“Before 1980, the prostitute was ‘pornographic,’” states Timothy Guilfoyle in his review essay on the historiography of prostitution (“Prostitution in History,” American Historical Review [1999]: 117). The subject has now become academically respectable. Since the 1980s, there have been numerous studies of prostitution and prostitutes reflecting the changing landscape of social and cultural history and the development of women's and gender history. Sexuality, particularly as associated with prostitution, morality, and health, became a subject of political campaigning, by women and men, and helped shape the individual's relationship to the state. In the 1980s and 1990s, much of the history of prostitution focused on the attempts made to control it, regulate it, protect public morality, and secure social order. These earlier works by Ida Blom, Mary Gibson, and Jill Harsin, and particularly that of Judith Walkowitz, also show women who worked as prostitutes to be dynamic figures who exerted some agency in their own lives. More recent studies of prostitution, such as those by Philip Howell, Philippa Levine, Luise White, Yvonne Svanstrom, Victoria Harris, Gail Hershatter, and myself, situate commercial sex within the contexts of social, political, religious, and economic developments. It is now recognized that sex, gender, class, and race shape and shaped commercial sex. The practices of prostitution, its relationship to power and authority, the politics of sexuality, the diversity of the experience of prostitutes, the ways in which venereal diseases have shaped public health policy, and the impact of international debates on issues such as trafficking and the rights of women and children, together with the impact of regulation on the colonies, suggest how these new histories of prostitution are reshaping our understanding of the impact of what is never simply an act of sexual commerce.

Julia Laite's study adds considerably to our understanding of prostitution in London between 1885 and 1960. She argues that prostitution was woven into the fabric of space, culture, and the economy of the city and that its geography was always more diverse than contemporaries or historians have admitted. This was a city that attracted all kinds of individuals, and prostitution was an enterprise not only hidden away in dark alleys but also rather part of the city's entertainment and leisure industry. Both world wars saw an influx of buyers into the city in the army of soldiers recreating or working there. Indeed, Laite shows that soldier clients played an important role in shaping attitudes toward commercial sex.

Laite provides insight into the everyday lives of women working as prostitutes. Courts sometimes refused to compel married men to support their children when a wife had deserted with the children and was earning her living on the street. Crusades to close down brothels merely drove the women to other parts of the city, making many homeless in the process. Violence was always on the edge of and sometimes central to this world. The murders of women in the Whitechapel area of the city were particularly brutal, but as Laite shows, these were not isolated incidents, with violent assaults and attempted and actual murders of prostitutes continuing throughout the period. Laite also provides a discussion of the clients of prostitutes, a particularly difficult subject to research. There was a range of ways in which society attempted to understand the clientele. While there was little research into the clients of prostitutes after the 1940s, one psychologist, T. C. N. Gibbens, investigating the phenomenon in the 1950s, surprisingly argued that the most compulsive clients of female prostitutes were “closet homosexuals” (47).

Anxieties about prostitution, its existence and prevalence, surfaced in waves. Brothels faced severe repression after the introduction of the Criminal Law Amendment Act (1885), when local authorities and religious groups and organizations sought to close brothels. But women soon found ways around the legislation, and a legal loophole allowed single women to occupy a flat and work out of it, and thus it could not be assumed that she managed a brothel. The changing architecture of the city, the building of multiple-dwelling mansion blocks, brought a new resource that women utilized to engage in prostitution. From the 1950s attitudes toward prostitution became more hardened, and Laite argues convincingly that the loss of empire; anxieties about gender, class, and race; the new welfare state; and colonial emigration within the context of celebratory civic events such as the coronation and the festival of Britain saw greater intolerance to prostitution. The media, itself evolving rapidly in this period, brought greater public attention to the subject. From 1959 legislation provided harsher penalties for soliciting, and greater control was exerted over commercial sex just at the time when, ironically, Britain was becoming more permissive.

This book is particularly strong on exploring the rise of commercial sex in the period and the ways in which it was shaped by legislation, which in turn was formed by social crusaders and local authorities. Women working as prostitutes became increasingly subjects of coordinated crime control, but the world of commercial sex was/is always able to reorganize itself around legislative limitations. Laite also shows how the women themselves negotiated their own lives and their work within processes of criminalization. This is a thorough and engaging history of its subject, offering historical insight into not only the issue of prostitution but also the powerful argument that until the public, legislators, policy makers, and academics accept historical insights into prostitution, how it was repressed, what it offered women who engaged in this world, and how it was shaped by policy and legislative initiatives, society as a whole will remain blind to the impact of law and policy, unable to see how real change can be effected in this social and commercial world.