Green’s Dictionary of Slang

(Aus./US) a prostitute; thus dovecotery, prostitution.

1642		J. Taylor St Hillarie’s Teares 5: Covent-Garden, long Acre, and Drury Lane, where thoses Doves of Venus, those Birds of youth, and beauty (the wanton Ladies) do build their nests.
[1850		Bell’s Life in Sydney 4 May 2/6: Two young ladies of the species ‘columba Veneris’].
1866		Sportsman 29 Sept. 2/2: Notes on News [...] Why should the [...] magistrates pass sentence on the ‘soiled doves’ of the West-end four times heavier than others of the sisterhood would get for creating ten times as great a nuisance at Clerkenwell.
1868		J.D. McCabe Secrets of the Great City 297: She was a ‘soiled dove,’ indeed, but the gentlest and dearest.
1875		Wichita Beacon 15 Sept. in Miller & Snell Why the West was Wild 492: A soiled dove got her guzzle full of whisky last Friday.
1879		in J.G. Rosa Gunfighter (1969) 80: A desperate fight occurred [...] last Tuesday evening, between two of the most fascinating doves of the roost.
1879		London Life 23 Aug. 4/1: [T]he rooms were swarming with ‘soiled doves’ and the ‘jeunesse dorée’.
1882		Sydney Sl. Dict. (2 edn) 88: Soiled doves - The ‘midnight meeting’ term for prostitutes and ‘gay’ ladies generally.
1888		Lantern (New Orleans, LA) 4 Feb. 2: A woman who belongs to the large army called soiled doves.
1890		Bulletin (Sydney) 5 July 12/1: A man walking once up the George-street Block [...] saw 14 women with tinted locks and frescoed faces – and he happened to recognise some of them as not avowedly belonging to the soiled-dove sisterhood.
1900		Bulletin (Sydney) 29 Sept. 11/1: Three or four years ago the Melb. police amused themselves by pretending to clear all the soiled doves out of Lonsdale Street, a farce which merely served to enlarge the suburban radius of dovecotery. The Lonsdale Street flutter is quite forgotten now.
1904		Sydney Sportsman (Surry Hills, NSW) 26 Oct. 8/5: A soiled Venus up before the ‘beak’ [...] for marketing her charms in the wee hours [...] flatly denied the charge.
1904		Sydney Sportsman (Surry Hills, NSW) 21 Dec. 1/3: Then there are the two thousand and fourteen soiled virgins [...] , who beat up and down, the streets like broody hens, and cluck at every passer-by.
1908		[Donald Shaw] (con. 1860s) London in the Sixties 52: The ‘Pic’ [...] was the resort of pickpockets, bullies and ‘soiled doves’ of a very mediocre class.
1909		Advertiser (Adelaide) 19 Nov. 9/2: Now he’s dived down into the depths. ‘Ann Veronica’ — story of a soiled dove.
1917		D.G. Phillips Susan Lenox I 383: You better keep away from that there soiled dove. [...] She’s a thief—has done time—has robbed drunken men in dark hallways.
1929		D. Hammett Red Harvest (1965) 16: A soiled dove, as the fellow says, a de luxe hustler, a big-league gold-digger.
1940		Aus. Women’s Wkly 13 Jan. 13/2: ‘Oh,’ I said, ‘too pure for our poor soiled dove, eh?’.
1949		Monteleone Criminal Sl. (rev. edn).
1974		(con. 1860s) T.A. Larson Hist. of Wyoming 203: Many ‘soiled doves’ could be found in Wyoming towns and at rural ‘hog ranches’.
1989		J. Morton Lowspeak.
2001		(con. late 19C) C. Jeffords Shady Ladies of the Old West 🌐 Indeed, soiled doves often found there was more money to be made in the dance trade than horizontally. [Ibid.] In the Kansas trail towns common terms included [...] ‘fallen frails’, ‘doves of the roost’ [etc.].
2003		Victoria Advocate (TX) 7 May 7/2: Weisinger liked to refer to the working girls as ‘soiled doves’.
2011		(ref. to late 19C) Lansing State Jrnl (MI) 19 June 35/1: It is a late-19th-century [...] bath house where women known as ‘soiled doves’ entertained road-weary strangers while clothes dried on wooden racks.