Betwixt The Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal & Society - Sex Work in Victorian London

Episode Date: June 27, 2025

What were the lives of women like who sold sex in the Victorian era? How did the law makers and moral crusaders of the time try to control it? How did sex workers create community in the 19th century?In the final part of our mini-series on sex work throughout history, Kate's joined by Dr. Julia Laite, historian, professor of history at Birkbeck University, to take us back to the Victorian era.This episode was edited by Tom Delargy. The producer was Stuart Beckwith. The senior producer was Charlotte Long.Please vote for us for Listeners' Choice at the British Podcast Awards! Follow this link, and don’t forget to confirm the email. Thank you!Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe.  You can take part in our listener survey here.All music from Epidemic Sounds.Betwixt the Sheets: History of Sex, Scandal & Society is a History Hit podcast. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Do you want even more shocking and scandalous history? Like why the ancient Greek statues had such small manhoods? Or what went on behind closed doors in the Georgian era? We'll sign up to History Hit, where you can see me discover the scandalous side of history, as well as hundreds of hours of original documentaries, plus new releases every week, covering everything from prehistoric Scotland to the Treaty of Versailles.

Sign up to join me in locations around the world and explore the past. Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. Hello, my lovely betwixters. It's me, Kate Lister. You are a betwixta and you are listening to Betwixtor sheets. And I'm so, so glad that you are. But for your safety, my safety, and, well, the lawyer's safety, I have to tell you, this is an adult podcast spoken by adults,

to other adults about adultery things in an adultery way, coming arrange a real subject and you should be an adult too. Oh my God. Everybody knows this by now, don't we? You know it? I know it. I hope that the lawyer bloody well knows it. But anyway, let's get on with the show.

Join me for a stroll for the streets of Victorian London. I hope you got your wits about you, because this is not the Tweed London of Chocolate Box sentimentality. Oh no, this is dark and this is dangerous, and this is home to hundreds of thousands of people all crammed in on top of one another. And as always, wherever you get poverty, you will get sex work.

But what were their lives really like? How did Victorians legislate around sex work? And why were the Victorians so damn fascinated by what they referred to as the great social evil? Well, I think I'm ready to find out. Are you ready to find out? Let's do it. What do you look for a man?

Oh, money, of course. You're supposed to rise when an adult speaks to you. I make perfect copies of whatever my boss needs by just turning it up, Yes, social courtesy does make a difference. Goodness, my beautiful time. Goodness, it has nothing to do with it, Dary. Hello, and welcome back to Betwixt the Sheets, the history of sex scandal and society with me, Kate Lister. Oh, the Victorians loved a bit of pearl clutching. They loved a moral outcry, but even more than that, they had a real savior complex,

especially when it came to, quote-unquote, fallen women, which sex workers were very much thought of. What made a woman turn to selling sex in the 19th century? What did the law have to say about it? And how did sex workers find community together amongst that hardship? Well, joining me today for the fourth and final, for now, episode in our mini-series on sex work throughout history is the wonderful Julia Leight, historian and author of, common prostitutes and ordinary citizens commercial sex in London. And if anyone can help us answer these questions, it's going to be her. So Let's do it. Hello and welcome to Betwicks the Sheets.

It's only Julia late. How are you doing? I'm doing very well. It's a beautiful sunny day. It's fabulous to see you. You're looking amazing. How's the world treating you? The world is treating me pretty good, despite the crises.

I feel like I'm kind of sailing through. So I'm one of the lucky ones. The many, many. Exactly. You are here to talk to us for our little mini-series about historical sex work. And you are the author of a lot of things, but you are the author of common prostitutes and ordinary citizens, commercial life in London 1885 to 1960. So I suppose my first question, the one that I tend to start with all the time, is do you remember what brought you to the subject of the history of sex work? Did you just kind of end up here a little bit?

Like, how did I get here? Or was there a moment when you're like, this is something I want to research? I think it's the second one, actually. I like being asked this question because I have an answer. I read Judith Walkowitz's prostitution in Victorian society. We love Judith. Yeah, exactly. It's fantastic work.

100% stands the test of time. But it ends in 1885, which is right when an enormous law is passed that criminalizes brothel keeping. And so I just sort of went, what happened then? Cliffhanger. It was. It felt like a real cliffhanger to me. And as I started investigating it more, I very quickly realized that sex work, sexual labor, prostitution, all the different words that are used for it is kind of at the heart of everything. And, you know, it's not a niche topic. It is a sort of key to understanding an enormous range of human experiences in the past and the present and kind of understanding how society works or fails to work.

What do you mean by that? How can sexual labor be at the heart of something as big as that? Because it's very, very easy for people to dismiss it or turn away from it or pretend it's nothing to do with them. What do you see in this topic as being that important? Yeah, exactly. I used to fend off a lot of older, usually male academics who would say, oh, that's a very niche subject. Very niche topic. It's very niche. You know, at first I didn't really have a good answer, but then I realized, well, first, of all, it's one of the most lucrative kind of industries. I hesitate to use that word because it's so broad. But, you know, it's one of the most lucrative global industries, if you count all of the different forms of sexual labor and sexual commerce. It's also not in isolation, right? So it's related

to the position of women in particular and other marginalized people in society. The relationship between marriage and prostitution is something that's very interesting. And I think that might have been the one, the moment when, you know, one of those light bulb moments for me, when I was reading a book by Cecily Hamilton, which was written in 1910, and she wrote, the difference between marriage and prostitution is not that great. And marriage is also a trade for women. And that's when I realized, you know, this isn't just a sort of niche subject. This is related to everything. Everything, right? What fascinates me about it is there's that old expression, don't hate the players, hate the game. But if you look at most of our history, patriarchy has been enforced.

Women have been denied equal pay, access to education, access to well-paid jobs, stigmas kept them away from it. They haven't been able to get into those spaces and earn enough to support themselves. But sex work, however you interpret that, has always been and remains something that all of us, I'm not advocating it, by the way, but this is just a fact. But it's something that all of us can do to win a lot of money in a very short space of time. There are no barriers to entry. There's no training program that you have to go on. It has always been there as this, I'm very careful when I say it, but a bizarre safety net that it's always been there.

That sounds really weird, but I think I know what I mean by that. And I know what you mean by it too. I mean, selling sex has always been part of the economy of makeshift for women. and that economy of makeshift as a phrase I take from Judith Walkowitz. You know, it was always seen as worst case scenario, it's a way to make ends meet. For other women, it became a way to achieve real social mobility, real affluence, you know, to be able to afford the pleasures in life, not just the basics. I think for an enormous range of people who are having an enormous range of experiences,

it's seen like that, you know, as something that you can get into without much training, as something that you can pick up and that you can leave as well. And, you know, the early feminists knew this. The very first feminist campaigns were centered around entering the professions, so women want to be doctors, women want to be lawyers. They were also about marriage rights and divorce rights. And the other major thing that it was about was about what they would have called prostitution. Sexual labor.

And they immediately, you know, as early as the 1870s and 1880s, they understood the link between women's economic and social subjugation. writ large and prostitution as something that they did in order to overcome some of those subjugations while also encountering new ones within it. Sex work has, it's always been where there's as long as there's been money to trade for it. But the Victorians seem to have been particularly flustered about it. Every time period has had its own hang-ups and somebody goes, oh, we need to make it illegal. Oh, no, it'll be fine.

Oh, let's put it in a zone. but the Victorians really seem to have got into a twist about it. Why do you think that was? What's particularly unique about the Victorians and sex work? That's a great question, actually, and it's a big one. I think one of the things is they weren't just interested in sex work. They were interested in the way that you manage public space more generally. So they saw prostitutes, and I'm using that word,

because they didn't have a concept of sex workers. They didn't see sex workers at all. In fact, they went out of their way to, unsee sex workers. So they saw prostitutes as they would as they would call them and conceptualize them, you know, as part of a wider story of disorder on the streets. So this was a moment when the Victorian street was becoming a more heterogeneous space. There were more kids. There were more women. There were more families. The West End was no longer this place where only men and sex workers hung out. It was a place where all kinds of people went. And so there was this sort of

session with making it family friendly, with sanitizing it, with making it morally safe to sort of be there. And that triggered all kinds of hand-wringing about, you know, first of all, how do we do that? How do we invest the police with powers to clear the streets? And most importantly, of all, with all these new women in public space, how do we tell the difference between a woman who's selling sex and a woman who is not? And so that was the first bit. And the other one is kind of related. It's again about protection. So a lot of these campaigns start from the perspective that women need to be protected, that children need to be protected, that the age of consent should be raised.

A lot of things that actually from our contemporary perspective seem fairly reasonable, socially progressive. But they very quickly became, as so many conversations about protective legislation are, right, they very quickly became about suppressing prostitution itself, about pushing people underground. And the woman who sold sex, unless she was a kind of perfect victim, became a threat rather than somebody to be protected. And so that's another reason. They got themselves in that enormous tangle. And finally, just gender roles are changing.

Economics are changing. The world is globalizing in new ways. People are moving more than they ever did before in this period. And so the Victorians get really worried about sex workers crossing borders as well. And the industrial revolution, of course, the massive expansion of the cities. Because as you're right, you're saying it wasn't just women selling sex that they were panicked about. It was poverty. It was crime.

It was alcoholism. All these things that tend to come when you have a city that suddenly blows up, triples, quadruples in size. And of course, poverty that goes along with that. Yeah, exactly. Extreme poverty. And a poverty that needed surveillance, right? So, you know, this was also a moment when health visitors and other kinds of people that we would now call social workers were going into the homes of the poor, deciding whether they were fit or unfit, deciding whether mothers were fit or unfit. You see a rise in laws in the 1870s and 1880s about protecting children, which included being able to remove them from the homes of women who are identified as prostitutes.

So that was absolutely part of the story. And it also, you know, 19th century London was a space with abject poverty and incredible social inequalities, incredible housing crises, especially in the 1880s, which is throwing people into these economies of makeshift, right? So, you know, you've got both a kind of social reality and a cultural obsession, clashing against each other, caught up within Christian morality. And it's producing, well, unfortunately, it's producing the laws that we largely still live under today when it comes to sexual labor. How did they define a quote-unquote prostitute? Because this is actually a really critical argument to the history of sex, but also laws today, because actually being able to pin down a definition, like we think we know what it means. It's a woman who goes out on the street and says, give me a shilling and I'll give you a blowjob. That's pretty straightforward. But there's so much gray area. Like what about kept mistresses? What about women that are doing it for? not for monetary, but some kind of other financial compensation. And people that go into it for a little bit, drift in and then drift out again. Do they count themselves as sex workers?

So how did they go about defining this? Yeah, this is the hilarious thing, is they never really managed to do so, you know, despite the fact that they have the term common prostitute in their legislation, and that has been in the legislation since the 1830s. Every now and then you see, you know, over the same. the course of the discussions between the police and the home office and the lawmakers, somebody stops and says, but wait a minute, what is a prostitute? What is a prostitute? What is a prostitute? And it's really interesting to me. And they don't even know where the

term common prostitute even comes from. And you see them realizing it over and over, you know, as the decades passed. Like, why are we using the term common prostitute? Why not just prostitute? And they just sort of say, oh, well, it's a vestige of the old common laws, et cetera. We don't know. And I guess eventually the statute, not the statutory law, sorry, the case law starts to decide that a prostitute is somebody who offers sexual services for gain. So it's not temporally bounded as in if you do it once, I guess that makes you by law defined as a prostitute. And it's not spatially defined. So it doesn't matter if you're on the street or if you're in a walk up in Soho, it's still part of the definition. But the other thing they don't define is a brothel.

So they make brothels illegal, but they actually don't know what. a brothel is. And about 10 years after they make them illegal, somebody finally says, but wait a minute, what's a brothel? And then they say, well, it's a place where more than one prostitute goes to sell sex. And then they say, oh, but what's a prostitute? And so these questions of definition continue to plague these laws for about 100 years. It's still the definition of a brothel today, isn't it? It's still the definition of a brothel. And it was formed in the 1890s on a series of case laws, but one really important case law about these kind of mansion blocks in the west end of London. You know, those kind of red brick mansion blocks that are around in the west end? A lot of them,

as soon as they were built, dodgy landlords and estate agents would rent them out as individual flats to women selling sex. And they would say, well, it's not a brothel because, you know, it's separate residences. And so that triggered a series of cases that determined what a brothel really was. But because I think the burden of proof in these cases is so very low, the actual definitions stopped mattering quite quickly because as long as you've got a magistrate and a police officer agreeing, okay, this is how you prosecute. Questions of definition don't really come up. It's a non-indictable offense, right? So it doesn't go to higher courts. And it's partly why the reason you get some extraordinary claims about numbers in the 19th century that sort of passed into fact.

and I still repeated occasionally when you see them. Like there's 83,000 prostitutes in the city of London alone. Someone else said there was 250,000. And what's kind of extraordinary about that is everyone at the time just kind of went, oh, that's terrible. But when you actually think about it, we don't know how many people are selling sex in the capital today. It's estimated by government stats.

I think it's about 80,000 in total throughout the whole of the UK. So the idea in the 19th century, it could have been quarter of a million. Tell me about those figures. Why were they so readily believed? I'm so glad you asked me about that because that was one of my first enraging encounters because historians have repeated those numbers as well, uncritically. And so I sort of said, I'm getting to the bottom of this, damn it.

And so I went back and the 80,000 figure comes from Patrick Colcuhn, who was a kind of moral reformer in the late 18th century, who used that number and very explicitly said, this includes women living out of wedlock with a man. Whoops a daisy. There we go. Right? A nation of prostitutes, according to Culkewin's definition.

Yeah, most of the listeners, I think, have just been outed as a Victorian prostitute. Sorry, guys. Exactly. Exactly. And then William Acton repeats this in the 1870s. So he goes to Culkewen and repeats this number and says, you know, Colquin said 80,000. And he doesn't query it. And then from then on,

because William Acton is the one who writes what essentially becomes the justification for medically regulating the sale of sex in garrison towns. It's a form of regulationism called the Contagious Diseases Acts. And he writes this book to sort of support the Contagious Diseases Acts. And it becomes a really influential book. And that's where that number really takes off and people just repeat it and repeat it. The police were really annoyed by this number. they'd get regularly annoyed. Their guess was there was about 8,000 women actually selling sex in London.

And while, I know, I don't need to tell you this, it's important to be very suspicious about what the police say. I am inclined to say that is a significantly more accurate estimate. I would have said so, yes. People just believed this. And it kind of gets to the heart of, A, the general panic that they seem to have. have had about the time of like, oh my God, all women are on the game quite clearly. And like the prevalence of it. And you alluded there to the Contagious Diseases Act.

And we probably should talk about that. And because what's clearly feeding into that and to try and regulate this is this like real panic of what they call the great social evil of like there's absolutely, they're mass in it's an army of sex workers. Oh my God. So tell us about some of the regulatory laws that were brought in. Yeah, I will. I will. So about the army of women, I mean, one of the fears, of course, is that these women are able to exit the system of domestic service. They found a cheat code. Right. Exactly. They've got a cheat code and they don't need to be tethered to these incredibly exploitative working conditions in domestic service for incredibly low pay. And so they're all panicked because what they really want is their servants. But the servants are leaving the kitchen and going into brothels. And so they start a whole moral reform. movement to try to get them out of the brothels and back into the kitchens. That's one reason they're panicked. But they're also panicked because of syphilis. That's fairer, I think. It's much fairer, right?

And, you know, I tell when I teach about this, syphilis is obviously still a serious disease now, and there's concerns about antibiotic resistance in syphilis. But it's extremely important to remember that before antibiotics in 1942, syphilis was an incredibly deadly disease. It was a very serious epidemic. Give us a rundown of the kind of things that syphilis can do if you got a dose of it that was untreated. Primary syphilis, you get sores on your genitals, sometimes in other places. Secondary syphilis is often dormant and you don't know you're carrying it, but you can absolutely still spread it. And tertiary syphilis is when it starts to attack your organs. It can be very deadly. It can include attacking your brain. And disfiguring, of course. Yeah, disfiguring your face,

disfiguring your body in general. It can be passed in utero from a mother to a child and causes all kinds of congenital birth problems. So yeah, it is incredibly serious and they knew about it for a very long time. But the 18th and 19th centuries, which are centuries of mass war and militarism, see it spike even more. So the Crimean War, there's estimates that, you know, one in 10 men, two and ten men who are fighting in that war have a venereal disease. By the first world war, they're certain that one in ten men are on medical leave because of a venereal disease and it's often syphilis. So it's an incredibly, incredibly serious problem.

Why they thought that regulating commercial sex was going to work is another question, right? So Britain has a sort of allergy to some of the more draconian measures on the continent in France and in Italy, for example, they've got full regulation. Women have to work in certain places. They have to be inspected by a medical doctor once a week. You know, they can't be out at a certain time. Some systems even set prices that they would have to charge. In Britain, they only ever reach as far as the garrison towns and port towns,

places where soldiers and sailors are. Okay. And so in that system, anybody who was suspected of being a prostitute by the police, of course, would be put on a register and would have to submit themselves to regular genital inspections, which included using a speculum, often a dirty one.

So one can only assume that they were spreading as much syphilis as they were preventing. And of course, very, very little happened to a man if he had syphilis. But if the woman was, she'd be thrown in a lock hospital. So this is a theory then, because what they're worried about is everyone's got syphilis

and that's a shame. But when they start losing manpower in, the military, then it becomes an issue. And in order to try and curtail this, they've gone to just certain towns where there are military garrisons and said, round up any woman you think could be selling sex. That's the solution. Yeah. Yeah, that's what they felt the solution was. Because the other important part of the puzzle, of course, is the connection between the military and prostitution. The military, I doubt they'd go on record about it today, but they certainly went on record about it in the past, saying, we have to keep these men happy. And in order to keep them happy

and keep them fighting and keep them obeying orders, we need to provide certain necessary pleasures. Prostitution was seen as very much a necessary evil. It was considered that men, especially fighting men, had to have a sexual outlet. And so it wasn't the idea that, you know, maybe this is not something that should be happening at all. It just didn't occur to them. So the only solution in that case would be to regulate. But they're not regulate. I mean, we'll get to how unfair and cruel this is, but they're not regulating the men. Not really. There are some ways in which men are sort of inspected and stuff in the military, but only if you're in the military. They're not regulating civilian men, not in the slightest. The very thought is anathema to them. And that was brought up at the

time. I mean, this is what sparks one of the largest feminist campaigns in history, the campaign to repeal the Contagious Diseases Acts. And they spotted exactly what you're spotting. This is deeply unfair. It's reifying sexual and social and economic inequalities. It's stigmatizing women. It's subjecting them to what one feminist called instrumental rate. And it's also a grotesque double standard. And completely ineffectual as well. Exactly. And a completely ineffectual. It's not even doing what it's supposed to be doing. I'll be back with Julia after this short break. I'm wondering, do we have records of some of these women that were subjected to this? Because the other thing about the history of sex work is because so much of it is secretive and unhidden away,

the records to try and understand what's going on are often missing unless they fall foul of the law. And then do you start to get a bigger, if not slightly biased picture? But do we know the kind of women that were being subject to this? Do we have names or ages or anything like that? We do because it's a rare moment when official registrations. were kept, right? And these official registers would include age, occupation, these sorts of things. And so in some ways, the records from the Contagious Diseases Acts are some of the most quotidian. You know, they enable you to see a woman going about her daily life to a certain

extent. And we know they're just ordinary women, you know, mostly working class women with families who are, and again, this is Judith Walkowitz's argument, not isolated from their neighborhoods. they're part of their communities. And it's one of the reasons why the campaign was so effective to repeal it because it was working class men who were saying, these are our wives, these are our daughters, these are our sisters. You can't do this. Let's talk about the campaigns to repeal the Contagious Diseases Act.

If memory serves, they were just, they were kind of brought in quietly, in a few garrison towns, and then they were rolled out to a few more. And then suddenly people start to notice what's going on here. But let's talk about who was. was campaign to get them abolished. Yeah, the campaign for the repeal of the Contagious Diseases acts kind of had two prongs that were really linked. So one were radical liberals. So people who whose main sort of motivation was this is a grotesque abuse of constitutional law. Like, this is against the rights of the person. Because they're just detaining women. Yeah, yeah.

I didn't, I didn't even ask you. What would happen if a woman said, fuck off? She'd be arrested. She'd be thrown in prison. Right, there we go. You know. And if she's found to be suffering from a venereal disease, she's also thrown in a different kind of prison. Yeah. So the radical liberals just sort of said this is unacceptable in a free country. The feminists, who among whom were many radical liberals as well, were sort of saying the same thing. You know, this is unconstitutional. It's constitutional violation.

It's against people's rights. But they added those textures of, you know, it's also a grotesque double standard. It's also sexual assault. that's the sort of branch of the movement that's really been remembered. So tell me about Josephine Butler, who I always nearly say Josephine Baker, two fabulous women, very, very different people. Tell me about Josephine Butler. Josephine Butler is so interesting because she's become this sort of symbol for both abolitionist feminists in the present day, so feminists who want to legally sort of abolish prostitution.

And she's also a symbol for sort of advocates of decriminalization in the present. And so I find her so fascinating. She in no way, shape, or form would have advocated for sex work or that sort of thing. But she was deeply committed to the rights of people who sold sex on the grounds that she was deeply committed to sort of civil rights. Yeah. She also, you know, through the lens of her evangelical Christianity, understood that women who were fallen on hard times were not sort of criminals. They shouldn't be thrown in prison. They should be helped.

They should be supported. She was part of that kind of movement, which you would call the rescue movement. There was lots of that, wasn't it? Lots of people rescuing. There was lots of people rescuing. And she was less involved in it than some others. And in fact, towards the end of her life, she went out of her way to condemn what she saw as a morally conservative crusade against prostitution.

You know, she said, you know, these social purity people who are trying to criminalize pornography and they're burning all the dirty books and they're shutting down the dirty music halls and they're campaigning against brothels and throwing women in prison. You know, that's not what I campaigned for. I completely distanced myself from this. She was successful, wouldn't she? She got the act overturned, but they were on the pages for a good long while. Yeah, so they span the 1860s through to 1885. So they're suspended in 1884 and repealed in 1885, which is that cliffhanger that I mentioned. earlier. And I really do think that Josephine Butler was very disappointed in what came afterwards,

which was, in her opinion, just more crusades against the rights of women who sold sex. Can you explain to us what the problem with those kind of crusades are? Because as with many, many things like this, is they are, I believe coming from a good place is that people genuinely want to rescue sex workers and help them back onto a lot of. life where they're not doing that. And, you know, they believe that if they just make everything illegal, that it will fix everything. But what's the bigger picture here? What is it that Josephine Butler would have been objecting to? Yeah. And so I'll sort of say that this might be Josephine Butler, but also some of the feminists who come after her who very much see themselves as kind of walking

in her stead. So Alison Nielens and the folks at the Association for Moral and Social Hygiene, which is the most boring, conservative-named organization. And yet, they were the organization that first launched a campaign to decriminalize solicitation. Wow. And the reason they did this, and Josephine Butler would have very much agreed, you know, the reason they did this is why they campaigned against it, I should say, is because they saw it as a fundamentally unjust law. They said, you can't say, okay, you're a prostitute,

and therefore you're on the street, and therefore you're guilty of an offense that nobody who isn't a prostitute would be guilty of because that's how the law worked. Common prostitute is in Piccadilly Circus, therefore she's soliciting. And so Josephine Butler and other feminists said that is fundamentally unjust law.

You can't label somebody something and then arrest them because they're that thing and happen to be in public space. So that was one of the reasons they were so against it is for the sheer injustice of it and the onworkability of it. They were also against it because of the double standard. Some of them may have been a little convinced by the Nordic model, right? The idea that you criminalize the man, not the woman, you criminalize demands, not supply. That's where you make it illegal to purchase sex, but it remains legal to sell sex. Yeah, I started getting interested, you know, would these early feminists have supported the Nordic model? And then I found something that one of them had written that said, we don't want an equality of injustice. because the only way you enforce the Nordic model is by applying the same kind of unjust law to a man,

because otherwise how do you tell why somebody's on a street or not? How do you supply evidence that they're committing a crime? What they didn't quite get to, but the police got to, the reason the police didn't like these laws is because they saw it as pushing prostitution underground. And they understood from basic observations that if you push prostitution under, you introduce more third parties, more landlords, more estate agents, more pimps. You also mean that you can't see it. And the police really don't like not knowing things, right?

The police want to have an oversight. And they said, well, once you push it underground, we don't know what's happening. We don't know who's being harmed. We don't know what other crimes are being committed. So it was really interesting. You've got this kind of combination of feminists saying this is unjust. This is a double standard. And you've also got the police saying, yeah, this isn't helpful.

This isn't helpful. It's pushing prostitution underground. And in a best case scenario, we wouldn't have to deal with this at all. In your research, have you found anything that could be called a sex work community? Today, sex workers organised together. There are unions that people can go and read about and support if you like. And they come together to support one another. COVID is a really great example of that. It was Swarm the Sex Worker Activist and Resistance Movement, that group who crowdfunded to get money to give money to sex workers because obviously they couldn't work but were left out of any government policies around being furloughed. Did you see anything like that?

Not COVID, but that kind of community action in the 19th century? So I certainly look for it and I think about it because, you know, I know that these organizations didn't just emerge from nothing in the 1970s, that there absolutely had to be other moments when solidarities and organizational structures emerged. But it's really hard to see. All you have is the opinions of the police and records from the police. police up until the 1950s. But there's glimmers. There's certainly glimmers that, you know, women work together. They watched out for each other. Even in the Jack the Ripper murders,

you see in the police interviews, you know, they'll talk to a woman who's selling sex and and she'll say, oh, yes, well, I notice so and so and so and so and so ensue. It's evidence they're keeping an eye out for each other. And in certain communities, especially around Soho, I think there really was a kind of subculture, I guess you could say, of women who were working and living in Soho, clubbing together, helping each other out, many, many references to mutual support. Even the moralists, right, even the ones who are sort of like, oh, these awful prostitutes, you know, they're hopeless, they'll never be reformed. They'll sort of say, you know, and one of the problems is they're just, they just take care of each other and, you know, they don't turn to us for help.

They've got this mutual support structure. And there's. saying it in kind of a negative way. Like, they're all caught up in this world. But reading that against the grain, it suggests that there were very real support networks for women selling sex across time. And when we look at something like the killings that were attributed to somebody called Jack the Ripper, which I just hate that anyway, like giving serial killers cool names, but that's kind of what we're left with for Fux 8. But that was really interesting because it revealed a lot of lot about how society and how the press spoke about women that they associated with sex work. And it wasn't good.

No, but it was such an interesting time. The 1880s were so important for the history of sexual labor and the laws associated with it. So 1885, they made brothels illegal as a non-inditable offense. So prosecutions go from about 200 a year to 1,200 a year, almost literally old. overnight. And that's three years before these killings start. In 1985, the other thing that happens is the maiden tribute of modern Babylon, this enormous newspaper expose about child prostitution in London. And so people are talking about it, but it's not just Jack the Ripper. And I couldn't agree with you more about the cool names thing, but it's not just that moment that puts the idea of

prostitution and sexual labor as a social problem in people's minds. It's this sort of five-year span where people are obsessed with it. And Jack the Ripper stuff does start to create a language of let's shut this down, let's suppress it. But surprisingly, actually, it also generates quite a lot of sympathy, a sort of awareness for what the difficult lives of very, very poor women were. But it also reveals something I was talking about earlier, which is, oh, these women are sleeping rough and they're outside after midnight, ergo they must be prostitutes. They must be. Right.

That's an interesting argument that I suppose was raised predominantly by Hallie Rubenhold's book was that she disturbed that narrative that they were definitely all selling sex. I personally think that it's really interesting that she did that. It's made us rethink it. I'm not as convinced about it as Hallie is in some places, but I'm really glad that she did that because it's the same as saying today, all homeless women are definitely selling it. in sex that they must have been because they were poor and they were and they were homeless.

So obviously they were doing it. So it's this huge judgment call being evoked, isn't it? Yeah. And it's relying on the opinion of the police officer, right, who says, oh, she's a prostitute. And in fact, a lot of the time they were using the term unfortunate. It was a synonym for prostitute, but it was also, like a lot of euphemisms, fairly capacious. And, you know, you can't tell if the person's using it is using it specifically. as a euphemism or using it more to describe a woman who is down and out who's fallen. Yeah. You know, she's fallen into drink.

She's fallen into homelessness. And she's potentially fallen into prostitution. I mean, it happened in Yorkshire as well with the Peter Sutcliffe killings is that a lot of those women were assumed, described as being prostitutes like the first victim, Wilma McCann. And the only evidence for that is what Sutcliffe himself said. We don't know that. Exactly. And even the idea that Jack the Ripper targeted what he would have called prostitutes comes from a letter that has long been proved to be a hoax.

Right? So there's actually virtually no evidence that suggests that this man was a serial killer of what he perceived to be prostitutes. There is very little evidence to suggest that at least three of those women were selling sex, certainly at the time of their murders. But not all. That's not proven at all. No, not in the slightest. One of the most interesting moments is Kate Kelly, who's also called Catherine Eddo's, when the coroner asks her partner, her lover, the man she lived with, did she walk the streets?

And he says, yes, she walked the streets. You know, when we couldn't afford a lodging house, she'd walk around so that she didn't get done for sleeping rough. Because if you kept walking, they couldn't arrest you. And that's how he was using the term walking the streets. And he flat out denied that she was selling sex. And, you know, I encountered that years ago when I sort of went, wait a minute now. Hang on a sec. Yeah.

And I think Hallie has really developed that and really questioned some pretty tidy and incredibly prejudiced assumptions about what these words mean and those sorts of things. I'll be back with Julia after this short break. Those women fell into something that we still do today, which is like the Victorians had this idea of the deserving and undeserving poor. and I think that they did that with sex workers as well. It was deserving and undeserving. And the deserving ones were girls, ideally for them to fix this.

They've turned to sex work because they've been cruelly seduced and abandoned by some terrible rake. They're desperate to leave this life. Please won't somebody help me? They've been abandoned. And if you just take them into your rescue home, Charles Dickens had one of them, and teach you how to sew and play the piano, all will be well. Then there are other women, like the victims of Jack the Ripper, who are not, deserving because they are repeat offenders in quote-unquote marks. They are drinking a lot.

They're impoverished. They're homeless. They don't fit that. We're happy to rescue you mold at all. Yeah, exactly. And so the women in rescue homes almost always didn't really have extensive experiences of selling sex. So women who ended up in rescue homes tended to be young and maybe what we would call at risk young women today. So maybe they would have had some encounters that the Victorians would have classified as prostitution. But for the most part, they're seen as at risk of becoming a prostitute. And they were, yeah, they're savable, they're rescuable, they're impressionable, they're not too far gone. And there were actually lots of conversations about making sure that seasoned

prostitutes, my air quotes are up, by the way, didn't mix with these at-risk girls, right, lest they tempt them to the dark side. But I will correct you, they were not taught to play piano. I mean, maybe nominally they were. But what they were mostly doing is the laundry of other people's institutions. So these rescue homes overwhelmingly trained women into domestic service. It was seen as a pipeline to get them back into domestic service at a time when the servant crisis was very real. There was an immense labor shortage. And they were used to work in laundries. And the profits from those laundries, so they'd wash institutional bed sheets. They'd wash hotel stuff, that sort of thing. And the profits from them.

these laundries were then used to run these institutions. And the women didn't see any pay. So it was definitely, you know, nominally, it was for improvement. But really, it was a labor camp. Free labor. Yeah, exactly. In terms of labeling these women and saying, you know, oh, you're a repeat offender, there was actually a word for it under the Vagrancy Act. If you got done three times under the Vagrancy Act for drunken disorderly solicitation, you would be labeled an incorrigible rogue. And that was a legal term, incorrigible rogue. That's incredible. We should probably talk about men on the game before I let you go,

because we've spoken a lot about women, but of course, they've always been men selling sex as well. Were they part of this panic for the Victorians, or were they just, they couldn't really go there because it was just a bit too much for them? They were definitely part of the panic, but as a subcategory of men who had sex, with men more generally. So that law I mentioned the 1885 law that criminalized brothels,

which is called the Criminal Law Amendment Act, also has the infamous Labusher Amendment in it, which criminalized, quote, gross acts of indecency between men. That was the sort of, the same law that criminalizes brothels is also the law that criminalizes homosexuality beyond just what the, what the Victorians would have called buggery. They're panicking about that more generally, but within that category, there are men who are selling sex overwhelmingly to other men. Some of these men were dressed as men, some of them were cross-dressed, and some of them were trans women who were incorrectly labeled as men. We can't tell because, unfortunately, again, the police officers are only source of information. So we know that there were commercial sex scenes for men who had sex with men, that Piccadilly was a major scene,

there were other different sort of corners that you'd always find a little pocket in port towns again thinking of the sailor. Oscar Wilde and his partner Bozy. I don't know if we're ready to have this conversation yet goes, but he did pick up a lot of young teenage boys. He did. And it was very much part of a queer subculture at the time. There's a couple of different issues with this when you're studying it as a historian. in. One is we don't know if the men who are selling sex to other men are themselves have a sexual preference for men. Or if they're doing it as what they would identify in the present day is

straight. And they're just doing it for the same reason most people do it, which is to make money. Or if they are queer themselves and part of a kind of very difficult to see where the line is between mercenary and non-mercenary sex. And the other problem is the law that was being used to prosecute them was not the same law that was used against women who sold sex. It was about indecent behavior on the street. And it was the same law that was used for men who were just sort of out on a date. And so it's really, really difficult to see in the criminal records which men were working as sex workers and which men were just out on a date with their body. Yeah. Yeah. And so it makes it really, really tricky. There's some great scholarship about this, but it is very, very tricky to

see them in the past because of the way the law categorized them. Do you think that our laws today are still very Victorian in nature? I mean, they're literally Victorian in nature, right? They're literally Victorian in nature. They're literally Victorian but worse because the Victorian solicitation laws stipulated that the woman had to be doing something in addition to soliciting. She had to be drunk and disorderly. She had to be causing a nuisance. She had to be bickshrafting the pavement, bothering passengers. Now, in practice, most magistrates would just sort of say, hey, police officer, tell me she was bothering someone.

And the police will say, she was bothering someone. And the magistrate will see it, okay. But in 1959, they got rid of that clause altogether. And they literally made it so that any common prostitute, and that means any woman who's been stigmatized, you know, constitutionally illegally as a common prostitute, any common prostitute loitering or soliciting is liable for arrest. And that meant that if you're labeled a common prostitute and you pop out for some milk and a man passes you and say, good morning, good morning, police officer could arrest you. And the burden of proof would be basically non-existent.

So that's from 59 on. So if anything, our laws have gotten worse. The brothel law that was passed in 1885 was subsumed into the 1956 Sexual Offenses Act and remains the same today, despite the fact that for genuinely 100 years, people have been taken. campaigning to make off-street sex work safer by allowing people to work together, it's unfortunately still in the statute books today. The only progressive thing that's been done to these laws is that they've made a common prostitute a gender neutral term. Oh, thank you for that. Yeah, so enlightened. Julia, you've been amazing to talk to. And because I know you from way back when, I've actually, I've done something for you. I've written you a quiz.

I've got flashcards. This is my, you just say true or false to these. These are, this isn't like a sex work specific quiz. These are common history claims that I see cropping up about the Victorians like on Facebook and stuff, you know, like history facts.com, that stuff. So you just say yes or no. Are you asking a historian to give a one word answer to something? Oh man, that's going to be the hardest part.

All right. We can pick it up afterwards if you need. He's explaining. All right, here we go. Ten questions. The Victorians covered up the legs of their pianos to avoid causing offence. False. Correct. The penile piercing, known as a Prince Albert, is so cold because Queen Victoria's husband, Prince Albert, had a piercing in his penis. I think that's also false. That is also false. Well done. False eyelashes were invented by a Victorian sex worker called Gerrida Periddle to keep semen out of her eyes and she called them Cumborellas. I want this to be true so badly, but I'm pretty sure it's false.

It's completely and utterly false. But boy, oh boy, do I ever want it to be true. I've seen that one doing the round so many times. Thank you for that gift. You're very welcome. The poet Robert Browning once mistakenly used the word twat in one of his poems because he believed it was slang for a nun's habit. False.

That is true. That is true. The reason I said false is because I was like, did he accidentally or did he accidentally? He accidentally. He didn't know what it meant. Lipsy Daisy, bless him. Same sex acts between women were never criminalized in the UK because Queen Victoria didn't believe in lesbians. They were never criminalized. That's true. The Queen Victoria not believing lesbians also true, but it's not why they weren't criminalized.

Correct. Oh, we've done this one. The serial killer known as Jack the Ripper was actually the Queen's surgeon. No, it's false. Correct. Hans Christian Anderson used to test his own morality by visiting brothels and just talking to the girls and having a cry. I think that's true. That is true. The Victorians invented the vibrator to cure hysteria.

True. False. Oh, shit. I know. They were doing weird shit, but not that one. I feel like the archivist Leslie Hall is now judging me for getting that one wrong. Victorian sex workers used candles to time each client and these were known as brothel candles.

Let's say true because there may have been the couple people who did it but I've never come across a direct reference to it. Also like the candle, like that's way too long. Like way too long. Exactly. And they had blushes. Maybe one of those like little beeswax candles that are really expensive and burn fast but other than that definitely not.

No, no, no, no. Okay, finish this famous exchange that occurred between Prince Albert aka Dirty Bertie and his courtesan Lily Langtree. Madam, I've spent enough on you to build a battleship. Oh, I don't know this one. And you've spent enough in me to float one. I love this stuff, right? Because it really does show that the Victorians were not just like covering piano

like prudes, that there was a vibrant body subculture. Right? You got almost all of them correct. You got eight out of ten. I absolutely did just spring that on Julia with no prep. The one about the false eyelashes that is still doing the rounds to this very day. That just didn't happen.

Legendary, though. Julia, you have been amazing to talk to you. Thank you so much for dropping by. If people want to know more about you and your research, where can they find you? I think the easiest place is to find my book, The Disappearance of Lydia Harvey, available at all great bookshops,

and it tells the story of a woman, Lydia Harvey, who was trafficked in 1910, from New Zealand to Buenos Aires, and to London, and I tell the whole kind of story of her adventures and trials. And I think that's probably the place to find my work. And are you on social media, or are you smarter than that? I am. I am on Blue Sky. Thank you so much. You have been marvelous to talk to.

Thank you so much, Kate. It's been a blast. Thank you for listening, and thank you so much to Julia for joining me. And if you like what you heard, don't forget to like with you and follow along whatever it is. You get your podcasts. If you'd like us to explore a subject or if you just wanted to say hello, then you can email us at betwixt at history hit.com. Coming up, we are going to address the question of why are the penises on classical statues so small?

Don't pretend you haven't wondered too. And I'm really getting to grips with this one in a documentary I did for History Hit called Dicking About, which you can view at your leisure right now. We will also have the first episode in our new miniseries on Royal Sex, an exploration of the scandalous things some royals have gotten up to a. over the centuries. This podcast was edited by Tom Delaggy and produced by Stuart Beckwith. The senior producer was Charlotte Long. Join me again, betwixt the sheets, the history of sex scandal in society, a podcast by History Hit.

This podcast contains music from Epidemic Sound.