Sex and the Impossibility of Financial Freedom

I found a 1972 BBC production of George Bernard Shaw's 1893 play Mrs. Warren's Profession on YouTube. It stars Coral Browne as the title character and Penelope Wilton as her daughter, Vivie. It's a highly moralistic play with an unvarnished political argument but it's also engagingly witty at times.

With this play, George Bernard Shaw resembles the other famously witty Victorian Irish playwright, Oscar Wilde, in that his most amusing character is a supporting role, a leisurely gentleman who casually pronounces scandalous opinions. This gentleman is named Praed and, in the course of praising Vivie for being a very modern, independent woman, describes himself as a "born anarchist".

The main drama of the play concerns Vivie's discovery that her mother has worked as a prostitute for a very long time and also manages a brothel. Vivie's prized independence, as Mrs. Warren points out in the climax, was bought with the money the elder woman earned in the sex trade. Her costly education and upbringing, which exposed her to the ideas that helped formulate her ideals, were purchased with her mother's sex work.

Bernard Shaw, in speaking about the play, said that "prostitution is caused, not by female depravity and male licentiousness, but simply by underpaying, undervaluing and overworking women so shamefully that the poorest of them are forced to resort to prostitution to keep body and soul together." I'm sure this is true in many cases, but people do argue that some people prefer sex work to other kinds of work. And then there are characters like Kathleen Turner's in Crimes of Passion who engage in it as a side profession entirely of their own volition. As I said before in my earlier post on prostitution in fiction, it remains a popular subject among intellectual writers precisely because of these eternally insoluble ambiguities that many people will eternally, nonetheless insist are obviously soluble.

Wilton is perfect as the morally strident young Vivie and Browne is perfect as a worldly and vaguely predatory dame of intelligence. This production is available on YouTube for now. Hopefully it won't be copyright struck, it's been up for six years.