Melbourne ~ Australia
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Prostitution might appear a rather strange subject for historical inquiry. As 'the oldest profession', concerned with buying and selling something as 'natural' and 'unchanging' as sex, it might seem to have no history. On the contrary, prostitution and sexuality are subject to historical change and are shaped by the society in which they exist. In Australia over the last 200 years the nature of prostitution and the experiences of people working as prostitutes have varied a great deal. They have been affected by the character of women's economic options, by economic depression, by wars, by changing popular attitudes and, in particular, by the law and the ways in which the police, the courts and the prisons have administered the law. Organized political resistance has also played a role. People working as prostitutes have developed strategies to survive and resist increasing social control. At the same time, the unique cultures of prostitutes are also formed by factors not immediately related to their work - for example, by the working-class communities and families to which they belong. The historical record of prostitution, however, points us towards examining issues of social control, because the records we have are mainly of prostitutes' contact with powerful social institutions. It is necessary, first, to sketch the historical backdrop to the drama of female prostitution in Australia.
In the early colonial period in Australia there were few economic opportunities for women. Women transported as convicts were either imprisoned in one of the Female Factories or sent out to service. Sometimes, assigned servants were expected to provide sexual as well as domestic services. Prostitution was the only way assigned servants could earn money of their own. Clandestine night adventures were also one of the few ways in which women could express their contempt for their masters and the penal authorities. Women dissatisfied with their situations would often turn to the town brothels. These provided both a social meeting place and a shelter for absconding prisoners. Upon receiving tickets of leave, women convicts had few means of earning a living. Single women could get little work outside domestic service. Women who had spent many long years as assigned convict servants would not have been attracted to an occupation that offered little change. Marriage was probably the most attractive option for most women, but, though there were fewer women than men, not all women married. Even those who did marry were not guaranteed economic security. Wages were low for men, lower still for women. Work was often erratic, and men often had to travel in search of it, leaving their families behind. For many women, prostitution became both an economic necessity and a relatively attractive option in a very limited job market.Although opportunities for women in Australia have expanded, restricted economic options have continued to influence the recruitment of women into prostitution right up to the present day. One clear indication of this is the large number of women from racial and ethnic minorities working in the trade. Aboriginal women, for example, have been recruited into prostitution from the early times of settlement. Racial discrimination against Aboriginal women ensured that they had even fewer work options than white women. So the economic reality for all women, that society expected them to rely upon male support in exchange for sexual services, was even starker for Aboriginal women.It also follows that periods of economic crisis and high unemployment must have resulted in numbers of women who had not previously worked as prostitutes being forced to do so. However, it is difficult to determine the exact impact of depressions on prostitution. The fact that more prostitutes might be arrested in one year than in another may simply reflect an increase in police activity, not an increase in the number of women in the trade. Still, there are some clues. Married and single women would probably have been forced into prostitution at different stages during both the 1890s and 1930s depressions. In both cases the main industries employing female labour had crises of their own before the general depression hit. In 1887, the small apparel factories and shops employing female labour fell on hard times, and in 1926-7 there was a collapse in the textile and clothing industries. Young single women who depended upon work in these industries would in some circumstances have found it necessary to work as prostitutes, at least on a part-time basis, years before the main crisis began. Married women would have been more likely to enter prostitution when their husbands lost their work in the early 1890s and 1930s. During both depressions many workers had their hours of work and wages drastically cut; women were no exception. One seventeen-year-old woman working during the 1930s as a shop assistant in the inner Sydney suburb of Leichhardt had her working hours and pay cut by half; she was then encouraged to work as a prostitute by a middle-aged widow. Her circumstances reveal another effect of the depression on the prostitution industry: because men were earning less and women were desperate, women charged less for their services. Full-time workers in Sydney brothels were charging between twenty shillings and thirty shillings a time in 1930. Yet the woman in Leichhardt only received five shillings, and two shillings of that went to the widow. There are also people who can remember their women friends in the 1930s having intercourse with men in parks for a pittance, just so they could buy their next meal.
Gold rushes and wars have also created social and economic upheavals in Australia. From the Victorian gold rushes of the 1850s to the Western Australian boom in the 1890s, the search for gold not only gave enormous impetus to the settlement of Australia, but also presented a new context for prostitution. The population was extremely mobile, and included large numbers of single men. Prostitution flourished, drawing in both local women and significant numbers from overseas. Some married women who were left without breadwinners when their husbands headed for the goldfields would also have had to resort to prostitution. When the boom days passed for the miners, they came to an end for prostitutes, too. In Western Australia, for example, the structure of gold-mining changed in the early twentieth century. Men went from the insecurity of individual prospecting into more secure jobs working for big mining companies. More women moved to the fields to live with their husbands, and fewer men were moving through the port towns. In this more settled society prostitution became less accepted, and concerted moves were made to control the trade that had been allowed to flourish during the mining boom. These changes, in turn, radically affected the structure of the prostitution industry and the options available to women working as prostitutes.
The two world wars were also times of social instability accompanied by large influxes of men into Australia. There were many expressions of concern at the change in sexual values, particularly about the casual nature of sexual encounters between soldiers and women. Such comments suggest that prostitution probably increased. This was clearly the case in Perth. In 1914-15 the number of convictions for soliciting was twice the pre-war average. It was not just a matter of the same women being arrested more often; there was an increase in the number of first offenders. The increased numbers of arrests reflect a real increase in the numbers of women working as prostitutes. It would be reasonable to assume that this was the case in most of the seaboard cities during the wars.
The influence of wars was not confined to increasing the number of prostitutes. Pressures from the military, coupled with public health policies, affected the lives of prostitutes in various parts of Australia from the 1880s until penicillin was introduced as a cure for syphilis during the final stages of the Second World War. In Tasmania in 1879, legislation was passed to control prostitutes who had venereal disease. It was modelled on the Contagious Diseases Acts, which had operated in England since the mid 1860s. As had been the case in England, the Tasmanian Contagious Diseases Act resulted from pressure by the military. The Royal Navy was concerned at the number of sailors who were contracting venereal disease while ashore in Tasmania. With the promise that Tasmania would be used as a summer base if measures were taken to control venereal disease amongst the prostitute population, Tasmanian authorities agreed to take action. The Contagious Diseases Act enabled women working as prostitutes to be confined in special 'lock hospitals'. These were actually more like prisons than hospitals. Their location made the point: in Hobart, soon after the implementation of the Act, the lock hospital was located at Cascades, in what had previously been the Female Factory. In Launceston, part of the Female House of Correction was set aside as a lock hospital in 1886.Although Western Australia did not pass a Contagious Diseases Act, the pressures of the First World War resulted in closer medical surveillance of women working as prostitutes in that state. Soon after the outbreak of war, military authorities became concerned about a number of venereal cases amongst soldiers at Blackboy Hill. The police requested the Government Medical Officer, Dr. Blanchard, to examine prostitutes in Perth's brothels. Blanchard continued to inspect the women at a number of brothels each fortnight, charging a guinea for each visit. This practice was investigated by a royal commission, which concluded that the police and the medical authorities had acted in collusion to force the women to have medical examinations at their own expense. At the same time, the police had been systematically closing all brothels in Perth outside one street - Roe Street - so that the control of disease was easier. As Raelene Davidson (now Frances) has explained in her history of prostitution in Western Australia, the police considered that maintaining the health of troops in time of war was sufficient justification for impinging upon the civil liberties of prostitutes without legislative authority.During the Pacific campaigns of the Second World War, there was a great deal of fear that venereal disease would reduce the efficiency of the Allied armed forces stationed in Australia. Under the National Security Regulations (Venereal Diseases and Contraceptives), proclaimed in September 1942, women found to be infecting troops with venereal diseases could be incarcerated for medical treatment. The Act was administered in a particularly punitive way in Queensland, because of the enormous number of troops stationed in that state and its proximity to the theatre of war. Military and civilian authorities co-operated to ensure that both professional prostitutes and 'good time girls' were subjected to state medical surveillance.
Looking at prostitution in its economic context, it is crucial to discuss prostitution as part of the history of women's work. This work, however, is fundamentally related to sexuality, just as women's work in the home is connected with the sexual patterns our society has made. As such, it is shaped by prevailing ideologies. One of the most important of these has been the double standard of sexual morality. Even today, greater pressure is placed upon women than men to avoid sexually promiscuous behaviour. In the past the differences were even greater. The gap was especially wide during the Victorian era. The 'good' Victorian woman was expected to display no interest in sex. As the English physician William Acton wrote: 'The best mothers, wives and managers of households know little or nothing of sexual indulgence. Love of home, children and domestic duties are the only passions they feel ... As a general rule, a modest woman seldom desires any sexual gratification for herself'. At the same time, male sexuality was regarded as urgent and compelling, and sexual adventure the measure of the man. In this context prostitution was recognized as a 'necessary evil', yet prostitutes themselves were vilified. This ideology underpinned the contagious diseases legislation. The fact that in Queensland and Victoria, contagious diseases legislation was passed without pressure from military authorities highlights the pervasiveness of the double standard. In Victoria, however, the Act was not implemented. Although the Acts were supposed to control the spread of venereal disease, in reality it was just that men wanted sexual access to women they thought could be guaranteed free from disease. A disease that did not discriminate between sexes or classes could not be controlled effectively by legislation directed only at one group of women.In Damned Whores and God's Police, Anne Summers has suggested that all women's lives in Australia have been powerfully affected by the image of the prostitute as a profoundly 'bad' woman whose work is simply an expression of sexual deviance. The sexual behaviour appropriate for women was rigidly defined. Women were divided into 'damned whores' and 'god's police', the existence of the 'damned whores' a constant reminder to all women of the fate which might befall them if they strayed from the straight and narrow. The distinction was not always as straightforward as this, however.With the rise of the charity movement in the last decades of the nineteenth century, there was greater concern about the fate of women working as prostitutes. Numerous 'magdalen asylums' and refuges were set up around Australia, and Christian philanthropists tried to intervene personally in the lives of 'fallen women'. They believed in particular that very young women who had been 'led astray' were capable of being 'rescued' before falling irrevocably into the abyss of immorality. Although this charitable work may appear to have softened the distinction between good and bad women, it was really important in maintaining this distinction. The abyss of immorality was populated by deviant, sinning, sexual women; only God was capable of redeeming the fallen sisterhood. Not surprisingly, few women left prostitution as the direct result of 'rescue' work. Women working as prostitutes continued to be classified as deviant. The state and the benevolent institutions subjected them to close surveillance of a kind that would have been considered quite inappropriate for respectable citizens.
The police actually participated in constructing the distinction between prostitutes and all other women. In Melbourne during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, prostitution was mainly policed by plain-clothes constables. They took it upon themselves to watch all women on the city streets, on the lookout for those whose behaviour appeared less than virtuous.'If we have our doubts about a woman,' explained Senior Constable James Stapleton, 'we watch her and follow her, and when we get her in a brothel we know who she is'. The police would also follow up anonymous complaints. In March 1893, for example, police received an anonymous letter alleging that Mrs Phillips of 13 Smith St Fitzroy was a high-class prostitute and expressing concern that Mrs Phillips' four daughters, aged from five to sixteen, lived in the house with her. Constable O'Sullivan approached Mrs Phillips' neighbours and found that they had noticed nothing 'that would lead them to believe that she was otherwise than a respectable woman'. The constable made inquiries 'in other ways', with the same result. Even after O'Sullivan and the constable on night duty had kept the house under observation without results, surveillance on the house was continued, and O'Sullivan promised to report'anything wrong on the part of Mrs Phillips'. All women, then, were under surveillance. To identify those who worked as prostitutes, the police had to watch the rest as well.There is evidence to suggest that this kind of state surveillance and control increased in the half century from 1860. This was a period of rapid urban expansion and industrialization, bringing urban over-crowding, poverty, ill-health and, despite the youth of the cities, decay. Those in power began to see these problems as being partly related to the nature of working-class life. The campaign against prostitution was part of the broader offensive against the culture of the working class, discussed in earlier chapters. Street life was becoming increasingly regulated. In 1891 in Victoria, for example, the Police Offences Act was amended to broaden the definition of anti-social behaviour and give police greater power to control the behaviour of individuals in public places. In the process, soliciting was made an offence for the first time. The moves to control prostitution were also linked with the rise of legislation and medical practices that impinged ever more closely on women's bodies. At the same time, the centralization of most colonial police forces was underway. They were crucially involved in the control of prostitution. Yet, the state has been ambivalent about prostitution. There has been a compromise between total repression and formal state regulation. Total repression was not acceptable, because it would deny men sexual access to prostitutes, but formal regulation risked sanctioning sex outside of marriage and undermining the central position of the family. So there was a consistent conflict between the desire to control, and the desire to retain for men access to prostitutes. The laws that resulted, and the ways in which they have been administered, have powerfully shaped the prostitution industry and the experiences of women in the trade over the last hundred years or so.
Although the act of prostitution itself has never been made illegal in Australia, each state has gradually developed a complicated set of laws that have brought virtually all activities associated with prostitution within the ambit of the law. The framework was set up during the crucial period from about the 1860s to the First World War. Before 1860 the law already affected prostitution. Prostitutes and brothel-keepers could usually be arrested under catch-all vagrancy legislation, and 'keeping a disorderly house' was an offence at common law. Women working as prostitutes were already beginning to be treated as a distinct legal category. Legislation restricted their access to public social places. This was actually built on a tradition dating back hundreds of years.Yet, at the same time, the state was acting directly to sanction prostitution, and even actively procuring women. Two events in Tasmania point to the collusion of the state. In 1834 when the Strathfieldsay berthed in Hobart, the female passengers were mobbed by 2,000 men who shouted obscenities and harassed the women they fancied. This event underlines why the state's immigration policy stressed the need to bring in single women. Then, in the 1840s, there was considerable fear of homosexuality in the all-male environment of the prison, so the state allowed 'well conducted' prisoners leave to go into the town, obviously for sexual purposes. However, from the point of view of women working in prostitution, it could be argued that official tolerance at least meant less state surveillance. Despite the harshness of authority and the blatant collusion of the state in prostitution, the daily lives of women working as prostitutes in this earlier period in Australia would have been less restricted by the state than those of prostitutes several decades later.It was from the 1860s that an edifice of laws was constructed. Firstly, forcing women into prostitution (procuring), the relationships between women working in prostitution and their children, and the spread of venereal disease, caught the attention of the legislators. Later, from about the 1890s, there was a new spate of legislation related to soliciting, the ownership and management of brothels, procuring, and living on the earnings of prostitution.Laws have institutionalized the distinctions between 'good' and 'bad' women. They have also reflected the idea that men have sexual rights over a group of women in the community. A blatant example of this was in the Victorian law against procuring, passed in 1891. This law only extended its protection to'good' women. It specifically stated that it was not an offence to procure any woman or girl, no matter of what age, who was 'a common prostitute or of known immoral character' or who was a resident of a brothel. In 1961, the laws were amended as the result of a panic about young women being involved in a prostitution racket operating from cafes. The Chief Secretary, Mr Rylah, was of the opinion that, if 'the evil is to be suppressed there must be no implication, as there is in section 56 of the Crimes Act at the moment, that the law allows trading in prostitutes and doubtful characters. This is traffic in human bodies for gain which, I think, all honourable members will agree is particularly vile'.Yet honourable members did not seem particularly concerned about the traffic in bodies of women over the age of twenty-one. After the 1961 amendments, women in the prostitution trade and 'women of known immoral character' were no longer excluded from the provisions that created the offences of procuring women under twenty-one and of procuring by fraudulent means. As adult women working as prostitutes were not mentioned in these amendments, they must have continued to be regarded as legitimate objects of trade.Living on the earnings of prostitution was made an offence in most states early in the twentieth century. This provision drastically affected the personal lives of prostitutes in a way that would have been regarded as quite unacceptable for other women. It became impossible for women working as prostitutes to support husbands, lovers, ageing fathers, brothers or friends, without fear that these men would be charged with an offence. More recently, it has become possible for women to be charged with the same offence, further limiting the personal choices of prostitutes.The notion of prostitutes as a distinct category of women has operated within other areas of the law. The early restrictions on the public space that prostitutes may occupy have already been mentioned. Primarily, they have been prevented from socializing in bars and restaurants. Women working as prostitutes have also had trouble claiming child maintenance. A crucial way in which the law has reflected the idea that men have a right to sexual access to a particular group of women has been the leniency which has been shown to men who have raped alleged prostitutes. Only recently has the practice of cross-examining rape victims on their past sexual history been questioned. So prostitutes have been denied a number of elementary rights.Laws have generated their own resistance; prostitution has continued, and women in the trade have worked out their own tactics to take advantage of loopholes in the laws. For example, in 1907 the Victorian parliament passed laws to control brothel-keeping. Most of the city brothels were closed and many prostitutes were dispersed throughout the inner suburbs. The legislation was later interpreted to mean that a house used by only one woman for the purposes of prostitution was not a 'house of ill fame and repute', and therefore did not fall within the new law. So, by 1940, areas of small working-class terraces, especially in Fitzroy, had been taken over by women in the prostitution trade, each working alone in a house, waiting in her doorway for passing prospective customers. Such women could not be touched by the police because technically they were within the law.Though the legislature played a crucial role in shaping prostitution, it cannot be viewed in isolation. The police necessarily played an important part in making prostitution and the experiences of individual prostitutes what they were. Similarly, the court and prison systems structured the experiences of women in the trade in fundamental ways, although discussion here will be limited to the role of the police. State power has to be examined at the points where it has been in the most immediate contact with those it affected.
The police have sometimes acted independently of the legislature. In the case of Western Australia, they actually worked overtly to create red-light districts in Perth and the goldfields. Historian Judith Allen has suggested also that police involvement in the restructuring of prostitution in New South Wales during the first part of the twentieth century was closely related to the penetration of organized crime into the prostitution trade. The courts have sometimes allowed police to do things for which they have had no legislative authority. In both Western Australia in the early twentieth century and in Victoria some years earlier, the police and city magistrates worked out a system to prevent prostitutes with venereal disease from working, although neither state had implemented a contagious diseases act. When police were informed that a woman had venereal disease she was brought before the court on one of the charges usually used to arrest prostitutes. In Victoria she was simply remanded for medical purposes and kept in remand for as long as necessary; some women remained in remand for over four months, to be released without conviction at the end of their period of remand. In Western Australia, a woman who was certified to be suffering from V.D. could be convicted and imprisoned for a term of up to six months.Police activities have shaped the experiences of prostitutes in less dramatic ways too. Some of these can be illustrated by looking at the policing of prostitution in late nineteenth and early twentieth-century Melbourne. The state's ambivalence towards prostitution also becomes very clear.The police were 'the law' to most women in the trade. In Victoria it was the local beat constables and the plain-clothes constables with whom prostitutes dealt on a day-to-day basis. The 'beat' system had been introduced in Melbourne in the 1850s to regulate the potentially unruly, largely untrained and usually working-class constables. Each constable had a particular route to patrol. He had to walk in the same direction, at a constant speed of about two miles per hour, so that any person requiring assistance would be able to catch him, much as they might catch a bus or tram. If this routine were interrupted, the constable had to remain where needed, reporting the cause of delay as soon as the matter was settled. As the uniformed constables' beats were so predictable, prostitutes could evade them by waiting until they were past and then following at a safe distance at the same speed, soliciting behind their backs. Certainly, prostitutes avoided the constables. 'The uniform men cannot get near to them; they whip up their skirts and away like fury up the lanes', explained one policeman.The plain-clothes constables were less predictable than the uniformed beat constables and therefore they were more difficult to avoid. These men were primarily responsible for the policing of prostitution. Uniformed constables made few arrests for soliciting. Although this discrepancy may be partly explained by the prostitutes' wily avoidance of the regular constables, it also suggests that prostitution was regarded by all police as the plain-clothes men's responsibility. Some uniformed constables may have interpreted advice to caution a prostitute before arresting her as a licence to avoid policing prostitution altogether. It would not be surprising if constables who enjoyed the sexual services of prostitutes in their leisure time were loath to arrest such women when on duty. Many constables came from the same working-class culture as the women, where prostitution was both part of a continuum of young women's sexual activity and a crucial work option in a limited job market; they may have identified with the needs and interests of the women who could have been their sisters, friends and mothers.Even if constables came from a class background similar to that of the women with whom they shared the streets, they were upholding the interests of the state when carrying out their duties. In 1908, in response to complaints about the level of street soliciting, the police clamped down on city brothels. Helped by new legislation against brothel-keeping, the police finally succeeded in moving most of Melbourne's overt brothels out of their traditional location in the north-east corner of the city. However, 'sly brothels' then opened in parts of the city where they had never been before. The way the new brothels were run made it extremely difficult for the police to get evidence to support a charge of keeping a disorderly house. Previously, prostitution carried out in brothels had been regarded as a deviant activity, yet tolerated and acted against only when there was some flagrant offence to the public. After the 1908 campaign, brothels became more clandestine. So a mode of employment for primarily working-class women was being forced into a more and more marginal position. It is possible that the women themselves now came to regard themselves as 'criminals'. This action against the brothels was part of the powerful middle class' wider campaign to set the limits of acceptable behaviour. It was done on the instructions of the Chief Commissioner of Police. Even with the 1907 law, the women in the city brothels would probably have been left in peace by the constables if it had not been for the increasing complaints from the respectable middle class and the ensuing instruction from Chief Commissioner O'Callaghan.
The way in which police activity defended the interests of the middle class is clearly evident in the campaign about 1908-13 to reduce visible street soliciting in Melbourne's salubrious Collins Street East. As the result of numerous complaints, the Chief Commissioner ordered that changes be made to the practices of beat and plain-clothes constables. The police were reluctant to crack down on prostitution in any consistent way, and the Chief Commissioner had to intervene repeatedly to order that the effort should not be merely spasmodic. The upper echelons of the force put even greater effort into convincing the legislature to amend the Police Offences Act in order to give the police more power. The police were clearly trying to construct a moral landscape that satisfied the influential property owners in a respectable district. At the same time they were attempting to maintain a balance that would keep prostitution in existence. The irony was nicely emphasized when Rev. Johnson of Ballarat asked for a police escort on a guided tour of 'the "Grand" houses of ill-fame ... also the lower places and chinese dens etc.', to gather material for a series of lectures on social reform. What the wealthy Collins Street residents wanted was the removal of the rowdy women from their doorsteps, so they contacted the police in the hope of immediate satisfaction. The police were the intermediaries between 'vice' and 'respectable society'. In many other cases people of influence would have contacted Members of Parliament when dissatisfied. The police acted on their behalf, the Chief Commissioner regularly requesting the Chief Secretary to act to amend the law.The tactics that the police used to satisfy the residents and influence the legislators impinged immediately upon the women working in the streets. Although convictions of prostitutes under the laws relating to soliciting and vagrancy were infrequent, the police used these charges to harass women. Many were brought up before the courts, the police knowing full well that few or no convictions would result. On one occasion, Inspecting Superintendent Sainsbury ordered a 'sweep' of the city streets to ensnare as many prostitutes as possible on one night. This tactic was a clear political ploy aimed at getting wider police powers. As Sainsbury explained:
The magistrates can dispose of them as they think fit and whether they convict or not the police cannot be accused of any neglect of duty. The result of such an extensive raid may assist in getting fresh legislation which in my opinion is badly needed.
Twenty-eight women were arrested and forced to appear at the city court on charges of vagrancy. No convictions resulted. Because of this, Sainsbury notified the Chief Commissioner that he would no longer interfere with women working as prostitutes.Nevertheless, soon the police were again harassing the women working the streets. Although the prostitutes were quite aware that conviction was unlikely, the police could clearly make their lives difficult and unpleasant. They responded in a number of ways. Some simply chose to work in localities not receiving special attention from the police. Others more defiantly chose to stay put, but took great pains to avoid confrontation. Sometimes the women would linger until asked to move on, but would then move quietly. Occasionally a woman would confront a constable, perhaps because of anger at frequent harassment or for a little sport with the men who also regularly worked the streets at night. In such cases she might be arrested for abusive language or disorderly behaviour. We cannot know how much of such behaviour was tolerated by the police. Certainly, the defiant women in the following encounter, reported by Constable Spottiswood, knew exactly where they stood in regard to the law:
I said what is your name she said find out. I warned her to keep off Collins St. Const Grant and I then went over to two women who were standing by the monuments opp the treasury hotel, I said get out of this and don't loiter, or I'll deal with you, one said you can't touch us, I said I will, if I find you abusing anybody.
The constables' relations with prostitutes were also influenced by general attitudes towards women. We can get a feel for these attitudes by looking at the evidence police gave to a 1909 inquiry into the desirability of raising the age of consent. Overall, the police reports present an ambivalent attitude towards female sexuality. Most police believed that the age of consent should be raised to 'protect' young women. Some policemen thought that greater legal protection was needed to prevent young women becoming victims of seduction. However, there was also a lurking sense that young women needed to be protected from themselves, from their own strong sexual desires that developed at puberty. The belief in an assertive, and consequently dangerous, female sexuality was only expressed fully in a few police reports, but interestingly enough, these were written by policemen who had considerable contact with prostitution. They showed little sympathy for women in prostitution or understanding of the environmental factors contributing to prostitution. Of particular interest are the reports of Constable Sharpe and Senior Constable Sims from Carlton, an inner-city area where prostitution was common. These men perceived women as having an aggressive, powerful sexuality. Sims especially found this fearful and believed youthful female sexuality to be purely destructive. The prime cause of prostitution, he believed, was women's lustfulness; and many youthful sexual encounters were the result of women seducing men. He believed the age of consent should be raised to twenty in order to protect girls as much as possible from their own desire. Clearly, then, although all girls experienced these powerful urges, womankind was divided into those who 'fell', before gaining rational control over their impulses at some magic age, and those who remained virtuous to become good wives. These police seem to have absorbed a negative image of women working as prostitutes as deviant, as 'damned whores'. They would in all likelihood have treated them as such. Women working as prostitutes in Carlton while Sims and Sharpe were stationed there were unlikely to have been treated with much respect or sympathy by the police. So in this specific situation we can at least begin to envisage what the contact between prostitutes and police might have been like at the time.
Some broad features of the relationship between prostitution and the state have been constant throughout the history of prostitution in Australia. Debate and policy continue to be powerfully influenced by the contradiction between the desire to repress prostitution and the desire to retain access to prostitutes for men. The failure of the Victorian government to introduce the reforms to the prostitution law proposed by its 1986 Inquiry into Prostitution is evidence of this. Only when the lives and working conditions of women in the prostitution industry are made the central concern will radical change be possible.Although the state did not eliminate prostitution, its increasing intervention into prostitutes' daily lives had far-reaching effects on the structure of the industry. Everywhere, prostitution had to become more clandestine, if the women were to remain independent. Judith Allen has argued that state intervention brought fundamental changes in the Sydney prostitution scene. The police were widely bought-off by organized crime figures, who thus gained a hold over the industry. Small-time streetwalkers were forced out, to be replaced by larger brothels and massage parlours in the main red-light district of King's Cross. Links were established between prostitution and drugs, with the eventual result that many prostitutes were drug-addicted women. Allen's work and overseas evidence permits us to imagine how these changes may have affected the way women working in the industry experienced their work. Women working under an employer's thumb in a brothel or massage parlour would have less control than if they were working for themselves. They might lose the right to choose not to work, to reject men they did not want to go with, to select the hours they worked and the environment they worked in; and in many places a customer who paid for a particular service would be entitled to it, even if it was repugnant to the woman. Not all women were subjected to this kind of control. In Victoria, for example, a surprisingly large number of women have continued to work inconspicuously from their homes in the suburbs, taking in a limited number of regular clients. But in the red-light districts the police presence encouraged the development of more centrally controlled arrangements.At all times, how far women were able to avoid police harassment depended on their position in the industry and the class of their clients. Although the view of prostitutes as 'damned whores' suggested that all were alike, this was never the case. Prostitution took different forms in specific situations, and the industry had its own class structure, mirroring that of the wider society. Always the working-class street prostitute was most visible and most vulnerable to police harassment. It was mainly prostitutes of this class who were cleared off the streets into the factory-like brothels and massage parlours described above.Alongside this form of prostitution, however, there were more elite operations. In nineteenth-century Victoria some of the most notorious high-class brothels were those near Melbourne's Parliament House. These places flourished on a clientele of well-heeled men and members of the legislature; there was a scandal in the early 1890s when the parliamentary mace disappeared, and was allegedly found later in one of these brothels. At the upper end of the social scale, prostitution merged into relationships that had many of the qualities of traditional bourgeois marriage. The kept mistress, most genteel of all, was expected to remain faithful to her gentleman benefactor as long as he continued to support her.The state effectively turned a blind eye to high-class prostitution. Women working in the better brothels were unlikely to be picked up soliciting on the street; they met their clients indoors. Those who worked from private houses were similarly hard to detect, unless the neighbours turned them in. Most recently, the state has made no attempt to target the activities of the mushrooming 'escort agencies' that provide well-dressed, well-spoken young companions for businessmen and government officials visiting cities such as Melbourne and Canberra.
State intervention has reinforced the differences within the industry. Street prostitution and the more blatant forms of soliciting have been increasingly confined to the unofficial red-light districts, and even there are subjected to periodic police blitzes. Mass-production massage parlours and brothels have grown up in these areas to service a primarily working-class clientele. In the meantime the more discreet forms of prostitution have flourished. So, at the end of the process, the middle class has its moral landscape (as long as middle-class people avoid walking in the red-light districts) and men still have access to prostitutes whose attributes and prices fit their own station in life. The casualties have been the women themselves and popular confidence in the honesty of the police.