REGULATING SEX

The urban environment was enticing and exciting to the young men and women who flocked to European towns and cities for work. London, Glasgow, Paris and Berlin and smaller urban centres were magnets, contain­ing a range of amusements and leisure pursuits.

All of these forms of entertainment offered an escape from monotonous jobs in the factory, but single working girls were represented as both at risk themselves and a danger to society in general. Young girls, it was alleged, might easily become ensnared in vice and tempted to become commercial sellers of sex. Indeed, any girl who worked in the public sphere and who went about the city unescorted might be identified as a prostitute.

In the urban spaces of late nineteenth-century Europe, the prostitute was ‘the central spectacle in a set of urban encounters and fantasies'.¹⁷ The woman of the street, the working girl, the ‘round-the-corner-Sallie', symbol­ised the opposite of domestic virtue and feminine piety. Prostitutes were portrayed as ‘female grotesques, evocative of the chaos and illicit secrets of the labyrinthine city'.¹⁸ Across Europe, from Dublin to St Petersburg, the disorderly, diseased, corrupt body of the prostitute was used as a metaphor for fears about urban decay, national decline, and transgressions across class, gender and racial borders.¹⁹ She was a symbol of pleasure and danger, her body capable of satisfying her male clients and at the same time threatening the social fabric by spreading venereal disease.

A moral panic about commercial sex swept across Europe from the mid­nineteenth century. However, the supposed evil of prostitution was not a wholly new concern. In eighteenth-century cities, streetwalkers, as prostitutes were often known, were already confined to certain streets, and in London it was said that the freedom of prostitutes to ply their trade threatened decency, modesty and public order.²¹ By the 1860s, though, prostitution became the currency for a range of concerns about the urban condition and the health of the nation. It also provided a field of experimentation for the new theories put forward by physicians, criminologists and anthropologists. Indeed, the similarities amongst different nation-states in their attitudes towards the issue are remarkable and it is important to note that virtually all industrialising European states adopted a range of similarly repressive measures designed to control ‘vice'. The Contagious Diseases Acts were introduced in Britain and Ireland in 1864, 1866 and 1869 and applied only to ports and garrison towns. Police were given special powers to apprehend and formally identify women they believed to be guilty of procurement, and thereafter they were subjected to regular medical inspections. If found to be infected with venereal disease, a woman would be imprisoned in a special lock hospital or ward for treat­ment. These laws were only the most notorious. In parts of Germany, in addition to the registration system, prostitutes were confined to certain city streets and prohibited from frequenting areas such as parks, promenades and outside theatres where they might offend the (middle-class) residents and passers-by.

The official justification for introducing regulations to control prostitu­tion at this time was the fear of the spread of sexually transmitted diseases. Prostitutes were blamed for a decline in the nations' health and, more particularly, for the threat to the strength of the armed forces at a time of nation-state formation and imperial expansion (when there was no cure for syphilis). However, the regulations were more successful at controlling women than disease. It could hardly be otherwise when no efforts were made to apprehend the male customers. Registration, restrictions on movement, and medical intervention combined to stigmatise the prostitute but, at the same time, this raft of measures helped to define the prostitute as every­thing the ideal woman was not, and thus the control in effect extended to all women, working class and middle class, prostitute or otherwise. The prostitute was immodest, gauche, public and seemingly independent, and moreover she took sex on to the streets.

Some professionals, particularly those in the new realms of forensic medi­cine and criminal anthropology, tried to explain prostitution in terms of sexual perversion and congenital abnormality. The views of the Italian forensic psychiatrist Cesare Lombroso were particularly influential not only in his home country but also abroad. Lombroso argued that the habitual prostitute was a congenitally depraved type, sexually assertive and criminally insane. In Russia the country's expert on venereal disease, Veniamin Tarnovskii, tended to agree: ‘A woman who willingly and consciously engages in the prostitu­tion trade, is always a morally vicious and most often a physically abnormal being.'²4 However, societal explanations are more convincing. Prostitutes were drawn overwhelmingly from the ranks of single women in insecure and poorly paid occupations — they were ‘the unskilled daughters of the unskilled classes' — formerly workers in the most common occupations of working­class women: service, laundering, char work and the needle trades.²⁵ All these jobs were precarious, seasonal and low-paid. Factory workers, on the other hand, were proportionately less likely to turn to prostitution on account of the relative security of the work and the higher wages. The majority of prostitutes were single, lived outside the family, and had turned to prostitu­tion for economic reasons allied to personal circumstances. Rescue workers amongst prostitutes reported that they were characterised by their inde­pendence and assertiveness although they acknowledged the importance of a female subculture where prostitution was an acceptable solution to eco­nomic need.²⁶ There were complex reasons, then, for a woman's decision to take up prostitution; it was not premeditated and neither, as some critics suggested, was it hereditary.

The vice trade operated in ways which severed the link between the pro­stitute and her community. Prostitutes were harassed by the police and corralled into designated streets which were invariably in the poorest parts of cities. Local residents expressed their dismay at the proximity of the sex trade. No one wanted a brothel in their neighbourhood, both because of the inevitable heightened police activity it attracted and because the working classes were well aware of the fine line drawn by the middle classes between prostitutes and working-class women.²⁷ Moreover, attitudes towards pro­stitution spilled over to affect attitudes towards other women who fell foul of the ‘chastity laws'. Unmarried pregnant women were the prime targets, although any working-class woman who was labelled as sexually precocious or promiscuous was equally in danger of being sent to an institution, to remove her from the perilous streets and incarcerate her in a substitute family. This was a means of making sex secret, by removing a woman who had transgressed so that she could no longer pollute the streets or her family, so that any woman's body that radiated sexuality, especially if pregnant with an illegitimate child, could be hidden away.

One of the institutions in which so-called immoral women were incar­cerated was the Magdalene home. These establishments symbolised the dichotomy between the respectable working-class girl and the fallen woman.

Unlike the later lock hospitals which housed prostitutes against their will, the early nineteenth-century Magdalene homes took women defined as at risk but redeemable by magistrates, the police or even their families. Ireland had its first Magdalene Asylum as early as 1765 and established many more, most run by Catholic nuns, including eleven in Dublin by the 1830s. In Russia, the Russian Society for the Protection of Women founded in 1901, attempted to rescue young women before they succumbed to the clutches of brothel­keepers and established similar refuges for their rehabilitation.²⁸ The aim of the homes was to institute a regime of moral regulation whereby girls were remade into respectable working-class women. They were taught to be modest, silent, hard-working and subservient through religious indoctrina­tion and training in domestic duties.²⁹ Laundry work was a favourite means of subduing and reforming the ‘girl at risk'. As well as providing training for domestic service, it symbolised the cleansing of the girls' shame as well as the dirt of the urban environment and was a potent reminder of the girls' fall from grace. ‘Through the Christian chain of command which paralleled the Victorian social class hierarchy and which sanctioned female inferiority, self-abnegation and duty, each inmate learned her appropriate gender-role and social class position.'³⁰ In some institutions the inmates were desexed — their heads were shaved and they were forced to wear rough and unattractive clothing. But not all inmates were as compliant as the reformers might have wished. In the Scottish asylums, girls rebelled against the strict regime of scripture-reading and laundry or sewing work whilst observing a ‘becoming silence' at all times, by swearing, deliberate vandalism and running away. In one Russian lock hospital it was said that far from using decent and inoffensive language, ‘disorders among women being treated for syphilis are frequent'.³¹ Repeat offenders were numerous. Of course, women who defied the rules were regarded as merely acting true to type. Good girls were silent and submitted to the moral regulation designed to make them into model domestic women.