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© Southampton City Council
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"The oldest trade in the world" |
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The Contagious Diseases Acts
The Contagious Diseases Acts, passed in 1864, 1866 and 1869, applied to a number of garrison and dock towns, and were intended to safeguard soldiers and sailors against the spread of venereal diseases. The Acts created a system of identifying, registering, and medically examining prostitutes. Plain clothes policemen controlled by the Metropolitan Police were sent to each town, and any woman they identified as a “common prostitute” was required to submit to a periodical examination, to determine if they suffered from a venereal disease.
In the 1870s Southampton was a bustling port town
© Southampton City Council |
If a prostitute was infected, she was compelled to go to a Lock Hospital for treatment, and could be imprisoned for refusing to do so. The definition of a “common prostitute” was vague, and so much depended on the attitude of the plain clothes officers, who kept a close eye on the places where “public women” congregated. If a woman was accused of being a prostitute, it was up to her to prove her own virtuousness – she was guilty until proven innocent – and newspapers of the time carried reports of women who had been unjustly accused, simply because they wore “gay clothing”.
Resistance
Southampton’s was the first civilian population to come under the Acts, when they were extended in 1870. The Southampton Board of Health had voted 15-4 in favour of adopting them, but from the outset they encountered widespread resistance in the town. By 1870 a national movement for repeal of the Acts was already underway, prompted by outrage at the sexual double standard they implied (punishing women but not men) and the “instrumental rape” of the medical examinations.
Josephine Butler was a leading campaigner for the repeal of the Contagious Diseases Acts
© By Courtesy of the University of Liverpool Library |
However, Southampton prostitutes showed considerably more resistance to the restrictions than those in garrison towns. Between 1870 and 1877 there were 420 such cases brought before Southampton magistrates – 133 for “non-submission” and 287 for refusal to appear for examination. Petitions against the Acts were signed by thousands of Southampton women and others, and the working-class community often leant prostitutes support. Crowds occasionally gathered to denounce the “water police”, as they were known, and some neighbours hid prostitutes or helped them to escape the neighbourhood when the police came knocking.
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