Contagious Diseases Acts
The Contagious Diseases Acts (laws on infectious diseases) are British Parliament decrees of the 19th century to combat sexually transmitted diseases . The reason for the adoption of these decrees was the high number of sexually transmitted diseases among members of the British military .
The decrees gave police officers extensive rights to apprehend women and girls who appear to be or actually engaged in prostitution , to detain them and to order that they undergo a gynecological examination. The first Contagious Diseases Act was passed in 1864, expanded and tightened in 1866 and 1869, respectively. The edicts were repealed in 1883 and completely repealed in 1886.
British women of all walks of life fought against these edicts from 1869 in a campaign that criminalized prostitutes but left their customers unmolested. The petition signed by 140 women to abolish the Contagious Diseases Acts is one of the founding documents of modern feminism . The leading figure of the campaign was Josephine Butler . The fight against the Contagious Diseases Acts was instrumental in politicizing British women and shaped the British women's suffrage movement in the 19th century. The protest in Great Britain spread to other countries where protest groups were formed in a similar way.
The protest against the edicts led to widespread public debate in Great Britain about the causes of prostitution, the living conditions of prostitutes and the prevailing sexual double standards . The prevailing view was that prostitution was a social evil that was necessary and therefore tolerable for men, while women who engaged in prostitution were strictly socially ostracized.
Prostitution, Gender Role Understanding and Sex Morality in Great Britain
The reasons that led to the adoption of the Contagious Diseases Act, and the reasons why a large number of women in particular opposed this decree, lie in the treatment of prostitution at the time, in the understanding of female and male sexuality and the perception of each Gender role .
Prostitution in Great Britain in the first half of the 19th century
According to social conventions, prostitution and the STDs it transmitted were not a topic that was widely discussed in Great Britain outside of medical magazines until 1857. Socially, this topic was largely ignored.
However, prostitution was widespread. The London Chief Commissioner of Police estimated in 1841 that there were 3,325 brothels in the inner city of London alone . In some parts of the city, every second house was considered a "house of dubious reputation", as they described brothels and hour hotels . Some streets were no longer passable for a "decent" woman from the early afternoon hours, as prostitutes there openly and aggressively advertised for customers. The life of the prostitute was not very glamorous - only a few led a life similar to that of Violetta in Verdi's La traviata . For example, near the Aldershot garrison , prostitutes lived half-naked and filthy in holes in the ground that they had dug in the dunes themselves. Many suffered not only from venereal diseases such as syphilis , but also from tuberculosis .
Due to a variety of causes, the number of prostitutes rose sharply in the 19th century. Against the backdrop of the Industrial Revolution , rural exodus had set in, which drove up the number of the urban population. This also increased the proportion of the urban population who did not find enough paid work to be able to finance their living. Women were particularly hard hit because they had very few and then mostly poorly paid opportunities to earn a living. The group of occasional prostitutes included, for example, maids , milliner women , flower women and laundresses, who used it to supplement their meager salaries. For many women, prostitution was the only way to make a living.
The few social groups that did not ignore prostitution in the first half of the 19th century and dedicated themselves above all to “saving prostitutes” included various religious groups such as Jewish organizations, the Salvation Army , Bible study groups and Catholic religious. Even if their religious orientations were different, they were all equally aware of the existing double standards. As a rule, the focus of their work was therefore not the “punishment” of prostitutes, but their “reforming” or conversion to a better life. The ultimate goal of these religious groups was to enforce a moral code that was equally applicable to men and women, the core of which was conjugal love and loyalty.
While it was legitimate for a member of the British middle or upper class to be involved in the field of social welfare , according to the prevailing role model, “decent” women were unaware of such “dirty” and “improper” incidents. The women who took care of prostitutes therefore already disregarded social conventions. From among these women, the first groups formed in 1869 to protest against the decrees.
William Acton and his book on prostitution
A wider public discussion of prostitution arose after William Acton , one of the leading medical professionals of his day, published a book on prostitution in 1857 . William Acton's book also testifies to the prevailing double standards of his time:
“Sin does not hide itself - it lines our streets, breaks into our parks and theaters [...], tempts the reckless and seduces the innocent. It invades our homes, destroys conjugal happiness and parental hopes. Our society is not only indirectly threatened by it. We have long known that prostitutes [...] despite their tainted bodies and their depraved conscience will eventually become wives and mothers. Some of our social classes are already so deprived of all morals that they do not look down on women who live from renting their bodies, but see them as almost equal. It is evident, therefore, that even when we refer to these women as outcasts and pariahs, they are carrying evil into all layers of the community. The moral damage they do to our society is immeasurable. The physical damage we suffer from them is almost as great. "
Acton's book was widely read - the tenth edition of his work was printed as early as 1867. It is now considered to be the pivotal work that led to the Contagious Diseases Act.
Unlike the religious groups that have hitherto devoted themselves to the issue of prostitution, William Acton was firmly convinced that prostitution could not be eradicated. In his book and his lectures, however, he took the view that far-reaching measures should be taken to curb the “physical damage” caused by prostitution. By physical damage, he understood the transmission of sexually transmitted diseases. In fact, the number of sexually transmitted diseases had risen sharply over the course of the 19th century. The members of the military were particularly hard hit: in 1864 every third case of illness in the British Army was due to a venereal disease. Despite this high incidence of sexually transmitted diseases, the compulsory examination of soldiers for sexually transmitted diseases was discontinued in 1859 because the soldiers reacted very negatively to this intimate examination. Instead, the idea was pursued to compulsorily examine prostitutes for sexually transmitted diseases.
The passage of the Contagious Diseases Act
The first decree in 1864
Acton's advocacy of an edict requiring prostitutes to be compulsorily tested for sexually transmitted diseases met with approval from his peers. It corresponded to the zeitgeist of the 19th century to want to solve an existing social problem "scientifically". As Acton pointed out in a lecture to the Royal Medical Society in 1860, the philanthropists and the Church had failed in curbing prostitution. Acton also took the view that the introduction of a compulsory examination of prostitutes for sexually transmitted diseases would by no means endorse or even support a vice, but would ultimately also raise national morality by raising public hygiene.
The British Parliament set up a commission to work out ways to combat sexually transmitted diseases. Before this commission also spoke Florence Nightingale , who, since her heroic and effective work for the wounded of the Crimean War, has been considered a successful public health reformer. She found compulsory medical examinations such as those already carried out in France and Belgium to be ineffective and obnoxious. France in particular was known for the fact that prostitutes there were exposed to arbitrary measures by the police, medicine or the church without the perpetrators having to fear any consequences. Nightingale recommended the establishment of closed medical wards, in which especially hygienic principles should be observed, as well as the improvement of living conditions in military garrisons. She also demanded that it should not be punished for infection with a sexually transmitted disease, but rather for concealing the infection.
William Acton's proposal, which allowed police officers to take prostitutes for a gynecological examination, prevailed. Those who refused to do this investigation could be sentenced to forced labor in a court case. If, on the other hand, a sexually transmitted disease was diagnosed during the examination, the prostitute could be detained in a workhouse until she was declared cured. The Contagious Diseases Act was passed by Parliament in 1864 without much debate. The decree was applied in some port and garrison towns in Great Britain and in the British colonies.
The tightening of the decree in 1866 and 1869
The Contagious Diseases Act was significantly expanded within a few years. The first extension in 1866 forced women and girls who were to be regarded as prostitutes on the basis of a sworn statement by a police officer to undergo this gynecological examination every three months. These examinations, which were mainly carried out with the help of a speculum , by no means took place in the hygienic seclusion of a doctor's room. In Davenport Harbor , dock workers could watch through the windows as the women were subjected to a hasty and brutal examination of their vaginas . However, the Contagious Diseases Act continued to apply in only a few cities, although the application of the decree was extended to a ten-mile zone around these cities. The extension of 1869 extended the applicability of the decree to all garrison towns in British territory and significantly restricted the rights of women and girls. The decree allowed women and girls suspected of prostitution to be detained without an arrest warrant or judicial order for five days before undergoing a gynecological examination. Plainclothes police officers searched specifically for women who were secretly engaged in prostitution. It is not known how many women who were not prostitutes had to undergo these compulsory medical examinations on suspicion. What is known, however, is the case of a woman from 1875 who lost her job after submitting to such an investigation and who then committed suicide.
The campaign against the Contagious Diseases Act
Prostitutes - Victims or Perpetrators?
The first decree from 1864 and its tightening in 1866 and 1869 were hardly noticed by the public. That changed when, in the fall of 1869, it was discussed whether to apply the Contagious Diseases Act across Great Britain. The options he gave the police were criticized and hundreds of thousands signed petitions that prevented further tightening.
The dispute about the decree now made numerous women aware that it dealt exclusively with the prostitutes and not with their customers. Many women who were already involved in social welfare derived the need to oppose the decree. However, it was difficult to find a woman who could speak for a campaign because dealing with the issues of prostitution and sexuality was considered obscene and inappropriate for a "decent" woman. The campaign leader had to be above any moral doubt. She also had to muster up the courage to address this unpopular subject to a public that would not refrain from personal attacks. Thus, in October 1869, about seventy women met in Bristol to organize the resistance to the Contagious Diseases Act, but none of them felt able to lead the campaign. Following the meeting, one of the participants, who would later become the women's suffrage campaigner, Elizabeth Wolstenholme , sent a telegram to her forty-one-year-old friend, Josephine Butler, with the request to take on this task.
Josephine Butler
Josephine Butler was the wife of the educator and Anglican priest George Butler and the mother of four children. Together with her husband, she had sided with the Union since the outbreak of the American Civil War in 1861 and campaigned in Great Britain for both support for this war party and its planned abolition of slavery. She therefore already had experience in conducting a political campaign. On the other hand, she had no experience whatsoever as a public speaker.
Josephine Butler was familiar with prostitution and the women and girls who went about it due to many years of voluntary work. She had evangelized for a more religious life among the destitute prostitutes who sat in the workhouse and those who waited in the docks for customers. In order to get over the accidental death of one of her daughters, she set up a home herself to accommodate prostitutes. At least two prostitutes dying of tuberculosis are known to have been looked after by Josephine Butler in their own homes until they died of her illness. From Butler's point of view, prostitutes were victims of their circumstances.
Josephine Butler was not only very familiar with the living conditions of prostitutes. She was also a charismatic, courageous and strong-willed woman with great charisma. Her spouse, George Butler, supported her in her decision to fight this decree, even though her engagement was bound to have a negative impact on both his reputation and his professional career.
The "Screaming Sisterhood"
On January 1, 1870, the petition appeared calling for the Contagious Diseases Act to be repealed in full. From the petitions that prevented the Contagious Diseases Act from being further tightened in the summer and autumn of 1869, these differed in their clear and explicit language. In the manifesto, the signatories stated that the Contagious Diseases Act exposed the reputation, freedom and physical integrity of women to the arbitrariness of the police. It is wrong to leave the sex unpunished, the lustfulness of which gives rise to prostitution, but instead to imprison women, subject them to a compulsory examination and, if they resist, sentence them to forced labor. For men, the Contagious Diseases Act is a means to make their vicious life safer and easier, while it only humiliates women. The decree would not reduce the number of sexually transmitted diseases, because their causes are less physical than moral. The 140 women who signed this petition included Josephine Butler, Florence Nightingale , the philosopher Harriet Martineau , the social reformer Mary Carpenter and the suffragette Lydia Becker .
The petition sparked a scandal because never before had respectable women spoken publicly on such an issue in such clear language. The British newspaper Saturday Review caricatured the undersigned women as " shrieking sisterhood ", as " screaming sisterhood ". And publisher John Morley warned in his normally liberal Fortnightly Review that the petition was welcome evidence to all those who advocated the exclusion of women from political life that women were incapable of political debate.
The Ladies' National Association
The scandal that the petition caused caused many British women to grapple with the wider implications of the Contagious Diseases Act for the first time. The 140 signatories of the petition founded the Ladies' National Association for the Abolition of the State Regulation of Vice (LNA), which within a few months had branches in every major UK city. The level of mobilization against the Contagious Diseases Acts caused by the LNA can be measured by the number of petitions that were filed against these enactments in the following years: From 1870 to 1879 the British Parliament received 9,667 petitions, making a total of 2,150,941 Wore signatures.
The organization also found support from many men. In the north of Great Britain the doctor Hoopell founded the newspaper The shield , which became the mouthpiece of the resistance to the decree. The French author Victor Hugo wrote from Paris and encouraged the women to continue to crack down on the decree.
The demands of the LNA, led by Josephine Butler, included far more than just the complete revocation of the Contagious Diseases Act. Inadequate education and inadequate job opportunities were among the causes forcing women into prostitution, Butler argued. The cramped housing conditions in the slums of British cities also contributed to the fact that women had sexual experiences very early on. The fight against prostitution therefore includes improving living conditions and changing paternity laws. Regulations to combat street prostitution should apply to prostitutes and their clients alike.
The tactics of the LNA
Josephine Butler led a highly emotional campaign against the Contagious Diseases Act. She compared the use of the speculum in examining prostitutes to rape, claiming in public speeches that she would rather die than allow a man to examine her with such an instrument.
In her speeches and writings, she often referred to her work with prostitutes: she shook her audience and readership, for example, with descriptions of a mother who desperately shouted the name of the respected member of parliament who was the first to seduce the young girl on her daughter's deathbed. or she confronted her audience with the desolate life stories of prostitutes. One of her contemporaries complained that Butler's campaign forced him to grapple with extremely unseemly subjects as he read his paper in the morning and that there was little way he could prevent both his wife and daughter from becoming aware of these subjects.
The unusual spectacle of a respected woman who was ready to comment on such topics in a public speech drew a large audience. Butler appeared specifically in the places and counties in which strict supporters of the Contagious Diseases Act stood for election for parliament. Even if Butler could not always prevent the election of a proponent of the decree, she and the LNA managed to steal so many votes from them that the campaign was widely reported in the press.
Her audience did not always respond to her concern with sympathy. Butlers and their supporters had to flee from the angry crowd several times. The more it was threatened and the more it upset its audience, the more detailed the topic was covered in the press and the more supporters it was able to win. This tactic in particular was later deliberately used by suffragettes such as Christabel Pankhurst .
The courage that Josephine Butler showed with her demeanor, as well as her personal integrity, earned her a lot of public sympathy. Nevertheless, there was no shortage of personal attacks on her person. She has been labeled as hysterical, shameless, and completely irresponsible. Most of their contemporaries still believed that the most effective remedy for prostitution was prayer and hard work. More realistic contemporaries such as Lord Dufferin , the Viceroy of India, found their call for a chaste life for soldiers naive, saying that their campaign would only result in an increase in sickness and death rates within the British Army.
Even many liberals found it difficult to identify with their cause. John Morley wrote in the Pall Mall Gazette March 3, 1870:
“To sacrifice the health and strength of the unborn in order to satisfy the 'right' of prostitutes to spread diseases unhindered seems to be a dubious contribution to the further development of humanity. This sentimental insistence to treat these permanently abused creatures as if they were still fully capable of decency is one of the worst mistakes of those we count among the best of us. "
Extension of the demands
The campaign led by Josephine Butler was heavily influenced by the moral and religious concerns of Protestantism. However, unlike many of her supporters, she believed that if a woman chose to sell her body on the street, she had the right to do so without being harassed by the police. Despite these libertarian views, Butler's struggle focused on chastity that applies to both sexes. Since she saw prostitutes predominantly as the victims of socially determined need, her movement initiated numerous efforts to implement further social reforms. This included, for example, improving the legal position of women in marriage and changing divorce legislation.
In the years leading up to the suspension of the Contagious Diseases Acts, however, there was an increasing demand for women to have a greater say on the political stage. Butler argued that men are the ones who make laws that enshrine moral injustice. On the other hand, she saw women as morally superior to men. In 1885 she made a melodramatic appeal to the men entitled to elect the members of the House of Commons:
“... what we ask for with aching hearts is the right to protect ourselves and our children from the male destroyer - not only from his shameless deeds, but also from his negative influence on the legislature. There is a French proverb that says that women make up a country's morale. That is not true and it cannot be true as long as men alone make the law. "
Repeal of the Contagious Diseases Acts
The long and passionate fight that Josephine Butler and the LNA waged against the Contagious Diseases Acts achieved its first partial success in 1883. While she and her followers were praying in a room near the Houses of Parliament , the UK Parliament decided to repeal the Contagious Diseases Acts. The compulsory examinations of the prostitution suspects were lifted and the police officers' powers of access were restricted.
For many liberals it was incomprehensible that Butler and the LNA continued their fight against the Contagious Diseases Acts afterwards. As long as the Contagious Diseases Acts were enshrined in the statutes, Butler did not see the goal yet. It wasn't until 1886 that the Contagious Diseases Acts were completely removed from the statutes, due to a parliamentary maneuver. MP James Stanfield was slated to succeed Minister Joseph Chamberlain . Stanfield, one of the group of people who had long campaigned against the Contagious Diseases Acts, only wanted to take up this office if the edicts were finally annulled, which was what happened.
The fight against the Contagious Diseases Act and the UK women's suffrage movement
Resistance to the decree shaped the period after 1890, when the struggle of British women for the right to vote intensified. Emmeline Pankhurst , who later became the leading figure of the suffragettes , adapted many of the tactics that Josephine Butlers had successfully used in her opposition to the decree. According to the author Philipps, who dealt extensively with the British women's rights movement in her book The Ascent of Women , it was this campaign that created the basis of a suffrage movement supported by many women:
“[In the sixteen years until the edict was revoked] this campaign changed the political landscape. The campaign challenged social and sexual conventions that had never been publicly discussed before. The campaign radicalized numerous women, hardened them against public attacks and slander and created an infrastructure for political protest. "
During the time of the LNA's struggle against the decree, this resistance was not without controversy among the groups that campaigned primarily for the right to vote for women. For many advocates of women's suffrage, it was considered too sensitive, too controversial and potentially harmful. In order not to harm the struggle for the right to vote for women, efforts were made to keep cooperation between the individual groups as low as possible.
literature
- Melanie Phillips: The Ascent of Woman - A History of the Suffragette Movement and the ideas behind it. Time Warner Book Group, London 2003. ISBN 0-349-11660-1
- Georges Duby, Michelle Perrot (ed.): History of women – 19. Century. Campus, Frankfurt / New York 1994. ISBN 3-593-34909-4
