It’s an ongoing joke among those who know my work that if there’s a prostitute in the family, I will find them. Sex work is the world’s oldest profession, so it’s no surprise to discover someone in the hundreds of members of any given family tree made a bit of money that way, but how does the family historian identify them?
First, you need to know something of sexual culture in the Victorian era. There was a long-held idea (of both contemporary men and some historians) that an unmarried woman who became pregnant MUST have been a prostitute, which is patently rubbish. Women in cohabiting relationships were also considered prostitutes. The evidence shows that many working-class couples did not marry until their first child was expected, suggesting that sex was an accepted part of courtship patterns once a couple were engaged. Engagements could last for years, while a man found steady work, so perhaps sometimes a baby sped things up a bit. Other historians think it was a way to check fertility before committing to marriage. There was very little privacy in any Victorian neighbourhood. People lived, as Emily Cockayne put it in her book on neighbours, cheek by jowl. In towns, you might have ten or eleven families living in one courtyard, making it an unlikely place for a young couple to get much privacy. In villages, even open fields were likely to be in view of someone. And then there was the matter of TIME: young people were in full-time work before they hit sexual maturity. Men worked twelve hour days minimum, and women were either working all day in domestic service placements, all day in a textile mill, or all day at a home-based job. In short, opportunities for sexual behaviour before marriage were limited, and tended not to be wasted.
You also have to consider your personal definition of prostitution. I have found a great many rape cases reported where the man was acquitted because he paid his victim afterwards, which tells you a lot about Victorian courts. I have read bastardy court reports where putative fathers got other men who had slept with the mother of an illegitimate baby to give evidence, and relieve them of paying maintenance. A woman who had slept with more than one man did not fit the Victorian idea of an innocent led astray into pregnancy, and would have been considered a prostitute according to the morals of the time. And can you really blame a woman in dire poverty for selling sex rather than starve?
Prostitution was tolerated, and indeed licensed until 1885. It is rare to find a woman prosecuted for prostitution in Victorian newspaper columns, although sex workers arrested for other offences (being drunk or theft, most commonly) were usually identified as ‘notorious’, ‘wanton’ or ‘loose’. Some prostitutes were widows, stuck with a family to feed and no childcare to work around. Others were women who may have been coerced into sex work, or simply decided it was better to sell sex than get married or stay in an abusive relationship. In towns, women were more likely to work the streets than from home.
Things began to change as women began to be idealised in Victorian culture as a calm and angelic mother figure, deifiying the domestic sphere. The Contagious Diseases Act (1864-1869) was introduced to forcibly send prostitutes for treatment of venereal disease for two months, effectively imprisoning them without arresting them. The age of consent was raised from twelve to sixteen in 1885, which helped stop the trade in child prostitutes. Evangelical movements developed to ‘save’ women. If you find a female relative living in a non-workhouse institution in the late Victorian period, make sure you google the institutions: a great many charitable homes for child prostitutes and street workers opened in this era, some for only a short amount of time.
There is an old trope that ‘laundresses’ and ‘seamstresses’ on the census were just euphemisms for sex workers. This is not the case: a great deal of widowed and unmarried women made their money doing laundry and mending clothes. It is difficult to imagine the sheer amount of TIME it took to get your washing done when you had to boil the water by the bucket, scrub all the washing by hand, rinse it by hand, mangle it and then try and get it dry. It took all damn day, and women who could afford to pay someone else to do it for them did, even if they couldn’t afford a servant. As for sewing, when ALL your clothes were made by hand, and expensive, you couldn’t throw a shirt or dress away when it tore. Seamstresses were always in demand. However, a fair amount of laundresses and seamstresss may have sold sex on the side.
So, how do you know if your great great great grandmother was a prostitute? The truth is, unless you can find them living in a home for ‘fallen women’, or arrested for a sex-work offence, you can’t know for sure. Unmarried pregnancy alone is not enough evidence, since many women gave birth before marrying or were pregnant on their wedding day.
However, a woman who had several children outside marriage warrants extra investigation, as does a young woman living completely independently without any apparent job. The Poor Law would not give relief to an able-bodied woman without children; she was expected to work for a living.
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Sophie Michell 