Abstract

Sex work has held an important yet marginalised space within Montreal society, with a pervasive culture of vice living alongside a selectively implemented legal framework. This thesis examines the lives and legal status of the women who owned and worked within brothels in Montreal during the 1930s and 1940s, as well as how brothels operated as small businesses. Women at all levels within the brothels, from sex workers to housekeepers to brothel owners, exercised agency in different ways. Many of Montreal’s brothels during this period were run as female small businesses that both interacted with and circumvented the police and municipal authorities. The main sources for this thesis are the depositions of twelve sex workers before Montreal’s 1954 Caron Inquiry, which provide an insider perspective on Montreal’s sex work industry in this period. These sources also shift the perspective from seeing sex workers as “existing” on the margins of society, criminalised and stigmatised for their methods of procuring a living and brings their work into Canadian workers history as a form of labour. Using a history from below approach, this thesis reads hostile state documents against their grain to piece together the lives of sex workers and to situate their stories within the context of the period’s legal framework surrounding sex work and cycles of relative toleration and repression. Through biographies of the women who were deposed before the Caron Inquiry, this thesis contextualises and humanises sex workers as workers and Montrealers with multi-faceted lives.