I put up a lot of old-time mugshots lately, and I thought I exhausted that theme, then Jorge sent me a link to more that I'd never seen before. These were police photos of prostitutes taken in Montreal in the 1920s. What a find!
None of them were what I expected. In the U.S. the 20s was the era of Prohibition and gangsters, and movies from that era always portrayed prostitutes as high-living Flapper-types (above). After seeing Jorge's pictures I'm wondering if the Flapper image was exaggerated. None of the Montreal women looked like Flappers.
Here's a few of Jorge's pictures. The woman above was a madam in a house of ill repute.
So was this woman (above).
And so was this woman (above). Yikes! Some of these women managers were pretty mean-looking. I wonder if that's because some of their employees were virtual slaves. I don't know if that's the case...I'm just guessing.
Some of the women (above) who were mere sex workers in those houses looked pretty mean themselves.
Maybe they were madams in training. They look hard as nails.
Some of the workers looked tragic, as if nothing good ever happened to them in their entire lives.
Others looked simple-minded.
By the 1940s the women (above) in the mugshots looked more normal.
Maybe by then more women were in that business voluntarily. 'Just a guess.
What were women in that line of work like before the 1920s? I'm not sure, but this mugshot (above) from 1920s Australia might contain a clue.
