A common bawdy-house is a house, room, set of rooms or place of any kind kept for purposes of prostitution. Wodson, Harry M. Toronto: , Canada's nineteenth-century sex work laws were profoundly shaped by British legislation and culture. In the s a vocal movement developed in the British Empire to abolish the "Contagious Diseases Acts. While the Acts sought to prevent the spread of diseases like syphilis, they also resulted in the harassment and stigmatization of usually single working-class women but not potential male clients.
Under these laws any woman walking alone at night could be arrested and subjected to invasive exams, or placed on official lists that were practically impossible to get off of. A major protest movement against the Acts emerged under the leadership of reformer Josephine Butler.
This new law turned out to be, in many respects, worse. The Act abolished state-regulated prostitution, and criminalized sex work and many sexual acts including homosexual sex. When the first Canadian Criminal Code was adopted in , it incorporated the provisions of Britain's Act. The Canadian Criminal law is a classic example of how prostitution laws were applied to regulate morality and sexuality more generally.
While older systems that regulated licensed houses in Britain were deeply problematic, history suggests that the criminal laws surrounding commercial sex in Canada also created a myriad of negative and unintended consequences. The laundry of Toronto's Mercer Reformatory for Women reminds us what might face a sex-trade involved woman in a Canadian court a century ago. Women convicted of sex-trade related offenses often dreaded being sentenced to places like the Mercer. Here reformers and religious officials focused on "saving" the convicted through prayer, hard labour, strict discipline, and punishment.
In focusing on the perceived immorality of sex workers, however, staff at the Mercer also seldom successfully addressed the larger economic, legal and social inequalities that drew many into sex work in the first place.
