Female Sex Workers

This chapter covers the issue of female sex workers, noting the difficulty of finding first-person accounts. A historical approach to the subject places sex work as one choice among a limited set of possibilities for poor women. The idea that female sex workers were morally reprobate or particularly unhealthy is debunked. A look at literature about and by sex workers reveals the biases of certain middle-class male writers. Only in a few rare accounts is sex work seen as a legitimate and possible choice for women.