Content area
Full Text
In the construction of social problems , rhetoric often outweighs data. This is especially true in the history of prostitution. Historically and today, US policies and practices directed at prostitution have systematically ignored structural factors in favor of pathologizing individuals and social groups associated with sex work. Such policies and practices are rooted in misconceptions about prostitution that emerged in the early twentieth century in the United States as a response to social anxieties over shifting economic structures, challenges to previously held ideas about female sexual agency, and patterns of migration and immigration specifically as they relate to race.
This article concerns the existence of tropes in the history of prostitution that coalesce in this earlier period but persist into the present. We identify two major axes around which these tropes operate: race as a line of worthiness and the prostitute as an economic actor. Criminal justice approaches to prostitution disproportionately impact communities of color and other marginalized groups. The failure to recognize sex work as a form of labor situates sex workers as morally deficient. We argue that the historical roots of these ideas can be found in the early twentieth-century reform efforts directed at prostitution. The first part of this article mines archival data to reveal the foundation of these tropes with rich empirical historical detail. The second part of the paper establishes their continued presence in the contemporary period. The degree to which these historical tropes continue to inform contemporary discursive practices allows us to ignore both the structural conditions and the underlying resilience of sex workers.
For the historical foundation, we use reanalysis of archival data from Katharine Bement Davis, founding superintendent of the New York State Reformatory for Women at Bedford (hereinafter Bedford), which has played a central role in the formation of US womens corrections and social reform as well as prostitution policy and research. Davis arrived at Bedford with an advanced degree in political economy and an emphasis on scientific investigation into female delinquency (Rosenberg 1982, 197-99; Sealander 1997, 160). By the time she left Bedford to assume the position of commissioner of corrections in New York City, she was widely regarded as a leading authority on female delinquency and penal reform (Fitzpatrick 1990, 92). Bedford, established in...