Where are all the Oppressed B*****s?
I have returned to where I belong. Once again, I am reading old books. This week, I am reading a novel called The Genuine Memoirs of the Late Celebrate Jane D*****s. Published in 1761, it purports to be the history of Jane (Douglass), a famous London bawd. Jane is the daughter of a Black soldier and a white sex worker. She grows up around the industry. So the narrator of the text suggests to the reader that perhaps entering the sex work industry wasn’t so much a choice for Jane as the only real option. This reality, of course, doesn’t stop the narrator from judging her hard and insisting that she is a depraved monster.
But even so, as I was reading, I kept thinking that this novel had to have been a source text for Harlots, the eighteenth-century period drama about London sex workers that ran on Hulu for three seasons (2017-2019). Harlots, in my professional opinion, is in the top two of best eighteenth-century television period pieces. (The number one spot goes to The Great…and, speaking of, Nicholas Hoult was robbed of that Emmy by Coach Lasso. Hoult Hive rise up!) Anyway. Harlots understands the eighteenth-century in a way that a lot of period pieces don’t. For one thing, Black people lived in eighteenth-century London. This is just a fact. It is not some manifestation of wokeness. And Harlots not only knows this, but casts Black actors and actors of color with an awareness of how multicultural, multiracial London worked in the eighteenth century. (Unlike a different long-eighteenth-century period drama that shall remain nameless but that nonetheless stages its colobrlind casting in a way that asks us to forget the means by which all those girlies got all that money to bow before the queen in the hopes of becoming the diamond of the season.)
But Genuine Memoirs reminded me of Harlots not just because both demonstrate that, even in the eighteenth century, London was a diverse place, but also because of it’s frank and rather businesslike depiction of sex work. In Genuine Memoirs, Jane begins adult life as a sex worker in London. We are told, “though she had not inherited a fortune from her parents, [Jane] had received form them an education which prevented her being the least at a loss about getting a livelihood.” Genuine Memoirs tracks her progress up the corporate ladder, so to speak. She moves from bawdy house to bawdy house, changing places when she has disputes with her bawds or when she feels she can make more money elsewhere. We’re told that she is “naturally ambitious.” And this ambition leads her to open her own bawdy house, eventually becoming one of the most successful in London.
But this is the eighteenth century. The text is far from celebrating Jane as a female entrepreneur, though one could argue that its moral hand-wringing over Jane’s behavior is pretty weak and largely eclipsed by its much more exuberant luxuriating in all of her “depravity.” The narrator implies at every turn that she’s greedy and licentious and in this business because of an innate depravity. She is described multiple times as “the substitute of satan.” And this is where the text and the show diverge most forcefully. In Genuine Memoirs, Jane turns to sex work out of depravity. While we understand that Jane probably had little alternative opportunities to make a living, the implication is also that depravity was passed down to Jane by her parents, making her innately nasty. In contrast, sex workers in Harlots do the work out of desperation. Harriet Lennox is a prime example of this.
We meet Harriet Lennox in season 1. She married the white man who enslaved her and her children, and she hopes that he will free her children and make them legitimate. Before he can do this, he suddenly dies, leaving Harriet desperate to protect her children from being sold by her late husband’s son. In an attempt to make the money she needs to buy her children and provide for them, Harriet begins work as a prostitute.
The show suggests that Harriet is a good mother for doing so. She would do anything for her children, therefore her choice to do sex work is not only acceptable but noble. Another character, Fanny Lambert has a child over the course of the show and sex work provides her with the income to care for her child. And Margaret Wells, a bawd and one of the show’s main characters, prostitutes both of her daughters as a means to make ends meet. In Margaret’s case, her decisions are imbued with more moral complexity, as both her daughters struggle against her power over them.
Though the show never shames its characters, it also largely frames sex work as a desperate choice. Only one character, Violet, claims to do her work because it’s what she wants to do. Walking the streets, she says, gives her freedom from a bawd or a master. Yet, even Violet ends up working in a ‘respectable’ position as a maid for Justice Hunt after her lover, Amelia, secures it for her.
There’s a sense throughout the show that the women need to justify themselves, that they need to have good and desperate reasons for doing the work they do. And as much as Memoirs is a viciously anti-sex-work text, its insistence on Jane’s depravity and on her unboundedness does something that Harlots never quite manages to replicate. It liberates Jane from likability and from moral action. Harlots wants its audience to cheer for its protagonists as they navigate the tension between their ethics and the imperative to survive. In many ways, the show suggests what feminists have long argued: capitalism can’t save women from patriarchal violence.
Yet, the show’s central conflict also stages a rivalry between two bawds (Margaret Wells and Lydia Quigley). Margaret worked her way to freedom and to opening her own bawdy house after being sold by her own mother to work for Lydia Quigley when she was a child. Lydia Quigley, in contrast, is considerably more villainous. Already made obscenely wealthy by her work as a bawd, she still routinely deceives young girls seeking service positions, drugging them and kidnapping them before charging wealthy men to assault them. Through this juxtaposition, the show suggests that Margaret is a mostly righteous, though still morally complex, female entrepreneur, while Lydia Quigley is a villain, much more in the vein of Jane Douglass. The show asks its whores to buy, sell, and accumulate ethically, but more importantly, in a way that the audience can sympathize with.
Genuine Memoirs, however, luxuriates in its protagonist’s refusal of such norms and ethics. Which is not to say that it’s a liberatory text. Like just about any eighteenth-century novel you could find, the text professes to be a moral one. Its purpose is to inform young people of the vices that threaten them so that they can become informed enough to resist such vices. It ensures that its depraved protagonist is dead by the end of the novel, suffering painful illness, a result of her “irregular life.” Which is to say, probably, a sexually-transmitted infection. Yet, she also, of course, repents before dying. All this is to say, Jane is shamed for actions that aren’t shameful (selling sex). But she also commits violent actions that do deserve censure and consequences – like Lydia Quigley, she lures girls into her bawdy house and indentures them. The text levels these actions, suggesting that rape and kidnap is the natural extension of sex work in general. Yet, also like so many eighteenth-century texts that profess a purpose to morally instruct their readers, this one spends a remarkable amount of time reporting Jane’s “vices” with little editorializing on the morality of such actions.
Genuine Memoirs doesn’t have to justify Jane because it doesn’t want to. But it’s frustrating that, even now, narratives of sex work, if not characterized by depravity, still seem to be motivated by desperation. In much of the media that exists about women, there’s still an impulse to justify. There’s still a sense that we need #sheroes. Sometimes a woman can be oppressed and also a bitch. Give me more oppressed bitches.
