Common Prostitutes and Ordinary Citizens: Commercial Sex in London, 1885–1960 by Aeron Hunt, and: Policing Prostitution, 1856–1886: Deviance, Surveillance and Morality, by Catherine Lee (review)

Catherine Lee’s Policing Prostitution, 1856–1886: Deviance, Surveillance and Morality provides a local case study based in Kent. This region, she asserts, “felt the impact of the [Contagious Diseases] legislation particularly intensely” (23). Four of the eleven districts in which the Criminal Law Amendment (CLA) Acts operated were located in either Kent or Kentish London. In her introduction, Lee reprises Judith Walkowitz, when she explains that under these Acts police were given powers to arrest those suspected of being “common prostitutes,” and order them to undergo an internal examination at a certified hospital. If the women were found to be diseased, the hospital was required to detain them for a period of treatment or until they were pronounced cured. Not surprisingly, many objected to this curtailment of human rights and a vigorous campaign led by Josephine Butler emerged to repeal the Acts. The campaign succeeded in 1886, the date at which Lee’s book ends.

Lee’s book has much to recommend it, not least in its opening up of an important local area to historical scrutiny. Her early chapters contextualize the Acts by reconstructing the life histories of the women who came to the attention of the authorities. Using criminal justice and poor law records, Lee identifies over five hundred named women who worked as prostitutes in the port and garrison towns of Kent and is able to examine the lives of two hundred of them in more detail. For instance, Lee charts the life of poor Sarah Durge whose father drowned when she was eleven years old, and who later became a prostitute, presumably to help support her mother and Sarah’s eight siblings. Tragically, Sarah’s working life featured a series of arrests, punctuated by bouts of drunkenness and street fighting. She died at the age of thirty-eight in the Gravesend Union Workhouse. Most of the stories Lee tells resonate with pain and sorrow: young women, who were often homeless or ill-housed, sometimes orphaned, and certainly impoverished, were drawn to prostitution because of a lack of viable alternatives. Indeed, one of the strengths of Lee’s book is her examination of the lifestyles and life cycles of street prostitutes who had been prosecuted. These cases were frequently reported in the local press and cast “light on factors such as the way in which women were recruited into prostitution, where they lived and how they met their clients, their sexual health and public behaviour” (79). Helen Ware’s unpublished PhD dissertation The Recruitment, Regulation and Role of Prostitution in Britain from the Middle of the Nineteenth Century to the Present Day (1969), makes similar observations, but nonetheless this remains the most original part of Lee’s book. Certainly, its main strength is the charting of the heartbreaking lives of so many prostitutes in these towns. Its weakness is that it tends to be a miscellany of anecdotes and individuals’ stories. Little attempt is made either to generate the kind of theoretical framework or to acknowledge the wide literature on prostitution which would qualify the work as historically noteworthy. Following Walkowitz, a number of historians have published compelling research into prostitution and its policing, and it is disappointing that Lee should have failed to consult, for example, Mary Gibson’s Prostitution and the State in Italy, 1860–1915 (1986) and Philippa Levine’s Prostitution, Race, and Politics: Policing Venereal Disease in the British Empire (2003). Both texts offer telling insights which would have provided a rich background of historical theory to build upon.

Lee’s work is best when she deals with facts rather than theory. Indeed...