“An Immense House of Ill-Fame”: Prostitution, Politics, and the Instrumentality of Sexuality in Ontario, 1860s-1930s
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Authors
Ross, Margaret
Date
2025-01-21
Type
thesis
Language
eng
Keyword
gender and sexuality , sex work , sex work history , prostitution , legal history , gender history , labour history , Ontario history , Canadian history
Alternative Title
Abstract
This dissertation provides the first comprehensive historical examination of sex work in Ontario from 1860 to 1930. It illustrates how women navigated sexual labour and how communities regulated prostitution in urban centres such as Toronto and Kingston, industrial cities like Windsor, and northern resource extraction towns including North Bay and Timmins. I underscore that the lack of economic options for women in turn-of-the-century Ontario drew them into circuits of profit through prostitution, liquor, and other illicit ventures. Sex workers played a fundamental role in sustaining underground economies and legal financial networks, including the real estate and entertainment industries.
The primary research contribution of this project is to explore the instrumentality, or usefulness, of sex work for legal, economic, and political projects that were often ostensibly unrelated to sexuality. It demonstrates how prostitution and the politically effective language of morality served as strategies to be leveraged in the service of municipal budgets and political campaigns, to reshape urban neighbourhoods and property values, to reform police departments, and to expand the provincial judicial system over northern Ontario. The dissertation draws from policing, legal, press, civic, and provincial records to underscore that the political and financial salience of prostitution supported far-ranging objectives at numerous institutional levels. Its case studies revolve around four themes: property, profit, profiling, and politics. Each study highlights different actors each with their own stakes in the government of prostitution and varying relationships to power, including social reformers, municipal governments and police, the provincial government, and sex workers themselves.
This project is attuned to the ways that prostitution was embedded in other forms of vice, including liquor and gambling, which manifested through vagrancy legislation, policing practices, and the lived experiences of criminalized people. It draws together legal, social, and political history by underscoring that the legal regulation of sex work, the social history of vagrancy, and the politicization of sexuality all rested upon a shared understanding of the overlapping nature of immorality.
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ProQuest PhD and Master's Theses International Dissemination Agreement
Intellectual Property Guidelines at Queen's University
Copying and Preserving Your Thesis
This publication is made available by the authority of the copyright owner solely for the purpose of private study and research and may not be copied or reproduced except as permitted by the copyright laws without written authority from the copyright owner.