“Sir, I’m merely waiting for the bus,” retorts an unescorted woman to a man’s solicitation for sexual services as she stands on a street somewhere in 19th-century England waiting for public transit.

This exchange appeared in an infamous 19th-century cartoon in an issue of the nefarious British magazine Punch, and it describes a typical problem experienced by unattended women, who were assumed to be prostitutes in earlier times. Prostitution was a popular and controversial concern in England in the 19th century and throughout British colonies.

This anecdote was repeated during a lecture titled “Prostitution, Race and Politics” from Dr. Phillipe Levine, USC professor and author of “Gender and Empire,” on March 8 in Bakersfield College’s Fireside Room.

The lecture, which drew a crowd that filled the room, helped kick off Women’s History Month. The second lecture celebrating women’s history was delivered by Dr. Patricia Cohen, a UC Santa Barbara American history professor, on March 15 in a crowded Forum East. Cohen’s lecture was titled “The Underworld of Commercial Sex in 1830s America.”

The celebration of women and their history will continue in April at Cal State Bakersfield, with Dr. Dorothy Roberts and her talk on race and reproduction April 11 at CSUB’s Dore Theatre and her lecture on social service agencies and African-American Communities April 12 in CSUB’s Student Union.

The series will be capped off with Dr. Lillian Faderman’s lecture, “Then the Cops Burst in! Police Harassment in 1950s Lesbian Bars” April 28 in CSUB’s Albertson Room.

Levine began her lecture by stating, “Sex is a private and public affair,” to a packed and intense audience in BC’s Fireside Room. She blended women’s issues with prostitution, law, race and politics. In history, according to Levine, sex “crossed the racial divide” and eventually also became part of a political agenda.

And sex also, according to Levine, was inextricably mixed with legal history and territorial conquest, particularly in the British empire, which Levine’s lecture focused on.

In the 19th century, the British empire owned approximately 25 percent of the world’s land mass and possessed an army that, according to Levine, was quite “far-flung,” throughout the empire, which included colonies in Africa, Singapore, Hong Kong, and India. The use of prostitutes was a common phenomenon among British soldiers since only 6 to 9 percent of them were allowed to marry, not to mention sexually transmitted diseases and certain laws pertaining to prostitutes that did not benefit them in any way, according to Levine.

The British empire needed its military to survive and succeed in all of its conquered territories, and its soldiers contracting STDs was not conducive to achieving that goal, according to Levine. Laws regulating prostitutes and their trade were in order.

Although concubinage, and not masturbation, among the soldiers was encouraged for a time until about 1909, by the mid-19th century, gonorrhea and syphilis were on the rise among soldiers, and cures were not always effective, according to Levine.

In fact, the known cure for STDs in the 1850s, which was mercury, and not penicillin since it had not been invented yet, caused more harm than good.

So, during the 1850s-1860s came the notorious “contagious diseases” acts, which focused on prostitutes and gave rise to another example of the “double standard.” From this era came the legal term, “common prostitute,” and the acts required prostitutes to submit to genital exams once every two weeks. However, no man was subjected to this biweekly exam.

If a prostitute was found to be suffering from VD, she was promptly incarcerated in a “lock hospital” for nine months. Again, this fate was not endured by the male sufferer. Within the colonies, the population of non-white women, according to Levine, had to register as prostitutes; whether the non-white women were actually prostitutes made absolutely no difference.

In the second lecture, Cohen was referred by BC history professor Ann Wiederrecht as a “historian’s historian who gets her hands dirty” doing extensive and exhaustive research by delving into personal letters, diaries, newspaper achives and the like.

Co-author of the text, “American Promise,” Cohen’s lecture focused on the sensational murder of prostitute Helen Jewett, which occurred in the 1830s in New York.

Cohen’s discovery of the Jewett murder was serendipitous; Cohen happened to be in the Northeast, in a library archive, in the late 1980s, scavenging for pamphlets that circulated during the 19th century. Looking specifically for women’s names in the publications, she chanced upon a macabre periodical that trumpeted the heinous ax murder of the 23-year-old Jewett.

The trial documents and indictment papers Cohen found at the municipal archives fascinated Cohen, as well as the lists of Jewett’s letters confiscated soon after the murder. The sensational periodical of the time, “The National Police Gazette,” published the written communiques Jewett possessed at the time of her murder.

Particularly fascinating was the acquittal of her accused killer, which left Jewett’s murder unresolved. But not only that, Jewett, instead of being villified for being a prostitute, was actually “lionized” by the press, making her into a “celebrated victim” and a “paragon of virtue,” Cohen reported.

Perhaps the judge feared, as Cohen said, that Jewett’s “moral flaws would be laid at his doorstep” unless he said that he tried to help and educate her. Nevertheless, the press, in pictures of Jewett, often portrayed Jewett in a “literate, epistolary” way, frequently depicting her carrying a letter that she had written to a suitor or one that she had received from a suitor. Cohen remarked that Jewett insisted that her admirers write her letters.

One young letter writer/suitor of Jewett’s, according to Cohen, was the dapper upper-class 19-year-old Richard P. Robinson, the accused killer of Jewett. For nine months, Robinson carried on an affair with Jewett, Cohen explained. However, at some point, Cohen speculated, one or the other party decided to end the liaison and Robinson became concerned that the letters sent between the two of them would fall into the wrong hands and could be used as a tool for blackmail.

One night at the brothel, Cohen said it was surmised, Robinson found an ax on the premises and struck the sleeping Jewett three times and then set the bed on fire. The ax was found later in the brothel’s back yard clean of blood.

Robinson was arrested and indicted for Jewett’s murder but was later acquitted.