###Firstly: what do we mean by prostitutes?

Some 19th century writers use the word in an expansive sense -- a prostitute could be any woman who had any sort of sexual contact outside of lawful marriage, any mistress of a wealthy man whether financially supported by her partner or not, any girl whose virginity was damaged by past sexual abuse, any working woman who was suspected of being less than entirely chaste. (It's this kind of ambiguity that has led some recent authors like Hallie Rubenhold in her book The Five to question the Ripper victims' involvement in sex work, though I'm not super convinced by what I've seen of her historical methology.) Others, especially social reformers, drew careful distinctions between types of prostitution defined not so much by working conditions or economic status as how the women involved became "fallen" and who was to blame for it -- a wicked mother, a devious aristocratic seducer, or the fallen woman herself. Police estimates of the number of suspected prostitutes in any given region were necessarily imprecise, reflecting only the number of women known to police through arrests regardless of individual case history. In the late 19th century, some working-class women sold sex only part of the time such as during parts of the working year where other forms of employment were scarce; others for a part of their career, such as for a limited span before marriage or after the failure of marriage and employment to sustain their economic needs. These part-timers likely made up the majority of the sexual workforce. Street prostitution and brothel prostitution both took place alongside other arrangements that 19th century contemporaries would have also grouped under prostitution, like mistresses and purveyors of sexual services other than intercourse; men as well as women engaged in sex work, boys as well as girls, but for the purpose of this answer I'll be focusing on British women and girls in the second half of the 19th century.

###Secondly: what do we mean by hygiene?

Late 19th century medical and legal authorities in England were definitely concerned about venereal disease transmission and its enduring association with prostitution. Some of this concern was a practical response to rising urbanization of the English population and associated public-health challenges not limited to STIs. But some of it was a response to what venereal disease represented -- not just a painful, humiliating, potentially lethal disease with uncertain transmission routes and unpredictable manifestations but a symbol for moral deterioration and atavistic filth. A range of sexually-transmitted illnesses were known to the Victorians to one degree or another, but the two conditions that commanded the greatest public fear and alarm were gonorrhea and syphilis -- not least of all because the two were popularly misunderstood to be expressions of the same underlying condition.

The Contagious Diseases Act of 1864 had authorized the arrest of women suspected of selling sex in port and army towns due to a perception that increasing female prostitution in proximity to centers for the armed forces endangered the health not of the women and girls engaging in paid sex but of the soldiers and sailors with whom they had sex. Despite this, the prescribed consequence was not enforced medical inspections for soldiers and sailors, but compulsory and physically invasive inspections of suspected prostitutes -- which necessitated the examination of the interior of women's genitals with a steel speculum, far before such inspections were commonplace -- followed by indeterminate detention if found guilty of having a disease. By 1888, the year of the first canonical attack on a woman by the Ripper killer, the CD Act had been repealed, and the scope of its enforcement was deliberately limited in the first place, but this regulatory approach to sexually-transmitted disease as a public health hazard would be echoed and amplified in later medical and social approaches to prostitution. Formal regulation of prostitution would be enforced more stringently in some English colonial holdings like Malta, and these same attitudes about sexuality would be compounded with contemporary racial thought in similar regulatory action in Hong Kong and India.

The legislation of the Contagious Diseases Act, however brief-lived, illustrates an ongoing Victorian double standard regarding sexuality -- this punitive focus on women as the transmitters of sexually-transmitted disease and the omission of their male sexual partners was evident not only to the modern student of history but to contemporary feminists and social reformers like Josephine Butler. The perception of promiscuous women as the primary carriers and sole blameworthy agents of sexually-transmitted disease was in part facilitated by the still-developing medical understanding of venereal disease in women -- male fears that the inconspicuous location of sores and discharges inside the vagina and on the cervix (relative to the comparative visibility of chancres on the penis) and the appearance of hereditary syphilis in children born to mothers not visibly affected might suggest even a seemingly well woman transmitting such a condition to her unwitting sexual partners and offspring, out of ignorance or malice. This coincided neatly with preexisting contemporary understandings of female sexuality and the female body, especially the bodies of working-class women -- bodies and persons already stigmatized in medicine and society as dirty and leaky.

###Okay but how physically dirty were the prostitutes of 19th century London?

That would have varied wildly with income and housing situation. Sex workers in high-end workplaces would have been as well-washed and carefully-styled as circumstances allowed. Many sex workers in working-class environments were likely no more visibly dirty or unkempt than a random sampling of other working men and women; others were effectively homeless or living in dramatically under-served neighborhoods with little access to laundry facilities or basic sanitation. Life in crowded conditions under extreme poverty did not lend itself easily to rigorous personal cleanliness, even for individuals who strove for it, and many English residences had little or no access to running water even as late as the 1880s and 1890s. This isn't to say that all of London was filthy -- on the contrary, the differences between conditions in slum neighborhoods like Whitechapel and those in other areas, even other working-class enclaves, were striking to contemporary viewers -- or that the men and women who lived in slum neighborhoods didn't care about what they wore, how they smelled, or what they looked like; they followed fashion, maintained their appearances, observed conventions of modesty, and strove to protect themselves from the rigors of their environment. The same went for people who weren't prostitutes as well as people who were. Nor is it to say that all sex workers operated in slum areas, or came from backgrounds of abject poverty, or that poverty was a single enduring state without shades of gray or levels of distinction; a survey of the biographies of the Ripper murder victims and their contemporaries speaks to different degrees of social mobility and work histories that could vary all over the map. The Ripper murder victims have been so enduringly understood in terms of both physical filth and the monolithic idea of the filthy fallen woman, the irretrievably lost and morally degenerate Victorian prostitute -- in terms of understanding why, it's helpful to think about the idea of these different types of "filth" (the corruption of contagious disease, the conditions of grinding poverty, physical dirt and grime, bad morals, sexual promiscuity) and how such stigmatizing associations muddled them all up into one. The repair of diseased women's bodies in isolated wards and venereal hospitals necessitated the repair of their morals through religious education, hard work, and physical scrutiny; the enforcement of institutional standards regarding bodily hygiene, appearance, and dress was meant to correct the perceived moral hazards of the prostitute's workaday appearance as well as the practical hygienic and environmental concerns of adequate attire. Becoming clean after being dirty didn't just mean a good wash and a fresh set of clothes but a total overhaul of one's habits, relationships, housing, and employment -- not a small thing for women who were already economically and socially vulnerable.

Simply wearing dirty clothes or living in a neighborhood with stinking streets won't give you syphilis, but the popular association between filthy slum conditions and contagious disease sometimes took a further toll. Poverty proved a barrier to access to medical care, and misconceptions regarding STI symptoms and transmission were wide-ranging even among physicians, leading to misdiagnosis and incorrect treatment even for those who could afford care, and often conflated the moral filth and visible dirt of poverty with specific individual diseases -- diseases not transmitted by any old dirt or fecal matter but by exposure to specific bacteria under specific conditions. Sexually-transmitted infections and injuries from sexual abuse were misdiagnosed in young girls of the lower classes as consequences of their natural uncleanliness.

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