GRSJ224/The Rescue Home and the Bawdy House

Debates today over the abolition of prostitution and sex work in Canada have venerable roots extending through the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century. The question of regulation, for example, was inspired by European trade unions and French newspapers from this period. The discourse of sex work, which frames prostitution as labour, has been adopted within policy in cities such as Vancouver and, most recently, the Supreme Court struck down Canadian laws prohibiting brothels. Canadian prostitutes have been at the centre of disciplinary practices across institutions.

This Wiki discusses two institutions during the period: the brothel and the rescue home. Historically, the brothel and the rescue home articulate modern notions of the bodily management, but towards very different objectives. Through institutions like these, prostitution marked an "other" that bundled a racialization, queerness, and poverty against which a preferable white, middle-class femininity could be defined. In terms of poverty, marked the state criminalization of women's economic duress under cover of moral transgression and illegality. The "sex trade" emphasizes the particular terms under which institutions tasked with policing moral transgression and illegality regulates women's bodies. Framed in these terms, it makes sense to think about brothels, prisons, and churches as institutions that occupy positions relative to this process. In other words, a broad coalition of agencies legitimized their moral authority by positioning women as an object of rescue; white, middle-class femininity as its ideal; and the policing of domesticity as its project.

The Bawdy House: Managing Sex Work

It might seem strange to think of the bawdy house as an institution (alongside schools, police, and churches), but some bawdy houses were highly regulated environments that were run as orderly systems. To think about prostitution during the period is also to think about different positions across a hierarchy, much like any other employment or incarceration.

Rather than simplifying the position of prostitutes to “victims,” it is important to note that different women occupied different positions relative to this system. The experiences of women cannot be flattened into a single description, since women were positioned differently relative to prostitution: while some worked as prostitutes, others owned the establishments as madams and others managed the businesses as housekeepers. Housekeepers managed the affairs of the brothel, but also served to shield the madam from prosecution by being charged in her place.

Women could climb out of poverty by occupying these positions. Given the kind of social disapproval they faced, it is understandable that prostitutes would not leave firsthand accounts of their work. But one scholar speculates that one former resident of Nelson, British Columbia, who died in Tokyo having amassed a valuable estate (including two buildings) was likely a former prostitute and madam before retiring, since there were no other options available for women to earn such a fortune.

These housekeepers were also modern managers and had many of the tools of management at their disposal: while the use of bells to mark off periods of activity might be familiar from their use in schools or factories, in some bawdy houses, a manager would ring a bell in order to break up time into ten- or fifteen-minute periods.

In addition to time keeping devices, documentation was key to keeping track of labour. Carrying a punch, the housekeeper would track on prostitutes' punchcards how many clients they had serviced. One sixteen year old had her card punched fifty-three times in a ten hour period.

Debt was another important tool for managing labour. Prostitutes paid rent and laundry to the brothel. Traveling salespeople also sold goods at the brothels and gave a commission to the madams. The management of women's bodies also depended upon drugs such as cocaine and heroin, which were central to these debts for 50 to 70 percent of all prostitutes. The reasons were varied: whereas some attributed these drugs as a tool used to continue working in prostitution, others point out that addiction forced some into the sex trade.

While madams and housekeepers were positions that women took up in order to manage other women under this system, men, it goes without saying, also took up positions managing women's bodies, such as pimps, clients, and police.

The men who participated in the sex trade as clients were not subject to the same regulation. Even if arrested, few men were given medical examinations and, in the Montreal police annual report, a fraction of men were declared infected, which of course did little to stem any subsequent infection on their part of prostitutes. Since clients came from all positions within society, criticizing customers would have incriminated men who could not be relegated to the same marginal status that prostitutes were.

The experiences of prostitutes cannot be separated from the experiences of women in the labour market more broadly, since employment in prostitution is linked to unemployment in other areas. Prostitution must therefore be considered in a broader picture of economic need and the options that women considered available to them.

As we have seen, to describe women's experiences of bawdy houses exclusively in terms of prostitutes' experiences would be to ignore the range of positions that women took in this system. These positions included housekeeper managers, not to mention the madam herself. The bawdy house was a key institution in the management of women's bodies: it brought together the principles of management (managers), owners (madams), external regulatory bodies (the criminal justice system). In addition to managers and owners, the brothel depended upon complex tools and practices in order to regulate its system.

Yet the brothel was not the only institution to use these tools and practices: in order to explore the extent of their application, we must turn to another institution that depended upon disciplining of a different sort: the rescue home.

The Rescue Home

On the west coast, the arrival Japanese prostitutes became the focus of media attention in 1889, reported first by a Vancouver Consul, then picked up by outlets in Seattle and San Francisco. In order to understand the financial situation these women found themselves in, one must examine the debts that they owed to masters and husbands. If Japanese women wanted freedom from their relationships with husbands, for example, they could pay "consolation money" (tegirekin) for divorce. This practice was of particular importance to Japanese migrants to western Canada because of the difficulty of getting divorced under Canadian law (as opposed to the western U.S.) and societal negativity in Canada towards divorce.

Ideas of the "white slave trade" shaped racialized dimensions of prostitution as well. The son of an American missionary in China established the Oriental Home and School in Victoria in 1887 to save young Chinese girls from a "slavery worse than the slavery of the Blacks." Canadians were told by Royal Commission that the "position of women in China is deplorable": concubines could be "discarded; sold; and made the slaves of keepers of houses of prostitution."

Given these views on Japanese and Chinese treatment of women, reform projects were be legitimized by offering Christian marriage as a preferable goal. As one legal historian put it, "in a minority community that was overwhelmingly male and in which women were regularly bought and sold, it was assumed by detractors that, with limited exceptions, any Chinese girl or woman who came to Canada must already be a prostitute or destined for that role."

The Chinese Rescue Home was run by the Methodist Woman's Missionary Society started in 1888 and its success depended upon how closely the “rescued” Chinese and Japanese subjects embodied the ideals of white, middle-class women. As such, the moral authority of reform movement was intertwined with these institutions, which valued Christian marriage as the proper transformation of its rescued subjects.

It should be noted that there is no record that the local Japanese community to this kind of rescue work: instead, middle-class Japanse churchwomen and immigrant leaders seemed more invested in protecting "virtuous" women from sliding into prostitution than in "rescuing" prostitutes, more interested in marginalizing prostitutes than integrating them into a community. Rescue work, in other words, marked the whiteness of its reform, whereas distancing attitudes toward prostitution also marked the precariousness of residency for a Japanese middle-class.

Social inclusion into imagined ideals were predicated on such spaces of transformation as the reform house, where unruly otherness could be domesticated.

Conclusion

The brothel and the rescue home were two important institutions in Canada in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Historically, the brothel and the rescue home articulate modern notions of the bodily management, but towards very different ends.

The bawdy house and the rescue home were key institutions in the disciplining of women’s bodies under the sign of “prostitution”: one for the purposes of sex as work that could be bureaucratized using the tools of modern management for profit, whereas the rescue home disciplined women’s racialized bodies in order to not only uphold the ideological centrality of white, middle-class, Christian femininity, but also to define it.

If we are to understand the history of present-day debates around prostitution, sex work, and abolition, we must understand how institutions came to manage not only women’s bodies, but also manage the discourses and ideologies that marked them.