The Ladies Victorian Bawdy House

The ladies of this seaside resort are getting restless. Frustrated by the inattention of their husbands to their physical needs, Miss Ellie's bran d new Bawdy House is just what they are looking for. The young men recruited by the devious Dr Jones from the ranks of the local prison are only too pleased to oblige the ladies, who crave more excitement in their mundane lives

Drawing upon the satirical prints of the eighteenth century, the author explores what made Londoners laugh and offers insight into the origins of modern attitudes toward sex, celebrity, and ridicule.

Many of the brothel madams were kind hearted. For instance, Madame Pauline, on hearing of a desperate family in dire straits, provided them a house and a job for the father. In the west, the bawdy house girls filled an obvious need or they wouldn't have survived. Many girls left the trade as soon as they could, usually by marriage. Others became hooked on drugs or committed suicide.

These profiles of the soiled doves who plied the oldest trade in the Rocky Mountains explain many of the facts of life in the nineteenth and twentieth century West.

Throughout the development of the American West, prostitution grew and flourished within the mining camps, small towns, and cities of the nineteenth-century Rocky Mountains. Whether escaping a bad home life, lured by false advertising, or seeking to subsidize their income, thousands of women chose or were forced to enter an industry where they faced segregation and persecution, fines and jailing, and battled the hazards of disease, drug addiction, physical abuse, pregnancy, and abortion. They dreamed of escape through marriage or retirement, but more often found relief only in death. An integral part of western history, the stories of these women continue to fascinate readers and captivate the minds of historians today. Expanding on the research she did for Brothels, Bordellos, and Bad Girls (UNM Press), historian Jan MacKell moves beyond the mining towns of Colorado to explore the history of prostitution in the Rocky Mountain states of Arizona, Idaho, Montana, New Mexico, Utah, and Wyoming. Each state had its share of working girls and madams like Big Nose Kate or Calamity Jane who remain celebrities in the annals of history, but MacKell also includes the stories of lesser-known women whose role in this illicit trade nonetheless shaped our understanding of the American West.

A pioneering, field-defining collection of essential texts exploring girlhood in the nineteenth century

It is safe to say that selling sex constituted a significant, and visible, part of urban culture in Georgian England. Alongside the rise of the 'polite society' of Jane Austen's novels, the city of London, so described in 1758, had long been portrayed as a centre of vice and debauchery. In the shadows of the fashionable public parks and gardens, in alleyways along the banks of the Thames, even at church doors, there lurked a world of criminality and prostitution for which the bawdyhouse became one of the most potent symbols. The book will explore what is was like to run, work in, and frequent these establishments, which ranged from the filthy East End hovel to grand upmarket apartments. Through newspaper reports, criminal trials, political speeches and bawdy pamphlets and prints, it will also explore how they were perceived and, as the nineteenth century dawned, how the threat of disease and Victorian prudery meant that they were increasingly feared by the public and controlled by the legal system - and the 'happy hooker' firmly confined to the past.

Shani D'Cruze and Louise A. Jackson provide students with a lively overview of women's relationship to the criminal justice system in England, exploring key debates in the regulation of 'respectable' and 'deviant' femininities over the last 4 centuries. Major issues include: - Attitudes towards murder and infanticide - Prostitution - The decline of witchcraft belief - Sexual violence - The 'girl delinquent' - Theft and fraud. The volume also examines women's participation in illegal forms of protest and political activism, their experience of penal regimes as well as strategies of resistance, and their involvement in occupations associated with criminal justice itself. Assuming that men and women cannot be studied in isolation, D'Cruze and Jackson make reference to recent studies of masculinity and comment on the ways in which relations between men and women have been understood and negotiated across time. Featuring examples drawn from a rich range of sources such as court records, autobiographies, literature and film, this is an ideal introduction to an increasingly popular area of study.

Prostitution bears the unique title of being both the "world's oldest profession" and one of the least understood occupations. Unlike most of the crime and family literature, prostitution appears to have all the features of traditional markets: prices, supply and demand considerations, variety in the organizational structure, and policy relevance. Despite this, economists have largely ignored prostitution in their research and writings. This has been changing, however, over the last twenty years as greater access to data has enabled economists to build better theories and gain a better understanding of the organization of sex market. The Oxford Handbook of the Economics of Prostitution fills the gap in our understanding. It brings together many of the top researchers in the field who explain how the prostitution markets are organized across space and time, the role of technology in shaping labor supply and demand, the intersection of prostitution with trafficking, and the optimal use of law enforcement. What makes the material unique is its explicit focus on economics as the primary methodology for organizing our understanding of prostitution. The Handbook brings to scholars' attention for the first time a collection of original writings on prostitution that provides an overview of what is known and what is not known in this area. Researchers with an interest in underground markets, labor economics, risky behaviors, marriage, and gender will find the book's contents illuminating and path breaking.

Working life of Women in the Seventeenth Century, originally published in 1919, was the first comprehensive analysis of the daily lives of ordinary women in early modern England. It remains the most wide ranging introduction to the subject. Clark uses a variety of documentary sources to illuminate the experience of women in the past. Gentlewomen left memoirs, letters, and household accounts detailing administration of their family estates; craftsmen's wives and widows figure in the apprenticeship and licensing records of guilds and towns; the wives of yeomen, husbandmen and labourers are glimpsed in court evidence, petitions and the registers of parish poor relief. Alice Clark's evidence dates from the later sixteenth to the early eighteenth century, and her analysis addresses a broad transition, from a medieval subsistence economy to the industrial capitalism of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Clark's conclusions about the effects of industrial capitalism on women's working conditions and contribution to the economy were controversial in her own time and remain so today. Her vivid portrayal of the everyday lives of working women - and all women who worked - in seventeenth-century England remains unsurpassed. This book was first published in 1919.