ABSTRACT
Prostitutes had a very public presence in nineteenth-and twentieth-century European towns and cities. It was most often their visibility that caused anxiety, not only about the use of public space, but also the contamination of that space. Many of the discussions that developed around prostitution focused on the idea of contagion, either in the spread of disease or immorality; prostitution was itself believed to be contagious. Within the United Kingdom the prostitute could be described in a number of ways as a ‘fallen woman’, ‘unfortunate’, ‘woman of bad character’, ‘woman of notorious character’, ‘nymph of the pave’, among other names. It was clear to contemporaries what type of woman was being referred to. Prostitution, as a subject, was much discussed and written about in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as journalists, medical doctors, rescue workers, and policy makers described and tried to offer remedies to the ‘problem’ of prostitution. In this chapter I want to focus on the perception of prostitutes and prostitution, its extent, attempted regulation and control, and its association with disease. The definition of prostitution used in this chapter follows that of Outshoorn as ‘the exchange of sex or sexual services for money or other material benefits’, and commercial sex as ‘men buying the sexual services of women, within a set of social relations implying unequal power
relationships between the sexes’.4 What will not be discussed here is the wider sex industry, or ‘sex work’ more generally, which includes lap dancing, phone sex or pornography. Utilizing the concept of Kelly et al., prostitution here means ‘face to face contact, in which some form of sexual/bodily contact takes place, most commonly penetrative sex’.5
