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| 'Found', by Dante Gabriel Rossetti Delaware Art Museum Public domain |
The Acts
Victorian prostitutes mainly served working-class men in squalid conditions, and their typical clients were soldiers and sailors, who tended to be single because of their conditions of service. Their middle-class clients were mainly young single men (rather than married men). At Oxford in the 1840s the proctors’ records suggest a figure of between 300 and 400 prostitutes in a city of 25,000 people of whom 1,500 were students.Prostitution was a widely-recognised social problem that occupied many philanthropists, such as the wealthy heiress, Angela Burdett-Coutts, who founded a home for young women, Urania Cottage. See here for Dickens's involvement with the scheme. There are interesting discussions here and here.
The three euphemistically titled Contagious Diseases Acts (1864, 1866, 1869) were an attempt by the British government to regulate prostitution in the manner of other European countries such as France in order to reduce the sexually transmitted diseases that plagued the British army and navy. The acts applied to specifically named ports and garrison towns, although the ultimate intention was to include all of Britain.
The first Act stipulated that within a radius of eleven army camps and naval ports, a woman suspected of prostitution had to register with the police and receive a compulsory medical examination. If the examination revealed disease, she would be confined to a ‘lock’ hospital for a period of up to three months.
The Act of 1864 was replaced by a new Act in 1866, which added Chatham and Windsor to the number of subjected towns and introduced the enforcement of fortnightly examinations of prostitutes. The third Act of 1869 extended the provisions of the second Act to cover a total of eighteen towns in the British Isles. The maximum period of detention for a diseased prostitute was extended to nine months.
The CD Acts were administered by units of plainclothes policemen seconded from the Metropolitan Police. They were given sweeping powers to determine who was a prostitute. No warrant or probable cause was needed. The victims were not merely prostitutes but working-class women in general, many of them illiterate, who were locked up without any regard for their legal rights. If a girl signed papers agreeing to an examination, her agreement was a de facto acknowledgement of prostitution. She was then required to be re-examined regularly. If she refused to sign the papers, she could be held in prison for months.
The examinations were often brutal. Typically, the woman's legs were clamped open and her ankles tied down. Surgical instruments - sometimes not cleaned from prior inspections - were inserted so inexpertly that some women miscarried. Others passed out from the pain or from embarrassment. Some women with harmless conditions were misdiagnosed and locked in hospitals without recourse.
Because men were not included within the provisions, the Acts embodied the double standards of sexual morality in which prostitution was seen as an unavoidable, and perhaps necessary, evil.
Arguments for the Acts
The government saw the Acts as a step towards maintaining military efficiency in the teeth of a worrying venereal epidemic. Public health reformers welcomed them as a step towards state-regulated prostitution on the continental model.The initiative for the Acts lay with politicians deeply concerned by the abysmal performance of the British military during the Crimean war. Certainly infection rates from venereal diseases were rising, and troops returning from India were a particularly grave source of infection.
Faced with this problem, the military establishment formed an alliance with the public health lobby led by The Lancet to secure a supply of disease-free prostitutes to serve the rank and file. In a speech to the Royal Medical Society in 1860 Dr William Acton said that since philanthropists and the clergy had failed to stem prostitution, they should hand it over to scientific regulation. One of the doctors who reluctantly supported the Acts was Elizabeth Garrett Anderson.
Arguments against the Acts
The Acts were opposed from the start by Florence Nightingale, and by a number of doctors. Their arguments were:- the doubtful effectiveness of periodical examinations to curb the transmission of sexual disease
- the Acts were immoral because they condoned prostitution
- they forced the degradation of the examinations on women alone.
In October 1869 a National Anti-Contagious Diseases Acts Association was formed. This was intended to encompass both sexes, but the women decided to form their own grouping - the Ladies National Association. One of the members, Elizabeth Wolstenholme, saw her friend, Josephine Butler, as the ideal person to lead this campaign.
Josephine Butler
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| Josephine Butler campaigner for the rights of prostitutes Public domain |
Josephine Butler, née Grey came from a Liberal upper-class family in Northumberland and was married to George Butler, son of a former headmaster of Harrow, who subsequently became Vice-Principal of Cheltenham College and Principal of Liverpool College. She was a devout Christian, and having settled in Liverpool in 1866, she helped to establish homes and refuges for friendless women, housing large numbers of them in her own home. When she received the ‘call’ from Elizabeth Wolstenholme, she saw it as a message from God. After three months hesitation, and with the support of her husband, she agreed to become the secretary of the Ladies’ National Association.
The campaign
The campaign was launched on 1 January 1870 when the Daily News published a protest against the Acts, signed by 140 women. The manifesto was a potentially feminist and very powerful attack on the sexual double standard. Within a few months all major provincial cities had repeal societies, and many had ladies’ committees as well. In the first year of her campaign, Butler travelled nearly 4,000 miles and addressed 99 meetings - this at a time when it was rare for women to speak in public and even rarer to choose a taboo subject like prostitution.Josephine Butler came from a Liberal family but she fell out with the party after Gladstone's Liberal government passed the 1869 Act. But she was devastated when the Conservatives won the 1874 election, and at the end of the year she left for the Continent to see if she would have more success there. In her campaigning she won the support of Guiseppe Garibaldi and Cardinal Manning.
The ‘White Slave Trade’
As Josephine Butler's campaign widened, it became linked with a separate campaign against enforced prostitution.Late in 1879 anti-vice campaigners discovered that British women were being held against their will in the state brothels of Belgium. On 1 May 1880 Butler published an emotive attack on the most sensational aspect of the trade - child abduction and prostitution, which led to the sacking of the chiefs of the Brussels morals police. She then took the campaign to England and won the support of the Foreign Secretary, Earl Granville. Granville was sympathetic and moved for a Select Committee of the Lords to investigate white slavery.
The Committee confirmed that a serious problem of procuration by fraud existed while discovering little evidence of child abduction. They called for measures to prohibit solicitation for foreign brothels, for the age of consent to be raised to sixteen, and for comprehensive measures to tighten the law against brothel keepers. As suggested by the Committee, Gladstone’s ministry introduced a Criminal Law Amendment Bill into the Lords on 31 May 1885. Then the government fell.
W. T. Stead and the Pall Mall Gazette
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| W. T. Stead, campaigning journalist (1881) Public domain |
W. T. Stead was a crusading journalist who agreed to use his Pall Mall Gazette to aid the campaign against the abduction of children. He persuaded Rebecca Jarrett, a former brothel-keeper but now a Salvation Army convert, to take up her former trade and procure a girl to provide the crucial evidence. Reluctantly Jarrett went back to her old haunts and in June 1885 came back with a thirteen-year-old, Eliza Armstrong, whom she had bought for £5 from her impoverished mother. The details of the transaction are obscure. Eliza thought she was going into service and Mrs Armstrong might have thought the same. The father, a chimney sweep, was not present and was not consulted. Stead had Eliza certified as a virgin and then spirited her out of the country to a Salvation Army hostel in France.
Convinced he had proved Butler’s allegations about child prostitution, he wrote four articles headed ‘The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon’, published in the week beginning Monday 6 July 1885 (having previously told his readers not to buy the issues as the subject matter was too shocking!). In one of the articles, Eliza appeared as ‘Lily’ and the narrative stated (wrongly) that she had been raped. The fourth article threatened to expose ‘Princes of the blood and prominent public men’.
Public reaction was extraordinary. At mass meetings in London, Liverpool, and Newcastle there were demands for legal protection for children. On 9 July the Conservative Home Secretary, Richard Cross, moved the resumption of the second reading of the Criminal Law Amendment Bill. It received the royal assent on 10 August, and included a new clause raising the age of consent to sixteen. (Since 1275 English law stated that men could have sex with a child over the age of twelve. The age limit had been raised to thirteen in 1875.)
But by this time the case was turning sour. By the middle of July Eliza Armstrong’s parents made a formal application to the police about their missing daughter. At the end of August Eliza was handed back to her parents. On 2 September prosecutions were brought against Stead, Rebecca Jarrett and others for unlawful abduction. Ironically the case was the first of its kind to be brought under the new law. The trial began in the Old Bailey on 23 October. In November Rebecca Jarrett was sentenced to six months’ imprisonment, and Stead to three months’ hard labour. Stead served only two months (in comfort), while Jarrett served her full sentence in harsh conditions.
Stead's actions were extremely controversial but it could be argued that he had achieved his purpose and helped change opinion. In the following year (1886) the Contagious Diseases Acts were repealed.
Significance of the movement
- The tactics used by the CDA repealers were to be imitated by the suffragettes, though the campaigners were over-optimistic in believing that they could create a political machine to rival the Liberals or Tories.
- The campaign gave rise to other reform groupings to work against the injustices and disabilities affecting women, such as married women's property rights.
- The state had defined women as the source of contagion. But the CDA campaigners declared that the problem lay with male vice. In 1873 the Social Purity Alliance was founded in order to change the nature and conduct of men. The campaign for sexual purity was tied in with the campaign for women’s suffrage. How could women fulfil their mission to reform men unless they had a say in legislation? Should the Angel in the House be given the vote?
- As an ironic by-product, the Criminal Law Amendment Act further decriminalized homosexual activity. Oscar Wilde was convicted under the Act for gross indecency.
