Being a woman who sold sex in medieval London’s red-light areas had to be hair-raising. You could be licensed in one of the stews, where you were stringently regulated and subject to terrible punishments. If you operated as a single woman in an outlaw business or on your own, potential penalties were even worse. When you died your body was piled into crowded potters’ fields like Cross Bones graveyard.
Yet, for all that, you were a member of the community. In a society where monarchy and nobility constituted moral authority, your profession was believed necessary to provide an outlet for lust and protect other women. You might be exiled beyond the city walls, but there was no talk of abolishing you. Women who sold sex were seen as strong, capable, bawdy and potentially dangerous. They were called geese; they squawked.
Into the 18th century historians confirm prostitutes still belonged to the natural order. But during the Enlightenment, with the demise of belief in the divine right of kings, the bourgeoisie moved into social power. Nuclear family values were front and centre: a patriarch in charge with a domesticated woman at his side. Fearing that a wave of immorality might spread from the ‘dangerous classes’ to good society, bourgeois citizens could not conceive why the poor failed to marry, got drunk in the street, liked eating in taverns and slept in alleyways. Social theory was the talk of the day, begetting a myriad of social explorers who went out to observe the habits of the poor. The goal was to bring them in from the unproductive margins.
This became the age of the Fallen Woman, when wives were chattel to their husbands. British social-realist paintings of the time depict the fate of women whose husbands or fathers cast them out: prostitution and death. Women who sold sex were an object of particular interest to investigators, who concluded they were not innately bad but rather victims of circumstance. This meant they might be saved and society spared a great scourge. The mission to rescue prostitutes relied on belief in Progress as a stream of time in which some human groups are located ahead and others behind. Thus Fallen Women were to be rescued by their moral and spiritual betters, who were imagined to be self-sacrificing. But the benefit to them was clear from the start: charity work meant the possibility of acquiring a new benevolent identity. To them it was clear: prostitutes must be placed in institutions, taught obedience, morally rehabilitated and trained for domestic service.
But there was a fly in the ointment. Investigators spoke to many women who wished not to be selling sex. But they also talked to strong, feisty women determined to make a good living at it. This produced a dilemma. For those who hated it, becoming a servant might have been a relief. But those desiring independence and much more money than maids could make didn’t like being rescued. They resisted; they escaped out the windows of institutions where they were placed. Many returned to prostitution.
And that’s where we still are today, 200 years later, with one big difference.
Identity-formation is a flourishing component of contemporary life. Now, women who don’t want to be rescued from prostitution may call themselves sex workers and advocate for labour rights in a growing social movement. At the same time, others who do feel they were victims may call themselves survivors and condemn prostitution. It’s reasonable, and it’s not impossible for legislation to make room for these different experiences: recognition of the profession and rights for some, exit and new jobs for others. New Zealand’s Prostitution Reform Act of 2003 provides both Protections for sex workers and Protections for persons refusing to work as sex workers. But most prostitution laws make no distinction between the willing and the unwilling, instead writing one overarching rule for everyone involved.
This occurs because the activity is still conceived as a social evil. Police units handling commercial sex are still called Vice to signify immoral activities requiring constant repression to prevent them spreading like disease to clean-living folk.
In legal circles patriarchal morality predominates. Early this year in London, a judge removing the requirement that former prostitutes must reveal convictions to employers said it was ‘greatly to their credit’ the women had succeeded in removing themselves from prostitution. Rescued from their sin and repentant, they are to be rewarded. In January, the US Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, in refusing to hear a challenge to California’s prostitution law, said, ‘Persons who… are deterred from becoming prostitutes can avoid the associated evils of increased exposure to violence, illegal drugs and disease.’ Note the word evils in a statement of apparent fact but which cannot be proved, and then consider that the judges said these words to self-defined sex workers who were bringing the case. It’s as though they were still considered to be feeble-minded, a late 19th-century theory about prostitutes.
The attitude is repeated in contemporary social debates, where anti-prostitution campaigners perform moral outrage, relying on the vocabulary of melodrama and pulp fiction. Less debating than declaiming, they routinely accuse opponents of being heartless pimps. Rights proponents, on the other hand, use rational arguments, avoid grand claims, cite research evidence and refer to human rights. Talking on completely different levels, both sides feel inadequately heard, and little changes.
The plaque for Cross Bones calls it a burial ground for the Outcast Dead. It’s true that pre-modern women who sold sex were denied burial in hallowed ground. But they were not ostracised or told they were ciphers with no grasp of what they were doing, mere pawns of men. They were not told their kind should cease to exist, as happens now.
Defining sex workers as victims in need of rescue has stood in the way of improving sex workers’ lot for the past 200 years. Admittedly postmodernity is patchy, but in times of harm reduction, gender equality and recognition of the diversity of women’s needs and desires, could we not rid ourselves of the idea of social evil? Do we need a Rescue Industry?