Common Prostitute Research Articles

The other women's rights movement: ‘Streetwalkers’, habeas corpus and anticarceral activism in New York City, 1830–1860

AbstractThis article reconstructs the earliest known movement for sex workers' rights in US history. It interprets collective assertions of due process as a strategy to overturn vagrancy laws, which permitted municipal officials to summarily commit ‘common prostitutes’ to the penitentiary for months. Mass arrests sparked an anticarceral movement of ‘streetwalkers’ who refused to be contained. Unlike the middle‐class Woman's Rights Movement, which sought equal rights for their own sake, streetwalkers acted to build a world in which they could control their own labour, have sex without punishment and move freely through their city.

The "Medical Plot Thickens": Bad Medicine and Good Health in the Contagious Diseases Acts Repeal Campaign.

Britain's Contagious Diseases Acts (1864, 1866, 1869) mandated the use of medical detention and speculum exams to manage the bodies of "common prostitutes" and thereby reduce sexually transmitted diseases among enlisted men. Repeal advocates challenged the gendered power structure of the Acts but also used melodramatic frameworks to produce a broader critique of nineteenth-century Britain's centralizing medical orthodoxy and to argue for unregulated traditional approaches to medicine. Across a variety of repeal speeches and documents, advocates idealized alternative health practices in order to challenge institutionalized modern medicine and the governmental interests that extended its authority. J. J. Garth Wilkinson's Forcible Introspection of Women for the Army and Navy by the Oligarchy, Considered Physically (1870) exemplifies the multivocal and intertextual medicolegal plots of repeal melodrama as it cast professionalized modern medicine as corrupt, villainous, and in collusion with the state while presenting alternative medicine as authentically preventative, curative, and democratic.

Tamar says #MeToo: Reading Genesis 38 through the lens of gender justice

The Genesis 38 story of Judah’s engagement with his daughter-in-law Tamar, who had disguised herself as a common prostitute ( zonah), speaks to the opaque nature of patriarchal oppression of women throughout the ages, an oppression that often leads to sexual harassment, abuse, and violence. Women often suffer silently through the indignities of these violations in order to achieve personal and professional goals that lead to the establishment and sustainability of jobs, careers, and stable environments for their children. The story of Tamar’s brave, strategic action combined with Judah’s confession of wrongdoing speaks into the twenty-first century’s international struggle for gender justice as evidenced by the #MeToo movement.

Prostitution and the Ends of Empire: Scale, Governmentalities, and Interwar India by Stephen Legg

Prostitution and the Ends of Empire: Scale, Governmentalities, and Interwar India, by Stephen Legg. Durham & London, Duke University Press, 2014. xi, 281 pp. $94.95 US (cloth), $25.95 US (paper). It is only fairly recently that the historiography of prostitution and the attempts at its control or eradication has moved into the interwar era, a period in which there was a distinctive shift away from regulation and segregation, largely due to the development of a wider discourse of hygiene and the role of the citizen in combating venereal diseases. Legg writes as an urban geographer with a particular interest in India, and while this work addresses theoretical debates particular to these fields, it is also extremely valuable to the historian, especially to historians of sexuality who are examining the varied roles of space. It provides useful ways of thinking about changing ideas of public space and civic life in the era of modernity and demonstrates the importance of bringing particular material sites of the urban environment into the picture. This study does not however take the very granular approach that we find in Julia Laite's Common Prostitutes and Ordinary Citizens: Commercial Sex in London, 1885-1960 (New York, 2012) or that of Catherine Lee's Policing Prostitution, 1856-1886: Deviance, Surveillance and Morality (London, 2013) on Kent. Legg is more interested in the ways in which the problem was being addressed at a variety of interconnecting levels, from the League of Nations' concern over the Traffic in Women and Children to what happened on specific streets, via a range of different government bodies, imperial, national and local, and civil organizations. While paying tribute to Philippa Levine's magisterial work, Prostitution, Race and Politics: Policing Venereal Disease in the British Empire (New York, 2003), Legg registers an important proviso that Levine, and other historians, have tended to present India as a more monolithic entity than in fact it was. In particular he points out the complex, even at times incoherent, interplay between different governmental levels--transnational, imperial, national, local--further complicated by the involvement of various voluntary organizations engaged in campaigning and activism, as well as particular factors that came into play at specific sites at particular times. Legg brings a particularly useful insight into the role of sexology (itself more strongly influenced than is sometimes credited by late nineteenth century movements of moral reform as well as movements for public health) as an influence upon policy toward prostitution. This builds upon scholarship that has already gained significant recognition, regarding the influence of campaigns of moral reform (emerging from the UK protests against the Contagious Diseases Acts of the 1860s) and a rising paradigm of preventive medicine and public and individual hygiene. …

Vice Queens and White Slaves: The FBI’s Crackdown on Elite Brothel Madams in 1930s New York City

In the wake of the FBI's attack on organized prostitution operating out of exclusive call houses in the late 1930s, which, according to J. Edgar Hoover, revealed that powerful rings operate in almost every large city in the country, sex worker named Linda Robertson from Minneapolis wrote letter to the bureau chief defending her right to engage in prostitution. Proclaiming herself to be a common prostitute. Clean, healthy, in fine physical condition, she pointed to her educational background, her ability to rationally choose prostitution in sex-segregated job market, and the fact that her employers looked after her interests as evidence that she provided service necessary to our social structure. Of her customers, she had this to say: Lawyers, Priests, business-men, social lions, scions of pioneer families, city and state officials and officers of the Law form the bulk of our customers. They demand superior girls and they get them. She concluded her note by signing off: So in the future wouldn't it be more sportsmanlike to leave us to our devices and let those who actually think they have cause arrest us? Robertson believed the FBI's crackdown on elite call houses to be hopelessly naive, needlessly interventionist, and perhaps hypocritical in that it criminalized what Robertson believed to be victimless crime; it targeted only the upper echelons of the commercial sex market, which catered exclusively to the wealthy and well-connected customers, like the ones that Robertson described. Though Hoover suspected the letter might be hoax, he still shared it with Courtney Ryley Cooper, well-known journalist of true crime articles and books who served informally as publicist for the FBI by working closely with Hoover. From 1933 to 1942 Cooper collaborated with Hoover to polish the public image of the FBI; he operated as most important ghostwriter of the 1930s while also publishing books and articles celebrating the work of the FBI under his own name. Cooper reprinted the most sensational parts of the letter as the opening vignette in his 1939 expose of prostitution, Designs in Scarlet. In that vignette, Cooper recalled what Hoover had said when he handed over the letter: [Note] the viewpoint. The idea that well-educated, apparently otherwise decent girl may look upon prostitution as an envied profession. Hoover believed that it was the FBI's responsibility to protect silly girls like Linda Robertson from the venal people who profited from their degradation. In providing Cooper with this letter, Hoover was mounting defense against those accusing him of unsportsmanlike, or overly interfering, tactics in his antivice campaigns. The FBI began investigating call house prostitution in the fall of 1935, and Hoover announced nationwide attack on rings--criminal networks devoted to profiting off of prostitution--in February 1936. For the remainder of that year newspapers across the country routinely published articles about the G-men's daring exploits against organized and their targeting of the madams--frequently called vice queens--who profited from New York City's sex marketplace. Sensational headlines abounded: Blonde Indicted as White Slaver, Bad News for Vice Queen, and Women Unfold Sordid Story in Slave Case. In the FBI's telling, Hoover's FBI sought to protect the hearts of innocent, naive, white girls from the machinations of madams consumed with greed, ambition, and perversity. According to Hoover, these madams were particularly dangerous because they acted as procurers, inducing the victims to transport themselves interstate and violating the federal White Slave Traffic Act, commonly known as the Mann Act. Hoover's embrace of publicity and public relations tactics during this campaign was an unprecedented effort to remake the FBI into popular culture product. The public relations narrative of the FBI emphasized, in the words of historian Matthew Cecil, a story of responsibility, science, and leadership, themes that, not coincidentally, undermined critics' concerns about unchecked federal power. In this effort to solidify the bureau... Language: en

Nancy Dawson, Her Hornpipe and Her Posthumous Reputation

Abstract Nancy Dawson was famous for dancing the hornpipe during her short career on the London stage (1756-63). The tune to which she danced was quickly named after her and became popular as a ballad tune. After her death, “Nancy Dawson” was used as a name for race horses and boats and the tune took on a life of its own, while the dancer was forgotten. During her stage career she had been slandered in so-called Genuine Memoirs (quickly pirated as Authentic Memoirs) and attacked in satires over her liaison with the comic actor Edward Shuter. However, the tune’s popularity with sailors and a set of bawdy words made to it in the early nineteenth century led to her acquiring a reputation of being little more than a common prostitute. This paper attempts to sift fact from fiction about her life and character and considers errors and omissions in her entries in the Biography Dictionary of Actors and the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.

Elite Citizen Women and the Origins of the Hetaira in Classical Athens

Introduction If you open the Liddell-Scott-Jones dictionary to look up the word hetaira, you find the definition courtesan. The recognizable English word provides a reassuring sense of comprehension, a sense that is unfortunately false. Greek does not always translate easily into English and often readers are compelled to examine cultural, political, or socio-historical contexts for a word before making a decision on how to translate it. Some words, therefore, have extensive entries in our dictionaries. Words that denote women's social statuses, however, typically do not. Rather, LSJ, assuming that the social statuses of women are transparent and obvious, hides the complexities that surround the words applied to these women or how they are represented generally in image and text. When scholars see an image of a woman or read the name of a woman in a forum for public audiences, like comedy or oratory, they immediately make a series of assumptions about the woman's identity, including her social position, occupation, and legal status. In images, a woman is immediately deemed a prostitute, if nude, or if dressed but playing a flute, or if handed a change purse. (1) If pictured at a symposium, she is a hetaira. The term has a basic meaning of 'companion' (on analogy with hetairos) (2) and is almost always, except in limited cases, translated as courtesan. (3) Courtesan is itself a vague and culturally contingent word, especially in the nineteenth century when our lexicon was produced. According to LSJ, it is to be neither a common prostitute nor a married woman but something in between. How scholars have dealt with this ambiguity has varied, but interpretation has fallen strongly on the side of closer to prostitute than to and many scholars consider hetaira a synonym for prostitute, especially since they believe that only prostitutes attended symposia. (4) The ancient sources, however, tell a different story from the narrative driven by these lexical assumptions. The term hetaira was used in archaic and classical Athens to designate both a status and a set of behaviors. For example, there is evidence that the status of hetaira designated a woman who could not, for a variety of reasons, contract a formal marriage. This use of hetaira to designate marriageability occurs only in the fourth century. (5) In the late sixth century, in Athens and in some Ionian Greek poleis, I will argue that the word hetaira designates not a status but a person associated with a set of behaviors typical of the sympotic culture of the Greek elite. When scholars collapse these historically distinct uses of the term hetaira, they imagine a social world based on a strict wife-whore dichotomy. The mechanical application of this dichotomy has created basic misunderstandings of the position of some women, particularly noncitizen women, in classical Athens. The wife-whore dichotomy underlies many approaches to women in Athens and intersects with scholars' use of the language of respectability. They typically label a woman as disreputable if she is named in the courts, on the comic stage, or appears on a sympotic imaged. It is a short step to labeling her a prostitute, which then is assumed to exclude her from the category of wife and citizen. (6) Scholars identify this strong wife-whore dichotomy in a variety of ancient sources and claim that it is an unbreachable ideological barrier for the ancient Athenians. As Madeleine Henry writes, Erotic pleasure and legitimate marriage are classified into categories of thought ... which are firmly separated from one another. (7) This dichotomy exists in some of the language of Athenian orators and comedy. But not every woman in Athens was either a citizen wife or a foreign prostitute in reality (or even, I would argue, ideologically). Recent scholarship has questioned this dichotomy. (8) Unfortunately, these discussions have frequently started from the assumption that noncitizen women were mostly sexual laborers. …

Laite Julia. Common Prostitutes and Ordinary Citizens. Commercial Sex in London, 1885–1960. [Genders and Sexuality in History.] Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke [etc.]2012. 299 pp. Maps. £55.00.

Laite Julia. Common Prostitutes and Ordinary Citizens. Commercial Sex in London, 1885–1960. [Genders and Sexuality in History.] Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke [etc.]2012. 299 pp. Maps. £55.00.

Julia Laite. Common Prostitutes and Ordinary Citizens: Commercial Sex in London, 1885–1960. Genders and Sexualities in History series. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. Pp. 320. $85.00 (cloth).

Julia Laite. Common Prostitutes and Ordinary Citizens: Commercial Sex in London, 1885–1960. Genders and Sexualities in History series. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. Pp. 320. $85.00 (cloth).

JULIA LAITE. Common Prostitutes and Ordinary Citizens: Commercial Sex in London, 1885-1960.

JULIA LAITE. Common Prostitutes and Ordinary Citizens: Commercial Sex in London, 1885-1960.

Common Prostitutes and Ordinary Citizens: Commercial Sex in London, 1885-1960, by Julia Laite.

Common Prostitutes and Ordinary Citizens: Commercial Sex in London, 1885-1960, by Julia Laite. Basingstoke, UK, Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. ix, maps, 299 pp. $85.00 US (cloth). Buying and selling sex has never actually been illegal in Britain. However, solicitation and other activities that facilitate commercial sex were increasingly prohibited by legal statute and police action since the late nineteenth century. In Common Prostitutes and Ordinary Citizens, Julia Laite explores the complex and contingent experience of prostitutes in relation to the criminal justice system. Laite questions both the motivations and utility of criminalization, arguing that it helped to make prostitution about specific demons in society that could be managed by specific laws, rather than a sign of something very wrong in the fundamental structure of society or the state itself' (p. 216). More often than redressing exploitation and the dangers associated with commercial sex for women, Laite argues, criminalization instead created dynamics which encouraged the involvement of third-parties, organized crime, and women's increased vulnerability to physical harm. Present-day positions and policies on prostitution, Laite concludes, fail to recognize these histories or the harmful consequences of past legal interventions. Laite extends the study of British prostitution through the first half of the twentieth century, from the 1885 Criminal Law Amendment Act to the 1959 Street Offences Act, a critical period in which prostitution was increasingly the fodder of tabloid sensationalism, public concern and state intervention. During this period prostitution came to be more circumscribed than it had been at any other time in Britain's modern history (p. 2). Critical to understanding commercial sex and its treatment by the criminal justice system is the common prostitute, a term never legally defined, but pervasive in the ongoing criminalization process. Statutes against solicitation were based on an understanding of the public nuisance caused by the common prostitute, an unrespectable urban character distinct from the respectable ordinary citizen. Women entered prostitution for many reasons. Some with dependent children, parents, or partners valued the income and flexible time commitments. Others were coerced or believed they had no other options. Some enjoyed the work. But they all did it, as Laite points out, because there were customers for commercial sex. These included a similarly diverse range of men and motivations. Despite historians' focus on prostitute women, it was men who comprised the majority of individuals participating in commercial sex. Laite's chapter on male clients, and references to male third-parties, pimps, touts, and landlords recognized that on many levels prostitution was inflected by a variety of gender relations. Unlike prostitute women, men were never legally liable for their role in commercial sex and therefore remained largely invisible in the historical record. Still, Laite reminds us that their role cannot be discounted; clients' sexual desires, their spending and earning patterns, their mobility, their leisure patterns and their attitudes were highly determinative of the forms that commercial sex would take (p. 44). Criminalization was, according to Laite, an ongoing process that was both contingent and historically specific. Legal reforms never reduced the incidences of commercial sex, and instead increasing prostitutes' reliance on third-parties, while also undermining women's ability to work safely. …

Common Prostitutes and Ordinary Citizens. Commercial Sex in London, 1885-1960. By Julia Laite

Common Prostitutes and Ordinary Citizens. Commercial Sex in London, 1885-1960. By Julia Laite

Lady Astor and the Ladies of the Night: The Home Office, the Metropolitan Police and the Politics of the Street Offences Committee, 1927–28

Section 54 (11) of the Metropolitan Police Act 1839 criminalized the act of a common prostitute causing annoyance by soliciting in public.2For the police to implement this legislation was no simple matter, as no definition of “prostitute,” or indeed “annoyance,” was scribed in statute law. Although common law aided the interpretation of this offense—the case ofRex v. de Munck(1918): “We are of the opinion that prostitution is proved if it is shown that a woman offers her body commonly for lewdness of payment in return”3—in practice, identifying a “common prostitute” and defining “annoyance” was left to the discretion of the individual police officer. Although specific squads were deployed to target streetwalkers in West End police divisions, where the presence of prostitutes was more likely to cause public offense, a “blind eye” was often turned to women soliciting in the less salubrious streets of the metropolis. Local knowledge gained on the beat and the informal advice of colleagues shaped an unofficial police policy of containment and toleration.4

Women Performers and Prostitutes in Medieval India

Music and dance, the esoteric performing arts, were markers of culture in medieval India. A number of these differing forms developed into well-recognized and reputed arts over time. The practitioners were, accordingly, regarded as agents of refinement and culture. At the same time, music and dance were also among the most popular forms of entertainment and physical pleasure. This aspect remained crucial in classifying musicians, singers and dancers as entertainers, alongside prostitutes. While the labelling together might have reduced the status of performers at times, the labelling hardly remained fixed. Certain practitioners, even if involved in practices otherwise considered immoral, could remain within the elite circle, while for others the ‘evil’ characteristics got emphasized. There were, within the class of women who prostituted themselves, courtesans trained in the skills of music and dancing and educated in the fine arts, who were treated more as embodiments of culture. These categories—artists, skilled entertainers, courtesans—were quite fluid, with the boundaries seemingly fused together. Still, there were certainly some distinctions among the categories and those did not totally disappear, affording sanctity and purity to certain kinds of performers and allowing them to claim distinctiveness. Notably, the class of courtesans clearly stood apart from the common prostitutes. The attempt in this article is to look at different categories of women performers and prostitutes, their apparent coalescing boundaries and specialities as a separate group, their societal position, their shifting roles and the changes that affected their status. In this, it is worthwhile to consider the state’s attitude towards them, besides societal views that remained quite diverse.

The deviance of women: a critique and an enquiry

The deviance of women: a critique and an enquiry

The “Nudes Murders” 1959–1965

This article relates to the murders of eight women between 1959 and 1965. All of the victims were prostitutes and some, possibly all, appear to be the victim of the same killer. The Senior Investigating Officer utilisedwhat resources that were available at the time,many of these we take for granted today. One such resource was to have provided a car fitted with a police radio. Read on. Elizabeth Figg was a 21 year old prostitute who was last seen alive by a client on the early morning of Wednesday 17 June 1959. The client, after their business had concluded, took her by motor vehicle dropping her off at Holland Park Avenue at 0110 hrs. The client was satisfactorily eliminated from the enquiry. Her partially clothed body was found in Dukes Meadows on the north bank of the Thames at 0510 hrs. She had been strangled. No effort had been made to conceal the body. Her brassiere, knickers, shoes and handbag were missing and have never been recovered. Gwyneth Rees was 22 years old when she disappeared. Her decomposed remains were found on a council rubbish tip in Barnes on 8November 1963. The bodywas almost nakedwith the exception of one rolled down nylon stocking on the left ankle. The victim had plied her trade in the East End of Londonwhere she associated with members of organised crime gangs. Her body was the only one found south of the river. The main link to the spate of killings is the time factor, her body being found three months before the ‘series’ commenced. Hannah Tailford was the first of the definitive series of murders, whichwere to followa regular pattern throughout 1964 and into 1965. Her body was found on the foreshore of the north bank of the Thames, upstream from Hammersmith Bridge, on Sunday 2 February 1964. She was naked with the exception of nylon stockings, which were around her ankles. A pair of knickers had been stuffed into her mouth. These knickers were to show positive for traces of semen and in the absence of any obvious injury, cause of death was given as drowning. A surprising conclusion, as examination of photographs of the body clearly show the mark of a panty line on the victim's right buttock, which plainly demonstrates that the body continued to wear this apparel after death and they presumably were taken off and forced into her mouth before she was dumped into the river. She had last been seen alive at 2100 hrs on Friday 24 January 1964. The post mortem findings concluded she had been immersed in water from between two and seven days. The outside estimate of seven days is still two days short from when she was last seen alive. Irene Lockwood was a lady who in the parlance of the day was a ‘common prostitute’. She operated as Tailford had done on the bottom

Manon in the Desert, Wagner on the Beach

The fourth act of Manon Lescaut takes place, notoriously, in a desert “on the borders of New Orleans.” Previously, in Paris, Manon had been arrested as a common prostitute and exiled to the New World. Now she is in flight again. As the curtain opens, she and her lover Des Grieux are half-dead—starving and exhausted; midway through the act he goes off in futile search of shelter. While Des Grieux hesitates, and then leaves the stage, we hear an extended orchestral passage that culminates in the citation of a theme that has represented the characters' love for much of the opera. At the end of the third act it was sounded triumphantly, triple forte, by the full orchestra. Now it is luminous but also distant, like a memory. Moments of purely instrumental writing such as this, coupled with a canny use of leitmotifs, have often earned Puccini's opera the epithet “Wagnerian.” The passage also brings to mind, and quite clearly, Verdi's ironic treatment of the “bacio” theme in the last act of Otello. But in the next measures Puccini leads the listener into a rather different sound world (ex. 1). The love theme is cut off with five blunt chords: B-flat minor, F minor, B-flat minor, F minor, B-flat minor. The tempo then relaxes, these same harmonies are slowed down from quarter notes to half notes, and they alternate unceasingly for the first thirty-seven bars of Manon's aria “Sola, perduta, abbandonata.” After a contrasting passage of exactly equal length, the two chords return, oscillating again until the aria's close.1 “One of the most original pages of the score,” according to Julian Budden, this static aria has no obvious precedent in the Italian repertoire.2 If the lyrical love theme looks back to the traditions of the nineteenth century, Manon's ostinato heralds the twentieth.

Taking Nellie Johnson's Fingerprints: Prostitutes and Legal Identity in Early Twentieth-Century London

British laws which sought to control and prevent street prostitution in the early twentieth century all relied on the idea that a ‘common prostitute’ was a legally definable person, and, while prostitution itself was not an offence, that the action of street solicitation represented a special kind of public nuisance. This article explores some of the implications of this legal system, especially after prostitutes were added to the fingerprinting schedule of the London Metropolitan Police in 1917. Centred around one rare case-file concerning the mistaken identity of a street prostitute in 1920, the article explores the way in which women working as prostitutes experienced and negotiated the criminal justice system. In contrast to the historical attention given to the Contagious Diseases Acts, the solicitation laws are seriously under-examined. Yet these laws were put in place prior to the CD Acts, lasted long after their repeal, affected a far greater number of women, and were significantly more important to the police and the state in their control of prostitution than were the short-lived and geographically limited CD Acts. In the context of the CD Acts, historians have looked at the ways in which a prostitute identity was developed and assigned by medical discourse and medical registration. However, the far more common and long-lasting experience of prostitute women in Britain was governed by the solicitation laws and a legal, not medical, process of classification. Through Nellie Johnson's story, we can begin to explore the intricacies of a legal system of prostitution control peculiar to Britain at a crucial point in its development. This article argues that over the course of the early twentieth century, the criminalization of identity became the grounds upon which the entire system of street- prostitution control in England and Wales rested. The fingerprinting of prostitutes, and Nellie Johnson's personal experiences, fit into a larger story of modernization in early twentieth-century Britain and the early twentieth-century world. This period witnessed the development of particular, and technical, forms of identification which were applied to particular groups of people, an abstraction which turned the body itself into a text that had very real consequences for women like Nellie Johnson.

:The Courtesan's Arts: Cross-Cultural Perspectives

Courtesans, hetaeras, tawaif-s, ji-s--these women have exchanged artistic graces, elevated conversation, and sexual favors with male patrons throughout history and around the world. Of a different world than common prostitutes, courtesans deal in artistic and intellectual pleasures in ways that are wholly interdependent with their commerce in sex. In pre-colonial India, courtesans cultivated a wide variety of artistic skills, including magic, music, and chemistry. In Ming dynasty China, courtesans communicated with their patrons through poetry and music. Yet because these cultural practices have existed primarily outside our present-day canons of art and have often occurred through oral transmission, courtesans' arts have vanished almost without trace. The Courtesan's Arts delves into this hidden legacy, unveiling the artistic practices and cultural production of courtesan cultures with a sideways glance at the partly-related geisha. Balancing theoretical and empirical research, this interdisciplinary collection is the first of its kind to explore courtesan cultures through diverse case studies--the Edo period and modern Japan, 20th-century Korea, Ming dynasty China, ancient Greece, early modern Italy, and India, past and present. Each essay puts forward new perspectives on how the arts have figured in the courtesan's survival or demise. Though performative and often flamboyant, courtesans have been enigmatic and elusive to their beholders--including scholars. They have shaped cultures through art, yet their arts, often intangible, have all but faded from view. Often courtesans have hovered in the crevices of space, time, and practice--between gifts and money, courts and cities, feminine allure and masculine power, as substitutes for wives but keepers of culture. Reproductively irrelevant, they have tended to be ambiguous figures, thriving on social distinction while operating outside official familial relations. They have symbolized desirability and sophistication yet often been reviled as decadent. The Courtesan's Arts shows that while courtesans cultures have appeared regularly in various times and places, they are universal neither as a phenomenon nor as a type. To the contrary, when they do crop up, wide variations exist. What binds together courtesans and their arts in the present-day post-industrialized world of global services and commodities is their fragility. Once vital to cultures of leisure and pleasure, courtesans are now largely forgotten, transformed into national icons or historical curiosities, or reduced to prostitution.

"Justly to Fall Unpitied and Abhorr'd": Sensibility, Punishment, and Morality in Lillo's The London Merchant

When Lady Mary Wortley Montagu discussed the hero of The London Merchantwith her friends, she could not accept any doubt, hesitation, or disagreement on the matter: she was fond of declaring "that whoever did not cry at George Barnwell must deserve to be hanged." 1 An "observing Lady" quoted in the Gentleman's Magazine concurred: "such is the artful Contrivance of this Play; so delicate is the Texture of its Composition, that none, but a common Prostitute, can find Fault with it." 2 According to Montagu and the others, only some kind of monster could view the tragedy of George Barnwell and remain unaffected by it. Any hint of disobedience on this topic, any outward sign of indifference, any failure to respond exactly in the manner of Montagu, betrayed a serious flaw in one's character. Because the only acceptable response to Montagu's tears was more tears, those who failed to produce the requisite response "must deserve" their punishment. In Montagu's desire for her emotions to be mirrored, like can only be answered by like, tears can only be answered by more tears, or else suffer the redoubled pains of punishment and social exclusion.