I thought it would be interesting
to write my last blog entry on 17th and 18th 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 18th
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 1/6th of the population during the late 17th
and 18th 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 17th and 18th
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 18th 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 19th century!