Sex and the City: Educational Initiatives for 'Dangerous" and "Endangered" Girls in Late Victorian and Early Edwardian Manchester

Abstract

The article explores the narratives surrounding Manchester School Board's removal in 1883 of children living in Manchester's brothels. It examines how gendered technologies of urban representation focusing on the prostitute impinged on the lives of children living in brothels and inflected the work of women reformers in the urban context more generally. The article traces a range of representations that underpinned the action of the Manchester School Board: the sexually active girl; Manchester mill girls' independence, lack of chastity and subversion of sexual difference; Manchester as a place of sexual danger; "imaginings" of the city in terms of the body; and epistemological links between the body and nineteenth century statistical method. It looks at the involvement of the Manchester Ladies' Association for the Care of Friendless Girls in the removal of the children from the brothels. The article concludes that while the work of women social reformers and activists in voluntary societies, and increasingly as members of poor law boards and school boards, was legitimated through maternalist rhetoric, it was also legitimated through reimaginings of the city in which middle-class women's increasing urban presence played an important role.