prohibitionist policing that viewed any form of extra-marital sex as adulterous and sinful,
such regulationist policies were permissive of men hiring prostitutes – a distinction that
legitimated male sexual authority within and outside of their household. 18 I would also argue
that such policing had a deeper nuance too; by controlling the trade of sex for both
prostitute and client, the state placed the greatest sexual authority with itself. These
regulationist laws were controversial and frequently contested by the women they were
imposed on. 19 Whilst a highly stigmatised profession, Nina Kushner explains that prostitution
provided many women, who generally had limited opportunity for paid labour, with ‘sexual
capital’. 20 These policing methods, therefore, eroded both the sex worker’s bodily and
financial autonomy.
Such approaches also reflected a growing concern around the health of the sexual
body. The increasing medicalisation of modern society, and the rising prevalence of disease
in the new urban landscapes, encouraged an expansion of state involvement in public
health. 21 As the poem highlights, sex workers’ bodies were seen as disease risks. This was not
a new concept. Figure 1 is a sixteenth century etching that depicts two soldiers approaching
a prostitute. In a tree behind them sits Death, pointing ominously towards an hourglass. J. R.
Hale suggests this etching symbolises the mutually understood risk of contracting syphilis
when purchasing sex. 22 That both Death and the prostitute hold fixed positions within the
image (the soldiers appearing to have entered the scene) may suggest, however, that it is the
prostitute’s body that is the carrier of disease – a warning, therefore, about the health
18 Gibson, pp. 4-6 19 Gibson, pp. 1-10 20 Nina Kushner, Erotic Exchanges: The World of Elite Prostitution in Eighteenth-Century Paris (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2013), p. 221 21 David McLean, Public Health and Politics in the Age of Reform: Cholera, the State and the Royal Navy in Victorian Britain (London: I. B. Tauris, 2006), pp. 1-10 22 J. R. Hale, ‘The Soldier in Germanic Graphic Art of the Renaissance’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History , 17. 1 (1986), 85-114 (p. 103)
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