"Call Off Your Old Tired Ethics”: Sex and Work in 1970s Seattle and San Francisco

Abstract

The buying and selling of sex has been a persistent element of the social, economic, and political structures of early Pacific Coast metropolises since the 1848 California Gold Rush. Despite long histories of condoning sex work, unilaterally punitive treatment of women, particularly Black, Indigenous, and Chinese women endured through the 1970s, until the synergy of the sexual revolution and civil rights movement allowed for Margo St. James, a former sex worker and social activist, to organize the country’s first sex workers reform and aid group “Call Off Your Old Tired Ethics” or COYOTE. While COYOTE was ultimately a transient political movement, its intellectual goals and concrete initiatives resulted from and furthered broader and more sustained political consciousness regarding the precarious relationship of the law to women’s sexuality and sexual labor– a relevant theme in contemporary analyses of sex work and its social, moral, and legal legitimacy.