138 O’Connell Davidson and Brace 1996: 16
139 Piscitelli 2004: 20
140 Piscitelli 2004: 22
141 Piscitelli 2004: 16
142 Seabrook 1996: 38
143 Frank 2002; Ratliff 2003
144 Frank 1998: 189
145 Ratliff 2003: 157
146 Cohen 1982: 415; see also MacCannell 1973
147 Phillip 1999; De Albuquerque 1998; Cabezas 1999; Hanson 1998
148 Crick 1992: 142
149 Pruitt and LaFont 1995
150 De Albuquerque 1998; Phillip 1999
151 Dahles 1998: 30
152 Bunzl 2000: 74
153 Seabrook 1996: 22
154 Ratliff 2003: 122
155 Cabezas 2004
156 Kempadoo 1999
157 Kuate-Defo 2004; Ueno 2003; Ho 2003; Cornwall 2002
158 Consider ‘mistress’, on the one hand, and ‘sugar daddy’, on the other.
159 Zelizer 2000: 826
160 Matthews 1990: 78
161 Hanson 1998: 16
162 Goldman 1917; Beauvoir 1953
163 Amnesty for Women 1998
164 Wijers and Lap-Chew 1996; Skrobanek et al 1997
165 Phizacklea 1997: 5
166 Lu 2005
167 Wilson 1988; Domingo Tapales 1990;Wijers and Lap-Chew 1996; Tolentino 1996; Robinson 1996; Constable 2003; Lu 2005; Davin 2005b
168 Hobson and Heung 1998: 132
169 Truong 1990; Barry 1995; Bishop and Robinson 1998
170 Kempadoo 1995: 75-6
171 Lyngbye 2000; O’Connell Davidson and Anderson 2003: 20-23
172 Agustín 2001a
173 Laziridis 2001: 86
174 Bonelli et al 2001: 83
175 Stoler 1995; McClintock 1995
176 Hefti 1997
4
THE RISE OF THE SOCIAL – AND OF ‘ PROSTITUTION’
This chapter reveals the beginnings of social interventions aimed at helping people considered needy and unable to help themselves. In today’s Europe, non-European migrants may be the group perceived as most needy, problematic, threatening and in need of control (and the subgroup ‘migrant prostitutes’ most of all). In the nineteenth century, ‘the poor’ were perceived this way, and ‘prostitutes’ perhaps most of all. As part of a phenomenon known as the Rise of the Social, a newly empowered bourgeoisie set out to define how society ought to be constituted and how citizens should live; in the process, our contemporary understanding of ‘prostitution’ was fashioned and philanthropy was carved out as a women’s sphere of work. The Rise of the Social began around the time of the French and US revolutions and forms part of the Enlightenment; today, the social is a major element of governments. In this sense, the social refers to the way social problems, social reform and social welfare are formulated and managed. The concept derives substantially from the work of Jacques Donzelot, who closely links the social with conscious efforts at philanthropy.1 The role of female philanthropists, both voluntary and paid, is crucial to the later formation of states’ assumption of social services, programming, planning and other technologies.
I do not mean to imply that there was no stigmatisation, harassment, regulation or suffering of women who sold sex before the social period. Rather, the social caused what it called ‘prostitution’ to be viewed in a different way, and, more important, designated a class of people with a mission to do something about it.
Whereas earlier Victorian writings had emphasised pauperism as a failure of the moral will, they now relocated the locus of poverty, putting it within the homes and bodies of the poor themselves. Whether victims of environmental or biological determinism, the poor would remain the poor, unless extricated from their fate by the transforming power of heroic investigators and reformers.2
The Rise of the Social occurred all over Europe – although local commentators may not describe it the same way – over the late eighteenth to early twentieth centuries. On ‘prostitution’, studies demonstrate general European trends from the Middle Ages on.3 I concentrate on evidence from France and England, since both theory and evidence on the social are abundant there. The French evidence chiefly concerns the setting up of a state system to control ‘prostitution’, while the English mostly concerns how a work sector was created to control individual ‘prostitutes’.4 The two histories are intertwined, since the French system was almost extended to Britain (as it was to other parts of Europe), but energetic campaigners fought against it.5
I do not think a recounting of chronological events is the best way to understand the simultaneous and contradictory, the ebbing and flowing, waves of sentiment about sex. People with reforming, repressive and regulatory theories and projects have existed throughout human history. I take a genealogical approach to the discourse on ‘prostitutes’ as well as to that of helping them, following Judith Butler’s concept of genealogy as investigating the ‘political stakes in designating as an origin and cause those identity categories that are in fact the effect of institutions, practices, and discourses with multiple and diffuse points of origin’.6 I am particularly interested in how new social theories of how to help were entangled with helpers’ own needs and desires, and I relate these to changes in the patterns of women’s work, which are documented Europe-wide.7
The subject of helping is usually treated as benevolent, as the entry of capable women previously excluded from nondomestic work into the field of philanthropy. Martha Vicinus seeks to correct a version of history that did not respect ‘charity work’:8
Women had always been active in charity, willingly giving of their time and money, but the increasing wealth and leisure of middle-class Victorians freed even larger numbers of women to take up the cause of the poor ... Charitable organizations united middle- and upper-class women and gave them greater access to poor women and children; since women were less identified with economic exploitation and political power, they were more readily accepted into the homes of the working class and the poor ... By the end of the century an upper-class woman who did not do some kind of volunteer work would have been an anomaly among her friends. And for single women, such work had become a respectable alternative to idleness. But boredom alone cannot explain why so many women willingly visited the slums,week after week.9
I do not deny the charitable impulse but want to consider other motivations, such as the desires for autonomy, status and money. In this period, people interested in the management of human life shifted their focus from the sovereignty of rulers to the art of government. A new entity, the ‘population’, was perceived to have problems that must be solved. For Foucault, the goal of government consists
not in the act of governing as such but in the improvement of the condition of the population, the increase of its wealth, longevity, health, etc.; and the means that the government will use to attain these ends are all in some sense immanent to the population, all of them pertain to the population itself on which government will intervene either directly through large-scale campaigns, or indirectly through techniques that will make possible, without the full awareness of the people, the stimulation of birth-rates, the directing of the flow of population into certain regions or activities etc.10
Power-knowledge is exercised over individuals through controlling institutions: schools, asylums, reformatories, penitentiaries, prisons and armies. This power is carried out through interlinked ‘regimes of practices’ known as punishment, medicine, education, protection and so on.11 Discourses, practices and acts are inseparable; the machinery produced by efforts to govern are varied; governmentality theory can help us understand not only what social agents were thinking but also what they were doing, as well as illuminate the cult of domesticity and attached ideas of moral reclamation and regulation.12 My work reveals not only the discourse but the tangible practices of those who tried to do something about ‘prostitution’ by controlling women who sold sex.
Before the Invention of ‘Prostitution’
Though not a ver
y honorable profession, no disgrace was attached to the person practising it. The professional prostitute was a free-born independent woman and the law protected her economic position.13
To understand the historic development of prostitution we need ...
to examine its relationship to the sexual regulation of all women in archaic states and its relationship to the enslavement of females ... It is unfortunate that most authorities use the same term to cover a broad range of behavior and activities and to encompass at least two forms of organized prostitution – religious and commercial – which occur in archaic states.14
According to Gerda Lerner’s analysis of patriarchy, historians have unjustifiably melded ‘cultic sexual service’ with commercial sexual service when writing about ancient worlds, creating a cause–effect relation that cannot be proved. Here, among scholars considering human customs many thousands of years old, we find a fusion of distinct cultural activities into one supposedly encompassing term. Lerner’s sources are encyclopedias and historical works, the earliest dated 1858, William Sanger’s A History of Prostitution. The date is not coincidental, falling squarely in the period I explore. The following are some suggestive points.
In general, before the late eighteenth century, commercial sex was treated as one of an array of offences to be managed, without any special moralism. Between 921 and 939 AD, an English decree required that certain wrongdoers be banished or killed, among these wizards, sorcerers, perjurers, conspirators to murder and ‘vile, polluted, notorious horewenan’, a word comprising whores, fornicators and adulterers.15 By the eleventh and twelfth centuries, the clergy had much to say about the buying and selling of sex, theologians arguing, after Saint Augustine, that women who sold sex were a necessary evil (the ‘sewer in the palace’) who needed only to be contained. Later, both monarchs and municipalities attempted to suppress commercial sex as one of several kinds of vice; projects ranged from curfews and expulsion of sex vendors outside the city walls to the assigning of them to designated districts and municipally run brothels, but all evidence shows that sex was sold at every place and hour and that those selling it were ‘an integral part of urban life in the Middle Ages’.16 City authorities were interested in legal issues related to selling sex, but they did not usually isolate this particular problem from a range of others.17 The recurring concerns were (1) juridical (what crimes to punish and what methods to use) and (2) town planning (where to allow this sex to take place). There was always a minor discourse of religious reclamation as well, but, in the premodern world-picture, every object and being was believed to occupy its proper place for a reason, and large-scale attempts to change fate did not make sense.
Leah Otis, in her study of the Languedoc, believes that modern concepts of deviance and marginality cannot apply to the medieval period, ‘when prostitution was a recognized, if not particularly respected, profession’.18 Mary Perry, describing sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Seville, writes that the common maxim of the day that whores were moral cesspools had the effect of integrating them into society ‘because it saw them as necessary vessels for human filth, sinners who could divert others from the more serious sins of homosexuality, incest, adultery, and propositioning honorable women’.19
The issue is less whether those selling sex were considered part of society or not and more whether they were considered to have a distinguishable identity. Although laws were passed to regulate whoredom, the category ‘whore’ itself was never defined.
The connection of sexuality, greed, and commerce permeates the view of gender relations presented in late medieval English as well as Continental literature. If prostitutes in real life were marginalized by their treatment under the law, the institution of prostitution was integral to medieval English culture’s concept of what it was to be a woman, for all women threatened to introduce sex into the world of commerce. The prostitute presented that threat most forcefully, but she was not so different from the married woman.20
Although Ruth Karras uses the word ‘prostitute’, there was no word or concept which signified exclusively the sale of sexual services until the social period.‘Whoring’ referred to sexual relations out of marriage and connoted immorality or promiscuity without the involvement of money, and the word whore was used to brand any woman who stepped outside current boundaries of respectability. The emphasis was on the behaviour, not the personal identity.
Jacques Rossiaud believes that there was a general change toward further social integration of those selling sex from the fifteenth century on,21 but the evidence points both ways: toward a greater acceptance and normalisation and also toward a more moralising rigour. In the early sixteenth century, a severe syphilis epidemic swept Europe, preparing the way for further repression.22 Edward Bristow suggests that ‘for conventional moralists of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, sexual misconduct was a serious matter; but there was no reason to single it out as the ultimate in wickedness’.23 But as the eighteenth century went on, repressive movements grew, in France related to denunciations of the hedonism of nobles and royals, and in Britain associated with the evangelical Protestant revival.Vice and the obscene were to be rooted out on the stage, in books and in a general reformation of manners. Improper sexual relations formed part of this general concern, but there was still a lack of consensus on how to frame the problem itself. Most attempts to control it referred to disorder, public scandal or indecency, in which nonsexual offences were included with sexual. Although homes for reformed harlots had existed in other parts of Europe earlier, linked to the Catholic Church, history showed that such attempts usually failed, and women took up their old occupation. Despite accusations of popishness, reformatories began in Britain during this time.24
Again, tendencies can be seen both ways: towards repression and towards acceptance. In the eighteenth century, when James Boswell was keeping track of his sexual encounters in London’s open spaces, and vice societies were attempting to stop such behaviour, the first modern argument for officially regulating and surveying commercial sex was published in London.25 Both regulation and reform shared the logic of the social: identifying subjects to be rounded up and placed in buildings where programmes would work on them and authority figures would watch over them.
The Rise of the Social – and the Family
In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, societies in northern Europe were discrediting the idea that monarchs had a divine right to rule. Self-appointed observers and commentators consciously set out to consider social questions: of poverty, of the effects of industrialisation and of the growth of cities. Beyond the ages-old belief that destiny proclaimed some people unlucky or depraved, thinkers began to consider the possibility that destitution and depravation could be prevented. Philosophers and new social experts began to define the virtuous way for people to live and how to bring this about. Foucault described this task as involving not only ‘upwards continuity’, in which the governing person must first govern his own conduct, but ‘downwards continuity’, in which good governing principles are transmitted to families and to individuals. Government’s purpose became not simply to govern but to assure the welfare of the population.26
Women who sold sex constituted one of the groups targeted for attention from this time.27 This is not to claim that no such attention had ever been paid before or that the values were completely new. Some of the difference lies in the moral charge assigned to these values, the sheer number of people proclaiming them and a shift in the sex of who was doing most of the proclaiming. But a good part of the innovation lies in new ideas about the relationship between those making proposals about social problems and the people considered to be problems.
During the Rise of the Social, the bourgeoisie were finally achieving the power and status they had long sought. For the nobility, lineage and pride were secured through guaranteeing that property stayed in the family; noble persons were invested automatically with right and respectability – the principle of n
oblesse oblige. For the bourgeoisie, the nuclear family was to be society’s central unit and ‘family’ had more emotional meanings – a way of life, domesticity,‘the home’.28
When the man and woman of the people live in disorder, they often have neither hearth nor home. They are only at ease where vice and crime reign free. But on the contrary, once a man and a woman of the people, illicitly joined together, are married, they desert the filthy rooms that were their only refuge and set up their home. Their foremost concern is to withdraw their children from the hospitals in which they had placed them. These married fathers and mothers establish a family, that is, a center where the children are fed, clothed, and protected; they send these children to school and place them in apprenticeship.29
Ariès emphasises two essential changes in this new vision of family: the development of the notion of privacy and the concept of childhood. Before, all of life was permeated with sociability, home and work were not considered separate, married couples with their children lived amidst larger households, and houses themselves were not separated into the rooms and functions we know today. The formulation of childhood as a time of innocence requiring long years of protection and instruction meant that particular people had to be assigned these tasks; families required supervision and spiritual nourishment in a specific place of their own.30 Women were considered uniquely gifted with virtue and affection and therefore called to carry out these tasks, if not directly then through correct supervision of servants. Women’s work was increasingly regarded as the ‘emotional labour motivated (and guaranteed) by maternal instinct’. Conveniently, her domestic role contributed to bourgeois wealth and power.31
Donzelot shows how eighteenth-century French ‘policing’ extended its power through the family and how the home as a feminine domain became the new focus of respectability and virtue.
This great discovery: woman, the housewife and attentive mother, was man’s salvation, the privileged instrument for civilising the working class. It sufficed merely to shape her to this use, to furnish her with the necessary instruction, to instill in her the elements of a tactics of devotion, in order for her to stamp out the spirit of independence in the working man.32
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