The Association for Moral and Social Hygiene: abolitionism and prostitution law in Britain (1915–1959)

The Association for Moral and Social Hygiene was the most prominent and arguably the only abolitionist organization in Britain in the first half of the twentieth century. This article focuses on one of the AMSH’s most prominent campaigns, calling for the repeal of ‘the solicitation laws’: the series of statutes used by police the country over to control street prostitution. This campaign, at its height between 1916 and 1930, sheds light on the way in which British abolitionism, which had first developed amid debates over the state regulation of prostitution, came to form its policies and ideologies in the context of a ‘criminalized’ rather than a ‘regulated’ national system of prostitution control.