Making a Living: The Sex Trade in Early Modern Venice.

SOCIAL history; SOCIAL conditions of women; ECONOMIC trends; SEX industry; SEX workers; HISTORY

"Making a Living" moves the gendered analysis of sex work in an economic direction. Using examples from seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Venice, the analysis focuses on the ground-up economics that provided women as well as men with disposable income, economic value, and agency. Based on the firsthand testimonies of ordinary women from throughout Europe summoned before Venice's moral tribunal of the Executors against Blasphemy, the research illuminates the larger story in world history about the economic potential of the sex trade for household and family and how market demands undermined gender norms and religious traditions. The Bestemmia's microstories refine our picture of the trade in relation to household composition and alternatives to patriarchal rule. Both individual and corporate behavior on the part of Venice's sex workers lend themselves to a different interpretive paradigm for prostitution, one that departs from conceptualizations that view the trade in primarily moralistic terms as external to or even opposed to the family unit. In Venice, sex work did not necessarily separate women from the rest of the population. On the contrary, they remained deeply embedded in the city's social and financial networks as well as family life. This is evidenced by various constituencies within the city responding to plausible economic incentives and thus approaching the sale of sex differently. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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