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Between 1885 and 1960, laws and policies designed to repress prostitution dramatically shaped London´s commercial sex industry. This book examines how laws translated into street-level reality, explores how women who sold sex experienced criminalization, and charts the complex dimensions of the underground sexual economy in the modern metropolis.

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List of Figures Acknowledgements Introduction: Criminalizing Commercial Sex Selling sex: Women, Work, and Prostitution Buying Sex: Men and the Marketplace The Crusade Begins: The Criminal Law Amendment Act and London´s ´Brothels´ Before the First World War Women in Public and Public Women: Controlling Street Prostitution 1887-1914 ´Down on Whores´ and ´Living on the Earnings´: Violence, Vulnerability and the Law after 1885 White Slaves and Alien Prostitutes: Trafficking, Protection, and Punishment in the Early Twentieth Century Making War, Taking Fingerprints, and Challenging the Law: Policy Changes and Public Debates after 1914 Behind Closed Doors: Off-Street Commercial Sex in the Interwar Years Sex, War, and Syndication: Organized Prostitution and the Second World War The Shame of London: Prostitution and Panic in the Post-War Metropolis Risking the Dangers: Reconsidering Commercial Sex in ´Permissive Britain´ Conclusion Appendix Notes Bibliography Index

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JULIA LAITE Lecturer in Modern British History at Birkbeck College, University of London, UK. She has published several articles on prostitution in Britain and is presently researching women´s migration, sexual labour, and human trafficking in the twentieth century world.

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