A sapphic love story as a window into sex work and rebellion at the turn of the Twentieth Century.

Abstract

Through newly discovered archival sources, including love letters, police records, hospital files and censuses, this article tracks the love story of two young women, Flora and Agnes, a same-sex couple at the turn of the nineteenth century, working in the sex trade. Their story takes us through police arrest, forced hospitalisation and leisure spaces such as dance halls. Historically, Flora and Agnes represent the many sex workers, who engaged in same-sex relations. It has been estimated that as many as 25% of women selling sex in European metropoles were in sapphic relationships, at the turn of the nineteenth century. The article describes the historical entanglement of sapphic love and sex work and provides example of how sapphic love and sapphic communities could provide solidarity and emotional support for sex workers, as well as enable class mobility and fertilised conditions for collective resistance towards authorities. Differently from male same-sex activities, female same-sex engagements were not criminalised in countries like Britain, Germany and Denmark. However, young women, like Flora and Agnes, were heavily surveilled by police and medical doctors, due to contemporary aims to control venereal diseases. We employ the notion of a "disobedient archive" to explore the ways in which historically marginalised subjects, such as young, working class, sapphic sex workers, contested structures of control, power, violence and confinement. Here, we pay attention to everyday acts and practices that challenged oppressive or disciplinary forces, as well as to failed or unsuccessful attempts of resistance. This permits a reading of the archive as a record of struggle and resistance, documenting previously silenced subjects' assertions of presence and agency against institutional control and erasure.