Such attitudes had global and imperial reaches. In her study of occupied Japan, Sarah
Kovner explores how the US implemented regulationist policies on Japanese sex workers.
Though Japan had historically regulated sex work (during the early modern period, pleasure
cities were built specifically for the trade of sex), the sex workers were often glamorised and
held celebrity-like status within Japanese culture. American regulation was focused on
controlling venereal disease, and subsequently altered local cultural associations of sex
work. 30 This is an example of how the policing of sexual bodies could be implemented to
establish power dynamics in colonial contexts; a foreign power policing the local sex trade
was, by extension, a show of foreign power over the population in general (especially
considering the number of local women forced into the trade due to wartime conditions). 31
The growth of urbanisation was another element of modernity that encouraged
greater state policing of sex work. In the poem, there is a distinct nostalgia about country
life; the young woman had lived a ‘blissful lot’, lacking in material wealth but rich in nature’s
wonders. 32 This may reflect tensions that were developing around urbanisation. Urban
populations were swelling and becoming increasingly anonymous. The subsequent visibility
of impoverished women exaggerated fears of wayward sexuality. 33 In Britain, solicitation laws
were introduced in the early nineteenth century to police sex workers. Prostitution itself was
not illegal, but its visibility was considered a public nuisance. The term ‘common prostitute’
came into legal parlance. 34 The word ‘common’ illustrates that policing was particularly
concerned with its prevalence. This can also be seen in the language used to report about
30 Sarah Kovner, Occupying Power: Sex Workers and Servicemen in Postwar Japan (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2012), pp. 1-15 31 Hershatter, p. 6 32 ‘The Prostitute’, stanza 4 33 Cott, pp. IX, X 34 Julia A. Laite, ‘Taking Nellie Johnson’s Fingerprints: Prostitutes and Legal Identity in Early Twentieth -Century London’, History Workshop Journal , 65 (2008), 96-116 (pp. 98-100)
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