Stigma, Pleasures, and Dutiful Daughters

Stigma, Pleasures, and Dutiful Daughters Gail Hershatter. Dangerous Pleasures: Prostitution and Modernity in Twentieth-Century Shanghai. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997. xii + 591 pp.; ill. ISBN 0-520-20438-7 (cl); 0-520-20439-5 (pb). Kevin J. Mumford. Interzones: Black/White Sex Districts in Chicago and New York in the Early Twentieth Century. New York: New York University Press, 1997. xix + 238 pp. ISBN 0-231-1492-8 (cl); 0-231-10493-6 (pb). Gail Pheterson. The Prostitution Prism. Amsterdam: University of Amsterdam Press, 1996.176 pp. ISBN 90-5356-176-5 (pb). Mary Spongberg. Feminizing Venereal Disease: The Body of the Prostitute in Nineteenth-Century Medical Discourse. New York: New York University Press, 1996. χ + 231 pp. ISBN 0-8147-8060-1 (cl). James Francis Warren. Ah Ku and Karayuki-san: Prostitution in Singapore. Singapore: Oxford University Press, 1993. xvi + 433 pp.; ill. ISBN 0-19-588616-X (cl). Luise White. The Comforts of Home: Prostitution in Colonial Nairobi. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990. xi + 285 pp. ISBN 0-22689507 -6 (pb). Donna J. Guy State-regulated female prostitution was one of the first modern public health campaigns. From the Napoleonic wars to World War II, nation states as well as local municipalities examined, licensed, and monitored prostitutes long before penicillin offered a definitive cure for venereal disease. Treatment for syphilis and gonorrhea was painful, dangerous, and often coercive, and public health views of contamination and isolation marked women who engaged in commercial sex as carriers of disease. Moral reformers, many of them feminists, critiqued the immorality of statesponsored bordellos and began campaigns to eradicate prostitution—a system they believed exploited women and their bodies. Physicians began to question the efficacy of prostitution supervision. The anti-state regulation movement spread to the United States and other developing nations, and became a feature of the post-World War I League of Nations. At the same time as doctors and politicians in European countries experimented with legalized prostitution, imperialist European nations carved out empires in Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, and less formal arrangements in Latin America. But legalized prostitution outside Europe © 1998 Journal of Women's History, Vol. 10 No. 3 (Autumn) 182 Journal of Women's History Autumn encountered cultural resistance that was different, and moral reformers who critiqued the system often used arguments reflecting diverse cultural concerns which obscured medical and reformist arguments. Nineteenth- and twentieth-century female prostitution is as linked to views of gender, sexuality, and culture as it is enmeshed inextricably in modern Western efforts to reform, modernize, and sanitize the sexuality of young women all over the world. Prostitution was, and still is, connected firmly to religious beUefs, family survival strategies, and patriarchal authority. Yet women throughout the world also consciously have chosen commercial sex work to provide an income, find independence Ui their own lives, and/or control their own sexuality. Full of apparent contradictions and discrepancies, the history of modern prostitution control offers a dynamic perspective on the private lives of women as well as the public functioning of medicine, patriarchy, and the nation state, and emphasizes the need to understand how gender and sexuality are interrelated inextricably to race, cultural diversity, and economic rircumstances. A sampling of recent works on prostitution in Asia, Africa, the United States, and Great Britain indicates that female commercial sex may have been a common phenomenon, but its impact on colonial and postcolonial societies, and upon non-white, non-European women, was quite diverse. Thus it is appropriate to contemplate the many ways authors have conceptualized its meanings and dynamics, and then to look at how individual studies fit into a comparative cross-cultural focus. Starting with now-classic works, feminists and non-feminists alike explored the centrality of prostitution control to the maintenance of order in urbanizing and industrializing societies.1 They viewed the topic from the perspective of moral reformers, principally Protestant, public health physicians, and politicians who wanted to regulate the behavior and labor of working-class women. They also emphasized that these campaigns were designed to sanitize and hide the presence of socially defined immoral and unhealthy women in the urban landscape. While these studies acknowledged that prostitutes, along...