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https://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/747/01/

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Some facts & interesting information about the setting of our play!

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Find out more
Books
Women's History in Britain, 1850-1945 ed. June Purvis (London UCL Press 1995) A collection of essays covering a range of topics from women's work and the family to education, health, sexuality and politics.

Women, Gender and Industrialisation in England, 1700-1870 by Katrina Honeyman (Basingstoke Macmillan, 2000) A concise volume good on gender, class and industrialisation.

The First Industrial Woman by Deborah Valenze (Oxford OUP, 1995) Good on the implications of shifting employment patterns, agricultural work and domestic service.

A History of European Women's Work, 1700 to the present by Deborah Simonton, (New York Routledge, 1998) Good for the longer time perspective and for European similarities and contrasts.

Links

The Womens' Library An organisation of historians of women in Britain promoting research and writing on women's history. This website also contains a number of very useful links to other websites associated with the history of women.

Spartacus Schoolnet A website directed at schools containing biographies of key women in the history of the British women's movement.

Places to visit

There a several museums which help to recapture the nature of Victorian society and the place of women within it, most obviously the Victoria and Albert Museum in London which has wonderful collections of art and artefacts reflecting the nature of the middle- and upper-class Victorian home. Smaller museums yield information and evidence of women's work and their patterns of dress and consumption. Most notably Quarry Bank Mill at Style, Cheshire; the textile museum in the Halifax Piece Hall; and Platt Hall Museum, Manchester.

The new industrial and commercial middle classes of the Victorian era were great patrons of the arts, and some British provincial art galleries contain major collections of the sorts of works which they commissioned as well as work depicting domestic interiors and women. Amongst the best of these art galleries are the Birmingham City Art Gallery and the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool.

Consult some primary sources detailing the nature of women's work and household activities such as business records, census enumerators' books, trade directories, household budgets and private diaries. Details of business records relating to women in the West Yorkshire textile industries can be found in The West Riding Wool Textile Industry: a catalogue of business records by Pat Hudson, (Edington, Pasold, 1976). Other guides to archive holdings can be found on the websites of most major repositories. Many collections of working class autobiographies have been published and include several written by women. For a guide see for example, The Autobiography of the Working Class: an annotated critical bibliography vols 1-3 ed. by J. Burnett, D. Vincent and J. Mayall, (Hassocks Harvester 1984, 1987, 1989).

Examining surviving Victorian housing from outside and from within can be very revealing particularly if these can be matched to information from Census returns. It is possible to reconstruct Victorian households at each census point and to imagine where each household member resided within the house. In many major cities there are now organised walks which are helpful in tracing Victorian history and women's history trails. Details of these can usually be obtained from local history libraries.

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Discover what life was like for Victorian women who worked wage-paying jobs alongside their domestic duties. How did this affect society?

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Juno Mac campaigns for better working conditions for sex workers by fighting criminalization and supporting public education projects around issues relating to sex worker rights.

Why you should listen

Juno Mac is a sex worker and activist with the Sex Worker Open University (SWOU), a sex worker-led collective with branches in London, Leeds and Glasgow. SWOU is focussed on advocacy, campaigning, cultural events and community support for sex workers.

Through their organizing, SWOU activists support each other through stigma and isolation, demand better working conditions by fighting criminalization and provide public education around issues relating to sex worker rights. Mac's activist work with SWOU has included delivering workshops in universities, political lobbying and campaigning, consulting with human rights organisations (including Amnesty International), appearances on radio and TV, and taking part in public panel discussions at festivals and conferences.

Mac has also curated an exhibition of sex worker art, contributed to magazines and a live storytelling night, facilitated skill-sharing and support spaces for fellow sex workers, and helped to organise SWOU's Open Conference of The Advancement of Sex Worker Rights 2015.

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Juno Mac campaigns for better working conditions for sex workers by fighting criminalization and supporting public education projects around issues relating to sex worker rights.

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The laws that sex workers really want

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Toni Mac: The laws that sex workers really want

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Everyone has an opinion about how to legislate sex work (whether to legalize it, ban it or even tax it) ... but what do workers themselves think would work best? Activist Toni Mac explains four legal models that are being used around the world and shows us the model that she believes will work best to keep sex workers safe and offer greater self-determination.

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What does this quote show about Shaw's way of thinking? How do we see this way of thinking in his play?

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It's been more than 60 years since the feminist movement started asking: What do women want? And after all those decades of soul searching, we have solved the mystery: It turns out that women want exactly what men do! That's what one might conclude anyway from the recent push by feminists to legalize prostitution.

In a cover story in last week's New York Times Magazine, Emily Bazelon asks: "Should Prostitution Be a Crime?" And just a few weeks ago, New York magazine ran a cover story called "Is Prostitution Just Another Job?"

Both of these articles are ostensibly written because human-rights organizations across the world are debating whether decriminalization of prostitution would result in less sex-trafficking and greater safety for women who choose to do what we are now quaintly supposed to refer to as "sex work." But really these articles are part of a cultural push to makes us think that women selling their bodies is no different from women who bartend or become management consultants.

After Amnesty International decided last summer to support decriminalization, a variety of other organizations and other activists objected, arguing that full decriminalization would result in "a system of gender apartheid" in which women are just another consumer good.

But those groups seem, as the left likes to say, to be on the wrong side of history. The question of whether legalizing prostitution altogether or controlling it - restricting it to brothels, for instance, as Nevada does, or punishing the Johns (or clients, as we're now supposed to call them) instead of the prostitutes - would make life safer for these women is an open one.

Just as proponents of drug legalization argue that a great deal of the violence surrounding illegal substances is the result of their being sold underground, so proponents of decriminalizing prostitution say that it is the black market for sex that makes prostitution a problem.

But we shouldn't forget that legalizing something means you'll get more of it. AAA released a study this week showing that fatal car crashes have increased in states that recently legalized marijuana.

In Washington, for instance, the percentage of drivers in fatal crashes who had recently used marijuana more than doubled between 2013 and 2014. After legalization, 1 in 6 drivers involved in fatal crashes in the state had recently used marijuana.

So the real question is whether we want more prostitution. And the answer of many Americans seems to be: Sure. Why not?

In 2012, 38% of Americans thought legalization was a good idea. In 2015 it was up to 44%. As the author of the New York magazine piece notes, many of the women involved in sex work think it's empowering. He profiles Chelsea Lane, who started reading the blogs of sex workers while she was a student at Reed College in Portland, Ore. She thought sex work sounded "cool" and "edgy." She was insecure about the way she looked, and she describes how the sex workers she contacted "told me that everybody has beauty and that there's someone out there who will appreciate it - who'll even pay for it."

Only in 2016 would it come as a pleasant surprise to a young woman that there are men who will pay to have sex with unattractive women. Pretty soon, Lane was pulling in more than a thousand dollars a week from her sex work - a lot more than she was making at Sears. At 20, she says she is hanging out with "wonderful" people and "getting laid on the regular."

There are a million college students around the country who have accounts with a website called SeekingArrangement.com, to help them find sugar daddies to fund their education.

The authors of both pieces acknowledge that prostitution is different for the poor and the middle class. But just as removing the stigma on premarital sex and single motherhood freed upper class women to pursue their dreams of sexual freedom while screwing over the lower classes, so removing the stigma from prostitution will do the same.

Only in 2016 would it come as a pleasant surprise to a young woman that there are men who will pay to have sex with unattractive women.

Another young woman was sold into sex slavery when she was 15 and then escaped to make a life for herself. Once she was laid off from her job as a flight attendant, though, she decided to go back into prostitution. "I needed the money, and if anything, I went from having very little money to having more than enough immediately...I could go to Starbucks every day if I wanted to."

Imagine the hundreds of millions of women in human history who have struggled through poverty and hardship to raise children, teaching them the values of hard work and self-respect, telling them that giving your body to someone is an act to be reserved for someone who will love and protect you. But you know, there's also that mocha Frappuccino.

Meanwhile, desperate women at the bottom of the economic ladder will receive the message that if they are unemployed they should consider selling their bodies to make ends meet.

Surely feminists of another era would smell a conspiracy. Someone has managed to persuade young women that their ultimate fulfillment lies in trading their bodies for better coffee drinks. At the end of her article, Bazelon writes that the "sex-workers' rights movement is a rebellion against punishment and shame. It demands respect for a group that has rarely received it, insisting that you can only really help people if you respect them."

Perhaps, but it's hard to respect people who don't respect themselves.

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Making prostitution legal doesn't 'empower' women - it turns them into commodities

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It's been more than 60 years since the feminist movement started asking: What do women want? And after all those decades of soul searching, we have solved the mystery: It turns out that women want exactly what men do! That's what one might conclude anyway from the recent push by feminists to legalize prostitution.

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Jimmy Carter, the 39th president of the United States, is founder of the nonprofit Carter Center.

It is disturbing that some human rights and public health organizations are advocating the full legalization of the sex trade, including its most abusive aspects. I agree with Amnesty International, UNAIDS and other groups that say that those who sell sex acts should not be arrested or prosecuted, but I cannot support proposals to decriminalize buyers and pimps.

Some assert that this "profession" can be empowering and that legalizing and regulating all aspects of prostitution will mitigate the harm that accompanies it. But I cannot accept a policy prescription that codifies such a pernicious form of violence against women. Normalizing the act of buying sex also debases men by assuming that they are entitled to access women's bodies for sexual gratification. If paying for sex is normalized, then every young boy will learn that women and girls are commodities to be bought and sold.

There is a much better policy option.

In my 2014 book " A Call to Action: Women, Religion, Violence and Power," I described the approach known as the "Nordic model," which is consistent with advancing human rights and healthy societies. Pioneered in Sweden and adopted most recently in Canada and France, this strategy involves decriminalizing prostituted women and offering them housing, job training and other services. Instead of penalizing the victims, however, the approach treats purchasing and profiting from sex acts as serious crimes. Another key component is public education about the inherent harms of prostitution for those whose bodies are sold.

In Sweden, demand for prostitution has fallen dramatically under this model. Conversely, Germany and New Zealand, which have legalized all aspects of prostitution, have seen an increase in sex trafficking and demand for sexual services.

Critics of the Nordic model assert that mature adults should be free to exchange money for sex. This argument ignores the power imbalance that defines the vast majority of sex-for-cash transactions, and it demeans the beauty of sexual relations when both parties are respected.

Sex between people who experience mutual enjoyment is a wonderful part of life. But when one party has power over another to demand sexual access, mutuality is extinguished, and the act becomes an expression of domination. As author and prostitution survivor Rachel Moran explained in her book, " Paid For," once money has exchanged hands, a woman must deliver whatever service the customer demands.

In May 2015, when the Carter Center held a global summit to end sexual exploitation, sex-trade survivors, including Moran, described their painful journeys through exploitation. They told of the abuse they suffered - abuse that should be understood as torture. They expressed their determination to speak not only for themselves but also for those who are either too traumatized to come forward or who perished as a result of homicide, suicide, drug abuse or disease. They compare their movement to the abolition of slavery, an institution that once also seemed like a permanent fixture in society.

Prostitution is not the "oldest profession," as the saying goes; it's the oldest oppression.

Those survivors told us that they once believed that selling sex was their choice but that this attitude was a requirement for survival - that only once they were fully free from the fetters of the trade were they able to fully understand their lack of choice.

If full legalization is adopted, it will not be the "empowered sex worker" who will be the norm - it will be the millions of women and girls needed to fill the supply of bodies that an unlimited market of consumers will demand. Where do we think these young girls in the sex trade will come from? (Most victims are girls, though some boys are exploited, too.) It is simply naive to oppose sex trafficking of children and women and at the same time support decriminalizing the buyers who create the demand and the pimps who profit from the supply of girls and women.

I believe it is better to help women and girls avoid a life of prostitution and to deter men from buying sex acts.

We must not abandon the equal dignity of each human being by simply regulating a form of abuse. There is a better way.

Read more on this issue:

Lagon and Mickelwait: The U.S. turns a blind eye to policies that fuel sex trafficking

Colbert I. King: Washington D.C.'s serious sex-trafficking problem

The Post's View: How our system punishes sex-trafficked girls for suffering abuse

Cindy McCain: Amnesty International's dangerous plan to decriminalize the sex trade

The Post's View: Solving prostitution

Malika Saada Saar: There is no such thing as a child prostitute

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To curb prostitution, punish those who buy sex rather than those who sell it

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Jimmy Carter, the 39th president of the United States, is founder of the nonprofit Carter Center. It is disturbing that some human rights and public health organizations are advocating the full legalization of the sex trade, including its most abusive aspects.

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Prostitution should/ should not be legalized US nationwide because reasons a, b, and c.

To be conventional in Victorian England society is a theme that is present in George Bernard Shaw's play, Mrs. Warren's Profession. The way in which we see this as a major theme in Shaw's play is through (a, b, and c).

The two characters in Shaw's Mrs. Warren's Profession, Mrs. Warren and Vivie  can be compared and contrasted with one another in multiple ways; some of the ways these two characters can be compared and contrasted are (a, b, and c).