Monthly Archives: July 2015



Laite, Julia (2008). Taking Nellie Johnson’s fingerprints: prostitutes and legal identity in early Twentieth-Century London. History Workshop Journal 65 (1), pp. 96-116. ISSN 1363-3554.


British laws which sought to control and prevent street prostitution in the early twentieth century all relied on the idea that a ‘common prostitute’ was a legally definable person, and, while prostitution itself was not an offence, that the action of street solicitation represented a special kind of public nuisance. This article explores some of the implications of this legal system, especially after prostitutes were added to the fingerprinting schedule of the London Metropolitan Police in 1917. Centred around one rare case-file concerning the mistaken identity of a street prostitute in 1920, the article explores the way in which women working as prostitutes experienced and negotiated the criminal justice system. In contrast to the historical attention given to the Contagious Diseases Acts, the solicitation laws are seriously under-examined. Yet these laws were put in place prior to the CD Acts, lasted long after their repeal, affected a far greater number of women, and were significantly more important to the police and the state in their control of prostitution than were the short-lived and geographically limited CD Acts. In the context of the CD Acts, historians have looked at the ways in which a prostitute identity was developed and assigned by medical discourse and medical registration. However, the far more common and long-lasting experience of prostitute women in Britain was governed by the solicitation laws and a legal, not medical, process of classification. Through Nellie Johnson’s story, we can begin to explore the intricacies of a legal system of prostitution control peculiar to Britain at a crucial point in its development. This article argues that over the course of the early twentieth century, the criminalization of identity became the grounds upon which the entire system of street- prostitution control in England and Wales rested. The fingerprinting of prostitutes, and Nellie Johnson’s personal experiences, fit into a larger story of modernization in early twentieth-century Britain and the early twentieth-century world. This period witnessed the development of particular, and technical, forms of identification which were applied to particular groups of people, an abstraction which turned the body itself into a text that had very real consequences for women like Nellie Johnson.

Bergquist, Kathleen Ja Sook. “Criminal, Victim, or Ally? Examining the Role of Sex Workers in Addressing Minor Sex Trafficking.” Affilia 30, no. 3 (August 1, 2015): 314–27. doi:10.1177/0886109915572844. 
The absence of representation from the sex industry in efforts to address the commercial sexual exploitation of children is striking. “Voices” that get heard are generally limited to survivor testimony, while those who are currently in “the life” are excluded, despite the fact that many enter into prostitution underage and would have been defined as child sex trafficking victims under the Trafficking Victims Protection Act. This article explores the silencing effect of conflating prostitution with sex trafficking, the ways in which sex workers might contribute to addressing the commercial sexual exploitation of children as “allies,” and the ethical responsibility of social workers in anti-trafficking work.
In Mein Kampf, Adolf Hitler attacked prostitution as a major cause of Germany’s decline. The “prostitution of love,” he claimed, was responsible for the “terrible poisoning of the health of the national body” through syphilis. “Even if its results were not this frightful plague, it would nevertheless be profoundly injurious to man, since the moral devastations which accompany this degeneracy suffice to destroy a people slowly but surely.” According to Hitler, many of Germany’s troubles could be blamed on “this Jewification of our spiritual life and mammonization of our mating instinct” that threatened to annihilate future generations of healthy Germans. Hitler’s tirades about the moral and racial dangers of venal sex suggested that, once in power, the Nazis would show little tolerance for the persistence of “vice.” Paradoxically, however, state-regulated prostitution increased dramatically under Nazism. Especially during wartime, the regulated brothel became a key institution of Nazi sexual policy. How can we make sense of this tension?

As this essay intends to show, to gain a fuller understanding of Nazi attitudes toward prostitution, it is vital to analyze them in the context of Weimar conflicts over prostitution reform. Recent studies on the history of prostitution in the Third Reich tend to neglect pre-1933 developments. If historians mention the topic of Weimar prostitution policy at all, it is primarily to emphasize basic continuities in this area after the Nazi takeover. Thus, Gisela Bock has argued that Weimar prostitution reforms paved the way for the sexual and economic exploitation of prostitutes under National Socialism. However, the notion of unbroken continuities between Weimar and Nazi attitudes toward venal sex is problematic for several reasons. The exclusive focus on continuity tends to obscure important differences between the two periods. Far from representing a mere prelude to the brutal persecution of prostitutes after 1933, the nationwide abolition of state-regulated prostitution in 1927 led to significant improvements in prostitutes’ civil and legal status. To acknowledge these (albeit limited) gains in prostitutes’ rights is key for the analysis of the impact that concerns about “immorality” had on the crisis of the Weimar Republic and the rise of Nazism.

The more liberal aspects of Weimar prostitution reforms triggered a powerful right-wing backlash. In the eyes of religious conservatives, the state’s perceived failure to enforce “moral order” and cleanse the streets of prostitutes profoundly discredited Weimar democracy. Among large segments of the police, the loss of authority to control and punish streetwalkers similarly bred resentment against the democratic government. The Nazis were keenly aware of the propagandistic value of the issue of prostitution. Nazi attacks on the 1927 prostitution reform as yet another expression of Weimar’s “materialism” and “moral decay” aimed to widen the party’s appeal among the religious Right and conservative officials. During the early 1930s, the Nazis’ successful attempt to portray themselves as guardians of conventional morality intent on eliminating “vice” was key to winning them the approval and collaboration of many conservatives. We can only account fully for this dynamic, however, if we recognize some of the positive achievements of Weimar prostitution reforms. The abolition of state-regulated prostitution was one of the major successes of the 1920s movement for sexual reform, which failed to achieve other goals such as the decriminalization of abortion and homosexuality. This is why Weimar prostitution reforms became a central target of Nazi propaganda.

BEFORE 1980, THE PROSTITUTE was “pornographic.” Few historians considered prostitution an important topic, and studies of the subject commonly played to the sensational and salacious.’ The small body of significant scholarship concentrated on ideas, social movements, and campaigns to control or abolish prostitution.2 Other serious works focused on cities with red-light districts, emphasizing the most visible and elite forms of prostitution.3 Additional investigations were buried in monographs and theses devoted to crime, deviancy, hospitals, and public hygiene.4 Historians, in the words of Alain Corbin, “remained haunted by the ancient links between the prostitute, rotting flesh, corpses, and filth.”‘5 While recent historians of prostitution have hardly become metaphoric under- takers unearthing “rotting flesh” and “corpses,” they have complicated the subject in ways unanticipated a generation ago. In less than two decades, more than a score of scholarly monographs on prostitution have appeared….
You can read the article online for free after registration at JSTOR.


This article examines the League of Nations Advisory Committee on the Trafficking of Women and Children (CTW) to assess the impact of international feminists on the interwar anti-sex trafficking movement. It argues that women who were firmly embedded in the transnational and international women’s rights movement built a coalition on the CTW to ensure the prominence of the feminist abolitionist position of sex trafficking in the 1920s. This position was defined by calls for equal standards of morality between the sexes, resistance to laws that treated prostitutes as a group and infringed on their human rights, and unwavering demands for the abolition of state-regulated prostitution. Changes in the personnel and bureaucratic structure of the CTW and the rising tide of nationalism served to undermine the feminist abolitionists’ position in the League in the 1930s.

Full article available here. 

During November 1933 the trial of three men accused of ‘living off the earnings of prostitution’ captivated the news reading public of Edinburgh. This article uses the detailed trial transcription and newspaper coverage of the Kosmo Club trial to examine the role that dance clubs played within a larger network of clandestine prostitution and the implications this had for the women who worked in these clubs as ‘dance partners’. The case study focuses on a key moment in the history of prostitution, one that has not yet received sufficient historical attention, a moment when new technologies, such as the telephone and the motorcar, first began to dramatically alter the landscape of prostitution. Furthermore, the trial offers a rare glimpse of dance partners’ experiences, both the dangers they faced and the many ways in which they attempted to resist those who sought to control and exploit them.
Full article available here.