A black and white photograph of Alison Roberta Neilans, a white woman with wavy brown hair and glasses. She wears a loose-fitting, long sleeved blouse afixed with a bow at the collar.

Alison Roberta Noble Neilans (1884–1942), an early advocate for the decriminalisation of prostitution.

A campaign for the decriminalisation of prostitution occurred in the early 20th century. Despite most early feminist campaigners being fundamentally opposed to prostitution, they still campaigned to repeal solicitation laws. Josephine Butler argued that the solicitation laws unjustly labeled and stigmatised women, and opposed any measure or law that singled out prostitutes. They campaigned to remove all laws that referenced prostitutes, arguing it was unconstitutional to label somebody before charging them. They opposed immigration laws that targeted women who were labelled as prostitutes, and did not wish to see clients criminalised either. They instead wanted a general law against street harassment. Several bills were put forward for street harassment bills to replace solicitation laws, but they did not succeed.

It was not just a handful of radical women. By the early 1920s, these campaigns had the support of the National Council of Women's Suffrage Societies, the National Teaching Association, the YWCA, the Catholic Women's Association, and the support of the Salvation Army. The decriminalisation of prostitution was at the heart of early and mid 20th century feminist politics. The movement was spearheaded by Alison Neilans who wrote, 'The prostitute is the scapegoat for everyone's sins, and few people really care whether she is justly treated or not. Good people have spent thousands of pounds in efforts to reform her, poets have written about her, essayists and orators have made her the subject of some of their most striking rhetori; perhaps no class of people has been so much abused, persecuted, hated, or alternatively, sentimentalised over as prostitutes have been, but one thing they have never had yet, and that is simple legal justice. Ought we not to secure legal justice for the "common prostitute" before we set out to reform her?'(The Shield, 1922).

Early feminist campaigners were aware that prostitution would exist so long as women's economic and social inequality existed.

Image via the Library of the London School of Economics and Political Science