Prostitution and Victorian Social Reform

Paul McHugh

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136247750
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia sociale

In the mid-nineteenth century many parts of England and Wales were still subjected to a system of regulated prostitution which, by identifying and detaining for treatment infected prostitutes, aimed to protect members of the armed forces (94 per cent of whom were forbidden to marry) from venereal diseases.

The coercive nature of the Contagious Diseases Acts and the double standard which allowed the continuance of prostitution on the ground that the prostitute 'herself the supreme type of vice, she is ultimately the most efficient guardian of virtue', aroused the ire of many reformers, not only women's rights campaigners.

Paul McHugh analyses the social composition of the different repeal and reform movements – the liberal reformists, the passionate struggle of the charismatic Josephine Butler, the Tory reformers whose achievement was in the improvement of preventative medicine, and finally the Social Purity movement of the 1880s which favoured a coercive approach. This is a fascinating study of ideals and principles in action, of pressure-group strategy, and of individual leaders in the repeal movement's sixteen year progress to victory.

The book was originally publised in 1980.

1 Introduction

DOI: 10.4324/9780203104040-1

One hundred years ago, 18 districts in England and Wales were still subjected to a system of regulated prostitution similar, in essence, to those systems of police-controlled and registered prostitution widely employed throughout continental Europe in the nineteenth century and still, in part, surviving in the twentieth. The United Kingdom’s flirtation with regulation lasted only from 1864, when the first of the Contagious Diseases Acts was enacted, to 1886 when the system was abolished. The object had ostensibly been to protect members of the armed forces from the consequences of venereal disease, and the government from the resulting financial penalties and loss of manpower. The method employed was to identify prostitutes and submit them to examination by designated official doctors; if they were found to be diseased they were detained in hospitals for specified periods. To implement the Acts a specialised police force and purpose-built Lock wards were provided. ¹

In the nineteenth century, attitudes to the Acts ran deep. They were defended as examples of progressive sanitary enlightenment, berated as immoral abuses of the constitution. An agitation sprang up to campaign for repeal of the Acts which has recently been called ‘one of the century’s most notable protest movements’. ² Certainly the repeal movement recruited an extraordinary variety of campaigners: moralists, feminists, individualists, opponents of medical pretensions and military arrogance were amongst those who found the Acts repugnant, and were prepared to work for their repeal in what were, at first, highly unfavourable circumstances.

However, consideration of the repeal movement has been excessively concerned with its place in the history of women’s social and political emancipation. ³ This concentration on the Acts’ relationship to women’s rights has tended to obscure other equally interesting aspects of the campaign against them. This study will attempt to redress the balance by assessing the campaign’s connections with non-feminist agitations, and with wider social and political questions. It will also analyse the movement’s internal mechanisms in order to show how a Victorian pressure group operated, and why this particular one eventually succeeded where so many others failed. ⁴

Yet this feminist bias is forgivable when one confronts the assumptions which underpinned the Acts; assumptions memorably encapsulated in Keith Thomas’s long-standing indictment of the Acts as the high-water mark of the double standard of sexual morality. ⁵ The Acts were based on the premisses that women but not men were responsible for the spread of venereal disease, and that while men would be degraded if subjected to physical examination, the women who satisfied male sexual urges were already so degraded that further indignities scarcely mattered. Protection for males was supposed to be assured by inspection of females. ⁶

Why should these assumptions, grounded in sex discrimination still to be found today, have borne fruit in the mid nineteenth century? There are probably two reasons for the Acts’ appearance at this historical juncture.

Firstly, it seems likely that Victorian interest in prostitution, the ‘social evil’, was at its greatest in the 1850s and 1860s – in 1860, for example, the Saturday Review noted its popularity as a subject for discussion. ⁷ Furthermore the bulk of the discussion – in the medical and weekly press – was in the direction of recognising the inevitability of prostitution and reaching some accommodation with it. Dr William Acton had published his Prostitution in 1857, an enormously influential argument for humane treatment of prostitutes associated with measures to keep them as free from disease as possible. As he realised, most prostitutes eventually found their way back into the community at large. ⁸ Upper-class males would be familiar with the contemporary debate on the necessity for the prostitute if the premarital virtue of upper-class females was to be preserved; a debate clinched for many in Lecky’s notorious phrase: ‘Herself the supreme type of vice, she is ultimately the most efficient guardian of virtue.’ ⁹ They would also be familiar with the sight of police-regulated prostitution in European cities, which kept the streets decent and apparently offered some protection from disease. ¹⁰ The whole discussion was, of course, couched in terms of society’s needs being best served by an authoritarian, albeit enlightened, provision of healthy prostitutes. Humane concern for the prostitute herself may have followed from this, but any concession to the notion of these women as citizens with the right to lead independent lives was notably absent.

Secondly, the Acts can be seen as a response to the supposed deterioration of health in the armed forces. In the aftermath of the Crimean War and the invasion scare of the late 1850s, the army and navy had, for a time, emerged from the neglect with which government and public opinion alike usually treated them. Reform was in the air, Royal Commissions exposed inadequacies, and serious fears were voiced about military ineffectiveness caused by the ravages of venereal disease. ¹¹

Living conditions were still appalling and marriage was restricted by regulation to about 6 per cent of enlisted men. Despite the efforts of philanthropic and religious workers, notably the Wesleyans from the early 1860s, this ‘bachelor army’ was accustomed to turn to prostitutes, hordes of whom were to be found in dockyard and garrison towns. ¹² In 1865 the Inspector-General of Hospitals estimated the prostitute population of the eleven towns under the 1864 Act to be 7,339, of whom 929 were said to be diseased. ¹³

Since the climate of upper middle class opinion was so strongly in favour of some form of regulation of prostitution, since the armed forces in particular seemed to be imperilled by venereal disease and since doctors were unable, in practice, to control it effectively given the then state of medical knowledge, some form of legislative onslaught on the ‘carriers’ of disease (however arbitrary that definition) was increasingly likely. Indeed it possessed almost a logic of its own in the early 1860s.

The reaction against this medico-military consensus was slow in manifesting itself. Not until 1870 did the movement against the Acts get off the ground, and even then amidst tensions and divisions which it will be a primary task of this study to analyse. One such tension was the contest between provincial radicalism, on its way towards the capture of the liberal party, and the declining force of Metropolitan radicalism, The battle between these two groupings, so crucial to the future shape of British liberalism, was fought out within the repeal movement. The provincials–Nonconformist, self-assured and convinced of the duplicity of all things metropolitan–eventually came to displace the secular, cosmopolitan, ‘old radical’ Londoners as prime movers of the agitation. ¹⁴

To some extent, this contrast is reflected in the relationship between the leading personalities in the repeal movement: the charismatic Josephine Butler, the Liberal minister James Stansfeld and H.J. Wilson the Sheffield radical.

Josephine Butler (1828–1906) was first in the field and is normally regarded as the movement’s leading light; so much so that brief references to it usually talk of ‘Josephine Butler’s crusade against the Contagious Diseases Acts’. ¹⁵ She came from a branch of the Grey family of Northumberland–her father, John Grey of Dilston, was a scientific farmer, a leading northern liberal, a strong supporter of his kinsman Earl Grey at the time of the Reform Bill agitation and an anti-slavery enthusiast. This Whiggish background was a splendid apprenticeship for a lifetime of philanthropy – even though there was sometimes a touch of wistful noblesse oblige about it, a feeling that she was the last of her kind. Towards the end of her life she commiserated with her son about ‘the vulgarising influences of the present day, and the decay of the best traditions through the advance of the money-making class into all places of influence’. ¹⁶

In 1852 she married George Butler, eldest son of Dr George Butler, Dean of Peterborough and former headmaster of Harrow. The Butlers were an academic family (one of George’s younger brothers, Montague, became Master of Trinity College, Cambridge) and George pursued a predictable career of examining and schoolmastering. ¹⁷ After five years of teaching at Oxford, he became vice-principal of Cheltenham College where he remained from 1858 until 1866. While at Cheltenham, the Butlers were struck by personal tragedy – the accidental death in 1864 of their youngest child Eva. Mrs Butler was understandably prostrated by it, and throughout her life was haunted by the memory of the child, having fallen down the stairs as she rushed to greet her parents, dying in her father’s arms. ¹⁸ The tragedy had two immediate results: George Butler leapt at the offer of the principalship of Liverpool College, and once they had moved there early in 1866, Josephine Butler began to discover in philanthropy the solace for her own grief – as she said, ‘it was not difficult to find misery in Liverpool’. ¹⁹ She began visiting the oakum sheds of the Brownlow Hill Workhouse where she was confronted by the wretchedness of destitute women. Moved by this, she founded first a house of rest, and later an industrial home; she even took dying prostitutes into her own home. ²⁰ Subsequently she went on to champion women’s education, becoming president of the North of England Council for Promoting the Higher Education of Women. She was also acutely aware of the need to extend employment opportunities for women; and in correspondence with her friend Albert Rutson and with the positivist Frederic Harrison, she angrily pointed out the connection between unemployment and prostitution. ²¹ In 1869 she edited and introduced a collection of essays, Woman’s Work and Woman’s Culture, which served to emphasise the link between her two interests. ²²

Until 1869 Mrs Butler was thus a conventional advocate of women’s rights (though this is in itself remarkable enough), broader-minded than most women of the day, more courageous in her personal espousal of the cause of suffering women, but not yet offering any challenge to a male-dominated society. That was to come when she took up repeal. In all this, she was loyally supported by her husband, whose career suffered as a result of his wife’s activities. As a public school Head, George Butler was initially a great success and his breadth of interests make him one of the nineteenth century’s more progressive headmasters, but besides this, he also sustained Josephine in work which was from that expected of a Head’s wife. ²³ The strain was great, and the last years of his headmastership were unhappy; he was at odds with his directors and his grip on the school faltered. ²⁴ By 1877 the Butlers wanted to retire, but were prevented by lack of alternative income; indeed financial worries added to the strain. Mrs Butler’s correspondence is full of references to their grave problems: raising three boys on an income which fluctuated with the College’s roll, the need to maintain an office on erratically provided funds from repeal bodies and the temptation, which she was seldom able to resist, of plunging into her own pocket to keep repeal work going – on occasions her bank balance fell to 6d. ²⁵

All this had a crippling effect on her life. She sold her jewels to raise funds, she begged money from wealthier repealers. Their response was generous. Indeed two funds were raised to help the Butlers, the second of which, in 1882, was originally designed to en...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Tables and Figures
• List of Abbreviations
• Dedication
• Preface
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Regulating Prostitution
• 3 The Attack on the Acts Launched
• 4 Defeat and Regrouping
• 5 The Repeal Campaign in Action – Organisation and Methods
• 6 The Role of Women in the Repeal Movement
• 7 Religion and the Repeal Campaign
• 8 The Liberal Strategy
• 9 Political Connections and Alliances in the Repeal Campaign
• 10 Conclusion
• Appendix A: The Principal Repeal Associations as at 1 June 1880
• Appendix B: Income and Expenditure Figures
• Appendix C: Some Employees of Repeal Associations and Salaries
• Bibliography
• Index