THE WORST CLASS OF WORKERS:

MIGRATION, LABOR RELATIONS AND LIVING STRATEGIES

OF PROSTITUTES AROUND 1900

Lex Heerma van Voss

Only a couple of decades ago, labor history had a clear subject: male indus-
trial workers in developed capitalist countries, who were fully engaged in
wage work. Labor history was the story of their struggle through unions
and political parties to improve their working and living conditions. This
interpretation was criticized fijirst by feminist historians, who pointed
out that women should be brought into this story, and that bringing in
women points to diffferent occupations, diffferent struggles, and other
forms of organization.1
Over the past two decades, labor history has been broadened even fur-
ther, as labor historians realized that several other parts of the traditional
defijinition of their subject and their traditional story were an indefensible
limitation. Not only were workers not exclusively males but also females;
they were also not as individualistic as they had been perceived—they
belonged to families, were in need of reproductive labor to survive, and
often were employed not as individuals but in groups. They were not only
or even typically employed as industrial wage workers, but also in services
and in agriculture, and, for instance, as unfree or semi-free workers. They
may prefer other forms of organization than trade unions or political par-
ties, and their struggle may take other forms than striking and voting. In
short, they may have living strategies which difffer from the traditional
script that labor historians were looking for. These may include setting
up private businesses, illegal activities, or migrating to places that offfer
better working and living conditions, or seem to do so. And the majority
of them had to live, work and struggle for change outside of the devel-
oped capitalist countries.2 In what follows, I want to consider whether
this approach is helpful in analyzing the working conditions and living

1
 To quote just one example from an immense body of literature: Alice Kessler-Harris,
Gendering Labor History (Urbana and Chicago, 2007).
2
 Jan Lucassen (ed.) Global Labour History. A State of the Art (Bern etc., 2006); Marcel
van der Linden and Jan Lucassen, Prolegomena for a Global Labour History (Amsterdam
1999) (also at <http://www.iisg.nl/publications/prolegom.pdf>).

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 154 lex heerma van voss

strategies of prostitutes in six non-European towns, in the period between

roughly 1875 and 1940.
The towns selected are Nairobi, Buenos Aires, Shanghai, Mexico City,
Bombay and San Francisco. None of these was part of the core area of
global capitalism at the time under consideration, but all of them were
in intense contact with this core, and the labor conditions and labor rela-
tions in prostitution were influenced by this global entanglement. These
six towns were also selected because monographs on the local history of
prostitution were available which supplied the necessary data.3 The com-
parison deals with labor relations within prostitution, but also with the
position of women more generally: in migration, on the labor market out-
side of prostitution, and in the family.
Each of the six towns started the period with tolerating prostitution. In
all towns, diffferent forms of prostitution were found, but the forms locally
available difffered from town to town. Usually a hierarchy was felt between
diffferent forms of prostitution. In some towns, the top of the hierarchy
was formed by a more or less respected sort of prostitution, like courte-
sans. Types often found were prostitutes working in brothels, from their
private rooms and streetwalkers. Of these forms, brothels had the clearest
location. They were sometimes licensed, therefore subject to registration
by the authorities, and retrievable in historical records. This is the form of
prostitution that is therefore most studied by historians.4
The top layer of courtesans and well paid prostitutes had considerable
control over working conditions, and was often able to end their career
with a good marriage. If they played their cards well, they could thus
achieve an amount of agency that was large for women in their societies
and enjoy a comfortable standard of living.5 In Shanghai, traditionally,

3
 Luise White, The Comforts of Home. Prostitution in Colonial Nairobi (Chicago and
London, 1990); Donna J. Guy, Sex and Danger in Buenos Aires. Prostitution, Family and
Nation in Argentina (Lincoln and London, 1991); Gail Hershatter, Dangerous Pleasures.
Prostitution and Modernity in Twentieth-Century Shanghai (Berkeley, Los Angeles and
London, 1999); Katherine Elaine Bliss, Compromised Positions. Prostitution, Public Health
and Gender Politics in Revolutionary Mexico City (University Park (Pennsylvania), 2001);
Ashwini Tambe, Codes of Misconduct. Regulating Prostitution in Late Colonial Bombay (New
Delhi, 2009) and Benson Tong, Unsubmissive Women. Chinese Prostitutes in Nineteenth-
Century San Francisco (Norman, 1994). Other relevant literature on prostitution in these
towns includes: Christian Henriot, Belles de Shanghai. Prostitution et sexualité en Chine aux
XIX e–XX e siècles (Paris, 1997) and Jacqueline Baker Barnhart, The Fair but Frail: Prostitution
in San Francisco, 1849–1900 (Reno, 1986).
4
 Guy, Sex and Danger, pp. 90, 118.
5
 Hershatter, Dangerous Pleasures, p. 64.

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 the worst class of workers 155

courtesan houses were very visible. The existence of courtesans was

“not furtive or stigmatized. When a new brothel opened or a courtesan
changed houses or professional names (. . .) it was often announced in the
tabloid press (. . .) Brothels also advertised in the newspaper”.6 In Bombay,
the top layer of courtesans had a similar position.7 The top segments of
brothels often also offfered other services beyond sex, like food, music or
educated company.
Below this top group, the hierarchy was often less clear. Streetwalk-
ing is often seen as the most vulnerable form of prostitution. However,
whether prostitutes working in brothels were really better offf than those
working the street depended on circumstances that difffered from place to
place and from time to time. Streetwalkers were often harassed by police
offfijicers, but were in a better position to refuse going with clients whom
they did not trust. Prostitutes working in brothels were more vulnerable to
pressure from brothel owners to accept customers whom they would have
preferred to turn down. Women working from their homes or in brothels
were sometimes also in a weaker position vis-à-vis customers who refused
to pay for services rendered. To avoid confronting neighbors with their
activities, prostitutes might prefer not to quarrel with customers. Fauzia
Abdullah, a prostitute working in the Pumwani neighborhood of Nairobi
from the mid-1920s, explained this problem as follows: “I mean that my
people, the Muslim people here in Nairobi, often knew that a woman was
a prostitute but she will have their respect as long as she doesn’t bring
this to their attention.”8
Besides women working regularly as prostitutes, some women would
supplement their main individual or family income with casual prostitu-
tion. Fulltime prostitutes with a certain amount of craft pride would look
down on these occasional prostitutes, but others might well have thought
them morally slightly above their professional sisters.
In the period under consideration, government attitudes towards pros-
titution changed. At the start of our period, in the middle of the 19th
century, the relevant governments either condoned prostitution, or regu-
lated it with the intention of curbing sexually transmitted diseases. Where
prostitution was regulated, women were licensed to work as prostitutes,
and they were often required to undergo regular medical inspections.

6
 Hershatter, Dangerous Pleasures, pp. 72–3.
7
 Tambe, Codes of Misconduct, pp. xxii–xxiii.
8
 White, Comforts of Home, p. 59.

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 156 lex heerma van voss

In Britain, the Contagious Diseases Acts of the 1860s allowed the police
in towns with army or navy establishments to arrest prostitutes, and have
them checked for venereal diseases. Arrangements for health checks were
also introduced in many British colonies. In metropolitan Britain, public
opinion came to consider such medical checks distasteful and objected to
the double standard they embodied, as male clients were left untouched.
The Contagious Diseases Acts were repealed in 1886, but licensed brothels
and health checks remained common practice in many colonies.9
The campaign to repeal the Contagious Diseases Acts broadened into
other aspects of prostitution. From the 1870s, it embodied the idea that
girls and young women were kidnapped and lured into prostitution against
their will. Although reports of white slavery were much exaggerated,
the abolitionists succeeded in getting the age of consent for girls raised
from thirteen to sixteen. From 1885, brothels were prosecuted, and the
police cracked down on streetwalkers soliciting clients.10 This campaign
reverberated internationally: the licensing of brothels came under attack,
and over the next decades, many countries repealed licensing systems,
and prohibited procuring, pimping and soliciting. The campaign against
white slavery culminated in three international treaties (in 1904, 1910 and
1921) and an immense investigation by a special Expert Committee of the
League of Nations in 1924–1927. The Committee interviewed 6,500 indi-
viduals in 28 countries. It failed to prove the existence of a large network
of procurers luring European girls into prostitution. Where it established
the existence of international migration of European women to work as
prostitutes elsewhere, this concerned women who had already worked as
prostitutes in their home countries and who expected better earnings in
a foreign town.11 Even if in reality hardly any trafffijicking in white slaves
could be proven, the international campaign against it still contributed to
measures repressing prostitution.

 9
 Philippa Levine, Prostitution, Race & Politics. Policing Venereal Disease in the British
Empire (London, 2003); Philip Howell, Geographies of Regulation. Policing Prostitution in
Nineteenth-Century Britain and the Empire (Cambridge, 2009).
10
 Judith R. Walkowitz, Prostitution and Victorian Society. Women, Class and the State
(Cambridge, 1980).
11
 Jean-Michel Chaumont, Le mythe de la traite des blanches. Enquête sur la fabrication
d’un fléau (Paris, 2009); Thomas Fischer, “Frauenhandel und Prostitution—das Beispiel
Buenos Aires in den 1920er Jahren,” in Petra Bendel (ed.), Menschen- und Bürgerrechte:
Ideengeschichte und Internationale Beziehungen (Erlangen, 2004), pp. 229–258 (con-
sulted at <www.regionenforschung.uni-erlangen.de/publikationen/dokumente/6/09.pdf> on
4 November 2011).

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 the worst class of workers 157

Prostitution in the six towns

Nairobi was a recently founded colonial administrative and military town.

It drew immigrants from the surrounding areas, where native tribes found
a livelihood in agriculture, especially raising cattle. This hinterland had
been plagued by rinderpest, and social relations had been changed by
increasing monetization, induced by taxes introduced by the British. Pros-
titution in Nairobi took three forms: malaya (prostitutes who received in
their own rooms), watembezi (streetwalkers) and wazi-wazi (working from
a door, a window or a porch). In the wazi-wazi form, women had some-
what more control over who entered as a customer. It was typically used
by daughters helping their parents out. The house where several malaya
prostitutes had their room might be owned by a former prostitute, but it
was not a brothel, and the owner was not a madam. She received rent,
not a share in the prostitute’s income. In the period under consideration,
Kenya followed the Indian Penal Code. Prostitution was not a crime, but
soliciting was. However, prostitution was not very accepted, and all types
of prostitutes tried to be inconspicuous. Black inhabitants of Nairobi were
confijined to two neighborhoods: Punwami and Pangani, where a curfew
was in place.
Buenos Aires drew a large number of European immigrants, and would
be a magnet for any international network of prostitute migration. In
the town, prostitution was practiced in brothels and by streetwalkers.
Licensed brothels were legal businesses from 1875. Later laws regulated
where in town prostitution could be practiced. In 1934 Buenos Aires abol-
ished municipally regulated prostitution.
In Shanghai, the foreign concessions comprised a large part of the sur-
face of the inner town, but the number of resident Westerners was lim-
ited: about 1% of the population. Between 1870 and 1930 Shanghai became
a major economic, political, and cultural center and prostitution changed
from a luxury service by courtesans into a varied market primarily geared
to commercial and working-class immigrants. Prostitutes were found in
diffferent classes of brothels and on the streets. Qing and Republican leg-
islation allowed prostitution, but it forbade procuring and trafffijicking. In
Shanghai, brothels were licensed and taxed. In 1920–1924, a successful
prohibition movement led to the gradual closure of brothels in the Inter-
national Settlement, but this only drove prostitution to the Chinese part
of town and to the French Concession, where prostitution remained legal
and licensed.

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 158 lex heerma van voss

Under the 1872 Reglamento in Mexico City, prostitution was licensed

and prostitutes were registered in an attempt to limit the spread of vene-
real diseases. In 1898, the minimum age was raised from 14 to 16 years.
Brothels of diffferent classes were distinguished, and rules were laid down
for their location. Aisladas, independent women not working in brothels,
could meet their clients wherever they liked. Among its 200,000 female
inhabitants in 1908, it was estimated that Mexico City counted 10,000 reg-
istered prostitutes and as many unregistered clandestinas. Licensing was
suspended in 1940.
In Bombay, prostitution as such was not against the law. Brothels and
streetwalkers operated in the town. From 1867, brothels were licensed
and inspected to curb venereal diseases. From that date, prostitution
by unregistered women became illegal. In 1870, prostitutes were seg-
regated by neighborhood. Over time, rules on holding women against
their will and against trafffijicking were tightened, and from 1926 soliciting
was prohibited.
As regards San Francisco, I do not consider all forms of prostitution, but
only Chinese prostitutes. Both male and female Chinese migrants to San
Francisco predominantly came from peasant families in the Kwantung
area in South China. Chinese males migrated to work on the railroads, in
mines or lumber camps and in various other occupations. If they married
a Chinese woman, they usually did so in China, and their family remained
there. Among the Chinese women who migrated to California, by far the
largest group worked as prostitutes. The fijirst women arrived in the early
1850s and soon set up a number of brothels. From 1854, Chinese prostitu-
tion was run by gangs, the Tong, which bought and sold the women it
brought over. From that moment, Chinese prostitutes were seldom self-
employed, as Euro-American prostitutes in San Francisco were. Chinese
prostitutes worked in the red light district around Dupont Street, and led
a secluded existence, segregated from other Americans. Streetwalking was
rare: the skewed sex ratio in California did not force prostitutes to solicit
clients. Prostitution was outlawed by a 1854 City Ordinance, but this rule
was not enforced. After the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 Chinese migra-
tion to the United States became insignifijicant, and Chinese prostitution
in San Francisco declined.

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 the worst class of workers 159

Other opportunities for women to earn their livelihood

In the historiography of prostitution in countries in the capitalist core,

industrialization has often been regarded as a cause of a rising number of
prostitutes. With industrialization, young working class men and women
left the protection of their family home and migrated towards towns.
There, young women often did not fijind the waged labor they had hoped
for, or the wage was insufffijicient. Girls born to urban working class fami-
lies, too, could not fijind proper paid employment. These women found in
prostitution a solution to make ends meet.12 An example is Shao Meiting, a
woman from the countryside to the South of Shanghai. She found a job in
a cigarette factory in Shanghai, but when the factory folded, she told the
police: “I had no way to support myself, and had to sink to becoming an
unlicensed prostitute. Originally I planned to do it for several months and
then return to the countryside. My parents don’t know I am doing this.”
She declined help to leave prostitution: “I can’t go, because my parents
are old and my sisters are still young, and there is no one at home to take
care of them.”13
Indeed, all six towns surveyed went through a period of fast urban
growth, with either increasing government and military activity, or grow-
ing industrial employment. This meant that there were large numbers of
young men and women migrating to these towns, with the men usually
outnumbering the women. Job opportunities for women were limited.
The lists of waged occupations open to women in the diffferent towns are
remarkably similar. Nairobi was founded in 1899 by the English coloniz-
ers. It had a surplus of white male settlers, and no industrial base, so the
permanent African population, male and female, worked in the service
sector. By 1938, it had a total population of about 65,000, of whom 40,000
were Africans. In that year, there were 8 African men for every African
woman. Of the latter, only 237 were legally employed: 164 in child care,
58 as hospital ward attendant and 15 brewing beer.14 The pattern of

12
 Ruth Rosen, The Lost Sisterhood: Prostitution in America, 1900–1918 (Baltimore and
London, 1982), pp. 3–4; Victoria Harris, Selling Sex in the Reich. Prostitutes in German
Society, 1914–1945 (Oxford, 2010), pp. 46–55.
13
 Quoted in Hershatter, Dangerous Pleasures, p. 195.
14
 White, Comforts of Home, pp. 80, 98. A similar pattern existed in Johannesburg, where
prostitution, laundry work and liquor selling were the main female occupations in 1927
(Kathy Eales, “Popular representations of Black Women on the Rand and their Impact

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 160 lex heerma van voss

women working in domestic care is repeated in the other towns, with

the addition of working in the textile industry. Buenos Aires grew from
180,000 inhabitants in 1869 to 1,4 million in 1914, mainly through inter-
national immigration. In 1869 16% of the female population worked in
textiles, sewing or cigarette manufacturing. Over the following decades
employment in domestic work and the needle trades increased, but not
enough to absorb the influx of women.15 The population of Shanghai grew
from one to three million between 1910 en 1930, mainly through immi-
gration from the Chinese countryside. Men outnumbered women about
4 to 3. The immigrant women worked in manufacturing, especially cot-
ton textiles, as household servants, wet-nurses, itinerant peddlers, and
entertainers.16 Mexico City grew from about 500,000 inhabitants in 1900
to 1.6 million in 1940, mainly through immigration from the Mexican
countryside. Young women outnumbered young men signifijicantly, and
besides in prostitution, they found jobs in laundries, sewing, restaurants
and light manufacturing, but these rarely provided female workers with
a living wage.17 Bombay counted 650,000 inhabitants in 1872, 980,000 in
1906 and 1,5 million by 1941, due to migration from the Indian country-
side. Between 1870 and 1910, men outnumbered women about 5 to 3.18 The
Chinese migration to San Francisco was almost totally male. In 1870, the
2,794 Chinese prostitutes formed 77% of the Chinese women in California.
The other occupations were in declining order of magnitude: laundresses,
miners, servants, seamstresses, cooks and lodging house operators. The
1880 census counted 1,726 Chinese women with a gainful employment in
California: 44% were prostitutes, the other recorded occupations were:
seamstress, servant, laundress, cook, entertainer, laborer, miner and lodg-
ing house operator.19 Male or female surpluses both seem conducive to
large numbers of prostitutes, increasing respectively demand and sup-
ply. What all these situations have in common, is that large numbers of
women could not fijind other employment that paid a living wage.
Not only did prostitution offfer work, it was even often well-paid work,
unless middlemen like the Tong gangs in San Francisco took a large cut.

on the Development of Influx Controls, 1924–1937,” University of Witwatersrand History

Workshop, Structure and Experience in the Making of Apartheid, 6–10 February 1990, p. 8).
15
 Guy, Sex and Danger, pp. 41, 45.
16
 Hershatter, Dangerous Pleasures, p. 40.
17
 Bliss, Compromised Positions, pp. 25–26, 66, 46, 151, 33.
18
 Tambe, Codes of Misconduct, pp. xx, xxiv.
19
 Tong, Unsubmissive Women, p. 30.

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 the worst class of workers 161

Even in rich and developed countries, prostitution offfers an income that

lies well above what women working as a prostitute can earn elsewhere.
As Havelock Ellis observed at the beginning of the 20th century: “no prac-
ticable rise in the rate of wages paid to women in ordinary industries can
possibly compete with the wages which fairly attractive women of quite
ordinary ability can earn by prostitution”.20
Luise White’s study of prostitution in Nairobi offfers us an interesting
view on the origins of the oldest profession in a town which was only
founded in 1899, and where prostitution as an occupation only became
established in the 1910s. She quotes Amina Hali, who was born around
1895, and who described her fijirst contacts as a prostitute:
When we went to pick beans, we sometimes found these Kibura [white]
men, so it was extra money, we went to pick beans and had a man in secret.
Sometimes a woman would go there just for the men, she would take a gun-
nia [gunny sack] so that no one would be suspicious, it looked like she was
going to pick beans but she would use the gunnia as a blanket . . . When they
saw a woman lying on her gunnia they would take out their money, and she
would motion for him to lie down with her. They paid us and sometimes
they gave us babies, so we were rich, we had money and babies that way.21
That the women earned a good income, is confijirmed by a male observer:
I remember seeing Nandi [a Kenyan tribe] women before the German War
[World War I]. They were cutting wood over near Muthiaga and they took
it to Mambase Village to sell. Some of these girls would go . . . with anybody,
even white men and Indians. You could give her anything you wanted—half
a rupee, one rupee—but some men gave a cow or some goats. You know, in
those days a very important African only made Rs. 4 or Rs. 5 a month, and
workers got even less. So these prostitutes really made a lot of money—
more than most men—and they even raised their prices after the German
War. That’s how they came to have so many houses in Pumwani.22
So even here, from the start of the establishment of prostitution and when
it was only a secondary activity besides bean-picking, prostitution paid
relatively well.

20
 Quoted in Lena Edlund and Evelyn Korn, “A Theory of Prostitution,” February 16,
2001, consulted at <http://the-idea-shop.com/papers/prostitution.pdf> [4 November 2011].
21
 White dates this recollection to the years 1909–16, Comforts of Home, p. 41.
22
 Elderly Kikuyu man, interviewed in 1966, quoted in Kenneth G. McVicar, “Twilight
of an East African Slum: Pumwani and the Evolution of African Settlement in Nairobi,”
PhD thesis, University of California, Los Angeles, 1968, pp. 240–1. Here quoted after White,
Comforts of Home, p. 41, who doubts whether ever a cow was traded for intercourse.

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 162 lex heerma van voss

Trafffijicking and other forms of migration

In all six cases, recent immigrants were an important recruiting ground for
prostitution. These were internal migrants in Nairobi, Mexico City, Shang-
hai and Bombay.23 In Buenos Aires, they were mainly foreign immigrants,
but that held true for the population of the town as a whole.24 The Chinese
women who migrated to San Francisco were brought to that town to work
as prostitutes.
Two types of trafffijicking demand our attention here. The fijirst one is
“white” slavery, an idea which led to a moral panic in the West lasting
from the 1870s to the 1920s. This idea was of course inherently racist: the
concern of the activists was not that any girl might be abducted and forced
to work as a prostitute, but that this might happen to Caucasian girls. In
line with this concern, when international concern about white slavery
led to pressure on Bombay police commissioner Stephen M. Edwardes to
act against trafffijicking in European prostitutes, he declared the adjective
“white” incorrect for Bombay, as the women “were chiefly of Eastern Euro-
pean origin”. Catering to anti-Semitic sentiments, Edwardes also reported
repeatedly that many “white” prostitutes were actually Jewish. Clearly,
Mr. Edwardes considered Jews and East Europeans less white than other
whites and trafffijicking in these cases consequently less urgent.25
A global migration network of white prostitutes certainly existed. Euro-
pean prostitutes were available in Mexico City, Shanghai, Bombay and
Buenos Aires.26 In Mexico City, the arrival of French and Jewish pimps
and prostitutes was noted in the 1920s, but by the end of the decade only
1–2% of the registered prostitutes was foreign. In Shanghai, some 8,000
Russian were to be found, their number swollen by refugees from revo-
lutionary Russia, and 2,000 West-European prostitutes. This would mean
that 10–15% of all prostitutes in Shanghai were foreigners. In Bombay,
the percentage declined from about 5% to about 1%. In Buenos Aires,
the number was considerable, but this was in a town were foreign immi-

23
 White, Comforts of Home, pp. 37–9; Bliss, Compromised Positions, pp. 16, 26; Hershat-
ter, Dangerous Pleasures, p. 40; Tambe, Codes of Misconduct, pp. xx, xxiv.
24
 Guy, Sex and Danger, pp. 41–2.
25
 Tambe, Codes of Misconduct, pp. 57–8.
26
 Bliss, Compromised Positions, pp. 91–2, 138–45; Hershatter, Dangerous Pleasures,
pp. 50–3; Tambe, Codes of Misconduct, pp. 57–64, 72; Harald Fischer-Tiné, “ ‘White Women
Degrading Themselves to the Lowest Depths’: European Networks of Prostitution and
Colonial Anxieties in British India and Ceylon ca. 1880–1914,” Indian Economic Social
History Review, 40 (2003), pp. 163–90.

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 the worst class of workers 163

grants constituted a majority of the population as a whole. Until the 1870s,

both upper- and lower class brothels in Buenos Aires featured native-born
women, but from the 1880s French women, or women who posed as such,
set the tone in upper class brothels. The women came from Southern,
Middle and Eastern Europe, partly via Uruguay. An extensive network
of intermediaries was involved in recruiting and shipping these women.
However, they were not the innocent young victims of seducers and kid-
nappers, but seasoned prostitutes who migrated to a promising market,
where their ethnic background sold at a premium. In 1912, the women
who arrived were asked about their previous status, and 70% declared
that they had been prostitutes before. All in all, the number of immigrant
women that might have been misled or forced to come to work as a pros-
titute in Buenos Aires, was extremely small.27
Real trafffijicking existed, with a considerable percentage of women being
sold into prostitution against their will and against their expectations. But
it was not “white,” but Asian. In Shanghai, in Chinese prostitution in San
Francisco and in Bombay, women were led to brothels by false promises
of marriage or employment as mill worker or nanny. In 1928, the Bombay
Vigilance Association intercepted 54 trafffijicked Indian girls, of whom four
had been promised marriage and seven a job. Thirteen were seduced or
kidnapped, en the rest were dedicated by their parents to temples or were
considered a prostitute on the basis of their caste.28
Similar data exist for Shanghai, were just before and after the Chinese
Revolution prostitutes were asked how they had become prostitutes. Her-
shatter reports on two such surveys, one in 1948 and one in 1951. They give
diffferent categories of answers, but both give low fijigures for being lured
into prostitution.
For most Shanghai prostitutes, the decision to enter prostitution was
not made under circumstances completely of their own choosing; but it
was a decision made by their families and themselves. Prostitutes often
introduced other members of their family or native place network into
their brothel. Compared to the alternative, that could be a positive choice.
One social worker who interviewed prostitutes before 1949 summarized
their feelings: “Other work was rather tiring. This kind of work made more

27
 Guy, Sex and Danger, pp. 16, 33–4, 46–7, 63, 73, 112–6, 120, 126–8; Fischer, “Frauenhan-
del und Prostitution—das Beispiel Buenos Aires.”
28
 Tambe, Codes of Misconduct, p. 74. Similar cases are mentioned in Tong, Unsubmis-
sive Women, pp. 34–53, 193.

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 164 lex heerma van voss

Table 1. Reasons given by former prostitutes for their entry in the profession
1948 1951
tricked or seduced 4% kidnapped 9%
family pressure 5% sold or pawned by family 11%
poverty 60% death or unemployed earner 43%
unemployment/bankruptcy 18% family circumstances/divorce 27%
afffijinity for the work 13%
total 100% 90%
N 500 501
Source: Hershatter, Dangerous Pleasures, p. 194. The author does not explain why the 1951
survey does not add up to 100%.

income, and one ate well, so they did it.”29 But quite often the choice was
not as positive as that, but induced by debts the family had incurred, or
the inability to provide an income by other means. Women could either be
sold or pawned to brothels. Hershatter concludes that pawning a woman
into prostitution usually was a family decision to deploy an economic
resource—a woman’s body—without relinquishing it. As with many
family strategies, it remains unclear how much say the family member
most involved, the woman, had in this decision. But an example suggests
that women not necessarily resisted being pawned. In a 1929 court case,
a father charged his son with selling his wife to a brothel. At the hearing,
both the woman and the madam testifijied that she had not been sold, but
pawned. The woman did not use the suit to try and win her freedom. As
her father in law was willing to fijile a suit against his son over his daughter
in law, and as the son himself worked in a clothing store just outside the
brothel to which he had pawned his wife, the woman cannot be seen as
cut offf from her family network.30
Pawning remained common until the 1930s, when protests against the
practice grew. Some sources suggest that half of the women that entered
prostitution were pawned. In pawning, the woman acted as collateral
to a loan made to the family. The sum loaned was half the value of the
woman. She lost her freedom, and all her income as a prostitute went
to the brothel owner. The family received money, sometimes also some

29
 Hershatter, Dangerous Pleasures, p. 195.
30
 Ibidem, p. 199.

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 the worst class of workers 165

income, and had a mouth less to feed. Pawning allowed the brothel owner
to buy a prostitute’s most productive years.31

Labor relations in prostitution

With the pawning and selling of Chinese women, we have already intro-
duced one form of labor relation in prostitution. In these cases a Chi-
nese woman would lose her freedom, permanently or temporarily, and
this was of course only possible in legal systems that allowed for people
losing their freedom. The Tong gangs exported these practices—under
Chinese law—to the United States. In Bombay too, it was possible to own
women. Here, in 1917, the prostitute Akootai was tortured to death by her
owners, which led to a criminal court case which sheds some light on
the relations between brothel owners and prostitutes. The brothel owner
Mirza was a Pathan, an ethnic group which was “commonly portrayed as
greedy moneylenders who forced the wives of debtors into prostitution”.
Akootai’s fellow prostitutes, who were heard at the trail as witnesses, were
in Mirza’s power, because they respectively had borrowed twenty rupees
from him, because Mirza paid offf a debt the woman owed (she had been
enticed away from another brothel by Mirza’s brother, who promised he
would keep her as his mistress), and because the third women was sold
for fijifty rupees to Mirza by a former paramour.32 In other instances, free
Bombay women worked in a brothel and shared their income with the
madam according to set rules.
Pimps fijigure not very prominently in these cases. In Mexico City, the
brothels were run by madams. Pimps start being mentioned from the
1920s, specifijically foreign pimps in connection with foreign prostitutes.
However, they apparently do not become very important.33 In Shanghai,
pimps became important even later.34 In Bombay pimps and male owners
could be brutal, as Akootai’s case showed. Matters improved when a 1930
law prohibited brothels and prostitutes started working from individual
rooms.35 In Buenos Aires, pimps cornered a large part of the prostitution
market in the 1920s, but even here their grip was less strong than it was

31
 Ibidem, pp. 196–8.
32
 Tambe, Codes of Misconduct, pp. 79–99.
33
 Bliss, Compromised Positions, pp. 91–2.
34
 Hershatter, Dangerous Pleasures, pp. 341–2.
35
 Tambe, Codes of Misconduct, p. 112; Santosh Kumar Mukherji, Prostitution in India
(New Delhi, 1986) [Reprint 1934 edition], pp. 244–45, 465.

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 166 lex heerma van voss

reputed to be.36 Perhaps the influence of pimps and their cut of prosti-
tutes’ income were in general not so large as reputation would have it.37
Like pirates, pimps trade in fear, and they had certainly every reason to
magnify their bad reputation, as it was an important tool to extort money
from the prostitution branch.
In Nairobi, prostitutes were generally self-employed. This meant that
they did not have to share their income—which, as we saw, was consid-
ered high—with pimps, madams or brothel owners. That they were self-
employed prostitutes, and thus tried to avoid wage labor, for themselves
and their dependents, did not mean that they had no relation with wage
labor. Working women combined diffferent strategies and types of labor
relations to generate income. In Nairobi, living from wage labor alone was
a feasible strategy for only a very limited number of women. From the his-
torical literature on prostitution in the West, we are familiar with the idea
that women occasionally work as prostitutes to supplement a low-wage
income. In Nairobi, it makes just as much sense to conclude that some
women used wage labor as a way to increase income from prostitution.
White gives several examples.38 Hadija binti Nasolo came in 1938 from
Uganda to live in Pumwani. She was employed as a part-time sweeper in
a Nairobi police station. She used this job to meet well paying European
men, one of whom took her to a hotel outside Nairobi. This was what
made her poorly paid wage labor worthwhile.
Wanjira Ng’ang’a decided to leave her agricultural village, and seek her
fortune in Nairobi in 1937/38, together with a friend. The reason to do so
was that the friend had already “gone with European men and they paid
a lot of money”. As it turned out, her friend landed a job as a domestic
servant for an Asian family in the Westlands neighborhood of Nairobi. In
colonial Nairobi, prostitution in itself was not a crime, but soliciting was.
In the black neighborhoods, Pumwani and Pangani strict rules applied.
Inhabitants of these neighborhoods could not stay outside them in the
evening; whites were not allowed in Pumwani and Pangani between seven
o’clock at night and six o’clock in the morning. As rents were high, domes-
tic servants often shared rooms supplied by their employers with friends

36
 Guy, Sex and Danger, pp. 120–9.
37
 Other indications for this in Harris, Selling Sex, pp. 78–86; Edlund and Korn, “A The-
ory of Prostitution,” p. 8; and Ben L. Reitman, The Second Oldest Profession (New York and
London, 1987), pp. 85–94.
38
 White, Comforts of Home, pp. 65–6, 98–101.

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 the worst class of workers 167

or co-workers. When her friend was housed on her employers’ premises,

Wanjira Ng’ang’a shared her room, and was thus allowed to reside at a
strategic place: “so we both lived there and every morning she would wake
up early and go to work, while I would go out and look for men.” Since
she had to safeguard the respectability of her friend and her employers,
Ng’ang’a could not opt for the malaya form, but became a watembezi
prostitute:
I would walk up and down the streets, or I would stand at a corner, and if
a man asked me to go with him I would tell him that I had no place to go,
and could we go to his house. Sometimes, they were African men, and they
were somebody’s servants we could go to their rooms, but sometimes we
couldn’t and then we would go to the bushes, just for short-time. But if it
was an Asian man or a white man who wanted to go with me, then there
was no problem, we could go directly to his house.
In Buenos Aires, the chance that a woman could land a paid job deterio-
rated in the 1930s. This led to protests, in the wake of which a vocal minor-
ity of prostitutes demanded respect as women and as humans working for
honorable reasons in a shameful industry. One prostitute told a reporter
“we have not all become what we wanted to become, but the fact is that
we are workers, the worst class of workers, but we have a right to live as
gente decente.”39
Another source of respect for prostitutes was the income that they could
generate, which was the basis of their material wealth or of their remit-
tances home. In Nairobi, malaya prostitutes earned enough to buy houses,
and rent out rooms to other Africans. Sometimes their lodgers would also
be prostitutes, but the house owners would not act as madams. In other
parts of the world, prostitutes used their savings to buy a brothel and
become a madam. In San Francisco, Ah Toy was one of the fijirst Chinese
prostitutes in business. She procured other Chinese women and owned
two brothels, which she lost when, from 1854, the Tongs took over the
prostitution business in San Francisco. After that date, women seldom
more managed to develop themselves to independent entrepreneurs.40

39
 “La vida miserable y trágica de las carabeteras revelanda ante varios funcionarios
ofijiciales,” El Gráfijico, October 19, 1937, p. 12, quoted in Guy, Sex and Danger, p. 200.
40
 Tong, Unsubmissive Women, pp. 6–11.

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 168 lex heerma van voss

Relatives

Respect as workers or business success were not the only possible source
of pride for prostitutes. As we saw, many women entered prostitution to
deal with a family crisis. By enabling their family to settle as debt, or to
survive a drought, prostitutes contributed to family survival.41 In Kenya,
around 1900, increased wage labor by young men led to higher prices for
the livestock they had to acquire as bridewealth, and to higher bridewealth
payments. Livestock also became scarce because of war and rinderpest.
Prostitutes sent home remittances that were used to replenish stock.42 In
Shanghai, working on behalf of family, to clear a debt or pay for a parent’s
funeral, even could be construed as a form of fijilial piety.43
Sometimes real family relations existed within a brothel, for instance
when a prostitute raised her children there, or when a prostitute went
back to her native village to fetch her younger sisters to work in the
brothel.44 Often, within brothels, surrogate family relations were enacted.45
Madams and prostitutes addressed each other as mother and (adopted)
daughter. Little girls were raised in Shanghai brothels as apprentices: they
received no salary, but were taught a trade. Eventually, the defloration fee
would defray the costs of raising a girl. Their position resembled that of
“little daughters in law” who were adopted by the family of their future
husband, ensuring the husband’s family of their labor, and save the future
cost of purchasing a grown bride.46 Even in the Bombay brothel where
Akootai was tortured to death, family-like relations between non-kin
were adopted.47

The indecent way to live as gente decente

I posed the question whether the toolbox of enhanced labor history, devel-
oped over the last two decades, is useful in analyzing the working condi-

41
 Guy, Sex and Danger, p. 45; White, Comforts of Home, p. 20.
42
 White, Comforts of Home, pp. 34–9.
43
 Hershatter, Dangerous Pleasures, pp. 194, 199.
44
 Tambe, Codes of Misconduct, p. 95; Hershatter, Dangerous Pleasures, p. 75; White,
Comforts of Home, p. 42.
45
 Hershatter, Dangerous Pleasures, p. 311.
46
 Hershatter, Dangerous Pleasures, pp. 75–6.
47
 Tambe, Codes of Misconduct, pp. 86–7.

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 the worst class of workers 169

tions and living strategies of prostitutes in six non-European towns in the

period around 1900. The answer, I would like to suggest, is afffijirmative.
In three of the six cases discussed, women could be sold, also to a
brothel. Not by coincidence, these were also the three cases in which
women actually were kidnapped or lured into prostitution, while they were
led to believe that they were being married offf or migrating to urban wage
employment. Even so, in these three cases, the huge majority of women
sold or pawned to a brothel knew what awaited them, and accepted this
as a survival strategy to help carry their family through troubled times.
How reluctant this acceptance was, is hard to fathom. Also not coinci-
dentally, in these three cases, the position of women in the sex trade was
on average clearly weaker than in the three other cases. The women were
physically mistreated more often, had less say over their daily lives and
earned less.
In the other three cases, the legal position of women was somewhat
stronger. Still, in Kenya women went into sex work both because they
thought prostitution less burdensome than agricultural work in the coun-
tryside, and because this was a way to accumulate capital or to help their
families through times of hardship. In the Argentine countryside, abduc-
tion of women was a prelude to consensual marriage. Wives were abused
sexually by their husbands’ employers. This may have made prostitution
more palatable, but in all six cases women experienced the transition to
commercial sex probably as less traumatic than middle- and upper-class—
reformers—both in Europe and in the six towns—could imagine.48
Labor relations in prostitution were often harsh. They were also
diverse, ranging from self-employment in Nairobi, via sharing revenues,
wage labor and debt bondage to slavery. When women were working in
a brothel, this list is probably ranged in order of declining agency and
worsening working conditions. It would be less clear where streetwalking
would fijit in this range, which was usually self-employed, but had a lower
status than working in a brothel. Pimps were only of some importance in
Buenos Aires, but madams were very central in running brothels. They ran
from abusive to motherly.
The conclusion that prostitutes were worst offf in slavery does not sound
very surprising. However, we should keep in mind that the reverse rela-
tion was not automatically true. The predominance of slavery in a society
needs not necessarily lead to a high incidence of prostitution, nor to the

48
 Guy, Sex and Danger, pp. 43–5.

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 170 lex heerma van voss

exploitation of female slaves as prostitutes. In the Southern, slaveholding

states of the United States, blacks were underrepresented among prosti-
tutes. Fogel and Engerman reported on a count of prostitutes in the town
of Nashville, where, in 1860, 4.3% of the prostitutes were black, compared
to a fijifth of the population of the town. All black prostitutes where free
and light-skinned. They concluded that white men who desired illicit sex
had a strong preference for white women. The growth of black prostitu-
tion in the United States was a 20th-century phenomenon.49
This tallies well with some of the characteristics that our cases had
in common. All towns experienced rapid urbanization, with an influx of
both large numbers of males and females from the countryside (and, in
the Argentine case, also from abroad). Most towns also were developing
an industrial sector. Jobs that offfered women a living wage were scarce.
The jobs to be had were typically in domestic service, in textiles and the
needle trades. Still, the situation on the countryside was so precarious,
that migration to the town seemed the better option, even to women who
knew full well that they would be working as prostitutes. In the Asian
cases, trafffijicking was only supplementary to the much larger migration
flows of women who knew where they were headed. European women
had usually worked in prostitution before, and migrated in search for bet-
ter prostitution markets. This too, was a reality that was hard to stomach
for the reform movement. For most women, working in commercial sex
was the only viable way to earn a good income. They had to accept to be
the worst class of workers, to live to some extent as gente decente.

49
 Robert W. Fogel and Stanley Engerman, Time on the Cross. The Economics of Ameri-
can Negro Slavery (London, 1976) pp. 134–6; Eugene D. Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll. The
World the Slaves Made (New York, 1974), pp. 460–1; Herbert G. Gutman, The Black Family in
Slavery and Freedom 1750–1925 (New York, 1977), p. 613, n. 9; Jacqueline Jones, Labor of Love,
Labor of Sorrow. Black Women and the Family, from Slavery to the Present (New York, 1985),
pp. 181–2; Kevin J. Mumford, Interzones. Black and White Sex Districts in Chicago and New
York in the Early Twentieth Century (New York 1997).

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