History: Prostitution and Irish Society 1800-1914 By Maria Luddy Cambridge University Press, 352pp. £15.99Between 1800 and 1940, thousands of women worked as prostitutes throughout Ireland. For some, prostitution was a way of life, while for others it was a temporary solution to a desperate situation.
For all, however, it was an economic necessity, which left them susceptible to serious disease and exploitation, the root cause of which has never been adequately investigated. At the heart of Maria Luddy's study of Irish prostitution lies a challenge to the image of Ireland as a sexually pure and morally superior nation in which a puritanical attitude to sexual expression has always existed. Luddy exposes a very different Ireland that, until now, has remained largely hidden behind moral posturing, as well as a degree of puritanism and moral righteousness that has lurked within Irish nationalism.
Positioned within a framework of investigation into the nature of power and authority in Ireland, Luddy designates for the book a role in opening up "another frontier in Irish history": that of the destitute, marginalised and outcast. This is not only a meticulously researched chronicle of prostitution in Ireland, it is also an investigation into the relationship between prostitution and the kind of society Ireland was and is, and which exposes the ways in which sexuality in Ireland has been linked with politics, "whether within the fields of medicine, suffrage, or independence".
WHILE THE MAJORITY of Irish prostitutes have always been located in Dublin, from the mid-1800s, there were significant numbers in Belfast, Cork, Limerick, Drogheda, Kilkenny, Galway and Kildare. Outside the cities, prostitution was particularly evident in towns that housed garrisons. Since the establishment of a permanent military base in the Curragh in 1855, for example, there is much to suggest that, although the military authorities insisted they did not condone prostitution, there existed a tacit acceptance of the female "camp followers" who lived in makeshift huts on the perimeter of the military base, later known as the "wrens" of the Curragh as a result of their living together in holes in the banks of ditches.
In Dublin, soliciting was overtly carried out throughout the city. Sackville (now O'Connell) Street was a principal "promenading ground" for prostitutes, who were also found in St Stephen's Green and around the dock area. From the 1880s, prostitutes were gradually confined to an area encompassing Lower Gardiner Street, Gloucester Street, Railway Street and Corporation Street, as a result of its cheap accommodation and lack of police harassment, while, by the early 20th century, the Mecklenburgh/Montgomery (or "Monto") district of the city, northeast of the Custom House, and one of the most impoverished areas of Dublin at the time, became notorious for its brothels. One observer was so moved by the "terrible sights of the Irish capital" in 1894, he reported that, "in the slum district where the poorest women live we went through the streets . . . I have never seen . . . such brazen immorality. There were literally hundreds of the women sitting about on the pavements and doorsteps. Their first floor windows - curtainless - were wide open, and the ground floor rooms were similar, so that passers-by could see the whole interior, with a bed".
Luddy enhances her historical and sociological evidence of the exploitation of prostitution during different historical periods by extending her discussion to the literary. The Monto and its prostitutes, fictionalised by James Joyce in Ulysses, allow Bloom to elucidate his view of prostitution as "a necessary evil", but one in which the women should be licensed and medically inspected. Liam O'Flaherty's The Informer(1925), reveals Gypo Nolan, an ex-policeman who has betrayed his friend and comrade for money, wandering through the area with his only friend, "Connemara Maggie", a prostitute who ultimately betrays him when his money is gone. And, most controversially, the riots associated with Séan O'Casey's The Plough and the Stars, first staged in 1926 and intended as a critique of the 1916 Rising, were orchestrated by republican Frank Ryan and led by a number of republican women, including Hanna Sheehy-Skeffington, not, as might be expected, on grounds that the character of prostitute Rosie Redmond defiled Irish womanhood, but, rather, that her representation on stage dishonoured the memory of those who had died in 1916, by suggesting that an Irish woman would use her sexuality to seduce Irish men away from nationalist rebellion.
IMPRESSIVE IN ITS scope, Prostitution and Irish Society 1800-1940provides a comprehensive history of the workhouse system, the "rescue" work associated with the Magdalen, convent and lay asylums, as well as the ways in which prostitutes, often (mis)represented as passive victims, used the legal system to secure justice for themselves. It also provides a history of venereal diseases, the "lock" hospitals and their barbaric treatment of "contaminated" women, as well as extensive discussions of the relationship between prostitution in Ireland and various ideological and political groupings, including Catholicism, women religious, lay charities, the nationalist and suffrage movements, and the Irish Free State. What emerges is a picture of women who remained at the mercy of changing political ideologies, most of which made superficial and gratuitous attempts to address the symptoms rather than the nature of their exploitation as prostitutes, and which hypocritically exploited the issue of prostitution for specific political ends.
Dr Rebecca Pelan is a lecturer in the School of English, Drama and Film at University College Dublin. She is currently editing a critical anthology on the work of Éilís Ní Dhuibhne