Julia Laite. Common Prostitutes and Ordinary Citizens

Julia Laite has written a smart book in accessible prose that adds significantly to the history of prostitutes as people and prostitution as vice in Britain. She shifts attention forward from the well-studied Contagious Diseases Acts and the movement to abolish them to examine “the trend toward more efficient identification and criminalization of prostitute women” (p. 117). This process first grew out of the 1885 Criminal Amendment Act and became codified with the 1959 Street Offences Act, laws which, three-quarters of a century apart, responded to similar moral panics about the sale of sex on London streets. Emphasizing the changing spatial distribution of London prostitution as a result of new laws, transforming cultural contexts, and the fluctuations of police enforcement, Laite challenges existing historical assumptions about prostitution and creates a remarkable street-level view of prostitutes' lives. Laite choreographs a wide range of actors: prostitutes, social-purity reformers, feminist activists, police, magistrates, central and municipal government officials, the press, doctors, and “ordinary” women and men. These actors pushed and pulled against each other to establish authoritative knowledge about prostitution, while prostitutes negotiated their lives in the context of the competing discourses. The results of these struggles constrained women's physical mobility and increasingly imposed an identity as a “prostitute” on women selling sex. Laite demonstrates the process and impact of criminalization through careful analysis of a wide array of materials, especially the Metropolitan Police Papers at the National Archives, which she reads both qualitatively and quantitatively in fascinating ways.

Context (archaeology) · Criminalization · Criminology · Enforcement · Government (linguistics) · Law enforcement · Metropolitan area · Political science · Sociology · Colonialism, slavery, and trade · Gender Studies · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Law · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies