Restoration Prostitutes

I thought it would be interesting to write my last blog entry on 17^th and 18^th century prostitution because many of the plays of the time include prostitute characters, and English society certainly did.  During this time period, prostitution was especially common near ports where sailors and traders would arrive after long periods of time at sea and with wages and goods to trade and spend.  As more trade routes opened, particularly during the 18^th century, the availability of prostitutes increased and the women became more varied in origin and more exotic to the English sailors.  The men who could not afford the higher class prostitutes were simply taken to an isolated place or the woman’s own lodgings to complete their transaction; the majority of prostitutes did not work in a brothel. 

Generally prostitutes worked alone or in small numbers with very few under the supervision of pimps or madams.  These independent workers were able to keep all of their wages and gain economic independence despite their gendered disadvantages and marginalized social group.  It was often poverty that forced women (and often men) into the prostitute lifestyle to begin with and it has been estimated that 1/6^th of the population during the late 17^th and 18^th centuries had participated in prostitution at one time.   The large scale participation in prostitution was largely to blame for the pandemic-like spread of various STDs, most notably syphilis (the sores of which were often hidden with black patches on the face of the carrier in little shapes and designs… ridiculous).

Despite the openness with which prostitution was carried out during the 17^th and 18^th centuries and its illegal status, the police were not too harsh on prostitutes because society demanded them and there were usually no crimes of violence involved (or at least reported).  Even during the reign of Cromwell prostitution was not eradicated but simply flourished underground, only to rise with a vengeance after the restoration of Charles II.  It was only during the mid to later years of the 18^th century that prostitutes were ostracized from society and a more Victorian sense of morality began to enter the social consciousness.  The economic factors leading women into prostitution were preached by social reformers but the logic of their arguments did not eradicate the increasingly believed fallacy that prostitutes and women in general needed to have their immoral selves controlled in order to save men from temptation—welcome to the 19^th century!