A Festering Sore on the Body of Society’

prostitution and the Street Offences Act as the control of women's sexuality. 4 Within this framework of analysis, they constituted part of a more general reassertion of the ideologies of family life and motherhood in the 1950s, which sustained 'women's position within the patriarchal order' and which served to elevate the prostitute into 'a new folk devil in spite of an apparent liberation of female sexuality in discourses on sex'. 5 However, in the main, existing research has centred on the social politics of the Wolfenden Committee at a national level in Westminster and Whitehall, and its implications for sexual law reform in England, and there is a notable lack of regional studies.It is important to recognise that, while its proceedings may have focused on metropolitan concerns south of the Border, they also involved a Scottish dimension.Both written and oral evidence was presented to the Committee by a range of Scottish civil servants, law officers, medical experts, and social workers; evidence that was shaped by distinctive traditions of law, local government, and medical practice in Scotland, as well as arguably a distinctive civic and sexual culture.This article has four main objectives.First, it utilises this evidence to document the existing provisions for the prosecution and treatment of female 'prostitutes' in mid-twentieth-century Scotland.Secondly, it investigates the forces and arguments both for and against the revision of street offences legislation as revealed in the Scottish testimony to the Committee.The article then focuses on the response of Scottish opinion to the recommendations of the Wolfenden Report and to the subsequent exclusion of Scotland from the 1959 Street Offences Act.In conclusion, it seeks briefly to assess the implications of the Scottish experience for any interpretation of the Wolfenden Committee and its role in the developing relationship between sexuality and the State. The prosecution and treatment of prostitutesIn the 1950s, female solicitation was prosecuted in Scotland primarily in the police courts, under either the Burgh Police (Scotland) Act of 1892 or a variety of local corporation orders in the major cities.The usual charge was that,'being a common prostitute or streetwalker', the accused 'loiter[ed] about or importune [d] for the purposes of prostitution'. 6 In addition, a wide range of byelaws regulating public parks, pleasure grounds, links, seashores and other places of public resort included provisions against soliciting. 7 The Licensing Acts were also employed to reduce the 'A Festering Sore on the Body of Society' 81 4 C. Smart,'Law and the Control of Women's Sexuality:The Case of the 1950s', in B. Hutter and

Ancient history · Political science · Sociology · Gender Studies · Historical Studies on Reproduction, Gender, Health, and Societal Changes · History · Irish and British Studies · Medicine · Sex work and related issues

• The Social Geography of Prostitution in Edinburgh, 1900–1939

  Open Access•Louise Settle•Journal of Scottish Historical…•2013

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