"Money for which my Buttocks had labored so vigorously": John Locke and Sexual Labor in The London Jilt

Abstract:What if a prostitute had expressed the idea of individual rights to property based on labor, even before John Locke? The London Jilt presents Cornelia, a prostitute who endorses her stigmatized job on the grounds that sexual labor is the same as any other profession. By analyzing self-ownership embodied in the prostitute figure, I claim that The London Jilt significantly anticipates Locke's labor theory. Cornelia adopts the emerging discourse of labor and property and situates prostitutes as economic subjects who turn female sexuality into profits. This fiction also reveals marriage is an unfair financial trade that exploits women's sexual labor.