A review by archytas
The Women of Little Lon: Sex Workers in Nineteenth-Century Melbourne by Barbara Minchinton

informative reflective slow-paced

3.5

Minchinton draws on a range of sources from newspaper articles and family historians, as well as the archeological digs of the site, to sketch out details of the heyday of Little Lon's sex work district. Little Lon was a largely matriachial world, with women owning most of the businesses large and small, and dominating the housing. The book divides into sections to cover both the broader environment, the specific legal and social conditions governing sex work and, for nearly half the book, the stories of individual women. The sources she draws on are scattered, making this more opaque than I wanted it to be at times, but I also appreciated Minchinton's unwillingess to fill in the gaps with her own imagination, and hence yet again taking voice away from women.