Traces the history of prostitution during the period, when all prostitutes were required to register with the police, live in licensed brothels, undergo health examinations, and be treated in a special hospital if they were infected with venereal disease. Records of the era are used to examine how laws affected prostitutes' lives. Gibson teaches history at John Jay College of Criminal Justice and at City University of New York. First published in 1986 by Rutgers, The State University. This second edition contains a new introduction, a new Part I, and a new bibliography. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
The most effective way to deal with prostitution has always been hotly debated by governments and women s movements alike. Feminists want it abolished or regulated as sex work; governments have to safeguard public health and order. This book shows how women s movements in Western Europe, North America and Australia have affected politics on prostitution and trafficking of women since the 1970s, asking what made them successful in some countries but a failure in others. It also assesses whether government institutions to advance the status of women - so-called women s policy agencies - have played a key role in achieving policy outcomes favourable to movement demands. Written by an international team of experts and based on original sources, all chapters follow the same framework to ensure comparability. The final chapter offers an overall comparison identifying what makes women s movements successful and women s agencies effective, presenting the case for state feminism .
"This book examines how a group of transnational British-Italian women affiliated with the exiled patriots of the Italian Left repurposed traditionally feminine activities, such as fundraising, gift-giving, maternity, and memory collection, to make a substantial contribution to Italian Unification and state-building. Through their actions, Mary Chambers, Sara Nathan, Giorgina Saffi, Julia Salis Schwabe, and Jessie White Mario transcended the boundaries of acceptable behavior for middle-class women and participated in the broader female emancipation movement. By drawing attention to their activities, this book reveals how nineteenth-century female activists achieved their most revolutionary goals by using conservative, domestic, or anti-Catholic language. Adding to the growing understanding of the Italian Risorgimento as a transnational phenomenon, it also shows how non-Catholic and non-Italian women participated in the creation and development of the Italian state. Finally, the book argues for the continuing importance of religion in both politics and philanthropy throughout the nineteenth century."
Bringing together an interdisciplinary group of scholars, this volume explores nineteenth-century Italian sexualities from a variety of viewpoints, illuminating in particular personal and political relationships, same-sex desires, gender roles that defy societal norms, sexual behaviours of different classes and transnational encounters.
Third Sector Organizations in Sex Work and Prostitution is about sex work and prostitution third sector organizations (TSOs): non-governmental and non-profit organizations that provide support services to, and advocate for the well-being of people operating in the sex industries. With a focus on three vast and extremely diverse regions, Africa, the Americas, and Europe, this book provides a unique vantage point that shows how interlinked these organizations’ histories and configurations are. TSOs are fascinating research sites because they operate as zones of contestation which translate their understandings of sex work and prostitution into different support practices and advocacy initiatives. This book reveals that these organizations are not external to normative power but participate in it and are subject to it, conditioning how they can exist, who they can reach out to, where, and what they can achieve. Third Sector Organizations in Sex Work and Prostitution is a resource for scholars, policymakers, and activists involved in research on, and work with third sector organizations in the fields of sex work and prostitution, gender and sexuality, and human rights among others.
This study of prostitution addresses issues of female agency and experience, as well as contemporary fears about sexual coercion and the forced movement of girls/women, and police surveillance. Rather than treating prostitutes solely as victims or problems to be solved, as so often has been the case in much of the literature, Nancy M. Wingfield seeks to find the historical subjects behind fin-de-siècle constructions of prostitutes, to restore agency to the women who participated in commercial sex, illuminate their quotidian experiences, and to place these women, some of whom made a rational economic decision to sell their bodies, in the larger social context of late imperial Austria. Wingfield investigates the interactions of both registered and clandestine prostitutes with the vice police and other supervisory agents, including physicians and court officials, as well as with the inhabitants of these women's world, including brothel clients and madams, and pimps, rather than focusing top-down on the state-constructed apparatus of surveillance. Close reading of a broad range of primary and secondary sources shows that some prostitutes in late imperial Austria took control over their own fates, at least as much as other working-class women, in the last decades before the end of the Monarchy. And after 1918, bureaucratic transition did not necessarily parallel political transition. Thus, there was no dramatic change in the regulation of prostitution in the successor states. Legislation, which changed regulation only piecemeal after the war, often continued to incorporate forms of control, reflecting continuity in attitudes about women's sexuality.
Sex for Sale in Scotland examines the various formal and informal methods that were used to police female prostitution in Edinburgh and Glasgow between 1900 and 1939 and explores how these policies influenced women's lives. The book uses a rich combination of police, probation, magistrates', poor law and voluntary organisations' records to demonstrate how these organisations combined to establish a 'penal-welfare' approach towards regulating prostitution in Scotland. By mapping the geography of prostitution, the book argues that prostitution was not forced into the outskirts of society, either physically or socially.The book examines both indoor and outdoor prostitution and the relationships that developed among the wide range of people who profited from commercial sex. Particular emphasis is placed on the experiences of the women involved in prostitution, highlighting the poverty, exploitation and abuse they faced, but also the ways in which they negotiated these dangers. This social history of prostitution maps how the organisation, policing and experiences of prostitution developed in an ever-changing urban landscape during a period of extraordinary developments in technology and entertainment, alongside the wider socio-economic changes brought about by the First World War.
Sexual drives are rooted in biology, but we don’t act on them blindly. Indeed, as the eminently readable judge and legal scholar Richard Posner shows, we make quite rational choices about sex, based on the costs and benefits perceived. Drawing on the fields of biology, law, history, religion, and economics, this sweeping study examines societies from ancient Greece to today’s Sweden and issues from masturbation, incest taboos, date rape, and gay marriage to Baby M. The first comprehensive approach to sexuality and its social controls, Posner’s rational choice theory surprises, explains, predicts, and totally absorbs.
A thought-provoking analysis of the historical expansion and recent dramatic acceleration of international crime control, 'Policing the Globe' provides a bridge between criminal justice and international relations on a topic of crucial public importance.
In the half-century before Poland’s long-awaited political independence in 1918, anxiety surrounding the country’s burgeoning sex industry fueled nearly constant public debate. The Devil’s Chain is the first book to examine the world of commercial sex throughout the partitioned Polish territories, uncovering a previously hidden conversation about sexuality, gender propriety, and social class. Keely Stauter-Halsted situates the preoccupation with prostitution in the context of Poland’s struggle for political independence and its difficult transition to modernity. She traces the Poles’ growing anxiety about white slavery, venereal disease, and eugenics by examining the regulation of the female body, the rise of medical authority, and the role of social reformers in addressing the problem of paid sex. Stauter-Halsted argues that the sale of sex was positioned at the juncture of mass and elite cultures, affecting nearly every aspect of urban life and bringing together sharply divergent social classes in what had long been a radically stratified society. She captures the experiences of the impoverished women who turned to the streets and draws a vivid picture of the social milieu that shaped their choices. The Devil’s Chain demonstrates that discussions of prostitution and its attendant disorders—sexual deviancy, alcoholism, child abuse, vagrancy, and other related problems—reflected differing visions for the future of the Polish nation.
