Wrong(ed) women: Righting the record on Dublin's historic red-light district
Bella Cohen was the madam who was so notorious for running a BDSM themed brothel where James Joyce visited and even included in Ulysses. Picture: Lafayette Photographers
It is not very often an interview begins with a discussion of the health benefits of vibrators, and antique ones at that, but academic and author Caroline West is explaining how Victorian women appropriated a tool invented to help men with blood disorders.
Vibrators were originally designed to help (male) blood circulation by massaging the skin on the arms and upper body, but women soon discovered a far more pleasurable use — further south.
That dexterous about-turn was an unspoken secret for a time but, by the early 1900s, manufacturers began to market the electric devices to women.
West has a collection of about 100 of those early vibrators — some fitted with attachments you wouldn’t put anywhere near the body — and she hopes to show them in an exhibition some time.
The existence of her singular cache comes to light as we talk about her new book, , a meticulously researched and humane study of Monto, the once-notorious square mile in Dublin’s inner city where thousands of women sold sex between 1860 to 1925.
It was, as West puts it, “a mere dot on the landscape” not far from O’Connell Street in Dublin city centre but its reputation, and its notoriety, travelled far across Europe and America.
It was a tiny space — a porous maze of alleyways — that had its own distinct lingo (a brothel was known as a flash house), its own fashions, its own tunnels and its own crackling atmosphere which, say the relatives of the madams and the women who once worked there, is still palpable on its cobbled streets today, if you are attuned to it.
Few are, although local historian and author Terry Fagan keeps those memories alive with his famed walking tours of the area.
Now, the stories of the forgotten and often-maligned women who once worked there will reach a new audience thanks to , a book that not only reclaims the past, but shows how little has changed since Monto officially closed a century ago, almost to the day, on March 12, 1925.
In fact, West was “absolutely fascinated” by how similar the experiences of women 100 years ago were to those of the women she studied in the American porn industry for her PhD in sexuality studies in 2020. She discovered “the exact same clients, the exact same power dynamics, the exact same hierarchies, the exact same use of fashion”, she says.
There is another layer to her own personal experience that explains the deep humanity and compassion evident in the pages of this book.
Growing up in a council estate in Ballybrack in Dublin, she was familiar with many of the issues that affected the people of Monto, such as poverty and sexual violence.
She speaks openly about experiencing sexual violence herself and how it informed her approach to writing about the women of Monto.
“I think I saw so many parallels with myself in the book. I felt like a ‘wrong woman’ in myself and had that self-blame of ‘Oh, I shouldn’t have done that, it was my fault’. It permeates every second of your day, sometimes. Your choices in life — where you live, who you date… everything — is all influenced by those previous experiences.”
She went on to work with women in a variety of different settings, from refuges to homeless shelters, and saw that sexual violence was pervasive.
Thankfully, she says, she found safety and security in her 30s, but a lot of women are unable to access support networks.
“If you look at people in Monto, they went into the sex trade to survive because maybe they had literally no other option. It could be any of us. You could fall through the cracks at any stage,” she says.
West now works as the sexual violence and harassment prevention and response manager at University College Cork (UCC), but there’s a lighter side to her work too.
She hosts the podcast, and the phrase “pleasure is not a dirty word” runs under her photograph on her website.
The idea that sex was not always connected to abuse forced its joyous way into West’s life thanks to the colourful excesses of Eurotrash TV in the 1980s and 90s.
“I’d sneak upstairs and watch that at nighttime, and be like, ‘Oh, sex looks actually really fun and lovely and kind and silly… but then outside my door there was misery and [the threat of going] to a [Magdalene] laundry for the rest of your life.”
That dual experience allows her to skilfully and sensitively expose the very many layers between sex work as exploitation, at one end of the scale, and sex work as empowerment at the other.
In Monto, she explains, women could earn enough to dress in the finest fashions, attend high-society gatherings and send their children to private schools, but they could also find themselves sleeping on the streets, struggling to survive, and ravaged by syphilis.
At the very privileged end, the so-called Queen of Monto, May Oblong, enjoyed power, wealth and agency. Even over Zoom, Caroline’s evocative description conjures up the commanding presence of this formidable madam who stood more than 6ft tall.
“She would glide around Monto, dressed up in her finery. She wore furs, jewellery, brooches and earrings. She had a very loud presence. She was super glamorous, going to the opera, going to high-society events, and she also had a horse and carriage. It was a real unapologetic show of wealth and everyone knew she was a madam. She wasn’t trying to hide it.”
She was also a money lender who helped the local community and her workers if they faced a crisis but if they stole from her or crossed her, she would slash their faces with a bacon knife.
It did more than just mark them out as trouble-makers, it made it more difficult to attract clients.
The casual meting-out of such ruthless punishment was not unusual and West does not flinch when describing the brutal realities of living in an area where, as she writes, “blood was splashed, tears trickled their way down, and vomit and faeces were liberally distributed across the [cobble] stones”.
Monto was a multi-level, multisensory environment where schools, factories and shops were pressed up close to the houses of ill-repute.
The balconies of open windows were populated by “young women of abandoned life, fashionably attired, smoking cigarettes and cracking audibly their obscene jests”.
May Oblong’s brothel was on what is now James Joyce Street. There’s an irony in the name because the famous writer who inspired it was a regular at Monto, visiting Bella Cohen’s den of hardcore BDSM pleasure. The brothel even features in Ulysses.
If the madams enjoyed wealth, glamour and finery, it was paid for by the sex work of girls who were sometimes as young as 12.
“It does sound quite shocking, but at the time the age of consent was 13 and girls were being kicked out of the workhouse at 13, expected to be independent adults,” Caroline says, providing a context that doesn’t quite blunt the awful reality.
Yet, in Monto there was also a sense of community among sex workers who looked out for each other, and there were women who cared for them.
A woman known as Granny Dunleavy worked as the district’s midwife. She helped pregnant women give birth, but she was also one of Ireland’s first sex educators. It seems she provided abortions too.
Despite attempts at protection, many women developed syphilis and ended up in lock hospitals where the treatments were often as bad as the incurable disease.
There were chilling rumours that some of the women were smothered to put them out of their misery but even if those were never fully proven, women were certainly used as medical guinea-pigs.
West spells out the horror of that conveniently forgotten piece of Irish history, and she recasts these women as the unnamed heroines who paved the way for medical advances.
“Their bodies saved millions from painful deaths,” she writes. She also invokes machnamh — the Irish concept that encompasses compassion, reflection and meditation — and suggests that it provides an ideal framework to right the injustices done to these ‘wrong’ women.
Looking at their lives tells us so much about what is still happening today, she says.
“If you want to learn about humanity, study sex, because through understanding sex, you can understand things like feminism, gender, power, capitalism, history, geography.”
Her hope for is that it will help people engage with the stories of the people behind today’s headlines, and just see their humanity and have a little bit more tolerance and compassion for them.
- ‘Wrong Women: Selling Sex in Monto, Dublin’s Forgotten Red Light District’ by Caroline West, published by Eriu, is out on Thursday
