Abstract
In this novel history of debates surrounding the matter of prostitution over roughly the last one hundred and fifty years, Michele Renée Greer sets out to explicate the complex relationships within and between groups that sought to abolish prostitution and those that advocated for the prostitutes’ emancipation. The former, the “abolitionist” or anti-prostitution movement, sees prostitution as gender-based violence, while the latter, the sex worker movement, lobbies for decriminalization of commercial sex. Greer does not aim to valorize one group over the other, no matter their ideological camp. In fact, it is feelings—not ideologies—that bind and break the groups which the author reframes as “emotional communities.” The historic role of these emotional communities in the evolution of feminist protest politics thus emerges while, at the same time, a new historiographic methodology, namely “history of emotions,” is applied is an analytical tool to unpack the theories and practices of the “abolitionist style.” The long and complex fight to end prostitution unfolds over six chapters, each one a historical case study of a community defined by its own emotional discourse: the Moral Liberals, the Purity Crusaders, the Maternal Feminists, select post-World War 2 groups, the Radical Feminists, the Social Regulators, and the Survivors.
Mid-nineteenth century Britain saw the advent of the Moral Liberals, the first of the abolitionist emotional communities, whose activism was fueled by a range of emotions from moral indignation to fear of the state's legislative intrusion into the privacy of women's bodies. Motivated by the same anti-aristocratic emotional outlook as their working-class adherents, their campaign to repeal the “Contagious Diseases Act” fought the State's idea of the prostitute as inevitably lower class and a dangerous carrier of venereal disease who required increased monitoring and control. In their protest against police enactment of this legislation, the Moral Liberals were supported by leading intellectuals like John Stuart Mill who wrote in 1870: “I do not think the abuses of power by the police mere accidents which could be prevented” (p. 22). One decade later, the Purity Crusaders gained prominence as a rival emotional community in Britain, rousing “moral shock” and social anxiety over the fear of degeneracy and “white slavery”—the sex trafficking of white, non-foreign girls and women. While they did combat multiple forms of prostitution, the Purity Crusaders style of “moral panic” resulted, in part, in the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885 which aimed to prevent the sexual exploitation of children. In reality, the law “further criminaliz[ed] sex work and extend[ed] the laws against male homosexuality which would land Oscar Wilde in prison a decade later” (p. 39). Finally, the Maternal Feminists, as early experts on gendered emotions, upheld the ideal of a unique “motherly love” while fighting an array of double moral standards, “permissible male and condemnable female sexuality” (p. 65) in particular. As their feelings of righteous indignation transformed over time into feminist anger, their activism challenged the state's “medico-police” regulation of prostitution and the fundamental paternalism of the Industrial Revolution.
Much as the twentieth century moved away from the Victorian era's preoccupation with morality and toward a psychological perspective on sexuality, so too the emotional communities of the nineteenth century shifted to emotional patterns and understanding of self and other. Yet the abolitionist cause persisted, with emotion driving both group and gender-based knowledge. New connections between trafficking, gender-based violence and sexual inequality saw activists reframe prostitution as an international feminist concern. The Radical Feminists, an emotional community rooted in the American anti-pornography movement of the 1970s, viewed prostitution as sexual slavery reflecting the structural commodification of women by men. They crafted collective political action that aimed for an entirely new feminist epistemology, with an emotional style that transformed rage, frustration and resentment into desire for connection. From the 1980s onward, the Social Regulators reified the emotions of shame, guilt and fear of humiliation to boost state regulation of prostitution—not of the prostitutes themselves but those who purchase sex from them. Like the nineteenth century's Moral Liberals, this emotional community valued rules designed to enhance the common good. Finally, and currently, the abolitionist emotional community of Survivors has emerged from women's “shared and yet individually lived injury caused by an experience in prostitution” (p. 133). While they may overlap with the Radical Feminists, the #MeToo story-telling approach of the Survivors has mobilized a new public acceptance of emotions, namely righteous indignation and compassion.
Packed with research from primary sources in Europe and the United States, Greer presents six “case studies” of social movements which, from mid-nineteenth century Britain to the USA in the early twenty-first century, advocated for the abolition of prostitution. Though she remains “dubious of the static genealogical link drawn between the abolitionists of the past and the abolitionists of today” (p. 151), nevertheless her overarching “history of emotions” template does build such a link. Effectively de-marginalizing emotions, Michele Renée Greer thus advances a new way of looking at the value-laden history of protest politics surrounding prostitution.
