Beyond Brutal Passions: Prostitution in Early Nineteenth-Century Montréal by Mary Anne Poutanen (review)

For social historians interested in questions of labour from a critical perspective, Mary Anne Poutanen’s Beyond Brutal Passions offers a well-researched study that makes an original, significant contribution to labour studies, the history of Montréal, and feminist scholarship.

Poutanen’s work is comprised of two sections. The first offers an overview of different forms, types, and activities of prostitution: its social geography, the culture of the brothel, and the lives of street-walkers. The second section turns its attention to legal regulation, examining in particular laws and legal procedures, the role of police officers, judgements rendered, and discourses, practices, and institutions of correction. Taken together, the two sections provide sound analysis of the lives of sex workers as well as the legal and moral regulation they faced.

When I first picked up the book, I expected a social history of labour and sex work that would shed light on the lives and work of the poor – and sometimes, the not-so-poor – in Montréal. To be sure, this book offers such an analysis. Yet its contribution extends far beyond a simple case study, and as such it warrants consideration by scholars outside narrow fields of sexuality studies or the history of Montréal; I would like to highlight three contributions of note in this regard.

First and foremost, Poutanen offers an analysis that gives considered attention to the very notion of evidence itself. She triangulates data from court records, newspaper accounts, and the census (among other sources) in order to amass a wealth of detailed information. This allows her to be able to properly situate the elements of everyday life discussed – a sex worker who has stolen food, for example – within broader social relations. She is careful to cite relevant studies on prostitution and the poor in other cities, while maintaining the specificity of the Montréal context. Scholars interested in thinking about different kinds of source documents to make sense of the poor, and especially poor women, will especially appreciate her explicit ruminations on source documents. As I read the book, I often thought of the profound pedagogical value of the text: it would be of tremendous use in the classroom to have students think through how specific kinds of documents bring different realities into view, and how an historian can weave many sources together to advance her argument.

The second major contribution of Poutanen concerns the lives and survival strategies of sex workers. While she clearly provides a labour history, she also pays attention to the strategies of economic and social survival enacted by these women. She demonstrates instances of kindness and solidarity among sex workers, as well as between sex workers and their neighbours, or sex workers and the police. This focus on solidarity moves beyond a labour analysis of prostitution that is reduced to transactional sex. And perhaps most importantly, Poutanen suggests that the data she presents is useful to help us think, and rethink, the very notion of kinship itself. Poutanen extends consideration of kinship and solidarity outside of the bounds of the family. This move achieves two things simultaneously: firstly, it offers new theoretical ground to conceive the very idea of kinship, and secondly, it suggests that for historians who are interested in the lives of the poor in particular, an approach which begins with their myriad networks of kinship and strategies of solidarity would benefit their analysis tremendously. In this regard, Poutanen has not simply offered a case study of prostitution in Montréal. She has raised an important question about the conceptual underpinning of the very notion of kinship, and why historians ought to consider this matter.

The final contribution of Beyond Brutal Passions that I would like to underline is again of a conceptual order. Poutanen demonstrates that the labour of prostitution often occurred at the interstice of public and private spheres. Her chapter on the brothel, in particular, cites compelling data...