Dissertation Information for Stan Nash NAME: - Stan Nash
- (Alias) Stanley Dana Nash
DEGREE:
- Ph.D.
DISCIPLINE:
- History
SCHOOL:
- New York University (USA) (1980)
ADVISORS: - None COMMITTEE MEMBERS: - None
MPACT Status: Incomplete - Inspected
Title: SOCIAL ATTITUDES TOWARDS PROSTITUTION IN LONDON FROM 1752 TO 1829
Abstract: "This study deals with social attitudes and perceptions toward prostitutes and prostitution rather than with prostitutes themselves. The main focus is on the increased concern about prostitution as a social problem that became evident in London in the 1750s and became especially intensified during the era of the French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars. This anxiety was particularly demonstrated by the wealthy middle class through the foundation of charities avowedly set up to reform and rehabilitate prostitutes and the evangelical anti-vice societies which attempted to suppress them. The charities for prostitution in their application of the concept of reform and rehabilitation represented a departure from the older method of merely punishing prostitutes. The primary conclusion of this dissertation is that the need felt to address the problem of prostitution was subordinated to the larger need felt especially by the middle class of finding more effective methods of placing social controls on the lower class.
Both fear of the lower classes as a source of crime and civil disorder and concern over their reliability as workers generated a great many movements in the eighteenth century. New methods were thus searched for to control and regulate the lower classes; hence, the movement for police reform that began in the 1750s and culminated in the formation of the Metropolitan Police Force in 1829, and the prison reform movement that began in the 1770s and led to state intervention in the regulation of prisons in the 1830s. The search for a new method of dealing with prostitution which was perceived as a cause and concomitant of crime, civil disorder, and degeneration of lower-class males, was only part of this broader quest for control and regulation of the lower classes.
That the eighteenth century should bring with it a special concern about the stability and reliability of the lower classes may not be surprising since London's population continued to grow rapidly and was accompanied by increased crime and severe rioting. This was certainly exacerbated by the fear from the 1790s that the London lower classes would imitate their French counterparts in Paris. Moreover, the eighteenth century had begun with the legacy of a weakening of traditional sources of authority, including the Church and the King. This laid the foundation for insecurity with regard to social stability. Thus, prostitution associated in the minds of the middle class with social and civil disorder increasingly became an area of concern.
Several other aspects of society and prostitution are stressed in this dissertation. Much emphasis is given to the law as it pertained to prostitution and how the establishment could not or would not enforce it in the era before the formation of the Metropolitan Police. And, a good deal of attention is paid to society's views of the origins and causes of prostitution.
This investigation into society's attitudes toward prostitution is based primarily on an analysis of four fundamental sources: records and publications of the several charities for prostitution that were formed between 1758 and 1813; parliamentary committee hearings on the ""police"" in London; publications of the anti-vice societies that existed in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries; and on numerous contemporary monographs and periodicals dealing with prostitution."
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MPACT Scores for Stan Nash A = 0
C = 1
A+C = 1
T = 0
G = 0
W = 0
TD = 0
TA = 0
calculated 2008-01-31 06:33:35
Advisors and Advisees Graph
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