Overview

This critical sourcebook compiles excerpts from the extensive interviews undertaken by the Wolfenden Committee on the subject of prostitution. The Committee is remembered, first and foremost, for recommending the decriminalization of sex between men. However, the other half of its remit—prostitution—has largely been forgotten, despite the fact that prostitution, not homosexuality, was the original impetus behind the Committee’s appointment. If we consider the Committee and its Report from this perspective, its status as both a liberal and permissive endeavour must be called into question. This book captures the controversy, diversity and complexity of opinions surrounding prostitution in this period, and provides critical analysis and context. It restores the question of prostitution to its central place in the history of Britain’sso-called progressive era and challenges the way that the Report and its legacy have been characterized. Crucially, this book highlights the substantial evidence gathered by the Committee on prostitution outside of London, which the Wolfenden Report itself largely disregarded. The excerpts, the reprinted report, and the critical introductions to each chapter are intended to spark important debates amongst students, researchers and the public about the history of sexuality, society and the state in twentieth-century Britain. 

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9781137440204

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Reviews

“This volume remains an essential reading for those wanting to know more about prostitution and the opinions surrounding it in liberal Britain. By making these sources available, Caslin and Laite give a much more nuanced picture of what the police, the magistrates, the civil society, academics and social workers thought of prostitution at the time, than what a study limited to the Wolfenden official report could have ever offered us.” (Marion Pluskota, Journal of British Studies, Vol. 60 (4), October, 2021)

This volume remains an essential reading for those wanting to know more about prostitution and the opinions surrounding it in liberal Britain. By making these sources available, Caslin and Laite give a much more nuanced picture of what the police, the magistrates, the civil society, academics and social workers thought of prostitution at the time, than what a study limited to the Wolfenden official report could have ever offered us. (Marion Pluskota, Journal of British Studies, Vol. 60 (4), October, 2021)

Author Information

Julia Laite, is Reader in Modern History at the Department of History, Classics and Archaeology at Birkbeck, University of London, UK. She researches and teaches on the history of women, crime, sexuality and migration in the nineteenth and twentieth-century British world. She is the author of Common Prostitutes and Ordinary Citizens: Commercial Sex in London (Palgrave, 2012), and The Girl Who Disappears: Sex, Work and Crime in the Early Twentieth Century World (forthcoming in 2021). Samantha Caslin, is Lecturer in History at the Department of History at the University of Liverpool, UK. She researches and teaches modern British history, with particular interests in gender history, prostitution and policy, and feminism. She recently published Save the Womanhood: Vice, Urban Immorality and Social Control in Liverpool, c.1900–1976 (2018).

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