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© Southampton City Council
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"The oldest trade in the world" |
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But, over time, the public nature of the registration process took its toll, and support and sympathy for prostitutes among the working class in Southampton – and elsewhere – began to falter. Repeatedly being stopped in the street by the police, visited in their homes, and forced to walk to the examination in broad daylight, destroyed the prostitutes’ self-respect, removed the division between their public and private lives, and marked them out as “fallen” and “dangerous”. Consequently, many of their working-class neighbours became reluctant to associate with them, for fear of the recriminations and economic sanctions that might follow, and so prostitutes became increasingly isolated.
A professionalised work force
Prostitution was characterised as "The Great Social Evil"
© Mary Evans Picture Library |
The registration system gave prostitutes a reputation which they found difficult to shake off - registered women were often abandoned by their lovers, and found trouble finding “respectable” employment again without leaving the area. Contemporaries noted a “hardening” among registered prostitutes - one streetwalker was reported saying “it was no use trying to reform now, she was registered as a prostitute and everybody would know what she had been doing”. The figures confirm that after 1870, prostitutes in Southampton became older, and stayed in the trade longer than before.
The Contagious Diseases Acts were repealed in 1886, but by then they had stimulated a lasting change in the working lives of Southampton prostitutes. Prostitution was now much less likely to be a temporary stage in women’s lives, entered into almost as a form of “seasonal” employment, but was more of a “career” for many women. As Walkowitz puts it in her study of prostitution, “a streamlined, rationalized ‘work force’” had been created.
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