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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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
These sorts of motivations for choosing prostitution—money, labour, lack