History 364-0-01: Gender and Sexuality in Victorian Britain; Northwestern University, Fall 2014

• Population of prostitutes
  • 3 million people in London, 55,000 prostitutes in London
  • Police would’ve given a lower number of prostitutes because they base their statistics off arrests, and arrests were low
  • Britain does not have a state-controlled brothel system like other European capitals do
• Legislation
  • 1839 Vagrancy Act: criminalized loitering for the purposes of prostitution or solicitation
    • The Vagrancy Act was aimed at the public, in public spaces
    • It’s not the actual act of prostitution that is illegal, it is “loitering for the purposes of”
    • This meant the prostitutes would be prosecuted, but the ones looking for and using prostitutes would not – it was always the woman who was criminalized
  • 1864, 1867, 1869 Contagious Diseases Acts
    • There was a high number of diseases in military men
    • Any woman who was suspected (social profiling) of being a prostitute could be picked up by the police and subjected to a forcible full pelvic exam (with a speculum, opening the vaginal cavity) by an army doctor
    • Army doctors were not used to inspecting working-class women, they usually only inspected military men
    • If the woman was found to have a sexually transmitted disease, she was held in a locked hospital for three months while she underwent treatment
    • It was working-class women and girls who were constantly paying the price of prostitution
  • Repealed in 1886 by Josephine Butler and the Social Purity Movement
    • This happens one year after the Criminal Law Amendment Act
• Prostitutes
  • Asking young girls when and how they had fallen
    • Most girls say they had fallen at age 16, because it was a respectable answer – this answer was given both before and after the Criminal Law Amendment Act (few girls say they had fallen earlier)
    • They either said they had fallen to a boyfriend of the same class (and they may have fallen into prostitution after this)
    • Or, to the man of the house to which they were a servant
    • Girls often charged one pound per encounter – this was a lot of money for a working-class girl in the east end of London (one pound was subsistence wage)
  • Older prostitutes
    • As the girls got older, the amount they charged slipped down to about 4-8 pence and were “fourpenny knee tremblers,” the lowest of the low
    • Knee-trembling sex was commercial, fast, rough sex done while standing up; fourpenny knee tremblers didn’t have a place to which to take the men because they didn’t have a permanent room or bed
    • Jack the Ripper’s victims were fourpenny knee tremblers
    • “Doss money” is the money needed to purchase a cheap, temporary bed in a doss house for one night
    • The Ripper’s victims were in their 40s with no permanent man in their life and no permanent place to stay – these are the kinds of women who were out on the streets very late at night
  • Pimps/bullies
    • Working class girls felt they needed a man as a front to make it look like they were more reputable
• Prostitution (Handout)
  • Fall-out of the Criminal Law Amendment Act, 1885
    • The Act outlawed brothel-keeping and the procurement of women for prostitution
    • Brothel-keepers and their agents could now be imprisoned or fined (both clauses of the Act were opposed by W.T. Stead and Josephine Butler)
      • Landlords were now reluctant to rent their houses or rooms to women living alone or collectively with a small group of women
      • Working-class prostitutes now felt compelled to include at least one man in the household. These men were referred to as “bullies,” and they provided some protection and cover
      • This undermined the personal and economic independence that working-class prostitutes had enjoyed prior to 1885
  • Fall-out of the Whitechapel (“Ripper”) Murders
    • The social purity movement moved against prostitution and urged even greater regulation and police powers (opposed by Stead and Butler)
    • Some of the worst slums in Whitechapel were cleared, and old “common lodging houses” or “doss houses” were destroyed. New housing for respectable Jewish immigrants (usually skilled artisans) was built, but the extreme poor were forced onto the streets. Many of these were older women
    • Male working-class vigilance committees were set up to patrol the streets of the East End and protect women. The result was that working-class women were increasingly confined to the home