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Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast Episode 309 – Lesbians and Sex Work

Sunday, March 23, 2025 - 18:21

Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast - Episode 309 – Lesbians and Sex Work - transcript

(Originally aired 2025/03/22 - listen here)

Introduction

There are a number of interesting themes that intersect with women loving women across history, but one that might seem, at first, to be unexpected is the association of lesbianism with sex work. I mean, here you are thinking, “Isn’t sex work mostly about women providing sexual services for men? And isn’t that a bit in conflict with women loving women?” And yet we find this association repeatedly in many different contexts. So what’s going on?

Obviously a significant underlayer is simple misogyny, whereby all women who stand outside the approved sexual norm get lumped together. But when we start sorting through the data, we find four distinct motifs. I should note that these motifs don’t necessarily reflect patterns of women’s experience, as opposed to social archetypes. And the ways in which these motifs are framed are sometimes informed by other models of gender and sexuality embedded in a particular era.

The four motifs can be summed up first as “some women are oversexed and they incline both towards sex work and lesbianism;” second as “women are trained into sex work by being seduced by an established female sex worker;” third “female sex workers view men as a job and therefore turn to women for their own love and pleasure;” and fourth “there is a specific marketplace for women providing sexual services to women.”

When I do this sort of historic survey, usually I try to organize it by culture and then by era, but in this case the data is so sparse and scattered that I’m going to organize it by those four themes.

Over-Sexed

The first motif stems from the idea that if a woman transgresses approved sexual norms in one manner, she is likely to transgress other norms. But in some eras, we also find an explanation that the reason why women might turn to sex work or to sex with other women is because they have an excessive sex drive that can’t be satisfied by sticking to approved objects and relationships. This motif doesn’t necessarily treat sex work and lesbianism as distinct concepts. Perhaps the most direct expression of this idea is in derogatory language where a woman might be insulted by simultaneously calling her a whore, a slut, and a lesbian—something we find in early modern English drama. So we might see this not so much a conflation of sex workers and lesbians as a failure to distinguish them.

This conflation may be present in Plato’s invention of the word “hetairistria” in the Symposium dialogue about the origin of sexual orientation in the separation of two-bodied creatures who are forever trying to find their “other half.” As Boehringer explains, the root “hetair-” covers a cluster of meanings in the sense “friend, companion” but with gendered nuances. The masculine “hetairos” only ever has a neutral sense of “friend” whereas the feminine “hetaira” developed a contextual meaning of “courtesan, mistress.” A verb derived from the same root occurs in the context of male prostitution. While Plato’s invention “hetairistria” clearly refers in some way to women loving women, though the context suggests that it may mean specifically “a woman whose love for women goes beyond the accepted norm.”  However Plato intended the word, it was later interpreted and used to mean a woman-loving woman generally, used in parallel with tribade and lesbian. But the connection with hetaira as courtesan also anchored this sense in the semantic realm of sex work.

We see this same evolution of overlapping meanings in the shifting images of Sappho where she is reimagined as a courtesan in combination with her reputation for loving women.

Taking a somewhat different angle we see a connection between gender transgression and sex work in the popular association of the latter with cross-dressing. On the 16th century Italian stage, characters depicting courtesans are often given cross-dressing scenes, mirroring habits attributed to real life courtesans. In English court records of the 15th and 16th centuries, cross-dressing women were assumed to be sex workers, whether because cross-dressing gave them the freedom to be out on the streets illicitly or because their clients may have found it titillating. While this isn’t to say that most sex workers cross-dressed, the law assumed that a cross-dressed woman was engaged in sexual transgression of some type. There are specific records of a woman being “enticed to whoredom” in a process that included cutting her hair short and dressing her in men’s clothing. The women in this category were not assumed to be engaging in sex with other women, but the motif links via the cross-dressing theme. Notorious 17th century gender outlaw Mary Frith was accused of being involved in prostitution purely on the basis of her mix of male and female garments, and dramatic characters based on her were also depicted as bisexual. It’s also worth noting that in this era calling a woman a whore or prostitute didn’t depend on whether she accepted money, but could simply refer to any sex outside marriage.

This motif of prostitutes wearing masculine clothing as an advertising statement continues into the 19th century in the American West, alongside other types of signifiers such as wearing overly sumptuous dress.

During the same era in France, writers and artists documenting the demi-monde associated lesbians with the spheres of sex work and theater. These depictions echoed the developing medical theories of homosexuality, which viewed it as a direct byproduct of criminality and prostitution.

Lesbianism as Training

Male anxiety about lesbian relations among sex workers was defused, to some extent, in the motif of same-sex seduction as a means to provide an erotic awakening for prospective sex workers. In this scenario, an older, experienced woman introduces an innocent young girl to the pleasures of sex and then—in the male-centered context of this motif—leaves her eager for the supposedly more enjoyable encounters with male clients.

This is a popular motif in dramas and novels of the 16th through 18th centuries, such as the 16th century Spanish dialogue La Celestina and its many derivatives such as the English translation as The Spanish Bawd. The theme is strongly implied in the 17th century English play The Three Ladies of London and is overt in the 18th century French pornographic novel Thérèse the Philosophe, though in the latter case the supposed ingenue already has a lesbian history before being taken under the wing of a procuress. Perhaps the most widely known example is in John Cleland’s 18th century novel Fanny Hill, in which the innocent Fanny is initiated into sexual pleasure by an older prostitute. Her mentor is described as having a preferred taste for female partners, while Fanny is eager to move on to men.

The motif of lesbian seduction into sex work may not have been entirely restricted to fiction. In one 17th century Spanish court case, a lesbian couple on trial are also accused of collecting a group of “wayward” young women supposedly to deliver them to a convent for reformed sex workers, but believed to be instead recruiting them to set up a brothel. Though in this case there isn’t direct evidence that the couple were engaging in sex with their recruits.

Women for Love

But what if, like Fanny Hill’s mentor, a sex worker actually prefers to take her pleasure with other women? Then we have our third motif. This one provokes a bit more male anxiety than the “seduction into sex work” motif, because it undermines the necessary fiction that sex workers have a more-than-commercial relationship to their clients. It also undermines the fiction that women turn to other women for sex only because men aren’t available. As Brantôme laments in 16th century France, “Even courtesans, who have men at their disposal at all hours, yet have recourse to these fricarelles, seek each other out and love each other, as I have heard of sundry doing in Italy and in Spain.

Among the various myths that arose about Sappho, one strand turned her into a courtesan—perhaps from the misapprehension that only courtesans would have the education and sophistication to be poets. There are images of Sappho on Greek pottery that depict her as a part of a symposium of courtesans participating in a female pederastic tradition.

A genre of teasing and satirical poetry in medieval Spain includes references to homosexual relations, including three verses that make clear and explicit reference to female same-sex encounters by sex workers serving military camps.

Brantôme, along with some of his contemporaries even name names in this context, contrasting the “chaste” love between two female aristocrats with the more lascivious desires of “the great prostitute Cecilia Venetiana” and a famous Spanish courtesan in Rome, Isabella de Luna, who herself kept another courtesan named Pandora as her mistress.

In an era when women on stage found it difficult to escape a second career as mistresses to wealthy theater patrons, a number of prominent actresses were famous for their female lovers, including 18th century French actress Mademoiselle de Raucourt who was said to have “married” her lover, the singer Sophie Arnould and had succession of other female lovers. (Though Raucourt is perhaps not an ideal example of the category as she struggled to avoid the need for having male clients.) The motif of actresses competing with men for the affections of courtesans and mistresses was prevalent enough to become a standard trope in French comic media.

Sometimes these relationships were complicated. Betty Rizzo explores one 18th century couple who combined a romantic and (probably) sexual relationship with a business partnership, Sophia Baddeley being a sometime actress and courtesan, and Elizabeth Steele being her companion, lover, pimp, and business manager.

Guy de Maupassant’s late 19th century French novel “Paul’s Mistress” features the protagonist’s suicidal despair when his mistress deserts him for the “more certain affections” of a band of lesbians.

A Russian psychiatrist’s case study of the late 19th century tells of a female couple who met while working together in a brothel and were fired for neglecting their customers in favor of each other. After the two eventually broke up, one of the women returned to working in the brothel, picked up another girlfriend, and again was kicked out, taking her new girlfriend with her.

Lest I give the impression that these motifs are restricted to Western culture—honestly, it’s the old problem that the vast majority of my research sources have that focus—I’ll offer two other items. Among a 9th century collection of songs and stories from the Islamicate world, there is an anecdote of the famous courtesan Bathal daringly singing a song about her preference for sex with women.

And in India, within the curious genre of Rekhti poetry—an Urdu genre in which a typically male poet writes in a female voice addressing a female beloved—there is evidence of courtesans performing these poems for each other.

Lesbian Sex Work

Our fourth motif is a bit harder to pin down, especially with regard to whether it existed in real life as opposed to literature. Were there circumstances in which women provided sexual services to other women as a commercial enterprise? What sort of evidence would that leave? What is the dividing line between a woman providing financial support to her female lover, and sex as a financial transaction? In this essay, I’ve been treating a wide variety of non-marital heterosexual liaisons as falling within the category of sex work, including ones where the women are characterized as “courtesans” or “mistresses.” But female couples didn’t have the option of formal marriage; is it fair to apply the same definitions to them? These are some of the complications.

In Lucian’s fictional Dialogues of the Courtesans, we have a clear example of a professional courtesan (who appears to be much more on the “sex worker” end of the scale than the “intellectual companion” end) hired to entertain a female couple, including engaging in sex with both of them. (For the moment we’re going to skate over the question of whether the character of Megilla should be treated as transgender, because Lucian clearly intended her to be read as female.) This courtesan’s profession includes providing entertainment to her clients, that entertainment clearly is expected to include sexual services, and while she is a bit surprised to be asked to provide those services for women, she is perfectly willing and appears to be continuing to engage with these clients. Was this an actual feature of 2nd century Greek culture? Not proven, but neither does Lucian present it as something the reader is expected to disbelieve.

In late 15th century English legal records, there is one tantalizing reference to a woman named Thomasina keeping in her household a cross-dressed woman who was a concubine. While there’s enough ambiguity in the record for doubt as to whose concubine the woman was, the most straightforward reading is that she was Thomasina’s concubine. However there’s even more doubt as to whether the relationship should be read as transactional, as “concubine” simply meant a non-marital relationship and may have been the only word available to the clerk to describe the situation.

Less ambiguous, though not clearly certain, is an inquisition record from mid-17th century Spain in which one member of a female couple was recorded as having boasted that her girlfriend was willing to pay her for sex (but evidently was not actually doing so). The most straightforward interpretation would be a culture where sex work for a female client was understood as a possibility. But in the specific case, this is a long-term couple, although with a stormy relationship, where neither woman is considered by the court to be a sex worker.

Returning to the realm of fiction, Delariviere Manley’s early 18th century novel The New Atalantis includes an anecdote in which a female couple—one crossdressing as a man—together engaged the services of “Creatures of Hire” who were happy in “obliging [their] peculiar taste.” A similar event occurs in Eliza Haywood’s mid-18th century novel The History of Jemmy and Jenny Jessamy, where a character named Lady Fisk goes on a cross-dressed adventure in Covent Garden that ends in picking up a (female) prostitute, though in this case the sex worker was not amenable once she learned Fisk’s assigned sex.

Interacting with sex workers while in gender disguise does add another twist to interpretative difficulty, especially if one is viewing the situation through trans possibilities. 18th century English actress Charlotte Charke’s autobiography records flirtations with sex workers while crossdressing, though the demands of her audience meant that she generally depicts it as attracting not-entirely-wanted attention and that the sex workers were not aware of her assigned sex.

 Another complication? Where is the dividing line between a brothel, where women go to pay for sex, and a sex club, where they gather to have encounters with other women? The potentially fictitious 18th century Anandrine Sect in France is clearly a sex club rather than a house of prostitution, and the description by a German visitor to London in the 1780s of organized societies for “females who avoid all intimate intercourse with the opposite sex, confining themselves to their own sex” similarly sounds non-commercial.

A complaint in 18th century Amsterdam against 4 women who shared a house “where disreputable people gathered” is unclear on the nature of the establishment. The house was said to be one where women came to caress and kiss one another and feel under each other’s skirts. While one of the women said she was “seduced with coffee and alcohol,” it isn’t clear that the house was a commercial establishment as opposed to a meeting place.

The most explicit descriptions I’ve found of English brothels catering to lesbians have turned out to be an elaborate game of telephone, with sources citing each other in circular fashion, adding ever more specific details as they go. If you’re interested in going down that rabbit hole, check out my podcast on “Researching the Origins of Lesbian Myths, Legends, and Symbols” (linked in the show notes). But in the end I could find no verifiable evidence for lesbian bordellos in 18th century London.

Summary

So as you can see the question of a historic connection between lesbians and sex workers is complex and full of uncertainties, not only due to the nature of the sources and the biases of the people recording them, but due to the often ambiguous nature of sex work itself within societies where even relationships with official imprimatur are transactional in nature. But perhaps this exploration has offered new ideas for historic stories and characters.

Show Notes

In this episode we talk about:

  • Four motifs that connect women loving women and sex work in historic sources
  • Sources used
    • Bennett, Judith and Shannon McSheffrey. 2014. “Early, Erotic and Alien: Women Dressed as Men in Late Medieval London” in History Workshop Journal. 77 (1): 1-25.
    • Beynon, John C. 2010. “Unaccountable Women” in Lesbian Dames: Sapphism in the Long Eighteenth Century. Beynon, John C. & Caroline Gonda eds. Ashgate, Farnham. ISBN 978-0-7546-7335-4
    • Blackmore, Josiah. 1999. “The Poets of Sodom” in Queer Iberia: Sexualities, Cultures, and Crossings from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance ed. Josiah Blackmore and Gregory S. Hutcheson. Duke University Press, Durham. ISBN 9780822323495
    • Boehringer, Sandra (trans. Anna Preger). 2021. Female Homosexuality in Ancient Greece and Rome. Routledge, New York. ISBN 978-0-367-74476-2
    • Burford, E.J. 1986. Wits, Wenchers and Wantons - London’s Low Life: Covent Garden in the Eighteenth Century. Robert Hale, London. ISBN 0-7090-2629-3
    • Cheek, Pamela. 1998. "The 'Mémoires secrets' and the Actress: Tribadism, Performance, and Property", in Jeremy D. Popkin and Bernadette Fort (eds), The "Mémoires secrets" and the Culture of Publicity in Eighteenth-Century France, Oxford: Voltaire Foundation.
    • Choquette, Leslie. 2001. “’Homosexuals in the City: Representations of Lesbian and Gay Space in Nineteenth-Century Paris” in Merrick, Jeffrey & Michael Sibalis, eds. Homosexuality in French History and Culture. Harrington Park Press, New York. ISBN 1-56023-263-3
    • Craft-Fairchild, Catherine. 2006. “Sexual and Textual Indeterminacy: Eighteenth-Century English Representations of Sapphism” in Journal of the History of Sexuality 15:3
    • DeJean, Joan. 1989. Fictions of Sappho, 1546-1937. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ISBN 0-226-14136-5
    • Donoghue, Emma. 1995. Passions Between Women: British Lesbian Culture 1668-1801. Harper Perennial, New York. ISBN 0-06-017261-4
    • Engelstein, Laura. 1990. "Lesbian Vignettes: A Russian Triptych from the 1890s" in Signs vol. 15, no. 4 813-831.
    • Garber, Marjorie. 1992. Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing and Cultural Anxiety. Routledge, New York. ISBN 0-415-91951-7
    • Faderman, Lillian. 1981. Surpassing the Love of Men. William Morrow and Company, Inc., New York. ISBN 0-688-00396-6
    • Gilhuly, Kate. 2015. “Lesbians are Not from Lesbos” in Blondell, Ruby & Kirk Ormand (eds). Ancient Sex: New Essays. The Ohio State University Press, Columbus. ISBN 978-0-8142-1283-7
    • Habib, Samar. 2007. Female Homosexuality in the Middle East: Histories and Representations. Routledge, New York. ISBN 78-0-415-80603-9
    • Haley, Shelley P. “Lucian’s ‘Leaena and Clonarium’: Voyeurism or a Challenge to Assumptions?” in Rabinowitz, Nancy Sorkin & Lisa Auanger eds. 2002. Among Women: From the Homosocial to the Homoerotic in the Ancient World. University of Texas Press, Austin. ISBN 0-29-77113-4
    • Ingrassia, Catherine. 2003. “Eliza Haywood, Sapphic Desire, and the Practice of Reading” in: Kittredge, Katharine (ed). Lewd & Notorious: Female Transgression in the Eighteenth Century. The University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor. ISBN 0-472-11090-X
    • Jones, Ann Rosalind & Peter Stallybrass. 1991. “Fetishizing gender: constructing the Hermaphrodite in Renaissance Europe” in Body guards : the cultural politics of gender ambiguity edited by Julia Epstein & Kristina Straub. Routledge, New York. ISBN 0-415-90388-2
    • Jones, Heather Rose. 2021. “Researching the Origins of Lesbian Myths, Legends, and Symbols” (podcast). https://alpennia.com/blog/lesbian-historic-motif-podcast-episode-201-researching-origins-lesbian-myths-legends-and
    • Katritzky, M.A. 2005. “Reading the Actress in Commedia Imagery” in Women Players in England, 1500-1660: Beyond the All-Male Stage, edited by Pamela Allen Brown & Peter Parolin. Ashgate, Burlington. ISBN 978-0-7546-0953-7
    • Klein, Ula Lukszo. 2021. Sapphic Crossings: Cross-Dressing Women in Eighteenth-Century British Literature. University of Virginia Press, Charlottesville. ISBN 978-0-8139-4551-4
    • Kranz, Susan E. 1995. The Sexual Identities of Moll Cutpurse in Dekker and Middleton’s The Roaring Girl and in London in Renaissance and Reformation 19: 5-20.
    • Merrick, Jeffrey. 1990. “Sexual Politics and Public Order in Late Eighteenth-Century France: the Mémoires secrets and the Correspondance secrète” in Journal of the History of Sexuality 1, 68-84.
    • Merrick, Jeffrey & Bryant T. Ragan, Jr. 2001. Homosexuality in Early Modern France: A Documentary Collection. Oxford University Press, New York. ISBN 0-19-510257-6
    • Rizzo, Betty. 1994. Companions without Vows: Relationships among Eighteenth-Century British Women. Athens: University of Georgia Press. ISBN 978-0-8203-3218-5
    • Sears, Clare. 2015. Arresting Dress: Cross-Dressing, Law, and Fascination in Nineteenth-Century San Francisco. Durham: Duke University Press. ISBN 978-0-8223-5758-2
    • Shapiro, Michael. 1994. Gender in Play on the Shakespearean Stage: Boy Heroines and Female Pages. Ann Arbor.
    • Van der Meer, Theo. 1991. “Tribades on Trial: Female Same-Sex Offenders in Late Eighteenth-Century Amsterdam” in Journal of the History of Sexuality 1:3 424-445.
    • Vanita, Ruth and Saleem Kidwai, eds. 2000. Same-Sex Love in India: Readings from Literature and History. St. Martin’s, New York. ISBN 0-312-22169-X
    • Velasco, Sherry. 2011. Lesbians in Early Modern Spain. Vanderbilt University Press, Nashville. ISBN 978-0-8265-1750-0
    • Wahl, Elizabeth Susan. 1999. Invisible Relations: Representations of Female Intimacy in the Age of Enlightenment. Stanford University Press, Stanford. ISBN 0-8047-3650-2
    • Walen, Denise A. 2005. Constructions of Female Homoeroticism in Early Modern Drama. New York: Palgrave MacMillan. ISBN 978-1-4039-6875-3

Links to the Lesbian Historic Motif Project Online

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