New Sociologies of Sex Work

Kate Hardy, Sarah Kingston

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317087991
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Ethics & Moral Philosophy

Sex work studies have seen an expansion in publications over the past decade, drawing together disciplines from across the social sciences, namely sociology, criminology and social policy. There has, however, been a tendency for research and writing to focus on the more obvious aspect of the sex industry - the visible elements of female street prostitution and those features which attract media attention such as the criminalised aspects of the sex trade. The sex industry is diverse in terms of its organisation, presentation, participants and how it is located in the broader context of globalisation and regulation; there is a need for publications which demonstrate this breadth. This book makes an outstanding contribution to the sociology of sex work through advancing theoretical, policy, methodological and empirical ideas as each chapter pushes the boundaries of a specific area by offering new and critical research as well as commentary.

PART I
Prostitution Policy: Then and Now

Chapter 1
Flappers, Amateurs and Professionals: The Spectrum of Promiscuity in 1920s Britain

Samantha Caslin

In this chapter I argue that in the early part of the twentieth century, female prostitution in England and Wales was treated, often conflictingly, as both a social problem and a criminal practice. Legally and socially, prostitutes were defined as ‘others’, as a separate and lower class of women. They represented a threat to gender norms and were understood to be a danger to the moral order. A repository for wider fears about social dislocation and the changing position of women, the female prostitute, as she emerges in the historical record, was a highly politicized and much contested figure. She featured in distinct yet overlapping debates about issues of class, gender and popular culture. Indeed, during the 1920s, conceptions of prostitution as ‘criminal’ or ‘deviant’ were reinforced by contemporary anxieties surrounding female sexuality generally. Fears about prostitution as a social contagion appeared alongside a perceived rise in promiscuity amongst young women.

This chapter argues that during the 1920s the boundaries used to define ‘professional’ prostitute women from the ‘amateurs’ (girls who would occasionally engage in sexual acts with men for money or some other form of payment) became volatile, causing significant concern about what was to be done about the sexual habits of young women. In fact, though it may be possible to provide a general definition of what was meant by a ‘professional’ or ‘amateur’ prostitute in 1920s Britain, there was by no means consensus as to the boundaries separating these two forms of deviance. It is suggested that the very labelling and categorization of women in this way was illustrative of Britain’s struggle to make sense of a spectrum of sexual practices and femininities. This spectrum ranged from the respected domesticated female, through the flapper and the amateur, to the more transgressive professional prostitute. Official concerns about how the prostitute could or should be distinguished from other women, as reflected in evidence put to the Departmental Committee on the issue of solicitation in 1927 and 1928, were interrelated with wider fears about the degree of influence prostitutes might have over other younger women. Consequently, a historical approach to sexual morality has the potential to draw out how the criminalization of the prostitute has been used as part of wider cultural discourses which seek to regulate which types of sexual practice are respectable and thus acceptable.

Although prostitution¹ has in fact already been the subject of considerable historical investigation much of this work has concentrated on the Victorian era. In particular, the seminal work of Judith Walkowitz (1982, 1992) on Victorian London has been very influential in women’s and gender history.² However, less is known about prostitution during the early-mid twentieth century. With academic interest in contemporary prostitution, or sex work, increasing, it is pertinent that this gap in the academic literature is addressed. The way in which prostitution is understood and legislated is very much a product of the history of the discourses and anxieties that surround it. To this end, I offer a reading of the prostitute as a constructed subject rather than an objective, a priori agent whom the law merely intervenes to control.³ I work from the assumption that the ways in which prostitution is defined and understood are products of their social contexts.

Although other historians have begun to address early twentieth century prostitution in Britain much remains to be explored in terms of the cultural history of prostitution. Recently, Julia Laite (2008a, 2008b) has done useful work on the policing of prostitution in the early twentieth century as well as examining the role of pressure groups such as the Association for Moral and Social Hygiene in provoking a review of prostitution laws. At the same time Helen Self’s (2003) work has provided us with a detailed account of prostitution law in the mid-twentieth century. Focusing on the proceedings of the Wolfenden Committee (1954–1957), she offers a feminist interpretation of prostitution law and argues that it has been morally shaped. This work seeks to add to these studies on the law and prostitution in this period by providing a cultural analysis of the subject. I draw on a wide range of sources, from books by noted social commentators such as Mrs Cecil Chesterton to accounts provided by senior officials within the police service. I argue that much of the anxiety that surrounded prostitution and the debates about how prostitution should be dealt with was the result of the widespread cultural practice of using prostitution to define how women should not behave. For many cultural commentators and officials, responses to prostitution were intended to send out a message to all women about how to behave. However, this is not to say that there was by any means consensus about the specifics of such a message. This chapter illustrates that, during the 1920s, there was a great deal of concern about female respectability. I propose here that a discursive spectrum of promiscuity was invoked by law-makers and commentators in a bid to make sense of prostitution as a form of transgression requiring legal control.

Prostitution as Part of a Spectrum of Promiscuity

During the early part of the twentieth century, the symbolic figure of the female prostitute was often invoked by cultural commentators and journalists seeking to make statements about the sexual morality of Britain as a whole. Motivated particularly by concerns about the perceived promiscuity of Britain’s young women, especially in the aftermath of the First World War, the female prostitute acted as a ‘nefarious “other”’ in the process of post-war reconstruction (Hubbard 1999: 1). Following the war, domesticity, ‘an ideal for which [Britain’s men] might risk their lives’, assumed primacy as the peacetime idyll and the focus of post-war reconstruction (Bourke 1999: 162–3). Yet against this vision of what Britain could and should be there was fear that the war had challenged and changed Britain’s sexual mores and practices. Uncertainties about gender roles created an unsettled view of social order. Judy Giles (1995: 102) has argued that the war broke down gendered geographies of urban space in Britain with women’s increased social and financial independence making them more visible in urban life. The idea that a woman’s ‘respectability’ could be ascertained by her patronization, or lack thereof, of particular city spaces had been disrupted. Moreover, war itself was linked to heightened sexual awareness amongst women. For example, in 1934 Magnus Hirschfeld believed the war to have ‘confirmed’ the theory that ‘war atrocities and bloody deeds have an erotic effect on women’ (in Kohn 1992: 47). Beneath this sentiment was a belief that the war had somehow sexualized women. In some instances the eroticization of women came to represent war itself. In 1929 Mary Borden invoked images of female prostitution to personify ‘pain’ as ‘a harlot in the pay of War’, a creature who could be seen ‘plying her trade here any day’ (in Kingsley Kent 1993: 71). Unsurprisingly then, the ‘modern young woman’, ‘the flapper’, that iconic mix of 1920s androgyny and hedonistic debauchery, received an ‘exceptional’ amount of attention in contemporary press and literature (Bingham 2004: 47). Fresh, fashionable and sexually provocative, the flapper was invoked alongside the ‘amateur’ prostitute as an ‘eternal Eve’ (Melman 1988: 1).

With considerable overlap in terms of how ‘flappers’ and ‘amateurs’ were defined, discourses about the lifestyles of ‘modern’ women were implicitly and sometimes explicitly conflated with those about prostitution. The amateur, just like the flapper, was said to frequent ‘Bohemia’ and the ‘underworld’; both were considered to be influenced by literature and cinema and spend their days idly shopping or visiting the cinema whilst earning their ‘keep by going for joy rides with young men’ (Chesterton 1928: 158). This meant that the boundaries between who was defined as a ‘flapper’ and who was defined as an ‘amateur’ prostitute were blurred. According to one cultural commentator, the amateur was simply a girl who was ‘ready to have promiscuous relations for gifts or pleasures, or even for no external reward’ (Hall 1933: 19). Sometimes a girl did not even have to engage in ‘promiscuous relations’ to be labelled an amateur: Unlike the ‘professional’ or the ‘part-time’ prostitutes, this girl would, it was suggested, ‘make a habit of “teasing”’ (Chesterton 1928: 158). In this way, prostitution was understood to be one aspect of sexual deviance on a spectrum of promiscuity. There was a degree of fluidity in and uncertainty about definitions of promiscuity, amateurism and professional prostitution. In fact, from time to time a woman could be classed as moving between these categories. Mrs Cecil Chesterton argued that some amateurs would settle into jobs, others would mix this lifestyle with occasional work and some would become part-time prostitutes (Chesterton 1928: 159). Consequently, promiscuity was rendered synonymous with amateur prostitution and the deviancy of females who engaged in pre-marital sex was viewed increasingly as a derivative form of prostitution. The belief that women could fall into various categories at different points in their young lives meant that the lifestyles of all young women came under close scrutiny.⁴

The growing consumer market was seen by many at the time as linked to the sex lives of young women. In 1920 Hubert Stringer (1920: 180) conducted an investigation into the causes of prostitution. Amongst the causes he identified were ‘bad literature’, ‘sensational – but not necessarily immoral – cinema films’ and ‘unpleasant shops’, each encouraging ‘vicious thoughts’ in those of such a predisposition and stirring ‘such thoughts in others’. This suggests that Stringer believed there to be a link between people’s past times and their sense of morality. He implies that the viewing, reading and shopping habits of women could encourage them to engage in prostitution. At the same time, new consumerism and new leisure patterns added to anxieties that traditional courtship rituals were being eradicated in favour of new geographies of sex. It was feared that greater economic freedom amongst the young was allowing them to take ownership of certain public spaces. One commentator, Mrs Neville-Rolfe (1935: 295), worried that economic changes provided the modern youth with the money to enjoy ‘their own amusements’, such as the cinema, whilst ‘entirely independent’ of the supervision of the family. Moreover, the cinema and the dance hall were presented by her as sites of moral disorder, as places where ‘girls’ might ‘drift for a time into a life of promiscuity or even prostitution’ should they begin to meet ‘casual acquaintances’ there (Neville-Rolfe 1935: 295). Thus anxieties about changes in women’s lifestyles came to be discussed with reference to the opportunities for promiscuity now available to young women through new forms of consumerism.

For anxious moral commentators new patterns of female consumerism intensified their fear that it was becoming increasingly difficult to tell on which part of the spectrum of promiscuity a woman sat simply by judging her appearance. Indeed, by the late 1920s it was ‘difficult to tell some of the professionals from the amateurs’ (Chesterton 1928: 161).⁵ Central to this ambiguity was the proliferation of girls purchasing and wearing make-up, with the young female body itself becoming a source for anxieties about promiscuity and prostitution (see Chesterton 1928: 161). Kohn (1992: 6) has suggested that within West End society there ‘was no border between prostitutes and socially acceptable women’; ‘wearing make-up’ and patronizing the streets were ‘no longer the sole prerogative of prostitutes’.

That any young woman was a potential ‘amateur’ became a source of great anxiety. Mrs Cecil Chesterton’s work Women of the Underworld (1928: 163) warned of the dangers that the amateur presented to all who encountered her: ‘Externally…sweet mannered’, she appears as a ‘flower that has been taken out of water and only needs kindness and shelter to blossom again’. Yet for Chesterton this was supposedly part of the amateur’s ploy to con men into taking pity on her; thus she emerged crueller and more morally reprehensible than her professional counterpart. Describing her as an ‘incubus’, the amateur was presented by Chesterton as being of a lower moral standard than the professional prostitute who, in Chesterton’s words, ‘is not a vicious product’ (Chesterton 1928: 163 and 153). Indeed, Chesterton considered professional prostitution far more sympathetically; it was suggested that this category of women were usually found ‘drifting’ into their trade as ‘victims of circumstance’ (Chesterton 1928: 153 and 1926: 79). According to Chesterton (1926: 80), it was unsettlingly plausible that a naïve young woman might ‘in sheer high spirits and love of fun…go to lengths she never contemplated and wake up the next morning in a man’s bed’. With a premium placed upon the respectability of women, it was difficult for a ‘fallen’ woman to regain her social status. At the same time Chesterton (1926: 84) emphasized the poverty experienced by younger professional prostitutes, recalling how one girl she saw had holes in her stockings and wore a ‘cheap coat’. In this sense an appreciation of the economic causes of professional prostitution was not absent from debates about the issue during the 1920s.

Prostitution and the Law

With the prostitute functioning as a key figure in discourses about promiscuity and sexual morality, it is no surprise that the laws which surrounded prostitution became a matter of debate and interest. By the 1920s, the legal status of prostitution was considered by many to be unclear. Though prostitution was not in itself illegal, convictions were possible because of acts associated with the trade. The Vagrancy Act, which had been passed in 1824, punished prostitutes who wandered in public in a ‘riotous or indecent manner’ with either a fine or imprisonment. In addition, the Metropolitan Police Act of 1839 stated that prostitutes who lead to the annoyance of passers-by in London would be fined, whilst the Town Police Clauses Act of 1847 meant that elsewhere solicitation was punishable by a fine or up to fourteen days imprisonment. Significantly, arrests made under the 1839 and the 1847 Acts only needed to have been witnessed by one constable. Without corroborative evidence, the application of these laws was consequently open to interpretation and exploitation by the police.

Following a number of scandals, such as the 1922 overturning of Sir Almeric Fitzroy’s conviction for ‘annoying’ two women in Hyde Park ‘on the ground that one of the women, Mrs Turner, was a “notorious prostitute”’, the Association for Moral and Social Hygiene (AMSH) called for changes to the ‘solicitation laws’ (Self 2003: 5). As with the British branch of the International Abolitionist Federation, the AMSH was opposed to the state regulation of prostitution (Jeffreys 1997: 19). Though the organization wanted a reduction in promiscuity, it did not support the notion that the law should intervene in the private activities of consenting adults. It is not surprising then that Lesley Hall (2000: 101) has described the AMSH as ‘perhaps the most feminist and libertarian of the social purity organizations’. They argued that women were prosecuted for soliciting men when, in fact, men solicited women (Self 2003: 5). However, proposals that the solicitation laws should be relaxed or significantly altered proved to be controversial. The National Vigilance Association was opposed to the AMSH’s campaign. In 1928 they argued that prostitution had moved from the streets and into entertainment venues such as cafes, music-halls and cinemas (Letter from the NVA to the AMSH, 10th May 1928). So, while ‘vigilance, refuge and reformatory organisations’ simultaneously campaigned to get the solicitation laws strengthened (Self 2003: 6), between 1923 and 1926 the AMSH supported a Public Places (Order) Bill (Laite 2008a: 217) which called for the removal of the term ‘common prostitute’ and proposed to replace the ‘solicitation laws’ with ‘a simple provision, which substantially covers the same ground as the existing law, but applies to all persons alike’. It was also proposed that ‘proceedings shall only be taken on complaint by or on behalf of the party aggrieved’ (Public Places (Order) Bill Memorandum, November 1926). Though the Bill was not passed, the criticisms that it raised did not go unnoticed.

As a result of these debates and campaigns, the Street Offences Committee was appointed by the Home Office to examine the legalities of the law surrounding solicitation. Known, after its chairman, as the Macmillan Committee, it met between 1927 and 1928. During the course of their inquiry, the Macmillan Committee outlined what it regarded as the two main opposing positions on the legal status of the ‘common prostitute’. Outlining what was essentially the AMSH’s argument in favour of changing the law, the Committ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Tables
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction New Sociologies of Sex Work in Perspective
• PART I PROSTITUTION POLICY: THEN AND NOW
• PART II METHODOLOGY: DOING SEX WORK RESEARCH
• PART III MOBILITY, SEX WORK AND CONSUMPTION
• PART IV SEX WORK: ORGANIZING, RESISTANCE AND CULTURE
• Index