Sociology Of Prostitution

A prostitute in the 18th century was anyone who engaged in sex for money or favors. It is important to note that people could engage in prostitution without it being their sole career. Prostitution could and was most often a side job, used to help supplement low wages in domestic service or other occupations. Those that were career prostitutes were often picked up by a procurer, usually an old woman who would either trick or coerce the adolescent into performing sexual acts for money. These prostitutes would use local inns or taverns as meeting places for their clientele and lived with other prostitutes and a supervisor in a brothel or bawdy-house. A brothel or bawdy-house was a dwelling that was specifically set up to attract those wanting …show more content…
The laws affecting them changed with varying degrees of social pressure and prostitutes could find that they could walk down the street unmolested one day and be taken to jail the next. Historians have approached the topic of prostitution differently as time has gone on and as new evidence has been undercovered. Historians of prostitution have utilized tools such as feminist lens, quantitative study, social theory and case studies in order to chip away at larger topics. They have also been critical of the views of other historians. Historical literature on prostitution has been around almost as long as prostitution itself, this literature review focuses on prominent historians of the field writing in the last two decades. Whether writing through a specific lens or focusing on a specific topic, these historians have generally agreed that being a low-level prostitute in the eighteenth-century was not the greatest …show more content…
While Levine was focused on the “victim ideology” that was present in the writings about prostitution in her day, Hitchcock, four years later wants historians to note that the sources they have can also cloud their judgement of a time period. Henderson, coming just two years after Hitchcock wants historians to look at how prostitution over time changed other social structures around it. This type of historical work looks at broad changes over time instead of focusing on a specific topic and can provide new ways to analyze other similar stretches of time. Henderson and Dabhoiwala focus on prostitution as a specific chosen occupation which is something that is very different from the prostitute as victim ideology that Levine was responding to in 1993. These authors put agency back into the prostitute’s hands by sifting through the bias present in sources of the time period and offer new perspectives of how these predominantly moral reformist sources can be read. Dabhoiwala also extends his analysis to how prostitution as an occupation affected the rise of other occupations such as police