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Buried in the depths of Hulu is a series based on Harris's Guide to the Ladies of Covent Garden, an erotic guide book to the prostitutes who worked the area. This little magazine was issued every year, at a cost 2 shillings + in London during the period 1757-1795. As the charms and specialities of each woman were described in sometimes graphic detail, it was titillating reading in and of itself.
Having spent a lot of time imagining exactly that time period in the course of working on various novels, I was instantly drawn in. As befits a British production, the costuming and the opening street scenes on the poor side of town were thrillingly authentic, full of piss, drunks, poverty and danger. I confess, I'm completely addicted to Harlots, which has more engaging characters and more twists, turns and heart-breaks in one episode than some series contain in an entire season.
Way beyond the soft core flash, Harlots is genuine women's history, served straight up. (!) It's written by women and a stern female gaze informs every scene and every line of dialogue. It made me realize, so much more than the tepid statement: "women had no property rights," that these women were property/chattel, just like their client's carriage horses.
A woman belonged to her father until she belonged to her husband. If she was married off to a gross rich old man or to a violent young one, she might still be lucky enough to become a widow. Only then would she have a chance to control her own life. In a terrific scene at the end of the first series, an aristocratic woman confides that she doesn't care who killed her husband, but if his whore knows who did, she only wants to say "thank-you."
The best a harlot could hope for was a rich and congenial "keeper," a man who would protect what belonged (often by contract) to him. During Georgian times, in London, one in five women was engaged in the sex trade. There were many sociological factors bringing this heart-breaking statistic about, but whatever was the cause, young women flooded into town from impoverished rural families looking for work as domestics. Even if they were fortunate enough to avoid being recruited or even kidnapped for sex work, they were utterly dependent and could easily be forced into sex with their masters. The practice survives today, in the form of workplace sexual harassment.
If you think those bad old days are over, take a look at the headlines in the past few years about the trials of women working in the entertainment (and the infotainment) businesses. This also happens in the course of ordinary employment, in offices, in restaurants, where tipped workers are paid (in my state $2.83/hr.) and in factories where women, in ever increasing numbers, have gone to work. One reason for the vulnerability of working women is because even college educated women are not paid what men are paid for producing exactly the same work. Moreover, the color of your skin decides exactly how much less than a man you will earn. Poor women discover that they can make a great deal more "on the game" than working at a minimum wage job, so, if they are young or need to make their own hours because their children are young and daycare impossible because of cost, sex work might still seem to be the only option.
The Viennese novels I've written are about the morally sketchy entertainment business, true then as now. Singers, actresses, and dancers enjoy fame and a bit of fortune while their looks and physical abilities last, but in the 18th Century they were never considered "respectable." Glamour and charisma brought wealthy men routinely into a talented woman's orbit. In a time when rich men routinely took mistresses, (and I'm sure it's not any different today) these talented women were collected by gentlemen as objects that proved status and virility--a virility often lodged only in their bank accounts.
My heroines, born poor and talented, Maria Klara and Nanina Gottlieb, live in a world where they always walk a cliff path way, the kind with a crumbling edge and an abyss beneath. Men take them for harlots simply because of their profession. Maria Klara is, quite literally, the property of a dissolute music-loving aristocrat. Her career as well as her comfort depend upon her powerful Count's good will and her ability to please him--both on stage and in his bed. Escape from her gilded cage seems utterly impossible.
Nanina, her family impoverished by the death of her father, barely escapes being turned out by her own mother. Lost virginity was the end of respectability, and, with that went the only other option for a woman in the 18th Century--marriage. Wife or Prostitute were woman's choices, unless she had money of her own sufficient to survive upon. Artists like Mozart lived on the edge of this fast and loose theatrical world; Papa Leopold Mozart's letters are full of exhortations and warnings to his precious, susceptible son on the subject of whores, who might also be talented prima donnas, the kind of women who have passed through the hands of many men.
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