{"id":3441,"date":"2021-09-18T11:55:32","date_gmt":"2021-09-18T11:55:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/tahneyalexandramay.com\/?p=3441"},"modified":"2024-06-10T09:19:31","modified_gmt":"2024-06-10T07:19:31","slug":"the-women-of-little-lon","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tahneyalexandramay.com\/index.php\/2021\/09\/18\/the-women-of-little-lon\/","title":{"rendered":"Book Review: \u2018The Women of Little Lon\u2019 by Barbara Minchinton"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\u2018For some, those lives were poor and short, yet for others it was a better life than they might have had elsewhere, at least partly because they lived surrounded by peers and people who did not condemn them on sight – a small, safe space in a large disapproving world. It might seem a meagre and miserable space to us, but it was one of the few they had\u2026\u2019 – Barbara Minchinton, The Women of Little Lon<\/em><\/h6><\/blockquote>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t
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The rise of mainstream feminism over the last decade has been more positive than not, for sure. But much of its resulting popular literature doesn’t stray far from the optics of representation.\u00a0In lazy, self-congratulatory discourse, a<\/span>uthors parrot basic ideas and their readers – who probably already know better- join the pretence that gender equity started to find its way from 2010.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>

When touching on sex work, such texts barely go beyond charismatic Instagram infographic concepts, like \u2018sex work is real work!\u2019 and \u2018fuck SERFs!\u2019 It\u2019s not groundbreaking to condone one of the world\u2019s oldest industries, and it\u2019s boring to virtue signal since the reader probably agrees (why would someone buy a book about women if they hate women?). As well, everything and anything is more complex than championing it.\u00a0I have said before there’s only so much<\/span>\u00a0<\/span>calling attention can do<\/a>, and <\/span>crafting a special angle<\/a>, whether touching or just smart,\u00a0<\/span>adds breadth to how we think about it moving forward.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>

Sometimes, people finding their social justice feet need entry-level books. Accessible ideas are important, even if they aren’t new. Even then, it\u2019s na\u00efve not to start from the assumption that oppressed peoples have always resisted the conditions afflicting them. It’s high time authors and readers alike go beyond feminism 101\u00a0with its not-that-hot opinions and lean more critically into the historical context gender rights exist within. At least, that’s what I want as a reader from my authors.\u00a0<\/p>

Historian Barbara Minchinton\u2019s The Women of Little Lon: Sex Workers in Nineteenth-Century Melbourne<\/i><\/a> <\/i>is as intricate as one could hope for. Her research on sex workers, as they flex around the social and economic constraints of their time, gives readers an example of society’s long-lasting resistance to the patriarchy\u2019s chokehold. It takes them deeper, it takes them back.\u00a0<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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What do we know about Melbourne's first sex workers?
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Covering Melbourne\u2019s first 70 years,\u00a0The Women of Little Lon<\/i>\u00a0explores the loosely regulated sex industry in a pleasure-seeking city until it became subjected to moralistic fervour by the turn of the century. For working-class women, the brothels congregated along Little Lonsdale Street offered community cohesion, economic benefits \u2013 earning more than a servant and sometimes entering the property market \u2013 and the independence of dodging marriage or racist employers.<\/p>

Little Lon\u2019s women were intrinsic to the fabric and financial ecosystem of the young city: local businesses from bakers to furniture makers to liquor dealers relied on their business. Powerful men, from the Duke of Edinburgh to Chief Commissioner of Police Captain Standish, tolerated and even indulged in their work. The baby colonial city had little incentive to do away with an industry contributing to the economy. Law enforcement was tokenistic, and the sex industry remained, for the most part, legal.<\/p>

Minchinton sets straight that\u00a0The Women of Little Lon<\/i>\u00a0won\u2019t cash in on entertainment value, as often done by Melbourne tourism providers covering\u00a0the ‘slum’ district.<\/a>\u00a0Opening and closing chapters establish legal and social context, and chapters sandwiched between hone in on several noteworthy sex workers and brothel owning madams.\u00a0It\u2019s not until the work’s end does Minchinton condemn the judgement often plaguing the sex industry to pose a clean closure to her book.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>

Sometimes sociological, sometimes dramatic, sometimes wading the murkiness of criminal justice,\u00a0The Women of Little Lon<\/i>\u00a0never ties itself down. It is as gripping as a true-crime podcast, but with a more intelligent than kitsch tone.<\/p>

Even with the vaguest data<\/span>,\u00a0<\/span>Minchinton conjures an objective yet compelling showcase of the era\u2019s good and bad. The book generously includes archival transcripts which highlight the century\u2019s colourful gendered language: the Ballarat Star described one woman as a \u2018notorious nymph,\u2019 another paper called a young woman a \u2018meek and gentle dove,\u2019 another noted a mayor asking a sex worker to be \u2018less warlike\u2019 after she argued with members of a rival brothel at the theatre.\u00a0<\/p>

Second-hand archival documents form much of what can speak to the women of Little Lon, who didn\u2019t leave diaries and the like. Observations emerging from court, prison and hospital records, as well as scandal driven tabloids, give undue emphasis on crime or health rather than the humdrum of daily life. While Minchinton recognises these limiting \u2018elastic facts,\u2019 she doesn\u2019t fold: \u201cAs with the best puzzles, even if we are not able to construct a perfect full-colour image, the outlines are sometimes enough to give us a worthwhile sketch.\u201d<\/p>

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Little Lonsdale Street from the Old Governor Bourke Hotel, corner Spring Street, Melbourne, c. 1870. Courtesy of Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales<\/figcaption>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/figure>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t
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Redressing sexist sources for an objective truth<\/h2>\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t
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The book\u2019s girth emerges from piecing this puzzle together. The\u00a0<\/span>indiscernible\u00a0<\/span>author reads between the lines of sources and scrutinises the many accounts written by men about women as \u2018alternative facts\u2019 of the \u2018male imagination.\u2019 Sex workers were not diseased, thieves or bad mothers because middle-class prudes thought of them as such.<\/span><\/p>

Without creative twists or generalisations,\u00a0<\/span>Minchinton<\/span>\u00a0observes the wide range of experiences punctuating their lives.\u00a0<\/span>Their multifaceted personalities emerge – their love of fashion, their boldness to laugh and dance on the street – and the subjects take up more space in<\/span>\u00a0Minchinton’s book than within the male-controlled sources where she found them.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>

She asks the right questions, and follows appropriate routes of enquiry: where did these women acquire the taste to design their beautiful brothels? How did they win court cases from their social status as women and prostitutes?<\/span><\/p>

As well, she doesn\u2019t gild the lily \u2013 with fierce understanding of class she both praises the women\u2019s prowess while noting hazards abating them. Pursuing background behind each footnote,\u00a0The Women of Little Lon<\/i>\u00a0replaces neat sentiments and fun facts with wise conclusions and controlled speculations.<\/span><\/p>

Readers aren\u2019t spun round and round an argument, but rather pulled into a mesmeric narrative through a web of facts. Minchinton slowly pulls the web apart by deliberating through the historical record, judging her sources, and piecing together what we know to be true, what is more of an educated guess, what is rumour and what can never be distinguished from fact or fiction.<\/span><\/p>

She develops a driving point by the book\u2019s closing – well-timed, as the reader is now ready too. The thesis is straight and necessary: the moralistic attitudes that doomed Little Lon’s flourishing sex industry underpin the unsafe and discriminatory legislation regulating sex work in Victoria today.<\/p>

She offers a clear through-line from then until now. The persuasion is gentle but foolproof: the Little Lon community benefited from prostitution<\/a>. Consensual commercial sex, when driven by women, isn\u2019t more dangerous than other work. Problems with sex work lie in undue criminalisation and stigmatisation.<\/p>

Maybe the reader already believes this. But by seeing this historical community, they have chance to further flesh out their convictions.\u00a0<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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More of this, less pop-feminism, please<\/h2>\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t
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Minchinton writes with neutrality. Her sex workers are never\u00a0 \u2018Other\u2019 nor homogenous in terms of why they entered the industry and their experience of it. With this, The Women of Little Lon<\/i> has a refreshing dexterity compared to the regurgitated information, hyperbolic opinion, and moot debates flooding many recent feminist publications.<\/p>

Sex work has and will always be real work; it\u2019s an assumption Minchinton doesn\u2019t need to breathlessly leverage. She understands nothing is so simple, and that’s why we need to look closer, further back. The book\u2019s due diligence pursues dynamic but sound insights into the industry positioning of sex workers with a flexible existence hardly ever afforded to them by either historians or their contemporary feminist peers.<\/p>

It\u2019s a relief to pick up a book not desperate to push an obvious point, but rather richly imbue context to feminist thought.<\/p>

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Book review:\u00a0The Women of Little Lon: Sex Workers in Nineteenth-Century Melbourne\u00a0by Barbara Minchinton<\/a>\u00a0(Black Inc Books).\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>

Read more of Tahney Fosdike\u2019s\u00a0arts criticism here.\u00a0<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Barbara Minchinton’s persuasion is gentle but foolproof: the women of Little Lon benefited from prostitution. Consensual commercial sex, when driven by women, isn\u2019t more dangerous than other work. Problems with sex work lie in undue criminalisation and stigmatisation.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":3458,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_vp_format_video_url":"","_vp_image_focal_point":[],"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[466,111,464,465],"class_list":["post-3441","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-barbara-minchinton","tag-history","tag-sex-work","tag-the-women-of-little-lon"],"acf":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/tahneyalexandramay.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/09\/b0c982514834b6f829d0ff38a8c7c4d0a6cf574a-e1644191744425.jpeg?fit=1240%2C1060&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p9Pso7-Tv","jetpack_likes_enabled":false,"post_mailing_queue_ids":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tahneyalexandramay.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3441","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/tahneyalexandramay.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/tahneyalexandramay.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tahneyalexandramay.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tahneyalexandramay.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3441"}],"version-history":[{"count":79,"href":"https:\/\/tahneyalexandramay.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3441\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4372,"href":"https:\/\/tahneyalexandramay.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3441\/revisions\/4372"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tahneyalexandramay.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3458"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tahneyalexandramay.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3441"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tahneyalexandramay.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3441"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tahneyalexandramay.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3441"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}