In Glasgow, one account and one remedy came to prevail, that of the Glasgow system, with its particular focus on the ‘magdalene’. The ‘prostitute’ meant different things to different people at the time. For Acton they were generally the healthiest women of their class, who might only make a living from prostitution for a few years before leaving to take up respectable employment on a cushion of their savings. The figure of the ‘prostitute’ was not only a sexuality, but also a vocational status. The discourses on prostitution appear to divide the population up on other grounds by singling out specific objectionable sexual characteristics and especially ‘feminine’ gender behaviours, but they also contained a class component. The ‘prostitute’ was a gendered status, and both the deployment of the discourses which produced these characters and the apparatuses which administered them have to be understood in the context of gender and class inequality.