Introduction

Echoing Karl Marx, evoking Michel Foucault, and channeling early radical and 1970s socialist feminism, Judy Walkowitz in Prostitution and Victorian Society looked anew at the Contagious Diseases Acts (CDA) of mid-Victorian Britain, the experts and reformers who debated them, and the prostitutes who sought to earn a living in their shadow. It is not only that Prostitution and Victorian Society showed how to "study class and gender relations" together or that Walkowitz drew upon Foucault to chart governmentality, biopower, and sexual regulation through discourses, particularly those of medicine (vii). She also concretely explored "how sexual and social ideology became embedded in laws, institutions, and social policy" (5). The lock hospital embodied bodily regulation, with the dreaded speculum as a disciplinary wand. Despite assault on their bodies and subjection to their rescuers' admonitions, prostitutes emerged in this prodigiously researched book as "women who made their own history, albeit under very restrictive conditions" (9).

This now classic study has it all: a wide cast of characters, known and discovered; multiple geographies and spaces; sex; and the state. There are workingmen's societies and ladies' house meetings, social purity reformers and Liberal Party stalwarts, and social scientists and evangelical crusaders. Through thick description of the implementation of the CDA and repeal campaigns in the military garrison cities of Plymouth and Southampton, Walkowitz uncovered women who ran away from lock hospitals and refused inspection, as well as the men and women who sheltered them. She put the history of feminism and suffrage in conversation with medical, social, political, and labor history to trace the making of a new category of stigmatized worker and the tentativeness of cross-class sisterhood.

Walkowitz herself underscores how Prostitution and Victorian Society is very much a book of its time in her response to the thoughtful reflections in this forum by scholars of commercialized sex and its policing. It appeared when social history was in vogue, before the linguistic turn, although we find a preview of her later deconstructive studies in her parsing of language and attentiveness to representations. Walkowitz wrote during a heady moment when women's liberation generated an Atlantic exchange between British and US radicals who denounced capitalist patriarchy, defended bodily autonomy, and celebrated sexual pleasure. The spirit of probing the past with an eye on the present pervaded the first decade of Feminist Studies, the journal that Walkowitz joined as part of a collective with Mary Ryan, Christine Stansell, and others connected to the socialist feminist tendency.¹ Indeed, the preface to Prostitution and Victorian Society cites the efforts of Ryan, along with Carroll Smith-Rosenberg and Linda Gordon, to chart "the efforts of female moral reformers in America to dictate sexual standards and to carve out a moral territory for themselves in the public world"—although Walkowitz was well aware that the case "for women's power and autonomy" was more complicated than fights against the double standard (vii). In demonstrating the embeddedness of women who sold sex in working-class communities, Stansell's City of Women would demonstrate the survival strategies and constrained choice that Walkowitz already had illuminated.² At a time when Coyote and other prostitute rights groups were demanding recognition, Walkowitz gave sex workers a vibrant history.

Looking for previous cross-class alliances similar to those they desired to forge with women strikers at Dagenham or Harlan County, historians discovered the Women's Trade Union League, explored the legacy of the old left in the great labor battles of the 1930s, and reinterpreted moral reform as more complex than scholars usually portrayed. Left historians took inspiration from the studies of culture and class by E. P. Thompson, Raymond Williams, and Stuart Hall. Feminist historians engaged with the work of Juliet Mitchell, Shelia Rowbotham, Mary McIntosh and Michele Barrett, Mariarosa Dalla Costa and Selma James, and Silvia Federici, who were redefining work, the people who scholars considered to be workers, the shape of the family, and the value of women's lives and labors. British...