18th century Anthropologist
Stanley Diamond comments that prostitution was encouraged in
Dahomey as it was a form of acquiring tax revenue in the state.
Archibald Dalzel documented in 1793 that prostitutes were distributed by the civil power throughout various villages at a price that was set by civil decree. It was the responsibility of prostitutes to provide services to anyone who could afford the fee. During the
Annual Customs of Dahomey, prostitutes paid taxes. J. A. Skertchly wrote in 1874 that prostitutes were licensed by the
King of Dahomey. According to
Dervish Ismail Agha, in the
Dellâkname-i Dilküşâ, the
Ottoman archives, in the
Turkish baths, the masseurs were traditionally
young men who helped wash clients by soaping and scrubbing their bodies. They also were referred to as
sex workers. The
Ottoman texts describe who they were, their prices, how many times they could bring their customers to
orgasm, and the details of their sexual practices. In the 18th century, presumably in
Venice, prostitutes started using
condoms made with catgut or cow bowel.
19th century illustrating his then very controversial novel
Albertine about the life of a prostitute. In North America, prostitution was seen as a "necessary evil" that aided in marital fidelity, especially as a system that would allow men to obtain sex when their wives did not desire it. D'Emilio and Freedman document that prostitution was not a crime in the early part of the 19th century, and thus brothels (or bawdy houses) were tolerated in American cities and the laws against individual prostitutes were enforced only occasionally. In the 1830s, prostitution was becoming more visible in North-American cities, and with the professionalization of police forces, visible prostitutes such as streetwalkers risked arrest. But D'Emilio and Freedman note that raids on brothels were comparatively rare, and prostitution was tolerated in mining towns, cattle towns, and urban centers in the American east. In 1870, prostitution was legalized and regulated in the city of
St. Louis, Missouri. Prostitutes were licensed by public health officials and were required to maintain weekly inspections for sexually transmitted diseases. However, due to protests and demonstrations organized by women and members of the clergy, Missouri legislators repealed the legislation allowing regulated prostitution. The
Page Act of 1875 was passed by the US Congress and forbid any importation of women for the purpose of prostitution. The national move to criminalize prostitution was led by Protestant middle-class men and women who participated in the revivalism movement of the 19th century. Many of the women who posed in 19th- and early-20th-century
vintage erotica were prostitutes. The most famous were the
New Orleans women who posed for
E. J. Bellocq. In the 19th century legalized prostitution became a public controversy as France and then the United Kingdom passed the
Contagious Diseases Acts. This legislation mandated pelvic examinations for suspected prostitutes. It applied not only to the United Kingdom and France but also to their overseas colonies. Many other European countries used the so called
Regulation System of registration of regular control of licensed prostitutes during the 19th century. Many early
feminists fought to repeal these laws, either on the grounds that prostitution should be illegal and therefore not government regulated or because it forced degrading medical examinations upon women. A similar situation existed in the
Russian Empire. This included prostitutes operating out of government-sanctioned brothels given yellow internal passports signifying their status and were subjected to weekly physical exams.
Leo Tolstoy's novel
Resurrection describes legal prostitution in 19th-century Russia. During the 19th century, the British in
India began to adopt the policy of social segregation, but they continued to keep their brothels full of Indian women. In the 19th and early 20th centuries there was a network of
Chinese and Japanese prostitutes being
trafficked across Asia, in countries such as China, Japan,
Korea, Singapore and
British India, in what was then known as the "Yellow Slave Traffic". There was also a network of European prostitutes being
trafficked to India,
Ceylon, Singapore, China, and Japan around the same time, this known as the "White Slave Traffic". The most common destination for European prostitutes in Asia were the British colonies of India and Ceylon, where hundreds of women and girls from
continental Europe and Japan were raped by British soldiers.
Mining camps The houses of prostitution found in every mining camp worldwide were famous, especially in the 19th century when long-distance imports of prostitutes became common. Entrepreneurs set up shops and businesses to cater to the miners, and brothels were largely tolerated in mining towns.
Prostitution in the American West was a growth industry that attracted sex workers from around the globe where they were pulled in by the money, despite the harsh and dangerous working conditions and low prestige. Chinese women were frequently sold by their families and taken to the camps as prostitutes and were often forced to send their earnings back to the family in China. In Virginia City, Nevada, a prostitute,
Julia Bulette, was one of the few who achieved "respectable" status. She nursed victims of an influenza epidemic, earning her acceptance in the community and the support of the sheriff. The townspeople were shocked when she was murdered in 1867 and they honoured her with a lavish funeral and hanging of her assailant. Until the 1890s, madams predominately ran the businesses, after which male pimps took over. This led to a general decline in the treatment of women. It was not uncommon for brothels in Western towns to operate openly, without the stigma that was beginning to emerge in East Coast cities as a result of anti-prostitution activism. Gambling and prostitution were central to life in these western towns, and only later, as the female population increased, reformers moved in and other civilizing influences arrived, did prostitution become less blatant and less common. After a decade or so the mining towns attracted respectable women who ran boarding houses, organized church societies, and worked as laundresses and seamstresses, all while striving for independent status. Australian mining camps had a well-developed system of prostitution. City fathers sometimes tried to confine the practice to red-light districts. The precise role prostitution played in various camps depended on the sex ratio in specific population groups of colonial society as well as racial attitudes toward non-whites. In the early 19th century British authorities decided it was best to have lower-class white, Asian, Middle Eastern, and Aboriginal women service the prisoners and thereby keep the peace while maintaining strong class lines that isolated British gentlemen and ladies from the lower elements. Prostitution was so profitable that it was easy to circumvent the legal boundaries. When Australians took control by 1900 they wanted a "white Australia" and tried to exclude or expel non-white women who might become prostitutes. However, feminist activists fought against Australia's discriminatory laws that led to varying levels of rights for women, races, and classes. By 1939 new attitudes toward racial harmony began to surface. These were inspired by white Australians to rethink their racist policies and adopt more liberal residency laws that did not focus on sexual or racial issues. Latin American mining camps also had well-developed systems of prostitution. In Mexico the government tried to protect and idealize middle-class women but made little effort to protect prostitutes in the mining camps. In 20th-century African mining camps, prostitution followed the historical patterns developed in the 19th century. They added the theme of casual temporary marriages.
20th century 1914–1950s During World War I, in the colonial Philippines, U.S. Armed Forces developed a prostitute management program called the "American Plan" which enabled the military to arrest any woman within five miles of a military cantonment. If found infected, a woman could be sentenced to a hospital or a farm colony until cured. Beginning in the 1910s and continuing in some places into the 1950s, the American Plan operated in the United States. Women were told to report to a health officer where they were coerced to submit to an invasive examination. Immigrants, minorities, and the poor were primarily targeted. In 1921, the
International Convention for the Suppression of the Traffic in Women and Children was signed. In this convention, some nations declared reservations about prostitution. The leading theorists of
communism opposed prostitution.
Karl Marx thought of it as "only a specific expression of the general prostitution of the laborer", and considered its abolition to be necessary to overcome capitalism.
Friedrich Engels considered even marriage as a form of prostitution, and
Vladimir Lenin found sex work distasteful. Communist governments often took wide-ranging steps to repress prostitution immediately after obtaining power, although the practice always persisted. In the countries that remained nominally communist after the end of the Cold War, especially China, prostitution remained illegal but was nonetheless common. In many current or former communist countries, the economic depression brought about by the collapse of the Soviet Union led to an increase in prostitution. During
World War II,
Japanese soldiers engaged in
forced prostitution during their invasions across East Asia and Southeast Asia. The term "
comfort women" became a
euphemism for the estimated 200,000 mostly Korean and Chinese women who were forced into prostitution in
Japanese military brothels during the war.
1950s–2000s Sex tourism emerged in the late 20th century as a controversial aspect of Western tourism and
globalization. Sex tourism was typically undertaken internationally by tourists from wealthier countries. Author
Nils Ringdal alleged that three out of four men between the ages of 20 and 50 who have visited Asia or Africa have paid for sex. A new legal approach to prostitution emerged at the end of the 20th century, termed
the Swedish model. This included the prohibition of buying, but not selling, sexual services. This means that only the client commits a crime in engaging in paid sex, not the prostitute. Such laws were enacted in Sweden (1999), Norway (2009), Iceland (2009), Canada (2014), Northern Ireland (2015), France (2016), and the Republic of Ireland (2017), and are also being considered in other jurisdictions.
21st century In the 21st century,
Afghans revived a method of prostituting young boys, which is referred to as
bacha bazi. When the
Soviet Union broke up, thousands of Eastern European women became prostitutes in China, Western Europe, Israel, and Turkey every year. There are tens of thousands of women from eastern Europe and Asia working as prostitutes in
Dubai. Men from
Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates form a large proportion of the customers. India's
devadasi girls are forced by their poor families to dedicate themselves to the
Hindu goddess
Renuka. The BBC wrote in 2007 that devadasis are "sanctified prostitutes". In Germany, attempts to develop a comprehensive framework for prostitution in 2017 have been met by fierce opposition from sex workers, with less than 1% of the prostitutes submitting to their registration duty. ==United States==