This study of the politics of prostitution has emerged from the co-operation of scholars within the Research Network on Gender Politics and the State (RNGS) which set out to answer the perennial questions of feminist politics and social movements: do feminist politics make a difference, and can democratic states, still dominated by men and often denoted as patriarchal, actually be feminist? Do women's policy offices work? And how do women's movements actually contribute to the improvement of women's status? To look into prostitution as a political issue to research these questions seemed both an obvious and an unlikely choice. On the one hand, prostitution is mostly about women selling sexual services to men, a long-time concern for feminism as it mainly occurs within unequal relationships of power. On the other hand, prostitution is usually neglected by the mainstream of political science and policy studies that tend to regard the matter as a social or public health problem. Both aspects made it a challenging topic for analysing the question about the impact of women's movements in democratic states and the role of women's policy agencies within government in improving women's status.

The Research Network on Gender Politics and the State was founded in 1995 at Leiden University, the Netherlands, by a group of political scientists, sociologists and women's studies experts from both sides of the North Atlantic.