“An Immense House of Ill-Fame”: Prostitution, Politics, and the Instrumentality of Sexuality in Ontario, 1860s-1930s
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This dissertation provides the first comprehensive historical examination of sex work in Ontario from 1860 to 1930. It illustrates how women navigated sexual labour and how communities regulated prostitution in urban centres such as Toronto and Kingston, industrial cities like Windsor, and northern resource extraction towns including North Bay and Timmins. I underscore that the lack of economic options for women in turn-of-the-century Ontario drew them into circuits of profit through prostitution, liquor, and other illicit ventures. Sex workers played a fundamental role in sustaining underground economies and legal financial networks, including the real estate and entertainment industries. The primary research contribution of this project is to explore the instrumentality, or usefulness, of sex work for legal, economic, and political projects that were often ostensibly unrelated to sexuality. It demonstrates how prostitution and the politically effective language of morality served as strategies to be leveraged in the service of municipal budgets and political campaigns, to reshape urban neighbourhoods and property values, to reform police departments, and to expand the provincial judicial system over northern Ontario. The dissertation draws from policing, legal, press, civic, and provincial records to underscore that the political and financial salience of prostitution supported far-ranging objectives at numerous institutional levels. Its case studies revolve around four themes: property, profit, profiling, and politics. Each study highlights different actors each with their own stakes in the government of prostitution and varying relationships to power, including social reformers, municipal governments and police, the provincial government, and sex workers themselves. This project is attuned to the ways that prostitution was embedded in other forms of vice, including liquor and gambling, which manifested through vagrancy legislation, policing practices, and the lived experiences of criminalized people. It draws together legal, social, and political history by underscoring that the legal regulation of sex work, the social history of vagrancy, and the politicization of sexuality all rested upon a shared understanding of the overlapping nature of immorality.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.021 | 0.019 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".