ABSTRACT
This chapter examines first and second-wave feminist accounts of prostitution. It explores several recent feminist texts which argue against this continuum approach and which advance specific grounds for a principled feminist opposition to prostitution. Many 'first-wave' feminist accounts of prostitution focused on issues of sexual economics, stressing the connections between sexual and economic practices. Feminist approaches which situate prostitution on a continuum of sexual-economic relationships and which question popular accounts of prostitution tend to facilitate a broad feminist support for prostitute women. Several Australian feminists argued that the resolution of this 'dilemma' could be achieved by a focus on prostitution as 'sex work'. During the 1980s some feminist theorists rejected the whole idea of a continuum between prostitution and other aspects of women's sexual and economic lives. Carol Pateman, for example, contended that prostitution was not like other work because the prostitution contract was not like other employment contracts.
