Prostitution in the 19th Century

I was asked to give a talk at the yearly symposium of History Students in the Netherlands   ( Studenten Geschiedenis in Nederland ). It was held in Amsterdam in June of this year. The overall theme was taboos. Below you will find my introduction text and the slides. 

Can you make a paper book from a blog with little effort? Yes, you can. I recently tried Pixxibook.com and found the result astonishing: a hardcover book with all the posts from my Dutch Nineteenth-Century Prostitution blog. These are my findings in short... 

Prostitution was legal in the nineteenth century. As part of the General Local Regulations (AVP), municipalities could determine the regulations on this topic themselves. It is quite a search in a municipal archive to find such an ordinance. So when I came across a bounded collection with no less than forty nineteenth-century prostitution regulations from various municipalities at an online antiquarian bookshop a year ago,  I was overjoyed . My delight disappeared, however, quickly when I noticed the price tag. Shortly afterwards I discussed my beautiful findings with colleague Frank de Jong of the International Institute of Social History (IISH). He immediately had an interest in purchasing the collection and also wanted to scan it and make the data online available. The findings turned out to fit perfectly with the local regulations of various municipalities from the same period that the IISH already owned. The idea of adding and digitising the regulations has recently been real

There are several new or soon-to-be-published books on Nineteenth-Century prostitution that I want to read this winter. Here is an overview of them.   

Where to go for a night in town? In nineteenth-century Amsterdam leaflets with tips on where one could have a 'peek at lady servants' or meet  "greek nymphs" were handed out on the streets. (1) In other metropolia, newsstands offered pocketbooks with addresses and reviews of local brothels and prostitutes. The old guides are still popular. In 2020  The pretty women of Paris , printed in 1883, was sold for  6.000 dollars  at an auction. For historians, these urban pleasure guides are interesting resources. Not because the given reviews provide new insights into what men considered important qualities of  'women of the night'. Those remarks have not changed much during the centuries. What is of interest is where public women and houses were located in a metropolis, the prices of services and descriptions of establishments. Fortunately, the originals can still be viewed in libraries or online and contemporary reprints can be bought at reasonable prices. (2)     

On the 17th of February 2022 Johanna Bourke , professor in History at Birbeck, University of London, will give a lecture on Sex Work . The lecture for Gresham College will be streamed online. Registration is required via this link .   "In the late nineteenth century, highly contentious debates about prostitution were central to broader questions about women’s status within society, including their rights to property, entitlement to suffrage, and claims over their own bodies. Political scandals such as those over the 1860s Contagious Diseases Acts (which criminalized sex workers, not their customers) and the 1885 Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon (which was the first expose of child prostitution in the UK) not only reveal attitudes towards the commercialization of the body but have left a legacy that we live with today." Johanna has written interesting books on women's work and is also the principal researcher for the interdisciplinary project SHaME (Sexual Harms and Med