Legally emancipating Women: 4

Campaigns for moral purity

Much of the moral stance of late Victorian feminists assumed stemmed from fear. Feminist attitudes to sexuality revolve largely around the dangers it implied[1]. Campaigns around marital violence pre-dated the murders by a full decade and one of the most powerful arguments that campaigners against ‘wife-torture’ had was the inadequacy of the law in protecting women from reprisal. Frances Power Cobbe and many others were convinced that levels of male violence were made worse by the consumption of alcohol; an analysis not exclusive to feminists as long-standing temperance societies show.

The moral stance that characterised the feminist position should be understood against a background tinged with both economic and physical threats as well as with theoretical objections to legislative or even cultural injustices. They saw themselves as victims of a male ideology, as victims of a lust denied to them, of a right to speak denied to them, of a society shaped by male requirements. Feminists took hold of the position to which they were limited by Victorian ideology and inverted its precepts, turning the duties of moral guardianship into a campaign that castigated the laxity and degradation of precisely those who ascribed them that role. Yet the element of philanthropy that surfaced in almost all the campaigns is apparent here to: some of the activity centred around the prostitution controversy and laid emphasis on the rescue of ‘fallen women’ and their moral re-education.

From the early part of the nineteenth century, until absorbed by the new social purity movements of the 1880s, the Society for the Suppression of Vice [founded in 1802] remained the Victorian’s basic legal force against the obscene. Its work demonstrated the often close relationship between private vigilance and public authorities. It was the persuasion of the Vice Society that led to the Obscene Publications Act 1857. Through the 1870s and 1880s, the ‘abolitionists’[2] were a major social force and the stimulus for the emergence of vigorous social-purity organisations such as the National Vigilance Association. Why was there a major attempt at moral restructuring in the last decades of the nineteenth and first decade of the twentieth centuries? Various causes can be identified:

From the 1870s, following what was seen as a decline in standards in the 1850s and 1860s, a new confidence in the moralistic ethic can be detected[3]. In the early years of the century moral reformers had been sustained by the threat of revolution. No such fears limited them in the 1880s and 1890s but there were a series of causes and scandals that maintained their momentum: the iniquities of the CDA to the scandalous leniency meted out to high class ‘madams’; from the exploitation and abduction of young girls in the White Slave Trade to the divorce case of Charles Dilke in 1886 and the Irish leader Parnell in 1890; the scandal of the Cleveland Street homosexual brothel 1889-90[4] said to involve the eldest son of the heir to the throne and the Cranby Croft gambling scandal of 1891 that did involve the Prince of Wales.

There was a constituency ready to be stirred by such scandals, in the lower middle class and the respectable working class whose values were being attacked by radicals and libertarians. Respectability, with its stress on values such as self-help and self-reliance, the value of work and the need for social discipline and the centrality of the family, was threatened by public immorality. Here was a strong basis for social purity. Behind this, giving the campaigns a tremendous dynamism was an evangelical revival, bringing large sections of the feminist movement into alliance with nonconformity, an alliance sealed in outrage against double standards. Many of the leaders of the campaigns in the 1880s were products of this Christian revival. W.T. Stead described himself as ‘a child of the revival of 1859-60’ which had swept across the Atlantic and won hundreds of thousands of converts. Social purity was also able to mine very deep fears of a more secular kind. 1885, an immensely important year in sexual politics, was also the year of the expansion of the electorate [Third Reform Act], there were fears of national decline following the defeat and death of General Gordon, anxieties about Ireland and all this in the context of a socialist revival and feminist agitation. Social purity became a metaphor for a stable society.

By 1885, social purity was able to tap an anxiety that found a symbolic focus in the ‘twin evils’ of enforced prostitution and the exploitation of young girls. W.T .Stead’s sensational expose of the latter in his articles on ‘The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon’ generated a sense of outrage with which a wide range of public opinion found itself in sympathy. The result was the Criminal Law Amendment Act which attempted to suppress brothels, raised the age of consent for girls to sixteen and introduced new penalties against male homosexuals in private as well as in public. Further changes, in the Vagrancy Act 1898 and the Criminal Law Amendment Act 1912, underlined the new legislative involvement with prostitution and homosexuality. Reformers in 1885 had no doubt that their cause was right: a crusade against ‘a dark and cruel wrong’. Yet reformers were directing their energies at many of the wrong targets, illustrating the typical nineteenth century preference for moral campaigns rather than structural social reforms.

Social purity was linked with the issue of birth control and eugenics in the period after 1870. The birth control controversy spanned the century. Utilitarians like Jeremy Bentham and James Mill proposed various kinds of birth control. It was in the 1860s and 1870s that there was a real extension of propaganda on birth control directed at the middle classes. Charles Bradlaugh’s National Reformer carried articles on the issue. It was, however, the trial of Bradlaugh and Annie Besant in 1876 for republishing a banned pamphlet that gave the birth-control movement wide publicity and created a demand for more information and led to the setting up of the first organisation to campaign on birth control, the Malthusian League. Between 1876 and 1881, over 200,000 copies of the banned tract were sold in England and Annie Besant’s own The Law of Population, published in 1877, sold 175,000 copies by 1891. The arguments in favour of limiting the size of the family had never before been presented to so large a public.

By the beginning of the twentieth century, the sexual question was inextricably linked with the politics of population and the case for racial as well as social purity. A major sign of this was the re-emergence of neo-Malthusianism in an organised form with the founding of the Malthusian League in 1877. The consequence of a failure to limit population was, contemporaries believed, growing degeneracy, a view reinforced by the drastic unfitness of the imperial race shown during the Boer War. There were different approaches to these perceived problems. Maternalism marked a partial shift in the dominant ideology away from the nineteenth century stress on woman as wife towards woman as mother. Motherhood was seen as a major key to a healthy population. Therefore it was not poverty that was seen as the major cause of physical deterioration and high infant mortality, but poor maternal training. The result was the tackling of working class ignorance by a host of unofficial voluntary bodies that sprang up in the years prior to 1914 like the Institute of Hygiene [1903] and the Women’s League of Service for Motherhood. A change in official attitudes away from child rearing as just an individual duty to it as a national duty. This was reflected in increased state intervention. Compulsory education had already undermined parental choice and the measures associated with the Liberal reforms accentuated this trend: school meals in 1906; medical inspections in 1907 and the Children Act of 1908. Most of the policies that were adopted were ad hoc rather than part of a national strategy. Nevertheless, they did contribute to an improvement in health underlined by the reduction in infant mortality and the growth of child-welfare centres after 1918.

Control of aliens was grounded in the thesis that race-mixing was an evil, causing degeneration of a biological stock appeared in 1853 and was particularly influential in Germany were the term ‘anti-Semitism’ first appeared as a biological rather than religious concept in 1879. Yet Jews in Britain had long been received more liberally than in many other European countries but there was a change of mood, reflected in literature as well as reality, by the end of the century[5]. A Royal Commission on Aliens was set up in 1903, rejected the contention that immigrants were unclean or unhealthy and concluded that fears about alien immigration were largely unfounded. Nevertheless it recommended controls which became law in the Aliens Act 1905[6]. The underlying belief behind eugenics was a conviction that it was possible to intervene directly in the processes of producing the population by regulating sexual selection between stocks and individuals.

Anxieties about moral standards reflected a deep belief that the roots of social stability lay in individual and public morality. The marked interest in the moral sphere that grew to such significant proportions towards 1900 was a double-headed beast. In part, it was a logical successor to early moral reform campaigns bringing into feminism women who had championed more immediate rights, but it also gave those women a means of understanding those grievances through the lens of gender.

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[1] This can be seen in Judith Walkowitz City of Dreadful Delights, Virago, 1993 which uses the Ripper murders of the autumn of 1888 as its liet-motif.

[2] They were in favour of the repeal of the CDA.

[3] Trevor Fisher Scandal: The Sexual Politics of Late Victorian Britain, Sutton, 1995 is a useful and readable examination of this issue.

[4] On this see Lewis Chester, David Leitch and Colin Simpson The Cleveland Street Affair, Weidenfeld, 1976. This book demonstrates clearly the ambiguous attitudes to homosexuality by the Establishment. When the affair seemed likely to become the most explosive scandal of the nineteenth century and the taint of homosexuality came close to the royal household, it was quickly and quietly buried.

[5] David Feldman Englishmen and Jews: Social Relations and Political Culture 1840-1914, Yale University Press, 1994 is now the standard work on this issue and much else besides.

[6] On this issue see Ann Dummett and Andrew Nicol Subjects, Citizens, Aliens and Others, Weidenfeld, 1990.

Legally emancipating Women: 3

Prostitution and the Contagious Diseases Acts

Growth in population and in the corresponding preference for urban living mobilised an increasing degree of state intervention in the private lives of its citizens. Sanitation and housing, water supplies and the control of disease, all became subject to government directive in some way during the century, alongside the cross-over from the definitely public to the obviously private. Government’s role was an increasingly prescriptive one laying down acceptable sexual behaviour and policing sexual relations through laws governing such areas as prostitution, homosexuality and contraception. In many respects, the state assumed the role previously played by the church. This can be seen in its sanctioning marriages and its pronouncements as to the grounds on which divorce was valid, in its defining the forms of licit and illicit sexual behaviour and in its treatment of prostitution[1].

Legislation and repeal

In the urban context, increasing anxiety was expressed over the perceived increase in prostitution and its corollary, of venereal disease. Military reports had reported a steady increase in venereal infections among the men since the 1820s. A series of government inquiries in the 1850s and 1860s, precipitated by the Crimean War, testified to the seriousness with which the dual problems of VD and sexual immorality among the lower ranks was regarded in official circles. In 1862 29 per cent of all army men admitted to hospital and 12.5 per cent of all naval hospital admissions were for sexually transmitted diseases. From the 1840s public anxiety had also been focused on prostitution, the ‘great social evil’, by studies from evangelical clerics and doctors and by rescue and reform societies campaigning for a police crackdown on the London streets. Attempts to subject enlisted men to periodic genital examination met with considerable rank-and-file resistance and government turned instead to the regulation of the women with whom soldiers and sailors consorted leading to the passage of the Contagious Diseases Acts of 1864, 1866 and 1869 [hereafter CDA].

The 1864 CDA applied to a number of naval ports and army garrison towns in England and Wales. Under its provisions, both police personnel and medical practitioners [acting under the direct supervision of the War Office and the Admiralty, rather than the local constabulary] were empowered to notify a justice of the peace if they suspected a woman of being a ‘common prostitute’. The woman would then be apprehended and taken to a certified hospital for medical examination, where she could be detained for up to three months to effect a treatment if the examination proved positive. A woman’s refusal to co-operate with what was effectively a suspension of habeas corpus could lead to a prison sentence of one month, doubling for any subsequent offence. Infringement of the hospital rules, or quitting without medical consent, also carried penalties of up to two months imprisonment. In apprehending a ‘common prostitute’, the police relied on certain indicators of guilt: residence in a brothel; soliciting in the street; frequenting places where prostitutes resort; being informed against by soldiers or sailors; and lastly, the admission of the woman herself. There were also penalties for brothel keepers.  The CDA 1866 and 1869 extended the geographical locations covered by the regulations, while the Admiralty and War Office were now mandated to provide hospital facilities for inspection and treatment. Provision was also made within hospitals for adequate moral and religious instruction of the women and for regular fortnightly inspections of former detainees, while the period of compulsory detention was extended to six months.

Supporters of the acts did not see the principles of state hygiene as contradicting the moral emphases of the public health movement. Far from the state sanctioning male vice by providing men of the forces with a clean supply of women, it claimed that the acts were essentially moral in aim and intention. In reality, the acts were concerned with the regulation of the sexual and moral habits of two particular groups within the urban poor: female prostitutes and the lower ranks of the armed forced. But the tactics used to discipline these two groups were markedly different.  The legislation understandably angered women, and many men, the more so because of the opportunities it afforded the police to harass women. The result was organised opposition to the acts which gained ground during the 1860s and led to the setting up of the Ladies’ National Association for the Repeal of the Contagious Diseases Act in 1869 led by Josephine Butler. The repealers were well organised and effectively vocal. As soon as it was established it issued a strongly worded protest in The Daily News signed by prominent figures like Florence Nightingale, claiming the acts were not only an attack on the civil liberties of all women but also implicated the state in sanctioning male vice. The Shield, a weekly circular giving news of the acts and of protests against them, began publication in March 1870.

The women’s protest was received with expressions of outrage and puzzlement by men within the dominant political culture. Divorce, prostitution and women’s emancipation were designated as outside the parameters of political discourse and MPs customarily prefaced speeches on these topics by apologising to the house for intruding on parliamentary time. Repealers soon grasped this and drew on the only vocabulary able to bear the moral and intellectual weight of their challenge. This was the militant language of radical dissenting religion. Many LNA women came from a background of similar, if less explicitly sexual, moral reform campaigns, anti-slavery and temperance in particular. The recognition that class was an important consideration won them support from working class men fearing the effects of the acts on their own wives and children. In the feminist context, the CDA agitation proved important in crystallising the value of a wider feminist analysis. In the wake of the suspension of 1883 and the final repeal of the acts in 1886, many women choose to concentrate not on older-style feminist campaigns such as those in education, but on obtaining a single moral standard for men and women alike.

The repeal campaign in retrospect

The issue that concerned Victorian feminists in the 1870s and 1880s was what the proper balance should be between state intervention and individual liberty. The passage of the Contagious Diseases Acts in 1864, 1866 and 1869 crystallised much feminist thinking and led to the development of the Ladies’ National Association for the Repeal of the Contagious Diseases Acts [LNA] in 1869 as the leading pressure group for repeal. This was eventually achieved in 1886 following suspension of the legislation three years earlier.

The LNA leadership included veterans of the Anti-Corn Law League and the abolitionist campaigns in which women had forged themselves an important role that stopped short of feminism. The timing of the CD Acts was important for British feminism and the campaign against the legislation absorbed women who might otherwise have been attracted to the burgeoning temperance movement with its comparable stress of women victimised by male vice and power[2]. The consequence for the LNA was that its critique of male-dominated society was far more radical. In contrast to the feminist organisations of the 1850s and 1860s, the LNA, like the suffrage movement of the 1870s, was national in scope rather than London-based, claiming 92 local associations in 1882. The LNA was particularly strong in big cities where prostitution was widespread and in middle class, Nonconformist families.

However, there was a tension between married and single women within the repeal campaign and within feminist agitation generally. Married women received priority in the agitation for property law reform, single women in the push for employment and educational gains. In was the divisive British emphasis on a limited suffrage that would disproportionately benefit single women may have strengthened the determination of married women in the LNA to take the lead on matters where there sexually inexperienced sisters were at a disadvantage.

Josephine Butler embodied the background and preoccupation of the LNA leadership. She was the daughter of a Northumberland agricultural reformer and abolitionist, married to a supportive Anglican clergyman and educator established in Liverpool. She could speak for the middle class provincial activist independent of the London elite. Like many women who undertook moral reform, religious conviction and faith drove her. She had not herself been an abolitionist but she shared with anti-slavery activists’ empathy with powerless fellow-women debased by circumstances. The LNA attracted some working class women to its meetings and Mrs Butler, together with its other middle class leaders, stressed that repeal was essentially a women’s cause and a cause of all women. Butler stressed medical moral and constitutional arguments against the CD Acts. The underhand ways in which they were passed. Their failure to detect or check venereal disease; the unfair way in which they penalised women but ignored her better-off client; the infringement of women’s civil liberties. The attempts to condone sanitise and regulate sin; and the physical results that might be visited on innocent married and unmarried women. The Acts were, she maintained, a mockery of formal Victorian veneration of womanhood.

Middle class evangelists had worked for the poor since the early part of the century, attempting to stamp out their alleged immorality. Leading repealers took a far more direct and, on occasions, dangerous action. They believed in the power of united womanhood and openly worked with, as well as for, the objects of their concerns. They sought out registered prostitutes, gave them practical help and moral support in opposing the legislation. Feminists of the LNA supported the contemporary campaign for female doctors and challenged male doctors, politicians and army men with a number of telling points. First, they denied the naturalness of male lust and the double standard of morality for the sexes. They rejected the commonly held view, directed at middle class women, that prostitutes in the public sphere protected virtuous females in the private sphere against unreasonable sexual demands and argued that all women were vulnerable to sexual exploitation within their profession of marriage and that men should raise themselves to women’s levels of sexual self-control.

Secondly, activists condemned MPs’ prurient interest in the sordid matters raised by the repeal campaign and criticised doctors’ insistence on internally examining arrested prostitutes. The support for the CD Acts by Elizabeth Garrett who, like male doctors, put checking disease before defending liberty, was an embarrassment to the LNA that was not concerned with the control of venereal disease. Thirdly, feminists argued that a Parliament of rich men was unfit to legislate for poor women on such matters, contrary to the politicians’ assertions that they looked after the interests of disenfranchised females. Feminists resented the way in which women were defined only in relation to men and motherhood. Men predictably objected to changing a state of affairs from which they benefited considerably.

There were problems of emphasis. Some repealers argued that prostitution was a result of women’s exclusion, by men, from most rewarding and reliable work. Others, however, focused on its immorality and, in presenting the prostitute as a helpless victim of male lust, drew attention away from her social context and attitudes to the institution thereby reducing the woman at the centre of their fight to an abstraction. The LNA leadership and rank and file also had different priorities: the former stressed the importance of political agitation while local workers, outside exceptional branches such as Bristol, highlighted religious objections to regulation. It was these individuals, concentrating on the less controversial and well-established work of providing refuges for prostitutes, who formed the backbone of the more repressive purity campaigns of the 1880s and 1890s.

The campaign against the CD Acts did not destroy the double standard of morality for the sexes any more than it materially improved the position of prostitutes. Politicians may have become disenchanted with the CD legislation and tired of the struggle in provoked, but they had not been persuaded that Parliament should abandon other attempts to regulate vice. Women were divided on the issue. Rescue work attracted both feminists and non-feminists members of the LNA, and women outside the Association. It reinforced those notions about feminine mission and moral superiority that had encouraged female community and justified women’s involvement in reform earlier in the century. During the 1880s and 1890s it led some of them, mobilised in a host of social purity groups like the National Vigilance Association to believe that legislation could be used to ‘force people to be moral’.

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[1] There is a growing literature on prostitution. The best starting point is Judith Walkowitz Prostitution and Victorian Society: Women, Class and the State, CUP, 1980 and Paul MacHugh Prostitution and Victorian Social Reform, Croom Helm, 1980 deal specifically with the debate on the Contagious Diseases Acts. Linda Mahood The Magdalenes: Prostitution in the nineteenth century, Routledge, 1990, Eric Trudgill Madonnas and Magdalens: The origin and development of Victorian sexual attitudes, Heinemann, 1976 and Frank Mort Dangerous Sexualities: Medico-moral politics in England since 1830, Routledge, 1987 provide valuable background. Philippa Levine ‘Rough usage: prostitution, law and the social history’, in A. Wilson (ed.) Rethinking social history: English society 1570-1920 and its interpretation, Manchester University Press, 1993, pp.266-292 provides an up-to-date synthesis. Trevor Fisher Prostitution and the Victorians, Sutton, 1997 is a useful collection of sources.

[2] In the United States the rise of abolitionism in relation to alcohol arose at the same time as the CDAs and LNA in Britain. Its critique of male attitudes was far less radical. Had the CD legislation not been passed, it is possible that British feminism would have also taken this route.