During the early and mid-twentieth century, prostitution was subject to considerable moral panic and cultural anxiety. The legal status of the common prostitute as a criminal was the result of her failure to conform to traditional codes of respectable female behaviour, that is to say, of her lack of sexual innocence and moral purity. Legally and socially, the female prostitute was supposed to be demarcated from all other women, ringfenced in law as a distinct category of woman offender so that she may be exhibited as an example of the need to hold women's sexual morality in check. Official efforts to confirm this perception of the prostitute as ‘other’ were rooted in Victorian jurisprudence, which supported the criminalization of these women on the assumption that prostitution was predicated upon female disreputability and a man's struggle to control his own sexual urges. In 1871, when a Royal Commission rejected the suggestion that the male clients of prostitutes should face criminalization, it did so infamously on the grounds that the prostitute committed an offence ‘as a matter of gain’, while her male client was guilty only of an ‘irregular indulgence of a natural impulse’. Consequently, the prostitute was credited with a sense of sexual moral agency that the man, at the mercy of his own biology, was not. According to this gendered view of sexual relations, male sexuality was understood to be unruly; it required taming and tempering in relationships with respectable women. By igniting male passions, the prostitute was therefore charged with undermining the seemingly functionalist basis of personal relationships between men and women. A visibly disreputable woman, the criminalization of the prostitute was justified by this idea that she represented a threat to male sexual sensibility and urban social order itself.

Yet, by the interwar years, a perceived rise in promiscuity and increasing social freedoms for women meant that distinctions between the prostitute and the sexually adventurous modern woman were fraught with both social and legal uncertainties. After the First World War, the prostitute was joined by a cast of others (the flappers, the ‘modern’ girls, the amateur prostitutes) who also stood accused of sexual provocation.