What are some of the ways I could go about this?

i appreciate nead’s work but don’t talk about myth myself. rather i found that selling sex did not endow one with a set identity before the designation of prostitutes as victims. ancient-world women who sold sex were not seen as they began to be during the Rise of the Social – see lerner and others. also the term whore referred and still refers to more people than sex-sellers.

one would have to do research to know about the point you raise – whether there was simply more money available to carry out social helping. i doubt it because my research did not turn this up but rather pointed to new priorities from the bourgeoisie plus a notable increase in numbers of somewhat educated women who wanted to find respectable work.

visualising prostitutes as a public-health problem came later and is not the whole story. saving them from their fate was more important, i believe. for me it’s about the rise of social helping and bureaucracy, hand in hand.

(a) you seem to be concluding (with Nead [1988]) that ‘the prostitute,’ with all the attending details (the prostitute’s fallen character and threat/danger to ‘decency’) was a 19th-century, Victorian myth; but isn’t it the case that ‘bad’ characterizations of women who sell sex abounded in the literature long before that (all the way to the ‘Whore of Babylon’ in the Bible)?

(b) if so, isn’t the difference actually in the fact that the 19th century (with the ‘Rise of the Social’) was simply the first time in history in which sufficiently many resources existed, and sufficiently many willing people could be found, to carry out the project to ‘tackle’ the ‘problem’ of prostitution — which was seen as a problem long before that?

(c) in that spirit, the Foucauldian concept of the change in punishment would suggest, not that ‘the prostitute’ suddenly emerged as a new myth, but that the old myth of the prostitute-as-danger now was going to be attacked as a ‘health’ problem, as something to be ‘cured’, rather than as something to be ‘punished’? Or, in other words: isn’t what happened to prostitution at the time simply the same as what happened to all other ‘crimes’ and ‘problems’ that traditionally had been seen as deserving ‘punishment’ or ‘sanction’? (I note that injunctions to ‘help the poor’ and examples about ‘talking to and helping prostitutes’ go at least as far back as Jesus himself.)

Or, to summarize: was it a ‘new myth’ into which, like a Procrustean bed, a new class of people was forced, no matter what they individual features were; or was it an ‘old myth’ (which already included such people) which suddenly became a ‘disease’ which the 19th-century finally thought it had the means to eradicate? If I understand Foucault correctly, the change was not that ‘crime’ suddenly appeared as a category in need of resolution (via ‘punishment’), but that the social strategies/philosophy for dealing with it — the meaning that (preexisting) crime had for that epoch, the role it played — changed.

Or am I missing something here?

But anyway — your paper is a great read, wonderful food for thought — and has kept me up till 1:25 AM instead of going to sleep like a good boy should. Thank you very much!