About

Kathryn Norberg is a Professor Emeritus at UCLA in the Department of History. Her research focuses on the history of women, fashion, and material culture in Europe, particularly from the medieval to the modern period. She has held various leadership roles, including serving as Co-Editor of Signs: Journal of Women in Culture & Society from 2000 to 2005, and as President of the Western Society for French History in 2003-2004. Norberg has also been the Director of the UCLA Center for the Study of Women from 1992 to 1996. Her scholarly work includes editing and authoring books on fashion, material culture, and the political body in 17th and 18th-century France. Notable publications include 'Fashion Prints in the Age of Louis XIV,' 'Furnishing the Eighteenth Century,' and 'From Royal to Republican Body.' Her articles explore topics such as the fashion of Louis XIV, the body of prostitutes from medieval to modern times, and the role of women in palace settings like Versailles. Her research contributes significantly to understanding gender, culture, and social history in European contexts.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Art
• History
• Mathematics
• Art history

Selected publications

• Introduction

  University of California Press eBooks · 2023

  Senior authorCorresponding
  • Computer Science
  • Computer Science
  PublisherDOI

• : <i>The Creation of the French Royal Mistress: From Agnès Sorel to Madame Du Barry</i>

  Renaissance Quarterly · 2022

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Art history
  • History
  • Art

  The Creation of the French Royal Mistress: From Agnès Sorel to Madame Du Barry. Tracy Adams and Christine Adams. Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2020. xii + 236 pp. $89.95. - Volume 75 Issue 1

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Prostitution in France, 1500–1700

  2022-10-31

  reference-entry1st authorCorresponding

  Between 1500 and 1700, French attitudes toward prostitution changed. After centuries of toleration during the Middle Ages, in 1560 the French king issued the ordinance of Blois which made brothels illegal. This decree did not come in reaction to the appearance of syphilis in Europe in 1494. Rather, it stemmed from concerns about public order, in particular the host of vagrants and thieves who, the authorities believed, gathered in brothels. The authorities found it difficult to apply the new law because it was hard to prove that a landlord intended for his property to be used as a brothel. The courts tended to ignore the new laws. Only pressure from religious reformers prompted the judicial authorities to act. A good example of such pressure was the reforming priest, Jean-Jacques Olier (1608–87), who spearheaded an effort to close brothels and banish prostitutes from his parish, Saint-Germain-des-Prés. The quarter's magistrates bowed to Olier's demands and closed an unusually large number of brothels. The Catholic reformers had a particular dislike for a new kind of prostitute: the courtesan. Though long established in Italy, it was not until the seventeenth century that courtesans, venal women of some social standing and elite manners, appeared in France. Ninon de l'Enclos (1623–1709) is the most famous of these women. The daughter of a minor noble who abandoned her at an early age, Ninon was forced by poverty into entertaining at women's gatherings and eventually accepting paying lovers. Celebrated in poetry and prose, Ninon came to embody the notion of a high-born, free-thinking courtesan who rejected the greed and duplicity attributed to most prostitutes. Meanwhile the criminalization and harassment of ordinary prostitutes increased. In 1667, Louis XIV created the post of lieutenant general of police, thereby preparing the way for the growth and greater authority of the police. Police practices changed, moving from the elimination of brothels to the incarceration of individual women. In the 1690s, the police acquired the manpower and authority to apprehend and incarcerate delinquent women found abroad at night. Repression was also fierce in France's struggling colony of Québec. There, the religious authorities pressed for the arrest of women who engaged in sexual commerce. By 1700, criminalization of prostitution was the law both in Canada and France, but it did little to contain or control sexual commerce. Criminal laws and the growth of the police in Paris fostered the multiplication of third parties who appropriated a portion of the prostitutes' wages, usually by force. Violence increased while prostitutes continued to solicit on the street and receive clients in brothels.

  PublisherDOI

• 10. WOMEN OF VERSAILLES, 1682–1789

  2019-12-31 · 1 citations

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Salon as Stage: Actress/Courtesans and their Homes in Late Eighteenth-Century Paris

  2017-07-05 · 2 citations

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• The History of Prostitution Now

  Journal of women's history · 2017-01-01 · 2 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  The History of Prostitution Now Kathryn Norberg (bio) Melinda Chateauvert. Sex Workers Unite: A History of the Movement from Stonewall to SlutWalk. Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2014. 1 + 263 pp.; ISBN 978-0-8070-6139-8 (cl); 978-0-8070-6123-7 (pb). Emily Epstein Landau. Spectacular Wickedness: Sex, Race, and Memory in Storyville, New Orleans. Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 2013. xv + 310 pp.; ISBN 978-0-8071-5014-6 (cl). Penny Petersen. Minneapolis Madams: The Lost History of Prostitution on the Riverfront. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2013. xiv + 822 pp.; ISBN 978-0-8166-6523-5 (cl); ISBN 978-0-8166-6524-2 (pb). Elizabeth J. Remick. Regulating Prostitution in China: Gender and Local State-building, 1900–1937. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2014. xv + 170 pp.; ISBN 978-0-8047-8836-6 (cl). Tiffany A. Sippial. Prostitution, Modernity, and the Making of the Cuban Republic, 1840–1920. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2013. xi + 256 pp.; ISBN 978-1-4696-0893-8 (cl); 978-1-4696-0894-5 (pb). Maryjean Wall. Madame Belle: Sex, Money, and Influence in a Southern Brothel. Lexington, KY: University of Kentucky Press, 2014. vii + 190 pp.; ISBN 978-0-8131-4706-2 (cl); 978-0-8131-6844-9 (pb). Fifteen years ago, Timothy Gilfoyle published a lengthy essay devoted to the history of prostitution in the American Historical Review. He observed that in the last quarter of the twentieth century, historians complicated the history of prostitution “in ways unanticipated a generation ago.”1 As the six books reviewed here demonstrate, innovation in the history of sex work continues. Historians are now studying “up” rather than “down,” concentrating on brothel madams and luxury establishments rather than streetwalkers and street solicitation. Scholars today point to changing patterns of consumption and leisure (including tourism), rather than altered labor relations (like industrialization) to explain changes in the sex trade. Historians now importantly address previously neglected issues like colonialism, state building, and race to produce a more complex picture of the sex worker of the past and her business. [End Page 188] A case in point is Elizabeth Epstein Landau’s Spectacular Wickedness. Landau is hardly the first historian to write about New Orleans’ famous vice district, but her book departs from its predecessors in its cultural approach and focus on race.2 Landau’s analysis begins with Plessy v. Ferguson, the 1896 Supreme Court decision that decreed that blacks and whites be separated by a color line that could not be crossed. That same year, the Storyville red-light district emerged in New Orleans and offered just what Plessy denied: sex across the color line. Based on the Bluebook tourist guides to Storyville produced biannually between 1897 and 1900, Landau argues that Storyville “aggressively advertised the availability of mixed-race women for the sexual pleasure of white men” (5). Bluebooks capitalized on the “cultural fantasy of antebellum white supremacy,” evoking the “octoroon balls” and light-skinned “fancy women” purchased by wealthy white men for sexual enjoyment under slavery (11). The “sexual organization of Storyville” reflected this largely imaginary but potent vision of the Old South, which “reinscribed the racial order of the plantation” (162). Black men were servants and musicians but never customers, and white men were offered “the illusion of antebellum, white male supremacy” (8). While Storyville capitalized on an imagined past, the vice district and its denizens were “modern.” Modernity in Storyville stemmed not only from industrialization or rationalization of labor, but also from up to date business practices like advertising and repackaging the vice district as a tourist destination. Storyville offered escape and exoticism: its brothels, known as “resorts,” advertised “foreign” girls (for example, Jews and “French” women) who entertained in rooms decorated in Chinese or Moroccan styles. Storyville was a “sexual theme park” or fantasyland rather than a factory, an eroticized version of Coney Island (9). Spectacular Wickedness is less concerned with the common prostitute than with the Storyville elite, the brothel madams. Landau devotes a chapter to Lulu White, mistress of the Mahogany Hall, a four-story brothel on Basin Street that combined luxury with modern fixtures like elevators, central steam heat, and “seventeen...

  PublisherDOI

• : <i>A Kingdom of Images: French Prints in the Age of Louis XIV, 1660–1715</i>

  Renaissance Quarterly · 2016-09-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  A Kingdom of Images: French Prints in the Age of Louis XIV, 1660–1715. Peter Fuhring, Louis Marchesano, Rémi Mathis, and Vanessa Selbach, eds. Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2015. xii + 332 pp. $80. - Volume 69 Issue 3

  PublisherDOI

• <i>Erotic Exchanges: The World of Elite Prostitution in Eighteenth-Century Paris</i>. By Nina Kushner (Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 2013) 295 pp. $35.00

  The Journal of Interdisciplinary History · 2015-02-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Unlike street solicitation, serving as someone’s mistress is a form of prostitution with a little-known history. Because mistresses were virtually invisible, the police usually ignored them, thereby depriving us of historical sources that concern them. An unusual set of police reports, however, allows Kushner to describe mistress-keeping in mid-eighteenth-century Paris. In Erotic Exchanges, she focuses on the women in these relationships, reconstructing their “life histories” to describe “their historical significance” (13, 3).Many of the police reports that Kushner cites were published in the late nineteenth century and have been utilized by historians both amateur and professional.1Erotic Exchanges surpasses these earlier studies; it is longer, more detailed, and devoted exclusively to kept women. The first chapter, which explores how the police reports were produced, also describes the Parisian police force and the lives of the police inspectors who wrote the reports. However, Kushner does not scrutinize the texts with a critical eye. She takes them at face value, arguing that the reports are accurate because the inspectors corrected them when they erred and updated them when new information emerged. The reports, which exhaustively document kept women’s family backgrounds, their initiation into the world of venal sex, their successive lovers, and (above all else) every gift that they received from patrons, are probably accurate, at least in the mundane details (addresses and the sums of money). But attention to detail in this respect does not preclude the kind of subtle biases of presentation or selection that can distort the inspectors’ portraits.Kushner uses the information in the police reports to write six chapters organized according to a kept woman’s life cycle. She begins with the women’s birth families (usually from the ranks of artisans or lower-level officials) before turning to the women’s initiation into the world of commercial sex. One of Kushner’s more interesting chapters concerns girls who were sold by their families into elite prostitution. A later chapter concerns the fate of kept women when age forced them to retire. A few of them wed, but not to elite men. Usually they took husbands whose social standing approximated that of their birth families.Kushner does not overlook the elite men who kept such mistresses, devoting a full chapter to them. But she declines to speculate on their social backgrounds, citing the difficulties posed by Old Regime social categories. Instead, she focuses on an even more treacherous subject, their sentiments regarding the women that they kept. The relationships between the two parties were generally, she concludes, “not merely mercenary, but meaningful” (162).The core of Kushner’s argument rests upon the money and goods bestowed on the women by their patrons; she refers to these gifts collectively as the “contract.” The label is misleading because the promises made by a patron were purely verbal and utterly (as Kushner herself admits) “unenforceable” (161). Yet, Kushner considers this agreement similar to a “marriage contract,” arguing that it even conferred “respectability” on the kept women (162, 146). The term contract also carries the implication that the mistresses were engaged in work. Because scholars, activists, and even policymakers since the 1980s have come to describe prostitution as “work,” Kushner’s assertion does not surprise. Nevertheless, some readers might not be convinced. Kushner maintains that the “contract constructed sexual acts as services that could be sold” (160), but she does not explain how sexual acts or services constituted labor. An interdisciplinary approach would have provided an answer. Social scientists working on contemporary prostitution have used the concept of “emotional labor,” as developed by Hochschild, to describe the activity that goes into sex work.2 Hochschild argues that “emotional labor” is performed by service workers (stewardesses and nurses, for example) because they must manage their emotions and discipline their bodies to produce the desired emotional response in their clients. Was the eighteenth-century kept woman who strived to please her patron and mold her appearance and personality to his whims very different?Kushner might have done well to compare the Parisian kept women to elite prostitutes elsewhere in the world and to explain the significance of mistress-keeping for our understanding of eighteenth-century society. Even so, Erotic Exchanges lifts the veil covering elite extramarital sexuality in eighteenth-century Paris. Historians of women, sexuality, luxury consumption, and Old Regime elites will find it useful and informative.

  PublisherDOI

• The Body of the Prostitute

  2015-02-17

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Fashion Prints in the Age of Louis XIV: Interpreting the Art of Elegance

  2014-01-01 · 7 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding
  Publisher

Frequent coauthors

• Philip T. Hoffman

  4 shared

• Sandra Harding

  University of California, Los Angeles

  4 shared

• Sara E. Melzer

  3 shared

• James R. Farr

  University College London

  2 shared

• Anne Honey

  University of Sydney

  1 shared

• Maria Chenut

  1 shared

• Sabine Grenz

  1 shared

• David G. Troyansky

  1 shared