Everything that happened in Plymouth and Southampton was reproduced at the national level with the same intensity and drama. Throughout the country, preventive approaches to moral reform rapidly superseded the more limited efforts to reform and rescue the experienced prostitute. The 1880s witnessed the proliferation of clubs and armies to train the young and innocent in sexual repression. As in the Three Towns, these voluntary and propagandist efforts were complemented by repressive public measures against unrespectable sexual activity. Compared to mid-Victorian moral-reform movements, this new social-purity crusade was more oriented to a male audience, more hostile to working-class culture, and readier to use the instruments of state to enforce a repressive sexual code.

Social purity especially focused on youthful sexuality as a dangerous form of sexual activity. The desire to protect the young, particularly young females, from sexual abuse was not new, nor did it fully eclipse public anxiety over “illicit” sexual activity between adults. But it is noteworthy that the cultural image of the female victim in the 1880s was several years younger than her popular stereotype in earlier decades.

W.T. Stead's exposé of child prostitution in London epitomized this new preoccupation with childhood sexuality. Appearing in the Paul Mall Gazette in the summer of 1885, “The Maiden Tribute to Modern Babylon” proved to be one of the most successful pieces of scandal journalism published in Britain during the nineteenth century.

In 1869 the men and women who first organized public opposition to the Contagious Diseases Acts were dismissed as a small sectarian group of “eccentric cranks” and religious zealots. For most of the 1870s the repeal movement continued to be regarded as a “forlorn hope” even by its staunchest supporters. By 1880, however, the social and political climate had changed. The image of the repeal movement as a collection of cranks still persisted, especially in certain official circles, but the political power and popular appeal of the repealers could not be ignored. By this time, these “eccentrics” had been able to impose their views on a significant part of the general public and also to dictate Liberal party policy on the subject of regulation. Their political influence could be felt at national and local levels. In 1883, for example, Joseph Rowntree recounted a conversation he had had recently with a political acquaintance in York. The gentleman had asked him, “have you any fads in York?” “I said, ‘Yes, any Liberal candidate must be against the C. D. Acts.’”

How did repealers move from the periphery of social and political power to center stage? They certainly benefited from the reorganization and domination of the Liberal Party by Radicals in the early eighties. But structural change in the Liberal Party apparatus tells only part of the story. The repeal of the acts also reflected a new public consensus on prostitution and the double standard.

With middle-class support, many registered prostitutes in Plymouth and Southampton forcibly resisted the requirement of the Contagious Diseases Acts. Their experience under the acts constitutes an important chapter in the social history of an outcast group in Victorian England. Although the acts were ostensibly passed as sanitary measures to control the spread of venereal disease, their local administration extended well beyond the sanitary supervision of common prostitutes. As single women residing outside their families, registered women were perhaps the most vulnerable members of their community; consequently, official intervention into their lives offered police an easy opportunity for general surveillance of the poor neighborhoods in which they resided. These women were used as a leverage on the working-class community, not simply because of their marginal status within that community, but in good part because they shared social characteristics in common with the mass of the urban poor. Their temporary moves into and out of prostitution reflected the fluid social identity among the casual laboring poor who so violated Victorian society's sense of order and place. In the districts where the acts were enforced, prostitution, petty theft, and the seasonal migration of the poor into the countryside to pick hops and strawberries were all means by which the chronically underemployed endured through hard times. The Contagious Diseases Acts were part of institutional and legal efforts to contain this occupational and geographic mobility.

In 1882, repealers glumly reviewed the select committee's favorable report on the working of the C.D. acts. The ordeal of the long-drawn out inquiry had ended badly for the repeal side. Most committee members had simply accepted official accounts of the beneficial operation of the acts while dismissing repeal arguments and evidence of police abuse as unsubstantiated and malicious propaganda. The majority report included some additional thrusts at the repeal movement. It observed that “the majority of the more intelligent and respectable classes in these districts would be strongly opposed to the repeal of the Acts,” and pointedly noted that “the strength of the opposition [to the acts] in each locality is [proportional] to its distance from the places where they are in operation.”

However strong their support in the north, the failure of abolitionists to sway public opinion in subjected areas remained a serious flaw in their overall political strategy.

When I began research on this project in 1970, sexuality and prostitution were only just emerging as legitimate subjects for historical inquiry. Two influential works, Steven Marcus's The Other Victorians (1966), and a 1963 essay by Peter Cominos, had already begun to explore the relationship between sexual ideology and social structures and to identify prostitution as a fundamental aspect of social life in Victorian Britain.

Since that time, the study of Victorian sexuality has been refined in a number of ways. Critics have challenged the assumption of a unitary, Victorian culture and single, repressive standard of sexuality. Others have questioned how precisely sexual prescription translated into behavior. Historians of women, in particular, have taken exception to the exclusively negative image of women – as subordinated, silent victims of male sexual abuse – that emerged from the study of prescriptive and pornographic literature. Instead Mary Ryan, Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, and Linda Gordon have focused on the efforts of female moral reformers in America to dictate sexual standards and to carve out a moral territory for themselves in the public world. Although the argument for women's power and autonomy can be carried too far – female moral reformers sometimes reinforced rather than challenged modes of class and gender domination – the story of women's resistance to the dominant forces of society needs to be told.

The Contagious Diseases Acts present a particularly good opportunity to study class and gender relations in mid-Victorian Britain.

An object of fascination and disgust, the prostitute was ingrained in public consciousness as a highly visible symbol of the social dislocation attendant upon the new industrial era. By the 1850s prostitution had become “the Great Social Evil,” not simply an affront to morality, but a vital aspect of the social economy as well. Commentaries on prostitution took a variety of forms: novels, manifestos, letters to the editor, and police reports. Embedded in bluebooks on overcrowding, workhouse children, factory conditions, and women's employment were obligatory references to the immorality consequent upon deleterious social conditions. In addition to this public outpouring of concern, recently published diaries of such men as A. J. Munby and W. E. Gladstone reveal the degree to which prostitution constituted a private obsession for some respectable Victorians, or as Gladstone put it, “the chief burden of my soul.”

The early-Victorian period also witnessed the elaboration of a new style of social research into prostitution and the formulation of activist programs for its amelioration. The intensity of concern, the style of analysis, the special emphasis on empirical and statistical research are all reflections of this particular moment in British political and cultural history. These early investigations deserve special attention for two reasons. They represent perhaps the most systematic efforts in the 1840s to examine the problem – formally proceeding from an examination of causes to results, extent, and remedies for prostitution.

Historical interest in the Contagious Diseases Acts has principally focused on their cultural importance as explicit manifestations of mid-Victorian social and sexual ideology. This cultural interpretation, although important, has generally been presented in isolation from the political background surrounding passage of the acts and the administrative machinery and medical technology that facilitated their operation. The separation of the ideological and the practical origins of the acts has distorted the historical picture by making the acts appear to express a more programmatic and coherent social policy than was actually the case.

This chapter will offer a corrective to this oversimplified approach by investigating the interaction between ideology and its implementation under the acts. It will also examine the changing public rationale for the acts, from limited sanitary measures to far-reaching pieces of social legislation.

By the mid-Victorian period, many doctors and public officials came to assess syphilis as a serious health hazard for the British population. Newly available medical statistics on the incidence of venereal disease in the civilian and military populations had alerted public authorities to the problem and convinced them of the need for preventive measures – in particular, for the sanitary supervision of common prostitutes. The medical rationale for a regulation system was predicated on three assumptions: that syphilis was spread through promiscuous sexual contact with diseased prostitutes; that existing voluntary facilities for treating female venereal patients were ineffective as preventive and therapeutic institutions; that available diagnostic and therapeutic methods were adequate to carry out the medical provisions of a regulation system. A later generation of venereologists would dismiss mid- Victorian confidence in existing therapeutics as naive and misguided. At the time, however, doctors were only dimly aware of their limited ability to cure venereal disease. Nor could they foresee that syphilis would decline “spontaneously” over the course of the nineteenth century, irrespective of medical intervention or the operation of programs for the sanitary control of prostitutes.

Although conforming to accepted medical and clinical standards, the treatment of venereal disease was also governed by the dominant sexual and social ideology. This chapter will explore the various levels of meaning attached to the treatment of venereal disease. It will try to examine how class prejudice and the double standard of sexuality influenced medical treatment, and how these ideological influences shaped institutional facilities for the care of venereal-disease sufferers.

In 1864, Parliament passed the first of three statutes providing for the sanitary inspection of prostitutes in specific military depots in southern England and Ireland. Initially this first Contagious Diseases Act, as it was obliquely entitled, aroused little attention inside or outside governmental circles. Florence Nightingale had objected to its passage, on the grounds that it officially sanctioned “vice,” but she failed to convince politicians like William Gladstone that a standing army could be a “moral institution.” Public opposition to regulation did, however, surface in the 1870s, when a coalition of middle-class nonconformists, feminists, and radical workingmen challenged the acts as immoral and unconstitutional, and called for their repeal. The participation of middle-class women in repeal efforts fascinated and shocked many contemporary observers, who regarded this female rebellion as an ominous sign of the times. One troubled member of Parliament was moved to remark to Josephine Butler, the feminist repeal leader, “We know how to manage any other opposition in the House or in the country, but this is very awkward for us – this revolt of the women. It is quite a new thing; what are we to do with such an opposition as this?”

The public controversy surrounding the Contagious Diseases Acts constitutes a fascinating chapter in the history of class and gender relations in mid-Victorian Britain. This book looks at the origins of these acts, the successful feminist campaign to repeal them, and their impact on registered prostitutes and their community.