Consistent contradictions: Prostitution and protective labour legislation in nineteenth‐century England∗

Abstract

Recent work on the growth and development of the welfare state among the industrializing nations of the nineteenth century has sought successfully to redefine both our understanding of the meaning of the term 'welfare state' and the ways in which we seek to explain its emergence and shape. Kathryn Kish Sklar's characterization of this shift -'where once we heard orators declaiming, now we hear babies crying'l succinctly conveys this new attention to issues of gender. This recent perspective has pushed us to see how normative sexual identity influences a reading of such key welfare vocabulary as 'protection' and 'vulnerability'. In turn, this has consolidated a new reading of the welfare state constructed around crucial dichotomies of strong and weak, man and woman, worker and dependent. In this paper, I want to pursue a similar exercise in 'gendering' to that which welfare historians have raised anew, as a means of reading consistency into aspects of British law hitherto regarded as contradictory in purpose. In her influential work on mid-Victorian gender, Mary Poovey has pointed to apparent discrepancies in British law which divided the passive idealized object of protective legislation from the aggressive object of prostitution regulation, creating a fractured view of woman.2 One such area of contestation was the validity and legitimacy of women's waged work, a subject on which fierce debate raged for the greater part of the nineteenth century. At the same time, though women engaged in prostitution were regulated and scorned, their right to continue in the sex trade was rarely challenged wholesale. Why was it that prostitute women could contract but not be workers while wage-earning women could work but not be contractors? Though ostensibly contradictory in spirit, these seemingly disparate policies find common ground in illuminating practically the gendered specificity of the politics of contract. The