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A person with a red t-shirt that says "whore" stands next to another person with a small dog and a red lace umbrella. Both hold cardboard signs reading "sex work is work" and "address low wages, poverty, stop criminalizing."
Sex Workers and Friends, International Women's Day, Oakland, 2017. (Photo: Carol Leigh).

Term "sex work" is first publicly coined.

1979

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Sex Workers and Friends, International Women's Day, Oakland, 2017. (Photo: Carol Leigh).

Carol Leigh creates the term sex work as the "beginning of a movement," writing that the term acknowledges "the work we do rather than defines us by our status" (NSWP, n.d) in her essay, "Inventing Sex Work."