← Betwixt The Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal & Society
Betwixt The Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal & Society
Inside Europe's Biggest Red Light District
00:51:47
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- [00:00]
Kate Lister
Hi, I'm your host, Kate Lister. If you would like betwixt the Sheets ad free and get early access, sign up to History Hit with a History Hit subscription. You can also watch hundreds of original documentaries with top history presenters and enjoy a new release every single week. Sign up now by visiting historyhit.com subscribe. Hello, my lovely betwixters. How the hell have you been? I'm fine, thank you very much for asking. I can't wait to delve into today's episode, that's for damn sure. I hope your game as well, but it is of a sensitive nature, so I have to tell you, this is an adult podcast, spoken by adults to other adults about adulty things in an adulty way, covering a range of adult subjects. And you should be an adult too. And we have to tell you that because if you sit down and you listen and you happen to get offended, then we get in trouble. But if we've told you at the start that it's a spicy one, well, then that's just all on you, I'm afraid. Fair dues. You were warned. Right. Oh, with the show, join me for a stroll betwixt us to the cobbled streets of Dublin at the turn of the 20th century. Up here, north of the river Leafy, the streets get narrower, darker, and provide a haven for the countless brothels and the thousands of sex workers that have called this part of town home. Oh, look, there's Bella Cohen, and she runs one of the BDSM brothels here in Monto. A very interesting lady and just one of the many incredible characters around here that I can't wait to introduce you to. Her brothel was actually a favorite of the writer James Joyce, who even gives her a mention in his book Ulysses. If you've ever bothered to read that far into that book. I know I haven't. Worth paying a visit though, wouldn't you say? Well, let's get a little bit closer and find out more. What do you look for in a man?
- [01:56]
Dr. Caroline West
Oh, money, of course. You're supposed to rise when an adult speaks to you.
- [02:00]
Kate Lister
I make perfect copies of whatever my boss needs by just turning a knob and pushing the button. Now, emot.
- [02:12]
Dr. Caroline West
Now, yes, social courtesy does make a difference. Goodness, my beautiful dime. Goodness has nothing to do with it, dearie.
- [02:23]
Kate Lister
Hello, and welcome back to Betwixt the Sheets, the history of sex scandal in society with me, Kate Lister. When you think of the biggest red light districts of Europe, your mind might naturally wander to Amsterdam, Paris, or London. But between 1860 and 1925, Dublin's Monto district had upwards of 1600 sex workers working there at any one time. What was it like inside the brothels and the alleyways of Monto? Who were the people that worked there and what were their stories? What had brought them all to Monto in the first place? And what led to its eventual decline? Joining me today is the marvellous Dr. Caroline west, author of Wrong Women Selling Sex in Monto, Dublin's forgotten red light district. If you're interested in more sex work histories, why not scroll back to our episode, sex work in 18th century Paris? But without further ado, let's crack on. Hello and welcome to Betwixt the Sheets. It's only Caroline West. How are you doing?
- [03:27]
Dr. Caroline West
So glad to be here. I'm such a fangirl, Kate. I'll try to get through this without fangirling all over you, but we'll see.
- [03:34]
Kate Lister
I'm not the important thing here. You and your book, your brain, baby, that you've written. Let's give it its full title. Wrong Women Selling Sex in Monto, Dublin's forgotten red light district. This, and she's been holding it up for me to have a look at. It is a beautiful, beautiful book. This is an incredible history. And you're not kidding when you say forgotten, because I didn't know the extent of this and I researched sex work for a living. It's really bad. But what, what made you find this history?
- [04:05]
Dr. Caroline West
So it was really a singular sentence that really changed the whole course, I suppose, of my life. And this book was that I read in a book about Monto that the women had been smothered with pillows when they went into hospital to try treatment for syphilis. And I was like, excuse me, what, what, what? You can't just have that as a single sentence and not do anything with that. And this was around 2015, so we knew about the laundries, we knew about like state violence and everything else, but Arlen was very good at going, ugh, sex, women. Like, we'll not record any of that stuff. So it kind of got forgotten about. So you only really hear of Monto in like songs now. So all those like, like stories about like potentially state sponsored mass murder just got left to the wayside. So yeah, seven's kind of stayed with me for a while and then I do my PhD on porn stars in Vegas and realized it's kind of the same thing. So it's over in Vegas. It's a little pop up red light district. The same kind of stratification through class, the Same kind of people there. I was like, I might as well be back in Dublin in the 1860s. And here I am in Vegas at the Born Awards 2016. And it's kind of the same thing. So it's really interesting to see how everything's continued, really.
- [05:23]
Kate Lister
Now you said there, and you're absolutely right, that a lot of people won't know about this history. So I think for most of us. Can you tell us what Monto is?
- [05:32]
Dr. Caroline West
Yeah. So Monto was a red light district in Dublin in this tiny little one square mile area of tenements, houses, cottages, and between 1860, 1925, there would have been tens of thousands of women who passed through there. Because it was right in the city centre of Dub Dublin. It was right next to British army barracks, it was right next to the train station and the docks. So it was perfect for right time, right place. So it kind of was just off the street and this higgledy piggledy world of laneways and alleyways. And you can go through one house, end up in another house. There's all these secret passages. Because it was also where the IRA revolutionaries were fighting against the British for Easter rising. So the women would hide a lot of the soldiers as they were running through the houses. So really it's like a snapshot of Irish history of 60 years, but it actually really helped like fight for our independence. Yeah. So the legacy of Montau really stretches into so much like how Ireland bumped up the idea of a good woman. Was a Catholic woman who had all the babies and she definitely didn't socialize with those British soldiers. So we were trying to be different from you guys and trying to say our women are chaste and pure and sex work was part of English life. So it was, it was very hidden. Wasn't, you know, part of the good Catholic Ireland that they were trying to build up at the time.
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Kate Lister
So this is an approach to sex work that you see all throughout history. There are various approaches and this is one called zoning, where someone comes up with the idea of, all right, you can do it, but we're going to kind of basically force you to do it. In this area here, was this approved by the state? Because in some cases, like in Italy and France, they're state regulated zones. Or was this sort of like an impromptu informal area that they were working out of?
- [07:24]
Dr. Caroline West
It kind of came about because a lot of the brothels got shut down through the rest of the city and people just didn't want to see it. Respectable ladies didn't want to see it, they didn't want to hear the calls of the women. So it all kind of moved over towards this particular area which is on the north side of the city. And poverty really kind of changed things. So those houses, that would have been quite well to do people, very middle class people, they would have been involved in, you know, governments running the country and things like that. But they left to go to England in 1801, the act of Union. So all the rich, fancy people left Dublin and all their houses got turned into tenements. And because you could buy houses in Montau for like a fiver, loads of people were able to get really, really cheap houses. And one of the madams built up an empire of 200 houses because you could buy them for like a shilling, you know, by the very end, they're all crumb kind of tenements. Or a brothel became a room in one of the tenements. So you'd have family houses or family rooms next door. So it was all kind of very mixed. But yeah, we liked to kind of hide this away and pretend that this wasn't happening. And it was at a time as well when the Catholic Church was really kind of getting its hook into Irish society and telling Irish women what we should be like. So Monto didn't fit with that at all. So it just got smaller and smaller and more hidden. But still, like, even if it was one square mile, there were still tens of thousands of women who pass through there. So at any one time there could be 1600 sex workers, but thousands of soldiers, sailors, royalty. We had Prince Albert over in Monto as well. He's meant to lose his virginity there. Yeah, good old Prince Albert. So, yeah, for such a small, tiny little dot on the landscape, you had thousands of people flooding in and doing all sorts of weird, wonderful stuff all night long.
- [09:14]
Kate Lister
Wow. So it was never like officially sanctioned by the city of Dublin. It just sort of existed in this uneasy sort of. Well, we won't say anything about it if you sort of. If everybody keeps quiet type of a situation.
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Dr. Caroline West
Absolutely. Ireland's really good at doing that. Many, many areas we've done that in.
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Kate Lister
What was the legal status of sex work when it. When it opened in the 19th century? Because, I mean, even today the law is kind of. It's sort of a bit all over the place. But what was it like when it. When it first opened? I say opened. Developed.
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Dr. Caroline West
Developed, yeah. Well, just before that, I suppose. But Ramonto, a lot of the time it was if you looked like a sex worker, you could be arrested. And the joy of that was that anyone who wasn't behaving the way men and the state said we should, you could get arrested and brought in for prostitution. But it was kind of a bit of a nod, nod, wink, wink, because there's lots of stories of women being brought up towards the judges and then saying, well, he paid me 5 shillings last night and now he's locking me up this morning. There's loads of that, of course, lots of hypocrisy. But then we also had the CDA come in. So that's the Contagious Diseases act and that was used to target women who were working as sex workers around the docks. So that wasn't in Dublin, it was in Cork and Kildare. But lots of those women would ended up in Monto. So, like horrific forced examinations on the women. But thankfully in Dublin they didn't adapt that. But they just said, they'll come in, we'll give them a nice talking too, and then they'll gladly go home afterwards and behave themselves.
- [10:48]
Kate Lister
I see. So we have spoken a little bit about the contagious diseases that before on the podcast, but let's just go over it again because it's a really big and important piece of legislation when it comes to sex work in the UK and Ireland, obviously. What was it? What the hell were they doing?
- [11:05]
Dr. Caroline West
Yeah, they were doing very bad things. So the idea was to get rid of syphilis and gonorrhea or VD as they were kind of jointly known at the time. Time.
- [11:14]
Kate Lister
Now, why did they want to do that, Caroline? Was it because they really cared about people's health and the well being of the general populace?
- [11:20]
Dr. Caroline West
Surprisingly, no. They wanted. They wanted to keep their soldiers and sailors and everything else on the battlefield and working, and they were being felt by the brothel instead. So the more that they could keep their men good and wholesome, the better. And this was also a time they viewed women as the spreaders. So men were just like, oh, sweet and innocent. And then it was the women who were to be locked up and examined. And so there were some sergeants who were like, oh, there's no syphilis in my unit. This is disgraceful. We shouldn't do this. And every unit had syphilis in it. That's fine. It was a big problem, a big, big, big one. So what they would do to the women would be to bring them in for quote, unquote, voluntary exam. But if they didn't agree to it, they're forcibly subjected to it and they would tie their Legs down, use speculums on them. So Josephine Butler did a lot of work around this, and she called the speculum an instrument of rape. Steel rape, government rape. And it horrendous stuff that they did to the women, because, again, they're viewed as dirty and diseased and not innocent. They're viewed as, like, dangerous kind of women. So they would be left in horrendous state. And some of the practitioners of this wanted that exam being done every day. Some settled for like twice a week and stuff. But, like, you know, those women were left bleeding and also infected as well, as a result of the shared instruments and stuff that they were using in those exams. So a lot of those women would have made their way to Monto afterwards because they might have known that the hospital here didn't forcibly lock them up. So they would come in several times into the westmorelandlock Hospital, which is where a lot of the women of Montau would end their lives. So they weren't subjected to the Contagious Diseases act, but they were subjected to being experimented on for trying to find the cure for syphilis. So some of them get injected up to 400 times.
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Kate Lister
Fuck off. What?
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Dr. Caroline West
Yeah. And it was. And I didn't know that, and I was trying to find out about this moderation and then discovered this. So there's a physician called James Morgan, he worked here and he worked in the uk, and he would say, oh, I'd never infect any good person. It's always like the bad women who might have had syphilis. Now, like, back in the day, if you had any kind of vaginal discharge, they were like, that's an sti. And obviously we know now that's a bit different. But he would inject a woman with syphilis from another woman or gonorrhea from a man into her skin and then see if that would bring up sores, which it did, and then they would keep doing that. So he's like, oh, no, it's only the syphilis people that were injecting.
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Kate Lister
When was this?
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Dr. Caroline West
This was around 1870. So they would have done this in France and London and in Dublin as well, and I think in Liverpool as well. So really horrific stuff. And they would treat any bits of sores with, like, nitride nitrate of silver, which would burn the skin. And they're like, oh, they didn't come back for treatments. Like, I wouldn't really blame them for that. That doesn't sou. But, yeah, some of them were left with, like, open wounds, open Sores the size of like their entire thighs. And they were like, oh, no. Our experiment didn't contribute to their death at all in any way. So really vicious kind of stuff. But again, it was viewed as, that's the price you're paying to get this medical care. That's what the fee is. You're one of these dirty women. We're fancy medical professionals. It's kind of our right to experiment on you.
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Kate Lister
I can't really get my head around this. So they. This is medical men infecting women with syphilis and then offering them the treatment for syphilis.
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Dr. Caroline West
The attempts at syphilis at the time.
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Kate Lister
Well, it's not a treatment, is it? Wow.
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Dr. Caroline West
So it was at the backs of sex workers that we basically have the cure for syphilis to thank. Because when they were subjected to these for a number of years, you know, they learned a lot. It wasn't the right move at the time, but it led to the person who did invent it then he was able to use all this history and experimentation to then come up with a cure for syphilis, which he also invented alongside the same time as chemotherapy. So, you know, we have that sex work aspect to that that doesn't get talked about, you know, and we have to ethically remember those women and like, what they went through for saving the rest of us from syphilis, you know, so their experiments saved millions of people. And it also meant millions of soldiers were back on the battlefield for World War II and they would have been taken out by the brothels beforehand. So really did impact quite a. You know, but the women get forgotten about.
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Kate Lister
The brutalization of that is insane. I mean, the contagious diseases act is bad enough that they can just round up anyone they even vaguely suspect and subject them to this stuff. But forced medical experiments, like, that's unbelievable. Where were you when you first read about that? It must have just been like, what the hell am I even reading here?
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Dr. Caroline West
I know. And like. And I had no idea about it. I was looking for the smothering stuff and then I just found medical journals that included photo. Well, not photos, drawings of the experiments and said how great it was. And then there was a backlash against it from other medical people and said, oh, this is really inhumane. We shouldn't be sharing these pictures and stuff. So it was a tolerated practice, I think for about 10ish years, starting in France from what I can see, and then over. So it was there and they were boasting about it, but it's just Been lost to history, really, because who else is looking up 1870 medical journals, like thousands of women. He personally experimented on over about 2,000 women that this one guy did between Dublin and London. So, yeah, and, like, if they were going in for syphilis treatment at that point, they were generally quite far along the pathway of, you know, and dying by syphilis is quite horrendous. So if you're already dying from syphilis and then someone else is injecting you with even more syphilis, that's not great for your health. So, yeah, really dehumanizing.
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Kate Lister
I mean, you know that things are bad in the 19th century when other doctors start to say, hang on a minute, remind when it's so bad that even the doctors at the time are going, hang on a minute, maybe we shouldn't be doing this. That's unbelievable. So take it back to 19th century when Montau kind of not opened, but evolved. It wasn't too long after the famine, was it? And one thing that we do know is there is a direct link between sex, work and poverty. Can you talk to us a little bit about that link?
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Dr. Caroline West
Sure, yeah. So we had a great famine in the late kind of 1840s into the 1850s, and that really impacted the poor and the rural side of Ireland, in Dublin, they're still having a great time. They're still going out to horse shows and drinking bottles of whiskey and having a fantastic time, whereas people in the country were dying on the way to the workhouse. And, like, their bodies being left there really kind of decimated the country. So the people who generally survived it were women because they could get into the workhouses. Men were often told, you need to go out and work and earn your keep when they're, you know, half dead. The women survived, but a lot of the time, the workhouse system was incredibly cruel. They were sex workers. They were separated from the other respectable people so that they wouldn't contaminate them. And their options, really, for outside work were domestic servants, which was high risk of sexual violence and regular violence. Again, their education wasn't really prioritized because they were girls. A lot of them couldn't. They would have spoken Irish, so they couldn't speak speak English, because if they could, that could have led them to emigrate. So they kind of really didn't have a whole lot of options. And then a lot of them were fleeing family violence, too. So domestic and sexual violence within the family. So where else do you go, you know, if you. If you're escaping all Those factors, you have no job, no accommodation. You can end up in Montgomery, no family. And, you know, and the shame as well of being in Monto would mean you couldn't go back to your family. So you had a lot of people passing through Manta with no connections to a previous life. So some of them were there for a couple of weeks. Some of them were there for years. Some of them went on to be the madams and earned like, an astronomical amount of money. But a lot of them stayed poor because you have extremely traumatized people coming in to do sex work and extremely traumatized in situations as well. And it just. There was so much misery and poverty there. There was obviously the very glamorous side. There was, you know, saucy broth, and everything else was fantastic. But a lot of the women really, really suffered. A lot of the soldiers and sailors would want to get infected with syphilis, so they didn't have to go off to war. So they would see the women as well, or pretend. They'd inject their penises with goop to try and make it look like they had some things. They wouldn't go out. But for being really poor, uneducated, unsupported women, they really made Monto theirs in a lot of ways. So they supported each other. There was communal living. You know, they'd share a big pot of stew, they'd share clothes. They pay the neighborhood kids money to bring them up alcohol. Or if the neighborhood kids had to pawn their mom's clothes or something for money, they'd say, no, no, winter's coming. You know, you need to keep that. And they'd give them a few bob to kind of not have to go to the pawn shop. So they really built up a very strong community and strong class system actually as well. So you have the higher class brothels who are seeing royalty, who are like really well decorated brothels. You know, there's like erotic postcards on the walls, there's wallpaper, there's all fancy stuff right down to, you know, if it's a room in a rotten tenement, the floorboards are being ripped up for firewood. If they're very lucky, they'd get a straw bed. But those straw beds would walk themselves to the bin. They were like teeming, you know, with life and st. Or then you'd have the streets, so, you know, they'd be down alleyways or in coach houses. It's also where a lot of abortions were carried out on the streets and stuff. So because they didn't have Access, obviously, to proper care. So it was really quite grim. But if we just look at how grim it was, then we miss all those. All that knowledge about how they survived, how they built community, how they rejected the stigma, how they scammed their men, how they, you know, hustled and everything else. So there's so much life that went on in Monto from these people that would have died on the side of the street, probably, but they went on and left their mark on Irish culture for the next 200 years.
- [22:10]
Kate Lister
I'll be back with Caroline after this short break.
- [22:29]
C
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- [23:28]
Kate Lister
Such a grim history. Often, sex work is. It's inescapably part of it, because as you rightly pointed out, is people turn to it when they have absolutely nothing left. That's generally the system that is set up when they have no family, no support, no husband, they have nowhere to go. So you're already dealing with trauma. And then as soon as they've started doing it, they've taken on an identity. Fallen woman, whore, prostitute, which is incredibly difficult to shift. And it's sort of within that that you do find communities, and I find it so difficult. I don't know how you do this. Like, you're clearly dealing with women that are traumatized and have been treated really badly. But you do find it's not empowerment that's completely wrong, but like a sense of agence, a community that you were saying there, and like, how they survived it, how they pulled together. I think that's so important. And. And all of that is often lost to history. Completely lost to history.
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Dr. Caroline West
So much so. And they just become fallen women, or what the women of Munt were known as was the poor and fortunate.
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Kate Lister
The unfortunate. Yeah, yeah, Unfortunate. Everyone's very unfortunate.
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Dr. Caroline West
Everyone's terribly unfortunate. But, yeah, that label of fallen woman was especially dangerous in Ireland because it could mean you got locked up in medical and laundry.
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Kate Lister
Just about to ask you about that. How does that work? Because, like, we've done a couple of episodes on the mother and baby home and the laundry. It's brutal. They were just walking, wandering around, looking for a woman that they thought might be a bit of a goer and throw her in one of these, what are effectively jails. How does someone like Monto exist in this world with a mother and with the mother and baby homes?
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Dr. Caroline West
It was wild. The. The Magdalene Audrey backed on to Montau. It was the perimeter of it. And some of the madams would get their sheets laundered in the Magdalene laundry. So they're almost colleagues would be there doing their laundry, and they'd mark the girls out. So they'd shave their heads and make them wear brown sacks, basically to mark them out as fallen women. So, you know, if they used to go out afterwards, they were so institutionalized and they could just, you know, they couldn't function in real life society. So a lot of them ended up institutionalized for life Then. One of the founding principles of a lot of the asylums and refuges and Magdalene laundries was that they only helped freshly fallen women.
- [25:57]
Kate Lister
Yeah, I've heard that in other places before. Yeah.
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Dr. Caroline West
Yeah. And, you know, really looking at it and going, maybe the women that have been on the streets for 10 years would really need that help and support.
- [26:08]
Kate Lister
Explain what they mean by that, what that, in effect meant.
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Dr. Caroline West
So it meant that if you had one incident, maybe of sex outside marriage, or they said seduced at the time. So that was either a code word for had had sex with someone who promised them to marry them but then dumped them afterwards, so they were tainted forever, or they were sexually assaulted. And we didn't really kind of name that for what it. They were called seduced women. So if they turned up at a laundry and said, I really need help, you know, they. They'd see, are you employable? Are you pretty? Are you. Can you get a good job afterwards? And they put a few resources into making those women fit for the workhouse or, well, fit for the work, the world of work. But then they would turn away other women who were too far gone. And, you know, they wanted the success stories. They wanted to be able to say, look, we had 20 women go off to their new jobs. But you can't do that when you're dealing with extremely traumatized people who have substance issues, homeless issues, health care, all that kind of thing. So they were like, great, we're saving all these women, but not really. They're saving the easy cases, quote, unquote. So they're brutal to them. They took their names away from them, they cut their hair, they changed their uniforms. They weren't allowed to speak about their past. And the same kind of. In Monto, when it kind of got shut down, it's like the women couldn't speak about it because they could get locked up in laundries. And that was not part of, like, Irish Catholic culture at the time. Time was you had your babies, you had. You got married, and you had your 16 babies. There were some places in Monto, or they're in one room, and the family would have 20 kids in one room. I don't know how they managed that.
- [27:47]
Kate Lister
Sometimes. You do see those kind of numbers, don't you? You just, like, all out of one vagina. That is. I mean, they must, like, constantly marrying young, and they're basically pregnant every single year that they're fertile. These. It's insane.
- [28:01]
Dr. Caroline West
Yeah. And some of them. There's an amazing local historian, Terry Fagan, and he's collected a lot of the stories from the old people who lived in the area. So Terry had said that he had the story of a woman who had, like, multiple. Multiple babies. And she went to the priest and said, I need to stop having babies. My health is getting destroyed. The doctors are telling me I might die if I have another one. And the priest would say, tough. This is your duty before God. You're a woman. You're meant to stay at home. You're meant to have babies. Serve God. Be quiet. So women. Women kind of really got confined to the house and got confined to these roles that really developed with, like, that Irish Catholic idealized womanhood and femininity that was really meant to be different from the British. So, you know, you're talking at this stage, the 1920s, which was when we were really kind of getting our independence and figuring out who we were outside of British colonialism. And that was like a good Catholic Irish mummy. And if you didn't fit that mold, you were locked up in the laundries. So the laundry that bordered Monto was the longest one going, and the last ones closed down in 1996. So, like, I grew up in Dublin knowing I didn't know what a laundry was, but I knew there was somewhere I could be locked up if I was bold. I knew that air. But at the same time, we had the Spice Girls at number one singing about girl power. But if we enacted that girl power, we'd be locked into the laundry. But that's. That's very indicative of how Ireland has Treated sexuality. It's like one thing on the surface and then another thing underneath. But yeah, so it's. It's. It's definitely carried on that vibe. And even, you know, still now you have sex workers fighting for rights. They're overdue a review of the current law that's been in place since 2017, and the review was due in 2020, and now here we are in 2025, it still hasn't happened. So it's that same kind of thing of we're not going to listen to women. Middle class knowledge is more important than lived experience. So you still have that kind of who gets to speak and who doesn't speak. It's still there. And a lot of. I interviewed a lot of current sex workers for the book as well. And the things that they were saying might as well still be in Monto. You know, they're still experiencing police violence and violence from clients. They're not feeling so safe. So it's really has not changed. Yeah, depressing.
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Kate Lister
I mean, we've covered a lot of dark history, but I fear I'm gonna make it even darker. We touched very briefly on their mother and baby homes and the sheer numbers of babies that were having. I mean, presumably in Monto, pregnancy must have been a real issue. Contraception, as it was, is rudimentary, to say the least in the time period we're talking about. But what happened when women got pregnant?
- [30:47]
Dr. Caroline West
Yeah, another grim chapter in Irish society. So we used to have foundling hospitals, which is where you can kind of go and leave your baby if you couldn't take care of it. They all died pretty much at a something like 5,000 babies in one year that was taken in by this hospital. Pretty much every single one of them died. So when that hospital closed in, like, the 1830s, infanticide became. Became huge. They were like, just dead babies everywhere because there was just no way to keep them going, you know. And in Monto, they did. Like, the local kids gone through the scrap and stuff for looking for bits and pieces, would find dead babies as well, because they were just not knowing what to do with them. But actually, the women of Monto had a lot better contraception than women in Ireland in the 1930s had, because contraception was outlawed in 1935 because it didn't fit with Catholic values. But up until then, they could access abortion pills. There was ads and newspapers. They had early contraception. They had condoms available in chemists and stuff. Now they were rubber and made to be reused, which is grim as well. But they actually had Better techniques. But then when it didn't work, they had abortion. So they would take herbs. There was a lot of Irish folkloric history about how to induce abortions through herbs. There was the usual gin and falling down the stairs, knitting needles. But Monto also had abortionist there. So some of the madams would force the women to get abortions because they wanted them to keep working. A lot of the women were happy to get the abortions because they knew if they got pregnant, they would be kicked out on the streets. So, you know how much is a free choice in those particular situations. But as a result, in the book, I'd found that there was a midwife of Monto called Granny Dunleavy. And she seemed really cool, quite the character. If she got a call at 3am That a baby was being born, she'd whip the sheets off her own bed and go out and help the. This baby come into the world with clean sheets. And these are women that were extremely marginalized. You know, she was helping them give birth on the street and in corridors and wow, tenement hallways, all this kind of stuff. And then her great great granddaughter spoke to me for the book, and she found out through asking her uncle about the family history that, yeah, the Granny Dunleavy did carry out abortions. Not just the childbirth, but they didn't talk about it because they didn't think that was appropriate. But her other great granny, Mrs. Farrell, was the cleaner in the brothels, and she would take the remains of the abortion, wrap it up in newspaper, and it's her job to dispose of it. Then this is quite grim. But actually, a lot of them, if we come back to agency again, if they had their baby, they knew life was, you know, gonna be grim. That's it. If they were lucky, they could kind of escape to England and start afresh. But for the ones who had to leave their babies behind, the choice was either go to a mother and baby home, or they gave their babies to the local families in the area. So they became known as Monto babies. And the family will just take them in even though they're already struggling. You know, they had no money themselves, but they were like, look like this is what's needed. And the women would come back and visit them like maybe once a year or something, but generally leave them there. But I thought it was interesting that they chose that rather than the mother and baby homes. So they already knew that, like they didn't want to go near that. And it wouldn't be doing them or the kid any favors. So they left them in their community, which I think is a real. When you're very disempowered, you know, you find your power anyway. And I think that's one way that they resisted going into that state institution.
- [34:24]
Kate Lister
There's no way that you can look at this history and not be deeply moved by it and just the sheer horror of it. But I'm not going to say this makes any of this okay, but that sounds like that. That's a microcosm of what was happening on a much wider scale. Because rates of infanticide were. Were shockingly high. Because you've got a situation where if a young woman has a baby outside of wedlock, she will lose her job, she'll probably be thrown out of her family, no man will want to marry her, she will literally be on the streets. So you do get this awful system. And if you look at the Old Bailey records online from like the 17th century right up to the 19th is, the rates of women being taken there for infanticide are off the charts. And it's for that exact, exact reason. It's absolutely brutal. When you're researching this, how do you protect yourself? Because this is. I know that like, you know, you didn't experience the things that you're reading about, but reading about them is really upsetting. How do you make sure you're all right when you're reading this history?
- [35:26]
Dr. Caroline West
Yeah, it took a lot to be honest. So I haven't experienced the Montau women, but I have experienced sexual violence and I have experienced poverty and other challenges, you know, and I think a lot of people will see parts of themselves in the book as well because some of those experiences are universal, unfortunately. So I work in sexual violence as well. So I'm kind of well used to trying to mind myself and ignore all the madness and take that self care. And yeah, thankfully I have a gorgeous sausage dog and I spend lots of time with her and away. I try and make my life as calm as possible, but it never ends because I always end up writing about sex in some kind of capacity. But yeah, to take some time off and not look at the Internet, not look at the news. You know, ignorance is bliss. And it's also a survival tactic at some point because I think when I was finishing this up, it was coming up to the American election as well and I was like, oh God, this.
- [36:21]
Kate Lister
Is just too much.
- [36:23]
Dr. Caroline West
So, yeah, so I try and focus on the positive in it as well. You know, even for some of the women arriving pregnant thinking, God, what's going to Happen to me. Like one of the madams, Annie Meehan, she take them in, give them a nanny job, job, and then give them a fake birth certificate, fake death certificate and fake marriage certificate so that they could get a bit of money behind them and go off to the States and be like, oh, I'm a widow, my husband died in the war. And they'd be a respectable woman. So they do things like that. Or. What I really loved as well is the sense of community that they built up. So when they were dying, like, horrific deaths as well, you know, deaths from syphilis were just so, so dehumanizing. But the priests refused to come and give the girls the last rights because they were like, again, these are, you know, not respectable women. And instead of accepting that, they made their own cross called the Monto Cross. And I have a picture of it in the book, thankfully. And they brought that cross around to all the girls dying and looked after them and saw them on their way, passing through death and then made sure that they had a decent funeral as well. And I think that's really important because those last moments, well, they were subjected to that state and religious violence of, no, we're going to leave you go off to the afterlife without your last rites, which are really important for Catholic people. So they did themselves and they passed around the cross. And in one of the descendants of the madams, he has it in his living room and, like, he still has it there. And I think that's just so magic, how creative they all were. And the hustling they did and all the like, tricks and scams, the way they got money out of men and tricked them. I think you have to look for those little moments because all the grimness kind of can get a bit overwhelming sometimes.
- [38:15]
Kate Lister
Do you have many of the names left of the women that will work in all the madams? I know you mentioned Granny Dunleavy there, who sounds fascinating, but do you have other names of the people there?
- [38:28]
Dr. Caroline West
I do. And thankfully I have pictures of them as well in the book. So there's the great, great granddaugh of a madam, Annie Meehan. So she was 13 when she was pregnant, 14 when married, and she was the one who built up an empire of like 200 houses. Again, being 13, you know, pregnant, coming from poverty, no education, and still had all the street smarts to be able to kind of get that going. So Pearl, her great great granddaughter, spoke to me. She still has her belongings. She gave me her photo of her. There's another woman called Bella Cohn and she ran a kinky brothel. James Joyce was a fan of.
- [39:07]
Kate Lister
Oh, he would be, wouldn't he? James Joyce. So this was a BDSM brothel.
- [39:12]
Dr. Caroline West
Yeah. So they specialized in the kind of more wilder sides. And that was used as the inspiration for Ulysses, the circa chapter where he goes into this weird and wonderful world. And that's all Monto. So he got the names of the women that were in Monto and put them into his book. So there's lots of, like, family history that's still. Still kind of there. I had. There's also another woman called Becky Cooper, so she died in 1949. So again, all these little grandkids are running around the place. And, you know, some of them remember the history. One of a great granny, the daughter actually of a madam. She remembers, like, sitting under the table as a kid, like, listening in and getting all the gossip and all the stories and stuff. So it's all this, like half paired knowledge kind of floating around. But, yeah, they're very glamorous women. With another Adam called May Oblong, she ruled with Madame May Oblong. And she was kind of the queen of the Monto. She ruled everything for quite a while. And she thought the ideal age for any girl to get into sex work was 12.
- [40:19]
Kate Lister
Oh, fucking hell.
- [40:21]
Dr. Caroline West
Yeah. But now legally, you were kind of seen as an adult at 13 at the time. So the age consent was 13, and you got kicked out of the workhouse as an independent woman at 13 as well. So she was kind of a product of her time, I guess. But she would go around in all these, like, furs and jewelry dripping off every possible appendage she could put it on. She'd have a horse and carriage, and she'd put the girls in the carriage and parade them around. And that was her advertising techniques. And they'd be there in all their silks and furs. And that was incredible to see again, in a Dublin that. That was. You couldn't even see the ground. It was full of so much like, poo and God knows what and everything else. And then you have this glamour strolling through. But she was also vicious. She would cut the girls with bacon knives if they crossed her. And she cut their faces, you know, that meant that they couldn't earn as much money. So. So they were complicated women. You know, there's lots of stories of them, like, going out of their way to save the women and give them better lives, and then the other hand completely exploiting them for financial gain.
- [41:33]
Kate Lister
I'll be back with Caroline after this short break. One of the things you've identified in the book, I think this is fascinating, is how the women who worked in Monto influenced fashion and influenced women outside. Despite being this very marginalized group of women who were shunned and stigmatized, they managed to exert quite a bit of influence.
- [42:19]
Dr. Caroline West
Yeah, so a lot of the madams and the higher class kind of sex workers were again, really glamorous, would attend high society events and be there in all their dresses and all their finery. And they took guidance from London because we're Ireland, that's what we do. We copy you guys quite a lot. So in like the 1860s, some poor guy in London made a mistake in some experiment and invented a kind of mauvine color. So it's like a purpley pink kind of color. And then all the sex workers in London started wearing it, and then all the sex workers in Ireland started wearing it. But then high class women were like, oh no, we can't wear the brash colors anymore. That's the sex worker color. So they went back to paler pinks where sex workers got louder and brasher, you know, liked all those fuchsias and things. But they also, when they were swanning around, you know, they'd go to the shopping centers, make a big deal out of getting their new clothes and everything. And their style, they were also hobnobbing with all the newspaper journalists and magazine editors. So it's all kind of feeding back in. So they're saying, this is really glamorous, this is what a sexy woman looks like. And then the newspaper editors would bring that back as well. So, yeah, they were definitely glamour when there wasn't a lot of glamour, especially in, in the inner city in Dublin. So their styles absolutely influenced the rest of us. And they would wear still like their shawls, you know, they'd have shawls from Galway, which would be a particular color, or shawls from other areas. If they're super fancy and rich, they could have patterns on it. But that was kind of rare. But generally a black shawl was kind of the go to cover up for everything.
- [43:55]
Kate Lister
So what happened to Montauk then? Is it still the red light area of Dublin? What happened to it?
- [44:01]
Dr. Caroline West
So according to one man, Monto was officially shut down on the 12th of March, 1925. So we're just coming up to the 100 year anniversary. So this was a religious campaigner called Frank Duff. He was involved in the Catholic Legion of Mary. And they had decided, right, enough is enough, we're not tolerating this anymore. And they decided to go in. They did like kind of a year of outreach, kind of going in, saying, hey, look, we can bring you to a retreat. And they kind of picked off a few women that way. But then they finally decided, enough's enough, let's move in. They did this, like, intense plan. They got new tenants, like, literally ready, lining up. So when the sex workers madams were kicked out, five minutes later, a family was put in so that they couldn't come back to the door. They got them all new furniture and everything else. And the women that, I think the night it closed, they had something like 45 women arrested. And they all got off. They were like, yeah, Grant, we'll walk out of here. And one madam got locked up because she didn't kind of take any responsibility. Responsibility. She was like, yeah, feck is. It's grand. So she got like a few weeks in prison and that's the only conviction, really. So they were like, oh, yeah, Mondo's closed now. It's grand, you know. And they put crucifixes on every door and they had a march through with their Catholic procession and stuck a big cross in the wall and said, we've reclaimed this area, it's all clean now. And that's it. But there was no help for the women who still had to live and feed themselves and clothe themselves. So of course it went on. But actually, actually, Frank, like, kind of gets all the credit for closing it down. But behind the scenes, there were loads, loads of women actually doing the work to make sex workers lives safer. So they were dealing with housing and poverty and food and educational opportunities and poor health care for women. So all those women really should get the credit for closing down Monto. Not just the guy who walked in with the cross and went, there you go, Grant, problem solved. I've done all this. It was like women who did that groundwork of, of dressing the root cause of sex work, which really is poverty and so many cases. So, no, it, it definitely hasn't finished. There's still sex work today. It's mostly online or a brothel is usually an apartment someone shared. But today, because of the law, if two sex workers work together for safety, they can be arrested for brothel keeping. So, yeah, there's. It's not great. And a lot of police violence as well. Like the women of Monto, they had to keep all the police sweet. The police were best friends with Madame Mont Blanc as well in our brothel for 12 year olds. So the police were in there all the time. But nowadays, I Think there was some research done a few years ago that current sex workers have a 1% level of trust in the police, whereas the general public have 81%. So you can see it's not changed for everybody.
- [46:48]
Kate Lister
No, it hasn't. And what happens? And it happens all throughout history. It just recycles again and again and again. You get areas and places like Montau, various zoned areas, and then there'll be a change of heart and people will come in and close it all down and they'll wave crosses around and go, we fixed everything, anything. But they don't. They've not fixed everything because the women who are working there are still brutalized. They still need the money. They still have all of this disadvantage and structural oppression against them. They don't stop selling sex just because you've thrown them out of their home, do they ever?
- [47:21]
Dr. Caroline West
And. And they don't stop being traumatized either. And even if you give them a few quid, like, that's. That's not gonna solve everything. So it's so structural and intergenerational as well. You know, a lot of the women who went on to be madams, like, they grew up in the area, you know, or they had family members who were there, because that's what happens, you know. So it's just. It's a very cruel way of treating a lot of people in our society that we don't like. And we don't like women who stand up and be sexy. You know, we're always told how to be, how to behave ourselves. And for women to stand up and say, no, I'm not going to do that, and I'm going to do this, it's quite brave in a lot of senses, but it's very punished. Like, visible sex workers are, you know, subjected to violence and police harassment and harassment from punters, whereas if you're in, like, some fancy upper class brothel, you're probably a little bit safer. So class still really plays a huge part. And then class and exclusion, you know, it's. That's why I named the book Wrong Women. These were viewed as the wrong women. Like, they weren't worthy of protection or help or kindness or support, and they were sex workers, but they were all also poor women and working class women. And I think, you know, that class element is really important to note because, you know, it really changes the whole outcomes of their whole lives.
- [48:41]
Kate Lister
So as a final question then, what do you think that we can learn from the history of Monta that would be useful perhaps to attitudes to sex work and sex workers today?
- [48:52]
Dr. Caroline West
Yeah, I think looking at the people behind the term is really important. So the women of Montau were not just poor unfortunates, they were your Auntie Susan, or just women trying to get through their day like the rest of us, you know, and trying to feed their families and everything else. So, you know, I think we sensationalize sex work sometimes or we only frame it in terms of exploitation or empowerment. And they're the only two options that you're ever allowed. But I'd ask people to like, look in the middle of that and look in the gray areas and actually just listen to people with their lived experience. So I spoke in the book about how survival of the Magdalene laundries and the mother and baby homes tried to tell their stories and at first they were rejected by the government and, you know, they were like, no, we're not going to listen to this. And the same thing is kind of there for sex work as well. You have people who are making laws and not talking to the sex workers that actually impacts or they're saying, we know better than you. And that's not the case. So I think, you know, making sure that there's always a seat at the table for sex workers. If you're doing anything related to sex work or trafficking or prostitution, whatever angle, you know, we're taking, it needs to be person centered and it needs to have that real life lived experience in there. And I think how we talk about the women is really important. Not just dead hookers. You know, the headlines of that. And actually we've seen this still. I talk about a woman in the book, Belinda Pereira, who was murdered in the 90s, and she was murdered a few days around a white woman, a white French woman who was murdered. And the difference is the woman who's murdered Sophie, she's remembered as Sophie, she's remembered as this lovely French woman. But Belinda is Slain Hooker was the headline when she was murdered and her family found out about her being a sex worker. Troll the newspaper headlines and she was brutally murdered in Dublin. She come over from the UK for a sex work tour and all the headlines were like, slain hooker, celebrity clients and you know, all this kind of scandalous, kind of disgraceful stuff. And then her killer was never caught, but there was never anything in the media all became about Sophie. And we're not pitting women against each other, but that's just an example of the right woman and the wrong woman. And Belinda was Sri Lankan as well, so she had brown skin. So we have to include race in these conversations too. So we just think about the ethics of how we talk about people in this work, what the media, their responsibility is for talking about it. But yeah, kind of getting rid of all those preconceived ideas in our heads and look at the person as, as Sophie, as Susan, as whatever. They're people first, you know, and just because they do something that we personally mightn't do or we personally don't like, doesn't mean they're any less deserving of respect and safety and consultation on their lives as well. It seems really obvious to have to say that, but it needs to be said.
- [51:46]
Kate Lister
Caroline, you have been incredible to talk to. I have thoroughly enjoyed myself. Let's have the full title of the book and tell us what when it's out.
- [51:53]
Dr. Caroline West
So it's a long title. I'm definitely on the academic side of things. I like my long titles. So it's wrong Women Selling sex in Monto, Dublin's forgotten red light district. And it is out on the 20th of February, which is very, very soon and I'm very excited.
- [52:09]
Kate Lister
Well, I'm pre ordering my copy right now. That was so good, Caroline. Thank you so much for talking to us today. You've been wonderful.
- [52:16]
Dr. Caroline West
Thank you so much. Kate Foreign.
- [52:22]
Kate Lister
Thank you for listening and thank you so much to Caroline for joining us. And if you like what you heard, please don't forget to like, review and follow along whatever it is that you get. Your podcasts. If you'd like us to explore a subject or maybe you just fancied saying hi, then you can email us@betwixt historyhit.com Coming up, we've got episodes on sex and scandal in 1920s, Soho and Michelangelo's sex life all coming your way. This podcast was edited by Tom Delaghi and produced by Stuart Beckwith. The senior producer was Charlotte Long. Join me again Betwixt the Sheets the History of Sex Scandal in Society, a podcast by History Hit. This podcast contains music from Epidemic Sound.