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‘A Festering Sore on the Body of Society’: The wolfenden committee and Female Prostitution in Mid-Twentieth-Century Scotland

The proceedings and report of the Wolfenden Committee on Prostitution and Homosexual Offences (1954–7) figure prominently in the historiography of the sexual politics of late twentieth-century Britain. In terms of female prostitution, three broad but inter-related strands of interpretation may be detected within the literature. First, a largely narrative approach has located the Committee and subsequent legislation within the broader story of changing sexual mores and associated moral panic in 1950s Britain. Secondly, many social historians and sociologists have focused upon the coercive and regulatory implications of the report and the Street Offences Act of 1959,often within a Foucauldian framework of analysis. For commentators such as Jeffrey Weeks, the Wolfenden Report, by redefining the relationship of the law to the private moral terrain of the citizen, enabled a reaffirmation of the policing of public space in the interests of order and decency. Similarly, for Frank Mort, one of its most significant features was its codification of a ‘new geography of sexuality’ which both made the ‘troublesome and dangerous sexualities of prostitution’ more visible to the official mind and furnished a new ‘topography of regulation’. Meanwhile, other commentators have advanced a more specifically feminist interpretation of events. Thus, Carol Smart views the central thrust of the Wolfenden Committee’s deliberations on