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BEYOND BRUTAL PASSIONS: PROSTITUTION IN EARLY NINETEENTH-CENTURY MONTREAL by Mary Anne Poutanen, was recently reviewed on Christopher Moore’s History News. The following is an excerpt from history Professor Elsbeth Heaman’s piece Book Notes: Heaman on Poutanen on Montreal Prostitution
That tension between ideal and real women is fully on display in Mary Anne Poutanen’s new book on prostitution in early nineteenth century Montreal. The period saw a huge change in the status and experiences of women. Their world narrowed in many ways: they were being pushed out of work, out of ownership of land, out of public space, and out of political debates. Separate spheres was never fully enforced of course, but the change was huge nonetheless. Prostitution was at the centre of those changes: it breached public and private, street and household, work and non-work, and above all respectability and its opposite. Poutanen sees a huge paradox at the centre: women tended to take up prostitution because they were poor: widowed, abandoned, newly emigrated, etc. It was work (and relatively lucrative work at that) but it was deemed the opposite of work: legally it was classified as idleness and vagrancy, a breach of the peace. It kept households together, children with mothers, but was seen to destroy households because there was so much immoral sex involved. Nothing better conveys the contradictions of a Victorianizing Canada than the tortured ideas about and practices of prostitutes: they embodied (sorry) the impossibility of reconciling ideal and real worlds, moral and economic identities, loving and mercenary motives. Poutanen brings enormous work and extraordinary detail to characterize what she describes as a “shift from a local moral economy to a more repressive local state apparatus” (317). Read more >
BEYOND BRUTAL PASSIONS: PROSTITUTION IN EARLY NINETEENTH-CENTURY MONTREAL
Referencing newspapers, parish registers, census returns, coroners’ reports, city directories, documents of Catholic and Protestant institutions, police books, and court records, Mary Anne Poutanen reveals how these women confronted limited alternatives and how they fought against established authority in the pursuit of their livelihoods. She details these women’s lives not only as prostitutes but also as wives, mothers, sisters, and daughters who reconstructed the bonds of kinship and solidarity.
An insightful history of prostitution, Beyond Brutal Passions explores the complicated relationships between women accused of prostitution and the society in which they lived and worked.
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