Prostitution in the United Kingdom in the Victorian Period - Essay Example

Prostitution in the United Kingdom in the Victorian Period Victorian Britain was characterized by extremes. It was the period in which Britain roseto be world power, controlling the largest proportion of the known world since Roman times and being the fulcrum for the Industrial Revolution which would transform life for most people. But there was a dark underbelly to this power and prosperity. In the massive conurbations that had grown so quickly with industrialization, and particularly within the metropolis of London, there was a growing underclass mired in poverty who did not enjoy the benefits of this expansion. The streets of London immortalized by Dickens in their fascination and horror were in many ways embodied by the spectacle of prostitutes, many little more than children, plying their trade. Prostitution became a symbol of the worst excesses of Victorian Britain, and as such were a focus for attempts at change. As with many social ills that attract a variety of attention, prostitution was viewed through a number of different lenses according to the interests of the viewer. By the beginning of the 1840's a number of different groups:- mainly religious groups, major news organizations and women's social groups - began to take notice of the problem of prostitution. One of the major reasons for this new attention, as William Acton noted in his landmark study, Prostitution (1870) was the sheer number of prostitutes now visible on metropolitan streets in general, and London streets in particular. Acton estimated that there were at least 40,000 prostitutes actively working in London alone. It had become impossible to simply ignore the activity as it was so prevalent. The very title of Acton's book shows the variety of different perspectives that were taken on the subject: Prostitution, Considered in its Moral, Social and Sanitary Aspects in London and Other Large Cities The basic foundation for the study was moralistic in nature, but as was often the case in Victorian thought, it needed at least a veneer of the rational, scientific thought that had come to such dominance during the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution. Thus the "social" and "sanitary" aspects also need to be considered. The concentration on "London" and "Other Large Cities" reflects the concern that these massively growing conurbations were essentially out of control. Prostitution was a visible, terrible sign of this lack of control. Various reasons were put forward to explain why there were so many prostitutes. The idea of the "fallen woman" was prevalent among these, as Walkowitz (1982) suggests. The fallen woman archetype was, of course, an essential element of the Christian theology of the period which often associated any expression of sexuality, and specifically any embodiment of female sexuality, as innately evil and something to be avoided. The "fallen woman" was in fact any woman who had sexual relations with a man outside of marriage, whether she had a single lover or slept with dozens of men a day as her profession. Prostitution was seen as a moral and social problem by many of the writers of the time such as Charles Booth and Henry Mayhew (Walkowitz, 1992). One major 'reason' given for prostitution by contemporary commentators was the rather surprising gender disparity that had been revealed by the 1851 census. This showed that there were 4% more women than men. This implied that about 750,000 women would remain unmarried because there were not enough men to go around. These unmarried females began to be known as "superfluous women" and/or "redundant women" (Bartley, 1999). These designations are telling: a woman's worth is seen purely within her ability to marry a man. Any woman who cannot marry because of a shortage of men is at risk for becoming a prostitute. The doubtful logic that this rather large leap relied upon was that unmarried women had no man to support them and so would need to support themselves through illegitimate means. The idea that all unmarried women would be tempted to become prostitutes might seem laughable today, but it was regarded as a powerful argument in the mid Nineteenth Century. In some of the writing of the time there was also a hint that because these unmarried women's desires could not be met by a husband, they would be forced to seek them elsewhere. This is linked to the idea of a rampant, uncontrolled female sexuality that must be corralled at all possible costs. Allowed to exist outside of the natural limitations of marriage, London streets crawling with prostitutes were the result. As Foucault (1976) stated in his seminal work, during the Nineteenth Century sexual repression was regarded as a sign of good breeding. In a semiotic sense, repressed sexuality was a signifier for a whole series of signifieds that showed upper class temperament. Conversely, a released sexuality was a signifier for a whole series of undesirable signifieds. In the same sense, the prostitutes on the streets were the most visible embodiment of those signifieds. Yet as Foucault also states: Toward the beginning of the eighteenth century, there emerged a political, economic, and technical incitement to talk about sex...... This need to take sex 'into account', to pronounce a discourse on sex that would not derive from morality alone but from rationality as well, was sufficiently new that at first it wondered at itself and sought apologies for its own existence. How could a discourse based on reason speak like that (Foucault, 1976) (emphasis added) It is with a background to this supposedly "rational" discourse that those attempts to curb prostitution, specifically the Contagious Disease Acts of 1864, 1866 and 1869 must be viewed. Prostitution was regarded as a social problem that could be rationally studied and rationally dealt with through laws. A law must be based upon rationality rather than emotion, and so much of the discourse by the 1860's was based upon rational thought rather than pure moral condemnation. The first Contagious Disease Act (1864) allowed local police to take custody of and examine any woman who was suspected of having a venereal disease. The wording of the Act itself is very revealing: "Should a member of a special force or a registered doctor believe that a woman was a common prostitute (a term left undefined), then he might lay such information before a Justice of the Peace who was then to summon the woman to a certified hospital established under the act for medical examination. Should she refuse, then the magistrate could order her to be taken to the hospital and there forcibly examined and if found, in either case, to be suffering from venereal disease, then she could be detained in a hospital for a period of up to three months. Resistance to examination or refusal to obey the hospital rules could be visited with one month's imprisonment for the first offense and two months for any subsequent offense. They might, however, submit voluntarily to examination without a magistrate's order, but if infected became liable for detention." (Act, 1964) The act of prostitution, which was illegal in itself, was not the target of this legislation, but rather the disease that the woman might be carrying because of her profession. The Act conflated medical and legal procedures. The constable (legal) would enable the doctors (medical) to forcibly (legal) examine the woman and if she was found to have a venereal disease she could be "detained" (legal) at the hospital (medical) for a designated period, much as a prison sentence would be outlined (legal). Refusal to submit to the examination, or to obey hospital rules, is a criminal offense in and of itself, and is thus punishable by an actual prison sentence. It is the prostitute's potentially diseased body that is the subject of criminal limitations, not the fact that she is a prostitute. Megera Bell argues that this Act, far from trying to stamp out prostitution, actually implied that prostitution was a permanent and necessary evil. They condoned male sexual access to fallen women and were specifically directed at women in order to protect the health of men. If the priority had been to fight VD, then inspecting the prostitutes' clients would also have been required by the Acts. However, the assumption was that, while men would be offended at the intrusion, the women were already so degraded that further humiliations were of no consequence. (Bell, 2007) (emphasis added) This Act was originally broached as an attempt to protect the Empire's safety through protecting its vital armed forces from being infected with debilitating venereal diseases. However, it also engendered a backlash that was completely unforeseen. Josephine Butler started a campaign to repeal the act, attacking the double standards that were being shown within the Act. In turn, this campaign become part of a wider anti-prostitution that brought about strange bed-fellows. The neophyte feminist movement joined forces with the more reactionary elements of the religious organizations in condemning the Act and its implied acceptance of prostitution as a fact of modern life. They condemned the Act for different reasons, but they had a common cause. They combined together to suggest that it was prostitution, rather than merely the diseases that a prostitute might carry, that was the problem. Prostitution was characterized by many of these people as a kind of disease itself. Take a passage from Acton: The sin does not hide itself - it wanders our roads, breaks into our parks and theatres . .. it brings careless people into temptation and entices the innocent . . . it penetrates our homes, destroys conjugal happiness and parental hopes. (Acton, 1870) Within such a point of view prostitution is the disease whereas prostitutes are merely its most visible symptom. Attempts to make them disease-free merely mask some of the more obvious effects of the disease. A cure would require the destruction of the disease itself. The terminology adopted by Acton is also revealing. Prostitution is seen as "penetrating" the supposedly sanctified space of the familial home. Paradoxically, prostitution, a titular "female" activity takes on the "male" role of penetrating, perhaps even raping the family environment. But this is a logical extension of the idea that prostitution reveals an uncontrolled, rapacious side of female sexuality. It is the female taking on the male role that was perhaps most frightening to many of these crusaders. The 1866 and 1869 Contagious Diseases Acts extended the amount of time that a woman could be detained in a hospital to up to a whole year. While these Acts were aimed specifically at "protecting" British armed forces by the late 1860's supporters were suggesting that they should be extended to the civilian population, especially in the North of England, where out-of-control urban growth was causing often riotous conditions. While the catalytic effect of prostitution on these riots is highly doubtful, it was an easy target for politicians concerned with maintaining public order. It is highly ironic that many of the techniques and ideas which were developed during the campaigns against the Contagious Disease Acts were actually perfected by the suffragist protestors in later decades of the century and into the Twentieth Century. A campaign against a law that was designed to protect men from disease women would lead to a much larger social movement that would eventually transform British society by giving women full voting rights in the 1920's. Some people supported the Acts for surprisingly similar reasons to those that opposed them, albeit from a different perspective. For example, Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, a senior nurse at the New Hospital for Women in London, supported the Act as just about the only practical way of saving unknowing wives from the philandering of their husbands and the subsequent diseases that were passed on to them. Far from being an example of an attempt at discriminating against women, the Acts were seen as actually liberating them by these campaigners. However, it is clear that Anderson et al. divided women into the worthy (faithful wives) and unworthy (prostitutes). To conclude, prostitution in Britain during the Nineteenth Century was a multifaceted phenomena that can be used to reveal many, often contradictory forces within the society that had produced it. Victorian society was supposedly moralistic, even puritanical in nature, but at the same time it allowed quite open sexual commerce to occur on virtually every street. Hypocrisy is one of the vices that the Victorian period is commonly associated with today, and it nowhere more apparent than in the double standards shows towards male and female sexuality within the discussion of and action towards prostitution. It was the women who were subject to an invasion of their privacy and essentially imprisonment in a hospital for up to one year if they were found to be suffering from a venereal disease. But the men who were having sex with them, and then returning home to their unsuspecting wives and infecting them were not subject to any examination at all. The Contagious Disease Acts were ultimately repealed in 1886, yet their legacy was more difficult to expunge. They had led to a birth of female consciousness in large and diverse groups of women that would not disappear. Prostitution, often regarded as the "oldest profession" still existed after the Acts came and went, as it does today. ______________________________________ Works Cited Acton, William. Prostitution. Praeger, London: 1969. ------------------. Prostitution, Considered in its Moral, Social and Sanitary Aspects in London and Other Large Cities London: 1870. Bartley, Paul. Prostitution: Prevention and Reform in England 1860-1914. Routledge, New York: 1999. Bell, Megara. "The Fallen Woman in Fiction and Legislation" Quoted at The Victorian Web. http://www.victorianweb.org/gender/contagious.html. The Contagious Diseases Act, 1864. ---------------------------------------. 1866. ---------------------------------------. 1869. Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality, Volume I. Vintage, New York: 1976. Walkowitz, Judith. Prostitution and Victorian Society: Woman, Class and the State. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge: 1982. ----------------------. City of Dreadful Delight, Virago Press, New York: 1992. Read More