Christian society assigned both prostitution and usury to stigmatized, spatially segregated castes

Evidence

Their situation and the Jews’ were often rightly compared: usury and money lending were forbidden by the Church exactly as extra-conjugal sex was; but society can no more do without financial speculators than free love, so these functions fell to the damned castes: they were relegated to ghettos or reserved neighborhoods. In Paris, loose women worked in pens where they arrived in the morning and left after the curfew had tolled; they lived on special streets and did not have the right to stray, and in most other cities brothels were outside town walls. Like Jews, they had to wear distinctive signs on their clothes. In France the most common one was a specific-colored aglet hung on the shoulder; silk, fur, and honest women’s apparel were often prohibited. They were by law taxed with infamy, had no recourse whatsoever to the police and the courts, and could be thrown out of their lodgings on a neighbor’s simple claim. — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 215

Categorization

• XREF: Parallel to the second published article’s discussion of sumptuary laws (Lex Oppia) and distinctive dress codes as instruments of class and moral stratification. — connects to: Unpaid sex and paid sex face identical social stigma
• SEED: Article angle: how societies outsource ‘necessary’ moral violations to marked castes — prostitutes and moneylenders as twin institutions of licensed transgression.
• SHARE: The detail that Parisian prostitutes were confined to walled pens, wore a colored aglet on the shoulder, and could be evicted on a neighbor’s simple claim — worth sending to a historian of policing or urban space.