“Your Town is Rotten!”

Moral Uplift, Profit, and the Governing of Prostitution in Kingston, Ontario, 1860s-1920s

Abstract

This article explores the history of sex work in Kingston, Ontario, from the 1860s to the 1920s. In addition to highlighting women’s lives and labour in the sex trade, it analyzes the city’s approach to governing prostitution and profiting from vice. This research traces two different regimes in the government of sex work, from nineteenth-century law and punishment, characterized by long jail terms and steep fines for sex workers, to a disciplinary-administrative regime in the early twentieth century. Civic leaders reframed the regulation of morality as part of the mandate of general municipal government, and Kingston women were increasingly subjected to surveillance from police and quasi-state institutions, including the Children’s Aid Society, the police matron, and the military police. This shift is framed in the work of Michel Foucault, who argues that prostitution existed as a disciplinary system which served to redirect the political and economic profits from sexual pleasure back to the general circuits of capitalism and the state. This paper suggests that the extension of the disciplinary system of prostitution served to bring the political and economic profits from vice, which had previously remained in a closed sex trade milieu, back to the city in the form of monetary fines and political clout for politicians and reformers. In addition to underscoring the links among politics, economics, morality, and sexuality, this article emphasizes the broad interpretation of vice at the time, which linked prostitution to alcohol, gambling, and other illicit but profitable pleasures. While the historical shift in regulatory strategies from punishment to discipline instrumentalized prostitution and other vices to serve civic and reform goals, it came at the expense of working-class women whose lives were interrupted by arrests and interventions that rarely addressed the underlying poverty that shaped the lives of so many sex workers.