Contagious Diseases Acts Research Articles

Josephine Butler in Paris: Sex and Race in the Early Campaign to Abolish Regulated Prostitution, 1870–1880

Abstract: During the 1870s, Josephine Butler brought her campaign against the Contagious Diseases Acts to Paris, the birthplace of regulated prostitution. While in Paris, Butler and her allies refined their arguments against regulated prostitution using the Paris morals police as their primary example. As they did so, these activists came to increasingly radical conclusions about the danger of police power more generally. However, the French context not only pushed Butler toward greater skepticism regarding the police but also to an increasingly racialized understanding of that danger. In order to play to French natalist fears, Butler argued that reducing police power over female prostitutes was necessary to preserve European racial health.

Loosening the Stays: Victorian Shaw

ABSTRACT This article for the special edition “Victorian Shaw” focuses on the intersections across social issues in the mid- to late-Victorian era that influenced the writing and reception of plays by George Bernard Shaw and contemporaries Wilde and Pinero. Shaw was an advocate for workers’ rights, as well as women’s rights, and spoke out in writing and orally to abolish the Contagious Diseases Acts that went after women but not the men who transmitted the diseases. Shaw’s connections to women activists are also featured; key speeches/essays by women are included. Shaw’s role as a theater critic gave him the opportunity to show the impact of the social ills of the era. By the 1890s, he began to write plays; by the end of the Victorian era, he was an established playwright who gave women roles that went beyond the boundaries of nineteenth-century theater.

The health/power/criminality-nexus in the state of exception

The positioning of the ‘other’ as a dangerous vector of disease is a long-standing trope. This has existed both in racial terms, such as the 1905 Aliens Act, and for others positioned as on the outliers of society, such as sex workers, under the Contagious Diseases Acts 1864, 1866, 1869 (Hamilton, 1978). The public health system has long been used as a system of control, alongside its self-described role as existing for the betterment of population health. Similarly, other aspects of our health system have long functioned both as a foundational part of the welfare state, and as key perpetrators of racial injustice and part of the carceral state. This is most obvious in the psychiatric system, where there continues to be a disproportionate detention of black men (Singh, 2007). Injustice, surveillance, and even mass detention, that is enacted within a health systems framework is rarely given the same critical focus as other systems of power, such as the criminal justice system – which has been highlighted by the reality that various recent reports into racial discrimination only give a brief mention to the role of healthcare systems in perpetrating various injustices (Equality and Human Rights Commission, 2016). During the pandemic the healthcare system has increasingly been used as a justification for advancing a state apparatus of biopower, and has experienced little resistance from the organised left.

The "Medical Plot Thickens": Bad Medicine and Good Health in the Contagious Diseases Acts Repeal Campaign.

Britain's Contagious Diseases Acts (1864, 1866, 1869) mandated the use of medical detention and speculum exams to manage the bodies of "common prostitutes" and thereby reduce sexually transmitted diseases among enlisted men. Repeal advocates challenged the gendered power structure of the Acts but also used melodramatic frameworks to produce a broader critique of nineteenth-century Britain's centralizing medical orthodoxy and to argue for unregulated traditional approaches to medicine. Across a variety of repeal speeches and documents, advocates idealized alternative health practices in order to challenge institutionalized modern medicine and the governmental interests that extended its authority. J. J. Garth Wilkinson's Forcible Introspection of Women for the Army and Navy by the Oligarchy, Considered Physically (1870) exemplifies the multivocal and intertextual medicolegal plots of repeal melodrama as it cast professionalized modern medicine as corrupt, villainous, and in collusion with the state while presenting alternative medicine as authentically preventative, curative, and democratic.

Josephine Butler, Women's Rights, and Low Church Anglicanism

Josephine Butler, Women's Rights, and Low Church Anglicanism Timothy Larsen (bio) It was an article in the Edinburgh Review (October 1853) on "Church Parties" that crystalized the assumption that members of the Church of England could be sorted into three basic ways of being Anglican. The author, W.J. Conybeare—opting for spatial reasoning—called them High, Low, and Broad (Burns). By "Broad," he meant an openness to liberal theology and a desire for inclusiveness rather than the dogmatic policing of boundaries. Many, both at the time and to this day, have considered F.D. Maurice to be the most important theological voice for the Broad Church in the second half of the nineteenth century. By "High," Conybeare meant an emphasis on the Catholic nature of the Church. In the Victorian age, this tradition was transformed and dominated by the Tractarian, or Oxford Movement. One of its leaders, E.B. Pusey, was so important that many referred to these Anglicans as "Puseyites." "Low Church" meant an emphasis on the Church of England's Protestant identity. Therefore, strictly speaking, Victorian Broad Church Anglicans were also Low Church. Conybeare, however, was clear that he was using the term to refer only to those who also were marked by the evangelical movement. Low Church Anglicans who were neither Broad Church nor evangelical tended to think of themselves as just garden-variety or generic Anglicans and therefore did not found journals or societies or otherwise make themselves visible through organizing as a distinct group. It is Conybeare's evangelical, Low Church Anglicans that are our focus. In the Church of England Calendar today, leaders of all three traditions are celebrated. Pusey is commemorated on 16 September. One wonders, however, if a bit of party mischief was behind F.D. Maurice being commemorated on April Fool's Day (maybe the day of his birth would have been a better choice than that of his death). More important than either of these, however—not a mere "commemoration" but a "lesser festival"—is the observance on 30 May for the evangelical, Low Church Anglican Josephine Butler (1828–1906). Butler is famous for her deep commitment to the rights of women. Although the term was not in general use at the time, scholars often identity some Victorians as "feminists," with Butler being a prime example (Caine). Indeed, in 1866, Butler was a prominent supporter of the first attempt in Britain to legislate for women's suffrage (Jordan). Her first publication was in support of the opening up of higher education to women: The Education and Employment of Women (1868). She is best known, however, for defending women who were sex workers—or who were suspected of being so. The Contagious Diseases Acts of the 1860s empowered authorities in areas with concentrations of military personnel to inspect women thought to be [End Page 146] prostitutes for venereal diseases. Butler was outraged. Why were the men not inspected? (She even used the phrase "double standard.") Why were women not presumed innocent, as men were? And many more such arguments. She fought the good fight until, in 1883, Parliament finally gave in. In his landmark study, Evangelicalism in Modern Britain: A History from the 1730s to the 1980s, D.W. Bebbington formulated what has become the standard definition of evangelicalism. The Bebbington Quadrilateral identifies four distinguishing marks of evangelicals: conversionism, activism, biblicism, and crucicentrism (Bebbington 2–17). Butler exemplified all these traits. Her entire career was a manifestation of evangelical activism. It was in conscious succession to an eminent evangelical Anglican from earlier in the century, William Wilberforce, and his campaign to end the slave trade. Butler was clear that sex trafficking was a form of slavery and that therefore she too was an abolitionist. As to crucicentrism (a focus on Christ's atoning sacrifice on the cross), Butler could even end a pamphlet written to rally women's rights activists with this conclusion: "We are learning now more deeply than ever the power of Christ's Crucifixion and Death" (Truth Before Everything 23). By the late nineteenth century, even many self-described evangelicals had become squeamish in regards to the old articulation of the Atonement and had turned...

From Exclusion to Inclusion: the Glasgow Magdalene Institution, an Instrument of Social Control in the Nineteenth Century

The Contagious Diseases Acts that were passed in the 1860s to protect the army and the navy from venereal diseases represented the first real attempt of the British government to control and regulate prostitution in Great Britain. Although Glasgow was a garrison town, the laws were never applied there, as the town developed its own system to fight prostitution, the “Glasgow system”. From the early 1870s onwards three different institutions combined their efforts to try to eradicate the “great social evil”: the police, the Lock Hospital, whose mission was to cure venereally diseased prostitutes, and the Magdalene Institution, where prostitutes underwent a process of moral purification. This paper examines the role of the Glasgow Magdalene Institution as an instrument of social control and analyses the content and the function of the former inmates’ letters that were published in the annual reports of the Magdalene Institution. These letters always gave a most positive image of the Institution and tended to demonstrate the efficiency of the system in terms of moral rehabilitation. But the organisation, the structure, the vocabulary as well as the content of the letters are so similar that they seem to testify more to the moral and didactic purpose of the directors of the institution than to the spontaneous and natural expression of their authors. These letters, which were diverted from their primary function — the private sphere –, fitted in the Glasgow Magdalene Institution’s entire strategy that was primarily aimed at resocializing the women who had sinned and at imposing a moral model that actually stifled more than encouraged personal development.

Community as Counterpublic: The Shield (1870–86) and the Campaign to Repeal the Contagious Diseases Acts

The Shield (1870–86) was the chief mouthpiece for the campaign to repeal the Contagious Diseases Acts. This article focuses on the Shield's role in fostering a reform-oriented community. It used various strategies, including editorials, letters, and petition templates, to create the sense of a growing community and construct a diverse readership in terms of class, gender, religion, and nationality. Significantly, it promoted a religious collective that was ecumenical in nature and tolerant of doctrinal differences. Following Michael Warner, I define the repeal community as a marginalized "counterpublic," which can be understood through acts of imagination and participation largely encountered through texts.

Die letzten Tage der Menschheit by Karl Kraus Fred Bridgham Edward Timms

Reviews 284 Allgemeiner Österreichischer Frauenverein, the Reichsverein für Kinderschutz and the Österreichische Liga zur Bekämpfung des Mädchenhandels operated at a supranational and supra-confessional level. Did this make imperial Austria something of an anachronistic oddity, always behind other countries which supposedly focused more on the spectre of national, eugenic or racial ‘degeneration’ than on the moral or trans-European public order threat posed by prostitution? Wingfield is a little unsure on this. The imperial capital, Vienna, did come to regulation comparatively late, in 1873. State bureaucrats, police physicians and district officials, rather than elected national politicians, drove through reforms in the years 1906–11. Yet on the other hand, the categorization of some prostitutes as being ‘incorrigible’, ‘asocial’, ‘feeble-minded’ or ‘work-shy’ looks ahead to Nazi times, as does the frequent association between prostitution, trafficking of ‘Christian’ girls and East European Jews made in the Viennese antisemitic press. Much of the late imperial legislation and police ordinances remained in force in the successor states after 1918, as did the military and security concerns around prostitution. Indeed, in many ways, Habsburg Austrian policies seemed more indicative of what the twentieth century had in store for social outsiders than did the British experience, where state regulation, in the form of the Contagious Diseases Acts, was overturned by parliament in 1886. Matthew Stibbe Sheffield Hallam University Die letzten Tage der Menschheit. By Karl Kraus. Translated by Fred Bridgham and Edward Timms as The Last Days of Mankind. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. 2016. 672 pp. £19.13. ISBN 978–0-30020767–5. ‘My tragic drama synchronizes our sufferings with the forms and sounds of a world bent on destruction’, claims the Grumbler of Karl Kraus’s Die letzten Tage der Menschheit (1915–22). Or so it has been rendered by Fred Bridgham and Edward Timms in the first unabridged and annotated English translation of Kraus’s epic First World War satire (p. 381). Bridgham has edited and authored multiple wide-ranging studies on German culture and history, and his translations of German lieder and operas include Hans Werner Henze’s The Prince of Homburg. But if there is an authority on Kraus in and beyond the Anglophone world, it is Timms, whose two-volume biography of the ‘apocalyptic’ Viennese satirist is an ur-text for interpreting Kraus’s immense — and immensely complex — body of work. With its keen eye (and ear) for journalistic impropriety, bureaucratic stupidity, technological mania and nationalistic delirium, Die letzten Tage stands as an unparalleled satire not only of the First World War, but perhaps of any modern war. And nearly a century after its initial publication, there finally exists an English translation adequate to the demands of the original. These demands are, indeed, legion. First, there is the problem of satire itself: for more than most modes or genres of literature, satire’s weddedness Reviews 285 to the moment of its production often renders it less intelligible to posterity. In this respect, Kraus’s drama — which he never intended to stage because of its perceived incomprehensibility — is no exception. Thus among the many challenges Die letzten Tage poses to contemporary readers are its numerous references to the cultural and political landscape of early twentieth-century Germany and Austria. Thanks, however, to the comprehensive glossary and index appended to The Last Days, we now have greater access to this bygone world. Yet it is the translation itself that warrants our critical attention. Kraus famously possessed an uncanny talent for reproducing local (and not so local) dialects, accents and even class- and/or profession-indexed intonations. From his perspective, he was reproducing the world-views contained in such modes of speech. Translating this text thus required, as Timms and Bridgham suggest in their afterword, a hermeneutic flexibility that sought, on the one hand, to capture the ‘keynote of the era’ (p. 516), and, on the other, to mediate the drama’s intensity for a contemporary audience. As an example of the latter impulse, the instances of Yiddish, Swabian, Austrian and Bavarian littered throughout the original are occasionally translated as colloquial Britishisms. A couple of concrete examples from the translation should further illustrate some of the...

The Queen’s Daughters: White Prostitutes, British India and the Contagious Diseases Acts

Within the larger subject of the regulation of prostitution under the British Empire in South Asia, this article examines the figure of the White Prostitute in brothels and lock hospitals in colonial India. The White Prostitute in colonial India was in every way segregated from her native counterparts: in medicine, in physical quarters and in popular conceptions of her mobility, agency and rationality. Despite their mistreatment and vulnerability in many sources, white prostitutes were understood as closer to the ideal of regulable, liberal subjecthood compared to Indian women working in the same conditions and ultimately demonstrated the dynamism of the conditions of prostitution in this time and place. Through examination of literature, advocacy and military records, this article contends that the figure of the White Prostitute fractured concepts of caste-based prostitution in India and was wielded by imperial feminists to attack British regulation of prostitution and sexual slavery in India for brown as well as white women.

Introduction

Introduction Eileen Boris (bio) Judith R. Walkowitz. Prostitution and Victorian Society: Women, Class, and the State. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1980. vii + 347 pp. ISBN 978-0-5212-7064-9 (pb). Echoing Karl Marx, evoking Michel Foucault, and channeling early radical and 1970s socialist feminism, Judy Walkowitz in Prostitution and Victorian Society looked anew at the Contagious Diseases Acts (CDA) of mid-Victorian Britain, the experts and reformers who debated them, and the prostitutes who sought to earn a living in their shadow. It is not only that Prostitution and Victorian Society showed how to "study class and gender relations" together or that Walkowitz drew upon Foucault to chart governmentality, biopower, and sexual regulation through discourses, particularly those of medicine (vii). She also concretely explored "how sexual and social ideology became embedded in laws, institutions, and social policy" (5). The lock hospital embodied bodily regulation, with the dreaded speculum as a disciplinary wand. Despite assault on their bodies and subjection to their rescuers' admonitions, prostitutes emerged in this prodigiously researched book as "women who made their own history, albeit under very restrictive conditions" (9). This now classic study has it all: a wide cast of characters, known and discovered; multiple geographies and spaces; sex; and the state. There are workingmen's societies and ladies' house meetings, social purity reformers and Liberal Party stalwarts, and social scientists and evangelical crusaders. Through thick description of the implementation of the CDA and repeal campaigns in the military garrison cities of Plymouth and Southampton, Walkowitz uncovered women who ran away from lock hospitals and refused inspection, as well as the men and women who sheltered them. She put the history of feminism and suffrage in conversation with medical, social, political, and labor history to trace the making of a new category of stigmatized worker and the tentativeness of cross-class sisterhood. Walkowitz herself underscores how Prostitution and Victorian Society is very much a book of its time in her response to the thoughtful reflections in this forum by scholars of commercialized sex and its policing. It appeared when social history was in vogue, before the linguistic turn, although we [End Page 157] find a preview of her later deconstructive studies in her parsing of language and attentiveness to representations. Walkowitz wrote during a heady moment when women's liberation generated an Atlantic exchange between British and US radicals who denounced capitalist patriarchy, defended bodily autonomy, and celebrated sexual pleasure. The spirit of probing the past with an eye on the present pervaded the first decade of Feminist Studies, the journal that Walkowitz joined as part of a collective with Mary Ryan, Christine Stansell, and others connected to the socialist feminist tendency.1 Indeed, the preface to Prostitution and Victorian Society cites the efforts of Ryan, along with Carroll Smith-Rosenberg and Linda Gordon, to chart "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 Walkowitz was well aware that the case "for women's power and autonomy" was more complicated than fights against the double standard (vii). In demonstrating the embeddedness of women who sold sex in working-class communities, Stansell's City of Women would demonstrate the survival strategies and constrained choice that Walkowitz already had illuminated.2 At a time when Coyote and other prostitute rights groups were demanding recognition, Walkowitz gave sex workers a vibrant history. Looking for previous cross-class alliances similar to those they desired to forge with women strikers at Dagenham or Harlan County, historians discovered the Women's Trade Union League, explored the legacy of the old left in the great labor battles of the 1930s, and reinterpreted moral reform as more complex than scholars usually portrayed. Left historians took inspiration from the studies of culture and class by E. P. Thompson, Raymond Williams, and Stuart Hall. Feminist historians engaged with the work of Juliet Mitchell, Shelia Rowbotham, Mary McIntosh and Michele Barrett, Mariarosa Dalla Costa and Selma James, and Silvia Federici, who were redefining work, the people who scholars considered to be workers, the shape of the family, and the value of women's lives and labors. British...

Syphilization and Its Discontents: Experimental Inoculation against Syphilis at the London Lock Hospital.

In 1867 James Lane and George Gascoyen, surgeons to the London Lock Hospital, compiled a report on their experiments with a new and controversial treatment. The procedure, known as "syphilization," saw patients be inoculated with infective matter taken from a primary syphilitic ulcer or the artificial sores produced in another patient. Each patient received between 102 and 468 inoculations to determine whether syphilization could cure syphilis and produce immunity against reinfection. This article examines the theory and practice of this experimental treatment. Conducted against the backdrop of the Contagious Diseases Acts, the English syphilization experiments have been largely forgotten. Yet they constitute an important case study of how doctors thought about the etiology and pathology of syphilis, as well as their responsibilities to their patients, at a crucial moment before the advent of the bacteriological revolution.

‘Granny thinking what she is going to write in her book’: religion, politics and the Pontefract by-election of 1872 in Josephine Butler’s Personal Reminiscences of a Great Crusade (1896)

ABSTRACTJosephine Butler’s Personal Reminiscences of a Great Crusade (1896) has long been considered as one of the crucial pieces of evidence for the campaign against the Contagious Diseases Acts. Yet few scholars have examined this text to consider what Butler’s only explicit autobiographical publication tells us about how she represented and sought to represent her role in the repeal movement. Scholars have instead preferred to explore how Butler revealed the ‘auto/biographical I’ in the biographies of her father, sister and husband, as well as in her hagiographical writings. This article argues that Personal Reminiscences enabled Butler to reinforce a religiously informed identity. It does so by unpacking her account of the Pontefract by-election of 1872. Both biographers and historians have been drawn to her account of the by-election, especially her description of the terrifying events in the hayloft.

Prostitution and the Ends of Empire: Scale, Governmentalities, and Interwar India by Stephen Legg

Prostitution and the Ends of Empire: Scale, Governmentalities, and Interwar India, by Stephen Legg. Durham & London, Duke University Press, 2014. xi, 281 pp. $94.95 US (cloth), $25.95 US (paper). It is only fairly recently that the historiography of prostitution and the attempts at its control or eradication has moved into the interwar era, a period in which there was a distinctive shift away from regulation and segregation, largely due to the development of a wider discourse of hygiene and the role of the citizen in combating venereal diseases. Legg writes as an urban geographer with a particular interest in India, and while this work addresses theoretical debates particular to these fields, it is also extremely valuable to the historian, especially to historians of sexuality who are examining the varied roles of space. It provides useful ways of thinking about changing ideas of public space and civic life in the era of modernity and demonstrates the importance of bringing particular material sites of the urban environment into the picture. This study does not however take the very granular approach that we find in Julia Laite's Common Prostitutes and Ordinary Citizens: Commercial Sex in London, 1885-1960 (New York, 2012) or that of Catherine Lee's Policing Prostitution, 1856-1886: Deviance, Surveillance and Morality (London, 2013) on Kent. Legg is more interested in the ways in which the problem was being addressed at a variety of interconnecting levels, from the League of Nations' concern over the Traffic in Women and Children to what happened on specific streets, via a range of different government bodies, imperial, national and local, and civil organizations. While paying tribute to Philippa Levine's magisterial work, Prostitution, Race and Politics: Policing Venereal Disease in the British Empire (New York, 2003), Legg registers an important proviso that Levine, and other historians, have tended to present India as a more monolithic entity than in fact it was. In particular he points out the complex, even at times incoherent, interplay between different governmental levels--transnational, imperial, national, local--further complicated by the involvement of various voluntary organizations engaged in campaigning and activism, as well as particular factors that came into play at specific sites at particular times. Legg brings a particularly useful insight into the role of sexology (itself more strongly influenced than is sometimes credited by late nineteenth century movements of moral reform as well as movements for public health) as an influence upon policy toward prostitution. This builds upon scholarship that has already gained significant recognition, regarding the influence of campaigns of moral reform (emerging from the UK protests against the Contagious Diseases Acts of the 1860s) and a rising paradigm of preventive medicine and public and individual hygiene. …

John Stuart Mill and the Contagious Diseases Acts: Whose Law? Whose Liberty? Whose Greater Good?’

Legal fictions are often used to lubricate the machinery of jurisprudence. One of these is the idea that laws created to restrict the liberty of some individuals or class of individuals in order to protect the public good are in effect outcomes of tradeoffs between abstract universals, namely liberty and the public good. A three way relationship is imagined in which law, liberty, and the public good are in creative tension. The role of the law in this three way tension is further imagined to be the mediator where it serves to calibrate this tension in ways that are also assumed to legitimate the intended outcomes in practice. In particular, where the outcome is the prevention of harm, then laws that curtail liberty must be seen not just as measures for the public good, but rather as necessitated by the potential effects of the very harm itself. The justification for this view is often traced back to the views of nineteenth century political philosopher John Stuart Mill, who famously expressed this in terms that have become known as the “harm principle”; specifically that “the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others.”

Prostitute or Parasite: The Entanglement of Scientific and Social Victorian Discourses

Where does scientific inspiration come from? How does society determine its identity? Biology acts as a source for social metaphor, just as society can be the catalyst to drive scientific discovery. Though the word “parasite” has its origins in Greek drama, it became popularly associated with biology with the advent of the microscope. The story of the “parasite” is complicated by the frequent adoption of biological language to describe society and reinforce constructed social hierarchy. Prostitutes, as a group, are socially “parasitized” in the 19th century largely because of the threat of rapidly spreading venereal disease. The Contagious Diseases Acts, passed from 1864-1869, were a drastic medical solution to a problem that could have been more easily solved through milder social reforms. The primary motivation seems to be a fear of contagion, class mixing, and the weakening of the empire. Both the unseen biological parasite and the prostitute or “social parasite” act as threatening forces in the Victorian mind. The language of primary social and scientific literature from the 19th century shows each discourse being influenced by the other in an inextricably entangled way.

A Body Politic of Women’s Own: Josephine Butler, Social Purity, and National Identity

A Body Politic of Women’s Own:Josephine Butler, Social Purity, and National Identity Chieko Ichikawa (bio) The contagious Diseases Acts of 1864, 1866, and 1869, which can be seen as representing the social acceptance of the perceived reprobate sexuality of British men, became a political battleground upon which feminist middle-class women resisted the double standard of sexual morality and protested against male tyranny over women’s bodies. Regulationists justified the state supervision and medical inspection of prostitutes1 by labelling them vectors for the spread of disease, while they saw syphilis among prostitutes’ male clients as resulting from lust attributed to normal masculine sexuality. Josephine Butler (1828–1906), the central figure of the repeal movement, organized female networks to rescue their “fallen” sisters. This article will explore Butler’s promotion of female leadership in the context of the moral reconstruction of British national identity, focusing on her agitation for the repeal of the Contagious Diseases (cd) Acts and revealing her use of maternal imagery and her strategy of occasional alliance with working-class men to subvert middle- and upper-class men’s political and medical authority over women’s bodies. Criticism in the last decade has re-examined Butler’s works from the dual perspectives of religion and feminism. Indeed, Great Britain in the nineteenth century witnessed the parallel developments of the organized feminist movement and of women’s philanthropic activities, both within and beyond the framework of evangelical religion. Anne Summers suggests parallels between Butler’s liberal framework and her Christian faith (60), and Helen Mathers places Butler’s campaign within a tradition of evangelicalism (124). More recently, collected essays for the centenary of Butler’s death revisit the religious dimension of her writings and activities, testifying to her uniqueness and the pre-eminence of her position as a Christian reformer.2 My analysis focuses on the aspects of dynamism in Butler’s political writing3 to illuminate the correlation between her audacious handling of political issues and her strategic employment of religious language. Butler recognized the importance of writing as a crucial device for influencing public perceptions of sexual morality. During the repeal campaign, she wrote a number of different texts, including pamphlets, circulars, books, and public and private letters, as well as numerous speeches for public [End Page 107] speaking tours throughout Great Britain. Butler admitted that her outspokenness at times conveyed to the public a violent impression of her (“A Letter to the Mothers of England” 80). This article examines the way in which her political writing on the repeal of the cd Acts and on prostitutes serves to reconfigure female roles and to strengthen women’s engagement and public visibility in the political arena, although her writing, in its tropes of motherhood and femininity, reveals conflicts between her views and those of medical women at the time. Butler speaks in emotional language in much of her writing and even in her plea for the roles of Rebecca Jarrett and William T. Stead in the aftermath of his sensational exposé, strategically mobilizes the British image of motherhood that was conventionally defined in sentimental images within the context of Victorian cultural myth. She thereby endeavours to recast mothers as fearless and aggressive political agents, acting beyond the confines of orthodox maternal roles. the crusade of women as “god’s agents” The first cd Act was introduced in 1864 as a temporary, experimental piece of legislation designed to contain the spread of sexually transmitted diseases in the armed forces. Two further acts extending the original legislation were then passed in 1866 and 1869. The jurisdiction of the 1869 Act was extended to apply to nonmilitary residents in eighteen garrison towns and naval ports in the south of England and in Ireland. This amendment introduced a coercive form of medico-legal regulation of prostitutes as well as an intensified regime of police surveillance (Mort 59). Within a ten-mile radius of each of these towns, all registered prostitutes were required to submit to fortnightly examinations. The new act regarded women’s bodies as agents of infection and, by allowing any woman suspected of being a prostitute to be arrested and forced to submit to a medical...

‘Syphilis is given over to sentimentalists’: the Dublin Medical Press and Circular and the drive to extend the Contagious Diseases Acts

Abstract In 1878, a meeting organised in Dublin by those in favour of repealing the contentious Contagious Diseases Acts ended in chaos and disruption. The acts themselves empowered police and doctors to forcibly detain and examine women (within specified geographical locations) suspected of being infected with venereal disease. The campaign to abolish the acts appeared to lack the widespread support that it had gathered in England, particularly in medical circles, and the disorderliness of the Dublin meeting seemed to confirm this. The Irish medical press, specifically the weekly Dublin Medical Press and Circular (D.M.P.C.) mirrored The Lancet’s vilification of those who sought to abolish the acts. This article examines the D.M.P.C.’s campaign to extend the acts in Ireland and explores its influence within the context of the debate surrounding these controversial acts. Despite prolific representation of leading English medics among those who opposed the acts, the D.M.P.C. did not offer any outspoken testimony for the repeal of the C.D.A.s by an important figure in the Irish medical profession. This article examines the reasons for such a muted response by Irish doctors to the draconian legislation that directly involved the profession.

‘Equal Laws Based upon an Equal Standard’: the Garrett Sisters, the Contagious Diseases Acts, and the sexual politics of Victorian and Edwardian feminism revisited

Dr. Elizabeth Garrett Anderson (1836–1917), co-founder of the London School of Medicine for Women, and Dame Millicent Garrett Fawcett (1847–1929), leader of the constitutional suffrage movement, were centrally involved in the Victorian and Edwardian campaign for women's equality. Both women attempted to maintain a separation between the suffrage movement and the sexualized realm of the female body, which was subject to state intrusion during the debates over the Contagious Diseases Acts and again during the force-feeding of imprisoned suffragettes some forty years later. But the Garretts had to negotiate the intersection of gender, class, and sexual politics in order to advance the cause of feminist social reform.

'Real Men' and Anti-Feminism

The important part played by men in the history of British feminism, particularly in the nineteenth-century struggle for women’s rights, has long been recognized. As Olive Banks pointed out some decades ago, a common feature among Victorian feminist activists was the presence of supportive fathers who encouraged their daughters to seek education, and to pursue goals that challenged the limits imposed on them as women.1 Husbands mattered too, often providing support for their feminist wives as they campaigned for reform of the marriage laws, for repeal of the Contagious Diseases Acts or for the vote.2 Some of these men, including Jacob Bright and James Stansfeld, carried feminist campaigns into parliament where they worked to gain significant reforms in women’s legal and political status. But the number of men wholeheartedly committed to the emancipation of women was very small and the passage of legislation required the support of many other male MPs whose views on women’s status were often equivocal. Nonetheless, if one is to understand how married British women gained some legal and political rights in the nineteenth century, including limited rights to divorce, to the ownership of property and the custody of children, one needs to address not only the women’s movement that campaigned for these reforms, but also the willingness of sufficient numbers of men to enact the relevant legislation.

Jane Eyre's Daughters: the feminist missions of Mary Carpenter and Josephine Butler in India

The nineteenth-century literature served as a theatrical space wherein culture and politics merged to constitute women's subjectivity. Charlotte Brontë's literary imagination of the heroine's ‘mission’ in Jane Eyre heralded Mary Carpenter's reform of Indian women's education and Josephine Butler's campaign to repeal the Contagious Diseases Acts in India. This article explores the way in which the writings of both feminists betray imperial/anti-imperial and domestic/political aspects of their activities, as Brontë represents such complex issues through the deliberate articulation of the protagonist's subject-position, seeking the configuration of the female political network which stemmed from Jane's individual engagement with nineteenth-century gender politics.