Julia Laite, is Reader in Modern History at the Department of History, Classics and Archaeology at Birkbeck, University of London, UK. She researches and teaches on the history of women, crime, sexuality and migration in the nineteenth and twentieth-century British world. She is the author of Common Prostitutes and Ordinary Citizens: Commercial Sex in London (Palgrave, 2012), and The Girl Who Disappears: Sex, Work and Crime in the Early Twentieth Century World (forthcoming in 2021).
Samantha Caslin, is Lecturer in History at the Department of History at the University of Liverpool, UK. She researches and teaches modern British history, with particular interests in gender history, prostitution and policy, and feminism. She recently published Save the Womanhood: Vice, Urban Immorality and Social Control in Liverpool, c.1900-1976 (2018).

1. Introduction: Prostitution and the Law before the Wolfenden Committee: A brief history

2. Prostitution and Public Space

3. Beyond London

4. Policing

5. Law, Jurisprudence and Punishment

6. Brothels, Off Street Premises, Privatization

8. Causes, Intervention, and Pathologization

9. Demand

10. Wolfenden's Missing Women

11. The Report of the Departmental Committee on Homosexual Offences and Prostitution

12. Conclusion: The Legacies of Wolfenden