The Sex Workers’ Revolution: Prostitution, Feminism and Female Virtue in British and Irish Women’s Writing (1787-1801)

Abstract

This thesis offers a comparative feminist analysis of women’s writing on prostitution published during the French Revolutionary period. It examines the memoirs of sex workers, Authentic and Interesting Memoirs of Miss Ann Sheldon (1787), Memoirs of Mrs Coghlan (1794), Memoirs of Mrs Margaret Leeson (1795-1797), and Memoirs of the Late Mrs Robinson (1801), alongside the novels of authors now classified as revolutionary feminists. These include Elizabeth Inchbald’s Nature and Art (1795), Wollstonecraft’s Maria; or the Wrongs of Woman (1798), and Mary Hays’ The Victim of Prejudice (1799). In these texts, prostitution becomes a basis for scrutinizing women’s attempts to remain virtuous in a misogynistic system, especially by living according to their authentic desires and principles. I contend that the memoirists represent themselves as multidimensional moral subjects, negotiating with external patriarchal pressures to establish their autonomy. However, the novelists mobilise sex workers as objects of political concern, their authentic selves inevitably stifled by patriarchal oppression. The two thematic sections of this project examine how representations of prostitution are shaped by major sociopolitical debates surrounding Moral Sentiment and Maternal Virtue. Each section contains two chronologically structured chapters, mapping the texts’ shifting sociopolitical climate. Chapter One contends that Sheldon, Coghlan and Leeson represent sex workers as authentic moral subjects, honouring principles of sincerity and benevolence alongside the theatrical demands of prostitution. Chapter Two examines representations of sex workers’ stifled moral development in the novels, attributed to their sexual insincerity. Chapter Three examines Sheldon, Coghlan and Leeson’s destabilisation of ideological divisions between prostitution and maternal virtue; Chapter Four argues that the novelists reinforce these divisions, representing sex workers’ struggles to fulfil their authentic maternal potential. My coda examines Mary Robinson’s navigation of these moral debates, amid backlash against feminist politics at the turn of the century. Unlike the other memoirists’ overtly transgressive self-representations, Robinson’s strategic autobiographical silences regarding her prostitution help to assert her subjectivity in a hostile sociopolitical context.