We actually read Wrong Women last year, when it first came out, and were instantly gripped by it. But Chapters wasn’t really doing proper long reads then, so notes were taken, recommendations were made, customers were gently, and occasionally not-so-gently,  pointed towards it, and the book stayed quietly lodged in our heads. 

 

Now that it has been released in paperback, we have the perfect excuse to return to it properly: to rave about it again, and more importantly, to rave at length about why you should read it.

A friend's daughter told me recently that I had to read Wrong Women.
She is in her early twenties. It was not on a course. There was no lecturer at the front of a room pointing meaningfully at a PowerPoint. Nobody was going to test her on Montgomery Street, venereal disease, British soldiers, madams, hunger, state violence, shame, survival, or the long Irish tradition of pretending women's lives are too inconvenient to count as history.

She had simply found the book.

And it had got her.

This delighted me more than is perhaps reasonable. There is something genuinely thrilling about a younger reader picking up a book about Monto and asking the obvious question: why did nobody tell us this? Why did we learn so many names of men, battles, committees, proclamations, martyrs and speeches, and so little about the women whose bodies, labour, illness, danger, intelligence and courage were also part of the making of the city?

I first read Caroline West's Wrong Women: Selling Sex in Monto, Dublin's Forgotten Red Light District when it appeared in its larger trade paperback edition last year. I devoured it, then did what all deeply responsible booksellers do with books they love: put it on my shelf and become mildly unbearable about it.

Dr West is a sexuality scholar and consent educator, and her day job, leading sexual violence prevention work at UCC, shows up in the book as instinct rather than credential: she knows how to sit with a difficult disclosure without flinching, and how to ask a hard question without turning a woman into a case study.

The book stayed with me because it changed the map. After reading it, Foley Street is not just Foley Street. It is Montgomery Street. It is Monto. It is Nighttown. It is sex, commerce, violence, laughter, debt, illness, fashion, hunger, gossip, danger, policing, intelligence, ritual and memory. It is a place where women were bought and sold, yes, but also where women watched, listened, carried knowledge, navigated risk and shaped Dublin.

Monto, centred on Montgomery Street, now Foley Street, and the surrounding streets of Dublin's north inner city, was once one of the most notorious red-light districts in Europe. West follows it across the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, through poverty, empire, brothel economies, policing, lock hospitals, reform movements, revolutionary politics and the 1925 closure usually associated with Frank Duff and the Legion of Mary.

But to describe it that way already makes it sound too tidy.

Wrong Women is not tidy. Thank God.

It is a feminist history of Monto, but also a rescue mission of a different kind: one that opens a locked room in the city and says: look properly. Look at the women who were here. Look at what was done to them, what they did, what the record kept, and what it refused to keep. Look at the names, where we have them, and the silences, where we do not.

Monto has often been allowed to exist as atmosphere. Literary Dublin knows it as Nighttown, the hallucinatory setting of Joyce's "Circe" episode in Ulysses. Folk Dublin knows the songs. Moral Dublin knows it as vice. Revolutionary Dublin is only now beginning to acknowledge that women there provided arms, ammunition and intelligence during the War of Independence.

On Bloomsday, a plaque was unveiled on Foley Street, behind Cleary's Pub, dedicated to the "Ladies of the Night" of Monto, remembering the women who assisted the Irish Republican Army during the War of Independence.

Cuimhin linn iad.

We remember them.

It is a small sentence, but not a small act. A plaque does not undo erasure or restore lost records, testimony, safety or lives. But it interrupts forgetting. It says these women were here. It says their contribution was not incidental, not something to be whispered about after the "proper" history has concluded.

West's book belongs in that act of interruption.

Its great strength is that it refuses the easy story. It does not tidy the women of Monto into saints. It does not flatten them into victims. It does not turn them into colourful old Dublin characters, which is often just another way of refusing people their full humanity. It asks us to sit with complexity.

And complexity is the only honest place to begin.

The women of Monto were working in an industry shaped by poverty, coercion, demand, violence, illness, survival and limited choice. Some were exploited. Some were exploiters. Some were very young. Some were controlled by madams, bully boys, debt, hunger or the threat of the workhouse and the laundry. Some ran houses. Some had power within narrow and brutal systems. Some may have chosen sex work in the sense that people choose from the choices actually available to them: pragmatically, conditionally, under pressures polite society preferred not to examine.

West is very good on that distinction. She is not asking us to romanticise Monto. She is asking us to understand it. There is a difference. Romanticising turns suffering into atmosphere. Poverty becomes "colour", violence becomes "grit", and sex work becomes a wink, a song, a gaslit doorway, a bit of old Dublin mischief. Understanding asks harder questions.

Who profited? Who was punished? Who was policed? Who was rescued, and on whose terms? Who disappeared from the record?

These questions matter because the archive itself is not innocent. Women like those in Monto are often most visible in history when they come into contact with power: police reports, hospital admissions, court cases, rescue literature, newspaper scandal, institutional files, reform campaigns. That means we often meet them through the words of people who judged them, used them, pitied them, feared them, regulated them or wanted them removed.

The state finds women most legible when we are causing paperwork.

That is one of the great difficulties of women's history, especially the history of poor, sexual, stigmatised, working-class women. Their letters were not carefully saved. Their rooms were not preserved. Their memories were not treated as national treasure. They were not invited to narrate their own complexity. They were recorded as problems: of vice, disease, public order, morality, rescue, shame.

So yes, Wrong Women has gaps. Of course it has gaps. Any honest book about women like these must have gaps, because the gaps are part of the violence. The absence is evidence too.

West has to work with oral history, local memory, family testimony, folklore, fragments, institutional records and inference. Some readers may want more footnotes. Some may want firmer archival scaffolding. Some may feel uneasy when the book moves from Dublin to other red-light districts, or from historical Monto to contemporary sex work, or from documented fact to remembered story.

Those are fair responses. But they are also part of the central wound the book exposes.

What happens when the people you are writing about were never considered worth recording properly in the first place? What happens when records were destroyed, institutions burned their papers, families hid their shame, streets were renamed, and the state filed women under "fallen", "criminal" or "diseased"?

Do we stop there, and say the archive was built by power, so the women must remain shadows?

That would be neat. It would also be another abandonment.

West is clearly aware of the difficulty. The book does not pretend that every silence can be filled or every rumour proved. In fact, some of its most important moments come when she does the opposite: follows a story to its limits, shows us its provenance, admits what cannot be known, and then asks why such a story might have survived.

That is especially important in the sections on the lock hospital, smotheration and medical violence. The folklore around women being smothered in institutions is exactly the sort of material that can be mishandled: too easily turned into gothic shock, too easily dismissed because it is hard to prove, and too easily used to make poor women’s suffering into spectacle. West’s handling of it is one of the reasons the book earns trust. She does not grab the most dramatic rumour and run down the street waving it above her head. She tests it, complicates it, follows its traces, recognises its instability and is honest about the limits of what can be known. Then she turns towards what is documented: the medical treatment of women with venereal disease, the experiment, stigma, confinement, inspection and disposability of poor women’s bodies are not gothic embroidery. They are central to the history of medicine, gender, class and state power.

The work is more important than the gaps. In fact, the work is important because of the gaps.

Wrong Women is at its strongest when it moves from category to person: from "prostitute" to woman, from "fallen" to pushed, from "vice" to economy, from "sordid district" to neighbourhood.

And what lives emerge.

The book gives us clothes as armour, debt as control, fashion as longing and trap. It gives us wages, fines, bribes, hunger and the revolving door between brothel, street, court, prison, hospital, laundry and workhouse. It gives us the bodily toll: syphilis, pregnancy, abortion, addiction, violence, exhaustion and the brutal indignity of being treated as both contagion and commodity.

It gives us Monto as a place over-policed and under-protected, watched but not cared for, raided but not understood. Violence there was not only the spectacular murder or dramatic court case. It was the everyday machinery of threat: the bully boy, the slashed face, the debt, the locked room, the client who would not be reported, the woman whose disappearance did not trouble the right people enough.

And then, importantly, the book gives us care.

That may be the most moving part of all.

West's later chapters are extraordinary in their insistence that women's hidden care is part of history. Care is not softness added after the real events. Care is structure. Care is survival. Care is resistance.

Women in and around Monto fed each other, warned children away, rescued shawls from pawn, collected rent, shared tea, shared information, protected pregnant women, delivered babies, helped with abortions, sat with the dying, organised wakes, paid for funerals, took in children, created rituals when priests refused them, and built community where respectable society offered contempt.

This is where the book becomes much more than a history of a red-light district: it becomes a history of how women survive systems designed to shame them into silence.

One of West's great reframings is to think of Monto not only as a site of exploitation, but also as a village. That does not soften the violence. It sharpens it. Because harm and tenderness often exist in the same places, sometimes in the same people. A madam could exploit women and feed local children. A woman could be dangerous and generous. A community could be cramped, violent, funny, cruel and lifesaving. History is better when it admits it.

The closure of Monto in 1925 is another place where West resists simplicity. Frank Duff matters. The Legion of Mary matters. The police raid matters. So do the property deals, the female volunteers, the negotiations with madams, the women who wanted out and the women who carried on selling sex afterwards. So does the wider tide: the declining British military presence, the strengthening of Catholic social power in the new Free State.

Monto did not end because vice was defeated by virtue. It ended because political, religious, economic and social forces converged. Closing the district was not the same as ending poverty. Removing visible sex work was not the same as protecting women. A street can be cleaned while the conditions that put women there remain untouched.

That is one of the reasons the book feels so contemporary.

Wrong Women is about nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Dublin, but it keeps pressing against the present. It asks questions about sexual labour, stigma, bodily autonomy, state power, public morality, policing, rescue, institutional harm and the stories women are allowed to tell about themselves. Those questions have not gone away. They have merely changed clothes.

Ireland has always had a complicated appetite for symbolic women. The nation as woman? We can do that. Cathleen Ní Houlihan, Dark Rosaleen, the Poor Old Woman, Mother Ireland: mourned, sung, worshipped, defended, sacrificed for. Beautiful, suffering, pure enough to die for and abstract enough not to answer back.

Actual women are more troublesome. Actual women get hungry. Actual women have rent. Actual women have sex. Actual women get sick. Actual women make bargains. Actual women know things. Actual women do not always suit the commemorative programme.

The women of Monto disturb the cleaner version of Irish memory because they do not fit easily into the roles traditionally offered to women in Irish history: mother, martyr, nurse, widow, courier, muse. They were not easily respectable. And respectability has always been one of the most efficient tools for deciding whose suffering counts.

That is why the title is so good.

Wrong Women.

Not bad women. Not fallen women. Not lost women.

Wrong women.

Women on the wrong side of respectability, the wrong side of the street, the wrong side of the law, the wrong side of the church, the wrong side of the archive, the wrong side of the story Ireland preferred to tell about itself.

But the book quietly turns the phrase back on us. Were the women wrong? Or was the world around them wrong? Was it wrong to survive? Wrong to work? Wrong to be poor? Wrong to live in a society that offered women so few options and then condemned the options they took?

The final chapters, on disruption and ethical remembrance, are where the book's moral purpose becomes clearest. West is not only asking us to know more. She is asking us to remember better: without voyeurism, without pity dressed up as virtue, without turning women into symbols of scandal, degradation, colour, sin or rescue. To remember them as whole people, even when wholeness is precisely what the record denied them.

That is what makes Wrong Women such a generous book. It does not claim to complete the history of Monto. It cannot. No book could. Too much was lost, hidden, burned, ignored, misfiled, mocked, whispered, sanitised or deliberately destroyed. But it insists that incomplete history is still history, and that refusing to look because the evidence is damaged only serves the forces that damaged it.

Public history does not always begin with certainty. Sometimes it begins with a question. Sometimes with a plaque. Sometimes with a family story. Sometimes with a rumour that leads somewhere else. Sometimes with a young woman picking up a book and asking why nobody told her any of this before.

At Chapters, we are interested in books that complicate the familiar. Books that make the city strange again. Books that recover the overlooked and ask better questions of the stories we thought we knew.

Wrong Women is one of those books. It belongs beside Irish social history, feminist history, labour history, urban history and literary Dublin. It belongs in conversation with Joyce, yes, but also with the north inner city, the Magdalene laundries, the lock hospitals, the Irish Free State, sex-worker rights, public health, policing, commemoration, family memory and the politics of shame.

Most of all, it belongs in readers' hands.

Read it for the women who were treated as scandal when they were also witnesses. Read it for the women who provided arms, ammunition and intelligence. Read it for the women who dressed themselves, fed each other, suffered, laughed, worked, mourned, fought, survived, disappeared and left traces anyway.

Read it because the old city is still there beneath the new one. Read it because public memory is never finished. Read it because Cuimhin linn iad should not be an inscription we admire briefly and walk past.

The women of Monto were not lost because they were unimportant. They were lost because the record was never built to hold them properly.

Caroline West has gone looking for them in the broken places: the gaps, rumours, scars, hospital records, oral histories, family stories, folklore, court reports, street names and silences. The result is not perfect. It could not be. But it is humane, absorbing, brave, necessary and alive.

And sometimes that is what history needs most.

Not the pretence of completeness.

The courage to begin remembering.

Dawn