Pod Insights Betwixt The Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal & Society Sex Work in Victorian London About this episode What were the lives of women like who sold sex in the Victorian era? How did the law makers and moral crusaders of the time try to control it? How did sex workers create community in the 19th century?
In the final part of our mini-series on sex work throughout history, Kate's joined by Dr. Julia Laite, historian, professor of history at Birkbeck University, to take us back to the Victorian era.
This episode was edited by Tom Delargy. The producer was Stuart Beckwith. The senior producer was Charlotte Long.
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0:00 Kate Lister? Do you want even more shocking and scandalous history? Like why the ancient Greek statues had such small manhoods? Or what went on behind closed doors in the Georgian era? Well, sign up to History Hit, where you can see me discover the scandalous side of history, as well as hundreds of hours of original documentaries, plus new releases every week, covering everything from prehistoric Scotland to the Treaty of Versailles. Sign up to join me in locations around the world and explore the past. Just visit historyhit.com/subscribe.
0:35 Kate Lister? Hello, my lovely betwixters. It's me, Kate Leester. You are a betwixter and you are listening to Betwixter Sheets. And I'm so, so glad that you are. But for your safety, my safety, and, well, the lawyer's safety, I have to tell you, this is an adult podcast, spoken by adults, other adults, about adulty things in an adulty way, covering a range of all subjects, and you should be an adult too. Oh, my God. Everybody knows this by now, don't we? You know it, I know it, I hope that the lawyer bloody well knows it. But anyway, let's get on with the show.
1:08 Kate Lister? Join me for a stroll through the streets of Victorian London. I hope you've got your wits about you, because this is not the twee London of chocolate box sentimentality. Oh, no. This is dark, and this is dangerous, and this is home to hundreds of thousands of people, all crammed in on top of one another. And as always, wherever you get poverty, you will get sex work. But what were their lives really like? How did Victorians legislate around sex work? And why were the Victorians so damn fascinated by what they referred to as the great social evil? Well, I think I'm ready to find out. Are you ready to find out? Let's do it.
1:57 Speaker 01 What do you look for in a man?
1:58 Speaker 02 Oh, money, of course.
1:59 Speaker 03 You're supposed to rise when an adult speaks to you.
2:02 Speaker 02 I make perfect compliments of whatever my boss needs by just turning a knob and pushing the button.
2:14 Speaker 03 Yes, social courtesy does make a difference.
2:17 Speaker 04 Goodness, what beautiful time. Goodness has nothing to do with it, Derek.
2:25 Kate Lister? Hello and welcome back to Betwixt the Sheet, the history of sex scandal in society with me, Cait Lister. Oh, the Victorians loved a bit of pearl clutching. They loved a moral outcry, but even more than that, they had a real saviour complex, especially when it came to quote-unquote fallen women, which sex workers were very much thought of. What made a woman turn to selling sex in the 19th century? What did the law have to say about it? And how did sex workers find community together amongst that hardship? Well, joining me today for the fourth and final, for now, episode in our mini-series on sex work throughout history, is the wonderful Julia Lake, historian and author of Common Prostitutes and Ordinary Citizens: Commercial Sex in London.
3:10 Kate Lister? And if anyone can help us answer these questions, it's gonna be her. So let's do it.
3:19 Kate Lister? Hello and welcome to Betwixt the Sheet. It's only Julia Lake. How are you doing?
3:26 Speaker 05 I'm doing very well. It's a beautiful sunny day.
3:29 Kate Lister? It's fabulous to see you. You're looking amazing. How's the world treating you?
3:33 Speaker 05 The world is treating me pretty good, despite the crises. I feel like I'm kind of sailing through, so I'm one of the lucky ones.
3:39 Kate Lister? The many, many.
3:40 Speaker 05 Exactly.
3:42 Kate Lister? You are here to talk to us for our little mini-series about historical sex work. And you are the, you're the author of a lot of things, but you are the author of Common Prostitutes and Ordinary Citizens: Commercial Life in London, 1885 to 1960. So I suppose my first question, the one that I tend to start with all the time is, do you remember? What brought you to the subject of the history of sex work? Did you just kind of end up here a little bit like what? How did I get here? Or was there a moment when you're like, this is something I want to research?
4:14 Speaker 05 I think it's the second one, actually. I like being asked this question because I have an answer. I read Judith Walkowitz's Prostitution in Victorian Society.
4:23 Kate Lister? We love Judith.
4:24 Speaker 05 Yeah, exactly. It's fantastic work. One hundred percent stands the test of time. But it ends in eighteen eighty five, which is right when an enormous law is passed that criminalizes brothel keeping. And so I just sort of went, what happened then? You know, it was, it was, it felt like a real cliffhanger to me. And as I started investigating it more, I very quickly realized that sex work, sexual labor, prostitution, all the different words that are used for it, is kind of at the heart of everything. And, you know, it, it's not a niche topic. It is a sort of key to understanding an enormous range of human experiences in the past and the present,
5:07 Speaker 05 and kind of understanding how society works or fails to work.
5:10 Kate Lister? What do you mean by that? How can sexual labor be at the heart of something as big as that? Because it's very, very easy for people to dismiss it or turn away from it or pretend it's, it's nothing to do with them. What do you see in this topic as being that important?
5:28 Speaker 05 Yeah, exactly. I, I used to fend off a lot of older, usually male academics who would say, oh, that's a very niche subject.
5:34 Kate Lister? Very niche topic.
5:35 Speaker 05 Very niche. You know, at first I didn't really have a good answer, but then I realized, well, first of all, it's, it's one of the most lucrative kind of industries. I hesitate to use that word because it's so broad. But, you know, it's, it's one of the most lucrative global industries, if you count all of the different forms of sexual labor and sexual commerce. It's also not in isolation, right? So it's related to the position of women in particular and other marginalized people in society. The relationship between marriage and prostitution is something that's very interesting. And I think that might have been the one, the moment when, you know, one of those lightbulb moments for me, when I was reading a book by Cecily Hamilton, which was written in nineteen ten.
6:18 Speaker 05 And she wrote, the difference between marriage and prostitution is not that great. And like marriage is also a trade for women. And that's when I realized, you know, this isn't just a sort of niche subject. This is related to everything.
6:34 Kate Lister? Everything, right? What fascinates me about it is there's that old expression, don't hate the players, hate the game. But if you look at most of our history, patriarchy has been enforced. Women have been denied equal pay, access to education, access to well-paid jobs. Stigmas kept them away from it. They haven't been able to get into those spaces and earn enough to support themselves. But sex work, however you interpret that, has always been and remains something that all of us. I'm not advocating it, by the way, but this is just a fact. But it's something that all of us can do to earn a lot of money in a very short space of time. There are no barriers to entry. You don't, there's no training program that you have to go on.
7:15 Kate Lister? It has always been there as this, I'm very careful when I say it, but a bizarre safety net that it's always been there. That sounds really weird, but I think I know what I mean by that.
7:28 Speaker 05 And I know what you mean by it too. I mean, it, selling sex has always been part of the economy of makeshift for women. And that economy of makeshift is a, is a phrase I take from Judith Walkowicz. You know, it was always seen as worst case scenario, it's a way to make ends meet. For other women, it, it, it became a way to achieve real social mobility, real affluence. You know, to be able to afford the pleasures in life, not just the basics. I think for an enormous range of people who are having an enormous range of, of experiences, it's seen like that, you know, as something that you can get into without much training, as something that you can pick up and that you can leave as well. And, you know, the early feminists knew this. The very first feminist campaigns were centered around entering the profession. So women want to be doctors, women want to be lawyers.
8:13 Speaker 05 They were also about marriage rights and divorce rights. And the other major thing that it was about was about what they would have called prostitution.
8:22 Kate Lister? Sexual labour.
8:23 Speaker 05 And sexual labour. And they immediately, you know, as early as the eighteen seventies and eighteen eighties, they understood the link between women's economic and social subjugation writ large and prostitution as something that they did in order to overcome some of those subjugations, while also encountering new ones within it.
8:43 Kate Lister? Sex work has, it's always been with us as long as there's been money to trade for it. But the Victorians seem to have been particularly flustered about it. Every time period has had its own hangups and somebody goes, oh, we need to make it illegal. Oh, no, it'll be fine. Oh, let's put it in a zone. But the Victorians really seem to have got into a twist about it. Why do you think that was? What's particularly unique about the Victorians and sex work?
9:10 Speaker 05 That's a great question, actually, and it's a big one. I think one of the things is they weren't just interested in sex work. They were interested in the way that you manage public space more generally. So they saw prostitutes, and I'm using that word because they didn't have a concept of sex workers. They didn't see sex workers at all. In fact, they went out of their way to unsee sex workers. So they saw prostitutes as they would, as they would call them and conceptualize them, you know, as part of a wider story of disorder on the streets. So this was a moment when the Victorian street was becoming a more heterogeneous space. There were more kids, there were more women, there were more families. The West End was no longer this place where only men and sex workers hung out.
9:55 Speaker 05 It was a place where all kinds of people went. And so there was this sort of obsession with making it family friendly, with sanitizing it, with making it morally safe to sort of be there. And that triggered all kinds of hand wringing about, you know, first of all, how do we do that? How do we invest the police with powers to clear the streets? And most importantly of all, with all these new women in public space, how do we tell the difference between a woman who's selling sex and a woman who is not? And so that was the first bit. And the other one is kind of related. It's again about protection. So a lot of these campaigns start from the perspective that women need to be protected, that children need to be protected, that the age of consent should be raised.
10:37 Speaker 05 A lot of things that actually from our contemporary perspective seem fairly reasonable, socially progressive.
10:42 Kate Lister? With them on that one.
10:43 Speaker 05 But they very quickly became, as so many conversations about protective legislation are, right? They very quickly became about suppressing prostitution itself, about pushing people underground. And the woman who sold sex, unless she was a kind of perfect victim, became a threat rather than somebody to be protected. And so that's another reason they got themselves in that enormous tankel. And finally, just gender roles are changing, economics are changing, the world is globalizing in new ways. People are moving more than they ever did before in this period. And so the Victorians get really worried about sex workers crossing borders as well.
11:24 Kate Lister? And the industrial revolution, of course, the massive expansion of the cities. Because as you rightly saying, it wasn't just women selling sex that they were panicked about. It was poverty, it was crime, it was alcoholism, all these things that tend to come when you have a city that suddenly blows up triples, quadruples in size. And of course, poverty that goes along with that.
11:48 Speaker 05 Yeah, exactly. Extreme poverty and a poverty that needed surveillance, right? So, you know, this was also a moment when health visitors and other kinds of people that we would now call social workers were going into the homes of the poor, deciding whether they were fit or unfit, deciding whether mothers were fit or unfit.
12:06 Kate Lister? Yeah.
12:06 Speaker 05 You see a rise in laws in the eighteen seventies and eighteen eighties about protecting children, which included being able to remove them from the homes of women who are identified as prostitutes. So that That was that was absolutely part of the story. And it also, you know, nineteenth century London was a space with with abject poverty and incredible social inequalities, incredible housing crises, especially in the eighteen eighties, which is throwing people into these economies of makeshift, right? So, you know, you've got both a kind of social reality and a cultural obsession clashing against each other, caught up within Christian morality, and it's producing, well, unfortunately, it's producing the laws that we largely still live under today when it comes to sexual labor.
12:50 Kate Lister? How did they define a quote unquote prostitute? Because this is actually a really critical argument to the history of sex, but also laws today, because actually being able to pin down a definition, like, we think we know what it means. It's a woman who goes out in the street and says, give me a shilling and I'll give you a blowjob. Oh, that's pretty straightforward, but there's so much gray area. Like, what about kept mistresses? What about women that are doing it for, not for monetary, but some kind of other financial compensation? And people that go into it for a little bit, drift in and then drift out again. Do they count themselves as sex workers? So how did they go about defining this?
13:33 Speaker 05 Yeah, this is the hilarious thing, is they never really managed to do so. You know, despite the fact that they have the term common prostitute in their legislation, and that that has been in the legislation since the eighteen thirties. Every now and then you see, um, you know, over the course of the the discussions between the police and the home office and the lawmakers, somebody stops and says, but wait a minute. What is a prostitute?
13:58 Kate Lister? What is a prostitute?
13:59 Speaker 05 What is a prostitute? And and it's really interesting to me, and they don't even know where the term common prostitute even comes from. And you see them realizing it over and over, you know, as the decades pass. Like, what, why are we using the term common prostitute? Why not just prostitute? And they just sort of say, oh, well, it's a vestige of the old common laws, et cetera. We don't know. And I guess eventually the statute, not the statutory law, sorry, the case law starts to decide that a prostitute is somebody who offers sexual services for gain. So it's it's not temporally bounded as in if you do it once, I guess that makes you by law defined as a prostitute. And it's not spatially defined. So it doesn't matter if you're on the street or if you're in a walk up in Soho.
14:41 Speaker 05 It's still part of the definition. But the other thing they don't define is a brothel. So they make brothels illegal, but they actually don't know what a brothel is. And about 10 years after they make them illegal, somebody finally says, but wait a minute, what's a brothel? And then they say, well, it's a place where more than one prostitute goes to sell sex. And then they say, oh, what's a prostitute? Um. And so these these questions of definition continue to plague the these laws for about a hundred years.
15:09 Kate Lister? That's still the definition of a brothel today, isn't it?
15:11 Speaker 05 It's still the definition of a brothel, and it was formed in the eighteen nineties on a series of case laws, but one really important case law. Um. About these kind of mansion blocks in the West End of London, you know, those kind of red brick mansion blocks that are are around in the West End. A lot of them, as soon as they were built, dodgy landlords and estate agents would rent them out as individual flats to women selling sex. And they would say, well, it's not a brothel because, you know, it's separate residences. And so that triggered a series of cases that determined what a brothel really was. But because I think the burden of proof in these cases is so very low.
15:51 Speaker 05 The actual definitions stopped mattering quite quickly because as long as you've got a magistrate and a police officer agreeing. Okay, this is how you prosecute. Questions of definition don't really come up. It's a non-indictable offence, right? So it doesn't go to higher courts.
16:06 Kate Lister? And it's partly why the reason you get some extraordinary claims about numbers in the nineteenth century. The the sort of passed into fact and are still repeated occasionally when you see them, like. There's eighty three thousand prostitutes in the city of London alone. Someone else said there was two hundred and fifty thousand. And what's kind of extraordinary about that is everyone just kind of, everyone at the time just kind of went, oh, that's terrible. But when you have to think about, we don't know how many people are selling sex in the capital today. It's estimated by government stats, I think it's about eighty thousand in total throughout the whole of the UK. So. The idea in the nineteenth century, it could have been quarter of a million. Tell me about those figures. Why were they so readily believed?
16:49 Speaker 05 I'm so glad you asked me about that because that was one of my first like enraging encounters. Because historians have repeated those numbers as well, uncritically. And so I sort of said, I'm getting to the bottom of this, damn it. And so I went back and the eighty thousand figure comes from Patrick Colquhoun, who was a kind of moral reformer in the late 18th century, who used that number and very explicitly said, this includes women living out of wedlock with a man.
17:18 Kate Lister? Whoops-a-daisy, there we go.
17:20 Speaker 05 Right? A nation of prostitutes, according to Colquhoun's definition.
17:25 Kate Lister? Yeah, most of the listeners, I think, have just been outed as a Victorian prostitute. Sorry, guys.
17:30 Speaker 05 Exactly, exactly. And then William Acton repeats this in the 1870s. So he goes to Colquhoun and repeats this number and says, you know, Colquhoun said eighty thousand, and he doesn't query it. And then from then on, because William Acton is the one who writes what essentially becomes the justification for medically regulating the sale of sex in garrison towns. It's a form of of regulationism called the Contagious Diseases Acts. And he writes this book to sort of support the Contagious Diseases Acts. And it becomes a really influential book. And that's where that number really takes off and people just repeat it and repeat it. The police were really annoyed by this number. They got very, they get regularly annoyed.
18:15 Speaker 05 Their guess was there was about eight thousand women actually selling sex in London. And while, I know, I don't need to tell you this, it's important to be very suspicious about what the police say. I am inclined to say that is a significantly more accurate estimate.
18:33 Kate Lister? I would have said so, yes. People just believed this. And it kind of gets to the heart of, A, the general panic that they seem to have had about the time of like, oh, my God, all women are on the game, quite clearly. And like the prevalence of it, and you alluded there to the Contagious Diseases Act. And we probably should talk about that. And because what's clearly Feeding into that and to try and regulate this is this like real panic of what they called the great social evil of like there's there's there's there's absolutely they're massing it's an army of sex workers oh my god. So tell us about some of the regulatory laws that were were brought in.
19:11 Speaker 05 Yeah, I will, I will. So to to about the army of women, I mean, one of the fears, of course, is that these women are able to exit the system of domestic service.
19:21 Kate Lister? They found a cheat code.
19:23 Speaker 05 Right, exactly. They've got a cheat code and they don't need to be tethered to these incredibly exploitative working conditions in domestic service for incredibly low pay. And so they're all panicked because what they really want is their servants, but the servants are leaving the kitchen and going into brothels. And so they start a whole moral reform movement to try to get them out of the brothels and back into the kitchens. That's one reason they're panicked, but they're also panicked because of syphilis.
19:48 Kate Lister? That's fairer, I think.
19:49 Speaker 05 It's much fairer, right? And and you know, I I tell when I when I teach about this, syphilis is obviously still a serious disease now. And there's concerns about antibiotic resistance in syphilis. But it's extremely important to remember that before antibiotics in nineteen forty two, syphilis was an incredibly deadly disease. It was a very serious epidemic.
20:10 Kate Lister? Give us a rundown of the kind of things that syphilis can do if you got a dose of it that was untreated.
20:16 Speaker 05 Primary syphilis, you get sores on your genitals, sometimes in other places. Secondary syphilis is often dormant and you don't know you're carrying it, but you can absolutely still spread it. And tertiary syphilis is when it starts to attack your organs. It can be very deadly. Um it can include attacking your brain.
20:34 Kate Lister? And disfiguring, of course.
20:36 Speaker 05 Yeah, disfiguring your face, disfiguring your body in general. It can be passed in utero from a mother to a child and causes all kinds of congenital birth problems. So, yeah, it is incredibly serious and they knew about it for a very long time. But the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, which are centuries of mass war. And militarism see it spike even more. So the Crimean War, there's estimates that, you know, one in ten men, two in ten men who are fighting in that war have a venereal disease. By the First World War, they're certain that one in ten men are on medical leave because of a venereal disease, and it's often syphilis. So it's incredibly, incredibly
21:21 Speaker 05 serious problem. Why they thought that regulating commercial sex was going to work is another question, right? So Britain has a sort of allergy to some of the more draconian measures on the continent. In France and in Italy, for example, they've got full regulation. Women have to work in certain places. They have to be inspected by a medical doctor once a week. You know, they can't be out at a certain time. Some systems even set prices that they would have to charge. In Britain, they only ever reach as far as the garrison towns and port towns, places where soldiers and sailors are.
21:58 Kate Lister? Okay.
21:59 Speaker 05 And so in that system, anybody who was suspected of being a prostitute by the police, of course, would be put on a register and would have to submit themselves to regular genital inspections, which included using a speculum, often a dirty one. So one can only assume that they were spreading as much syphilis as they were preventing. And of course, very, very little happened to a man if if he had syphilis. But if the woman was, she'd be thrown in a lock hospital.
22:26 Kate Lister? So this is a theory then, because what they're worried about is is everyone's got syphilis, and that's a shame. But when they start losing manpower in the military, then it becomes an issue. And in order to try and curtail this, they've gone to just certain towns where there are military garrisons and said, round up any woman you think could be selling sex. That's the solution.
22:49 Speaker 05 Yeah. Yeah, that's what they felt the solution was. Because the other important part of the puzzle, of course, is the connection between the military and prostitution. The military, I doubt they'd go on record about it today, but they certainly went on record about it in the past, saying, we have to keep these men happy. And in order to keep them happy and keep them fighting and keep them obeying orders, we need to provide certain necessary pleasures. Prostitution was seen as very much a necessary evil. It was considered that men, especially fighting men, had to have a sexual outlet. And so it wasn't the idea that, you know, maybe this is not something that should be happening at all, it just didn't
23:30 Speaker 05 occur to them. So the only solution in that case would be to regulate.
23:35 Kate Lister? But they're not regulating, I mean, we'll get to how unfair and cruel this is, but they're not regulating the men.
23:41 Speaker 05 Not really. There are some ways in which men are sort of inspected and stuff in the military, but only if you're in the military. They're not regulating civilian men, not in the slightest. The very thought is anathema to them. And that was brought up at the time. I mean, this is what sparks one of the largest feminist campaigns in history, the campaign to repeal the Contagious Diseases Acts. And they spotted exactly what you're spotting. This is deeply unfair. It's reifying sexual and social and economic inequalities. It's stigmatizing women. It's subjecting them to what one feminist called instrumental rape. And it's also a grotesque double standard.
24:24 Kate Lister? And completely ineffectual as well.
24:26 Speaker 05 Exactly. And a completely ineffectual.
24:28 Kate Lister? It's not even doing what it's supposed to be doing.
24:36 Kate Lister? I'll be back with Julia after this short break.
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25:53 Kate Lister? I'm wondering, do we have records of some of these women that were subjected to this? Because the other thing about the history of sex work is because so much of it is secretive and hidden away, the records to try and understand what's going on are often missing, unless they fall foul of the law. And then you start to get a bigger, if not slightly biased, picture. But do we know the kind of women that were being subject to this? Do we have names or ages or anything like that?
26:19 Speaker 05 We do, because it's a rare moment when official registers were kept, right? And these official registers would include age, occupation, these sorts of things. And so in some ways, the records from the Contagious Diseases Acts are some of the most quotidian. You know, they enable you to see a woman going about her daily life to a certain extent. And we know they're just ordinary women, you know, mostly working class women with families who are, and again, this is Judith Walkowitz's argument, not isolated from their neighborhoods. They're part of their communities. And it's one of the reasons why the campaign was so effective to repeal it, because it was working class men who were saying, these are our wives, these are our daughters, these are our sisters. You can't do this.
27:03 Kate Lister? Let's talk about the campaigns to repeal the Contagious Diseases Act. Because if memory serves, they were just, they were kind of brought in quietly in a few garrison towns, and then they were rolled out to a few more. And then, and then suddenly people start to notice what's going on. On here, but let's talk about who was campaigning to get them abolished.
27:22 Speaker 05 Yeah, the campaign for the repeal of the Contagious Diseases Acts kind of had two prongs that were really linked. So one were radical liberals, so people who whose main sort of motivation was this is a grotesque abuse of constitutional law. Like this is against the rights of the person.
27:40 Kate Lister? Because they're just detaining women.
27:42 Speaker 05 Yeah, yeah.
27:42 Kate Lister? So I didn't, I didn't even ask you, what would happen if a woman said fuck off?
27:47 Speaker 05 She'd be arrested, she'd be thrown in prison.
27:49 Kate Lister? Right, there we go.
27:49 Speaker 05 You know, and, and if she's found to be suffering from a venereal disease, she's also thrown in a different kind of prison. Yeah, so, so, so the radical liberals just sort of said this is unacceptable in a free country. The feminists, who among whom were many liberal, radical liberals as well, were sort of saying the very same thing. You know, this is unconstitutional, it's constitutional violation, it's against people's rights. But they added those textures of, you know, it's also a grotesque double standard, it's also sexual assault. That's the sort of branch of the movement that's really been remembered.
28:24 Kate Lister? So tell me about Josephine Butler, who I always nearly say Josephine Baker, two fabulous women, very, very different people. Tell me about Josephine Butler.
28:33 Speaker 05 Josephine Butler is so interesting because she's become this sort of symbol for both abolitionist feminists in the present day. So feminists who want to legally sort of abolish prostitution. And she's also a symbol for sort of advocates of decriminalization in the present. Um, and so I find her so fascinating. She in no way, shape or form would have advocated for sex work or that sort of thing. But she was deeply committed to the rights of people who sold sex on the grounds that she was deeply committed to sort of civil rights.
29:04 Kate Lister? Yeah.
29:05 Speaker 05 She also, you know, through the lens of her evangelical Christianity, understood that women who were fallen on hard times were not sort of criminals, they shouldn't be thrown in prison, they should be helped, they should be supported. She, she was part of that kind of movement, which you would call the rescue movement.
29:23 Kate Lister? There was lots of that, wasn't it? Lots of people rescuing.
29:26 Speaker 05 There was lots of people rescuing and I'm. She was less involved in it than than some others. And in fact, towards the end of her life, she went out of her way to condemn what she saw as a morally conservative crusade against prostitution.
29:40 Kate Lister? Wow.
29:40 Speaker 05 You know, she said, you know, these social purity people who are trying to criminalize pornography and they're burning all the dirty books and they're shutting down the dirty music halls and they're campaigning against brothels and throwing women in prison, you know, that's not what I campaigned for.
29:56 Kate Lister? Hmm.
29:57 Speaker 05 I completely distanced myself from this.
29:59 Kate Lister? She was successful, wasn't she? She got the act overturned, but they were on the pages for a good, long while.
30:04 Speaker 05 Yeah, so they they they span the eighteen sixties through to eighteen eighty five. So they're suspended in eighteen eighty four and repealed in eighteen eighty five, which is that cliffhanger that I I mentioned earlier. And I do, I really do think that Josephine Butler was very disappointed in what came afterwards. Which was, in her opinion, just more crusades against the rights of women who sold sex.
30:29 Kate Lister? Can you explain to us what the problem with those kind of crusades are? Because as with many, many things like this, is is they are, I believe, coming from a good place, is that they people genuinely want to rescue sex workers and help them back on to a a life where they're not doing that. And, you know, they believe that if they just make everything illegal, that it will fix everything. But what's the bigger picture here? What is it that Josephine Butler would have been objecting to?
30:57 Speaker 05 Yeah, and and so I'll sort of say that this might be Josephine Butler, but also some of the feminists who come after her, who very much see themselves as kind of walking in her stead. So Alison Neelens and the folks at the Association for Moral and Social Hygiene, which is the most boring, conservative named organization. And yet, they were the organization that first launched a campaign to decriminalize solicitation.
31:22 Kate Lister? Wow.
31:22 Speaker 05 And the reason they did this, and Josephine Butler would have very much agreed, you know, the reason they did this is um, why they campaigned against it, I should say, is because they saw it as a fundamentally unjust law. They said, you can't say, okay, you're a prostitute and therefore you're on the street and therefore you're guilty of an offense that nobody who isn't a prostitute would be guilty of. Because that's how the law worked. Common prostitute is in Piccadilly Circus, therefore she's soliciting. And so Josephine Butler and other feminists said that is fundamentally unjust law. You can't label somebody something and then arrest them because they're they're that thing and happen to be in public space.
32:05 Speaker 05 So that was one of the reasons they were so against it is for the sheer injustice of it and the unworkability of it. They were also against it because of the double standard. Some of them may have been a little convinced by the Nordic model, right? The the idea that you criminalize the man, not the woman, you you criminalize demands, not supply.
32:23 Kate Lister? That's where you make it illegal to purchase sex, but it remains legal to sell sex.
32:30 Speaker 05 Yeah, I started getting interested, you know, would these early feminists have supported the Nordic model? And then I found uh something that one of them had written that said, we don't want an equality of injustice. Because the only way you enforce the Nordic model is by applying the same kind of unjust law to a man, because otherwise, how do you tell why somebody's on a street or not? How do you supply evidence that they're committing a crime? What they didn't quite get to, but the police got to, the reason the police didn't like these laws is because they saw it as pushing prostitution underground. And they understood from basic observations
33:08 Speaker 05 that if you push prostitution underground, you introduce more third parties, more landlords, more estate agents, more pimps. You also mean that you can't see it. And the police really don't like not knowing things, right? The police want to have an oversight. And they said, well, once you push it underground, we don't know what's happening. We don't know who's being harmed. We don't know what other crimes are being committed. So it was really interesting. You've got this kind of combination of feminists saying this is unjust. This is a double standard. And you've also got the police saying, yeah.
33:39 Kate Lister? This isn't helpful.
33:40 Speaker 05 This isn't helpful. It's pushing prostitution underground. And in a best case scenario, we wouldn't have to deal with this at all.
33:46 Kate Lister? In your research, have you found anything that could be called a sex work community? Today, sex workers organise together. There are unions that people can go and read about and support if you if you like. And they come together to support one another. Covid is a really great example of that. It was Swarm, the sex worker activist and resistance movement, that group who crowdfunded to get money to give money to sex workers, because obviously they couldn't work but were left out of any government policies around being furloughed. Did you see anything like that? Not Covid, but like that kind of community action in the 19th century?
34:24 Speaker 05 So I certainly look for it and I think about it. Because, you know, I know that these organisations didn't just emerge from nothing in the 1970s, that there absolutely had to be other moments when solidarities and organisational structures emerged. But it's really hard to see.
34:41 Kate Lister? Yeah.
34:41 Speaker 05 All you have is the opinions of the police and records from the police up until the 1950s. But there's glimmers, there's certainly glimmers that, you know, women worked together, they watched out for each other. Even in the Jack the Ripper murders, you see in the police interviews, you know, they'll talk to a woman who's selling sex and and she'll say, oh, yes, well, I noticed so and so and so and so and so and so. It's evidence they're keeping an eye out for each other.
35:06 Kate Lister? Yeah.
35:06 Speaker 05 And in certain communities, especially around Soho, I think there really was a kind of subculture, I guess you could say, of women who who were working and living in Soho, clubbing together, helping each other out, many, many references to mutual support. Even the moralists, right? Even the ones who are sort of like, oh, these awful prostitutes, you know, they're hopeless, they'll never be reformed. They'll sort of say, you know, and one of the problems is they're just they just take care of each other and, you know, they don't turn to us for help. They've got this mutual support structure. And they're saying it in kind of a negative way, like they're all caught up in this world. And but reading that against the grain, it suggests that there were very real
35:49 Speaker 05 support networks for women selling sex across time.
35:52 Kate Lister? And when we look at something like the killings that were attributed To somebody called Jack the Ripper, which I just hate that anyway, like giving serial killers cool names, but that's kind of what what we're left with for fuck's sake. But that was really interesting because it revealed a lot about how society and how the press spoke about women that they associated with sex work. And it wasn't good.
36:17 Speaker 05 No, but it was such an interesting time. The eighteen eighties were so important for the history of sexual labor and the laws associated with it. So eighteen eighty five, they make brothels illegal as a non indictable offence. So prosecutions go from about two hundred a year to twelve hundred a year, almost literally overnight. And that's three years before these killings start. In eighteen eighty five, the other thing that happens is the maiden tribute of modern Babylon, this enormous newspaper expose about child prostitution in London. And so people are talking about it, but it's not just Jack the Ripper. And I couldn't agree with you more about the cool names thing. But it's not just that moment
37:02 Speaker 05 that puts the idea of prostitution and sexual labor as a social problem in people's minds. It's this sort of five year span where people are obsessed with it. And Jack the Ripper's stuff does start to create a language of let's shut this down, let's suppress it. But surprisingly, actually, it also generates quite a lot of sympathy, a sort of awareness for what the difficult lives of very, very poor women were. But it also reveals something I was talking about earlier, which is, oh, these women are sleeping rough and they're outside after midnight. Ergo, they must be prostitutes.
37:42 Kate Lister? They must be.
37:44 Speaker 05 Right?
37:44 Kate Lister? That's an interesting argument that I suppose was raised predominantly by Hallie Rubenhold's book, was that she disturbed that narrative that they were definitely all selling sex. I personally think that it's really interesting that she did that. It's made us rethink it. I'm not as convinced about it as Hallie is in some places, but I'm really glad that that she did that because it's the same as saying today, all homeless women are definitely selling sex, that they must have been because they were poor and they were and they were homeless. So obviously, they were doing it. So it's this huge. Judgment call being invoked, isn't it?
38:18 Speaker 05 Yeah, and it's relying on the opinion of the police officer, right? Who says, oh, she's a prostitute. And in fact, a lot of the time, they were using the term unfortunate.
38:28 Kate Lister? Unfortunate.
38:29 Speaker 05 It was a synonym for prostitute, but it was also, like a lot of euphemisms, fairly capacious. And, you know, you can't tell if the person's using it is using it specifically as a euphemism or using it more to describe a woman who is down and out, who's fallen.
38:46 Kate Lister? Yeah.
38:46 Speaker 05 You know, she's fallen into drink, she's fallen into homelessness and she's potentially fallen into prostitution.
38:52 Kate Lister? I mean, that, it happened in Yorkshire as well with the Peter Sutcliffe killings is that a lot of those women were assumed, described as being prostitutes, like the first victim, Wilma McCann. And the only evidence for that is what Sutcliffe himself said. We don't know that.
39:08 Speaker 05 Exactly. And even the idea that Jack the Ripper targeted what he would have called prostitutes comes from a letter that has long been proved to be a hoax.
39:18 Kate Lister? Yeah.
39:18 Speaker 05 Right? So there's, there's actually virtually no evidence that suggests that this man was a serial killer of what he perceived to be prostitutes. There is very little evidence to suggest that at least three of those women were selling sex, certainly at the time of their murders.
39:34 Kate Lister? But not all, that's not proven at all.
39:37 Speaker 05 No, not in the slightest. And one of the most interesting moments is Kate Kelly, who's also called Catherine Eddowes. When the coroner asks her partner, her lover, the man she lived with, did she walk the streets? And he says, yes, she walked the streets, you know, when we couldn't afford a lodging house, she'd walk around so that she didn't get done for sleeping rough. Because if you kept walking, they couldn't arrest you.
40:00 Kate Lister? Ah.
40:00 Speaker 05 And that's how he was using the term walking the streets. And he flat out denied that she was selling sex. And, you know, I encountered that years ago and I sort of went, wait a minute now.
40:10 Kate Lister? Hang on a sec.
40:11 Speaker 05 Yeah. And I, and I think Hallie, Hallie has really developed that and really questioned some pretty tidy and incredibly prejudiced assumptions about what these words mean and those sorts of things.
40:29 Kate Lister? I'll be back with Julia after this short break.
40:50 Speaker 06 Land a Viking longship on island shores, scramble over the dunes of ancient Egypt, and avoid the Poisoner's Cup in Renaissance Florence. Each week on Echoes of History, we uncover the epic stories that inspire Assassin's Creed. We're stepping into feudal Japan in our special series Chasing Shadows, where samurai warlords and shinobi spies teach us the tactics and skills needed not only to survive, but to conquer. Whether you're preparing for Assassin's Creed Shadows or fascinated by history and great stories, listen to Echoes of History, a Ubisoft podcast brought to you by History Hit. There are new episodes every week.
41:46 Kate Lister? Those women fell into something that we still do today, which is, like, the Victorians had this idea of the deserving and undeserving poor. And I think that they did that with sex workers as well. There was deserving and undeserving. And the deserving ones were girls, ideally for them to fix this. They've turned to sex work because they've been cruelly seduced and abandoned by some terrible rake. They're desperate to leave this life. Please, won't somebody help me? They've been abandoned. And if you just take them into your rescue home, Charles Dickens had one of them, and teach them how to sew and play the piano, all will be well. Then there are other women, like the victims of Jack the Ripper, who are not deserving because they are repeat offenders in quote-unquote marks. They are drinking a lot, they're impoverished,
42:31 Kate Lister? they're homeless, they don't fit that we're happy to rescue ye mould at all.
42:35 Speaker 05 Yeah, exactly. And so the women in rescue homes almost always didn't really have extensive experiences of selling sex.
42:45 Kate Lister? No.
42:45 Speaker 05 So women who ended up in rescue homes tended to be young and maybe what we would call at risk. Um, young women today. So maybe they would have had some encounters that the Victorians would have classified as prostitution. But for the most part, they're seen as at risk of becoming a prostitute. And they were, yeah, they're savable, they're rescuable, they're impressionable, they're not too far gone. And there were actually lots of conversations about making sure that seasoned prostitutes, my air quotes are up by the way, didn't mix with these at-risk girls, right, lest they tempt them to the dark side. But I will correct you, they were not taught to play piano. I mean, maybe nominally they were.
43:27 Speaker 05 But what they were mostly doing is the laundry of other people's institutions. So these rescue homes overwhelmingly trained women into domestic service. It was seen as a pipeline to get them back into domestic service. At a time when the servant crisis was very real, there's immense labour shortage. And they were used to work in laundries. And the profits from those laundries, so they, you know, they'd wash institutional bed sheets, they'd wash hotel stuff, that sort of thing. And the profits from these laundries were then used to run these institutions. And the women didn't see any pay. So it was definitely, you know, nominally, it was for improvement, but really it was a labour camp.
44:06 Kate Lister? Free labour.
44:07 Speaker 05 Yeah, exactly. In terms of labelling these women and saying, you know, oh, you're a repeat offender, there was actually a word for it under the Vagrancy Act. If you got done three times under the Vagrancy Act for drunken disorderly solicitation, you would be labelled an incorrigible rogue. And that was a legal term, incorrigible rogue.
44:28 Kate Lister? That's incredible. We should probably talk about men on the game before I let you go, because we've spoken a lot about women, but of course, there've always been men selling sex as well. Were they part of this panic for the Victorians or were they just, they couldn't really go there because it was just a bit too much for them?
44:48 Speaker 05 They were definitely part of the panic. But as a subcategory of men who had sex with men more generally. So that law I mentioned, the eighteen eighty-five law that criminalised brothels, which is called the Criminal Law Amendment Act. Also has the infamous La Boucher amendment in it, which criminalized, quote, gross acts of indecency between men. That was the sort of, the same law that criminalizes brothels is also the law that criminalizes homosexuality, beyond just what the, what the Victorians would have called buggerie. They're panicking about that more generally, but within that category, there are men who are selling sex overwhelmingly to other men. Some of these
45:31 Speaker 05 men were dressed as men, some of them were cross-dressed, and some of them were, were trans women who were incorrectly labelled as men. We can't tell because unfortunately, again, the police officers are only source of information. So we know that there were commercial sex scenes for men who had sex with men, that Piccadilly was a major scene. Um, there were other different sort of corners that it was, you know, you'd always find a little pocket in port towns, again, thinking of the sailors.
45:59 Kate Lister? Oscar Wilde and his partner Bosie, don't know if we're ready to have this conversation yet, guys, but like, he did pick up a lot of young teenage boys.
46:08 Speaker 05 He did, and it was very much part of, of a queer subculture at the time. There's a couple of different issues with this when you're studying it as a historian. One is, we don't know if the men who are selling sex to other men are themselves, have a sexual preference for men.
46:24 Kate Lister? True.
46:25 Speaker 05 Or if they're doing it as what they would identify in the present day as straight, and they're just doing it for the same reason most people do it, which is to make money.
46:33 Kate Lister? Go for pay, yeah.
46:34 Speaker 05 Or if they are queer themselves and, and part of a kind of, very difficult to see where the line is between mercenary and non-mercenary sex. And the other problem is, the law that was being used to prosecute them was not the same law that was used against women who sold sex. It was about indecent behaviour on the street, and it was the same law that was used for men who were just sort of out on a date. And so it's really, really difficult to see in the criminal records which men were working as sex workers and which men were just out on a date with their beau.
47:09 Kate Lister? Yeah.
47:09 Speaker 05 Yeah. And so it makes it really, really tricky. Um, there's some great scholarship uh about this, but it it is very, very tricky to see them in the past because of the way the law categorized them.
47:20 Kate Lister? Do you think that our laws today are still very Victorian in nature?
47:24 Speaker 05 I mean, they're literally Victorian in nature, right? They're literally Victorian in nature. They're literally Victorian, but worse because the Victorian solicitation laws stipulated that the woman had to be doing something in addition to soliciting. She had to be drunk and disorderly. She had to be causing a nuisance. She had to be obstructing the pavement, bothering passengers. Now, in practice, most magistrates would just sort of say, hey, police officer, tell me she was bothering someone. And the police will say, she was bothering someone. And the magistrate will say, okay. But in nineteen fifty nine, they got rid of that clause altogether. And they literally made it so that any common prostitute, and that means any woman who's been stigmatized, you know, constitutionally
48:05 Speaker 05 illegally as a common prostitute, any common prostitute loitering or soliciting is liable for arrest. And that meant that if you're labeled a common prostitute and you pop out for some milk and a man passes you and say, good morning, good morning, police officer could arrest you. And the burden of proof would be basically non-existent. So that's from fifty nine on. So if anything, our laws have gotten worse. The brothel law that was passed in eighteen eighty five was subsumed into the nineteen fifty six Sexual Offenses Act and is remains the same today, despite the fact that for genuinely a hundred years, people have been campaigning to make off-street sex work safer by allowing people to work
48:46 Speaker 05 together. It's unfortunately still in the statute books today. The only progressive thing that's been done to these laws is that they've made a common prostitute a gender-neutral term.
48:58 Kate Lister? Oh, thank you for that. That.
49:00 Speaker 05 Yeah, so enlightened.
49:01 Kate Lister? Julia, you've been amazing to talk to. And because I know you from way back when, I've actually, I've done something for you. I've I've written you a quiz.
49:12 Speaker 05 Very nervous.
49:13 Kate Lister? I've got flashcards. This is my, you just say true or false to these. These are, this isn't like a sex work specific quiz. These are common history claims that I see cropping up about the Victorians, like on Facebook and stuff, you know, like historyfacts.com, that stuff. So you just say yes or no.
49:33 Speaker 05 Are you asking a historian to give a one word answer?
49:36 Kate Lister? I am.
49:36 Speaker 05 Oh, man, that's gonna be the hardest part. All right.
49:40 Kate Lister? We can pick it up afterwards if we need explaining. All right, here we go. 10 questions. The Victorians covered up the legs of their pianos to avoid causing offence.
49:49 Speaker 05 False.
49:50 Kate Lister? Correct. The penile piercing known as a Prince Albert is so cold because Queen Victoria's husband, Prince Albert, had a piercing in his penis.
49:59 Speaker 05 I think that's also false.
50:01 Kate Lister? That is also false. Well done. False eyelashes were invented by a Victorian sex worker called Gerida Periddle to keep semen out of her eyes, and she called them cumberellas.
50:11 Speaker 05 I want this to be true so badly, but I'm pretty sure it's false.
50:17 Kate Lister? Completely and utterly false.
50:20 Speaker 05 But oh boy, do I ever want it to be true.
50:23 Kate Lister? I've seen that one turned around so many times. Right.
50:26 Speaker 05 Cumberellas. Thank you for that gift.
50:28 Kate Lister? You're very welcome. Right. The poet Robert Browning once mistakenly used the word twat in one of his poems because he believed it was slang for a nun's habit.
50:37 Speaker 05 False.
50:38 Kate Lister? That is true.
50:39 Speaker 05 That is true. The reason I said false is because I was like, did he accidentally or did he accidentally?
50:46 Kate Lister? He accidentally. He didn't know what it meant. Bless him.
50:49 Speaker 05 Whoopsie daisy. Bless him.
50:51 Kate Lister? Same-sex acts between women were never criminalised in the UK because Queen Victoria didn't believe in lesbians.
50:57 Speaker 05 They were never criminalised, that's true. The Queen Victoria not believing lesbians, also true, but it's not why they weren't criminalised.
51:05 Kate Lister? Correct. Oh, we've done this one. The serial killer known as Jack the Ripper was actually the Queen's surgeon.
51:11 Speaker 05 No, it's false.
51:13 Kate Lister? Correct. Hans Christian Andersen used to test his own morality by visiting brothels and just talking to the girls and having a cry.
51:21 Speaker 05 I think that's true.
51:22 Kate Lister? That is true. The Victorians invented the vibrator to cure hysteria?
51:27 Speaker 05 True.
51:28 Kate Lister? False.
51:28 Speaker 05 Oh shit.
51:29 Kate Lister? I know, they were doing weird shit, but not that one.
51:32 Speaker 05 I feel like the archivist Lesley Hall is now judging me for getting that one wrong.
51:36 Kate Lister? Victorian sex workers used candles to time each client, and these were known as brothel candles.
51:43 Speaker 05 Let's say true, because there may have been a couple of people who did it, but I've never come across a direct reference to it. Also, like, the candle, like, that's way too long, like, way too long.
51:53 Kate Lister? Exactly, and they had watches.
51:55 Speaker 05 Maybe one of those, like, little beeswax candles that are really expensive and burn fast, but other than that, definitely not.
52:00 Kate Lister? No, no, no, no. Okay, finish this famous exchange that occurred between Prince Albert, aka Dirty Bertie, and his courtesan Lily Langtree. "Madam, I've spent enough on you to build a battleship."
52:12 Speaker 05 Oh, I don't know this one.
52:14 Kate Lister? "And you've spent enough in me to float one."
52:18 Speaker 05 I love this stuff, right? Because it really does show that the Victorians were not just, like, covering piano leg prudes, that there was a vibrant body subculture.
52:27 Kate Lister? Right? You got almost all of them correct. You got eight out of 10, and I absolutely did just spring that on Julia with no prep. The one about the false eyelashes, that is still doing the rounds to this very day. That just didn't happen.
52:41 Speaker 05 Legendary, though.
52:43 Kate Lister? Julia, you have been amazing to talk to. Thank you so much for dropping by. If people want to know more about you and your research, where can they find you?
52:51 Speaker 05 I think the easiest place is to find my book, The Disappearance of Lydia Harvey, available at all great bookshops, and it tells the story of a woman, Lydia Harvey, who was trafficked in 1910 from New Zealand to Buenos Aires and to London. And I tell the whole kind of story of her adventures and trials, and I think that's probably the place to find my work.
53:13 Kate Lister? And are you on social media, or are you smart on that?
53:16 Speaker 05 I am. I am on Blue Sky.
53:18 Kate Lister? Thank you so much. You have been marvelous to talk to.
53:21 Speaker 05 Thank you so much, Kate. It's been a blast.
53:29 Kate Lister? Thank you for listening and thank you so much to Julia for joining me. And if you like what you heard, don't forget to like, review and follow along whatever it is you get your podcasts. If you'd like us to explore a subject or if you just wanted to say hello, then you can email us at [email protected] . Coming up, we are going to address the question of why are the penises on classical statues so small? Don't pretend you haven't wondered too. And I'm really getting to grips with this one in a documentary I did for History Hit called 'Digging About', which you can view at your leisure right now. We will also have the first episode in our new mini-series on royal sex, an exploration of the scandalous things some royals have gotten up to over the centuries. This podcast was edited by Tom Delargy and produced by Stuart Beckwith. The senior producer was Charlotte Long.
54:14 Kate Lister? Join me again, Betwixt and Sheats, The History of Sex Scandal in Society, a podcast by History Hit. This podcast contains music from Epidemic Sound.
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