Prostitution and Victorian Society: Women, Class, and the State by Judith R. Walkowitz The state regulation of prostitution, as established under the Contagious Diseases Acts of 1864, 1866 and 1869, and the successful campaign for the repeal of the Acts, provide the framework for this study of alliances between prostitutes and feminists and their clashes with medical authorities and police. Prostitution and Victorian Society makes a major contribution to women's history, working-class history, and the social history of medicine and politics. It demonstrates how feminists and others mobilized over sexual questions, how public discourse on prostitution redefined sexuality in the late nineteenth century, and how the state helped to recast definitions of social deviance. About The Author: Judith Walkowitz is a Professor of History and Women’s Studies at Johns Hopkins University and a British historian whose publications have been translated into many European languages, plus Japanese. For the past thirty years, her research and writing have concentrated on nineteenth-century political culture and the cultural and social contests over sexuality. Her first book, Prostitution and Victorian Society (1980), examined the system of medical and police regulation of prostitution, a system first established in 1864 and abolished in 1886, to control the spread of venereal disease among enlisted men. City of Dreadful Delight (1992) maps out a dense cultural grid through which compelling representations of sexual danger, including W.T. Stead’s expose of child prostitution and the tabloid reporting of Jack the Ripper, circulated in late-Victorian London. Her new book, Nights Out: Life in Cosmopolitan London (Yale University Press, March 2012), extends her interest in the cultural and social history of London to mid-twentieth century, zeroing in on a modern space of multiethnic settlement in London that was at the center of things, yet marked by segregation, political tensions, and social exploitation.