- To whom does a woman's body belong? And I'm going to look at this primarily from historical perspective. So historical debates that I'm going to be addressing include such things as 19th century debates about, is marriage prostitution? Are girls and women animals, dogs in particular? How have journalists used sensationalism, used Gothic fiction, used pornography to change policy? And what is it about certain upper class men in 19th century Britain that made them feel comfortable about publicly admitting to having sexually abused working class children and arguing publicly in the House of Lords, to be precise that they are entitled to do so? So those are the questions today. So to start with, to whom does a woman's body belong? In mid 19th century Britain, this question provoked impassioned debates between moralists, between feminist, and other social commentators. Were girls, for example, actually the property of their fathers to be given in marriage? Once married, was a woman allowed to refuse her husband access to her body or had she in fact, prostituted herself to him for life in exchange for food, lodging, the possibilities of motherhood and social respectability? Progressives and radicals who fought for the abolition of black slavery employed its rhetoric when talking about women's subjugation. Now philosopher, John Stewart Mills issued a trenchant critique in his 1859 essay entitled'The Subjection of Women". He maintained that a married woman was little more than a personal body servant of a death spot, who at any time could claim from her and enforce the lowest degradation of any human being. In Britain, he provocatively claimed there were no legal slaves except the mistress of every house. Now in the context of the most vulnerable girls and women, poor, minoritized ones, these radicals saw women's degraded position as resulting in what they called, and I'm going to problematize this, of course, sexual slavery or street prostitution. Now these heated denunciations of the oppression of women peaked with the passing of the Contagious Diseases Acts, 1864, 1866, 1869. Now what these acts did was that they allowed in certain, they are policemen in certain designated towns to take any woman they suspected of prostitution before a magistrate, who could then order her to be intimately examined for evidence of sexually transmitted infections. If the woman was found to be ill, she could be forcibly detained. It was in other words, a blatant example of the double standard of sexual morality, which ruthlessly punished women who performed sex work rather than the men who procured their services. Now, this stigmatization of prostitutes was one thing, but these acts went a lot further in dehumanizing women all together. Liberal politician, Lyon Playfair, every time I read his surname, I think what irony. Playfair. By the way, besides the other things I'm going to be talking about that he's done, he's a chemist as well as a politician. And he really argued very strongly for the use of chemical weapons by the Brits during the Crimean War. Okay. Liberal politician, Lyon playfield, 1870. He appealed to his fellow parliamentarians in the House of Commons to approve an extension of the contagious diseases acts on the grounds that prostitutes possessed the habit of beasts. They were fallen creatures who needed to be redeemed from savagery to something approaching civilization. Disregarding the views of girls and women who would be affected by the legislation, Playfair believed that the good men or parliament and the church knew best. Women who sold sex required his words, the humanizing influences of these punitive laws. In this lecture, I'm going to start with these debates from the 1860s to the 1910s about claims, about the legitimate authority over women's bodies in order to provide an historical context for the sex wars, which erupted again in the 1970s, a century later in other words. Now just, important point here. This is not to suggest that there is this seamless narrative universal and similar in many ways, over more than a century. In fact, the opposite is the case. But it is I think to draw attention to some of the underlying tensions revolving around class, gender, race, and ethnicity. Playfair's appalling comments in 1870 about the humanizing influence of punitive laws is I think especially opposite for thinking about more recent debates when Carceral humanitarianism, that is policing in prison, being seen as the solution for the problem of sex work has once again been evoked in human rights discourses. Playfair and the militaristic moralism of his colleagues were deaf to the voices of the girls and women they so passionately hounded. To whom does a women's body belong in the 1860s? In the 1860s women who sold sex on the streets of London had answer to that. They angrily resisted the claims made by their betters about their rights to bodily integrity. For some women who sold sex, the medical certification that was introduced by the Contagious Diseases Acts was used instrumentally by them to increase their trade. After all, women who could show evidence that they had this certificate got more work. But others found that the medical examination was morally as well as physically humiliating. Now this fact puzzled one male reformer. What was the difference between compelling themselves to any man who came to have connection with them and showing themselves to the doctor to see that they were free of disease? Aby Williams, member of the Rescue Society asked this question to one woman street worker in the early 1870s. And she responded with fury. She told him, I should have thought you'd have known better. Note that."Ain't one, the way of nature, the other ain't natural at all. Ain't a different thing what a woman's obliged to do for a living, because she has to keep body and soul together and going up there to be pulled about by a man as if you were cattle and had no feelings and to have an instrument pushed up you, not to make you well,'cause you ain't sick, but just that man may come to you and use you to please their selves." I call it downright Beasley altogether. Her companion added, it's only the men as they care for. And this makes it hurtful to a women's feelings to go up there 'cause we ain't cattle, but women and has got our feelings as well as other people. So I think really eloquent retorts by women who were making choices within the social and economic constraints imposed upon them. Their comments reveal their strong sense of right and wrong. The distinction that they made between legitimate and illegitimate power and the value they placed upon their bodies, their selves. However, such eloquence provided no protection from those who sought to speak for them. Even if these people speaking for them had the best of intentions. Feminists, both male and female actively opposed the Contagious Diseases Acts forming societies to overturn them. In doing so, however, they also claimed authority over the bodies of their significantly poor sisters. As their journal, "The Shield" explained. The association for the repeal of the Contagious Diseases Acts was the equivalent to the society for the prevention of cruelty to animals. Both societies were required to interfere for the protection of dumb creatures who cannot protect themselves. Dumb here is being used in the sense of unable to speak. Or as Josephine Butler, the leading activist in the movement to appeal these acts succinctly put it, the poor creatures cannot tell. It was a rhetoric that precariously weighed up the respective importance that should be given to gender, class and age. On the one hand, the acts were seen as evil because they potentially treated all women as if they were animals by passing free will, forcing them to undergo compulsory medical examinations. And if found to be ill quarantined or subjecting them to a physical, that's the animal one and or social women death. On the other hand, though, these mute creatures who understood in terms of class and age, that's not only gender here. It's also class and age. Working class women, young women were dumb beasts ripe for rescue. The middle class, all the women reformers had a voice and they of course were the humanity towards which these working class girls and women should aspire. There was a broadly understanding though, between these working women, feminists and other rescuers about the fundamental causes of prostitution. The women interviewed by Williams, I just quoted, in 1870 were clear. They told him that their punitive treatment under the Contagious Diseases Acts was a beastly affair. One lamented that she didn't know what England was coming to for women to be dragged up through the streets in the middle of the day, just in the working hours with men hallooing at you. And you got to show your private parts to a drunken old beast, meaning of course the doctor. Another added that the shame of the certification process meant that she never went with a man till she could endure hunger no longer. She had several times nearly fainted with starvation before she could make her mind to come up out at night to seek men. It was an argument that was actually accepted by Butler. In a speech she gave October 1874, Butler observed that underprivileged women were forced into prostitution because they had been denied full employment opportunities and would not otherwise be able to feed their families. Criminalizing these women without reforming employment practices could only harm them and their dependence. But Butler also harnessed the rhetoric of animal protection societies, which were closely allied to societies for the protection of children and other progressive causes. Butler compared the treatment of women in the sex trade to the way sentimental naturalists treated dogs. Dogs had a powerful maternal instinct, Butler contended, and on freezing winter nights, like today, those maternal instincts meant that the dog would tear off its fur for the protection of its young. Sentimental naturalist, she wrote might see this behavior and becoming distressed for the dog would muzzle the dog. So as effectively to prevent her denuding her own breast in order to protect her nest. However, she continued, these sentimental naturalists neglects to furnish her, meaning the dog, neglects to furnish her with any material in place of her own coat. She poor creature cannot tell him if I do not tear off my own fur, my offspring will perish. She can only inarticulate fret and rage against the restraint put upon her and her young do perish. In other words, what she's saying here is that by adopting punitive measures against prostitution, similar to muzzling dogs, legislators risk causing greater distress to working women and their dependence. Like non-human animals, these women were unable to communicate their message or their misery. It required socially privileged women like Butler to speak on their behalf, directing ignition towards the roots of women's poverty to issues of constrained employment, low wages and so on. Campaigners against the Contagious Diseases Acts were joined by other feminists and more crusaders who were coming aware increasingly that many of the people who sold sex on the streets and brothels were in the streets. On the streets? In the streets, on the streets and in the brothels were in fact children The age which a girl could legally have sex was only to 12 years at the stage and working class homes in this period, children even younger than 12 were required to contribute financially to their families livelihood. In this context, sex work could be a preferable and more profitable alternative to the highly exploitative domestic work or work in the factories. This fact in itself was deemed an in insult to middle class beliefs that childhood should be a period of passivity and purity. Revelations of widespread child prostitution shocked the sensibility of moralists and social reformers alike. An illustration of this can be found in evidence presented before the... I love this title. Think about this title The select committee of the House of Lords to inquire into state of law relating to protection of young girls from artifices to induce them to lead corrupt life. Isn't it beautiful? 1881. It's a really, really revealing title. I mean, I could spend a whole hour just talking about this title. But what it does, it's kind of it gestures towards the economic exploitation involved while also conveying a moralistic message about working class girls being seduced into prostitution through their own avarice. Indeed, the committee observed was a, the committee was obsessed with their view that working class girls turned to prostitution because of envy for the luxuries that these girls obtained. When questioned by the commissioners, Superintendent Joseph Dunlop of the Metropolitan Police described himself observing a girl who was under the age of 13, whose fingers he wrote were covered with rings. She wore high boots buttoned up halfway up her legs. She had very short pet coats. Her hair was down her back and she wore a tight fitting polonaise. She laughingly told him that she was waiting outside the court to see her man go down, that is taken to prison. Their not contended that the two people were living in sin and that she was assisting in keeping him through prostitution. This image of the girl child who laughed and enjoyed the luxuries of sex work through sex work, offended the sensibilities of those lobbying to increase the age of consent. Since it kind of suggested that the girls might not be as in need of rescuing as they had imagined. But girlish innocence was rhetorically, at least restored in 1885 when Butler met up with William Stead, the editor of The Pall Mall Gazette and convinced him to write a series of articles about white slavery or the forced trafficking of White English girls into sex work. Stead went undercover in the trafficking trade for a month and over a series of weeks in 1885, drip fed the British public with lurid stories of young girls drugged, raped, trafficked into sex work in the UK and in Europe. Under the title "The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon", London was transformed into the cretin la brant of Greek myth into which every nine years the ancient Athenians sent seven Virgin maids as a sacrifice to the Minotom. According to Stead, the only difference was that in his time wealthy men were demanding not seven maidens only, but many times seven served up as dainty morsels to minister to the passions of the rich. In grizzly pros, he described young girls who had been snared, trapped and outraged either when under the influence of drugs or after a prolonged struggle in a locked room. These girls shrieks of torture is the essence of their, which meant delight. And they would not silence by a single note, the cry of agony over which they gloat. He then describes how he posed as an immoral man and brought what a 13 year old girl named Lilly Armstrong on the pretext of raping her. His account on the 6th of July, 1885, concluded with Lilly Armstrong being taken to the brothel and the sensationalist and semi pornographic tale concluded with these words."The innocent girl, Lilly Armstrong, was taken to her house to feel fame. She was taken upstairs undressed and put to bed. She was rather restless, but under the influence of chloroform, she soon went over. Then the woman withdrew, always quiet and still. A few moments later the door opened and the purchaser entered the bedroom. He closed and locked the door. There was a brief silence and then there rose a wild and piteous cry, not a loud shriek, but, not a loud sheep, but a hopeless startled scream like the bleat of a frightened lamb. And the child's voice was heard crying in accents of terror. There's a man in the room. Take me home, or take me home then all at once, it was still." So this year was just pure Gothic fiction. And the toying pornography masquerading as journalism. It encouraged a tidal wave, quite literally tidal wave of similarly sensationalist journalism, fiction and purported first person accounts using the moralistic framing of white slavery to titillate readers, but also to evade the sensor. Stead achieved his aim although he was sentenced to three months in prison on charges, this is interesting, on charges of abduction and indecent assault. Why was he charged? He was charged because he had failed to ensure that Lilly Armstrong's father consented to his subterfuge. In other words, who owns the girl's body? It's the father. But the maiden tribute to Modern Babylon created a scandal. On the one side, there were these really, really powerful, powerful figures who were virulently opposed to any curtailment in their sexual access to young girls and women of the working classes, as Lord Oranmore and Brown in the House of Lords. That's what he's saying in The House of Lords, 1884. He said he believed that there were very few of his lordships who had not, when young men been guilty of immorality. He hoped they would pause before passing a clause within the range of which their sons may come. He would ask them whether their class was so desperately moral, that they were entitled to insist upon all people being moral. The more they attempted to prevent the indulgence of natural passion, the more they would force unnatural crime. In other words, rich men were entitled to free access to the bodies of poor girls and women. If denied, they might turn to the unnatural vice of homosexuality. This was one answer to the question of, who owns the women's body? But on the other side, we've got something very different happen. His focus on the innocence naivety of young working class girls in contrast to the vicious assertion of sexual entitlement by aristocratic and upper class men generated fury amongst broader public. Around 20,000 people demonstrated in Hyde Park, demanding changes to the age of consent. And as a result, the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885 was passed raising the age of consent of girls from 12 to 16 years. The act had the effect of dramatically increasing police powers overworking class girls, boys who also sexually exploited, that's another talk and women. Further, it had sex between consenting adult, men made a criminal offense. And of course, homosexuality consensual remained a criminal offense for another 82 years. The act was a classic example though, of punishing sex workers, rather than their clients. Brothels were forcibly closed, prostitutes were harassed. They were forced out their homes and into lodging houses where they were more vulnerable to abuse. Male pimps became increasingly necessary if girls and women were to continue in sex work. As historian, Judith Walkowitz argues in her landmark article entitled"Male Vice and Feminist Virtue". And if you only read one article on this, this is the one. You can get the reference and the published version. She wrote, "The 1885 Act drove a wedge between prostitutes and the poor working class community. It effectively destroyed the brothel as a family, industry and a center for a specific female subculture, further undermining the social and economic autonomy of prostitutes and increasingly rendering them social outcasts." Campaigns against the Contagious Diseases Acts and child prostitution are interesting I think for, well, for great many reasons, but I'm going to focus on five first. The literature generated by the two movements reproduce time, and again, a formulaic Gothic sexualized semi pornographic plot. They typically invoked a naive virginal white girl or young woman being wooed by a foreigner, Jewish, Italian, Greek. She's drugged with wine, beer, ether, chloroform. When she retains consciousness, she is locked in the bedroom of a brothel. Later that night a male stranger enters and rapes her, she cries. Forever onwards, the victim is fallen, unable to free herself from being trafficked to numerous men. Such formulaic tales led feminist Theresa Billington Greg, to explain in her 19th of article, 13 article entitled"The Truth About White Slavery", that the tales must strain the credibility of the most willing believer. She observed that the girls and women reportedly trafficked were portrayed as impotent and imbecile weaklings, incapable of resistance. Why weren't more of these male abusers brained with fenders or injured with chairs, pictures, or other articles of furniture? Why weren't windows broken? She scorned the sensationalist and pornographic to those more of these stories in which the invader was revealed to be the girl's father, the girl's brother or friend. These stories typically ended with the detestable final tag. The door opened, it was the girl's father or a young man friend stood before her flushed in shame. He got her out. Not only were the victims totally passive in these accounts, but of course they all required to be saved by white men. Billington's demolition of the genre was matched by her scorn for the feminist and other so called progressives, who advocated Carceral and other punitive responses to prostitution. And this is the second point I want to make. Billington Greg reminded readers that demanding the reintroduction of the by parity of flogging ignored the common place knowledge that the law is of little value in the underworld of sexual trading. Such stories alleviated the conscience of feminist and reformers while doing nothing to help the victims of exploited prostitution. Third, Billington Greg was troubled by the fact that progressive feminists had forged allegiances, alliances with political conservatives and moralists. And this, she saw as evidence that they were just as interested as in controlling sexuality of working class women, as they were in alleviating issues of deprivation. Forth, the coalition of conservatives moralists and feminists drew upon a highly problematic racist language of white slavery. Both white and slavery were increasingly being used as literal rather than metaphorical descriptions. Blackness became a metaphor for white suffering. As Edwin Sims, legal expert who formulated some of these acts in the states, put it in "The White Slave Trade of Today, 1910", the white slave traffic made the Congo slave traders of the old days appear like a good Samaritans. It was routine for this literature to assert that the enslavement of white girls and women was more heinous than black slavery. In the introduction to a book entitled"Horrors of the White Slave Trade, 1911", readers were informed that the white slave trade was instantly more inhumane than the black slave trade. For the suppression of which so much of America's best blood was willingly shared half a century ago. So in other words, not only minimizing the horrors of slavery, but also positioning the heroes of the anti-slave movement as the white male abolitionists. The white slavery trope was rhetorically really effective in white circles, precisely because it inverted the racial implications of slavery. As historian Jessica Peli argues. White slavery discourse underscored the grotesque nature of white women's entrapment by highlighting the perversity of the race reversal that left black men and women free and white girls enslaved. It was a narrative that not only ignored the historical exploitation of male and female black slaves, but also the continued sexual abuse of women of color. Fifth, the abolitionist anti prostitution movements in Britain allied themselves with imperialism. The leading protagonists were white women who saw sex trafficking as a problem to be solved through interventions by women like themselves, who came from a more enlightened west and in Italy. Burton explores this in a really great book called"Burdens of History, British Feminists, Indian Women, and Imperial Culture, 1865 to 1915". She argues that white British women's campaigns to gain the vote relied on portraying themselves as guardians of economically poor prostitutes in India as well as the UK. Separate spheres feminism, that some, the view that women have a distinct sphere of influence to men, embolden them to insist that they could sympathize or empathize with their suffering sisters in the empire and give them the liberties possessed by women in the west. The abolitionist labor of white women would cleanse the imperial process. In so doing, these white feminists portrayed Indian women as little more than victims of their own oppressive and backward cultures. By definition, Indian women could not consent. This racialized hierarchy posted backward cultures as black and brown ones, while the enlightened rescuers were white heroes and heroines sacrificing themselves in order to bring knowledge of pain to the world. So this was imperialism masquerading as rescue. Of course there were feminists and other radicals during these debates who produced particularly robust critiques of this unholy alliance between conservative moralists, imperialists and feminists. They were concerned that responding to prostitution, whether coerced or not by law, enhanced policing and imprisonment was inappropriate, if not downright damaging because sex work was fundamentally a social and economic problem. As we'll see in the second half of this talk, this view was shared by many late 20th century feminists. But this earlier generation of socialists and anarchist orientated, feminists contended that the 1885 act made things worse for women who worked. Eleanor Marx, the youngest daughter of Carl remind the authors of the legislation that laws are not applied equally. They would be used to prosecute and harass working women rather than the men who purchased their sexual labor. Still other feminist critics linked male sexual privilege in the public sphere to male privilege in the private sphere. This is what John Stewart Mills, who I started this lecture with was doing as early as 1859, but it was taken up by socialists and anarchist feminists from the 1890s to the 1910s. And a really interesting version of this argument is one by Eleanor, sorry, Emma Goldman called"The Traffic in Women, 1910". She reflected on the injustices experienced by all women, none of whose bodies belong to themselves. She argued that social evils such as low wages drove women into many forms of slavery. This might mean prostitution, but it also meant marriage, which was sanctified by law and public opinion, but involved exchanging sexual services for monetary considerations. In her words, Goldman's words. It is merely a question of degree, whether she sells herself to one man in or out of marriage or to many men. Goldman also fiercely reminded her readers that it was not only white women who were traded. Women of all skin colors and backgrounds were exploited by, I love this quote,"The merciless Moloch of capitalism that fattens on unpaid labor", thus driving thousands of women and girls into prostitution. Moloch is a, for those you probably do know is a deity in the Bible involved in child sacrifice. Rather than praising women who rescued downtrodden women working in brothels and in the streets, Goldman branded them parasites who stalk about the world as inspectors, inspectors, detectors and so forth. So why are these historical debates interesting or important? The question to whom does the body belong? Whom does the women's body belong, excites as much debate today as it did in the 19th and early 20th centuries. The last lecture of this series, I explored the sex wars that took place in the 1980s around pornography. I argued that a certain wing of the feminist movement allied or lined themselves with moralists and evangelicals in policing the bodies of other women, primarily those who sought to make living through the porn industry. Like some of the 19th century feminists and progressive, who spoke for the mute working women affected by the Contagious Diseases Acts, with largely positive effects and against the heightened policing of the 1885 Acts, with negative effects. Their sisters a century later also attempted to assert their authority over other women's bodies. Central to their rhetoric was the claim that sex workers were incapable of rescuing themselves. And these radical feminists positioned themselves as the protectors of their lesser sisters. In this, they ignored the constrained agency, but agency nonetheless of marginalized women, like the prostitutes interview by Arby Williams in 1870, who were more than capable of articulating their values and visions of their bodies, their selves. The crucial argument of this group of feminists in the 1970s onwards was that all forms of commercial sex, including pornography and prostitution were forms of patriarchal violence. By definition, the sex was degrading and exploitative. Questions of consent were therefore just irrelevant. Sex workers who claim to have chosen the job or to enjoy it were suffering from a form of false consciousness, unaware of or unable to articulate their own suffering. A prominent example of this radical or governance feminism. Governance feminism is the term coined by Janet Haley. Refers to politics that moves out of the street and into the state. But example of this governance feminism can be seen in the work of Kathleen Barry, whose book, 'Female Sexual Slavery" was published in 1979. And in many different additions continues to be really influential. Like 19th century abolitionists, Barry draws on the problematic concept of slavery. She conflates all forms of sex work into the paradigm of forced human trafficking or forced sex trafficking, I should say. In her words, the only distinction that can be made between traffic in women and street prostitution is that the former involves crossing international borders. For Barry, the sexual oppression of women is the original oppression upon which women as a class, as a whole are held in bondage. In the words of the director of the coalition against trafficking and women, the global sex industry is not labor or work, but an institution of male dominance at its most virulent. A system of power and control that keeps women and girls inside it in conditions of perennial gang rape. And it's a view espoused by organizations as different as National Organization of Women, Catholics for Free Choice, Equality Now, and The Female Feminist Majority. Now, again, this specific radical feminist vision has been contested by other feminists, specifically socialist ones and those concerned with intersectionality. They point out that the universalist tendency of governance feminism threatens to reduce the entirety of a person's life to her sex work, including her relationships with male pimps or traffickers. Social economic context, complex intersectional identities, vastly different working experiences are erased along with, for example, distinctions between sugar daters, street walkers, core girls escorts, exotic dancers, masseuse, fetish specialists, strippers and women who work in different media, including digital. Ironically, by espousing a universalist concept of sex work as the paradigm of all female impression, these commentators silence, the very people they believe need rescuing. Governance feminism has excited, many, many critiques. It's accused of increasing the vulnerability of girls and women by raising their risk of imprisonment or deportation. Trafficking is conceived of in this paradigm as a women's rights or human rights issue. But then it's prosecuted through criminal law, as opposed to human rights protocols. This has led to a focus on people who, dangerous people, bad people who evade borderer controls. So undocumented migrants. An expansive and carceral state, and military nationalism that polices these borders, disproportionately harms people without cultural or financial capital. People of color, undocumented migrants, trans, the homeless, those on low wages are subjected to heightened policing, including police arrests, police violence, discrimination in housing, employment, medical care, and so on and so on. This carceral focus also diverts government tension and funding towards tackling the really important questions, employment, health. housing towards policing prisons. As Eleanor Marx put it a century earlier, laws are not applied equally. Further by conflating sex work, sexual slavery, and human trafficking, this kind of approach sidelines the fact that the most common form of trafficking is domestic labor and the hospitality, farming, fisheries and manufacturing industries. These are the forms of labor with some of the most systemic and pernicious aspects of neoliberal capitalism are found. From the 1990s however, this dominance feminism or governance feminism has been a really dominant voice in anti-sex work movements. Melodramatic stories have been revived in high profile, exposes, TV dramas, sensationalist newspaper reports, evangelicals have teamed up with feminists to fight the evil fusing questions of morality, the family and human or women's rights. Within this paradigm, distinctions are made between good and bad victims. As with the debates in the 1880s about prostitution, there are innocent victims, the gullible, naive, Lilly Armstrong who are deserving of rescue. Then there are these kind of undeserving ones who are agatic, use their agency with the options available to them, and sometimes even take pleasure in their job. In the earlier period, this might include that young girl I mentioned near the start, who so dismayed Superintendent Dunlop, she laughed and she wore tight fitting polonaise while waiting outside the court. From the late 20th century, such troops of deserving and undeserving have been translated into the language of anti-trafficking legislation. To be worthy rescue good sex workers must satisfy certain narrow requirements. They must have been forcibly coerced into work, express great abhorrence it, be easily distinguishable from economic migrants. Be prepared to accept much more lower paid work, never to have committed a crime and to be eager to cooperate with law enforcement, despite the serious risks that this provides for them , poses for the. They must all be totally under the control of traffickers. Evidence that they might have engaged in negotiation with their pimp, such as can I have a day off? Improvements to their living conditions becomes damning evidence that they possessed agency and therefore not actually true victims. Sex workers fight such characterizations. Indeed from the 1970s onwards, their voices are heard very loudly. Central intervention made by Carol Lee, otherwise known as Scarlet Harlet, a member of COYOTE, Call Off Your Old Tired Ethics, just founded in 1973 and is still the best know prostitutes rights organization in the US. She has, I mean, this fundamental insight that she has, that words determine what people think of the world and how they experience it. So she substituted the term sex work for prostitution. The term not only opened up ways to think of pro sex orientations, but also drew attention to sex work as professional labor, which like other forms of work might be either exploitative or fulfilling or more typically something in between. The term explicitly acknowledges that workers are differently situated. Those who have greater control over their conditions of labor can flourish more than others. Empowerment, political labor central. This is where the analysis of people who like Venita, Carter and Evalina Gilberm is astute. They chastise certain sections of the pro sex working workers lobby for treating all prostitutes as though they were independent business women who should be allowed to do whatever they use with their bodies, sell sex and their money, give it to pimps. They point out that this ignores the social context in which prostitution occurs, especially the race, class, power differential that exists between prostitutes and their customers. And the point is I think very well made. For example, the predominantly white middle class, well educated members of COYOTE is not representative of most sex workers. Their calling cards are free choice fulfilling work and bears of rights. None of which are available to most women, especially those for minoritized groups. But sex workers throughout the world have been active in forging these communities where they can access medical and legal advice. Unionization and community creation has not been easy. I mean, workers in any of these kinds of industries based on independent contracts, high employment, employee turnover, and poor wages typically express our experience such difficulties. However, these movements have flourished since the 1980s. And these groups think in terms of constrained choice, dignity in earning a living, central pleasure and empowerment. They insisted that they are, they insist that they are political subjects with social rights. And crucially, they scorn the savior mentalities of the abolitionists. It's no coincidence that the most trenchant critiques were formulated by third world feminists who multiply oppressed by global capitalism, first world militarism and white carceral feminism. An example is the first national conference of sex workers, 1997, took place in Calcutta more than 300 delegates. Their sex workers manifesto lamented the fact that sex work continues to be the targets of the moralizing impulses of dominant social groups through missions of cleansing and sanitizing, both materially and symbolically. And they criticized NGOs and feminist movements for setting out to rescue, rehabilitate, improve, discipline, control and police us. Pity was demeaning, they said as were attempts to rehabilitate sex workers by redirecting their labor into micra income generating activities. Why should white saviors think they're hoping sex workers by giving them demeaning jobs, making trinkets and other cheap commodities for tourists with the bulk of the prophets going to the rescuers. As one sex worker and researcher from Burma explained. I did so many job... I did so many jobs before sex work. I was exploited in every one of them. Sex work gives me the most independence, freedom and the best conditions. It's the same for all my friends. We are grateful and thank you for your concern, but please don't rescue us. So just to conclude, one minute. Why is history important? It's a reminder that answers to that question, to whom does a women's body belong? Are complex, personal and political. The dichotomy between choice and coercion is not a hopeful one. The dehumanizing rhetoric of people like Playfair in 1870 and Lord Oranmore's vicious appeal to sexual entitlement of the bodies of working class women in the 1880s were forcibly counted by feminists of those times. Solutions to social and economic oppression are not easy though. The reformers who Goldman condemned for stalking about the world as inspectors, investigators, detectives are well meaning. But the historian, feminist, social commentator and sex worker today, and some of us, all of those, do well to consider that sex workers are historical actors located within numerous intersecting and even conflicting or contradictory political, economic, social, and cultural frames of being. There is nothing in common between the working women protesting the beastly contagious diseases acts, and those scorning, the partiality of white privileged women and men to rescue them, except for this assertion of dignity and a knowledge always constraint of their own worlds. And that's it for today.(audience clapping)- How do/did attitudes towards sexual orientation in addition to gender identity, race, class, intersect with these debates and how has this changed over time? So that interest is in sexual attitudes towards sexual orientation.- Yep, absolutely brilliant question. And there's been some great research done about that, and if you email me, I'm willing to send it to you. So the short answer of that is, is that sexual orientation is really, really central to these debates particularly... Well, the best research that I know of is in the Victorian Period. Because in the Victorian Period, of course, gay men, this was one of their main ways of getting money. This was really, really important to cultures of homosexuality of that period. So very, very important. And again, trans is another example in more recent years, because these are identity where sex work has actually played a really big role and often a really positive role in developing communities and acknowledging one's identity and acknowledging one's desires.- Thank you. So Ms. Smith, who asked that question, if you want to, email us@inquiries@gresham.ac.uk. You can pass on some sources.- I'm very happy. And in fact, anyone can email me.- There's another question here about, a couple of questions about class and demographics. You've emphasized kind of lower class prostitution, sex work, sorry, but it's carried out by people of all class levels and demographics surely. So what is the relevance of referencing this so heavily?- Yeah, really good question. In the Victorian Period, clearly all classes are involved in sex work, but the attention is not on your mistress, who you set up in a nice house, separate and treat her well. The emphasis is always significantly on working class women. There's reasons for that. Because it's about social control. It's about fear of illness, fear of disease. It's about fear of working class sexuality, female sexuality. It's also linked to notions of the family being destroyed and that working class men need this strong family environment. And you that that working class, the sexuality of working class families, men as well as women is really crucial and it must be contained within that family. So these are, the commentary on prostitution is so geared, so focused on these moral, social, political concerns that there's no moral panic about the upper middle class man or the aristocratic man who engages, pays a woman of his own class to have sex. The problem comes when he's paying, or the problem increasingly comes when he is paying working class women and girls, and indeed boys to do that.- Thank you. That was super interesting. I was just wondering whether you would draw any distinction between like ownership of the body versus ownership of the stories that are told about the body and where those diverge. And I have half a thought about Lisa's "Today's Three Women" and that kind of ethnographic storytelling that kind of planes to give ownership back, but maybe does some of that kind of titillation that the Victorian texts were talking about. So I'd be really interested an opinion on that.- Really, really brilliant question. And it's one that, historians are not only historians, but in my field, historians are really obsessed with, right now, the ethics of writing about other people. In the past, I remember when I was doing my, when I was an undergraduate, we never thought about the ethics of writing and about taking someone else's narrative and making them into our story. And then of course, hopefully getting it published and getting people say, oh, how wonderful you are. We just never thought about that. That has now really, really changed particularly in the last 10 years. But it's one of the central topics of discussion right now. And certainly my research group, the shame group, we have meetings and meetings and meetings about this. Because there is this uneasy balance between allowing the people you are writing about to talk, and then what do you do with what they are saying and what if they don't agree with how you interpret what they have said? And these are huge, huge questions. And I don't, I mean, I don't have an answer for those. I think where we are right now is acknowledging that issue and that problem and problematizing it and being very upfront about what we are actually doing when we take the words of a working class person who's dead now and can't talk back and then we make it into a story that, I mean, I hope that I, I hope that she would like the way I'm using her words. And I think very often about that. Incidentally, I don't think very often about what Playfair would think about the way I use his words, but that's just another point. I mean, I think it's that power imbalance that makes the problem, creates the problem for the historian.- You mentioned race, class and economics in the 19th century over prostitution. You touched on religion briefly, but nothing. I just wondered what the church was doing and saying in these times.- Yep. I can answer that very quickly. When I'm talking about the political moralists or conservative moralists, they are the church. I mean, they're not only the church, but that's where most of the churches is involved. That's where they are. And so many of these, the people I respect greatly, the feminists, for example, I critique what they're doing, but I respect them very, very strongly. But so many of them are actually part of very strong religious movements. The evangelicals I talk about. These are people who really are intervening in these big movements against sex work for reasons that are very varied. I mean, some of the reasons are the moralistic ones, but there's also a lot of them who believe that sex work is wrong, but their main focus is alleviating the harms that are done to so many people. But religion is central to all of this and it's also central to the imperialism. It's central to the slavery motif. I'm told white slavery motif I'm talking about, these movements are full of it.- Well, professor Burke, thank you very much for a really interesting and thought provoking lecture. And please join me in thanking the professor.(audience clapping)