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© Southampton City Council
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"The oldest trade in the world" |
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Although a hierarchy of prostitutes existed in Southampton to service clients from different classes, the vast majority were poor women, who “went” with men of their own class. Unlike common Victorian stereotypes, most of these prostitutes 
Southampton Royal Pier and Town Quay, c 1877
© Southampton City Council |
were neither victims of middle-class seducers, nor young children drugged into “white slavery”, but rather working women who made a voluntary choice to walk the streets, given the limited employment opportunities available.
Many of the jobs open to women in Southampton, such as dressmaking, laundering, and serving as maids of all work, were highly casual and very low paid, putting young single women in a vulnerable economic position. For women subject to seasonal lay offs and perhaps with no family or friends to offer support in lean times, prostitution, with its (relatively speaking) good pay and shorter hours, may have seemed like an attractive solution.
“Wages of sin”
When a new ship came in, a prostitute could earn the weekly wages of a “respectable” working woman in a single day, and this relative affluence could give them a room of their own, better clothes, and access to the warmth and light of the local pub. 
Sailors and dock workers provided a ready clientele for prostitutes
© Southampton City Council |
Such benefits often tipped the balance in favour of prostitution, regardless of the physical danger, venereal disease and alcoholism it could entail.
Moving into prostitution like this from economic necessity was accepted almost as a norm within the working-class community, whose sexual mores were very different to the strict standards the ruling classes wished to impose. However, the Contagious Diseases Acts weakened this toleration, and from 1870 onwards, prostitutes in Southampton found themselves increasingly isolated.
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