Source Database
Section 15: Prostitution
(15.1) In 1869 Josephine Butler became involved in the campaign against the Contagious Diseases Acts. These acts gave the police powers to force women that they suspected of being prostitutes, to be medically examined. If the women were found to be suffering from venereal disease they could be detained for treatment. As these acts only applied to women, Josephine Butler believed it was an example of the double standard of sexual morality and the way in which it condemned the woman but excused the man. Butler drafted a petition against the Contagious Diseases Acts. She then toured the country trying to persuade people to sign the petition.
We, the undersigned, enter our solemn protest against these Acts. (1) Because these Acts have been passed without the fullest discussion. (2) Because, so far as women are concerned, they remove every guarantee of personal security which the law has established. (3) Because the law is bound to define clearly an offence which it punishes. (4) Because it is unjust to punish the sex who are the victims of a vice, and leave unpunished the sex who are the main cause both of the vice and its dreaded consequences; and we consider that liability to arrest, forced medical treatment, and (where this is resisted) imprisonment with hard labour, to which these Acts subject women, are punishments of the most degrading kind. (5) Because of such a system the path of evil is made more easy to our sons. (6) Because these measures are cruel to the women who come under the action – violating the feelings of those whose sense of shame is not wholly lost, and further brutalising even the most abandoned. (7) Because the disease which the Acts seek to remove has never been removed by any such legislation.
(15.2) In her book Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, her daughter Louise, describes the conflict between her mother and Josephine Butler over the Contagious Diseases Acts.
An effort was made in 1866 to introduce continental methods into England for the
control of venereal disease and in that year the first of the Contagious Diseases Acts was passed. The principal of state regulation and compulsory examination of prostitutes had been practised in France and some other European countries since the time of Napoleon and statistics were quoted to prove that these methods controlled the spread of the disease. Immediate and vigorous opposition arose. In the constituencies, this was led
by Mrs Josephine Butler, a woman of intense courage… Mrs Butler and her supporters were convinced that the group of feminist women would support abolition. Dr. Elizabeth Blackwell did so. Elizabeth Garrett did not. She accepted the prevalent view of the profession that, distasteful as the measures were, they provided the only means of protecting innocent people – mainly women and children – from venereal disease. She has been severely criticised for supporting the regulations. During the controversy, which was most bitter, she wrote to the press… If she had been older or wiser she would have kept out of the battle, but the suggestion that she supported the Contagious Diseases Acts for an unworthy motive, such as gaining favour with her medical profession, will be dismissed by all those who appreciate her character.
(15.3) On 20th May 1882, Catherine Booth gave evidence to the House of Lords on juvenile prostitution. Later she told her husband what had happened when she argued that the age of consent should be increased from thirteen to eighteen.
I did not think we were as low as this! One member suggested that it should be reduced to ten, and oh my God, that it was hard for a man having a charge brought against him not to be able to plead the consent of a child like that.
(15.4) Josephine Butler began visiting workhouses in the Liverpool area. Butler discovered that many of the women in the workhouse had been driven into prostitution by low earnings and unemployment. She wrote to her friend, Catherine Booth, about her campaign against prostitution.
We have had mass meetings all over the country, and I have addressed the working-people in open corn markets… speaking from a cart or any kind of platform… I cannot doubt that you suffer a pang of heart every time you remember… that among that class are thousands under the age of fifteen, a large proportion of them orphans, many of whom have been sold into this awful slavery by traders in vice.
(15.5) Catherine Booth’s son, Bramwell, recalled how his wife, Florence, reacted when she found out about child prostitution.
It came upon her as an appalling revelation to find that young girls - children of thirteen and fourteen were being entrapped by a vicious network and condemned to a life of shame… These hideous facts greatly affected her. Thinking of the miseries of the poor creatures. Mrs. Booth cried herself to sleep night after night.
(15.6) In 1885, Josephine Butler, Catherine Booth, Bramwell Booth and William Stead, the editor of the Pall Mall Gazette, became involved in a plot to expose how working class parents were selling their young daughters into prostitution. Stead’s article, ‘A Child of Thirteen Bought for £5’ that appeared in the Pall Mall Gazette, caused a storm of protest and as a result Parliament increased the age of consent from thirteen to sixteen.
At the beginning of this Derby week, a woman, an old hand in this work, entered a brothel kept by an old acquaintance, and opened negotiations for the purchase of a child. One of the women who lodged in the house had a sister, as yet untouched. The child was between thirteen and fourteen, and after some bargaining it was agreed that she should be handed over to the procuress for the sum of £5. There was no disguise on either side that the sale was to be effected for immoral purposes. While the negotiations were going on, a drunken neighbour came into the house… Far from being horrified at the proposed sale of the girl, she eagerly whispered to the seller, "Don’t you think she would take our Lilly? I think she would suit." Lily was her own daughter, a bright, fresh-looking little girl, who was thirteen years old last Christmas.
(15.7) In her article, Towards Woman’s Liberty, Teresa Billington Greig attempted to explain the connections between a patriarchal society, poverty and prostitution.
Day after day at a single Police Court in London scores of wretched women appear charged with solicitation, but it is a rare thing for one man to appear for annoying women. Yet so constantly is this offence committed in that district that women avoid it in the evening as a plague spot. The sweated woman worker who cannot earn a sufficient pittance on which to exist is driven into the army of the street. The seasonal worker, whose wage when work can be got is too low to permit saving, finds the same degradation. Thousands of other working women – the domestic servant turned suddenly out of place, the shop assistant dismissed without a character reference, the pretty girl tempted once and then eternally banned by society – fall a ready prey to the sharks that prowl ever on the outlook for victims.
The stream can only be stayed by legislation dealing with the evil itself, by legislation ensuring women a fair chance of employment and of living wages, by the gradual raising of the status of women in the eyes of men, and by the inculcation of a standard of morality. But this legislation will never come, this change of outlook will never come, until women hold the power of lawmaking in their own hands.
(15.8) Margery Corbett Ashby wrote a letter to the East Grinstead Observer on 7th February 1913 complaining about Parliament’s failure to protect women.
May I point out the delays, which habitually occur in the case of legislation concerning women. We waited and worked twenty years for the Children Act and twenty years for the White Slave Traffic Act. We are still working and waiting for the amendments to the divorce laws of 1859. We are still waiting for the rising of consent from 16 to 18 as has happened wherever women have gained the vote. We are working and waiting for measures dealing with the inferior position of women under the law in regard to the guardianship of her children, maintenance, insurance and such matters as the position of illegitimate children.
back to top