Unruly women

My memoir of a young social worker and an elderly prostitute spans the period from 1920 to 2000 telling the stories of two women from very different backgrounds who nevertheless, from some subterranean space, eluded their conditioning to be perfect wives and mothers. My telling of Pat’s story could have followed a problem trajectory—how she suffered physical and sexual abuse and neglect as a child which led to a lifetime of prostitution and alcoholism, inability to parent her own children, and a propensity to being in relationships with violent men. However, my relationship with Pat demanded that I let go of judgements and conventional morality, turn away from my social work perspective and my need to fix. In the face of social disapprobation she refused to be shamed or silenced—thus my story sets out to create a voice for both of us, to rebel against being nobodies. The exegesis examines the genre of women’s life writing through the critical dimensions of voice, agency, identity, and relationality. The historical context of the memoir is explored through fiction and non-fiction set in Sydney during the years leading up to and during WW2; and literature on social policy and attitudes regarding children in care, prostitution and alcoholism over the last 80 years. Finally, literary representations of prostitutes in fiction, memoirs and autobiographies are reviewed with reference to feminist analyses and debates about prostitution. Critical analysis of the concept of the angel in the house, the Victorian ideal of womanhood, has drawn attention to the stereotyping of women into madonnas or whores. Anne Summers (1975) posited that Australian women have been colonised through our history to be damned whores or God’s police. This duality of thinking that classifies women as good or bad must be laid to rest. In 1931 Virginia Woolf famously said that the angel must be killed if women are to achieve their creative and social potentials, if they are to be accepted as individual and unique with all their light and shade.