chapter 26 Working and Living Conditions Raelene Frances Introduction This chapter surveys the ways in which working and living conditions for women in the sex industry have varied across the globe since 1600. It draws on the city-specific studies in this volume as well as primary research and the broader secondary literature on prostitution. Unless otherwise indicated, in- formation about particular cities is taken from the relevant urban case studies in this volume. This chapter argues that five key factors have shaped the working and liv- ing conditions of sex workers across the globe since the beginning of the sev- enteenth century.1 These include the degree to which women were bound or “free”, or were able to exercise power in relation to employers and clients. Relat- ed to this is the location of individual women within the sex industry—where they existed within any particular hierarchy based on the class of clients, eth- nicity, and so on. Market forces have also been major determinants of the pay and working conditions in the sex industry. Shifts in the economy have impacted sex work- ers as well as other workers, affecting both the demand for sexual services and the supply of women willing to sell sex. A third major influence on sex workers’ lives has been the responses to pros- titution of the community in which they worked. This has included both in- formal and official responses which often determined where and how women could sell sex and under what circumstances. 1 I have used the terms “sex worker” and “prostitute” interchangeably, while being aware that both are contested terms and “sex worker” is in many cases anachronistic. Both of these terms are shorthand for the more accurate term: “a provider of sexual services for material gain.” Similarly, the designations “pimp” and “madam” are charged terms, but they are used here because of their common usage in the places and times under discussion. “Pimp” refers to males who act as intermediaries between client and worker in the exchange of sexual ser- vices; he may or may not be in an additional relationship to the woman. “Madam” refers to a female brothel-keeper. © Raelene Frances, 2017 | doi 10.1163/9789004346253_027 This is an open access chapter distributed under the terms of the CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license.Raelene Frances - 9789004346253 Downloaded from Brill.com09/25/2021 06:10:40AM via free access 678 Frances The formation, expansion, and disintegration of nations and empires have had a similar impact on the market for sex and have contributed to official responses to prostitution. Finally, developments in technology and medicine, especially since the early twentieth century, have contributed to significant changes in the ways in which sexual services are delivered and also impacted the health of sex workers. Degrees of Freedom and Power Rebecca Scott has employed the concept of “degrees of freedom” in relation to post-emancipation slave societies in the us and Havana, alerting historians to the spectrum of power that emancipated slaves exercised, depending on lo- cal circumstances.2 One can usefully employ the same concept in relation to women engaged in commercial sex in this survey across time and place. However, as the chapters on coercion and agency in this volume canvass, the concepts of free will, choice, and agency are extremely complex and dif- ficult to unpack in relation to prostitution, as they are so frequently overlaid with moral and political assumptions and judgements. Nevertheless, histori- ans must recognize that women have had varying degrees of power in their dealings with clients and employers/owners and that the degree of autonomy enjoyed by an individual woman at any particular time has been enormously important in determining how much control she has had over the type and quantity of services she provided and the remuneration she received. And in societies where women could be owned—such in Nigeria/Lagos, Shanghai, Singapore, Calcutta, Japan, and Istanbul—women were more likely to be in- volved in some kind of unfree sex work. The most common form of unfree sex labour encountered in the studies in this volume was debt bondage, whereby women were “sold” or pawned to entrepreneurs, usually by their families. These women then had to provide sexual services for the profit of the entrepreneurs until the original price paid for them, plus any additional debts subsequently accrued, was recovered. In such circumstances, women had little control over the number of clients they received, the services they provided, or the conditions in which they worked. Chinese women working in Singaporean brothels at the turn of the twen- tieth century could earn five times the amount that had been paid for their purchase price in one year, but were rarely able to pay off the original debt quickly as brothel keepers made sure they continued to accumulate debts for 2 Rebecca Scott, Degrees of Freedom: Louisiana and Cuba after Slavery (Cambridge, 2005). Raelene Frances - 9789004346253 Downloaded from Brill.com09/25/2021 06:10:40AM via free access <UN> Working and Living Conditions 679 personal items, clothing, food, and medical expenses.3 Similarly in Istanbul until quite recently it was apparently fairly common for a woman to be “sold” into a licensed brothel by a husband, male relative, or male “friend”, and she would then be forced to work off the money, a process which meant that wom- en would have to work for years before becoming free of the debt.4 Even women who had not been sold or pawned to brothel keepers often became indebted to their keepers through high-interest loans for clothes or jewellery as part of a deliberate strategy by the keepers to keep women in a dependent relationship.5 In some cases it was husbands rather than brothel keepers who directly controlled the sexual labour of their wives or concubines. In Southeast Asia, for instance, European traders put their wives to work sew- ing, weaving, cleaning, and selling sex, especially if they were slave women. This was similar to the practice of Chinese merchants in Singapore, who im- ported women from China to sell merchandise, provide for their domestic and sexual needs, and work as prostitutes.6 Other examples of the spectrum of unfree labour include the thousands of Japanese prostitutes who were in debt bondage throughout Southeast Asia, Australia, Canada, the us, and as far afield as South Africa in the period from the 1870s to the 1920s. Many of these women did eventually work off their debts and become independent sex workers or brothel keepers, and some married, took jobs, or started businesses outside of the sex industry. But during the time they were in bondage they were very much under the direction of those to whom they were indebted.7 3 Herzog, this volume, Singapore. 4 Wyers, this volume, Istanbul. 5 Tracol-Huynh, this volume, Hanoi; Wyers, this volume, Istanbul; Jürgen Nautz, “Urban Over- view: Vienna”, unpublished paper collected for the project “Selling Sex in the City”, 2013; Amir et al., this volume, Tel Aviv/Jaffa; Herzog, this volume, Singapore; Gronewold, this volume, Shanghai; Nuñez and Fuentes, this volume, Mexico City; Hammad and Biancani, this vol- ume, Cairo; Blanchette and Schettini, this volume, Rio de Janeiro; Mechant, this volume, Bruges; Absi, this volume, Bolivia; Conner, this volume, Paris. 6 Herzog, this volume, Singapore. 7 James Francis Warren, Ah Ku and Karayuki-San: Prostitution in Singapore 1870–1940 (Oxford, 1993); Sone Sachiko, “Karayuki-san of Asia 1868–1938: The Role of Prostitutes Overseas in Japanese Economic and Social Development”, (Unpublished M.Phil., Murdoch University, 1980); Hiroshi Shimizu, “Karayuki-san and the Japanese Economic Advance into British Malaya, 1870–1920”, Asian Studies Review, 20 (1997), pp. 107–132; David Sissons, “Karayuki-San: Japanese Prostitutes in Australia 1887–1916”, Historical Studies, 17 (1976), pp. 323–341; Yamaza- ki Tomoko, Sandakan Brothel No. 8 (trans. Karen Colligan-Taylor) (New York, 1999); Clive Moore, “‘A Precious Few’: Melanesian and Asian Women in Northern Australia”, in Kay Saun- ders and Raymond Evans (eds), Gender Relations in Australia: Domination and Negotiation Raelene Frances - 9789004346253 Downloaded from Brill.com09/25/2021 06:10:40AM via free access <UN> 680 Frances The case of Chinese women working on the us frontier illustrates the effects of unfree labour relations on working conditions. While a minority of Chinese women who came to America became wives or concubines of Chinese men, the majority came under a form of debt bondage. According to contemporary reports, their situation often resembled that of slaves, with women kept virtual prisoners in sub-standard rooms and forced to take on all comers.8 The practice of debt bondage persists into the present century, especially amongst women who cross national borders to work in the sex industry and accrue debts to those who make the travel arrangements. Itinerant sex workers in this case are especially disadvantaged in their power relationship with their employers as they often do not speak the language of the country in which they are working and are vulnerable to prosecution and deportation by im- migration authorities.9 Even where more overt forms of coercion such as slavery and debt bond- age were not a factor, the general trend towards capitalist labour relations in the sex industry over the last two centuries, which mirrored broader changes within capitalist economies, led to brothel workers in particular being subject to demands to supply more and varied services.10 One could also include drug dependency as a form of bondage, especially when many employers deliberately encouraged such dependency. This was clearly a strategy used by Sydney’s notorious Tilly Devine in the 1920s to in- crease her control over the working lives of prostitutes.11 And even when drug or alcohol addiction gets started outside the context of an employment relationship, the result is usually a worsening of the working conditions of the (Sydney, 1992), pp.