Abstract
Practices of ‘rescue’ and ‘reform’ of women who were labelled ‘prostitutes’ were far older than the modern laws that Wolfenden sat to reconsider. Since the early modern period, religious organizations had sought to incarcerate errant women in penitentiaries where they could be saved from their dissolute ways, a practice that continued and increased through the early modern and modern periods. Popular ideas about the causes of prostitution focussed either upon narratives of the ‘fallen’ woman who was forced into selling sex through seduction, pregnancy, and abandonment or upon the image of the highly sexualized independent female, who was given over to debauchery and unable to control herself.
Published Version
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