Harlots, Whores and Hookers

I hope I got you attention with the title of this post. Harlots, Whores and Hookers is an entertaining if not particularly scholarly history of prostitution. And the social history of the 19th century is one of the focuses of this blog (or at least it was intended to be one of the focuses).

He takes the story back about as far as it can be traced, to the historical rise of temple prostitution in ancient times.

He tries to be fairly even-handed, admitting abuses when they existed although it’s fairly obvious that he takes the entirely sane view that most of the abuses are either the result of attempts to prohibit prostitution, or are exacerbated by such attempts. At the time he wrote the book (1979) it still seemed possible that western societies would learn to deal with sex in a rational grown-up manner.

Much of the book is devoted to cataloguing the repeat attempts to suppress prostitution and the inevitable failure of all those attempts. Failures which usually just made things worse for everybody. Evans seems to favour the idea of legalised but government-regulated prostitution, which is at least saner than attempts at prohibition (although the argument could be made that government regulation could make things worse).

He’s not inclined to see prostitutes as victims, pointing out that for most of history prostitution was a better option for women than supposedly respectable occupations which paid a pittance. He also explodes the myth that most prostitutes come to a bad end. Some prostitutes certainly have come to a bad end, but most have eventually married and blended into respectable society and some have done very nicely for themselves.

The book does deal briefly with the subject of prostitution in the 19th century, which is of course the period that interests me most.

The book is an interesting throwback to a time when it was still possible to discuss social problems in an intelligent and reasonable way. Not a great book but not bad as a brief introduction to the subject.