Preserving sex worker history is a goal that is extremely important to me; all too often we are spoken over, our stories suppressed or lost to time. When I started reading “La Prostitution Contemporaine”, a book in which the author argues for the full decriminalization of prostitution, I became obsessed with it and decided it needed to be translated and preserved in English. It includes letters from sex workers, segments from sex trafficking court cases in the 1800s, data on legal prostitutes working in France, and discusses the history of lesbians and gay men who sold sex at the time. This is one of the very few texts from the 19th century that mentions men selling sex at all, and it dedicates an entire chapter to them.
It is not a perfect work. There is bigotry within it alongside the author’s expressions of empathy for sex workers and young people forced into prostitution – it is, however, a fascinating look into prostitution in the time period.
From the arguments for police abolition due to the police’s appalling treatment of prostitutes all the way to the discussion of the religiosity of Parisian brothel workers, this work aims to cover each aspect of the lives of sex workers in 19th century France and spends over 180,000 words to provide that insight. The descriptions of brothels and disputes between madams and “girls on cards” paint a vivid and full picture of the lives of sex workers which were not often discussed. Upon reading the included letters in these sex workers’ own words, I became sure that I wanted to preserve the text in English so their stories wouldn’t be forgotten.
To be able to complete the translation and publish it, I’ve decided to create a Kickstarter. You can order copies of the book so that I can dedicate the time needed to finish it and to print physical copies and distribute the PDFs to the supporters:
This Kickstarter will launch on September 20th, but it would be of a huge help if you would sign up to be notified about it (even if you can’t contribute yourself!) to help with the algorithm and get more people to see it.
Here are some excerpts from the translation!
The intro:
Letters:
The full book will be available as a PDF as well as physical copies, and the cheapest reward tier will be £5 for a PDF of it once complete!
The book rails against the idea that legal prostitution is safer than prostitution by independent sex workers who are not controlled by the state. Modern sex worker rights campaigners would have a lot of things to argue with Léo Taxil about from this work… but that wouldn’t be one of them.
The content is varied, with a significant amount of data and citations from various sources. You will find transcribed interviews with the police, quotes from judges and solicitors during trials, data from the women registered by the police as prostitutes, and of course the communications written by various sex workers and madams themselves. There are segments from Parent-Duchatelet’s “On Prostitution in the City of Paris”, used to provide context, which was another popular work about prostitution which did not examine it as a social question but rather one of public health. Taxil both praises and critiques this famous work.
I hope this has been enough to get you just a little bit as excited about this book as I have been!
Some of the images included in the book:
Jack Talks About Sex Work 