body, there’d be
nothing left of it for you to see today.”
Of course, if a sex worker is in fact enslaved then her body may indeed
become a commodity. This is not something that is limited to prostitution,
however: any worker, once enslaved, becomes a commodity. But even if most
prostitution were slavery, this would not disqualify it as work. No-one denies
that slaves work: it is, in fact, their raison d’être. What qualifies work as slavery
is not the labour that is performed, but the condition of the labourer as an
unfree subject and commodity.
Abolitionist feminists make a more subtle point, however, when they claim
that even freely consenting to prostitution is not work like other work. They
anchor this argument in their understanding of human social relations as pa-
triarchical, claiming that the position of women within a labour system that is
conceptually organized around male dominance leads to the marginalization
of women as labourers and, in fact, socially erases much of what women actu-
ally do, qualifying this as non-work. Given the greater context of the economic
marginalization of women under capitalism and the institutionalized misog-
yny of patriarchy, abolitionists argue that no-one can truly say that women
freely choose prostitution; rather, they are compelled to it by greater social
constraints. In such a situation, according to these theorists, it is futile to talk
about agency as social structure trumps individual will.
What is curious about this position, however, is that these feminists do not
seem to take their own arguments regarding the marginalization of women’s
labour to its logical conclusions. After all, according to Friedrich Engels, one of
24 Finn McKay, “Arguing Against the Industry of Prostitution: Beyond the Abolitionist Ver-
sus Sex-Worker Binary”, Feminist Current, 24 June 2013, available at: http://feministcurrent
.com/7758/arguing-against-the-industry-of-prostitution-beyond-the-abolitionist-versus
-sex-worker-binary/; last accessed 2 August 2017; Janice G. Raymond, “Prostitution as
Violence Against Women: ngo Stonewalling in Beijing and Elsewhere”, Women’s Stud-
ies International Forum, 21 (1998), pp. 1–9; Sheila Jeffreys, The Idea of Prostitution (North
Melbourne, 2009).
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Seeing Beyond Prostitution 757
the founders of the critique of patriarchical capitalism, in bourgeois marriage
the wife “differs from the ordinary courtesan only in that she does not hire out
her body, like a wage-worker, on piecework, but sells it into slavery once and for
all.”25 In other words, the wife stands in relation to the prostitute as the slave
does to the worker. In fact, the voluntarism of the marriage contract itself is
understood by Engels as being determined by the same social coercive forces
which abolitionist feminists claim make a mockery of the idea of choice in the
context of prostitution.
Readings of abolitionist feminist critiques of sex work reveal that there is
rarely a discussion of this point; it is as if prostitution were either the nadir
or origin of women’s oppression. And yet, as so many of the contributions
in this book point out, prostitution was and often is a means of escape from
even more onerous and un- or underpaid forms of work carried out within
traditional women’s roles. For it is a fact that while prostitution (absent actual
slavery) does not necessarily entail possession of women’s bodies, engendered
family roles have often historically meant exactly that.
Ultimately, both O’Connell-Davidson and her abolitionist interlocutors
fall into the same problem vis-à-vis agency; while attacking the liberal view
of agency as the right to consent and contract, they unfortunately end up
reifying agency itself. Both construct a utopian condition (what O’Connell-
Davidson calls the “full powers of agency”) around a non-existent alternative
to engendered market-based capitalism in order to critique sex work. While
such a critique is interesting, if used as the basis for an understanding of truly
occurring prostitution, it violates one of the key principles of social-scientific
investigation: it classifies social facts as moral constructs that should be evalu-
ated a priori according to pre-established philosophies.26 When set against the
opportunities presumably available in a postcapitalist, postpatriarchical uto-
pia, the choices made by women facing servile marriage, low-wage labour, or
prostitution can seem very pitiful indeed. “Full powers of agency”, understood
as freedom from engendered socio-economic constraint, don’t exist, however,
and actually occurring agency cannot be measured in relation to them.
When one anchors the concept of agency in the idea of free choice, one
obfuscates actually occurring social praxis in which people make constrained
choices that are nevertheless perceived by themselves and others as very
real. As relational theorists point out, people make decisions within a socio-
culturally defined field of possibilities and these decisions significantly alter
25 Frederick Engels, “The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State”, in Karl Marx
and Frederick Engels, Selected Works (New York, 1986), pp. 468–595, 503.
26 Durkheim, The Rules of the Sociological Method.
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their life trajectories.27 It is difficult, from this point of view, to claim that in-
dividuals have “more” or “less” agency, as agency is not a reified object which
can be quantitatively measured but rather the innate ability of individuals to
refract social forces in accordance with their interests, calculations, and choic-
es, thus (re)producing social structures. Within this point of view, asking how
much agency an individual has is rather like asking which ocean is wetter.
The feminist critique of engendered capitalism is well-taken; life as it’s lived
is certainly not a level playing field where everyone competes as free agents.
Some people have more opportunities than others. Opportunity, however, is
not agency and to mistake it as such is to confuse object with subject. Further-
more, in the world of labour as it’s lived, it must be remembered that few if
any workers have a wide variety of options—even university professors. This,
of course, was the reality faced by the young woman in unisuor’s restroom:
given the social constraints and commitments in which she was embedded,
she couldn’t simply “up and leave”. Her employers, conscious of this fact, had
neatly trapped her in a cycle of precarious labour and indebtedness. Her op-
tions were very constrained, even though she was engaged in a more comfort-
able (and certainly less stigmatized) form of labour than most sex workers.
Agency has thus become something of a red herring in discussions of sex
work; it is most often used to construct a false dichotomy between voluntary
and involuntary prostitution or to claim that, in the face of a coercive and en-
gendered capitalist economy, no-one can ever “freely” choose sex work (as if
one could “freely” choose most other forms of labour). In the name of weighing
a reified “agency” (and thus supposedly determining whether or not a given
form of prostitution is slavery or quasi-slavery), questions are asked of sex
workers that are rarely asked of other labourers. “Do you really want to work
as a prostitute?” is one of these. “Do you regret choosing this path?” is another.
Sex Work and Economies of Makeshift
An important effect of the reified view of agency is that it doesn’t allow us to
see sex work as a logical continuation of (or a revolt against) normative gen-
der relations under patriarchical capitalism. One thing that I commonly en-
counter in my fieldwork—and which many of the texts in this volume also
demonstrate—are women who sell sex as an extension of other, socially re-
spectable, engendered roles. An excellent example of this can be found in
27 Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice; Gilberto Velho, Projeto e metamorfose: Antropo-
logia das sociedades complexas (Rio de Janeiro, 1972).
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Seeing Beyond Prostitution 759
Dasgupta’s28 article on Calcutta. Because of traditional Indian taboos against
remarriage, women who choose to be housewives and mothers can find them-
selves bereft of both economic support and sexual fulfilment upon the death
of a partner. It is not surprising, then, to find that 78 per cent of the women
who voluntarily chose sex work in Dasgupta’s study are widows. The sex work-
ing, family-supporting mother or daughter is also a classic example of this phe-
nomenon. Rio de Janeiro prostitutes often emphasize that they’ve chosen sex
work in order to provide better educational opportunities for their children
or healthcare for their parents. In these situations, prostitution is situated as
an adjunct for the reproduction of the family and a necessary extension of
women’s roles within it.
In eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Bruges, twentieth-century Nairobi,
early twentieth-century Rio de Janeiro, early twentieth-century Buenos Aires,
mid-twentieth-century Nigeria, twentieth-century Bolivia and, in fact, in al-
most every context presented in this volume, increased female immigration to
cities, combined with poor or uncertain wages in engendered labour markets,
led women to combine sex work with other forms of (generally unstable and
poorly paying) labour. Seasonal work, piece work, and dependent labour all
characterize much of what is traditionally considered “women’s work”, making
the salaries obtained through these forms of labour insufficient or uncertain.
These conditions of engendered labour make sex work a viable and/or neces-
sary option for many women in an economy of makeshifts.29
One should not be too quick to label sex work in this context a “survival
strategy”, however, especially if one means to set it apart from other work
through this. All work is ultimately a survival strategy. To claim that certain
women are “vulnerable” to sex work while not seeing them as “vulnerable” to
other forms of women’s labour is to naturalize prostitution as inferior labour.
It is also important to remember that “women’s work” has often combined la-
bour and sex in ways which may not be neatly categorizable. In the chapters on
nineteenth-century Rio de Janeiro, Buenos Aires, Havana, Bruges, and Singa-
pore we find reports of domestic labour being intermixed with the provision of
sexual services.30 Furthermore, as Mechant points out, domestic labour in par-
ticular makes women highly dependent on the family as an employer and thus
28 Dasgupta, this volume, Calcutta.
29 For an understanding of the concept of the “economy of makeshifts” and its application
to women’s lives in one given historical context, see Chapter 2 of Sarah Mendelson &
Patricia Crawford, Women in Early Modern England 1550–1720 (Oxford, 2003).
30 In fact, the persistent occurrence of this mix of sexual and domestic labour in almost all
the chapters leads me to wonder if some sort of deeper, structural factor might be in play.
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particularly liable to lose everything upon unemployment. This, in turn, often
results in a domestic worker’s rapid entry into prostitution upon dismissal.31
Other forms of socially acceptable women’s work may involve systematic
sexual exploitation, as is the case with women’s labour in the construction
trade in Calcutta.32 It should be pointed out that this sort of coercion is hardly
restricted to “lower class” occupations. Shortly after Ana left unisuor, for ex-
ample, the university’s male chancellor was discovered in the school’s parking
lot engaging in sexual relations with a young female professor; she was imme-
diately fired and he continued on with his post. Rumours abounded that the
professor in question had been the target of sexual coercion.
Traditional marriage for women is also, in many contexts, a combination
of unpaid domestic and sexual labour and this supposedly “free” sex is cer-
tainly not free of coercion. In the words of one of our informants, a 35-year-old
woman who works in Copacabana:
When you marry a man, that’s when he thinks he owns you. What I do
here in the streets isn’t any different from what I did at home when I was
married […]. It was a job, just like this here. Actually, that’s a lie: it was a
duty. And you don’t make money off of a duty. Here at least I get paid for
what I do. My husband never paid me.33
Sex work, for all its many problems, can be liberating, especially when it is
set against other forms of traditional women’s work. And while sex work does
result in situations similar to slavery, so do other kinds of work, particularly in
the lowest reaches of the economy. It’s interesting to note in this context that
Dasgupta’s Calcuttan informant Sapna distinguished sex work as a superior
oppositional category to both the supposed “freely given” sex of marriage and
the coerced sex demanded of women by foremen in the construction trade,
declaring “No more free and forced sex!”34
For a woman to sell sex at least presumes that she has sex to sell, in other
words, that it is hers.35 This position stands in direct contrast to a wide range
31 Mechant, this volume, Bruges.
32 Dasgupta, this volume, Calcutta.
33 Thaddeus Gregory Blanchette & Ana Paula da Silva, “Prostitution in Contemporary Rio de
Janeiro” in Susan Dewy & Patty Kelly (eds), Policing Pleasure: Sex Work, Policy and the State
in Global Perspective (New York, 2011), pp. 130–145.
34 Dasgupta, this volume, Calcutta.
35 This presumes, of course, that the woman in question is not a slave. That qualifier, how-
ever, should be made for all forms of labour and not just the sexual.
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Seeing Beyond Prostitution 761
of historically occurring forms of sex and gender control which situate female
sexuality as the possession of another, almost always an older man. If one of
the horrors of “pimping” is that a man possesses a woman’s sexuality, it must
be recognized that this has historically been a base condition for “respectable”
women throughout history. As Simone de Beauvoir pointed out forty years
ago, sex work can indeed be empowering for some women in that it at least
asserts—as the title of Cristiana Schettini’s review of sex work in early twenti-
eth century Rio de Janeiro points out—that women have their own bodies.36 If
we accept that economic power increases women’s options in the world, then
getting paid for sex can indeed be liberatory as many sex working women point
out, especially if it stands in opposition to not getting paid for sex and having
to do it anyway.
But finally, as so many authors in this collaboratory effort show, sex work
pays well when compared to other forms of women’s work—often ridiculously
well. This is, of course, why many women choose to work selling sex. Moreover,
prostitution can also involve more flexible and even more attractive work con-
ditions than other kinds of commonly available labour.
It’s true, as anthropologist Susan Dewey points out, that sex workers may
exaggerate their income, stating as “typical” what in fact might be extraordi-
nary and receiving liquid earnings that are ultimately comparable to those
achieved in other forms of low-wage labour.37 However, many of the articles
in this volume report sex work earnings that are much higher than any other
comparative form of feminized labour. Mechant remarks, in fact, that the price
for sexual services has remained remarkably consistent in Bruges over the cen-
turies at the equivalent of one (male) day’s wage.38 This, interestingly enough,
seems to be another pattern which repeats itself in many different contexts.
Hammad and Biancani, for example, report that lower-class prostitutes in
Cairo in the early twentieth century charged 10 piastres a head while native
masons during the same period made 6–12 piastres per day.39 In Rio de Janeiro
in 2009, the cheapest prostitutes charged 15–20 reais per act at a time when the
minimum wage was around 500 reais a month, or 16.6 reais a day. Meanwhile,
36 Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex (New York, 1953); Cristiana Schettini, “Que tenhas teu
corpo”: Uma história social da prostituição no Rio de Janeiro das primeiras décadas republi-
canas (Rio de Janeiro, 2004).
37 Susan Dewey, Neon Wasteland: On Love, Motherhood, and Sex Work in a Rust Belt Town
(Berkeley, 2011).
38 Mechant, this volume, Bruges.
39 Biancani and Hammad, this volume, Cairo.
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762 Blanchette
the prostitutes working in the city’s most luxurious saunas—women whose
clients typically made 10,000 reais a month or more—were charging 350 reais.
The ability to earn in one sex act what a male earns in a day is a non-trivial
means of achieving one’s socio-economic goals which can counterbalance
the stigma of prostitution and the need to perform sex without desire. Thus,
while prostitution may not take women’s sexual desires into consideration, it
often provides a more satisfactory means of achieving a woman’s other desires
than any form of labour available on her horizon of possibilities. The ability to
choose to be a prostitute rather than, say, a wife or a maid is not necessarily a
small thing, even if it doesn’t provide “sovereignty” (and is there a profession
that does?).
What is particular about agency within this general context is that in spite
of claims that women entering into sex work have “no real choice”, many sex
working women are very clear that this is indeed a real choice for them. It
is often the best available way to meet the multiple engendered demands to
which they are subject, escape other demands, and create opportunities that
would otherwise not be open to them. In fact, it may be precisely because they
are mothers, daughters, wives, widows, divorcees, and/or desirous of the glam-
orous, on-the-go, consuming, independent, professional lifestyle held out to
them as the feminine ideal by much of today’s globalized media that so many
women enter into sex work. In short, they are often chasing opportunities and
not just being driven by need.
When we claim that women are “vulnerable” to trafficking and prostitution,
while forgetting that they are also vulnerable to un-, underpaid or coerced
labour and forced immobility, we forget that migration and sex work are of-
ten seen by women as a means of escaping onerous, but more socially accept-
able, engendered duties. This is particularly obvious in Chacha’s discussion of
prostitution in Nairobi, where migration to the city and a life as a “disrespect-
able” woman was a means of escape from the traditional demands placed on
women for unpaid agricultural labour by the rural patriarchical gerontocra-
cy.40 Ekpootu details similar situations in Nigeria, highlighting how not only
female migrants from the rural interior, but also middle-class, urban university
students involved in “runs” see prostitution as a means of providing an entry
into modern, urbanizing, individualizing consumer culture.41
40 Babere Kerata Chacha, “An Over-view History of Prostitution in Nairobi: From the Preco-
lonial Period to the Present”, unpublished paper collected for the project “Selling Sex in
the City”, 2013.
41 Ekpootu, this volume, Nigeria.
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At the same time, sex workers are also usually very clear about the dangers
and stigmas they are subject to; they are aware that they are often seen by
other members of society as “the lowest of the low” and that this makes them
vulnerable to harassment, exploitation, and violence. Prostitution is generally
not understood by them to be positive (though, of course, there is a significant
minority that disagrees) and it is not what they would “freely choose” if given
the proverbial three wishes. Nevertheless, they often see it as the best choice
available along their horizon of possibilities.
It is thus in the field of truly existing opportunities and desires that women
exercise the decision to engage in sex work and not against the backdrop of
some utopian full autonomy where all possibilities are equally available. Nev-
ertheless, these decisions are real and have real consequences. It is women’s
negotiation of the possibilities and perils of sex work—in short, their agency—
which often determines whether or not sex work allows them to achieve their
goals, traps them in a regressive life cycle,42 or, indeed, enslaves them.
Agency and the Social Organization of Prostitution
When we apply a relational understanding of agency to prostitution, we begin
to see that the questions we should be asking have to do with what options are
opened or closed for a person who engages in sex work. How does sex work
link to, reinforce, negate, or modify other social roles, especially engendered
roles? How do people negotiate the possibilities created by sex work while try-
ing to avoid its pitfalls? How does this work intersect with other social forms
and institutions?
In order to give a reasonable account of prostitution as work, we must study
it as a set of lived cultures and not as a singular, abstract, ideologized category.
It is only by situating sex work within life as it’s lived by socially-constrained
actors that its meanings become clear. The ultimate poverty of the eternal ar-
guments between “sex positive” and “abolitionist” feminists and their respec-
tive political allies is that these debates reify extremely abstract definitions of
prostitution to the point where they have little, if any, link to actually occurring
social practices.
42 The concept of the “regressive life cycle” comes from Paul Cressey’s ground-breaking sex
work study The Taxi Dance Hall (Chicago, 2008 [1932]), p. 97. It refers to the fact that work
which places a high premium on youth, beauty, and/or novelty tends to trap labourers in a
downward spiral in which it becomes ever more difficult to reproduce economic success.
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Anthropologist Laura Agustin believes that the only way out of the impasse
in which a large part of prostitution studies has been stuck over the past cen-
tury is to look at commercial sex as a rich field of human activities intimately
intertwined with the surrounding socio-cultural milieus:
The cultural study of commercial sex would use a cultural-studies, in-
terdisciplinary approach to fill gaps in knowledge about commercial
sex and relate the findings to other social and cultural concepts. Recent
work has demonstrated how people who sell sex are excluded from stud-
ies of migration, of service work and of informal economies, and are in-
stead examined only in terms of “prostitution”, a concept that focuses on
transactions between individuals, especially their personal motivations.
With the academic, media and “helping” gaze fixed almost exclusively
on women who sell sex, the great majority of phenomena that make up
the sex industry are ignored, and this in itself contributes to the intran-
sigent stigmatization of these women […]. A cultural-studies approach
[…] would look at commercial sex in its widest sense, examining its inter-
sections with art, ethics, consumption, family life, entertainment, sport,
economics, urban space, sexuality, tourism and criminality, not omitting
issues of race, class, gender, identity and citizenship.43
The persistent classification of prostitution as a morally separate and inferior
activity engaged in by women who have a distinct and sexualized social per-
sona flattens and homogenizes the phenomenon. When “agency” becomes a
code-word for “free will” and is transformed into the prime category through
which people attempt to distinguish between “enslaved prostitution” and
morally-noxious-yet-tolerable sex work, the real interactions between choice
and structure, individual will, and socio-economic limitations involved in the
decision to start, continue, or stop selling sex disappear from view. In this way
“prostitute” comes to stand as a singular, homogenous sign for an enormous
variety of forms of sexual(ized) labour engaged in by women in different con-
texts and conditions. Its incautious usage causes us to lose touch with the lived
cultures of sex and work. And it is precisely within these lived cultures that
agency, opportunity, enslavement, and independence become manifest, not to
mention the actual social organization of sex work itself.
In order to better grasp the diverse set of social realities with which we need
to engage in order to study commercial sex as a cultural phenomenon, let’s
43 Laura Agustin, “New Research Directions: The Cultural Study of Commercial Sex”, Sexu-
alities, 8 (2005), pp. 618–631.
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briefly look over a few of the cultural categories associated with prostitution
within the historical context of three of the cities presented in this volume:
Bruges
Brothel prostitution (official and clandestine). Phone sex. Pole danc-
ing. Foreign and native prostitutes. Literate and illiterate prostitutes.
Registered and unregistered prostitutes. Textile and domestic work
as linked to prostitution. Full time and part time prostitution. Pimps.
Madams. Escort agents. Brothel owners. Married and unmarried
prostitutes. Prostitutes with and without children. Older and younger
prostitutes. Soldiers as customers of prostitutes. Immigrant prosti-
tutes. Brothel networks that exchange prostitutes. Debt as a means of
controlling prostitutes. “Dishonest inns”. Payment in money and pay-
ment in goods. Paying a fixed amount for lodging in a brothel. Paying
half of one’s earnings for lodging in a brothel. Prostitutes who work
from their homes. Street prostitution. Visible and invisible prostitu-
tion. Independent prostitutes. Forced and free prostitutes. Cities
which tolerate prostitution and cities which openly fight it.
Buenos Aires
White slaves. Trafficked women. Jewish traffickers. Pimps. Cafishos.
Madams. Brothel prostitution. Regulated brothels. Immigrant prosti-
tutes. Foreign prostitutes as emblematic of aggressive modernity, ur-
banization, and otherness. “Creole” or native prostitutes. Clandestine
prostitutes. Waitresses who sell sex. Actresses who sell sex. Domestic
workers who engage in sex as part of their work. Dance hall workers.
Boarding house residents. Brothels. Registered prostitutes. Under-
aged prostitutes. Independent prostitutes. Prostitutes who work from
their homes. Street prostitutes. Licensed brothels. French prostitutes
as teachers of “civilized” sex. Prostitutes who don’t speak Spanish. Ca-
sas de citas. Casas de comissionatas. Working class clients. Debt as a
means of controlling prostitutes. Tango musicians and other men ac-
companying “artist prostitutes” as protectors. Entrepreneurs, directors
and managers of night clubs, cafés, and theatres as managers of pros-
titutes. Prostitutes’ union.
Lagos
Wives whose male lovers pay their husbands “for encroaching on his
property”. Slave wives. Hausa prostitutes. West African prostitutes.
Chinese prostitutes. European prostitutes. Immigrant prostitutes.
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Runaway wives from the provinces. Hotel-based prostitutes. Foreign
clients. Clients with high social status. Clients with low social status.
High-class prostitutes with good educations. Escort services. Call girls.
Strip clubs. Brothels. Divorcees and widows who sell sex and engage in
other commercial ventures, particularly beer-brewing. Seamstresses
who engage in prostitution in bars and cafés. Patron/husbands. Street-
hawkers who sell sex. Smuggler prostitutes. Poor women engaged in
“survival” prostitution. University students engaged in “runs”. Boys
employed by prostitutes to engage clients. Under-aged sex workers.
“Women’s houses”. Domestic workers who engage in sex as part of
their work. Married and unmarried prostitutes. Prostitutes with and
without children. Payment in cash and payment in goods or proper-
ty. Prostitutes’ organizations. Prostitution as a transient stage before
marriage. “Ammunition wives”. Prostitution as a route for participa-
tion in global consumer culture. Prostitution as a means of assuring
accommodation during housing shortages. Child marriage disguising
child prostitution. Debt as a means of controlling prostitutes. On-line
soliciting. Outdoor prostitution. Street prostitution. Companion and
hostess prostitution. Massage parlour prostitution. Lap dancing. Pros-
titution and “boma” and “jaguda” criminal boys’ gangs. Prostitution
as an act of defiance and resistance to the social/sexual constraints
placed on women. “Awon” girls. Management societies formed by
prostitutes along ethnic lines. Sex Workers’ Alliance Nigeria.
The histories collected in the present volume do a sterling job of identifying
these cultural categories and allow us to descry some questions which seem
to be common to prostitution almost everywhere. However, they only begin
to scratch the surface of the social organization of prostitution and how the
many categories deployed to describe it interrelate with one another and with
larger social contexts.
We know, for example, that certain sex working women in mid-nineteenth
century Florence could live as isolated registered prostitutes in casa particolari
and that this allowed them “to gain an appearance of normality, make more
complex relationships” and achieve a notable degree of autonomy. How and
why did these women become casa particolari prostitutes as opposed to broth-
el prostitutes, however? What did they have to do to negotiate this status?
How did they protect it? In twentieth-century Rio de Janeiro, we can see that
a distinct bifurcation developed between prostitutes confined to the lower-
class Mangue red-light district and those who worked in the “artistic” cafés
and clubs of the bohemian Lapa and Copacabana districts. We do not know,
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however, how sex working women became inserted into these moral regions
or what the relative benefits—if any—were of working in one district or the
other. In early twentieth-century Singapore brothel prostitution, Chinese Ab
Ku were divided into “sold”, “pawned”, and “voluntary” categories depending
upon their financial relationship with the house. How well do these essentially
European categories translate their original Chinese content, however? What
were the rights of a “sold” woman? Was she pure chattel or were other, more
subtle, distinctions of servitude in play? How did women pass from one cat-
egory to the other? How likely was it that their debts could be paid off?
All of this volume’s contributors could easily address these questions and
many more, given enough time and space. A certain degree of abstraction
must be accepted in a project that brings together close to two dozen authors
with a synchronic and diachronic focus that spans six continents and half a
millennium. Without a deeper cultural-studies, micro-historical, or ethno-
graphic-based engagement with the multitudinous varieties of sex work pre-
sented here, however, little of any substance can be said regarding the agency
of women involved in sex work, because it is only at the micro level where
individuals negotiate with social structures that agency is revealed.
More problematic, however, are certain conceptual and analytical ques-
tions that become apparent in a large-scale, comparative project such as this.
One of the most salient of these is a relative lack of discussions regarding
clients. They are rarely described and generally only appear (when they ap-
pear) vaguely categorized by status/class (“high” or “low”), race/ethnicity, and
occasionally occupation (“soldier” being the most common). Men, in general,
are not problematized in this volume. Male and trans- prostitutes can be seen
peeking around the corners of some of the articles, but most authors (includ-
ing myself) ignore them, even though red-light districts the world over contain
male and trans- prostitutes. Likewise, males involved in the organization of
prostitution are generally presented in an unambiguous, flat, and essential-
ized manner, typically bounded by the qualifiers “pimp” and “client”, as if these
terms were self-explanatory and transcultural.
This brings up what is perhaps the worst vice of prostitution studies, from a
relational, agency-oriented point of view: the unconscious and almost unques-
tioned use of emic and even accusatory categories as if they were analytical de-
vices. Unquestioning use of these terms makes it difficult to recover any agency
at all, given that they presume as stable those meanings that are bitterly and
constantly (re)negotiated in life as it’s lived. I’d like to briefly deal with three of
these problematic terms in particular: pimp, trafficking, and prostitute.
Pimp is an ugly and imprecise term that is inevitably weighted with all sorts
of moral prejudices and has been polluted by an English-language bias that
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symbolically links the word to Hollywood-inspired, racialized thug stereo-
types. More problematically, it is essentially a legal accusation. Many third par-
ties are involved in the social organization of prostitution, including landlords,
the owners and managers of hotels/bars/clubs, security personnel, chamber
maids, bartenders, taxi drivers, and so on. All of these people are more properly
neutrally termed “market facilitators” and all of them extract surplus—directly
or indirectly—from prostitutes’ sexual labour. Unfortunately, many countries
simply define a pimp as someone who makes money from the sexual labour
of others. In places like Brazil, India, and France, the concept is widened to
include anyone who receives direct or indirect benefits from prostitutes, mon-
etary or otherwise. This means that the children, husbands, lovers, roommates,
parents, and dependents of prostitutes can be labelled as pimps.
Prostitution studies are full of examples of men and women involved in
sexual/affective relationships with prostitutes and who work as these women’s
aids, managers, and security personnel. Prostitutes also exercise their agency
by hiring third parties to work for them. An example of this can be seen in
Ekpootu’s article on Lagos44 in which she reports that women employ “boma”
and “jaguda” boys as client-finders. In Rio de Janeiro, sex working women in
Copacabana likewise often employ street children to pass out pamphlets to
tourists. These third parties are routinely accused of being pimps and exploit-
ers even when they serve as welcome support for prostitute women. Schettini’s
article45 shows that “artistic” traveling prostitutes in early twentieth-century
South America often engaged male companions who could intercede for them
in the face of excessive demands for sex work on the part of club or theatre
owners. These male “circuit breakers” could be accused by local authorities (al-
lied with local venue owners) of “pimping” precisely as a means of stripping
prostitutes of this protection and opening them up to greater exploitation.
At the same time, these hirelings and lovers/boyfriends/husbands-cum-
managers can also be exploiters and even pimps in the classic, thuggish sense.
Ekpootu reports that the same sorts of boys hired by Lagos prostitutes might
also coercively manage younger girls. And in both Rio de Janeiro and Buenos
Aires accusations of pimping and trafficking were often levelled by prostitute
women against men who had, at other moments, been their companions. In
other words, relationships between prostitutes and people accused of being
pimps involve dense and often contradictory demands and roles involving
44 Ekpootu, this volume, Nigeria.
45 Schettini, this volume, Buenos Aires. See also Thaddeus Gregory Blanchette & Ana Paula
da Silva, “As American Girls: Migração, sexo e status imperial em 1918”, Horizontes Antrop-
ológicos, 15 (2009), pp. 75–99.
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support, love, respect, fear, abuse, legal privileges, limitations, and engendered
violence—much like marriage, in fact. These relationships are not reducible to
a simple equation of villains and victims and to do so, again, buries any possi-
bility of recovering—let alone understanding—the agency of women involved
in prostitution and the empirical structures of the organization of sex work.
Trafficker and trafficking are likewise legal accusatory categories. It is worth
reflecting upon the fact that both of these terms were originally formulated
in the context of the nationalist tensions that led up to and followed the First
World War. As historian John Torpey points out in The Invention of the Passport,
the universalization of this document took place at a time in history when
vigilance of national frontiers was being taken to new heights. With the advent
of capitalist modernity and the decline of servitude and slavery, the power of
authorizing or prohibiting the movement of individuals was centralized in the
hands of the state. The creation of the modern passport system thus “signaled
the dawn of a new era in human affairs, in which individual states and the
international state system as a whole monopolized the legitimate authority
to permit movement within and across their jurisdictions.” This monopoliza-
tion was not neutral. It manifested certain interests, principally an overween-
ing preoccupation with what Torpey calls “masterless men”: free and rootless
individuals moving about and answering to no-one.46
The recrudescent nationalism and fears of revolution of the late nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries found expression in a growing body of interna-
tional jurisprudence that sought to create social defences against two specific
types of engendered “footloose” individuals: the male anarchist/Bolshevik
and the female prostitute/white slave.47 As many authors have pointed out,
the white slavery panic very rarely focused upon repressing actual, provable
instances of slavery, but more generally upon restricting the growing mobility
and perceived immorality of women and their male companions, particularly
those of certain classes and ethnic groups.48
Women, it must be remembered, were generally not understood to be full
and sovereign citizens during this period but rather dependent individuals
46 John Torpey, The Invention of the Passport: Surveillance, Citizenship and the State (Cam-
bridge [etc.], 2000), pp. 8–9, 111–121.
47 Mathieu Deflem, Policing World Society: Historical Foundations of International Police
Cooperation (Oxford [etc.], 2002), pp. 65–70.
48 Mary Ann Irwin, “‘White Slavery’ as Metaphor Anatomy of a Moral Panic”, Ex Post Facto:
The History Journal, 5 (1996), pp. 2–22; Frederick K. Grittner, White Slavery: Myth, Ideology,
and American Law (New York, 1990); Jo Doezema, Sex Slaves and Discourse Masters: The
Construction of Trafficking (London [etc.], 2010); Schettini, “Que tenhas teu corpo”; Blanch-
ette & Silva, “As American Girls”.
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under the tutelage of male “protectors”. To obtain a passport and travel inter-
nationally, women often had to have a chaperone. Original documents from
the American Embassy in Rio de Janeiro regarding Brazilian demands on mi-
grating women during the first decades of the twentieth century indicate that
this meant that a woman needed to be married, provably widowed, a minor
and traveling with family, traveling as a registered employee, or in possession
of a good conduct certificate signed by members of her local clergy and rati-
fied by her country’s passport bureau.49 In other words, it wasn’t enough to
just have a passport in order to migrate if one was a woman; one had to prove
one’s respectability by situating oneself as a mother, wife, employee, or devout
Judeo-Christian. In short, that meant proving that one’s sexual morality was
beyond suspicion, typically by linking oneself as the dependent of a male au-
thority figure.
It is in this context that the accusation of trafficking was created. While por-
trayed as unscrupulous slavers (which some certainly were), traffickers were
first and foremost those people who aided “suspect” women in avoiding im-
migration restrictions. Beginning in 1904, trafficking became legally defined
through successive international treaties as the crime of transporting women
for the purpose of prostitution.50 The concept had little to do with slavery and
the treaties discussing trafficking rarely mentioned slavery until 2002, when
trafficking was reworked by the un’s Palermo Protocol. In Brazil and many
other nations, trafficking is still simply legally defined as aiding and abetting
the movement of prostitutes; whether or not one profits from this movement
or even if it involves coercion or practices similar to slavery is beside the point
in the eyes of the law.
By using the term trafficking to unreflexively label any assisted migration of
prostitutes, we forget that for a great part of history, women could only legally
migrate if they could show that they weren’t prostitutes. Migrants involved
in sex work were ipso facto trafficked according to the law because the very
definition of “trafficking victim” was “migrant prostitute”. This does not mean,
however, that they were necessarily enslaved, which is what the post-2002 in-
ternational legal definition of trafficking implies and what most twenty-first
century readers understand it to mean.
A reflexive understanding of trafficking that seeks to recover prostitute
women’s agency must take this history into consideration. It should investigate
49 National Archives and Records Administration (nara). rg 84, Foreign Service Posts of
the Department of State, Brazil: Rio de Janeiro Embassy.
50 Isabel t.c.m. Ferreira, “A construção social do tráfico de pessoas” (Unpublished m.a.,
ppgas/mn/ufrj Rio de Janeiro, 2009).
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Seeing Beyond Prostitution 771
the motivations and conditions of female migration, what alliances and per-
formances were needed in order to accomplish it, and how sexual exchanges
of all sorts can be related to this nexus of agents and structures. Furthermore,
it must be remembered that trafficked objects are passive, while human agents
are not. The political rhetoric of anti-trafficking ironically objectifies women
in ways that that are strikingly similar to pornography, as the current predilec-
tion for portraying naked, boxed, caged, and shrink-wrapped female bodies on
anti-trafficking billboards and posters graphically demonstrates. While many
sex working women obviously encounter violations of their rights and bodies
during trajectories of migration, these do not magically transform them into
pork-chops: such women continue to be endowed with and exercise agency.
Attempts to understand trafficking and its relationship to the social organiza-
tion of prostitution that do not take this fact into consideration are doomed to
be fruitless.
Finally, prostitution itself must unpacked as an analytical category. A vast
variety of instrumental exchanges of sex for livelihood appear in the articles in
this volume. In the face of these, several authors have attempted to categorize
prostitution as the commercialized sale of alienated sex. However, when we
look at, say, Cairo in the twentieth century (to draw just one example from
the rich body of work contained in this volume), we quickly perceive that the
category “prostitute” was not necessarily used in this sense by the authorities
or, indeed, by the women selling sex. It was an accusation applied to certain
women by the colonial—and later the independent Egyptian—state. Indeed,
as we move farther back in time in western Europe (the region which would ul-
timately export the concept of prostitution around the world in the nineteenth
and twentieth centuries), we see the term calving off from the more general
term “whore”, which was used to describe “disreputable” women of all sorts.
In spite of the theoretically more precise typification of “prostitute”, however,
colonial authorities the world over (and, indeed, authorities in metropolitan
states) applied the term to ordinate51 a bewildering variety of instrumentalist
exchanges of sex which did not neatly slot into rationalized, essentialized legal
concepts regarding prostitution.
We thus find in Cairo, Bruges, Buenos Aires, Florence, Nigeria, Rio de
Janeiro, Mexico City, Paris, Sydney, and many other places the odd category of
“clandestine prostitute” which refers to women who are seen by the authorities
as “really” being prostitutes but have somehow escaped official classification
as such. These women seem to have engaged in a variety of sexual exchange
practices in the course of other work or relationships. Given my experiences in
51 As in “to engage in ordination” either by ordaining or by defining social and legal ordinates.
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interviewing carioca women who exchange sex for presents, money, and nights
on the town with foreigners in the Lapa and Copacabana tourism districts, I
very much doubt that many—if not most—of these women saw themselves
as “prostitutes”. If we unreflexively adopt accusatory terms of this nature as
analytical categories, we run the risk of foregrounding state biopower and its
capacity to classify and ordinate behaviour and, once again, we lose track of
agency. It’s worth remarking in this context that very few men and women de-
sire to be labelled as a prostitute precisely because the term was developed
in the context of criminalization, state repression, and social stigmatization.
People are not “prostitutes”; they are engaged in activities classified by other
political and moral actors as “prostitution”. An agency-based understanding
of prostitution and its social organization should respect this distinction and
eschew the naturalization of state-originated legal and accusatory categories.
Conclusion: Seeing Beyond Prostitution to Agency
Prostitution studies have suffered from two major vices: an ethnocentric ten-
dency to view prostitution from “the top down” via a framework of naturalized
moral and political standards, and the reification and unreflective use of ac-
cusatory categories created by state ordination. Both of these problems have
militated against a relational understanding of sex work as cultural phenom-
ena and eschewed the recuperation of agency by foregrounding macro-scale
social structures and (more problematically) legal accusations in descriptions
of sex work.
The histories collected in this volume lay out a rich variety of phenomena
that have been labelled “prostitution” and allow us to envision how much work
still needs to be done in order to fully understand these phenomena and their
relationships to surrounding cultural categories. If nothing else, the articles
presented here serve as a warning to those who would attempt to homoge-
nize and flatten the intersection between sex and work into a one-size-fits-all
category.
We can, however, see certain global trends in the material presented here
that relate specifically to the question of agency and the organization of sex
work. One of the most important of these are the laws that have been made
with regards to prostitution over the past 500 years. Simplifying (but not great-
ly), we can say that the hegemonic legal structures through which prostitution
is conceived in the world today seem to have been born in modern Europe
during the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and exported via colonial
imperialism throughout the rest of the world. It is notable in this respect that
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some of the first globalized international treaties ever signed dealt with the
migration and ordination of “fallen” or “disreputable” women, antedating the
League of Nations by several years.
The rubrics of prostitution have thus been internationalized almost exclu-
sively according to western models and this situation continues today with
surprisingly little effective contestation. Basically, there seem to be three main
models of prostitution legislation that have come out of the West over the past
few centuries: regulation, abolition, and prohibition. Much ink has been spilled
dealing with the supposed benefits and pitfalls of these systems, but few peo-
ple have noted their inherent similarity: all three legislative models presume
that prostitution is a problem and seek to address that rather than address the
demands, desires, and issues of people engaged in sex work. Furthermore, all
three criminalize certain aspects or forms of prostitution, situating the sale of
sex as essentially a problem to be managed by the police rather than by other
social authorities. Finally, all three turn a blind eye to certain socially accept-
able exchanges of sexual-reproductive capacities for sustenance, most particu-
larly in the context of monogamic, patriarchical, and heterosexual marriage.
Most of the articles presented here chart a shift from the “French model” of
regulation to the “British model” of abolition and on to (in certain cases) what
could arguably be called the “American model” of prohibition. It is notable
that these shifts occurred more or less around the same time, which is a clear
indication that they were not being generated solely by local conditions but
rather also by international pressures. It is also striking that these shifts from
policy to policy created changes in the forms of sexual commerce occurring
“on the ground” but never eliminated or even provably reduced the incidence
of prostitution. None of the three policies have ever come close to meeting
their stated moral and political goals in any of the countries studied here.
They have, however, repeatedly reformulated the social and legal constraints
around which prostitution must organize. One can argue, then, that the only
proper way to study the effects of laws on prostitution is through a relational
understanding that works from the ground up; analysing what limitations or
opportunities laws present for sex workers is a much more fertile field for so-
cio-historical research which seeks to understand so-called prostitution than
the laws themselves and the stated goals of their architects.
From the point of view of the women engaging in prostitution, shifts from
one legal paradigm to another rarely appear as beneficial because they do
not contemplate sex work as anything other than a morally noxious category
which must be either done away with or segregated from respectable society.
In other words, again, these legal approaches seek to solve prostitution as a
problem and do not focus on the problems of prostitutes. Strikingly, it is almost
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impossible to find instances of government intervention which attempt to
situate sex workers as the primary stake-holders in the legislation being con-
templated in their name. The newest trend in prostitution law, the so-called
Swedish model, has been notorious in this respect, going so far as to deny sex
workers any possibility of having an active voice in their country’s prostitution
debates and instead medicalizing these women as mentally ill, addicted, or
brainwashed.52 Whether states see sex workers as “criminals” or “victims”, a
singular fact remains: they are rarely contemplated as full citizens in posses-
sion of their rights. Rather, they are understood, at best, as what anthropologist
Paul Amar calls “para-humans”: human subjects of governmentality “always
already-disabled or insecure, [victims] needing parallel, emergency, paralegal,
or extralegal protective action or rescue intervention in order to assume the
provisional status of citizen.”53
Given this, many politically-organized prostitutes have come to deeply dis-
trust the state as an ally or partner. In the words of Alice Raizel, a New Zealand-
based prostitutes’ rights activist and sex worker:
Trusting in the benevolence of those who reserve the right to destroy
you at the slightest shift in the political winds is both imprudent and
unprincipled. Power does not become your friend simply because it has
refrained from beating you for a decade. Certainly, if political dynamics
come out in momentary favor of a liberatory cause, one should take ad-
vantage of them, and some gratitude justly belongs to those who ably
do so. But believing that this represents some fundamental shift in the
nature of state or class power-structures is a dangerous illusion.54
Prostitution researchers should take these words to heart and seek to create
investigative projects that foreground the experiences, trajectories, and forms
of negotiation of the people involved in the sale of sex, prioritizing local con-
tingency rather than grand moral or political questions. In such a way of look-
ing at the world, even the category of “prostitute” itself must be contextualized
and interpreted with an eye to the dialectical relationship between individual
agency and social structures.
52 S. Dodillet & P. Östergren, “The Swedish Sex Purchase Act: Claimed Success and Docu-
mented Effects” (Unpublished paper presented at the workshop Decriminalizing Prosti-
tution and Beyond: Practical Experiences and Challenges, 2011).
53 Paul Amar, The Security Archipelago: Human-Security States, Sexuality Politics, and the End
of Neoliberalism (Durham [etc.], 2013), p. 41.
54 Personal communication, 4 April 2013.
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chapter 30
Coercion and Voluntarism in Sex Work
Mark David Wyers
Introduction
Investigated in terms of a broad perspective that takes into account concrete
historical and geographical particularities, the concepts of coercion/volun-
tarism as they apply to sex work appear to raise more questions than they an-
swer. In this study, I intend to scrutinize the concepts as they have evolved and
been invoked historically, and through an exploration of how they have been
brought up in debates and lived out on the ground in disparate time periods
and urban settings around the world, I hope to problematize the notions and
examine the inner contradictions they reproduce. Coercion/voluntarism are
intimately bound up with the issues of violence and slavery, which are prob-
lematic concepts in themselves, but still we must take those into account as
well in the construction of a theoretical approach capable of teasing out com-
plexity rather than essentializing moments of rupture and continuity. For me,
the first question that comes to mind when thinking about these concepts is:
How useful are they as a means of thinking about sex work? If all forms of sold
sex represent acts of male violence, as some abolitionists argue via a singular
model of coercion, are there no spaces at all for agency in the various ways
that sex work suffuses the urban spaces of cities around the world? Conversely,
if we posit a dichotomous coercion/voluntarism model in thinking about the
sexual economy, an approach that recognizes agency but also the reality of
force, what nuances might be elided? To begin an enquiry into these issues, I
intend to examine how these concepts evolved and have been employed and
discuss how they have impacted legislation and the people those laws target.
By taking a broad, global approach, I think it is important for us to ask: Is this
model perhaps a western notion that still today propagates latent imperialist
modes of thinking? Through an examination of its inner workings in colonial
and post-colonial settings, in addition to the “western world”, I think it is im-
portant to also ask: What are the moral underpinnings of the supposed coer-
cion/voluntarism divide, and have these led to a conceptual bias that leads to
blind spots when dealing with sold sex as an aspect of social history? Is it pos-
sible to “rescue and rehabilitate” this concept? Should we even try?
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776 Wyers
Legal Constructs of Prostitution
The idea of coercion/voluntarism as a popular discourse about sold sex de-
veloped in western Europe and the United States in the eighteenth and nine-
teenth centuries. The concept emerged along with the interrelated issues of
entrenched modes of capitalist production and labour, pervasive processes
of medicalization of society and urban spaces, shifts in conceptualizations of
the relationship between the individual and society, and increasingly powerful
feminist movements. It is within this context that the issue of sex work arose
as a concern of public debate and government legislation as women began to
participate in greater and greater numbers in wage labour. Additionally, devel-
opments in transport led to large-scale migrations for work, leading to anxiet-
ies about women’s movement and place in society. Additionally, disease was
identified as a threat to urban environments, and prostitutes were vilified as
a critical vector in the spread of venereal diseases, which were perceived to
be existential threats to the state. This also went hand-in-hand with shifts of
what were perceived to be “proper” expressions of sexuality which prolifer-
ated along with an explosion of discourses on sex from the points of view of
such fields as psychology, biology, sociology, and anthropology. Feminist move-
ments, revolted by the state-sanctioned system of registered prostitution that
led to the forced registration of women selling sex, pushed for the abolition of
regulationism and, ultimately, as the social purity movement gained political
clout, sought the eradication of all forms of sold sex. Adopting a similarly pur-
ist stance, Christian missionaries abroad set themselves the task of “saving”
women through missions and interventions. Taking up prostitution as a “social
affliction”, researchers over the past two centuries have set about trying to un-
derstand this “problem”, and the predominant analytical models that emerged
were coerced prostitution and its hotly debated opposite, voluntary sex work.
This either/or understanding of sold sex would go on to inform how sold sex
has been discussed to date, but how did these concepts emerge and in what
ways have they impacted how we perceive sold sex?
The urban overviews for this project and other historical research on the
issue of sex work indicate that in early modern Europe1 there was a general
1 See, for example, James A. Brundage, “Prostitution in the Medieval Canon Law”, Signs 1
(1976), pp. 825–845; Marjorie Ratcliffe, “Adulteresses, Mistresses and Prostitutes: Extra-
marital Relationships in Medieval Castile”, Hispania 67 (1984), pp. 346–350; Ruth Mazo Kar-
ras, “The Regulation of Brothels in Later Medieval England”, Signs 14 (1989), pp. 399–343;
Randolph Trumbach, “Sex, Gender and Sexual Identity in Modern Culture: Male Sodomy
and Female Prostitution in Enlightenment London”, Journal of the History of Sexuality, 2
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Coercion and Voluntarism in Sex Work 777
attern in which sold sex was perceived to be more or less as a “necessary evil”,
p
and although there were bouts of moral fervour accompanied by efforts to
eradicate it,2 in general the authorities were content with maintaining a modi-
cum of control over this “sin” via forms of registration and taxation. In early
modern Tuscany, for example, there were various conceptualizations of what a
“prostitute” was, ranging from streetwalkers to brothel prostitutes and parlour
whores to courtesans, and authorities were often asked to determine whether
or not women engaging in promiscuous behaviour “counted as public prosti-
tutes”. But rather than being perceived by the lower classes as a crime or a sin
per se, it appears that prostitution was often seen as a “rational strategy” for
survival.3 Similarly, in early modern Bruges, there was ambiguity surrounding
terminology; the terms “whore” and “dishonest women” did not just refer to
women who sold sex, but also to women who committed adultery and sexually
active women who were unmarried.4 Similar terminological vagueness was
common in early modern London.5 By the mid-eighteenth century, the notion
of the “sinfulness” of sold sex carried out by “bad women” began shifting to-
wards discussions of it as a “condition”6 along with medicalizing discourses
on sexuality that sought to sequester prostitution in regulated zones to pro-
tect society from the “moral and physical” danger that regulationists claimed it
posed for society. In this process, prostitution as a term of legal jurisprudence
emerged. The creation of “the prostitute” as a body subject to state laws and as
an object of scientific enquiry involved a conceptual shift from her as a “bad
woman” to either a “victim” or a “sexual deviant”, depending on whether she
was perceived to be a victim of patriarchal and capitalist violence (the feminist
and abolitionist claim) or “genetically predisposed” to sexual perversion (the
regulationist argument); both of these conceptualizations, of course, centred
on notions about coercion and voluntarism.
The advent of the “victim” concept was predicated upon two mutually
self-supporting ideas promoted by nineteenth and early twentieth century
(1991), pp. 186–203; John K. Brackett, “The Florentine Onesta and the Control of Prostitution,
1403–1680”, Sixteenth Century Journal 24 (1993), pp. 273–300; Susan P. Conner, “Public Virtue
and Public Women”, Eighteenth Century Studies 28 (1994–1995), pp. 221–240; Diane Yvonne
Ghirardo, “The Topography of Prostitution in Renaissance Ferrera”, The Journal of the Society
of Architectural Historians 60 (2001), pp. 402–431.
2 Rhys Glyn Llwyd Williams, “Towards a Social History of London Prostitution”, unpublished
paper collected for the project “Selling Sex in the City”, 2013; Conner, this volume, Paris.
3 Turno, this volume, Florence.
4 Mechant, this volume, Bruges.
5 Williams, “Towards a Social History”.
6 Conner, this volume, Paris.
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778 Wyers
abolitionists. First, many abolitionists and feminists claimed that chastity
was a characteristic of women and it should also be promoted among men,
who were thought of as having the potential to be predatory. Secondly, it was
claimed that no woman could willingly sell her body for sex. This move in-
volved the replacement of the dualistic categories of “whore” versus “sexually
virtuous woman” with “good woman” and “good woman-but-fallen-victim”
stripped of agency, with men positioned as the active elements leading to her
“demise”. In contrast, proponents of state-regulated prostitution argued that
women who persisted in engaging in sold sex were sexually deviant by nature
and that this deviance was often hereditary, thus effecting a shift from the no-
tion of the “bad woman” to a “deviant” which the state needed to control.
“White Slavery” and Narratives of Victimhood
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as panic over “white
slavery” gave way to international movements against “trafficking in women
and children” launched by feminist groups and later the League of Nations,
the notion of the “victim” persisted. Although the abolitionist movement was
by no means monolithic, with some reformers collapsing “white slavery” and
prostitution while others maintained that there were differences between the
two, it was increasingly argued that the regulationist system had to be eradi-
cated for the reason that it promoted trafficking in women.7 At the heart of
the debates was the issue of consent. Regulationists argued that prostitution
was a “necessary evil”8 requiring scientific legislation and control, and that
“while ‘innocent’ women needed protection from immorality, it was society
that needed protection from immoral women”9 who were by nature dissolute.
As Jo Doezema points out,
In this, feminist abolitionists shared a view of women’s sexuality that
was common to all the various anti-slavery campaigners. Women were
7 Jo Doezema, “Loose Women or Lost Women? The Re-emergence of the Myth of White
Slavery in Contemporary Discourses of Trafficking in Women”, Gender Issues, 18 (2000),
pp. 23–50, 25.
8 The classic “safety valve” argument posited that male sexuality needed release or else it would
be channelled into “improper” modes of expression such as homosexuality, or it would result
in increased harassment of “virtuous” women in public.
9 Jo Doezema, “Who Gets to Choose? Coercion, Consent, and the un Trafficking Protocol”,
Gender and Development, 10 (2002), pp. 20–27, 22.
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Coercion and Voluntarism in Sex Work 779
considered sexually passive, which made them more “virtuous” than
men, but, paradoxically, once that virtue was “lost” through illicit sexu-
al behaviour, women’s sexual nature became dangerous. Consequently,
calls for the need to protect women’s purity alternated with attempts to
reform and discipline prostitutes.10
In subsequent decades, the League of Nations assembled an “expert” commit-
tee to study the problem of the international “trade” in women, and the con-
cept of the “victim” persisted, leading to a conceptualization in which coercion
and agency did not occupy a continuum. As pointed out by Magaly Rodríguez
García, “A rationale suggesting that deceit and agency are necessarily exclu-
sionary led the experts—along with many contemporary scholars and radical
feminists—to conclude that most women found in foreign brothels were not
free agents and thus that ‘a traffic of considerable dimensions’ did exist.”11 The
only agency ascribed to women by the League’s Body of Experts was the mo-
ment when a woman chose to stop being a prostitute and turned herself over
for rehabilitation. It was also argued that procurers were the “agents of traffic”
for the reason that women would not of their own volition move to another
country for the purposes of prostitution.12 Among female delegates in the
League, this approach was grounded on a “strong gendered logic” positing that
men represented the active danger for women, while male delegates tended to
focus on female vulnerability.13
Positioning all women who sell sex as victims is a precarious balancing act,
however. In the 1930s, the League of Nations began to increasingly employ psy-
chiatrists in analyses of prostitution.14 Its publication dating from 1938 titled
Enquiry into Measures of Rehabilitation of Prostitutes is indicative of how the
positioning of prostitutes as victims was in fact an uneasy move that was subtly
undermined by latent notions of female sexual deviancy, a carryover from the
regulationist argument that “confirmed prostitutes” were genetically inclined
10 Ibid., p. 23.
11 Magaly Rodríguez García, “The League of Nations and the Moral Recruitment of Women”,
International Review of Social History, 57 (2012), pp. 97–128, 108.
12 Ibid., p. 109. Rodríguez García points out that while there were dissenting voices within
the League of Nations on the matter of consent, such as one delegate who argued that a
piece of legislation under consideration at the time could lead to the “infringement of the
liberty of adult women who consent to prostitution”, these arguments went unheeded in
favour of the idea that such “unfortunate” women could never willingly engage in prosti-
tution abroad.
13 Ibid., p. 122.
14 Ibid., p. 104.
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to prostitution. Stating that “the existence of licensed houses was undoubt-
edly an incentive to traffic, both national and international” and that abolish-
ing licensed brothels was the best way to reduce that traffic, the report noted
“whenever licensed houses are closed, it is essential that measures should be
adopted to rehabilitate the women concerned.”15 Enquiry into Measures of Re-
habilitation of Prostitutes was compiled through data collected via question-
naires that were sent to fifteen governments regarding the social profiles of
registered prostitutes in their countries with the ostensible aim of providing
a framework for thinking about methods of rehabilitation. Taking a psycho-
logical approach to profiling prostitutes, the report sought to determine the
reasons why these women had become “victims” by determining their ages,
upbringings, education levels, employment histories, and age at which they
began prostitution. Notably, however, data about past criminal convictions
was also collected, hinting at ways that sex workers were construed as “social
deviants”, and in a similar way, the recording of intelligence levels echoes regu-
lationist arguments which drew on eugenic discourses of hereditary deviance;
in fact, even though the report is ostensibly about rehabilitation of “trafficking
victims”, the report’s conclusion notes:
[…] some of the most powerful predisposing causes of prostitution seem
to lie in the mentality and temperament of the individual. A third of the
women described in this enquiry were considered to be mentally abnor-
mal or sub-normal, and this, for the most part, without special tests or
examination by expert psychologists. Whenever the examination was
more thorough, an even larger number was found to be below normal.
Only a few of the women were considered to be imbecile or insane; in the
great majority, the defects were too slight to entitle them to special care
or treatment, although apparently serious enough to handicap them in
their life and work.16
15 League of Nations, Enquiry into Measures of Rehabilitation of Prostitutes (Part i), Prosti-
tutes: Their Early Lives, p. 5.
16 Ibid., p. 64. There were substantial differences, however, regarding perceptions of prosti-
tutes’ intelligence levels, and some were less nuanced than others, as indicated in some
unpublished reports on the issue. Consider, for example, the following statement, which
is indicative of the League’s contradictory position on the topic: “The United Kingdom
Government remarks in its analysis that ‘It’s a matter of some surprise that so many of the
women concerned have been considered to be of normal or superior intelligence’. This re-
mark applies to most of the answers received. Dr. Kemp, however, argues in his study that
of the prostitutes examined 80 per cent were retarded, debile, or imbecile, which suggests
that the mental assessment might have been different in some of the other cases if the
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Coercion and Voluntarism in Sex Work 781
Two other characteristics pointed out by the experts as regards brothel workers
were “laziness and the love of luxury” and a team specialist, Dr. Kemp, “attrib-
uted the aversion to work, in many of the women he examined, to a mental
condition.”17 This positioning of trafficking victims within frameworks of
criminality, deviance, and feeblemindedness is indicative of two interrelated
notions. First, the implicit idea is that (although they are victims) these wom-
en “are doing something wrong”; however, because of a “lack” of intelligence,
they are simply not capable of making rational decisions, nor are they able
to engage in “proper” forms of labour. This rather uncomfortable compromise
reflects an inherent moral judgement of “improper” expressions of female
sexuality (criminal), while at the same time writing off this “deviance” as the
result of mental deficiency, allowing for the rehabilitation project to proceed;
all these women need is to be rescued from the shackles of sexual slavery and
obtain some education to be set “free”.
The “white slave scare” and “trafficking in women” have functioned as cul-
tural myths which “were indicative of deeper fears and anxieties concerning
national identity, women’s increasing desire for autonomy, foreigners, immi-
grants and colonial peoples.” In this context, as greater numbers of women be-
gan migrating abroad in search of work, the “white slave scare” was transformed
into a larger project based on a “need to regulate female sexuality under the
guise of protecting women”, and in the process, the notion of the “innocent”,
unwilling victim was perpetuated:
Only by removing all responsibility for her own condition could the
prostitute be constructed as a victim to appeal to the sympathies of the
middle-class reformers, thereby generating public support for the end
goal of abolition. The “white slave” image as used by abolitionists broke
down the old separation between “voluntary” sinful and/or deviant pros-
titutes and involuntary prostitutes. By constructing all prostitutes as vic-
tims, it removed the justification for regulation.18
examination had been made from a psychiatric standpoint.” League of Nations, Enquiry
into Measures of Rehabilitation of Adult Prostitutes, Traffic in Women and Children Com-
mittee, Part iii (unpublished report), 1936, p. 17. I would like to thank Magaly Rodríguez
García for bringing my attention to this report.
17 Ibid., p. 65.
18 Doezema, “Loose Women or Lost Women?” p. 24. For further discussions of the cultural
construction of myths surrounding “white slavery”, see also Frederick Grittner, White Slav-
ery: Myth, Ideology and American Law (New York, ny, 1993); Ruth Rosen, The Lost Sister-
hood: Prostitution in America, 1900–1918 (Baltimore, ml, 1982); Judith Walkovitz, City of
Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in late-Victorian London (Chicago, il, 1992).
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Various devices were employed in constructing the innocence of the victim,
such as highlighting her youth/virginity and whiteness, in addition to attribut-
ing to her an “unwillingness” to sell her body for sex. This in turn was bolstered
by the construction of the “evil trafficker”, a male figure, and in this way the
realities underpinning prostitution were simplified.
Contested Hegemonies: The Paradox of the Agentic “Victim”
Following World War i, the “racially charged term white slavery was dropped
from the parlance of the League of Nations”19 to be replaced with the term
“trafficking”, but the discourse of the victimization of women who sell sex
was retained. And the victim’s dark counterpart, the impossible “voluntary”
prostitute continued her shunted existence in the eyes of the law, subject to
state violence, incarceration, and deportation in the case of migrants—as is
the case in most countries today. International decrees have often retained an
obsession with the idea of the “victim”. In 1910, the same year in which the In-
ternational Convention for the Suppression of White Slave Traffic was promul-
gated as an expansion of legislation drafted in 1904, the United States passed
the Mann Act, which initiated criminal penalties for individuals caught in the
transportation of women across state lines for the purposes of prostitution.
However, the majority of people convicted under the law were women volun-
tarily engaging in sex work, not procurers (as a reflection of the racial aspect of
discourses on “white slavery”, the law was also used to charge non-white men
with the “crime” of having relations with white women).20 This is the grey area
inhabited by “bad” women who were found, in fact, to not be “victims of the
slave trade” but rather women whose sexuality transgressed moral and ethical
boundaries.
While the agreements dating from 1904 and 1910 did not conflate “white
slavery” with prostitution, in 1933 the League of Nations Convention for the
Suppression of the Traffic in Women was inherently abolitionist, as was the
League’s Draft Convention for Suppressing the Exploitation of the Prostitution
of Others (1937) which was intended to fill the gap in the existing conventions
by protecting adults of either sex against procuration, even when they con-
sented and were not taken abroad; this would later constitute the basis of the
un Convention promulgated in 1949. The agreement dating from 1933 urged
19 Penelope Saunders, “Traffic Violations: Determining the Meaning of Violence in Sexual
Trafficking Versus Sex Work”, Journal of Interpersonal Violence, 20 (2005), pp. 343–360, 346.
20 Doezema, “Who Gets to Choose?” p. 24.
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Coercion and Voluntarism in Sex Work 783
countries to actively punish “any person who, in order to gratify the passions
of another person, procures, entices or leads away, even with her consent, a
woman or girl of full age for immoral purposes to be carried out in another
country.”21 Perpetuating this discourse, in 1949 the United Nations issued the
Convention for the Suppression of the Traffic in Persons and Exploitation of
Prostitution of Others, an abolitionist document which promoted the punish-
ment of all parties involved in the facilitation of prostitution even if there is
consent.22 Following the fall of the Soviet Bloc and the increased liberalization
of economies around the world in the 1980s, large-scale international migra-
tion by both women and men has gathered pace, and correspondingly there
has been a resurgence in concerns about the movement of women’s bodies
across national borders. It has been argued that, “As in the earlier spate of in-
terest in ‘white slavery’ in the early 1900s, concerns about women’s movement,
women’s sexuality, women’s place in society, and women’s bodies, rather than
changes in trafficking itself or some objective interest in harm to women, are
driving the international focus on trafficking.”23 Not unexpectedly, the United
Nations has also taken up the issue, which has been marked by fierce debate on
the nature of women’s agency in migration.
The un Protocol to Suppress, Prevent and Punish Trafficking in Persons,
Especially Women and Children was finalized in 2000 after two years of strenu-
ous negotiations and feminist lobbying. The primary point of contention dur-
ing negotiations over the wording of the document was the notion of consent.
The Human Rights Caucus (hrc),24 arguing that sex work is a legitimate form
of labour, stated:
Obviously, by definition, no one consents to abduction or forced labour,
but an adult woman is able to consent to engage in an illicit activity (such
as prostitution, where this is illegal, or illegal for immigrants). If no one is
forcing her to engage in such an activity, then trafficking does not exist.25
In this way, the hrc (and sex workers’ rights activists) have utilized a dual
conceptualization of coercion/voluntarism, stating that a distinction must be
21 Ibid., p. 23. Emphasis added.
22 Saunders, “Traffic Violations”, p. 346.
23 Molly Dragiewicz, “Teaching about Trafficking: Opportunities and Challenges for Critical
Engagement”, Feminist Teacher, 18 (2008), pp. 185–201, 186.
24 The Human Rights Caucus is a conglomerate of ngos from Asia, Africa, eastern and west-
ern Europe, Latin America, and North America.
25 Cited in Doezema, “Who Gets to Choose?” p. 21.
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784 Wyers
made between voluntary and forced prostitution, with the latter represent-
ing a form of violence.26 Sex workers themselves have also made their voices
heard on the issue of coercion/voluntarism, particularly through the organi-
zation Network of Sex Work, which has argued, “Historically, anti-trafficking
measures have been more concerned with protecting ‘innocent’ women from
becoming prostitutes than with ensuring the human rights of those in the sex
industry.”27 The other camp in the debates over the Protocol is represented by
the Coalition Against Trafficking in Women (catw), which asserts that pros-
titution is itself inherently a violation of women’s rights and that trafficking
“should include all forms of recruitment and transportation for prostitution,
regardless of whether any force or deception take place.”28 Additionally, during
negotiations over the Protocol pro-abolitionist delegations pushed for a defini-
tion of trafficking that included all situations, even when women had consen-
sually agreed to migrate for sex work.29 Also, the International Human Rights
Network lobbied for prostitution to be defined as trafficking, and demanded
that the word “consent” not appear in the Protocol.30
As the above overview indicates, there are basically two approaches to the
issue of coercion/voluntarism as regards sold sex. The first, as espoused by
the hrc, promotes a dualistic model in which women can voluntarily engage
in sex work as a form of labour, but they can also be subject to coercion and
exploitation. In contrast, pro-abolitionist groups such as the catw employ
a singular model of coercion in which voluntarism is ideologically impos-
sible, as they claim that all forms of prostitution represent patriarchal vio-
lence against women; in this model, “trafficked” women, whether or not they
consciously consent to migration for sex work, are to be treated as victims.
26 Jo Doezema, “Now You See Her, Now You Don’t: Sex Workers at the un Trafficking Proto-
col Negotiation”, Social and Legal Studies, 14 (2005), pp. 61–89, 70. Influenced by the sex
workers’ rights movement, the Global Alliance against Trafficking in Women (gaatw)
has also argued that a distinction must be made between “trafficking in women/forced
prostitution” and “voluntary prostitution”. Doezema, “Loose Women or Lost Women?”
p. 33.
27 Saunders, “Traffic Violations”, p. 347.
28 Doezema, “Who Gets to Choose?” p. 21. Emphasis added.
29 Ibid. As regards the position held by catw, Doezema notes, “In the abolitionist feminist
version of the trafficking myth, the sex worker ‘disappears’ through the denial of the pos-
sibility of consent. As the space for consent dwindles to nothing, the myth of trafficking
grows to encompass all prostitution, and every woman selling sex becomes mythically
positioned as a slave.” “Now You See Her, Now You Don’t”, p. 74.
30 Saunders, “Traffic Violations”, p. 348.
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Coercion and Voluntarism in Sex Work 785
The latter approach has the effect of stripping women who engage in sex work
of agency, while at the same time hyperscrutinizing sex work and generating
discourses on migration that reproduce notions of “male agency” and “female
vulnerability”.
In legislation produced by the League of Nations in the early twentieth cen-
tury as regards trafficking, “women and children” were collapsed into a singular
object of analysis.31 Echoing this, contemporary discourses on migration make
the same conflation, as evident in the title of the un Protocol from the year
2000 which refers specifically to “women and children”. It has been pointed
out, however, that what is at work here is the issue of agency, or in the case of
women, the supposed lack thereof: “[T]his phrase ‘women and children’ con-
sistently dominates the issue [of migratory labour], to the point where the con-
tinuous repetition of the phrase has turned it into ‘womenandchildren’, which
can easily collapse into ‘women as children.’”32 In this dynamic, where women
are projected as “helpless” child-victims requiring protection,
The emphasis on innocence and vulnerability constructs a prohibi-
tively gendered trafficking victim. Men, and women who violate gender
boundaries of passivity, cannot access the trafficking discourse in order
to include their narratives as legitimate experiences within the current
framework. Furthermore, men are imagined as active agents, able to col-
lude and participate in smuggling and illegal migration, while women
(and children) are imagined as vulnerable innocents, not as agentive
subjects.33
Also, inherent in such formulations is the post-colonial notion that migrant
women “trafficked” from developing countries are in need of the protection/
guidance of the “West”,34 whether by “paternal” states or “maternal” women’s
organizations setting out to “save their helpless Eastern sisters.”
31 The category “women and children” occurs regularly in the names of the unit in the
League of Nations dealing with “human trafficking”, which was: The Advisory Commit-
tee on the Traffic in Women and Children, Advisory Committee on Traffic in Women and
Protection of Women, Advisory Commission for the Protection of Children and Young
People—Traffic in Women and Children Committee.
32 Pardis Mahdavi and Christine Sargent, “Questioning the Discursive Construction of Traf-
ficking and Forced Labor in the United Arab Emirates”, Journal of Middle East Women’s
Studies, 7 (2011), pp. 6–35, 16.
33 Ibid.
34 Ibid.
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Post-colonialism: Moral Authority and “Unfree” Bodies
Discourses that present women from developing countries, particularly in the
East, as “backward” and “uncivilized”, are often invoked in western-backed “in-
terventions” such as raids on brothels. As Gretchen Soderlund notes,
Too often Western feminists have participated in producing the victim
subjects that state actors step in to protect through the deployment of
military, legal, or law enforcement strategies. Victim discourse has been
implicated in the creation of feminists’ sometimes patronizing attitude
toward non-Western women onto whom victim status is projected.35
Of course, there can be widely varying amounts of agency even within cases
of coercion, and this also depends on how agency is defined. “Victimization
frameworks […] often wrest autonomy from women and place it in the hands
of states configured as masculine protectors.”36 Doezema similarly has point-
ed out that “[p]ictured as poor, naive, and ‘unempowered’, women from the
third world or former communist countries are perceived as unable to act as
agents in their own lives or to make an uncoerced decision to work in the sex
industry.”37 Such women are “in need of rescue”, and in the process of being
saved, “through her, the superiority of the saving western body is marked and
maintained”38—indicative of the ways that coercion can be deployed in a way
that determines who speaks for who and from which “higher” moral ground.
In light of this,
The “third-world prostitute”, oppressed by tradition and religion, exploit-
ed by western patriarchal capitalism, carrying the baggage of the colonial
legacy of presumed backwardness and sexual innocence, is the perfect
35 Gretchen Soderlund, “Running from the Rescuers: New us Crusades against Sex Traffick-
ing and the Rhetoric of Abolition”, Feminist Formations, 17 (2005), pp. 64–87, 82.
36 Ibid., p. 72.
37 Doezema, “Loose Women or Lost Women?” p. 37. Doezema also notes, “It is by no means
only western feminists who treat third-world sex workers as child-like and unable to
speak for themselves. Third-world anti-trafficking activists can also take a ‘matronizing’
stance towards sex workers. The catw lobby in Vienna had many third-world activists
who, with the rest of the lobby members, supported a definition of trafficking in women
that collapsed trafficked women and children into a single category.” “Now You See Her,
Now You Don’t”, p. 73.
38 Jo Doezema, “Ouch! Western Feminists’ ‘Wounded Attachment’ to the ‘Third World Pros-
titute’”, Feminist Review, 67 (2001), pp. 16–38, 31.
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Coercion and Voluntarism in Sex Work 787
figure to hold up to the world as the image of sexually subordinated wom-
anhood. Her victimhood, established by over a century of feminist, aboli-
tionist and colonialist discourse, is indisputable.39
It is such an approach that lays the groundwork for a situation in which such
“victims” cannot speak for themselves but must be spoken for, and cannot act
for themselves so must be acted upon. This marks one difference between
discourses on trafficking in the early twentieth century and today; the “white
slavery” panic was about (“our”) western women being “trafficked” outwards,
whereas today it is largely about (“their”) women from “underdeveloped”
countries coming to the “West.” But in both cases, the popular argument is that
women cannot possibly make such a move voluntarily, but must have been co-
erced. As the overviews for this project (and also other case studies) indicate,
however, this does not always seem to be the case. The on-the-ground realities
are much more complex, and there is much more discontinuity and flux than
a singular definition of coercion can account for. As Holly Wardlow has sug-
gested, the commonly invoked notion of sex work, which itself is primarily a
western construct, cannot accommodate the multitude forms of exchanging
sex for money that have existed around the world.40 Indeed, a reading of the
overviews for this project demonstrates that sex work cannot even simply be
defined strictly in terms of monetary value, but also in terms of exchanges for
goods, power, and influence.
Problematics: A Way Forward?
A more nuanced framework for thinking about coercion/voluntarism seems to
be needed here. It has been argued that accounts of sold sex should be viewed
as “a continuum of forced and voluntary decisions”41 and that in current proto-
cols there is assumed to be “a neat line of demarcation between o ppositional
39 Ibid., p. 33. In their study of Muslim women and foreign prostitutes in Norway, Christine
M. Jacobson and Dag Stenvoll note that “foreign women who sell sex […] are constructed
as people who need ‘our’ help and protection from ‘the other men’ in order to become
emancipated and equal.” Christine M. Jacobson and Dag Stenvoll, “Muslim Women and
Foreign Prostitutes: Victim Discourse, Subjectivity, and Governance”, Social Politics: Inter-
national Studies in Gender, State and Society, 17 (2010), pp. 270–294, 275.
40 As cited by C. Heike Schotten in “Men, Masculinity, and Male Domination: Reframing
Feminist Analyses of Sex Work”, Politics and Gender, 1 (2005), pp. 211–240, 233.
41 “Conference Report: The Globalization of Sexual Exploitation”, Feminist Review, 67 (2001),
pp. 142–144, 143.
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categories of migration—voluntary and consensual versus involuntary and
non-consensual migration—an assumption that research shows to vastly
oversimplify the systems and processes that facilitate irregular migration in
the real world.”42 So, in light of this need for a sufficiently nuanced approach
that is sensitive to the cultural and temporal variations in discursive practices
of sold sex and the myths and discourses they have produced, it will be helpful
to read the overviews created for this project with the following questions in
mind: Just how is sold sex defined—or better yet, what particular understand-
ings of sold sex have been produced in cities around the world in the past four
centuries—and how does the concept of coercion/voluntarism fit in (or not fit
in) with these conceptualizations?
But before addressing the overviews, there is one last issue that must be ad-
dressed: How has it been determined that states of coercion/voluntarism oc-
cur? Ever since sold sex came to be constructed as an extremely politicized and
polarized object of “scientific” scrutiny in the eighteenth and nineteenth cen-
turies, first by regulationists and then by abolitionist groups and subsequent
organizations including, but of course not limited to, the League of Nations
and un, there has been an overwhelming concern (bordering on an obsession
with the fetishized body of the “victim”) with compiling statistics about why
individuals have engaged in sold sex and how many are doing so. Often, the
motivating factor is to “prove” something, to “find sensationalist stories that
grab the attention of readers and legislators”,43 but sensational stories func-
tion by smoothing over complexity and ambiguity in favour of black and white
depictions of so-called “facts”. It has also been pointed out that the figures pro-
duced by different sources “vary significantly, and these discrepancies in data
reflect the political convictions and motivations that shape and generate such
investigations.”44 Additionally, “many researchers may feel pressure from col-
leagues and activists to declare ‘whose side’ they take in relation to prostitution
and trafficking”, and organizations providing funding for research also tend to
support one view over the other (i.e., all forms of sold sex as coercion/violence
versus sex work that can be voluntary as well as forced).45 And of course the
42 Julia O’Connel Davidson, “Will the Real Sex Slave Please Stand Up?” Feminist Review, 83
(2006), pp. 4–22, 9.
43 Julie Cwikel and Elizabeth Hoban, “Contentious Issues in Research on Trafficked Women
Working in the Sex Industry: Study Design, Ethics and Methodology”, The Journal of Sex
Research, 42 (2005), pp. 306–316, 314.
44 Mahdavi and Sargent, “Questioning the Discursive Construction”, p. 13.
45 Saunders points out that “[f]unding restrictions on antitrafficking programs within
the United States Agency for International Development now prohibit agencies who
‘advocate prostitution as an employment choice or which advocate the legalization of
prostitution’ from receiving funds.” “Traffic Violations”, p. 352.
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theoretical approach that is used (for example trauma theory, human rights,
migration, sexology, legal aid) will determine the types of questions that are
asked and how they are perceived by respondents.46
But the difficulties don’t stop there. The individuals being interviewed may
have their own reasons for not providing “the desired facts” regarding their
situation:
Women’s vulnerability may also lead to situations where [they] are afraid
to provide information about their trafficking or migration history. Alter-
natively, they may provide researchers and authorities with false state-
ments to protect themselves, their families, and “those who have been
kind to them”; the latter may include traffickers or agents in the source
country.47
Alternatively, women who migrate illegally for sex work often know that they
will be denied rights as voluntary sex workers if they are caught, so they may
find it in their interests to project an image of victimization. Another issue is
that, out of fear of being tipped off to the police, individuals engaging in sold
sex outside of brothels, whether as temporary work or not, tend to keep a low
profile and hence may slip through statistics; for this reason, women working
in more permanent brothels, because they are more accessible, tend to pre-
dominate in the literature.48 Lastly, it should also be noted that a critical is-
sue is when an individual engaging in sold sex is interviewed. She may have
initially entered sex work voluntarily, but later found herself in a situation of
coercion through, for example, debt bondage. Conversely, she may have been
forced into sex work and later exited, but then returned due to a lack of other
means of income.49
As the discussion above indicates, the issue of coercion/voluntarism is
problematic at numerous levels, from the ideological to the statistical. Bear-
ing these difficulties in mind, however, and allowing them to highlight points
of difference and similarity in the nuances of the discursive production of
sold sex across time and geographies, will permit a reading of prostitution
46 Cwikel and Hoban, “Contentious Issues”, p. 310.
47 Ibid.
48 As regards women who have faced coercion, Cwikel and Hoban note: “There will never be
an accurate census of trafficked persons, because of the ramifications of their legal sta-
tus: they are mobile, may have illegal papers or lack documents such as national identity
cards or social security numbers….” Ibid., p. 312.
49 Joanna Busza, “Sex Work and Migration: The Dangers of Oversimplification—A Case
Study of Vietnamese Women in Cambodia”, Health and Human Rights, 7 (2004),
pp. 231–249, 232.
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as a highly complex social phenomenon embedded in contested notions of
women’s sexual agency. And, just what prostitution means is at the heart of the
matter of coercion/voluntarism. One of the most striking things that emerges
from the overviews is that sold sex often appears to be a fluid part of urban
environments, not always perceived as a full-time “occupation” and often dif-
fering from western practices of sold sex from which emerged the coercion/
voluntarism model.
Imperialisms of Sold Sex
Although the early modern Ottoman era bears numerous similarities as
regards sold sex to what was happening contemporaneously in Europe, the
historical outcome offers striking differences. In pre-modern Cairo (prior to
colonial control), sold sex had a public presence that was tolerated and subject
to governmental controls and taxation, as well as policing within the urban
environment. Although they were not part of the guild system, women who
sold sex were unofficially recognized but still, as in Europe, they were a mar-
ginalized group of people working in a highly informal sector that occasionally
was subject to repressive government measures.50 Sold sex in Ottoman Istan-
bul presents similar patterns. Although the taxation of sold sex was abolished
by the authorities in the sixteenth century, it was more or less tolerated until
the nineteenth century, when the municipal authorities initiated a system of
forced registration. There were periods in which the authorities actively sought
out and banished women engaging in sold sex, along with the men who were
caught with them, but these were generally times of social strain and women
selling sex were an easy target for authorities seeking to root out the “moral
corruption” of society. Pressure to eliminate prostitution from the streets of
Istanbul increased throughout the nineteenth century, most likely as a reac-
tion against “westernizing” reforms, increased social upheaval, and the spread-
ing belief that prostitution was a western import, and discourses on sold sex
became increasingly bound up with competing forms of nationalism as the
Ottoman Empire slowly disintegrated.51 Unlike in Europe in the nineteenth
and twentieth centuries, however, large-scale public discussions of “victims”
did not emerge in Cairo and Istanbul, and correspondingly, nor were there
large-scale projects to “rehabilitate” women who sold sex. The “necessary bad
woman” seems to have remained just that. Although systems of regulated pros-
titution were implemented in both cities, there was not a powerful backlash
50 Hammad, this volume, Cairo.
51 Wyers, this volume, Istanbul.
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Coercion and Voluntarism in Sex Work 791
against them as a form of patriarchal violence. There were active women’s
movements in Cairo and Istanbul that denounced the regulatory system,
but they lacked the political traction to push their views through the newly
founded Turkish government in Istanbul, or through the colonial government
in Cairo. While sex work was taken up as an object of “scientific knowledge”
in early twentieth century Istanbul (primarily by male authorities), the aboli-
tionist model of “coercion” did not become entrenched52 and the regulationist
system has remained in place in Turkey.
While sold sex in pre- and early-modern Europe and the Ottoman Empire
may have shared common characteristics as regards perceptions of sold sex as
a more or less “tolerable evil”, a different picture regarding notions of “coercion/
voluntarism” emerges in Lagos (and across Nigeria), India, and Shanghai. For
several places it has been suggested that European forms of prostitution did not
have an historical precedent and were in fact a colonial import.53 Within the
tolerated courtesan practices of Calcutta and Shanghai, and within traditions
in the area of precolonial Nigeria as regards autonomous female sexuality, the
coercion/voluntarism dichotomy does not appear to historically fit with local
practices. It seems, however, that the colonial introduction of regulated sys-
tems of licensed brothels and subsequent abolitionist legislation on trafficking
have reproduced the coercion model and its incumbent violence against wom-
en who sell sex, regardless of whether they are victims of deception/coercion
or voluntary sex workers, and the same holds true around the world.
The Power to Wound: Violence and Bodily Rights
Violence, whether perpetrated against “suspect” women by state actors,
third parties or otherwise, has long been part and parcel of sex work. While
abolitionism was initially not anti-prostitution per se, and while there were
dissenting voices within the movement as regards the abolishment of licensed
houses, as the movement gained momentum in the early twentieth century
it became increasingly associated with the purity movement and the push to
52 A brief experiment with abolition was attempted by the Turkish government in the early
1930s, but the system of registered sex work was quickly reinstated based on fears that
venereal diseases would undercut the country’s development, as Turkey was critically
underpopulated as the result of military losses during the Balkan Wars and World War
i along with the deportation and large-scale elimination of religious minorities. Mark
David Wyers, “Wicked” Istanbul: The Regulation of Prostitution in the Early Turkish Repub-
lic, (Istanbul, 2012).
53 Ekpootu, this volume, Lagos; Gronewold, this volume, Shanghai.
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completely eliminate regulation (and prostitution along with it).54 During and
after the “white slave scare”, anti-trafficking measures, which ostensibly sought
to “protect” women (read “innocent” women) by criminalising procuring and
the transport of women across state lines, were implemented across the globe.
Invariably, however, experience has shown that this legislation has been pri-
marily used against women, not the “profiteers” and “white slavers” it ostensi-
bly targets. Even where prostitution itself is not criminalized, anti-trafficking
laws have in effect pushed it underground and given the police and health au-
thorities wide-ranging powers. As Saunders notes:
Human rights studies have revealed that sex workers are mistreated by
traffickers and by immigration systems that stigmatize prostitutes, de-
port them when they seek assistance, sexually harass them with impuni-
ty, and leave them stateless. This observation dovetails with sex workers’
own reports of their most pressing issues in regard to abuse: confronta-
tions with the police and other state authorities such as immigration and
health workers who subject them to rape, beatings, harassment, arrest
and extortion.55
Saunders also points out that “[c]ampaigns and policies based on the impulse
to protect women from migration and sexual danger are frequently punitive,
just as campaigns against White Slavery punished bad women and demonized
migrant men.”56 In effect, women migrating for sex work in today’s world turn
to “irregular modes of migration” and seek assistance from “middle men and
recruiters who facilitate migration without contracts or visas” which opens up
a space for violence.57 Once in the destination country, they can be subject to
debt bondage58 and violent police raids and arrests.59
54 See Rodríguez García, “The League of Nations”, pp. 101–102.
55 Saunders, “Traffic Violations”, pp. 353–354. Of course, just as we must remain careful about
sex workers’ statements against alleged traffickers and violent pimps, we must also take
similar statements against public authorities and social workers with the same amount of
circumspect.
56 Ibid., p. 355.
57 Mahdavi and Sargent, “Questioning the Discursive Construction”, p. 28.
58 While illegal in most countries, forms of debt bondage in sex work appear to be quite
common. See for example Nuñez and Fuentes, this volume, Mexico City; Schettini, this
volume, Buenos Aires; Ekpootu, this volume, Lagos; Amir et al., this volume, Tel Aviv/Jaffa;
and Tracol-Huynh, this volume, Hanoi.
59 Busza, “Sex Work and Migration”, p. 245.
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Coercion and Voluntarism in Sex Work 793
In the overviews for this project, the theme of violence appears often, par-
ticularly as regards state authorities. With the widespread implementation
of regulation in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries,60 the police
were granted wide-ranging powers to detain women suspected of “illicit” be-
haviour, which could be broadly interpreted, resulting in increased violence
against women suspected of or actually engaging in sold sex.61 Anti-trafficking
laws, which similarly grant broad powers to state authorities, have also re-
sulted in widespread violence against sex workers at the hands of those who
are s upposed to defend human rights.62 Naturally this has led to sex workers’
suspicion of law enforcement officers, and in this disempowered position, in-
dividuals who sell sex are unable to apply to the authorities when they have
suffered at the hands of their clients.63
The violence associated with anti-trafficking legislation is predicated upon
morally-charged discussions of just who should be accorded the rights of a
“victim” of trafficking. As Doezema argues, “…women who knowingly migrate
to work in the sex industry and who may encounter exploitation and abuse are
not considered to have a legitimate claim to the same sorts of human rights
protections demanded for ‘trafficking victims’.”64 So in order to be accorded
human rights as a migrant, first an individual must prove that she did not con-
sent to sex work, and secondly that she was subject to suffering. It has also been
pointed out that violence has been utilized as a sensationalist discursive tool
in constructing notions of victimization; the more violence that has occurred,
the more entrenched the concept of the victim becomes: “The construction
of a ‘victim’ who will appeal to the public and policy makers demands that
she be sexually blameless.”65 The ultimate form of violent coercion is thus the
60 Of course not all countries have experimented with regulation. Among the exceptions are
Israel, Brazil, and the United States. However, Brazil has a system of de facto regulation
controlled by the police.
61 Absi, this volume, Bolivia; Turno, this volume, Florence.
62 Blanchette, this volume, Rio de Janeiro; Ekpootu, this volume, Lagos; Amir et al., this vol-
ume, Tel Aviv/Jaffa; Tracol-Huynh, this volume, Hanoi; Gronewold, this volume, Shang-
hai; Schettini, this volume, Buenos Aires; Nuñez and Fuentes, this volume, Mexico City;
Cabezas, this volume, Havana.
63 In the case of Bolivia, however, where sex workers’ rights have been afforded greater pro-
tection under law, violence in state-recognized brothels has fallen away, and it is primar-
ily outside these brothels beyond the purview of authorities that it persists. Absi, this
volume, Bolivia.
64 Doezema, “Loose Women or Lost Women?” p. 37.
65 Ibid., p. 36.
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enslavement of another human, and this shunts aside any and all notions of
voluntarism.66
Slavery and Sex Work
Despite its contested usage today as a popular trope of exploitation, sexual
slavery does have a historical precedent; as the overviews indicate, slavery has
been associated with bartered sex in locales around the world throughout his-
tory. In the pre-modern Ottoman Empire, imperial edicts forbidding the short-
term sale of female slaves for the purpose of prostitution suggest that this was
a social phenomenon that had alarmed the authorities to the extent that guilds
were entrusted with preventing it from occurring.67 In mid-nineteenth century
Rio de Janeiro, black slaves were bought and exploited as prostitutes, in addi-
tion to being wives and concubines,68 and a similar situation was reported in
Havana.69 But it appears that, at least in Mexico City, slaves were not always
forced into sold sex by their owners; in one case, the black slave of a judge man-
aged to buy her freedom from the earnings she made through prostitution.70
In Nigeria, slaves were used for sexual purposes as well, although this may not
have been perceived to be “prostitution” per se.71 As colonial Singapore grew
in size and importance, Chinese and Japanese families purportedly sold their
daughters into prostitution in a form of debt bondage,72 a situation that was
reported for late nineteenth-century Australia as well for women from im-
poverished rural regions of Japan.73 But at this point, it should be pointed out
that in terms of sex work, as it is popularly used in contemporary discourses,
the concept of slavery is problematic. At what point, for example, does debt
bondage, which was and continues to be a common form of violence against
66 Soderlund points out that both the Trafficking Victims Protection Act and un Protocol
“label the objects of anti-trafficking interventions ‘sex slaves’, a term that functions to
obliterate distinctions between involuntary and voluntary sex work.” “Running from the
Rescuers”, p. 74.
67 Wyers, this volume, Istanbul.
68 Blanchette, this volume, Rio de Janeiro.
69 Cabezas, this volume, Havana.
70 Nuñez and Fuentes, this volume, Mexico City.
71 Ekpootu, this volume, Lagos.
72 Herzog, this volume, Singapore.
73 Frances, this volume, Sydney/Perth.
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Coercion and Voluntarism in Sex Work 795
women the world over in the sex industry,74 shade into slavery? As Davidson
points out, can a clear line really be drawn between slavery and exploitative
“free” wage labour?
The problem is that even when understood as defined in the Slavery Con-
vention of the League of Nations (1926), which states that slavery is “the
status or condition of a person over whom any and all of the powers at-
taching to the right of ownership are exercised”, slavery implies a package
of unfreedoms, not all of which are unique to slavery.75
To use Davidson’s term, the “packaged” notion of “free versus unfree” elides
more than it reveals; perhaps it would be more useful to think of “a continu-
um of various degrees of servitude rather than a dichotomy”76 because such a
definition allows for nuances of experience in varying locales and time periods
rather than an essentialized either/or conceptualization based on the idea of
“total control” over another.77 In other words, what may be needed is an ap-
proach sensitive to the ranges of force and choice occurring in the sexual econ-
omy and the political and practical repercussions therein. As the overviews
for this project indicate, the vast array of experiences of sold sex in terms of
coercion and voluntarism, often overlapping and interweaved both temporally
and spatially, defy clear-cut categorization. In terms of on-the-ground realities,
74 See, for example, Nuñez and Fuentes, this volume, Mexico City; Schettini, this volume,
Buenos Aires; Ekpootu, this volume, Lagos; Amir et al., this volume, Tel Aviv/Jaffa; Tracol-
Huynh, this volume, Hanoi; Frances, this volume, Sydney/Perth. Of course, debt bondage
also exists outside the sex industry.
75 Davidson, “Will the Real Sex Slave Please Stand Up?” p. 6. Emphasis retained from the
original.
76 Ehud R. Toledano, “Late Ottoman Concepts of Slavery”, Poetics Today, 14 (1993),
pp. 477–506483. Toledano argues that in the late Ottoman Empire, there were various
categories of servitude which Europeans at the time lumped together under the term
“slavery” in the drive to abolish the slave trade. One such category was kul, which were
male “slaves” bought at a young age to be raised in the homes of elites for the purpose
of eventual service in high-ranking state positions which afforded financial control over
sizable amounts of wealth, a form of servitude which differed greatly from American and
British practices of agricultural slavery.
77 Davidson, “Will the Real Sex Slave Please Stand Up?” p. 6. Davidson points out that “…
not all slaves in the slave societies of the Caribbean and America, for example, were com-
pletely controlled by their owners—some were in a position to engage in autonomous
trading (including the trade of sexual services) and/or to engage in a range of different
types of resistance.”
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“identifying [victims of trafficking] in the sex sector requires the authorities
to distinguish between forced labour and extremely poor working conditions,
and this is no easy task”.78
Elusive Definitions: Just Who is a Sex Worker?
It is precisely the flux of sex work—in other words, a continuum of practices—
that defies neat classification. In Shanghai, for example, there are seven “quasi-
official categories” used for defining sold sex.79 It has been noted that in Bolivia,
one form of sex work involves the distribution of flyers to advertise, but even
within that approach, various practices occur with differing levels of exploita-
tion: “These ‘small ads’, which include photos of naked women and telephone
numbers, may be a front for women working independently, either alone or
with other women, or negotiated by police or pimps. On the whole, they reveal
the existence of women seeking to leave street prostitution, whilst also hint-
ing at a reality far more complex than the one-dimensional concept of sexual
exploitation…”80 It was noted that in Lagos multiple forms of sold sex inter-
weave throughout the urban geographies of the city: “High class prostitutes
or sex workers are mostly young women with more than secondary schooling,
often in university or other tertiary institutions like polytechnics”, while less
educated women are more likely to participate in higher-risk sexual services
as a survival strategy.81 In Singapore, as in many other cities in the world, “free-
lancers” operate in such places as nightclubs, karaoke bars, and strip clubs,82
but this may not be perceived as a full-time, life-long occupation. Increasingly,
the internet has become a commonly used means for sex workers to attract
clients. While this has opened up ways for sex workers to work independently,
it can also be involved in practices of exploitation by third parties, a reflection
of the fact that women who sell sex even within the same city and through the
same media can occupy radically different positions as regards autonomy and
control over their income. It should also be pointed out that not all women en-
gaging in the barter of sex for material gain perceive themselves as p rostitutes,
78 Ibid., p. 11.
79 Gronewold, this volume, Shanghai. These include a form of second wife, “contracted
wives”, escorts and hostesses, “ding dong girls” who call men at hotels, “massage parlour
girls”, streetwalkers, and itinerant sex workers “who service the poorest men.”
80 Absi, this volume, Bolivia.
81 Ekpootu, this volume, Lagos.
82 Herzog, this volume, Singapore.
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Coercion and Voluntarism in Sex Work 797
as in the case of female university students in Nigeria taking up “runs”83 or ru-
ral women seeking access to networks of empowerment through sex.84 Admit-
tedly, while this brief survey of practices of sex work is by no means exhaustive,
it does indicate the broad continuum of practices of sold sex that exists and
the spaces for voluntarism and coercion that are produced therein.
Another aspect of this continuum that should be mentioned here is the
temporal fluidity that tends to be a hallmark of the sex industry. As the ur-
ban overviews indicate, while it is taken up as a long-term survival strategy,
a significant number of individuals who engage in sex work have seen it in
varying ways. Some see it as a temporary means to supplement their existing
income,85 accumulate capital for entrepreneurial ventures,86 improve their so-
cial position,87 participate in global consumer culture,88 liberate themselves
from patriarchal systems of power or familial exploitation and seek financial
independence,89 meet potential marriage partners,90 or any number of com-
binations of the above motivations, thus problematizing the singular coercion
model even further. Discussions in the overviews on rescue and rehabilita-
tion are also revealing in this manner, indicating that “catching victims”91 in
the sex industry and “rehabilitating” them often results in prison-like living
conditions, violence, and inappropriate solutions that ignore the underlying
economic disparities that create situations in which sex work can be just one
83 Ekpootu, this volume, Lagos.
84 Gronewold, this volume, Shanghai. In Bolivia, many sex workers strongly object to the
term “prostitute” (puta): “They consider ‘prostitutes’ to be women who sleep around and
do not charge and, as they tell their clients, ‘the puta is your wife who has sex with other
men while you’re working.’” Absi, this volume, Bolivia.
85 See for example Mechant, this volume, Bruges; Conner, this volume, Paris; Hammad, this
volume, Cairo; Ekpootu, this volume, Lagos; Babere Kerata Chacha, “An Over-view History
of Prostitution in Nairobi: From the Precolonial Period to the Present”, unpublished paper
collected for the project “Selling Sex in the City”, 2013; Tracol-Huynh, this volume, Hanoi;
Herzog, this volume, Singapore.
86 Absi, this volume, Bolivia; Ekpootu, this volume, Lagos.
87 Blanchette, this volume, Rio de Janeiro; Schettini, this volume, Buenos Aires; Absi, this
volume, Bolivia.
88 Ekpootu, this volume, Lagos; Gronewold, this volume, Shanghai.
89 Absi, this volume, Bolivia; Ekpootu, this volume, Lagos.
90 Ekpootu, this volume, Lagos.
91 The act of “catching victims” is underpinned by the notion that the victims are perhaps
“not so innocent” after all. Davidson argues that while the un Protocol does provide pro-
visions for people trafficked for reasons other than prostitution, most countries’ efforts
primarily target individuals illegally migrating for sex work. Davidson, “Will the Real Sex
Slave”, p. 11.
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798 Wyers
choice among none, or a means of achieving desired ends with varying ranges
of freedom of choice.92 As the overview on Lagos notes, “The extent to which
coercion or choice determines a prostitute’s sexual activity is dependent on the
position she occupies in the hierarchy of sex work.” In this way, the question of
coercion is problematized by class: “the freedom of ‘choice’ is not so free but
can only be exercised by a select few”, as poverty places strict limitations on
the options that are available whereas higher levels of education and access to
networks of power increase a sex worker’s ability to negotiate with clients.93
Conclusion
Approached in light of these issues, it becomes clear that the array of practices
of sold sex in cities around the world cannot be neatly fitted into a dualistic
either/or model of coercion and voluntarism, much less be accounted for with
a western-based abolitionist framework that denies any space for agency at all.
As the overviews and other research have indicated, migrating women often
know they are going to be involved in sex work,94 but much of the time the
working conditions they find themselves in are far worse than anticipated. But
whether migrant or not, sex workers are vulnerable to multiple layers of co-
ercion and exploitation that can coincide with voluntary sold sex,95 and this
must be taken into consideration along with cases in which women are forced
either by severe economic duress and/or third parties, including families, to
engage in prostitution.96 In this way, it appears that it would be more useful
92 Cabezas, this volume, Havana. Soderlund notes, “Reports from sex worker rights organiza-
tions and testimonials from individuals who manage shelters suggest that rescue escapes
are exceedingly common throughout India and Southeast Asia. It appears that while
some women use brothel raids and closures as an opportunity to leave the sex indus-
try, others perceive the rehabilitation process itself as a punitive form of imprisonment
thereby complicating the captivity/freedom binary asserted by abolitionists.” Soderlund,
“Running from the Rescuers”, p. 66.
93 Ekpootu, this volume, Lagos.
94 Doezema, “Now You See Her, Now You Don’t”, p. 66.
95 “Evidence from countries, including Russia, Nepal and China, suggests that sex workers’
experiences fall along a continuum, with women who have undergone widely varying
degrees of choice or coercion working alongside each other in the same sites.” Busza, “Sex
Work and Migration”, p. 232.
96 As Mahdavi and Sargent in “Questioning the Discursive Construction”, p. 27, note, “To
universalize meanings and values that different individuals ascribe to sexual labour
would be to silence and deny the diversity of voices worldwide articulating manifold and
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Coercion and Voluntarism in Sex Work 799
in social history to think of sexual labour as a field in which varying degrees
of coercion can simultaneously occupy the same space as agentic labour in a
continuum that is in constant flux spatially and temporally. The conflation of
trafficking and “sexual slavery” so commonly found in the media and legisla-
tion, however, seeks to smooth over this complexity, leading to a situation in
which sex workers are awkwardly articulated as “criminal-victims” under laws
ostensibly put into place to protect them and thus subjected to even greater
violence.97 The overviews also suggest that far from seeing themselves as “en-
slaved”, some women take up sexual labour as a means of achieving financial
independence and liberation from male oppression, thus further problematiz-
ing the abolitionist-social purist notion that prostitution is the ultimate ex-
pression of patriarchal violence via exploitative coercion.
As a final note, perhaps we should consider just what hidden historical bag-
gage the term “consent” might be carrying with it and what implications that
could have on future research into histories of sexual labour. In current leg-
islation and debates over the rights of sex workers, consent is a pivotal term;
abolitionists argue that regardless of consent, prostitution is a breach of hu-
man rights, while sex workers and their supporters argue that so long as an
individual consents to sex work, it should be treated (and protected under law)
as any other form of labour and that victims of coercion should be protected as
well. A noteworthy point here is that in discourses on labour, the issue of con-
sent has been hyper-scrutinized in terms of female sold sex, not other forms
of work. We do not speak of whether or not men consent to cross borders to
find employment, nor if women consent to be employed as domestic workers,
whether migratory or not; there is also a rather notable silence on the issue of
queer sex workers in the coercion/voluntarism debates, likely because taking
into account same-gender sold sex would destabilize the argument that con-
structs prostitution as the violent male penetration of women. It would appear
that the sticking point here is an underlying moral prejudice about hetero fe-
male sexuality and how it “should” be practised. This is evident in the ways that
alleged victims of trafficking are accorded human rights, whereas women who
s ometimes contradictory reasons for entering into commercial sex work and experiences
with migration and sex work.”
97 Saunders in “Traffic Violations”, p. 354, points out that “It should not be surprising that
sex workers rarely seek formal channels to redress other forms of violence such as sex-
ual assault, physical assault, and robbery perpetrated against them. Although the anti-
trafficking framework works to define some of these migrants as victims, it also works to
heighten border and police controls, thus making migrant sex workers even more vulner-
able to abuse.”
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800 Wyers
voluntarily migrate for sex work are not—they are “bad women” who “get what
they deserve”. Also at work here is the conceptual blurring of the line between
promiscuity and prostitution, as evident in such expressions as “whore” and
“puta”, and ways that “suspect” women are subject to harassment by police,
reformers, or otherwise. This is significant: the underlying idea here is a mor-
alistic valuation which states that, along the lines of the anthropology of the
sexual deviant, if a woman agrees to sell sex (or be promiscuous for that mat-
ter) there is “something wrong with her”. Seen in this way, the idea of consent is
saturated in socially constructed notions of “proper” expressions of sexuality,
and as such carries with it prejudices that impact how we think about sexual
labour. Perhaps we need to “[overcome] the ‘voluntary/forced’ dichotomy, and
the concept of consent implicated in it, that the myth of trafficking both de-
pends on and propagates”.98 In this way, we may be better equipped to under-
take social histories of sexual labour and avoid the conceptual traps that our
tools of analysis might lay for us.
98 Doezema, “Now You See Her, Now You Don’t”, p. 82. It has also been argued that “instead of
focusing on whether the women were forced or not […] it is more important to look at the
living and working conditions of the women, to identify where violations of their rights
are occurring, and to find ways to ameliorate these”. Leyla Gülçür and Pınar İlkkaracan,
“The ‘Natasha’ Experience: Migrant Sex Workers from the Former Soviet Union and East-
ern Europe in Turkey”, Women’s Studies International Forum, 25 (2002), pp. 411–421, 411.
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chapter 31
A Gender Analysis of Global Sex Work
Elise van Nederveen Meerkerk
Introduction
Sexual objectification is the primary process of the subjection of women.
It unites act with word, construction with expression, perception with
enforcement, myth with reality. Man fucks woman; subject verb object.1
In an article published in Signs in 1982, Catherine MacKinnon claimed that
feminist theory, as opposed to traditional—as well as Marxist—approaches,
was “consciousness raising”. In her article MacKinnon argued that (hetero)
sexuality institutionalizes male dominance over women through the process
of women’s “sexual objectification”. Instead of analysing sexuality as a neutral
concept, she, and other feminists at the time, argued that sexuality should be
seen as a form of power that is embodied by gender and hence reinforces in-
equalities between women and men.2 Feminists since the 1970s have pointed
to the importance of sexual relations in constituting gender inequalities. By
emphasizing women as the “other”, or the second sex, women were “the sex”
in (otherwise unproblematized, male-defined) humanity. Thus, feminism
“helped to place sexuality at the centre of new historical narratives.”3 In fact,
an important reason for replacing the term “sex” with “gender” was to point to
the constructivist elements in social power relations and try to avoid biological
determinism in the power relations between men and women.4
Much of the debate in the field of the history of sexuality since then has cen-
tred on the question about whether we should understand it as a history of re-
pression or as the emancipation of women.5 Many of the earlier feminist studies
1 Catherine A. MacKinnon, “Feminism, Marxism, Method and the State: An Agenda for
Theory”, Signs, 7 (1982), pp. 515–544.
2 Ibid., pp. 526–533.
3 Victoria Harris, “Sex on the Margins: New Directions in the Historiography of Sexuality and
Gender”, The Historical Journal, 53 (2010), pp. 1085–1105.
4 Joan Scott, “Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis”, The American Historical Re-
view, 91 (1986), pp. 1053–1075.
5 Harris, “Sex on the Margins”, p. 1093.
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802 van Nederveen Meerkerk
seemed to view the history of sexuality in terms of the former, prostitution
being the sublimation of this oppression of women. According to MacKinnon,
both traditional and Marxist historians before the 1980s had wrongly under-
stood prostitution “either as mutual lust and degradation or an equal exchange
of sexual need for economic need” instead of subjugation.6 However, more re-
cent historical scholarship has revealed that women working in prostitution
have quite often not been purely victims falling prey to vicious male pimps
or souteneurs.7 Likewise, it has been pointed out that sex worker-client rela-
tionships can defy “traditional” male–female power dichotomies. Simone de
Beauvoir, who was generally very critical of prostitution, also noted that female
prostitutes can attain a certain degree of independence not only economically
via their earnings but also psychologically, as sleeping with numerous men
means that these women do not ultimately belong to any of them.8 Some his-
torians even contend that “[p]rostitution is an act of defiance, a resistance of
the social space to which women are traditionally confined, a countering of
prescribed notions of womanhood and thus a threat to patriarchy.”9 Indeed,
many feminist scholars as well as activists since the late 1980s have stressed that
prostitution should instead be called “sex work”, suggesting that free choice,
agency, and sexual liberation are its most important parameters.10
With this comparative overview, I would like to expose the more dynamic
and complex gender relations that exist in the history of sex work. It is undeni-
able that women throughout history have been objectified more than men and
that this ultimately relates to their sexuality and bodies. However, I believe it
would be ahistorical to construct from this a one-dimensional picture of fe-
male submission. This also holds true for the history of female sex workers.
While I by no means wish to discard the all too real experiences of violence,
harassment, and discrimination that women sex workers have suffered in the
past and present, most of the articles in this volume provide evidence for a
more nuanced history. Of course, female sex workers have often been in an
6 MacKinnon, “Feminism, Marxism, Method”, p. 531. See also Susan Migden Socolow,
“Women and Crime: Buenos Aires, 1757–97”, Journal of Latin American Studies, 12 (1980),
pp. 39–54.
7 For example, women sometimes “recruited” their own pimps. Magaly Rodríguez García,
“The League of Nations and the Moral Recruitment of Women”, International Review of
Social History, 57 (2012), pp. 97–128, 110–111.
8 Simone de Beauvoir, De tweede sekse: Feiten, mythen en geleefde werkelijkheid (Utrecht,
2000), p. 662.
9 Ekpootu, this volume, Nigeria.
10 Sheila Jeffreys, “Prostitution, Trafficking and Feminism: An Update on the Debate”,
Women’s Studies International Forum, 32 (2009), pp. 316–320, 316.
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A Gender Analysis of Global Sex Work 803
unfavourable position, but they still generally had room to manoeuvre and at
times could exert outright power over their male clients or pimps. Also, al-
though we know relatively little about the history of male or transvestite/trans-
gender prostitutes, some of the chapters here suggest that men have mostly
not been very high up in the social hierarchy of sex workers. Moreover, female-
female relationships can also result in highly unequal terms, for instance be-
tween madams and the prostitutes in their brothels.
I want to explore these gender dimensions of sex work on several levels.
First of all, I will analyse them on the level of the labour market. To what ex-
tent was prostitution considered to be work in different times and places of
the world? And, while we know that in most societies women and men have
had different ranges of access to professions, how did the existence of such a
gendered labour market affect women’s entrance into prostitution? Secondly,
I aim to investigate the role of gender relations in intermediation. To what ex-
tent have relationships between procurers and sex workers been influenced by
gender? Have there been, for instance, noticeable differences between pimps
and madams in this respect? Thirdly, I will deal with prostitute-client rela-
tions. As clients were and are often (but not always) of a different sex than
their “service providers”, gendered power relations come into play. This chapter
therefore also looks into male and transvestite/transgender prostitution. Last-
ly, I will deal with prostitutes in relation to their families. As daughters, sisters,
or mothers they have had specific gender-related responsibilities and in the
family context certain expectations have existed. Of course there are myriad
ways in which families have responded to a family member involved in pros-
titution; they may disapprove of and even expel a family member who works
as a prostitute; they may simply ignore her activities, especially when she has
(temporarily) migrated; they may support her; and, at the other extreme of the
spectrum, family members may provide a network for prostitutes to perform
their work by selling their daughters or wives or even doing the work of procur-
ing themselves. On all of these levels, the rich urban overviews in this volume
offer information that can be used to draw conclusions about gender relations
in sex work over the past five centuries.
Sex Work in the Gendered Labour Market
In this section I investigate the place of prostitution in the labour market in the
course of the last few centuries. The editors of this volume have explicitly de-
fined prostitution as “a societal phenomenon as well as a form of labour”, but
not all historical agents nor all historians have regarded it as work. Therefore,
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804 van Nederveen Meerkerk
I will briefly discuss this issue first, mostly by drawing upon the information in
the urban overviews presented here. Secondly, labour markets in the past and
present have tended to be highly segmented based on class, ethnicity, and es-
pecially gender. Many of the chapters in this volume indeed seek out explana-
tions for the occurrence of sex work within the scope of the unequal access to
the labour market available to men and women. Therefore, I will pay attention
to prostitution in relation to labour alternatives for women. Lastly, this section
will address what has been called the “outsourcing of women’s subordination”,
meaning either poor women from poor countries being drawn to wealthier
countries to perform sex work, or sex tourism by westerners in poor regions of
the world.11 Are we indeed witnessing a new global gender division of labour
in this respect or does history refute this image?
Sex Work as Work?
The general idea of prostitution as “sex work” was developed by sex workers’
rights organizations in the 1980s.12 This does not mean that prostitutes did not
regard themselves as workers before this period or that all prostitutes since
then have considered themselves to be workers, but the issue has been on the
(international) political agenda since then. As mentioned in the introduction,
this was related to the more general shift in feminist views on prostitution as
an exponent of women’s submission to women’s freedom. In my opinion, both
the proponents of prostitution as “female (sexual) freedom” and of prostitu-
tion as “female (sexual) submission” make it difficult to analyse prostitution
as “work” because both tend to sublimate the female body as a symbol for (all
women’s) agency or lack thereof. After all, both interpretations grant a much
broader, cultural-ideological and psychological dimension to prostitution and
thus to the women practicing it. However, as Harris has recently stated, “The
prostitute engages in sex for money, but this is entirely separate from how she
might define her sexual self.”13 In other words, we need to avoid conflating the
act of sex work with prostitutes’ (sexual) identities.
In order to historically analyse prostitution as work, it is thus important to
ascertain to what extent prostitutes themselves, as well as the societies they
lived in, considered their activities as work. This is of course a difficult task, as
11 Jeffreys, “Prostitution, Trafficking and Feminism”, p. 317. See also Sheila Jeffreys, The Indus-
trial Vagina: The Political Economy of the Global Sex Trade (London, 2009).
12 Gail Pheterson and Margo Saint James (eds), A Vindication of the Rights of Whores (Seattle,
1989); Valerie Jeness, Making It Work: The Prostitutes’ Rights Movement in P erspective
(New York, 1993).
13 Harris, “Sex on the Margins”, p. 1096.
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A Gender Analysis of Global Sex Work 805
the voices of the “subaltern”, most notably women, do not easily emerge from
archival sources. Moreover, views on sold sex as “work” are definitely histori-
cally and geographically contingent. Also, societal and even juridical norms
may have worked out rather differently in practice.
In the preindustrial period in many of the regions under study here, pros-
titution was not necessarily regarded as a profession as such. Sexual offences
were mostly treated under the more general umbrella of “adultery”, which was
a crime for men and women alike, although women were more likely to be
prosecuted for it. In Russia, for example, the ecclesiastical literature did not
distinguish between women who slept with men to whom they were not mar-
ried for money and those who did it for other reasons. Both categories of wom-
en were called bludnitsa (“a woman who has gone astray”) in the tradition of
the Slavonic Church, and both were equally subject to judgement by the eccle-
siastical authorities.14 In seventeenth-century Florence, adultery committed
by women was perhaps even considered to be worse than prostitution, “as it
undermined the institution of the family and challenged male prerogatives.”15
We see similar conflations of extra-marital sex offences in other European
countries16 and also in other parts of the world. In eighteenth-century Bue-
nos Aires, for example, almost all crime convictions involving women were of
a sexual nature. In particular, the sexually deviant behaviour of women who
were married was both societally and judicially condemned.17 Despite the ju-
dicial focus on women as regards sexual offences in early modern times, there
were countries such as Sweden where both men and women could be accused
of being “a whore” or for “whoring” in cases of extra-marital sex.18 This type of
stigmatization, especially for women, was however not restricted to the early
modern period. Even today women who do not conform to society’s explicit or
implicit sexual norms are branded as “whores” or “sluts”. In present-day Bolivia,
for instance, terms such as “puta” are commonly used to denounce a woman
who is considered to be displaying deviant sexual behaviour.19
Notwithstanding societal views on this issue, during the entire time period
studied here many prostitutes as well as their procurers chose to make a living
14 Hetherington, this volume, St. Petersburg/Moscow.
15 Turno, this volume, Florence.
16 See Mechant, this volume, Bruges, who notes: “Whores were women having sex outside
of marriage.” For the early modern Netherlands, see Lotte van de Pol, Het Amsterdams
Hoerdom: Prostitutie in de zeventiende en achtiende eeuw (Amsterdam, 1996).
17 Socolow, “Women and Crime”, p. 42.
18 Svanström, this volume, Stockholm.
19 Absi, this volume, Bolivia.
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806 van Nederveen Meerkerk
in this sector, sometimes earning a substantial amount of money. While not all
of them performed sex work of their own free will, there is an abundance of
evidence which suggests that for many women (and men) it was a conscious
choice, even if it meant working illegally. Sometimes, such as in precolonial
Cairo, the authorities decided that prostitution should be taxed. A female tax
collector (Daminat al-Maghani) would obtain the right to collect taxes from
prostitutes, recording them and their profits, and they earned a percentage of
the profits themselves. In return, the prostitutes received some state protection.
Biancani and Hammad label this early modern maghani tax as “state recogni-
tion of sex workers as a professional group.”20 In many regions and time peri-
ods, prostitution was bound to a certain period in women’s life cycles; aside
from the exceptions, prostitutes have generally been young unmarried women.
For all of these reasons, we can safely assume that many of the women in-
volved in sold sex must have seen their activities not as constituting a lifelong
identity but as generating income they could use to get by in a certain stage of
their life. Examples of women (and men) occasionally providing sexual ser-
vices in difficult economic times, as was the case in nineteenth-century Johan-
nesburg, colonial Nigeria, and present-day Florence and Australia, attest to this
rather pragmatic attitude. Many of the women and men reported on in this
volume did not necessarily self-identify as sex workers but rather considered
it to be one of the available strategies for survival.21 However, if we move away
from the traditional (often gendered) view of work as a lifelong occupation
with a particular career trajectory and employ a more inclusive definition of
work,22 we can safely say that prostitution in these cases was work. Many pros-
titutes—either very explicitly or more implicitly—considered themselves to
be workers, even if they did not think of their work in terms of an occupation
or lifelong career.
Over the past few decades, the number of sex workers’ organizations has in-
creased tremendously, indicating that prostitution indeed is a form of work akin
to any other job and deserving of similar rights. The question of course is wheth-
er all sex workers want to identify themselves as such, or if they would rather
see their work if not as “normalized” at least just as a means to make a living,
temporarily if possible. However, over the past couple of years radical feminists
20 Biancani and Hammad, this volume, Cairo.
21 Ziyad Choonara, “Selling Sex in Johannesburg: From 1886 to the Present”, unpublished pa-
per collected for the project “Selling Sex in the City”, 2013; Ekpootu, this volume, Nigeria;
Turno, this volume, Florence; Frances, this volume, Sydney/Perth.
22 Marcel van der Linden, Workers of the World: Essays toward a Global Labor History (Leiden,
2008), esp. Chapter 2, pp. 17–38.
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A Gender Analysis of Global Sex Work 807
instead have increasingly objected again to the “common but erroneous theory
that prostitution is simply work” and even more so if it involves migration or
trafficking.23 While I acknowledge that these layers of (non-)identification and
moral judgement are, and have historically been, present in the debates on
women’s prostitution, I nevertheless believe that many prostitutes throughout
history have considered themselves to be economically active, even if it may
not always have been “simply work” for them. In light of the broader definition
of work proposed by recent studies on labour history, I think it is legitimate to
analyse prostitution as one form of women’s work in the historically gendered
labour market.
Alternatives in the Labour Market
Many historians of women’s work have pointed to the dualistic or segmented
labour markets that have influenced women’s and men’s economic activities
in very different ways. While full gender equality in the labour market has yet
to be achieved, it is clear that in most societies in history labour markets were
even more segmented and access to most occupations was often highly re-
stricted for women.
We know that in mediaeval and early modern times many of the limitations
for women in the labour market were institutionalized in (formal or informal)
guild regulations. Several of the articles in this volume mention the role of
guild exclusion and marginalization for women in the labour market in general
as regards prostitution. Many guilds did not welcome (single) women and in
the course of the mediaeval period they started to exclude them, which ruled
out a whole range of profitable job opportunities for women. This was the case
in Cairo24 and also in Istanbul, where “it is likely that sex work was one of the
only options for lower-class women in times of duress.”25 In Europe as well this
gender segmentation of the early modern labour market in which men were
able to hold positions that required more skills and were better paid led to a
crowding of many women into lower-paid occupations such as spinning, lace-
making, and domestic service.26 Indeed, in their court testimonies, ( alleged)
23 Melissa Farley, “Theory versus Reality: Commentary on Four Articles about Trafficking
for Prostitution”, Women’s Studies International Forum, 32 (2009), pp. 311–315, 311. See also
Jeffreys, The Industrial Vagina.
24 Biancani and Hammad, this volume, Cairo.
25 Wyers, this volume, Istanbul.
26 Merry Wiesner, “Spinsters and Seamstresses: Women in Cloth and Clothing Production”,
in Margaret Ferguson, Maureen Quilligan, and Nancy Vickers (eds), Rewriting the Renais-
sance: The Discourses of Sexual Difference in Early Modern Europe (Chicago, 1986), p. 202;
Elise van Nederveen Meerkerk, “Segmentation in the Pre-industrial Labour Market:
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808 van Nederveen Meerkerk
prostitutes often mentioned textile work, lace making, needlework, and do-
mestic service as their main economic activities.27
Thus, most women involved in prostitution seem to have been involved
mostly in “menial and least-paid occupations”28 for which—especially in times
of economic hardship—they may have sought out a complementary source
of income. To be sure, we cannot always tell whether sex workers reported to
the authorities that they were involved in another occupation because they
were really doing it or because they wanted to appear to have “decent work”.
In Stockholm, for instance, the early modern urban authorities were notably
under the impression that prostitution was often carried out by women pre-
tending to be fruit-sellers. Later, in the nineteenth century it was assumed that
Swedish “orange girls” (young girls selling oranges) provided sexual services.29
In nineteenth-century colonial Nigeria, petty trading and hawking by black
women were also seen as being intimately related to prostitution, at least in
the colonial narrative and popular imaginary.30
Perhaps more than “selling fruit” and street vending, the sale of alcohol was
in many parts of the world intrinsically bound up with prostitution. In Stock-
holm at the beginning of the nineteenth century there were 1,200 establish-
ments licensed to sell liquor such as taverns, coffee-houses, restaurants, and
beer houses. These were frequently run by women, but more often women
worked as servant girls. As Svanström notes, “the assumption that several of
these establishments were brothels seems reasonable.”31 Also, in nineteenth-
century Johannesburg women often worked part-time as barmaids in canteens
or bars. The association between alcohol and prostitution was utilized by bar
owners who employed women to attract male customers.32 In particular, black
women could employ the beer brewing skills that they had learned at home and
many of them started their own businesses in the townships of Johannesburg.
Because of the limited alternatives available to them in the labour market,
“beer brewing and prostitution seemed to go hand in hand”, especially since
Women’s Work in the Dutch Textile Industry, 1581–1810”, International Review of Social His-
tory, 51 (2006), pp. 189–216.
27 See Conner, this volume, Paris; Mechant, this volume, Bruges; Svanström, this volume,
Stockholm. See also Van de Pol, Amsterdams Hoerdom, pp. 27–28. We cannot, of course,
be sure if this was their actual (side) job, their previous occupation, or a cover-up for their
activities in prostitution.
28 Conner, this volume, Paris.
29 Svanström, this volume, Stockholm.
30 Ekpootu, this volume, Nigeria.
31 Svanström, this volume, Stockholm.
32 Choonara, “Selling Sex in Johannesburg”.
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it paid three or four times more than providing household services or working
in factories.33 In colonial Nigeria and Nairobi, brewing and selling beer also
were “usually an adjunct of prostitution rather than a separate occupation”,
thus forming a profitable part of some women’s incomes.34
Many of the chapters presented here stress the often casual nature of sex
work, which has been performed along with other economic activities either in
low-paid industry or domestic service, or—perhaps in a more directly related
way—in bars and taverns. The general impression from the industrializing pe-
riod is that while male migrants also had difficulties adapting to the urban job
market, women encountered even greater barriers due to the smaller range of
occupational options they had, and they often combined other economic ac-
tivities with prostitution. In the nineteenth century, industrialization and the
lure of the urban economy may have raised people’s expectations but generally
it did not have much impact on the real opportunities available to women in
the labour market. In Cairo, for instance, it seems that there was a “diffusion of
prostitution as a response to the increased economic and social vulnerability
of women within the capitalist wage labour market.”35 In nineteenth-century
Mexico City as well as in Florence and in Russia, most registered prostitutes
were crowded into domestic work or needle work. There were also groups of
women who (as former farm labourers) had moved to the city to become fac-
tory workers but were either fired or had not succeeded in getting a job in the
first place.36 Young unmarried migrant men earning low wages competed with
single migrant women in the nineteenth century, leaving them even fewer
job opportunities.37 Moreover, prostitution was not just a survival strategy for
unmarried women. As Sue Gronewold notes for Shanghai, “job security was
uneven at best, so many women (married or not) moved in and out of prostitu-
tion to supplement their income.”38
In many parts of the world, mechanisms of labour market segmentation had
distinct ethnic and religious features. For instance in Johannesburg, as in all
of colonial South Africa, most domestic services were provided by black men,
33 Ibid.
34 Babere Kerata Chacha, “An Overview History of Prostitution in Nairobi: From the Precolo-
nial Period to the Present”, unpublished paper collected for the project “Selling Sex in the
City”, 2013; Ekpootu, this volume, Nigeria.
35 Biancani and Hammad, this volume, Cairo.
36 Nuñez and Fuentes, this volume, Mexico City; Turno, this volume, Florence; Hethering-
ton, this volume, St. Petersburg/Moscow.
37 See Conner, this volume, Paris.
38 Gronewold, this volume, Shanghai.
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810 van Nederveen Meerkerk
leaving even more limited options for women in the urban labour market.39
And in Istanbul around 1920, small-scale male-dominated workshops still
tended to dominate the urban economy. While industrialization in this period
created new opportunities for some women to work, primarily non-Muslim
women were involved in factory labour. This limited access to work, in com-
bination with economic duress following World War i, led to a noticeable in-
crease in prostitution by Muslim women in Istanbul (although Christian and
Jewish sex workers were also active).40
In the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, labour market
alternatives—or rather a lack thereof—were still an important reason for
women to engage in prostitution. Although in comparison to earlier periods the
gender segmentation of the labour market may be less of a problem in western
countries today, it appears to be persistent elsewhere in the world. It has been
noted that in Israel in the 1990s women were crowded into a small number of
occupations and there were higher unemployment rates for women than for
men.41 In Turkey, urban labour market participation rates are strikingly lower
for women (22%) than for men (70%), and moreover women’s wages are sig-
nificantly lower.42 All this seems to drive women much more than men into the
informal spheres of the economy. In present-day Nigeria, only 8.3% of women
are listed as wage employees while 74.5% are self-employed. Thus, “women re-
main coded in patriarchal terms and encased in narrow confines with gender
appropriate jobs. Men continue to dominate in the political space.”43
In this “informal economy”, the income that can be made through sex work
is often more than what can be earned with the available alternative jobs, espe-
cially for illiterate and unskilled workers.44 In Bolivia, women from the work-
ing classes employed in the informal market as domestic workers, waitresses,
or saleswomen can earn about €50 to €100 per month. But as the ambitions
of these women grow and they consider owning a business themselves, they
often turn to prostitution as a way of earning start-up capital to realize their
dreams.45 Also, sex work is seen by many women as a means to obtaining a
more luxurious lifestyle and hence it is a supplement for or alternative to other
work. As Gronewold has noted for Shanghai, “shop girls or women in sweatshop
39 Choonara, “Selling Sex in Johannesburg”.
40 Wyers, this volume, Istanbul.
41 Amir et al., this volume, Tel Aviv/Jaffa.
42 Wyers, this volume, Istanbul.
43 Ekpootu, this volume, Nigeria.
44 See Dasgupta, this volume, Calcutta.
45 Absi, this volume, Bolivia.
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A Gender Analysis of Global Sex Work 811
jobs can aspire to own the urban style clothes, jewellery, and apartments that
their meagre incomes would not ordinarily allow.”46
Indeed, the income that can be earned through sex work historically was and
still is higher than many other kinds of women’s work and this may be seen as
contributing to even more than economic independence. As Blanchette states
in his thematic overview in this volume, “unpaid sex, seen as an integral form
of other female labouring roles, is often more oppressive than paid sex. […]
[T]he ability to earn in one sex act what a male earns in a day is a n
on-trivial
means of achieving one’s socio-economic desires which can counterbalance
the stigma of prostitution and the need to perform sex without desire.”47 To be
sure, working conditions for prostitutes may not always have been optimal, but
in many countries the alternatives have turned out to be worse. In Calcutta,
for instance, about half of the prostitutes who were interviewed reported that
they had experienced sexual assault in their previous jobs when they worked
as domestic servants, construction labourers, and secretaries. In these jobs,
they were sexually harassed by male recruiters and bosses. As one former sec-
retary remarked as regards a boss who constantly asked her for sexual favours,
“Well, then I decided I might as well get paid for sex.”48
A “New Division of Labour”?
Over the past decade or so, trafficking has received increasing attention in
both societal and academic debates.49 It has been argued that a new interna-
tional division of labour has emerged in which women from poor countries go
to western countries to provide sexual services under deplorable labour condi-
tions. Some have even talked about “modern day slavery”.50 Often, ethnicity
plays an important role in these debates, as (illegal) immigrants, often of non-
western origin and sometimes just barely adult women, are particularly vul-
nerable to exploitation by (white male) traffickers. As noted in many chapters
in this volume, both the issues of trafficking and ethnicity are far from being
new elements in the history of sex work. In particular, colonialism as well as
46 Gronewold, this volume, Shanghai.
47 Blanchette, this volume, Seeing beyond Prostitution: Agency and the Organization of Sex
Work.
48 Dasgupta, this volume, Calcutta.
49 See Farley, “Theory versus Reality”; Jeffreys, “Prostitution, Trafficking and Feminism”;
Rodríguez García, “The League of Nations”, pp. 97–98.
50 For a fierce criticism of the debate, see Thaddeus Blanchette and Ana Da Silva, “On
Bullshit and the Trafficking of Women: Moral Entrepreneurs and the Invention of Traf-
ficking of Persons in Brazil”, Dialectical Anthropology, 36 (2012), pp. 107–125.
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812 van Nederveen Meerkerk
early twentieth-century anxieties about globalization have played a major part
in ethnicizing sexual encounters and debates.
The presence of predominantly male Europeans in the colonies affected
gender and ethnic relations in the Americas, Asia, and Africa. In early mod-
ern Havana, sex work was dominated by the indigenous population, M ulatas,
slaves, and free women of colour. They worked in saloons and lodging hous-
es, and they offered both household services and sexual services to soldiers
and sailors.51 The same has been noted for Mexico City. In Africa as well in-
digenous women were often the first people with whom colonisers had close
relationships, and as Chacha notes, this was “their first strong encounter of
these ‘others.’”52 Colonial master–slave relationships obviously added another
dimension to sexual services, as these were generally distinguished from pros-
titution.53 In Southeast Asia, the concept of “temporary marriage” between
local women and merchants was also quite common, but over the course of
the seventeenth century, many foreign traders increasingly preferred female
slaves for their sexual relationships.54 Indeed, female slaves as well as “free”
prostitutes seem to have flooded the sex markets of pre-1800 port towns such
as Singapore, Batavia, and Malacca.55
This does not mean, however, that white women were not involved in co-
lonial prostitution. In nineteenth-century South Africa, for example, women
from all ethnic groups worked as prostitutes, and many of the white sex work-
ers were from eastern Europe.56 Especially from the late nineteenth-century
onwards, when European women increasingly were settling overseas, “white
slavery” was of utmost concern to the authorities. Schettini has shown that
in the case of Argentina regulations and legislation from the 1890s onwards
particularly targeted white women, thus enhancing their visibility. Other
groups of vulnerable women, such as Argentinian-born prostitutes, child sex
workers, and women involved in violent domestic relationships were less
problematized and therefore almost invisible.57 More generally, in the late co-
lonial p
eriod the international community (first and foremost the League of
51 Cabezas, this volume, Havana.
52 Babere Kerata Chacha, “An Overview History of Prostitution in Nairobi: From the Precolo-
nial Period to the Present”, unpublished paper collected for the project “Selling Sex in the
City”, 2013.
53 Ekpootu, this volume, Nigeria.
54 Barbara Andaya Watson, The Flaming Womb: Repositioning Women in Early Modern South-
east Asia (Honolulu, 2006), pp. 125–127.
55 Herzog, this volume, Singapore.
56 Choonara, “Selling Sex in Johannesburg”.
57 Schettini, this volume, Buenos Aires.
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A Gender Analysis of Global Sex Work 813
Nations) became increasingly concerned about the “traffic in women and chil-
dren”, and it was often assumed that “white” women were trafficked by Jewish
men or “men of foreign race”.58 It is clear that such approaches not only largely
tended to overlook the problem of exploitation of non-white women, for in-
stance in (former) colonies, but also depicted white prostitutes as the “helpless
victims” of traffickers, which they often seem not to have been.
A similar attitude towards the migration of sex workers seems to prevail
in present-day discussions, albeit now it is directed towards non-white
prostitutes.59 While there is, of course, an illegal circuit in which women
are recruited against their will, most of the chapters in this volume suggest
that today, the majority of women migrate voluntarily, usually—though not
always—knowing that they will enter into sex work. Thousands of Nepalese
and Bangladeshi women, for instance, migrate to India because they can earn
money for their families by selling sex. Most of the time, they know what they
are getting into and they aid in their own recruitment.60 Also, in contemporary
Bruges women mainly seem to enter sex work voluntarily, although physicians
visiting prostitutes have admitted that the boundaries are not always clear. It
is, for instance, very hard to get out of the business, as many women “fall back
on what they know.”61 Interestingly, in 2011 most of the sex workers in Flanders
were from Belgium (40%) and other European countries (almost 40%). Less
than 10% were from Africa, and the percentages for other parts of the world
were much lower still.62 While these percentages may less accurately reflect
prostitutes’ profiles in larger hubs of international migration, many of the
chapters here do suggest that statistics as well as representations of the share
of migrants in prostitution may be overstated. This is partly a reflection of the
fact that migrant women tend to end up relatively often in street prostitution
and thus are in the more visible spectrum of the business. But sometimes more
deliberate distortions are definitely the case. In China, for instance, the state
authorities seem to have good reason to represent the issue of prostitution
and trafficking as mainly a problem of migrant women, whereas the actual
estimates of numbers (30 million) imply that the majority of sex workers are
Chinese.63
58 See Rodríguez García, “The League of Nations”, p. 107.
59 See Farley, “Theory versus Reality” and Jeffreys, “Prostitution, Trafficking and Feminism”.
60 Dasgupta, this volume, Calcutta.
61 Mechant, this volume, Bruges.
62 Ibid.
63 Gronewold, this volume, Shanghai.
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Mediation and Gender Relations
Historically, sex workers have worked within the framework of various kinds
of labour relations. They may act entirely independently, working from their
own homes and soliciting costumers themselves. More often, however, some
form of mediation is involved both in recruiting prostitutes and/or dealing
with costumers. We may think of co-sex workers and recruitment agencies in
this regard, but in the chapters in this volume pimps and brothel-keepers are
particularly highlighted. Therefore, in this section these two categories will be
discussed, as well as their gender dimensions because typically pimping is as-
sociated more with men and brothel-keeping with women (madams). Below
I will briefly discuss how this has worked out in terms of the relationships be-
tween sex workers and their procurers in various parts of the world in different
times. Lastly, I will discuss the role of the state but only in very broad terms, as
this is more elaborately treated in the Conclusion to this volume.
Procuring and Pimping
Throughout history the act of pimping has been stereotypically thought of as
a male activity.64 Nevertheless, many examples from the urban overviews in
this project show that procuring has also been widely carried out by women.
In many early modern towns, women were found guilty of procuring and they
were not always brothel owners. They were colleagues, former prostitutes, and
even could be prostitutes’ mothers.65 Turno notes that in eighteenth-century
Florence “in the economy of a neighbourhood life, prostitution was often an
all-female affair.”66 In nineteenth-century Brazil it was fairly common for slave
owners, often themselves poor but free—or recently freed—women, to hire
out their slaves for sexual services. Often, the owner and slave lived under
the same roof and were both working as prostitutes, and the owners would
combine sold sex with other economic activities such as street vending or
cleaning.67 And in Cairo in the 1950s, a time when there were few male pimps,
64 See for instance the debates in the League of Nations Committee on Trafficking in the
1920s and 30s: Rodríguez García, “The League of Nations”, pp. 113–114. In this debate it
was acknowledged that women could also be procurers, but “pimp” (or the French word
“souteneur”) was the dubious privilege ascribed only to men.
65 In the Netherlands, female procurers were called “koppelaarster”. See Elise van Nederveen
Meerkerk, De draad in eigen handen: Vrouwen en loonarbeid in de Nederlandse textielni-
jverheid (Amsterdam, 2007), pp. 212, 218.
66 Turno, this volume, Florence.
67 Blanchette and Schettini, this volume, Rio de Janeiro.
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A Gender Analysis of Global Sex Work 815
“women dominated pimping and they were mostly old retired prostitutes.”68
Still, it is quite hard to distinguish in the historical sources between female
procurers and madams who owned brothels because pimping was simply not
a term used for women. Indeed, most historians tend to describe female pro-
curers as “madams”. Nevertheless, it is clear that women recruiting prostitutes
were not necessarily madams but could also be friends, family members, or
colleagues mediating, for example, to send women sex workers abroad.69
However, the majority of procurers have probably been male, and I will
therefore focus here on the gendered relationship between them and prosti-
tutes. The relationships between female sex workers and male pimps have been
complicated throughout history, to say the least. They range from genuine love
relationships to forms of protection as well as abuse and outright exploitation,
and they are often characterized by a mixture of two or more of these relations.
Sometimes women have deliberately chosen streetwalking because it comes
with a greater deal of independence than working in a brothel. Streetwalk-
ers can of course choose to work independently, as sometimes happens, but
women have more commonly worked with a pimp for the sake of protection.70
However, this can limit their freedom considerably as their male pimps can
turn out to be exploiters and abusers rather than protectors.71 In some cases,
pimping has been harsher than the labour relations that sex workers have had
with a brothel keeper, as was the case in Cairo and Mexico City. While pimps
can protect women against violent customers and even against exploitative
brothel keepers, they can just as well be an additional source of exploitation.72
Pimps or souteneurs for instance demand part of sex workers’ earnings, often
amounting to half or even more of their income.73 Other forms of exploitation
involve a debtor system in which men “loan” money to sex workers at such high
interest rates that women have difficulty paying off their debts.74 Furthermore,
the pimp-prostitute relationship may be tainted by physical and/or sexual
violence. Being involved with a pimp in a sexual and/or affective relationship
may guarantee a prostitute more of her pimp’s goodwill and protection, but it
can also add to her subordinate position and dependence. Throughout history
68 Biancani and Hammad, this volume, Cairo.
69 Rodríguez García, “The League of Nations”, p. 110.
70 Mechant, this volume, Bruges.
71 Frances, this volume, Sydney/Perth.
72 Biancani and Hammad, this volume, Cairo; Nuñez and Fuentes, this volume, Mexico City;
Amir et al., this volume, Tel Aviv/Jaffa.
73 Mechant, this volume, Bruges.
74 Wyers, this volume, Istanbul.
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men have used the pretence of a love affair to entice women into prostitution,
sometimes convincing them to lose their virginity through false promises of
marriage.75 Nevertheless, there are also examples of reverse gender relation-
ships. The reports issued by the League of Nations, for example, rather fre-
quently noted that both in Europe and America women recruited their own
pimps to help them travel abroad and mediate for them with brothels and/
or clients.76 This was also true in colonial Lagos, where most prostitutes seem
to have recruited “jaguda boys” to mediate for them rather than the other way
around. Sometimes they would not even pay their procurers anything.77
Interestingly, some of the chapters here note that new digital means of com-
munication, such as the internet and mobile phones, have tended to increase
the independence of female sex workers from intermediaries. Apart from the
economic advantages of these forms of self-employment, sex workers are also
able to decrease the risk of violence and police harassment.78
Brothel Owners
The urban overviews in this volume show that, perhaps except for the late
twentieth century,79 brothel-keepers throughout history have overwhelm-
ingly been female (and therefore they are usually referred to as “madams”).
In nineteenth-century Russia as well as in early twentieth century Australia,
Istanbul, and Mexico City, the authorities stipulated that the owners or manag-
ers of brothels had to be women. In Mexico City, the female owners of brothels
and assignation houses were also responsible for negotiating with representa-
tives of the public authorities such as health inspectors, doctors, and police
officers.80 In nineteenth-century Paris, madams in a sense had become “agents
of the government”81 and this formal position naturally gave them a lot of pow-
er. In the case of Russia, legislation even went as far to set a minimum age of
thirty-five for madams, so in a sense they had to be “more mature” women.82
A similar trend, though not set by law, was visible among brothel house owners
in Rio de Janeiro at the end of the nineteenth century, as most madams were
over 30 years old.83
75 Biancani and Hammad, this volume, Cairo.
76 Rodríguez García, “The League of Nations”, pp. 110–111.
77 Ekpootu, this volume, Nigeria.
78 Wyers, this volume, Istanbul; Ekpootu, this volume, Nigeria.
79 Conner, this volume, Paris.
80 Nuñez and Fuentes, this volume, Mexico City.
81 Conner, this volume, Paris.
82 Hetherington, this volume, St. Petersburg/Moscow.
83 Blanchette and Schettini, this volume, Rio de Janeiro.
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A Gender Analysis of Global Sex Work 817
Some of the chapters mention the fact that brothels also have had the po-
tential to offer a setting for surrogate families. In pre-revolutionary China, very
powerful fictive kin relationships existed within brothels, and madams were
often addressed as “mother”, older women were called “aunts”, and other pros-
titutes were referred to as “sisters”. According to Gronewold, this language of
family has persisted up until today in China. Sex workers often call their mad-
am “mother” and, interestingly, even male managers are sometimes referred to
as mamasan.84 In present-day Bolivia, madams are also often considered to be
a “house mother” especially by younger women, and they are referred to as “big
mother”.85 Obviously, the close relationships between prostitutes themselves
can, apart from being sisterly, also result in lesbian love relationships, as was
explicitly noted in the case of Russia.86
Clearly, however, these familial relationships generally come at a price. As
with pimps, sex workers have had to pay their madams for boarding, mediation,
and the “protection” they received. Madams who owned a house in the desir-
able parts of a city might very well exploit that fact, as was seen, for instance,
in Rio de Janeiro where madams sometimes owned two or three houses in the
same district for which they charged prostitutes much higher rent than was
the norm for the surrounding areas.87 Moreover, apart from economic power,
family-like ties can also mean that madams have greater (emotional) sway over
their sex workers, as Gronewold has noted for the city of Shanghai.88 At times
madams have exercised control in another way by creating debt relationships,
as happened for instance in early modern Bruges.89 In Mexico City, madams
often forced women to consume goods and services in the brothel offered by
acquaintances and friends. In this way, sex workers were constantly in debt to
their bosses, and it was more difficult for them to leave the brothel.90 Similarly,
Schettini notes for Argentina that it was not always the proverbial male pimp
who bound female sex workers to the premises. One infamous example was
Madam Blanca, who had set up a brothel in La Boca, Buenos Aires at the start
of the twentieth century. She also made a habit out of imposing on the women
working for her everlasting debt notes that they could never pay off.91
84 Gronewold, this volume, Shanghai.
85 Absi, this volume, Bolivia.
86 Hetherington, this volume, St. Petersburg/Moscow.
87 Blanchette and Schettini, this volume, Rio de Janeiro.
88 Gronewold, this volume, Shanghai.
89 Mechant, this volume, Bruges.
90 Nuñez and Fuentes, this volume, Mexico City.
91 Schettini, this volume, Buenos Aires.
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Examples of madams resorting to physical violence also surface in some
of the urban histories here. In eighteenth-century Bruges, a prostitute named
Isabelle Boddin took on a job as a waitress in a bar. When her madam told her
the next day to go upstairs with some soldiers who were drinking there, Isa-
belle refused at first, but she was beaten by her madam until she complied.92
A different form of physical abuse was noted for nineteenth-century Shanghai,
where madams often got their workers hooked on drugs in order to keep them
under their control.93 Similar mechanisms were in place in Australia, especial-
ly after the criminalization of procuring by men in 1908. While sex workers did
receive some protection in brothels, they were also often paid for their services
not with money but with cocaine as a means of keeping them dependent on
their employers.94
The Role of the State
While states—except in times of war or mobilization—have rarely functioned
as direct mediators for sex work, they have put into place institutional frame-
works for mediation, thus indirectly impacting on gender relations. We have
already seen that in many cases the state stipulated that brothel owners had
to be women. But in other ways regulation, abolition, and prohibition have in-
fluenced gender relations. For instance, one of the major consequences of the
ban on prostitution and female entertainment in nineteenth-century Cairo
was that it deprived self-employed women of much of their autonomy, as it
enhanced “subordination to the masculine figure of pimps and procurers in
return for protection from state control and its coercive methods.”95
Early twentieth-century Australian legislation was a case in point. The Po-
lice Offences Act was enacted in 1908, which made living off the earnings of
prostitution illegal for men but not for women. As a consequence, most street
prostitution disappeared and sex workers moved indoors, which did not al-
ways mean they were better off, as the example of the payment in hard drugs
has shown. Moreover, as Frances puts it, “without their male associates women
were more vulnerable to violence from clients and other men”, as well as p olice
violence.96 Indeed, police interventions in private matters in other parts of
the world have also been legitimized by an argument based on the protection
92 Mechant, this volume, Bruges.
93 Gronewold, this volume, Shanghai.
94 Frances, this volume, Sydney/Perth.
95 Biancani and Hammad, this volume, Cairo.
96 Frances, this volume, Sydney/Perth.
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A Gender Analysis of Global Sex Work 819
of prostituted slaves, or European “white slaves”.97 At times, state protection
could in fact be real, as was the case in the Ottoman Empire, where Islamic law
explicitly forbade the procuring of slaves for short-term sexual gratification in
an attempt to prevent female slaves from being repeatedly bought and sold.98
However, there are numerous examples in the chapters here that show
how, especially in countries that criminalize prostitution, soliciting or procur-
ing (or both) have led to state violence, which is often committed by the po-
lice. This held true in early twentieth-century Brazil and Australia as well as
in late twentieth-century France and present-day Istanbul, where the police
have the right to raid prostitutes’ homes.99 In some cases, the police even de
facto organize the trade, as increasingly happens in present-day Argentina.100
However, we are again presented with a history that has many shades of grey,
as prostitutes and brothel owners themselves all over the world have tried to
establish friendly relationships with the police, even in locales where prostitu-
tion is illegal. As Ekpootu suggests, there may be interesting class elements to
this, as the more educated women in Nigeria seem to be more successful at
accessing the police than other sex workers.101
Relationships between Sex Workers and Their Clientele
Demand for Sexual Services
Since prostitution is said to be (one of) the world’s oldest professions, we should
pay close attention to the demand for sex workers in history. Port and garrison
towns, for instance, tend to (temporarily) draw large numbers of men away
from their wives or fiancées. In metropolitan, imperial France, for instance,
prostitution was accepted as “a natural outlet for masculine needs”, as it was
argued that men, especially soldiers, could not be expected to be chaste.102
Colonial encounters often seem to have been a sublimation of such gender (as
well as ethnic) imbalances. As Nuñez and Fuentes write in their overview on
Mexico,
97 Blanchette and Schettini, this volume, Rio de Janeiro.
98 Wyers, this volume, Istanbul.
99 Conner, this volume, Paris; Wyers, this volume, Istanbul. See also Blanchette and Da Silva,
“On Bullshit”, p. 121.
100 Schettini, this volume, Buenos Aires.
101 Ekpootu, this volume, Nigeria.
102 Tracol-Huynh, this volume, Hanoi.
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The conquest was a men’s thing; men who left their women and children
behind, and who could reinvent themselves by “setting sail to America”.
In spite of royal ordeals issued on the matter, very few married women
came to join their husbands, leading to a complex and peculiar colonial
society. Although colonial legislation was in essence the same as the
Spanish one, its practice was more lenient. Carnal relations, whether sta-
ble or not, between white males and indigenous women or women from
the various castes that emerged [did take place] […]. Widows, orphans,
and poor, single, or abandoned women found in selling their bodies a
means to support themselves due to the lack of specific job opportunities
for them.103
In the British colonies, the imbalance between white male settlers and (white)
women concerned colonial officials as well. From Singapore to Australia (of-
ten young) British men setting foot on the shores of remote countries led to a
certain acceptance of domestic and sexual services offered by (native) women,
sometimes leading to relationships and marriage.104 While in Britain prostitu-
tion was condemned, early British authorities in the Indian subcontinent prag-
matically accepted that professional courtesans in India had a status that was
different from sex workers in the metropolis. However, during the Crimean war
(1853–1856) the number of British soldiers suffering from venereal diseases in-
creased to such an extent that the British Government drafted the Contagious
Diseases Act (1864), which was enforced in various parts of the empire.105 In
the Dutch and French colonies, prostitution also became an issue of increasing
concern, though it was mostly problematized in the same vein as cohabitation
or mixed-race marriages, thus exposing imperial anxieties about interracial
sexual contact and the “degeneration” of the “white” race.106 While colonial
concerns were thus usually directed towards non-white women, Nigeria nev-
ertheless presents a somewhat different case. In Nigeria the colonial authori-
ties tried to tackle the threat of venereal disease by examining not Nigerian
prostitutes but the colonial army. Soldiers who were infected had to pay fines
and they were also subject to more extreme measures such as “cock-pulling or
103 Nuñez and Fuentes, this volume, Mexico City.
104 Herzog, this volume, Singapore; Frances, this volume, Sydney/Perth.
105 Dasgupta, this volume, Calcutta.
106 Ann Stoler, “Sexual Affronts and Racial Frontiers: European Identities and the Cultural
Politics of Exclusion in Colonial Southeast Asia”, Comparative Studies in Society and His-
tory, 34 (1992), pp. 514–551, 550.
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A Gender Analysis of Global Sex Work 821
public displays of [their] genitals.” In contrast, prostitutes were not medically
examined, nor were they supervised or registered by the state.107
Aside from discussing racial anxieties and divisions, many of the chapters
here also mention the class dimensions of sex work. There have been many
types of prostitutes interacting with clients of various social standings, but
it should be noted that these categories are not always rigid. In nineteenth-
century China, for instance, an elaborate hierarchy had developed over the
course of a thousand years in which there was a range of types of prostitution,
from high-class courtesans (guanren) to “wild chicks” or “pheasants” (yeji or
zhiji) who worked in lower class brothels or as street walkers.108 While some-
times less developed, we see similar class-related client-sex worker relation-
ships occurring in other regions such as Cairo, France, Russia, and Australia.
Wealthy men often tended to visit large clubs, “grand brothels”, or courtesans.
There was also a broad middle segment consisting of brothels visited by men
from varying levels of the middle class, men who were both married and un-
married and of moderate means. Streetwalkers generally offered services to
men from all backgrounds, although of course because they charged less, they
were more affordable for lower-class men and seamen. As Frances has noted
for colonial Australia, “[t]he experience of working in the sex industry […] de-
pended very much on which part of the industry a woman worked in: women
in the higher class brothels were expected to provide a greater range of both
sexual and emotional services than those offering a cheap, quick outlet for the
pent-up lusts of visiting seamen or bushmen.”109
Client-prostitute Relationships
Historical information about the relationships between sex workers and their
clients is generally hard to obtain. In many periods and societies, prostitution
was carried out clandestinely because it was illegal, even if the typically male
clients were not persecuted.110 Moreover, sexual taboos also limit what sources
have to say about both prostitutes and clients as regards their interactions.
Nonetheless, many of the chapters provide some information about the multi-
faceted encounters that have occurred between sex workers and their clients.
107 Ekpootu, this volume, Nigeria.
108 Gronewold, this volume, Shanghai.
109 Frances, this volume, Sydney/Perth.
110 With the exception of present-day Sweden, Australia, and France (in France, there is cur-
rently also a heated parliamentary debate about legislation criminalizing prostitutes’
clients).
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While perhaps they are not aspects of the “regular” relationships between
sex workers and their customers, physical violence and abuse is mentioned
in many of the chapters and they seem to have been a common “occupation-
al hazard”.111 Differences in physical strength can clearly be a disadvantage
for female sex workers dealing with male clients, but there are also cases of
prostitutes physically or verbally abusing men. Humiliating clients can also
be an effective strategy used by prostitutes to assert control.112 More gener-
ally, some of the chapters note that performing sex work in the first place can
be a way for women to exert power over men. As has been mentioned, some
women have opted to provide sexual services in exchange for money rather
than having to have unpaid sex.113 In this way, as we have seen with prostitutes
in present-day Calcutta, getting paid for sex is sometimes preferred as a way of
doing “decent work” which may grant these women economic independence
and sometimes emotional empowerment as well.
Especially in societies with quite strict gender norms, sex work may be one
way to provide women with some leeway, despite the cost of social stigmatiza-
tion. It is estimated that in contemporary Turkey approximately 20 per cent of
men have their first erotic encounters with sex workers, which may be attribut-
ed precisely to the strict (gendered) sexual norms in society.114 In present-day
Bolivia, female sex workers regularly point out that they dominate men and
their money. Bolivian prostitutes make it very clear to their male clients that
just because the men have the money to pay them, that does not mean they
have power over prostitutes: “By being bawdy with their clients the women
rebel not only against traditional gender stereotypes but also against the so-
ciety’s concept of a submissive, seductive prostitute willing to do anything for
money.”115
Apart from abusive relationships, many of the chapters here also refer to
affective relationships between prostitutes and their clients, ranging from oc-
casional or part-time love affairs to actual marriage. In nineteenth-century
Australia, for instance, it was quite common for women to marry their clients.
They did not even always stop working after getting married, although this be-
came more customary in the twentieth century following the legislation which
111 As mentioned by Gronewold, this volume, Shanghai. Other chapters also reported on vio-
lence; see Wyers, this volume, Istanbul; Turno, this volume, Florence.
112 Wyers, this volume, Istanbul; Absi, this volume, Bolivia.
113 Blanchette, this volume, Seeing beyond Prostitution: Agency and the Organization of Sex
Work.
114 Wyers, this volume, Istanbul.
115 Absi, this volume, Bolivia.
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A Gender Analysis of Global Sex Work 823
made it a criminal act for men to live off earnings made from sex work.116 In-
terestingly, in present-day China we see that marriage-like relationships have
emerged particularly among both the wealthiest and poorest in society. Among
the elites, a new fashion is for men to have a concubine or second wife (ernai)
who often lives in her own apartment, and among the lowest classes there are
“women who live in a shed” (xiagongpeng) “who service the poorest men, usu-
ally migrant workers, sometimes living with or among them, exchanging sex
for food, shelter, and basic survival.”117 In contemporary Nigeria, call girls in
particular specialize in non-Nigerian (often white male) clients, sometimes
marrying their customers. “Indeed”, notes Ekpootu, “this is often the target as
derivable benefits from such liaisons are perceived to be very high.”118 And in
Brazil, too, many women often enter into relationships with immigrant clients,
and Blanchette and Schettini point out that these affective relationships are
“extremely varied and complex and cannot be reduced to a homogenized nar-
rative of Brazilian victims and foreign villains.”119
Male, Transvestite and Transgender Prostitution
While most of the chapters do not provide much information about male or
transgender/transvestite sex work (and in most historical (legal) contexts pros-
titution has been defined as “female”), some countries such as China and the
Ottoman Empire had a rich tradition of prostitution by men or boys.120 Gener-
ally, their clients were men as well. In Cairo in the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries, brothels and “night clubs” often had both male and female singers,
dancers, and prostitutes.121 In fact, when Abbas Pasha restricted female pros-
titution in Egypt, “men promptly filled the gap left by women dancers and
singers”. Often, these men were immigrants from other ethnic groups, such as
Turkish, Jewish or Armenian. Male brothel and night club workers occupied
a social niche, and “they were perceived as fulfilling a respectable, morally
sanctioned function during festivals and communal occasions”.122 In China,
male entertainers, especially those who played female opera roles (dan), were
116 Frances, this volume, Sydney/Perth.
117 Gronewold, this volume, Shanghai.
118 Ekpootu, this volume, Nigeria.
119 Blanchette and Schettini, this volume, Rio de Janeiro.
120 Gronewold, this volume, Shanghai; Wyers, this volume, Istanbul.
121 Biancani and Hammad, this volume, Cairo.
122 Ibid.
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quite popular and attracted wealthy benefactors. However, in the 1920s and
’30s, both homosexuality and prostitution were increasingly considered to be
deviant and criminal, resulting in their prohibition and total suppression un-
der Mao.123
Sometimes, male sex workers have been openly homosexual, as is the case
in present-day Bolivia where homosexual waiters working at brothels also ex-
change sex for cash with men.124 At other times, they may engage in bisexual
or heterosexual encounters, or at least appear to do so because of the social
stigma of homosexuality; in present-day China, it is likely that over 90% of
male sex workers marry women.125 On the other hand, both male prostitutes
and clients involved in male-male sexual encounters often report that they do
not perceive themselves as being homosexual, as was indicated in the chapter
on Istanbul. There, male clients seeking out transgender encounters “prefer in-
dividuals who have not undergone gender reassignment surgery, for the reason
that they can take active as well as passive roles.”126 This again underscores the
point that sex workers’ sexual identity does not necessarily overlap with their
occupational identity.
Either by offering a particular “niche” service such as in imperial Cairo or
late imperial China, or because a given society tries to ignore male prostitu-
tion as in the case of Havana today, male and transgender sex workers have
thus been able to operate relatively free of social stigma in some periods and
regions of the world.127 Sometimes, this leads to more uncertainty for female
sex workers, as in present-day Mexico City, where transvestites working on the
streets are presumably more inclined to have unprotected sex, thus increasing
health risks for the female prostitutes competing with them.128 Nevertheless,
there are also examples indicating that male sex work has been even more
stigmatized than sexual services provided by women. Currently in Istanbul,
for example, legislation prescribes that all sex workers in licensed houses need
to be female by birth or by gender reassignment surgery and hence they have
to hold a pink (female) identity card to be able to work in a state-sanctioned
brothel. Moreover, the police in Istanbul are particularly active in fining
123 Gronewold, this volume, Shanghai.
124 Absi, this volume, Bolivia.
125 Gronewold, this volume, Shanghai.
126 Wyers, this volume, Istanbul.
127 Cabezas, this volume, Havana.
128 Nuñez and Fuentes, this volume, Mexico City. However, it is not clear from the chapter
whether this is a fact or merely rhetoric spun by envious or intolerant prostitutes vis à vis
transgender sex workers.
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A Gender Analysis of Global Sex Work 825
t ransgender sex workers on the streets for vague reasons such as “disturbing
the peace”.129 And in Bolivia, it is very rare for transvestites to be employed in
brothels and they usually have to take up street prostitution.130
Sex Workers, Gender and Family
The relationships between sex workers and their families throughout history
may have been even more complex than their relations with intermediaries
or clients. After all, every prostitute has a family background, which may—
as we will see below—have been the reason for entering the business in the
first place, and many continued to sell sex because of a need to take care of
dependants. Family members may or may not know what their relatives are
doing, and if they do, they may reject, tolerate, or accept their involvement in
sex work. The chapters in this volume offer many interesting examples of this
range of family relations, which have often been highly gendered as, in most
societies, the proper place for women is seen as being caregivers in a familial
context. So, for instance, in contemporary Brazil, it is socially desirable to be a
“family girl” but “What, exactly, is a moça de família [i.e. a ‘family girl’] in 2008
is a topic open to much debate. One thing continues to be clear, however: she’s
not a prostitute.”131
Shame and Expulsion
In many cases, the social and/or legal taboos on prostitution have prevented
sex workers from telling their families about their work. Quite a few of the
chapters stress that young girls often migrate from the countryside to large
cities hoping to find work, sometimes knowing beforehand that they would
enter into sex work and sometimes taking it up due to a lack of labour mar-
ket alternatives or because they were enticed by intermediaries. This physical
distance from their home towns often has meant that their families have not
been informed about their activities, especially in times when communication
technologies and infrastructure were still underdeveloped. Most likely, not
knowing is better for both parties, as a prostitute and her family can avoid any
(public) shame about her work, whereas remittances may help their relatives
129 Wyers, this volume, Istanbul.
130 Absi, this volume, Bolivia.
131 Ana Paula da Silva, as quoted in Blanchette and Schettini, this volume, Rio de Janeiro.
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826 van Nederveen Meerkerk
back home. The effects of shame were, and are, often significant, leading to
feelings of guilt and lack of worth, as well as psychological problems and even
suicidal tendencies.132
While by no means exclusively, the great majority of European prostitutes
have throughout history been unmarried women, and only in recent decades
has this been changing. The situation was quite different, however, for non-
western societies where girls often married much younger. In colonial Lagos,
for instance, the records show that sex workers comprised a wide diversity of
women who were divorced, separated, and single, but most of them were mar-
ried women. Among them were large numbers of runaway wives who had fled
the countryside seeking to escape marginalization in the household or inad-
equate spousal support.133 Some of the chapters mention that women have
sought refuge in urban red-light districts as a way of escaping from violent
relatives, most typically husbands. A considerable number of the sex workers
who were interviewed in Calcutta, for instance, reported that they had suffered
violence at the hands of a spouse or other family member prior to entering sex
work.134 In contemporary Turkey, girls marry from as young as 13 years old, of-
ten forcibly, and some of them who try to escape an unhappy marriage cannot
easily go back home because of the disgrace it would bring to their families.
Consequently, they may take up sex work, either voluntarily or by being sold
into a brothel. If her family finds out, however, the shame is of course even
worse, and “honour killings” may be committed, especially in the southeast
of Turkey. Because local tradition prescribes that family honour is very much
dependent on women’s (“proper”) sexual conduct, killing a woman is seen as
being acceptable if it is thought that she disgraced her family’s honour.135
Interestingly, in precolonial Nairobi women who travelled from the coun-
tryside to the city were disrespected in general, even if they were married and
followed their husbands. With the advent of colonialism and capitalism, how-
ever, society and the economy changed, and so did social values. Many women
migrated to cities, “becoming receptionists, secretaries, telephone operators,
housemaids, nannies, vegetable vendors, sex workers, [and] dressmakers. They
were financially independent enough to be able to afford to rent rooms in
women’s hostels. So the increasingly segregated definitions of respectability
132 Gronewold, this volume, Shanghai, 18; Hetherington, this volume, St. Petersburg/Moscow.
133 Ekpootu, this volume, Nigeria.
134 Dasgupta, this volume, Calcutta.
135 Wyers, this volume, Istanbul.
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A Gender Analysis of Global Sex Work 827
at this time saw urban black women pitted against each other—the married
versus the unmarried.”136
Acceptance and Support
As has been mentioned, it is hard to establish whether or not the families of
prostitutes migrating to cities or foreign countries have been aware of the
women’s economic activities. They may have accepted the remittances with
gratitude, not knowing or at least not asking any questions about where the
money came from. However, as some historians have argued, the continued
contacts between most prostitutes and their families must have meant that in
many cases, family members back at home must have been informed to some
extent.137 Women often place more importance on their economic responsi-
bility for their families than on their “respectability”, as they believe it is more
respectable to do sex work than to let their families starve. As we have seen
above, the alternatives in the labour market available to women in most histor-
ical contexts paid less than prostitution, so for some sex work is the most prof-
itable way to provide for their loved ones.138 Some of the chapters mention that
grandmothers look after the children of single mothers working as prostitutes
far away from home. In other cases, such as in present-day Bruges and Istan-
bul, single mothers have to give up a large part of their income to pay for child
care.139 Apart from single mothers, there are also examples of married women
whose husbands were unable to support their families. In n ineteenth-century
Cairo, for instance, many prostitutes worked with the knowledge, consent, and
even encouragement of their husbands.140
This brings us to the more active involvement of family members in pros-
titutes’ lives and work. The chapters here give examples of mothers and
daughters and/or sisters working together in prostitution.141 In a broader
sense, kinship networks can play an important role in facilitating prostitution.
Aboriginal women before the nineteenth century mostly acted in family net-
works before the state authorities started to intervene more intensively, and
136 Chacha, “An Over-view History of Prostitution in Nairobi”.
137 Gronewold, this volume, Shanghai.
138 Absi, this volume, Bolivia.
139 Wyers, this volume, Istanbul.
140 Biancani and Hammad, this volume, Cairo.
141 Take, for example, early modern Bruges, nineteenth-century Sydney/Perth, and nineteenth-
and twentieth-century Rio de Janeiro.
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828 van Nederveen Meerkerk
they thought that prostitution was sufficient cause for a woman to be as seen
as unfit to be a mother, and the children of prostitutes would be kicked out
of their homes.142 In colonial Nigeria, kinship networks also often constituted
the social network through which new migrants were able to move to cities.
In Lagos, boys from the same ethnic background acted as intermediaries for
migrant prostitutes, who usually stayed with family members or people from
the same ethnic group.143
Family support can also involve offering help so that a woman can get out of
the business. Mechant reports the case of Marie Le Boeuf who, in eighteenth-
century Bruges, had started working at a brothel on her own initiative. Yet,
when after some time she wanted to get out, her only hope was that her father
would come to rescue her.144 However, legislation that criminalizes sold sex
has often sabotaged the helpful relationships between prostitutes and their
families. With the Contagious Diseases Act, for instance, the colonial authori-
ties made the family members of non-compliant sex workers subject to convic-
tion throughout the British Empire.145 Similarly, the Australian law enacted in
1908 also criminalized male relatives—even those in paid employment—“for
living off the earnings of their mothers, wives, sisters or daughters simply be-
cause they shared a house with them or were ‘habitually in their company.’”146
In India today, legislation still criminalizes living off a sex worker’s earnings,
which means that sex workers’ family members can be imprisoned for living
on their income.147
Family Members as Intermediaries
While this may have been an exception, family members throughout history
have also been known for getting their relatives involved in sex work. Cristiana
Schettini has shown for early twentieth-century South America that procuring
by relatives was also an exception in the more general entertainment business,
but that there were extreme cases in which daughters were completely depen-
dent on their fathers, who mediated between them and customers.148 In early
142 Frances, this volume, Sydney/Perth.
143 Ekpootu, this volume, Nigeria.
144 Mechant, this volume, Bruges.
145 Dasgupta, this volume, Calcutta.
146 Frances, this volume, Sydney/Perth.
147 Dasgupta, this volume, Calcutta.
148 Cristiana Schettini, “South American Tours: Work Relations in the Entertainment Market
in South America”, International Review of Social History, 57 (2012), pp. 129–160, 156.
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A Gender Analysis of Global Sex Work 829
modern Paris, women were known to have been sold into prostitution by their
families.149 For a long time in Istanbul, it was common that women would be
“sold” to a licensed brothel by a husband or male relative. They would often
work for years in the brothel to pay off the debt this incurred so they could
leave the house.150 Also, in more contemporary times women are sometimes
forced into sex work against their will by close family members.151
Of course, at times this state of affairs has resulted in child prostitution. In
China, Gronewold notes, “[t]here were always children in brothels, daughters
of prostitutes plus young girls procured to be trained and brought up as enter-
tainers, plus girls doing any manner of work.”152 The demand for young girls
and virgins could and can still be high in certain societies and this has taken a
particular twist since the appearance of aids because of the belief that young
girls are freer of disease. Few of the chapters here provide much information
about child prostitution, and this may be related to the fact that it is taboo in
many societies, which means that it may exist but is not discussed. In present-
day Istanbul, for example, the authorities have acknowledged the existence of
child prostitution but no serious measures have been taken so far. Neverthe-
less, sociological studies have shown that most female sex workers in Istanbul
began working before the age of eighteen.153
Some of the authors represented in this volume have also called for cau-
tion regarding the issue of child prostitution. Blanchette and Schettini’s ex-
ample from Brazil is a telling, but hopefully extreme, one: “[t]he current wave
of sexual panic surrounding foreign men and their sexual and affective rela-
tionships with Brazilian women—especially black and brown women—has
become so acute that in 2009, a (white) Italian tourist vacationing in Brazil
with his (black) Brazilian family was anonymously accused of and imprisoned
for the sexual exploitation of children. His crime? He had kissed his daughter
in a hotel swimming pool.”154
149 Conner, this volume, Paris.
150 Wyers, this volume, Istanbul.
151 Dasgupta, this volume, Calcutta.
152 Gronewold, this volume, Shanghai.
153 Wyers, this volume, Istanbul.
154 Blanchette and Schettini, this volume, Rio de Janeiro.
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830 van Nederveen Meerkerk
Conclusions
As most of the urban overviews in this volume generally only implicitly refer
to gender, I have chosen to construct an analysis of gender relationships on
four levels: the labour market, mediation, relations with clients, and relations
with family members. Much of the evidence I have presented is anecdotal and
only surfaced in some of the papers. Therefore, it is difficult to find consistent
trends in the development of gender relationships over time or make compre-
hensive comparisons between regions. I will nevertheless try to make a few
generalizations here, by way of conclusion.
Most of the chapters in this volume stress that prostitution is indeed work,
although it was not necessarily seen that way in all historical periods and re-
gions, neither by prostitutes themselves nor by the society in which they lived.
In early modern Europe, prostitution was not a profession as such but was
equated with other acts which society considered to be deviant sexual behav-
iour. In other parts of the world, colonialism likewise often led to a blurring
of forms of marriage, paid sexual services, and slavery.155 In different periods
and societies, periods of regulation and tolerance have occurred, often lead-
ing to some institutionalized acknowledgement of prostitution as “work” (e.g.
in the form of paying taxes). Nevertheless, in most of history and even today,
society as well as academia tends to have viewed sex work as not “just an ordi-
nary form of work.”156 However, both historical and contemporary testimonies
show that sex work pays well, often better than the alternatives in the labour
market. Not coincidentally, most of the authors here included the limited op-
tions available to women in the labour market as an explanation for entry into
sex work in many periods and societies.
Throughout history, segmentation in the labour market, by gender as well as
by ethnicity and religion, thus seems to have influenced the supply of women
in sex work, and often those women were from the lower classes, belonged to
minority groups, or were migrants. Moreover, with globalization proceeding
apace, it is tempting to conclude that the alternatives in the labour market
for white, non-migrant women in the northern hemisphere have rapidly ex-
panded, possibly creating an ethnic divide in many migrant-receiving cities.
Nevertheless, considering the greater attention paid to migrant prostitutes to-
day, and the continuing presence of non-migrant women in the profession,
155 For more on the issue of gender relations in colonial settings, see the chapter on Colonial
Relations in Prostitution in this volume.
156 Jeffreys, “Prostitution, Trafficking and Feminism”, p. 319.
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A Gender Analysis of Global Sex Work 831
it seems too rigid to speak of a “new international division of labour” in this
respect.
While migrant women and non-migrant poor prostitutes throughout
history may have had fewer opportunities at their disposal, this comparative
overview has shown that they also often operated as conscious agents. All in
all, within their constrained context, gender relations did not always work out
unfavourably for women sex workers. We can clearly see this in the complex
gender relationships that arise between prostitutes and their mediators. On
the one hand, male procurers and pimps are known to have exploited female
sex workers throughout history, but there have been many kinds of other re-
lationships in which women have had considerable agency or even the upper
hand. At the same time, madams ranged from protective, “mother-like” figures
to exploitative greedy women whose main concern was to keep their girls de-
pendent on them, for instance by imposing debts on them or getting them
hooked on drugs. Almost always, state interventions—even if the goal was to
protect women involved in sex work—further complicated the existing gender
relations, as the (usually male) police have often been called on to control or
protect prostitutes, and in both cases that has not necessarily always been to
the advantage of the women involved.
Likewise, client-prostitute relationships again have not always followed the
stereotype of male–female power relations. While prostitutes have suffered
from male violence and domination throughout space and time, power rela-
tions in most societies have been more complex, as there are many examples
of female sex workers exerting considerable influence over their clients as well.
Furthermore, while male and transvestite/transgender sex workers in some
historical contexts occupied an exceptional position compared to their female
counterparts, in other contexts they have been particularly subject to social
stigmatization and aggression.
Lastly, while female sex workers have generally defied traditional gender
roles with regard to family, we can see that many of them throughout history
have seen it as their duty to provide for their families back home. Often, their
relatives have been unaware of their daughter’s, sister’s, or mother’s activities,
especially when she has (temporarily) migrated, or they choose not to know. If
they do know, they may opt to expel the woman from the family because of the
shame and social stigma associated with prostitution. But there are also many
historical examples that show tolerance and even acceptance. In extreme
cases, family members—ranging from fathers to husbands—may function as
intermediaries or procurers. This has usually been done by force and starting
from an early age. But, on the other hand, sex work can also be a way to escape
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832 van Nederveen Meerkerk
violent or otherwise suffocating family relationships. Escape often means
searching for work in the available segments of the (migrant) labour market, a
market that has traditionally been much more restricted for women, migrants,
and particular ethnic groups. They might have been enticed by a “loverboy” or
madam, or deliberately chose to work on the streets or—as is often the case
nowadays—provide their services independently via the internet. Again, this
not only neatly shows the complexity and diversity of gender relations as well
as the restrictions imposed on women and the freedoms they have enjoyed
through space and time, but also how gender relationships at the different lev-
els discussed here interrelate and develop their own dynamics.
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chapter 32
The Social Profiles of Prostitutes
Maja Mechant
Fanny Hill, Tristessa, Pretty Woman, Lilya 4-ever … There is no shortage of m
edia
portrayals of prostitutes.1 Yet the images that inform our opinions regarding
sex workers tend to be largely negative,2 depicting them as either criminals
or as victims. Today, the latter perception prevails: sex workers are stereotypi-
cally seen as young, migrant girls with no education and no alternatives. In
this chapter, I analyse the social profiles of real prostitutes over the past four
hundred years. Prostitutes’ origins and racial and ethnic backgrounds are ex-
amined, as well as their educational levels, professional experiences, ages,
and family circumstances. However, gender has not been taken into consider-
ation here, and male prostitutes are not integrated into the analysis. The main
aim of this undertaking is to determine if female prostitutes form a distinct
group within society or not. To that end, I analyse whether certain populations
are overrepresented in the sex industry and if their profiles can explain why
they turned to prostitution, whether voluntarily or otherwise. The emphasis
is on the long-term evolution of prostitutes’ profiles, and both chronological
and geographical comparisons will allow conclusions to be drawn regarding
whether there are determinative elements in prostitutes’ profiles.
Profiling is not a new approach. The French physician Alexandre Parent-
Duchâtelet published his social profile of Parisian prostitutes in 1835, and
* I am grateful to the editors of this volume (Magaly Rodriguez Garcia, Lex Heerma van Voss
and Elise van Nederveen Meerkerk) for giving me the opportunity to write this chapter.
I would also like to thank them and the other participants of the Sex in the City project for
their comments on the first draft of this paper, which I presented at the conference in Am-
sterdam. Finally, I am grateful to Thomas Donald Jacobs for reading this chapter and advising
me on the use of the English language.
1 John Cleland, Fanny Hill or Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (London, 1748/1749); Jack
Kerouac, Tristessa (New York, 1960); Pretty Woman, Hollywood film written by J.F. Lawton and
directed by Garry Marshall, 1990; Lilya 4-ever, Swedish-Danish film written and directed by
Lukas Moodysson, 2002. For a recent example of a film that breaks through such stereotypes,
see the French film Jeune et jolie, by François Ozon, 2013.
2 Despite the nuanced differences between “prostitute” and “sex worker”, I have used them
synonymously in this chapter because of linguistic variations.
© Maja Mechant, 2017 | doi 10.1163/9789004346253_033 - 978-90-04-34625-3
This is an open access chapter distributed under the terms of the CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license.
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834 Mechant
there have since been numerous attempts at defining sex workers as a group.3
However, there are two general problems associated with profiling. The first is
related to the available data.4 There are registration lists, criminal statistics, so-
cial inquiries, physicians’ reports, contemporary accounts and so on, but not a
single source provides a complete overview of all sex workers operating in any
given city or area. Registration lists, for instance, only include the names of le-
gal prostitutes, while criminal statistics only contain data on those prosecuted.
All sources reflect the attitudes of the socio-political climate in which they
originated and are thus unique, yet there are some common characteristics.
For example, they are not really representative. The most conspicuous types of
prostitutes tend to be overrepresented, while those operating in private have
largely been overlooked. In addition to which, the “facts” about the sex workers
represented in the sources may not always be entirely correct, as they might
have told their interlocutors what they believed would best serve their needs,
rather than what was true.
Yet these shortcomings do not make profiling useless. It may not be possible
to obtain detailed statistics, but by combining several sources in a critical fash-
ion we may arrive at an approximation of broad evolutions in prostitute popu-
lations, at least for Europe from the early modern period to the present day,
as well as contemporary developments elsewhere. Nevertheless, lack of data
means that not all regions and periods can be discussed in the same detail.
Moreover, the research presented here is based on rather basic data such as
degrees and places of birth—facts that are less sensitive to distortion than as-
sertions regarding motives. Finally, even if we can only obtain a fairly accurate
image of the women working in the most visible portions of the sex industry,
this is still a constructive endeavour provided that we bear in mind that our
conclusions do not necessarily extend to all sex workers.
The second issue associated with profiling is its relevance. This method has
always been employed in determining why people turn to prostitution, but is
this the right question to ask? Elsewhere in this volume, Thaddeus Blanchette
argues that this presupposes moral judgement because we do not ask why
people join other occupations: “To claim that certain women are ‘vulnerable’
to sex work while not seeing them as ‘vulnerable’ to other forms of women’s
3 Parent-Duchâtelet, De la prostitution dans la ville de Paris, considérée sous le rapport de
l’hygiène publique, de la morale et de l’administration: ouvrage appuyé de documents statis-
tiques puisés dans les archives de la Préfecture de police, 2 vols (Paris, 1836). The most recent
edition comes at the hand of Alain Corbin (Paris, 2008).
4 Wyers, this volume, Coercion and Voluntarism.
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The Social Profiles of Prostitutes 835
labour is to naturalize prostitution as inferior labour.”5 I agree with his critique
on the notion of “vulnerability” and acknowledge that we have to deal with our
own prejudices before attempting to objectively study prostitutes’ profiles—
yet I do think that why women become prostitutes remains a relevant ques-
tion. There is a vast body of scientific literature dedicated to examining the
backgrounds of people engaged in various professions both past and present,
and their reasons for doing so.6 Prostitution stands out because it is not seen as
an ordinary profession; in fact, many do not consider it real work even though
it provides most of those engaged in it with an income. Furthermore, people
working in the sex industry are confronted with an entire range of problems
that people in other professions generally are not. Perhaps the most eternal,
universal and burdensome of these is social stigma, and the mere fact that
many sex workers conceal their profession makes it worth studying why they
started in the first place.7 Investigating whether people with limited employ-
ment possibilities are overrepresented in sex work does not inevitably imply
any moral judgement regarding their choices; rather, it gives us an insight into
the opportunities for earning a living in various societies. Lastly, the ubiquity
of stereotypes regarding sex workers’ profiles and their use in ideological and
moral reasoning makes taking a scientific approach worthwhile.8
5 Blanchette, this volume, Agency.
6 For an introduction to the influence of background on career choices, see: Monica Kirkpat-
rick Johnson and Jeylan T. Mortimer, “Career Choice and Development from a Sociological
Perspective”, in Duane Brown, Career Choice and Development, Fourth edition (San Francisco,
2002), pp. 37–83. For an example of literature in which workers’ backgrounds have been in-
tegrated, see the work of Hilde Bras, who studied the social and geographical backgrounds
and ages of domestic servants in the Netherlands in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries:
Hilde Bras, Zeeuwse meiden. Dienen in de levensloop van vrouwen, ca. 1850–1950 (Amsterdam,
2002), pp. 70–77. For an example pertaining to the present, see Shuqin Long’s work regard-
ing the importance of backgrounds in determining career options in China: Shuqin Long,
“Personal Choice or Forced Choice: An Event History Analysis of the Corporative Employees’
Occupational Mobility in Nanjing”, Chinese Journal of Sociology, 29 (2009), pp. 39–59.
7 I am referring here to women who are actually concealing their profession and leading a
“double life”. There also are many women who do not self-identify as prostitutes even though
they meet the basic definition in that they earn money or another form of income by having
sexual intercourse. This shows that the boundaries of prostitution are not always clear, and
that deciding who is a prostitute and who is not is a thorny issue for researchers.
8 An example of the misuse of data can be found in a recent column in the Belgian newspaper
De Morgen. The nationally acclaimed author Saskia De Coster wrote a column about pros-
titution titled “Modern Slavery” and stated that “De naakte—excusez le mot—feiten zijn
bekend: 90 à 95 procent van de prostituees hier is slachtoffer van mensenhandel, is verslaafd
of zit anderszins kilometers diep in de miserie.” [“The naked—excuse the word—facts are
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836 Mechant
Migrant and Minority Backgrounds
On a global level, race, ethnicity and religion are not determinative factors in
sex workers’ profiles. Black or white, Slavic or Andean, Catholic or Muslim,
prostitutes can be found everywhere. Within most cities and regions, however,
the population of sex workers has changed tremendously, shifting from a local,
homogenous labour force to one more international and heterogeneous. Two
types of migration have influenced this long-term evolution. The first derives
from gradually increasing mobility due to transport developments, globaliza-
tion and—in some places—eased border controls. In early modern Amster-
dam, for example, the proportion of foreign prostitutes was 30 per cent, and
now it is over 70 per cent.9 At the beginning of the twentieth century, nearly all
the prostitutes in Lagos were Nigerian, but since the 1990s an increasing num-
ber of sex workers hail from other African countries or Asia.10 Nevertheless,
heterogeneity has not been constantly on the increase because the direction
of migration depends upon economic circumstances. For example, the per-
centage of foreign prostitutes in Amsterdam temporarily increased during the
city’s “golden” seventeenth century, when Dutch prosperity and job opportuni-
ties attracted people from less well-off regions. When the good times ended,
however, their numbers decreased before rising once again as the economy
picked back up.11
The second type of migration encompasses the organized forced reloca-
tions that took place in colonial contexts. As such removals were generally un-
dertaken on a large scale, the impact on the make-up of prostitute populations
was far more abrupt. For example, many early modern slaves were captured
and sold in order to serve as sex workers, and as a result of the trans-Atlantic
slave trade, Latin American saloons, lodging houses, and the like were already
filled with black prostitutes in the sixteenth century.12 While racial heterogene-
ity marked that region’s sex industry from very early on, black prostitutes seem
known: 90 to 95 per cent of the prostitutes here are victims of human trafficking, ad-
dicted, or otherwise miles deep in misery.”] (Saskia De Coster, “Moderne slavernij”, De
Morgen, 7 October 2013, p. 3). However, De Coster’s data is not derived from any known
source, and the situation she describes is simply a confirmation of stereotypes and is not
in any sense a reflection of Belgian reality.
9 Pluskota, this volume, Amsterdam.
10 Ekpootu, this volume, Nigeria.
11 Pluskota, this volume, Amsterdam; Lotte Van de Pol, Het Amsterdams hoerdom: Prostitutie
in de zeventiende en achttiende eeuw (Amsterdam, 1996), p. 103.
12 Amalia L. Cabezas, this volume, Havana.
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The Social Profiles of Prostitutes 837
to have been rather exceptional in eighteenth-century London,13 and racial di-
versity arrived even later in smaller cities.
While sex workers were not the only people involved in either of these two
types of migration, and slaves were not forced into prostitution in all societies,
migrants were—and are—overrepresented among prostitute populations. In
the United Kingdom of today, the share of migrants among prostitutes is two
to three times higher than in the general population: 41 per cent versus 12 per
cent throughout the entire country, and 80 per cent as opposed to 42 per cent
in London.14 Proportions may vary, but the correlation has not; migrants have
historically been overrepresented among prostitutes. Momentarily setting
aside the slave trade, migrants have been especially numerous in the sex in-
dustry for two primary reasons. Firstly, prostitution can be the result of migra-
tion. Newcomers to an area are more likely to become prostitutes than locals
because of economic hardship. They often find themselves at a disadvantage
in the labour market because of discrimination, or simply because they lack
the right contacts or educational background.15 Yet while the current situation
may appear to be exacerbated in this regard purely as a result of the distanc-
es involved, the reality is that the way in which societies perceive insiders vs.
outsiders has changed alongside migration patterns. In seventeenth-century
Europe, for example, people coming from other towns were considered outsid-
ers even if they had resided in the same country.
Secondly, prostitution can be the cause of migration, as the sex trade has
always been characterised by a certain degree of mobility. Sex workers tend
to migrate more often than other people for various reasons: to keep making a
profit, to explore new and promising markets, to escape from stigma or pros-
ecution, and so on. Since they also seek prosperity, the direction they travel
usually does not differ from that of other migrants, although they tend to opt
more often for destinations with a male surplus. In particular, two migration
flows involving sex workers have attracted the attention of commentators and
scholars: the so-called “white slave trade” during the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries, and the contemporary movements of sex workers from
13 Tony Henderson, Disorderly Women in Eighteenth-Century London: Prostitution and Con-
trol in the Metropolis, 1730–1830 (London [etc.], 1999), p. 20.
14 General data available at: http://www.migrationobservatory.ox.ac.uk/briefings/migrants-
uk-overview (census 2011), last accessed 2 August 2017. Data on Sex Workers: Tampep,
Sex Work in Europe: A Mapping of the Prostitution Scene in 25 Countries, Amsterdam,
2009, p. 16, available at: http://tampep.eu/documents/TAMPEP%202009%20European
%20Mapping%20Report.pdf; last accessed 2 August 2017.
15 Amir et al., this volume, Tel Aviv/Jaffa; Gronewold, this volume, Shanghai; Absi, this vol-
ume, Bolivia.
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838 Mechant
both ex-colonies and the former Soviet Union. The interest in these particular
migrants derives from the alleged involvement of human traffickers and coer-
cion. This topic is discussed elsewhere in this volume, but it should be stated
here that organised migration is a complex phenomenon, involving both the
coerced and the willing.16 Furthermore, not all prostitute migration is the re-
sult of trafficking. However, the focus of this chapter is the consequence of any
type of mobility: increasing heterogeneity among prostitute populations. Hav-
ing said that, migration is not the only factor at play here.
The descendants of migrants or minorities can face the same difficulties
and discrimination that their ancestors did. Indeed, the largest discrepancies
between general and prostitute populations can be found in regions character-
ised by high levels of xenophobia. In Latin America, for example, the S panish
and Portuguese coerced black and indigenous women into prostitution.17 After
slavery was formally abolished, these groups remained overrepresented among
sex workers because former slaves had few professional options outside of do-
mestic service or prostitution.18 Similarly, black people in the United States
were excluded from a wide range of professions until the 1960s, and this clearly
had repercussions on the prostitute population—at least, in the twentieth cen-
tury. In the nineteenth century, black women were underrepresented in the
North American sex industry because white men, who made up the majority
of clients, preferred white women.19 By 1917, however, 22 per cent of New York’s
prostitutes were African American, although blacks only made up 3 per cent
of the city’s total population.20 Much smaller divergences are usually expected
when official segregation is absent; yet, whenever minorities face discrimina-
tion in the job market or grow up in environments with few social-economic
prospects, they still are more likely to turn to prostitution than members of
the dominant society. In present-day Chicago, the proportion of black women
among arrested prostitutes is 74 per cent, even though black people only con-
stitute 36 per cent of the total population. While this discrepancy does reflect
a real difference, what it mainly tells us is that black sex workers tend to be
streetwalkers, the sector most likely to draw the attention of the authorities.
16 Wyers, this volume, Coercion and Voluntarism; Keusch, this volume, Migration.
17 Cabezas, this volume, Havana.
18 Ibid.
19 Lex Heerma van Voss, “The Worst Class of Workers: Migration, Labor Relations and Living
Strategies of Prostitutes around 1900”, paper presented at the esshc, Glasgow, 2012, p. 12.
20 For data on prostitutes, see: Timothy J. Gilfoyle, City of Eros: New York City, Prostitution,
and the Commercialization of Sex, 1790–1920 (New York [etc.], 1992), p. 415. For general
data, see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographic_history_of_New_York_City.
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The Social Profiles of Prostitutes 839
Meanwhile, Asian women typically work in massage parlours, Latinas in clubs
and bars, and Caucasians in escort services—the less visible sides of the sex
industry.21 This stratification along racial lines only confirms that minorities in
the United States still face inequality at all levels of society, despite the election
of the country’s first black president.
However, such segregation in sex work is not unique to the United States,
and examples can be found everywhere, although it isn’t always the local popu-
lation that has the advantage.22 In colonial Hanoi, regulations regarding pros-
titution made distinctions between various groups. Japanese prostitutes were
seen as both more elegant and healthier than their local colleagues and there-
fore they could charge tenfold what the Vietnamese sex workers made. The
most luxurious and expensive, however, were European prostitutes.23 Such
formal hierarchies may have disappeared over the course of the twentieth
century, but as the Chicago example demonstrates, informal pecking orders
continue to exist. And at present, the position of various ethnic groups largely
depends upon the local situation. For example, Rio de Janeiro was once char-
acterized by extreme racial segregation, but prostitutes now describe them-
selves as blond, brown, or mulatta rather than black or white.24 In present-day
Moscow, however, Russians usually inhabit the upper echelons of the sex in-
dustry, whereas the lowest are mostly comprised of women from other regions
of the former Soviet Union. While the former work in hotels, the latter—the
bomzhi—solicit customers in railway stations and truck stops.25
Before concluding this section on sex workers’ backgrounds, it is neces-
sary to emphasise that locals are never entirely absent from the prostitute
population. While they may be less numerous, they are always present, espe-
cially in smaller, poorer locales. As mentioned above, 41 per cent of the u.k.’s
sex workers are foreigners, but this means that 59 per cent—the majority,
in fact—are not. However, local women are more likely to work in the more
discrete sectors of the trade, while migrants tend to be more visible, strongly
reinforcing the belief that all sex workers are foreigners. In turn, this has had
a huge impact on public opinion, which incorrectly characterizes prostitution
as an “outsider profession” even though local women sell most of the sex. At
the same time, however, the overrepresentation of migrants and minorities
21 Linehan, this volume, Chicago.
22 Herzog, this volume, Singapore; Conner, this volume, Paris; Biancani and Hammad, this
volume, Cairo.
23 Tracol-Huynh, this volume, Hanoi.
24 Blanchette and Schettini, this volume, Rio de Janeiro.
25 Hetherington, this volume, St. Petersburg/Moscow.
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840 Mechant
in the industry, as well as its stratification along those lines, do confirm that
marginalized groups are more likely to take the lowest-ranked places in any
social hierarchy.
Educational Levels
In the past, prostitutes were primarily drawn from the illiterate masses, but
their educational levels have evolved. As schooling for girls became more wide-
spread, sex workers became substantially better educated than their predeces-
sors. In short, their range of educational levels came to reflect that of their
contemporaries. The question now facing us is whether people with a lower
than average level of schooling are overrepresented in sex work. Unfortunately,
this is difficult to determine, particularly in relation to the past. For example, in
nineteenth-century Havana, prostitutes were illiterate, while few sex workers
in Istanbul ever attended school until well into the twentieth century.26 Yet,
these findings may not indicate any divergence from the general population;
education for girls was limited or sometimes even prohibited in Havana, while
in Istanbul, less than 10 per cent of women were literate in 1935.27
In some places, the data suggests that the lowest educated women were
overrepresented among prostitutes, at least to a small degree. In nineteenth-
century Bruges, for example, 49 per cent of prostitutes were unable to write
their own names, while only 41 per cent of the total female population was
illiterate, and similar figures are available for Florence.28 Meanwhile, in con-
temporary western Europe, prostitutes do have lower than average levels of
education—at least if the examples of Amsterdam and Flanders are anything
to go by.29 However, this has not been the case everywhere. According to Rae-
lene Frances, apart from migrants from regions with little access to education,
neither nineteenth-century nor contemporary sex workers in Sydney or Perth
are distinct from the general population in terms of their education, which
became compulsory during the 1870s.30 Similar circumstances prevail else-
where. In present-day Bolivia, 32 per cent of sex workers have had at least a
few years of primary education, whereas in the cities at least 50 per cent went
26 Cabezas, this volume, Havana; Wyers, this volume, Istanbul.
27 Ibid.
28 Mechant, this volume, Bruges; Turno, this volume, Florence.
29 Pluskota, this volume, Amsterdam; Mechant, this volume, Bruges.
30 Frances, this volume, Sydney/Perth.
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The Social Profiles of Prostitutes 841
to secondary school—numbers that are no different from those of other fe-
males.31 The same is true of Cuba, where education is free.32
Where the possession of a degree is an important factor in finding a de-
cent paying job—like in present-day Flanders and Amsterdam—the major-
ity of sex workers may be people lacking the right skills and qualifications for
other employment. In Calcutta, research shows that sex workers do not have
enough schooling to find work that pays above the minimum wage.33 Yet as
we have seen, education and opportunity are not always closely connected. In
the past, there were very few schooling opportunities for European women in
general and so prostitutes were hardly a distinct group in educational terms.
Elsewhere, the possession of a degree does not guarantee good employment,
such as in Cuba where the populace has greater access to higher education.34
Nigeria is particularly interesting in this respect: in the 1970s most prostitutes
were uneducated women, but now they have various educational backgrounds,
university schooling included. Education was available in the 1970s, and at that
time having an education meant excellent job prospects; however, since the
economic crisis of the 1980s, there are fewer opportunities for educated wom-
en. High-end sex work appears to be attractive under these circumstances be-
cause it opens up new opportunities, such as migration to more economically
promising regions of the world, like Europe or the United States.35
Yet despite this general pattern, educated sex workers are not only present
in societies with fewer employment prospects for women with schooling. The
educational levels of sex workers everywhere reflect the range of schooling
available to females, and the prostitute population of every society—past and
present—has consisted of women with both high and low levels of education.
The famous courtesans of early modern Italy and France, for example, made
impressive achievements; they could read, write, converse on varied subjects,
and many could also play an instrument.36 Similarly, present-day escorts
are highly educated women. As already indicated, the exceptions are more
numerous in some societies than in others, but wherever prostitution offers a
way to make a living above subsistence level, prostitution by educated women
is prevalent. In fact, prostitution can also be a means to obtain an education.
31 Absi, this volume, Bolivia.
32 Cabezas, this volume, Havana.
33 Dasgupta, this volume, Calcutta.
34 Cabezas, this volume, Havana.
35 Ekpootu, this volume, Nigeria.
36 Tessa Storey, Carnal Commerce in Counter-Reformation Rome (Cambridge, 2008), pp.
194–197.
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842 Mechant
In countries with high tuition fees such as Australia and the United Kingdom,
many students engage in sex work in order to finance their education.37
However, while all levels of education may be found among prostitutes,
educated women have the advantage in the sector’s hierarchy, just as they do
in other sectors. Like many minorities, low-educated prostitutes are overrepre-
sented in the most visible parts of the sector, and are therefore the most likely
to appear in the sources. Those with more education work at the high-end of
the sex industry, as escorts or in clubs. In contemporary Shanghai, where pros-
titution is extremely stratified, the top three levels consist only of educated
women.38 Their schooling is hugely important to these women as their sta-
tus allows them to charge higher prices, often because they are able to offer
their customers more than just sex. However, income is not the only thing that
distinguishes high- from low-educated sex workers. The hierarchies within
prostitution sectors are complicated webs with many interwoven factors. In
Lagos, there is correlation between a prostitute’s level of education and the
health risks she faces. Women with more education are in a better position to
refuse clients or certain demands, such as requests for intercourse without a
condom, and therefore run less risk of becoming infected with venereal diseas-
es.39 The underlying difference between both groups, however, is fairly simple:
highly educated women more often opt for prostitution to create an income
surplus, whereas less educated women are more often engaged in survival
prostitution—once again highlighting the importance of the professional al-
ternatives available to sex workers.
Professional Experiences
Migrants, minorities and—in some societies—uneducated women are more
likely to become prostitutes, and it has been claimed that this can be explained
by a lack of job opportunities. Although it is clear that prostitution rates in-
crease when there is a rise of poverty and unemployment,40 the data available
do not allow for group-specific analyses of the ease or difficulty in finding or
37 Frances, this volume, Sydney/Perth. In the uk, specialised programmes have been set up
in several university towns to provide advice concerning sexual health and other subjects
relating to sex work. For an example, see the Student Sex Work Project in Swansea, avail-
able at: http://www.thestudentsexworkproject.co.uk/; last accessed 2 August 2017.
38 Gronewold, this volume, Shanghai.
39 Ekpootu, this volume, Nigeria.
40 Tracol-Huynh, this volume, Hanoi.
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The Social Profiles of Prostitutes 843
keeping a job. However, it is possible to study sex workers’ former or concur-
rent professions, which in turn informs us as to their professional options and
how they have evolved in general. Particular occupations such as waitressing,
entertaining, beer brewing, and domestic service repeatedly turn up in this
context, and it is often believed that they either lead to prostitution or lend
themselves to it.41 However, perception is sometimes quite hard to distinguish
from reality, as illustrated by the example of domestic servants.
Despite the persistent belief that servants are especially “at risk” of becom-
ing prostitutes because they live far from home, are exposed to the pleasures
and dangers of city life, and are vulnerable to sexual advances and abuse by
their employers, the available data for early modern Europe shows that they
were no more numerous among prostitutes than they were among the gen-
eral population.42 The number of servants amongst prostitutes only decreased
around 1900, when the tradition of going into service declined and new pro-
fessions appeared.43 The reason why contemporaries thought that domestic
servants were especially “at risk” is probably because when they did enter the
profession, they worked in the more visible branches of the sector. When a ser-
vant lost her position she also lost her shelter, and a brothel provided both full-
time work and lodging. Women working piece rate in the textile or clothing
industries, on the other hand, were more likely to use part-time prostitution
as a way of supplementing their meagre earnings.44 It may be that similar sys-
tems of labour organisation can clarify the emphasis on the “vulnerability” of
servants elsewhere. However, the most significant aspect of domestic service
is that it is still one of the most important sources of employment for women
in patriarchal societies, and where they are overrepresented among prostitutes
this reflects their limited opportunities, not their employment as servants.
41 Ekpootu, this volume, Nigeria; Babere Kerata Chacha, “An Over-view History of Prostitu-
tion in Nairobi: From the Precolonial Period to the Present”, unpublished paper collected
for the project “Selling Sex in the City”, 2013; Biancani and Hammad, this volume, Cairo;
Amir et al., this volume, Tel-Aviv/Jaffa.
42 Van de Pol, Het Amsterdams hoerdom, p. 104; Mechant, this volume, Bruges. Relative num-
bers comparing the proportion of servants amongst prostitutes to their share of the gen-
eral population are available for St. Petersburg at the end of the nineteenth century, and
although these figures show that servants were slightly overrepresented amongst prosti-
tutes, this can be explained by the servants’ ages. Barbara Alpern Engel, “St. Petersburg
Prostitutes in the Late Nineteenth Century: A Personal and Social Profile”, Russian Review,
48 (1989), pp. 21–44, 28–30.
43 Gilfoyle, City of Eros, pp. 290–291.
44 Van de Pol, Het Amsterdams hoerdom, p. 104.
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With regards to the evolutions and regional variations in sex workers’ former
and concurrent professions, they can generally be explained by fluctuations
and differences in regional labour markets. In colonial Africa, for instance,
black women had few options apart from brewing beer and prostitution, and
so they often combined both professions.45 In early modern and nineteenth-
century Europe, prostitutes were textile workers, seamstresses, or domestic
servants, just like other women.46 A similar employment pattern can be found
in many other regions of the same period. In nineteenth-century Mexico, for
instance, prostitutes under questioning most often stated that they were seam-
stresses and servants.47 Today, however, sex workers’ professional horizons
have expanded just as they have for other women. For example, prostitutes in
present-day Flanders are employed in beauty parlours, nail and tanning salons,
or they are cleaners, nurses, saleswomen, labourers or office workers.48 Howev-
er, in some developing nations and patriarchal societies, employment options
for women have remained limited; in Turkey, for example, only 22 per cent of
women work outside the home, as opposed to 70 per cent of the men. In such
regions, there is not as much variety in sex workers’ professional backgrounds.
In Calcutta, for instance, prostitutes are offered domestic work or menial la-
bour to “save” them from sex work.49
Yet the enormous differences in labour markets make it difficult to com-
pare sex workers’ professional alternatives across time and between countries.
Many urban studies argue that women choose to become prostitutes because
the alternatives are limited and low-paid, and their opportunities are inferior
to those of men.50 This statement is certainly correct for much of the periods
under consideration, and is still true in countries characterised by strongly
gendered labour markets. Domestic service, textile work, and street hustling all
fit the above job description, and in many societies there are simply no other
45 Ziyad Choonara, “Selling Sex in Johannesburg from 1886 to the Present”, unpublished pa-
per collected for the project “Selling Sex in the City”, 2013; Ekpootu, this volume, Nigeria;
Chacha, “An Over-view History of Prostitution in Nairobi”.
46 Mechant, this volume, Bruges; Conner, this volume, Paris.
47 Nuñez and Fuentes, this volume, Mexico City.
48 Karolien van Nunen, Charlotte Gryseels and Guido Van Hal, Effectonderzoek naar preven-
tie bij sekswerkers (Antwerpen, 2012), p. 136.
49 Wyers, this volume, Istanbul; Dasgupta, this volume, Calcutta, 17.
50 For example, see: Biancani and Hammad, this volume, Cairo; Amir et al., this volume,
Tel-Aviv/Jaffa; Dasgupta, this volume, Calcutta; Wyers, this volume, Istanbul; Turno, this
volume, Florence; Jürgen Nautz, “Urban Overview: Vienna”, unpublished paper collected
for the project “Selling Sex in the City”, 2013.
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The Social Profiles of Prostitutes 845
o ptions for women. Regarding eighteenth-century England, Vern Bullough
stated that “prostitution was one of the few ways a woman could make it on
her own”, and this is definitely the case elsewhere and elsewhen too.51
The situation in present-day Europe seems to be entirely different because
women generally have many other options in the labour market, and so pros-
titutes have varied backgrounds although those lacking opportunities are still
overrepresented. General transformations in society and the fact that the ma-
jority of people in Europe no longer struggle merely to survive mean that the
distinction between them and the majority of prostitutes is growing. In other
words, it seems that individual profile characteristics become more important.
Yet this does not mean that individual characteristics are utterly unimportant
in patriarchal labour markets elsewhere. There probably are differences, but
the data allow for little differentiation. For example, general maids are pre-
sumably less well paid than kitchen maids and nursemaids, and differences in
spinning skills can also determine earnings.
Nevertheless, the underlying reason for engaging in prostitution remains
unchanged: it provides an income, and people do it to earn money. The range
of other professional options for women is dependent upon both their so-
cial profiles and society, but when prostitution offers a higher income than
the available alternatives, women enter the profession whether they are con-
fronted with limited options or not. Former slaves in Havana could earn more
by selling sex in dark alleys than by working as domestic servants, just like
office workers bring in more money by escorting than in their nine to five job.
Indeed, the relatively higher earnings to be made via prostitution are men-
tioned in nearly all urban studies on the subject, and the importance of this
factor can hardly be exaggerated.52 Several have found that sex work is not just
a profession for those experiencing difficulty in surviving, but rather is a way of
reaching or maintaining a certain standard of living.53 Simply put, sex workers
are opting for a job that generally pays more than the available alternatives, or
are using it to supplement their current income, whether part-time or more
occasionally.
51 Vern L. Bullough, “Prostitution and Reform in Eighteenth-century England”, Eighteenth
Century Life, 9 (1984), pp. 61–74, 72.
52 For example, see: Dasgupta, this volume, Calcutta; Tracol-Huynh, this volume, Hanoi;
Absi, this volume, Bolivia; Blanchette and Schettini, this volume, Rio de Janeiro; Linehan,
this volume, Chicago; Mechant, this volume, Bruges.
53 Absi, this volume, Bolivia; Gronewold, this volume, Shanghai.
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846 Mechant
In fact, coupling prostitution with another form of labour appears to be
quite a common feature of the sector.54 In the early modern period, utilizing
several income strategies was central to the economic lives of the lower classes
in what Olwen Hufton has famously called “the economy of makeshifts”. In the
industrial era, however, labour grew more professionalised and combining sev-
eral occupations became less common. Moreover, there seems to have been a
growing demand for the separation of “honest” and “dishonest” trades and peo-
ple. In nineteenth-century France, registered prostitutes were not allowed to
practise a second profession, and in Australia, it became increasingly difficult
to hold a “respectable” job alongside prostitution.55 Yet, in many other areas,
combining sex work with another profession remained common.56 Sometimes
it depends upon the sector. In present-day Flanders, part-time sex workers are
employed in the least visible, high-end part of the industry, namely as escorts,
while the more stigmatized window prostitutes mostly work full-time.57 In Ni-
geria, students work part-time as high-end prostitutes, while full-time prostitu-
tion is not exceptional in the country’s slums.58 High rates of full-time sex work
may correspond with high rates of survival prostitution, even today.
Of course, combining sex work with another profession is only possible
when it is practical. Early modern, part-time prostitutes were more likely to be
streetwalkers than brothel workers because soliciting was easier to do in be-
tween other activities.59 Need also makes a difference; if prostitution is used to
supplement a meagre income in hard times, then the primary job must allow
for this. For this reason, domestic servants very rarely work as prostitutes on the
side. More typically, prostitution has been combined with home-based textile
work, street hustling, laundering, brewing beer in colonial Africa, and work-
ing at jobs in the beauty and entertainment industry.60 Like domestic service,
these jobs are often linked with prostitution, but this time there is some basis
for it. On the one hand, the work allows women to associate with potential
clients. Laundresses who wash for soldiers, for example, can take advantage of
the contact involved, just like waitresses and dancers. On the other hand, these
54 Erica Marie Benabou, La prostitution et la police des moeurs au XVIIIe siècle (Paris, 1987),
p. 307; Engel, “St. Petersburg Prostitutes in the Late Nineteenth Century”, p. 22; Hender-
son, Disorderly Women in Eighteenth-Century London, p. 16.
55 Conner, this volume, Paris; Frances, this volume, Sydney/Perth.
56 Amir et al., this volume, Tel-Aviv/Jaffa; Mechant, this volume, Bruges.
57 van Nunen, Gryseels and Van Hal, Effectonderzoek naar preventie bij sekswerkers, p. 137.
58 Ekpootu, this volume, Nigeria.
59 Mechant, this volume, Bruges.
60 Ekpootu, this volume, Nigeria; van Nunen, Gryseels and Van Hal, Effectonderzoek naar
preventie bij sekswerkers, p. 136; Gronewold, this volume, Shanghai.
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The Social Profiles of Prostitutes 847
jobs are easy to combine with prostitution and they are low-skilled and not
highly esteemed, which means that they are feasible options for migrants, low-
educated women, and others from the working classes. Black women in colo-
nial Johannesburg and Lagos, for example, had few options other than beer
brewing, a skill they had learned at home, and one that brought in three to
four times the amount they could make by washing, ironing, or factory work.61
Part-time prostitution allowed them to earn even more.
Age
Popular historical accounts of prostitution usually depict the occupation in
dreadful terms, with everlasting effects on girls entering the profession no mat-
ter how briefly. One eighteenth-century commentator, for example, describes
how “a young creature perhaps is debauch’d at fifteen, soon abandoned, quick-
ly common, as quickly diseas’d and as quickly loathsome and detested.”62 Little
has changed since then. Many people are still convinced that prostitutes are
young, and only remain in the sector for a short period. Generally speaking,
they are correct. Young adults between the ages of 15 and 35 have always made
up the majority of sex workers, and a large proportion of those are between 20
and 25 years of age.63 Obviously, the nature of the profession, which relies on
a constant demand for attractive youths, explains this continuity. Yet a more
detailed analysis shows that this general picture simplifies complex realities.
In actuality, prostitutes’ ages have considerably risen over time. The long-
term data available for Bruges, for example, clearly illustrates this as the
mean age of sex workers rose from 24 in the eighteenth century to 26 in the
nineteenth, and is now 34.64 While this increase appears to have taken place
61 Choonara, “Selling Sex in Johannesburg”.
62 Rhys Glyn Llwyd Williams, “Towards a Social History of London Prostitution”, unpub-
lished paper collected for the project “Selling Sex in the City”, 2013.
63 Ekpootu, this volume, Nigeria; Biancani and Hammad, this volume, Cairo; Amir et al.,
this volume, Tel-Aviv/Jaffa; Cabezas, this volume, Havana; Hetherington, this v olume,
St.
Petersburg/Moscow; Turno, this volume, Florence; Conner, this volume, Paris;
Svanström, this volume, Stockholm; Nautz, “Urban Overview: Vienna”.
64 Mechant, this volume, Bruges. Mean ages are also available for other areas, but they do
not allow for comparison over time. In seventeenth-century Amsterdam, the mean age
of sex workers was 23; in nineteenth-century St. Petersburg it amounted to 22; in Tel Aviv
and Jaffa it was 23 at the start of the twentieth century; whereas in Thailand and Bolivia
it currently amounts to 22 and 24, respectively. For the data, see: Van de Pol, Het Amster-
dams hoerdom, p. 102; Absi, this volume, Bolivia; Engel, “St. Petersburg Prostitutes in the
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848 Mechant
everywhere, it is usually not as great. In developing countries in particular,
prostitutes’ ages remain substantially lower, and as a consequence of migra-
tion large differences can also be noted within European populations. Pros-
titutes’ ages are lowest in places characterised by large immigration levels,
simply because foreign sex workers tend to be much younger than their local
colleagues. In contemporary London, for instance, the mean age is only 26.65
Nevertheless, the increase does appear to be steady, both at entering and leav-
ing the profession. I will first discuss starting ages, with particular attention to
child prostitution, before turning to quitting ages and the length of prostitutes’
careers.
Exact data showing long-term trends in sex workers’ starting ages are
rare. For Flanders, we know that the age of entering the profession increased
from about 21 in the nineteenth century to about 27 today, but other con-
crete examples are unavailable.66 Still, partial evidence shows that ages also
have increased over time elsewhere. Such is the case in Nigeria, although the
current starting age is only estimated at between 13 and 15.67 This pervasive
increase in sex workers’ ages can be explained by evolving definitions of child-
hood and adulthood—as reflected in normative measures—and in economic
and demographic changes. In Bolivia, for example, prostitution under the age
of 17 was forbidden in 1906, and in New York the age of consent was raised
from 10 to 16 in 1889, and to 18 in 1895.68 In early modern Europe, there was no
official age at which prostitution was allowed, but youngsters were supposed
to begin earning a living much earlier than today. Girls were paid as adult la-
bourers starting in their mid-teens, while today working life only starts in their
Late Nineteenth Century”, p. 36; Maria J. Wawer et al., “Origins and Working conditions of
Female Sex Workers in Urban Thailand: Consequences of Social Context for hiv Trans-
mission”, Social Science & Medicine, 42 (1996), pp. 453–462, 457.
65 This rather young mean age can be explained by the fact that 80 per cent of London sex
workers are not born in the u.k., and the relatively young age of migrant sex workers has
been established for both the u.k. and Flanders; Lucy Platt et al., “Risk of Sexually Trans-
mitted Infections and Violence among Indoor-working Female Sex Workers in London:
The Effect of Migration from Eastern Europe”, Sexually Transmitted Infections, 87 (2001),
pp. 377–384, 378; van Nunen, Gryseels and Van Hal, Effectonderzoek naar preventie bij sek-
swerkers, p. 132.
66 There was, however, a temporary decrease during the world wars: Mechant, this volume,
Bruges.
67 Ekpootu, this volume, Nigeria.
68 Absi, this volume, Bolivia; Gilfoyle, City of Eros, pp. 62–70.
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The Social Profiles of Prostitutes 849
twenties.69 Lastly, the increase in the marriage age in Nigeria also shows that
childhood has been extended, and emancipation and activism have also
caused an increase in the age of the country’s sex workers.70
This evolution also puts a different complexion on the notion of “child pros-
titution”. The international child rights community currently defines this as
sex work engaged in by those under the age of 18;71 however, some societies
consider people adults before this age, and it is clear that the definition is both
modern and Eurocentric.72 In other parts of the world, such as the aforemen-
tioned Nigeria, underage sex workers remain numerous. Thailand, however,
is probably the most notorious country in this respect. In 2007, researchers
estimated that underage sex workers constituted 40 per cent of the prostitute
population.73 Such extreme proportions can be explained by a ready “supply”
of young women with limited educational opportunities and an earlier start to
working life. However, a stronger demand for younger girls may also account
for it, and indeed, such sexual preferences seem to be culturally determined to
a certain extent. In Asia, for example, an inclination for young girls is present
in the historical record as well as current practice.74 In some countries, this
demand has been affected as a result of the widespread belief that sex with vir-
gins is a cure for diseases such as aids.75 Finally, sex tourists looking to engage
in activities that their own societies deem unacceptable help to stimulate this
part of the trade.
Nevertheless, the belief that western paedophiles have made child prosti-
tution a booming business is something of an exaggeration. Firstly, there are
vast numbers of local customers. Secondly, the majority of sex tourists and lo-
cals are not actually looking for “children”. Most of the young sex workers are
69 Amy M. Froide, Never Married: Singlewomen in Early Modern England (New York, 2005),
p. 9.
70 Ekpootu, this volume, Nigeria.
71 Ecpat, Questions and Answers about the Commercial Sexual Exploitation of Children,
2008, p. 3; available at: http://resources.ecpat.net/EI/Publications/About_CSEC/FAQ
_ENG_2008.pdf; last accessed 2 August 2017.
72 Julia O’Connell Davidson and Jacqueline Sanchez Taylor, “Child Prostitution and Tourism:
Beyond the Stereotypes”, in Jane Pilcher and Stephen Wagg (eds), Thatcher’s Children?
Politics, Childhood and Society in the 1980s and 1990s (London, 1996), pp. 206–227, 215.
73 Ecpat, Global Monitoring Status of Action against Commercial Sexual Exploitation of
Children, Country Report of Thailand, 2011, p. 13; available at: http://resources.ecpat.net/
A4A_2005/PDF/EAP/A4A2011_EAP_Thailand_FINAL.pdf; last accessed 2 August 2017.
74 Tracol-Huynh, this volume, Hanoi; Gronewold, this volume, Shanghai.
75 Gronewold, this volume, Shanghai.
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850 Mechant
between the ages of 13 and 18, which means that they are post-pubescent.76
Paedosexuals looking for pre-pubescent children do so outside of the standard
prostitution scene, and while abuses do take place, they are the exception,
not the rule.77 This situation is similar to that of Europe in previous centuries.
Despite popular nineteenth-century narratives claiming, among other things,
that London was the capital of child prostitution and “five pound virgins”, ex-
tremely young sex workers, were rare.78 Indeed, there are only a few recorded
examples of 10 to 12 year-old prostitutes in the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries in the metropolises of Amsterdam, Paris, and London, as well as in
Australia, and there is some evidence to suggest they worked in specialised
brothels catering to paedophiles.79 Furthermore, present-day research into the
reasons that men visit child prostitutes shows that the majority of the custom-
ers do not have deviant sexual preferences concerning age. Rather, it just so
happens that sex workers simply tend to be very young in some places.80
Authorities trying to stop such practices currently misdirect their efforts by
concentrating on foreigners, and as such, are not successful in shutting down
this part of the sex trade. Locals continue to fuel demand, and the sex tourists
move on to other countries and other markets with less oversight.81 A different,
more structural approach is required. Attempts at driving back child prostitu-
tion should focus on putting an end to child labour in general and extending
childhood, thus diminishing both supply and demand. Quite logically, under-
age prostitution occurs the least in those societies where working life starts
after the age of 18; moreover, a lengthy childhood is linked to strong societal
condemnation of child prostitution. Because of this, the occurrence of child
prostitution has decreased in western Europe and other countries, although it
continues to exist everywhere in greater secrecy.82
76 Julia O’Connell Davidson, Children in the Global Sex Trade (Malden, 2005), p. 85.
77 Davidson and Taylor, “Child Prostitution and Tourism”, p. 218.
78 Judith R. Walkowitz, Prostitution and Victorian Society: Women, Class and the State (Cam-
bridge, 1982), p. 17.
79 Frances, this volume, Sydney/Perth; Randolph Trumbach, Sex and the Gender Revolu-
tion: Heterosexuality and the Third Gender in Enlightenment London, (Chicago, 1998),
pp. 116–118. Such specialised brothels could of course be found outside of Europe or Aus-
tralia such as in Lagos, for instance; Ekpootu, this volume, Nigeria.
80 Davidson and Taylor, “Child Prostitution and Tourism”, pp. 217–218.
81 Ecpat, Global Monitoring Status of Action against Commercial Sexual Exploitation of Chil-
dren, Country report of Thailand, 2011, p. 11.
82 Absi, this volume, Bolivia; Nuñez and Fuentes, this volume, Mexico City; Wyers, this vol-
ume, Istanbul; Linehan, this volume, Chicago.
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The Social Profiles of Prostitutes 851
Cultural differences not only play a part in determining when prostitutes
enter the profession, but when they leave it as well. Although exact figures for
quitting ages are not available, the proportions of older prostitutes can give
us an idea. In early modern Europe, less than one fifth of the prostitutes were
above 30, and very few were over 40.83 Today, the situation is completely dif-
ferent: 64 per cent of the sex workers in Flanders are 30 or older, and 25 per
cent are 40 or older.84 Lack of longitudinal data means that it is difficult to de-
termine whether similar changes have occurred elsewhere; yet, it is clear that
there are fewer older sex workers in Asia, Latin America, and Africa. In Buenos
Aires, Lagos, Cairo, and Thailand, the percentages of sex workers 30 years or
older respectively amounts to 10, 11, 21 and 22 per cent.85
Presumably, the stopping age is rising because of increases in life expectan-
cy. People are increasingly ageing, and under much better circumstances. Sex
workers are physically capable of remaining in the sector for extended periods,
and their clients are able to call on their services for longer. It is probable that
the demand for older women has grown because of this, and indeed, some
sex workers age along with their regular customers. Youth—or at least the ap-
pearance of it—remains an important factor in attracting clients, but better
living conditions, medical care, cosmetics, hygiene, and plastic surgery have
decreased the effects of ageing. This evolution seems largely restricted to west-
ern nations, perhaps because of the differences in living standards, or perhaps
for other reasons as yet unexplained. In developing countries such as Bolivia,
Mexico, and Brazil, it is nearly impossible to make a living as a sex worker after
a certain age, say 35. Prostitutes in these countries usually either quit, or mi-
grate to Europe where they continue working in the sex industry.86
Closely connected to the issue of quitting ages is whether prostitution is
a life-cycle event or a life-long career. As mentioned earlier, it usually is seen
as a temporary profession. William Sanger, a physician who studied the pro-
files of New York prostitutes in the middle of the nineteenth century, believed
83 Mechant, this volume, Bruges; Benabou, La prostitution et la police des moeurs au XVIIIe
siècle, pp. 267–268.
84 van Nunen et al., Effectonderzoek naar preventie bij sekswerkers, pp. 131–132.
85 Schettini, this volume, Buenos Aires; Biancani and Hammad, this volume, Cairo; Ekpootu,
this volume, Nigeria; Wawer et al., “Origins and Working Conditions of Female Sex Work-
ers”, p. 457.
86 Thaddeus Blanchette brought up the practice of migrating after a certain age at the Am-
sterdam conference. However, this link between age and migration is not new, and was
found in Cairo during the first half of the twentieth century: Biancani and Hammad, this
volume, Cairo.
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852 Mechant
that prostitutes had a career of about four years and died shortly afterwards.87
Sanger was correct about one thing: prostitutes’ careers are usually short. Aver-
ages and estimates run from two to seven years, yet such figures are not very
useful since the length of careers is highly varied.88 Some sex workers stop af-
ter a few weeks while others continue for many years. Careers are lengthier in
places and times where older prostitutes can still make a living, such as pres-
ent-day Europe; but even so, life-long careers are exceptional. Only 4 per cent
of the sex workers in Flanders remain in the profession for over 20 years.89
And those rare examples who stay active until retirement tend to attract much
attention. When the Brussels sex worker Sonia Verstappen, for example, quit
in 2011 at the age of 59 after a career spanning 35 years, it was covered in the
national media.90 Her working life stands in sharp contrast to those of most
of her colleagues. In Bolivia, for example, 40 to 60 per cent of the sex workers
in brothels indicate that they have been active in the industry less than one
year.91
Not much is known regarding what prostitutes do after leaving the profes-
sion.92 Despite Sanger’s convictions, few die shortly afterwards, but whether
they continue to live on the margins of society or settle in an ordinary life is
hard to find out. Tony Henderson and Judith Walkowitz have discussed the
possibility that prostitution in eighteenth and nineteenth-century England
was a life-course event preceding marriage.93 And for some cities and regions,
this has been confirmed. Sex workers who later married have been found in
eighteenth-century Bruges, nineteenth-century St. Petersburg and Australia,
twentieth-century Hanoi, and present-day Nigeria.94 While the likelihood of
87 Marilynn Wood Hill, Their Sisters’ Keepers: Prostitution in New York City, 1830–1870 (Berke-
ley, 1993), p. 47.
88 van Nunen et al., Effectonderzoek naar preventie bij sekswerkers, pp. 142–143; Henderson,
Disorderly Women in Eighteenth-Century London, pp. 47–48.
89 van Nunen et al., Effectonderzoek naar preventie bij sekswerkers, p. 143.
90 Available at: http://www.brusselnieuws.be/artikel/brussels-bekendste-prostituee-stopt;
last accessed 2 August 2017; http://deredactie.be/cm/vrtnieuws/regio/brussel/1.973762;
last accessed 2 August 2017.
91 Absi, this volume, Bolivia.
92 The lack of information concerning this topic has also been mentioned in some urban
studies: Amir et al., this volume, Tel-Aviv/Jaffa; Tracol-Huynh, this volume, Hanoi.
93 Walkowitz, Prostitution and Victorian Society, p. 196; Henderson, Disorderly Women in
Eighteenth-Century London, pp. 47–50.
94 Ekpootu, this volume, Nigeria; Frances, this volume, Sydney/Perth; Tracol-Huynh,
this volume, Hanoi; Engel, “St. Petersburg Prostitutes in the Late Nineteenth Century”,
pp. 41–43.
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The Social Profiles of Prostitutes 853
marriage cannot be measured statistically, we may presume that the chances
of it occurring are related to societal norms regarding prostitution. For exam-
ple, marriage was common among the Hausa sex workers in colonial Nigeria
because prostitution was not considered a criminal activity.95
Family Situations
Familial circumstances can play an important part in the decision to become
a prostitute. Broadly speaking, two categories of family-related reasons can be
delineated: a lack of people to derive support from—perhaps the most stereo-
typical reason—and the need to provide for other members of the family. The
fact that these are, in a certain sense, opposite reasons demonstrates that the
motives for entering the profession are both highly diverse and individually
determined. Women on their own include those who have to make ends meet
alone without a male provider and girls without parents or other family mem-
bers to take care of them, whether financially and emotionally. Women who
are providing for relatives include mothers, married women living in poverty,
and daughters and sisters working in what may be labelled a “family economy”.
Amongst the latter there are both women who are in control of their busi-
ness, and women who are dependent upon a family member who acts as an
intermediary.96 Single mothers are unique in that they combine traits from
both groups. They are responsible not only for their own wellbeing, but that of
another, and have no other person to fall back on. This classification system is,
of course, highly artificial, but it is helpful in understanding the family-related
reasons for becoming a prostitute. Both categories of sex workers may be found
anywhere and at any time, but societal changes have led to some general evolu-
tions in which some situations predominate.
Sex workers can be found among women who are single, those in relation-
ships, the wed, and the widowed, but lone women have always outnumbered
women in relationships. Over time, however, the number of single sex work-
ers has decreased. This evolution appears to be the most distinct in Europe,
or at least it is more easily demonstrated in that region. In eighteenth- and
nineteenth-century Europe, the proportion of unmarried women among pros-
titutes amounted to between 81 and 91 per cent, and the number of widows
95 Ekpootu, this volume, Nigeria.
96 Pluskota, this volume, Labour Relations in Prostitution.
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854 Mechant
accounted for 2 to 5 per cent.97 The situation now is rather different. In Stock-
holm during the 1970s, 30 per cent of the women working in illegal brothel
houses were wed as were 20 per cent of the streetwalkers. In present-day Flan-
ders, 58 per cent of sex workers are in a relationship.98 This shift may indicate
that prostitution is more socially accepted nowadays, although it is easier to
provide support for other reasons, such as the change in the average age of
prostitutes. Prior to the twentieth century in western Europe, people tended to
marry late, and were in fact too old to make a living as a prostitute.99 Widows
were rare in the prostitution sector for the same reason. Today, this is no longer
the case. People enter into committed relationships earlier on, and sex workers
tend to enter the profession later.
A second explanation lies in the breakdown of patriarchism and the intro-
duction of modern social welfare systems throughout Europe—both evolu-
tions that make it easier for women to live on their own. Moreover, the sub-
ordinate position of women in the past often made it impossible for married
women to work as prostitutes because the profession contradicted marital
norms.100 Of course, sexual fidelity remains an important requisite in most
romantic relationships to this day. However, legislation in western Europe no
longer seeks to establish an inferior legal position for married women. Fur-
thermore, adultery is no longer subject to punishment, nor is it forbidden for
married women to register as sex workers.
In several countries outside of western Europe, the decrease of single prosti-
tutes is less pronounced, perhaps even absent. Although the marriage age has
traditionally been lower outside of western Europe, this continuity can primar-
ily be explained via unequal gender-relations. However, the proportions of the
different marital groups did change as a new category arose: divorced wom-
en. While separations were either impossible to obtain or very rare in earlier
times, they now are common in many countries. In present-day Istanbul, for
97 Benabou, La prostitution et la police des moeurs au XVIIIe siècle, pp. 270–271; Turno, this vol-
ume, Florence; Mechant, this volume, Bruges; Hetherington, this volume, St. Petersburg/
Moscow.
98 Svanström, this volume, Stockholm; van Nunen et al., Effectonderzoek naar preventie bij
sekswerkers, p. 134.
99 Mechant, this volume, Bruges.
100 Where prostitution has been regulated, such as in nineteenth-century Florence and
present-day Istanbul, registration is often impossible for married sex workers; see: Turno,
this volume, Florence; Wyers, this volume, Istanbul. At the same time, in areas were pros-
titution was prosecuted, adultery was often counted a worse offence; see: Turno, this vol-
ume, Florence; Mechant, this volume, Bruges.
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The Social Profiles of Prostitutes 855
example, 66 per cent of sex workers are single and 26 per cent are d ivorced.101
Patriarchal traditions still play an important part in Turkish society. As men-
tioned previously, women lack employment opportunities, but marital practis-
es also highlight their subordinate position. Even now, many teenage girls are
forced into marriages from which it is difficult to escape. If they should leave
their husband, they cannot return to their parents because they have disgraced
their family. Many of these women turn to prostitution, either voluntarily or
because they are sold into it. Indeed, women in this situation account for 70
per cent of Istanbul’s formerly wed prostitutes.102
The Turkish example not only demonstrates the awkward economic posi-
tion of many single women, but it also shows that sex workers are sometimes
women fleeing bad relationships and facing a lack of familial support. Both
characteristics can be found among the prostitutes covered in many of the
urban studies.103 Although it is impossible to quantify how important such
factors are, several authors argue that broken homes are more important in
explaining why women opt for prostitution than either ethnicity or class.104 In
historical studies, such interpretations usually pertain to runaways, pregnant
girls thrown out of their homes and, in particular, orphans who lost one or
both parents.105 In the nineteenth century, more than half of the prostitutes
who lived in the New York House of Refuge, a youth detention centre, had par-
ents who were either deceased or who had left home, and similar figures are
available for London.106 The most disquieting numbers for this era can be seen
in the figures for St. Petersburg, where less than 4 per cent of prostitutes’ par-
ents were both alive.107
However, the figures are less ominous elsewhere.108 Furthermore, because
life expectancy was low, it was not extraordinary to lose a parent at a young
age. While this may help explain why some women became prostitutes, it does
not appear to be a particularly determinative factor. Moreover, now that life
101 Wyers, this volume, Istanbul.
102 Ibid.
103 Pluskota, this volume, Amsterdam; Absi, this volume, Bolivia; Linehan, this volume, Chi-
cago; Laite, this volume, London.
104 Linehan, this volume, Chicago; Gilfoyle, City of Eros, pp. 65–66.
105 Laite, this volume, London; Conner, this volume, Paris.
106 Gilfoyle, City of Eros, pp. 65–66, Walkowitz, Prostitution and Victorian Society, pp. 16–19.
107 Hetherington, this volume, St. Petersburg/Moscow.
108 An Huitzing, Betaalde liefde: Prostituées in Nederland, 1850–1900 (Bergen, 1983), pp. 79–83;
Maja Mechant, “Geboren en getogen in kwetsbaarheid? De familiale achtergronden van
prostituees werkzaam in Brugge tijdens de 18de eeuw”, in Isabelle Devos and Bart Van de
Putte (eds), wog Jaarboek (2014), pp. 52–55.
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856 Mechant
expectancy has increased, it has even less explanatory power. Other disrup-
tions in the family unit, however, are very influential. Domestic violence, pa-
rental abandonment, drug abuse, alcoholism, and sexual abuse are recurring
factors in the lives of sex workers, and in some places, like Chicago, they seem
to be decisive.109 All the same, these elements are not common among all pros-
titutes. In her research on Amsterdam, Marion Pluskota points out that the
family backgrounds of indigenous and migrant sex workers are quite diverse,
stating that Dutch women tend to come from homes marred by violence and
abuse and see prostitution as a “last resort”, whereas newcomers are more of-
ten driven by economic opportunity.110
Indeed, while the lack of a loving family is certainly important in some cas-
es, it is not possible to generalise on this issue. There are numerous examples
of sex workers who are in close contact with their families. Many mothers,
for instance, leave their children with their parents while earning money as a
prostitute.111 So it is not the case that all sex workers suffer from a lack of sup-
portive familial ties. In fact, many women—as stated at the beginning of this
section—opt for prostitution solely to help maintain their family, and not all
of them are single mothers having difficulty in providing for their children.112
In colonial Cairo, for example, it was not unusual for a married woman to work
as a prostitute if her husband did not earn enough money.113 Similarly, in pres-
ent-day Australia, Asian sex workers send a portion of their income to their
family back home.114 In these cases, weak family ties are not the deciding fac-
tor, rather economic circumstances are. Although families who live far away do
not always know how their daughters are earning this money, others certainly
do. Indeed, prostitution is sometimes part of the family’s subsistence strategy.
Aboriginal women in Australia who worked in the sex industry were part of
extensive familial networks, and they contributed to the survival of an entire
group.115 Of course, much depends on the society’s views regarding prostitu-
tion. While families in early modern Europe often imprisoned their prostitute
daughters for “immoral behaviour”, families in Asia and Africa helped them
to organise their business. In present-day Shanghai, women often enter the
109 Linehan, this volume, Chicago.
110 Pluskota, this volume, Amsterdam.
111 Absi, this volume, Bolivia; Ekpootu, this volume, Nigeria.
112 Wyers, this volume, Istanbul; Jan MacKell, “Frontier Prostitution in the United States”,
unpublished paper collected for the project “Selling Sex in the City”, 2013.
113 Biancani and Hammad, this volume, Cairo.
114 Frances, this volume, Sydney/Perth.
115 Ibid.
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The Social Profiles of Prostitutes 857
profession in order to provide a living for their families, husbands, and chil-
dren.116 In the nineteenth century, poor white Australian families employed
the same strategy, but attitudes changed and the authorities increasingly be-
gan combating this from the end of the century onwards.117
Conclusion
The social profiles of sex workers have changed considerably over the course of
the last four hundred years. While some stereotypical groups have been over-
represented among prostitute populations across all eras and areas, there have
been changes with regard to the importance of various factors. Prostitute pop-
ulations have become more heterogeneous in terms of their origin, race, age,
family situation, educational level, and professional background—albeit at
different paces. However, all such developments can be linked to general evo-
lutions in societies, which means that prostitutes’ profiles have changed very
little in a relative sense. Indeed, continuity is far more important than rapid
change when explaining shifts over time. For example, migrants did not sud-
denly appear in the western European sex trade after the fall of the Berlin Wall.
Rather, they were always present, and always overrepresented in the prostitute
population. What actually changed over time are the distances covered. Simi-
larly, prostitutes’ ages have altered in tandem with developments in society at
large, most notably lengthier childhoods and a later start to working life.
The central factor in explaining why women turn to prostitution is what,
if any, other professional alternatives are available to them, and this in turn
is dependent upon other factors. People may face poor job prospects because
of certain aspects of their profiles. Migrants, minorities, people lacking edu-
cational qualifications—factors that are often related with one another—are
more likely to experience difficulties in finding employment. At the same time,
an individual’s desire or need to participate in the labour market is dependent
upon their age and family circumstances. In theory, people are only supposed
to start working when they reach adulthood and it is desirable or necessary.
The importance of either set of factors is dependent on the society in ques-
tion. In patriarchal countries with few employment possibilities for women
in general, a lone woman has fewer opportunities than a single woman living
in a society characterised by greater gender equality and economic prosperity.
Women who turn to prostitution in the latter are more likely to belong to a
116 Gronewold, this volume, Shanghai.
117 Frances, this volume, Sydney/Perth.
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858 Mechant
distinct group for whom the opportunities are limited because of their minor-
ity status or inadequate education. However, having said this it is important
to emphasise that sex workers’ profiles are varied in every society, regardless
of type.
While it is definitely true that certain people have limited options for sur-
vival, the high degree of diversity among sex workers clearly shows that prosti-
tution cannot be reduced to a profession of the destitute, or one which people
passively end up in. In fact, people who are not members of so-called “vulner-
able” groups might be more numerous in the sector than anticipated because
of their invisibility. As discussed here, the sex industry is highly stratified, and
individuals with better prospects take the places at the top of the hierarchy
more often than those with limited possibilities. These women have chosen to
use their bodies to create a financial surplus, and they are thought to face fewer
dangers than the prostitutes working at the lower end of the market. It seems
easier for people to accept that these women actively chose their profession,
and harder to view them as passive victims. However, their underlying reasons
are not necessarily different from the masses employed at the industry’s mar-
gins. Although some women are forced into prostitution against their will one
way or another, this is certainly not the case for all sex workers, let alone the
majority. Most prostitutes are driven by opportunity, and the fact that most
have fewer opportunities than their contemporaries does not change that.
Simply put, prostitution can be emancipatory. It can be a positive choice, rath-
er than just a negative one. Profile characteristics do not explain why people
use their bodies to earn an income, but they do explain why certain people
end up in the most visible and least rewarding sectors of the profession. This is
interesting in its own right, given that the sex industry’s high level of stratifica-
tion forces researchers to avoid generalisations. Instead of relying upon simple
stereotypes, we must instead continue to explore the large degree of diversity
among prostitutes.
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part 3
Conclusion
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chapter 33
Sex Sold in World Cities, 1600s–2000s:
Some Conclusions to the Project
Elise van Nederveen Meerkerk, Magaly Rodríguez García and
Lex Heerma van Voss
Introduction
In the general introduction to this volume, we justified our approach to an-
alysing the global history of prostitution within a framework of a history of
work and labour relations. In doing so, we are following the broad concep-
tion of work recently put forward by, among others, Marcel van der Linden.1
Global labour history aims to describe developments in labour relations over
space and time, as well as to find explanations for the patterns that emerge. A
comprehensive geographical and temporal perspective on the history of sex
work is important because it can be placed in comparison with other forms of
work that are, perhaps, more traditionally viewed as determining labour his-
tory, such as transport or factory labour.2 Therefore, this project was directed at
asking the urban overviews’ authors about the historical labour relations and
working conditions of prostitutes, or sex workers, and how these changed over
time. In this concluding chapter we would like to highlight what we think this
approach has brought us and how it may help further the historiography of
prostitution and the field of global labour history more generally. This will be
done by emphasizing specific themes we outlined in our introduction, themes
that formed the guiding principles of both the urban overviews and the com-
parative thematic papers in this volume.
When drawing general conclusions, it is of course impossible to do justice to
all the rich and varied historical material that this volume has to offer. The aim
1 Marcel van der Linden, Workers of the World. Essays toward a Global Labor History (Leiden,
2008); Jan Lucassen (ed.), Global Labour History: A State of the Art (Bern [etc.], 2008); Andrea
Komlosy, Arbeit: Eine globalhistorische Perspektive. 13. bis 21. Jahrhundert (Vienna, 2014).
2 Sam Davies et al. (eds), Dock Workers: International Explorations in Comparative Labour His-
tory, 1790–1970, 2 vols (Aldershot, 2000); Lex Heerma van Voss, Els Hiemstra-Kuperus and
Elise van Nederveen Meerkerk (eds), The Ashgate Companion to the History of Textile Workers,
1650–2000 (Farnham, 2010).
© Elise van Nederveen Meerkerk ET AL., 2017 | doi 10.1163/9789004346253_034
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862 van Nederveen Meerkerk et al.
of the project has been to gather local data in the urban overviews with the aim
of comparing what has been brought to light through the thematic chapters
that show the connections among them. It is our hope that others will use this
collection for future comparisons as well. This final chapter focuses on several
themes that in our opinion stand out from the contributions in this volume.
Our goal is to systematically bring together some of these strands and sketch
the patterns that appear over time.
First of all, this chapter relates the history of prostitution and prostitutes’
experiences in terms of several broader developments in world history. Sec-
ondly, we stress the specifics of supply and demand in the labour market over
space and time in relation to the history of prostitution. Thirdly, we think that
the various ways societies and authorities have responded to prostitution and
prostitutes constitute another important feature of how labour relations have
developed in this type of work. Many of the thematic overviews in this volume
indeed point to the strong relationship between various determinants of sex
work such as legislation, labour relations, and working conditions. We aim to
systematize these varying experiences in world cities over time, and we draw
some general conclusions about the periodization of developments in the his-
tory of prostitution as we try to explain these patterns. Lastly, we briefly elabo-
rate on how we think that the history of sex workers can enhance the study of
global labour history.
Prostitution and Structural Change
Over the past four centuries, major socioeconomic changes have occurred.
In this section we aim to analyse five of these changes that are closely re-
lated to each other: urbanization, industrialization, migration, colonization,
and globalization. Although urbanization and migration existed before 1600,
these processes became all the more salient in the period investigated in this
volume. While prostitution has historically occurred in the countryside, both
the historiography and the chapters in this volume are in agreement that cities
have usually been the nodal points of the sex trade due to their concentra-
tion of people and services. This is related to both the supply and demand of
sex workers. On the supply side, cities in general offered more job opportuni-
ties, money, and other material benefits than the countryside, attracting many
(often single) male and female migrants.3 As indicated in the chapters here,
3 See Hilde Greefs and Anne Winter, “Alone and Far from Home: Gender and Migration Tra-
jectories of Single Foreign Newcomers to Antwerp, 1850–1880”, Journal of Urban History, 42
(2016), pp. 61–80.
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Sex Sold in World Cities, 1600s–2000s 863
a portion of the latter ended up in prostitution although they had not meant
to do so when they migrated to the city, whereas other women intentionally
sought the anonymity and grandeur of the urban environment to practise sex
work. This is why, especially in the earlier period, most of the women who mi-
grated to towns and became sex workers came from the (surrounding) coun-
tryside. Moreover, on the demand side, urban centres often provided a large
clientele of single men such as sailors, soldiers, or migrant workers, as well as
visiting businessmen and other short-term town dwellers, whether single or
married, who were looking for sexual pleasure during their stay. Since the late
nineteenth century, cheaper transport and the rise of mass tourism have pro-
vided both sex workers and clients with the means to have sexual encounters
in cities far away from their places of origin.4
Not coincidentally, in many colonized societies encounters with European
colonizers brought about the inhabitants’ first experiences with urbanization
as well as with prostitution in the form that was known in the “west” as well
as with “western” forms of sexual-affective exchange.5 In the world outside
of Europe, a vast, diverse set of sexual arrangements existed, many of which
involved the exchange of money or material goods for sex. As the European
colonial system invaded and/or co-opted these, sexual exchanges became re-
classified according to European moral schemata. This transformation was
also shot through with increasingly influential ideologies of blood purity and
race, literally denigrating (in the sense proposed by Frantz Fanon) sexual-
affective unions between Europeans and “natives”.6 In first instance, mainly
white men—either temporarily or permanently—migrated to the overseas
territories from the metropolis, and many of them had paid (monetary or oth-
erwise) sexual encounters with indigenous women. The foot soldiers of the
colonial armies were often non-white men from other parts of the colonial
empires, and the same held true for them. In the course of the nineteenth cen-
tury, with the increasing settlement of European men and later women in the
colonies, interracial sexual relationships increasingly became a great concern
for colonial states. Symbolically, one of the means of dealing with this “prob-
lem” was related to the urban environment. As Liat Kozma notes, colonial au-
thorities deliberately started to design the urban spaces of newly established
colonial towns with the aim of segregating their inhabitants along the lines of
4 Keusch, this volume, Migration.
5 See Raelene Frances, “Prostitution: The Age of Empires”, in Chiara Beccalossi and Ivan Cro-
zier (eds), A Cultural History of Sexuality in the Age of Empire (Oxford [etc.], 2011), pp. 145–170.
6 Frantz Fanon, Peau noire, masques blancs (Paris, 2001). We owe this suggestion to Thad
Blanchette.
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864 van Nederveen Meerkerk et al.
race, class, and “respectability”.7 The contributions to this volume make it quite
clear that processes of urbanization, migration, and colonialism generally con-
tributed to the rise and expansion of prostitution.
Another very important development that accelerated from the eighteenth
century onwards was industrialization. Although scholars in the past have
pointed to the relationship between industrialization and the occurrence of
prostitution,8 we believe that this relationship is far from clear-cut.9 For one
thing, both pre-industrial and early industrializing European and newly emerg-
ing colonial towns can, overall, hardly be called centres of booming industri-
alization. Much of the first industrialization in Europe took place in (semi)ru-
ral areas, and presumably colonialism even led to de-industrialization at least
into the late 1900s.10 Large cities had historically been centres of commerce
and services that were complemented with small-scale artisanal production.
As mentioned already, the service-oriented and recreational aspects of towns
attracted both migrant women looking for work and clients looking for plea-
sure rather than mere industrial activities (and this continues up to the pres-
ent day). Admittedly, from early on towns enjoyed a relatively high amount
of monetary circulation and wages were higher than in the countryside, but
this had already been the case long before industrialization.11 More indirectly,
perhaps, industrialization may have contributed to the rise of sex work as it
stimulated monetization, urbanization, migration, and population growth in
general. But in our view, the process of industrialization cannot be considered
to be one of the main driving forces behind increases of prostitution.
Lastly, the process of globalization is worthy of attention. Recent years have
witnessed animated debates about globalization and these have centred on
the following questions: When did it begin? How should we define it? And,
7 Kozma, this volume, Colonial Relations.
8 See Ruth Rosen, The Lost Sisterhood: Prostitution in America, 1900–1918 (Baltimore [etc.],
1982), pp. 3–4; Victoria Harris, Selling Sex in the Reich. Prostitutes in German Society, 1914–
1945 (Oxford, 2010), pp. 46–55; Lex Heerma van Voss, “The Worst Class of Workers: Mi-
gration, Labor Relations and Living Strategies of Prostitutes around 1900”, in Marcel van
der Linden and Leo Lucassen (eds), Working on Labor: Essays in Honor of Jan Lucassen
(Leiden, 2012), pp. 153–170, 159.
9 Magaly Rodríguez García, “Ideas and Practices of Prostitution around the World”, in Paul
Knepper and Anja Johansen (eds), The Oxford Handbook of the History of Crime and Crimi-
nal Justice (New York, 2016), pp. 132–154.
10 Jeffrey G. Williamson, Trade and Poverty. When the Third World Fell Behind (Cambridge,
ma [etc.], 2013).
11 Robert Allen, The British Industrial Revolution in Global Perspective (Cambridge, 2009).
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Sex Sold in World Cities, 1600s–2000s 865
how can we measure it?12 Regardless of whether we decide to adhere to the
broader definition of globalization, including the worldwide cultural, eco-
nomic, and even ecological convergences that have taken place since the “Co-
lumbian Exchange”, or hold to a stricter, more economy-based definition that
references low transport costs and market integration, it is clear that in both
cases globalization has historically had a tremendous influence on sex work-
ers. As, for instance, the many contributions to this volume on Latin America
show, the first encounters with the Spanish and Portuguese conquerors around
the year 1600 dramatically changed indigenous societies, leading to previously
unknown forms of sexual exchange and inscribing known ones with a Euro-
pean moral matrix.
Later waves of globalization dramatically lowered transport costs, lead-
ing to long-distance migration which prompted women to move greater dis-
tances, while at the same time raising completely new concerns related to sex
work such as “white slavery” and human trafficking. While the percentage of
migrants seems to be over-represented in the (past and present) population
of sex workers in comparison to the share of migrants in the population as
a whole, clearly globalization has significantly increased the proportion of
migrants.13 In fact, it can be argued that patterns of female migration across
national borders, as noted by Nicole Keusch in this volume, at least from the
nineteenth century onwards fit the chronology of “waves of globalization” (ex-
pansion from ca. 1850–1914, contraction between 1914 and ca. 1950, and again
expansion since the 1960s) rather well. In the nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries, this especially concerned European women travelling to other parts
of the world, Chinese women travelling to the us, and Japanese women going
to other parts of Asia. The more recent wave of globalization conversely shows
a trend of women from the “Global South” travelling to the “Global North”.14
Both strands of migration seem to have run parallel with preoccupations
of a moral, ethical, and racial nature, and more generally with concerns about
12 See Jeffrey G. Williamson and Kevin O’Rourke, “When Did Globalisation Begin?” Euro-
pean Review of Economic History, 6 (2002) pp. 23–50; Dennis O. Flynn and Arturo Giraldez,
“Path Dependence, Time Lags, and the Birth of Globalization: A Critique of O’Rourke and
Williamson”, European Review of Economic History, 8 (2004), pp. 81–108; Jan de Vries, “The
Limits of Globalization in the Early Modern World”, Economic History Review, 63 (2010),
pp. 710–733.
13 Nevertheless, although migrants are and have always been over-represented in the popu-
lation of prostitutes compared to the total population, we should also remember that
the majority of sex workers generally have been non-migrants or rural–urban migrants.
Mechant, this volume, Social Profiles.
14 Keusch, this volume, Migration.
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866 van Nederveen Meerkerk et al.
public safety and organized crime. As more women migrated alone and across
long distances, which removed them from their families’ sexual-economic
control and protection, it was to be expected that this would lead to charges of
sexual immorality as well as cases of abuse. It is possible that during the first
wave (1850–1914) these concerns were more likely expressed by stressing the al-
leged victimhood of white women and by scapegoating Jewish people,15 while
in the second wave (since 1960), concerns have more often been connected to
issues of unwanted non-western immigration and the stereotyping of eastern
European and non-European women (as victims) and men (as perpetrators).
Furthermore, globalization has also brought about new forms of communica-
tion, such as the telephone and the internet. These technical developments
have enlarged the scope and capabilities of sex workers worldwide and con-
siderably changed the features of the trade, as many of the chapters in this
volume emphasize.16
Labour Relations and Labour Market Dynamics
As mentioned above, we do not believe that it was industrialization per se but
rather urbanization and the (monetary) labour opportunities towns offered
that stimulated the engagement of women in sex work. While monetization
and wage dependence are not necessarily linked to prostitution—as many
other forms of sexual exchange existed and still exist, such as bartering or sex
in return for certain privileges—it is clear that an increasing dependency on
money/wage labour has influenced the history of labour relations in prostitu-
tion. For instance, while a whole spectrum of labour relations, ranging from
slavery and reciprocal labour to independent remunerated labour, has existed
throughout history, those prostitutes working for someone in return for wages,
or for their “own wages” (e.g. self-employed), have generally been better off
than prostitutes in any other form of labour relation. Moreover, in recent de-
cades, self-proclaimed sex workers have staked the claim that they are selling
a service for a wage (their own), allowing them to more collectively organize
and demand workers’ rights and entitlements such as written contracts, health
15 Magaly Rodríguez García, “The League of Nations and the Moral Recruitment of Women”,
International Review of Social History, 57 (2012), pp. 97–128; Paul Knepper, “British Jews
and the Racialisation of Crime in the Age of Empire”, The British Journal of Criminology,
47 (2007), pp. 61–79.
16 See Ekpootu, this volume, Nigeria; Frances, this volume, Working Conditions; Keusch,
this volume, Migration.
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Sex Sold in World Cities, 1600s–2000s 867
and social benefits, and protection from violence at the hands of the state and
abusive employers or clients.17 Nevertheless, as demonstrated in most of the
urban as well as thematic overviews in this volume, prostitution has almost
never been considered to be “normal” work, not by the authorities, not by soci-
ety, and perhaps not by many prostitutes themselves.
A recurrent theme in many of the papers is the role of segmentation in the
labour market. In most of the periods and regions analysed in this volume, both
gender and ethnicity have significantly influenced labour market opportuni-
ties for women in general and for migrant women in particular. Historically,
gender discrimination against women has been almost omnipresent, and this
was not in the last place expressed in terms of unequal labour relations and
restrictions for women in the labour market.18 The limited prospects women
have faced in the labour market throughout most of history have led some of
them to deliberately choose sex work in order to make a living during at least
part of their lives. Less fortunate women may have been directed towards pros-
titution out of sheer poverty and lack of alternatives, and/or by force. Many
of the chapters in this volume show that throughout most of history, women
have been crowded into a small number of poorly remunerated and often pre-
carious jobs, such as domestic service, textile work, and small-scale retailing.
In contrast, as Raelene Frances notes in her overview on working conditions,
across space and time many prostitutes were able to earn significantly more
than women could in most other jobs. Although it is difficult to generalize be-
cause the circumstances in which women worked have varied substantially, for
one sexual exchange they could often obtain the same amount of money that
unskilled male labourers earned in a day.19 So, even if some women initially
did not become sex workers of their own free will, many of them may have
decided to stay in the business because of a lack of equally rewarding options
and because in most cases they had already suffered shame and been branded
for doing something illegal or “immoral”. Moreover, many prostitutes seem to
have preferred prostitution to other occupations which were not only badly
paid but also exhausting and often dangerous. “Ordinary” work outside the sex
trade often also involved rendering sexual services, as sexual harassment was
(and still is) fairly common in domestic and factory work, as well as in the retail
sector and the entertainment industry.20
17 Pluskota, this volume, Labour Relations.
18 Van Nederveen Meerkerk, this volume, Gender.
19 Frances, this volume, Working and Living Conditions.
20 Rosen, The Lost Sisterhood, pp. 152–154. See also Dasgupta, this volume, Calcutta.
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868 van Nederveen Meerkerk et al.
It is difficult to pinpoint patterns of labour relations in the history of pros-
titution. As Pluskota notes, all kinds of labour relations have existed and still
exist in the business. While past and present concerns about trafficking cer-
tainly have carried harsh political and moral connotations,21 it is undeniable
that various women have been, and are, experiencing forms of sex slavery.
More subtle forms of coerced and unfree labour relations occur when family
members drive their wives or daughters into sex work.22 Yet even in situations
which fit the definition of “forced prostitution” or “trafficking”, some women
do not seem to have resisted being pawned off or even sold, as working on be-
half of their families can be construed to be a form of filial piety.23
Most prostitutes do not seem to have been enslaved. Rather, they seem to
have worked either with a mediator or independently, receiving part of or all
of their clients’ payments. There are at least three frequent combinations that
seem to have occurred in most of the societies we have scrutinized in this vol-
ume, some of them in the early modern period and others only occurring in
later periods, for instance in the process of colonization and its accompanying
urbanization. These include streetwalking with a pimp, streetwalking or work-
ing from home without a pimp, and small-scale brothels run by a madam.24
In cases when prostitutes worked for pimps or madams, they would generally
have to give a rather large share of their earnings, usually ranging from one- to
two-thirds, to the person for whom they worked. Although this did often lead
to exploitation—as in the case of labour relations resembling debt bondage,
or if a pimp or madam tried to keep prostitutes addicted to drugs or alcohol—
working in a brothel or for a pimp could also mean real protection and even
involve affective relationships.25
The labour relations and working conditions associated with prostitu-
tion have been closely related to the ways in which society, and especially
the authorities, have responded to sex work. As Pluskota shows, working in
a tolerated or regulated brothel can provide a certain amount of security for
sex workers. From the nineteenth century onwards, regulation also brought
about a situation in which formerly independent prostitutes lost much of
their leeway and bargaining power because they were confined to particular
urban spaces; in addition, they were forced to register and were monitored in
21 See Rodríguez García, “The League of Nations”; Blanchette, this volume, Agency.
22 Pluskota, this volume, Labour Relations.
23 Heerma van Voss, “The Worst Class of Workers”, pp. 164, 168.
24 “Streetwalking” can also involve soliciting at public establishments like cafés, restaurants,
and theatres.
25 Van Nederveen Meerkerk, this volume, Gender.
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Sex Sold in World Cities, 1600s–2000s 869
numerous aggressive ways.26 But as Pascale Absi and Raelene Frances argue in
their contributions to this volume, while it is true that most women scorned
the mandatory health controls and medical treatment common in the regulat-
ed brothels of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, many also seem to have
used their contacts with doctors and social workers for their own personal
ends (e.g. to receive treatment for medical issues aside from venereal diseases
or to exit the milieu of prostitution). Also, the heightened awareness about
venereal diseases that accompanied the regulation system probably benefited
many women involved in prostitution.27 Nonetheless, this system was largely
perceived as being draconian. Therefore, many prostitutes in regulationist cit-
ies opted for clandestine prostitution, even if this meant an increased danger
of prosecution and even violence at the hands of the police.
Generally, we can conclude that the (positive or negative) effects of regula-
tion or tolerance on the labour relations and working conditions in the sex
trade have varied according to the way prostitution has been perceived by the
authorities across time and space. When prostitution was understood to be a
“necessary evil”, policies and working conditions seemed to have been fairly
relaxed; if prostitution was defined in terms of deviancy and harmful or dan-
gerous behaviour, harsh measures were the rule, labour relations deteriorated,
and (exploitative) intermediaries started to play a more prominent role; and
when prostitution came to be treated as a form of work, policies have become
far less repressive and have granted more benefits to sex workers. In several
cities, a mixed reading of prostitution seems to have existed (and still exists),
resulting in equally mixed policies and working conditions. The emphasis on
the importance of authorities’ dealings with prostitution leads us to the final
important category of analysis in this conclusion: state and non-state actors’
responses to sex work.
Responses to Prostitution
With some exceptions, most forms of prostitution have been morally and/or
legally condemned in the time periods and regions under study here. In most
early modern European towns, it was not prostitution as such that was consid-
ered to be a vice but, more broadly, extra-marital sexual relationships that were
often referred to as “adultery” or “fornication”. While in some settings, such as
pre-industrial China, high-echelon prostitutes may to a great extent have been
26 Pluskota, this volume, Labour Relations.
27 Absi, this volume, Bolivia; Frances, this volume, Working Conditions.
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870 van Nederveen Meerkerk et al.
accepted and even gained considerable social status, more frequently prostitu-
tion was seen as “evil”, albeit perhaps often a necessary evil. Prostitution was
tolerated or even regulated in many cities until around the sixteenth century
because prostitutes supposedly served as outlets for men’s sexual drives and
protected “honest” women from rape. Cultural, politico-military, and socio-
economic changes from the late fifteenth century onward altered perceptions
of prostitution and, above all, government responses to it. Parallel to the reli-
gious revival of the time, an increased number of unregulated prostitutes be-
came visible. As the early modern state and its large military apparatus devel-
oped, independent prostitutes started following the armies. This new situation
led to a spread of venereal diseases and the authorities reacted with the adop-
tion of ordinances prohibiting prostitution and confining women in hospitals
or prisons. Religious societies also became increasingly involved in campaigns
against prostitution and in rehabilitation programmes for “fallen women”.28
Hence in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries prostitution was likely to
be either criminalized and intensively persecuted by both civic and religious
authorities, or tolerated but only to a certain extent. Regulation was rare un-
til the late eighteenth century, as seen in graph 33.1. In north-western Euro-
pean towns such as Amsterdam and London, which attracted large numbers
of sailors and other migrants, tolerance was the most natural response, even
though prostitutes could easily be arrested if they were suspected of improper
or subversive behaviour.29 In most other European towns, however, procur-
ing, brothel-keeping, and/or prostitution were against the law and sometimes
dealt with in a harsh manner. Interestingly, many non-European pre-industrial
towns, particularly in North Africa and Asia, seem to have been relatively more
tolerant regarding sexual services up until the nineteenth century, with the
notable exception of Hanoi.
Graph 33.1 systematizes the patterns of authorities’ dealings with prostitu-
tion and prostitution-related activities over time in the cities included in this
project.30 There is immense complexity in the transitions from one kind of
response to another, and these do not seem to have been quite synchronous
for any of the towns and cities in our sample. On the other hand, if we look at
specific periods in history, we can indeed discern distinctive similar responses
28 Rodríguez García, “Ideas and Practices of Prostitution around the World”.
29 See Lotte van de Pol, The Burgher and the Whore: Prostitution in Early Modern Amsterdam
(Oxford, 2011). See also Pluskota, this volume, Amsterdam. Pluskota attributes the rela-
tive ease with which prostitutes were arrested in early modern Amsterdam to the town’s
distinct Calvinist culture.
30 For a discussion of the graph see the appendix.
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Sex Sold in World Cities, 1600s–2000s 871
100%
90%
80%
70%
60%
50%
40%
30%
20%
10%
0%
1600 1650 1700 1750 1800 1850 1900 1950 2000
Tolerance Prohibition/criminalisation/abolition Regulation Emancipation
Graph 33.1 Trends in legislation, 1600–2000
Source: Based on Table 33.1 (appendix)
to prostitution on a global scale, and the overall picture is rather simple.
These responses link up to the specific contextual developments mentioned
earlier in this chapter which steered urban or national authorities towards a
particular reaction to prostitution. Before the second half of the nineteenth
century, the two most common approaches were prohibition/criminalization
or tolerance. Quite often, prostitution was formally forbidden in either case,
and the difference was whether the authorities made an effort to stamp out
the practice or thought it better to supervise and therefore tolerate it at least
under certain circumstances (only in special neighbourhoods or via certain
ways of advertising the business and soliciting clients). In the course of the
nineteenth century, the combination of the emergence of the nation-state
and processes of globalization and colonialism led to increased awareness and
anxiety concerning uncontrolled sexuality, and this in turn led to an increase
in regulation. Regulation had started in (post)revolutionary France and it was
to a large extent concerned with the formation of a nation-state in which in-
formation about the population was meticulously kept and the goal was to
increase the health of its citizens. Consequently, a system of regulation came
into being which, not coincidentally, elsewhere was often referred to as the
“French System”.
While many towns in Europe and the Americas adopted the regulated sys-
tem during the second half of the nineteenth century, the regulations forced
upon colonial settings by imperial powers were particularly harsh. In the
1860s, the British introduced the Contagious Diseases Acts in garrison towns
and abroad. The measures were specifically intended to secure the imperial
project and combat the consequences of prostitution to protect British troops.
The system never extended to the metropolis as a combination of informal
regulation and repression continued to be practised in London throughout the
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872 van Nederveen Meerkerk et al.
nineteenth century.31 In the colonies, the regulation of prostitution served a
dual goal: on the one hand, protecting colonial soldiers and settlers from vene-
real diseases, and on the other hand, controlling interracial sexual encounters,
which were of increasing concern to many imperial rulers.32 As Kozma argues,
while in Europe regulation came under increasing criticism at the end of the
nineteenth century, in the colonies it was deemed to be unavoidable.33
Whereas in earlier periods the image of the prostitute as a deviant or “fallen
woman” had prevailed, towards the end of the nineteenth century the idea
of (especially white) women as victims of procurers and traffickers emerged.
The abolitionist movement may have gotten started in Great Britain but over
time it was increasingly supported worldwide by the emerging feminist move-
ment. Around the turn of the century, the International Bureau for the Sup-
pression of Traffic in Women and Children was established, and it condoned
state-regulated prostitution but strove to repress the international “white slave
traffic”. In the early twentieth century the first conventions against trafficking
were adopted, but it appeared that they were often not observed, so the League
of Nations in the early 1920s assembled a committee to investigate and discuss
the international traffic of women which came to be linked to the regulation
system.34 As Table 33.1 in the appendix shows, these international activities in-
spired many countries to draw up abolitionist legislation, even if it sometimes
took decades for those laws to be implemented. The authorities in many towns
only enforced legislation against activities that facilitate prostitution (pimp-
ing, soliciting, brothel keeping and so on) in the two decades after the Second
World War, although prostitution itself was not criminalized.
For many decolonizing countries, the abolition of the regulation system
may not have followed so much from concerns about international campaigns
against trafficking but rather constituted a reaction to the old colonial rela-
tions that were felt to have introduced despised western morals to overseas
territories, and those relations were then targeted for eradication. Another im-
portant development in this respect was of course the rise of communist re-
gimes that viewed prostitution as a detrimental result of the capitalist system
which, it was argued, had to be eliminated either by re-education or repres-
sion. The Soviet Union for instance explicitly decriminalized prostitution in
1918, removing any reference to it from their first Criminal Code. All through
31 Laite, this volume, London; Kozma, this volume, Colonial Relations.
32 Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common
Sense (Princeton, 2009), esp. Chapter 3, pp. 57–104.
33 Kozma, this volume, Colonial Relations.
34 Rodríguez García, “The League of Nations”, pp. 101–104.
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Sex Sold in World Cities, 1600s–2000s 873
the 1920s the official line (pursued by the central ministries against recalcitrant
local governments) was that prostitution was not a crime but pimping was.
This never changed. However, at the same time the police (or nkvd) arrested
prostitutes as “socially harmful elements” and for “hooliganism”. In the table,
we have classified as criminalization this practice of de facto persecuting what
was not de jure illegal for Moscow, St. Petersburg, Shanghai, and Havana after
their respective transitions to the communist system. In the non-communist
world, the only country that opted for the outright prohibition of prostitution
was the United States, which launched its prohibitionist policies in 1919. As
in other prohibitionist areas, the criminalization of prostitution in us cities
(except for the state of Nevada) led to harsh measures against sex workers and
drove the sex trade underground.
These broad categories also make it possible for us to look at the four re-
gional blocks in which we have organized the urban overviews in this volume.
These are commonly used geographical units: Europe, Africa and the Middle
East, the Americas, and Asia-Pacific. In Table 33.1 in the appendix we compare
nine European towns, six towns in Africa and the Middle East, six towns in the
Americas and six Asian-Pacific towns.35 As some of the overviews do not treat
the earlier period, over time the total number of observations grows from fif-
teen in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to twenty-eight in the twen-
tieth century. Can we distinguish different patterns for these four large areas?
As we noted before, the dominant responses to prostitution in the seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries on a global scale were tolerance and prohibition. But
in Europe prohibition was fairly common, while Latin America and Asia—and
to a lesser extent Africa—showed strong traditions of tolerance. Regulation in
these two centuries was limited to a small number of towns (Florence, Paris
and Cairo). However, from the mid-nineteenth century onward it became the
trend in Europe, followed, with a time lag of only a few decades, by the rest
of the world. Regulation remained the dominant system globally from the
1850s until the 1930s. The rest of the twentieth century saw formal abolition
and tolerance or de facto regulation on the rise, followed from the 1970s by
a few areas of emancipation. This movement was carried on by Latin Amer-
ica reverting to its tradition of tolerance and Europe becoming dominantly
tolerant of prostitution for the first time in the modern period. The areas of
emancipation are found in Australia and Europe. In terms of continents, Eu-
rope often stands out: first by a relative preference for prohibition (shared by
35 The total differs from the number of chapters as some chapters deal with more than one
town and not all cities for which information was collected in the project are included in
the publication.
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874 van Nederveen Meerkerk et al.
the Middle East), then by a strong preference for regulation spread around
the world through European colonialism and more recently by legalization or
various shades of abolitionism (ranging from tolerance to the criminalization
of clients).
Globalization and decolonization in the past few decades have stimulat-
ed the migration of women from the Global South to the Global North, and
a number of those women have engaged in prostitution. Likewise, the fall of
the Soviet Union stimulated the migration of eastern European sex workers to
destinations all over the world.36 These changes, together with a more general
tendency to liberate women’s sexuality (at least in the western world following
the second feminist wave), have since the 1970s led to a shift from abolition to
at least forms of tolerance or, in a few instances, to the legalization of sex work.
We can clearly see this illustrated in table 33.1 for towns in Europe such as Am-
sterdam and Florence and for towns in Latin America, Africa, and Australia. In
places where prostitution is now legal and regulated, the working conditions
for sex workers seem to have improved (although the stigma remains), as they
are entitled to the same benefits as other citizens in the labour market.37 Yet
parallel to the growth of the sex workers’ movement is the re-emergence of the
abolitionist/prohibitionist discourse and the strengthening of networks and
campaigns against human trafficking and so-called modern slavery. The idea
of prostitutes as victims has been emphasized and has led to alternative leg-
islative ways to repress prostitution. At the end of the 1990s, Sweden became
the first country to criminalize the purchasing of sex. Throughout the first de-
cades of the twenty-first century, several countries have followed the Swedish
example. In 2014, the European Parliament approved a non-binding resolution
which recommends that eu countries re-evaluate their sex work policies so
they can reduce demand for prostitution and trafficking by punishing clients.
In all these patterns of dealing with prostitution, labour relations in the
business have been very much influenced by the way state or urban authori-
ties set the legal framework. Some examples were already given in the previous
section. Being a self-employed prostitute does not necessarily mean that one
is better off because a woman may need the protection of a pimp or madam.
36 Keusch, this volume, Migration.
37 Alexis A. Aronowitz, “To Punish or Not to Punish: What Works in the Regulation of the
Prostitution Market”, in Nina Peršak and Geert Vermeulen (eds), Reframing Prostitution:
From Discourse to Description, from Moralisation to Normalisation? (Antwerp, 2014), pp.
223–251, 242.
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Sex Sold in World Cities, 1600s–2000s 875
Especially if prostitution is illegal, self-employed sex workers—particularly
streetwalkers—face harassment not only by clients but also by the police. On
the other hand, when prostitutes work under wage-dependent, debt bondage,
or coerced labour relations in the contexts of abolition or prohibition, they
are even more at the mercy of their pimp or madam because of their illegal
status. This also goes for present-day illegal migrant women who may be drawn
into criminal networks because of their vulnerable position. In cities where
sex workers operate in a legal environment, illegal prostitution has not entirely
disappeared. Illegal migrants still experience the detrimental effects of clan-
destine prostitution. It is, however, clear that the position of prostitutes on the
whole is most favourable when prostitution is legal and when individuals are
(relatively) free to enter or leave any occupation they prefer.38
Sex Work and Global Labour History
In this volume we have studied the history of prostitution in world cities within
the scope of work. Even if, as some feminist scholars and activists have fiercely
argued, all forms of prostitution should be seen as sexual slavery—a view we
do not endorse—it deserves to be studied from a labour history perspective be-
cause the broad definition of work includes all forms of labour, also slavery.39
In this final section, we wish to establish what such a long-term and worldwide
analysis of sex work adds to our knowledge of labour relations more generally
and how it may enrich the perspective of global labour history.
Throughout history, prostitutes have offered a service that many may have
considered to be aberrant or even “evil” but for which there has been demand
in all regions of the world in the entire period studied here. Sex workers have
received compensation for these services, be it monetary or non-monetary. In
recent decades, they have started organizing as workers and correspondingly
demanded workers’ rights, entitlements and—perhaps just as importantly—
recognition by society and the state. Nevertheless, prostitution up until today
has never been considered to be “normal” work, even in those few places where
it has been legalized.40 Moreover, prostitution, or facilitating it, has often been
38 Barbara Sullivan, “Rape, Prostitution and Consent”, Australian and New Zealand Journal of
Criminology, 40 (2007), pp. 127–142.
39 Van der Linden, Workers of the World.
40 Aronowitz, “To Punish or not to Punish”, pp. 223–256.
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876 van Nederveen Meerkerk et al.
criminalized, thus giving it a connotation of crime rather than of work. This
distinguishes it from a range of other occupations and sectors that have been
scrutinized by labour historians over the past few decades.
What sets prostitution apart from many other forms of labour is that it is
highly sexualized and highly gendered.41 As some authors in this volume have
argued, sexual services have often been considered to be a “natural duty” that
women should perform for men, and some prostitutes themselves have at
times even compared being married to fulfilling unpaid sexual services.42 In
this respect, sex workers can perhaps most adequately be compared to domes-
tic workers who, for a very long time, have also been largely ignored as true
workers by society, the state, and much of labour historiography.43 Domestic
work has also often been seen as the natural calling of women, particularly
wives, and has accordingly been undervalued and under-represented in the
labour movement and historiography.
However, what distinguishes prostitution from domestic work is that it
has in many instances been one of the few occupations in which women, at
least for a certain phase in their life cycle, could earn a relatively reasonable
to decent living, sometimes even exceeding the income of men in many oc-
cupations. In fact, if one looks at the alternatives women had in the labour
market in most of history, prostitution was often the only viable way to make a
living for women, either because they were excluded from many occupations
as females (and migrants) or because the alternatives they had just did not
yield sufficient incomes. A broader lesson to be learned from this is that labour
historians, when exploring the global history of work, should be careful not to
isolate a particular occupation or sector in their analysis of labour relations
and they should always take into account the wider labour market dynamics
pushing some groups of women, and also men, into particular forms of work
which may seem unreasonably dangerous or unattractive.44
Apart from the (often local) conditions in the labour market, it is clear
that more universal developments in history have also had a major impact on
41 Of course, throughout history there have always been male prostitutes, but they were and
still are generally a minority.
42 See Wyers, this volume, Istanbul; Dasgupta, this volume, Calcutta; Van Nederveen
Meerkerk, this volume, Gender.
43 See Dirk Hoerder, Elise van Nederveen Meerkerk and Silke Neunsinger (eds), Towards a
Global History of Domestic and Care Workers (Leiden, 2015).
44 One can think of the health risks involved in mining or some professional sports which
are well known to the workers concerned and still many people worldwide are drawn to
those professions.
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Sex Sold in World Cities, 1600s–2000s 877
l abour relations in prostitution. Here, we have identified three larger processes
in particular: urbanization, globalization, and colonization. These three devel-
opments were highly interrelated and also link up to the fact that a consider-
able proportion of sex workers (though usually not the majority) have been
migrant women. Together with the processes of urbanization and globaliza-
tion, migration has tended to become more important and be performed over
longer distances. The (lack of) opportunities that migrants, especially migrant
women, have had in the receiving labour market and more generally their rela-
tively vulnerable positions in the society they arrived in have determined to a
large extent the labour relations and conditions in which they worked.
However, as most of the chapters in this volume show, it would be a major
error, even a distortion of history, to view migrant sex workers solely as pas-
sive victims. In the case of migration, many women have known, or at least
suspected, what they were getting into, and even if it was because of lack of
alternatives, many of them seem to have weighed the advantages against the
disadvantages of prostitution and deliberately chosen to become sex workers.
After all, not all (migrant) women end up in prostitution, even if they too live
under similar miserable economic conditions and have limited choices in the
labour market. Moreover, whereas some women have indeed been forced or
lured into prostitution, this does not mean that they could not exert any con-
trol over their own lives after they found themselves in an unfavourable posi-
tion. The contributions in this volume show that many prostitutes have had
a considerable—although varying—degree of agency in deciding about their
working lives. This leads us to the final point we would like to make with this
global history of sex workers: labour historians should try to move away from
simple dichotomies between “coercion” and “voluntarism” and instead focus
on the degrees of freedom that workers have had in the past and present.45
This holds true for many other occupations aside from prostitution.
45 Robert J. Steinfeld and Stanley L. Engerman, “Labor—Free or Coerced? A Historical Reas-
sessment of Differences and Similarities”, in Tom Brass and Marcel van der Linden (eds),
Free and Unfree Labour: The Debate Continues (Bern, 1997), pp. 107–126. For a conceptual
overview of the boundaries of “free” and “coerced” labour in international law, see Magaly
Rodríguez García, “On the Legal Boundaries of Coerced Labor”, in Marcel van der Linden
and Magaly Rodríguez García (eds), On Coerced Labor: Work and Compulsion after Chattel
Slavery (Leiden, 2016), pp. 11–29.
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878 van Nederveen Meerkerk et al.
Appendix: Data for Graph 33.1
Table 33.1 Trends in legislation, 1600–2000
17th century 18th century 1780s–1800s 1810s–1840s
Tolerance Amsterdam Paris Sydney Chicago
Cairo Johannesburg Florence
Calcutta Moscow
Havana Rio de Janeiroh
Bruges Jaffa
London
Mexico
Shanghai
Prohibition/ Hanoi Moscow Amsterdama Cairo
criminal- Istanbul St. Petersburg Florence Havana
ization/ Moscowa Stockholma Bruges
abolition Paris
Vienna
Stockholm
Regulation Florence Cairo
Paris
Emancipation
Note: City names in italics designate attitudes to procuring, brothel keeping etc., not to
prostitution per se.
a = procuring; b = procuring by men; c = brothel keeping; d = radical; e = independent sex work;
f = restricted areas; g = clients; h = formally tolerated but subjected to much police harassment
based on other legislation
Source: Chapters in this volume.
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Sex Sold in World Cities, 1600s–2000s 879
1850s–1870s 1880s–1900s 1910s–1930s 1940s–1960s 1970s–2000
Havana Stockholm Amsterdam Bruges
Perth Paris Florence
Tel Aviv Johannesburg
Rio de Janeiroe Rio de Janeirof La Paz
Buenos Aires Mexico city
Moscowh Perth
St. Petersburgh
Amsterdam Chicago Cairo Paris
Chicagoa Calcutta Casablanca Stockholmg
Rio de Janeiroc Johannesburgd Hanoi Viennaa
Vienna Moscowh Havana
Sydneyb St. Petersburgh London
Singapore Mexico Cityc
Shanghai
Tel Aviva
Calcutta Buenos Aires Casablanca Singapore
Florence Cairo Lagos
Mexcio City Hanoi Perth
Stockholm Istanbul
Vienna Johannesburg
Singapore La Paz
Moscow Shanghai
St. Petersburg Tel Aviv
Bruges
Amsterdam
Sydney
Vienna
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880 van Nederveen Meerkerk et al.
Comments on the Table
For each town and period for which information is given in the urban over-
views, we have classified the position of the authorities towards prostitution
into one of four categories: tolerance, prohibition/criminalization/abolition,
regulation or emancipation. It is not so easy to define precise borders for these
categories, but there are clear cores which can be defined. Under tolerance,
prostitution is accepted as an inevitable phenomenon. This can either take
the form of the absence of any regulation of prostitution, informal or de-facto
regulation, or a political debate the outcome of which is that prostitution is
not to be interfered with by the authorities. Historically the word “tolerance”
has also been associated with the regulation (“French”) system. This is not the
way the term is used here.
Under regulation, there are written laws that regulate how prostitution is to
be organized in the whole of a jurisdiction.
Under prohibition, the authorities make an effort to stamp out prostitution
by criminalizing prostitutes, pimps, madams and/or brothels. When prostitu-
tion had been regulated, often the term abolition was used for its prohibition,
even if technically the abolition movement might just have demanded that the
state stop regulating the sex business, not prohibition (Conner, this volume,
Paris).
Emancipation is the attempt not just to tolerate prostitution as a necessary
evil, but to organize it as a viable career for women, and to stamp out forms of
oppression often associated with prostitution.
Apart from emancipation, the other policies can be applied in a mix as dif-
ferent authorities deal with prostitution. While the official policy of a state
may be that prostitution or activities related to it are unlawful and must be
abolished, local police authorities may think it a preferable policy to tolerate
prostitution in certain establishments or neighbourhoods as a better means of
containing and supervising it, or profiting from bribes.
The periods for which the data are listed in the table were chosen based
on changes in policy as suggested by the urban overviews. They have been re-
tained in the graph.
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Index
Some terms occur so frequently throughout the book that listing them in the index does not
provide useful information. The terms brothel, prostitute and prostitution are found on average
more than once on every page, and we have also excluded words which on average turn up
more often than on every fourth page (either the words themselves or an equivalent that would
have to be covered under the same index term). For that reason the terms brothel(s), commer-
cial sex, family, health, migration, pimp(s)/souteneurs, police, prostitute(s), prostitution, sex,
sex industry, sex work, sex worker(s), soldier(s)/military and trafficking/smuggling have not
been included in the index, nor have we included geographical locations, personal names or
laws and other measures concerning prostitution.
abolitionist movement 29, 42, 46, 54–55, ages of prostitutes 16, 20, 45, 50, 72–74, 92,
66–68, 83, 86, 99–101, 140, 163, 172, 95–97, 99, 101, 107, 143, 155, 183, 198, 211,
176, 192, 195–197, 199, 220, 234, 246, 214, 225, 255–256, 266–267, 272, 275,
252–253, 260–261, 277–278, 293–294, 296, 303, 317–318, 334, 371, 392–393,
305, 311, 333, 348, 350, 360–361, 366, 396, 425, 431, 447–448, 462, 480, 498,
369, 373–374, 381–385, 436, 446, 452, 512, 565, 581, 602, 626, 847–852
454–455, 459, 467, 469–471, 475–476, aharah 233
494, 502, 504, 551, 568, 589–590, 612, Albanian women 105–107, 225
614, 656, 664, 672, 674, 712, 742, 755–757, alcohol 103, 147, 189, 193, 196, 204, 206–207,
763, 773, 775–778, 781–784, 786, 788, 249, 256, 268, 276, 298, 389, 394, 398,
790–91, 798–799, 818, 871–875, 878–880 400–401, 410, 431, 458, 512, 588, 603,
abortion 268, 270, 276, 324, 390, 400, 442, 623, 633, 642–643, 646, 680, 740, 808,
583, 593, 627, 629, 644–645, 704 856, 868
abuse 1, 6, 44, 83, 96, 118–119, 133–134, 152, American women 406, 419, 428
191, 239, 241, 267, 271, 383, 394, 396–397, anti–trafficking measures 13, 16–17, 106, 226,
399, 403–404, 434, 438, 444, 475, 483, 290, 300, 318, 347–350, 372–373, 464,
487, 519, 528, 530, 534–535, 586, 606, 494, 528, 603–604, 611–612, 712, 770–771,
609, 611, 614, 617, 620, 646, 666, 674, 784–785, 791–794
769, 792–793, 799, 815, 818, 822, 843, Argentinian women 6, 358, 370–372,
850, 855–856, 866–867 479, 812
activism 1, 4, 14, 21, 138, 164, 167, 305, 318, 411, attitudes about prostitution 11, 46, 52, 122,
465, 488, 528, 573, 585, 611–612, 653, 672, 127, 168, 206, 262, 338, 592, 631, 721
756, 774, 783, 786, 788, 802, 849, 875
actors 3, 181, 250, 289, 365, 419, 568, 571, backgrounds of prostitutes 52, 70, 72, 88,
577–578, 663, 765 111, 149–153, 209, 224, 248, 292, 304, 322,
adoption 268 429, 475, 480–482, 486, 578–580, 590,
affection 9–11, 363, 378, 405, 437, 484–486, 623–624, 682, 722, 725, 744, 825, 828,
492, 511, 513, 732, 748, 749, 751, 768, 815, 836–845, 856–858
822–823, 829, 863, 868 bars 35, 38, 58, 80, 113, 148, 250–251, 272, 286,
agency 5, 14–17, 31, 58, 111, 119, 173, 195, 306, 314–316, 320–321, 327, 362, 382–383,
324, 327, 367, 388–389, 400, 434, 437, 394, 402, 408, 418, 427, 433–434, 459,
440, 465, 489, 528, 564, 566, 584–586, 472–473, 483, 497, 500, 505–506, 508,
678, 703, 748, 755, 773, 774–775, 787, 800, 513, 545, 578, 580, 584, 591, 593, 616, 625,
802, 804, 831, 877 638, 686, 749, 766, 768, 808–809, 839
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bar girls See hostesses child prostitution 16, 55, 103, 131, 153–155,
bartering 11, 126, 323, 325, 623, 626, 794, 196, 220, 303, 310, 313, 317, 325–326,
796, 866 340, 349, 426, 477–478, 481, 565, 580,
bathhouses 160, 177, 264, 268, 507 617–618, 627, 690, 755, 765–766, 812,
beer brewing 314, 766, 808–809, 843–844, 829, 848–850
846–847 children 16, 49, 75–76, 95, 99–101, 106,
bigha’ 233 124, 147, 184, 187, 190, 207–208, 211,
birth control 75–76, 124, 276, 400, 404, 219, 252, 267–268, 272, 276, 297–299,
643–644 308–309, 313, 319, 324, 335, 339–340,
black women 150, 389, 391, 401–402, 406, 347, 371, 386, 389, 394, 397, 411, 433,
412, 416, 421, 427, 444, 480, 495–496, 511, 442–443, 447–448, 452, 463, 472, 477,
681, 684, 686, 689, 724, 726, 740, 744, 480–481, 483, 485–486, 519, 580, 585,
794, 808, 827, 829, 836, 838, 844, 847 595, 599–600, 615, 626, 648, 657, 660,
boarding houses 182, 369, 380, 415, 495–497, 703–704, 726, 733, 759, 765–766, 768,
501, 506–507, 684, 765 785, 820, 827–829, 856
bodies 2, 5, 33–34, 51, 68, 134, 143, 175, 178, Chinese women 108, 110, 198, 390, 406, 429,
185, 200, 311–312, 323, 327–328, 343, 378, 557, 561–562, 567–593, 594–620, 624,
390, 398, 424, 441, 456, 462, 469, 522, 678–680, 683, 703, 727, 794, 813, 865
540, 544, 552–553, 585, 588, 609, 617, choice 15, 31, 50, 56, 78, 88, 101, 111, 117, 119,
653, 655, 659, 676, 698, 705, 726, 735, 176, 192, 197, 200, 243, 252, 311, 326–327,
755–757, 761, 771, 777–778, 782–783, 786, 352, 388, 394, 396, 398–399, 412, 444,
788, 802, 804, 820, 858 475–477, 480, 482, 526, 537, 558, 561,
Bolivian women 466, 473, 479–480, 822 573, 609, 615, 653, 665, 667, 678–681,
bomzhi 148–149, 152, 157, 839 685, 715, 721, 723, 728, 737, 748–751, 759,
Brahmin 524 763–764, 774, 777, 796–797, 800, 809,
Brazilian women 479, 492, 496, 498, 501, 856–857
503, 511, 829 cigarette making 451
British women 123, 406, 604, 624, 744 clandestine prostitution 31, 44, 48, 67–68,
brothel keeping 2, 65–66, 69, 77, 79, 102, 114, 95–97, 100, 102–104, 114, 136, 150, 155,
163, 202, 220, 244–246, 251, 264–265, 177, 188, 241, 248, 250, 253, 263, 265–267,
267, 608, 635, 646, 661, 670, 678–679, 269, 284, 286, 294–295, 305, 323, 327,
687–688, 814–816, 870, 872, 878 365–366, 369, 374, 378, 383, 420, 423,
brothel prostitutes 32, 39, 45, 71, 114, 144, 427, 446–447, 449–450, 452, 461,
146, 149–151, 153–157, 163, 165–166, 176, 492, 500, 503, 540, 544, 547, 550–555,
320, 322, 389, 399, 403, 407, 601, 610, 559–563, 613–616, 641–647, 661,
614, 670, 687, 697, 765–767, 777 669–671, 702, 765, 771, 821, 869, 875
Bulgarian women 53, 290, 713 clients See customers
coercion 14, 17–19, 30, 54, 313, 326, 347, 352,
cabarets 182, 257, 361, 385, 401, 434, 436, 439, 366–367, 370, 379, 392, 454, 467, 470,
457, 459, 497, 501, 507–509, 662 475–477, 482, 526–527, 532–533, 573,
cafés 114, 218, 236, 247, 257, 263–264, 268, 615, 640, 678–680, 715–718, 753, 760,
337, 341, 365, 374, 382–383, 427, 497, 770, 775 800, 877
500, 557, 563, 765–766 collective strategies of prostitutes 98, 197,
call girls 115–116, 220, 227, 321–322, 402, 461, 381, 423, 585, 656, 672, 680–681, 705, 721,
475, 575, 587, 616, 631, 634, 638, 701, 866 See also prostitute organizations
766, 823 colonialism 112, 192, 197, 242–247, 261,
cars See motor vehicles 263–264, 312, 415–416, 490, 521,
castes 443, 524, 820 524–525, 536, 538, 540–541, 545,
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551–552, 557–562, 595–596, 598, 728–729, 736, 774, 819, 824, 828,
600–602, 604, 606–608, 611–613, 619, 870–874, 876, 878–880
621–624, 629, 663, 668–669, 674, 690, customers 6, 10, 18, 34, 50, 57–58, 63, 66–67,
693, 696, 700, 705, 709–713, 730–747, 74, 76, 78–82, 92, 98–99, 102–106, 114,
771, 786, 791, 809, 811–812, 819–820, 826, 120–121, 126, 133, 144, 146, 164, 173, 175,
830, 863–864, 868, 871–874, 877 184, 186, 194, 205, 223, 236, 238–239,
coloured women 136, 390, 394, 416, 430, 444, 241, 247, 249, 256, 258, 268, 274–277,
684, 725–726, 744, 812, 829 283–284, 292, 299–302, 304, 314, 318,
comfort women 690, 694 320–322, 324–327, 334, 343, 366, 372,
commodification of sex 10, 12, 391, 653, 657, 391, 393, 397, 401–407, 431, 436, 438,
672, 683, 693, 752 443–444, 455, 460, 463, 469, 479–481,
communism 109, 157, 169, 334, 436, 439, 541, 483–489, 496, 505–512, 521–522, 524,
568–569, 688, 786, 872–873 544, 553, 557–559, 562, 564–565, 572,
concubines 94, 241, 273, 281, 308, 442–443, 577–578, 580–582, 584, 586, 593, 605,
494, 543, 545, 577–578, 595, 599–601, 608, 614, 616, 626, 628, 633, 636–638,
620, 679–680, 683, 710, 733–736, 743, 641–645, 653, 662, 665–670, 672–673,
794, 823 677–678, 681–683, 687, 689, 695–699,
condom See prophylactics 701, 703, 705, 712–715, 720, 724, 728–729,
consensual sex 107, 155, 254, 316, 404, 512 738, 762, 765–767, 802–803, 808, 815,
contraceptives 34, 124, 157, 212, 276, 322, 327, 822–825, 831, 838, 842, 846, 849–851,
463, 627, 629, 643–644, 688, 703–704 863–864
corruption 90, 130–131, 179, 244, 288, 314, cybersex 200, 439, 701, 714, 727
367–368, 374, 376, 423, 434–435, 454, Czech women 150
456, 464, 469–473, 514, 545, 564, 570,
587, 591, 600, 633–636, 639, 649–650, da‘arah 233
694, 716, 726, 790 dance halls 193, 257, 264, 369, 400–401, 578,
courtesans 96, 183, 468, 521, 538–539, 580, 584, 591, 615, 765
569–572, 576–579, 582, 584–586, 593, dancers 235–237, 241, 266, 316, 379, 398, 402,
605, 667, 669–670, 682, 693, 734, 736, 439, 465, 501, 575–576, 593, 616, 693,
757, 777, 791, 820–821, 841 732, 736, 823, 846
criminal codes 41, 68, 127, 140, 143, 163–164, debt bondage 54, 77–79, 252, 291, 299–300,
185–186, 195–196, 202–203, 208, 246, 346, 348, 378–379, 385, 398, 427, 461,
270, 279–280, 293, 310, 333, 338, 343, 473, 485–486, 561, 582, 602, 608–610,
348, 350, 360–361, 368, 390, 438, 464, 613, 630, 639, 658, 661–664, 671, 675,
466, 469–470, 492–493, 539, 581, 678–680, 682–683, 688–689, 749–750,
588–589, 596, 633, 872 758, 765–767, 789, 792, 794, 815, 817,
criminality 43, 47, 68, 310, 391, 522, 723, 829, 831, 868, 875
764, 781 decriminalization 15, 30, 44–46, 52–53, 57,
criminalization of clients 14, 134–135, 173, 173, 199, 203, 220, 253, 411, 514–515, 527,
198–199, 201, 222, 228–229, 334, 351–352, 537, 593, 625, 631, 635, 638–639, 650,
519, 636, 674, 695, 874 672, 675, 681, 688, 693, 699, 872, 874, 880
criminalization of prostitution 12, 41, 64, 83, demography 43, 63, 97, 109, 121, 123, 182, 186,
89, 109, 116, 128, 131–134, 136, 140–143, 191, 208–209, 225, 261–262, 265, 270–271,
161, 165, 175, 197, 203, 220–224, 234, 277, 304–305, 327, 331, 340, 357, 371, 451,
254–255, 257, 260, 270, 277, 310–311, 478, 598, 628, 715, 719, 848
313–314, 320, 322–323, 333, 352, 390–391, dispensaries 187, 190, 264–265, 269,
408–409, 425, 491–493, 519–520, 525, 546–548, 550–551, 553–555, 561–563,
536, 581, 635, 649, 693–694, 698, 565, 698
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divorce 74, 153–154, 267, 272–273, 292, 297, 623, 647, 663, 671, 677, 685–687, 690,
314, 319, 340, 394, 462, 565, 593, 626, 701, 716, 725, 729–731, 735, 744, 766–767,
762, 766, 826, 854 769, 804, 809, 811–812, 819, 823, 828, 830,
doctors 11, 44, 46, 51, 95, 147, 152, 157, 832–833, 836, 839, 855, 867
188, 245, 261–263, 265, 276, 360, 365, extra–marital sex 11, 32, 64, 87, 122, 128,
368, 371, 374, 378, 390, 400, 429, 437, 139–140, 143, 167, 186–187, 202–207, 20,
445–449, 452–453, 456, 471, 473, 475, 228, 233, 236, 254, 256, 262, 267, 270, 272,
550, 563, 552, 632, 644, 666, 816, 869 276–277, 280, 289, 307, 338, 389–391,
domestic service 4, 40, 48, 71, 82, 89, 96, 442, 444, 468, 539, 631, 688, 734–735,
98–99, 117, 124, 132, 152, 169, 189, 191, 744, 765–767, 777, 805, 854, 869
208–209, 243, 256, 258–259, 266–267,
271–273, 275, 281, 292, 335, 379, 415–416, family economy 153, 180, 653, 655, 657–660,
444, 449–451, 453, 473, 476, 479–484, 670, 716, 853 See also households
494, 498, 530–531, 533–535, 595–597, femininity 313, 450, 511, 649
599, 601, 685, 737, 750, 759–760, 765, feminism 6, 13–14, 86, 110, 119, 164, 196, 201,
799, 807–811, 835, 838, 843–846, 252, 278, 287, 293, 303, 348, 351, 353, 381,
867, 876 384–385, 387, 391, 404, 429, 454, 460,
domestic violence 49, 272, 303, 352, 394, 463, 515, 527, 536, 584–585, 593, 631,
483, 531, 593, 664, 856 635, 656, 672, 681, 746, 754–758, 763,
drugs 1, 9, 27, 43–44, 51, 103, 105–106, 115, 119, 776–779, 783, 786–787, 801–802, 804,
125–126, 164, 196, 198, 236–237, 256, 276, 806, 872, 874–875
323, 340, 348–349, 391, 396, 398, 400, Finnish women 150, 219
410–411, 426, 434, 439, 463, 484, 512, 516, forced prostitution 15, 18, 31, 54–55, 69,
569, 582–583, 591, 609, 612, 633–634, 78–79, 83, 107, 119, 176, 196, 225, 238,
639, 665, 667, 680–682, 704–705, 723, 296, 299–300, 326–327, 373, 389, 391,
818, 831, 856, 868 398, 411, 444, 454, 461, 464–465, 530,
533, 616, 618, 674, 679, 680, 690, 712, 715,
earnings See remuneration of prostitutes 717–718, 725, 765, 784, 787–789, 829, 868
emancipation of slaves and serves 158–159, French Revolution 185–187, 199
416, 430, 678, French women 55, 150, 196, 198, 200, 290,
emancipation of women 167, 289, 318, 716, 371–372, 406, 479, 495–496, 503, 524,
801, 849, 858, 873 562, 605, 624, 684, 686, 692, 700, 703,
emancipation of prostitution See 725, 742, 744–745, 765
decriminalization
empires 144–45, 149, 159, 167, 234, 278–280, gender equality 141, 222, 721, 807, 857
285, 310, 312, 323, 521, 543, 595, 600, 603, German women 54, 123, 150–151, 288, 290,
678, 689–693, 702, 733, 742, 744–746, 386, 425, 450, 605
820, 828, 863 globalization 12, 27, 53–54, 69, 136, 497, 655,
escorts 9, 31, 36, 39, 45, 80, 108, 126, 135, 673–674, 676, 710, 713, 750, 762, 773, 812,
223, 302, 316–317, 320–322, 326, 394, 830, 836, 862, 864–866, 871, 874, 877
399–400, 402, 475–476, 480, 519, Greek women 150, 249, 286, 289–290, 624
578, 616, 630, 632, 637, 665, 673, 682,
765–766, 839, 841–842, 845–846 health cards 193, 470, 472–473, 475, 488, 617
Estonian women 150, 227 health inspections 6, 41, 45, 67, 92–96,
ethnicity 18, 52, 56, 106, 123, 149–152, 198, 98–100, 104, 140, 155, 176, 186–188,
211, 226, 270–271, 279, 281, 304–305, 307, 193–184, 201, 209, 212, 215, 240, 244–246,
318–319, 330, 344, 347, 377, 390, 394, 444, 261, 264–265, 269, 300, 338, 366,
468, 480, 494, 578, 604, 608, 615, 617–618, 404, 410, 421–424, 446–450, 452, 458,
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469–472, 474, 477, 485, 488, 521–522, intermediaries 42, 45, 55–57, 76–78,
546, 548, 550 552–553, 563, 565, 583, 82–83, 318, 426–427, 434, 439, 443, 470,
589, 611–612, 614, 632, 643, 681, 687, 695, 475–476, 480, 493, 514, 595, 599, 662,
700, 709, 721, 742, 744–745 687, 816, 825, 828, 831, 853, 869
hierarchy 18, 36, 84, 135, 149, 152, 321–323, 326, internet 39, 57, 108, 116, 135, 200, 225,
337, 425–426, 434, 480, 487, 4 95–496, 301–302, 304–305, 316, 321, 326, 400,
498, 523–526, 562–563, 5 76–579, 609, 402, 408, 439, 475, 585, 587, 631,
616, 618, 641, 644, 646, 677, 682, 724–727, 665–666, 701–702, 796, 816, 832, 866
798, 803, 821, 839–840, 842, 858 Italian women 88, 95, 97, 106, 108–110, 249,
homosexuality 68, 222, 273, 303, 369, 383, 290, 371, 524, 624, 692, 841
478, 485, 507, 539, 544–545, 571, 581,
600, 617, 743, 824 Japanese women 390, 406, 557, 561–562,
hostesses 197, 314, 323, 575, 578, 593, 766 604, 606–608, 613, 624, 679, 683, 686,
hotels 34, 38, 42, 57, 101, 103, 108–109, 114, 700, 727, 839
149, 152, 195–196, 211, 227, 249, 268, Jewish women 150 151, 266, 277, 286,
274–275, 301, 319–322, 337, 348, 361, 380, 288–290, 334, 337, 339–340, 342, 345,
400, 427, 435, 456, 459, 461, 492, 495, 352, 360, 363, 371–373, 376, 503, 623,
500–502, 506–507, 509, 519, 578, 580, 684, 687, 744–745, 810
582–583, 630, 633, 642, 647, 682, 684,
686, 766, 768, 839 karaoke bars 475, 486, 575, 578, 583–584,
households 204, 319, 273, 327, 451, 626, 653, 591, 593, 616, 618, 660, 667, 675, 796
657–659, 670, 716, 721, 737, 749–750,
826, 831, 853 labour market 1, 3, 18, 48, 54, 144–147, 178,
Hungarian women 150, 225, 288, 524, 604 202, 243, 297, 314, 330, 332–335, 339,
348, 370, 372, 379, 427, 481–483, 571, 616,
identity 10, 139, 201, 220, 313–314, 358, 360, 628, 658–659, 668, 685, 687, 759, 720,
365, 391, 420, 425, 427, 437, 439–440, 803–810, 825, 827, 830–832, 837, 8 44–845,
495, 582, 659, 729, 764, 781, 806, 824 857, 862, 866–867, 874, 866–877
immorality See morality League of Nations 16, 279, 290–292, 329, 331,
imperialism 314, 435–436, 541, 772 335, 337, 363, 374–375, 380, 458, 525, 701,
imprisonment of prostitutes 93, 103, 117, 125, 712, 745, 773, 778–779, 782, 785, 788, 795,
129–130, 132–133, 137, 171, 174, 179–180, 812–813, 816, 872
182, 186–187, 203, 213, 240, 246, 254, life cycles 38, 783, 806, 851, 876 See also ages
258, 274, 280, 283–285, 343, 348, 383, of prostitutes
393, 404, 406, 417, 423, 427, 445, 449, Lithuanian women 150
519–520, 522, 550, 609, 633, 639, 647, lock hospitals 123–124, 213, 244, 247, 583,
694, 705, 735, 797, 856, 870 612, 698, 735
indentured workers 429, 602, 609–610, 618, loose behaviour 8, 87, 94, 147–148, 207, 209,
657–658, 661, 663, 675, 688 240, 245, 330, 352, 445, 450, 722–725
indigenous women 49–50, 247–248, 250,
253, 263, 266, 360, 367, 372, 389, 393, maiden cages 207
442–444, 450, 461, 468, 480, 495, makeshift economy 48, 117, 658, 665,
522–523, 562, 595, 599–600, 605–606, 673–674, 758–759, 846
625, 663, 686, 693, 726, 732, 735, male prostitution 85, 120, 273, 456, 544–545,
743–745, 765 812, 820, 838, 856, 863 571, 581, 823–824
indoor prostitution 38, 58, 80, 105–106, masculinity 495, 742
108–110, 113–115, 135–136, 316, 321, 337, massage parlours 34, 42, 80, 114–116, 149,
341, 514, 637, 660, 670, 701, 818 218, 301, 394, 399–400, 402, 408, 461,
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massage parlours (cont.) patriarchy 222, 305, 326, 352, 417, 441, 465,
475, 480, 507, 509, 519, 578, 616, 618, 632, 468, 527, 570, 587, 657, 722, 751–752,
635–638, 660, 667, 766, 839 756–758, 762, 773, 777, 784, 786, 791, 797,
masturbation 125–127, 316, 402, 743 799, 802, 810, 843–845, 854–855, 857
medical doctors See doctors pawning wives 571, 609, 658, 663, 678–679,
medical examinations See health inspections 683, 767, 868
Mexican women 390, 406, 450, 461, 812 Peruvian women 479–480
miscegenation 240, 389, 393, 406, 595, petty trading 314, 480, 556, 558, 613, 808
599–600, 669, 724, 732–733, 735, police corruption 374, 376, 514, 633–636,
742–745, 747, 820, 863, 872 639, 649–650, 694
mobility 36, 53, 56, 69, 78, 83, 98, 134, 201, police harassment 96, 106, 132, 195, 199, 240,
209, 313, 365, 399, 417, 420, 427, 440, 274, 301, 350, 391, 400, 413, 434, 439, 522,
453, 500, 590, 606, 689, 702, 707–729, 617, 638, 672, 699, 701, 727, 792, 800, 816,
730, 739, 742, 769, 836–838 875, 878
money boys 581 Polish women 106, 150–151, 219, 227,
morality 5, 90, 96, 129, 172, 177–178, 184, 192, 290–291, 386, 495–497, 503, 524, 604,
203, 235, 250, 253, 282, 304, 310, 313, 345, 624, 686, 692, 725
352, 358, 418–419, 432, 441, 445, 448, 451, pornography 8, 28, 184–185, 196, 218, 221,
540, 560, 580, 588, 649, 655–656, 660, 247, 328, 402, 432–433, 435–436, 439,
709, 743, 769–770, 778, 866 574, 675, 688, 771
moral panic 42, 54, 114, 525, 711 poverty 1, 4–5, 37, 48–49, 58, 62–63, 70, 76,
motherhood See children 84, 89, 107, 115, 117–118, 131, 135–136, 143,
motor vehicles 34, 37–39, 44, 104, 115, 133, 154, 159, 161, 168, 171, 178, 180, 187, 191,
197–198, 257–258, 274, 630, 673, 698, 702 202, 204, 209, 229, 241, 248–249, 256,
mulatta women 416, 438, 444, 496–498, 511, 264, 267, 283–284, 295, 312, 321, 323,
745, 812, 839 327, 329–330, 332, 339, 344, 352, 371, 391,
394, 399, 415, 417–418, 434, 443, 449,
nation–states 1, 12, 359, 728, 871 453, 457, 461–462, 480–481, 494–496,
negotiating power 92, 181, 252, 318, 324, 327, 511, 522–523, 527, 531–534, 536, 558,
363, 370, 381, 395, 406, 427, 463, 483, 561, 569, 571, 573, 575–580, 587, 590,
487, 515, 616, 653–654, 658, 660–663, 601, 604–609, 623, 625, 630, 641, 654,
665–670, 672–673, 675, 687, 696, 703, 658, 665, 673, 683–684, 688, 703, 710,
716, 763, 766–767, 774, 798, 831 712–713, 719, 721–723, 726–727, 737, 740,
Nigerian women 57, 106–107, 110, 227, 755, 759, 763, 766, 786, 794, 798, 804,
306–328, 662, 704, 736, 809–810, 820, 808, 811, 814, 820, 823, 831, 837, 839, 842,
836, 841, 846, 848–849, 852–853 853, 857, 867
nightclubs 250, 257, 434–435, 439, 480, 506, precarious labour 4, 45, 48–49, 79, 152, 267,
508, 616, 796 715, 723, 728, 758, 867
precolonial 1, 260, 262, 307–309, 538, 541,
Office of Decency (Ufficiali dell’Onestà) 85, 596, 598, 693, 731, 734–736, 791, 806, 826
87–90 pregnancy 7, 49, 95, 117–118, 125, 133, 190,
organized crime 42–44, 47, 54–55, 107, 135, 267–268, 272, 276, 324, 408, 448,
148, 163, 176, 226, 325, 391, 399, 401–402, 481–482, 485, 583, 627, 629, 643–646,
408, 433, 435, 454, 461, 464–465, 484, 670, 704, 855
606, 633–634, 639–640, 646, 664, 716, pregnancy See also birth control
866, 875 prices See remuneration of prostitutes
orientalism 234, 247, 264, 732, 736, 745 procuring 41–43, 53, 57, 76, 80, 91, 134, 140,
orphans 124, 153–154, 267, 443, 557, 820, 855 175–176, 180–181, 192, 196–198, 200,
Ouled Naïl tribe 736 202–203, 205, 207, 212, 220, 225, 241, 243,
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250–251, 281, 284, 300, 310, 324–325, 639, 644–645, 658, 662, 665, 671,
335, 342, 368, 379, 415–416, 433–434, 698–699, 718, 768, 806, 815, 817–819,
462, 469–471, 484, 514, 543, 579–580, 866–868, 874
589, 607, 616, 618, 661–662, 665, 692, public health 43, 96, 140, 142, 155–157, 163,
718, 724, 779, 782–783, 792, 803, 805, 165, 184–185, 253, 294, 310, 362, 366–367,
814–816, 818–819, 828, 831, 870, 872, 878 418, 421, 445, 456, 588–589, 611
prohibition 5, 29, 66, 104, 136, 140, 142, 169,
221, 250, 279, 310, 338, 352, 401, 420, 440, race 18, 100, 149, 198, 226, 245, 253, 268,
452, 454, 513, 539, 568, 581, 590, 616–617, 310, 312, 364, 372, 386, 388–390,
674, 773, 818, 824, 870–871, 873–875, 393–394, 401, 406, 416–418, 420–421,
878, 880 425, 429–430, 437, 440, 492, 494–495,
prophylactics 34, 51, 103, 124, 157, 276–277, 497–498, 511–512, 523, 525, 536, 542,
322, 397, 409–410, 463, 488, 529, 583, 561–563, 595, 599–600, 605, 642, 645,
644, 667, 682, 703–704, 842 647, 663, 669, 683–686, 693, 700, 705,
prosecution of prostitutes 65–66, 68, 87, 709, 711, 721, 725–727, 729–735, 738, 741,
103, 120, 127–118, 130–131, 163, 186, 254, 743–747, 764, 767–768, 782, 813, 820–821,
287, 348, 350, 389, 391, 420, 446, 452, 833, 836–837, 839, 857, 863–865, 872
520, 536, 627, 633–634, 643–644, 648, rape 5, 14, 187, 219, 267, 272, 274, 294, 301,
680, 698, 805, 837, 869 346, 348, 403–405, 441, 492, 531, 535,
prosperity 62, 99, 120, 149, 166, 192, 217, 236, 645, 666, 699–700, 792, 870
238, 242, 257, 259, 264, 281, 291, 294, 314, recruitment 17, 52, 54, 56, 108, 220, 243, 251,
317, 322, 399, 419, 423–424, 480, 564, 255–256, 258, 265, 375, 426, 470–471,
572, 577, 581, 591, 596, 601, 604–605, 475–476, 485, 487, 493, 573, 749, 784,
607–608, 617–618, 620, 638, 643–644, 792, 811, 813–816
665, 684, 713, 719, 755, 804, 821, 823, red–light districts 27, 37–39, 41–43, 45, 47,
836–837, 857 58–60, 111, 115, 135, 235–236, 247–251,
prostitute culture 165, 180, 260, 407–409 256–257, 261–269, 277, 286, 295,
prostitute organizations 2, 6, 32, 46, 299–300, 322, 349, 405, 499–509,
164–165, 220, 223, 360, 384, 459, 527, 513–514, 519–520, 526–527, 529–533,
529, 535, 654, 664, 804, 806, 866, 875 535–537, 548, 604, 614, 618, 632, 637,
prostitutes’ rights 6, 33, 36, 45–46, 104–105, 640, 648, 695, 697, 731, 742, 747, 760,
165, 197, 215, 223, 279, 293, 316, 327, 349, 766–767, 768, 772, 826
384, 423, 454, 459–460, 463, 465, 489, registration of prostitutes 31, 35–37, 41,
520–521, 528, 533, 535, 537, 585, 650, 44–45, 50, 53, 55, 61, 67–68, 80, 82,
653, 656, 661, 663, 672, 675, 755–756, 87–90, 92, 94–100, 103–104, 139–140,
767, 771, 774, 783–784, 789, 791–793, 799, 143–147, 150–151, 153–155–156, 159,
804, 806, 866, 875 162–163, 168, 176, 187–195, 210–214, 229,
prostitution as necessary evil 67, 93, 238, 240, 244–246, 249, 252, 255, 259,
390, 441, 463, 631, 725–726, 777–778, 262, 265–266, 269, 285–286, 290–292,
869–870, 880 295–301, 303–305, 335, 338, 358, 360,
prostitution as supplementary income 71, 365–367, 370–372, 375, 421–423, 427,
82, 98, 116, 159, 248, 266–268, 274–275, 430–431, 434, 446–453, 458, 471–474,
297, 299, 302, 314–315, 323, 396, 415, 426, 478, 500–501, 504, 521–522, 524–525,
523, 574, 595, 600, 616, 625, 647, 659, 546–548, 550–551, 553, 565, 570, 574,
674, 697, 797, 809–810, 843, 845–847 584, 589, 602, 607, 610–612, 619, 636,
protection of prostitutes 15, 36, 76, 87, 134, 659, 661–662, 665, 669–670, 684, 687,
164, 170, 175, 197, 200, 223, 237, 241, 251, 694, 696–700, 702–703, 745, 765–766,
257, 305, 342, 364, 367, 400, 776–777, 780, 790, 809, 821, 834, 846,
407, 427, 439, 459–460, 519, 535, 635, 854, 868
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regulation 5, 6, 18, 29, 33, 35, 38, 40–42, 615–616, 629, 631, 639–646, 649, 657,
45–46, 58, 66–68, 77, 83, 86–87, 94 661–662, 664–665, 667, 670, 673, 678,
104, 109, 111–113, 122, 127–129, 132, 685–688, 696, 724–725, 750, 761, 809,
134–136, 138–140, 142–145, 147, 156–157, 842, 866, 876
161, 163, 165–169, 172, 175–176, 187, repression of prostitution 7, 64–67, 90,
184–185, 187–188, 190–196, 201, 204, 131, 142, 178, 382, 445, 500, 507, 574,
208–216, 228–229, 234, 240, 244, 246, 693–695, 772, 871–872
254, 260–262, 269, 277–279, 285, respectability 264, 362, 451–452, 522, 625,
293–294, 303–305, 310, 335, 337–338, 725, 730, 746, 770, 826–827, 864
344, 352, 357–360, 365–378, 380–383, restaurants 38, 113–114, 148, 160, 257, 314,
390, 417, 419–425, 431, 438, 440, 380, 427, 459, 475–476, 479–480, 578,
446–447, 453–454, 456–459, 466–467, 582, 586–587, 682, 808
469–472, 474–476, 484–485, 487–494, risks of prostitution 15, 36–37, 48, 51, 57, 59,
498–500, 502–506, 510, 514–516, 157, 165, 214, 226, 256, 274, 301, 320, 324,
525–526, 536, 539–548, 550–553, 555, 349, 364, 399, 406, 412, 463, 465, 485,
559, 562–563, 565–570, 573, 588–589, 487, 583, 588, 632–633, 643–645, 647,
591, 596, 600–604, 611–614, 619–620, 666–669, 672, 682, 698–699, 701–702,
632, 661–662, 668–672, 675, 687, 693, 704, 750, 796, 816, 824, 842 See also
695–698, 700–705, 709, 725, 731–732, safety of prostitutes and vulnerability
734–735, 739, 741–747, 765, 773, 776–781, Romanian women 53, 106–107, 110, 150, 225,
788, 790–793, 812, 818, 830, 839, 227, 290, 295, 300, 713
868–874, 878–880 rural environments 2, 19, 57, 63, 158–159,
rehabilitation of prostitutes 132, 141, 191, 203, 229, 242, 261, 264, 271, 275, 277,
179–180, 284, 292, 311, 350, 411, 417, 436, 282, 311–313, 319, 324, 326, 334–335, 343,
438–440, 458, 520, 523, 526–528, 533, 367, 378, 418, 430, 438, 461–462, 466,
535–536, 779–78, 790, 797, 870 503, 511, 555, 575, 583, 591–592, 606, 615,
religion 18, 40–41, 55, 89–90, 102–103, 128, 625, 628, 642, 644, 654, 662, 690–691,
140, 142, 149–152, 167–169, 173, 177–179, 714–715, 717, 719, 741, 762, 794, 797, 864
195–196, 202–205, 211, 228, 233, 235–236, Russian women 138–170, 227, 290, 295, 371,
239, 241, 247, 250, 252–253, 261–263, 373, 524, 604, 623, 681, 686, 693, 713, 839
265–266, 268–270, 277, 279–293,
302, 304–305, 331–335, 345, 363, 371, safety of prostitutes 39, 44, 56–59, 80, 164,
376–377, 383, 389, 391, 409, 414, 417, 170, 175, 198, 302, 322, 324–325, 401,
441–442, 444–445, 448, 468, 487, 512, 410, 486, 536, 578, 593, 638, 649, 665,
515, 522–524, 557, 593, 600, 617, 623, 667–668, 673, 696, 701–702, 768, 815,
636, 684, 686–687, 692, 720–721, 724, 868 See also protection of prostitutes
729, 731–732, 734–736, 770, 776, 786, and risks of prostitution
805, 810, 819, 830, 836, 870 sailors 48, 51, 62–63, 121, 268–269, 283–284,
religious segmentation 279, 282, 286, 292, 312, 317, 414–416, 601, 644, 730, 740, 812,
524, 684, 809 863, 870
remittances sent home 49, 319, 626, 660, segregation 32, 66–67, 237, 247, 268, 286,
825, 827, 856 292, 374, 450, 562, 684, 730, 738–739,
remuneration of prostitutes 8, 34–36, 50, 743, 746, 838–839
57, 72, 80–81, 83, 102, 106, 126, 146, 205, servants See domestic servants
212–213, 219, 241, 251–252, 258, 275, settlers 261, 277, 386, 428, 622–623, 707,
289, 297–298, 302, 316, 321–323, 326, 709, 712, 726–728, 733, 738–739, 741,
333, 337, 347, 380, 396–400, 402, 406, 820, 872
427, 433–434, 462, 483, 487, 502, 505, sex clubs 36, 218, 221, 435
512, 534, 557–558, 562, 587, 608–611, sex ratio 390, 628–629
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Index 889
sex tourism 8, 27, 432, 434, 509, 688–689, social networks 55, 322, 326, 419, 716, 828
716, 726, 804, 849–850 soldatka 147
sexual exchanges 5, 8–9, 11, 33, 44, 143, 159, Spanish women 371, 428, 443, 450, 468, 524
175, 241, 244, 271, 282, 308, 391, 405, 427, spatiality 18, 27, 31–39, 43–44, 48, 57–59,
433, 437, 439–440, 443, 455, 467, 477, 67, 112–116, 120, 142, 201, 244, 247, 250,
492, 498, 513, 544–545, 570, 621–623, 321–322, 325, 366, 374, 451, 498, 662,
631, 653–655, 675–676, 734, 737, 740, 669–673, 737–741, 743, 795, 799, 868
746, 748, 751–753, 771–773, 787, 802, 822, status of prostitutes 29, 31, 34, 45, 56, 95, 119,
824, 863, 865–867 127, 244, 246, 280, 320, 322, 324, 326–
sexual harassment 15, 272–274, 530, 327, 343, 366, 368, 411, 519, 525–526,
535–536, 867 568, 588, 616, 618, 641–642, 646, 660,
sex work other than prostitution 8, 33, 218, 683, 703, 723–724, 767, 820, 842, 870
316, 324, 398, 402, 465, 480, 616, 631, 675 stigmatization 7, 9, 11, 14, 46, 52, 79, 91, 109,
shame 52, 57, 149, 155, 256, 269, 303, 311, 313, 136, 184, 272, 300, 316, 320, 330, 351–353,
408, 440, 463, 477, 613, 714, 716, 724–725, 366, 376, 388, 391, 406, 413, 416, 420,
745, 825–826, 831, 867 427, 437, 440, 450–451, 468, 474, 493,
singers 236–237, 266, 379, 501, 577, 663, 823 520, 528, 536, 648, 655, 697, 715, 721,
slavery 5, 14, 54, 233, 235, 238, 247, 262, 265, 728, 750, 762–764, 772, 792, 805, 811, 822,
273, 281, 306, 308, 346, 364, 378, 399, 824, 831, 835, 837, 846, 874
415–417, 419, 424, 429–430, 440, 444, storytellers 248, 576
452, 494–495, 498, 527–528, 530, 533, streetwalking 34, 38–39, 43–44, 48, 58, 66,
537, 584, 594–595, 598–602, 606–607, 71, 79–80, 104, 107–108, 133, 135, 219, 224,
619, 656–657, 664, 672–673, 675, 275, 282, 320, 344–345, 399, 401–403,
678–680, 688, 694, 709, 737, 740, 749, 406–407, 461, 502, 505, 560, 577, 635,
755–758, 760, 763–765, 769–770, 775, 637–638, 642, 646, 660, 662, 671, 698,
781, 794–795, 799, 811–812, 814, 819, 830, 796, 813, 815, 818, 821, 825, 846, 868
836–838, 845, 866, 868, 874–875 students (involved in prostitution) 119, 259,
social class 3, 12, 18, 43, 48, 50, 80, 81, 84, 302, 318, 320–321, 323, 325, 327, 347, 580,
89, 96, 99, 108, 120, 122, 126, 128, 136, 625, 665, 686, 762, 766, 797, 842, 846
146, 148, 152, 160, 173, 178, 181, 196, sugar daddies 405
207, 209, 211, 213, 235–237, 243–244, survival prostitution 3, 49, 82, 160, 180,
248–249, 251, 260, 266, 271, 275, 277, 183, 192, 277, 311–312, 315, 321, 323–324,
282, 292, 310, 314, 320–322, 333, 340, 363, 391, 393, 398, 408, 415–416, 418,
344, 366, 386, 390, 395–396, 398, 404, 437, 462, 515, 528, 530, 532, 578, 582,
407–408, 416–417, 425–426, 427, 429, 655, 685–659, 665, 703, 720, 735, 759,
433–434, 438, 445, 448–453, 455–457, 766, 777, 796–797, 806, 823, 842, 846,
460–461, 468, 471, 482–484, 486, 856
492, 494–497, 500–501, 507, 511–512, Swedish model 134, 199, 695, 774, 874
523–524, 527, 558, 571, 573, 576–579, Swedish women 150, 695
582–583, 587, 590, 611, 625, 628–629,
636–637, 641–643, 645–649, 653, taverns 35, 51, 58, 114, 145, 163, 206, 238,
659–660, 665–667, 669, 671, 673, 677, 247, 251, 284, 365, 415, 595, 602, 616,
682–684, 686–687, 689, 696–697, 710, 808–809
713, 724, 726, 728, 730, 735–736, 738, 741, taxes 31, 36–37, 45–46, 65, 89, 198, 205, 220,
744, 752, 760–762, 764–767, 769, 774, 237–242, 244, 280, 241, 299, 349, 366,
777, 781, 796, 798, 804, 807, 810, 819, 821, 521, 547, 570, 589, 606, 612–613, 634,
823, 830, 846–847, 855, 864 656, 668, 688, 698, 720, 777, 790, 806,
socialism 86, 101, 139, 141, 144, 169, 199, 381, 830
438, 541, 569, 581 taxi drivers 196, 274, 400, 475, 616, 768
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890 Index
telephones 8–9, 115, 133, 135, 225, 258, 275, 162–164, 166, 174, 176, 178, 182, 184,
301, 384–736, 631, 665, 701, 765, 749, 765, 186–188, 190, 192, 201, 208, 212, 215,
796, 816, 866 240, 245, 250, 253–254, 261, 263–265,
temple prostitution 693, 734, 736 268, 276–277, 292, 294, 296, 298,
textile industry 2, 40, 61–62, 70–71, 89, 183, 301–302, 310, 312, 319, 323–324, 357,
187, 208, 242, 272, 451, 573, 576, 580, 607, 368, 382, 396–397, 401, 404, 409–410,
765, 808, 843–844, 846, 867 419, 422–423, 445–447, 454–459, 463,
thread spinning 51, 63, 207, 685, 807, 845 472, 474, 488, 500, 521–522, 527, 532,
tolerance of prostitution 40, 64–65, 134, 136, 536, 540, 542–544, 552–554, 565–566,
140, 165, 176, 279, 323, 345, 349, 419–421, 581, 583, 590, 593, 596, 603, 611–614,
426, 431, 433, 446, 452, 457–458, 619–620, 627, 632, 643–645, 668,
502–503, 588, 683, 830, 869–871, 671–672, 681–682, 702–705, 709, 735,
873–874, 878, 880 741–743, 776, 820, 828–829, 842, 849,
tourism 8, 47, 243, 249, 258, 431–432, 869–870, 872
436–437, 439, 511, 615, 713, 720, 764, vice squads 96, 190–192, 540, 542, 546, 552,
772, 863 560, 743
trafficking networks 54–55, 78–79, 83, 107, virginity 192, 258, 270, 272, 277, 302, 363, 417,
134–135, 176, 226–227, 259, 348–350, 447, 454, 456, 460, 462, 580, 611, 687,
375–377, 385, 402, 532, 603, 875 782, 816, 829, 849–850
transactional sex 9–11, 248, 254, 322, 751 visibility 48, 66, 104, 313, 320, 323–339, 376,
See also Sexual exchanges 451, 494, 496, 566, 591, 701, 723, 739,
transsexual prostitutes 2, 33, 105–106, 812, 858
108–110, 175, 196–198, 304–305, 388, 463, vulnerability 12, 14, 17, 36, 71, 76, 84, 127,
478, 519, 582, 617, 755, 803, 823–825, 831 135–136, 241, 243, 264, 313, 330, 346, 364,
treating 8, 11, 395, 398 371, 393–394, 399, 401, 404, 411, 427,
Turkish women 219, 295, 302, 381, 701 430, 434, 464, 470, 479, 486, 573–574,
604, 627, 633, 635, 637, 645–646, 665,
unemployment 36, 45, 49–50, 98, 107, 117, 675, 680, 699, 702, 714, 717, 723, 745, 750,
141, 148, 159–161, 183, 204, 216–217, 257, 759, 762–763, 779, 785, 789, 798, 809,
319, 335, 347, 395, 419, 427, 435, 587, 625, 811–812, 818, 834–835, 843, 858, 875, 877
760, 810, 842 See also safety of prostitutes and risks
United Nations 16, 54, 172, 195, 198–200, 226, of prostitution
297, 324, 343, 438, 464, 467, 469, 603,
663, 675, 712, 770, 783, 788 wages See remuneration of prostitutes
upper–class prostitutes 36, 72, 80, 96, 108, wages (aside from prostitution) 49, 63, 72,
136, 181, 237, 275, 320–321, 333, 426, 496, 80–82, 146, 152, 251, 256, 272, 275, 288,
571, 576, 587, 591, 632, 643, 646, 667, 290, 296, 320, 332, 337, 396, 398–399,
682, 696, 821, 839 415, 427, 450, 453, 476, 482, 534,
urbanization 1, 18, 60, 139, 157, 159, 165, 312, 556–558, 575, 625, 685, 714, 750, 755,
334, 358, 459, 471, 555, 597, 641, 708–710, 759, 761, 809–810, 864
765, 862–864, 866, 868, 877 welfare state 50, 202, 218
white slavery 16, 42, 192, 373, 376, 379, 392,
vagrancy 128–130, 143, 153, 164, 203–204, 207, 493, 525, 612, 733, 745–746, 769, 778,
216–217, 228, 418, 632, 645–646 782–783, 787, 792, 812, 865
Valaque women 563 white women 82, 287, 375, 389, 391, 394, 401,
variety artists 501, 507, 663, 743, 765, 768 404, 406, 416, 427, 430, 442–443, 525,
venereal disease 41–43, 45, 50–51, 93–95, 623–624, 725–726, 733, 735, 744–746,
99–100, 103, 124–125, 130, 156–157, 782, 812–813, 820, 838, 866, 872
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Index 891
whore 1, 11, 32, 35, 64–65, 67, 91, 122, 136, 140, women’s labour market access 48, 54,
177, 205, 333, 338, 435, 443, 468, 492, 243, 297, 330, 334–335, 483, 628, 658, 804,
506, 655, 724, 771, 777–778, 800, 805 807–811
whoring 65, 143, 161, 205–206, 435, 805 work contracts 33, 50, 259, 349, 375, 379,
widowhood 48, 74, 88, 95, 97, 99, 124, 485, 489, 607, 609, 654, 656, 658, 660, 663,
153–154, 267, 272–273, 282, 289, 314, 340, 670, 792, 866
415, 419, 443, 523, 526, 626, 658, 688, 759, workhouses 51, 124, 126, 129, 141, 202–203,
762, 766, 770, 820, 853–854 207, 443, 658 See also rehabilitation of
window prostitution 10, 31–32, 34–36, 39, prostitutes
45, 47–48, 53–55, 58–59, 68, 72, 80–82, 467,
498, 501, 667, 684, 846 Yugoslavian women 219
- 978-90-04-34625-3
Downloaded from Brill.com09/18/2022 09:15:08PM
via free access
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