In 1815 an Irish soldier described in his diary the lottery held prior to the redeployment of his unit to India to determine which seven men in this bachelor army would be allowed to take a woman with him. One lucky winner sold his lot to an unmarried comrade. The transaction permitted the single man to transport a prostitute who could thereafter service the entire unit (69–70). This anecdote offers a unique glimpse into several aspects of Irish and imperial history, not least into the nature of prostitution in Ireland. Yet it leaves many questions unanswered. Intriguing, but ultimately inconclusive, the anecdote is also typical of Maria Luddy's study of prostitution and Irish society over 140 years.
Since demographers began to speculate discreetly on the likely social side effects of Ireland's unusual marriage patterns in the second half of the nineteenth century, the history of Irish sexuality has taken on the characteristics of the proverbial elephant in the room. In a society that appeared almost dependent on celibacy and delayed marriages, commercial and illicit sex must surely have been widely practiced. Historians seemed reluctant to study the issue, and sociologists seemed more interested in the social and religious mechanisms of sexual restraint than in the history of sexual expression. In the late 1990s this was to change. Investigative journalists began to uncover the evidence of the abuse of women and children in Irish state facilities and in doing so to question why these victims had been institutionalized in the first place. Frequently, their discoveries cast light on the unwritten history of Irish attitudes to sexuality: Magdalene Homes were originally intended to be asylums for prostitutes, but they had become a means of incarcerating deviant women. Children were frequently admitted to industrial schools when their widowed mothers were courted by men.
The relationship between the past and history as an academic discipline became fraught. Victims of institutional abuse sought redress, and archives shut down in the interests of both justice and self-preservation. The history of sexuality in Ireland, and in particular the history of illicit sexuality, moved from being underresearched to being overresearched. The output was uneven, the debates heated, and veteran researchers found themselves denied their sources but obliged to contribute to the growth industry that was the history of Irish sexuality.
In these circumstances it is particularly important to acknowledge the significant achievements of a serious scholar such as Maria Luddy but also to acknowledge the shortcomings of her work. Prostitution and Irish Society is a monumental study, the outcome of years of research by a justly respected historian. Her bibliography, appendixes, and figures alone will provide material for scholars for years to come, and she has succeeded in adding Irish experience to the historiography of prostitution in the United Kingdom. Prostitution was, as she demonstrates, endemic in Irish society during this period, but the sources that would allow historians to attempt an analysis of the incidence, geography, or nature of prostitution, or to seek to find patterns across place or time, are notoriously sparse. Her study is thorough but necessarily impressionistic. The chapters dealing with the nineteenth century are thematic, and there is little sense of change. Additionally, Irish sources are euphemistic about prostitution, using such phrases as “unfortunate women,” “phrynes,” or “nymphs of the pave.” This is typical of the literature of the United Kingdom, and where it is possible to extrapolate the experiences of real women from the sources, Luddy is both imaginative and sensitive, but it does mean that we can never be certain whether the woman under discussion was or was not engaged in the commercial sex trade.
This is not a criticism of Luddy's research, but it is a criticism of her title. Prostitution and Irish Society should perhaps have been named Irish Society and Prostitution. It is essentially a study of how the pillars of Irish society dealt with prostitution and how they used the language of prostitution to engage with a variety of discourses surrounding deviant and dangerous women, including unmarried mothers, the mentally ill, single women living together, and, with the increasing militancy of Irish nationalism during the First World War, “separation women”—the dependents of servicemen.
Luddy presents a very convincing and useful account of how women regarded as prostitutes were treated by the courts, Poor Law guardians, Magdalene Asylums, and hospitals dealing with venereal disease. She offers a valuable insight into those most local experiences of prostitution, “Monto” (the area of Dublin immortalized in literature as Joyce's “Nighttown”) and the “wrens of the Curragh.” The latter were the camp followers of the soldiers based at the Curragh camp, whose communitarian lifestyle has caused them to be embraced as romantic subjects by some feminist historians. Luddy's account of the deprivations, violence, and indignities suffered by these women is more convincing.
However, it is when dealing with the twentieth century that Luddy's work is most original and most valuable, not least because while the emphasis remains on the views of the nonprostituted population—and frequently about “problem women” rather than prostitutes per se—it is possible to construct a chronological history of the development of attitudes. Clearly, the views of policy makers and philanthropists toward deviant women hardened at some stage proximate to, although not necessarily resulting from, the emergence of advanced nationalism in Ireland. In the early twentieth century the prostitute became a nationalist metaphor for the condition of Ireland and a feminist metaphor for the condition of women. The prostitute became a contested image of exploitation, and her welfare receded into the background of political debate.
Luddy's final chapter examines the prostitute in independent Ireland. Here she rightly draws attention to the degree to which the prudery of postindependence Irish legislation was as much influenced by feminism and protectionism as by Catholic nationalism. What emerges from Luddy's study is an awareness that the discourse on prostitution and illicit sexuality inherited from Victorian Britain continued in independent Ireland for many years. Luddy begins her study with an account of how, in the 1980s, her attempts to talk about prostitution in a number of Irish venues were hindered by local people who regarded the subject as irrelevant to the Irish historical experience. She has proved them wrong.
