Common Prostitutes and Ordinary Citizens: Commercial Sex in London, 1885–1960 by Julia Laite (review)

Laite’smonograph, Common Prostitutes and Ordinary Citizens, demonstrates that new work can be done and done well on a topic that has been thoughtfully examined in the past and remains highly contentious in the present. Laite’s book explores the history of prostitution in London but it begins where many studies end–at the repeal of the Contagious Disease Acts in 1885–and it focuses on London as a specific place, rather than as the symbolic backdrop for national and international debates about the issue. In detailing changes in prostitution between 1885 and 1960, Laite demonstrates how shifts in the law did little to end prostitution or help prostitutes; instead, they merely added to the complexities of the trade and made women more vulnerable to outside agents for protection, access to housing, clients, and bail money. Laite begins and ends her discussion with Alison Neilans’s statement that prostitutes were subject to legal intervention but never received the benefits of the law. For all the money spent of trying to change the trade and all the money collected from fines from the trade, all of the laws passed, and all of the policies developed, little effort has been secured to get prostitutes simple legal justice. Laite demonstrates that this is perhaps the one truism that stands up over time.

Laite’s book is organized both chronologically and thematically as a way to break down an intensely detailed story into manageable portions. The work contains eleven chapters as well as a substantial introduction and conclusion. Chapter 1 discusses women who sell sex. The discussion of women over multiple decades necessarily focuses on their similarities. To augment the discussion, Laite considers how the discourse about women changes over time. This methodological remove seems warranted given the levels of embedded claims about prostitutes but leaves the reader wondering about how to understand the real women beneath the layers of claims about them and whether historical realities of women’s lives remain undiscoverable. The problem becomes even more pronounced with the next chapter on men who bought the services of prostitutes. Though Laite’s position that there must be a greater number of men buying their services than prostitutes is well argued, we are left with virtually no knowledge about those men. Nonetheless, both chapters are enriched by deft characterizations and careful use of archival sources to build up the details we can know.

The chapters then begin a slow march through time with each chapter focusing on a particular aspect of the trade. Chapter 3, for example, looks at the effect of the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885 that criminalized both procuring and keeping a brothel. The law changed the trade by allowing small enterprises, including those owned by women themselves, to be targeted which in turn made way for massage parlors and rented flats. In Chapter 6, Laite looks at White Slave Trade legislation to highlight the vulnerabilities of foreign women who received no legal protection and instead faced deportation as aliens. As a result of new laws and practices, women developed strategies including pricey marriages of convenience that let them remain in London but contributed to their enmeshment with criminal organizations who could arrange such solutions. These sorts of detailed chapters allows Laite to chart how changes in the law, in implementation of the law, and in strategies for circumventing the law, affected individuals lives.

Laite suggests that rather than following the passage of laws alone, historians should explore back-door practices, case histories, and magisterial decisions to see how implementation affected prostitution and prostitute’s lives. Because she does not look to the passage of acts alone, Laite can explore how other factors influenced the trade. For example, Laite finds certain practices among the police including keeping of registers and rota systems for arrest important, though not legally demanded or sanctioned. Further, Laite considers the state not as a single actor but as a series...