In 1986 an eminent Scottish historian wrote: ‘The history of the family, and of child upbringing and the place of women within and without the home, is so neglected in Scotland as to verge on becoming a historiographic disgrace.’ For M. Foucault, the study of sexuality is guided by the aim of analysing not an essential sexuality, but what various discourses said about sexuality, why they emerged when they did, and some of the consequences of their pronouncements. The Foucauldian analysis of the process of identification, classification, and subsequent persecution of peripheral sexualities, can also be extended to the female ‘prostitute’ in the nineteenth century. Foucault, for example, argues that sexuality is an historical construct. He claims that the nineteenth century was characterized by the ‘deployment of sexualities’: the attempt to identify and classify diverse forms of human sexuality, notably the ‘hysterical’ woman, the masturbating child, the Malthusian couple, and the homosexual.