This post is a part of the 2023 Selected Papers of the Consortium on the Revolutionary Era, which were edited and compiled by members of the CRE’s board alongside editors at Age of Revolutions.
By Rosamond Hooper-Hamersley
It is a privilege and a joy to write on behalf of Susan Conner’s fine work as an historian. I am grateful to contribute to this session that considers the impact of Susan in her field. I am a lucky colleague and friend particularly for the deep and lasting impact of Susan’s scholarship and guidance. Her role of historian transcended the classroom in the multiple institutions where she taught and was revered as a beloved professor. Over the years Conner served as Associate Dean of the College of Humanities, Social & Behavioral Science at Central Michigan University, Vice-President for Academic Affairs at Florida Southern College, and ultimately Provost and Professor of History at Albion College. She received numerous awards and accolades throughout her career including a Civilian Service Medal from the U.S. Department of the Army as well as the Legion of Merit Award from the International Napoleonic Society. Conner served as a lifelong member of the American Association of University of Women and on a variety of boards including the Napoleonic Society and the Consortium on the Revolutionary Era. Her influence, both pedagogical, administrative, and collegial was broad and deep and thoughtful.
One of the first lessons I learned as a graduate History student was to avoid the use of the first person in papers and presentations. Ergot, “we shall find that… the premise of this paper suggests…as we observe”, et al. Get out of the way of personalizing the argument long enough to let judicious scrutiny of the evidence drive the paper. Makes sense. One of the second rules I was taught was to be objective about the subject: don’t take history personally! I have stood by the first rule — most of the time! I have not been as faithful to the second. My proclivity to engage deeply often spills over into my work for better — or for worse! I will break both of these cardinal rules in my reflections on the personal impact and work of my dear and much-missed friend, Susan Conner, whose keen insights, erudition, and professional respect for uncluttered critical analysis have made us better and more faithful historians.
I first met Susan in 2001 at the CRE in Auburn, Alabama. It was my third CRE conference and my fourth or fifth conference as a doctoral student. I used to describe myself then, (age of 49 a mother, a wife, and a former actor), as a baby scholar. I was embarrassed to be among so many accomplished historians and teachers. I was, as I have said so often, late to the academic party. It was a Saturday night. John Merriman had just given his riveting talk on The Stones of Balazuc and I marveled at how lucky I was. I was sitting next to dear Bill Olejniczak and grateful to revel in the wonders of this talk with someone who knew and loved John well…another beloved scholar gone way too soon. Afterwards the crowd migrated to the bar. I loved that bar — light, airy, friendly. Somehow, I found myself at the long counter with Bill, John, Hines and Joy Hall, and Susan. I am sure that there were others. Here is what I remember — two things in particular. One, this group of accomplished, seasoned, smart, and funny historians welcomed me as if I had known them forever. Two, in chatting with Susan, she engaged me immediately in a discussion about my own research. I was working on my dissertation on Mme de Pompadour and was so appreciative of her kind interest. And then I realized that Susan was the historian whose chapter “Women and Politics” I had so admired in the collective edition, French Women and the Age of Enlightenment. Oh my goodness, I said, you are that Susan Conner! I complimented her greatly on her captivating and helpful observations. I told her that I was already incorporating what she wrote into my dissertation! For some reason Susan never forgot that. I will always be grateful to her and to all of these dear colleagues for their kindness and generosity of spirit — for guiding me and so many others. I thanked Susan many times over the years but I wanted to do so publicly, now.
In 2012 Susan and I organized a panel for the Western Society for French History’s conference in Banff, 2012 along with Nina Kushner. Kushner’s own impact in this field is considerable including her 2013 publication Erotic Exchanges: The World of Elite Prostitution in Eighteenth-Century Paris. Regarding her Banff paper Susan decided without missing a beat, “I will write about my prostitutes.” I was beguiled then, as I am now, by her unequivocal respect for these women, a sense of filiality, if you will. For that paper she observed, as she continued to do so throughout her career, that “Women of the streets were [considered] responsible for the plague that was depopulationist and dangerous to the strength of the nation.”[1] She was referring to the complex perils of venereal disease, among the many hazards prostitutes faced. This paper primarily offers a soupçon of Conner’s work that addresses shunned women of the 18th c. These women, though alternately controlled and manipulated by men, actively sought to exercise critical agency particularly because of the challenging complexities of their livelihood.
This paper draws from several examples of Conner’s endeavor to dispel the shadows of shame and victimhood especially for marginalized women in 18th c. century Revolutionary France and to put it into concrete, marketable terms. These include “Politics, Prostitution and the Pox in Revolutionary Paris, 1789-1799” (Journal of Social History, 1989), “Public Virtue and Public Women: Prostitution in Revolutionary Paris, 1793-1794” (Eighteenth-Century Studies, 1994-95), and “The Paradoxes and Contradictions of Prostitution in Paris” in Selling Sex in the City: A Global History of Prostitution, 1600s-2000s (2017.) In these works, Connor examines the role prostitutes played in a political, economic, and violent culture, often serving as governmental props or legal targets. As she notes, “the French have historically defined prostitution in classical terms, i.e., prostitution as a “sewer in the palace” or an unavoidable necessity.”[2] She addresses the canon that grew out of historical and religious scholarship which habitually pigeonholed women as deviants, femmes perdus ou femmes tombées. Such rationales and moral platitudes, Connor writes, denigrated women whether through tolerance or suppression: “within essays and polemics, there was no sense of who these women were. They remained faceless and generally nameless objects.”[3] This caught Conner’s unbridled attention throughout her career.
In one of her last publications in 2017 Conner challenged her readers to consider the following:
Where does individual liberty end, including the right to use one’s body as a form of labour? Where does governmental intervention for the protection of others begin? Is prostitution forced or free? Are all prostitutes victims, or do some practise prostitution as a choice? Is prostitution a form of labour? If prostitutes use parts of their bodies to ply their trade, in doing so, are they so different from manual labourers who use their arms, backs, and hands to earn a living?[4]
These fundamental questions formed the backbone of Connor’s work. In preparation for this session, I thought about that as I considered her research in this field. In addition to her work as noted above, I looked again at her commendable 2004 monograph, The Age of Napoleon. Here Conner observed the emperor’s prickly distaste for women conducting themselves in any public forum as well as a complete rejection of their potential exercise of power. The dictator objected, Conner writes, to the reach of civil liberties for women as “uncomfortable, disruptive, and in opposition to the social order he was trying to create.” The attention that women engendered irritated Napoleon. They were not equals, he determined, they were “mere machines to make children.”[5] Conner reminds us that the Code Napoléon ensured the determination that women were clearly subordinate to the men who should, by rights, hold all the power. As she observes in “Women and Politics”, “Because of the legal exclusion of women from the government, their influence came through informal channels to power.”[6] Women understood that the option of creating an egalitarian system was out of the question, Conner argues, insofar as their qualified influence was almost always synonymous with their sex. We should not be surprised that any power they endeavored to hold, unsavory relics of the ancien régime as they were deemed to be, was marooned outright by the Revolution.[7] In any realm where women conducted themselves the possibilities were grievously limited.
When we examine the scope of Conner’s work over several decades, we see that she scrupulously exposed the manner in which women, especially the indigent, dispossessed, vagabonds, and libertines, were relegated to spaces increasingly gendered and controlled — by men. At the time of the Revolution Connor points to “careful definitions of a woman’s appropriate sphere [that] were being articulated by members of the Commune, by Jacobins in the Convention, and by contemporary authors.”[8] In spite of the manipulation of women that came from all quarters, Conner’s abiding argument is that women, who optioned the purchase of their bodies, or who were controlled by pimps or madams to that same end, fundamentally contributed to economies that spanned multiple centuries. Taking on the role of a femme publique constituted work for thousands of women in Paris. It had, Conner finds, “become a job, whether part-time or full-time, frequently in spite of police action.”[9] Conner considers what women made of their sordid conditions and deficient opportunities to carve out careers for themselves that, at the very least, took care of body and soul. As she notes, by the 19th c. “prostitution was more of a solution than a problem as long as it was regulated…survival often hung in the balance: prostitution was an economic choice.”[10] Conner’s clarity and her signature impartial assessments define the content and value of her work.
Social historians including Olwen Hufton, Conner notes, began to address these issues in the late 1980s hampered in part by the paucity of evidence. Departmental and municipal archives yielded little unless these purportedly toxic women had been brought up on charges. Nomenclature was an additional problem — what to call them? The multifarious activities of these women placed them in any number of venues from being a kept woman — a femme entrenue — to a peddler, whose tangible goods were often as marketable as her body, unless diseased. Building on the additional work of pre and post-revolutionary scholars including Jill Harsin and Alain Corbain, Conner addresses the missing piece she identifies as the “marketplace of prostitution” during the French Revolution.[11] Unlike the evidentiary roadblocks Hufton and others experienced, Conner found rich resources in Parisian archives — neither the police nor the femmes publiques were silent, she observes. The pivotal change, Conner argues, came when prostitution was no longer viewed as problematic. It came to be viewed as a useful tool in the potential eradication of vices previously associated with the ancien régime. Prostitution, Conner shows us, “became a job category for some women.”[12] Mendicity carried stiff fines and sentences; for as long as acts of prostitution remained cloaked women by and large stood outside the reaches of the law.
Prostitutes could be pragmatic, Conner asserts, in her 1994-95 article on public virtue and public women. Here she addresses several elements that played out in Revolutionary Paris. One was the distinct matter of economics. The benefits of prostitution suited women and men. For the former, among other challenges, “prostitution was a practical solution to economic problems.”[13] In the Revolutionary era, prostitutes found that this mercantile option allowed them to potentially face down the burdens of subsistence permanently, depending on the use they made of selling their bodily wares. Men were willing to pay the cost for their favors. Drawing on the work of sociologist Richard Symanski, Conner argues that the financial gains for prostitutes eliminated the need for male Revolutionaries to provide alternative assistance to impoverished women. Symanski notes, “Simply put, men are willing to pay more for sexual access than for almost any other forms of female labor.”[14]
As society was changing dramatically, historical discourses surrounding the seemingly absent virtue of prostitutes were called into question. It became politically expedient for public sexuality to be manipulated in profitable ways that differed from what was considered to be egregious immoral conduct that characterized the ancien régime…Louis XV and his frequent visits to the parcs aux Cerfs comes to mind where virginal girls assuaged his fears of venereal disease. Attacking the licentiousness of women during that era allowed a full-on assault and charges of endangerment to men and society. They were viewed no less as “voracious political animals with equally voracious sexual appetites.” By the time the Jacobins were in power, Conner determines, prostitutes were seen as outside the confines of those entrenched and damning claims. As they defined male-identified virtue, she finds, “prostitution did not need to be suppressed under the law.” In the period of the French Revolution, Conner posits, prostitution shed the odious burdens of the ancien régime and “became a solution to be used by those in power.”[15] It was the sans-culottes, in fact, who leaned into a literal definition of virtue and vice. As they saw it, the concerns were matters of “control, policing, and hygiene.”[16] The avowedly repugnant elements of prostitution, e.g. disease, violence, when visible, had to be addressed, even with a cudgel.
While prostitution was generally shrugged off in the early days of the Revolution, Connor asserts that this would not always be the case. Prostitution may well have come to be levied, she argues, as a form of social control. In this climate a “class of women” began to accept the evolving concept of prostitution facing new regulations and dwindling options for bienfaisance. Women remained on the margins of a society which continued to subscribe to virtue. Conner reminds us that by 1793-94 women were on the fringes in a variety of venues unless they comported themselves as the ideal citoyenne: “A republic of virtue was allegedly being created in which morality would be rewarded and vice would be eliminated.” Even before sexually transmitted diseases shifted the sands, more and more women increasingly found themselves outside of employment unless they became femmes publiques. They were, as the saying goes, between a rock and a hard place. Once the 19th c. emerged, health officials and municipal authorities began to promulgate tolerance for prostitution, another nod to stabilizing the economy.
Writing in 2017, Conner found, that prostitutes in the 20th c. finally gained a measure of civil liberties despite the setbacks engendered by the Sarkozy Law of 2003 which initially targeted sex workers, many of them immigrants, as dangerous to domestic security. Though the law was ultimately reversed, subsequent governmental strictures continued to ensnare prostitutes and other sex workers in a “web of contradictory practices”. A multitude of discourses on the distinctions between prostitution and human trafficking, still sought to define and to control those who subscribed to prostitution. As Conner determines, regulationists and abolitionists had historically muzzled prostitutes in these ongoing debates. They were characterized “as having no agency, being mere pawns because they had no choice, or being pathologically inclined to delinquency.” Even the government was viewed in the role of pimp. We read that the French government assented to the UN “Resolution Suppressing the Traffic in Persons” with, Connor reminds us, a predictable caveat: “The free exercise of prostitution is allowed for those who practice it individually.” This left the door wide open to harassment and arrest at the hands of the police, with echoes of the sans-culottes. Prostitutes have remained, in some ways, at the mercy of moral crusaders and governmental proscriptions. Conner’s research shows that while their relationship to society and the state was convoluted, and that legal documents from court to prison sought to proscribe their character in full, the words of the women in particular are there also: “those truths and fictions can be ferreted out”.[17]
The shady, often abusive advantage that was taken of women in their contributions to a sound economy, remains. Women, Connor argues, continue to protect the legitimacy of their economic choices. Connor is clear about the paradoxes. We cannot make a simple distinction between the perils of disease, violence, crime, and human trafficking. The French, as Connor penned in this final chapter in 2017, continue to seek a middle path but it is not possible, she concludes, “to separate prostitution from prostitutes, whether they are French or immigrant. If prostitution is permissible under the law, then it might be argued that prostitutes should be entitled to equal protection and equal benefits.” Should women have the opportunity to make different life choices, then the government should provide a way out through fundamental access to “social services, health care, and transitional training and employment.”[18]There are no easy answers, Connor determines, and the current laws do not satisfy these paradoxes.
When I first read Susan’s final chapter, I was startled by her inclusion of my name in the first footnote for those who offered critiques on her research. Why was it there? I had no memory of this. I turned to my emails and there I found a message from her with the subject line “Hookers.” How very Susan! She had asked me to review her draft for content and argument. I found the draft with my notes and suggestions, horrified to find what I might have observed! As ever, Susan was appreciative and effusive in her thanks. Her commendable work stands on its own, my observations and anyone else’s, notwithstanding. I will miss her voice. I will miss her insights. I will miss her informed and compassionate advocacy on behalf of those accused of what western society had once called “a victimless crime”.[19]Susan’s scholarship, rooted and unyielding, began to shine a light for those society would seek to relegate to the shadows of shame.
Rosamond Hooper-Hamersley is an Assistant professor in the History Department of New Jersey City University in Jersey City, NJ. Her area of expertise is in 18th C. French cultural history and she recently published “The Hunt After Jeanne-Antoinette de Pompadour: Patronage, Politics, Art and the French Enlightenment (Lexington Books, 2011.)”
Title Image: “This way!” Prostitutes in Paris during the revolutionary period, 1793-1795. Stipple engraving by Jacques-Louis Copia after Jean-Baptiste Mallet. Source: Wikimedia Commons.
Endnotes:
[1] Susan P. Conner, 2012, “Public Women in Revolutionary and Napoleonic Paris: From Narrow Streets to Furnished Rooms and Other Unseemly Places.” Paper presented at The Western Society for French History, Banff, Alberta, Canada.
[2] Ibid., 172.
[3] Susan P. Connor, “Politics, Prostitution, and the Pox in Revolutionary Paris, 1789-1799), Journal of Social History, Summer, 1989, Vo 22, No. 4, p. 713.
[4] Susan P. Conner, “The Paradoxes and Contradictions of Prostitution in Paris,” in Selling Sex in the City: A Global History of Prostitution, 1600s-2000s, ed. Magaly Rodríguez Garcia, Lex Heerma van Voss, Elise van Nederveen (Leiden: Brill, 2017), 200.
[5] Susan P. Conner, The Age of Napoleon (Westport: Greenwood Press, 2004), 42.
[6] Susan P. Conner, “Women and Politics,” in French Women and the Age of Enlightenment, ed., Samia I. Spencer (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), 52.
[7] Ibid., 61.
[8] Susan P. Conner, “Public Virtue and Public Women: Prostitution in Revolutionary Paris, 1793-1794, Eighteenth-Century Studies, Winter, 1994-1995, Vol. 28, No. 2, p. 223.
[9] Ibid., 232.
[10] Conner, “The Paradoxes and Contradictions of Prostitution”, 192.
[11] Ibid., 715.
[12] Ibid., 719.
[13] Conner, “Public Virtue and Public Women”, 222.
[14] Richard Symanski, The Immoral Landscape: Female Prostitution in Western Societies (Toronto: Butterworths, 1981), 3, as quoted by Conner, “Public Virtue and Public Women”, 222.
[15] Connor, “Politics, Prostitution, and the Pox”, 714.
[16] Connor, “Public Virtue and Public Women”, 222; 223.
[17] Connor, “The Paradoxes and the Contradictions of Prostitution”, 198; 199; 194; 173-74.
[18] Ibid., 200.
[19] Conner, “Politics, Prostitution, and the Pox”, 730.
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